UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Baking Powder Wars

home for the first time and worked in New England textile mills instead of in theirfamily kitchens disrupted domestic functions and the mother-daughter transmission ofculinary knowledge. The transportation and communications revolutions of JacksonianAmerica brought wheat from the heartland, and the new market economy made itpossible to purchase bread more cheaply. With no history of male-controlledprofessional bakers’ guilds or male court chefs in the United States, cookingdeveloped in the home. American women adapted the ingredients available to them inthe new country, and created new foods that contributed to a uniquely Americancuisine and a national identity. American women created American cuisine.Bread was crucial to the British and the American diets and identity. A family offour or five would consume approximately twenty-eight pounds of bread each week,about one pound per person per day.1 Bread was not just newly-baked loaves eatensliced. Fresh or stale, some form of bread was consumed at every meal of the day.Sometimes it was the meal. It was the mainstay of the diet of children. Bread wasnever thrown away. It was also used to thicken sauces, to make stuffings andpuddings, and to add substance to soups and stews. Stale bread was grated intocrumbs for coating oysters, chicken, and other foods before they were fried. Toast wassoaked in milk or water to feed invalids. “Brewis” was the thick liquid made from crustsof soaked brown bread. “Charlotte” was fruit baked with slices of bread and butter.2Sarah Josepha Hale, Early American Cookery: The “Good Housekeeper” (1841: Mineola, New York:Dover Publications, Inc., 1996) 24-26.12Eliza Leslie, Miss Leslie’s New Cookery Book, Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson and Brothers, 1857; 455;467-8.2

“Brown Betty” or “Pandowdy” was fruit layered with bread crumbs and butter, and thenbaked. Bread was also a purifier, added to foods like butter to absorb objectionableodors and flavors. Bread crusts were even used to scrub walls.3Women have been connected to bread making since antiquity. Words forbread, like the English language itself, come from two sources. The word “bread” isfrom German brot; the word “pantry,” the place the bread was stored, is from Latinpanis. The Old English word for loaf, the staple of life, was hlaf. “Loaf-keeper,” hlaford,became “lord”; loaf kneader, hlaefdige, became “lady.”4 The first law to regulate foodin England was the Assize of Bread, in 1266-67.5Bread beliefs were based on ancient humoral theory, which divided foods intofour humors: hot or cold, wet or dry. Anything cold and dry could lead to physicalillness, a melancholy temperament, and death. Humoral theory was class-based.Suitable for laborers but unsuitable for the delicate constitutions of the upper classeswere “Browne bread made of the coarsest of Wheat flower [sic] having in it muchbranne”; rye bread, which was “heavy and hard to digest”; and hard crusts, which“doe engender . . . choller, and melancholy humours.”6 Therefore, the ideal loaf of3Hale, Early American Cookery, 121; 116.4Definitions from Oxford English Dictionary, I:1557, 1663.The Assize of Bread weight definitions for loaves were in effect until 2008. Harry Wallop, “Bread RulesAbandoned after 750 Years,” Telegraph, Sept 25, 2008.56Thomas Cogan, The Haven of Health, (London: Printed by Anne Griffin, for Roger Ball, 1636), wheat,27; rye, 29; page/26/mode/2up.3

upper-class British bread was white, light, and soft.7 Country folk had to make do witha half-rye, half-wheat loaf called “maslin.”British bread developed differently from French bread. Prized for their hardcrusts, French breads were leavened with a starter that was obtained by combiningflour and warm water and capturing wild yeast and bacteria from the air. Dough wassaved from the previous batch of bread and continuously fed with more flour. As timeprogressed, this dough became increasingly sour. British bread, however, was notsour because it was leavened with yeast that was the by-product of brewing a Britishbeverage, ale.8 The yeast came in two forms: barm, the foam from the top of the ale,and emptyings, or “emptins,” the dregs after brewing. Beginning in the Middle Ages,British ale contained hops, so both the ale and the bread were bitter.British colonists brought these bread concepts and technology with them.However, the exigencies of survival in a new climate and geography soon causedthem to diverge from tradition. Without commercial breweries or bakeries, women hadto make their own ale, then use the emptins to leaven bread. Or they had to maketheir own yeast.No one knew what yeast was or how it functioned until Louis Pasteur observedit under the microscope. He published his preliminary results in 1857, followed in 18607Ibid., 25.8William Rubel, Bread: A Global History. London: Edible Series, edited by Andrew F. Smith (London:Reaktion Books, 2011), baguette, 128; yeast, 17-18.4

