CHAPTER VII
THE DUTCH LARDER
There is no doubt that the Dutch colonists were very valiant trenchermen; more avid, perhaps, of quantity and frequency in their food than exacting of variety. Cardinal Bentivoglio (the diplomatist and historian) writing at the time of the first emigration to New Netherland, says that the greatest pleasures of the Hollanders were those of the table. This love of eating made them provident and lavish of food-stores in emigration; and the accounts of scant supplies, poor fare, and dire starvation which are recorded of other colonies, never have been told of the vol-gevoedt Dutch. Then, too, they landed on a generous shore,—no rock-bound coast,—Hendrick Hudson said the finest soil for cultivation that he ever set foot on. The welcoming fields richly nourished and multiplied the Hollanders’ store of seeds and roots and grafts. The rye quickly grew so tall that a man could bind the ears together above his head. Van der Donck saw a field of barley in New Netherland in which the barley stems were seven feet high. Domine Megapolensis stated that a Rensselaerwyck schepen raised fine crops of wheat on the same field eleven years in succession. Two ripe crops of peas or of buckwheat could be raised on the same land in one season. The soil seemed inexhaustible; and fields and woods also offered to the settlers a rich native larder. Among these American food supplies came first and ever the native Indian corn, or “Turkie-wheat.” The Dutch (fond of all cereal foods) took to their liking and their kitchens with speed the various forms of corn-food.
Samp and samp porridge were soon their favorite dishes. Samp is Indian corn pounded to a coarsely ground powder in a mortar. Like nearly all the foods made of the various forms of Indian corn, its name is of Indian derivation, and usually its method of preparation and cooking. Roger Williams wrote of it:—
“Nawsamp is a kind of meal pottage unparched. From this the English call their samp; which is the Indian corn beaten and boiled.”
Samp porridge was a derivative of Indian and Dutch parentage. It was samp cooked in Dutch fashion, like a hutespot, or hodgepot, with salt beef or pork and potatoes and other roots, such as carrots and turnips. These were boiled together in a vast kettle, usually in large quantity, as the porridge was better liked after several days’ cooking. A week’s supply for a family was often cooked at one time. After much boiling a strong crust was formed next the pot, and sometimes toward the end of the boiling the porridge was lifted out of the pot bodily—so to speak—by the crust and served crust and all. Samp was pounded in a primitive and picturesque Indian mortar made of a hollowed block of wood, or the stump of a tree. The pestle was a heavy block of wood shaped like the interior of the mortar and fitted with a handle attached to one side. This block was fastened to the top of a growing sapling which gave it the required spring back after being pounded down on the corn. Pounding samp was slow work, often done in later years by unskilled negroes and hence disparagingly termed “niggering” corn. After those simple mortars were abandoned elsewhere they were used on Long Island; and it was jestingly told that skippers in a fog could always get their bearings off the Long Island coast because they could hear the pounding of the samp-mortars.
Suppawn, another favorite of the settlers in New York, was an Indian dish made from Indian corn; it was a thick corn-meal and milk porridge. It soon was seen on every Dutch table, and is spoken of by all travellers in early New York.
From the gossiping pages of the Labadist preachers we find hints of good fare in Brooklyn in 1679:—
“Then was thrown upon the fire, to be roasted, a pail full of Gowanes oysters which are the best in the country. They are fully as good as those of England, better than those we eat at Falmouth. I had to try some of them raw. They are large and full, some of them not less than a foot long. Others are young and small. In consequence of the great quantities of them everybody keeps the shells for the burning of lime. They pickle the oysters in small casks and send them to Barbados. We had for supper a roasted haunch of venison which he had bought of the Indians for three guilders and a half of sea-want, that is fifteen stivers of Dutch money (fifteen cents), and which weighed thirty pounds. The meat was exceedingly tender and good and also quite fat. It had a slight aromatic flavor. We were also served with wild turkey, which was also fat and of a good flavor, and a wild goose, but that was rather dry. We saw here lying in a heap a whole hill of watermelons which were as large as pumpkins.”
