Early in the 1980s, at one of the first Oxford University symposia on food, I was asked to speak on the subjects of American culinary history and the history of American cookbooks. As the founder and proprietor of Ann Arbor’s Wine and Food Library, America’s oldest antiquarian bookshop devoted solely to the culinary arts, I must have seemed like a logical choice for this kind of presentation. But whatever this sophisticated and international audience thought about my bona fides as a food historian, they were somewhat incredulous that I could speak on topics as odd as American culinary history and American cookbooks. They said America had no cuisine or culinary history to speak of; all we ate were hamburgers and fries, with ketchup! Having spent more than a year preparing for the lecture, I knew they were wrong. I came home determined to learn more about American culinary history and to share what I learned.

Enter John Dann, who was then director of the Clements Library for American history at the University of Michigan. John had been a client of my bookshop and obviously shared my passion for this aspect of American history. From the beginning, John agreed with my very broad definition of American culinary history as everything that influenced or influences America and everything that America influenced or influences in culinary matters. Shortly after I returned from Oxford, John asked if my husband, Professor Dan Longone, and I would present an exhibition of our culinary books at the Clements Library. Motivated, perhaps, by the same prejudices that characterized my audience at Oxford, we first planned to show European works, many of them beautifully bound and illustrated. But we realized that since Clements was an Americana library, we ought to show our American imprints. It was a momentous decision, as it turned out. We were surprised and dismayed to learn that no one had ever mounted such an exhibition accompanied by a scholarly catalogue. Ours would be the first. In 1984, Dan and I co-curated our first Clements exhibition, “American Cookbooks and Wine Books,” and co-authored the accompanying monograph. This first marked the start of our richly satisfying collaboration with the Clements Library.

By the mid-1980s, the Clements had a very small but select collection of culinary material. Over the next decade and a half, as volunteers at the library, we began to see a larger, more coherent collection emerge. We were happy to be part of the process! After all, Dan and I had spent much of our adult lives creating collections of books on food and wine intended to define the American culinary experience. In 2000, I accepted the pioneering position of Curator of American Culinary History with the mandate from John Dann to develop an unequalled research collection.

Tenure at the Clements proved to be quite an education. Dan and I soon realized that the meshing of the Clements holdings with our own collections would create the kind of archive that would fulfill John’s mandate and our vision; thus we donated our collections to the library. Over the years, many bookshop clients generously donated their collections as well. Dedicated volunteers, old friends and new, helped this project in other ways. Together, they have donated about 50,000 hours in the last ten years and, along with the Clements staff, have developed new methods of descriptive cataloging. Staff and volunteers now examine and catalogue not only the culinary archive but all of the rich Americana holdings in all divisions (books, manuscripts, maps, graphics) for their culinary content.

The Spring-Summer 2005 issue of The Quarto, the semi-annual newsletter sent to members of the Clements Library Associates, was devoted to the First Biennial Symposium on American Culinary History: Dedication of the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive and Inauguration of the Longone Center for American Culinary Research. Announcing the JBLCA, John Dann summed up the academic importance of culinary history:

Fifty years ago or more, wars were generally seen to be won or lost on the basis of military strategy or battlefield heroics. Today, historians are as likely to emphasize deficiencies in supply lines or perhaps disease caused by malnutrition … Historians are finally coming to realize that diet, the production of and commerce in foodstuffs, and cookery are not only important but are actually defining characteristics of a nation’s culture.

In 2010 the University of Michigan expressed its plans to establish culinary history as a scholarly research specialty.

This brief history of one archive, the JBLCA, is part of a larger story about the vitality and visibility of food studies. Culinary history classes and programs are increasingly reaching more students at all levels as well as interested amateurs throughout the United States and elsewhere. This would not be possible without the growth of culinary archives, which have preserved the historic literature in the field. Some are small, regional collections or are limited to a specific subject, but there are now a goodly number of broad and large archives available to the researcher. Significant institutional holdings now exist throughout the country, from New England to the West Coast, where they fuel new directions in diverse academic fields.

The range and diversity of the images below speak not only to the state of the field but also to the strength of the JBLCA; selecting highlights for this issue of Common-place was very difficult. Each image was chosen to represent many others in our holdings. The archive is notable for containing not only most of the essential “high spots” in the field, but for strong holdings for related areas of interdisciplinary study. It contains about 25,000 items, about one-third of which are cookbooks. The archive is a work in progress and not all of our holdings are yet cataloged. But cataloging continues apace and we add to the total every week.

 

Please click on any thumbnail below to view images.

 

 

 

 

 

This article originally appeared in issue 11.3 (April, 2011).

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Jan Longone, curator of American culinary history at the Clements Library, University of Michigan, and proprietor of the Wine and Food Library, an antiquarian bookstore, is a member of the editorial board or contributor to the Oxford Companion to Food, the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, The Quarto, Gastronomica, and the University of California series Studies in Food and Culture. In 2000, she received the Food Arts Silver Spoon Award in recognition of her scholarly determination to preserve and honor American culinary literature and her many other contributions to food history.

This year, 2011, is a great time to be a food historian. Over the past decade and more, hundreds of books, journals and essays on food history and food studies have been published. Conferences on food history occur regularly and whole societies dedicated to the study of food exist. Even television and radio programs on food history have become a commonplace, helping food scholars reach broader audiences. In addition, electronic technology gives us easy access to all kinds of sources that, before this boon, were difficult if not impossible to see, much less acquire. Having first indulged my intense curiosity about what people in the past did with food long before this swell of connected talk and texts, I have to admit to sometimes feeling puzzled as to why it all came about. Do we owe all this to Julia Child—who has been credited at some point or another for most of the changes in American food culture over the past decades—as well?

Probably not, although certainly her brilliant job of interpreting French recipes to American cooks has played some part. By interpreting, I do not mean translating from French to English, although she and her co-authors did that as well. No, I refer here to how she approached each recipe as if it were a living thing, to be opened up and understood for what it was, where it was, how it should be treated and what it could provide. In other words, she understood the culture of her recipes, which necessarily implicated the French culture as well as the regional and local cultures, and interpreted that culture in a way Americans could fully understand. Such interpretation went beyond the techniques of cooking, which at the time in which she wrote were daunting in and of themselves, and into the realm of mastery, as the title, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, suggests.

It is this business of interpretation with which I have struggled in trying to understand not only what people in the past ate but what, beyond bodily fuel, their food meant to them. Food is a part of our material culture, like anything else intentionally created by humans. As such, it possesses multiple cultural meanings within the culture in which it is made. Additional or different meanings may be attached to any aspect of material culture by those who use it, particularly if they are not in the culture of origination. Getting at those meanings for any material thing is difficult, and it is even more so for the impermanent past, those things like food, music and the landscape that start disappearing as soon as they are made, or continually change. We have the directions and/or instruments for making them, but for food we don’t have the ingredients. We can never grow the same hogs, turnips, apples or wheat that Americans ate in 1800. Unlike a chair, a painting or a building, the actual edible past cannot be explored with our senses. And, although people of the past spent a large portion of every day growing, processing, preparing and eating food, they seldom wrote what they thought about the meaning of it all. That is a recent phenomenon.

I have approached meaning in several ways, many of them examining what people wrote about meals they ate or foods they saw, how people shared or hoarded food, how they wrote about the people who ate—or didn’t eat—certain foods, how people ranked foods (from animal fodder to fit for a king), how they argued about foods, what laws they passed about the production, distribution, preparation or consumption of food, and finally, the directions they left for making their foods. All of these approaches have been more or less successful in getting at part of the meaning of particular foods at certain points in time and space. They have revealed facts and feelings about food and eating that were not known. I’m not sure, however, that I adequately interpreted the past to the present.

Interpreters are couplers. They enable the two people, groups, or cultures to understand each other because they understand both. While the methods mentioned above can facilitate a further understanding of past food cultures, what about the other part of the connection—between people today and in the future? The historical interpreter has the unusual task of coupling people in one group about which she can only know a part, one group she knows well, and, if she publishes her interpretation in any form, one group in the future, about which she cannot know. The question is, then, not only what can we learn about meanings in the past, but how can we interpret those meanings to people today and in the future?

 

Amelia Simmons, American Cookery

Of all aspects of food history, recipes are the most difficult to interpret. Lists of ingredients, sometimes with, sometimes without measurements or directions, they can too readily become mirrors in which we see the present instead of the past. In fact, that may be easier to do with recipes from the mid-eighteenth century forward that are written in a more standardized, modern English. The easier they are to understand—the more familiar they seem to us—the easier it is to telescope the present into the past and assume that cooks today find the same meaning in their foods and techniques as cooks of the past. So how does one interpret a recipe or even a cookbook, helping people of the present to communicate with the past in a way in which both maintain their integrity and the former understands the latter for what it was?

Take, for example, what is usually described as the first published American cookbook, Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery. Published in 1796 in Hartford, Connecticut, it included recipes using natural ingredients indigenous to North America, such as maize and cranberries, and formulated ingredients credited to Americans, such as potash. One or more of these facts is usually the basis for its distinction. It was neither the first cookbook published in America (a 1742 reprint of the English cookbook, Compleat Housewife, by Eliza Smith) nor the first cookbook published for North Americans (an English cookbook by Susannah Carter retitled The Frugal Colonial Housewife [emphasis supplied] for its 1772 Boston printing) as opposed to citizens of the British Empire, although technically the term colonial housewife could include women in Ireland, India and other British colonies. Not much is known about Simmons other than what she stated in the preface: she was an American orphan who wrote the book so that other poor orphans or women like herself could teach themselves to be cooks in wealthier households. Whether Simmons was actually an American, a woman, or an orphan is unknown. Given the practice of exaggeration, dissimulation and plagiarizing in publishing at the time, such biographical stories should be noted more for what they say than their accuracy.

American Cookery’s first-ness is usually why authors cite it, although scholars such as Elizabeth M. Scott have examined it for other reasons, such as its mention of culinary material culture, or as an historical example of a political text in which “an isolated recipe is clearly the least interesting aspect of what [it] has to offer,” with its greater importance being “the relationship of recipes to each other, to complementary texts, and to political contexts.” This latter statement is striking, although not so much for its blunt character as for what it reveals about the nature of food scholarship. Taken in groups, recipes may reveal something from their time period of importance, such as the formation of a national identity or shifting social attitudes or changing consumption patterns or time. Single recipes themselves, however, hold no interest. This attitude rumbles around in academic—not just food studies—circles. I have come up against it while at the same time operating under a variant of it myself. It is time to question why.

Several answers come to mind. Perhaps it’s true. Recipes are just lists, nothing more, and therefore meaningless in and of themselves. Hmmm, I’m sure economic and other historians would be surprised to hear this. Maybe we are still rubbing up against a bias against the importance of women’s work that, while greatly depleted over the last 40 or so years, is not completely empty and holds a few odds and ends, like recipes and ironing. Is the single recipe a sort of territorial demarcator defining the rough and foggy terrain between academics and others? Chefs, dietitians and, yes, home cooks use single recipes; scholars do not. This could be because professional groups need ways to distinguish themselves from others, but … really?

Maybe, just maybe, we have not yet figured out how to interpret those individual recipes. Anything but user-friendly, rather than resembling a little black box that refuses to reveal its inner landscape, a single recipe seems more like a perfectly clean, frameless, floating, and therefore nearly invisible, window. Rather than stopping short at the surface, our vision whisks right through it and out the other side. We see nothing, unless an exotic ingredient, an unfamiliar technique or something else visible to the modern eye sullies its surface. In short, perhaps because individual recipes are so familiar to us, in form, in content, and for the images and memories they conjure up, they challenge historical interpretation. We think we know exactly what they are and therefore find them of little use other than in cooking. To me, this is like going to England. Most people would think me mad if I, a native English speaker, requested an interpreter for my visit there. Yet, as one of my mentors is fond of saying, “We speak the same language but we are an ocean apart.”

Freeman Tilden’s Interpreting Our Heritage

A possible solution to this dilemma may lie in the work of Freeman Tilden. A nonfiction and fiction writer by trade, Tilden became interested in state and national parks and the way in which park employees interpreted their natural and historical beauty. He was 58 years old and it was 1941. He began what became a four-decade career of writing about the parks and then about his philosophy of interpretation. That philosophy is applicable to many types of interpretation, including historical interpretation. Indeed, his 1957 text Interpreting Our Heritage has been a primer for interpreters at those sites ever since.

Six basic principles form Tilden’s philosophy:

1. Any interpretation that does not somehow relate what is being displayed or described to something within the personality or experience of the visitor will be sterile.

2. Information, as such, is not interpretation. Interpretation is revelation based upon information. But they are entirely different things. However, all interpretation includes information.

3. Interpretation is an art which combines many arts, whether the materials presented are scientific, historical, or architectural. Any art is in some degree teachable.

4. The chief aim of interpretation is not instruction but provocation.

5. Interpretation should aim to present a whole rather than a part and must address itself to the whole man rather than to any phase.

6. Interpretation addressed to children (say, up to the age of twelve) should not be a dilution of the presentation to adults but should follow a fundamentally different approach. To be at its best it will require a separate program.

Straightforward enough, these guidelines are prefaced by two other pieces of advice: first, that “interpretation is the revelation of a larger truth that lies behind any statement of fact” and second, that “interpretation should capitalize mere curiosity for the enrichment of the human mind and spirit.” Additionally, they are accompanied by several essays that further explain how to—and not to—employ them. Written in the 1950s at a time when history textbooks stressed facts and great men, Tilden’s prose takes the imbalance to task, urging a more harmonious blend of art and science, a wider consciousness of viewers and listeners, and a broader contextualization of the subject at hand within the human experience, writ large. As if this weren’t a tall enough order, it reminds the reader that “the recreation of the past, and a kinship with it” is the goal of all ideal interpretation. The changes that have taken place within American museums and national parks over the last several decades reflect these goals.

It is all well and good to have such lofty goals when interpreting the breathtaking grandeur of Yellowstone Park or the quiet activities of the figures on an exquisite ancient Greek vase. The Yellowstone area was set aside as a national park for that very reason; the vase is in the museum precisely because of its incredible, silent beauty that speaks immediately to humans around the globe and through time. But what about the rest of our heritage that is neither sublime, breathtaking, nor an important part of our nation’s story? Like, for example, the recipe? What would Tilden have to say about it? Yes, you are right, my interpretive guidelines will only work for those parts of our heritage that are important enough to be set aside in parks or museums? Or, yes, you are right, this method will only work on objects and not words, overlooking the fact that a recipe is an object? Just his life story will give us the answers to these questions. Anyone who worked energetically from the age of 58 well into his nineties to revolutionize historical and cultural interpretation was not the kind of man who would have been frightened by a recipe or a cookbook. Nor would he have dismissed either as too lowly. And he certainly wouldn’t have found them uninteresting.

Freeman, Meet Amelia

But what would he have done? Well, of course he would have applied his six principles. Rearranged for speedy application they are:

1. Accumulate facts.

2. Experience revelation.

3. Interpret the whole artistically.

4. Communicate the results in a provocative manner which appeals to the whole person and relates to universal human traits or experiences.

Right.

The Recipe

Since numerous scholars have examined the uniquely American facets of American Cookery, I’ve chosen a recipe that does not have such a distinction, or at least that scholars have not yet determined to have, although some of the ingredients became significant in American culture in the ensuing decades:

To stuff a Turkey

Grate a wheat loaf, one quarter of a pound butter, one quarter of a pound salt pork, finely chopped, 2 eggs, a little sweet marjoram, summer savory, parsley and sage, pepper and salt (if the pork be not sufficient,) fill the bird and sew up.

The same will answer for all Wild Fowl.

Waterfowls require onions.

(Some of) The Facts

One can go in two directions in gathering the facts surrounding this recipe: outward to the context of the cookbook, its author, the time period in which she wrote it, and the tradition of which it was a part; and inward to the ingredients, proportions, techniques, and other characteristics of the recipe itself. The basic outward facts have been given above, so for now, we’ll go to the recipe itself. At first glance, it appears to be very much like stuffed turkey recipes today, with its bread, fat, quartet of herbs that today are known as poultry seasoning, pepper and salt to taste, and deceptively simple “sew up.” It even has some measurements. A wheat loaf would likely have been a one-pound loaf and, since the recipe doesn’t call for a “fine wheaten loaf,” it would have been whole wheat. By 1796, the ounce and pound were standardized, so a quarter of a pound of salt pork was a commonly understood quantity. That is not to say, though, that scales, particularly those of merchants, were calibrated and sealed by public authorities to assure that it actually was a common quantity.

 

While American Cookery doesn’t explain the qualities of bread, it does describe some of the other ingredients in this recipe. With all poultry, females were preferred. The hen turkey, it said, was “higher and richer flavor’d, easier fattened and plumper—they are no odds in the market.” Freshness could be determined in all birds by a tight vent and a fresh smell. Young birds had smooth legs and combs whereas old ones had “speckled rough legs.” The best butter looked “tight, waxy, [and] yellow” and if gotten from a firkin, should come from the center where it wouldn’t be in contact with the oils in the wood which were usually present, even if the firkin was made of old used oak. The best eggs—”clear, thin shell’d, longest oval and shapt ends are best”—had to be hand-candled or put in water. Fresh eggs laid “on their bilge” while stale ones “bob[ed] up and end.” “Addled” eggs rose to the water’s surface and weren’t to be used.

The book lists parsley as a vegetable as well as an herb and devotes more text to it than any other food except potatoes and apples, giving directions for winter cultivation and storage. Simmons knew of three varieties of parsley and preferred the “thickest and branchiest” and felt it “good in soups, and to garnish roast Beef, excellent with bread and butter in the spring.” Sweet marjoram was only for turkeys, summer savory for turkeys, sausages, salted beef and pork legs; and sage, although used in cheese and pork, was “not generally approved.”

Unlike recipes today, this one doesn’t tell the cook what to do with the turkey once it is stuffed. Although it is listed with roast mutton, veal, and lamb, a recipe for stuffing and roasting fowl succeeds it and calls for a very different stuffing, one with beef suet rather than salt pork, no parsley or sage and a gill (one half cup) of wine. The trussed, stuffed bird, after being hung “down to a steady solid fire,” needed constant basting with salt water until steam came out of its breast. Variations of this recipe suggest substituting parsley “done with potatoes” for the other herbs or stuffing the entire bird with three pints of potatoes mashed with sweet herbs, butter, pepper and salt. Potatoes, according to Simmons, took “rank for universal use, profit and easy acquirement” and Irish potatoes better than any other.

Finally, although the book gives some descriptive information about different kinds of waterfowl, that kind of detail doesn’t seem important at this point. As for onions, while Madeira white onions had a “softer” flavor, the “high red, round hard” onions were superior. For economy, the largest ones were best; for taste, the smallest had the “most delicate” taste and were “used at the first tables.”

Revelation

Tilden offers some insight into what he believed to be enlightened interpretation. It addressed the whole story, not just the facts, and that whole story blended history and spirituality. Quoting Jacques Barzun, he wrote “‘The use of History is not external but internal. Not what you can do with history, but what history does to you, is its use.'” Interpretation, by its very nature, is highly personal and therefore, unlike facts, highly variable. One source can prompt many interpretations, all of them sound. This is why this part seems so difficult. It asks us to mind the facts but stray beyond them to find how they make a more comprehensible whole. For people trained in any aspect of the scientific method, this requires courage and, yes, faith—in oneself if nothing else.

As with other forms of revelation, this quest may be made easier by asking a few questions. Why, I wonder, does this recipe simply give directions for stuffing the turkey and not cooking it? Was it intended to be roasted but, in classic eighteenth-century style, the author or publisher assumed readers would know that? Or didn’t it matter? If it didn’t matter, then why was this recipe directly followed by another one specifically for stuffing and roasting? Another careless editorial mistake? If sage was undesirable, why put it in the stuffing? And last, but certainly not least, why do waterfowl require onions and landfowl not?

While all of these questions are good and I would like to pursue them sometime, it is the last question that intrigues me the most, in part because most turkey stuffing recipes today call for onions. And it is one of those questions for which there may not be a definitive answer. It seems to me that this point is the key point of Tilden’s interpretive scheme. Most historians today, I would suggest most inquisitive people today, are fact-oriented. Living in a science-based culture, when we have questions, we want answers. But remember what stage of the plan we are at. We have already gathered all of our facts, and so these questions don’t have to be answered. They are, so to speak, revelational questions, ones that help us dig deeper into the recipe to understand it and the culture that created it. Questions we ask of the past seek explanation of what we don’t understand and, thus, expose the differences that have been hidden by the similarities. They are the couplers, if you will. More than glue, nails or clamps that simply hold two things together, couplers connect in such a way as to allow communication.

Artistic interpretation

Artistry is a word seldom used in teaching people how to be historians. To those people who believe history to be a social science, it may be a word that should never be used. Not a graduate of any formal, “scientific” school of human studies, Tilden took a classical philosophical approach to history, suggesting that interpreters focus on the form of a thing rather than the material with which it was made, because the form is the essence. In the nineteenth century, writers called this Truth, a term dropped by historians and others sometime in the last sixty years or so. Even more shocking in this post-modern period, Tilden insisted that any good interpreter “will be somewhat of a poet.” Furthermore, he believed everyone capable of it.

This is another point at which an interpreter can misstep, for it is very easy to mistake form for shadow. Form is the essential nature of a thing, what it must have in order to be that thing no matter the time or the place. A shadow is the shape created when the material of a thing stands in the light. In this exercise, the material is the facts. At this point, it is essential to not be artistic with the facts. This can all too easily lead to what is euphemistically called “poetic license” and end up in factual distortion. A recipe must have two parts—ingredients and procedure. This is its form, which is universally recognized and understood, and Tilden believes that using it to arrange or frame the facts for better viewing is the artistic act.

What makes this recipe so interesting to me is how flexible and inflexible ingredients and procedure are at one and the same time. The stuffing ingredients are specific but they can be used in any kind of bird. Any kind of bird, that is, except waterfowl. Waterfowl requireonions. While we can understand the grouping of birds by habitat, why was it habitat and not how the birds lived, such as in domestic captivity or in the wild, that divided them? Why did Amelia Simmons build the wall between them with onions? What was it about those waterfowl, domestic or wild, that demanded onions when no other birds did? Were they thought toxic without them? Or, what was it about onions that made them the necessary accompaniment to waterfowl? Or, was it neither the waterfowl nor the onions but the eaters whose acculturated senses of taste made them relish waterfowl with onion stuffing and reject as unpalatable anything less? Or, was it something else that we can’t begin to imagine?

Appealing to the whole person

This artistic process has brought forth questions that suggest a larger and more universal appeal. From these questions can be taken interpretive lenses that look at how people organize their organic world (water or land) and why; what they see as harmonious or jarring in their world (waterfowl with onions or landfowl with onions) and why; how they organize themselves (who will and won’t eat waterfowl without onions) and why; and what these questions have to do with culture, taste and what happens every time someone sits down to a table to eat. That is a larger interpretive point; as Tilden would say, “a whole picture” that readers or listeners will understand and take away.

Well, okay. Fine. But was it really necessary to go through all of these steps just to end up with what everyone already knows—that food, taste, cooking and recipes all go together? Why not just skip to that and save yourself a good deal of time, energy and hard work? I think Tilden would say, in fact Tilden does say in so many words, that the story is only the beginning and not the end. Think here of a murder mystery or a romance. Before you even open up the book or start watching the movie you know that someone has been killed or two people will fall in love. So although for the interpretive approach, the story is the point, for telling the story, it’s not the point. The facts are. They are the details that flesh out the story and make it unique. By skipping to the end and avoiding the process, you end up with just another fact—food, taste, cooking, and recipes are related—that has lost its human, or in Tilden’s words, spiritual, dimension. The connection between the present and past, the communication between the two, has failed.

Further reading

The “first American cookbook” by Amelia Simmons, American Cookery (Hartford, Conn., 1796), can be accessed electronically at www.fullbooks.com/American-Cookery.html. Important commentators on Simmons’s book include Elizabeth M. Scott, “‘A Little Gravy in the Dish and Onions in a Tea Cup’: What Cookbooks Reveal About Material Culture,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 1 (2) (1997): 131-155, and Glynnis Ridley, “The First American Cookbook,”Eighteenth-Century Life 23 (1999): 114-123. For Freeman Tilden’s helpful remarks on parsing the past, see Interpreting Our Heritage 4th ed., R. Bruce Craig, ed., (Chapel Hill, 2007).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 11.3 (April, 2011).

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The following recipes have been extracted from assorted cookbooks published during the Age of Experiment. Most recipes predating 1840 were designed for hearthside cookery; those post-1840, for cookstove preparation. As you will see, they are facsimiles, reprinted here exactly as they were written for nineteenth-century cooks. The challenge and pleasure of updating them for the twenty-first century kitchen are yours. Bon appétit!

Soups

 

Black Bean Mock Turtle Soup

Take the usual quantity of beans (the Spanish, a black bean) wash them, put them into the pot with the proper quantity of water, boil them until thoroughly done, then dip the beans out of the pot and press them through a colander, return into the water of the pot in which the beans are boiled, the flour of the beans thus pressed through the colander, tie up some Thyme, put it in the pot, and let it simmer a few minuts, then boil a few eggs hard, take the shells off, quarter the eggs and put them into the soup, together with a sliced lemon, and season with pepper and salt and butter, and you will have a soup so nearly approaching the flavor of the real turtle soup, that few, except for the absence of the meat, would be able to distinguish the difference. Those who like wine in their soup, can, of course, add it, so as to suit their taste.

This bean is called the ‘Black Dwarf,’ and was we believe, introduced into our country by that friend of agriculture, Mr. George Law, of our city, to whom the farming public is indebted for many good things before and since. The American Farmer, 3, 2 (June 1848), p. 390.

 

Butter Bean Soup 1

Butter beans should be full grown, but tender. Hull them, rinse and boil them tender, in clear water, with a little salt. Thicken the soup with butter, flour, pepper and cream, and serve it up with toasts or crackers. Mrs. Lettice Bryan, The Kentucky Housewife (Cincinnati: Shepard & Stearns, 1839), p. 22

 

Butter Bean Soup 2

Boil a fat young fowl till about half done; then put in your butter beans, and boil them with the fowl till all are done, seasoning it sufficiently with salt, pepper and butter. Mash the beans to a pulp, make it into small cakes, and put over them yolk of egg and flour. Remove the skin from the fowl mince the breast and some of the other parts, and put them in the soup, with the cakes; stir in enough flour and cream to thicken it, boil it up, and serve it. Dried butter bean soup may be made in either of these ways, after parboiling them in clear water. Mrs. Lettice Bryan, The Kentucky Housewife (Cincinnati: Shepard & Stearns, 1839), p. 22.

 

Catfish Soup

An excellent dish for those who have not imbibed a needless prejudice against those delicious fish Take two large or four small white catfish that have been caught in deep water, cut off the heads, and skin and clean the bodies; cut each in three parts, put them in a pot, with a pound of lean bacon, a large onion cut up, a handful of parsley chopped small, some pepper and salt, pour in a sufficient quantity of water, and stew them till the fish are quite tender but not broke; beat the yolks of four fresh eggs, add to them a large spoonful of butter, two of flour, and half a pint of rich milk; make all these warm and thicken the soup, take out the bacon, and put some of the fish in your tureen, pour in the soup, and serve it up. Mrs. Mary Randolph, The Virginia Housewife: or, Methodical Cook (Baltimore: Plaskitt, Fite & Co., 1838), p. 19.

 

Cold Cherry Soup

Boil a pound of stoned cherries with sugar, until soft, and put by. Bruise the stones, and pour over them a quart of water, a piece of cinnamon, and some lemon-peel; let it boil for a quarter of an hour, add to it a bottle of wine and a half a pound of sugar, and let it cool; then pour this liquid over the boiled cherries and some broken crackers into the tureen. William Volmer, The United States Cook Book (Philadelphia: John Weick, 1859), p. 25.

 

To Make a Chowder

1st. Procure a hard-fleshed fish, like a striped bass—than which nothing is better—one of six pounds will be sufficient for an ordinary family. Clean the fish in the coldest well water; split it from head to tail, and cut it then into pieces, half as large as your hand.

2d. An old-fashioned round-bottomed pot is indispensable.

3d. Take half a pound of salt pork, slice it and fry it in the pot; then remove the pork, leaving the fat.

4th. Make a layer in the pot of pieces of fish; then season this with a little salt, red and black pepper, and a little (only a little,) ground cloves and mace, on this sprinkle a small quantity of chopped onions, and a part of the friend pork chopped or cut into fine pieces.

5th. Cover this with a layer of split crackers.

6th. Another layer of fish, seasoning, chopped onions, and pork, as above.

7th. Another layer of cracker, and so continue till all the fish is used, letting the top layer be of crackers.

8th. Pour into the pot just water enough to cover the whole, set it on the fire and let it simmer half an hour or so till the fish is tender to the touch of a fork. Great care should be taken that it does not come to a hard boil, but keep it at just the boiling point. Then removed the fish, crackers and all, with a skimmer, to a deep dish, leaving the gravy in the pot.

9th. Thicken the gravy with pounded crackers, add to it the juice of a lemon, half a tumblerful of good claret, and if it needs more seasoning, a little red and black pepper to your taste.

