Bread

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
From American Food Writing: An Anthology With Classic Recipes

Interesting Links

“Did Henry David Thoreau Invent Raisin Bread?” (Lapham’s Quarterly Tumblr)

“We must have our bread.”: A letter by Thoreau to Harrison Blake (Monadnock Valley Press)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “A Walk to Wachusett,” Henry David Thoreau
• “Cookery: Meat Department,” Harriet Beecher Stowe
• “Bill of Fare on the Plains,” Annie D. Tallent
• “The Eating-Houses,” George G. Foster

Buy the book
American Food Writing: An Anthology With Classic Recipes
Paperback • 753 pages
List price: $24.00
Web store price: $14.00

“Walden Pond from Emerson’s Cliff,” hand-colored lantern slide created c. 1917 from a photograph taken in 1899 by Herbert Wendell Gleason (1855–1937). Courtesy of the William Munroe Special Collections at the Concord Free Public Library.

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Two decades ago, Library of America published the anthology American Food Writing, which included a passage on bread from Walden by Henry David Thoreau. The late Molly O’Neill (1952–2019), the book’s editor, introduced the selection with the following headnote:

In his classic Walden (1854), Henry David Thoreau investigates the possibilities of a self-sufficient mode of life—a life in harmony with nature, free from the system of entanglements, compromises, and sacrifices commonly known as civilization. Having first obtained for himself a rudimentary shelter near Walden Pond, he turned of course to the question of what to eat. And here, as in most things in Walden, he found ample satisfaction in bare essentials: purslane, a weed he gathered in the local cornfields, made a good dinner simply “boiled and salted.”

Even bread—one of the most basic and elemental parts of an everyday diet, as the proverb would have it—he realized he could simplify. A well-puffed loaf, it was conventionally believed, was the only healthy and wholesome kind. But Thoreau challenges his readers to see such claims for what they may be—propaganda for costly yeast and wheat flour—and to consider the moral superiority of an unleavened bread made of rough-ground, native corn. His notes on watermelon likewise affirm his underlying credo: “Our diet . . . must answer to the season.”

A major spiritual ancestor of many today who look for locally grown, organic foods, Thoreau seems not, however, to have been especially motivated by a concern for flavor—for the better taste of natural fare. To critics who questioned his austerities, he had a simple answer: “I can live on board nails.”

Thoreau began his stay at Walden Pond on July 4, 1845, a week shy of his 28th birthday, and remained for over two years, until September 6, 1847. The section in Walden on bread follows his famous admission that, during his first months of self-sustenance, he spent under $9.00 (about $350 in today’s dollars) on food he was unable to raise or gather himself. He itemized “the expense of food for eight months, namely, from July 4th to March 1st, the time when these estimates were made,” and he divided the list into two groups, foodstuffs that proved essential or appreciated and those that “failed,” which appear to be items he regretted or were not worth the expense:

Rice, .......... $ 1.73½
Molasses, .......... 1.73     Cheapest form of the saccharine.
Rye meal, .......... 1.04¾
Indian meal, .......... 0.99¾     Cheaper than rye.
Pork, .......... 0.22

All experiments which failed:
Flour, .......... 0.88     Costs more than Indian meal [cornmeal], both money and trouble.
Sugar, .......... 0.80
Lard, .......... 0.65
Apples, .......... 0.25
Dried apple, .......... 0.22
Sweet potatoes, .......... 0.10
One pumpkin, .......... 0.06
One watermelon, .......... 0.02
Salt, .......... 0.03

“Yes, I did eat $8.74, all told,” he concluded, “but I should not thus unblushingly publish my guilt, if I did not know that most of my readers were equally guilty with myself, and that their deeds would look no better in print.”

Notes: Primarily used today as a household cleanser, sal soda, or sodium carbonate, was formerly used in tiny amounts as a leavening agent. (Sodium bicarbonate, or baking soda, was not readily available in the U.S. until shortly after Thoreau’s trip to Walden.) The instructions for making bread by Marcus Porcius Cato (aka Cato the Elder) are from De Agri Cultura (On Agriculture), written about 160 BCE. The two lines about making “liquor to sweeten our lips” are from “New England Annoyances,” an anonymously written song from the early seventeenth century.

