Catharine Dean Flint

Plum Pudding, Boiled—and Baked

Posted December 2016

By Stephen Schmidt

Plum Pudding, or Christmas Pudding

On the evening of November 7, 1862, Catharine Dean Flint staged a formal company dinner for eleven people in her elegant Boston home. An elaborate affair by today’s standards, her dinner included two dessert courses, the first of which featured a plum pudding. When we hear the words “plum pudding,” we visualize a dense, dark, shiny mound that comes to the table dramatically wreathed in brandy flames. The British and Irish still serve plum pudding at Christmas today, albeit under the modern name “Christmas pudding,” but most Americans seem to associate it with English Christmases of the past, most famously, perhaps, that of the Cratchit family in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. It is indeed an old-fashioned pudding, nothing like the cold, creamy desserts that we call puddings today, but rather a sort of dense suet pound cake stuffed with raisins—the “plums.” It is served piping hot, with “rich sauce,” as most puddings once were served.

But this was not, in fact, the pudding that Mrs. Flint served at her dinner on November 7, 1862. Mrs. Flint wrote extensive notes about this dinner, as she did about all of her entertainments, in her manuscript cookbook, which is now in the possession of the American Antiquarian Society, in Worcester, Massachusetts. And in these notes Mrs. Flint remarks, approvingly, that the pudding was served turned out of “the dish in which it was baked.” Classic plum pudding, the kind that comes to the table in flames, is not baked: it is boiled in a cloth bag or, more commonly today, steamed in a ceramic pudding basin or in a fluted metal steeple mold. But American women knew another kind of plum pudding too, which was baked, and it happens that Mrs. Flint’s cookbook contains a recipe for the baked sort of plum pudding—an unusually firm baked plum pudding that proves easy to unmold from its baking dish. The donor of the recipe, “Madam Salisbury,” was likely the mother of Stephen Salisbury II, a frequent guest in the Flint home.

Madam Salisbury’s Plum Pudding

Elizabeth Tuckerman Salisbury (1768-1851), by Gilbert Stuart (courtesy of Worcester Art Museum)

Half a loaf of bread soaked two hours in one quart of milk. Butter the size of an egg. Two heaped spoons of sugar and seven eggs beaten with the sugar and strained on to the bread after it is cold. Pint bowl full of raisins – two tea spoons salt. One even tea spoon cloves a little cinnamon. Bake two hours.

Madame Salisbury’s Plum Pudding

If you are wondering why plum puddings were once so highly esteemed, the simple answer is that, historically, raisins were special. When the English nicknamed raisins “plums” or “little plums” (which happened around the time of the Restoration, in 1660), they were affiliating the fruits with comfits, or dragées, which the English called “sugar plums.” Sugar plums were fancy and festive, and the English, historically, thought the same of raisins, both the large “raisins of the sun” and the small “raisins of Corinth,” which the English called “currants.”¹ Writing in 1617, the English traveler and social commentator Fynes Moryson tells us that “the use of Corands of Corinth [is] so frequent in all places, and with all persons in England, as the very Greekes that sell them wonder what we doe with such great quantities thereof, and know not how we should spend them, except we use them for dying, or to feede Hogges.”² In Moryson’s day, large and small raisins still found their way into many meat, poultry, and vegetable dishes, as they had since the thirteenth century. But the fruits were already beginning to be particularly associated with the many new sweet things then appearing on the scene, including sweet puddings, which were rapidly gaining favor with the English.

Although based on earlier precedents, boiled plum pudding, so named, did not emerge until the early eighteenth century. Through most of the century, it was, like other puddings, served in the first course of dinner, with the principal meats. And like several other raisin-rich comestibles—such as plum cakes (the ancestors of today’s fruitcakes and British Christmas cakes), plum pottage (a sort of spicy-sweet, fruited beef stew thickened with bread), and mince pie (from which Jack Horner extracted a plum)—plum pudding was a favorite at Christmas. The “Miss Caldwell cookbook, 1757-1790,” an English manuscript in the possession of the University of Iowa, showcases both plum pudding and smallish mince pies in the first course of a Christmas bill of fare, along with two other classics of the English Christmas feast: brawn (cold pickled pork) and “a sirloin of roasted beef.” A number of other English manuscript cookbooks of the period outline similar Christmas dinner first courses.

Miss Caldwell Cookbook Christmas Dinner Bill-of-Fare, First Course, page 124

Boiled plum pudding came to America early on—there are recipes in several eighteenth-century American manuscript cookbooks—and it duly shifted to the second course of dinner in the late eighteenth century, as it did in Britain. Still, American cookbooks imply that the pudding was never as wholeheartedly embraced in this country as in Britain. Harder-pressed American families—families whose circumstances were similar to the Cratchits’—seem rarely to have served it, even at Christmas. And while the American gentry did serve it, sometimes even apart from Christmas and New Year, many gentry cookbooks frame the pudding, in one way or another, as English, as though it were not fully naturalized here. Indeed, starting with Mary Randolph’s The Virginia House-Wife (1824), more than a few American cookbooks title their recipes English Plum Pudding. Perhaps America’s problem with the pudding was its abundance of plums, which made it expensive—or perhaps it was the booze, which many Americans already found objectionable by the 1840s. Or perhaps it was the suet, or beef kidney fat, which had to be cleaned and minced, a fiddly project that English women took in their stride but that American women seem always to have balked at. In addition, many American women no doubt shied away from the six-hour boiling, which someone (preferably “help,” which was always in short supply in America) had to supervise, shifting the pudding in the pot to maintain its round shape and topping up the water as it boiled away. Finally, there was the national “dyspepsia” crisis (or so it was perceived) of the antebellum decades and beyond, during which boiled puddings came to be considered unhealthily “rich” and “heavy.” In The Good Housekeeper, her cookbook of 1841, the redoubtable Sarah Hale warned, “As Christmas comes but once a year, a rich plum pudding may be permitted for the feast, though it is not healthy food; and children should be helped very sparingly.”

Sarah Josepha Hale (1788-1879)

Enter baked plum pudding. Baked plum pudding was essentially a simple bread pudding dressed up a bit: enhanced with plums, obviously (which plain bread pudding in the day did not have), and served hot with a rich sauce (while plain bread pudding was served “cool,” say the cookbook authors, and sauce-less). Baked plum pudding was in multiple ways friendlier to American sensibilities than its boiled counterpart. It had fewer plums than the boiled article and so was cheaper. It did not have booze (except in a very few highfalutin recipes), and while some recipes, in a nod to tradition, do suggest that suet can be used (a dreadful idea, in my view, as suet never melts sufficiently, if at all, in a baked pudding), these same recipes invariably say that butter will do just as well instead, “if you choose.” And most recipes call for butter only—and not for much.³ Even children could be permitted to indulge. And of course there was no six-hour boiling to fret over. An hour or so in an oven (or a Dutch oven) and the pudding was done.

