In case anyone in 1791 needed to know how to carry fish alive a great distance, an item in the Halifax Weekly Chronicle that year explained how.
Take an ounce of white sugar-candy, and as much salt-petre as is about the size of walnut, and as much wheat flour; mix them together, and put the mixture in a little bottle in your pocket.
This quantity is sufficient for a pail of water.
The water, if possible, should be changed every four or five miles.
This recipe is one of more than 500 collected by Dr. Edith Snook at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, and Dr. Lyn Bennett at Dalhousie University in Halifax.
They collaborated to build a database of old Maritime recipes that circulated before 1800 in what is now defined as Canada’s Maritime provinces, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island. They searched through archives, old manuscripts, newspapers, letters and accounting books.
Recipes were printed in newspapers and almanacs in two of the three Maritime provinces. The researchers did not find any recipes in New Brunswick newspapers.
Halifax Weekly Chronicle, Vol. 5 No. 2, March 26, 1791, Nova Scotia, NSA Reel 8165. Source: Early Modern Maritime Recipes.
The recipes have been made available on the website, Early Modern Maritime Recipes. They are mostly in English and represent the work of printers and settlers in the later decades of the eighteenth century.
Cakes, paint, and remedies
In this collection, recipe has been broadly defined as a text that includes ingredients and offers practical instructions on how to do something with those materials.
In addition to recipes for cakes, breads, puddings, meat and poultry, there is a large number of intriguing recipes most people today couldn’t imagine making, such as a cure for measles in swine, dying turkey leather, and a remedy for contracted limbs.
A recipe for making paint includes a note saying that water, in which codfish heads have been boiled, makes a good cement for lime wash.
