ISSUE 12, CLASSIC COOKBOOKS, Part 1, Harder's Practical American Cookery
The Rosetta Stone of American Vegetable Cookery
The Great Book of American Cookery—Jules Arthur Harder’s Physiology of Taste
American culinary histories have traditionally granted greatest significance to cooks and their creations. Yet for most of this narrative I’ve held cooks at bay, calling attention to the plant breeders, pomologists, agricultural experimentalists, market gardeners, and market vendors who created the grains, vegetables, and fruits that stocked the southern pantry. This emphasis dramatizes my contention that the producers transformed the flavor of southern (and American) cuisine into something distinctive and unprecedented, not American cooks or chefs. Historians tend to focus on the first appearances in print of dishes that become fixtures of the table. Yet the cookbook as national or regional culinary scripture presents problems. Consider the first elaboration of the recipe for the southern New Year’s Day standard “Hopping John.” Mrs. A. P. Smith offered the following instruction:
Pick out all defective ones from a quart of dried peas; soak them several hours in tepid water; boil them with a chicken or piece of pickled pork until the peas are thoroughly done. In a separate stew-pan boil half as much rise dry; take the peas from the meat, mix them with the rice, fry a few minutes until dry. Season with pepper and salt. This may be made of green English peas.
The substitutability of English peas for field peas, the disinclination to specify a type of dried pea, the generic designation of ‘rice’ as an ingredient typify the homemaker pragmatism that characterized the listing of ingredients in nineteenth-century cookbooks generally. Always aware that a reader might not have a particular ingredient available, the author used the most categorical designation possible for vegetables, grains, and meats. A recipe for pone would instruct you to take a quantity of sweet potatoes-- whether the sweet potato should be a Nansemond, a Spanish black, a Hayman, or a Georgia yellow yam did not get noted. So pronouncedly different were the tastes and cooking qualities of these varieties, that their neglect constituted a problem.
The vast majority of cookbook authors did not particularize varieties of fruits or vegetables. Even fewer (three, maybe for) said anything about the production, the growing of the vegetables or fruits indicated for use. Consider briefly the roll of famous authors silent about the subject. None of the great matrons of nineteenth-century kitchen art—none of the leaders of the great cooking schools—spoke of it. Not Lydia Marie Child, Mrs. Ellis, Mrs. E. A. Howland, Miss Leslie, Sarah Josepha Hale, Elizabeth Ellet, Mrs. S. T. Rorer, S. Annie Frost, Jennie June, Catharine Beecher, Juliet Corson, Maria Parloa, or Fannie Farmer. Nor did the master hotel chefs of the century—William Volmer, Pierre Blot, Felix Deliee, and Alexander Filippini. None of these figures noted the stupendous increase in the variety of types of vegetables available.
I do not mean to impugn the abilities or knowledge of these noteworthy authors. Merely to suggest that the creativity registered in their works lay elsewhere than the meats and vegetables sections; it appeared in the sections on baked goods, puddings, and confections, wherein the cooks and chefs reported the results of energetic experimentation analogous to their contemporaries, the experimental horticulturists. The extraordinary achievements in baking and confectionary deserve a separate historical study and appreciation.
American cookbooks (and I include the canon of southern classics by Mary Randolph, Sarah Rutledge, Mrs. A. P. Hill., Mrs. Lettice Bryan, Mrs. Maria Barringer, Mrs. Sarah A. Elliott, Miss Tyson, Marion Cabell Tyree, Mrs. B. C. Howard, Lafcadio Hearn, the Christian Women’s Exchange of New Orleans, A. G. Wilcox, Mary Stuart Smith, and Mrs. Washington)[1] of the nineteenth century did not register the single most distinctive development of the national cuisine—the enormous proliferation of fruit, grain, and vegetable varieties during the 1800s. All of the genius at plant breeding visible in any seed catalogue, horticultural journal, or agricultural magazine vanished in the recipes. To a certain extent, the authors of gardening compendia attempted to compensate for the shortfall of information. The landmark books all specify the most popular varieties of garden cultivars: Thomas Fessenden’s The New American Gardener (1835), Thomas Bridgeman’s The Young Gardeners Assistant (1837), Francis Homes’s The Southern Market Gardener (1842), L. D. Chapin’s The Vegetable Kingdom (1843), Robert Buist’s The Family Kitchen Gardener (1850), William N. White’s Gardening for the South (1857), Alexander Watson’s The American Home Garden (1859), Fearing Burr, Jr., American Garden Vegetables (1866), and Burr’s Field and Garden Vegetables (1874). From the 1850s onward, the horticultural authors made an effort to designate the suitability of certain varieties for culinary uses; Red Dutch was a favorite “pickling cabbage,” Long Green Turkey was a salad rather than a pickling cucumber. When authors commented on typical modes of preparing a vegetable, the explanations tended toward the rudimentary: William N. White’s remarks upon frying eggplants were representative of a multitude of cooking observations in contemporary gardening manuals: “Cut the egg-plant in slices a quarter of an inch thick. To remove the acrid taste, piles the slices on a plate with alternate layers of salt; raise one side of the plate, that the juice may run off. In half an hour wash them well in fresh water, and fry them quite brown in batter.”[2] No mention of the frying medium, the constituents of the batter, the time of cooking, or the required degree of heat grace this minimal instruction.
