Homemade or Industrial?

"In the first half of the nineteenth century, a revolution occurred in the preparation of breadstuffs. Once they escaped the limitations of yeast, American women were free to experiment, innovate, and create new kinds of food, removed from religion. This culinary revolution started with cake." (The Baking Powder Wars, p. 17)

"What [Michael] Pollan sees as a positive reversal of industrialism is a burden the nineteenth-century women were elated that baking powder, industrialization, and corporate America had lifted from them." (p. 184)

This spice cake, along with many similar cakes, originated in the 19th century. 

Served at afternoon tea or evening social events in the 19th century, sweet, soft layer cakes or molded cakes changed American tastes. These were made to rise with baking powder rather than yeast or beaten eggs, and were much easier and faster to make at home. The bundt pan, as shown in the photo, became popular in mid-20th century America, though tinsmiths made similar cake molds in the 19th C.

In the book Baking Powder Wars: The Cutthroat Food Fight that Revolutionized Cooking, author Linda Civitello shows how the popularity of such cakes was closely related to changes in household management, to expectations of how to be a good middle-class wife and mother, and to other social changes. Technology also enabled increasing availability and lower cost of high-quality wheat flour, which contributed to the ease of home-baking as well. Thus: an industrial revolution in the kitchen!

Peanut butter cookies date to the early 1920s. 

In 1796, Amelia Simmons first used the word "cookie" for round biscuits made with pearlash, a predecessor to baking powder. Throughout the 19th century, more and more types of cookies appeared in cookbooks and ladies' magazines as the effectiveness and ease-of-use of baking powder developed. You could say the peak of invention in cookies was the Toll-House Cookie, invented in 1931. Both modern baking powder, invented by chemists and industrial food manufacturers in the 19th century, and chocolate chips, also effectively an industrial product, made this recipe possible for easy baking.

Cobbler with biscuit-dough topping: first made in the 19th century.

Cornbread. One of the earliest baking powder dishes.
This and earlier photos are from my own kitchen.

"The Pancake Baker" by Adriaen Brouwer (WikiArt):

Pancakes were FLAT before baking powder!

Look at the pancake, another food that changed and became typically American. As illustrated in this seventeenth-century painting, and as reflected in events such as pancake-flipping races the day before Lent, pancakes are highly traditional in Europe and have been made for centuries. However, the expression "flat as a pancake," which Civitello quotes often, points to the change that happened when baking powder became available, and American pancakes began to be high and fluffy instead of flat.

Question: What do all these breadstuffs -- cookies, layer cakes, cobblers, biscuits, fluffy American pancakes, cake donuts, muffins, cornbread, and more -- have in common?

Answer: Baking powder is responsible for their unique texture, flavor, and ease of baking. It's the "indispensable, invisible ingredient." (p. 187) Further, they are all in fact American food innovations.

We think of these items as home made and traditional, but in fact their history is not as old as all that. Baking powder is a 19th century invention, and so are all the recipes made with it. Linda Civitello tells this story, beginning with descriptions of the hard labor needed to make bread from yeast or to enable cakes and biscuits to rise by other means -- but nowhere near as quick and labor-saving as baking powder. Yes, you could beat eggs for an hour to get a nice fluffy cake. Yes, you could make "beaten" biscuits, which required someone in the kitchen to beat the dough with a rolling pin for hours. (Hint: these were a popular Southern food. The person doing the beating was often a slave, or after the Civil War, a very poorly paid black servant. Civitello is always highly aware of the role that slavery and later racism played in the development of American cuisine.)

Baking powder is made from baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) and another rising agent, which varied during the time when the product was being developed; at first the two elements had to be added at different times in the mixing process, and timing was critical. Several chemists worked in laboratories and then invented industrial processes to deliver an easily usable product to home bakers and commercial bakers.

Big business always was responsible for baking powder. Several corporations with very colorful owners and promoters were rivals in an effort to corner the market for this profitable product. In the course of their rivalry, they engaged in some amazing antics. For example, one baking powder manufacturer bribed virtually every member of the Missouri legislature in the late 19th century to enable passage of a law prohibiting the key ingredient used in the products of other baking powder manufacturers. The "baking powder wars" involved early food and drug regulation, bribery, both national and state-level politicians, and many other fascinating machinations, made most vivid by Civitello's narrative.

The Baking Powder Wars is full of wonderful nuggets of food history and cookbook history, as well as industrial history. In the twentieth century, more and more cookbooks and recipes called for baking powder, which was not a standardized product until remarkably late. Civitello traces the way that baking powder took over most baking recipes in popular sources, especially The Joy of Cooking, first published in 1931 and revised many times into the 21st century. She also illustrates how the use of baking powder changed baking methods in other cultures, such as Hispanic cuisine in California and baking of traditional German biscuits that were previously raised with non-chemical leavening methods. And she lists how fast food makers use baking powder biscuits and similar foods -- just think of the Egg McMuffin! 

