Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald

A La Mode des Francais, Anglais, Américains

The expression "à la mode," as used appended to apple pie in modern American English, makes no sense: apple pie in the style or fashion of . . . what? Or whom? Have we slovenly Americans yet again, in importing vocabulary and cuisine from France, robbed both of their native clarity and elegance? Not really. It turns out that long before apple pie topped with vanilla ice cream, another "à la mode" dish was so widely loved that there was in that case as well no need to fill in the blank after the "de." This was, in the Anglophone world, "beef a la mode." Nor was the American Amelia Simmons the first to make the usage even more casual by turning the phrase into a verb that served as shorthand for the entire process of cooking the dish: "To alamode a round." The English author Elizabeth Raffald had pulled a similar stunt three decades before: "To a-la-mode beef."  Read More 

Good Every Way

Along the New England coast, it's the peak time of year for catching striped bass. Or if like us you're not that much into fishing, it's the season when you can be sure to find this delicious species at your local market. Back at the very beginnings of the English settlement of New England, in 1634, William Wood, in his book New Englands Prospect, wrote that "though men are soon wearied with other fish, yet they are never with Basse." Over two hundred years later, our good friend Catharine Beecher heartily agreed. "Bass are good every way," she said. Nowadays, one of the ways of cooking bass that people particularly like is grilling it on a cedar plank, as is also popular with salmon, and as we did, using a recipe from Mrs. Bliss, with haddock (see our blog post, "Scrod or Young Cod, Roasted"). Read More 

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 

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 

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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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. 

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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 

17
A few years after he published the second edition of American Cookery, the Albany printer Charles R. Webster received a letter from President John Adams thanking him for his patriotism. Webster was a captain in Albany’s Independent Artillery Company, and when it seemed that war with France was about to break out, he volunteered the Company’s services to the President.

18
In 1807 in a Portsmouth, New Hampshire, newspaper, five cookbooks were advertised, including American Cookery. In today’s money, the prices were $27.50, $20, $15, $12.50, and $5. Any idea which of the cookbooks was going for the way lowest price of $5?

These intimate details about life in the young republic—a printer’s social position and political allegiances, prices of books—paint a picture of early American society we don’t often see. How do such portraits of ordinary American life help us understand American Cookery by Amelia Simmons? Find out in our just released book from University of Massachusetts Press, United Tastes: The Making of the First American Cookbook.

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15
In the eighteenth century, writings of all kinds—letters to the editor, articles, essays, books, pamphlets—were published with the author's identity concealed beneath a pseudonym. Literary critic Michael Warner notes that Samuel Adams used over twenty-five different pseudonyms in his revolutionary writings. Women authors also hid behind pseudonyms, such as "A Lady of Maine" and "an Aged School-Mistress, in the State of Massachusetts." The reasons writers used pseudonyms varied, but in general the public was not put off by these disguises.

16
Two novels written in the 1820s but set a few decades earlier, one by then-famous novelist Lydia Sigourney, the other by James Fenimore Cooper, mention a food item called a "nutcake." In the Sigourney novel, a family offers its guest "a plate of nut-cakes and cheese." In Cooper's work, one corner of a Christmas Eve banquet table features a plate of "certain curiously twisted and complicated figures, called 'nut-cakes.'" In other words, Cooper's nutcakes are what we would call crullers. As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, the most common meaning of nutcakes was doughnuts.

These intimate details about life in the young republic--the ways authors presented themselves, the names given to foods--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