Research, reenactments, and recipes from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America.
Researching 19th-century food I started with gingerbread. Why, is a long story. It’s winter, for one thing, so the kitchen garden was out. Some of the recipes and other bits and pieces will show up here. For the rest, wait for the book.
Intrigued by Thomas Jefferson’s calendar of the Washington city market (see the previous post) and liking the design, I decided to use it as a model for mapping produce available right here, right now. So with some help from Erin Kauffman, market manager for the Durham Farmers’ Market, I compiled a produce calendar for Durham, North Carolina, 2011. Read on
Friends, I have been derelict in my duty this week! I let George Washington’s birthday go by without passing on a delightful (ahem) recipe for Washington Pie and an accompanying nugget of invented history from the esteemed mid-twentieth-century food writer Clementine Paddleford. Read on
In researching historical baking I’ve ignored some old standards — very old standards, I mean, not like oatmeal cookies — and now that I have a lull in the research I’m picking them off. This month it’s jumbles, or jumbals, if you prefer the old spelling, which were formerly like nothing that goes by that name today. Read on
Thomas Jefferson was a man of many interests, and being President of the United States doesn’t seem to have deterred him from pursuing them. If from the White House he couldn’t putter in his beloved garden at Monticello, he still managed to keep up with the business. During his eight years in Washington, he kept track in his journal of the produce available month by month at the city market and drew up a chart showing each item’s earliest and latest availability during his residence — a fascinating, if a bit foggy and bubbly, window into early American gardening and vegetable consumption.
Because I’ll not be out-geeked by a two-centuries-dead president, I’ve made an HTML version of Jefferson’s chart. His handwritten original was quite clever (you can see it at low resolution on the Monticello website) and I’ve preserved the basic design while adding a bit of interactivity: for now just the ability to mouse over headings to highlight rows and columns, but eventually also to view definitions and commentary on various items of produce. Read on
Lest you think that the symbolic gesture of the self-righteous reformer is an invention of our own age, let me assure you that it has been with us for a good couple of centuries. Tonight I bring you conscientious consumption, 1830s-style!
But first, as always, a little historical background. Read on