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Karen Hess

On Adapting Historical Recipes

Posted March 2019 
by Stephen Schmidt 

By Stephen Schmidt       

Martha Washington manuscript, Historical Society of Pennsylvania

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

One evening last November, the Culinary Historians of New York sponsored a panel discussion on the work of culinary historian Karen Hess, in celebration of her 100th birthday. Karen Hess, who died in 2007, came into public awareness with the publication of The Taste of America, in 1978, which she wrote with her husband John Hess. The book became notorious for its caustic, sometimes unfair attacks on the era’s bestselling historians and food luminaries. But its basic argument—that the quality of American cooking, far from improving over the centuries, had actually declined—was compelling. To make their case, the Hesses drew on hard evidence in the form of historical recipes, which they quoted, visualized step-by-step, and, in some instances, seem to have made. To the extent that historical recipes reveal what people of the past actually cooked and ate—a fraught question, I realize—the Hesses’ argument seemed incontrovertible.

Karen Hess

Younger people may find it hard to believe how revolutionary such an approach was at the time the Hesses published. In 1979, when Barbara Wheaton, author of the groundbreaking Savoring the Past (1983), wrote about her experience in preparing a roasted peacock redressed in its plumage for a medieval banquet, many people thought she was daft. Culinary history, especially American culinary history, was then almost exclusively treated as a popular subject, mostly in works that were essentially cookbooks expanded to include some historical material. Few writers of these works even cited historical American recipes, much less attempted to make them. And those few who did recreate historical dishes, or claimed to, professed varying measures of befuddlement, amusement, and alarm at the recipes’ instructions, which obliged them to “adapt” the recipes more or less to point of erasure. Many mid-twentieth-century popular evocations of the American past seem sentimental, patronizing, and biased by today’s standards, but evocations of historical American cooking seem shockingly so. Books that dealt with historical cooking dished it up as quaint and fun but ultimately just old-timey women’s work—a subject that no one could take entirely seriously.

Martha Washington manuscript, Historical Society of Pennsylvania

Very much of its time is Marie Kimball’s The Martha Washington Cook Book (1940), which purports to elucidate the meals and entertainments of George and Martha Washington, as revealed by a handwritten cookbook that Martha Washington owned and eventually passed down to her granddaughter. Kimball tells us that this cookbook was authored by Martha Washington’s first mother-in-law, Frances Parke Custis, and comprises “a collection of the favorite dishes and ‘rules’ of the Washington household.” Actually, the manuscript was compiled by an unknown person of a privileged English family around 1675, and was subsequently brought to this country by unknown means, whereupon it somehow fell into Martha Washington’s hands. The first lady is unlikely even to have recognized most of the recipes, much less used them, because by the time she married her first husband, Daniel Custis, in 1750, the Restoration-era cooking that the manuscript outlines was thoroughly outmoded. The bulk of Kimball’s book comprises over one hundred pages of recipes supposedly culled from the manuscript. “It has been necessary, of course, to make some adaptation” of the recipes, Kimball writes, since the recipes yield “appalling” quantities, and “some of the recipes are scarcely in accordance with modern taste or practice.” Kimball’s ignorance of the recipes is almost hilarious, as when she defines “suckets of long bisket” as “a variety of crouton.” (They were long comfits, perhaps of candied citrus peel.) In any event, “some adaptation” is a considerable understatement. A number of the recipes appear to be simply Kimball’s own creations. Others bear titles and some random ingredients imported from the manuscript’s recipes but produce entirely different dishes, invariably bad ones. At the end of her recipe for Quince Pie, an utterly bowdlerized version of a recipe that does appear in in the manuscript, Kimball suggests omitting the pie’s top crust in favor of a topping of whipped cream. “Martha Washington did not do this,” Kimball writes in all seriousness—as if Martha Washington, much less the actual author of the book, did any of this.

In 1980 Karen Hess published Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery, her first solo book and arguably her masterwork. The book is not a riposte to Kimball’s, which Hess does her best to “ignore,” but it does, by its brilliant example, expose the attitudes that underlay Kimball’s book and the many others like it, as well as the misconceptions that these books promoted. Hess presents a verbatim transcription of the Martha Washington manuscript, with commentary following each recipe, in which she explains unfamiliar terms and procedures, fills in gaps in the recipe’s instructions, describes the recipe’s variants, antecedents, and later forms, and explores the recipe’s possible meanings to the people who created it. In some instances she submits recipes to trial and reports her results. In the end, we gain a concrete sense of how one privileged Restoration English family cooked and ate, knowledge that is crucial to us because, as Hess states, English cooking is the “warp and weft” of our own. This is more obviously apparent in American cookbooks written before the Civil War, which are replete with recipes copied verbatim from English works, but it is still true today, even as myriad diverse culinary influences have been brought to bear on our daily cuisine. Bacon, barbecue, ham, meatloaf, macaroni and cheese, candied sweet potatoes, sandwich bread, ketchup, biscuits, muffins, cornstarch puddings, fruit pies, sweet potato pie, lemon meringue pie, and butter cakes all have links to historic English cooking. And that is hardly an exhaustive list.

Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery, by Karen Hess

Today, many culinary historians ground their work in the close study of historical recipes, following the example of Karen Hess, Barbara Wheaton, and other pioneering recipe scholars. But the unhappy truth is that much of the culinary history most visible to the public follows in the tradition of Marie Kimball’s book: mangled “adaptations” of historical recipes falsely presented as a “taste of the past.” The enormous public interest in food now impels all sorts of people to adapt historical recipes, some for their own purposes, and some for the purposes of an organization that employs them. In effect, historical recipes have become a tool of business in the broadest sense of the word, and when the claims of business and scholarship compete, business usually wins. Meanwhile, the hive of this activity is cyberspace, where historical recipes, like everything else, are dragged through the muck of blithe ignorance, self-dramatization, unrelenting solipsism, vulgarity, and shameless pandering endemic to the realm. ‘Truth is the debt we owe to the dead,’ said Voltaire, supposedly, but the only debt many online adapters owe is to their own interests. They profess to “update” historical recipes toward the end of making them more palatable, or more healthful, or more practical to cooks today, when they are actually rewriting the recipes from top to bottom. It is galling when these persons claim or imply that their handiwork serves some historical purpose. But there is no point in fulminating against these bad recipes—Karen Hess’s fulminations got her nowhere. The more useful response is to ignore them and create better work.

