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ISBN 9780807854150

Published: Fall  2002

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Copyright (c) 1997, 2002 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.




Introduction
The Lees and Me*

We didn't make much of ancestors when I was growing up. Maybe that was considered bragging, or maybe the grownups were somehow protecting us. Or, as I learned only recently, my aunt once said: "I tried to raise my children not to be bitter, but sometimes I find it hard to forget." That feeling probably accounts for at least some of the family's reticence. At any rate, I didn't always know who all the people on the walls were, but I liked the stories. Many were funny and fond, and they made me feel part of a comfortable continuum. "Don't forget who you are and what you represent," said lightly as we went off to birthday parties, was about as serious a burden as being a Lee was then. But as we grew and the phrase began to mean more than "Don't put pepper on your host's ice cream," it became an unspoken duty to live up to those who had gone before us. At least it did to me.

We descendants of Robert E. Lee did unveil a few portraits, which I rather liked doing. When I was about eight, I went to the White House, scrubbed and knobby-kneed, my hair in tight braids, to give a smoked turkey to President Roosevelt. He was busy, though, so his son James took the bird.

It was during my hypersensitive early teens that being on display began to feel unpleasant. On one occasion I crawled over the floor with a radio personality, dodging wires and furniture and reading stilted dialogue. For this initiation into show business, I had bought a new girdle, maybe my first, and when after lunch the constriction became unbearable, I had stuffed it into my equally new purse. As I stood up in front of an audience after the program, the purse fell open and the girdle fell out, while people clapped politely. I wanted to die, of course.

Forebears came to the forefront only once in college that I can remember, in an anthropology class. Kinship expert Dorothy Lee (Greek and no known kin) had assigned students to write down as much of our family trees as we could remember, to demonstrate, pre-Roots, how comparatively unimportant lineage was to Americans. Mostly for devilment, a Bostonian, a Charlestonian, and I stayed up all night filling strips of shelf paper with ancestors, many of mine wildly misplaced. Without batting an eye, Mrs. Lee acknowledged that ancestors were of consequence in a few pockets of the United States.

Working in New York after college, I began to realize that, at least in some circles, white southerners were considered second-class citizens or worse. When a Jewish artist informed me that there was no difference between southerners and Nazis, he left me speechless. That was just as well. I didn't know enough about the prewar South, or about how my family treated slaves, to argue. I wish I had known then about Robert Carter of Nomini Hall, who freed 500 people in 1791 — though I might not have mentioned his father, also Robert Carter, the richest man in Virginia, who lacked such compunctions. Slavery in America, even in one family, I have learned, can be a complex subject.

I had left New York and been living in Ohio, where Lees were not exactly a frequent topic of conversation, for over twenty years when Agnes Mullins, curator at Arlington House, sent me a copy of a little notebook that belonged to my great-grandmother Mary Lee. Typical of the times, the receipts ran heavily to eggs, butter, and cream. Having spent most of my adult life dieting, I stuck the notebook and its temptations in a drawer. It stayed there for years, until I realized I might not have to cope with all those calories alone: at a meeting of the Ohio State University Gourmet Group, I asked if anyone wanted to help try out the receipts of Mrs. Robert E. Lee, and was surprised at how many did.

Culinary Archaeology 101
My aim was to find out as closely as possible what the Lee family actually ate, not just to unearth a few forgotten treasures and gussy them up to appeal to people today. The Gourmet Group volunteers and I set out to try every receipt in the notebook. At that time I had no idea of the tangled path ahead or the detours I would take in attempting to understand this unpretentious little book.

After some predictable early attrition, nine of us stuck with the project for over a year, cooking at home and meeting twice a month to taste, critique, and then — often — try again. We were a diverse bunch. Our baking expert came from Iowa, and when the conversation turned one day to ancestors, the Sri Lankan with a Ph.D. in nutrition owned softly that hers had been kings from the ninth century until just recently. A Kentuckian's first bite at the first meeting took her back, like Proust with his madeleine, to her grandfather's Sunday-night suppers of cornbread and milk. A gourmet cook from Tennessee owned a whole wall of cookbooks, but even so she could not always answer the questions of an astute but less experienced member.

Sometimes what we did was more treasure hunt than testing, and occasionally serendipity served us well. "Butter the size of a goose egg" was an easy measurement to track down, because somebody's sister-in-law raised geese. But the size of a "bottle of oil" remained questionable and a "dripping box of flour," impossible to determine. Two receipts for caromels [sic] made a primitive chocolate fudge that either crumbled or relaxed into puddles; only later would I puzzle out why. And eventually I learned (from an eighteenth-century source) to make boiled puddings, but only after producing ugly, gluey concoctions that looked, as one helpful tester remarked, "like a brain."

