Mrs. Goodfellow

by Becky Diamond

  This handwritten cookbook is just one example of the collections of recipes likely taught in her school, but it represents the variety of dishes Mrs. Goodfellow was teaching, giving these girls well-rounded culinary training. This fact is affirmed in the 1907 Colonial Receipt Book, a collection of nineteenth-century dishes that became popular in and around the Philadelphia area, including “celebrated old receipts used a century ago by Mrs. Goodfellow's Cooking School.” In this cookbook's introduction, the Goodfellow experience is described as follows: “Under her able training many of our exquisite yet practical ancestors gained a thorough knowledge of cooking—from soups and the ‘Staff of Life’ to plum-pudding and Queen cakes.”29 A comparable compilation of recipes, Famous Old Receipts Used a Hundred Years and More in the Kitchens of the North and the South, maintains that young ladies learned the art of cooking at Mrs. Goodfellow's, “it being the last touch of their education preparatory to entering society.”30

  The memoirs of Philadelphia Quaker Elizabeth W. Levick provide similar and additional insight into Goodfellow's school. Born in 1789 to Isaac and Mary Jones, Elizabeth was educated very well, receiving instruction in advanced literary works as well as sewing and embroidery from two English women, Ann Gilbert and Elizabeth Pritchard, who had their school in the Pine Street Meeting House. She later continued embroidery lessons with Julia Bader, described as a kind and lively German woman who had received her training at the Moravian school in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. When Elizabeth was in her mid-twenties she was also fortunate enough to attend botany lectures with a small group of other young ladies given by Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse in one of the rooms of the American Philosophical Society.

  While she was not one of Goodfellow's students, her sister Mary was, and Elizabeth would often tag along when Mary attended classes. She describes the cookery school as being very different from that of “Miss Julia,” referring to it as “a course of instruction given in pastry and other cooking, by Betsey Goodfellow, a famous maker of cakes and pies at that time. ‘Mrs. Goodfellow’ was a very respectable, ladylike person, who having been thrown on her own resources, opened a pastry cookery establishment, which soon became famous.”31

  In the memoirs, Levick gives no explanation as to why her sister was a pupil of Goodfellow's yet she was not. However, her narrative seems to indicate that she and Goodfellow had a fairly familiar relationship, as she calls Mrs. Goodfellow “Betsey” and mentions her “need” to work after what she is surely referring to as the consecutive deaths of her husbands.

  It is also clear from Levick's tone that she liked and respected Mrs. Goodfellow. She continues her description of Mrs. Goodfellow and the school by claiming that “her pupils were the daughters of our best citizens, and many a household, for years after, bore evidence of her skill in teaching. Her especial talent was in the making of fine cakes and pastry, though she also gave occasional instruction in the preparing of boned turkey, salads and the like.”32

  As previously mentioned, another difference between Goodfellow and some of her contemporaries is that she did not publish any of her recipes herself. The one cookbook that has been attributed to her, Mrs. Goodfellow's Cookery as It Should Be, was actually published after her death and, as Eliza Leslie adamantly claimed, many of the recipes it contained were not those of Mrs. Goodfellow.33 Being a cookbook writer conceivably would have helped Goodfellow reach an even wider audience, but it appears she achieved public acclaim and high enrollment in her school regardless.

  She encouraged her students to take detailed notes, which Eliza Leslie famously did and wrote a slew of cookbooks based on them. However, it is unlikely that Leslie's works had much of an impact on attendance at the cookery school. Mrs. Goodfellow's school had already been open for at least two decades by the time Leslie published her first cookbook, Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes and Sweetmeats, in 1827.

  In addition to their own notebooks, it is thought Goodfellow's students also used cookbooks written by British authors Maria Eliza Ketelby Rundell and Hannah Glasse.34 Although these two never became cooking instructors (or if they were, it was never recorded), Mrs. Goodfellow must have highly respected their cooking abilities as she set up her recipes in the same style and used their books as references for her students.

