Clarke Historical Library

Michigan Cookbooks: 150 Years of Mostly Good Meals

Michigan Cookbooks: 150 Years of Mostly Good Meals Published in Conjunction with an Exhibit in the Clarke Historical Library Celebrating the Maureen Hathaway Michigan Culinary Archive August 22, 2006 - December 21, 2006 Clarke Historical Library Central Michigan University Mt. Pleasant, Michigan 2006

The Science and Technology of Cooking and Cookbooks

Cookbooks, as we understand them today, were invented in the nineteenth century. Although the first cookbook written by an American was published in 1796, the volume would not be useful, or even understandable, to a cook today. Basic technology that is taken for granted by today's cooks, things as elementary as a cooking stove, for example, had not yet been invented. Similarly, there was no reliable method for keeping food cold. The earliest cookbooks in America generally described cooking in a single pot suspended over an open fire in a hearth.1

The beginnings of wide-scale change, and what one might call the modern cookbook, first stirred in the 1850s. As early as the 1830s, some far-seeing foundry worker modified a metal stove used to heat rooms by placing a metal box equipped with a door that opened into the room inside the stove. This modification allowed the stove to be used as a crude baking or warming oven. This inventor, or someone of like mind, eventually realized that if holes were cut in the top of the stove enough heat would escape to boil water in a pot, while the stove generated sufficient heat to allow a cook to still use the oven. When this stove design was coupled with a means to control the amount of heat generated by the fire, through a series of grates and dampers that could control the intake of oxygen and thus the rate at which the fire burned, the modern cooking stove was born.2

Traditionalists had a lukewarm response to the new invention. Albert Bolles, an early historian of the stove industry, wrote, "The open fire was the true centre (sic) of home-life, and it seemed perfectly impossible to everybody to bring up a family around a stove."3 Traditionalists were overwhelmed, however, by Americans who bought the new device for two very practical reasons. First, because the stove's dampers could control the size of the fire, wood consumption declined by 50 percent to 90 percent compared to an open hearth, according to stove manufacturers. Second, a stove could be installed by unskilled workers, but hearth construction usually required the assistance of a skilled mason. In a frontier society where skilled labor was often hard to find, this was an important advantage. As they were generally made of cast iron, stoves were not cheap, but they were affordable. In an era when a common laborer's income was about a dollar a day, a typical stove cost anywhere from five to twenty-five dollars. By 1860 cooking stoves accounted for one-third of all the cast-iron products made in the United States.4

When coal replaced wood as the primary heating source in homes, it also proved to be a more efficient fuel for stoves. As Edward Everett Hale recalled his mother saying, when he spoke of the beautiful atmosphere and effect of an open-hearth fire in a room, "You may take the poetry of an open wood fire of the present day, but to me in those early days it was only dismal prose, and I am grateful to have lived in the time of anthracite coal."5

Nineteenth-century stoves, however, lacked one feature essential to modern stoves, and modern cookbooks, a simple way to control temperatures. The experienced nineteenth-century cook regulated the size of the fire and (when cooking on top of the stove) the distance of the pot or pan from the fire. This practice depended almost entirely on a cook's skill, however, as it was more art than science.

Temperature control, and cookbook recipes based on exact temperatures, became possible at the beginning of the twentieth century when stoves fueled by either gas or electricity were introduced. In 1915 the American Stove Company marketed the first effective oven thermostat for a gas stove. Electric-stove manufacturers were not far behind, introducing thermostats in the 1920s. By World War II, the convenience of gas or electrically heated stoves had led consumers to largely abandon cast-iron stoves, and this meant that oven-temperature controls were now part of most American kitchens.6

If the nineteenth century created a means of heating food that is somewhat familiar to today's cooks, it still lacked an essential element of modern cooking and recipes: a practical mechanical means to keep food cold in the home. Food preservation was a problem in the warm months. By the late nineteenth century, manufactured iceboxes and refrigerators were widely available, though many ill-designed units wasted ice and bred bacteria. As demand outstripped the supply of ice harvested from lakes and rivers and the new germ theory of disease led customers to fear pollution, commercially manufactured ice came to dominate the market. Between 1880 and 1914, ice consumption increased fivefold in the cities of Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Although it is uncertain whether more than half of all urban families patronized the iceman as late as 1919, most families prosperous enough to buy cookbooks had doubtless acquired refrigerators some time earlier. By the early 1900s, then, most cookbook users could preserve food and cool it in the refrigerator. But home freezing except in ice-consuming ice-cream makers was not yet feasible.7

