Hands to Work, Herbs to Market, Flavor to Table - Inside the Shaker Pantry
- michel1492
- 10 hours ago
- 25 min read
This article began with a game. I have hundreds of cookbooks on my shelves, so I choose a number at random and go where it sends me. This time the number was 59.
Book 59 turned out to be Amy Bess Williams Miller and Persis Wellington Fuller’s The Best of Shaker Cooking, published by Macmillan in 1970. It is a substantial book, more than 450 pages long, filled with recipes attributed to Shaker communities from Maine to Ohio. I expected to find a recipe worth exploring. Instead, I found a sentence.
In their introduction, Miller and Fuller write that Shaker cooks used herbs so liberally that a chapter devoted to herbs alone could easily have been the largest in the book. They describe the kitchen sisters relying on herbs to vary and enrich otherwise familiar dishes. That stopped me, because there is a persistent image of Shaker food as plain food: wholesome, restrained, practical and perhaps even austere. Simplicity was certainly important within Shaker life, but simplicity and blandness are not the same thing. If Miller and Fuller were right, there was another story hiding in the Shaker pantry.
So I went looking for it. What began with a cookbook on my shelf led to nineteenth-century herb catalogues, business records, drying houses, garden photographs, peddlers’ route books, commercial labels, tin canisters, an herb department diary and a tiny cookbook published in 1882. Along the way, I also found a recipe that did not say what a later cookbook seemed to suggest it said.
The deeper I went, the clearer the story became. The Shakers were not simply cooking with herbs. They were growing flavor, preserving it, packaging it, selling it and sending it out into what they called “the World.”
First, Who Were the Shakers?
Before we walk into the pantry, it helps to know whose pantry it was.
The Shakers are properly the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing. The movement grew out of a small dissenting religious group in northern England in the eighteenth century, and its familiar nickname came from the ecstatic physical movement associated with its worship. In 1774, Ann Lee, known to her followers as Mother Ann, sailed for America with eight companions. They eventually established themselves near Albany, New York, and from that beginning Shaker communities spread through New England and New York and eventually westward into Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana.
Shakers held property in common, practiced celibacy, worshipped with song and movement, and developed a leadership structure in which women and men exercised parallel spiritual authority. Because celibacy meant that Shaker communities did not reproduce biologically, membership grew through conversion and through the admission of children and adults from outside the communities. Villages were divided into “families,” communal households that might contain dozens of people who were not related by blood.
Work occupied an important place in Shaker life. The saying most famously associated with Mother Ann captures the ideal beautifully: “Put your hands to work and your hearts to God.” It is also the reason this article has the title it does.
At their mid-nineteenth-century height, the Shakers numbered roughly 6,000 people in 19 communities. Those decades overlap with the period when Shaker seed, herb and other commercial enterprises were becoming particularly sophisticated. Membership declined steadily afterward. The only continuously active Shaker community today is Sabbathday Lake in Maine. In 2025, that community numbered three members.
Two more things are worth holding onto as we go. First, the Shakers deliberately distinguished their communities from what they called “the World,” meaning the society outside them. Second, they sold things to that World, constantly and skillfully. Those two facts sit in tension, and the tension is where some of the most interesting history lives.
A Garden Is Only the Beginning
One surviving photograph from Mount Lebanon, New York, makes a good place to begin. Preserved by the New York State Library, J. E. West’s photograph The Kitchen Garden shows the North Family kitchen garden laid out across the foreground of the settlement, with long cultivated rows and distinct planting plots stretching through an ordered landscape.
We cannot identify the individual plants from the photograph, and I do not think we should try. What we can see is organization. This was a working food landscape.
Beyond the kitchen garden was something much larger. By the nineteenth century, several Shaker communities were producing herbs not merely for their own kitchens and medicine cupboards but as commercial crops. At Harvard, Massachusetts, the herb business developed during the 1820s and became the community’s most lucrative industry. By 1845, the Harvard Shakers were selling 197 kinds of medicinal herbs, 13 extracts and, particularly interesting for our story, eight varieties of “sweet herbs in canisters.” In 1848 they built a stone Dry House at a cost of $400, and a larger herb house was completed two years later.
