Category Archives: Modern

Bodies, Family and Household, Knowledge Transmission, Modern, Remedies, Series: Newspapers and Advertisements, Series: Reading Practices, Women and Gender

Pimples, Corns, and Correspondence: Remedying Victorian Beauty Dilemmas

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By Jessica P. Clark

As we’ve seen in previous posts, eighteenth-century English newspapers were important sites for exchanging recipes and knowledge. This tradition flourished in the nineteenth century via a textual forum aimed specifically at female readers: correspondence columns in leading women’s magazines. However, rather than share recipes for curing the common cold, nineteenth-century correspondents often used this textual space to tackle highly personal beauty “problems” plaguing both men and women: chilblains, bald spots, warts. From time-honored home recipes to reviews of a new generation of manufactured beauty products, this imagined community traded information on how to enhance readers’ appearances and, most likely, improve their lives.[i]

In the mid-nineteenth century, new print technologies and reduced taxation prompted a boom in print publishing. Publishers turned their attention to expanding markets of female readers; new ladies’ magazines like the Ladies’ Treasury (1858), Le Follet (1846), and The Queen (1861) kept readers up to date on the latest Parisian fashions, shopping advice, and culinary recipes.[ii] Correspondence columns became a regular feature in many of the publications. Most notably, readers of The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (produced by Isabella and Samuel Beeton of Mrs. Beeton fame) submitted personal queries to the “Englishwoman’s Conversazione,” which tackled rules of etiquette, fashion trends, but also questions about health and the body.

Title Page of "The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine," September 1861. Source credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Title Page of “The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine,” September 1861. Source credit: Wikimedia Commons.

A survey of the “Englishwoman’s Conversazione” through the 1860s reveals frank admissions of highly personal aesthetic concerns. In one column from 1868, for example, readers inquired “how to cure little pimples on the forehead and chin” or for advice on stimulating hair growth after developing “two large places on the head [that were] perfectly bare” from wearing false hair. Such unsightly problems seem trivial when compared to the “50 small warts” on the back of one reader’s hand or the “natural fleshy enlargement” on the chest of another, a point of “great annoyance” for her. While brief, the letters betray correspondents’ intense desire to solve aesthetic dilemmas, with contributors promising gratitude or perhaps “a very good recipe for the cure of corns” in exchange for assistance.

 

Respondents were quick to heed the call of their fellow readers, and remedies appeared in subsequent editions of the “Conversazione.” These responses reveal fascinating processes in nineteenth-century home production, as women manipulated dyes, powders, and ointments. Readers suggested compounds often replete with chemicals, like one mixture for homemade colorant that depended on sulfur. Another reader suggested as a cure for chilblains “[h]ydrochloric acid, diluted, ¼ ounce; hydrocyanic acid, diluted, 30 drops; camphor-water, 6 ounces,” before warning “it is a deadly poison, and should be kept under lock and key” – except, of course, when applying it to the body!

The effects of these home remedies sometimes proved unexpected and detrimental, and correspondents shared “horror stories” in their quest for beauty. One reader described how her “hair came off” after a botched recipe, but now “few ha[d] thicker hair than” she. She even offered to send a sample of her revamped hair-growth treatment to correspondent “Hibernia” to try herself. In this way, the “Conversazione” functioned as a means of determining the efficacy and safety of home concoctions, a virtual testing ground for the latest hair dye and cosmetic wash.[iii]

"Mrs. S.A. Allen's World's Hair Dressing or Zylobalsamum," 29 May 1860. Source credit: brary of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
“Mrs. S.A. Allen’s World’s Hair Dressing or Zylobalsamum,” 29 May 1860. Source credit: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

