Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, September 8, 1993 TAG: 9309080259
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CAROLE SUGARMAN THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
But first, we will all sing together:
Here's a rule, here's a rule,
Taught to us at our cooking school,
How to use, not abuse,
Eggs in different ways.
If a loaf of cake you make,
Then the egg with care you break,
For the white, you beat light,
Till of mountain height.
Oh, to be a fly on the wall of a cooking class that took its lessons from "The Cooking Garden: A Systematized Course of Cooking for Pupils of All Ages," by Emily Huntington, published in 1885.
Those were the days when egg whites were whipped "till of mountain height" and with a fork; when KitchenAid was the name of the class helper in a muslin cap; when young women students sang about food before cooking it.
Those were the days when cooking schools were in their infancy. What better place to document those early days, and the development of cooking schools, than the American Home Economics Association in Alexandria, Va.?
There, amid the textbooks, magazines, manuscripts and photographs in the association's archives lie such gems as Huntington's "Cooking Garden," with a song for every lesson.
What else can be found in the association's crowded store room? "A Treatise on Domestic Economy," written by Harriet Beecher Stowe's sister, Catherine E. Beecher, who established the first format for teaching home economics in schools. Old lantern slides of students at the Boston Cooking School, the first incorporated cooking school in the United States. A 1796 cookbook, "The Frugal Housewife," by Susannah Carter, with 18th-century recipes.
There are more recent records, too: Files documenting AHEA's participation in developing consumer standards, like the 1949 ones that standardized kitchen equipment and utensils (jelly roll pans, for instance, must be 15 1/2-10 1/2-1 inches). And there are more pictures of women attending AHEA conventions than there are gadgets at Kitchen Bazaar.
But the library, which amounts to a jumbled file room piled high with boxes and books, is much more: Its contents detail a time in the late 19th century when cooking and homemaking were turned into a worthy science, when a group of social activists worked to make women's lives more leisurely, interesting and respectable.
"They were concerned that women worked hard all day and never got rewarded," said Gladys Gary Vaughn, director of development for AHEA. "They wanted to make things easier."
Beecher's tome was written in 1840, but it wasn't until 1880 that cooking was taught to public-school children in Boston. During the next decade, classes in "domestic science" would flourish in the United States, according to "The AHEA Saga," by Keturah Baldwin (AHEA, 1949).
And if cooking was such a science, why shouldn't it be taught professionally as well? It was, starting in 1879, at the Boston Cooking School, which would set the standards for professional cooking schools to come.
The Boston Cooking School began as a charitable mission, founded by well-off women to teach poor girls how to cook inexpensive, healthful foods, says Laura Shapiro, author of "Perfection Salad: Women in Cooking at the Turn of the Century" (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1986).
But as people who thrive on today's pastry and stir-fry classes will understand, the school soon spread wider wings. As fewer and fewer poor girls wanted to attend, Shapiro says, "more and more middle-class and upper-middle-class women wanted to cook fancy things."
Soon, lessons in mutton and potatoes gave way to lessons in larded grouse with bread sauce and orange sherbet with cream meringues. Recreational cooking, as practiced on weekends in so many homes today, had been born.
But key to the Boston Cooking School classes, and to the growing domestic education field as a whole, was cooking as science.
The founders of the movement were "trying to give it status and substance," says Shapiro. Essentially, they were professionalizing the home. "If you peel a potato, you're just a drudge," Shapiro theorizes. "If you peel a potato and know about starch, then you're a chemist."
For that last way of thinking, women can thank Ellen Richards, the Gloria Steinem of the home-ec movement and the first woman graduate and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Richards, the founder and first president of AHEA, felt strongly about using science to improve home life.
In fact, that is what is so striking about the old cooking-class textbooks. They were so, well, so scientific. Granted, technology and modern conveniences have helped us take a lot of the science of cooking for granted, but still, these textbooks just show us up.
In "The Way We Did at Cooking School" (John Alden, 1896), a charming book written in letter form, Virginia Reed, a student at the Philadelphia Cooking School for the school year 1894-95, writes to her "dear cousin" Alethea: "This week the lecture was on fuel." In her third letter, Reed writes, "Ventilation was the topic for our last lecture," adding some of the questions the teacher asked the class: "Describe the draught of a chimney. Why do new chimneys smoke? Which is best for cooking, large or small coal?"
Likewise, in the "Elements of the Theory & Practice of Cookery: A Textbook of Household Science for Use in Schools," by Mary E. Williams and Katharine Rolston Fisher (Macmillan, 1901), there is much technical inquiry: How is sugar refined? How is gelatin manufactured? Describe the alimentary canal of a fowl. Examine the shin bone used to make soup stock. Where is the bone the hardest? Where is it spongy?
Shapiro contends that the turn-of-the-century cooking school's emphasis on making food easy, clean and scientific, rather than pleasurable, set the stage for the onslaught of poor-tasting packaged and processed foods that would dominate the rest of the century.
by CNB