Stirring the Pot with Benjamin Franklin by Rae Katherine Eighmey (review)

There is much to admire about Rae Katherine Eighmey's culinary biography of Benjamin Franklin. Although the book will appeal to a wide variety of readers, the text is most ideally suited for a popular audience interested in attempting to recapture some of the lost tastes of the past than, for example, scholars of early American history.

Eighmey's achievement in mining the archive of Franklin's writings and household records for clues about what he and members of his household ate throughout his long life is impressive. Equally significant is Eighmey's culinary sleuthing. She scoured a wide variety of contemporary sources to help her make educated guesses when Franklin's own records were insufficient for the task of figuring out what he was eating at any given period in his life. Sometimes using only the slimmest clues, Eighmey gives her readers detailed insights into the nature of comparative colonial American fare as well as about the English and French cuisine of the era. For example, she notes that when young Franklin traveled from Boston to Philadelphia in 1723, he was surprised to discover that residents of the latter city ate "puffy rolls" instead of a firmer Boston-style "bisquit" (13). Using a method that she employs throughout her research, Eighmey turned to English cookbooks from the period for clues about what the biscuits of Franklin's New England childhood looked and tasted like, ultimately determining that they were probably twice baked, slightly sweetened treats "rather like modern biscotti" (26).

Stirring the Pot with Benjamin Franklin will particularly appeal to fans of historical reenactments and living history demonstrations because Eighmey is tireless in her quest to replicate the smells, tastes, and even the physical sensations of the eighteenth century. She diligently describes the details of her research process to her readers. Because Franklin's father was a candle maker, Eighmey was inspired to spend hours laboriously making handmade candles from beef tallow, rejoicing that at the end of the messy task she had produced "ugly candles" that "burned beautifully" (19). However, she is also realistic about the limitations of replicating techniques and recipes from the past. Throughout the text, she provides readers with modernized eighteenth-century recipes, which utilize current technology and acknowledge problems accessing historical ingredients. For example, she notes that cooks interested in making her recipe for "Sodden Sallett" (mixed greens coated in a warm dressing) could substitute white wine and lemon for verjuice (the juice of unripened grapes); however, she warns that doing so, though practical, "won't do this amazing salad justice" (88). With less ambivalence, in her recipe for "Ragu of 'Mutton,'" she empowers American cooks who cannot find a source for sheep flesh to use beef instead (86).

Due to the limitations of the source material Eighmey had to work with, this culinary biography of Franklin is somewhat uneven. For example, due to the scarcity of concrete evidence, she is left to speculate about what Franklin's wife Deborah may have cooked or purchased for her young family in the 1730s. Describing her methods, she explains, "As I looked through recipes from the era in period cookbooks in manuscript collections, I thought about Deborah's everyday life" (76). In contrast to her need to make guesses about Deborah's favorite recipes, Eighmey found the resources needed to describe definitively what Franklin and his household ate while he was living in Paris in the 1780s. Thanks to the detailed records kept by the servant in charge of the kitchen, Eighmey was able to reconstruct such a detailed portrait of the menus that she was able to conclude that during 1783, 80 percent of the animal protein Franklin ate was red meat and that he consumed much smaller portions of fish and chicken (230).

Throughout this unabashedly celebratory biography, Eighmey conveys a general light-heartedness by sometimes using food puns and metaphors. Readers are told that Franklin "stirred the pot over his long...