Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats

 First published in Boston in 1828, this volume in the American Antiquarian Cookbook Collection was America’s first baking cookbook and the first to organize recipes by listing ingredients at the beginning of each recipe separate from the directions, as opposed to being lumped together in a narrative paragraph.  Eliza Leslie’s Seventy-five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats was the first distinctively baking cookbook published in America, as well as the first to share ingredients in a systematic list order at the beginning of each recipe. As Eliza recorded at the time of initial publication, “All the ingredients, with their proper quantities, are enumerated in a list at the head of each receipt, a plan which will greatly facilitate the business of procuring and preparing the requisite article.