Edited by Anne Sinkler Whaley LeClercq

Culture, customs, and cookery as recorded by a Northern woman living in the plantation South

6 x 9, 181 pages
8 halftones, 1 line drawing
cloth, ISBN 1-57003-129-0, $24.95t

ABOUT THE BOOK

At the age of nineteen Emily Wharton married Charles Sinkler and moved eight hundred miles from her Philadelphia home to the swampy Low Country region of South Carolina. Suddenly she found herself living in a totally unfamiliar environment—a cotton plantation in an isolated area along the Santee River. In monthly letters to her family she recorded keen observations about her adopted home, and in a receipt book she assembled a trusted collection of culinary and medicinal recipes reflecting her ties to both North and South. Together with an extensive biographical and historical introduction by Anne Sinkler Whaley LeClercq, these documents provide a flavorful record of plantation cooking, folk medicine, travel, and social life in the antebellum South.

While Emily Wharton Sinkler's letters reflect the vibrancy and affluence of Low Country plantation society at the peak of its power and wealth, they record her philosophical indisposition to slavery and document her significant role in managing the plantations, which meant administering provisions and attending to the health of more than 200 people.

Emily Wharton Sinkler's receipts offer valuable insight into the melding of diverse cultural and ethnic influences—French Huguenot, African, Low Country, Virginian, and Pennsylvanian—in her kitchen. They reveal her reliance on locally grown ingredients, success in devising substitutions for items that had been readily available in Philadelphia, and skill in treating a myriad of ailments.

ABOUT THE EDITOR

Ane Sinkler Whaley LeClercqis library director of the Daniel Library at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, and a great-great-great-granddaughter of Emily Wharton Sinkler.

REVIEWS

"Here in the letters of Emily Wharton Sinkler is a window open on a woman's life in the South Carolina Low Country before the national trauma of the Civil War. To read these letters with their lively account of the daily life is to resurrect from the dead a world that pulsates with vitality and makes us breathe with rapturous appreciation the air of past times when our nation, North and South, was shaping its destiny."—Richard Marius, author of The Coming of Rain and Bound for the Promised Land

"Sinkler's letters are a previously untapped gold mine of valuable historical information on the social, religious, intellectual, and ethnic hsitory of the Carolina Low Country before the Civil War."—Robert Leath, assistant curator, Historic Charleston

ALSO FROM THE EDITOR

Between North and South