Historian Nancy Isenberg has analyzed the sexualized politics of the early Republic that gave rise to Burr’s reputation as an immoral, sexually dissipated man. As Isenberg explains, Burr became the target of sexually charged attacks in the press for fifteen years beginning with his becoming a U.S. senator for New York in 1792. This depiction of him as sexually corrupt in his private life contrasted sharply with his early pedigree and public accomplishments. The grandson of famed New England minister Jonathan Edwards, Burr was born in 1756 in Newark, New Jersey. He attended Princeton at the age of thirteen, eventually becoming a successful lawyer. He served as a U.S. senator, as the third vice president of the United States, and as a major figure in the development of the political party system in the new nation. In 1800 Aaron Burr stood a “hair’s breadth” away from becoming the third president of the United States, losing to Thomas Jefferson by just one electoral vote. He married widow Theodosia Prevost in 1782. Together they had one child, Theodosia. Both his wife and daughter perished tragically and prematurely: His wife died from cancer in 1794, and his daughter was lost at sea in the winter of 1812. Her son (Burr’s only grandchild) had died at the age of ten that same year. In 1833, after almost four decades of being a widower, he married widow Eliza Jumel, separating just four months later. He lived until 1836, dying at the age of 80—on the very day that their divorce was finalized.

Public memory of Aaron Burr contains fascinating threads that defend his reputation by asserting that his inner self conformed to normative, idealized standards, and thus that he could not have been guilty of the charges of immorality that were leveled against him. There has never been a shortage of negative depictions of Burr, but it has become a nearly two-centuries-old cliché that he “has always been out of favor,” that he has only enjoyed the reputation of “outright villain” among the founders. By tracing defenses of his personal life from the nineteenth century to the recent past, this essay shows that sex has long been used to define the character of the American founders; arguably it continues to be used in this capacity as a window to the nation’s soul.

Two Burrs, Burr the traitor and Burr the rake, were often co-conspirators. In the preface to an 1847 novel titled Burton: Or, the Sieges, the incredibly prolific popular novelist Joseph Holt Ingraham illustrated how negative depictions of Burr explicitly connected his private character and his political person: “In the page of history from which this romance is taken, we see the young aid-de-camp exhibiting the trophies of his conquests, drawn from the wreck of innocence and beauty. If we turn to a later page, we shall see the betrayer of female confidence, by a natural and easy transition, become the betrayer of the trust reposed in him by his country, and ready to sacrifice her dearest interests on the altar of youthful vanity, ripened into hoary ambition.”

His earliest biographer, Matthew L. Davis, stated that he had possession of virtually all of Burr’s letters and met and discussed with him (at Burr’s request) as he worked on his memoirs. Burr’s letters, according to Davis, indicated “no very strict morality in some of his female correspondents.” Acting with the chivalry that his subject supposedly lacked, Davis separated out and destroyed such letters to protect the reputations and virtue, not of Burr, but of the young women and their families. He claimed that Burr wouldn’t let the letters be destroyed in his lifetime, but when Burr died Davis burned them all so that no one else could publish them. In the absence of such sources, biographers have largely had only the accusations to work with.

 

Davis was criticized by numerous biographers for largely depicting Burr as his political enemies had done. Burr’s second biographer, James Parton, set the tone for future defensive accounts. Parton, who would found American Heritage, was the most popular biographer of nineteenth-century America. He complained: “Mr. Matthew L. Davis, to whom Colonel Burr left his papers and correspondence, and the care of his fame, prefaces his work with a statement that has, for twenty years, closed the ears of his countrymen against every word that may have been uttered in Burr’s praise or vindication.”

Parton’s mid-nineteenth-century account defended Burr from a host of negative depictions, beginning with those that centered on his youth and reputation as a college lothario. “It has been said … that he was dissipated at college; but his dissipation could scarcely have been of an immoral nature.” Burr, he explained, was not given to immoral activities that typically link to sexuality, including gambling, drinking, and general excess.

One such rumor was that during the Revolution, he seduced and abandoned a young woman named Margaret Moncrieffe. Parton’s biography dismissed the story, and additionally cast aspersions on her character. Parton described Moncrieffe as a girl of fourteen, “but a woman in development and appetite, witty, vivacious, piquant and beautiful.” He attempted to discredit her by portraying her as immoral, stating the account had been “published after she had been the mistress of half a dozen of the notables of London.” And he lamented Burr’s legacy: “the man has enough to answer for without having the ruin of this girl of fourteen laid to his charge.”

Later defenders would echo Parton’s response. An 1899 biography of Burr by Henry Childs Merwin explained: “It is evident that, whatever may have been Burr’s conduct toward Margaret Moncrieffe, the lady herself, the person chiefly concerned, had no complaint to make of it.” And Merwin yoked Burr’s sexual reputation to broader character traits. “Burr was all his life an excessively busy, hard-working man; he was abstemious as respects food and drink; he was refined and fastidious in all his tastes; he preserved his constitution almost unimpaired to a great age. It is nearly incredible that such a man could have been the unmitigated profligate described by Mr. Davis.”

Burr’s defenders also trained their sights on his marriage. Similar to popular depictions of Hamilton, Washington, and Jefferson, in the hands of his biographers Burr appears to have experienced the perfect marital union. (And similar to the cases of Hamilton, Washington, and Jefferson, we have little to no documentation to support the characterization of this very personal relationship.) Virtually all of his defenders emphasize the idealized romantic bond that he shared with his wife. Parton insisted: “To the last, she was a happy wife, and he an attentive, fond husband. I assert this positively. The contrary has been recently declared on many platforms; but I pronounce the assertion to be one of the thousand calumnies with which the memory of his singular, amiable, and faulty being has been assailed. … I repeat, therefore, that Mrs. Burr lived and died a satisfied, a confiding, a beloved, a trusted wife.”

Parton made it clear that Burr could have won the hand of any young “maiden” he desired. But that he “should have chosen to marry a widow ten years older than himself, with two rollicking boys (one of them eleven years old), with precarious health, and no great estate,” revealed much about his character. And, indeed, for Parton the marriage countered much that had been written about Burr. “Upon the theory that Burr was the artful devil he has been said to be, all whose ends and aims were his own advancement, no man can explain such a marriage.”

Parton emphasized that Burr was not guilty of marrying for money: “Before the Revolution he had refused, point-blank, to address a young lady of fortune, whom his uncle, Thaddeus Burr, incessantly urged upon his attention.” And he could have married others for personal gain: “During the Revolution he was on terms of intimacy with all the great families of the State—the Clintons, the Livingstons, the Schuylers, the Van Rensselaers, and the rest; alliance with either of whom gave a young man of only average abilities, immense advantages in a State which was, to a singular extent, under the dominion of great families.”

No, it would be made clear that Burr married not for power but instead for love. Parton explained, “no considerations of this kind could break the spell which drew him, with mysterious power, to the cottage at remote and rural Paramus,” where his future wife lived.

Parton wrote in a decade that saw the emergence of a dedicated women’s rights movement, and he portrayed Burr as an early feminist, a view that would later be more fully developed: “He thought highly of the minds of women; he prized their writings. The rational part of the opinions now advocated by the Woman’s Rights Conventions, were his opinions fifty years before those Conventions began their useful and needed work,” Parton claimed. (At the time of the publication of his biography of Burr, James Parton was married to Sara Payson Willis, who had gained fame under her pseudonym Fanny Fern as the author of the proto-feminist novel Ruth Hall.) Parton’s depiction of Burr’s wife as friend supported the claim that Burr had a deep respect for women. “The lady was notbeautiful. Besides being past her prime, she was slightly disfigured by a scar on her forehead. It was the graceful and winning manners of Mrs. Prevost that first captivated the mind of Colonel Burr.”

Burr’s defenders have long recognized the need to defend his personal life as part of the defense of his political life. Virtually all have recognized the significant role that his personal reputation played in his public standing. Parton insisted: “Burr nevercompromised a woman’s name, nor spoke lightly of a woman’s virtue, nor boasted of, nor mentioned any favors he may have received from a woman.” Indeed, he exclaimed, “he was the man least capable of such unutterable meanness!” Although Burr has remained a lesser known founder, and one with a tarnished reputation, his ample supply of defenders have long followed Parton’s well-constructed foundation, one that relied on yoking positive portrayals of his sexuality in an effort to shore up his battered political self.

Many of his early twentieth-century biographers decried the fact that his personal life overshadowed his public accomplishments, and they continued to highlight his intimate life as one of virtue. The alleged falsity of the tale of the seduction and abandonment of Margaret Moncrieffe and additionally the supposed lies behind a story of the intentional “ruin” of one Miss Bullock were repeatedly used to defend his character. A 1925 biography by Samuel Wandell and Meade Minngerode prematurely stated that the legend about Bullock had been “finally laid to rest” by the reference librarian at Princeton, who had “showed conclusively, from evidence furnished by the unfortunate lady’s family” that she had died “quite virtuously.” Nathan Schachner wrote in his biography of Burr, a decade later, that: “Another legend is not so innocuous. It was the forerunner of a whole battalion of similar tales, all purporting to prove Aaron Burr a rake, a seducer, a scoundrel, a man without morals and without principles, wholly unfit to be invited into any decent man’s home. Though, on analysis, not one of these infamous stories has emerged intact.” He then described the “canard” of Burr seducing and abandoning a “young lady of Princeton” who later in “despair committed suicide.” The author explained that the girl died of “tubercular condition” twenty years after Burr graduated from Princeton.

Some accounts defended Burr as having exposed Moncrieffe as a spy for the British. A 1903 historical novel—Blennerhassett, by Charles Felton Pidgin—depicted the Moncrieffe story as a later burden for Burr, despite the fact that he was in fact a great patriot. In this regard, rumors about Burr’s sexual history were criticized for overshadowing the truth of his virtue and for hiding what was his true patriotism. Explained the character of Burr in the novel: “‘I became convinced that she was conveying intelligence to the enemy and I wrote a letter to General Washington informing him of my suspicions. By his orders, she was at once sent out of the city. The chain of circumstances was followed up and it was discovered that the mayor of the city, who was a Tory, and Governor Tryon, the British commander, who made his headquarters on board the Duchess of Gordon, a British man-of-war lying below here in the river, were implicated in the plot.'” The man he explained this to asked: “‘And were you publicly thanked by the commander- in-chief?'” “‘Not by name,’ said Burr, somewhat abruptly, and he thought of the manner in which his name had been coupled with that of the young lady in question.” Here Burr was portrayed as the victim of his own patriotism. For this author, dismissing the Moncrieffe story not only cleared Burr’s name—it made it possible to depict the true Aaron Burr, a patriot and war hero.

Another early twentieth-century account, by Alfred Henry Lewis, romanticized the incident, notably including only vague reference to the young woman’s age: “On that day when the farmers of Concord turn their rifles upon King George, there dwells in Elizabeth a certain English Major Moncrieffe. With him is his daughter, just ceasing to be a girl and beginning to be a woman. Peggy Moncrieffe is a beauty, and, to tell a whole truth, confident thereof to the verge of brazen… . Young Aaron, selfish, gallant, pleased with a pretty face as with a poem, becomes flatteringly attentive to pretty Peggy Moncrieffe. She, for her side, turns restless when he leaves her, to glow like the sun when he returns. She forgets the spinning wheel for his conversation. The two walk under the trees in the Battery, or, from the quiet steps of St. Paul’s, watch the evening sun go down beyond the Jersey hills.” This account styled Moncrieffe as hardly a victim, but rather as “brazen,” welcoming the advances of the dashing young soldier. The defense of Burr in the case of Moncrieffe would continue through the twentieth century. A mid-century account by Herbert Parmet and Marie Hecht dismissed the story directly, stating that the “lady’s own words contradict this assumption” and calling it a “very good example of the propensity of his chroniclers to link Burr’s name with women, particularly notorious ones.” Milton Lomask’s two-volume biography included the story of Miss Bullock as a “typical example of the many half-factual, half-fanciful tales that have attached themselves to the memory of Aaron Burr.” It continued by explaining that, “fed by Burr’s then growing reputation as a ladies’ man, this macabre tale persisted in the face of evidence, unearthed by a Princeton librarian, that Miss Bullock had died in the home of an aunt, ‘quite virtuously,’ of tuberculosis.”

