Back Forty: A history of food, and freedom, at American boarding houses

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By Christopher Ketcham

One summer years ago, when I was reporting on a left-wing secession movement in Vermont, I stayed for a month in a boarding house in the little village of Hancock, hard by the fast-flowing White River. The proprietor, 70-something Kat the Cat Lady (as she called herself), worked in hospice care during the day.  For this she had the ideal temperament, as she radiated peace and comfort, which perhaps was the outgrowth of many years in nursing. Her boarding house was bright and sunny and clean, and in it one felt safe and content. The cats were many, there were chickens in the yard under the shade trees, for a supply of fresh eggs, and Kat tended a vast vegetable garden, in a greenhouse and in outdoor beds where you could hear the rushing of the river.

A lefty secessionist herself, her politics were fiery, iconoclastic. NPR radio stood for Not Particularly Relevant, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were treasonous affairs, the DemoRepubs were Upton Sinclair’s two wings of the capitalist bird of prey, and the Black man in the White House — this was during Obama’s first term — was, for Kat, mostly a joke because he was far too conservative. She wanted out of the American Empire altogether and for Vermont to become an independent anarcho-socialist republic.

She talked politics over delicious dinners, inviting her lodgers to gather at the long wooden table in the sunroom and share food. She maintained an enormous range of vegetarian recipes (my girlfriend at the time kept at least 30 of them). There was sauerkraut cabbage soup, red lentil soup, and mulligatawny soup. Moroccan yam veggie burgers with a cilantro-lime topping.  Sweet potato vichyssoise. In her kitchen, she would bring out with a flourish large sheet pans of sizzling roasted mixed vegetables — roasted cauliflower and broccoli, for example, cooked until caramelized, drizzled with olive oil. Among the many desserts, I remember the cream scones.

I recall all this, the politics and the food, because it’s contemporary evidence of the long tradition of charismatic and successful female boarding house operators in the United States, the subject of the informative, if sometimes stiltedly academic, first book by Elizabeth Engelhardt, a professor of Southern studies at the University of North Carolina.  

The focus in Boardinghouse Women: How Southern Keepers, Cooks, Nurses, Widows, and Runaways Shaped Modern America, is the American South and the rise of an emancipated class of women, the “keepers” of domestic households they transformed into commercial opportunities. They offered rooms and meals to relative strangers for what was usually a modest fee — and thereby incubated, among other things, a peculiarly Southern food culture. 

Her investigation of this “overlooked story,” writes Engelhardt, reveals that “women’s crucial roles in business, politics, and culture were nurtured and enacted inside the walls of boarding houses,” which became “radical engines of social change and spaces for shelter and reinvention.” Many of the keepers — “charismatic women” all, according to Engelhardt — “used boardinghouses to leave their past behind, whether in terms of racial identity, gender, or class; some found the freedom to love who they wanted or resist expectations they hated.“ 

Boarding houses became pivotal staging sites in the Underground Railroad that facilitated the escape of enslaved people from the antebellum South. They were safe houses during the oppression and terrorism of Jim Crow. In exceptional cases, boarding houses were sites of libertinage, sexual and prandial, places of lust and gluttony and debauchery in an era when (to some) these were forbidden fruits. Sometimes they were covers for or doubled as brothels. 

It was by taking in boarders in Gold Rush-era San Francisco that Mary Ellen Pleasant, a Black woman, built up the capital to buy more property and get rich — so rich she is said to be America’s first Black female millionaire. Hers is perhaps the most fascinating tale of a keeper’s rise to prominence. Shrewd and enterprising, Pleasant, who in a government census identified herself as “a capitalist by profession,” leveraged her wealth first in real estate and then in wide-ranging investments. Working out of her mansion in San Francisco, she used her money to fund the creation of Underground Railroad networks for slaves to reach California, became friends with (and a benefactor of) the abolitionist John Brown, and, following the Civil War, led so many battles for the emancipation of women that she was known as “the mother of human rights” in the Golden State. 

Threaded throughout the narrative is that boardinghouse keepers presided over both the creation of new foodways and the preservation of old ones. It was from a boarding house that the first Southern cookbook emerged, in 1824, titled The Virginia Housewife, which food historian Karen Hess described as possibly “the finest work to come out of the American kitchen.” The pioneering author, Mary Randolph, ran slaves on a plantation in Virginia with her prominent husband, an acquaintance of Thomas Jefferson, but the family fell on hard times.  Mary deftly pivoted, opening her first house in Richmond in 1808. It was advertised “for the accommodation of Ladies and Gentlemen” — literally, the gentry — and soon, as Engelhardt writes, “her parlor and dining room table were the place to see and be seen, hash out the latest political controversies, and, not least, indulge in food and drink that rivaled any to be found in the still relatively young United States.“   

Engelhardt stumbles a bit in her conclusions to the book, trying to argue, for example, that Airbnb represents a continuation of the boardinghouse tradition. This, of course, is laughable, in that Airbnb has produced no culture and no community, but, quite the contrary, can be said to have hollowed out both. The book’s structure is rigid, with each chapter fashioned with formulaic predictability around the historical lives of two boarding house keepers. We are treated to long passages of detailed history that can be dulling, because it’s down in the weeds, and Engelhardt’s language is mostly bereft of lyrical charm. Nonetheless, the evidence she marshals for her case is solid: tenacious boardinghouse women like Pleasant, faced with incredible adversity, comprised the avant-garde of female (and racial) liberation.