This image was created by Sarah Conrad and Will Heath, and presented to me as an incredible birthday present. I’m speechless.
Archive for the 'gallery' Category
Brandon brought me this great article: an explanation for the word “Brunch,” from Punch, or The London Charivari, August 1, 1898.
Will I see you later for suckfast? Or do you want to get together tomorrow for brupper?
Re: my event with the Brooklyn Diggers last weekend, celebrating the 150 anniversary of the construction of the Monitor. The Diggers dug up this amazing image of cooking on the deck of the infamous iron clad ship.
What where they cooking? Find out.
The Popularity of Vanilla vs. Rosewater
Starting Tuesday night, I’m teaching a three-part course on Historic Gastronomy at the Brookyln Brainery. It’s going to involve a lot of history, a lot of nerdery, and a lot of eating. You can read the full course description and sign up here (new spots were recently opened for students due to high demand; at the time of the writing, there were three spots left. Sign up here.)
My first class is called A Timeline of Taste; we’re going to explore the history of American food through flavor: we’ll travel from 1796-1950, making a pit stop every 50 years to explore the tastes of a particular time. Participants will smell and sample the spices, fruits, extracts, and other ingredients that defined the flavors of different time periods. We’ll discuss why each of these flavors were popular and how they were used in day to day cooking.
Many ingredients have a flash point that sends them soaring in popularity, pushing other tastes out of vogue: an increase in production, a decrease in cost, a popular recipe, etc. As I was researching the histories of American ingredients, like rosewater, vanilla, curry and ketchup, I realized the results would be a really cool data visualization project. I wanted to see a timeline of when ingredients were the most popular.
A quick and dirty way to do this is through Google Ngram Viewer, one of the coolest toys on the web. Google says: ”When you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books.”
I plugged in search terms, I was astounded by the visualization of the results. You could often see the exact historical moment an ingredient became popular.
For example, from about 1750-1840, rose water was the primary flavoring for cakes and other confections in the United State. While today we associate it with Middle Eastern cuisine, for English colonists it was used as a cheap alternative to vanilla. Vanilla was only grown in Mexico because its pollination was very closely linked to a certain species of Mexican bee. In 1841, a twelve year old slave discovers how to hand pollinate vanilla flowers. Vanilla cultivation is moved outside of Mexico and the product became much cheaper.
Look at the chart above: rose water is more or as popular as vanilla until 1841. Then vanilla takes off while rosewater flat lines.
A few more fun charts are below. We’ll be talking about these ingredients, and so much more, at the Brooklyn Brainery Tuesday night.
Nutmeg, Mace, Cinnamon, and Clove
Curry Powder, Soy Sauce, Chili Powder
Mayonnaise, Mustard, Tomato (ketchup was originally not made from tomatoes)
Take a moment to read the above advertisement for “Better Butter,” c 1914.
I’m becoming convinced that the terms “Hygienic” and “Sanitary” were the “All-Natural” and “Organic” of the 19teens: buzzwords that not only reflected the culture of a time, but were also important tools for advertising.
In a way, it’s not a surprise. For decades children had died of swill milk; germ theory was slowly being accepted by the turn of the century; and, without antibiotics, there was still not a cure for most contagious illnesses. There was a focus on the best preventative medicine: good hygiene.
An article on the history of Washing DC’s bread factories, Bread For The City: Shaw’s Historic Bakeries, has more to say on the topic:
“At the beginning of the twentieth century, food sanitation had become a nationwide obsession, culminating in Upton Sinclair’s famous The Jungle, about the horrors of the meatpacking industry. Bread-making was also a topic of concern. An article in the New York Times in 1896 excoriated small traditional bakeries in that city (‘The walls and floors are covered with vermin, spiders hang from the rafters, and cats, dogs, and chickens are running around in the refuse…’) and asserted that ‘the cause of this trouble is that small bakeries are owned by ignorant persons. The large bakeries are conducted in an exemplary manner.’
It seems to have been part of a campaign to get people to buy all their bread from large factories. An 1893 article in theEvening Starobserved that ‘Home-made bread is a back number. Machine-made bread takes the cake. The twentieth century bakery is a thing of beauty and the up-to-date baker is a joy forever.’ At the popular Pure Food Show at the Washington Convention Hall in 1909, D.C. bakeries put on a massive exhibit that filled the K Street end of the hall. Visitors could observe machines doing the work in a modern factory setting; dirty human hands never touched the bread. In that same vein, a 1919 advertisement for Dorsch’s in The Washington Times urged consumers to give up their old-fashioned reliance on the corner store: ‘Why buy bread at the grocer’s, fresh for each meal, when it is possible to get good, wholesome, and fresh bread that tastes as good at the last bite as it did when you first cut into the warm loaf?’”
The shift from stuff made at home = bad and stuff from a factory = economic, sanitary, attractive, appetizing is interesting to think about. I understand why it happened: to be able to buy a gallon of milk, a pat of butter, or a loaf of bread in the grocery store that is clean and consistent is a beautiful thing. But, I think society’s shift back to a love of the homemade has provided a much needed balance.
These pages come from a handwritten, leather bound journal that was given to me for Christmas. It belonged to a friend’s grandmother; the inside cover is signed “Annie S. Bush” and “Warren Koons.” According to my friend, Warren is a relation of her grandmother, and Annie Bush was Warren’s first wife. She was born June 20, 1854 and died Sept 1, 1883. I suspect Warren picked up the book after his wife died (her signature appears to be written earlier) and wrote in it until his untimely death in 1910. Warren and his second wife were brutally murdered by their son-in-law: read the New York Times article here.
In addition to home remedies like these, the book is full of beer and wine recipes; baked good reciepts from Annie; and a study of wild mushrooms. I’ll be sharing more pages over the next week.
Via Food Party via Retrospace. Dated January14th, 1961.
I don’t know if there’s something wrong with me, but I would definitely eat these. Maybe I’ll make them…
Brooklyn Sanitary Fair 1864: The New England Kitchen.
My mom was in town over the weekend, and being the history nerd duo that we are, we decided to go see “Healing the Wounds of War: The Brooklyn Sanitary Fair of 1864” at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. I know a “Sanitary Fair” doesn’t sound like much fun, but apparently it was in the 19th Century. From the BMA website:
“During the Civil War, sanitary fairs were held to raise money for the war effort in major cities in the Northeast. These large-scale fairs were social events that combined entertainment, education, and philanthropy…The money was used for clothing, food, medical supplies, and other provisions for the Union Army.”
There were arts and crafts for sale, “curiosities” on display, and opportunities to flirt. But my favorite? “The New England Kitchen.”
“The idea is to present a faithful picture of New England farm house life of the last century. The grand, old fire place shall glow again; the spinning wheel shall whirl as of old; the walls shall be garnished with the products of the forest; and the dinner table, always set, shall be loaded with substantial New England cheer. We shall try to reproduce the manners, customs, dress, and if possible, the idiom of the time…The period fixed upon is just prior to the throwing overboard of the tea in Boston Harbor.
The idea was to live in the Past, and the Present was ignominiously banished.” From History of the Brooklyn and Long Island Fair
The Kitchen was a Civil War reenactment of Revolutionary War era foodways. It was 1864 reenacting 1776.
Awesome. I love this. Love. It.
I really want to reenact the 186o’s reenacting 1770′s. I just have to figure out how.
