Category Archives: History

A call from my daughter coming home from college for the weekend. “Can we go out to dinner?…. Or can I help you make chicken pot pie?”

Pie, as you know I know, has the pull of the elemental, the essential, the eternal.

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the first use of the word “pie”  to 1303, observing that the word was well-known and popular by 1362.

“Pie…a word whose meaning has evolved in the course of many centuries and which varies to some extent according to the country or even to region….The derivation of the word may be from magpie, shortened to pie. The explanation offered in favour or this is that the magpie collects a variety of things, and that it was an essential feature of early pies that they contained a variety of ingredients…”

The New York Times ran an article today about lasting foods, foods that fall out of favor and then come back. The piece focuses on foie gras, primarily, and its variations. Tournedos Rossini (truffles, foie gras and madeira sauce.) Hamburgers that incorporate foie gras, beef and spam. But also classics like beef Wellington and lobster newburg.

Apparantly the outcry for these dishes is newly revived, if in fact it ever went away.

I love foie gras. One of my fondest restaurant memories is Au Pied de Cochon in Quebec, where we ate foie gras with every course.

But I would suggest that in terms of lasting fullfillment, a classic that sticks to your heart as well as your ribs, pot pie will never go away.

Chicken, turkey or beef, you choose

Doing some research on the foodways of 1875, I found that in 1876, the women of the First Congregational Church in Marysville, Ohio, published a cookbook to raise money to build a parsonage. They called it the Centennial Buckeye Cookbook. It turned out to be one of America’s most popular cookbooks. I like the dedication on the frontispiece of the first edition:

“To the plucky housewives of 1876, who master their work instead of allowing it to master them.”

Darker, though, is this unattributed quote with which the book opens: “Bad dinners go hand in hand with total depravity, while a properly fed man is already half saved.”

Jumping the gun on Valentine’s Day — which I am celebrating by going to the Westminster Dog Show with Gil.

Did you know that bridegrooms were served three courses of asparagus at their prenuptial dinner in nineteenth century France? Earlier, English herbalist Nicholas Culpepper opined that asparagus “stirs up lust in man and woman.”

Succulent Spears

Alexandre Dumas dined on almond soup every night before rendezvousing with his mistress. Samson hooked Delilah with the same nut.

And the Aztecs’ name for the avocado plant was Ahuacuatl, the “testicle tree.” Catholic priests in Spain in days gone by found the fruit so obscene, they banned its consumption.

Chocoholic Lous XIV made love to his wife twice a day at the age of 72.

Food for thought.

Would you care for some sugar-cured herring? Stewed potatoes? The place to go in in 1880 would be the United States Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York.

You could get some redhead ducks and charlotte bengalienne at Delmonico’s if you were there in 1885 for the Annual Dinner of the New York Free Trade Club.

At the Ladies Festival Banquet, catered by William Tufts, quail on toast was the order of the day. You’d have to be a member of the Baptist Social Union of Boston.

Sweetbread pate, anyone?

Downtown Association, 1890

This most wonderful trove of 9,567 restaurant menus will transport you to another place and time. The kitchen’s always open at the New York Public Library, just click here.

For some reason, “cardinal punch” is a constant. But not all of the feasts offer “DeBrie.”

Reading a book that consists of the unedited manuscript of a WPA guide called America Eats, an in-depth description of the varied cuisines of the country as they existed in the 1930s. The Food of a Younger Land: The Northeast Eats is fascinating, ranging as it does from a discussion of a “C.O. Cocktail” — castor oil in soda served at a drug store, to a description of Vermont, where maple sugaring is so much a part of peoples’ lives that “sugaring off” became an expression. A person might close some transaction by saying, “Well, Ed, it’s about time we sugar that off.”