photo courtesy of Chester Ghost Tour,
hauntedaccommodations.com
photo courtesy of Ghostly Places
Potato Rocks and Ice Houses
Not too long ago, as part of my continuing series of “quick detours to get away from the monotony of I-95,” the kids and I visited Shirley Plantation, southeast of Richmond, Virginia. The kids now profess to hate anything associated with history because I have dragged them to so many historic sites. So although the detour off the interstate was not too far, it seemed to take a very long time. The roads were narrow and winding with a shaded seclusion that gave me the sense that we were about to become the unnamed victims at the start of a horror film. Yes, the mood coming from the back of the minivan was that bad.
But as soon as we stopped, everything changed. That’s because someone decided the rocks in the parking area looked like potatoes.
Okay, whatever. I’ll take it. So the kids liked the rocks in the parking lot. There was one other thing at Shirley Plantation that captured their interest and that was the ice house. I thought it was cool that they had made it out of the foundation of an old wing of the house that had burned down. The kids just liked it because it was so deep and dark. They couldn’t see the bottom. When they dropped rocks (only the ones that did not look like potatoes) down inside, they couldn’t hear them hit the bottom.
So I thought of the kids when I visited Hampton Plantation a few weeks ago. Hampton is north of Baltimore and though it was once a two-day journey from town, I can now get there from my house in just about twenty minutes, so the kids can stay at home. But they might have liked the ice house. It reminded me of a Celtic burial mound. Up on top of the earthen mound was the hatch for putting the ice in. On the opposite side there was a walkway tunneling into the mound. It led to a door at a lower level where servants (slaves for much of the plantation’s history) could enter to extract ice when it was needed.
My next question was “just when was it needed?” Obviously the ice was stored in winter and used sometime during the warmer months. But what was it used for? The guide at the plantation said ice was used to chill wine and make ice cream. Okay, that seems reasonable. But the ice house at Hampton is 33 feet deep. Even allowing space for insulation, that’s a lot of ice if you’re just using it for ice cream.
The natural thing to us would be to use the ice for food preservation. But I’ve never run across any evidence that it was used for that more mundane purpose. Everyone, rich and poor, tended to preserve food by smoking, salting, drying or pickling it. Only the wealthy had access to ice, and they seemed to use it to show off, to enjoy luxuries unable to common folk. Is it possible they did not realize that they could keep food fresher longer with ice? That seems unlikely, given that they must surely have noticed that meat and cream keep better in winter than in summer.
In any case, this is an area I’d like to explore more, so I’m going to start looking closely for references to chilled beverages, desserts and other things involving the use of ice. I’d also like to find out more about where the ice came from. Plantation homes in the deep south had ice brought down by ship from New England. But here in Maryland, we might have had enough of our own native ice that it could just be cut from a local pond.
Incidentally, to keep the ice cream season lasting through the summer, the ice house apparently had to be packed with ice, not snow. George Washington wrote to a friend complaining that the snow he packed in his ice house at Mt. Vernon had melted too soon. He blamed the design of his ice house and asked for building instructions for a different type. But the friend, Robert Morris of Philadelphia, said that the problem was not the structure but the snow itself. “"I tried snow one year and lost it by June,” he wrote. “The ice keeps until October or November."*
But you know, I’m not so sure the ice house wasn’t to blame after all. Maybe it wasn’t deep enough. I think the next time I go to Mt. Vernon, I’ll have to try dropping a rock in the ice house to see if I can hear it land.
Of course, first I’ll have make sure it doesn’t look like a potato.
Until next time...
--K
* Quote taken from “The Papers of George Washington” http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/articles/news/icehouse.html
Lilliputian Parliament
In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I thought I’d pay homage to the “little people” who played a vital role in the development of the free press we enjoy today. Not leprechauns, but close. I’m referring to Lilliputians, created by Jonathan Swift in his most famous work, Gulliver’s Travels. (Swift was a gifted English writer but he lived most of his life in Ireland and that’s my only tie-in to the shamrock holiday).
