Composition, Literacy, and Culture

Women's Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790-1940

Sarah W. Walden, Sarah Walden

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780822983125
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Retórica

Tasteful Domesticity demonstrates how women marginalized by gender, race, ethnicity, and class used the cookbook as a rhetorical space in which to conduct public discussions of taste and domesticity. Taste discourse engages cultural values as well as physical constraints, and thus serves as a bridge between the contested space of the self and the body, particularly for women in the nineteenth century. Cookbooks represent important contact zones of social philosophies, cultural beliefs, and rhetorical traditions, and through their rhetoric, we witness women's roles as republican mothers, sentimental evangelists, wartime fundraisers, home economists, and social reformers. Beginning in the early republic and tracing the cookbook through the publishing boom of the nineteenth century, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Progressive era, and rising racial tensions of the early twentieth century, Sarah W. Walden examines the role of taste as an evolving rhetorical strategy that allowed diverse women to engage in public discourse through published domestic texts.

1

TASTE AND VIRTUE

Domestic Citizenship and the New Republic

By having an opinion and determination, I would not be understood to mean an obstinate perseverance in trifles, . . . but only an adherence to those rules and maxims which have stood the test of ages, and will forever establish the female character, a virtuous character—altho’ they conform to the ruling taste of the age in cookery, dress, language, manners, &c.

AMELIA SIMMONS, AMERICAN COOKERY, 1796

AMELIA SIMMONS opens her 1796 cookbook, American Cookery, the first both written and published on American soil, by clearly asserting, “This treatise is calculated for the improvement of the rising generation of Females in America.”¹ In this phrase alone, she boldly argues that a cooking text can improve the character of a population, particularly the first generation of American women. Amid much public debate regarding the goals of American democracy, the reach of the federal government, and the education of its citizens, Simmons argues that virtuous character displayed through appropriate tastes can achieve a balance between the “old people [who] cannot accommodate themselves to the various changes” that are occurring in American society and “the young and the gay [who] bend and conform readily to the taste of the times.”² In so doing, Simmons engages a rhetoric of taste already present in print discourse. Building on Hutcheson’s assertion of a sixth “moral sense” and Hume’s delineation of the passions, taste in the late eighteenth century is positioned to construct a national character by uniting citizens through a shared sense of value in egalitarianism, virtue, and the public good. Taste discourse served to naturalize republican principles to construct a cohesive national body.

American cookbook production began to increase through expansion and improvements in print technology in the decades surrounding the American Revolution. Several British cookbooks remained popular in the United States during the first decades of the nineteenth century, such as Elizabeth Raffald’s Experienced Housekeeper (1769) and Maria Rundell’s New System of Domestic Cookery (1807). However, they now competed with American-authored texts that not only used more familiar ingredients and techniques but also appealed to American readers, who linked their domestic roles directly to their new national identity. Most important, however, American texts provided the basic domestic education that many British texts took for granted. American texts answered the call for a revised women’s domestic education by describing women’s daily activities in terms of Enlightenment principles of reason, virtue, and self-control. By demonstrating and promoting proper tastes, they suggested women could become active citizens of a new republic.

This socialization process made American wives and mothers central to the national project through a set of qualities and characteristics later named “republican motherhood.”³ This ideology emerged shortly after the revolution and continued to evolve and grow in popularity well into the nineteenth century. As the “precursor to domesticity,” it is often defined as the relegation of women’s authority to the “private” sphere.⁴ Based on “the Enlightenment tenet that youth was particularly susceptible to both good and bad influences,” republican mothers were charged with educating young Americans, particularly young boys, who would grow into political leaders. The role of the republican mother built on a common understanding that one’s passions and preferences must be regulated for the good of the republic. Through the cultivation of good taste, women wielded “a determining power over the fate of the Republic.”⁵ Although the early years of the republic limited their educational opportunities and print contributions, domestic writers turned to cookbooks to harness the power of taste discourse and demonstrate the authority and necessity of womanly virtue in an emerging democracy.

Simmons’s definition of taste demonstrates the pervasiveness of Hume’s argument that, for a good critic of taste to function, a cultural standard must exist. Simmons carefully notes that she selected each recipe based on two criteria: it must “conform to the ruling taste of the age” only after it has been determined to adhere to “those rules and maxims which have stood the test of ages.”⁶ In “Of the Standard of Taste,” Hume likewise states that one ascertains a delicacy of taste by appealing “to those models and principles, which have been established by the uniform consent and experience of nations and ages.”⁷ Women can be sure, Simmons suggests, that these recipes will contribute to their emerging republican identities and that cooking and eating are acts of public participation.

