Grog to Grits

Harvey Levenstein’s 2003 book Paradox of Plenty is a thick book that recounts the history of food in America over the past 150 or so years.  It covers enough material that, in some ways, it functions better as a reference book than something you’d sit down and read.

However, it has a lot of good ideas, and one set of ideas I want to talk about today revolves around how Americans’ ideas about nutrition have changed over the time the book covers.  Levenstein divides the past 150 years into four different periods, and looking at each period shows how people thought (and think) about food and nutrition.

The first period is before the 1870s or so, when our ideas about what food is made up of, and what is needed to live, came either from old folk beliefs or what people had observed.  People did not know about germs and so, for example, a Civil War government commission could write that water from the Mississippi River was generally wholesome, even though it might be muddy, while water from the Ohio River was unhealthy. (1)  Most people believed that meat and bread were necessary for good health, and vegetables could be dangerous to the stomach unless boiled until soft.

The second period, which Levenstein terms The New Nutrition, started in the 1870s with the discovery that foods had calories, and calories gave people energy (the research into this is pretty amusing, and includes putting people into sealed rooms while precisely measuring everything that went into and, um, out of their bodies).  In addition, researchers determined that all foods could be divided into proteins, carbohydrates, and fats.

These discoveries were revolutionary.  For the first time researchers could have a scientific understanding of what food was and why it was important to humans.  The caloric content of foods became an important factor in determining what people should eat (since calories were all-important, and obesity was not a problem for most Americans, this was an age in which high-calorie foods were considered to be good things).

Further research into what foods were made of led to the discovery of vitamins in the early 20th century, which Levenstein calls The Newer Nutrition. This was also revolutionary since scientists were able, for the first time, to tie specific diseases to the lack of a specific vitamin or mineral.  Scurvy, the bane of sailors everywhere, was due to a lack of vitamin C, while rickets, which especially affected miners, happened because people didn’t have enough vitamin D (our bodies naturally produce vitamin D when exposed to sunlight, and since miners spend most of their waking hours underground, they were lacking).

Once scientists identified vitamins and minerals, the next step was to isolate them, determine how to make large amounts of them, and add them to specific foods that were lacking in particular vitamins and minerals.  For example, pellagra is a nutritional disease (lack of niacin) that affected thousands of poorer people in the American south.  Their diet was corn-based  (mostly cornmeal, which was cheap and could be prepared in a number of different ways), and since corn does not contain niacin, those people suffered from pellagra.  Once researchers figured out how to add niacin to foods the government simply mandated that all cornmeal needed to have niacin added to it, and the pellagra problem disappeared (by the way, Native American groups that relied on corn-based diets for thousands of years dodged the pellagra bullet by hulling their corn with ashes, which added niacin into the food).

Both the New Nutrition and the Newer Nutrition saw foods as a tool to help make people healthier.  If there was a problem, people just had to eat more food  An example of this comes from a World War II-era poster showing the Basic 7 food groups, a forerunner to today’s food pyramid, which only identified the different groups without suggesting how much of each to eat.  At the bottom of the poster is the advice “In addition to the Basic 7…eat any other foods you want.” (2)  In the context of the thinking at that time, any foods could be helpful, including processed foods like TV Dinners or even candy.

This belief about the positive power of food began to change in the 1960s and led to the Negative Nutrition.  In the Negative Nutrition, foods shifted from being positive things to being somewhere between helpful and dangerous.  Foods could provide valuable vitamins and minerals, but they could also have too many calories, too much fat, and be too highly processed.

I shouldn’t need to say too much about the Negative Nutrition since it’s the set of beliefs about food we still operate under today.  What is interesting is to compare our approach to foods today with the older belief that food is a useful tool, with few, if any, downsides.  Things have changed a lot over the years; our distrust and fear of certain aspects of food is just one example.

(1) Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1951), 126.

(2) Barbara McLean Ward, ed., Produce and Conserve, Share and Play Square: The Grocer and the Consumer on the Home-Front Battlefield During World War II (Portsmouth, NH: Strawbery Banke Museum, 1994), 115.

