Gathering the girls around her, she finished up her pastry-making discussion, stressing the significance of keeping everything involved with the process as cool as possible, from the ingredients to the equipment and even the environment where the pastry is made. It is difficult to make puff paste in the summer, unless in a cellar or very cool room, and on a marble surface, she told them. If ice is available, it should be placed under the butter as it sits on the paste board and also in the water used to mix with the paste. Even the warmth of the hands can injure the paste, she explained, so it is best to use a knife to transfer it. After the paste is mixed it should be set in a cool place until it is time for the last rolling.
She also told them that while it is fine to use lard for a regular pastry (pie) crust, or a combination of lard and butter, puff paste needs to be made entirely out of butter, as the result is much more flavorful and it helps the dough rise into delicate paper-thin sheets when baked.
Although many of the cooking basics and concepts Mrs. Goodfellow preached have been integrated into contemporary cooking instruction, her cooking school and classes were quite different from those we know today. Goodfellow's students were not attending to get a culinary degree so they could become a restaurant chef or food critic. Lessons did not take place in a classroom setting, but rather in the kitchen in her pastry shop.
Not much is known about Mrs. Goodfellow's teaching style or how the classes were structured. Eliza Leslie's books probably give the most insight, and her commentary in addition to other brief descriptions depict Mrs. Goodfellow as being no-nonsense, yet fair and kind. There is also the feeling that she was passionate about her work, and this enthusiasm was passed on to at least some of her students.
Those attending the lectures were all women—mostly the daughters and wives of upper-class society in Philadelphia as well as other American locations as far away as Charleston, South Carolina. (There is a possibility that servants and boardinghouse workers were also sent to Mrs. Goodfellow's by their employers from time to time in order to enhance their cooking abilities.) These society women needed to learn how to create extravagant dinners and desserts for a variety of entertaining situations. Although men were indeed pastry chefs, cooks, and caterers at this time, they learned their craft through apprenticeships.
This model was based upon what had been happening in England in terms of cooking education, where confectioners and pastry chefs had been teaching classes and writing books about their talents since the eighteenth century, thus giving them a second income source. An enterprising gentleman named Edward Kidder is considered to be proprietor of perhaps the most well-known of England's early cookery schools, which he operated out of several London locations in the early 1700s. The recipes he taught can be traced back to a cooking manual he used in his classes entitled Receipts of Pastry and Cookery: For the Use of His Scholars. The book has been found in both manuscript and printed forms and is thought to date from between the 1720s and 1740s. Pastry recipes are definitely the focus. Reflective of the time period, however, most of the pies contain savory fillings, as the use of sugar was just beginning to spread from the upper class to the general public. Even the dishes under the heading “Sweet Pyes” are what we would consider a main dish today rather than a dessert. Examples include recipes for “A Lamb Pye,” “Egg Pyes” and “A Lumber Pye” (which contained minced veal and beef seasoned with spices and pippin apples). He also refers to this type as a humble pie.1
It is unclear whether the manuscripts were dictated by Kidder to his students, or copied from one of the printed versions. In any case, this manual was meant to serve as a textbook, and the simplicity of the recipes and lack of detailed instructions suggest that its users already knew or would soon learn the necessary measurements and cooking times for each. The fact that Kidder was able to produce so many copies implies that his activities were successful. In addition to instructing students at his shop, he also advertised that he taught ladies in their own homes.2