by a book, Mémoire sur la fermentation alcoolique.9 Yeast is a living organism, asingle-celled fungus. When it reacts with the sugar in wheat flour, its metabolismcreates carbon dioxide, a gas that leavens. Like the human body, yeast has a narrowrange of temperatures in which it can thrive.Reliable commercial yeast was not available in the United States until theAustrian Fleischmann brothers introduced it at the Philadelphia Exposition in 1876.Until then, brewer’s or distiller’s yeast and home-made yeast varied widely. One couldnot be substituted for the other. Recipes repeatedly gave alternate amounts fordifferent yeasts or came with caveats: “Two wine-glasses of the best brewer’s yeast,or three of good home-made yeast”10; and “Half a pint of best brewer’s yeast; or more,if the yeast is not very strong.”11 An increase in yeast meant an increase in bitterness.One cookbook writer informed readers: “Many people are not aware of the differencebetween brewer’s and other yeasts, such as distiller's. . . . Half a teacupful of brewer’syeast is as much in effect as a pint or even a quart of distiller's. . . . Distiller's yeast isalways meant if not contradicted.”12 “Distiller’s yeast is always meant” in thatparticular cookbook. Other cookbooks used other types of yeast. Consistency waslacking.9M. L. Pasteur, Mémoire sur la Fermentation Alcoolique (Paris: Imprimerie de Mallet-Bachelier, st#page/n3/mode/2up.10Eliza Leslie, Seventy-five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes and Sweetmeats, 3rd ed. (Boston: Munroe andFrancis, 1828), 63.11Ibid., 62.12Anon. The Cook Not Mad (Watertown, NY: Knowlton & Rice, 1831), 80.5

Catharine Beecher’s Domestic Receipt-Book (1858) contains two pages ofrecipes for making yeast for bread. There is plain “Yeast,” “Potato Yeast,” “Homemade Yeast, which will keep Good a Month,” “Home-brewed Yeast more easilymade,” “Hard Yeast,” “Rubs, or Flour Hard Yeast,” and “Milk Yeast” (“Bread soonspoils made of this.”)13 She has an additional recipe in the cake section for a differentkind of potato yeast, to use when making wedding cake.14 Beecher preferred potatoyeast for two important reasons: “it raises bread quicker than common home-brewedyeast, and, best of all, never imparts the sharp, disagreeable yeast taste to bread orcake, often given by hop yeast.”Yeast was time-consuming to make, and any small slip in cleanliness in theequipment used to make or store it could cause bacterial growth that rendered ituseless. Beecher’s instructions for keeping yeast are an additional half a page,including instructions for cleaning the container in which the yeast is stored: “Yeastmust be kept in stone, or glass, with a tight cork, and the thing in which it is keptshould often be scalded, and then warm water with a half teaspoonful of saleratus[baking soda] be put in it, to stand a while. Then rinse it with cold water.”15 It was alsodifficult to keep yeast in hot weather. At the other extreme, homemade yeast cakesthat were solid enough to store had to be soaked for hours to soften and restore.13Lydia Maria Child, The American Frugal Housewife, 2nd ed. (1829: Mineola, NY: Dover Publications,1999), 11. s/frugalhousewifechild/frch.pdf.Catharine Beecher, Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt-Book; (1841, Mineola, NY: Dover: 2001) 85-86,147.1415Ibid., 230.6

With yeast so difficult to make, and with so many variables, it is easy tounderstand why many American women preferred the alternative, emptins. AmeliaSimmons provides a recipe for emptins in American Cookery, in 1796:EmptinsTake a handful of hops and about three quarts of water, letit boil about 15 minutes, then make a thickening as you dofor starch, which add when hot; strain the liquor, when coldput a little emptins to work it; it will keep in bottles wellcorked five or six weeks.16Three quarts of water might seem like it would make a great deal of emptins, butemptins was liquid, not concentrated, so it took a great deal of it to leaven breadstuffs.Recipes call for it by the pint. The hops made emptins, bitter, too.It was also difficult to leaven bread because wheat was in short supply. NewEngland was at the northern geographic and climate limit for growing wheat, the stapleof British bread, and not native to the Americas. This climate made wheat susceptibleto diseases like Hessian fly and black stem rust.17 The scarcity or complete lack ofwheat forced New England housewives to become more creative in their use ofgrains, and to expand the definition of bread. Corn, native to the Americas and easy togrow, was the solution.Amelia Simmons, The First American Cookery Book: A Facsimile of “American Cookery” (1796: NewYork: Dover Publications, 1958), 64.1617William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. (New York:Hill and Wang, 1983), 154.7