Anyway, in the story published in 1726, Swift satirizes the politics of Britain with his description of the government of Lilliput, a land of people about six inches tall. At the time, it was illegal to print transcriptions of debates in the English Parliament. But the public thirst for knowledge was great enough to inspire some enterprising publishers to print them anyway. In 1738, Edward Cave, publisher of The Gentleman’s Magazine, was ordered to discontinue reporting on parliament. He evaded the problem with a little publishing subterfuge. He hired someone to hide within earshot of the debates and jot down rough notes about what was said. Then the notes were then written up and reported as the “Debates in the Senate of Lilliput.” Samuel Johnson eventually took over the writing of these reports, although historians doubt that he was ever actually present at a debate. Since he was working from another reporter’s sparse notes, Johnson had to imagine what the speakers actually said and fill in with political rhetoric he would have expected them to use. So the public was able to get a quasi-journalistic view of the debates.
Of course, to comply with legalities, the speakers in the debates were given Lilliputian names, but those familiar with the politics of the day would have easily been able to determine who he was referring to, especially since the Lilliputian names were often simple anagrams of the real political figures they represented. The Lilliputian debates were so successful they boosted the magazine’s circulation considerably. But after a few years, Johnson decided to stop writing the debates. He told his biographer that he had to quit as soon as he realized that people were mistaking his fictional speeches for the real thing. I guess this would have been sort of like the problem with the airing of The War of the Worlds, except that no one thought the Lilliputians were actually attacking. In any case, it seemed to take him an awfully long time to gauge public reaction. But he supposedly regretted his part as “an accessary[sic] to the propagation of falsehood” for the rest of his life.
Regardless of his regret, these half-fictional reports eventually paved the way for true parliamentary reporting in Britain, which was not officially legalized until 1771.
In a strange way, we seem to have come full circle in the media in recent years. We started with real reports pretending to be fictional. Johnson and his unknown reporter partner presented the substance of actual parliamentary debates under the guise of fiction. Today we have staged and contrived situations portrayed on television and reported in other media as “reality.” And with the advent of cable television and internet blogs, journalistic reporting and commentary have so many voices spouting “truth” from so many different divergent viewpoints that it is hard to know who has been hiding in the shadows taking notes on what’s really going on.
I, for one, would love to read what Swift and Johnson would have to say about it.
Until next time...
--K
Tastes Change - Thankfully
Just as you wouldn’t expect to see a scullery maid in Regency England wearing a mini skirt, you wouldn’t expect to see her eating a popsicle or a slice of pizza, either. Over time, fashions and tastes have changed in food, just as they have in clothing. We can’t necessarily predict what people will be eating in the future, but we can look back and see what foods and flavors were popular in the past. Some might seem odd by modern standards, and some, in my opinion, verge on truly repulsive. But they’re all interesting.
To begin with, I want to clarify that when looking for “odd” foods that used to be common, I looked primarily at English and American cuisine from the late middle ages through the early nineteenth century. In other words, these were foods that might have been eaten by that scullery maid and her ancestors - or more likely, her wealthy employers and their ancestors. In addition, I was looking for food that was ordinary and desirable, not cases where starving settlers resorted to eating their boiled moccasins.
Now that the disclosures are out of the way, I’d like to look first at ingredients and flavors that used to be popular but can’t be found in most kitchens these days. At least not as food. Although we might see violet leaves might in a vase or rose water in perfume, today we generally don’t eat flower parts the way people did to in the past. But cooks in Elizabethan times frequently used violet leaves as seasoning; later violet leaves appear more often pickled with salad vegetables. Cowslips, borage, marigolds and carnations (called “gillyflowers”), along with buds from a variety of other flowers, were also pickled for winter salads. And of course two of the most popular flavorings for sweet dishes, rose water and orange flower water, are also flower products. These two flavorings were as common in old dessert recipes (spelled “receipts”) as vanilla is today.
