Book Review: Shaker Cookbook

Title: Shaker Cookbook

Author: Caroline B. Piercy

Date: 1953

Publisher: Crown

ISBN: none

Length: 274 pages

Illustrations: line drawings by Virginia Filson Walsh

Quote: “This little volume on Shaker cookery may never find its way into the technology departments of our large libraries...I am writing it not for its scientific contributions, but rather to set forth the Shakers’ important contributions to the development of an all-American cookery.”

“Shaking Quakers” was an originally derogatory nickname for an early group of people who called themselves “Believers in Christ’s Second Appear­ing.” Their religious beliefs were not what later became known as Adventist; they believed that they were called to build God’s Kingdom in this world, and among other things they taught that the people of God’s Kingdom would feel called to commit to a celibate life. There were, according to the encyclopedia, five Shakers still living when I first went to school, all old ladies. By the time I went to college no living Shakers remained. Nevertheless, in the nineteenth century, when bearing and burying children daunted many people of both sexes, several Shaker communities flourished. They were self-supporting communities known for the good honest work they did, and “Shaker styles” in furniture and “Shaker ribbing” in knitwear are still widely copied today. The Shakers were also known for making and selling good food.

In this historical study of Shaker foodways, which is well bound in hard covers and would look impressive in libraries today, we learn the names and read some of the works of several of the head cooks in the Shaker settlements. We get their thoughts on diet and health—they raised good meat, but also experimented with vegetarian diets—frugality, the uses of scraps and leftovers and wild foods (at first some Shaker communities were very poor), table manners, and “plating” foods.

Some of their recipes are on the plain side; several favorite foods were just heated until they seemed “done” and served with (or without) cream sauce. By current standards they’re not cheap and may even seem exotic. The Shakers’ guiding principle was that they all lived on largish communal farms located in fertile parts of the Northern and Upper Midwestern States. They did not have freezers or refrigerators; food might be kept cool for much of the year by burying it among chunks of ice, but generally fresh meat, fish, and milk had to be used up before they went bad. Meat and fish were generally dried and salted, and were not great delicacies. Most protein came from milk and eggs, and cheese when they had enough milk to venture into cheesemaking. Not all the recipes emphasize these dairy products, but many do. Other staples of Shaker cookery were the wild foods that were abundant in the nineteenth century. Black walnuts, butternuts, hickory nuts, rosewater, lavender, maple syrup, honey, nasturtium pods, gooseberries, cranberries, asd currants were as plentiful as apples, eggs, and corn. It was largely because these native or easily naturalized foods were cheap and not “marketed” that they fell out of fashion and are hard to find in supermarkets today.

However, in much of the United States it’s still possible to enjoy most or all of these luxury goods. We’ve never raised cranberries at the Cat Sanctuary but we have made our own maple syrup, the secret to which is that, south of Vermont, you have to tap the trees earlier in the year. The black walnuts, butternuts, hickory nuts, roses, nasturtiums, gooseberries, and currants used to be as easy for us as they were for the Shakers to find in season; and we used to have two neighbors who kept bees and sold honey. If you know what you’re doing you may choose to consider these recipes as survival food. They are not hard to make into cheap staples in most of North America. The big asset to using Shaker or other Early American recipes for survival food will of course be whether you live in a place where the climate is cold enough for wheat and rye to grow well; in the Southern States they do not. (High in the Blue Ridge is a little town called Rye Cove; it never became a commercial center of grain production, the wonder was that rye survived even a few years.)

If your diet is gluten-free, dairy-free, or “free” from many other things, although the Shakers don’t seem to have any idea that anybody needed to avoid using any of their “good foods” for health reasons, you will still find several recipes you can safely use. Rarely if ever could any Early American cook depend on any one staple food being available every day. (Many families do, of course, have records or legends of having lived on one thing they ate every day for a season, but this was something people survived, not something they recommended.)

Recipes selected for inclusion in this book, for example, often recommend combining wheat flour with cornmeal or cornstarch in baking and cooking. When wheat was available Northerners liked to use it, and since field corn bran contains an enzyme that interferes with the metabolism of niacin Southerners, who liked to boast that corn was good enough for them, learned that people can get by on a lower-protein diet (e.g. a vegetarian diet) if they can mix wheat with corn. But many would have been the times when the Shakers, like everyone else, had cornmeal and not wheat flour. Generally cornmeal dishes will taste as good or better if more cornmeal is substituted for any wheat flour mentioned in the recipe, unless they are breads raised with yeast. Wheat gluten will, however, “glue” food together more effectively than corn—all-corn cornbread is best eaten with a fork—and gluten-free people who eat corn need to make sure they get enough niacin and other B-vitamins in their diet.

Again, the Shakers kept cows, and during those cows’ months of peak production the Shakers had milk to spare, and they worked out ways of adding milk even to maple syrup, although the secret of making lactose-enhanced maple syrup seems to have been lost. Whey and soured milk were not much liked and were often fed to the hogs, but the Shakers found ways of using up whey and sour cream too. But they also developed several recipes for use during the months when the cows were producing little or no milk.

Geese and guinea fowl were kept primarily as watch-fowl in flocks of free-range ducks and chickens. Neither their meat nor their eggs were very popular, but the Shakers did develop recipes to use up both.

If you want to serve period-appropriate food to historical reenactors, Piercy provides enough historical documentation that you can find an appropriate recipe in this book. The Shaker sect originated in England in the 1740s but the printed recipe collections reflect the relative prosperity of the Northeastern States in the mid-nineteenth century. Here be many things to cook over an open fire or on a wood stove, and although the Shakers did feel that some things (like lemons and mangoes, and wheat if they couldn’t make it grow) were worth importing, they always relied on what could be persuaded to grow on their own farms. As a general rule, when a recipe offers multiple sweetening options, using local honey, sorghum, maple syrup, or concentrated apple juice will give it an authentic flavor of 1800 to 1820. White sugar was more generally available after 1850, but it was still expensive, and people trying to sell sugar made fun of the frugal “oldfashioned country” cooks who used locally grown products, even after 1900. Piercy explains this and several other details.

This cookbook was written primarily for historians. It’s not an ideal first cookbook for raw beginners; recipes are simple, but some understanding of how to follow them is expected. If it were the only cookbook you had, however, you’d have enough recipes to serve a variety of “good oldfashioned country” meals in any season.