ISSUE 12, CLASSIC COOKBOOKS, Part 6: Mrs. Elliott's Housewife 1870
North Carolina Cookery at its Finest
Mrs. Elliott’s Housewife
It was not the first North Carolina Cookbook—Maria Massey Barringer’s Dixie Cookery preceded it by three years. But Sarah Elliott’s is the most local, comprehensive, and evocative expression of North Carolina cooking published in the nineteenth century. Both Barringer’s and Elliott’s books spoke to the new political circumstance of white women in the post Civil War South. The enslaved cooks who had labored in the kitchens of white households before the war were liberated; white families found themselves newly indigent and incapable of hiring servants; and a large proportion of the male population had died or been disable during the war, elevating women into the entire management of households. As Elliott proclaimed in her Preface, “The change of times in the South indicates to woman there a solemn duty. In the discharge of it she must look to God to sustain her. Her influence at home and abroad over her own sex, and through the various circles of human life, makes it a duty to call into action the power of the mind, and lay every resources under contribution.”
Elliott composed her instructions on cookery while living at Oxford, NC. Yet it drew own decades of experience, including a protracted stint as a boarding house keeper at Chapel Hill, feeding the students of the College of North Carolina. (Her recipe for possum and sweet potatoes was particularly savored by these students, she notes). That circumstance explains several notable dimensions of the book—its variety, the orderliness, and its attention to breakfast and supper as well as dinner. Lunch had not yet much impressed itself on southern households outside of cities. Because boarding house keepers operated in a zone of the cooking profession, she shares with the systemic northern cookbook writers an ideal of the model kitchen that she presents before giving any particular recipe. She also gives instructions on what constitutes an ideal servant, indicating the ambition that still drives the white woman cook is to manage a staff that performs the labor.
The glory of the collection is its trove of recipes—a chapter on cured meats more extensive than any published about the South—an excellent series of game recipes—and the definitive treatment fish and shellfish for the Atlantic Southeast. The lost art of sturgeon cookery appears in all its faces. The formula for corning shad fillets produces splendid fish. Potted herrings, deviled crabs, and crab cakes all appear (albeit the last called patties). Fresh water fish and salt water have extensive treatments.
A similar amplitude of treatment can be found in the section on vegetables. An entrenched characteristic of old southern cookbooks was the stress on baked goods—cakes, pies, confections, biscuits, and bread. Vegetables are given cursory treatment, and the treatments are often simplistic. Not with Sarah Elliott: good instructions of making smothered cabbage, sauerkraut, baked eggplant, tomato fritters, and wonder of wonders—several mushroom recipes!
The variety of North Carolina cookery evidenced in Elliott’s Housewife can be attributed in part to the changing circumstances of her life. Sarah Elliott (1819-1891) was married and widowed by three husbands, each living in a different sector of the state. After a stint in Chapel Hill, most of her life with Gilbert Elliott (father of her five children), took place in Elizabeth City—hence the deep knowledge of seafood—in 1855 she married Otha Cauble and lived outside of Charlotte in Rowan County. (Knowledge of cured meats obtained here?) When Cauble died she returned briefly to Elizabeth City, where she lived until she met and married R. S, Glasscock of Oxford, NC, in 1860. She moved to Oxford in the North of the State. Glasscock would not survive the Civil War. After the War, Oxford and Granville County enjoyed an economic boom connected with Bright Leaf tobacco. Sarah Elliott attached herself to Oxford’s Hotel, run by S. A. Williams, and wrote the book while on the staff there. The 1870 Census listed her residence as the hotel and her occupation “authoress.” She lived out her life as something of a local celebrity. Her surviving sons became the president of the Atlantic Coast Line, a naval captain, and a St. Louis merchant.
When characterizing Elliott as a culinarian, one has to note how a profound traditionalism seems bound to an intense curiosity. Her “Carolina Biscuit” recipe is the old beaten biscuit formula, not the new quick rise baking soda varieties that gained popularity over the 19th century. (She does include a quick rise shortbread recipe later.) Her allegiance to yeast activated dough is so firm that she includes a chapter to the capture or creation of multiple kinds of yeast. She includes many old time recipes, including three different versions of ash cake, and the plainest of plain corn bread recipes. Yet she does not lye treat her hominy.
Link for the text of this excellent book: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Mrs_Elliott_s_Housewife/e28EAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover