All posts filed under: Food History

Chicken Fricassee Face-Off: 18th Century Haute Cuisine versus 1950s Can-Opener Cooking

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When I was a graduate student in the Boston University Gastronomy program, Ken Albala assigned an intriguing final exam question in the course “A Survey of Food History:” to compare and contrast two Chicken Fricassée recipes. While it may appear at first glance that Francois Massialot’s recipe, “Poulets en Fricasée au Vin de Champagn” from Le Nouveau Cuisinier Royal et Bourgeois (1748), is the culinary superior of Poppy Cannon’s “Chicken with White Wine and White Grapes” from The Can-Opener Cookbook (1953), such an assumption ignores the complexity of each recipe as a unique product of a particular time and place. As Anne Bower contends, a cookbook can be read as a “fragmented autobiography” (Bower 1997: 32) that reveals unique details not only of the author’s experience, but also those of his or her time. Cannon’s recipe in particular fulfills Bower’s assertion that the main theme of cookbooks is the “breaking of silence” (1997: 46-47), as it reveals the struggles and desires of the 1950s American housewife. Examples of Period Food Trends First published in 1691 and in revised additions throughout the early eighteenth …

The Woman Suffrage Cookbook of 1886: Culinary Evidence of Women Finding a New Voice

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The Woman Suffrage Cookbook (1886), edited by Mrs. Hattie A. Burr, was created as a fundraising tool for Massachusetts suffragists, but it also provided a powerful new voice. It communicated with women of all classes in the common language of the cookbook about not only food and domesticity, but also the radical cause of women’s right to vote. The Woman Suffrage Cookbook also tracks changing cooking practices in the United States in the late nineteenth century, changes that mirrored larger transitions in society. The growing forces of industrialization, urbanization, and a variety of social movements—among them women’s suffrage—swept the nation, forever molding her into a new shape. This cookbook demonstrates the changes impacting women’s domestic and civic life at the time by documenting the transformation taking place within her kitchen. The Cookbook The cookbook begins: “This little volume is sent out with an important mission,” which we can assume has scope beyond “cookery, housekeeping, and the care of the sick” given when and why it was published. The Woman Suffrage Cookbook is the oldest fundraising cookbook in support of women’s suffrage. It …

Cooking a Sixteenth Century Meal Brings Food History to Life

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As students in Dr. Ken Albala’s Survey of Food History class, we were overjoyed that the Food and the City Conference brought him to Boston not only to deliver the conference keynote, but to allow us the opportunity to meet him in person and cook together a sixteenth century meal. From our course lectures, we had learned that throughout history, specific ingredients have served as markers of social class that exude distinction. The most prestigious ingredients were often rare, expensive, and fashionable among the upper class at a certain time in a particular place. Rarity, cost, and fashion were unstable factors, however, meaning that the symbolic potential of ingredients evolved over time. The existence and expansion of trade networks, and globalization more generally, also played a significant role in specific ingredients securing elite status, while others did not. Trends and fashion made certain ingredients signs of social distinction. The variables of rarity and cost influenced trends, which tended to occur in cyclical and reactionary patterns. Culinary fashions changed for a variety of reasons, among them political, economic, cultural, and even due …