Tag Archives: Recipes

What the Judge Ate

And drank. Today I have a new source (to me anyway) for food history: the diary of a Colonial judge who rode the circuit, keeping accounts of his tavern food and drink along the way. I’ve been immersed in Salem diaries for the past few weeks, preparing a talk I’ve giving for Salem Ancestry Days and the Pickering House on April 23. I’ve got diaries from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, and Judge Benjamin Lynde Sr.’s is one of the earliest. He’s an early transatlantic man: born in Salem in 1666, he was sent to England by his parents in his teens for an education. I don’t know if the law was the plan, but he ended up reading it at the Middle Temple in London, and when he returned to Masssachusetts he became the first judge in the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature with formal legal training. He became chief justice in 1729 and his son and namesake succeeded him later in the century, serving as one of the justices in the Boston Massacre trial. I think Benjamin Lynde Jr. lived in more interesting times but I find Benjamin Lynde Sr. more interesting!

Two very different views of Judge Lynde: by the Pollard Limner, c. 1730 (Peabody Essex Museum) and John Smibert, c. 1731 (Huntingdon Library).

Given his legal training and experience, you would think that Judge Lynde would analyze some of his trials in his diary but that is not the case: very few legal concepts are discussed, although the occasional execution is referencd. He is more forthcoming about his travels and his tavern accounts, and he is tireless, riding the circuit from York, Maine (my hometown—then part of Massachusetts province), to Plymouth and Springfield. He rides out to the Cape, and sails out to Nantucket for a session. When he returns home to Salem for a spell he immediately goes out to his farm at Castle Hill and works the fields. He is hale and hearty and on the job into his seventies. Can we attribute this to his diet? Well, I don’t think so, but here it is.

Breakfast:  frequent “chocolate breakfasts” but sometimes the Judge liked heartier fare: cheese and bread, fowl, lobster in the summer! But you can’t underestimate the colonial consumption of chocolate, it was food, drink, stimulant, even medicine all in one. The most popular transatlantic recipe called for the chocolate (sold in brick form and ground or shaved) to be mixed with sugar, long pepper, cloves, aniseed, almonds and other nuts, and some sort of flower water, “the hotter it is drunke, the better it is.” On those days which were not commenced with a Chocolate Breakfast, he went for ale, particularly sage ale, and a few times he referenced “superior wine” in the morning. No mention of coffee; tea pops up once or twice.

Lunch: is never referenced by the Judge. It’s more of a nineteenth and twentieth century concept, although I have found references to it in the 18th: one English author admits that he “clapp’d a good Lunch of Bread into my Pocket” in 1707. But Judge Lynde was busy, or on the road. Maybe he did have something in his pocket, but he doesn’t tell us—or his diary. When he stops in the middle of the day, he would have more ale, cider, the occasional “lime punch” and some plum cake, sometimes with cheese, sometimes without.

Dinner: a regular range from simple to substantive. There are quite a few “milk suppers” and also those of “three eggs” but he also orders up large dinners: lamb, mutton, turkey, fowls, bread with cheese and “isle butter,” lobster. Sometimes he is very detailed: he enjoyed a dinner of “fine chowdered cod” on one occasion, on another he dined on “puff apple pie and cheese with a bottle of ale, an ear of corn, and sugar brandy dram.” He ate “minced veal” and “neats tongues,” beef tongues which were seasoned and dried to preserve them and used in a variety of recipes (I included one below). He really liked sauces for his fish, and his lobster, and plum cake, any time and anywhere. Gingerbread and apple tarts are also referenced, and all sorts of beverages: madeira, madeira, and more madeira, “green Fyal wine,” cherry and brandy drams, strong beer, cider, different ales, flips, “Florence” flasks (I’m not sure of what this is: general “Florence” was a reference to olive oil at this time, but this seems to be something he is drinking), various punches, and “sangaree,” a form of sangria. And rum of course. Judge Lynde’s detailed tavern accounts are clearly intended for his compensation by the provincial authorities, but when he is at home the only commodities he records purchasing are gallons of rum and madeira, plum cakes, and “bread with cider for the poor.” Presumably someone else was keeping his household accounts.

