Garden to Table -

 The Potato Peeler, by Swiss artist Albrecht Samuel Anker (1831-1910) 

From Garden to Table

From Garden to Table

Garden to Table - Early Cookbooks on Google Books for Free

Google Books has these free, digitized books completely searchable. Simply open a book, enter a word in the search window, and the search engine will show you the word’s occurrences in that book.  

18th Century Cookbooks

The Whole Duty of a Woman, (London). First published in 1701. Free editions available on Google Books: 1707, 1737.

A Collection of Above Three Hundred Receipts, Mary Kettilby, (London). First published in 1714. Free editions available on Google Books: 1714, 1734.

The Compleat Confectioner, Mary Eales, (London). First published in 1718. Free editions available on Google Books: 1742, 1767.

The Cook’s and Confectioner’s Dictionary, John Nott, (London). First published in 1723. Free editions available on Google Books: 1723, 1724.

The Country Housewife and Lady’s Director, R. Bradley, (London). First published in 1727. Free editions available on Google Books: 1732, 1736.

The Compleat Housewife, Eliza Smith, (London). First published in 1727. Free editions available on Google Books: 1739.

The Compleat City and Country Cook, Charles Carter, (London). First published in 1732. Free editions available on Google Books: 1732, 1736.

The House-Keeper’s Pocket-Book, Sarah Harrison and Mary Morris, (London). First published in 1733. Free editions available on Google Books: 1739, 1760.

The Complete Family Piece, M.L. Lemery, (London). First published in 1736. Free edition available in Google Books: 1737.

The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, Hannah Glasse, (London). First published in 1747. Free editions available on Google Books: 1774, 1780, 1784, 1805,

The London and Country Cook, Charles Carter (London). First published in 1749. Free editions available on Google Books: 1749.

English Housewifery, Elizabeth Moxon, (London). First published in 1749. Free editions available on Google Books: 1764.

The Art of Confectionary, Edward Lambert, (London). First published in 1750. Free editions available on Google Books: 1761.

The Prudent Housewife, Mrs. Fisher, (London). First published in 1750. Free editions available on Google Books: 25th Edition.

A New and Easy Method of Cookery, Elizabeth Cleland, (Edinburgh). Free editions available on Google Books: 1755.

 A Complete System of Cookery, William Verral, (London). First published in 1759. Free editions available on Google Books: 1759.

The Complete Confectioner, Hannah Glasse & Maria Wilson (London). First published in 1760. Free editions available on Google Books: 1800.

The Experienced English Housekeeper, Elizabeth Raffald, (Manchester). First published in 1769. Free editions available on Google Books: 1769, 1803, 1806.

The Lady’s, Housewife’s, and Cook-maid’s Assistant, E. Taylor, (Berwick Upon Tweed). First published in 1769. Free editions available on Google Books: 1769.

The Professed Cook, B. Clermont, (London). First published in 1769. Free editions available on Google Books: 1812,

The Court and Country Confectioner, Mr. Borella, (London). First published in 1770. Free editions available on Google Books: 1770.

Cookery and Pastry, Susanna MacIver, (Edinburgh, London). First published in 1773. Free editions available on Google Books: 1789.

The Lady’s Assistant, Charlotte Mason (London). First published in 1777. Free editions available on Google Books: 1777, 1787.

The London Art of Cookery, John Farley, (London) First published in 1783. Free editions available on Google Books: 1783, 1785, 1792, 1797, 1800.

The English Art of Cookery, John Briggs, (London). First published in 1788. Free editions available on Google Books: 1788, 1798.

The Complete Confectioner, Frederick Nutt (London). First published in 1789. Free editions available on Google Books: 1790, 1807, 1819.

The Practice of Cookery, Mrs. Frazer, (Edinburg). First published in 1790. Free editions available on Google Books: 1791, 1820.

Every Woman Her Own Housekeeper, John Perkins, (London). First published in 1790. Free editions available on Google Books: 1796.

The Universal Cook, Francis Collingwood and John Woollams, (London). First published in 1792. Free editions available on Google Books: 1792, 1797, 1806.

The New Experienced English Housekeeper, Sarah Martin, (London). First published in 1795. Free editions available on Google Books: 1795.

The Frugal Housewife, Susannah Carter, (Philadelphia). Free editions available on Google Books: 1796, 1822.

The Accomplished Housekeeper, T. Williams, (London). First published in 1797. Free editions available on Google Books: 1797.

Early 19th Century Cookbooks

The Art of Cookery Made Easy and Refined, John Mollard, (London). First published in 1801. Free editions available on Google Books: 1802, 1808.

The New Practice of Cookery, Mrs. Hudson and Mrs. Donat, (Edinburgh). First published in 1804. Free editions available on Google Books: 1804.

Culina Famulatrix Medicinae, Alexander Hunter, (York). First published in 1804. Free editions available on Google Books: 1804.

The Housekeeper’s Instructor, William Henderson (London). First published in 1804. Free editions available on Google Books: 1805.

A Complete System of Cookery, John Simpson, (London). First published in 1806. Free editions available on Google Books: 1806, 1816.

A New System of Domestic Cookery, Maria Eliza Ketelby Rundell, (Exeter). First published in 1807. Free editions available on Google Books: 1808, 1840,

The Female Economist, Mrs. Smith (London). First published in 1810. Free editions available on Google Books: 1810.

Apicus Redivivus; or, The Cook’s Oracle, William Kitchiner (London). First published in 1817. Free editions available on Google books: 1817, 1822, 1823, 1825, 1827, 1836, 1845, 1860,

American Domestic Cookery, Maria Eliza Ketelby Rundell, (New York). Free editions available on Google Books: 1823.

The Art of French Cookery, A.B. Beauvilliers, (London). Free editions available on Google Books: 1827.

Houlston’s Housekeeper’s Assistant, (Wellington, Salop). Free edition available on Google Books: 1828.

The Cook’s Dictionary and Housekeeper’s Directory, Richard Dolby (London). Published in 1830. Free editions on Google Books: 1830.

Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats, Eliza Leslie, (Boston). Free editions available on Google Books: 1830, 1836.

The Cook’s Own Book, N.K.M. Lee, (Boston). Free editions available on Google Books: 1832, 1840, 1842, 1854.

The Complete Economic Cook, Mary Holland, (London). First published in 1836. Free editions available on Google Books: 1837.

A Treatise on Bread and Breadmaking, Sylvester Graham, (Boston). Free editions available on Google Books: 1837.

The Virginia Housewife, Mary Randolph, (Baltimore). First published in 1838. Free editions available on Google Books: 1838.

The Good Housekeeper, Sarah Josepha Buell Hale, (Boston). Free editions available on Google Books: 1839.

Garden to Table - Brewing Beer in Early America

When Ben Franklin wrote, "Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy," he was speaking for many Americans of his day. Beer, and the art of brewing, was one of the first things European settlers needed America in the 17th century.  

The Mayflower landed on Plymouth Rock in the winter of 1620. They’d actually landed on Cape Cod in November & tried to sail south to their intended destination—The Virginia Colony, still 220 miles south—eventually ending up in Plymouth Rock. The choice to land was due in part to treacherous shoals & breakers facing Mayflower Captain Christopher Jones off the cold coast of Cape Cod—but it was also due in large part to a dangerous shortage of beer.

When he became alarmed that his ship's supply of beer was running low, Captain  Jones  decided to land at Plymouth Rock (rather than sailing further south) to "winter" there. It was determined that the passengers & servants should go ashore to  seek out new water (hopefully to make more beer). Captain Jones sent all passengers off the ship into the frigid New England winter on December 19th, 1620. 

The ship's crew remained on the moored vessel, reserving the beer for themselves. One passenger, William Bradford, complained that he & other passengers "were hastened ashore & made to drink water, that the seamen might have the more beer." And even though the pilgrims discovered clean streams ashore, they were suspicious of the New World liquid & not altogether fond of its taste. As one colonist was quick to write, "I dare not prefere it before good beere" 

To the Pilgrims on the Mayflower, beer had become an essential part of daily life. Even the children drank beer. "Ship's beer" as it was known, did not have high alcohol content. Neither did the even weaker "small beer," of which passengers drank a quart per day. Beer was stored on board many seagoing ships; because after being stored for long periods of time, a ship's water would become a contaminated, germy affair. Beer, on the other hand, could be stored & ingested for weeks & months without ill effect, making it the ideal beverage for a lengthy journey — as long as there was enough to go around.

