Edna Lewis, Chef (Photo credit: John T. Hill)

Who was Edna Lewis? Why call her an American Idol?

Before she wrote The Edna Lewis Cookbook, The Taste of Country Cooking, In Pursuit of Flavor, and co-authored that recent jewel of a book, The Gift of Southern Cooking with chef Scott Peacock, well, Edna Lewis did many things in her long, experience-rich life, including campaigning for Franklin Roosevelt.

But she always cooked — what Southern girl from her background didn’t? After all, she was the granddaughter of freed slaves who helped found Freetown, Virginia.

Miss Lewis stood on the shoulders of those giants, cooks like her female slave forebears. But she also harkened back to the work of several African-American cookbook authors: A Domestic Cook Book Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen, by Mrs. Malinda Russell, an Experienced Cook (1866), What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking (1881), and Rufus Estes’ Good Things to Eat: The First Cookbook by an African-American Chef (1911).

This chef got her start in the usual way — by cooking.  Because she cared about cooking and freshness and people, all homey everyday things, her cooking brought her fame and deep friendships.

At a time when a black female chef was as rare as a chicken with incisors, or nearly so, Edna Lewis cooked in the Café Nicholson in New York City. Homesick Southerners like author Truman Capote used to hang around the back door, hoping for a fresh biscuit or some buttermilk cookies.

In a world where a frozen pie crust suffices for most people, Edna Lewis insisted on making her own pie crusts, so much so that once, when she was to prepare hundreds of pies for a reception in Georgia, she lugged a hundred pounds of her own pie dough with her on the train. She made her own baking powder, too, cream of tartar and baking soda. You can see her heritage in the cookbooks left by Martha Washington and Mary Randolph, Virginia aristocrats who enjoyed the cooking of black female slaves like Edna’s grandmothers and great-grandmothers, no doubt.

Her gift to us was that insistence on the fresh, the natural, the personal touch that doesn’t come out of a box or a can or a jar (unless she canned it herself). Getting it right and taking care. It was all about those kinds of old-fashioned values. Like a tot of Southern Comfort on a crisp fall night.

Lord knows, we need more people like Edna Lewis in our world today.

Pound Cake (Used with permission.)

Pound Cake

From The Virginia House-Wife, by Mary Randolph (1824)

Wash the salt from a pound of butter and rub it until it soft as cream, have ready a pound of flour sifted, one of powdered sugar, and twelve eggs well beaten ; put alternately into the butter, sugar, flour, and the froth from the eggs ; continuing to beat them together till all the ingredients are in, and the cake quite light ; add some grated lemon peel, a nutmeg, and a gill of brandy [1/4 of a pint or 4 ounces] ; butter the pans and bake them. This cake makes an excellent pudding if baked in a large mould, and eaten with sugar and wine. It is also excellent when boiled, and served up with melted butter, sugar, and wine.

To Make an Excellent Curran Cake

From Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery (dating to the 17th century)

Take 2 pound of butter and wash it in rose water, casting ye water out. Then take 2 pound of flower & 2 pound of sugar, mix ye flower and sugar together, deviding it into 2 parts, & putting in some into a dredging box. & shake it into a trey till halfe be shaked in, beating ye butter all ye while with ye hand. Ye take 6 eggs to a pound of sugar & flower (takeing out 2 of ye whites), 6 spoonefulls of rose water, some mace beaten. Yn put in ye other halfe of ye sugar & flower, & 2 pound of currans, picked & rubbed verly clean. Yn butter yr pans & fill them halfe full, & set them in a moderate oven.

Malinda Russell’s Plain Pound Cake

This recipe reads a lot like the one in Mary Randolph’s The Virginia House-wife, which Mrs. Russell used, since she spent time in Lynchburg, Virginia, on her way to settle in Liberia.

One lb sugar, one lb flour, one nutmeg, 3-4ths lb butter, twelve eggs, half gillbrandy. Paper and grease your pans well ; bake in a moderate oven.

Vanilla Pound Cake

Serves 8-12, depending on appetite and girth
Adapted from The Taste of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis, who said “The keeping quality of pound cake made it a popular favorite, plus the fact that the main ingredients were always available: butter, eggs, and flour. Sugar and flavoring were nearby at Lahore store. All the grownups had their own way of measuring, be it on a dime, nickel, teacup, or sifter, and their cakes were perfect. It was my dream to make a pound cake equal to theirs. I learned that the formula for a good pound cake is a slow oven, cold butter, carefully measured flour (too much flour will cause the cake to crack on top), and proper mixing of butter, sugar, and eggs.” The original recipe calls for beating the butter with a wooden spoon for 5 minutes – true, the beaters might make the butter a tad bit too warm, but 5 minutes of beating causes my arm to fall off. Hence the mixer.

Ingredients

1 cup (1/2 pound) cold butter
1 2/3 cups sugar
1/4 teaspoons salt
5 eggs (medium to large but not jumbo)
2 cups sifted unbleached flour
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon fresh-squeezed lemon juice

1. Beat the butter with a hand-held mixer in a large bowl until it becomes smooth and pliable, about 5 minutes. Add the sugar and salt and continue to beat sugar and butter together until light and fluffy.

2. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. After the third egg has been incorporated, add 2 tablespoons of flour and stir well. This will keep the batter from separating and curdling. Add the fourth and fifth egg and continue to stir, then the rest of the flour in four parts, stirring well after each addition. Finally beat in the vanilla and lemon juice.

