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Eliza Leslie

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 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.

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.

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)

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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]

  1. 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. ↩
  2. 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. ↩
  3. 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!) ↩
  4. 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. ↩
  5. 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. ↩
  6. 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. ↩
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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.

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.

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,

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,

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 cold2016-4-23 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

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 charlotte3Seemingly 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:

 

  1. 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. ↩
  2. 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. ↩
  3. 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 ↩
  4. Catharine Beecher, Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt-Book, 3rd 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. ↩
  5. Mrs. Flint refers to her supper parties as “stand up suppers” in order to distinguish them from her “suppers,” which were sit-down meals. ↩
  6. 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 ↩
  7. 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. ↩
  8. 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. ↩
  9. Mrs. Flint makes a number of references to other “books” that she kept. ↩
  10. 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 ↩
  11. 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. ↩
  12. 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. ↩
  13. Beecher, 166. ↩
  14. 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. ↩
  15. 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. ↩
  16. 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.) ↩
  17. 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. ↩
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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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The Fateful Meeting of the Old English Stirred Custards with French Crème Anglaise

Posted July 2015 
by Stephen Schmidt 

2015-5-23 Custards IMG_0616

In 1838, a well-to-do New York City woman, likely of the Hoppin family, recorded in her cookbook a dessert that she had served with great success to company so that she would remember how to serve it again. Consisting of two stirred custards—that is, saucepan custards—one made with the whites of eggs and the other with the yolks, the dessert played upon a white/yellow color scheme that was fashionable at the time in the serving of cakes. The writer’s extension of the conceit to the serving paraphernalia was typical.

When having company to dinner, as when the Whitneys were here for a dessert, make Lemmon Custards of the yolks of eggs, making them yellow, and take the whites of the Lemmon receipt with one or two more eggs for white boiled Custard seasoned with mace and orange peel pounded very fine and sifted so as not to speck them, and add a little cream. This is the answer instead of whips in the summer or any time. Put the custards into the low jelly glasses & serve them on the dinner table on the china custard stands, one white & one yellow, to look very handsome, or sometimes put the white custards in glass handle cups and set the yellow & white on the glass stand.

Hoppin Family Recipes, American, 1838-1841 (New York Public Library)

It is difficult for us today to grasp this dessert. We have never seen nineteenth-century jelly glasses, glass-handled custard cups, or custard stands, and we think of stirred custards as components of other desserts (like trifle or floating island) or as sauces, not as principal desserts. Above all, we are puzzled by the custards themselves, particularly the white one, made with egg whites. We do not understand how custard containing egg whites can be prepared in a saucepan. Won’t the result simply be a curdled mess? In fact, no. From the mid-1600s to the mid-1800s, the English-speaking world knew many stirred custards (or “creams,” as they were also called), both as desserts and as accompaniments to cake at evening parties. Many of these custards were thickened with whole eggs or with egg whites only, and when properly prepared these custards were perfectly smooth

Indeed, the most common type, plain stirred custard, or “boiled” custard—which was not boiled, of course; the name merely distinguished it from baked custard—was among this group. As originally made in Anglo-America, its basic ingredients were milk or cream, whole eggs, and sugar. But by 1884, when Mary Lincoln, the first principal of the Boston Cooking School, published her cookbook, the common wisdom on the eggs had shifted. “Boiled custard is much smoother when made only with the yolks of eggs,” Lincoln pronounced, dismissing traditional whole-egg boiled custard as inevitably lumpy. Regrettably, once egg white was deemed undesirable in plain boiled custard, all of the other traditional stirred custards that contained it fell under suspicion and, soon enough, these custards, too, were no longer made or even thought possible—and hence our bafflement at the Hoppin writer’s dessert.

Why did traditional whole-egg boiled custard disappear and take with it so many other lovely stirred custards? The term “crème anglaise” hints at the answer. This is the French name for plain stirred custard—and, nowadays, it is a typical American name for the custard too.*

Starting in the mid-seventeenth century, with the publication of ground-breaking cookbooks by La Varenne and other new-wave French chefs, (privileged) Anglo-America increasingly fell under the sway of Gallic culinary sorcery. Notwithstanding Franco-phobic pushback—and there was plenty of that—wealthy households on both sides of the Atlantic had adopted Frenchified (if not exactly French) fare for company occasions by the mid- nineteenth century (the English somewhat earlier than the Americans), and by the end of the nineteenth century, the upper-middle classes had followed suit. Meanwhile, French culinary ideas also permeated everyday cooking. French culinary signifiers like creaming, breading and deep-frying, patty shells, mayonnaise, meringue toppings, and many others are rampant in late-Victorian American cookbooks, especially in those of the influential Fannie Farmer, who was Mrs. Lincoln’s successor as principal of the Boston Cooking School.

