In 1866, John Staily experienced a change of heart that left its mark on Christmas cooking for the next half-century. Without telling his family, he praised the Lord, closed the barroom of his Liverpool Inn in Liverpool, Pa., and emptied out all the liquor on the floor.
When his wife came in to get some whiskey for her baking, she was aghast--not so much at the sudden conversion but that "he should at least have spared her some liquor for the mince pies." In the eyes of Christmas cooks like Mrs. Staily, mincemeat made without liquor thoroughly deserved the name it soon received, Humbug Pie.
It's daunting to think of the changes the American Christmas has undergone in the last century and a quarter: temperance and its sister, the Non-Fermentation Movement, which promoted baking powders over yeast; the commercialization of desserts; cookie cutters mass-produced from tin; scrap pictures to decorate cookies and cakes; the Christmas tree as an American custom; Santa Claus. And the vast alterations in diet wrought by the Industrial Revolution, perhaps best measured by the doubling of the national per-capita consumption of meat and sugar, have altered the culinary meaning of the day. Sweets and fat-rich foods that formerly had been once- a-year indulgences for many people became readily available year-round. If they could visit our time, Colonial Americans would say that many of us now eat as though it were Christmas every day.
In the 18th Century, the meal itself was not nearly as important as the foods and customs associated with the day as a communal event. New England didn't celebrate Christmas at all until well into the 19th Century.
For some Protestant denominations, Christmas Day was solely a time of prayer and meditation. For others, it meant bouts of heavy drinking (making "merry"); pork butchering, sausage making and serving up great vats of plum porridge to everyone in the neighborhood, rich or poor; "mumming" from house to house in comic costumes; singing carols for handouts of food; exchanging goose pies; or simply baking Yule Dows, little bread images of the Christ Child to give to children.
This Christmas feasting was an antidote to the lean diet of the rest of the year. In practical terms, overindulgence readied the body for a long, cold winter. But Victorian Americans, secure in their sense of progress, suspicious of the old village customs and scandalized by public drinking, did away with all this and shifted the emphasis from the village green to the family dining room.
The typical 19th-Century American Christmas dinner was short on fresh vegetables and fruit and long on root vegetables, with plenty of melted butter as "sauce."
A typical dinner might include soup, fish, boiled ham, boiled turkey with oyster sauce, three roast ducks and satellite dishes of scalloped oysters, potatoes, parsnips, turnips and celery. Dessert might include a plum pudding; pastry, including cookies; fresh fruit, such as pears or apples; and bitter, black coffee, made by boiling the grounds for several days.
For the Victorian cook, the centerpiece was a whole roast turkey, clearly visible at one end of the table. It became not only the epitome of Christmas and affluence but also a symbol of something essentially American. Christmas menus of the period abound with pictures of wild turkeys in association with American flags. In short, serving turkey at Christmas dinner, as at Thanksgiving, became a symbol of acculturation, and as such it distinguished those who had become Americans from "new arrivals."
There is an enormous quantity of old cookbook literature dealing with various methods of preparing Christmas turkey: boiling, a technique reserved for the less expensive, old birds; pulling the meat apart into shreds and serving it in cream sauce, and, of course, roasting. \o7 Roast\f7 turkey in the old sense of the word meant spit-roasting it before an open fire and then basting it with salted water and dusting it liberally with flour to give it a crisp skin.
From these historical gleanings, I set out to construct a holiday menu with traditional dishes cooked more to contemporary tastes. Butter and hefty glazings of bacon fat have been lopped from each dish, but otherwise the flavors are traditional. In this mini-buffet, small portions should be the rule. That's how Victorians managed to wade through their immensely long menus.
Dinner begins with a vegetarian leek soup from Benjamin Smith Lyman's "Vegetarian Diet" (1916). Lyman, who lived in Japan in the 1880s, was influential in the American Vegetarian Society during its formative years. The Turnip and Potato Casserole traces its American origins to the Pennsylvania Dutch \o7 schales\f7 , a species of gratin that had its roots in the Jewish cooking of the German Rhineland. It is a form of \o7 cholent\f7 , a dish left in the oven overnight on Friday to avoid cooking on the Sabbath.
