ISSUE 65, COLONIAL COOKING, Part 5: Bullock's The Williamsburg Art of Cookery (1938)
The Williamsburg Art of Cookery
In 1938 a book about colonial cooking appeared that was actually seriously engaged with the question what did households in the period before the American Revolution prepare in the way of food. The author of the book, Helen Duprey Bullock, was a Californian come east. She looked at the houses, papers, furnishings, and crafts that survived from the 18th century with the appraising eye of someone deeply familiar with the objects a records, yet not fixated upon them as relics of “the ancestors.” She worked as archivist at Colonial Williamsburg, Inc. from 1929 to 1939, then as a cataloger the Thomas Jefferson Papers at the University of Virginia, then archivist in the manuscripts division of The Library of Congress. In the 1950s she became historian for and editor of the journal of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. She knew both the rules of evidence in play in academic history and in textual editing. Yet she sympathized greatly with the impulse of the 1930s to make history matter for the people. In an era when many male historians equated history with political history, Bullock was a cultural historian. History: “You can feel it in fabrics, taste it in cooking, and see it in architecture” [Mrs. Bullock Sees History in Dimensions,” Washington Evening Star (May 16, 1955), 30]. The place of women in the past mattered to Bullock.
While at Williamsburg she prepared research reports for archaeologists and architects, determined what music was played in the colonial capital and selected the content of the concerts performed in the city during the 1930s. (Thomas Jefferson’s music making became known to her then, and would lead to her fascination with him, and finally her removal to the University of Virginia.) But the most consequential project of her tenure as archivist was her compilation The Williamsburg Art of Cookery. Whereas the cookbooks I have mentioned in this series can be regarded as antiquarian exercise, as much an expression of a fantasy about the past as a record of its actual cookery, Bullock’s was grounded in evidence. Indeed, she taught herself hearthside cookery, using Jacks, cast iron skillets, ovens, and griddles, baking in a beehive oven and managing embers. She had studied the most popular English cookbook of the 18th century—Hannah Glassie’s—and had cooked through it, but had collected every manuscript reference to food in the Virginia Gazette, in plantation records, and in old letters. Still there was a paucity of surviving colonial material about cooking from Williamsburg. So she drew from Mary Randolph’s The Virginia Housewife extensively as well, though written 50 years after the American Revolution—also a collection maintained by Mrs. Labbe Cole collected in the 1830s. There were recipes taken from undated family collections. Also a few memorable dishes (fried cucumbers) taken from E. Smith’s Compleat Housewife, a cookbook published in Williamsburg in 1742.
Her major internal struggle had to do with the extent to which she would regard the Art of Cookery as a replication of past recipes, regardless of their entire alienation to modern tastes and kitchen knowledge. She ultimately believe her readers would only approach a sense of what women (enslaved or free) experienced in the kitchen if the recipes had sufficient familiarity for a reader to take them up with some confidence. So baking soda finds its way into some formulations. If I were to venture which body of recipes were actually the closest to what was performed in pre-Revolutionary Williamsburg, I would venture the beef recipes, for even something like beefsteak and ham pie (drawn from Radolph’s book) was traditional fare by the time of the 1820s.
The most controversial inclusion is the Brunswick Stew recipe which imputes a Virginia antiquity for this famous dish that probably predates its creation by several decades. Bullock’s was the version with squirrels and chickens. The dating of the Pilau recipes in the first decade of the 19th century seems right, for by that time there was direct shipment of Carolina Rice to Virginia. It didn’t have to go from Charleston to England to Williamsburg as did prior to 1776.
I recall the copy on my mother’s cookbook shelf. It was printed in antique Caslon type, so that it didn’t look like a contemporary book. The paper was not smooth and bleached. By favorite recipe (they were all narratives without the preliminary listing of ingredients) was beef collops.
Bullock lived to the age of 90, dying in Washington D. C., one of the pioneering historians of everyday life in the United States. In recent years culinary historians have found her too white, too upper class, and too approximate in its collection of recipes. Fair enough. But such criticisms don’t appreciate the extent to which Bullock took the historical cookbook away from antiquarianism. One can only see that by having examined how the term “colonial” operated in the presentation of food from the time of Celestine Eustis (1903) to Harriet Conquitt (1933). For Bullock’s recipes there is a text and a kitchen test standing behind each—the former grounds the recipe in a material past, the latter, enables the food to be intelligible to diners of the 1930s.