3. Grease and dust with flour a 9-inch tube pan on the bottom only (Bundt or Angel Food cake pan). Spoon the batter into the pan-it will be thick.

4. Put into an oven that has been preheated to 300°F. Bake 40 minutes at that temperature, then raise the temperature to 325°F for 20 minutes.

5. Remove cake from the oven, run a knife around the sides of the pan, turn out right away on a wire rack, and turn face up. Cool uncovered for 15 minutes, then cover with a clean towel; otherwise the cake will become dry and hard.

6. When cold, store in a clean metal cake tin. Plastic containers develop an undesirable odor.

© 2008, 2010 C. Bertelsen

M. F. K. Fisher inspired, and continues to inspire, countless American food writers.

But still, not one quite surpasses her. Yet.

Anyone who reveres food and eats oysters, who yearns for security and longs for love, and who seeks out experiences and thinks much must discover M. F. K. Fisher. Just who was M. F. K. Fisher and why did James Beard, that gentle giant of the food world, call her a national treasure? And why did John Updike refer to her as ”the poet of the appetites”?

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher was an American food writer, but what a food writer! Believing that our three most basic needs—for food, security, and love—so entwine that we cannot straightly think of one without the others, M. F. K. Fisher wrote prose that melts in the brain like butter mints melt on a warm tongue. She paints scenery with words, not oil paints. Caught up in the startling and sensuous observations of this gifted observer of Life, the reader floats calmly along the stream of M. F. K.’s words, buoyed by the lyrical phrases, by the images of far away and exotic places, by nearly indescribable tastes and odors. Such richness!

Discovering the wealth of M. F. K. Fisher’s writing might begin with any of the dozen or so volumes she produced since 1937.* Ironically, for a writer who has never made any money on her books, most of her books are still in print. Perhaps the best of M. F. K.’s books is The Art of Eating, a compendium of five small and slender volumes. Any oyster-loving fisherman will not want to miss Fisher’s treatise on the oyster, appropriately entitled Consider the Oyster and included in The Art of Eating. Be sure to read the ending pages, where the shipwrecked little boys dive and dive for oysters…

How can you fail to respond to a fabulous storyteller who seems to invite you to pull up a stool and swap yarns with her? Did you hear the one about the young woman who, while eating something extraordinarily delicious lamented, “Ah…what a pity that I do not have little taste buds clear to the bottom of my stomach!”? And what about the mad waitress who kept bringing a stranded M. F. K. food cooked by a seemingly invisible French chef in a café miles from anywhere? When reading Fisher’s work, you keep wanting to pull up your stool closer and closer, to make sure that you don’t miss anything.

Not only does Fisher tell a good yarn; she offers up many interesting recipes gleaned from French fishermen, California wine-growers, Long Island Sound potato farmers, Italian housewives, and a grandmother nicknamed “The Nervous Stomach.” With Bold Knife and Fork is the closest thing to a true cookbook that she ever wrote, but many of her other books contain recipes, cooking suggestions, and food philosophy dished out here and there.

Just before her death in 1992, Fisher still cooked occasionally for a few close friends. Lunch might have been a beef ragout (or stew), perhaps, and a clafouti and maybe a small salad of baby lettuce. And, of course, a fine California wine, from vineyards near Jack London’s ill-fated Valley of the Moon ranch (and that is another story worth telling some day).

Oh, to be one of Fisher’s lucky friends, eating her food and drinking in her wine and stories! Lacking all that, the next best thing would be to cook her recipes and read her books, one propped up on the counter, spooning up beef stew à la provençal, green salad, and an apple clafouti.

As she would have said, “It is a great way to live!”

Beef Stew à la Provençal

Serves 6-8

3 lbs. beef stew meat, cut into 1 ½ -inch chunks

2 onions, coarsely chopped

4 garlic cloves, peeled and mashed

2 carrots, peeled and cut into 1-inch slices

1 stalk celery, finely chopped

salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

3 T. olive oil

3 cups good quality red wine (Cabernet or Merlot work best)

Fresh thyme leaves (3 sprigs, tied together with kitchen string) or 1 t. dried thyme

3 bay leaves

2-inch piece of orange peel (be sure to omit white part underneath as it is bitter)

1. Marinate the meat in all the ingredients overnight. use a stainless steel or glass container. Refrigerate and cover.

2. The next day, simmer the stew covered over low heat for about four hours or until the meat is tender to the fork. Let stew cool, skim off fat, and reheat gently until warmed through.

3. Serve garnished with small whole cooked peeled potatoes, lots of thickly sliced French bread, and a green salad.

Green Salad with Vinaigrette Dressing

2 heads Boston or Bibb lettuce, washed and dried

2 T. fresh lemon juice or red wine vinegar

6 T. extra-virgin olive oil

salt and black pepper to taste

1 garlic clove, peeled and mashed

1-2 t. Dijon mustard

Mix dressing ingredients in a jar and shake well. Serve lettuce on individual plates and pass the vinaigrette.

Apple Clafouti

Serves 8

2 lbs. apples, peeled, cored, and thinly sliced

2 cups milk

4 eggs

½ cup sugar

4 T. butter, softened

pinch of salt

1 ½ cups flour

¼ t. pure vanilla extract

Vanilla ice cream, whipped cream, or powdered sugar for topping (optional)

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9-inch X 13-inch pan.

2. In a large bowl, mix the remaining ingredients together and spread over the bottom of the pan. Layer the apple slices over the batter.