For the past twenty years Wendell Berry has been excoriating the state of affairs that has led to a disconnect between the production and preparation/consumption of food. His demand that we conceive eating as “an agricultural act” sounded the tocsin against food ignorance. The “farm to table” aesthetics of many current chefs responded to the call to bridge the gap. Yet when we look to the canon of American national and regional cookbooks before the rise of industrial agriculture and commercial food processing and marketing, witness that the disconnect between production and cooking and eating has existed since the nation’s founding. It has been a fixture of American print culture since the early nineteenth century. Inscribed in two mutually exclusive bodies of print (garden books and cook books) we witness a cultural fissure firmly in place in the mid-nineteenth century. Surely the more capable chefs and cooks of that time possessed the knowledge that bridged the gap. François Lagrove, the chef of the Maryland Club who concocted the Maryland Feast, and Eliza Seymour Lee, preparer of the Jockey Club banquet in Charleston, encountered the plenitude of southern vegetable culture every time they visited their cities’ produce markets. They selected items calling upon a fund of experience about which varieties suited which dishes best. This ingredient wisdom gave the best cooks distinctive advantages over rivals, and thus became part of the withheld knowledge of culinary practice. It is precisely this profound practical knowledge of ingredients that present day regionalist chefs most wish to recover.
Is there any work the vast archive of nineteenth-century American cookbooks that reveals the kitchen wisdom about produce? Did any cookbook bridge the divide between the market garden and the stove?
Of the multitude of cookery manuals that sprang from the press during the heyday of agrarian America—from 1820 to 1920—few connected the kitchen to the garden, the table to the farm field: Mary L. Edgeworth’s The Southern Gardener and Receipt Book, published in Philadelphia on the eve of the Civil War, and its model, Phineas Thornton’s The Southern Gardener and Receipt Book (1839, 1845) remain of interest for their elaborations of the use of sugar to preserve fruit. Yet the recipe sections were cursory. Fortunately, one work, composed by one of the greatest cooks in North America, reveals the mind of the chef-- Jules B. Harder’s Physiology of Taste; or, Harder’s Practical cookery—published by the author in San Francisco in 1885. Harder alone, exposed the whole knowledge of the master chef, after decades securing ingredients and tending the stoves at Delmonico’s in New York City and the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. He supplied what others kept as privy intelligence: the deep farm to table knowledge of the ingredients.
Artfulness in vegetable cookery lay in conceiving of preparation in terms more nuanced that the simple application of cooking methods to an item: boil it, bake it, roast it, pickle it, fry it, dry it.. At minimum, the capable cook knew the most suitable method of bringing the peculiar qualities of a product to fore, whether dressed as a side dish, or as a component of a composite dish. The compatibility of a dish to the other preparations on the menu for a meal comprised another level of artistry. Mastery in vegetable cookery lay in a systematic knowledge of all the possible modes of preparation of any ingredient available in the cycle of seasons. Harder was concerned with this last.
Harder commended The Physiology of Taste; Harder’sPractical American Cookery to readers as “the result of a lifetime of study, constant observation, and practical experience in the best culinary establishments of both Continents. He, therefore, brings to his task a thorough knowledge of the subject, and asserts, fearless of successful contradiction, that the result of his labors will be the only competent treatise—applying culinary science especially to the material conditions of this country—ever written. He intends it for a trustworthy guide to all what to eat and drink, and what to avoid.” His treatise discussed “vegetables and all alimentary plats, roots, and seeds grown on the American continent” presenting “the best varieties, their mode of cultivation, cooking, and other matters of interest connected with this branch of the culinary art—one, by the way, of no small importance, but to which generally scant attention is paid by the household, and even by the club and hotel, cook.”
