History comes alive through cookbooks

As a child, Valerie Frey loved to check out cookbooks from her local library and clip recipes from magazines. Her mother would take her to the store to buy ingredients even though Frey describes her as a “Hamburger Helper” cook, using mushroom soup instead of fresh mushrooms.  

But it was her Arkansas grandfather’s love of history and his excitement on finding a recipe for tea cakes by his great-grandmother that coalesced into Frey’s lifelong interest in combining food and history, which has resulted in two books on Georgia’s culinary heritage for The University of Georgia Press.  

8^th grade Georgia history – ugh! 

As the education coordinator for the Georgia Archives in Morrow, Frey often found herself with a roomful of 8^th graders who were less than enthused about the required Georgia history lesson she was there to teach.  

“When I asked, ‘How many of you like history?’ and only one kid raised his hand and then quickly put it back down, my job changed at that moment,” she said.  

“That became a holy mission for me – to get kids to like history and feel connected.”  

The way to a middle schooler’s attention turned out to be food. When Frey brought in the tea cake recipe and samples she had baked, they were all in for learning what kitchens would have looked like at the time her great-great-grandmother cooked; how the tea cakes differed from an Oreo; what subsistence farming looked like.  

“Now, there was no one not paying attention,” Frey recalls. When  UGA Press learned about her success in teaching with historic recipes, she was asked in 2006 to develop her first book for them: “Preserving Family Recipes: How to Save and Celebrate Your Food Traditions.”  

That book took Frey, a librarian and archivist, nearly nine years to research and write, while at the same time, moving with her new husband for a four-year Army stint in California and giving birth to a son.  

“It was a joy to gather but it was tricky because no one else had done it,” she says. “I didn’t have a template, and it was completely new territory for me.” 

This worked to her advantage as it required her to interview dozens of people to figure out what someone would need if they were gathering and studying their family recipes with the goal of preserving them for future generations to cook. She started with her own family recipes and relatives, cooking and adjusting and documenting for the reader. Then she interviewed experts, family cookbook authors, and home cooks who shared their know-how for tweaking recipes. She read dozens of books and cookbooks and visited historical kitchens. The book was published in 2015.  

Foodways 

Frey’s most recent book, “Georgia’s Historical Recipes: Seeking Our State’s Oldest Written Foodways and the Stories Behind Them,” was published last fall. Chef and author Rebecca Lang writes, “There is no other in-depth look at Georgia foodways that can even compare to the scope of this…” 

Foodways is a term that was first used in the 1920s and ‘30s when academics and sociologists working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture were studying food habits, with the goal of improving nutrition for poor, rural communities. The word gained traction in the 1960s and ‘70s with increasing interest in folklife studies and became widespread in the 1990s with the formation of organizations such as The Southern Foodways Alliance, whose mission is “ to document, study and explore the diverse food cultures of the changing American South.”  

The New Georgia Encyclopedia puts it succinctly: “Foodways is the study of what people eat and why they eat it.” 

For Frey, food is really about connection and memory. “Food can be a way to bridge some gaps in this divisive time. It allows us to think about what we have in common, not what we don’t.”  

Her second book for UGA Press also took 10 years to research and write. She traveled all over the state, tracking down old cookbooks, all types of magazines, newspaper clippings, and personal stories, while exploring various archives and collections, and buying “a lot of cookbooks.”  

She visited historic kitchens like the one reproduced at the St. Simons Island Lighthouse. After discovering a 1912 cake recipe by the lighthouse keeper’s wife, she experimented with how to translate it into a modern format that today’s cook can follow successfully. 

“People get excited about international recipes or gourmet recipes, and they never think to give historic recipes a try,” she laments. She estimates that she experimented with and cooked scores of historic recipes.  

“Old recipes improved my kitchen skills,” she says, “And they helped me piece together how foodways in my state, region and country evolved. They gave me a sense of rootedness I hadn’t realized I was missing.”  

And while the recipes might date back a century or more, she points out that many are in line with our thinking today about food being locally sourced, minimally processed, fresh, and sustainably grown.  

To encourage the use of historic recipes, Frey also has been reproducing some of the older cookbooks that are long out of copyright and only available in archives. The first two can be found on her website: valeriejfrey.com or from Amazon.  

