The Social Life of Food – an example

I’ve been thinking this week about the Columbian Exchange – the exchange of plants, animals, and people between the Eastern and Western hemispheres initiated by Columbus in 1492, which changed the world dramatically and irrevocably. It’s a long story, and a complicated one, and the transplantation of food crops between hemispheres, and the transmission of foodways between their inhabitants is a long and complicated part of it. Europeans brought new consumables and commodity crops with them — that with the most far-reaching effects being, arguably, sugar, but they also transplanted wheat, rice, and numerous food animals. Meanwhile, New World foodstuffs had significant impact on lives of people in the Old World, both as sustenance and as items of delectation, to the point where many Old World cuisines are inconceivable without ingredients of New World origin.

I’ve been reading about the European adoption of chocolate and tobacco, in a work I can’t possibly recommend highly enough: Marcy Norton’s Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: a history of tobacco and chocolate in the Atlantic world.   I’m still very much under the book’s spell, so the matter of this post owes a great debt to Norton’s relation, explication, and analysis of changing tastes and patterns of consumption.  (Any instances of imperfect comprehension or sloppy thinking are, of course, on my head solely.)

Europeans naturally learned the uses of American foodstuffs from native peoples, through observation or direct instruction. As European explorers gave way to European colonists, and as colonists became, themselves, Americans, they adopted the new foodstuffs and both adopted and transformed their uses.  To do this, they needed to adopt the foods into their idea of what people eat, and find uses for them: incorporating them into evolving European and American foodways.

Food is far more than just sustenance. In another book that I’ve been gulping down in great heady draughts, Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789, Barbara Wheaton sagely observes that “…precisely because food is a part of everyone’s lives, it is available in every society for use as a carrier of meaning, as a social marker, and as a medium of exchange.”  For explorers, colonists, and the new Americans, to encounter the foodstuffs used by Native Americans also meant coming into contact with the significance of foodways, and how they fit into Native American culture. This brings me to Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s writings, and especially his relation of Native American myths and legends, where we see this with Native American foodways observed in situ.

Schoolcraft was a 19^th century traveler, writer and (now controversial) ethnographer of Native American communities. 19 years as a federal Indian agent, and marriage to a woman from a prominent Ojibwa family in what was then the American Northwest (which we now call the upper Midwest) gave him ample opportunity to observe the Native American lives and ways of his day. He’s perhaps best remembered now for relating, in print, the legend on which Longfellow based Hiawatha.

Schoolcraft doesn’t set out to write about food, which is perhaps why I find what he *does* say so interesting.  In his 1848 The Indian in his wigwam, or Characteristics of the red race of America from original notes and manuscripts and his (far better known) 1839 Algic researches, comprising inquiries respecting the mental characteristics of the North American Indians, he never describes the full course of preparation or consumption of a meal, but there are many references to foodways throughout – and the references turn out to be far more than incidental to the matter at hand.

He gives us glimpses, and the glimpses tell us much. Consider the following, from “Personal incidents and impressions of the red race, drawn from notes of residence and travel in the Indian territories — Domestic condition of the tribes and constitution of the Indian family” in The Indian in his wigwam

“The tribes who cultivated maize in the rich sub-vallies and plains of the Ohio and Mississippi, had fuller means of both physical and mental development…”   “…the prairie-tribes, west of the Mississippi, who pursue the bison on horse back, and rely for their subsistence greatly, on its flesh…”  “The well fed Muscogee, Cherokee, or Choctaw, who lived in the sunny vallies of upper Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee, the robust Osage, reveling in the abundance of corn and wild meat, south of Missouri, and the lean and rigid Montaignes, Muskeego, and Kenisteno, who push their canoes through waters choked with aquatic weds and wild rice…”

He gives us a sort of a “you are what you eat” typology, showing us one way that a moderately educated white American categorized the Native Americans whom he, so much more than most of his readers, encountered: interesting, at least to me, because characterizing and categorizing are such potent human tools for trying to understand and explain things, including other people.

Mention of food and foodways is, as I say, notable in the many Native American legends Schoolcraft relates.  Representing a character as an able hunter and (therefore) a good provider, in the first few sentences of the tale is a common way of identifying personal excellence and letting us know that a hero is on stage. Gorging on the fat of the spoils of a hunt is a sign of greed, and lack of social competence, and functions as a synecdoche of “something’s not right here.” Of course numerous tales tell such things as how the first man was given bow and arrow and taught to use it to keep from starving, or how fish came to be abundant in certain waters.  In numerous tales, an undertaking is preceded by a feast to mark its importance, or the way a fast is conducted testifies to an individual’s strength of will, or maybe stubbornness. An uncanny character such as a Manito has a curious way of cooking, or a peculiar cooking device. And so on, and extensively so on.

