The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America

4 Boarders' Beefs

chapter four Boarders’ Beefs A BOARDING-HOUSE COLLOQUY:— Landlady (deferentially). Mr. Smith, do you not suppose that the first steamboat created much surprise among the fish when it was first launched? Smith (curtly). I can’t say, marm, whether it did or not. Landlady. Oh, I thought from the way you eyed the fish before you, that you might acquire some information on that point. Smith (the malicious villain). Very likely, marm, very likely; but it’s my opinion, marm, that this fish left its native element before steamboats were invented. Godey’s Lady’s Book (April 1873) At the boarding house where I live Everything is growing old Long grey hairs upon the butter Everything is green with mold When the dog died, we had sausage When the cat died, catnip tea When the landlord died, I left there Spareribs were too much for me “ At the Boarding House,” anonymous, undated song, sung to the tune of “Silver Threads among the Gold” (1873) Boarders suffered numerous indignities. They endured cramped bedchambers , soiled linens, and dirty carpets. Rats and “determined cannibal insects” “promenaded” through their rooms at night.1 But worst of all was the food. The real and imagined deficiencies of boardinghouse fare—immortalized in innumerable stories, jokes, and even songs—inspired a colorful folklore and an equally colorful vocabulary: “hirsute butter,” “damaged coffee,” “ancient bread,” “azure milk,” “antediluvian pies.” One satirist claimed to have been served “the fossil remains of an omnibus horse.” Others wrote of apple dumplings with “crusts so tough” they “require[d] . . . axe[s] or cleaver[s] to cut” them, watery soup, over-salted butter, dry toast, and “apple-pie with crust like sole leather.” Still another suggested that boardinghouse potatoes might make good “cannon-ball substitutes.”2 Social commentators spilled more ink on food than on any other aspect of boardinghouse life. Perhaps food, with its intrinsic variety, offered humorists greater latitude and creativity (for discussions of boardinghouse food were almost always comic); even writers who admitted that boardinghouses generally served good plain food could rarely resist descending into parody. Perhaps jaded bachelors, who might be expected to overlook faulty housekeeping, cared more about their stomachs than their surroundings. Perhaps, more important, food—“board”—stood at the heart of boardinghouse experience; daily meals at a common table distinguished boarding from lodging and other living arrangements. Perhaps, most important of all, food, its quantity and quality, reflected landladies’ real and perceived obsession with economy. And economy underscored boardinghouses’ association with the market, reminding residents that they lived in houses, not homes. As with other aspects of boarding life, the story was not so simple. Home and work, love and money proved not inseparable but hopelessly intertwined. Cuisine “Our chief objection applies all most universally to the cuisine of BoardingHouses ,” explained Thomas Butler Gunn in his Physiology of New York Boarding-Houses. Gunn made his point by intentionally employing what he considered an oxymoron. Boardinghouses might serve eats, vittles, or simply food but never anything approximating cuisine. And according to nineteenthcentury cultural logic, they could not. Presided over by “avaricious” landladies motivated by “interest,” not affection,” boardinghouses sheltered strangers, not private families. Interest tarnished everything it touched, turning cleanliness into filth, order into disorder, and exposing otherwise private homes to the glare of publicity. If boardinghouses offered unappealing victuals, homes—in theory at least—served delectable meals. Claims to the superiority of home cooking—a term that seems not to come into general usage until the twentieth century—rested on especially shaky ground. European travelers routinely commented on the mediocrity of American food; Americans them-  The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America selves rarely admired their national cuisine.3 If boardinghouses bore a closer resemblance to homes than many analysts cared to admit, there is good reason to believe that the vittles dished up in boardinghouses were not so very different from the food served in homes. Nevertheless, nineteenth-century commentators considered boardinghouse food a distinct species. They wrote of “boarder’s beef” as if the beef served to boarders came from an entirely different type of cow. They evoked the “painfully intense . . . odor of boarding-house vegetables.” They pondered the mysterious contents of boardinghouse hash and the unidentifiable “Sunday vegetable.”4 Yet, the extent to which boardinghouse “cuisine” deviated from all but the most refined American diets is open to question. Most urban boardinghouses, like most homes—at least until the end of the...