“Sweet herbs” did not mean herbs that tasted sweet. In the culinary vocabulary of the period, the term referred to aromatic herbs used for seasoning. Elsewhere in the surviving Shaker commercial and culinary record, sage, thyme, summer savory and sweet marjoram emerge clearly as important culinary herbs, while parsley, mint, dill, tarragon and others appear within the broader Shaker culinary world.
An herb could therefore occupy two worlds at once. It could be food, and it could also be inventory.
Growing Flavor for “the World”
Garden seeds are among the best-known examples of Shaker commerce. Shaker communities developed extensive seed businesses, packaged seeds in small printed paper packets and distributed them through merchants, agents and peddlers. Herbs entered a similarly sophisticated commercial world.
That created a tension inside Shaker life that I find far more interesting than the familiar story of clever Shaker entrepreneurs. How much commerce was too much commerce? How does a community seek separation from the World while becoming increasingly skilled at producing exactly what the World wants to buy?
The records suggest that the question was not comfortable. During the spiritual revival of the late 1830s and 1840s, a period the Shakers called Mother’s Work, believers recorded communications they understood as coming from the spirit world. In October 1841, one such message was attributed to Father Joseph Meacham, who had died in 1796.
The message criticized the Church Family’s increasingly profitable seed garden as a source of pomp, pride and worldly excess and warned against the pursuit of extensive trades and money-making. Instead, it urged a return to older, plainer trades. The manuscript survives in the Shaker Collection at the Western Reserve Historical Society. Yet the seed business continued and remained profitable in a number of Shaker communities through the Civil War.
The communities might separate themselves spiritually from the World, but packets, catalogues, invoices, wagons, agents and customers crossed that boundary constantly. The World wanted what the Shakers grew.
Harvesting Aroma
Growing thyme is easy enough to understand. Preserving the flavor of thyme is another matter entirely.
Once an herb is cut, its quality begins to change. Aroma is lost, color fades and moisture encourages deterioration, so poorly handled herbs become a shadow of what was growing in the field. Nineteenth-century agricultural and culinary literature shows considerable awareness of this problem. Herbs were gathered at appropriate stages of growth, dried and then protected from moisture and excessive exposure to air.
The Shaker commercial record is particularly revealing on this point. A surviving catalogue section advertising “Pulverized Sweet Herbs” offered sage, thyme, summer savory and sweet marjoram, emphasized the care taken in drying and grinding so that the herbs retained their aroma and strength, and offered customers a choice between coarse and fine pulverization.
That is not simply gardening. That is processing.
Someone had to decide when the crop was ready. Someone cut it. Someone carried it in from the field. Someone dried it. Someone picked through it. Someone arranged for it to be ground.
Someone sifted it. Someone filled the container. Someone attached the label. Someone recorded the order. Much of that work disappears when all we see is the finished canister.
The Sisters Behind the Sage - Hands to Work
One of the most evocative glimpses of that work comes from Harvard, Massachusetts. Elisha Myrick worked in Harvard’s herb department in the middle of the nineteenth century, and surviving excerpts from his diary give an unusually intimate view of the business.
On January 17, 1850, Myrick recorded being up at four o’clock putting up herbs bound for Boston. That evening, three sisters picked over dried sage. Less than a month later, on February 14, the department worked after the evening meeting until midnight and put up 18 dozen large cans of thyme. That is 216 cans in one entry, in one night.
The diary records something else I did not expect. On April 30 of that year, Myrick noted taking two wagonloads of sage roots to John Blanchard, who would cultivate the sage for the community, cut it, return it green and receive seven cents per pound after it had been dried. The Shaker herb business had reached beyond the boundaries of Shaker-owned fields and was contracting with someone in the World for cultivation.
As the year continued, Myrick recorded cutting, gathering and processing on a scale that has very little in common with the romantic picture of a tiny household herb garden. Five hundred pounds of sarsaparilla root and 300 pounds of sage appear in a single May entry. Other plants filled the herb house garret and eventually additional storage space. Seven sisters and four brethren went out together to gather wintergreen. We are looking at production.
The labor was not exclusively male. Shaker work was frequently divided along gendered lines, although those divisions varied by community, period and task. Men often become more visible in surviving business records because of the agricultural, trustee and commercial positions they held, while sisters performed a great deal of sorting, picking, processing and packaging.
