Past is Present

Let them eat cake

If one thing connects Americans over the centuries, it’s dessert. Vanilla may have replaced rose water, the electric mixer (even the egg beater) may be heavenly gifts from a sympathetic large-bicepped ancestor, but the recipes (and the tastes) are remarkably similar. The first cookbook published in America, Amelia Simmons’ 1796 American Cookery, offers recipes for pies, puddings, cakes, tarts, custards, cookies, and biscuits. Sound familiar? The most peculiar dessert recipe is for syllabub (a relative of our holiday eggnog). But it’s the directions that are strange, not the ingredients.

Is it fair to assume that a time-traveling dessert could leave early America and end up right at home in our own kitchens? An experiment was in order.

The contenders: Two pound cake recipes (the cow was unavailable on such short notice).

From the 19th century: Sarah Josepha Hale, The Good Housekeeper, 1839.

From the 21st century: Pound Cake recipe in Martha Day, The Ultimate Book of Baking, 2005.

The Time Travelers: Diann Benti, Assistant Reference Librarian, and Jess Lepler, Hench Post-Dissertation fellow and assistant professor of History at the University of New Hampshire. One willing to beat batter for an hour, the other trying to embrace modernity with an ill-advised immersion blender.

The Scene: Mark Zanger writes in the American History Cookbook that, “As a technical note, Early American cakes are among the most difficult historical recipes to reproduce today because so many ingredients have changed” (58). Flour held more moisture and had different protein contents than those found in grocery stores today. Eggs tended to be smaller and butter often had more salt (58-9). The 1839 recipe calls for loaf sugar and suggests using rose water, both unavailable in the AAS Test Kitchen. (We added a little bit of molasses to the 1839 cake to mimic the increased moisture of loaf sugar.)

In the end, after converting a measure of weight (the pound) to volume (cups), we were left with 4 cups of flour, 2 ¼ cups sugar, and 4 sticks of butter for two loaves in the Hale recipe—just about double the recipe of Day’s one-loaf cake. Using these same ingredients, the assembled cakes would go in the oven together and remain there until they each passed the toothpick test.

Ready to go in the oven, the 19th century cake is on the left. — The 19th century cake batter is on the left.

The Question: The details decided, the real battle between old and new emerged, pitting the arm against the chemical: Hale’s hour of batter beating versus Day’s one teaspoon of baking powder. What would the difference mean in taste and size?

The Taste Testers: The AAS fellows. Known to gnaw on the books if left unsupervised in the evening hours, they were fair game against a pound of butter, a pound of sugar, and a pound of flour.

The Results: A blister and arm cramps at 3am that night. Oh wait. You mean how did the cakes turn out?

The Verdict: The challenge rested on the lengths one would go to create a tasty dessert. Desperate for lighter pound cake, a cook’s only real option in the 1830s was to beat air into it. So was all the labor worth it? Given the inherent biases of the testers (18th and 19th century Americanists, who as academics have been known to like it dense), Sarah Josepha Hale emerged victorious. It was universally agreed by the taste testers that while the 19th century loaf was still dense, its flavor was much richer than its 21th century opponent, and tasted very much like shortbread. Perhaps, as the modern cake mushroomed in its pan, the flavor diffused to meet the enlarged size. Some suggested the Day cake needed a sauce and others detected a chemical taste. If mixed only minimally, Hale’s cake might have had a second career as building material, but after an hour’s beating it was enjoyable and more than welcome on our table.

The Take Away: If you’re looking to recreate an 1839 dessert at your next get-together, please note that one tester characterized it as “strange,” “mealy,” and “good” all in the same sentence. Zanger tells us that as technology (e.g. iceboxes) expanded the realm of possibility in home cooking the pound cake decreased in popularity. But, pound cake remained a dessert staple in “pioneering zones and isolated areas such as Appalachia well into the twentieth century, the recipe is easy to remember and the cake works without refrigerators, yeast, or baking powder” (62).