Some errors seemed to stem from the kinds of mistakes common in passing on receipts. The cup of ground ginger that made one gingerbread receipt's outcome inedible may have been fine if the cup was in fact meant to be a tablespoon instead. Those delicious little chocolate volcanoes probably erupted because someone forgot to put any flour in the list of ingredients. And surely more liquid would have kept Mrs. Lee's Muffin Bread from falling apart like damp sand.

A bigger problem was vagueness. Sometimes it rose to great heights in the notebook, probably because the contributors, family members and close friends, could explain in person what was not written down. Such vagueness was common in early cookbooks, particularly before Fannie Farmer published a system of measurements in her 1896 watershed Boston Cooking School Cookbook, and it reflects the depth of knowledge and repertoire of techniques possessed by centuries of cooks. Black and white, slave and free, earlier cooks, working with equipment far from precise and with ingredients as yet unstandardized, achieved often superb results with little more to go by than a list of ingredients. In addition to dishes for the table, they also made products such as yeast at home, and gelatin, which was just beginning to be manufactured at the time of the notebook. No wonder the Lee daughters had to struggle to master the arduous art of cooking.

The Ohio testers found that most of the receipts can be made easily with present-day ingredients, techniques, and equipment. Most of our attempts, we judged, were good to excellent and reasonably close to the originals. But was a higher degree of historical accuracy possible? And how to understand those curious disasters? What did the collection of receipts represent, anyway — with so many different kinds of bread, so many sweets, and only three vegetables? Why were they in dozens of different people's handwriting, and who wrote them?

And then there were the notebook's other contents, the lists — of General Lee's godchildren, of groceries bought and wagonloads of food received, of hundreds of socks and gloves knitted from bales of cotton and pounds of wool, the myriad household uses for common ingredients like salt and ammonia. As I puzzled over the brittle pages, the shabby little notebook grew in fascination. Might it, if understood, illuminate the intimate domestic life of the people in those dim portraits, at least in part?

So in 1989, when my husband Fred and I moved back to Virginia where I grew up, I began to read about saleratus and syllabub churns and many other facets of the times they belonged in, as well as the people who used them. And just in time, as it turned out, I began to find my family.

Linking Generations
My aunt, the last descendent of the Robert Edward Lees of her generation, was then in her nineties. She asked not to be named, but she matched handwriting in the notebook to letters from her aunts Mary and Mildred and generously shared her many memories: stories about both of those aunts, her father and mother, her Uncle Custis, all of whom she had known, and others she had grown up hearing about. From her I went to her father's book about his father and to other sources of information about the family. When accounts differed, she told the family's version as she knew it. When she died peacefully several years ago, a comforting connection to the past was severed, but in a very real sense, she is still with me.

Today, when many children know their great-grandparents, it amazes me that mine lived before and through the Civil War; that my great-grandmother's father George Washington Parke Custis was raised from infancy by George and Martha Washington; and that her husband's father, Light Horse Harry Lee, was also a hero of the Revolution.

The Washingtons even have some indirect connections to this little notebook. A Mount Vernon servant, George Clark, worked side by side with George Washington Parke Custis to build Arlington and was the head cook while Mary Lee was growing up and forming her taste. Mrs. Lee probably knew a family cookbook owned by her grandmother, Martha Washington, too. And since her father spent his life memorializing his adoptive father and turned the house into a shrine to the father of his country, it is not unlikely that there was a culinary carryover as well.

As I explored the stories and photographs connected to the little notebook, I became fond of these forebears, except for formidable Great-aunt Mary, who was nevertheless the most adventurous, outrageous, and fun to learn about. (She and Mr. Custis deserve books of their own.) I felt jolts of recognition, too, over what I had considered mine that turned out to have been "pre-owned." There was my nose — on two Mrs. Robert E. Lees, the one the mother-in-law of the other. "Precious Life," my nickname as a small child, had belonged to Great-aunt Mildred first (happily, I outgrew it early). Chairs and a sofa that were just always at our house showed up in an historic photograph of the Lees' parlor in Lexington. I began to play "takes after," that comforting form of folk genetics that lets you blame your flaws on those who came before you. (Scientific gene research may yet bear us out.) Am I messy, unpunctual, and feeble in arithmetic? Well, so was Mrs. Lee. I'd have preferred her talent for exquisite sewing (inherited from her mother), but at least a trunkful of botched garments shows I share their persistence. Whenever this book threatened to finish me before I finished it, I thought of Mr. Custis, plunging in beyond his competence to glorify his adoptive father George Washington in paintings, plays, and even agriculture — by starting a breed of sheep from a Mount Vernon ram.