In the Algic researches there’s scarcely a tale where food or foodways doesn’t appear with some ritual or narrative significance: signs of magic, signs of feeling or personality, signs of magic, signs of feeling or personality, or signs of socially important relationships. Foodways are used to characterize actors or action, and set the scene or the tone, even when they don’t move the story forward…which of course they often do. The upshot is that Schoolcraft shows us the significance of foodstuffs, especially their social meaning in Native American communities.

Is this, strictly speaking, Culinary History? I think I’d rather describe it as the social life of food, and therefore as one of the places here Culinary History meets Food Studies.

Schoolcraft’s works at the Internet Archive

The Clothespin Game

By popular demand (if 2 public comments can be said to constitute demand)  the rest of the Clothespin Olympics.

 

This does give me the opportunity to remark that The book of parties and pastimes is not the only work on the subject of entertaining that we possess.  “Culinary” is really too narrow a description for the collection, but I have yet to successfully find a term that covers culinary-and-domestic-and-gastronomic-and-associated-concerns.   That “and associated” can be a real killer on the attempt to divide life into categories.

One way to look at it would be everything that leads to the table, everything that happens at the table, and many things that provide context for the aforementioned. But “provides context for” is another notable broaden-er of scope, and perhaps it also leads to excessive and ungovernable breadth.

So the logical thing to ask is…..provides context in what way? Or maybe, provides what sort of context?  Context useful in what fashion?   That will be another challenge, as I go on, to articulate that domain and rationale.

Suffragette City

Before I am accused of false advertising, permit me to clarify that this post is not about a visit to the Clements by the estimable Mr. David Bowie. Rather, it concerns a visit with a small handful of students, the other week, and a few books, with which I had occasion to better my acquaintance.

On Tuesday, I heard that three or four students would be coming in on Thursday for a bit of an orientation. The course which occasioned this is fondly known as American Studies Bootcamp, and the idea of such a visit is that the students get an introduction to the Clements as a repository of primary source material, and to consulting a curator, and to mining information out of the possibly surprising places.  Cookbooks, for instance.

Curator, I said. Eeep, that’s me, I said.

Their professor asked that they get a chance to work with the kind of materials found in our web exhibit The Old Girl Network: Charity Cookbooks and the Empowerment of Women. (Accompanying talk here)

The idea, in a nutshell, is that women, as volunteers for charities and other causes, built up experience in conducting enterprises and political campaigns, and so learned ways to act in, and on, the wider world.  They did this, in many cases, while still sticking to the safety of socially approved “Women’s Concerns,” and while engaging in uncontroversial projects like publishing cookbooks. Also, as in the suffrage  and temperance cookbooks, one sees elements of the female sphere, as then constructed,  showing reflections of political activity

After a couple of entirely enjoyable hours reviewing the possibilities, I settled on a number of Suffrage and WCTU cookbooks to show them, as well as a manual, about which more in a moment.  I sat them down with the books and presented this challenge:

“What information can you find in these, about the lives of the women they belonged to…besides what recipes they had available to them?”

They had, as it turned out, worksheets to complete: I didn’t get a good look at them, but the assignment was to find the stories that could be told, so my question for them (fortunately!) fell right into line.  They were a diligent bunch, and had questions to ask about the materials in their hands.

It was a blast

The best question, I think, on the face of it was about one thing, but actually contained a critique of the whole project of a book. The student was examining The expert waitress:  a manual for the pantry, kitchen, and dining-room by Anne Frances Springsteed, from 1898.  The work is dedicated to the young ladies of the Columbia Club, with the affection of the author.  It’s a book of advice for women in service in private homes, treating not only of the tricks and requirements of the trade, but also of deportment, and one’s attitude about one’s work.

The student’s question was where we had gotten the work – had it come from a publisher? For someone’s home?   Easily enough answered if that was the real question…which it wasn’t. The real question was…who had read this? Did anyone, in 1898 or any other time,  read books like this?

It’s a good question. Some portion of the interest of the work, as an historical artifact, is that it opens up more questions than it answers.  The author’s stated intent is that it be of use to such young ladies of the Columbia Club, and their peers, who may happen to find employment in domestic service.  It does not, however, seem to be written from experience doing such work. Did the author draw on her experience as an employer? Was part of the projected readership employers who would wish to know how to instruct their servants?  The author’s voice is encouraging, not to say exhortatory, and from numerous little asides about making oneself valuable, the general burden seems to be “this is how to thrive in your position, this is how to get ahead, this is how to succeed.”  Near the end of the book, in “Miscellaneous Instructions” we find talk of the dignity of a profession:

A waitress with good health, a fair amount of brains, and a determination to be a better waitress than any woman was before, has a great field before her. But if she aspires to raise waiting to the dignity of a profession, she must study; she must educate her eye to know the difference between a line that is exactly straight and one that is slightly askew; she must train her memory until the daily  routine is perfectly easy and she can give thought to decoration and invention; she must educate her hands until they are to be trusted with the care of the frailest glass and china, and educate her sense of smell and of taste until she can suit each salad dressing to the  dinner of which it forms a part, making it  rich or piquant, as the other dishes demand.

