Cooking with coals in a Dutch oven and skillet at Liberty Hall, 2013. (John van Willigen)
CHAPTER ONE
Antebellum Hearth Cooking
The earliest Kentucky cookbook is The Kentucky Housewife, written by Lettice Bryan and published in 1839. Its content reflects the foodways of the region’s upper-class white households in the decades prior to the Civil War. The recipes were designed to be prepared on an open, wood-fired hearth, and the ingredients consist mostly of foods produced in the household’s gardens, orchards, and pastures. There are also recipes for game. Some ingredients, such as sugar and various spices, had to be obtained from great distances and were no doubt used sparingly. In reading the recipes, one is made aware of the labor involved in producing the food and preparing it for use. Many ingredients required processing in the home. Convenience was not an attribute of food, and self-sufficiency was an important part of Kentucky foodways. One indication of this is the lack of branded food products referred to in the recipes. These kinds of foods, so common today, began to appear in a limited number of recipes after the Civil War. Although The Kentucky Housewife was probably intended as a comprehensive cookbook, it certainly has a southern cast and contains some foods clearly associated with the South, including the earliest published recipe for cobbler.
Like most other cookbooks, The Kentucky Housewife adapted to the social forms of the region. Its presumed audience consisted of the mistresses of large households, who often had cooks on staff and other kitchen help. This means that although the mistress had considerable knowledge of cooking, she was primarily a manager of staff, equipment, and ingredients and less actively involved as an actual cook. Although only one sentence in The Kentucky Housewife expresses it directly, it is clear that in many cases the cooks and other kitchen staff were enslaved women and men. As a result, in addition to its value as a cookbook and its usefulness as a source on culinary history, it is a document about slavery.
While relatively little is known about Mrs. Bryan, a few things can be said. She was born Lettice Pierce in 1805 near Danville in Boyle County1 and was married to Virginia-born Edmund D. Bryan in Adair County in 1823. She died in 1877 while in Macoupin, Illinois, and was apparently buried at Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville. Her family had originally migrated from Virginia and appeared to be well-off. Her name appears in the 1850 U.S. Census records of Washington County, Kentucky, along with those of her husband and their six children; Edmund Bryan’s occupation is listed as physician.2 Mrs. Bryan may have been a resident of Cincinnati during the time her husband was attending medical school at the Medical College of Ohio in that city; he graduated in 1835.3 The cookbook was registered with the district court of Kentucky and published in 1839 by Shepard and Stearns in Cincinnati.4 At the time, Cincinnati was growing rapidly, based on intense industrialization. Much of the boom was attributable to livestock slaughtering, which provided feed stock for the cooking fat, soap, and candle industries, in addition to the meatpacking potential. The venerable Cincinnati-based firm of Procter and Gamble, founded in 1837, produced soaps and candles made from animal fats and, much later, Crisco.
The Kentucky Housewife is one of the three “southern housewife” cookbooks. Although these cookbooks do not constitute a series, they are sometimes written about together in culinary histories. The others are The Virginia Housewife or Methodical Cook by Mary Randolph, originally published in 1824 (Fisher 2006; Randolph [1860] 1993), and The Carolina Housewife by Sarah Rutledge, published in 1847 (Rutledge [1847] 1999). None of these books should be thought of as limited to the states in their titles, as Mary Randolph, Lettice Bryan, and Sarah Rutledge were clearly more cosmopolitan. In his introduction to the University of South Carolina Press’s 1991 edition of The Kentucky Housewife, Bill Neal states that Mrs. Bryan’s book is less original than the other two but is nevertheless fully developed with service ideas and suggestions for food to accompany the large number of recipes. The three “housewife” books are thought to be the earliest American regional cookbooks; although there are earlier American cookbooks (Fisher 2006), the housewife cookbooks are important. Damon Lee Fowler (2008), a prominent cookbook author and advocate for the southern food tradition, cites four cookbooks that provide “the largest surviving record” of classical southern cooking: the volumes by Randolph, Bryan, and Rutledge (all antebellum) and Mrs. Hill’s New Cookbook by Annabella Hill, published in 1867. According to Fowler, the Hill volume has a western Georgia focus.
A number of earlier and historically important cookbooks were produced in colonial America. The first cookbooks used in the colonies were written by English authors and were either imports or American reprints of English books. The best known of these is The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy by Hannah Glasse, which was originally published in 1747. This cookbook was widely used in England and, as such, expresses English foodways. The first cookbook written by an American was Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery, or the Art of Dressing Viands, Fish, Poultry, and Vegetables, and the Best Modes of Making Pastes, Puffs, Pies, Tarts, Puddings, Custards, and Preserves, and All Kinds of Cakes, from the Imperial Plum to Plain Cake: Adapted to This Country, and All Grades of Life, published in 1796 in Hartford, Connecticut (Simmons [1796] 1984; Fisher 2006). In contrast to the Glasse volume, the recipes in Simmons’s modest little book make use of American ingredients, including corn, cranberries, turkey, molasses, squash, and potatoes.5
The Kentucky Housewife is comprehensive, as it contains more than 1,300 recipes. The recipes are presented in block format, which means that the ingredients and procedures are contained in a single narrative. This format was used until the innovative cookbooks of the Boston Cooking School, which presented the ingredients list separate from the description of the procedure. This pattern became the standard (with some exceptions) and is still used today. It is usually attributed to Mrs. D. A. Lincoln and her Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book: What to Do and What Not to Do, published in 1884. Bryan’s discussion of the cooking process includes considerable detail. While most of the book is devoted to food preparation, she includes recipes or advice for food processing and preservation, food for the sick, household remedies, cosmetics, and household cleaning agents. The sources of the recipes are not indicated, with one exception. In that case, Bryan identifies the source as the British Encyclopedia.
The Kentucky Housewife has multicultural roots. Besides its apparent British foundations, it includes foods of both African and Native American origin. There are recipes for okra, eggplant, and yams, on the one hand, and for turkey, cranberries, corn, beans, and squash, on the other. Just a few recipes have a specific ethnic identity, such as the Dutch oley koeks.
The recipes are generally vague and even elusive about the quantity of ingredients, and they use a combination of measurements—some familiar to contemporary cookbook readers, some not. In addition to the familiar cups, quarts, and tablespoons (although we cannot assume that these are the same as the measurements used today), there are references to “bird-based” measures, such as a lump of lard or butter the size of a hen’s egg or a partridge’s egg. Handfuls are also used. That said, many recipes do not specify any amount. These practices continued to the end of the nineteenth century, when many of these names for measures were abandoned.
