All posts tagged: food history

Trader Vic: The Man, The Legend, The Gastronomic Enigma

Published by

When I first acquired a copy of Trader Vic’s Book of Food and Drink (1946), I knew it wouldn’t be long before I wrote something about it. There’s a tangible excitement to owning a first edition of something, anything. In an age of inescapable planned obsolescence, it’s mildly thrilling to own something, anything from before 1950. As I flipped through the book’s pages, I couldn’t help but be interested in its recipes for mai tais and mojitos—drinks now so unquestionably commonplace that it’s hard to imagine a time when they once cast an allure of intriguing exoticism. Drinks aside, however, it was Trader Vic himself—San Francisco native, Victor Bergeron Jr.—who enthralled and beguiled me. My most recent piece for Zester Daily, “Trader Vic: The Apostle of Rum and Ready-Prepared Foods,” explores the fact and myth, truth and legend of the man who purportedly invented the mai tai, popularized the margarita and nachos, and introduced American diners to morel mushrooms, sunflower seeds and green peppercorns before most restaurants included them on the menu. Adored by diners and well-respected by food writers and restaurant critics, Bergeron did all this …

5 Posts to Celebrate National Coffee Day

Published by

It’s National Coffee Day, which means you can pick up freebies to sip that will pair perfectly with these coffee themed posts: 1. American Coffee Culture in 1872: So Different from Today? Start off with a taste of coffee history and ponder how coffee transformed into the United States’ national beverage and a potent patriotic symbol. 2. Dunkin’ Donuts Coffee: A Site and Source of Bostonian Identity Even During a Lockdown. During the manhunt and city-wide lockdown following the Boston Marathon bombing, Dunkin’ Donuts remained open to serve police officers and first responders. This piece, published in The Inquisitive Eater, considers the deep meaning of the coffee chain in New England. 3. The Dunkin’ Donuts Origin Story: A Meaningful Beginning. This piece covers a brief history of one of New England’s favorite chains. 4. When Theory Actually Applies: Starbucks is to Bourdieu as Dunkin’ Donuts is to Foucault. This post conducts a comparative cultural analysis of the two chains, which are I argue align with opposing theoretical frameworks. 5. Imagining the Dunkin’ Donuts Identity Outside of New England. Considering coffee consumption as an expression of identity, …

The Food Heritage, Hybridity & Locality Conference

Published by

The Food Heritage, Hybridity, and Locality Conference, which was held here at Brown University, October 23-25, 2014. This exciting event brought together presenters from throughout the United States and across the globe, whose work explores the intersection of tradition, place, and the dynamic processes of fusion, melding, and hybridization that create new food phenomena. Providence, Rhode Island proved a unique host for this conference—and not just because it has earned top rankings among Travel and Leisure’s America’s favorite food cities. As the conference call for papers states so well, waves of immigration have fashioned Rhode Island food culture into a unique hybrid, marked by such gastronomic wonders as Rhode Island chowder, whose clear broth defies both cream and tomato-based conventions, and Johnnycakes, cornmeal cakes whose origins are a complex combination of worlds both old and new. Even local, homegrown favorites fuse the conference’s themes of heritage, hybridity, and locality, like Del’s lemonade, a lemon flavored Italian ice sold from distinctive mobile units that first set up shop in Cranston, Rhode Island in 1948, and coffee milk, a beverage very deservedly Rhode Island’s state drink. Rhode Island provides additional examples, including the chow …

Archive Adventures #2: Wartime, Memorial Day … & Kraft American Cheese?