Emphasis mine.

And at the end there is section called “A Servant’s Contract” which is equally full of advice, some of which has, to the modern ear, a certain ring of condescension.

If published today, it would probably be a “For Dummies” book, and what are historians going to make of those in a hundred years?

A revised edition, from 1911, may be inspected here

Two remarkable things, in the Suffrage vein, were a party plan, and a satire phrased in recipe form.

The satire is found in the book which gave the students the richest vein to mine: The suffrage cook book compiled by Mrs. L.O. Kleber, published in 1915. Besides recipes from assorted Suffrage notables, and miscellaneous celebrities, there are letters of support from various elected officials, whether heartfelt or opportunistic.  And there is this charming recipe

Anti’s Favorite Hash

(Unless you wear dark glasses you cannot make a success of Anti’s Favorite Hash.)

1 Ib. truth thoroughly mangled

1 generous handful of injustice.

(Sprinkle over everything in the pan)

1 tumbler acetic acid (well shaken)

A little vitriol will add a delightful tang and a string of nonsense should be dropped in at the last as if by accident.

Stir all together with a sharp knife because some of the tid bits will be tough propositions.

The work itself, in a choice of formats (text, pdf, or djvu) can be read here

And, finally for a glimpse at Suffrage in the vernacular imagination of the day, we have suggestions for “A Suffrage Sociable.”  Now, Suffrage Sociables seem to have been a known phenomenon, social events promoting solidarity, fund-raising, and what we would now call consciousness-raising. A spoof on the institution occurs in The book of parties and pastimes by Mary Dawson and Emma Paddock Telford, published in 1912.

The party plan is reproduced here in its entirety, gay careless peppy tone, gender-role switching, and all

A Reference Shelf

This post comes at the end of two very busy weeks – I started at the Clements on Sept 8, and the time has quite whirled by since then.

What has occupied the days? Well, besides the usual orientations, meetings, and the process of incorporating myself (or the name and password which are my proxy) into a small number of very large systems, I have commenced cataloging.  For those familiar with MARC and AACR2 (RDA not yet being effectively on our institutional horizon) I will merely say that they are not my areas of greatest competence.  However, practice does much to increase facility, and practice is what I’m unquestionably getting, along with, of course, a good bit of patient guidance and sage advice.

For those to whom all these acronyms mean nothing, or less than that, I will merely indicate that they are that species of arcana, the which undergirds certain highly specific modes of findability, as practiced in libraries, and that they have their unquestionable uses, quite beside that of baffling neophyte associate curators.

What, you may perhaps be asking, am I cataloging?  At the moment, I’m building up a reference shelf, chiefly for my own edification but also for the use of the other staff and docents who work with the culinary materials.

Jan, the founding donor and curator over the last 10 years, has an encyclopedic knowledge of culinary bibliography, for instance – myself, not so much.  Since I can’t consult my memory, I am taking the bold step of making sure that works on that subject are present to be consulted instead.   Stacked on my desk to be cataloged we find…..

Elizabeth Robins Pennell’s My cookery books, as printed in the Atlantic Monthly 1901-2 (a more formal version is also in the collection, but this will do for reference. The curious may also read it here.)

Katherine Golden Bitting’s Gastronomic bibliography, a 1995 reprint of the 1939 original

Eleanor Parker Brown’s Culinary Americana: cookbooks published in the cities and towns of the United States of America during the years from 1860 through 1960 from 1961

Margaret Cook’s America’s charitable cooks: a bibliography of fund-raising cook books published in the United States (1861-1915) from 1971

Eleanor Lowenstein’s Bibliography of American cookery books, 1742-1860 (based on Waldo Lincoln’s American cookery books,  1742-1860 ) from 1972 (which may be consulted at the Internet archive, here.)

William R. Cagle’s A matter of taste: a bibliographical catalogue of international books on food and drink in the Lilly Library, Indiana University from 1999

Already in use, downstairs in another office, are Bitting (the original 1939 edition , slowly being annotated with works in our collection,) Lowenstein, and Cagle’s  indispensible American books on food and drink.

There are also a number of reference books on food and drink awaiting my attention:

Prosper Montagné and Prosper Salles’  La grande cuisine illustrée from 1902 (Sure to challenge my French, which is no better, really,  than my cataloging.)

William L. Downard’s Dictionary of the history of the American brewing and distilling industries from 1980

John F. Mariani’s The Dictionary of American food & drink from 1983

Harold McGee’s  On Food and Cooking: the science and lore of the kitchen — the 1984 edition, which I much prefer to the 2004 one

Alan Davidson’s The Oxford companion to food from 1999, a book I could cheerfully sit down and read for about 3 weeks.

Already in use are….