In addition to flower flavorings, there were greens that have fallen out of fashion like sorrel, purslane and tansy that can’t really be compared to any flavors most of us are used to. One flavoring that was common in the seventeenth century has disappeared so thoroughly that experts aren’t entirely sure what it was. Verjuice has been described as a sour cider made of crab apples, but records also indicate that it may have been the juice of unripe grapes. Either way, it would have been pretty sour. At the opposite extreme was “bastard wine,” a wine sweetened with honey or sugar which was sometimes used to refresh pickled food that was past its prime.
The flavoring that I found most unpalatable to my modern tastebuds was ambergris, the morbid (dying) secretion of a sperm whale. Although it appears in recipes well into the 18th century, experts contend that no one was still actually using it much past the middle ages. Perhaps others found the concept as unpalatable as I did. It also became extremely expensive. In any case, to find out whether cooks were really using it, we’d have to travel back in time to do some taste testing. Frankly, if I had a time machine, I’d be searching for other things.
In addition to flavors that have fallen out of fashion, there are animals or animal parts that we just don’t eat much anymore. These days, lamprey and carp are more likely to appear in an aquarium than a refrigerator, but both were very popular in English recipes, especially through the middle ages and Tudor era. And one popular meat you don’t hear much about anymore is humbles. In our modern language, we think of “humble pie” as something denoting humiliation, but humbles the food actually comes from the Old French word noumbles, which is a dish that appears in The Forme of Cury, the book compiled by the master chefs of Richard II.
So what is this royal dish? The heart, liver kidneys and other internal organs of a deer. Venison was reserved for nobility or even royalty in England, since the only people who could legally obtain it were those with a lot of land that could support deer populations. As deer became increasingly scarce in the 17th Century, recipes appear that were designed to make beef taste like deer. Nevertheless, by today’s standards, the internal organs of deer or any animals are considered little better than dog food. Today, humbles would really be humble.
Calves also don’t get the attention that they used to. We still eat veal today, but not too many people make calves feet and heads into pies, soup, or jelly anymore. Of course, back when I was in high school, I do remember once finding a jar of pickled pigs’ feet in the refrigerator, so I guess the taste for animal feet hasn’t entirely disappeared from our culture. Similarly, beef tongue and ox tail still have a few fans, although sheep and pig tongues aren’t around much.
We also don’t eat the variety of birds that chefs used to prepare in centuries past. Old recipes abound for pigeon, squab, doves, partridge and a variety of wildfowl. There is even a legendary 16th Century Italian recipe that calls for baking stunned songbirds in a light piecrust so that when the pie was cut, the birds would fly out to delight the dinner guests. That would be the “four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie” from the “Sing a Song of Sixpence” nursery rhyme. If this worked, it would drive the cats crazy.
Of course, in looking through the old “receipt” books, what really strikes me is not so much the individual ingredients themselves but the way they are combined. For example, ketchup as a condiment appears in the English language as far back as 1690, but it was originally made with mushrooms, pickled oysters or walnuts. The tomato version didn’t appear in written recipes until the 1820s.
One of the most difficult concepts for me to find appealing is the use of sugar and sweet spices with foods that I usually associate with salt. I recently made an onion pie from an 18th Century recipe that called for sliced onion, boiled eggs, apples and potatoes. And this combination turned out to be pretty good. But the primary seasonings were nutmeg and mace, which gave everything the faint aroma of Christmas cookies. So while I enjoyed eating a piece or two of this onion pie, the leftovers sat in the frig untouched until I decided I needed the space for a pitcher of sangria or something. I think I just didn’t want nutmeg on my potatoes.
