The maid and the tart: Or, a pie to die for

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One finds the strangest flotsam in the backwash of the early nineteenth century. I found this gem while sifting through the private papers of Sarah Hale, to whom it appears to have been submitted while she was editor of The Ladies’ Magazine and Literary Gazette in the 1830s. Unsurprisingly she never published the poem, and I couldn’t find a copy of any accompanying correspondence, either from the author or from Mrs. Hale rejecting the work. The poem thus remains untitled and anonymous.

The poem, in (mostly, if occasionally somewhat addled) heroic couplets, tells the tragic story of a “humble maid” who gives life and limb to save an apple tart. It’s at once charming and simply dreadful. Its palpably oozing sincerity evinces a giggle from the modern reader. It goes on, as we would say now. The verses strain under the weight of its overwrought verbiage (“gossamer gauze of alabaster skin”? Seriously?) And it’s hard to know how to read it — as a cautionary tale, about the dangers of women’s work? As a love letter to a departed domestic? Or as a simple paean to a damn fine apple tart? The poem’s meaning sleeps with its author, or did, at least, until I dredged the thing up last week.

In any case, until I can manage to write something of my own for this space, enjoy. And don’t be too hard on our departed would-be Byron. No doubt he meant well.

Gingerbread men

Recipes

Of course I had to make gingerbread men for Christmas. You can’t be halfway through a book on gingerbread and then pass up the obvious opportunity to bake it; it simply wouldn’t be allowed. And, of course, I’m no longer happy with the recipes I had at hand. So I came up with a recipe with a genuinely historical flavor but the tenderness and richness we expect from a Christmas cookie.

Apple dumplings

DessertsHistorical GastronomyRecipes

One more apple recipe before we move on to winter. My grandmother used to make these, but I’d forgotten them until recently when my mother and sister mentioned they were looking for the recipe. They’re simply apples baked in pastry with a brown sugar syrup, a sort of single-serving pie, and I have no idea why they’re called “dumplings,” because every other dumpling I’ve ever heard of was boiled, and these are of course baked. In any case, I was compelled to try to reconstruct the recipe from a memory that is, by now, a quarter-century old and pretty foggy.

Pretty good banana bread

Breads

Cook’s Illustrated finally went off the deep end this month. I’ve seen this moment coming for years, as they gradually ran through the classic American repertoire and resorted to publishing home versions of questionable restaurant fare and revisiting recipes that were already perfect. I’m a charter subscriber; I’ve been getting this magazine in the mail every other month since 1993, and every time I think about dropping it they run something that is so good that it pays for the year’s subscription. I refer to my back issues more than to any cookbook on my shelf. So I don’t say this lightly. But my old reliable has gone off the deep end. What’s finally done it? What’s inspired one of my rare full-on Internet rants and a corrective recipe?

Extreme banana bread.

Brandy-orange ginger cookies: A semi-historical mashup

Recipes

This recipe started as a historical reenactment and turned into an attempt to see how close I could get to my own Platonic ideal of a cookie while staying within the spirit of antebellum cuisine. After a few tries I got something I was pretty happy with, and this one you can make for your friends without having to explain that it was part of some guy’s research project.

Crisp gingerbread biscuits

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There are countless recipes for gingerbread in 19th-century cookbooks, most simply called “gingerbread” (or, to distinguish them, Gingerbread No. 1, Gingerbread No. 2, and so on), but most of the recipes fall into a few types. There’s soft gingerbread, which is what we’d call a cake. There’s “common gingerbread,” which is typically a soft cookie and always contains molasses — which is what made it “common,” molasses being cheaper than even brown sugar. “Sugar gingerbread,” by contrast, used sugar. And then there’s hard gingerbread, which was designed to keep well.

I assumed that hard gingerbread would give me something like a gingersnap (or, I hoped, like Sweetzels Spiced Wafers). But this recipe, at least, turned out completely different from what I expected — somewhere between a cookie and a cracker, rather like an English biscuit. Which is, as they say, why you play the game.

Early American gingerbread cakes

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In researching 19th-century American cooking I started with gingerbread — why, exactly, is a long story — and in researching gingerbread I started with Amelia Simmons’ 1796 American Cookery. This was the first cookbook written by an American author and published in America, and although nearly all of the culinary influence is (unsurprisingly) English, there are American touches, such as recipes for cornbread and cranberries.

One American influence on Simmons’ cooking is the use of a chemical leavener, pearlash, for baking.

cracked ginger in a mortar and pestle

Pounding ginger

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I have been researching historical gingerbread lately, for a probable book project on nineteenth-century American cooking. The first part of the research involves cataloguing recipes. So far I have thirty-eight recipes for gingerbread published in the United States prior to 1832, all neatly stored in a database and assigned appropriate metadata. Don’t panic: I’m not going to tell you all about the metadata. I’m going to tell you about spices.

cracked ginger in a mortar and pestle

As a cultural historian I’m interested in the deeper meanings and broader implications of everything, and I know that often people eat what they eat and cook the way they cook because of tradition or philosophy or politics. But as a cook and a craftsman I know that sometimes people have more practical reasons for doing things that are almost impossible to discover unless you actually try to do them. I’m interested in not just inner feelings and amorphous notions but in the sounds and smells and tastes that were the fabric of life in other times and places, the constant movements and sensations without which culture is just a topic for anthropological discourse. It seems to me that if you want to research the history of food, you need to get in the kitchen.

So I started baking gingerbread.