Published by

With the tagline, “Hanker No More!” this advertisement from my archive adventures at the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History at Duke University celebrates the return of not only America’s World War II heros, but of Kraft cheese products, like Kraft American cheese, Velveeta, and “Old English” Pasteurized Process Cheese, which were rationed on the home front. Ad copy commiserates with America’s housewives: “For a long time during the war, you couldn’t get an ounce of this mellow, smooth-melting cheese; since then a single package has been ‘a find.’” Now, however, the “cheddar goodness you’ve missed so long” has not only returned to supermarket shelves, but “is plentiful.” Furthermore, while an ounce was once impossible to procure, Kraft American cheese could now be purchased in a five-pound loaf or by the half pound (packaged in blue) if preferred. Such linguistic comparisons of weights and measures reveal some evidence of the food industry’s post-war aim to not only find domestic markets for wartime goods, but to increase consumption more generally. Finally, nearly all of the other advertisements that I collected for Kraft cheeses during the …

Archive Adventures #1: The Oh-So-Glamorous World of Velveeta & Cheez Whiz

Published by

Telling the story of how the food industry won over (albeit not immediately) the hearts and kitchens of America’s housewives, Laura Shapiro‘s Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America (2004) is hands down one of my favorite food history texts. I very truly geeked out when she signed my copy at the Siting Julia symposium in 2012. As “deliciously readable” as The New York Times Book Review claims it to be, this delightful book demonstrates how in the years following World War II, the food industry, women’s magazines, and the press alike attempted to sell housewives on convenience food products, emphasizing the technological wonderment and time saving attributes of frozen vegetables, canned meats, and complete frozen meals. I got a taste of this myself when I was researching the marketing of Kraft food products in the archives at the Hartman Center at Duke University last month. But first, let’s talk a little history. Despite the industry’s best efforts, food technology at first failed to capture housewives’ hearts or stomachs. Women who had utilized processed foods during wartime rationing did not desire to do so when …

Defining American Food in ‘The Saturday Evening Post All-American Cookbook’

Published by

If you ever want to strike up a passionate food debate, just toss out the the question, “What is American food?” While you’ll hear the unenlightened decree with disdain that the United States has no food culture, the answer is far more nuanced. Like jazz and blues music, some argue that barbecue is a unique American cultural food product, one that loudly communicates a multiethnic history and both local and regional identity. Others will insist that the food traditions of New England form the culinary roots of American cuisine.[1] Others will point to McDonalds and other fast food joints known for selling burgers and fries as quintessentially American in taste, presentation, and capitalistic expansionism.[2] Still others will argue that the continually simmering melting pot[3] of American citizens ensures that all food served within U.S. borders in some way represents, absorbs, and communicates American food culture. These disparate points of view are portrayed in different ways in The Saturday Evening Post All-American Cookbook. Published in 1976, filled with reproductions of the Post’s covers and advertisements, and made up …

Forecasting a Bright Future from the 2013 Future of Food and Nutrition Graduate Conference

Published by

This past Saturday, I had the pleasure of attending the 7th annual Future of Food and Nutrition Graduate Research Conference at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. Organized and run by Friedman graduate students, the conference was as engaging and polished as any put on by a professional organization. Graduate student research dealt with a host of topics both international and domestic, ranging from food access, food prices, and property values near grocery stores to behavior change and breastfeeding. Presentations that I attended also explored childhood obesity in Indonesia, regional U.S. food systems, and the latest in molecular nutrition. Students came from diverse backgrounds, including not only nutrition policy, biochemical and molecular nutrition, public health, and medicine, but also environmental science, agriculture, economics, urban and environmental planning; not to mention food studies and gastronomy as well. Collectively, presenters brought valuable multidisciplinary perspectives to the topics of food, nutrition, and food systems. Beyond attending thought provoking panels, I participated in the poster presentation, giving two-minute power pitches on the paper I …

Curating an Online Food Exhibit: “Making the Modern American Food System”

Published by

After studying the food views of second-wave feminists, the cuisines of the counterculture and the 1950s, and the foodways of turn-of-the century immigrants, Dr. Warren Belasco’s U.S. Food History course turned to specific histories of the industrial food system—from the Dust Bowl to the industrialization of milk production to the rise and triumph of refrigeration. At each stage, we pondered how these events, people, and institutions contributed to both America’s abundant, cheap food supply and the distancing of Americans from traditional food knowledge. The course culminated in our final project assignment: creating an online food exhibit dedicated to the creation of the modern American food system. And so I invite you to visit my online exhibit, “Making the Modern American Food System.”