At Plymouth Rock, the Wampanoags reportedly taught them how to ferment alcohol, but not beer. Along the Atlantic coast, hops were scarce. Some settlers did manage to find hops growing in the wild, but their supply was quickly exhausted, leaving them in the same awful situation they were in, when they were dropped off by the sailors here in the first place. 

In Jamestown, Virginia, the situation was even worse. Somehow, the Virginia Company had sent the early settlers to the colony without thinking to bring someone who actually knew how to make beer. The settlers planted a field of barley, put an ad in a 1609 London paper asking for two brewers to sail over; and later in 1609, they finally brewed beer. The remnants of the very first “brewery” in America can be seen at Historic Jamestowne.

The early colonist's desire for beer was both a born-in cultural habit as well as what was then a common-sense approach not to drink strange water and possibly die in any one of a myriad of unappealing ways. Prior to the advent of breweries and taverns in America, beer was brewed at home. 

Early American brewers took malted barley and cracked it by hand. They would then steep, or soak, the grains in boiling water. They called the process mashing. Mashing allowed the brewer to extract the sugars from the barley. Brewers took the mash they had created, which had the consistency of oatmeal, and dumped it into a sawed-off whiskey barrel. The modified tub acted as a sieve, filtering the sugary liquid from the grain. The colonial brewer returned the strained liquid to the boil kettle, or the copper as it was called, for a 2-hour boiling. He added hops, chilled the brew, sprinkled it with yeast, and drained the final product into wooden kegs. The brewer then placed those kegs in a cellar for three weeks to a month.

Brewing did not always turn out well. For some Early American brewers, beer went bad quite often. In a letter dated 1623, George Sandy of the Virginia colony wrote, "It would well please the country to hear he had taken revenge of Dupper for his Stinking [sic] beer, which hath been the death of 200." Like most food or beverage products, beer is not immune to bacterial growth or becoming rank from improper brewing practices.

By the 1700s beer was big business, although recipes differed. Farmers planted fields of barley and hops, beer's chief ingredients, to help keep the liquid flowing. Many people, especially rich gentlemen, built private brew houses, handcrafting most of the equipment from wood (except the copper kettle, of course). Thomas Jefferson and George Washington built breweries on their plantations. In fact, Jefferson's wife brewed 15 gallons of low-alcohol beer every two weeks.

Thomas Jefferson grew hops at Monticello for brewing, and also purchased them in fairly large quantities from others. Jefferson's memorandum books record a handful of purchases by both Jefferson and his wife in the early 1770s, mostly from local slaves. These hops were most likely used for brewing batches of "small beer."

George Washington’s instructions for making Small Beer: 

Take a large Siffer [Sifter] full of Bran Hops to your Taste. Boil these 3 hours. Then strain out 30 Gall[ons] into a cooler, put in 3 Gall[ons] Molasses while the Beer is Scalding hot or rather draw the Molasses into the cooler & St[r]ain the Beer on it while boiling Hot. Let this stand till it is little more than Blood warm. Then put in a quart of Yea[s]t if the Weather is very Cold, cover it over with a Blank[et] & let it Work in the Cooler 24 hours then put it into the Cask — leave the bung open till it is almost don[e] Working — Bottle it that Week it was Brewed. — From a notebook (c. 1757) kept by George Washington

Jefferson also mentions hops in Notes on the State of Virginia, in Query VI, in a list of native esculent plants: "Wild hop - humulus lupulus."1 Regarding his own culture of the plant, Jefferson first lists hops in his "Objects for the garden" in 1794.

In 1812, Jefferson began brewing beer at Monticello on a large scale, and that same year he lists hops in his garden calendar. They also appear on his garden "agenda" for 1813. Despite growing hops, Jefferson continued to record purchases of hops from various other sources until 1820.

Amelia Simmons 1796 American Cookery, the first cookbook written by an American, using ingredients available to Americans, gives a recipe for spruce beer containing hops, water, molasses and “essence of spruce.”   (The essence was produced by boiling the young fresh shoots of the spruce tree and reducing the liquid to a concentrated extract.)  

In 1824, Mary Randolph included a similar recipe for spruce beer in The Virginia Housewife, calling for a handful of hops, and twice as much of the chippings of sassafras root, one gallon of molasses, two spoonfuls of essence of spruce, two of powdered ginger, and one of powdered allspice.

Eliza Leslie's, 1837 Directions for Cookery included recipes for spruce beer, ginger beer, molasses beer  and sassafras beer, (as well as for  fox grape shrub and cherry bounce): Sassafras Beer– Have ready two gallons of soft water; one quart of wheat bran; a large handful of dried apples; half a pint of molasses; a small handful of hops; half a pint of strong fresh yeast; and a piece of sassafras root the size of an egg… Leslie gives instructions for boiling the mixture, straining through a hair sieve, and putting into open jugs to ferment. 

Even up into the later 1800s, some households were producing their own beer. This recipe for beer comes from a community cookbooks, Housekeeping in the Blue Grass compiled by the Southern Presbyterian Church Missionary Society of Paris, Kentucky, in 1875: Beer- Two quarts of wheat bran, two and a half gallons of water, a few hops, one pint of molasses, and one pint of yeast. –Miss Kate Spears.

Spruce and molasses, along with hops and malt, continued to be employed in home brewing well into the 19th century.  Lydia Maria Child, the noted American abolitionist, women’s rights activist, journalist, Indian rights advocate, and successful author, uses all of these ingredients and more in her recipes  from The Frugal Housewife, which was reprinted at least 35 times between 1829 and 1850:

Beer– Beer is a good family drink. A handful of hops, to a pailful of water, and a half-pint of molasses, makes good hop beer. Spruce mixed with hops is pleasanter than hops alone. Boxberry, fever-bush, sweet fern, and horseradish make a good and healthy diet-drink. The winter evergreen, or rheumatism weed, thrown in, is very beneficial to humors. Be careful and not mistake kill-lamb for winter-evergreen ; they resemble each other. Malt mixed with a few hops makes a weak kind of beer ; but it is cool and pleasant ; it needs less molasses than hops alone. The rule is about the same for all beer. Boil the ingredients two or three hours, pour in a half-pint of molasses to a pailful, while the beer is scalding hot. Strain the beer, and when about lukewarm, put a pint lively yeast to a barrel. Leave the bung loose till the beer is done working; you can ascertain this by observing when the froth subsides. If your family be large, and the beer will be drank rapidly, it may as well remain in the barrel; but if your family be small, fill what bottles you have with it; it keeps better bottled. A raw potato or two, cut up and thrown in, while the ingredients are boiling, is said to make beer spirited.

New Yorker John Nicholson wrote about early American beer in The Farmer's Assistant in 1820,

"To make Spruce beer. Boil some spruce boughs with some wheat-bran till the water tastes sufficiently of the spruce; strain the water, and stir in at the rate of 2 quarts of molasses to a half-barrel; work it with the emptyings of beer, or with yeast if you have it. After working sufficiently, bung up the cask, or, which is better, bottle its contents.

"To make Molasses beer. Take 5 pounds of molasses, half a pint of yeast, and a spoonful of powdered ginger; put these into a vessel, and pour on 2 gallons of scalding hot soft water; shake the whole till a fermentation is produced; then add of the same kind of water sufficient to fill up your half barrel...Let the liquor ferment about twelve hours; then bottle it, with a raisin or 2 in each bottle.
"If honey instead of molasses be used, at the rate of about 12 pounds to the barrel, it will make a very fine beverage, after having been bottled a while.

