MARY TOLFORD WILSON
Long after Stephen Day had begun the operation of a printing press in the infant Massachusetts Bay colony, the American who sought printed guidance in almost any branch of temporal affairs was still forced to rely upon European works. “Those that walk mournfully with God” might turn to Richard Standfast’s Little Handful of Cordial Comforts for Fainting Souls,1 printed in Boston, or to any of the numerous sermons that flowed from colonial American presses; but the man who needed to know the best time to plant his wheat and the housewife whose receipt for syllabub was not completely to her taste could find help only in imported books.
For aid in such mundane matters, the English-speaking colonist might bring with him Thomas Tusser’s Five Hundreth Pointes of good Husbandrie, first printed in 1573 and frequently reissued. This work was doubly desirable because it also contained a section devoted to Huswiferie.2 The rhymed advice in Tusser’s appealing book covered every aspect of life on the land and in the house, from sowing “peason and beans, in the wane of the moone,” to marking new blankets and sheets. However, from the housewife’s point of view, it was in many ways too general. For example, it contained no recipes for the pancakes, wafers, seed cakes, pasties, and frumenty that he recommended to her for use on such special occasions as Shrove Tuesday, sheepshearing, or harvest home.
Unless she was illiterate or unusually shiftless, the homemaker of course had her own written collection of receipts, medicinal as well as culinary, gathered from family and friends. A surprising number of early English manuscript receipt books, many of them beautifully written, have survived and can now be found in such collections as the Bitting in the Library of Congress and the Whitney in the New York Public Library.3 Or the well-to-do mistress of a household might own one of the rather few works on cookery printed in England before 1600, such as the several very rare items now in the Whitney collection.4
After Gervase Markham’s popular works began dispensing their widely inclusive advice, the seventeenth-century wife might find that her sporting husband’s copy of Markham’s Countrey Contentments included, in addition, The English Huswife: Containing the Inward and Outward Vertues which ought to be in a Compleate Woman.5 For the housewife’s exclusive use, the latter section was frequently bound separately. Or it was combined with Markham’s English Husbandman to make an extremely desirable reference work. It would be interesting to know how many copies of these two popular works were worn past preserving in colonial homes. We do know from the records of the Virginia Company of London that as early as 1620, copies of the two “bound togeather” were destined for use in America.6
Markham’s English Huswife, besides containing a lengthy section devoted to cookery, which began with a calendar for planting necessary herbs in the right phases of the moon, also gave explicit advice about dairying and brewing; on making hempen, linen, and woolen cloth; and on how to achieve “vertue in physick,” which covered everything from remedies for “griefes in stomacke” and an ointment to “breede haire” to cures for consumption and the plague. As for the inward virtues the housewife ought to possess, these, too, covered a wide field. They ranged from being religious to being witty, from being chaste of thought to being “wise in discourse but not frequent therein.” Save that Markham’s book lacked candlemaking instructions, the English housewife could scarcely have wished for a work better calculated to guide her in all her activities. The colonial wife, on the other hand, would come to feel that the work had certain lacunae. In America she had learned to use native-materials, the butternut in her dye pot, for example. But until a more specifically American work could be written, a book like Markham’s was invaluable to her.
The success of Markham’s publications encouraged many another author eager to advise on household affairs. The seventeenth century saw a marked increase in the number of such works printed in England. “Cabinets” and “Closets,” including Queen Henrietta Maria’s, were opened to disclose receipts for cookery, confectionery, distilling, “physick,” and “chirgurie.”7 Moreover, women entered the field as authors when the Countess of Kent’s True Gentlewoman’s Delight and Hannah Woolley’s Queenlike Closet were published.8
The next century produced an almost overwhelming number of English works embracing the art of cookery. Many were the product of women writers, and an increasing proportion dealt exclusively with cooking. The varieties offered were numerous: queen’s, royal, court, England’s new, modern, complete, professed, easy, and economical. The cooks whom the works were intended to suit were characterized by even more diverse adjectives: British, English, London, court, country, universal, modern, complete, family, pastry, experienced, prudent, frugal, and accomplished. A colonial bookseller thus had a wealth of titles from which he might choose to please his growing clientele.
