Duties and Desires: The Brooklyn Eagle Cookbook, 1926
By Megan J. Elias
The Eagle Cookbook and Household Manual, 1926 cover.
In 1926, a cheese fairy appeared in the pages of the Brooklyn Eagle Cookbook and Household Manual. The recipe is for something like a savory rice pudding, made with “snappy cheese” and mustard powder. Mrs. C. Barnes of 67 Brevoort Place had contributed the cheese fairy, a name that may have been of her own invention, as it does not appear in other cookbooks of the era.[1] Barnes recommended that it be “served hot on hot plates,” setting the table for her readers. Hot on hot plates required a little extra planning and a particular attention to the moment of consumption. The diner waits at the table as appetizing smells fill the room. An arm reaches around with a friendly warning — “it’s hot, don’t touch!” and the plate appears before her, a little steam rising from the bubbling surface and heat radiating off the plate.
Barnes was one of hundreds of people, mostly women, who submitted recipes to be included in the Brooklyn Eagle’s 1926 cookbook.[2] Community cookbooks were usually assembled by groups of women organized for a charitable purpose — restoring an old church, for example.[3] Some newspapers, however, took up the model, probably reasoning that each woman who was published would buy at least one copy. The Los Angeles Times, for example, published a cookbook of reader’s recipes in 1922.
These cookbooks can reveal many things about a community. Reviewing recipe ingredients tells us what was available and considered normal to the community. The Eagle cookbook, for example, included sections for fish, fish sauces, shellfish and one section just for oysters, reflecting Brooklyn’s coastal geography. In contrast, the Battle Creek Cookbook, published in Michigan in 1922, treated fish and oysters together in one short chapter.[4] Advertisements in these cookbooks can tell us what kinds of food technologies were available to home cooks.[5] They can tell us something about social roles, too. For instance, a corset maker advertised in the 1926 Eagle Cookbook, offering corsets, corselettes, and brassieres, the latter two being new, less restrictive types of undergarments, reflective both of new ideals of female beauty and new expectations for women’s physical mobility. Ads also featured cars and driving lessons, further mobility and autonomy for women readers. Taken together the ads show us a pivotal moment in gender expectations and a release of restrictions on women’s bodies.
Historians typically consider most reading material, apart from very cheap works like comic books, to be aimed at a middle-class audience because the middle class have disposable income to use in buying books and leisure time, as well as literacy, for reading them. Historians of cookbooks also assume a middle-class audience for these reasons. The Eagle cookbook actually provides street addresses for its contributors, enabling readers to test this assumption. A map of all of the addresses associated with one section of the book reveals some clustering around the Bedford-Stuyvesant and Ditmas Park neighborhoods, middle-class areas at the time. Using Google Street View, it is possible to see that where buildings that pre-date 1926 are still standing, they are mostly of the middle-class single-family-home type, rather than either larger houses, denoting wealth, or apartment buildings, suggesting lower income.
This cookbook can also tell us how the contributors saw and sensed their world. By focusing on two sections in the book, “Household Hints” and “Tasty Dishes,” we can access the sensations of domestic life in Brooklyn in 1926, its rhythms and expectations. The “Household Hints” section tells us what a woman saw during her day, what she noticed and felt responsible for. We can learn what was difficult and necessary and where she felt time could be saved. We can learn about her sensory environment — the smells she wanted to eliminate and what she would replace them with. We learn that stains and rips matter and need to be combatted; she had a world to keep clean and untorn.
In contrast, “Tasty Dishes” reveals the delights of the era. What was particularly interesting to the palate and outside the ordinary round of meals? The tasty dishes reveal a blurry line between women’s responsibility always to feed others and their power to make choices in that realm. Food work was labor women had to perform, even if it was choosing the dish for a cook to make, but it was also labor they could use as a voice. Just as the household hints revealed women as experts in domestic management, Tasty Dishes spoke of women’s connoisseurship, knowing what among many options was truly delectable. Lives of the women who contributed to this book flowed between duties and desires.
Household Hints
The Eagle Cookbook and Household Manual, 1926, p. 111.
The title of this section reflects the understanding that housekeeping methodology passed down generationally in an oral tradition. The material is framed as “hints” rather than lessons or knowledge. Although the field of home economics was emerging in this time period, the title perpetuated the common assumption that women learned what they needed to know about housekeeping from other women engaged daily in the work. By 1926, the so-called “servant problem” had become acute because working class women now had more job opportunities, made possible through industrialization, the experience of the First World War, and widespread public education.[6] Thus, the household hints that an earlier generation would have imparted to their housekeepers took on a personal urgency.
