Recent History: Crispy Kale

I have fallen in love with kale chips. Their recent history calls up a celebrity chef, the raw food movement, and the blogosphere, and raises a question in my mind about what constitutes an historical trend.

We grow a fair amount of kale in our garden, more than a small household can profitably use so I was delighted to acquire the directions for making kale chips. You can see the recipe by reading my newspaper column for this week here.

Of course, I wondered where the idea came from, how long it has been around, and how it has been disseminated. I encountered kale chips only this past summer via word of mouth from a neighbor who described her method to me. Then this past weekend I ate some in a restaurant that specializes in using local seasonal foods, and with the weather increasingly cold outside here in Maine, kale is one of the last things still in the garden for fresh picking.

Now mind you, I spent all of a half hour poking around on the web to learn about kale chips. The earliest date I found for a mention of them was February 2, 2005 at food.com where the raw food site radicalhealth.com was cited. Further exploration found the method attributed to the celebrity chef Dan Barber of Blue Hill fame in New York.

More mentions about crispy kale or kale chips come up in 2009 and 2010. So the idea and the directions have been around at least five years. Googling crispy kale, however, connects one to lots of food blogs where the bloggers offer advice, luscious close-up pictures, and praise.

I wouldn't call crispy kale a raw food because one bakes it. While there was a flurry of activity with raw food a few years back, even "cook" books, and the occasional raw food restaurant start up, I do not observe a vigorous trend of raw food becoming mainstream.

I doubt crispy kale will ever be mainstream fare either until someone figures out how to produce it commercially. Other increasingly mainstream trends, however, like trickle down chef cookery, and the power, or at least ubiquity, of food blogs certainly are revealed with the current interest in crispy kale.

Two genuine historical trends, in my opinion, are increasing vegetarianism, which has a few centuries of history behind it, and growing interest in local foods which, at least here in Maine, has three decades of back story. Perhaps, the word trend is the bug-bear here. For a food historian, much of what is passed off these days as trends are blips on the radar of time.

Two Classic Maine Cookbooks

Marjorie Standish's Cooking Down East, and Marjorie Mosser's Good Maine Food both dating to the mid-20th century, reflect traditional Maine cooking. One is a "her's" book, and one is a "his" book.

Both have recently been reprinted by Down East Books. I'm fresh home from the launch on Wednesday in Portland, Maine, where I spoke about the two, having written a new foreword and scattered commentary for the Mosser book. Star chef Melissa Kelly of Primo restaurant did a foreword for the Standish book and inserted some of her own recipes. Melissa cooked from Standish and her own repertoire: Oysters Rockefeller, two kinds of crab cakes, a fish stew and a clam chowder, doughnuts, cannoli, and blueberry cake, all passed around for our delectation. Truly lovely fare.

What do I mean by his and her books?

Cooking Down East is a companion in the kitchen for the household cook (at the time the book was written, that would have been most commonly a woman). The recipes are homey--chowders, blueberry desserts, meatloaf, finnan haddie, pot roast, baked beans, squash pie. Good home cooking. Standish writes in an advisory fashion. Her recipes have incredible legs. In the column I write weekly for the Bangor Daily News, the response to various queries I post for recipes results in family favorites that someone's mother or gram found in Standish's book.

The copy of the book I own is full of splatters and spills, and handwritten recipes on scraps of paper stuck into the book. Used constantly, Standish's cookbook was a friendly, useful, woman-to-woman kind of book.

Good Maine Food by Marjorie Mosser is dominated by Mosser's uncle, the historical novelist Kenneth Roberts. The cookbook was assembled when Robert's Trending into Maine chapter on Maine food, kicked up a pile of nostalgic correspondence. Readers sent recipes and Roberts seemed to be determined to put together a profile of traditional Maine food in the form of a cookbook, heavily larded with his own commentary. No lack of opinion there. He had experienced the last of the Maine culinary tradition, he was sure, with his grandmother's mincemeat and ketchup.

