Would you like some cream with your beef tongue?

The oldest Christmas dinner tradition in this reporter’s family goes back to 1954.

In the year my mother was born, my grandmother, understandably distracted by her first child, forgot to buy a ham for Christmas. In those days, markets weren’t open on Christmas Day, so she cooked what was in the house; stuffed shells. To this day, it doesn’t feel like Christmas without a dish of stuffed shells – usually served alongside more traditional holiday fare.

The winter feast, whatever holiday it honors, is something that every family invents for themselves, and that cultures reinvent wholesale to suit demographics, economy, tastes and times. In Salem and throughout New England, the composition of the Christmas meal is the result of changing cultural preoccupations and a delicate balancing act between a historically wide world market and the old immigrant story of making your home cuisine out of what’s at hand.

But what would Christmas have tasted like if I was celebrating it in the age of hoop skirts and plum duff instead of the age of pumpkin ravioli and pajama jeans? I decided to find out – and when I did, I’d cook it.



Finding my food

In the early days of New England, Christmas wasn’t a major holiday, but the that tide began to turn in the mid-19th century. One place where you can clearly see the cultural shift toward Christmas is in the Salem Gazette. In the Dec. 24, 1811 edition, the only mention of Christmas is in a brief advertisement for a bookseller.

By 1901, it’s a different story. The paper had changed for one thing; it was no longer simply a gazette (few remember that “gazette” once meant an official notice roll for government documents, ship movements, and promotions) but a modern newspaper with regional news stories, editorials, and lifestyle columns.

One of these was a biweekly cooking column called Good Cookery. Dec. 23, 1901’s Good Cookery column was called “For A Holiday Dinner.” If ever I wanted to see what Salemites ate for Christmas more than a century ago, this seems the place to do it.

“I am one of those who esteem very highly the goose as a central figure on the occasion of a formal dinner,” said Barbara Sadler, the column’s author. “Properly cooked it cannot fail to please almost everyone.” Sadler’s menu goes on to include beef tongue prepared not one, but two ways (potted and spiced), chicory with cream sauce, cole slaw, celery nut salad, chicken cutlets, pancakes (baked and fried with sweet potatoes), mutton pie and fig pudding.

I quickly realized that I’m kind of glad to live in the pumpkin ravioli/pajama jeans era. I mean, a goose costs about eighty dollars. I’m not even certain I know what chicory is, but I’m pretty sure they don’t sell it at Market Basket. I may be a hard-boiled newspaperwoman, but for sheer skill, bravery and derring-do, it appears I have nothing on an early 20th century Salem housewife. I could never, ever cook all that.

I decided instead to simply focus on three of the desserts in the column – French Tea Cream, Walnut Loaf Cake and Sour Cream Pie. Based on the ingredient lists (recipes at the time being mostly ingredients, as technique was apparently beamed to the home cook via telepathic connection) I figured these would be the most frugal choices and the ones most familiar to the modern palate. Plus, I could bring them to Christmas parties with my graduate student friends, who will eat anything.



Dairy and lemons

A few words of warning, brave readers – if you choose to follow in my footsteps and try these recipes, be prepared for a level of incredulity verging on disgust as fellow shoppers, grocery clerks and baggers judge the sheer volume of dairy products you’ll be buying. We’re talking sticks of butter, quarts of whole milk, a Royal Flush of creams – light cream, heavy cream, whipping cream, you name it. Then there’s the eggs – an even dozen for these three recipes. I was behind a woman whose entire grocery order was a 24-pack of water and three heads of lettuce. I don’t think I’ve ever left a shopping plaza so gravid with shame.

Next, you’ll notice when you read these recipes that the flavorings look a little bland and weak, especially considering the phalanx of dairy they’ll need to stand up to. In the walnut cake, there’s a scant teaspoon of vanilla; the sour cream pie filling recipe, which makes enough for two pies, is flavored with the rind and juice of half a lemon. There are a few reasons, I think, for this. One is that these ingredients were comparatively more expensive in 1901 than they are now. Produce in the winter wasn’t always easy to get. That lemon might have to last you a while; best to save half of it for later.

But the other reason is the same reason I think many old-timey recipes look bland to modern cooks – the recipes weren’t meant to be followed exactly. In an age where most women did not work outside the home, cooking was a form of expression that gave something akin to professional satisfaction. Part of the pleasure was taking a simple recipe and zhushing it up with your own secret ingredients.

When I made these recipes, I did add a little extra flavoring here and there – a tablespoonful of elderflower juice concentrate in the Sour Cream pie, half a shot of bourbon and some brown sugar in the walnut cake (a Christmas dessert without alcohol being fit only for the Island of Misfit Toys in my opinion). But I am reprinting the recipes exactly as they were written in Good Cookery, adjusted for modern kitchen equipment. You can make your own additions



The memory of Salem

But the real question is, are they worth making? Yes, yes, yes. The flavors are subtle and sophisticated, surprisingly related to foods we enjoy today. The French Tea Cream is basically a panna cotta, and the Sour Cream pie comes out like a delicious lemon chiffon, with just enough tang to taste like a winter dessert. The walnut cake would make a great breakfast bread any time of the year, and if I try it again I’ll add a streusel topping.

But more than the flavors, they were a chance to step into the shoes of people who might have lived in my apartment building, walked my streets, ate my dessert a century or more ago. I could have read about Christmas in 1901 for hours and never understood what it meant in the same way that looking at those ingredients did. The sour cream? That would be the Eastern European influences coming in. And that one treasured lemon? Maybe it could be kept in a box on the windowsill – home refrigerators were still over a decade away.

If taste is the sense most linked to memory, then these recipes are a little amuse-bouche of the memories of Salem.

Source: http://www.wickedlocal.com/salem/newsnow/x1282423460/Would-you-like-some-cream-with-your-beef-tongue#ixzz1hPfwqliR