By James C. O’Connell,
Author of Dining Out in Boston
Most New Englanders assume that
traditional regional cooking has been around since colonial times. Yet it was
not until the twentieth century, that restaurants explicitly featured these
dishes. Earlier menus did not make a fuss about serving specialties like “New
England clam chowder” or “Boston cream pie.” The widespread celebration of New
England cooking started with the Colonial Revival movement in the early 1900s.
The movement championed the Puritan and Revolutionary Era heritage of New
England, particularly through preserving historic buildings and designing
decorative arts in a Colonial Revival style.
New England restaurants started to
feature “Yankee” pot roast, “Boston” baked beans, and “New England” boiled
dinner. The dining ritual of Thanksgiving dinner became entrenched. It was a
simple meal of roast turkey and the homely accompaniments of dressing,
potatoes, and root vegetables. Cranberry sauce became the traditional fruit
relish. The feast concluded with an array of pies, those all-purpose dishes
from colonial days. Thanksgiving embodied Pilgrim frugality, which self-reliant
Americans adopted as they carved out civilization from the frontier.
In America’s
Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking, Keith Stavely and Kathleen
Fitzgerald observed: “In foods as in so many other cultural expressions, the
domineering, once-dominant Yankees, through their own unique blend of myth and
magic—brilliantly disguised as an aversion to myth and a disavowal of
magic—attempted to create normative America out of plain, frugal New England.”
New England cooking conveyed a sense of romance connected with the Pilgrims and
the Minutemen.
It is telling that lowly baked beans
became such an iconic food. Boston was nicknamed “Beantown,” and the National
League baseball franchise between 1883 and 1906 was known as the “Beaneaters.”
Baked beans were subsistence food going back to England and medieval cookery.
During Puritan times, beans were baked on Saturday to be eaten after church on
the Sabbath, when the hearth was cold. Pieces of salted meat were added to the
bean stew. By the nineteenth century, salt fat pork was added to white pea
beans, and, by the last quarter of the century, molasses became an ingredient.
A traditional accompaniment of baked beans was brown bread. Boston brown bread
was made from rye and cornmeal steamed in a pudding tin. By the mid-nineteenth
century, molasses and, sometimes, raisins, were added. In another generation,
brown bread and baked beans had become iconic foods.
It took awhile for Indian pudding
and corn bread to become New England standbys. When the Puritans arrived, they
brought with them a predilection for wheat and rye. Rye was easy to grow in New
England, but wheat was not. The Puritans considered cornmeal an inferior grain,
but corn grew easily and was versatile, so the colonists eventually adopted it.
Cornmeal (which often was called simply “Indian” or “Injun”) was made into a
pudding, mixed with milk and, later, molasses, berries, or raisins. In the
colonial era, puddings were eaten as the main course at breakfast, lunch, and
dinner and only became a restaurant dessert in the nineteenth century.
It is surprising that Indian pudding
has persisted at traditional New England restaurants into the twenty-first
century while other traditional desserts, like corn starch pudding, hasty
pudding, and Tipsey cake, have disappeared. Corn bread (which many think of as
a Southern dish) was a traditional food item, which evolved into a regional
specialty. It is still served in such landmark restaurants as Durgin-Park and
Jacob Wirth.
Seafood that is celebrated in
contemporary Boston did not originally hold the spotlight. Although oysters
were wildly popular, clams, lobsters, and white finfish were not. Fish-eating
was looked down upon as a Roman Catholic practice. The poorest quality cod
ended up feeding the black slaves of the Caribbean.
Chowder, which was a thick mix of
fish, clams, salt pork, and potatoes, was prepared at home, but not much in
restaurants. After 1900,
milk was added, creating “New England” chowder. It became a Friday restaurant
dish, when Catholic abstinence and Yankee chauvinism enshrined chowder as a
regional staple. By the 1920s, clam chowder achieved primacy over fish chowder,
probably because canned clams were more convenient to incorporate
into chowder than varieties of finfish.
