Lying
horizontally on the cart’s bottom shelf was a fat, older-looking volume with a
scuffed leather cover. One of its 808 pages fell out when I opened the book,
which turned out to be a nineteenth-century bestseller: Dr. Chase’s Third Last and Complete Receipt Book and Household
Physician or Practical Knowledge for the People (1887). The author is Dr. A.W.
(Alvin Wood) Chase (1817-1885), a native of upstate New York and a graduate of
the Eclectic Institute
of Cincinnati (which sounds as though it had been invented by the late Charles
Portis).
Chase was
not exactly a quack. At the time, medical accreditation was fluid. Patients
were less impressed by the medical degrees hanging on the wall, patent medicines
flourished and malpractice insurance was unheard of. Receipt in Chase’s title refers not to an authentication of
purchase but, in the words of the OED:
“a statement of the ingredients and procedure necessary for making a medicinal
preparation, a prescription. . . . a remedy or cure.” The word is closely related
to the modern recipe, and the book,
indeed, contains many instructions for preparing food. When doctors were scarce
and people lived in remote parts of the country, a book like Chase’s might save
a life or preserve a limb – or claim both. In his preface, Chase writes:
“As I was
once traveling through Illinois, a gentleman, just before we reached the
crossing of the Mississippi at Burlington, approached me, and said, ‘Isn’t this
Dr. Chase, the author of Chase’s Receipt
Book?’ (referring to my first) to which I replied, ‘Yes, sir,’ when he
remarked: ‘I thought I recognized you from the frontpiece in your book;’ and
added, ‘We read it more than the Bible,’ etc. To which I remonstrated and
begged to suggest that he instruct his family from that time forward to read
the Bible most, inasmuch as eternity was of infinitely more importance than
this life.”
Chase’s book
is a grab-all, a loosely organized compendium of remedies, theories and
platitudes – and a lot of fun to read. Under the heading “LIFE LENGTHENED—Sensible
Rules for,” he makes fifteen suggestions, including: “Cultivate an equable
temper; many have fallen dead in a fit of passion” and “Never resist a call of
nature, for a single moment.” In his entry for gonorrhea, Chase assures us the
disease is caused by “impure cohabitation.” For a remedy he prescribes a “cooling
purgative” consisting of “compound powder of jalap, with cream of tartar, or a
full cathartic dose of any medicine one is in the habit of using as a
cathartic.”
An earlier
reader clipped articles from newspapers and slipped them between the pages of
Chase’s book. All are brown and brittle. The only one dated is from 1929. Its
headline reads: “Quinine is best remedy for influenza or grip.” Another headed “Tested
Recipes” includes instructions for making fried apple sauce, apple whip, and fried
bacon and apples. There’s a recipe for Southern Spoon Bread and tips on the “Wise
Way to Cook Rice.” The final text is equally helpful: “Celery can come out of
the luxury class if all of the bunch is used. The green ends and leaves may be
used to good advantage in soup.”
For a sample
of Chase’s folksy, earnest prose, see his entry for the preparation of minced-meat
pies, which concludes with these “remarks,” as he calls them:
“Some people
will have brandy or wine in their mince pies, let such put in 1 cup of brandy,
or 2 cups of wine, into the above amount. It is each one’s privilege to suit
themselves, or the demand of the majority, or the head of the house, as the
case may be. What is not baked up when made, pack nicely in jars and cover well
with cloths and a plate with a light weight upon it, or other cover, not adding
the apples only as used, and the meat keeps better without.”
Sounds like
a recipe for botulism.
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