Grog to Grits

I recently made some stir fry, which made me start thinking about the history of Chinese food in this country.

Joseph Conlin’s Bacon, Beans and Galantines is a book that looks at what gold miners ate back in the gold rush of the 1850s and 1860s. It talks quite a bit about Chinese food, specifically Chinese food in mining camps.

A wave of Chinese immigrants, mostly men, came to this country starting in the 1850s to look for gold. While many of them did work in the gold fields, some of them realized an easier way to make money was to cook food for the gold miners. As it turned out, Chinese food was quite popular among the gold miners.

Part of this was because the food was good, and part of it also may have been because the food was very spicy – we’re talking Szechwan Chinese food here. As Conlin points out, miners spent their days breathing in the dust from explosions and the resulting chemical fumes. This probably resulted in taste buds that were nearly dead. Spicy Chinese food, and very flavorful French food, were both popular in mining camps in California and Nevada.

As the Western gold and silver mines were tapped out over time (and because the Chinese were often kicked off mining claims), Chinese miners gravitated towards Western cities, where, among other things, they opened restaurants. The popularity of Chinese restaurants started in the West and gradually spread across the country.  It eventually reached the point where, even in cities without a large Chinese population, a Chinese restaurant was nothing out of the ordinary––think of the end of the movie A Christmas Story, where the family ends up having their Christmas dinner at a Chinese restaurant.

Of course, most Chinese restaurants in America are nothing like Chinese restaurants in China–they serve fortune cookies, which are, after all, an American invention.

I’m always interested in connections between things that seem to be completely unconnected, and if you look through history enough you’re bound to find various connections. For example, I was looking through some old notes I have and found this information about the history of grapes in America:

In the 1840s, Ephraim Wales Bull, of Concorde, New Hampshire, started working on developing a new kind of grape. At that point there were no American grapes that were good tasting, and his idea was to crossbreed various kinds of grapes to end up with something that was good to eat and drink. After about 10 years of experimenting, he announced the development of the Concorde grape, America’s first commercial grape.

And what is the connection to literature? Bull’s test garden was located next door to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s residence, and Bull was friends with Henry David Thoreau. Back then the world was a much smaller place, especially in New England.

Another connection between the worlds of literature and of food comes from the book Moby Dick. At one point the author explains the nobility of the whaling profession, and he says that while there was no royal blood that ran through the veins of whalers, they had connections to one of the founding fathers:

The grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was Mary Morrel; afterwards, by marriage, Mary Folger, one of the old settlers of Nantucket, and the ancestress to a long line of Folgers and harpooneers–all kith and kin to noble Benjamin–this day darting the barbed iron from one side of the world to the other.

By the time Melville wrote Moby Dick sperm whales had been hunted to extinction in the Atlantic Ocean.  New England whaling ships commonly sailed on a three-year trip that took them around the southern tip of South America and up into the North Pacific. In 1849, after the news of the discovery of gold in California reached New England, a group of young Folger men decided to set sail not for whalebone but for gold.

They reached California a year later, but the gold mining business never panned out for the Folgers. Some of the brothers eventually returned East and the remainder went into other businesses, including–of course–the coffee business. Fourteen-year-old Jim Folger first found work in a coffee and spice mill, and later opened a store selling coffee to gold miners. He rejoined the coffee and spice mill, took over the firm, and then unfortunately went bankrupt. It took him over 10 years to pay off the debts for the mill, but in the end he did and expanded his sales of coffee across the country.  Today Folgers is a name associated with coffee, long after the New England whaling business has faded away.

Marketers who advertise products aren’t just selling a product, they’re selling a set of ideas around the product.  Car advertisements sell the idea of a car being sporty and fast; political advertisements sell the idea of the politician being the right person for the job; credit card advertisements sell the idea of the card being just the right one for you.

Food advertisements sell ideas as well.  One kind of marketing I’m interested in is origination stories; that is, stories of how products were invented.  Many of the stories you hear about products, especially stories that are publicized by companies that sell those products, are either completely fabricated or don’t tell even close to the whole truth (I’ve previously written about the origination story behind Coca-Cola; click here for part 1 and here for part 2 of that article).

One subset of those origination stories are those that involve people of different races interacting.  Below are examples of three similar types of origination stories for three different products.  In each one a person of non-white status invented a food, but then the recipe ended up in the hands of a corporation.  Read on for my analysis of what the stories tell us.

