Category Archives: Food History

The Taste of the Finger Lakes: Cornell Chicken with Salt Potatoes

29 Thursday Sep 2016

Posted by in Contemporary Food Culture, Food History, Travel

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cornell-chickenOne of the paradoxes of seeking out traditional regional foods is that restaurants often don’t serve them. If a dish has been around a long time and it’s prepared often at home, the locals prefer something more trendy when they go out to a restaurant. Such is the case with Cornell chicken, a style of BBQ chicken developed at Cornell University in the 50’s. It’s standard fare at state fairs, little league games, and home barbecues in central New York, but finding a restaurant that serves it would require a lengthy car trip.

So I made it myself along with another dish endemic to these environs—Syracuse salt potatoes.

Cornell chicken was developed by food scientist Dr. Robert Baker, who is also responsible for chicken nuggets and poultry hot dogs. It’s a simple, very effective marinade and basting sauce that gives the chicken a briny flavor with a subtle vinegar essence that penetrates below the meat’s surface. If you’re not a fan of sticky sweet gloopy barbecue sauce, this recipe is for you.

Salt potatoes are another simple, effective recipe that originated in the Finger Lakes. Syracuse has a long history of producing salt the traditional way. Brine from salt springs was placed in large trays and heated. When the water evaporated, the salt residue was harvested and packaged. In the 1800’s salt miners would bring potatoes to work and boil them in the brine for their lunch.

Today 5 lb. bags of small white potatoes with packages of salt included are sold in grocery stores here, and salt potatoes are a staple at cook outs and clambakes. Use a ratio of one cup of salt to six cups of boiling water and stir until salt is dissolved . Boil the potatoes with skins on until a knife slips easily into and out of the potato. Drain and return the potatoes to the pot. Add butter according to preference and gently stir until the potatoes are coated. Then serve. These potatoes have a wonderful creamy texture with a salty crust on the skins.

 

Bob Baker’s Cornell Chicken Recipe

Makes enough marinade for 2 chickens, halved, or cut up

1 egg

1 cup cooking oil

2 cups cider vinegar

3 tablespoons salt (I used 2 tablespoons)

1 tablespoon poultry seasoning

½ teaspoon pepper

1. Beat the egg, then add the oil and beat again forming an emulsion similar to mayonnaise.

2. Add vinegar, salt, poultry seasoning and pepper and stir until well mixed

3.  Place chicken in a container suitable for a marinade (I use freezer bags) add marinade and marinate for 24 hrs. if you have the time.

4. Grill over indirect heat at 325 degrees turning the meat several times and brushing with the marinade.

5. When the dark meat reaches 155 degrees, grill over direct heat to crisp the skin.

6. Remove from the grill and serve when the dark and white meat reaches 165 degrees.

Importing Local Cuisine

21 Wednesday Sep 2016

Posted by in Contemporary Food Culture, Food History, Philosophy of Food and Wine

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fried spamAs the virtues of eating local food have gone from a radical idea to a commonly accepted norm in the food world, it has systematically distorted our understanding of the history of cuisines. The “romantic” idea is  that, in our pre-industrial past, food was based on what the land could provide. Historically, cuisines developed locally from peasant dishes in the country-side to more complex high cuisine in the cities. That idea now sits comfortably alongside the notion that truly authentic food must have a pure origin in local foodways that resisted the bastardization of outside influence.

As I argued in American Foodie, nothing could be farther from the truth. The mixing and matching of ingredients, cooking methods, and recipes has been going on ever since humans could move about the globe. (The habit of calling border food inauthentic is one of my pet peeves.)

But if you want a more authoritative source for what’s wrong with this idea of authenticity along with a fascinating tour of the fascinating cuisine of Hawaii, check out this paper by food historian Rachel Laudan. (H/T Gary Allen)

Using Hawaiian cuisine as an illustration of her more general thesis, she argues that entire food systems have been transplanted from one region to another and that many of the world’s best known “local” dishes were invented to serve tourists.

Laudan argues that cuisines are held together by culinary philosophy not agricultural resources and specifies different meanings of the word “local” which show the idea of a “homegrown” cuisine to have only limited application.

