A very Biltmore Thanksgiving
A look at George Vanderbilt’s legacy and a menu inspired by it.
In the bustling, modern kitchen of a farm near Asheville, preparations for Thanksgiving dinner are in full swing, providing a perfect snapshot of a farm-to-table movement taking root in western North Carolina.
The 25-pound Bronze turkey simmering in a water bath on the stove, to be later roasted in a wood-fired oven, came from the farm’s poultry yards. So did the eggs being hard-boiled and grated for the bird’s corn bread dressing. The on-site dairy produced the milk, butter and cream from the farm’s Golden Lad Jersey cows. The Queen sweet potatoes, White Plume celery, parsnips, onions and pumpkins getting peeled, chopped, boiled, roasted or pureed were grown in fields below the French Broad and Swannanoa rivers. Spinach and lettuce were pulled from the property’s glass-roofed greenhouses.
Or so I imagine. This Thanksgiving dinner, in my mind’s eye, takes place not in 2014 but in 1902. The farm is Biltmore, a 125,000-acre estate, and the house a 250-room French Renaissance chateau. “Many novel dishes were set before the guests, the ingredients for which came from the good things raised on the estate farms and which were the original product of Biltmore’s astute chef,” the Asheville Citizen reported about that day.
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Today, Biltmore — on much less land — is considered one of the nation’s premier examples of Gilded Age architecture. The home, still the largest privately owned residence in the country, is also Asheville’s biggest tourist attraction. What I didn’t realize until I investigated, though, was just how visionary its owner, George Washington Vanderbilt II, was. His goal that the house be self-sufficient, like the European manors he much admired, made it an early example of a back-to-the-land focus that we now take for granted. Vanderbilt’s influence, in fact, changed Asheville’s landscape and even provided the backdrop for its current culinary boom.
When I toured Biltmore in July, my guide noted how seriously the Vanderbilts took special occasions and mentioned that George’s favorite meal was roast turkey and corn bread dressing. That set my wheels in motion. I decided that as Biltmore approaches the 120th anniversary of the house’s completion, I’d develop a Thanksgiving menu as a tribute.
First, some background. Vanderbilt was the last of eight children born to William Henry Vanderbilt, whose father, Cornelius, had amassed a fortune in railroads and shipping. Upon William Henry’s death in 1885, George’s two eldest brothers ran the family’s business affairs, leaving George free to pursue pastoral interests.
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On a trip to Asheville with his mother, Maria, in 1888, Vanderbilt, then 26, was captivated by the Blue Ridge Mountains and decided to build a country home there. Construction took six years, from 1889 to 1895. By the time Biltmore was finished, the locals, skeptical about a millionaire New Yorker turning wilderness into manna, had been won over.
"Vanderbilt the farmer," wrote the Asheville News and Hotel Reporter in 1887, "has shown the Carolinians the productive capacities of their Virgin Soil ... by the scientific drainage, the improved machinery, the importation of fine stock, the ... lavish use of fertilizers, and the most up-to-date and scientific methods ... ."
Vanderbilt employed the most talented people he could find, including experts in forestry, road building, horticulture, agriculture and general management. Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., who designed New York’s Central Park, was the landscape architect, but he was more than that.
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“A land use planner, really,” says Ted Katsigianis, Biltmore’s vice president of agricultural and environmental sciences. “He convinced Vanderbilt that most of the land had to go back to forestry and managed sustainably like a crop, because everything else east of the Mississippi that was accessible had been logged.”
Pretty much everything was grown and raised at Biltmore: grain crops, forage crops, field crops, fruits, vegetables, poultry (hens, brooders, turkeys, ducks, game birds), Berkshire swine, lard hogs, Jersey cattle, sheep, goats, bees. What couldn’t be produced there was bought from Asheville vendors or brought in by rail from the Northeast. In turn, the estate was selling enough products to be commercially viable by the beginning of the 20th century.
Biltmore was cutting edge. Greenhouses (called forcing houses) supplied produce such as asparagus, melons, tomatoes and lettuce in the winter. The dairy, Vanderbilt’s pride and joy, was tiled in white enamel for easy cleaning and had cold storage, ice and electric plants. Its three cattle barns were temperature controlled in winter and turned into open-air sheds in the summer.
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In 1898, Vanderbilt married Edith Stuyvesant Dresser, who was taken with Biltmore and involved herself in the lives of the farm families, says Leslie Klingner, Biltmore’s curator of interpretation. She advocated literacy, created Biltmore Industries so locals could earn money making furniture and handicrafts, and established a School of Domestic Science for African American women. She promoted agricultural reform and set up agricultural fairs and competitions.
Biltmore House was the apogee of modernity at the turn of the century. It had electricity, hot and cold running water, a bowling alley, a 70,000-gallon indoor swimming pool, a gym, freight and passenger elevators, dumbwaiters, forced-air heat, an in-house telephone system, a centrally controlled clock system, an icemaking plant and refrigeration that used compressed ammonia gas to chill brine water.
What is striking about Biltmore’s basement-level kitchen, preserved in its original condition, is how brilliantly it was planned. With a bit of updating, you can easily picture a cadre of today’s chefs happily working there. It has a walk-in cooler and three reach-in refrigerators. The dry goods storage room was lined in steel to keep it rodent-free. The spacious main kitchen, with its batterie of gleaming copper pots and pans hanging over the work space, features a large coal-and-wood-fired stove and a wood-burning grill. Separate rooms house a fruit and vegetable pantry, a root cellar for preserved foods, a pastry kitchen and an enormous wood-fired rotisserie with an electrically operated spit for roasting meat.
