Metro Pulse/Gamut/An Old Fashioned Tennessee Thanksgiving

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Of Oysters, Booze, and Puree of Asparagus with Whipped Cream

by Jack Neely

America's favorite lie is that the past was "a simpler time." A century ago, in politics, in architecture, in attire, it was often a much more complicated time. That goes double for holiday meals.

Ask anybody what makes for a good old-fashioned Tennessee holiday dinner, and they'll probably tick it off like they're naming the Seven Dwarves: turkey and dressing, of course; maybe ham, either country ham or honey baked; mashed potatoes, or sweet potatoes, or both. Cranberry sauce. Maybe some turnip greens, maybe some kind of corn relish. The holiday dinner is almost like an homage to our forebears, as if we eat only food that we imagine our ancestors would have recognized.

Something as exotic as oyster dressing shows up in some Southern family dinners but has been known to appall traditionalists, who remark that oysters don't grow well in these parts. They might be surprised. As it turns out, compared to what Knoxvillians were eating on holidays a century ago, oyster dressing's a little on the conservative side.

Holiday meals aren't as well documented as Civil War troops movements or the terms of City Councilmen. However, if you're alert, you'll find evidences of holiday meals of long ago here and there, usually when you're not looking. Antiquarian Ron Allen recently found a Christmas Day menu, dated 1894, for the Palace Hotel, a big place which used to stand down on State Street, at the corner of Commerce.

That's remarkable in itself. Today, spending Thanksgiving Day or, God forbid, Christmas Day, eating in a restaurant is considered by many to be a pitiable sacrilege, another sad symptom of the disaffection of modern life. However, not only were many restaurants and saloons open on the holiest holidays during the Victorian era, but holiday meals were a big, competitive business among downtown hotels in particular: a century or more ago, the Palace, the Imperial, the Flanders, perhaps other hotels tried to outdo each other with their extravagant holiday menus.

A typical 1890s Christmas Day menu at the Hotel Imperial, at Gay and Clinch, for example, featured Stewed Terrapin, Maryland Style; Boiled Philadelphia Capon with Egg Sauce; Saddle of Elk; and, for dessert, Absinthe Jelly.

Though the Palace was considered to be a little cheaper than the Imperial, Allen's 1894 Palace Hotel Christmas Day menu was competitive. It opens with raw oysters, and serves them again in "Escalloped" form midway through the meal. You could enjoy some aspects of a traditional holiday meal at the Palace—they did serve turkey at the Palace—but even the turkey came stuffed with Oyster Dressing.

Among the hotel's other Christmas Day options were Prairie Chicken with Champignons, Red-Headed Duck with Petit Pois. With the Chicken Salad came Lobster Mayonnaise. For dessert, English Plum Pudding with Brandy Sauce, and Tutti Frutti Ice Cream, with French coffee.

Of course, this could have been a case of commercial pseudo-extravagance for the purpose of sounding impressive and sophisticated; there's no hard evidence that large numbers of people actually ate these dinners, or of whether actual Knoxvillians, as opposed to traveling salesmen, ate extravagant holiday dinners. To learn what Knoxvillians ate at home, we have to look at the cookbooks they made.

The only volume we know of that ever bore the title The Knoxville Cook Book was published 102 years ago. It includes contributions from about 150 Knoxvillians, from the prominent to the little known; among the known contributors were some black servants. We can only guess who was chiefly in charge of compiling these recipes, but leading the list of the cookbook's dozen directors is the name of Betty McGhee Tyson, the old-family Knoxvillian who would much later insist, via a gift, that Knoxville's airport be forever named for her aviator son, killed in World War I. We may assume that Capt. McGhee Tyson was raised on the recipes in this book.

It's full of revelations. Though it does include a few recipes for corn bread and biscuits, they're overwhelmed by the recipes that are more interesting than inspiring: Chaudfroid of Tongue with Aspic Jelly is in there, with a helpful illustration. Maryland Terrapin insists on plunging a live terrapin (did box turtles suffice?) into boiling water. (For the squeamish, the Very Satisfactory Mock Terrapin calls for two ducks and a pound of calf's liver.) The Mignon de Volaille calls for finely minced chicken, egg, milk, and mace to be molded into egg shells and steamed. The book shows us how to prepare Reed Birds, Calves' Brains, Pigeons on Toast, and Fricasseed Ox Tails.

On page 233 is something ostensibly more familiar: a recommended "Thanksgiving Dinner Menu." Use it as a guide for your family holiday meal this year. I dare you.

It's a multi-course meal and, yes, it does include turkey. But only after several courses, the first of which is "Oysters Served in Square Blocks of Ice." Oysters were a very big deal in Victorian Knoxville and had been since just before the Civil War. The Knoxville Cook Book includes 15 separate recipes for oysters: creamed oysters, smothered oysters, panned oysters, curried oysters, minced oysters, escalloped oysters, fried oysters, sautéed oysters, corn oysters, pickled oysters, oysters en Coquille, oyster cocktails. The Pig in a Blanket wasn't a hot-dog treat for kids, but an oyster wrapped in bacon. That's without even mentioning the most popular way to serve oysters, which was raw, perhaps with an Oscar sauce. As defined in the cookbook, "Oscar's Relish For Oysters" was a piquant and more complicated version of the modern cocktail sauce: tomato sauce, vinegar, olive oil, with horseradish (three times as much horseradish as tomato sauce, in fact), Tabasco, Worcestershire Sauce, and a chopped shallot.

My theory is that oysters played a municipal role in cities of the Southern interior; because oysters go bad quickly without refrigeration and have to be prepared fresh, edible oysters were proof that a city has very good train service.