More generally, The Kentucky Housewife reflects foodways based on high levels of self-sufficiency, with much evidence of home gardens and animal production. I am not speaking of pioneer households on the frontier, but in the 1830s the nation’s food system was still based almost entirely on local resources. It had yet to undergo the spectacular transformation in production and transportation that so dramatically reduced the cost of food and increased its availability over the next seventy-five years. People relied on local mills for meal and flour, and there was no centralized production and distribution of livestock, as evidenced by the instructions for slaughter embedded in some recipes. There are many recipes for food preservation, and other recipes include information relevant to harvesting from the garden. No branded or packaged foods are used in the recipes, and commodities like sugar were expensive and required home processing. Although canned foods were available as early as 1810, Mrs. Bryan does not include any canned foods in her recipes. This book was published before the invention of baking powder, and some of the recipes call for its ancestors pearlash and saleratus.
The next generation of Kentucky cookbooks underwent a significant transformation, as the Civil War was a major stimulus for food processing and preservation. The next Kentucky cookbook, Housekeeping in the Blue Grass, was published in 1875. It contained much less about food processing, fewer food preservation recipes, and even a limited number of recipes that include canned foods and branded products. As the role of processed foods increased, food processing companies had an impact on the content of cookbooks in the late nineteenth century. The home economists and cooks who worked for these companies created recipes that used the companies’ products; these recipes were then distributed by the companies themselves and incorporated (to an extent) into newly authored cookbooks.
Mrs. Bryan’s recipe instructions, however, reflect the fact that much food was grown or raised at home rather than purchased at the market. For instance, in the recipes that involve meat, it is clear that the animal must be slaughtered. Some of the recipes actually indicate that the meat is to be slaughtered at home, and many call for the animal to be “freshly killed.” Home butchering is part of the culinary story of The Kentucky Housewife. Under the general remarks on pork, Mrs. Bryan exhorts the reader, “In cutting up meat, be careful to cut it smoothly: to have it rough and haggled does not only spoil the looks of it, but flies are much more apt to get into it than when cut smooth” (1839, 92). The proximity of field or garden can be seen in the instructions for butter beans: “They should be full grown and the pods yellow on the vines before they are gathered; then hull or shell them out, and dry them perfectly in the shade” (ibid., 210). There are also instructions for drying and pickling various foods, curing meats, and saving seeds. Nevertheless, foods imported from elsewhere do appear in the recipes, and they call for a number of exotic ingredients, including staples such as sugar and many spices of tropical origin. Mrs. Bryan even includes six recipes for large batches of curry powder.
Cooks using The Kentucky Housewife must have spent a great deal of time preparing the ingredients to make them usable in the recipes. I am not talking about slaughtering a pig here, but far more complex processes such as preparing sugar, butter, and cheese. Refined sugar was imported from the Caribbean and was kept in the pantry in the form of a loaf; because it was so expensive, it was often locked up in a sugar chest. After boiling the juice from the sugarcane to reduce its water content, refiners poured the sugar-saturated liquid into conical iron molds, where the sugar crystallized. These cone-shaped loaves varied in size (a small one weighed about three pounds) and state of refinement, and they were often wrapped in blue paper to make the sugar look whiter. Brown sugar was also used as a sweetener, as was molasses and honey. Mrs. Bryan makes no mention of sorghum, which was apparently introduced to Kentucky cooks in around 1850 (Roberts 2011, 14). In her general instructions about cake making, Mrs. Bryan advises, “Weigh your sugar and break up, spread it out on a cloth, crush it to a fine powder with a rolling pin, pass it through a sieve and put it into a bread pan” (1839, 275). Kitchens were equipped with shears or nips to cut sugar from the loaf. Shortly after publication of The Kentucky Housewife, the price of sugar began to drop dramatically, and the use of sugar became more common.
Mrs. Bryan also includes advice for making butter and preparing it for use in cooking. Her general discussion of cake making includes the following: “Weigh your butter, wash it in one or two cold waters, and work it with a wooden spaddle6 till firm, draining every particle of water from it” (1839, 275). The water in the butter is related in part to the churning process. Similarly, she starts her Almond Cheese Cake recipe with a long discussion of how to produce suitable cheese, beginning with rennet: “If you have the liquid preparation of rennet, turn your milk to a curd with some of that… But if you have not got the preparation, cut a piece of dried rennet two or three inches square, according to the strength of it; put it in a cup, pour over it two or three spoonfuls of wine, and twice as much warm water, and set it by till next day. Then make a quart of sweet milk over lukewarm, pour in the rennet water, cover it, and set it by the fire, where it will keep warm, till the curd forms” (ibid., 288). The Kentucky Housewife is one of the few cookbooks that includes a recipe for preparing rennet, an essential ingredient in cheese making.7 Rennet is a substance produced in the stomachs of young, unweaned calves; it curdles the milk the calf consumes, starting the process of digestion. The dried rennet Mrs. Bryan refers to is a piece of a calf’s stomach.
Calf’s Rennet (1839)
Take the rennet from the calf as soon as it is killed, empty it of its contents, and hang it in a cool, dry place for four or five days. Then turn the inside out, slip off the curd with your hand, fill the rennet with salt, having mixed with it a very little saltpetre, and lay it in a stone pot. Sprinkle over it a teaspoon of vinegar and a handful of salt, cover it, and set it in a cool dry place for several weeks. Then hang it up, dry it thoroughly, and it will keep good a year or two. When you wish to make use of it, cut a piece the size you wish, put it in a cup, pour on a few spoonfuls of wine or brandy, cover it well with lukewarm water, and the next day the liquid will be fit for use. It is an excellent plan to keep rennet ready prepared; being always in readiness, it will be found a great convenience. Cut off a piece six or eight inches square, put it in a small jar, or wide-mouthed bottle, pour on a pint of water, half a pint of brandy, and stop it securely. Shake it up each time before you use it; a table-spoon of the liquid will be sufficient to turn a quart of milk, if the rennet is good. (Bryan 1839, 73)
Consistent with the emphasis on self-sufficiency, recipes for preserving food abound in The Kentucky Housewife. There are instructions for drying a wide array of fruits, such as peaches, cherries, cranberries, and apples; drying vegetables such as pumpkins and green beans; saving seeds; curing ham; and corning and pickling beef and pork. Mrs. Bryan also provides instructions for preserving eggs.
