French culinary influence

When Service à la Française Met Service à la Russe

Posted November 2016

By Stephen Schmidt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Place setting for 12-course dinner a la russe

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

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

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

Centerpiece with Flowers and Fruit

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

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

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

Oyster Patties (courtesy of finecooking.com)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finger bowl

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

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

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

Casters

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

[NOTES]

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

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 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? ↩

Ambergris, the Perfume of Whales that once Scented Foods

Posted July 2015

by Stephen Schmidt

“Windy Overlook” Wellington, New Zealand, Breaker Bay
Elia Locardi, blamethemonkey.com

On Saturday, September 20, 2008, the excitement was beginning to grow on Breaker Bay, near Wellington, New Zealand . . . [A] crowd had gathered to investigate a strange object that had washed up ashore during the night. It was large, perhaps the size of a 44-gallon drum . . . No one had seen it arrive. It was just there on the sand . . . roughly cylindrical in shape . . . the color of dirty week-old snow.

As the news media arrived and locals began breaking off pieces of the mass with garden tools, Christopher Kemp, an American biologist on an academic visit to New Zealand, watched the scene with growing amazement. Was it an aspect of New Zealand national character that made people act this way?

Then a rumor began to circulate. The mysterious object was ambergris.

Kemp had never heard of ambergris, and the spectacle on Breaker Bay prompted him to embark on an obsessive study of the substance during his two-year stay in New Zealand. He phoned, emailed, and flew across continents to pry whatever intel he could (often frustratingly little) from the shadowy global network of professional ambergris hunters and traders. He sniffed the stuff in museums and absorbed the wisdom of experts. And he combed remote New Zealand beaches, often by himself and sometimes for days at a time, in hope of finding treasure of his own, which, sadly, he never did. When he returned to the United States, Kemp wrote a brief book about ambergris titled Floating Gold: A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris (The University of Chicago Press, 2012), which tells us what ambergris is, gives us a sense of its historical and current uses, and recounts, in lushly descriptive and often lyrical prose, the author’s dogged beach treks in search of it. For those curious about ambergris, a perfume ingredient that was once also used in food, the book is a marvelous find.

The original English word for the substance was simply “amber,” derived from the Arab anbar via the French ambre. When, at a later point, ambre/amber came also to designate fossilized resin, fragrant amber came to be distinguished as ambre gris, or gray amber, and hence the modern English word (whose last syllable is generally pronounced griss or greez). Sperm whales are the producers of the substance. The whales subsist on enormous quantities of squid, and an occasional unlucky animal (perhaps one in one hundred) gets squid beaks caught in its gut. As the mass grows, the animal secretes a fluid around it, transforming it into ambergris, much as some oysters turn sand grains into pearls, although in the case of whales, unfortunately, it appears that the mass eventually proves fatal. Ambergris can be harvested directly from its source—by the early nineteenth century, whalers knew that lean, sickly, torpid animals often bore the commodity—but, historically, it was far more commonly a thing that washed up on the shore, its origins mysterious. As Paul Freedman explains in Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination, some (including Marco Polo) knew that ambergris came from whales as early as the thirteenth century. However, this connection was only “dimly and inconsistently” understood by the world at large until two Massachusetts savants, in the 1720s, published separate papers conclusively proving the link, their expertise almost surely gathered by way of the Nantucket whaling industry.

Throughout its history, which reaches back to antiquity, ambergris has been used primarily in perfumes, in which it both functions as a powerful fixative, causing perfumes to linger far longer on persons, fabrics, gloves, or sachets than they otherwise would, and also contributes a fragrance of its own. Everyone who has smelled ambergris (unfortunately, I am not among the number) agrees that the fragrance is compelling, but no two people describe the fragrance in the same terms. Perfumers classify the aroma as “animalic,” which could perhaps encompass the scents that Kemp detected in a particular piece, which included cow dung, tobacco, rotting wood, drying seaweed, and open grassy spaces on a beach. But there are sweeter, lighter notes too, such as violets and vanilla. One of the reasons the fragrance is so difficult to pin down is that ambergris smells different depending on whether it has been expelled from the whale only recently (or indeed excavated from a whale carcass) or has been bobbing about on the surface of the world’s oceans for decades. When fresh it is distinctly fecal, as one would expect. When it has aged (and its key chemical component, ambrein, has oxidized into slightly different compounds), its aroma becomes complex—and magical. Its color and texture, too, change as it matures, from dark and putty-like to whitish-gray and barely malleable, like sealing wax.