10th. Pour the gravy over the fish and crackers and all; garnish the dish with clices of lemon, serve warm, eat, and return thanks. American Farmer’s Magazine 12 (January 1859), 57-58.

 

Clam Chowder

Procure a bucket of clams and have them opened: then have the skin taken from them, the black part of their heads cut off, and put them into clean water. Next proceed to make your chowder. Take half a pound of fat pork, cut it into small thin pieces and try it out. Then put into the pot (leaving the pork and drippings in) about a dozen potatoes, sliced then some salt and pepper, and add half a gallon of water. Let the whole boil twenty minutes and while boiling put in the clams a pint of milk and a dozen hard crackers, split. Then take off your pot, let it stand a few minutes. Clams should never be boiled in a chowder more than five minutes; three is enough, if you wish to have them tender. If they are boiled longer than five minutes they become tough and indigestible as a piece of India rubber. Too much seasoning is offensive to many people, the ladies especially. Excursion Letters from Mr. [Nathan] Willis Number XIV, Home Journal 38, 188 (September 15, 1849), p. 2.

 

Fine Clam Soup

Take half a hundred or more small sand clams, and put them into a pot of hard-boiling water. Boil them about a quarter of an hour, or till all the shells have opened wide. Then take them out, and having removed them from the shells, chop them small and put them with their liquor into a pitcher. Strain a pint of the liquor into a bowl, and reserve it for the soup. Put the clams into a soup-pot, with a gallon of water, and half pint of the liquor; a dozen whole pepper-corns, half a dozen blades of mace; but no salt, as the clam liquor will be salt enough; add a pinto of grated bread-crumbs, and the crusts of the bread cut very small; also a tea-spoonful of sweet-marjoram leaves. Let the soup boil two hours. Then add a quarter of a pound of fresh butter, divided into half a dozen pieces, and each piece rolled slightly in flour. Boil it half an hour longer, and then about five minutes before you take up the soup, stir in the beaten yolks of three eggs.

As the flavour will be all boiled out of the chopped claims, it will be best to leave them in the bottom of the soup-pot, and not serve them up in the tureen. Press them down with a broad wooden ladle, so as to get as much liquor out of them as possible, while you are taking up the soup. This soup will be better still, if made with milk instead of water; milk being an improvement to all fish-soups. Miss Leslie, The Lady’s Receipt-Book (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1847), pp. 13-14.

 

Dixie Soup [Chicken & Oyster Soup]

Cut up a chicken and put it, with a sliced onion, into a soup pot; fry it brown in a little hot butter or lard; then pour on it 3 quarts of water, and boil it slowly until the meat separates from the bones. Skim off all grease, and remove the bones; add 1 pint of oyster liquor, and boil for 30 minutes; then add 1 quart of oysters. When the gills turn, stir 1 table-spoon of butter, rolled in flour, to thicken the soup. Put some nicely toasted bread, cut into squares, into the tureen; pour upon them the soup, and serve. Knuckle of veal or rabbits can also be prepared in this manner. Miss Tyson, The Queen of the Kitchen; a Collection of ‘Old Maryland’ Family Receipts for Cooking (Philadelphia: T. B. Petterson & Brothers, 1874), p. 93.

 

Duck Soup

Half roast a pair of fine large tame ducks; keeping them half an hour at the fire, and saving the gravy, the fat of which must be carefully skimmed off. Then cut them up; season them with black pepper; and put them into a soup-pot with four or five small onions sliced thin, a small bunch of sage, a thin slice of cold ham cut into pieces, a grated nutmeg, and the yellow rind of a lemon pared thin, and cut into bits. Add the gravy of ducks. Pour on, slowly, three quarts of boiling water from a kettle. Cover the soup-pot, and set it over a moderate fire. Simmer it slowly (skimming it well) for about four hours, or till the flesh of the ducks is dissolved into small shreds. When done, strain it through a sieve into a tureen over a quart of young green peas, that have been boiled by themselves. If peas are not in season, substitute half a dozen hard boiled eggs cut into round slices, white and yolk together.

If wild ducks are used for soup, three or four will be required for the above quantity. Before you put them on the spit to roast, place a large carrot in the body of each duck, to remove the sedgy or fishy taste. This taste will be all absorbed by the carrot, which, of course, must be thrown away. Miss Leslie, The Lady’s Receipt-Book (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1847), pp. 12-13.

 

Fish Stock

Take a pound of skate, four or five flounders, and two pounds of eels. Clean them well and cut them into piece: cover them with water; and season them with mace, pepper, salt, an onion stuck with cloves, a head of celery, two parsley-roots sliced, and a bunch of sweet herbs. Simmer an hour and a half closely covered, and then strain it off for use. If for brown soup, first fry the fish brown in butter, and then do as above. It will not keep more than two or three days. An Experienced Housekeeper, American Domestic Cookery (New York: Duyckinck, 1823), pp. 129-130.

 

Fish Chowder

Take a bass weighing four pounds, boil half an hour; take six slices raw salt pork, fry them till the lard is nearly extracted, one doz. Crackers soaked in cold water five minutes; put the bass into the lard, also the pieces of pork and crackers, add two onions chopped fine, cover close and fry for twenty minutes; serve with potatoes, pickles, apple sauce or mangoes; garnish with green parsley. Anon., The Cook Not Mad, or Rational Cookery (Watertown: Knowlton & Rice, 1831), p. 20.

 

Gumbo Soup, a favorite New Orleans Pottage

Take a fowl of good size, cut it up, season it with salt and pepper, and dredge it with flour. Take the soup kettle, and put in it a table spoonful of butter, one of lard, and one of onions chopped fine. Next fry the fowl till well browned and add four quarters of boiling water. The pot should now, being well covered, be allowed to simmer for a couple of hours. Then put in twenty or thirty oysters, a handful of chopped okra or gumbo, and a very little thyme, and let it simmer for half an hour longer. Just before serving it up, add about half a table spoonful of feelee powder. This soup is usually eaten with the addition of a little cayenne pepper, and is delicious. “Okra, and the Science of Soups,” Horticulturist and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste 2, 3 (September 1847), p. 118.

 

Jerusalem Artichoke Soup

Have a knuckle of veal (weighing about five pounds) for dinner. When all have dined, return the bones into the stewpan, with the liquor in which it was boiled, a nice, white onion, and two turnips. Boil some Jerusalem artichokes in milk, (skim milk will do,) then beat up all with the liquor, which, of course, must be first strained, then thickened with a small quantity of flour rubbed smooth in a tea cup, with a little milk. Use white pepper for the seasoning, to keep the color pure. Mrs. J. C. Croly, Jennie June’s American Cookery Book (New York: Excelsior Publishing House, 1878), p. 29.

 

Excellent Lobster Soup

Take the meat from the claws, bodies, and tails, of six small lobsters; take away the brown fur, and the bag in the head: beat the fins, chine, and small claws in a mortar. Boil it very gently in two quarts of water, with the crumb of a French roll, some white pepper, salt, two anchovies, a large onion, sweet herbs, and a bit of lemon-peel, till you have extracted the goodness of them all. Strain it off. Beat the spawn in a mortar, with a bit of butter, a quarter of a nutmeg and a tea-spoonful of flour; mix it with a quart of cream. Cut the tails into pieces, and give them a boil up with the cream and soup. Serve with forcemeat balls made of the remainder of the lobster, mace, pepper, salt; a few crumbs, and an egg or two. Let the balls be made up with a bit of flour, and heated in the soup. An Experienced Housekeeper, American Domestic Cookery (New York: Duyckinck, 1823), p. 130.

 

Maigre, or Vegetable Gravy

Put into a gallon stewpan three ounces of butter; sit it over a slow fire; while it is melting, clice four ounces of onion; cut in small pieces one turnip, one carrot, and a head of celery; put them in the stewpan, cover it close, let it fry till they are lightly browned; this will take about twenty-five minutes: have ready, in a saucepan, a pint of pease, with four quarts of water; when the roots in the stewpan are quite brown, and the pease come to a boil, put the pease and water to them; put it on the fire; when it boils, skim it clean, and put in a crust of bread about as big as the top of a twopenny loaf, twenty-four berries of all-spice, the same of black pepper, and two blades of mace; cover it close, let it simmer gently for one hour and a half; then set it from the fire for ten minutes; then pour it off very gently (so as not to disturb the sediment at the bottom of the stewpan) into a large basin; let it stand (about two hours) till it is quite clear: while this is doing, shred one large turnip, the red part of a large carrot, three ounces of onion minced and one large head of celery cut into small bits; put the turnips and carrots on the fire in cold water, let them boil five minutes, then drain them on a sieve, then pour off the soup clear into a stewpan, put in the roots, put the soup on the fire, let it simmer gently till the herbs are tender (from thirty to forty minutes), season it with salt and a little cayenne, and it is ready. You may add a table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup. You will have three quarts of soup, as well colored, and almost as well flavored, as if made with gravy meat. To make this it requires nearly five hours. To fry the herbs requires twenty-five minutes; to boil all together, one hour and a half; to settle, at the least, two hours; when clear, and put on the fire again half an hour more. A Boston Housekeeper, The Cook’s Own Book, and Housekeeper’s Register (Boston: Munroe & Francis, 1840), p. 206.

 

New England Chowder 1

Have a good haddock, cod, or any other solid fish, cut it in pieces three inches square, put a pound of fat salt pork in strips into the pot, set it on hot coals, and fry out the oil. Take out the pork, and put in a layer of fish, over that a layer of onions in slices, then a layer of fish with strips of fat salt pork, then another layer of onions, and so on alternately until your fish is consumed. Mix some flour with as much water as will fill the pot; season with black pepper and salt to your taste, and boil it for half an hour. Have ready some crackers soaked in water till they are a little softened; throw them into your chowder five minutes before you take them up. Serve in a tureen. Mrs. [Elizabeth] Ellet, The Practical Housekeeper (New York: Stinger & Townsend, 1857), p. 187.

 

New England Chowder 2

Cover the bottom of a pot with slices of boiled salt pork, with a little onions; on this place a layer of fish in large pieces, season with pepper, and cover it with a layer of biscuit soaked in milk, and a layer of sliced potatoes. Put above this another layer of pork, as before, with fish, &c., the biscuit being on the top of all. Pour in a pint and a half of water, cover, and boil it slowly an hour; then skim and turn it into a deep dish. Thicken the gravy with butter rolled in flour, and parsley. Mrs. [Elizabeth] Ellet, The Practical Housekeeper (New York: Stinger & Townsend, 1857), p. 187.

 

Okra Soup

The pods are of a proper size when two or three inches long, but may be used while they remain tender; if fit for use, they will snap asunder at the ends, but if they merely bend, they are too old, and must be rejected; for a few of such pods will spoil a dish of soup.

Take one peck, cut them across into very thin slices, not exceeding one-eight of an inch in thickness, but as much thinner as possible, as the operation is accelerated by their thinness; to this quantity of okra add about one-third a peck of tomatoes, which are first pealed and cut into pieces. This quantity can be increased or diminished, as may suit the taste of those for whom it is intended. A coarse piece of beef (a shin is generally made use of) is placed in a digester, with about two and a half gallons of water, and a very small quantity of salt. It is permitted to boil for a few moments, when the scum is taken off, and the okra and tomatoes thrown in.

These are all the ingredients absolutely necessary, and the soup thus made is remarkably fine. We, however, usually add some corn cut off from the tender roasting ears: the grains from three ears will be enough for the above quantity: we sometimes take about half a pint of Lima beans. Both of these improve the soup, but not so much as to make them indispensable; so far from it, that few add them. The most material thing to be attended to is the boiling, and the excellence of the soup depends almost entirely on this being faithfully done: for, if it be not boiled enough, however well the ingredients may have been selected, the soup will be very inferior, and give little idea of the delightful flavor it possesses when properly done. I have already directed that the ingredient be placed in a digester. This is decidedly the best vessel for boiling this, or any other soup in, but should there be no digester, then an earthen pot should be prepared; but on no account make use of an iron one, as it would turn the whole soup of a black color; the proper color being green, colored with the rich yellow of the tomatoes.

The time which is usually occupied in boiling okra soup is five hours. We put it on at 9 a.m, and take it off about 2 p.m., during the whole of which time it is kept boiling briskly; the cook at the same time stirring it frequently, and mashing the different ingredients. By the time it is taken off, it will be reduced to about one half; but as on the operation of the boiling being well and faithfully executed depends its excellence, I will state the criterion by which this is judged of:—the meat separates entirely from the bone, being done to rags, the whole appears as one homogenous mass, in which none of the ingredients are seen distinct, the object of this long boiling being thus to incorporate them. Its consistence should be about that of thick porridge. Mrs. Mary L. Edgeworth, The Southern Gardener and Receipt-Book (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. 1860), pp. 135-136.

 

Pepper-Pot

To three quarts of water put vegetables according to the season; in summer peas, lettuce, and spinach: in winter, carrots, turnips, celery: and onions in both. Cut small, and stew with two pounds of neck of mutton, or a fowl, and a pound of pickled pork, in three quarts of water, till quite tender.

On first boiling, skim. Half an hour before serving, add a lobster, or crab, cleared from the bones. Season with salt and Cayenne. A small quantity of rice should be put in with the meat. Some people choose very small suet dumplings boiled with it. Should any fat rise, skim nicely, and put half a cup of water with a little flour.

Pepper-pot may be made of various things, and is understood to be a due proportion of fish, flesh, fowl, vegetables, and pulse. An Experienced Housekeeper, American Domestic Cookery (New York: Duyckinck, 1823), p. 126.

 

Red Pea Soup

One quart of peas, one pound of bacon, (or a hambone,) two quarts of water, and some celery, chopped; boil the peas, and, when half done, put in the bacon; when the peas are thoroughly boiled, take them out and rub them through a cullender or coarse sieve; then put the pulp back into the pot with the bacon, and season with a little pepper and salt, if necessary. If the soup should not be thick enough, a little wheat flour may be stirred in. Green peas may be used instead of the red pea. [Sarah Rutledge], The Carolina Housewife, or House and Home: by a Lady of Charleston (Charleston: W. R. Babcock & Co., 1847), p. 44.

 

Squirrel Soup

Take two fat young squirrels, skin and clean them nicely, cut them into small pieces, rinse and season them with salt and pepper, and boil them till nearly done. Beat an egg very light, stir it into half a pint of sweet milk, add a little salt, and enough flour to make it a stiff batter, and drop it by small spoonfuls into the soup, and boil them with the squirrels till all are done. Then stir in a small lump of butter, rolled in flour, a little grated nutmeg, lemon and mace; add a handful of chopped parsley and half a pint of sweet cream; stir it till it comes to a boil, and serve it up with some of the nicest pieces of the squirrels. Soup may be made in this manner of small chickens, pigeons, partridges and pheasants. Mrs. Lettice Bryan, The Kentucky Housewife (Cincinnati: Shepard & Stearns, 1839), p. 14.

 

Turtle Soup

Your turtle must be cleaned and prepared for the soup the day before you make it. Let the meat lie in weak salt water all night; early in the morning put it on the fire, about two gallons of water to a moderate sized turtle. Let it boil steadily but very slowly about four hours. Then put two potatoes, two small onions, one turnip and one carrot, all cut up very small, (these should be put in a cloth,) and let them boil until you put in the thickening. A tea-spoonful of cloves and as much ground black pepper, if not strong, a small table-spoonful. A tea-spoonful cayenne pepper, a table-spoonful of salt and the same of sweet marjoram, summer savory and thyme. If this is not enough to your taste, add more, two middle sized nutmegs. Boil all these until the soup is reduced one-half; then take out the cloth of vegetables and the turtle, and pick the latter clean, cut it into pieces large enough to eat with your soup, and return it to the pot, and afterwards mix three or four table-spoonsful of browned flour, with half a pound of butter; add this to the soup-let this be very smooth, or your soup will be covered with small black floating particles. Put two table-spoonsful of catsup and one-half pint of white wine. These last must be to your taste. In making turtle soup the lower shell should be boiled with the soup.

With [turtle] soup have always forcemeat balls; to make which take a pound and a half of veal not cooked, chop it fine, put a small quantity of beef, salt, some crumbs of bread, say half as much as meat-season the mixture highly with sage, sweet herbs and pepper, nutmeg and salt, roll the balls round and then flatten them and fry them in butter a light brown, and when the soup is ready to be served drop them in: either celery tops or parsley in small quantity is an improvement to the soup; they must be cut very small.

A lady. Southern Planter 4, 9 (September 1844), p. 203.

 

Fish and Seafood

 

Cat Fish

Cut each fish in two parts, down the back and stomach; take out the upper part of the back bone next the head; wash and wipe them dry, season with cayenne pepper and salt, and dredge flour over them; fry them in hot lard of a nice light brown. Some dress them like oysters; they are then dipped in beaten egg and bread crumbs and fried in hot lard. They are very nice dipped in beaten egg, without the crumbs, and fried. Lady of Philadelphia, The National Cook Book (Philadelphia: Hayes & Zell, 1856), p. 27.

 

Clam Bake, Steamer, or Bake Out

There is an Indian feast, quite common on the sea shore, that is known by either or all of these names. The Barnstable (Mass.) Patriot says it is got up in this wise:

It is prepared by first laying a bed of stone six or eight feet square, on which a fire is built and kept burning until the stones are red hot; a layer of wet sea weed is then thrown upon them and upon the sea weed a layer of quahaugs or clams. Over these is placed another layer of wet sea weed; on this layer, fish is laid stuffed and wrapped in cloths; and after another layer of sea weed vegetables may be put, or they may be placed between the fish and quahaugs. Over the whole is thrown a thick layer of sea weed which keeps in the steam which is generated by the heat of the stones, and which thoroughly penetrates the whole mass. In a short time the ‘bake’ is opened and all the culinary preparations are found completed ‘to a charm’ and ready for the table. In this way and with little trouble or time, a rich feast may be served for a large company. The Indians doubtless prepared their public dinners in this summary mode, and it is from them that their white brethren are indebted for this art in cookery. There is another way for preparing shell fish, probably derived from the same source, that is common on festive occasions in the villages on the south side of this town. It is called a ‘roast nut’ and is prepared by placing a large quantity of clams of quahaugs on the ground, joint downwards, and placing over them some light dry brush, which is set on fire and soon causes the clams or quahaugs to open their wide mouths just far enough to secure the prize within, without losing the delicious water. They are then taken up and are ready to serve. Thus a very large party may be provided with a dish of clams or quahaugs at the shortest notice in the most primitive style. Niles’ Weekly Register 2, 23 (August 5, 1837), 356.

 

To Fry Soft Shell Clams

When taken from the shell, and the black skin taken off, wash them in their own liquor, and lay them on a thickly folded clean cloth, to dry out the moisture; then have a pan of hot lard and butter, equal parts, roll the clams well in flour, and fill the pan, let them fry until one side is a fine brown, and before turning the other side, dredge it well with flour; serve with their own gravy. Grated horse-radish moistened with vinegar, to eat with them, and plain boiled or mashed potatoes. In city markets they will be found ready opened and cleaned. Mrs. T. J. Crown, Every Lady’s Cook Book (New York: Kiggins & Kellogg, 1854), p. 86.

 

Baked Cod

A fish weighing six or eight pounds is a good size to bake; it should be cooked whole to look well. Make a dressing of bread-crumbs, pepper, salt, parsley, and onion, and a little salt pork chopped fine; mix this up with one egg, fill the body, sew it up, lay it into a large pan; lay it across some strips of salt pork to flavor it; put one pinto of water and a little salt into the pan; bake it an hour and a half; baste it often with butter and flour. Dollar Monthly 20, 2 (August 1864), 156.

 

Slices of Cod-fish fried

Cut the middle or tail of the fish into slices nearly an inch thick, season them with salt and white pepper or Cayenne, flour them well, and fry them of a clear equal brown on both sides; drain them on a sieve before the fire, and serve them on a well-heated napkin, with plenty of crisped parsley round them. Or, dip them into beaten egg, and then into fine crumbs mixed with a seasoning of salt and pepper (some cooks add one of minced herbs,) before they are fried. Send melted butter and anchovy sauce to tabe with them. From 8 to 12 minutes to fry.

Obs.—This is a much better way of dressing the thin part of the fish than boiling it, and as it is generally cheap, it makes thus an economical, as well as a very good dish: if the slices are lifted from the frying-pan into a good curried gravy, and left in it by the side of the fire for a few minutes before they are sent to table, they will be found excellent—would be quite spoiled, if they are boiled with the fish. Garnish the dish with slices of hard boiled eggs, and serve with egg-sauce. Sarah Josepha Hale, Mrs. Hale’s New Book of Cookery (New York: H. Long & Brother, 1852), p. 35.

 

Crab Patties

Boil hard crabs, clean them nicely and pick out the white meat; season them with butter, pepper, and salt, and hard boiled yolk of egg grated; put in a few bread crumbs, give the mixture one boil, and fill crusts baked in patty-pans. Mrs. Sarah A. Elliott, Mrs. Elliott’s Housewife (New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1870), p. 35.

 

Lobster Salad

With a lobster weighing two pounds in the shell, cut one large head of fresh lettuce. Then, for the dressing, mix 6 table-spoonsful of olive oil, 6 tablespoonsful of vinegar, 2 table-spoonsful of sugar, 2 tea-spoonfuls of mustard, 1 tea-spoonful of salt, and 2 hard-boiled eggs. The mustard may be used either dry or wet, and should be rubbed with the oil before the vinegar and other ingredients are added. All of the articles must be of good quality, especially the oil; and then the preparation is delicious. Scientific American7, 8 (August 23, 1862), p. 117.

 

Mackerel Boiled

This fish loses its life as soon as it leaves the sea, and the fresher it is the better. Wash and clean them thoroughly (the fishmongers seldom do this sufficiently) put them into cold water with a handful of salt in it; let them rather simmer than boil; a small mackerel will be done enough in about a quarter of an hour; when the eye starts and the tail splits, they are done; do not let them stand in the water a moment after; they are so delicate that the heat of the water will break them. Flag of our Union 13, 23 (June 5, 1858), p. 183.

 

To stew Muscles [Mussels]

Open them, put them into a pan with their own liquor, to which add a large onion and some parsley with 2 table-spoonful of vinegar; roll a piece of butter in flour, beat an egg, and add it to the gravy, warming the whole up very gradually. Sarah Josepha Hale, Mrs. Hale’s New Book of Cookery (New York: H. Long & Brother, 1852), p.64.

 

Best Pickled Oysters

Take fine large oysters, put them over the fire with their own liquor, add to them a bit of butter, and let them simmer until they are plump and white; when they are so, take them up with a skimmer, have a large napkin folded, lay the oysters, each spread nicely out, on it; then take of the oyster liquor and vinegar equal parts—enough to cover the oysters, have a large stone pot or tureen, put in a layer of oysters, lay over it some whole pepper, allspice and cloves, and some ground mace, then add another layer of oysters, then more spice, and then a layer of oysters, and spice, until all are done; then pour over the oyster liquor and vinegar, let them stand one night, and they are done—the vinegar and liquor must be warm. Oysters prepared in this way, are delicious. American Farmer, and Spirit of the Agricultural Journals of the Day 1, 7 (Baltimore January 1846), 22.

 

Oyster Sausages

Shred very small a pound of the lean of a leg of mutton, and two pounds of beef suet; in larger bits, a pint and half of oysters; and very small, half a handful of sage, or savory. Mix all together with the liquor of the oysters; season it with pepper and salt, adding half a dozen pounded cloves, and a blade or two of beaten mace; break among it three eggs; and work up the whole with grated bread crumb. Make them up as they are wanted, either in skins or cakes, and fry them in butter. Priscilla Homespun, The Universal Receipt Book (Philadelphia: Isaac Riley, 1818), p. 67.

 

To Fry Perch

Small perch should be fried whole. Scale and clean them immediately after they are killed; rinse them clean in two or three waters, wipe them dry with a cloth, season them with salt and pepper, and sprinkle on them a little flour or fine Indian meal. Put some lard into a frying-pan, set it on the fire, and when it boils up, and then becomes still, put in your fish; turn them over once, but do not break them. As soon as they are a light brown and crisp on both sides, serve them up. Send with them to table a boat of plain melted butter, to be seasoned with catchup, &c., as may be preferred. Large black perch may be fried in this manner, having them first split in two. Mrs. Lettice Bryan, The Kentucky Housewife (Cincinnati: Shepard & Stearns, 1839), p. 149.

 

To Bake a Rock Fish

Rub the fish with salt, black pepper, and dust of cayenne, inside and out; prepare a stuffing of bread and butter, seasoned with pepper, salt, parsley and thyme; mix an egg in it, fill the fish with this, and sew it up or tie a string round it; put it in a deep pan, or oval oven and bake it as you would a fowl. To a large fish add half a pint of water; you can add more for the gravy if necessary; dust flour over and baste with butter. Any other fish can be baked in the same way. A large one will bake slowly in an hour and a half, small ones in half an hour. Elizabeth E. Lea, Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers (Baltimore: Cushings & Bailey, 1859), p. 35.

 

To Cook Shad

With iron the shad should never come in contact. A piece of planed plank, two feet long and one foot wide, with a skewer to impale the fish upon it, are all the culinary implements required. A fire of glowing coals, in front of which the shad is placed, gives you a shad cooked as shad should be. Apicus himself could desire nothing more delicious. Ballou’s Dollar 12, 1 (July 1860), p. 88.

 

 

Sheep’s-Head

This delicious fish is finer in the Norfolk, Virginia, market than any part of our country, and will not bear transportation without being packed in ice. After the fish is nicely cleaned and rinsed in two waters, put it on a fish-slice over a boiler of water, cover it and let it steam till perfectly done. When ready to serve, put in a dish with butter sauce poured over it. Garnish it with hard boiled eggs, cut in round slices, and curled parsley, and have butter sauce in the tureen to serve with it. Odenheimer, Worcester, or tomato sauce as an accompaniment. Mrs. Sarah A. Elliott, Mrs. Elliott’s Housewife (New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1870), pp. 24-25.

 

Shrimp Pie

To two quarts of peeled shrimps add two tablespoonfuls of butter, half a pint of tomato catsup, half a tumbler of vinegar; season high with black and cayenne pepper; salt to taste; put into an earthen dish; strew grated biscuit, or light bread crumbs very thickly over the top; bake slowly half an hour. This may be varied by using Irish potatoes boiled and mashed, in place of the bread crumbs; or use a layer of shrimps, then macaroni, previously soaked in hot sweet milk. Mrs. A. P Hill, Mrs. Hill’s New Cook Book (New York: Carleton, 1872), p. 44.

 

Stewed Fish, Hebrew Fashion

Take three or four parsley-roots, cut them into long thin slices, and two or three onions also sliced, boil them together in a quart of water until quite tender; then flavor it with ground white pepper, nutmeg, mace, and a little saffron, the juice of two lemons, and a spoonful of vinegar. Put in the fish, and let it stew for twenty, or thirty minutes; then take it out, strain the gravy, thicken it with a little flour and butter, have balls made of chopped fish, bread-crumbs, spices, and the yolk of one or two eggs mixed up together, and drop them into the liquor. Let them boil, then put in the fish, and serve it up with the balls and parsley-roots. Mrs. [Elizabeth] Ellet, The Practical Housekeeper (New York: Stinger & Townsend, 1857), p. 214.

 

Fowls

 

To roast Wild Fowl

The flavour is best preserved without stuffing. Put pepper, salt, and piece of butter, into each. Wild fowl require much less dressing than tame: they should be served of a fine colour, and well frothed up. A rich brown gravy should be sent in the dish: and when the breast is cut into slices, before taking off the bone, a squeeze of lemon, with pepper and salt, is a great improvement to the flavour. To take off the fishy taste which wild fowl sometimes have, put an onion, salt, and hot water into the dripping-pan, and baste them for the first ten minutes with this; then take away the pan, and baste constantly with butter. An Experienced Housekeeper, American Domestic Cookery (New York: Duyckinck, 1823), p. 117.

 

Duck

Clean and wipe dry your duck; prepare the stuffing thus; chop fine and throw into cold water three good sized onions; rub one large spoonful of sage leaves, add two ditto of bread crumbs, a piece of butter the size of a walnut, and a little salt and pepper, and the onions drained. Mix these well together, and stuff the duck abundantly. Always keep on the legs of a duck; scrape and clean the toes and legs, and truss them against the sides. The duck should be kept a few days before cooking to become tender. Three quarters of an hour is generally enough for an ordinary sized duck. Dredge and baste like a turkey. A nice gravy is made by straining the drippings; skim off all the fat; then stir in a spoonful of browned flour, a teaspoonful of mixed mustard, and wine glass full of claret; simmer this for ten minutes. Serve hot. With the duck currant jelly is necessary. A Practical Housekeeper, Cookery as it Should Be (Philadelphia: Willis P. Hazard, 1856), p. 53.

