Augustine's Croquettes, Miss A. C. Claytor

“We do not believe that in the length and breadth of New York there is just such a place of refined enjoyment, dietetically speaking, as that narrow red brick house, not more than twenty feet front, in Walnut street, above Eleventh. It is not Delmonico’s in splendor, for there is no splendor, but it is exquisite in its comfort. Let all who go to the Centennial carefully abstain from the cold, badly-cooked edible of the commemorative dinner-tables, make it a point to visit Mr. Peter Augustin. A Centenniel croquette, a Revolutionary ris de veaux, will repay one for a dull day in Philadelphia.”
— The Philadelphia Times, 1875

I am guilty of occasionally forgetting that the railroads that brought passengers from points north into Baltimore to enjoy “real old Maryland cooking” ran both ways.

Culinary reminders of this two-way exchange occasionally appear in recipes with names such as “Delmonico Pudding,” or “Philadelphia Pepper Pot.” Others are less obvious.

Recipes for “Augustine’s Croquettes” appear repeatedly throughout my database: in the c.1895-1905 Goldsborough Family Papers recipe manuscript, in “New Old Southern Cooking”, written in 1902 by Laura D. Pickenpaugh, and finally, in the 1937 “Recipes Old and New” from St. Anne’s Parish cookbook (this recipe was also repeated in Maryland’s Way.)

These three recipes provide a hidden reminder that Philadelphia, like Baltimore, was a city where Black caterers had a stronghold over the culinary industry. W.E.B. DuBois wrote in his study “The Philadelphia Negro” that there existed “as remarkable a trade guild as ever ruled in a medieval city. This was the guild of the caterers, and its masters include names which have been household words in the city for fifty years: Bogle, Augustin, Prosser, Dorsey, Jones, and Minton.”

Three generations of the Augustin family reigned in Philadelphia, their overlapping careers spanning nearly a century.

*Augustin’s 1105 Walnut Street location in 2018*

In the early 1900s, the Maryland press liked to pit Black chefs against French chefs in a culinary proxy battle from which Maryland/Southern cuisine generally emerged triumphant. This oversimplification loses some intrigue when you remember that plenty of Black chefs were trained in French techniques. The whole thing seems even more silly in light of the fact that the industry was pioneered by men like Peter aka Pierre Augustin, a Creole man from Haiti, who probably was both Black AND French.

Around 1818, Augustin purchased the Philadelphia catering business of Robert Bogle. Bogle is credited with essentially establishing catering as a Black profession, but Augustin is credited with offering services that would become standards of the trade, such as providing china, tablecloths, tables, and chairs for catered events. “Bogle’s place was eventually taken by Peter Augustin, a West Indian immigrant, who started a business in 1818 which is still carried on. It was the Augustin establishment that made Philadelphia catering famous all over the country,” wrote DuBois.

The Augustin catering empire encompassed several talented family members including Mary Frances, a confectioner, and her and Peter’s son James, who ran the business with his mother after Peter’s death in 1841. Their restaurant M.F. Augustin & Son, was known as the “Delmonico’s of Philadelphia.” Peter Jerome Augustin took over the business when his brother James died in 1877.

In 1879, the Philadelphia Times wrote that Augustin & Son “in addition the nightly supper parties at their rooms on Walnut Street, for which the charge is never less than five dollars a plate,” provided catering to clients all over the United States, furnishing terrapin, turkey, salads and other “good things” to clients in New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, and Nashville. The business had patrons in “Paris and other European cities.”

Of all of the varied viands provided by the Augustin’s, one dish won them fame and publicity above all others: their chicken croquettes.

In 1881, Lorenzo Delmonico divulged the culinary preferences of some of his more famous clientele to a New York newspaper. One man, lawyer Charles Brooke, was originally from Philadelphia. According to Delmonico, Brooke had “a tendency to chicken croquettes born of a taste created at Augustin’s that should be restrained.”

Then as now, people who couldn’t make the trip to experience such a much-talked-about dish wanted a taste.

The recipes that made their way to Maryland differ from one another. Goldsborough’s contained “chicken or veal”, potato, cream, eggs, pepper, salt, nutmeg, and was rolled in “cracker dust”. The recipe in Pickenpaugh’s cookbook included chicken, sweetbreads, butter, onion, and nutmeg. The recipe I used, submitted by Miss A. C. Claytor to “Recipes Old and New,” contained chicken, flour, butter, onion, nutmeg, and parsley.

My recipe is similar to one uncovered in the late 1980s by William Woys Weaver. In his book “Thirty-five Receipts from the Larder Invaded,” he printed a recipe from an 1890s manuscript of a Lizzie Martin, an unidentified Philadelphian. Martin recorded “Croquettes Augustine’s” alongside her recipe for Philadelphia Pepper Pot. The Lebanon Pennsylvania Daily News printed the recipe in 1987 under the headline “‘Long Lost’ Croquettes Discovered.”

Ingredients aside, this is just the type of recipe that demonstrates the futility of even having recipes for this kind of thing. I imagined the Augustines and their staff’s skill at chopping, sauce-making, and frying up hundreds of croquettes night after night. Anyone can combine chicken with some seasonings. It’s the process that takes skill.

After Peter Jerome’s 1894 death, his wife Elizabeth B. Augustin ran the business. As with her mother-in-law Mary Frances, Elizabeth’s career is a reminder that there were many women involved in catering operations, even if they did not get the glory. It is unknown when exactly the Augustin’s business ceased operations – probably between 1904 and 1907.

The gilded-age heyday of Black catering may have faded, but its impact has been woven into the hospitality industry we know today. With their aspirations to capture a taste of that prestige in their own kitchens, home cooks left recipes in cookbooks and manuscripts, faint echoes of a time when the “remarkable guild” captured appetites and imaginations.

Recipe:

1 chicken, boiled and minced very fine; 1 pint milk, 1 large tablespoon flour, 1/4 pound butter, 1 teaspoon minced onion, a very little nutmeg or some minced parsley, salt and pepper to taste. Make cream sauce of milk, flour, butter and seasoning, and cook until thick; add the chicken and set aside to cool. Shape in molds, roll in bread crumbs, then in beaten egg, then again in bread crumbs, and fry in butter or lard.

Augustine was a famous caterer in his time.
From “Recipes Old and New,” St. Anne’s Parish, 1937