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| American Civil War |
One of the relatively few explicit references to wartime politics that appears in these books was in a recipe called “Tessie’s Wheaten Biscuit. (From a Contraband),” which appeared in Mrs. S. G. Knight’s 1864 Tit-Bits; Or, How to Prepare a Nice Dish at a Moderate Expense. Contrabands were a temporary designation used by Union troops to refer to former slaves who escaped across Union lines but whose legal standing—as free people or as property— remained uncertain. It’s not clear whether Knight herself got this recipe directly from an escaped slave named Tessie, whether a friend of hers did, whether she read about the recipe in a newspaper or another source, or—always a possibility—whether she or someone else made it up altogether. In any case, Knight chose to convey the recipe in an imitation of African American speech, which her readers may have seen as humorous or quaint, or as a mark of the recipe’s authenticity. For example, according to the recipe, “you beat the dough ’till it begins to go pop, pop, pop,—it’ll crack moo’ like a whip,—then you know it’s done.” At a time when photographs of the scarred backs of escaped slaves were appearing in Northern newspapers, readers may have seen this reference to the pop of a whip—a sound they would have assumed ex-slaves knew all too well—as a reference to abolitionist literature. It’s also worth noting that even though Knight attributed many of the other recipes in her book to specific women, she never directly quoted anyone else or imitated their speech. And unlike the other women, whom she designated with the respectful titles of Mrs. or Miss, she used only Tessie’s first name.
While the Contraband recipe was rare in its direct reference to wartime politics, politics appeared in other forms. Some of Knight’s other dishes, like Yankee Pudding and Thanksgiving Pudding, would have struck readers at the time as clear allusions to contemporary events. Thanksgiving only became a national holiday in 1863, the year Knight published her book, after Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation to that effect because he believed creating a nostalgic American holiday would raise morale. It’s also noteworthy that Knight chose to include several southern recipes in her book, such as “Gumbo (a favorite Southern dish),” without further comment on their origins in the self-proclaimed Confederacy.
Meanwhile, other recipes with political leanings appeared, too, like Election Cake, a dessert popular since the Revolutionary era, and Railroad Cake, which had become popular during the 1850s as an affordable way for women to celebrate Manifest Destiny at home. Meanwhile, nostalgic recipes like Old Times Johnny Cake and other self-consciously austere dishes harkened back to simpler times.
Many of these cookbooks focused openly on thrift. While economizing was an old theme in American cookery, it would have been especially relevant to families during the Civil War. For instance, the first cookbook ever to focus on leftovers, What to Do with the Cold Mutton: A Book of Réchauffés, Together with Many Other Approved Receipts for the Kitchen of a Gentleman of Moderate Income, appeared in the United States in 1865, and its publisher’s confidence that leftovers would be a selling point rather than an embarrassment underlines the fact that economizing on food had taken on new urgency in many American families by the end of the war. Hundreds of thousands of Northern families had lost husbands, sons, or fathers, and in many cases that meant they had lost the basis of their economic subsistence. As many Americans knew all too well, turning the scraps left from one dinner into a palatable meal the next day could mean the difference between living within one’s budget and sliding into debt.
Besides staying within the changeable family budget, housekeepers would also have been expected to master special cooking repertoires aimed at invalids, and a section on invalid cookery was practically obligatory in cookbooks of the era. The established place of invalid cookery as a specifically female domestic skill gave women significant authority over sickness throughout this era. In fact, the invalid cookery tradition was one reason that women were readily accepted as Civil War nurses at a time when it was generally presumed that women were otherwise too delicate and squeamish to bear the rigors of formal medical training. Food preparation was one of the central tasks of female nurses during the war, and in both the North and the South female nurses established “diet kitchens” connected to military hospitals, based on the widespread cultural assumption that the right kind of nourishing food, delicately prepared by experienced women, would speed soldiers’
convalescence.
These cookbooks were also useful because of the widespread migration and immigration occurring throughout this era, and many people eagerly bought cookbooks because they had much to learn and no one to teach them. The American population was a prodigiously mobile one in the early and mid-nineteenth century. Americans were geographically mobile, with some families moving west to claim land on the expanding frontier, sometimes moving from cities to farms, while many other people were moving from farms to cities.
