Chapter 8: American History - the Colonies
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Chapter 8: American History - the Colonies |
The history of escagraphs in the American Colonies began much as it had been in 13th century England with laws governing the placement of marks for identification on their breads as well as laws governing weight and ingredients. Actual bread escagraphs have not been preserved from colonial America but prevailing laws give us evidence to their existence. Colonial bakers, in Massachusetts and New Amsterdam, were handed a law of the same kind that brought John of the Lane before a Assize court on July 3, 1316 for making light loaves. From the General Laws and Liberties of the Massachusetts Colony [1] comes the following:
It is Ordered by this Court and Authority thereof; That henceforth every Baker shall have a distinct mark for his Bread, and keep the true Assizes, as hereafter is expressed.
Then follows the table which sets the prices for each kind of bread depending on the price per bushel or weight of grain used. The ordinance continues to describe an enforcement policy which says that the bread that does not meet the assizes and is sold by a baker shall be forfeited to the use of the poor of the town.
New Amsterdam officials, on March 25, 1661, also recorded a law similar to that of Massachusetts. From The Records of New Amsterdam [2], we learn that the New Amerstdam colony also established regulations that there be marks affixed to the bread by bakers and spells out the penalties for infractions of the law.
And you are hereby further ordered by the Schout, Burgomaster and Shepens of this City, to govern yourself accordingly under the penalties, stated in the proclamation, and to designate the bread, you bake, with a special mark under the penalty of forfeiting the bread, found unmarked, and paying a fine of 25 sl. You are also to report the mark, which you intend to use, to the Secretary of this City within three times twenty four hours. Thus done etc. March 25 1661.
If the marks chosen by the bakers, and registered with the City Secretary, were the initials of the seven bakers who plied their trade in the city, then these escagraphs would fall under the Trademark Name category. Of interest, however is the following paragraph in the same Ordinance report which registers the bakers' marks as per instruction.
Marks of the Bakers, which they have reported according to the order of Schout, Burgomasters and Schepens as to be used.
X this is the mark of Jacob Teunizen Kay
X " " " " " Hendrick Janzen, baker
X " " " " " Reinier Willemzen Backer (baker)
X " " " " " Jan Gerrisen from Buytenhuysen
X " " " " " Andries de Haas
X " " " " " Antony de Milt
X " " " " " Hendrick Willemzen, baker
Are we to understand that:
If light bread were found and all breads were marked with an X, that would not differentiate bakers or identify the culprit. Whatever the possibilities were, it remains that this is the first evidence of putting marks on food in the Colonies.
There were other assize escagraphs documented in the early days of colonial America but one from the Revolutionary War period needs our scrutiny because it has less to do with municipal regulations than with insensitivity - or if you care to give the worst intentions to this escagraph maker - psychological warfare.[3]
In the winter of 1782-83, a 29 year old Benjamin Thompson was put in charge of keeping Huntington, New York under the heel of his boot for the British occupiers. He gained a despicable reputation for being a callous man in this bastion of rebel sentiment. He was born in Woburn, Massachusetts but was a British loyalist. In 1782, with a provisional peace agreement about to be signed between the British and the Americans, Thompson was ordered to place his loyalist regiment in Huntington where he set up camp on a burying yard (cemetery), the Old Burying Ground on East Main Street. He constructed a fort which he called Golgatha and tore down the headstones in the cemetery to make ovens for baking bread[4]
The enemy are fortifying Huntington. They have pitched on a burying yard and have dug up graves and gravestones, to the great grief of the people there, who, when they remonstrated against the proceeding, received nothing but abuse.
The entry goes on to say that the historian, Nathaniel Prime, wrote in 1845 that he had talked with old men who were there at the time, and they had "seen the loaves of bread drawn out of these ovens, with the reversed inscriptions of the tombstones of their friends on the lower crusts." This bizarre incident of an escagraph is mentioned because it may be, if the reports of Thompson's callousness are not exaggerated, that we have here an example of an escagraph being created and used as a powerful psychological spirit breaker, an activity for which they are not normally applied.