The Physiology of Taste was the first of six projected volumes, covering all aspects of food. The five remaining volumes, never saw publication; they would have explored “soups, fish, flesh, fowl, farinace, sauces, conserves, liquers.” The encyclopedic design derived from Marie Antoine Carême’s survey of French cuisine, L'Art de la cuisine française au dix-neuvième siècle. Traité élémentaire et pratique (1833-47, 5 vols.) Yet Harder’s title also nodded to the other great theoretician of European gastronomy, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s whose Physiologie du gout proposed a “transcendental gastronomy”—that is, a system in which taste and a philosophy of consumption combine to make the experience of eating the highest sort of human activity.
Harder, however, abandoned Brillat-Savarin’s intuitive order of matters and his pre-scientific speculations on the mechanism of the tongue, to explore the range of things grown and tasted. What Harder shared with Brillat-Savarin was the ambitious scope of inquiry. Just as Brillat-Savarin thought the Parisian restaurant table the nexus of a global system bringing by boat and ox-cart an array of comestibles from every corner of the planet to the plate of the gastronomic citizen of the world, Harder conceived of the metropolitan food market and urban luxury hotel kitchen as the twin foci of America’s national food production system. Only someone who had cooked at the greatest restaurant (Delmonico’s) in the most gastronomically obsessed city (New York City) in the country in the period after a national rail transportation system had been built could from experience have spoken of so vast an array of products as is contained in this volume.
How comprehensive was his scope? De Voe’s 1867 The Market Assistant, which described every article of food sold in the Philadelphia, New York, Brooklyn, and Boston markets treated 224 vegetables, herbs, fruits, and nuts with no specification of the chief varieties of these cultivars and no indication of their agriculture. Harder treats 240 vegetables and herbs (no fruits, except the tomato), and details all of the significant varieties, their cultivation, and preservation. Separate tables of contents using French and German plant names appear after the English contents.
Harder’s employment of the vegetables available to him in the New York and San Francisco markets was hedged with rigorous judgment. In the early nineteenth century the great American metropoli were ringed by huge glass house gardens growing produce suited to forcing and controlled planting regimens. With the improvements in canning over the 19th century an increasing percentage of the vegetable component of the city diet was so preserved. Harder in the name of taste and hygiene spoke the ban on both for the realm of gastronomy. “Preserved vegetables should not be used for the table, fi they can be possibly declined.” “Vegetables forced in hot-houses are not as good as those grown in the open air, and subjected to ordinary natural conditions.” This latter dictum gave the seal of approval for the extraordinary market farming system the developed in the United States after the Civil War.
Jules Harder knew the Lowcountry through the superlative vegetables he encountered in New York shipped from Charleston, Savannah, and Jacksonville. Having every comestible item in the country available for his inspection, he judged the virtues of produce with a circumspection and depth of knowledge unequaled by anyone of his era. He knew of Lowcountry preferences for Sea-Kale, the southern cultivation of Goosefoot (white Quinoa), the inclusion of Cuckoo-Flower Cress in Georgia salads, the use of Strawberry Tomatoes (Alkekengi) in preserves, the African-American benne puddings of Carolina. He knew that Seven Top Turnips were cultivated for their greens, while the Early White Flat Dutch Strap-Leaved Turnip grew in kitchen gardens for the table. Only in Harder’s compendium do we learn of the affinity of the south for the Drumhead Short Stem cabbage (p. 62) or its fascination with the heat tolerance of the late season Green Glazed Cabbage (p. 63). No other print source records the taste that southerners had for Burlington Early Adams corn as a white table corn. Harder notes the southern avoidance of sugar and cream in salad dressings (p. 187). He revels in the varieties of southern sweet potatoes. Trained in classic French technique, but kitchen taught in American vernacular cookery to suit the taste of hotel patrons in Saratoga, NY, he approached each ingredient with a sense of possibility, hoping to discover what might bring its distinctive features to the fore. That is how to approach the newly restored ingredients of classic Lowcountry cuisine. To the 21st-century tongue they taste with all the novelty and possibility that a Lowcountry guinea squash (long purple eggplant) did when Harder first encountered it as chef of Delmonico’s. Harder fulfilled in the kitchen the accomplishments that the age of experiment had managed in the fields, orchards, and gardens. By returning to use the range of grains, roots, berries, and greens created during that time when taste mattered so greatly in plant breeding, is to restore as aesthetic promise to cooking in this region. A living tradition does not foreclose creativity by ritually repeating a repertoire of dishes.