Twenty years later, the previously mentioned Elizabeth Raffald was another resourceful Briton who shared her pastry-making skills through teaching and writing. She was an extraordinary entrepreneur, sort of an eighteenth-century English version of Martha Stewart, according to University of Pennsylvania professor and folklore, culture, and food historian Janet Theophano.3 Raffald's recipes were decidedly sweeter in nature, which was not surprising, since just like Mrs. Goodfellow, she operated her cooking school out of her confectionary shop. In addition, sugar was gaining in popularity by this time. Her book, The Experienced English Housekeeper, even features a chapter entitled “Observations on Making Decorations for a Table,” in which she gives detailed instructions and recommendations on how to fashion dazzling creations out of sugar, including spinning delicate gold and silver webs to cover sweetmeats for the dessert table. She also gives guidance for making fluffy meringue whips and syllabubs, custards and attractive molded flummery, as well as transparent puddings, or jellies that would serve as their quivery base, creating the look of a fish pond or what Eliza Leslie later referred to as a “floating island.”4
Around this same time, another British pastry cook, Elizabeth Marshall, ran a patisserie and cookery school in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Like Raffald, she also wrote a book based on her recipes, entitled The Young Ladies' Guide in the Art of Cookery, subtitled Being a Collection of useful Receipts, Published for the Convenience of the Ladies committed to her Care, by Eliz. Marshall. A significant feature of her book is that it involves large amounts of expensive imported ingredients such as truffles, morels, pineapples, and lemons. So, it is likely that her clientele was upper-class ladies who needed to know how to prepare fancy dishes for their social events, as with Mrs. Goodfellow's students. Marshall also recommends washing butter in order to remove extra salt before using in the cheesecake, pudding, and sweet pastry recipes she taught her pupils to prepare, just as Goodfellow did. Her version, however, contains the interesting twist of washing the butter in rosewater,5 perhaps to impart some of this delicate taste to the baked goods.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in the American colonies, a few lady pastry cooks also began to share their cookery skills, giving wealthy girls and women the ability to learn to make some of these luxuries themselves. In 1731 a woman named Martha Gazley ran an announcement in the New York Gazette advertising that she taught pastry making.6 And in early eighteenth-century Louisiana, the French Canadian governor Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville had the insight to offer cooking lessons to prospective brides for his colonists taught by his experienced housekeeper, Madame Langlois. The governor's idea was to give these young ladies the knowledge to modify unfamiliar American foods into recipes recognizable to the Old World palate during times when their stock of imported goods might be running low. One can only imagine the types of French-inspired dishes they concocted, but unfortunately the concept did not stick as the girls staged the “Petticoat Rebellion” at having to substitute cornbread for French bread.7
There were also classes in cookery taught at the Moravian Seminary in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in the eighteenth century. The Moravian Seminary was a school for wealthy girls from all over the country, not only those of the Moravian faith. Many regional food recipes from this school, such as Moravian sugar cake, ended up in manuscript cookbooks of wealthy southern ladies.8
In colonial Philadelphia Mary Newport was a pastry cook with a Norris Alley location,9 who later possibly moved her business to Dock Street. It is not known whether she gave pastry-making lessons, but by 1796, her niece, Elizabeth Sturgis, was advertising that she had taken over her aunt's business of “pastry cook in all its branches” and had removed from Dock Street to No. 185, South Second Street. She includes the following notation at the bottom of the advertisement: “Young ladies taught by the month on moderate terms.”10 It is likely Sturgis was a Quaker as she references her “Friends” in the announcement; it is not known what instruction she provided or if it encompassed more than pastry making.
