I
If interest in the art of eating called for justification, I could show
that I come by mine legitimately. My family took care of that when the
sensible ancestor who made me an American settled in Accomac, where most
things worth eating were to be had for the fishing or the shooting or
the digging, so that Accomac feasted while the rest of Virginia still
starved, and when my Grandfather, in his day, moved to Philadelphia
which is as well provided as Accomac and more conscientious in
cultivating its possibilities. It would be sheer disloyalty to the
family inheritance if I did not like to eat well, just as it would be
rank hypocrisy to see in my loyalty a virtue.
Accomac's reputation for good eating has barely got beyond the local
history book, Accomac, I find, being a place you must have belonged to
at one time or another, to know anything about. But Philadelphia made a
reputation for its high living as soon as the Philadelphian emerged from
his original cave, or sooner--read Watson and every other authority and
you will find that before he was out of it, even the family cat occupied
itself in hunting delicacies for the family feast. And right off the
Philadelphian understood the truth the scientist has been centuries in
groping after: that if people's food is to do them good, they must take
pleasure in it. The material was his the minute he landed on the spot,
not the least recommendations of which were its fish and game and its
convenience as a port where all the country did not produce could be
brought from countries that did--a spot that, half-way between the North
and the South, assured to Philadelphia one of the best-stocked markets
in the world, ever the wonder and admiration of every visitor to the
town. Pleasure in the material, if history can be trusted, dates as far
back. A wise man once suggested the agreeable journeys that could be
planned on a gastronomical map of France--from the Tripe of Caen to the
Bouillabaisse of Marseilles, from the Chateau Margaux of Bordeaux to the
Champagne of Rheims, from the Ducks of Rouen to the Truffles of
Perigord, and so, from one end to the other of that Land of Plenty. I
would suggest that an agreeable record of Philadelphia might be based
upon the dinners it has eaten, from the historic dinner foraged for by
the cat over a couple of centuries ago, to the banquet of yesterday in
Spruce Street or Walnut, at the Bellevue or the Ritz.
[Illustration: THE PHILADELPHIA DISPENSARY FROM INDEPENDENCE SQUARE]
I should like some day to write this history myself, when I have more
space and time at my disposal. I have always been blessed with a healthy
appetite, a decent sense of discrimination in satisfying it, and also a
deep interest in the Philosophy of Food ever since I began to collect
cookery books. The more profoundly I go into the subject, the readier I
am to believe with Brillat-Savarin that what a man is depends a good
deal on what he eats. This is why I think that if the Philadelphian is
to be understood, the study of him must not stop with his politics and
his literature and his art, but must include his marketing and his bill
of fare. He has had the wit never to doubt the importance of both, and
the pride never to make light of his genius for living well.
The early Friends in Philadelphia knew better than to pull a long face,
burrowing for the snares of the flesh and the devil in every necessity
of life, like the unfortunate Puritans up in New England. It was not to
lead a hermit's existence William Penn invited them to settle on the
banks of the Delaware, and he and they realized that pioneer's work
could not be done on hermit's fare. They entertained no fanatical
disdain for the pleasures of the table, no ascetic abhorrence to good
food, daintily prepared. Brawn and chocolate and venison were Penn's
tender offering as lover to Hannah Callowhill, olives and wine his
loving gift as friend to Isaac Norris. For equally "acceptable presents"
that admirable citizen had to thank many besides Penn. James Logan knew
that the best way to manage your official is to dine him, and in his
day, and after it, straight on, no public commissioner, and indeed no
private traveller, could visit Philadelphia and not be fed with its
banquets and comforted with its Madeira and Punch, while few could
refrain from saying so with an eloquence and gratitude that did them
honour. Benjamin Franklin, keeping up the tradition, was known to feast
more excellently than a philosopher ought, and his philosophy of food is
explained by his admission in a letter that he would rather discover a
_recipe_ for making Parmesan cheese in an Italian town than any ancient
inscription. The American Philosophical Society could not conduct its
investigations without the aid of dinners and breakfasts, nor could any
