Thistle Dew Books

We often imagine history resides only in the large meanings of large movements, that isms and events have shaped our world. But history also resides in the smallness of everyday life. Did you know that America’s first icebox was patented in 1803, but so rarely available that more than 50 years later Catherine Beecher would give American housewives directions to make one from a barrel? Imagine having a barrel of straw and ice in the corner of your kitchen, and the fridge that so neatly tucks into the counter is not only a gift of convenience, but a marker of America’s relentless drive to industrialization, linked to ice-making machines, shipping processed food, and supermarkets.

Victoria Rumble’s collection of historical recipes and domestic history is a personal one, developed out of her own passion for the topic, and she provides not only cookable recipes but a historical context to illuminate them. These are not particularly ethnic or regional recipes, but the nineteenth century American recipes common at the time. Rumble has chosen representative recipes that have appeared in print on a regular basis in popular ladies magazines like Godey’s Ladies Book and Arthur’s Home Companion.

The book is not just recipes, but a description of the lives behind them. Rumble explores techniques for gardening, preserving, households, and housewares, animal husbandry along with the particulars of American domestic manners as put forth by advocates like Catherine Beecher, Eliza Leslie, and Marion Harland.

Each chapter begins with information about a given foodstuff – how it was made, stored, and used – and then goes on to recipes. The chapters begin with spices and go through the basics like bread, meat, and vegetables, but also include refined dishes like chocolate, confectionary, beverages, and salads. In such detail and extensiveness, the housekeepers of old were a heroic race. We can have a new appreciation for our microwaves and no longer wonder what goes into a Good Christmas Pudding or how to make Strasbourg Potted Meat.

Rumble’s book is full of detail. We take salt for granted, but she outlines the history of some American saltworks, the politics and economics of importing salt, and its vital use for food preservation. But the early American kitchen was more than coarse basics. Rumble’s recipes give insight as well into the potential elegance of historical cookery with recipes for Raspberry Vinegar, sugar-crusted Bath Buns, and “The Italian Method of Dressing Macaroni.”

The variety of recipes is surprising. The chapter on breads includes corn, graham, rice, buttermilk, Sally Lunn, salt-rising, cream crackers, and brown bread, flavored with molasses. And small details illuminate daily life. The first page of weights, measurements, and equivalents provides its own little insights. Ten eggs equal a pound, a firkin of beef equals a hundred pounds, and a barrel of soap weighed 256 pounds. Suddenly Costco is for light-weights.

Rumble is a historian who has developed interpretive programs for national parks and living history museums, and is a regular contributor to the Civil War Courier, as well as the author of other cookbooks. She hopes the book will not only give historical insight, but continue the useful lessons of our grandmothers.

#2:

Victoria’s Home Companion

There are myriad cook books that claim to accurately represent the preparation of Victorian cuisine yet fall as flat as a soufflé on close inspection. There are also numerous tomes on life and culture in 19^th Century America; however, no other book captures the breath of domestic life in the United States of the 1800’s as fully as Victoria R. Rumble’s marvelous Victoria’s Home Companion. This work is a must for any student of cultural and domestic history and de rigueur for writers of historical fiction. It is the definitive work on American material culture and other treatises pale by comparison.

Victoria’s Home Companion was first brought to my attention when I was in the midst of researching a manuscript that is set in 19^th Century Boston. I was in need for information on Victorian American cuisine, domestic customs and the kitchens of the period. I contacted a noted chef in Los Angeles who immediately steered me to Mrs. Rumble’s website and thankfully, Victoria’s Home Companion. I found the book to be full of colorful facts that were not confined simply to cooking. There were regional recipes, information on planting, a marvelous chapter on edible plants that were consumed in the 19^th century, methods of preservation and preparation of meat and fish. Mrs. Rumble also gives a detailed list of canned foods that were available in the 19^th century in addition to an authentic examination of American kitchens and what went on in them from the pre to post Civil War era. The book is also replete with descriptions of period cooking tools; for anyone interested in cultural history, the book is remarkably free of anachronisms.

There are a plethora of recipes, all totally authentic and presented in their original format, before Fanny Farmer revolutionized the cookbook with her accurate measurements. A recipe for Pepper Pot illustrates the authenticity of the recipe. “Stew gently in four quarts of water till reduced to three, three pounds of beef, half pound of lean ham, a bunch of dried thyme, two onions, two large potatoes, pared and sliced; then strain through a colander, and add a large fowl, cut into joints and skinned, half a pound of pickled pork, sliced the meat of one lobster, minced, and some small suet dumplings the size of a walnut. When the fowl is well boiled, add half a peck of spinach that has been boiled and rubbed through a colander, season with salt and cayenne.”

In addition to recipes, there are chapters on specific foods replete with historical information. The chapter on bread was filled with anecdotal information about the staff of life and the pages overflow with jewels of information gleaned from memoirs, journals, and letters. It was a joy during the Christmas holidays to sample some of the instructions for beverages including a festive gin-punch and an 1858 recipe for eggnog.

Perhaps some of us view the “good old days” through the lens of rosy nostalgia but this marvelous work enlivens the past in a manner that illuminates and entertains.

Reviewed by Francesca Miller, novelist. As posted to amazon.com Feb. 2005