Retro Baking: Velvet Spice Cake from the "Joy of Cooking"

Just out of the oven!

My copy of The Joy of Cooking is dog-eared, broken-spined, and full of splatters from past cooking experiences. I also own the Joy of Cooking iPad app, which I actually used to make this spice cake. Baking from scratch is kind of a retro thing to do involving beaten egg whites and many steps to completion. Not at all like a cake mix!

My also-antique bundt pan is coated with Teflon, but it still works. (Note that Teflon is not considered harmful, that's kind of a myth.) The printed book I used is so old that the recipe version there only mentions a tube pan. Bundt pans became popular in 1966, which is probably when I received mine as a gift from my Aunt Bernadine, though she may have given it to me even before that. The app -- being entirely twenty-first century -- says to use a bundt pan, which I did.

Here's the cake after it cooled a bit, shown in front of my very-not-retro stand mixer.
The spices I used were ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves: a bit more than the recipe suggested.
Also, I used Kefir in place of the buttermilk specified in the recipe, as I often do these days.

I greased the pan with my secret hoard of original Crisco. I use it only for greasing baking pans, so I don't think it will harm us too much even though it's trans fat. I used butter as the shortening in the cake itself -- butter, the great and wonderful and vindicated fat that isn't anywhere near as dangerous as they once told us. Greasing the pan with Crisco does make a very crisp and brown exterior on a cake!

A Devil's Choice: Print Cookbook or iPad App?

New iPad App, old print cookbook.

To make a classic recipe, Devil's Food Cake, I looked in a classic cookbook -- The Joy of Cooking. Perfect for Cookbook Wednesday (though I baked it Sunday morning). As it happens I have a very old copy of the printed book as well as a copy of the Joy of Cooking App for my iPad.

Devil's Food Cake ingredients all ready to go: egg whites in mixer,
flour, sugar, chocolate mixture, egg yolks, milk, butter.
Devil's Food Cake continues my theme of devil-titled foods for Halloween.

Examining the instructions for the same recipe from the two different formats offered me a chance to compare the standard, in fact old-fashioned, cookbook with the app. The cookbook wins for several reasons, though these are not intrinsic problems with using apps, just with the way this one is implemented.

To begin with, the cookbook instructions are all on one page, while the app requires scrolling with your sticky, floury hands. A smeary iPad screen will be annoying a few hours later when you try to do Sudoku, check email, or read on your Kindle app. But if you touch the page of the old book or splatter it with batter, you get a permanent stain on the recipe which is kind of amusing as the years go by.

Both versions of this recipe call for the same ingredients and essentially the same method, but the old cookbook seems to think you know more about baking. For example, the print version says to sift the flour, add salt & soda, and resift (which I did). The app version says sift the flour, put it in a bowl, and then thoroughly stir in the salt and soda, which takes more time and probably isn't as good a way to do it.

It's easier to find things in the old-fashioned print index. If the iPad app has an index like this, I haven't been able to find it. At left: the entries for "Deviled" foods in the printed Joy of Cooking. It takes a while to locate a recipe in the electronic version. It shouldn't be that hard.
Notes: 
• I don't have anything against e-recipes in general. I typed in most of my own recipes starting on a very early Macintosh in around 1990, and now use them on the iPad. I also find many cooking ideas and recipes online. My remarks about e-book issues are specifically about the Joy of Cooking App.
• For much more information on the history of the original Joy of Cooking, there's a biography of its two authors, Rombauer and Becker. I reviewed the book, here: Stand Facing the Stove.

About Devil's Food Cake

A piece of the cake I baked, as we served it for dessert at Nat's house.

According to the Food Timeline: "Recipes for rich, chocolate cakes similar to devil's food were fairly common in late 19th century cookbooks, but they were not named such. They were typically listed under the generic name 'chocolate cake.' Recipes titled devil's food proliferated, sometimes with interesting and creative twists, in the first decades of the 20th century. Red Devil appears in the 1930s. ...How this chocolate cake came to be called devil's food no one knows although it may have been a play on opposites: it was as dark and rich as angel food was light and airy."

The traditional difference between just a chocolate cake and a devil's food cake is more chocolate. "When the larger amount of chocolate is used, it is a black, rich Devil's Food," said the first Joy of Cooking (1931 p. 236, cited in the Food Timeline). For a selection of mid-twentieth century recipes see this post at Dying for Chocolate.

1950 Devil's Food Cake Mix ad
from Swans Down

Devil's Food was a natural for cake mixes, though I'm not sure when the very first mix for Devil's Food Cake was introduced. Mixers and cake mixes both became very popular in the early 50s -- though both had existed as less widespread products prior to that. My mother started using both of them at that time.