That creates a problem for the historian. Follow only the names printed on invoices and catalogues, and some of the people who actually handled the herbs vanish from the story.
Myrick’s diary lets us glimpse them again. Three sisters, picking over dry sage, in the evening, in January.
Hands to work.
Selling Preserved Flavor
The finished product is where this story becomes extraordinary.
Shaker commercial labels survive for pulverized culinary herbs including sage, thyme, summer savory and sweet marjoram. Some of those labels did more than identify what was inside the package. They told customers what the herb was for.
Surviving examples advertise pulverized herbs for seasoning poultry, meats and other foods. That small instruction is enormously important because it moves us beyond simply knowing that the Shakers sold herbs. They were marketing flavor.
They were also selling that flavor in a form designed to survive the journey from their fields to someone else’s pantry.
Think about what the canister represented. The harvesting had already happened. The drying had already happened. The picking and cleaning had already happened. The grinding had already happened.
For the customer, much of the labor required to turn a living plant into a convenient seasoning had been performed by other hands. Open the container. Season dinner.
In that sense, the Shakers were not simply selling thyme.
They were selling preserved flavor.
From Mount Lebanon Into the World - Herbs to Market
Then the canister had to go somewhere, and this was one of the hardest parts of the story to reconstruct.
It would be easy to imagine a tidy journey in which an herb leaves Mount Lebanon, rides in a wagon to a country store and is bought by a housewife. History is rarely that cooperative. What survives instead is more complicated and, I think, more impressive.
The Mount Lebanon records include seed-business correspondence, account books and five surviving peddlers’ route books covering portions of the period from 1844 to 1867. One of those route books contains a section titled “Schedule of Herbs, Roots & Barks.” Later East Family records include shipments and payments for dried corn and herbs.
The New York State Library preserves another substantial body of Shaker business material, including correspondence, orders and invoices tied to the production, sale and distribution of herbs and seeds. Among them is an 1854 invoice identifying a Shaker Depot at 112 John Street in New York City, whose dealers handled Shaker herbs, ointments, extracts and seeds.
The discovery worth carrying away is that there was no single road from the Shaker field to the American pantry. There were peddlers, merchants, agents, catalogues, urban dealers, orders, invoices, shipments and payments.
There was a distribution network. The Shakers organized the landscape, the labor and the product. Then they organized its route to market.
Herbs to Market
But Did Shaker Cooks Actually Use All These Herbs?
This is where I had to put on the brakes.
A community selling an herb does not prove that the community cooked with it. A medicinal plant does not automatically belong in the kitchen. And a recipe attributed to a Shaker village is not necessarily a nineteenth-century Shaker recipe.
So I went looking for a source much closer to an actual Shaker kitchen.
That brought me to Mary Whitcher.
In 1882, Mary Whitcher’s Shaker House-Keeper appeared under the imprint of Weeks & Potter of Boston. Whitcher was associated with the Canterbury Shaker community in New Hampshire, and she signed the book’s preface at Shaker Village on March 1, 1882.
It is also worth noticing what kind of object the little book was. Alongside bills of fare and recipes are advertisements for Corbett’s Shakers’ Sarsaparilla. Weeks & Potter, the firm whose name appears as publisher, is also identified inside the booklet as the wholesale agent for the medicine.
A cookbook that sells sarsaparilla is still a cookbook, but the food historian should notice the arrangement.
The book is tiny compared with Miller and Fuller’s enormous collection, yet for this investigation it became invaluable because the cooking recorded in its pages was not flavorless.
Parsley appears in savory dishes. Sage appears as a seasoning. Onion is common. Black pepper appears repeatedly. Cayenne provides heat. Mustard turns up in savory preparations. Then the spice cupboard opens.
Ginger. Nutmeg. Mace. Cloves. Allspice. Cinnamon.
One recipe for Alamode Beef combines cinnamon, cloves, allspice, mace and pepper. Other recipes employ similarly assertive combinations.
This was not a pantry afraid of seasoning. Whitcher’s little book also gave me a warning.
The Dumpling That Changed the Investigation
Miller and Fuller include a recipe for Herb Dumplings and Parsley Dumplings that they associate with Mary Whitcher’s Shaker House-Keeper. Their version contains flour, baking powder, salt, eggs, milk and butter. The cook can add chopped fresh parsley or choose among tarragon, basil, thyme and rosemary, using the herbs singly or in combination, with an adjustment for dried herbs.
