Leni Sorensen is cooking her way through the 1824 cookbook “The Virginia House-wife.” The recipe in progress is “To Make Souse” – a gelatinous loaf studded with pieces of pig’s head. (Amanda Lucier | The Virginian-Pilot)
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Leni Sorensen had me with souse. That, plus the fact that she and her husband had raised two hogs in their side yard and had the heads in their freezer.
Souse is a gelatinous loaf studded with stewed pieces of pig's heads - ears, snout and such - a troubling dish today, but one with a long tradition in the commonwealth.
Colonial Virginians sliced it up and served it to company, cold. Mary Randolph, a member of the Richmond elite with family ties to Thomas Jefferson, included it in "The Virginia House-wife," her blockbuster 1824 cookbook.
Souse was the topic of conversation last summer when Sorensen and I huddled amid the grandeur of The Jefferson Hotel lobby in Richmond. The 70-year-old had just delivered a standing-ovation lecture on Randolph's cookbook to members of the Southern Foodways Alliance and was dishing me the backstory on those heads in her deep freezer.
A hog’s head boils with water and cornmeal. Mary Randolph, a member of the Richmond elite, included a recipe for souse in her 1824 cookbook the “The Virginia House-wife.” (Amanda Lucier | The Virginian-Pilot)
Finally, I'd found a person who shared my obsession for Mary Randolph and "The Virginia House-wife," considered by culinary historians to be the nation's first truly regional American cookbook and the most influential of its time.
I own two copies of the book; Sorensen, who is way further gone, has kept a copy in her purse for years.
But her interest in "The Virginia House-wife" transcends my own curiosity about recipes for boiled pigeons, gooseberry fool and directions "To Make Jelly From Feet," which starts like this:
"Boil four calf's feet, that have been nicely cleaned and the hoofs taken off."
When Sorensen reads these recipes, the white spaces between the lines bulge with a class of people whose sweat, skill and singed petticoats have been largely lost to history.
Who killed the calf? she wonders.
Who cleaned the feet and who set them to boil?
Who stirred just the right amount of white wine, loaf sugar, cinnamon and mace into the gurgling pot?
Sorensen devours the recipes with a historian's sensibility, a skill she honed while earning her master's and doctorate degrees in American Studies from the College of William & Mary and while working as a costumed interpreter and research historian at some of Virginia's most important historic homes - including Thomas Jefferson's Monticello.
She pries apart the printed lines to glimpse plantation kitchens of 18th and 19th century Virginia, where the mistress planned elaborate menus and skilled slaves did the work, pickling sturgeon, roasting geese, fricasseeing calves' feet, whipping cream, brewing yeast, curing bacon, brewing beer, hashing beef and beating biscuits - day after day turning out feasts fit for presidents.
"They were not house cooks; they were indeed chefs by any standard," Sorensen said. "To call them anything but chefs is to do a disservice."
Her mission: "I want to know what they knew," to give credit where credit is due.
Her plan: "My intent is, as best as I possibly can - and I might be dead before I can - but I would like to cook everything in this book."
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Recipe No. 20 of 456: Souse
"To Make Souse"
Let all the pieces youintend to souse, remaincovered with cold watertwelve hours; then washthem out, wipe off theblood, and put them againin fresh water; soak themin this manner, changingwater frequently, andkeeping it in a cool place,till the bloodis drawn away...."- Mary Randolph,"The Virginia House-wife"
Leni Sorensen rolls the souse in a tight cylinder. The recipes in “The Virginia House-wife” assume vast knowledge of the cooking techniques of Colonial times and long, strenuous effort on the part of the slaves working in the kitchens.
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It's late October. The sycamores, maples and oaks that blanket the rolling hills of rural central Virginia are just beginning to blush when I arrive at Sorensen's 5-acre farmette north of Crozet to find that she has tackled some of the spadework.
Two stockpots stand atop her gas stove, a heavy-duty, six-burner number set into an enormous soapstone island with a chandelier of seasoned cookware dangling overhead.
One hock, two ears, two hearts and a tail fill a cavernous stainless-steel pot. A single hog's head rests in a red enamel pan on the next burner over.
"To souse," she says, shaking her head, tickled by the 19th century grammar. "All of us have forgotten these verbs."
Sorensen's intent is to approach Randolph's recipes as authentically as possible.
I'm impressed that she started the souse recipe by raising those hogs.