Francis Symonds advertised the “first” chocolate mill in Salem in 1771 (Essex Gazette, 17 December 1771) so I’m not sure where the Judge got his supply when he was at home earlier in the century; a recipe for Neats Tongue and Udders Alamode for a late 17th century cookbook at the Folger Library; the Lynde family tankard, Sothebys.

Thanks to my friend Alicia Diozzi for the title! She envisioned the Judge’s meals as an Instagram account.


A Mysterious Matron and other Salem Cookbooks

Salem has a brand new cookbook out just in time for the holiday season: Salem’s Cookin‘, the Official Chamber of Commerce Cookbook. I kind of wish it had more historical recipes, as Salem has quite a few culinary claims to fame, but I’m sure I’m the only person with this wish as it features a range of recipes for dishes served at the city’s most popular restaurants and offerings from other establishments and individuals which seem surprisingly doable. It’s a very practical cookbook as well a showcase of Salem’s culinary landscape. Still, I’d rather read about food than attempt to make it so I thought I would mark the occasion with a survey of Salem cookbooks, beginning with the serious and mysterious The American Matron; or Practical and Scientific Cookery published in 1851 by an anonymous “housekeeper” who lived in Salem. This housekeeper was quite the cook, quite the chemist really, and quite the writer, and I’ve been trying to find out who she was for quite some time, with no success.

As its title implies, The American Matron is a very practical cookbook as well, so practical that it often seems as concerned with preventing food spoilage and consequential poisoning as offering up recipes that are easy to make and pleasant to eat. The instructions for pickle storage below are very representative of its author’s tone throughout: warning her readers not to keep their pickles in pottery or metal containers due to arsenic and acid, she concludes that One may not be instantly poisoned after eating pickles prepared or kept in such vessels; but if constantly used, a deleterious influence must be operated on the health from this cause, even when lest suspected. This is a text which begins with the proper storage of water and reads more like a public health manual than a cookbook in places, but it also includes scores of recipes for both traditional New England dishes as well as more exotic concoctions featuring ingredients from around the globe, highlighting Salem’s continuous seaport status. There are a lot of interesting seafood recipes in particular, all stressing the necessity of using just-off-the-boat ingredients. It is also a manual for housekeeping, containing instructions for dyes, cleaning agents, and pest control that one might see in the more random printed recipe collections of the early modern era: my favorite is her very nineteenth-century prescription for  how to remove the black Dye left on the skin from wearing mourning in hot weather. That’s a predicament I never considered before reading this book!

I can’t find any Salem cookbooks from the later nineteenth century, so I guess that brings us to a collection of historical recipes gathered together under the title What Salem Dames Cooked and published as a fundraiser for the Esther Mack Industrial School in 1910. Like many Salem creations of this particular time, this little volume expresses a Colonial Revival view of the past with its ye olde type and terms, and it was reissued about a decade ago in a glossy reprint so it is widely available. Moving forward another half century, the Hamilton Hall Cook Book was published by the Chestnut Street Associates as a fundraiser for Hamilton Hall just after World War II. Its recipes are quite minimalist, but as it contains both the iconic 1907 photo of Hall caterer Edward Cassell and a lovely illustration of the Hall’s Rumford Roaster I think it must be my favorite Salem cookbook. Old copies turn up on ebay rather regularly but I think Hamilton Hall should reprint it!

A Mary Harrod Northend photograph of the students at the Esther C. Mack School, Historic New England; Mr. Cassell making his deliveries in front of the Peirce-Nichols House.