Traditional boiled custard was swept up in this sea change. The French made plain stirred custard with egg yolks only, and since the French were presumed to always know best, the French way became the usual American way. To be sure, it did not help the cause of traditional whole-egg plain stirred custard that the custard is tricky, trickier than yolk stirred custard, which many home cooks find plenty tricky enough. Besides curdling at a lower temperature than yolk custard, whole-egg plain stirred custard has very little “tolerance.” While yolk stirred custard thickens gradually in a range of nearly twenty degrees, whole-egg custard only begins to thicken at around 160⁰F and then becomes as thick as it can get, without curdling, at 165⁰F. Just a degree or two beyond this point and—drat!—it’s ruined. Whole-egg stirred custard requires a knack that was quickly lost once the custard was no longer routinely made—and so the custard was deemed a bad recipe from the benighted (pre-French) past and was forgotten. This is a pity. Whole-egg stirred custard is perfectly smooth when carefully cooked, and to many tastes it is nicer than that made with yolks: thicker yet lighter on the tongue, with a delightful slippery quality.

An even greater pity is the loss of the many other lovely stirred custards that went to their grave along with traditional boiled custard, among them the Hoppin writer’s white and yellow desserts. Precisely how the Hoppin writer made her white stirred custard we cannot know, for she did not record the recipe in her cookbook. But we can speculate. Since she was after stark, unmistakably white custard, I would guess that she started with a recipe like the following (which was popular) and substituted whites for yolks and orange (and mace) for lemon. Apparently, she also replaced (most of) the cream called for in this recipe with milk. In testing, I discovered that this is possible but dicey, as milk, having less fat than cream, also provides less tolerance, making the custard more likely to curdle (or separate, which is what mine did, and which is less dire than curdling but still not what one wants). So I retested with cream and liked the result very much. My adapted recipe, “White Custard with Orange and Mace,” is posted in Adapted Recipes.

Lemon Cream

Eliza Leslie, Directions for Cookery, 1837

 Beat well together a quart of thick cream and the yolks of eight eggs. Then gradually beat in half a pound of powdered loaf-sugar, and the grated rind of three large lemons. Put the mixture into a porcelain skillet and set it on hot coals till it comes to a boil; then take it off, and stir it till nearly cold. Squeeze the juice of the lemons into a bowl; pour the cream upon it, and continue to stir it till quite cold. You may serve it up in a glass bowl, in glass cups, or in jelly glasses. Eat it with sweetmeats and tarts.

The Hoppin writer did not write down a recipe for her bright-yellow lemon custard, either, but again we can speculate. It could not have been simply the Lemon Cream above or some version of today’s plain stirred custard with lemon. Made with cream or milk, these custards would have been too pale in color to have cut it in her color scheme. She must instead have made one of the old water-based stirred lemon custards (or “creams”), many of which were thickened with egg yolks and/or whole eggs and were vivid yellow. (There was also a popular version with egg whites only, which is transparent. Amelia Simmons, our earliest published cookbook author, has a recipe that is very much worth making.) These custards were tremendously fashionable in Anglo-America from the mid-1700s to the mid-1800s. But the French did not know them, and what the French did not know, fashionable late-Victorian America tossed out. What a loss! Contrary to modern expectations (at least mine), water-based stirred custards can be cooked to a higher temperature and have greater tolerance than milk-based stirred custards—even when whole eggs or, indeed, only egg whites are used. And they are lovely.

Water-based lemon custards thickened entirely with egg yolks taste unpleasantly eggy to me—and perhaps they did to people of the past as well, for most recipes call for whole eggs or egg whites. So, while the Hoppin writer apparently prepared her yellow custard with egg yolks only, I would prefer the following delicious, decidedly yellow custard, which is made with whole eggs—and whose yellow can be intensified by the addition of one or possibly two (but, to my taste, not more) of the yolks left over from the white custard. For my recipe, see “Yellow Stirred Custard with Lemon” in Adapted Recipes.

