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Catherine Beecher

How To Make an Election Cake

Election Cake was a highlight of the Puritan celebration of Election Day, one of the important colonial holidays along with Commencement Day and Training Day.

The Puritans had no use for Easter or saints’ days, which they viewed as Papist abominations, and they even banned Christmas.

Public notice declaring Christmas illegal in Boston in 1659.

Election Day, however, was a big deal. It usually took place in May, though it could happen anywhere from mid-January to June. In some places, enslaved black servants came along and held their own shadow election.

In Massachusetts, Election Day started with cannon firing followed by a military exercise. Then came a procession of government officials to a local church, where they sat and listened to a long sermon.

Connecticut, unlike most other colonies, elected its own governor. The ballot counting at the end of the day featured a banquet and, of course, the cake, followed by a ball.

The cake recipe came from England with the early colonists, who called them ‘great cakes’ and served them at large gatherings. Similar to fruit cakes, they could weigh as much as 12 pounds.

Amelia Simmons’ American Cookery

The first recipe for American election cake appears in 1796 in the first U.S. cookbook, Amelia Simmons’ American Cookery.

Simmons notably substituted ingredients like maize for English oats. Her recipe called for 30 quarts of flour, 10 pounds of butter, 14 pounds of sugar, 12 pounds of raisins, three dozen eggs, a pint of wine and a quart of brandy — plus spices.

Over time, the cakes shrunk in size. By 1820, people considered the large election cake old-fashioned.

Hartford Election Cake

An election cake with plums.

The cakes got linked with Hartford, Conn., and are sometimes called Hartford election cakes or Hartford cakes.

Why Hartford?

Partly because the Connecticut Colony paid roughly £3 for the first documented election cake in Hartford in 1771.

Catharine Beecher

The Connecticut Historical Society explained that town officials once gathered in Hartford to elect the state’s leaders–and then ate cake.

Towns held elections in early spring, and the town representatives gathered in Hartford in May for the formal counting of the votes. First they counted the votes for governor, then lieutenant governor, then other officials. The counting often went long into the night, and the town representatives stayed overnight in Hartford homes. Women made election cake to serve the out-of-towners.

Another reason may be that prominent Hartford native Catharine Beecher, big sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, published a cookbook that included a much-copied recipe for election cake.

Fannie Farmer Recipe

Fannie Farmer

Cookbook author Fannie Farmer also published recipes for the cake in her cookbooks. Here’s her Recipe for Election Cake, from the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, 1911, orig. 1896).

1/2 cup butter
1 cup bread dough
8 finely chopped figs
1 1/4 cups flour
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon soda
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup sour milk
2/3 cup raisins seeded, cut into pieces
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon each of clove, mace and nutmeg
1 teaspoon salt

Work butter into dough, using the hand. Add egg well beaten, sugar, milk, fruit dredged with two tablespoons flour, and flour mixed and sifted with remaining ingredients. Put into a well-buttered bread pan, cover, and let rise one and one-fourth hours. Then bake one hour in a slow oven. Cover with Boiled Milk Frosting.

The Cooking Channel offers a modern version for today’s bakers. Click here for the recipe.

Plum cake image by By Frank Vincentz – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3485743. Fannie Farmer By Unknown author – http://ourgrandmotherskitchens.com/?tag=fannie-farmer, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=86403164. This story was updated in 2022.

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Edward Hammond Clarke and the Chance for Girls

Education was a hot topic in the 1870. How much education should one have and who should get it? Edward Hammond Clarke sought to put the debate into a new perspective – before too much education made everyone sick.

Edward Hammond Clarke (Harvard University Archives)

By the 1870s, there was an established consensus that for boys education should extend well beyond the simple reading and writing demanded in colonial days. Math, science and philosophy were all valued subjects.

For girls, the debate still percolated. Girls had finishing schools and schools that taught home economics. But many schools discouraged girls from studying science and math.

Emma Willard

Connecticut’s Emma Willard had been fighting this trend as early as 1819 with publication of her Plan for Improving Female Education. Willard opened a school for girls in Troy, N.Y., the following year. Catherine Beecher opened a school for girls in Hartford, Conn. in 1823. Public high schools opened for girls in Boston and New York in 1826.

Inevitably, greater education led to greater demands for equality in other areas. For example, while Willard never supported the women’s suffrage movement, the girls who graduated her school did. As more and more girls received a high school education, more began contemplating college.

Edward Hammond Clarke

Edward Hammond Clarke found that idea dangerous as well as disturbing.

Clarke, a Harvard-trained physician, moved in the right Boston social circles. His patients included abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Born in 1820, he received his Harvard degree in 1841. He took his medical training in Philadelphia.

In 1872 the New England Women’s Club, an organization of progressive Boston women, invited Clarke to speak. By then Clarke had a position as a professor at the Harvard Medical College and had reached peak of his profession. He had a reputation for treating medical disorders successfully with the latest medications.

New England Women’s Club headquarters, ca 1903

Clarke chose as the topic for his speech the appropriate education for girls. The thrust of Clarke’s talk was that educating girls was fraught with peril. If girls during the ages of 13 to 17 spent too much time learning, the efforts they put into developing their brains would hinder the needed growth of their ovaries and uterus.

The state of womanhood was dire, Clarke observed in his practice, as disease ran rampant. Food and fashion were in part to blame, he acknowledged. Too much cake and pie contributed their part. Corsets and binding clothes were to blame for some problems, as well. But not all disease could be explained this way.