James Trager’s The food chronology : a food lover’s compendium of events and anecdotes from prehistory to the present from 1995

Linda Campbell Franklin’s 300 years of kitchen collectibles,  the 5th edition from 2003

And another I’d be happy to devote several weeks to devouring: Andrew F. Smith’s The Oxford encyclopedia of food and drink in America from 2004, splendidly reviewed in the Guardian in 2005

Plus facsimile editions of (amongst others)

Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery from 1796. Facsimile here, and here is the full text of the 1798 edition.

Hannah Glasse The art of cookery made plain and easy, the 1805 Alexandria edition (the book itself first published in 1747.) Facsimile here, and the full text of a a 1774 edition is here.

Lydia Maria Francis Child’s The American frugal housewife: dedicated to those who are not ashamed of economy, the 1844 edition. The facsimile is here and the full text of 1838 and 1841 editions are to be found online courtesy of the Internet Archive and Google Books, respectively.

The Jewish manual or Practical Information in Jewish and Modern Cookery with a Collection of Valuable Recipes & Hints Relating to the Toilette, edited by A Lady (ascribed to Judith Cohen, Lady Montefiore, 1784-1862) of 1846;  the facsimile here and full text from Project Gutenberg here.

Sarah Rutledge’s The Carolina Housewife of 1847, the facsimile here, and the original, alas, not digitized that I could find.

Eliza Leslie’s Miss Leslie’s Directions for cookery, an 1851 edition.  The facsimile here, and the full text of an 1837 or an 1840 edition may be read from the comfort (such as it is) of your own screen.

Catherine Beecher’s Miss Beecher’s domestic receipt-book, an edition from 1858. The facsimile we have is here, and, in a new development in the world of digitized texts, one can both read the 1850 edition and order a copy fresh struck here.  Moreover the full text of an 1846 edition, an 1850 edition, or an 1871 edition may be read online.

The National cookery book compiled from original recipes for the Women’s Centennial Committees from (of course) 1876, about which one finds precious little information that one may refer to online, but the facsimile edition, with an introduction by Andrew Smith,  may be found here.

And, of course, Fanny Farmer’s Boston cooking-school cook book, the original 1896 edition. The facsmile is here, and the thing itself may be read at the Internet Archive here.

Whew.

That, I believe, will do to be getting on with. Next time, unless something else entices the butterfly of my attention, cursory investigations into the history of cookies.

The Further Adventures of Apple Snow

I’m a little obsessed with Apple Snow, just now, and new versions have been jumping out at me. I found a later one last week, in one of the books in my “to Catalog” box. It’s a much-reduced version both in quantity and preparation, with a single apple raw and grated, and two egg whites.

From The Household Companion, by Alice Johnson, Janet Hill, et al, 1909.  On p. 61 we find, in a sentence worthy of Virginia Woolf…

Apple Snow

Peel and grate one large sour apple, sprinkling over it a small cup of powdered sugar as you grate it, to keep it from turning dark; break into this the whites of two eggs, and beat it all constantly for half an hour; take care to have it in a large vessel, as it beats up very stiff and light; heap in a glass dish and pour a fine, smooth custard around it and serve. A very delicate dessert.

I also find one in a book that I’ll be talking more about, in future posts: Malinda Russell’s A Domestic Cook Book: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen, 1866. On p. 24 we find:

Apple Float

Boil twelve large apples, remove the skin and strain through a sieve, beat the whites of eggs to a stiff froth, sweeten to the taste, and beat with an egg whip one hour, flavor with lemon; to be eaten with cream.

This is the first recipe of the ones I’ve seen that mentions what the frothing tool is. This brings up a question that has been nagging at me for some time: when was the whisk, as we know it, invented?  Was its invention consequent, as I suppose, on advancements in metallurgy becoming commonly enough known to be available to the makers of household tools?  What was used before that?  I will report back as I acquire any definite information.

There’s much to say about Malinda Russell and her book (the earliest known American cookbook authored by an African-American, of which the Clements holds the only known copy) more than this slight post can well bear upon its slender back, but a reference is here.

Before I leave Malinda Russell entirely, here is a striking thing: on the page facing the Apple Float recipe I found this

Cracker Pie

One Boston cracker, one cup water, juice and grated rind of a lemon, one cup sugar, piece of butter the size of a butternut. This makes one pie.

Recognizably the “Mock Apple Pie” recipe from the back of a well-known modern cracker box, beautifully situating the 1866 work between the desserts known to the 18^th century, and those still vivid in the popular consciousness of the 21^st .

The book is full of intriguing recipes and as the weather cools I’m planning on making some soured cream (of which she makes great use) and trying out a few. For those who wish to peruse it for themselves, we’ve published a facsimile, which is available here.

A little recent history

Seems a kind of solecism, an error of number, has crept into this blog, and right in the very first post, too.