  In America's early days, the cuisine was so highly influenced by the British heritage of its settlers that the American cookbook was a traditional English cookbook, with those by Rundell and Glasse the most popular. So although there had been a few published American cookbook authors by the time Mrs. Goodfellow was teaching, she probably was simply following her (assumed) British roots and traditions by borrowing and modifying these two authors' recipes to suit American tastes and ingredients. And while it is unlikely that Mrs. Goodfellow worried about adhering to fashion, she was in fact using the most well-known cookery sources at that time as her textbooks.

  British cookbooks were also held in high regard by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans since these authors often boasted of gaining their cookery knowledge and experience through direct assignments in high-ranking, upper-class households. Americans continued to be fascinated and impressed by the European aristocracy, even if they had often journeyed to America to escape the class and religious strictures of one kind or another.35

  First published in London in 1747, Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery was widely used throughout the United States and has been referred to as “the most influential cookbook in the English-speaking colonies.”36 In writing about it for a facsimile version of the first American edition in 1805, food historian Karen Hess states, “It was the most English of cookbooks. It was the most American of cookbooks. George Washington owned a copy, as did Thomas Jefferson; indeed, recipes attributed to Mrs. Glasse are included in cookery manuscripts kept by Jefferson's granddaughters, for example.”37

  Then in the early nineteenth century, Maria Rundell's A New System of Domestic Cookery became the cookbook of preference, outselling all others at the time. An American edition was first published in 1807, not long after the English version, and was reprinted sixteen times in the U.S. until 1844.38 In the cookbook's opening remarks, Rundell states that the recipes and advice within should serve as guidance for her children. She also explains that she wanted to create the type of cookery reference book that would have been helpful to her when she was a young lady.39

  According to food historian Jan Longone, Richard Briggs's New Art of Cookery was also used as a teaching tool by Mrs. Goodfellow. “This book was very popular among the Quakers of Philadelphia and influential through its use in Mrs. Goodfellow's Cooking School, which flourished in that city in the early nineteenth century,” maintains Longone.40 The cookbook was an American version of The English Art of Cookery, which documented Briggs's inventive recipes while chef of the Globe Tavern in London. (He also did stints at Fleet Street, the White Hart Tavern, Holborn, and Temple Coffee-House.) Originally published in London in 1788, the edition used by Goodfellow and her students (The New Art of Cookery, According to the Present Practice) was printed in Philadelphia in 1792.41

  So Mrs. Goodfellow was definitely keeping pace with the times, teaching recipes and menus that were the most fashionable, both back in Britain as well as locally. She had her finger on the pulse of what young ladies needed to know in order to position themselves favorably in society.

  This was not always an easy task, as it appears that these girls were often quite unwilling students. Many times they were forced by their mothers to attend cooking school; they weren't going because they necessarily wanted to.

  For example, a nineteenth-century letter written by a young Quaker from Philadelphia named Nancy Howell breezily describes a trip to Wilmington, Delaware, where she stayed with Friends and attended meeting with them. While the letter was addressed to her mother, at the bottom she writes a “Note to Molly and Miss [Sarah] Emlen [perhaps younger cousins or sisters]: ‘I heard before I came out of town that Sally intended to go to a cookery school, poor girl.
’” She doesn't mention Mrs. Goodfellow's specifically, so it is unknown to which cooking school Nancy refers. However, the previously mentioned handwritten recipe book owned by Margaret Emlen Howell that includes some Goodfellow recipes is part of the same set of correspondence, making it likely some of these family members were Goodfellow students.42

  This short note illustrates the fact that attending cooking school wasn't exactly the top choice of activities for most girls in the early nineteenth century. Christopher Crag's tongue-in-cheek piece from the 1809 Tangram, or Fashionable Trifler goes into vivid detail. Although meant to be pure satire, his deliciously comical interpretation still provides some insight into what these girls thought and felt about this “requirement,” and also how Mrs. Goodfellow was viewed by Philadelphia society: as both a skilled, practical cook and a strict and orderly teacher.

