The American Cookery reprint sold by Townsends is by far the most readable I’ve seen.

As we move toward America’s Sestercentennial next year—or Semiquincentennial, as it looks like it will officially be called—it’s time to go back to the beginning. In previous years I’ve covered cookbooks from 1976 celebrating the Bicentennnial, and cookbooks from 1876 celebrating the Centennial.

There were no cookbooks in year zero, 1776, celebrating the American Declaration of Independence, for two obvious reasons. The glib answer is that we were too busy fighting for that Independence to waste time writing a cookbook celebrating Independence.

The second reason is that, until we declared our independence we weren’t American. We were British, and our cookbooks were British. Our cookbooks remained British, with likely a smattering from France and Italy among those literate in those languages, even after the war.

Now, it isn’t entirely obvious that there would be no cookbooks celebrating the fight for independence in 1776. There was a homespun movement leading up to the Declaration. It isn’t just conceivable, it’s very likely, that someone had the idea of emulating the homespun movement in cooking. If anyone did, however, there is no known record of it. It’s likely that if any such effort existed it was passed by letter from household to household and never collected into a single work.

The earliest American cookbook we currently know about is Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery. It was published in 1796—twenty years after the signing, although there is no evidence that it was in any way commemorating the vicennial or that decennials were even significant. While 1796 was twenty years since we’d declared ourselves independent, it was only seven years since we’d approved our new constitution—and only five since the ratification of the Bill of Rights that made that Constitution recognizable to us today.

American Cookery is very different even from the 1876 cookbooks I highlighted last year. One of the amazing things I discovered while reading those 1876 books was how similar they were to modern dishes. Mrs. Winslow’s Cocoanut Pie, or The Centennial Cook Book’s Lemon Pie, or The Horsford Cook-Book’s Irish Potato Pie, are all dishes you could bring to a pot-luck or dinner and I doubt anyone would catch on to their being a century-and-a-half old. They might be variations on modern dishes that have fallen out of fashion, but they are modern dishes. The recipes might use odd instructions and assume odd things—but they are recipes that use technology that was directly antecedent to the technology we use today.

Even recipes that hearken back to older methods such as Madam B’s Molasses Gingerbread from Mrs. Winslow’s Domestic Receipt Book for 1876, or Beef Stewed with Raisins from The Centennial Cook Book and General Guide, are all modern dishes even if they use older techniques or flavors.

There were more advancements in food and food preparation methods in the 80 years between 1796 and 1876 than there have been in the 150 years between 1876 and 2026. The biggest advancement, refrigeration, would come closer to 1876 than to 2026. Cooks in 1876 didn’t necessarily like their ovens and stovetops, but they did have them. In 1796 people were still baking over a fire in a Dutch oven, or in an earthen oven where the heat source was removed before baking began.

We still follow that method slightly, whenever we start the oven at a high temperature—such as making pies—and then allow the oven to cool either immediately or ten to fifteen minutes after putting the pie in.

If I’m reading American Cookery right, if they were cooking on a “stovetop” it was the top of a stove used for heating the house in the winter. The stove would not be available in the summer.

But more than for its technology, American Cookery is also different because it is an attempt at creating or highlighting a truly American cuisine. That goal is right there in its typical-for-its-era very long subtitle:

The Art of Dressing VIANDS, FISH, POULTRY, and Vegetables, and the Best Modes of Making PASTES, PUFFS, PIES, TARTS, PUDDINGS, CUSTARDS and PRESERVES, and All Kinds of CAKES from the Imperial PLUMB to Plain CAKE, Adapted to This Country and All Grades of Life.

It was signed “By Amelia Simmons, An American Orphan”.

This was not a cookbook for the rich, or the poor, or the gentry, or the officer. It was a cookbook for Americans because Americans of All Grades of Life were equal. And it was not a cookbook about our heritage or history or customs because Americans were orphans. It was time to create our own customs. It was time to create a new heritage for future generations to preserve.

