The Virginia Housewife (first published in 1824) – authored by the slave-owning white antebellum Virginian, Mary Randolph – is widely considered to constitute the earliest printed example of a ‘Southern’ cookery book.
Randolph came from one of the elite families of Virginia, which traced its roots in the South to the union of William and (another) Mary Randolph, whose ancestries lie in Warwickshire and Northamptonshire, in England, respectively. This couple are sometimes referred to as the ‘Adam and Eve of Virginia’.
William Randolph’s children included Isham Randolph of Dungeness – whose daughter Jane was the mother of Thomas Jefferson – and Elizabeth Randolph, whose daughter Mary was the great grandmother of the legendary Confederate General, Robert E. Lee. The young Thomas Jefferson was educated alongside members of the Randolph family at Tuckahoe Plantation and Jefferson’s younger brother was named Randolph. Thomas Mann Randolph Sr., one of the Randolphs who was raised and educated alongside Thomas Jefferson, was the father of Mary Randolph. Mary’s brother, Thomas Mann Randolph Jr., married Martha Jefferson, the daughter of Thomas Jefferson, and became a Congressman and Governor of Virginia.
Randolph’s book would go on to be a highly significant work among elite Southern families. Thomas Jefferson, for example, wrote to Randolph, thanking her for sending him a copy of her book, of which he stated: ‘a greater degree of merit few classes of books can claim’.
One might expect, therefore, that Randolph’s volume would present the reader with a new cuisine, birthed in Virginia, which throws off the shackles of the English past. To a certain extent, this could be seen as true. There are some Native American influences, and a small number of African influences, as seen in the recipes for gumbo and pepper pot found in the book. However, as culinary historian Stephen Schmidt notes, ‘for the most part, the book outlined the same cuisine that was in vogue among the privileged classes of the North in Randolph’s day: genteel English cooking interspersed with a few American dishes’.
In her book Our Founding Foods, food historian Jane Tennant writes:
Mary Randolph came from a tradition of gracious living. After her death it was said she had spent three fortunes in cooking … Mary had learned the art of housekeeping from her mother and her early influences came from English authors such as Hannah Glasse and Mary Rundell.
Scholars have long noted the influence of Glasse on Randolph’s cookery. Karen Hess, for example, points this out in her 1997 Historical Notes on Glasse’s book, as does the entry on Randolph’s A Quire of Paper Pancakes in Dining with the Washingtons (Stephen McLeod, ed., 2011). As we shall see, the influence of Rundell is also marked in Randolph’s recipes.
For those familiar with the English cookery of the 18th century, Schmidt’s assessment of Randolph’s cookery rings true. Time and again, Randolph’s Virginian – or ‘Southern’ – recipes turn out to be little more than slightly-tweaked versions of well-established English dishes. Some examples follow.
Fried Lamb
Randolph writes:
Separate the leg from the loin, cut off the shank and boil the leg; divide the loin in chops, dredge and fry them a nice brown, lay the leg in the middle of the dish, and put the chops around, pour over parsley and butter, and garnish with fried parsley.
Rundell, in her A New System of Domestic Cookery, instructs the following for cooking lamb:
Leg boiled in a cloth to look as white as possible; the loin fried in steaks and served round, garnished with dried or fried parsley.
Rundell doesn’t include the parsley and butter sauce, but she does employ it in recipes for fowls, eels, and pigeons. It was hardly an unusual sauce: Charlotte Mason includes a recipe for it in her The Lady’s Assistant for Regulating and Supplying Her Table (1778); John Farley, in his The London Art of Cookery, and Housekeeper’s Complete Assistant (1783), accompanies rabbits, eels, and pigeons with parsley and butter.
In The English Art of Cookery: According to the Present Practice (1788), Richard Briggs includes instructions for boiling a leg of lamb, followed by:
If you fry the loin, fry it as directed in the chapter for frying; put a small dish within the other, put the leg in, and the loin all round; garnish with spinach and fried parsley.