1. Fritos corn chips.  Fried corn chips were popular in San Antonio, Texas, in 1932 when Elmer Doolin bought a bag of them.  He liked them enough to track down the Mexican maker and offer him $100 (borrowed from his mother, who had pawned her wedding ring) for the recipe.

True?  Probably, but I can’t imagine that a corn chip recipe is complex enough that you’d need to buy a recipe since you can’t make your own.

2. Bisquick.  In 1930 a General Mills salesman was traveling across country on a train.  The salesman was hungry so he ordered some biscuits, and was surprised at how quickly they were served.  He talked to the black chef about it and found out he had made a dry mix for biscuits so mixing them up was a snap.  As the story goes, the salesman obtained some of the dry mix, sent it to General Mills chemists to analyze, and they then created Bisquick from the sample.

True?  Probably not.  If the salesman could get a sample of the mix, why couldn’t he just get the recipe?  Also, by the 1930s dry mixes had been around for decades (see the next example), so it’s hardly likely that no one at General Mills had ever thought of the idea before.  The addition of scientists in the story is a interesting point—the black guy came up with the recipe, but the white scientists are the ones who really created the Bisquick mix.

3. Aunt Jemima pancake mix.  This is the granddaddy of these kinds of stories, and the Aunt Jemima story is complex enough that I will probably write a separate article about it in the future.  The origination story for Aunt Jemima pancake mix changed over time, but here’s a quick version of it: Back before the Civil War (i.e. during slavery) a Colonel Higbee was known far and wide for the hospitality at his plantation, and for the pancakes that were served there by a slave named Aunt Jemima.  During the war the pancakes got Higbee out of a jam when Union soldiers stormed his plantation and threatened to rip out his mustache.  Aunt Jemima intervened by serving her delicious pancakes, though, and everything was okay.

Years later, some of those Union soldiers had bought a flour mill and, when thinking about what they could make, thought back to Aunt Jemima’s delicious pancakes.  They went looking and found her still working on Higbee’s plantation, and offered her gold for the recipe.  Depending on which version of the story you look at she either accepted the gold or turned it down, but at any rate she went north to give up her recipe, and now everyone can enjoy Aunt Jemima’s delicious pancakes.

True?  Nope, it’s completely fabricated.  However, the various ad agencies that handled the Aunt Jemima account were so skillful at making the story believable that one woman who portrayed Aunt Jemima in the 1960s believed she was portraying a real person.

These stories point to an old idea: that certain foods are more authentic if they come from certain nonwhite ethnic groups.  For biscuits and pancakes it’s blacks, while for corn chips it’s Hispanics.  The three products themselves all come from huge, multinational corporations, but the origination stories put something of a human face on the products, or at least try to make the products more authentic by connecting the foods to nonwhites.

Sources: The information on Fritos corn chips and Bisquick came from Donna R. Gabaccia’s We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans, pages 160 and 165.  Information on Aunt Jemima came from M.M. Manring’s Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima.

This is the second part of an article looking at a 1967 report that examined what the world would probably be like in the year 2000.  The first part of the article can be found here.

Prediction: The home as a hub for entertainment and leisure activities.  Just after talking about something as goofy as using pneumatic tubes to deliver food, the report completely nails the world of tomorrow (that is, today).  While only talking about videotapes, which at that point were still expensive (Sony’s cheapest VCR was $1,240), and things like DVDs, Blu-Ray and downloadable content were scarcely even dreamed of, the report quotes the Wall Street Journal as saying that “As electronic devices pipe more and better entertainment into the home, some experts foresee less demand for outside activities such as movies, concerts and live theater.”  Not only does it discuss the use of timeshifting, it also mentions that broadcasters could show less popular programs at odd hours, knowing that people who wanted could tape them and watch them later.

Prediction: Holography.  Ah, holograms, the technology that’s always five to ten years in the future.  Not only would we have holograms by the year 2000, we would decorate our homes with them: “the theme of a room [could change] from Greek Temple to Turkish Harem, or French chateau with the flip of a switch.  Even conventional decorative devices such as rugs and wall coverings can be projected effectively with holography.”  That is, they could if it existed.

