Sampling the Tastes of the Civil War

Daniel Mowles preparing roasted rabbits for a tasting of Civil War-era food at the Roger Smith Hotel on Monday. The chef, it turned out, was from southwest Virginia and grew up in a household that, he said, had inherited some of Robert E. Lee’s silverware.

Those were just coincidences at a tasting of dishes from the Civil War era, prepared according to recipes adapted from cookbooks published between 1861 and 1865.

Here was another coincidence. The tasting was organized by Andrew F. Smith, a faculty member at the New School and the editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, who said he was distantly related to a Miss Leslie.

He said she was famous among culinary historians as a 19th-century cookbook writer from Philadelphia. And it was her stewed mutton chops that were on the tasting menu, right after “Captain Sanderson’s boiled pork-and-bean soup” and before “Mrs. Haskell’s 1861 mashed potatoes.” That accompanied the roast rabbit....