"To make Beer with Hops. Take 5 quarts of wheatbran and three ounces of hops, and boil them 15 minutes in 15 gallons of water; strain the liquor; add 2 quarts of molasses; cool it quickly to about the temperature of new milk, and put it into your half barrel, having the cask completely filled. Leave the bung out for 24 hours, in order that the yeast may be worked off and thrown out; and then the beer will be fit for use. About the 5th day, bottle off what remains in the cask, or it will turn sour, if the weather be warm. If the cask be new, apply yeast, or beer-emptyings, to bring on the fermentation; but, if it has been in this use before, that will not be necessary.

"Yeast, particularly the whiter part, is much fiter to be used for fermenting, than the mere grounds of the beerbarrel ; and the same may be observed, in regard to its use in fermenting dough for bread.
"To recover a cask of stale Small beer. Take some hops and some chalk broken to pieces; put them in a bag, and put them in at the bunghole, and then stop up the cask closely. Let the proportion be 2 ounces of hops and a pound of chalk for a half-barrel.

"To cure a cask of Beer. Mix 2 handsful of beanflour with one handful of salt, and stir it in.

"To feed a cask of Beer. Bake a rye-loaf well nutmeged; cut it in pieces, and put it in a narrow bag with some hops and some wheat, and put the bag into the cask at the bunghole.
"To clarify Beer. For a half-barrel, take about 6 ounces of chalk, burn it, and put it into the cask. This will disturb the liquor and fine it in 24 hours.  It is also recommended, in some cases, to dissolve some loaf-sugar and add to the above ingredients.
"We omit going into any description of the method of making strongbeer, as the necessity for it among Farmers, as a household beverage, seems to be greatly obviated by that of smallbeer, which is much less intoxicating, and by cider, a stronger drink, which is readily afforded from apple-orchards, which are more or less natural to almost every part ot the United States, except a little of its southern border, where the grape can be cultivated to advantage...

"It is indeed true, that many Farmers in Great Britain brew their own strongbeer; but there is but little of that country where apple-orchards are natural...It is an expensive liquor tor the Farmer to make much use of, as it requires 4 bushels of malt to make a barrel, even of common ale, and 8, for a barrel of beer ot the strongest kind."

Garden to Table -

Garden to Table -

Peter Jakob Horemans (1700-1776)  Gentleman enjoying Table of Fruit & Vegetables with a sip of Wine     Detail

Garden to Table -

Peter Jakob Horemans (1700-1776)  Gentleman at a Table Laden with Food (and a Flower) from the Garden   Detail

Garden to Table -

Woman Bundling Asparagus, 1771, John Atkinson (British artist, fl 1770-1775      Detail

1700 John Lawson writes of Food of Carolina Native Americans

Image after a Watercolor drawing of Indian Village of Secoton by John White (created 1585-1586)

A NEW VOYAGE TO CAROLINA, by John Lawson 1709

Venison, and Fawns in the Bags, cut out of the Doe's Belly; Fish of all sorts, the Lamprey-Eel excepted, and the Sturgeon our Salt-Water Indians will not touch; Bear and Bever; Panther; Pole-cat; Wild-Cat; Possum; Raccoon; Hares, and Squirrels, roasted with their Guts in; Snakes, all Indians will not eat them, tho' some do; All wild Fruits that are palatable, some of which they dry and keep against Winter, as all sort of Fruits, and Peaches, which they dry, and make Quiddonies, and Cakes, that are very pleasant, and a little tartish; young Wasps, when they are white in the Combs, before they can fly, this is esteemed a Dainty; All sorts of Tortois and Terebins; Shell-Fish, and Stingray, or Scate, dry'd; Gourds; Melons; Cucumbers; Squashes; Pulse of all sorts; Rockahomine Meal, which is their Maiz, parch'd and pounded into Powder; Fowl of all sorts, that are eatable; Ground-Nuts, or wild Potato's; Acorns and Acorn Oil; Wild-Bulls, Beef, Mutton, Pork, &c. from the English; Indian Corn, or Maiz, made into several sorts of Bread; Ears of Corn roasted in the Summer, or preserv'd against Winter.

Garden to Table - Slave Chefs Helped Shape American Cuisine

Enslaved men & women have had a significant impact on the nation's culinary traditions from the colonial period until today. They were forced to prepare food, usually raised or grown in the owners' fields, nearby waterways, & gardens for the owners & their guests.  

In most cases, fellow slaves had planted & tended the gardens & fields where the plants grew, cared for the animals destined for slaughter, & caught the fish in local rivers & nearby salt-waters. For their own food, many slaves received a weekly or monthly ration of vegetables, meat, & sometimes fish from their owners.  To add to this allocation, some owners allowed their slaves to grow a small garden near their slave quarters.

Archaeological discoveries, notes on "receipts" (or recipes), & plantation journals & records offer hints into the lives of enslaved plantation cooks from colonial times through emancipation. These men & women often lived & worked inside the sweltering conditions of Southern plantation house kitchens; & when the heat was unbearable, they slept on the ground very near the kitchen.  Fellow plantation slaves probably built the kitchen as well. 

These cooks drew upon skills & seeds brought with them from their African homelands to create complex, labor-intensive dishes such as oyster stew, gumbo, jambalaya, & fried fish.  From the gardens, they added African accents with hot peppers, peanuts, okra, & greens. Some methods of cooking that are well-known in the U.S. today were reported in West Africa before 1500, including deep frying fish & barbecuing meats.

How Enslaved Chefs Helped Shape American Cuisine

By Kelley Fanto Deetz, Zócalo Public Square

Smithsonianmag.com  July 20, 2018

This...is the story of people like Chef Hercules, George Washington's chef; & Emmanuel Jones, who used his skills to transition out of enslavement into a successful career cooking in the food industry, evading the oppressive trappings of sharecropping. It is also the story of countless unnamed cooks across the South, the details of their existences now lost...

It’s not easy uncovering the histories of enslaved cooks, who left few records of their own & whose stories often appear in the historical record as asides—incidental details sprinkled through the stories of the people who held them in bondage. In my recent study of enslaved cooks, I relied on archaeological evidence & material culture—the rooms where they once lived, the heavy cast iron pots they lugged around, the gardens they planted—& documents such as slaveholders’ letters, cookbooks, & plantation records to learn about their experiences. These remnants, scant though they are, make it clear that enslaved cooks were central players in the birth of our nation’s cultural heritage.

In the early 17th century, tobacco farming began to spread throughout Virginia’s Tidewater region. Before long, plantations were founded by colonists, such as Shirley Plantation, constructed circa 1613; Berkeley Hundred, & Flowerdew Hundred, whose 1,000 acres extended along the James River. These large homes marked a moment of transition, when English cultural norms took hold on the Virginia landscape.

Traditions surrounding dining & maintaining a grand household were part of those norms, & the white gentry began seeking domestic help. At first, the cooks they hired on plantations were indentured servants, workers who toiled without pay for a contractually agreed-upon period of time before eventually earning their freedom. But by the late 17th century, plantation homes throughout Virginia had turned to enslaved laborers, captured from central & western Africa, to grow crops, build structures & generally remain at the beck & call of white families. Before long these enslaved cooks took the roles that had once been occupied by white indentured servants.

Black cooks were bound to the fire, 24 hours a day. They lived in the kitchen, sleeping upstairs above the hearth during the winters, & outside come summertime. Up every day before dawn, they baked bread for the mornings, cooked soups for the afternoons, & created divine feasts for the evenings. They roasted meats, made jellies, cooked puddings, & crafted desserts, preparing several meals a day for the white family. They also had to feed every free person who passed through the plantation. If a traveler showed up, day or night, bells would ring for the enslaved cook to prepare food...

Enslaved cooks were always under the direct gaze of white Virginians. Private moments were rare, as was rest. But cooks wielded great power: As part of the “front stage” of plantation culture, they carried the reputations of their enslavers—& of Virginia—on their shoulders. Guests wrote gushing missives about the meals in they ate while visiting these homes...

These cooks knew their craft. Hercules, who cooked for George Washington, & James Hemings, an enslaved cook at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, were both formally trained, albeit in different styles. Hercules was taught by the well-known New York tavern keeper & culinary giant Samuel Frances, who mentored him in Philadelphia; Hemings traveled with Jefferson to Paris, where he learned French-style cooking. Hercules & Hemings were the nation’s first celebrity chefs, famous for their talents & skills.