 

Canvasback Duck

Of the two dozen species of American wild-ducks, none has a wider celebrity than that known as the canvas-back; even the eider-duck is less thought of, as the Americans care little for beds of down. But the juicy, fine flavored flesh of the canvas-back is esteemed by all classes of people; and epicures prize it above that of all other winged creatures, with the exception, perhaps, of the reed-bird or rice-bunting, and the prairie-hen. These last enjoy a celebrity almost, if not altogether equal. The prairie-hen, however, is the bon morceau of western epicures; while the canvas-back is only to be found in the great cities of the Atlantic. The reed-bird—the American representative of the ortolan—is also found in the same markets with the canvas-back. The flesh of all three of these birds—although the birds themselves are of widely different families—is really of the most kind; it would be hard to say which of them is the greatest favorite. The canvas-back is not a large duck, rarely exceeding three pounds in weight. Its color is very similar to the pochard of Europe; its head is a uniform deep chestnut, its breast black; while the back and upper part of the wings present a surface of bluish-gray, so lined and mottled as to resemble—though very slightly, I think—the texture of canvas; hence the trivial name of the bird. It is the roots of the wild celery that the flesh of the canvas-back owes it esteemed flavor, causing it to be in such demand that very often a pair of these ducks will bring three dollars on the markets of New York and Philadelphia. Littell’s Living Age 3, 490 (October 8, 1853), p. 86.

 

Chickens Fried in Batter

Make a batter of two eggs, a tea-cup of milk, a little salt, and thickened with flour; have the chickens cut up, washed and seasoned; dip the pieces in the batter separately, and fry them in hot lard; when brown on both sides, take them up on a dish, and make a gravy . . . Lard fries much nicer than butter, which is apt to burn. Elizabeth E. Lea, Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers (Baltimore: Cushings & Bailey, 1859), p. 27.

 

Chicken Corn Pie

First, prepare two chickens as for frying, then put them down and let them stew in a great deal of good, rich highly seasoned gravy until they are just done. Then, have ready picked two dozen ears of corn; take a very sharp knife and shave them down once or twice, and then scrape the heart out, with the rest already shaved down; then get a baking pan (a deep one,) and place a layer of the corn on the bottom of the pan or dish, then a layer of the chicken, with some of the gravy, and then a layer of the corn, and so on, until you get all of the chicken in. Then cover with the corn, and pour in all the gravy, and put a small lump of butter on the top, and set it to baking in not a very hot oven. It does not take long to cook; as soon as the corn is cooked, it will be ready to send to the table. It can either be sent in the pan it is baked in, or turned out into another dish. There must be a great deal of gravy, or it will cook too dry. Saturday Evening Post (September 26, 1857), p. 4.

 

Fowl Pillau

Put one pound of rice into a frying pan with two ounces of butter, which keep moving over a slow fire, until the rice is lightly browned; then have ready a fowl trussed as for boiling, which put into a stewpan, with five pints of good broth; pound in a mortar about forty cardamom seeds with the husks, half an ounce of coriander seeds, and sufficient cloves, allspice, mace, cinnamon, and peppercorns, to make two ounces in the aggregate; which tie up tightly in a cloth, and put into the stewpan with the fowl; let it boil slowly until the fowl is nearly done; then add the rice, which let stew until quite tender and almost dry; have ready four onions, which cut into slices the thickness of half crown pieces; sprinkle over with flour, and fry, without breaking them, of a nice brown color; have also six thin slices of bacon, curled and grilled, and two eggs boiled hard; lay the fowl upon your dish, which cover over with the rice, forming a pyramid; garnish with bacon, fried onions, and the hard-boiled eggs cut into quarters, and serve very hot. Mrs. [Elizabeth] Ellet, The Practical Housekeeper (New York: Stinger & Townsend, 1857) p. 362.

 

Quails Cured in Oil

Procure a sufficient number of fine, plump quails. Pluck them, draw them, clean them thoroughly, cut them open so that they will lie flat, as broiling, and rub them over with salt. Let them lie in the salt, turning them every morning, for three days. Let them dry; and then pack them down close in a stone jar, covering each layer of quails tightly with fresh gathered vine leaves. Fill the jar with pure salad oil, and cover it securely with bladder, so as quite to exclude the air. When they are wanted, take them out and broil them. They make a delicious dish for breakfast. S. Annie Frost, The Godey’s Lady’s Book Receipts and Household Hints (Philadelphia: Evans, Stoddart & Co., 1870), p. 136.

 

Meat

 

To broil Beef Steaks

The steaks should be from half to three-quarters of an inch thick, equally sliced, and freshly cut from the middle of a well kept, finely grained, and tender rump of beef. They should be neatly trimmed, and once or twice divided, if very large. The fire must be strong and clear. The bars of the gridiron should be thin, and not very close together. When they are thoroughly heated, without being sufficiently burning to scorch the meat, wipe and rub them with fresh mutton suet; next pepper the steaks slightly, but never season them with salt before they are dressed; lay them on the gridiron, and when done on one side, turn them on the other, being careful to catch, in the dish in which they are to be sent to table, any gravy which may threaten to drain from them when they are moved. Let them be served the instant they are taken from the fire; and have ready at the moment, dish, cover, and plates, as hot as they can be. From 8 to 10 minutes will be sufficient to broil steaks for the generality of eaters, and more than enough for those who like them but partially done.

Genuine amateurs seldom take prepared sauce or gravy with their steaks, as they consider the natural juices of the meat sufficient. When any accompaniment to them is desired, a small quantity of choice mushroom catsup may be warmed in the dish that is heated to receive them; and which, when the not very refined flavor of a raw eschalot is liked, as it is by some eaters, may previously be rubbed with one, of which the large end has been cut off. A thin slice or two of fresh butter is sometimes laid under the steaks, where it soon melts aand mingles with the gravy which flows from them. The appropriate tureen sauces for broiled beef steaks are onion, tomato, oyster, eschalot, hot horse-radish, and brown cucumber, or mushroom sauce. Sarah Josepha Hale, Mrs. Hale’s New Book of Cookery (New York: H. Long & Brother, 1852), pp. 88-89.

 

Beef a-la-mode (a Philadelphia Receipt)

Cut the bone out of a round of fresh beef, and put into several incisions a dressing made of bread-crumbs, sweet herbs, and two small onions, chopped fine, with seasoning of salt, pepper, mace, and butter. Lard the beef, and fasten up the slits, and tie it firmly with tape.

Put into a kettle a pint and a half of water, with a few slices of pork; and put in the beef, stuck with a few cloves; cover closely, and bake it several hours. When it is cooked through, dish it and pour over the gravy, which may be increased in quantity by the addition of a little boiling water, and flour to thicken it, with a spoonful of brown sugar, and a glass of wine. Serve this gravy in a tureen, moistening the meat with it, and garnishing with sliced carrots and beets, and parsley or celery. Mrs. [Elizabeth] Ellet, The Practical Housekeeper (New York: Stinger & Townsend, 1857), p. 264.

 

Jerking Meat

So pure is the atmosphere, in the interior of our continent that fresh meat may be cured, or jerked, as it is termed in the language of the prairies, by cutting it into strips about an inch thick, and hanging it in the sun, where in a few days it will dry so well that it may be packed in sacks, and transported over long journeys without putrefying.

When there is not time to jerk the meat by the slow process described, it may be done in a few hours by building an open frame-work of small sticks about two feet above the ground, placing the strips of meat upon the top of it, and keeping up a slow fire beneath, which dries the meat rapidly.

Salt is never used in this process, and is not required, as the meat, if kept dry, rarely putrifies. Spirit of the Times, 29, 42 (November 26, 1859), 497.

 

Veal Sweet-Bread

Trim a fine sweet-bread; parboil it for five minutes, and throw it into a basin of cold water. Roast it plain, or beat up the yolk of an egg, and prepare some fine bread crumbs. When the sweet-bread is cold, dry it thoroughly in a cloth; run a skewer through it; egg it with a paste-brush, powder it well with bread crumbs, and roast it. For sauce, fried bread crumbs round it, and melted butter, with a little mushroom catsup and lemon-juice, or serve them on buttered toast, garnished with egg sauce or with gravy. S. Annie Frost, The Godey’s Lady’s Book Receipts and Household Hints (Philadelphia: Evans, Stoddart & Co., 1870), p. 116-117.

 

Frogs

This ugly, noisy animal is considered equal to young chicken by some epicures, and I give a receipt from early recollection when my father enjoyed them alone. Take the hind legs of the large bull-frog, skin them and throw them in boiling water and let them remain ten minutes, then put them in cold water to cool, wipe them dry, sprinkle a little salt and corn meal over and drop them in hot lard to fry until a light brown. Mrs. Sarah A. Elliott, Mrs. Elliott’s Housewife (New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1870), p. 40.

 

Lamb Chops

Take a loin of lamb, cut chops from it half an inch thick, retaining the kidney in its place; dip them into egg and bread crumbs, fry and serve with fried parsley. When chops are made from a breast of lamb, the red bone at the edge of the breast should be cut off, and the breast parboiled in water or broth, with a sliced carrot and two or three onions, before it is divided into cutlets, which is done by cutting between every second or third bone, and preparing them, in every respect, as the last. If house-lamb steaks are to be done white-stew them in milk and water till very tender, with a bit of lemon-peel, a little salt, some pepper and mace. Have ready some veal gravy and put the steaks into it; mix some mushroom-powder, a cup of cream, and the least bit of flour; shake the steaks in this liquor, stir it, and let it get quite hot, but not boil. Just before you take it up, put in a few white mushrooms. S. Annie Frost, The Godey’s Lady’s Book Receipts and Household Hints (Philadelphia: Evans, Stoddart & Co., 1870), pp. 100-101.

 

To Barbeque a Pig

Cut it open on the back, cut off the feet and clean the head as for roasting; wash it well, then dry it and sprinkle over Cayenne pepper, salt and sage. Put the inside on a gridiron and let it remain an hour, taking care to baste the skin with sweet oil, then turn it and take three fourths of a pound of butter to one pint of Port wine, melt the butter in it and baste the inside which lies uppermost, continually with it. Two hours will cook one of seven pounds’ weight. For sauce, take the inwards and boil them an hour, with a dozen cloves, a little salt and a few pepper corns, then chop them fine, add sweet herbs, a little sage if you like it, considerable white wine, some of the liquor in which it was boiled, more pepper and salt if necessary. P. H. Mendall, The New Bedford Practical Receipt Book (New Bedford: Charles Taber & Co., 1862), p. 4.

 

To Barbecue Any Kind of Fresh Meat

Gash the meat. Broil slowly over a solid fire. Baste constantly with a sauce composed of butter, mustard, red and black papper, vinegar. Mix these in a pan, and set it where the sauce will keep warm, not hot. Have a swab made by tying a piece of clean, soft cloth upon a stick about a foot long; dip this in the sauce and baste with it. Where a large carcass is barbecued, it is usual to dig a pit in the ground outdoors, and lay narrow bars of wood across. Very early the morning fill the pit with wood; set it burning, and in this way heat it very hot. When the wood has burned to coals, lay the meat over. Should the fire need replenishing, keep a fire outside burning, from which draw coals, and scatter evenly in the pit under the meat. Should there be any sauce left, pour it over the meat. For barbecuing a joint, a large gridiron answers well; it needs constant attention; should be cooked slowly and steadily. Mrs. A. P Hill, Mrs. Hill’s New Cook Book (New York: Carleton, 1872), pp. 139-140.

 

Boiled Chitterlings [Chitterlings & Gravy]

In buying the chitterlings, see that they are white and fresh. Wash them in warm water, rub in some salt, let them stand for an hour in fresh water, put them in a pot of boiling water to the fire, and let them boil, till soft. Then brown very slightly in a piece of butter, the size of a hen’s egg, three spoonfuls of flour, add a little vinegar, some lemon-peel, whole peeled onion and some nutmeg, pour off the water from the chitterlings, stir quite smooth with it the browned flour, cut the chitterlings in pieces and put them into the sauce, pour over a glass of wine, let it boil half an hour and then dish it. You may also, before dressing, add some chopped parsley and the yolks of a few eggs. . . .You may also, if you like, cut them up and bake them after they have been boiled. William Volmer, The United States Cook Book (Philadelphia: John Weick, 1859), pp. 92-93.

 

Hash

Now listen all ye matrons, who would save your husband’s cash,
Are you willing on a washing day to dine on savoury hash,
And save yourselves the trouble of roasting, and of boiling,
And the fear that each and every dish is in the course of spoiling:
I’ll teach how, by wise economy, you may save your scraps of meat
That are left from plenteous dinners, and make a hash complete.
Take beef that has been roasted, and rather underdone,
And from it take off all the fat, the skin, and every bone,
Then cut it up in pieces, see no cartilage remains,
Pick out each little piece of bone, and all the stringy veins,
And pound it in a mortar, or with sharp chopping knife
Mine it like meat in winter, when Christmas pies are rife.
Now boil some white potatoes, which, having mashed with care,
You must pass them through a wire sieve, to see no lumps are there,
Then mix them with your minced meat, and rub throughout the whole
Some little bits of butter, which well in flour you roll;
Or you may use the dripping that oozes from the roast.
Which every good and careful cook takes care shall not be lost.
Now season well with pepper, with salt, a little sage
And cayenne, but for this spice your taste must be the gauge,
You may chop a little onion, or chives, to give it zest,
The taste of your own family, of course you know the best;
Some much dislike an onion, or shallot, in the food,
You may leave them out with safety—’tis equally as good.
Your hash now being seasoned, you turn it in a plate,
And smooth or flour it o’er the top, and set before the grate,
Or place it in an oven, ’till handsomely ’tis browned,
And send it to the table hot—a nice dish ‘t will be found.
If any other meat you have, as mutton, veal or lamb,
‘Twill serve the purpose just as well if only minced with ham.

T., Dwights American Magazine 3, 16 (April 17, 1847), p. 244.

 

Hog’s head-cheese

Boil with the meat jelly half an unsalted pig’s head. When the calves’ feet are soft take them out, cover them with a cloth, so that the air may not dry up the meat, and the following day, when it is quite cold, cut it up in small dice. If there are four spoonfuls of meat, boil two spoonfuls of clarified aspic and a spoonful of very finely cut shallots, down to less than one half, mix in the meat, pour the whole, whilst still warm into a smooth deep form, in which a wet napkin has been laid, then close the napkin on top, and put it to cool. When wanted, the head-cheese is taken out of the napkin, is cut into nice-looking pieces and ornamented with aspic. When the pig’s head is too fat, it is well to put some lean boiled beef, or salt beef’s tongue with it; also fry the head-cheese before putting in into the napkin, if not sufficiently seasoned, remedy it by putting some strong vinegar, salt and pepper.

A more simple and perhaps better head-cheese, may be made in the following manner: take a pig’s head, the tongue and the ears, split the former in two, rub in a good deal of salt and some saltpetre, (to six pounds of salt take half an ounce of saltpetre,) and let it stand for three days. Then boil the head and some large pieces of fresh pig’s skin, with three bay leaves, pretty soft, in the necessary quantity of water, take it out, bone it, cut it, whilst quite hot, into dice, season it with salt and pepper, mix it well, and put it into a smooth form, which has been lined with the soft-boiled pig’s skin, and let it cool. William Volmer, The United States Cook Book (Philadelphia: John Weick, 1859), p. 100.

 

Preparation of Lard

The following is our mode of trying up lard, of which we make three qualities; that from the intestines, that from the leaf-fat, and that from the upper part of the back-bones. The latter is the super-fine. So soon as the intestines are taken from the hogs, while yet warm, the fat is rid off and thrown into cold water, where it remains to soak some hours; it is then washed out and put into other fresh water, in which it remains until next morning. It is then cut up into pieces not more than two or three inches long, rinsed again and immediately put on in iron boilers thoroughly cleansed. The fire is then applied, which must be free from smoke during the whole process of boiling, which should be continued for at least twelve hours. It is very frequently stirred during the boiling, and the bottom of the boiler scraped hard with the sharp edge of the iron ladle, to keep the cracklings from adhering and burning, which they are apt to do towards the end of the process if the fire is strong and the boiling rapid. When the cracklings begin to turn brown, and the lard becomes clear as water and scarcely any evaporation is visible, the fire should be slackened. The bubbles rising to the top will be as clear as cut glass. Continue the simmering gently until the cracklings are quite brown. They never become crisped; but although brown and entirely done, will be soft and flabby. The clearness of the lard, the brown color of the cracklings, the crystal purity of the bubbles, and the nut-like scent arising, indicate the end of the boiling. Take the boilers off the fire, or extinguish the fire, and when the lard is so cool that you can bear its heat on your finger dipped into it without pain, strain it off into clean tight vessels. Exclude the air; and you will have a nice article even from gut fat. John Lewis, Llangollen KY Southern Planter 1, 11 (December 1841), 238.

 

Mutton

Mutton is in its greatest perfection from August to Christmas. For roasting or boiling allow fifteen minutes for each pound. The saddle should always be roasted, and garnished with scraped horse radish. The leg and shoulder are good roasted; but the best way of cooking the leg is to boil it with a bit of salt pork. If a little rice is boiled with it the flesh will look whiter.

For roasting, mutton should have a little butter rubbed over it, and salt and pepper sprinkled on it. Allspice and cloves, some like. Put a piece of butter in the dripping pan, and baste it often. The bony part should first be presented to the fire, for roasting.

The leg is good to bake, gashed and filled with a dressing made of soaked bread, pepper, salt, butter, and two eggs. A pint of water, and a little butter should be put in the pan.

The leg is good, too, sliced and broiled. Also boiled, after corned a few days.

The rack is good for broiling. Each bone should be separated, broiled quick, buttered, salted, and peppered.

The breast is fine baked. The joints of the brisket should be separated; the sharp ends of the ribs sawed off; the outside rubbed over with a small piece of butter; salted; and put into a bake pan, with half a pint of water. When baked enough, take it up, and thicken the gravy with a little flour and water, adding a small piece of butter. A spoonful of catsup, cloves and allspice, improve it. The neck makes a good soup. Mrs. A. L. Webster, The Improved Housewife, or Book of Receipts (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Co., 1853), p. 41.

 

Mutton Hams

Mix two ounces of brown sugar with an ounce of fine bay salt and half a table spoonful of salt petre; rub the ham therewith, and lay it in a deep dish; baste and turn it twice a day for three days; throw away the pick which in this time will have drained from the ham, and wipe it dry. Rub it again with the same mixture of sugar, etc., one day, and baste it the next, for ten days, turning it every day. Smoke for ten days, (with green hickory, if possible.) The hams are best eaten cold. New England Farmer 3, 28 (April 15, 1825), 299.

 

To make Scrapple

Take the heart, kidneys, sweet-bread, milt and liver, and put them to boil. The liver will be done sufficiently in an hour. Chop all very fine, take the skins and scraps unfit for sausages, the feet and tongue, boil them all very tender, chop them fine and return them to the liquor they were boiled in, salt, pepper and sage must be added according to the taste; when boiling, stir in buckwheat meal to the thickness of mush, keep it stirring while it boils to prevent it from burning; it need not boil long. P. H. Mendall, The New Bedford Practical Receipt Book (New Bedford: Charles Taber & Co., 1862), p. 10.

 

Possum

As an article of food the opossum is considered by many a very great luxury, the flesh, it is said, tastes not unlike roast pig. In cooking the ‘varmint,’ the Indians suspend it on a stick by its tail, and in this position they let it roast before the fire; this mode does not destroy a sort of oiliness, which makes it to a cultivated taste coarse and unpalatable. The negroes, on the contrary—and, by the way, they are all amateurs in the cooking art—when cooking for themselves do much better. They bury the body up with sweet potatoes, and as the meat roasts thus confined, the succulent vegetable draws out all objectionable tastes, and renders the opossum ‘one of the greatest delicacies in the world.’ T. B. T. Louisiana, October 1841, Spirit of the Times 11, 40 (December 4, 1841), 469.

 

Fricassee of Squirrels

Put two young squirrels into a pot with two ounces of butter, one or two ounces of ham, some salt and pepper, and just water enough to cover them. Let them stew slowly until tender. Take them up, and pour half a teacup of cream and beaten yolk of egg into the gravy, and when it has boiled five minutes, pour over the squirrels in the dish. Some persons prefer a wineglass of red wine, and omit the cream and egg. Mrs. Barringer, Dixie Cookery: or How I Managed my Table for twelve years (Boston: Floring, 1867), p. 26.

 

To Roast Venison

The best joints to roast are the haunch and the loins, which last should be cut saddle fashion, viz, both loins together. If the deer be fat and in good season, the meat will need no other basting than the fat which runs from it; but as it is often lean, it will be necessary to use lard, butter, or slices of fat bacon to assist the roasting. Venison should be cooked with a brisk fire—basted often—and a little salt thrown over it; it is better not overdone. Being a meat very open in the grain and tender, it readily bastes with its juices, and takes less time to roast than any other meat. Mrs. C. P. Traill, The Canadian Settler’s Guide (Toronto: Toronto Times, 1857), p. 152.

 

Brown Fricassee of Venison

Fry your steaks quite brown, in hot dripping; put them in a stewpan with a very little water, a bunch of sweet herbs, a small onion, a clove or two, and pepper and salt. When it has boiled for a few minutes, roll a bit of butter in flour, with a table-spoonful of catsup or tomato-sauce, and a tea-spoonful of vinegar; stir this into the fricassee, and dish it quite hot. Mrs. C. P. Traill, The Canadian Settler’s Guide (Toronto: Toronto Times, 1857), p. 152

 

Sauces

 

Chestnut Sauce for Roast Turkey

Scald a pound of ripe chestnuts, peel them, and stew them slowly about two hours in white gravy; then thicken with butter and flour, and serve the sauce poured over the turkey. Pork sausages, cut up and fried, are sometimes put into this sauce. Sarah Josepha Hale, Mrs. Hale’s New Book of Cookery (New York: H. Long & Brother, 1852), p. 201.

 

Indiana Sauce

One ounce of scraped horseradish, one ounce of mustard, one of salt, half an ounce of celery seed, two minced onions, and half ounce of cayenne, add a pint of vinegar; let it stand in a jar a week, then pass it through a sieve, and bottle it up securely. Mrs. A. M. Collins, The Great Western Cook Book (New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1857), p. 32.

 

Lobster Sauce

Take out all the meat and soft part from the body; cut it up very fine, and put it into a sauce-pan with a pint and a half of white stock. Braid into a quarter of a pound of butter a large spoonful of flour; stir it in, and add a little salt, pepper, and vinegar; give it one boil. Send it to the table, in an oyster-dish, as sauce for boiled fish. Dollar Monthly 20, 3 (September 1864), 240.

 

Pepper Catsup

Fifty pods of large red peppers, with the seeds. Add a pint of vinegar, and boil until the pulp will mash through a sieve. Add to the pulp a second pint of vinegar, two spoonfuls of sugar, cloves, mace, spice, onions, and salt. Put all in a kettle and boil to a proper consistency. S. Annie Frost, The Godey’s Lady’s Book Receipts and Household Hints (Philadelphia: Evans, Stoddart & Co., 1870), p. 78.

 

Tomato Catsup

Take two quarts of skinned tomatoes, two tablespoonfuls of black pepper, and one of allspice, a little Cayenne, two tablespoonfuls of ground mustard; mix and rub these thoroughly, and stew them slowly in a pint of vinegar, for three hours; then strain the liquor through a sieve, and simmer it down to one quart of catsup. Put this in bottles, and cork it tight. Mrs. J. Chadwick, Mrs. Chadwick’s Cook Book. Home Cookery: a Collection of Tried Receipts (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, & Co., 1853), p. 100.

 

Vegetables

 

Baked Beans

Put a quart of white beans to soak in soft water, at night; the next morning wash them out of that water; put them into a pot with more water than will cover them; set them over the fire to simmer until they are quite tender; wash them out again and put them into an earthen pot, scald and gash one and a half pounds of pork, place it on top of the beans and into them, so as to have the rind of the pork even with the beans; fill the put with water, in which is mixed two table-spoonsful of molasses. Bake them five or six hours; if baked in a brick oven it is well to have them stand over night. Mrs. Putnam’s Receipt Book (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1850), p. 64.

 

Pickled Beets

Parboil some of the finest red beet roots in water; then cut them into a sauce-pan with some sliced horse-radish, onions, shallots leaves, pounded ginger, beaten mace, white pepper, cloves, all-spice, and salt; and boil the whole in sufficient vinegar to cover it for at least a quarter of an hour. Strain the liquor from the ingredients, put the slices into a jar, pour the strained liquor over them, and if higher colour be wanted, add a little powdered cochineal when the pickled is quite cold, and keep it closely covered with bladder or leather. A little oil may be poured on the top of this pickle which will assist the better to preserve it without prejudice to the beet root, which is common served up in oil, its own liquor, and small quantity of powdered loaf sugar poured over it. Some also add mustard, but this is by no means necessary, and certainly does not improve the colour of this fine pickle. New England Farmer III, 9 (Sept. 25, 1824), p. 67.

 

Broccoli and Buttered Eggs

Keep a handsome bunch for the middle, and have eight pieces to go round; toast a piece of bread to fit the inner part of a dish or plate; boil the broccoli. In the mean time have ready six (or more) eggs beaten, put for six a quarter of a pound of fine butter into a saucepan, with a little salt, stir it over the fire, and as it becomes warm add the eggs, and shake the saucepan till the mixture is thick enough; pour it on the hot toast, and lay the broccoli as before directed. This receipt is a very good one, it is occasionally varied, but without improvement, the dish is however nearly obsolete. Mrs. [Elizabeth] Ellet, The Practical Housekeeper (New York: Stinger & Townsend, 1857), p. 388.

 

Brussels Sprouts

This delicate vegetable can be cooked in several ways; but the following method, communicated to the author by a gentleman many years resident in Brussels, will be found to produce, as old Gerrard used to say, ‘a dainty dish.’ After the sprouts have been frosted, a process which renders them more tender and sweet, they may be gathered; (the more close and compact they are the better.) Immerse them in clear soft water for an hour or two, to cleanse them from any dirt or insects; then boil them for about twenty minutes rather quickly, using plenty of water; when soft they must be taken up and well drained; they are then to be put into a stew-pan, with cream, or with a little fresh butter thickened with flour, and seasoned with pepper and salt, and stirred until they are thoroughly hot. They are served up to table with a little tomato vinegar, which greatly heightens their flavour. Southern Agriculturist, Horticulturist, and Register of Rural Affairs 3 (March 1841), 144.

 

Cabbages

There are more ways to cook a fine cabbage than to boil it with a bacon side, and yet few seem to comprehend, that there can be any loss in cooking it, even in this simple way. Two-thirds of the cooks place cabbage in cold water, and start it to boiling, this extracts all the best juices, and makes the pot liquor a soup. The cabbage head, after having been washed and quartered, should be dropped into boiling water, with no more meat than will just season it. Cabbage may be cooked to equal broccoli or cauliflower. Take a firm sweet head, cut it into shreds, lay it in salt and water for six hours. Now place it in boiling water, until it becomes tender—turn the water off, and add sweet milk when thoroughly done, take up a colander and drain. Now season with butter and pepper, with a glass of good wine and a little nutmeg grated over, and you have a dish little resembling what are generally called greens. Southern Planter 14, 9 (September, 1854), 271.

 

Saur Kraut

Take as many drum-head cabbages, or any other kind having a firm head, as you wish to preserve, tear off the outer leaves, quarter them, cut out the stalks, and chop the remainder into small pieces by hand or with a machine. Then, to every one hundred pounds of cabbage take three pounds of salt, one-quarter pound of caraway seed, and two ounces of juniper berries, and mix them together in a dish or bowl. Then procure as many clean casks, strongly hooped with iron, as may be required, and fill them with layers of chopped cabbage, about three inches thick, sprinkling each layer, as it is pressed in, with the mixture of caraway seed, juniper berries and salt. When each cask is full, lay over it a coarse linen cloth and a wooden follower or lid, just fitting within the mouth of the cask, upon which must be placed a stone or weight sufficiently heavy to prevent it from rising, and allow it to ferment for a month. The cabbage produces a great deal of water, which floats around the sides of the casks to the top of the follower or lid. This must be poured off, and its place supplied with a solution of lukewarm warm water, whole black pepper and common salt, taking care that the cabbage is always covered with brine. In order to keep the kraut fresh and for a long time, the casks should be placed in a cool situation as soon as a sour smell is perceived. Southern Planter 8, 3 (March 1848), 88.

 

A Carrot Pudding

You must take a raw carrot, scrape it very clean, and grate it; take half a pound of the grated carrot, and a pound of grated bread; beat up eight eggs, leave out half the whites, and mix the eggs with half a pint of cream; then stir in the bread and carrot, half a pound of fresh butter melted, half a pink of sack, three spoonfuls of orange flower water, and a nutmeg grated. Sweeten to your palate. Mix all well together; and if it is not thin enough stir in a little new milk or cream. Let it be of a moderate thickness: lay a puff-paste all over the dish, and pour in the ingredients. Bake it, which will take an hour. It may also be boiled. If so, serve it up with melted butter, white wine, and sugar. Susannah Carter, The Frugal Housewife, or Complete Woman Cook (New-York, C & R Waite, 1803), pp. 166-67.

 

Fried Cauliflower

Having laid a fine cauliflower in cold water for an hour, put it into a pot of boiling water that has been slightly salted, (milk and water will be still better,) and boil it twenty-five minutes, or till the largest stalk is perfectly tender. Then divide it equally, into small tufts, and spread it on a dish to cool. Prepare a sufficient quantity of batter made in the proportion of a table-spoonful of flour, and two table-spoonfuls of milk to each egg. Beat the eggs very light; then stir into them the flour and milk alternately; a spoonful of flour, and two spoonfuls of milk at a time. When the cauliflower is cold, have ready some fresh butter in a fry-pan over a clear fire. When it has come to a boil and has done bubbling, dip each tuft of cauliflower twice into the pan of batter, and fry them a light brown. Send them to table hot. Miss Leslie, The Lady’s Receipt-Book (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1847), p. 40.