 

In a similarly defensive move, Burr’s marriage was idealized by his twentieth-century biographers, as it had been by Parton a century earlier. Henry Childs Merwin wrote in his 1899 biography of Burr that “his family life was ideal,” and Charles Burr Todd, writing three years later, stated: “I think it should be mentioned here—because the opposite has been stated—that the marriage was conducive of great happiness to both, and that Colonel Burr was to the end the most faithful and devoted of husbands.” Quoting a lengthy passage in the Leader, it continued, and included the following: “His married life with Mrs. Prevost … was of the most affectionate character, and his fidelity never questioned.” Virtually all of the accounts read in a similar manner. Consider, for example, the following: “This marriage certainly gives no color to the popular belief that Colonel Burr was a cold, selfish, unprincipled schemer, with an eye always open to the main chance.” Similarly, Wandell and Minngerode defended Burr’s marriage thusly: “It was a love marriage, that of Aaron Burr and Theodosia Prevost,” and “admirable in the last degree.”

The depiction of his marriage as spotless provides a powerful counterweight to the blemishes that mar both his public and private reputations. Biographers implicitly and explicitly use the bond of husband and wife to discredit those who challenge his personal character in the area of romantic relations. One 1930s author noted: “Between Burr and his wife ardent love had deepened to an abiding trust.” This depiction only deepened in the twentieth century. In the early 1970s, Laurence Kunstler described the marriage as “twelve wonderful, happy, and triumphant years,” and Jonathan Daniels lauded the union as “a faithful love which only the most austere historians and venomous critics have questioned.” Samuel Engel Burr Jr.—the founder of the Aaron Burr Association, a professor of American studies, and a sixth-generation descendant of Burr—wrote several books in the 1960s and 1970s defending his ancestor’s reputation, and all bolstered his character by defending his marriage. In Colonel Aaron Burr, Burr depicted it as a “happy experience for both of them.” And in a Mother’s Day lecture delivered to the New York Schoolmasters’ Club, he focused on the “influence of [Burr’s] wife and his daughter” on his “life and career” to underscore his domestic bond, in contrast to the view of him as a vile seducer of women. (Burr Jr. also argues that Madame Jumel divorced Aaron on trumped up charges of adultery, arguing it was the “only legal grounds for divorce” at the time, thus trying to further wipe the slate clean.) Virtually all authors agree with Jonathan Daniels, who argued that “Nothing is more clear in the record than Burr’s tenderness and concern for his wife.” Still others, including Milton Lomask, contended: “To trace Aaron Burr’s life as a husband and father … is to glimpse the man at his best. Domesticity became him.”

Of particular importance to Burr’s defenders was his choice of spouse. Virtually all biographers insert that Mrs. Prevost was no “beauty,” underscoring that there was no superficial attraction that drew Burr to her. In a typical example, Nathan Schachner described her as “not beautiful,” “pious,” “well read and cultured.” This view continued through the twentieth century. Burr could have married “into any of those powerful prosperous dynasties,” wrote Laurence Kunstler, emphasizing that he had instead married for love. Charles Burr Todd (a descendant of the Burr family) made a similar point in his 1902 biography: “He was young, handsome, well born, a rising man in his profession, and might no doubt have formed an alliance with any one of the wealthy and powerful families that lent lustre to the annals of their State. This would have been the course of a politician. But Burr, disdaining these advantages, married the widow of a British officer, the most unpopular thing in the then state of public feeling that a man could do, a lady without wealth, position, or beauty, and at least ten years his senior, simply because he loved her; and he loved her, it is well to note, because she had the truest heart, the ripest intellect, and the most winning and graceful manners of any woman he had ever met.” Late in life, Aaron Burr would marry a second time. But as if to underscore the significance of his first marital bond, no biographers dwell on this bond or the marriage.

Virtually all twentieth-century accounts point out that in contrast to the politicized depiction of Aaron Burr as a man who seduced and abandoned women, Burr “showed an understanding of women.” Such authors typically concede that Burr had numerous affairs with women, but that they were not exploitive. As Jonathan Daniels wrote, perhaps over-descriptively: “There was never anything in his life, however, to suggest the bestiality and brutality in sex which his enemies imputed to him. Concupiscent, he may have been, cruel he never was.”

Burr’s most recent biographer, Nancy Isenberg, the only academic historian to take on that task, highlights his support for early feminism as evidenced by the fact that his marriage was “based on a very modern idea of friendship between the sexes.” Calling Burr a “feminist,” she argues that he was alone among the Founding Fathers in this regard: “No other founder even came close to thinking in these terms.”

Today, much as in his own lifetime, the debate rages about the salience of his personal life for understanding the “true” Burr. Some contend that the “true biography” of Burr “must be disentangled” “from … a mass of legend about his lapses with the ladies.” Others revel in those stories as a way to bring to life the Burr they think existed. The view of Burr as unique—for better or worse—is an old one. James Parton, writing in direct response to the early account of Matthew Davis, set the tone for a defense of Burr’s personal life that would last until the present day. Parton could not have been more assertive:

Aaron Burr, then, was a man of gallantry. He was not a debauchee; not a corrupter of virgin innocence; not a de-spoiler of honest households; not a betrayer of tender confidences. He was a man of gallantry. It is beyond question that, in the course of his long life, he had many intrigues with women, someof which (not many, there is good reason to believe) were carried to the point of criminality. The grosser forms of licentiousness he utterly abhorred; such as the seduction of innocence, the keeping of mistresses, the wallowing in the worse than beastliness of prostitution.

This kind of defense continued through the end of the nineteenth century, with biographers outlining their case against his detractors and making a strong case for examining the public and private life of a man who clearly had intimate relationships outside the context of marriage and who raised questions in many minds about his allegiance to the nation.

Twentieth-century biographers wrote of Burr as a victim on many scores: of politics in the early republic, of a back-stabbing first biographer, and of later portrayals, as “one of history’s greatest losers,” as Donald Barr Chidsey put it. The novel Blennerhassett began with a similar note of Burr’s exceptional status: “For a hundred years, one of the most remarkable of Americans has borne a weight of obloquy and calumny such as has been heaped upon no other man, and, unlike any other man, during his lifetime he never by voice or pen made answer to charges made against him, or presented either to friends or foes any argument or evidence to refute them.” Nathan Schachner, writing in the 1930s, similarly captured the view of many biographers who have chronicled Burr. He wrote: “Probably of no one else in American history are there more unsupported, and unsupportable, tales in circulation.” And he ended his biography with a similar refrain: “Who in history has survived a more venomous brood of decriers?”

Burr’s legacy dramatically illustrates the various ways that sexual reputation informs public masculine character. Despite the complaints of his biographers who positioned themselves as solitary champions of history’s greatest victim, a man repeatedly “misinterpreted” and “misjudged,” there has never been a shortage of Burr defenders, then or now, and virtually all of them use sex as one means of shoring up his public standing. Our enduring interest in connecting personal with public selves will almost certainly keep competing Burrs alive in popular memory—and will no doubt prevent Aaron Burr from ever being either completely “rescued” or finally banished from the pantheon of great American founders.

Further Reading

This essay comes out of my research for my most recent book, Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past (Philadelphia, 2014), which examines the ways in which we have (or haven’t) talked about the sex lives of the founders. The current depiction of Burr as sexually and morally bankrupt was perhaps most popularly captured by the 1973 historical novel Burr by Gore Vidal, in which Burr is gossiped to be the “lover of his own daughter”—a fictionalized rumor created by Vidal. Burr has been the subject of more straightforward biographies since shortly after his death. The earliest is Matthew L. Davis, Memoirs of Aaron Burr with Miscellaneous Selections from his Correspondence (New York, 1836), while the most enthusiastically pro-Burr may be James Parton, Life and Times of Aaron Burr (New York, 1858). There have been numerous biographies since, including Herbert S. Parmet and Marie B. Hecht, Aaron Burr: Portrait of an Ambitious Man (New York, 1967); Donald Barr Chidsey, The Great Conspirator: Aaron Burr and His Strange Doings in the West (New York, 1967); Jonathan Daniels, Ordeal of Ambition: Jefferson, Hamilton, Burr (New York, 1970), Laurence Kunstler, The Unpredictable Mr. Aaron Burr (New York, 1974); Milton Lomask’s two-volume Aaron Burr (New York, 1979-82). The best modern biography is by Nancy Isenberg, Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (New York, 2007). Her essay “The ‘Little Emperor’: Aaron Burr, Dandyism, and the Sexual Politics of Treason,” in Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004) is also extremely valuable.

Burr is notable among the founders for the extent to which his descendants have taken up his cause. Charles Burr Todd, a historian of the Burr family from Connecticut, wrote The True Aaron Burr: A Biographical Sketch, in 1902 (New York). Samuel Engle Burr Jr. not only founded the Aaron Burr Association; he also wrote books loyal to his ancestor’s memory, including Colonel Aaron Burr: The American Phoenix (New York, 1961) and The Influence of his Wife and his Daughter on the Life and Career of Col. Aaron Burr (Linden, Va., 1975).

This article originally appeared in issue 15.1 (Fall, 2014).

Thomas A. Foster is professor of history at DePaul University. He is the author and editor of six books, including Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past (2014). Foster tweets at @ThomasAFoster.

The roots of the current debate over presidential power

The recent conflict over President Bush’s domestic surveillance program reflects one of the oldest recurring divisions in American politics, dating all the way to the 1790s. Bush’s Democratic critics have taken a stance that traces back to the Jeffersonian (or Democratic) Republicans, arguing that the U.S. government is rather flexibly bound, but still bound, by the values and rules embedded in our founding documents and, as such, is a government whose power is essentially limited. The Bush administration and its modern (anti-Democratic) Republican defenders have staked out a position that traces back to Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists, reasoning from the inherent nature of government and the overwhelming fearsomeness of the challenges the United States faces that the powers of its government must be essentially unlimited. The GOP-Federalist position applies especially to times of foreign crisis, a state that Federalists saw as virtually perpetual in the early Republic and the Republicans have likewise been warning about ever since the outbreak of the cold war in 1946.

This recurring argument has often turned on the question of whether the norms and procedures of democracy and republicanism are adequate to national survival in a dangerous world of terrorists, Commies, and Frenchmen. Federalists and modern Republicans alike have often indicated their belief, expressed with varying degrees of regret, that the methods of democratic, accountable, transparent government are not strong enough to meet these challenges. Jeffersonian Republicans and modern Democrats, in turn, have tended to respond that they are. The essence of the frequently heard rightist refrain that America cannot fight the evildoers of the moment with democracy tying its hands or with one arm tied behind its back (fill in your Goldwaterish/Cheneyesque metaphor) can be found in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed columnabout the Pentagon paying Iraqi journalists for favorable coverage. If the U.S. military had elected to “play by Marquess of Queensberry rules,” argued the WSJ, we would have had to “wait decades” for some good Arab press, and we would have created “a heady propaganda win for the terrorist/insurgents, a prolonged conflict, and more unnecessary violence and death”—as opposed to the speedy triumph the writer apparently believes we are experiencing in Iraq right now.

The key difference in the recurring party debate is not so much the government’s or military’s mere use of extraconstitutional powers and undemocratic methods. Those things have happened under many presidents of most of the major U.S. parties, especially during the cold war. The key is the further act of justifying such powers and methods in principle. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have repeatedly gone out of their way to do this, asserting and exercising an alleged independent presidential authority to do things (like eavesdropping on suspected terrorists) the government was able to do just as swiftly and effectively under existing legal procedures. (A secret court was created in the 1970s with no other purpose than legally authorizing government eavesdropping when national security requires it.) In other cases, they have ordered up briefs to self-legalize obviously unconstitutional powers to have people tortured and to hold American citizens without charge or trial.

A similar tactic was recently used against Senator John McCain’s anti-torture resolution, a measure that Bush vehemently opposed but finally signed just before New Year’s Day. With the president’s signature, the administration included a “signing statement” explaining that it reserved the right to torture whoever it pleased no matter what the resolution said.

The executive branch shall construe [the provision], relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President . . . of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.

The recipe for this little writ of mandamus is two parts pure executive prerogative and one part the ends justify the means. The statement invokes the president’s “constitutional authority” but employs a concept not found in the Constitution: the idea that the president has the apparently sole and absolute power to supervise a “unitary executive branch.” Advise and consent this, Congress. The only constitutional limitation mentioned is on the judicial branch and any effort it might make to hold the “unitary executive” to any procedural standards when it decides to detain people. Capping things off we have a statement implying that any action the administration deems handy in the “shared objective” of “protecting the American people” is automatically legal and constitutional.

