Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald

The Oyster: Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor

In a previous post on Lydia Maria Child's "Escaloped Oysters," the oyster had the featured role. But the oyster has also performed admirably in historic New England cuisine in supporting parts. This time we offer oysters in such a supporting role with a recipe from Amelia Simmons and her cookbook, American Cookery, that's considered the first American cookbook. 
 
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, huge numbers of oysters could be included in huge numbers of recipes because there were still huge numbers of oysters ready to be harvested from marine reefs. Oysters—lots of them—formed the basis of pies and ketchups (yes, oyster ketchup!), were added to chowders, pancakes, and omelets, and were even cooked with macaroni. But the type of food with which the oyster was most frequently paired was fowl, of every species—snipe, duck, turkey, chicken. Simmons's versatile 1796 recipe for fowl "smothered" in oysters is designed for either turkey or chicken. Read More 

It simply can't be that a year has passed since we last posted to our Cooking (and Contemplating) New England blog! We've been cooking up a storm, mind you, just not blogging about it. We're at work on a cookbook--a collection of historic recipes that we've made at home--which leaves little time for blogging, or much else. But our blog tells us it feels neglected . . . so here's something we made recently and just love. We hope this keeps our blog readers happy (and thank you, dear readers) until we can devote more time to this medium!

 Read More 

In New England, as in Old England, creams and custard pies were perennial favorites. Creams, sweetened pudding-like mixtures, have pretty much fallen out of fashion now, though we still think they're quite delicious. But why was cooked cream and custard, with or without pie crust, once so popular?
 
The answer involves the health concerns of early modern diners as much as taste preferences. In a time before pasteurization, many feared that consuming raw milk or cream would lead to sickness, or worse. Andrew Boorde, the sixteenth-century English physician most famous for writing one of the earliest handbooks of medicine, The Breviary of Health, and a companion cooking and health advice volume, A Compendious Regiment or Dyetary of Health (both first published in the 1540s), related that "raw cream undecocted, eaten with strawberries or hurts [bilberries or blueberries], is a rural man's banquet. I have known such banquets hath put men in jeopardy of their lives."[1] His and like sentiments would make cooked creams and custards the norm for centuries among the well-informed.

 Read More 

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 

Having spent many happy hours sleuthing the sources of historic recipes, we were interested to read Priya Krishna's "Who Owns a Recipe? A Plagiarism Claim Has Cookbook Authors Asking" in the New York Times recently. The story covers many aspects of this currently controversial issue. But as with much food journalism, it truncates the historical dimension of the subject. "Recipe plagiarism has been around since the first American cookbooks" reads the caption to a picture in the article of renowned bookseller Bonnie Slotnick.

Well, plagiarism in English-language cookbooks has been around a lot longer than Simmons and American Cookery. Like so many aspects of American culinary culture, even this nefarious practice was imported from elsewhere. Read More 

As we emphasized in earlier posts on the evolution of Rye and Indian (aka Ryaninjun) bread into Boston Brown Bread, New Englanders from the first years of settlement wished to eat bread made primarily of wheat. (See the first post in the series, Growing Grains and Ingrained Ideas, for an explanation of these corn-related terms and how we're using them.) For centuries, though, this goal was unattainable for most. Wheat did not grow well in the region's rocky soil and what did grow was susceptible to a killing fungus known as "the blast." Imported from the mid-Atlantic colonies, it was an expensive luxury which only the wealthy could consume on a regular basis. The Connecticut River Valley, with rich alluvial soil suited to wheat growing, was the one area in New England where wheat was plentiful. But things changed with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. Wheat imports from farming regions to the west became more plentiful and cheaper. Later in the century, mechanized milling further reduced the cost of wheat, though some began to complain that industrial-milled wheat, shorn of its germ and bran, was tasteless. It was certainly less nutritious. 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.
      Read More 

With the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, New England became more plentifully supplied with wheat grown farther west, and people were at last able to partake regularly of the "good white and wheaten bread" that had always been their preference. Yet recipes for Ryaninjun bread, made with rye and cornmeal but little or no wheat, continued to appear in New England cookbooks. How come? (See the first post in this series, Growing Grains and Ingrained Ideas, for an explanation of "Ryaninjun" and other corn-related terms and how we're using them.) Read More 

In our last post, Growing Grains and Ingrained Ideas in Colonial New England, we stressed that New England's first English settlers were embarrassed by their dependence for survival on the principal cereal grain of the region's Indigenous people. Sending word back to England about how successful their settlements were, they adopted diverse, even conflicting, strategies in talking about the grain they called "Indian Corne" or simply "Indian." (See the last post for an explanation of these and other corn-related terms and how we're using them.) Edward Johnson, in his 1654 book Wonder-Working Providence, admitted that at first the colonists had been forced to get along on "Indian Bread and water." But now, a quarter century in, they had reached a point where "good white and wheaten bread is no dainty," implying (untruthfully, in fact) that they were no longer eating Indian Bread. 

 Read More 

The English settlers arrived in New England in the early seventeenth century possessed of an ancient set of attitudes about which kinds of bread were more and less desirable. The most desirable kind—indeed, the only kind that was really desirable—was wheat bread. But their longing for breads made exclusively with wheat could only be satisfied in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, after the opening of the Erie Canal made wheat shipped from areas to the west affordable. Before that, in the 18th century, New England was a major importer of wheat, bringing it in from Pennsylvania and other Middle Colonies. This trade, however, was never carried on in sufficient volume to make wheat bread a dietary staple on all levels of New England society. With a short growing season, stony soil, labor for clearing acreage in limited supply, and the depredations caused by a fungus which farmers called "the blast," colonial New England was particularly ill-suited for growing wheat. Read More