English influence on U. S. foodways

Plum Pudding, Boiled—and Baked

Posted December 2016

By Stephen Schmidt

Plum Pudding, or Christmas Pudding

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

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

Madam Salisbury’s Plum Pudding

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

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

Madame Salisbury’s Plum Pudding

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

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

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

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

Sarah Josepha Hale (1788-1879)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amelia Simmons’s A Bread Pudding

A Bread Pudding

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

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

[NOTES]

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

When Did Southern Begin?

Posted November 2015

by Stephen Schmidt

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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. ↩
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. ↩
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 14^th 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 19^th century. But I recently spotted the recipe as Hallico of Mutton in The Johnson Family Treasury, an 18^th century English manuscript recipe book that has just been published (beautifully). Was “hallico” current in England in the 18^th century? Or did the Johnson family get their recipe from a French source? ↩

Mrs. Goodfellow and Miss Leslie

Posted September 2014

by Stephen Schmidt

Eliza Leslie (1787-1858)

As a child, Eliza Leslie had no plan to become a cookbook author, much less the finest and most influential American cookbook author of the second third of the nineteenth century. She was born in 1787, the eldest of five children of Robert Leslie, an eighteenth-century Philadelphia philosophe, who made watches by day and spent his evenings discussing science, mathematics, and the ongoing invention of the American republic with Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and other friends from the American Philosophical Society. From 1792 to 1797 Mr. Leslie brought his family to London, where he attempted to expand his watchmaking into an export business, and where the young Eliza, haphazardly educated at home, began to mature into a constant reader and mildly acerbic intellect whose ardent hope was one day to see her name in print. Alas, Mr. Leslie’s business plans failed, as did his health, and after his death, in 1803, his wife was compelled to open a genteel boardinghouse to keep the family afloat. As helpmate to her mother in this enterprise, Eliza Leslie found herself having to supervise a staff, including a cook, about whose doings she knew little. Fortunately, a famed Philadelphia confectioner by the name of Mrs. Goodfellow had opened a cooking school in her shop—the first school of its kind in America. Here, Leslie recorded, in copious detail, recipes which made the Leslie boardinghouse famous—and recipes which, even many years later, when Leslie had become a successful writer, mostly of children’s stories and short fiction, her friends constantly importuned her to share. Finally, her brother Charles Robert Leslie (who had stayed behind in England and become a well-known painter of historical scenes) convinced Leslie to publish these recipes as cookbook, which she did, in 1828, titling it Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats, by A Lady of Philadelphia. At the time there were only a handful of American cookbooks in print—most American women still cooked out of British cookbooks—and it was perhaps Leslie’s promise, in her preface, that her recipes were “in every sense of the word, American” that impelled her “little book” to enormous popularity, appearing in innumerable editions practically to the end of the nineteenth century.

Although Leslie continued to publish fiction and journalistic pieces into the 1840s, garnering several prizes along the way, the success of Seventy-Five Receipts inevitably lured her into rechanneling her career toward books of domestic management, for she was unmarried and self-supporting. In 1837, Leslie brought forth a general-purpose cookbook titled Directions for Cookery in its Various Branches, which sold at least 50,000 copies in various printings and editions (an astonishing achievement in the day), and, in 1846, a somewhat tonier cookbook, The Lady’s Receipt-Book, which met with somewhat lesser but nonetheless impressive success. Still more cookbooks, as well as a “behavior” (or etiquette) book, appeared in the 1850s. By this time Miss Leslie (as she had come to be known) was ensconced as a full-time resident of Philadelphia’s United States Hotel, where she comported herself as the grand figure she was, visiting with the hotel’s many celebrated guests and signing the autograph books of the many admirers who sought her out.

Mrs. (Elizabeth) Goodfellow (1768-1851)

It has always intrigued me that Leslie’s remarkable career was built on the work of a confectioner and cooking teacher named Mrs. Goodfellow—and I have always wondered if it really was. Since the beginning of Anglo-American cookbook publishing, cookbook authors have been wont to buttress the authority of their recipes by attributing them to respected or famous persons, whether royalty, first ladies, the socially prominent, or well-known cooks. Mrs. Goodfellow might seem too obscure a figure to elevate as recipe godmother, but she was in fact renowned even beyond the environs of Philadelphia. Indeed, following Mrs. Goodfellow’s death, in 1851, at age 83, a woman who identified herself only as “A Good Housekeeper and a pupil of Mrs. Goodfellow,” published a cookbook titled Cookery as It should Be, which the publisher crowed was “sure to be well received” given its source, which was, at least ostensibly, the noted confectioner. In point of fact, very few of the receipts in this 362-page tome date from Mrs. Goodfellow’s heyday, and if Eliza Leslie actually did copy her Seventy-Five Receipts from Mrs. Goodfellow, as Leslie claimed, our Good Housekeeper must have been a very poor note taker, for no more than two or three of Cookery’s recipes overlap with Seventy-Five Receipts.

