Economic Advice From the Past

Could be useful for now.

Reading the news this morning forced me to eat another big slice of apple pie for breakfast. You know how expensive apples are these days? 5 percent more than they were last year. If I wasn’t math illiterate I could figure out how much eight apples would have raised the price from last year’s apple pie. But I can’t so I won’t and I’ll cut another piece of pie, instead.

I want to eat healthy, but it’s cheaper for me to go to McDonald’s and get a little meal than it is to cook dinner.—Gerard Lamourex, a 51-year-old retiree, as quoted in The New York Times, Monday, October 17, 2022

It will help to remember that there’s nothing new about this time. In fact, we have experienced many periods in the past when national and international forces impacted the cost of living and especially the price of food. Mr. Lamourex’s solution may be shared by others but our forbearers, who ferried their way through their own financial downturns, recommended another way to lower their grocery bills and still manage a healthy diet.

As it happens, this situation plays well into one of my historical food obsessions—old books whose subject matter addresses the daily realities of economically fraught times. It has to be pointed out that the books below are written from the perspective of American and British white authors. There’s a bunch of other cookbooks I could have pulled out from other cultures and lands whose recipes include some that have been created out of hard times. They are often gathered under the category of country—read peasant—cuisine. Most importantly there are the dishes that form the bedrock of our Black heritage. My intentions are not to ignore them. Instead, my focus on these books is because they were expressly written to address distinct moments of meager means. Their guiding principles reflect the wisdom and practices true to all foodways when our table offerings are paltry and our shelves growing bare.

The American Frugal Housewife. Dedicated to Those WHO ARE NOT ASHAMED OF ECONOMY, by Mrs. Lydia Marie Child, 1828.

Mrs. Child was a popular and prolific author, noted for her arden feminism, civil rights and abolitionist activities, and stance against Jacksonian expansion. If that is not enough for you, she was a poet—Over the River and Through the Woods is one of her most memorable.

Her best seller, The American Frugal Housewife, was the first book written expressly addressed to a middle class and poor audience. It went through 32 editions that spanned the full spectrum of our early financial history, starting with the country’s westward expansion and a period of inflation, and ending during the first great Depression brought on by Andrew Jackson’s stupendously misguided economic policies. Child amended each edition to reflect the country’s ever changing circumstances. The book’s framework, itself, remained centered on her advice about how to run a disciplined and wholesome household. The Frugal Housewife addressed the different needs of those with moderate fortunes, the working poor, and the impoverished. She instructed each to avoid wasting time and resources on expensive material objects and pursuits, and to never fall victim to dubious business adventures. A central component is how to provide the family with balanced meals through shunning the finer cuts of meats and avoiding store-bought cakes, breads, wine, and beer.

Substitutes and recipes are given throughout. Cheaper cuts of beef and pork are improved upon by using them in soups and stews. Her recipes for offals, including heads, feet, ears, and hoofs (yes, all of them) are improved through a heavy hand with spices, a long soak in water or brine, and perhaps a good broil for crispy skin. All pastries and breads are cheaper when made at home and furnish children with an excellent education in self-reliance.

Child’s recipe for wine dictates that those who must drink “will do well to use no wine but of their own manufacture.” She then presents recipes for beer and wine. She recommends this one for when the year’s currant crop is abundant:

Break and squeeze the currants, put three pounds and a half of sugar to two quarts of juice and two quarts of water. Put in a keg or barrel. Do not close the bung tight for three or four days, that the air may escape while it is fermenting. After it is done fermenting, close it up tight. When raspberries are plenty, it is a great improvement to use half raspberry juice, and half currant juice. Brandy is unnecessary when the above-mentioned proportions are observed. It should not be used under a year or two. Age improves it.”

A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes by Charles Elmé Francatelli, 1861

Charles Elmé Francatelli held the position of head chef in sumptuous houses throughout England and for Queen Victoria until she supposedly canned him for leaning too heavily on French cooking. His position in wealthy kitchens gave him an intimate view of the effects of the Industrial Revolution: his rich employers got richer and his poor staff got lower wages and misery for their families. Francatelli decided to write his book to help his readers gain “the greatest amount of nourishment at the least possible expense; and thus, by skill and economy, add, at the same time, to your comfort and to your comparatively slender means.”

Francatelli’s recipes are lessons in cost-effective cooking, generous in their technical directions and substitutions for ingredients that are common in affluent households but out of reach to nearly everyone else. Like Child, he expounds on the goodness of cheap meats and fish, and the abundant use of fresh vegetables—for city dwellers to be purchased at the end of the business day when they’re more affordable, and for country people who are lucky enough to cultivate their own vegetable patch. He praises the nutritional virtues of beans and for adding bulk to other dishes. His soups were made in large quantities, first to feed large households and second to offer an abundance of leftovers and more flavor and sustenance to other dishes. Francatelli agreed that it is important not to buy what you can make for yourself, especially bread, biscuits, cakes, and pudding. What was not used right away could be preserved in salt; vegetables and fruit canned.