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For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce Thoreau’s text below. You may also download it as a PDF or view it in Google Docs, and this selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Bread

I learned from my two years’ experience that it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one’s necessary food, even in this latitude; that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength. I have made a satisfactory dinner, satisfactory on several accounts, simply off a dish of purslane (Portulaca oleracea) which I gathered in my cornfield, boiled and salted. I give the Latin on account of the savoriness of the trivial name. And pray what more can a reasonable man desire, in peaceful times, in ordinary noons, than a sufficient number of ears of green sweet-corn boiled, with the addition of salt? Even the little variety which I used was a yielding to the demands of appetite, and not of health. Yet men have come to such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want of luxuries; and I know a good woman who thinks that her son lost his life because he took to drinking water only.

The reader will perceive that I am treating the subject rather from an economic than a dietetic point of view, and he will not venture to put my abstemiousness to the test unless he has a well-stocked larder.

Bread I at first made of pure Indian meal and salt, genuine hoe-cakes, which I baked before my fire out of doors on a shingle or the end of a stick of timber sawed off in building my house; but it was wont to get smoked and to have a piny flavor. I tried flour also; but have at last found a mixture of rye and Indian meal most convenient and agreeable. In cold weather it was no little amusement to bake several small loaves of this in succession, tending and turning them as carefully as an Egyptian his hatching eggs. They were a real cereal fruit which I ripened, and they had to my senses a fragrance like that of other noble fruits, which I kept in as long as possible by wrapping them in cloths. I made a study of the ancient and indispensable art of bread-making, consulting such authorities as offered, going back to the primitive days and first invention of the unleavened kind, when from the wildness of nuts and meats men first reached the mildness and refinement of this diet, and travelling gradually down in my studies through that accidental souring of the dough which, it is supposed, taught the leavening process, and through the various fermentations thereafter, till I came to “good, sweet, wholesome bread,” the staff of life. Leaven, which some deem the soul of bread, the spiritus which fills its cellular tissue, which is religiously preserved like the vestal fire,— some precious bottle-full, I suppose, first brought over in the Mayflower, did the business for America, and its influence is still rising, swelling, spreading, in cerealian billows over the land,— this seed I regularly and faithfully procured from the village, till at length one morning I forgot the rules, and scalded my yeast; by which accident I discovered that even this was not indispensable,— for my discoveries were not by the synthetic but analytic process,— and I have gladly omitted it since, though most housewives earnestly assured me that safe and wholesome bread without yeast might not be, and elderly people prophesied a speedy decay of the vital forces. Yet I find it not to be an essential ingredient, and after going without it for a year am still in the land of the living; and I am glad to escape the trivialness of carrying a bottle-full in my pocket, which would sometimes pop and discharge its contents to my discomfiture.

It is simpler and more respectable to omit it. Man is an animal who more than any other can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances. Neither did I put any sal soda, or other acid or alkali, into my bread. It would seem that I made it according to the recipe which Marcus Porcius Cato gave about two centuries before Christ. “Panem depsticium sic facito. Manus mortariumque bene lavato. Farinam in mortarium indito, aquæ paulatim addito, subigitoque pulchre. Ubi bene subegeris, defingito, coquitoque sub testu.” Which I take to mean— “Make kneaded bread thus. Wash your hands and trough well. Put the meal into the trough, add water gradually, and knead it thoroughly. When you have kneaded it well, mould it, and bake it under a cover,” that is, in a baking-kettle. Not a word about leaven. But I did not always use this staff of life. At one time, owing to the emptiness of my purse, I saw none of it for more than a month.

Every New Englander might easily raise all his own breadstuffs in this land of rye and Indian corn, and not depend on distant and fluctuating markets for them. Yet so far are we from simplicity and independence that, in Concord, fresh and sweet meal is rarely sold in the shops, and hominy and corn in a still coarser form are hardly used by any. For the most part the farmer gives to his cattle and hogs the grain of his own producing, and buys flour, which is at least no more wholesome, at a greater cost, at the store. I saw that I could easily raise my bushel or two of rye and Indian corn, for the former will grow on the poorest land, and the latter does not require the best, and grind them in a hand-mill, and so do without rice and pork; and if I must have some concentrated sweet, I found by experiment that I could make a very good molasses either of pumpkins or beets, and I knew that I needed only to set out a few maples to obtain it more easily still, and while these were growing I could use various substitutes beside those which I have named, “For,” as the Forefathers sang,—

“we can make liquor to sweeten our lips
Of pumpkins and parsnips and walnut-tree chips.”

Finally, as for salt, that grossest of groceries, to obtain this might be a fit occasion for a visit to the seashore, or, if I did without it altogether, I should probably drink the less water. I do not learn that the Indians ever troubled themselves to go after it.