Lemon Cream

Mary Randolph, The Virginia House-Wife, 1824

Pare the rind very thin from four fresh lemons, squeeze the juice, and strain it—put them both into a quart of water, sweeten it to your taste, add the whites of six eggs, beat to a froth; set it over the fire, and keep stirring until it thickens, but do not let it boil—then pour it in a bowl; when cold, strain it through a sieve, put it on the fire, and add the yelks of the eggs—stir it till quite thick, and serve it in glasses.

 

*Ironically, the term “crème anglaise” translates as “English cream,” not because the French believed that the custard was an English invention but because they perceived it as characteristic of the English. At least one other custard, now forgotten, also shows up under the same name in seventeenth-century French cookbooks.

This entry was posted in Desserts, French cooking, Stephen Schmidt Tagged: A Collection of Choise Receipts  |   Adapting Historical Recipes  |   Ambergris  |   Amelia Simmons  |   American Antiquarian Society  |   Andrew Boorde  |   Anonymous Andalusian Cookbook  |   Atul Gawande  |   Banqueting houses  |   Banquets (sweets)  |   Barbara Wheaton  |   Boston Public Library  |   Bread  |   bread pudding  |   British Library  |   C. Anne Wilson  |   Catharine Beecher  |   Catharine Dean Flint  |   Charles Perry  |   Christopher Kemp  |   Clements Library  |   Collation  |   Cracknels  |   Custards  |   E. Smith  |   Edna Lewis  |   Edward Livingston Trudeau  |   Elaine Leong  |   Elinor Fettiplace  |   Eliza Leslie  |   Elizabeth Freke  |   Elizabeth Raffald  |   Emptins  |   English influence on U. S. foodways  |   Fannie Farmer  |   Flour Measure  |   Folger Shakespeare Library  |   Forme of Cury  |   Frances Trollope  |   French culinary influence  |   Fricassees  |   Georgetown University  |   Gervase Markham  |   Gingerbread  |   Hannah Glasse  |   Hannah Woolley  |   Henry Frederick (Prince of Wales)  |   Hilary Spurling  |   Hoppin Family Cookbook  |   Hot Bread Kitchen Cookbook  |   Italian culinary influence  |   Ivan Day  |   Johanna St. John  |   John Evelyn  |   John Murrell  |   Joy of Cooking  |   Karen Hess  |   La Varenne  |   Lacock Abbey  |   Longleat House  |   Louise Conway Belden  |   Marchpane  |   Maria Parloa  |   Maria Rundell  |   Marie Kimball  |   Martha Washington Cookbook  |   Martino da Como  |   Mary Cornelius  |   Mary Henderson  |   Mary Lincoln  |   Mary Randolph  |   Marzipan  |   Max Planck Institute  |   Medieval cooking  |   Medieval Islamic cooking  |   Molasses and treacle  |   Morgan Library  |   Mrs. (Elizabeth) Goodfellow  |   Mrs. Cornelius  |   Mrs. N. K. M Lee  |   Musk  |   Neapolitan Recipe Collection  |   Oysters  |   Patriotic cakes  |   Paul Freedman  |   Peter Rose  |   Portugal Eggs  |   quince  |   regional cooking  |   Rose water  |   Sandra Oliver  |   Sarah Josepha Hale  |   Scappi  |   scientific cookery  |   Service a la francaise  |   Service a la russe  |   Seventeenth Century  |   Sicily  |   Spain  |   sucket fork  |   Supper Parties  |   Sylvester Graham  |   Tea  |   Terrence Scully  |   The Recipes Project  |   The Taste of America  |   Theobalds Palace  |   Two Fifthteenth-Century Cookery Books  |   University of Iowa  |   Viandier of Taillevent  |   Void (voidee)  |   waffles  |   Waldo Flint  |   Yeast  |   2 Comments on The Fateful Meeting of the Old English Stirred Custards with French Crème Anglaise  

Did the English, Too, Bring Dutch Waffles to America?