At the same time, large numbers of immigrants were entering the United States in the mid-nineteenth century—with particularly large numbers of people coming from Ireland and Germany—and they all would have encountered unfamiliar ingredients, tools, and cooking styles that needed explanation.4 As people moved, they often moved away from networks of friends and family that women otherwise would have relied upon for domestic knowledge.
At the same time, the mid-nineteenth century was a time of intense class mobility, and that sort of mobility also called for new culinary knowledge and skills. People with newly enlarged incomes who were joining a growing urban middle class would have had access to ingredients they had never used before, as well as more disposable income to spend on food. They would also have faced new social expectations about when, what, and how they ate. Even had family members been near enough to give advice, they would not necessarily have possessed the skills or experience considered necessary to new lives and positions. For socially ambitious Americans, cookbooks could be sources of important information about middle-class norms of cooking and dining, which they would not have learned in their childhood homes. But not all class mobility was upward. While some prospered, others struggled, losing fortunes in financial panics, for example, or finding that new forms of industrial production made their artisanal professions obsolete.
Several cookbook authors directly addressed the downwardly mobile. Mary Cornelius, in the 1863 edition of The Young Housekeeper’s Friend, marveled ruefully that “Adversity succeeds prosperity like a sudden inundation. The poor and uneducated are often rapidly elevated to wealthy independence, while the refined and highly educated are compelled to taste the bitterness of poverty.” Indeed, it was often a shift in economic fortunes that compelled westward migration in the first place. Thinking about women who were moving west with their families because they could no longer afford to live in the East, Cornelius expressed special sympathy for women who had “passed their youth in affluent ease” but who were now “obliged, by the vicissitudes of life, to spend their time and strength in laborious household occupations.” For Americans who were compelled for the first time to provide food for their families on small incomes and to cook without the aid of servants, a good cookbook with clear instructions could be invaluable.
Because of both geographic and class mobility, more people than ever in the mid-nineteenth century felt they needed outside guidance when it came to food and cooking. It is little wonder that the cookbook market exploded. In fact, the expanding market for cookbooks was only part of a burgeoning genre of advice literature, as advances in print combined with the growth of cities to create a huge demand for how-to books for a battery of skills including etiquette, dancing, and calculating, as well as cooking.
People accustomed to thinking of cookbooks as a source for recipes, and not much else, can be surprised how much information cookbooks can reveal about the daily lives, social practices, class aspirations, and cultural assumptions of people in the past. While cookbooks offer us a tantalizing glimpse of the past, however, like all historical documents they offer us only a glimpse. In fact, cookbooks can be an especially deceptive source, and anyone using them to understand the past has to be on guard. First and foremost, we cannot assume that the recipes or cooking techniques that any single author suggested accurately reflect how Americans in the Civil War era actually cooked and ate. It’s important to keep in mind that cookbook authors made decisions about which recipes to include and which to leave out, and they based those decisions in part on guesses about what information would be helpful to readers. The fact that people went to the trouble of recording a recipe at all meant that the writers assumed most people didn’t already know it by heart. For instance, Knight wrote that she purposefully omitted most recipes for meat, which she considered “plain cooking,” because she supposed readers already knew how to prepare it. This is a good reminder that we can’t assume people always, or only, cooked in the way cookbooks describe.
Furthermore, we remain ignorant of the most basic information about the people who read these cook books. We don’t know who bought them or how they may have modified the recipes—if they tried them at all—once they got them home. We also don’t know what they thought of any dishes that resulted. We can infer from the fact that publishing firms accepted the cookbooks in the first place that the editors, at least, believed their recipes would be popular, and we can assume that books that came out in multiple editions were in some demand. But we don’t even know with any certainty how many copies 1860s cookbooks sold.
