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Autumn 2024, Posts

“To a Lady of any delicacy”: A visual exploration of the sway of English dining etiquette on early American identity

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By Jennifer Wells

Gilbert Stuart, Abigail Adams (c. 1810-1815), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

In the summer of 1784, Abigail Adams sailed for London to join her husband as the wife of the first Ambassador of the United States to Britain. In her diary, she confessed, “With the best accommodations [the voyage] will be dreadfull, to a Lady of any delicacy.” She bemoaned the ship’s drab lodgings and noted that her silver porringer was the only cup or bowl in sight. She also complained in a letter that the ship’s Black cook had “no more knowledge of cookery than a savage; nor any kind of order in the distribution of his dishes, but hickeltapickelta [higgledy piggledy].” She criticized his supposed missteps on course order, grumbling, “on they come with a leg of pork all Brisly, a Quarter of an hour after a pudding, or perhaps a pair of roast fowls first of all, and then will follow one by one a peice of Beaf and when dinner is nearly compleated a plate of potatoes.”

Paul Revere, Porringer (c. 1760). Image Credit: The Met, New York. 

Adams’s frustrations reveal the fledgling nation’s distinctions in race and class and indicate the significance of mealtime rituals to elite and aspiring Americans. Her anecdote makes clear that dinner was not the place for experimental expositions or risk-taking jaunts but a choreographed performance, with every detail scrutinized. For Americans like Adams, sophistication materialized through the precise ordering of ingredients and synchronized flow of dishes. 

In the nascent shine of independence, print culture celebrating American distinctness flourished. Americans juxtaposed their supposed virtue with the corruption and follies of Europe, but their claims of superiority belied deep insecurities. Because much of Europe, particularly England, regarded the fledgling nation as a provincial backwater, white Americans searched for ways to establish themselves as cultural equals in the eyes of their former kinsmen. Their desire for validation manifested in part through the emulation of English standards of etiquette that appeared in early American cookbooks.

Front piece and Title Page to Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (London: Printed by L. Wangford, c. 1777). Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons. 
The Art of Cookery constantly lambasted so-called French extravagance while including French recipes in her Cookbook. Note, for example, Chapter III: “How expensive a French Cook’s Sauce is.” 

Colonists in British North America had long consumed English cookbooks, devouring rhetoric extolling the virtues of honest English fare when compared to French lavishness. Their popularity on both sides of the Atlantic tells of long-simmering obsessions with self-image and station within shifting social hierarchies. Manners, clothing, household furnishings, and table settings became markers of rank during the early modern period, and markets emerged for printed works to help readers traverse the fluctuating landscape. Cookbooks arose to aid housewives and housekeepers in their quest to project posh. 

Directions for a Grand Table, 1st Course and 2nd Course to Elizabeth Raffald, The Experienced English Housekeeper (Manchester: Printed by J. Harrop, 1769), Google Books. 

Social climbers throughout the British Empire believed that the correct execution of politeness distinguished the well-bred from the low-born, materializing in countless small ways, especially at the dinner table. Elizabeth Raffald’s The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769) enjoyed enormous success with its print life spanning nearly five decades, including an edition of  The Experienced English Housekeeper printed in Philadelphia in 1818. Raffald promised “Economy with Neatness and Elegance.” Her index provided “Directions for a Grand Table” and sketched out course arrangements to “make a pretty appearance” and “be entertaining to the Company.” She also noted what serving dishes to use and when, such as “Sweetmeats and Fruits dished up in China Dishes, or Fruit Baskets,” and added tips for garnishing. By heeding Raffald’s advice, the upwardly mobile strived to gain entry into privileged spheres.

Roberts’s index included extensive directions for meal service, see pages 42 to 64. Index to Robert Roberts, The House Servants Directory (1827), (Boston: Munroe and Frances, 1827), MSU Libraries. Image Credit: MSU Libraries, East Lansing. 
Henry Sargent, The Dinner Party (c. 1821), MFA Boston. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

After Independence, Americans sought approval by mastering preset codes of civility. While images rarely appeared in American cookbooks before the late-1830s, an emphasis remained on table settings as representations of prestige in and of society. Maria Rundell’s American Domestic Cookery (1823) (a revised version of an English cookbook for an American audience by the same author titled New System of Domestic Cookery (1807)) stated that an elegant table “gives respectability to her who presides.” Mary Randolph’s The Virginia House-wife (1824) affirmed, “a dinner justly calculated for the company, and consisting for the greater part of small articles, correctly prepared, and neatly served up” creates a “pleasing appearance” for all in attendance. Robert Roberts’s The House Servants Directory (1827), one of the earliest books written by a Black American in the United States, had explicit instructions on “Regulations for the dinner table,” “Dinner on the table,” “The first course removed,” “Second course removed,” and “Placing on the desert.” And Eliza Leslie’s The House Book (1844) dedicated nearly fifty pages to “The Dining-Room:—Table Furniture, Waiting on Table, Carving, &c.” Henry Sargent’s The Dinner Party (1821) illustrates that sweet spot Americans craved—quiet luxury through tasteful display.

