New England Sunday Dinner Etiquette in the 1860s

Barnaby, my black bear, sits at the end of his chain beneath the cabin window with his nose to the sash. The Sabbath ham is in the house, and he believes it is his. It was never his. Once he has been told so he sits down sulking, like a deacon who has just learned that the sermon runs long. In that company I take up my pen on Sunday Dinner Etiquette for Heathens, which is a lecture on manners from a man who has none. It is like a sermon on chastity from a tomcat. He knows the subject very well, only from the other side.

First, the plain word before we sit to eat: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and all that follows is written for history and instruction only. Tuck your napkin in your collar and keep your elbows to yourself.

The Sabbath Table of New England

Here in the Suncook Valley we take dinner at midday, not in the evening as the Boston swells do. Dinner is the great meal at noon. Supper is the cold bit you pick at by candlelight before bed. So Sunday dinner lands just as meeting lets out, when every soul in the house has sat two hours on a pine pew hard enough to bend a horseshoe. They come home starving, ill-tempered and ready to commit a sin with a carving knife.

The Puritan grandfathers fixed it so that nobody cooks on the Lord's Day, and in the strict old way the Sabbath began at sundown on Saturday. So on Saturday afternoon the beans go into the crock with salt pork and molasses and the brown bread goes in to steam, and all of it sits in the brick oven overnight. On Sunday the beans are hot, the bread is soft, and the only labour anyone has done is keeping a straight face through the long prayer. Saturday beans are also why a New England Sunday afternoon has a certain thunder to it. The Almighty rested on the seventh day. The parlour did not.

If it is not beans, it is the boiled dinner: corned beef in the great iron kettle with cabbage, turnips, potatoes, carrots and beets, boiled until the house smells like a wet dog's prayer meeting. On Monday whatever is left is chopped and fried, the beets turn the lot red, and we call it red flannel hash. It comes to the table as corned beef and goes out as hash, the same way a deacon comes to church a saint and goes home a horse trader.

Rules for the Heathen at Table

The fine ladies of Philadelphia who write etiquette books, Miss Eliza Leslie at the head of them, have told the whole republic in print that a gentleman shall not carry his food to his mouth on the blade of his knife. Miss Leslie never ate at a Pittsfield table, where the fork has two steel tines spread wide enough to drive a cow through, and the peas fall straight between them. So the country man loads his knife. I hold that this is a skill and not a sin. A man who can carry eleven peas to his mouth on a steel blade without bleeding has the steady hand of a surgeon, and I would hire him to hold my patients' tongues.

Then there is the American zig-zag. We cut the meat with the knife in the right hand and the fork in the left, then lay the knife down, pass the fork to the right hand and eat. Englishmen passing through watch us as if we were a travelling show. A Yankee moves his fork back and forth for the same reason he moves his money back and forth: he likes to watch it change hands.

Mr. Charles Dickens came over in 1842 and wrote a whole book, American Notes, and a good share of it is about how our tobacco juice horrified him. There are spittoons in the parlour, in the courthouse and in the Senate itself, and plenty of men who miss them. So here is the heathen's first rule: the plug comes out of your cheek before grace. Leave a brown mark on a deacon's wife's linen and you will be talked about from Pittsfield to Gilmanton Iron Works until your grandchildren die.

The second rule comes from me as a dentist. A gentleman picks his teeth with a goose quill cut to a point, and a rich man carries one of silver or gold in his waistcoat. Either way you pick behind your napkin, not out in the open like a man digging a well. The third rule concerns the cup. In my grandfather's day hard cider stood on every New England table, watered for the baby and straight for the minister. Now the temperance people have dried out half the Sunday tables in this state. Drink the water, praise the pie, and save your opinions for the walk home, where only the cows can hear you.

Last comes the collection plate. Last year the Mint struck the two-cent piece of 1864, the first coin of these United States to bear IN GOD WE TRUST. I set one on my anvil and punched G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. on the other side, so the parson may decide which of us to blame. The Treasury does not say whom God trusts, and I notice it is not the Treasury.

A Bear at Grace

A county tax assessor once came up Route 28 in a black coat on the Lord's Day. I shall call him Mr. Pratt, for his widow is a fine woman. He reckoned that a man who works the other six days would be at home on the seventh with his books open and his kettle warm. It is the rule of this house that any man who knocks gets fed, even one who has come to count your barrels.

