From the Archives: Dining in July 1815

Loretta reports:

Since we had a short video about 18th and early 19th C dining last week, now seemed like  good time to bring back this post on what foods were available in July during the Regency era.

The Greengrocer

From The Epicure’s Almanack July Alimentary Calendar:

~~~

The heats of the season now impose the necessity of occasionally substituting a light vegetable diet for the more solid gratification of animal food ... Cauliflowers, artichokes, green-peas, French-beans, Windsor* and other garden beans, frequently form a conspicuous part of the family dinner, to which butcher’s meat, in moderate quantities, may be said to serve merely as an auxiliary stimulant. Ham, bacon, and tongues, as well as ducks and geese, are the most seasonable viands for this purpose ... On festive occasions venison and turtle retain their pre-eminent station at the tables of the opulent, where also the fawn ... forms an elegant dish, when roasted whole and served up with rich gravy. Veal, having now been fed on milk, in its richest state, is peculiarly fine and well flavoured; but care should be taken that it be delivered fresh to the cook, as it is more liable to suffer from the heat of the weather and from flies than any other kind of meat. Ragouts of sweetbreads, oxpalates, lambs’ bits, fat livers, and cocks’-combs, are among the light dishes introduced at superior tables; where also various preparations of curry afford a delectable repast to those who have acquired a taste for this Indian diet.
 ...
 ... a plenteous and varied dessert presents itself at this season; consisting of pines, melons, peaches, cherries, grapes, currants, gooseberries and raspberries, as well as early apples and pears. Fruit is certainly most salubrious in hot weather; but, if the opinion be well founded that it does most good when taken before dinner, the dessert ought to take place of that spurious meal called lunch, which, being usually made of animal food, too often banishes the appetite irrecoverably for the day.

~~~

*broad beans

Excerpted from The Epicure's Almanack: Eating and Drinking in Regency London (The Original 1815 Guidebook).

Image: James Pollard, The Greengrocer (ca 1819) courtesy Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it. Clicking on the caption will allow you to read at the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

Friday Video: 18th Century Dining

Loretta reports:

As I’ve pointed out in a previous blog post, the dinner table of the late 1700s and early 1800s looked very different from our own, with a large number of dishes, both sweet and savory, presented at the same time.

This video gives a nice, three-dimensional view of what was on the table, as well as short explanations of the dishes. Also, I think you'll enjoy curator Ivan Day’s dry wit.

If the macaroni and cheese surprises you (as it did some commenters), you might want to check out Susan’s blog post on the subject.  Also, as she explains in this blog post, the governor of Virginia would have been eating in the same fashion as his aristocratic counterparts in London.

YouTube Video: English Taste: The Art of Dining in 18th Century England with curator Ivan Day
Image is a still from the video.
Readers who receive our blog via email might see a rectangle, square, or nothing where the video ought to be. To watch the video, please click on the title to this post (which will take you to our blog) or the video title (which will take you to YouTube).

Friday Video: Making a Plum Pudding, c1775

Susan reporting,

Since we're officially in the holiday season now, it seems like the appropriate time to share a video on how to make a traditional plum, or hunter's - the same pudding goes by different names - pudding. This is one of many excellent 18thc cooking videos produced by Townsends, an American purveyor of all kinds of 18thc and 19thc necessities for re-enactors and anyone who relishes the past, from reproduction wool cloaks to hunting knives to research books to (as mentioned in this video) the proper kidney suet for puddings.

Here you'll learn not only how to make a proper Georgian-style pudding, but also the histories of many of the ingredients. Who knew 18thc raisins were so different from their modern day descendants?

If you've received this video via email, you may be seeing a black box or empty space where the video should be. Please click here to view the video.

Who Really Invented Potato Chips?

Loretta reports:

You find out the darndest things in the darndest places. I recently found a clipping stuck in my trusty computer-side notebook, from a “Violet Days” comic strip by Chris Monroe that appeared in Funny Times of May 2016. In it she pointed out a myth about the creation of potato chips (that would be crisps, to British readers). Naturally, I had to investigate.