The article makes me hungry for some fried spam.

For Cooks, the Good Old Days Weren’t so Good

31 Thursday Mar 2016

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cooking_in_the_pastFood historian Cynthia Bertelsen wonders if food writing relies too much on nostalgia, distorting our relationship to food in the process:

Seeking the “perfect” French experiences of M. F. K. Fisher and Julia Child or the Venetian raptures of Marcella Hazan and Marlena di Blasi buries certain truths:  producing food is hard, hard work, from the first sowing of the seed to the harvesting, and then finally the cooking.

Our current fascination with hands-on, farm-to-table-cooking-from-scratch encourages us to assume that our grandmothers (because it was always women who did this work) enjoyed the drudgery of getting meals on the table three times a day without any of the modern conveniences available to cooks today. Surely that is a distortion of reality.

Nostalgia simplifies history in another way as well:

Other food writers out there falling into the fallacious column include those who propose – without rigorous adherence to scholarship – that one group or another deserves credit for a whole body of cuisine, as in the currently popular assumption that slave cooks created Southern cuisine almost single-handedly and spiced it all with the aromas of Africa . And who decry efforts to publish material with which they don’t agree.

The linked article is about the controversy over a book that falsely depicted a commodious relationship between slave owners and the slaves who cooked their food, again a misreading of the past encouraged by our current fascination with home-cooked meals.

I devote a lot of attention to this issue of nostalgia in American Foodie. Given the nature of food and the fact that food is always embedded in traditions, I doubt that a certain degree of nostalgia can be avoided. Each of us has an eating history that explains our preferences and that resonates through every dish we encounter. Food is about traditions and the pleasure they bring and so it stimulates the imagination in a way that encourages the selective editing of the past that buries the bad parts. Nostalgia is by necessity a work of the imagination; the danger is in confusing the actual past with the imagined one.

Bertelsen is right to be concerned about these distortions when they are used to reinforce harmful prejudices. There is no easy solution to reigning in the imagination; the best we can do is to be reflective enough to distinguish fact from fantasy.

It’s important to realize that our nostalgic yearnings regarding food are not really about the past; they are about our future. It’s via nostalgia that we re-enchant modern life and try to imagine new ways of eating less beholden to the food industry and a form of resistance to the time compression of modern life.But our current attitudes cannot be decontextualized to provide an understanding of the past. We should leave history to the historians and be skeptical of the potted histories our imaginations concoct.

But don’t hold breath that such self-reflection is poised to penetrate culture. Surely that is a distortion of reality.

Booze in American History

30 Monday Nov 2015

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drunk pilgrimsHistorian of addiction Susan Cheever’s new book Drinking in America: Our Secret History contains fascinating facts about America’s relationship with alcohol. According to Cheever, the Pilgrims landed at Cape Cod in part because they were running out of beer. Somehow that never made it into our grade school social studies texts.

Because most water was not potable in the 17th Century, especially on a long voyage across the ocean, beer or ale was the drink of choice. It would be interesting to know how much that daily dose of alcohol influenced their judgments; in Cheever’s view the influence was considerable.

Sarah Hoopla’s fascinating review of the book summarizes some of the history:

In the harsh early years of the New World, drink was a necessary balm. Settlers sipped their way through icy winters. Schoolchildren were weaned on flip, a cocktail meant to keep the young ones hardy. Alcohol was sustenance, celebration, and fortitude. Even the notoriously prim Puritans believed in the power of booze, though they warned of its dangers as well. As Massachusetts Bay Colony elder Increase Mather put it, “Wine is from God, but the Drunkard is from the Devil.” The tricky question is: when does the one tip over to the other? The Puritans were the first to place restrictions on alcohol consumption, and as Cheever writes, “the difference in attitude toward drinking between the Pilgrims and the Puritans would split the 17th century Great Migration to America into two factions.” You can still find these warring philosophies today — “the one that holds our freedom to eat and drink as an essential liberty, and the one that hopes to limit our drinking through law for the good of the community.”

