Conversation with a Food Historian
David S. Shields Shines a Light on America's Leading Culinarians of the 19th and Early 20th Centuries
"I was interested in the people who devoted themselves to public hospitality. Who had to serve the stranger or at least a clientele that included people who were unexpected coming in."
David S. Shields, Carolina Distinguished Professor at the University of South Carolina and the chairman of the Board of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, is a prolific author and one of the most important voices in the movement for the revival of southern cuisine and agricultural heritage. Shields’ most recent book, The Culinarians: Lives and Careers from the First Age of American Fine Dining, is a history of professional cooking in America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries told through profiles of 175 of the most important cooks and restaurateurs of the period. He recently spoke with NYFoodstory editor Ari Ariel about writing the book, the history of American cookery, and the Delmonico-Sherry rivalry. An excerpt from the book is reprinted in this edition of NYFoodstory.
AA: How did you decide to write The Culinarians?
DS: I was writing my previous book, Southern Provisions, which was an attempt to document the formation of Low Country cuisine, and meditate on its collapse, and talk about the crusade in the last 15 years or so to revive the ingredients and revitalize southern cooking. And one of the things I became aware of while attempting to discover what the world of professional cooking was in the eighteen-teens, twenties and thirties, in Baltimore, New Orleans, Richmond, Columbia and Savannah was that there were no resources out there. There was no book that you could go to with a handy dictionary of chefs or restaurants. You certainly could find out about Delmonico’s, but beyond that it was a hard slog for anyone trying to find anything out about the world of professional cooking, and the entire world of training and hospitality in the American cities. So of necessity I wrote out the histories of such things in the southern cities. I was collecting information—a lot of the major chefs cycled through other places. A lot of them came from New York and then headed out to the hinterlands of the U.S. in the nineteenth century. I figured, no one seems inclined to write this book. I’d at least gotten a start on it. So why don’t I start gathering all the information to see what I can come up with. I started the first histories connected with Southern Provisions ten years ago when I wrote the first profiles, but intensively in the last four years. Finally, I had so much information I knew just had to sit down and write the biographies and I realized I had too much information. It would create a book so unwieldy, so fat, that no publisher would pick it up. Multi-volume books are something that are a thing of the past outside of the world of sci-fi. So, I systematically started excluding certain categories of food processors. I jettisoned all the bakers, all the charcuterers, butchers were out, brewers, distillers. I learned that someone else was writing a book about boarding houses. And I sat down and wrote 275–300 profiles, and these got whittled down to the 175 that appear in The Culinarians.
AA: What distinguishes culinarians from these other categories of food processors, or for that matter from other professional cooks? In the book, you make an argument about the culinarians being different from the categories of cooks that came before them.
A lot of the population in America was either African or Anglo, so you had a tradition of roasting and brewing and certain elements of baking that came out of England, Ireland, and Scotland. . . . Even today in many states the most expensive restaurant you’ll find is a chop house, . . . and that’s a tradition that dates back from the very earliest period, and New York is in large part responsible for modeling that kind of enduring institution.
DS: That’s right. You had a cadre of elite cooks that operated in Europe serving the royal and noble households. They were private cooks before anything else, but they did public cookery because the people they were attached to were public figures. And in the nineteenth century, there was an equivalent sort of figure—plutocrats went off and hired European hotel chefs to be private chefs in their Hudson valley mansions. You could have something prepared by a chef trained in Maison Dorée or one of the other great Parisian restaurants. And I wasn’t interested in that. I was interested in the people who devoted themselves to public hospitality. Who had to serve the stranger or at least a clientele that included people who were unexpected coming in. I wanted them to be professional cooks, and that meant that they had a certain set of skills—pastry cooking, fermenting, roasts, confiseur-type work—that versatility, and that they’d undergone at least the three-year apprenticeship in a kitchen that was the standard for the profession. They had worked in a public venue and were familiar with several types of cuisines—not just German or Italian, but they could do French pastries if need be. Cosmopolitanism was an important dimension. That set of ingredients was what I was looking for in terms of all of the people who got covered.