But long as was the list from which she might select, the needs of the eighteenth-century American housewife could not be completely met by any one of the British works. Colonial cookery had undergone numerous changes since her ancestors had first established homes in the New World, and British authors seemed unaware of the resulting American needs in cooking instructions.
It was a noteworthy event, therefore, when the first edition of Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery appeared in Hartford, Connecticut, in the spring of 1796.9 So far as we know this was the first cookbook of American authorship to be published in the United States. The work was an unpretentious volume, paper covered, and of only forty-seven octavo pages. Its contents lived up to its straightforward title: the receipts it contained and its section on “Catering, or the Procuring the Best Viands, Fish, &c” recorded the changes that had taken place in our cookery and even in our speech. Moreover, the inclusion of many of these American variations marked their first appearance in print. Consequently, Amelia Simmons’s work was, in its minor sphere, another declaration of American independence.
Credit should in fairness be given to an earlier attempt to publish a cookbook particularly suited to American users. William Parks, printer at Williamsburg, was the innovator. When he published his edition of E. Smiths Compleat Housewife in 1742, he did so with the stated purpose of excluding receipts, “The Ingredients or Materials for which, are not to be had in this Country.”10 Such things as skirrets and broom buds apparently fell within that category. In so far as he followed his guiding principle of including only such receipts as were “useful and practicable here,” the cookery section of Parks’s book might also be labeled “American.” But this negative approach could not mirror, as Amelia Simmons’s book did, the changes that Americans had been making in their cookery.
During the following half century or so several other standard British works were reprinted in America. Notable are two editions of Carter’s The Frugal Housewife, the first of which (Boston, 1772) has plates on carving by Paul Revere, and Briggs’s almost encyclopedic The New Art of Cookery.11 The largest of these leather-bound volumes ran to 557 pages, but none even claimed to be particularly concerned with American tastes, ingredients, or necessities.
Little is known of Amelia Simmons. She was, she said, an American orphan, and her preface reveals a preoccupation with that status in life. She described herself as one “circumscribed in her knowledge” and without “an education sufficient to prepare the work for the press,” a fact that was to cause her some distress. The enterprise seems to have been her own, for the title page announced that the printing, done by Hudson and Goodwin, was “For the Author,” a practice by no means universal. That she was a down-to-earth person, shrewd and practical, we can scarcely doubt. Her work, being without an expensive binding, could—and did—sell for 2s. 3d., a price which justified its purchase even in homes where the family income would permit the buying of little printed matter besides the yearly almanac. Her material was a well-calculated combination of the most common and practical recipes and those suited to special occasions and to more liberal food allowances. The book thus made an appeal to a wide audience and came close to justifying her claim that it was adapted “to all Grades of Life.”
Many of her receipts were outright borrowings from British cookery books of the period, particularly Susannah Carters. But this plagiarism was then—and even much later—accepted as customary procedure. She too was to suffer from such practices, even though her work was covered—apparently not very effectively—by the first Federal copyright law, of 1790. Based on standard works, her book contained the expected and traditional directions for making meat pies, trifles, and syllabubs, and instructions on how “To Dress a Turtle.” The originality of Amelia Simmons’s work lies in its recognition that an American could not find in a British cookbook recipes for making dishes that she as an American had known and eaten all her life. The deficiencies of British works stemmed largely from one source: Americans used ingredients that Europeans did not ordinarily employ. Amelia Simmons was the first writer of cookery books to set to work with that fact in mind.
Modern Americans who learn in kindergarten the importance of Indian corn to our colonial life will find it hard to believe that it took almost two centuries for a recipe treating this common ingredient to find its way into a cookery book. But British authors, having had no experience with its use, did not recognize the existence of this New World grain. Amelia Simmons demonstrated her practicality and proved that her work was truly “Adapted to this Country” by including five receipts requiring the use of corn meal: three for Indian Pudding, one for “Johny Cake or Hoe Cake,” and one for “Indian Slapjacks.” This was the first known appearance of any of the three in any cookbook.