And that is what many of today’s online historical recipe adapters would like to do, if they only knew how. Herewith I offer some tips on the endeavor for the benefit of non-specialists. I will focus on the fine seventeenth-century English cuisine outlined in the Martha Washington manuscript, but my advice applies to historical Anglo-American cuisine of any period.

 

2.

Let’s first set the terms—at least as I see them.  As Karen Hess acknowledges, in adapting historical recipes for today’s cooks, revisions are sometimes unavoidable—and they are fine as long as they respect the intentions of the original recipes. For example, Karen disliked the “sliced nutmeg” called for in many seventeenth-century recipes. I don’t mind it, but I don’t think you would be violating a recipe if you grated the nutmeg instead. Many seventeenth-century puddings made with a pound of butter taste little different when made with only half as much. Likewise, some of the dozen or more ingredients called for in a seventeenth-century “pie of many things” can be omitted—indeed some, such as cow’s udder or cockscombs, must be. But there is a difference between updating a historical recipe to make it feasible—and updating it to the point that it becomes a contemporary recipe with old-timey affectations. If you puff up a batch of Portugal cakes with baking powder, which people of the day had never heard of and would have regarded as an adulterant if they had, you cannot call your recipe Portugal cakes. Likewise, if you decrease or omit the sugar in the pungently spiced, syrupy-sweet banqueting wine called hippocras, you are no longer making hippocras. Hippocras was a medicinal wine, and in the medical thinking of the day, the sugar it contains was an indispensable drug, both unleashing the curative properties of the spices and conveying a potent cure of its own.

That said, let’s proceed. I will assume that you already have a particular seventeenth-century recipe in your sights and that, if it is a manuscript recipe, you have already transcribed it verbatim. I now present my process of adapting historical recipes in four steps.

 

Step One: Look at Multiple Contemporaneous Recipes for Your Dish or Conceit

Before you can adapt a seventeenth-century recipe, you need to discover what your recipe is telling you. And you also need to discover anything that your recipe is not telling you but that you need to know in order to recreate the dish in modern terms with reasonable faithfulness. The quickest and surest way to make this discovery is to examine a number of contemporaneous recipes for the dish or conceit you are working with. Whatever is unstated, unclear, unknown, or possibly erroneous in your particular recipe will likely be elucidated in others.

Examining multiple recipes will often reveal the meaning of strange words and phrases in your recipe that are not defined online or in any dictionary. I think most contemporary readers will be stumped, as I once was, by the term “hard lettuce,” which turns up in a dozen recipes for so-called “boiled meats” and meat pies in Hannah Woolley’s The Queen-like Closet (1681). If you patiently page through all of Woolley’s recipes for boiled meats and meat pies, towards the end of the book, you will finally come to a recipe titled “To boil Chickens with Lettuce the very best way,” which reveals what hard lettuce is. The crucial sentence reads, “Take good store of hard Lettuce, cut them in halves, and wash them . . .”  Lettuces that can be cut in halves through their hard cores are head lettuces, like today’s Boston or Bibb lettuces—as opposed to leaf lettuces, the kind that make up mesclun. A few pages further on, your new-found insight is corroborated by the recipe “To make a Lettuce Pie.” The crucial sentence here reads, “Take your Cabbage Lettuce and cut them in halves.” A cabbage lettuce, obviously, is a lettuce that looks like a cabbage because it grows in a head. In the course of perusing multiple recipes, you will also begin to pick up seventeenth-century culinary language. “Boil” usually means simmer; “sifted” often means grated; “temper” means mix; meats can be “fried” in wine or water; and “bake” does not always mean in an oven. “Gravy” is the juice that runs from rare-cooked meat, and “sauce” can mean an elaborate garnish that is practically a separate dish.

Cracknels, A Collection of Choise Receipts, 1680 [manuscript], New York Academy of Medicine

Examining multiple recipes will also help you to fill in those many matters that historical recipes, maddeningly, leave unsaid because they were obvious to people of the day—the quantities of ingredients, the cooking times and temperatures, and the size, shape, preferred texture and color, and serving temperature of the thing. A few years back I was slated to give a talk at an esteemed institution and was asked to provide half a dozen recipes for little cakes (think cookies) that could be served at the end of event. The organizer of the event wanted one of these cakes to be cracknels. This institution, like many others, was forbidden by contract to allow any entity other than its in-house caterer to prepare food that would be served on the premises. I told the caterer that he absolutely had to roll the cracknels dough paper-thin, as my adapted recipe stated, for this is what makes cracknels crackling crisp, as they are meant to be. I had a feeling that the caterer would find this troublesome and wouldn’t do it, and he didn’t. He formed the dough as a log and cut it in slices perhaps around 1/4-inch thick, which he presumably thought was thin enough. Do I need to tell you that the result was something quite other than cracknels—and not especially worth eating? Obviously, that evening’s cracknels debacle was no one’s fault but the caterer’s. But an unwary cracknels adapter could well make a similar mistake if he or she relied solely on a recipe that does not mention the critical rolling. Many recipes for cracknels don’t. Likewise, most seventeenth-century recipes for jumbles, Shrewsbury cakes, rusks, Prince bisket, and the multifarious gingerbreads give little or no indication of the usual size and shape. Only by looking at multiple recipes will you discover the essential clues.

