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Serving the Servants

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There was an interesting item in the New York Times about historic house museums shifting the focus from rich and famous occupants, to the servants that made these huge homes run.

The new servant’s tour at the Breakers, a Vanderbilt estate, is “…accompanied by audio commentary from blunt, almost embittered retired servants and their children.”
The article continues: “A former footman recalls spending entire days just polishing brass or waiting on tables while female dinner guests ignored him. As he stood holding out heavy trays of food, he explains on the audio narration, he would imagine taking revenge: ‘You think about dropping the whole thing in her lap.'”
Anyone who has worked as a caterer in New York will agree that not much has changed.
Read the full article:

The Scullery Maid Behind the Brocade at Mansion Museums (NY Times)

Organic Food: Luxury or Necessity?

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Ever since my tenement project, I’ve been involved in a lot of discussions about eating well on a very tight budget. Recently, my friend Ben forwarded me this article about eating “ethically” on a food stamp budget:
“A recent National Review column argued that organic food was, in fact, “an expensive luxury item, something bought by those who have the resources…When Alice Waters told Americans that they could dine better by forgoing “the cellphone or the third pair of Nike shoes,” my monthly cellphone bill totaled zero and I owned just one pair of sneakers. When Michael Pollan urged citizens to plant a garden, I was living on the 10th floor of an urban apartment building.”
The author attempts to feed her and her husband organically on $250 a month. She ends up turning to some historic sources to learn how to craft delicious meals with limited funds. Overall, an interesting read.

Dinner on the Road to Wellville

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I’m re-reading The Road to Wellville, a historic novel (and movie) based on the life of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. I would credit Kellogg with launching vegetarianism into popular culture. While there had been American vegetarian advocates before him (like Dr. Graham of Oberlin college, inventor of the cracker by the same name) Kellogg’s health spa, The Battle Creek Sanitarium, made it fashionable. “The San,” as it was nicknamed, was frequented by the wealthy and famous. It treated all your ills with “scientific living” and “biologic eating.”

What appeals to me about Kellogg’s food is it’s combination of the cream-and-butter French cuisine that was so popular at the turn of the century; early vegetarianism; and the foundations of the modern American diet.
Although many of Kellogg’s ideas were bunk (and a few even dangerous, like radium treatments) many of them still hold up. Kellogg’s diet focuses on fruits and vegetable, whole grains, and replacing proteins lost by excluding meat. He invented the breakfast cereal, launched peanut butter into the mainstream, and introduced “exotic” foods like yogurt and seaweed to America. He invented meat substitutes like Protose, which were not dissimilar from the black bean burgers and tofu hot dogs of today.
It was all a huge departure from the eating habits of the day. But Kellogg was also working around the same time as the release of The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s expose on the meat packing industry in Chicago. In a time before the FDA, it may have not been such a bad idea to eat vegetarian. Sinclair and his wife frequented the San themselves.
After reading about Kellogg’s food, I became curious to try it. I tracked down a cookbook of recipes from the Battle Creek Sanitarium, The New Cookery by Lenna Frances Cooper (available in its entirety online) and I’m planning a dinner party in March. The menu will be as follows:
Salpicon of Fruits
Soup
Manhattan Soup
Toast Sqaures
Hors D’oeuvres
Radishes with Butter
Toasted Pine Nuts
Olives
Refeve
Protose Roast
Baked Eggplant
Buttered Cauliflower
Potatoes a la Maitre d’Hotel
Entree
Asparagus Tips on Toast
Hollandaise Sauce
Sorbet
Pineapple Sherbert
Roti
Apple and Celery Salad
Dessert
The Queen of Puddings
Assorted Fruits
Fromage
Neufchatel Cheese on Wafers
However, I don’t know if this single event would do Kellogg’s diet justice. He promoted it as a way of life, not just limited to the walls of his Sanitarium, that would “exonerate the bowels” and flush the poisons from your system.

So I’ve been considering immersing myself in his diet for a week, to see if my bowels exonerate. What do you think?

Diamond Jim Brady, World Famous Glutton

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The New York Times recently published an article debunking the gastronomic capabilities of “Diamond” Jim Brady, an entrepreneur and hearty eater from around the turn of the century.