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In any case, it was not long after when we have our first confirmation that Mrs. Goodfellow had opened her business. She was teaching while she was married to (her second husband) Robert Coane, as per several sources, including a recipe book that dates from the early nineteenth century and is now housed at the Independence National Historic Park Library. This manuscript cookbook contains some recipes for “Mrs. Coanes Puddings,” and the unknown owner had written “Mrs. Goodfellow” next to the Mrs. Coane attribution. There is also a date listed—1808—so perhaps this is when the person made the name correction (the same year the widow Coane married William Goodfellow). It is not clear whether the manuscript's owner attended classes given by Mrs. Coane before she was Mrs. Goodfellow, or if she got the recipes in another way. The recipes listed include two lemon puddings, two “Cocoa Nut” (puddings), two almond puddings, orange (pudding), two apple puddings, two citron puddings, two “Potatoe” puddings, and “To Make Paste.”11
While the exact date Mrs. Goodfellow began teaching or under what name is uncertain (it is possible she began while married to her first husband or soon after his death), she knew that Philadelphians highly valued the handiwork that went into crafting sweets and fine baked goods, and that the city's elite in particular expected an abundance of these treats to appear on the tables at their many social functions. So, although most households had servant assistance, women would also make particular dishes on their own, as a way of showing off their talents. The cooking skills that seemed to be the most significant appear to have been making pastry and sweetmeats and preserving fruit, as these were most often mentioned by Philadelphia ladies in their diaries and letters from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.12
Because sugar was so expensive, sugared fruit was a kind of status symbol, and women would spend long hours over the hot cooking fire producing these confectionaries.13 They would begin by making a clarified sugar syrup, which required combining large quantities of loaf sugar with fresh spring water and egg whites and boiling the mix over the open fire. Once it was cooked, it could be used right away, or bottled and used at a later date.14 Such a tricky and time-consuming procedure was considered more of an artistic feat than a lowly household duty. Reputations were made and upheld over colorful, transparent sweetmeats that glittered like stained glass on the banqueting tables of wealthy socialites.15
Preserving fruit was also a practical way to enjoy summer and fall bounty such as juicy peaches, plums, and strawberries through the cold winter months, putting color on the table when fresh fruit was unavailable. So even though it is unlikely that these ladies enjoyed the tedious process, the end result was something they could be proud of and at the same time helped cement their social positions.
Pastry making was ranked among the highest of all cooking skills for ladies to master. It was considered on par with other refinements such as having a thorough understanding of literature, learning a foreign language, producing fine needlework, painting, performing music, and dancing. Even the wealthiest women would learn how to make pastry. For some, it may have been one of the few household tasks they did, and even then, they made sure they didn't get mussed.
This point is made clear by Frances Trollope in her book Domestic Manners of the Americans. Published in 1832, Trollope describes a typical day of an upper-class Philadelphia lady:
Upon rising, she first spends some time choosing which of her exquisite outfits to wear. After dressing in her finery, she then descends to her parlor for a leisurely breakfast of salt fish, fried ham and coffee prepared by servants and served by her footman. A carriage arrives for her at eleven; but until then she is employed in the pastry-room, her snow-white apron protecting her mouse-coloured silk. Twenty minutes before her carriage should appear, she retires to her chamber, as she calls it, shakes, and folds up her still snow-white apron, smooths her rich dress, and with nice care, sets on her elegant bonnet.16
Many Philadelphia girls learned the pastry-making skill as part of their boarding school education. In addition to studying French, art, and literature, they would be sent “off campus” to Mrs. Goodfellow's. The background of these girls varied. Although all were in the upper echelons socially, some may have been the daughters of wealthy Philadelphia merchants, others part of the Quaker circle like the previously mentioned Elizabeth Ellicott Lea, author of the mid-nineteenth-century cookbook Domestic Cookery.
It appears that several members of one of Philadelphia's most prominent Quaker families, the Emlens, also probably attended Mrs. Goodfellow's. There are a number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century manuscript cookbooks with connections to this family, and the latter include Goodfellow recipes. One handwritten recipe book compiled in Philadelphia by an unidentified author lists a recipe for Jumbles attributed to “Mrs. (Elizabeth [Emlen]) Physick from Mrs. Goodfellow's.17 Mrs. Physick was the wife of the well-known innovative surgeon Philip Syng Physick. Another manuscript cookbook owned by a Margaret Emlen Howell lists Goodfellow recipes including “Jumbles (Mrs. Goodfellow's),” “puff paste,” and “buns” (i.e., Spanish Bunns).18 A manuscript cookbook compiled by Ellen Markoe Emlen also includes recipes for jumbles and puff paste,19 seemingly two of Goodfellow's cooking school staples.