It looked like wonderful evidence for Shaker cooks using culinary herbs in an everyday food. Better still, it seemed to connect that practice directly to Mary Whitcher and the nineteenth-century Shaker kitchen.
Then I opened Whitcher’s original 1882 book.
Dumplings
From Mary Whitcher’s Shaker House-Keeper, 1882
“One pint of unsifted flour, one teaspoonful of cream-of-tartar, one-half teaspoonful of soda, one of sugar, one of salt, a small teacupful of milk. Run the dry ingredients through the sieve and with the milk cut into small cakes and cook just ten minutes in the soup or stew, which must boil rapidly all the while.”
The difference is impossible to miss.
There is no parsley, tarragon, basil, thyme or rosemary in Whitcher’s printed recipe. There are no eggs or butter either. Instead of baking powder, the leavening comes from cream of tartar and soda. The dough is not dropped by spoonfuls but cut into small cakes and cooked for ten minutes in rapidly boiling soup or stew.
(This was one of those research moments when I stared at the two recipes side by side and realized the story had just changed. The 1882 dumpling had cream of tartar and soda. The 1970 version had baking powder, eggs, butter and herbs. Somewhere during the research of how dramatically the evidence had shifted, the investigation apparently became a crime scene.
“Ma’am, step away from the cream of tartar.” I laughed far too hard at that not to share it.)
So what happened between Mary Whitcher’s little book in 1882 and Miller and Fuller’s much larger collection in 1970?
I cannot answer that with certainty, and that became one of the most important lessons of this investigation.
Miller and Fuller were serious preservationists working with a complicated body of material. Their own preface explains that The Best of Shaker Cooking drew from manuscripts, family recipe collections, oral traditions, Shaker publications, living Shaker communities and recipes transmitted through people connected with individual villages. Their work preserved an enormous amount of Shaker culinary tradition that might otherwise have been much harder to find.
But preservation and provenance are not quite the same thing.
A recipe associated with Mary Whitcher in a twentieth-century collection does not necessarily mean that the recipe appeared in Whitcher’s nineteenth-century book, or even that we can trace every part of it directly to her. In this case, the surviving printed evidence tells us something very specific: the dumpling recipe published under Whitcher’s name in 1882 is materially different from the herb dumpling Miller and Fuller associated with her in 1970.
And yet the later recipe has its own story to tell.
Miller and Fuller include a wonderfully practical instruction for forming their dumplings: dip the spoon into the hot stock before dipping it into the dough. Wetting the spoon helps the sticky dough release into the pot. They also suggest that the same basic idea can move in a sweet direction rather than a savory one.
Those two details eventually became the inspiration for the modern Oak City Spice Blends recipes that follow. I am not presenting them as reconstructions of Mary Whitcher’s dumplings. They are modern recipes inspired by a later Shaker collection, with the historical trail left visible rather than tidied away.
That distinction matters. Attribution is not the same thing as provenance. Sometimes it takes an archive full of records to reveal that.
Sometimes it takes a single dumpling.
The Shaker Pantry Was Bigger Than the Herb Garden
Whitcher revealed something else.
If we describe Shaker flavor entirely through locally cultivated herbs, we create another false picture because the culinary world represented in her book also contained ingredients whose histories stretched far beyond New England.
Pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, mace, ginger and allspice reached American kitchens through much larger networks of trade.
That places the Shaker pantry at an intriguing intersection. Outside the kitchen door were parsley, sage and other plants that could be cultivated locally. Inside the cupboard were spices whose journeys began far beyond New England.
A community could seek religious separation from the World while its pantry remained connected to it.
That does not make the Shakers hypocritical.
It makes their food history complicated, human and much more interesting.
Then I Found the Herb Salt
Near the back of Miller and Fuller’s book are two recipes that stopped me cold.
One is attributed to North Union Shaker Village in Ohio and the other to Harvard Shaker Village in Massachusetts. Both are called Herb Salt.
The North Union version combines thyme, bay, black pepper, nutmeg, cayenne, marjoram and cloves with salt. The Harvard version uses a considerably larger proportion of salt with thyme, sage, black pepper, nutmeg, cloves and ginger.