Joining Child, he expounded on the delicious possibilities of offal as a fine substitute for expensive meat. These offerings might not be as palpable or freely available for us. But you may find Francatelli’s recipes, as befitting a classically trained chef, savory enough that they inspire a charitable thought. Many are what we have indulged in as part of a fine charcuterie board. Consider, for instance, Belgian faggots. The Farmer General, one of the most astute and witty sites devoted to culinary history and literature, made the recipe below and gives a fine modern translation of it just in case you take a fancy to try it yourself.

Belgian Faggots

These may be prepare with sheep’s pluck or even with bullock’s liver, and other similar parts of meat; but a pig’s pluck is preferable for the purpose. Chop up the heart, liver, lights, and other similar parts of meat; season well with pepper, salt, allspice, thyme, sage, and shallots, and divide this sausage-like meat into balls the size of an apple, which must be each secured in shape with a piece of the pig’s caul fastened with a wooden twig, or skewer, and placed in rows in a tin baking-dish, to be baked for about half an hour in a brisk oven. When the faggots are done, place them on some well-boiled cabbages, chopped up, in an earthen dish, and having poured the grease from the faggots over all, set them in the oven to stew gently for half an hour.

How to Cook a Wolf, by M.F.K. Fisher, 1942

Of course, one cannot pass by Mrs. Fisher. Wolf was published a year into America’s entrance into World War II and in it she nudged readers through the period’s discomforts and deprivations with her usual dry humor and intelligence. Beside recipes and menu suggestions, she included level-headed financial and household advice, and culinary alternatives to maneuver around rationing. Fisher dismissed gastronomic prejudice against tinned fish and meats. In fact, her attitude toward any canned ingredients was to thank your stars you have them at all. Her strongest stance was to always have on hand vegetable soup and, once the vegetables are all gone, retain its broth. She preferred to cook each vegetable individually using the same pot and the same water to increase its fulsome flavors and vitamins. Use the broth throughout the week in whatever you’re cooking or simply drink it straight from the bottle. One should also keep adding to it any liquid you consume through the week—tomato juice, tea, coffee, and large drops of lemon, anything at all. Her preferred container was an old gin bottle that kept the liquid properly chill in the refrigerator. There’s a sense that Fisher might have approved including a little gin from a new bottle for an extra kick to the broth.

As you would expect from a woman famous for having spent her formative cooking years between the wars in France, Fisher referred a great deal to French country food. She did herself proud up against Child and Francatelli on the offal front as seen in this famous gourmet dish, Tête de Veau.

Tête de Veau

[my clarifications in brackets]
1 calf head
2 or 3 quarts water
1 carrot
1 onion
1 small head celery or 3 large stalks
1 lemon in quarters
2 bay leaves
6 cloves
salt and pepper

Have head cut in half. Soak for 1 hour in cold water. [Meanwhile]Boil water and rest of ingredients for 10 minutes. Drain [the cow head's] halves, add [them] to liquid, and simmer, well covered, for about 1 1/2 hours or until the cheeks are tender. (The tongues and brain can be removed, the former to be cooked with the head, the latter added to the bouillon for the final quarter-hour of simmering. They should be nicely trimmed, sliced, and served in the [cow's head] halves.) Drain, and serve at once, surrounded by parsley, with a sauce-boat of vinaigrette made of 1 part vinegar, 1 part of the cooking liquor, and 2 parts of oil, with the required seasonings. Or . . .drain, rub [head] carefully with a cloth soaked in lemon juice to keep the flesh from darkening, and chill well. Serve surrounded by small green onions, capers, parsley, and sliced cucumbers, with a sauce-boat of vinaigrette to taste.

Now comes a personal story that reflects on our authors’ instructions.

My interest in these books is probably based on my own experiences. My first job out of college paid so little that I was eligible, but didn’t apply, for food stamps. During our early years living in New York City, my husband and I lived on my salary that kept us a bit above the poverty line. In subsequent years, while raising children, the household budget left little room for mistakes and splurges. Each of these periods were influenced by where I lived: a poor Black community in Atlanta; a mixed low- to-middle class neighborhood on the cusp of being gentrified on the City’s Upper West Side; a working-class Latino section of Brooklyn.

I sat down yesterday and tried to remember exactly what I cooked and found the dishes would probably fit well into Mrs. Child, M.Francatelli, and Mrs. Fisher repertory. What I came up with is the list below. These dishes were made so frequently that my family moans when they see them on the table again but that’s what they get from my kitchen sometimes.

Some cookery suggestions for frugal housewives and the working class, often with the wolf at the door

Curried chicken livers
Beef liver deeply buried under onions (not often but frequent enough)
Steak and kidney pie (never very successful)
All kinds of pasta, most frequently served with puttanesca sauce because a tin of anchovies was at the time about seventy-five cents
Onion, potato, chicken, or bean soup
Lots of greens and vegetables from public markets
Ham hocks
Turkey legs 
Cheaper end of the fish case--skate, porgie, catfish, trout, etc
Salted cod
Tuna casserole (of course)
All kinds of egg dishes, often omelets
Anything I could fill a pie shell with (good for bulking up leftovers)
Bean chili (no meat at all)
Baked beans and hot dogs (and not the good kind, either)
Kielbasa and sauerkraut
Potato dishes like scallop potatoes layered with bacon bits or pieces of smoked ham