But this exchange did not only apply to homemade beauty concoctions. From the mid-nineteenth century, Britons increasingly depended on manufactured goods, including beauty and grooming products. By the 1860s, the “Conversazione” assisted readers in navigating this new commercial scene, allowing readers to debate the efficacy and, more importantly, the safety of widely available products. For example, the column featured a series of letters from March 1868 on “Mrs. Allen’s World’s Hair Restorer,” an American commercial hair wash distributed by local wholesalers. Hearing that the product caused itchy, red scalps in two acquaintances, a female correspondent turned to readers of the “…invaluable Conversazione, which so often helps us out of difficulties.” Her letter set off a chain of responses over the coming months. Respondents warned that “Mrs. Allen’s Dressing” contained hazardous amounts of mercury, eventually prompting a defensive response from London agent John M. Richards, who asserted the “natural” makeup of the product. Reader responses followed both refuting and supporting the charge of mercury, accompanied by correspondents’ proven personal recipes for hair-restorers. In this Victorian precursor to “customer reviews,” readers placed their trust in the textual community in an effort to recreate the traditional exchange of advice among female intimates. Their efforts bore fruit; they elicited responses that exposed the dangerous chemical makeup of manufactured beauty products, all while soliciting tried-and-tested alternatives from readers’ own recipe collections.

 

 

This post cites letters published in the “Englishwoman’s Conversazione” between November 1862 and October 1870.  The EDM is available via Gale’s 19th Century UK Periodicals.

[i] On “imagined communities,” see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities; Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991) and Margaret Beetham, “Periodicals and the New Media: women and imagined communities,” Women’s Studies International Forum 29.3 (2006): 231-240.

 [ii] For more on women’s magazines, see, for example, Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of her Own?: Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800-1914 (London: Routledge, 1996); Margaret Beetham and Kay Boardman, eds., Victorian Women’s Magazines: an Anthology (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001; and Hilary Fraser, Stephanie Green, and Judith Johnston, Gender and the Victorian Periodical (London: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

 [iii] Samuel Beeton eventually complied toilette recipes in his Beeton’s Domestic Recipe Book (London: Ward, Lock, and Co., 1871) 65-78.

Family and Household, Food and Drink, Ingredients, Modern, Posts, Research and Writing, Women and Gender

From Recipe to Biography: Georgiana Hill’s life in cooking

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By Rachel Rich

 

Two rabbits sitting next to the entrance of their burrow while a couple of rabbits are gamboling in the background. Etching by J. Tookeyafter J. C. Ibbetson.
Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

In a previous post, I compared Georgiana Hill with Isabella Beeton, in order to reflect on different genres of Victorian recipe books. But Hill is interesting as more than a counterpart to the more famous Beeton. Georgiana Hill was a prolific cookery writer in the 1860s. Of what she did before this, and how she spent her remaining years after, little is known. Until recently, the most notable mention of her by a historian was in Joan Thirsk’s ‘Forward’ Women in English Society, 1500-1800 (edited by Mary Prior, 1985). Thirsk, perfectly understandably, assumed that Hill the cookery writer was the same person as Georgiana Hill who published on women’s history in the 1890s. We now know otherwise.  In 2012 Panmacmillan reprinted Everybody’s Pudding Book as A Year of Victorian Puddings. Now Hill is back in our minds and the ODNB will be adding an entry on her to their publication in the near future.

Apart from what the census yields, the best clues about Hill’s life come from her cookbooks. The introduction to Puddings suggests that Hill had sense of humour since she offered a funny take on the usual trope of scolding women for their lack of culinary know-how, with a clearly exaggerated tale of a visit to an elderly woman who served apple pudding six months a year and gooseberry pudding the other six, because these were the only two recipes her servant could tolerably execute. Hill wrote that ‘This slight incident decided me to undertake a work for the assistance and enlightenment of any ladies who may be in like distress; and if through my editorial exertions, one of the fair or even sterner sex be spared a moment’s trouble on the subject…I shall…feel I am incontestably entitled to be looked upon as a benefactor of my species.’

Elsewhere, Hill did away completely with the conventional form, opting, for example, for some thoughts on rabbits as pets, and as having health-giving properties, in the introduction to The Gourmet’s Guide to Rabbit Cooking, in one hundred and twenty-four dishes (1859), where she includes a little poem:

For onions, you know, are generally said
To be an excellent remedy for a cold in the head;
And rabbits I’m told by those who are smart,
Are a capital cure for a cold in the heart!

As well as being quite playful in the introductions to her books, Hill also shows herself to be a woman interested in the world around her. French frequently appeared in recipes and on menus throughout the period, being, as it was, the de facto language of gastronomy. But Hill went further than simply paying lip service to the French. She included French, but also many Spanish recipes in her books, perhaps drawing on knowledge she had acquired when she worked as a language teacher in the 1850s.