  In the spoof, Crag refers to Mrs. Goodfellow as

  an ancient madre of five-lorded acquirement, who had invitingly thrown open the doors of her convent to such of the frolicksome and fashionable belles of this our frugal city.…or in the simple terms of the madre's dialect, had opened a cook school for the edification of the pretty fair ones; where, by the assistance of her notable and long experience, she professed to instruct them, in the art and mystery of pickling cabbages, brewing gooseberry wine, boning turkeys, and making puff paste apple-tarts. To these propositions the young ladies sufficiently testified their abhorrence, maintaining, as such pursuits were unknown in polite literature, they would violently protest against this system of education; but their mamas, kind souls, being determined in this case to rule the roast, insisted on their attendance at the epicurean hall.43

  So, whether they were from a Quaker background or not, these young ladies were testing those in charge; resisting authority while trying to assert their independence. However, Mrs. Goodfellow managed to win them over, as Crag explains:

  Convinced at length, of the absurdity of opposition, they were content to call upon the madre, who by an exhibition of unaffected grace, and a no very small donation of oven trumpery, prevailed in determining them upon receiving lessons in domestick accomplishment. Unwilling as they might first have been, to yield to the persuasion of their careful mothers, they were now equally as eager to become the mistresses of cookery, when they received assurance from the madre, that they should not be obligated to acquit the duties of basting, tasting, and pen-feathering.44

  Eliza Leslie's comments about Mrs. Goodfellow in her books allude to the fact that she did not tolerate sullenness, japery, or dim-witted behavior in her classroom. She strongly felt the skills she was teaching were on par with any of the academic higher learning the girls may have received, and therefore expected them to behave correctly. According to Leslie, if Mrs. Goodfellow's students were acting dull or silly she would quip, “It requires a head even to make cakes.”45

  Through her cookbooks Leslie also reinforced the idea that Mrs. Goodfellow followed a strict regimen regarding using only fine, quality ingredients. In Miss Leslie's New Cookery Book (1857), she comments at the end of the recipe for Spanish Buns, “These buns were first introduced by Mrs. Goodfellow; and in her school were always excellently made, nothing being spared that was good, and the use of soda and other alkalis being unknown in the establishment—hartshorn46 in cakes would have horrified her.”47

  Imagining what her kitchen looked like conjures up visions of a very orderly place where items were laid out before cooking and the ingredients were measured as precisely as possible. In this same tidy and practical vein, she liked to list ingredients first when dictating recipes to her students, as is shown in manuscript cookbooks from her school. Up to this point in time, recipes were usually written out in paragraph form, which could be somewhat confusing and allow more room for error. Through Eliza Leslie's cookbooks, this more useful method of recipe construction was passed on and popularized.

  Because Goodfellow started teaching in the early 1800s, it can be assumed her instruction was for open-hearth cooking, as food was cooked over an open fire with heavy kettles and awkward fireplace tools, such as the pivoting crane, until the 1820s, when cast-iron cookstoves were introduced. These new appliances covered and replaced the outmoded fireplaces and burned one-third less wood, which had become increasingly more difficult to obtain as acre after acre of North American forest was cut down. The stoves could also be fueled by coal and made cooking easier because their work surfaces were at waist level, saving housewives from constantly stooping. In the 1830s, most middle-class families bricked up their fireplaces and purchased the new stoves. By the 1850s, only rural families and poor Southerners continued with the old ways.48

  Goodfellow probably taught open-hearth methods of cooking through the time she was at her Dock Street location, but then switched over to cookstove techniques once she moved to Washington Square in 1835. (The fire insurance survey from this location indicates that there was indeed a stove there, as well as two ovens.)49 So she may have continued using a brick oven for some of the baking, as many enthusiasts of baked goods made this way claim it really is the preferred method (think of the brick-oven pizzas many of us find so tasty today).