The orphan, tho’ left to the care of virtuous guardians, will find it essentially necessary to have an opinion and determination of her own… It must ever remain a check on the poor solitary orphan, that while those females who have parents, or brothers, or riches, to defend their indiscretions, that the orphan must depend solely upon character.

In my opinion, Simmons was being both literal and allegorical. The cuisines of other countries have their national reputation to back them up. The American cuisine must depend solely upon its character. There was an interesting bit in the first section about how to use various vegetables, meats, and spices, where the book relegates garlic to the French:

Garlicks, tho’ used by the French, are better adapted to the uses of medicine than cookery.

That may be a case of the author and the publisher not talking to each other. Simmons does include a clove of garlic in her instructions for pickling melons. She claimed later that she didn’t write the introduction and that it was added during printing.

The order of instructions is often outlandish to modern eyes. The pastry recipes are amazingly modern in some ways, and then outright strange. The Royal Paste (Paste No. 9), for example, gives every ingredient in weights, making it very easy to assemble the ingredients. And then the instructions are almost in Reverse Polish Notation. Do this… but it’s better if you do that instead.

Royal Paste,

No. 9. Rub half a pound of butter into one pound of flour, four whites beat to a foam, add two yolks, two ounces of fine sugar; roll often, rubbing one third, and rolling two thirds of the butter is best; excellent for tarts and apple cakes.

I added salt to the pastry because the butter they used very likely had more salt than the butter we use.

Royal Paste (9)

Servings: 1
Preparation Time: 4 hours
Amelia Simmons
American Cookery (Internet Archive)

Ingredients

• 8 oz flour
• 1 oz sugar
• ¼ tsp salt
• 4 oz butter
• 2 egg whites
• 1 egg yolk

Steps

1. Mix the flour, sugar, and salt in a large mixing bowl and put in the refrigerator.
2. Keep the butter in the refrigerator until needed.
3. Bring the egg whites to room temperature.
4. Cut one ounce of the butter into the dry ingredients.
5. Beat the egg whites until foamy and white.
6. Mix the egg whites into the flour.
7. Lightly beat the egg yolk and mix into the flour.
8. Mix with your finger until it sort of holds together (it will not hold together, no worries).
9. Wrap in plastic wrap and pat into a square.
10. Refrigerate for an hour or so.
11. Place between two sheets of wax paper and roll into a quarter-inch thick rectangle.
12. Slice 1-½ ounces of butter thin and pat half onto one third of the rectangle.
13. Fold over, pat the remaining slices over the top, and fold the final third on top.
14. Roll into a quarter-inch thick rectangle. You may at various places in this process need to switch out to a fresh sheet of wax paper.
15. Refrigerate for half an hour.
16. Slice the remaining 1-½ ounces of butter thin and pat half onto one third of the rectangle.
17. Fold over, pat the remaining slices over the top, and fold the final third on top.
18. Roll as needed for tart or pie.

Once past the ingredients, her original instructions are almost incomprehensible to modern ears. I’m still not sure what “roll often” means in that context, although I’m assuming it means to roll out the dough, put in pats of butter, and then fold and roll out again, to create layers. “Rubbing one third” means to mix, by hand (rubbing in this manner is a term still occasionally used today) a third of the butter into the dry ingredients. Modern cooks would cut the butter in for that step, which is what I did.

In modern recipes, doing something “often” means a rate compared to some other process. When boiling sugar, you might stir once, or stir often. But here, “often” seems to be more a synonym of “several times”.

But at least that’s an instruction. The cranberry tart filling that I put into the pastry literally just says “Stewed, strained and sweetened, put into paste No. 9, and baked gently.” While it sounds somewhat pointless as a recipe, it’s possible many of her readers didn’t consider cranberries as a food, or didn’t consider it a dessert food. That is, she may have been recommending an ingredient rather than a method.