I said, on the maiden voyage…..
“This curatorship is a brand new position, possibly the first of its kind”

It has been pointed out to me, both nonymously and otherwise, that this is inaccurate in the spirit, however careful in the letter.  What is true is that this is, as far as we know, the first Full Time and Funded such Position – a FTE in the parlance of the great administrative engines that drive our the large enterprises of our world. I say “As far as we know” in hopes that, if someone chancing to read this paragraph knows of a previous instance of same, we will soon hear of it.

This is not to say, however, that this is new for the Clements — there has been a Culinary Curator at the Clements lo these ten years.  The original announcement may be seen here.

Therefore this correction notice is one of my favorite kind….the kind with a story behind it.

How this collection came to be

First, I have the pleasure of introducing to these pages the current and original Culinary Curator, the founder of the feast: Janice Bluestein Longone.

I was careful to ask Jan if I could mention her in these pages, but of course if you google “Jan Longone” you get nearly 4500 hits, so her appearance here is hardly anything worth remarking on.  You’ll find encomia to Jan and her work scattered all over the web – such as this recent typical, telling, and bacon-savored tribute

Typically, her response was “Yes yes, but don’t write about me, write about the collection.”  Still, a bit of background is in order:

Jan officially became Curator in 2000, when she donated a large swath of her personal collection of cookbooks (and related materials, a very large “&c”) to the Clements, adding to what was already there

The Clements already has a splendid collection of classic American cookbooks,” says Longone. “Their holdings include the first American cookbook (Amelia Simmons’ ‘American Cookery’ – 1796), the first Black authored household manual (Robert Roberts’ ‘House Servant’s Directory’ – 1827), the earliest Jewish American cookbook (Mrs. Levy’s ‘Jewish Cookery Book’ – 1871), and the first book on New Orleans cookery (‘Creole Cookery Book,’ edited by the Christian Woman’s Exchange of New Orleans – 1885). In addition, the Clements’ diverse collection of manuscript and published materials, including diaries, herbals, letters, exploration and medical chronicles, all serve as prime resource for culinary scholars.
http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?Releases/2000/Feb00/r020800b

However,  she had been volunteering (per her memory, of which I’m frankly in awe) for a good ten years before that, lending her expertise in the matter of culinary-and-related materials.

And the source of that expertise?  The experience of running what is now the country’s oldest Culinary and Gastronomic book dealership. To quote a 1996 catalog “The Wine and Food Library, an antiquarian bookshop founded in 1973, is devoted solely to books and related materials (antique menus and advertising pamphlets, engravings and journals) on the pleasures of the table and the cellar.”

I read about Jan’s bookstore in a food magazine, before I took off for school…indeed, it was a strong persuasion in favor of UM. The article mentioned her remarkable collection of charity cookbooks and I made a mental note to get in touch once I got to Ann Arbor.

Little did I know!

But wait, you say….any dealer is likely to have a collection, but so what? Cookbook publishing, Gastronomic and Oenophilic publishing, are wide and international. How did this particular dealer come to amass a collection explicitly suitable to the Clements, with its focus on the history of America?

In case it’s not clear from what I’ve said already, Jan is a Woman with a Vision. After a certain point in her career, she was also a Woman on a Mission. Her interest in food history materials (paired neatly with her husband Dan’s in works on wine) took on an American focus in the early 80’s

At The Oxford Symposium

As Jan tells the story, the moment of realization came at a seminar on food history in Oxford in 1980 – one of the seminars that would shortly be formalized as the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery

Jan had been asked to give a talk on the history of American cookbooks.  Her topic was met, it seems, with a certain skepticism. I’ll give it to you in Jan’s own words…

My extremely sophisticated and international audience, however, was somewhat incredulous that I would speak on such topics. They said America had no cuisine or culinary history to speak of: all we ate were hamburgers.  Well, having prepared for the lecture, I knew they were wrong.

(from The Quarto, published by the Clements Library Associates, No. 23, Spring-Summer 2005)

Interestingly, this echoes a question asked at another gathering of folk from many nations:

In 1876…foreign visitors to the American Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia asked, `Have you no national dishes?’
“That same question was still being asked of us 100 years later,” says Janice (Jan) Longone. “We knew the answer was a resounding yes! Thus, we built this collection.”
http://www.umich.edu/news/MT/04/Fall04/story.html?cooking

Skipping over much of interest and import (including a series of ground-breaking exhibitions) the upshot here is that the collection was built to contribute to the documentation of American Culinary History, considered with an eye that sweeps very broadly, taking in “everything that influenced or influences America and everything that America influenced or influences in culinary matters.”

