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Mary Randolph

Homemade Bread, with Home-Brewed Yeast

Posted May 2017 
by Stephen Schmidt 

By Stephen Schmidt

 

Bread, adapted from Mary Randolph’s 1824 recipe

 

For the first two hundred years or so of European settlement, most Americans lived on isolated farms or in small villages, far from the nearest bakery. Thus, most substantial American homes were built with brick bake ovens, first and foremost for the purpose of baking bread, which most women did once or twice a week, typically on Wednesdays and/or Saturdays. A practice that originated in necessity persisted as a cultural habit to the end of the nineteenth century. By this time, forty percent of the American population lived in cities and towns, and yet nine out of ten American women (by many estimates) still chose to bake their bread at home, now in the convenient ovens of their enclosed iron stoves. There were probably still some women who clung to home bread baking out of fear that bakery white bread was adulterated with chalk, plaster, and other inedible materials, as Sylvester Graham had famously charged—and bakery bread did cost more, if only the materials were considered, than homemade. But reading between the lines of the nineteenth-century bread recipes, many of which go on for pages and frame home-baked bread as a sort of holy manna, I sense that home bread-baking became, over time, a typical nineteenth-century domestic value: something that a good Christian mother did for the health and comfort of her family. In Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt Book (1845), Catharine Beecher speaks of “sweet, well-raised, home-made yeast bread” as a “luxury” and a “comfort” enjoyed by only a lucky few, who “know that there is no food upon earth, which is so good, or the loss of which is so much regretted.” In The Boston Cook Book (1884), Mrs. Lincoln proclaims that “nothing . . . more affects the health and happiness of the family than the quality of its daily bread,” the home-baking of which “should be regarded as one of the highest accomplishments” of the housewife. With their hyperbole and their Biblical echoes, these recipes seem not to be just about the bread.

Prior to the 1870s, when Fleischmann’s yeast cakes became available, the yeast needed for this project typically originated as a semiliquid byproduct of brewing or distilling—in the case of brewing, either the foam that rose to the top of the barrel during fermentation or the residue left in the emptied barrel, which Americans referred to as “emptins.” To judge from the number of cookbook references, brewer’s yeast was the more common leaven, and “emptins” possibly the more common form, for the word is used to denote a variety of leaveners. However, distillers’ yeast was regarded as stronger and faster-acting.1 Antebellum cookbook authors do not express any preference for one yeast or the other with respect to the taste of the baked bread.

Top Yeast on Fermenting Beer

Charles Louis Fleischmann (1834-1897)

Women who lived close to a brewery or distillery could simply pick up yeast whenever they wanted it and use it straight, and this was the ideal way, according to the cookbook authors. In The Virginia House-Wife (1824), Mary Randolph advises, “Persons who live in towns, and can procure brewer’s yeast, will save trouble by using it,” sentiments echoed by Eliza Leslie, in Directions for Cookery (1837), who writes, “Strong fresh yeast from the brewery should always be used in preference to any other.” But many women could only procure brewery or distillery yeast periodically, and so they had to grow the yeast they bought into a larger batch and preserve this batch for some weeks or months. And thus we find many recipes for yeast in antebellum American cookbooks, both print and manuscript.

Maria Parloa (1843-1909)

Eight years ago I tried the recipe titled simply “Yeast” that is outlined in Maria Parloa’s New Cook Book and Marketing Guide (1881), after I had read about it in Sandra Oliver’s Saltwater Foodways, a fascinating study of nineteenth-century New England cooking on land and sea. The recipe calls for boiling two tablespoons of dried hops in two quarts of water, straining the infusion over six large finely grated raw potatoes, and bringing this mixture up to a boil. This is removed from heat, a half cup of sugar and a quarter cup of salt are added, and, when blood warm, also a cup of yeast—or, interestingly, “one cake of compressed yeast,” which suggests that many women of the 1880s found yeast cakes as hard to come by as their foremothers had found yeast from a brewery or distillery. The mixture is allowed to rise for five or six hours in a warm place. Then it is turned into a “stone jug,” corked tightly, and “set in a cool place.” I made a half recipe, using three 8-ounce baking potatoes and 1 teaspoon of granulated dry yeast (which is more or less equivalent to one half cake of compressed yeast). I got a total of three quarts, which I kept in a glass Mason jar in the refrigerator. I was able to make bread with this yeast from mid-April to mid-August—by which point I had used up the entire batch—using 1/3 cup of yeast to 14 ounces of flour, that is, flour sufficient for one standard loaf. Granted, by the time of my last batch of bread, the dough took some eighteen hours to rise to double in the bowl and another two hours in the pan. But this is only a little more time than Mary Randolph anticipates that it will take her bread to rise, including an initial setting of a sponge (which I did not do in making my own loaves).