3. Bake approximately 30 minutes. Serve warm, topped if you wish with one of the suggested toppings.

*Fisher’s books include: The Art of Eating (containing How to Cook a Wolf, Consider the Oyster, Serve it Forth, The Gastronomical Me, An Alphabet for Gourmets); With Bold Knife and Fork; A Considerable Town; Map of Another Town; Sister Age; As They Were; Dubious Honors; A Cordiall Water; Here Let Us Feast: A Book Of Banquets; Among Friends; Long-Ago in France; Last House: Reflections, Dreams, and Observations 1943-1991; To Begin Again: Stories and Memories; Stay with Me, Oh Comfort Me: Journals and Stories, 1933-1941; A Stew or a Story: An Assortment of Short Works by M. F. K. Fisher (gathered and introduced by Joan Reardon); Conversations with M. F. K. Fisher; M. F. K. Fisher: A Life in Letters; From the Journals of M. F. K. Fisher; and The Measure of Her Powers: An M. F. K. Fisher Reader (edited by Dominique Gioia).

Books about M. F. K. Fisher: M. F. K. Fisher Among the Pots and Pans: Celebrating Her Kitchens and Poet of the Appetites: The Lives and Loves of M. F. K. Fisher (both by Joan Reardon), A Welcoming Life: The M. F. K. Fisher Scrapbook (compiled and annotated by Dominique Gioia), and Between Friends: M. F. K. Fisher and Me (By Jeanette Ferrary).

© 2008, 2010 C. Bertelsen

Brillat-Savarin’s comments about the English being the worst cooks in the world drew a sniff from the proper Isabella, sure that her book would right that situation.

In spite of the moralizing tone, and the plagiarism, BOHM became a runaway bestseller. Readers and critics considered the soup, fish, sauce chapters the best.

Quantities of food served at dinner now seem phenomenal. But Isabella emphasized strict economy,  sometimes distressingly so, especially with family meals. She tackled the problem of leftover joints of meat, indexed in BOHM under “Cold Meat Cookery.” For surely, as you well know, leftovers  signal prosperity and abundance, a luxury not possible for the poor, whose next meal may just be a dream and a wish.

And Sam Beeton, crafty publisher that he was, decided to take advantage of that situation. In 1863, he and Isabella created and published The Englishwoman’s Cookery Book — a compendium of cold meat recipes and economical dishes. Leftover meat presented huge problems for households and readers clamored for ideas of how to use up the huge joints of meats.

Cooks still mine BOHM for recipes, for the book reveals social and cultural history. According to Aylett and Ordish in First Catch Your Hare,

It is still in print today, though modernised. First editions are extremely valuable properties; all nineteenth-century editions are collectors’ pieces.

The book provides an invaluable guide to the domestic life of Victorian England, especially eating habits. People gorged themselves, at least in the upper classes and whenever there was enough money for food. Obesity was a problem then, too. BOHM reflects the urban life of most of the readers, in that no one appears to have grown their own food. Isabella focused on doing the marketing/purchasing of goods for the household, including the food. At the

time, houses had official “back doors,” to which the tradesmen came and sold their wares, thus relieving the housewife of having to go out to do the marketing. Female servants did go out if necessary. Isabella included copious information on servants, their ranks in the household, and the pay they received. All food was cooked and nothing eaten raw,  understandably so because of the dangers of contamination by poor water and dirty hands. Isabella’s book came out  before Pasteur confirmed his germ theory discoveries around 1862. And the legendary Sweeney Todd, the evil barber of Fleet Street, killed his customers to make meat pies out of them.

Keywords characterizing the times of Isabella Beeton include Industrial Revolution, growing female literacy, appearance of new consumer goods, breakdown of social class, and democratic movements. Charles Darwin published his The Origin of Species two years before. So Sam’s magazines filled an important niche and fed his readers’ hunger for knowledge propelled by the burgeoning intellectual life and growing literacy of the times. The contents of the book included items arranged according to the manner in which they were served or eaten at large dinner parties:

Sauces

Meat

The Sheep and Lamb

The Common Hog

The Calf

Birds

Games

Vegetables

Puddings

Creams

Preserves

Milk and Eggs

Breads and Cakes

Beverages and

Invalid Cookery

Sample recipes:

CAPER SAUCE FOR FISH.

383. INGREDIENTS – 1/2 pint of melted butter No. 376, 3 dessertspoonfuls of capers, 1 dessertspoonful of their liquor, a small piece of glaze, if at hand (this may be dispensed with), 1/4 teaspoonful of salt, ditto of pepper, 1 tablespoonful of anchovy essence.

Mode.—Cut the capers across once or twice, but do not chop them fine; put them in a saucepan with 1/2 pint of good melted butter, and add all the other ingredients. Keep stirring the whole until it just simmers, when it is ready to serve.

Time.—1 minute to simmer. Average cost for this quantity, 5d.

Sufficient to serve with a skate, or 2 or 3 slices of salmon.

CAPERS.—These are the unopened buds of a low trailing shrub, which grows wild among the crevices of the rocks of Greece, as well as in northern Africa: the plant, however, has come to be cultivated in the south of Europe. After being pickled in vinegar and salt, they are imported from Sicily, Italy, and the south of France. The best are from Toulon.

A SUBSTITUTE FOR CAPER SAUCE.

384. INGREDIENTS – 1/2 pint of melted butter, No. 376, 2 tablespoonfuls of cut parsley, 1/2 teaspoonful of salt, 1 tablespoonful of vinegar.

