My favorite part of researching culinary history is working with manuscript cookbooks. They illustrate more than just the recipes that were being used, for to me, they provide a visual link to the women who were writing them. One can see the style of cooking as it changes over time; the use of ingredients that demonstrate economic status; and the manner by which foods were presented at table, to list just a portion of the information that can be gleaned from reading these sources. As I read manuscript cookbooks while researching Hearthside Cooking, I often came across recipes that seemed familiar. Comparing them with the published sources (Hannah Glasse, Mary Randolph, and Eliza Leslie, for instance), made it obvious that women were often copying recipes from these published cookbooks, just as women do today. Last weekend, a group of friends gathered at Eric Orr’s Lake Anna house to cook and eat recipes from Hearthside Cooking. We began Saturday night’s meal with a recipe from the early 1800s’ Tucker family cookbook, a manuscript that can be found in the archives at William and Mary’s Swem Library. “Frances Tucker Coalter’s Ochra Soup” featured on pages 95-96 of Hearthside Cooking, is from that collection. Here is the recipe, just as Mrs. Coalter transcribed it: Set on a Gallon of Water let it boil cut in two double handfuls of tender Ochra – ½ hour after put in a handful of Lima Beans – 3 Cymlines – and a bit of fresh meat or a fowl, which is better than anything except Beef or Veal – About an hour before you take up your Soup put in 5 large Tomatas cut in pieces or more if you desire when all are well boiled together add Butter rolled in flour, but not to make the soup to thick, and pepper & salt, Observe to make Soup with ochra in a stone vessle and to stir with a wooden spoon as Metal turns it black --- and to put on all soups very early that they may only simmer on the fire. Mary Randolph was a kinswoman of Frances Coalter’s. She wrote The Virginia Housewife, published in 1824, and considered to be the first regional cookbook in America. Here is her version of Ochra Soup: Get two double handfuls of young ochra, wash and slice it thin, add two onions chopped fine, put it into a gallon of water at a very early hour in an earthen pipkin, or very nice iron pot; it must be kept steadily simmering, but not boiling: put in pepper and salt. At 12 o’clock, put in a handful of Lima beans, at half past one o’clock, add three young cimlins cleaned and cut in small pieces, a fowl, or knuckle or veal, a bit of bacon or pork that has been boiled, and six tomatas, with the skins taken off when nearly done: thicken with a spoonful of butter, mixed with one of flour. Have rice boiled to eat with it. While the directions differ considerably, the two recipes appear to be from the same source. According to the Swem Library, Frances Tucker Coalter’s recipe book dates from around 1800; since she was married in 1802, perhaps she recorded her recipe for Ochra Soup around the time she became a bride. Mary Randolph, some seventeen years older than Frances Coalter, was already known as a skilled hostess who kept a fine table. Was she already compiling the recipes later published in The Virginia Housewife? Wouldn’t it be interesting to know which of them first recorded this recipe? Did these two women from the Virginia gentry both have access to another family manuscript cookbook in which a recipe for Ochra Soup already existed? An in-depth examination of both collections might reveal answers to these and other questions that arise as one studies the past through the recipes that link us across generations.
Posted on: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 18:30:24 +0000
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