other Philadelphia Society or Club study, or read, or hunt, or fish, or
legislate, or pursue its appointed ends, without fine cooking and hard
drinking--though I hope they were not the inspiration of Thomas
Jefferson's severe criticism of his fellow Americans who, he said, were
unable to terminate the most sociable meals without transforming
themselves into brutes. It was impossible for young ladies and grave
elders to keep descriptions of public banquets and family feasts and
friendly tea-drinkings out of their letters and diaries: one reason of
the fascination their letters and diaries have for Philadelphians who
read them to-day. And altogether, by the Revolution, to judge from John
Adams' account of his "sinful feasts" in Philadelphia, and General
Greene's description of the luxury of Boston as "an infant babe" to the
luxury of Philadelphia, and the rest of America's opinion of
Philadelphia as a place of "crucifying expenses," and many more signs of
the times, the dinners of Philadelphia had become so inseparable from
any meeting, function, or business, that I am tempted to question
whether, had they not been eaten, the Declaration of Independence could
have been signed. But it was signed and who can say, in face of the
fact, that Philadelphia was any the worse for its feasting? And what if
it proved a dead weight to John Adams, did Boston, did any other town do
more in the cause of patriotism and independence?
[Illustration: MORRIS HOUSE, GERMANTOWN]
One inevitable feature of the "sinful feasts" was the Madeira John Adams
drank at a great rate, but suffered no inconvenience from. I could not
dispense with it in these old records, such a sober place does it hold
in my own memories of Philadelphia. The decanter of Madeira on my
Grandfather's dinner table marked the state occasion, and I would not
have recognized Philadelphia on my return had the same decanter not been
produced in welcome. It was an assurance that Philadelphia was still
Philadelphia, though sky-scrapers might break the once pleasant monotony
of low, red brick houses and motor horns resound through the once
peaceful streets.
From the beginning Madeira was one of the things no good Philadelphia
household could be without--just the sound, dignified, old-fashioned
wine the Philadelphian would be expected to patronize, respectable and
upright as himself. Orders for it lighten those interminably long
letters in the Penn-Logan correspondence, so long that all the time I
was reading them, I kept wondering which of the three I ought to pity
the most: Penn for what he had to endure from his people; Logan for
having to keep him posted in his intolerable wrongs; or myself for
wading through all they both had to say on the subject. As time went
on, I do not believe there was an official function at which Madeira did
not figure. There I always find it--the wine of ceremony, the
sacrificial wine, without which no compact could be sealed, no event
solemnized, no pleasure enjoyed. It seems to punctuate every step in the
career of Philadelphians and of Philadelphia, and I thought nothing
could be more characteristic, when I read the _Autobiography_ of
Franklin, than that it should have been over the Philadelphia Madeira
one Governor of Pennsylvania planned a future for him, and another
Governor of Pennsylvania later on discoursed provincial affairs with
him, "most profuse of his solicitations and promises" under its pleasant
influence. Throughout the old annals I am conscious of that decanter of
Madeira always at hand, the Philadelphian "as free of it as an Apple
Tree of its Fruit on a Windy Day in the month of July," one old visitor
to the town records with a pretty fancy for which, as like as not, it
was responsible.
And throughout the more modern records, there it is again. Even in the
old-fashioned Philadelphia boarding-house less than a century ago, the
men after dinner sat over their Madeira. New generations of visitors,
like the old, drank it and approved, the Madeira that supported John
Adams at Philadelphia's sinful feasts helping to steer Thackeray and an
endless succession of strangers at the gate through Philadelphia's
course of suppers and dinners. It amuses me to recall, as an instance of
all it represented to Philadelphia, that for a couple of years at the
Convent, though a healthier child than I never lived, I was made by the
orders of my Father, obeyed by no means unwillingly on my part, to drink
a glass of Madeira, with a biscuit, every morning at eleven. And so
deep-rooted was its use in the best traditions of Philadelphia
respectability, that the irreproachable Philadelphia ladies who wrote
cookery books never omitted the glass of Madeira from the Terrapin, and
went so far as to quote Scripture and to recommend a little of it for
the stomach's sake.
