Today, a book tells how our great-grandparents did
things. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines that
make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
So much of what we now buy in drug
and hardware stores we made for ourselves in 1895. Just
how much, I hadn't realized until I found an offbeat old
book: Lee's Priceless Recipes. Don't let the
title fool you. It isn't about cooking supper.
This compact compendium runs over 300 pages -- some 3000
formulas for everything you can imagine. It has sections
on The Household, The Druggist, Toilet Articles, The
Chemist and more.
The Druggist section begins with recipes for antacids. It
goes on to liniments and ointments. It explains how to
mix your own tincture of opium. The book tells how to
replicate many popular patent medicines -- liberally
laced with arsenic, carbolic acid, alcohol, and hemlock,
as well as sarsaparilla, aloe, myrrh, frankincense, and
digitalis.
The toiletries section offers recipes for perfumed
waters, rouge, and lipstick. Lipstick is made from cold
cream, wax, and a little carmine of vermilion. To remove
wrinkles we mix a scruple of aluminum sulfate with a
half-pint of water and use it to bathe our face three
times a day -- I think I'll live with my wrinkles.
By the way, a scruple is an old word meaning a small part
of an angle, a weight, or an hour. Here it means a 24th
of an ounce. Scruple comes from the Latin for a rough
pebble. So it also means a nagging pebble in the shoe of
our conscience. Weights and measures weren't standardized
a century ago. The book groans with drams, pennyweights,
grains, and various kinds of pounds.
We see how to mix paint and paint removers, how to slice
steers into beef steak, how to make ink, how to etch
copper, how to make pencil leads, and how to turn crude
suet into oleomargarine.
One item especially catches my eye. It's a prescription
for killing tobacco worms. No arsenic or carbolic acid
here. Rather, the book recommends a biological
counterattack. The solution is to turn four-winged flies
upon the worms.
There's a long section on making explosives: gunpowder,
fulminate of mercury, nitroglycerin. It tells how to make
dynamite from nitroglycerin. Then it blandly warns that
dynamite is set off by simple percussion. If that sounds
frightening, well, I used to make gunpowder by their
recipe when I was a kid. The fact I'm here to tell about
it probably testifies to my ineptitude.
I'm powerfully struck by how in touch with physical
processes our forebears were. Take their recipe for ice
cream. It's the same ice cream my great aunt used to make
for me. Two quarts of thick cream, the yolks of three
eggs, a pound of sugar -- need I go on! But people really
did do much of this stuff for themselves. That was just
ending when I was a child. And today -- this little book
seems to represent life on another planet.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where
we're interested in the way inventive minds work.
(Theme music)
Oliver, N.T., Lee's Priceless Recipes.
Chicago: Laird & Lee Publishers, 1895. (I am grateful
to Detering Book Gallery in Houston for turning up this odd
little relic of yesteryear.)
See also a much older book of this type which may be
found in the UH Library: Mackenzie's Five Thousand
Receipts in all the Useful and Domestic Arts: ...
Philadelphia: James K. Jun and Brother. 1829. (Author
given as a "An American Physician")
Image courtesy of Special Collections, UH
Library
The title page of Lee's Priceless Recipes,
1895
Image courtesy of Special Collections, UH
Library
The frontispiece of Lee's Priceless Recipes,
1895
Image courtesy of Special Collections, UH
Library
Here's a recipe for you. Do not try this at home!
Another work of this type is Mackenzie's Five Thousand
Receipts in all the Useful and Domestic Arts: ...
Philadelphia: James K. Jun and Brother. 1829. (Author
given as "An American Physician.")
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is Copyright
© 1988-1997 by John H. Lienhard.
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