In the same vein, President Bush’s December radio address assured listeners that the National Security Agency’s warrantless domestic-spying program was “fully consistent with my constitutional responsibilities and authorities.” Not legally authorized by Congress, but “consistent” with the general ends of the president’s duties. Bush could not even cite which constitutional duties he might mean because those would actually be quite hard to find in the Constitution. Commander in chief of the armed forces is one thing, but Bush and Cheney clearly have some broader and frankly more king-like role in mind, something along the lines of the monarchical title that John Adams thought presidents should bear: “His Highness the President of the United States and Protector of the Rights of the Same.” Karl Rove might want to add the British monarchs’ tag, “Defender of the Faith,” for the religious Right’s benefit. Even closer to what Bush and Cheney seem to intend would be the title that Richard III used before he finally dealt with those pesky little congressmen, I mean princes, in the Tower: “Lord Protector of the Realm.”

Hamilton, Lincoln, and the Inherent-Powers Tradition

President Bush’s admirers will doubtless be heartened by the knowledge that he shares some aspects of this governing philosophy with the newly re-burnished “Business Class Hero” of the founding era, Alexander Hamilton. Confronted by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison with the fairly credible argument that the brand-new Constitution did not provide the government with the power to create his proposed national bank, Hamilton appealed by referring, not simply to the text of the Constitution itself, but more importantly to the “general principle . . . . inherent in the very definition of government.” The principle was “That every power vested in a government is in its nature sovereign, and includes, by force of the term, a right to employ all the means requisite and fairly applicable to the ends of such power.” While Hamilton recognized (unlike Bush) that a constitutional government could not legally engage in actions that its constitution specifically prohibited, his “definition of government” was in fact far older than the United States and its founding documents, and in truth it was not terribly respectful to those documents. Hamilton derided Jefferson and Madison’s arguments that the text of the Constitution might truly limit the government’s “sovereign power, as to its declared purposes and trusts,” writing that they presented “the singular spectacle of a political society without sovereignty, or of a people governed without government.” It barely dawned on Hamilton that such a spectacle, of a people governed without a traditional European form of government, was exactly what many Americans thought their revolution had sought.

Abraham Lincoln fell back on a similarly ante-constitutional notion of the inherent powers of government in justifying his decision to restore the Union by force. As explained in his first inaugural address, Lincoln held “in contemplation of universal law” that “the Union of these States is perpetual.” Like Bush and Hamilton, Lincoln invoked the Constitution but based his position largely on concepts not mentioned in it. “Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination.” It may not have been as safe to assert this as Lincoln hoped because for many Americans, and not only the defenders of slavery, the U.S. experiment in liberal government had relatively little in common with the fundamental law of all other national governments. They did not see the United States as a “government proper” if that meant it existed in unconditional perpetuity, with the people losing forever the Lockean right of revolution described in the Declaration of Independence.

The Hamilton/Lincoln idea of the “definition of government” or “government proper” amounts, in the final exigency, to the very old and widely embraced idea of government as rulership, the repository of sovereign authority that has no superior within its ambit and cannot be lawfully overruled. Though not necessarily absolute or completely insulated from popular influence, this sort of government derives its authority from some transcendent and irresistible source, a divine source for most of the monarchs who practiced it and a natural source—the nature of government and the practical requirements of nation-building—for Hamilton and other American advocates of inherent powers.

The logic behind this view can seem beguilingly simple and practical. Government is coterminous with the community and the guarantor of its structure, values, and very existence—matters too basic to be left to the whims of political give-and-take. Government is charged with the fundamental tasks of preserving the community from internal disorder, external conquest, and other forces that threaten to destroy it. Burdened with such awesome responsibilities, it needs powers to match, powers that were limited only by what its subjects would accept as legitimate by their mere acquiescence.

Defenders of the inherent-powers position frequently and significantly direct attention to the necessity or desirability of the ends they seek to achieve: fighting the terrorists or Communists or (in Hamilton’s case) achieving national greatness and economic growth. While such goals were worthy enough on their own, the move of loudly proclaiming their transcendent worthiness is a political tactic rather than a constitutional or substantive argument; its real function is to embarrass and silence critics by calling their patriotism or morals into question. At the same time, the tactic expresses a basic tenet of old-school governance, which is that law, procedure, and constitutionalism are minor matters as long as what Hamilton called “the essential ends of political society”—security and prosperity and whatever other states of being a community wants for itself—are being met. State this as a folksy modern politician might, say as “getting the job done,” and it sounds like practical good sense. State it a bit more clearly, and it makes a mockery of the very idea of limited, transparent, and democratic government by dismissing it as so much “red tape.”

Angels in the Form of George W. Bush?

As Reinhard Bendix points out in Kings or People (1978), one of the very first scholarly books I can remember buying, the old-school view of government as a mandate to rule, constrained only by such compromises as were necessary to allow the mandate’s continued existence, is one that any medieval king, pope, god-emperor, or caliph would have found perfectly familiar. A ruler had to do what a ruler had to do. And you knew his actions were legitimate if he got away with them and succeeded in his goals. 

While it has monarchical origins, the reliance on inherent powers does not by itself render a government monarchical. Early American nationalists like Hamilton, Lincoln, and Daniel Webster had made the modernizing transition that Bendix describes from God to “the people” or “the nation” as the inviolate source of governmental authority. By contrast, Bush and Cheney clearly hearken back to the older monarchical model in which everything rests with the supreme ruler and his supreme duties. The key difference lies in their approach toward law. While different societies tend to have very different legal traditions, in the crudest sense we may say that kings got to be kings by establishing themselves as the sole legitimate source of secular law within their realms. American government has long been celebrated as one of “laws, not men,” where law is created by following certain publicly known and set procedures and, in the process, obtains some form of popular consent.

This is where Bush and Cheney’s views and actions seem quite breathtakingly dangerous. There have likely been absolute monarchs whose lawmaking was more procedurally constrained than that of the present administration. “We have a system of law,” Senator Russ Feingold said of the NSA spying program. “He just can’t make up the law . . . It would turn George Bush not into President George Bush, but King George Bush.” While I hope and believe that George W. Bush has no intention of crowning himself, his mentor Cheney has been seeking “unimpaired” presidential power ever since his days as a junior aide in the Ford White House. Why should his president/boy-prince be forced to endure the insolent effrontery of pesky reporters and congressional investigating committees? For Cheney, the Imperial Presidency is a matter of personal and ideological conviction.

Despite my obvious preferences in present politics, the underlying philosophical question here is still an open one for me. All governments probably do have inherent powers they will have to exercise in times of crisis. Lincoln certainly faced one and probably made the most courageous and far-sighted choice. Yet we should be clear that we are doing just that—making a choice—when we endorse government action based on such thinking. Governing on the basis of inherent powers rather than clear legal-constitutional authority is a distinctly undemocratic, illiberal, and un-American approach to governance. As Lincoln recognized, it should be used sparingly and only when absolutely and indispensably necessary.

The problem comes when leaders manipulate the public sense of crisis to make extraconstitutional powers and presidential monarchy thinkable. The modern American Right has a long record of promoting phony or highly exaggerated crises for political effect, often as a way to attack aspects of democracy, especially the economic, cultural, and intellectual expressions of it that conservatives so dislike. Extensive freedom of expression, strict protections for the rights of the accused, and other civil liberties have never been popular with the dominant elements of the American Right, and strangely enough, the present crisis—whatever it is—always seems to demand that civil liberties be curtailed in some way. The 9/11 terrorist attacks only provided a more easily salable version of the ongoing crisis that the Right has been ringing alarm bells over for the past sixty years or more. The sudden salience of Islamic terrorism as an issue allowed Republicans to revive many of their old cold war themes and policies and provided the opportunity to apply them in Iraq.

There is pretty overwhelming evidence that the intelligence failures regarding al Qaeda and Iraq had more to do with incompetence and ideologically driven inattention and misperception—useful information had been gathered but was not acted on or reported correctly—than a lack of “tools” such as legalized torture and illegal mass eavesdropping. Given that situation, I will let Thomas Jefferson’s first inaugural address give the last word, for now, on my behalf.

I know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government can not be strong, that this Government is not strong enough; but would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm on the theoretic and visionary fear that this Government, the world’s best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest Government on earth. I believe it the only one where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern. Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.

Further Reading:

The sources for all the quotations above are linked at the point where a particular document or news item is first introduced.

The Bush administration’s working theory of the executive’s nearly absolute powers in matters relating to national security and foreign policy has been given its most developed form by University of California, Berkeley, law professor John Yoo (a former Department of Justice official) in his book The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11 (Chicago, 2005). Simply put, the Constitution does not seem to have much to do with it, except through the most, er, tortured constructions imaginable. Yoo can be heard defending the presidential power to do just about anything here. (Link via Information Clearinghouse.)

For my money, the most incisive recent commentary on the president’s role in our current system is a chapter in Jon Stewart’s America (the Book): “The President: King of Democracy.”

I don’t claim great expertise on the history of kingship or its theoretical basis, but the remarks above are influenced by Martin Van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State (Cambridge, 1999); Richard L. Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, 1992); Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Somerville (Cambridge, 1991); the first part of Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992); and especially Reinhard Bendix, Kings or People: Power and the Mandate to Rule (Berkeley, 1978). History Book Club dealt in some weighty tomes back in those days. Van Creveld, a military historian based in Israel, recently had some choice words on the Bush administration and the Iraq War in the Forward.

In expectation of the hate mail I will soon be receiving from Alexander Hamilton’s many fans, let me urge any present-day liberals tempted to imagine Hamilton and the Federalists as their guys in the 1790s—I know a lot of historians who incline this way—to first read Mike Wallace’s review essay “Business-Class Hero,” about the New-York Historical Society’s Hamilton exhibit. That said, Max Edling’s recent book, A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (New York, 2003), convinced me that Hamilton was a more measured statist than I once believed. A somewhat overdrawn reminder that the early presidents were no strangers to the perennial presidential yen for secrecy and covert action is Stephen F. Knott, Secret and Sanctioned: Covert Operations and the American Presidency (New York, 1996).

While Hamilton and the Federalists strike me as far more respectful of the law than the present administration, one thing that Bush and Cheney still seem to have in common with the Federalists is a largely imaginary sense of social superiority to the rabble engaged in democratic politics. This week’s Time magazine contains a remarkable quotation in which the White House uses frank social prejudice as a way of distancing themselves from disgraced House Majority Leader Tom Delay: “Of the former exterminator, a Republican close to the President’s inner circle says, ‘They have always seen him as beneath them, more blue collar. He’s seen as a useful servant, not someone you would want to vacation with.’”

I imagine this piece will have many detractors, and I hope they and any supporters will take advantage of the Common-place Coffeeshop in making their views known. Future plans call for a blog-like discussion space that will be more directly linked to this column.

This article originally appeared in issue 6.2 (January, 2006).

Jeffrey L. Pasley, a former journalist and speechwriter, is associate professor of history at the University of Missouri, Columbia. He is the author of “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville, 2001) and the co-editor (with Andrew Robertson and David Waldstreicher) of Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, 2004).

On the weekend after the midterm congressional elections of 1998, I flew east to appear with a score of constitutional scholars before the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives. The subject of the hearing was the background and history of impeachment, and the occasion was the impending impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton. Prior to the hearing, Forrest McDonald and I spent a pleasant hour discussing the subject on C-SPAN’s morning Washington Journal program. The highlight of that hour came when Brian Lamb replayed an excerpt from an interview he had conducted with Forrest back in the mid-1980s. When asked what one would see if one ventured out to the McDonald farm outside Tuscaloosa to catch the historian in the act of writing (in flagrante delicto, as it were), Forrest’s eyes dart to the side, a smirk briefly crosses his face, followed by the disarming confession that he writes in the nude–at least in the summer. From the studios opposite Union Station, we grabbed a cab to the House office building on the far side of the Capitol, and checked in with the committee staff; then we went to the main hearing room and took our places.