The reader who won the Eagle’s prize for her household hints offered advice grounded in the very quotidian and tactile. Ella M. Canning, who lived near Brooklyn College, offered “Nine Useful Hints.” The hints all valorize conservation and care, an ethic quite at odds with the new culture of consumer capitalism.[7] Canning’s hints implied alertness to every tiny flaw in the material of domestic life. She had remedies for stains and scuffs and squeaks and she clearly hated to see anything potentially useful go to waste. Canning, for example, advised using pieces of old carpet to clean a coal range and encouraged readers to recycle grape baskets as holders for clothing pins.[8] The basket, relic of a treat, could be hung on the washing line and moved along it, taking up a mundane role. These hints reveal a woman who looked at ordinary items and saw beyond their designated uses into new purposes. Even a broken clock could be right once a day: Canning suggested setting it in “a sick room” to “indicate the next time for taking medicine.”[9] Although Brooklyn had many hospitals by 1926, much healthcare was still conducted at home and managed by women as part of their domestic duties.[10]
Canning noticed but chose not to accept the everyday annoyances of domestic life. Rather than live with stuck dresser drawers, she advised readers to use household soap to help them “open easily and noiselessly.” Her final piece of advice was about how to revive nuts that seemed “too dry to be eatable.” Perhaps another woman would allow them to be tossed out, but Canning had somehow discovered that soaking them in water and milk overnight and then roasting them could make them once again “fresh and good.”
When the Eagle’s editors gave Canning their prize for her advice they must have thought her frugal spirit and attention to detail would resonate with readers. And indeed, other entries in this section also fought the demons of imperfection and waste. More than one advocated re-using old newspapers to cover work surfaces because they eased cleanup. And like Canning, many were concerned with cleaning stoves, making it clear that women noted and worried about these appliances, whether they were still using the older coal-fired models or the newer gas ranges.
All were alert to stains and odors and one recommended a bowl of charcoal in the pantry to keep it “sweet.” Window screens, curtains and window shades received much attention, reflecting the increased dust caused by the rapid industrialization of Brooklyn. Madeline Jacobsen addressed this when she encouraged readers to live “in a section where the time to reach Wall Street takes more than the allotted three to five minutes” so as to avoid “the soft coal pestilence” of multi-use urban streets.[11] Even as the city grew around her brownstone on Pineapple Street, Jacobsen promised readers that life “in a clean neighborhood” would make housework a pleasure. Her promise, “you will be able to put your house in order, have draperies and hangings if you like, have clean windowsills” reveals the dirty reality of even comfortable middle-class life in Brooklyn in 1926. “Household hints” presents Brooklyn women as engaged in constant tiny defenses against dirt and waste of resources.
Crossing over into the culinary, two separate contributors noted that adding lemon juice to heavy cream speeded up the whipping time. Whipped cream was used in many of the desserts of the era as well as in some salad dressings, so this was much more relevant than it might be today in a world of stand mixers and Reddi-wip.[12] Light desserts and fancy salads were also considered women’s fare. The advice transports us into a kitchen where a harried woman, twirling a whisk in a bowl, sweats over the work and wonders if the cream will ever stiffen. Whipped cream is not the kind of thing you can approximate. If it is flat, you and your guests are eating a puddle, not the anticipated cloud. These “hints” alert us to the material and scale of women’s lives in this time and place. Even as opportunities for education, employment activity in general improved, some part of a woman’s mind had to store this kind of knowledge because it was always also her business.
Tasty Dishes
Advice about how to achieve quick and perfect whipped cream reveals overlap between household hints and tasty dishes. While tasty dishes evoked desires, they were also part of the world of duties, a woman’s obligation to please others. And just as the title “household hints” implied an irregular collection of knowledge, so too did “tasty dishes,” offer an assortment of recipes that did not fit into existing categories. The recipes in this section tended mostly to the savory, with strong flavors and rich preparations. Liver, heart, sweetbread, and tongue attest to a lingering national appetite for organ meats that would begin to fade after the Second World War. Some recipes, such as Pate au Jambon and Spanish Meatloaf, alluded to international origins, although from our perspective they may not seem international in composition. For example, “Eggs a la Chinese” described shredded hardboiled egg whites arranged in a basket shape, filled with mashed yolks, garnished with chopped pickles and topped with tomato sauce.[13] However, the recipe for Chicken Chop Suey was contributed by Harry Wong Ti, of the Colonnade Restaurant in Jamaica, Queens.[14]
The Eagle Cookbook and Household Manual, 1926, p. 55.