Mode.—Boil the parsley slowly to let it become a bad colour; cut, but do not chop it fine. Add it to 1/2 pint of smoothly-made melted butter, with salt and vinegar in the above proportions. Boil up and serve.

Time.—2 minutes to simmer. Average cost for this quantity, 3d.

So too a number of classic phrases and sayings first appeared in Household Management: “Dine we must and we may as well dine elegantly as well as wholesomely”, “A place for everything and everything in its place”, and “In cooking, clear as you go.” — all originated in Isabella’s book.

Other features of the book included an index, recipes numbered and alphabetized within the chapters, cost information, preparation times, and number of servings. Granted, Eliza Acton had pioneered some of these features found in Isabella’s book, but that Isabella adapted them and that her book went on to be reprinted and revised so many times—unlike Acton’s work—virtually guaranteed that these items would be carried over by other cookbook authors, including Fanny Farmer of the Boston Cooking School in the United States.

Excited about the delivery of her fourth child, Isabella worked on Beeton’s Dictionary of Cookeran abridged version of Beeton’s Book of Household Management, up to a week before she died. She also started a magazine called The Queen (now called Harper’s & Queen).

She died of puerperal fever at age 28 one day after the birth of her fourth son, Mayson, in January 1865. Sam’s broken-hearted eulogy read:

USQUE AD FINEM (Forever At Rest) Her hand has lost its cunning, the firm, true hand that wrote these formulae and penned the information contained in this little book…exquisite palate, unerring judgment, sound common sense, refined tastes, all these had the dear Lady, who has gone, ere her youth had scarcely come…her duty no woman has ever better accomplished than the late Isabella Mary Beeton.

Bibliography:

Aylett, Mary and Ordish, Olive. “Mrs. Isabella Beeton, 1836-1865.” In: Aylett, Mary and Ordish, Olive, First Catch Your Hare: A History of the Recipe Makers. London: Macdonald, 1965, pp. 220-239.

Beeton, Mrs. Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management. Oxford World’s Classics. Abridged Edition. Edited by Nicola Humble. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

David, Elizabeth. “Isabella Beeton and her Book,” in An Omelette and a Glass of Wine. London: Viking, 1986, pp. 303-309. Reprinted from Wine and Food, Spring 1961.

Day, Helen. “Isabella Beeton.” In: Arndt, Alice, editor, Culinary Biographies. Houston, Texas: Yes Press, 2006, p. 57-59.

Freeman, Sarah. Isabella and Sam: The Story of Mrs. Beeton. London: Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1977.

Hughes, Kathryn. The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton. New York: Knopf, 2006.

(Excellent bibliography and analysis of the life and work of Isabella Beeton.)

Spain, Nancy. Mrs. Beeton and her Husband. London: Collins, 1948.

Online Resources:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/10136

http://www.mrsbeeton.com/

© 2008, 2010 C. Bertelsen

This initiates a series on the women who wrote cookbooks.

In today’s world, where people still attempt to discover themselves as they approach 30 or 40 or 50, it’s rather sobering to look at the accomplishments of people like John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley and Isabella Beeton.  All of whom died before the candles on their cakes numbered 30. Yet they left mature works of almost immortal greatness.

Today in Britain, “Mrs. Beeton” is a culinary trademark not unlike “Betty Crocker,” whom General Mills created in a Frankensteinian moment to boost sales by appealing to Every Housewife.

The difference between the two ladies is that Mrs. Beeton was a real, breathing, living personage who wrote a monster of a book with a monster of a title: The Book of Household Management Comprising information for the Mistress, Housekeeper, Cook, Kitchen-Maid, Butler, Footman, Coachman, Valet, Upper and Under House-Maids, Lady’s-Maid, Maid-of-all-Work, Laundry-Maid, Nurse and Nurse-Maid, Monthly Wet and Sick Nurses, etc. etc.—also Sanitary, Medical, & Legal Memoranda: with a History of the Origin, Properties, and Uses of all Things Connected with Home Life and Comfort, BOHM for short.

But “ …Mrs. Beeton was a plagiarist.” So states biographer Kathryn Hughes In The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton, published in 2006, nearly 139 years after the death of twenty-eight-year-old author Isabella Mary Mayson Beeton, Mrs. Sam Beeton.

Kathryn Hughes was not the first twentieth-century writer to use the dreaded “P’ word. Elizabeth David, famed mid-twentieth century English food writer, pointed the turning fork at Isabella, too. And whispered all but the word “plagiarism, in her article, “Isabella Beeton and her Book.” David goes on to enumerate what happened to Isabella’s book after her death and the many revisions that occurred.

Antonin Carême

Isabella also took a leaf so to speak from the pages of several other English cookbooks popular at the time, written by female authors like Hannah Glasse, Maria Rundell, and the well-known Eliza Action. And she grabbed material from William Kitchiner’s The Cook’s Oracle, too. As well as Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste and Thomas Webster’s Encyclopaedia of Domestic Economy. A Mrs. Parkes wrote a great deal of that book and included cost information and also listed ingredients at the beginning of the recipes, so Isabella really did not invent something new under the sun.

Born 1836, in Cheapside, London, Isabella was the oldest daughter in a family of 21 children, which she called a “living cargo of children.” At age 19, she married Samuel Orchard (Orchart as some researchers write it) Beeton. Sam Beeton made his fortune by publishing Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Britain. He adorned the book with the beehive symbol/logo of his company. Isabella served as his editor, copy editor, and compiler from 1859–1861 for The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, which Sam started in 1852. She also wrote a monthly cooking supplement for the magazine. In October 1861, Beeton published the twenty-four “supplements” as a single volume.