Thinking of that moment ever since has reminded me of the scene in Larry McMurty’s Lonesome Dove where Gus has to hang Jake Spoon, his Texas Ranger buddy gone bad, for throwing in his lot with the evil Suggs brothers. Gus says something like, “I’m sorry you crossed the line, Jake,” and Jake, distracted by the noose, replies something like, “I never seen no line to cross.” Walking into the committee room, I felt I had crossed a line as well. Testifying as an expert, and effectively taking sides in a highly charged political dispute, is not a role that historians assume readily, nor is it an opportunity that comes our way with any frequency. Forrest professed to be testifying only as an impartial scholar, but I, for one, wasn’t buying his line, nor was I so naive about my own sentiments as to claim to act in the same capacity. I am a native Cook County Democrat, with family ties to the old machine of the elder Richard J. Daley, and proud of it, and I thought then, as I do now, that Hillary Rodham Clinton (coincidentally the mother of one of my better-known students, though we had not yet been introduced) was close to the mark in her famous remark blaming a “vast right-wing conspiracy” for the impeachment.

For many historians, becoming professionally involved in a partisan conflict (such as these hearings) or in litigation (which I have also done) risks crossing the line between scholar and advocate. Professional historians should have no problem in admitting ambiguity or uncertainty in our findings, but political and legal disputes leave little room for scholarly hemming and hawing. Of the nineteen “experts” testifying on November 9, only one, Michael Gerhardt of William and Mary, appeared in a neutral capacity. The others had been summoned by one party or another. My own invitation came through the assistance of my Stanford colleague, Deborah Rhode, then serving as a staff attorney for the committee’s Democratic minority.

For my part, I have to confess that I was not uncomfortable in this role. For one thing, I had already begun writing op-ed essays about the constitutional issues raised by impeachment, and had formed a position strongly critical of the theory upon which it was proceeding. For another, I felt, with characteristic immodesty, that my work on the origins of the Constitution offered a perspective on the Impeachment Clauses that only a handful of scholars were qualified to present. Legal scholars aplenty would be testifying, but they are used to adversarial argument, and cavalierly happy to deploy whatever materials serve the cause they favor without the historian’s due regard for the limits and ambiguities of the evidence. I had spent more than a decade developing a model or method for conducting inquiries into the original meaning of the Constitution, with due respect for the rules of using historical evidence, and this was too good an opportunity to pass up. Moreover, I felt then, and still believe now, that historians have a civic obligation to bring their knowledge to bear, even if it involves taking sides in a partisan dispute. Obviously it would be better to do so in a more balanced, less partisan forum. But if that is all that is available, why should we forego the opportunity, challenge, and obligation? The test has to be whether what one is prepared to argue in this public role is consistent with what one has written as a scholar. On this count, I had no qualms about my ability to present an originalist argument against the legitimacy of Clinton’s impeachment that would fully comport with the discussion of the presidency in my book, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York, 1996).

The hearings got off to a curious start. Although most of the full committee attended most of the day, the hearings were held under the auspices of the subcommittee on the Constitution, chaired by my fellow Haverford College alumnus, Charles Canady. I was naive enough to suppose that Canady might begin by thanking the witnesses for taking time out from their schedules to help enlighten the members on a truly difficult subject. Instead, his opening remarks seemed to amount to saying, we have a rope, yonder is the tree, and all we need is to catch the evildoer and string him up.

An even more curious interlude followed. Television monitors were turned on, and the members of the committee sat raptly watching a ten-minute video consisting primarily of earnest statements about the gravity of impeachment culled from the Watergate proceedings of 1974. This struck me as a strange way to get the members in the mood, but who was the historian to judge? Having been assigned to the afternoon panel, I sat back and prepared to watch the proceedings unfold.

One lesson became evident fairly quickly. The Judiciary Committee’s reputation as the most partisan and ideologically polarized committee on the Hill was well deserved. The tone of the questioning was sometimes amiable, especially when members were questioning friendly witnesses. But from Canady’s opening remarks on, it was difficult to ignore the intensely partisan character of the proceedings, or to resist the conclusion that the hearings were basically a sham because the members already knew (barring some unforeseen political contingency) how they would vote.

As a close student of the political debates of the Revolutionary era, I have always assumed that legislative debate must matter at some level–that there must be a point to deliberations. Yet it was sobering to observe and participate in a discussion where all the positions to be taken are preordained, where the rhetorical moves each side can make are sharply constrained by the structure of the dispute and the limits of the available evidence, where debate as such can therefore have little, if any, impact. Although “pre-commitments” were not possible for many of the issues that the revolutionaries faced in the 1770s and 1780s, the hearings were a useful reminder of the lesson that historians ignore context and circumstance only at their peril.

The second great lesson I took away from the impeachment proceedings came when I had to ask myself what, if anything, I had been able to add to the discussion–as nondeliberative as it turned out to be.

Here I have to begin by describing my substantive position on the merits of impeachment. In Original Meanings, I had argued that the establishment of the presidency proved to be the single most difficult and puzzling problem in institutional design that the Framers of the Constitution had confronted. There were no useful antecedents for the national republican executive the Framers contemplated and there were numerous perplexing uncertainties about the proper mode of election and the political dimensions of executive power. These considerations help to explain why the Framers literally looped around in their attempts to decide such interlocking questions as the mode of election, eligibility for re-election, length of term, and method of removal–including, of course, impeachment. The key decisions on the presidency emerged only during the final fortnight of debate, and even then, the key initiatives came out of the so-called Committee on Postponed Parts.

If any one factor best explained the eventual design of the presidency, I argued, it was the Framers’ desire to make the executive as politically independent of Congress as possible, while allowing Congress (or more specifically the House of Representatives) the residual right to elect the president should the electoral college fail to produce a majority. My testimony to the committee argued that that same principle should be applied to the interpretation of the Impeachment Clause.

In the case of President Clinton, the key problem was to determine whether the phrase “other high crimes and misdemeanors” should be read narrowly or expansively. A narrow reading would limit impeachment to offenses that amounted to a clear abuse of the public trust in the performance of official duties. A broad reading would leave much more to the discretion of Congress, and arguably embrace the kinds of nonofficial failings for which Clinton stood exposed. If one wanted to reason as an originalist, a narrow reading would be consistent with the idea that the Framers worried about leaving the president vulnerable to congressional pressure and manipulation–which is what the records of debate seemed to me to suggest. A broad reading of “high crimes and misdemeanors” carried the opposite implication–that the Framers wanted to make the president politically subservient to Congress–and that seemed incompatible with the evolution of the presidency through the course of the Federal Convention.

By the time my turn came to testify, the atmosphere in the committee room had eased considerably. The mood during the morning session had seemed quite charged, especially when Republican members took issue with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., for asserting that gentlemen always lied about sex. But by late afternoon, some of the committee members had absented themselves, and our circadian rhythms clicked in.

Reading my testimony and trying to gauge what sense the committee members could possibly make of it led to another insight. As much as members of Congress like to praise the Founders and cite useful passages from The Federalist to demonstrate their own learning, their sense of history is both underdeveloped, on the one hand, and distorted by their romantic attachments to the founding era, on the other. All of them, I am convinced, feel a deep kinship and sense of gratitude to the founding generation, for establishing the institutions and offices they now love to inhabit. All of them know how to wallow in the conventional trappings and expressions of American patriotism.

But few of them know much about how the Constitution was drafted, or have a good grasp of the political disputes and conceptual uncertainties of the Revolutionary era. They are much more inclined to think of the Framers imparting their collective wisdom to posterity than to realize that the decisions of 1787 were reached by processes not dissimilar to the ones in which they ordinarily engage. To offer, therefore, an account of the Impeachment Clause which emphasized George Mason’s idiosyncratic role in the debates, or the difficulty of defining “high crimes and misdemeanors,” or the deep uncertainty that clouded the entire discussion of the executive branch at Philadelphia in 1787, was (I sensed) to provide an unsettling lesson that they could neither assimilate nor easily apply. I believed that immersion in the historical evidence was essential to understanding the Impeachment Clause, but as I watched the bemused (or confused) look on Chairman Henry Hyde’s face, it occurred to me that I just as well could have been speaking Greek. My account of Mason’s and Madison’s respective concerns could hardly compete with his appeals to Thomas à Becket or the Normandy war dead.

But why should history matter at all to the members of the Judiciary Committee? With the sole exception of Mary Bono, whose presence on the committee was a bit of a mystery, they were all attorneys, and therein lay a clue to the workings and mentality of the committee. They might not know much about history, but they knew a lot about the workings of the legal system, the importance of witnesses telling the truth and the likelihood that witnesses often try to shade their testimony in just the self-serving and indeed duplicitous way in which Clinton had his. Their own substantial legal experience, in other words, readily shaped the way in which they thought about impeachment; even the most compelling account of the true historical origins and ambiguities of the relevant constitutional language could only be a quaint distraction.

So the unpleasant and messy truth is that the sense of nuance that historians bring to their work cannot be readily translated into the political sphere, especially in a controversy as bitterly partisan as the impeachment imbroglio. Does that mean that historians should refrain from engaging in such controversies, in part because they have little chance to influence them, and in part because they risk compromising their objectivity? I have already been attacked twice by the distinguished jurist and overly prolific legal writer, Richard Posner, for having signed the historians’ “October surprise” advertisement challenging the House impeachment hearings before the 1998 congressional elections and otherwise participating in an avowedly political debate under the bare pretense, as he sees it, of being scholarly. I take comfort, however, from the belief that everything I wrote during the impeachment mess was consistent with my prior scholarly writings. I still believe that historians have an obligation to inform public discussions as best we can, when the opportunity arises. And as citizens, we have the same rights to exercise as anyone else. But as historians we should also understand why our contributions, which rely on the nuanced feel for the past that we have to develop to ply our trade, are likely to have little effect. I accordingly no longer believe, as I did then, that if I could just be given forty-five minutes of prime time to present the equivalent of an undergraduate lecture on the origins of the Impeachment Clause, the country could have been spared the year wasted on the whole sordid affair.

Since September 11, 2001, I have entertained one further reflection about the impeachment imbroglio. At the time, nothing was more common than to hear opinions expressed on either side as to how history would judge either the president’s behavior or the passion with which his detractors hounded him even after they knew that he would remain in office until January 20, 2001. We now know, I think, what the truer judgment of history will really be. While politics dictated that the national government be paralyzed for a year with partisan foolishness, our enemies elsewhere were making other plans for us–plans that we perhaps could have been better prepared to confront. But of course Monica was more important.

This article originally appeared in issue 2.4 (July, 2002).

Jack Rakove is the Coe Professor of History and American Studies and professor of political science at Stanford University.

As the hot glow of 1998-99’s impeachment crisis fades, and the Clinton presidency recedes into the past, we now know far more than we could have wanted to know about the former president’s personal life. We have also learned much that we should have known earlier about the right-wing agitators and propagandists who discovered, publicized, fomented, and sometimes simply manufactured scandalous accusations against him. Yet with all the ink spilt, strikingly little attention has been paid to the nature of the political passions underlying the crisis–the outsized and persistent contempt and resentment that the president himself inspired among a vocal minority of the American electorate.

Why did so many conservatives see the president not simply as a detested opponent but as a cheater, a deceiver, a beguiler, and a rogue? Why did many left-liberals regard him as a self-serving betrayer of their principles? And, perhaps most perplexingly, why did so many members of the cosmopolitan middle, what we might call the supercilious center–people who actually come very close to sharing the former president’s politics–hold him in such disdain? It won’t do simply to say that the accusations are true and thus the opprobrium justified; for one must then contend with the fact that the man was not only twice elected president, but maintained historically high levels of public approval through most of his presidency. Clinton hating was more than ordinary disaffection; it was aggravated and embittered, a phenomenon as much personal as political, and one that simply confounds conventional political analysis.

So how is this phenomenon and impeachment, which was its logical culmination, to be understood in the context of the American constitutional order?

While the United States Constitution is a table of rules and procedures for organizing and running the national government, it was also devised–perhaps principally devised–as a structure to channel and break the tides of passion and political enthusiasm that are common to, and recurrently threaten, the existence of popular government. Impeachment had a narrow constitutional focus in the sense that the trial and attempted removal of the president followed the prescribed constitutional procedures. But it is perhaps more fruitfully understood as the culmination of a process that has several times recurred in American political history and is in some sense intrinsic to the American constitutional order: periods of turbulent political transition wherein the Constitution’s separation of powers prevents the resolution of basic political questions for an extended period of time. Parliamentary systems avoid this problem, providing the possibility of unified control of the levers of legislative and executive power even when substantial division in the electorate remain. But the separation of powers at the heart of the American governmental structure–along with the additional divided authorities created by federalism–creates too many redoubts and recesses of authority where committed oppositions can retrench, regroup, and stymie majorities.