To Keep Eggs (1839)
Eggs will keep good for some time, buried in charcoal or wheat bran, after greasing them a little with mutton tallow; but I believe the general opinion of those who have tried it is, that to keep them in lime- water is the best way they can be preserved. To half a bushel of water add little over a pint of unslaked lime,8 and as much coarse salt, and when the whole is dissolved, put in the eggs; be very particular that you do not put in one that is cracked, as it will spoil the whole; there should be plenty of water to cover them well; if the brine is too strong with the lime, it will eat the shells; this of course can be easily detected; if the eggs are fresh and whole, and water to the proper strength, it is said they will keep good for years. (Bryan 1839, 224–25)
The self-sufficiency theme is also evident in the large number of recipes for cooking game, including venison, rabbit, squirrel, wild duck, woodcock, feelark,9 snipe, and “any sort of small birds” (Bryan 1839, 130).
To Roast Woodcocks, Feelarks or Snipes (1839)
Pluck them carefully, touch a slip of writing paper to a blaze of fire, and hold them immediately over it to singe off the little hairs that adhere to the skin; wash them very clean in cold water, and if practicable, let them lie in sweet milk and water at least one hour before they are cooked. Season them inside and out with salt, put in each a lump of butter, rolled in bread crumbs, and seasoned with a little pepper; rub them over with butter, and roast them before a brisk fire, which will cook them in a few minutes; them serve them up, garnish with little mounds of ripe, soft peaches, having them mashed fine; add to the drippings, some drawn butter, chopped asparagus, or parsley and pepper, and serve it in a boat, to eat with the birds. (Bryan 1839, 130)
Hearth Cooking
The recipes included in The Kentucky Housewife are geared toward cooking at a hearth or fireplace. It is the only cookbook included here that is based on this technology. Cooking was done on the hearth well into the nineteenth century, yet by the time Housekeeping in the Blue Grass was published in 1875, wood and coal cookstoves were the norm. In fact, wood-burning cookstoves were available before the publication of The Kentucky Housewife, but they are not apparent in the recipes. The use of wood-fired fireplaces shaped the cooking strategies as well as the cooking implements and recipes of this era. Some argue that the upper-class households of the region were slow to adopt innovative wood- and coal-burning cookstoves because they had servants—either enslaved or hired—to do the much more demanding work of hearth cooking.
Before returning to Mrs. Bryan’s recipes, a discussion of fireplaces and hearths is in order. Fireplaces varied in size, design, and associated tools and utensils through time and based on the resources of the home owners. The physical evidence in Kentucky is largely limited to the elaborate hearths of the few remaining stately homes from that era.10 The typical hearth was far simpler. Most fireplaces served the dual purpose of heating and cooking, although sometimes the kitchen was detached from the rest of the house. In the earliest pioneer log cabins, the fireplace was built at one end of the one-room structure. In what architectural historians call saddlebag houses, the fireplace was located in the center of the room and had two sides. Typically, hearths and chimneys were built of locally available stone, often limestone or river cobbles; however, in the earliest pioneer period, chimneys were often constructed of mud and sticks.
Cooking with coals in a Dutch oven and skillet at Liberty Hall, 2013. (John van Willigen)
These fireplaces could be quite large, often requiring a long “backlog” in the rear of the fireplace. Over time, these logs would burn through and be replaced. A man from Adair County reported in a 1966 interview, “This old fireplace was so big that they would bring in what they called a back log, and my grandfather would roll it into the house with big wooden sticks and roll it o’er to the fireplace and put it up on these big stove irons” (Montell and Morse 1976, 47). Daniel Drake, who grew up in Mayslick in the 1790s, recalled that, thanks to his lack of planning, “I often had to cut off a large backlog in a cold winter morning, before a fire could be made” (1870, 261). According to Drake, buckeye was the preferred tree for backlogs, which could be four or five feet long, because buckeye did not burn easily and the logs lasted a good long while.
There was great variation in the size and elaborateness of fireplaces in early Kentucky. Those used for cooking were generally much larger than those used for heating alone. In large mansions, cooking fireplaces might be located in alcoves, and the brick floor of the fireplace was often enlarged to allow cooking on the hearth floor, with coals taken from the fire with a shovel. Designs changed over time and became more fuel- efficient and convenient. People of more limited means continued to make do with simple hearths and basic equipment.
Archaeology of a Hearth
Located on the Ohio River in Jefferson County is the historic site called Riverside, mentioned earlier. The focal point is the Farnsley-Moremen brick farmhouse (still standing) that was built in 1837, just two years before The Kentucky Housewife was published. Archaeologists from the Kentucky Archaeological Survey discovered the foundation of the sixteen- by seventeen-foot frame building that served as the detached kitchen, as well as the remains of the hearth it contained. At the time, it was common for the kitchen to be detached from the main house; this reduced the risk of fire, lessened the impact of kitchen heat during the summer, and served to separate the people of the household from the enslaved African American staff. Through their excavation and careful analysis, the archaeologists were able to reconstruct the kitchen building. The brick hearth was five and a half feet wide and two feet deep. The bricks used to construct the chimney foundation and the hearth were handmade and fired at Riverside. The burned fragments of firewood included sycamore, white oak, yellow poplar, and hickory (Linn and Stottman 2003). Among the artifacts found in the excavation were fragments of andirons—sometimes called firedogs. Firewood was placed on the andirons to allow a draft under the logs and to keep the burning wood in its proper place (Cebulska 1976). The size and shape of the hearth clearly showed how it was used. Cooking was done with hot coals rather than flames. The hot coals from the log fire were distributed to different places on the spacious hearth to heat individual utensils—in effect, creating many “burners.” Thus, the cooking fire was much more like the one used to cook hamburgers on the backyard charcoal grill than the roaring fire depicted on Christmas cards.
In the deposits covering the remains of the hearth, the researchers found fragments of ceramic cookware and a trammel.11 The presence of a trammel implies the use of an iron hearth crane to swing large cast- iron pots over the main fire. Clues to the types of food cooked included the remains (bones) of pigs, cows, sheep, and chickens (likely raised on the farm), as well as animals that were hunted, such as turtles, quail, and squirrels. Plant remains were also found, including corn, barley, peaches, black walnuts, and hickory nuts.