The only problem was that she did not know much about cooking— her own sisters called her “an indifferent cook.” A damning quote from a letter from Mrs. Henrietta Mary Pourtois English, who married Robert English in 1835, formerly a footman to George IV and well-versed in the ways of the kitchens of noble households and Henrietta also worked in the grand ancestral homes of the English aristocracy. The letter reads in part:

Cookery is a Science that is only learned by Long Experience and years of Study, which, of course, you have not had … .

Samuel Beeton

Mrs. English wrote to Isabella Beeton, July 21^st, 1857, when the Beetons were seeking support for what would become Isabella’s magnum opus, published in 1861 with an ornate front piece painted by Henry George Hine.

In her letter, Mrs. English brings up questions about just for whom Isabella was writing the book. The ensuing tone of the book resembled the voice of a comfortable, middle-aged lady appalled at the declining standards of competent womanhood. And Isabella was particularly concerned with extravagance of women driving their families into ruin, never mind their husbands with their gambling, horseracing, and other sundry vices!

Charges of plagiarism against Isabella take on a different perspective with this letter from Mrs. English. For Mrs. English is blatantly telling Isabella to “lift” the recipes from other sources, namely Simpson’s Cookery! This is, according to Hughes,

the way that cookery books had been put together from time immemorial … .

And so Isabella began her book with a poignant preface:

I must frankly own, that if I had known, beforehand, that this book would have cost me the labour which it has, I should never have been courageous enough to commence it. What moved me, in the first instance, to attempt a work like this, was the discomfort and suffering which I had seen brought upon men and women by household mismanagement. I have always thought that there is no more fruitful source of family discontent than a housewife’s badly-cooked dinners and untidy ways.

The book contained a number of interesting and somewhat unique characteristics, or at least features not common in many of the cookery books published at the time. A number of classic phrases and sayings first appeared in Household Management: “Dine we must and we may as well dine elegantly as well as wholesomely”, “A place for everything and everything in its place”, and “In cooking, clear as you go.”

In addition to anecdotal stories and history peppered throughout the recipes, Isabella quoted Byron, Milton, Keats and Tennyson in the chapter on “Dinners and Dining.” She created a usable index, numbered and alphabetized the recipes within the chapters, estimated cost information, measured preparation time, and included the number of servings for each recipe. She also paid attention to seasonality of ingredients.

The detailed engravings/illustrations — some in color — were outstanding, a very different thing for a book of it price (7S 6d). The first review appeared a year after publication in a magazine called Athenaeum. Even so, sixty thousand copies sold during that first year. A moralizing tone characterized many cookery books of the past, a trend which came and went like waves at the seashore, sometimes present during certain time periods and then absent for a while. BOHM took on a somewhat moralizing tone, as was the fashion of the time. Forty-six intensive detailed chapters, beginning with “The Mistress of the Household” and ending with “Legal Memoranda” comprised the book. The title page oozed ripely with Victoriana. Over 1,112 pages made this a massive book, with 900 of those pages devoted nearly 1400 recipes.

As Hughes and David mention in their twentieth-century analyses of BOHM, Isabella plagiarized a number of recipes from Eliza Acton’s Modern Cookery for Private Families.

It was one of the first books to publish recipes in the format that we find familiar. With her maid, Isabella also supposedly tested every recipe, but Hughes is skeptical about that.  She chose recipes to be used in middle-class homes, with few of the fanciful flourishes favored by Charles Francatelli, chef to the Queen Victoria and author of another popular book of the time, The Modern Cook.  Beeton’s book made a tremendous impact on Englishwomen’s cookery, for better or worse, like a marriage.  She provided a list of prepared/canned foods available at the time, and includes the prices. One section focused on the nutritional value of various foods and is quite on the money.  Seven recipes for Plum Pudding appear in BOHM, catering to the pocketbooks of the various economic situations of her readers. Cakes were a luxury food until the end of the nineteenth century. “A Nice Useful Cake,” recipe number 2414, calls for new-fangled baking powder. She also included recipes for Australian, Indian, French, German, and Italian dishes.

(Continued on August 26, 2010.)

© 2008, 2010 C. Bertelsen

[A photograph, and nothing more, for silent contemplation.]

Sliced Ginger Root

Sir Toby Belch: Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?
Clown: Yes, by Saint Anne, and ginger shall be hot i’ the mouth too.

Twelfth Night. Act ii. Sc. 3.

If anyone ever makes a movie about ginger’s long and fascinating history, I want Leonardo DiCaprio to play the lead.  Imagine him sporting a multi-colored pair of hose, leaping from bow to stern on a flimsy wooden caravel …

Anyway, Shakespeare described ginger (Zingiber officinale) as being  “hot in the mouth.”  Confucius dictated rules about cutting it. No poets have praised it, yet.

Young Ginger Plant

In ancient Bengal, in a time out of mind, people discovered a hot spicy yellow root – related to turmeric and galangal – and called it sringavera, meaning “horned root” in Sanskrit. Ginger, a rhizome plant almost twin to bamboo and easy to grow, quickly spread throughout Asia. The Chinese and Japanese soon learned to pair ginger with fish, because ginger eliminated fishy odors. As a cure for seasickness, ginger had no equal and early Chinese sailors swore by it.

