Also available on Amazon^• and Lulu.

I hope you have great plans for this summer! This New Year marks a great milestone in American history: Independence Day 2026 will mark the 250^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

In celebration, for the next eight months, through the summer picnic and reunion season, The Padgett Sunday Supper Club will feature even more recipes from our 1976 and 1876 celebrations, and from 1796.

I have collected most of the recipes from my last three Independence Day posts into a small cookbook, The Padgett Sunday Supper Club Sestercentennial Cookery (PDF File, 7.0 MB). The book also includes a handful of recipes I’ve tested since those posts, and from the same sources. It collects bicentennial, centennial, and vicennial recipes, the latter from America’s first native cookbook, the 1796 American Cookery. That’s three centuries of American independence: the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

Each recipe includes a color photo; it’s the same format I used in my Ice Cream Cookery.

Like the Ice Cream Cookery, my Sestercentennial Cookery is a free download (PDF File, 7.0 MB). You can buy it in print from Lulu or from Amazon^•. If you want to save on shipping when ordering from Lulu, I have a list of other books I’ve published in print.

Commemorating the Battle of Bennington in 1819, Samuel B. Young said of the Fourth of July:

All nations, from time immemorial, have had their days of commemoration. These days have marked the character of the nation itself. Among the Pagan nations they commemorate the birth day of some supposed God or Goddess—In Monarchies they commemorate the birthday of some favorite Prince or Princess. In Aristocracies they commemorate the birth day of some splendid Nobleman. But in the United States of America we commemorate the birth day of our Liberties.

I’ll be bookending my Sestercentennial posts with the Battle of Bennington, starting from last September’s Our lot is cast in this happy land… and ending with this coming September’s take on The Rifleman’s Song.

One of my favorite new recipes for this book is a cookie recipe from American Cookery. I sometimes call these “the first American cookies”. They obviously were not; cookies certainly existed, at least among the Dutch community, before 1796. But it is the first published recipe for cookies in an American book. They’re very similar to shortbread. They also use coriander, which is one of my favorite forgotten ingredients.

America’s First Cookie

Servings: 24
Preparation Time: 2 hours
Amelia Simmons
American Cookery (Internet Archive)

Ingredients

• Cookies
  • 4 oz sugar
  • ¼ cup water
  • ½ tsp baking soda
  • 1 tbsp milk
  • 10 oz flour
  • ½ tbsp coriander
  • 1 oz butter
• Icing (optional)
  • ¾ cup powdered sugar
  • 3 tsp rose water

Steps

1. Cookies
   • Boil sugar in water at medium-low to 220° to make a syrup.
   • Let cool.
   • Mix baking soda into milk and then stir into the syrup.
   • Sift flour and coriander into the syrup.
   • Rub in the butter to make a dough.
   • Flatten by hand to half an inch thickness.
   • Cut into 1-½-inch rounds.
   • Bake twenty to thirty minutes at 325°.
2. Icing, if used
   • Mix powdered sugar with rose water.
   • Drop or spread onto warm cookies.

Chemical leavening was very rare in this period; Max Miller’s 1773 gingerbread is representative of the period—and a great look at an American patriot and baker. But the baking soda in these cookies is not an anachronism. This is among the first published recipes to include chemical leavening. In 1796, that leavening was pearl ash, a refinement on potash that made it more useful for baking.

Cookies

One pound sugar boiled slowly in half pint water, scum well and cool, add two tea spoons pearl ash dissolved in milk, then two and half pounds flour, rub in 4 ounces butter, and two large spoons of finely powdered coriander seed, wet with above; make roles half an inch thick and cut to the shape you please; bake fifteen or twenty minutes in a slack oven—good three weeks.

Except for the “slack oven” it’s a very modern recipe. And I’ve never tested whether these cookies are “good three weeks”.

I’ve interspersed The Sestercentennial Cookery (PDF File, 7.0 MB) with texts from early Independence Day celebrations and related commemorations. The book includes, for example, President Grant’s proclamation for the Centennial in 1876, and President Ford’s for the Bicentennial in 1976, back to back, right between the omelet snackers and a puff paste for pies and tarts.

