1860-1899

c. 1900 Maysville SC Cooking Classes

by Rena

Emma Wilson's cooking class, c. 1907.

Born five years before the Civil War as the daughter of an enslaved cook, little Emma Wilson wanted to go to school with her white friends. She was told she couldn’t because of her race, and after the Civil War she was told she couldn’t because she was a girl. Through her determination, she kept pace with the class outside of school. When the time finally came that she could attend school, she was placed within her grade.

Emma Wilson, c. 1900.

Emma Wilson, founder and principal of the Maysville Industrial and Educational Institute

Wilson’s commitment to education and her great desire to assist others of her locale and race made her change her plans from ministering in Africa to building a local school in her hometown of Maysville, South Carolina. The school began in the kitchen of her mother’s cabin in 1885. It quickly grew and was incorporated as the Maysville Industrial and Educational Institute. After a few years Wilson became committed to teaching not only liberal arts, but also skills such as blacksmithing, sewing, and cooking.

The first cookbook known to be authored by an African-American woman is the 1866 book, A Domestic Cook Book: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen by Malinda Russell.

1884 The Cooking Club

by Rena

Pray what do they do at the club?
Tis ever the question they ask; But to answer it fully, I fear, Were rather a serious task; And yet, if you’ll listen to me, And pardon my rhyming with “grub,” I’ll venture a bit of a song To tell what they do at the club.

Imprimis, I’ll tell you they cook.
Oh, thoughtful and careful the eyes
That study the recipe book.
With glances so eager and wise!
Or they listen, as if In a trance,
To lectures and hints and the rules
From their sisters, their cousins and aunts
Who have learned in experience schools.

Then they measure, they pound and they sift,
They bake and they stew and they fry;
They roast and they stir and they lift,
They mold and they shake and they try–
Till from cellars and pantries and fire,
From kitchens and ovens and shelves
Come dainties I’m sure you’d admire.
And say they were made by the elves.

With a flutter of fans and of lace,
They meet for their “six o’clock tea”
With a smile of content on each face
And appetites startling to see.
They have jellies that melt like a dream
And patties and salads and meat
And coffee and biscuit and cream
And pickles and “sweets for the sweet.”

Then the cooks all laughingly chat.
As the moments so merrily fly.
Not forgetting their duty and-—that
Is to taste every dish passing by.
And they talk upon frivolous fun,
Or on subjects as grave as the “Hub,”
And they eat and they eat and they eat
And that’s what they do at the club.

– from Cook book of the Young Ladies Cooking Club, Monroe, Michigan,

Living History Farm classes

by Rena

Wood-burning Stove cooking class at Living History Farms, 2012.Today kicked off the first class of 2012 at the Living History Farm near Des Moines, Iowa. The class was “Cooking on a Wood-burning Stove.” Besides learning how to build a fire in the 1871 cast iron stove, complete with working the drafts, the 5 adult students made Beef Stew, French-style Green Beans with lemon, Braided Onion Bread, and a chocolate dessert–all while working under lights of the oil lamps. Like

…more Living History Farm

1898 Invention of Pepsi Cola

by Rena

The Historical Museum Bern in Switzerland portrays Caleb Bradham, inventor of Pepsi Cola, at his North Carolina drugstore. Pepsi was first called Brad’s Drink, and in 1903 Bradham changed the name to Pepsi (referring to pepsin) Cola (referring to the original ingrediant Kola nuts). Like

Fannie Farmer Reenactment Dinner

by Rena

Chris Kimball took two years planning this one reenactment dinner proposed in an 1896 book by Fannie Farmer, legendary cook book writer and cooking instructor and principal of the Boston Cooking School. Farmer opened her own school, Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery in 1902. The reenactment dinner was held at Kimball’s home in the same area of Boston where Fannie Farmer had lived over 100 years earlier. His preparations started from the ground up, supplying his kitchen with a built-in wood-burning range built into the fireplace. Kimball lived to write about it in his book, Fannie’s Last Supper: Re-creating One Amazing Meal from Fannie Farmer’s 1896 Cookbook. The dinner was also filmed, click here for the trailer.