Using the Hearth and Managing the Fire
The application of heat was accomplished in a number of different ways. First, convection heat was provided by the fire itself to heat pots and pans suspended over it. The fire also supplied radiant heat that could be used to cook with the help of spits. Spits were usually placed in front of the fire rather than over it. Reflector ovens—sometimes called tin kitchens—were also designed to be placed in front of the fire. As was apparent at Riverside, another method was to shovel coals from the fire to the space in front of the fireplace and heat food in utensils. These coals were inevitably consumed, so the heat they provided started to decline immediately. The coals had to be shoveled back into the fire when cooking was done or replenished if the cooking was to continue. Last, some foods were cooked directly in the ashes. According to my reading, Mrs. Bryan includes only one recipe for direct cooking in The Kentucky Housewife, where she advises wrapping mackerel in fish paper and roasting it in “wood ashes on a clean hearth” (1839, 147). Similarly, hot ashes were used to roast ears of green corn in their shuck, winter squash, and sweet and Irish potatoes in season (Montell and Morse 1976, 48). Simple cornbreads called ashcakes could also be cooked this way, either placed in the ashes or on a specially cleared area on the hearth.
With hearth cooking, cooks had to be skilled in managing the fire and its heat. This involved complex knowledge of the factors that control the amount of heat produced. The distance of the pot from the heat source; the fuel’s size, extent of ash covering, and wood type; and the amount of draft were important factors. When coals are referred to in The Kentucky Housewife, they are often described as “clear,” which presumably means without a lot of ash. Cooks had to know that wood chopped to kindling size burned quicker and hotter than large logs. They could also control the heat by reducing or increasing the amount of embers allocated to a particular pot. Newly placed logs created cool spots in the fire and could be used to shield a pot from the heat. The last factor that controlled the heat was the amount of draft.
In earlier and simpler times, cooking utensils were suspended over the fire from a device called a lug pole. Because the early ones were made of wood, they gradually weakened and required replacement. In fact, they would sometimes break during cooking, sending pots into the fire with disastrous results. Cooks were at considerable risk of being scalded if the lug pole broke. An important improvement over the lug pole was the crane, mentioned earlier. These hinged, wrought-iron frames were firmly attached to the fireplace masonry, allowing the cook to swing the pot in or out of the fire and providing more heat control and safer and more comfortable cooking. These cranes were often used to suspend large pots of simmering water, as cooking in boiling water was a common method that required less attention than other techniques. With the use of the crane, a cast-iron cauldron could simply be swung over the fire, making heat regulation less of a challenge. This method was used in many recipes for pudding.
The Kentucky Housewife includes more than fifty pudding recipes featuring a wide range of ingredients, including sweet potato, white potato, and various fruits such as orange, lemon, plum, apple, cherry, cranberry, whortleberry, quince, raisin, and pear. A number of recipes are based on rice or bread; others are based on squash, coconut, almond, custard, or cornmeal. Although the majority of the recipes are for baked puddings, a number of Mrs. Bryan’s recipes are for boiled puddings prepared in a cloth pudding sack. Mrs. Bryan advises, “For boiled puddings, you should have very thick cloths, made of German sheeting, or a remarkably thick linen, as a thinner article will admit the water and spoil the pudding. The cloths should be dipped into boiling water and dusted with flour before the puddings are put in. Tie a string tightly round the cloth, to exclude every particle of water, leaving plenty of room in it for the pudding to swell. They should be boiled in a large quantity of water, which must be boiling when the pudding is put in. Add no water except from a boiling kettle” (1839, 232). Here is one of Mrs. Bryan’s boiled pudding recipes.
A Raisin Pudding (1839)
Beat six eggs very light, and stir them into a quart of sweet milk, with a large spoonful of mixed mace and cinnamon, a grated nutmeg and a glass of white wine, adding by degrees enough flour to make it into a common pudding batter. Seed, cut and dust with flour a pound and a half of raisins (Sultana raisins are preferable, having no seed); stir them gradually into the other ingredients, giving all a hard stirring at the last. Put it into a pudding cloth, having first dipped it into boiling water, and dusted it with flour; tie a string firmly round end of the cloth, leaving plenty of room for the pudding to swell, and dusting the tying place with a little dry flour, to secure it against the admission of water, which would spoil the pudding, if suffered to approach it. Put it in a large pot of boiling water, and boil it gently and steadily for several hours, turning it over several times, and replenishing the pot with water from a boiling kettle. When it is done, turn it smoothly into a dish, sprinkle over it some preserved raisins, finely shred; grate on some loaf sugar, and eat it warm, with wine sauce, or white wine and sugar. (Bryan 1839, 241–42)
The cookbooks of the nineteenth century contained many pudding recipes that used various cooking procedures in addition to boiling in a bag. Cookbooks published later had fewer boiled pudding recipes, and contemporary cookbooks have few pudding recipes of any kind.
Kitchen Utensils, Hearthside
Cooking in the coals was accomplished with a number of special utensils. Most of these were probably made of cast iron, but utensils made of copper, tin, and other metals are mentioned in recipes. These cooking vessels tended to have rounded bottoms rather than the flat bottoms that were typical of pots used with woodstoves (not to mention today’s induction ranges). We still use some of these utensils in today’s kitchen, while others are obsolete. The most important were gridirons, Dutch ovens, and skillets specially adapted to hearth cooking, called spiders. These were supplemented with trivets and salamanders.
Gridirons are open iron frames with legs and handles; they were usually used to cook meats in the coals of the hearth. Good cooks ensured that the gridiron was hot and well greased before use—accomplished by putting lard in a linen covering and rubbing it on the gridiron.