In closing, we’ll give the last word to Mrs. Hale,

Never spread butter on cake; it is a sin against that economy and propriety which domestic rules should always exhibit; and besides, it renders the cake too rich for the stomach. The kinds of cake most apt to prove injurious are pound cake and rich plum cake. (84-5)

Cookbooks and calf heads

In 1952 the renowned chef Julia Child joined a book project to bring French cuisine into North American homes. As many movie-goers now know, she spent the next nine years working on the “dog-eared, note-filled, butter-and-food-stained manuscript” (My Life in France, 207) that would become the seminal Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

The wearisome demands of researching and testing grew out of a resolve to translate one culture’s food to another successfully. Child remembered “wailing” to her co-author Simone Beck, “Why did we ever decide to do this anyway?” when she realized her “beloved crème fraîche” was unavailable in most American grocery stores (207).

What Child understood, and applied in her books, is that any recipe of value in a kitchen needs to center around available products.

A cookbook comprised of exotic ingredients only found halfway across the globe must be relegated to travel literature or wishful thinking.

By their nature, household cookbooks are created to be relevant, to rely on a common language, and to fit within their audience’s ways of life. Historian Susan Strasser cautions though that they “tell us neither more nor less about reality than…the latest edition of the Joy of Cooking” (Never Done, xv). If we accept, though, that historic cookbooks, especially in an era of limited consumerism, had an incentive to be useful, then we can draw on them to reveal a spectrum of realistic possibility.

Cookbooks of the past offer ingredients and instructions that may seem peculiar or horrifying on one page, and look a lot like tonight’s dinner on the next. Historic recipes invite us into a wonderful conversation, both familiar and foreign. In coming posts, Past is Present hopes to offer up some of the recipes from our substantial cookery collection. We know the fundamentals: to measure, to mix, to heat, and to dine, but the real communication is in the details, where we surely will find old friends as well as a few strangers ready to meet us.

But we shouldn’t take Strasser’s warning too lightly. In the interest of starting things off in the right direction, another Child offered the perfect example. First published in 1829, Lydia Maria Child’s The Frugal Housewife would go through more than thirty printings into the 1850s. With a “waste not, want not” mentality, she advised, among other things, that when boiling calf’s head, “it is better to leave the wind-pipe on, for if it hangs out of the pot while the head is cooking, all the froth will escape through it (46).”

Here seems proof that the average American stomach of 2009 turns a bit more quickly than its 19th century counterpart! But apparently, calf’s wind-pipe could be offensive in 1829 too. Reviewing the book in the American Monthly Magazine, its editor Nathaniel P. Willis (and former suitor of Lydia Maria), while “begging pardon of our readers for any offence in facts or the language,” quoted the more graphic instructions and noted with a biting sarcasm and classist air that those seeking economy would enjoy reading of the “coarsest of their wants…what others might call the repugnant details of such matters.” Willis found fault with the discussion in refined company, not with the presumption of calf’s head availability, or even as a cooked dish on the dinner table.*

In other words it’s complicated. Trying to understand how Americans thought about food and cooking is as difficult as trying to understand how American think about food and cooking today. But we’ve got one powerful tool on our side: our taste buds. Let’s hope this conversation about the past proves delicious.

For a more in-depth discussion of the critical reception to The Frugal Housewife* see Chapter 6 of Carolyn L. Karcher’s The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child.

Apply for an AAS research fellowship and learn a trade!

Since the early 1970s, the American Antiquarian Society has been awarding fellowships to enable scholars to come to Worcester and spend anywhere from a month to a year in residence at the Society, immersing themselves in our collections. Many fellows over the years have raved about the richness of the research experience, which is borne out in the use of AAS materials in countless dissertations, articles, and books.

However, an AAS fellowship can also serve as a valuable exercise in professionalization, exposing young scholars to people from other institutions and disciplines and preparing them for the rigors of the academic job search. But given the current depressed state of the economy, the job market in most humanities fields is tighter than ever before. How is AAS responding to this crisis in academic hiring? Why, by reconfiguring its fellowship programs to include valuable vocational training. For example, in the footage below, current AAS-NEH long-term fellow Emily Pawley can be seen preparing herself for an agricultural career.

While this idea may need some additional fine-tuning, we hope that you will consider applying for a fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society. More information and application materials are available here.