October is a little early; she's pushing the season of souse.
In Randolph's day, hog slaughtering mostly took place closer to the New Year, when insects had died and the cold meant the meat kept longer.
But then again, Sorensen notes that the early 1800s marked the ebb of the Little Ice Age, a period of cooler weather. And last night was cold enough to set the pots outdoors while the pork pieces soaked.
Like colonial cooks, Sorensen is using every part of the pig; those hearts are destined for scrapple, a side project today, and the ears for chicarron, the fried pork skins of her Southern California roots.
She opens her copy of "The Virginia House-wife," the green cloth spine long since sprung. Yellow, pink and blue sticky notes protrude from the pages like flower petals. Cradling it in elegant, toast-colored hands, she begins to read the next lines of the recipe in a rich, lilting, fairy-tale tone, her pronunciation unerringly precise.
"... mix some meal with water, add salt to it,and boil your souse gently,until you can run a strawinto the skin with ease. Do not put too much in thepot for it will boil to piecesand spoil the appearance.... these should beboiled till you can takeall the bones out."
Randolph's contemporaries handed handwritten housekeeping handbooks down through the generations like heirloom silver. Sorensen has read all that she can find. She detects a confidence in Randolph's writing that's missing from the others.
"From her instructions, she knows exactly how to do these things," Sorensen said.
"And could have done them herself."
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Leni Sorensen’s house near Crozet, about 20 miles west of Charlottesville, is filled with historic cookbooks, including “The Virginia House-wife.” It’s considered by culinary historians to be the nation’s first truly regional American cookbook and the most influential of its time.
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Mary Randolph was born into Virginia gentry in 1762 into a family whose line went all the way back to Pocahontas.
Hers was a time when women of wealthy families were groomed to "keep the keys," which meant running plantation houses, an enormous responsibility for young girls who were often still in their teens.
After marrying cousin David Meade Randolph at age 18, Mary assumed her duties at Presque Isle, her husband's 750-acre plantation near Richmond. They owned 19 slaves.
The Randolphs later moved to Richmond, where an invitation to their grand home, Moldavia, was coveted in elite social circles. Mary earned the reputation as the finest hostess in Virginia.
Then, political differences with President Thomas Jefferson led to the loss of her husband's government post. The couple sold Moldavia, and Randolph made a shocking move for a woman of her time: she opened a boarding house a few blocks away.
Her clientele included the Federal elite, and she soon earned the nickname "Queen Molly" for her unparalleled hospitality.
Randolph published "The Virginia House-wife" in retirement, subtitled it "Method is the Soul of Management" and dedicated it to young ladies who would soon enough learn that "The government of a family, bears a Liliputian resemblance to the government of a nation."
The printed words advise young ladies to serve vegetables al dente, to precisely measure ingredients and to take full advantage of the international foodstuffs becoming available to New World cooks.
But then there are those spaces between the lines.
The souse recipe doesn't specify how much meal to mix in or how long to cook it. But it was expertly prepared and enjoyed by Queen Molly's boarders.
"I would argue that all of the cooks would know this," Sorensen says. "She can't stand there and tell them."
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The souse soaks overnight in vinegar and salt. Leni Sorensen started the dish by raising hogs. She loves to unearth obscure documents and search them for clues about the slaves who worked on such dishes.
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Sorensen ignites flames under the stockpots on her stove. While the pork "gently boils," we move to her work/dining room table, where a vase of rosemary stands in the center of a swath of scribbled notes, vintage cookbooks and historical documents.
I've come from the coast with crab pie. It's cooking in the oven. We'll soon begin a leisurely lunch, an absurd luxury for slave cooks.
Instead, while the pork pieces boiled, perhaps they'd be turning out Randolph's Ragout of Turnips or soap or starch or Oyster Catsup. Or be busy making yeast from hops, roasting woodcocks, collaring a calf's head, pounding spices, polishing silver or dissolving alum in lye to make the polish to polish the silver.
Lunch, called dinner back then, was the main meal of the day and, in Randolph's circle, most were as elaborate as any Thanksgiving feast, complete with fine china, tablecloths and visiting dignitaries.
"All of these dinners," Sorensen said, shaking her head in wonder. "These people did it every damn day. The sheer volume of it. That's what blows my mind."
But in the historical record, the slave cooks, "they just disappeared."