I am sure there must be more later twentieth-century Salem cookbooks: perhaps issued by ladies’ committees of a church or the Hospital? But the only one I have in my possession is Served in Salem, published in 1981 by the Ladies Committee of the Essex Institute. Both the Hamilton Hall Cook Book and Served in Salem feature lots of recipes with ready-made, canned and frozen ingredients, in stark contrast to The American Matron: twentieth-century cooks didn’t have to worry about preservation and were apparently interested in as many shortcuts as possible. Served in Salem emphasizes entertaining: there are many “party” dishes and featured table settings which showcase the Essex Institute’s collections. Like its Chestnut Street predecessor, however, Served in Salem also features several nods to the past, including a letter from Sally Ropes Orne to her brother Nathaniel which reveals in great detail the Christmas dinner she served to her guests in the family mansion in 1848. It’s so great, and brings us back to the time of of The American Matron, though Sally writes from the perspective of a gracious hostess rather than a practical housekeeper. The dinner began with a toast with sherry, Maderia and hock (which she disdains as too expensive for the taste), then came in the oyster soup, followed by boiled chickens and a ham with caper sauce, mashed potatoes and squash. The next course featured a “noble turkey” accompanied by gravy and liver sauce and more mashed potatoes, this time “browned on top and marked off in diamonds,” which was followed by deserts: plum pudding with hard sauce, mince pies, and cream pudding. Everything was then removed, including the white tablecloth, and the meal was completed with Baldwin apples, grapes, nuts and raisins, along with more sherry. She concludes that “every article was charmingly cooked” and assures her brother that the day went off finely.

Christmas Dinner Service in the Ropes Mansion, from Served in Salem (1981).


Feeding Suffrage

Sorry I’m a bit late today with my #SalemSuffrageSaturday post: I’ve migrated up to Maine for several weeks and the wifi situation is a bit challenging! But I think I have it together now. I’m going to move into some national suffrage history for a few weeks and then go back to the parochial, because the long-term suffrage movement was successful ultimately because it operated at several levels: the national and the local, the exterior and the interior. I have been continually impressed, as I studied this movement this year, at how adept the marketing was, with every concern taken into consideration: messaging, branding. graphics, audience. Lately I’ve been reading some wonderful suffrage cookbooks, which in many ways were the perfect venue for the Suffrage message: not too radical, traditional really, but also containing themes of practicality, self-sufficiency, and above all, femininity. The first Suffragist cookbook, the Woman Suffrage Cookery Books, was edited and published by Mrs. Hattie Burr of Boston in 1886 with exactly that message in its forward:  Alarmists of both sexes will shrink back abashed before this cook-book, for at least two recipes, which she has tested with success, will be given over the signature of each fair suffragist who contributes to its pages. It will be a confession book, a proof that, even if they wish to vote, the suffragists cherish a feminine interest in culinary matters.

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First and Second Editions of Mrs. Hattie Burr’s Woman Suffrage Cookbook, 1886 & 1890: you can read the text here.

Indeed there was nothing at all alarming about this cookbook: no radical recipes! In addition to recipes for everything from soup to nuts, there are sections on the care and feeding of invalids and helpful household hints, followed by “Eminent Opinions on Woman Suffrage” (starting with Plato!) only at the very end: an appendix. I think the relative banality of this book must have helped the cause considerably, and it certainly inspired regional editions as well as the first British Suffrage cookbook in 1912. I also think it inspired valuable support, in the form of advertising, from commercial food producers, such as Fleishmann’s Yeast (referenced in several of the recipes) and Kellogg’s Cereals. All in all, it seems like the cookbook was a very nourishing genre for the Suffrage movement.

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Suffrage Pittsburg 1915

Suffrage British Cookbook 1912 (2)

Suffrage Ad Collage

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Suffrage cookbooks from Washington State (1908), western Pennsylvania (1915) and the UK (1912), from the Ann Lewis Women’s Suffrage Collection. Fleischmann’s Yeast and Kellogg’s advertisements from the 1890s and 1914. I bet that Laura Kumin’s All Stirred Up, which will be published in August, will have lots more details about the publication and impact of these cookbooks. 