This recipe could have been even stranger if it had had as much sugar and fruit as many old recipes. Would you like a dish of calves foot, rosewater and currants? How about leg of mutton with half a pound of sugar, cloves, egg yolks, and nutmeg? Or carp roasted in its own blood with nutmeg and ginger? Or gooseblood with oatmeal, sugar, currants and cloves? Liver pudding with currants?
And then of course there’s mincemeat. One very old form of this dish included minced veal or neat’s tongue, suet, raisins, apples, rosewater and candied orange peel.
Just as main dishes frequently included sweet ingredients, the old recipes for desserts often included some rather un-dessert-like ingredients. While I like bread pudding, I don’t think I’d care for the version with bone marrow and artichoke bottoms (which are listed as interchangeable with apple slices). How about a tart made of lettuce and prunes? Or parsnips, rosewater and wine? Chard and spinach also found their way into piecrust, although most likely not as dessert.
This has been a fascinating study and I can see myself adding to my list of “gross-out” dishes for years to come. So in keeping with my spirit of ridiculing the tastes of the past, I thought I’d close with the most unusual, unappealing combination I’ve found so far. This would be for a “white leach of cream,” which is sort of like a 17th Century Jello®. It consisted of a pint of cream flavored with rosewater, mace and musk. These ingredients were boiled with isinglass (a type of gelatine made from a sturgeon’s bladder) to make a stiff pasty loaf that could be sliced when cold.
They say there’s always room for Jello®, but I think in this case, I’d say I was full.
_________________________________________________
For more information about old recipes, ingredients and cooking techniques, I highly recommend Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery and Booke of Sweetmeats, an old collection of English family recipes transcribed and thoroughly annotated by Karen Hess (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).
Other valuable sources on the subject include:
Bullock, Helen. The Williamsburg Art of Cookery or Accomplished Gentlewoman’s Companion. Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg, 1938.
Child, Lydia Maria. The American Frugal Housewife. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1999.
Glasse, Hannah. The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, 1997 (first published in England, 1747).
Huesken, Sue and Mercy Ingraham. Colonial Burlington Cookery: A Book of Receipts April 1770, Polly Burling. Riverside, NJ: Good Impressions, Inc., 2008.
The Pennsylvania Housewife: English Household Receipts in the Middle Colonies. Philadelphia: Past Masters in Early American Domestic Arts, 2003.
Rombauer, Irma S. and Marion Rombauer Becker. The Joy of Cooking. New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. 1931.
Simmons, Amelia. The First American Cookbook: A Facsimile of “American Cookery,” 1796. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. 1958.
Ghost Tours and Battlefield Fries
Gettysburg is not a good place to look for colonial history.
This is probably obvious to everyone but me, I thought it was worth a try. Yes, the Pennsylvania town is most famous for the pivotal Civil War battle fought in and around its borders, but I figured the town had to exist before 1863 and I thought that some of that older settlement would still be around.
Turns out I was wrong. History in Gettysburg begins and ends in 1863, according the approximately 3.7 million historical markers, plaques and signs that litter the town like political posters during election week.
This was not immediately obvious when we first arrived in town on a dark Friday night, of course. We headed out on foot to check out a couple of restaurants recommended by locals. The first we came to, Farnsworth House, was Victorian. Since they were about to close for the evening, we headed further down the street to the other recommended restaurant, Dobbin House Tavern. This was an 18th century clapboard building with a big stone basement. We ate in the Springhouse Tavern, a dark basement room with a big fireplace, flickering candles, and waitresses in pseudo-colonial garb.
So far, so good. We’d been in town half and hour and without trying had already found an atmospheric 18th century establishment. How hard could it be to find more?
Very. In fact, impossible is more like it. The next day, I spent most of my time in a writers’ retreat, but I sent out my research assistant (i.e., my husband, Jim) to find any 18th Century buildings within walking distance. I figured I could check them out on Sunday at the end of my retreat.