Robert Tristam Coffin similarly held forth similarly in Mainstays of Maine, where the sainted black iron stove in the kitchen under the control of the dominating female relative generated memorable smells and hearty boy-supporting fare. Roberts was not to be outdone.

Besides, the swashbuckling, thumping good tales that Roberts wrote, point to a man's man: someone who fished and hunted and presented some patient woman in the kitchen with dead animals and birds to cook toothsomely. In Mosser's book there is no lack of game and fowl recipes. In the earliest version there is hardly any effete fare at all, though apparently Roberts thought the book ought to have wider appeal and recipes from what Mainers invariably describe as "Away", all of which Maine is surrounded by, invade the cookbook. Timbales, au gratins, aspics and omelets were in fact, going out of fashion even as they were added to the book. Extra-regional favorites as scrapple, jambalaya, and burgoo crop up unaccountably.

One gets the impression that old Uncle Ken sat in the living room with his pipe rack by his side, foot on a hassock, and bellowed out from time to time, "Mrs. R., listen to this," as he read a letter from a reader who suggested a recipe, and then he's holler for his secretary and niece Marjorie to add it to her file for the next edition of Good Maine Food. It was his cookbook, after all.

The 1974 edition of Mosser's cookbook, the one reprinted by Down East is a fun read for men and women alike, suitable for the living room. The Standish one you will take into the kitchen and spill and spatter on. Both represent Maine food history both in the traditional form, and in the gradual overlays that time and change invariably make.

What Is True About Lobster?

A query about the myth of lobster being poor man's food in early New England and rejected by apprentices, lumbermen, prisoners, boarding house occupants etc. etc. arrived in my email in-box. At www.foodhistorynews.com, there is an article about this topic on the Debunk House page, and a food writer read it and then wrote saying, "I recently read your article about lobster not being a poor man's food in New England. You stated that this is a common misconception … but [I] wanted to offer you this as an example of apparently documented historical mention of the unimportance of lobster, along with a citation as to the source."

He then quoted John Mariani's Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink, 1999 edition: "They [lobsters] sometimes washed up on the beaches of Plymouth, Massachusetts, in piles of two feet high. These settlers approached the creatures with less than gustatory enthusiasm, but the lobsters' abundance made them fit for the tables of the poor...In 1622 Governor William Bradford of the Plymouth Plantation apologized to a new arrival of settlers that the only dish he "could presente their friends with was a lobster...without bread or anything else but a cupp of fair water."...The taste for lobster developed rapidly in the nineteenth century, and commercial fisheries specializing in the crustacean were begun in Maine in the 1840s…" etc. etc.

The writer wanted to know, "In your opinion, is this mention of Governor Bradford in 1622 a fabrication? Even the American Lobster Institute supports the position that lobsters were once so abundant in New England as to be used a fertilizer and generally viewed as 'poor man's' food." Then the writer said "I'm engaged in publishing a cook book and am hesitant to cite your article given the abundance of contrary evidence."

The questions posed by the Bradford citation and the other miscellaneous information tucked into Mariani's work is an object lesson in how to frame a question. Here is my response:

Mariani is a very weak source. Pitch it out and replace it with the Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink, edited by Andy Smith. It is true that Bradford said that about lobsters, and that must be put into the context of a proper, formal 17th century meal containing animal meat, not merely seafood alone. Bradford is saying they had no beef or pork or mutton which, in the days when a gentry meal had on the table several dishes some of which included one or more of those served in a rather whole condition, in a joint, plus bread, and wine or other brewed beverage. It is not a slam against lobster---merely a statement of fact. AND further it needs to be understood in the context of large joints carrying significance and formality while a lobster, even a big one, is, when picked, still in smallish pieces.

Commercial lobster fishery had its origins much earlier than the 19th century. In the 1740s in NYC, for example, there was a regular market for it, with lobsters caught in Long Island sound conveyed into the city and sold live. And lobsters were not used for fertilizer though the empty shells were -- a misconception rising I think because of the amount of lobster refuse from 19th century canneries hauled off by farmers who spread it on their fields where city slickers saw it and concluded that the poor dumb farmers were using the lobsters...