Despite these daunting limitations, however, cookbooks can still tell us all sorts of things. For example, even if cookbook authors sometimes left out dishes they considered too simple or obvious to record formally, recipes with names like Pickle for Daily Use, Common Doughnuts, Every-day Cake, and Good Common Sauce still give valuable clues about what kinds of food people ate regularly. Meanwhile, when authors warned readers against eating certain foods or cooking in certain ways, it’s a good clue that they believed many people were already doing so—and should stop. For instance, the author of the 1868 What Shall We Eat: A Manual for Housekeepers, Comprising a Bill of Fare for Breakfast, Dinner, and Tea, for Every Day in the Year felt it necessary to caution readers against drinking wine for breakfast. If wine was too strong, the author wrote, “it diminishes business keenness,” whereas weak wine “imparts no warmth,” an essential quality for breakfast beverages in chilly America. Instead, the author suggested coffee, tea, or hot chocolate for breakfast.
It’s also noteworthy that many of the foods that people today consider quintessential American dishes, steeped in age-old tradition, don’t appear in these cookbooks or appear only in unfamiliar forms. For example, while there are a few recipes for apple pie, there are many more recipes for blancmange, a popular nineteenth-century custard. While there are occasional recipes for cookies, there are many more recipes for puddings, part of the English culinary tradition that was still thriving in the United States more than eighty years after the Revolution.
Likewise, foods that would become mainstays of all-American cooking in the next century, like cheese, ground beef, and chocolate, play very minor roles in these recipes. In contrast, there were whole genres that were popular in the Civil War era that almost totally disappeared from mainstream American cookbooks in the decades that followed. These now defunct genres included Sweetmeats, encompassing recipes like Peaches in Brandy, Candied Lemons, and preserved Watermelon Rinds; Invalid Cookery, filled with recipes like Wine Whey, Toast Water, and various gruels; and Common Drinks, with homemade beverages that were sometimes alcoholic and sometimes not, like Effervescing Drink, Cherry Bounce, and Spring Beer.
Meanwhile, other recipes that seem familiar at first glance turn out to be quite different from what modern readers might assume. In the recipe for Waffles that appears in the 1868 edition of Ann Howe’s American Kitchen Directory and Housewife, for instance, she suggested a salty gravy, rather than a sweet syrup, as an accompaniment. A “pickle” at this time was more likely to refer to a pickled nut or tomato or melon than it was to a pickled cucumber. Macaroni appears regularly in these cookbooks, although rarely with cheese; instead, authors mixed it with fish, served it as a plain side dish, or used it in sweet desserts like Macaroni Pudding.
Likewise, Knight’s recipe for Coffee Cake was not a cinnamon cake intended to be eaten with a cup of coffee, but instead a cake that actually contained coffee, along with molasses and raisins. At other times the ingredients for dishes were roughly what we might expect, but the methods of cooking—and how people then defined when a food was “done” or not—were wildly different. Note, for instance, that authors routinely instructed readers to boil vegetables for thirty, forty, fifty minutes or more, including tender young vegetables like fresh peas and corn. Cornelius suggested boiling carrots for up to an hour and a half, just as Knight instructed readers to boil rice for a full two hours. By our standards, the mushy pastes that would have resulted would seem disastrously overcooked. But by 1860s standards, of course, these were simply what cooked carrots and boiled rice were.
Readers may also be surprised by different cultural rules about how and when certain foods were eaten. For example, Mary Cornelius outlined strict guidelines concerning which vegetables should properly be served with different styles of meat. According to her, vegetables like carrots, parsnips, greens, and cabbage should only be served with boiled meat, while sweet potatoes, squash, and onions should go with roast meat. Even more striking, as What Shall We Eat—the only book here organized around menus—makes clear, breakfasts in this era were filled with items like mutton, pickled pigs’ feet, liver, venison, and fish. That might jar modern readers who think of breakfast as a light meal centered around starches, but there was nothing inherently unnatural about it. Indeed, at a time when Americans were much more likely to perform hard physical work all day, large breakfasts centered around meat would have been a valuable source of energy. The different nineteenth-century expectations about food pairings and about what kinds of food were appropriate for which meals call attention to how arbitrary many of our own cultural rules about food are.
