O Say Can You See?

Recipe of the Week: Julia Child’s Le Glorieux (flourless chocolate cake)

Today’s post is the fourteenth in a series of weekly Julia Child recipes. This week, finance director Beth Kline reveals the poetry behind baking a decadent chocolate dessert.

“A Very Rich, Very Light Chocolate Cake”

Julia called this cake a “dark and delicious cousin of the Quatre Quarts,” the yellow butter pound cake that originally called for a quarter pound of its four ingredients—eggs, sugar, flour, and butter. Le Glorieux, however, uses cornstarch instead of flour, and 5 large eggs. An essential step is to sift the cornstarch before sprinkling it into the egg mixture, a step easily handled with a sifter or a simple wire strainer. In Julia’s kitchen, these three strainers hung at the ready off the hood of the Garland range.

A Pilgrim or a poseur?

Many Americans share the experience of learning a story about the first Thanksgiving that bears only a passing resemblance to the historical truth. The classic narrative might go as follows: a group of religious separatists called Pilgrims sailed to Cape Cod on board the Mayflower in 1620. They landed on a rock they quickly named for their city of departure in England, Plymouth, and wrote an egalitarian compact to govern their new colony. The Pilgrims proceeded to make friends with the native inhabitants of New England, including Squanto, who taught the settlers how to grow American crops and hunt and fish in the New World. To cement a bond of friendship, the Pilgrims decided to invite the Indians to a feast they called Thanksgiving with cooked turkey, cranberry sauce, potatoes, and pumpkin pie.

Teaching in a digital classroom

Over the past few months, the museum has dipped its toes into the wild world of webinars (presentations given over the Internet, in live time). Given the cost of traveling for professional development, it’s no surprise that we’ve all taken webinars before, but now, we’re running webinars for others.

After spending a year teaching in the classroom, I knew some cues for seeing if my students were engaged. Were they volunteering to participate? Did they ask for clarifications? Were their eyes on me or out the window? With a webinar, teaching feels very different.

Recipe of the Week: Thanksgiving with Julia Child

With turkey day fast approaching, cooks around the country are whipping up grocery lists and getting ready for what is the equivalent of a marathon for many home chefs. With the release of the film Julie & Julia earlier this year and a renewed interest in Julia Child’s recipes and methods, many of you might be thinking: What Would Julia Do?

In November 2000, Business Week ’s Thane Peterson asked the question of Julia herself in an interview about holiday cooking. Julia’s advice for Thanksgiving? Plan ahead. Get things started ahead of time: Make your pumpkin pie filling, string your string beans, and cream your onions. If your family is anything like mine, there are decades-long debates still going strong over whether to cook the stuffing inside the turkey or out. Julia offered a unique approach: bake the stuffing in a “great big fat squash” and baste it with turkey juices.

Julia Child cooked many Thanksgiving dinners on this six-burner professional Garland range. In an interview with Smithsonian researchers in 2001 she said, “ . . . for a big turkey, everything just fits very well into that oven. And I just love it. I would take it to my grave if it would fit.”

Food enthusiasts and amateur chefs have long looked to Julia for guidance and inspiration around the holidays. Her mashed potato recipe was featured in NPR Morning Edition host Bob Edwards’ 2003 Thanksgiving Fantasy Feast with dishes from celebrity chefs Maida Heatter, Paul Prudhomme, and Wolfgang Puck. In 2000, Julia was invited to demonstrate a few of her recipes on Good Morning America, including a recipe for roast turkey from Julia Child’s Kitchen Wisdom.

Instead of featuring a new dish as part of our Recipe of the Week series, we’ve decided to highlight one we’ve already tested. Every Thanksgiving feast needs mashed potatoes, and this recipe includes a great idea for using your leftovers!

Whether you plan to make turducken or tofurkey for your holiday, remember to heed Julia’s most important advice: “ . . . above all, have a good time.”  And be sure to share your cooking experiences with us.

After you’ve eaten your fill, you might consider working off some of those Thanksgiving calories by taking a stroll down to the Mall to see Julia Child’s kitchen for yourself. The museum will be open on Thanksgiving Day until 5:30 pm and will have extended hours on Friday, Nov. 27, and Saturday, Nov. 28 (open until 7:30 pm).