I started, as anybody would, by Googling “potato chips origin.” And there, as is the case with many myths, one finds numerous sites citing a tale that happens not to be supported by historical evidence. Several sites declare one George Crum as the inventor, in 1853, and there’s a long, charming story—which very often is a clue to a historical myth—of his inventing them by accident, due to aggravation by an annoying customer.

In fact, a recipe appeared as early as 1817 in Dr. William Kitchiner's Apicius Redivivus; or, the Cook’s Oracle. In other words, our Regency heroes and heroines might have had a bad potato chip habit, just like some of us who shall remain nameless who write this blog post.

Potato Chip Recipe 1817

As Ms. Monroe pointed out in her comic, the recipe also appeared in The Virginia House-Wife in 1827, and Shilling Cookery for the People by Alexis Soyer in 1845, and continued to appear in edition after edition of the Cook’s Oracle. If you compare the clippings from the earlier and later editions of the Cook’s Oracle, you’ll notice a slight change in method, which allowed for even thinner, crispier crisps. You’ll also notice lard, which will cause many readers to grimace. Again, there’s some misinformation about lard. For one thing, it shouldn’t be confused with the vegetable shortening that comes in those familiar cans. Well, familiar to those of us who grew up in the last century. For another, it turns out to be not nearly as unhealthy as had been assumed for decades. And it does make superior pastry, among other delights.

Potato Chips Recipe 1831

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

Leadenhall Market in 1815

Leadenhall Market

Loretta reports:

I’ve previously posted excerpts  (here and here) from the Alimentary Calendar section of Ralph Rylance’s The Epicure’s Almanack, originally published in 1815 and republished in 2012 with extensive, useful  notes.

The following excerpt is from the section on markets in and about London. There were quite a few (more than I was aware of). Mr. Ryland rates Leadenhall Market as Number One.

“Leadenhall Market, independently of the sales of hides and leather effected there, is by far the most considerable market in London. The articles sold here are town and country-killed meats of every sort, and of the primest quality. In addition to the usual variety of fine beef, veal, and mutton, some of the first rate butchers here expose, during the winter season, specimens of very delicate house-lamb, which is usually sold by the quarter, at Christmas tide from fifteen to twenty-five shillings each.”

Meat Market by Pollard

The meats include all possible cuts of pork, as well as poultry:

“Not only turkies, bustards, geese, peacocks and peahens, guinea fowls, pullets, capons, pigeons, ducks, wild and tame, widgeons, teal, plovers, quails, woodcocks, snipes, larks, and all other lawful game are sold here.”

Unlawful game was sold as well, under the counter, by a method of coded words.

“Around the wholesale poultry-market are the shops of several retail poulterers of great fame, such as Messrs. Mott’s. Here are roasting-pigs, eggs, and fresh-butter, in great abundance; nor is there wanting a proportionate supply of the finest fish in season.” Here also are two or three excellent tripe-shops. This is the most considerable market in London for tame and wild-rabbits, wild in particular, which arrive every day during the season from the several warrens in Essex, Herts, and Suffolk.”

Starting here you will you'll find a detailed history and description of Leadenhall Market, including which days which items were sold.

Image above, from Ackermann's Repository, courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art via Internet Archive. Image below, James Pollard, The Meat Market, courtesy Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

Friday Video: Cooking 101 for the 20th century

Loretta reports:

Someone recently told me that the height of gourmet dining early in his adult life was Trout Almondine, and that reminded me of going to fancy restaurants decades ago, where it did indeed star on the menu.

Most of what’s in the film is strange to me, but then, I did grow up in an immigrant household, in New England, and wasn’t exposed to much of the food that my husband, for instance, grew up with in the South. Of course, watching some of our cooking shows today, the people in the film likely would have been equally puzzled.

I wonder how many of these food ideas traveled from Britain to the U.S. or vice versa. I also wonder how many of us dress to cook in the style of the woman in the first segment. But I do lust for her jewelry. And her dress. And the mid-century dishware.

Readers who receive our blog via email might see a rectangle, square, or nothing where the video ought to be.  To watch the video, please click on the title to this post.