The years after World War II saw a number of advances in the world of foods, but particularly in the world of convenience foods.  Dehydrated potatoes, nutritional breakfast cereals (with added vitamins), nondairy creamer for coffee, TV Dinners, and many other foods were either introduced or improved during this time period.

Cake mixes, too, were popular, and it’s what I’m looking at today.  For many people cake mixes seemed to be so new and so useful that, as one food industry executive put it, they “were miracles…using them was like having the essence of the modern world in your kitchen.”*

But why did cake mixes become popular at that particular time?  They had been originally introduced decades before—why did they wait until after World War II to really catch on?

According to a number of writers, the reason comes down to psychology.  The original mixes came with everything required for a cake, in dehydrated form; therefore, for those mixes the cook only needed to add water, stir the batter, and bake the cake.  These early cakes were soundly rejected by consumers, though, because they were too easy to make.  Cake making was baking, and baking should be work.  Cake mixes only became popular when the ingredients, and the instructions, were changed slightly: instead of only adding water, cooks had to add oil, water, and an egg.  Suddenly, in this psychological explanation, cake making seemed like real work, and therefore acceptable to cooks.  Cake mixes then sold like, well, hot cakes.

This is a silver bullet sort of explanation, a very simple theory that makes the women of the time (who were the ones making the cakes) seem fairly stupid.  There’s not that much difference between adding oil, water, and an egg and just adding water.  It’s a tempting theory to believe in, but it doesn’t go very far in explaining what really happened.

A better way to explain  why cake mixes took off in popularity is too look at what was happening in society at that time.  From 1941 to 1945 we were involved in World War II, when millions of men were drafted and millions of women went to work in factories and other jobs across the country.  In spite of the full-time work women were still expected to cook meals for their families, and many of those women were understandably looking for a way to make foods quickly by using mixes and other shortcuts.

Home cooking was made more difficult because of rationing.  Many kinds of raw ingredients were rationed, like meat, flour, and sugar, so if a consumer wanted to buy a bag of sugar she first had to make sure she had a ration stamp for it.  If someone wanted a cake it was often easier to buy a finished cake, since the sugar ration given to bakeries was higher than that given to individuals, and bakeries sometimes received extra allotments of sugar.  Furthermore, sugar rationing continued until about two years after the war was over, long after other rationing had stopped.

This was the time period—during and just after World War II—when cake mixes exploded in popularity.  Between 1942 (the first full year of WWII) and 1946 (the first full year after the war) sales more than tripled.  And why did they become so popular?  Because during the war women were busy and it was difficult to get sugar, so women often turned to mixes rather than making a cake from scratch (the mixes were also rationed but with a different set of ration stamps). After rationing was done many women were comfortable in using the mixes, so they kept with them.

But what about the psychological explanation of how adding an egg, oil, and water to a mix felt like baking, more so than just adding water?  I think it’s a very simplistic explanation that doesn’t really look at what was happening during that time.  However, that explanation does come close to getting one thing right: adding an egg was probably an important step forward in cake mixes, but not for any psychological reason.  Rather, it’s more likely that adding an egg allowed mix producers to drop dehydrated egg from their ingredient list.  They had never gotten the dehydrated egg to taste right, and the tradeoff for making the instructions slightly more complicated was a better-tasting cake that sold exceeding well.

*Robert D. Buzzell & Robert E. M. Nourse, Product Innovation in Food Processing, 1954-1964 (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1967), 39.  Most of the data for this article comes from that page and the pages following.

Note: this article originally appeared in my printed zine Bread & Salt. Not that many people read it, so I’m reprinting it here.

Ah, the life of an English sailor back in the olden days.  The ocean breeze in your hair.  The salty tang in your mouth.  The azure water stretching to the horizon.  The exclusive company of men, if you’re interested in that sort of thing.  The food–well, the food was a pretty good reason to stay as far away from a ship as possible.  It was usually awful.