Were there any sweet escagraphs in the colonies? First we must remember that refined sugar in the Colonies was a rare commodity, molasses, maple sugar and honey being the main sweeteners. The curators of the Winterthur Museum and Gardens and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation both informed me that, in their collections of kitchen equipment for the colonial period, they have no molds which contain letters or words although they had some which had pictorial representation. My failure to find any evidence of early colonial molds for making escagraphs, coupled with the fact that sweeteners were in short supply in the colonies, indicate that escagraphs in the early days of the colonies were rare. Since gingerbread is made with molasses (an available sweetener in colonial America) and since the settlers would have been more than a little familiar with gingerbread in the cities from which they had come, it is possible, that gingerbread escagraphs were baked in the kitchens of creative cooks. So, sweet escagraphs that existed on a daily basis for general consumption were probably home-made. No tools for making them exist, molds or stamps, and any actual gingerbread escagraphs would be long gone.
The year 1778 or 1779 is the first in which I find anything I might call a sweet escagraph. It is mentioned in the "Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography" Volume 11, 1887 and is reported in Hooker's Food and Drink in America [5].
After independence, July 4 was celebrated, In 1778 the delegates to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia and other Gentlemen met at the City Tavern and dined to the music of an orchestra. The meal featured a large baked pudding in which were implanted a flag and various symbols and figures.
There are several conditions to be reckoned with in this citation. What, for instance, does the author mean by "symbols?" As understood by the Massachusetts semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce, at the end of the 19th century, a symbol had a definition: a signifier that stands for its signified in an arbitrary and conventionalized way. The largest collection of symbols, then, would be words, according to that definition. The author could well have meant "words" by his use of the word "symbols" since he is writing in 1887, but that is to beg the question. Another condition to be reckoned with is whether a sweetener was added to the baked pudding.
Yet another problem arises with this entry. James R. Heintze of the American University in Washington D.C. has compiled A Chronology of Notable Fourth of July Celebrations[6]. He cites the 1779 as the one in which members of the Continental Congress attended an "elegant" dinner held at the City Tavern over the objection of 14 of the members, not 1778. And he says nothing about what was served.
Next I turned to cookbooks to see if there are any instructions for making food with words on them or food shaped according to the alphabet as I had found in Murrel's cookbook. According to Karen Hess[7], books of cookery in colonial America were inherited family manuscripts which had undergone recopying several times as they were handed on from mother to daughter to granddaughter. Since the settlers brought with them the cuisine of 17th century England captured in family manuscripts with additions and deletions based on family preference and economic status, making a distinction as to whether this particular culinary habit existed in colonial America and that one did not, based on cookbooks alone, is a dubious practice.
The closest I can come, by way of cookery books, to authenticating the existence of sweet escagraphs in colonial America is to stretch a point where Martha Washington's cookbook tells the cook to "Do as you please." when shaping marzipan paste to make Nimblesses (marzipan encased in stiff sugar paste) in the section called "A Book of Sweetmeats." In this section of her cookery book, Washington tells the reader how to use molds or how to form knots but no mention is made of molds with writing or how to shape alphabet letters.
The work of Alice Morse Earle[8], a late 19th century prolific writer on the subject of colonial life in America, gives more hope. Earle wrote domestic and social histories of colonial days with special attention to the lives and habits of children. The bulk of her work seems to be gleaned from memory and "handed down" sources. Yet she is extremely well read on the English Hornbook, making references to the minor poets which Tuer[9], in his monumental The Hornbook mentions as having written about the social practices surrounding the hornbook and gingerbread alphabets. In Child Life in Colonial Days, she writes:
I have seen in New England what were called "cookey-moulds," which were of heavy wood incised with the alphabet, were of ancient Dutch manufacture, and had been used for making those "koeckje" hornbooks.
To make a guess as to when Earle saw those hornbooks in
New England or what their date was would be only a guess, but to say in the
middle of the 19th century would be safe since the publication date of Child
Life in Colonial Days is 1899. Her reputation as a social historian causes
me to note that cookie horn books (also spelled koeckje horn books), probably
were a part of 19th century children's learning apparatus in the American
Colonies, but I can not say so safely. The Dutch influence, which Earle alludes
to, needs our attention.
In History of the Horn Book, Tuer documents the
oldest hornbook mold he had found to 1778, and it was of Dutch manufacture.