No one person or company solved all of the problems involved in creating the home refrigerator. It took a number of inventions, including the development of an electric compressor small enough for home use in 1914, the appearance of a satisfactory automatic-temperature-control device in 1917, and the development of the nontoxic, nonexplosive coolant Freon in 1930 to bring home refrigerators into mass production. In 1927 General Electric offered for sale the first machine that looked and worked like the refrigerators we use today (although it used toxic sulfur dioxide as its coolant). Early electric refrigerators were not particularly dependable. In 1923 electric-utility companies estimated the average machine required a service call once every three months. Despite this drawback, Americans wanted refrigerators, and by 1941 approximately 45 percent of American households had one.8

The variety of foods to put in these refrigerators had been growing since the late nineteenth century. As the national rail network expanded, fruit and vegetables from the South and California appeared in stores, substantially lengthening the season for many foods. Refrigerated rail cars and commercial cold storage were standard by the early twentieth century, enabling city retailers to stock basic items year-round. (Meat, fish, and butter were frozen hard for storage, eggs and produce sharply chilled.) Alternatively, housewives could use canned goods. These were expensive novelties in the 1880s and 1890s, but by 1910 processors such as Heinz produced three billion cans a year. Although that still amounted to only a few dozen cans per person per year, by the 1920s canned foods were absolutely commonplace.9

Very quickly electric refrigerators also began to include "freezer units." Food brought to the freezing point slowly bursts its cells, resulting in poor taste when the food is thawed. But food that is frozen quickly allows the cells to remain intact. Frozen food was first introduced to the American public in 1928, and by 1934 thirty-nine million pounds of frozen food was sold in this county. In 1944, only ten years later, the public consumed six hundred million pounds of frozen food.10

Commercial Cookbooks

Michigan's cookbooks largely conformed to national patterns. Published cookbooks fell into three broad categories: commercial ventures, corporate publications, and fundraising (charitable) volumes. Books from commercial publishers were the first to appear and remain quite common. Corporate publications were usually designed to accomplish one of three goals: increase the sales of specific products, encourage the use of a particular appliance, or support the use of gas or electricity by promoting "modern" cooking using gas or electric appliances. Corporate cookbooks were often viewed as a form of advertising, and they were usually distributed at minimal or no cost to consumers. Fundraising cookbooks were locally produced volumes that first appeared during the Civil War. These cookbooks were sold, but the money received from sales almost always went to support charitable causes.

The first commercially successful cookbook published in Michigan was printed in 1858 in Ann Arbor. 11 Alvin Wood Chase's, A Guide to Wealth! Over One Hundred Valuable Recipes for Saloons, Inn-Keepers, Grocers, Druggists, Merchants and for Families Generally, was clearly aimed at a very broad audience. Chase was born in New York State. For many years, however, he lived near Toledo, Ohio, where he was a peddler who, as a sideline, collected and sold folk remedies and recipes. In 1856 Chase moved to Ann Arbor to seek a medical degree at the University of Michigan. Although he never received a degree from the university, while he was a student in Ann Arbor Chase supported himself and his family by selling remedies and recipes. The town's druggist, Christian Eberback, took an interest in Chase, and in 1856, with Eberback's help, Chase published a small pamphlet that included seventeen medicinal formulas.

This pamphlet launched Chase into a successful and lucrative career in printing. In 1858 he published his first book. In 1860 a new volume appeared, containing more than six hundred recipes. The 1863 edition had more than eight hundred recipes. By 1864 Chase's cookbook had become so successful that he constructed the largest steam-powered printing plant in Michigan, primarily to issue ever newer and improved editions of what had become a multipurpose, how-to-guide, as well as a large selection of recipes.12

Chase's volume includes recipes that regularly feature two products: pork and corn. Both were easily obtained and thus common in the diet of Michiganians in the years before the Civil War.13

Chase's admonition to add more rye flour than cornmeal reflected a frequent complaint about Michigan cooking: the seemingly unending number of corn products that appeared on the table daily. The following recipe uses pork products in an unusual way.

