Eat Your History! History through Cookbooks, Part 2

By Jeff Burns

My wife and I love cooking (and eating) and often combine that love with our love of history.  Over the years, we’ve accumulated a collection of cookbooks.  Our favorites are the ones that combine great recipes and culture and history.  Foodways are an important part of learning and enjoying history, and, of course, you can find interesting cookbooks in bookstores, but don’t forget to look for cookbooks in museums and historic sites as well.  You can also find them in garage sales, used book sales, and on Ebay.  Here are some of the books in our collection.

We love Indian food, and we have a couple of Indian cookbooks.  Madhur Jaffrey is the undisputed queen of Indian cuisine in the United Kingdom and the United States.  You might say that she did for Indian cooking what Julia Child did for French cuisine or Paula Deen for southern food.  Besides cooking on television and publishing cookbooks, she’s also a noted actress and author.  She has a great gift for demystifying Indian favorites and for imparting cultural history along the way.

The Classic 1000 Indian Recipes is an expensive book, filled with more recipes than you can make, and there aren’t glossy photos. The recipes are thorough, but doable.  The Art of Brazilian Cookery has been around for a long time, first published in 1960.  Brazil’s culture reflects a combination of many different cultures; it is a true melting pot, and the recipes reflect that. 

Analogy time again:  Before anybody had ever heard of Paula Deen, there was a queen of southern cuisine on television, in magazines, and publishing cookbooks. That queen was Nathalie Dupree. Even though she was born in New Jersey, she grew up in the South, and she became the first woman since Julia Child to host more than one hundred cooking episodes on public television. Nathalie Dupree’s Matters of Taste represented sort of a departure for her as it is not solely southern cuisine.  Instead she blends stories and recipes from all over America.

The Jewish Holiday Kitchen is a treasury of knowledge about the traditions and rituals of Jewish holidays, and an important part of those holidays is food. Jewish or not, it makes for interesting reading and tasty food.

Alton Brown is a current star on the food scene.  His show “Good Eats” entertained and educated for years, he’s been a staple on The Food Network since its start, and he’s currently on another tour of sold out venues across the country with his combination of food, science, music, and comedy.  A few years ago, he undertook a motorcycle road trip along the Mississippi River, from the Gulf of Mexico to Minnesota, and made the trip into a TV series.  He introduced the viewers to the best roadside food along the way, the food and traditions that make each region and community unique.  The accompanying book, Feasting on Asphalt, is part travelogue and part cookbook and every bit as entertaining as the television show.  We’ve not only used some of the recipes, but we also used the book as a guidebook for our own roadtrip, stopping at some of the locations he wrote about.

Eat Your History! History through Cookbooks, Part 1

By Jeff Burns

My wife and I love cooking (and eating) and often combine that love with our love of history.  Over the years, we’ve accumulated a collection of cookbooks.  Our favorites are the ones that combine great recipes and culture and history.  Foodways are an important part of learning and enjoying history, and, of course, you can find interesting cookbooks in bookstores, but don’t forget to look for cookbooks in museums and historic sites as well.  You can also find them in garage sales, used book sales, and on Ebay.  Here are some of the books in our collection.

Chef Paul Prudhomme introduced many Americans to Creole and Cajun cuisine in the 1980s and 1990s.  He worked in the most famous restaurants in New Orleans and with many famous chefs.  He owned his own restaurants, made lots of television appearances and had his own cooking shows, and he published several cookbooks. Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen  is his first book, published in 1984, and our copy is well used.  He introduces readers to Cajun and Creole ingredients and techniques before providing dozens and dozens of easy to follow recipes in thirteen different categories, from jambalayas, to pork and rabbit to sweets and brunch.  One of our favorites, a go-to for special occasions, is shrimp Diane, a simple but decadent dish of shrimp, butter, and spices.

The Williamsburg Cookbook, first published in 1971, is a collection of traditional recipes that were served in the taverns and inns of colonial America, adapted and contemporized for modern cooks. You can find cream of peanut soup, shad roe omelets, and game pie, along with interesting stories about colonial tavern cooking and dining.

We bought The Best of Shaker Cooking at the Canterbury Shaker Village in New Hampshire.  The Shakers were a religious sect, an offshoot of Quakerism, that established communities in America during the first half of the 19^th century.  Simplicity and communal living were major tenets of the faith they practiced in their agrarian communities.  Their recipes used the fruits and vegetables that they grew themselves, and there is a great chapter on jams, jellies and preserves.