Partly because ambergris is so mutable, beached blobs of sewer grease and other garbage are often mistaken for the real thing—as proved, alas, to be the case of the mass that came ashore on Breaker Bay in 2008 and caused so much excitement. The sovereign test is to probe with a hot needle: if the specimen is indeed ambergris, it will “melt into a thick, oily fluid the color of dark chocolate,” writes Kemp, and release an ineffable aroma. And you will be suddenly richer. The highest-quality white ambergris sells for $8,000 or more per pound in Europe, where it is in demand by many of the big perfume houses (although they are cagey about using it, likely because its possession and trade are illegal in many places, including the U. S. and Australia). This is not quite the present value of 24-karat gold but surprisingly close.

Ambergris was never nearly as common in cooking as in perfume-making, but its use in food was very early. I do not recall seeing it in Apicius, and I would be surprised to it find there, as it strikes me as out of sync with the usual Apicius flavor notes. But ambergris did play a part in medieval Arab and Indian cuisines, which adapted it from the court cuisine of early-medieval Persia, along with various other fragrances that modern Westerners do not expect to find in food: musk and civet (both animal-derived); roses, orange blossoms, and other flowers; aloe and sandal woods; and camphor. There is, for example, this recipe from the fifteenth-century The Ni’matnama Manuscript of the Sultans of Mandu (Routledge, 2012):

Boil the meat well, take it off [the fire], dry it, and fasten it to a wooden skewer. Mix saffron, white ambergris and rosewater together and rub it on the meat. Put it in a cooking pot and add rice. Put in fresh ginger, onions and salt and cook it. Serve it with good gravy.

Since ambergris was part of medieval Arab cuisine, it might well have entered the cuisines of the medieval European privileged, which incorporated many Arab influences. (How many is a matter of disagreement; my personal sense is rather a lot.) But I do not recall having seen it in any English or French medieval recipe manuscript. I would be curious to know if it appears in medieval Italian recipe manuscripts (which I have not studied), for Renaissance Italian court cooks used it in biscotti and other sweets, typically in combination with musk. By the seventeenth century, the French, too, had adopted it. In La Varenne’s Traité de Confitures (1650) ambergris—almost always paired with musk—scents diverse candied-fruit conceits, sugar-paste pastilles, pralines, marzipans, wines, and lemonade, as well as a preparation called “crème, autre façon,” which is basically our crème anglaise. La Varenne gives these directions for preparing both musk and ambergris for use in recipes (my translation). There were other ways, but this was a particularly common one.

Francois Pierre de la Varenne (1615-1678)

To prepare your musk in the proper way, put it in a little cast-iron mortar, pound it with a pestle of the same material, mix it with a little powdered sugar, and after everything is well ground, put it in a paper so that you can make use of it as needed. You can prepare ambergris in the same way and even mix them together, to use as much for beverages as for preserves.

In due course, ambergris infiltrated English cooking by way of the Italians and the French, whose cuisines were much admired and emulated in early-modern England. Kemp cites a “curious lady” of the eighteenth century, who claimed to have read, in obscure sixteenth-century sources, that ambergris was “the haut-gout” of Tudor court circles starting in the early 1500s. Perhaps this was true (if so, the fashion would have been imitated from the Italians), but there is very little mention of ambergris in sixteenth-century English printed and manuscript cookbooks—and indeed there remains little until the time of the Restoration, in 1660, when cookbooks are suddenly redolent of the stuff. Robert May, in The Accomplisht Cook (1660, 1665), has some twenty recipes. Hannah Woolley, in Queen-like Closet (1672), has close to thirty. Woolley’s fondness for the material is interesting, for she addressed the upper-middling classes as much as she did the very wealthy. Perhaps ambergris was not quite as rare and expensive in seventeenth-century England as we might suppose.