Another new recipe in the book is this very seventies pasta dish with eggplant, from Copperas Cove, Texas’s Bicentennial community cookbook.

One of the more fascinating Fourths was the fiftieth anniversary in 1826. It was marked, retroactively, by commemorations of the death of both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. No one knew on July 4, 1826, that two of the most important founders would die within hours of each other. But once it happened it was impossible not to see it as something special. Future Massachusetts Governor and Senator Edward Everett, then a member of the House of Representatives, wrote an uncharacteristically short eulogy perfect for a book like mine. And a semi-attributed Poem By a Lady of Richmond also commemorates the event in print and in poetry.

That those two deaths occurred at the same time and on such a special day was often attributed to divine favor. It still is.

Frances Hopkinson’s 1788 Ode for the 4th of July is a wonderful find. I first heard it when Mark Steyn recited it in one of his musical Independence Day specials. You’ll need to be a subscriber to listen to his rendition of it, but if you enjoy music, history, and musical history, it’s well worth it.

Hopkinson wasn’t just a songwriter. He signed the Declaration of Independence as a delegate from New Jersey. And he was also a satirist. I covered his Battle of the Kegs last week.

One fascinating text I discovered is Daniel Webster’s 1802 Fourth of July oration. He was twenty years old at the time; it’s easy to see that this young man had a successful future ahead of him as a politician!

On the title page, I’ve given this anniversary two names. I’ve been calling it the sestercentennial since I started writing about it in 2023. It comes from the Latin for two-and-a-half (sester) and for a hundred (centennial). Two-and-a-half centennials is 250.

When we celebrated the hundredth anniversary, we called it the Centennial; when we celebrated the two hundredth anniversary, we called it the Bicentennial. There were three likely names for the 250^th anniversary, and I chose the simplest and most similar to those names. The official name today is apparently semiquincentennial. The prefix quin is five and the prefix semi is half, so this is half of five hundred, which is, of course, also 250.

I predict that Semiquincentennial is going to engender as many jokes as serious uses. Centennial and Bicentennial are reasonable words and were common at each anniversary. Sestercentennial is close to them. But it could have been worse. Apparently “bisesquicentennial” was also in the running, which sounds like an alien underwater life form. The Latin’s a bit hard to understand, too, going by how every online source explains it. Even Google’s AI describes it as:

• “Bi”: Latin for “two”.
• “Sesqui”: Latin for “one and a half”.
• “Centennial”: Refers to a period of 100 years.

So, “bisesquicentennial” literally means “two and a half hundred years,” which equals 250 years.

I’m not entirely clear on why this isn’t “literally” 300 rather than 250. But, according to Cassell’s Latin Dictionary, Google’s AI is slightly wrong. Sesqui has (at least) two meanings:

sesquĭ, adv. (perhaps from semis/que), one half more, half as much again: sesqui major, Cic.

You have to squint to get the right meaning out of this, but it would seem to be considered as meaning two, plus one half, for two and one half and not two, plus half again as much. I’d be interested to see the reaction of an actual Roman faced with the term. It’s a lot of explanation for a word that sounds like it belongs in a Lovecraft tale.

But whether you call it the sestercentennial, the semiquincentennial, or eschew Latin in favor of calling it the 250^th anniversary of America’s Declaration of Independence, 2026 marks an impressive milestone in American history. Throughout our history, we have celebrated such milestones with food—and specifically with cookbooks, as my 1876 and 1976 installments show.

Download the Sestercentennial Cookery for free (PDF File, 7.0 MB) or buy a full-color copy from Amazon^• or Lulu. I hope you enjoy this sestercentennial sampling of our culinary history! It's filled with great American recipes for potlucks, picnics, and just general snacking and dining as we celebrate this marvelous year.

A wonderful rhubarb crumble.

Some Texas fried chicken—with sesame!

Very crispy cranberry-oatmeal cookies.