Grog to Grits

Over Christmas my wife and I went to Costa Rica for a vacation. While we were there we toured an organic farm which raised over 100 varieties of fruits and vegetables. One thing they raised was chocolate.

During the tour we got to taste the various products they have, including sugar cane and sugar cane juice. We also got to taste chocolate straight from the tree.

The fruit of a chocolate tree is shaped vaguely like a football and is about four inches long. The seeds inside the fruit are what chocolate comes from, but the seeds have to be processed before they look anything like the chocolate we know (and the processing is quite something, since the seeds have to be both fermented and roasted).

Unprocessed seeds are white, flat, about an inch round, and vaguely resemble a piece of liver in terms of consistency.  The actual seed is inside the fleshy outer coating, and is hard. Our host handed seeds around for us to taste, warning us that we should not bite the seed because the core was bitter. Sucking on the seed and gently biting it released a kind of citrus flavor that wasn’t unpleasant, but it was nothing like chocolate flavor. Again, chocolate seeds are heavily processed before they become what we know as chocolate.

And all of this reminds me of a bit of chocolate history, from Tim Richardson’s Sweets: A History of Candy.

Many years ago, when the Spanish ruled Mexico and when chocolate was extremely popular among the upper class, a bishop in southern Mexico was having a problem with chocolate. The issue was that rich church women had their maids bring them chocolate during the Mass, and this was understandably irritating the bishop. He ordered his priests to confiscate the chocolate the next time it happened, but when they did it turned into a standoff in the church with swords being drawn. The bishop died shortly afterwards, convinced that he had been poisoned by the pro-chocolate group. Was he actually poisoned? It’s impossible to know, but the story is a good indication of how passionate some people are about foods, particularly about chocolate.

Hamburgers make up a big part of the fast food industry, and so they make up a big part of American dining in general, but it wasn’t always so. If you go back to the early twentieth century Americans had very different attitudes toward the simple burger.

Simply put, they didn’t trust it. Hamburger is made from ground up beef and back then was something of a byproduct of the butcher trade. It was where the butcher put all the remaining scraps after cutting up a beef carcass, along with the tougher cuts of meat. Almost anything could be included in a pound of ground-up hamburger.

This meant that hamburger was cheap, which in turn meant that it was used in food operations where price was preferential to quality.  Hamburgers were popular at county fairs, and they and their brethren-in-food—the hot dog—were sold by street vendors in cities across the country.  The fact that these low-class and fly-by-night joints sold hamburgers further reduced the burger’s esteem in many peoples’ eyes.

Because of this, the meat industry and restauranteurs started working to change the hamburger’s bad reputation. For its part, the meat industry helped pass a law that legally defined hamburger as being 100 percent beef (and this law is still in effect—anything labelled “hamburger” has to be 100% beef). No longer could hamburger be made from beef, pork, and whatever other animal scraps might be left behind at the packing plant. While this law might have been intended to increase the public’s trust of hamburger, the law certainly did not say what parts of the cow–innards, tongue, or even hooves–could legally be included in hamburger.

The fact that hamburger was cheap led to some restaurants focusing on producing hamburgers for the public. White Castle was America’s first hamburger chain, and it, too, had to fight the perception that hamburger was a low class, dirty food. The name was carefully chosen to evoke ideas of cleanliness and the upper class. The grill was placed in full view of customers so they could see what was being cooked, and the meat was supposedly delivered fresh twice a day.

The company even went so far to prove that hamburgers were harmless that they sponsored an experiment at the University of Minnesota where, for 13 weeks, a medical student lived on nothing but White Castle hamburgers and water. He was as healthy at the end of the experiment as he was at the beginning, and White Castle used that to show customers they had nothing to fear from eating their burgers.

Hamburgers are far more popular today than they were back then, and White Castle’s popularity was long ago eclipsed by the likes of McDonald’s and Burger King.  Still, the nagging questions about health remain—even if the hamburgers today are made from high-grade meat, are they healthy?  You might be able to survive eating nothing but White Castle’s sliders, but it sure wouldn’t be a good existence.

This story takes place in Indiana back in 1818, at a time when Indiana was just being settled by non-Native Americans.

Late that year, husband and wife Thomas and Betsy Sparrow became sick with a relatively new disease that was known as the trembles.  While the disease was new, it was becoming well-know for being both painful and deadly. As one historian has described it, victims “lie on their backs with their legs up and spread apart.  Their breath grows ever shorter, their skin turns clammy and cold, their pulse becomes irregular, [and] finally they slip into a coma.”*  After the coma, then, was death.

As the Sparrows grew weaker and weaker, their niece, Nancy Lincoln, moved into their house to help them.  She also came down with the trembles and within a week was dead, another victim of a strange new disease.

Luckily, she did not take her son Abraham with her to help the Sparrows, or the country would have lost one of its greatest presidents.  Abraham Lincoln would almost certainly have caught the trembles as well, since the trembles came from the milk the Sparrow family drank.

Today we know where the trembles came from, and the disease is usually called “milk sickness.”  It comes from what is essentially poisoned milk, although the poisoning happens when the milk is made inside the cow, not after it comes out.  When cows eat white snakeroot the poison leaches from the snakeroot into the cow, and then into the milk.  Anyone who drinks the milk also drinks the poison.

The thing is, white snakeroot only grew in the midwestern United States, so settlers to that region had never encountered milk sickness before.  It was a tricky thing to figure out, since the disease didn’t affect everyone who drank milk, only people who drank milk from cows who had eaten snakeroot.

Obviously, dairy producers today keep their cows away from white snakeroot.  The plant is listed on numerous states’ noxious weed lists, which are lists of plants that are known to be dangerous.

