On 16 November 1911, a crowd of expectant diners headed by the wife of US presidential hopeful Woodrow Wilson gathered at Delmonico’s, one of Manhattan’s most famous restaurants. They were there to enjoy an eight-course dinner laid on by Good Housekeeping magazine. The menus, printed on paper bags, hinted at what was in store: out came a procession of appetisers, each inside a scorched paper wrapping. Waiters wheeled in soufflé, a constellation of cooked vegetables and two roast turkeys – all prepared in paper bags. Undeterred by the presentation, the diners lingered for ice cream (frozen, of course, in paper bags) and finally coffee boiled inside a bag. A culinary revolution had begun.
“THE day may be coming,” The New York Times thundered in 1911, “when our kitchens shall no longer be hung with pots and pans. Nay…That day is already upon us.” The notion of cooking in paper was hardly new: fish wrapped and baked in parchment, or poisson en papillote, is one of the great standards of French cuisine. Much like modern aluminium foil, the paper wrapping keeps food wonderfully moist and flavourful. But in 1911 cooks across the UK and America embraced the humble paper bag to bake fish and fowl alike, and just about everything else from pot roast to toad-in-the-hole.
The paper-bag cookery fad had its inauspicious beginning in 1896 at the stately home of the Dowager Duchess of Newcastle. Nicolas Soyer, grandson of the influential Victorian chef Alexis Soyer, was working in the duchess’s kitchen when he asked a kitchen maid to add a little sauce to the poisson en papillote he was preparing. “She put in too much,” he recalled. “By-and-by the paper vessel began to bubble up, and before I could interfere it exploded with a bang.” As he mopped up the steaming mess, Soyer popped a piece of the ruined fish in his mouth.
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It was beautifully tender, better even than the best poisson en papillote served up in Paris. Inspired, Soyer piled meat, vegetables and a splash of water into a hastily created envelope and thrust it into the oven. “The paper got burnt, and soon afterwards it exploded,” he reported. Adding too many wet ingredients created an uncontrollable build-up of steam. And yet the splattered mess was delicious – if you were willing to scrape it off the oven walls and didn’t mind the faint but persistent taste of paper.
“It was delicious if you were prepared to scrape it off the oven walls”
Even as he climbed the culinary ranks to become the chef of Brooks’s Club in London, Soyer fitfully experimented with paper cookware. In July 1911 he unveiled his radical new cookbook, Paper-Bag Cookery. The key to success was not just the paper – it was the bag. Soyer had realised that explosions could be avoided if the paper container was strong enough; and while his own hand-folded parchment didn’t work, a paper bag with the opening folded over several times and secured with metal clips proved up to the task.
His experiment had coincided with a great innovation in packaging. Although shops had used paper bags for centuries, they were narrow and handmade, luxury items themselves and used only for precious commodities such as sugar. Shop assistants wrapped bulkier purchases in paper and tied them up with twine, a slow and clumsy task.
That began to change in 1852, when the first paper-bag machine appeared. “I can remember when machine-made bags first came into use,” one shop assistant recalled years later. “We clerks hailed them with joy.” Margaret Knight’s subsequent invention in 1868 of a machine to produce capacious square-bottomed paper bags was of such sensational importance to retailing that she became the first woman to receive a US patent. Paper bags became ubiquitous: by the time Soyer’s fish dish exploded in 1896, more than 4 billion bags a year were used in the US alone, and New York City’s parks commissioner was grumbling about them littering Central Park.
But there was still the matter of that unwanted paper flavour. Not long before Soyer began his experiments, waxed paper bags had become widely available, and other scentless and water-resistant bags followed. Soyer also carefully coated the inside of the bag with butter or oil, and to avoid scorching he placed them on a wire grill in a moderately heated oven. So now Soyer had a cheap and disposable form of cookware. It seemed you could cook almost anything in it, although even Soyer was defeated when it came to making a cup of tea, for which, he admitted, you still needed a teapot. Paper-bag cookery was hygienic and simple: there were no pots to clean, it freed kitchen space in cramped tenement apartments, cooked faster and with less fuel, and even sealed in cooking odours, sparing the neighbours the smell of boiling cabbage. “The kitchen will become a whole new room,” Soyer crowed.
A grateful public agreed. As Soyer barnstormed around the US and the UK giving cooking demonstrations, Paper-Bag Cookery flew off the shelves, with new printings every month. London’s Daily Chronicle called the technique “the question of the hour”, although American pundit H. L. Mencken took a dim view of the fad, grumbling that “if the average American husband wants a sound dinner he must go to a restaurant to get it”.
Inevitably, there were imitators. Within months a competing “Dreycoul” bag system was hawked in Edinburgh. In London, the prolific chef Herman Senn rushed out his own Paper-Bag Cookery Manual with an endorsement from the Daily Express, which sold its own branded paper bags and oven thermometers. In the US another copycat cookbook welcomed American housewives to “the paper-bag culinary cult”, and even Dr Miles Laxative Tablets issued a promotional paper-bag cookbook, although it is doubtful whether Dr Miles’s customers were all that keen on cooking.
These cookbooks embody the peculiarities of the Edwardian palate. Soyer’s recipe for curried venison is redolent of an age when game meats were still common fare, and Senn’s curious use of bananas reflects the new vogue for them as they suddenly became widely available. Hence unlikely paper-bag dishes as this:
Bananas with bacon
This makes an excellent breakfast dish. Take six bananas, not over ripe, peel them, and cut them in half lengthways; season with salt and pepper, and put each half on a slice of streaky bacon. Place these in a well-buttered paper-bag, fasten the ends securely as above directed, and bake in a hot oven for about 12 minutes or longer; it will not spoil.
For sheer oddness, though, Soyer’s cookbook remains unsurpassed. He dismissed the “uncooked foods cult” and saw paper-bag cooking as a tool in the service of the empire “able to cook a meal that will be to many a wandering son of Britain a sunny souvenir of the Savoy and a radiant reminiscence of the Ritz”. Soyer even has a paper-bag-themed short story, The Bag and the Bachelor. Its titular protagonist complains “Cook it myself! Oh, come, I say…” before being converted to the delights of paper-bagging.
Like most culinary fads, paper-bag cookery had run its course within a few years. Old habits die hard, and the need to buy bags and the counter-intuitive idea of putting paper into an oven didn’t help. And it was impossible to eliminate pots and pans from the kitchen entirely: omelettes and soups did not lend themselves to the technique. Soyer fell on his feet, though, serving as a chef for both King Edward VII and King George V.
But what of Soyer’s vision of a paper kitchen? The idea proved prophetic: what needed to change was not just the recipes and the cookware, but the oven. With the rise of the microwave, paperboard and paper bag cookware has become commonplace. These microwaveable packages often rely on “susceptors” – thin films of aluminium sandwiched between the layers of paper. Though typical microwave heating vibrates water molecules so that food “cooks itself”, susceptors heat up so that a dish will brown and crisp, effectively creating a conventional oven inside the microwave.
The Bag and the Bachelor has indeed come to pass, and to a greater extent than Soyer imagined. “They may provide themselves with a simple and sufficient meal in half an hour,” he claimed of his paper-bag chefs, “and have nothing to wash but a plate and a knife and fork.” But as many a student knows, now you can buy a ready meal, zap it, and eat it from the package in minutes, without ever doing the washing up.