Posted September 2014 
by Stephen Schmidt 
Circle of Georg Flegel (1566-1638). From Wikimedia Commons

Circle of Georg Flegel (1566-1638). From Wikimedia Commons

A few years ago, while reading the manuscript cookbook of the seventeenth-century English diarist John Evelyn,* I was surprised to come across a recipe called “To make Duch waffers”—or waffles. I had always been told that the English settlers of America knew nothing about waffles until they were introduced to them by Dutch settlers, and I had never questioned this story, for two reasons. First, the British do not eat waffles today, or at least they do not consider them a traditional British food. Second, there are no recipes for waffles in seventeenth -century English printed cookbooks, and I have seen only two recipes in eighteenth-century English cookbooks, and these recipes are easy to discount. Robert Smith offers what seems to be the first printed English recipe (as well as the first printed use of the word in English, says Wikipedia) in Court Cookery, published in 1725, but, goodness knows, anything might be fashionable at the Court. The other eighteenth-century English printed recipe of which I am aware is Elizabeth Raffald’s “Gofers,” in The Experienced English Housewife, published in 1769—if Raffald’s “Gofers” are, in fact, waffles. The peculiar word comes from the French gauffres, which can designate either wafers or waffles—the two are essentially thin and thick cousins—or some betwixt-and-between hybrid of the two, which is what Raffald’s “Gofers” appear to be. In any case, Raffald’s cookbook, like many other eighteenth-century English cookbooks, is filled with all sorts of obscure, pretentious French recipes that few of their readers had ever heard of, much less made. But Evelyn’s recipe turns out not to be an anomaly, for four of the six seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English manuscript cookbooks in the possession of the New York Academy of Medicine also have recipes for waffles. In three of these manuscripts, the word used in the recipe title is some cognate of “waffles.” In the fourth, the word is “gofers,” which actually designates two different recipes, one called simply “Gofers,” and the other “Dutch Gofers.” And what is the difference between them? So far as I can tell nothing. They appear both to be waffles. All of this strongly suggests that more than a few English were eating waffles from the late seventeenth century onward and that, therefore, waffles may have been popularized in America as much by English settlers as by the Dutch. This might partially explain why waffles were already so well known in colonial America that William Livingston, the aristocratic future governor of New Jersey, attended a “waffle frolic,” or waffle-centered supper party, in 1744. If American waffles were not so much a food fusion story as a fission story, they came here with a very big bang.

Elizabeth Duncumb's Waffles

Elizabeth Duncumb’s Waffles

Five of the six waffles outlined in the NYAM manuscripts are, like Evelyn’s waffles, the usual seventeenth-century Dutch type. They are essentially buttery yeast-raised breads baked under pressure in a waffle iron, which makes them crusty and crunchy on the outside and tender and moist, almost custardy, within. In composition, they are the same as today’s “Belgian” waffles, but as made at the time, they may have looked and tasted somewhat different, as many of the old fireplace waffle irons had shallow grids and would have produced rather thin waffles with a high ratio of crust to crumb. But no matter what the iron, waffles of this kind are delicious, and so I have adapted the following recipe in the adapted recipes section of this site. The recipe comes from the 1791 manuscript cookbook of Elizabeth Duncumb, of the town of Sutton Coldfield, in Warwickshire.

To make Wafles good Take half a pint of Cream & a quarter of a pound of butter, melt the butter over the fire with three or four spoonful of the Cream, then put it into an earthen pot with half a pound of flour, three Eggs well beaten with one spoonful of sack (or raisin or white Wine) & a little salt, let it run through a hair sieve, put it into the pot again, take half a spoonful of barm mixt with a little Milk, put that thro: the sieve, stir all together & cover it close with a Cloth, set it by the fire near two hours then butter your Irons & bake them & send them to Table with Wine Sauce—

Approved Receipts Waffles

Approved Receipts Waffles

One of the NYAM waffles recipes, from an anonymous late seventeenth-century English manuscript titled “Approved Receipts in Physic,” is an outlier. Its batter is essentially rice porridge stiffened with eggs. My good friend Dutch-American culinary historian Peter Rose is not aware of any Dutch precedent for this recipe, so it is quite possibly an English adaptation, perhaps inspired by the similar rice pancakes of the day, for which English cookbook author E. Smith published a recipe in 1727. A culinary historian is always interested in a local adaptation of an imported recipe, for it usually implies long familiarity with the original dish. When I made these waffles, I found it necessary to stiffen the batter with wheat flour in order for the batter not to run, and I suspect that flour was intended but was inadvertently omitted. In any event, if you would like to try these somewhat painstaking but delicious waffles, you will find my revised recipe in the adapted recipes section.

