One of the Alvin Langdon Coburn photographs that shaped the interpretation of Minnie Fox’s The Blue Grass Cook Book. (University Press of Kentucky)
CHAPTER THREE
The Early Twentieth Century
This chapter focuses on two Kentucky cookbooks published in 1904: The Blue Grass Cook Book by Minnie C. Fox and The Blue Ribbon Cook Book by Jennie C. Benedict.1 In many ways, Fox’s book reflects a nostalgic culinary past, while Benedict’s book looks toward the future. Both are important in terms of understanding the changing needs of households in this era, and both were written by a single author with her personal goals in mind. The contrast between the Fox and Benedict cookbooks reveals the influence of the emerging domestic science movement and the increased entrepreneurship of women. Following an examination of these two cookbooks, a number of committee-produced charity cookbooks and singleauthor cookbooks, including the earliest Kentucky cookbooks written by African Americans, are discussed.
Minnie Fox’s The Blue Grass Cook Book is closely related to the earlier charity cookbook Housekeeping in the Blue Grass. It includes an introduction by her famous brother, journalist and novelist John Fox Jr. Two of his best-known novels are The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1903) and Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1908). Both these regional novels were on the New York Times best-seller list. Another of Minnie’s brothers, Rector Fox, had established the book’s publisher, Fox, Duffield Publishing in New York, only the year before. The book is enhanced by photographs taken by Alvin Langdon Coburn, depicting African American cooks and other household staff at two Bourbon County estates: Auvergne and Mount Airy.2 Minnie Fox lived a few miles away from Auvergne and was a good friend of the Clay family that owned the estate. Coburn, who was a well- known photographer of celebrities (his subjects included George Ber-nard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, Mark Twain, and Henry James), may have been a friend of John Fox Jr. His photographs were published in The Blue Grass Cook Book only a few years after his return from Paris, France, where he received his initial training in photography. Coburn was associated with two other famous photographers—Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen. Although he destroyed much of his work toward the end of his life, there are collections of his prints at the University of Texas, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art. After World War I Coburn became a British subject and lived in Wales. The U.S. Postal Service honored Coburn by issuing a stamp based on one of his photos as part of a series commemorating important American photographers. Coburn’s photographs figured prominently in the social interpretation of Fox’s cookbook.
One of the Alvin Langdon Coburn photographs that shaped the interpretation of Minnie Fox’s The Blue Grass Cook Book. (University Press of Kentucky)
The relationship of Fox’s cookbook to Housekeeping in the Blue Grass goes beyond their shared Paris, Kentucky, roots. The link is evident in the recipes. A few of the same contributors and their recipes are found in both books, although the recipes are presented somewhat differently. The Mrs. W. A. Johnson of Paris, Kentucky, who contributed a recipe to the Fox volume is likely Nannie Talbot Johnson, who published an important cookbook of her own in this era, What to Cook and How to Cook It (discussed later in this chapter). Both Housekeeping in the Blue Grass and The Blue Grass Cook Book reflect an upper-class, white sensibility. As Toni Tipton-Martin writes in the introduction to the reprint of the latter, “The book seems broadly representative of the culinary experiences of well-to- do white people in Kentucky a century ago” (2005, vii).
In these households much of the cooking was done by African Americans. Fox’s cookbook makes their contribution to the development of cooking in Kentucky clearer than do other volumes published in this and later eras. This is accomplished by Coburn’s photographs of African American cooks and references in the titles of a few recipes. For instance, the name Marcellus, an African American staff member at Auvergne, is mentioned in the title of six recipes, and his photograph is included. His recipe for potato soup is included here. Notice that it follows the so-called standard pattern of listing the ingredients first.
Marcellus’s Potato Soup (1904)
3 large-sized potatoes,
Butter,
1 cup of cream,
Salt and pepper to taste.
Cut the potatoes up in fine pieces and boil 2 hours in 2 quarts of water. Add seasoning and piece of butter size of an egg and 1 cup of cream. Serve hot. (Fox [1904] 2005, 41)
Tipton-Martin’s introductory essay provides an interesting perspective on early Kentucky cookbooks in general as well as the specific circumstances of the Fox cookbook. Fox’s book represents an attempt, albeit cautious, to acknowledge the contributions of African Americans to Kentucky foodways. This relationship is explored in much of Tipton-Martin’s writing, where she points out that the role of African American cooks, who were often enslaved or indentured, was hidden and uncelebrated and that much of their culinary creativity and inventiveness was appropriated by white women. Under what Tipton-Martin calls the “Jemima code,” the understanding was that these African American women were merely the providers of kitchen labor, not the active creators of a regional cuisine. As Tipton-Martin states, “The written word has been cruel to African American cooks, and that truth alone makes the unearthing and reproduction of The Blue Grass Cook Book a cause for celebration … it is a salutary redress to the African American descendants of generations of invisible cooks” (2005, v).
In contrast to Tipton-Martin’s recognition of the cultural confiscation of African American cooks’ culinary creativity, cookbook historian Anne Mendelson takes a more typical and far less nuanced view when she writes dismissively, “The nostalgia for survival of the slave-owning South is gratified in Minnie C. Fox’s Blue Grass Cookbook” (1996, 115). Food historian Karen Hess generalizes the concern to southern cookbooks: “I should note that most of the recipes in all Southern cookbooks are, in fact, largely recipes gleaned by the writers from African American cooks, their own and others” (1995, 90). These assessments aside, Fox’s cookbook begins to recognize the importance of African American cooks in the development of the region’s cuisine (Tipton-Martin 2005, xix).
The Original Aunt Jemima
The original and ultimately iconic Aunt Jemima was born Nancy Green in Montgomery County, Kentucky. She was working as a maid when she was hired by a Missouri businessman to make pancakes using a mix he had developed for a display at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. She subsequently became the advertising spokesperson for the pancake mix and related products, and as the stereotypical African American mammy, she was an instantly recognizable icon. She worked in this role until she was struck dead by an automobile in 1923.