Dana Allen-Greil is the new media project manager at the National Museum of American History.

Snake oil is no balm for America

There is no shortage of snake oil in America. Whether sold by politicians as endless campaign promises, or by spammers tempting us with virility enhancers and other elixirs of life, we are all too familiar with snake oil and its salesmen.

What America needs is a good, honest BALM . And I have just the thing—a little something for most anything that ails you—in our patent medicine collection at the National Museum of American History. Currently we have over 600 remedies available (for browsing only!) on our Web site Balm of America: Patent Medicine Collection. Here you will find humor (probably unintentional), snake oil salesmanship, and quackery, but also “regular medicine”: common remedies used to alleviate symptoms and pain.

I have spent a lot of time digging up bits and pieces of the stories behind these products and the people who made them. It can be fun and frustrating; while some products are well known, others have come and gone, leaving few traces. Here are some facts and speculation about two such products:

Balm of America

Balm of America was a cough and cold remedy offered by the Boston apothecary, Thomas Hollis, in the mid-nineteenth century. The name, suggesting a cure for all the ills of our nation, seemed a perfect fit for our site’s title.

Balm of America broadside, mid-19th century.
 Note the disclaimer at the bottom: “The Balm of America will be found on trial to be all that can be reasonably expected of Medicine…”

To add to the product’s allure, the name also suggests that most-famous-of-all-balms, the “Balm of Gilead,” a substance highly valued for its medicinal value since antiquity. [“Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? Why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?” Jeremiah 8:22]

Was Hollis selling snake-oil? His establishment in Boston was one of the oldest (est. 1821) and most widely respected, and his other proprietary mixtures generally had rather simple, prosaic names: Hollis’s Lozenges, Pectoral Syrup, Horse Liniment, Syrup of Sarsaparilla, etc.

Hollis Store, ca 1923. The dark blob of shadow at the top is from his large mortar and pestle sign.

Then I came across this: Populus candicans is called Balm of Gilead in America . The buds of this common tree, also known as balsam poplar, exude a resin that is used medicinally, especially for coughs and pulmonary complaints.

Perhaps Hollis’ cough cure referred simply to this native species, the “Balm of Gilead” in America. Many local folk remedies found their way into mainstream medicine and became widely distributed. Maybe this was Hollis’ “Valuable Discovery.” In Appalachian folk medicine, Balm of Gilead Buds were known as “Bam Gilly Buds,” and they are widely available today in many herbal remedies .

Of course this is pure speculation on my part. No government regulation existed to require Hollis to reveal the ingredients in his preparations, so his formula remains a mystery.

White Eagle’s Indian Oil Liniment

Sixty years later, the proprietors of White Eagle’s Indian Oil Liniment were not as free of government oversight.

Side of box for White Eagle’s Indian Oil Liniment, noting the product’s original name.

I found the liniment listed in the American Medical Association's 1921 Nostrums and Quackery section on “Misbranded Drugs and Foods: Convictions Under the Food and Drugs Act Government chemists found no rattlesnake oil in the liniment (mostly kerosene), and the claim that it would cure diphtheria, hay-fever, goiter, deafness and rheumatism was declared false and fraudulent. The proprietors of the White Eagle Medicine Company of Piqua, Ohio were Aaron P. and Caroline McCarty. They changed the name and label on their product, paid the fine of $25 each, and were back in business.

 
Bottle of snake oil “The Old Indian Remedy” and “Chief White Eagle”, A.P. McCarty, from the box.

I was able to learn more about Aaron P. McCarty through his famous son, heavy weight champion of 1913, Luther McCarty. Luther died tragically in the ring, on May 24, 1913, killed by a blow from opponent Arthur Pelkey. News articles following the death revealed more about the father: A. [Aaron or Anton] P. McCarty traveled about the country under the name of Chief White Eagle selling his rattlesnake oil. Although he was widely believed to have Indian blood, he admitted that he was of Scotch-Irish descent.

Worthy balms or worthless nostrums? Honest apothecaries or snake oil salesmen? Take a look at our collection and let us know what you know about these products and their proprietors.

Diane Wendt is Associate Curator in the Division of Medicine and Science at the National Museum of American History.