The next course in this recommended Thanksgiving dinner was Puree of Asparagus with Whipped Cream. (Asparagus was especially popular in 1901: one recipe is called Asparagus In Ambush, and is a little hard to picture in its finished form, calling for egg yolks, butter, and tarragon vinegar, served in a hollowed loaf of bread.)

Followed by a glass of sherry. This was, after all, pre-prohibition Knoxville, which we often forget was a considerably more alcoholic place than the sober city we know today.

I remember the first Thanksgiving dinner when wine was served. It was sometime in the late '70s, I think, and it seemed thoroughly daring and modern, a deliberate slap at our Puritan forebears, especially the abstemious pilgrims who founded the holiday. My grandparents didn't indulge, and I suspected they didn't much approve of it.

But my grandparents' grandparents, had they lived in Knoxville in 1900, would have been well-acquainted with the custom and, in fact, would likely have been a little tipsy most of the time, especially at Thanksgiving. The Knoxville Thanksgiving menu includes five separate alcoholic drinks—sherry, sauterne, claret, Roman punch, and champagne—to be served with successive courses.

The motto for the Knoxville Thanksgiving feast, as cited in the Knoxville Cook Book, was a quote from a 17th-century Englishman, and he wasn't Myles Standish or the translator of the King James Bible.

With a few friends and a few dishes dine,
And much of mirth and moderate wine.

It's an obscure couplet from "Ode Upon Liberty" by the London Restoration-era poet Abraham Cowley. The rest of the stanza goes:

To thy bent mind some relaxation give,
And steal one day out of thy life to live.
Oh happy man, he cries, to whom kind Heaven
Has such a freedom always given
Why, mighty madman, what should hinder thee
From being every day as free?

After the Puree of Asparagus, and the sherry, came something more common sounding, baked fish and cucumber salad—but also with a glass of sauterne—as well as chicken soufflé "in cases." What sort of cases isn't explained, but if you look up the chicken soufflé recipe, it involves truffles, mushrooms, and "two large spoonfuls of Madeira wine."

In the recommended dinner, one was to wash that all down with a glass of claret.

Then came the traditional part: roast turkey, filled with chestnuts, and cranberry sauce. In the book's turkey recipes, the only stuffing mentioned, and perhaps the only variety known to Knoxvillians of 1901, is oyster stuffing, made of a quart of bread crumbs, 25 oysters, salt, pepper, butter, and "a suspicion of onion juice."

Accompanying the turkey on the side were corn and that traditional Southern holiday dish, macaroni.

Then comes the Roman Punch. It was a tart, sweet drink made of lemon zest and lemon, sugar, sherry and brandy. A lot of sherry and brandy, in fact. If I'm doing my math right, the Roman Punch as served cold at the Thanksgiving table was at least 40 proof.

Hope you saved some room for Roast Quail and celery salad. Followed by champagne.

Then dessert, which is less specific, just "Individual Ices." Most of those listed by that name are sherbets, but one had a special meaning at the holidays. A recipe for "Frozen Odds and Ends—For Midwinter" was presumably intended for solstice parties. Making it sounds like an intimidating process, and the results are a little hard to picture. It's made from milk, cream, sugar, cherries, mashed macaroons, blanched chestnuts, beaten egg whites, which you freeze together somehow and add whiskey and whipped cream. It serves 20, suggesting that Midwinter was a big deal for some folks.

Also on the Thanksgiving menu was "cake"—the cookbook gives us an enormous number of choices, over 40 different varieties, from Sarah Bernhardt Cake (named for the actress whom Knoxvillians were proud to claim, had performed here; it's something of raisins, almonds, and pineapple), Federal Cake (which contained a glass of wine and a glass of brandy), Robert E. Lee Cake (made of mashed banana and grated pineapple, though these ingredients were likely scarce at Chancellorsville) and, to be fair, this being Knoxville, Yankee Ginger Bread (which sounds like a more-conservative version of another historical recipe, Ponce De Leon Ginger Bread).

The cake, whatever you end up deciding, is naturally served with coffee—and Creme de Menthe. As prepared here 103 years ago, it was a thick, sweet drink made of spearmint and "proof spirits." The authors didn't specify which proof spirits, presumably because few could read the labels at this point.

Pies aren't quite as prolific, and, surprisingly, the cookbook seems never to have heard of holiday standard pumpkin pie, though it does include a bland-sounding pumpkin custard.

Included are two recipes for mince, or mincemeat, pie. Today, parents around the country will explain to their skeptical kids at the end of the holiday dinner that mincemeat pie doesn't really contain actual parts of deceased mammals. However, as baked in Knoxville in 1901, mincemeat pie really did include a good deal of meat, including "one large beef tongue, one and one-half pounds of beef suet"—along with three pounds of sugar, raisins, currants, apples, oranges, etc. For the record, standard recipes for mincemeat pie also contained hard cider, wine, and brandy.

Egg Nog was de rigeur at holiday parties, and was always alcoholic, typically with both whiskey and rum, more of the former than the latter. Other holiday drinks known in Knoxville a century ago include Lalla Rookh, a frozen eggnog, with rum and whiskey; and Christmas Punch.

Punch is, in this case, a literal term. Made from "half a gallon of good Jamaica rum" and a pint of brandy, along with an equal amount of water, several lemons, and a lot of sugar, it was stronger than any wine. But if you wanted to dilute Christmas Punch to make it tamer, for a reception, perhaps, the Knoxville Cook Book suggests that you could mix it with "a quart bottle of champagne."

It's hard to read these recipes without a little poignant melancholy. Six years after the publication of the Knoxville Cook Book, many of the favorite ingredients of a Knoxville holiday dinner were illegal.