Broiled Beef Steaks (1839)
Place a gridiron over a bed of clear coals, and clean and grease the bars well. Having prepared your steaks as for frying, with the exception of seasoning them, broil them on the gridiron till thoroughly done, turning them over frequently; then transfer them to a hot dish, sprinkle them immediately with salt and pepper, and put on a few spoonfuls of melted butter, and you may slightly acidulate them with flavored vinegar, or lemon juice, if you like them so. (Bryan 1839, 40)
Dutch ovens are large, round, covered kettles with legs that allow them to be placed in the coals. The lids were usually constructed with a flange so that hot coals could be placed on the cover, thus cooking the food from both top and bottom. Dutch ovens were often used for baking, sometimes with a water bath, as well as for frying and simmering. Mrs. Bryan describes part of the process of making “light white bread” after combining the flour, yeast, salt, and water or milk: “Knead it till it becomes smooth, but no longer; put it in an oven that has been cleaned, greased and rubbed with dry flour; throw a few embers about it, to warm it slightly, but not so much so that you may bear your hand on it without burning you. Cover the oven, set it by the fire where it will keep a little warm, and do not disturb it more than to turn it round occasionally till it rises to double the original height; then heat it gradually and bake it with a moderate heat” (1839, 317).
Newly manufactured and vintage Dutch ovens can still be bought for campfire cooking. The Lodge Manufacturing Company and others make Dutch ovens with and without legs. One central Kentuckian, interviewed in 1965, recollected that his mother “had a big cast-iron container with a lid, called an oven. She used coals of fire under the oven and on top of the lid to bake things inside” (Montell and Morse 1976, 48). This strategy appears in Mrs. Bryan’s recipes for wheat bread and, with the addition of a water bath, custards. In the following recipe, the term oven refers to a Dutch oven.
Baked Custard (1839)
Boil a quart of sweet milk, flavor it with anything you please, and set it by to cool. Beat eight eggs very light, and when the milk is cold, mix them with it, adding four ounces of powdered sugar. Stir it till well mixed, put it in custard cups, filling them quite full; set them in an oven, pour round them hot water, but not enough to reach to tops, lest it gets in, and spoils your custards. Having heated your lid, put it on the oven, throw some coals on, and under it, and bake the custards till thick, and of a light brown. When cold, grate nutmeg over them, and send them to the table with a teaspoon for each cup. (Bryan 1839, 320)
Also common were long-legged frying pans with round bottoms and long handles, which allowed them to be used in wood coals arranged on the hearth. Although some historical literature calls these pans spiders, Mrs. Bryan does not use the term; nor does it appear in the other “housewife” cookbooks. Typically, contemporary collectors of antique pans use this term. In some places, spider refers to the flat-bottomed iron skillets used on the flat tops of woodstoves.12 Here and there, in other historical Kentucky cookbooks, one can find recipes for spider cornbread. Mrs. Bryan calls these pans frying pans; she also refers to stew pans, soup pans, sauce pans, and porridge pots, as well as unspecified pots and pans.
Fried Steaks of Veal (1839)
Cut them from the fillet or leg, having them tolerably small and about half an inch thick; beat them evenly, not tearing them in the least, lay them for a minute or two in a pan of fresh water or milk, which will improve them greatly; then squeeze them a little, spread them out smoothly, sprinkle them with salt and black pepper, and dust them with flour. Have ready a frying-pan of boiling lard, place it over a bed of clear coals, and put in your steaks side by side, not crowding them too much, a fault that is often practiced. As soon as they are a nice brown on both sides, put them into a warm steak dish by the fire, thicken the gravy with a little flour, cream and chopped parsley, or minced onion, give it a boil, stir in gradually the juice of half a lemon; pour it over the steaks and send them up warm. (Bryan 1839, 64)
Among the other utensils used were trivets and salamanders. Most often, a trivet functioned to raise a kettle above the coals. Alternatively, a trivet could be placed inside a Dutch oven to raise the food off the bottom of the pot, as might be desirable with a pan of biscuits. The salamander, a special-purpose tool, is a heavy iron plate with a long handle. The salamander was heated up and then placed over the food (such as meat) to brown it. Only a few recipes in The Kentucky Housewife call for a salamander, and Mrs. Bryan suggests that a hot shovel could be used as well (1839, 67). Today, the term salamander refers to the industrial-strength browning ovens used in restaurants, and in some contemporary setups, a handled iron called a salamander is used as an alternative to a propane torch to caramelize the sugar in crème brûlée. The following recipe for burnt custard is the English version of the familiar French dish crème brûlée.
Burnt Custard (1839)
Beat the yolks of ten eggs and the whites of five to a froth, stir in a quart of milk, add four ounces of powdered sugar, a little grated lemon, and boil it in a pitcher as before directed. [In an earlier recipe for vanilla custard, Mrs. Bryan instructed: “Put it in a pitcher, set it in boiling water, and simmer it gently till thick and smooth, stirring it all the time; then remove it from the fire and set it to cool.”] When it is quite cold, put it into cups, pile on each the beaten white of eggs, grate on some loaf sugar, and brown them delicately with a salamander or red hot shovel, by holding it a little above them. (Bryan 1839, 324)
Some fireplaces were equipped with built-in brick ovens for baking cornbread, biscuits, and loaves of bread. The presence of a brick oven indicated the family’s wealth and distinction. Usually a fire was built in the oven, which heated the bricks; the coals were then removed, and the food was cooked on the residual heat. As a result, bread was always baked with steadily declining heat. Baking was also accomplished with tin reflector ovens or Dutch ovens, as mentioned earlier.
As one might expect from such an early regional cookbook, The Kentucky Housewife achieves several “firsts.” According to Damon Lee Fowler, it contains the earliest recipe for the iconic southern dish cobbler, which Mrs. Bryan calls “a peach pot-pie.”
A Peach Pot-Pie (1839)
A peach pot-pie, or cobler, as it is often termed, should be made of clingstone peaches, that are very ripe, and then pared and sliced from the stones. Prepare a pot or oven with paste, as directed for the apple pot pie, put in the prepared peaches, sprinkle on a large handful of brown sugar, pour in plenty of water to cook the peaches without burning them, though there should be very little liquor or syrup when the pie is done. Put a paste over the top, and bake it with moderate heat, raising the lid occasionally, to see how it is baking. When the crust is brown, and the peaches very soft, invert the crust on a large dish, put the peaches evenly on, and grate loaf sugar thickly over it. Eat it warm or cold. Although it is not a fashionable pie for company, it is very excellent for family use, with cold sweet milk. (Bryan 1839, 268)
Here, oven refers to a Dutch oven, and paste means pastry dough. In the apple pot pie recipe referred to, a small Dutch oven or porridge pot is buttered and floured before lining and covering the fruit with rolled-out pastry dough. Mrs. Bryan instructs us to “bake it with moderate heat, having a fire both on and under the oven” (1839, 267–68).