The recipes in The Blue Grass Cook Book are presented with limited precision and instructions and a mixture of old English and standard American measurements. The formatting, as noted earlier, is somewhat more modern, in that some of the recipes start with a separate list of ingredients, followed by the instructions. Variation in the format is related to the book’s hybrid nature—a combination of the individually authored and the community contributed. Included here is a recipe for poultry croquettes, a dish that was far more common in earlier cookbooks.
Very Fine Croquettes (1904)
1 pound of cooked turkey or chicken,
3 teaspoons of chopped parsley,
1 pint of cream,
1 large onion,
¼ pound of butter,
¼ pound of bread-crumbs,
Salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper to taste.
Sprinkle the parsley over the meat and run through grinder twice.
Boil the onion with the cream and strain onion out, and when cool pour cream over bread-crumbs, add the butter, and make a stiff mixture, then add salt, etc. Beat in the meat and mix all together.
If too stiff, add a little cream and make as soft as can be handled. Put on ice to get stiff. Then roll and shape. Dip in egg, and roll in breadcrumbs, and fry in hot lard. (Fox 1904, 80)
To commemorate the republication of The Blue Grass Cook Book, the Southern Foodways Alliance held a luncheon during its 2008 field trip to Louisville. The menu included dishes inspired by recipes in the book and prepared under the direction of Todd Richards, then the executive chef at the Seelbach Hotel. Dishes included Bluegrass pea soup, green tomato pickle, smoked bacon and cheddar spoon bread, string beans, almond mandalines, brandied peaches, and Xalapa punch. In most cases, the recipes were modified somewhat from the original. For instance, the recipe for brandied peaches contributed by Mrs. John W. Fox (Minnie’s mother) was turned into a salsa.
Brandied Peaches (1904)
Pour hot boiling water over white clingstone peaches and rub the peeling off. Make a rich syrup of half a pound of sugar to a pound of fruit. Add water to sugar, and when the syrup boils up, drop the peaches in and let them cook till the fruit can be pierced with a straw. Remove the peaches and put in a jar. Let the syrup boil till very thick, and while warm add an equal part of brandy and pour over the fruit. Seal in glass jars. Ready for use at any time. (Fox 1904, 293–94)
In contrast to Fox’s book, The Blue Ribbon Cook Book by Jennie C. Benedict makes the transition to a more modern presentation. Writing the book was part of Benedict’s robust entrepreneurial strategy, and she was influenced by the domestic science movement, which can be seen as a metaphor for the transformation of gender expectations and women’s increased freedom from the constraints of the traditional patriarchal domestic sphere. These changes were national in scope, and Benedict’s work, as well as other Kentucky cookbooks, was just one a manifestation of them. The cookbooks were an important part of the food-based entrepreneurial careers that women like Jennie C. Benedict, Nannie Talbot Johnson, and Atholene Peyton developed in the context of the domestic science movement.
The 1904 edition of The Blue Ribbon Cook Book.
Benedict’s first cookbook, A Choice Collection of Tested Receipts, was published in 1897 and was used as the basis for a succession of editions with the Blue Ribbon title. In 2008 the University Press of Kentucky republished the 1922 (fourth) edition, with a spirited introductory essay by Louisville food writer Susan Reigler. The fifth and last edition was published in 1938. In contrast, other than its 2005 reissue, The Blue Grass Cook Book appeared only in 1904 and did not seem to have much presence in the market.
Jennie Benedict was born at Harrods Creek in 1860, and by 1900 she “had become Louisville’s foremost caterer” (Reigler [1922] 2008, v). According to her memoir The Road to Dream Acre (1928), an important foundation for her cooking skills was the teaching of her old black mammy, who predicted Benedict would be a fine cook someday. This experience corroborates Tipton-Martin’s ideas about the Jemima code. Similarly, the later cookbooks written by Marion W. Flexner—Dixie Dishes (1941) and her better known Out of Kentucky Kitchens (1949)—acknowledge the creative role of African American cooks in her household in a respectful and affectionate, though patronizing, way.
Benedict’s father, who was also in the food business, encouraged her endeavors. One of her earliest businesses was making and selling lunches to schoolchildren. From there, she started to do catering, including for Derby Day. She ran the catering business from her home, taking orders for cakes, pies, sandwiches, and homemade candies and promoting her services with mailed circulars (Benedict 1928, 8). In her memoir she includes this tip for serving a crowd, which she seemingly can’t help sharing with her readers: “Just here it may be of interest, and a help to many, to know that the meat from a three pound hen, and half as much celery as meat, will make a quart of chicken salad. A gallon of salad will serve thirty people. If a little lemon juice is added to the water in which the chicken is boiled, the meat will be bleached and tender” (ibid., 23). Benedict was clearly an entrepreneur—a very successful one—and fruitcakes were an important building block in her business. During the Christmas season she baked and sold them, often shipping them to her customers by mail. Here is her fruitcake recipe.
Fruit Cake (1904)
1 pound butter
1 pound sugar
1 pound flour
½ pound citron
½ pound candied cherries
12 eggs
2 nutmegs
½ glass of wine
½ glass of brandy
2 pounds raisins
1 pound currants
½ pound figs
½ pound pineapple
2 pounds almonds
1 tablespoon cinnamon
1 tablespoon allspice
1 cup molasses
2 teaspoons baking powder
Cream the butter and sugar together. Add New Orleans molasses, then eggs, which have been beaten separately, next the flour, which has been browned; then dissolve two teaspoons of baking powder in a cup of cream or new milk, and add to the mixture. Then add the spices which have been dissolved in the tumblerful of liquor. Chop fruit and nuts, dredge with flour, and put in the batter last. Bake slowly four hours. (Benedict 1904, 89)
Benedict reminds us in a footnote, “This is the recipe which gave me my start in business.”
