History_at_Dinner

History is best served one dinner table at a time. By studying what people harvested, hunted, purchased, cooked and ate we can all gain an immediate recognition of how their lives and ours intersect. When we work with actual recipes from the various eras and taste the foods, our understanding of their lives and times becomes something to savor.

Translating recipes from the past for modern preparation while placing them in historic and human context is part detective story, part chemistry and part old-fashioned cooking skills. The results are a rediscovery of flavors, combinations and even hints for healthful delicious meals that have been lost or overlooked for generations. But the best part is being able to enjoy the rich and varied flavors of the past while savoring insights into the lives of those who built our nation.

Baked goods are a practical way of demonstrating how American and midwestern foods have changed over the past two centuries. Biscuits and corn breads are foods that we all eat today. Yet, these have changed significantly from the 19th century and those changes demonstrate the impact of shifts in grains grown, introduction of chemical leavenings, sacrifices made for war and economic pressures.

Old cookbooks, journals, magazines, newspapers and letters are good sources for recipes and demonstrate trends to understand what was actually cooked in Midwestern kitchens. Grocery store advertisements are particularly helpful in seeing what was available, plentiful and how expensive some ingredients were relative to others. It is one thing to know that lemon extract was available in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1857. It is quite another to realize that at 25 cents a bottle it cost more than a bunch of lamp wicks, a pound of fresh meat, salt pork or even coffee.

There are important differences across time and place. It is key to realize just because someone wrote a magazine article about a particular ingredient, for example artichoke hearts, not everyone rushed out to buy them or even considered cooking with them. What is significant for each of us is to capture our own family’s history. What did our mothers, grandmothers and even grandfathers cook and eat? How did their choices reflect the times they lived in and where they came from? If we capture those traditions, habits and recipes and pass them down to our children and grandchildren we can tell the story of our own part in the American stew pot of history.

History at the Dinner Table

Rae Katherine Eighmey