Friday Video: Food Shopping Tips for 1950

Interior, Marden-Abbott Store
Strawbery Banke Museum

Loretta reports:

Today's video called to me because I grew up living behind the shop, that is to say, behind a small Mom and Pop store. In those days, what today we’d call a convenience store was "the corner store," which Worcesterites called a spa—and no, I have no idea why.

The main articles on offer at our place were canned goods, bread, milk, soda, cigarettes, and penny candy—and then, a few years after the store opened, there was a snack bar, too, which became very popular. In any case, neither our shop nor even the supermarkets, as they were then, were anything like today's mega-super-duper-supermarkets. A tangerine was about as exotic as things got in the produce aisle.

Though my parents set up shop a decade or so later than today’s video, we girls learned these same shopping principles, at home and in Home Economics classes. No, the boys weren’t taught, although, if the video offers a clue, they could have used the lessons.

Image: Interior of Marden-Abbott Store (WWII era)  at Strawbery Bank Museum, courtesy me.

Readers who receive our blog via email might see a rectangle, square, or nothing where the video ought to be.  To watch the video, please click on the title to this post.

Recreating Emily Dickinson's 1883 Black Cake

Isabella reporting,

Last week, quite by accident, I attended a 185th birthday party for American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). While visiting Harvard's Houghton Library to see their current exhibition (more about that in a future post), I was invited to join the festivities by friend-of-the-blog Andrea Cawelti, Ward Music Cataloger at Houghton. How could I resist?

Such a celebration wasn't surprising. The Emily Dickinson Collection at Houghton is the largest in the world devoted to the poet, and contains everything from hand-stitched manuscript copies of her poems to the small desk on which she wrote them. But the centerpiece of this party wasn't a  poem. It was a recipe.

Emily Dickinson's handwritten recipe for Black Cake - the name comes from the dark color created by the ingredients - is a typical 19thc. cake for holidays and celebrations, rich in dried fruit and spices and laced with equal parts of molasses and rum. It's also dauntingly large, requiring nineteen eggs (!) and producing over twelve pounds of batter.

Two intrepid members of Houghton's staff recreated the recipe in all its glory (and beat all those eggs by hand) for the party. Emilie Hardman, Research, Instruction, and Digital Initiatives Librarian and Emily Walhout, Reference Assistant, are the stars of the above video, showing exactly how they made the cake - or rather, several cakes, since the amount of batter exceeded any modern cake pans.

Much like the Rich Cake for Twelfth Night that I featured here last week, this cake needed a month to "mature" and meld the flavors and alcohol. It was worth the wait: I can report that the cake was absolutely delicious, and as  you can see, left, I wasn't the only one to think so.

If you want to try the cake yourself, here's the digital version of Emily Dickinson's original handwritten recipe, and here's the post from Houghton Library's blog with more information about the cake.

From the Archives: Time to Bake Your Rich Cake for Twelfth Night

Isabella reporting:

A worthy repeat post for seasonal celebrations from our archives....

If you were the cook for a great house in the 17th-early 19th centuries, or simply a woman who lived in a sufficiently prosperous household, you'd be baking your Rich Cake, left, for Twelfth Night celebrations now. The Christmas holidays were also a popular time for weddings,and the Rich Cake would be the wedding cake of choice, too.

Celebratory cakes of the past were not the frothy, towering constructions of piped and colored icing that they are now. What made them festive was the lavishness of their ingredients, not their outer display. These cakes would be rich with eggs and butter and sugar, candied fruit and costly imported spices, brandy and sherry. With eggs as the only leavening, the texture would be dense to modern tastes, more of a cross between our pound cake and a fruit cake. But because the ingredients were fresh (or freshly ground), there'd be none of the chemical-preservative flavor that makes many 21st century fruitcakes such bad jokes.

Rich Cakes were often baked in a Turk's-head pan, shaped much like contemporary Bundt pans. Once unmolded, they could be wrapped in cloth and soaked with more liquor to develop their flavor and moistness. By the time the cakes were served in late December or January, they would truly be worth their star status on the holiday table.