Thus I could avoid all trade and barter, so far as my food was concerned, and having a shelter already, it would only remain to get clothing and fuel. The pantaloons which I now wear were woven in a farmer’s family,— thank Heaven there is so much virtue still in man; for I think the fall from the farmer to the operative as great and memorable as that from the man to the farmer;— and in a new country fuel is an encumbrance. As for a habitat, if I were not permitted still to squat, I might purchase one acre at the same price for which the land I cultivated was sold— namely, eight dollars and eight cents. But as it was, I considered that I enhanced the value of the land by squatting on it.

There is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me such questions as, if I think that I can live on vegetable food alone; and to strike at the root of the matter at once,— for the root is faith,— I am accustomed to answer such, that I can live on board nails. If they cannot understand that, they cannot understand much that I have to say. For my part, I am glad to hear of experiments of this kind being tried; as that a young man tried for a fortnight to live on hard, raw corn on the ear, using his teeth for all mortar. The squirrel tribe tried the same and succeeded. The human race is interested in these experiments, though a few old women who are incapacitated for them, or who own their thirds in mills, may be alarmed.

Originally published in Walden; or, Life in the Woods, 1854.

Hot Dogs

H. L. Mencken (1880–1956)
From American Food Writing: An Anthology With Classic Recipes

Interesting Links

“H. L. Mencken: Culinary Chronicler of Baltimore” (Minxeats)

“H. L. Mencken as a Boy? Oh, Boy!” (Danny Heitman, Humanities)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Nature of Liberty,” H. L. Mencken
• “The Declaration of Independence,” Abigail Adams
• “Immigrant Picnic,” Gregory Djanikian
• “Eating American” Sheila Hibben

Buy the book
American Food Writing: An Anthology With Classic Recipes
Paperback • 753 pages
List price: $24.00
Web store price: $14.00

Women eating hot dogs at White City amusement park, Chicago, Illinois, during the 1920s. Unknown photographer. Chicago History Museum.

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“The national taste for bad food seems all the more remarkable when one recalls that the United States, more than any other country of the modern world, has been enriched by immigrant cuisines,” wrote H. L. Mencken a century ago in the pages of the Chicago Tribune. His article, under the title “Victualry as a Fine Art,” despaired of the state of American food:

Every fresh wave of newcomers has brought in new dishes, and many of them have been of the highest merit. But very few of them have been adopted by the natives, and the few have been mainly inferior. From the Italians, for example, we have got only spaghetti; it is now so American that it is to be had in cans. But spaghetti is to the Italian cuisine simply what eggs are to the Spanish: a raw material. We eat it as only those Italians eat it who are on the verge of ceasing to eat at all. Of the multitudinous ways in which it can be cooked and garnished we have learned but one, and that one is undoubtedly the worst.

“What ails our victualry, principally,” Mencken concluded, “is the depressing standardization that ails everything else American.”

Which brings us, perhaps inevitably, to the hot dog, which Mencken called “the reductio ad absurdum of American eating . . . a cartridge filled with the sweepings of the abattoirs.” He seemed to have a love-hate relationship with the frankfurter, although his more charitable feelings about them were usually tucked away from view. While he condemned the uniformity and blandness of this wholly (if not wholesome) American fare, Mencken delightedly served hot dogs on a silver platter to his goddaughter when she visited. And, likely as not, a mere mention of hot dogs would recall to him the happiness of youth:

Some time ago I read in the New York papers about the death of an Irishman* who had been esteemed and honored in life as the inventor of the hot-dog. . . . They said that he had made his epochal invention in the year 1900 or thereabout, and that it had been first marketed as consumers’ goods at the Polo Grounds.

All this made me smile in a sly way, for I devoured hot-dogs in Baltimore ’way back in 1886, and they were then very far from new-fangled. They differed from the hot-dogs of today in one detail only, and that one was hardly of statistical significance. They contained precisely the same rubbery, indigestible pseudo-sausages that millions of Americans now eat, and they leaked the same flabby, puerile mustard. Their single point of difference lay in the fact that their covers were honest German Wecke made of wheat-flour baked to crispness, and not the soggy rolls prevailing today, of ground acorns, plaster-of-Paris, flecks of bath-sponge, and atmospheric air all compact.

The name hot-dog, of course, was then still buried in the womb of time: we called them Weckers, being ignorant that the true plural of Weck was Wecke, or in one of the exceptional situations so common in German grammar, Wecken. They were on sale at the Baltimore baseball-grounds in the primeval days before even [Orioles infielder] Muggsy McGraw had come to town, and they were also sold at all picnics. In particular, I recall wolfing them at the annual picnic of F. Knapp’s Institute [a private school]. One year I got down six in a row, and suffered a considerable bellyache thereafter, which five bottles of sarsaparilla did not cure. (From Mencken’s memoir Happy Days, 1939.)

