Beef A La Mode, Mary Ann Buchanan Coale
Walking into a library’s Special Collections to view a cookbook manuscript typically goes something like this: you enter the library or historical society or museum and find your way to a room. Pens are forbidden; as are certain folios or bags. You leave those things behind in a locker and announce yourself to the helpful Special Collections librarian. You sit at a big wooden table with pull-chain reading lamps that are often old and somewhat unhelpful. If the book is known to be especially fragile and tightly-bound, you receive a v-shaped foam cradle to rest it in, and little ropes that are weighted for gently holding the pages open. The librarian retrieves a box. Sometimes it is a long flat box, other times it is upright with a lid that hinges open (known as a Hollinger box).
The box is full of folders. Your cookbook is in one of them. You can’t wait to see it.
But what else is in the box? Suddenly you are faced with folders labeled with things like “Letters 1810-1850”; “Commonplace Book c. 1840”; “clippings 1895”; “family tree.”
Oftentimes, these letters are the reason that this cookbook was saved at all; swept in with the history of a family, of the country, of things considered important and worth saving.
The Coale Collection at the Maryland Center for History and Culture consists of five Hollinger boxes and one flat box. Inside the various boxes are letters, scrapbooks, albums, and commonplace books full of hand-copied poems, quotes, psalms, and notes.
One letter is from Thomas McKean to his granddaughter Mary Ann Buchanan Coale. “I suppose the cornerstone of Washington’s monument has been laid,” he wrote, “with becoming ceremony and publicity. This monument is a grateful tribute, voluntarily & justly bestowed on distinguished merit: we should praise God for having given to the United States a man of such wisdom and virtue at a time when most useful; he was really a blessing to this country.” The year was 1810. Baltimore was building one of the first monuments to George Washington, a man who McKean, as a signer of the Declaration of Independence and president of the Continental Congress, might have known personally.
A letter from another relative mentioned “The British Plot” in 1812, while later letters from Mary Ann to a cousin asked, “What do you think of the war with Mexico?” For her part, Mary Ann stated that “it seems very queer that people should go to war about a little piece of land.” Nonetheless, she was proud of her cousin Robert Buchanan, who was making headlines as an officer of war. “I thought it would not be long before he did something of note,” she wrote. He would go on to be a Union Brigadier General in the Civil War.
As to the Civil War, the Coale family’s involvement was not so straightforward as some Maryland families. Various members of the family had owned slaves, but they primarily fought for the Union. Edward Johnson Coale, Mary Ann’s husband, a lawyer turned bookseller, was an officer of the misguided “Maryland State Colonization Society,” whose members came with varying motivations and schools of thought. Their bonding mission was to repatriate freed slaves to Africa. To this day, a county called Maryland exists in Liberia, a vestige of these efforts. It is important to note that the people being sent to live in Africa had been American for generations at this point.
Another letter in the Coale collection mentions the evacuation of Richmond and surrender of Robert E Lee as cause for “an intoxication of joy” and “happiest hope of a restoration of brotherhood with peace.”
Amongst the Coale letter topics, there is also food. Family members sent one-another gifts of preserves, cakes and hominy. A recipe for “India Pickle” appears randomly sandwiched between an essay and a poem. The recipe is for cucumbers pickled in a brine seasoned heavily with ginger, garlic, mustard, and turmeric, and a glance at the ingredients gives question to the assumption that food in the 1800s was bland.
Mary Ann Buchanan Coale was born in 1792. Her great-grandfather George Buchanan had been one of the commissioners of the “Act of 1729 Authorizing Erection of Baltimore Town.” Several Buchanan family members are buried in the small Rogers-Buchanan cemetery that is now a part of Druid Hill Park.
The Coales were a family of intellectuals, and one of Mary Ann’s husband’s publications was called “The American Lady’s Preceptor: A Compilation of Observations, Essays and Poetical Effusions,” designed “to direct the female mind in a course of pleasing and instructive reading.” It is clear from Mary Ann’s commonplace books and letters that she took to the family tradition of education and practiced essays on topics like the flora of Malaysia, the accomplishments of Prince Alfred, walking in the city versus the country, and “the most fitting subjects of conversation in general society.”
Mary Ann also collected poems, quotes, sermons and psalms about grief. It’s clear from the collection that several deaths in her life affected her greatly. In 1825 she lost her sister Elizabeth. Edward died in 1832. In 1845 her mother passed away. Her daughter Anna Laetitia Coale Brune died at age 39 in 1856.
In memory of her mother, Mary McKean, she copied verses written by her husband’s uncle, Founding Father Francis Hopkinson “To yonder new made grave I’ll go; and there indulge my swelling grief; There shall the tears of friendship flow; and give my wounded heart relief.”