In their focus on food preservation, the cookbooks also highlight another important aspect of nineteenth-century life. Preserving food and preventing spoilage were urgent tasks in an era before electric refrigeration because food that wasn’t consumed in a timely manner, especially in summertime, could quickly spoil. Americans were more accustomed to eating questionable or moldy food at this time, and Civil War soldiers on both sides routinely ate moldy hard tack or rancid meat. In her section on preserves and jellies, Cornelius noted that “a thick, leather-looking mould” on top of a preserve was good because it would effectively seal out air, but she cautioned readers that if the preserves were merely speckled with mold they should taste them to determine how much could be salvaged. Food spoilage could be dangerous as well as wasteful, and people who ate food that had gone bad could get seriously ill or even die. Nineteenth-century Americans had good reason to fear food spoilage, and housekeepers mastered a diverse range of skills to keep it at bay. To preserve meat, they might dry it, salt it, smoke it, pickle it, can it, pot it, pack it in snow, or make sausages. Cookbooks were also filled with recipes for preserved vegetables, fruits, eggs, and nuts. Cheese was a good way to preserve milk, just as beers, ciders, and other alcohols were good ways to preserve grains and fruits. In addition, cookbooks almost always included whole sections on pickles, jams, syrups, and relishes.
In fact, these homemade condiments were more than a good way to keep foods from spoiling. The cookbooks’ heavy reliance on boiling and baking may make their vegetable and meat recipes seem straightforward by today’s standards, and modern readers might casually assume that eaters then subsisted on hearty but plain meat-and-potatoes fare. These stereotypes are right, in part. Ann Howe, for instance, warned cooks “not to have the natural flavor of the food disguised by the seasoning,” and she cautioned against using excessive spices. Yet what comes through most clearly in the cookbooks is not the blandness of 1860s meals, but rather how diverse and flavorful they must have been, especially when supplemented with condiments like tomato figs, burned butter sauce, East India Pickle, pepper vinegar, and pickled nasturtium buds. In fact, highly seasoned condiments including ketchups, chou chous, pickles, curries, sauces, sweetmeats, and slaws were more prevalent in mainstream cookbooks, and perhaps more unabashedly appreciated, than they would be again in this country for more than a century. The arsenal of recipes for ketchups alone—including recipes not just for tomato ketchup but also for walnut ketchup, oyster ketchup, and mushroom ketchup—shows that some aspects of twenty-first-century cooking might seem straightforward and bland by 1860s standards, and not the other way around.
Besides an array of homemade condiments, Americans during the Civil War era also produced many items at home that people today think of as things you get from grocery stores and only from grocery stores. Foods regularly made at home in the 1860s included not just bread and butter, but also gelatin, carbonated drinks, vinegar, yeast, cheese, shortening, and bouillon cubes, also called portable soup. Yet Americans in the 1860s— especially the middle-class northeastern Americans targeted by these cookbooks—were hardly off the industrial food grid. For instance, recipes sometimes called for boxed gelatin or for Maizena, a commercial brand of cornstarch. In her section on bread, Mary Cornelius gave instructions for people who grew their own wheat as well as for those who bought theirs at the store. For this second group, she stressed the importance of buying flour under trusted brand names, an acknowledgment of the rapidly changing geography of American wheat production, which meant in practice that consumers often had little idea about where their wheat came from.
Recipes at this time also called for processed items that would likely have come from stores, like cream of tartar, saleratus (or baking soda), or isinglass, a collagen made from fish bladders that served roughly the same role as gelatin.
Another development that might surprise modern readers is that Americans in the 1860s responded with growing interest to recipes whose titles loudly declared them to be foreign. These cookbooks are filled with recipes like Chicken Pillau, Calcutta Curry, Vermicelli Soup, Charlotte Russe, Mullagatawnee Soup, and Sauce Piquant, and authors also casually used generic national titles for recipes like French Rolls, German Cake, Spanish Soup, and Irish Stew. Most notably, as French cooking was increasingly exalted as the highest and most artful cuisine in the world, authors touted cooking styles that wore their French influence on their sleeves, like fricassees, soufflés, sautés, and ragouts.
Moreover, all these cookbooks, even the humblest, demanded ingredients that would have been transported across the country and the globe. Among others foods grown far from the northern United States—and often outside America—cookbooks called for chocolate, tea, coffee, sugar, vanilla, cinnamon, mace, nutmeg, cloves, cayenne, curry, pepper, olive oil, almonds, figs, citrus fruits, coconut, bananas, pineapples, gum arabic, and starches from tropical plants like sago, arrowroot, and tapioca. The fact that these cookbook authors didn’t hesitate to call for imported ingredients, even in the midst of the Civil War, is one more reminder that these were Northern cookbooks, since virtually none of these far-flung ingredients would have been readily available in the South by the middle of the war because of the blockade.