AA: Reading the book, I was almost surprised that French cooks and cookery weren’t more dominant.
DS: There was certainly a moment after the Civil War when they attempted to impose a kind of professional hegemony. And the prestige of French cookery was always great, particularly in terms of pastry cooking, but the other traditions were strong. And one of the thing we have to remember is that a lot of the population in America was either African or Anglo, so you had a tradition of roasting and brewing and certain elements of baking that came out of England, Ireland, and Scotland that were incredibly consequential. Even today in many states the most expensive restaurant you’ll find is a chop house, a theme on the sort of Ruth’s Chris model, and that’s a tradition that dates back from the very earliest period, and New York is in large part responsible for modeling that kind of enduring institution.
AA: The African-American influence in terms of oyster houses is really interesting. Could you tell us a little more about that?
In the South, many of the African-American professionals were enslaved, and in Charleston there is even a kind of lineage that extends from the eighteenth century well into the twentieth century of African-American professional cooks, each generation of which trained the next generation.
DS: African-American professional cookery was a fascinating thing because there were two dimensions to it. You have a diaspora population in the North—Joshua B. Smith, the Downings in New York, Newport and Washington, D.C., Isaiah LeCount and the Augustin family in Philadelphia. And these people are usually the primary event caterers in their cities. And the other institution African Americans tend to run are oyster houses, or oyster cellars originally. The public event cookery was extraordinary. Sometimes thousands of people were served under tents in open-air situations on portable stoves, so you had to be a sort of general commanding the troops when you are working in a situation like that—it’s quite different than the comfortable confines of one’s own kitchen in a restaurant. Some quite heroic figures operated in that world. In the South, many of the African-American professionals were enslaved, and in Charleston there is even a kind of lineage that extends from the eighteenth century well into the twentieth century of African-American professional cooks, each generation of which trained the next generation. It starts off with a pastry chef named Sally Seymour in the 1790s. Her daughter Eliza Seymour Lee trains many of the best African-American household cooks in Charleston. She also trained the greatest professional restaurant cook, Nat Fuller, who in turn trained Tom Tully, who is turn trained Alfred Castion and William G. Barron and finally in the twentieth century James F. Perrineau, who died in the 1940s, so an arc that covers a century and a half.
AA: People don’t often think of enslaved labor as skilled labor, but here it is clear that enslaved cooks were valued for specific kinds of skills and educations?
DS: That’s exactly the case, and Fuller was reckoned to be the genius of Low Country cooking. There are other figures, like Abraham Cobb in Savannah, in similar sorts of situations. I don’t write about him in The Culinarians, but I have a manuscript that I put together about him. There are others, like Nellie Murray in New Orleans, who are similar figures.
AA: Would you say that French, English, and African-American influences were the three pillars of American fine dining, or am I pushing that too far?
DS: I think we have to realize that there are other dimensions to it, for example German chemistry. Justus Liebig publishes about the nutrition cycle—the chemistry that gives rise to leaveners, baking powder, baking soda, what they called saleratus in the early nineteenth century, which gave rise to the whole world of quick breads—biscuits and things like that. That German influence is extraordinarily strong. In Chicago, St. Louis, and Cincinnati, fine dining had a decidedly German inflection. In the Southwest we have another tradition, Hispanic. In my profile of Jose Sanroman, I use him as a figure to draw the entire nascent Latin American cooking scene in Los Angeles—his rivals, how they supported themselves, and what their repertoire of dishes was in the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
AA: How are these culinary rivalries taking place at the end of the nineteenth century, in print?
