Culinary Adventures

Apple Cider Wishes & Shad Dreams: A History of Food in the Hudson Valley
by Susan Piperato illustrations by mike dubisch

The Hudson Valley is blessed with fertile ground, not only for farming but also for cultural proliferation. Virtually every nationality is represented between New York and Albany, but the cultural diversity that has taken root here is perhaps no better evident than in the varieties of cuisine available. However, although today's mid-Hudson residents can satisfy a yen for any kind of food, from Thai to Afghan, it wasn't until the 1970s that eateries featured much besides the usual burgers and Italian or Chinese fare. Yet chefs, gourmands and cultural sophisticates alike are now drawn to this region, attributing its ever-widening local smorgasbord of gastronomical options to a number of factors.

"It has to do with immigration patterns, and what's already there," says food historian, writer, teacher, and lecturer Peter G. Rose. "Groups [of immigrants] come to New York City, then up here." First to arrive were the Dutch in the 1600s, who brought "too many things to mention," she says. "Cows, horses, pigs, oxen; all the European vegetables; fruit trees; cabbages, carrots, parsnips; parsley and herbs; beets. Really, every known European vegetable is still grown in the Hudson Valley."

"Immigrants definitely have had the biggest influence," agrees Culinary Institute of America (cia) chef Jim Heywood, who moved to the Hudson Valley in 1969. "I go back to the early 1970s, and I've seen a lot of immigrants come to the area. And when they come, they grow what they want to grow, and cook what they want to cook. We've got a reasonably long growing season, which helps," he says. "In the '70s it became easier and faster to get here from New York City because of better roads and trains. The weekenders brought with them what they wanted to eat. They weren't satisfied with what was here. People moved from the city to towns like Rhinebeck and Millbrook, establishing them as very wealthy, very cultural communities of people who wanted finer food."

"So," says Heywood, "we give it to 'em." cia chefs have worked to provide these new upscale residents a higher level of cuisine by establishing on-campus restaurants and diverse courses. "The cia came here in 1947, from near Yale University, but it really grew when people started buying weekend houses," he says. "We've got 600 to 700 students, and over 300 alumni have remained here. You can't underestimate how big an influence the school has been on food."

Depuy Canal House proprietor John Novi says he first noticed innovations in regional cuisine in the early 1980s. "A major transformation occurred as a result of government buyouts of milk farms," he says. "When they were gone, local produce people began asking me what I wanted. Now they had to cater to the local restaurateurs. My egg man brought me a seed book, I remember, and asked me what I wanted him to plant for me. I'd been buying from California; now, lo and behold, I could get what I wanted right here."

But in order to appreciate fully the wonderful diversity of Hudson Valley cuisine, it's important to revisit the area's formative years. As idyllic as people tend to find the region today, it wasn't exactly the Garden of Eden in the beginning. To get an idea of what local Ice Age residents went through, picture yourself living outdoors at the height of last Christmas' blizzard. Imagine being cold and hungry, blinded by snow, equipped only with a branch tipped with carved flint, when suddenly a mammoth walks past. You've got to go for it, whatever the odds. If you're successful, you'll literally rip limb from woolly limb, chomping on raw flesh on the spot—or else not survive.
That was the extent of "dining" during the Paleo-Indian occupation, the earliest evidence of which exists in southern Orange County near Middletown at Dutchess Quarry Cave, dating back to 10,580 bce, give or take 370 years, according to suny New Paltz history professor Laurence M. Hauptman. In The Native Americans: A History of the First Residents of New Paltz and Its Environs he writes that the Ice Age population was "entirely dependent upon big game hunting." That included "plentiful herds of caribou as well as mastodon, mammoth, and other large animals." Nomadic bands of 20 to 75 members "moved seasonally," writes Hauptman, "within a loosely defined area of up to 1,000 square miles." Thanks to the abundance of game, the nomads didn't do too badly for themselves, but their culinary experiences weren't very adventurous, being so, shall we say, glacially challenged.

As the area thawed during the Native American Archaic Period (8000-1300 bce), new foods were discovered, including deer, nuts, a wide assortment of plants, and mussels. By the Middle Woodland Period (1000 bce-1600 ce) the natives were eating roasted acorns, hickory nuts, butternuts, and white-tailed deer. Slash-and-burn agriculture became the norm during the Late Woodland Period (1000-1600 ce), writes Hauptman, with cultivation of maize, corn, beans, pumpkins, and squash, as well as fishing. All game animals—deer, ducks, geese, fowl, muskrat, otter, fox, rabbit, squirrel, raccoon, opossum, and bear—were eaten, but beaver tail cooked in bear grease was considered haut cuisine. With more stable food sources, tribal populations increased, but the fights that ensued over cropland were mild compared to the wars to come between the natives and the Dutch, whose influence was both dramatic and devastating.