Chase's book, in endless new editions, would remain popular for more than fifty years. In 1915 one publisher estimated total sales amounted to more than four million copies, and it was often said at the time that the volume was second in sales only to the Bible. Chase, however, profited little from this success. Obsessed with premonitions of his own death, Chase sold the rights to his name, the book, and his press in 1869. In addition, he signed an agreement promising never again to publish in Michigan. Chase, however, did not suffer an early death, and he eventually returned to printing in Michigan, only to be put out of business by a court order in 1875. Chase moved to Toledo and opened another print shop. He published a new book to compete with his wildly successful original, but he was forced out of the business by his new partners. Chase eventually wrote a third recipe book, but he lacked the money to print it himself and could find no one interested in supporting the venture. He died in 1885.14

Chase's national success was not typical of Michigan authors. Most successful commercial cookbook authors, as well as almost all of the major cookbook publishers, were located in the large cities along the Eastern seaboard, particularly in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. However, some Michigan authors did attempt to emulate Chase's accomplishment. In 1878, the Rose-Belford Publishing Company of Detroit produced The American Home Cook Book, attributing the authorship to "the ladies of Detroit and other cities."15 Miss E. Neil, of Jackson, published The Every-day Cook-book and Encyclopedia of Practical Recipes: Economical, Reliable, and Excellent about 1890.16 Newspapers also sometimes issued cookbooks, whose recipes were probably drawn from the pages of their own paper. In 1881, for example, the Detroit Free Press published, and apparently sold, The Household (of the Detroit Free Press): A Cyclopedia of Practical Hints for Modern Homes, which was edited by May Perrin Golf.17

In the twentieth century only one writer born in Michigan relied on her Michigan roots to become a best-selling cookbook author. Della Lutes was born in Jackson in 1872. She moved to Detroit in 1893 and began to write professionally. In 1908 she launched a career writing for and editing various magazines that were marketed to women, and in 1924 she started writing about food. The Great Depression caused the magazine she was working for to go bankrupt and turned Lutes into a freelance food writer. It may have been the greatest stroke of luck she ever experienced. Her style, which combined recipes with reminiscences of her childhood, became immensely popular. She was frequently published in magazines such as Reader's Digest, the Atlantic Monthly, American Mercury, and Woman's Day. Her columns were often compiled in book form. The most successful of these books was The Country Kitchen, which was first published in serial from beginning in 1935 in the Atlantic Monthly and subsequently appeared in book form the next year, was referred to by some as a "gastronomical autobiography."18 The Country Kitchen would go through fifteen reprintings before Lutes's death in 1942. The following recipe is from her book:

It was a tedious job, making apple butter, but less so, it seems to me, when brewed out of doors, especially on an October day with the sun beating warmly down upon your neck, and crimson leaves drip, dripping from the maple trees - sometimes straight into the huge pot itself, like some jocose gamester flipping cards into a hat.

But it took time. For instance, you put ten gallons of sweet cider into a cauldron and let it boil away to half. Then you added - a quart or so at a time - three pecks of pared, cored, and quartered apples. This you let cook over a slow fire for four or five hours. Then you added (stirring all the while with a long wooden paddle) ten pounds of sugar and five ounces of cinnamon, and boiled it until it thickened, never forgetting to stir, lest it stick to the kettle.

And there you are with your apple butter, and welcome. To be out of doors on an October day with a blue sky overhead, sun on your back, and only the gentle llp! with which an autumn leaf breaks its loose hold upon a parent stem to mar the silence, would be a joy under any circumstances - almost. To have to stand and stir, stir, stir, for five, six, or more hours - well, I do not like apple butter anyway .19

Despite the fact that most cookbooks were published elsewhere, Michigan did have a link to what is arguably the most influential commercial cookbook of the twentieth century, The Joy of Cooking. This work was one of America's most successful cookbooks. Privately published in 1931, it was issued nationally in 1936 by Bobbs-Merrill and became a huge, enduring success. The book's author, Irma Rombauer, hit upon a formula similar to Della Lutes's: she combined recipes with a chatty style that many readers found irresistible. Unlike Lutes, however, Rombauer wrote a recipe book with occasional stories and comments, not a storybook with occasional recipes.

