Grog to Grits

I was looking through Susan Williams’s Savory Suppers and Fashionable Feasts, an excellent book about Victorian dining in America, and came across some interesting information she has on the history of dining rooms in America.

In the 1600s – the first century of English settlement in America – only the rich had a specific room set apart for dining. The vast majority of Americans lived in simple one or two room cabins and usually ate around the fireplace that served as cookstove, heater, and light source.

During the 1700s, the idea of having a dining room slowly trickled down to members of the lower upper class. The early 1800s was when the idea of having a dining room really took off, and a large part of the appeal of having a dining room came from new ideas in the middle class.

Williams gives the example of rowhouses built in the 1830s and 1840s in cities like Boston and Philadelphia. They were usually three or 3 1/2 stories tall. The bottom story had a kitchen in the back and a family dining room in front. The second story had a parlor and a formal dining room, while the top story was given over to bedrooms. The functions of the rooms in these three stories neatly fit the idea of separate spaces in the home. In these homes, the bottom floor was productive, the second floor was a public space, and the top floor was a private space.

The dining room, seen as being a public space, sometimes had multiple functions. Williams has a good photo of a dining room from before 1900 with a dining table and enormous sideboard, typical of the time. But the photo also shows a sofa along one wall where the family or visitors could sit and talk. This makes sense, since a dedicated dining room can be a lot of real estate for a room that might not be often used.

Of course, dining rooms today are often joined to the kitchen, making a more open and informal space where people sitting at the table can easily talk to the cook. The idea of productive/public/private space has disappeared, replaced by only a differentiation between public and private space. While the kitchen can be productive, we no longer have the idea that it is. Now, kitchens are seen as being a type of public space, where guests can easily enter when visitors are over.

Catsup (or ketchup, as it is usually spelled these days) has a fairly definite meaning today: it is a thick, sweet sauce made from tomatoes. Before about the mid 20th century, though, and especially in the 19th century, catsup was a much more generic term for a thin sauce that tasted strongly of one of a number of different ingredients. Not all catsup back then was tomato based, and the loss of variety in catsups is another example of how, over time, the variety of foods we have has dwindled in some ways.

Not to say that tomato catsup wasn’t popular back then, though. It shows up often in old cookbooks. An example comes from Kate Brew Vaughn’s Culinary Echoes from Dixie, printed in 1917. Her recipe was fairly typical, requiring a peck of tomatoes, four large onions, salt, a host of spices including cloves, allspice, and mustard, brown sugar, vinegar, and a few peach leaves to round out the taste.

That cookbook included another recipe typical of old cookbooks: mushroom catsup. Tomatoes are naturally juicy, while mushrooms aren’t. To get liquid for mushroom catsup, the cook placed a pint of mushrooms in an earthen jar, with layers of salt alternating with layers of mushrooms, and let the jar stand for 24 hours in a warm place. The liquid was strained out, and peppercorns, allspice, ginger root, cloves, and mace were added. All of this was boiled, simmered, strained, and then bottled, resulting in a runny liquid that would obviously taste strongly of mushrooms (and since these would probably be wild mushrooms, the taste would be fairly intense).

That wasn’t the extent of the variety of catsups. Buckeye Cookery, from 1877, included recipes for cucumber, current, cherry, gooseberry, and tomato catsups. Something like with the mushroom catsup, the cucumber catsup recipe had the cook peel and chop very fine 3 dozen cucumbers and 18 onions, sprinkle them with salt, and let them drain overnight. This liquid was then used for the catsup, to which was added mustard seed, black pepper, and cider vinegar.

The cherry catsup recipe combined 1 pint of cherry juice with a half to three-quarter pound of sugar. To this was added cloves, cinnamon, and a little cayenne pepper. The mixture was then boiled to a thick syrup and bottled.

Sadly, the old cookbooks only include the recipes, but not the instructions of just what to do with these various catsups. The recipes in the Buckeye Cooking book take large amounts of raw materials, such as nine pounds of gooseberries or half a bushel of tomatoes. This makes it apparent that catsups served a couple of purposes. They used large amounts of raw materials, which at harvest time might spoil rapidly. Those materials would be boiled and cooked down into a much more manageable amount of liquid distillation of taste, which could be bottled and used weeks or months later.