Lobsters were a subsistence food where there was no market but were sometimes too valuable to eat if where was a market, hence the story about it being food for the poor. One has to make the effort to hold these two seemingly conflicting notions in mind at the same time.

Southern Lady, Northern Food

Edges are the most fruitful places to look for information about what is and what used to be historically. An edge is a point of time when things are changing and people experiencing change comment on what went before. An edge is a stressful situation, like war, deprivation, or new settlement. An edge can also be a traveler in a new place commenting on differences between the familiar and the unfamiliar.

A good example is this little bit of insight I dug out of the Southern Historical Collection at Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. I love this little passage from a letter written by Mary McNeill McEachern, a young woman raised in Fayetteville, North Carolina, who went to spend a bit of time with friends in Fishkill on Hudson, New York, in 1876. She spoke quite a bit about food and living arrangements, even household apparatus like furnaces and cisterns which impressed her very much for the comfort that they provided. She even commented on the manner of dressing in the North writing, “the people don’t dress much – they seem to go for comfort more than looks, and in their actions and dress are much more regardless of what the world will say than we are at the South.” As I reckon we still are. (I always take my make-up when I go South.)

Here are Mary's observations of food:

"Now I must tell you what I get to eat. In the way of fruits we have quantities of currants growing in the garden; it is beautiful fruit - I wish you could see it growing, We have also two or three kinds of raspberries and also quantities of cherries of different kinds, gooseberries --- after a while they will have quinces and pears and grapes. I see and hear but little of apples and peaches and think that these fruits that I have mentioned are the only ones that are much cultivated. We never sit down to table without those kind of fruits on it - always raspberries and currants and often pineapples and oranges."

If there are currants, she is writing in summer, and apples and pears will come later.

"In the fish line we have salmon for supper every night - for breakfast we have mackerel and for dinner we have "holbert" [halibut] - I reckon that is the way to spell it; it is beautiful white fish and is cut in slices and fried - no bones in what we have had; the fish they say is very large, sometimes a yard or more long. One day we had clam fritters for dinner and they were nice, tasted like oysters. Mrs. Van A let me see her open the clams and she roasted one for me to eat."

"We have beef but I never would have recognized either the dish or the appearances-it is much whiter meat than our beef and does not taste so strong. Mrs. Van A says the difference is in the feed. I have seen corn bread once, but the meal was so yellow it looked like sponge cake made of brown sugar; they never get white corn meal. That cornbread was the only hot bread I've tasted - light bread all the time and it is delicious."

Mary McNeill McEachern Papers, 1871- 1876 (Coll. 5094 SHC)

Two or Three Slices in Your Club Sandwich?

Sandwiches as we know them have been around quite a while and though humans have been eating food on bread for centuries, the Earl of Sandwich made the idea of two pieces of bread the standard. Nowadays we think of the club sandwich as a three-slice affair but some of the earlier recipes for Club Sandwiches, by name, don't necessarily call for more than two.

What does seem to distinguish club sandwiches from contemporaneous sandwiches is a filling featuring more than one sort of meat: bacon, lettuce, tomato and sliced turkey or chicken, sometimes tongue or ham. From the later 1800s into the twentieth century most sandwich fillings presented in cook books seem to have been mixtures: cheese blended with another ingredient, or a salad of chicken, or tuna fish, or eggs. Lettuce was often laid on the salad filling, too, and the bread was sliced thinly. These sandwiches seem to have often been dainty fare for tea but heartier sandwiches had been offered for a couple of decades before in bars. A club sandwich, with its robust filling, however, seems masculine. The name certainly implies that the sandwich was to be found at gentleman's clubs. One 1909 recipe in The Good Housekeeping Woman's Home Cook Book, Chicago, by Isabel Gordon Curtis says "complete this delicious 'whole-meal' sandwich with the remaining slice of toast." A whole meal in a sandwich was a far cry from little tea sandwiches beloved of ladies.