If you make spice blends for a living, you can probably understand why I became slightly obsessed.
Here, apparently, was a prepared Shaker seasoning blend. Except I could not find a nineteenth-century Shaker source for either formula. So I kept looking. And the trail led outside the Shaker villages entirely.
The Shakers Did Not Invent the Spice Blend
Prepared dry seasoning mixtures were already circulating in nineteenth-century American cookery.
Juliet Corson’s Twenty-Five Cent Dinners for Families of Six, first published in 1878, contains a recipe called Spice Salt. In the revised 1879 edition, Corson instructs the cook to dry, powder and repeatedly sift thyme, bay leaf, pepper, marjoram, cayenne, cloves and nutmeg. One ounce of salt is added to every four ounces of the resulting powder, which is then kept in an airtight vessel.
The resemblance to the basic technology behind Miller and Fuller’s Herb Salt is striking.
Corson is not an isolated case. Other nineteenth-century cookery books contain related preparations. The proportions change. Particular herbs and spices come and go. Sometimes salt dominates the mixture while sometimes the aromatics do.
But the underlying idea remains recognizable. Grind the aromatics. Sift them. Combine them. Keep the mixture dry and tightly closed. Season from it when needed.
Cooks had discovered one of the great conveniences of the spice cupboard. Do the work once and keep the flavor ready. None of this proves where Miller and Fuller’s North Union and Harvard recipes came from, and it certainly does not prove that either Shaker community invented them.
That is precisely the point. I cannot responsibly call either formula an authenticated nineteenth-century Shaker spice blend on the evidence I have found.
What I can say is that Miller and Fuller preserved two recipes attributed to Shaker communities that sit comfortably within a much broader nineteenth-century tradition of prepared dry seasonings.
That answer is less tidy.
It is better history.
So What Was Particularly Shaker About All This?
Perhaps I had been asking the wrong question.
The Shakers did not invent dried herbs, pulverized herbs, seasoning meat with thyme or the spice blend.
American cooks were calling for pulverized sweet herbs before the Shaker commercial herb business reached maturity. Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery, published at Hartford in 1796, calls in one savory preparation for pulverized sweet herbs and specifically identifies sweet marjoram and thyme as preferred.
What the Shakers did exceptionally well was build an organized commercial system around flavor.
They cultivated plants at scale and, as Myrick’s diary shows at Harvard, could contract cultivation beyond their own fields. They built facilities for drying. They sorted and processed the crop, pulverized culinary herbs, offered different grinds, packaged the results, labeled them and told customers how to use them.
Then they built the machinery of commerce around those products: catalogues, accounts, correspondence, merchants, agents, peddlers and shipment records.
A customer did not need to grow thyme. She did not have to judge when to harvest it, dry it, strip it, grind it or sift it. She could buy much of that work already done. It is a remarkably modern proposition.
From Their Pantry to Ours - Flavor to Table
There is one final reason I think this story matters.
We tend to imagine convenience food as a twentieth-century invention, but culinary convenience has a much longer history.
A packet of seed offered one kind of convenience. A canister of pulverized thyme offered another. A prepared spice salt offered another still. This was convenience created through labor performed in advance. Someone else’s hands had already done part of the work.
That idea survives every time we reach into the cupboard for dried thyme or shake a prepared seasoning over dinner. We rarely think about the field behind it, the drying house, the grinder or the person filling the container. The Shaker records let some of those invisible steps become visible again.
Flavor to Table
Through the Kitchen Window
After all this talk of fields, drying houses, canisters, catalogues and peddlers, I wanted to end where the herbs themselves were meant to end, which is in the kitchen.
And that brought me back to the dumplings.
Miller and Fuller’s Herb Dumplings and Parsley Dumplings may not match the dumpling recipe printed in Mary Whitcher’s 1882 book, but that does not make their recipe uninteresting. It means we should identify it accurately for what it is: a recipe Miller and Fuller preserved in The Best of Shaker Cooking and associated with Whitcher, but whose earlier provenance I have not been able to establish.
There is one tiny instruction in their version that I especially love. When forming the dumplings, the cook is told to dip the spoon into the hot stock first, then into the dough, and then drop the dough into the stock.