What exactly is in the collection?  Well, I had the privilege of sitting with Jan as she spoke with a bookseller, recently, and made a little list

• Cookbooks, of course, both the seminal works of cookery that shaped the cooking America inherited (and influenced what culinary publishing was to become,) and the productions of American presses throughout the 18th & 19th centuries, and on into the 20th.
• Especially representative regional cookbooks, and works from the multitude of ethnic communities in the US; so, culinary works in all languages and of all nationalities, when published in the US
• Charity and community cookbooks from any US community
• Works meant for the professional as well as the home kitchen, including restaurant and hotel manuals as well as those for institutional and military food operations.
• But also “whole house” books and works in the Domestic Arts, treating of the care of the household, home doctoring, entertaining, childrearing, etc; plus books on marketing and markets, and tradesmen’s directories.
• Works on gastronomy and consumption.
• Works on beverages, both the coffee/tea/chocolate realm, and works on the making, or consumption and delectaion, of wine, beer, cider, and spirituous liquors.
• Ephemera: Menus, advertising materials (for tools and equipment as well as foodstuffs,) and promotional pamphlets and give-away publications from food processors.
• Cookery and domestic arts periodicals
• Anything treating of new world foodstuffs: maize, chocolate, the new world beans and squashes, the tomato, etc.

Plus sundry related materials not included in my notes.

This is, you will say, more than culinary history. It is.  Our collecting interests take in culinary history’s implications, and what it is implied by, tending towards a particular slice of food history, and food in history: American history from the point of view of food production, preparation, and consumption.

For more on the vision and the mission:

3 video clips

Out of the Blue episode

American cooking from A-Z

An ingredients list of news releases

And that almost scratches the surface.  Next time, an addendum to apple snow.

A Dish of Snow

David Potts's Book

Finally, talk about the materials themselves, and, as promised, a recipe.

I went in to see a new acquisition, recently, a manuscript cookbook dated to 1785.  The name on the cover, seen here, is David Potts.

I wasn’t going to do anything with it, particularly….indeed, part of it was troubled with black mold, notably pernicious stuff, and about to be sent for cleaning. I went to see it, I think, just to reassure myself that I wasn’t dreaming about this job, just for the pleasure of reading recipes that someone jotted down for their own use two-hundred-odd years ago.

Perhaps this will all seem a matter of course, in a year, but this time it was quite a thrill to pick it up and, with gloves and such delicacy of touch as I have at my command, browse through the recipes.

I say “dated to 1785” as though such things can be taken for granted, but that’s far from the case. The dealer from whom the manuscript was purchased had cataloged it, I had been told, as being from around 1830, but the guess “in-house” had been that is was some 50 years earlier, based on paper and handwriting. (This caused me to add a whole new section to the “things I have to learn” list.)  By the time I was looking at it, an actual date had been located in the thing, putting all well-informed guesswork to an end.

This does, however, bring up the topic of how you date cookbooks by the recipes in them.  Cookbooks, being often enough casual or ephemeral productions, by printers, publishers, organizations, or other concerns, don’t invariably include a publication date.  Sometimes, sleuthing is necessary. Fortunately for the sleuth, every era has its pet tastes and preparations, its little culinary conceits and fetishes.  Every era has as well characteristic ways of expressing itself, which show up in cookbooks as one more aspect of the general sensibility of a time and place.  By the 17th century, for instance, you are no longer being told the Hew anything in Gobbets as the first step to making a stew.  Not that the changes happen bang on January first of any given year, mind you, what with texts being reprinted or pirated, and fashions in cooking and expression spreading unevenly from here to there.

On one such transition, I include here a quote from a book that may have moved permanently onto my nightstand:Leonard N. Beck’s  Two loaf-givers: or a tour through the gastronomic libraries of Katherine Golden Bitting and Elizabeth Robins Pennell

In the century we now leave [the 17th] English cookery had ceased being more than half medieval and become more than half modern. Most obvious is the solo appearance of meat, that is, the disappearance of the medieval meat stews, the mawmenees and mortrells. This is evidenced in the cookbooks by [Robert] May’s 112 recipes for beef, in high society by the formation of the Sublime Society of Beefsteaks, and in literature by the verse “The Roast Beef of Old England.”
…
Even the style has changed. The trailing anacolouthas and tangled parentheses of Sir Kenelm Digby give way to the Addisonian well-made sentence. At the end of the coming century, Mrs. Raffald will write with most un-Cavalier matter of factness a sentence like: “Stick your pig just above the breast bone, run your knife to the heart, when it is dead, put it into cold water.”

