Food on the Page

Cookbooks and American Culture

Megan J. Elias

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780812294033
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

What is American food? From barbecue to Jell-O molds to burrito bowls, its history spans a vast patchwork of traditions, crazes, and quirks. A close look at these foods and the recipes behind them unearths a vivid map of American foodways: how Americans thought about food, how they described it, and what foods were in and out of style at different times.In Food on the Page, the first comprehensive history of American cookbooks, Megan J. Elias chronicles cookbook publishing from the early 1800s to the present day. Following food writing through trends such as the Southern nostalgia that emerged in the late nineteenth century, the Francophilia of the 1940s, countercultural cooking in the 1970s, and today's cult of locally sourced ingredients, she reveals that what we read about food influences us just as much as what we taste.Examining a wealth of fascinating archival material—and rediscovering several all-American culinary delicacies and oddities in the process—Elias explores the role words play in the creation of taste on both a personal and a national level. From Fannie Farmer to The Joy of Cooking to food blogs, she argues, American cookbook writers have commented on national cuisine while tempting their readers to the table. By taking cookbooks seriously as a genre and by tracing their genealogy, Food on the Page explains where contemporary assumptions about American food came from and where they might lead.

CHAPTER 1

THE BEST-FED PEOPLE IN THE WORLD

AMERICAN COOKBOOKS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

IN THE FIRST AMERICAN cookbook, published in 1796, Amelia Simmons struck a note that would continue to resound over the next two hundred years: “This treatise,” she explained, “is calculated for the improvement of the rising generation of Females in America.”¹ During Simmons’s lifetime, American women’s skill in the kitchen was supposed to grow from the newlywed’s stumbling incompetence to the seasoned housekeeper’s expertise. In later generations, the American woman would be compared unfavorably to her counterparts abroad, to men, and even to her own grandmother in kitchen affairs.

Little is known about Amelia Simmons herself, but she seems to have had knowledge of well-to-do foodways, probably as a professional cook. Simmons’s American Cookery set itself apart from similar English books previously published in North America by including recipes for originally American foodstuffs such as corn and turkey. Her book was not only the first American cookbook, it was also first in a soon-to-expand market for kitchen guidance. Before Simmons’s generation, cookbooks—like most books—had belonged to the economic elite. In the early years of the nineteenth century, as a middle class emerged, cookbooks appeared too, to serve this new market.²

The antebellum era in America was a time of migration and cultural transformation. New communication and transportation technologies made it possible for Americans to keep in touch culturally while moving farther away from older settlements. Cookbooks helped ease these transitions and simultaneously became part of expanding markets across the continent. If a woman carried a cookbook published in Philadelphia with her on the Oregon Trail in the 1840s, for example, she could expect to enjoy flavors of the old home in the new. Foodstuffs might be different in the West, but her cookbook would give her guidance for preparations that would look familiar. As entrepreneurs established towns and trade routes, a new edition of her Philadelphia book could find its way out west in the years after she settled. For all their potential mobility, however, cookbooks published before the Civil War tended to show little in the way of diversity.

Before the Civil War, American publishers produced approximately 265 books with recipes, not all of them cookbooks.³ This number includes works primarily concerned with gardening, cheese making, brewing, winemaking, and husbandry, as well as some humorous pieces such as The Hasty Pudding, an ode to the joys of cornmeal mush.⁴ Of the recipe books published before the war, only twenty-six overtly referred to America or the United States in their titles and only nine referred to particular regions—Virginia, the Carolinas, Philadelphia, and New England.

“America” and the United States became more popular terms in cookbook titles in the 1840s and 1850s, while regional references in titles are equally spread over the period, beginning with one of the first successful American cookbooks, Mary Randolph’s The Virginia Housewife: or Methodical Cook, first published in 1824.⁵ By the 1840s, publishers offered American audiences a few German, French, and Spanish cookbooks, both in those languages and in translation.

A noted twentieth-century cookbook collector, Louis Szathmary, wrote in 1974 that his collection of American cookbooks included “a few” works from the 1700s and almost three hundred from the nineteenth century, but more than five thousand published since 1900.⁶ As Szathmary’s accounting suggests, in the 1870s, the American publishing industry began a phase of expansion that continued well into the twentieth century. One of the results of this expansion was the diversification of American cookbooks as a genre. The cookbooks published after the Civil War built upon models established before the war but also introduced new themes that in turn shaped early twentieth-century writing about food. Three of these new themes were community, Southern regional identity, and progressivism.