During a recent visit to Colonial Williamsburg, the cooks in the kitchen of the Governor's Palace were baking the Rich Cakes for Twelfth Night. I was there for the final unmolding, right, a process that apparently involves exactly the same held-breaths and crossed fingers familiar to modern bakers. But as you can see, the cake slipped free with nary a crumb left behind.

If you'd like to try making a Rich Cake yourself, Colonial Williamsburg has put the recipe that they use (from Hannah Glasse's classic 18th c. cookbook The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy) on their Historic Foodways site. In case the non-specific nature of an 18th c. recipe is too daunting, the site provides a modern version, too.

Photographs ©2012 Susan Holloway Scott.

Washing Up Correctly in 1854

Still Life: Tea Set

Loretta reports:

Washing Up Instructions

Many centuries ago, when I was in school, we had Home Economics classes. That is to say, the girls did. The boys had Shop. I’m not sure what our process was at home. Mainly I remember regarding all household chores as loathsome wastes of valuable time I could have spent reading.

I do remember that the Home Ec method involved more or less the same order of events as in the Victorian-era approach. Otherwise, though, Godey's advice seems to modern eyes rather slapdash, not to mention unhygienic.

And so it’s a good example of a world that hadn’t yet caught onto BACTERIA, let alone grown hysterical about the little critters. The Victorians didn’t have hot water on tap, either, or instantly-dissolving dish cleaning liquids, or the host of other allegedly labor-saving devices available to us.

I’ve read elsewhere of cleaning rugs and other items with used tea leaves, a method I haven’t tried, but I’m thinking of experimenting with certain bottles and decanters.

Image: Jean-Étienne Liotard, Still Life: Tea Set (circa 1781-83), courtesy Getty Center via Wikimedia Commons.
Text from Godey’s Magazine, November 1854

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

From the Archives: Candy Corn, a 19thc. Treat

Isabella reporting:

Trick or treat! Since today is a travel-day for me, I've pulled this Halloween-themed post from the archives. 

While modern candy-makers offer scores of new treats every year, there's one that's stood the test of time: candy corn. According to the food experts at Gourmet magazine, candy corn was first created in the 1880s as the culinary brain-child of Philadelphia's Wunderle Candy Company.

Nineteenth century candy-lovers were already gobbling sugary treats in the shapes of vegetables, fruit, and other plants, and Wunderle owner George Renninger suggested the company try kernels of corn next. This was more a marketing challenge than a candy-making one, for Americans at the time regarded corn as feed for livestock, not people, and very little was consumed on polite dining tables. But Wunderle's tri-color layering captivated buyers, and the new little candies were an immediate hit. Originally linked to harvest and available only in the fall months, candy corn soon became connected with Halloween as well, and as Halloween as a holiday grew in popularity in the 20th c., so did candy corn: today the industry sells more than 35 million pounds of candy corn each year. That's one sweet treat.

The delightful Halloween postcard, below, comes from the collection of the Toronto Public Library. Printed in 1909 in Germany for the American market, this postcard is only one that the library shared on its blog here - definitely worth a look!

Dinner in the Early 1800s: What & How To Serve

Loretta reports:

When I came upon the listing of courses, I’ll admit I was a little daunted, even though I’ve encountered far more elaborate 19th C menus. But when I saw the map of the table setting,* I wondered where the people were supposed to fit.

In any case, as the advice makes plain, the courses depend on what the host can afford as well as who the guests are.

Advice

Fancy Menu

Table Map

Simpler menu

Map for simpler menu

 *You'll notice that the table settings don’t match the September menu. This is because The Female’s Friend didn’t provide settings for every month. However, the 1811 London Art of Cookery  table setting for a simpler September menu comes close.