That turned out to be really easy - for me. There was only one building for me to look at and it wasn’t open to the public. But Jim spent hours looking for others. Though Gettysburg features a great many buildings that might well date back to the 1700s, they are all labeled with plaques that say simply “Civil War Building, July 1863.” My husband concluded that in Gettysburg, all that matters is whether something did or didn’t exist at the time of the battle.
The one labeled 18th Century building he found, the “Stevens Log House,” had two conflicting signs dating it to both the 1790s and 1830s. The latter sign contained five paragraphs of text. Out of all that, only one sentence had anything to do with the house. The rest talked about how (in July 1863, of course) the inhabitants must have witnessed the battle, etc. And then there were four paragraphs about the organization that put up the plaque.
All the signs in town pretty much talk about the same thing: the battle. Specifically, they discuss three aspects of the battle. First, since most larger buildings were used as hospitals, there are lots of descriptions of the moans of the wounded and dying. Second, the signs also insist that all shots fired nearby came from sharpshooters. Either both armies brought large brigades of sharpshooters with them, or town historians decided that shots fired by regular infantry didn’t sound impressive enough. The third common feature of the signs is that they all seem to indicate that the site had a connection with Jennie Wade, the sole civilian casualty of battle. She must have been a very social woman.
At least one sign combined these two features by asserting that Jennie Wade had been killed by a sharpshooter. Jim pointed out that the shooter couldn’t have been particularly sharp if he hit a civilian woman cooking in her sister’s kitchen.
So anyway, those were the official signs. Most of the non-official signs dealt with the sale of souvenirs, ice cream or ghosts. Okay, so we didn’t see any actual ghosts for sale. But there were at least six different ghost tours and a couple of places advertising ghost hunting equipment.
The Farnsworth House, where we had dinner our second night, even offered two different ghost tours on their own property. Proud of their label as “one of the most haunted inns in America,” The Farnsworth house advertises that it was (surprise) “occupied by Confederate Sharp Shooters” and has “Over 100 Bullet Holes.” In fact, some historians have noticed that this building (which, as Jim pointed out in a period photo, had another building right next to it at the time of the war) has more bullet holes on the side than any of the buildings on the actual battlefields. There is some speculation that if you come out to the Farnworth House late on a dark night, you won’t find any ghosts but you will find the owner of the establishment outside chiseling more “bullet” holes in the brickwork of his building.
But even though we didn’t find much about the early town of Gettysburg, we did find some fun things.
My husband’s favorite place was Ernie’s Texas Lunch Hot Weiners, a hot dog joint that was in its third generation of family ownership. Though there may be other things on the menu, most customers order “one with” or “one without,” meaning a hot dog with or without a huge pile of raw onions. He was very disappointed that the place was closed on Sunday because he wanted to take me there for breakfast.
One of my favorite things in Gettysburg was “Penelope” the cannon that is stuck in the cement sidewalk not far from Lincoln Square. Town bigwigs purchased the gun in the first part of the 19th Century not to protect the town but just for fun so they’d have something to make noise with to celebrate festive occasions. It was said to be fired every time the Democrats won an election, and when the gun was overloaded with powder and the barrel ruptured in 1855, she was stuck into the cement in front of the office of the Gettyburg Compiler, the town’s Democratic Newspaper. The newpaper is long gone now, but Penelope is still there.
All in all, I’ve got to believe that Gettysburg must frustrate history buffs who want to know about the year 1863 about as much as it frustrates someone like me who would rather hear about 1763. The town has spent nearly a century and a half trying to capitalize on its fame, and much of the real history is obscured by all the tourist hype. I can’t imagine that Civil War historians enjoy seeing signs advertising “battlefield fries” any more than I did.
And maybe the deceased residents of Gettysburg find that a bit tacky, too. That would explain why there are so many restless ghosts in town.
Until next time...
--K
Up on Cripple Creek
“Don’t go to Cripple Creek,” a local newspaper writer advised me on my first visit to Colorado Springs. “It’s just trash.” At the time, I figured since he lived in the area and wrote about it regularly, he knew what he was talking about. Now I’m not so sure.
