Easily more than three feet wide, with a beehive oven to one side and what appears to be the original iron crane, the brick hearth in the Esek Hopkins Homestead would have once been the center of domestic life for the house’s inhabitants. Women — whether the head woman of the household, a servant, or an enslaved person — likely would have tended to the fire all day long, especially during the colder months of the year. So life happened around the fire: Children played, socks were mended, illnesses soothed, meals cooked, books read, conversations had, and stories told. 

For the last several decades, the main hearth in the Hopkins Homestead has gone cold. In March, a pair of trainees took PPS’s masonry workshop, a continuation of a previous workshop which sought to repair and refurbish the main hearth. This time around, the trainees finished the area surrounding the hearth, which had previously been stabilized, with neat rows of brick. As many of these bricks as possible were historic bricks found around the property.

While trainees Josh Wojnar and Jake Spencer — both curatorial staff at the Nathanael Greene Homestead (1770) in Coventry — mixed mortar and instructor Noel Sanchez supervised, the four of us discussed what the parts of the hearth were used for historically.

Anatomy of an 18th-19th Century Hearth

There’s some question of exactly what year the hearth inside the Esek Hopkins home dates back to — while the original house was built sometime between 1740 and 1750, what is now the main hearth is in the second ell addition of the home. That part of the building was likely added between 1820 and 1840, nearly 100 years after the first section of the home was erected. 

Esek Hopkins very likely never used this hearth — he died in 1802. His daughters, Heart Hopkins and Desire Hopkins Leonard, would have been the residents to commission a new addition. Heart never married, and Desire had been divorced once and widowed once by the time she moved back to her family’s country home around 1807. Historical research on the home done by the National Hopkins Family Organization suggests that while the kitchen ell was probably added between 1820 and 1840, an existing building could have been moved and adjoined to the house. 

The all-purpose hearth was falling out of style by the mid-19th century, with many favoring cast iron stoves instead. As a country residence, the Hopkins Homestead may have lagged behind the most popular innovations of the time. Fire-resistant bricks also weren’t invented until 1822; depending on when the hearth was built and if the mason used firebricks, this hearth would have needed to be repaired time and time again.

This diagram of the Esek Hopkins House Homestead hearth includes four important parts: the main fireplace, the iron crane over the fireplace, the beehive oven, and a fairly deep cutout underneath the oven, which may have been used as an ash hole or for wood storage.

Cooking Over the Open Flames

In the main fireplace, the iron crane would have been used mostly to cook stews and soups. Using s-shaped hooks, pots could be held over the fire at the necessary distance. To pan-fry food, the cook could have scraped a few hot coals on the brick in front of the main fire and used a spider — a cast-iron pan with legs that could sit directly over the coals.

One dish the Hopkins may have made with a spider is the Rhode Island Jonnycake — or Johnnycake, depending on who you ask. The recipe differs by region: some batters are thinner, some thicker; some use milk, some favor boiling water. In general, the Jonnycake is like a lesser pancake, traditionally made using Rhode Island cornmeal, which has a flakier texture and stronger corn flavor than regular cornmeal. 

Some time in the second half of the 20th century, a group of historians at a 1697 home in Newport spent the summer testing out old recipes, compiling their findings in Oldport Cooks: Recipes from the Open Hearth of the Wanton-Lyman-Hazard House. One of the docents noted that, “the more you have, the better they [are],” at least when it came to Newport-style milk Johnnycakes.

Baking in the Bread Oven

If you poke your head through the opening behind the Homestead oven’s cast-iron door, you’ll find the brick walls inside form a dome — this shape is what inspired the term “beehive oven.” Though the oven’s proximity to the fire might suggest the oven is heated simply by the main fireplace, this isn’t the case. Instead, the baker would have scooped coals from the main fire into the oven and closed the door. Once the oven was at the right temperature, she would then scrape the coals onto the floor and place whatever dish she was preparing inside.

In the Hopkins House, the coals may then have been swept into the cutout underneath the oven to be dealt with at a later date — the position of the cutout is convenient for that use. Throwing some doubt on that theory, however, is the depth of the space underneath the oven. If you could fit through the opening, there’s probably enough room inside for an adult to curl up in a ball on the floor. Because of its size, it’s also possible this space could have been used for wood storage.

As the Oldport Cooks docents discovered, using the oven required a significant amount of guesswork:

“The early housewife, or her cook, with years of experience, controlled the source of heat by skillfully feeding it just the right amount of wood, of the right size and kinds to produce the desired results. It is this science of fire-tending for cookery that is largely extinct, and must be relearned in restorations for demonstration purposes. There was no thermometer, but the cook’s knife and intuition knew when the deep kettle dish was done, or her sense of rightness determined when the roast was cooked to perfection (more often boiled in a pot than roasted in New England).”

Oldport Cooks: Recipes From the Open Hearth of the Wanton-Lyman-Hazard House

What would have gone inside the oven besides bread? To find out, I consulted six cookbooks from the Providence Athenaeum: 

• Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery (transcribed in 1995 by Karen Hess, with 16th century recipes)
• The Compleat Housewife (by E. Smith, published in 1758)
• The Boston Cook Book (by Mary J. Lincoln, published in 1904, with 19th-20th century recipes)
• The Williamsburg Art of Cookery (by Helen Bullock, published in 1947, with 18th-20th century recipes)
• Oldport Cooks (by the Oldport docents, published c. 1970s, with 18th-19th century recipes)
• The New England Cookbook (by Brooke Dojny, published in 1999)

Nearly all of them contained recipes for “plumb” or “plum” cakes — none of which actually call for plums. Instead, a plumb cake is the dessert that may elicit the most groans at a family function: fruitcake. 

Maybe because families were larger then, older plumb cake recipes call for an incredible amount of each ingredient — see an abridged recipe from The Compleat Housewife below.

The recipe used by the Oldport docents is similar to The Compleat Housewife, except with far more sugar (4 lbs!), and an additional 10 eggs. Their recipe seems to have come from one of the former occupants of the house, as they included a note from Oliver Hazard Perry, who said it “will make a devilish good wedding cake such as I had.” 

The docents used ⅛ of the original recipe and reported back: “We all agreed it was a ‘DEVILISH’ cake indeed!”

Other popular recipes across these cookbooks were “Indian meal mush” and “Indian pudding” — neither of which were inspired by Indigenous cuisine beyond the use of cornmeal — and orange cake. Besides pancakes, green pea soup was the only recipe I found in every single book. Older recipes for pea soup recommend cooking with “ye youngest pease you can get” (Martha Washington’s Booke) and “a good quantity of marigolds” (The Compleat Housewife), the latter of which seems to have fallen out of memory by the 1830s. We may never know exactly what the Hopkins family and the other inhabitants of the house were eating in the early 1800s, but these dishes are as good a guess as any. 

If you decide to use the plumb cake recipe from The Compleat Housewife in this post, let us know how it goes and send us a picture of your creation – we will post these photos on Instagram!

By Keating Zelenke / Mary A. Gowdey Special Projects Fellow / kzelenke@ppsri.org

Thank you to the research librarian at the Providence Athenaeum, Stephanie Ovoian, for her help in tracking down these cookbooks!