An Antebellum Plantation Household: Including the South Carolina Low Country Receipts and Remedies of Emily Wharton Sinkler with Eighty-Two Newly Dis (Women's Diaries and Letters of the South)

At the age of nineteen Emily Wharton married Charles Sinkler and moved eight hundred miles from her Philadelphia home to a cotton plantation in an isolated area in the South Carolina Low Country. In monthly letters to her northern 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 also record her philosophical indisposition to slavery and document her significant role in managing the plantation, which meant administering provisions and attending to the health of more than two hundred people. The receipts offer valuable insight into the melding of diverse cultural and ethnic influences—French Huguenot, African, Low Country, Virginian, and Pennsylvanian—and reveal Sinkler's 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.

This new edition of An Antebellum Plantation Household includes an appendix of eighty-two additional receipts, recently discovered by the author amid her family archives.