By 100 AD, the Romans and Greeks used ginger in huge quantities in their cooking. Homesick Roman legionnaires camped in Britannia and Gaul demanded ginger (and got it) to spice up their less-than-fresh food. Thus, ginger took hold in Europe, where it dominated the art of cooking throughout the Middle Ages.

During the Age of Discovery, sailors on long voyages, like the Chinese, chewed ginger to combat seasickness. English cooks made the “ginger pills” more palatable for the sailors by baking cookies and cakes flavored with ginger. Ginger became so ingrained in English cooking that cooks laced traditional English Christmas Eve carp heavily with ginger. So important was ginger for the English palate that special containers sat on the dining table, alongside salt and pepper shakers. English settlers bound for the New World carried ginger in their luggage and that is how ginger first came to America.

Tingly yellow ginger  imparts a certain pep and prance to gingerbread boys and bestows the snap in  gingersnaps.

Ginger turned up in many English recipe books during the period of the Renaissance. A Book of Cookyre Very Necessary for all such as delight therein, Gathered by A.W. (1591) includes a number of ginger-studded recipes for poultry, as indicated by the following offering:

To bake Chickins.

Season them with cloves, mace, sinamon ginger, and some pepper, so put them into your coffin, and put therto corance dates Prunes, and sweet Butter, or els Marow, and when they be halfe baked, put in some sirup of vergious, and some sugar, shake them togither and set them into the oven again.
Bake Sparowes, Larkes, or any kinde of small birds, calves feet or sheepes tunges after the same manner.

Here’s another example, from the 1691 A New Booke of Cookerie:

To smoore an old Coney, Ducke, or Mallard, on the French fashion.

PArboyle any of these, and halfe roast it, launch them downe the breastwith your Knife, and sticke them with two or three Cloues. Then put them into a Pipkin with halfe a pound of sweet Butter, a little white Wine Uergis, a piece of whole Mace, a little beaten Ginger, and Pepper.
Then mince two Onyons very small, with a piece of an Apple, so let them boyle leisurely, close couered, the space of two howers, turning them now and then. Serue them in vpon Sippets.

Minced Ginger Root

On the other side of the Atlantic, America’s Revolutionary war soldiers received rations of ginger, probably for the same reasons that Roman soldiers clamored for it. As the years went by, American housewives added ginger only to cakes, cookies, ice cream, and pumpkin pies. Ginger ale and ginger beer became popular. Christmas sweets hogged most of the ginger. And that’s still the case.

Not until hordes of other immigrants came to America did ginger begin to take on other cooking roles. Ginger teases the palate in Indian curries, Moroccan stews, and West African chicken and peanut sauces. Asian cooks re-introduced the idea of pairing ginger with fish and shellfish. Used gingerly, ginger indeed reduces the fishiness of fish.

For the modern cook, ginger appears widely in markets, available in both fresh and ground form.

Fresh ginger stores well in the fridge and in the freezer when wrapped in foil and bagged in plastic. Just cut off what you need and refreeze.

Store ground ginger, made from the dried root, in a glass jar in a cool dry dark place. Substitute ground ginger for fresh only when fresh cannot be found in any grocery store or Asian market. Use only one-fourth the amount of ground ginger for fresh ginger. When making curries or other dishes (see “Spiced Moroccan Shrimp” below) where directions call for the dried spices to be fried first, take care not to scorch the spices, as this will permeate the dish with a bitter flavor. Remove large pieces of fresh ginger from the finished dish or finely grate the ginger before cooking. Why?  Biting into a large chunk of fresh ginger can be unpleasant, to put it mildly.

Ginger Plant with Ginger Root

For no less an authority than the famous English herbalist, John Gerard, said, “It heateth in the third degree,” seconding Shakespeare’s adage: ginger indeed sits “hot in the mouth.”

Now about that movie,  Mr. DiCaprio …

NUTRITION NOTES

Some commercial motion-sickness preparations include potassium-rich ginger. Some things never change, do they?

SPICED MOROCCAN SHRIMP
Serves 4

4 garlic cloves, mashed
4-6 T. oil
1/4-1/2 t. salt
1 t. sweet paprika
1 t. cumin
1/2 t. ground ginger
1/8 t. cayenne pepper
1 lb. peeled shrimp
1/2 c. chopped parsley

Fry the garlic in the oil for 30 seconds over medium-high heat and add the spices. Fry for 15 seconds and then quickly add the shrimp. Stir shrimp until they turn pink and just begin to curl.

Toss in the parsley, stir briefly, and serve the shrimp with saffron rice.

FISH FILLETS SAUCED WITH GINGER
Serves 2

1 lb. fresh fish fillets, preferably red snapper, flounder, or mackerel
4 T. oil
Salt to taste
1 T. Chinese rice wine or dry sherry
2 scallions, chopped
1 clove garlic, mashed
2 T. finely grated fresh ginger
4 T. soy sauce
1 t. sugar

Heat 2 T. of the oil over high heat and quickly sear the fish on one side until fish is cooked through. Remove pan from the heat. Lightly salt the fish to taste. Place cooked fish seared side up on 2 warm plates in a warm oven.

Pour out any juices from the pan. Reserve. Wipe out the pan and return it to the heat. Add the remaining 2 T. of oil and the ginger. Cook, stirring constantly, for 1 minute. Add the scallions and the garlic. Fry for 10 seconds  Add the soy sauce and the reserved juices or 2 T. water. Stir in the sugar, cook for 15 seconds, and remove from the heat. Pour the sauce over the fish and serve immediately.

