ISSUE 75, OLD AMERICAN DESSERTS, Part 4: Ambrosia
Ambrosia
It is unwise to commit to a historical tendency when judging things. People who claim that food or anything else is in an irreversible decline, or who claim that it is improving and progressing with every decade are too easily called to task by people with a particularly item in mind. How can you say food is degenerating when the stores are full of blackberries plumper and more flavorful than have ever existed? How can you say we are progressing when the nutritional content of the major grain cultivars is less than ancient landraces? One can only make claims about tendency when you narrow your focus to specific cases.
That said, let me just say that Ambrosia over the course of the twentieth century went to hell. And a particularly fluffy version of hell at that. One can only understand the degree of degeneration by holding before one the elegant rightness of the original form of ambrosia
This dessert emerged in the wake of the Civil War. In 1867 or so, some enterprising cook decided that an elegant convergence of acid, sugar, and fat might be had by combining orange slices, granulated sugar, and shredded coconut in generous layers. Maria Massey Barringer published a brief description of the dish in her 1867 Dixie Cookery, Or How I Managed by Kitchen for Twelve years. But the dessert did not go national until published by the great women’s fashion magazine of the era, Godey’s Ladys Book in September of 1870. Here is their recipe:
General adoption of the dish by middle class households had to await the arrival of dessicated coconut on the country’s grocery shelves. This only happened after 1875 when Smith and Malby’s “Machine for Paring Coconut Meats” (patented 1875) enabled the industrial production and distribution of shredded “desiccated coconut.” The organization of the Florida citrus industry in the decade after the Civil War, too, made tangerines (the Dancy) and oranges (the Parson Brown, Magnum Bonum, and Pineapple) available nationally. Throughout the gilded age this dish became a favorite buffet dish at socials, balls, and receptions and a party dessert. Its age of splendor coincided with the Gilded Age.
In the “delightification” of this elegant dish into fluffy amalgams of marshmallow, cream, mayo, maraschino cherry, grapes etc. dates from the 1910s—occurring precisely at the same time cooks began tarting up candied sweet potatoes with extraneous sweetness. We know the culprit: the early marshmallow producers. After the turn of the twentieth century the invention of the starch moghul method allowed confectioners to eliminate mallow root and mass manufacture marshmallows out of corn starch, gelatin, and sugar. This cheap simulacra of that cherished old candy entranced people. Or perhaps “delighted” them would be more apt, because the flood of “delight” recipes employing marshmallow appeared in newspaper cooking columns. Alas when it comes to sweetness, some have no sense of tact. “More is more good.” And so well before cries were raised about the sugaring of America in the last quarter of the 20th century, the supercharging of the glycemic index began.
Some old believers hew to the original recipe, but all too often the bowl that appears from the kitchen will be garish with sweet glop. I take no comfort in the knowledge that this ambrosia will hasten the servers’ and partakers’ journey to that supernal realm where ambrosia is reputed to be the perpetual food.