 

Indian Corn or Roasting Ears

Who don’t know how to cook roasting ears? But if every body does know how to cook them, it is seldom we find green corn upon the table, with all its good qualities preserved. It is no wonder that our negroes are so greedy for pot liquor, when in nine cases out of ten, it contains all the best of the vegetables. Corn boiled in the ear should be dropped into boiling water with salt to season. Corn cut from the ear, and boiled in milk seasoned with butter, pepper and salt, is an excellent dish. Corn cut from the cob after boiling, and mixed with butter beans, seasoned with butter, pepper and salt, makes succotash, a capital dish. Corn oysters is a delicious dish: grate the green corn from the cob, season with salt and pepper, mix in batter, and fry in butter. Green corn pudding is a great delicacy: grate the corn from the cob, mix sweet milk and flour until of the consistency of paste, season with anything the taste may dictate, and bake in a hot oven—it should bake quick. Southern Planter 14, 9 (September, 1854), 271.

 

A Crookneck or Winter Squash Pudding

Core, boil and skin a good squash, and bruise it well; take 6 large apples, pared, cored, and stewed tender, mix together; add 6 or 7 spoonsful of dry bread or biscuit, rendered fine as meal, half pink milk or cream, 2 spoons of rose-water, 2 do. Wine, 5 or 6 eggs beaten and strained, nutmeg, salt and sugar to your taste, one spoon flour, beat all smartly together, bake. Lucy Emerson, The New-England Cookery (Montpelier: Josiah Parks, 1808), p. 49.

 

To Stew Cucumbers

Peel and cut cucumbers in quarters, take out the seeds, and lay them on a cloth to drain off the water; when they are dry, flour and fry them in fresh butter; let the butter be quite hot before you put in the cucumbers; fry them till they are brown, then take them out with egg-slice, and lay them on a sieve to drain the fat from them (some cooks fry sliced onions, or some small botton onions, with them, till they are a delicate light brown color, drain them from the fat, and then put them into a stewpan with as much gravy as will cover them); stew slowly till they are tender; take out the cucumbers with a slice, thicken the gravy with flour and butter, give it a boil up, season it with pepper and salt, and put in the cucumber, as soon as they are warm, they are ready. The above, rubbed through a tamis, or fine sieve, will be entitled to be called “cucumber sauce.” This is a very favorite sauce with lamb or mutton cutlets, stewed rump-steaks, &c., when made for the latter, a third part of sliced onion is sometimes fried with the cucumber. A Boston Housekeeper, The Cook’s Own Book, and Housekeeper’s Register (Boston: Munroe & Francis, 1840), p. 60.

 

Dandelion

Pick and wash your dandelion and cut off the roots. Drain it, and make a dressing of an egg, well beaten, a half a gill of vinegar, a tea spoonful of butter, and salt to the taste. Mix the egg, vinegar, butter and salt together, put the mixture over the fire, and as soon as it is thick, take it off, and stand it away to get cold. Drain your dandelion, pour the dressing over it and send it to the table. Lady of Philadelphia, The National Cook Book (Philadelphia: Hayes & Zell, 1856), p. 94.

 

Egg Plant

The purple is better than the white; they must be boiled in plenty of water until tender, then take up, and take off the skins, and drain; cut them up and wash in a deep dish or pan; mix some grated bread, powdered sweet marjoram, a piece of butter, and a few pounded cloves; grate a layer of bread over the top, and brown in the oven; send to the table in the same dish. It is generally eaten at breakfast. Mrs. Laura Trowbridge, Excelsior Cook Book and Housekeeper’s Aid (New York: Mason, Baker & Pratt, 1870), p. 87.

 

Broiled Egg Plant

Split the egg plant in two, peel it, and take the seeds out, put it in a crockery dish, sprinkle on chopped parsley, salt, and pepper; cover the dish, and leave thus about forty minutes; then take it off, put it on a greased and warmed gridiron, and on a good fire; baste with a little sweet oil, and seasoning from the crockery dish, and serve with the drippings when properly broiled. It is a delicious dish. Pierre Blot, What to Eat, and How to Cook It (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1863), p. 182.

 

Mustard

There are two species of this plant, the white and the brown seeded or black mustard. The white is used as a salad. It is the black mustard which bears the seed used in commerce and from which the condiment is obtained.

In the manufacture of mustard some white seed combined with the black is said to make the best. They are ground in a mill and sifted to a fine flour. One of the grand secrets of making it good, is to keep it perfectly dry from the seed to the time of use. The pungency of mustard, the quality by which it raises blisters on the skin and bites the tongue is owing to a volatile oil which is not originally present in the dry flour. It is created by the chemical action of two substances which compose it (known to the chemists as emulein and myronic acid.) These do not act upon one another until water is added.—When the flour is moistened they quickly form the oil. Vinegar diminishes this changes. It is, therefore, a great mistake to use it in preparing mustard. Tepid water is the proper fluid both to mix up the condiment and to make the irritating poultice. As we have before said, the oil is of a valuable character and will after awhile fly away and leave the mustard without strength. It should then be prepared but a few hours before the time when wanted for use. Southern Planter 8, 1 (January 1848), 27.

 

Stewed Onions

Young onions should always be cooked in this way: Top, tail, and skin them; lay them in cold water half an hour or more, then put into a saucepan with hot water enough to cover them; when half done, throw off all the water except a small teacupful—less, if your mess is small; add a like quantity of milk, a large spoonful of butter, with pepper and salt to taste; stew gently until tender, and turn into a deep dish. If the onions are strong and large, boil in three waters, throwing away all of the first and second, and reserving a very little of the third to mix with the milk. Mrs. Washington, The Unrivalled Cook-Book and Housekeeper’s Guide (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1886), p. 199.

 

Parsnip Fritters

Boil four or five parsnips; when tender, take off the skin and mash them fine, add to them a teaspoon full of wheat flour and a beaten egg; put a tablespoon full of lard or beef drippings in a frying pan over the fire, add to it a saltspoon full of salt; when boiling hot, put in the parsnips, make it in small cakes with a spoon; when one side is a delicate brown, turn the other; when both are done, take them on a dish, put a very little of the fat in which they were fried over, and serve hot. These resemble very nearly the taste of salsify or oyster plant, and will generally be preferred. Elizabeth M. Hall, American Practical Cookery (New York: Saxton & Barker, 1860), p. 139.

 

Pea Fritters or Cakes

Cook a pint or three cups more peas than you need for dinner. Mash while hot with a wooden spoon, seasoning with pepper, salt, and butter. Put by until morning. Make a batter of two whipped eggs, a cupful of milk, quarter teaspoonful soda, a half teaspoonful cream tartar, and half a cup of flour. Stir the pea-mixture into this, beating very hard, and cook as you would ordinary griddle-cakes. I can testify, from experience, that they make a delightful morning dish, and hereby return thanks to the unknown friend to whom I am indebted for the receipt. Marion Harland, Common Sense in the Household (New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co., 1874), p. 226.

 

Stuffed Bell Peppers, American Style

Select one dozen nicely shaped Bell Peppers, slice off the tops and scoop out the seeds. Chop two onions finely and put them into a saucepan with a piece of butter. Fry them lightly and then add a handful of fine chopped mushrooms. Cover the sauce-pan, and when the moisture is reduced add four spoonfuls of reduced Allemande sauce, a handful of fresh nutmeg. Mix them well together, then take the saucepan off of the fire and add the yolks of two raw eggs and some finely chopped parsley, and stir them well together. Stuff the Peppers and arrange them in a buttered baking pan. Sprinkle fresh bread crumbs over them, put a piece of butter on each one, then bake them in a moderate oven, and when nicely browned serve them on a dish with a teaspoonful of veal gravy over each one. Jules Arthur Harder, Physiology of Taste: Harder’s book of Practical American Cookery, p. 257.

 

Fried Plantains or Bananas

Buy some sweet plantains, or bananas. If not thoroughly ripe, hang them up in the room to ripen. Take off the skins, cut in slices, and fry in hot lard until browned. The long, green, hard, plantains are peeled and roasted in the ashes, when it closely resembles bread. It is also cut in slices and fried a nice brown in hot lard. They are also boiled in soups, stews, hashes, etc. S. Annie Frost, The Godey’s Lady’s Book Receipts and Household Hints (Philadelphia: Evans, Stoddart & Co., 1870), p. 169.

 

How to Cook Potatoes

Wash them clean and scrape the skin off,
One water never is enough
Take the eyes and nubbins then off,
And every little speck that’s rough.
Do not let them lie in water,
(So the nice observers say,)
Not a minute, not a quarter,
That will take the taste away.
When the fire is burning brightly,
And the water’s boiling hot,
Sprinkle table salt in lightly,
Then put the kidney in the pot.
Eighteen minutes, sometimes twenty,
Cooks them nicely to a turn,
Some say more, but that is pleanty,
Every one must live and learn.

Southern Cultivator 1, 9 (May 3, 1843), 72.

 

Spiced Rhubarb

Peel, spice, and weigh the rhubarb. Heat it slowly in a porcelain kettle without water. When the juice flows freely, put the kettle over direct heat, and boil for 1/2 hour. Dip out half of the juice in an earthen vessel, and keep it hot. To the rhubarb add 1/2 pound sugar (brown will answer), 1 teaspoon cloves, and 2 of cinnamon to each pound rhubarb. Mix thoroughly, add some of the juice if it seems too thick. It does not need to be as thick as jam. Simmer 15 minutes; seal up hot. Mrs. Owen’s Cook Book (1884), p. 355.

 

How to Cook Rice as Practised in Carolina

1st. The Rice must be thoroughly scrubbed and rinsed, in several waters, until the floury particles, which are often sour or musty, are entirely removed.

2d. A handful of salt should be thrown into a pot of water which must boil before the Rice is sprinkled in.

3d. The Rice should be boiled steadily twelve minutes by the watch; the water should then be poured off, and the pot covered and set close to the fire to steam, for ten minutes.

Thus prepared, and eaten with gravy, milk, butter &c. Rice is the of the most digestible articles of food in nature. The Episcopal Watchman 6, 21 (September 29, 1832), p. 84.

 

Rice Casserole

Take a pound and a half of rice, wash it thoroughly in several waters (warm), and then put it into a saucepan, at least eight inches in diameter; moisten it with stock, in this proportion; if the rice lies an inch thick, let the stock come two inches above it, and four ladlefuls of fowl skimmings; place the saucepan on a hot stove; when the rice boils, set it on the side, and skim it; then put it on hot ashes, cover, and let it boil slowly for fifteen to twenty minutes; stir it, let it boil as before; in twenty or twenty-five minutes, stir it again; if by this time the rice is perfectly soft, take it off, but if not, add a little more liquid, and continue boiling until it is so; place the saucepan slant on the side of the stove that the fat may drain away and be taken off easily. As soon as the rice is lukewarm, work it into a firm, smooth paste, with a spatula; it can hardly be worked up too much, as every grain of rice ought to pass under pressure (If necessary, add more stock, a very little at a time). When the paste is then thoroughly worked up, form your casserole of it, first laying it in a heap, four or five inches high, and seven in diameter; do it with the hand as you would a raised crust; make the ornaments of the outer surface with the point of a knife, or by carrots cut for the purpose, taking care that the decorations be detached from the mass of rice, at least an inch; attention to this particular will not only add to the beauty of the form, but to the color also, as the raised parts will be lightly colored, while the ground will be quite white. When properly formed, mask the whole surface with clarified butter, and place it in a hot oven for an hour and a half by which time it will be of a fine clear yellow. Take off the top of your casserole, clear away all the rice from the inside that does not adhere to the crust (which ought to be very thin), and mix it with béchamel, espagnole, or whatever other sauce may be proper, put it in again, and then fill your casserole, with such ragouts as your fancy may dictate; glaze the surface of the outer ornaments, and serve it. Water, with butter and salt, is frequently thought preferable to the stock, &c., as the rice is thereby rendered much whiter. A Boston Housekeeper, The Cook’s Own Book, and Housekeeper’s Register (Boston: Munroe & Francis, 1840), p. 174.

 

Salsify Fritters

Three eggs; One pint of milk; Three roots of salsify grated without being cooked; Salt sufficient to taste. Beat the yolks very thick, add gradually the milk and flour, then the grated salsify and salt. Whisk the whites very stiff and stir them in last. Have ready a pan of hot butter and lard mixed; drop a spoonful of the batter into it, fry the fritter a light brown on both sides. This is known by the name of oyster plant. Hannah Widdifield, Widdifield’s New Cook Book; or, Practical Receipts for the Housewife (Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson, 1856), p. 104.

 

Succotash, a la Tecumseh

Boil the [lima] beans from half to three-quarters of an hour, in water, a little salt. Cut off the corn from the cobs, boil the cobs with the beans, be sure and not cut too close to the cob. When the beans have boiled three-quarters of an hour, take out the cobs and put the corn in; let it, then boil fifteen minutes, if the corn is tender, if not, twenty. Have more corn than beans. When it is boiled sufficiently, take a lump of butter as large as you think will be in proportion with the vegetables, roll it well in flour, put it in the pot with the beans, with black pepper enough to season it well. This is a real Western dish, and is very easily made. Mrs. A. M. Collins, The Great Western Cook Book (New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1857), p 84.

 

Sweet Potato Pone #1

A quart of grated potato, three-fourths of a pound of sugar, ten ounces of butter, half a pink of milk, three table-spoonfuls of powdered ginger, the grated peel of a sweet orange. Rub the ingredients well together, and bake in a shallow plate, in a slow oven.

 

Sweet Potato Pone #2

Peel and grate two moderate sized sweet potatoes; pour on it nearly a pint of cold water, four good spoonfuls of brown sugar, one good spoonful of butter; season with ginger to taste. Bake in a moderate over about three hours. Sarah Rutledge, The Carolina Housewife (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1979 facsimile of the 1847 edition), pp. 130-131.

 

Baked Tomatoes

Wash them, and cut them in two parts, round the tomato, that is, so as the cells can be divested of the pulp and seeds which they contain. To six tomatoes take half a pint of bread crumbs, one large onion finely chopped, one ounce of butter, pepper and salt to the taste. Fill the cells of each piece with the dressing, put two halves together, and tie them with a piece of thread. Put them in a pan with an ounce of butter and a gill of water, set them in a moderate oven, and cook them till they are soft. When done, cut off the threads and serve them. Lady of Philadelphia, The National Cook Book (Philadelphia: Hayes & Zell, 1856), p. 84.

 

Tomato Pie

Pick green tomatoes, pour boiling water over them, and let them remain a few minutes; then strip off the skin, cut the tomatoes in slices, and put them in deep pie plates. Sprinkle a little ginger and some sugar over them in several layers. Lemon juice and the grated peel, improve the pie. Cover the pies with a thick crust, and bake them slowly about an hour. Mrs. A. L. Webster, The Improved Housewife, or Book of Receipts (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Co., 1853), p. 92.

 

Puree of Turnips

Pare a dozen large turnips, slice them, and put them into a stew-pan, with four ounces of butter and a little salt; set the pan over a moderate fire, turn them often with a wooden spoon; when they look white, add a ladle full of veal gravey, stew them till it becomes thick; skim it, and pass it through a sieve; put the turnips in a dish, and pour the gravy over them. Mrs. Mary Randolph, The Virginia Housewife: or, Methodical Cook (Baltimore: Plaskitt, Fite & Co., 1838), pp. 105-106.

 

Turnip Tops

Put them into cold water an hour before they are dressed; the more water they are boiled in the better they will look. If boiled in a small quantity of water they will taste bitter; when the water boils, put in a small handful of salt, and then your vegetables; if fresh and young, about twenty minutes’ boiling will cook them; drain them through a simmer. They are perhaps better when boiled with bacon. Tennessee Farmer 2, 4 (April 1837), 60.

 

Fruits

 

Apple Butter

First, boil down the best flavoured cider, of selected fruit, (and sweet is the best to keep,) to two-thirds of the quantity put in. To every barrel of cider put in six bushels of apples, of best quality, pared, quartered and cleared of the cores, and free from rots and bruises.

As soon as boiled down one-third, as above, feed in the quartered apples as fast as they boil away, which must be done in brass or copper. It is best to have two kettles, in order to supply the finisher from the other, which keeps it from boiling the apples too much. It will require 12 to 18 hours constant and moderate boiling, when it must be stirred at the bottom to prevent its burning, by a long handle, with a piece of wood three or four inches wide attached to the other end.

To know when it is done, cool and try some of it on a plate, till the liquid ceases to run from it. Towards the close of it, some put in cinnamon, cloves and allspice.

If only one kettle is used, each parcel of raw apples must be boiled or brought down to mush before another supply is added. If it scorches in the operation, it is ruined. As soon as done, it must be taken out immediately from the kettle into wooden vessels, to cool, and afterwards into crocks, or stone-ware, or wood; but in order to keep it best in summer, crocks or stone-ware are to be preferred. The American Farmer 7, 36 (November 25, 1825), p. 287.

 

Apple Molasses

I make little cider, my apples are worth more fed to my hogs than for cider; but I make a practice of selecting my best sweet apples, those that furnish the richest, heaviest liquor, and making a cheese from them, using the cider thus obtained for making apple or quince preserves, boiling down for molasses, and keeping two or three barrels for drink, or ultimate conversion into vinegar. When new from the press, and before fermentation commences, that which I intend for boiling is brought to the house, and boiling in brass to the proper consistence; taking care not to burn it, as that gives the molasses a disagreeable flavor, and taking off the scum that rises during the process. The quantity to be boiled, or the number of barrels of cider required to make one of molasses, will depend greatly on the kind of apples used, and the richness of the new liquor. Four, or four and a half, are generally sufficient, but when care is not used in making the selection of apples, five barrels may sometimes be necessary; but let it take more or less, enough must be used to make the molasses, when cold, as thick as the best West-India. When boiled sufficiently, it should be turned into vessels to cool, and from them transferred to a new sweet barrel, put into a cold cellar, where it will keep without trouble, and be ready for use at all times.

Molasses made in this way will be pure, and possess a vinuous or rather brandied flavor, which makes it far superior to the West-India for mince, apple or tart pies, though where the apples used are very sour, a small quantity of imported molasses may be advantageously used. It is also excellent for making beer in the summer, giving it a briskness and flavor which common molasses will not; in short, there are but few uses to which molasses is applied, in which it will not be found equal or superior to the other. Southern Agriculturist and Register of Rural Affairs 10, 10 (October 1837), 552. [Extract from the Genesee Farmer.]

 

Recipe for a Baked Apple Pudding

A pint of fine apples quite thoroughly stewed,
And sugar one-fourth of a pound, well bedewed
With two gills of cream, or it will not much matter
Should you chance to prefer two ounces of butter;
Now you must have some spice from the east,
Nutmeg I think is considered the best,
And pray do remember you need take but one,
And grate it quite finely till all shall be done—
A spoonful of water distilled from the rose
United with lemon peel, soon will compose
A nice apple pudding, quite good to the taste,
Provided that you shall not bake it in haste.

Tennessee Farmer 1, 20 (July 1836), p. 320.

 

Apple Fritters

Pare and core some fine, large pippins, and cut them into round slices. Soak them in wine, sugar, and nutmeg, for two or three hours. Make a batter of four eggs, a tablespoon full of rosewater, a tablespoon full of wine, a tablespoon full of milk; thicken with enough flour, stirred in by degrees, to make a batter; mix in two or three hours before it is wanted, that it may be light. Heat some butter in a frying pan; dip each slice of apple separately into the batter, and fry them brown; sift pounded sugar, and grate nutmeg over them. Elizabeth M. Hall, Practical American Cookery and Domestic Economy (New York: C. . Saxton, Barker & Co., 1860), p. 193.

 

American Figs Dried

To the farmers of Georgia: American figs dried according to the system of Turkey, Portugal and Spain:—Pluck from the tree the ripened figs, and place them on straw mats for two or three days, till they become withered; then lay them on a tin pan, powder them with wheat flour mixed with brown sugar, and put them into the over middling warm; then let the figs dry, and tread them with the feet in order to make them flat. Southern Agriculturist and Register of Rural Affairs 12, 2 (February 1839), p. 106.

 

A Receipt to make Maple Sugar

Make an incision in a number of maple trees, at the same time, about the middle of February, and receive the juice of them in wooden or earthen vessels. Strain this juice (after it is drawn from the sediment) and boil it in a wide mouthed kettle. Place the kettle directly over the fire, in such a manner that the flame shall not play upon its sides. Skim the liquor when it is boiling. When it is reduced to a thick syrup and cooled, strain it again, and let it settle for two or three days, in which time it will be fit for granulating. This operation is performed by filling the kettle half full of syrup, and boiling it a second time. To prevent its boiling over, add to it a piece of fresh butter or fat of the size of a walnut. You may easily determine when it is sufficiently boiled to granulate, by cooling a little of it. It must then be put into bags or baskets, through which the water will drain. This sugar, if refined by the usual process, may be made into as good single or double refined loaves, as were ever made from the sugar obtained from the juice of West India cane. Sussannah Carter, The Frugal Housewife, or Complete Woman Cook (New-York, C & R Waite, 1803), pp. 209-10.

 

Maple Sugar Sweeties

When sugaring off, take a little of the thickest syrup into a saucer, stir in a very little fine flour, and a small bit of butter, and flavor with essence of lemon, peppermint, or ginger, as you like best; when cold, cut into little bricks about an inch in length. This makes a cheap treat for the little ones. By melting down a piece of maple sugar, and adding a bit of butter, and flavouring, you can always give them sweeties, if you think proper to allow them indulgencies of this sort. Mrs. C. P. Traill, The Canadian Settler’s Guide(Toronto: Toronto Times, 1857), p. 146.

 

Dried Peaches

Just before quite ripe, peal Peaches, either plum or soft Peaches. Take out the nuts, put them in boiling water till they are a little soft. Take them out and throw them into a pail-full of cold water, when cold, drain them and weigh them. To every pound of Peaches put half a pound of powdered loaf sugar. Lay the Peaches in a kettle, and sprinkle the sugar till it is all in. Let it remain till the syrup runs sufficiently to allow putting it on over a very slow fire. When the sugar is all melted, let them boil slowly, till the Peaches look clear, put them in a large bowl and let them remain all night. The next morning place them singly in dishes, and put them in the sun to dry. Turn them over every day, till they are sufficiently dry to be packed in boxes or stone jars. The soft Peaches are as good, if not better than the plum or cling-stone Peach, and the nut is taken out much easier.

The Peaches will, some of them, break in doing. After they have been in the sun two or three days, with a tea spoon and a silver fork draw the broken pieces together in the form and size of a peach, and they will dry solid.

There will be more syrup than can be dried with them, which may be used, by boiling some Peaches prepared as above in the spare syrup. These will be inferior, but still good. Southern Agriculturist and Register of Rural Affairs 3, 10 (October 1830), p. 526.

 

Sweet Pickle Peaches (excellent)

Pare the pickles and cut them in halves, and to two pounds of fruit, take one quart of vinegar, and one pound of sugar. Put the sugar and vinegar over the fire, skim it, and when it has simmered fifteen minutes, put on the peaches, and let them remain until they are slightly cooked, but not soft. Boil cinnamon and mace in the syrup. Cloves are nice, but discolor the fruit. Mrs. Barringer, Dixie Cookery: or How I Managed my Table for twelve years (Boston: Floring, 1867), p. 45.

 

Pear Sauce

Take the large bell-pears, peel them and extract the cores without cutting the pears into pieces. Put them into a deep dish, pour over enough white wine to prevent them burning, lay a piece of white paper over the top, and bake them in rather a slow oven. When they are done quite soft, place them side by side in a glass dish, squeeze on them a little lemon juice, grate on some nutmeg and enough loaf sugar to dulcify them sufficiently, and eat them with the nicest roasted poultry and game. They are often eaten as a dessert, accompanied with rich sweet cream and powdered sugar or boiled custard. Common pears may be prepared for sauce by peeling, slicing and stewing them in a very little water till soft and nearly dry, sweetening them with sugar and mashing them very fine. They are sometimes eaten at tea with sweet cream and powdered sugar. Mrs. Lettice Bryan, The Kentucky Housewife (Cincinnati: Shepard & Stearns, 1839), p. 177.

 

Persimmon

The persimmon is a delicious fruit, when fully ripe. In fact, when it is in perfection, there are few tropical fruits that can rival it in richness; when green it has a fragrant astringency, only equaled by the prickly-ash or the wild turnip. The natives of Florida used the dried persimmon extensively as an article of food, and we read in the lists of stores and provisions furnished by them to the old Spanish expeditions of cakes of dried persimmon. DeBow’s Review (May 1855), p. 611.

 

Quince Marmalade

It has been said that quinces commend themselves more to the sense of smell than of taste; hence are better to ‘adorn’ other preparations than to be prepared themselves. When stewed till quite tender, and sweetened, they are, however, very pleasant, yet rather expensive sauce. In the form of marmalade, it is a better seasoning for bread, cakes, or puddings, than butter.

Pare, core, and quarter the quinces; boil them gently, uncovered, in water, till they begin to soften; then strain them through a hair sieve, and beat, in a mortar or wooden bowl, to a pulp; add to each pound of fruit three quarters of a pound of sugar; boil till it becomes stiff, and pour into small molds or sweetmeat pots. R. T. Trall, The New Hydropathic Cook-Book (New York: Fowlers and Wells, 1854), pp. 203-04.

 

Water Melon Juice

When they commence ripening, we commence cutting, and use them freely during the hot weather. When the weather becomes cool in September we haul a quantity of them to the house, split them open, and with a spoon scrape out the pulps into a cullender, then strain the water into vessels. We boil it in an iron vessel into a syrup, then put in apples or peaches, like making apple butter; boil slowly until the fruit is well cooked, then spice to taste, and you have something most people will prefer to apple butter or any kind of preservers. Or the syrup may be boiled, without fruit, down to molasses, which will be found to be as fine as sugar molasses. Valley Farmer 7, 8 (August 1855), 362.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 11.3 (April, 2011).

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Various authors.

Ask a few Americans what they think about barbecue. The guy from Kansas City will tell you about his sauce, the one from South Carolina will disagree. The Texan with hold forth on beef brisket. Someone from Memphis, waving a charred smokey rib, will beg to differ. The Californian will be discussing his patio grill and tri tip. But no one will be indifferent. Soon you will discover what they all have in common: serious passion and strong feelings about the meaning of barbecue. For all Americans, this is manly outdoor cooking—messy food you eat with your hands. Freud understood the urge well. For every civilized meal, eaten inside politely with a knife and fork, cooked by women, served on china, there’s the primal, even savage barbecue. Roasted meat gnawed from the bone is nothing new, nor are these associations. Think of Homer’s warriors roasting whole oxen, or Charlemagne as described by his biographer Einhard, as a serious eater of meat. Americans just happen to have raised this form of cooking to High Art.

Andrew Warnes takes these macho associations one step further, though, arguing that the barbecue, from the initial encounter between Europeans and Native Americans, right down to the present, is really about race, violence, and exploitation. The idea of barbecue, he argues, even when alluring, is tainted by associations with the primitive, exotic other, the cannibal, and the assertion of white superiority.

But isn’t barbecue one of the few foods prepared and enjoyed by all Americans regardless of color? A truly hybrid cuisine which all claim as their own and share equally? Blacks, whites, even Mongolians, stake a rightful claim to it. Warnes could not possibly be further from the mark with his impression of “American culture’s low estimation of pit barbecue” (10). But perhaps this enthusiasm really does conceal, like a cloying thick sauce, an underlying truth that is vicious and racist.

 

The evidence presented is unfortunately tough and hard to swallow. The first chapter tries to convince us that putting together the words barbecue and barbarian is not coincidental. Early conquistadors and their chroniclers who first described the crude cooking methods of the Native Americans unwittingly forged an association that would be used to justify the exploitation of natives who slow-cooked not only horrid beasts like iguanas, but even human flesh. Theodor de Bry’s popular images of freakish bald-headed cannibals chomping on arms and legs certainly would seem to suggest a “long tradition of conflating barbecue and cannibalism” (46).

But does the evidence really hold up? Do a handful of references denote a long-standing tradition of associating barbecue with racial discrimination? We are offered a Puritan divine, Edmund Hickeringill’s Jamaica Viewed,which appeared in 1661, who mentions that Caribs, or Cannibals, barbecue the flesh of captives and feed it to their wives and children. But does this really reflect a “new and emergent doctrine of white supremacy” (35) or merely a statement of what Hickeringill took to be fact? Every other early historic reference to barbecue is completely neutral: a wooden platform for cooking food. Or even any wooden grid raised off the ground. And would this technique really have been so fundamentally strange to Europeans? They had been using iron grills since ancient times—just think of St. Lawrence, barbecued for the faith. The famed Bartholomew Pig is an English BBQ.

