Articles, Essays, Encyclopedia Entries
Eating in Eden: The Jonny-Cake Papers of 'Shepherd Tom'
In January, 1879, the Providence Journal invited Thomas Robinson Hazard — or, as he liked to call himself, Shepherd Tom — to share his thoughts on 'white Indian meal', which, the paper noted, was 'very nice, as all Rhode Islanders know'. Hazard began his published acceptance of the Journal's invitation by excluding the city with which the paper identified itself, along with most of the rest of Rhode Island, from the domain of white cornmeal authenticity. 'Nowhere else on the globe' but in Newport and Washington counties (the latter being due west across Narragansett Bay from Newport) 'was the real article ever to be found'. The implication was that only some, not 'all Rhode Islanders', were capable of authentic participation in the state's traditions of cornmeal cookery. Hazard proceeded to compose almost four hundred pages, in twenty-six 'bakings', in amplification of his claim to culinary supremacy and purity for the small subregion -- within what was already the smallest state in the federal union — in which had had himself lived his entire life. . . .
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Plainness and Virtue in New England Cooking
Stephen Mennell has disputed the idea that Puritanism caused English cookery to become plain instead of complex like French cookery. By the time English culinary preferences began to become conscious of themselves as English, Puritanism was on the wane as a decisive presence in English culture. It may be, however, that a stronger case for Puritan culinary influence can be made for New England, where this more intense form of English Protestanism held sway longer. One prominent American historian has argued as much: 'The Puritans of Massachusetts created one of the more austere food ways in the Western world. For three centuries, New England families gave thanks to their Calvinist God for cold baked beans and stale brown bread, while lobsters abounded in the waters of Massachusetts Bay and succulent gamebirds orbited slowly overhead. Rarely does history supply so strong a proof of the power of faith.' . . .
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Women's Works: A Fresh Look at Three Historic New England Cookbooks
In the first essay in this two–part series, we presented new biographical information about three New England cookbook authors of the nineteenth century, Mrs. A. L. Webster, "Mrs. Bliss of Boston," and Mrs. S. G. Knight (Stavely and Fitzgerald 2025). Prior to our investigations, little was known about these women, even though their works had begun to receive modern scholarly and popular attention (Szathmáry 1973; Patent 2009: 59; Bliss 2025; Knight 2025). With these authors' identities now more fully established, we thought it fitting to take a fresh look at their cookbooks—The Improved Housewife, or Book of Receipts (1844) by Mrs. Webster, The Practical Cook Book, Containing Upwards of One Thousand Receipts (1850) by Mrs. Bliss, and Tit- Bits: Or, How to Prepare a Nice Dish at Moderate Expense (1864) by Mrs. Knight. These works were part of a developing arena of culinary writing by women authors, fostered by advances in publishing and an emerging emphasis on domestic life. . . .
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A Book of One's Own: New Light on Three New England Cookbook Authors
In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf speaks of the many British women who 'began as the eighteenth century drew on to add to their pin money, or to come to the rescue of their families by making translations or writing [. . .] innumerable bad novels which have ceased to be recorded in text-books' (Woolf 1935, 96). Woolf might well have added cookbooks to the types of works that such women began to produce in that period. By now, of course, all kinds of books by British women authors of the eighteenth century and later, including novels and cookbooks, good and bad alike, have been recorded in the decades of scholarship called into being, either directly or indirectly, by Second Wave feminism. A case in point is culinary historian Gilly Lehmann's The British Housewife, an exhaustive chronicle of the slow but steady displacement after the Restoration of the 'court cookery' school of British cookbook writing by that genre's emerging 'housewifely tradition' (Lehmann 2003, 48-53, 81-166). . . .
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Native Land, Pilgrims' Pride: An Updated History of the American Thanksgiving
Despite their annual celebration of Thanksgiving, a holiday thought to have originated with the Plymouth settlers, most Americans date their nation's beginning from the War of Independence. That period's best-known figures—Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin—form a sort of American Pantheon, their names inscribed in the national consciousness as the country's founders. The heroes of the Revolution ignite the public's imagination, from Crispus Attucks, the first person killed in the 1770 Boston Massacre, when British troops fired on an angry crowd in that city, to the colonials who resisted British imperial power, like Samuel Adams and John Hancock, and on through the years of combat, with dashing figures like Patrick Henry, Nathan Hale, and Ethan Allen. . . .
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boardwalks in American coastal resort towns are promenades running parallel to the beach, with shops and amusements fronting them along their landward sides. The first boardwalk was built in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1870 (although Cape May, New Jersey, claims an 1868 boardwalk). Railroad officials and hotel owners proposed a planked walkway on the beach to prevent coach and lobby floors from getting covered with sand when resort patrons returned from the beach. . . .
fudge is a semisoft confection of American origin, also popular in Canada and the United Kingdom. From its first appearance in newspapers, magazines, cookbooks, and advertising pamphlets in the 1880s, fudge was promoted to the home cook and amateur candy maker as an innocent pleasure suitable for the domestic environment. Fudge was among the first candies to escape both the sexual overtones of luxury bonbons and the vulgar associations of penny candy. . . .
If you'd like to buy The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, edited by Darra Goldstein,
and featuring a Foreword by the late, great anthropologist Sidney Mintz, click here