"In 1609 when Henry Hudson sailed up the river later to bear his name," writes Margery H. Johnson in An Informal History of Poughkeepsie Through 1900, the "natives offered [him] a welcoming meal of freshly-killed pigeons and a fat dog." Marveling at the abundance of wild grapes, pumpkins, fruit, fish, and oysters, Hudson declared the land "the finest for cultivation that I ever in my life set foot upon." Even so, the Dutch did little to settle the area besides establishing the fur trade. Within 50 years there was open hostility between the Dutch settlers and the Esopus and Lenape tribes, much of it food-related. The brandy and beer sold to the Native Americans by the Dutch brought on drunken rages in a hitherto sober people. Indigenous folk were further enraged when colonists stole their supplies of maize and beaver; in turn, at Wildwyck (now Kingston) some natives pretended to sell corn to colonists and then attacked them. The colonists retaliated by destroying food storage pits and maize fields. The nine-year Peach War began when a Dutch farmer killed an Esopus woman for stealing a peach—peach, pear, and apple trees having been introduced by the Dutch. The fur trade decreased the animal population (especially beavers), causing some Lenape to starve to death, while others were forced to trade land for food.

However, as Rose maintains in The Sensible Cook: Dutch Foodways in the Old and the New World and Foods of the Hudson, as well as her Gannett newspapers and Hudson Valley Table columns, the Dutch also had positive impacts on the Hudson Valley's cultural development. "The fact that the Hudson Valley was settled by the Dutch has had a profound impact, and sets the Hudson Valley apart from the rest of America, where other ethnic groups made their impacts," she says. Having immigrated to the Hudson Valley from the Netherlands in 1964, Rose says she constantly confronts the Dutch influence: "I see it in our historical houses, Dutch barns, and the kitchen, in cole slaw, cookies, and donuts."

In fact, the Dutch have much to do with America's love of baked goods, says Rose. "For Dutch children, sweet buns and sweet breads were real treats. Dutch bakers also traded sweet bread with the Indians." However, in terms of the American sweet-tooth, the Dutch contributed relatively little, preferring extremely rare (and expensive) oranges imported from South America, as well as sugared almonds to anything sweeter. (The English are largely responsible for our national obsession with all things sweet, starting with stick candy during the Revolution.) The Dutch are also responsible for many of our Christmas traditions, says Rose, including Santa Claus. Originally a gloomy figure, visiting on a somber holiday, Santa changed after Washington Irving noticed his Dutch neighbors enjoying their fat, jolly Sinter Klaas and promoted "changing the whole holiday."

"When any ethnic group comes to a new area they tend to make what's there into something familiar," Rose explains. "Corn was abundant, so the Dutch made cornmeal pancakes. They were used to eating porridge, and they liked the native pumpkin, so they made it into porridge." The Dutch also "very readily adapted a simple porridge of pounded corn and water, called sapaen, a Native American food. Being dairy people, the Dutch added milk." In return, the Dutch introduced the natives to bread. "The Native Americans already made a kind of bread, or corn cakes, made from corn ground up and then boiled. But the Dutch brought wheat here, so Native Americans then had real bread."

In 1665 England took over from the Dutch and Royal Governor Richard Nicolls traveled to Kingston. English-Esopus relations ran somewhat smoothly throughout the American Revolution, despite frequent complaints from the natives about the continuing liquor trade and resulting increases in alcoholism among their people. Food still played a large part in colonial-native dealings. In a peace treaty signed with the Esopus tribe in 1776, colonists provided food for land. "The Native Americans were allocated beef, mutton, turnips, potatoes, bread, rum, beer," writes Hauptman in The Native Americans. Count the following among the delicacies meanwhile imported by the English: lemon drops, fruit cake, pork and apple pie, Litchfield crackers, soda biscuits, sour milk cake, and almacks (dried fruit, cut into cakes).

Betsy Booth MacDaniel, daughter of early 19th-century Woodstock glassblower and preacher Martin Booth, became a friend and student of local tribesmen, learning to gather and dry roots and herbs, which she carried in a basket to sick neighbors. Her recipes remain in the MacDaniel family. Spotted maple bark, for instance, steeped in water until the color of tea, could heal wounds and counteract boils. Betsy is also remembered for guiding the first tourists—including Thomas Cole—to the top of Overlook Mountain for a picnic.