One time in the early 1950s, our neighbor (who worked for a survey outfit) recruited my mother to bake several cakes from unmarked boxes of cake mix and fill out a questionnaire about how she liked each one. I've always wondered if my mother contributed to the cake mix makers' belief that women prefer a mix that requires the addition of real eggs. At about this time, Betty Crocker, Duncan Hines, Swans Down and the rest formulated most cake mixes to require 2 or 3 eggs instead of including powdered eggs with the other powdered ingredients.

As I baked on Sunday, I was thinking how much work it would have been to bake even a mix without an electric mixer! These two convenience products obviously made cake baking much easier.

While devil's food cakes and cupcakes are often featured for Halloween, they are obviously well loved all year around. Not like pumpkin!

Main Course: Poulet Diable

We took my cake to Nat's house Sunday night, for dinner with Nat and Carol. To complement the Devil's Food Cake, Carol prepared a recipe for Poulet Diable; that is, chicken with a piquant sauce of Dijon mustard, shallots, white wine, and cream. I think she used Dorie Greenspan's recipe.

Devilish Dinner: Carol's Poulet Diable and two Devil-Themed Wines at Nat's house. Followed by the cake.

Poulet Diable, in some form or other, seems to be a classic -- as illustrated by several French cookbooks. In celebration of Cookbook Wednesday, I also give you this list of references to the dish from cookbooks published between the 1930s and 1960s:

• Mastering the Art of French Cooking has a recipe for Poulet Grillé à la Diable: chicken halves or quarters broiled with mustard, herbs, and breadcrumbs. (Beck, Bertholle and Child, p. 265).
• Both the Larousse Gastronomique entry for "Devilled" and the glossary of Raymond Oliver's La Cuisine define the method of cooking chicken called à la Diable to consist of slitting the bird along the back, spreading it out flat, and grilling it with various spices or sauce. In the "Sauce" entry, Larousse also provides three recipes for a Sauce Diable for grilled chicken, with vinegar, shallots, thyme, cayenne pepper and other ingredients.
• In his cookbook Ma Gastronomie the very famous chef Fernand Point gives a recipe for Poulet Grillé à la Diable. He calls for a chicken cut as described above, with a sauce made from vinegar, parsley, peppercorns, tarragon, egg yolk, and butter (p. 170).  

I wondered why the name of the dish was "à la Diable." I found out that it's short for à la façon du Diable; that is, in the manner of the devil. There are various derivations for this expression, but none of them have anything to do with Halloween customs. Like devil's food cake the dish would be good at any time of year!

"Cookbooks as Literature"

I just read a really good article about cookbook authors: "Soul Food: Cookbooks As Literature" by Maria Bustillos. Included for a detailed review: Alexandre Dumas for his Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine, Elizabeth David; Irma S. Rombauer, the original author of The Joy of Cooking; and Black Panther activist Bobby Seale for Barbeque'N with Bobby. She mentions others as she describes these favorites. She also singles out a few cookbook authors who provide a less interesting and appealing persona, notably Martha Stewart. Bustillos selects apt quotations and recipes to illustrate her descriptions of these authors, which makes this a very readable and enjoyable piece of writing.

In summing up her ideas on cookboos as literature, Bustillos writes: "Dumas, and Elizabeth David and Julia Child, Marcel Boulestin and Alice B. Toklas and Bobby Seale and so many others, have the eating of soup figured out and a good deal besides; as literary artists and beyond this, as artists of savoir faire, of life itself. Given that one must eat, how then to do it? Historians and philosophers as well as poets tend to come up short where advice on questions urgent and as homely as these is required."

Lebkuchen

Our friend Marianna in Berlin sent us a wonderful box of Lebkuchen, the German favorite Christmas pastry. Lebkuchen is ginger flavored, and each large cake-like piece is baked on top of a thin wafer -- so it's not a simple cookie, and not the same as American gingerbread either.

My culinary book club met last night (it's sponsored by & meets at a local bookstore). We were reading Stand Facing the Stove, which is about the authors of the Joy of Cooking. Since the German-American author Irma Rombauer's best recipes are for cookies, many in a German tradition, I shared some Lebkuchen with the group. They were very enthusiastic -- we don't normally have refreshments.

Our book discussion was very interesting -- especially about the history of cooking and cookbooks that's covered in the book. The Joy of Cooking was published at a moment when much about American kitchens and home cooking was changing, so the history is very important. All eight book club members enjoyed reading the book, though they agreed with me that it could have used some editing in spots. I wrote up my thoughts about it here.

"Stand Facing the Stove"

The Joy of Cooking, 1964 edition, has been one of my most reliable food references for much of my life. If I want to bake cookies or a cake, it's the first place I usually look. I use it if I just want to know something about some ingredient (though these days, I am more likely to google). I'm pretty fond of ethnic cookbooks and of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, but sometimes I need a simpler recipe -- my old battered, food-stained Joy of Cooking is where I go.

