Northern Hospitality: Cooking by the Book in New England

Introduction

1 Cookbooks are big business. Titles in the America’s Test Kitchen series regularly show up on the best-seller lists, and The Joy of Cooking, a fixture in American middle-class households for two generations, could still become a best seller in its 2006, seventy-fifth-anniversary incarnation . Anyone who has ever worked in a public library, as we both have, knows that cookbooks rank near the top when such libraries’ collections are evaluated in terms of the types of materials that are most frequently checked out. The reading public’s love affair with cookbooks is aptly summarized in a recent article in The Economist, where it is observed that “even a medium-sized bookshop contains many more recipes than one person could hope to cook in a lifetime.”1 The popularity of cookbooks is nothing new. Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery, now generally considered the first American cookbook , was reprinted (not to mention plagiarized) for almost thirty years after its initial publication in 1796. Simmons’s successor as a widely read New England cookbook author was Lydia Maria Child, whose American Frugal Housewife (originally The Frugal Housewife) went through thirtyone editions between 1829 and 1845. In 1843, Child was lauded by a • Introduction 2 • introduction New Hampshire farming periodical as having “won unfading laurels” for her cookbook, in that it contained the type of material “which is calculated to benefit the greatest number.”2 Similar success stories can be told about eighteenth-century British cookbooks. Of the three best-selling works of that era, E. Smith’s The Compleat Housewife remained in print for nearly half a century, while Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy and Elizabeth Raffald’s The Experienced English House-keeper were both, like The Joy of Cooking, extant in current editions almost seventy-five years after their initial publications. All three were published in North American editions. Cookbooks of past times such as these, which are known to have been in great demand, constitute valuable historical evidence. However, it is evidence that must be used with caution. As some culinary historians have emphasized, cookbooks do not directly hold the mirror up to dietary reality. Until quite recently, their content reflected almost exclusively “the fare of the . . . well-fed.” Most of the people of nineteenth-century America, for example, “had no time or wealth to exercise the kinds of prescribed refinements or self-conscious style promoted by the Beechers or Sarah J. Hale”—that is, Harriet Beecher Stowe, her sister Catharine Beecher, and the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book.3 But that doesn’t mean that such people wouldn’t have liked to have had the time and wealth to engage in the elegant cookery offered in the works of these and other authors of the era. Since ancient times, bread made with the highest grade of wheat was consumed on a regular basis only by the upper classes. For just as long—in other words, well before the invention of the printing press began the process of making cookbooks widely available—people of the lower classes also wanted to eat bread of this type. And there was more to this than just the fact that bread made with “clean wheat” tasted better. To eat the bread of the upper classes was to partake to some small degree of the upper-class way of life. The invention of printing and with it the ever-broadening dissemination of cookbooks further stimulated this symbolic role of food and cooking as an expression of social aspiration. This is what primarily accounts for the popularity of cookbooks throughout the modern era.4 So the cookbooks of past times tell us what a few well-off people actually ate, and in so doing these books give us clues about what a great introduction • 3 many more people wanted to eat, or were being encouraged to want to eat. We can see the latter dynamic at work in our own society. Consider the difference between the McDonald’s menu of today, on which salads and “gourmet” coffee are offered alongside the burgers and fries, with the fare offered by this same fast-food behemoth just a few years ago, when little beyond the burgers, fries, and ordinary coffee were to be had. Or take a walk down the aisles of any supermarket and measure the amount of shelf space devoted to “international...