On November 1, 1929, the Friday after the Great Crash, the stock market remained closed to allow traders to “clean up” their records after the previous week’s chaos. The market reopened on Monday and continued its decline, and Wall Street announced that the exchange would close again the next day. Late that afternoon, past the screaming headlines of the front page, Mencken’s weekly column appeared as usual in the Baltimore Evening Sun. With his trademark arrogance and wit, he offered advice on how Americans might elevate hot dogs “to the level of an art form.” Often quoted and reprinted in the years since, it might well be the only lasting contribution of the Great Crash, and we reprint it here as our Story of the Week selection.

* The “Irishman” mentioned above by Mencken is concessionaire Harry Mozley Stevens, from Derby, England, who had been credited by some sources as being the originator of “hot dogs,” so called. Stevens supposedly first sold them at a Giants game at the New York Polo Grounds on a cold day in April, either in 1900 or 1901 and the following day cartoonist Tad Dorgan referred to the new offering as “hot dogs” in a now-lost illustration, and the name stuck. In the 1937 edition of The American Language, Mencken added, “The name was suggested, of course, by the folk-belief that wienies were made of dog-meat.” The attribution of the coinage to Stevens and Dorgan has since been discredited by numerous appearances of the term in print during the 1890s—and by the simple fact that in 1900–01, Dorgan was still living in San Francisco.

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For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce the text of Mencken’s article below.

Hot Dogs

The hot dog, as the phrase runs, seems to have come to stay. Even the gastroenterologists have given up damning it, as they have given up damning synthetic gin. I am informed by reliable spies that at their convention in Atlantic City last May they consumed huge quantities of both, and with no apparent damages to their pylorus. In such matters popular instinct is often ahead of scientific knowledge, as the history of liver eating shows so beautifully. It may be that, on some near tomorrow, the hot dog will turn out to be a prophylactic against some malady that now slays its thousands. That this will be the case with respect to gin I am willing to prophesy formally. Meanwhile, hot dog stands multiply, and millions of young Americans grow up who will cherish the same veneration for them that we, their elders, were taught to give to the saloon.

My own tastes in eating run in another direction, and so it is very rarely that I consume a hot dog. But I believe that I’d fall in line if the artists who confect and vend it only showed a bit more professional daring. What I mean may be best explained by referring to the parallel case of the sandwich. When I was a boy there were only three kinds of sandwiches in common use—the ham, the chicken and the Swiss cheese. Others, to be sure, existed, but it was only as oddities. Even the club sandwich was a rarity, and in most eating-houses it was unobtainable. The great majority of people stuck to the ham and the Swiss cheese, with the chicken for feast days and the anniversaries of historic battles. Then came the invasion of the delicatessen business by Jews, and a complete reform of the sandwich. The Jewish mind was too restless and enterprisng to be content with the old repertoire. It reached out for the novel, the dramatic, the unprecedented, as it does in all the arts. First it combined the ham sandwich and the cheese sandwich—and converted America to the combination instanter. Then it added lettuce, and after that, mayonnaise—both borrowed from the club sandwich. Then it boldly struck out into the highest fields of fancy, and presently the lowly sandwich had been completely transformed and exalted. It became, as the announcements said, “a meal in itself.” It took on complicated and astonishing forms. It drew on the whole market for materials. And it leaped in price from a nickel to a dime, to a quarter, to fifty cents, even to a dollar. I have seen sandwiches, indeed, marked as much as a dollar and a half.

The rise in price, far from hurting business, helped it vastly. The delicatessen business, once monopolized by gloomy Germans who barely made livings at it, became, in the hands of the Jewish reformers, one of the great American industries, and began to throw off millionaires. Today it is on a sound and high-toned basis, with a national association, a high-pressure executive secretary, a trade journal, and a staff of lobbyists in Washington. There are sandwich shops in New York which offer the nobility and gentry a choice of no less than 100 different sandwiches, all of them alluring and some of them downright masterpieces. And even on the lowly level of the drug-store sandwich counter the sandwich has taken on a new variety and a new dignity. No one eats plain ham and cole-slaw to set it off. At its best it is hidden between turkey, Camembert and sprigs of endive, with anchovies and Russian dressing to dress it.