Benedict also opened a successful tearoom called Benedict’s in the heart of Louisville, in the 400 block of South Fourth Street. It apparently became a landmark. One of the Little Colonel books—a sentimental, central Kentucky-sited series—mentions Benedict’s tearoom (Johnston 1906). In addition to her success as an author and businesswoman, she made important contributions to Louisville by encouraging the development of health care facilities for women and the poor. In these ventures she was closely associated with Jennie C. Casseday, one of the leaders of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Casseday was instrumental in creating the Louisville program of the King’s Daughters health and social services, in which Benedict was active.3
Jennie Benedict’s approach to food, in contrast to Minnie Fox’s, was consistent with that of the national domestic science movement. From the standpoint of cookbooks (our primary concern here), a domestic science orientation involved more precision in the cooking process, greater awareness of nutrition and health, more concern for hygiene, and, to a lesser extent, the presentation of recipes to feed the sick and infirm. The clearest indicator of these changes was the advocacy of standardized measurements. “Exact measurement was the foundation for everything else that happened in the scientific kitchen, although there was not always agreement about how to reach exactitude” (Shapiro 2001, 108). In the cookbooks written by early advocates of domestic science (such as Mrs. D. A. Lincoln and Fannie Farmer), the use of level measurements in standardized containers, as well as the abandonment of “bird-based” measures, was advocated. The wide availability of more precise measuring cups and spoons in the 1890s made this possible.
Institutionally, the movement was related to the establishment of cooking schools for the general public, classes in cooking and nutrition in high schools, and academic programs in home economics at public land-grant universities such as the University of Kentucky,4 as well as the writing of cookbooks. The cooking schools were an important institutional base of the movement. Initially, they were oriented toward training immigrant women to both provide better nutrition to their families and prepare for careers in domestic service. In Louisville the program was aimed at African Americans and immigrants. Nationally, the target audience for this training had to be augmented by middle-class women to ensure an adequate clientele for these services. The early manifestations of this movement occurred first in the Northeast, in cities such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. With some time lag, the movement extended to Kentucky—mostly in Louisville, but also in Lexington and then in rural communities.
The domestic science movement resonated with the women’s movement in general, as well as with other social and technological changes.5 The movement raised the prestige of women by supporting the professionalization of traditional domestic roles typically associated with women and the application of scientific knowledge to the domestic sphere. That is, cooking and meal preparation became more technical and entered the domain of the expert. The social changes included increased urbanism, changing expectations about gender roles, and a diminution in self-sufficiency among rural households. The technological changes included the availability of gas and later electric cooking, at least in urban areas, and a better scientific understanding of the role of proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and vitamins in the diet. Domestic science–oriented cookbooks such as Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book (1884) included extensive and scientifically based discussions of the nutritional aspects of food.
The best culinary practices were thought to be within the purview of professionals and academics, rather than the good cooks of a community. This is consistent with the proliferation of single-author cookbooks and the establishment of cooking schools and academic programs. According to culinary historian Janice Longone, the post-Civil War cooking school innovation was focused on large eastern cities (1997, 18). Today, the most famous (but not the first) of these schools is the Boston Cooking School, which was founded in 1879 under the direction of Mrs. D. A. Lincoln.6 She was succeeded as principal of the school by Carrie M. Dearborn and then by the not yet famous Fannie Merritt Farmer. Apparently, the Boston Cooking School was the first to replace the block recipe format with the modern or standard format, which provides a separate ingredients list followed by a description of the procedure. Mrs. Lincoln herself was an early—perhaps the first—user of this format in Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book: What to Do and What Not to Do (1884), which was later reprinted as The Boston Cooking School Cookbook. Fannie Farmer is often associated with this innovative format, but she was not the first to use it; in fact, this format is found inconsistently in the Fannie Farmer cookbooks published by the Boston Cooking School. This pattern is used in most, but not all, contemporary cookbooks. A few Kentucky cookbooks use a format similar to that introduced in the second edition (first trade edition) of The Joy of Cooking (Rombauer 1936). Typically called the action method, it combines the procedures and the ingredients and uses typography and page placement to make the distinctions clear. According to Marion Rombauer Becker, daughter of The Joy of Cooking’s author, “Bold type carried ingredients in a chronological framework of light-face. You only had to run your eye down the bold items to see if you had suitable on hand. And you couldn’t go wrong in procedure if you followed the sequence of preparation in light-face” (1966, 29). Irene Hayes uses a similar format in What’s Cooking in Kentucky (1965), as do the cookbooks written by Bowling Green’s Duncan Hines.
An important part of the institutional story of the domestic science movement was the creation of the previously mentioned land-grant universities and their home economics departments. Starting just before World War I, these organizations and their related extension services brought the values and technologies of the domestic science movement to rural Kentucky. This represented a push for improved nutrition, especially in rural settings. These programs organized homemaker associations that promoted various aspects of domestic life, including improved food preparation; these homemaker groups also produced cookbooks starting in the 1950s. On the downside, extension programs had the effect of devaluing traditional food preparation practices, resulting in what might be called a culinary disenfranchisement. This was guided by a pervasive gustatory ethnocentrism based on the depiction of locally produced food as impure and unhygienic and the assumption that local cooks did not know enough about the science of nutrition. The foodways advocated by the movement were oriented toward the British-inspired cuisine of New England.
On a somewhat smaller scale, the domestic science movement was also reflected in the Pure Food Expositions held in various cities, including Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, New York, Cincinnati, and Louisville (in early 1895). These events were often sponsored by local grocery retailing associations, and they exhibited the products of food manufacturers such as Knox gelatin, Baker’s chocolate, Fleischman’s yeast, and McCormick spices. These expositions also included cooking classes, the distribution of free samples, and entertainment. Clearly, there was a mutually supportive relationship between the domestic science movement and the food producing industry. There was also a close association between the domestic science movement and the cooking schools.