Lobsters took a long time to become
a delicacy. Since colonial times, lobsters had been cheap and abundant. They
were considered inferior food and were often served to prisoners. Sometimes
lobsters were incorporated into pies, stews, fricassees, and salads. When
canning was introduced in the late nineteenth century, lobster meat became
available in tins. During the twentieth century, lobsters became upscale food
served broiled, stuffed, thermidor, or à la Newburg.
Culinary historians Waverley Root
and Richard de Rochemont, in Eating
in America: A History, argued that Boston’s seafood dishes had culinary
merit: “A unique quality of the historic restaurants of Boston is that almost
all of them were dedicated to the New England cuisine, in contrast to New
York’s famous eating places, which kowtowed to the prestige of French cooking.
Valid gastronomic traditions are almost invariably built around foods locally
available, and this was the case for Boston, whose seafood has always been
important on its restaurant menus.”
As interest in New England cooking
grew, Durgin-Park and the Union Oyster House, which had been ordinary eateries
in the nineteenth century, became major tourist destinations. Lucius Beebe, bon vivant and café society columnist for the New York Herald Tribune and Gourmet
Magazine ranked Durgin-Park
among the country’s leading restaurants. In Boston
and the Boston Legend (1935),
he maintained that:
Durgin and Park’s is not a
restaurant; it is a dining-room in the old New England manner. … You do not dine in the gourmet’s sense
there, but you feed magnificently. The bill of fare is long: there are about 15
cuts of steak, and the food simple. An impressive baked potato, buttered and
salted to perfection, and a kind of hot tea cake—the specialty of the
house—come with every order whether a patron indicates them or not. Usually he indicates a preference for more.
The eatery’s
main clientele were food market men, quite different from today’s tourist
customers. Durgin-Park opened at 4:00 AM and served pie for breakfast. It
closed by 8:00 PM. According to Beebe, “patrons sit at long boards as in an
ordinary, and in the center of the room the cooks do things with meat and fish
and vegetables directly under the professional and highly critical gaze of
experienced dealers in these very commodities.” Beebe played up the reputation
of the waitresses as incorrigible characters: “The waitresses are great blowsy
girls, all good teeth, smiles and affability, with notions of their own as to
what patrons ought to eat and ideas of table service that would make the hair
of a French waiter captain stand up on his head. Durgin’s is old New England
eating at its worst and best.”
Lucius Beebe also waxed eloquent
about the Union Oyster House, comparing it to Paris’s Tour D’Argent. He
maintained that “the Union Oyster House has been a cathedral, or more properly
speaking, a chapel of seafood, its high altar the oyster bar, its acolytes and
priests the white-coated experts who deftly render available and edible its
Cotuits and Little Necks, its worshippers the patrons whose mouths water and
whose nostrils quiver at the salt odor of lobster broiling on a coal fire in
its kitchens.” The house specialties were raw oysters, lobster stew, and clam
chowder.
As travel accounts and guidebooks
about Boston proliferated, the reputation of the local food increased. In 1959,
Chinese travel writer Chiang Yee, in The
Silent Traveller in Boston, wrote that “Boston is perhaps the only city in
America to have its name attached to a number of foods,” referring to Boston
baked beans, cod, clam chowder and fish chowder. Chiang Yee made the rounds of
the city’s most famous restaurants. He described the long queue at Durgin-Park,
where he was served “a big plate with two huge slices of roast beef and many
other things on it. By the time I had eaten the first slice my eagerness for
food was damped.” A “buxom” waitress observed his waning interest in the food,
saying: “‘What’s the matter, young man? Can’t you finish your plateful? If you
can’t, you should not have come here to waste your money; if you don’t like the
food, we want to know why. We don’t like people who don’t like our food.’” She
laughed at her joke, then foisted upon him a strawberry shortcake. Chiang Yee
went on to eat lobster at the Union Oyster House, where he wore a paper bib
imprinted with the image of a red lobster. He sampled roast beef and Yorkshire
pudding at Locke-Ober and Parker House rolls and sautéed codfish tongues and
cheeks at the Parker House.