“Leucorrhoea, amenorrhea, dysmenorrhea, chronic and acute ovaritis, prolapsis utari, hysteria, neuralgia and the like are indirectly affected by food, clothing and exercise; they are directly and largely affected by the causes that will presently be pointed out and which arise from a neglect of the peculiarities of a woman’s organization,” Clarke said. “The regimen of a college arranged for boys, if imposed on girls, would foster it even more.”

Girls vs. Boys

Clarke’s theory was straightforward. “Brain work and stomach work interfere with each other if attempted together.”

This put girls at a particular disadvantage. Boys, he postulated, entered the world much more fully developed than girls. They would withstand the rigors of school and college and still turn into men with functioning reproductive organs. Girls simply couldn’t do both. What’s more, too much time in school doomed women to a lifetime of sickliness, or as he put it: “A youth of study and an old age of nerves.”

Clarke believed that boys in adolescence would withstand six hours of schooling a day and occasionally as much as eight. Girls should be limited to four and never exceed five.

More time spent studying contributed to the puny, unhealthy population Clarke was treating in his practice. The brain and the body were at war, and the brain was too often winning.

Halifax

To buttress his observations, Clarke told of a recent trip to Halifax. There he noted that boys of 11 grew as tall and broad-shouldered as a 16-year-old from Massachusetts. And the young girls? “Girls of 10 or 11 were there who looked almost like women – that is, like ideal women – simply because they looked so calm and undisturbed.”

At civic functions on his Canadian trip, Clarke noted, he was surrounded by healthy and happy men and women. The reason, he concluded, was that Halifax had no public schools.

Controversy

Clarke’s presentation caused quite an uproar. He would research further and publish his theories in book form in 1873: Sex in Education: Or, A Fair Chance for the Girls. In the book, he added research from Europe that argued girls flourished when they dropped out of school as adolescents and pursued their studies more leisurely at home. Clarke then visited the National Education Association in 1874 to deliver his findings.

Clarke’s own life may have driven his thinking. He was a studious but sickly youngster, too sick to attend his graduation exercises. He also suffered from maladies of his digestive system throughout his life. Clarke died in 1877 – just four years after he published his book on education for girls.

Nevertheless, his book had influence that lasted long after his death. The book went through 17 printings. The American Association of University Women, founded in 1883, spent decades funding research to debunk Clarke’s theories.

This story about Edward Hammond Clarke was updated in 2023.

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Catherine Beecher Reluctantly Shares a Plum Pudding Recipe

Catherine Beecher was the Martha Stewart of her day and, like Martha Stewart, lived in Connecticut (Hartford, not Westport). She was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s big sister and together they wrote The American Woman’s Home in 1869. It was probably the most important guidebook of domestic advice in the 19^th century.

From The Century, courtesy Boston Public Library

Catherine had taken over running her family’s household at 16 when her mother died. In addition to becoming a 19^th century domestic diva, she was a pioneer in women’s education. She opened the Hartford Female Seminary in 1823, one of the first major educational institutions for women in the United States. Later in life she established women’s colleges in Iowa, Illinois and Wisconsin.

Catherine Beecher

Catherine Beecher never married, though she was engaged to Yale University professor Alexander Metcalf Fisher. He died at sea before the wedding.

Alexander Metcalf Fisher

She was a woman of strong but not inflexible opinions. She weighed her students’ food before they ate it and fed them the Graham diet, a health food craze of the 1820s. It involved Graham flour, high-fiber foods and no meat, spices or sweeteners.

Her students rebelled against the austere diet, but in a genteel way. Ten of them invited her to eat in a restaurant where she had an excellent meal. The food at the Hartford Female Seminary quickly improved.

Catherine Beecher

In The American Woman’s Home she inveighs against plum pudding and mince pie: “Witness the national recipe for plum-pudding: which may be rendered: Take a pound of every indigestible substance you can think of, boil into a cannon-ball, and serve with flaming brandy. So of the Christmas mince-pie…”

She was not a huge fan of cakes, dismissing confectionery as “pleasing and complicated compounds of sweets and spices, devised not for health and nourishment, and strongly suspected of interfering with both—mere tolerated gratifications of the palate, which we eat, not with the expectation of being benefited, but only with the hope of not being injured by them.”

But in a supplement to The American Woman’s Home, as in her students’ diets, she relented. Here is Catherine Beecher’s recipe for Baked English Plum Pudding from Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt Book.

Ingredients:

A quarter of a pound of suet, chopped first, and half a teaspoonful of salt
Half of a pound of bread crumbs
Half of a pound of stoned raisins, wet and dredged with flour
Three ounces of citron
Milk, and six eggs
Half of a pound of currants
Half of a pound of sugar.

Directions:

Pour enough scalded milk onto the bread-crumbs to swell them; when cold, add the other ingredients. If it is too stiff, thin it with milk; if it is too thin, add more bread crumbs. Then add two grated nutmegs, a tablespoonful of mace and cinnamon, and half a gill of brandy. Bake two hours.

Catherine Beecher died of apoplexy in 1878.

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The Christmas holiday actually began in ancient Rome — and so did Italian cookies. The New England Historical Society’s new book, 24 Historic Italian Christmas Cookie Recipes, tells you how to make those delicious treats. It also bring you the history of the Italian immigrants who brought them to New England. Available now on Amazon; just click here.

This story about Catherine Beecher was updated in 2022. Image of plum pudding By Musical Linguist, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1100178.

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