Old Cookbook Reveals “Amazing Details of Washington’s Dining Habits” With hundreds of servants at her command… a person would think our first First Lady was a woman of leisure. Not so… according to a new historical discovery. A long out-of-print volume entitled, “The Martha Washington Cook Book” shows Mrs. Washington personally supervised her entire household staff… and especially the kitchen and dining room servants. Martha made sure every dish served at Mount Vernon… as well as in the first Presidential “White Houses” in New York and Philadelphia… was prepared exactly as called for in her personal cookbook. The family cookbook was given to Martha at the time of her first marriage. In 1749, beautiful seventeen-year-old Martha Dandridge married Daniel Parke Custis. As a wedding gift, the Custis family presented Martha with a family cookbook entitled Booke of Cookery and Booke of Sweetmeats. Handwritten by an unknown hand, there is evidence the recipe book had been in the Custis family for generations. It is quite likely this was a family heirloom dating back to the early 1600s. In all, there were over five hundred classic recipes, dating largely from Elizabethan and Jacobean times, the golden age of English cookery. Later, Martha Custis became a widow and in 1759 she married Col. George Washington. Washington was to become the Father of our country and its first President. Martha, of course, became our very first, “First Lady.” Martha kept and used her family cookbook for over fifty years. In 1799, she presented the book to her granddaughter, Eleanor Parke Custis as a wedding gift when she married Lawrence Lewis. The cookbook was handed down from mother to daughter until 1892 when the Lewis family presented it to The Historical Society of Pennsylvania where it still resides today.
