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 

Clearly from the name she gave her recipe, Mrs. Webster thought Thanksgiving was a time for pies--and not only of the sweet variety. This savory one is as delightful an addition to the banquet today as it was in the 1840s when the recipe was first published. The tradition of adding savory pies to the meal was widespread in New England, in part because domesticated turkeys in the nineteenth century and earlier were generally smaller than ours today, weighing on average eight pounds or less. To feed hungrey dinner guests, the turkey was supplemented with roast meats and other dishes, such as this one. We think this is a Thanksgiving tradition well worth reviving. Read More 

The New Nativism--An Old Story
It has become almost a cliche to say that the present period of American history, beginning around 1975, is similar in many important ways to the period beginning roughly a hundred years earlier. We are living now, it appears, in a second Gilded Age, with pronounced inequalities of wealth and income and with transformative changes in our technology, economy, and the demographic profile of our society.

The last of the trends on this list—the arrival of lots of new people—has received much attention in the past few years from political commentators and is in the headlines almost every day in the coverage of the current presidential campaign, because of the xenophobia that constitutes the primary plank in the platform of the Republican candidate. Read More