Old-Style Cracknels, John Murrell, A Deligtfull Daily Exercise (1623)

I will add a caveat. A cracknels sleuth may come across a recipe that says to form cracknels in the shape of a cup or bowl and immerse them in boiling water before baking them. These alarming instructions do not indicate an unsuspected elision in the many other cracknels recipes that the sleuth has perused. Rather, they pertain to an older, pan-European form of cracknels that remained current for several decades as modern, distinctively English cracknels evolved. If you suspect a like complication in the dish you are working with, you should search the dish in sources predating and postdating the source of your recipe. There are not many such recipes, thank goodness. More often, recipes follow different patterns because the dish was extant in variations. Most seventeenth-century English fricassees, for example, are “white” because the meat is “fried” in liquid, which is to say, it is actually poached. However, there are also fricassees that entail true frying (as the French word “fricassee” connotes), resulting in browned meat in a brown sauce. (These fricassee variations persist to this day.) Likewise, most of seventeenth-century banqueting creams exist in variants with respect to the manner of thickening, whether by heat, acid, rennet, gelatin, whipping, churning, or some combination. Recipes for “Portugal eggs” and “Spanish eggs” are crazily variable for a unique reason. The terms came to denote several quite different Iberian sweet egg dishes that presumably were brought to England by Catherine of Braganza, the Portuguese queen consort of King Charles II—as well as far-flung variations on these dishes dreamt up by English cooks.

Eggs in the Portugal Fashion, Robert May, The Accomplisht Cook (1665)

Eggs the Portugal Way, John Nott, Confectioners’ Dictionary (1723)

 

Eggs the Spanish Way, John Nott, Confectioners’ Dictionary (1723)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A final caveat: There are some things you will never discover no matter how many recipes you look at. What, for example, is that “bundle of sweet herbs” that turns up in recipe after recipe? Sweet herbs comprised most of the common herbs in use today, except for basil and tarragon. But did certain dishes generally take more of some sweet herbs and less of others, as is true today? We will likely never know.

 

Step Two: Adjust for Seventeenth-Century Ingredients and Cooking Technologies

Many seventeenth-century recipes call for ingredients that are now hard to find or unavailable. For some of these you can suggest substitutes: candied chestnuts for candied eryngo roots; lemon juice for verjuice; granulated yeast plus water for ale yeast (I’ll discuss equivalents in my next blog post); a sweet orange and a lime for two bitter oranges (as nineteenth-century cookbook author Eliza Leslie does in making orange pudding). Others such as pickled samphire, certain organ meats, and ambergris and musk must be omitted. Omissions do not matter much unless there are many of them or they are the principal feature of the dish, as in a mugget pie (bovine umbilical cord). In that case, you need to move on to another recipe.

A more important ingredient consideration is discrepancies between old and modern foodstuffs. Some of these are clear-cut. Cream and milk were raw and reacted differently to heat, acid, and whipping than our pasteurized product. (A few banqueting creams and syllabubs are impossible to reproduce for this reason.) A dozen seventeenth-century eggs weighed around one pound, while it takes only eight of today’s “large” eggs to weigh as much. Thus the eggs called for in a seventeenth-century recipe should be reduced by about one third in an adaptation. (Sometimes the arithmetic is awkward and you will have to approximate.) Other discrepancies are hazier. I assume that, like eggs, seventeenth-century farm-raised meats, fruits, and vegetables were around a third smaller than ours. I confess that I don’t actually know anything about seventeenth-century animal breeds, and I should ask people who do. (There are some.) The typical size of seventeenth-century fruits and vegetables is probably anybody’s guess. Also a guess is the taste and texture of seventeenth-century meats and produce. Karen Hess believed their flavor was more intense, but I think this may be a sentimental generalization. Revived varieties of “heirloom” apples often prove to be dry, sour, woody, and generally unpleasant. Since you cannot know these things there is no point obsessing over them.

Wheat flour presents special complications. Seventeenth-century English wheat flour had less protein than our all-purpose flour and was therefore less absorptive, despite the specks of germ and bran likely present in even “the finest white flour,” which had the opposite effect. Thus in adapting recipes, relatively low-protein all-purpose flours, such as Gold Medal and Pillsbury brands, are wiser choices than Hecker’s or King Arthur, which are very nearly bread flours even though they are labelled “all-purpose.” I start be adding whatever quantity of flour the original recipe calls for and hope that the dough or batter will cooperate. If it doesn’t, I make adjustments. Unfortunately, absorption is not the only wheat-flour issue. When a recipe specifies flour by a volume measurement—that is, a peck, a gallon, a quart, or a pint—the recipe may intend the understood weight of the flour when measured by the old dry peck, which was 14 pounds (and thus 7 pounds to a gallon, 1 3/4 pounds to a quart, and 14 ounces to a pint). Or the recipe may intend the volume of the flour when measured by the ale or wine quart, which was the same as the modern American quart: 32 cups to a peck,1 16 to a gallon, and 4 to a quart, and 2 to a pint. There is a big difference between the dry-peck weight and the liquid volume measure. While a quart of flour by the peck weight is 1 3/4 pounds, a quart of flour by liquid volume is only 1 to 1 1/4 pounds depending on how settled the flour is in the measure. In adapting old recipes, Elizabeth David hews to the peck weight (which she reckons at 12 pounds, yet another complication!). Karen Hess adapts by the liquid quart. They are both right. Seventeenth-century cooks followed both systems. A few recipes specify the system to be used, stating “by weight” or else giving the measure in “ale pints” or “wine quarts.” And sometimes you can deduce the system from context, as you can in Constance Hall’s extraordinary helpful 1672 table of pastry recipes. If your recipe provides no explicit clues, begin adapting by volume. If your dough turns out to be soup, you know that the original recipe meant weight.