The food on board ship was monotonous and of poor quality.  I’ll get to the quality in a minute.  It was monotonous because there were only a few foods that could be stored for months at a time without refrigeration.  Here, for example, is the weekly menu for the English navy in 1588:

• Every day: 1 pound of biscuit and 1 gallon of beer
• Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday: 2 pounds of salt beef
• Monday: 1 pound bacon and 1 pint dried peas
• Wednesday, Friday and Saturday: 1/4 stockfish or 1/8 salt ling, 4 ounces cheese and 2 ounces butter.

Yo ho ho, it must be Monday because we’re having peas.  Just think what it would have been like to be at sea for months with that menu.  The Spanish navy at about the same time wasn’t much better:

• Every day: 1.5 pounds biscuit or 2 pounds fresh bread and 1.5 pints wine or 1 pint Candy wine
• Sunday and Thursday: 6 ounces bacon and 2 ounces dried rice
• Monday: 6 ounces cheese and 3 ounces dried beans or chickpeas
• Wednesday, Friday and Saturday: 6 ounces salt fish (tunny or cod, squid or 5 sardines), 1.5 ounces olive oil, .25 pint vinegar, 3 ounces dried beans or chickpeas.  On Wednesday sailors also received 6 ounces of cheese.

Note the vinegar on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.  Vinegar prevents scurvy although I’m not sure to what extent this was known in the 1580’s.  The British navy didn’t get around to adding vinegar to the provisions until over 150 years later; until then sailors just accepted it as a natural danger of shipboard life.

The English shipboard diet provided about 5,000 calories per day, at least on paper.  Unfortunately, over the course of a long journey much of the food would spoil, and the navy compounded this problem by ignoring spoilage as a factor in any calculations.  By the navy’s calculations, a ship with 100 men outfitted for a three month trip would need exactly 9,100 pounds of biscuit (100 men x 1 pound per person per day x 91 days), and the person in charge of the ship’s stores would be held personally accountable for any difference when the ship came back to port.  Over time the bacon got moldy, the beer went flat and the bread…had some problems.

The bread eaten on ship was called biscuit, a word that comes from an Old French word meaning “twice baked” (the Italian biscotti and German zwieback both mean the same thing).  Ship’s biscuit was indeed baked twice to get all the moisture out of it; if done properly it could last for up to a year in the right conditions.  Those conditions included keeping it dry and in tightly sealed containers which ship’s builders attempted to provide but this was in those dim, dark years before zip-lock bags.  The biscuits didn’t stay dry.

There were two main problems with biscuits.  Well, three, if you count the fact that they were nearly indestructible and had to be either hammered apart or soaked in water to be edible.  But the two basic problems were rats and worms.  Rats were endemic to any wooden ship.  The worms came from lord knows where and infested the biscuit, burrowing through until the bread became so delicate it turned to dust if touched.

There were several ways to deal with the worms.  The simplest was just to wait until dark to eat.  You didn’t see the worms but you could still taste them–the weevils tasted bitter while the maggots tasted cold.  You could also put a freshly-caught fish on top of the biscuit, which would attract the worms.  Or you could set the bread in the sun for a few hours to kill the worms, or rebake the biscuit.  This last one wasn’t really an option because a ship didn’t have an oven for baking.  It just had a single huge cauldron.

Mealtimes worked like this: each group of six to eight men chose one guy to be the cook.  His job was to take whichever stores the men wanted boiled (like the salted meat or dried peas), put them into a mesh bag and drop them into the boiling water for a few minutes.  He’d then fish the bag out and take it back to his mates.

Shipboard cooking, as you can see, was pretty simple.  Consequently, the ship’s cook was usually the most worthless man on board.  His only real job was to keep the fire going (someone else was responsible for doling out the food to each person).  He was often a sailor who was too old or lame to do anything else.  They were considered to be so worthless that men in ports trying to get away from navy “recruiters” (the kind that grabbed you and hauled you straight off to a ship) often smeared their faces with soot and claimed to be cooks, knowing that the recruiters wouldn’t be interested in them after that.