The pattern of a two-term president who is widely popular but also deeply reviled in a period of rapid political, economic, and social change is not unprecedented in our history. In their own times, Franklin Roosevelt (1933-45) and Andrew Jackson (1829-37) engendered similar political polarization, with embitterment and contempt on the one hand, and a deep, intuitive identification with a broad mass of the population on the other. (The only other presidential impeachment, that of Andrew Johnson, originated similarly in a disjunction between the forces controlling the executive and legislative branches.) Franklin Roosevelt’s enemies vilified him as “that man”–a demagogue and class traitor who had seduced voters through a kind of illicit, hypnotic mass spell. Jackson was, in his own time, similarly reviled. Part aristocrat and part rough-hewn soldier, Jackson represented a new kind of politics and a new conception of the presidency. He too had a deep, intuitive connection with the American people that terrified his enemies and convinced them that he was a demagogue who threatened the very institutions of American government.

Both men’s presidencies had a transformative character. Each, individually, had a unique ability to connect and communicate with ordinary citizens, an ability that their enemies saw as phony, perverse, opportunistic, and ultimately dangerous. In each case the president’s adversaries’ attacks upon him only deepened and intensified the support of his supporters, in a circular and mutually reinforcing fashion. The antagonism over the man echoed deeper cultural and political rifts that remained inchoate, latent, or simply unspoken. The impeachment crisis of 1998 and ’99 had similar origins in unresolved political stalemate and the unrelieved passions and antagonisms this generated.

Over the years observers have posited a number of possible explanations for the enmity that grew up around the forty-second president. Early in his presidency the disaffection was often chalked up to generational transition: Clinton was the first president since John Kennedy to be well under fifty years of age; he was also the first president to have been fully washed over, and in many ways compromised, by the upheavals and experimentation of the 1960s. His very person, in this reading, became a battleground for a newly intensified version of culture war that had been playing itself out in one form or another since the late 1960s. Yet another theory sees Clinton hating rooted in a sort of baby-boomer self-loathing, a contempt for their inability to reconcile their own youthful indulgence and middle-aged hypocrisy. Each of these explanations is partly true. But neither is quite satisfactory.

To get a better purchase on the questions, let’s first distinguish between at least three distinct kinds of Clinton hating: conservative Clinton hating, left-liberal Clinton hating, and cosmopolitan Clinton hating, each of which shares common roots and predilections but remains nevertheless distinct.

The rhetoric of conservative Clinton hating is immediately familiar. Clinton is a liar, a phony, an immoral man, a deceiver. He can’t be trusted. He had “stolen” their issues. The feelings have become more tortured and embittered because again and again Clinton has won when he shouldn’t have been able to win.

Conservative Clinton hating echoes the McCarthyism of the 1950s, only not necessarily in the sense some of his supporters have argued. The subtlest historical interpretations of McCarthyism describe the movement as a product of two quite distinct forces–one crassly political and opportunistic, another deeply rooted in the insecurities of the early Cold War. In 1946 the Republicans won back the Congress for the first time in fourteen years, only to lose it again two years later, and be defeated in a presidential election they seemed certain to win. From what seemed like an expected restoration after Franklin Roosevelt’s death, the GOP now faced a fifth straight presidential loss and what seemed like it might be a near permanent exclusion from power in the national government.

This reverse made Republicans resentful; it also made them feel cheated. And they retaliated with an attitude that held no tactic or charge as beyond the pale. As Robert Taft, the respected Republican Senate Majority leader, famously told McCarthy early in his crusade, “[K]eep talking, and if one case doesn’t work–proceed with another.” But partisan warfare was only half the story. It was a necessary, but not a sufficient cause for what happened in the early 1950s. Only in a climate of deep-seated political uncertainty and fear could such concerted political attacks have had the truly explosive results they did. The early 1990s were not the early 1950s, of course, but in many respects the times were equally unsettled. The end of the Cold War, though immeasurably more benign than its onset, nevertheless created a similar disequilibrium in the nation’s politics, shaking free a swirling hatred of government and a search for internal enemies that had not been seen in so virulent a form since the McCarthy era. Journalists have described the partisan campaigns–open and covert–against Clinton, but why these efforts struck such a profound chord among a minority of the population still needs to be explained.

One clear reason for the out-sized opposition to Clinton was how much his election–and even more his subsequent success–scotched the paradigm of historical and ideological transformation Republicans had been crafting for themselves during their twelve-year hold over the executive branch from 1980 to 1992. For partisan Republicans these three successive presidential victories were not simply the result of favorable times or quality candidates–for many Republicans, in fact, quite the opposite for the first President Bush. They were the result of an epochal shift in the ideological complexion of the American electorate–a wholesale shift away from liberalism and the New Deal. Clinton’s election in 1992 might have been either an accident or simply a time-out in the Republican hegemony–à la Jimmy Carter. But his eventual success created a dissonance and frustration among partisan Republicans that in its own way was as frustrating as Truman’s unexpected victory in 1948, which seemed to doom them to permanent executive-branch oblivion.

Much less visible to the general public is the equally charged antipathy toward the president among many liberals. The left-liberal Clinton hater found the president phony and inauthentic, willing to sacrifice any principle or precept not simply for expedience but for self-interest. At the same time however (and in a partly contradictory fashion) these Clinton haters see the president as providing Democratic cover for a complete surrender to Reaganism, with balanced budgets, welfare reform, and tax cuts. Like conservative Clinton haters, they despised him because he is something their map of the world doesn’t account for: a Democrat who plays to win, a Democrat who wasn’t afraid to play political hard ball, cut necessary deals, or generally get his hands dirty in the inevitable back and forth of political warfare. Other similarities exist. Part of the depth of disaffection with Clinton among many left-liberals was that he had been successful when he should not have been able to be successful. In many cases he had been able to accomplish goals these critics have long espoused by means that shouldn’t have worked. And perhaps most galling, Clinton had been able to gain the support of constituencies left-liberals have long considered very much their own (women and African Americans particularly), even while eschewing their policies.

The third group, the cosmopolitan Clinton haters, are the most paradoxical because their displeasure is not obviously rooted in specific ideological disagreement. For many, in fact, the level of disgust and disdain for the president appeared to be inversely related to ideological proximity. Political commentators and prominent press figures Howell Raines, Michael Kelly, Maureen Dowd, Joe Klein, Christopher Matthews, and most of the rest of Clinton’s most vituperative elite media critics were centrists of a vaguely liberal hue. This group includes much of establishment Washington, but extends a good deal further, taking in an important slice of society up and down the Northeast corridor. With this group the element of class condescension and resentment runs most deeply, and what seems to cause the greatest irritation is that Clinton is a “bubba” and a mandarin–two qualities that should not be able to coexist in the same person.

As in the cases of Roosevelt and Jackson, a group of journalists and intellectuals slipped into a pit of their own contempt for Clinton and somehow became unhinged by it. They became obsessed and this obsession transformed them, in many cases leaving them different, damaged, certainly not the same. Some of the prime examples of this are Stuart Taylor, Michael Kelly, Maureen Dowd, Christopher Hitchens, Nat Hentoff, and even Kenneth Starr. Every president has critics. And most of these began in a conventional enough way. But Clinton’s unwillingness to be defeated by conventional political means–typified by his refusal to resign after being impeached–undid them. The failure of ordinary means pushed them to extraordinary means. Their failure to bring him down, paradoxically, magnified him in their eyes, leading these critics into an endlessly escalating series of polemics.

Clinton was different, of course, for at least two reasons. Jackson and Roosevelt each in their own way threatened important political and economic constituencies and interests. On the surface at least it is difficult to see how this can be said about Clinton. His policies were centrist and, after 1994 at least, cautious. His cabinets were liberally staffed with men and women who had made their careers on Wall Street. The stock market prospered mightily during his presidency. Many of the social pathologies that conservative politicians and social critics have railed against have undeniably diminished during his tenure in office. Clinton’s policies significantly tacked against the conservatizing course of his predecessors and cut against the pure celebration of the market that so typified the decade. But his policies were still generally friendly toward business and the market and surely not nearly so leftist in complexion as the intensity of the opposition would imply. So–and I hasten to say again, on the surface at least–it is not immediately clear why Clinton’s presidency should be so contentious and polarizing.

Second, as the president’s critics never tire of pointing out, while his public approval numbers were high by historical standards, Clinton has always enjoyed more support than respect. His political strength has been rooted in a politics of empathy, a fact which polling data, if scrutinized closely, bear out. Beside the normal horse-race polls we usually see, pollsters ask a variety of other basic questions, one of which is: Does politician X care about the needs of people like you? On many other questions Clinton’s numbers have fluctuated drastically. Thus, for instance, according to the Gallup poll, from February 1995 to January 1999, the percentage of Americans who believed Clinton could “get things done” rose from 45 to 82 percent. Less favorably, over precisely the same period, the percentage of Americans who believed Clinton was “honest and trustworthy” dropped from 46 to 24 percent. But on the question of whether Clinton “cares about the needs of people like you” his numbers remained virtually unchanged over the entire course of his presidency, averaging just over 60 percent. Without too much facetiousness this might be fairly be called the “feel your pain” index. And, though he was roundly abused for that line, it was also been the core of his political strength and resilience.

Many of those who opposed impeachment saw it at the time as an abuse of constitutional mechanisms provided for most of extreme crisis and executive malfeasance. But the roots of the crisis–particularly the structure of the government the Constitution prescribes, with its pronounced separation of powers, which frequently stalemates resolution of major political divisions and questions–are just as clearly rooted in the Constitution itself. Separation of powers may benignly slow the workings of government and refine them through countless small revisions and seasoning of radical reforms. But in an essentially democratic polity it also contains within itself the seeds of crises–crises for which the extreme solution of impeachment may have been virtually preordained.

This article originally appeared in issue 2.4 (July, 2002).

Joshua Micah Marshall, former Washington editor of the American Prospect, is author of Talking Points Memo. His articles have appeared in a wide variety of print and electronic publications including the American Prospect, the New Republic, the New York Times, Salon, Slate, Talk, and the Washington Monthly. He is currently finishing his doctoral dissertation in colonial American history at Brown University.

Biographies are among the most popular forms of history because reading about individual lives humanizes historical moments. Like a new friend, we learn about the secrets, foibles, and successes of individuals and rediscover aspects of ourselves in the process. Historians have long suggested that objectivity and perspective are especially difficult to achieve (if ever possible) in biographical endeavors, because writers become attached to their subjects. In addition, the present has a way of creeping into our reading and writing, as our current code of morals, anxieties, and desires influence the types of questions we ask and the answers we seek. These problems are especially pronounced when dealing with the Founding Fathers, according to Thomas A. Foster, associate professor of history at DePaul University, who investigates the nature of biography and America’s relationship to sex in his book, Sex and the Founding Fathers. Foster’s work does not attempt to reconstruct the sexual lives of the Founding Fathers, but rather analyzes the biographies and historical memories related to six of the founders from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries. He finds that Americans’ contemporary sexual and gender mores consistently contribute to our narratives about the sex lives of the founders—often more than the historical record allows—and are important sources of our national and civic identities.

Sex and the Founding Fathers is not Foster’s first work positing the importance of sexuality and masculinity in understanding the United State’s national identity. In tackling the historical remembrance of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Gouverneur Morris, Foster brings his expertise to bear on the way Americans have interpreted the lives of the men whose life and history have greatly affected Americans’ imaginations. Foster is careful not to offer his own analysis of each founder’s sexual past, and gives only short synopses of the historical documentation available to the biographers who crafted their narratives over three centuries. Nevertheless, some moments cry out for his own interpretation: How likely was it that Benjamin Franklin moved beyond flirtation in Paris given the gender and sexual mores of the time? With his expertise in the field, it was a loss not to have Foster’s full perspective and even more context for the sexual histories he provided. But this is not the task Foster set for himself in this book. He sought to reveal our perceptions of the founders, not scour the historical record for evidence of sexual “truths” that does not exist.