Hop Plants

Maria Parloa’s yeast astonished me. I would never have guessed that a mere teaspoon of dry yeast could be stretched to raise twelve loaves, or some sixteen pounds, of bread. I was even more surprised that the yeast remained alive and active, if sluggish, over a period of four months. The secret to its longevity may have been the hops, an ingredient in most antebellum yeast recipes. (I got my hops from “hop tea,” which is sold at natural foods stores, in individual teabags.) David Yudkin, owner of Hotlips Soda, in Portland, Oregon, explained to me that hops is a mild antibacterial. In beer, it allows for yeast fermentation but suppresses other organisms, thus acting as a preservative, and it presumably does the same in homemade yeast. In fact, my batch of yeast had begun to smell sour as early as May, which suggests that organisms other than yeast were growing in it. However, these organisms did not kill the ferment and, just as importantly, their sourness was not imparted to the bread, a critical issue for antebellum bread bakers—more about this in a moment.

Hop Flowers, or Hops

 

I more or less forgot about my 2009 home yeast experiment until a couple of months ago, when I received an intriguing bread recipe from John Buchtel, Director of the Booth Family Center for Special Collections of the Lauinger Library, at Georgetown University. This bread was baked by one Brother Gavan, the head of the Georgetown campus bakery, around the time of the Civil War, and it was a large batch indeed, made with “a barrel of flour.” Assuming that the flour weighed around 200 pounds (196 pounds is the understood weight of a barrel today) and the dough was made up with 60% as much water by weight as flour (which is Mary Randolph’s hydration; Brother Gavan’s recipe is unclear on this point), the recipe yielded around 300 pounds of baked bread. The yeast used in this recipe captured my attention. It is made in two stages. First, “a quart of stock yeast,” presumably from a brewery or distillery, is fermented for 24 hours in a slurry of hop “juice” (made by boiling one ounce of dried hops in a gallon of water for half an hour), four ounces of wheat flour, and one ounce of malt flour (ground dried sprouted barley). This, strained, makes what the recipe refers to as “the yeast.” In the second stage, this yeast (measuring about one gallon) is combined with a “bucket of potatoes,” boiled and mashed (“skins and all”), four pounds of flour, and eight gallons of water, and this mush is allowed to “ripen” in a “tub of double capacity for . . . 12 to 13 hours.”  This, strained, is used to make a sponge, and the sponge, presumably with additional water, is kneaded up into the dough.

I assumed at first that only large-scale bakeries would make use of a two-stage yeast brewing process, whose point, I inferred, was to provide the yeast with two separate feedings, thereby growing a small amount of stock yeast into sufficient leavening for an enormous quantity of bread. But I had a nagging suspicion that I had seen similar recipes in home cookbooks too, and indeed I had. Here is one from the “Jane E. Hassler cookbook, June 1857,” a manuscript cookbook in the possession of the University of Iowa:

Fountain Rising

Boil a large handful of hops, in about 3 qts of water, several hours, put it boiling hot on about 1 qt of Rye flour. Taking care to wet every part, when cool enough, add some leaven to make it rise, 2 spoonful of salt, Ginger, and sugar each, when light, beat it down, and let it rise again. Cover it well from the air, and keep it in a cool place.

When you boil potatoes pour the water on some flour, and mash a few potatoes with it, when cool stir a large handful of the rising above mentioned, and then set your bread to rise with it afterwards.

This recipe calls for considerably more yeast food (rye flour) in the first stage than Brother Gavan’s recipe does, and it is presumably this food that keeps the yeast fed during storage, just as grated potatoes do in Maria Parloa’s recipe. Although the recipe does not say so, I assume that the second stage of Fountain Rising includes a fermentation period, during which the yeast gains strength by feeding on the potatoes. While not facing the Herculean task of leavening 300 pounds of bread, as Brother Gavan’s yeast must, Fountain Rising will have become fatigued if it has been kept for some weeks or months. The second feeding will revivify it, so that, with luck, it will raise the dough in something less than eighteen hours.