Both May and Woolley outline ambergris-infused medicinal drinks (some of which were pleasant and were more enjoyed than “taken”) and both have hartshorn jellies (gelatins) flavored with the substance. But otherwise their recipes differ. Woolley focuses on ambergris-scented marzipans, preserved-fruit conceits, and sugar candies. May uses ambergris primarily in dishes involving eggs or cream or both: eggs poached in syrups, scrambled or poached eggs on toast (a rare non-sweet preparation), rich baked puddings, codling cream (apple fool of sorts), snow cream (a showy whipped-cream conceit), cheesecakes, and the mildly alcoholic hot custard beverage called posset. Manuscript cookbooks trend toward recipes similar to May’s, their most common ambergris vehicles being rich, custardy baked puddings of bread and/or ground almonds, most of which feature dried or preserved fruits (and sometimes sliced apples or cooked artichoke bottoms too), lumps of beef marrow or butter, and plenty of thick cream and eggs. The following recipe is typical except for the “green potatoes whole,” which I am going to guess were the cream-colored sweet potatoes of the day, harvested when tiny and then candied and tinted green to resemble candied citron.

To make Almond Puddings

A Collection of Choise Receipts (New York Academy of Medicine)

Take two pound of Jordan Almonds and lay y^m in cold water to Blanch, then beat y^m very well w^th 3 or 4 spoonfulls of Rose water, Put to your Almonds 3 or 4 ladles full of y^e bread soaked in Milk, as for the Bread Puddings, then put in Cream & 7 Eggs, 3 of the whites taken out, Season it w^th Sugar, Nutmeg, Orange or Rose water, some Muske and Amber grease—Put in green Potatus whole, & pretty store of Marrow in pieces.

15th-century woodcut of Siberian musk deer, whose musk gland supplies musk. Wikimedia Commons.

It seems odd to us today that an “animalic” flavor, no matter how subtle, was once favored in rich baked puddings or any other sweet dish. But so it must have been, for musk, too, is animalic, and musk was not only used in most recipes calling for ambergris but also in many recipes on its own—most famously perhaps in the musk sugar candies (or “kissing comfits,” as Shakespeare called them, in reference to musk’s supposed aphrodisiac properties) that the Elizabethan English adopted from Italy and adored for sweets banquets. Whether used singly or in tandem, ambergris and musk were generally deployed in English recipes with rose water and spices—a combination of skanky, racy, and floral scents that sounds to us, rather precisely, like a recipe for perfume. The obvious lesson here is that tastes in seasoning diverge greatly across time—just as they do across cultures. A Dutch-born friend of mine finds the vanilla omnipresent in American foods (nowadays often in extreme concentrations) unpleasant. And I have been told by at least three French persons over the years that the cinnamon met with in American breakfast cereals, doughnuts, yeast breads, quick breads, desserts, and holiday drinks is, to their palates, bizarre and jarring.

In the end, the English predilection for animalic foods proved fleeting. Ambergris and musk appear in few recipes written after 1700. But they do appear in cookbook author E. Smith’s recipe for Whipt Cream (1727), which was copied by Hannah Glasse (1747), and, in turn, by Susannah Carter (American edition, 1772), and finally by Amelia Simmons, our country’s first native-born cookbook author, in her little cookbook of 1796. Served with pastry in the second course of dinner or with cake at evening parties, whipt cream was frothier and more evanescent than our whipped cream, with a winy tang.

Whipt Cream

Amelia Simmons, American Cookery, 1796

Take a quart of cream and the whites of 8 eggs beaten with half a pint of wine; mix it together and sweeten it to your taste with double refined sugar, you may perfume it (if you please) with musk or Amber gum tied in a rag and steeped a little in the cream, whip it up with a whisk and a bit of lemon peel tyed in the middle of the whisk, take off the froth with a spoon, and put into glasses.

One might have expected Simmons to have cut the fragrance from this recipe, as too outré and costly for a cookbook touted on the title page as “adapted to this country and to all grades of life.” But she not only left it in—she almost certainly did so intentionally, for she revised the original “ambergrease” to “amber gum,” which was presumably a colloquial American term at the time. It is just possible that ambergris was in wide culinary use by sophisticated American cooks circa 1800. After all, the precious commodity must have been brought in often by the whalers of the northern Atlantic seaboard, and it probably sold then for considerably less than the price of gold.

The Fateful Meeting of the Old English Stirred Custards with French Crème Anglaise

Posted July 2015

by Stephen Schmidt

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.