Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald

As spring the winter doth succeed

And leaves the naked trees do dress,

The earth all black is clothed in green.

At sunshine each their joy express. 

Puritan Poet Anne Bradstreet, May 13, 1657. 

To celebrate the arrival of spring, we're revisiting an old favorite, "Boston Cream Cake" (really they're "cakes," plural) by Catharine Beecher. These lovely little tea-time (or any time) choux pastry treats are made with lots of butter, milk, and eggs, ingredients that traditionally got better and more plentiful in the springtime. Before modern lighting and breeding, the hen's laying cycle was dictated by daylight, with production of eggs beginning in late February or March and peaking in May. Butter was of higher quality in spring, too, and milk more abundant, as dairy cattle calved and were moved from their winter quarters in barns, where they survived on grain, to fresh, green, and grassy pastures. In this prime butter-making and egg-producing season, early New Englanders who could get hold of some good flour delighted in turning out cakes, sweet breads, "small cakes" (cookies) and custards, like the kind used to fill these lovely little cakes.

In our forthcoming book, Northern Comfort, we offer an updated recipe (with scaled-down quantities) for Beecher's classic dessert. There, we point out that Beecher's version, though there were many cream cake recipes in nineteenth-century cookbooks, was the simplest, plainest, and most affordable--qualities that we think modern home cooks will appreciate today. Beecher's recipe was such a nineteenth-century hit that it was reprinted (unfortunately with incorrect attribution), as late as 1876 in The Centennial Buckeye Cook Book. We think it deserves a twenty-first century revival.

So here's a link to our earlier post on "Boston Cream Cake" and we hope you'll also check out the version of the recipe in Northern Comfort, when it comes out in November 2026. Bon appetit!

Many cultures engage in some form of traditional eating on New Year's Day. The idea is that eating lucky things, or one particular time-honored dish, will bring good fortune in the coming year. 

This coming year, more than ever, the world needs some good luck. That's why we're posting our version of a New Year's Pie, based on Mrs. Bliss's 1850 recipe for "A New Year's Pie." The original recipe is reproduced, with commentary, in our book Northern Hospitality, p. 261.  Read More 

If you grew up in or around Boston in the 1950s and '60s, as one of us did, then at one time or another you undoubtedly ate Brown Bread (aka Boston Brown Bread) from a can. Despite the word "brown" in its name, this was not some kind of before-its-time fresh-baked, super healthy bread. No, indeed. We're talking about a mass-produced, steamed, and highly sweetened loaf, sold—yup—in cans. True enough, even the canned variety was, and still is, made with whole grains—cornmeal, rye flour, and whole wheat flour—but its high molasses content will give you in just a single ½ inch slice almost a quarter of your daily recommended dose of sugar. The particular bread we're talking about is made by the B&M (Burnham and Morrill) company of Portland, Maine. There are few truly regional foods left in New England, but these cans of steamed Brown Bread certainly count as one of them, given their one-time ubiquity in the region and the vivid memories many people have of eating warm slices of B&M Brown Bread as children.
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11
According to historians of domestic interiors Elisabeth Donaghy Garrett and John E. Crowley, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, upper-class people coordinated their windows, mirrors, chandeliers, and candles so as to create an impression of "lustrous surfaces" wherever one looked. And according to clothing historian Aileen Ribeiro, this love of shininess was so comprehensive that the buttons on men's coats to be worn on formal occasions were "made of either diamond paste or marcasite (faceted crystalized iron pyrites)," so that they would "glitter in candlelight.”

12
Horticulture figured prominently in the efforts at agricultural improvement made by Boston gentlemen in the early years of American independence. But lingering Puritan attitudes meant that hothouses, ornamental flowers and trees, and even fruits and vegetables were viewed as potentially luxurious. Eventually, Boston gentlemen farmers concentrated on the apple. This was a fruit that, in the words of historian Tamara Plakins Thornton, “represented just the right combination of utility, still valued in a republican nation and a mercantile society, and beauty.”

These intimate details about life in the young republic--diverse forms of domestic refinement--paint a picture of early American society that we don't often see. How do such portraits of ordinary American life help us understand American Cookery by Amelia Simmons? Find out this November in our new book from University of Massachusetts Press, United Tastes: The Making of the First American Cookbook.

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9
In 1794, the English cloth manufacturer Henry Wansey stayed at a Boston inn called the Bunch of Grapes, paying in today's money about $18 a day for a bed and all meals (including tea). Dinner, the main meal, was served at 2:00 p.m. Wansey noted the speed with which his fellow boarders dispatched their midday fare: “In half an hour after the cloth was removed every person had quitted table, to go to their several occupations and employments, . . . for the Americans know the value of time too well to waste it at the table.”

10
At the first American presidential inauguration in 1789, the cloth for the suits worn by President George Washington, Vice President John Adams, and the members of Congress from Connecticut was made at the Hartford Woolen Manufactory. Unfortunately, by 1795, this early U. S. industrial venture had failed. Henry Wansey, visiting Hartford after his sojourn in Boston, "found it much on the decay . . . I saw two carding engines, working by water, of a very inferior construction.”

These intimate details about life in the young republic--commercial dining, the beginnings of American industry--paint a picture of early American society that we don't often see. How do such portraits of ordinary American life help us understand American Cookery by Amelia Simmons? Find out this November in our new book from University of Massachusetts Press, United Tastes: The Making of the First American Cookbook.

 Read More