Many antebellum yeast recipes look much like Maria Parloa’s (albeit typically with mashed cooked potatoes rather than grated raw), a few like Fountain Rising. And there are many others too, some sustained with whole wheat flour or pumpkin, some without hops (which Beecher contends can give bread an unpleasant sharpness), and more than a few with ginger, which was perhaps believed to increase the liveliness of yeast because it is “hot.”2 There are also yeast “cakes,” which Mary Randolph, in common period fashion, makes by thickening a yeasted hop slurry with cornmeal to “the consistency of biscuit dough,” rolling and cutting the dough into “little cakes,” and drying them “in the shade, turning them frequently.” There are also recipes for (liquid) yeast that do not call for stock yeast, apparently relying on wild yeasts for leaven. Catharine Beecher outlines such a recipe in her cookbook of 1845, under the title “Milk Rising.” A similar recipe also appears in “American Cookbook, 1824-1855,” a manuscript cookbook at the University of Iowa:

Milk Emptins

Boil one pint of new milk then add one pint of water and stir in flour till about as thick as slapjack & let it stand over night & it is fit for use

I am curious about all of these yeast recipes, and I wish that I had the time and patience—and the yeast expertise—to explore them. But I don’t, so I will assume, on the basis of my yeast experiment eight years ago, that most of these recipes work, perhaps far better and far longer than I would think from reading them on the page. I am tempted also to assume that home-brewed yeasts imparted more or less the same flavor to antebellum bread that supermarket yeast imparts to bread today, for, in fact, the bread I raised with my home-brewed yeast tasted entirely familiar. But, obviously, I cannot make such an assumption because the original leaven in my home-brewed yeast came from the supermarket.

Barrel of Branded Flour

Unfortunately, this is only one of many assumptions that cannot be made in attempting to replicate the standard antebellum American white loaf. Indeed, it is probably an error to even speak of such a thing. Although there were flour brands as early as 1800, they were not graded by standard protocols, as all commercial flours are today, and people bought these flours on the basis of diverse criteria. (There is much advice on this score in the cookbooks.) And many women baked bread using local flour, perhaps ground from wheat grown on their family’s fields. So the flours that went into antebellum loaves must have varied considerably with respect to protein and starch content, moisture, grind size, and degree of bolting, resulting in rather different antebellum loaves. That said, based on my experience with adapting antebellum recipes generally, I suspect that antebellum flours, as a rule, had considerably less protein and absorptive capacity than today’s “bread flours” and less even than today’s higher-protein all-purpose flours. If this was indeed the case, relatively low-protein all-purpose flours (about 10.5%), such as Gold Medal and Pillsbury brands, should be as close to the mark as it is possible to come.

Additional difficulties in arriving at a standard antebellum white loaf are posed by the period recipes. Perhaps because flours varied so greatly, most antebellum recipes are maddeningly sketchy with regard to hydration, the crucial determinant of texture. Eliza Leslie’s directions are typical. She says only to add “as much soft water as is necessary” to mix the sponge and the remaining flour called for in her recipe into dough, which could imply a hydration anywhere between 50% and 65%. Making matters still more complicated, antebellum recipes call for wildly divergent proofing times, the critical factor for flavor. After kneading her sponge into dough, Leslie says to set the dough “in a warm place to undergo a further fermentation; for which, if all has been done rightly, about twenty minutes or half an hour will be sufficient.” A twenty- to thirty-minute rise does not strike me as even remotely sufficient, but, in fact, cookbook author Mary Cornelius, in the 1859 edition of The Young Housekeeper’s Friend, does not proof her dough at all. (Granted, Cornelius allows her sponge to rise overnight, which would have helped.) On the other hand, there is Mary Randolph. She allots around five to seven hours for setting the sponge (depending on the season) and she proofs the dough overnight.

Antebellum bread recipes stress two points in particular. First, the dough must be thoroughly kneaded (for as long as thirty minutes, says Leslie) in order that the bread be “white and light,” says Beecher. Second, as Mary Cornelius puts it, “Care is necessary that bread does not rise too much, and thus become sour.” Eliza Leslie says the same, and so does Catharine Beecher, adding that over-risen bread can “lose its sweetness” even “before it begins to turn sour.” Sourness being so abhorrent, all antebellum cookbook authors give directions for correcting soured doughs by kneading in a solution of water and pearl ash or saleratus, alkaline compounds more commonly used as baking sodas. Unfortunately, soda is damaging to the texture of bread, turning it crumbly and dry, like a baking powder biscuit, as Catharine Beecher acknowledges, writing, “Bread is never as good which has turned sour, and been sweetened with saleratus, as if it had risen only just enough.”3 Some culinary historians have written that antebellum American bread was a species of sourdough. These people are mistaken. The word repeatedly used in antebellum recipes to describe the desired flavor in bread is sweet.