Other recipes, too, mark this work as original and as plainly the product of an American cook—the inclusion of “Pompkin” Puddings, for example. British works of the day included many varieties of pudding, and the pumpkin was known in Europe, but previous American cookery imprints had not employed this ingredient. Actually, Amelia Simmons’s pumpkin puddings would be called “pies” in America today. They were baked in crusts, and the ingredients of the filling were similar to those used in present-day pumpkin pie. This is not to say that Americans were then without a dish called “pumpkin pie.” Mrs. Silvester Gardiner of Boston set down the rules for one in her book marked “Receipts from 1763.”12 However, this pie was made by placing alternate layers of raw apple and raw pumpkin, both sliced and well sugared, under a crust. The baked result was similar to deep-dish apple pie and very different from what we now know as pumpkin pie. By 1796, in Amelia Simmons’s work, eggs, cream, sugar, and spice were being mixed with stewed pumpkin to create what has become an American Thanksgiving Day classic.
Her “Crookneck, or Winter Squash Pudding” was another newcomer to cookery books. Here even the word “squash” was an American contribution. Nor was this word the only borrowing from the American Indian that the recipe revealed. A practice learned from him was copied when she suggested that “dry whortleberries scattered in, will make it better.”
Another noteworthy innovation was the inclusion of the Jerusalem artichoke among the book’s “Directions for … Procuring the Best Viands, Fish, &c.” This North American root had been introduced into England early in the seventeenth century, where it had at first been received as “dainties for a Queene,” according to John Parkinson, herbarist to Charles I. But in 1629, when his herbal appeared, Parkinson had to report also that in his country the vegetable’s “being so plentifull and cheape, hath rather bred a loathing then a liking of them.”13 British cookbooks reflected this distaste. Even Briggs’s voluminous work did not contain a recipe for cooking them. American Cookery did, marking again the beginning of a divergence in the cookery books of the two peoples.
Finally, the work introduced another novelty American cookbooks were to copy—a recipe “For brewing Spruce Beer.” This beverage had also been overlooked by British-American imprints on cookery. Long revered in Europe and America as an antiscorbutic, spruce beer had been much used on long sailing voyages and by armies on both sides of the Atlantic. The decoction, especially when fermented by the use of molasses, was recommended by the Scottish doctor James Lind in his Treatise of the Scurvy in 1753.14 Perhaps faith in the remedy persisted longer on this side of the water, or perhaps the greater availability of spruce caused the inclusion of the recipe in Amelia Simmons’s work. Certainly her book set a fashion for many American cookery books. Additions made to the New York edition of Carter’s Frugal Housewife in 1803 included an “Appendix containing Several New Receipts Adapted to the American Mode of Cooking” where two recipes for brewing this beer were to be found.15
In minor details, Amelia Simmons’s work was equally American. Corn cobs were used in the smoking of bacon; her roast turkey receipt called for accompanying “cramberry-sauce”; she used watermelon rinds to make “American citron”; and her directions for treating “Minced Pies” reflected the New England custom of long-range pie baking: “Weeks after, when you have occasion to use them, carefully raise the top crust, and with a round edg’d spoon, collect the meat into a bason, which warm with additional wine and spices to the taste of your circle, while the crust is also warm’d like a hoe cake, put carefully together and serve up, by this means you can have hot pies through the winter, and enrich’d singly to your company.”