Tributes to Fannie Farmer
What Fannie Farmer Means to Me from In Our Grandmothers’ Kitchens

Victorian Breakfast, Lunch & Tea

by Rena

Breakfast

Previous Episode:
Victorian Kitchen — Introduction

Later Episodes:
Lunch
Afternoon Tea
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Community Oven

by Rena

Original settlers from the Alps of Northern Italy of the Waldensian Faith immigrated to the US in the 1890s. Besides building their church and homesteads in North Carolina, they also built a community oven which can still be seen along with original buildings at the Trail of Faith open-air museum in Valdese, NC. Like

1860s

by Rena



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1860s New Cooking Gadgets

  • Eggbeater with rack-and-pinion movement
  • Chuck wagon 1866

1860s New Foods

  • Perrier water
  • Canned pork & beans
  • Canned soup
  • Tabasco Sauce
  • White Rock Spring Water
  • Peerless Wafer
  • Cold breakfast food (Granula)
  • Gulden Mustard Fish & Chips (England)
  • Folgers coffee (pre-roasted & ground)
  • McDougall flour (English) in US
  • Peanuts as snack food
  • Text printed on “Conversation” candy
  • Fleischmann’s compressed yeast
  • Eggs Benedict (Delmonico, 1860)

1860s New Food Companies

  • Arm & Hammer
  • Cargill
  • Bassett
  • Schrafft
  • DelMonte
  • Bay Sugar Refining
  • Royal Baking Powder
  • Chase & Sanborn
  • Goodman’s Matzohs
  • Ghiardelli
  • Nestle
  • Tobler
  • Armour meat-packing factory: 1868
  • Chicago Union stockyards: 1865
  • Louis-Dreyfus, grain trader

1860s Food Industry Beginnings

  • Pasteurization – sterilization by heat & pressure: 1864
  • Demonstration of starch produced by photosynthesis
  • Roller mills (stone)
  • Flour mill with middling (bran & outer grain layer) purifier
  • “Patent” flour (double ground)
  • Mechanical refrigerator: 1861
  • Ice machine: 1865
  • Ovaltine testing
  • Salmon cannery: 1864
  • Tin can with key opener
  • Thinner steel for cans
  • Machine-cut cans
  • Calcium chloride added to boiling water, speeding canning time
  • US Pretzel bakery 1861

1860s Farming Progress

  • US Department of Agriculture Homestead Act
  • Marsh reaper
  • Check-row corn planter
  • Massachusetts Agricultural College (UMass)
  • British Food & Drugs Act
  • Union starves South during Civil War
  • Wheat futures
  • Wide-scale cattle theft (rustling)
  • Steam trawlers import fish to England (thus, “fish & chips”)

1860s Timeline

1870s

by Rena

Baking animation by Rena Goff

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1870s New Foods

  • Saccharin
  • Cubed sugar
  • Synthetic vanilla
  • Rootbeer
  • Wheatena
  • Nestle’s Infant Milk Food
  • Milk chocolate
  • Ice cream soda
  • Commercial production of margarine
  • Japanese beef-eating taboo ends (c. 1870)
  • Chewing Gum from chicle
  • Tone Brothers [spices and coffee]

1870s New Cooking Gadgets

  • Can opener with cutting wheel.
  • Four-tined silver fork, beginning the end of eating with knife.
  • Square bottomed paper-bags.

1870s New Food Companies

  • Lipton
  • Pillsbury & Co.
  • F. & J. Heinz
  • Quaker Mills
  • Hills Brothers
  • Grand Union Tea Co.
  • Confectioner’s Journal

1870s Food Industry Beginnings

  • Milking machines
  • Glass milk bottles
  • Orange crates
  • Pressure cooking in food canning: 1874
  • Frozen meat shipments: 1877
  • Mechanical cream separator
  • Porcelain rollers make roller-milling flour (wheat germ removal) standard practice
  • William Underwood first to register U.S. food trademark (Red Devil)

1870s Farming Progress

  • Bison herds disappearing
  • Large US agricultural exports
  • European farm land shortage
  • Quantity banana imports to US
  • Long-distance cattle driving
  • Barbed wire fences
  • Vast US acreage for farming and cattle ranches

1870s Timelines

1880s

by Rena

1880s kitchen

1880s School of Cookery

mason jar.

1880s New Cooking Gadgets

Hand cream-separators
Lenox China
Ball-Mason jars introduced [invented in 1857]

1880s New Foods

  • Malted milk
  • Powdered pea and beet soups
  • Evaporated milk
  • Aunt Jemima Pancake Flour
  • Coca-Cola
  • Moxie
  • Dr. Pepper
  • Thomas’s English muffins
  • Oscar Mayer wieners
  • Salada Tea
  • Tetley Tea
  • Log Cabin Syrup
  • Morton’s salt
  • Canned meat and fruit in stores: 1880

1880s New Food Companies

  • McCormick Spices
  • R. T. French
  • Maxwell House
  • B. H. Kroger
  • ConAgra
  • White Lily Foods
  • Lever Brothers
  • Calumet Baking Powder
  • Diamond Crystal Salt
  • American Cereal
  • Manischewitz
  • Pillsbury-Washburn Flour Mills
  • L’Ecole de Cordon Bleu

    1880s Food Industry Beginnings

  • Packaging of grain commodities
  • Efficiencies in railroad meat shipments
  • Pea-viner and podder machine
  • Commercial aluminum production
  • Ice-making plants start replacing ice-cutting industry
  • Self-service restaurant
  • Vending machines for gum 1888

    1880s Farming Progress

  • Long cattle-drives end as railroads enter Texas

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1890s

by Rena

1899 cook book, American Pure Food Cook Book & Household Economist.