To Make Duch Waffers Take about a quarter of a pound of rise boyl it in a quart of milk till it is thick yn straine it throw a strainer yn take 8 egges very well beat a pound of butter melted 2 spoonefull of yest and 2 of sugger a little salt beat all these together and let it stand before ye fier halfe an hower to rise yn beat it very well againe yn bake ym in your Irons pore butter in ye holes and serve ym

Pieter Aertsen (1508-1575), Still Life with Waffles and Pancakes. From Wikimedia Commons

Pieter Aertsen (1508-1575), Still Life with Waffles and Pancakes. From Wikimedia Commons

According to Peter Rose, the seventeenth-century Dutch buttered their waffles hot and ate them with their fingers—both at festive meals and on the streets, where they were sold by vendors (which is interesting, of course, because it means that any English person visiting Holland would have seen waffles). In short, waffles, to the Dutch, were basically a sort of special bread. They were treats but hardly rarities: seventeenth-century Dutch paintings show waffles being enjoyed by common folk and gentlefolk alike. The seventeenth-century English, though, appear to have adapted waffles as what they called a “made dish,” a whimsical or fanciful dish, often of foreign extraction, generally served in the second course of dinner or supper and eaten with a fork and knife (or just a knife in households that did not use forks). The crucial clue is the sauce—melted butter enough to “pour” in the recipe directly above, but, in most other recipes, the day’s usual pudding sauce of butter, sugar, and wine, either “beat up thick,” as Evelyn suggests, or melted, as Elizabeth Duncumb seems to have in mind. The English serving conventions are important because they imply the kind of English households in which waffles were served: only the relatively well-to-do indulged in made dishes or dined and supped in courses.

If waffles, in England, were in fact a rather upper-class thing, it makes sense that we would find few recipes for waffles in early English printed cookbooks even if many (upper-class) English people ate them, at least on occasion. While English cookbook authors were generally all too pleased to print pretentious recipes, they would probably shy away from recipes that might strike their middle-class readers as simply ridiculous, as waffle recipes might if their middle-class readers did not own the specialized irons, which I think most did not. Fireplace waffle irons were essentially yard-long iron

Waffle Irons, Musée Lorrain. From Wikimedia Commons

Waffle Irons, Musée_Lorrain. Wikimedia Commons

tongs attached to thick iron plates; they were hinged either at the far end of the plates, like a nutcracker, or, less commonly, between the handles, like scissors. Waffle irons must have been fairly expensive in England, and a household would likely not invest in one unless it would be frequently used. And it probably would not be frequently used in most middle-class homes because waffles were a bit of a nuisance to bake. The heavy irons had to be propped just so before the fire and turned frequently and, obviously, they had to be watched closely. And according to Peter Rose, a single waffle takes six to eight minutes to bake in a fireplace iron, which means that producing enough waffles to fill a serving dish would take a half hour or more. In early nineteenth-century America, waffles were, in fact, a distinctly upper-class food, and while some privileged women did bake (or have their help bake) them at breakfast for family, they were mostly company fare. In addition to their continuing role in waffle frolics, parties, and suppers, waffles were considered among the nicest “warm cakes” to serve at a supper, or tea, to which company had been invited, and some hostesses also served them at dressier, more formal late-evening tea parties, though cookbook author Eliza Leslie objected, “lest the ladies’ gloves be injured with butter.” (Besides butter, most Americans of the day also sprinkled waffles with sugar and cinnamon.) In the mid-nineteenth century, when American women switched from cooking in the fireplace to cooking at stoves, waffles became somewhat less of a chore to produce, and they soon enough became a middle-class breakfast dish, often now served with maple syrup or molasses. Thus, Fannie Farmer organized her four waffle recipes, including one calling for cooked rice, in the “biscuits and breakfast cakes” chapter of her 1896 cookbook. Farmer’s waffles are all pleasant enough but not nearly as rich and delicious as their early English forebears. *Driver, Christopher, ed. John Evelyn, Cook: The Manuscript Receipt Book of John Evelyn. Blackawton, Totnes, Devon: Prospect Books, 1997.

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