Finally, unless you happen to be a hearth cook, you cannot know the particular tastes and textures of foods cooked at the fireplace using seventeenth-century cooking equipment. Karen Hess claimed that meat roasted in or in front of a fireplace attained a fabulous thick, dark crust, while meat roasted in a gas or electric oven emerges gray and steamy. Perhaps she was right. Nineteenth-century American cookbooks show that some households continued to roast meat in the fireplace many decades after they had otherwise given up cooking at the hearth in favor of the stove. But whether or not fireplace-roasted meats were superior, there is no point in trying to replicate them in a modern stove oven because it cannot be done. And in case you regret being unable to reproduce the taste of smoke in your adapted recipe, don’t. Seventeenth-century fireplace foods did not taste of smoke, or at least were not meant to. I have read that fireplace-cooked meats tasted delightfully “barbecued” or “grilled” and that hearth breads like muffins tasted smoky. This is nonsense.

 

Step Three: Check Your Adaptation for Modern Biases and Assumptions 

I am assuming that by now you have a draft of your adapted recipe before you. Now you must ruthlessly examine it for any modern biases or assumptions that you may have brought to it. I am particularly prone to importing modern notions into an adapted recipe when attempting to wriggle out of something in the original recipe that I don’t want to do—like boiling turnips or spinach for an hour, or using the entire “peel” of a lemon or orange (including the bitter white pith), or deliberately curdling eggs (even when I know that curdling is the point, as in a posset or certain cheesecakes). You may also be led astray by some insidious miscue embedded in the recipe. A recipe titled “in the French style” may tempt you to cram your adaptation with butter, or drown it in wine, or shower it with herbs, or somehow make it “fancy.”  These are all mistakes. Whatever “French” connotes in your recipe, it does not connote what it does today. The same is true of recipes described as “Italian,” “Dutch,” or “Spanish.” The same goes for “best” and “newest fashion.” These terms could mean anything—or possibly nothing other than the egotism or marketing eagerness of whoever wrote the recipe. Think of how many recipes today are touted as “best,” “ultimate,” “perfect,” “the only recipe you need,” or whatever. Whether or not we today understand the rationales behind such boasts (and often we don’t), we can be certain that culinary historians three hundred years from now won’t have a clue.

Especially insidious are those seventeenth-century recipes that go by names familiar today, such as stew, roast, pudding, pie, tart, pasty, biscuit, custard, and cake. Although the names are the same as ours, the dishes are quite different. Sometimes we don’t grasp these differences, and sometimes we do, at least sort of, but they seem so wrong to us that we smudge them over with our own notions when adapting the recipe. The following recipe from Hannah Woolley’s Queen-like Closet tempts me to fall into this particular pit, although I hope to have avoided doing so in my (untested) adaptation.

 

Hannah Woolley, frontispiece of “The Gentlewoman’s Companion” (1673)

To stew a Loin of Mutton

Cut your meat in Steaks, and put it into so much water as will cover it, when it is scummed, put to it three or four Onions sliced, with some Turneps, whole Cloves, and sliced Ginger, when it is half stewed, put in sliced Bacon and some sweet herbs minced small, some Vinegar and Salt, when it is ready, put in some Capers, then dish your Meat upon Sippets and serve it in, and garnish your Dish with Barberries and Limon.

 

To Stew a Loin of Mutton (adapted)

Have your butcher cut a side of lamb loin into six chops. Arrange the meat in two or three overlapping layers in a large pot with 2 medium onions, sliced, 3 peeled and quartered white turnips, 6 whole cloves, and 2 tablespoons thinly sliced peeled ginger. Add enough water to cover the ingredients, bring to a boil over high heat, and then turn the heat down to the point where the water gently simmers. Cook for 30 minutes, periodically skimming off any gray foam that rises to the top. Add 3 slices bacon, cut in 1-inch pieces, 1 or 2 tablespoons each minced thyme and rosemary, 1/4 cup white wine vinegar, and sufficient salt to season, probably about 1 tablespoon. Cover the pot, turn down the heat very low, and cook until the meat is very tender and nearly falling off the bone, 30 to 60 minutes longer. Add 1/3 cup large capers, rinsed of salt or brine. Cover a large, deep platter with thinly sliced white bread that has been dried in a slow oven until crisp through and through. Arrange the meat and vegetables on the bread and then, a little at a time, ladle on as much of the broth as the bread will absorb and the platter will hold. Strew the meat with scalded cranberries and thin lemon slices.

 

Like most historical recipes, this recipe requires some substitutions (for the mutton, seventeenth-century bacon, and barberries; it’s conceivable that Woolley’s ginger was fresh) and some guessing about quantities. But the more serious problem is that the dish runs counter to our expectations of a stew. We would brown the meat, and we would cook it in stock and/or wine. And, at the end, we would reduce the cooking medium and perhaps also thicken it with flour and butter, making a rich sauce or gravy. But that is not how seventeenth-century cooks typically made a stew. Recipe after recipe yields the same sort of dish that Hannah Woolley’s recipe does: boiled meat in a mildly acidulated broth served on dry bread. Robert May succinctly conveys the character of the dish when he writes, in his recipe for stewed lamb’s head, “serve it on carved sippets and broth it.” With a recipe such as this, we are liable to read right past the actual instructions and adapt the recipe as we would prefer it—and that would hardly constitute a “taste of the past.” For all I know, this dish may be more interesting than it reads on the page, although I confess that I am not eager to try it. If, for some reason, I absolutely had to adapt a period stew recipe, I would search for an outlier recipe that better conforms to modern stew standards.  Robert May has one in The Accomplisht Cook (1665): Stewed Collops of Beef.

Your adaptation is now done. You know what the original recipe says and you have written what it says in modern terms. But before you test the adaptation in your kitchen, you need to ask yourself if everything your adapted recipe says to do is actually practical for today’s cooks.  If it is not, you may decide to revise your adaptation at least slightly, even though this will likely mean changing the original recipe’s intent. How much you can change a historical recipe in your adaptation and still legitimately claim your adaptation as “a taste of the past” is a case-by-case decision. I offer the following test case.