From Compendiums to Tastemakers

Antebellum era cookbooks were most often household manuals, helping readers to get rid of moths and to care for the sick as well as teaching them how to cook contemporary Anglo-American fare. Authors organized texts around foodstuffs, including both raw materials and finished goods, rather than meals. Randolph’s Virginia Housewife, for example, began with a chapter on soups, but followed this with chapters on beef, lamb, mutton, and pork. Chapters on fish and poultry (including eggs) were followed by chapters on sauces, vegetables, puddings, and cakes. By beginning with soups and saving chapters on desserts till the end of the book, authors loosely followed the outline of the typical middle-class dinner meal.

This format assumed that the reader already understood the basic grammar of the meal—what the accepted order and composition of courses was.⁷ It also suggested that dinner was the meal most in need of planning, which was certainly the case through the nineteenth century. Breakfast and lunch were private meals, most often composed of leftovers from a previous night’s dinner. Even when specific foods became associated with these meals, they were seldom occasions for entertaining guests, so the nineteenth-century housewife had much less cause to think about them.

Exemplifying the encyclopedic impulse, well-known editor Sarah Josepha Hale titled her 1857 cookbook, Mrs. Hale’s receipts for the million: containing four thousand five hundred and forty-five recipes, facts, directions, etc. in the useful, ornamental, and domestic arts, and in the conduct of life. Being a complete family directory. Relative to accomplishments, amusements, beauty, birds, building, children, cookery, courtship, dress, etc. economy, etching, etiquette, flowers, gardening, Grecian painting, phrenology, potichomanie, poultry, riding, swimming, surgery, domestic temperance, trees, etc. woman’s duties, words of Washington, etc. The hodgepodge of her title encompassed most of the enthusiasms and anxieties of mid-nineteenth-century America.⁸

Economy was a common theme in antebellum cookbooks. Lydia Maria Child, for example, in her very popular 1829 The Frugal Housewife, laid out a plan of moderation in all things.⁹ Echoing the tones of an almanac, she prefaced a list of household hints with the words, “IF you would avoid waste in your family, attend to the following rules, and do not despise them because they appear so unimportant: ‘many a little makes a mickle’.” The emphasis was on economy and thrifty management of the entire home, not just the kitchen.

Child differentiated her book from its predecessors and competitors by identifying its audience as ordinary folk. Calling it a “cheap little book of economical hints,” she avowed her “deep conviction that such a book is needed.” Although her material was “of the common kind,” she argued, “It is such as the majority of young housekeepers do not possess.” Child explained that cookbooks had been mostly written for the wealthy, whereas she had written for the poor.

Child’s understanding of poverty, however, was belied by her description of girls’ education: “When quite young, they are sent to schools where no feminine employments, no domestic habits can be learned; and there they continue until they ‘come out’ into the world.”¹⁰ This kind of academic education and formal entry into the social world were features of upper-middle-class life. The working poor, who could seldom provide schooling for any of their children, were least likely to arrange for girls to learn anything but housekeeping. Child’s insistence that her book was for practical use, however, reflected her experience as an editor who had learned that this notion would appeal to book buyers.

Child and others like her wrote for a generation of American women who were taking on roles different from those modeled by their own mothers. As American households transformed from productive centers, where everything from homespun cloth to sausages was made, to repositories of consumer culture, families increasingly bought food outside the home in its raw or semiprepared state and processed it in the kitchen. The colonial era housewife had little need to think of “economy” when she had grown all the vegetables, churned the butter, and slaughtered the hog herself. She could be clever about how she managed her resources, but they seldom had a cash equivalent in her experience. In the antebellum era, in contrast, middle-class husbands gave their wives budgets with which to feed the family and impress guests. This brought the concept of economy in its financial sense into woman’s sphere of work.

As food became a consumer good, private fine dining, in contrast to family meals or public feasting, was an important part of middle-class life. Housewives now entertained with elegant meals, a new phenomenon that required guidance. Style began to matter just as much as substance.¹¹

Mary Randolph capitalized on both trends—toward economy and in pursuit of style—when she published what can be considered the first regional, as well as the first American cookbook, The Virginia Housewife, in 1824.¹² The book’s subtitle “Methodical Cook,” and its opening epigraph, “Method Is the Soul of Management,” spoke to the middle-class woman manager of a household that consumed market goods. When she wrote the book, Randolph was locally renowned as the mistress of the Queen, a popular boarding house in Richmond. By identifying herself with Virginia, where she had grown up the child of a wealthy plantation owner, Randolph drew on common associations of the South with lavish hospitality, made possible through the use of enslaved labor. Those who aspired to elite lifestyles would have been attracted by Randolph’s instructions for managing staff and her many rules for proper culinary performance.