As a sub-group within Tasty Dishes, cheese dishes outnumbered others. Cheese Fairy, Cheese fondue, St. Armand cheese, cheese balls, cheese straws, cheese puffs, cheese patties, and “hot cheese dreams,” all appeared in this section. Since the late 19th century, Americans had been able to buy factory-made cheese, which became popular for its material predictability.[15] An ad in the Eagle in April 1926 announced the availability of “Shefford Cheese Products,” which included snappy, cream, limburger, and loaf styles of cheese.[16] Although in Brooklyn, Eagle Cookbook contributors had the benefit of delicatessens where they could find European cheeses, most contributors did not differentiate. One “tasty dish” featured “Italian cheese,” and another called for Roquefort, but apart from these, recipes only listed cream cheese, American cheese, and “snappy,” a log made of shredded cheddar.[17]
Cheese dishes belonged to the special category of foods served at lunch parties, a vital part of the world of urban middle-class women’s social lives. [18] With children at school and husbands in offices, middle-class women combated the potential loneliness of housekeeping by visiting each other in the middle of the day. And when another woman sat down to Mrs. Barnes’s, to be treated to a cheese fairy, the women most likely talked shop, sharing household hints and recipes as well as information about and evaluations of others in the community. They noted each other’s accomplishments and failures in the material and sensory world of the household. They saw stains on a tablecloth as not just a personal failure or the result of ignorance, but part of the constant work that all women conducted together, whether they were paid for it or not: keeping the world in order. The foods they served each other posited and established a shared palate and preferences common to that cadre and cohort, the people who were always cleaning soot off the curtains, the people who appreciated a dish served hot on a hot plate.
Megan Elias is Director of the Gastronomy Program at Boston University and Associate Professor of the Practice. She is the author of Food on the Page: Cookbooks and American Culture (Penn, 2017) and Editor of the journal Food, Culture & Society.
[1] Brooklyn Daily Eagle, The Eagle Cookbook and Household Manual, Brooklyn: The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1926, p.55. In the Library of Congress’s digitized collection of American Church, Club and Community Cookbooks, I searched books from the same era as the Brooklyn Eagle Cookbook and found no other cheese fairies. In case the recipe might have been old fashioned, I also searched the Feeding America digitized collection, which includes some of the most popular cookbooks from the early 19th century through the First World War. There I also did not find any cheese fairies. I also found no cheese fairies in the Adam Matthew Food and Drink database, a subscription database. https://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/SciRefGuides/americancookbooks.html. https://d.lib.msu.edu/fa
[2] The Eagle had published cookbooks in 1922, 1923, and 1924. These were part of the Eagle’s “Libraries,” a series of pamphlets on diverse topics.
[3] For more about community cookbooks, see Anne L. Bower, editor, Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997 and Megan J. Elias, Food on the Page: Cookbooks and American Culture, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.
[4] Battle Creek, MI. First Congregational Church. The Battle Creek cook book: a collection of well tested recipes selected by the Women of the First Congregational Church, Battle Creek, Michigan. Battle Creek, MI, Ellis Publishing Company, 1922.
[5] Leslie, “The Eagle Cookbook and the Brooklyn Diet,” Brooklyn Public Library blog, August, 2011 https://www.bklynlibrary.org/blog/2011/08/23/eagle-cookbook-and accessed January 12, 2021.
[6] For an excellent recent treatment of this history, see Laura Schwartz, Feminism and the Servant Problem, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
[7] For a good history of the tension between the spirit of thrift and consumerism, see Susan J. Matt, Keeping Up with the Joneses: Envy in American Consumer Society, 1890-1930, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.
[8] Grapes were sometimes sold in wooden slat baskets to keep vine and any dropped fruit together. The term and object would have been familiar to women who shopped at Brooklyn green grocers.
[9] Ella Canning, “Nine Useful Hints,” Brooklyn Eagle Cookbook, Brooklyn, NY: 1926, p.111
[10] For more about health care in Brooklyn, see “Taking Care of Brooklyn: Stories of Sickness and Health,” an exhibit at the Brooklyn Historical Society.
[11] Madeline A. Jacobson, “Location an Important Consideration,” The Eagle Cookbook and Household Manual, Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Eagle, 1926, p.113. Jacobsen lived in the still quiet but also convenient Brooklyn Heights neighborhood, on Pineapple Street.
[12] Some examples from this book: “Angostura Maple Syrup Puff” (95), “Apricot Fluff,” (99), and Raspberry Whip” (105); “New Salad Dressing” (71) and the dressing for “Twentieth Century Salad” (968)
[13] Anonymous, “Eggs a la Chinese,” Eagle Cookbook, p. 60. The recipe for Pate au Jambon is actually not a pate as we currently think of them but instead a layered casserole made with slices of potato and ham in a white sauce.
[14] Harry Wong Ti, “Chicken Chop Suey (made of white chicken)” Eagle Cookbook, p. 60 Historians typically designate chop suey as authentic to the Chinese-American experience rather than Chinese cuisine, but even so it is rare to see a Chinese name in community cookbooks. The recipe can be read as a sign of Brooklyn’s cosmopolitanism. For more about the history of Chop Suey, see Haiming Liu, From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015 and Anne Mendelson, Chow Chop SueyI, New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.
[15] Paul Kinstead, Cheese and Culture: A History of Cheese and its Place in Western Civilization, White River Junction, Vt: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2012, p. 174.
[16] Advertisement, Shefford Cheese Products, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 14, 1926, p.15.
[17] Kraft Foods Co. v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, 21 T.C. 513 (U.S.T.C. 1954)
[18] The cookbook’s Salads chapter would also provide dishes for lunch parties. Megan J. Elias, Lunch: The History of a Meal (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).