Some cooking was done with radiant heat in front of the fire using spits or reflector ovens. Spits could be turned by hand or by a number of different devices, all called jacks. Jacks were powered in different ways, including by a spring-driven device resembling clockworks or by the draft in the flue of the fireplace.
Roasting Meat
The Kentucky Housewife has much to offer in terms of technique for cooking meat on a hearth. Mrs. Bryan starts at a basic level, instructing her readers how to skewer the meat on a spit without mutilating it. She ad vises, “Be careful not to run it through a nice part of [the beef roast], or through a part that will be exposed when served” (1839, 28). The spit may have been attached to the front of the andirons or to a special rack placed in front of the fire (not over it). Basting was an important part of the cooking process, and the recipes often mention the need to place a pan under the meat to catch the drippings. For roasting beef, Mrs. Bryan instructs, “Stir as much salt as you think it will take to season it well, in a little cold water, with a small portion of pepper, and baste the beef with it frequently till you have used up the brine, or till the meat is sufficiently seasoned; then discontinue it, and baste with a mixture of fresh lard and hot water, until a sufficient quantity of essence has flown from the meat into the drippingpan; then baste bountifully with it, till the meat is done” (ibid.). The spit had to be turned occasionally, and the fire needed to be tended so that it was “clear and steady,” with little smoke or blazes. With large pieces of meat, there was the risk that the outside would be overcooked and the inside would still be too rare. To avoid this, Mrs. Bryan suggests covering the outside of the roast with white paper. In her recipes for roasting beef, the meat is evenly dusted with flour from a “dredging box” late in the cooking process, after removing the paper.
Mrs. Bryan gives no roasting times or temperatures; she suggests using a fork to see how the juices are running. “In the place of counting the hours by the clock, you will find it best to notice the fire and what you are cooking” (1839, 29). Cooking in the days of The Kentucky Housewife was not a “set it and forget it” affair. Fires had to be tended more or less constantly, spits had to be turned, and fuel had to be added. Between periods of cooking, the fire would usually be allowed to subside (to conserve fuel and reduce the risk of burning the house down) but not go out. Glowing embers might be preserved in a corner of the fireplace and then brought to life with wood shavings and kindling.
As the final step in the roasting process, Mrs. Bryan instructs readers to “turn the spit very fast for a few minutes to raise a froth, basting the meat all the time with melted butter, which will make the froth much higher, lighter and more delicate every way, than to baste with hot drippings” (1839, 29). Typically, the fat in the drippings pan was skimmed, and the remaining gravy was seasoned and served as an accompaniment to the meat. Various ingredients were used to flavor gravies, including wine and ketchup. Brown flour—wheat flour that has been toasted—was often used to thicken gravy. Mrs. Bryan describes the process of making brown flour: “Put [the flour] into an oven that is moderately heated, set it over a few coals, and keep stirring it as you would coffee to brown it evenly and prevent its burning. As soon as the whole is of a light brown, take it up, cool it, put it up in dry bottles, and cork them tight. It will be found a very convenient article, being always in readiness” (ibid., 163). A similar recipe for browned flour appears in Marion W. Flexner’s Dixie Dishes (1941, 3) and in Naomi Judd’s Naomi’s Home Companion (1997), under the name “Polly’s Toasted Flour.” Damon Lee Fowler discusses it under “Southern Browning” in his encyclopedic Classical Southern Cooking (2008, 210).
In addition to gravy making, the drip pan comes into play when cooking vegetables. Mrs. Bryan suggests that after cooking white potatoes flavored with butter, cream, salt, and pepper, place them in the drippings pan to allow the juices to flavor the potatoes.
The roasting process is nicely described in the following recipe.
To Roast a Pig (1839)
A pig for roasting should be recently killed, very fat, and not too large to lie in a dish. Having it neatly prepared, rub a little salt on the inside of it, cut off the feet close to the joints, skewer the legs to the body, and fill it with a stuffing, made of bread crumbs, fresh suet, or butter, pepper, sifted sage, grated nutmeg, and lemon, and made sufficiently moist with the yolks of eggs. Then rub it over with lard, truss it for the spit, pin white paper over it and roast it before a clear, brisk fire, basting it with salt-water and pepper, till well seasoned, and then with cold lard till it is done. While the pig is roasting, boil the feet, heart and liver, mince them fine, and reserve them for the gravy. When the pig is done, dust a little flour very evenly over it, having removed the paper, and baste it well with butter; let it remain a few minutes on the spit, and if it is small serve it whole, garnished with slices of lem on; but if it is rather large to serve whole, take off the head, separate the chop from the face, split the pig lengthwise, from one end of the chine to the other, press it open, and lay it in a dish with a part of the stuffing laid around it, and the head and chop placed on each side. Having skimmed the drippings, put the mince into it, with a lump of butter, rolled in flour, a handful of shred parsley, and a glass of Madeira; serve it in a gravy boat. (Bryan 1839, 94)
The strategies for roasting in The Kentucky Housewife are particularly interesting in a historical context, as they contrast with cooking methods from more recent times. As Anne Mendelson states, “Roasting in the original sense—a dry-heat method requiring free circulation of air around meat on an open rack or spit before the heat source—had disappeared from American homes as enclosed ranges replaced open hearths in the course of the nineteenth century” (1996, 135). As late as 1884, Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book defined roasting as “cooking before an open flame” (Lincoln 1884, 20). By this standard, today’s roasts should be called “bakes.” In fact, Mrs. Bryan includes recipes for both roasting and baking meats, with roasting done on a spit and baking done in an oven. Her “To Roast a Pig” recipe (above) is followed in the text by a “To Bake a Pig” recipe (1839, 94). This method is discussed in the next chapter, which focuses on recipes geared toward cooking with woodstoves.