By the eighteenth century British ship’s rations had gotten a little better:

• Every day: biscuit and beer.
• Sunday: pork, peas, butter.
• Monday: oatmeal, butter and cheese.
• Tuesday: nothing additional.
• Wednesday and Friday: peas, oatmeal, butter and cheese.
• Thursday: pork and peas.
• Saturday: beef

Amounts are: 1 pound biscuit, 1 gallon beer, 2 pounds salt beef, 1 pound salt pork, 1/2 pint peas, 1 pint oatmeal, 2 ounces butter, 4 ounces cheese.

Sailors could bring their own foods on board and usually ate a bit better in the weeks after leaving port because of this.  Using the rations they received and foods they bought themselves they were able to make a number of dishes:

• Lobscouse: salt beef or salt pork with water with biscuits crumbled up.
• Sea pie: meat and peas layered with biscuit.
• Dunderfunk (which means thunder and lightning): biscuit soaked in water, mixed with fat and molasses and baked in a pan.
• Midshipman’s crab: salt beef, pickles, biscuit crumbs and cheese.
• Scotch coffee: powdered, browned biscuit in hot water

Okay, ship’s food still generally sucked.  It’s hard to be a gourmet if you’re 1,500 miles from dry land.  Here’s one more tidbit about the connection between food and sailing:

The meat the sailors took with them from Europe was salted.  It lasted okay for a trip across the Atlantic, but when they got to the New World they wanted to take on fresh stores.  The sources of salt here were limited but that was okay because sailors could buy meat from the Indians which was dried on racks over an open fire.  The French word for the rack was boucan and the name given to the French and English hunters who began selling the meat to passing ships was buccaneer.  And this word, over time, became the name not of the people who dried and sold the meat but of the people, often pirates, who bought the dried meat.*

Sources: unless otherwise noted, all facts in this article come from either “Dancing with the Mermaids: Ship’s Biscuit and Portable Soup,” by Layinka Swinburne, or “Survival Kit (16th Century Seaman’s Fare)”, by Maggie Black.  Swinburne’s article appeared in the 1996 edition of the Oxford Symposium of Food and Cookery while Black’s article was in the 1989 edition.  Both editions are published by Prospect Books.  Information in the last paragraph came from an unpublished manuscript from another author on the history of barbeque.

Love and Kisses and a Halo of Truffles: Letters to Helen Evans Brown, by James Beard, edited by John Ferrone (New York: Little, Brown, 1994)

Love and Kisses and a Halo of Truffles is an odd sort of book.  I’d seen it mentioned in numerous other books and, even though it’s over fifteen years old now, still wanted to check it out.  I’m glad I did.  As John Ferrone explains in the introduction, after James Beard’s death in 1985 Ferrone was given access to a huge stash of letters Beard wrote to Helen Evans Brown, a close friend, between 1952 (when their friendship began) and 1964 (when Brown died).  Excerpts from about 300 of the letters are reprinted in the book.  Thus, the book is a conversation between the two food writers, although it’s generally one-sided, as almost all the excerpts are from Beard’s letters, not Brown’s.

And what’s in those excerpts?  Lots and lots of talk about food in the 1950s and 1960s.  The book is a bit confusing to begin since not much context is provided other than brief footnotes explaining who people are, but this is the kind of book where the individual players aren’t that important: rather, what comes across is Beard’s life, lived through food.

Beard clearly loved good food, and could both cook and eat with the best of them.  Dishes and ingredients roll across the page, making it difficult to read the book on an empty stomach.  For example, while vacationing in France, he “lunched magnificently on a hot pâté of sweetbreads, truffles and a good deal of grated carrot in a delicate crust.  Then an omble chevalier…and a chicken with morilles, gathered this morning on the grounds.  I am eating only asparagus and an omelet tonight….I swear I am not going to eat a thing on the ship but eggs and vegetables and fruit.” (page 210)

A couple of things come across about Beard’s life through these letters, in addition to his love for food.  For one thing, that love brought him considerable problems, especially with his health and weight, as he visited numerous hospitals during this time period, usually leaving the hospital with orders from his doctor to lose weight and stick to a diet.  For another thing, especially in the 1950s, Beard was extremely concerned with money, taking on assignments and jobs that added considerable amounts of stress that, then, sent him to the hospital.  His life during this time was a whirlwind of traveling and writing: visits to Europe, the west coast, and travels throughout America (he was based in New York City); new cookbooks, revised cookbooks, a book of memoirs; and jobs cooking for restaurants, catered affairs, and creating new products for companies like Nestle and French’s (the mustard people).  Oh, and he also started a cooking school.  The man was busy.