 

Step Four: Make Judicious Practical Revisions in the Recipe before You Test It

The following recipe for a Dutch Pie is from “Cookbook of Ann Smith, 1698,” at the Folger Shakespeare Library. For the pastry, I used a recipe in Queen-like Closet (1681), by Hannah Woolley. Ann Smith’s recipe provides uncommonly precise ingredient quantities, probably because the dish is unusual (this is the only recipe I have seen), with an unusually high seasoning, and so a period cook could not wing it based on past experience.

 

To Make An Excellent Dish Called A Dutch Pye

Take A spesiall brest of Veale bone & roll Beaten & Lett it be seasoned 6 houres with these Following things Viz: 1/2 oz of nutmegs 1/2 oz of cloves & mace ye greatest part to mace & 2 oz of pepper one of them beaten & 2 large rasess of Ginger and 2 handfulls of Marjorum & Thyme and a handful of Salt the Like of sorrill & A Lemon ye rinde shread small & the juce Squezed in: all thesse must be well Beaten & mixed in together & 4 Anchoivess 1/4 of a pinte of white wine 3 Spoonfulls of venigur 3 youlks of eggs: The Venigur ye  wine the eggs Beaten together & putt into yor  meate Just before itt goes into the Paste, The other seasonings is to be putt in 6 houres before & putt into the Bakeing 3 lb of Butter & Cover itt over with Butter itt must be 4 houres A Bakeing att the Leastt The most Natturall way is to Eatt itt Cold.

To Make a Pasty of a Breast of Veal

Take half a peck of fine Flower, and two pounds of Butter broken into little bits, 1 egg, a little Salt, and as much cold Cream, or Milk as will make it into a Paste; when you have framed your pasty, lay in your Breast of Veal boned . . . .

 

To Make An Excellent Dish Called A Dutch Pye (adapted)

Remove the bones from a small half veal breast weighing 5 to 6 pounds. In a medium bowl, stir together 1 tablespoon grated nutmeg, 1 1/2 tablespoons ground ginger, 2 teaspoons ground mace, 1 teaspoon ground cloves, 2 tablespoons ground black pepper, 2 tablespoons whole black peppercorns, and 1 1/2 tablespoons fine-textured salt. Add the finely minced peel of 1/2 small lemon (including white pith), 1/4 cup chopped sorrel (or 1 tablespoon vinegar), about 2 tablespoons each chopped marjoram and thyme leaves, and 2 mashed anchovy fillets or 1 tablespoon anchovy paste. Spread this mixture evenly over the bone side of the veal breast and then roll the veal breast up. Refrigerate in a covered container for at least 6 hours or up to a day if more convenient.

Combine 30 ounces all-purpose flour (about 6 cups) and 2 teaspoons fine-textured salt in a large bowl. Have ready 24 ounces unsalted butter, softened to a clay-like consistency. Cut the butter into thick pats and rub it into the flour with your hands until it mostly disappears. In a small bowl, beat together until well combined 2 large eggs and 1/2 cup cold milk. Using a large spoon or rubber spatula, stir this into the flour/butter mixture until the dough gathers and then knead the dough in the bowl until smooth and cohesive.

Cut off one third of the dough (or 1 pound) and set aside. Roll the remainder into a 16-inch round on a well-floured work surface. Fold the dough in half, transfer it to a buttered 10- X 3-inch spring-form pan, unfold it to cover the bottom and side of the pan and then press it into place, flattening pleats in the wall and smoothing or patching any tears. Press the wall all around with your fingers to make it extend about 1/4 inch beyond the top of the pan. Fit the meat inside the crust. Beat together 1/4 cup white wine, 3 tablespoons vinegar, and 1 egg yolk. Pour this over the meat. Scatter 6 to 8 ounces butter, cut into bits over and around the meat. Roll the reserved dough into a 10 1/2-inch round. Place it over the top of the pie and press the edges of the bottom and top crust together with your fingers to seal. Trim the edge if necessary and flute. Cut four 1-inch slits at right angles in the center of the top crust to allow steam to escape. Place the pie on a rimmed baking sheet. Bake in the lower-middle level of a 325-degree oven for 4 hours.

 

In my adaptation, I cut all ingredients by half, and I guessed, as I had to, what is meant by “2 large races of ginger” (these are dried gingerroots), a “handful,” and a “spoonful.” I didn’t have sorrel and suspected that most people wouldn’t either, so I suggested replacing it with a little vinegar. The crust of this pie has to be thick, sturdy, and rather deep in order to hold the large piece of meat and the three pounds of butter. Since this pie bears a general similarity to a pasty, I thought it was justifiable to adapt it with a typical crust for a pasty, which has the advantage of being thick, sturdy, and also edible, unlike many of the thick, sturdy crusts for meat pies in the day. These adaptations, in my view, are minor, but I did significantly revise the original recipe on two points. The crust for this pie would likely have been “raised” with the hands, at least partially, and the pie would have been baked freestanding on a flat tray. I don’t trust myself to do this, and I doubt that most cooks today would want to try. So I rolled the crust with a pin and I baked the pie in a spring-form pan, whose sides and bottom can be removed after the pie is baked, providing the illusion that no pan was ever involved.