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All the better for producing a special dinner like Thanksgiving’s. Although we don’t know what the house served in 1902, we do know that the guests numbered 18, and many arrived in Vanderbilt’s lavish private rail car, the Swannanoa, just in time for the holiday. Some of the guests had been at Biltmore all month. The meal was served in the banquet hall, 70 feet long and 42 feet wide with a 70-foot vaulted ceiling, adorned with flags of the 13 original states, moose and big-game heads, 16th-century Flemish tapestries, a triple fireplace and a pipe organ loft.
Seating for the dinner was in the French style, with George and Edith facing each other at the center of the table and the guests of honor, noted architects Thomas Hastings and Charles McKim, at either head. The writer Edith Wharton, who frequented Biltmore, sat to George’s right. Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., a successor to his father’s architectural firm, also attended. Olmsted Sr. died in 1903.
The oak dining table, 12 feet wide, could extend from 7
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feet to 40. It was always set, says Klingner, with a white damask tablecloth and napkins, all made by hand and most embroidered with the GWV monogram. The Vanderbilts’ burgundy-and-gold-bordered china was made in England by Minton and Spode Copeland. Silver flatware featured an engraved Old English pattern from Frances Higgins, London, 1894. The delicate, feather-light crystal was Baccarat.
Dinner was always served at 8 and was always formal dress. There were seven or eight courses, up to 10 for special occasions. Oysters on the half shell were a favored starter, followed by soup (often consommé), fish (bass and Spanish mackerel were popular choices), an entree (often an elaborate variety-meat dish), a relevé (a roasted meat joint or bird, plus multiple vegetable and starch side dishes), salad and black coffee, considered an aid to digestion.
I developed my Biltmore tribute dinner mostly from one historical gold mine: a diary describing 14 weeks of menus for luncheons and dinners served between Sept. 27 and Dec. 31, 1904. In addition to turkey, the Thanksgiving menu that year included oysters, consommé, broiled Spanish mackerel, calf’s brain cutlets and Virginia ham. Many of the menus contain notations and changes added by Vanderbilt or his wife, Edith.
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You’ll notice one major difference between my tribute menu and those served at Biltmore: I trimmed mine to four courses, keeping in mind that you are unlikely to employ an English chef, a French assistant and 12 other cooks, as the Vanderbilts did. (The 12 cooks were women, 11 of them from Western North Carolina.)
Share this articleShareThe first course is something I’m calling Oysters Biltmore, bivalves on the half shell with bits of country ham and a lemony scallion Mornay sauce that broils into browned, bubbling, cheesy perfection.
The second is a Waldorf salad update from Asheville chef Katie Button, owner of Curate and Nightbell. A “salade” was always served before dessert at Biltmore dinners. The course was popular among wealthy people in the early 19th century because lettuce, being so perishable, was a delicacy. That the Vanderbilts served lettuce grown in their own greenhouses in the winter would have impressed guests.
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The preparation George Vanderbilt liked most for roast turkey and dressing was that of Ellen Davis, a cook from Avery Creek, a few counties over, who came to work at Biltmore in 1899.
As it turns out, her turkey recipe, sent to me by Klingner, results in a terrific bird. In a covered pan on top of the stove, Davis first simmered the bird in water covering its thighs, basting it regularly to keep the breast moist, then roasted it in the oven until golden brown. That method produces braised thigh meat that is tender and flavorful without overcooking the white meat: two hours for a 14-pound turkey. I added extra touches, including a two-day dry-brining and butter under the breast skin to eliminate the need to baste.
A pencil notation added in George Vanderbilt’s hand to a luncheon menu for Nov. 25, 1904, reads, “Give me puree of parsnip sometimes as a vegetable,” so I did, topping it with bruleed sweet potato disks as a riff on sweet potatoes with roasted marshmallows.
Fried hominy appears often in the 1904 menus, usually as an accompaniment for duck. I fashioned cakes from grits, hominy, spinach, bacon and Parmesan cheese and sauteed them to golden brown crunchiness.
Charlotte russe, a molded dessert of Bavarian cream surrounded by ladyfingers, was popular on the Vanderbilt table. My version is a showstopper: pumpkin Bavarian cream encased in strips of gingerbread and topped with caramelized pineapple, a fruit often served at the Vanderbilt table.
There’s another reason to pay tribute to Biltmore this Thanksgiving: This year is the 100th anniversary of George Vanderbilt’s death, after an emergency appendectomy. So raise a glass to him, and to his continuing influence.
Soon after her husband died, at age 51, Edith sold off 85,000 acres of land to the U.S. Forestry Service, ensuring that the land would be protected, as he had wished. In 1930, the Vanderbilts’ only child, Cornelia, and her husband, John Cecil, opened Biltmore to the public. After World War II, farms became more specialized and Biltmore concentrated on its dairy operation.
In the 1950s, the Cecils’ two sons took over the estate’s operations. George oversaw the dairy, his brother William the house. The present-day historic site of Biltmore, still owned by the Cecil family, includes 8,000 acres. The balance of the land was inherited over generations by members of the Vanderbilt and Cecil families.
When the dairy was sold off in 1982, William Cecil decided to return to his grandfather’s original vision of a varied, food-producing estate. In 1983, he replaced the dairy with a winery and hired Katsigianis, who has a PhD in animal breeding, to establish a beef cattle operation.
“We started with Angus, added sheep in the early ’90s, then a poultry program based on George Vanderbilt’s breeds and free-range pigs,” says Katsigianis. “Seven years ago we started experimenting with Wagyu genetics and now have a small herd of Angus-Wagyu crosses.”
That’s very 2014, in an 1895 kind of way.
Hagedorn is a food writer and former chef. He will join Wednesday's Free Range chat with readers at noon at live.washingtonpost.com.
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