Irma Rombauer lived most of her life in St. Louis, Missouri, while Marion Rombauer Becker, her daughter and successor as the book's author, lived in Cincinnati as an adult. Both mother and daughter vacationed in northern Michigan, however. For many years Edgar and Irma Rombauer, along with their two children, rented a cottage on the outskirts of Bay View. Irma grew up in a family sufficiently prosperous to afford a cook and thus was never taught how to cook. It is likely that she learned about cooking through a class she took at Bay View. Irma quickly developed a considerable flair for cake decoration, a hobby that resulted in some of the strongest chapters in early editions of The Joy of Cooking.

Marion , of course, accompanied her parents to Bay View and spent her summers growing up in that area. Late in her life, beginning in 1967 or 1968, Marion and her husband returned to Michigan, vacationing along Grand Traverse Bay, and seriously considered purchasing a condominium in the area. However, she was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1972. Her race against death to finish the 1975 revised version of The Joy of Cooking, as well as the passing of her husband after his own struggle with cancer in 1974, drove any plans involving Michigan out of her mind.20

1 Mary Anna DuSablon, America's Collectible Cookbooks: The History, the Politics, the Recipes (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994), 1-3; Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 53-54.

2 Cowan, More Work for Mother; 53-55.

3 Albert S. Bolles, Industrial History of the United States (Norwich, Conn.: H. Bill Publishing Co., 1879), 276; quoted in Cowan, More Work for Mother, 56.

4 Cowan, More Work for Mother, 56-61.

5 Edward Everett Hale, A New England Boyhood and other Bits of Autobiography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1900), 58; quoted in Cowan, More Work for Mother, 58.

6 Cowan, More Work for Mother, 90-97. The first electric stove was demonstrated at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago. Janice B. Longone and Daniel T. Longone, American Cookbooks and Wine Books, 1797-1950 (Ann Arbor: Clements Library, 1984), 10.

7 Oscar Edward Anderson, Refrigeration in America: A History of a New Technology and Its Impact (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1972), 44-45, 113-15.

8 Cowan, More Work for Mother; 132-34. For a history of the household refrigerator, see Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 599-604.

9 Harvey A. Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 31, 36-37; F. G. Urner, "Food Conservation by Cold Storage," in Fourth National Conservation Congress, Addresses and Proceedings (Indianapolis: The congress, 1912), 328-34.

10 Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 599-604.

11 Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project, Michigan State University, biography of Alvin Wood Chase, found at http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/html/authors/author_chase.html, viewed June 15, 2006.

11 The first cookbook published in Michigan was The Western Artist written by Michael Miller of Homer and published in Detroit in 1845.

12 Donna R. Braden, Eagle Tavern Cookbook (Dearborn: Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village, 1988), 13, discusses the typical diet of Michigan residents about 1850.

13 A. W. Chase, Dr. Chase's Recipes, or Information for Everybody (Ann Arbor: The author, 1864), 290.

14TheAmerican Home Cook Book (Detroit: Rose-Belford Publishing Co., 1878).

15 E. Neil, The Every-day Cook-book and Encyclopedia of Practical Recipes: Economical, Reliable, and Excellent (Detroit: n.p., 1890).

16 May Perrin Goff, ed., The Household (of the Detroit Free Press): A Cyclopedia of Practical Hints for Modern Homes (Detroit: Detroit Free Press Publishing Co., 1881).

17 Della T. Lutes, The Country Kitchen, with an introduction by Lawrence R. Dawson (1935; repr., Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), ix-xxii, quotation on p. xx.

18 Ibid. 177-78.

19 Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker, The Joy of Cooking (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), 807.

20 Longone and Longone, American Cookbooks, 4-10, 29.

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