Baked plum pudding shows up in some nineteenth-century British cookbooks, but I do not sense that British women were nearly as fond of it, or as reliant on it, as American women were.⁴ Here it became not only an “every woman’s” alternative to boiled plum pudding on holiday tables but also, as Mary Cornelius tells us, an all-purpose company treat that could be served either as a dessert or as a tea cake. In the 1859 edition of The Young Housekeeper’s Friend, Mrs. Cornelius advises her readers:

These puddings are served with a rich sauce, if eaten warm, but are excellent cold, cut up like cake. People that are subject to a great deal of uninvited company, find it convenient in cold weather to bake half a dozen at once. They will keep several weeks, and when one is to be used, it may be loosened from the dish by a knife passed around it, and little hot water be poured in round the edge. It should then be covered close, and set for half an hour into the stove or oven.

Mrs. Cornelius provides two recipes for baked plum pudding. Her first recipe, she says, can be made with soda crackers rather than bread, in which guise it was often called cracker pudding. Most nineteenth-century American cookbook authors have a recipe for cracker pudding, including Fannie Farmer, who features it in her Thanksgiving menu under the name “Thanksgiving Pudding.” Mrs. Cornelius’s second recipe is thus:

Soak a pound of soft bread in a quart of boiled milk till it can easily be strained through a coarse hair sieve; then add seven eggs, two gills of cream, a quarter of a pound of butter (melted), a gill of rose-water, or some extract of rose, a little cinnamon or nutmeg, and a pound of raisins. For a small family, bake it in two dishes, an hour; and reserve one for another day.

Students of historical American cooking may think that they have seen this recipe somewhere else—and indeed they have. It is a paraphrase of the recipe called “A Bread Pudding” outlined by Amelia Simmons in American Cookery (1796), our nation’s first homegrown cookbook. As I’ve said, historical American bread pudding did not have plums, so Simmons’s title is something of a mystery.

Amelia Simmons’s A Bread Pudding

A Bread Pudding

One pound soft bread or biscuit [crackers] soaked in one quart milk, run thro’ a sieve or cullender [colander], add 7 eggs, three quarters of a pound sugar, one quarter of a pound butter, nutmeg or cinnamon, one gill rosewater, one pound stone raisins, half pint cream, bake three quarters of an hour, middling oven.

It turns out that Catharine Dean Flint copied Simmons’s recipe verbatim into her manuscript cookbook, so it may have been Simmons’s baked plum pudding, not Madam Salisbury’s, that Mrs. Flint served at her dinner of November 7, 1862. Which is better? I would give the edge to Simmons’s pudding, which is sweeter, richer, and softer than Madam Salisbury’s and has the lovely flavor of rose water (which, despite the large quantity, is subtle). Still, Madam Salisbury’s pudding slices beautifully and has an appealing spicy flavor, and it is sweet enough if you interpret her “two heaped spoons of sugar” liberally. Adapted recipes for both puddings can be found here. Those fortunate to be subject to a great deal of company, uninvited or invited, over the holidays may find it convenient to have at least one in reserve.

[NOTES]

Currants, the berries, came to England in the sixteenth century. Initially, some English mistakenly believed that the berries, when dried, made raisins of Corinth. And so the berries, too, became “currants.” ↩
William Brenchley Wrye, England as Seen by Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth and James I (London: John Russell Smith, Soho Square: 1865), 190. Retrieved December 3, 2016 from Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/englandasseenbyf00ryew ↩
While classic boiled plum pudding requires an equal weight of fat to bread (and/or flour), baked plum pudding has only a quarter weight of fat to bread or less. ↩
My hunch is that American baked plum pudding and British baked plum pudding evolved (fairly) independently. The American and British recipes differ in some details, and the uses of the recipes, as implied in the cookbooks, are also different. ↩

When Service à la Française Met Service à la Russe

Posted November 2016

by Stephen Schmidt

By Stephen Schmidt

The library of Harewood House, Yorkshire, UK. Mrs. Flint staged her November 1862 in her home library, which may have been similar.

Those who have read my post about Catharine Dean Flint’s evening parties and late-night suppers know that Mrs. Flint was an ideal hostess—someone who knew the latest fashions and whose entertainments were certainly stylish, but also someone who was secure in her sense that she knew best how to please her particular guests and so was not afraid to do things her own way. Mrs. Flint also had the perfect temperament for a hostess (and perhaps for anyone). When something went awry at one of her parties—when the silver arrangement was a tad too crowded, or the dessert display was awkward, or too many plates of scalloped oysters went uneaten—she did not let herself get upset. Instead, she wrote down what had gone wrong in a notebook so that she would know how to better manage things the next time.

Now in the possession of the American Antiquarian Society, in Worcester, Massachusetts, Mrs. Flint’s notebook tells us that she once again marshalled her formidable skills as a hostess—and displayed her equable hostess temperament—on the evening of November 7, 1862, when she staged a formal dinner for eleven people in the library of her fine Boston home. Sixty years old at the time of this event, Mrs. Flint had been schooled in a style of dinner-giving called service à la française but had lived to see a new style, called service à la russe, come into fashion. Mrs. Flint neither slavishly clung to the old way nor heedlessly embraced the new but instead merged the two styles, delightfully, into service à la Flint. As it turned out, there was a glitch in her November 1862 dinner, but, as usual, Mrs. Flint took it in her stride.

Second course by Elizabeth Raffald, 1769, with serving dishes specially shaped for specific table positions.

From the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries the Anglo-American formal dinner was served à la française, or French style. The antebellum American version of service à la française (which differed from the contemporaneous British version) entailed two principal courses, the first savory and the second sweet, plus a little caboose course called dessert. In her cookbook of 1846 Catharine Beecher lays out a typical French-style menu “for what would be called . . . in the most respectable society . . . a plain, substantial dinner.” Her first course comprises a soup, a fish dish, two principal meats (a turkey and a ham, a common choice), a game roast (ducks), a fancy side dish (scalloped oysters), several plain vegetables, and various sauces and condiments. By Beecher’s day, the first course had become, de facto, two courses, as the soup and the fish were brought to the table and served first—most diners ate one or the other, not both—before the rest of the course was laid on.¹ Beecher’s second course features a pudding (hot, with a sauce, as was traditional), at least two unspecified pastry dishes (particular favorites were mince and apple pies), and one or more delicate sweet dishes selected from the family denominated custards and creams (which, confusingly, also included gelatin jellies). Her dessert focuses on fruit in various forms—fresh, preserved in syrup, candied, and dried—augmented by nuts, candies, and little cakes (such as macaroons and kisses).

When a dinner was served à la française, all of the items of each course were arranged on the table in a clever symmetrical pattern of top, bottom, middle, side, and corner dishes. There was nothing on the table other than the food, which, in effect, supplied the table decoration.² Seated at opposite ends of the table, the hostess and host served the soup and the fish of the first course and the pudding and pastry of the second, while their guests served one another whatever dishes were nearest to them, helped by waiters who were standing by. Some guests not only had to serve but also slice or carve, for at French-style dinners roasts, birds, meat roulades, savory pies, and all else came to the table whole and intact. Fortunately, beasts requiring complicated dismemberment (like a roasted turkey) were typically set before the host, who was presumed to know how to dispatch them.

Catharine Beecher’s First Course (after the soup and fish had been served and cleared). Beecher’s serving pieces are much simpler than Raffald’s, as is Beecher’s dinner.