Black & white images courtesy Google Books.
Photograph of table setting at Victoria & Albert Museum courtesy me.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

Dining in July 1815

The Greengrocer

Loretta reports:

From The Epicure’s Almanack July Alimentary Calendar:

~~~

The heats of the season now impose the necessity of occasionally substituting a light vegetable diet for the more solid gratification of animal food ... Cauliflowers, artichokes, green-peas, French-beans, Windsor* and other garden beans, frequently form a conspicuous part of the family dinner, to which butcher’s meat, in moderate quantities, may be said to serve merely as an auxiliary stimulant. Ham, bacon, and tongues, as well as ducks and geese, are the most seasonable viands for this purpose ... On festive occasions venison and turtle retain their pre-eminent station at the tables of the opulent, where also the fawn ... forms an elegant dish, when roasted whole and served up with rich gravy. Veal, having now been fed on milk, in its richest state, is peculiarly fine and well flavoured; but care should be taken that it be delivered fresh to the cook, as it is more liable to suffer from the heat of the weather and from flies than any other kind of meat. Ragouts of sweetbreads, oxpalates, lambs’ bits, fat livers, and cocks’-combs, are among the light dishes introduced at superior tables; where also various preparations of curry afford a delectable repast to those who have acquired a taste for this Indian diet.
 ...
 ... a plenteous and varied dessert presents itself at this season; consisting of pines, melons, peaches, cherries, grapes, currants, gooseberries and raspberries, as well as early apples and pears. Fruit is certainly most salubrious in hot weather; but, if the opinion be well founded that it does most good when taken before dinner, the dessert ought to take place of that spurious meal called lunch, which, being usually made of animal food, too often banishes the appetite irrecoverably for the day.

~~~

*broad beans

Excerpted from The Epicure's Almanack: Eating and Drinking in Regency London (The Original 1815 Guidebook).

Image: James Pollard, The Greengrocer (ca 1819) courtesy Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it. Clicking on the caption will allow you to read at the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

Friday Video: The King's Chocolate Kitchen

Loretta reports:

Those enduring this particularly ghastly winter may want to make a cup of hot chocolate and settle in to watch this short video.  But I hope chocolate and/or history lovers everywhere will enjoy this story about the loving recreation of ... yes, the king’s own chocolate kitchen at Hampton Court Palace.

The photo of of an early 18th century chocolate pot in the Victoria & Albert Museum was taken by Valerie McGlinchey.

Readers who receive our blog via email might see a rectangle, square, or nothing where the video ought to be.  To watch the video, please click on the title to this post.

Casual Friday: How to make tea

View at source

Loretta reports:

About the time I discovered this video clip, I found another, from the 1950s, extolling the virtues of bagged tea.  As tea fanatics are aware, bagged tea is made with tea dust, the stuff left over at the end of the leaf-grading process.

To a tea fanatic, the idea of making tea in big urns is even less appealing than making it with tea bags.  But there's no way to provide an army hot tea in in little teapots.  And I give credit to the makers of this film for showing so much care and  respect for this wonderful beverage.

Illustration: Edward Penfield, [Girl holding tea pot and cup on tray] between 1884 and 1925, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA
Readers who receive our blog via email might see a rectangle, square, or nothing where the video ought to be.  To watch the video, please click on the title to this post.

Seasonal Foods in November 1811

View online here

Loretta reports:

Because we live in the era of supermarkets and refrigeration, we need to stop and think—look it up, actually—when we’re giving dinner parties in our books—if, that is, we want to talk about the food  as well as what the hero and heroine say and do during the meal.

A recent trip to the local farmers’ market showed me what the non-supermarket food choices are in New England at this time of year.  And of course it awakened my Nerdy History Girl curiosity about what would be available to eat in England during an early 19th century November.

Read online here

—The Female Instructor; Or, Young Woman's Companion, 1811

Return Engagement: Queen Victoria's Wedding Cake

Loretta reports:

[Update: I've moved to an island for a while, and am temporarily  unable to access some of my stuff electronically.  Thus today's repeat performance, in honor of Queen Victoria's wedding anniversary, coming up this weekend.]

When Queen Victoria got married on 10 February 1840, she was not, as many believe, the first bride to wear a white wedding dress—though it was a new look for royals, who’d previously inclined toward silver.  Still, she did start a fashion for BIG royal weddings.  Previously, these had been relatively quiet, private affairs.  But then, hers was a big deal—the first wedding of a reigning queen since Queen Mary in 1554.

