Waterbury, Helen Ramm

[REPURPOSED] CULINARY MANUSCRIPTS

Holland, Ohio: 1890s-1960s. Hardcover. (1) 22 x 12.5 cm. & 32. (2) 5 x 14 cm. Helen Ramm Waterbury (1883-1936), a first-generation American born to German parents, assembled this pair of working culinary manuscripts over several decades. The first volume, signed "Miss Helen Ramm" on the front pastedown, was a repurposed engineer's earthwork and ditch-section field book and Helen used this as a recipe notebook, with entries in at least three hands, with numerous recipes laid in. ("Short & Forman, Printers" -Cleveland, OH - label on front pastedown anchors the date of the book roughly 1876-1890, before the firm's reorganization into Forman-Bassett-Hatch after the 1890 fire). Recipes are written on an eclectic range of scraps, including the versos of two letters addressed to the Lucas County Children's Home in Miami, Ohio (postmarked 1908), and a blank letterhead for a Milk & Cream Bottling company bearing a recipe for Dandelion Wine with the mischievous notation at the end: "Drink a pint and hit your mother." The contents cover a broad domestic repertoire: soups, roasts, puddings, cakes, pies, and pickles, among others. The manuscript appears to have been passed down from Helen's mother Catherine Ramm to Helen and then to her descendants - her granddaughter Joyce Helene Waterbury and great-granddaughter Thelma R. Waterbury - accounting for the multiple hands and the inclusion of later ephemera from the 1960s.

The second volume is an indexed account book, reused as both an expense ledger and a scrapbook for recipes and home remedies. Dated 1925 in the index, it also holds a substantial cache of laid-in ephemera, including Walker's Method of Easy Bread Making (1916) and Seasonable Meat Recipes, issued by the National Live Stock and Meat Board (1929). Both volumes are heavily rubbed and worn, showing consistent household use. Item #4833

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