Even the American Revolution is pulled into the narrative:

The patriots who tossed tea into the Boston Harbor in 1773 hadn’t planned on doing so, but they were blasted after hours of drunken scheming. “Perhaps if they had been sober,” Cheever writes, “the night would have been different; they were not sober. They were drunk enough to change history.”

In fact much of our early history seems to have been decided through a alcoholic haze:

John Adams drank a tankard of cider upon waking. Washington ran a profitable distillery at Mount Vernon. Irish immigrants built the Erie Canal fueled by whiskey. Johnny Appleseed, the staple of children’s fables, sowed his seeds not for apples to eat but apples to drink.

There is plenty more along these lines as Cheever brings her narrative into the late 20th Century, pointing out that the much maligned prohibition was fueled by women attempting to make their home a safe space.

We tend to think of our leaders as soberly pondering the great issues of war, economics, and politics in the great, unfolding pageant of American history inspired mostly by their religious faith and concern for the common good.

As Cheever shows, more than likely our history (and by implication the history of other nations) was carried out by alcohol-addled tipplers stumbling through life like the rest of us.

It explains a lot.

I have not yet read the book but Hoopla’s review has piqued my interest. I’m sure you know an “alcohol-addled tippler” for whom this would make a nice Christmas gift.

Wine Boats on the Douro River

16 Monday Feb 2015

Posted by in Food History, Wine Culture

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I’ve been under the weather for the last few days—not conducive to tasting and reviewing wines. But this video of the old days on Portugal’s Douro river cheered me up. (h/t Jamie Goode)

The Douro region is fascinating because it is an example of the hardships people have endured through history to harvest grapes and get their wines to market. Steep hillsides bordering the river meant workers had to carry harvested grapes on their back. And after the wine was barreled it was sent down the treacherous river in small boats to the port at Oporto to be shipped to England where most port wine was consumed.

Today, the Douro River is a placid thoroughfare for cruise ships carrying tourists into the back country, thanks to 5 dams and locks built in the early 1970’s. The port barrels are sent to Oporto in trucks travelling on well-paved roads, and in the larger vineyards in mid-Douro owned by the big port houses, terraced vineyards now allow some machine harvesting.

But in years past winemaking was a dangerous business.

Is Home Cooking on the Decline?

16 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by in Art and Food, Food History, Philosophy of Food and Wine

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home cookThe conventional wisdom, often repeated by leading pundits in the food world, is that home cooking is disappearing with deleterious consequences to our health and the environment.  Americans, especially women trying to earn a living while being primary caretakers,  are simply too busy to bother spending hours in the kitchen when there is a whole industry out their ready to supply us with prepared foods at a modest price.

But food historian Rachel Laudan pushes back against this idea.

So what’s the truth of the matter?

*There’s been no decline in home meals in the last twenty years

*Two thirds of all calories are consumed at home

*Each day, more than one in two Americans between 19 and 65 cooks (or so they report)

*The poorer the people, the more they eat at home

The research she relies on suggests that food supplied from home decreased precipitously from 1965 to the mid-1990’s (when more women were entering the work force) but has leveled off since then.

As Laudan points out, there is some ambiguity in the research. It measures food from the “home supply” which could include prepared foods purchased at the supermarket. It also doesn’t seem to control for the lack of a fresh food supply in poorer, urban areas of the country. Poor people might eat more often at home if they had better access to markets. But the research is encouraging in that it shows that the home is still the site where Americans consume most of their food.

Why does this matter? As Michael Pollan and others have argued, food cooked at home tends to be healthier than prepared foods, and locally-sourced food is better for the environment.

But I want to point to other benefits of home cooking. This research shows that the kitchen, one central area where aesthetics and creativity enters daily life,  still plays a role. We can all use more beauty and creativity in our lives and kitchen activity can be the site of daily creative practice. But, in addition, it is important to create space in our lives where commercial interests do not rule. Yes, the food industry can supply us with the calories we need to function. But why turn our lives into profit centers for someone else? Why lose control over something so important as eating?

Presumably, we work hard to earn money in order to control the conditions of life. Why then relinquish that control to corporate interests?