What I have to suggest is that the hot dog entrepreneurs borrow a leaf from the book of the sandwich men. Let them throw off the chains of the frankfurter, for a generation or more their only stay, and go seeking novelty in the vast and brilliant domain of the German sausage. They will be astonished and enchanted, I believe, by what they find there, and their clients will be astonished and enchanted even more. For there are more different sausages in Germany than there are breakfast foods in America, and if there is a bad one among them then I have never heard of it. They run in size from little fellows so small and pale and fragile that is seems a crime to eat them to vast and formidable pieces that look like shells for heavy artillery. And they run in flavor from the most delicate to the most raucous, and in texture from that of feathers caught in a cobweb to that of linoleum, and in shape from straight cylinders to lovely kinks and curlycues. In place of the single hot dog of today there should be a variety as great as that which has come to prevail among sandwiches. There should be dogs for all appetites, all tastes, all occasions. They should come in rolls of every imaginable kind and accompanied by every sort of relish from Worcestershire sauce to chutney. The common frankfurter, with its tough roll and its smear of mustard, should be abandoned as crude and hopeless, as the old-time ham sandwich has been abandoned. The hot dog should be elevated to the level of an art form.

I call upon the Jews to work this revolution, and promise them confidently even greater success than they have found in the field of the sandwich. It is a safe and glorious business, lying wide open to anyone who chooses to venture into it. It offers immense opportunities to men of genuine imagination—opportunities not only for making money but also for Service in its best Rotarian sense. For he who improves the eating of a great people is quite as worthy of honor as he who improves their roads, their piety, their sex life or their safety. He does something that benefits every one, and the fruits of his benefaction live on long after he has passed from this life.

I believe that a chain of hot dog stands offering the novelties I suggest would pay dividends in Baltimore from the first day, and that it would soon extend from end to end of the United States. The butchers and bakers would quickly arise to the chance it offered, and in six months the American repertoire of sausages would overtake and leap ahead of the German, and more new rolls would be invented than you may now find in France. In such matters American ingenuity may be trusted completely. It is infinitely resourceful, venturesome and audacious. I myself am acquainted with sausage-makers in this town who, if the demand arose, would produce sausage of hexagonal or octagonal section, sausages with springs or music boxes in them, sausages flavored with malt and hops, sausages dyed any color in the spectrum, sausages loaded with insulin, ergosterol, anti-tetanus vaccine or green chartreuse.

Nor is there any reason to believe that the bakers would lag behind. For years their ancient art has been degenerating in America, and today the bread that they ordinarily offer is almost uneatable. But when the reformers of the sandwich went to them for aid they responded instantly with both wheat and rye breads of the highest merit. Such breads, to be sure, are not used in the manufacture of drug-store sandwiches, but they are to be found in every delicatessen store and in all of the more respectable sandwich shops.

The same bakeries that produce them could produce an immense variety of first-rate rolls, once a demand for them was heard. I believe in my scheme so thoroughly that I throw it overboard freely, eager only to make life in the United States more endurable. Soli Deo gloria! What we need in this country is a general improvement in eating. We have the best raw materials in the world, both quantitatively and qualitatively, but most of them are ruined in the process of preparing them for the table. I have wandered about for weeks without encountering a single decent meal. With precious few exceptions, the hotels of America all cook alike—and what they offer is hard to distinguish from what is offered on railway dining-cars.

Originally published in the November 4, 1929, issue of The Evening Sun [Baltimore]; collected in A Second Mencken Chrestomathy, 1944.

The Tyranny of Pie

George Augustus Sala (1828–1895)
From American Food Writing: An Anthology With Classic Recipes

Interesting Links
“The Late Mr. Thackeray: A Notice by George Augustus Sala” (The New York Times, January 17, 1864)

“Dickens in America” (David Perdue’s Charles Dickens Page)

Previous Story of the Week selections for Thanksgiving
• “Eating American,” Sheila Hibben
• “Celebrations of Thanksgiving: Cuban Seasonings,” Ana Menéndez
• “Hunting the Deceitful Turkey,” Mark Twain

Buy the book
American Food Writing: An Anthology With Classic Recipes
Paperback • 753 pages
List price: $24.00
Web store price: $14.00

“The Kitchen,” 1874, from Prang’s Aids for Object Teaching–Trades and Occupations, a collection of twelve chromolithographic plates issued by L. Prang & Company, Boston. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

The prolific and flamboyant journalist George Augustus Sala, one of several young British writers who found fame as acolytes of Charles Dickens, rose to become a regular contributor to Dickens’s weekly magazine, Household Words, and, eventually, one of The Daily Telegraph’s most well-known correspondents. Sala was actually a small boy when he first met the great author—his mother was an actress in Dickens’s 1836 play The Village Coquettes—but it was William Makepeace Thackeray who publicly praised one of Sala’s early articles and truly launched his career. His many books included travelogues, memoirs, five novels, and several collections of stories and journalism—but his spendthrift habits and public drunkenness often led to trouble, and he died virtually penniless only weeks after being forced to sell the immensely valuable library he had amassed from his travels.