Prediction: The disappearance of restaurants in airline terminals, and of prepared food on airplanes.  To quote from the study: “Highly efficient processing from plane to city will be so speedy that few travelers will need to spend time in the terminals.”  Also, we won’t be eating on planes because they’ll all be supersonic transport planes that can get practically anywhere in 2.5 hours, and on the biggest (with a few hundred passengers) it’s impossible to feed everyone within 2.5 hours.  Instead, the report suggests “that vending machines will be a likely solution to this problem.”  As it turned out, supersonic transports were expensive (because they burned huge amounts of fuel), only used over the ocean (because people were so annoyed with the sonic booms they produced) and dangerous (no civilian supersonics have flown since one crashed in Paris in 2000).  As for the prediction about the efficiency of the airlines in getting people to their destination quickly—I’ll just say that I’d like to live in that alternate universe.

Prediction: We won’t be eating food pills.  The report notes that food pills are being developed at Pillsbury “for the space program but are not being considered for the commercial market.”  This one, obviously, is correct.  Food pills are a cute idea in science fiction but won’t ever come about in reality, especially not now when the trend is toward organic, more natural foods.

Prediction: Increased air travel will change Americans’ tastes.  This gem is hidden away in the Conclusions section of the report: “The more people travel, the more sophisticated their tastes become.  Air travel will contribute to the American taste for varied national foods.”  Absolutely correct.  As Americans moved from the 1960s to the 70s to the 80s, tastes did shift in favor of more international foods, and the fact that more of us were traveling is one reason why this happened.

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All information in this article is from the folder “French (R. T. French Co.),” Information Center Records Box 4 of 24, J. Walter Thompson Company Archives, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

It’s hard to predict the future, but that certainly doesn’t stop people from trying.  With the benefit of hindsight (i.e. if you look back at past predictions for how the world is supposed to be now) these predictions tend to fall into three categories: laughably off-base, just plain wrong, or (very rarely) close to being on target.  A few years ago I visited the historical archives at Duke University which contain, in addition to lots of other items, the corporate records of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency.  In 1967 the agency produced a report on what the world of the year 2000 would hold for the R.T. French Company (the mustard people) in terms of food and consumers.  Today I’ll look at four of the predictions, and Friday I’ll look at five more.*

Prediction: The 35 hour work week.  The report quotes a computer expert as predicting a standard 35.5 hour work week by 1980, and, in fact, lots of people thought businesses were going in that direction.  As it turns out, Americans are working longer hours today than they were in the 1960s, and the report hedges its bets on this topic.  It discusses the rubber industry in Akron, Ohio, which, during the Depression, went to a standard 6 hour work day, and kept that schedule into the 1960s.  While that’s a 30 hour work week for the factories, researchers who asked employees how they spent the extra time found that more than half of them got a second job, and some of them even picked up a second job at another rubber factory, which meant they worked 60 hours a week, with no overtime paid (since they were technically working two jobs, not one).

Prediction: The importance of the microwave oven.  Raytheon, the defense contractor that discovered radar technology could warm food as easily as it could track Russian fighter planes, was predicting a $500 microwave oven in 1967.  While the explosion of the microwave  market didn’t occur until about a decade later, the report’s authors clearly realized that this was going to be a big market, and one which required different sorts of food.  For example, while a microwave could cook meat the finished product didn’t look like grilled meat, so some coloring would be required for meat products.

Prediction: The combination freezer/microwave oven.  The housewife pushes few buttons, frozen food tumbles out of the freezer and into the oven, and the food is automatically cooked.  While I’ve seen washer/dryer combos that do this sort of thing, I’ve never seen it with a freezer/microwave oven.  It’s kind of like the refrigerators that track what’s inside and automatically order more food: while it sounds like a good idea, it’s just easier to use the old system of going to the store.

Prediction: Cities where food is delivered from the store through sterile pneumatic tubes “to eliminate wrappers that constitute much of today’s household waste.”  This is just such a goofy idea that it’s difficult to imagine how anyone could believe this sort of thing; I’m not even sure where to start criticizing this.  With no packaging, how exactly does food keep clean?  Pneumatic tubes use air to push or pull the food along; what happens with oddly-shaped foods like chicken drumsticks or frozen burritos?

*All information in this article is from the folder “French (R. T. French Co.),” Information Center Records Box 4 of 24, J. Walter Thompson Company Archives, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.