Mary Randolph (1762-1828)

Those determined to make an antebellum loaf—if not a standard loaf and possibly not even a typical one—can find no better guide than Mary Randolph. Randolph provides proofing times for both the sponge and the dough, she specifies the hydration, and—miracle of miracles—she correlates the volume measure and the weight of wheat flour. And her correlation (one quart of flour weighs one and one quarter pounds) is precisely accurate for today’s all-purpose flour, which tempts one to think (perhaps wishfully) that her recipe, adapted with all-purpose flour, yields bread similar to the bread she baked.

To Make Bread

Mary Randolph, The Virginia House-Wife (1824)

When you find the barrel of flour a good one, empty it into a chest or box made for the purpose, with a lid that will shut close; it keeps much better in this manner than when packed in a barrel, and even improves by lying lightly; sift the quantity you intend to make up, put into a bowl three quarters of a pint of cold water to each quart of flour, with a large spoonful of yeast, and a little salt, to every quart; stir into it just as much of the flour as will make a thin batter, put half the remaining flour in the bottom of a tin kettle, pour the batter on it, and cover it with the other half; stop it close, and set it where it can have a moderate degree of warmth. When it has risen well, turn it into a bowl, work in the dry flour and knead it some minutes, return it into the kettle, stop it, and give it moderate heat. In the morning, work it a little, make it into rolls, and bake it. In the winter, make the bread up at three o’clock, and it will be ready to work before bed time. In summer, make it up at five o’clock. A quart of flour should weigh just one pound and a quarter.

Loaves Cast on Oven Floor

Randolph makes up her bread as “rolls,” by which she does not mean rolls as we now think of them but, probably, small eight- to ten- ounce round loaves, hand-shaped and baked free-standing, similar perhaps to the fine white loaves that the seventeenth-century English called manchet, or so Karen Hess speculates in her annotations to Randolph’s recipe in the 1984 South Carolina Press edition of Randolph’s cookbook. Historically, breads baked freestanding were typically cast from a peel directly onto the oven floor, which has led some authorities to surmise that the pan-baking of American bread came in with the introduction of enclosed stoves, whose slatted oven shelves made such a maneuver impossible. However, in The American Frugal Housewife (1833), Lydia Maria Child bakes her bread in pans—in a brick oven. So it seems that the stove oven did not usher in pan baking but sealed the transition to it, which had already begun by the time Randolph wrote.

Like the classic French baguette, Randolph’s bread is made with four simple ingredients: flour, water, yeast, and salt. This was typical—possibly even ubiquitous—in this country for all loaves simply called “bread” until around 1850, when water came to be replaced, at least in part, with milk. After the Civil War, small amounts of shortening and sugar were introduced, and today’s standard American “white bread” was born. Bread aficionados might enjoy baking my adapted recipe for Randolph’s bread side-by-side with a modern American white bread that includes milk but has a similar hydration, perhaps the classic Joy of Cooking White bread (which appears in all editions) or the richer Pullman Loaf from the excellent Hot Bread Kitchen Cookbook.4 While Randolph’s bread is a bit different from its modern counterparts—firmer and more cohesive, slightly less white in color—it has the same thin crust, the same small, tight crumb, and a similar flavor: unmistakably an American loaf.

  1. I gather from what I’ve read—and I am hardly an expert—that today’s brewery and distillery yeasts are different strains of the same organism. ↩
  2. Some contemporary research suggests that certain spices promote the growth of yeast, while others inhibit it. ↩
  3. The yeast, too, was supposed to be sweet, and, to keep it sweet, Leslie recommends recourse to pearl ash: “It is best to make yeast very frequently; as, with every precaution, it will scarcely keep good a week, even in cold weather. If you are apprehensive of its becoming sour, put into each bottle a lump of pearl-ash the size of a hazel-nut.” If yeast did turn sour, Beecher did not think alkali correction would help: “Sour yeast cannot be made good with saleratus.” As I have said, my sour-smelling home-brewed yeast produced perfectly sweet bread. ↩
  4. Correcting for the milk used in the modern loaves, which contains 15% materials other than water, their hydrations are approximately 68%, comparable to the hydration of Randolph’s loaf and promoting a similar texture. ↩
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When Did Southern Begin?