As Foster writes, “we are stuck with the Founding Fathers,” and over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in particular, their romantic liaisons, adulterous affairs, and marriages have provided a way for new generations to assess the early nation (168). That is not to say that nineteenth-century Americans had no interest in the founders’ sexual lives. Indeed, they wrote biographies of the founders that touched on their sexual and personal lives. However, the general trend was to ignore indelicate information—such as Alexander Hamilton’s affair with Maria Reynolds, or Thomas Jefferson’s sexual relationship with Sally Hemings. Perhaps most compellingly, Foster shows that Gouverneur Morris’ frank and exuberant writings about his own sex life, which offer the clearest picture of any founder’s sexual encounters, were “whitewashed” (144) by his family and historians until the twentieth century. The turning point in discussions of the founders’ sexual lives occurred in the early twentieth century, when many Americans began to more openly embrace sex as a positive force in their lives. At this point, biographers began to consider Benjamin Franklin’s ribald humor and behavior in France, George Washington’s romantic past before his marriage, and Thomas Jefferson’s desirability, among other topics. By the twenty-first century, according to Foster, the founders became emblematic of a masculinity that valued successful marriages, as in the case of John Adams, while also being symbols of virility and a passionate sex life. In this way, the founders’ sexual vices became virtues in the hands of biographers. Understandings of Thomas Jefferson, for example, transformed from a “chaste widower” (46) in nineteenth-century biographies to a modern “multicultural hero” (75) in the twenty-first century as Americans increasingly accepted evidence of his affair with Sally Hemings and mostly ignored any possibility of sexual coercion on his part.

Each generation has contextualized the sexuality of the founders differently but ultimately came to value them as role models for their masculinity and sexuality. The desire to laud the founders has resulted in faulty histories more useful in nation building than innate historical worth. Foster writes that our quest for virile and faultless founders reveals the importance of sexuality and gender in our national narratives and identities. Why, for example, Foster asks, has the marriage of John and Abigail Adams been idealized and covered in a “romantic gauze” (90) given John Adams’ prioritizing of politics and his career goals over his family? The couple’s long-term separations suggest their marriage was not the consistently romantic union it is characterized as today. The way we dismiss, embrace, and analyze information about each man suggests how caught up we are in the mythmaking of the founders—always finding ways of celebrating them to stand as a contrast to present day sexual and moral dilemmas, such as the 1872 Beecher-Tilton affair or the 1998 Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. Even the capitalization of “Founding Fathers” suggests our deification of their historical contributions and personal lives, and our difficulty in treating the founders as actual men. “[A]nd so we rewrite and respin and remember them in various ways to present them in a positive light,” Foster concludes (168).

Foster’s book would have benefited from further in-depth analysis of the gendered constructs existing in the historical refashioning of the founders’ past. Expanding his discussion of the changing ideals of masculinity and male bodies would have added a fuller picture of the motives of writers, particularly during the re-imaginings of the 1950s and twenty-first century, though Foster briefly details these issues with Gouverneur Morris and George Washington. Alexander Hamilton’s physicality and recent makeover is especially ripe for this line of inquiry. Some attention to the gender and sexual privileging of the founders is also necessary. Certainly the founders’ masculinity has been heralded, but what were the gendered implications of this in the writing of history? The discovery and celebration of the founders as ribald and virile depend upon an acceptance of patriarchal sexual ethics, and analysis of this would flesh out the interrelationship between writing, historical memory, and gender systems over time. Time and again, the adjustment in turning a founder’s previously unacknowledged sexual vice into a virtue was the reinterpretation of a woman’s sexual and moral nature. Thus, Maria Reynolds became a conniving lower-class woman who duped Alexander Hamilton; Martha Jefferson a frigid woman who withheld love from Thomas; and several French women lustful partners willing to forgo morality for a momentary sexual tryst. Studying the gender and sexual biases of authors would more fully reveal the way myths of the founders were created and how biases influence our history-making and nation-building.

Foster’s narrative is a thoughtful one that subtly challenges readers and historians to consider their motives in reading and writing history. Readers walk away with an understanding of how contemporary trends influence historical output and perceptions of the founders outside of academia. However, Foster’s real contribution here is his evidence of the ways manliness and sexuality influence our understanding of the founders and the subtle ways that sexuality influences our mythmaking. Reading Foster’s narrative, one concludes that the discipline of history provides a starting point for understanding the human experience, and self-consciously works toward creating histories true to the past while also relevant to our current moment. In this way, we will continue to build a truer past—full of vice and virtue.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.1 (Fall, 2014).

Kelly A. Ryan is an associate professor of history at Indiana University Southeast. She is the author of Regulating Passion: Sexuality and Patriarchal Rule in Massachusetts, 1700-1830 (2014), and is currently working on a project examining the implications of violence in the early national Northeast.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

From Langston Hughes, “I, Too, Sing America”

Setting the Table

As an interpreter, researcher and educator in the subject area of enslaved people’s lives and foodways, I am often asked, “where did you go to learn all of this?” The sincerity of the question enhances the awkwardness and anguish of making a humorous retort. My reply generally goes: “Well, I read. I cook on the hearth as much as possible. I listen to the elders of my past and those who are left, and I make mistakes and learn not to repeat them. I lose my eyebrows and arm hair to the fire, and often burn my hands and spill things. Sorry, there are no B.A., M.A. or Ph.D programs in how to cook like an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century slave or how to work in a cotton, tobacco, corn or rice field.” There is nothing sexy about what I do. And what little feeling of “comfort” people get from the smells, stories and samples I have to offer is quickly turned bittersweet by the discomfort of the real meat of the meal—slavery.

We don’t shy away from slavery as much as we once did. It always seems to raise eyebrows and get the discursive blood flowing. Most of this kinetic response comes from thinking about slavery as a challenge to democracy. The same could be said for the mythos surrounding the Underground Railroad, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights movement, in which what we debate is not what made this debate necessary in the first place—slavery—but rather how the debate was resolved in terms of protests, movements, politics, wars, great men and women. I am an iconoclast. I’m really not turned on by this lofty democracy talk. It doesn’t tell me how I got here, how we got here. In some ways it makes me angrier because slavery rolled into quasi-freedom in slow motion, while wars of independence and the birth of the personal computer seemed to revolutionize American life in minutes. I cannot understand my history looking through that lens. Slavery was not a complication; it was a civilization.

My hero is not the freedom seeker as much as the one who endured the institution out of sheer survival and the promise of better times and freedom as an inheritance for posterity. My great questions do not revolve around the southern Founding Fathers and their issues with “the Peculiar Institution.” I care about the enslaved world they tried to shield themselves from with fences and hedgerows, columns and dumbwaiters even while they lived in its midst. The smell, sound, feeling, and unbearable taste of being black and enslaved is where I find our common genesis. Slavery was central to the American economy, the birth pangs of black America, and served as the underpinning narrative of all other definitions of ethnicity in America to come; the chains are still on us.

There is no better way to encourage people to understand and empathize with the enslaved than through food. While these “notes from the field,” are intended to create a picture of my process and findings, I should state outright that by recreating and preserving these traditions, my ultimate mission is to give humanity and dignity to my ancestors. Invariably, my audiences will often participate in some part of the food preparation. Children will understand concretely what being enslaved was like. Elders will testify to witnessing the vestiges of the nineteenth century in the dimness of their childhood, and people of various colors and cultures will find themselves in my ingredients, methods, and narratives. Whatever poetry, truth, or wisdom people find in what I do or teach, they themselves bring to an already prepared table. What follows here is a sense of what they find at the feast.

Early African American foodways—toward a definition

Is slave food soul food? Is it born in Africa and transported to America or is it inspired by Africa but essentially an American creation? Does it center itself in key staples or is it the improvised brainchild of iron chefs in iron chains? Alternatively, aren’t early African American foodways really just the black side of a generic lower-class, early American palette?

Definitions are notorious for being the simplest way to be complex. It’s easier to say what the label “early African American food tradition” does not connote than what it does. It was not soul food, even though it’s clear there would have been no soul food without enslaved people’s food. Soul food is the moniker that the great-great grandchildren of enslaved people gave to the accumulated culinary knowledge and flavors that they felt helped to define them as an ethnic group. However, soul food has a spice that enslaved food did not. The average enslaved person would only intermittently enjoyed elements of the classic “Sunday dinner” of soul tradition. Poor whites in early America shared some of the staple foods that enslaved people consumed, but they were not accountable to a “higher authority,” like a master or an overseer, when they sat down for their meals; and poor whites, if they acquired the financial means, could purchase or grow or raise whatever they wanted. Access to ingredients and luxuries and accountability to white figures of authority were navigated by the enslaved through patterns of resistance and both individual and communal empowerment. Not to mention the fact that we have racialized certain foods and cooking methods over the past two and half centuries for definite reasons—they were associated with Africans, African Americans, and enslaved people. To ignore this is to disregard historic perceptions of ethnicity as well as the ways that we simultaneously create parallel cultures and maintain distinctions between them. Neither modern soul food nor the food of lower-class whites contemporary with American slavery serve as useful models for how enslaved people ate.

What we can say about the ultimate origins of early African American foodways is that it would have not taken the same shape had it not been born in a complex nexus known as the “African Atlantic.” The foodways of the West and the Americas were not first introduced to enslaved Africans in America, they were introduced in Africa, sometimes long before contact with Europeans. This pattern of exchange built on connections with the Islamic world and Southeast Asia; it drew African plants and foods north and east even as ingredients and dishes from these regions came into the African world. Commensurate with the creation of new Creole languages, spiritualities, and aesthetics in the Atlantic world was a flowing food tradition that drew on West and Central Africa for its deep structure, values, and “grammar,” as Charles Joyner once put it. This tradition then found in European (and by extension, Native American) traditions, the parallels, luxuries, limitations and possibilities that created an edible jazz. In key regions—Senegambia, the Gold Coast (modern Ghana), southeastern Nigeria and west-central Africa, the culinary negotiations were immediate and palpable. American crops parallel to African cultigens would come to flourish—think maize and cassava, tomatoes, peanuts and curcubits. Where classic African traditions, Creole innovations, and caste control met, there the foodways of early African America were born.

Early African American foodways were also the product of the interplay between ethnic groups from West and Central Africa and new “nations” that emerged out of the catalyst of the Middle Passage. People drawn from a 3,500-mile stretch of coast who had no contact with each other before the slave trade now found themselves having to work out a common Afri-Creole food tradition parallel with a common Afri-Creole tongue and culture. Wolof met Igbo, Mende met Mbundu, Akan met Fang. There was also some level of exchange and movement between enslaved communities in mainland North America and those from the Afro-Caribbean and Latin America. The story is made yet more complex by the fact that whomever enslaved and liberated Africans lived among—be they Dutch, Swedish, Scots Irish, German, Sephardic Jewish, Cherokee, Creek, French or Spanish—would either enrich or limit the culinary realities of their exile in America. No enslaved cultures in the history of the world have had such an enormous influence on the national cuisines of its sojourn than the peoples of the African Atlantic and the African Americas.

Transitions of taste

It has occurred to me that if we were to transport enslaved African Americans through time to the present, they would be amused and amazed with the current trends in American food. Local, seasonal eating? Sure! More than anyone else, enslaved people had little choice but to rely on the immediate environment for their needs since they were literally bound to the land. Eating offal, wild plants and game as something chic? Perhaps not chic, but necessary and favorable? Absolutely. Comfort food prepared and served in unpretentious ways, eaten as a “mess”? Affirmative. Underground eating, food prepared and served guerrilla style apart from the prying eyes of authorities and judgmental eaters? Again, a winner. The conventions of enslaved people’s foodways from the colonial and antebellum periods are remarkably consistent with contemporary passions about the possibilities and power of food as a communal experience.

Enslaved Africans and their descendants clung to hot and spicy foods. They maintained their cravings for salt, grassy leafy greens and herbal tonics. They liked their soups and stews with gummy okra and other mucilaginous textures; they favored one-pot meals where flavors melded and rice cooked so that every grain was single and distinct. They punctuated heavy starchy fillers with the unctuous flavor of heavy oil and crispy outside skins of fried foods. They satisfied their desire for what foodies now call umami (meaning mouthfeel) with parboiled roasted meat, boiled peanuts, and the slightly aged and fermented taste of preserved fish and meat that lent savor to cowpeas.

But there was no single enslaved food culture.

