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A Dispatch from the Old School

Posted by Matthew Amster-Burton, March 14, 2008 at 8:30 AM

What's the best culinary dictionary? Sharon Tyler Herbst's Food Lover's Companion? Alan Davidson's Oxford Companion to Food? Michael Ruhlman's Elements of Cooking?

Forget those upstarts. Only Jessup Whitehead's book will tell you this:

Ox-gall: Used for cleaning carpets. May be obtained of the butcher.

The Steward's Handbook and Guide to Party Catering was written at the turn of the 20th century. It is hilarious, illuminating, and sometimes incomprehensible. Best of all, it's in the public domain, and the 1903 version is free for download from Google Books. (I found it while Googling "popcorn popped in lard.")

Whitehead was, in his time, something of a Craig Claiborne or James Beard figure for culinary and hotel professionals. The first half of the Steward's Handbook is about keeping your hotel running smoothly. Little of it has aged well (I'm not sure the position of hotel steward even exists any more), but Whitehead was sometimes prescient. The menus of his time were rarely more descriptive than "roast lamb," but Whitehead suggests giving the diner a fuller picture:

Possibly the practice which has prevailed for some time of interpolating poetical quotations in the bill of fare might be improved by the introduction of informatory paragraphs about some special kind of game, fish, or novelty in sweets, turning the attention of those who dine upon one leading feature of the dinner by giving an intimation of its quality, its rarity, its merits, its relation to literature, its origin.

And the dictionary isn't all ox-gall, either:

Pancake parties: This reminds one that last year pancake parties were all the go at the fashionable seaside places in France. At Étretat especially it became quite a mania. The pancake batter was brought on the beach ready mixed in a jar, and a small portable charcoal stove was erected in a sheltered corner against the rocky shore. The other indispensable components of the pancake, such as sugar, lemon, and butter, were also brought in a hand-basket, as well as bottles of cider, the only beverage allowed....

You could argue that Whitehead foresaw not only the proliferation of creperies throughout the West, but also the Batter Blaster.

Google Books also offers several other books by Whitehead, including The American Pastry Cook and Hotel Meat Cooking. He's now been forgotten to the extent that he has no Wikipedia entry. Perhaps someone will rectify that.

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