Cookbooks about Ginger or of Interest Because of Recipes Containing Ginger:

Ginger: Common Spice and Wonder Drug, by Doug Schulick (2001)

Ginger East To West: The Classic Collection Of Recipes, Techniques, And Lore, Revised And Expanded, by Bruce Cost (1989)

Spoonful of Ginger, by Nina Simonds (1999)

© 2008, 2010 C. Bertelsen

If you think that real cooking needs to be resurrected, you’d be right. You can’t exist on McNuggets alone, as the film Super Size Me proved.

But if you think we should all go back to cooking everything just like our foremothers (and sometimes forefathers) did, you’d be a bit misguided.

Romantic, yes, and it’s not hard to be romantic about days that seem simpler as you struggle to get e-mail answered, peer at the Tweets streaming endlessly into your iPhone, and talk to your mother as you zoom along the interstate at 75 miles an hour.

Who wouldn’t want to trade that picture for an idyllic country cottage redolent with the soothing scent of a meaty rabbit pottage? (Read The Garden Cottage Diaries: My Year in the Eighteenth Century, by Fiona J. Houston, the next time you get a hankering for living the simple life.)

Cotswold cottage

Rachel Laudan, a prize-winning historian recently mentioned in the New York Times for her prescient article, “Why We Should Love Culinary Modernism,” and a historian who uses food issues to examine the past, included an important link in a recent post on her blog. I think more people should know about Rachel’s blog, so go ahead and visit her there. You will be delighted. And challenged, healthily.

Rachel’s post intrigued me. It’s about a Web site that looks at some forgotten recipes in Venezuela and includes a song,” La Cocinera” (The Cook), about a cook who longs for freedom from the drudgery of everyday cooking. This reality slaps down the nostalgia so many (including me) feel in their yearning for the “simplicity” of old ways of doing things:

If the cooks could speak from the days we consider nostalgically, no doubt they would sing the same tune. But their gender and their illiteracy banished them from the historical record.

Taken from the Web site Las Recetas Olvidadas, by Jean-Luc Crucifix, this material is based on the book of the same name, available in English, Spanish, and French. Be sure to go the Web site and look at all the photos and commentary.

Las Recetas Olvidadas in some ways resembles work done by cookbook author Diana Kennedy in Mexico. Kennedy does not place  the recipes in much historical or social context; instead, she basically catalogs them, raising our awareness of the richness that could be lost without her diligence. Kennedy’s latest book, Oaxaca al Gusto: An Infinite Gastronomy (William and Bettye Nowlin Series in Art, History, and Culture of the Western Hemisphere) , is particularly valuable for this reason.

No doubt we will be seeing a lot more of this kind of work in the future, as writers and publishers recognize the increasing loss of food knowledge as old cooks die and leave no record of their powers in the kitchen.

Some recent books point to this trend.

Anne Mendelson pioneered the way with Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages (2008).

Then Darina Allen published Forgotten Skills of Cooking: The Time-Honored Ways are the Best – Over 700 Recipes Show You Why (2009) and Ken Albala and Rosanna Nafziger wrote The Lost Art of Real Cooking: Rediscovering the Pleasures of Traditional Food One Recipe at a Time (2010). Allen’s book is far more comprehensive in several ways, while The Lost of Real Cooking presents material in a personal style that people who read blogs will find comfortable.  Both of these books gather information that is readily available, but widely dispersed across the Internet, in old cookbooks, and via oral history.  The chief contribution of both of the latter volumes is to gather together in one place many of the old cooking methods, making them more accessible to modern readers.

This whole discussion of cooking, feeding, and growing food seems like something new, but humans have been arguing the merits of many approaches to food since antiquity. (For example, take a look at Michael Beer’s Taste or Taboo: Dietary Choices in Antiquity if you think the locavore movement is a brand new reaction to the industrialization of food production and preparation.)

Thanks to Rachel Laudan, for raising the questions and providing some of the answers and interpretations.

© 2010 C. Bertelsen

Lettuce

I don’t know about you, but I grew up with the ‘berg in the fridge, with a jar of Hellman’s on the side. That was as green as it got (and still gets) in my mom’s kitchen. Iceberg lettuce. Crisp, colorless, flavorless.

Usually just a tired limp leaf garnishing a shrimp cocktail or stuck haphazardly in a sandwich, lettuce is one of those things taken for granted. A part of the landscape, so to speak. A piece of furniture. A speck of green and a thing of beauty.

Still considered a new‑fangled rabbity health food by the burgers and beer crowd, and my Mom, lettuce now enjoys a renaissance on the plates of many health‑conscious Americans. Mom says stuff like, “But those other leaves, they’re flabby and have no crunch. Lettuce has to have some crunch!” I give up in the face of this kind of talk, biting my tongue, wanting to retort, “That’s why there’s bacon and walnuts and celery!”

Like Mom, most Americans, when they think of lettuce, still think of that iceberg lettuce doused with chunky blue cheese dressing or swimming à la Michael Phelps in a pool  of Thousand Island dressing.  But many other types of lettuces adorn the nation’s produce sections today. From avant garde red radicchio to dark green assertive romaine and arugula, the salad lover revels in a wide choice of greens, thanks in part to the farmers market movement and locavore lore.