Both Robert and Mary Lee were frugal; I am cheap, a useful trait for those not attracted to endeavors with much money in them: a great-grandfather who chose a salary of $1,500 a year over riches can be a comfort. Other qualities I share with him, though not the ones I'd choose, include the way our hair flips up above our ears and our propensity for getting in trouble when people take our jokes too seriously. I rather like knowing that we share the habit of keeping our accumulated mail in wash baskets, though mine is mostly catalogues, not correspondence about healing a nation.

Having safely reached the age when sad, melodramatic romance is unlikely, I do not regret my lack of Great-aunt Agnes's beauty, if it was a cause of her blighted love. I would have liked the tidiness gene that her father passed on to Great-aunt Mildred, but no. As for Great-aunt Mary's insatiable appetite for travel, sometimes I wonder if my husband Fred could have inherited that by marriage.

I do not wish depression on anyone, but it helps to realize that others before me fought the black demon — without, alas, the remedies available today. And I hope some day to find in my own life the thread of integrity that ran through theirs.

A Whirlwind Finish
I had been steeping myself in the lore of wood stoves, rose water, cornmeal, and flour mills as well as my nineteenth-century forebears when Adelaide Simpson, kitchen guru of Lexington, Virginia, offered help with the loose ends still dangling. To test the thirty-five receipts that still needed more work, she gathered twenty-five more volunteers, ranging from a professional caterer to a bride who feared she'd flunked lemonade. Then what seemed like half the population of Lexington descended to the basement of the R. E. Lee Memorial Church for a final free-for-all tasting of their efforts.

For one reason or another, a handful of receipts still escaped. The winemaker's currant crop failed, so the Currant Wine has yet to be tried. We failed to find tough mutton (a blessing, judging from an earlier trip to Greece) and did not boil lamb because a nineteenth-century cookbook claims that it tastes terrible. And the arthritis cures seemed far too dangerous to swallow.

Although I have tried to follow at least partway the many paths the notebook led down, I have not made an exhaustive search of the thousands of Lee family letters or read anywhere near all the books, especially those written about the general and his military career. Nice as it is to have a family so thoroughly researched by others, there is a downside: I could never have finished all the reading.

At first I decided that more than enough had been written already about Robert E. Lee and that I would simply leave him out. But he was too deeply woven into the fabric of his family to exclude. The person who emerges here is a private family man, who in my mind rose to greatness in defeat, coincidentally about the time most of these receipts were collected. He has helped me immeasurably in my research, too. "Anything for Marse Robert," said Adelaide Simpson cheerfully, and many others who went so much farther than the extra mile to help must have felt the same way.

I have tried to represent the family's point of view, but I have not shown this manuscript to any of them; they are all free to deny responsibility.

About Terminology
I grew up saying "receipt" and use that spelling here because it is the older form. But both "receipt" and "recipe" appear in the notebook and family letters. Having studied the War Between the States and the Civil War in three different schools in three different states as a child, I was an adult before I realized that both, as well as the War of the Rebellion, were the same cataclysmic conflict. I was writing this book before I began to appreciate how emotionally charged the terms — and the event — remain. I chose "Civil War" as the most neutral name and ask anyone it offends to forgive me.

I ask the same of African Americans and Native Americans. Words are powerful but not all-powerful. I believe it is the perceptions behind the words that need to change. While that is happening (and it is), new terms will continue to be coined in the effort to change those perceptions and will in their turn be dropped if and when they do not have the desired effect. The above terms came into my life too late for me to feel comfortable with them, so I have used whatever feels right in context, with no intention of disrespect.

Victorians were far more flexible about spelling and far more exuberant with punctuation than we are today, particularly when, as here, they did not write for outside eyes. I have reproduced the text of the notebook as written, hoping to convey its flavor and trusting that readers will not mistake casualness for ignorance.

Now may I introduce the Lees, their household notebook, about seventy of the dishes that appeared on their table, and some of their housekeeping hints.

*Note: The author is the great-granddaughter of Robert Edward and Mary Custis Lee; her maternal grandfather was Robert E. Lee Jr.