The Quest for Flavor
Recipes in The Kentucky Housewife make extensive use of a wide variety of herbs, spices, juices, wines, spirits, and other elements to enhance flavor. Herbs mentioned in the recipes include parsley, thyme, sweet marjoram, summer savory, sage, sweet basil, and rosemary. Also in the inventory are spices such as pepper, allspice, nutmeg, mace, cinnamon, cloves, cumin, cardamom, ginger, and turmeric. Some of these are processed into spice mixtures, flavored vinegars, sauces, and “catchups” (as Mrs. Bryan spells it) to be added to gravies and sauces. She uses various kinds of mustard, including mustard seeds, ground mustard seeds, and something called “made mustard,” which is used as a dressing for chicken salad. Mrs. Bryan provides six recipes for curry powders. The ingredients for the first one are as follows: “coriander seeds thirteen ounces, black pepper two ounces, cayenne pepper one ounce, tumeric [sic], and cumin seeds each three ounces, and trigonella [fenugreek] seeds four drachms;13 all to be pulverized and mixed together” (1839, 159). Mrs. Bryan’s flavored vinegars are made with shallots, celery, red peppers, tarragon, and horseradish, and she notes that they “are particularly useful to flavor gravies, soups, and sauces” (ibid., 178). I provide one example here.
Tarragon Vinegar (1839)
Pick the leaves of the tarragon from the stalks just before it blooms; spread them out on a cloth, and let them lie for two or three days to dry a little; then put them into a jar [of vinegar], close and set it by for one week; then strain and bottle it. If you wish it very strongly flavored with the tarragon, fill it up the second time with fresh leaves and soak them in the same manner. Any kind of nice sweet herbs may be soaked in the same manner for the purpose of seasoning. (Bryan 1839, 179)
Mrs. Bryan’s commitment to ketchup was strong, and she includes recipes based on oyster, lemon, rum, lobster, mushroom, anchovy, fish, and walnut, along with an elaborate tomato-based preparation called “kitchen catchup” (see below). Ketchup was made to be bottled and “sent to table in castors, and sometimes sent in the small bottles in which they are put up” (1839, 171).
Kitchen Catchup (1839)
Chop fine two quarts of ripe tomatoes, sprinkle them with salt and put them into a pan with one dozen minced onions, a handful of scraped horseradish, and boil them gently for one hour, adding no water, but stirring them frequently: then strain them, put the liquid into a pan with an equal portion of red wine; and half an ounce of black pepper, half an ounce of nutmegs and half an ounce of cloves. Cover the pan and boil it gently till reduced to half the original quantity: then cool and bottle it. (Bryan 1839, 174)
The Quest for Light Breads and Cakes
Mrs. Bryan employs a number of strategies to lighten baked goods. Many of her bread recipes use yeast, which is described as a bottled liquid. Her cake recipes often include egg whites beaten with an improvised whisk. Mrs. Bryan writes, “Beat the whites in an earthen dish to a stiff froth, using a broad-bladed knife, small hickory rods or a bunch of wire, bent in hoops or broken” (1839, 75). This is similar to today’s practices, except that many more eggs are used in Mrs. Bryan’s recipes. In the sixteen recipes that call for whole eggs, the average number used is just over a dozen; the maximum is twenty-eight eggs. Among the recipes that use just the egg whites, the average is eighteen egg whites, with one recipe requiring twenty- four whites. This is a lot of eggs, but it is important to remember that eggs were smaller then.
The Kentucky Housewife was published about thirty years before a true baking powder was available on the market. Until then, other chemical leavens were used. A few of Mrs. Bryan’s cake recipes include saleratus as an ingredient, and one recipe says that pearlash can be used. Pearlash, which appears more frequently in earlier cookbooks, is potassium carbonate, or potash. It is obtained by running water through wood ashes until the resulting solution is thought to be saturated, and then boiling it down to a dry state. This “make-do” pioneer process became the foundation of the American chemical industry, as both pearlash and saleratus were utilized in soap and glass making and played an important role in the export market.
In terms of baking, both pearlash and saleratus give off the gas carbon dioxide when mixed with an acid, acting as a leavening agent. In this regard, saleratus has an advantage because it gives off twice as much carbon dioxide as pearlash. On the downside, the potassium carbonates have a strong aftertaste, described as bitter and soapy. In fact, saleratus was initially used not as a leaven but to help neutralize the sour taste found in sourdough bread (Ciullo 2006). In the process, bakers discovered it was a good leaven. The name saleratus means “aerated salt,” reflecting how it is made, which involves exposing a carbonate compound to carbon dioxide. Confusing the issue is that saleratus can refer to either potassium bicarbonate or sodium bicarbonate. Most of us have sodium bicarbonate—or baking soda—on our pantry shelves. Baking soda, or bicarbonate of soda, represented an improvement because it does not have the bitter aftertaste of pearlash and the potassium version of saleratus. The following recipe for biscuits uses saleratus or, optionally, pearlash.
Saleratus Biscuit (1839)
Sift a quart of flour, sprinkle into it a salt-spoonful of salt, and rub into it one ounce of butter. Pour half a tea-cupful of boiling water on a small tea-spoonful of saleratus, let it stand to dissolve, and then stir it into enough sour milk to make the flour into a soft dough. Knead it but very little, flour your hands, make it into small biscuits, and bake them in rather a hasty oven. In using saleratus or pearlash, for any kind of cake or bread, be sure to dissolve it in boiling water or sour milk, and make up the bread with sour milk; otherwise, it will not rise so well. Pearlash biscuit may be made in the same manner. (Bryan 1839, 304)
Although the content of baking powder can vary, it is often a mixture of sodium bicarbonate, an acid salt such as tartaric acid, and cornstarch to keep it dry and bulk it up. It is easier to use than baking soda. I discuss baking powder in more detail in the next chapter.
Mrs. Bryan’s Ongoing Influence
In addition to being an important historical document, The Kentucky Housewife continues to have an influence on cuisine. Recipes from Mrs. Bryan’s book are published on the Internet and in historically oriented southern cookbooks such as Damon Lee Fowler’s Classical Southern Cooking (2008). Fowler’s cookbook is an excellent source of iconic southern recipes and culinary scholarship and includes a number of recipes adapted from Lettice Bryan’s book. Here is one of them.
Lettice Bryan’s Fried Cabbage
1 small, fresh cabbage
2 tablespoons lard or unsalted butter
¼ cup water
Salt and whole black pepper in a peppermill
1. Pull off the tough, dark outer leaves of the cabbage and discard them or set aside for soup. Wash it under cold, running water and cut it in half lengthwise. Cut out the core and slice each quarter across into thin strips no more than a quarter of an inch wide.
