Feb 26 Wednesday. Have been baking Heat the oven twice
made 18 mince pies. Cake brown bread & ginger snaps
Mr Whitwell called & brought home some books.
I called to see Miss Eaton this afternoon she has failed
very much since I saw her nearly two weeks since. Mrs.
Wright is sick with the pleurisy & lung fever, both have watches
Abby & Malvina spent this evening here The boys have
all gone to the meeting house to a sing Pleasant & mild
A[u]gustus here to dine
Eighteen mincemeat pies! Hard to fathom a domestic pantry, pie safe or cold shelf that could hold 18 mince meat pies all at once, let alone an oven that would bake even half that number at one time. Cake, cookies, and bread, too.
The brown bread that Evelina baked today was a staple of the New England kitchen, and was made from some combination of Indian (corn) meal and rye. While other geographic areas of the United States, like the south, the mid-Atlantic and the expanding west, had turned to wheat as their preferred grain for baking bread, Yankee housewives, “who valued and esteemed brown bread as the food of their Puritan ancestors,*” held to the familiar cornmeal and rye. So it was in Evelina’s kitchen.
According to Sarah Josepha Hale, who published The Good Housekeeper in 1841, brown bread was “an excellent article of diet for the dyspeptic and the costive.” Mary Peabody Mann, in Christianity in the Kitchen, pronounced brown bread to be “a nutritive bread, though inferior in this respect to wheat,” and agreed that it produced “a laxative effect upon the system.” Lydia Maria Child, author of The American Frugal Housewife, liked brown bread for its economy and tradition. She advised that it “be put into a very hot oven, and baked three or four hours.”
After she got away from the cook room, Evelina was visited by Reverend Whitwell who either borrowed some books from her or lent some to her – the passage is unclear. Both of their homes must have housed a collection of books, and borrowing and sharing was common. A decade or so earlier, Easton had boasted of two or three lending libraries but these institutions had pretty well ceased to operate. Other, better organized libraries would be formed later that century, but in 1851, if someone wanted a book to read, he or she borrowed it from a friend or bought the publication.
In the neighborhood, Miss Eaton was still failing and now, under the same roof, Mrs. Wright, mother of Harriet Holmes, was believed to be dying, also. Neighbors were helping Mrs. Holmes with the care and feeding of the two invalids.
*Judith Sumner, American Household Botany, 2004, p. 48
evelinaames 