Then there is the little story upon which Warnes’ whole argument hinges, Edward Ward’s The Barbacue Feast: or, the Three Pigs of Peckham, which was published in 1707, supposedly heralding “barbecue’s popularization in 1700s and ’10s London” and “the ascent of new notions of racial exoticism and mastery. Even among those who ate it, as we will see, barbecue in these years seems to have retained its full complement of savage and cannibal meanings …” (53).

Really? It turns out this is a story about sailors meeting for a common meal not far from the docks south of London for something, it seems, that reminded them of the food they ate back in Jamaica. And the sailors do what sailors do: eat raucously, make bad music and dance, tell stories, drink way too much rum, smoke, and then stumble home. It is anything but a cannibal feast. In fact, the two clearly racist lines in the whole work—one in which the color of the roasting pig is compared to an Indian squaw’s belly—goes no further than that.

A few lines further down comes another reference to barbecue. Warnes interprets this to mean that the sailors are comparing a pig to an African woman. What actually happens is that the sailors get impatient and start giving advice on the cooking, each one thinking himself an expert, and “every blundering Tarpaulin, that had but cross’d the Tropick of Cancer, and taken a Negro Wench by the short Wool, was ready to Wrest his Office out of his Hand”—that is out of the cook’s hand. In other words, anyone who had been to Jamaica on the slave trade and grabbed African women by the hair considers himself an expert on barbecue. It is a horrid thing to picture, and of course enslaving and abusing another people, and especially the act here described, is monstrous. But does it really have anything to do with barbecue? Absolutely not. It means that those who had been to Jamaica think they know something about barbecue. Period.

Still, maybe there was a persistent connection between barbecue and racism. Poking around a bit in the eighteenth-century sources to see exactly how this word barbecue was used might offer some clues. Elizabeth Raffald in The Experienced English Housekeeper, of 1786, gives us directions “To barbecue a pig,” which except for a half teaspoon of “Chyan pepper” in the stuffing is a thoroughly English roast whole pig. There is certainly nothing savage about the technique here. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary defines barbecue as a term for dressing a whole hog—which is exactly how Raffald uses it. Nothing more. This at least points to the popularity of the technique.

Edward Long’s History of Jamaica of 1774 explains barbecue in glowing terms: “the fame of our Jamaica barbecue is so well established, that it would answer to no purpose to reiterate their praises, except to tantalize the reader.” A play called The Patron, written by one Mr. Foote and performed in Haymarket around 1764, seems to be getting closer. It featured Sir Peter Pepperpot, a West Indian of great fortune, who is about to eat a delicious barbecue and is “rating [berating] a couple of negroes, by whom he is attended, for neglected to carry his bottle of Kian,” i.e. Cayenne pepper. I am surprised Warnes didn’t find this reference as easily as I did online. What exactly does it prove, though? Yes, white people who had black slaves did exploit them, and the owners did like barbecue a lot. But does their proximity here prove a direct association of the slaves with barbecue? What if they were bringing him tea or crumpets?

Perhaps there is just some fundamental methodological difference between the way historians and literary scholars interrogate sources. Random associations appear to be perfectly legitimate here. Even worse, sources are cited for what they do not say. Because Thomas Jefferson doesn’t mention barbecue in his notes on Virginia, this “suggests he finds its barbarity, its stark racial alterity, hard to stomach” (112). Maybe he just didn’t have anything to say about barbecue?

And what of the picture of the Big Chief Barbecue joint taken in 1940 in Georgia? The mere presence of a black servant (or perhaps slave) on the sign is proof of long standing savage associations? But he is holding beer. And what of Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima? Are rice and pancakes also violent? There is no doubt that there was racism in the United States, and these images do of course reveal a great deal about its legacy. There are also fascinating studies that explain that legacy, such as M.M. Manring’s Slave in a Box. But does the mere presence of a black servant in a beer sign on a BBQ joint really prove anything?

I would argue with John T. Edge that if there is any true common ground among blacks and whites in the South, if there is hope for harmony, it should be sought not only in food but specifically in barbecue (as he pointed out in an interview on ABC’s “Nightline” on Sept. 3, 2010). Of course, this is not to deny that racism and violence have been an integral part of American life, not merely in the South, but everywhere. Barbecue too has been a crucial element in this mix, but this book and the evidence it provides fail to convince that the two have anything to do with each other.

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Years before his immersion in the company of injured Union soldiers, Walt Whitman was surrounded by disabled men—or so he claimed. His 1858 column, “Manly Health and Training, with Off-Hand Hints Toward Their Conditions,” republished for the first time in 2015, portrays the mid-nineteenth-century United States as overrun with “feeble” men.^[1] Throughout the column, Whitman argues that “physical inferiority, in one form or another, is the rule rather than the exception” and offers insight into how readers might remedy this condition. Over the course of thirteen weekly installments, he insists that the American male physique is in desperate need of revitalization, something he proposes literature might supply.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the self-proclaimed “poet of the Body” also authored an instructive physical training text.^[2] Whitman published the series in The New York Atlas under the name Mose Velsor in 1858, between editions of Leaves of Grass (fig. 1). While the poet’s prescriptions are fairly representative of nineteenth-century health regimens—strict diet, routine exercise, sexual restraint—Whitman’s essays are remarkably attentive to their own textuality. “Manly Health” not only recommends healthy habits, but also presents text as itself an agent of cure. Henry David Thoreau suggested in Walden (1854) that, “to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise… It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object,” and Whitman takes this proposition seriously, providing as methodical instruction in reading as he does in his more conventional health recommendations.^[3] Attending to such metatextuality in “Manly Health” allows us to reconsider the relationship between text and reader both in and beyond the column, as Whitman draws on the prescriptive project of self-help to articulate a broader theory of literature as a rehabilitative technology. Ultimately, his framing of text probes the parameters of masculine American identity by providing a conduit between “inferior” readers and conceptions of ability.

This approach to literature emerges at a critical point in the poet’s career. Zachary Turpin has noted that when Whitman composed “Manly Health” he was considering abandoning poetry for more instructive genres, possibly in response to the looming threat of war.^[4] The column’s literary preoccupations, however, situate it not as a departure from Leaves of Grass, but as a complement to Whitman’s antebellum poetry. The timing of the publication of “Manly Health” is significant, as its 1858 appearance bridges the second (1856) and third (1860) editions of Leaves of Grass. The second edition had been published by Orson Squire Fowler and Samuel Wells, two of the most prominent U.S. phrenologists, and this association may have informed Whitman’s interest in exercise and related health sciences.^[5]

While the mid-century science of phrenology Whitman encountered during this period is perhaps best remembered for its claims to decipher the contours of human skulls, experts in the field paired this deterministic practice with an investment in transforming individual character through physical training.^[6] As Fowler puts it in an 1855 manual, “health of body produces health of mind and purity of feelings… While, therefore, phrenologists should scrutinize the size of organs closely, they should observe the STATE OF HEALTH much more minutely.”^[7] While phrenologists insisted that the human body was akin to a text that could be both read and revised, Whitman proposes that the act of reading itself could be a catalyst for rebuilding the body. This rehabilitative logic that governs “Manly Health” also extends to the editions of Leaves of Grass that bracket it, suggesting Whitman’s investment in rethinking literature’s influence on the body beyond the self-help genre.

Such a porous boundary between body and text has been the subject of much Whitman scholarship.^[8] In Disseminating Whitman (1991), Michael Moon argues that in the ongoing revisionary project of Leaves of Grass, “discourses of the body and discourses of the literary interact in ways which extend readers’ conceptions of both realms, and of the range of possible relations between these two realms.”^[9] “Manly Health” introduces another “possible relation” between the corporeal and the literary. Along with the “affectionate physical presence” that Moon argues Whitman imparts from writer to reader in Leaves of Grass, the authorial “We” that offers advice throughout “Manly Health” cultivates an instructive ethos that purports to alter the reader’s physicality by training him.^[10] Whitman’s column highlights the specifically therapeutic bodily contact imagined by his prescriptive as well as poetic works.

 

Despite this uniquely metatextual approach, Whitman was not alone in his assessment of the nation’s health, nor in his desire to intervene. In the wake of increased industrialization, the maintenance of an active, healthy body became a key concern of self-help texts. This literature for middle-class white men and women proliferated in the mid-nineteenth century, and publications ranged from exercise manuals such as Whitman’s to comprehensive instruction in cultivating “character,” which nearly always recommended physical training.^[11] These works were as committed to ideas about sex difference as they were to promoting health.^[12] While Eliza Ware Farrar’s The Young Lady’s Friend (1837) and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Means and Ends: Or, Self-training (1842) offered advice to the authors’ “young country-women,” the masculinist title of “Manly Health” joins such volumes as William Alcott’s The Young Man’s Guide (1833) and Timothy Shay Arthur’s Advice to Young Men (1848), which guided men in the development of a moral character and a healthy physique (fig. 2).^[13] These texts located the body as a site of self-improvement, encouraging corporeal transformation while maintaining strict adherence to a binary understanding of male and female traits.

For the men Whitman addresses, then, self-help was always about pursuing a distinct idea of “manliness” as well as health.^[14] This self-improvement was in part a response to the supposedly debilitating feminine “cult of domesticity” as well as a strategy for achieving economic success amidst the rise of industrial capitalism. This period saw a national investment in ideas about masculine self-control after Henry Clay valorized the “self-made man” on the Senate floor in 1832.^[15] Climbing the socioeconomic ladder, experts insisted, required an impressive degree of discipline that included command over one’s body. This economic imperative for corporeal self-control coincides, as disability studies scholar Robert McRuer has shown, with the emergence of the term “able-bodiedness,” which is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “soundness of health; ability to work; robustness.”^[16] Though Whitman doesn’t reference “able-bodiedness,” he does use the term “perfect-bodied.” Such terminology reflects both the ever unachievable fantasy of Whitman’s ideal physique and, because the verb “perfect” implies action, his conviction that such an ideal could be produced through human effort.

In its attempt to produce “live, robust American men,” “Manly Health” advances what McRuer calls “compulsory able-bodiedness,” which privileges certain bodies and minds as normal based on aesthetics or functionality, and positions others as deviations. Additionally, though Whitman’s use of the label “feeble” predates the consolidation of “feeblemindedness” into a eugenic category, the term was widely used in the mid-nineteenth century to describe people with disabilities.^[17] Whitman’s proto-eugenic language for those lacking idealized health (as well as manliness) denotes his concerns about disability. By offering reading as a means of training the ubiquitous “feeble” male body, Whitman escalates middle-class ideals about masculine self-help into a comprehensive rehabilitative project.

The compulsory nature of the agenda of “Manly Health” is made explicit by the suggestion that merely reading the text constitutes abiding by its scripts. From its inception, the column is intimately aware of its interactions with readers. The opening line of the first installment addresses the reader as “you whose eye is arrested by the above headlines.” The text’s title, this introduction implies, acts on the reader, not merely catching his attention, but also immediately ensnaring him in its rehabilitative project. “Manly health!” the column proceeds, “Is there not a kind of charm—a fascinating magic in the word?” The rehabilitation process commences without warning, beginning before the reader has considered the actual health recommendations detailed in the column. According to the second installment, the rest of the title, “Training,” has an equally mystical effect. “[T]here we print the magic word,” Whitman writes, “that can remedy all the troubles and accomplish all the wonders of human physique!” The effects or “charms” of these words are activated the moment the reader encounters them. They operate according to what Alison Kafer calls “curative time,” or an orientation towards disability—what Whitman here calls “troubles”—that “not only expects and assumes intervention but also cannot imagine or comprehend anything other than intervention.”^[18] Whitman’s “magic” diction produces an intensified strain of curative time in which the process of rehabilitation is initiated the very instant it is described. 

A similarly immediate and involuntary transformation takes place in Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”^[19] Like “Manly Health,” the 1856 and 1860 versions of the poem begin with a claim that the text physically alters the reader: “I celebrate myself,/ And what I assume you shall assume/ For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.” Moreover, “Manly Health’s” self-proclaimed effect of “arrest[ing]” the reader’s “eye” is echoed and elaborated on by the metamorphosis “Song of Myself” supposedly catalyzes. For the reader to “assume” what Whitman’s speaker does means not only sharing his knowledge, but also adopting his physical qualities. The command “you shall” makes the impact of text on reader compulsory. As in “Manly Health,” it is the reader’s contact with the poem, and not an intentional engagement with its content, that initiates physical transformation, here at the molecular level.

“Manly Health” does, however, invite the reader’s active participation. Just as Whitman recommends health-promoting dietary, hygienic, and exercise routines, so too does he outline a disciplined engagement with his column. He warns against incomplete reading, advising, “to those of our readers who have seen only partial sections of this series, we can only repeat our charge and wish that they procure the entire series.” Echoing an earlier suggestion that all men “form the habit” of a daily swim in order to maximize its health benefits, Whitman advocates for habitual reading of “Manly Health.” He also recommends adherence to this practice throughout one’s life. As the first installment states, physical training is suited “to all ages of life, from the beginning to the end of it.” “Manly Health” purports to be of value across a similar longevity, requiring of its audience, “the careful reading, once or twice every year, during the remainder of their lives.” Similarly, when Whitman invites his readers to heed his advice, he articulates this process as a physical activity, asking readers “to ponder, with all the strength and comprehension of their minds, upon what we are here trying to impress upon them.” Comprehending the text apparently requires the very “strength” sought out in other sections of the column, and this “pondering” is also more literally embodied. “We call upon you, reader,” Whitman writes, “to mark this, for it is well worth pondering upon.” Beyond asking the reader simply to take note, this request invites a physical act where annotation represents assent to instructions the author deems especially important. These carefully prescribed practices suggest that reading “Manly Health” demands the same discipline required by its more conventional prescriptions.

Whitman does not reserve this physically active reading for “Manly Health” alone, but rather promotes a shift in general reading habits. In addition to the metatextual commentary that pervades the column, he also quite literally offers reading aloud as a prescription:

We would recommend every young man to select a few favorite poetical or other passages, of an animated description, and get in the habit of declaiming them, on all convenient occasions—especially when out upon the water, or by the sea-shore, or rambling over the hills on the country [sic]. Let him not be too timid or bashful about this, but throw himself into it with a will. Careful, however, not to overstrain his voice, or scream, for that is not the object that is aimed after. A loud, slow, firm tone, as long as it can be sustained without fatigue, and agreeably to the ear, is the test.

Here reading is presented with the same detail afforded to other “physical exercises” in Whitman’s column, as it apparently “helps, indeed, the bodily system in many ways.” A far cry from the “not a bit tamed…barbaric yawp” Whitman claims to “sound” in Leaves of Grass, this scene of reading aloud requires carefully controlled vocal exertion.

This strict approach to vocalization is not Whitman’s own invention, but rather draws on the “vocal gymnastics” described in physician Andrew Comstock’s A System of Vocal Gymnastics, a Key to the Phoneticon (1854). Proper use of the “vocal organs,” Comstock explains, can “invigorate the lungs, and consequently, fortify them against the invasion of disease.”^[20] Much like “Manly Health,” Comstock’s manual asserts that proper reading can directly affect health. Whitman likely encountered this concept of “vocal gymnastics” (a term Whitman himself never uses) in the work of physician Russell Thacher Trall.^[21] Between 1855 and 1856, Whitman contributed regular pieces to Life Illustrated, the weekly newspaper distributed by his new publishers, Fowler and Wells. Trall served as assistant editor during this period, and Fowler and Wells published Trall’s own health manual, The Family Gymnasium, in 1857, one year before “Manly Health” appeared in The New York Atlas.^[22] In a chapter on “Vocal Gymnastics,” Trall offers his own “practical hints” with the aim to “improve the respiration and articulation.” He advises readers to “declaim in a loud whisper,” select passages “which require firm and dignified enunciation,” and keep the mouth “freely opened” (emphasis original).^[23] Whitman takes up these guidelines in “Manly Health” by specifying that readers select “animated” texts and “declaim” them at a regulated volume and pitch.

These images of physically active reading by Whitman and others resemble a section added to the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. In this first revision, Whitman added a new conclusion to what was then titled “Poem of the Body” (retitled “I Sing the Body Electric” in 1867). In this addition, the speaker addresses his body directly. “Oh my body!” he cries, “…I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems.” He then offers an exhaustive taxonomy that begins with body parts such as “[h]ead, neck, hair, ears” and evolves into more active processes. One line in particular, “Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming,” could pass for “Manly Health’s” table of contents, as it is only after these have been detailed that the list’s final object, “the exquisite realization of health,” emerges. The logic of active reading presented in “Manly Health” indicates that long before Whitman had revised the title to its canonical declaration—“I Sing the Body Electric”—he had begun to take stock of the sonic value of his poems. It is not only that the poet, by describing the body, attaches literary value to presumably mundane corporeality. More crucially, the list qualifies as just the kind of “animated description” recommended in “Manly Health” for therapeutic reading aloud, providing insight into the “electric” function Whitman would ascribe to the poem by 1867.^[24] The poem both sings and invites a range of sonic expressions—what it describes in the 1856 version as “The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud”—to promote an active, enlivening vocalization of its content.

Likewise, when read in light of “Manly Health,” Whitman’s claim in “Poem of the Body” that the body “shall stand or fall with my poems” reflects contemporary debates about reading posture. In his history of posture, Sander Gilman traces efforts to correct the damage wrought by sedentary reading to Samuel-Auguste Tissot’s 1776 volume, On the Health of Men of Letters.^[25] Trall takes up this issue in a section in The Family Gymnasium on comportment “during study.” He insists, “it ought to be among the first duties of parents and school teachers to guard those under their care against improper attitudes.”^[26] He illustrates this point with juxtaposed sketches of adult men reading while standing (fig. 3). The upright figure, eyes focused ahead, is captioned “standing erect,” while the reader with his head and shoulders tilted down toward his book is labeled “malposition in standing,” perhaps critiquing bookishness as an antisocial orientation.^[27] Whitman engages this idealized reading posture when he insists that declamation “provokes the habit of electricity through the frame … and gives a dash and style to the personality of a man.” This association of “frame” and “personality” reflects the Enlightenment-era belief that “‘bad’ posture incorporated all the negative qualities: illness, ugliness, immorality, and lack of patriotism.”^[28] Whitman’s reading prescriptions, then, correct for not only the “feeble” qualities he perceived in American men, but also the potential implications of such disability on “manliness.” Indeed, “Manly Health” at one point defines “manly beauty” as “an upright attitude” as well as “the capacity of being agreeable as a companion … always welcome” (emphasis mine). For Whitman then, erect posture facilitates not only individual able-bodiedness, but also masculine belonging.

 

This link between health and sociality is essential to “Manly Health’s” rehabilitative vision. Whitman describes “a wonderful medicinal effect in the mere personal presence of a man who was perfectly well,” and similarly wonders, “what can be more debilitating than to be continually surrounded by sickly people?” (emphasis original). This logic extends to not only face-to-face interactions, but also those facilitated by text. “Poem of the Body” declares that a “well-made man”  “conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more” by simply walking past the speaker. In “Manly Health,” text transmits this “medicinal effect” between men, beginning with the authorial “We” that narrates the series. The plurality of this masculine narrative voice signals the phrenological category of “adhesiveness” that, for Whitman, found its “fullest expression … in male-male relationships.”^[29] Claiming physical proximity, this “We” also professes to connect the reader to a presumably healthy collective. “We fancy,” Whitman writes of the column’s reception, “we see the look with which the phrase is met by many a young man.” The community of men is brought, by way of the text, into close contact with readers.  “Manly Health” reveals that what Moon calls the “fluid” boundary between bodies in Whitman’s text can have therapeutic effects.

This porosity is not without risks, and the supposedly deleterious influences of “sickly people” also extend to literary characters.

There is a class of writers, both in this country and Great Britain, who seem to be doing their best, in their novels, sketches, poems, &c., to present as the models for imitation and approval, a set of sickly milk-and-water men… We hope the young fellows who read our remarks will be on their guard against these writers and their sickly models.

Here Whitman prescribes a strict literary diet, offering instruction not only in how, but also what to read. “Manly Health” imagines a literacy in which readers expose themselves only to images of healthy embodiment that they intend to emulate. What Byrne Fone terms the “masculine landscapes” of Whitman’s writing are populated by able-bodied men, distinct from the feeble populations that dominate both literature and the nation (fig. 4).^[30] Here the compulsory element of “Manly Health’s” able-bodiedness emerges, as there’s simply no place for “sickly” figures in Whitman’s literary culture. Whitman suggests that only healthy men can produce such edifying representations, and he clearly saw himself as one such writer. The 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass includes a flattering letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson praising Whitman’s text as a departure from the prevailing literary models, which he deems plagued by “too much lymph in the temperament.” Whitman draws on this assessment in “Manly Health” when he calls for a new cohort of writers to correct—or revise—the errors made by the “modern puny and dandy tribes of literary men” of the time. By diverging from the column’s focus on the formation of individual habits to comment on the state of literary culture, Whitman suggests that the production of new texts is key to recuperating able-bodiedness on a national scale.

These nation-altering “Poets to Come,” as they are termed in “Chants Democratic,” which was added to Leaves of Grass in 1860, are also, importantly, described in that poem as a “a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known,” highlighting the concerns about progeny and heredity that undergird much of “Manly Health.”^[31] Though it would be more than twenty years before the term “eugenics” was used to describe the practice of selective reproduction in pursuit of genetic homogeneity, “Manly Health’s” anxiety about imperfect bodies complements the proto-eugenic language that pervades the column. At one point, Whitman posits that “feeble paternity and maternity” are equally to blame for national deficiency as the prevalence of unhealthy habits. Even beyond this explicit turn to heredity, however, “Manly Health” warns against the reproduction of certain physiques. While selective reading is certainly distinct from selective reproduction, both abide by eugenic logic. For Whitman, one “sickly” body, fictional or otherwise, begets another.^[32] The then-widespread Lamarckian model of heredity, which posited that acquired as well as congenital traits could be passed on to one’s offspring, is largely compatible with Whitman’s rehabilitative vision.

 

Whitman ascribes reproductive power to writers as well as to parents. In a section titled, “Birth Influences—Breeding Superb Men,” he laments that “there has never yet been found a generation that would shape its course, or give up any of its pleasures, for the greater perfection of the generation which was to follow,” implying that the young men who heed his advice have the potential to catalyze such change. Later, however, this logic reappears in the context of literary cultures. Whitman insists that the literary “models” of masculinity available “are not for live, robust American men—and especially not for our youth. A very different pattern indeed is wanted to be placed before the growing generations.” With more “robust” images available, he reasons, a healthier nation might emerge. Framing “generation” as a concern of both parentage and literature suggests that transforming the health of American men requires a shift in literary representation and consumption. This link between reproduction and literary production also emerges in the final poem that was added to the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, “So Long!” This original iteration of the poem opens with the declaration, “To conclude—I announce what comes after me,/…I announce greater offspring, orators, days, and then depart.”^[33] The reproductive category of “offspring” quickly morphs into figures resembling the previous “Poets to Come,” marking these artists as the speaker’s progeny. This “announcement” is, by Whitman’s own logic, performative; it not only heralds the emergence of a subsequent generation, but also, in doing so, actually produces it. Here the speaker transmits “every atom” of his body to the reader through the textual “announcement.”

Marking his literary descendants as “greater…orators” also positions “So Long!” as a text intended to be spoken aloud, invoking the “declamations” of vocal gymnastics. While Whitman’s description of a sole reader “rambling the hills” conjures the idealized nineteenth-century image of the individualistic frontiersman, the exclamatory “So Long!” implies that these oral poetic productions are social in that they realize the corporeal interactivity of text. One’s declamations or “announcements” can be heard and registered by others, whether or not they seek them out. Emerson, the unwitting endorser of the 1856 Leaves of Grass, articulates a similar sentiment in the introduction to Representative Men (1850) when he writes, “the ideas of the time are in the air, and infect all who breathe it…we learn of our contemporaries, what they know, without effort, and almost through the pores of the skin.”^[34] Declaiming does more than fill one’s own lungs with air; it allows ideas to circulate and “infect” listeners, whether or not any “effort” is exerted.

This passive, even involuntary consumption of text widens Whitman’s audience, a consequence that both affirms and complicates the compulsory nature of able-bodiedness in Whitman’s rehabilitative reading. “Manly Health” makes claims of universality that reiterate one of the core concerns in Leaves of Grass: “In all people I see myself.” The column, too, professes a wide, though sex-specific, audience of “every man, rich or poor, worker or idler.” This characteristic expansiveness ultimately challenges the terms of able-bodiedness, even while the text heralds this trait as prerequisite to masculine American identity. While “able-bodiedness” is defined in part as the “ability to work,” Whitman includes the “idler” in his readership. This figure also appears in a stanza of “Chants Democratic” that appears only in the 1856 and 1860 versions, which bracket “Manly Health.” “His shape arises,” the poem declares of the American man, “…worker, idler, citizen, countryman,/… Of pure American breed, of reckless health, his body perfect.” This inclusive definition of a “body perfect” subverts the social categories of Whitman’s time. Building on McRuer’s work on able-bodiedness, Sarah F. Rose’s labor history of disability, No Right to be Idle (2017), traces the association of ability with productivity to the economic shifts of the mid-nineteenth-century.^[35] Whitman’s vision of an able-bodied American male collective, however, paradoxically incorporates the “idler” through his treatment of reading. Though historically associated with leisure and indolence, Whitman presents reading as a form of physical exercise that answers the proto-eugenicist call to improve future “generations” of American men.

This theory of reading allows Whitman’s able-bodied collective “We” to be joined imaginatively as well as physically. The famous eleventh section of “Song of Myself” depicts this very process, by describing a scene of “twenty-eight young men bath[ing] by the shore” and a “lady” watching them from a window. This juxtaposition illustrates the ideas about sex difference that birthed the rise of the self-help genre. The isolated “womanly” observer, “hid[den]” in her “fine house,” is defined by inactivity: she “hides handsome and richly drest.” The bathing men are both part of a community (“all so friendly”) and actively engaged in swimming, a practice “Manly Health” calls “one of the most ancient of health-generating and body-perfecting exercises.” This set-up introduces a strict binary model of “womanly” idleness and “manly health” that quickly disintegrates. As the men bathe, “an unseen hand” emerges that “pass[es] over their bodies” and “seizes fast to them” before an invisible figure’s chest “puffs and declines” after joining them in their exercise. The “womanly” figure at the window now occupies both her original position and that of the men: “You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.” She is at once idle and immersed in this network marked by physical health, representing the possibility of such flexible identities embedded in “Manly Health’s” vision of reading.

“Manly Health” carves out this paradoxical position for its audience. Able-bodiedness, as disability studies scholars have long argued, is not a discrete biological category, but a socially constructed position. By presenting reading as a conduit to able-bodiedness, Whitman’s text unwittingly makes this position more accessible, despite insisting on physiological markers such as “herculean strength, suppleness, a clear complexion.” The prescriptions detailed in “Manly Health” are exclusive in that they insist on certain pre-existing abilities (i.e. walking) not necessarily required by reading. Of course, these presumptions extend to reading as well, which requires literacy and, in some cases, vision.^[36] But Whitman’s “magic words” might also be “animated” by another’s declamation of them, further expanding the possibilities of how reading is accomplished. In this way, “Manly Health” imagines increased, though always incomplete, access to both texts and the position of able-bodiedness.

By presenting literature as rehabilitative, Whitman reconceives of both able-bodied “health” and, as a result, the “manliness” to which it was linked by mid-nineteenth-century self-help culture. What emerges amidst “Manly Health’s” insistence on being read by “every man” is akin to Tobin Siebers’s “theory of complex embodiment,” which straddles social and medical models of disability by “theoriz[ing] the body and its representations as mutually transformative.”^[37] If the reader’s capacity or willingness to abide by Whitman’s more conventional health instructions is relatively insignificant, then perhaps the embodied actions depicted in “Manly Health” are not prescriptions at all. As Whitman suggests in “Song of Myself,” the text is contingent on “every atom” of the reader’s body. By using “Manly Health” to restate the relationship between reader and writer, Whitman reveals that instructive texts are subject to the very transformations they seek to impose.

________________

[1] Walt Whitman, Manly Health and Training: To Teach the Science of a Sound and Beautiful Body, ed. Zachary Turpin (New York: Regan Arts, 2017).

[2] Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn: Fowler & Wells, 1856).

[3] Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Other Writings: Authoritative Texts, Journal, Reviews and Posthumous Assessments, Criticism, 3rd edition., Norton Critical Edition. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 72.

[4] Zachary Turpin, “Introduction,” in Manly Health and Training: To Teach the Science of a Sound and Beautiful Body, by Walt Whitman, ed. Zachary Turpin (New York: Regan Arts., 2017), 7-9.

[5] M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Whitman’s Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 59.

[6] Jan Todd, Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful: Purposive Exercise in the Lives of American Women, 1800-1870 (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1998), 176-7.

[7] Orson Squire Fowler and Lorenzo Niles Fowler, The Illustrated Self-Instructor in Phrenology and Physiology: With One Hundred Engravings, and a Chart of the Character (Fowler and Wells, 1855), 34.

[8] The 1990s in particular saw a wealth of such readings of Whitman’s writing, many of which focus specifically on the sexual implications of such “fluidity” (Moon). Mark Maslan, Michael Moon, and Tenney Nathanson each consider the author’s endeavor to project his physical body into his work.

[9] Michael Moon, Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass (Harvard University Press, 1991), 7.

[10] Moon, 3.

