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.