American Cookery - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

American Cookery, by Amelia Simmons, was the first known cookbook

Cookbook

A cookbook is a kitchen reference that typically contains a collection of recipes. Modern versions may also include colorful illustrations and advice on purchasing quality ingredients or making substitutions...

written by an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, published in 1796. Until this time, the cookbooks printed and used in what became the United States were British cookbooks, so the importance of this book is obvious to American culinary history, and more generally, to the history of America. The full title of this book was: American Cookery, or 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 plum to plain cake: Adapted to this country, and all grades of life.

This book was quite popular and was printed, reprinted and pirated for 30 years after its first appearance. Only four copies of the first edition (Hartford, 1796) are known to exist.

From the Historic American Cookbook Project of Michigan State University: "The importance of this work cannot be overestimated. Its initial publication (Hartford, 1796) was, in its own way, a second Declaration of American Independence..."

About the author

The only biographical information known about the author is from the cover and title pages of her cookbook that list her as "Amelia Simmons, An American Orphan"; nothing else is known about the author, so all else is by inference. American Cookery is the only known published work by her. She said in her preface:

The candor of the American Ladies is solicitously intreated by the Authoress, as she is circumscribed in her knowledge, this being original work in this country.

This phrase indicates that she probably lacked formal education. Based on other quotes from her preface, she was most likely a domestic laborer. She wrote of "those females who have parents, or brothers, or riches," and how female orphans may be "reduced to the necessity of going into families in the line of domestics."

Culinary Historian Karen Hess

Karen Hess

Karen Loft Hess was an American culinary historian. Her 1977 book The Taste of America co-authored with her late husband, John L. Hess, established them as anti-establishment members of the culinary world....

says that because "...the first edition is from Hartford, historians have always assumed that she was a New Englander." However, many of the later editions were published from a cluster around the Hudson River Valley (e.g. - Albany, Salem, Troy, Poughkeepsie, New York). Also, several Dutch words appeared in her work (for example, slaw and cookey), words that would have more likely come from that region, rather than New England. So a case can be made that Simmons more likely came from the Hudson Valley region.

Karen Hess also referred to Miss. Simmons as a "good plain cook", noting the generous use and variety of herbs and the use of wine in her recipes. Simmons also showed the use of English "extraordinarily fine roasting techniques" in her recipes.

Early editions and 20th century editions

As of 1860, there were 13 known editions of this book, all published from 1796 to 1831.

In 1808, Lucy Emerson plagiarized Simmons's book (from the Troy, NY 1808 edition) by renaming part of the title and copying verbatim most of the rest of it. She changed the words "American Cookery" to "The New-England Cookery", but the title is otherwise almost the same. Published in Montpelier, VT in 1808.

In 1957, Mary Tolford Wilson wrote The First American Cookbook, an essay that served as the introduction to the facsimile of the first edition of American Cookery (Harttford, 1796). This edition was originally published by Oxford University Press

Oxford University Press

Oxford University Press is the largest university press in the world. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics appointed by the Vice-Chancellor known as the Delegates of the Press. They are headed by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as...

in 1958, and then reissued by Dover Publications

Dover Publications

Dover Publications is an American book publisher founded in 1941 by Hayward Cirker and his wife, Blanche. It publishes primarily reissues, books no longer published by their original publishers. These are often, but not always, books in the public domain. The original published editions may be...

in 1984.

In 1982, Gail Weesner edited and annotated a typographically reset edition with an introduction and an extensive number of individual annotations for recipes in which usage or content needed clarification. The type is easier to read, since the old-fashioned long cursive-like form of the letter "s" (called a long s

Long s

The long, medial or descending s is a form of the minuscule letter s formerly used where s occurred in the middle or at the beginning of a word, for example "ſinfulneſs" . The modern letterform was called the terminal, round, or short s.-History:The long s is derived from the old Roman cursive...

) that looks like an "ƒ" has been rendered as a modern typographical short "s". Published by Rowan Tree Press (1982).

In 1996, culinary historian Karen Hess encouraged the publishing of the facsimile edition of the American Cookerys second edition (Albany, 1796) by Applewood Books
Applewood Books
Applewood Books is a book publishing company founded by Phil Zuckerman in 1976. They specialize in publishing exacting recreations of historic books, including complex reprints of children's art and pop-up books and other books published by methods which duplicate antique publishing techniques. ...

, and wrote the introduction and historical notes for it. This was the Bicentennial edition of American Cookery, published in 1996.

Importance of text

Firstly, it is the first known cook book that brings together English cooking methods with American products. More specifically, it contains the first known printed recipes with the substitution of American maize (cornmeal) for English oats in otherwise English recipes. The recipe for Johnny Cake is apparently the first printed version made with cornmeal. Both corn and oats are cereal grains

Cereal

Cereals are grasses cultivated for the edible components of their grain , composed of the endosperm, germ, and bran...

. It also contains the first known printed recipe for turkey

Turkey (bird)

A turkey is a large bird in the genus Meleagris. One species, Meleagris gallopavo, commonly known as the Wild Turkey, is native to the forests of North America. The domestic turkey is a descendant of this species...