Half a Calf’s Head to Frances Harriet Green, The Housekeeper’s Book (Philadelphia, William Marshall & Co., 1837). Image Credit: HathiTrust. 

 Frances Harriet Green’s The Housekeeper’s Book (1837) was one of the first American cookbooks to include multiple illustrations. Her images focused on presentation and performance, notably the skills required for carving and serving meats. With seats at either end of the table, hosts and hostesses were expected to perform the task in front of a crowd. When dishes like calf’s head were placed before them, all eyes met theirs in eager anticipation. The show could turn into a debacle if done without finesse. As Eliza Leslie’s The Cook’s Own Book, and Housekeeper’s Register (1840) remarked, “nothing can be more disagreeable to one of a sensitive disposition, than to behold a person, at the head of a well-furnished board, hacking the finest joints, and giving them the appearance of having been gnawed by dogs.” American cookbooks aimed to spare such humiliation by incorporating images with step-by-step instructions. 

“Turkey for Roasting,” to Frances Harriet Green, The Housekeeper’s Book (Philadelphia, William Marshall & Co., 1837). Image Credit: HathiTrust.

Green also provided readers with the “most approved” method for presenting roasted turkey through a tale of caution. Green recounted that she was once invited to a dinner where the unappetizing bird was “brought to the table with the head on as well as the feet.” She tsked, “such trussing is exceedingly ugly and altogether unworthy of a good cook.” Her disapproving tone indicates the implications of not following her suggestions—an accusation of lousy cooking and inept hosting that verged on buffoonery.

Green’s text followed precedents set by English cookbooks as authoritative sources that set culinary standards and assuaged nervous readers. Her comments also reveal how following precise procedures led to assumptions about status. While adhering to polite culture opened opportunities for self-elevation for some, it simultaneously barred others who did not conform to its exacting standards. 

America’s newcomer status meant that many of its inhabitants wanted to prove their worth to themselves and the wider world. Cookbooks and other prescriptive English texts had set guidelines for taste long before the first shots rang out at Lexington and Concord. During the early national period, Americans continued to purchase English cookbooks and began to author ones of their own based on the English model. While Abigail Adams might have wanted to adopt a stars-and-stripes attitude toward the early republic’s distinctness from England, the proof was in the pudding—the mother country’s parameters of decorum largely dictated America’s cultural norms of the time.

Jennifer Wells is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Texas A&M University specializing in British colonial North America, the American Revolution, and the Early American Republic during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Her research explores the social ambiguities of the urban South following the Revolution, a transformative period when questions of national identity and belonging swirled. Her dissertation studies the petition of Christopher McPherson, a free man of color who attempted to repeal an ordinance prohibiting Black Americans from owning or riding as passengers in carriages in Richmond, Virginia. Using the petition as a lens into the early national period, she investigates veteran affairs, the influence and limits of polite culture on class and race, educational reforms, apocalyptic prophets, and the history of early American psychiatric institutions. You can read a recent article she wrote about Christopher McPherson here.

Reference List:

Berg, Maxine. Luxury and Pleasure: In Eighteenth-Century Britain. Oxford: University Press, 2005. 

Bickham, Troy. “Defining Good Food: Cookery Book Illustrations in Britain.” Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies, 31 (2008): 473-489. 

Bickham, Troy. Eating the Empire: Food and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain. London, Reaktion Books, Ltd., 2020. 

Breen, T.H. “Baubles of Britian’: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present, 119 (1988) 73-104. 

Lehmann, Gilly. The British Housewife: Cookery Books, Cooking and Society in Eighteenth Century Britain. Prospect Books: Totnes, 2003. 

Theophano, Janet. Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote. New York: Palgrave, 2002. 

Yokota, Kariann. Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation. Oxford: Oxford University, 2011.

 

American Studies, Blog Posts, CFP, Events, and Conferences, Food and Drink, Global Exchange, Series: Race

Listening, Tasting, Reading, Touching: Interdisciplinary Histories of American Food

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By Theresa McCulla

When members of the American Historical Association gathered for their annual meeting in New York City in January, attendees set out to explore disciplines other than history. Or rather, they aimed to understand where and how other disciplines intersect most fruitfully with the practice of history. To our panel of four scholars interested in food, such a perspective felt perfectly apt. The study of food has demanded an interdisciplinary approach since food history’s rise to popular prominence in the 1980s. Our papers sought to illustrate the value of material, visual, spatial, literary, and sensory approaches to answering historical questions.

Spanning the colonial period through the twentieth century, in rural as well as urban sites, we used food as a lens to explore social transformations in North America. United by themes of consumer culture and ethnic encounter, our research showed how food consumption reflected, and was reflective of, notions of nationality, religion, ethnicity, race, gender, and sexuality in distinct historical moments.