In the first decade or two of the twentieth century, there probably were overlapping practices in club sandwich construction, as a quick look shows sandwiches called club with only two slices of bread. Lowney's Cook Book, 1907, Boston, page 199, has a two-slice club containing tongue, lettuce, and tomato with mayonnaise. Lily Haxworth Wallace's Rumford's Complete Cookbook, 1908, basically calls for a BLT with sliced chicken and two slices of bread.

An example from The Neighborhood Cook Book compiled by the Portland Section Council Of Jewish Women. Portland, OR. published in 1914, is named "Li Hung Chang Sandwiches," and goes like this: "One slice of white bread, one slice of rye bread; butter each slice, place on the white bread the sliced white meat of either chicken or turkey, on top of this two slices of smoked beef tongue; if desired one or two pieces of bacon may be placed between the white meat and the tongue; cover with the rye bread, trim away the crust and cut through diagonally." (pg 282.) Li Hung Chang was a famous Chinese general and statesman who had died in 1901, though since I don't know the context for this reference, his connection to any sandwich at all puzzles me.

From the same cook book comes this three-slice sandwich called "Club House Sandwiches." "Toast thin slices of white bread, butter lightly and place on them thin slices of crisp fried bacon. Lay on another slice of buttered toast, then slices of chicken well seasoned, another slice of toast and then cucumbers, pickles sliced crosswise and another slice of toast. A third one from Portland called "club" called for only two slices of bread.

I'd love to see Mrs. Rorer's 1894 sandwich cookbook, to see if three-slice clubs appear there or if they are all two-slicers. From my own reference collection I can't detect when the tipping point is to a three-slice club. Not until after the 1920s, I am going to guess. It would not surprise me one little bit if something like Howard Johnson's restaurants or a similar phenomenon codified the three-slice club sandwich. It bears more research.

Peanut, Butter, African Americans, and Invention

Peanut butter invention turns out to be a bit controversial. Seems that neither John Harvey Kellogg or George Washington Carver invented it. All is revealed by patents and their dates. But there is a little racial ugliness involved which you can read about here.

Here is a riff on inventions and origins of various foodstuffs. No one is going to learn a damn thing if we keep looking for so-called "the origin" of various dishes. Cookery evolves, dishes change slowly over time. The question needs to be about development, further extension of certain ideas. Food and cookery is very like genealogy, as as you know people are not invented, but rather they descend. Rarely, if ever does something spring forth fresh new, unprecedented.

It is also incorrect to claim or assign a certain cookery method to any one group out of the context of all the rest of humankind and all you are going to do is get into trouble if you try to do that. The more I look, the longer I do this work, the more I realize that what all groups and regions have in common is greater than what distinguishes them from each other, and that holds true over time.

Give up the invention stuff. Give up the origin struggle. It is the wrong question, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Look for what we all have in common and go from there. The bugbear here is ownership of an idea. So forget effective food history until everyone stops trying to say "mine, mine."

Salad Dressing Poem

One species of recipe comes as a poem. I find these often in my travels through nineteenth century women's magazines, early community cookbooks, and miscellaneous other sources. A few years ago, Carolyn Blackstock of Toronto wrote an article on salad dressings for Food History News and included the following charmer. Unfortunately the citation has gone astray, so you will merely have to enjoy it for itself:

"To make this condiment, your poet begs

The powdered yellow of two hard-boiled eggs;

Two boiled potatoes, passed through the kitchen sieve,

Smoothness and softness to the salad give;

Let onions atoms lurk within the bowl,

And, half suspected, animate the whole;

Of mordant mustard, add a single spoon;

Distrust the condiment that bites so soon;

But, deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault

To add a double quantity of salt;

Four times the spoon with oil from Lucca crown,

And twice with vinegar, procured from town;

And lastly, o'er the flavoured compound toss

A magic soupcon of anchovy sauce.

O, green and glorious! O, herbaceous treat!

'Twould tempt the dying anchorite to eat;

Back to the world he'd turn his fleeting soul,

And plunge his fingers in the salad bowl;

Serenely full, the epicure would say,

'Fate cannot harm me, I have dined to-day."