Briggs’ frying directions state: ‘pepper and salt them, rub the yolk of an egg on both sides, and sprinkle bread-crumbs over them’. He also offers Another Way: ‘pepper, salt, and flour them’.
The same recipe appears in the 1798 American edition of the book, published under the title The New Art of Cookery.
To Broil Calf’s Liver
Randolph writes:
Cut it in slices, put over it salt and pepper; broil it nicely, and pour on some melted butter with chopped parsley after it is dished.
Rundell’s Calf’s Liver recipe reads:
Sliced, seasoned with pepper and salt, and nicely broiled—rub a bit of cold butter on it, and serve hot.
To Broil Eels
Randolph writes:
When you have skinned and cleansed your eels as before, rub them with the yolk of an egg, strew over them bread crumbs, chopped parsley, sage, pepper, and salt; baste them well with butter, and set them in a dripping pan; serve them up with parsley and butter for sauce.
Francis Collingwood’s The Universal Cook and City and Country Housekeeper (1797) also has a To broil Eels recipe:
Having skinned and cleansed your eels, rub them with the yolk of an egg, strew over them bread crumbs, chopped parsley, sage, pepper, and salt. Baste them well with butter, and set them in a dripping-pan. Roast or broil them, and serve them up with parsley and butter.
T. Williams’ The Accomplished Housekeeper, and Universal Cook (1797) includes the same recipe.
To Stew Carp
Randolph writes:
Gut and scale your fish, wash and dry them well with a clean cloth, dredge them with flour, fry them in lard until they are a light brown, and then put them in a stew pan with half a pint of water, and half a pint of red wine, a meat spoonful of lemon pickle, the same of walnut catsup, a little mushroom powder and cayenne to your taste, a large onion stuck with cloves, and a slick of horse-radish; cover your pan close up to keep in the steam; let them stew gently over a stove fire, till the gravy is reduced to just enough to cover your fish in the dish; then take the fish out, and put them on the dish you intend for the table, set the gravy on the fire, and thicken it with flour, and a large lump of butter; boil it a little, and strain it over your fish; garnish them with pickled mushrooms and scraped horse-radish, and send them to the table.
In The Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy (1747), Hannah Glasse offers recipes titled To stew a Brace of Carp and To fry Carp. To fry Carp begins:
First scale and gut them, wash them clean, lay them in a cloth to dry, then flour them, and fry them of a fine light brown.
To stew a Brace of Carp instructs:
Scrape them very clean, then gut them, wash them and the roes in a pint of good stale beer, to preserve all the blood, and boil the carp with a little salt in the water.
In the mean time strain the beer, and put it into a sauce-pan, with a pint of red wine, two or three blades of mace, some whole pepper, black and white, an onion stuck with cloves, half a nutmeg bruised, a bundle of sweet herbs, a piece of lemon-peel as big as a six-pence, an anchovy, a little piece of horse-radish. Let these boil together softly for a quarter of an hour, covered close; then strain it, and add to it half the hard row beat to pieces, two or three spoonfuls of catchup, a quarter of a pound of fresh butter and a spoonful of mushroom-pickle. Let it boil, and keep stirring it till the sauce is thick and enough; if it wants any salt you must put some in: Then take the rest of the row, and beat it up with the yolk of an egg, some nutmeg and a little lemon-peel cut small, fry them in fresh butter in little cakes, and some pieces of bread cut three-corner-ways and fried brown. When the carp is enough take them up, pour your sauce over them, lay the cakes round the dish, with horse-radish scraped fine, and fried parsley. The rest lay on the carp, and the bread stick about them, and lay round them, then sliced lemon notched and laid round the dish, and two or three pieces on the carp. Send it to table hot.