Sala visited the United States twice, first during the Civil War in 1863 and again in 1879. His initial visit was chronicled in the two-volume work, My Diary in America in the Midst of War, and the second trip, a lecture tour, inspired the better-known America Revisited. In addition, his admiration for American humor resulted in a three-book series of anthologies, Yankee Drolleries (1866–1870), which introduced British readers to such authors as Artemus Ward, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell—as well as two up-and-coming writers named Bret Harte and Mark Twain.

After his first trip to the States, Sala complained of “the melancholy and consistent monotony of American Towns.” Even the “the glittering splendour of New York” was pockmarked by the occasional neighborhood resembling “a slovenly, untidy, ill-kept Augean stable.” But he found much improvement sixteen years later. “The truth is, that in New York there is room enough for Everybody,” he wrote in America Revisited, “whereas in London, huge as it is, there is not sufficient room for Anybody.” He also noted that by the late 1870s transatlantic visitors often ran into friends from home, as Manhattan had become a popular travel destination for the European upper class.

Sala especially had a lot to say about American food. His comments range from despair and scorn to grudging, if infrequent, admiration. “It is always hard to leave New York,” he remarked, noting that the food and accommodations there were “what Europeans usually consider to be refinement and comfort.” But “once out of New York, you must expect nothing better than pork and beans and Indian pudding, or hog and hominy if you go South; the whole washed down by rough cider or molasses and water.” In a chapter describing a train trip to Baltimore, he inserted the brief digression presented below, mocking what was (according to Sala) the uniquely American passion for pie.

Notes: Bohwani is Sala’s spelling for Bhowani (Bhavani), the violent incarnation of the Hindu goddess Parvati. Dan Godfrey (1831–1903) was a famous band leader and the first of three generations of famous Dan Godfreys in England, all of them musicians and conductors.

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For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce the text of Sala’s digression, “The Tyranny of Pie,” below. You may also download it as a PDF or view it in Google Docs.

The Tyranny of Pie
Almost everything that I behold in this wonderful country bears traces of improvement and reform—everything except Pie. The national manners have become softened—the men folk chew less, expectorate less, curse less; the newspapers are not half so scurrilous as our own*; the Art idea is becoming rapidly developed; culture is made more and more manifest; even “intensity” in æsthetics is beginning to be heard of and Agnosticism and other “isms” too numerous to mention find exponents in “Society,” and the one absorbing and sickening topic of conversation is no longer the Almighty Dollar—but to the tyranny of Pie there is no surcease. It is a Fetish. It is Bohwani. It is the Mexican carnage god Huitchlipotchli, continually demanding fresh victims. It is Moloch. Men may come and men may go; the Grant “Boom” may be succeeded by the Garfield “Boom;” but Pie goes on for ever. The tramp and the scallawag, in pants of looped and windowed raggedness, hunger for Pie, and impetuously demand nickel cents wherewith to purchase it; and the President of the United States, amid the chastened splendour of the White House, can enjoy no more festive fare. The day before we left New York one of the ripest scholars, the most influential journalists (on the Democratic side) the brightest wits and most genial companions in the States lunched with us. He would drink naught but Château Yquem; but he partook twice, and in amazing profusion of Pumpkin Pie. They gave me Pie at the Brevoort, and I am now fresh from the consumption of Pie at the Mount Vernon, Baltimore. Two more aristocratic hotels are not to be found on this continent. I battled strongly against this dyspepsia-dealing pastry at first; but a mulatto waiter held me with his glittering eye, and I yielded as though I had been a two-years child. The worst of this dreadful pie—be it of apple, of pumpkin, of mulberry, or of cranberry—is that it is so very nice. It is made delusively flat and thin, so that you can cut it into conveniently-sized triangular wedges, which slip down easily. Pardon this digression; but Pie really forms as important a factor in American civilisation as the pot-au-feu does in France. There is no dish at home by which we nationally stand or fall. The “roast beef of Old England” sounds very well to the strains of Mr. Dan Godfrey’s band at a dinner at the Freemason’s Tavern; but sirloin of beef is fourteen pence a pound, and there are hundreds of thousands of labouring English people who never taste roast beef from year’s end to year’s end—save when they happen to get into gaol or into the workhouse at Christmastide.

