America’s first cookbook includes two apple pie recipes.
The cookbook is American Cookery, written by Amelia Simmons and first published in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1796. It is generally recognized as the first known cookbook written by an American for an American audience, although many of its methods and recipes reflect older British traditions.
Its two apple-pie recipes show that the dessert was already established in the young republic. The book used ingredients and terminology familiar to American cooks and helped document a food culture that combined European techniques with ingredients available in North America.
American Cookery was influential beyond its apple pies. It included early printed recipes using cornmeal, pumpkin, cranberries, and pearlash, an alkaline leavener related to later baking soda. The book went through numerous editions, but only a small number of copies from the first edition are known to survive.
A common mix-up is confusing “first American cookbook” with the first cookbook printed in America. British cookbooks had already been printed and used in the colonies; Simmons’s book was notable for its American authorship and adaptation.