New in paperback
An Antebellum Plantation Household
Including the South Carolina Lowcountry Receipts and
Remedies of Emily Wharton Sinkler
With Eighty-Two Newly Discovered Receipts
Anne Sinkler Whaley LeClercq
“Using the letters and receipt books of an ancestor, Anne Sinkler Whaley LeClercq has
vividly recreated life on a South Carolina Low Country plantation during the two
decades before the Civil War…. In reconstructing the narrative of these letters, LeClercq
offers us remarkable insight into the roles and responsibilities of women in antebellum
society.”—Georgia Historical Quarterly
“LeClercq’s An Antebellum Plantation Household…provides a moving chronicle of
a place, well-loved in its time, and passed into memory, legend, and now onto the
printed page.”—Southern Quarterly
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 Lowcountry. 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.
The receipts offer valuable insight into the melding of diverse cultural and ethnic
influences—French Huguenot, African, Lowcountry, 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.
Anne Sinkler Whaley LeClercq
(1942–2014), a native of Charleston,
was a great-great-great-granddaughter
of Emily Wharton Sinkler. LeClercq was
also the author of A Grand Tour of Gardens: Traveling in Beauty through Western Europe and the United States and
the editor of Between North and South:
The Letters of Emily Wharton Sinkler,
1842–1865 and Elizabeth Sinkler Coxe’s
Tales from the Grand Tour, 1890–1910.
April 2015, 224 pages, 24 b&w illustrations
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