Curating the History of Freshness

Published by

In Fresh: A Perishable History, Susanne Freidberg chronicles the fascinating history of how refrigeration expanded the reach of the industrial food system, forever altering not only the world’s food supply, but also how consumers view freshness and conceptualize its meaning. She tells this story through a series of mini-histories focusing on specific foods: beef, eggs, fruit, vegetables, milk, and fish. In doing so, she reveals the many meanings of “fresh,” five of which are discussed in the following five images. 1. The Refrigerator Consumers once got along without refrigeration, shopping frequently and preserving food by canning, drying, and pickling. In fact, consumers were at first wary of refrigeration, though World War I marked a turning point. While meat and wheat were shipped to the warfront, American civilians were encouraged to consume fresh foods, unsuitable for shipment to soldiers. Consuming fresh produce, eggs, and dairy products were considered acts of both patriotism (as seen in this WWI food poster) and scientifically based health promotion, confirming the new place of these foods in the American diet and the role …

The Dust Bowl Isn’t Over -OR- How the iPhone Could Save American Agriculture

Published by

Many Americans view the Dust Bowl of the 1930s as merely a historical event, a long ago environmental and agricultural trauma that, along with the Great Depression, stains our collective history, but will never occur again. Such a point of view, however, is not only revisionist, but highly inaccurate. The determinants of the Dust Bowl are not isolated to the 1930s, nor are its effects secluded to the American plains. In Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (1979), Donald Worster posits that a combination of factors not only caused the Dust Bowl, but continue to derail agriculture worldwide: American values run amuck, capitalism ruling without restraint, farming taken over by business, and unstable agricultural policy hastily enacted. Worster argues that the Dust Bowl, as well as subsequent agricultural issues, are rooted in American values and unrestrained capitalism. Fueled by the sprit of Manifest Destiny, the desire for endless opportunity, and the promise of plenty, farmers during the Dust Bowl era exploited the land to the fullest extent possible, employing every available technology to ensure …

Seven Simply Smashing Food Exhibits: No Tickets, Shoes, or Shirts Required

Published by

One of my favorite things on a weekend afternoon, a weekday evening—well, we can go ahead and say just about anytime—is to spend a few glorious hours of levity and escape at a museum. I’m lucky to live in Boston where world-class museums abound as plentifully as colleges and universities, but sometimes, I hear you, we get busy and don’t make it out the door to enjoy the many intriguing exhibits on display. Here you’ll find seven excellent online food museum exhibits that you can visit anytime you like from your computer—and in your pajamas if you so desire. There are likely many more delightful virtual expos, but these seven, listed in no particular order, can be a very filling place to start… 1. Julia Child’s Kitchen Even if you aren’t in Washington D.C. you can peek in the drawers and cupboards of Julia Child’s kitchen, view selected culinary objects, and peruse an interactive timeline that chronicles her love of cooking. Exhibit by the Smithsonian, National Museum of American History 2. War-Era Food Posters Check out …

American Coffee Culture in 1872: So Different from Today?

Published by

Since the seventeenth century, Americans have roasted, steamed, and boiled coffee, causing its gradual transformation into our national beverage and a potent patriotic symbol. In his 1872 text, Coffee: Its History, Cultivation, and Use, (read it for free on Google Books) Robert Hewitt Jr. captured the historical prominence of coffee in the United States, saying, “Since cotton has been proclaimed ‘king’ in the realm of commerce, coffee should be styled ‘queen’ among the beverages of domestic life” (Hewitt 1872: 11). Coffee has since risen from its status of queen of the domestic realm and emerged as a leading global commodity, second only to petroleum oil (Pendergrast 1999: 1). Coffee thus exerts considerable political and economic power. The United States has led world coffee consumption for the past two hundred years (Tucker 2011:18). Coffee plays multiple social and cultural roles within American daily life as a beverage consumed upon waking, shared in social settings, enjoyed at the end of a meal, savored during the workday coffee break, and so on. In his historical text, Hewitt depicts …

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

Published by

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

Published by

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

Published by

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 …