by Diana Cercone
Come with Bucks County Magazine as we travel back 250 years to celebrate the holidays. We could think of no better guide for our Bucks County Christmas Past than Mercy Ingraham. It was as a ten-year-old Girl Scout that she first cooked over an open fire. “I fell in love with cooking over a fire,” she says. “It was like falling down the rabbit hole of historical food.” There were so many things she wanted to know. “How did they cook? What did they cook?”
Over the years Mercy has more than found answers to her questions, becoming a well-known figure for her knowledge of colonial cooking—often demonstrating open-hearth cooking at historic sites as well as teaching classes in the art of open-hearth cooking, both historic and contemporary. She is a member of the Historic Foodways Society of Delaware Valley (HFSDV) and the Association for Living History, Farm and Agricultural Museums. She’s also a very good sport and kindly agreed to slip into her colonial role as a middling (middle class) wife and invite us into her home to share Christmas dinner.
As I arrive at her address in Hulmeville, she’s standing outside to greet me complete in costume except for her cap. “I’ll put on my cap before my guests arrive,” she says, leading me on a tour of her historic house. The house was built in the 1750s, she says, and is probably the oldest stone farmhouse in town, which takes its name from John Hulme, Jr. In the late 1790s, Hulme bought most of the town, then called Milford Mills, including her house, which he bought in1796. Pointing to a line running the height of the stone wall between two sections, she says, “You can see where Hulme added the new wing to the house in 1804 or 1805. It’s my living room now.” Hulme sold the house to his son George in 1813, and, in 1815, George rented out the front room to The Farmers Bank of Bucks County, the first bank in Bucks County. The bank relocated to Bristol in 1823, and in 1830, moved to it present site at 244 Radcliffe Street where a Wachovia Bank is now. Except for that short-lived commercial venture, the house has always been a private residence, she says. But before we step inside, she adds that Josiah Canby had his carriage shop on the large hill she can see from her kitchen window. “Edward Hicks worked for him,” she said, “and I often thought he would have come hear to deposit money in the bank.”
Her kitchen and open-hearth fireplace reside in the original section of the house where they were first built more than 250 years ago. Unlike the rarified air on a mountaintop, here in her kitchen, it is rich and wonderfully warm with the aromas of a fat goose roasting over the open-hearth and a plumb (sic) pudding gently bubbling nearby. “You can hear the goose fat sizzling as the drippings meet the flames,” she says. “That’s something you’re not going to hear when cooking a goose in a conventional oven.”
To learn more about Colonial Cooking see page 68 and go to our food section to get recipes.