Grog to Grits

Note: The following is part of a series on traveling foods.  Upcoming articles will look at foods eaten while sailing in the 1600s and while traveling through the US in the 1800s.

These days, packing for a long road trip means assembling things you need to wear and things to keep you entertained—t-shirts and shorts, iPods and DVDs for the kids to watch.  If there’s any food involved it’s often added as an afterthought, a few granola bars or a pack of trail mix thrown in with the swimsuit and tanning lotion.

Here’s the list of provisions The Complete Official Road Guide of the Lincoln Highway gave for a four-person road trip in 1924 (everything in parenthesis are comments from the original authors, not from me):

• 1 slab Best Bacon
• 1 can peaches
• 1 can pineapple
• 2 cans tomatoes
• 2 cans baked beans
• 1 dozen eggs
• 2 loaves bread
• 1 sack salt
• 1 can pepper
• 1 lb butter (not necessary)
• 2 lbs rice
• 10 lbs potatoes
• 6 cans evaporated milk (small size)
• 1 lb sugar
• 1 package safety matches (dozen boxes)
• 2 lbs cracked wheat
• 1 pint pickles
• 1 box Graham crackers
• 2 lbs coffee (ground)
• 1/2 lb tea
• 1 roll surgeon’s plaster, 1 in. wide, 5 yards (for sealing cans, etc.)
• 3 cans corn
• fresh fruit, as often as possible.

Things have obviously changed a lot in 90 years.

Cars, for example, are much more reliable than they were in the 1920s.  Breakdowns were frequent and blowouts a common occurrence.  Many heavily-traveled routes these days are divided, multilane interstates or state highways, things which were scarcely even conceived of at a time when a coast to coast trip generally meant a long train ride, not a car ride.

In the 1920s most roads were still gravel and the national highway system was just being set up (the interstate system is a product of the 1950s).  The first coast to coast highway was the Lincoln Highway, which the few motorists brave enough to drive could follow from Times Square in New York City to Lincoln Park in San Francisco, passing through 13 states as they went.

The Complete Official Road Guide of the Lincoln Highway was a guide for motorists driving all or a part of the route.  Not many people in the 1920s would have driven it—cars were still relatively expensive, and the heyday of the family driving vacation was still several decades off—but it’s an interesting book to look through to contemplate what’s changed since then.  The Lincoln Highway is gone, superseded by a series of state and national highways and interstates, and even the idea of crossing the country on anything but interstates is not something that would appeal to many people.

Looking at the list above, it’s quite clear from the suggested rations that drivers would be stopping along the road to make their own meals.  The authors of that section of the guide admitted that, in most places, this was unnecessary since towns of any size would have at least one restaurant or diner, and furthermore motorists could stop at grocery stores along the way to stock up on food.  However, there were some parts of the country, particularly in the west, where towns were few and far between.  While a motorist driving through those areas might see a few towns in the course of a day, they might not pass through a town around mealtime, and the relatively high chance of a car breaking down, especially in desert areas in the summer, could make travel dicey.  Thus, they needed to take some food with them.

The food suggested above was something of a hodge-podge of items that could be thrown together to make quick dishes.  Some of the food, like the baked beans, could simply be warmed and eaten, while other items, like potatoes and eggs, could be thrown together to make a quick meal.  The book did not have any recipes in it so travelers were on their own for figuring out what to eat.

Again, by 1924 the idea of carrying your own food while driving across country was passing from fashion.  The 1920s saw an explosion in the number of cars on the road but it wasn’t until the 1950s that things really got going with car sales—that’s when it could be assumed that every family owned a car.  That was also the time when fast food restaurants, ready to feed busy motorists, sprouted up along well-traveled roads and interstates across the country.  From a dozen eggs and a pound of sugar to a hamburger and french fries, people always need to eat while traveling—it’s just that today, the food is easily obtainable and can be eaten while you drive, instead at a roadside rest park or on a blanket along side the road.