Gift shops at historic sites often have small and inexpensive paperback collections of recipes of the time.  Be sure to check them out.

Fall Into a Great New Book

By Jeff Burns

My “to-read” list is getting longer and longer.  Sometimes I think it’s too bad that I have to teach for a living; work is getting in the way of the important stuff:  reading.  This fall, there are number of great books about history being released, and I think my list is only going to get longer.  You might also want to be on the lookout for these titles.

The Last of the President’s Men by Bob Woodward is the heretofore untold story of Alexander Butterfield, a top Nixon aide at the heart of the Watergate Scandal.  It promises more shocking details of the goings on within the Nixon administration.



One of my favorite authors, Sarah Vowell, is releasing a new book called Lafayette in the Somewhat United States.  Vowell is an essayist, humorist, and keen observer of life whose previous books have combined history with current events, always in a funny, engaging, and challenging way.  This book is about the Marquis de Lafayette and his relationships with George Washington and the fledgling United States.

War of Two is about the infamous rivalry between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, a rivalry that led to the most famous, and most tragic, duel in American history.


Bill O’Reilly is following up Killing Kennedy, Killing Lincoln, and Killing Jesus with Killing Reagan, a biography of Reagan through the prism of the assassination attempt made early in his presidency.



Paul Theroux is one of the most famous travel writers working today, and Deep South is his take on the region.

While on the subject of the South, Rick Bragg has published a new collection of essays, never before published.





Finally, three music icons (and three of my favorites) have published autobiographies.  Each one is said to be an unflinching and honest account.

These are just a few.  Are there any new books about history that are on your list?

Heritage Food and Food Heritage

By Jeff Burns

Southern cuisine’s popularity continues in the foodie world, and southern cooking has been called the quintessential American cuisine.  Americans also seem more and more interested in traditional crafts and nostalgia. Three recently published books examine southern food traditions and efforts to revive them.

The most recent is Southern Provisions:  The Creation and Revival of a Cuisine by David S. Shields.  For more than ten years, Shields has researched early American agricultural and cooking practices, and he has produced what chef Sean Brock has called “the most important book written about southern food.”  He writes about both “cuisine” and “cooking”, which might seem synonymous, but there are differences in connotation.  “Cuisine” is often used in a more elevated, formal way to refer to a style of cooking of a region or people; “cooking” refers to informal, basic home food.  Part one of Provisions is about cuisine, the uniquely southern dishes that found their way onto fancy menus prepared by top chefs  in hotels and restaurants across the antebellum South and drew lots of attention and praise from travelers. Part two is about southern foods in the marketplace of the 19^th century, and part three is about the crops and agriculture.  Shields’ points out that we’ve developed cultural amnesia and have forgotten many of the crops that were once staples across the South like sorghum and benne (a West African form of sesame).    Along the way, the reader meets colorful historical characters like Sally Seymour, a free black pastry chef in Charleston who was herself a slave owner and founded a thriving business, and Colonel Francis Dancy, a citrus pioneer who developed the tangerine.


The aforementioned chef Sean Brock is an expert on southern cuisine himself. He’s a renowned chef in Charleston, South Carolina whose book Heritage is a winner of both the  James Beard Foundation Award for Best Book of the Year in American Cooking and the Julia Child First Book Award.  Heritage is an all-in-one volume based on Brock’s personal southern food experiences from his Appalachian childhood to his life in the South Carolina Low Country.  It is a cookbook full of delicious recipes running the gamut from home comfort food to high-end restaurant food, but it also contains Brock’s essays on the history and culture of the region through the food prism.  Finally,  the beautiful photos taken by Peter Frank Edwards make it an art book that you will want to display.


Marcie Cohen Ferris’ book The Edible South:The Power of Food and the Making of an American Region is not a cookbook and is not about specific foods.  Instead, it’s a history of the South told through food, starting from the first interactions of African, European, and Native American cultures and progressing all the way through the civil rights movement.  It is the story of southern identity and the importance of food in shaping it. Ferris also explores the connection between food and power, economic and political. The book is a fascinating read for anyone interested in southern history and culture.  ( Also, check out Ferris’ book Matzoh Ball Gumbo:  Culinary Tales of the Jewish South)

History, Yum!