Vicennial Cranberry Tarts

Servings: 12
Preparation Time: 20 hours
Amelia Simmons
American Cookery (Internet Archive)

Ingredients

• 2 lbs fresh or frozen cranberries
• 3 ounces sorghum molasses, maple syrup, or honey
• ½ cup sugar
• 1 recipe Royal Paste No. 9

Steps

1. Pastry Shells
   • Roll Royal Paste thin enough to get at least ten 3-½-inch rounds (or as many as needed for your pans).
   • Use a 3-½ inch cutter, preferably fluted, to cut into rounds. Without removing rounds, place sheet in refrigerator for half an hour.
   • Butter a 12-serving muffin tin in the refrigerator. You may also wish to cut rounds of parchment paper to put in the bottom of the muffin cavities.
   • Remove the rounds and place in the muffin pan, pressing down to make a pastry shell.
   • Roll the remaining pastry dough to cut more rounds in the same manner.
   • Store muffin pan with pastry shells in refrigerator until the filling is ready.
2. Cranberry Filling
   • Cook cranberries, molasses, and sugar in a pan over low heat until the cranberries pop.
   • Preheat oven to 350°.
   • Fill pastry shells will cranberry mix.
   • Bake for about 30 minutes at 350° until the pastry is golden brown.
   • Let muffin pan cool on rack for five or ten minutes.
   • Remove tarts to rack and let cool completely.

Made as individual tarts, this is very nice as a snack for breakfast or a sweet for brunch. It is also very impressive on a buffet table at a pot-luck or outdoor picnic. I have to confess to a little too much pride when I brought a plate of these to a church dinner, and, after Mass, came back to find them given pride of place on the top plate of a multi-layer snack tray.

The Molasses Gingerbread was a nice surprise, too. I made it because one of the “lost ingredients” that fascinate me is coriander in baked goods. This “gingerbread” contains as its optional ingredient either coriander or allspice. So of course I chose coriander. If you’re not a coriander fan, you might consider halving the amount that I chose, or just choosing allspice.

If I’m reading the instructions correctly, and I think in this case I am, this is called “ginger” bread solely because it looks like gingerbread. It has no ginger in it, just cinnamon and either coriander or allspice. But with the molasses it has both the color and texture of gingerbread.

Molasses Gingerbread

Servings: 32
Preparation Time: 45 minutes
Amelia Simmons
American Cookery (Internet Archive)

Ingredients

• 1 lb flour
• ¼ tsp salt
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp ground coriander
• 1 tsp baking soda
• ¼ cup water
• 1 cup molasses
• 1 ounce butter, melted
• 1 egg white
• 1 tsp sugar

Steps

1. Mix the flour, salt, cinnamon, and coriander together.
2. Stir the baking soda into the water.
3. Stir water into flour.
4. Heat the molasses and butter and mix together.
5. Beat molasses into flour to form a stiff dough.
6. Spread into a 9x9 pan.
7. Whisk the egg white and sugar together and brush over the dough.
8. Bake for 10-15 minutes at 375°.

It was surprisingly light. I didn’t believe her when she wrote “knead well ’til stiff, the more the better… the lighter and whiter it will be.” Kneading too much is commonly blamed for making dough stiffer, not lighter. But given those instructions, I chose to beat it in a modern Kitchen-Aid stand mixer without fear of overbeating. The result was a dough more like a cookie dough than a quickbread dough. But it rose like a quick bread, turning out a light gingerbread that isn’t nearly as sweet as modern gingerbreads.

My version of this gingerbread is a quarter recipe. A full recipe would be either quite large or quite high. I originally made it as an eighth recipe, thinking it was going to be more cookie-like than quickbread-like. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was wrong.

There’s also a hint at how they chose to bake and cook in 1796. In parentheses after the “four ounces butter” the author notes:

(if in summer rub in the butter, if in winter, warm the butter and molasses and pour to the spiced flour,)

Besides the fascinatingly programmer-like use of parentheses here—the comma is placed such that if the parentheses are removed then the sentence maintains correct comma usage—there is no indication of which if either method is better. In the summer, the butter will be softer, sure, and in the winter, well, there’s a reason “slow as molasses in January” remains a saying long after people have stopped storing molasses in unheated pantries.