Turkey Figs

I was researching the major tea importers and purveyors in Salem in light of the upcoming anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, but another commodity kept popping up in the sources: turkey figs. I didn’t look at any customs records, but newspaper adverts both before and after the Revolution provide evidence of large imports of Turkey figs in Salem, and presumably a corresponding demand. I’m wondering if this is a by-product of what we now know was a very vibrant trade in fish and wine between Salem and the Iberian peninsula? It’s clear that figs were used for both medicinal and culinary purposes, although some purveyors favored one utility over the other. The very entrepreneurial apothecary Philip Godfrid Kast, for example, who had prosperous businesses in Boston, Salem, and Haverhill, clearly marketed them as a medicine in the 1770s and 1780s (though it also looks like he is providing Salem cooks with many of the ingredients for a Christmas “figgy pudding”).  This was nothing new to me—I’ve spent the last year reading early modern medical manuals for the book I’m working on and figs are always listed as one of the few “useful” fruits by Elizabethan authors—and the prescription of figs for various cough syrups and digestive tonics continued into the twentieth century. I presume New Englanders were eating lots of figs too but I can’t find any recipes in the early American cookbooks, and apparently Thomas Jefferson brought back a cutting of this particular variety, now called Brown Turkey Figs, only when he returned from Paris in 1789.

FIg Kast Collage

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Fig Collage 1804 1829Philip Godfrid Kast’s advertisements for Turkey figs in the 1770s and his 1774 trade card, American Antiquarian Society; Figs for sale in Salem, 1804-1829.

Not only do I not know what is happening to all those cases of figs being sold in Salem in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; figs are also difficult to identify as a culinary commodity in English cooking before the twentieth century. The classic “figgy pudding” seldom has any figs in it as the word was just a synonym for “plum”, denoting any dried fruit. Figgy pudding originated as a steamed savory potage and evolved into its sweeter, more Dickensian ideal over the early modern era and into the nineteenth century. Of course the Victorians invented Christmas as we know it, and the recipe for figgy pudding of Queen Victoria’s own chef, Charles Francatelli, contains no figs at all. In America, fig cultivation seems to have become centered on the South and California (particularly the valley surrounding Fresno) and so growers marketed a variety of fig recipes, encompassing everything from ices to jams to whips to “pickles”, and the use of figs in syrups for coughs and constipation continued into the twentieth century.

Fig PicMonkey Collage

Figs WellcomeJ.C. Forkner Fig Garden recipes, 1919 & California Fig Syrup Co. advertisement, Wellcome Library.


The Storied History of Indian Pudding

My contribution to Thanksgiving next week at my brother’s house will be Indian Pudding, which I have made many times in years past, always with variant recipes. As we are getting into the holidays, my general plan is to avoid some of the more serious topics here on the blog in favor of food, decorations, and traditions, but as I started looking into the history of this pudding, a dish that was always around and which I always took for granted, I started getting into some material that was not light, fluffy, and cheery. Indian Pudding is more complex than I thought! The general story is one of colonial New Englanders missing their old English puddings, and substituting “Indian” corn meal out of necessity, but this is too simple a tale: you can also connect this native pudding to the French and Indian Wars, the inventive expat Count Rumford, slavery and abolition, vegetarianism, and “Yankee” thrift. It’s more American than Apple pie.

Indian Pudding Durgin Park HNE

Indian Pudding CardAn advertisement for Durgin Park in Boston, which always featured Indian Pudding and closed just this year, from Historic New England, and a typical “old New England” recipe card featuring IP (not one of my recipes—I’m egg-phobic so I always bake the eggless varieties).