DS: It is an interesting case. One of the hallmarks of professional cooks who operate in the fine-dining world is that they treat their recipes as proprietary properties. And they do not tend to release them. It is only late in the game, in the mid 1880s, that professional cooks finally decide to start publishing. When Charles Ranhofer publishes The Epicurean in the nineties, it is a challenge laid down. There is no dumbing down of any recipe. His presumption is that household cooks can in no way can accomplish even ten percent of the recipes in the book—so just gaze on how spectacular and arcane and highly developed this art is. And treat us [chefs] with due reverence. There is a kind of extraordinary vanity in this explosion of publications at the end of the nineteenth century, when major chefs lay out their goods for the first time. You read the recipes and think, I don’t have enough hours of the day to do this.
AA: Are these mostly cookbooks? Is this sort of like the French Laundry Cookbook or the El Bulli cookbook of the late nineteenth century?
DS: Yes, and some of them are quite astonishing. My favorite of them is done by Jules Arthur Harder, a spectacularly significant chef. He worked at Delmonico’s, the Maison Dorée in New York, the Union Club, the Long Branch Hotel, spent a year in Savannah learning southern cooking, and most importantly, was the founding chef of the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. And it was he who had all of the California gardeners prepare from the best strains of vegetables available. He insisted on the highest quality. He kick-starts the world of California vegetable growing. And he publishes privately what he calls his Physiology of Taste or Harder’s Book of Practical American Cookery. He intended it to be six volumes; only one ever appeared. The second volume apparently existed in manuscript but has been lost. But the first volume is entirely devoted to vegetables. And what’s so spectacular about this book is that Harder has realized that the great contribution of American agriculture has been the expansion of all of the vegetables into multiple strains with different tastes and qualities. So the great challenge becomes how to suit the proper vegetable to the proper dish. And his book is like the Rosetta Stone of nineteenth-century vegetable cooking. There is nothing else that exists like it. Indeed, the usual cookbook says things like, ‘take one squash and slice it’—what squash? Or ‘take a potato.’ But Harder has the mind of a chef who has been to the Washington Market in New York, knows every vegetable that is grown in America, knows its qualities and has actually experimented in the kitchen to find out what their virtues are given the classic repertoire of dishes.
AA: Who does he imagine is the audience for the book? Is he promoting this approach to cuisine to home cooks, or is this really for other professionals?
DS: I have no idea. It could have been for growers. Every set of recipes has a little introduction on the vegetables themselves—how they are grown, where they are valuable, who has valued them in the past. It’s a strange book, and if I had to do an American cookbook collection I think it would be the first or second book I would purchase.
AA: One of the articles in this edition of NYFoodstory is going to be about the Seeley dinner at Sherry’s. Could you tell us a little bit about the Delmonico–Sherry rivalry?
DS: There is a style war that takes place at the end of the nineteenth century, and Delmonico’s, for all its storied excellence of cuisine and extraordinary lineage of master chefs, had certain institutional peculiarities. One of them was an austerity about presentation. Delmonico’s had no paintings on the walls. No music was ever allowed to be played while people were dining. There were certain rules governing who could be seated. No single women were allowed at Delmonico’s in the nineteenth century. And Charles Crist Delmonico, the last of the great family, was revered by many diners for having maintained this sort of purity, which makes the company, and the food and wine, the focus of things. Sherry was a different breed of cat. And he was sponsored by a contingent in New York high society, the Astor family, which thought things were getting stodgy and wanted social institutions to be more unbuttoned and merry. This may have been due to the influence of people going to Paris and experiencing the increasingly Toulouse-Lautrecian quality of public entertainment at that time. They wanted to import it back to America. Sherry, whose real culinary interests was in sweets—and Champagne was his other great fascination—was the ideal steward for a rival conception of the way that fine dining occurs—as an occasion for revelry. And, bubbles, extraordinary decors, all of this were part of his grand scheme. Sherry himself was a kind of dapper gallant who could talk to anyone, while Charles Crist was a very down-home friendly, but reserved man. They presented two personalities. I guess one step further was Rector’s, the first of the Lobster Palaces, where Stage-Door Johnnies and showgirls gathered to gobble on lobsters and guzzle Champagne in large palm courts.
