I know several non-cooks who boast an extensive cookbook collection. These literary epicureans enjoy reading about the creative process of making food but don’t necessarily shop, prep, or cook meals much. A subcategory of these culinary literati relish reading about food from the past. They find gustatory pleasure in discovering what was on the menu in days of yore without having to shoot a pheasant or cook it over an open fire.

Nowadays, I also tend to read cookbooks more than I cook from them. Though if the ingredients are available and the recipes not too complicated, I’ll engage a few other senses by sampling the delicacies of a previous era.

Such was the case with The Gilded Age Cookbook: Recipes and Stories from America’s Golden Era 1868-1900  by food writer Becky Livourel Diamond. Having written two historical novels set in the late l800s and early 1900s, I’m curious about what types of food were consumed during the period and how they were prepared as industrialization and wealth disparities transformed the country. Diamond provides a feast of historical food details and shares easy-to-follow recipes to sample the cuisine of the past.

OVERVIEW

Diamond’s book includes seventy recipes from Apple Fritters to Herbed Tomatoes to Rabbit, Hunter Style. Interspersed are stories of the era along with interesting bits of trivia like a list of “homesick foods” from Mark Twain (who happened to coin the phrase “The Gilded Age” for his 1873 book of the same name). Twain wrote the list after returning from an extensive trip abroad and advised other travelers to carry it with them to remind them of what awaited them when they returned home. Local delicacies like “Lake trout from Tahoe,” “Sheep-head and croackers from New Orleans,” “Black bass from Mississippi,” and “American roast beef.”

A section on winter holidays points out that many of our modern-day Christmas traditions originated in this period—including a decorated Christmas tree. “Food was one of the most important of all the Christmas rituals,” says Diamond who points out that Christmas tree decorations were typically edible. These included fruits, candies, and cornucopias filled with nuts and sugarplums.

Debutante Balls happened over the Christmas season accompanied by grand teas. Christmas dinner was “one of the most carefully planned meals of the year” and ranged from two to eight courses which often finished off with a flaming Christmas pudding laced with bits of meat or suet. Hot chocolate was a favorite beverage.

RECIPES

I decided to sample some of Diamond’s  holiday appropriate recipes and started with two items often found on Thanksgiving menus. The first was a croquette which Diamond says were found throughout cookbooks from the era and at large catered events such as weddings and receptions. These “little nuggets of ground meat or vegetables bound with eggs or a sauce” were coated in breadcrumbs and then fried to a bit of crunchy goodness.

Diamond writes that Sweet Potato Croquettes were something often found on a Gilded Age Thanksgiving menu. The filling is made with microwaved and skinned sweet potatoes mashed up with egg, butter and nutmeg then rolled in more egg and breadcrumbs. Fried to a crispy goodness, they were delicious.
Another Thanksgiving favorite Diamond includes is Crisp Celery made from celery refrigerated in ice water with a few drops of vinegar and served with salt. Diamond points out that celery, which is considered a common staple in modern cooking, was a “high-status” food in the Gilded Age because it was so difficult to grow.

Sticking with the vegetable offerings, I sampled Bermuda Potatoes with Parsley Sauce, using some new potatoes from my weekly CSA vegetable box. This recipe turned out to be a simple, but delicious rendition of something I was often treated to as a child. I grew up on a potato farm in Idaho and the sweetness of “new potatoes” dug a few weeks before the official fall harvest was enhanced by a white sauce and paired with frozen green peas. Diamond’s recipe nixed the peas but added chopped parsley to the white sauce evoking a similar look and taste.

And then, of course, I had to try a Gilded Age dessert. Since literature of the time often mentions baked apples, I decided to try Baked Apple Pudding. My six-year-old grandson was visiting, and he loved operating an old-fashioned apple peeler to core and peel the apples which were placed whole in a baking dish and filled with a mixture of cinnamon sugar. After they’d baked for twenty minutes on their own, I covered them with a sugar-free batter creating a whole-apple cobbler type dessert. The apples and cinnamon sugar were enough to sweeten the batter and combined with some whipped cream proved very tasty.

Another dessert, Chocolate Biscuits, used separated eggs to make a light sponge cake cooked up in mini-muffin tins then frosted in melted bittersweet chocolate chips. Discovered in an 1863 cookbook, these airy little confections were also less sweet than a modern dessert and surprisingly easy to produce.

The next time I read about an elegant meal in the works of Edith Wharton or glimpse a sumptuous table at one of the society balls in HBO’s The Gilded Age, I’ll turn to The Gilded Age Cookbook to see if I can learn more about the food mentioned or used as props. If you, too, are a fan of this golden period, I’d highly recommend you take a look—and a bite.