De Vries tells of an abundant supply of game in the colony; deer (as fat as any Holland deer can be); great wild turkeys, beautiful birds of golden bronze (one that he shot weighed thirty pounds); partridges and pigeons (in such great flocks that the sky was darkened). Domine Megapolensis says the plentiful wild turkeys and deer came to the hogpens of the Albany colonists to feed; fat Dutch swine and graceful red deer must have seemed strange trough companions. A stag was sold readily by an Indian for a jack-knife. In 1695 Rev. Mr. Miller said a quarter of venison could be bought “at your door” for ninepence. Wild swan came in plenty, “so that the bays and shores where they resort appear as if they were dressed in white drapery.” Down the river swam hundreds of gray and white-headed geese nearly as stately as the swan; Van der Donck knew a gunner (and gives his name, Henry de Backer) who killed eleven gray geese with one shot from his gun. Gray ducks and pelicans were plentiful and cheap. Gone forever from the waters of New York are the beautiful gray ducks, white swan, gray geese, and pelican; anent these can we sigh for the good old times. The Earl of Strafford’s letters and despatches, telling of the “Commodities of the Island called Maniti ore Long Ile wch is in the Continent of Virgenea,” confirms all these reports and even tells of “fayre Turkees far greater than here, five hundred in a flocke,”—which must have proved a noble sight.
The river was full of fish, and the bay; their plenty inspired the first poet of New Netherland to rhyming enumeration; among them were sturgeon—despised of Christians; and terrapin—not despised. “Some persons,” wrote Van der Donck in 1656, “prepare delicious dishes from the water terrapin, which is luscious food.” Two centuries and a half of appreciation pay equally warm tribute to the terrapin’s reputation.
Patriarchal lobsters five and six feet long were in the bay. Van der Donck says “those a foot long are better for serving at table.” Truly a lobster six feet long would seem a little awkward to serve. W. Eddis, in his “Letters from America” written in 1792, says these vast lobsters were caught in New York waters until Revolutionary days when “since the late incessant cannonading, they have entirely forsaken the coast; not one having been taken or seen since the commencement of hostilities.” Crabs, too, were large, and some were “altogether soft.” Van der Donck corroborates the foot-long oysters seen by the Labadists. He says the “large oysters roasted or stewed make a good bite,”—a very good bite, it would seem.
Salted fish was as carefully prepared and amiably regarded in New York as in England and Holland at the same date. The ling and herring of the old country gave place in New York to shad. The greatest pains was taken in preparing, drying, and salting the plentiful shad. It is said that in towns, as in New York and Brooklyn, great heaps of shad were left when purchased at each door, and that the necessary cleaning and preparation was done on the street. As all housewives purchased shad and salted and packed at about the same time, those public scavengers, the domestic hogs, who roamed the town-streets unchecked (and ever welcomed), must have been specially useful at shad-time.
At a very early date apple-trees were set out and cultivated with much care and much success. Nowhere else, says Dankers, had he seen such fine apples. He notes the Double Paradise. The Newtown pippin, the Kingston spitzenburgh, the Poughkeepsie swaar-apple, the red-streak, guelderleng, and others of well-known name, show New York’s attention to apple-raising. Kalm, the Swedish naturalist, spoke of the splendid apple-orchards throughout New York in 1749, and told of the horse-press for making cider. Cider soon rivalled in domestic use the beer of the Fatherland. It was constantly used during the winter season, and, diluted with water, sweetened, and flavored with nutmeg, made a grateful summer drink.
Peaches were in such lavish abundance as to become uncared for. The roads were covered with fallen peaches which even the ever-filled hogs would not eat. Plums were equally plentiful. Cherry-trees were planted in good numbers and produced in great quantities. “All travellers and passers-by could pick and eat at will,” says Kalm. Comparatively scanty and poor are peaches, plums, and cherries in New York State to-day.
There were also plenty of vegetables: cibollen (chibbals), peasen (pease), chicoreye (chiccory), karoten (carrots), artichock (artichoke), lattouwe (lettuce), beeten (beets), pastinaken (parsnips), radys (radish), and many others. Pumpkins and squashes abounded, but do not appear to have been in as universal use as in New England. Quaasiens were so easily cooked “they were a favorite with the young women,” says one authority; they “grew rapidly and digested well,” also were qualities accorded in their favor. Under the name of askutasquash, or vine-apples, Roger Williams sung their praises. Musk-melons, water-melons, and cucumbers were grown in large number and excellent quality. Whether they cooked the Duyvel’s broodt, the picturesque Dutch name for mushrooms, I know not, but the teeming woods of the Hudson valley offered them rich and abundant store of this dainty food.