(which is native to North and Central America) with cranberries

Cranberry

Cranberries are a group of evergreen dwarf shrubs or trailing vines in the subgenus Oxycoccus of the genus Vaccinium. In some methods of classification, Oxycoccus is regarded as a genus in its own right...

.

Secondly, and probably most importantly, it is the first known printed American call for the use of a chemical leavening agent

Leavening agent

A leavening agent is any one of a number of substances used in doughs and batters that cause a foaming action which lightens and softens the finished product...

that was the precursor to modern baking power

Baking powder

Baking powder is a dry chemical leavening agent used to increase the volume and lighten the texture of baked goods such as muffins, cakes, scones and American-style biscuits. Baking powder works by releasing carbon dioxide gas into a batter or dough through an acid-base reaction, causing bubbles in...

, used to cause dough

Dough

Dough is a paste made out of any cereals or leguminous crops by mixing flour with a small amount of water and/or other liquid. This process is a precursor to making a wide variety of foodstuffs, particularly breads and bread-based items , flatbreads, noodles, pastry, and similar items)...

to rise in baking. At that time, it was known as potash

Potash

Potash is the common name for various mined and manufactured salts that contain potassium in water-soluble form. In some rare cases, potash can be formed with traces of organic materials such as plant remains, and this was the major historical source for it before the industrial era...

, pearl ash, pearlash, or alkali. Contrast this method with others, such as using yeast

Yeast

Yeasts are eukaryotic micro-organisms classified in the kingdom Fungi, with 1,500 species currently described estimated to be only 1% of all fungal species. Most reproduce asexually by mitosis, and many do so by an asymmetric division process called budding...

.

"Although native Americans had been using corn

Maize

Maize known in many English-speaking countries as corn or mielie/mealie, is a grain domesticated by indigenous peoples in Mesoamerica in prehistoric times. The leafy stalk produces ears which contain seeds called kernels. Though technically a grain, maize kernels are used in cooking as a vegetable...

for many millennia and European

European ethnic groups

The ethnic groups in Europe are the various ethnic groups that reside in the nations of Europe. European ethnology is the field of anthropology focusing on Europe....

and African American

African American

African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...

s from earliest Pilgrim days, this book offers the first printed recipes using cornmeal

Cornmeal

Cornmeal is flour ground from dried maize or American corn. It is a common staple food, and is ground to fine, medium, and coarse consistencies. In the United States, the finely ground cornmeal is also referred to as cornflour. However, the word cornflour denotes cornstarch in recipes from the...

..."

Wilson wries: "This facsimile of the first American-written cookbook published in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

is not only a first in cookbook literature, but an historic document. It reveals the rich variety of food Colonial Americans enjoyed, their tastes, cooking and eating habits, even their colorful language. Author Amelia Simmons worked as a domestic in Colonial America

Colonial America

The colonial history of the United States covers the history from the start of European settlement and especially the history of the thirteen colonies of Britain until they declared independence in 1776. In the late 16th century, England, France, Spain and the Netherlands launched major...

and gathered her cookery expertize from first-hand experience." By 1831, American Cookery had long been superseded by other American editions of English cookbooks, but Wilson goes on to say "But Amelia Simmons still holds her place as the mother of American cookery books. And no later work, however completely it may reflect the mores of this country, has quite the freshness of this first glimpse caught in the small mirror held up by an American Orphan."

Karen Hess writes: "Indeed, English cookbooks had long been in documented use by the Colonists, going back at least to The English Hus-wife of 1615 by Gervase Markham. ... Not one of them included specifically American recipes, although by that time a few native American products had become adopted in English cookery, beginning with turkey and so called French beans, but gradually also both sweet and white potatoes, even chocolate, vanilla, and tomatoes, and so came to be called for in English cookbooks well before the end of the eighteenth century. But we find not one cookbook written by an American, for Americans, that is, until 1796, when American Cookery appeared in Hartford, and later the same year, in Albany." Hess goes on to say: "So, again, what makes American Cookery so very American? It is precisely the bringing together of certain native American products and English culinary traditions. So English that entire chapters were "borrowed" from The Frugal Housewife by Susannah Carter, which appeared in American editions in 1772 and 1792, and yet so very American in her use of those elements."

Jan Longone writes for the Historic American Cookbook Project: "...the revolutionary and original aspects of her work lie in its recognition and use of truly American produce. There are five recipes using corn meal (corn is indigenous to America): three for Indian Pudding, one for Johnny or Hoe Cake and one for Indian Slapjacks." He continues with "Perhaps the most far-reaching innovation was the introduction of pearlash, a well-known staple in the colonial American household, as a chemical leavening in doughs. This practice eventually led to the compounding of modern baking powders." She ends with: "Thus, twenty years after the political upheaval of the American Revolution of 1776, a second revolution - a culinary revolution - occurred with the publication of a cookbook by an American for Americans."

Works cited

Historic American Cookbook Project of Michigan State University: Feeding America. Simmons, Amelia Retrieved from http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/html/authors/author_simmons.html on 2007-05-29.
Simmons, Amelia. American Cookery. Oxford University Press, 1958.
Simmons, Amelia. American Cookery 2nd ed. Applewood Books, 1996.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

About the author

Early editions and 20th century editions

Importance of text

See also

Works cited

External links