Thus far we have seen characteristics of American Cookery that have remained rather exclusively American, if they have survived at all. In addition, the work recorded an innovation that was to revolutionize European cookery as well. This novelty was the introduction of chemical leaven into doughs, a practice which was to result in the compounding of modern baking powders. Until nearly the end of the eighteenth century, the desired lightness in baked goods was produced by beating in air along with eggs, or adding yeast or various spirits to produce a ferment. Even cakes were leavened with yeast. But by 1796, someone—and the evidence seems to point to an anonymous American woman—had dared to introduce a chemical into her dough to produce carbon dioxide in a hurry. Joseph Priestley had already shown the world how to carbonate water, but the materials he had used were acid and wet chalk.16 In America, cooks of Amelia Simmons’s time were adding pearlash to gingerbread and cooky doughs, and her work is the first cookbook known to have recommended the ingredient.
This newcomer to the oven was a well-known staple of American households where soap was a homemade article and where wool was scoured or cloth bleached. In all these processes, as well as in the manufacture of glass, potash or its refined form, pearlash, was a desired ingredient. Consequently, the European who lacked the forests from which these ashes were procured had made “sope ashes” one of the products to be sought in America. The extent of their manufacture here in the late 1790’s just when their use in baking was becoming common, is recorded in the account that the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt wrote of his travels in the United States in the years 1795 to 1797. At Albany and “other American cities, the back country of which has been lately cleared,” he found the ashes “forming a considerable branch of the trade,” for in addition to the quantities used locally, the annual amount leaving United States harbors had reached close to 8,000 tons in 1792.17 It is hard to imagine an American housewife unfamiliar with these “cheap and plentiful”18 ingredients when Amelia Simmons’s cookbook appeared.
That the use of these ashes in baking was an American innovation seems established by the publicity given the method in 1799 when it apparently first became known in England. In the United States, controversy had arisen over the comparative merits of alkalis and acids, a discussion which incidentally led to the question whether potash, “which women have [for] so great a duration of time mingled with their cakes,”19 was wholesome for children. The debate evoked two letters from Dr. Samuel Latham Mitchill, a professor at Columbia College, and these letters, first circulated in New York, were then published in the London Monthly Magazine in early 1799. Their appearance excited an inquiry from a British reader about the cakes “and the manner of making them.”20 An explanatory letter from a Long Island woman was lengthy and detailed.21 The fact that the British magazine gave more than two pages to her discussion of a cake leaven suggests that the method was still a novelty in Britain. Yet, in early 1796 American Cookery contained four recipes, two for cookies and two for gingerbread, requiring this forerunner of baking powder.22
The portion of Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery devoted to gingerbread revealed another emerging American preference. For centuries, gingerbread had been a traditional European pastry, a thin, flat, spiced confection similar to what we call a cooky today and eminently suited to the making of gingerbread men. To achieve the desired result, the dough was rolled thin and cut or printed in molds. “This is your Gingerbread used at the Court, and in all gentlemens houses at festival times,” wrote Sir Hugh Plat of similar pastry in the early seventeenth century.23 More than 150 years later the receipts in the manuscript cookbook used by Martha Washington were for this same kind of gingerbread. “Prints is moste used after the second course in christmas,” says one of her receipts; and another, “The prints of white ginger bread are used much thinner then the cullerd which is commonly made allmoste halfe an Intch thick or a quarter of an intch at the least.”24 There can be little doubt that the kind of gingerbread that figured as a refreshment for troops on early mustering days and quasimartial occasions was of this same cookylike, convenient variety. “We ate gingerbread all day long and saw the Governor exercise the foot,” wrote William Byrd of Westover while with his troops in a display of strength calculated to intimidate the Tuscarora Indians in 1711.25 And the gingerbread bought by the seventeen-year-old Benjamin Franklin on his way to Philadelphia was almost certainly no other kind.26 Amelia Simmons’s work contained recipes for this popular and easily vendible type of pastry, but it also contained a recipe called “Soft Gingerbread to be baked in pans,” the ancestor of the cake-like baked product that usually comes to the American mind when the word “gingerbread” is mentioned. Moreover, so far as we have been able to discover, this was the first time the recipe appeared in American print.