The British colonists accepted corn quickly. They trusted their own experienceand what they learned from Native Americans, and ignored European scientists. In1636, the British herbalist John Gerard wrote that corn was hard to digest, providedno nourishment, and was food for “the barbarous Indians” and “a convenient food forswine.”18 Yet in 1662, John Winthrop Jr., the governor of Connecticut, spoke to theRoyal Society in London and made a case for corn as a wheat substitute, anddescribed how to mill and prepare it: boiled, roasted, and baked. The Society was notswayed.19In A Revolution in Eating, James E. McWilliams presents this incident tobolster his Jeffersonian argument that “the way they [the colonists] thought aboutfood was integral to the way they thought about politics”—in other words, landownership led to republicanism.20 This incident shows something else, too. Winthropdid not spend hours in the kitchen perfecting corn recipes. In addition to his ownbotanical observations, in all probability he got this information from his wife,Elizabeth Reade Winthrop, and other women in the Connecticut colony, who in turnlearned it from Native American women. This shows the resourcefulness andingenuity of colonial women, and that men, or at least Winthrop, valued their wives’labor. This kind of pragmatism and empiricism connected to food, and the ability to18James E. McWilliams, A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America. New York:Columbia University Press, 2005; 82.1920Ibid., 55-56.Ibid., 15.8

trust their own observations and experience, showed independent thinking and thewillingness to take risks and contravene dogma from the beginning in America.It also shows American exceptionalism through food. The colonists substitutedcorn for wheat in bread recipes. The British country loaf, half rye and half wheat,became half rye and half corn meal. The colonists called it “rye ‘n’ injun.” According tohumoral theory, this was not even human food. It was a heavy, dense bread becausecorn does not contain gluten. Rye does, but it is of poorer quality and lesser quantitythan the gluten found in wheat. The proportions of rye ‘n’ injun could be half and half,or two-thirds to one-third. If wheat flour was available, it was added sparingly, usuallyone-third of the total grains. This made the classic New England “thirded bread.” Evenwith the addition of yeast, this dough is difficult to work. It never attains the shinyelasticity of bread made with wheat only. Even modern commercial yeast strugglesmightily to lighten this bread.One tradition the colonists kept was the connection of bread to religion. In NewEngland, scarce wheat was prized, its use limited to “the sacrament and company.” 21This deepened the pressures on women. The ancient religious association to breadwas critical, but also failing to create good bread with the little wheat that wasavailable would have been wasteful and shameful.American wheat presented a further obstacle for housewives, becauseAmerican flour was different from British flour. British writer Maria Eliza Rundell,writing in 1807, said that American flour “required almost twice as much water” as21Ibid., 83.9

English flour to make bread. Fourteen pounds of American flour would make 21-1/2pounds of bread, while the same amount of English flour made only 18-1/2 pounds.22This meant that in America, women had to re-invent the bread-making skills and/orbread recipes they brought with them from England, or the recipes available to themin British cookbooks until American women started to write their own cookbooks atthe end of the eighteenth century.Although women had always been connected to bread making, tensions aboutwomen and breadstuffs had not always existed. Cookbooks published in England andin America prior to the beginning of the nineteenth century contained few or no breadrecipes. Recipes were unnecessary because in England the government controlledcommercial bread price and quality; in America, bread was baked in the home.Mothers taught daughters; each family had its own recipes.However, two domestic sources, manuscript cookbooks and diaries, provideinformation about what kind of bread was baked and with what frequency. A Booke ofCookery, started in the seventeenth century, came to Martha Washington in theeighteenth, and went on to her granddaughter to use in the nineteenth.23 Thesehandwritten cookbooks were treasured heirlooms, handed down from generation togeneration along with the family Bible.22Maria Eliza Ketelby Rundell, A New System of Domestic Cookery (Philadelphia: Benjamin C. Buzby,1807), ren Hess, Transcr., Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery and Booke of Sweetmeats (New York:Columbia University Press, 1981) 1995; 447-63.10