Book Review: A History of the World in 6 Glasses, by Tom Standage (New York: Walker & Co., 2005)

A History of the World in 6 Glasses is a good overview of world history as seen through the lens of six beverages that have been widely consumed through history.  In looking at each beverage Standage focuses on a particular time and place, and the book is organized mostly chronologically (although there’s quite a bit of overlap among three of the drinks).  The beverages examined are:

• -beer in Mesopotamia and Egypt up through about 1500 BC
• -wine in the heydays of Greece and Rome
• -hard liquor among American colonists (yes, there’s a fairly large jump in time before this section)
• -coffee among the English and French in the 1600s and 1700s
• -tea in the British Empire during the 1600s through the 1800s
• -Coca-Cola’s rise to prominence in the late 19th and 20th centuries.

Standage is the digital editor of the Economist and a longtime journalist, and as a result the book is quite readable.  From what I can tell the history side of the book is solid, although the only section I know much about is the hard liquor section, since I teach American history.  Hard liquor was pretty important to the colonists, as rum was a major export product from New England, and further inland whiskey was important enough that western farmers rebelled because of a tax on whiskey meant to pay for the Revolutionary War.  Standage covers these topics and many more, on a fairly solid historical footing.

A good example of how Standage “gets it” as a historian is in the section about Coca-Cola.  He starts by outlining the company’s own story about how Coca-Cola was invented, which was that pharmacist John Pemberton “stumbled on the right combination of ingredients by accident, while trying to devise a cure for headaches.” (page 233)  Standage goes on to outline the real story: Pemberton was “an experienced maker of patent medicines, the quack remedies that were hugely popular” at that time, and was, in fact, trying to make cola-infused wine but local authorities outlawed alcohol, so he switched over to making a soda instead.  Throughout this part of the book Standage provides lots of context and background information about the popularity of patent medicines, how pharmacies had soda fountains, the legal battles Coke went through (it was forced to reduce its caffeine content in the early 20th century), etc.

Another part of the Coke story Standage does a good job of covering is the effect World War II had on the popularity of the drink.  While many industries suffered because of rationing, Coke was able to convince government authorities that, since Coke was vital to American morale, not only should it not have to suffer from sugar rationing (as virtually all other sugar-using companies did), but the military should set up bottling machines at military bases around the world so that Coke could be delivered directly to service people.  Coke succeeded wildly on both counts and came out of the conflict stronger than ever.

I did find a couple of problems with the section on hard liquor in colonial times, though.  First, a factual problem: he writes that the Whiskey Tax affected all liquors, which is incorrect.  The tax was only on whiskey, not rum, partially because the colonial leaders who made the law drank rum rather than whiskey.  The second problem is one which almost all authors who write histories that look at a particular thing have: that thing becomes more important in the book than it did in reality.  In discussing the disputes between British leaders and American colonists over tea that led, for example, to the Boston Tea Party, Standage writes that “the dispute over tea proved a decisive step toward Britain’s loss of its American colonies.” (page 206)  Sure, the colonists were mad about the tea tax, but they were mad about a lot of things: the Stamp Act, which put a tax on all printed materials; the Sugar Act, which assumed that anyone arrested was guilty; and the fact that Parliament was passing laws without the colonists having any say in what those laws were.  The Tea Act was just one step on a long road towards independence.

A History of the World in 6 Glasses is recommended if you like food history, and also if you’re interested in history in general.  Standage provides enough background and context in the book that by the end you’ll have read not only about a few different drinks but also about how the British Empire functioned, how American colonists exported goods, how different Chinese rulers viewed China and the rest of the world, and many other things.

Note: this article originally appeared in my printed zine Bread & Salt a few years ago.  Since only a few people read that, and it points out some important things about “authentic” foods, I’m reprinting it here.

“Gris was provincially Spanish, and Gertrude Stein used to say that only a true Spaniard could behave as he did; that is, he would speak Spanish and sometimes return to his family in Spain.  It was really quite marvelous to see.”