I have no reservations about how I handled the crust, but I am slightly less comfortable about my revision of the butter. I found the quantity of butter called for in the original recipe scary, and I did not see the point, so I adapted the pie with only a quarter as much. After I had tasted the pie (which was lovely and not nearly as spicy as I had expected), it occurred to me that if the meat had baked ‘covered over with butter,’ as the original recipe says, it might have had a different texture, like that of a confit or potted meat. And it dawned on me that possibly the purpose of the seemingly outrageous quantities of butter called for in many meat pie recipes of the period is precisely to make the pie meat long-keeping, in the manner of a confit. There is evidence that these pies were served and stored and then served again and stored again over a stretch of weeks. The only way to know if the full complement of butter promotes a different taste and texture in the pie is to try the recipe as written. Perhaps someday I will. And if the butter does prove to make a significant difference (and does not invite a butter-fueled oven fire or some other catastrophe), I may suggest that intrepid cooks consider trying the recipe that way.

A final word: I really liked this pie. But I don’t like every old recipe I test, and it is very hard for me to give up on a recipe that I’ve brought to the point of testing. Sometimes I don’t have to. For example, if I dislike a recipe I’ve tested simply because it has too much mace, I don’t have qualms about retesting it with less, especially if other recipes for the same dish call for less mace or indeed none at all. But sometimes I dislike an old recipe on multiple counts and I cannot possibly justify all the revisions I would need to make in order to make it palatable. When this happens to you, don’t torture yourself struggling to turn an unappealing historical recipe into a modern recipe you like. Just move on to another recipe.

 

What, if anything, do we really learn from recreating historical dishes?

One of the highlights of my undergraduate years was a poetry seminar I took with Adrienne Rich. She passed on to us three questions that a crusty, old professor of hers said should be asked of any piece of writing: What did the writer set out to do? Did the writer do it? Was it worth doing?  The same questions can be asked of historical recipe adaptation. What we are trying to do is clear: we are trying to recreate “a taste of the past.” Whether or not we have succeeded we will never know for certain because, unfortunately, there is no one to ask. Still, there are clues. As is often said, ‘the past is a different country.’  If your adapted seventeenth-century dish tastes just like a dish made today, you are probably not succeeding at your task. The dish should taste “foreign.” By “foreign” I don’t mean bizarre. Very few seventeenth-century dishes taste bizarre to a sophisticated modern palate—perhaps few dishes of any time do. To get in the proper spirit, strive to embrace the strangeness of the seventeenth-century repertory, as you would any foreign cuisine. If you do, once you have tried a few recipes, you will key in to the tastes of the day, which will give you a sense of when you are on the right track.

I’m interested in food, and I’m curious to know what it felt like to live three hundred years ago, including what dinner tasted like, so I don’t doubt that recipe adaptation is worth doing. Of course, we must grant that the seventeenth-century recipes we adapt were familiar to only a small cohort of privileged English people, and that some of these recipes, like Ann Smith’s Dutch pie, were probably obscure in their time and so may not reflect the cooking of even this small group. Nonetheless, our recreated dishes do give us at least a taste of that remote time, and they also reveal to us that that time still lingers. Seventeenth-century European visitors to England were struck by the enormous English fondness for meat and sugar. Tourists in America today come away with a similar impression of us.

Finally, you will hear some people opine that historical dishes cannot be recreated because ‘everything was so different then.’ This is silly. By that logic, you also can’t recreate your late Aunt Josie’s potato salad from a recipe card that she wrote thirty years ago. You don’t know the brands of mayonnaise, sweet pickles, sour pickles, mustard, and “seasoned salt” that she bought at her local Piggly Wiggly. You also don’t know what kind of potatoes she used, whether she boiled them whole or peeled and cut up, and whether she served the salad right after she made it or let it sit in the refrigerator for a few days. Indeed, the potato salad that you make following her recipe is not exactly the same as hers. Nonetheless, you have no doubt that it is Aunt Josie’s, even if it lacks her particular touch.

  1.  In theory, a recipe calling for “a peck of flour” should unambiguously mean the old English peck weight of the flour, or 14 pounds, since there was no “peck” liquid measure. However, this seems not to have been the case. In The Compleat Cook (1656), the recipe for Oxfordshire Cake calls for “a peck of flour by weight,” which must mean that “a peck of flour” was sometimes reckoned by the liquid quart, that is, 2 gallons, 8 quarts, or 32 half-pint cups. ↩
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Homemade Bread, with Home-Brewed Yeast

Posted May 2017 
by Stephen Schmidt 

By Stephen Schmidt

 

Bread, adapted from Mary Randolph’s 1824 recipe

 

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

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

Top Yeast on Fermenting Beer

Charles Louis Fleischmann (1834-1897)

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

Maria Parloa (1843-1909)

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

Hop Plants

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

Hop Flowers, or Hops

 

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

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

Fountain Rising

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

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

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

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

Milk Emptins

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

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

Barrel of Branded Flour

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

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

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

Mary Randolph (1762-1828)

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

To Make Bread

Mary Randolph, The Virginia House-Wife (1824)

