Food History

I can’t resist it. Maybe it’s because Australia just had an election and the US is inexorably moving towards one (I have some historical election cake recipes for crucial moments in the US process, by the way - I just can’t leave well alone, can I?) or maybe it’s because I’m entirely focussed on the social implications of eating right now.

I’m not going to give you commentary - both extracts speak for themselves. I want to point out the names of the “this journal is good” commentators and the rather curious points made by Frances Willard. This is how a cookbook can be used for material it contains that isn’t quite as food-related as you might think: historians can find data from anything written or printed, it’s just a matter of looking at the documents differently.

From an advertisement in The Woman Suffrage Cookbook

WOMAN’S JOURNAL, BOSTON, MASS.

“It is the only paper I take, and I find it invaluable to me.”-Louisa M. Alcott.
“I would give up my daily paper sooner than the WOMAN’S JOURNAL.”-Maria Mitchell.
“It is an armory of weapons to all who are battling for the rights of humanity.”-Mary A. Livermore.
“The best source of information upon the woman question that I know.”-Clara Barton.
“The WOMAN’S JOURNAL has long been my outlook upon the great and widening world of woman’s work, worth and victory. It has no peer in this noble office and ministry. Its style is pure and its spirit exalted.”-Frances E. Willard.

Speaking of Frances E. Willard,
“I send this protest for the WOMAN SUFFRAGE COOKBOOK, viz.:
That pepper, especially black pepper, be omitted from every receipt given. It is an abomination to the sense of every normal stomach. If one is so abnormally constituted as to desire it, it can be added ad libitum, and thus give those who cannot endure it, a chance to eat many a dish that would, without the pepper, be palatable and wholesome. There is nothing more grateful, especially in cold weather, and after fatigue, than well-prepared, nourishing soups; but at hotels, in boarding-houses, and often in private homes, they are made so unpalatable and injurious by pepper that no right-minded person would think of giving them to children, nor of eating them themselves. While speaking of soups, I would like to say that they
ought to be a part of every well-ordered dinner. They may be made most nourishing and appetizing at a very small cost. Anyone who has seen the French and German peasantry make what seemed an enjoyable and satisfying meal on a well-made soup and black-bread, can appreciate how much it might add of nourishment and cheer to the laboring-man’s dinner in America.

If there is a roast for dinner, any pieces that would not be suited, cold, for the table, may be used for soup the next day, with all the bones, juice and gravy that were left added, with a potato, turnip, carrot, onion, celery, and a light sprinkle of herbs, dry or green, if one has them-all to be chopped fine and put in with the meat remnants, and to simmer slowly from early morning until dinner-time. The remnants from a chicken or turkey dinner make a delicious soup; the nourishment and flavor is enhanced by adding the feet of the fowl, the heads and necks, all of which may be properly prepared by pouring boiling water upon them, which enables one to remove the skin as a glove from the finger. There is, I venture to say, enough good material wasted from the majority of American tables every day, to make an excellent soup for the day following. I have never been able to understand why this inexpensive and nourishing part of a good meal,-a soup, has been so generally neglected by our American housewives.

I have formed a settled conviction that the world is fed too much. Pastries, cakes, hot bread, rich gravies, pickles, pepper sauces, salads, tea and coffee, are discarded from my “bill of fare,” and I firmly believe that they will be from the recipes of the twentieth century. Entire wheat-flour bread, vegetables, fruit, fish with a little meat, and milk as the chief drink, will distil in the alembic of the digestive organs, into pure, rich, feverless blood, electric but steady nerves, and brains that can “think God’s thoughts after
Him,” as they have never yet been thought. This is my recipe: “Plain living and high thinking;” and this is my warning: With high living you will get exceedingly plain thinking.

Yours for stomachic rights,

FRANCES WILLARD”