The Colonial Revival celebration of
traditional New England cooking gave birth to a multitude of neo-traditional
inns across New England. These inns were redecorated to fit the aesthetics of
the 1920s and 1930s, which cleaned up the designs of centuries past. Most country
inns had been shabby hostelries, but they were redesigned to appear like the
sort of inn where George Washington might have slept.
Author Mary Harrod Northend
romanticized operating twentieth-century inns in We Visit Old Inns (1925): “Here and there around the
room were gate-legged, square and rood tables, each one of the old-time tavern
type, surrounded by Windsor chairs. Following the custom of olden days,
homespun linen covered every table, while maids costumed in aprons and caps of
the seventeenth century moved gracefully back and forth as they set the table
for our coming repast… The supper was delicious, and how we enjoyed the
old-fashioned food served as it was in our ancestors’ time!”
Traditional New England inns were
tremendously popular between the 1920s and 1960s. They were special occasion,
white tablecloth restaurants, where diners dressed up. Guidebook pioneer Duncan
Hines loved the inns around Boston. In his 1941 guidebook, he recommended more
than a dozen of them, praising their décor as much as their food. One of the
exemplars was the Longfellow’s Wayside Inn in Sudbury. Howe’s Tavern in Sudbury
claimed to be the oldest operating inn in America, having been opened in 1716.
In 1863, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow gave Howe’s Tavern a new prominence when he
set his poetry collection “Tales of a Wayside Inn” there. Henry Ford acquired
the historic inn in 1923. Longfellow’s Wayside Inn still serves such Colonial
Revival dishes as “Traditional” Yankee pot roast, roast turkey with cornbread and
sausage stuffing and giblet gravy, deep dish apple pie, and “Homemade” Indian
pudding.
Historic inns clustered in other
Revolutionary Era towns west of Boston. Hartwell Farm on Route 2A (The Battle
Road) in Lincoln was located in a seventeenth-century farmhouse, conjuring up
memories of the beginnings of the American Revolution. Concord’s Colonial Inn
was built as a house in 1716. By 1900, it was known as the Colonial Inn and was
trading on its revolutionary associations. Seiler’s 1775 House was located in
Lexington in the farm house of Benjamin Wellington, the first militiaman to be
captured by the British during the military action.
One of the most famous New England
inns was the Toll House Inn in Whitman. In 1930, Kenneth and Ruth Wakefield
opened a restaurant and inn in a colonial house on the road between Boston and
New Bedford. Duncan Hines called the Toll House one of his favorite places to
eat. The Toll House served featured codfish soufflé, haddock a
la king, and broiled live lobster. Meat dishes were straightforward mixed
grill, roast beef, and baked ham in cider.
Ruth Wakefield was particularly good
at making desserts. Her cookbook included recipes for 29 cakes,
38 puddings, 28 pies, and 18 candies. Duncan Hines favored the Indian pudding:
“It makes my mouth water to think of the baked Injun Porridge as it is prepared
at Toll House, Whitman, Massachusetts. That’s the kind of dessert that makes a
fellow wish for hollow legs.” Of course, Ruth Wakefield’s most famous creation
was the Toll House cookie. In 1937, Ruth invented the chocolate chip cookie by
adding a chopped semi-sweet Nestlé chocolate bar to butter cookies.
During the 1950s, the Toll House Inn
was wildly popular, serving 1,500-2,000 customers every weekend. Thanksgiving
dinner became such a tradition that diners had to make reservations by mid-May.
The heyday of Colonial Revival inns
specializing in New England food lasted until about 1970. After that, some inns
became “gourmet” and added French or Italian dishes. Only a few, such as the
Wayside Inn in Sudbury and the Publick House in Sturbridge, maintained the
classic New England dishes like chicken pot pie, Yankee pot roast, and Indian
pudding. Today, regional cooking has morphed into something more creative,
where chefs seek to provide an innovative spin to New England foodstuffs and
cooking styles.
James C. O’Connell is the author of Dining Out in Boston