But I suspect something else, too. The oven used for baking would not have been one that you would open and close and open and close like today’s ovens. When you use a dutch oven, there are coals on top and on bottom. Yes, you’ll have to check it once or twice, but you don’t want to be looking inside often. It will get coals inside.

In 1796, when Tennessee became a state, if you talked about an oven, you meant what was called a “Dutch oven”. Dutch ovens were pots with lids both made of thick cast iron. At that time, cooking was done over a fire.

And if you were using an earthen or clay oven, you heat it up, remove the coals, and then bake while the oven is cooling down. There was a set order of what got baked when, depending on how hot the oven needed to be. You would not use such an oven as a convenience tool for warming the butter and molasses, even if this makes a better final product, as it does in the 1876 version. That would be a waste of the time remaining for baking and it would not be convenient.

I had enough for sixteen tarts. I brought the fourteen best to the potluck.

Gingerbread ala mode combines two of my obsessions: sestercentennial cooking and early refrigerator cooking.

It looks more like a mince pie than a beef pie.

The slice looks more like a meat pie.

You would really only melt the butter and heat the molasses on a stovetop. But your stove isn’t turned on in the summer. Its main purpose isn’t cooking, but heating the room it’s in. That you can melt butter and heat molasses on top of it is an added feature, but you’re not going to fire up the stove—literally—in the summer heat.

That is all purely speculation on my part. But in 1796 the idea of the modern stovetop and oven was only just beginning to unfold. The innovative Rumford roaster wouldn’t be released until the turn of the century. That’s one very good reason why 1876 cookbooks are more modern than 1796 cookbooks. They, like us, are using ovens with a range on top.

You can get another hint at how they’re cooking in 1796 by looking at the note for how to roast beef:

To Roast Beef. THE general rules are, to have a brisk hot fire, to hang down rather than to spit, to baste with salt and water, and one quarter of an hour to every pound of beef, tho’ tender beef will require less, while old tough beef will require more roasting; pricking with a fork will determine you whether done or not; rare done is the healthiest and the taste of this age.

They’re cooking over an open fire.

But there’s another item in the gingerbread recipe that highlights its newness at the same time. In 1796 most baked goods that needed to rise got their rise from yeast or from egg whites. Simmons included two sets of recipes that call for a chemical leavener: two gingerbreads and two cookies both call for pearl-ash.

Pearl ash is a product of the ashes left over from a wood fire, refined from that “potash” into potassium carbonate. Potash had occasionally been used earlier for the same purpose, but even more rarely, because it added a smoky flavor to its baked goods.

There are two innovations here. The first is the use of a chemical leavener. Pearl ash was still a very new ingredient. The second is in calling cookies, cookies. The term came from the Dutch in America, and even eighty years later we still saw that some cookbook writers did not use the term, preferring to classify cookies as cakes.

Generally, you can replace pearl ash with baking soda on a one-to-one basis, as I did with the gingerbread.

I didn’t originally plan to make the Minced Pie of Beef. Apples instead of potatoes for a beef pie? Raisins? Not to mention that suet is ridiculously hard to come by nowadays. With no added sweetener, this pie looks like a weird unsweetened mincemeat.

Minced Pie of Beef. Four pound boild beef, chopped fine, and salted; six pound of raw apple chopped also, one pound beef suet, one quart of Wine or rich sweet cider, one ounce mace, and cinnamon, a nutmeg, two pounds raisins, bake in paste No. 3, three fourths of an hour.

However, when I wrote up the first draft of this post, I noticed that I had very few savory dishes and no main dishes. Further, between making my list of interesting recipes and writing the post, I made last year’s Beef Stewed with Raisins and loved it. So when I browsed through American Cookery looking for something more meaty to round out the post, I looked at this recipe with new and more hungry eyes.