SIDNEY SMITH

Cincinnati Chili and Editor's Notebook

This week's Editor's notebook is up on the Food History News website with a sudden insight I had on the seasonings of Cincinnati Chili plus an announcement about a Culinary Historians of New York event honoring Dr. Jacqueline Newman and considering Chinese food in America plus a day dedicated to the history of food and dining in Hudson Valley, NY.

Here are my thoughts on the chili.

Cincinnati Chili showed up on the food site Zester Daily. This fascinating dish, unique to Cincinnati, consists of a pile of spaghetti topped by chili, and cheese, and sometimes onions and other stuff. It is a fine example of a micro-regional dish, and it has a decades old history by now. Apparently developed by a pair of Greeks who ran an eatery, the dish still is found in diners, and small restaurants, and migrated into the home kitchen. The sauce consists of ground beef, seasoned with cinnamon, cloves and unsweetened chocolate in a beef and tomato base, and no beans. Some descriptions report that the seasonings are "unusual" and if you are thinking of a Tex-Mex style chili then yes, it would be. However, if you are conversant with late 19th century chili sauces, then the spicing wouldn't seem so odd.

I first encountered chili sauces in my research on late 19th century New England foodways. They are a fairly common relish cropping up in manuscript sources as well as imprints. Typically they are made with tomatoes, green peppers, and onions and are seasoned with cloves, cinnamon, sometimes ginger, red pepper, and/or allspice. They have sugar and vinegar and the whole is boiled until it is quite thick. I've made it, and it is a favorite at our house, suitable for use as one would use tomato ketchup. I love it on fishcakes, myself. It is not always spicy hot with capsicum, but, depending on the recipe, it is spicy and can be sharp with vinegar. By the early 20th century, this species of chili sauce was pretty common in most places in the North and Midwest.

Here is a pretty typical Chili Sauce which comes from the Cincinnati Cookbook, 1908, originally published by F. C. H. Manns Company, and reprinted by the University of Iowa Press in 1994, edited by David Schoonover, page 65.

Chili Sauce

Twenty-four large tomatoes, eight large onions, thirteen green sweet peppers, four cups vinegar, eight tablespoons sugar, four tablespoons salt, one teaspoon ginger, one teaspoon cloves, one teaspoon cinnamon, one teaspoon red peppers. Cook three hours. Makes one gallon.

Lunch

Janet Clarkson, The Old Foodie, whose charming blog has been enlightening us for years, is doing "Meals of the Day" this week and today's topic is lunch.

This put me in mind of a lunch I ate on Cape Breton, Canada, about thirty years ago. My husband Jamie MacMillan's family were all from Cape Breton, Mabou and Port Hawksbury, to be specific. In our first year together, Jamie and I traveled through Nova Scotia using our thumbs and went to Mabou to the house that Jamie's dad was born in and where his dad's sister Aunt Jean lived. One evening that we were there Aunt Jean took us visiting to a friend's house, Malcolm, the plumber, and his wife.

Malcolm grew up speaking Gaelic and in his adulthood ate three lunches a day. He had breakfast, then a lunch mid-morning, then dinner, and a mid-afternoon lunch, then supper, and then a lunch in the evening. His wife, hospitably offered us a "lunch" which included a cup of tea, cheese and crackers, a small cookie, a small piece of iced cake, and a piece of bread with butter. She apologized saying it was a "mean" lunch -- in the sense of "paltry" or scant.

It was lovely, and I had for that moment the sense that I was experiencing something fleeting as indeed it was.

This Week's Editor's Notebook at Food History News Website

In this issue: Florida history digitized. Leeds symposium. Fried chicken and black (food) history. Styrofoam coolers. Living bannock tradition.

Go here to read all about it.

PALMM site full of good stuff for the likes of we with thanks to Rachel Laudan for telling us about it. Follow my exploration...

Leeds (England) plans Crunch-y Symposium.

Fried chicken and the Black history connection. It may be inflammatory but I am dubious...but read this before you fly off the handle.

Styrofoam coolers and their place in food history and Canadians are still making bannock.