2. Put the cabbage, fat, and water into a large, heavy lidded skillet and cover tightly. Turn on the heat to low. Cook slowly, stirring from time to time, until the cabbage is very tender, about ¾ to 1 hour. If it gets too dry, add a few spoonfuls of water, but no more than is necessary.
3. When the cabbage is very tender, remove the lid and raise the heat to medium high. Cook, stirring constantly, until all the moisture is evaporated and the cabbage is evenly golden, being careful not to let it scorch. Turn off the heat, season with salt and pepper, and serve warm. Serves 4. (Fowler 2008, 217)
Fowler’s recipe adaptations are quite simple. He abandons Bryan’s block format for the modern system of listing ingredients separately and in sequence, followed by a more detailed and systematic description of procedures. He also provides actual measures; for example, “enough lard or butter to season it well” (Bryan 1839, 192) becomes “2 tablespoons.” The increase in heat is absent in the original, as is the warning about scorching.
The Social Context
The Kentucky Housewife is intended to be a cookbook for a supervisor of a large upper-class household with a kitchen staff, which often included enslaved persons. Slavery is not addressed directly in the book but is referred to in passing. In her brief discussion of management, Mrs. Bryan observes that households “have established rules for domestics and slaves to be governed by.” She comments that an effective household manager should “fail not to give [the staff] such advice as is really necessary to promote their own welfare.” She advises the household manager to “examine frequently your cupboard and other household furniture, kitchen, smokehouse, and cellar, to see that everything is in its proper place, and used in the right manner, that nothing be lost, or wasted by the neglect of hirelings or servants.” She goes on: “Attend to the giving out of your meals, and proportion the seasonings to each dish yourself. This may be done at an early hour; and with the proper instructions to the cook, the lady may be relieved of further trouble during the day” (1839, vii).
Mrs. Bryan’s upper-class audience is reflected in the large quantities yielded by the recipes and in some of the instructions she includes. For instance, she periodically concludes recipes with the phrase “send the dish to the table,” which implies that the kitchen and its activities are separate from the dining room and that, in contrast to most readers’ experiences, the cook did not necessarily eat the food. She also notes that some of the dishes are meant to be served at “fine suppers.” For example, there is a recipe for a construction called a “jelly cone,” based on gelatin and sponge cake. According to Mrs. Bryan, these “are only introduced at parties or fine suppers, and should be at least two on the table” (1839, 329). Yet Mrs. Bryan also displays a practical orientation against extravagance, which she reveals toward the end of her extensive introduction to baking cakes. “If these directions, together with what I will hereafter give in each receipt, be carefully followed and dexterously performed, you may safely calculate on having the best of cake, besides relieving yourself of the expense and inconvenience of hiring a cook expressly for the purpose” (ibid., 275).
Although expressed in a limited way, slavery was an important part of the social world of Mrs. Bryan’s audience. Kentucky was a slave state even though it did not secede from the Union and become part of the Confederacy. In Kentucky there were both advocates of secession and a few abolitionists (e.g., Cassius M. Clay). Between these two extremes resided the majority of Kentuckians, who were both pro-slavery and pro-Union. Kentucky’s brand of slavery was different from that which operated in the Deep South; it resembled the pattern of slavery found in other border states such as Missouri. Kentucky slave owners believed they treated their slaves better than their counterparts in the Deep South did. Although some early scholarly writers accepted this view, contemporary historians reject it; nevertheless, it may linger in the public thinking. It is important to note that individual Kentucky slave-owning farmers held relatively few slaves. In almost all cases, they owned fewer than twenty slaves, the number used to define a plantation demographically. As a result, slave masters and their families worked more closely and were more familiar with the slaves they owned compared with slaveholders farther south. In addition, Kentucky farms were typically based on a mixed farming strategy rather than the Deep South’s monocrop plantations based on cotton, sugar, or rice. This presumably gave the enslaved workers access to a wider variety of food. That said, the tobacco and hemp farming taking place in Kentucky, as well as the manufacture of hemp products such as rope, twine, and bags, was very labor intensive and made use of slave labor.
There was substantial variation in the percentage of enslaved peoples at the county level in Kentucky. The Bluegrass counties had higher slave populations relative to the state as a whole, with an average of 7 slaves per slaveholder in 1860. Woodford County had the highest percentage, with an average of 9.2 slaves per slaveholder and more than 52 percent of the county’s total population enslaved, according to the 1860 census (Astor 2012, 22). In Boyle County, where Mrs. Bryan was born, the average was 6.5 slaves per owner.
In addition to fieldwork, many enslaved women and girls did house-work as cooks, washerwomen, child care providers, and maids. No doubt they were active users (but probably not readers) of the information provided in The Kentucky Housewife and the other cookbooks and manuscript recipes available at the time. The involvement of these women in cooking and other kitchen work went beyond the households of their owners. A feature of Kentucky and other slaveholding border states was the hiring out of slaves, often to non-slave-owning households. In his study of slavery in Bourbon County (in the Bluegrass), Keith C. Barton (1997) found that more than 60 percent of such hiring out involved enslaved women per forming domestic services as cooks, laundresses, and child care providers. African American cooks played an important role in the development of American foodways (Wallach 2013, 45).
With the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863, President Abraham Lincoln freed enslaved people in the states in rebellion. But because Kentucky had not seceded, its slaves were not freed until ratification of the Thirteenth amendment in December 1865.14 One of the effects of the Civil War and the associated political turmoil was African American migration to towns and cities both in and out of state. Those African Americans who remained on the farms became more difficult to control. The postwar period was chaotic, and the white slave-owning class lost its slave labor, which devastated its farming and manufacturing enterprises and reduced the value of its capital wealth. The enslaved women and men who worked in the kitchens of large farms also left, radically challenging the white women who made up the readership of The Kentucky Housewife. Interestingly, nostalgic vestiges of slavery continued to appear in some Kentucky cookbooks at least through the 1950s.
To close, cooking The Kentucky Housewife way was hard work. Much of the cooking was done just a little above floor level, so the cook had to bend over to tend to the cast-iron pots, which were heavy and tiresome to handle. Control of heat levels required special skills and knowledge, and it took a lot of fuel (firewood) to prepare meals. In sum, hearth cooking was dangerous, unhealthy drudgery. Woodstoves would be a significant improvement, and they quickly replaced hearth cooking where they were available and affordable.