On Food and History

Bibliography of Mushroom Cookery

Recently I bought a little booklet, Kate Sargeant's One Hundred Mushroom Receipts, published in 2006, by Fred Kelso, Hengwrt Publishing Company, Lewisville, Pennsylvania. It is a reprint of the original book, published in 1899 by Charles Orr, Cleveland, Ohio. It is presumably the first English language cookbook dedicated to the little mushroom. In Mr. Kelso's introduction, he mentions "there were no other mushroom cookbooks published until Countess Morphy's 1938 Mushroom Recipes".

So I had a look in the library here at Kitchen Garden Books and came up with some other titles to add to a bibliography. In Lavonne Brady Axford's excellent bibliography, English Language Cookbooks 1600-1973,  there is a list of more than two dozen books about mushroom cooking, some more contemporary (not included) and she was so useful in compiling this list.

William Rubel of  Santa Cruz, California contacted me recently with several excellent additions, noted by an *asterik. He recommends those marked with the pound sign# as being particularly important. Thank you William!

The Seven Sisters of New Orleans

Many, many years ago when I first discovered the pleasure of reading food history I was  entranced by a picture in the 1964 American Heritage Cook Book, Illustrated History (p.286), Volume I. So charming, so colorful, of such essence depicting the painful nostalgia of the American South. Here was a cookbook with a red and white gingham border with a beautiful painting of an African-American woman marketing, a basket draped over her arm and a fish about to be taken home for a family meal. The attribution states it's in the collection of  The Shadows, New Iberia, Louisiana. A property of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. A caption below the photograph says, "Cover of a manuscript cookbook made for a New Orleans family in the early 1900s. It was bound in the colors of their cook's aprons. She was called Zouzoute and she is portrayed on the cover."

Decades later, while reading introductory remarks, "The Creole Heritage" by Shirley Abbott, in Madame Begue & Picayune Creole Cook Book, part of the Antique American Cook Books Series published in 1984, there she was again! Zouzoute as remarkable as ever.  The caption said pretty much the same thing except for this poignant comment about the fabric, " a 1900s New Orleans family shows their cook, Zouzoute, from whose apron the cover was made."  I could not exactly remember where had I seen her before. And let it rest. 

Table Scraps. 19th Century Manuscript Recipe Holders

Over the last few decades, I have managed to acquire several relatively scarce pieces of culinary Americana, the Recipe Folder. Before the days of recipe boxes, these special recipe cases, basically a handy oversize "envelope" where the cook collected all her loose slips of paper with hand written receipts. I observed that it seemed to be the custom when sharing a recipe, that they were passed along folded in half. I don't know if there was a standard size of writing paper and envelopes, into which the recipes were mailed. Maybe each company had their own size. They are almost always folded.

Recipe Folders were often made of cloth, sometimes leather and usually quite decorative. The example on the left is 5 inches by 10 inches. The cardboard is covered with cream linen and is hand painted. The illustration is of a medieval man and woman at table, a period when it was customary to toss scraps (orts) onto the floor to feed household pets. Quite a tidy tie-in to the bits and pieces tossed into the folder.

Inside the case there is hand-embroidered edging to the flaps on both sides in which to hold the recipes. On the outside, there are remnants of a linen ribbon sewn midway into the spine to secure the contents.

A Ramble Through Jambalaya Land

In March 2006 I was inspired by an article from Bethany Ewald Bultman Who Saved Jambalaya? in Petit Propos Culinare, PPC 80 (a venerable publication on culinary history).  Ms. Bultman proposed that the recipe for Jambalaya among the Cajun population didn't come into general use until the middle of the 20th century. In my limited, but familiar, knowledge of Louisiana cookery and the literature about regional foods of the Creoles and Cajuns, I just knew that Bethany must not have had enough literature of the kitchen at hand when she came to some of her conclusions. Careening through some two dozen books, I assembled a list of citations forwarded to her via email. She thanked me and that seemed to be it.