Place setting for 12-course dinner a la russe

By the 1860s, the rich and fashionable had abandoned service à la française in favor of service à la russe, or Russian service, and magazine writers, cookbook authors, and “behavior” experts were strenuously promoting this new serving style to middle-class women. While a French-style dinner was essentially a three-course buffet, a dinner à la russe was served in eight to fourteen separate small courses. In antebellum America, the more or less obligatory courses comprised, in the following order: raw oysters on the half-shell, soup, fish, croquettes or a creamed food in puff pastry, a roast with potatoes and a vegetable, game with salad (or salad only), a cold dessert, a frozen dessert with fancy cakes, and, finally, coffee. If a grander effect was wanted, other items could be grafted onto this basic template: an entrée (meaning a light meat or fish dish), and/or a vegetable, and/or a palate-cleansing sorbet could follow the roast; cheese and crackers could be served either following the game/salad or just before coffee; a hot dessert or a large cake could precede the cold dessert; and fresh, preserved, and dried fruit might follow the frozen dessert.³ It all sounds like quite a production, but in Practical Cooking and Dinner-Giving (1876), Mary Henderson opines that “it is very simple to prepare a dinner served à la Russe”—indeed, “after a very little practice it becomes a mere amusement.” Henderson’s nonchalance is less surprising than it seems. She presumes that many items will be purchased ready-made, either from a caterer or in cans, and that all of the cooking required will be done by servants, which any hostess who hazarded such a dinner would have had at the time.

Mary Henderson (1842-1931) was certainly one of the “rich and fashionable.” Shown here is her Washington DC home (built c. 1889) shortly before it was razed in 1949.

In addition to being served in many courses, Russian service differed from French in the way the food was presented. Each dish was sliced, sauced, and artfully arranged on a platter in the kitchen. A waiter then bore the platter to the table and offered it to guests one at a time, who helped themselves to as much as they wanted. There was never any food on the table except what was on the diners’ plates. But this does not mean that a table styled à la russe was unadorned. As Mary Henderson explains, “In serving a dinner à la Russe, the table is decorated by placing the dessert in a tasteful manner around a centre-piece of flowers.” By dessert she means “fruits, fresh or candied, preserved ginger or preserves of any kind, fancy cakes, candies, nuts, raisins, etc.”

Centerpiece with Flowers and Fruit

Most cookbooks published after the Civil War—including Fannie Farmer’s hugely influential Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, first published in 1896—take it as a given that formal dinners staged in upper-middle-class homes were served à la russe. But given the complications of Russian service (notwithstanding Mrs. Henderson’s airy assertions) and its profound departure from tradition, one suspects that many women merged the two systems—as Mrs. Flint did, to charming effect.

The savory dishes of Mrs. Flint’s November 1862 dinner were served in the Russian style, but not consistently in accordance with correct Russian procedure. The first of the savory courses was the popular turtle soup (three quarts total, ordered from a purveyor). Mrs. Flint’s houseboy, Edwin, ladled the soup from a tureen that had been set on a small table before a window. Henry Smith, a caterer and party planner hired for the occasion, passed the filled soup plates to guests. The soup was served with sherry, as most soups were at the time. Champagne was drunk with the remaining savory courses, as was typical in the day even when red meats were on offer.

The next course was creamed oysters in puff pastry shells, or “oyster patties,” a clever choice, as the patties could stand in either for the second Russian course, which was fish, or the third, which was typically a sauced morsel in pastry. Mrs. Flint notes that there were eight patties altogether, arranged “four on a dish, each patty cut across.” The waiters must have struggled to serve the patties, as each held a generous pint of filling (four quarts of oysters having been ordered for the dinner), which must have threatened to spill out.

Oyster Patties (courtesy of finecooking.com)

The third course may have been meant as the Russian roast course (which was the de facto Russian “main course”), but it was hardly a proper one. For one thing, the roast—a turkey “of nine or ten pounds”—was served in tandem with four boiled chickens, which had no place in this slot of a Russian menu. For another, the turkey was carved at the table by Mr. Flint, a violation of Russian protocol. As Mrs. Henderson explains, at a Russian dinner “the dishes are brought to the table already carved neatly for serving, thus depriving . . . the host of [displaying] his skill in carving.” However, hewing to the Russian style, both birds came to the table garnished with parsley, a new fashion that Mrs. Flint thought it worth her time to note.

While Mr. Flint was working at the turkey, Henry whisked Mrs. Flint’s chickens away and carved them in some unspecified place. Once carved, the birds were transferred to platters with their vegetable accompaniments, the turkey with deep-fried breaded mashed-potato balls, sweet potatoes, and squash; the chickens with boiled potatoes, sweet potatoes, and Matinas (a type of tomato, which may have been canned, considering the lateness of the season). The platters were then offered by waiters to the guests. At her sit-down suppers, too, Mrs. Flint was wont to offer two varieties of poultry, one roasted and one boiled, apparently with the expectation that guests would choose one bird or the other, not both. My guess is that she assumed her dinner guests would do likewise. Why Mrs. Flint thought it a good idea to serve two similar poultry dishes simultaneously is a mystery. Catharine Beecher paired her turkey with a ham, which seems a better choice.

The savory courses of the meal concluded with a three black ducks and “celery dressed,” that is, some sort of celery salad. This was a classic Russian game course—if not, one thinks, really the right game course for this particular meal, considering the bounty of feathered edibles already proffered. And contravening Russian convention once again, Mr. Flint carved the ducks.

Elizabeth Tuckerman Salisbury (1768-1851), by Gilbert Stuart (courtesy of Worcester Art Museum)

Elizabeth Tuckerman Salisbury (1768-1851), by Gilbert Stuart, circa 1810 (courtesy of Worcester Art Museum)

The dinner now departed from Russian procedure entirely, in favor of a French-style second course constructed in the American way—that is, all sweet.⁴ Americans of the day sometimes called this course “dessert” (which was a bit confusing when a dessert of fruit followed) and sometimes “pastry and pudding,” after its principal constituents. At Mrs. Flint’s dinner, the pastry was apple pies, and the pudding was a hot plum pudding. By today’s definitions, the pudding was essentially a baked bread pudding with lots of raisins (the “plums”), not the classic, fancier plum pudding, which was boiled or steamed (now generally known as Christmas pudding in Great Britain and Ireland). Mrs. Flint had two recipes for the pudding in her notebook, one belonging to “Madam Salisbury,” who was likely the mother of Stephen Salisbury II, a frequent guest of the Flints, and the other copied from Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery, the first cookbook published by an American author, in 1796. Mrs. Flint observes that the pudding “was removed from the dish in which it was baked and placed on a small oval platter, which I liked.” This fashion had been abroad for some decades by 1862, but it seems to have been seldom done, so it is possible that Mrs. Flint had never seen it.⁵

Mr. Flint served the pies and Mrs. Flint served the pudding (which was surely accompanied by a sauce, although Mrs. Flint does not mention one in her notes). Since the pudding was hot, those guests who wanted both pudding and pie started with the pudding. Most guests, though, probably had room for only one or the other. Calves’ foot jelly, a spiced wine gelatin made with calves’ foot stock, “was passed around after the pudding and pies had been served,” says Mrs. Flint. The jelly was likely eaten off fresh plates supplied by the waiters.⁶

Finally, there was the dessert. In Miss Leslie’s Behaviour Book (1864 edition), American author Eliza Leslie recounts, in awed tones, a stultifying-sounding dinner à la russe staged for twenty-four in a grand English manor—waited by a butler and eight liveried footmen. The dessert that capped this extravagant dinner was essentially a Russian frozen dessert course yoked to a fruit course by dint of elaborate table setting. Mrs. Flint’s dessert was similar. First, the table was “entirely cleared, all the glasses removed,” Mrs. Flint writes. Then new place settings were brought on, consisting of “white china plates, each containing [a] white tea napkin,” with a “silver knife, fork, and spoon & fresh wine glass placed before every guest.” That word “containing” points to the surprising purpose of the tea napkins, which was to muffle unpleasant scraping noises when plates of ice cream were laid on top of the white plates, as was soon to occur. Leslie explains: “Next a dessert plate was given to each guest, and on it a ground-glass plate [for an ice], about the size of a saucer. Between these plates was a crochet-worked white doyly . . . . These doylies were laid under the ground-glass plate[s], to deaden the noise of their collision.”