* The modern American press seems to me to offend only against good taste in their omnivorous appetite of interviewing celebrated or notorious individuals (and the interviewing nuisance has become common enough in England), and in their fondness for filling their columns with brief personalities sometimes very quaint, but usually almost childishly frivolous and quite harmless.

Originally published in America Revisited: From the Bay of New York to the Gulf of Mexico (1882).
This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

The Eating-Houses

George G. Foster (1814?–1856)
From American Food Writing: An Anthology With Classic Recipes

Interesting Links

“The origins of dining out in New York City” (Museum of the City of New York)

“Remembering Delmonico’s, New York’s Original Restaurant” (Amanda Kludt, New York Eater)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Bill of Fare on the Plains,” Annie D. Tallent
• “Success in Entertaining,” Ward McAllister

Buy the book
American Food Writing: An Anthology With Classic Recipes
Paperback • 753 pages
List price: $24.00
Web store price: $14.00

Detail from Politics in an Oyster House, 1848, oil on fabric by American artist Richard Caton Woodville (1825–1855). Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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Earlier this year various news sources reported that—for the first time ever—Americans are spending more in restaurants than in grocery stores. Although these statistics were soon followed by skepticism (the numbers compiled in the original report didn’t take into account the trend of buying groceries in big-box stores), there is little argument that restaurant receipts have increased: “Especially now that the recession has ended for the most part, consumers are looking to splurge a little bit,” remarks the president of the Food Institute.

The idea of sitting among strangers for the sole purpose of eating a meal was regarded as a rare and awkward experience—usually confined to the inn or the tavern—until the appearance of the American restaurant in the middle of the nineteenth century, particularly in New York City. Putnam’s Monthly in 1853 disapprovingly observed (with some exaggeration) that “the male members of the family are eating their little dinners at Delmonico’s, Frederick’s or Sweeney’s, as the case may be, [and] the female members are solacing themselves with fricandeaus, meringues, and ices at Thompson’s, Taylor’s, or Welter’s; so that it may be said that nearly half of the people of New-York dine out every day in the week but Sunday.” By the end of the century, the novelist Edgar Fawcett would look back in wonder: “Few New Yorkers ever pause to consider what mighty changes the past thirty years have wrought in all our modes of eating.” For the most part, he recalled, “eating houses predominated whose atmosphere would now be defined as vulgarity itself.”

New York Tribune journalist George G. Foster was an early chronicler of these new establishments. Between 1848 and 1854, he published four books (and an instantly forgettable novel) detailing the everyday lives of New Yorkers, ranging from lurid portraits of outcasts to humorous sketches of the upper crust. Several chapters described the new trend for eating in public and, on the whole, Foster was appalled. In a short piece on the various oyster houses that were cropping up around the city, he wrote:

The oyster-cellars, with their bright lamps casting broad gleams of red light across the street, are now in full tide, and every instant sees them swallow up at one entrance a party of rowdy and half-drunken young men on their way to the theater, the gambling-house, the bowling-saloon, or the brothel—or most likely to all in turn—while another is vomited up the other stairway, having already swilled their reeking mouths each with an atrocious cigar, which the bar-keeper recommended as “full-flavored.”

Foster’s attitude towards the new “eating-houses” was hardly more appreciative, but his colorful and harsh judgments are supported by other surviving reports. He divided the new public eateries into three categories: six-penny houses that dispensed quick and cheap midday meals to workers in the financial district; the more expensive chophouses, usually little more than glorified taverns offering slabs of meat with side dishes; and, still in a class by itself, the European-inspired Delmonico’s, which had been established during the 1830s.

Although Foster made his name with sensational accounts of the seedier elements in New York, his preference for high-society haunts like Delmonico’s ultimately caused his downfall. (He delighted in satirizing society swells, but Foster “does seem to have been a bit of a dandy himself,” remarks his biographer Stuart M. Blumin.) Assuming the identity of a New York theater owner, Foster was caught forging a check for upscale clothing in Philadelphia. He spent the better part of 1855 in jail, awaiting trial for phony payments of several hundred dollars—although, according to his victims, the forgeries totaled in the thousands. Rufus Griswold, Foster’s childhood friend (and the late Edgar Allan Poe’s literary nemesis) reluctantly helped bail him out and the case was eventually dropped, but Foster died the following year of a flu-like illness.