Folklore, archaeological evidence, & a rich oral tradition reveal that other cooks, their names now lost, also weaved their talents into the fabric of our culinary heritage, creating & normalizing the mixture of European, African, & Native American cuisines that became the staples of Southern food. Enslaved cooks brought this cuisine its unique flavors, adding ingredients such as hot peppers, peanuts, okra, & greens. They created favorites like gumbo, an adaptation of a traditional West African stew; & jambalaya, a cousin of Jolof rice, a spicy, heavily seasoned rice dish with vegetables & meat. These dishes traveled with captured West Africans on slave ships, & into the kitchens of Virginia’s elite.

You also see evidence of this multi-cultural transformation in so-called “receipt books,” handwritten cookbooks from the 18th & 19th centuries. These were compiled by slaveholding women, whose responsibilities sat firmly in the domestic sphere, & are now housed in historical societies throughout the country. Early receipt books are dominated by European dishes: puddings, pies, & roasted meats. But by the 1800s, African dishes began appearing in these books. Offerings such as pepper pot, okra stew, gumbo, & jambalaya became staples on American dining tables. Southern food—enslaved cooks’ food—had been written into the American cultural profile.

For the women who wrote & preserved the receipt books, these recipes, the products of African foodways, were something worthy of remembering, re-creating, & establishing as Americana. So why can’t we, as Americans today, look at this history for what it was? Colonial & antebellum elite Southerners understood fully that enslaved people cooked their food. During the 19th century, there were moments of widespread fear that these cooks would poison them, & we know from court records & other documents that on at least a few occasions enslaved cooks did slip poisons like hemlock into their masters’ food.

But the country began recalibrating its memories of black cooking even before the Civil War...While newly free African Americans fled the plantations to find work as housekeepers, butlers, cooks, drivers, Pullman porters & waiters—the only jobs they could get...to be an American is to live in a place where contradictions are the very fibers that bind a complicated heritage divided sharply by race.

Garden to Table - South Carolina - Peanuts

Dr David S Shields, author and distinguished professor at the University of South Carolina tells us of the "Carolina African Runner Peanut.  This small sweet peanut was the variety brought over by enslaved Africans from the Gold Coast and Slave Coast at the end of the 17th century—it is the ancestral peanut of the South."

Slaves appear to have planted peanuts throughout the southern United States (the word goober comes from the Congo name for peanuts – nguba). In the 18C, peanuts, then called groundnuts or ground peas, were studied by botanists & suggested as an excellent food for pigs. Records show that peanuts were grown commercially in South Carolina around 1800 & used for oil, food & a substitute for cocoa.

Although there were some commercial peanut farms in the U.S. during the 18C & 19C, peanuts were not grown extensively. Until the Civil War, the peanut remained basically a regional food associated with the southern U.S.

The legumes eventually made their way to the South on board slave ships, which were stocked with peanuts for the long voyage. Some speculate that the peanut plant may have originated in Brazil or Peru, although no fossil records exist to prove this.

For as long as people have been making pottery in South America (3,500 years or so) they have been making jars shaped like peanuts & decorated with peanuts. Graves of ancient Incas found along the dry western coast of South America often contain jars filled with peanuts & left with the dead to provide food in the afterlife. Tribes in central Brazil also ground peanuts with maize to make an intoxicating beverage for celebrations.

In the Americas, peanuts were grown as far north as Mexico by the time the Spanish began their exploration of the New World. European explorers took peanuts back to Spain, where they are still grown. From Spain, traders & explorers took peanuts to Africa & Asia. In Africa the plant became common in the western tropical region. The peanut was regarded by many Africans as one of several plants possessing a soul.

During the 19C American Civil War, letters & memoirs from the Civil War relate that Confederate soldiers were without the basics of bread or meat, especially toward the end of the war. Peanuts were an available food & could be carried wherever they went. On the trail, soldiers roasted or boiled peanuts over campfires & added salt as a preservative.

Women as Fruit Venders in 1863 USA

Flowers are formed to please the eye & indulge the fancy; but fruits are a healthy & important article of food. Some women sell fruit in market; some, at stalls in the street; some, in fruit shops or groceries, & some, from baskets, going from house to house. 

Most dispose of small fruit, such as berries —some wild & some cultivated. The ferries in large cities are very good stands for sellers of fruits & sweetmeats. Places of amusement & the entrance to cemeteries, are also. 

I talked to one apple woman, who says her business is a slavish one. Her stand was at the Atlantic ferry, New York. When she goes to her dinner, she gets the gate keeper to mind her stand. She earns, on an average, $1 a day. She rises, gets her breakfast, & starts to market by five o'clock. She remains at her stand until nine o'clock at night. She sells the greatest quantity of fruit in the spring & fall, when people are most apt to be making money, & so permit a little self indulgence. She sells least in winter. 

I saw a woman on the street selling fruit & flowers. When she is out all day, she can generally earn from fifty cents to $1. Another fruit seller told me that she makes a good living. She has been at her stand eight years. She sells most fresh fruit in summer; & in winter, about the holidays, most dry fruit & nuts. In the coldest weather she remains in her basement, heated by a stove, where she stores her fruit at night. Her grapes are brought in on the cars, put up in pasteboard boxes. Her location is excellent, for the working class of people pass in the evening, returning from work, or in their promenades. 

I talked with an old woman at an apple stand, who told me she often sells $1 worth of articles in a day, but seldom makes a profit of more than half. She seils most fruit in summer, but most cigars, candy, & nuts in winter. She says there is a stand on every block, in that part of New York. Hers is a good location, because so many men pass. In wet weather, she does not sell much. She is shielded in winter, by sitting in a hall near, where she can keep an eye on her stand. She lives near, & while she goes home to dinner, her husband sells for her. 

An apple woman, in New York, told us, she has kept her stand in Washington park for seven years. She remains at it all the year. If any other fruit vender should trespass on her bounds, a policeman would soon send him or her off. Another old woman, keeping a fruit stand, told me she makes a comfortable living at it in summer; but in winter she stays in a confectionery store, & gets $10 a month & her board. 

At another fruit stand, on asking the old lady how she got on, she burst into tears, & replied, very poorly, scarcely made enough to keep her alive. A professional honor exists among fruit women, & a desire to sustain each other in their rights. A wholesale fruit dealer writes me that it takes from two to four years to learn the business, when carried on extensively. 

The Employments of Women: A Cyclopaedia of Woman's Work by Virginia Panny Published Boston, MA. by Walker, Wise & Company. 1863

To read about women's changing roles in the 2nd half of the 19th century. see:
Boorstin, Daniel. The Americans: The Democratic Experience. New York:Random House, 1973.
Clinton, Catherine. The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Hill and Wang, 1984.
Cott, Nancy. A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of Women. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979.
Cott Nancy. History of Women in the United States, Part 6, Working the Land. New York: K. G. Saur, 1992.
Degler, Carl. At Odds: Women and the Family from Revolution to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Green, Harvey. The Light of the Home: An Intimate View of the Lives of Women in Victorian America. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983.
Juster, Norton. So Sweet to Labor: Rural Women in America 1865-1895. New York: The Viking Press, 1979.
Kessler-Harris, Alice. Out to Work: A History of Wage Earning Women in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982
Mintz, Stephen and Susan Kellogg. Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life. New York: Free Press; London: Collier Macmillan, 1988.
Ryan, Mary P. Womanhood in America front he Colonial Times to the Present. New York: F. Watts, 1983.
Smith-Rosenberg, Caroll. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Strasser, Susan. Never Done: A History of American Housework. New York Pantheon Books, 1982.
Welter, Barbara. Dimity Convictions : the American Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Athens : Ohio University Press, 1976.

Garden to Table - Chocolate

Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702-1789)  Madame Liotard and her Daughter & Chocolate  Detail

Garden to Table - Jefferson's (1743-1824) Slave Cook Frances (Fanny) Hern

Monticello's kitchen, restored to its 1809 configuration

 Frances (Fanny) Gillette Hern, An Enslaved Cook

From Monticello's Digital Classroom

Frances (Fanny) Hern was the daughter of Edward and Jane Gillette, enslaved farm laborers who had twelve children. While Thomas Jefferson was president, the family worked in the fields for a tenant on the Monticello plantation.

