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!

Black Cake
In working on our next book, due out from University of Massachusetts Press this fall, we had some correspondence with the staff of Harvard's Houghton Library on the subject of citron, a fruit that, in candied form, is included in many fruitcakes. Some of the Houghton staff had gotten together and baked a "black cake,"from a recipe used by the great nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson and contained in the Dickinson manuscripts held by the Houghton. They described how they baked it in a blog post, Baking Emily Dickinson's Black Cake. Black cake is a type of fruitcake. Catharine Beecher's recipe for it in her popular 1846 cookbook, is given the name "Fruit Cake, or Black Cake."

Finding Citron

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The New Nativism--An Old Story
It has become almost a cliche to say that the present period of American history, beginning around 1975, is similar in many important ways to the period beginning roughly a hundred years earlier. We are living now, it appears, in a second Gilded Age, with pronounced inequalities of wealth and income and with transformative changes in our technology, economy, and the demographic profile of our society.

The last of the trends on this list—the arrival of lots of new people—has received much attention in the past few years from political commentators and is in the headlines almost every day in the coverage of the current presidential campaign, because of the xenophobia that constitutes the primary plank in the platform of the Republican candidate. Read More 

Let Them Eat Creamy Boston Cake
Nowadays Americans think the only word that can possibly complete the phrase "Boston Cream" is "Pie." But in fact the Boston Cream Pie—a notoriously misnamed yellow sponge cake with cream filling and chocolate icing—did not appear in print until the 1870s, long after Catharine Beecher’s 1846 cookbook made "Boston Cream Cake" popular with those of a mind to imitate the dining fashions of New England’s metropolis. (She used "cake," singular, in her recipe title, but the result is definitely "cakes," plural.)  To confuse matters further, Beechers’s recipe wasn’t the only one circulating at the time under the stylish name of Boston Cream Cake(s). In our opinion those other recipes, relying on heavier, scone-like dough, aren’t nearly as good as Beecher’s éclair-like concoctions. Her recipe produces a light, flaky pastry, which she suggests filling with cream (meaning pastry cream) or custard. It seems highly likely that she got the idea—and most of the details—for these elegant little cakes from the famous French chef Antonin Carême, Read More 

Despite its title, this dish isn't much like a modern stew of pieces of meat, fowl, or fish simmered along with vegetables in a rich broth or gravy. It's more like a seventeenth- or eighteen-century hash, which, as we explain in Northern Hospitality, was an elegant preparation of thinly sliced meat. Beecher's recipe calls for beef or veal, cut "in thin slices," and apple "sliced fine."

We confess that we thought this might be a rather bland dish. It was a popular preparation right into the nineteenth century, which is why we included it in our book. But there is so little to it--just sliced beef or veal, apples, a bit of onion, salt, pepper, and some butter to coat the pan. Read More 

Puff pastry is that light, multilayered, buttery dough that rises impressively when it is baked and causes your guests to say "Oooooh!" It can be used as a pie dough, baked as a shell for sweet fillings such as ice cream or strawberries and whipped cream, or stuffed with lobster or chicken salad for an elegant lunch. Or it can simply be rolled and twisted into shapes such as twigs or pinwheels, sprinkled with a bit of sugar and cinnamon, and baked for a hand-held treat. In other words, puff pastry can be used in any number of ways to enhance both savory and sweet dishes. Read More