Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [368]
SPHERES OF INFLUENCE
Nor were the omnibuses generally able to get gentlemen back uptown in time for dinner. Until 1830 or so, dinner had been the main meal of the day for upper-class New Yorkers, served enfamille at two or three in the afternoon, followed by a light and informal supper in the early evening. As the distance between home and office increased, however, men of affairs found it more convenient to make a quick midday snack of oysters or clams bought from street vendors (“Here’s your fine clams, as white as snow, on Rockaway these clams do grow”) or to have “lunch” together at business-district restaurants like Dyde’s on Park Row or the Porter House on John Street. Back home, meanwhile, wives and small children made do on cold meat, soup, bread, cheese, and other breakfast leftovers. “Dinner” now waited until Father returned in the early evening, while supper was pushed back to nine or ten o’clock or abandoned altogether.
The rescheduling of dinner was accompanied by changes in the consumption and presentation of food that would make the meal as much an emblem of gentility as restraint in fashion or a choice address. Guests no longer arrived to find the table already laden with dishes, which the genial host would dispense, amid much communal passing of plates. Instead, servants (who no longer ate with the family) distributed dishes in a carefully specified order: first soup and fish, then meat and vegetables, finally pies and puddings, which Americans had begun to call “dessert.” The new manners did encounter some opposition—“This French influence must be resisted,” Philip Hone declared—but the more ceremonial and “refined” mode eventually prevailed.
Food preparation too changed in upper-class households. Breads, hoecakes, and johnny cakes, once made in an open hearth, were baked in new cast-iron cookstoves, using the new “refined” white flour that came down the Erie Canal from the new Rochester mills. Meat wasn’t boiled in a pot or spitted over a fire, as in the past, but oven-roasted and served with fancy sauces. The mistress crafted ornate pastries and compotes from recipes gleaned out of increasingly complex domestic manuals like Lydia Maria Child’s Frugal Housewife (1829). Costly imported porcelain and silverware, once reserved for guests or special occasions, were now considered de rigueur for everyday use.
Changes in the dinner ritual were further evidence that for upper-class New York households “work” and “home” increasingly occupied distinct social spaces, one ruled by men, the other by women. By the 1820s the downtown commercial district was well on its way to becoming a separate male preserve—virtually empty of respectable families, and scrupulously avoided by respectable women except for shopping expeditions to lower Broadway or visits to the Ladies’ Dining Room of the City Hotel. John Pintard, then living over the offices of the Mutual Insurance Company on Wall Street, realized that his wife and daughter were “nearly prisoners during the hours of business in Wall Street.” In 1832 a popular guide to the city advised “distant readers” that no women appeared in its pictures of the area because women rarely went there. So, too, the Mirror reported a few years later that “the sight of a female in that isolated quarter is so extraordinary, that, the moment a petticoat appears, the groups of brokers, intent on calculating the value of stocks, break suddenly off, and gaze at the phenomenon.”
This was as it should be. Decent women didn’t belong in the heartless,