Henry set ice cream next to Mrs. Flint but he was the one who served it—“on red china plates” (perhaps rented, as Mrs. Flint’s party tableware sometimes

Finger bowl

was), which were “placed on the white china, just as one places a soup plate on a dinner plate,” Mrs. Flint observes. After the ice cream had been eaten, the red plates were removed along with the tea napkins, and finger bowls were brought in and fruit was “distributed,” to be eaten off the white china plates. “The servants left the room,” Mrs. Flint writes, giving her guests an interval of privacy. As stylish as it was, this course, too, flouted proper Russian procedure, which decreed that the frozen dessert was to be served with fancy cakes. Mrs. Flint’s dinner did include cakes—squares of frosted pound cake, macaroons, and coconut cakes, all left over “from Wednesday,” when she had staged an evening party. But, following French custom, “coffee tea & cake [were] passed in the drawing room soon after we left the table,” Mrs. Flint writes.

Mrs. Flint’s notes tell us that this hybrid Russian-French dinner got off to a rough start. “Had I expected to have my dinner served in the way it was I should have had choice fruit & a few flowers, but I intended when I began my arrangements to have only my own people to serve it,” Mrs. Flint writes in her notebook. “Only fruit jelly & cranberry on the table when we sat down,” she continues. Clearly this was not the way the table was meant to look. What had happened?

For some reason that Mrs. Flint does not state, Henry Smith, assisted by his helper (described by Mrs. Flint as “a colored man”) and Edwin, ended up serving the dinner instead of Mrs. Flint’s “own people,” and Henry apparently pushed the dinner farther in a Russian direction than Mrs. Flint’s people would have. I don’t know if Mrs. Flint’s people would have brought out the savory foods in a single French-style first course, although this seems plausible, as Catharine Beecher composes her first course of virtually the same savory dishes that Mrs. Flint serves. But I do think that Mrs. Flint’s people would have simply set the savory dishes on the table and let the diners help themselves, for this is how things were done at Mrs. Flint’s sit-down suppers. If this was indeed the usual procedure at her dinners, Mrs. Flint ordinarily saw, when she sat down, a soup tureen and soup plates, all ready for her to serve, at her end of the table. And in the center of the table she was probably used to seeing a set of cut-glass cruets, or “casters,” containing pungent catsups and store sauces, for she reminds herself in her notebook always to set casters on her supper table.

Casters

But at a Russian-style dinner there was never soup on the table, for the soup was served by the waiters, nor were there casters, for all dishes came to the table already sauced. A Russian-style table was supposed to be decorated with a centerpiece consisting of flowers and fruit, but it seems that Mrs. Flint only decided to serve the dinner à la russe at the last minute, and did not have a chance to order the “choice fruit” and “few flowers” that the centerpiece required. And so Henry had put only the two jellies on the table, hardly a welcoming sight for Mrs. Flint’s dinner guests as they sat down. Mrs. Flint seems to have been a little embarrassed by this incident but not discombobulated. She simply wrote down what had happened so that she could avoid having it happen again.

[NOTES]

In the eighteenth century the entire course was on the table when diners sat down. The soup and the fish were eaten first and then replaced (or “removed”) by new top and bottom dishes. The obvious drawback to this plan was that the bulk of the first course was cold and sodden with condensation under its covers by the time diners got to it. ↩
This was the case in middling households. However, in very elite households, the center of the table was elaborately decorated, at least on company occasions, with flowers, fruit, sugar sculpture, porcelain objects, candles, and still other things. These items might be arranged on a long footed silver tray called a plateau. Or they might be displayed in a silver epergne, a large bowl elevated on a tall stem and surrounded by smaller bowls supported by radiating branches. ↩
A serious disadvantage of a fourteen-course dinner à la russe was its length. Mrs. Henderson rails against “fashionable dinners” à la russe that stretch three or four hours; she feels that “every minute over two hours” is unendurable. (Today’s plotters of “tasting menus” might take note!) ↩
By the late eighteenth century, the American version of French service entailed an entirely sweet second course, while the British second course contained a mix of savory and sweet dishes, as was traditional. Some diners chose savory dishes only, others only sweet, and others sampled both (changing their plates, of course). In Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), Frances Trollope, an Englishwoman who visited this country in the early 1830s, expresses surprise at the American way, which she disliked, as she did virtually everything about this country. ↩
Baked plum pudding will be the subject of a forthcoming blog post, and adapted recipes for Madam Salisbury’s and Simmons’s puddings will be provided. ↩
Although service à la russe was supposedly dreamt up in Russia, the fashion was identified with the French, and in Britain and America most of the dishes served at Russian-style dinners were either French or Frenchified. This was particularly true of the desserts, which meant that pastry and pudding were rarely served. A plum pudding might be permitted for a holiday dinner (likely renamed in French, as le pouding, on the menu), but as lowly and contemptible thing as apple pie absolutely never made an appearance. The extraordinarily popular calves’ foot jelly was acceptable for the Russian cold dessert course, but a brightly colored, fruit-flavored French jelly was preferable. ↩

A Boston Hostess Reveals Her Supper Secrets

Posted April 2016

by Stephen Schmidt

Merchant’s House (1832), New York City. The Flints’ home may have been similar.

The Flints were a middle-aged, childless couple who lived in Boston, just off the northeast end of Boston Common, in the 1850s and 60s. Their home had front and back parlors, a dining room, and a large library, all nicely furnished, as well as bedrooms and sitting rooms on the upper stories. The Flints employed three fulltime servants: a cook, a maid, and a houseboy. Besides being a busy professional, Mr. Flint was active in his parish of the Episcopal Church and was a trustee and major supporter of the Boston Public Library. Mrs. Flint devoted much of her time and attention to staging elaborate company meals and parties. Some of these entertainments were occasioned by her husband’s involvement with the library, while others were purely social affairs. The guest lists at the library events were particularly elite, comprising physicians, judges, high political officials (including a former state governor), and prominent businessmen, but Mrs. Flint’s social gatherings were only slightly less glittering. Many of the same individuals who attended the library functions also showed up at Mrs. Flint’s Thanksgiving dinners and Christmas parties, along with the Flints’ close circle of family and friends. Catharine Dean Flint tells us all of this in her manuscript cookbook, which is in the possession of the American Antiquarian Society, in Worcester, Massachusetts, and which has recently been digitized, along with the rest of the impressive AAS manuscript cookbook collection. The Flint family papers and diaries, also at the society, give us a sense of how the Flints came by their wealth and social prominence. Catharine Dean Flint (1802-1869) was a daughter of a New Hampshire merchant; one of her sisters married a governor of New Hampshire, while another was the first wife of Stephen Salisbury II, a wealthy Massachusetts landowner. Catharine’s husband, Waldo Flint (1794-1879), was a Harvard-educated lawyer who served in various political offices before going to work for the Eagle Bank, of which he had become president by 1860.