In general, though, what’s remarkable isn’t that Americans in the 1860s thought of themselves as cosmopolitan eaters, but the fact that they didn’t. Although authors sometimes acknowledged the distant provenance of their ingredients, usually they did not, even as they were increasingly interested in foreign cuisines. American food systems had been global long before the Revolution, and by the mid-nineteenth century their international reach was thoroughly normalized. It seems likely that readers of these cookbooks rarely thought of imported ingredients like cinnamon or olive oil as particularly exotic at all. The regular use of imported ingredients also highlights how contemporary nostalgia about “returning” to local, regional eating is based on a simplistic understanding of the past.
Yet while many of the spices and flavorings used by northern Americans were imported long distances, most of their core foods were domestically produced throughout this era, and many in fact were actually native to the Americas. All of the American cookbook authors here gave recipes for strikingly American dishes like succotash, Indian Fritters, and Corn Dodgers, and they all regularly called for native American ingredients like cranberry, pumpkin, sweet potato, squash, corn, and turkey. It’s noteworthy, in contrast, that virtually none of those American ingredients appeared in the one book originally published in England, What to Do with the Cold Mutton.
If food in the Civil War era was not strictly local, it was more seasonal than it is today. Seasonal availability of ingredients was a serious constraint, an issue present in all the cookbooks but clearest in the monthly menus of What Shall We Eat, in which fresh produce abounds only in the summer months, meats like lamb are only suggested in spring, and shellfish appears only in the winter. Of course, those food preservation techniques discussed above would have expanded cooks’ options, but cookbook writers—and presumably ordinary eaters, too—were sensitive to the differences between fresh and preserved foods. Another issue nineteenth-century cooks grappled with, and one that modern readers are less likely to consider when thinking about seasonal foods, is that cooking techniques also had to be adjusteddepending on whether the weather was hot or cold.
Cookbook writers at the time routinely referred to this daily reality. Ann Howe, for example, wrote that venison tasted better when it had been stored for about ten days before cooking it, but she knew that this was only possible in cold weather. Similarly, in a recipe for Rennet Pudding, Knight instructed readers that in cold weather they should warm the milk “enough to remove the chill,” though she noted it would already be warm enough in summer. The phrase “room temperature,” a commonplace cookery term by the mid-twentieth century, virtually never appeared in the mid-nineteenth century, a time when room temperatures would have varied enormously during the year.
The variability of household temperatures was only one of the challenges 1860s cooks faced as they ran their kitchens, the most thoroughly demanding job in any home. Among many other tasks, housekeepers or their servants had to pump and haul water, tend kitchen gardens, and care for animals like chickens, pigs, and cows. They carried coal and sometimes chopped wood, and they had to start and supervise the fire, the most complicated and dangerous job of all. Getting the cook stove to a desired temperature and keeping it there was an art form. Heated by coal or by wood, ovens were notoriously hard to control, and cooks would not have had thermometers to help them gauge the temperature. As a result, cookbook authors did not specify precise temperatures but instead used broad terms to describe levels of heat, like “a slow oven,” “a moderate oven,” “a quick, but not furiously-hot oven,” or simply “bake until you think it is done.” In other words, they relied heavily on their readers’ experience to know how hot to get the oven and how long to leave the food inside. Of course, for people with little cooking experience to draw upon, cookbooks could offer frustratingly meager help on this point.
Like instructions about oven temperatures and baking times, cookbook authors described food quantities with what can seem like jarring imprecision. At least a generation before the use of measuring cups and spoons was standardized in the United States, measurements tended to be relative and impressionistic.9 Authors described quantities of food in terms like “the size of a hen’s egg” or “about the size of a Spanish silver dollar.” Although the use of cups, rather than scales, would become one of the leading distinctions between American and British cookery by the early twentieth century, authors in the 1860s still varied, sometimes from page to page, over whether quantities appeared in terms of cups, like a “wineglass” or a “coffee cup,” or in terms of weight, as in the popular phrase “the weight of six eggs in sugar.”