In Rabbits, Hill offers several Spanish-inspired recipes, such as ‘Spanish Conejo con Arroz,’ which involved a lot of garlic, and ‘Rabbits a la Ronda’:

Take shred ham, cold veal, and beef suet…a little grated lemon-peel, nutmeg, Cayenne pepper, salt and the crumb of a penny roll. Pound all this in a mortar, bind it with two well-beaten eggs, and put it inside your rabbit, sew it up, truss it, and lay it in a stewpan, with a quart of strong stock, a bottle of white wine, two lemons cut in quarters, a bunch of sweet-herbs, a few cloves, and a slat-spoonful of pepper…rub it over with olive-oil, and place it before a slow fire for forty minutes, basting it frequently with oil.

In Puddings, Hill mostly concentrated on English recipes, with only a smattering of French. Some of the recipes, like ‘Oxford Pudding’ or ‘Yorkshire Pudding’ had place names, and the same was true of ‘Berkshire Apple Dumplings’:

Peel and core six middling-sized apples; cover them well over with white sugar; place them in a deep dish, and put them into your oven: when they become tender, pour over them a batter made with two eggs, two spoonful of flour, and sufficient milk to make it of the requisite consistency. Bake for twenty minutes, and serve with spiced sugar, apart.

In both cases, Hill shows herself to be a skilled cook, who also expected skill of those she addressed, as in her recipe for ‘Pommes Farcies’ where she instructs that the apples are to be baked for half an hour ‘in a gay oven.’ These are recipes which were to be followed by cooks comfortable with the basics of the kitchen, and who had the confidence to follow instructions which left much to the discretion of the cook.

Reading Hill’s recipes, I feel I am getting to know a smart and funny woman, who had either travelled, or wanted to travel, and loved all things Spanish. Hill never married. Her cookbooks, which are sympathetic to women, without being overly burdened with concerns about cleaning, nursing sick children or other common concerns of the domestic advice writer, might be a clue to either the cause or the effect of remaining single. In either case, Hill is a no-nonsense sort of woman, serious minded and comfortable with the idea of women as smart, competent and hard-working, for which her subsequent career as a nurse in the 1870s provides further evidence.  Writing someone’s life from their cookbooks may not become the next mainstream trend in biographical research. But it does seem like as good a way as any of getting to know this mysterious woman, who was at once a successful professional cookery writer, and a completely unknown, ordinary, respectable woman.

In the coming months, I intend to write more about Hill and her recipes. If anyone knowns anything about her, I would love to hear from you!

American Studies, Food and Drink, Modern, Series: Jokes and Humorous Recipes, Series: Wartime Recipes

Ironclad Apple Duff: Exploring Recipes from the American Civil War

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By Jessica Eichlin and Amanda E. Herbert

USS Monitor crewmembers cooking on deck, in the James River, Virginia, 9 July 1862. Photographed by James F. Gibson, courtesy of Wikipedia.
USS Monitor crewmembers cooking on deck, in the James River, Virginia, 9 July 1862. Photographed by James F. Gibson, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Food rations during wartime do not have the reputation for being delicious, fresh, or even edible, and this was especially true during the American Civil War.  Fought from 1861-1865, the war disrupted supply lines across the United States, making food difficult to acquire for soldiers and citizens alike.  When Union (northern) and Confederate (southern) troops were receiving rations, these usually included hardtack, salt pork, flour, and cornmeal; when soldiers were lucky, this rather grim diet was supplemented by small amounts of condiments such as molasses, salt and pepper, and sugar; beverages such as milk, coffee, or tea; and vegetables such as rice or hominy, dried beans or peas, and “fresh” (although frequently desiccated) vegetables.  And whenever they were able, soldiers and sailors foraged for food, or traded with locals – both free and enslaved – in order to survive.