It is the kind of kitchen instruction that barely seems worth mentioning until you have tried to scrape sticky dumpling dough from a dry spoon. Wet the spoon first and the dough releases.
That is practical kitchen knowledge, handed down. Miller and Fuller offer one more possibility, which is that the same basic dumpling can move away from savory herbs and take a sweet flavoring instead. One basic idea, two directions, one savory and one sweet. That seemed like the perfect place to bring the story from their kitchen into mine.
Garden Delight Savory Dumplings
This is my modern Oak City Spice Blends interpretation of Miller and Fuller’s herb dumpling idea. It is not presented as a historical Shaker recipe. Garden Delight contains basil, marjoram, oregano, parsley, rosemary, onion, sea salt, thyme and garlic. Several of those herbs overlap with the culinary vocabulary encountered throughout this investigation.
Yield: About 12 dumplings Prep Time: 10 minutes Cook Time: 10 to 12 minutes
Bloom Classification: Fat Bloom Bloom Medium: Melted butter
Why the Bloom Works
Garden Delight contains dried leafy herbs as well as onion and garlic. Briefly warming the seasoning in melted butter helps release and distribute its aromatic compounds before the butter is incorporated into the dumpling dough. The goal is not to toast or brown the herbs. A short, gentle bloom wakes up the seasoning and carries its flavor more evenly through each dumpling.
Ingredients
2 cups all-purpose flour (240 g)
1 tablespoon baking powder (12 g)
1/2 teaspoon salt (3 g)
2 large eggs (about 100 g without shells)
1/2 cup milk, plus a little more if needed (120 g)
2 tablespoons unsalted butter (28 g)
1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons Oak City Spice Blends Garden Delight (3 to 4 g)
6 cups gently simmering chicken or vegetable stock, soup or stew (about 1.4 L)
Method
Bloom the seasoning. Melt the butter over low heat. Add the Garden Delight and stir for about 20 to 30 seconds, just until the herbs become noticeably aromatic. Remove from the heat and allow the butter to cool slightly.
Whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt in a large bowl. Because Garden Delight already contains sea salt, resist the temptation to increase the salt in the dough.
In a separate bowl, beat the eggs with the milk. Whisk in the slightly cooled seasoned butter.
Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and stir only until a soft dough forms. Do not overmix. If necessary, add a small splash of milk to achieve a soft, scoopable dough.
Bring the stock, soup or stew to a steady simmer.
Now use Miller and Fuller’s wonderfully practical technique. Dip the spoon into the hot stock first, then into the dough, and drop the dough into the stock. Repeat, dipping the spoon back into the hot liquid before forming each dumpling.
Cover and cook for approximately 10 to 12 minutes, depending on the size of the dumplings, until they are puffed and cooked through.
Taste the broth or stew before adding additional salt, since Garden Delight contributes seasoning of its own.
Notes from the Spicekeeper
Garden Delight already contains sea salt, so start lightly with any additional salt in the soup or stew and adjust only after the dumplings have cooked. The bloom should be gentle. You are looking for fragrance, not browning. If the butter gets too hot, the dried herbs can become bitter.
These dumplings work especially well over chicken stew, vegetable soup or a simple broth-based supper. If you prefer a softer dumpling, keep the dough slightly loose. For a firmer dumpling, use only enough milk to bring the dough together.
And do not skip the spoon trick. Dipping the spoon into the hot stock before scooping the dough really does make the process easier.
1st Day of Autumn Sweet Apple Dumplings
For the second path, I wanted to follow Miller and Fuller’s suggestion that the basic dumpling could move in a sweet direction. Oak City Spice Blends 1st Day of Autumn contains cinnamon, ginger, vanilla powder, nutmeg, black pepper and clove. Several of those spices were already at home in the nineteenth-century pantry encountered during this research, although the finished Oak City blend is entirely our modern interpretation.
Yield: About 12 dumplings with apples Prep Time: 15 minutes Cook Time: About 20 minutes Bloom Classification: Fat Bloom Bloom Medium: Butter
Why the Bloom Works
Cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, ginger and black pepper all become more aromatic when briefly warmed in fat. Blooming 1st Day of Autumn in butter before adding the apples releases those aromas into the cooking medium, allowing the spice to flavor the butter, fruit and eventual sauce rather than sitting dry on the surface. The bloom should be brief and gentle so the spices become fragrant without scorching and the vanilla remains soft rather than bitter.