In the 1860s, Americans who could afford to do so generally ate large quantities of animal products, building their meals on milk, butter, cream, eggs, lard, and, especially, meat. Indeed, middle-class cooking centered around meat, incorporating it into virtually every meal and making use of a diversity of animal species and cuts that would dizzy a contemporary eater accustomed to the paucity of modern supermarkets. Desserts routinely called for meat products, too. Beyond gelatin or mincemeat, nineteenth-century desserts regularly contained suet, lard, and salt pork—and sometimes pounds of them.
Americans in this era were also generally comfortable eating—and thinking about—a much greater variety of animal body parts than Americans today. For instance, in Cornelius’s recipe for Souse—which meant meat that had been boiled and then soused, or soaked, in vinegar and spices—she instructed readers to remove “the horny parts of the feet and toes of a pig, and clean the feet, ears, and tail very thoroughly.” In another recipe, she instructed the reader to cut off the feet of a freshly slaughtered piglet, to stuff the body cavity and skewer it on a spit, and then to make a gravy with the feet, liver, and brains while the piglet turned before the fire. And how would the reader know when the piglet was done? That was easy: when the eyes fell out. Ann Howe thought it a nice touch to serve the calf’s feet on a platter right alongside the calf’s head. Recipes routinely instructed readers to work with appendages and organs, to remove eyes or brains or to saw bones.
Together, excerpts from five cookbooks from the Civil War era present a compelling portrait of cooking and eating in the urban North of the 1860s United States.Many different kinds of people used cookbooks in the 1860s, and the intended audiences of these books were diverse. Mary Hooker Cornelius’s Young Housekeeper’s Friend and Ann Howe’s The American Kitchen Directory and Housewife are both classic examples of domestic encyclopedias. Detailed works aimed at inexperienced housekeepers, both offered relatively explicit instructions that would have been useful to young women keeping house for the first time as well as to anyone hoping to learn about the cooking styles of the urban middle class. That would have included the many families living in cities for the first time and families with newly enlarged incomes, among other groups. The fact that both books went through multiple editions—The Young Housekeeper’s Friend was first published in 1845 and then many times thereafter, including in 1863, while The American Kitchen Directory and Housewife was published first in 1863 and then again in 1868—shows that a real demand existed for their variety of detailed domestic advice.
Yet the cookbook genre itself was changing in the 1860s, and the Civil War accelerated those changes. Demand was steadily rising for a range of specialized cookbooks that focused exclusively on food, rather than for thick reference works in which cooking featured as one among a host of domestic topics. Knight concentratedon the cost of food, tailoring her concise recipes for women who could regularly afford meat and desserts but who still needed to prepare such dishes in a relatively economical way. The 1865 What to Do with the Cold Mutton: A Book of Réchauffés, Together with Many Other Approved Receipts for the Kitchen of a Gentleman of Moderate Income, first published the year before in London by an author identified only as P. K. S., demonstrates the strong continuing influence of British cookery in American kitchens well into the mid-nineteenth century.
The author aimed the book at women who were forced to prioritize economy when they planned their meals. The book focuses on the humble categories of leftovers, which the author called réchaufés, presumably because he or she thought the French term sounded more elegant. Finally, with notably less concern for economy than the other cookbooks, the author of the 1868 What Shall We Eat? A Manual for Housekeepers, Comprising a Bill of Fare for Breakfast, Dinner, and Tea, for Every Day in the Year aimed squarely at ladies in charge of overseeing prosperous households. Anticipating the heavy multicourse dinners that would become chic in the Gilded Age, the author organized the book around menus, offering valuable hints about how Americans may have organized their meals, although the elaborate spreads suggested on a daily basis here would have been prohibitively expensive for the great majority of Americans.
Grammar, spelling, and capitalization were all somewhat idiosyncratic in the mid-nineteenth century. In a few cases, I made minor changes in the capitalization of the recipe titles in order to make the style consistent across the cookbooks. Otherwise, I have kept the authors’ original text except in cases where there was clearly a typographical error.
Edited by Helen Zoen Veit in "Food in the Civil War Era - The North" Michigan State University Press,USA, 2014, excerpts pp.23-35.Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.