-Woody Allen, “A Twenties Memory”

Every September there’s a gathering of food historians in Oxford, England.  I’ve wanted to go for some time now, but I never seem to get around to submitting a paper by the deadline.  This year I had some lead time, but the theme of the meeting had me stumped: authenticity.  What could I write about authenticity?

I’m in the Kansas City area so I thought about writing something on authentic barbeque, or maybe something about authentic versus inauthentic ethnic restaurants, but these ideas never seemed to go anywhere.  The concept of authenticity percolated in the back of my mind for a few months until one day I realized that the question of authenticity is bogus: there is no such thing as authenticity, at least as we usually think of it.

When we talk about authenticity, we usually have the idea that there is one central thing that is truly authentic, something that everything points back to.  Take Italian cooking: authentic Italian cooking includes pasta, obviously, and some sort of sauce on the pasta, maybe a marinara sauce.  For it to be truly authentic, it should be made from fresh ingredients.  There are gradations of authenticity: a less authentic dish may include canned tomatoes, while an inauthentic dish would have the Hot Pockets logo on the outside of the package.

The problem is that pasta in marinara sauce can’t be authentically Italian, meaning the sort of thing that has been made in Italy for hundreds of years, because tomatoes have only been used in Italian cooking for less than 200 years.  Before that they were feared as a possibly poisonous relative of nightshade.  Furthermore, Italy itself is a creation of the 19th century (1861 to be exact); before that the region was a loose collection of city-states.  How can Italian cooking have been around for a few hundred years if Italy itself is less than 150 years old?

Maybe Italian cooking is a bad example.  Let’s try this: imagine your still-living grandmother came over from Croatia as an adult (it could be any country, I’m just picking a random one).  During your childhood, she made many meals of Croatian foods and you developed a liking for it, but as an adult you moved away and haven’t had it for years.  You go visit your grandmother when her church is having a fund raising dinner with all your favorite Croatian foods.  You go and it’s just like reliving your childhood: cooking smells wafting in from the kitchen while older men and women speak Croatian in low tones.  You taste the food and it’s exactly like you remember: it truly is authentic Croatian food.

Your grandmother, sitting beside you, takes one bite and says, “Bah!  This isn’t how we used to make it.  The onions are cut too small–did they use a machine?  You have to do it by hand!  And this soup, it’s too salty.  It’s all wrong.  This isn’t real Croatian food!”

Clearly, there’s a difference of opinion.

Let’s take this one step further.  A few months later you decide to go back to the old country to see what it’s like.  You fly to the capital city, take a train to the small town your grandmother grew up, and pop into the first restaurant you see.  You peruse the menu, looking for your Croatian favorites…and they’re not there.  They have spaghetti, and pizza, and baked potatoes, but nothing that’s really Croatian. When the waitress stops by you ask for some of the foods from your childhood.  “No, we don’t serve any of that,” she says.  “No one eats that anymore, except for my grandpa.  And who could?  It’s all butter and cream–I’m watching my weight as it is.  Salad and tuna fish is the way to go.”  She saunters off and you’re a little more confused about authenticity–is “authentic Croatian food” what Croats used to eat, back when your grandma lived there?  Or is it what Croats currently eat?  And if that food is just like the food most Europeans eat, is it really Croatian?

The problem here is with the concept of authenticity.  Like I wrote above, when we think of authenticity, we usually think of something that matches back to some more pristine idea, like a snapshot in time.  However, this pristine idea doesn’t exist in reality, only in our heads.  And because it only exists in our heads, it shifts and changes without our knowing it.

Anthropologists call this “invention of tradition.”  It’s a process that has much more to do with people in the modern time than people in the past, since the modern people are defining what is and isn’t included in a tradition.

Take, for example, today’s “traditional” Thanksgiving meal: turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, dressing, desserts.  We believe it’s a reflection of what the Pilgrims ate at the first Thanksgiving in 1621, but the single surviving account of that meal mentions only that they ate deer and fowl.  Europeans weren’t eating potatoes by that point, so today’s mashed potatoes aren’t “authentic.”  And the fact is that the idea of having a holiday called “Thanksgiving” only came into vogue in the 19th century, so the holiday itself is less than about 150 years old.