At the time, food that was processed and packaged in factories was touted as healthier than food produced on farms. These ideas are still used today to discourage institutions such as universities and hospitals from buying their food direct from the farmer. Laura Shapiro concludes, “Uniformity, sterility, predictability—the values inherent in machine-age cuisine—were always at the heart of scientific cookery, so the era of manufactured and processed food descended upon the domestic-science movement like a millennium” (2001, 191). Foodways, whether ethnic or rural, were dismissed as problematic on either health or nutritional grounds. Perception of these “deficiencies” mobilized the movement’s reformist tendencies. The goal was to reform America one cook at a time. Although the cuisine advocated by domestic science was nutritious and efficiently prepared, it did not necessarily taste good. The emphasis seemed to be on whether the food was right to eat, rather than good to eat.
Jennie Benedict’s career took flight at the Pure Food Exposition in Louisville. Carrie Dearborn, principal of the Boston Cooking School, was scheduled to do a domestic science demonstration at the exposition, but she became ill, and Benedict was asked to replace her. According to Benedict’s memoir, Mrs. Dearborn’s husband was so grateful that he offered Benedict admission to the Boston Cooking School. As a consequence, she attended a six-week course at the school—an important center advocating the domestic science approach. Following her Boston experience, Benedict was able to add the role of cooking instructor to her résumé.
The first classes Benedict taught were in Owensboro and Bowling Green, and they focused on gas cooking—specifically, natural gas, the newly introduced replacement for manufactured gas. The first natural gas pipeline reached Louisville in 1888, and shortly thereafter Benedict taught classes there. Her 1897 cookbook recommends a gas cooking stove, among other products, and includes an ad for a Louisville gas appliance dealer. The transition to gas is discussed more thoroughly later in this chapter.
The Boston Cooking School Cookbook endured through a number of editions, the last being published in 1990, when it was called The Fannie Farmer Cookbook. This long-running cookbook made the Boston Cooking School the most famous of the various cooking schools established in this era. The recipes are conveyed in such a way that even cooks with little experience could replicate them. These are not “ingredients only” recipes. Their use of standard volume measures and their concern for nutrition represent the domestic science turn in American cookbooks and in the history of American culinary affairs (Hess and Hess 2000, 124). Benedict’s cookbook follows a similar pattern and is a central Kentucky manifestation of the domestic science movement and its approach to cooking.
The recipes selected by Jennie Benedict are a combination of regional and cosmopolitan. Although the description of procedure is robust, The Blue Ribbon Cook Book does not intentionally evoke a sense of place—that is, there is no narrative focusing on the origin and history of the recipes or on Kentucky life in general. Cookbooks with an explicit regional, cultural, and historical flavor do not appear until the 1940s. Consistent with the earlier Boston-based cookbooks, there is a certain amount of “product placement” in Benedict’s cookbook. She mentions some branded food products, including Daisy flour, Nonpareil oil, and Fleischman’s compressed yeast, as well as the Claudine brand of flour sifter. The 1904 edition includes a section consisting of advertisements that is introduced with this statement: “It gives me great pleasure to add to my book (for the benefit of the many who ask of me) the firms from whom you can purchase the VERY best, in their separate lines, to be had in this country. I urge every friend of this book to buy from them” (Benedict 1904, 139).
Benedict’s recipes use a variety of fats, including butter, lard, oil, and olive oil. The Blue Ribbon Cook Book contains three recipes that call for olive oil: deviled crab, mayonnaise, and a chicken, mushroom, and tomato dish called Spaghetti a la King Humbert. The advertisements for locally sold products include one for Holy Father pure Italian virgin olive oil. Lard tends to be used in her recipes for biscuits, breads, and pastries; otherwise, the fat of choice is butter. Interestingly, the recipe for baking powder biscuits includes both butter and lard. This reflects the beginning of a big change in the fats used for cooking. In the earliest cookbooks, lard and its close cousin bacon drippings were the primary cooking fats, although some butter was used. In parts of Kentucky, rather than making butter, many households sold most of the cream they produced to local cream stations, as they were called. This cream ended up at commercial dairies and was used for butter and ice cream production. Therefore, lard continued to be very important in rural settings, and for many years, the production of lard was the most important goal of hog raising, butchering, and processing. The preferred hog was colossal and as fat as possible—nothing like the lean animals of today. Lard was rendered on the farm and might have a residue of caramelized tissue in it, producing a brownish cast and a characteristic flavor. This worked well for some applications, but for others, a whiter fat with a cleaner, more neutral flavor was preferable. This led to innovations in the industrial production of cooking fats.
Perhaps the most important of these innovations was the development of solid fats made by hydrogenating vegetable oils. The result was called shortening. The originator of this process in the United States was Cincinnati’s Procter and Gamble, which first manufactured Crisco in 1910. Other companies introduced seemingly identical products such as Spry and Snowdrift. Prior to the Crisco revolution, other alternatives to lard were developed. Perhaps the most widely used was Cottolene, consisting of about 90 percent cottonseed oil and 10 percent beef tallow. This was marketed with the tagline “Nature’s Gift from the Sunny South” and was sold in buckets like lard (Lincoln 1910). As these new fats were developed and marketed, lard was also undergoing change. Today, most of the lard that is sold is highly processed and filtered to make it white and more neutral in flavor. It is also partially hydrogenated to increase its stiffness and stability (Fowler 2008, 44). There is no mention of products such as Crisco in the 1922 edition of Benedict’s cookbook, even though it had been on the market for at least a decade. It is interesting that most other cookbooks of this era did not list shortening as an ingredient either (with the exception of Procter and Gamble’s Crisco-based cookbooks). Mrs. Peter A. White includes the use of “salad oil” in her instructions for frying fish in her 1885 cookbook (80), and Benedict mentions oil in two recipes in the 1904 edition of her book. Surprisingly, shortening did not become a widely used ingredient until the 1940s, and by the 1950s, lard had virtually disappeared. For example, the community cookbook Latonia’s Favorite Recipes has no lard-containing recipes (Trinity Methodist Church 1950). Typically, its cake and roll recipes call for shortening or, in some cases, butter or margarine. In contrast, some of the recipes in the 1956 community cookbook Cabbage Patch: Famous Kentucky Recipes call for animal fats; the recipe for Kentucky beaten biscuits includes “2 heaping tablespoons hog lard (grainy)” (Cabbage Patch Circle 1956, 106). I assume this description refers to the kind of lard one could produce at home.
