The Devil's Dinner by Stuart Walton

Author:Stuart Walton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

8

Bowls o’ Red and Chili Queens—An American Affair

The early history of North American cooking bears the complex imprints of the various culinary traditions brought across the Atlantic by European settlers from a diversity of backgrounds. There was an obvious English strain, buoyed by the use of standard cookbooks such as Eliza Smith’s The Compleat Housewife (1727) and The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747) by Hannah Glasse. These were domestic tracts that retained a link to the cooking of the English aristocracy, theoretically democratized for use in middling households with kitchen staff. Glasse’s book found a home in the kitchens of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, and although its ideological heart lay in Anglo-Saxon thrift and economy—its third chapter was entitled “Read this chapter, and you will find how expensive a French cook’s sauce is”—it nonetheless applied the glossy veneer of haute cuisine when inspiration demanded. There were daubes and truffled sauces, and a recipe for “French bread,” but there was also an attempt at a chicken curry in the Indian style, coyly spiced with ginger, turmeric, and pepper, but with nothing so brash as a chili pepper.

By the time the North American edition of Glasse’s book had appeared in 1805, it was a few years behind what is generally considered the first properly indigenous United States cookbook, American Cookery (1796) by Amelia Simmons. While her compendium has obvious continuities with the English cookbooks, Simmons diligently adapts many traditional recipes to the seasonal ingredients of New England and the eastern seaboard. Its roast turkey with cranberries is the first such printed recipe, joining cornmeal johnnycakes, Indian pudding, and Indian slapjacks. The more showstopping recipes, such as the dressing of turtle or calf’s head, or the round of beef à la mode, are seasoned with thoroughgoing quantities of cayenne pepper, the first suggestions of anything in American cookery with a spicier attitude than regular pepper.

In the nineteenth century, the Scottish physician William Kitchiner’s Apicius Redivivus, or the Cook’s Oracle (1817),1 which made its way across the Atlantic to become a New York edition “adapted to the American public” in 1830, takes a buccaneering approach to seasonings and dressings for meat and fish that are laden with what today’s food science knows as umami, the taste element defined by a concentrated savoriness. A sauce piquante for cold meats, fish, and salads is essentially a well-seasoned mayonnaise, but may be boosted by additions such as “mushroom catchup,” horseradish, capers, and cayenne. An all-purpose sauce for grilled meats may be sharpened with “a little Chili vinegar, or a few grains of Cayenne.” The book warns that inferior cayenne has been colored red with lead oxide, to disguise the inferior faded peppers in it, and there were directions on making your own from fresh whole homegrown chilies: “Take away the stalks, and put the pods into a colander; set it before the fire; they will take full twelve hours to dry; then put them into a mortar, with one-fourth their weight

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