Minced Pie of Beef

Servings: 12
Preparation Time: 1 hour, 15 minutes
Amelia Simmons
American Cookery (Internet Archive)

Ingredients

• 6 ounces raisins
• ⅔ cup wine
• 12 oz cooked beef, shredded
• 1 tsp salt
• 2-½ oz suet
• 1 lb peeled and chopped apple
• ½ tsp mace
• ½ tsp cinnamon
• ⅔ tsp nutmeg
• pastry shell and top

Steps

1. Soak the raisins in the wine.
2. Mix the beef, salt, and suet.
3. Stir in the apple.
4. Stir in the mace, cinnamon, and nutmeg.
5. Stir in the raisins.
6. Pour into a 9-inch pie shell.
7. Bake at 425° for 15 minutes.
8. Drop temperature to 350° and bake for 45 to 60 minutes more.
9. Cool completely before serving.

As a historical note, it looks like a semi-savory mincemeat recipe because it is a semi-savory mincemeat recipe, or at least a variation on it that Simmons’s contemporaries would have recognized. Mincemeat before it became associated with the holidays didn’t always have added sugar. For that matter, before it became associated with the holidays, it also included meat. It started out literally as minced meat.

It’s so much a mincemeat pie that I wonder whether Simmons called it “minced pie of beef” to emphasize that this is not a sweet version or to disassociate her American cookbook from its English sources.

And I’m not even sure it isn’t a sweet version. Sweet dishes weren’t always as sweet then as they are today—see the Cream Almond Pudding, for example. Today we’d add a lot more sugar to that pudding.

To our tastes, all of those raisins make this pie too sweet to count as a savory, and not sweet enough to count for dessert. It’s definitely a meat pie; it’s definitely a slightly sweet pie. But I have no idea how sweet it would have been comparatively in 1796.

Existing in the valley between sweet and savory makes it a great breakfast pie. It’s a great choice if you want a dish with a distinctly period flavor.

Rather than boiling the beef I put about two pounds into a crockpot with a quarter cup of water. This produced about one pound of beef. Not because the beef lost weight—it did, but not that much—but because I’d forgotten how good slow roasted beef is even without any flavoring added. I kept snacking on it while prepping the other ingredients.

The juices can be cooled to remove some of the fat, and then reduced over low heat to make a very nice glaze for the pie or any leftover beef.

Part of the reason I could get away with roasting the beef instead of boiling it is that my beef wasn’t heavily salted, which gets us back to the question of just how sweet this pie was meant to be. In 1796 the beef very likely would have been preserved with salt. You boiled beef to remove enough salt to make it edible. But boiling didn’t remove all of the salt. And despite that, if I’m reading this recipe correctly, Simmons has us add some salt back in after mincing it!

It’s very possible that my version of this pie is much less salty than it would have been in 1796.

A full by-the-book recipe makes a lot of pie. I initially cut it down to a quarter recipe. When I realized how much apple and raisins that would take, I cut it down again to two-thirds of that. A full recipe would make enough filling for six modern pies.

But if apple and beef doesn’t do anything for you, consider this apple pie:

Vicennial Apple Pie

Servings: 12
Preparation Time: 2 hours, 5 minutes
Amelia Simmons
American Cookery (Internet Archive)

Ingredients

• 6 large apples, or about 4 lbs
• 1 tbsp water
• zest of one lemon
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• ½ tsp mace
• 2 tbsp rosewater
• ¼ cup sugar

Steps

1. Put the apples and water in a crockpot on low for seven to nine hours until very soft.
2. Strain the apples to remove seeds and other hard parts.
3. Mix in the lemon zest.
4. Mix in the cinnamon, mace, and rosewater, tasting to adjust.
5. Mix in the sugar, tasting to adjust.
6. Pour into pie shell and top with pie crust. The Puff Paste for Tarts #3 goes well with this pie.
7. Bake at 425° for ten minutes.
8. Reduce heat to 350° and bake another 45-55 minutes until golden and bubbling.

Rather than stewing the apples (presumably in water) as the book says, I chose, again, to use a crockpot. This doesn’t lose any of the apple goodness to water. The tablespoon of water added is just enough to get some steaming started as the crockpot warms; the apples will provide their own liquid after they start “stewing” in the pot. I also used a crockpot liner, making it easier to pour the liquid into the mix after straining the solids.