Lots of diseases are associated with food.  Some illnesses happen because people don’t get enough of a certain vitamin or mineral.  Some happen because something bad got into the food somewhere along the way when it was being processed.  Milk sickness belongs to a very small group of food problems where something bad was added, in a natural way, when the food was created.  Luckily for us, we don’t have to worry about it any more, since the source of the problem was identified long before anyone reading this article was born.

*The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln, by Michael Burlingame (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 94.

At a conference a few months ago I heard a presentation on a popular kind of craft in Japan: making little sculptures of sweets from felt material.

I had never heard of this before, but it’s quite popular. If you do a search on “felt sweets” on Etsy, you’ll come up with many different examples. Some of the examples are cute and whimsical, but some are also quite lifelike.

There is a long tradition in Japan of making what are essentially food sculptures. It’s the same sort of sculptures that show up when they bring around the desert tray at an upscale restaurant in America. In Japan, the tradition is for much of the food to be in sculpture form so potential customers can see it.

American restaurants don’t have that tradition, but there was a tradition in one part of American culture of making wax food. In the 1800s, it was common for middle- and upper-class women to make wax sculptures of food.

The tradition has died out in America today, but 150 years ago it was common enough to show up in books like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where Mark Twain wrote:

On the table in the middle of the room was a kind of a lovely crockery basket that had apples and oranges and peaches and grapes piled up in it, which was much redder and yellower and prettier than real ones is, but they warn’t real because you could see where pieces had got chipped off and showed the white chalk, or whatever it was, underneath.

Dorothy Moss wrote about the tradition of making wax parlor art in the winter, 2004, issue of the journal Gastronomica.  By making wax fruit or other foods middle- and upper-class women learned both science and art. They learned science in their minute examinations of the fruit they were modeling: although they made a plaster cast of the subject, they spent quite a bit of time working over the wax sculpture with a modeling pin, making “wilted, bruised, and over-ripened areas” (as Moss writes) to mimic nature. The art lesson came in with the overall composition: the goal was to make something as naturalistic and real as possible, not something perfect and balanced.

The art of making wax parlor art eventually fell from favor as women had other ways to learn about botany and art, and as more and more women entered the workforce. The wax parlor art pieces required lots of time to make, and as women’s roles changed over time women simply didn’t have the time anymore. Making felt desert pieces today is something of an extension of that art, just in a different medium.

My family knows I’m into food history, so for Christmas I received Food and Life: Eat Right and Be Normal, a book from 1917.

Food and Life is something of a cross between a cookbook and a book of menus. It doesn’t have an author listed, mainly because this was a “product” much more than a “book”: it was intended to be sold by pharmacies to their customers, and the copy I received had a Toledo, Ohio, pharmacy’s name stamped on the front cover.

Much of the book is menus for people suffering from different health conditions. There are menus for overweight and underweight people; sufferers of tuberculosis, diabetes, and kidney disorders; and for young people and pregnant women. Pretty much anyone with a health condition could find out what they were supposed to eat.

In looking through the book, though, what really intrigues me are the advertisements, and there are lots of them. Most of the last half of the book is page after page of full-page advertisements for different products sold at pharmacies.

The advertisements intrigue me because many of them are for such strange products.  Clysmic was “A sparkling table water–corrective in all acidosis conditions of the stomach and system.”  Schratz’s Oriental Deodorant was “A destroyer for all disagreeable body odors. A harmless, refreshing deodorant, stainless and greaseless.”  Odo-Ro-No was “The toilet water for excessive perspiration.”  Vaucaire Galega Tablets were advertised as a “Bust Developer, Flesh Builder and Tonic for thin, nervous, undeveloped women.”  Listerated gum was advertised as having “an odd flavor that delights and satisfies.” What was the copywriter thinking when he wrote that line?

A couple of things strike me in looking through the advertisements. First of all, many of the products are for problems that are either solved today by prescription medicine, or that aren’t consider problems anymore.  Celere-Fo-Mo was “The World’s Bracer,” the “Only preparation of its kind, of merit that does not contain a heart drug.” I’m not quite sure what a bracer is, nor do I have any idea why a bracer would contain a heart medicine to begin with. Lots of the products advertised are like this.

The second thing I’m struck by is how regional the products are. The book was sold by a chain of pharmacies in Toledo, Ohio, and while many of the advertisers were from New York City or Chicago, many others were companies from smaller cities or towns.  Dr. R. A. Armistead’s Famous Ague Tonic was produced by the W. M. Akin Medicine Co, in Evansville, Indiana while Rubifoam, which seem to have been some sort of toothpaste, was produced by E. W. Hoyt & Co., in Lowell, Massachusetts. Marshalltown, Iowa; Fond du Lac, Wisconsin; Rupert, Vermont; and Irondequoit, New York all had companies producing products sold in pharmacies.  How many of those towns have any sort of manufacturing at all any more?

In some way, all of this parallels what happened in the world of food during the twentieth century. As American businesses got bigger in the twentieth century, drug and chemical companies merged together, so the only companies around today operate on a national, rather than regional scale. Also, as our knowledge of medicine increased, and as advertisers’ knowledge of how to sell standardized products increased, these strange products that used to be sold in drugstores across the country gradually fell off the shelves in favor of products produced by only a few big companies.

Today, the shelves of CVS and Walgreens lack a certain something the old pharmacy shelves had.  Rubifoam sounds so much more exciting than Crest, and Dr. R. A. Armistead’s Famous Ague Tonic sounds so much more exciting than, I don’t know, whatever modern product it was similar to, maybe DayQuil or liquid Tylenol or either of those mixed with several shots of whiskey.  All I know is that with standardization and medical knowledge came a sort of blandness that replaced the Wild West kind of feeling there was on pharmacy shelves back in the day.