As part of her "Randolph project," Sorensen offers group cooking lessons in her home based on Randolph's recipes. And she's developing lectures like the one she delivered in the summer titled "Mary Randolph, The Virginia Housewife and the Unsung Heroines of Her Kitchen."
But assembling a critical mass of documentation has proved difficult. Slaves were illiterate by law. Few kept journals or diaries - Sorensen knows of no kitchen slave who did. They appear only briefly in the census.
Then there's the misinformation. For generations, slave cooks have been romanticized in popular culture as wise happy folk, content in the kitchen, like Aunt Jemima, Mammy in "Gone With the Wind," and that smiling man on the Cream of Wheat carton.
They might have had nicer clothes than field hands, but kitchen slaves were only "superficially privileged," Sorensen says.
They were on call 24 hours a day, every day. They faced the hazards of colonial kitchens - open fires, oppressive heat, heavy cauldrons, swinging cranes and sparks flying onto long skirts and petticoats.
They often were beaten and lived on the brink of starvation, and female slaves were accosted, even raped, by owners and guests. Like all slaves, they could be torn from family and community and sold at any time.
It's unknown how the Randolphs treated their help. Today, "we have no right to expect" that she was a kind and benevolent mistress, Sorensen says. "But she doesn't talk bad about them either."
Sorensen does detect a hint of humanity in the introduction to Randolph's book, and she reads aloud the author's sole comments on slaves:
"... have the butter, sugar, flour, meal, lard, given out in proper quantities; the catsup, spice, wine, whatever may be wanted for each dish, measured to the cook.... When the mistress gives out every thing there is no waste; but if temptation be thrown in the way of subordinates, not many will have power to resist it; besides, it is an immoral act to place them in a situation which we pray to be exempt from ourselves."
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Jefferson, whose Monticello home sits on a hill an hour west of Richmond, owned James Hemings, the best-documented kitchen slave of his time.
At age 19, Hemings, brother to Sally Hemings, traveled with the president to Paris, where he trained for two years under the finest French chefs. He became fluent in French (his master did not) and returned to Monticello to cook and train his younger brother, Peter, in exchange for his freedom.
At Monticello, Hemings turned out dishes such as capon stuffed with truffles, artichoke-chestnut puree, Virginia ham sauced with apple brandy.
But the record of Hemings' life is an exception. So Sorensen reads and reads, unearthing obscure documents and mining the white space between the lines for clues.
Her delight in recently learning that one of Randolph's boarders kept a diary is near childlike.
"I can just hardly wait to go find this guy," she said. "I'm hoping this man may give us more specifics about it - the number of boarders, how many stables."
And maybe, just maybe, a few glimpses of the slaves or servants.
Steam rises from the souse pot and it begins to boil over; time for the straw test. But before that, Sorensen reads aloud an excerpt from the diary of Martha Wayles Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson's wife, dated January 1776.
"Made 400 pounds of soft soap, 420 pounds of hard soap, killed calf."
Who made the soft soap? Who killed the calf?
"That's all in the same entry!" Sorensen says. "We can take that little sentence and spend two-and-a-half, three hours on that. Just one sentence!
"She wrote it down; thank you, Mrs. Jefferson!"
At the stove, Sorensen takes a raffia straw and pushes it into the hog's head.
"Ahh," she says. "The snout is tender."
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"I'm not a Virginian; I don't have a dog in this fight."
The "scandal of slavery" - that "truly repugnant" chapter of American history that makes talk of race taboo for so many Southerners - just isn't a barrier for her, Sorensen says.
"I'm not bound to a point of view. I'm a humanist," she says. "My focus is always 'who were the people?' If a text says 'the food was carried,' it becomes 'the food was carried by whom?' "
Sorensen's father was a California native and grandson of a former slave from Texas. Her mother was white and a self-proclaimed communist. The pair eloped to Mexico because biracial marriages were illegal in California before 1948.
Sorensen was born in 1942. Growing up biracial in a Southern California home that did not tolerate racism or bigotry, she was exposed to a cornucopia of cultures - Mexican-, Chinese- and African-American and Jewish.
The era of anti-war and anti-establishment movements had just begun when Sorensen dropped out of high school in 11th grade and became a counterculture folk singer. In her 20s, she toured as Leni Ashmore with The Womenfolk, an acoustic guitar quintet that recorded five albums for RCA, appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show" and opened for Bob Hope, twice.