Finding and issuing nutritious, reliable rations was made even more difficult by the new military equipment that was developed during the Civil War.  Although European countries had begun developing ironclad ships in the late 1850s, American shipbuilders were not prompted to create this innovative type of ship until the American Civil War.  The South was the first to construct their ironclad (the CSS Virginia), followed quickly by the North.  The Union’s USS Monitor, designed by John Ericsson, was ironclad as well as semi-submersible: it was the first ship with its living quarters and engines entirely below the waterline.  The ship was nicknamed “Ericsson’s Folly” and “cheesebox on a raft” as no one thought it could float, let alone sail into battle.  Because the sailors lived almost entirely underwater, provisioning them and keeping them healthy proved to be a difficult undertaking.

Primary source documents written by the sailors on board these ships help to reveal important details about the history of Civil War food.  George Geer, a First-Class Fireman from Troy, New York who was stationed aboard the Monitor, corresponded with his wife Martha throughout the war, describing skirmishes, interactions with other sailors and officers, and especially the food on board ship.  Prior to enlisting, Geer had been unemployed and in debt: as he and his wife had two children, it is perhaps unsurprising that many of his letters focused on food.  But if Geer thought that joining the Union navy would keep him well-fed, his hopes were soon dashed.  His letters are full of funny, sarcastic comments about sailor’s rations.  In regards to the rock-like hardtack crackers, which were a staple of their diet, Geer said that the sailors could “eat as many crackers as [they] may wish which for me is usuly one.”  When the men were given pork, Geer was dismayed that “it is of the Lardy kind and no body pretends to eat it…the balance [is] given to the Fishes.”  Discussing bean soup, which the sailors consumed three times every week, Geer noted wryly that he was “tempted to strip off my shirt and make a dive and see if there realy is Beens in the Bottom.”

George S. Geer, First-Class Fireman, USS Monitor. Image courtesy of the Mariner's Museum, Newport News, Virginia.
George S. Geer, First-Class Fireman, USS Monitor. Image courtesy of the Mariner’s Museum, Newport News, Virginia.

Geer’s colorful discussion of the food on board the USS Monitor did not stop with mere description.  In his letters, he sometimes provided his wife with recipes for the foods that made up the sailors’ rations.  In order to make navy-style tea, he told his wife to take “abut three times as much of black Tea or Grass as you would take to make a cup of Tea for you and me and about a tea cup full of that muscovada shugar that has such a bad taste.”  The most detailed recipe inscribed by Geer was for a dessert called Apple Duff.  Duff was a steamed or boiled pudding which was consumed frequently in the nineteenth century.  It was simple to make and contained cheap ingredients, usually just flour, water, and a handful of fruit.  Geer told his wife that he would “give you the recpt and you can try it.”  He told her to “take ½ lb Flour to each person and wet it until it is a thick paste then put in one ounce [o]f Dride Apples to each person.”  The apples, he noted, included “cores and dirt” and his wife should add them to the dough “without cutting them up or Washing them.”  This mixture was to be put “in a Bag over night and boil then in the morning until it is about half done through then cut it up with a knife so as to make it as heavy as poseable.”  The resulting lump of half-cooked dough was hard to digest, but it was filling – for although most puddings “will be apt to work out of your stomac in the course of time,” Geer joked, “this Duff is wanted to stay.”

*****
Interested in the sources used in this post?  You can find them here:

  1. “What Did Civil War Soldiers Eat?” Civil War Preservation Trust, accessed 13 April 2014. http://www.civilwar.org/education/pdfs/civil-war-curriculum-food.pdf
  2. “Duff,” in The Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 259.
  3. “Letter No 2,” George S. Geer Family Papers, 1862-1995, MS010, The Mariners’ Museum Library, Christopher Newport University, Newport News, Virginia.
  4. A.A. Hoehling, Thunder at Hampton Roads (New York: Prentice Hall, 1976).

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Jessica Eichlin is a senior History Major at Christopher Newport University.  She found these documents while working as an intern at the Mariner’s Museum and Mariner’s Museum Library, both in Newport News, Virginia.  Jessica is on Twitter @jesseich

Education, Family and Household, Food and Drink, Knowledge Transmission, Material History, Modern, Posts, Printed Books, Series: Reading Practices, Students, Women and Gender

Navigating a New Domesticity: Women, Marginalia, and Cookbooks

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By Rachel A. Snell

Example of annotation from A new system of domestic cookery, formed upon principles of economy, and adapted to the use of private families. By a lady. Boston, W. Andrews, 1807. LOC.
Example of annotation from A new system of domestic cookery, formed upon principles of economy, and adapted to the use of private families. By a lady. Boston, W. Andrews, 1807. LOC. 