Boston, Massachusetts 1860 City Directory Page 152, which lists Flint, Waldo, pres. Eagle Bank, 16 Kilby, h. [house] 6 West

Boston, Massachusetts 1860 City Directory Page 152 lists
Flint, Waldo, pres. Eagle Bank, 16 Kilby, h. [house] 6 West

In her cookbook Mrs. Flint comes across as a lovely person: even-tempered, self-effacing, warm, and reflexively kind. She repeatedly praises her three servants, her caterer, and even her caterer’s assistant by name, celebrates the confectioners who supplied her cakes (except for one that came under new management, whose cakes she describes as “miserable”), and revels in the intimate suppers she took with her friend Mrs. Gilchrist in the kitchen while her husband presided over his “library suppers.” Mrs. Flint’s deep affection for her husband is touching. About Mr. Flint’s 1863 library supper she writes, “The supper was said to be very nice & the guests said they enjoyed it. I thought so from the sound of their voices – Mr. Flint seemed well pleased, which pleased me.”

Mrs. Flint certainly did not mean to write an autobiographical cookbook. She revealed her personal story purely inadvertently, in the course of compiling notes on her various entertainments, which sprawl across over thirty pages of her cookbook. ¹ Mrs. Flint kept these notes to record how she had managed these affairs and how she had judged their outcome, so that she would know what to do, and not to do, the next time she hazarded a similar event. In order to ensure that these notes were useful, she took pains to make them as detailed and specific as possible, which is why, inevitably, she ended up writing so much about herself. This specificity and detail make Mrs. Flint’s notes enormously helpful in understanding antebellum meals and entertainments, which anyone interested in culinary history strives to do. The frustration of historical recipes is that they tell us only how the dishes of the day were prepared. If we want to know how people of the past, or at least a certain group of them, actually cooked and ate, we have to see these dishes in the context of their period serving occasions.

This post focuses on Mrs. Flint’s supper parties and sit-down suppers, which were her most frequent company entertainments and which, being “suppers,” albeit of different sorts, revolved around some of the same foods and observed some of the same conventions. ²

Mrs. Flint’s Supper Parties

The grandest supper party was the ball supper of the elite, which seems to have been the prototype of all antebellum American supper parties on whatever scale. Ball suppers were served very late, after the dancing was over, in a specially designated room whose doors were said to be dramatically “thrown open” at the appointed hour, to reveal a long white-cloth-covered table splendidly decorated with candles, flowers, and sugar sculptures and spread with a lavish buffet. In a cookbook of 1847, Eliza Leslie outlines a menu suitable for a ball supper. The bill of fare comprises an astonishing fifty-eight items: an abundance of cold dishes, as was typical for suppers (boned turkey in aspic, a ham, partridge pie, tongue, beef a la mode, chicken salad, potted lobster, pickled lobster, pickled oysters); a few hot dishes (creamed oysters in patty shells, fried oysters, turtle); twenty-two cold desserts (charlottes, blancmanges, custards, creams, jellies); ten ice creams and ices; six varieties of preserved fruit; and three very large cakes. ³ People worked their way through this feast with multiple changes of plates and silver, which waiters fetched for them from a separate table or sideboard. While there might be some chairs set against the walls of the supper room in which people could sit, most people at such affairs ate standing.

Most antebellum American hostesses staged more modest supper parties along the lines of cookbook author Catharine Beecher’s plan of 1846, which Beecher describes as “a plain but genteel arrangement for company in . . . any of our larger cities.” ⁴ Beecher makes no mention of dancing, which was not always part of ordinary supper parties, and she states firmly that such parties should wrap up at a reasonable hour and should not entail outrageous amounts of food. Still, her plan basically follows that of the ball supper: a buffet set out on a table in an attractive manner and eaten standing. Beecher covers “a long table in the dining-room . . . with a handsome damask cloth,” sets a high flower arrangement or other “ornamental article” in the center, and places “champagne glasses with flowers at each corner.” If the party is small, Beecher thinks it sufficient to arrange “loaves of cake at regular distances” down the middle of the table and surround the cakes with preserved fruits, cold desserts, and lemonade. However, “if a very large company” is to be served and “a larger treat . . . required,” she writes, the large table should be supplemented by two smaller tables, one “furnished with sandwiches, oysters, salad, celery, and wine, and the other with coffee, chocolate, and lemonade.” Those fortunate enough to possess a very large table can arrange everything on it, she adds, with the sweet things in the center, the savory foods and wine at one end, and the lemonade and coffee at the other.

While Beecher goes into greater detail on the subject of supper parties than any other antebellum cookbook author, she leaves unsaid many things that we would like to know, because these things were common knowledge to her readers. Happily, Mrs. Flint tells us more than we would even think to ask in her notes on five “stand up suppers,” as she calls these entertainments ⁵: a party for eighty persons (fifty-four attended) staged in 1859; an 1863 all-gentlemen’s party for twenty-five members of “the parish committee”; and three Christmas parties, in 1862, 1863, and 1864, each for fifteen to twenty guests. We almost feel as though we were there!

All of Mrs. Flint’s supper parties were rolled out similarly. Mrs. Flint’s cook prepared all of the savory foods for the party except the tricky dressing for the chicken or lobster salad, which was either made by Henry Smith, Mrs. Flint’s caterer and party planner, or else bought from a purveyor. Mrs. Flint always ordered all of the breads, cakes, and frozen desserts to be served from outside purveyors. The cakes and breads were delivered to the house in the morning or early afternoon of the party, the frozen desserts at about eight in the evening. Henry Smith and his assistant arrived at three in the afternoon and immediately began to move furniture. Mrs. Flint generally had the dining room table moved into the library, to serve as the supper table, and had the piano drawn to the center of the dining room, to hold the “silver tea set and china for tea & coffee.” However, for her small Christmas party of 1863 Mrs. Flint chose instead to set out the supper on the piano, in the back parlor (which seems to have been its usual place). For this event, Henry positioned her tea table in front of the piano, presumably as a staging area for tea and coffee, and placed a “small table” before the fireplace in some unspecified room, perhaps to hold plates, glasses, and silver, which likely could not have fit on the piano with the food. All this furniture rearranging seems strange to us, but people of the day happily staged company meals and entertainments in whatever space struck them as suitable for particular occasions.

Guests at the more formal supper parties were similarly attired.

Guests at the Flints’ more formal supper parties were likely similarly attired.