One fundamental shift in what this cuisine looked and tasted like probably occurred about the same time that the majority of enslaved blacks were American born—a shift that occurred between1740 and 1760. By the end of this period, the trade in enslaved peoples began to slow and was ended in the North and Chesapeake by the 1780s. In the Lower Mississippi, Gulf Coast and Lowcountry, successive waves of late importations would continue into the nineteenth century, well past the congressional close of the slave trade in 1808. The result was that the cuisine of the Lower South reflected ongoing influxes from Africa long into the nineteenth century. In the Chesapeake, influential to the Upper South and parts of the cotton belt, the cultural impact of earlier demographic patterns was key to the uniquely African American approach to Southern food. The foods, cooking methods, and manners of eating that appealed to, say, a man arriving from what is now southeastern Nigeria in the 1720s might not be so appealing to his great-granddaughter born in southeastern Virginia in the 1770s. Technology would have accounted for some of the differences in taste between this man and his great-granddaughter. He would have grown up in a household where a kitchen hearth was an outdoor or separate building with a fire pit that held three supporting stones on which a slim variety of clay or iron trade pots could be placed. Wooden spoons, large knives, mortars and pestles, brush whisks, baskets, grinding stones and gourds used as bowls were the primary culinary implements. Contrast this with the brick hearth, metal pots and pans, and multiple utensils that his great-granddaughter might have used as a cook in at the home of a prominent Virginia master. In her world, food was to be served in courses, and made into separate dishes rather than a single pot entree. And the food she prepared would have included baked goods, a novelty to her great grandfather, whose traditions did not include either wheat flour or long baking.

Africans living in the Americas, like their European counterparts, developed a sweet tooth. European and Islamic tastes for honey-flavored desserts lost ground to king sugarcane. The traditional African palette favored bitter, spicy and oily dishes over sweet ones. Raw honey, sugarcane or sorghum cane (native to Africa and brought to the South in the mid-nineteenth century) and fresh fruits were valued but not essential snacks. In the Americas, however, Africans would not only cut cane, but would come to develop new ways of their own to produce confectionary. Sucrose was one of the few comforts known to bonds people. Great-grandfather may have looked askew at anything but fresh fruit and honey; but his great-granddaughter would already be fond of jumbles, biscuits, cakes, sweet bread, jams and other delights including a newly introduced preparation from grain—macaroni.

Both great-grandfather and great-granddaughter would have based their “vegivore” diet on a starchy preparation made from grains and tubers enhanced with leafy greens and bits of meat or fish and nuts or legumes as protein. While great-grandfather’s diet was based on yams, legumes, some millet and sorghum and leafy greens from tropical crops, great-granddaughter’s diet was based on corn first and foremost, supplemented with legumes, sweet potatoes and leafy greens from temperate brassicas. Both diets would have incorporated African ingredients or New World substitutions. Okra, Bambara groundnuts, sesame, cowpeas, sorghum, watermelons and muskmelons, hot peppers, and peanuts all provided a taste of an African home. Sweet potatoes, temperate and tropical pumpkins, Eurasian brassicas (like cabbages, kale, collards) and a variety of indigenous North American fruits—berries, persimmons and the like—were substitutions for West and Central African foods. At the same time, foods consumed by enslaved blacks in the Americas found their way to Africa. The corn that would have been so important to great-granddaughter was consumed on both sides of the Atlantic. Like other grains and tubers, it was mushed, popped, roasted, fried, cooked into flat cakes, and made into loaves. The sole difference between its African and American preparation was that nixtimalization (treating corn with lye or lime to loosen the hull as in hominy) was not utilized in West and Central Africa although the process was endemic to the southeastern coast of North America. The result was that corn remained a poor addition to the diet in Africa, but served as a fairly nutritious food in America.

And meat? Great-grandfather would have enjoyed heads, feet, innards, tongues and eyes of domesticated livestock. Each part would have had its own spiritual and culinary meanings and savor. His great-granddaughter would relish what protein she could get but was tempted by the cuts her owner preferred. Long after slavery, her descendants would look on the cast-off parts with disgust and associate them with powerlessness rather than their equally important roots in West and Central Africa.

While Europeans (and Native Americans, for that matter) influenced the foodways of the enslaved community, enslaved women and men also influenced the food traditions of their neighbors and owners. Native Americans in the southeast began growing watermelons, sweet potatoes (read “yams”) and cowpeas. Europeans could not live without pepper vinegar and other condiments influenced by fiery African tastes. Native persimmons replaced the fruit of the ebony tree and pawpaws were substituted for bananas; cutting grass rat stewed with yam became possum roasted with sweet potatoes; violets became “wild okra.” Early receipt books give a hint of the transformation from European to Southern. We can see the shift with every recipe for fried chicken, turnip tops cooked “Virginia style,” chickens stewed with sweet potatoes, gumbo, hoppin’ John or cowpeas cooked with rice, black eyed pea cakes, barbecue (a term with possible roots in the Hausa word “babbake/babbaku,” “to grill or toast”), sweet potatoes cooked in syrup, okra soup, and treats made from plants with African names like “fevi/ochra/gumbo” (okra) “benne” (sesame), “goober” (originally referring to the Bambara groundnut, later the peanut), “pindar” (peanut), “cala” (a fried rice ball), and fried plantains, the bananas cooked in New Orleans. We should not confuse written “receipts” with real dishes. Not all dishes had names, and the necessity of improvisation meant that a mess of wild greens eaten with a hoecake has only as much meaning as we assign them. But to West and Central Africans and their descendants, dinner was always a starchy or leafy dish eaten with a soup or stew or, much more rarely, a roasted or fried protein.

Research, interpretation, presentation and preservation

There is a lonely sense of merit attempting to embrace and interpret the enslaved cooks of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The audiences at my museum demonstrations and programs admire what I do, but few patrons express interest in joining in the reenactment. There are no legions lining up to participate as there are with Civil and Revolutionary War enthusiasts. Accuracy is hard to assess. And anyway, “cooking as the slaves did” should really be me serving a visitor or student a bowl of mush or rice or a corncake with no frills except perhaps some salted meat or fish, and water, for several meals a day. That might be the most jarring and authentic way to transfer the message: Enslaved foods were supposed to be filling and blandly satisfactory, not tasty and comforting.

The prospect I lay out for the visitor is quaint but unbearably tedious. I must rise before sunrise, and using the leftover coals, re-ignite the fire, often building a wooden tower from which large shovelfuls of heat-giving charcoal will rise. It’s important to know what type of wood to use, knowing each has its own burning qualities, taste, and levels of neutrality and savor. The menu is determined by which animal is in its prime and which garden truck is in season. To feed both Big House and slave cabin, I have to answer a flurry of questions:

What species of wild flora and fauna were a part of the diet and what is their present status as food—rare/endangered/threatened/common? (As much as I am responsible to accurately re-create the past, I have a greater responsibility to the future.) What heritage breeds and heirloom vegetables and grains approximate the tastes known to the people of the past? When is poke safe to eat? What are the breeding habits of possums? What is the proper way to eat a biscuit? Which hand do I use? What is the color of a ripe persimmon? The folk knowledge that went into cooking for kitchens high and low is immense. One has to know blanc mange as well as ashcake. Is jambalaya au congri from New Orleans the same thing as hoppin’ john in Charleston?

The receipt books of the past are my tour guides; they get a vote but not a veto. One has to allow for “work presence,” as Karen Hess defined it—the moment a cook deviates from the formula, which in itself is only a distillation on paper. I allow my informants—the formerly enslaved and their observers—a say. I also focus on locally available foodstuffs. I cannot assume that because a food is available in one place it is available in another, or that what is common today was common in the past. I grow the herbs and heirlooms I need for the pot months in advance, source protein from farmers and hunters and fishermen, order for rare and costly grains, and limit myself to the seasons’ produce. It is difficult but necessary work.

I also rely on written sources ranging from Hannah Glasse and Adam and Eve’s Cookbook through Mary Randolph, Lettice Bryan, Sarah Rutledge, Elizabeth Lea, Mrs. Hill, Lafacdio Hearn, B.C. Howard and the Times-Picayune to Robert Roberts, and Mrs. Abby Fisher. Historical receipts and cookbooks must be mastered even if they don’t have absolute power over me as an interpreter. One has to know and how to subtract and add ingredients according to the needs and restrictions of the enslaved community. In a sense, my working goal is to master two or perhaps three cuisines—the meals of the British-French-American classics of the Big House, soup to nuts, patty shells to snow eggs; the foodways of the enslaved community in times of want and of plenty; and the outskirt, antique parent traditions of West and Central Africa, Brazil, and the Afro-Caribbean and Latin America. These traditions serve to inform and verify the work of re-creating and restoring.

Some might question my expansive/inclusive approach to documentation. The only universally acceptable form of evidence seems to be limited to observations made by white men living 200 years ago. I reject this as not only culturally biased but short-sighted.  Evidence for the foodways of the enslaved can be gleaned from the remarks of slave traders, slave owners, and plantation visitors and some of this evidence is amazingly specific. However, these observations have to be weighed against the cultural backgrounds of an enslaved community, the ethnicities they encountered, the available food in any given region, the accounts of enslaved people themselves, historic receipts, and not least the oral tradition, culinary traditions, and memories that have filtered down into the present. Culture bearers are important counter voices to academic pronouncements. To suggest that my 92-year-old grandfather has nothing valid to add to the discussion, despite his having lived in the rural South in an era not much different from the antebellum period or having been in the presence of his enslaved grandparents; or that the testimony of a West African immigrant or the ethnographic writings of the early colonial period are moot merely because they were not recorded during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is ludicrous and arrogant. Checks and balances on the sources and accuracy of data are fairly intuitive. If nothing else I work with the dictum, “if you can’t prove or prove it reasonable, don’t say it or cook it.”

There is of course a body of knowledge that only experience can help accrue. It is impossible to understand what it meant to be a cook if you have not experienced the fear of moccasins in a Carolina rice paddy or known the blindness that the sun casts on cotton on a hot early autumn day. Tobacco stains the hand and tasseling corn numbs them. The lower back and feet ache from hours on brick kitchen floors. You learn the wisdom of the recipes for salves and cures listed in the same receipt books that provide inspiration for menus. Your arms will teach you about the heft needed to carry 40- and 60-pound pots and the stamina it takes to cook a large meal by the standard dinner hour of two or three p.m.

These experiences are still not as instructive as the ones that time, place and fortune excuse me from. What if I was forced into the field for half a day to get the harvest in and made to leave the relative safety and privacy of the kitchen? Conversely, what if I had to feel the daily loneliness of the kitchen, being separated from much of the rest of the enslaved community? What if I was whipped for tasting too much or not tasting enough and sending out something burned? What if my accidents and tardiness were not forgiven? What if I had to wear the horse’s bit to keep me from eating though I was malnourished?

Free to fail in a way my ancestors never were, my work is spent scouring letters from slave traders, WPA slave narratives, and emancipatory narratives and recording my observations about the smell of game musk, gardening by pine-knot and moonlight, and trials and error with Spanish moss as support for baking dishes. I am now a veteran hog-butcherer, from dividing up the carcass to salting the meat down to each pore. I know the forearms it takes to pound corn and rice and the caution one should exercise when attempting to catch bullheads, crawfish or snappers. I’m working on having the “light touch” in baking, on expertly executing the multi-hour antebellum barbecue, and designing the perfect roux. Frequently I find myself on sourcing safaris where I find Senegalese cowpeas and bitter leaf, dried okra and calabaza and spiny gherkins and hunt down Sieva beans and sesame seeds to plant. Though I am not bound by the colonial and antebellum calendars, I trace time in terms of tobacco and cotton seasons, acknowledging the 101 labors needed to produce food on the plantations of yore—from orchard work to slaughtering to salting fish to shifting the gardens and truck patches from spring to snow, and treating the treats of historic cookery with the respect of a starving man.

The other part of the work is preserving it for the future. Putting measurements to orally transmitted compositions for recipes is not enough. Some foods are dying out not because they are physically endangered but because they are culturally endangered. Reenactment is also reintroduction. You have to eat it to save it. You have to ensure the tastes will endure that make the history relevant and alive for the enthusiastic learner. African Americans are still not well represented in the current drive to save our national and regional heritage foods. Yet these are the same foods that reverberate with deep and complex histories and that connect us to global legacies. My mission is to use this platform to reconnect my people with the culinary heritage many left behind in the transition from agrarian to urban realities. More than that, I believe these stories have the power to connect people across racial and ethnic lines, and to create a table where we are all at once welcome to finally sit and partake of the fruits of our ancestors.