Fanny married David (Davy) Hern, who worked at Monticello as an enslaved nailmaker, blacksmith, and wagon driver. In 1806, Thomas Jefferson decided that Fanny and Edith Hern Fossett, Davy’s sister, should go to the White House and train to be cooks. They traveled the 120 mile journey in a cart pulled by two mules.

At the White House, Fanny trained with chef Honoré Julien. She received a small gratuity but not a wage. Her husband visited every six months, arriving at the White House with letters and crates of supplies, departing for Monticello with seeds, trees, geese, and hogs. While at the White House, Fanny and Davy’s daughter died of whooping cough.

In 1809, Jefferson retired from the presidency and left the White House. Fanny, Davy, Edith, and Edith’s children traveled back to Monticello through a snow storm “half-leg deep.” Fanny was pregnant. That summer, her daughter Ellen was born. Fanny and Davy had eight children; however, five died at a young age

Fanny continued to work as a cook in the Monticello kitchen, located under the south terrace. She and Edith, the head chef, cooked on “iron stew holes mounted in a brick base”, which resembled an early kitchen stove. They prepared vegetables, roasted meat and churned ice cream, a favorite dessert at Monticello. Jefferson’s guest praised the meals: “The dinner is always choice and served in the French style.”

Research & images & much more are directly from the Monticello website - to begin exploring, just click the highlighted acknowledgment above. 

Garden to Table - Kitchen Garden

The Fuller Garden in the English Village at Plimoth Plantation, in Plymouth, Mass.

Ye Olde Kitchen Garden by Michael Tortorello

New York Times Published: July 6, 2011

Who was Good King Henry?

I first encountered the label in the Fedco Seeds catalog, as a common name for a plant in the genus Chenopodium. It’s an edible perennial with shoots like asparagus and leaves like spinach. But before Good King Henry was a salad green, he was, ostensibly, something nobler: European royalty.

There is no shortage of English Henrys to choose from, though few are remembered as paragons of good government. And did any of them have an appetite for roughage? On this question, history is mostly quiet.

A 1545 French herbal, or primitive botanical guide, mentions a “bon-Henri” (perhaps Henry IV of France), said Kathleen Wall, who cooks and gardens at Plimoth Plantation, a living history museum in Plymouth, Mass. But then Ms. Wall, 53, has also found a “bad Henry,” of German origin: der böse Heinrich.

What if Henry wasn’t a king at all, but an elf? That’s one of the hypotheses the botanical historian Judith Sumner put to me by e-mail.

“Henry (or Heinz or Heinrich) was a typical name for elves,” she wrote. “So the plant name may reflect some presumed magical qualities rather than commemorating an actual king. The ‘good’ part might mean it was safe to ingest.”

The exact namesake for Good King Henry may be lost to time. But then the plant itself, like so many others, has almost vanished as well. In the raised-bed gardens that flank the houses at Plimoth Plantation, Ms. Wall grew Good King Henry for years.

But “I didn’t save the seed,” said Ms. Wall, who bought it every year from catalogs instead. “And then the seed was gone for a long time.”

The mystery of Good King Henry made me wonder about other Colonial-era vegetables that have all but disappeared from our gardens and dinner plates. Gardeners today will routinely raise a dozen varieties of tomato, a plant utterly foreign to early Americans. So why do we neglect common Colonial food plants like burnet, smallage, skirrets, scorzonera, gooseberry and purslane? And how would they taste to us now?

When it comes to Good King Henry, Ms. Wall said, the flavor is easy to describe: bland. “That’s probably why it fell out of favor,” she said. “It wasn’t special. It doesn’t get into the recipe books, so it’s just forgotten.”

In contrast, she said, spinach, a green that “springs up in the English garden scene in the 1580s,” grew stalwartly through the country’s mild summers. And by the 17th century, “suddenly all the recipes called for spinach: salads of spinach, spinach boiled, with added butter and cinnamon and sugar and raisins.”

The story of early American kitchen gardening hides in recipes like these. Another source is herbals — what one modern historian calls “botanical bibles.” Yet botany, as we know it, is just a shadow on these pages. The herbal presents a pre-scientific universe, a realm of astrology and magic.

A “vegetable” could be any plant. An “herb” was a useful one, for the table or the medicine chest.

The colonists relied on popular guides like “The Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes” (1597), 1,400 pages of reminiscences, folk medicine and superstition written by John Gerard. Domestic handbooks like Thomas Hill’s “Profitable Arte of Gardening” (1568) were more artful than horticultural.

“A lot of the time when they write about gardening,” Ms. Wall said, referring to authors like Hill, “they’re writing about the ancient Greeks” or Romans — that is, beliefs and ideals that dated back to Pliny the Younger.

Actually growing “herbs” to feed a New England household was anything but a scholarly pursuit. The average kitchen garden was about an acre, the historian James E. McWilliams wrote in a monograph titled “ ‘To Forward Well-Flavored Productions’: The Kitchen Garden in Early New England,” from the March 2004 issue of The New England Quarterly. Hired help was practically nonexistent. Given the abundance of land, settlers had their own acres to harvest. And men were preoccupied with tending livestock and sowing grains.

That meant “this arduous task fell almost entirely to women,” Mr. McWilliams wrote. Then, as now, raised beds were standard. The soil needed to be improved, Mr. McWilliams noted: “stirred,” loosened and loaded with dung. A garden often would include an orchard of fruit trees, like apples, pears, quince and plums. And these required their own pruning and picking.

Ms. Wall has tried this kind of labor for herself in the recreated gardens outside each of the 12 historical dwellings at Plimoth Plantation. “I’m a housewife of perpetual visitation,” she said. “I travel between houses and help people.”

After 30 years at the museum, Ms. Wall is past complaining about the period costumes. But going without glasses, as most 17th-century women did, is an abiding nuisance. “It’s really hard for me to put seed in without having my nose in the ground,” she said. And weeds “have to grow large enough that I can tell them from my plants.”

It doesn’t help matters that many Colonial-era “herbs,” like dandelions or patience dock (Rumex patientia), would now be tarred as weeds. Burnet (Sanguisorba officinalis), one of Ms. Wall’s favorites, can be found growing by the side of the road.

The plant has a tireless quality. The flowers, typically maroon, will bloom all summer if you keep picking them, she said. And the little leaves of salad burnet (Sanguisorba minor) can be harvested almost all year.

“Why is this something that doesn’t show up in all these salad mixes?” she said.

Burnet turns up on a list of 59 seeds that John Winthrop Jr., a future governor of the Colony of Connecticut, ordered in 1631 from a London grocer, Robert Hill. And herbals widely recommended burnet, with its cucumber-like flavor, for doctoring wine after long sea voyages. “I dare say a lot of that wine needed help,” Ms. Wall said.

Yet burnet fell out of favor. For all her research, Ms. Wall has yet to answer the question of what makes something fashionable.

A case study, she said, could be smallage (Apium graveolens). The biennial plant grows a stalk like celery, but thicker and taller. And for 300 years — in between “medieval English cookery” and the “18th century,” Ms. Wall said — it displaced celery in cookbooks.

She discovered why after she and the head Plimoth horticulturist conducted a long quest for smallage, and she finally grew out the seeds herself.

“I was making potato salad,” she said, “and I didn’t have any celery. Then I realized, I have smallage. And in potato salad, it was heaven.”

And then there are the historical plants whose disappearance is no cause for mourning. A good riddance goes out to the root crop skirrets (Sium sisarum), said Clarissa Dillon, 77, who practices historical cooking and gardening at the 1696 Thomas Massey House in Marple Township, Pa.