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1890s New Cooking Gadgets

  • Electric range (though unreliable)
  • Aluminum saucepan
  • Chantilly silver pattern

1890s New Foods

  • Minute Tapioca
  • Condensed soup
  • Fig Newtons
  • Canned pineapple
  • Knox’s Gelatin
  • Shredded Wheat
  • Canada Dry Ginger Ale
  • Grape Nuts
  • Cream of Wheat
  • Postum
  • Jell-O
  • Tootsie Rolls, 1896
  • Swans Down Cake Flour
  • Uneeda Biscuits
  • Entenmann bakery products
  • Pepsi-Cola
  • Wesson Oil
  • Cracker Jacks
  • Bottled Coca-Cola
  • Crepes Suzettes
  • Oysters Rockefeller
  • Published brownie recipe
  • US brunch fashionable English lunch
  • S&H Food Stamps
  • Public school hot lunches
  • Beef Stroganoff

1890s New Food Companies

  • Quaker Oats
  • Beech-Nut
  • Beatrice Foods
  • National Biscuit
  • Baker’s Coconut
  • Smucker
  • Hobart
  • American Beet Sugar

1890s Food Industry Beginnings

  • Bottle capping machine
  • Vacuum flask
  • Automatic bottle-blowing machine
  • Electric coffee mill
  • Diner
  • Full page food ad in national magazine (Van Camp in 1894)
  • Coca-Cola Company bought for $2,300
  • US pizza parlor
  • 57 Varieties ad campaign
  • Campbell adopts red & white labels (inspired by Cornell football uniforms)

1890s Farming Progress

  • US gasoline tractor
  • Butterfat measurement
  • Wheat futures hedging

1890s Timelines

1864 Grist Mill and Cider Mill

by Rena

Historic Bowen Mills photos on Facebook will give you an idea of the activity and events at this fun living museum at 55 Briggs Rd, Middleville, Michigan. 269-795-7530 Like

Historic New England kitchen exhibits

by Rena

American History Museum is hosting America’s Kitchens traveling exhibit from Historic New England on Friday, April 1 until October 31, 2011. The exhibit includes a 1759 kitchen, a southwest adobe kitchen and a bright blue 1957 kitchen, and more. Earlier, the exhibit was at the Long Island Museum. Historic New England also has an online exhibit, From Dairy to Doorstep. Like

Historic New England features their 36 historic house museums online. Many of the houses have kitchen photos, and here they are:

New Year’s Day Victorian Dinners

by Rena

Victorian era New Years party cake.

New Year’s
Dinner Party
with
Punch
Recipes

Victorian party menus..

eBook Instant Download

Add to Cart.

$4.99

  • Economical New Year’s Dinner Woman’s Exchange Cook Book, 1894
  • Family-Style New Year’s Dinner The Modern Cook Book, 1899
  • Presidential New Year’s Dinner White House Cook Book
  • Restaurant New Year’s Dinner The Table, Filippini of Delmonico, 1889.

    • 1880s Cranberry sauce recipe for Thanksgiving 2010

    by Rena

    Old-fashion cranberry sauce recipe handwritten in the 1880s.

    Cranberry Jelly
    1/2 as much sugar as cranberries
    1/2 as much water as sugar
    Cook cranberries fast till they
    stop popping — Rub through sieve –
    Add sugar — Just let boil up &
    pour in molds.

    Refrigerate or freeze the cranberry sauce in mold. An old fashion method of releasing the cranberry sauce is to dip the metal mold into hot water before release, if necessary.

    cranberry sauce.

    Music from wikipedia VocalLessonNumber51910_64kb

    The Bride’s 1880s Handwritten Cook Book

    An ebook of Ella’s other recipes in her own handwriting when she was a newly married in Fairfield Iowa in 1881 is available here alongside a transcription for easy reading.
    eBook (Adobe PDF) Instant Download
    $3.88
    Instant Download

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    Time-travel 1830s to 1890s kitchen

    by Rena

    The Pioneer kitchen at the museum in Watertown New York is the scene for hands-on pioneer kitchen work for children during the Pioneer Times program. On the other side of the room you can see over 50 years in the future to a Victorian kitchen — a good way to compare historic kitchens side-by-side! Like

    Pioneer Root Cellar

    by Rena

    Climb down the stairs to the Evansville Historical Foundation’s pioneer root cellar in Evansville, Minnesota to see refrigeration before the electric refrigerator, and before the icebox!