The Oxford English Dictionary lists a 1722 cookbook as the first source of the phrase “Indian Pudding”, but the first reference I could find was not in a cookbook, but rather in “Indian Pete” Williamson’s “memoir” French and Indian Cruelty, exemplified in the Life and various Vicissitudes of Fortune of Peter Williamson, who was carried off from Aberdeen in his Infancy and sold as a slave in Pennsylvania (York, 1757). This is a sensational and suspect source, in which Williamson ascribes all sorts of barbaric behavior to the “savages” of North America, including cannibalism and the concoction of “Indian Puddings” out of their British victims. Published in the midst of the French and Indian War (which was the North American theater of the Seven Years War) this was lurid propaganda, but the reference pops up in several other North American “descriptions” later in the century before disappearing (thankfully). Much more influential was Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford’s recipe for “wholesome” and cheap Indian pudding, prescribed as a beneficial food for the European poor in his Essays, political, economical, and philosophical (1796). Thompson, Massachusetts Loyalist, accused spy, and accomplished inventor (who served an apprenticeship in Salem) achieved fame, fortune, and title in Britain and Bavaria, but always seems a bit sentimental about his native land. He devotes quite a few pages to Indian Pudding, describing its benefits, providing a recipe (with American variations) and even giving directions on how to eat it.

Indian Pudding Rumford

Indian Pudding 1814 cover

Indian Pudding 1814 Collage

Indian Pudding and Slavery collage

Back in America, Indian Pudding was a staple in all the cookbooks issued from the later eighteenth century well into the twentieth–as far as I could tell: I checked in with a sample about every twenty years. There are notable variations: boiled or baked, plain or fancy, eggs or no eggs, savory or sweet, all sorts of additions in terms of spices, berries, and nuts. The pudding becomes progressively sweet in the early nineteenth century, presumably as it is moving from breakfast porridge to dessert, but then there is a reduction of sweetness in the later nineteenth century, as it was featured as an economical and “healthy” food, and a favorite dessert of vegetarians. In between, there is an amazing abolitionist argument put forward by Nathan Bangs in his Emancipation, its necessity and means of accomplishment : Calmly submitted to the Citizens of the United States (1849) in which he associates rice pudding with the perpetuation of slavery and Indian Pudding, “the good old food of New England” with freedom! (This argument does seem to discount the sugar and molasses in “Yankee” Indian Pudding).

Indian Pudding was already “old” in 1849 and became older still—definitely out of fashion in the later nineteenth century except for working families and housewives more concerned with thrift than show. The Colonial Revival movement put it back on the table, especially the Thanksgiving table, for “old-fashioned” holiday meals at the beginning of the twentieth century. And after that, I’m not sure what happens to Indian Pudding: I guess it depends on the family, and the region. It is included in all of the cookbooks which were labeled American in the twentieth century, but that might be more for custom than utility: I have a feeling that pies prevail.

tIndian Pudding American Agriculturist

COlonial Thanksgiving Delineator 1902

Indian Pudding Edible Series

I don’t think this unhappy family (in the American Agriculturist, 1894) is pondering pudding, but the juxtaposition is amusing; Anna Wells Morrison’s “Colonial Thanksgiving” menu in the 1902 Delineator features “Indian Meal Pudding”; Jeri Quinzio’s Pudding is part of the Edible Series at the University of Chicago Press.


“The Beautifying Part of Physic”

I’m diving deep into early modern recipes this month, and as the term recipe was not reserved for the culinary realm during this time that means instructions for all sorts of things: health, hygiene, magic, preservation, and cosmetics, or the “beautifying part of physic” according to one of the first books devoted exclusively to made beauty: Johan Wecker’s Cosmeticks (1660). Wecker’s categorization of cosmetics was in alignment with the contemporary understanding of the body and its operation, best expressed by Francis Bacon in his Advancement of Learning earlier in the seventeenth century:  the knowledge that concerneth man’s body is divided as the good of man’s body is divided, unto which it referreth. The good of man’s body is of four kinds, Health, Beauty, Strength and Pleasure: so the knowledges are Medicine, or the art of Cure; art of Decoration, which is called Cosmetic; art of Activity, which is called Athletic; and art Voluptuary, which Tacitus truly calleth eruditus luxus [refined luxury?]. This subject of man’s body is of all other things in nature most susceptible of remedy; but then that remedy is most susceptible of error. What cosmetic remedies does Wecker offer? Here’s the title page and his own summary of its contents:

Cosmeticks

Cosmetics Contents

As you can read, this book offers a lot: all deformities of Nature corrected, age renewed, youth prolonged, the least impediment amended. I am wondering if it was “promised to the world” by the prominent physician Nicholas Culpepper; I assume that’s just an advertising ploy. The egalitarian pitch (every one may be his own apothecary) is contradicted by many of the valuable ingredients of the recipes within, but there are also some very simple recipes with basic ingredients—essentially there are hierarchies of recipes for the same goal: whiter skin, smoother skin, spot-free skin, fairer hair, more hair in some places, less in others, a sweeter-smelling body. Women should have rose-water on hand at all times, and lots of lemons, the occasional pineapple, and be prepared to devote many eggs to their beauty regimens.

Cosmetics collage

A few skin-whitening recipes are above, with reference in one to the legendary ceruse, the white-lead concoction which all of my students think Queen Elizabeth I slathered on her face every single day to hide her smallpox scars and project majesty and Virgin Mary-ness, thanks to Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth (1998). We don’t have a lot of evidence for this cosmetic fable (see here), and I can’t find recipes for ceruse in any of the likely seventeenth-century texts, perhaps because it was purchased as a ready-made commodity (especially the preferred Venetian variety), or it was too much of a target for the anti-paint Puritans. I did find a Royal Society recipe of sorts (more like an industrial process) in a charming twentieth-century book about the history of cosmetics, Neville Williams’ Powder and Paint. A History of the Englishwoman’s Toilet, Elizabeth I—Elizabeth II (1957), but most of the cosmetic creams referenced in seventeenth-century recipe books featured the less-dangerous and -expensive “bear’s grease”(or that of any animal, but usually pigs) rather than ceruse. The marvellous Hannah Woolley’s skin waters, ointments and creams echo those of Wecker: even though some of her recipes are equally elaborate, it seems that “beautifying” is more about pampering (and removing) than paint (and adorning). Don’t get me started on patches–they are a whole other story.

Cosmetics Williams

Woolley 1685.jpgBeinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

A recipe for an excellent “Pomatum”, to clear the Skin, from Hannah Woolley’s The accomplish’d ladies delight in preserving, physick, beautifying, and cookery : containing I, The art of preserving and candying … II, The physical cabinet, or, Excellent receipts in physick and chirurgery, together with some rare beautifying waters … and also … The art of angling. III, The compleat cooks guide ((1685).

Wash Barrows-grease, or [pig] Lard often-times in May-dew that hath been Clarified in the Sun, till it be exceeding white, then take Marsh-mallow-Roots, scraping off the out-sides, make thin slices of them, set them to macerate in a Balneo, and scum it well till it be Clarified, and will come to rope, then strain it, and put now and then a spoonfull of May-dew therein, beating it till it be through cold in often change of May-dew; then throw away that Dew, and put in a Glass, covering it with May-dew, and so keep it for your Use.


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.

remond-dinner-1826

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 Transmogrifiedas 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.

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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.


Tom and Jerry for Christmas

I spent a lot of time last weekend de-stressing in front of and around the television watching Turner Classic Movies, to which my little set is almost permanently tuned. There were old Christmas movies on, and it seemed like every time I looked up from whatever I was doing various characters were getting tipsy on a seasonal drink called a “Tom and Jerry”. It appeared to be an eggnog-like concoction but I had never heard of it: what was it and where did it go? I did a little Google research, and turned up multiple recipes, images of vintage Tom and Jerry punch bowls and cups (which got me even more curious and excited), and some nice sentimental articles about this “all-American” drink’s survival in the upper Midwest. Tom and Jerry is a lighter eggnog variant, which utilizes many eggs but milk (or even water, see below) instead of cream, sugar and spices and rum and brandy, and is typically served warm. Based on the sheer survival of all the punch sets on the second-hand market alone, it must have been very popular in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

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Just one of many Tom & Jerry bowls on Etsy, Vintage mid-century Fire King.