Carla Cevasco, a PhD candidate in American Studies at Harvard University, used methods of material culture analysis to compare English Puritan, French Catholic, and Huron communion vessels in colonial America. Cevasco argued that violent imperial conflict troubled the boundaries between spiritual and secular eating, blood and wine, and cannibalism and communion in these three cultures. Protestants were suspicious of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, and yet Protestants and Catholics alike practiced medicinal cannibalism, ingesting substances derived from the human body for medical purposes. In the same era that early Puritan colonists repurposed secular drinking implements as communion vessels, the Huron used French-made copper kettles to practice a ritual called the Feast of the Dead. Cevasco argued that New World combatants were willing to kill and die over perceived differences between what were in fact strikingly similar ideas and practices. Her paper testified to the value of material culture methodologies to the historian seeking to understand the belief systems of marginalized people who left only faint traces on the historical record.

Drawing on techniques of sensory history, Ashley Rose Young, PhD candidate in History at Duke University, listened to the sounds of the late-nineteenth-century French Market in New Orleans to unearth the pivotal role of immigrant vendors in shaping the taste preferences and food culture of the postbellum city. Young argued that sound, more so than sight, touch, taste or smell, informed depictions of late-nineteenth-century ethnic identity in New Orleans. Similar to public markets in many American port cities, the French Market served as a meeting ground for the city’s diverse population—a key space where the daily rituals of consumption bonded together community members from Europe, West Africa, the Caribbean, and North America. Here, African-American calas vendors competed alongside Spanish oystermen and Italian fishermen for customers. Their sonorous efforts to attract the attention of passers-by manifested in a wide variety of witty, salacious, musical, and grating street cries, which writers attempted to capture. To the delight of attendees, Young sang several street vendor cries. Her performance gave shape to compositions that used to be vital economic tools and cannot be fully appreciated as words and notes on a page.

The New Orleans French Market served as a social and economic space for city residents, travelers, slaves, free people of color, and indigenous people. French Market, New Orleans, 1900-1910, Detroit Publishing Co., Library of Congress.
The New Orleans French Market served as a social and economic space for city residents, travelers, slaves, free people of color, and indigenous people. French Market, New Orleans, 1900-1910, Detroit Publishing Co., Library of Congress.

With the paper of Heather Lee, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the panel moved from the market to the restaurant. Lee employed methodologies of visual and spatial studies to understand Chinese restaurants as urban spaces, translating the establishments’ physical layouts into social histories of sexual transgression and exoticism. With the additional input of city anti-vice records, Lee argued that New Yorkers patronized Chinese chop suey joints during the 1920s and 1930s not to sample unfamiliar tastes, but because the restaurant experience allowed patrons to experiment with their sexuality. By staying open to the early morning hours, Chinese restaurants provided a contact zone for people looking to live outside the boundaries of propriety. Young couples could evade their communities’ social conventions of courtship by rendezvousing at Chinese restaurants, because the Chinese staff acted aloof to their clients’ behavior. Female prostitutes solicited johns on the dining floor and men interested in other men met up in secluded corner booths. In her broader work, Lee is developing a historical database of Chinese restaurants, which she will make publicly available through an interactive digital platform on Chinese migration.

Early-twentieth-century New York City's Chinatown attracted diners in search of social and sexual transgressions. New Years, Chinatown, Port Arthur Chinese Restaurant, New York, n.d., Bain News Service, Library of Congress.
Early-twentieth-century New York City’s Chinatown attracted diners in search of social and sexual transgressions. New Years, Chinatown, Port Arthur Chinese Restaurant, New York, n.d., Bain News Service, Library of Congress.

My paper shifted the frame back to New Orleans and forward to the mid-twentieth century. I read a set of letters and recipes for Creole gumbo – the signature dish of New Orleans – that Louisiana residents submitted to a 1951 newspaper recipe contest. The recipes functioned as a window onto private conceptions of regional and even racial identities in the final years of de jure segregation. I argued that New Orleans whites tried to use Creole cuisine to claim ownership of an exceptional cultural legacy, exclusive of people of color, during an era when the social and political privileges associated with whiteness were eroding. These gumbo recipes – which arrived from addresses throughout New Orleans, from cooks of varying social and educational classes – showed how the practice of being Creole and making and eating Creole food mattered just as much in home kitchens as it did in public places like restaurants. African Americans resisted such exclusionary efforts, however. Restricted from eating the food that they had cooked in their own restaurants’ dining rooms, both implicitly and explicitly, Creole chefs and cooks of color made the midcentury New Orleans kitchen a political space.

Together, our papers affirmed the inherent interdisciplinarity of food history as a strength. While we each benefitted from scholarship outside of history, our collective goal was to demonstrate the value of food history to the broader study of American history and encourage a similarly expansive, creative approach to investigating all historical questions.