Thus it was with great anticipation that I approached a manuscript cookbook in the possession of the Clements Library of the University of Michigan, which appears in the library’s catalogue under the title “Mrs. Goodfellow Receipts, 1860-1870,” and which contains twenty-three recipes explicitly identified as belonging to the famed confectioner (along with 175 or so others, which are later). Presumably copied by a pupil of Mrs. Goodfellow, the manuscript would seem to corroborate Miss Leslie’s claims as to origins of Seventy-Five Receipts. Fully eleven of the manuscript’s Goodfellow recipes are manifestly versions of recipes appearing in Leslie’s little cookbook, and two are versions of recipes outlined in Leslie’s later Directions for Cookery. In addition, five of the manuscript’s Goodfellow recipes bear an obvious relationship to recipes in Seventy-Five Receipts; that is, although Leslie chose not to print these recipes, she imported distinctive elements of them into her own recipes for the same items. Only five of the manuscript’s Goodfellow recipes do not show up in any form in any of Leslie’s works. Or at least I do not think they do: Leslie published thousands of recipes over the course of her career, and while I think I have seen them all, I probably have not—and I certainly do not remember all that I have seen.

Obviously, I cannot say for certain that the recipes in the Goodfellow manuscript cookbook were copied verbatim from Mrs. Goodfellow. Nor can I say that Mrs. Goodfellow taught the same recipes for the same items throughout her teaching career. In fact, speaking as a cooking teacher myself, I would be surprised if she did. But if we assume, for the sake of argument, that the recipes in the manuscript are the originals from which Miss Leslie worked, we can discern just how canny Leslie’s appraisal of her readers’ needs and aspirations was. From the start of her career, Leslie positioned herself as a cookbook author who, on the one hand, was willing to make reasonable compromises for the sake of practicality but who, on the other hand, remained an unabashed exponent of what was then called “rich cooking.” In the second third of the nineteenth century, this was precisely the right appeal for the audience Leslie presumed, the supremely ambitious upper-middle classes, who, though beset by anxieties amid the day’s ruinous economic cycles and increasingly bitter North-South divide, were nonetheless determined to live well and express a genteel identity through fancy-dress evening parties featuring lavish displays of food. For this audience Leslie cleverly reconfigures the manuscript’s Goodfellow recipes to make them just a bit richer and more highly (and more imaginatively) flavored, without significantly increasing their cost and complication. Leslie’s pound cake has twelve drops of lemon essence and an entire nutmeg, where the manuscript version has only six drops and a few scrapings. Leslie’s Apees (a sort of crisp-crumbly cookie) are made with wine and rose water and feature three tablespoons of caraway seeds, while the manuscript’s Apees (abbreviated as A. P.’s) are made with water and have only “a few” seeds. Leslie enriches her Milk Biscuits with butter and eggs, while manuscript’s recipe for the same calls for only flour, milk, and yeast. Leslie’s Almond Pudding has twice as many almonds as the manuscript’s recipe for the same, and her Coconut Pudding has twice as many beaten egg whites. And so it goes. In no instance does Leslie make a recipe plainer, although she does sometimes make it more practical. For example, all of the manuscript recipes for puddings in puff pastry crusts yield four tiny puddings. Leslie reconfigures these recipes to yield one medium-size pudding, on the assumption, I think, that one medium-size pudding would be sufficient for most women’s purposes and, if not, it would be easy enough to double the recipe.

The recipes in the manuscript that Leslie chose to leave behind are interesting for another reason, and this brings us to the cookbook ostensibly sourced from Mrs. Goodfellow but actually not. By the end of her career, the tiny, parochial, overwhelmingly culturally English America of Leslie’s youth had been swallowed up by a far larger, rapidly industrializing and urbanizing, and increasingly diverse and factionalized America. Food and cooking had changed in tandem, the prevailing taste of the times, at least as exhibited in the many cookbooks now on the market, having shifted from an essentially British, upper-class, eighteenth-century cuisine, freighted with rich, expensive ingredients and many practical difficulties, to a much simpler, easier, more naturalized cuisine that truly was “in every sense of the word, American.” Many of these changes did not please Leslie at all, especially one: women’s ever-escalating reliance on chemical leavening, whose common forms today are baking soda and baking powder.

