Stories of Salem: Indiana's First Cookbook

SPONSORSHIP NOTE: Stories of Salem is made possible through the assistance and resources of the John Hay Center, located at 307 E. Market Street in Salem. Open Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays from 10 to 5, they are an invaluable source of information for anyone interested in the history of their hometown. Learn more at johnhaycenter.org!

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Long before recipe blogs and TV cooking shows, a woman here in the Ohio River Valley quietly shaped the way Hoosiers approached cooking. Her name was Angelina Maria Collins.

Mrs. A. Collins, Age 36.

Born in Petersburg, Virginia on May 26, 1805, Angelina Lorraine grew up in the Methodist faith and was influenced by the early abolitionist sentiments common among many Methodists of the time. On May 12, 1830, she married James Collins in Wilmington, Ohio before moving to Paoli, Indiana, where the young couple began their life together on what was at that time the western frontier.

In 1851, after moving to New Albany, Angelina published Mrs. Collins’ Table Receipts: Adapted to Western Housewifery, the first known cookbook written in Indiana. Her goal was simple but ambitious: to make cooking easier for women living on the frontier. She emphasized recipes that used ingredients commonly found in the Midwest and tailored her instructions to suit the realities of life far from the markets of the East Coast.

The preface from Mrs. Collins’ Table Receipts: Adapted to Western Housewifery

The book, printed in New Albany with the help of bookseller John R. Nunemacher, quickly found an audience. By 1857, it was republished in New York as The Great Western Cookbook. Organized by topics like boiling, pickling, and baking, the book contains recipes for hearty frontier offerings like corn pone, succotash, and stews, as well as some other… interesting… dishes such as “Calf’s Foot Jelly”, “Chicken Pudding”, and “Brain Balls”.

Yum.

Angelina and her husband spent most of their married life in New Albany. After James’ death in 1869, Angelina moved to Salem to live with her sons, James Jr., Alfred, and Judge Thomas L. Collins.

She remained active and respected in her later years, remembered not only for her cookbook but also for an assortment of poetry and other writings. Angelina Collins died on September 28, 1885, at her son’s home on North High Street in Salem, at the age of 80. She was buried beside her husband in New Albany.

Today, thanks to the efforts of the Indiana State Library, her cookbook survives in digital form as a fascinating glimpse into daily life on the Indiana frontier.

But let’s do more than glance into that life. Let’s taste  it.

Uh-oh. You thought this article was wrapping up? No, we’re just getting started — and this week, Stories of Salem is going full-blown food blog on you guys.

Don’t worry, I didn’t choose anything too strange out of the book. I’m honestly not sure where I could find any ethically-sourced calf’s feet, anyway. These recipes are quick, simple, a little different, and can actually be made with ingredients the average modern midwestern human might have in their kitchen.

Appetizer: Egg Balls

This is the perfect light appetizer for anyone who has ever said, “I really love scrambled eggs, but I wish there was a way to make them that took five times as long, dirtied seventeen dishes, and wasted half the egg in the process”.

Main Course: Potato Pie

For this frontiersman twist on Shepherd’s Pie, I used local, free-range, pasture-raised, premium ground beef from Voils Family Wagyu. I then committed one of history's most egregious culinary sins by dousing it in Great Value ketchup for the sauce. Anyone with a little more time on their hands who wants to one-up me can use Angelina’s own catsup recipe.

By the time it had baked long enough to cook the beef (350 for literally almost 2 1/2 hours, I kid you not), the ketchup had boiled its way through the entire dish, and the end result was something that literally looked like it would be served in a Dickensian orphanage. But the taste... actually wasn’t... terrible.

"Please sir, may I have some more?"

Dessert: Grandmother’s Pudding with Pudding Sauce

This is the dish I was the most excited about — not much is known about Angelina’s ancestors, but Angelina was born in 1805, which means that her grandmother had to have been born well before the American Revolution. I had a chance to try a dish that was as old as the Founding Fathers themselves, and I was not throwing away my shot (sorry).

The recipe was going to be quite a few servings, so I made a half-batch. It was very… different. Not what you would expect when you heard the word “pudding” nowadays. It’s basically an unseasoned scrambled egg bake with a sweet, watery sauce over the top.

Cooking from a 19th-century cookbook is a bit like time travel — except instead of stepping into a portal, you just spend three hours trying to figure out what “as much salt as will lie on a shilling” means. And while not every dish is a culinary triumph, there’s something oddly satisfying about connecting to history through your own kitchen.

In the end, cooking from Angelina Collins’ cookbook wasn’t about recreating gourmet meals — it was about stepping into the daily life of someone who helped shape the way people cooked in early Indiana. Her recipes are practical, resourceful, and reflective of their time. And that’s what makes her story a story of Salem worth telling — not because the dishes were perfect, but because they’re part of the everyday history that still connects us to the people who came before.

This is Jacob Dufour. Bon appétit!