For the Apples
4 medium apples, peeled, cored and sliced (about 600 g prepared)
2 tablespoons unsalted butter (28 g)
2 tablespoons packed brown sugar or maple syrup, or to taste (25 g brown sugar or 40 g maple syrup)
1 teaspoon Oak City Spice Blends 1st Day of Autumn (about 3 g)
1 cup apple cider or water (240 g)
For the Dumplings
2 cups all-purpose flour (240 g)
1 tablespoon baking powder (12 g)
1/4 teaspoon salt (1.5 g)
2 tablespoons granulated sugar (25 g)
2 large eggs (about 100 g without shells)
1/2 cup milk, plus a little more if needed (120 g)
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and slightly cooled (28 g)
1 teaspoon Oak City Spice Blends 1st Day of Autumn (about 3 g)
Method
Bloom the seasoning for the apples. Melt the butter in a wide saucepan or Dutch oven over low to medium-low heat. Add 1 teaspoon of 1st Day of Autumn and stir for about 20 seconds, just until the cinnamon, ginger and other spices become fragrant.
Immediately add the apples and toss them through the seasoned butter. Add the brown sugar or maple syrup and the cider. Bring everything to a gentle simmer and cook until the apples begin to soften but still hold their shape.
While the apples cook, whisk together the flour, baking powder, salt, sugar and remaining 1 teaspoon of 1st Day of Autumn.
In a separate bowl, beat the eggs with the milk and melted butter.
Stir the wet ingredients gently into the dry ingredients just until a soft, scoopable dough forms. Do not overmix. Add a small splash of milk if needed.
Return to Miller and Fuller’s spoon technique, adapted this time to the sweet cooking liquid. Dip the spoon into the hot apple liquid first, then into the dough, and drop the dumpling gently over the simmering apples.
Repeat, wetting the spoon in the apple liquid before forming each dumpling.
Cover and cook gently for approximately 10 to 12 minutes, until the dumplings are puffed and cooked through.
Spoon the warm apples and their spiced juices around the dumplings to serve.
Notes from the Spicekeeper
Use an apple that will soften without collapsing completely. A mix of tart and sweet apples is especially nice because the dumplings and sauce already bring sweetness to the dish.
Keep the spice bloom brief. Cinnamon, clove, nutmeg and ginger become beautifully aromatic in warm butter, but they can scorch quickly. As soon as you can clearly smell the spices, add the apples.
The black pepper in 1st Day of Autumn may sound surprising in a sweet dish, but it does not make the dumplings peppery. It gives the warmer spices a little more depth and keeps the flavor from becoming flat.
If you want a richer finish, spoon the warm apples and cooking juices over the dumplings and add a small splash of cream just before serving.
These two dishes are not attempts to recreate a lost Shaker recipe. They are something different. They demonstrate the idea that started this entire investigation: seasoning can take an ordinary food and give it direction.
The same humble dumpling can lean toward the garden with basil, marjoram, parsley, rosemary and thyme, or toward the spice cupboard with cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, clove and vanilla.
The basic food stays recognizable.
The seasoning changes the story.
The Canister and the Spoon
I keep returning to those three sisters at Harvard in January 1850, picking over dried sage while Elisha Myrick prepared herbs for shipment to Boston.
We do not know who eventually bought that particular sage. I cannot follow one canister from their hands into one documented household kitchen, and I do not want to invent the woman who opened it.
The archive takes us only so far. But it takes us far enough. Someone planted the sage. Someone tended it, cut it and dried it. Three sisters sat together and picked through it. Someone ground it. Someone filled a container. Someone made out the bill. Someone carried it away.
Somewhere beyond the boundaries of the Shaker village, a customer eventually opened a package of preserved flavor and used it.
Perhaps that is why I like Miller and Fuller’s little instruction about dipping the spoon into the stock so much. After hundreds of pages of history, agriculture and commerce, suddenly we are standing over the pot again.
Dip the spoon into the stock. Dip it into the dough. Drop the dumpling into the pot.
The canister began as inventory. It ended in a pantry. And eventually someone reached for a spoon. Between those two moments lies a story of agriculture, labor, technology, commerce, cooking and faith.