Mrs. Wilkins asked him to say grace over the boiled dinner. At my table grace lasts exactly as long as it takes Barnaby to smell the ham. Mr. Pratt had got as far as "bless this bounty" when the window behind him went black with fur. I had left the bear a few links too much chain. He reached over the man's shoulder and took five pounds of corned beef off the platter with his teeth, and the brine ran down the assessor's collar. Then Barnaby licked the gravy out of his whiskers, slow and thorough, with a sound like a wood rasp going over a wet saddle. Mr. Pratt let out a whistle like a teakettle somebody had stepped on and pitched face-first into the mince pie. The bear ate the pie from around his ears and backed out with the ham hock. The assessor never opened his ledger. His hat still hangs on my hook with the band chewed off, and it is the only tax I ever collected.

A rival coppersmith from over the line in Barnstead fared worse. He came to Sunday dinner to make peace and to steal my methods. He bit on a pellet of lead shot in the partridge and split a back molar. I carry forceps in my vest the way a good Christian carries his Testament, so I put my knee on his chest and drew the tooth, root and all, and charged him a dollar. He never spied on my methods again.

Sunday in the Brushy Mountains

My guest at table was Junior Vance, a retired runner of mountain liquor who came the long and dusty road from Wilkes County, North Carolina. In his country Sunday dinner came ahead of church: fried chicken, chicken and dumplings, butter beans, creamed corn, biscuits as big as a mule's hoof, sweet tea and banana pudding.

One Sunday a young revenue agent came up the hollow with a fair notion that a load sat in his grandfather's smokehouse, as indeed it did. His grandmother met the agent on the porch and never batted an eye. "Son, you look puny. Come in and eat," she said. She made him say grace twice and served him three helpings of dumplings while the boys carried the jars out the back of the smokehouse, two to a hand, down the bank to the creek. The pudding came out just as the last jar went down the hill. When the agent finally reached the smokehouse, his belt undone, he found nothing in it but hams and a dirt-dauber's nest.

Junior told a second story about a church homecoming. A gallon jug of hundred-and-ten proof was hidden among the tea jugs, and the preacher's wife poured it into her punch bowl by mistake. The choir sang that afternoon as it never sang before or since, a pie was thrown, and the preacher called it the Holy Spirit moving.

His best Sunday tale was the plainest. At eleven o'clock every lawman in the county sat in a pew, so he ran his loads with the bells ringing in every valley as if to wave him through. That held until the morning the sheriff's own wife passed him on the road and waved sweetly. That Wednesday the sheriff remarked on how dressed up Junior had looked for a boy who was not in church, and Junior went to meeting every Sunday for a month after that. He learned his manners from an old runner named Pap Shumate: "Never reach across another man's plate, and never pass on a blind curve." I mean to carve those words over my door.

The Run Served in Courses

Now to your own apparatus, for a distilling run is a Sunday dinner with its courses. Set the table first. Ferment your grain or fruit mash into a weak beer, then charge the pot but leave a quarter to a third of it empty. An overfilled pot foams into the vapour pipe and fouls your worm.

Keep the fire low and slow, as a woman sets the beans on Saturday night. A roaring fire scorches the bottom and drives the run too hard to make clean cuts. Alcohol vapour burns, so make every joint tight and keep open flame away from any place vapour might leak. Never leave a running still alone, keep the still-house aired, and keep water and a sack of sand at hand.

The foreshots arrive first, a small cup that smells sharp like solvent and carries the methanol, which blinds and then kills. They are the cousin from Barnstead, and you throw them out. The heads follow, harsh and still volatile, and they are heavier with methanol on a fruit run because fermentation breaks the pectin of apple skin and pulp down into it. Take the heads in small jars and smell each one until something sweet and clean comes up. That is the roast, the hearts, which you take in small jars too. Last come the tails, oily and cloudy, smelling of wet cardboard and old dog. Some men run them again with the next batch, but nobody puts them in a good bottle.

Copper is the honoured guest. It grabs the sulphur stink of the mash, but it does most of that work where it touches hot vapour: in the helmet, the lyne arm and the worm. A copper pot with an iron vapour pipe is a Sunday coat over a tobacco-stained shirt. And never use lead in the solder, not a speck.

Ashes, Oak Shavings and the Blue Flame

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro asked about his uncle's practice of throwing hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean up bad heads. Hardwood ash is mostly potash, a strong alkali that our grandfathers leached for lye, soap and trade. It may change how sour the charge is, but it will not pull out methanol. Oak gives colour, tannin and vanilla-sweetness only over months and years in the barrel. An afternoon in a hot keg gives a pucker like a green persimmon. Nothing in the keg will save a bad head. You save yourself at the jar.

As for the spoon of burning spirit: methanol burns blue too, pale and nearly invisible in daylight. The flame proves nothing, and striking matches beside a working still is foolishness. For his honest question, Mr. Miller has a punched two-cent piece on its way to him by post.

Say your grace, keep your knife out of your mouth, and never pass on a blind curve. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.