Northern Hospitality: Cooking by the Book in New England

Chapter Four: The Civil War and After: Community Cookbooks, Colonial Revival, Domestic Science

93 By now we can see that industrialization and consolidation of resources, on the one hand, and nostalgia for a past that was imagined as disciplined, pastoral, and more humanly cohesive, on the other, were the warp and weft of the fabric of New England life in the nineteenth century and as such formed the social circumstances out of which the idea of a particular and noteworthy New England style of cooking emerged. We know further that beginning among wealthy Americans in the 1820s, and spreading like concentric circles outward to ever larger segments of society, domestic change was felt throughout the century in everything from eggbeaters to ovens, from the availability of fresh milk and meat to the disappearance of the homely fireside. In time, these changes—with the Civil War giving particular impetus to the process—would lead to the world of mass-produced and globally moved goods and services with which we are familiar. The disadvantages of the new social order, such as anonymity, homogenization, and economic insecurity, are now generally more commented upon by middleclass Americans than are the advantages. But from the inception of the chapter four • The฀Civil฀War฀and฀After Community Cookbooks, Colonial Revival, Domestic Science 94 • part 1. cooks and cookbooks Industrial Revolution until well into the twentieth century, Americans, and especially New England writers and intellectuals, domestic writers and cookbook creators among them, struggled quite explicitly to come to terms with all aspects of their new world, sometimes emphasizing its vast improvements and seemingly endless possibilities but at other times mourning the loss of a way of life in which everything from food to social relations was, or seemed, both richer and simpler. Sometimes, ironically, the developments that might seem to lead furthest from the imagined agrarian utopia of the past, as in the creation and expansion of the railroads, had the opposite effect of bringing agricultural bounty within the reach of average families living in the region’s small towns and expanding cities. In 1841, wealthy Bostonians endorsed building a railroad between Boston and Pittsfield, Massachusetts, as the best way to feed their urban workers at minimum expense. The new line, and others like it, had a stimulating effect on the markets for wheat, fruit, vegetables, dairy products, and meat. For example, the season during which strawberries , grapes, tomatoes, string beans, and peaches were on sale in Northern cities increased on average by three to four months between 1835 and 1865. Thus, the nostalgic and seemingly rarefied zeal for a vegetable and whole grain regimen espoused by such dietary reformers as Sylvester Graham and William Alcott was turned into a practical possibility by railroads, a pivotal feature of the otherwise past-obliterating Industrial Revolution.1 This is not to say that social reformers were wrong in suspecting that industrialization contributed to ill health of body and soul. Poor living and working conditions and many of the products of the industrialized food processes themselves were both the legitimate targets of temperance and health advocates who worried about the well-being of a population subsisting on denatured wheat, white sugar, fatty foods, and intoxicating beverages. Yet the expanding market in fresh foods was experienced as a veritable cornucopia by the majority in both town and country who had long gotten by on a diet of little more than starch, fat, and salt meat. To appreciate the change in circumstances, we might recall how the average New England breakfast table, a farmer’s table at that, appeared to a European visitor at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Constantin Volney wrote that farmers at breakfast “deluge their stomach with a quart of hot water, impregnated with tea, or so slightly with coffee that it is mere col- the civil war and after • 95 ored water; and they swallow, almost without chewing, hot bread, half baked, toast soaked in butter, cheese of the fattest kind, slices of salt or hung beef, ham, etc., all of which is nearly insoluble.” Dinner was no better , consisting of “boiled pastes under the name of puddings,” more melted butter, potatoes in hog’s lard, yet more butter or fat, and pumpkin pie in a pastry that was “nothing but a greasy paste, never sufficiently baked.”2 So increased mechanization as the century progressed resulted in a surplus that both delighted and perplexed. The sometimes salutary, sometimes damaging abundance produced by industrial processes was the overriding change...