I was never terribly curious about Irma Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker, the authors. They never made a popular TV show like Julia Child. I never saw them in person in my local venues as I've seen Joan Nathan, or read their autobiography in the start of a book as I did Claudia Roden's. But I was enthusiastic when I bought Stand Facing the Stove: The Story of the Women Who Gave America The Joy of Cooking by Anne Mendelson -- the selection for an upcoming discussion group.

The first hundred pages describe the life of Irma Rombauer up to 1931 when she wrote the first edition of the Joy of Cooking. She was then a recent widow in her mid-fifties. This part of the book was particularly fascinating as she was a native of St.Louis, as am I. Her family background thus appealed to me. I could picture many of the places mentioned, and learned quite a bit about 19th century St. Louis social history and the German immigrant background she came from. Most amazing: somewhat before her book became a big money-maker, Irma Rombauer moved to an apartment not far from my parents' first apartment. So for the first 8 years of my life, I learned, I lived about 2 blocks from her!

Mendelson's treatment of the origin of the Joy of Cooking and of its influence and importance includes much very interesting material. I enjoyed the stories of how Irma Rombauer collected recipes from friends and their cooks, edited the material, and with her daughter designed the innovative book. I was interested in how they invented its way of presenting recipes and information, and how Marion Becker re-invented much of the book for the later editions. Comparisons to other classic cookbooks of the era such as the Settlement Cookbook and Fanny Farmer are also enlightening. Mendelson covers many issues: social changes, decline of availability of household help, invention of better stoves and refrigeration, improvements in basic food products like seedless grapes, and development of convenience food like canned soup and Jello.

Unfortunately for a work whose topic is editing, cutting, shaping, and creating quality written material, much of the book itself is terribly undisciplined and badly in need of editing. I found too little of interest in the extensive treatment authors' enormous fights and lawsuits with their publisher about money and editing. The very sad later years of both women and Marion's husband -- their illnesses and family problems -- were perhaps also treated at too great length. Worst of all, a 50 page chapter "Chronicles of Cookery 2" has vast amounts of undigested observations, the history of cookbooks mingled with other social history, repetitions of Joy of Cooking background from other chapters, and gossip about American food history, and really doesn't come up to the standard of the rest of the book.

It's a very long book. It should have been shorter.

One Book Shelf

The amazon editors' blog Omnivoracious has invited readers to submit a photo of their bookshelves with a list of the books. I love the idea. I'm sure that this big-time website will never get around to my books, though, so I think I'll start blogging them myself.

I'm starting with some foodie books, which I'll do here on the food blog -- later if I don't lose interest, I'll do other books on my other blogs. The shelf in the picture represents about one-tenth of my food books (which are a fraction of all the books in the house). I don't guarantee that I'll ever finish the project. Be sure to click on the photo for a close-up!

About this shelf: as you see, in front of the books one of my other reading interests has sneaked up in the form of three plastic Shakespeare toys. Behind the cartoony Shakespeares, are the following books:

• George Lang, The Cuisine of Hungary.
• Andras Koerner, A Taste of the Past: the Daily Life and Cooking of a 19th-Century Hungarian Jewish Homemaker.
• Kay Shaw Nelson, The Eastern European Cookbook.
• Joza Brizova, The Czechoslovak Cookbook.
• Karoly Gundel, Gundel's Hungarian Cookbook.
• Joan Nathan, Jewish Cooking in America.
• Ladies Auxiliary of Jewish Home for Aged of Worcester County, Jewish Home Cookbook.
• Mrs. Esther Levy, The First Jewish-American Cookbook.
• Colette Rossant, Apricots on the Nile.
• Rebeca Levin, Cocina Judia: Memoria y Tradicion.
• Pati Shosteck, A Lexicon of Jewish Cooking.
• John Cooper, Eat and Be Satisfied: A Social History of Jewish Food.
• Cara De Silva, Ed. In Memory's Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin.
• Claudia Roden, The Book of Jewish Food.
• David M. Gitlitz & Linda Kay Davidson, A Drizzle of Honey: The Lives and Recipes of Spain's Secret Jews.
• Greenspoon, Simkins, & Shapiro, eds. Food & Judaism.
• Sherry Ansky, The Food of Israel.
• Angelo Pellegrini, The Unprejudiced Palate.
• Irma S. Rombauer & Marion Rombauer Becker, Joy of Cooking.
• Carolyn Dille & Susan Belsinger, Classic Southwest Cooking.
• Junior League of Baton Rouge, River Roads Recipes.
• Rima & Richard Collin, The New Orleans Cookbook.
• Mimi Sheraton, The Bialy Eaters.
• H.E.Jacob, Six Thousand Years of Bread.