During the first half of the nineteenth-century, as domesticity was increasingly redefined as a skill demanding instruction and experience, the geographical mobility of the industrial age removed young women from the traditional source of that instruction, their mothers and other female relatives. To meet this need a cadre of women authors published a canon of cookbooks and domestic manuals to instruct middle-class American women on the art of housekeeping.

These household manuals included recipes and advice on all aspects of domestic work, including managing servants, caring for the sick, aiding the poor, laundry and other cleaning tasks, and even advice on selecting furnishings and attire. By their design and purpose, these texts encouraged annotation by the reader. Housekeepers commonly used blank pages to record additional handwritten recipes, mark favorites and failures, and alter recipe measurements or make substitutions. These marginalia provide the researcher with invaluable clues about how ordinary women navigated domesticity. After all, “a women’s recipe book is the record of her life.”[1]

Women created annotated household manuals and cookbooks for their personal use, reminders that allowed them to perform their daily and seasonal tasks more efficiently. However, marginalia also allow the researcher a window into a previously inaccessible space: the nineteenth-century, middle-class kitchen. Printed cookbooks and household manuals also record the development of domesticity during this period. The marginalia in these texts suggest how ordinary women both conformed to and negotiated with cultural expectations of their proper place in society. Much scholarship focuses on the extraordinary women who supported themselves (and often their families as well) with their pens and worked to define domesticity, but what about their readers? How did the relatively silent majority of educated, middle-class, white women who consumed domestic literature apply that ideology to their daily lives? Marginalia may hold the key to answering these questions.

Figure 1
Figure 1

Ten copies of A New System of Domestic Cookery by Maria Eliza Ketelby Rundell published between 1807 and 1866 illustrate some of the ways that marginalia preserve the reader’s experience. Collected from the archives at the University of Guelph, the University of Waterloo, and the Library of Congress, this sample contains the most common types of annotation found in cookbooks, including handwritten recipes, newspaper clippings, inscriptions, and a variety of means for marking recipes for later attention. As figure 1 reveals, the annotators devoted most of their attention to cakes, pastries, puddings, and sweet dishes with more practical methods of food preparation largely ignored. The contrast is even more apparent when categorized by purpose. Of ninety-two total annotations, fifty-four modified to recipes related to entertaining (cakes, fruit preserves, wines, etc.), while just sixteen annotations related to everyday cookery and even fewer to keeping house and home remedies.

Figure 2
Figure 2

Why such disparity? During a period when the expectations of housekeeping were expanding and authors specifically addressed the poor quality of everyday cooking in their manuals, why aren’t women paying more attention to the everyday? One explanation for the general lack of concern toward daily cooking tasks is, as Janet Theopano offered, that “everyday cookery was common knowledge, [it] required no detailed instructions.”[2] Women knew how to bake bread, prepare a simple supper, nurse a sick child, and serve a hearty breakfast. These were the routine tasks that composed the daily life of the nineteenth-century housewife.

Thus, marginalia in printed cookbooks and household manuals is indicative of the influence of educational opportunities on women during the early nineteenth-century. Women identified species of birds, noted the best seasons for salmon, adapted chemical leaveners to older recipes, and recorded the production of their gardens in the pages of their cookbooks. While many annotators mark books as part of a learning process, a habit developed in the classroom, cookbook annotators (although often clearly educated) practice annotation for a different reason.

Their annotations mark them as experts rather than learners; they modify the text to suit their needs and experiences. Despite the stated purpose of the cookbook authors and the opinions of those who decried the influence of women’s education on domestic endeavors, most women did not depend on cookbooks as instructional manuals for the daily practice of domesticity, but turned to them for special occasions and entertaining. Women were empowered and confident in the domestic space–and their marginalia reflects that status.

This post references copies of A New System of Domestic Cookery that are part of the following collections:

The Una Abrahamson Canadian Cookery Collection at the University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada.

Special Collections at the University of Waterloo Dana Porter Library, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.