Mary Ann clipped a poem from a magazine, “My Mother’s Grave,” by G.D. Prentice. She copied down a poem by Charlotte Smith called Sonnet VIII To Spring. The poem describes a walk in the woods: “young leaves, unfolding,” “finch or woodlark,” “primrose pale,” and “cowslip wildly scatter’d round.” The beauty of the woods “have power to cure all sadness–but despair.”
The Coale collection contains many more poems copied in Mary Ann Coale’s practiced hand. Most are about death and mourning.
Among the cookbooks are a few pieces of vivid paintings of flowers, out of place among the old yellowed letters. A pencil-written note explains that these are the work of Elizabeth Buchanan, Mary Ann’s sister who died of consumption at the age of 24.
And then there are the recipe books, nested within the scrapbooks and letters. One is small like an address book, with a plain brown cover. The other, more well-used and spattered recipe book has a marbled cover, as is common with old manuscript books. The spattered pages contain recipes written in different people’s handwritings. Many of the recipes appear to be very old: there are many different puddings, a recipe for “beef steak pye,” a recipe for cucumber catsup, a relic of a time before tomato catsup claimed hegemony. Old recipe books often contain medical remedies that would have been administered by the lady of the household. The Coale books have treatments for for dysentery, diarrhea and warts, alongside household hints like “how to destroy weevils,” “how to do up shirt bosoms.”
Some recipes are from friends and family, or perhaps directly from servants or the enslaved, and their titles bear names: “Mrs. Joann’s Receipt for Fritters,” “Sally Lunn [bread] from Mrs. Humphreys,” “Mrs. Grimill’s Receipt For Keeping Tomatoes.”
One recipe, for “Elkridge Huckleberry Pudding” is attributed to “Mrs. Lea.” In this case, it was probably not a social connection. The recipe is a verbatim copy of a recipe from one of the oldest published Maryland cookbooks, “Domestic Cookery,” by the Quaker Elizabeth Ellicott Lea, printed in 1845.
Near the end of the marbled manuscript cookbook, there appear loose and pasted clippings from newspapers and women’s magazines. They may have been tried and favorite recipes, or they may have just caught someone’s fancy. The impulse to clip and save recipes is as old as printed recipes, and then as now, not all of them ever made it to the table.
On page 34, opposite a recipe “to make Calf’s Head Soup,” is a recipe for beef a la mode. The pages are spattered with ancient maroon droplets.
Like the Mince Pye, Apple Pudding, and Potted Shad recipes in the book, Beef A La Mode dates back to older colonial recipes, largely unchanged over a century of hearth cooking. In the mid-1800s, cookstoves began to take hold and recipes evolved along with them.
As the name suggests, the old pot roast recipe originated in France. It dates to the 1600s, but persisted long enough to make an appearance in volume one of Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.”
Despite French origin, Beef a la Mode was a standard eighteenth/nineteenth century English meal. In Kay Moss’ useful hearth cooking reference “Seeking the Historical Cook” she mentions employing the recipe “as an introduction to eighteenth-century tastes as well as techniques in stewing meats.”
As Moss points out, various recipes include 1) “sweet herbs” such as parsley, rosemary, or marjoram. 2) A spice or combination such as pepper, cinnamon, ginger, or cloves. 3) “Tartness” from wine, vinegar or lemon, and 4) Umami from anchovy, shellfish, mushroom or pickled walnut.
Mrs. B.C. Howard included several Beef A La Mode recipes in her 1873 book “Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen,” including one stuffed with oysters. In Mary Randolph’s influential 1824 book “The Virginia House-Wife,” Beef A La Mode is stuffed with plenty of garlic, along with thyme, nutmeg, parsley, cloves and pepper. Randolph enriches the gravy with walnut and mushroom catsup – two more varieties of catsup that eventually yielded to tomato.
As Beef A La Mode goes, the Coale recipe is fairly non-adventurous, containing no antiquated catsups, nor oysters or anchovy, or even a nice spike of garlic. Nonetheless, all of the elements are there for a satisfying and savory roast slow cooked to juicy perfection.
The Coale recipe books are far from the only recipe manuscripts interspersed with reminders of grief, death, and the brevity of life in the 19th century. But the volume of poetry, obituaries and religious verses are a reminder that through political turmoil, war, the rapid development of Baltimore, business, and more war – life went on, and so did death, and with it, grief.
Recipe:
“Take the round middle cut from 8 to 10 lbs – Make a stuffing of bread crumbs, parsley, marjoram, cloves, pepper, salt & one half tea cup of suet a little onion chopped fine. Make 2 diagonal slits 2 inches wide nearly to the bottom, fill with the stuffing between the beef & the flap & tie it securely with a string. Put across the bottom of the pot 3 little sticks, put the beef upon them & fill the pot with water to 2/3 of the beef. Put pepper, salt & flour on top, cover & let cook slowly for 5 hours. Pour over a tea cup of claret wine just before serving.”
Coale family cookbook, 1800-60. Mary Coale. 1800-60.