But I digress, Back to our late 18th c manuscript

In the first few pages I did happen to notice some constellations of ingredients that pointed more to the 1780s than the 1830s: Anchovy, mace, and lemon peel are a sort of a triumvirate of the highly flavored dishes of the 18th c. You find them all over Hannah Glasse (first published 1747) and Mrs. Raffald, for instance. By 1830, the style has changed, in one of the periodic waves of fashion that decry disguise and with a mighty vociferating insist that food should taste like what it is. This particular wave was the advent of the Cuisine Moderne of Careme and his fellows, which is material for about a dozen posts, so instead of another divagation, back to our manuscript….again…

The first recipe that met my eye was…

A Dish of Snow
Put twelve large apples into cold water, set them over a slow fire and when they be soft, pour them upon a hair sieve. take off the skins, and put the pulp into a bason. then beat the whites of twelve eggs to a very strong froth, beat and sift half a pound of loaf sugar and strew it onto the eggs, then beat the pulp of your apples to a strong froth. then beat them all together till they be like a stiff snow, lay it on a china dish and heap it up as high as you can. set round it green knobs [or knots] of paste in imitation of chinese snails, and stick a sprigg of myrtle in the middle of the dish.

A very similar recipe is in Raffald’s The experienced English housekeeper, from  1786

Lest I should have given a false impression, this dish is not one that dates the work to the late 18th c.  We find something similar in the 1892 Cassell’s dictionary of cookery : containing about nine thousand recipes

Sponge Cakes with Apple Snow
Cut four or five stale penny sponge cakes into thin slices ; lay these on a glass dish, and pour over them half a pint of good custard or cream flavoured with a little brandy. Bake half a dozen large apples in a well-heated oven till they break and are soft. Scrape the pulp away from the skin and cores, weigh it, and a quarter of an hour before it is wanted beat up with half a pound of it the strained juice of a lemon, as much powdered sugar as will sweeten it pleasantly — the quantity needed will depend upon the quality of the apples — and the well- whisked whites of two eggs. Beat the apple- mixture with a whisk till it looks light and frothy, and has the appearance of snow, pile it on the custard, and serve immediately. Time, two hours to soak the sponge cakes in the custard. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. if the custard be made with milk. Sufficient for a small supper dish.

The next recipe in the manuscript is for squirrel soup…one of two for that dish, which I will omit in deference to anyone who has a sentimental attachment to squirrels.

The manuscript will spend some time being cleaned and will then be incorporated into the holdings of the Manuscripts Division. Should you wish to come see it in the future, it can be found by means of its Accession number, which is M-4753.1

Next time, if I am sucessful in tracking down one elusive date, how the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive came to be.

In which the new blog muses on itself

What this blog is for

I describe myself as narrative hound. I love stories, think in stories, honor stories’ ability to make data handle-able, and see stories everywhere I look. One thing this blog allows me to do is share the stories I find as I explore the collection it’s going to be my privilege to curate. I know those will be ambushing me from sundry directions, asking to be told.

But there are also three journeys of discovery and learning that will be going on here:
First, the grand adventure of becoming a curator
Second, learning the collection.
Third, discovering and promoting the uses of the collection.

So, you know, not much.

For the first, well, I’ve been a number of things, including a restaurateur, a librarian, and a cartoon character, but being a curator is new territory. I’m not bumbling in quite blind, but oh how many instructive stumblings and whackings of my head against the unanticipated there will be.

This is also a personal journey from Stove to Shelf.  People often express surprise that I went from cook to librarian….I’ve taken to comforting them my referring to it as my  non-obvious transition. It’s not surprising from the inside: what I said on my grad school applications was that after a certain point in my career I realized I was dealing as much with information as with food.

That may not be the most useful way to put it, though.

Twenty years as a culinary professional meant I spent a lot of time interacting with cooks and diners, which made me very aware of how people talk about food (the fact that I grew up reading cookbooks might just possibly have something to do with this, too.)  One thing I came to see was how much we eat, so to speak, with our brains.

What I mean by this is that our sensibilities, along with our taste buds, are constitutive of our palates – ideas, memories, prejudices, associations…all come into determining what we relish.

But wait, there’s more….sensibilities, I believe, come into it again.  Our sensibilities about food, plus our palates, plus our vocabularies, make up our experience of dining.

Vocabularies?  Oh, you bet. I mean the vocabularies people have for describing foodstuffs and dining experiences to themselves.  Is that snapper burnt, or is it blackened? That Gymsock Cheese my roommate used berate me for having in the fridge — you know a menu would vaunt its “assertive truffle-y nose.”  One person’s Richly Sweet is another person’s Cloying. Are you a picky or a discriminating eater? A purist, or a lacking in gastronomic imagination?  You know how these characterizations just will fly about.

The upshot, for me, is that the terms we use with ourselves and with each other help make up the way we encounter the world….including the world on our plates. Making a slight leap to how these terms and characterizations get there in the first place (via upbringing, background, social position along numerous vectors, all as frames for personal experience) we get this: how people talk about food, cooking and eating is interesting for the cultural information it contains and the cultural phenomena it illuminates.  You could say I’m interested in food-talk as text.

That’s the Very Short version, on which I look forward to elaborating considerably as I go along. Small wonder, then, that I’m interested in cookbooks as texts – a vast deal goes into your typical cookbook that situates the author, text, and audience in milieu as well as time and place.  Quite interesting one cookbook at a time…but how much more interesting when you have a whole collection!

