Recent Foodsville Articles by karen

Absinthe makes a comeback

karenl@awb.com — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 13:01:25

Thought all you literary types might find the attached link of interest. Perhaps we should have a Foodsville event...an absinthe tasting combined with a showing of Van Gogh pictures and a Hemingway reading:Â Â

http://www.wbur.org/news/2007/72547_20071120.aspÂ

Miss Beecher's Housekeeper and Healthkeeper

karenl@awb.com — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 15:19:36

The nineteenth-century was a time of enormous social upheaval in America. Having passed through the political tumult of the Revolutionary War era and established the political frameworks that would govern this country, it seemed as if America’s educated elite could finally begin to concentrate their energies on the social structures and precepts that would dominate this land. Nowhere was this more evident than in the realm of education and, specifically, women’s education.

A proto-typical New England family, the Beechers, dominated nineteenth-century politics, religion, literature, and social reform. Daughter of noted clergyman and social reformer Lyman Beecher and sister to Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe and prominent clergyman, social reformer and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, Catharine Esther Beecher was herself a noted educator and women’s rights advocate. One can easily imagine the literary and social arguments with which Miss Beecher was raised and the ways in which these discussions would have colored her world view.

The religious ideals with which she was raised were those of Evangelical Protestantism, in which human behavior was directly linked to salvation. In the domestic world, this meant that men and women had specific roles and functions within society, with men functioning in the political world and women in the domestic, with responsibility for the household and children. While this delineation of roles was nothing new, what was unique about this time was that women were encouraged to believe that successfully managing the home had a greater status…it could get them into heaven.

Working within the social conditions laid out in her time, Miss Beecher's Housekeeper is radical in its assumption that women can and should be the educator of children, both in the home and professionally. By advocating the need for women to be well-educated from an early age in order to pass on appropriate virtues to their own children, she was able to extend this idea to advocate for women to professionally teach other children as well. One of the primary ways in which women would be able to educate their children would be in the proper maintenance of the home. It is with this aim that Catharine Beecher published in 1873, her most famous work, Miss Beecher's Housekeeper and Healthkeeper.

Neither purely a cookbook nor simply a household management text, Miss Beecher’s Housekeeper is divided into two sections: the first contains numerous recipes and practical instructions for setting tables, preserving food, and cleaning the house; the second emphasizes the training required for a woman to run her own home—with sections on building and construction, watching expenses, health, exercise, nutrition, care of the aged, care of animals, and comfort for a discouraged housewife. Social commentary and helpful hints are sprinkled throughout the text, and one gets the feeling that advice is being passed on in motherly, encouraging terms.

She advocates for proper “habits of system and order”:
No woman has a right to put a stitch of ornament on any article of dress or furniture, or to provide one superfluity in food, until she is sure she can secure time for all her social, intellectual, benevolent, and religious duties. If a woman will take the trouble to make such a calculation as this, she will usually find that she has time enough to perform all her duties easily "and well. (p. 291)

And at the same time, she provides recipes for Soup Stock, Oyster Omelets, “Third Bread,” or Apple Pie.

From Page 36 (read original here):
•   Soup stock is broth of any kind of meat prepared in large quantity, to keep on hand for gravies and soups. Beef and veal make the best stock. One hind shin of beef makes five quarts of stock, and one hind shin of veal makes three quarts.
•   Wash and put into twice as much water as you wish to, to have soup, and simmer five or six hours.
•   All kinds of bones should be mashed and boiled five or six hours, to take out all the nutriment, the liquor then strained, and kept in earthenware or stone, not in tin. Take off the fat when cool.
•   Cool broth quickly, and it keeps longer.
•   Use a flat-bottom kettle, as less likely to scorch.
•   Soft water is best for soups; a little soda improves hard water.
•   Stock will keep three or four days in cool weather; not so long in warm. Keep it in a cool place. When used, heat to boiling point, and then take up and flavor.
•   Put in the salt and pepper when the meat is thoroughly done.
•   Meat soups are best the second day, if warmed slowly and taken up as soon as heated. If heated too long, they become insipid.
•   Thin soups must be strained. If to be made very clear, stir in one or two well beaten eggs, with the shells, and let it boil half an hour.
•   Use the meat of the soup for a hash, warmed together with a little fat, and well seasoned.
•   Be very careful, in using bones and cold meats for soups, that none is tainted, for the soup may be ruined by a single bit of tainted meat or bone.

From Page 58 (read original here):
Oyster Omelet, (very fine.) Take twelve large oysters chopped fine. Mix the beaten yolks of six eggs into a tea-cupful of milk, and add the oysters. Then put in a spoonful of melted butter, and lastly add the whites of the eggs beaten to a stiff froth. Fry this in hot butter or salted lard and do not stir it while cooking. Slip a knife around the edges while cooking, that the centre may cook equally, and turn it out so that the brown side be uppermost.

From Page 68 (read original here):
Third Bread. This is made with equal parts of rye, corn-meal, and unbolted flour. To one quart of warm water add one tea-spoonful of salt, half a cup of distillery or twice as much home-brewed yeast, and half a cup of molasses, and thicken with equal parts of these three kinds of flour. It is very good for a variety.