Posted November 2015 
by Stephen Schmidt 

Mary Randolph[1]

Mary Randolph by Saint-Memin, Virginia State Library

Published in 1824, Mary Randolph’s The Virginia Housewife was the first cookbook printed in the South and the most enduringly popular and influential southern cookbook of the nineteenth century, remaining in print, in various editions, into the 1860s and lending some of its particularly famous recipes to southern cookbooks published to eve of the First World War. In 1984 the University of South Carolina Press brought out a facsimile edition of Randolph’s cookbook, which contained a lengthy introduction and copious notes by the redoubtable culinary historian Karen Hess. I bought the facsimile Virginia Housewife in 1993, and over the years I went back to it many times, rereading Randolph’s recipes and trying to convince myself that Hess was right about them. Hess contends that Randolph’s cooking exemplifies “an authentic American cuisine,” but it didn’t look like that to me. I did spot some native southern inventions—a few of which are still known today, like beaten biscuits and hominy griddle cakes—but, for the most part, the book outlined the same cuisine that was in vogue among the privileged classes of the North in Randolph’s day: genteel English cooking interspersed with a few American dishes such as pumpkin pudding, soda-leavened gingerbread, and doughnuts. Hess, in fact, acknowledges Randolph’s pervasive Englishness; her notes are largely given over to tracing it. And yet she argues on various grounds that The Virginia Housewife shows this Englishness transmuted to a unique southern cuisine.

 

Third edition, prepared by Randolph the year of her death, at age 65

Third edition, prepared by Randolph the year of her death, at age 65

Two and a half years ago I came across a manuscript cookbook at the Clements Library, of the University of Michigan, at Ann Arbor, that immediately brought Mary Randolph and Hess’s commentary on her back to mind. Titled Receipts in Cooking, this manuscript was “collected and arranged” (says the title page) for one Mary Moore, in 1832. Moore hailed from somewhere in the Deep South, likely Georgia or Mississippi, but I would barely have guessed this from her cookbook. I could find only fifteen dishes peculiar to the South among the book’s eighty-four recipes. The rest, I knew, were common in the North too, for I had seen them repeatedly in antebellum northern cookbooks. And, like The Virginia Housewife, Moore’s sixty-nine nationally popular dishes were overwhelmingly English. Only seven were American specialties, such things as pumpkin pie, soda-leavened cakes, and cornbread.

The resemblance between Receipts in Cooking and The Virginia Housewife, it turned out, was not coincidental. Fifty-six of Moore’s recipes—or two thirds of the total—were copied, verbatim or nearly so, from Mary Randolph. I understood why nearly all of Moore’s distinctively southern recipes were taken from The Virginia Housewife, for it was the only available printed source for such recipes in 1832. But I wondered why fifty-seven of Moore’s English recipes were also cribbed from The Virginia Housewife rather than from one of the English cookbooks that supplied another fourteen of Moore’s recipes. 1  Was Randolph chosen merely out of convenience or sentiment? Or did she handle English cooking in uniquely southern ways, in which case Hess might be right?

In fact, Randolph’s interpretation of English cooking proved to differ in no significant way from that “A Boston Housekeeper” (Mrs. N. K. M. Lee), author of The Cook’s Own Book, published 1832, which contains all but four of the English dishes copied from Randolph in the Moore cookbook. Here, for example, are the recipes of Mrs. Lee and Mary Randolph (and Mary Moore) for beef olives, or stuffed beef roulades served in brown gravy. 2

Beef Olives

The Cook’s Own Book, 1832

Cut the beef into long thin steaks; prepare a forcemeat made of bread-crumbs, minced beef suet, chopped parsley, a little grated lemon-peel, nutmeg, pepper, and salt; bind it with the yolks of eggs beaten; put a layer of it over each steak; roll and tie them with thread. Fry them lightly in beef dripping; put them in a stewpan with some good brown gravy, a glass of white wine, and a little Cayenne; thicken it with a little flour and butter; cover the pan closely, and let them stew gently an hour. Before serving, add a table-spoonful of mushroom catchup; garnish with cut pickles.

 

Beef Olives

The Virginia Housewife, 1824

Cut slices from a fat rump of beef six inches long and half an inch thick, beat them well with a pestle, make a forcemeat of bread crumbs, fat bacon chopped, parsley a little onion, some shred suet, pounded mace, pepper and salt; mix it up with the yolks of eggs, and spread a thin layer of each slice of beef, roll it up tight and secure the rolls with skewers, set them before the fire, and turn them till they are a nice brown, have ready a pint of good gravy thickened with brown flour and a spoonful of butter, a gill of red wine with two spoonsful of mushroom catsup, lay the rolls in it and stew them till tender: garnish with forcemeat balls. (See adaptation.)