Notes: For nearly two centuries the Croton River has supplied Manhattan with its water supply via the Croton Aqueduct. Foster’s joking reference to Taylor at Bueva Vista evokes the military skills exhibited by General Zachary Taylor, who led 5,000 troops to turn back a Mexican army force three times the size at the Battle of Buena Vista, February 23, 1847. “Above Bleecker” was a common phrase for New York’s residential neighborhood north of Bleecker Street. In the eighteenth century, Carl Linnaeus established the system for classifying organisms. The Astor refers to the Astor House Hotel, which opened in 1836 in lower Manhattan and which featured fine dining in an elaborate courtyard surrounded by alcoves.

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“Beefsteakandtatersvegetábesnumbertwenty—Injinhardandsparrowgrassnumbér-sixteen!” “Waiter! Waiter! WA-Y-TER!” . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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Eating American

Sheila Hibben (1888–1964)
From American Food Writing: An Anthology With Classic Recipes

Interesting Links

“Sheila Hibben” (Jon Michaud, The New Yorker)

“The First Kitchen: Eleanor Roosevelt’s Austerity Drive” (Laura Shapiro, The New Yorker)

“Cecile (Sheila) Craik Hibben” (Find a Grave)

Previous Story of the Week selection
• “Celebrations of Thanksgiving: Cuban Seasonings,” Ana Menéndez

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American Food Writing: An Anthology With Classic Recipes
Paperback • 753 pages
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First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (right), with Mrs. Hugh Easley of St. Louis and her 3-year-old daughter, eat a five-cent subsidized “relief” meal at the Daughters of the American Depression conference, Washington, DC, May 14, 1950. Harris & Ewing Photographers. Library of Congress.

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In the waning days of the Great Depression, LIFE magazine commissioned a lengthy profile of Eleanor Roosevelt, which appeared in its February 5, 1940, issue. The article recounted when, during her first year in the White House, the First Lady brought Sheila Hibben to Washington to share recipes for classic American regional specialties with the staff. Hibben, who became a writer out of necessity after the death of her husband in 1928, had just published The National Cookbook, a best seller in 1932, and would soon become The New Yorker’s first food critic. During Hibben’s tenure at the White House there was a bit of a kerfuffle when Major, the Roosevelts’ German Shepherd, bit her on the ankle. Upon hearing of the attack, the First Lady sternly addressed the maid. “Mamie, that settles it. From now on we will have iodine kept in this room.”

The incident with the dog proved to be an omen: Hibben would face an even more intractable adversary in the First Lady herself, whose primary concern was to promote an aura of practical austerity. According to the LIFE reporter, Hibben failed to convince Mrs. Roosevelt, “whose one idea seemed to be to expound the recipes at her press conferences, that the dishes were meant to be eaten rather than printed.” Laura Shapiro, in a 2010 New Yorker article, adds, “Hibben had a culinary sensibility that was half a century ahead of its time”: she advocated locally grown ingredients, convenience cooking, and well-prepared yet simple recipes for savory dishes. “To Eleanor, the disadvantages of this approach were clear,” Shapiro continues. “Such a project didn’t carry any of the larger messages about agriculture, the food industry, proper diet, and sensible parenting.” So Hibben and the First Lady parted ways—and for the next twelve years White House visitors, and the President himself, endured the regime of “dreary cuisine” that became an unfortunate part of the Roosevelt legend.

Hibben was far ahead of her time in another way. In 1937 Zora Neale Hurston published Their Eyes Were Watching God, which was greeted by mostly negative notices and poor sales. The novel wouldn’t become a commercial and critical success for another half century, but the month it appeared Hibben wrote for The New York Herald Tribune one of the few unreservedly favorable reviews, in part because the novel appealed to her own interest in American regional and ethnic diversity:

Here is an author who writes with her head as well as with her heart, and at a time when there seems to be some principle of physics set dead against the appearance of novelists who give out a cheerful warmth and at the same time write with intelligence. . . . There are homely, unforgettable phrases of colored people . . . ; there is a gigantic and magnificent picture of a hurricane in the Everglades country of Florida; and there is a flashing, gleaming riot of black people, with a limitless exuberance of humor, and a wild, strange sadness. . . . Mostly, though, there is life—a swarming, passionate life.

This Story of the Week selection showcases Hibben’s love of “back-to-the-country cooking,” as well as the humor and liveliness readers will find in all her writing. As a bonus, the last page features her recipe from The National Cookbook for “Cape Cod Turkey”—which, our readers will quickly learn, doesn’t contain a smidgen of turkey.

Notes: The opening lines of the selection refer to Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, who together began a movement of literary criticism in the 1890s known as the New Humanism.

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Regional cooking has struck New York. And with such a bang that soon nobody will be left to say, when the subject is brought up: “You mean regional planning?” . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.