This points to one reason why these various catsups have fallen from favor. Most people today do not grow their own food, and so they do not have large amounts of fruits or vegetables coming to them at one time. If they do, they have more options today of processing and keeping those foods, such as canning or freezing. While cucumber or cherry catsup may taste good, part of its reason for existence has disappeared, and so the catsup itself has also disappeared.

Back in March, 1901, Good Housekeeping had an article that featured an older, experienced homemaker helping out a young, recently-married woman who was completely adrift at cooking in the home. It’s an interesting article because it highlights the differences between cooking back then and cooking now.

The young woman’s primary problem is that, because of her lack of experience in cooking and running a home, the couple is very low on money–at the time of the writing, the couple had only a few dollars to last the week.

The older woman rolled up her sleeves and got to work, starting by taking stock of the young woman’s pantry. Here is an example of how things have changed. The older woman lists off staples she finds that are “standbys–a box of codfish, dried beef, sardines, eggs, oranges, butter, crackers, cereal, tea, coffee, sugar, flour, raisins, rice, beans, beef extract, chocolate, prunes, lard, cheese, sphaghetti [yes, that’s the spelling used] and plenty of canned things.” Most of these are familiar as staples today, but prunes, codfish, sardines, and lard are a bit surprising by today’s standards.

They then talk about specific foods that can be cut or changed, including dairy products. Here the instructions become a bit complex. The older woman says cream shouldn’t be purchased, because it can be taken from the milk, but the younger woman protests that the milk they get doesn’t have cream on top. “I’m afraid you don’t give it a fair chance to rise,” the older woman responds, explaining that

It does not rise, because you put it to set in the refrigerator. In winter milk needs a warmer temperature to yield cream. I put our milk, when it arrives, in two shallow pans, keeping four for this purpose. Two are emptied, and scalded each morning and set away for the next day’s use. I set the milk to rise in a cupboard in the kitchen, where it is fairly warm, covering it with plates to keep out any dust. In the morning there is a thick, rich cream on each pan. From one I get enough for the coffee; the rest I put in a cup to keep for anything that may be required.

It’s a complicated process that requires some knowledge of just how cream and milk work. The older woman then notices that the young couple purchases a certain amount of ice every week for the icebox (this is before electric refrigerators), and explains that they could stop buying ice in the winter by making some adjustments to their pantry. A proper pantry, at this time, was a separate room off the kitchen and not, as it often is today, a cupboard in the kitchen. Also, central heat did not exist–rooms in the house were heated with heaters or stoves in various rooms.

Your pantry with its wide shelves and upper and lower cupboards is a first-rate refrigerator while the thermometer stands at freezing. Simply keep the window open an inch or two at the top, and place things you wish kept coolest on the broad shelf by it. Put such things as oil or fruit, that a chill would injure, into a warmer cupboard.

Of course you must regulate the temperature of the pantry. Close the window entirely on a night when the thermometer falls below zero. You may even in very severe weather have to leave the door into the kitchen open to keep things from freezing. In this way a housewife in this part of the country can generally manage to shut down on an ice bill from November till April.

She then goes on to give a bit of advice that surely must have been obvious to anyone living back then: “When a frozen dessert is wanted you will find snow much easier to pack into the freezer than ice. If there is no snow, but the temperature is low, set a few shallow pans of water out doors at night; you will have as much homemade ice in that way as you need.”

All of these pieces of advice illustrate many small differences between then and now. They also illustrate the sheer amount of knowledge homemakers had to have back then, and how much time they spent performing food-related work. Time-saving devices have resulted in making cooking easier, and also made it so that cooks need a lot less knowledge than they needed back in 1901.

Source: Good Housekeeping, March, 1901, 207-211.

The April, 1922, edition of the Wholesale Grocery Review included a reprint of a poem from the Honolulu, Hawaii, Advertiser, written on the occasion of Canned Foods Week. It’s a good list of foods that were commonly canned in the early 20th century, and most of the brands listed are still around. Note the inclusion of Australian jams on the list of foods–Hawaii is a long way from the continental US, so Hawaii was likely getting a lot of its food from other countries.  Fittingly, the poem ends with Hawaii’s most commonly-canned food, which we today can usually get fresh.