Amelia Simmons’s section on gingerbread illustrates another point, her choice of language. When she called one variety “Molasses Gingerbread,” she was voicing the American preference for the use of this word over the “treacle” of British recipes like those of E. Smith. Several other words testify to the fact that she wrote in the vernacular. Her use of the Americanism “emptins,”27 a colloquial variation of “emptyings,” is particularly striking. This word had first been applied to the lees of beer, cider, or wine, specifically when these dregs were used as a ferment; only later was it applied to the semiliquid prepared yeast so commonly used in the baking of bread even long after Amelia Simmons’s day. Her use of the term is extremely early; the first citation noted in the Dictionary of American English is one of 1839. Moreover, two Americanisms, “slapjack” for a cake fried on a griddle and “Hannah Hill” for the sea bass,28 appeared here thirteen and eighteen years earlier, respectively, than their first uses claimed by the same dictionary. Amelia Simmons also used the word “shortning”—in later editions corrected to “shortening”—to denote fats, specifying that the proportions she used were “half butter and half lard.29 “Shortening” has been curiously slighted in works devoted to the history of words. The Dictionary of American English does not include it, nor do we find Mencken interested in its origins. The New English Dictionary cites the date of its first printed appearance in Britain as 1823, when it was listed in a work on Suffolk words. Yet Amelia Simmons used it as a term familiar to Americans in 1796. By 1828, it had become so well established in our vocabulary that Webster included it in his American Dictionary of the English Language.30
American Cookery was also the first American cookbook to use two words that we have borrowed from the Dutch: “cooky” and “slaw.”31 The former is from “koekje” the Dutch name for what British cookbooks called “cakes” or “little cakes.” In colonial New York koekjes were a popular treat offered to New Year’s Day callers, and English-speaking New Yorkers took over the name as well as the custom. How easily this word became Americanized is illustrated by the Revolutionary diary of Jabez Fitch from Connecticut, taken prisoner on Long Island. Fitch’s phonetic spelling wavered all the way from “fregize” to “friggarzie” when he wanted to write “fricassee,” but koekjes became “cookies” on the first try.32 The Americanism appeared in print in the New York Daily Advertiser in 1786,33 so Amelia Simmons’s use of it was not new or original. However, her work was the first American cookbook to abandon the British name for the pastry. “Slaw” for the Dutch “sla,” meaning salad, had also been in the process of absorption into our vocabulary for quite a period of time.34 When the two words appeared in American Cookery, they were still very much in the vernacular, however: though Webster had accepted “shortening” by 1828, “cooky” and “slaw” were still unrecognized by him.35
Just as an internal examination of Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery reveals a break with earlier efforts to meet the needs of American cooks, so an external examination—of its publishing history—suggests the degree of its influence on other works. The Connecticut District Court issued a copyright to Amelia Simmons on April 28, 1796.36 A copy of her work was deposited on May 26 of that year in the office of the Secretary of State in Washington, who was then the custodian of such volumes.37 On June 8, Isaac Beers of New Haven announced in the Connecticut Journal that the book was just published and was to be sold by him. It was a large advertisement for a single book to receive in those days, for its full title required space: American Cookery, or the Art of Dressing Viands, Fish, Poultry and Vegetables, and the Best Modes of Making Pastes, Puffs, Pies, Tarts, Tuddings, Custards and Preserves, and All Kinds of Cakes, from the Imperial Plumb to Plain Cake. Adapted to this Country, and All Grades of Life. By Amelia Simmons, an American Orphan. During August and September an advertisement that American Cookery was “For Sale at this Office” appeared in seven consecutive issues of the weekly Middlesex Gazette published in Middletown, Connecticut.38 As this was a busy market center to which farmers from New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont brought cattle for export to the West Indies, it is probable that the book had considerable distribution from this source in the saddlebags of home-faring drovers.