You’ll need to let the pie cool completely to get any semblance of structure; it’s a lot like an applesauce pie. Depending on how much of the pectin remains in applesauce, you could probably use applesauce instead of starting from scratch.

In any case, it tasted great. You would probably want to adjust the spices and the sugar depending on the apples you use. I used the cheapest ones at the grocery store, which were pretty sweet to begin with.

When I finished pouring the filling into the pie crust, enough remained to fill a small bowl, just enough to have as a snack with the baked pie crust scraps.

Both of these pies called for “Paste No. 3” as the pie shell.

Puff Paste for Tarts (3)

Servings: 12
Preparation Time: 3 hours, 20 minutes
Amelia Simmons
American Cookery (Internet Archive)

Ingredients

• 10 oz flour
• 8 oz butter (two sticks, cold)
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 large egg white

Steps

1. Whisk the flour and salt together.
2. Cut four ounces of butter into the flour.
3. Mix the egg white into the flour by hand, until the dough barely holds together (it will be very dry).
4. Form into a ball and wrap tightly in plastic wrap.
5. Refrigerate for an hour along with the rolling board.
6. Flatten, by hand rather than a rolling pin, the dough into a rectangle. It will be easiest to cover with wax paper or plastic wrap.
7. Cut half of the remaining butter into about six pats, laying three onto one side of the rectangle.
8. Fold over a third, and lay the remaining three pats on top, folding the remaining third over.
9. Roll back into a rectangle, refrigerate, and repeat, with the remaining butter.
10. Cut into two squares, wrap, and place in refrigerator for an hour.
11. Press one square into a flat disc for use in an 8- or 9-inch pie pan.
12. Fill with desired filling.
13. Press the other square into a flat disc and lay over the top of the filling.

I was planning on just using a standard pie crust from my repertoire, but on rereading the errata to see if the pie had any changes, I noticed that they made the No. 3 paste more interesting. First, it dropped down from twelve eggs to six, making it require only one egg for a single pie. And, second, “In Pastes, the white of eggs only are to be used.”

The only thing holding this pastry together is the butter and the single egg white. Can this even work? Yes. It was amazing, both the day of and after refrigerating the leftovers overnight. It’s tender. It practically dissolves in the mouth. I plan to use this pie crust even for modern recipes when I have the time. It was wonderful with both the minced beef pie and the apple pie.

A nice Indian Pudding (2)

Servings: 16
Preparation Time: 3 hours
Amelia Simmons
American Cookery (Internet Archive)

Ingredients

• 3 cups very hot milk
• 1 cup cornmeal
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 1 egg, lightly beaten
• 2 oz melted butter
• ½ cup molasses
• ¼ tsp nutmeg

Steps

1. Mix the cornmeal and salt.
2. Stir hot milk into cornmeal.
3. Cool to room temperature.
4. Beat egg into batter.
5. Stir in butter, molasses, and nutmeg.
6. Pour into a two-quart baking dish.
7. Place into a larger dish and pour hot water around to about ¼ inch.
8. Bake for about 90 minutes to two hours at 300°.

I made several of the puddings from this cookbook. My favorite, unsurprisingly, is one of the cornmeal puddings, “A Nice Indian Pudding No. 2”. It’s about as close to modern cornbread as it is to modern corn pudding. Like the Molasses Gingerbread (and Indian Pudding No. 2 uses molasses as well) it’s not heavily sweetened. It has just enough sweetener to accentuate the corn flavor. At least, as I made it. I assumed from the complete lack of amount on “sugar or molasses and spice” that it was to be lightly sweetened and lightly spiced. But of course it could also be that this is a very versatile dish meant to have a wide variety of flavors to satisfy a wide variety of tastes.

A Nice Indian Pudding No. 1 is much more pudding-like. It uses less cornmeal, more eggs, and also has raisins in it, although I used dried cranberries because I think cranberries and cornmeal are a very good match. It was nice, and it improved overnight. I would happily make it and eat it again.