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

“Everybody get ready—lift your glasses and sing
Everybody get ready to lift your glasses and sing
Well, I’m standin’ on the table, I’m proposing a toast to the King.”
—Bob Dylan, “Summer Days”

Today most people’s experience with toasting is limited to weddings. Toasts have long ceased to be a significant part of our political world, but in early America the practice of politics depended heavily on sociable drinking and toasting. At festive celebrations, men and women lifted their glasses to toast all sorts of subjects, from kings and presidents to military victories, legislation, principles, and historic events. Toasts variously praised, mocked, protested, or condemned their subjects. Their performance helped to create a convivial world of free-flowing conversation and song, food, and drink. Through toasting, individuals broadcast their political affiliations to the public. They also cemented social and political relationships, forging a sense of group belonging. By the end of the eighteenth century, toasts often appeared in newspapers, the expanding social media of the time. In this way, toasts not only reflected but potentially influenced public opinion.

To gain insight into the historical experience of toasting, students in my early republic class write and perform a series of toasts from the vantage point of the Federalists and Republicans of the 1790s. For three years, I have experimented with this activity in the classroom, and the toasting exercise has proven popular with my students. Preparing the toasts pushes them to develop their historical imaginations. Students step back into the past. As they write the toasts, they attempt to think in the language of 1790s politics. When they perform the toasts, they experience toasting as a social performance, an approximation of the historical experience of toasting in the early republic.

Historians trace the origins of toasting to the ancient world. Think of Plato’s Symposium, with participants at that famous banquet performing toasts on the subject of love. However, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, toasting achieved an unprecedented importance in European society. In eighteenth-century Britain, the practice complemented the rise of urban sociability. People ate and drank together in taverns and coffeehouses. They met in various societies with irresistibly fun names like the Kit-Cat Club, the Green Ribbon Club, the Red-Herring Club, the Easy Club of Edinburgh, the Beefsteak Club, and the Society of the Dilettanti. Clubbing was all the rage. In British North America, colonists emulated the sociability of the mother country. They established associations like the Junto in Philadelphia, the Tuesday Club of Annapolis, and the Old Colony Club of Plymouth. At these gatherings, participants shared laughter, made connections, devised self-improvement schemes, and advanced their reputations. These social occasions provided numerous opportunities to feast and toast.

During the American Revolution, toasting became highly combative. Patriots and Loyalists each tried to convince the public that their toasts represented the popular will. Americans carried forward this contentious style of politics into their new republic. Historians of the so-called “new, new political history” such as Susan Branson, Simon Newman, Jeffrey Pasley, and David Waldstreicher have reconstructed that vibrant political culture, demonstrating how ordinary men and women participated in politics by reading newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets, by organizing meetings, parades, and protests, and by attending festive dinners and other celebrations.

Toasting played a crucial role in shaping that increasingly partisan and democratic culture. Politics, Newman has emphasized, were not confined to voting on election day—and toasting rites belonged to a political world beyond the legislature in which non-elite individuals participated. Such practices enabled those who did not possess the franchise—men without property, women from all ranks, African Americans, and others—to stake their claim to the republic. Branson has demonstrated that during the partisan battles of the 1790s, women offered toasts on political subjects, even in mixed company gatherings, while the toasts offered by men sometimes appealed to women for their approval. Seth Cotlar has illustrated how artisans, mechanics, and other working men used toasting rituals to express their devotion to the French Revolution, particularly to the principles of liberty and egalitarianism associated with transatlantic radicalism. Waldstreicher has stressed that republican celebrations in opposition to the Washington administration, including the printed toasts that derived from those gatherings, contributed to the formation of a national opposition party, while Pasley has suggested that the toasts printed in newspapers actually represented an early version of a party platform.

The writing and performance of toasts was a social experience. Sometimes toasts were impromptu, but more often they were planned for maximum publicity. Before a gathering, a committee of arrangements would be charged with composing a series of toasts. Written individually or collectively, the toasts would all be reviewed and often revised by the committee before their performance. Since celebrants would never toast a sentiment with which they disagreed, such advance planning was necessary to ensure a display of unity. At these celebrations, consensus meant everything, historian Peter Thompson has argued. When performed, toasts would be followed by cheers, applause, sometimes music, and often in the case of militia companies, a ceremonial burst of artillery.

After the celebration, local newspaper editors received copies of the toasts to publish in their papers. As these newspapers circulated beyond their point of original publication, editors in other locations reprinted the toasts. Whereas few toasts from the colonial era circulated beyond the places where they had originated, toasts began being transmitted across the extended republic. When complaining to his wife about the toasts drunk at a Republican “frolic” in Philadelphia, Vice President John Adams asked Abigail: “Have you read them [?]” By the 1790s, Adams naturally anticipated that Philadelphia toasts might be reprinted in Boston. The circulation of printed toasts, along with other materials, pushed many Americans to start thinking nationally, as citizens in one location became increasingly aware of what other people across the nation were doing.

When I began teaching, I conceived of a toasting exercise as a method of conveying to students the participatory and performative nature of early republic politics. This idea was prompted by my own experience of writing and performing a series of toasts on regicide at a Summer Institute hosted by the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History. After performing these toasts, I gained a new understanding of the political culture that I had been reading about in books for so long. I wondered if a toasting activity could have the same intellectual impact on my students.

In the weeks preceding the assignment, students become familiar with the larger narrative of 1790s politics through lectures and readings. They learn about how Americans over the course of that decade grew divided between the Federalist supporters of the Washington administration and its Republican opponents. In class, we cover specific episodes to illustrate this polarization, from the battle over Alexander Hamilton’s financial policies to the contrasting attitudes toward the French Revolution, the controversy over Jay’s Treaty, the Alien and Sedition Acts, and the election crisis of 1800.

Students read and discuss several journal articles on popular political culture to complement this larger narrative. In past years, my syllabus has included articles by Waldstreicher on the legacy of revolutionary-era popular protests and festivities, Newman on celebrations of Washington’s leadership, Albrecht Koschnick on the Democratic-Republican Societies, and Pasley on the newspaper wars of the 1790s. These articles introduce students to the concepts of the public sphere and print culture, which enhance their understanding of the social and cultural contexts in which toasting rituals took place.

Students also analyze primary sources such as correspondence, addresses, and newspaper editorials from the period. In reading these sources, students learn about the arguments that appeared in print to justify various political positions. They further gain insight into the distinct language in which people discussed politics during the 1790s. On one occasion, a student observed that a newspaper correspondent used the word “jealous” in a way that differed from how people use the term today. While the term is largely used now as a synonym for “envious,” in the eighteenth century people used it to mean vigilant, as in the citizens jealously guarded their liberties. This observation led to a productive conversation in class about political vocabulary and how the meanings of words change over time.

Often when students first approach the partisan conflicts of the 1790s, they assume that those struggles paralleled today’s two-party political system. By reading the sources and then writing toasts, students reach a deeper, more nuanced level of historical understanding.

Finally, students read models of toasts culled from late eighteenth-century American newspapers. Toasts then fell into two categories. First, people drank healths to individuals like George Washington and to collective bodies like the Congress to demonstrate their admiration. Second, citizens drank sentiments to a wide variety of subjects. For example, at a joint celebration of the Democratic Society of Pennsylvania and the German-Republican Society of Philadelphia, participants drank to “the extinction of Monarchy,” adding: “May the next generation know kings only by the page of history, and wonder that such monsters were ever permitted to exist.” These examples give students a sense of the conventions of toasting that must shape their own historical toasts.

This combination of political narrative and readings in the secondary and primary sources prepares the students to work on their own toasts. For the exercise, the class divides into Federalists and Republicans. Working together, each team is charged with writing twenty toasts that reflect its politics. I advise students to begin by brainstorming the key issues of the 1790s and then figuring out their position on those subjects. Each team devises a list of topics such as the Bank of the United States or Jay’s Treaty, making sure that they adequately cover the decade’s political conflicts. The students proceed to experiment with writing their toasts, modeling them on the ones that they have read. They work together as I move around the classroom eavesdropping, advising, and reviewing their draft toasts. While I do not require students to meet outside of class to work on this assignment, the students invariably do this on their own initiative, either in person or virtually.

Typically, individual students take responsibility for writing three or four toasts. Even when they do this on their own, they interact with their peers and with me to revise their toasts. This activity encourages the writing process—brainstorming, drafting, and revising multiple times, which replicates the historical experience of writing toasts by committee. Students engage in this process in an intensive way that does not always happen when they write traditional essays. Maybe this particular assignment appeals to students who are immersed in the world of contemporary social media, like Twitter and Facebook. Perhaps also the knowledge that the students are going to perform these toasts in front of the class pushes them to perfect them. One student, for example, observed that “the pressure of sharing [the toasts] prompted me to do research beyond class notes.”

The major challenge students face in writing the toasts is putting their thoughts in apt historical language. One student quipped that “it was interesting and fun to use the lingo of the time,” but admitted that his group struggled to find the right words. After immersing themselves in the primary sources, students learn how keywords such as aristocrat and mob functioned as political insults during the 1790s. In one mock Republican sentiment, a student toasted: “To Mr. Hamilton’s Financial Plan: May the people come to see the true nature of the national debt as shackling the states to a federal aristocracy.” Another student, representing the Federalists, toasted the Democratic-Republican Societies “For showing us that the mob can be as tyrannical as the king.” Both toasts successfully employed the political vocabulary of the late eighteenth century, demonstrating that these students were thinking and writing in historical rather than contemporary terms. Often when students first approach the partisan conflicts of the 1790s, they assume that those struggles paralleled today’s two-party political system. By reading the sources and then writing toasts, students reach a deeper, more nuanced level of historical understanding. Students realize that in the early republic, Americans’ political vocabulary and assumptions about politics differed dramatically from their own, and that realization opens up a rich field for exploration.

I simulate the experience of historical toasting—and enhance the fun—by bringing plastic cups and a few bottles of sparkling grape juice, red and white, to class. A student who admitted to me that she was nervous before performing her toasts gained confidence when her team members responded to her toasts with several “Huzzas.” Through that collective cheering, students experience first-hand the social energies unleashed through toasting rituals. Ideally, if students connect their own emotions to those of the early republic’s citizens, they can make some valuable inferences about how the latter must have felt when toasting. Some students thrive on this social aspect of the assignment. The toasting exercise “helped me get to know my classmates,” commented one student, and theatre students particularly love the opportunity to connect history with performance.

Ultimately, this toasting exercise allows me and my students to bring the politics of the 1790s to life in our history classroom. Students are typically familiar with the traditional narrative of early American history, particularly the heroic representation of the founding fathers. They are less familiar with the political and cultural environment in which men like Washington, Jefferson, and Adams lived, a world that they shared with other lesser-known Americans who have not made it into the history books. In taking on the political identities of Federalists and Republicans, students imaginatively enter into that historical world. Ideally, in writing toasts, they gain insight into how people in the 1790s thought, and, in performing their toasts, they experience the social power of the early republic’s festive politics.

Further Reading

John Adams’s comments on the toasts drunk at the republican “frolic” in Philadelphia appear in Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, February 8, 1794. Adams Family Papers: An Electronic Archive, Massachusetts Historical Society. The “extinction to monarchy” toast derived from The General Advertiser, May 3, 1793.

A good narrative of 1790s political developments can be found in James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis (New Haven, 1995). For an overview of the “new, new political history,” see Jeffrey L. Pasley et al., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, 2004). On the British context of sociability, see Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580-1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford, 2000).

The last study that focused exclusively on toasting rituals appeared over sixty years ago: Richard J. Hooker, “The American Revolution Seen Through a Wine Glass,” The William and Mary Quarterly 11:1 (January 1954): 52-77. For a discussion of toasting within the larger context of alcohol consumption in early America, see Peter Thompson, “‘The Friendly Glass’: Drink and Gentility in Colonial Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 113:4 (October 1989): 549-573. Discussions of toasting also appear in the following works: Simon P. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia, 1999); Susan Branson, These Fiery Frenchified Dames: Women and Political Culture in Early National Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 2001); Seth Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic (Charlottesville, 2011); David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel Hill, 1997); Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville, 2002).

This article originally appeared in issue 16.2 (Winter, 2016).

Michelle Orihel is an assistant professor in the Department of History, Sociology, and Anthropology at Southern Utah University. Her research focuses on politics and the print media in early American and Atlantic history. She is writing a book about the Democratic-Republican Societies and opposition politics in the trans-Appalachian West during the 1790s. She has published articles in The Historian and The New England Quarterly.

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).

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).

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).

Various authors.