A Cheap and Dainty Lunch
Written by Daisy Zeijlon
The recipe, excerpted from Ladies Home Journal (1888).
Lunch is usually an afterthought for me.
9 times out of 10 I’m making my signature Fridge Salad: a bowl of lettuce tossed with whatever fridge finds need to be used up. Yesterday’s was arugula with three pieces of cold roasted potato, half a sliced apple and the last dregs of a jar of hummus, tossed with balsamic vinegar and olive oil. It was seasoned with the self satisfaction that comes with preparing a nourishing meal within three minutes.
My dedication to spending as little energy on lunch as possible is what prompted my interest in “A Cheap and Dainty Lunch”, a recipe published in Ladies Home Journal’s fifth volume in the spring of 1888. Its author is Julia Hubbell Treat, the wife of a reverend and an early member of the Daughters of the American Revolution (Lineage Book). She does not appear to have been a career writer or culinary instructor; instead, she was likely an occasional contributor to women’s magazines, as were many white, middle class women in the late nineteenth century. With the rise of inexpensive printing technology, these magazines proliferated and became important hubs for women to publish recipes, share housekeeping expertise and seek advice.
Recipes took up a significant chunk of each Ladies Home Journal issue, from its founding in 1883 to its final issue in 2016. The form and function of these recipes changed, but their purpose did not: to provide straightforward, accessible cooking ideas and instruction to an audience of American women. “A Cheap and Dainty Lunch” is no exception. Treat delivers concise but informative directions for a four-course “simple menu” which, she explains, can be made from ingredients that anyone “in city or country” can find. The courses are as follows:
Cups of hot poultry broth.
Sautéed poultry meat with drawn butter sauce, served with potatoes stewed in milk.
A cold salad of boiled potatoes, beets and eggs.
Individual cakes with whipped cream.
The idea of sitting down to a multi-course lunch—let alone making one—was too intriguing to pass up. So, as a twenty-first century resident, I set off to test if its premise as an inexpensive but refined meal had held up over nearly 150 years.
Cheap?
I spent $31.58 on ingredients, which excluded things like flour (which I already have) and included some things I didn’t use—I bought a dozen eggs, for example, but only used a few of them. I cooked for just me and my husband but it could have fed four, meaning I would have spent $7.89 per person, give or take. For a four-course meal, I think it’s fair to say this is a decent deal. The “cheap” descriptor holds up.
However, if we modify “cheap” to include time and labor costs, the price per portion skyrockets. Anything I saved in dollars and cents I made up for in minutes spent cooking, cleaning, and stressing. Let it be known that my approach to cooking is emphatically not scientific. Unless I’m baking, I’m a “little of this”, “little of that” kind of cook. I would have failed a class taught by Maria Parloa and, given that my husband does things like laundry and vacuuming, I would have flunked out of nineteenth-century womanhood.
All that’s to say that, even though I consider myself a pretty skilled home cook, preparing this meal was laborious in a way I typically reserve for Thanksgiving. I started the night before by boiling the Cornish game hen (my interpretation of a “fowl”) for three hours until it was so tender that it had started to disintegrate. I plucked it out of the stock and let it and the meat sit separately overnight. The next morning was a whirlwind: I began cooking at 9:30 AM and didn’t finish cleaning up from the meal until about 1:30 PM. During those four hours I also didn’t really sit down—I ate every course with my husband but did so quickly so that I could move on to preparing the next one. When I wasn’t actively cooking I was cleaning, since I ended up using every pot and bowl in my kitchen multiple times. Copious amounts of butter, flour and sugar meant it all tasted pretty good, but the details are hazy: I was too busy to savor anything.
Domestic scientists would not have approved of the state of my kitchen.
This included all of the modern technology I used: a gas stove, a refrigerator and, most scandalously, a dishwasher. The dishwasher was a particularly potent source of inner turmoil. I felt guilty not fully leaning into the nineteenth century experience. I know that it was never going to be possible to “authentically” recreate this meal by simple virtue of the fact that I live in 2021. I found the recipe in a digital archive. Nowhere sells fowls.
Still, as I loaded the bowl of my stand mixer into the dishwasher, in my machine-washed apron with the cool breeze of the air conditioning tousling my hair, I couldn’t help but shamefully whisper to myself “it’s what they would have wanted.” There is, though, truth to that whisper. As Ruth Schwartz Cohen has chronicled in More Work for Mother, dozens of popular new kitchen technologies were invented in the nineteenth century: egg beaters, mechanized butter churns, airtight heating stoves, and many more. These gadgets were hugely popular (Evans), and it’s easy to understand why. In the early nineteenth century, women sometimes spent so long beating eggs for cakes that they had to rotate the task through family members, shift-style (Evans). An egg beater could quite literally cut this work in half.