John Winthrop Jr. ordered three ounces of skirret seed for his father’s Massachusetts farmstead. The medicine of the era attributed some colorful qualities to the plant, notes Ann Leighton’s 1970 classic, “Early American Gardens: ‘For Meate or Medicine.’ ”

“ ‘They are something windie, by reason whereof they also provoke lust,’ ” Ms. Leighton wrote, quoting John Gerard’s herbal. “ ‘The women in Susula ... prepare the roots for their husbands, and know full well wherefore and why.’ ” (If ardor persists for more than four hours, call your physician.)

It’s no great challenge coaxing a bunch of skirrets to fill the yard. The horticulturist who started Dr. Dillon on skirrets “did not tell me how enthusiastic the seeds are,” she said. “And I have them everywhere.”

A cook needs an awful lot of plants to yield more than a teaspoon of roasted pulp. The edible root “is supposed to be the size of a man’s thumb,” Dr. Dillon said. But “my skirrets tend to be, as a friend said, the size of her dog’s toenails.”

And these toenails need to be peeled, too. “What’s really awful,” Dr. Dillon added, is the “wire” that runs through another forsaken and fast-spreading root crop, scorzonera (which botanists know as Scorzonera hispanica and civilians call viper’s grass). This core runs through the center of the root and must be removed. Far easier, she said, is to substitute parsnips, which are bigger, sweeter, better.

Gerard had his notions of why a woman would favor skirrets in the kitchen (and the bedroom). But Dr. Dillon wrote her dissertation on women and 18th-century kitchen gardens in eastern Pennsylvania, while she was teaching elementary school and raising a child. The experience helped her formulate a rule about why a taxing plant like skirrets might fall into the compost heap of history.

“Women don’t make work for themselves,” Dr. Dillon said. “They have enough to do.”

Clarissa Dillon at the 1696 Thomas Massey House in Marple Township, Pa.

Growing History

A PACKET of 250 purslane seeds costs about $3.60 from Seeds of Change, (888) 762-7333 or seedsofchange.com. Not a bad price, though it may be 249 purslane seeds too many. Like a lot of the “sallet” greens that the colonists brought with them to the New World, purslane (Portulaca oleracea) can colonize a yard all on its own.

A single specimen can produce a million seeds. Let a purslane patch go, said Clarissa Dillon, a food and garden historian, and “it’s the plant that eats your driveway.”

“It will come up through asphalt,” she said.

You can spray the thick red stem and the sprawling oval leaves with weed killer, Dr. Dillon added, which is what most gardeners do. Or you can pickle the whole plant with “equal parts vinegar and stale beer,” which is what she prefers.

Dr. Dillon recommends blanching the purslane first for a quick three-count. “I don’t want it to be limp,” she said. She learned this preparation from a “receipt” (that is, a recipe) in her 1750 edition of “The Compleat Housewife: Or Accomplish’d Gentlewoman’s Companion.”

Tricks like these were once common knowledge among kitchen gardeners, said Joel Fry, the curator at Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia, which dates from 1728. “One of the reasons they’ve disappeared,” he said of some colonial-era food plants, “is we don’t know what to do with them.”

Dr. Dillon learned a method for removing the stringy core from scorzonera. Overbaking the root crop for a few minutes can make the “wire” less unwieldy. There’s only one way to find out if it’s worth it: Fedco Seeds, fedcoseeds.com or (207) 873-7333, lists a 1/8-ounce packet for $1.30. (A trial packet of smallage, available under the name Afina Cutting Celery, is even cheaper at just 90 cents.)

Fedco sold out of skirret seed this spring. But Amishland Heirloom Seeds offers a packet of 20 seeds for $2.50; amishlandseeds.com.

The sallet green Good King Henry (Chenopodium bonus-henricus) can be found at Fedco as well. And to the long list of aliases for the plant, Fedco adds Lincolnshire spinach and goosefoot.

Like goosefoot (and goose itself), the gooseberry (Ribes hirtellum or uva-crispa) seems to have dropped off the nation’s menu at least a century ago. The cause was no mystery: federal authorities started to quarantine and eradicate the thorny shrub in 1917 to limit the spread of white pine blister rust. In 2003, New York State finally legalized the gooseberry and its close cousin, the red currant. (Sales of gooseberry and various currant shrubs remain restricted in a cluster of Eastern states, including parts of New Jersey.)

Hardy gooseberries were native to the New World. But that didn’t stop the English from importing their own varieties, said Kathleen Wall, a historical culinarian. These plants bore bigger, sweeter fruit. They also died in the warmer climate. Raintree Nursery, raintreenursery.com or (800) 391-8892, sells a dozen cultivars (most for $11.50), including a few American gooseberries that have a resistance to powdery mildew.

The English never lost their taste for gooseberries, Ms. Wall said, but colonial gardeners were typically pragmatic. When a tart called for small, sour fruit, they looked to the yard and started cooking with cranberries..

Tho Jefferson's (1743-1824) Legacy in Gardening & Food

Thomas Jefferson by Tadeusz Andrzej Bonawentura Kosciuszko (1746 - 1817)

 Thomas Jefferson's Legacy in Gardening and Food

Jefferson's Monticello garden was a Revolutionary American garden. One wonders if anyone else had ever before assembled such a collection of vegetable novelties, culled from virtually every western culture known at the time, then disseminated by Jefferson with the persistence of a religious reformer, a seedy evangelist. Here grew the earth's melting pot of immigrant vegetables: an Ellis Island of introductions, the whole world of hardy economic plants: 330 varieties of eighty-nine species of vegetables and herbs, 170 varieties of the finest fruit varieties known at the time. The Jefferson legacy supporting small farmers, vegetable cuisine, and sustainable agriculture is poignantly topical today.

Thomas Jefferson's 1,000-foot-long, terraced vegetable garden is the true American garden: practical, expansive, casual, diverse, wrought from a world of edible immigrants. Although the variable continental climate of Virginia presents unique horticultural challenges, few places on earth combine tropical heat and humidity with mildly temperate winters like those at Monticello. The microclimate, and really the genius, of the south-facing, terraced Monticello garden exaggerates the summer warmth, tempers the winter cold, and captures an abundant wealth of crop-ripening sunshine. To grow so many tropical species like sweet potatoes, peanuts, and lima beans in the same garden as traditional cool-weather crops like cauliflower, endive, and celery, without artificial hot beds, had likely never been done before Thomas Jefferson accomplished this feat at Monticello.

Aside from its diverse population of mostly introduced crops, the Monticello garden was American in its size and scope, experimental character, and expansive visual sweep. 600,000 cubic feet of Piedmont red clay was moved with a cart and mule to create the "hanging garden," and the terrace was supported by a rock wall as tall as fifteen feet and also running 1,000 feet. Below is the six-acre fruit garden that contained 170 varieties of the most celebrated varieties known at the time. As it stretches to the western horizon, seemingly limitlessly against the background of Montalto, Jefferson's "high mountain" to the southwest, or as one looks across the garden terrace to the forty miles of rolling Piedmont, the "sea view," one is struck by the garden's uniquely continental panorama.

Thomas Jefferson liked to eat vegetables, which "constitute my principal diet," and his role in linking the garden with the kitchen into a cuisine defined as "half French, half Virginian" was a pioneering concept in the history of American food. The Monticello kitchen, as well as the table at the President's House in Washington, expressed a seething broil of new, culinary traditions based on these recent garden introductions: French fries, peanuts, Johnny-cakes, gumbo, mashed potatoes, sweet potato pudding, sesame seed oil, fried eggplant, perhaps such American icons as potato chips, tomato catsup, and pumpkin pie. The western traditions of gardening—in England, France, Spain, the Mediterranean—were blended into a dynamic and unique Monticello cookery through the influence of emerging colonial European, native American, slave, Creole and southwestern vegetables.

Jefferson's daughter, Martha, left a recipe for okra soup, in effect, gumbo, a compelling metaphor for the Monticello garden: a rich blend of American native vegetables grown by American Indians like lima beans and cymlins; South and Central American discoveries adapted by both northern (potatoes) and southern (tomatoes) Europeans; and tied together by an African plant, okra, grown by both the French and enslaved blacks in the West Indies, rarely known among white Virginians, and prepared by African-American chefs at Monticello.