The Swedish naturalist, Kalm, visited Albany in 1749. He has left to us a very full account of Albany food and fashions of serving at that time. He found the Albanians faring as did their great grandfathers in the Netherlands, who were sneeringly called “milk and cheese men,” and he found them rasping their cheese as had their far-away forbears in Holland, and as do their descendants in Holland to this day. He writes thus:—
“The inhabitants of Albany are much more sparing than the English. The meat which is served up is often insufficient to satisfy the stomach, and the bowl does not circulate so freely as among the English.... Their meat and manner of dressing it is very different from that of the English. Their Breakfast is tea, commonly without milk. About thirty or forty years ago, tea was unknown to them, and they breakfasted either upon bread and butter or bread and milk. They never put sugar into the cup but put a small bit of it into their mouths while they drink. Along with the tea they eat bread and butter with slices of hung beef. Coffee is not usual here: they breakfast generally about seven. Their dinner is buttermilk and bread to which they sometimes add sugar, and then it is a delicious dish to them: or fresh milk and bread: or boiled or roasted flesh. They sometimes make use of buttermilk instead of fresh milk to boil a thin kind of porridge with, which tastes very sour but not disagreeable in hot weather. To each dinner they have a great salad prepared with abundance of vinegar and little or no oil. They frequently eat buttermilk, bread and salad, one mouthful after another. Their supper is generally bread and butter, or milk and bread. They sometimes eat cheese at breakfast and at dinner: it is not in slices but scraped or rasped so as to resemble coarse flour, which they pretend adds to the good taste of cheese. They commonly drink very small beer or pure water.”
The “great salad dressed with vinegar” was doubtless “koolslaa,” shredded cabbage, which we to-day call coleslaw. It was a universal dish also at that time in Holland. A woman-traveller there in 1756 wrote:—
“Everything of vivers is dear in Holland except vegetables, upon which the commons live all summer, and the better sort a great deall. Every body, great and small, sups on sallad with oil and vinegar.”
The Dutch were famously fond of “bakers-meats,”—all cakes and breads,—and excelled in making them, and made them in great variety. There was early legislation with regard to bakers, that they use just weights and good materials. In 1656 they were ordered to bake twice a week “both coarse and white loaves, both for Christians and Indians,” at these prices: Fourteen stuyvers for a double coarse loaf of eight pounds, with smaller loaves at proportionate prices; and eight stuyvers for a white loaf of two pounds. Two years later the coarse wheat loaf of eight pounds was definitely priced at fourteen stuyvers in sea-want, ten in beavers, and seven in silver. The bakers complained, and a new assize of bread was established at a slightly higher rate. Under Dongan’s charter bread-viewers were appointed; then the bread had to be marked with the baker’s initials. I have puzzled over a prohibition of any bakers selling koeckjes, jumbles, and sweet cakes, unless he also had coarse bread for sale; and fancy it was that the extravagant and careless purchaser might not be tempted or forced to buy too costly food. One baker was prosecuted for having gingerbread in his window when he had no coarse bread. There were also “pye-women” as well as bakers.
Favorite articles of food were three kinds of fried cakes of close kinship, thus described by Irving,—“the doughty doughnut, the tender olykoek, the crisp and crumbling cruller.” The doughnut was an equal favorite in New England, and was in some localities called a simball, or simblin; which was a New England variant, a Puritan degradent of the simbling-cake, or simnel, of the English Mid-Lent Sunday. In New England country-houses doughnuts were eaten, indeed, are eaten, all the year around three meals a day; but Mrs. Vanderbilt says the Dutch in Flatbush only made them from November through January, because at that period the lard in which they were cooked was still fresh. She also says they were limited in their public appearance to the tea-table or for children to eat “between-meals.” I don’t know that I am willing to acquiesce in her assumption that when the Pilgrims were in Holland the English goodwives learned to make doughnuts from the Dutch vrouws, and thus be forced to yield doughnuts to the other triumphs of “Dutch colonial influence.”