Another Martha, Maine midwife Martha Ballard, kept a diary for 27 years, fromJanuary 25, 1785, until the last entry on May 7, 1812. She recorded how often shebaked, and what she baked. She wrote “we Baked” or similar entries in her diary 362times. Sometimes she baked alone, sometimes with her daughters, sometimes withhired neighborhood girls. Sometimes the girls did the baking by themselves.Occasionally neighbors came to bake in Martha’s oven.24 Martha’s diary contains 109entries for “bread.” She differentiated among “wheat,” “flower” (or “flour”) bread, andbrown (“broun”) bread (51 entries). On February 24, 1785, Martha Ballard wrote thatshe “Bakt & Brewd.” Of the 93 entries in the diary about brewing, 24 are connected tobaking. Martha simply recorded what she made with no self-consciousness aboutwhether she is doing it right, or often enough, or if the results are good enough.However, by the beginning of the nineteenth century the moral pressures onwomen to produce good bread were intense. They came from multiple sources ofmale authority: the pulpit, the medical profession, and academia. Three of the leadingproselytizers were from the Connecticut River Valley, wellspring of the First GreatAwakening and stronghold of the Second: Reverend Sylvester Graham, Dr. WilliamAlcott, and Professor Edward Hitchcock.In his A Treatise on Bread, and Bread-making in 1837, Reverend Grahampreached that refined white flour was a sign of man’s fall from his wholesome naturalstate to an artificial one, and advocated flour made from coarse ground whole wheat,24Martha Ballard’s Diary Online, http://dohistory.org/diary/index.html.11

heavy in bran. This flour still bears his name. At the time, it led Ralph Waldo Emersonto refer to Graham as “the prophet of bran bread and pumpkins.”25Graham also firmly believed that no commercial baker could make real bread; itwas a quasi-religious calling reserved for women. When he wrote about food, hislanguage was religious and sexual: “pure virgin soil” versus “depraved appetites.” Healso campaigned against the evils of masturbation and excessive sex in marriage.Followers of his philosophy and his food lived in Graham boarding houses in NewYork and Boston.26 They also spread Graham’s teachings to the Midwest, at OberlinCollege, to health spas in upstate New York, and eventually to Battle Creek, Michigan,where they were instrumental in creating breakfast cereals.Dr. William Alcott went farther than Graham. Alcott believed that no breadshould be leavened with yeast because yeast was fermented, and fermentationequaled putrefaction. Yeast was already decaying and would damage the body. Alcotthad to overcome his own aversion to unleavened, unbolted (unsifted), unsalted bread:“It appeared to me not merely tasteless and insipid, like bran and sawdust, butpositively disgusting.” It was six months before he could force himself to becomeaccustomed to this bread.27 Alcott echoed Graham as to who should bake the bread:25Stephen Nissenbaum. Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and HealthReform. (Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1980), 3.26Gamber overlooks these in her book The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth Century America ((Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).27William Andrus Alcott, The Young House-Keeper or Thoughts on Food and Cookery, 6th ed. (Boston:Waite Peirce, and Co., s/books/younghousekeeper/youn.html#youn101.gif.12

the woman who has “a love for her husband and family,” because “no true mother,daughter or sister . . . can long remain ignorant of bread-making.”28Edward Hitchcock, professor of chemistry at Amherst College, believed thateating sparingly was the key to longevity, a philosophy also espoused by NathanPritikin in the late twentieth century. Hitchcock cites examples of men who thrived on aSpartan diet and lived well past 100 years of age.29 Hitchcock’s diet regimen consistedof twelve ounces of solid food, and twenty of liquid per day. The solid food was heavyon bread.Breakfast at 7:00 a.m.Stale bread, dry toast, orplain biscuit, no butter3 ouncesBlack tea with milk and a little sugar6 ouncesLuncheon at 11:00 a.m.An egg slightly boiled with a thinslice of bread and butter3 ouncesToast and water3 ouncesDinner at 2:30 p.m.Venison, mutton, lamb, chicken, orgame,

records and lawsuits revealed how baking powder was created, marketed, and regulated. Women's diaries and cookbooks—personal, corporate, community, ethnic—from the eighteenth century to internet blogs showed the use women made of the new technology of baking powder. American exceptionalism laid the groundwork for the baking powder revolution.