My Jonathan Chronology for Johnnycakes

The name for the simple bannock form of cornbread which came to be known as johnnycake in America evolved from a British prototype known as jonakin or jonikin. An alternative explanation for the name johnnycake rests on the use of John, Jonathan, or Johnny to indicate the common man, and the corn bread as the common man's bread. Yet another explanation attributes the word to a corruption of journey cake. I do not find satisfactory either of these latter two explanations, despite the Oxford English Dictionary weighing in on the Jonathan connection.

The term Jonathan to describe an American was a relative latecomer, and its common usage postdates the appearance of the cornbread and besides the term Jonathan was preferred over "Johnny." We do not hear of Jonathan cakes. I offer this chronology to support my assertion.

1675: Benjamin Thompson, in a poem "New England's Crisis," "Then times were good, merchants car'd not a rush, For other fare than Jonakin and mush."

1724: Hugh Jones in The Present State of Virginia refers to a local as a Jonathan.

1739: South Carolina Gazette reports on "New iron plates to cook Johnny Cakes or griddle bread on."

1765: Samuel Deane's diary quote, "So we breakfasted on tea and johnny cake, without butter, and fled for our lives."

1780s: Royal Tyler develops the character Jonathan as a New England bumpkin in his play "The Contrast," and Brother Jonathan as the American version of John Bull appears in the last quarter of the 18th century and into the early 1800s. (Discussion of this appears in Joseph Conforti's Imagining New England, 2001, p. 155-156).

I'd welcome comments on this, particularly information on the use of the word jonikin in the British Isles. Other opinions? Prove me wrong?

Slow Cookers

Slow cookers are back. It figures, the economy is bad and slow cooking makes savory, inexpensive food.

The idea has been around a long time. In the 1890s through the early 1900s, a little item called a fireless cooker was developed which slow cooked food on residual heat. Super-insulated boxes with tight-fitting insulated tops could hold a pot of food heated to boiling for many hours allowing the food to finish cooking. When homemakers had to buy fuel specifically for cooking, when heat for cooking was not a by-product of warming a house, people paid attention to the costs of cooking a meal. Some cook books of the era reveal this concern.

Fireless cookers had their time in the sun, then faded away.

In 1971, Rival Company introduced the crock pot based on a product developed by a company which they had purchased. Crock pots cooked slowly all day, too, a boon during the economic turn-down of the 1970s, and a help to women who were joining the workforce in ever-increasing numbers. During the more prosperous 1980s and 1990s, they acquired a dowdy reputation, and crock pots were cheap at yard sales.

So our economy has turned down again, women are employed at higher numbers than men, and "slow cookers" which sound classier than crock pots, are program-able to save electricity.

I can't wait to see the next iteration.

This Week's Editor's Notebook at Food History News Website

Here is where to go: FHN
In this week's issue: Marmalade in Toronto. Culinary Historians of Northern California meeting news. Pancakes by Ken. Global anything--a rant. Twitter and me.

Briefly, this weekend is the third annual "Mad for Marmalade, Crazy for Citrus" in Toronto with the Culinary Historians of Toronto who really know how to have a good time with food history.

Plus CHoNC (Cul. Hist. of No. California will meet in March and Andy Smith will speak.

Ken Albala covers himself in pancake glory in New Yorker.

I complain about Global in book titles.

Finally, I signed up with Twitter, so I can Tweet eventually and you can follow me.

Snickerdoodles

Snickerdoodles is one of food history's attractive nuisances. They sound like they ought to be "olde tyme" recipes. Cute or funny sounding names are candidates for this category, like Anadama bread, slumps, grunts, and pandowdy. Food writers (and their editors) are awful suckers for these things so from time to time, I get a little question like, "can you tell me the history of the colonial cookie snickerdoodles." Of course, no one is born knowing what is or isn't colonial so I say something like "there is apparently no evidence for snickerdoodles appearing before the twentieth century....yadda, yadda."

