Lady Frankland’s Recipe Book

A recipe book containing the handwritten culinary and medicinal recipes used by a slaveholding family.

Creator: Sarah Frankland (nee Rhett)

Date of Creation: 1750-1825

Place of origin: England

Physical measurements: 60 leaves : paper ; 181 x 111-192 x 154 mm. bound to 199 x 155 mm.

Materials: Paper, parchment, ink

Process by which it was made: Handwriting

Current location: Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts of the University of Pennsylvania



Further Reading

Judith A. Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).

Elaine Leong, Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008).

Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South (New York: Amistad, 2017).

Peter H. Wood, The Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina From 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. (New York: Knopf, 1974).


Information contributed by Marissa Nicosia.