 

Elizabeth Raffald by Morland

Elizabeth Raffald by Morland

There are, to be sure, minor discrepancies between these two recipes, but these cannot be attributed to differences between northern and southern styles of cooking (not that the recipes imply such differences) but rather to the fact that the two authors worked off different English sources. I have not been able to identify the English source of Mrs. Lee’s recipe, but I know there is one, for Mrs. Lee explicitly acknowledges that she copied almost all of her recipes from previously published cookbooks, and there was no American cookbook yet in print in which she could have found her beef olives. I do know the English cookbook from which Mary Randolph paraphrased her recipe. It is The Experienced English Housekeeper, published in 1769 by Elizabeth Raffald, a fancy caterer and gourmet food shop proprietor. In editing out the phrases “penny loaf” and “tossing pan” Randolph has Americanized the language of Raffald’s recipe, and in substituting bacon and suet for marrow she has modernized it. I do not know the reason for Randolph’s other minor changes, but I do not believe that any were meant to make Raffald’s English recipe more southern American.

Beef Olives

The Experienced English Housekeeper, 1769

Cut slices off a rump of beef about six inches long and half an inch thick. Beat them with a paste pin and rub them over with the yolk of an egg, a little pepper, salt, and beaten mace, the crumbs of half a penny loaf, two ounces of marrow sliced fine, a handful of parsley chopped small and the out rind of half a lemon grated. Strew them all over your steaks and roll them up, skewer them quite close, and set them before the fire to brown. Then put them into a tossing pan with a pint of gravy, a spoonful of catchup, the same of browning, a teaspoonful of lemon pickle, thicken it with a little butter rolled in flour. Lay round forcemeat balls, mushrooms, or yolks of hard egg.

Although I sense the stirrings of “an authentic American cuisine” in The Virginia Housewife, I believe that Randolph’s cooking remains essentially English. Actually, Hess seems very nearly to believe the same. She declares that the “warp” of Randolph’s cooking is English, and she observes, correctly, that “there are English recipe titles by the score in The Virginia House-wife.” Hess would certainly know: she was, and still is, the greatest American scholar of early modern English cooking. “But there are surprises,” says Hess—by which she means, primarily, a weft of peculiarly southern non-English influences interwoven with the English warp, creating a unique southern cloth. But her thinking about these “surprises” is not always persuasive.

Popular historical accounts maintain that critical influence on southern cooking was exerted by the French—the Creole and Acadian French of Louisiana, the Huguenot refugees of the Carolinas, and, preposterously, Thomas Jefferson, who was not French of course, but who traveled to France, served French dishes and French wines at his dinner parties, and had a French maître d’ at the White House, and who, therefore, is inferred to have somehow introduced French cooking to the South, indeed to America. Hess is properly dismissive of all this, writing that Randolph’s French-titled dishes—and there are dozens of them, eleven of which show up in the Moore cookbook—had been naturalized in England for a century or more by the time Randolph outlined them (and Jefferson served them to his guests). Hess cites as an example Randolph’s recipe for beef à la mode, which had already made regular appearances in English cookbooks since the early eighteenth century. 3

But Hess, oddly, falls into a trap that popular historians have set. Rarely bothering to study period recipes, the popularizers endlessly repeat the tired wisdom that historical English food was “bland and boring.” Some of it was, but not all—not many of the finer dishes favored by the sophisticated and the privileged. So while Hess is correct to point out the Englishness of beef à la mode, she is in error when she then goes on to state that Randolph must have imported her particular “wonderfully redolent” recipe for this dish directly from a French cookbook. Randolph’s recipe calls for two heads of garlic, and according to Hess, English recipes for beef à la mode had been “innocent of garlic all through the eighteenth century.” In fact, Randolph copied her recipe, including the garlic, virtually verbatim from one of her favorite English sources, The Experienced English Housekeeper. In a similar vein, Hess seems to imply—her phrasing is not clear—that Randolph’s recipes for four especially sophisticated conceits, Fondus, Bell Fritters, Matelote, and To Fry Sliced Potatoes (authentic French fries, claims Hess), are likewise direct French imports. Actually, all of these dishes can be found in eighteenth-century English cookbooks, three of them in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, a cookbook that virtually every elite antebellum southern household owned. Generally speaking, Hess gives historical English cooking a fair appraisal, but her thinking here seems to have been infected by popular tropes.