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

Loaves Cast on Oven Floor

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

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

  1. I gather from what I’ve read—and I am hardly an expert—that today’s brewery and distillery yeasts are different strains of the same organism. ↩
  2. Some contemporary research suggests that certain spices promote the growth of yeast, while others inhibit it. ↩
  3. The yeast, too, was supposed to be sweet, and, to keep it sweet, Leslie recommends recourse to pearl ash: “It is best to make yeast very frequently; as, with every precaution, it will scarcely keep good a week, even in cold weather. If you are apprehensive of its becoming sour, put into each bottle a lump of pearl-ash the size of a hazel-nut.” If yeast did turn sour, Beecher did not think alkali correction would help: “Sour yeast cannot be made good with saleratus.” As I have said, my sour-smelling home-brewed yeast produced perfectly sweet bread. ↩
  4. Correcting for the milk used in the modern loaves, which contains 15% materials other than water, their hydrations are approximately 68%, comparable to the hydration of Randolph’s loaf and promoting a similar texture. ↩
This entry was posted in Bread, Mary Randolph, Stephen Schmidt Tagged: A Collection of Choise Receipts  |   Adapting Historical Recipes  |   Ambergris  |   Amelia Simmons  |   American Antiquarian Society  |   Andrew Boorde  |   Anonymous Andalusian Cookbook  |   Atul Gawande  |   Banqueting houses  |   Banquets (sweets)  |   Barbara Wheaton  |   Boston Public Library  |   Bread  |   bread pudding  |   British Library  |   C. Anne Wilson  |   Catharine Beecher  |   Catharine Dean Flint  |   Charles Perry  |   Christopher Kemp  |   Clements Library  |   Collation  |   Cracknels  |   Custards  |   E. Smith  |   Edna Lewis  |   Edward Livingston Trudeau  |   Elaine Leong  |   Elinor Fettiplace  |   Eliza Leslie  |   Elizabeth Freke  |   Elizabeth Raffald  |   Emptins  |   English influence on U. S. foodways  |   Fannie Farmer  |   Flour Measure  |   Folger Shakespeare Library  |   Forme of Cury  |   Frances Trollope  |   French culinary influence  |   Fricassees  |   Georgetown University  |   Gervase Markham  |   Gingerbread  |   Hannah Glasse  |   Hannah Woolley  |   Henry Frederick (Prince of Wales)  |   Hilary Spurling  |   Hoppin Family Cookbook  |   Hot Bread Kitchen Cookbook  |   Italian culinary influence  |   Ivan Day  |   Johanna St. John  |   John Evelyn  |   John Murrell  |   Joy of Cooking  |   Karen Hess  |   La Varenne  |   Lacock Abbey  |   Longleat House  |   Louise Conway Belden  |   Marchpane  |   Maria Parloa  |   Maria Rundell  |   Marie Kimball  |   Martha Washington Cookbook  |   Martino da Como  |   Mary Cornelius  |   Mary Henderson  |   Mary Lincoln  |   Mary Randolph  |   Marzipan  |   Max Planck Institute  |   Medieval cooking  |   Medieval Islamic cooking  |   Molasses and treacle  |   Morgan Library  |   Mrs. (Elizabeth) Goodfellow  |   Mrs. Cornelius  |   Mrs. N. K. M Lee  |   Musk  |   Neapolitan Recipe Collection  |   Oysters  |   Patriotic cakes  |   Paul Freedman  |   Peter Rose  |   Portugal Eggs  |   quince  |   regional cooking  |   Rose water  |   Sandra Oliver  |   Sarah Josepha Hale  |   Scappi  |   scientific cookery  |   Service a la francaise  |   Service a la russe  |   Seventeenth Century  |   Sicily  |   Spain  |   sucket fork  |   Supper Parties  |   Sylvester Graham  |   Tea  |   Terrence Scully  |   The Recipes Project  |   The Taste of America  |   Theobalds Palace  |   Two Fifthteenth-Century Cookery Books  |   University of Iowa  |   Viandier of Taillevent  |   Void (voidee)  |   waffles  |   Waldo Flint  |   Yeast  |   Leave a comment  

When Did Southern Begin?

Posted November 2015 
by Stephen Schmidt 

Mary Randolph[1]

Mary Randolph by Saint-Memin, Virginia State Library

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Beef Olives

The Cook’s Own Book, 1832

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

 

Beef Olives

The Virginia Housewife, 1824

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

 

Elizabeth Raffald by Morland

Elizabeth Raffald by Morland

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

Beef Olives

The Experienced English Housekeeper, 1769

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

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

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

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

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

 

2.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted September 2014 
by Stephen Schmidt 

This post originally appeared on the Recipes Project blog, on December 21, 2012, and was reposted on the New York Academy of Medicine blog “Books, Health and History” on February 5, 2013.

Food writers who rummage in other people’s recipe boxes, as I am wont to do, know that many modern American families happily carry on making certain favorite dishes decades after these dishes have dropped out of fashion, indeed from memory. It appears that the same was true of a privileged eighteenth-century English family whose recipe book now resides at the New York Academy of Medicine, under the unprepossessing title “Recipe book : manuscript, 1700s.” (MCS title: English Receipt Book Headed “Wines, Sweetmeats, & Cookery,” mostly 1700 – 1740.)  The manuscript’s culinary section (it also has a medical section) was copied in two contiguous chunks by two different scribes, the second of whom picked up numbering the recipes where the first left off and then added an index to all 170 recipes in both sections. The recipes in both chunks are mostly of the early eighteenth century—they are similar to those of E. Smith’s The Compleat Housewife, 1727—but a number of recipes in the first chunk, particularly for items once part of the repertory of “banquetting stuffe,” are much older. My guess is that this clutch of recipes was, previous to this copying, a separate manuscript that had itself been successively copied and updated over a span of several generations, during the course of which most of the original recipes had been replaced by more modern ones but a few old family favorites dating back to the mid-seventeenth century had been retained. Among these older recipes, the most surprising is the bread crumb gingerbread. A boiled paste of bread crumbs, honey or sugar, ale or wine, and an enormous quantity of spice (one full cup in this recipe, and much more in many others) that was made up as “printed” cakes and then dried, this gingerbread appears in no other post-1700 English manuscript or print cookbook that I have seen. And yet the recipe in the NYAM manuscript seems not to have been idly or inadvertently copied, for its language, orthography, and certain compositional details (particularly the brandy) have been updated to the Georgian era:

25 To Make Ginger bread

Take a pound & quarter of bread, a pound of sugar, one ounce of red Sanders, one ounce of Cinamon three quarters of an ounce of ginger half an ounce of mace & cloves, half an ounce of nutmegs, then put your Sugar & spices into a Skillet with half a pint of Brandy & half a pint of ale, sett it over a gentle fire till your Sugar be melted, Let it have a boyl then put in half of your bread Stirre it well in the Skellet & Let it boyle also, have the other half of your bread in a Stone panchon, then pour your Stuffe to it & work it to a past make it up in prints or as you please.

