Northern Hospitality: Cooking by the Book in New England

Chapter Fourteen: Breads and Cakes

chapter fourteen • Breads฀and฀Cakes 348 Caroline Howard King, reminiscing about the foods of her Salem, Massachusetts, childhood in the 1820s and ’30s, recounts that “pancakes also were great favorites, made of batter, sometimes raised with new-fallen snow, and eaten with sugar and wine or lemon. Then for tea, we had flapjacks, which were large griddle cakes often made with rice, which were cut in four quarters and eaten with powdered sugar and cinnamon. And pandowdy, a dark brown mixture of baked bread and apples, rich with spices, and sweetened with molasses. And brewis, which was little crusty bits of brownbread stewed in cream, and best of all every Sunday night a ‘nimble cake,’ light and flaky, which was baked on a board before an open fire . . . and in winter always buckwheat cakes every morning.” breads and cakes • 349 As King’s account illustrates, milled cereals such as rice, wheat, and buckwheat (as well as corn, which we will discuss below) were regularly transformed into mouthwatering pancakes and bread puddings. King and her contemporaries happily consumed flapjacks, fire cakes, and brewis throughout the day, with fruit, spices, sweeteners, and sweet wine added to the batter. The appeal of these readily prepared treats is easy to understand. Using bread crumbs and grains to thicken and flavor dishes was nothing new, as we’ve just seen with puddings. Frumenty, a wheat porridge made with meat broth or milk; wine possets made up with bread crumbs and egg whites; and crisp gingerbread of fine wheat crumbs, honey, and spices were among the glories of the English diet. The taste for porridgelike mixtures that included wheat, barley, or oats was brought by the first settlers to Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. But in the harsh weather and harsher soil of their new home, the English found that their favorite grains did not grow well. So the old formulas for the best foods were quickly adapted for use with the one field crop that not only withstood the region’s environmental challenges but flourished—Indian corn. John Winthrop Jr. reports regarding “sampe,” that simple dish of hulled and stewed corn that makes an appearance in these pages as Chapter 5, #9: “This was the most common diet of the planters, at the first beginning of planting in these parts and is still in use amongst them . . . [Samp] into which if Milke, or butter be put either with Sugar or without, it is a food very pleasant and wholesome . . . after it is Cold it groweth thicker, and it is Eaten commonly by mixing a good Quantity of Milke amongst it.” We might be excused for taking Winthrop’s endorsement of this “very pleasant and wholesome” food (which grows even thicker when cold!) with a grain of salt—not to mention with milk, butter, and sugar. But a positive association was formed between this stick-to-your-ribs dish and New Englanders’ stick-to-itiveness. Thus Winthrop would have had no trouble in recognizing a twentiethcentury New England recipe for “Hominy Cakes.” These were composed of cold, leftover hominy (as discussed in Chapter 5, a de-germed and de-hulled gritlike corn dish), beaten eggs, and butter, the whole thing fried “like griddle cakes.” These “cakes,” like the frumenties, brewis, hearth breads, and samps they are related to, illustrate that the culinary distinctions we take for granted were not always so firm. For countless 350 • part 2. recipes and commentaries generations of New England cooks, cake, bread, and even puddings were categories as fluid as the batters of which they were made. Despite their appeal, these slighter products of the hearth and stove always played second fiddle to the most desirable of grain-based foods— oven-baked yeast breads made with wheat. Unfortunately, the region’s yearning for wheat bread to accompany the evening’s salt pork or the morning’s fried fish was not matched by a favorable climate and topography . Rye and barley grew fairly well, but even these grains failed to thrive as they had in Britain. The one grain that grew readily was native Indian corn, and so the New England tradition of making the most of it, both literally and figuratively, took hold. Among the first products of these conditions was an item of diet that became one of the most cherished, and occasionally vilified, foods of the region, a cross between the Old World yeast breads and the New...