Introduction
1. The recipes have not been tested. Although I have maintained as much of the original format as possible, I spell out abbreviations that might cause confusion (e.g., tablespoon is not written as T).
2. This paragraph draws on the foreword from Scaggs and McGraw (2013).
1. The First Kentucky Cookbook
1. What is now Boyle County was part of Lincoln County in 1805.
2. The information about Mrs. Bryan was found on Ancestry.com, a genealogy website. The basic information comes from Kentucky marriage records. In addition, a woman who was researching her ancestors identified Lettice Bryan as her great-great-great-grandmother and as the author of The Kentucky Housewife, based on personal family knowledge and references to Mrs. Bryan in her grandmother’s personal papers. The dates that appear in the records support this view.
3. Ultimately, the college merged with the University of Cincinnati.
4. A year later Shepard and Stearns published 2,000 copies of the third edition of The Book of Mormon. This version is historically important because it includes the corrections provided by Joseph Smith and was the penultimate edition published during Smith’s lifetime.
5. All the cookbooks mentioned so far are readily available in inexpensive facsimile editions or free downloadable versions.
6. Spaddle is an archaic word that means “small spade.” It was apparently used like a rubber (or vinyl) spatula. Sometimes, Mrs. Bryan refers to a wooden spoon.
7. Cheeses are also made with coagulants other than rennet, some of which are nonanimal.
8. Unslaked lime is calcium oxide. Calcium oxide is chemically unstable and transforms into calcium carbonate.
9. According to the Dictionary of Regional American English, a feelark is a meadowlark (Cassidy and Hall 1991, 381).
10. These include Liberty Hall (1796) and Orlando Brown House (1835) in Frankfort, Farmington (1810) in Louisville, Ashland (1809–1811) in Lexington, and the Brown-Pusey House (1825) in Elizabethtown, among others.
11. A trammel is an iron hook that attaches the cooking pot to the hearth crane. They can be simple-shaped hooks or more complex, adjustable devices.
12. Culinary historian Alice Ross describes the convoluted history of the term spider in “There’s History in Your Frying Pan,” Journal of Antiques and Collectibles (January 2001).
13. A drachm is ⅛ of an ounce and is the same as a dram.
14. Kentucky did not vote to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment until 1976.
2. The Needs of the “New Regime”
1. This should not be confused with Mrs. Bryan’s The Kentucky Housewife. The books are quite different, and the title of Mrs. White’s book was changed in later editions.
2. Although Moss’s cookbook is widely held to be the first charity cookbook, there are alternative views in the culinary history literature. Sanitary fairs were held in large cities in the North to mobilize civilian support for the medical care of soldiers. These events included exhibits and commercial sales. President Lincoln gave a speech at the Philadelphia Sanitary Fair, which raised over $1 million. The situation was desperate, as there were few government provisions for the mass casualties resulting from the Civil War. There was almost no funding on either side for ambulances or medical care or for registering and burying the dead. The U.S. Sanitary Commission was formed in the private sector to address some of these issues on the Union side (Faust 2008, 87–88). Sanitary fairs were one way to raise money for the Sanitary Commission.
3. Yelk is an archaic spelling of yolk and appears in some other cookbooks from this era.
4. This information is from the website of Janet Jarvits, an antiquarian cookbook dealer. It identifies Mrs. Peter A. White’s maiden name as Miss Mag Woolley and states that she was “trained in household duties.”
5. Much of the description of woodstoves presented here is from the article “The Kitchen Stove” by George D. Slade (2004), based on his experiences growing up in Harrison County. Although he was quite old when he wrote this, he was recalling experiences more recent than the late nineteenth century.
3. A Turning Point
1. The Blue Ribbon Cook Book is based on Benedict’s 1897 cookbook titled A Choice Collection of Tested Receipts. Both the Fox and the Benedict cookbooks have been republished by the University Press of Kentucky with informative introductory essays.
2. Auvergne was originally established by the Clay family in the eighteenth century. Berle Clay still owns and farms Auvergne. At the time Fox’s book was written, the estate was the property of Brutus J. Clay. Mount Airy was the estate of William Sims, a U.S. congressman and, during the Civil War era, a Confederate senator and member of Jefferson Davis’s cabinet.
3. King’s Daughters is an interdenominational Christian service organization founded in New York in 1886. It has a Protestant orientation.
4. The majority of land-grant universities were established by the Morrill Act of 1862. These universities usually had home economics departments. Today, these departments are almost always called something else, reflecting the complex changes in both agriculture and gender roles.
5. Laura Shapiro’s Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (2001) provides a well-researched and highly readable account of the culinary, institutional, and gender aspects of the domestic science movement. Much of my discussion of the national perspectives on this movement is based on that book.
6. After the death of her husband, she used the name Mary Lincoln.
7. That is, Mrs. William Alexander Johnson, after she married Johnson at age eighteen.
8. The first edition was published in 1931 at Mrs. Rombauer’s expense.
9. Nannie Talbot Johnson is called Mrs. Ray Johnson of Paris, Kentucky, in Becker’s volume. There is a copy of Johnson’s specialty cookbook Cake, Candy, and Culinary Crinkles (1912) in the Irma S. Rombauer Papers archived at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University.
10. This is usually spelled filé or file. It serves to thicken and flavor the mixture.
11. The bibliography, compiled by Doris Witt with David Lupton, is prefaced by an essay entitled “African American Cookbooks” by Witt. The only Kentucky cookbook listed is Hayes’s Kentucky Cookbook (1912); the earlier work of Atholene Peyton is not included.
12. The Women of Christ Church Cathedral also published Christ Church Classics: 200 Years of Favorite Recipes in 1996, which is supplemented by recipes from both the 1920 and 1926 volumes.
4. Hard Times
1. A culinary metaphor for prosperity was an iconic Kentucky dish called the Hot Brown sandwich. Its ubiquitous presence on Kentucky menus started in 1926, when it was created at Louisville’s newly built Brown Hotel by chef Fred K. Schmidt to feed hungry partygoers and recharge their energy after an evening of dancing. Decades later, this dish appears with many variations in numerous Kentucky cookbooks. Although the sandwich continued, the prosperity did not.
2. The WPA was originally named the Works Progress Administration; this was changed to Work Projects Administration in 1939.
3. The manual is undated. I use the estimated publication date of 1941 supplied by the Special Collections Department at the Hitchens Library at Berea College.
4. Queen’s Daughters is a women’s social services organization active in Louisville. It is associated with Catholic Church membership and was founded in St. Louis.
5. New Foods and New Roles
1. An interesting account of wartime rationing is “Meat Rationing during World War II” by Wilbur Bush, published by the Daviess County Historical Society and available on its website.
2. The Victory Handbook for Health and Home Defense seems to be a charity publication project that was instituted during the war in a number of different communities around the country. It contains both standardized and local content, including recipes, local ads, and lists of persons who served during the war. The publication dates range from 1942 to 1945. The issue reprinted by the Hopkins County group has credits from local businesses in Earlington and Madisonville.
3. Corn syrup is produced from cornstarch through the action of certain enzymes. It is different from high-fructose corn syrup, which represents an evolution of the original corn syrup technology and is sweeter than corn syrup.
4. Some say this GE model was called the Monitor Top because the cylindrical fitting on top of the cabinet resembled the turret on the Civil War–era ironclad USS Monitor.