Two other groups often imputed to have given southern cooking its unique character are American Indians and African slaves. Hess has little to say about Native American contributions, as these were mostly a matter of corn, and as crucial as corn was to the evolution of southern cooking, it was crucial to northern cooking too. Hess gives more consideration to the contributions of the enslaved, and justifiably so. She is right to point out African and African-Creole influence in southern dishes such as gumbo and pepper pot, as well as in typical southern foods like peanuts, sesame seed, watermelon, and yams. But Hess’s argument in favor of an African contribution to southern seasoning is dubious. Hess asserts that many of Virginia’s enslaved black cooks, having passed through the West Indies, picked up “tricks of seasoning from the exuberant Creole cuisines” of these places, which they then stirred into Virginian cooking pots. And thus, she writes, “Virginians had become accustomed to headier seasonings than were the English, or New Englanders, for that matter.” I am skeptical that “exuberant Creole  cuisines” existed in the hellacious West Indies at the turn of the nineteenth century or that slaves in transit were in a position to absorb seasoning tips. But beyond that, the problem is that Randolph does not season her food any differently from Mrs. Lee, Eliza Leslie, and other tony antebellum northern cookbook authors. Randolph does call for cayenne frequently, but so do her northern counterparts, for cayenne was beloved in England: Raffald’s reliance on cayenne in The Experienced English Housekeeper is almost compulsive.

 

2.

Whatever they may promise, most regional cookbooks deliver more or less the same recipes that can be found in many other cookbooks, for in truth most places do not possess distinctive cuisines. Still, people buy these books because, for various reasons, they are attached to the places these books celebrate. We assume today that southern women bought The Virginia Housewife to learn the secrets of southern cooking. But my sense is that antebellum southerners were barely aware of their cuisine as distinctively southern and that they bought—or in the case of the Moore cookbook, copied—Randolph’s cookbook primarily because it was of Virginia. Throughout the antebellum South, diverse though it was, Virginia was regarded as the cradle of the American republic and the South’s ideological and cultural lodestar, the exemplar of the highest-flown ideals of the southern way of life—as lived, of course, by its most privileged white inhabitants—ideals later popularly embodied in the phrase “southern hospitality.” Whatever the actual appeal of The Virginia Housewife was in its day, regional cookbooks whose pull was primarily their place were already on the scene by the time of the Civil War. A case in point is The Great Western Cook Book, first published in 1851, at the height of western migration. Most of the book’s recipes are along the lines of Soup à la Jardinière, Chestnut Stuffing, Veal Croquettes, and Charlotte Russe, fare more likely encountered in a New York townhouse than a wilderness log cabin. To rescue the theme, the publisher decorated the title page with a vaguely western-looking motif and inserted a few recipes with cornball “western” titles: Soup—Rough and Ready, Steamboat Sauce, and Sausages—Hoosier Fashion. Similar strategies are still deployed by publishers today.

grea001[1]I suspect that few in 1851 believed that The Great Western Cook Book typified western cooking or that there even was such a thing. But by the middle of the last century, the food publishing industry had managed to convince the public of the actual existence of regional cuisines that, in fact, the industry had largely invented. Famous, and appealing, examples of this sleight of hand are the five volumes in the Time-Life series “American Cooking,” published between 1968 and 1971. The general volume, titled simply American Cooking, and the southern volume are plausible, but the other three—The Northwest, The Great West, and The Eastern Heartland—make a far less convincing case for the distinctiveness of their respective cuisines. Actually, Time-Life would have us believe that there are twelve American regional cuisines altogether: the general volume delineates them in a color-coded map. Absurd though such formulations may be, they served clever marketing purposes. At mid-century, regional cookbooks endowed American cooking with a richness, diversity, and historical pedigree equal to that of French cuisine, thereby appealing to those alienated by the then-rampaging popularity of a foreign, highfalutin culinary fashion. Even more importantly, regional cookbooks materialized a dignified, wholesome American food culture separate from its modern mass incarnation, appealing to those who despised modern mass food as the degraded product of big business interests. At the risk of second-guessing Karen Hess, who is no longer living to speak for herself, I suspect that her notorious contempt for the national food scene of her time, in its diverse manifestations, lured her into framing The Virginia Housewife as embodying a more distinctive southern cuisine than it actually did.