Two different versions of the 1796 edition appeared, both of them now exceedingly rare, though the durable rag paper upon which they were printed prepared them to withstand hard usage. The second39 is supplemented by a sheet of obviously dissimilar paper on which is printed the following “Advertisement”: “The author of the American Cookery, not having an education sufficient to prepare the work for the press, the person that was employed by her, and entrusted with the receipts, to prepare them for publication, (with a design to impose on her, and injure the sale of the book) did omit several articles very essential in some of the receipts, and placed others in their stead, which were highly injurious to them, without her consent—which was unknown to her, till after publication; but she has removed them as far as possible, by the following Errata.” The appended corrections do indeed cover some serious errors such as the omission of flour for thickening puddings and the doubling of the amount of “emptins” required to leaven a cake. Unfortunately for the users of her books as well as for Amelia Simmons’s reputation, her attempts at rectification never completely caught up with the printings of her original recipes.
If we can believe her own statement about the success of the first edition, the demand had “been so great, and the sale so rapid” that she found herself “under a necessity of publishing a second edition.” This she did in Albany, probably in 1800.40 It was an extensively revised and considerably augmented work. There were new recipes such as “Election Cake” (beginning with thirty quarts of flour). “Independence Cake,” and “Federal Pan Cake,” recording by their names America’s awareness of its new status as a nation. The new edition also contained a recipe for “Chouder,” already an accepted part of the American menu and previously in print, and a recipe requiring the use of that very American combination of rye flour and corn meal, “rye ‘n’ injun.”
The second edition was widely reprinted, with only slight omissions; first at some undesignated place; then at Walpole, New Hampshire; twice at Brattleboro, Vermont; and in New York at Poughkeepsie.41 Some of these were possibly unauthorized, for Amelia Simmons’s name did not appear on the title page. Finally, two different augmented versions were published in New York City and Woodstock, Vermont, the latter in 1831.42 The original version, also, made two later appearances, both bearing her name and both carrying the mistakes she had tried to correct.43
All these editions and printings of Amelia Simmons’s work, whether or not they carried her name, were made under the original title. But American Cookery was also published under disguised names. New American Cookery … By an American Lady, published in New York in 1805, was a complete word-for-word reprint of Amelia Simmons’s revised edition minus her prefaces and with some material added.44 The New-England Cookery … Compiled by Lucy Emerson, which appeared in Montpelier, Vermont, three years later,45 was a less flagrant plagiarism, for it disclaimed “pretensions to the originality of the whole of the receipts herein contained.” However, it was largely a reprint of the first and uncorrected edition of American Cookery. The final plagiarism was perhaps the worst: Harriet Whiting’s Domestic Cookery published in Boston in 1819 contained no recipe that had not appeared in the original work of Amelia Simmons, and exactly as it was then printed.46 Harriet Whiting did not, however, claim to be an orphan, nor did she bother to correct the recipes.
For thirty-five years, then, between the time of her first edition in 1796 and the Woodstock edition of 1831, Amelia Simmons’s awareness of a distinctly American cookery had an impact directly upon the contents of American culinary imprints. Meanwhile, her book was affecting other cookbooks. Editors of British works about to be published in America acknowledged the validity of her assumption and took steps to compete with her work.
Susannah Carter’s Frugal Housewife,47 Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy,48 and Maria Rundell’s A New System of Domestic Cookery,49 all bowed in the direction of the American cook and, incidentally, in the direction of Amelia Simmons. Pumpkin pie, spruce beer, doughnuts, crullers, waffles, maple beer, maple molasses, squash, corn meal, and clams made their way into these new editions of old works. Claims of being adapted to the “American Mode of Cooking” or to the use of “Private Families Throughout the United States” advertised these new culinary wares.
While all cookbooks subsequently printed in America were not adapted to specifically American requirements,50 a fact for which we may be grateful, a pattern had been established, a model created, by Amelia Simmons in 1796. American Cookery was eventually superseded, and many another American woman’s name appeared on the title page of a book on cooking. In time, the awareness of indigenous cookery extended even to geographical differences, and regional works began to appear. But Amelia Simmons still holds her place as the mother of American cookery books. And no later work, however completely it may reflect the mores of this country, has quite the freshness of this first glimpse caught in the small mirror held up by an American Orphan.