When Harder moved westward in 1876, he knew the finest fruits and vegetables grown in the country from his deep engagement with the New York produce market, their sources, and exactly how the regional truck farming systems worked.[3] Upon arriving in San Francisco in 1875, he encouraged the construction on the west coast of what existed in the east. His kitchen in the Palace Hotel in San Francisco became the locus primus of demand for fine produce. His encouragement to California farmers and his promotion of their finest creations contributed to the elevation of the Golden State to the first rank among vegetable growing regions. His fame in California was such that when Los Angeles vied to become the cultural capital of the southland, it built a hotel to rival the Palace, the Nadeau House, and lured “the best cook of modern times” from San Francisco to head its kitchen.[4]
Adherents of the locavore movement will find Harder a redoubtable opponent. He understood that cities can never be sourced by the immediate locale. He believed that the finest dining depended upon the finest ingredients procured from wherever they may come without too great expense and peril to the quality of product. Indeed, it was to serve this sort of vision of possibility that the country’s infrastructure of transportion was elaborated so intensely from 1860 to 1960.
The Physiology of Taste; or, Harder’s American Practical Cookery is a marvel. Organized alphabetically like the post-Enlightenment guides to plants, it began with a general discussion of a category of cultivar—its cultivation, care, harvesting, processing—then a listing of the favorite varieties available in the United States, then recipes. Harder was born in France in 1845, emigrating with his family to New York City in 1853.[5] At age 12 he began apprenticeship in a kitchen, either at Delmonico’s under Alexander Fillipini, or at the Union Club in New York City.[6] In his late teens he became the chef de cuisine at the Union Club until the Leland brothers lured in him in 1867 to the Union Hall resort in Saratoga. He was present when the hotel was rebuilt in 1869 as the Grand Union, the greatest luxury hotel in North America. The dining room was immense and boasted four chefs of different nationalities; Harder was the French chef.[7] Charles Ranhofer, the brilliant head of cuisine at Delmonico’s lured him away to preside over the Fifth Avenue branch of the restaurant. Harder’s classic French training harmonized with Ranhofer’s palate and his experience servicing large numbers of patrons proved useful during the explosion of social banqueting that took place after the Civil War. Hotel cookery required a chef to please a metropolitan range of tastes—witness the Grand Union’s multiple cooking stations and nationalities. Harder absorbed the technique and repertoire of his hotel colleagues and by the end of his stint in 1872, it is doubtful another chef in America had so broad an ability with the several European traditions of haute cuisine. He added the best dishes of every tradition to his repertoire. This is what made him the ideal recruit for the ambitioius creators of the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. When he moved to the West Coast in 1875, the Hispanic dimension of his cooking took on additional prominence. In The Physiology of Taste Harder’s recipes reflect an acute attention to the proper ingredient, the best kitchen technique, and knowledge of the strongest dishes making up the eclectic mélange of traditions that comprise American cooking. He has had to wait over a century to be recognized as the prophet of American regional cookery.
When regional cooking revived in the last decades of the 20th century, a generation of chefs spearheaded the rehabilitation of dishes and cooking methods. Their cookbooks, their appearances on ETV, their writings in Gourmet and the burgeoning lists of culinary magazines ignited a curiosity about the food identities of places. Chef Robert Barrackman of Magnolia’s in Charleston made shrimp and grits a national icon of the Lowcountry. Elizabeth Terry, of the splendid Elizabeth’s on 37th, in Savannah restored the Fried Grits Cake to its honored place in Lowcountry cuisine. Yet it was the west coast chef Alice Waters, whose fetishistic concern with well grown vegetables, that raised consciousness about ingredients among culinary professionals. I do not doubt that the heady combination of regional revival, ingredient mystique, and the historical explorations of figures such as Karen Hess and John Martin Taylor contributed to the transformation of Glenn Roberts from a restaurateur to a grower and miller of landrace grains in the 1990s. Roberts’s advent on the culinary exchange marked the conjunction of the world of the seed savers such as David Bradshaw and John Coykendall with the world of the chefs. What was needed was a guide—a key to the flavors and how they operated in cooking. It was among our circle that Harder’s book became the grimoire wherein the properties of the storied ingredients could be divined. It should therefore come as no surprise that Sean Brock, the most celebrated chef, among the ‘lardcore’ revivalists of southern food, declares that his “favorite cookbook of all time” is Harder’s Physiology of Taste,[8] for its encyclopedic coverage of produce varieties—cultivation and cookery—and its challenging recipes. It is the greatest American Cookbook because it is the one that most permits us to find a way to celebrate a world of traditional ingredients.
