Northern Hospitality: Cooking by the Book in New England

Chapter Three: Cuisine and Culture at Midcentury: Sarah Josepha Hale and Catharine Beecher

65 ฀ Our next writer was what her century might have called a “true New Englander.” What they would have meant was that Sarah Josepha Hale was white, Protestant, middle class, and from a rural (in her case New Hampshire) farming family. It would only add to her pedigree that the patriarch of her family had fought in the American War for Independence. Hale was born and raised in Newport, New Hampshire, growing up on a farm but moving as a young adult to town when the family exchanged the hardships of farm life for tavern keeping. Her father, Gordon Buell, had served as an officer of the Continental Army under General Horatio Gates. Her brother Horatio, presumably named for her father’s commanding officer, was a Dartmouth graduate. After teaching school for several years, Sarah Josepha Buell married the young and dashing David Hale, an up-and-coming lawyer who had recently taken up residence in her hometown.1 Like the other American women in our story, Hale was moved by personal financial hardship to become a writer and eventually a writer chapter three • Cuisine฀and฀Culture฀ at฀Midcentury Sarah Josepha Hale and Catharine Beecher 66 • part 1. cooks and cookbooks of cookbooks. In her case, money problems followed the sudden death of her relatively young husband, who left her with five small children to support. Hale, like her contemporary Lydia Maria Child, took readily to writing and, also like Child, to writing across genres as different as novels , poetry, and domestic guides. Her literary career, once started, never ceased. She even found time to compile a thousand-page biographical dictionary of women. Her first book, The Genius of Oblivion, published in 1823 with the help of her deceased husband’s Masonic friends, was an unremarkable (and largely unsold) collection of poems. Success came four years later with the publication of her novel Northwood; A Tale of New England, whose themes of slavery and sectional differences struck a chord with the reading public. Set largely in “a New England country village” in her beloved “Old Granite State,” the book helped establish the nineteenth-century stereotype of the thrifty, morally upright New Englander whose values and manner of living derived from small-scale farming. As we have just seen, this was the same ideological project on which Child would soon be embarking in her Frugal Housewife. Hale wrote in a foreword to the novel ’s twenty-fifth-anniversary edition that she had received many favorable notices for “the portraitures of American character . . . particularly that phase generally known as the Yankee. The habits and tone of feeling characterizing the real yeomanry of this class are nowhere so clearly marked as in New Hampshire. There, the Farmers are really lords of the soil.” She brought these lords of the soil to life.2 Although a successful novelist and prolific writer in many forms, Hale, once again like Child, did not hew strictly to the writer’s path. In her case, it was not advocacy of social causes but rather work as an editor that drew her away from writing. Shortly after publishing Northwood, she took the helm of The Ladies’ Magazine, published in Boston, one of the earliest successful journals for women. Less than a decade later, as part of a merger between this periodical and Godey’s Lady’s Book, she became the latter’s editor in chief. Her tenure at Godey’s lasted for a remarkable forty years, from 1837 to 1877, a record even by the nineteenth century’s unhurried standards.3 Under Hale’s editorial leadership (the magazine’s owner, publisher, and namesake, Louis A. Godey, wisely confined himself to the management of business affairs), Godey’s became the gold standard for American wom- cuisine and culture at midcentury • 67 en’s magazines, a vehicle for good literature and an organ of social influence . Through Godey’s Hale not only helped to mold American fashions in clothing, house design, furnishings, manners, child-rearing, and food, she also played a role in forming the contours of the American literary landscape, publishing the stories and poems of Hawthorne, Longfellow, Emerson, Stowe, Whittier, and Poe, among others.4 In yet another parallel with Child, Hale is now best known as the Engraving from a portrait of Sarah Josepha Hale by W. B. Chambers, Godey’s Lady’s Book, December 1850. (Courtesy the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University) 68 • part...