[11] James B. Salazar, Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America, America and the Long 19th Century (New York: New York University Press, 2010).

[12] A distinction between sex and gender had not yet been introduced in the mid-nineteenth century and a biological understanding of “manly” and “womanly” traits was central to the health recommendations in self-help texts. Therefore, following Kyla Schuller, I use the term “sex” in my discussion of them.

[13] Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Means and Ends: Or, Self-Training, 2nd ed. (Harper & Brothers, 1842).; Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History, 3 edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

[14] As Gail Bederman has shown, the term “manliness” predates “masculinity,” which came into popular vernacular only in the 1890s (6).

[15] Kimmel, 20.

[16] Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (NYU Press, 2006), 7. Variations of “able-bodied,” according to the OED, appear far earlier, though the now-accepted hyphenated form also emerges in the nineteenth century.

[17] James W. Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

[18] Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 27.

[19] All quotations from “Song of Myself” (unless specified otherwise) are taken from the second edition of Leaves of Grass in 1856. Leaves of Grass famously underwent many revisions across the author’s lifetime. In fact, the poem would not take the title “Song of Myself” until the 1881-2 Osgood edition. In 1856, Whitman had given it the title “Poem of Walt Whitman, an American.” I use the title “Song of Myself” here since it has become the most familiar and canonical of the variations.

[20] Andrew Comstock, A System of Vocal Gymnastics, a Key to The Phoneticon (Philadelphia, 1854), 4.

[21] Harold Aspiz, “Specimen Days: The Therapeutics of Sun-Bathing,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 1, no. 3 (1983): 49.

[22] Aspiz, 49.

[23] Russel Thacher Trall, The Illustrated Family Gymnasium.. (New York, 1857), 199. Trall’s exercises are designed for children and drawn from Horace Mann’s work on teaching children to read aloud “rhetorical[ly]” (196). Whitman’s “Manly” variation, however, supplants this classroom instruction with outdoor activity. By resituating reading, he transforms an exercise for children into one that invokes the American idealization of the masculinist frontiersman. 

[24] Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York: W.E. Chapin & Co., Printers, 1867).

[25] Sander L. Gilman, Stand Up Straight!: A History of Posture (Reaktion Books, 2018).

[26] Trall, 22.

[27] Trall, 23.

[28] Gilman, 308.

[29] Carmine Sarracino, “Dyspeptic Amours, Petty Adhesiveness, and Whitman’s Ideal of Personal Relations,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 8, no. 2 (October 1, 1990): 85.

[30] Byrne Fone, Masculine Landscapes: Walt Whitman and the Homoerotic Text, 1st edition (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992).

[31] Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860–1861).

[32] As Turpin notes, “Manly Health” is concerned not only with individual health, but also with racial and national fitness and concerns about heredity were crucial to mid-nineteenth-century ideas about health well before the eugenic era.

[33] Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860–1861).

[34] Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men: Seven Lectures (Houghton, Mifflin, 1883), 30.

[35] Sarah F. Rose, No Right to Be Idle: The Invention of Disability, 1840s–1930s (UNC Press Books, 2017).

[36] Sari Altschuler and David Weimer’s 2019 exhibit, “Touch This Page! Making Sense of the Ways We Read” has highlighted the multi-sensory reading practices that emerged in the decades before “Manly Health’s” publication, specifically Samuel Gridley Howe’s “Boston Line Type,” which provided visual as well as tactile access to the text.

[37] Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory, Corporealities. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 25.

 

Further Reading

Sari Altschuler and David Weimer, “Touch This Page! Making Sense of the Ways We Read.” Accessed April 7, 2019.

Harold Aspiz, “Specimen Days: The Therapeutics of Sun-Bathing.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 1:3 (1983): 48–50.

Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United

States, 1880-1917  (Chicago, 1995).

Andrew Comstock, A System of Vocal Gymnastics, a Key to The Phoneticon (Philadelphia, 1854).

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men: Seven Lectures (1883).

Byrne Fone, Masculine Landscapes: Walt Whitman and the Homoerotic Text, 1st edition (Carbondale, Ill., 1992).

Orson Squire Fowler and Lorenzo Niles Fowler, The Illustrated Self-Instructor in Phrenology and Physiology: With One Hundred Engravings, and a Chart of the Character (1855).

Sander L. Gilman, Stand Up Straight!: A History of Posture (London, 2018).

Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington, Ind., 2013).

Jimmie Killingsworth, Whitman’s Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text, N Reprint edition (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991).

Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History, 3rd edition (New York, 2011).

Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York, 2006).

Michael Moon, Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).

Sarah F. Rose, No Right to Be Idle: The Invention of Disability, 1840s–1930s (Chapel Hill., N.C., 2017).

James B. Salazar, Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America (New York, 2010).

Carmine Sarracino, “Dyspeptic Amours, Petty Adhesiveness, and Whitman’s Ideal of Personal Relations.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 8: 2 (October 1, 1990): 76–91.

Kyla Schuller, The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Durham, N.C., 2017).

Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Means and Ends: Or, Self-Training (1842).

Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2008).

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Other Writings: Authoritative Texts,

Journal, Reviews and Posthumous Assessments, Criticism, third edition (New York, 2008).

Jan Todd, Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful: Purposive Exercise in the Lives of American Women, 1800-1870 (Macon, Ga., 1998).

Russell Thacher Trall, The Illustrated Family Gymnasium (New York, 1857).

James W. Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind a History of Mental Retardation in the United States (Berkeley, Calif., 1994).

Zachary Turpin, “Introduction” in Manly Health and Training: To Teach the Science of a Sound and Beautiful Body (1858), by Walt Whitman, 1–19. Ed. Zachary Turpin (New York, 2017).

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings (New York, London, 2002).

———. Leaves of Grass (1860) Thayer and Eldridge, 1860.

———. Manly Health and Training: To Teach the Science of a Sound and Beautiful Body. Edited by Zachary Turpin (New York, 2017).

 

www.whitmanbicentennialessays.com

This article originally appeared in issue 19.1 (Spring, 2019).

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About the Author

Jess Libow is a doctoral candidate in English at Emory University, where she is also pursuing a certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research and teaching interests include disability, health, and gender in U.S. literature and culture.

“Lean and loafe.”^[1] 

Every time Patti Smith comes to Philadelphia—her hometown—she crosses the river to Camden and takes a tour of Walt Whitman’s house.  Someone told me about this habit of Smith’s and I was agog.  “Is the house really that great?  What does she like about it so much?”  My friend, also a nineteenth-century Americanist, shrugged.  “No idea,” she said.

We rarely go to authors’ houses, we literature professors.  We are well-trained in the non-worship of the author, in anti-nostalgic reading practices, superior in our sense of our work as being above fandom.  But if I’m schooled against fandom as a literary critic, no one ever trained me not to geek out about musicians.  So, when I heard about Patti Smith’s regular pilgrimage, I decided I had to visit the house, too.  What, I asked myself, if she’s there?  She wasn’t.  We toured the house with a family from Spain: father, mother, three sons; the father could quote Whitman at length in Spanish, and did so in the bedroom, beautifully.  But what I wasn’t prepared for: if she wasn’t there, he was.

“What I loved about Whitman when I was young,” Patti Smith told Dan DeLuca of The Philadelphia Inquirer in April of 2019, “was how he reached out to the young poets in the future. You know, Jesus says that at the end of Matthew. ‘Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.’  And with Whitman it’s more specific. He’s thinking of the poets 100 and 200 years into the future. And then when I became friends with Allen Ginsberg, Whitman was like his mentor. Like his spiritual great-grandfather or something. In fact, when Allen died, we sat with him, and over his bed was a photograph of Walt Whitman.”   It’s interesting to me that Smith jumps to Jesus in this interview, and quotes the Gospel of Matthew rather than Whitman himself.  She thereby connects Jesus to Whitman to Ginsberg via their three deathbeds.  ‘Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world’ are the final lines, in the King James Version, of the chapter in which “Mary Magdalene and the other Mary” (Matthew 28:1) find the stone rolled away from the tomb and are invited by the angel to come “see the place where the Lord lay” (Matthew 28:6).  In other words, it’s a chapter about the drama of a deathbed.  In the interview, Smith shuttles us between Ginsberg’s deathbed (Ginsberg met Whitman in a poem—“A Supermarket in California” —and believed he was connected to Whitman as a lover through a “gay succession” of partners) and Jesus’s deathbed (or at least the bed on which his dead body was laid).  Whitman’s face hangs above Ginsberg’s bed, right where an image of Jesus might be expected to hang. Smith herself sits beside Ginsberg’s deathbed seeing that picture of Whitman and in the interview she cites the Jesus who might have hung there rather than the Whitman about whom she is speaking.   Together, Smith’s words, Ginsberg’s bed, Jesus’s bed, and Whitman’s photo summon up another deathbed, the one in Whitman’s Camden house, which Smith visits regularly.  The house is centered by the bed in which Walt Whitman died, and for which his final version of Leaves of Grass is named. 

There are several places Smith may be thinking of in Whitman when she, instead, quotes the final lines of the Book of Matthew.  But these, also final, lines of the poem-series “Calamus” must resonate somewhere for her—“Calamus,” which is, in so many ways, structured like the Gospel of Matthew:

FULL of life now, compact, visible,
I, forty years old the eighty-third year of the States,
To one a century hence or any number of centuries hence,
To you yet unborn these, seeking you.

When you read these I that was visible am become invisible,
Now it is you, compact, visible, realizing my poems, seeking me,
Fancying how happy you were if I could be with you and become 
your comrade;
Be it as if I were with you. (Be not too certain but I am now 
with you.)^[2]

You’re reading this poem, Whitman claims.  I’m dead—invisible—and you’re alive—visible.  It’s your body that is “realizing” my poems.  Wouldn’t it be great if, instead of realizing my poem, you were realizing me, myself?  Wouldn’t it be great if realizing a poem were to realize the poet?  Don’t you wish I were your lover?  Go ahead.  Pretend I am.  Then the sly, flirtatious parenthesis:  maybe I actually am your lover. 

“Lo I am with you always.”  “Be not too certain but I am now with you.”  These immortals—Jesus and Whitman—step out of the past alongside us.  “With you,” they both say. They are carried into the future by our next-to-them-ness.   Jesus’s “with you” is a promise that “I’ll love you.”   “I’ll get you off,” Whitman’s “with you” more playfully asserts.   The two speakers from beyond the deathbed offer themselves as companions, accompaniments; lean on me.   In fact, they lean on us.  They step out of the past only with our help, leveraging themselves into being on the strength of our compact, visible substance.  And when we find ourselves side-by-side with the poet/prophet, who is to say which of us is which?

Who am I to deny myself to Whitman?  Who am I to say I’m too anti-nostalgic?  Who am I to refuse to let Walt Whitman leapfrog into being over and into my flesh?  Who am I to put myself outside of gay succession?  We don’t have much to leave one another, certainly almost never estate.  Well, friends, the pretty little house in Camden is free and open to the public.  Patti Smith knows what’s on offer there, what it means to see the deathbed in the artfully disarranged room, which is a careful mess.  It’s as if the poet’s body has just been carried out.  Who am I to say that I know better than Smith and Ginsberg and the Other Mary?  I went to Camden, therefore, on my forty-seventh birthday.  It was summer, so I took the seasonal ferry across the Delaware from Philadelphia, where I live.  And it’s in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” that Whitman really lets rip with his theory of poetic immortality, with his idea that he can reincarnate himself in the bodies of those who think of him from the future.  Believe me, on that ferry, on my way to his house, I felt him laughing at me: “Who was to know what should come home to me? / Who knows but I am enjoying this? / Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?”

The Camden house is the house Whitman died in, and although that is certainly an invitation to meditate on the meaning of life and death, it is the materiality of living and dying that confronts you first.  The fact of his death in the house is mostly palpable because of the paraphernalia of his long illness and his dying that fills the space.  Much of what you see in Whitman’s house are the late nineteenth-century traces of how a group of friends manufactured a living space for a man increasingly disabled by strokes and, unknown to anyone until the epic autopsy of his body performed in his dining room, tuberculosis.  When doctors cut into his body, they discovered the excruciating calcification of nearly the entirety of his lungs and their adhesion to his internal organs and muscles.  The deathbed is a narrow, single bedframe that was moved in to replace the double bed made by Whitman’s father, and this single bedframe supported a water mattress that Whitman’s doctor had custom-made in an effort to help the dying poet find some comfort.  Beneath the bed is a huge, low-sided, battered tin tub, bigger in diameter than the bed itself is wide, protruding a good foot or more out.  This tub was also custom-made so that Whitman could stand in it from his bed and be bathed easily, thus maintaining his love of keeping, as he called it, “delicate.”^[3]  The rest of the room, while not so obviously built around the needs of a disabled man, adds to the story of capacity and incapacity.  The comfortable chair in which he sat, the (very big) shoes just where feet would rest, the piles of papers sloppily crowding close by, the pen—the exact sort of pen he wrote with, donated in the 1920s by the Camden company that still made them then—in his actual pen tray right there at the distance of an arm reaching up and over from the chair.  These furnishings and their orientation attest to the writing habits of a lifetime, but also to the needs of the often half-recumbent, partially paralyzed body that moved about in and used this room.  The sitting and dining rooms downstairs, with photos of friends pasted up everywhere, images of Lincoln en famille, two identical thigh-high garden statues of President William Henry Harrison, and formal horsehair furniture standing around, speak to the social, the vocal, the witty, the campy, the political Whitman.  The upstairs bedroom with its systems in place to maintain health, hygiene, comfort, labor, leisure, and rest, and also to support and make as beautiful as possible the long work of dying, speaks to the embodied Whitman who slept, wrote, bathed, sat, suffered, and ultimately passed on or glimmered out or who knows—who in any case left that once-electric body here, at 328 Mickle Street, on March 26, 1892, buoyed up on that rubber water bed. 

As Sara Ahmed invites us to understand in the long, beautiful, furniture-heavy preamble to her “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology,”

Bodies hence acquire orientation by repeating some actions over others, as actions that have certain objects in view, whether they are the physical objects required to do the work (the writing table, the pen, the keyboard) or the ideal objects that one identifies with. The nearness of such objects, their availability within my bodily horizon, is not casual: it is not just that I find them there, like that. Bodies tend toward some objects more than others, given their tendencies. These tendencies are not originary; they are effects of the repetition of “tending toward.”^[4]

From our inclinations, Ahmed draws orientations; “tending” leads, for her, to “tendencies.”  How we live, how our bodies repeat themselves is, she calmly points out, formative.  In Ahmed’s hands “tend” becomes a reflexive verb; you tend towards yourself.^[5]  Repetitions in space and with objects orient you to yourself.  Some people (now myself included) find Whitman’s bedroom to be an orienting space, and return to it multiple times. The objects in the room, their orientations toward one another and toward the needs of the now missing body, summon some sense of tending toward, of wanting to touch and be touched.  “Neither the object nor the body have integrity in the sense of being the same thing with and without each other. Bodies as well as objects take shape through being oriented toward each other, as an orientation that may be experienced as the cohabitation or sharing of space.”^[6]  In Whitman’s bedroom we are not allowed to touch.  Still, one feels as if one could.  Or should.  Whitman wasn’t rich.  The objects are all ordinary.  All well-used, in the service of keeping going, keeping writing, keeping clean, keeping alive.  All these objects. 

For me, it was the cane.  Leaning in the corner.   A simple, crooked cane.  I desperately wanted to grasp it.  I wanted to lean my weight on it.  My hand itched.  I yearned.  I tended toward.  I still do.

I don’t want to be obsessed with Whitman’s cane.  It isn’t dignified.  I’d rather not have these feelings, in spite of having read Whitman, and having recognized his direct addresses to me (to anyone) from out of his poetry.  I never hoped to meet him, in a supermarket or elsewhere.  But again—who am I to refuse the way this room, and in particular this one object, prodded, poked, and knocked me over?  Ahmed leads us through the problem of seeing only one side of a table; we conjure its other sides without seeing them.  For Ahmed’s queer phenomenological reading, “what is behind the object for me is not only its missing side, but also its historicity, the conditions of its arrival.”  There are many ways we could think about the conditions of arrival for this house and all that’s in it.  We know that Horace Traubel wanted the house to be a museum and planned for it before Whitman’s death, but it took a few decades to come to fruition.  We know which objects are original and which are not.  We could talk about practices of curation.  We could talk about the city of Camden and the house’s meaning for that place.  But “lesbihonest”: for visitors to Whitman’s House, or at least for me, a great deal of the queer “backside” of the objects in the house, a lot of the historicity, is some pleasurable sense of the presence of Whitman himself.  He teased us that it might be so.  When he was visible and we weren’t born yet, he told us that when he was invisible (the shoes sit there, the body does not) and we were visible (there we are, in the mirror), he would be “with us.”  Why didn’t—why don’t—we believe him? 

On my first visit, the cane and its particularities were easy to miss.  Leaning in a heavily shadowed corner away from the bed and beside a dresser, it was nothing more than a simple, dark stroke of shadow against the wall, like an elongated comma.  I could barely see it, but I couldn’t look away.  Reduced to a simple shape like that, its beauty held me in thrall.  On my second visit, made just to see the cane, the docent had clearly propped the cane against the bed so I could get a better look at it.  It is made from a sapling of some sort, probably hawthorn, with the nubbles where small branches grew still prominent on the long, tapering shaft.  Those nubbles must make for a pleasing texture to a stroking hand.  A beat-up brass ferule caps the almost-dainty point.  On the bold curve of the crook the bumps are sanded away and the wood is smooth.  On most canes with crooks, the parabola of the crook is tight, and continues until it makes a perfect and symmetrical rainbow arch, a half-circle, then it is sanded into a rounded-off end.  On this cane, however, the crook curves outward in a broader arc, but then it is sliced through a good many inches before the half circle it implies would ever be complete.  If the cane were standing upright with its shaft perfectly straight, the slice comes from directly above, perpendicular to the ground. Rather than a perfect circle, which would be the result were the cane sliced across the logic of the wood, the cut on Whitman’s cane creates a bold, abrupt, upside-down teardrop.  And that blunt, teardrop-shape is covered with a thin, flat cap of ivory.  The curve of the cane with its bone cap looks, therefore, like a huge crooked finger with a white, pointed fingernail. It is both creepy and beautiful, both accusatory and beckoning.  The wood is dark, and I was not allowed near enough to really see, but it seemed that the light shone differently where the crook had been much caressed by the pressure of a heavy hand, a sense that I found seconded by a description of what may have been this cane made during Whitman’s lifetime: “He held in his hand an old cane like a shepherd’s crook, from which the polish had been worn.”^[7]  The second time I visited (only to see the cane) I was not allowed to touch or take pictures, but I sat cross-legged on the floor of the bedroom and drew a picture of it.  Here is my drawing (fig. 1).  But since this cane features in many of the late-life photographs of Whitman, you have, in fact, already seen it. 

 

Today canes are almost exclusively used as support for people who need to rely on them for stability and mobility.  Canes with this use can also be fashionable, self-fashioning and multi-valenced.  But in the past canes served many additional purposes.  It has been a century since a cane was a necessary fashion accessory for a man wishing to signal wealth, power, and high style.  The cane as an adjunct to gentlemanly attire developed in Europe from the carrying of a stick or a sword as a weapon.  Across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was an extended craze for canes that could double as other manly things.  Canes concealed weapons, snuffboxes, compasses, alcohol.  They served as hiding places for maps, messages, pornography.   They sported carved or otherwise molded handles in the shape of various symbols of power or desire.  Lion’s heads, snakes, naked ladies, racist carvings of the heads of enslaved people.^[8]  The cane’s serviceability as both a weapon and as a means of support was expressive of a man’s leisure (I can lean, and fill my hands with something that supports my most basic movements) and his aggression (I can carry a weapon through the streets).  As an item that could quickly become extraordinarily expensive through materials and artistry, it was an expression of wealth.  So, at the same time that canes served as literal prop for the body, they also marked the way in which wealth produces leisure that is propped up on the labor of others, the way that it is bludgeoning and priapic and imperious.  The cane was a scepter.  But scepters change hands; the cane also became (and remains) a staple in African American and derivative American dance traditions that mimic and mock class and race pretensions, such as tap dance.  A 1903 film in the Library of Congress records a Cakewalk performed by a single African American man with exceptional cane-twirling skills leading two African American couples, the men each holding a cane and the women holding the men by the elbow.  They dance-walk in a circle, gracefully inhabiting the trappings of white power and privilege through stately dance, while simultaneously scoffing at those trappings.^[9]  In this film, as in many photographs and paintings of the use of fashionable canes in everyday life as well as dance, men escort the women in promenade, reminding us that the gentleman who carries a cane is supportive of a woman on one side, who leans on his arm, while needing or mimicking needing the support of a cane on the other.  The man is the woman’s prop.  What is the cane to the man, with its blunt, round head fitting into the palm, or its thick shaft, about which he wraps his hand, thumb to middle finger? 

We know that Whitman carried a high-fashion cane for a brief period of time as a young man, during a few months in 1842 when he was the editor of The Aurora and felt he had to dress the part: “The Aurora targeted a more sophisticated demographic than Whitman would address for papers he later edited, and he adopted the appropriate accessories—a top hat, boutonniere, and walking cane.”^[10] But we can tell, from a particularly charming editorial, that Whitman felt the cane and other accoutrements of the company of gentlemen got in the way of the sorts of masculine fraternity he actually enjoyed.  Whitman describes himself, in the plural, going on a walk in his fancy duds including cane (and a picture of him from this time features just such a heavy, dark crook cane as he describes [fig. 2]).  Although he is dressed to the nines, Whitman fails to be recognized by anyone as a gentleman:

Then, finding it impossible to do any thing either in the way of “heavy business,” or humor, we took our cane, (a heavy, dark, beautifully polished, hook ended one,) and our hat, (a plain, neat, fashionable black one, from Banta’s, 130 Chatham street, which we got gratis, on the strength of giving him this puff,) and sauntered forth to have a stroll down Broadway to the Battery. Strangely enough, nobody stared at us with admiration—nobody said “there goes the Whitman, of Aurora!”—nobody ran after us to take a better, and a second better look—no ladies turned their beautiful necks and smiled at us—no apple women became pale with awe—no news boys stopped, and trembled, and took off their hats, and cried “behold the man what uses up the great Bamboozle!”—no person wheeled out of our path deferentially—but on we went, swinging our stick, (the before mentioned dark and polished one,) in our right hand—and with our left hand tastily thrust in its appropriate pocket, in our frock coat, (a grey one.)

 

It isn’t until Whitman meets a group of children that he is recognized, and despised, by one of them as a “gentleman.” He is grateful to be redeemed by the appraisal of a second (“handsome,” not “peevish”) teenage boy who sees past the clothing and finds that Whitman doesn’t expect inferiors to step aside for him, but is, rather, the possessor of a “manful . . . disposition” who can make way for the greater claim of the multitudes.  Clothes (and canes) for young Whitman do not make the man:

“Ah!” said one, with a peevish air, to a companion, “we shall have to break the line. There comes a gentleman.”
The boy spoken to was a fine, handsome fellow, of twelve or thirteen years. He turned and looked at us for a moment; then the expression changed, and his face greeted ours with an arch confiding smile, as much as to say “I know, my dear sir, you are too good natured to disturb us, merely to save the trouble of turning out a step!” It is needless to add, we did turn out. What wonderful powers children have of discriminating who is possessed of a courteous, kindly, manful and creditable disposition!^[11]

Elsewhere in his early writings, Whitman is suspicious of fashionable canes as signifying “the trouble of great wealth. . . . What wise man thinks of cumbering up this journey with an immense mass of luggage? Who, that makes pretensions to common sense, will carry with him a dozen trunks, and bandboxes, hatboxes, valises, chests, umbrellas, and canes innumerable, besides two dirty shirts in the crown of his hat, and a heavy brass watch that won’t keep time, in his waistcoat pocket?”^[12]  And in the infamous early story “Death in the School-Room.  A Fact” (1841), a cane—rattan, made specifically for punishment—features as an instrument of grisly post-mortem torture.  The evil schoolteacher Lugare chooses “a long and heavy ratan,” which later in the story becomes his “longest and stoutest ratan” cane, and uses it to threaten sickly young Tim Barker: “I’ll thrash you till you beg like a dog.”^[13]  Eventually he does beat the child, whom he thinks is sleeping, only to discover that the child has been dead for quite for some time, and “Lugare had been flogging A CORPSE.”  The blows that fall are grotesque, but stripped of their sting.^[14]

These early uses of a cane—the fashionable one he carried down Broadway, the canes innumerable, and the cruel rattan weapon—prop Whitman’s explorations of the problems of social hierarchy and the violence of social discipline.  These early canes are prosthetics in the sense of being, as Katherine Ott puts it in her entry in Keywords for Disability Studies, “assistive devices that people use to support what they want to do,”^[15]  to the extent that a sword or cudgel—the fashionable cane’s grandparents—extend one’s capacity to claim power.  But in 1855, with the publication of Leaves of Grass, we see the cane reappear as a more complex prosthetic object, employed now as a prop or crutch to a body in need of its support, a disabled body:  “Agonies are one of my changes of garments; / I do not ask the wounded person how he feels . . . . I myself become the wounded person, / My hurt turns livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.”^[16] 

The first, 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass was written before the Civil War and therefore before Whitman spent his years in the military hospitals where he witnessed innumerable amputations (“Out doors, at the foot of a tree, within ten yards of the front of the house, I notice a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, &c., a full load for a one-horse cart”^[17]).  It was written before, as Ott puts it, the United States’ understanding of “the integrity of the human body” was profoundly affected by “war and its aftermath of injured soldiers [. . .] As a result of the Civil War, federal, state, and local governments entered the business of providing limbs, made by contractors, for the thirty-five thousand amputee soldiers who survived.”^[18]  The 1855 edition was also written before the 1873 stroke that would partially paralyze Whitman and make him dependent on a cane for the rest of his life.  These national and personal crises, which would change forever Whitman’s understanding of the wounded and disabled body, are still in the future.  Whitman’s pre-war, pre-stroke mid-century voice emerges here as demonstrative of the mid-century moment Ellen Samuels has described, when “a crisis began to emerge within modern nations regarding the identifiability and governability of the individual bodies making up their bodies politic.”  Samuels reminds us that the proliferation of state institutions of control, as well as the codification of languages of categorization around race, gender, and disability, began to organize bodies into identities, a shift away from what Sari Altschuler and Cristobal Silva have described, in early America, as an “idea of disability—that is, a set of stigmatized physical and cognitive impairments around which certain exclusionary practices [were] organized . . . but disability was not yet the singular word used to describe it.”^[19]  The coalescence of disability from idea to identification made the mid-nineteenth century a moment when not only “disability,” “race,” “gender” etc., but also “normalcy” became powerfully embedded in what Samuels calls (negatively) “fantasies of identification.”  In other words, at the moment of the publication of Leaves of Grass, bodies identifiable as “disabled” were becoming useful to state and cultural systems of categorization, repression, and violent control, a use that was twinned with the importance of bodies newly categorizable as “normal.”  Samuels teaches us that, of all the relatively new categories of identification, disability serves as a sort of limit case and therefore is always present (“haunting”) the rest, often invisibly.

Once embedded in the cultural realm, fantasies of identification stubbornly persist, despite being disproved, undermined, or contradicted . . .  Finally, fantasies of identification are haunted by disability even when disability bodies are not their immediate focus, for disability functions as the trope and embodiment of true physical difference.

Whitman introduces the cane in the midst of what we might see as the poet’s long “fantasy of identification,” when he claims the ability to be just about everyone.  But Whitman’s is decidedly not a fantasy of identification in Samuels’s sense of the term.  Whitman ranges across huge numbers of identifications, inhabiting them all, kicking against the rigidity of these newly crystalizing identities as he expansively and seemingly endlessly takes on the embodiment of others.  But although Whitman’s fantasy of identification works, through excess, to critique the cultural obsessions Samuels describes, the entrance of the cane-leaning, disabled poetic voice functions exactly as Samuels says it will.  The cane-leaning poetic voice is not just another “type” Whitman inhabits, but is rather a limit.  The cane signals a retreat from the intensity of his poetic inhabitation of multiple embodiments, and “functions as the trope and embodiment of true physical difference.”  What is that true physical difference for Walt “Every Atom Belonging to me as Good Belongs to You” Whitman?  It is one that arrives with deathly violence, at the limits of the ability of the poetic voice to o’erleap the tortures of gendered and racialized oppression.

