Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald

The Oyster: Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor

In a previous post on Lydia Maria Child's "Escaloped Oysters," the oyster had the featured role. But the oyster has also performed admirably in historic New England cuisine in supporting parts. This time we offer oysters in such a supporting role with a recipe from Amelia Simmons and her cookbook, American Cookery, that's considered the first American cookbook. 
 
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, huge numbers of oysters could be included in huge numbers of recipes because there were still huge numbers of oysters ready to be harvested from marine reefs. Oysters—lots of them—formed the basis of pies and ketchups (yes, oyster ketchup!), were added to chowders, pancakes, and omelets, and were even cooked with macaroni. But the type of food with which the oyster was most frequently paired was fowl, of every species—snipe, duck, turkey, chicken. Simmons's versatile 1796 recipe for fowl "smothered" in oysters is designed for either turkey or chicken. Read More 

Having spent many happy hours sleuthing the sources of historic recipes, we were interested to read Priya Krishna's "Who Owns a Recipe? A Plagiarism Claim Has Cookbook Authors Asking" in the New York Times recently. The story covers many aspects of this currently controversial issue. But as with much food journalism, it truncates the historical dimension of the subject. "Recipe plagiarism has been around since the first American cookbooks" reads the caption to a picture in the article of renowned bookseller Bonnie Slotnick.

Well, plagiarism in English-language cookbooks has been around a lot longer than Simmons and American Cookery. Like so many aspects of American culinary culture, even this nefarious practice was imported from elsewhere. Read More 

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Jedidiah Morse, father of the inventor of the telegraph, Samuel F. B. Morse, complained in his American Geography (1789) that in Albany, New York, all the houses were constructed with projecting "watergutters or spouts," a custom that made it "almost dangerous to walk the streets in a rainy day."

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In the 1740s in Wethersfield, Connecticut, a town near Hartford, women were employed to prepare onions for sale by tying them in bunches. Historian Gloria L. Main writes that these women workers were paid not in cash but rather in "store merchandise, mostly luxury imports." One woman's payment took the form of "a copy of Homer's Iliad."

These intimate details about life in the young republic--variations in house design, the specifics of a barter economy--paint a picture of early American society that we don't often see. How do such portraits of ordinary American life help us understand American Cookery by Amelia Simmons? Find out this November in our new book from University of Massachusetts Press, United Tastes: The Making of the First American Cookbook.

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In the first decade of the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson's father, William Emerson, was the pastor of the prestigious First Church of Boston. "Every Sunday evening," writes historian Phyllis Cole, "the deacons and other friends enjoyed wine and spirits, arrayed in gleaming decanters on the sideboard" in the dining room of the Emerson residence.

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According to then-president of Yale Timothy Dwight, in his Travels in New England and New York, sometime in the early years of American independence, a justice of the U. S. Supreme Court told a governor of Connecticut that "when General Washington took the oath of office in the balcony of the assembly house in Philadelphia, the chief justice, who administered it, could scarcely be heard at a distance of ten feet on account of the noise and tumult of the yard below."

These intimate details about life in the young republic--cocktail hour at the parsonage, an unruly audience for Washington's swearing in--paint a picture of early American society that we don't often see. How do such portraits of ordinary American life help us understand American Cookery by Amelia Simmons? Find out this November in our new book from University of Massachusetts Press, United Tastes: The Making of the First American Cookbook.

Black Cake
In working on our next book, due out from University of Massachusetts Press this fall, we had some correspondence with the staff of Harvard's Houghton Library on the subject of citron, a fruit that, in candied form, is included in many fruitcakes. Some of the Houghton staff had gotten together and baked a "black cake,"from a recipe used by the great nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson and contained in the Dickinson manuscripts held by the Houghton. They described how they baked it in a blog post, Baking Emily Dickinson's Black Cake. Black cake is a type of fruitcake. Catharine Beecher's recipe for it in her popular 1846 cookbook, is given the name "Fruit Cake, or Black Cake."

Finding Citron

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