The American Heritage Cookbook [10], first published in 1964 under the editorial direction of Helen McCully, Eleanor Norderer and Helen Duprey Bullock carries a recipe for NEW YEAR'S COOKIES, which mentions that Dutch cookies, baked in molds producing a design and the name of a famous person were traditional at holidays, especially New Year's Day. An eagle or the name "G. Washington" were common. That cookie, given its reference to Washington who died in 1799 but was remembered with awe, would most likely be in mid to late 18th or beginning of the 19th century, another Dutch reference to escagraphs in the early days of the Federation.
There is nothing so satisfying as holding the piece of evidence in your hand when you need to substantiate a claim. We can't do that for evidence of sweet escagraphs in the American colonial period or early Federation. We lack even the technology (molds) for substantiating that such escagraphs existed. But the evidence that does exist (written reports and descriptions which too often fail to mention their sources) for such escagraphs point to the Dutch who seemed to have a peculiar interest in decorated food stuffs often sweetened and gilded.
In the Colonial American English dictionary[11] is included and entry for:
burial cake: A cake about four inches square, marked with a deceased's initials and kept as a souvenir.
The mortuary loaves of Egypt come directly to mind. That escagraph was a loaf of bread. Lederer uses the word cake to describe the mortuary token made in the colonies. The word cake implies sugar. If it was indeed a colonial custom to make cakes marked with the deceased's initials as a keepsake, they would probably have been cake made with molasses strongly suggesting gingerbread which, if made in the stiff form, has great keeping power. As I studied escagraphs, I grew accustomed to finding them at moments of celebration and joy. It was a surprise to find 3 escagraphs which were not associated with joyous celebrations, the mortuary escagraphs and the escagraph created by Thompson in New York by using grave stones as a baking oven and his burial cake. The first two are not sweet. The third non-joyous escagraph, the burial cake, was very likely gingerbread. It can hardly be overlooked that each of these escagraphs has something to do with death and the lack of sugar in two-thirds of them augers for the belief that the burial cake might also have been a non-sweet escagraph. There is doubt that the burial cakes were eaten because as Lederer says, they were kept as mementoes. Otherwise, they have all the required components of the escagraph. The Egyptian mortuary loaves, even before they were made of stone, were eaten only symbolically.
One escagraph that existed, authorities claim, did so only on paper and was "created" by the biographer of George Washington, Mason Locke Weems [12]. Weems had a biography ready months after Washington's death. Cunliffe tells us it sold well. By 1806, a short 7 years after the death of the first president, Weems' publisher, Carey, "...brought out the fifth edition of Weems' Washington, and it was in that edition that two new anecdotes appeared. One is the oft' repeated and well loved story about George, as a boy, not being able to tell a lie after he cut down his father's much prized cherry tree with his new hatchet. The other anecdote had to do with cabbage plants. Cunliffe's work contains a reprint of the Weems biography, fifth edition, and it is from that source that the following comes. "He," in the following, refers to George Washington's father.
One day he went into the garden, and prepared a little bed of finely pulverized earth, on which he wrote George's name at full, in large letters-- then strewing in plenty of cabbage seed, he covered them up and smoothed all over nicely with the roller. This bed he purposely prepared close along side of a gooseberry walk, which happening at this time to be well hung with ripe fruit, he knew would be honoured with George's visits pretty regularly ever day.
Weems goes on with three pages of quoted dialogue which supposedly took place between George and his father upon George's discovery of his name spelled out in cabbage plants, an attempt on his earthly father's part to introduce George to his Heavenly Father. Here we have a word spelled out in edible plant life with no doubt as to the place and time of its occurrence or its appearance in print but with every reason to doubt that it ever existed.
What is important in this fabrication is that Weems, obviously a cagey man,
connected edible material and writing which, because of his widely read
biography of Washington tells us that the idea was not completely radical. Did Weems invent the cabbage escagraph as surely as he invented the anecdote? That
is a possibility; but, it is just as possible that he repeated an already
acculturated practice, therefore not radical, of combining food and writing with
which his readers could associate. And he chose a gardening anecdote sure to
please people used to growing their own vegetables in the early 19th century.
In 1944, my mother did the same for me except she used lettuce seed (black seeded Simpson) in place of cabbage. I was stunned beyond belief when I discovered my name growing in the ground. My mother repeated the Washington story for me after I came running into the house proclaiming the miracle that had occurred in the garden. I repeat the fact that she knew the Washington story to give some credence to the claim that Weems' biography had a lasting effect on Americans and brought, lastingly, to their attention the possible combination of food and writing.
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