An unusual feature of The Blue Ribbon Cook Book not found in the other cookbooks is a section entitled “Simple Dishes for the Sick.” Recipes for invalids are often found in domestic science–oriented cookbooks. Some examples from The Blue Ribbon Cook Book include barley water, flaxseed tea, beef tea, creamed calf brains, and chicken broth; there are also suggested menus for the sick in the menu section. The recipes include items suitable for liquid and bland diets and a discussion of the peptonization of milk and other foods (the process by which the enzyme pepsin breaks down protein). Here is one of Benedict’s recipes for the sick.
Creamed Oatmeal (1904)
Boil oatmeal as for breakfast, rub it through a fine sieve, add a little cream, and cook very slowly in a double boiler for half an hour longer. When perfectly smooth, add a very little salt and rich cream. This is the most delicate preparation of oatmeal that an invalid can take. (Benedict 1904, 118)
As noted earlier, Benedict was closely associated with community efforts to improve health care, especially for the poor and women. There is still an important community service organization in Louisville called the Jennie C. Benedict Circle.
Benedict’s recipes often appear in more recent Louisville cookbooks. The short Kentucky Heritage Recipes cookbook, published by the Historic Homes Foundation in 1976 to raise money for historic homes in Louisville, includes her recipes for lemon wafers, eggnog, fruitcake, rum punch, and hollandaise sauce.
A number of other cookbooks compiled by Kentucky women deserve attention. One of these women is Nannie Talbot Johnson (aka Mrs. W. A. Johnson),7 a culinary entrepreneur whose career shared features with Jennie Benedict’s. Johnson wrote What to Cook and How to Cook It, which was revised and reprinted a number of times. The 1899 edition is usually cited as the first; however, the words “Seventh, Enlarged Edition” appear on the cover, and the book is augmented with an appendix of recipes— evidence of a revision. The last edition seems to be the eighteenth, published in 1923. The cookbook is a blend of old and new elements. The most anachronistic feature is consistent use of the block format. There is little evidence in the text that supports the idea that it was written with wood and coal stoves in mind. Measurements are modern, with some exceptions; in contrast to Benedict’s instructions, the measurements are specified as rounded rather than level. There is no mention of actual cooking temperatures and little about cooking times. In contrast, a modern feature is that the recipes provide quite a bit of detail about procedure—not as much as today’s cookbooks, but more than earlier cookbooks. She includes an extensive discussion of sweets, especially candy. In 1912 Mrs. Johnson published a companion volume to What to Cook and How to Cook It entitled Cake, Candy, and Culinary Crinkles. Although this volume contains recipes (including many for icings and candies; see below), it is primarily concerned with the techniques of presentation. As Johnson explains, “Culinary Crinkles consist in shaping, cooking to a nicety, arranging and garnishing, observing always the best way to serve in order to please the eye and invite the appetite” (1912, 3).
Plain White Candy (1912)
Pour over three pounds of granulated sugar, one pint of water, put on the stove and stir until dissolved; add a pinch of soda, two tablespoons of vinegar and a teaspoon of butter; cook over a quick fire. Have a tumbler of cold water, and when the candy begins to cook in large bubbles, put a teaspoon of it in the water, and if it becomes hard and cracks on the side of tumbler, pour at once on a greased slab or flat china dish. When it begins to harden so that it makes a dent when pressed by the finger, gather it all in a lump and pull until it gets light and creamy; pull the flavoring into it and make it into long, thin strips and cut into one or two inch pieces. By the use of fruit coloring, this candy can be made any desired color by putting in the coloring after the candy has been pulled white. Continue to pull until the coloring has been uniformly mixed through. (Johnson 1912, 196–97)
Apparently, Johnson began writing cookbooks, cooking professionally, and teaching cooking classes when her husband died. She is an interesting figure in the culinary history of Kentucky. An intriguing fact is that Mrs. Johnson is cited as the cooking instructor of Irma Rombauer, the original author of The Joy of Cooking (1931).8 Rombauer took cooking classes from Johnson as part of a summer program sponsored by the Bay View Association Methodist Church near Traverse City, Michigan, sometime around 1915. This was near the Rombauers’ summer home. Mrs. Rombauer’s daughter notes that “the Johnson School was perhaps Mother’s only exposure to formal culinary training. But it brought out her unusual and at first rather inexplicable flair of decorating cakes” (Becker 1966, 2).9
Like Jennie Benedict, Nannie Talbot Johnson was a food-focused entrepreneur. Around 1920 she and her two daughters established the Cherokee Inn in Louisville. The business apparently began as a tearoom and evolved into a boardinghouse with the economic stresses of the Depression. As part of an oral history project focused on preservation of the Cherokee Triangle neighborhood, Frances Hannah Lamason recollected, “I had some Johnson relatives … Nannie was from Paris, Kentucky, and she wrote a cookbook called What to Cook & How to Cook It. Her cookbook was a step above the older cookbooks because I think she actually had measurements in it. My friends remember my mother taking us there for afternoon tea when we were so big. This was part of our education in etiquette. We would go for tea and cinnamon toast at [the] Cherokee Inn” (Thomas 2003, 199–200). The inn was a landmark on Cherokee Road until it was demolished and replaced by an apartment complex in 1972. Whereas the inn was an attractive (though unadorned) two-story Italianate building, typical of the better neighborhoods of late-nineteenth- century Louisville, the apartment complex was described by one community leader as an aesthetic monstrosity. The community’s resistance and reaction to the loss of the inn and other nearby historic buildings led to the establishment of the Cherokee Triangle Preservation District.