Although she associated her book with a single southern state, Randolph in fact included recipes of many regions and nations, such as polenta and ropa vieja. These inclusions reveal that American cuisine was never so xenophobic or bland as its critics often suggest. Alongside directions for preparing this multicultural cuisine, Randolph assured her readers that careful management was “an art that may be acquired by every woman of good sense and tolerable memory.” For the reader ready to embark on this business, Randolph had choice recipes for cologne and dish soap as well as pies and soup, attentive to the total household, not just the dining room.

Randolph’s book both echoed the preexisting models of cookbooks published in her time and participated in establishing culinary norms for the elite and those who strove to entertain in the finest manner. While there were other more countercultural cookbooks in the antebellum era, such as temperance cookbooks and a few books that advocated a vegetarian diet, the majority remained true to alcohol-consuming and carnivorous American foodways.¹³ The cookbooks of early nineteenth-century America offered much practical advice but very little diversity in style of presentation and scant paragraphs of commentary on the culture that they served. With the end of the Civil War, however, came a transformation in cookbook styles.

In the mid-nineteenth century, innovations in printing and commercial advertising, as well as the transportation of goods—books among them—expanded the American reading audience. Most notably, the mechanization of typesetting speeded up production and thus made it easier to publish more books. The introduction of wood pulp paper in the 1850s also brought down the costs of production. Railroad networks brought these cheaper books to readers outside the Northeastern cultural centers. More people could both find and afford books.

Postwar industrialization brought rising incomes while the introduction of public schools and universities brought rising literacy rates. Together these trends produced a larger cohort of readers and book buyers, a group largely found in the middle class. The growth of a market for ever-increasing categories, types, and styles of household goods also helped create a demand for manuals and magazines that could help middle-class women and their servants manage the new abundance.

Nineteenth-century readers seem to have appreciated books that helped them navigate the daily business of life. Etiquette guides and books of house plans joined with the popular new monthly journals and magazines to keep readers up to date with contemporary fashions and values. While there are no collected sales figures for cookbooks in the nineteenth century, the trade journal Publishers Weekly appears to have listed cookbooks as “domestic economy” texts, a category that showed a marked expansion at the beginning of the twentieth century.¹⁴

The Grolier Club of New York, a society of self-described bibliophiles, included Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cookbook on its list of “100 influential American books printed before 1900.”¹⁵ It was the only cookbook on the list. These books clearly spoke to the reading class, those middle-class Americans involved in a wide range of self-improvement projects extending from intellectual enrichment to modern housing design. Servants, who tended to have low levels of literacy and little leisure, did not often read cookbooks. Instead, the books served as guides for women of the employer class in directing kitchen staff but also in establishing their own membership in a socioeconomic cohort.¹⁶

Many domestic commodities tied middle-class women to the world of commerce. Cookbooks gave women another way to connect the private and public sphere by showcasing food fashions from around the country and offering advice for perfect meals and management.¹⁷ For middle-class women, culinary work was descriptive and imperative rather than hands-on. Most of the owners and readers of cookbooks did not regularly cook whole meals for their families. Literate and with access to disposable income, the cookbook purchaser was most frequently a woman of the urban or small town middle class, a person unlikely to be found stirring pots or stoking fires to feed her family. She might enter the kitchen on the cook’s night out, or to prepare special treats for family occasions, but she was usually only responsible for choosing her family’s menu, not for making her choices edible.¹⁸

When she read cookbooks, then, the middle-class housewife did so as a reader, rather than as a worker. She may have taken inspiration from what she read to request new dishes from her hired cook, but she would also have read for interest and to keep current with the latest fashions in food. Introductions set a tone and helped the reader see herself as part of a particular culture with assumptions and expectations in common with social peers.

At the turn of the century the American middle class became tastemakers, never entirely displacing elites, but flexing economic muscle in a way that made publishers and other producers of consumer goods pay attention. Because they existed between classes, Americans who had some disposable income but could not be truly careless with money had more cause to think about distinction than either the very rich or the poor. Unable confidently to assume propriety, the middle class was the perfect market for items such as cookbooks that provided social guidance.¹⁹

Cookbooks identif...