Guests arrived between 8 and 8:30 in the evening and were “received” at the door by Henry Smith, or by Henry’s assistant, or, on one occasion, by Henry and Mrs. Flint’s “new boy Frank,” who she remarks “did very well & improved by seeing Henry.” Typically, guests removed their coats in a room on the ground floor (I think the foyer), but at the very large party of 1859 guests were conducted upstairs, where Mrs. Flint’s houseboy, standing in front of her closed bedroom door, directed “the ladies & gents” to separate rooms where they removed their outer garments and freshened up. The ladies were “assisted” by Mrs. Flint’s maid, whose principal task was likely to help the ladies adjust their hair. In her behavior book, Eliza Leslie tells us that the complicated hairdos of the day, full of “false curls,” were prone to a sudden, mortifying collapse if so much as a pin had slipped out of place. ⁶

The light mixed cake was likely served in a cake basket.

“As soon as friends arrived” at Mrs. Flint’s 1864 Christmas party—and at her other supper parties too, as her notes tell us—they were offered coffee, tea, and a choice of cakes, specifically “squares of frosted pound cake” ⁷ and what Mrs. Flint called “light mixed cake,” by which she meant some combination of almond macaroons, coconut cakes (coconut macaroons), sponge drops (individual dropped sponge cakes), and hard meringues. (She varied the assortment slightly from party to party.) This little repast, which was essentially an abbreviated version of the usual evening meal of the time, often referred to as “tea,” was old-fashioned in Miss Beecher’s view, and she was happy to dispense with it, as it entailed “labor and anxiety.” The “anxiety” was that the whole business was properly conducted by servants, which Beecher, rightly, was concerned that her readers might not have to spare. Beecher suggested that if this interlude simply had to be “resorted to” (perhaps in deference to tradition), the lady of house preside in a ceremonial fashion at the tea table, while the gentlemen “wait upon the ladies in the room, and then help themselves.” The Flints, of course, had plenty of help on hand, and so professionals did all. In her notes on her gentlemen’s supper party of 1863, Mrs. Flint remarks that Henry “would have liked to have Mary [Mrs. Flint’s maid] pour tea & coffee, which she might have done had I known it beforehand.” Presumably Mary was occupied on this occasion, and so Henry had to assume the duty. At the Christmas supper party of the same year, Henry’s assistant and Mrs. Flint’s houseboy “poured and passed coffee and tea.”

Supper was served between 9 and 9:30. Like Catharine Beecher, Mrs. Flint chose salad, oysters, and sandwiches as her savory supper items—but Mrs. Flint, unlike Miss Beecher, also tells us how she prepared these foods. Party salads in the day were meaty affairs. The favorite was chicken salad, which Mrs. Flint served at all of her supper parties except the very large one of 1859, where, for convenience’ sake, she had turkey salad instead and offered lobster salad in addition. No matter what their main ingredient, party salads were similar. They were composed of roughly two-thirds meat and one-third vegetable—chopped celery in the case of chicken or turkey salad, torn head lettuce in the case of lobster salad—and were dressed with a mustardy mayonnaise made with hard-cooked egg yolks. This dressing seems to have been the earliest iteration of mayonnaise in American home kitchens, and it is clear from period recipes that neither cookbook authors nor home cooks had a clue how to mix the eggs and oil into a smooth emulsion. Mrs. Flint wrote down Henry Smith’s assistant’s excellent recipe for the dressing in her notebook (see Adapted Recipes), but her cook seems to have been met with failure in making it and seems never to have been asked to attempt it again.

Stephen Salisbury II, Catharine's brother-in-law, attended many Flint parties

Stephen Salisbury II, Catharine Flint’s brother-in-law, attended many Flint parties, sometimes with his son, who later became a renowned philanthropist.

Mrs. Flint ordered “solid” (that is, shucked) oysters in the substantial quantity of one half pint (or slightly more) per person for all of her supper parties. At three of her parties, all of the oysters ordered were scalloped—that is, arranged in three or four layers in a dish, with buttered bread crumbs in between and on top, and baked. But at two of her parties, some of the oysters she ordered were served cold rather than scalloped, including at her gentlemen’s supper party, about which she notes “two gallons solid oysters—two quarts of them to be cold.” Our first thought is that the cold oysters came to the table raw, but this may not have been the case because then, as now, raw oysters were customarily served freshly opened and on the half-shell. I suspect that the cold oysters may have been pickled ⁸, for under the heading “Necessary to be thought of at Mr. Flint’s Suppers – Copied from Book of 1853” ⁹ Mrs. Flint lists cayenne pepper, mace, and nutmeg, all of which were required for pickled oysters—and for no other dish in Mrs. Flint’s supper-party rotation. Pickled oysters turn up frequently in accounts of antebellum American parties, including one penned in acid by Frances Trollope, an unsparing British observer of antebellum America’s “domestic manners.” “Their large evening parties are supremely dull,” Trollope wrote in 1832. “To eat inconceivable quantities of cake, ice, and pickled oysters—and to show half their revenue in silks and satins, seem to be the chief object they have in these parties.” ¹⁰

Unlike Miss Beecher, Mrs. Flint did not serve ready-made sandwiches at her standing suppers. ¹¹ However, she did order “bread rolls” for all of her parties, and I believe that she expected many of her guests to cut the rolls in half and stuff them with the salads, which would be a convenient way to consume the salads when eating standing. And I suspect that the “oyster rolls” that Mrs. Flint ordered for two of her supper parties were meant to serve a similar purpose. Oyster rolls were generally used to prepare the dish then known, indeed, as “oyster rolls” (or sometimes “oyster loaves”), which consisted of hollowed-out rolls stuffed with creamed oysters. Cookbook author Maria Rundell, writing in 1807, tells us that hollowed-out rolls were “sold for the purpose” of making this dish. ¹² However, since Mrs. Flint never mentions any oysters being creamed, I surmise that she set out the rolls as receptacles for the scalloped oysters, just as, I think, she set out the bread rolls for sandwiches, all in an effort to make things easier for her standing guests.

Beecher deployed large, fine cakes as the focal point of her supper table, as many antebellum American hostesses did. But Mrs. Flint instead decorated her table with an array of fancy molded frozen desserts. She was particularly drawn to frozen desserts associated with the new vogue for French cooking, such as frozen pudding (suggestive of rum-raisin ice cream), Roman punch (a citrusy, boozy tea sorbet), vanilla ice cream (which was considered fashionably French even though it had long been on the scene), and bombe glacée (typically vanilla ice cream encased in berry sherbet). In addition, she found room in her dessert display for three long-traditional iced favorites, pistachio, lemon, and pineapple ice creams. Mrs. Flint personally extricated these desserts from their molds onto serving plates, evidently not even trusting her cook to do the deed. So long as they made a splendid visual impact, she seems hardly to have cared if these desserts were eaten. “A good deal of ice left, but I think about the right quantity provided,” she notes about her Christmas party of 1863. Unfortunately, visual splendor was not always achieved. About her 1859 supper party for eighty she notes, “I should have liked four dishes instead of two of the Bombe Glace & Frozen Pudding, one quart in each – they were too large to look well.”

Modern bombe glacee.