Last summer, I made my third trip to Colorado Springs, and this time, I decided I had to make the trek through the hills to the old mining town. After all, I knew there had once been a booming, lawless gold rush community on the site, even if nothing now remained of it .
But it turns out that a lot of that town does, in fact, remain. Cripple Creek, which is about 45 miles west of Colorado Springs, sprouted up in about 1890 when gold was discovered in the region. By 1893, the influx of prospectors swelled the town to a population of 10,000. Almost as fast as it grew, however, Cripple Creek caught fire, burning down almost entirely in 1894 and then again in 1896. But the residents quickly rebuilt and today a large percentage of the “new” brick buildings from 1896 remain in place on the main street.
The town gets no respect from many residents of surrounding counties, however, because most of those 1896 buildings have now been converted into casinos.
I actually think that makes the town more authentic in a way. Modern Americans are not going to flock to an area expecting to get rich quick by sticking a tin pan into an icy stream looking for flakes of gold. These days, we still spend money and take chances in the hopes of striking it rich, but we expect to do it by buying a lottery ticket or hitting it big at the casino.
In other words, Cripple Creek has the some aura that it had during its heyday from 1890-1910. Everywhere, business owners are trying to feed on the “get rich quick” mentality. Instead of selling overpriced mining tools, they’ll sit you down in front of a slot machine.
On my visit, I actually didn’t set foot in any of the casinos because my husband and I were accompanied by my eleven-year-old daughter. She was more interested in the blackjack gum at the counter of the candy store than the blackjack machines that promise to make you rich.
We had originally headed to the area to visit the Mollie Kathleen gold mine and I wasn’t sure we’d even have time to get into the town of Cripple Creek itself -- remember, it wasn’t supposed to be worth visiting. But despite having talked to an agent on the phone who said he’d hold a place for us, we made the hour-long drive through the winding mountain roads only to be told (by a less-than-friendly manager) that the last tour was sold out. So we got back into the car and headed down to the town of Cripple Creek itself.
It turns out that the lady shrew at the mine did us a huge favor. If we had gone on the mine tour, we would have missed the Cripple Creek District Museum. As it was, we arrived about twenty minutes before it was scheduled to close. But the much more considerate manager of this establishment said she would stay open as long as we needed to complete our tour of the three story building.
And when we finished, we found out that they were also holding a second building open for us across the street, as well.
Needless to say, we appreciated the great service. But we also appreciated the cool things in the museum.
Although visitors are urged to start at the top in the Victorian living rooms, to me the most interesting (and most appropriate) part of the museum was the collection of artifacts related to the town’s shadier elements. The “vice case,” as we termed it, featured the opium pipe of one of the town madams, as well as an accordion-like device for hiding cards up a player’s shirtsleeve, plus antique slot machines and poker chips. It also had a faro board, which was a great reminder to me that gamblers of the day didn’t all play five card draw like they do in the movies.
All throughout the museum, artifacts were identified as belonging to specific residents of the town, which either indicates that great care was taken in assembling the museum collection or that the curators are a tremendous pack of liars. Given the consideration shown by the women who stayed open late to let us see everything, I’m inclined to believe it’s the former.
When we finally left to walk the streets, I was pleasantly surprised to see all of the buildings in beautiful shape. The storefronts of buildings that are not currently in commercial use feature period-style displays so that you still have the sensation of walking through a late 19th Century town. Even the only “trash” I saw was period correct - an occasional pile of horse manure in the street.
We did not have a chance to get to the Outlaws and Lawmen Jail Museum, but I definitely will make time for that on a future visit.
So all in all, I can only conclude that the “locals” who dis Cripple Creek don’t know what they’re talking about, even if they are professional writers.
Sometimes, even the best of us get it wrong.
Until next time,
--K