Schwartz Cohen, though, urges caution when considering the impact of this kind of tech. She argues that these gadgets ultimately only changed the nature of household labor—they didn’t reduce it. Moreover, the labor they saved was typically masculine. As stoves, for example, started to replace open hearths they reduced the time men spent gathering, cutting and hauling fuel (Schwartz Cohen). They did not minimize the time women spent cooking; as Schwartz Cohen puts it, frying bacon is frying bacon. In short: I’m going to be spending the same amount of time in the kitchen no matter what, so I might as well go ahead and load that dishwasher.
I’m dwelling on this labor not to whine but to illustrate just how much work went into this kind of meal production. In fact, I’d argue that this meal was really only accessible to women of wealth. Firstly, the reader is paying for a magazine subscription, meaning she is equipped with enough education and time to read it. More telling, though, is this meal’s time cost. As with cookbooks, the women who read these magazines typically employed servants (Elias). As Megan Elias argues in Food on the Page, these women were “usually only responsible for choosing her family’s menu, not for making her choices edible” (Elias 15). An upper class woman would have read this recipe and then outsourced its preparation to a housekeeper or cook, enabling her to sit and enjoy the meal with her guests. Still, even without household staff, a woman preparing this meal herself had enough money and time to perform this kind of unpaid domestic labor. Despite calling itself “cheap”, then, the recipe is full of hidden costs that give us insight into who might have been preparing it.
Potato dressing 101.
Dainty?
Despite its laboriousness, I enjoyed preparing this meal because I enjoy cooking. It’s been my main hobby for more than twenty years. Over the last two, ambitious, time consuming culinary projects (Croissants! Overnight braises! Pickles!) helped carry me through the darkest moments of the pandemic. Cooking is part of my identity—a big part—but not inevitably so. Unlike the domestic scientists considered in this project, I never felt that being a woman meant I would have to excel as a homemaker.
The women who would have been preparing this recipe in 1888 likely did feel that pressure. In the age of industrialization, work and home became separate spheres. As employment opportunities in manufacturing and industry increased, men began engaging in paid work away from the home and women, even those who also did paid work, continued to be responsible for housekeeping and child rearing. This unpaid domestic labor was made more challenging by isolation: women newly moved to cities for their husbands’ employment opportunities were separated from their female kin networks who had historically lent communal support to their care work.
Domestic science emerged in this context and one of its foundational principles was a disdain of “drudgery”. Lauren Shapiro examines this phenomenon in Perfection Salad, arguing that domestic scientists did everything they could to resist a characterization of housework as menial or dull. Instead they employed “dainty” as a descriptor wherever possible, to reposition homemaking as feminine, effortless, and pleasurable—a mechanism we see in action with this recipe in its attempt to obfuscate the arduousness of cooking a four-course meal.
“Dainty” is also a word dripping with class and racial implications. Dainty, as Shapiro explains, was used to “give housework an important boost upward in the social scale” (Shapiro 41). This framing was explicitly for middle- and upper-class women who may have been growing dissatisfied or bored with housework. By repositioning it as something ladylike and delicate, it became simultaneously more appealing to those who had already achieved high social status, while making this kind of status attainable to those who hadn’t gotten there yet. To prepare this meal was to perform high class values.
Dainty food was also overwhelmingly white. Every component of this meal—aside from the (optional) beets—was a shade of beige. This was in keeping with contemporary understandings of nutrition. Butter, milk, flour and sugar were dietary staples, because white, soft warm food was considered healthful (Elias 40). Anxieties about food safety also meant people tended to boil their vegetables for longer than we do now, and before vitamins and fiber had been identified, the benefits of crisp, vibrant produce was unknown (Shaprio 88). More importantly, this kind of monotone plate, a stalwart of New England or Yankee cuisine, was also a performance of civility. Domestic scientists considered this food, in all its whiteness, a celebration of modern American values. By equating this cuisine with Americanness, these women inherently othered immigrant and Black populations whose diets existed outside these rather strict rules. “Dainty”, then, was as much about performing racial superiority as it was about status and gender.
Stewed potatoes.
Butter sauce.
Cooling cakes.
The “fowl” settling in to boil.
The Value of Recipes
Recipes are often overlooked as historical sources, set aside in favor of treatises and manifestos. I am certainly not suggesting that we stop relying on these more traditional sources, but I do believe that recipes are uniquely valuable in that we can still live them. Preparing this recipe (albeit with the help of a few modern utilities) allowed me to get a glimpse of not only what middle class, New England Americans might have been eating, but also what they might have been thinking. It provides insight into the complicated political meaning with which domestic scientists saturated their cuisine, and the social and cultural values it performed. I can only hope my Fridge Salads have as much to say to future culinary historians as this recipe did to me.
Sources
Elias, Megan J. Food on the Page: Cookbooks and American Culture. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.
Evans, Meryle. “The Egg Beater.” Gastronomica, vol. 1 no. 2, Spring 2001, pp. 16-19. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/gfc.2001.1.2.16
Lineage Book of the Charter Members of the Daughters of the American Revolution, Volume 1. Harrisburg Publishing Company, 1895.
Shapiro, Laura. Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century. University of California Press, 2009.
Schwartz Cohen, Ruth. More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. Basic Books, 1983.