A Nice Indian Pudding (1)

Servings: 8
Preparation Time: 2 hours
Amelia Simmons
American Cookery (Internet Archive)

Ingredients

• 6 cups milk
• 7 tablespoons cornmeal
• 4 ounces butter
• 7 eggs
• 8 ounces raisins
• ½ tsp nutmeg
• 1 tsp ginger
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• ¼ tsp salt
• 7 tbsp sugar

Steps

1. Scald the milk with the cornmeal.
2. Beat in butter.
3. Let cool.
4. Beat in eggs.
5. Mix in raisins, spices, salt, and sugar.
6. Bake about 60-90 minutes at 350°.

Of the puddings that are more pudding-like, the Carrot Pudding was very similar to modern carrot puddings I’ve made, and it was also very good. The instructions were simple, and almost followable.

A coffee cup full of boiled and strained carrots, 5 eggs, 2 ounces sugar and butter each, cinnamon and rose water to your taste, baked in a deep dish without paste.

While the almond pudding and the two Indian puddings seem to assume that the eggs are mixed in whole, the Carrot Pudding says nothing about how the eggs go in. Given the complete lack of flour I decided to separate them and fold the whites in last. It meant a very high-rising pudding, and light. It would be a great treat at an Independence Day potluck.

Carrot Pudding

Servings: 4
Preparation Time: 1 hour, 15 minutes
Amelia Simmons
American Cookery (Internet Archive)

Ingredients

• 1 cup cooked and completely mashed carrots
• 5 eggs, separated
• 2 oz sugar
• 2 oz butter
• 1 tbsp rose water
• 1 tsp cinnamon

Steps

1. Beat the egg yolks until light.
2. Add the sugar and butter and continue beating until smooth.
3. Add the carrot mash and beat to completely incorporate.
4. Add the rose water and cinnamon and beat in.
5. Beat the egg whites to stiff peaks, and fold into the pudding.
6. Pour into a lightly-buttered quart baking dish.
7. Bake at 350° for about 45 minutes until risen and golden brown.

The Cream Almond Pudding had some of the oddest language in the book. After a brief consultation on Seasoned Exchange I decided that Simmons used “settled” to mean finely sieved, which appears to be an odd turn of phrase even for the period. This is definitely a dessert, but not at all sweet—you may be noticing a pattern there. My sense from this cookbook is that American cookbooks must have started catering to sweet tooths sometime between American Cookery and 1876. There is no sweetener in this pudding.

Cream Almond Pudding

Servings: 4
Preparation Time: 2 hours
Amelia Simmons
American Cookery (Internet Archive)

Ingredients

• ½ tsp mace
• 1-½ tsp nutmeg
• 2 cups cream
• 4 eggs
• 4 tbsp flour
• 2 oz blanched almonds, toasted and ground fine
• ½ tbsp rosewater
• 4 tbsp sugar
• 4 tbsp butter

Steps

1. Scald the spices and cream.
2. Allow cream to cool.
3. Beat the eggs well.
4. Beat the flour, almonds, and rosewater into the eggs.
5. Slowly beat the eggs into the cream.
6. Pour into a floured pudding dish.
7. Cover tightly and steam for one hour.
8. Serve warm with melted butter and sugar.

The only sweetener will come from the “melted butter and sugar” used as a sauce. Melted butter and sugar is in fact a great and simple sauce. The pudding was not palatable to me at all without the sauce. With the sauce, it was very good.

The recipe technically called for wrapping the pudding in cloth and boiling it. I chose to put it in a small casserole dish and steam it in the top of a steamer. Not the full messy 18th century experience, but a lot easier to handle. The other two puddings I made both called for baking. Neither of the Indian puddings specified when in the oven cooling process they were to be baked; I used 350° for Indian pudding No. 1 and 300° for Indian pudding No. 2, based mainly on the specified times. Only an hour and a half for the first seemed to allow for a higher temperature, and two-and-a-half hours for the second seemed to require a lower temperature. I also reduced the times because I reduced the size of the dish.

The Cream Almond Pudding was a fascinating experiment, and I would happily eat it if someone else made it, but I probably won’t make it again myself.