Jefferson, according to culinary historian Karen Hess, was "our most illustrious epicure, in fact, our only epicurean President," and his devotion to fresh produce, whether in the President's House at a state dinner, or at Monticello for the large numbers of celebrity tourists who crowded the retired President's table, remains a central legacy of Jefferson's gardening career. Jefferson also promoted commercial market gardening. The remarkable calendar he compiled while President, delineating the first and last appearance of thirty-seven vegetables in the Washington DC farmer's market, is among the most revelatory documents in the history of American food. As well, it was Jefferson himself who obtained new vegetable varieties from foreign consuls, passed them on to Washington market gardeners, and ordered his maitre'd to pay the highest prices for the earliest produce.

In 1792 Jefferson, while serving as Secretary of State in Philadelphia, received a letter from his daughter, Martha, complaining about the insect-riddled plants in the Monticello Vegetable Garden. His response is a stirring anthem to the organic gardening movement. "We will try this winter to cover our garden with a heavy coating of manure. When is rich it bids defiance to droughts, yields in abundance, and of the best quality. I suspect that the insect which have harassed you have been encouraged by the feebleness of your plants; and that has been produced by the lean state of the soil." Jefferson's rallying cry on the remedial value of manure, the horticultural rewards of soil improvement, has inspired gardeners of all kinds. Jefferson not only enjoyed the garden process and relished eating fresh produce, but the garden also functioned as an experimental laboratory, in some ways, as a vehicle for social change. He wrote that, "the greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add an useful plant to its culture," and Jefferson ranked the introduction of the olive tree and upland rice into the United States with his authorship of the Declaration of Independence. A Johnny Apple seed of the vegetable world, Jefferson passed out seeds of his latest novelty with messiahinistic fervor: not only to friends and neighbors like George Divers and John Hartwell Cocke, his family of daughters, granddaughers, and sons in law, but to fellow politicians—from George Washington to James Madison—and the leading plantsmen of the early nineteenth century like McMahon, William Bartram, William Hamiton of Philadelphia, and Andre Thouin of Paris.  Although few species can be proven as Jefferson introductions into American gardens, the recitation of vegetables grown at Monticello is a meditative chant of rare, unusual, and pioneering species: asparagus bean, sea kale, tomatoes, rutabaga, lima beans, okra, potato pumpkins, winter melons, tree onion, peanuts, "sprout kale," serpentine cucumbers, cauliflower, broccoli, Brussells sprouts, orach, endive, peanuts, chick peas, cayenne pepper, "esculent Rhubarb," black salsify, sesame, eggplant.

Although a modest endeavor, Jefferson's only published horticultural work was "A General Gardening Calendar," a monthly guide to kitchen gardening that appeared in a May 21, 1824 edition of the American Farmer, a Baltimore periodical of progressive agriculture. Here Jefferson authoritatively instructed gardeners to plant a thimble spool of lettuce seed every Monday morning from February 1 to September 1, as if the Monday morning lettuce sowing was a life lesson or discipline akin to dutifully saying your prayers or cleaning one's dinner plate; the rites of Monday morning led to a long life, happiness, and good teeth.

In 2009, White House chef and Coordinator of the White House Food Initiative, Sam Kass, reserved a discrete section of this garden in honor of Thomas Jefferson. In the spring of 2009 it was planted with seeds and plants of Thomas Jefferson's favorite vegetable varieties: Tennis-ball and Brown Dutch lettuce, Prickly-seeded spinach and Marseilles fig. The Jefferson legacy in gardening and food is not a mere historical curiosity, but is a compelling force in the movement toward a more sustainable agricultural future.

Peter J. Hatch, Director Monticello Gardens and Grounds, 2010

Research & images & much more are directly available from the Monticello website - to begin exploring, just click the highlighted title above. 

South Carolina - Plants for the Table - Slaves & Rice in Georgetown

"The intricate steps involved in planting, cultivating, harvesting, and preparing rice required an immense labor force. Planters stated that African slaves were particularly suited to provide that labor force for two reasons: 1) rice was grown in some areas of Africa and there was evidence that some slaves were familiar with the methods of cultivation practiced there, and 2) it was thought that the slaves, by virtue of their racial characteristics, were better able than white laborers to withstand the extreme heat and humidity of the tidal swamps and therefore would be more productive workers. Rice cultivation resulted in a dramatic increase in the numbers of slaves owned by South Carolinians before the American Revolution.

"In 1680, four-fifths of South Carolina's population was white. However, black slaves outnumbered white residents two to one in 1720, and by 1740, slaves constituted nearly 90% of the population. Much of the growing slave population came from the West Coast of Africa, a region that had gained notoriety by exporting its large rice surpluses.

"While there is no consensus on how rice first reached the American coast, there is much debate over the contribution of African-born slaves to its successful cultivation. New research demonstrates that the European planters lacked prior knowledge of rice farming, while uncovering the long history of skilled rice cultivation in West Africa. Furthermore, Islamic, Portuguese, and Dutch traders all encountered and documented extensive rice cultivation in Africa before South Carolina was even settled.

"At first rice was treated like other crops, it was planted in fields and watered by rains. By the mid-18th century, planters used inland swamps to grow rice by accumulating water in a reservoir, then releasing the stored water as needed during the growing season for weeding and watering. Similarly, prior records detail Africans controlling springs and run off with earthen embankments for the same purposes of weeding and watering.

"Soon after this method emerged, a second evolution occurred, this time to tidewater production, a technique that had already been perfected by West African farmers. Instead of depending upon a reservoir of water, this technique required skilled manipulation of tidal flows and saline-freshwater interactions to attain high levels of productivity in the floodplains of rivers and streams. Changing from inland swamp cultivation to tidal production created higher expectations from plantation owners. Slaves became responsible for five acres of rice, three more than had been possible previously. Because of this new evidence coming to light, some historians contend that African-born slaves provided critical expertise in the cultivation of rice in South Carolina. The detailed and extensive rice cultivating systems increased demand for slave imports in South Carolina, doubling the slave population between 1750 and 1770. These slaves faced long days of backbreaking work and difficult tasks.

"A slave's daily work on an antebellum rice plantation was divided into tasks. Each field hand was given a task--usually nine or ten hours' hard work--or a fraction of a task to complete each day according to his or her ability. The tasks were assigned by the driver, a slave appointed to supervise the daily work of the field hands. The driver held the most important position in the slave hierarchy on the rice plantation. His job was second only to the overseer in terms of responsibility.

"The driver's job was particularly important because each step of the planting, growing, and harvesting process was crucial to the success or failure of the year's crop. In the spring, the land was harrowed and plowed in preparation for planting. Around the first of April rice seed was sown by hand using a small hoe. The first flooding of the field, the sprout flow, barely covered the seed and lasted only until the grain sprouted. The water was then drained to keep the delicate sprout from floating away, and the rice was allowed to grow for approximately three weeks. Around the first of May any grass growing among the sprouts was weeded by hoe and the field was flooded by the point flow to cover just the tops of the plants. After a few days the water was gradually drained until it half covered the plants. It remained at this level--the long flow--until the rice was strong enough to stand. More weeding followed and then the water was slowly drained completely off the field. The ground around the plants was hoed to encourage the growth and extension of the roots. After about three weeks, the field was hoed and weeded again, at which time--around mid-June or the first of July--the lay-by flow was added and gradually increased until the plants were completely submerged. This flow was kept on the field for about two months with fresh water periodically introduced and stagnant water run off by the tidal flow through small floodgates called trunks.

"Rice planted in the first week of April was usually ready for harvesting by the first week of September. After the lay-by flow was withdrawn, just before the grain was fully ripe, the rice was cut with large sickles known as rice hooks and laid on the ground on the stubble. After it had dried overnight, the cut rice was tied into sheaves and taken by flatboat to the threshing yard. In the colonial period, threshing was most often done by beating the stalks with flails. This process was simple but time consuming. If the rice was to be sold rough, it was then shipped to the agent; otherwise, it was husked and cleaned--again, usually by hand. By the mid-19th century most of the larger plantations operated pounding and/or threshing mills which were driven by steam engines. After the rice had been prepared, it was packed in barrels, or tierces, and shipped to the market at Georgetown or Charleston. In 1850 a rice plantation in the Georgetown County area produced an average yield of 300,000 pounds of rice. The yield had increased to 500,000 pounds by 1860."