The wedding cake was a big deal, too. 

“If taste of design only equal what appears to be intended for the actual dimensions, it will beat any bride-cake ever seen.”*

~~~
  5. THE ROYAL WEDDING CAKE. —A select few have been gratified with a sight of the royal wedding cake at the apartments of the confectionary in St. James's palace, but it is described as consisting of the most exquisite compounds of all the rich things with which the most expensive cakes can be composed, mingled and mixed together into delightful harmony by the most elaborate science of the confectioner. This royal cake weighs nearly 300 lb. weight. It is three yards in circumference, and about fourteen inches in depth or thickness. It is covered with sugar of the purest white; on the top is seen the figure of Britannia in the act of blessing the illustrious bride and bridegroom, who are dressed somewhat incongruously in the costume of ancient Rome. These figures are not quite a foot in height; at the feet of his serene highness is the effigy of a dog, said to denote fidelity; and at the feet of the queen is a pair of turtle doves, denoting the felicities of the marriage state. A cupid is writing in a volume expanded on his knees the date of the day of the marriage, and various other cupids are sporting and enjoying themselves as such interesting little individuals generally do. These little figures are well modelled. On the top of the cake are numerous bouquets of white flowers tied with true lovers' knots of white satin riband, intended for presents to the guests at the nuptial breakfast. This elegant emblem of the felicities of marriage will be placed on the breakfast table of the queen at Buckingham palace at the breakfast which is to succeed the ceremonies in the chapel royal.
—1840 Annual Register.

*The Mirror of literature, amusement, and instruction, Volume 35, 1840.

Macaroni & Cheese, c. 1774

Isabella reporting:

While visiting Colonial Williamsburg over the holidays, I stopped by the kitchens of the Governor's Palace to see what our friends there were preparing. As usual, the day's dishes were set out on the kitchen table, above, as if waiting for a footman to come whisk them away to the royal governor and his guests. Sadly today they remain there, too, since modern health regulations prohibit the food made in an 18th c. kitchen to be consumed by 21st c. diners.

Among these dishes (counter-clockwise from the top) were: a pumpkin stuffed with eggs and seasoned bread crumbs; a boiled pound cake - close kin to a boiled pudding - in a sweet wine sauce; a chine of pork; and a tureen of rich onion soup. And what's that on the last plate? While none of the other dishes are common fare to most Americans today, this one definitely is: baked macaroni with cheese, topped with buttered bread crumbs.

The 18th c. recipe for macaroni and cheese was much the same as a modern one (at least a modern one that doesn't rely on day-glo-orange pasteurized cheese food), but the dish's place in the culinary world was much different. Today's mac and cheese is a homey comfort-food. The Georgian version would have been considered a luxury dish, redolent of fancy foreign cookery. Pasta was one of the tastes acquired by English gentlemen on their grand tours to Italy, and dried macaroni came home with them to England along with leopard-patterned waistcoats and paintings of ancient ruins. Pasta and Italian food in general became so closely connected to extreme male fashion and pretensions that foppish gentlemen were often derisively called macaronis themselves.

But to more epicurean English gentlemen, baked macaroni was a dish to impress, with the dried pasta either imported from Italy, or the work of a well-salaried, foreign-trained cook. Thomas Jefferson was a great fan, instructing his agent abroad to send him a macaroni-making machine for use at Monticello (here's his surviving letter.) In more modest households, cooks with a copy of Hannah Glasse's popular 1774 cookbook The Art of Cookery, Made Plain & Easy  might not have been able to create the forced or rolled tubular shape of macaroni, but they could make the long strands of vermicelli (vermicella) with the recipe below - though one hopes they didn't share Mrs. Glasse's comparison of the pasta to "little worms" with their diners.

                                                      To make vermicella