Man-oh-Manischewitz

25 Thursday Sep 2014

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manischewitzMix a matzo manufacturer on a stolen passport, a desire to corner the market, and some really bad grapes and what do you get? One of the most famous wines of the 20th Century.

Wine writers love to talk about the story behind a wine—usually that means an uplifting story about a good wine. This story is a little different, with more twisted turns than an afternoon soap—truly made for Hollywood. (h/t Elatia Harris)

More Men in the Kitchen?

10 Wednesday Sep 2014

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men in kitchenToday’s culinarians are almost unanimous in promoting the ideal of home-cooked meals, made from scratch, using fresh ingredients, as a route to good health, sustainable food supplies, and a revitalized home-life—while condemning the processed foods foisted upon us by the food industry.

But there is a reason why fast food and convenience foods have become so prominent a part of the American culinary landscape. As women began to enter the workforce in the 20th Century, they had little time for the labor-intensive planning and preparation required to make meals from scratch. The convenience of packaged, prepared meals promoted by the food industry were a necessity, not a choice.

This article by sociologists Bowen, Elliot, and Brenton (H/t Elatia Harris) reminds us that the situation for most women has not changed  very much:

While Pollan and others wax nostalgic about a time when people grew their own food and sat around the dinner table eating it, they fail to see all of the invisible labor that goes into planning, making, and coordinating family meals. Cooking is at times joyful, but it is also filled with time pressures, tradeoffs designed to save money, and the burden of pleasing others.

The researchers interviewed 150 women from all socio/economic classes along with ethnographic studies of 12 poor and working-class families and they conclude that:

The emphasis on home cooking ignores the time pressures,financial constraints, and feeding challenges that shape the family meal. Yet this is the widely promoted standard to which all mothers are held. Our conversations with mothers of young children show us that this emerging standard is a tasty illusion, one that is moralistic, and rather elitist, instead of a realistic vision of cooking today. Intentionally or not, it places the burden of a healthy home-cooked meal on women.

This is an issue that does not receive enough attention among people promoting healthy, aesthetically-pleasing meals. Cooking is time-consuming, expensive when seeking out specialty ingredients, and may not be appreciated by the rest of the family who might prefer Cheetos and soda for dinner.

So what is the solution? The article proposes some innovative remedies:

How about a revival of monthly town suppers, or healthy food trucks? Or perhaps we should rethink how we do meals in schools and workplaces, making lunch an opportunity for savoring and sharing food. Could schools offer to-go meals that families could easily heat up on busy weeknights? Without creative solutions like these, suggesting that we return to the kitchen en masse will do little more than increase the burden so many women already bear.

These ideas are fine but there is a more obvious solution to the time constraints involved with cooking—get men to help out in the kitchen and become more invested in preparing healthy, tasty meals for the family.

This is not a new proposal. Feminists have been pointing out the burdens of the “second-shift” for decades. And fathers today are doing more housework than in the past. Fathers are doing 4.4 more hours of housework per week than they did in 1965 according to this research by the Council of Economic Advisors—that’s real progress. But that is starting from a very low base and is still not sufficient.

Come on men! Hone those knife skills and that shopping savvy and help out mom. There is no reason why the joys of cooking must be gendered.

The Ark of Taste—an interesting and necessary idea

09 Tuesday Sep 2014

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noahThis is a fascinating project.

The Ark of Taste is an online catalogue of foods (including plants, animals, and processed foods) that have cultural significance but are in danger of disappearing. Anyone can nominate a food for inclusion and a committee assesses the nomination and decides if it meets the criteria or not. To be included the product must be of distinctive quality, linked to a specific area and its local traditions, be produced in limited quantities, and be in danger of extinction. Their FAQ has some details about how these judgments are made.

As the food supply becomes more and more globalized and as climate change promises to radically change the kinds of crops grown or plants and animals found in particular regions, this project looks to be crucial in preserving food heritage. Increasingly, this site should become a research tool for food historians and anthropologists.

It began as an Italian project in 1996 and has since grown to encompass the globe. It is sponsored by the the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity, and many commissioners are also officials of the Slow Food Movement.