Southern Provisions: The Creation and Revival of a Cuisine by David S. Shields

Author:David S. Shields [Shields, David S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226141251
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-03-22T22:00:00+00:00

The Wild Side

Wild meat held a peculiar exotic appeal to city buyers, the hotel and club cooks driving the demand for novelties; game immediately distinguished hotel meals from those served by even blue book cooks in New York and Boston town houses. De Voe described the appearance of antelope, badgers, bears, beavers, bighorn sheep, bison, black-tailed deer, caribou, deer, elks, foxes, groundhogs, guinea pigs, hares, lynx, moose, mountain goats, muskrats, opossums, otters, panthers, porcupines, raccoons, skunks, squirrels, and venison, noting frequency or rarity of appearance at the market and palatability. (Lynx did not appear at market, but De Voe wished to report its edibility from trappers’ accounts.) Yet the wealth of the metropolitan market was not registered in game so much as in fish and fowl. The fish section, including shellfish, operated as a shopper’s field guide, informing the cook on the basis of description about the color, size, and configuration of fish, shellfish, and turtles. Freshwater creatures appeared alongside the denizens of salt water in an abundance that would only be surpassed in the 1870s by Charles C. Leslie’s stall at the Charleston Market. The fowl and game birds would be unequaled in their variety and abundance.

City epicureanism, the cult of fine dining nurtured at Delmonico’s and the Union Club, placed a premium on certain game birds: the canvasback duck, the woodcock, the ricebird, the ruffed grouse, and the quail (in that order) comprised the chief wildfowl. The demand for these items marshaled steamships and railroads from the South and West to supply the city tables. High prices gave rise to a creature that would become, by the end of the century, the scourge of the waterways: the market gunner. In 1867 De Voe could already read the historical consequences of the culinary mystique surrounding these birds. The canvasback duck, “the finest and choicest wild duck known for the table,” owed its distinctive flavor to its diet of water celery, upon which it feeds during the late autumn in the eastern waterways. The flavor depended upon its feeding, so its season was short—late November to the first week in January—heightening its scarcity. Indeed, the rarity and fame were so great, that large numbers were shipped “by our swift steamers to Europe.”13 Prices in 1867 rose to $3 for a pair of canvasbacks, an amount exceeding by 50 percent any other fowl. He asked how the market could be regularly supplied with canvasbacks during season in the 1860s, when, prior to 1820, few came to the New York market. He then reproduced a report from a Norfolk newspaper about Edward Burroughs of Long Island in Princess Anne County, Virginia. Burroughs had

twenty men employed constantly since the commencement of the season; and up to the 20th of December, 1856, they had consumed in their vocation twenty-three kegs of gunpowder, with shot in proportion. The ducks which they killed were brought to Norfolk once a week, and piled up in the warehouse of Kemp & Buskey, on Roanoke Square, where, on every Wednesday, they were packed in barrels and shipped for New York by the steamship Jamestown.

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