The Town Crier is always looking to dip into the area’s past, and several times that has come by way of looking back at old businesses from here found in old newspapers, city directories or, in the case of last week, on a promotional map from 2000.
And over the years there have been visits to old and unique cookbooks, including one from the area’s nurses from the early 1960s and another from a Ruritan Club cookbook with interesting recipes for wild game.
This week we really hit the trifecta by having a cookbook, with ads included in it, that dates from more than 100 years ago. Sarah Harrison, whom many of you likely know, contacted the Town Crier about a copy of “The Dalton Cook Book” published in 1923 by Dalton’s own Showalter Publishing (located where Burr Park is now), with ads in it from supporters, and all for the benefit of First Presbyterian Church of Dalton. What a treasure trove!
The book was “revised and published” by the Woman’s Auxiliary of First Presbyterian Church of Dalton. The book came out in 1923 but it wasn’t the first edition. This was actually the fourth edition, with the first edition of this food-focused tome being from 1900. I’m not sure how the revisions changed the recipes from edition to edition, I’ve got no other editions to compare, but at least as far as 100-plus years ago we can get a look at what was on the wood-burning stove back then.
The index includes chapters on “Fish and Oysters,” which makes me wonder how hard it was to get oysters here in 1923. They would have had to come by railroad, but from where? Savannah? Gulf of Mexico in Florida? Maryland? Packed in ice, you could have gotten them within 24 to 48 hours of harvesting.
There are also sections on “Meats, Poultry and Game,” “Vegetables” (straight from the garden I’m guessing), “Pies and Puddings” and also “Cold Desserts,” “Cakes” and “Cake Fillings.” Looks like Dalton had a sweet tooth back in the day. There are also sections on “Special Recipes” and “Miscellaneous.” I haven’t had a good bowl of miscellaneous since I don’t know when.
The first section is about soups, and in there are answers to the oyster question. One recipe says to drain the water from the oysters. Is that from melted ice? Then, in a second oyster soup recipe, it says to use a “one-pound can of cove oysters,” so you could get them canned back then. Another mystery was the recipe for “Salsify Soup.” I had to look salsify up and turns out it’s a root vegetable that has a taste similar to … oysters! Salsify is also called Jerusalem Star plant. Oysters were popular then (or maybe just cheap?) as there’s even a Mock Oyster Soup recipe made from tomatoes, milk and soda. And there are recipes for Brunswick stew, gumbo or okra soup and “chili soup,” which we just call chili these days.
More oysters come up in the “Fish and Oysters” section. There are many different recipes here for oysters so clearly something was going on. It reads like Forrest Gump’s buddy Bubba’s recitation of shrimp dishes. There are oyster cocktails, creamed oysters, scalloped oysters (not served with scallops), oyster pâté, minced oysters, fried oysters and fancy fried oysters in case the boss is coming over. For oyster cocktail, allow for five or six oysters per person, so think 60 oysters. And remember, if preparing the creamed salmon on toast, the recipe says you can substitute oysters. Those are some traveling oysters to make it all the way to Dalton for cocktails.
If you’ve ever wondered what sauce goes with what meat, here’s the 1923 way. For roast beef, tomato sauce and pickles; for lamb, mint sauce; for veal, sliced lemon; for venison, gooseberry catsup; for pork, onion sauce; for goose, grape sauce; for ham, mustard or horseradish; and for turkey or chicken, currant jelly. As a fan of the Frankenstein movies, the recipe in the meat section that caught my eye was for “brain croquettes.” Basically you wash and skin them, boil and cook, mash them fine, dip in egg, roll in cracker crumbs and then fry in boiling hot lard. I say that’s a dish for any mad scientist. The spooky thing about the recipe is it never states what type of brains to use.
In the bread section there are name-drop recipes for Sally Lunn bread and for Parker House rolls. There are competing recipes from Mrs. Denton and Mrs. Lowry for rusk. Rusk, in case you didn’t know (and I didn’t), seems to be like melba toast or maybe even harder. It’s that hard bread they let teething babies munch on. Denton’s recipe calls for potato as an ingredient and Lowry’s does not. Denton had clearly been paid off by the potato co-op out of Idaho.
And if you’re a fan of the Huff House here in Dalton, Mrs. Huff has a recipe for a potato-free cinnamon cake. Then there’s a recipe for skillet bread, which is nothing more than throwing a buttered piece of bread in a hot pan and frying it on both sides, and a recipe for steamed bread, which calls for you to put the dough in a bucket, cover it, then put the bucket in a kettle and cook it for three hours. The pancake recipe here names them flannel cakes.
In the “Eggs and Cheese” section I was surprised to find a recipe that called for boiling the eggs for 25 minutes. That’s as hard-boiled as a 1930s detective.
For vegetables it’s interesting to note they had marshmallows back then for the sweet potato casserole, where they note sweet potatoes are superior to yams.
Next week: desserts and corporate sponsors.
Mark Hannah is a Dalton native who works in the film and video industry.