From Page 76 (read original here):
Best Apple-Pie. Take a deep dish, the size of a soup-plate, fill it heaping with peeled tart apples, cored and quartered; pour over it one tea-cup of molasses, and three great-spoonfuls of sugar, dredge over this a considerable quantity of flour, enough to thicken the sirup a good deal. Cover it with a crust made of cream, if you have it; if not, common dough, with butter worked in, or plain pie-crust, lapping the edge over the dish, and pinching it down tight, to keep the sirup from running out. Bake about an hour and a half. Make several at once, as they keep well.

The Blue Grass Cook Book (1904)

karenl@awb.com — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 21:10:04

The Blue Grass Cook Book, published originally in 1904, is a loving testament to the power of food-inspired memory, while being evocative of the sights, smells, and tastes of Kentucky in the 1900s. This book should be remembered, not just because the recipes were compiled by Minnie Fox, the mother of John Fox, Jr., American journalist, novelist, and short story writer, but also on its own merits. Fox gained a following as a war correspondent, working for Harper's Weekly in Cuba during the Spanish-American War of 1898, where he served with the "Rough Riders." Six years later, he traveled to the Orient to report on the Russo-Japanese War for Scribner's magazine. It was from this post in Japan that Fox, Jr. wrote the introduction to his mother’s book. A compilation of heirloom recipes from Kentucky and Virginia, the book was groundbreaking in its celebration of the vital role Black women played in building and sustaining the tradition of Southern cooking and Southern hospitality. As Fox, Jr. noted in his Introduction:

“All honor then to that turbaned mistress of the Kentucky kitchen—the Kentucky cook. She came to the Blue Grass from Virginia more than a hundred years ago, swift on the flying feet of the Indian. She was broad, portly, kind of heart, though severe of countenance, as befitted her dignity, and usually quick of temper and sharp of tongue. Her realm was not limited to the kitchen. She disputed the power of "mammy" in the drawing-room, and there were times when all, black and white, bowed down before her….As far as I know she has never got her just due….Publicly I acknowledge an everlasting debt, and to that turbaned mistress of the Kentucky kitchen gratefully this Southerner takes off his hat.”

While Fox’s celebration of slavery and the place of the black women in the plantation kitchen certainly is full of problematic social assumptions, this book is unique for its time in its recognition of these women—giving them their “due” was not something generally done within literature, culinary or not, at the time.

Despite this issue, the book is a joy to read for it is full of authentically regional Kentucky recipes, from the ubiquitous Mint Julep to the five different recipes for curing ham. While brain croquettes may not be on everyone's menu today, there are few who can resist the ten variations on corn bread, or the multiplicity of recipes for biscuits, or the wealth of ice cream flavors and desserts. While some of the recipes (such as the Peach Ice Cream below) call for some kitchen experience, presupposing the cook will have an understanding of basic kitchen skills, the majority of these recipes can easily be reproduced in today’s home kitchens. And while they may not always be the most dietetic (many call for frying in lard or for large amounts of cream and butter), this is Southern cooking at its homiest best.

PENDENNIS CLUB MINT JULEP
(Print this Recipe)

By a well-known member of the club, Louisville, Ky.
These are some essentials:
1st. Fine, straight, old Kentucky Bourbon whisky-blended whiskies do not give good results.
2d. An abundant supply of freshly cut sprigs of mint—preferably young shoots—no portion of which has been bruised.
3d. Dry, cracked flint ice. A glass will answer the purpose, but a silver mug is preferable. At this club, silver cups are kept on ice. A syrup of sugar and water is also kept on hand.

The silver cup is first filled with the ice, and then the desired quantity of fine whisky poured in and thoroughly shaken with a spoon or shaker until a heavy frost forms on the mug. The desired amount of syrup is then poured in and stirred enough to be mixed. The mint is then carefully placed in the mugs with the stems barely sticking in the ice and the tops projecting 2 inches above the top of the cup. Straws are then placed in the cup, reaching from the bottom to about 1 inch above the top, and the sooner one sticks one's nose in the mint and begins drinking through the straws the better. There is no flavor of mint, merely the odor.
Any stinting in quality or quantity materially affects the result.

MARCELLUS’S PEACH ICE CREAM
1 gallon rich cream
½ gallon ripe peaches and juice of a lemon
1 pound or more of sugar, the amount depends on the sweetness of the fruit.

Make a syrup as in other recipes, and when cold add the cream and put in the freezer. Mash the peaches and add the lemon and a little sugar. When the cream is half frozen, add the fruit and freeze. Very good.

KENTUCKY BAKED HAM
E. D. P.

Take a good magnolia ham 1 or 2 years old and let it soak 36 hours. Make a stiff dough of flour and water and envelop the ham and put in a baking-pan. Add enough water to keep from sticking. Baste frequently and cook till thoroughly done, or till the hock can be removed 5 or 6 hours. When done, skin it and make an icing of brown sugar and yolk of 1 egg, and cover top and grate bread-crumbs over. Put in oven and brown.