As word spread of Mrs. Goodfellow's success, families from miles outside the city's radius began sending their daughters to take lessons at her school, even if they were not attending boarding school. For example, Delaware girls traveled north to attend her classes, where among other things they learned to make “‘George Washington's Soup,’ a rich blend of crabmeat, sweet cream, bacon, tiny meat balls and hard boiled eggs.”20 Susan Israel, daughter of General Joseph Israel of Revolutionary War fame, was one of Goodfellow's admirers who traveled all the way from Christiana, Delaware, to attend classes in 1807.21
There were even some Southern belles that were Goodfellow students. Before the Civil War many Southerners wintered in Philadelphia, soaking up some culture during the colder months and then heading back to their plantations in the summer, or if not there, then the beaches of Cape May, New Jersey. “There was this large class of very well-to-do leisured people who had nothing to do but go to parties and dinners,” says food historian William Woys Weaver. “Plenty of Southern women came to these [Philadelphia] boarding schools, and I understand that one of their required courses was to study at Mrs. Goodfellow's. They all essentially learned debutante sideboard food—that's what [Eliza Leslie's] Seventy-Five Receipts is all about—how to make a good roast standing dish as they were called—things to put on the sideboard during parties and buffets.”22
Although not much is known about most of them, similar cooking schools eventually sprang up in Philadelphia as other knowledgeable cooks tried to cash in on the concept. In referring to this early nineteenth-century timeframe, Rufus Wilmot Griswold stipulates that the education of women was managed better during this period often called the “golden age of America,” than later in the century. “Among the institutions that flourished here then were cooking-schools, in which the most important of sciences was taught in a manner that contributed largely to the comfort of the people,” he wrote.23
Philadelphia ladies Hannah Widdifield and the previously mentioned terrapin cookery expert Mrs. Rubicam are two that are considered Goodfellow competitors. Hannah Widdifield was also a Quaker and the matriarch of a family who worked as professional cooks and confectioners in Philadelphia. Like Goodfellow, she expanded on her skills by teaching cookery during the early to mid-nineteenth century, although it is not clear if her instruction was designed for the public like Mrs. Goodfellow's, or if it was set up more as an apprentice system.24 And unlike Goodfellow, she did produce a cookbook of her recipes, published by her daughters Sarah and Mary after her death.25 Entitled Widdifield's New Cook Book: or, Practical Receipts for the House-wife, the recipes are a diverse collection of what was popular in Philadelphia at that time, featuring basics such as bean soup and boiled fowls as well as the interesting-sounding “salsify dressed as oysters�
� and “stewed rabbit, French mode” in addition to the rich cakes and pastry favored by the upper class. She also made sure to include directions for the preparation of dishes for the sick and convalescent.26
The preface of Widdifield's book states, “The author, in preparing this work, has endeavored to make the contents as plain and explicit as possible, in order that they may be found practicable by the young, as well as the more experienced housewife.”27 Like Goodfellow, she sought to share her cooking skills with young ladies in order to prepare them for marriage and to make them aware of the details they would need to know in order to run an efficient household. Indeed, in nineteenth-century manuscript cookbooks, recipes attributed to Widdifield are often found in close proximity to Goodfellow's, so perhaps girls attended both schools in order to receive the most comprehensive culinary education possible. Or maybe they were simply swapping recipes among their social circle, recording them in their cookery notebooks.
Mrs. Goodfellow wanted to provide her students with a thorough working knowledge of what was wholesome and suitable fare for any occasion. For example, the recipes attributed to her in one manuscript cookbook that dates from the mid-nineteenth century include not only the typical sweet dessert dishes such as almond pudding, gingerbread, and jumbles, but also some savory fare such as a “Ragou of Onions,” “Pigs feet souced,” and artichokes. In addition, there are instructions for making preparations for the sick, including barley water (a traditional British “soft drink”), tapioca and sago (starches extracted from tropical plants that were boiled with water and flavored with wine, sugar, and nutmeg), and “water gruel,” a thin porridge incorporating oatmeal or “Indian” (corn) meal spiked with a little wine and sugar for taste.28
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