II
One of these Philadelphia ladies wrote the most famous cookery book to
this day published in America; a fact which pleases me, partly because,
with Edward Fitzgerald, I cannot help liking a cookery book, and still
more because it flatters my pride as a Philadelphian that so famous a
book should come from Philadelphia. It seems superfluous to add that I
mean Miss Leslie's _Complete Cookery_. What else could I mean?
There had been cookery books in America before Miss Leslie's. America,
with Philadelphia to set the standard, could not get on very far without
them. If in the hurry and flurry of Colonial life, the American did not
have the leisure to write them, he borrowed them, the speediest way to
manufacture any kind of literature. There is an American edition of Mrs.
Glasse, with Mrs. Glasse left out--the American pirate was nothing if
not thorough. There is an American edition of Richard Briggs who was
not deprived of the credit of his book, though robbed of his title.
There are American editions I have no doubt of many besides which I have
only to haunt the old bookstalls and second-hand book stores of
Philadelphia assiduously enough to find. But of American cookery books,
either borrowed or original, before the time of Miss Leslie, I own but
the stolen Mrs. Glasse and an insignificant little manual issued in New
York in 1813, an American adaptation probably of an English model to
which I have not yet succeeded in tracing it.
Nor do I know of any I do not own, and I know as much of American
cookery books as any of the authorities, and I do not mind saying so, as
I can without the shadow of conceit. Vicaire includes only two or three
in his _Bibliographie_; Hazlitt, to save trouble, confined himself to
English books; Dr. Oxford's interest is frankly in the publications of
his own country, though, in his first bibliography, he mentions a few
foreign volumes, and in his second he refers to one American piracy, and
these are the three chief bibliographers of the Kitchen in Europe.
American authorities do not exist, when I except myself. It is true that
G. H. Ellwanger made a list of cookery books, but he threw them together
anyhow, with no attempt at classification, and his list scarcely merits
the name of bibliography. The history of the American cookery book is a
virgin field, and as such I present it to the innumerable American
students who are turned out from the Universities, year after year, for
the research work that is frequently of as little use to themselves as
to anybody else.
[Illustration: THE STATE HOUSE COLONNADE]
But many as may be the discoveries in the future, Miss Leslie cannot be
dethroned nor deprived of her distinction as the Mrs. Glasse of America.
Other writers, if there were any, were allowed to disappear; should they
be dragged out of their obscurity now, it would be as bibliographical
curiosities, bibliographical specimens. Miss Leslie was never forgotten,
she survives to-day, her name honoured, her book cherished. She leapt
into fame on its publication, and with such ardour was the First Edition
bought up, with such ardour either reverently preserved or diligently
consulted that I, the proud possessor of Mrs. Glasse in her First
Edition "pot folio," of Apicius Coelius, Gervase Markham, Scappi, Grimod
de la Reyniere, and no end of others in their first Editions, cannot as
yet boast a First Edition of Miss Leslie. I have tried, my friends have
tried; the most important book-sellers in the country have tried; and in
vain, until I begin to think I might as well hope for the Elzevir
_Patissier Francais_ as the 1837 _Complete Cookery_. It may be hidden on
some unexplored Philadelphia book shelf, for it was as indispensable in
the Philadelphia household as the decanter of Madeira. I ask myself if
its appreciation in the kitchen, for which it was written, is the reason
why I have no recollection of it in the Eleventh and Spruce Street
house, well as I remember _Lippincott's_ on the back parlour table, nor
in my Father's library, well as I recall his editions of Scott and
Dickens, Voltaire and Rousseau, a combination expressive of a liberal
taste in literature. But never anywhere have I seen that elusive First
Edition, never anywhere succeeded in obtaining an earlier edition than
the Fifty-Eighth. The date is 1858--think of it! fifty-eight editions in
twenty-one years! Can our "Best Sellers" surpass that as a record? Or
can any American writer on cookery after Miss Leslie, from Mrs. Sarah
Joseph Hale and Jenny June to Marion Harland and the Philadelphia Mrs.