Fellow finds horse’s head

horse head One of our great joys working on the far side of the reference desk is when a reader comes up to the desk with the words we all love to hear: “Look what I found!” We always know we are in for a surprise and now we can share these treats with you. (Be sure to read this one through to its hilarious conclusion …)

Background: The American Antiquarian Society began as an institution created to “encourage the collection and preservation of the Antiquities of our country.” “Antiquities” didn’t just mean books and paper, it also meant artifacts. The collecting focus of the library was revised by the early 20^th century and the large, disjointed museum collection was donated to appropriate institutions. Here we have a reminder of just the sort of thing a 19^th century researcher might have encountered in the old Antiquarian Hall.

Item: An 1817 letter from the first superintendent of the United States Patent Office, William Thornton, to American Antiquarian Society member, Benjamin Russell, editor of the Columbia Centinel.

Found by: Peterson Fellow James Snead, Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, George Mason University.

Location: American Antiquarian Society Records, Correspondence 1812-1819, Box 2.

Continue reading Fellow finds horse’s head

Welcome!

For those of us who have the privilege and pleasure to work everyday with the remarkable collections of the American Antiquarian Society the past is indeed present. Whether we are selecting new acquisitions, cataloging collections, preparing web exhibits, processing photo requests, conserving materials that have seen better days, planning workshops, editing publications, or assisting researchers in the reading room, we often become immersed in the lives of Americans who lived 150, 250, even 350 years ago. By collecting the books they owned, the newspapers they read, the almanacs they consulted, the letters they exchanged, and the prints they enjoyed, we make it possible for researchers to recreate long-ago happenings, reconstruct conflicts and causes, and reclaim from obscurity individuals whose separate stories can now be woven into the larger narrative of our collective history as a people and a nation.

And while all that sounds lofty and terribly (self-)important, it’s also a lot of fun! Through our Past is Present blog, we hope to share with you some measure of our excitement at acquiring a pamphlet that escaped the collecting grasp of our predecessors, our delight in helping a reader solve a research conundrum, and our amusement with the weirdly wonderful things that turn up in the collections here at AAS on an almost daily basis. Many individuals will be contributing to this blog, but I want here to acknowledge the good work of Diann Benti, Tom Knoles, and Elizabeth Pope in getting it launched and keeping it lively.

I often use the word “generous” is describing the relationships that form among the staff and readers at AAS. It is very common for research discoveries to be shared openly, rather than hoarded in a miserly fashion. Readers regularly help each other and take great interest in each other’s projects, as does the staff. There’s a sense of community here that is highly valued, and through the Past is Present we are pleased to include our blog readers in our community as well. In that way, the past will be our present to you.

Try tilting your head just slightly…

They represent a type of carnage we can’t even imagine. Today they would cause more than a few gasps. And, yet unable to rewrite this tragedy, we feast on the spoils.

Okay, I’m being dramatic. But for archivists and librarians the idea that 600 cartoons were cut from Civil War era newspapers is a little hard to handle. Yet with the dirty work already done, the four boxes of cartoons represent a gold mine for scholars of mid-19th century America.

The secret to so much of scholarship is that it matters how you view primary sources. Historian Forrest McDonald spoke to this issue in a 1999 CSPAN interview

When I first worked at National Archives, they just turned me loose in the stacks. Now you’ve got to go in, and you’ve got to tell them what volume you want or what document you want and so on, and you sit down in a waiting room, and they will bring the stuff down for you, and that’s that… Whereas it would have taken generations to do what I did in the early ‘50s, now it couldn’t be done; it simply could not be done.

Of course, full-text searchable databases have unveiled a new type of researching that changes the game once again and offer possibilities unheard of to McDonald’s generation of scholars. But the fundamental fact remains that how you see impacts what you see: Continue reading Try tilting your head just slightly…

*For a more in-depth discussion of the critical reception to The Frugal Housewife see Chapter 6 of Carolyn L. Karcher’s The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child.

For a more in-depth discussion of the critical reception to The Frugal Housewife* see Chapter 6 of Carolyn L. Karcher’s The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child.