Ann Peckham includes a recipe titled To stew Carp brown in her book The Complete English Cook (Fourth Edition, 1790), which reads as follows:
Scale and clean them, fry them brown on both sides, take them up to drain, then take a stew-pan, and put in as much gravy and red wine as will cover them, put in some anchovies, and sliced horse-radish, a little chian [cayenne] pepper and salt, a lump of butter worked in flour, put it into the gravy to make it of a proper thickness, then set it on your stove, and when hot, put in the carp, let it simmer on the stove till you serve it up, take them up with a slice, and pour your sauce on them thro’ a hair-sieve. Garnish with scraped horse radish.
A To stew Carps recipe is found in Eliza Smith’s The Compleat Housewife (1773 edition), which begins: ‘Scale and gut your carp… then flour them well, and fry them in butter till they are thorough hot’. William Kitchiner, writing in The Cook’s Oracle (1822 edition), states: ‘[S]ome cooks dredge them with flour, and fry them a light brown before they put them on to stew’. Richard Briggs’ recipe in his The English Art of Cookery (1788) instructs: ‘[S]eason it with pepper, salt, and Cayan pepper pretty high’.
To Dress A Cod’s Head and Shoulders
Randolph writes:
Take out the gills and the blood from the bone, wash the head very clean, rub over it a little salt, then lay it on your fish plate; throw in the water a good handful of salt, with a glass of vinegar, then put in the fish, and let it boil gently half an hour; if it is a large one, three quarters; take it up very carefully, strip the skin nicely off, set it before a brisk fire, dredge it all over with flour, and baste it well with butter; when the froth begins to rise, throw over it some very fine white bread crumbs; you must keep basting it all the time to make it froth well; when it is a fine light brown, dish it up, and garnish it with a lemon cut in slices, scraped horse-radish, barberries, a few small fish fried and laid around it, or fried oysters–cut the roe and liver in slices, and lay over it a little of the lobster out of the sauce in lumps, and then serve it up.
Elizabeth Raffald’s The Experienced English Housekeeper (1806 edition) includes the following:
Take out the gills and the blood clean from the bone, wash the head very clean, rub over it a little salt, and a glass of alegar [ale vinegar], then lay it on your fish plate; when your water boils throw in a good handful of salt, with a glass of alegar, then put in your fish, and let it boil gently half an hour; if it is a large one three quarters; take it up very carefully, and strip the skin nicely off, set it before a brisk fire, dredge it all over with flour, and baste it well with butter; when the froth begins to rise, throw over it some very fine white bread crumbs; you must keep basting it all the time to make it froth well; when it is a fine white brown, dish it up, and garnish it with a lemon cut in slices, scrape horse-radish; barberries, a few small fish fried and laid round it, or fried oysters; cut the roe and liver in slices, and lay over it a little of the lobster out of the sauce in lumps, and then serve it.
Onion Soup
Randolph writes:
Chop up twelve large onions, boil them in three quarts of milk and water equally mixed, put in a bit of veal or fowl, and a piece of bacon with pepper and salt. When the onions are boiled to pulp, thicken it with a large spoonful of butter mixed with one of flour. Take out the meat, and serve it up with toasted bread cut in small pieces in the soup.
When compared with the recipe for the same dish found in Elizabeth Moxon’s English Housewifery (14th edition, 1800), it is clear that Randolph is once again relying on English sources for her cooking:
Take four or five large onions, peel and boil them in milk and water whilst tender, (shift them two or three times in the boiling) beat ’em in a marble mortar to a pulp, and rub them thro’ a hair sieve, and put them into a little sweet gravy: then fry a few slices of veal, and two or three slices of lean bacon; beat them in a marble mortar as small as forc’d meat; put it into your stew-pan with the gravy and onions, and boil them; mix a spoonful of what flour with a little water, and put it into the soup to keep it from running; strain all through a cullender, season it to your taste; then put into the dish a little spinage stewed in butter, and a little crisp bread; so serve it up.
Randolph, then, was arguably as much an English cook as she was a ‘Southern’ cook. The Virginian culinary milieu of Randolph’s time was deeply rooted in, and reliant upon, the cookery of England and, in fact, this English influence can be felt strongly even in her recipe for that most ‘Southern’ of dishes – fried chicken.
EDMUND STANDING 
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