While cooking is typically viewed as a private domestic practice due to its association with both gender and individualized preferences and eating practices, reading about cooking engages public discourse on republican values and requires women to place themselves at the center of this conversation. The participatory nature of cookbooks allows women to amend recipes, both in the act of cooking and via transcribed changes in cookbook margins. Altering a published text is a rhetorical performance, adapted to one’s individual needs; taste discourse suggests the cultural precepts that guide the individual’s choices. In Simmons’s hands, “taste” is a rhetorical device that indicates an awareness of the cultural standards that shape one’s actions and the relationship of those standards to virtue and character.

This chapter explores three of the most prominent early American cookery texts: Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery (1796), Lydia Maria Child’s Frugal Housewife (1829), and Mary Randolph’s Virginia Housewife, or, Methodical Cook (1824).⁸ All three texts illustrate women’s use of taste as a definitional and identifying rhetorical device informed by a republican emphasis on virtue, yet their definitions vary based on their perceived context and audience. Simmons emphasizes taste as a display of character, while Child views it as an economic performance. Randolph, however, sets herself apart as the author of the first southern cookbook, and she uses taste in a way that will be consistent with future antebellum regional texts: although she uses the language of republicanism, Randolph describes taste only as a sensory experience (“season to taste”) rather than as a cultural standard.

As I discuss in chapter 3, Randolph’s text is consistent with a region whose domestic writing is transitioning from a manuscript to a print culture. It belies the complicated relationship of taste and virtue in an agricultural economy largely predicated on the domestic labor of slaves. While she forgoes describing this system in any detail, the commodification of black bodies and the central role of slavery in the economic success not only of a region but also of a nation as a whole challenges the emphasis on the autonomous, moral self common in taste discourse.⁹ As an established link between the body and mind, or the role of sentiment in intellectual thought, taste emerges as the means whereby all three women use, adapt, and challenge republicanism as a cultural standard.

ESTABLISHING THE TASTES OF THE REPUBLIC

The rhetoric of republican virtue often relied on taste as a primary means of prescribing human conduct. By the 1780s, “good taste” was defined as a rational discernment between tastes and appetites, an adherence to truth, and a pursuit of virtue. As such, good taste defined individuals’ relationship to their community and was widely thought to be of “great national importance.”¹⁰ Humean philosophy largely provided the basis of the republican conception of taste. Rhetorical education, the popular press, and, of course, Hume’s texts themselves disseminated his ideas. Library catalogs, both social and private, show the presence of Hume’s volumes, suggesting their circulation in the American colonies.

Although only a few records of Hume’s texts prior to 1760 exist, Mark Spencer notes that their availability dramatically increased between 1760 and 1770. Hume’s History of England (1754–61) and Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1758) were the most widely circulated; the first essay in his Essays and Treatises is titled “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion.” During this same time, colonial publishers began to print excerpts of Hume’s major works, one of the most popular being his second entry in Essays and Treatises, “Of the Liberty of the Press.” Hume encouraged these actions, as he indicates in a letter to Benjamin Franklin reminding him to print an American edition of his works.¹¹

Early American periodicals suggest a general agreement on the practice and public service of “taste.” Good taste pursues truth by reflecting on beauty, which, in turn, softens manners and leads to noble conduct. In his “Essay on Taste” (1786) in The American Museum, one of the first successful American magazines, Timothy Dwight, pastor and president of Yale University, emphasizes the role of taste in human conduct.¹² He remarks that improvements in taste will “add to our national dignity and reputation; and national dignity will every [sic] be productive of elevation of mind in individuals, will operate with benevolent hand on general happiness, and extend a fostering influence to all the estimable concerns of truth and religion.”¹³ The strength and virility of the nation, Dwight and others argue, rests on the tasteful actions of its citizens.

The republican economy and society propounded public virtue as a central tenet because it describes an understanding of self-interest that exists in, and is regulated by, the notion of service to a public good.¹⁴ This precept is consistent with moral philosophy, particularly that of Francis Hutcheson, who argued that benevolence, or seeking “the natural good or happiness of others,” is the source of virtue and tasteful action.¹⁵ Consent to a standard of taste, early American writers believed, could direct public action away from greed and self-interest if they clearly defined the republican virtues that form the foundation of this standard.

Yet, taste also implies the temptations that could destroy the “national dignity and reputation” that Dwight describes. If one does not regulate his or her passions to adhere to a cultural standard, taste becomes a temptation that could damage the progress of the young republic. Early American writers worked to define taste in terms of the republican values of egalitarianism, virtue, and public good in order to create a shared sense of the characteristics of a new population. Egalitarianism, for example, did not connote social leveling but rather a system divorced from aristocratic lineage, in which an individual’s “capacity, disposition, and virtue” could define his or her status.¹⁶ This often led to skepticism that wealth would tempt citizens away from a communal sense of duty in service to the state. Fear of hereditary aristocracy and the corrupting influence of luxury led many to question whether wealth could be compatible with republicanism, a system that required faith in a diffuse public. To address this concern, writers characterized an emerging middle class as the embodiment of self-restraint and good taste.