The book is much closer to a diary or journal than a biography, so if you’re looking for a history of James Beard you should look elsewhere.  However, it does have a lot of interesting tidbits about the man like how, after reading that rhubarb tops were eaten as a vegetable in France, he bought a bunch of rhubarb and ate the tops as a salad.  After the meal he sat down to read about rhubarb, only to “read that rhubarb tops were toxic and could be fatal!…All night my whole body smelled like rhubarb cooked without sugar, and I was sicker than I have ever been for an hour or two in the middle of the night.  I highly recommend that you leave rhubarb tops alone.” (page 261) Words of wisdom from someone who’s been there.

The book also comes with a number of recipes mentioned in the text so you can make some of the many delicious dishes Beard describes.

I had corn on the cob a few nights ago and so wanted to write an article about the history of corn, but my notes on corn are pretty paltry.  Certainly, I have a few interesting tidbits about corn, such as the fact that it was domesticated so long ago by Native Americans—somewhere between 7,500 and 12,000 years ago—and has been modified so many times since then that no modern variety can survive in the wild; corn needs to be planted by people in order to grow.

I don’t have much information about corn from other sources, so I turned to a book for today’s article: the excellent Popped Culture: A Social History of Popcorn in America, by Andrew F. Smith.

Sources on popcorn in America are pretty paltry before 1492, but Smith does some good analysis of the sources he can find.  He starts the book by talking about a few historical myths that turn out to be wrong, namely that Columbus encountered popcorn on any of his journeys, that Indians along the Atlantic coast ate popcorn before the 1500s (it arrived there because European colonists brought it up from Central and South America, not because the tradition of growing it had spread among Indians), and that popcorn was eaten at the first Thanksgiving (no surviving account mentions it and it has never been discovered by archeologists working in the area).

Eating popcorn wasn’t popular during colonization or the Revolutionary time period.  It wasn’t until the 1830s that eating it became a fad, and Smith reprints the first known published recipe for making popcorn, from the late 1840s: “Take a gill, a half-pint, or more of Valparaiso or Pop Corn, and put in a frying pan, slightly buttered, or rubbed with lard.  Hold the pan over a fire so as constantly to stir or shake the corn within, and in a few minutes each kernel will pop, or turn inside out.” (page 25)  One of the fun things about popcorn is the simplicity of making it; that 150 year old recipe works just as well today as it did back then.

Popcorn balls first appeared in America in the 1840s.  Smith notes that they were probably first made in Mexico or Guatemala, and the recipe then made its way to America, possibly as a result of the Mexican-American war of 1846-48 when thousands of Americans fought in Mexico (along with the idea of popcorn balls, returning veterans also brought chile pepper seeds with them, since the widespread growing of chiles in America dates to that time as well).  The first published recipe for popcorn balls dates from 1861, the first year of the Civil War: “Boil honey, maple, or other sugar to the great thread; pop corn and stick the corn together in balls with the candy.”

One of the most interesting aspects of the history of popcorn is its popularity in the early 20th century, when it was eaten in salads and as a breakfast cereal.  While the idea of eating popcorn in milk might sound strange, the fact is that we eat puffed rice and puffed wheat as breakfast cereals, so why not popcorn, which is essentially puffed corn?  Smith points to a couple of trends that relegated popcorn to the sidelines of American food: the growth of the movie industry, which stressed popcorn as a snack rather than an ingredient in other foods; and the popularity of ready-to-eat foods like breakfast cereals.  Cereal companies realized getting people to buy a box of popped popcorn was a tough sell so they didn’t even try and instead poured their advertising dollars into Corn Flakes, Rice Krispies, and other products you can’t make at home.  Today, popcorn is a big business, but it’s also a niche business, a shadow of what it could be.