Everyone would agree that by 1984, when the facsimile edition of The Virginia Housewife was published, southern cooking had long since coalesced into “an authentic American cuisine” with local variations. But the cookbooks tell us that this turning point came after the Civil War, when the humiliated South retrenched in self-flattering fantasies of the old southern way of living. As Eugene Walter, an Alabama native, observes in Time-Life’s American Cooking: Southern Style, the post-war South “took its tone, set its style, cocked its snoot, decided to become set in its ways and pleasurably conscious of being so. . . glamorizing its past and transforming anecdote into legend.” And among the old “rites and observances” to which the South clung, “none was more important than those of the table.”

The cooking of the antebellum South did change after the war, but not as much, and not in the same ways, as the cooking of the North. While the North borrowed liberally from the fashionable French cuisine of the Gilded Age and from the cooking of immigrant groups, the South tended to stick with dishes of the past, many of which were English: spiced beef (an iteration of beef à la mode), calf’s head variations, fricassees of all sorts, hashes and minces, meat collops, potted foods, drawn butter sauces, vegetable “mangoes,” multifarious pickles and ketchups, brandy peaches and other preserves, pones and other hot breads, pound cake, sweet potato puddings, boiled puddings, jelly cakes, cheesecakes (chess pies), syllabub, fruit and flower wines, and more. And while the North fell under the sway of so-called “scientific cookery,” the founding ideology of modern home economics, which taught a cheaper, simpler, lighter, plainer style of cooking, the South retained its allegiance to luxury, ostentation, richness, high seasoning, vinegar-sharpening, and tooth-aching sweetness. This is only part of a complex story, but it is the most crucial part: while the cooking of the North moved forward, becoming more modern and more distinctively American, the cooking of the South remained antique—and in many respects the better for it.

The astonishing southern cuisine that developed between the Civil War and the First World War was practiced by the extended family of Virginia Black smallholders into which the celebrated chef and cookbook author Edna Lewis was born in 1916. In What Is Southern?, an arresting essay that went unpublished until two years after her death, in 2006, Lewis answers her question with remarkable, resonant thoroughness, listing some four dozen dishes characteristic of  the South and not of the rest of the country. Edna Lewis’s southern is sometimes described as “refined” in contrast to today’s more typical downhome, deep-fried, barbecue-with-sides southern or its upscale restaurant correlative, summed up by one wag as “I don’t know what southern cooking is, but I always know there will be corn in it somewhere.” But Lewis’s own perspective is that her southern is not so much refined as old-fashioned, in danger of ‘passing from the scene’ unless deliberately preserved. It is hard to disagree with her. In our time, much of Lewis’s lovely southern—turtle soup with turtle dumplings, baked snowbirds, braised mutton, wild pig with pork liver and peanut sauces, potted squab with the first wild greens, and fig pudding—can only be cooked as historical reenactment.

  1. I was able to trace six of these fourteen recipes to three English cookbooks that were popular in this country and had been published in American editions: E. Smith’s The Compleat Housewife (1729), Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747), and the expanded edition of Dr. William Kitchiner’s The Cook’s Oracle (1822). I could not ascertain the origins of the remaining eight English recipes, but their language indicates with near certainty that they were indeed English and copied from print. ↩
  2. When this dish debuted in English manuscript cookbooks, in the fifteenth century, the word was “aloes,” from the French alouettes, or larks, which the rolls were thought, fancifully, to resemble. (Culinary historian Peter Rose tells me that the Dutch call a similar dish “little finches.”) “Aloes” became “olives” in the sixteenth century. ↩
  3. Randolph’s recipe To Harrico Mutton, which is copied in the Moore cookbook, illustrates the occasional complications of determining the origins of specific French recipes that appear in English-language cookbooks. Historically, this dish was known in France by two different names: “haricot” and “halicot” (both in various cognates). The latter name would seem to be more correct, as it derives, according to the 1984 Larousse, from the French verb halicoter, to cut in small pieces (as the ingredients in this dish are). But “haricot” (which now means green bean) is documented earlier, appearing in in the 14th century manuscript of Taillevent. When the English adopted the dish, in the sixteenth century, they called it “haricot” and I had always seen it thus in English and American sources into the 19th century. But I recently spotted the recipe as Hallico of Mutton in The Johnson Family Treasury, an 18th century English manuscript recipe book that has just been published (beautifully). Was “hallico” current in England in the 18th century? Or did the Johnson family get their recipe from a French source? ↩
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