A dessert consisting of six rather incompatible flavors of ice cream and sherbet—and nothing else—would seem strange and unappealing to us today, but in Mrs. Flint’s day the difficulties of freezing endowed frozen desserts with a cachet that carried the day for such a notion. Frozen desserts were a passion in antebellum America—and a nightmare for most antebellum hostesses. Most women could not buy frozen desserts because they lived inconveniently far from confectioners and could not afford their wares anyway. So they made the desserts at home—assuming that they could find the ice, which in warm weather or warm places could be problematic. Women who did have ice (or freezing weather) and lots of help could theoretically prepare several frozen desserts successively using the same apparatus—Miss Beecher suggests a “tin pail” if no better device is at hand ¹³—and keep them all frozen, possibly even in fancy molds, until serving time. But for most women, the only convenient way to keep frozen desserts frozen until serving was to leave them in the freezing apparatus, which meant that they could offer only one paltry variety, in freeform, at a party. Mrs. Flint’s gorgeous display could be mustered only by a wealthy (and generous) hostess living in a sophisticated big city like Boston, blessed with fine confectioners aplenty—and even for Mrs. Flint freezing presented complications. She had to order the desserts to arrive at her home just before her parties began, for the obvious reason that she could not keep them frozen for long, no matter how carefully and thoroughly they came packed in ice.

At the all-gentlemen’s supper of 1863, guests found the chicken salad, in an unspecified number of “round dishes,” and the frozen desserts on the long sides of the supper table and the scalloped oysters, in four dishes, at the opposite ends. This was a supper party at which cold oysters were served, but Mrs. Flint says nothing about where they were placed, nor does she mention the bread rolls or oyster rolls. “Silver arranged very prettily,” she writes. Perhaps the silver was laid out on the supper table in a pretty but not entirely convenient manner, for she adds that she “would have liked my small table placed in front of the piano with some of the silver and viands upon it.” Mrs. Flint does not mention where Henry set out the dinner plates, wine glasses, napkins, and the bottles of hock (German white wine), sherry, and champagne that she ordered for the party. Perhaps she managed these things the same way for every party so there was no need to remind herself about them.

The old Boylston Boston Library that Waldo Flint knew.

Mr. Flint’s Library Suppers

Every twelve to eighteen months, Mr. Flint presided over a sit-down supper for ten to twelve trustees and supporters of the Boston Public Library. Mrs. Flint did not attend “Mr. Flint’s library suppers,” as she calls them, even though women were sometimes among the guests—and even though it was typical in the day for wives to cohost otherwise all-male dinners staged for their husbands’ business associates. Perhaps even with all of the help that Mrs. Flint had at her disposal, these suppers required her personal supervision in the kitchen as they occurred. The library suppers were complicated, lavish productions, as their cost attests. Mrs. Flint records that she spent, on average, forty dollars on these suppers, which amounts to roughly $1,150 in contemporary dollars, or about $100 per person.

The sit-down suppers featured many of the same foods as the stand-up supper parties and were marshalled in a similar manner. The Flints’ cook prepared most of the savory dishes (starting a day in advance to dispatch the foods that would be served cold), while outside purveyors provided the breads, cakes, and cold and frozen desserts. As at the stand-up suppers, Henry Smith and his assistant arrived at three o’clock in the afternoon and immediately set to work rearranging furniture. The library suppers were always served in the library, so the dining room table and chairs had to be moved there. At the 1860 library supper (which Mrs. Flint writes “may serve as a guide” for all) the dining room was commandeered as a staging area for the waiters, the “tea service & coffee cups” laid out on the piano (which evidently was moved from its usual spot in the back parlor) and the “card table placed south of the piano for plates, spoons, forks, or whatever might be wanted.” The library supper of January 1861 also entailed extensive rearranging of furniture in the front parlor. Mrs. Flint’s notes on the matter are vague and hard to decipher, but it seems that some sort of book display was mounted on a “round table” and that “Mr. Flint’s green desk” and a “small sofa” were moved from their usual place. The reorganizing of the parlor was presumably undertaken to facilitate the business meeting that preceded all of the library suppers. These meetings started between seven-thirty and eight, but many of the participants joined in much later (if at all), and Mrs. Flint recorded the precise arrival times of these laggards in her notebook (at the request of her annoyed husband, one supposes). ¹⁴ The guests went to the table between nine-thirty and ten and got up shortly before midnight. The hour seems extraordinarily late, but most guests likely walked home on Boston’s gas-lit streets, which afforded an interval for digestion.

In writing out the menus for the library suppers, Mrs. Flint divides the main course (as we would call it) into two sections, which she heads “cold” and “hot.” She lists oysters under both headings in all of the supper menus, allocating one third of her oyster order for serving cold, the rest hot. My guess is that the cold oysters were pickled, though she does not say so. The hot oysters were scalloped and presented in two heaped dishes, one on each end of the table, except at the 1861 supper, where the hot oysters were creamed and served in puff pastry shells ordered from a bakery, making a popular period dish called “oyster patties.” Mrs. Flint ordered five or six quarts of oysters for every supper—or roughly one pint per person—but it is clear that she did not expect this staggering quantity to be consumed in its entirety, any more than she did the huge display of ices at her 1863 Christmas supper party. Her concern was that the oysters appear abundant on the table. About the 1863 library supper she writes, “The right quantity of oysters though nearly a quart left, of which Ellen [her cook] made a very nice pie.” ¹⁵

As superabundant as the oysters were, they constituted only a small part of the prodigious main course offered at all of the library suppers. At three suppers, the cold 2016-4-23 OldDesignShop_TurkeyRecipesClipArtBoiled foods comprised a whole ham and four chickens. Another supper featured the same cold dishes plus lobster salad, and another tempted guests with four cold chickens with “celery dressed” and four cold geese (a rather strange idea, at least to most people today). The cold foods were paired with an equally bountiful array of hot items. At most suppers, Mrs. Flint served three or four hot ducks plus four hot grouse or partridges, though at one supper she offered instead a turkey (with deep-fried mashed potato balls) and six roasted pigeons. I suspect that the turkey was boiled, and that the grouse and partridges served at the other suppers were boiled too. The many hot birds on these menus would not all have fit in a period stove oven, and boiling was then a common way to cook poultry, at least of certain types. ¹⁶ Mrs. Flint served “bread rolls” at all suppers, as well as cranberry and currant jellies to accompany the birds, and she mentions that the table was always set with castors (cruet sets) containing pungent catsups and store sauces. Still, the main courses do seem dull, not to mention rather too unremittingly focused on bird flesh. It is possible that the near absence of vegetables was a matter of period supper conventions; at dinners, multiple vegetable dishes were the rule.

Castors went out of fashion in the early 1900s

I am puzzled both by the enormous quantity of food served in the main course of these suppers and by the repetitiveness of the cold and hot dishes. I wonder if perhaps the main course actually comprised two complete main courses for twelve, one cold and one hot, allowing each guest to choose either a mostly cold meal, as was typical for a stand-up supper, or a mostly hot one, as was typical for a dinner. But even if this was indeed the plan, the amount of food still seems excessive, for it seems unlikely that all twelve guests would hanker after the same temperature meal. Couldn’t Mrs. Flint have prepared each meal in a quantity to serve, say, eight people? I would certainly think so, but then my sensibilities are likely very different from Mrs. Flint’s. What I consider simply sensible she might have considered an all-too-obvious ploy for thrift, any suggestion of which in an entertainment insulted the guests and shamed the host. Mrs. Flint’s notes speak her goal as a hostess clearly. She meant to lay a splendid table, both beautiful and abundant, not in order to “impress” her guests, which she never shows a need to do, but to cosset and delight them.