Growing Lettuce

In ancient times, however, there was no choice: all lettuce came loose‑leaf and headless. Lettuce first made an appearance in the annals of history with a reference in an Assyrian herbal guide, which mentioned that lettuce grew in the gardens of Babylon. Herodotus, “the Father of History,” also wrote of lettuce being served to the kings of Persia. Cultivated as such for thousands of years in Egypt and Asia, it wasn’t until the Romans marched on the scene that lettuce began to “head.” And it was the Romans who gave lettuce its major present‑day culinary role, that of salad greens. From Italy, lettuce traveled to Europe with Rabelais in the Middle Ages and from there to the New World with Columbus during the Age of Exploration in the early 16th century.

Until the time of Thomas Jefferson, lettuce was a not a big item on American tables.  He planted something called “Tennis Ball” lettuce, as well as fourteen other varieties of lettuce. His cousin, Mary Randolph, wrote about lettuce in her 1824 cookbook,  The Virginia Housewife:

To Dress Salad

To have this delicate dish in perfection, the lettuce, pepper grass, chervil, cress, &c. should be gathered early in the morning, nicely picked, washed, and laid in cold water, which will be improved by adding ice; just before dinner is ready to be served, drain the water from your salad, cut it into a bowl, giving the proper proportions of each plant; prepare the following mixture to pour over it: boil two fresh eggs ten minutes, put them in water to cool, then take the yelks in a soup plate, pour on them a table spoonful of cold water, rub them with a wooden spoon until they are perfectly dissolved; then add two spoonsful of oil: when well mixed, put in a teaspoonful of salt, one of powdered sugar, and one of made mustard; when all these are united and quite smooth, stir in two table spoonsful of common, and two of tarragon vinegar; put it over the salad, and garnish the top with the whites of the eggs cut into rings, and lay around the edge of the bowl young scallions, they being the most delicate of the onion tribe.

Actually, it took another hundred years or so until lettuce decorated more American plates. After World War I, probably as returning G.I.s raved about the virtues of delicately dressed European‑style salads, lettuce became a more important culinary item on American tables. California soon produced (and produces) over 70% of the nation’s iceberg lettuce. The term “iceberg” lettuce came about because of the ice packed around heads of lettuce shipped from Salinas, California.

Almost 520 years after Columbus, lettuce has finally “arrived” in America.

Salad of Lettuce

With the current American concern over health and fitness, lettuce plays an important role. When caressed with a light hand with dressing and assorted vegetables and other low‑calorie garnishes, lettuce salads make filling meals for the health‑conscious eater. And even if you don’t count yourself among those ranks, like my mom, you will find that leafy lettuce salads taste delicious and possess extreme versatility: nearly any dressing and other additions makes simple lettuce into a gourmet treat. The following salads may not exactly be diet fare, but they are lip‑licking good.

Once in a while, you just have to say, “Lettuce be,” and enjoy your differences, even when it comes to lettuce. Right, Mom?

NUTRITION NOTES

Dark green lettuce is rich in vitamins A and C, folic acid, calcium, and iron. Over 70% of lettuce is water, making lettuce low in calories: iceberg lettuce has 59 calories per pound and the darker lettuces carry 82 calories per pound. Even though it boasts fewer calories, iceberg lettuce ranks low in nutritional quality because its pale leaves do not pack the same punch as dark green leafy lettuce varieties. Choosing dark green lettuce means that you will take in vitamins and minerals in the meal. Besides romaine or Bibb lettuce, look for arugula, Boston lettuce, loose‑leaf lettuce, and radicchio.

SWEET‑N’‑SOUR LETTUCE SALAD

Serves 6

6 slices bacon, cut into small pieces

1 clove garlic, mashed and minced

4 T. cider vinegar

4 T. sugar

2 T. water

Salt and freshly‑ground black pepper to taste

2 quarts romaine lettuce, torn into bite‑size pieces

1 1/2 cups homemade croutons

1 large red onion, thinly sliced

Fry the bacon until crisp, remove bacon bits from skillet, set aside. Drain off all but 1/4 cup of the grease. Toss the garlic into the hot bacon grease, stir for 30 seconds, and then pour in the vinegar, sugar, water, salt and pepper. Heat to boiling, stirring constantly.

Pour dressing over lettuce, mix quickly, portion out lettuce onto 6 serving plates, and garnish with bacon bits, croutons, and sliced onion. Serve immediately.

FRENCH PEASANT’S SALAD

Serves 6

2 quarts dark green lettuce (romaine, Bibb, etc.‑‑DO NOT use iceberg)

8 oz. walnut pieces

3/4 cup blue cheese, crumbled

1 medium onion, thinly sliced

2 T. freshly‑squeezed lemon juice

1/4 cup oil (2 T. walnut oil or 2 T. good olive oil mixed with 2 T. vegetable oil)

Salt and black pepper to taste

Place the lettuce on 6 serving plates. Sprinkle each plate with a portion of the walnuts, cheese, and onions. 2. Mix the dressing: beat salt into the lemon juice, add the oil and pepper, and beat until mixed. Pour a portion of the dressing over each serving. Serve immediately. Have a pepper mill at table for those who wish more pepper.

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LOVERS OF HISTORY AND SOUTHERN FOOD will be in their element with three “new” books published by the University of South Carolina Press: The Virginia Housewife, by Mary Randolph (1824), The Kentucky Housewife, by Lettice Bryan (1839), and The Carolina Housewife, by Sarah Rutledge (1847).

© 2008, 2010 C. Bertelsen

Quiche aux Poireaux Julia Child

[A photograph, and nothing more, for silent contemplation.]