Pap for Infant Diet

History

"Pap for Infant Diet" is recipe No. 160 — the last in "What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking" (San Francisco, 1881). It is a sickroom and nursery preparation rather than a dish for the table. Fisher's method: "Take one pint of flour, sift it and tie it up in a clean cloth securely tight, so that no water can get into it; and put it in boiling water and let it boil steady for two hours, then take it out of water, and when it gets cold take outside crust from it." A tablespoonful of the hardened flour is then grated into half a pint of boiling milk and sweetened with white sugar; if the child has diarrhea, she directs that a stick of cinnamon be boiled in it.

Unusually for this book, a documented antecedent exists. The culinary historian Robert W. Brower, who traced Fisher's roots to Orangeburg, South Carolina, notes that "Sources for some of the recipes, presumably unknown to Abby Fisher, can be found. For example, her recipe Pap for Infant Diet (#160) can be sourced to a cookbook written in Andover, MA." Fisher, who could not read, would have carried the preparation by practice rather than from any printed page.

Fisher was born in Orangeburg in June 1831 to Abbie Clifton. Brower's research in San Francisco records identifies her father as James J. Andrews, an Orangeburg planter who held some seventy people in slavery, and an 1869 receipt from the Freedman's Savings and Trust in Mobile records her under her mother's name. Before 1865, censuses recorded only an enslaver's name with the age and sex of those he held, so no surviving record names Fisher herself; Karen Hess, who rediscovered her book, noted that absence of documentation. She dictated the whole book, drawing on "an experience of upwards of thirty-five years," and had already won a diploma at the 1879 Sacramento State Fair and two medals at the 1880 San Francisco Mechanics' Institute Fair.

Ingredients

• 1 pint flour
• 1 tablespoon boiled flour
• 0.5 pint milk
• white sugar
• 1 piece cinnamon stick

Instructions

1. Sift one pint of flour.
2. Tie the flour securely in a clean cloth so that no water can get into it.
3. Place the cloth in boiling water and boil steadily for two hours.
4. Remove the cloth from water and allow it to cool completely.
5. Remove the outside crust from the cooled flour cake.
6. When ready to feed the child, grate one tablespoon of the boiled flour.
7. Stir the grated flour into half a pint of boiling milk while the milk is still boiling.
8. Sweeten the pap with white sugar to taste.
9. If the child has diarrhea, boil a two-inch stick of cinnamon in the pap.