My recent series of articles, “The Gilded Age in Fernandina,” was inspired by the HBO-Max series. Overlapping partly with England’s Late Victorian period, some universal rules apply to both eras. Families ate together. Foods were “cooked down” (cooked thoroughly), or they were encased in gelatin. Three meals were served daily, with the last being a large mid-afternoon meal called dinner or a light evening meal called supper.
A variety of specialty utensils were used for many courses. Meals at home, fine dining restaurants, banquets, and parties were places for ladies to show off their wealth, with fancier dress for each event throughout the day. In the realm of food ingredients, fine fabrics, and processes—the more unusual, rare, or complex the better.
Take celery, for example. Brought to America in the 1600’s, it was not new, but The Gilded Age meeting of agricultural and industrial techniques boosted celery’s popularity. Being difficult to cultivate made it pricey, so it had a special place on Gilded Age tables. More than a status symbol, specialty celery vases showed off celery as fine art, but only as fine art. However, newer varieties became easier to grow, which increased production and dropped prices, so people began to eat their celery instead of just looking at it. Cooking celery to eat became the trend, so along came an elongated flat celery dish that remains an all-purpose dish today.
You can go celery-wild, too. Julia Child’s Braised Celery is easy and versatile, while Chadwick Boyd of Serious Eats writes a love letter to celery. And California Grown has many of what it calls “insanely delicious recipes for celery.”
New industries flourished in that period, as did the middle class staffing them. Also, between 1870-1900, nearly 12 million immigrants arrived to help drive the booming economy, bringing with them new cuisines, ingredients, and styles. Then as now, stylish restaurants were places to see and be seen. In 1837, at Delmonico’s in New York City was born our present concept of a restaurant: the French idea of a menu containing varying items at different prices where one could eat at a time of their choosing. There atop Delmonico’s menus from 1870 forward was celery. And turtle soup.
How I would rather skip this subject entirely, but it is important to the story. “In the mid-19th century, Americans developed a frenzied culinary affair with turtle. Almost overnight, the diamondback terrapin—a small coastal turtle found from Cape Cod to the Gulf Coast—went from subsistence food to luxury cuisine, showing up on menus from the White House to Gold Rush-era San Francisco,” reports Shoshi Parks for NPR.
Lucy Coleman Carnegie was reportedly famous for her turtle soup, but today, sea turtles are endangered because of the enduring place they found on menus more than 100 years ago. Fortunately, mock turtle soup was cheaper, easier to make, and delicious, and it became an even bigger hit. The 1887 White House Cookbook has a fine mock turtle soup made with beans, boiled eggs, and chicken forcemeat balls, the latter being a new culinary adventure that had just started.
My version of choice for Mock Turtle Soup is from Instructables.com, with its playful presentation. Mock-Mock Turtle Soup, I will call it, and I’ll serve it with Child’s Braised Celery, with a centerpiece of a big bouquet of celery.