AA: So, there was a shift away from formality to revelry in dining. Did Prohibition kill that?
Charles Crist Delmonico, the last of the great family, was revered by many diners for having maintained this sort of purity, which makes the company, and the food and wine, the focus of things. Sherry was a different breed of cat. And he was sponsored by a contingent in New York high society, the Astor family, which thought things were getting stodgy and wanted social institutions to be more unbuttoned and merry.
DS: Prohibition kills a lot. It certainly shuts down Rector’s, and Sherry has to reboot his entire business model. It was a good thing that he had a love for sweets, because when alcohol was prohibited he became a major dealer in ice cream. And it has to be said that when the restaurants shutter their doors in 1920 and 1921, it is only the hotels that manage to keep a semblance of fine dining alive in the periods between the wars. The restaurants are in a bad way, and you have dancing clubs trying to fill the gap, but what the hotels do is they refocus the drug of choice and make desserts a great attraction. The dessert cart becomes one of the ingredients of the dining experience.
AA: And hotels don’t have to be as profit driven, or at least they are profit driven in a different way than restaurants.
DS: That’s right. And it is interesting the last figures in The Culinarians are the figures that bridge the twenties and thirties and are present at the revival of fine dining after World War Two. Louis Diat becomes sort of resident expert in French cuisine for Gourmet magazine in the late 1940s.
AA: Do you have favorite entries?
DS: There are a number of people that I just love. Charles Pfaff, who was the host of Bohemia, whose cellar housed most of the indigent poets and writers of the late 1850s and 1860s, is just an interesting man. He is revered by these people because he always will let you eat for free if you don’t have any money. He has provided a place for them that was sort of like home when they lived miserable lives. He, in a certain way, is the very horizon of what hospitality can be.
I also like Ann Poppleton, the stylish New York pastry chef, who introduces the chocolate kiss to America, establishes luncheon as a meal, and a meal especially suited for women, and hires the poets of New York to write epigrammatic endearments that these kisses can be wrapped in. She also makes jam cake popular in America. Very interesting lady.
AA: What are you working on now?
DS: Part of what I do is bring back historic southern grains and heirloom vegetables into cultivation. I’m the chair of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation. The Tuesday before last Thanksgiving I discovered a corn variety that I’ve been looking for for years, Cocke’s Prolific Corn. It is the one corn that we know was produced by the circle of agricultural experimentalists around Thomas Jefferson. It is growing in a field outside of Landrum, South Carolina, maintained by a 95-year-old farmer named Manning Farmer. It’s a prolific corn, which means it has more than two ears of corn on the stalk at all times and can have as many as five or six. It is a beautiful white meal corn. So, I’m going to devote at least some time to getting that back into general cultivation here. In terms of writing, I write books in different areas as well as cuisine. I’ve written on photographic history and also early American literature. I may write a book about the history of physical culture in America from the first gymnasiums in the 1820s to pumping iron. There is something fascinating about the notion of the perfectibility of the flesh. That stuff that we theologically know is always perishing and is not immortal. The heroic effort to somehow reign flesh and perfect it is a fascinating thing. How were the ideals visualized? How did health regimens, exercise and diet work? The exhibition of the bodies? These people had their hands in all sorts of things—naturism, the early dance movement, vegetarianism, they invented peanut butter. I have been working on that. It is a different way of thinking through some of the same decades that I treat in The Culinarians and look at them from a really radical horizon.
The Author
Ari Ariel teaches history and international studies at the University of Iowa. He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and a diploma in Classical Culinary Arts from the French Culinary Institute (now called the International Culinary Center). His work focuses on ethnicity and nationalism in the Middle East, diasporic communities and foodways.
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David S. Shields Shines a Light on America's Leading Culinarians of the 19th and Early 20th Centuries