The famous olykoeks, or olijkoecks, were thus concocted, as given by an old Dutch receipt of the year 1740 belonging to Mrs. Morris Patterson Ferris:—
“About twelve o’clock set a little yeast to rise, so as to be ready at five P. M. to mix with the following ingredients: 3³⁄₄ pounds of flour, 1 pound of sugar, ¹⁄₂ pound of butter and lard mixed, 1¹⁄₂ pints of milk, 6 eggs, 1 pint raised yeast. Warm the butter, sugar and milk together, grate a nutmeg in the flour, add eggs last. Place in a warm place to rise. If quite light at bedtime, work them down by pressing with the hand. At nine next morning make into small balls with the hand, and place in the centre of each a bit of raisin, citron, and apple chopped fine. Lay on a well-floured pie-board and allow them to rise again. They are frequently ready to boil at two o’clock. In removing them from the board use a knife, well-floured, and just give them a little roll with the hand to make them round. Have the fat boiling, and boil each one five minutes. When cool roll in sifted sugar.”
The name means literally oil-cakes, and they were originally boiled or fried in oil. They were called “melting,” and I am sure from this description of the process of manufacture they were delicate enough to deserve the appellation. The Hessian officers in Revolutionary times give eloquent approval of these “rich batter-cakes.”
Tea-cakes which were made both in New England and New York were what Mrs. Vanderbilt calls “izer-cookies.” They were so termed from the Dutch word izer, or yser, meaning iron; for they were baked in long-handled irons called wafer-irons, which often had the initials of the owners impressed in the metal, which impression of course rendered the letters in relief on the cakes. Often a date was also stamped on the irons. These wafer-irons sometimes formed part of a wedding outfit, having the initials of the bride and groom intertwined. The cakes were also called split-cakes because, thin as they were, often they were split and buttered before being eaten. Other wafer-cakes were called oblyen. Cinnamon-cakes resembled a delicate jumble with powdered cinnamon sprinkled on top. Puffards, or puffertjes, were eaten hot with powdered cinnamon and sugar, and were baked in a special pan, termed a puffet-pan. Wonders were flavored with orange peel and boiled in lard. Pork-cakes, made of chopped pork with spices, almonds, currants, raisins, and flavored with brandy, were a rich cake. The famous Schuyler wedding cake had among other ingredients, twelve dozen eggs, forty-eight pounds of raisins, twenty-four pounds of currants, four quarts of brandy, a quart of rum. This was mixed in a wash-tub.
Many of these cakes are now obsolete. In one of the old inventories of the Van Cortlandt family, in a list of kitchen utensils is the item, “1 Bolly-byssha Pan.” This is the Anglicized spelling of bollo-bacia,—bolle the old Dutch and Spanish word for a bun, or small loaf of flour and sugar; bacia the Spanish for a metal pan. In old receipts in the same family the word is called bolla-bouche and bolla-buysies. The receipt runs thus:—
“To a pound of flower a quarter of a pound of sugar, the same of butter, 4 egs, sum Nut-Meg and Senamond, milk & yeast, A pint of milk to 2 pound of flower.”
Domestic swine afforded the Dutch many varied and appetizing foods. Two purely Dutch dishes were rolliches and head cheese. Rolliches were made of lean beef and fat cut in pieces about as large as dice, then highly seasoned with herbs and spices, sewed in tripe and boiled for several hours. This roll was then pressed into an oblong loaf, which made pretty slices when cut and served cold. Head cheese, or hoofd-kaas, was similar in appearance, but was made of pigs’-feet and portions of the head chopped fine, boiled in a bag, and pressed into the shape of a cheese. This also was served in cold slices.
Speck ende kool, pork and cabbage, was another domestic stand-by; fried pork and apples were made into an appetizing dinner dish. Roast ducks were served with pork-dumplings,—of which the mystery of manufacture is unknown to me.