A cane only appears once in Leaves of Grass, but it turns up in conjunction with another word that appears again and again in the poem: lean.  “Lean” is a word (much like its cousin “bent”) that I believe expresses a queer relation.^[20] The term “adhesiveness,” which Whitman borrows from phrenology and uses to describe the love of men for men, what would come to be called homosexual love, does not appear in this first edition, but arrives a year later in the 1856 edition.^[21]  The overabundant leaning of the 1855 edition (and all following editions) is, I would argue, the physical stance of adhesiveness appearing in the poem even before Whitman puts a word to it.   Historian of photography David Deitcher points out that phrenologists believed that the “organs” of adhesiveness and amativeness were located in the temples.  At mid-century, photographs of men together reveal “one frequently recurring pose as proof that in the United States highly developed organs of Adhesiveness were virtually epidemic.  Many photographs survive that attest to the popularity of this charming pose, in which men are seen in tight close-ups with their heads inclined so that they touch above, and often a little behind, the ear.  This ‘adhesive’ pose dates back to the second half of the 1850s, to the period of the earliest tintypes.”  In the photos, men tilt sharply toward one another, shoulders cantilevered so that their heads touch, gently but certainly, right at the spot on the temple behind which they believed their love dwelt.  Deitcher goes on to quote phrenologist George Combe (1784-1858), who believed this was a natural, inherent gesture, claiming that loving children were drawn to “put their arms around each other’s necks, and place their heads together, bringing the organ of Adhesiveness in each into contact with the same organ in the other.”^[22]  

Leaves of Grass begins with the energetic and seemingly sufficient celebration of self that immediately becomes a universal interpenetration of self with all others. This overwhelming and energetic self-togetherness gives way in the second stanza to a more contemplative mood and stance: “I loafe and invite my soul, / I lean and loafe at my ease . . . . observing a spear of summer grass.”  This leaning, observant, adhesive pose appears again and again in the stanzas that follow, as male bodies lean, seeking support sometimes in pleasure and rest, sometimes in peril and suffering.  The poet leans in to plant a “family kiss” on the cheek of a privy-emptier.  Even when objects lean (“My firelock leaned in the corner”), they lean in the service of facilitating masculine togetherness.  The firelock leans because the speaker has welcomed an escaping enslaved man, and the two are busy living and eating together in harmony; the gun is unneeded.  Leaning is an invitation, an inclination, to “my soul” and to others, a breaking down of social and racial hierarchy, a cantilevering of men who lean toward love.  Without one another, without being able to rest their temples together in an “adhesive” pose, these men are not fully whole.

Michael Moon’s reading of “Song of the Broad-Axe” (which first appears in the 1856 edition and much more forcibly carries on the leaning motif of 1855), suggests exactly this adhesive completion in the mutually leaning pose, though his argument tends in a different direction.   For Moon, the leaning of the priapic father on his son/axe is the completion of an oedipal connection between men.  The “European headsman [who] . . . leans on a ponderous axe” demonstrates a paternity in which “the broad-axe is a fully phallic ‘offspring’–‘born standing,’ one might say—not only ‘to be leaned’ as ordinary babies are, but also ‘to lean on.’”^[23]  The axe is birthed of a human mother (“head from the mother’s bowels drawn!”) it emerges as “Wooded flesh and metal bone! Limb only one and lip only one! . . . To be leaned, and to lean on.” This axe-baby is both a prosthetic limb (wood and metal flesh and bone) and a disabled baby (it has “only” one limb and lip, the “only” serving to mark it as incomplete).   Thus, bringing disability studies to bear here, we can see that the oedipal relation that Moon pursues is also, for Whitman, the relation between a disabled body and its prosthesis. As I will show, the personification of the son/lover in the object of the prosthesis, seen here so clearly, remains essential for Whitman, from this moment until his death.

But these leanings of men against one another and against axes and other sturdy props give way to an actually disabled body leaning on an actual cane only after Whitman enters the body and subjectivity first of a woman burned alive in front of her children, and then of the “hounded slave that flags in the race and leans by the fence, blowing and covered with sweat.”  The speaker is now interior to the enslaved, no longer helping him, no longer possessed of a firelock.  Now it is the enslaved body that leans, exhausted, against a barrier fence. The description continues, becoming extremely bloody and violent; the man is bitten by dogs, shot at, possibly trampled (by horses absolved of crime), and beaten.  It seems as if this, like the burning at the stake that precedes it, is a scene of murder and will end in death.

I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs,
Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen,
I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn’d with the ooze of my skin,
I fall on the weeds and stones,
The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close,
Taunt my dizzy ears and beat me violently over the head with whip-stocks.

Immediately after this grimmest of scenes the poet steps back from his list of embodiments and speaks to us in an aside.  “Agonies are one of my changes of garments; / I do not ask the wounded person how he feels . . . . I myself become the wounded person.”  Something about these last changes of costume, these journeys into murders done legally in the service of preserving white patriarchal supremacy, has bumped the speaker out of his otherwise flowing list of embodiments.  Having delivered his aside, he dives back into embodiment immediately, in a peculiarly aggressive, possessive way that seems to both invoke settler colonial violence and wave aside empathy and sentiment—“I do not ask the wounded person how he feels . . . . I myself become the wounded person.”  But in inhabiting the wounded person and taking on their hurt without asking, the stance of the poetic voice is changed.  He used to “lean and loafe at my ease . . . . observing a spear of summer grass.”  Now, ease is gone.  “My hurt turns livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.”  The elements are the same, but the orientation of the objects and therefore the valence of the action they enable—observation—has changed.  The spear of grass has become a cane.  The speaker is now so injured that he needs that spear, that staff, to lean upon in order to pursue observation.  With the spear turned to a cane, and the speaker now disabled, it is no longer clear what the speaker is observing.  Here, perhaps, is Samuels’s limit.

A woman is burned alive, an enslaved man is beaten, probably to death, the poet does not ask how a wounded person feels, he goes ahead and feels the wound himself.  What, then, is the wound?   On one level, Whitman is simply making the typical gesture of abolitionist sentimentality.  This is the wound that the white observer receives from identification (I become the wounded person) with the oppressed other.  The white reader, wounded by identification with the oppressed, is moved from that place of pain and anger (lividity) to take action against oppression on behalf of the powerless.  Under this reading, and on a metaphorical level, the speaker has so fully taken on the wound of identification with the other that he now needs a prosthetic cane in order to continue in his desired action of observing.  But continuing to observe violence further wounds him.  The injury that is “upon” him takes on a blue-gray hue and grows worse. 

But I think this fragment is more complex.  “My wound turns livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.”  If we take the “turnings” and “leanings” here as simile, if we read them as spatial and bodily—choreographic—rather than temporal and emotional, we can access a more complex understanding.  My hurt turns upon me in the same way that I lean upon a cane.  Now the poet’s self—“me”—is the prosthesis rather than the cane.  “Me” supports the pivoting action of the livid hurt.  Remembering that the speaker essentially invaded this hurt—“I do not ask . . . I become”—the active lividity of the hurt, its increasing pain and rage, may well be turning in rage not only against the injustice of slavery and gendered violence, but against the intruding, inhabiting self of the poet. This choreographic reading produces a much more ambiguous portrait of the identifications of abolitionist sentimentality.  The hurt of racial and gender violence is made worse by the hurt of possessive identification.  And the hurt cannot be controlled.  It uses the self as a prosthetic to enable its own ambiguous actions, and its lividity, its worsening, deepening rage, may as well turn to face the supposedly sympathetic, all-feeling “me” as the violent perpetrators of injustice.

In Narrative Prosthesis (2001), Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell argue that “literary narratives revisit disabled bodies as a reminder of the ‘real’ physical limits that ‘weigh down’ transcendent ideals of the mind and knowledge-producing disciplines. In this sense, disability serves as the hard kernel or recalcitrant corporeal matter that cannot be deconstructed away by the textual operations of even the most canny narratives or philosophical idealisms.”^[24] Certainly Whitman, however complex his acrobatics, introduces disability at the moment of intense violence in just the way Snyder and Mitchell describe.  I think it is interesting, however, that hurt and disability enter here in the poem along with the cane, but the leaning stance, the need and longing for support, have long preceded these things.  Sara Grossman writes evocatively of how “I found love in Whitman for parts of my body that others could not.”^[25]  For Grossman, the lean can be deployed defensively—“Hiding part of your body is all about angles”^[26]—but she also leans toward Whitman’s care. The angles, the queer (aslant) tendencies (leanings), the tilted poise of Whitman in Leaves of Grass ultimately give way to disability—and how different are they?  Much thinking has been done in disability studies about why and how the queer and the disabled are so often theorized together, with arguments on all sides for whether or not that pairing is helpful or harmful, and to what extent.^[27]  Here we see Whitman, writing at the moment Samuels pinpoints as the coalescence of disability as an “identification.”  We see him leaning toward his own identifications of something he will call, among other things, “adhesiveness.”  But we catch him in this moment—before the war and his own ultimate dependence on a cane—apprehending something in a stance that seems to make what-will-come-to-be-called disability and what-will-come-to-be-called homosexuality rhyme, if only in prosthesis for and propped up against one another. 

And yet they are different, and in this example, it is gendered and then racialized violence that produces the difference between the “gay” and the “disabled” stance; before an encounter with and inhabitation of the torture of a burned woman and an enslaved man, “I lean . . . at my ease.”  After, “I lean on a cane.”  In 1989 Karen Sanchez-Eppler notices that, in the draft material leading up to the 1855 publication of Leaves of Grass, Whitman puts the enslaver and the enslaved right at the heart of his definition of his poetic voice.  In the end, he cuts them from the manuscript, leaving only the body and soul behind.  Slaver and enslaved appear elsewhere in the poem, but Sanchez-Eppler’s excavation of them from their original place in the draft is useful.

I am the poet of the body
And I am the poet of the soul
I go with the slaves of the earth equally with the masters
And I will stand between the masters and the slaves
Entering into both so that both shall understand me alike

Sanchez-Eppler’s reading of this draft segment reaches, before the full development of the language of disability studies, for the work disability studies could help her do: “The ‘I’ who ‘will stand between’ gains the ability to be ‘understood,’ and so takes the name of poet, by occupying the place of linkage between the opposing but interdependent roles of master and slave. That the desire to be understood punningly recapitulates the hierarchic standing of master and slave, suggests the precariousness, if not the impossibility, of Whitman’s poetic goal.”^[28]  I want to amplify her argument, and extend it, lifting out the imagery of leaning—“linking . . . opposing but interdependent”—and of walking and standing, as more than simply punning.  Whitman understands his position, “going” between enslaved and enslaver, as a physical journey involving motion, pivot, poise—standing and some sort of penetration—whether of mind or body or both. That he cuts this claim may attest to his understanding that these are not puns, but dangerous, embodied stances.  But elsewhere Whitman is not afraid of that danger.  The “precarity” of the poetic voice that can “enter into both” is not, for Whitman, to be avoided.  The elegant leaning poise of Leaves of Grass’s opening, in which the healthy young poet leans because he is at leisure—“I lean and loafe at my ease . . . . observing” —is changed by the poet’s encounter with the deep historical divides of history (the burning alive and the torture and enslavement of human beings).  Now gravely, perhaps mortally, wounded by “standing between,” the poet’s poise and his activity remain the same as it was in the poem’s second stanza—“I lean” . . . “on a cane” now takes the place of  “and loafe at my ease” . . . “and observe.” 

Written four years after the first edition of Leaves of Grass, the poem cycle “Calamus” is also sprinkled with propping, embracing, and otherwise mutually supportive entwinement of men by men, but the word “lean” appears only once (“leaning my face in my hands”), then disappears completely in later revisions.  I argue that this is because “leaning” was a euphemism for homosexual love for Whitman, and in “Calamus” he uses “adhesive” and other words instead.  In this poem he tells us that he is trying—for the first time—to say it, to, perhaps, identify it—not embody it:^[29]

Here, by myself, away from the clank of the world,
Tallying and talked to here by tongues aromatic,
No longer abashed—for in this secluded spot I can 
respond as I would not dare elsewhere,
Strong upon me the life that does not exhibit itself,
yet contains all the rest,
Resolved to sing no songs to-day but those of manly 
attachment . . .

 

With the absence of leaning, there is also an absence of canes.  There’s no cane in these “Calamus” poems.   Or is there?   “Calamus” is mostly understood to refer to the wetland plant “sweet flag,” which has a flower that looks like an erect phallus.  Sweet flag is Acorus Calamus; “Calamus” is, in fact, not only sweet flag but an entire genus and it refers to many different varieties of palm, plants that are also often called “cane.”  Plants of the Calamus genus make cane seats, and light walking canes, and the rattan cane used by Lugare to beat a corpse.  So, you could say, somewhat jokingly, that the entire poem cycle about men leaning upon one another is actually entitled “Cane.”   Whitman’s friends and readers were in on the joke, and canes were passed between them as gifts.  We know of four gifts of canes that were exchanged.  The first makes the joke most explicit.  Naturalist John Burroughs gave Whitman an exuberant cane, carved into a spiral and tipped with a silver button that reads “To Walt Whitman, ‘A Calamus’” (figs. 3-4).  Whether this is simply a naturalist making a pun about genus names, or whether Burroughs found a clever way of using a plant genus to categorize his friend as genus homosexualus, we cannot know for sure—but the cane is very fancy, with the wood carved into a dramatic corkscrew-like helix.  The second cane Whitman himself gave to his friend, A. E. Johnson.  This blackthorn cane, tipped with a silver button, reading “A.E.J. from Walt Whitman,” sold at auction at Sotheby’s on June 19, 2015, for an astounding $43,750 (figs. 5-6).  The third cane doesn’t exist anymore as far as I know.  Traubel says that in May of 1889, Whitman said to him:

 

“I had a peculiar visit last night after you had gone. Three Hindu fellows came in—the fellows I spoke to you about: they could scarcely speak a word of English. They brought me this bamboo cane, here on the floor.” I picked it up and handed it to Tom to inspect.  “And I have used it a good deal today—it is very nice—strong; Warren is going to have a ferrule put on it for me. They brought me also that gay handkerchief you see there on the chair—pull it out.” It was a gay dotted red and blue silk affair, over which W. laughed goodhumoredly.

 

The Hindu travelers’ gift of a cane reaches across a linguistic divide, and travels in this passage from hand to hand (from the visitors to Whitman to Traubel to Tom to Warren).  Did the visitors truly speak no English?  If not, were they visiting Whitman on the strength of a translation into Hindi?  I can’t find any record of a Hindi translation that early.  Was the gift of a cane a translation of a translation of a joke denoting gayness?  If so, does Traubel’s mention of the “gay handkerchief” that makes Whitman laugh a key to the joke?^[30]  Or is Whitman chuckling in xenophobic/racist condescension?  We don’t know.  The cane is lost, and I, at least, am unable to decipher who the visitors were and why they brought it with them as a gift.

 

 

But the fourth cane, of course, is my cane.  The nobbled, ivory-fingernailed, crook-ended cane that is now in the Whitman House in Camden.  Although I was able to go back and visit the cane by myself, and sit beside it on the floor and draw it, and although I had a long, very informative conversation about it with Leo Blake, the curator of the Walt Whitman House, I was never actually able to get my hands on their accession records for the cane, so I don’t know how the house came to possess it or what they know about it.  It seems, however, to be the cane in the late photographs of Walt Whitman.  The cane in the photos has that cut-off end, and in some photos you can make out the ivory cap and even the nubbles.   Horace Traubel, Whitman’s friend who chronicled his final years in a journal that ultimately filled nine thick volumes, mentions this cane many times in his lengthy, tender descriptions of Whitman’s declining health, and of the rhythm of Whitman’s negotiation of his living space.  Whitman uses the cane for support, as you would expect; “Leaning the one side on the cane, the other on my arm.”^[31]   But the cane’s meaning deepens as Traubel’s references to its presence grow more numerous. The cane is described as a “constant companion,” and Whitman is repeatedly described sleeping with it; “I found him on his bed fast asleep—on his right side—curled together—looked like a babe—hand under his cheek—a steady breath—light low—cane at his side.”^[32]  The cane is “indispensable,”^[33] even magical—Traubel twice calls it a “wand” when describing Whitman asleep: “Face to the south—one hand out of cover, grasping the cane—his wand;”^[34] and again from a particularly beautiful description of Whitman asleep; “He slept peaceably, lying on his back, his face half-turned away from the window, the light only falling on the left cheek and forehead and the straggling beard. The throat is much gone—has lost the strength and set which made it worthy and able companion of that massive head. Hands out on the cover, holding easily the cane (the wand of his need, the call to watchful ears).”^[35]  But wakeful Whitman also uses the “wand of his need” constantly and energetically as a tool: “Now rose—went to his chair—giving the stove door a pull with his cane by the way,”^[36] knocking over the many piles of things that surround his chair as he searches for missing bits of paper; “Would take his cane, give a pile of books, &c., a knock— ‘make matters worse, as he said. ‘To-morrow, I’m sure to hit upon it somewhere.’”^[37] And, again and again, using it to knock on the floor to call for his helpers to come upstairs.  When Traubel imitates the trick, Whitman is amused; “I took his cane from the bed and knocked on the floor. He laughed, ‘Pretty good—but not quite my knock.’”^[38]  This prosthetic, in other words, is no inanimate instrument, but is instead animated and expressive of the body that uses it.  As R. Olkin says of canes and crutches; “When I use crutches I feel connected to them as if they are one of my limbs [. . .] I don’t want anyone to move my crutches without my permission, or to lean on the arm of the wheelchair or rest their hand on the back of it unless it is someone I feel comfortable touching me.”^[39]  We can see something of this understanding of cane-and-bodily self-sameness in Whitman’s rejection of Traubel’s knock, and his claim that only he can call forth the cane’s distinctive voice.   At last, fourteen days before his death, Whitman loses the ability to manipulate the cane, and, in his final mention of the cane in the diaries, Traubel understands this as a terrible turn: “The other night while Warrie was absent the bell became detached from the wire. Mrs. Davis was unable to reconstruct the line, so W. asked for his cane, which she gave him. But after he had got his cane he could not use it—could not comfortably lift it—and so he had to call her when she was wished. This is significant of the subtle loss that is day by day preparing him for the end.”^[40]

But most importantly, this cane, this calamus—if it is the one mentioned so often in the journals and pictures in the photographs—was also a gift to Whitman, and a most important gift.  Its provenance is mentioned three times in Traubel’s journals. 

Monday, June 18, 1888.

Pete Doyle was in yesterday and brought some flowers. “It was Pete who gave me the cane,” explained W., “the cane with a crook in it.  I always use Pete’s cane: I like to think of it as having come from Pete—as being so useful to me in my lame aftermath. You have never met Pete? We must arrange it some way some time.”

 

Peter Doyle was Whitman’s friend and lover.  They met in 1865 when Doyle was twenty-two and Whitman forty-six years old.  When Whitman had his stroke in 1873, Doyle cared for him closely, and perhaps made the gift of the cane to him then, for we know that Whitman always carried a cane after that.   Doyle and Whitman’s passionate and sometimes troubled connection somewhat dimmed after Whitman’s move to Camden.  This flower-bringing visit in June of 1888 is the last documented time we know that Doyle saw Whitman. 

The second mention of Doyle in connection to the cane comes five weeks later, and expands upon the importance of the cane to Whitman, making it clear that Whitman thinks of his lover and the cane as very nearly the same thing.

 

Tuesday, July 3, 1888.

Hobbled about the room. “This cane was given me by Pete Doyle,” he reminded me: “Pete was always a good stay and support.”^[41]

 

The final mention comes a year later, and yet more poignantly compares Peter Doyle to a support, a thing to be leaned upon, a cane. 

 

Sunday, May 26, 1889

Happening to touch his cane, W. said: “You know all about that cane, don’t you? You know who gave it to me?” Then spoke tenderly of Peter Doyle. “I wonder where he is now? He must have got another lay. How faithful he was in those sick times—coming every day in his spare hours to my room—doing chores—going for medicine, making bed, something like that—and never growling!”^[42]

 

 

“Another lay” could be another lover in today’s terminology, but it could also mean another job.  In early nineteenth-century slang, “lay” is a job, a perhaps somewhat-less-than-legal “gig.”  But either way Whitman remembers Doyle most for his faithfulness, his support, his constancy “in those sick times,” as if they had passed.  The cane is clearly not only an extension of Whitman’s body, but also of Doyle’s. We see this in the photo of Whitman and his lover Harry Stafford, whose association with “Hickory Saplings” Don James McLaughlin has discussed in a recent paper.  “Whitman’s references to hickory saplings in correspondence from this moment suggests further that he used coded language around the letters ‘H.S.,’ as a means of alluding to the initials of Harry Stafford, a young man with whom Whitman became romantically involved at the same time he began drafting the segments based in Camden for Specimen Days, and Collect.”^[43]  In the portrait of Whitman and Stafford, the young man stands behind the seated Whitman, his hand loosely propped on the older man’s shoulder (fig. 7).  Whitman sits, his hands loosely grasping the cane.  Look closely, and you can see the nobbles on the shaft and the ivory cap.   The cane is (in all likelihood) a Hickory Stick, made from a Hickory Sapling.  The joke of the photo could be that Whitman is grasping a “staff” that quite quickly can be decoded as H.S., a prosthetic stand-in for Harry Stafford himself.  But also, Whitman allows his shoulder to be leaned upon by the young man, happy to support him; Whitman, however, is supported by his other lover.  “You know all about that cane, don’t you? You know who gave it to me?”

Peter Doyle.

I will close with Peter Doyle’s words, written after Whitman’s death. 

I know he wondered why I saw so little of him the three or four years before he died, but when I explained it to him he understood…It was only this: In the old days I had always open doors to Walt—going, coming, staying, as I chose. Now, I had to run the gauntlet of Mrs. Davis and a nurse and what not. Somehow, I could not do it. It seemed as if things were not as they should have been. Then I had a mad impulse to go over and nurse him. I was his proper nurse—he understood me—I understood him. We loved each other deeply. But there were things preventing that, too. I saw them. I should have gone to see him, at least, in spite of everything. I know it now. I did not know it then, but it is all right. Walt realized I never swerved from him—he knows it now—that is enough.^[44]

Words about knowledge appear over and over again in this short, desperate paragraph.  “Know . . . wondered  . . .  explained . . . understood . . .  seemed . . .  understood . . . understood . . . saw . . . know . . . know . . . realized . . . knows.”  The word “understood” appears three times, and each iteration brings a moment of rest amidst the other, much more anxious words.  The idea of mutual understanding between himself and his lover is a balm to Doyle’s suffering over what Whitman may or may not have known, seen, wondered, realized.  “When I explained it to him he understood . . . I was his proper nurse—he understood me—I understood him.”  The word understand is very old.  The Oxford English Dictionary lists its first English usage, meaning “to comprehend,” from 888.  But English took it from Old Frisian via other Nordic and Germanic languages.  If you clear your mind of its present meaning, the word steps clearly forth as the development of an intellectual act—comprehension—from a physical one—standing under.^[45]    It kept its physical meaning in the stage directions of passion plays until the fifteenth century: “St. John hir body under stude,”^[46] instructing St. John to stand beneath the body of Christ on the cross.  These stage directions were directly linked to the later meaning of understanding: comprehension. According to Jamie Taylor, “in passion plays understanding was conceptualized as positionality — standing beneath, witnessing the suffering body of Christ, and since these plays involved entire communities, it was also a positional and performative way of comprehending that mutual support and community occur when people physically under stand the crucifixion.”^[47]   When we remember that “understand” develops from a physical and spatial relationship of interdependence and meaning- and community-making, we can see why it comforts Doyle in the midst of the many other, more anxious seekings after emotional and intellectual rest in this grief-stricken paragraph.   The “understanding” that Doyle so desperately wanted to feel that he had with Whitman is, at its core, a simple description of mutual physical relation and dependence.  The adhesive pose.  Leaning.  “I was his proper nurse—he understood me—I understood him.”  Hear the word “prop” in “proper.”  Think about the tilt and poise of mutual understanding.   “Pete was always a good stay and support.”    And like a good stay and support, Doyle is steady, strong.  His final self-comfort is a description of that steadiness, of being that staff upon which Whitman could lean. “I never swerved from him—he knows it now—that is enough.”

 

________________

[1] For Heather

[2] This version of the poem is taken from the 1881-2 edition of Leaves of Grass. That Smith leans on the end of the Book of Matthew when thinking (I believe) about the end of “Calamus” is fascinating.  The Book of Matthew begins with a huge series of “begats,” in which fathers breed sons in a male-only lineage from Abraham to Jesus.  It references, many times, the Kingdom of Heaven as a place only the initiated can reach or truly inhabit.  It moves through a few circumscribed engagements with various women named Mary, all of which turn again to male fraternity.  It is interested in discipleship and explores how misunderstood Jesus is by his followers.  It ends with Jesus’s post-resurrection claim, made only to his eleven remaining male followers, to immortal togetherness.  “Calamus” similarly carves out notions of male fraternity and lineage, ties it through tests of understanding to belonging in a future-perfect version of the “States,” struggles with the question of followers and disciples, glances off of women in order to shore up male camaraderie, and ends with a promise of immortality.

[3] Leaves of Grass (1855).

[4]Sarah Ahmed, “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 12, Number 4, 2006, pp. 543-574.

[5] A reflexive verb is one in which the verb has the same “agent” and “patient,” or subject and direct object.

[6] “Orientations,” 552.  Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick also writes of spatial cohabitation when she describes the intellectual potential of the preposition beside: “Beside comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations.” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2003), 8.

[7] From an account titled “An Old Poet’s Reception: How the Majestic Walt Whitman Received His Friends” in The Evening Sun (New York), April 15, 1887.  Collected in: Walt Whitman, Daybooks and Notebooks.  Volume II: Daybooks, December 1881-1891.  Edited by William White.  (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 417.

[8] For an expansive compendium of such cane designs, see Catherine Dike, Cane Curiosa: From Gun to Gadget  Cane Curiosa Press, 1983, and, by the same author, Canes in the United States: Illustrated Mementoes of American History, 1607-1953, Cane Curiosa Press, 1994.

[9]American Mutoscope And Biograph Company, and Paper Print Collection. Cake Walk. United States: American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1903. Video. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/96520361/>. “Certain derisive meanings were encoded in the dance, but it was read differently by whites who viewed the cakewalk as an amusing attempt at sophistication on the parts of their slaves rather than as a mockery of the matters of their masters.”  Thomas F. Defrantz, Dancing Many Drums : Excavations in African American Dance, University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. 71

[10] J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings, eds., Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), 458

[11] New York Aurora 6 April 1842.  Collected in Walt Whitman’s Selected Journalism, eds. Douglas A.Noverr and Jason Stacy (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 200.

[12] “Sun-Down Papers.—[No.7] 1840 From the Desk of a Schoolmaster.”  Long-Island Democrat September 29, 1840.  Collected in Walt Whitman’s Selected Journalism, 173.

[13] “Death in the School-Room,” The United States Magazine and Democratic Review Volume IX (New York: J. &H.G. Langley, 1841), 178, 180 and 178.

[14] In “Death in the School-room,” Whitman describes the child’s helplessness: “the stripling stood before that place of judgment.”  A “stripling” is one who is thin as a strip—according to the OED, “the etymological notion seems to be one who is slender as a strip.”  And a strip, again according to the OED, is from the Old German and is cognate with strop and strap—in other words, the thong of a whip.  We acknowledge this in the phrase, “thin as a whip.”  The boy, then, is a slender version of the man’s “thick ratan.” The erotic potential is obvious.  But the development of this essay will theorize why and how boy and man are figured as both embodying the cane, both, together, oriented toward “the place of judgment.” In this instance, the cane punishes, in later instances, it solaces. 

[15] Katherine Ott, “Prosthetics” in Keywords for Disability Studies Eds. Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss and David Serlin (New York and London: New York University Press, 2015), 140-5, 140.

[16] Leaves of Grass (1855).

[17] Specimen Days, and Collect (Philadelphia: Rees Welsh & Co., 1882-83), 26.

[18] Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics.  Eds. Katherine Ott, David Serlin, Stephen Mihm (New York and London: New York University Press, 2002), 26.

[19] Sari Altschuler and Cristobal Silva, “Early American Disability Studies.” Early American Literature, vol. 52 no. 1, 2017, pp. 1-27. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/eal.2017.0000

[20] Bending, leaning, tending; earlier I engaged Sara Ahmed’s reflections on the queerness of tending/bending/leaning, and Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick recognized it too; the cover art for Tendencies (1993) makes the kinship between tending and leaning graphic.

[21] See Michael Lynch, “’Here Is Adhesiveness’: From Friendship to Homosexuality,” Victorian Studies 29: 1 (Autumn, 1985), 67-96.

[22] David Deitcher, Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together 1840-1918, (New York: Harry M. Abrams, 2001), 139.

[23] Michael Moon, Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 98

[24] David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder eds., Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000), 49.

[25] Sara Grossman, “Ordinary Bodies,” MQR Summer 2015, 371-376, 373.

[26] Grossman, 373.

[27] See Carrie Sandahl, “Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer? Intersections of Queer and Crip Identities in Solo Autobiographical Performance.” GLQ 9 (2003): 25-56; Robert McRuer Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. (New York: NYU Press, 2006); Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2013); Kim Q. Hall, “Feminist and Queer Intersections with Disability Studies,” in The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy, eds. Ann Garry, Serene Khader, and Alison Stone (Routledge, 2017).

[28] Karen Sanchez-Eppler, “To Stand Between: A Political Perspective on Whitman’s Poetics of Merger and Embodiment,” English Literary History 56:4 (Winter, 1989) 923-49, 925.

[29] With the introduction of a nascent understanding of identity and the concomitant absence of the embodied lean and the embodied, violent “limits” of that stance—the complex relationship between leaning and cantilevered “identifications” across race, sexuality, gender, so important in “Song of Myself,” also vanish.

[30] A handkerchief is, of course, an object signaling romantic love.  For more on adhesiveness and handkerchiefs, see Lynch, 73-4.

[31] Friday, November 16, 1888, Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden vol. 3 (1914), 108.