    1860s Butter Churns

    by Rena

    Butter churning during the Civil War

    From the book, “Five Acres Enough” by R. B. Roosevelt, 1869 …Sold…
    …written near the end of the Civil War:

    “The first necessity…was to have a churn, and to obtain this I stopped in at one of the numerous stores in and near Fulton Street, where agricultural implements are sold. I inquired falteringly if they had churns for sale, not being certain that these came under that designation, and a good deal confused at the mass of curious implements and wonderful pieces of mechanism which were scattered about….”

    1881 Chocolate Caramels

    by Rena

    The New York Times selected a husband-and-wife chef team to create a new dish based upon their published 1881 Chocolate Caramel recipe.

    Ice Box

    by Rena

    Ice boxes were available in the 1860s but it was the traditional root cellars, ice houses, and winter storage that stayed the most popular forms of refrigeration in the US until the 1880s. (Ice houses were introduced to the UK, probably from Italy, circa 1660.) In 1900 the average family purchased 2.5 tons of ice per year for the ice box at 30 cents/100 pounds. The price doubled to 60 cents/100 pounds in the same year after “The Ice King” Charles W. Morse, American Ice Company, established a monopoly in ice.

    Blocks of ice were often kept in sawdust while being delivered by the iceman, and the frugal housekeeper wrapped the ice block in newspaper to prolong its life.[1]

    6.25 gallons of water make a 50 pound block of ice.

    Visit Knowlton Ice Museum in Port Huron for more discoveries about the ice industry, and Rentschler Farm Museum in Saline, Michigan and Caroga Museum in Caroga, New York for examples of family-farm ice houses. Here is a list of estates in England with ice houses that may be open to the public:

    And here is an ice house museum to visit in the United States:

    Video: 1892 Refrigerator Catalog





    Seventh Annual Catalogue, Revised Edition, 1892, Challenge Iceburg Refrigerators

    The term “refrigerator” was coined by a Maryland engineer, Thomas Moore, in 1800. Moore’s device would now be called an “ice box” — a cedar tub, insulated with rabbit fur, filled with ice, surrounding a sheet metal container. Moore designed it as as a means for transporting butter from rural Maryland to Washington, DC. Its operating principle was the latent heat of fusion associated with melting ice.[2] Like

    [1] Memories of Morse 1904-1979, “Charles Wyman Morse” by John Paul Heffernan, Brunswick Publishing Co., Brunswick, Maine. [2] Refrigerators, by Glenn Elert.


    1800s-1900s American Spice

    by Rena

    In the early 1800s America had her own native spices and herbs, and merchants from Salem Massachusetts still traded for exotic spices from the far east.

    Mid-1800s refrigeration in ships lessened the status and prices of the spice trade, but demand and competition was still keen.

    1869: a spice mill was added to Hulman & Company’s [Clabber Girl] grocery store wholesale business.

    1873: Tone Brothers, Inc. founded and still located in Des Moines, Iowa, today is perhaps second in volume to McCormick, and distributes Durkee Spices, Fleischmann’s Yeast, and Spice Islands products. Tone is also the leading supplier of spices to national warehouse club chains.[1]

    1889: Willoughby M. McCormick founded McCormick Spices in Baltimore, working out of one room and a cellar. The initial products were sold door-to-door and included root beer, flavoring extracts, fruit syrups and juices. Seven years later, McCormick bought the F.G. Emmett Spice Company and entered the spice industry….

    “Make the Best – Someone Will Buy It.” [2]

    Late-1900s: Fewer home cooks drastically decreased the volume of the spice market.

    Family Farm Museum in Maryland

    by Rena

    You will find an on-the-farm pork butchering display to the farm family kitchen and more at the Family Farm in Frederick, Maryland! The farm museum recreates the life of a family farm during the late-19th century and early-20th century. Like

    1863-1932 Amana Communal Kitchen

    by Rena

    Visit the Amana Heritage Society’s 1863-1932 Communal Kitchen Museum in Iowa.

    1890s – 1900s kitchen at the Hart Dummermuth House Museum

    by Rena

    Conveniently, Iowa’s Hart Dummermuth House Museum staff posted a picture of their 1890s-1900s kitchen on their website : ) Berkeley Historical Museum in Bayville, New Jersey doesn’t have a picture, but there is a 1900 kitchen there, if you’re in the neighborhood.

    Clabber Girl Museum

    by Rena

    Clabber Girl Museum in Terre Haute, Indiana

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