Much of What to Cook consists of rather straightforward recipes that use basic techniques. Here is a simple recipe for chicken fricassee.
Fricassee Chicken (1899)
Wipe, and cut at the joints in pieces for serving. Cover with boiling water. Cook one hour or until tender, reducing the water to nearly a pint. Remove the chicken from the liquor, dredge with salt, pepper and flour, brown in hot butter or pork scraps. Put the chicken on toast on a hot platter; add to the liquor one cup of cream or milk and heat it again. Melt one large tablespoon of butter in a sauce pan; add two tablespoons of flour, and when well mixed pour on slowly the cream and chicken liquor. Add salt and pepper and pour the same over the chicken. Trim a platter with toast, arrange the chicken on toast, pour the cream dressing over it and garnish with parsley. (Johnson 1899, 54–55)
This is a typical Johnson recipe. It is presented in block format, the measures are standardized, and she gives instructions for presentation.
The cookbooks of Jennie Benedict and Nannie Talbot Johnson contrast with the elegant little cookbook written by Mary Harris Frazer and published in 1903 by a Louisville printer. The preface of The Kentucky Receipt Book claims that the recipes “have been collected for generations, including Creole and French receipts known only to the wealthy planter families of the far South” (Frazer 1903, 3). This statement, along with the names of some of the recipes, provides a cultural context. Frazer was raised in Louisiana and, through her life experiences, learned about Virginia and Kentucky cooking. Frazer is concerned with how the food tastes, and the recipes are very technique-oriented for 1903, yet they are presented in the older block format.
The Kentucky Receipt Book is not presented as a Louisville cookbook, but its River City roots are evident. Its mix of recipes could be considered an early manifestation of Louisville’s foodways or culinary traditions. The essential parts of Louisville cuisine are classic Kentucky dishes such as green beans and cured pork seasoning meat, country ham, and biscuits, with a big helping of traditional Gulf coast dishes and highlighted by elements of ethnic cuisine—most prominently, German and other European influences. All this is coupled with an interest in good food, eating out, and new culinary ideas, or a more cosmopolitan view of food.
The recipe selection is quite interesting. Reflecting Frazer’s Louisiana roots, she includes a recipe for a southern classic—banana pudding— although it does not contain vanilla wafers. Hers is sometimes cited as the earliest published recipe for banana pudding.
Banana Pudding (1903)
Take ½ dozen bananas, peel and cut into pieces an inch thick, put in baking dish and pour over custard made in the following manner: Custard—One pint of milk, 3 eggs, beat the yolks light, add milk, also 2 tablespoons of granulated sugar. Have the milk boiling, add the eggs and let it cool until it thickens; when cool pour over the bananas. Make a meringue with whites of the eggs and granulated sugar, put on top of custard, set in oven a few minutes to brown. Serve at once. (Frazer 1903, 221)
Frazer includes sixty recipes for oysters, giving them a separate section of their own. This recipe for gumbo, taken from another section, also uses oysters.
Gumbo Fille (1903)
Take 1 large chicken and fry in butter, with 1 onion chopped finely (prepare chicken day before needed). Pour into a covered dish with the gravy and set away until next day. Then to the chicken add 3 quarts of cold water and cook until done. Remove chicken from kettle; have 2 large spoons gumbo fille10 powder; put in cup with cold water, stir until ropy; then add this to the soup and boil. Take 1 quart of large oysters, plump in their liquor, drain on a sieve; add them to gumbo, also the chicken. Have 1 pint of rice well cooked and serve at the same time. (Frazer 1903, 14)
Kentucky Receipt Book is the source of many of the recipes presented on the Old Louisville Guide website. Old Louisville is a federally designated Historic Preservation Area near the city’s downtown. The neighborhood’s Victorian architectural treasures and culinary traditions are also conveyed in David Domine’s A Feast for the Eyes: Recipes from America’s Grandest Victorian Neighborhood (2010).
African American–Authored Cookbooks
This era produced the earliest Kentucky cookbook written by an African American. Miss Atholene Peyton’s The Peytonia Cook Book was published in Louisville in 1906. She had deep roots in the city. Peyton was an 1897 graduate of Louisville’s Central Colored High School and then went on to the Colored Normal School, which provided teachers for Louisville’s public schools until it closed in 1935. Peyton served on the domestic science faculty of the segregated Central Colored High School and was the faculty sponsor of the Girls’ Cooking Club. In one of her applications on file in the Jefferson County Public Schools archives, she noted under “honors”: “Wrote the first Negro Cook Book in Kentucky.” Her career at Central Colored High School lasted from 1904 until her death in April 1951. Peyton also taught domestic science at the Neighborhood Home and Training School for Colored Boys and Girls, located on Fifteenth Street in Louisville. The Training School was supported by the Neighborhood Circle of the King’s Daughters. As mentioned earlier, Jennie Benedict was closely associated with this organization’s domestic science training program, so perhaps Peyton and Benedict were colleagues. Peyton also represented the Louisville schools at an event in Frankfort featuring Dr. Booker T. Washington, held to commemorate the construction of a new dormitory at Kentucky State University, from which she earned a degree in 1935.
Peyton also served on the domestic science faculty of the summer Chautauqua of the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, D.C. This was organized by the Woman’s Convention, an auxiliary of the National Baptist Convention, which was and remains an important African American religious organization. The president of the training school was the well-known African American educator Nannie Helen Burroughs, who advocated for the improvement of African American women’s marketable skills. Domestic science training was an important aspect this advocacy.