Soundbite: a collection of historic cookbooks (et al) is an unselfconscious repository of social history

Second, the voyage of exploration which is learning the collection. I expect the first pass at this will occupy the next 3 years, at least.  Can your hear that sound? That’s me rubbing my hands in glee.

There’s the culinary collection proper (about which more here) with cookery books from as early as the 16th century, plus food-related ephemera in the form of menus, promotional and souvenir cookbooks, and advertising material. And then there are a raft of community cookbooks, and hotel-and-restaurant-and-travel materials. Most of the materials are American in origin, but the collection includes European works that contributed to the formation of cuisine and culinary sensibility in America.

But that’s not all there is to it. There’s much else at the Clements with something to tell us about food, cooking, and eating:

[takes a deep breath before beginning the recitation]

The Manuscript Collections include manuscript cookbooks, as well as letters and diaries with discussions of food in daily life.

The Map Collections show trade routes, agricultural production, and food manufacture; and map cartouches and decorative elements include both allegorical and realistic renderings of food, along with its preparation and use.

The Prints and Photographs Collections depict food and dining in photo albums, advertisements, pen and ink illustrations and lithographs.

The holdings of books, pamphlets, broadsides, and periodicals include descriptions and information in city and trade directories; guides for immigrants; military, exploration, and travel accounts; compilations of laws; works of belles lettres; and printed ephemera such as trade cards, advertisements, and instruction manuals.

Third, discovering and promoting the uses of the collection. There’s all this fascinating information to be gleaned from such a collection. What can researchers do with it?  What progressions can be followed, and in service of what investigations into larger historical questions?

How can the potential uses of the collection be most usefully framed? Who will want to know about it, and in what context?    What connections will it be useful to make across the subgenres within the collection? (e.g. works in the Domestic Arts & works on Hotels, where both treat of table service, or table settings.)

Of all the threads that can be followed through a chronology of cookbooks (for instance, American cookbooks with female authors, Amelia Simmons to Fannie Farmer,) which will be most useful to pick out and highlight in exhibits or guides to the collection?

This is all very general and just barely indicative, because, well, because the journey has just begun.

But enough of self-reflection. Next time, Apple Snow as it was made in Philadelphia in the latter part of the 18th century

First Catch Your Hare, OR, Here Comes Another Blog

Greetings, readers imagined or otherwise, and welcome to my brand new blog.

So, what’s with the title of this first post?

“First catch your hare” is what Hannah Glasse, author of The Art of Cookery (first published in London, 1747, and much reprinted in Britain and the US through the 18th & early 19th centuries) is famous for saying, but never said.

Elizabeth Robins Pennell, in her 1903 My Cookery Books puts the case as well as anyone could:

If Mrs. Glasse alone survives, it is for one reason only, and that the most unreasonable. Her fame is due not to her genius, for she really had none, but to the fact that her own generation believed there was “no sich a person,” and after generations believed in her as the author of a phrase she never wrote…
…
I have spent hours in pursuit of the famous phrase, or, at least, the reason of the misquotation, in the hope that success might, forever after, link my name with that of Hannah Glasse. But I can come no nearer to the clue than the ” First Case your hare,” found in every cookery book of the period…
…
Well, anyway, believe in Mrs. Glasse, or not, the cookery book that bears her name is the only one published in the eighteenth century now remembered by the whole world.

Yes yes, you say, but what about it?

In just about 2 months, I’ll be starting work as Associate Curator of American Culinary History at the William L. Clements Library.  The Clements, to quote its richly stocked website, “houses original resources for the study of American history and culture from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. Its mission is to collect and preserve primary source materials, to make them available for research, and to create an environment that supports and encourages scholarly investigation of our nation’s past.”

Including, as it happens, a collection of cookbooks, cooking periodicals, culinary ephemera, and all manner of associated materials.

This curatorship is a brand new position, possibly the first of its kind, and there’s no doubt in my mind that I’m therefore Embarked on An Adventure.  Should all go as I plan, this blog will be the record of my wanderings through a world filled with things people say about things people eat (and sundry attendant phenomena, hereinafter to be enumerated.)

The story of what Hannah Glasse didn’t say is significant because it’s typical, in a way: too often, Culinary History (and therefore that part of Food Studies) has relied on received stories, on narrative often unsubstantiated or at least undocumented, for lack of organized access to source material…access of exactly the kind this new curatorship is dedicated to providing and promoting.

And yet, history isn’t data.  History may be based on data, but can’t be reduced to it (or to them. Is “data” a collective noun? Stay tuned!) The narrative’s what makes the history accessible, what allows us to make sense of what’s occurred in the near or distant past. So this first post also honors the stories by which Culinary History has thrived, right alongside the value of the elaboration of those stories which is afforded by recourse to primary sources.

That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

More next time about the narratives and journeys this blog hopes to recount.