  With their upper-class backgrounds, many of Goodfellow's students probably came to her school with limited cooking knowledge. As a result, she had her work cut out for her in order to prepare them to be self-sufficient in terms of meal planning. It is likely she used a demonstration format, at least at the beginning of a course, doing much of the work herself while the girls observed.

  It is not known if or how Mrs. Goodfellow graded or tested her students' learning. Although some of her students did write down the recipes they learned in class in their notebooks, it is doubtful that she gave handwritten tests given the practical nature of the course. Perhaps she measured their progress through oral questioning and “hands-on” assessments as their participation gradually increased over the course of a semester. This makes the most sense considering the circumstances as well as Eliza Leslie's comment that during her time at Goodfellow's she “took notes of every thing that was made, it being the desire of the liberal and honest instructress that her scholars should learn in reality.”50

  Whether they graduated with some sort of certificate or celebration is unknown, but according to Famous Old Receipts Used a Hundred Years and More in the Kitchens of the North and the South (1908), “boning a turkey gave one a diploma at this celebrated school.”51 Perhaps Goodfellow gave her students this task as a sort of “final exam.” And the Colonial Receipt Book claims that Susan Israel (who later became Mrs. Thomas Painter) “was graduated [from Mrs. Goodfellow's] with honors, which later grew into widespread appreciation of her recipes, all of which have been carefully preserved by her family, and tested many times before given to the public.” Indeed, several recipes in the cookbook were contributed by Mrs. Painter with attribution to Mrs. Goodfellow.52

  What happened to all the food the ladies created during their lessons is another mystery. It is probable that the students sampled the dishes there as part of the class, or maybe they were allowed to take a portion home, in order to share their handiwork with their families or eat later at their boarding schools. Perhaps it was even sold in the shop if Goodfellow thought the quality was high enough. And items not considered suitable for sale could have been given away to the young suitors who would wait eagerly outside her shop for the pretty girls to emerge, as suggested by Christopher Crag in his sarcastic Tangram piece. Crag writes that Goodfellow's shop “was daily honoured with the presence of a score or two of little foplings, who regularly came to storm the crusty wall of mutton pye, and masticate the dainty custard, whose existence was procured by the delicate exertion of these amiable fair-ones.”53

  Although it is not known for sure what happened to the students' creations, it is likely the food was never wasted. Food historian William Woys Weaver feels that if the girls made pound cake at Mrs. Goodfellow's, they took it back to their boarding school and had pound cake fo
r a couple of days with their meals. As he points out, that would make sense, because then it also becomes a reward. “I'm sure that food was not wasted unless of course it was a total disaster,” he said. “Boarding schools were on a budget. Girls probably paid a flat fee and that covered the cost of ingredients. You must realize Mrs. Goodfellow was buying her stuff wholesale; they bought items in large quantities in those days, such as thirty pounds of flour at a time, but she still had to watch her costs.”54

  Even though running the school would have required her to buy more ingredients than she needed to make the goods for her shop, the money she earned from teaching must have helped to defray these costs. Having the dual business of pastry shop and school allowed each one to advertise for the other. And the fact that Goodfellow was widowed three times indicates that she needed to support herself and her family, which she did.

  Weaver agrees that operating the school must have been lucrative or Goodfellow wouldn't have done it; she and the other cooking instructors took up teaching because they needed the money. The other cookery schools that existed in Philadelphia during Mrs. Goodfellow's period had something to do with the instructors' livelihood so it must have been a critical factor for them. Somebody like the previously mentioned Joseph Head, who was teaching French cooking at the Mansion House Hotel, may have taken up teaching to enhance and maintain his reputation and that of his hotel which had a restaurant. Just like the celebrity chefs on television today, these classes may have served as a form of advertising; a marketing tool.55