Their song "Little Boxes," a satire on the conformity of middle-class American suburbia, hit the Billboard Hot 100 in 1964.
Marriage, two children, a tamale business, divorce and relocation to a farm north of Toronto followed. While there, Sorensen answered a personal ad in Mother Earth News and began corresponding with Kip Sorensen, a white South Dakota farmer. The two married and had two children.
In South Dakota, the Sorensens raised 160 acres of Great Northern and pinto beans and tended a few milk and beef cows, 10 sows, 12 sheep, 50 hens and 500 chickens and some Peking ducks. Sorensen milked cows, baked all of the family's bread, canned everything that grew, killed chickens for dinner, made cream, butter, yogurt and soft cheese.
She once raised a patch of oats and cut it with a scythe, "just to have the sense of it," she said.
The family got "pushed out of farming" in 1982, when the federal government ceased granting loans to small farmers. A visit to friends led to a carpentry job for Kip, and a new life in central Virginia.
Sorensen knew how to spin wool, make soap and coax dye from indigo, and she found work as a costumed demonstrator at Colonial Williamsburg, Gunston Hall and other historic venues. Always interested in history, she devoured Virginia's past. While working at Ash Lawn-Highland, home to President James Monroe, she bought her first copy of "The Virginia House-wife."
That's when she first noticed the bulging white spaces between the lines.
"I thought, 'Here we are in this place, and no one knows how to talk about slaves,' " she said. "Shouldn't we be talking about the very people who made it happen?"
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Sorensen lifts the hog's head from the pot, sets it in a wire basket and again reads aloud from Randolph.
"... take all the bones out;let them get cold,season the insides withpepper, salt, and a littlenutmeg; make it in a tightroll, sew it up close in acloth, and press lightly.Mix some more meal andcold water, just enough tolook white; add salt andone fourth vinegar; put yoursouse in different pots, and keep it well coveredwith this mixture and closely stopped."
With bare hands, Sorensen begins doing what slave cooks did, tearing jowl, meat, skin and fat from the glistening head and hock.
Her kitchen smells of pure pork, clean and fresh. Sprinkled with nutmeg, this, we decide, might even suit a 21st century palate.
She forms the knuckly pieces into a sort of brick, wraps it in cheesecloth and holds the mass tight while I twist and tie the ends with twine. When we're done, it resembles a gigantic piece of hard candy.
The last lines of the recipe assume a cache of skill and knowledge, forcing Sorensen to make educated guesses of what to do next.
Press lightly? She places the brick of souse in a stainless-steel pan, centers a flat plate on top and then puts two pieces of stone atop the plate.
She mixes the meal with water using a whisk, pours it into the souse pan and pauses to empathize with Randolph's cooks.
"They didn't even have a wire whisk," she says. "They would have had a wooden version."
The next morning, I return to Sorensen's kitchen where she unwinds the gauze from the souse. It holds its shape, just like it should.
We wonder how Mary Randolph would have served the slightly gelatinous, gray-and-white slices. With a gravy perhaps? Could it ever be good?
Some of the 20 Randolph recipes Sorensen has tackled have become staples in her home. Cabbage A-La-Creme, for instance, a dish of cabbage boiled in salted butter and then stewed with milk, butter and flour.
"It's so wonderful! We've eaten so much of it," she says. "Mary Randolph must have loved cabbage, too!"
Others likely won't make it into her repertoire.
Directions "To Dress Turtle" begin like this: "Kill it at night in winter, and in the morning in the summer. Hang it up by the hind fins, cut off the head and let it bleed well." Sorensen isn't one bit hesitant about tackling that one. "At my house, anything that turns out crappy I just give it to the chickens," she says.
She cuts slices from the loaf before her, and we consider the souse.
"Would you do this again?" I ask.
"Only," she said, "in this context."
Lorraine Eaton, 757-446-2697, lorraine.eaton@pilotonline.com. Check out Lorraine's blog at hamptonroads.com/lorraine.
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cooking classes
Leni Sorensen offers hands-on cooking classes in her farmette kitchen north of Charlottesville. She teaches a broad array of topics, including bread baking, canning and, upon request, almost any recipe in "The Virginia House-wife." The cost is $65 a person, with a six-student minimum. Contact Sorensen at 434-960-8439 or through her website at indigohousehistory.com