MIX yolks of eggs and flour together in a pretty stiff paste, so as you can work it up cleverly, and roll it as thin as it is possible to roll the paste. Let it dry in the sun; when it is quite dry, with a very sharp knife cut it as thin as possible, and keep it in a dry place. It will run up like little worms, as vermicella does; though the best way is to run it through a coarse sieve, whilst the paste is soft. If you want some to be made in haste, dry it by the fire, and cut it small. It will dry by the fire in a quarter of an hour. This far exceeds what comes from abroad, being fresher.

Photo copyright 2012 Susan Holloway Scott.

Update: Quite by coincidence, History is Served, the Colonial Williamsburg Historic Foodways blog, posted a recipe today for how "To Stuff a Chine of Pork", in both an 18th c. version and a modern interpretation. This isn't the recipe that is pictured above, but still looks mighty tasty!

New Year's Day Calls in New York, 1847 & 1870

Isabella reporting:

While this description of a New Year's Day from 1847 is nearly contemporary with the one (1854) in Loretta's post yesterday, the celebration couldn't be more different.

In the genteel society of early 19th c. New York, New Year's Day was observed with a ritual of polite calls. Gentlemen put on their best clothes, and one by one visited each of the ladies of their acquaintance. While this must have made for a busy day for the gentlemen – at least the popular ones – the ladies, too, had to offer a considerable repast to their callers. Etiquette advisors of the day stressed that this should be informal and light, but clearly much more was expected than today's beer and a bucket of wings served with a bowl game on the flat-screen, as this excerpt from a New York cookbook shows:

"In New York City, where it is the custom for ladies to remain at home to receive the calls of their gentlemen friends, there is not time nor occasion for dinner; should it be desirable, it would be similar to that for Christmas, or instead – a cold roasted turkey (bone it if you can), cold boiled ham or tongue, a large glass salad-bowl of pickled oysters, or an oyster pie with dressed celery or a chicken salad, with jelly puffs and tarts and small mince pies, blancmange, de russe and jellies and ice cream and fancy cakes, with syrup water and orgeat or lemonade for temperance, or wines and punch. The manner of celebrating New Year's day by calls, is a peculiarity of our own, and having so few which are 'native here,' many of our wisest and best, have wished that this might in no wise be slighted. Many a feud-divided family have been united, and misunderstanding friends have been brought together, under the all-pervading hospitality and genial influence which distinguishes the day."

                                      ––The American System of Cookery, Mrs. T.J. Crowen, 1847

As charming as this tradition sounds, its days were already numbered. In Edith Wharton's short story New Year's Day, set in New York in the 1870s, the New Year's calls have become a nearly-forgotten curiosity:

"Even then fashion moved quickly in New York, and my infantile memory barely reached back to the time when Grandmamma, in lace lappets and creaking moire, used to receive on New Year's Day, supported by her handsome married daughters. As for old Sillerton Jackson, who, once a social custom had dropped into disuse, always affected never to have observed it, he stoutly maintained that the New Year's Day ceremonial had never been taken seriously except among families of Dutch descent, and that that was why Mrs. Henry van der Luyden had clung to it, in a reluctant half-apologetic way, long after her friends had closed their doors on the first of January, and the date had been chosen for those out-of-town parties which are so often used as a pretext for absence when the unfashionable are celebrating their rites."
                                    ––New Year's Day, by Edith Wharton, 1924

Above: Detail, Fashions for 1845, by S.A. & A.F.Ward. Collection of Library Company of Philadelphia

Friday Excess: Thanksgiving Dinner, 1900

Isabella reporting,

If you are feeling diner's remorse today, rest assured that whatever you ate at your Thanksgiving dinner can't hold a candle to the quantity that prosperous New Yorkers consumed for Thanksgiving in November, 1900.

This is a menu for the holiday dinner from the Park Avenue Hotel, New York. I hope you'll click on the image and enlarge to read the staggering variety of offerings. The traditional turkey is almost lost amidst the two kinds of oysters, suckling pig, larded tenderloin of beef, boiled Kennebec salmon, sweetbreads with trifles, saddle of lamb, potted quail....

Left: Thanksgiving Day Dinner [held by] Park Avenue Hotel, New York, NY, November, 1900. From the Rare Books Division, New York Public Library.