IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN THE QUIRKY NATURE OF BOSTONIANS, good gossip, and writing that is light and chatty, I highly recommend George F. Weston’s Boston Ways: High, By and Folk as well as Cleveland Amory’s The Proper Bostonians. For anyone interested in the Victorian table, customs, silverware, and decorations, Kathryn Grover’s Dining in America, 1850–1900 is a great read. The Victorian Book of Cakes contains drop-dead gorgeous illustrations of high Victorian cakes, although from England. The BBC ran a series entitled The Victorian Kitchen and published a companion book. The series is hosted by a cook who grew up working in a large, English Victorian-style kitchen. On our side of the Atlantic, The American Kitchen is a terrific resource.
Charles Ranhofer’s The Epicure is perhaps the most interesting, thorough cookbook ever published. Original copies are quite expensive (and huge) but worth it. I also put my hands on a copy of Urbain-Dubois’s Patisserie d’Aujourd’hui, which makes modern pastry chefs appear singularly unimaginative.
King’s Hand-Book of Boston is one of those odd finds that is packed with useful and fascinating Boston history. It is also well illustrated with detailed drawings of no-longer-extant Boston buildings. I also reviewed the food columns of the Boston Daily Globe for 1896, the “Housekeeper’s Column” in particular, a treasure trove of information about how Bostonians actually cooked and dined. Earlier columns were also helpful: the “Our Cooking School,” which ran from 1894 to 1895 and the “Boston Cooking School” columns, which ran from 1885 to 1889.
Finally, I read Oystering from New York to Boston cover to cover, since I could not get enough about oyster boats, oyster sex, and oyster farming. Fascinating stuff.
A Culinary Time Machine
Page 1: Kathryn Grover’s Dining in America, 1850–1900 provides an excellent description of the customs of dining in Victorian America.
Page 4: Descriptions of the Boston Food Fair found in the Boston Evening Transcript, Monday, October 5, 1896: “World’s Food Fair” and in the Boston Daily Globe of October 6, 1896: “Food Fair Opened.”
Page 15: Details of the Pie Girl Party are provided in Michael Macdonald Mooney’s Evelyn Nesbit and Stanford White: Love and Death in the Gilded Age.
Oysters
Page 23: Reporting on the original Boston Cooking School was based on the First Annual Report, The Boston Cooking School.
Page 25: Quotes about the Farmer family come from Dexter Perkins’s Yield of the Years.
Page 35: Information about oystering taken from John Kochiss’s Oystering from New York to Boston.
Mock Turtle Soup
Page 59: Fannie’s revelation regarding inexact measurements was reported in Laura Shapiro’s Perfection Salad. This epiphany was widely reported in later years and, to my ears, sounds apocryphal.
Lobster à L’Américaine
Page 72: Information about French restaurants in Victorian Boston as well as “cat pies” were found in George F. Weston Jr.’s Boston Ways: High, By and Folk.
Page 73: Boston clubs were full of original Boston characters as described in Alexander W. Williams’s A Social History of the Greater Boston Clubs.
Page 74: The Tavern Club, which still exists, is home to some of the best Boston stories, as described in M. A. DeWolfe Howe’s A Partial (and not impartial) Semi-Centennial History of The Tavern Club. This book includes two photos of Curtis Guild Jr., who filled in for Dr. Stanley, the explorer, after he had refused an invitation to speak at the club. The first photo shows Guild dressed in white duck, blackface, and carrying both an umbrella and a native shield, and then, in the next frame, he “gravely took off all his clothes and delivered his lecture as a savage, in black tights with a yellow codpiece and a necklace of leaves.”
Page 75: The full quote, as found in M. A. DeWolfe Howe’s A Partial (and not impartial) Semi-Centennial History of The Tavern Club, regarding the Cambridge don is: “An ideal is a principle of conduct carried to its abstract absolute and therefore useless expression, and charm . . . like the Cambridge don who invented an ingenious mathematical theorem and said, ‘The best thing about it is that no one can make any use for it for anything . . . ’ This uselessness is the highest kind of use. It is kindling and feeding the ideal spark without which life is not worth living.”
Saddle of Venison
Page 84: Cleveland Amory’s The Proper Bostonians pretty much cornered the market on stories regarding the Boston character, including two of my favorites, the one about the investment banker moving to Chicago and the comment about the lack of oatmeal. Amory also provided the quote from Henry Cabot Lodge and the example of social nudism referring to the appearance of a Cabot and a Coolidge in a series of Camel ads. Here is one story that did not make it into the book, and is a good example of the brutal frankness of the Boston character. “Richard Cabot was once asked to dinner and he replied, ‘Really I have so many people I should like to dine with but never get around to, I should not pretend that I ever would do it.’ ”
Page 111: The history of gas ranges and cookery is discussed in Ellen M. Plante’s The American Kitchen. She was also the source of much of the information regarding American cookware, although newspaper advertisements from the period were also helpful, as were “trade cards,” colored handouts that advertised ice cream machines, stoves, appliances, and gadgets.
Fried Artichokes
Page 124: The history of markets in Boston was found in many places but particularly useful was Moses King’s King’s Handbook of Boston. Also of great value was Quincy’s Market by John Quincy, Jr.
Page 130: The history of S. S. Pierce is covered in many books, but its own publication, The Epicure, contained a history in the 1931 anniversary issue by Mary Crawford entitled “One Hundred Years of Boston Hospitality.”
Canton Punch
Page 145: A good, if romanticized, description of the old-time Thanksgiving is found in the Boston Daily Globe, November 29, 1894, entitled “King of Fall Festivals.”
Page 164. Boston’s waterfront was covered in William S. Rossiter’s Days and Ways in Old Boston.
Page 165: The 1912 Farmer’s Cyclopedia detailed the processing of ginger in China.
Roast Stuffed Goose
Page 167: The history of linoleum and other kitchen history was found in Ellen M. Plante’s The American Kitchen.
Page 170: Faye E. Dudden’s Serving Women was the best source of information we found about immigration and household servants. The details of household dos and don’ts were found in Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood’s Manners and Social Usages.
Page 172–173: Kathryn Grover’s Dining in America: 1850–1900 has a chapter entitled “Technology and the Ideal,” which describes how American manufacturing changed dramatically as the nineteenth century progressed. The key moment was the introduction of the Brown and Sharpe sliding caliper gauge that went on sale in 1851.
Page 177: The source of the information on raising geese was Ducks and Geese, U. S. Department of Agriculture, Standard Varieties of Management, Farmer’s Bulletin, Number 64, George Howard.
Wine Jelly
Page 190: Towle Company pattern information was taken from Kathryn Grover’s Dining in America, 1850–1900.
Page 204–205: Information about how sugar was refined comes from a number of sources, including The Story of Sugar by George Thomas Surface; “Sugar: Its History, Production and Manufacture,” by Jacob A. Dresser, found in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Abstract of the Proceedings of the Society of Arts for the Nineteenth Year, 1880–1881, Meetings 256 to 270 Inclusive; and Something About Sugar by George Morrison Rolph.
Page 213: Quotes about Victorian dining and eating taken from Kathryn Grover’s Dining in America, including the fact that the number of etiquette books published in America had risen substantially after the Civil War.
Page 225: The story about the coffee/buffalo robe trade comes from Mark Pendergast’s Uncommon Grounds, as does most of the other history of coffee, although William H. Ukers’s All About Coffee was also very helpful.