A great favorite of the Dutch is shown through this advertisement in the “New York Gazette” of December 17, 1750:—
“The Printer hereof, ever mindful to please and gratify his Customers, finding but little Entertainment at present suitable to the Genius of many; has been obliged to provide for the Winter Evening Diversion of such of his Friends as are that way inclined, A Parcel of the Nuts commonly called KESKATOMAS NUTS which he sells at One Shilling per Half a Peck. N. B. They are all right ‘Sopus and of the right sort.’”
A writer in the “Literary World” in 1850 thus defines and eulogizes these nuts:—
Michaux, in his “North American Sylva,” says that many descendants of the Dutch in New Jersey and New York still call the hickory-nut Kisky-Thomas-nuts. The name is derived from an Indian word, not from the Dutch. These nuts were served at every winter evening company, great or small. Mrs. Grant tells of their appearance on the tea-table.
Of the drinking habits of the Dutch colonists I can say that they were those of all the colonies,—excessive. Tempered in their tastes somewhat by the universal brewing and drinking of beer, they did not use as much rum as the Puritans of New England, nor drink as deeply as the Virginia planters; but the use of liquor was universal. A libation was poured on every transaction, every action, at every happening in the community, in public life as well as in private. John Barleycorn was ever a witness at the drawing up of a contract, the signing of a deed, the selling of a farm, the purchase of goods, the arbitration of a suit. If either party to a contract “backed out” before signing, he did not back away from the “treat,” but had to furnish half a barrel of beer or a gallon of rum to assuage the pangs of disappointment. Liquor was served at auctions or “vendues” free, so Madam Knight says,—buyers becoming expansive in bidding when well primed. It appeared at weddings, funerals, church-openings, deacon-ordainings, and house-raisings. No farm hand in haying-field, no sailor on a vessel, no workman in a mill, no cobbler, tailor, carpenter, mason, or tinker would work without some strong drink, some treat. The bill for liquor where many workmen were employed, as in a house-raising, was often a heavy one.
A detailed example of the imperative furnishing of liquor to workmen is found in the contracts and bills for building in 1656 the first stone house erected at Albany, a government house or fort. It cost 12,213 guilders in wampum, or about $3,500, and was built under the charge of Jan de la Montague, the Vice-Director of the Fort. Every step in the erection of this building was taken knee-deep in liquor. The dispensing of drink began when the old wooden fort was levelled; a tun of strong beer was furnished to the pullers-down. At the laying of the first stones of the wall a case of brandy, an anker (thirty-three quarts) of brandy, and thirty-two guilders’ worth of other liquor wet the thirsty whistles of the masons. When the cellar beams were laid, the carpenters had their turn. Two barrels of strong beer, three cases of brandy, and seventy-two florins’ worth of small beer rested them temporarily from their labors. When the second tier of beams was successfully in place, the carpenters had two more cases of brandy and a barrel of beer.
The beams had already received a previous “wetting;” for when brought to the building they had been left without the wall, and had been carried within, one at a time, by eight men who had half a barrel of beer for each beam. There were thirty-three beams in all.
All the wood-carriers, teamsters, carpenters, stone-cutters, and masons had, besides these special treats, a daily dram of a gill of brandy apiece, and three pints of beer at dinner. They were dissatisfied, and “solicited” another pint of beer. Even the carters who brought wood and the boatmen who floated down spars were served with liquor. When the carpenters placed the roof-tree, a half-barrel of liquor was given them. Another half-barrel under the name of tiles-beer went to the tile-setters. The special completion of the winding staircase demanded five guilders’ worth of liquor. When the house was finished, a kraeg, or housewarming, of both food and drink to all the workmen and their wives was demanded and refused. Well it might be refused, when the liquor bill without it amounted to seven hundred and sixteen guilders.
The amount of liquor required to help in conducting an election was very great. In 1738 James Alexander and Eventhus Van Horne paid over seventy-two pounds for one election bill. Liquor then was cheap. This sum purchased sixty-two gallons of Jamaica rum, several gallons of brandy, eight gallons of lime-juice, a “pyd” of wine which cost sixteen pounds (I don’t know what a “pyd” could have been), a large amount of shrub, and mugs and “gugs” and “bottels.” There were also two bagpipes and a fiddler.