Inns catering to everyone from cattle drovers to generals became popular during the mid-1700s and remained so throughout the 1800s, offering what we now call "old-fashioned, home-cooked" meals. In 1965 Bernie Fitchett, a descendent of the founders of Fitchett Brothers Dairy in Poughkeepsie in 1904, compiled the histories and recipes of several local inns in Bernie Fitchett's Hudson Valley Recipe Book. According to Fitchett, the Ship Lantern Inn in Milton dates back to the Revolution and is one of the oldest restaurants featuring continental food, including Mignonette of Beef Bordelaise. The Treasure Chest, in Dutchess County, built in 1741, was spared by the Redcoats from destruction because its cook was such a good baker that sentries were posted to guard her while she made bread. The 1828 Silver Horn, between Amenia and Millbrook, was a Quaker meeting house, then a Methodist Church featuring popular strawberry festivals. In the 1930s it housed the Millbrook Theatre, welcoming guests like Eleanor Roosevelt. Pumpkin pie was served at intermission.

Ice cream became standard Fourth of July fare in the 1800s. Although we might find its making onerous, it was considered "a wonderful way to pass the time in good conversation" back in 1843, according to Paraclete Potter's 1815 American Cookery. Customers procured ice, an expensive luxury, from local icehouses. Leftovers were covered with burlap and carpeting and stored in the woodshed.

In the mid-1800s wine and beer making became the rage, and typical Victorian drinks, blending English sensibilities and local ingredients, included beers of spruce essence, ginger, or maple; wines of apple cider, currants, raisins, ginger, or elderberries; and sarsaparilla mead. Victorian sweet morsels included "divinity" or meringue candy, fudge, taffy, and cake. A typical dessert was Heavenly Pie, made of almonds, condensed milk, cherries, and heavy cream. Cookbooks from the late 19th to early 20th centuries, kept by such upstanding citizens as New Paltz's Mrs. Elting and the matrons of Poughkeepsie's Locust Grove and Glebe House, are filled with scrumptious foreign delights like Cornish game hen soaked in cognac and cherry juice and ignited, and Southern Lane Cake.

Sturgeon (along with shad) consumed since Henry Hudson's time, was considered "ersatz caviar," says the cia’s Heywood, and "called 'Albany beef,' the poor people traditionally ate it at taverns. It was free. That really mattered, because it was a vital source of protein. Of course, women missed out, because only the men could go to taverns. Meanwhile, the 'hill-toppers', like the Vanderbilts, ate real caviar. They lived at a higher level than anyone else did, literally. From their mansions it was downhill all the way to the river."

Father Divine, an African-American spiritual leader who established several New Paltz, High Falls, and Crum Elbow "heavens", also provided sustenance to the poor during the Depression, offering 20-cent chicken dinners, with all the fixings, to all and sundry. According to William Heidgerd's Black History of New Paltz, they attracted "busloads". Father Divine required attending folks to avoid laziness and remain sober. Those who succeeded in his eyes had "names bestowed upon them" like Reliable Willie and Handyman Amos.

From the Depression times onward the Hudson Valley diet has mainly followed national trends, as demonstrated by cookbook collections at both the Haviland-Heidgerd Historical Collection at Elting Memorial Library in New Paltz and Adriance Public Library in Poughkeepsie. In the 1950s and '60s convenience was the operative word in recipes, including quickly made desserts and icebox cakes. "Creative" meant nothing more than blonde brownies, shrimp Newburgh (made with Campbell's Soup), and Spanish rice. Of course, Woodstock was, as always, different (but in a good way). Woodstock: Recollection by Recipe, compiled in 1967, contains creative no-brainers often calling for a dash of msg, poetry, or sexual innuendo. From Opus 40 founder Harvey Fite comes Bachelor Soup—canned stuff with chopped frankfurters. For A Swinging Salad of endive, herbs, lemon, and lettuce, the cook is advised to "go out under the stars and swing it around until your arm is a little tired". Courtesy of the Maverick's summer productions is dandelion wine and eggplant salad. And there's painter Julio de Diego's paella; Woodstock Playhouse's Squash, Ennobled; and the annual library fair's "fudge brownies better than and as easy as anything you'll find in a box".

The most recent local cookbooks at Elting Memorial Library reveal our largest leap toward multiculturalism. The Huguenot Herald's 1979 recipe contest rewarded entrants for their recipes for Purim Hamentashen as well as Easter bread. Although Mediterranean foods like veal scaloppini were still standard in a 1985 St. Joseph's Church cookbook, also featured were Mexican, Moroccan, Japanese, Middle Eastern, and Indian dishes.

So far there's no evidence of community cookbooks having been compiled after 1990. Perhaps our penchant for eating out and enjoying the delights of Hudson Valley restaurateurs and caterers has gotten the best of us, and it isn't only I who have little time to cook more than frozen organic microwaveable wonders. But since it's 2003, maybe it's time for some brave soul to make a public call for folks to reveal what they're rustling up in their kitchens. After all, whatever it is we put on our tables today—or stand nibbling at the counter—will seem quaint come 2103.