[32] Thursday, May 21, 1891, Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden vol. 8 (1996), 215.

[33] Friday, November 16, 1888, Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden vol. 3 (1914), 108.

[34] Sunday, February 7, 1892, Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden vol. 9 (1996), 431.

[35] Thursday, February 4, 1892, Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden vol. 9 (1996), 431.

[36] Tuesday, May 19, 1891, Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden vol. 8 (1996), 211.

[37] Monday, September 23, 1889, Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden vol. 6 (1982), 15.

[38] Thursday, June 25, 1891, Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden vol. 6 (1982), 15.

[39] Rhoda Olkin, “Women with physical disabilities who want to leave their partners: A feminist and disability-affirmative perspective.”  Berkeley, CA: California School of Professional Psychology/Through the Looking Glass, Co. (2009), 23.

[40] Saturday, March 12, 1892, Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden vol. 9 (1996), 532.

[41] Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden vol. 1 (1906), 415.

[42] Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden vol. 5 (1964), 228.

[43] Citing the work of Edwin Miller and Gary Schmidgall on the significance of the initials “H.S.,” Don James McLaughlin discusses the relationship between this correspondence and Whitman’s erotics of disability in a paper titled “Whitman’s Aesthetics of Paralysis: Embodied Penmanship, the Herbert Gilchrist Depictions, and an Early Manuscript Concept for Specimen Days” delivered at “Whitman at 200: Looking Back, Looking Forward (A Symposium),” University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. March 29-30, 2019. Charley Shively was the first to make this discovery in his chapter on Harry Stafford in the book Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman’s Working Class Camerados. (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1987).

[44] “Interview with Peter Doyle.” Calamus: A Series of Letters Written during the Years 1868-1880 by Walt Whitman to a Young Friend (Peter Doyle). Ed. Richard Maurice Bucke. (Boston: L. Maynard, 1897): 32-33.

[45] Oxford English Dictionary. (Oxford: 2019).

[46] The Northern Passion Play (ca. 1450), Ed. F.A. Foster, vol 1; (London: Early English Text Series old series 145, 1913)

[47] Personal correspondence with Jamie Taylor

 

www.whitmanbicentennialessays.com

This article originally appeared in issue 19.1 (Spring, 2019).

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Bethany Schneider is an associate professor of English at Bryn Mawr College. She specializes in nineteenth-century American literatures with teaching and research interests in American Indian studies, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, slavery, childhood and concepts of citizenship and belonging. Writing as Bee Ridgway, she is the author of The River of No Return. 

One hundred and seventy-five bunches of asparagus. Sixty-five bunches of radishes. Three varieties of beans. Eleven hundred heads of cabbage. Twenty-four thousand three hundred and seventy-five quarts of milk. Thirty bushels of apples. Three varieties of pears, most plentiful were the Seckel–two hundred bushels. Currants, gooseberries, strawberries, grapes. Altogether the Twenty-Fifth Annual Report of the Trustees of the New York Asylum for Idiots lists forty-one kinds of produce, their yields, and price. The year is 1875. If you were studying landscape history in upstate New York, you could use these reports to track the yield data across the last quarter of the nineteenth century. But you could also learn about the history of science, international communications, industrialization, education, disability, and the professionalization of social work. In the Superintendent’s Reports, 1851-78, you would come to know the institution’s director, Hervey Wilbur. I like the man and feel assured, after reading nearly thirty years of his remarks, that his interests squarely focused on the wellbeing of his charges. They were mostly young people, ages six to eighteen, New Yorkers who fell into the category widely known as “teachable idiots.” Today, we would describe these children by their diagnoses-names like Down, Asperger, Williams, or Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, or the general label, autistic. Some of Wilbur’s charges probably acquired their cognitive impairments from malnutrition, high fever, or accidents. But regardless of cause, he understood their humanity and had faith in their possibilities. And perhaps most important, he acknowledged the limits of his and other scientists’ knowledge about the brain’s relationship to the body: “Various methods of classification in the case of idiots have been suggested,” Wilbur reported in 1875, “but these are either arbitrary or based upon pathological distinctions that are valueless, for any practical purposes of classification.” He had been in the field for twenty-five years. He continued, “[A]s to the results of management and treatment or training and instruction, or as it is put the prognosis, I see no guide in such a system of classification for determining this.” The nomenclature has changed, but special education teachers and neuropsychologists today would agree: a diagnostic label is not a prognosis. The categorizing classification term–a medical diagnosis–does not predict or describe the child with a cognitive impairment’s possibilities for competence and achievement. It is one of the most difficult truths about cognitive disability to grasp and accommodate fairly nowadays. Wilbur was advocating the point within the terms of his own day, but even then the classification systems were constantly shifting. Think about the name changes of the New York State Asylum for Idiots, founded 1851. Why does it become, in 1891, the Syracuse State Institution for Feeble-Minded Children; in 1921 the Syracuse State School for Mental Defectives; in 1927 the Syracuse State School? Did the shift in nomenclature reflect an improvement in our understanding of the conditions? the services? the outcomes? In 1973, the onetime “asylum” became the Syracuse Developmental Center, then closed permanently in 1998. Like asylums for the mentally ill, the state-run schools for children and adults with cognitive disabilities found across the United States from the 1850s until the 1990s were usually self-contained communities as isolated from society’s mainstream as prisons are today. The New York State Asylum opened in 1851 with about thirty students; the population doubled by 1853. There were 250 by 1878, 850 in 1922. But even as the crowding worsened and living conditions deteriorated, residents and staff must have found moments of refuge, sources of resilience.

 

I like to think this was possible at the Syracuse New York State Asylum during, say, a few days in September 1880. At work in the kitchen, the women would be swept up in aromatic clouds of cooking pears, applesauce, jellies. Residents and staff working side by side, filling glass mason jars with fruit, listening to the jars jiggle as they boil in vats. I want to believe that in November the entire community, residents and staff, knew the pleasure of eating homegrown pears canned in sweet heavy syrup. That’s when they are best, their texture still firm, the taste of summer still evident. I first tasted home-canned pears as a child in the 1950s. I grew up in a world in which the majority of young people with cognitive disabilities, rich or poor, still lived lives segregated from the community. This ‘other segregation’ is mostly over now. By federal law passed in the 1970s, children with disabilities are integrated in their communities’ public schools. I am an artist, not a historian, but my work is about the historical legacy that people with disabilities encounter. As an artist making documentaries in film and radio, I use history–its methods and records–to seek out the etymologies of habits of thought that persist in the here and now. I need this conversation with the past: Disability history invigorates my vocabulary, my imagination, it satisfies a deep personal need to know, even when what I learn is harrowing or sorrowful. My need to engage in this conversation with disability history arose because I have an on-going dialogue with my children about their encounters with it. At some point, your children may encounter this need too, as disability is the one category of identity any of us can join at any time. To help bridge this generation gap, and to accelerate the opportunities for young people to explore the historical experience of disability and identity as a disabled person in society, I founded a museum. It’s virtual, no bricks or mortar. But it’s a real museum with programs; there’s a library, a museum with exhibits, and an education area. The library is a searchable digital archive of primary sources (text documents, visual stills, and in the future, an audio collection: oral histories, radio programs and advertising, 78-rpm lectures) related to disability history. The museum sector will contain interpretive exhibits that draw library artifacts together and explore themes and topics in disability history. The education sector will provide curriculum materials linked to library artifacts and museum exhibits. Only the library is open now, but the wings will unfold in the foreseeable future. The library ‘borrows’ its materials from public and private collections around the country. It contains digital surrogates of materials about different groups of people with disabilities. The collections are searchable, and because our audience ranges from sixth graders to scholars, the finding aids are quite flexible–there are tools for keywords, dates and date range, sorting, formats, sources, and–for those users who want a quick sense of what’s there, we’ve created general subject directories. We aim to represent the range of disability history resources by selecting representative artifacts from the genres where disability history is found: veterans’ pension documents, the circus sideshow, moral literature, postcards of institutions, deaf- and polio- and blind-community newspapers and newsletters, service-club ephemera and meeting minutes. We love to find and post items that are truly unique. And we include, from 1775-1990, personal accounts and objects created by people with disabilities about their own experiences. We add to our collection at the rate of about one hundred artifacts every four to six weeks. We cannot be comprehensive; historical evidence relevant to the experience of people with disabilities, once you start looking for it, is simply everywhere. People with disabilities, after all, have always been here. The one area where we will not concentrate efforts, unless there is a need to use the materials in a museum exhibit, is traditional medical history–the tools of the trade, the landmark discoveries and experiments. This material is abundantly recorded and available in other collections. The Disability History Museum is interdisciplinary in approach, but the shared experiences of people, not their diseases, are what is most essential to our collecting mission. So, for example, a different sense of the world of Hervey Wilbur and his charges and the staff at the Syracuse Asylum can be discovered in nineteenth-century Sunday-school stories about children with disabilities.

 

Pull up Jessy Allan, a little novelette, first published in 1824. It’s about a girl who must make a commitment to God, but then needs to have a leg amputated, without the aid of anesthesia. Will her commitment see her through? In this tale, religious faith provides palpable comfort. But these stories contain much more than moral visions and proscriptions. Poor Matt; Or, The Clouded Intellect is an 1869 tale about a ‘visitor’ and a cognitively disabled boy seemingly based on fact. Matt’s affliction, and his care, are understood in theological terms. But beyond the theological underpinning you also see the visitor and the local community around Matt practicing what we today call early childhood intervention techniques–speech, occupational, and physical therapy. And he improves; he is educable and in the community. Then there are those tales like Patience and Her Friend, where Patience’s crisis involves submitting to God’s will and its social corollary–never complaining or expressing anger. It’s a restriction that in her case, Patience, a hunchback girl with a beautiful friend, seems particularly cruel. In Crazy Ann, the theological requirement is mercy: compassion is abundant in this story, and mental illness is ascribed to natural, not divine, causes.

 

John Ellard: The Newsboy, 1860, is one of my favorites in this genre. It’s a memoir by one of the founders of the Philadelphia Newsboys’ Home, Frederick Starr. He introduces us to a real boy with abundant character. Though there is the obligatory deathbed salvation scene and accounts of religious services, the intent of the book seems to be to prove that this group of smoking and drinking, urban street urchins is salvageable. This is a well-observed portrait of a proud, independent, adventurous disabled child and his buddies. Starr tells us what he knows about Ellard and friends, where they were born, how they work, their habits and interests, and the role of the Home in their lives. Cleanliness, godliness, drink and risk, they are all in this book, but it is not a fiction, so gentle sentiments are important to it. This is a midcentury account of urban street kids with visible and invisible disabilities. They are orphans, runaways from poverty, abuse or neglect, the children of alcoholics: today you find them on the streets in Rio, Los Angeles, Moscow, Lagos, Islamabad, Chicago. For something related but different in the realm of religious experience, try Thomas Gallaudet’s Sermon, On the Duties and Advantages of Affording Instruction to the Deaf and Dumb, 1824. It’s an inspirational talk, printed and sold as a tract by Isaac Hill. According to a preliminary note the speech was not designed “to solicit pecuniary contributions, but to excite in the public mind a deeper interest than has hitherto been felt for the DEAF AND DUMB.” Fundraising actually was a goal, but contemporary readers will find ‘the ask’ awesome. First, Gallaudet poses a question: Who are the heathen of our day? After listing the unconverted across the continents, he directs his listeners to the nonbelievers here at home, and then he cites another category:

Yes, my brethren, and I present them to the eye of your pity, an interesting, an affecting group of your fellow men;–of those who are bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh; who live encircled with all that can render life desirable; in the midst of society, of knowledge, of the arts, of the sciences, of a free and happy government, of a widely-preached gospel; and yet who know nothing of all these blessings; who regard them with amazement and a trembling concern; who are lost in one perpetual gaze of wonder at the thousand mysteries which surround them; who consider many of our most simple customs as perplexing enigmas, who often make the most absurd conjectures respecting the weighty transactions of civil society, or the august and solemn rites and ceremonies of religion; who propose a thousand enquiries which cannot be answered, and pant for a deliverance which has not yet been afforded them. These are some of the heathen;–long-neglected heathen;–the poor Deaf and Dumb, whose sad necessities have been forgotten, while scarce a corner of the world has not been searched to find those who are yet ignorant of Jesus Christ.

In Gallaudet’s vision we are potentially all God’s children, but only when we know the Protestant Word. Sign language is the means to bring these heathen out of darkness. Gallaudet directed the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, a school he cofounded with Laurent Clerc and Mason Cogswell. He is writing this sermon nearly a decade after studying sign language with Clerc, a French deaf man and teacher. Clerc describes how he learned to communicate–in English–in his Diary of their voyage to America in 1816.

The diary is about a deaf man’s life, a life richly textured, adventure filled. Like many of the artifacts in the Disability History Museum, it makes us ask, what is a disability story? In following the Syracuse Asylum trainees back into the community (and many did return), we need to ask: When does an impairment become a limitation in someone’s existence? When reading Isaac Hunt’s Astounding Disclosures! Three Years In A Mad House, his account of time spent at the Maine Insane Hospital, we need to ask: When does a legal definition of disability, in this case insanity, become more important than a individual’s sense of his or her own authority? What happens when we shift from a moral assessment of a disabling experience to a medical one? What happens when we shift from considering the circumstance of a specific individual with a tragic story about impairment, to considering groups of individuals with similar impairments as minority populations with basic human and civil rights? Disability issues are deeply complex and vexed topics in our culture. This is not new. But today we live in world where a map of the human genome helps predict what kinds of disabilities all of us are potentially vulnerable to acquiring in our life span or passing along to another generation. The historical study of the experience of people with disabilities points toward a historical understanding of the body and its differences: the human species and how we have conceptualized and understood the variations within it. Hervey Wilbur would be glad for the contemporary technologies that let us see inside the structures of the brain and our genes, but I think he would still be skeptical and cautionary about our willingness to confuse categories of classification with prognoses.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 2.3 (April, 2002).

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Laurie Block founded DisabilityMuseum.org, a virtual museum, in her role as executive director of Straight Ahead Pictures, Inc., a small nonprofit company whose mission is to create innovative media projects and educational forums that use archival materials and oral history to foster community dialogue about contemporary social issues. Block coproduced, narrated, and wrote Beyond Affliction: The Disability History Project, a four-hour radio series broadcast on NPR, and winner of the Robert Kennedy Journalism Award, 1999. She also produced and directed the award winning feature documentary FIT: Episodes in the History of the Body, broadcast on PBS in 1994.

It was mid-May, and it was beautiful outside. I was sitting inside, however, at a table in the reading room of the Connecticut Historical Society. But I wasn’t thinking of the warm sunshine I was missing because I had just opened a manila folder and seen something amazing. It was a fragile sheet of writing paper, which had been folded many times into a tight, small square and had frayed and torn along the folds. Someone had attached the pieces back together with tape and postal seals. The reassembled image had been painted in watercolors: a close-up view of a right foot and ankle, resting against a mattress. They look young and healthy—except for the toes, which are painted a dark, angry black that creeps toward the bridge of the foot. A thin red line frames the image and in the bottom left corner the following words appear, in black script: “Gangren from frost bite” (fig. 1).

I carefully removed this image from the file and found another underneath it, in the same condition, torn and repaired. Again, a shock: a foot rests in the same manner on the mattress, but the toes are gone, replaced by ragged holes painted in vivid hues of red, blue, purple, and yellow. Bits of bone poke through the skin. Again, there is a thin red border and the script: “Gangren from frost bite” (fig. 2). A before-and-after diptych, I thought, a common visual trope in images of amputees and amputation. Then I looked more closely. The amputated toes actually belonged to the left foot, not the right. These were two different feet. Interesting.

I laid the images side-by-side and sat down to ponder them. Whose feet were they? Why one image of the right and one of the left? Had he lost all ten toes? How did he get frostbite? Who made the decision to amputate? Did the amputee himself paint these images, or did someone else? If he painted them himself, why would he do such a thing? And what were the recipients of these intently folded pages supposed to think when they opened them up? I did not—and still don’t—know the answers to most of these questions.

 

 

What I do know is that the paintings—and presumably the feet as well—belonged to James Wilbraham, a soldier who served in Company D, 16th Connecticut Volunteers. His enlistment and discharge papers, also in the file, noted that he had joined the Union army in August 1862 and had been discharged in February 1864 “by reason of loss of toes & heels from frost bite.” A gravestone at the Old St. Patrick’s Cemetery in Enfield, Connecticut, notes that Wilbraham died eight months later, cause unknown.

I came to the Connecticut Historical Society, and to James Wilbraham’s amputated toes, in pursuit of manuscript evidence for my book project, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War. I was interested in all different kinds of ruins. The kinds you usually think of in the context of the war—city buildings, plantation houses, slave quarters—but also the ruins of living things: trees shot to pieces by shot and shell, and the bodies of men ripped apart by musket and artillery fire. Through its destruction, I believed, one could come to know the wartime experience, the real Civil War that, according to Whitman, never gets into the books.

I started my search for ruined men in manuscripts: in letters and diary entries. I read broadly through collections stored at various historical societies and libraries in New England and the South. I wasn’t necessarily interested in the most famous of war amputees—Confederate General John Bell Hood or Union General Oliver O. Howard—but in the rank and file. How were these men blown apart and why? How did soldiers and civilians react to the sudden proliferation of disarticulated bodies and veteran amputees that the Civil War created?

 

The letters and diaries contained an abundance of rich material regarding the effects of shot and shell on the human body. They also revealed anxious attention to amputation; soldiers and civilians expressed their fears of it and described watching the amputations of others with a mix of terror and fascination.

There was Massachusetts Captain Richard Cary, who jokingly reassured his wife that, “I told the Doctor what you said about amputation & he promised he would never cut me in half without a consultation,” and Maine private Napoleon Perkins, who wrote about the amputation of his leg with meticulous detail. He woke up twice during the surgery and talked to the surgeons about their progress, and then requested more ether. I compiled hundreds of pages of notes from such sources, from long descriptive accounts of mangled bodies on the battlefield to passing references to amputees.

Napoleon Perkins’ account of his life after amputation—he looked for work unsuccessfully for years, noting that, “The proprietors all seemed to feel sorry for me but they had no work that a one leg man could do”—interested me, as did the responses of his friends and family members to the loss of his leg.

I therefore turned my attention to postwar sources—pension applications, broadsheets that amputees published as moneymaking ventures, and pamphlets published by prosthetics manufacturers. All of these documents gave me a good sense of the valuation of veterans’ missing limbs. In the twenty years after the war ended, the U.S. government (which provided pension funds and other forms of aid only to Union veterans) put prices on absent body parts. A man’s loss of both hands, for example, was worth $25 per month in 1864; by 1875 the payment had increased to $50 per month. By 1880, Union soldiers with one empty sleeve were receiving an annual pension of $432 ($36 per month).

 

The federal government also established a prosthetics program for Union veterans, providing artificial arms and legs (or money to purchase them) after 1862. As a result, the prosthetics industry—which was based in New England and New York—flourished.

And as manufacturers competed for customers, they published thousands of pages explaining their inventions and providing testimonials regarding their quality. The prosthetics pamphlets I read through at the Center for the History of Medicine at Harvard Medical School suggested that not only did soldiers’ missing limbs acquire monetary value during and after the war, they also conveyed complex cultural meanings.

I came to understand that every part of these pamphlets—the introduction appealing to the patriotic spirit and manliness of Union veterans, the detailed illustrations of prosthetic designs attesting to their originality and their technological precision, and the reprinted letters raving about the “natural” feel and look of the product—shaped discussions of American manhood during and after the war. Also, prosthetics inventions and the men who wore them were seen as emblematic of the nation’s industrial “genius” but called attention to the costs of such achievements. If you couldn’t tell that a soldier was wearing a prosthetic limb, then how could you tell what was “real” what was “counterfeit” in American society?

These concerns about whole and incomplete men were also evident in American visual culture in the 1860s and ’70s. As I turned my attention to graphics, most of them held in the vast collections of the American Antiquarian Society, I found hundreds of Civil War amputees. They appeared in political cartoons, lithographs, engravings, woodcut illustrations, and the sketches and pictures that soldiers such as James Wilbraham drew themselves.

During my month of residency at the AAS as a Last Fellow in Graphic Arts, I found (among more than 300 images depicting legless and armless men) two political cartoons that demonstrate the many meanings that Civil War amputees embodied during the war.

Late in the war, a Union newspaper (probably Frank Leslie’s Budget of Fun, a newspaper devoted to humorous anecdotes and cartoons, its first run in 1859) published a six-panel cartoon entitled “Rebel Bulletins Illustrated” (fig. 3). The first panel depicts a rebel soldier (“Lee’s messenger”) running toward Richmond with a banner that says “Defeat of Grant Victory No. 1.” In subsequent panels, the messenger brings news of further defeats of Grant but loses a limb or two each time. In the penultimate image, the messenger is carried by a “contraband” (a fugitive slave), while in the final panel, a different male slave holds the banner in his right hand, and in his left he holds a basket, filled with the body parts—”all that remains” of Lee’s messenger.

At first I had no idea how to interpret this set of images. Luckily for me, an astute librarian had written the date of publication on the back: July 1864. By that time Grant’s spring campaign had settled into a siege of Petersburg after seven long weeks of campaigning and six major battles. In the cartoon, the messenger’s body is intact after the first battle (the Wilderness) but with every move that Grant’s army makes to the southeast during the campaign, the southern soldier loses limbs. These corporeal losses contrast with the strident messages of the text in the banners, of victories won and “Yankees routed.” An explicit critique of the delusional self-regard and the failure of Confederate war aims by the summer of 1864—and the centrality of emancipation to the progress of the war—”Rebel Bulletins Illustrated” uses amputation and missing limbs as signs of southern military and political weakness.

One year earlier, a cartoon appeared in another northern newspaper: a couple walks close together and away from the viewer, sauntering along a path next to a countryside fence and toward a leafy bower (fig. 4). The woman wears a plain dress with a flowery pattern and the man wears a Union uniform. She has her left arm wrapped around the man’s waist (her white, patterned dress illuminated by the dark color of his uniform) because the soldier’s arms have been amputated. The caption reads: “This may seem very bold, and all that sort of thing, on Julia’s part; but he cannot put his arm around HER waist—and something has to be done, you know.”

Because the veteran amputee can no longer make the first move, Julia has taken control of their courtship. Her boldness is required, for “something must be done, you know” to integrate amputees—who, without their limbs, were somehow less than men—back into the American family through normative heterosexual relationships. However, this reintegration has its cost; Julia’s audacity threatens to upend antebellum gender roles and provide American women with more power than many men (and women) found acceptable. Here, the figure of the veteran amputee provokes discussion about the effects of wartime violence on family relations.

Around 45,000 northern and southern men returned home from the battlefields and hospitals of the South, having given their limbs for their countries. They became primary symbols of both the positive and negative aspects of wartime violence. They also became central figures in its print, visual, and material culture: once you start looking for them, you find them everywhere.

For this I am grateful, not only because this amazing abundance of material allowed me to write a book chapter on ruined men, but also because the shock of seeing them conveys a sense of the “true” war, its material and corporeal reality. That those vivid images of James Wilbraham’s feet have come down to us in a plain manila file folder is somewhat miraculous, given that his relatives did not save much else pertaining to his life. And we should all look at those blackened and then missing toes, the flesh healing over but the bones still sticking out, to know the nature of war and its costs.

Further reading:

For details on James Wilbraham’s enlistment and discharge from the Union army, see Enlistment and Discharge Papers (1862, 1864), James Wilbraham Papers (1862-1864), Connecticut Historical Society. For Richard Cary’s and Napoleon Perkins’ thoughts on amputation see Richard Cary Letters, Massachusetts Historical Society and Perkins, “The Memoirs of N.B. Perkins,” New Hampshire Historical Society.

For further reading on the cultural significance of the broken and amputated bodies of Union and Confederate soldiers in the American Civil War, see Laurann Figg and Jane Farrell-Beck, “Amputation in the Civil War: Physical and Social Dimensions,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 48: 4 (October 1993): 454-75; Lisa Maria Herschbach, “Fragmentation and Reunion: Medicine, Memory, and Body in the American Civil War” (PhD diss., Harvard, 1997); Brian Craig Miller, “The Women who Loved (or Tried to Love) Confederate Amputees,” in Weirding the War: Tales from the Civil War’s Ragged Edges, ed. Berry (Georgia, 2011); Kathy Newman, “Wounds and Wounding in the American Civil War: A (Visual) History,” Yale Journal of Criticism6: 2 (Fall 1993): 63-85. For details regarding federal and state government aid for Union and Confederate veterans, see, for example, Jennifer Davis McDaid, “With Lame Legs and No Money: Virginia’s Disabled Confederate Veterans,” Virginia Cavalcade 47: 1 (Winter 1998): 14-25; Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States(Harvard, 1992); Ansley Herring Wegner, Phantom Pain: North Carolina’s Artificial-Limbs Program for Confederate Veterans (North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, 2004).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 12.1 (October, 2011).

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Megan Kate Nelson is a lecturer in history and literature at Harvard University. She is the author of Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp (2005) and the forthcoming Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (2012).

 

Equipped with a map of Newport, Rhode Island’s, famed Common Burying Ground in one hand and a camera in the other, I climbed the hill toward Desire Tripp’s arm’s gravestone. That’s right: I was looking for a 1786 gravestone that commemorated a woman’s amputated arm. I was told to keep an eye out for it among a row of Tripp family stones, but the stone—which was much more diminutive than I had anticipated—proved difficult to locate among the sea of slate slabs (fig. 1). As noontime approached I began to get hungry. I was considering trying again the next day when suddenly, the arm came into view (fig. 2). After reading the inscription that surrounds the arm—”WAIT daught./of/WILLIAM and/DESIRE TRIPP/died April 24/1780 Aged 10/Mo 10 days,” and, “Also WILLIAM/their Son/Died March/17^th 1784 Aged/22 Mo/Also his Wifes/Arm Amputated Feb 20 1786″—I plopped down onto the grass and began sketching the gravestone. I am not a skilled artist, but the exercise helps me wrap my mind around the objects I study (fig. 3). On that afternoon in May 2011, though, the record of the material world yielded more questions than answers. Who was Desire Tripp? Why was her arm amputated? Why did she bury it? What does the gravestone mean? These questions drove my research in the summer of 2011 as a fellow in historical interpretation at the Newport Historical Society. Ultimately, all but the most basic facts about Desire Tripp’s life remained elusive. This makes Desire’s arm’s unusual gravestone all the more important: it provides a unique portal into her life through which we can investigate how she dealt with impairment (or loss of a physical function of the body due to an event such as an amputation), death, and memory in late eighteenth-century Newport.

But it also figured into late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Newporters’ interpretations of disability in everyday life. Historical memory, or how observers have interpreted and remembered history and the legacy of those interpretations, played a significant role in my wrestling with the gravestone’s meaning. These memories do not always reinforce one another; often, they do not represent the “original” meaning (assuming we can figure that out) of a specific historical event or object such as the arm’s gravestone. Like me, the observers whose interpretations I traced wrangled with the stone’s unique attributes, such as the arm’s realistic representation and the unusual coupling of a traditional memorial for two children with a memorial for an arm. The gravestone surely served as a memorial for Desire Tripp and her family, but, as I came to learn in the course of my research, it also served as a site of local memory for individuals who never knew the family personally.

A curiosity since at least the mid-nineteenth century, the gravestone commemorates William and Desire Tripp’s two deceased babies, who died in 1780 and 1784, and Desire’s arm, which a local physician amputated in 1786. What makes the stone so unusual is the fact that the carver to whom the stone’s decoration is attributed—John Bull—carved a realistic representation of Desire’s arm, oriented lengthwise, into the center of the stone (fig. 4).

What I uncovered about Desire Tripp and her family was not limited to the biographical details I found on the stone itself. Yet as is so often the case with early American women, what we can unearth about them comes from records associated with their male kin. Even the gravestone refers to Desire in reference to William. Legal documents such as deeds, newspapers, and the Tripp family gravestones indicate that Desire Tripp married the once-widowed William, a tanner, between 1770 (the year William’s first wife Betsy née Robinson died) and 1780 (the year Desire’s first child Wait was born). Records from the Second Congregational Church at the Newport Historical Society document William’s active church membership through 1799. When he was not attending church, William Tripp’s work life as a tanner likely consumed much time and energy. Tanning and currying, notoriously malodorous crafts, required substantial space and water. The Tripps’ home and work site—on the outer limits of late eighteenth-century Newport—would have provided both of those assets. An 1802 real estate advertisement published in the Newport Mercury included a detailed description of the Tripp property:

LARGE and commodious Dwelling House, with an excellent Tan-Yard, formerly occupied by William Tripp., situated in the centre, and on the west side of Broad-street, containing about half an acre of land, fronting three public streets, together with a Currying-house [where tanned hides were processed], and all the Out-houses thereunto belonging, which are many, and calculated for every conveniencey. The House has a good shop in the front, a paved yard, and an excellent well of water, which is never dry. The house will be sold separate from the tan-yard, or together, as may best suit the purchasers.

Additional details about the Tripps’ Newport lives remain scarce. We can only imagine the personal stamp Desire put on this busy household and shop, particularly while William was out serving as the town corder of bark or as a state representative of Newport, as newspapers indicate that he did in the late eighteenth century.