Alkaline chemical leavenings (that is, baking sodas) had been used (in secret, it seems) by gingerbread bakers in northern Europe since at least as early as the sixteenth century. Commercial Dutch (and possibly German) bakers brought chemical leavenings to America, and by the late eighteenth century Americans were beginning to use these substances, heretofore regarded as adulterants, in home kitchens—the first people on earth to do so. Through the first half of the nineteenth century, most women remained wary of these substances, but most, including Leslie, countenanced their use in the “plain cakes” served to family and informal company at evening tea. However, the “fine cakes” that graced the tea tables and supper tables of evening entertainments were an entirely other matter. All good cooks considered chemical leavening an abomination in fine cakes, just as many European cooks today still do. Alas, by the time Leslie published her last cookbook, in 1857, just a year before her death, this barrier was being breached. Leslie had heard that some women were introducing alkalis to Golden Cake, a very fine cake but also a very tricky one. Predictably, she was appalled and railed in her recipe for this cake: “If you use soda, saleratus, hartshorn, or any of the alkalis, they will entirely destroy the orange flavor [of this cake], and communicate a bad taste of their own.” And then, a few pages on, at the end of a recipe for Spanish Buns (one of Mrs. Goodfellow’s particular specialties), Leslie drifts off into a bittersweet reminiscence of her days in Mrs. Goodfellow’s kitchen. There, she writes, only “good things” were made, and “the use of soda and other alkalis [was] unknown… hartshorn in cakes would have horrified her.”

Leslie was likely thinking of Cookery as It should Be when she penned these remarks. Although supposedly featuring Mrs. Goodfellow’s receipts, the book is full of chemically puffed-up cakes, including golden cake. Although this book was originally published by the same house that published Leslie, Leslie’s indignation was such that she savaged it in a review, first and foremost for its chemical horrors.

Pearl Ash (Potassium Carbonate)

This brings us to a puzzling issue. Four of the recipes in Seventy-Five Receipts call for pearl ash, the original American “baking soda,” and in the second edition of the book, published in 1832, Leslie replaces the book’s original soda-free gingerbread nuts (gingersnaps) with a pearl ash version. Did these recipes come from Mrs. Goodfellow, with her horror of alkalis? To judge from the Clements Goodfellow manuscript, they did not. None of Leslie’s chemically leavened recipes appear in this manuscript, and even more significantly, two of the cakes that Leslie raises with pearl ash in Seventy-Five Receipts, molasses gingerbread and the gingerbread nuts, show up in traditional, soda-free guise in the Clements manuscript. It bears mentioning that one of the Goodfellow recipes in the Clements manuscript, for the sweet buns called rusks (more often eaten fresh than dried, despite today’s understanding of rusks as toasts), does call for “a little pearl ash”—while Leslie’s rusks recipe in Seventy-Five Receipts does not. This, however, can be explained. The purpose of the pearl ash here is not so much to leaven the dough—the recipe specifies “yeast sufficient to raise it,” as was usual—as to ensure that the dough did not sour while rising, a common problem in the day, when yeast was often weak and slow-acting. Many women resorted to alkalis to sweeten soured yeast doughs; it is fascinating to see that Mrs. Goodfellow, too, apparently sanctioned this strategy.

Evidently, then, Leslie did not derive quite all of the recipes in Seventy-Five Receipts from Mrs. Goodfellow. Leslie was too forward-looking and too shrewd to do that. She knew that virtually everyone used alkalis in molasses gingerbreads and served alkali-leavened butter cakes to family and informal company at tea. Indeed, such cakes were proudly considered unique American inventions meriting patriotic titles bearing the names of revolutionary heroes (Franklin and Washington and Lafayette) or American cities. There was no way that Leslie could omit such cakes from Seventy-Five Receipts, and, in fact, she gave her readers two recipes, although she was ambivalent about the use of chemical leavening in one of these, her Lafayette Gingerbread. It was this careful balancing of fine cooking with practical considerations, reminiscent of the later Julia Child, who was an analogous figure in the twentieth-century American culinary scene, which brought Leslie such great success in the 1830s and 1840s, though it was also her scruples that relegated her to the sidelines by the 1850s. Her popularity may not have been enduring—no one’s is—but her influence proved to be. At least fifty of Leslie’s seventy-five receipts are still made in some form or fashion today.