Legend has it that Diamond Jim would down: “…a hefty breakfast of eggs, breads, muffins, grits, pancakes, steaks, chops, fried potatoes, and pitchers of orange juice. He’d stave off mid-morning hunger by downing two or three dozen clams or oysters, then repair to Delmonico’s or Rector’s for a lunch that consisted of more oysters and clams, lobsters, crabs, a joint of beef, pie, and more orange juice.”

For dinner: “Three dozen oysters a dozen crabs, six or seven lobsters, terrapin soup,” and a steak, with a dessert of “a tray full of pastries… and two pounds of bonbons.” Later in the evening, allegedly, came an après-theater supper of “a few game birds and more orange juice.””

The times test the legitimacy of Jim’s tall tale, but also has this to add:

“Indeed, who among us, especially at this time of year, doesn’t fantasize about simply letting go as Brady did, eating every rich thing set before us, impervious to guilt, health consequences or vanity? “I’d be obscenely fat, yes,” one thinks, “but I’d be celebratedly obscenely fat.”’

Lincoln’s Inuagural Lunch

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James A. Garfield’s pickled oysters, 1881 (photo: L.A. Times)

I’m down in D.C. for the next few days for the inauguration. There’s going to be an inaugeral lunch for the Obamas that “recalls Lincoln’s favorite foods.” The lunch will include seafood stew, a brace of American birds, and apple sponge cake.

I had been under the impression that Lincoln wasn’t much of a gastronome. He seemed to be so dis-interested in eating, he occasionally forgot. Lincoln’s 1861 lunch was very simple: Mock-turtle soup (a stew made by boiling a calf’s head), corned beef and cabbage, parsley potatoes, and blackberry pie. His 1865 dinner was a much grander affair, which you can read about in this L.A. Times article, along with the full history of presidential first meals.

Recipe: James A. Garfield’s pickled oysters, 1881

Recipe: William H. Harrison’s poundcake, 1841 Made with mace and nutmeg.

(photo: L.A. Times)

How to Cook a Wolf

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I came across this excerpt and commentary on How to Cook A Wolf (1942), a book by food writer M.F.K Fisher, that I think is appropriate to my Tenement experiment:

“The book was written when wartime shortages had compounded the problems of the Depression, and Fisher offers sensible advice in each chapter about how to make do, provide nutrition, and even enjoy oneself at table. Along the way she illuminates her times. For true emergencies, the essay “How to Stay Alive” ponders what’s needed spiritually and nutritionally to survive on what was a few cents a day in her time. It includes a recipe for making a slumgullion of “ground whole-grain cereal,” a tiny amount of cheap meat, and loads of vegetables (“wilted and withered things a day old maybe…[or] the big coarse ugly ones”), stewed three or more hours.

‘I know, from some experience,’ she says, ‘[that it] holds enough vitamins and minerals and so on and so forth to keep a professional strong-man or a dancer or even a college professor in good health and equable spirits. The main trouble with it, as with any enforced and completely simple diet, is its monotony. It must be considered, then, as a means to an end, like ethyl gasoline, which can never give much esthetic satisfaction to its purchaser or the automobile it is meant for but is almost certain to make that automobile run smoothly.’

All this sounds more applicable with each morning’s news. “

In the 1870s, proteins and fats had been discovered and taken into nutritional consideration, but vitamins had not yet made an appearance. It’s interesting that by the 1940s, vegetables are introduced as part of a poor man’s diet. But even today, it’s fresh produce that can be prohibitively expensive on a budget. The most expensive item of food I’ve bought so far is a bag of apples, and I anticipate my daily intake of fruit will put me far over budget.

The entire article on historic food writing is intriguing, and is on a blog that is quickly becoming one of my favorites: The Education of Oronte Chum

Meatless Loaf and other "Great" Depression Era Recipes

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When I pick an historic era to recreate in recipes, I don’t usually pick a time when people are starving to death. So I was surprised to stumble upon several Great Depression cooking shows on You Tube. The most notable is Great Depression Cooking with Clara, a 92 year old grandmother who cooks recipes from her youth. The show mostly involves potatoes and stories about how awful the Depression was. With the economy the way it is, maybe this is good information to know.

Egg Drop Soup

Poor Man’s Meal (This one seems pretty delicous. Fried potatoes and hot dogs? Hell yeah.)

These two boys are making “Meatless Loaf” for a class project. It’s a concoction inspired by The Grapes of Wrath that involves peanuts, rice, and cottage cheese.