Together with biographical and historical introduction by Anne Sinkler Whaley LeClercq, these documents provide a record of plantation cooking, folk medicine, travel, and social life in the antebellum South. They include an appendix of eighty-two additional receipts, discovered by the author amid her family archives.

The receipts offer valuable insight into the melding of diverse cultural and ethnic influences - French Huguenot, African, Low Country, Virginian, and Pennsylvanian - and reveal Sinkler's reliance on locally grown ingredients, success in devising substitutions for items that had been readily available in Philadelphia, and skill in treating a myriad of ailments. This new edition of "An Antebellum Plantation Household" includes an appendix of eighty-two additional receipts, recently discovered by the author amid her family archives.