Let me give, as a feeble excuse for the large consumption of beer, cider, etc., that the water was poor in many of the towns. Kalm wrote of the Albany water:—
“The water of several of the wells was very cool about this time, but had a kind of acid taste which was not very agreeable. I think this water is not very wholesome for people who are not used to it. Nearly every house in Albany has its well, the water of which is applied to common use; but for tea, brewing, and washing they commonly take the water of the river.”
What can be the other “common use” to which well-water was applied, except putting out fires,—which is an infrequent use?
In New York City the water was equally poor. The famous Tea-water Pump supplied in barrels for many years the more fastidious portion of the community. Perhaps we could scarcely expect them to drink much water when they had to buy it.
Our notions of life in New Netherland have been so thoroughly shaped by Diedrich Knickerbocker’s tergiversating account thereof, that it would be difficult for us to make any marked change in the picture he has painted. Nor do we need to do so. For though the details of public and official life and characters in that day have been wilfully distorted by Irving’s keen humor, still the atmosphere of his picture is undeniably correct, and the domestic life he has shown us was the life of that colony. I find nothing, after much illumination through careful examination of old records and the contemporary accounts given by early travellers, to change in any considerable degree the estimate of every-day life in New Netherland which I gained from Irving, save in one respect,—the account of Dutch table manners, and the attributing to the Dutch burghers of lax hospitality at dinner-time, which I cannot believe. Madam Knight wrote of her New York hosts in 1704:—
“They are sociable to one another, and Curteos and Civill to Strangers, and fare well in their houses.... They are sociable to a degree, their tables being as free to their Naybours as themselves.”
Mrs. Grant, writing of Albanians half a century later, gives a detailed description of their manners as hosts, which might serve as an explanation of apparent inhospitality in the time of Walter the Doubter:—
“They were exceedingly social, and visited each other very frequently, beside the regular assembling together in porches every fine evening. Of the more substantial luxuries of the table they knew little, and of the formal and ceremonious parts of good breeding still less.
“If you went to spend a day anywhere, you were received in a manner we should think very cold. No one rose to welcome you; no one wondered you had not come sooner, or apologized for any deficiency in your entertainment. Dinner, which was very early, was served exactly in the same manner as if there were only the family. The house, indeed, was so exquisitely neat and well regulated, that you could not surprise them; and they saw each other so often and so easily that intimates made no difference. Of strangers they were shy; not by any means from want of hospitality, but from a consciousness that people who had little to value themselves on but their knowledge of the modes and ceremonies of polished life disliked their sincerity and despised their simplicity. If you showed no insolent wonder, but easily and quietly adopted their manners, you would receive from them not only very great civility, but much essential kindness.... After sharing this plain and unceremonious dinner, which might, by the bye, chance to be a very good one, but was invariably that which was meant for the family, tea was served in at a very early hour. And here it was that the distinction shown to strangers commenced. Tea here was a perfect ‘regale,’ accompanied by various sorts of cake unknown to us, cold pastry, and great quantities of sweetmeats and preserved fruits of various kinds, and plates of hickory and other nuts ready cracked. In all manner of confectionery and pastry these people excelled; and having fruit in great abundance, which cost them nothing, and getting sugar home at an easy rate, in return for their exports to the West Indies, the quantity of these articles used in families, otherwise plain and frugal, was astonishing. Tea was never unaccompanied with some of these petty articles; but for strangers a great display was made. If you stayed supper, you were sure of a most substantial though plain one. In this meal they departed, out of compliment to the strangers, from their usual simplicity. Having dined between twelve and one, you were quite prepared for it. You had either game or poultry roasted, and always shell-fish in the season; you had also fruit in abundance. All this with much neatness, but no form. The seeming coldness with which you were first received wore off by degrees.”
It may be noted that Mrs. Grant gives a very different notion of Albany fare than does Kalm, already quoted; and she wrote scarce a score of years after his account. She tells—in this extract—not of wealthy folk, though they were truly gentle-folk, if simplicity of living, kindliness, and good sense added in many cases to good birth could make these plain Albanians gentle-folk. And in truth it seems to me a cheerful picture,—one of true though shy hospitality; pleasant of contemplation in our days of formality and extravagance of entertaining, of scant knowledge of the true home life even of those we call our friends.