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Health & Fitness

Cooking Indian Pudding with Mary in 1879

New England Farm and Artist is located in the heart of Washington Village, right across from the Paine House in Coventry. Being surrounded on every front by visual reminders of history has only enhanced my natural interest in days gone by.  The very first program held at NEFA was about the history of Washington Village, as seen through the eyes of the Paine House. For the occasion I thought it would be interesting to cook something that was common in colonial days, and I settled on Indian pudding. I wanted it to be authentic, and so I consulted a cookbook called “Just How: A Key to the Cookbooks” published in 1879.

This cookbook was previously owned by a woman named Mary. She apparently used it extensively, as it is filled with handwritten notes, including a recipe for “Loft Soap”. In addition there are recipes snipped out of newspapers, including one for fudge, and one for “Parker House Rolls.”  Mary had a habit of trying recipes and then making adjustments by hand, according to results. The recipe for Indian pudding was no exception. She recommends trying ½ of the receipt (recipe), and also advises adding cinnamon and ginger. There was a boiled version and a baked version, and I decided to go with the baked version, even after noting that it had to bake for TWO HOURS.  That might have something to do with the decline in popularity of this dessert!! The author of the cookbook notes that “country housewives” often mix fruit with the boiled version.

The author of this particular cookbook was Mrs. A.D.T Whitney. In the preface she noted that though the literature of cookery was already so enormous, she was providing the “grammar to the literature.” Her cookbook was meant to “take up the very ABC of it’s etymology; to give its parts of speech, to show the elementary principles of its syntax.” I suppose it does this, if compared to previous cookbooks, which assumed that the user already knew how to cook! However, the instruction to “keep the fire steady” despite the fact that “materials and heat of ovens do vary and may vary the baking; therefore watch and manage accordingly,” less than reassuring!! No hint of a baking temperature obviously; I translated “keep the fire steady” to 350 degrees.

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Mrs. Whitney was kind enough however, to lay out how the kitchen should be set up. First, she emphasizes, the kitchen should be neat! “Have it sunny, if you can, with windows on the south side, and closets on the north. In this kitchen, there should be three tables. One, called the cook’s dresser, is used for preparing meat, vegetables etc.  and for dishing up, one clear for general handiness and one for nice work. The first should be near the sink and the fire. The second should be near the first, but easily movable, and the third on the other side of the room, but in good light. This is the lady’s cooking table.”  Mrs. Whitney assumes the house has servants. She recommends keeping a duplicate set of cooking tools, so that one set may be kept “sacred and ready in their place” for the mistress of the house, unless she had “that friendly, capable, trustworthy woman who can do “lady’s cooking” for you, and in such service minister at your own shrine.”

Given that Mrs. A.D.T. Whitney was also a poet, a magazine writer and prolific author of moral books for young ladies, it is not surprising that she added some verbal frills to her cookbook. When she has finished describing the ideal kitchen set-up, she declaims “And now, my lady, my dame, bread-guardian and house-queen-you have your Boffin’s Bower, your feudal hall arrangement; dais and domestic poetry at one end,-prose and “the marsh” if they must be, at quite the other.”

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“Boffin’s Bower” had me scratching my head, but after a little research I discovered that Boffin’s Bower was a refuge and school in Boston, named after a fictional place in one of Dicken’s novels, for poor girls who are “too refined, too educated or too fragile physically for mere domestic service.” It was at this point that I shook myself and went ahead and made my Indian pudding-success!! Mary would have been proud of me. My next attempt is going to be Brown Fricassee Chicken. Can you still get salt pork somewhere? 

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