2016-4-23 charlotte3 Seemingly patterned after the fancy new dinner service called à la russe, the final courses of the suppers were incredibly lavish. On February 2, 1860, Mr. Flint’s twelve guests were confronted with one quart of charlotte russe, one quart of frozen pudding, three pints of Roman punch, three pints of vanilla ice cream, and two one-quart molds of calves’ foot jelly ¹⁷–which they were invited to consume with eighteen squares of frosted pound cake, twelve coconut cakes, and twelve macaroons. After diners had gotten down as much of this dessert as they could manage, the waiters cleared everything from the table, probably including the cloth—and brought on olives, cheese and crackers, oranges, raisins, English walnuts, and shagbarks. Finally, there was coffee. (At the 1861 supper there would also be cigars with the coffee—“for the first time,” Mrs. Flint writes in her notes.) Coffee was no doubt welcome after all that food, not to mention the hock, champagne, “brown Sherry,” “pale Sherry,” and Madeira that Mrs. Flint ordered for the 1860 supper (and all the others). She had “nearly 30 small tumblers [for] wine” on hand in 1860, suggesting that she expected guests to do some serious tippling.

The library suppers seem strange to me in all kinds of ways, but because Mrs. Flint has shown me exactly how they happened, I know that they actually did happen—which is more than I can say about the meals and parties described in most antebellum cookbooks, behavior books, and novels, which are so general, or incomplete, or obviously filled with fantasy that I can’t help disbelieving that persons of that time, if returned to life, would recognize them. How typical Mrs. Flint’s suppers were of other suppers staged by persons of her time and place and social class I don’t know and may never know unless I find parallel accounts in other manuscript cookbooks. And perhaps I will. But I doubt I will find another manuscript writer as illuminating as Catharine Flint or as companionable.

Notes:

The book also contains twenty pages of recipes, including five recipes copied from the second edition of Amelia Simmons’ American Cookery, 1796, two recipes copied from Eliza Leslie’s Seventy-Five Receipts, 1828, and many recipes contributed by friends. These twenty pages of recipes are written from the front of the book. The party notes are written from the back of the book going toward the middle, following four penmanship exercises (unattributed), a pasted-in newspaper recipe for black bean soup, and a handful of manuscript recipes. ↩
Mrs. Flint’s cookbook also contains notes on a fascinating company dinner, which will be the subject of the next blog post. At some future point this blog will broach the complicated topic of antebellum “tea,” which could be a family evening meal, a company entertainment, or an evening party. ↩
Eliza Leslie, The Lady’s Receipt Book (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1847), 392. Retrieved from Google Books April 23, 2016 https://books.google.com/books?id=D0MEAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Eliza+Leslie+Ladies%27+Receipt+Book&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjPh_7x8qTMAhVKVD4KHQrSBQEQ6AEINDAA#v=onepage&q=partridge%20pie&f=false ↩
Catharine Beecher, Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt-Book, 3^rd ed. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1858). Reprint, With a New Introduction by Janice (Jan) Bluestein Longone (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2001), 241-2. ↩
Mrs. Flint refers to her supper parties as “stand up suppers” in order to distinguish them from her “suppers,” which were sit-down meals. ↩
Eliza Leslie, Miss Leslie’s Behavior Book (Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson and Brothers, 1859), 106. Retrieved April 23, 2016 from Google Books https://books.google.com/books?id=8eMwAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Eliza+Leslie+Behavior+Book&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjr8M3j-qTMAhVGHD4KHQ2mDgMQ6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&q&f=false ↩
In the North, pound cake changed little between its emergence in the early 1700s and the end of the nineteenth century. It remained a fancy cake that was baked as a large round or square and that, for formal evening parties, was typically covered with the usual brittle white icing of the era. When the cake was served in cut squares, it was fashionable in Mrs. Flint’s day to present the pieces in an artful stack on a cake plate or in a pierced-silver cake basket. ↩
Eliza Leslie outlines two versions of pickled oysters. One is a mild pickle, which is meant for immediate consumption (although she says it is better if made a day ahead), and one a stronger pickle “for keeping.” See Eliza Leslie, Directions for Cookery (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1848). Reprint, with an introduction by Louis Szathmáry (New York: Arno Press, 1973), 57, 228. ↩
Mrs. Flint makes a number of references to other “books” that she kept. ↩
Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1901), 133. Retrieved April 23, 2016 from Google Books https://books.google.com/books?id=QFhLQZ0K67kC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Frances+Trollope+Domestic+Manners+of+the+Americans&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwirtsad76TMAhUGGz4KHYftDAMQ6AEIKTAC#v=onepage&q&f=false ↩
Beecher does not have a recipe for sandwiches, but perhaps the sandwiches she has in mind are like the ones that Eliza Leslie says are “used at supper, or at luncheon.” Leslie’s sandwiches consist of thinly sliced ham or shredded tongue on thinly sliced bread, with butter and, if liked, “a very little mustard.” She says the sandwiches can be rolled up or laid “flat on the plates.” See Leslie, Directions, 123. ↩
Maria Rundell, A New System of Domestic Cookery (London: J. Murray, Fleet Street, 1807), 22. Rundell was English, but her cookbook was extremely popular in antebellum America and was published in several American editions. Of course, most of the foods served at American supper parties were English, as were many of the conventions that governed these parties. ↩
Beecher, 166. ↩
The guests at an 1864 supper for associates of the Boston Public Library were particularly rude. Wrote Mrs. Flint: “7 1/2 the time fixed for meeting. At eight o’clock five had come.” Four more guests dribbled in between 8:25 and 8:50. Then, “just as the gentlemen were going to the table”—at 9:25—“Dr. M. & his father came.” Finally, at 10, “old Dr. Romans” straggled in. ↩
She said much the same about the scalloped oysters served at her 1862 Christmas party—that “few” were “eaten” but “about the proper quantity provided.” She sent one leftover dish to a friend and served another at dinner the next day. ↩
Mrs. Flint, in fact, served boiled grouse at an 1868 dinner party; her cook commented that the birds “would have been improved by boiling a piece of pork with them.” Boiled turkey and chicken are common in cookbooks of the early nineteenth century, when women cooked at the hearth, for boiling was far more convenient for hearth cooks than roasting, and both preparations are still seen in later stove-era cookbooks, if less frequently. But I have never seen a recipe for boiled grouse or partridges in any cookbook, of either the hearth or stove era, so Mrs. Flint’s predilection is fascinating. (I am assuming that the Flints had switched from hearth-cooking to the stove by the time Mrs. Flint’s cookbook was written, as most wealthy, urban, East Coast households had, though Mrs. Flint’s cookbook provides no evidence one way or the other. If the Flints’ cook in fact still toiled at the hearth, some of the cold birds may also have been boiled.) ↩
An extraordinarily popular antebellum dessert, calves’ foot jelly was a spiced, citrus-infused wine gelatin made with clarified calves’ foot stock. I would assume that a professional confectioner of the 1860s would actually have made the jelly with prepared gelatin sheets, which were readily available by this point and much more convenient and reliable than the stock. ↩