The Young Housekeeper’s Friend
There’s an attention to season in this cookbook that is absent even from a California farmers’ market. To make a salad, Mrs. Cornelius counsels her readers to “gather lettuce and pepper-grass early, before the dew has evaporated.” For butternut squash: “gather them between the twenty-fifth and thirtieth of June.” Snow fritters call for “new-fallen snow.”
All of this gathering comes in the midst of a demanding household schedule. Washing day, Tuesday, is the fulcrum of the week, spiritually second to the Sabbath, but practically the ninth circle of hell in the housekeeper’s week. The wash was an all-day affair and it required its own day of preparation (for mending clothes before the wash) and a day of rest afterwards. As Mrs. Cornelius says, “To most persons, both washing and ironing is severe labor, and therefore better not be done on successive days.” So, on Wednesday bake, and fold the clothes. Hold the ironing for Thursdays. Friday is a deep-cleaning day and Saturday a baking day again. Sunday, rest, and “the frame is reinvigorated.”
The names of many dishes, particularly the sweet ones, are familiar to me, as I was raised by a New Englander, although nearly two centuries after Mrs. Cornelius. I love Boston gingerbread and mince pie, buttermilk biscuits, waffles, bread pudding, tapioca, and rice pudding.
There are some recipes that are unrecognizable and not particularly appetizing, like Calf’s Foot Blancmange or Pigeons in Disguise. But, ground rice flummery, rusk, whigs, orgeat, and isinglass all sound pretty good. There’s a cornucopia of cakes. From Composition Cake, which is a lot like a fruit cake, to many local variants: Vermont sponge cake (two lemons) versus Brooklyn sponge cake (one lemon). Bridgeport Cake, which calls for currants, and Turnbridge Cake, which adds a little wine. Salem Wedding Cake requires ten pounds of flour, ten of sugar, ten of butter, plus 70 eggs, a pint of the best Malaga wine, twelve pounds currants, four pounds of raisins, and nutmeg, cinnamon, mace, powdered clove, and lemon. And there you have it; that’s the recipe. Bake!
After all these cakes, we should brush our teeth. This is Mrs. Cornelius’ recipe for tooth powder:
By the 1840s, writers of home advice manuals had identified a problem with white women’s education in the North. No longer did every young woman learn how to manage the household as a girl. Instead, she was busy in school or lived in a family with ample hired help. Mrs. Cornelius wrote despairingly in 1845, “Nothing is more common than to see young ladies, whose intellectual attainments are of a high order, profoundly ignorant of the duties which all acknowledge to belong peculiarly to women. Consequently, many have to learn, after marriage, how to take care of a family; and thus their housekeeping is, frequently, little else than a series of experiments; often unsuccessful, resulting in mortification and discomfort in the parlor, and waste and ill temper in the kitchen.”
Mrs. Cornelius’ audience was decidedly for the rising merchant class. Even if the young woman moved into her own home and was able to hire workers, she would be involved in the planning of the household tasks, and most likely in their execution. A section entitled “Ovens — And How to Heat Them” makes obvious just how much specialized knowledge was required by even the most seemingly straight-forward tasks in the mid-nineteenth century home. Mrs. Cornelius prefaces the chapter with “a few suggestions in regard to the construction of an oven,” but then goes on to say that “the size and structure of ovens is so different, that no precise rules for heating them can be given. A lady should attend to this herself, until she perfectly understands what is necessary.” Some helpful hints: use hardwood, like walnut, for high-heat items, such as baked beans. Softer woods, such as pine, are better for baking thin cakes. After you’ve rendered your hot coals, throw a little white flour into the oven to test the temperature (because there is no thermostat!). If it browns too quickly, leave the door open for three or four minutes to let out some heat.
Mrs. Cornelius described the situation as an “asymmetry” in women’s education. But she didn’t advocate for women to leave school; she simply advertised her own housekeeper’s manual. More housekeeping, not less schooling. She maintained, “excellence in housekeeping has come to be considered as incompatible with superior intellectual culture. But it is not so. The most elevated minds fulfil [sic] best the every-day duties of life.”
Mrs. Cornelius recommends that the lady of the house teach her servants to read, if they do not know how to already. This would be an hour’s work for Sunday, a religious duty and Christian mission. She suggests, “Encourage in them a taste for reading by keeping useful and entertaining books in the kitchen.” On some level her care for the domestic servant is designed to improve the vigor of their labor and longevity of their employment, but she also seems to recognize the fine line that divided upstairs from downstairs.
For women of the nineteenth century, property and one’s station in life was always tenuous. Mrs. Cornelius confided that she “cannot refrain from adding a few words of sympathy and encouragement for those who, having passed their youth in affluent ease, or in the delights of study, are obliged, by the vicissitudes of life, to spend their time and strength in laborious household occupations. […] Adversity succeeds prosperity like a sudden inundation, and sweeps away the possessions and the hopes of multitudes.”
Mrs. Cornelius was writing in the wake of the Panic of 1837, the gravest economic crisis known to young America. But, now, after more crises variously termed depressions, recessions, or downturns, and blamed on everything from fat fingers to faulty loans, we still have one thing in common: adversity sweeps away the possessions and the hopes of multitudes in America, perhaps like nowhere else. Food and the efficient direction of the household promised stability and even improvement. She warns: “However improbable it may seem, the health of many a professional man is undermined, and his usefulness curtailed, if not sacrificed, because he habitually eats bad bread.” Domestic economy, in Mrs. Cornelius’ view, was not only the housekeeper’s Christian duty, it was a patriotic one, too. The success of the new nation depended upon women.