However, having lots of food at Thanksgiving is our way of telling ourselves that we are a rich country, and having family around on that day reminds us that we are family-oriented.  Neither of these things may be true for an individual celebrating Thanksgiving, but the tradition overall reinforces those ideas about our identity.

And authenticity is often tied up in ideas of identity.  If we eat at an “authentic” Italian restaurant, don’t we in some way absorb some of that authenticity (literally, by consuming it)?  A person who knows the difference between an authentic French chardonnay and a cheap imitation makes himself or herself a little purer by drinking the authentic wine.  Again, authenticity exists in the eye of the beholder, not in reality, so its connection to identity makes it a prime target for advertisers: beware the authentic microwavable Italian meal.

So authenticity is bogus, on some level, but still exists in our minds.  Unlike eggs, which are the focus of the next Oxford food symposium.  The deadline for papers is a few months away but, alas, I can’t think of a thing to write about relating to eggs.

Or maybe I could present a paper titled “Our Ideas of Authenticity: The Chicken or the Egg?”

One good thing about teaching history to college students is that, when I meet people for the first time, it’s easy to explain what I do.  Everyone knows what a history class is.  And most people respond pretty positively to me.  “History?  I love history,” is a frequent comment, which is often followed up by, “I sure didn’t back in school, though…”

From what I can tell, most people didn’t enjoy their history classes back in high school and college.  A big part of this is probably because they were forced to take history classes, along with algebra, and literature, and many other courses.  History is just another class to check off on a long list.

A lot of people also didn’t like history because, to many people (both teachers and students), history is a just list of names and dates to be memorized.  George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, 1492, 1776, 1865: they’re all things to memorize quickly and then just as quickly forget after the exam is over.

The people who are into history as adults can enjoy it without having to worry about exams, essays, and grades.  They can read biographies or historical novels, they can watch the History Channel or documentaries, they can visit places like Valley Forge or Colonial Williamsburg.  The history they experience isn’t just a bunch of unconnected names and dates; it’s often stories that relate, in some way, to things that are happening today.

Grog to Grits is an example of this kind of history.  This is popular history, which means I’m not writing to a bunch of college people, I’m writing to everyone who is interested in food history in its various forms.

Which brings us back to the question of exactly what food history is.

There are lots of different kinds of historians out there.  There are political historians, who study what happens in Washington, D.C.; there are military historians, who study battles and wars; there are different kinds of racial historians who study history from the point of view of groups like African Americans or Hispanics.

I’m a cultural historian, which means I’m interested in how large trends in society affect people on an everyday basis.

Let me give you an example of this.  In the late 1940s, in the years after World War II, there was a huge housing boom in this country.  Not many houses had been built during the Great Depression in the 1930s since no one had money, and not many were built during the war because materials were rationed.  The postwar houses were meant to be affordable, and to keep costs down they were smaller than prewar houses.

So that’s the large trend: lots of relatively small houses being built.  How small?  In one huge housing development the average square footage was 750 square feet.  The average new American house these days is about three times that.  And this was in the midst of the Baby Boom, so these were families with 2, 3, or 4 kids.

The people who moved into those houses were affected by the size of the houses in a number of ways, but the way I’m interested in has to do with cooking.  With kitchen space, and living space, at a premium, both cooking and eating were pushed outside.

The result? The popularity of barbecuing skyrocketed.  The 1950s was the big time for barbecuing in this country.  Before that, outdoor grilling was one of a number of ways of preparing meats; after that, barbecuing was the way to prepare meats.

That’s what I’m talking about regarding the connection between large cultural trends (like small houses) and how people live their everyday lives (like how outdoor grilling even today is quite popular).  I’m interested in connections in history, not just obscure facts.  While obscure facts can be entertaining, delving into the connections in history can be a lot more illuminating.