Barbara P sent me a recipe purporting to be Emily Dickinson's Gingerbread Cookies, and I have no reason to doubt the provenance. According to the Amherst Bulletin, "Emily Dickinson is famed for the gingerbread she would lower from her bedroom window down to the neighbor kids in a basket tied with twine." The ingredients include:
4 cups flour
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 tablespoon ginger
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup molasses
That is a hell of a lot of molasses and ginger. I make no guarantees as to edibility. A recipe for the black cake of the reclusive poetess can be found here.
The daguerrotype shown above gives you a really good look at the eye she had so much trouble with. (It was the right eye, but on the daguerrotype it appears to be the left because daguerrotypes laterally reverse the image.) According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, she had either "exotropia (a kind of strabismus, the inability of one eye to align with the other)" or "anterior uveitis (inflammation of the uvea, a part of the iris."
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