This old drink has nothing to do with the cat and mouse cartoon: according to my (exclusively internet, I must admit) sources, its origins can be traced to either an extraordinary 1821 book by a British journalist, Pierce Egan, titled Life in London, or, The day and night scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, esq., and his elegant friend, Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their rambles and sprees through the metropolis or to a legendary nineteenth-century American bartender named Jerry Thomas whose pioneering 1862 mixologist tome How to Mix Drinks, or the Bon-Vivant’s Companion featured a recipe for the Tom and Jerry. No one seems to have connected all the dots between the popular British Tom and Jerry characters and the American drink, but the recipe seems very British to me, reminiscent of all the frothy “lambswool”- like drinks of centuries past. And no matter, I’m always more interested in the search for the source rather than the actual commodity/consumable, and the research into the drink’s origins led me to Egan’s text, featuring his Tom and Jerry characters exploring the highs and lows of London society with delightful illustrations by the Cruikshank brothers. Alcohol was definitely a major part of their exploits.

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Illustrations/scenes from Pierce Egan’s Life in London, British Library.

And I also discovered Jerry Thomas’s Bon-Vivant’s Companion which is available in many reprint editions as well as here. I could spend some time with this book, but for now, and for the holidays, here is his Tom and Jerry recipe (for a crowd):

To make the batter:  5 lbs sugar/ 12 eggs/ a half glass Jamaica rum/ 1 ½ tsp. ground cinnamon/ ½ tsp. ground cloves/ ½ tsp. allspice. Beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth, and the yolks until they are as thin as water, then mix together and add the spices and rum, thicken with sugar until the mixture attains the consistence of a light batter.

To deal out Tom and Jerry to customers: Take a small bar glass, and to one tablespoon of the batter, add one wine-glass of brandy, and fill the glass with boiling water, then grate a little nutmeg on top.


Shaking Quaker Pudding

I don’t know if you noticed the photograph of old recipes on the kitchen table in the Ropes Mansion in my last post: no worries, I’ll put it in this one. At the bottom of one piece of paper is the beginning of a recipe for “Shaking Quaker Pudding”–only the beginning, unfortunately, which set me off on a strange quest. As a descendant of a Shaker (I know–Shakers were/are celibate–how can they have descendants? Well, after he had had his family, my great-great-great? grandfather Calver sold everything at auction over in England and departed for New Lebanon, New York in the nineteenth century: we have the auction poster to prove it) I knew immediately that the reference was to the Shakers, who have developed quite a foodie reputation over the past few years, in addition to their long-established renown for furniture, seeds and herbal tonics. I thought it would be easy to find the rest of the recipe but when I first googled “Shaker Pudding” I came up with Jello Shake-a-Pudding! I can’t imagine anything less Shaker-ish, really. Then I found a British pudding called “Shaker Quaker” Pudding, but it did not start out with the “stone raisins”  line of the Ropes recipe. Finally I found the entire Shaking Quaker recipe, in Mrs. J. Chadwick’s Home Cookery: A Collection of Tried Receipts, Both Foreign and Domestic (1853). So here it is:

Shaking Quaker Pudding Chadwick

Ropes 054

and bake for half an hour!

The digitized version of Mrs. Chadwick’s cookbook cut off the recipe as well, but fortunately I found another source. All this work for a raisin custard bread pudding (the Shaker Quaker puddings seem to omit the bread) which I doubt I will ever make (unless I add lots of rum or bourbon). However, I did discover several recipes that did tempt me, especially “Shaker Lemon Pie”, apparently a favorite of Martha Stewart’s. And the pudding shaker.

Shaker Products

The delicious-looking Shaker Lemon Pie–made with thin lemon slices–is from the blog Love & Flour.


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