English Recipes for "Wines, Sweetmeats, & Cookery," 1700 - 1740

English Recipes for “Wines, Sweetmeats, & Cookery,” 1700 – 1740

From the fourteenth century into the mid-seventeenth century, bread crumb gingerbread was England’s standard gingerbread (for the record, there was also a more rarefied type) and, by all evidence, a great favorite among those who could afford it—a fortifier for Sir Thopas in The Canterbury Tales, one of the dainties of nobility listed in The Description of England, 1587 (Harrison, 129), and according to Sir Hugh Platt, in Delightes for Ladies, 1609, a confection “used at the Court, and in all gentlemens houses at festival times.” Then, around the time of the Restoration, this ancient confection apparently dropped out of fashion. In The Accomplisht Cook, 1663, his awe-inspiring 500-page compendium of upper-class Restoration cookery, Robert May does not find space for a single recipe.

The reason for its waning is not difficult to deduce. Bread crumb gingerbread was part of a large group of English sweetened, spiced confections that were originally used more as medicines than as foods. Indeed, the earliest gingerbread recipes appear in medical, not culinary, manuscripts (Hieatt, 31), and culinary historian Karen Hess proposes that gingerbread derives from an ancient electuary commonly known as gingibrati, whence came the name (Hess, 342-3). In England, these early nutriceuticals, as we might call them today, gradually became slotted as foods first through their adoption for the void, a little ceremony of stomach-settling sweets and wines staged after meals in great medieval households, and then, beginning in the early sixteenth century, through their use at banquets, meals of sweets enjoyed by the English privileged both after feasts and as stand-alone entertainments. Through the early seventeenth century banquets, like the void, continued to carry a therapeutic subtext (or pretext) and comprised mostly foods that were extremely sweet or both sweet and spicy: fruits preserved in syrups, candied fruits, marmalades, and stiff jellies; candied caraway, anise, and coriander seeds; various spice-flecked dry biscuits from Italy; marzipan; and sweetened, spiced wafers and the syrupy spiced wine called hippocras. In this company, bread crumb gingerbread, with its pungent (if not caustic) spicing, was a comfortable fit. But as the seventeenth century progressed, the banquet increasingly incorporated custards, creams, fresh cheeses, fruit tarts, and buttery little cakes, and these foods, in tandem with the enduringly popular preserved and candied fruits, came to define the English taste in sweets, whether for banquets or for two new dawning sweets occasions, desserts and evening parties. The aggressive spice deliverers fell by the wayside, including, inevitably, England’s ancestral bread crumb gingerbread.

As the old gingerbread waned, a new one took its place and assumed its name, first in recipe manuscripts of the last quarter of the seventeenth century, and then in printed cookbooks of the early eighteenth century. This new arrival was the spiced honey cake, which had been made throughout Europe for centuries. It is sometimes suggested that the spiced honey cake came to England with Royalists returning from exile in France after the Restoration, which seems plausible given the high popularity of French pain d’épice at that time—though less convincing when one considers that a common English name for this cake, before it became firmly known as gingerbread, was “pepper cake,” which suggests a Northern European provenance. Whatever the case, Anglo-America almost immediately replaced the expensive honey in this cake with cheap molasses (or treacle, as the English said by the late 1600s), and this new gingerbread, in myriad forms, became the most widely made cake in Anglo-America over the next two centuries and still remains a favorite today, especially at Christmas.

By the time the NYAM manuscript was copied, perhaps sometime between 1710 and 1730, molasses gingerbread was already ragingly popular in both England and America, and evidently the family who kept this manuscript ate it too, for the second clutch of culinary recipes includes a recipe for it, under the exact same title as the first. Remembering the old adage that the holidays preserve what the everyday loses, I will hazard a guess that the old gingerbread was made at Christmas, the new for everyday family use.

150 To Make Ginger Bread

Take a Pound of Treacle, two ounces of Carrawayseeds, an ounce of Ginger, half a Pound of Sugar half a Pound of Butter melted, & a Pound of Flower. if you please you may put some Lemon pill cut small, mix altogether & make it into little Cakes so bake it. may put in a little Brandy for a Pepper Cake

"Recipe book England 18th century. In two unidentified hands." Credit: New York Academy of Medicine

An interesting question is why the seventeenth-century English considered the European spiced honey cake sufficiently analogous to their ancestral bread crumb gingerbread to merit its name. It may have been simply the compositional similarity, the primary constituents of both cakes being honey (at least traditionally) and spices. Or it may have been that both cakes were associated with Christmas and other “festival times.” Or it may have been that both cakes were often printed with human figures and other designs using wooden or ceramic molds. Or it may possibly have been that both gingerbreads had medicinal uses as stomach-settlers. In both England and America, itinerant sellers of the new baked gingerbread often stationed themselves at wharves and docks and hawked their cakes as a preventive to sea-sickness. (Ship-wrecked off Long Island in 1727, Benjamin Franklin bought gingerbread “of an old woman to eat on the water,” he tells us in The Autobiography.) One thinks at first that the ginger and other spices were the “active ingredients” in this remedy, and certainly this is what nineteenth-century American cookbook authors believed when they recommended gingerbread for such use. But early on the remedy may also have been activated by the treacle. Based on the perhaps slender evidence of a single recipe in E. Smith, Karen Hess proposes that the first English bakers of the new gingerbread may have understood treacle to mean London treacle (Hess, 201), the English version of the ancient sovereign remedy theriac, a common form of which English apothecaries apparently formulated with molasses rather than expensive honey. I have long wondered what, if anything, this has to do with the English adoption of the word “treacle” for molasses (OED). Perhaps a medical historian can tell us.

Works Cited
Harrison, William. The Description of England. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1994
Hess, Karen. Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981.
Hieatt, Constance and Sharon Butler. Curye on Inglysch. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
“Treacle, I. 1. c.” The Compact Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1991

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