Last week was the Thanksgiving holiday and soon Christmas will be upon us.
This was once the beginning of the winter season when steamboat traffic between Aberdeen, Columbus and Mobile plied the Tombigbee River. As strange as it may seem, some traditional holiday food items are linked to those early steamboats.
A 1902 Billups’ family cookbook from Columbus provided a suggested menu for Thanksgiving. For Dinner (lunch) there should be: oysters on the half shell, mutton broth, celery, turkey stuffed with oysters, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, baked squash, boiled onions with cream sauce, peach pickles, Waldorf salad, cheese wafers, mince pie, pudding, nuts, fruit and coffee.
That same cookbook suggested that the Christmas fare should be: oysters on the half shell, cream chicken soup, boiled whitefish, sauce Maitre d’Hotel, roast goose, apple sauce, boiled potatoes, mashed turnips, sweet potatoes, Christmas plum pudding, lemon ice, squash pie, quince jelly, delicate cake, salted almonds, fruit and coffee.
Now what did steamboats have to do with all of this? It was usually mid to late November before the Tombigbee became high enough for steamboats to travel upstream from Mobile to Columbus and Aberdeen. It is also then when it usually becomes cool enough for the boats to bring up sacks of fresh oysters from Mobile.
With fresh oysters beginning to arrive mid-November to December, they became a traditional Thanksgiving and Christmas food along the Tombigbee River. Just as oysters were the first course mentioned in both the 1902 Thanksgiving and Christmas menus, many people still think of oysters as a traditional holiday dish, especially oyster dressing.
In the late 1800s the quantity of oysters brought into Columbus by steamboat was so large that the city began using the discarded oyster shells to fill pot holes in the city streets. It is also common to find lots of oyster shells on old Columbus house sites dating as far back as the 1820s.
Oysters, however, were not the only delicacy found on the old steamboats. A writer for Harper’s Monthly Magazine in 1858 described the meals on the Alabama steamboat, Henry J. King, as having “a quiet elegance nowhere equaled but in first-class restaurants of Paris.”
The most elegant dinner fare in early Columbus was probably served in the “grand saloon” of a Tombigbee Steamboat.
The range of foods served on a steamboat and the foods available in Columbus is shown by the “stores” purchased in Columbus in 1837 for the Steamer Tropic, a Tombigbee packet boat which was running between Columbus and Mobile. Those stores included potatoes, rice, beans, onions, ham, pork, beef, dried beef, beef tongue, cheese, flour, sugar, oil, lard, coffee, tea, almonds, raisins, figs, dried apples, preserves, pickles, cod fish, salmon, mackerel, butter, catsup, mustard, bottles of cayenne pepper, table salt, pepper, vinegar, French cordial and whiskey.
The occasion of an evening meal aboard the steamboat Norma steaming from Columbus to Aberdeen in 1844 was described as: “The beauty of the evening, the beauty of the women, rosy wine, sparkling wit, thrilling music… when supper was announced. The door was thrown open, and a scene disclosed that would have gladdened the heart of an Apicius. (Apicius was an ancient Roman gourmet noted for his luxurious lifestyle.) A table, extending half the length of the gentleman’s cabin, groaned with the rich array of viands, fruits, and cake… oysters and wine.”
The variety of foods available in Columbus and served during holidays in the 1800s is actually not that different than today.
It was interesting, though, that none of the pre-1890 family cookbooks contained a recipe for oyster dressing but all had Oyster Sauce. In Sallie Govan Billups’ 1867 copy of Verstille’s Southern Cookery, the recipe for Oyster Sauce was: “Have your oysters good, and give them one boil in their own liquor. Then take the oysters out, and add to the liquor two or three blades of mace, some melted butter and also a little thick cream. Return the oysters to the saucepan. Let them come to a boil, and then take them from the fire.”
Rufus Ward is a Columbus native a local historian. E-mail your questions about local history to Rufus at [email protected].
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