Household Papers and Stories (1896)

AUTHOR: Stowe, Harriet Beecher

KEYWORDS: Abolition, animals, education, environment, food, labor rights, Phrenology, race, women's rights

Catharine Esther Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The American Woman's Home

SUMMARY (Bryn Skibo, edited Deborah Madsen)

While Beecher mentions the “vegetarian doctrine being preached in America,” her narrator does not explicitly support it, only to say that the vegetables available throughout America are so varied and satisfying (assuming they have been properly prepared) that one could be very happy eating only vegetables. In Chapter X, the wife of the narrator asks him to write an article for The Atlantic on cookery, following their experiences over the summer in which they saw that America was filled with fine materials and beautiful houses but the food served was not good: “if the stomach is fed with sour bread and burnt coffee, it will raise such rebellions that the eyes will see no beauty anywhere” (154). Though the husband suggests that his wife write the piece, she argues that she would not know how and he, as an observer, would be better suited to write about “a pure woman’s matter” (155).

America is described as a land of plenty, but also as a land which neglects its plenty. Returning from a voyage to Europe, the narrator describes the many vegetable platters he is served in New York upon his arrival, including “Indian corn steaming in enormous piles, and great smoking tureens of the savory succotash, an Indian gift to the table for which civilization need not blush” (156). With all this variety, the vegetarian does not have to go without: “Verily, the thought has often impressed itself on my mind that the vegetarian doctrine preached in America left a man quite as much as he had capacity to eat or enjoy, and that in the midst of such tantalizing abundance he really lost the apology which elsewhere bears him out in praying upon his less gifted and accomplished animal neighbors” (156). The narrator compliments the cooking of Britain and France, but says America leaves travelers wanting and unsure.

He divides cooking into 5 categories: bread, butter, meat, vegetables, tea. He disregards confections because they are not eaten to benefit “but only with the hope of not being injured by them” (157). His biggest issue with them, it seems, is that women spend more time and effort making nice cakes and “clear jellies” than cooking meat properly (i.e. not in grease), and making good bread and butter. “It seems impossible to get the idea into the minds of people that what is called common food, carefully prepared, becomes, in virtue of that very care and attention, a delicacy, superseding the necessity of artificially compounded dainties” (158). “As regards the department of Vegetables, their number and variety in America are so great that a table might almost be furnished by these alone. Generally speaking, their cooking is a more simple art, and therefore more likely to be found satisfactorily performed, than that of meats” (175).