Publication Details
First published by Greenwood Press in 2006, American Cooking is now available through Bloomsbury Publishing.
Excerpted from the Introduction
This cookbook covers the years 1840 through 1945, a time during which American cookery underwent a full-scale revolution. Gas and electric stoves replaced hearth cookery. The time of year and location became decreasingly connected to the ingredients used in home cooking; canned, bottled, and eventually frozen products flooded the market and trains began to transport produce and meat from one end of the country to the other. During two World Wars and the Great Depression women entered the work force in unprecedented numbers and household servants abandoned low-paying domestic jobs to work in factories. As a result of these monumental changes, American home cooking became irrevocably simplified and cookery skills geared more towards juggling time to comb grocery store shelves for the best and most economical products than towards butchering and preserving an entire animal carcass or pickling fruits and vegetables.
The following collection of recipes reflects these changes, with each of the three chapters capturing the home cooking that typified the era. The first chapter covers the pre-industrial period from 1840 to 1875. During this time, home cooks knew how to broil, roast, grill, fry, and boil on an open-hearth flame. They also handled whole sheep carcasses, made gelatin from boiled pigs’ trotters, grew their own yeast, and prepared their own preserves. Visitors to the United States frequently commented on the abundance and variety of available foods. They also commented on the enormous quantities served to and eaten by Americans. The flesh of game and domestic animals and birds abounded as did many spices that virtually disappeared from the mainstream mid-twentieth century kitchen. Due to the large amount of meat eaten in relation to vegetables, dyspepsia (a general term used for a range of gastrointestinal disorders) became a national curse. In response, nutritional experts, much like their contemporaries today, encouraged Americans to eat less meat and consume more vegetables and whole grains. Beginning as far back as the 1830s, American health reformers, such as Sylvester Graham, advocated vegetarianism. His message became so widespread that recipes for Graham (also known as dyspepsia) bread abounded; these loaves are still common today, although they are better known as whole grain or whole wheat.
The second chapter covers 1876 through 1910, a time when rapid urbanization transformed the United States from an agrarian society into an industrial giant, giving rise to food corporations such as Armour, Swift, Campbell’s, Heinz, and Pillsbury. The mass-production and mass-marketing of commercial foods began to transform home cooking; meat could be purchased from a local butcher or grocery store and commercial gelatin became widely available. While many cooks still made their own pickles and preserves, commercial varieties multiplied. Crops grown on one side of the country could now be shipped across the nation, leading to the development of new types of produce, such as iceberg lettuce, that could withstand rougher treatment than traditional varieties. As a result, home cooks became less dependent on the season and the region in which they cooked. East Coast cooks could buy West Coast vegetables and vice versa, and landlocked regions could enjoy fish caught in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
From 1910 to 1945, the period covered by Chapter 3, the home cook became a full-fledged consumer and the national food supply became standardized to a large extent. A select number of brands and cultivars began to dominate the nation’s grocery store aisles and produce stands. The consumption of dairy almost doubled during this period. This rise resulted from the boom in commercial production and also from the growing accessibility of refrigeration. As the industrialization of the American food supply progressed, commercially produced breads, pastries, sauces, pickles, and preserves began to take over kitchen cupboards. Twentieth-century recipes increasingly relied on commercial products, such as canned soups, vegetables, and fruits. Meals also became far simpler and the number of courses declined, as servants began to disappear from middle-class homes; by the 1930s a soup, casserole, and fruit pie could serve as dinner instead of the elaborate array of soup, fish, roast meat, vegetable, side, and dessert dishes that typified the nineteenth-century middle-class table. Simultaneously, ethnic influences expanded the flavors of the mainstream American melting pot to include such ingredients as bean sprouts, avocados, paprika, spaghetti, olives, and olive oil.
Recipe Selection:
The recipes found in these three sections have been culled from some of the most popular commercial and community cookbooks of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; a modest number of recipes have been collected from popular ladies’ magazines, city newspapers, and unpublished family recipe collections. Taken together, the recipes included in each chapter reflect the major cookbook trends of the era. The first section, which covers 1840–1875, includes recipes from three of the earliest American cookbooks: Mary Randolph’s The Virginia Housewife (1824); Lydia Maria Child’s The American Frugal Housewife (1833); and Eliza Leslie’s Directions for Cookery (1837).
Part 2: 1876–1910 reflects the rise of community cookbooks, including recipes from such classic regional collections as The First Texas (1883), The Settlement (1901), and The Buckeye (1905) cookbooks. It also includes recipes from the second known cookbook by an African American woman, Abby Fisher's What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking (1881), and the first cookbook written by an Hispanic in the United States—Encarnacion Pinedo's Encarnacion’s Kitchen: Mexican Recipes from Nineteenth-Century California (1898). Part 3: 1911–1945 reflects the rise of male-authored domestic cookbooks and bears witness to the deprivations exacted by two World Wars and the Great Depression.
A comparison of the recipes in Chapter 1 with those in Chapter 3 illustrates the enormous changes in American life that occurred from the Civil War era through World War II. While a home cook in the early 1800s typically knew how to process pig caracasses from snout to tail, carve a calf’s head, and cure meat, home cooks in the 1930s were learning how to distinguish the best commercial food brands and to concoct entire meals from boxes, jars, and cans. An increasing reliance on the food industry to supply our daily meals resulted in an American dining table increasingly weighted with commercially prepared foods, including bread, snack foods, soups and stews, instant cake mixes, and frozen dinners. Alongside this trend, however, competing movements were beginning to bud in the American culinary scene—a craving for gourmet foods, a curiosity about ethnic cuisines, and a longing for sustainable agriculture; each of these movements would blossom in the 1960s.