The Campbells are coming!—-We mean the canned soups!
Carnation cows are mooing in well contented troops!
The eagle soars to Alpine heights, inspired by the band
That leads the armored forces of food goods that are canned!
Canned Foods Week will open in Hawaii on March first!
There’ll be a grand procession of tintanked Wienerwurst!
Del Monte, Ess-and-Doubleyou, and other packs of peas,
Will flaunt their trade mark labels, like banners to the breeze.
Khan O’Pener will monarch be for seven canny days,
And every true A-Merry-Can will sing a tinkling praise;
A great parade of corn and beans, and squash and rich mincemeat.
Will call the city’s populace to pack each public street.
Tin Lizzies will bear flivver floats of tinned Australian jams,
And trucks, piled high with canned corned beef, will block the rapid trams;
There’ll be peaches, kippered herrings, asparagus in tanks,
Borne proudly on our thoroughfares by advertising ranks.
Howe’er we venture to assert, though salmon and sardines
Get honorable mention in these exhibition scenes.
The big sensation of the show, according to all signs,
Will be that sweet pineapple treat—Hawaii’s golden pines!

Source: “Canned Food Romancing,” Wholesale Grocery Review, April 1922, 20.

The New Yorker recently reviewed the restaurant Betony, in New York City, and praised its milk punch. The drink, as prepared at the restaurant, “tastes like magic: smooth, sweet, and spicy–depending on a changing roster of seasonings, such as bergamot tea and Thai bird chili–topped off with your choice of spirit and served over a gigantic ice cube.”

Never heard of milk tea?  Neither had I. Intrigued, I checked my stash of cookbooks downloaded from Google Books for the phrase “milk punch” and came up with many hits.

The oldest recipe I have (and I’m sure there are many others out there) comes from page 187 of The London and Country Cook, from 1749, published in London. The recipe is:

To make fine milk punch.

Take two quarts of water, one quart of milk, half a pint of lemon juice, and one quart of brandy, sugar to your taste; put the milk and water together a little warm, then the sugar, then the lemon juice; stir it well together; then the brandy; stir it again, and run it through a flannel bag till it is very fine; then bottle it; it will keep a fortnight or more.

A few observations about the recipe. First, the milk will have a much higher percentage of fat than anything you can buy at the store today, including whole milk; this milk would have had the cream skimmed from it but otherwise would be quite rich. Second, the moment that lemon juice hits the milk-water mixture the milk is going to curdle like crazy. There’s nothing wrong with this, and it will result in a thick sort of drink with what is probably an interesting texture. Of course, putting it all through a flannel bag will change it, although I’m not quite sure as to whether the flannel bag is supposed to filter out large pieces or to break the large pieces into smaller pieces.

The New Yorker description mentions a few different tastes in their drink: “smooth, sweet, and spicy.” The London recipe could be sweet, with the sugar, and would be rich, with the milk, and is recognizable as an alcoholic drink, with the brandy, but it isn’t spicy. Another milk punch recipe, from Housekeeping in Old Virginia, from 1878, includes a spice as an ingredient. This was definitely a different time period, as that book placed the recipe in its sickbed recipe section. That recipe is:

Pour two tablespoonfuls good brandy into six tablespoonfuls milk.  Add two teaspoonfuls ground loaf sugar and a little grated nutmeg. An adult may take a tablespoonful of this every two or three hours, but children must take less.

Yes, it probably is best if children take a bit less of the drink that includes hard liquor. This recipe is likely closer to the drink the New Yorker reporter had, although it is a pretty simple concoction.

A more complicated drink appears in The Ideal Bartender, from 1917, which appears under “Egg Milk Punch.” That recipe has the bartender fill a bar glass half full of shaved ice, then add an egg (in the early 20th century they added eggs to everything), some sugar, some rum and brandy, and then fill the glass full of milk and shake until the mixture “creams.” It was then filtered and poured into a tall thin glass, with a sprinkling of nutmeg on top.

This is probably getting closer to the modern restaurant’s version of milk punch, but without the fancy spices. Milk punch has been around forever–the New Yorker mentions that Ben Franklin had his own recipe for it–and while it has certainly fallen out of favor it can certainly be resurrected by anyone willing to download some old cookbooks and experiment with some modern variations.