“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.
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.
Continue reading “Augustine’s Croquettes, Miss A. C. Claytor”