According to a news item in the Indianapolis Freeman (1907), The Peytonia Cook Book “has achieved a wonderful degree of popularity among the best authorities on the culinary art.” The cookbook itself in cludes a warm introduction by Nannie Helen Burroughs. Most recipes are presented in the standard format, although a few utilize the block format. The cookbook has a clear domestic science look and feel, and the recipes are described as tested. Although it is accurate to think of The Peytonia Cook Book as a general cookbook without a regional mission, there are references to southern and even African American cuisine. In her narrative on cooking greens, Peyton notes, “In fact, in the South jowl is used in preference to bacon with greens” (1906, 52). She also includes a few recipes for game, and the narrative accompanying her recipe for possum states: “Opossum and coon are both strictly Southern dishes, and are both unheard of in the north. These two dishes are generally eaten by the darky, and no one else has the knack of making them so toothsome” (ibid., 66). Her recipe for cobbler observes, “A cobbler is just a deep pie, and I believe they are eaten in no place like Kentucky” (ibid., 98).
In addition to recipes, Peyton provides sections on “kitchen equipment” and “waitress service,” as well as a series of sample menus. Certainly, the discussion of waitress service is another manifestation of the vocational thrust of the domestic science movement, and it appears to be oriented toward domestic service or possibly employment in an elegant restaurant. Her description of a properly equipped kitchen includes two types of ranges—gas and coal. Peyton explains, “I believe that bread and cakes are best cooked by coal” (1906, 6). She gives the advice, “Always light the gas or gasoline ovens at least ten minutes before you are ready to bake” (ibid., 19). In the section on cakes, she recommends a Dover eggbeater.
Typical of her book’s domestic science orientation, Peyton includes some branded products—Quaker oats, Vissman’s bacon and sausage, White Seal ginger ale, Cox’s gelatin, Burnett’s flavoring extracts, and the ubiquitous Baker’s chocolate. In a few cases, Peyton expresses an opinion about the nutritional qualities of some ingredients. These are of interest because they differ so radically from today’s thinking. “Fish is not a substitute for meat in nutritive value,” she states, “because it has less fat, but it is a pleasant change. Sauces must be served with fish to suply [sic] the lacking nutriment” (Peyton 1906, 55). Concerning fruit, she writes, “Cooking changes the character and flavor of fruit, but if sugar is used the nutritive value is increased” (ibid., 111). Here is one of her chicken recipes.
Smothered Chicken (1906)
Cut the chicken up as to fry; wipe dry and salt and pepper. Put in a pan with a slice of bacon and a pint of water; simmer for an hour or more until done. Keep the chicken well covered. Put the chicken on a dish; thicken the liquid and pour on chicken. Serve with rice. (Peyton 1906, 192)
Also authored by an African American is Kentucky Cookbook: Easy and Simple for Any Cook, written by Kentucky-born professional cook Mrs. W. T. Hayes (also known as Emma Allen Hayes) and published in 1912. Mrs. Hayes’s identity as an African American seems clear, as she describes herself on the title page as a “colored woman.” Apparently, she was living in St. Louis with her husband when this fifty-nine-page cookbook was published by printer J. H. Tompkins. John Egerton (1990, 130) cites this as one of the earliest cookbooks written by an African American, along with The Southern Cookbook by S. Thomas Bivins (1912); however, the latter does not have roots in Kentucky. Here is Mrs. Hayes’s recipe for macaroni croquettes with cheese sauce.
Macaroni Croquettes, Cheese Sauce (1912)
For the croquettes take enough cold boiled macaroni to make 2 cups when cut into small pieces. Add to this 1 teaspoon of lemon juice, ½ teaspoon of onion juice, a little celery salt and seasoning to taste. Mix with 1 cup of white sauce made of 2 tablespoons of butter, 2 tablespoons of flour, seasoning and one cup of boiling milk. Let the mixture cool. Form in cone shaped croquettes, roll in egg and bread crumbs and fry in deep fat till a very light brown. Stick a small spray of parsley in the top of each croquette. Cheese sauce: to 1 cup of white sauce add ½ cup grated cheese and 1 heaping tablespoon of chopped walnut meats. (Hayes 1912, 26)
To help locate these cookbooks in history, it is useful to mention some earlier non-Kentucky cookbooks written by African Americans. A comprehensive chronological bibliography of cookbooks by African Americans, published as an appendix to Doris Witt’s Black Hunger: Food and the Politics of U.S. Identity (1999), includes Robert Roberts’s The House Servant’s Directory, or a Monitor for Private Families: Comprising Hints on the Arrangement and Performance of Servants’ Work … Upwards of 100 Various and Useful Receipts, Chiefly Compiled for the Use of House Servants (1827).11 This is actually a household management manual that includes recipes, rather than a cookbook. According to Jessica B. Harris (2011, 278), the earliest cookbook written by an African American is A Domestic Cookbook: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen by Malinda Russell a Free Woman of Color, published in Michigan in 1867; it does not have a southern orientation. More clearly southern is Abby Fisher’s What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking, published in San Francisco in 1881. Mrs. Fisher was born enslaved in Alabama; she raised a large family and moved from Mobile to make her mark as a caterer in San Francisco following the Civil War.
The First Kentucky Cookbook Written by a Man
As stated earlier, cookbook writing was largely the domain of women, although through the years, there has been a sprinkling of cookbooks written by men. Based on my research, the earliest Kentucky cookbook written by a man is Tandy Ellis’s very interesting short pamphlet titled Camp Cooking, published in 1923. James Tandy Ellis, born in Ghent in Carroll County, was known as a poet, short story writer, and newspaper columnist for the Louisville Times. The recipe for burgoo included in Marion Flexner’s classic Out of Kentucky Kitchens (1949) is from Ellis. His recipes for simple country dishes are presented in an old-fashioned block format. The cookbook includes asides, written with humorous intent, that are demeaning to African Americans.