By Nina Kendall

                Do you have a taste for history? Are you looking for a good book to sample? Do you want to get someone hooked on history? Try food history.  Food reflects who we are and who we were as a people. It illustrates the influence of technology on society and reveals the cultural traditions and diversity of a region. Food is both an artifact and a motivator. The Columbian exchange transformed the world in part because of the food it introduced to new lands.

            Mark Kurlansky has written several books about history and food.  His works document both the role of food in society and how food reflects change over time. Well researched and accessible, Kurlansky's work is worth checking out.  Salt is an account of food as force of change. Salt made food preservation possible and once served as unit of exchange. This work illustrates how one commodity can influence population, and impact international relations.

In The Food of a Younger Land, Mark Kurlansky uses records from the Federal Writers Project administered by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to create a picture of food and eating habits in America in the 1940’s. The WPA employed out of work writers to conduct interviews and record traditions during the Great Depression. Mark Kurlansky shares a collection of recipes and stories that describe a land were food is traditional, seasonal, and regional. Kurlansky gives you a glimpse of American food habits before technology and transportation advancements.

The Histocrats are going to use The Food of a Younger Land as inspiration for a hunt for recent history. We have read about the history of drink and Soul Food. We have visited the Coca-Cola Museum Now we are going to hunt for the food of a modern land.  What do we eat now? How have traditions changed? How can we use what we learn to teach students about history?  What would you find if you went hunting in your hometown? Happy eating! May the history you find be delicious.

Tasty Books: Soul Food

By Jeff Burns

            The term “soul food” didn’t really mean much to me growing up in south Georgia; the cuisine it referenced was pretty much what we called everyday food.  My maternal grandmother was the oldest of 11 children, from a rural farming and sharecropping background, and my mother was the oldest grandchild, which meant she grew up more of a sister to the other 10 instead of a niece.  My father was one of 10 children.  They grew up eating and cooking what we know call soul food without even knowing it.  For them, it was what was available and affordable to feed a lot of people.

            The term itself came into vogue in the 1960s when “soul” was attached to lots of terms used by civil rights activists to generate black pride and awareness of the traditional foods and cooking styles used by generations of southern blacks and taken north during the migrations of the World War I and II eras by those seeking jobs, and freedom, in places like Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, and Detroit.

            Soul food has its roots in slavery, as Africans brought to the South key ingredients like rice and okra, and combined them with American ingredients like beans, yams, and cornmeal and European ingredients like cabbage, turnips, and other greens.  The meat of choice was pork, often the cuts and pieces leftover after slaughter that the slave master’s family didn’t eat:  ears, tails, feet, head, jowls, chitlins (chitterlings - intestines)  However, soul food cut across racial lines.  Poor whites were just as likely to eat it because the ingredients were cheap, and even wealthier whites often ate it because it’s what their cooks cooked.  Soul food is just basic down-home country cooking.  In his 1969 Soul Food Cookbook, Bob Jeffries summed it up thusly: “While all soul food is southern food, not all southern food is ‘soul.’  

            Today in the foodie world, southern cooking and soul food are riding new waves of popularity, with TV shows, restaurants, and cookbooks touting “southern cuisine”, “farm to table”, “down home”, and even “upscale or new southern food.”

Here are some recent books for more information:

 

Soul Food by Adrian Miller - In this insightful and eclectic history, Adrian Miller delves into the influences, ingredients, and innovations that make up the soul food tradition. Focusing each chapter on the culinary and social history of one dish--such as fried chicken, chitlins, yams, greens, and "red drinks"--Miller uncovers how it got on the soul food plate and what it means for African American culture and identity.

Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America (Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History) by Frederick Douglas Opie - Hog and Hominy provides a definitive history of the grand social forces and unforgettable personalities that have revolutionized Africa American cooking since the twilight of the Jim Crow system.

High on the Hog by Jessica Harris -Winner of the IACP Award for Culinary HistoryAcclaimed cookbook author Jessica B. Harris weaves an utterly engaging history of African American cuisine, taking the reader on a harrowing journey from Africa across the Atlantic to America, and tracking the trials that the people and the food have undergone along the way.

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_food

“Soul Food:  A Brief history” http://www.aaregistry.org/historic_events/view/soul-food-brief-history

“Soul Food:  History and Definition” http://americanfood.about.com/od/resourcesadditionalinfo/a/Soul-Food-History-And-Definition.htm