When Harder moved to Los Angeles, a reporter noted that The Physiology of Taste “comprises six large volumes of four hundred pages each. Dissertations on and instructions how to cook every known article of food are given, and work is an undoubted authority.”[9] Apparently Harder had finished his magnum opus. Only the first volume—on vegetables-- saw print. The remaining five volumes constitute the great lost treasure of American gastronomic literature. One can only imagine the kitchen wisdom that would have radiated from his treatment of soups, sauces, seafood, and pastry. I suppose I should simply be thankful for the one volume now available to us. But I and several West Coast allies in the culinary history world have been looking ceaselessly for the rest of Physiology for two years. Chef Harder had many descendents, and we are tracking them down assiduously. If it survives, we will find it.
[1] Mrs. Mary Randolph, The Virginia Housewife: or, Methodical Cook (Baltimore: Plaskitt, Fite & Co., 1838); Mrs. Lettice Bryan, The Kentucky Housewife (Cincinnati: Shepard & Stearns, 1839); [Sarah Rutledge], The Carolina Housewife, or House and Home: by a Lady of Charleston (Charleston: W. R. Babcock & Co., 1847); Mrs. Barringer, Dixie Cookery: or How I Managed my Table for twelve years (Boston: Floring, 1867); Mrs. Sarah A. Elliott, Mrs. Elliott’s Housewife (New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1870); Miss Tyson, The Queen of the Kitchen; a Collection of ‘Old Maryland’ Family Receipts for Cooking (Philadelphia: T. B. Petterson & Brothers, 1874); Marion Cabell Tyree, Housekeeping in Old Virginia (Louisville: John P. Morton, 1879); Mrs. B. C. Howard, Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1881); Christian Women’s Exchange, The Creole Cookery Book (New Orleans: T. H. Thomason, 1885); Lafcadio Hearn, La Cuisine Creole (New Orleans: F. F. Hansell & Bro., 1885); {A. G. Wilcox], The Dixie Cook-Book (Atlanta: L. A. Clarkson, 1885); Mary Stuart Smith, Virginia Cookery-Book (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1885); Mrs. Washington, The Unrivalled Cook-Book and Housekeeper’s Guide (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1886). [2] William N. White, Gardening for the South; or the Kitchen and Fruit Garden (New York: C. M. Saxton & Co., 1857), pp. 267-68. [3] “New York is the finest market place in the world.” Jules Harder, “Good Livers,” Lancaster Intelligencer (June 27, 1883); reprinted from the N.Y. Express. [4] “The Nadeau’s New Cook,” Los Angeles Daily Herald (Dec. 12, 1886). Because of inheritance issues arising from the death of Remy Nadeau, Harder moved to the Hotel Del Monte in Monterey in 1888 where he presided for a decade until lured by the Macfarlane family in 1898 to become chef of the Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, a post he held for four years until his children convinced him to return to San Fancisco. He died in 1912. [5] Census of the United States: 1910, City of San Francisco, State of California, District 4, 33, Sheet 10 B. [6] Harder repeatedly insisted that he had been at Delmonico’s for ten years, but since his reminiscences indicated he met President U. S. Grant in the early years of his presidency at the Grand Union, his stint at the famed New York eatery in the 1870s could only have been approximately four years, suggesting that he may have begun his culinary work in the famous New York restaurant circa 1858. [7] “A Saratoga Cuisine,” Oneida Circular 12, 36 (September 6, 1875), p. 287. [8] Paula Forbes, “Sean Brock on His Southern Cookbook Collection and what Blows his Mind,” Eater (Dec. 9, 2011), <http://eater.com/archives/2011/12/09/sean-brock-cookbook-shelf.php.accessed Jan 6, 2012. [9]Los Angeles Daily Herald (December 12, 1886).