But now thanks to the tireless efforts of Barry Popik we have an "early sighting/citing." Barry searches newspapers for the earliest mention of a word he can find. He found a reference to Snickerdoodles dated 1898 on page 8 in the Boston (Mass.) Daily Globe for Jun 14, 1898. That, of course, means that the cookie was around sooner than 1898, as all etymologies reflect common usage. There is even a recipe for them submitted by M. Elizabeth Adams.

Snickerdoodles
Three quarters of a cup of butter, 2 cups of sugar, 1 cup of milk, 3 cups of flour, 2 eggs, 2 teaspoons of cream of tartar, 1 teaspoon of soda. Mix; drop on a tin in spoonfuls, sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon, and bake in quick oven.

Barry also found a cool reference to them in Boise, Idaho, in 1901 in the Idaho Daily Statesman, Sunday, October 20, 1901 on page 11: "'Snickerdoodles' is the somewhat fantastic name of quickly made little cakes especially dear to the children hearts." The old receipt for them copied from an old scrapbook says:

'Stir together two cups of sugar and half a cup of butter. When creamy, add two well-beaten eggs, then one cup of milk, with a teaspoonful of soda, dissolved in it; and, lastly, add two and a half cups of flour, with two teaspoonfuls of cream of tartar and half a spoonful of salt. Beat the batter thoroughly, and bake in shallow pans, dusting the top of the cake before baking with cinnamon and sugar. Bake fifteen minutes, and when cool cut in squares. This receipt will make two panfuls, which will cut into twenty-four squares.'

To learn more about Barry Popik and his work, just google him. To learn more about snickerdoodles, make them. Use Ms. Adam's recipe above.

Marjorie Mosser and Good Maine Cooking

I can’t say I have ever seen a Queen Anne Revival recipe. Usually food doesn’t seem to adopt identifiable stylistic elements the way architecture, clothing, furnishings and art and music do. However, styles and ideas do affect food conservatively—that is, usually delayed and not very powerfully.

Down East Publishing Company, the same who do the magazine Down East, are reprinting Marjorie Mosser's Good Maine Cooking. Mosser was the secretary and niece of historical novelist Kenneth Roberts, who was actively writing in the mid-20^th century. Mosser’s book was reprinted in 1974 with additions to (and no deletions from) the original 1939. I am writing the foreword to the new reprint of the 1974.

I looked over the contents of the earlier book, and the notion of Arts and Crafts kept floating into my mind.

Abby Carroll has identified the whiff of Colonial Revival in the New England food of the late 19^th century during her research for her dissertation for Northeastern. When I think about it, I recall that tables in the late 18^th century were set with the same symmetrical sensibility as the Georgian houses that housed them. It is not as if someone said, in the Martha Stewart Living of the 1700s, “Today we are going to set our table in the latest Georgian style.” Rather it is in the air, and drifts down gently, exerting the mildest but persistent influence.

So in Mosser’s book there are lots of good old Maine baked beans, handcrafted donuts, brown bread, salt codfish dinners and all kinds of solid home produced food by the craftswoman of the kitchen. Memories of Roberts’ boyhood a riddled with the smells of home cooking, and the pages of the books are full of the kinds of things he ate growing up. It seems all Arts and Craftsy to me.

A New (Old) Blogger on the Block

Here for the first time in the Blogosphere is writing from Sandy Oliver, American Food Historian, with good stuff from my ongoing Editor's Notebook on the Food History News website, plus and minus other material.

Food History News? Editor's Notebook? You may well ask. Food History News was a printed quarterly newsletter begun June 1989 and ended peacefully in January 2010 after 80--count 'em--issues chock full of all kinds of American food history information.

It has a website with what, when it began, was a primitive sort of blog, called Editor's Notebook, started nigh on ten years ago. You can still go to www.foodhistorynews.com and click on Editor's Notebook where you can read what I have posted since sometime last fall.

Since my website is dedicated to news from the world of food history and a portal to sources, I will let this space become a platform for food history musings, opinion, and commentary. This blog will introduce you to me and my work as a food historian which is now sneaking up on its 40th year. (Yes, I started young, and am not ready to retire just yet.)