Finding history in recipes 

Frey points out that old recipes are primary historical documents that can tell us a lot about the times in which they were used. For instance, the lighthouse cake recipe shows that early recipes were in paragraph form as it wasn’t until 1896 that Fannie Farmer, a Boston cook and writer, introduced the concept of listing ingredients and instructions in chronological order.  

The size of eggs isn’t indicated as backyard chicken eggs would vary so the cook would take that into consideration when deciding how many to use. Sticks of butter didn’t come into use until 1907; baking powder wasn’t available until 1850. The old-fashioned term “scant” means a little less than the stated amount. All these variables had to be considered as Frey sought to reproduce and update some of the old recipes.  

“Almost all historical cake recipes are dry by our standards,” she explains, noting that she will add butter or milk, and in the lighthouse keeper’s recipe, an orange glaze.  

The women who cooked and wrote in early Georgia 

Frey discovered several independent and resilient women in her research. One she highlights is Annie Dennis. Frey stumbled upon a well-worn copy of “The New Annie Dennis Cookbook,” in a Bishop thrift store a few years before beginning her project.  

She found that the 1915 book was one of seven editions by Dennis whose book was called “the only real Southern Cookbook,” by The Atlanta Constitution. Unlike modern cookbooks, early editions offered little information about their authors. Frey had to comb through period newspapers and other documents to learn that Dennis came of age just after the Civil War and traveled extensively to enter her cooking in countless fairs, winning over $10,000 — over a quarter of a million dollars today. She never married although apparently her estate contained numerous proposals of marriage – a career woman of her day! 

Frey’s 1867 chapter is titled “Mrs. Hill’s New Cook Book” for the Young and Inexperienced. The descriptor is Annabella Hill’s in her introduction. The inexperienced were the women who, before the Civil War, would have dictated a menu and checked on the cook’s progress. Hill writes that she felt there was a need for a new clear and detailed cookbook because of “this peculiar crisis of our domestic as well as national affairs.” 

The Hills were prominent and socialized extensively until 1860 when Edward Hill died. After the war, Hill had to sell their property and would spend time in her daughter’s household before she published her $2 cookbook at age 57. From then on, she’s mentioned in numerous newspaper articles as an author and cooking expert. Her book has been called by one food historian, “a seminal work, one that could almost be called the southern Fanny Farmer of its day.”  

Of course, many of the recipes in any southern cookbook of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries would have found their origins in the kitchens of unnamed and uncredited slave cooks whose recipes were recorded by their owners, or later, their employers.  

One black woman who did achieve fame in her own name was Laura McCray of Athens, born into slavery in 1818 on the Robert Toombs plantation. She was freed at age forty-five and in the 1880 census, her occupation is listed as “Confectionery Baker.”  She not only baked wedding cakes for the prominent of Athens but also President Grover Cleveland. At one time, she was promoting a national brand of flour.  

Cooking historic recipes 

There are 210 recipes in Frey’s book, many mouth-watering, some unusual, and others unappealing to modern tastes. For example, desserts include Coca-Cola Fluff, Sweet Potato Ice Cream, Orange Drops along with numerous cakes, pies, cookies and candies. Main courses include Opossum, Oyster Pie, Macaroni Croquettes as well as chicken, barbecue and venison recipes. Beverages range from Chatham Artillery Punch, Corn Beer, Lemon Ice Foam, and Syllabub, as well as teas, coffee, and various punches.  

What’s a Syllabub? One quart cream, one tumblerful of good wine, one-half pound sugar – churn or whip to a stiff froth. Yum!  

Frey didn’t keep track of exactly how many recipes she cooked but it was substantial, and many were failures, she says, even though she could often weed out the ones that wouldn’t work well before trying them.  

“The Instantaneous Ginger Beer was a dud, as was the Pie for Dyspeptics.” 

With ingredients, she avoided a recipe if it had ingredients that would be too hard to get such as Iceland moss and isinglass.  

“I did track down yaupon holly,” she says. “The greatest length I went to was trying to find an Ogeechee lime despite haunting coastal gardening clubs, extension offices, garden centers and produce markets.” 

Frey’s research shows in extensive notes, bibliography, photographs, and illustrations but it’s her writing that captivates. The 50 core chapters are in chronological order, short and written in a lively style. As a reluctant cook but a history buff, I found this a fascinating book about Georgia’s past, and can recommend it highly. Available through UGA Press.

Betsy Bean founded BoomAthens in 2016.