There is another sense in which the language of this cookbook is very different from our own, and from 1876. In 1796, they were still using the long “s”, or “ƒ”. Everywhere there’s a lower-case “s”, except as the final letter in a word, “ƒ” is used instead. This was common at the time, although apparently on its way out. In this book the “ƒ” and “f” look nearly identical in places. The difference is a very tiny one on the letter’s crossbar easily lost due to the age of the manuscript. If you buy a reprint it will be easier to read.

A word like “Strawberries” looks perfectly modern. Then you come across “eƒtabliƒh” or a sentence like “The large ƒtall fed ox beef is the beƒt, it has a coarƒe open grain, and oily ƒmoothneƒs…” or a phrase like “flouncing on a ƒweaty horƒe.”

There are also interesting notes, mostly in passing, about… I’m not sure what:

[Salmon] are ameliorated by being 3 or 4 days out of water, if kept from heat and the moon, which has much more injurious effect than the sun.

This may not be superstition!

I don’t know if the Indian Pudding 1 was supposed to separate during steaming but it was a nice texture variation.

The Indian Pudding 2 was a little overdone on the bottom; I expect either a little water around the pan or a shorter baking time will fix that. Still a highlight.

The carrot pudding was another highlight.

Steaming is a lot easier than boiling and performs the same task.

Another interesting linguistic treat is a real treat. There are two recipes here for cookies, named, in fact, cookies! There is a recipe for what looks like a shortbread cookie, and a thick one. It’s even cut into shapes. Both of the cookies call for coriander seed, so of course I will make them.

Also of interest is her recipe for Diet Bread.

One pound sugar, 9 eggs, beat for an hour, add to 14 ounces flour, spoonful rose water, one do. cinnamon or coriander, bake quick.

“Diet” apparently referred to a food eaten regularly for sustenance, not a food designed to lose weight. (If you choose to make that recipe, “do.” likely stands for “ditto”; that is, use a spoonful of rose water and a spoonful of cinnamon or coriander.)

The Carrot Pudding and the Almond Pudding both call for rose water. I used this recipe, which I made myself. I have no idea how authentic it is.

The anniversaries I’ve highlighted in this series are not inherently more special than other years. It’s how they feel to us psychologically that makes them worth using as an excuse to remember and commemorate the founding of the greatest experiment in democracy so far in the history of the world.

Twenty years on, it must have been especially heartening to know that the country was finally on track enough to start producing its own cooking style after all the turmoil of recovering from the revolution.

A hundred years on, it must have been especially heartening to see the country still thriving after the horrific civil war we’d just been through.

Two hundred years on, it must have been especially heartening to see the country come together after a divisive overseas war, a still-controversial Presidential resignation, and while still experiencing a stagflation economy marked by low wages, high prices, and enforced scarcity.

In general, people don’t celebrate fifty-year markers like they do hundred-year markers. I’ve only seen one cookbook celebrating the 1926 sesquicentennial, for example. There was a sesquicentennial celebration in Philadelphia, but it appears to have been a flop. Like the 1876 Horsford pamphlet Gulden’s Mustard included their award from that fair in their subsequent pamphlets. Unlike Horsford, they did not include special sesquicentennial recipes or even otherwise reference the sesquicentennial. A hundred and fifty just isn’t as psychologically special as one hundred and two hundred. Those double zeroes make a difference!

But a quarter of a millennium seems to me like it ought to be commemorated, if for nothing else than to highlight what we’re being asked to give up when we’re told that freedom isn’t as important as whatever the latest crisis is. We’ve just come through a manmade pandemic exacerbated by divisive public policy, a combination of inflation and job loss very reminiscent of the seventies, and a news industry and political class that seems to welcome both.

But we did come through it. That’s worth celebrating. And the dream of the American founding, the dream of a “more perfect Union” that would “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”, a dream of a “government of the people, by the people, [and] for the people”, is worth not just celebrating, but striving to maintain, insuring that such a Republic “shall not perish from the earth.”