A Bicentennial Banquet

Salem was founded in 1626: its tricentenary was very much a big deal, celebrated with myriad events over several weeks and its quatercentenary is already on the horizon. I don’t know anything about its centennial, but its bicentennial was marked with at least one event (and probably more): an elaborate banquet at Hamilton Hall presented by the in-house caterer, John Remond. No doubt his wife Nancy, a “fancy cake maker” contributed much to the event, as well as his children. Catering and provisioning constituted the family business for this prominent free black family, along with hair dressing and unflagging advocacy for abolition. Despite the fact that 1826 would have been the bicentennial year, the feast actually happened on September 18, 1828: a bill of lading in the Remond Papers at the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum indicates that Mr. Remond had received a delivery of “one large green turtle” just a week before, a valuable commodity that must have ended up in his first courses of green turtle soup and green turtle pie.

The dish that really stands out for me on this elaborate menu is pigeons transmogrified: not being a culinary historian it seems rather exotic to me, and I wondered if this could be Remond’s original creation. No way: it’s in nearly all of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century cookbooks, apparently a classic. Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy (first published in 1747 and never out of print over the next century), the Joy of Cooking of its era, contains a recipe for Pigeons Transmogrified, as does Elizabeth Raffald’s Experienced English Housekeeper (1769) and all of their imitators. There were basically two recipes for this dish, as you can see below: one which encased the pigeons in puff pastry and another encasing them in cucumbers. I think the former represents the straightforward English cooking presented by Mrs. Glasse and the latter is more French-inspired, and I’m not sure which version was prepared by Mr. Remond in 1828. In any case, his guests, all 170 of them, had plenty of other choices if their preferences did not include pigeons.

John Remond’s menu for the bicentennial dinner at Hamilton Hall, Remond Papers, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum (accessed via American Broadsides and Ephemera);  title pages of Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy and  variant recipes for Pigeons Transmogrified.