The introduction of capitalism aided the transition of virtue from a characteristic of landed gentry to a public ideal defining the middle class.¹⁷ Virtue aligned with labor, both physical and intellectual. Thus, luxury and its accompanying idleness became the ultimate evil. Republican rhetoric depicted public virtue as a masculine trait and luxury as “effeminate” or a “weakness of unpatriotic men.”¹⁸ While Americans intended this characterization as a critique of European males by suggesting the superiority of American masculinity, it also aligns luxury and weakness with femininity, thus complicating women’s use of taste discourse despite their assumed moral superiority.

The campaigns to boycott British goods and to direct American tastes toward locally produced food items is an example of how the physical and ideological significance of taste helps to define virtuous behavior. Before the American Revolution, high taxes on items such as tea led to their categorization as luxury items. Thus, such items were maligned in a society that increasingly identified itself as the virtuous “other” to Europe’s tired and corrupting traditional social hierarchies. Because Americans associated luxury with British aristocracy and imperialism, “the myth of republican simplicity inverted the usual associations: ‘the tastes of necessity’ became fashionable.”¹⁹ Local foods such as cornmeal gained rhetorical significance as a way to concretize abstract ideals and create a representational aesthetic of American taste.

This aesthetic ideal, however, contended with the reality of association, a complication Hutcheson explores in An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725). Associations with an object, he argues, can complicate one’s perception of its beauty and lead to error and disagreement.²⁰ In the early American republic, those associations had deep roots in the religious and national superiority that underscored settlement. Seventeenth-century food writing in the Chesapeake Bay area, for example, indicates an association of “refined” grains with “civilized” or “English” identity, and “coarse” grains with “grotesque” or “Indian” bodies.²¹ Revolutionary writers such as Benjamin Franklin had to persuade readers to adopt new associations, thus changing their tastes based on a shared national identity. By the mid-1700s, American use of cornmeal became a rallying cry for revolutionary ideals. Writing as “Homespun” in the Gazetteer of London, Benjamin Franklin famously touted American tastes as indicative of rugged adaptability and independence from tradition. He suggested that “johny cake or hoe cake, hot from the first is better than a Yorkshire muffin—But if Indian corn were as disagreeable and indigestible as the Stamp Act, does he imagine we can get nothing else for breakfast?”²² In Franklin’s hands, taste characterizes American identity as a description of American physiological and intellectual difference. No longer an effect of the elite or a display of wealth, taste’s bodily origins are on display as a matter of physical preference, which mirrors its symbolic meaning. This sort of symbolic pragmatism often characterizes taste in American rhetoric.

This shift from ornament to intellect begins in American rhetoric early in the century as writers criticize “good taste” as a reference to the affectations of luxury. The dishes and foodstuffs common in French cookery came under particular scrutiny as Americans struggled to define a food culture that aligned with emerging republican principles. In a 1745 article in the American Magazine and Historical Chronicle, one author maligns taste as “the fashionable Word of the fashionable World” and suggests that it distinctly opposes “conveniency” or practicality. In his estimation, eating should be a “Subject of Humiliation” as it reveals the weakness of human nature, that it requires sustenance to repair its “decaying Fabrick” and is too vulgar a topic of conversation for “rational Being[s].”²³

This assertion suggests that physical taste is a “low” sense, requiring personal intimacy rather than the distance of rational contemplation. As such, it invokes Kant’s argument that taste is a “pleasure-sense” and thus cannot yield empirical truth or a “universally valid judgment.”²⁴ Kant likewise argues that taste should not be “overrefined” by luxury, a critique commonly made of European palates and preferences.²⁵ While early American writers certainly would have agreed with Kant in terms of their judgment of others, their reliance on taste discourse to shape their own national identities suggests a lineage far more reliant on the works of Hume. Their discussion of the French indicates, for example, a movement away from refinement to rugged individualism, and it highlights the complicated relationship with taste that would develop in American rhetoric.

Much of this complexity in American taste discourse results from the related language of appetite and desire and their relationship to commerce. Cultivating good taste does not mean that one “transcend[s] the world of commerce,” as Simon Gikandi writes in Slavery and the Culture of Taste. Instead, theories of taste attempt to “develop rules and standards that would enable the modern subject to reconcile the opposing demands of the production of goods and civic responsibility.”²⁶ Self-regulation is central to both classical and contemporary models of republicanism, while self-interested individuals potentially could threaten the viability of the comm...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Sources
• Introduction: Taste and the American Cookbook
• 1. Taste and Virtue: Domestic Citizenship and the New Republic
• 2. Taste and Morality: Motherhood and the Making of a National Body
• 3. Taste and Region: The Constitutive Function of Southern Cookbooks
• 4. Taste and Science: Cooking Schools, Home Economics, and the Progressive Impulse
• 5. Taste and Race: Revisions of Labor and Domestic Literacy in the Early Twentieth Century
• Epilogue: The Relevance of Taste
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index