PBA Galleries

91, [13] ad pp. Original pictorial wrappers. First Edition.

With numerous ads in rear for South Carolina rice brands, dealers, lowcountry bakeries, and other local businesses. In 1901, Mrs. Samuel Stoney compiled Carolina Rice Cook Book by gathering recipes from around the region. Karen Hess writes of the book (in her seminal work on the subject, The Carolina Rice Kitchen: The African Connection): "This charming booklet, containing some 237 receipts for rice, was compiled in 1901 by Louisa Cheves Smythe Stoney, wife of Captain Samuel...Stoney, a figure in his own right but most pertinently chairman of the Carolina Rice Kitchen Association, seated in Charleston...the work was 'offered at the South Carolina Interstate and West Indian Exposition as a 25-cent souvenir,' adding that 'the exposition was a sort of world's fair meant to inject some spark in the moribund Carolina economy.'...But we still have Carolina Rice Cook Book , which has become exceedingly rare...Mrs. Stoney also included receipts obtained from the interested ladies of Low Country society, including some of the proudest names of the old rice aristocracy and their cooks, to be sure, although they are seldom credited and if they are, then by their old slave names. In short, it is a period piece, but this is what is important about the book. That is, it reflects one aspect of the period, the unique rice kitchen of Low Country Carolina, the glory of which was also beginning to fad as the old African-American cooks departed from the scene, one after the other." Scarce.