Patti's Cold Cream

Anna C. Ames, the Governor Oliver Ames' wife kept a domestic diary during the 1890s. A few pages have come down to us, and in them is this recipe for a beauty cream.

Patti's Cold Cream

1 pound mutton fat

1 cup glycerine

A few drops of perfume

Try out the mutton fat upon a small alcohol stove allowing the grease

to slowly liquify out until there is a swimming cup full of fat;

Run it through a fine silver wire sieve.

Stir into it an equal quantity of glycerine. Into this put a few drops of perfume.

Stirring all gently until it begins to harden. Then put it into small stone fancy jars.

The above is the finest cold cream.

Every night Patti massages with that cream and if there are wrinkles her maid rubs it in mornings.

She rubs it off. Cold cream has driven every line from Patti's face.

Was this Patti a friend, or a local farmer's wife with lots of mutton fat to get rid of? The answer is no, it was Adelina Patti perhaps the most famous operatic soprano of the 19th century. Patti was born in Madrid, Spain to two Italian opera singers. The family soon moved to New York and and Patti was raised in the Bronx. She made her professional debut in 1859 at age 16. She was a brilliant singer (Verdi considered her the best ever) and went from success to success through a long career. She was also a good businesswoman who commanded $5,000 a performance at the height of her career. According to legend she trained her pet parrot to cry out "Cash, Cash" whenever a certain opera promoter appeared in her room. She was less lucky in love. Her first marriage, to the inevitable penniless Italian count, ended in a divorce that cost her half her fortune. Her second marriage ended with her husband's death, a possibility she reduced with her third marrage by marrying a man twenty-seven years her junior. Thus, Miss Patti may qualify as the first cougar.

Did the magic skin cream work? Here's a painting of her in 1863 a year after her command performance for Abraham Lincoln at the White House.

In 1893 Miss Patti commissioned the writing of an opera called "Gabriella" by Emilio Pizzi. She, of course, played the title role, and the world premiere was in Boston. Its fun to imagine Mrs Ames meeting the famous diva at that time and sharing beauty secrets, but I haven't been able to nail down the meeting. Here's a photo of the singer just a few years later, 34 years after the picture above.

  Looks like the mutton fat worked pretty well! Sadly while the face remained beautiful the voice began to deteriorate. Her last concert tour in America in 1903 was "a critical, financial, and personal failure" and from then on she seldom sang in public spending more and more time in her mansion in Wales. She last sang in public for a Red Cross benefit in London at the Royal Albert Hall in October 1914. She died in 1919 two years after Mrs. Ames.

Miss Patti was almost certainly the only person to sing at the White House for Lincoln during the Civil War who sang at a benefit concert for World War I. The White House performance occurred in 1862 when the Lincolns were mourning the loss of their son Willie. Miss Patti's singing of "Home, Sweet, Home" moved the Lincolns to tears. The song became a regular part of the diva's concert repetoire. In 1905 she and her husband installed a primitive recording studio in her retirement home and recorded about thirty songs. Through the scratches and the decay of a great voice you too can hear the song that moved the Lincolns. As far as I know this is the only voice heard by Lincoln that you can hear today, and it still has the power to move to tears.