Camp Cooking, Tandy Ellis’s 1923 pamphlet.
Baked ’Possum (1923)
Scald your ’possum the same as you would a hog and scrape him. Do not use skinned ’possum under any circumstances. Soak for half an hour in salt and water, hang out to cool and freeze over night.
When you put him in the baking pan, put some small oak or iron pieces under him to raise him above the grease. A good many people do not like ’possum because they are cooked in so much grease. Elevated about an inch or so above the bottom of the pan, allows grease to drip from him into pan. Baste him occasionally. Boil sweet potatoes until nearly done and about 15 minutes before taking ’possum out of the oven, place them around the ’possum in the pan and bake. (Ellis 1923, 19)
While the Kentucky cookbooks considered here have few possum recipes, it seems like they always involve sweet potatoes.
Cooking with Gas
Church fund-raising cookbooks continued to be published, and the Women’s Guild of the Christ Church Cathedral, Lexington, produced A Book of Recipes in 1920 and an enlarged and improved edition in 1926.12 This cookbook is noteworthy because it contains explicit instructions for cooking with gas. The book came out about thirty years after gas was introduced to Kentucky cities. Gas is mentioned in the Benedict cookbooks, but she gives no instructions. The format of A Book of Recipes is a combination of the traditional block format and the more modern presentation of a separate list of ingredients followed by a description of the procedure; there are also a few recipes consisting of ingredients only. As was typical of charity cookbooks of the era, editorial control was very light.
The references to cooking with gas suggest that this technique was becoming more widespread, although cooking was still being done by electricity, kerosene, wood, and coal as well. There are no specific instructions for oven temperatures, but the women of Christ Church Cathedral give the following advice on preheating the oven in the introduction to their cake recipes: “If gas oven is used, light the oven burners and turn low about five minutes before putting in cake. If layer cake, turn up burners so cake will rise slowly as oven heats” (Women’s Guild 1926, 71).
A 1926 charity cookbook from Lexington.
The gas range had a number of advantages over wood or coal stoves, including more temperature control, piped-in fuel, and the magic of an “instant on.” In addition, gas stoves heated up the kitchen far less and took up less space. Their relative lightness allowed a long-legged design to prevail for a time.
It is surprisingly difficult to determine when the transition from cooking with woodstoves to cooking with gas or electric stoves occurred. Certainly this happened much earlier in the cities than in the countryside. In the case of electricity, there was a gap of about fifty years between the time the first and last places were electrified. Some parts of rural Kentucky did not get electricity until the early 1950s. In both the city and the country, electricity was used first for lights and then for motors; cooking and refrigeration come later. Even long after electrification, wood-fired cookstoves were retained for limited uses, such as canning or heating water for laundry. As mentioned earlier, one of Jennie Benedict’s first jobs was to teach classes in cooking with gas in the 1890s.
In Kentucky the transition to gas cooking started with the formation of the Louisville Gas and Water Company in 1838. Originally, this business focused on street lighting, fueled by gas manufactured from coal in the city itself. Louisville had gas street lighting earlier than similar cities, but it was supplanted by electricity in around 1890, as electric lights were brighter. The need to develop an alternative market for the gas supply formerly used for lighting led to the increased use of gas for heating and cooking. In addition, new supplies became available with the construction of natural gas pipelines into Louisville, such as the pipeline from West Virginia built in 1914. What was called natural gas was more reliable, less expensive, and more efficient than manufactured gas.
The function of gas stoves was improved by the invention of the thermostat in around 1915. Even so, it took a long time for cookbooks to specify oven temperatures. Cookbooks from the hearth and woodstove eras used general terms, translated as follows: a very slow oven was equivalent to about 250 degrees; slow, 300 degrees; moderately slow, 325 degrees; moderate, 350 degrees; moderately hot, 375 degrees; hot, 400 degrees; very hot, 450 degrees; and extremely hot, 500 degrees. The transition from this nominal terminology to the use of numbers of degrees started in the mid- 1920s and was complete by 1950. The Women’s Guild’s 1926 cookbook used nominal terms for all recipes for baked goods. About ten years later, another church cookbook included a sprinkling of recipes with degrees specified. For example, a recipe for ice box biscuits states: “Bake 15 minutes at 425 degrees” (South Frankfort Presbyterian Church 1935, 3). Marion Flexner’s Dixie Dishes (1941) combined the nominal and the digital in each recipe. By the 1950s, nearly all recipes for baked goods specified oven temperatures in degrees.
Socially, these changes in cooking technology played an important role in the redefined expectations associated with both gender and race. Women used their culinary activities—cooking, teaching cooking, and writing cookbooks—to achieve independence and break the constraints of the domestic sphere. Women’s traditional domestic roles became the purview of specially trained experts, illustrated by the growing interest in the scientific basis of nutrition, the careful measurement of ingredients, and authoritative instruction through cooking schools. This was part of a much larger, national social movement to increase the rights of women, well described in the writings of Laura Shapiro and others. Less clearly understood is that the emergence of the “expert” cook diminished the value of ordinary individuals’ knowledge of food preparation and other things culinary. Traditional cooks and food producers were seen as people who had to be taught rather than respected. Associated with this was an increase in the perceived value of food produced by industry.
Kentucky, especially urban Kentucky, played an important (though regional) role in this transition, as can be seen in the entrepreneurial career strategies of Jennie Benedict, Nannie Talbot Johnson, and Atholene Peyton. In different ways, they each expressed the values underlying the domestic science movement and the gender evolution of which it was a part. At the same time, nostalgic vestiges of the old social order lasted into the 1950s and perhaps beyond.