Houston Presbyterian Church Cookbook circa 1883

Information about Church Cookbooks seem to be almost everywhere. Case in point is the inclusion of a page from a Presbyterian Church Cookbook in the book, Houston 1860-1900 by Ann Dunphy Becker (published by Arcadia and part of their Images of America series). On page 31 she has an image of a page from this cookbook, no other publication information is listed.  It also appears that the recipes from this cookbook may not have the names of submitters attached to them but it's hard to tell looking at only one page.

The page the author used in her book  is part of the Miscellaneous Receipts section of the cookbook.  What's interesting is that one of the recipes is for cough syrup and presumably one of the owners used a pencil to cross out the recipe and wrote next to it "Mistake.  Do not use. Poison." This might be a good warning in general that cures from the "olden" days may not be the best ones to use now.

That's one way to cure a cough.