Rorer, rank with her as a rival to Mrs. Glasse, as the author of a
cookery book that has become the rare prize of the collector?
III
It is so proud an eminence for a quiet Philadelphia maiden lady in the
Eighteen-Thirties and Forties to have reached that I cannot but wish I
knew more of Miss Leslie personally. From her contemporaries I have
learned nothing save that she went to tea parties like any ordinary
Philadelphian, that she was interested in the legends and traditions of
her town, which wasn't like any ordinary Philadelphian, and that she
condescended to journalism, editing _The Casket_. There is a portrait of
her at the Academy, Philadelphia decorum so stamped upon her face and
dress that it makes me more curious than ever to know why she was not
the mother of children instead of a writer of books. These books explain
that she had a literary conscience. In her preface to her _Domestic
Economy_, which is not an unworthy companion to her _Complete Cookery_,
she reveals an unfeminine respect for style. "In this as in her Cookery
Book," she writes, a dignity expressed in her use of the third person,
"she has not scrupled when necessary, to sacrifice the sound to the
sense; repeating the same words when no others could be found to express
the purport so clearly, and being always more anxious to convey the
meaning in such terms as could not be mistaken than to risk obscuring it
by attempts at refined phraseology or well-rounded periods." Now and
then the temptation was too strong and she fell into alliteration,
writing of "ponderous puddings and curdled custards." But this is
exceptional. As a rule, in her dry, business-like sentences, it would be
impossible to suspect her of philandering with sound, or concerning
herself with the pleasure of her readers.
Her subject is one, happily, that can survive the sacrifice. The book is
a monument to Philadelphia cookery. She was not so emancipated as to
neglect all other kitchens. _Recipes_ for Soup _a la Julienne_ and
Mulligatawny, for Bath Buns and Gooseberry Fools, for Pilaus and
Curries, are concessions to foreign conventions. _Recipes_ for Oysters
and Shad, for Gumbo and Buckwheat Cakes, for Mint Juleps and Sweet
Potatoes, for Pumpkins and Mush, show her deference to ideals cultivated
by Americans from one State or another. But concessions and deference do
not prevent her book--her two books--from being unmistakably
Philadelphian:--an undefinable something in the quality and quantity, a
definable something in the dishes and ingredients. I know that in my
exile, thousands of miles from home, when I open her _Complete Cookery_,
certain passages transport me straight back to Philadelphia, to my
childhood and my youth, to the second-story back-building dining-room
and the kitchen with the lilacs at the back-yard door. I read of Dried
Beef, chipped or frizzled in butter and eggs, and, as of old in the
Eleventh and Spruce Street house, a delicious fragrance, characteristic
of Philadelphia as the sickly smell of the ailanthus, fills my nostrils
and my appetite is keen again for the eight o'clock tea, long since
given way to the eight o'clock dinner. I turn the pages and come to Reed
Birds, roasted or baked, and at once I feel the cool of the radiant fall
evening, and I am at Belmont or Strawberry Mansion after the long walk
through the park, one of the gay party for whom the cloth is laid. Or
the mere mention of Chicken Salad sets back the clock of the years and
drops me into the chattering midst of the Philadelphia five o'clock
reception, in time for the spread that, for sentiment's sake, is dear to
me in memory, but that, for digestion's sake, I hope never to see
revived. Or a thrill is in the dressing for the salad alone, in the mere
dash of mustard that Philadelphia has the independence to give to its
Mayonnaise. I am conservative in matters of art. I would not often
recommend a deviation from French precedent which is the most reliable
and the finest. But Philadelphia may be trusted to deviate, when it
permits itself the liberty, with discretion and distinction.
[Illustration: THE SMITH MEMORIAL, WEST FAIRMOUNT PARK]