I found it because a random number sent me to Cookbook #59.
Hands to work. Herbs to market. Flavor to table.
Further Reading and Sources
Amy Bess Williams Miller and Persis Wellington Fuller, The Best of Shaker Cooking. Macmillan, 1970. This is the book that began the investigation. Particularly useful are the introduction on Shaker herbalism and culinary herbs, the authors’ explanation of their source material and the individual recipes attributed to different Shaker communities.
Mary Whitcher, Mary Whitcher’s Shaker House-Keeper. Weeks & Potter, 1882. This became one of the most important primary sources in the investigation because it allowed later recipe attributions to be compared with an actual nineteenth-century printed text. University of South Florida digitized edition | Scan-backed transcription at Wikisource
Amelia Simmons, American Cookery. Hartford: Hudson & Goodwin, 1796. Important for demonstrating that pulverized sweet herbs were already part of American culinary language before the Shaker commercial herb industry matured. Project Gutenberg edition
Juliet Corson, Twenty-Five Cent Dinners for Families of Six. Orange Judd Company, revised edition 1879, copyright 1878. Corson’s Spice Salt documents a wider nineteenth-century tradition of prepared dry seasoning mixtures. Project Gutenberg edition
Harvard Historical Society, “Shaker Village: Herb Dry House.” Particularly valuable for the scale of Harvard’s herb industry, the 1845 inventory and the construction of the Dry House and larger herb house. Harvard Historical Society
Harvard Shaker Village, “Herb Dry House.” Provides additional information about the Harvard herb industry and the $400 construction cost of the 1848 stone Dry House. Harvard Shaker Village
Shaker Museum, Mount Lebanon, “Making All Those Seed Packets.” Especially useful for understanding the organization of the seed trade and the October 1841 spiritual communication attributed to Joseph Meacham. Shaker Museum
Shaker Museum, Mount Lebanon, Manuscript Finding Aid. This is the source that led to the seed-business correspondence, five peddlers’ route books, the “Schedule of Herbs, Roots & Barks,” and later records of dried-herb shipments and payments. Mount Lebanon manuscript finding aid
New York State Library, Shaker Collection. An extensive collection of manuscripts, correspondence, invoices and ephemera. Particularly relevant is the 1854 invoice from the Shaker Depot at 112 John Street in New York City. New York State Library Shaker Collection
New York State Library, New Lebanon Shaker Community Photographs. The collection containing J. E. West’s The Kitchen Garden, Print 105/J38, showing the North Family kitchen garden at Mount Lebanon. NYSL collection guide
Hancock Shaker Village, Manuscript Collection Guides. These guides were invaluable for identifying commercial labels, catalogues, manuscripts and business records and for distinguishing archival material from later recipe attributions. Guide I | Guide II
“A Peek into History: Shaker Herbs,” Mother Earth Living. This secondary source reproduces selected entries from Elisha Myrick’s 1850 Harvard herb-department diary, including the Boston shipment, the sisters picking sage, the 18 dozen large cans of thyme and the John Blanchard sage-growing arrangement. Read the article
Smithsonian Libraries and Biodiversity Heritage Library, Shaker seed-industry materials. Useful for the history of Shaker seed packets, agricultural marketing and distribution. Smithsonian Libraries | Biodiversity Heritage Library
National Park Service, “Ann Lee.” Useful for the basic history of Ann Lee’s 1774 migration and the scale of the Shaker movement at its height. National Park Service
Canterbury Shaker Village, “The Shakers.” Provides institutional background on the Shaker communities and their history. Canterbury Shaker Village
A Note on Sources
One lesson from this investigation deserves to be stated plainly. A recipe appearing in a modern Shaker collection is not automatically a nineteenth-century Shaker recipe. A village attribution is not the same thing as an original manuscript. A plant appearing in a Shaker medicinal catalogue is not proof of culinary use. A recipe associated with a named Shaker should be checked against that person’s surviving work whenever possible.
Where an original source could be checked, I checked it. Where only a later attribution survives, I have said so. Where I relied upon a published transcription or excerpt rather than the underlying manuscript, I have tried to make that clear.
Where the evidence stops, so does the story.
That may leave a few questions unanswered.
It is far better than filling the gaps with things the Shakers never told us.
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