See The U.S. National Park Service

Garden to Table - America's Earliest Cookbook Author

Woman Bundling Asparagus, 1771, John Atkinson (British artist, fl 1770-1775)  

Amelia Simmons. American Cookery, or the art of dressing viands, fish, poultry, and vegetables, and the best modes of making pastes, puffs, pies, tarts, puddings, custards, and preserves, and all kinds of cakes, from the imperial plum to plain cake: Adapted to this country, and all grades of life. By Amelia Simmons, an American orphan. Hartford: Printed for Simeon Butler, Northampton, 1798.

Biography of Amelia Simmons

Very little is known of Amelia Simmons, the author of the first American cookbook. She seems to have appeared for the publication of American Cookery and then disappeared back into obscurity. There may be a faint clue to her identity in the title page reference to herself as an "American Orphan," followed by a discussion of the trials of orphanhood in the preface. She may have been unmarried, had little education, and was quite possibly illiterate. She writes of "those females who have parents, or brothers, or riches," and how female orphans may be "reduced to the necessity of going into families in the line of domestics," from which one may infer that she was employed as a cook. Her lack of education evidently led to some intrigue and a loss of control over the book's content: two different versions of the first edition appeared in 1796, the second of which is supplemented by what food historian Mary Tolford Wilson describes as "a sheet of obviously dissimilar paper" on which is printed an "Advertisement." It states:

The author of American Cookery, not having an education sufficient to prepare the work for the press, the person that was employed by her, and entrusted with the receipts, to prepare them for publication, (with a design to impose on her, and injure the sale of the book) did omit several articles very essential in some of the receipts, and placed others in their stead, which were highly injurious to them, without her consent-which was unknown to her, till after publication.

She then lists the corrections to the specific recipes. In Rice Pudding No. 2, for example, just 1/2 pound of butter and eight eggs should be used, not 1 pound butter and 14 eggs as originally stated. (Note: If you check her Rice Pudding No. 2 recipe in this 1798 edition, as well as the other recipes she cites as erroneous, you will find the errors remain uncorrected. Unfortunately for the users of her books as well as for Amelia Simmons's reputation, her attempts at rectification never completely caught up with the printings of her original recipes," writes Wilson in her introduction to the 1958 facsimile of the 1796 first edition, which does contain the list of errata and corrections.)

To make matters worse, when the second edition of American Cookery was published (not in 1800, as commonly noted, but in 1796, as per the findings of bibliographer Eleanor Lowenstein), Simmons claimed to have been shocked to find material in the first edition that she did not write, and had not authorized.

Nearly the whole of seventeen pages in the first edition, was filled with rules, and direction, how to make choice of meats, fowls, fish, and vegetables: this is a matter, with which, the Authoress does not pretend to be acquainted, much less to give directions to others; nor does she consider any way connected, with that branch which she has undertaken which is, simply to point out the most eligible methods of preparing those various articles for the tables when procured. This was done by the transcriber, without her knowledge or consent; and may with propriety be considered as an affront upon the good sense of all classes of citizens.

She goes on to say that her audience, whether city or country folk, know the difference between good and bad market produce, and do not need a guide for such matters. This sentiment may seem puzzling to a modern audience which will find the first seventeen pages of American Cookery (included in this 1798 first edition, of course) to be an informative, useful guide similar to passages found in modern cookbooks as well as cookbooks from the nineteenth century. It apparently, however, was not the work of Simmons.

Although she may not have been an authority at judging market meats, fish and produce, her book certainly establishes Simmons as a skillful cook: as food historian Karen Hess points out, she often calls for a variety of herbs in her cooking, as well as wine, and sets down "extraordinarily fine roasting techniques, English techniques that were admired even by the French." Since English culinary tradition formed the basis of early American cooking, this naturally follows; colonists brought over family recipes (and the well-to-do would ship bound cooking books) from England, and had no opportunity to purchase an American-published cookbook until 1742, when a Williamsburg printer, William Parks, published an American edition of the British cookbook, The Compleat Housewife. Though Smith excluded recipes with ingredients unavailable in America, the chosen recipes continued the same English tradition of cooking. When, in 1772, Susannah Carter published The Frugal Housewife in Boston, she made no concession for American ingredients or habits. Although Simmons "borrowed" heavily from Carter, copying word for word her entire section on creams and syllabubs, she incorporated common early American foods - cornmeal, pumpkins, and molasses -- into these English traditions. Most notably, she was the first cookbook author to use the leavening agent pearl ash, which is derived from leaching large amounts of wood ash, and was common in early America because of the proliferation of timber operations.

Where was Amelia Simmons' home? Some say Hartford, since the book was first published there. In late Colonial times, however, the Albany area was a center for the production of potash, i.e., the unrefined source of the pearl ash used in Simmon's recipes. Hess, seeing this as a clue, suggests Simmons may be from the Albany area or somewhere in the Hudson River Valley. Though American Cookery was initially published in Hartford, the second edition was published in Albany in the same year. Several later places of publication centered around the Hudson River Valley, namely one in Albany in 1804, Troy in 1808, Poughkeepsie in 1815 and New York in 1822. Though other copies hailed from other locales, this cluster of publishers may suggest a meaningful connection with the author. Hess also points out that American Cookery uses a number of Dutch words common to the Hudson River area at that time. These words are slaw, from sla, meaning salad, and cookey, from koekje, meaning cookie (the British would use the phrase "small cake.")

Finally, there is the question of whether Simmons made money from this book. Though it is impossible to say, she may have been a shrewd, business-minded author who founded a marketing strategy with the words of her title: "Adapted to this Country, and All Grades of Life." Not only was this the first cookbook to incorporate popular and plentiful American foods into a traditional cookbook, but it was affordable to many. It sold for two shillings and threepence (the equivalent of about $1.75 today), and contained just 47 octavo pages printed on durable rag paper. The first edition was published "For the Author." which probably meant that Simmons paid the printing costs and kept the sales profits and the publication rights. The book did sell well, for Simmons writes in the 1796 second edition preface that "the call has been so great, and the sales [of American Cookery] so rapid that [the author] finds herself not only encouraged but under a necessity of publishing a second edition." The second edition was widely reprinted but some were possibly unauthorized, because Amelia Simmons' name did not always appear on the title page. Then there were the outright piracies of the work, like the 1805 book, New American Cookery . . . By an American Lady, published in New York, which tacked on some original material, and the 1819 book, Domestic Cookery by Harriet Whiting, which was published in Boston and was devoid of any new material, not even the corrections Simmons called for back in 1796. It is fair to say that Simmons probably made some money, and was probably cheated of some money too. Her book remains an historical marker in American cookery, just as her life story remains a question mark in American biography.  From The Historic American Cookbook Project: Feeding America

Sources:
Hopley, Claire. "American Cookery," American History. 31, no. 2 (May 1, 1996):16 - 19, 65 - 66.
Ridley, Glynis. "The First American Cookbook," Eighteenth-Century Life. 23, no. 2 (1999): 114 - 123.
Simmons, Amelia. American Cookery, or the art of dressing viands, fish, poultry, and vegetables, and the best modes of making pastes, puffs, pies, tarts, puddings, custards, and preserves, and all kinds of cakes, from the imperial plum to plain cake: Adapted to this country, and all grades of life. By Amelia Simmons, an American orphan. Hartford: Printed for Simeon Butler, Northampton, 1798.
----------. American Cookery . . .Hartford: Hudson & Goodwin, 1796. Facsimile, with introduction by Mary Tolford Wilson, New York: Oxford University Press, 1958.
----------. American Cookery . . . Albany: Charles R. and George Webster, 1796, second edition. Facsimile, with introduction by Karen Hess, Bedford, Massachusetts: Applewood Books, 1996.
von Biel, Victoria. "Profiles in Cooking: Amelia Simmons," Bon Appetit. 43, no. 10 (October 1, 1998): 73, 76 - 77.