From Hardtack to Home Fries

Penguin Books

Introduction

Follow the Food

Writing about food as a way to understand American history has not been a stretch for me. I was prepared for the task by my academic training and experience (more about that in a moment) but perhaps even more by a lifelong interest in and curiosity about food and the meaning it has for people beyond satisfying hunger.

Take the time I went on an elementary-school field trip to a U.S. naval vessel when I was a child growing up along the Great Lakes. The ship was probably a destroyer — I have a vague recollection of big guns lining the deck, and of hordes of white-uniformed sailors scurrying around and looking busy — but the only part of the tour that I remember clearly was a visit to the ship's galley, where tray upon tray of pigs in blankets (hot dogs wrapped in a biscuit dough) were being prepared by the ship's cooks. I was intrigued with the size of those trays, three feet square at least, and the alarming size of the ovens, which summoned up impressions of the one owned by the witch in Hansel and Gretel. I wondered how many men these cooks were expected to feed and how many pigs in blankets each of them would be allowed to eat. I was full of questions, but my classmates were in a hurry to get back to the big guns and busy sailors, so we were hustled along and I never found out what I really wanted to know about the ship and the U.S. Navy.

Years later, in the midst of the student protest movement in the early 1970s, I slipped into a building on the Harvard campus that had been taken over by a group of young women demanding that the university supply low-income housing and a women's center for the women of Boston. Along with other sympathizers, I heard the demands of the protesters and read their position papers, but what I remember most about the meeting was an enormous vat of brown rice fortified with raisins and chopped almonds that I saw in the kitchen, giving me the impression that the students were preparing for a long siege. As I look back on the incident, that big pot of brown rice seems to me to conjure up the spirit of the times. Cheap, sustaining, and unpretentious, it was the food of choice for the counterculture of the late sixties and the seventies, a symbol of protest against the establishment and of a commitment to the poor and disenfranchised.

This preoccupation with food and what it means to people has persisted and sometimes gotten me into trouble. Not long ago I was at a dinner party when another guest who was chatting about grocery shopping confided that she had to remember to buy the snacks her husband liked to have in his study. The husband — within earshot — was a full professor of physics at a major university and a rather formal gentleman. I was suddenly overcome with curiosity about what this man munched on while working behind closed doors on his complex equations. So I asked him and got a curt answer: candy bars and peanuts. A less persistent person might have left it at that, but I had to know precisely what brands he liked and the sizes of his bars and jars. So I probed and was satisfied to learn that he liked plain half-pound milk-chocolate Hershey bars, not the miniatures or the kind with the crunch. I could also easily relate to his preference for Planters roasted peanuts lightly salted instead of those awful ones that are dipped in sugar as well as salt. In just a few moments, I had learned some pleasant and endearing things about this former stranger, and believed that we had broken the ice. Imagine my surprise, then, when the professor's wife told me later that he had thought my questions nosy, and was deeply embarrassed by my line of inquiry. He might not have been so offended had we found that we shared a passion for Bach or the Boston Red Sox, but I learned too late that snacks can be too intimate a subject for some people to talk about comfortably.

My private inclination to use food as a way of sizing up people and public events caught up with my professional life when I became Curator of Books at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. Here I have been responsible for developing the library's comprehensive collection of books and other printed materials on the history of women in America — a collection that from the first has included cookbooks and books on the history of food.

Founded in 1943, this social history research library has a distinguished manuscript collection that includes the papers of such notable American women as Betty Friedan, as well as the records of the National Organization for Women and other organizational papers that document women's collective activities. At the same time, the Schlesinger Library has collected the records of women who were not well known, including labor organizers, activists for women's health, and ordinary homemakers. It was for this reason that cookbooks became part of our collection, and that the Schlesinger Library holdings now include 16,000 cookbooks, as well as the papers of such noted food writers as Julia Child and M.F.K. Fisher.

Cookbooks were recognized by the library as having essential connections to women's history well before women's history was recognized as a respected field of academic study. The field took off at the end of the 1960s, when academic women who had been activists in the civil rights, antiwar, and women's rights movements came to realize that women in general had been excluded from the historical record. By way of setting the record straight, the resources of the library were called upon by faculty members, students, and independent researchers from all parts of the country and abroad who came to research and write about women's history. The cookbook collection, however, was generally ignored during this period as evidence of the past preoccupations of American women. Instead, women's studies specialists were more immediately intent on bringing visibility to the public activities of women and downplaying their kitchen duties, which seemed to symbolize women's subordination and oppression by the patriarchy.

This would change when women's history came of age and its subject matter became more inclusive. Historians of women had always been sensitive to the fact that women are not a monolithic group but range in age, income level, race, and ethnicity. In the last several years, however, studies in women's history have appeared that demonstrate how customs surrounding food and food itself reveal important distinctions among women and their connections to the communities in which they live. At the same time, for scholars in traditional fields such as literature, psychology, sociology, and anthropology, the study of food is beginning to become an academic growth industry.

In some ways, these scholars are late to the scene. Well before food became a legitimate and exciting area of investigation in colleges and universities, groups of nonacademic culinary historians were laboring in the vineyard of food history. In fact, it was these groups especially, which had been using the library's cookbook collections for years, that nurtured my inclination to see food as a way of understanding not only individual and group behavior but whole civilizations and major world events.

In particular, I found like-minded researchers among the Culinary Historians of Boston, an organization that has met for years at the Schlesinger Library and served as a model for similar groups that have formed around the country. These groups contributed to my sense that the study of food could be broad in its scope rather than narrowly elitist and antiquarian. The venerable Oxford Symposium, held annually at the university for worldwide historians of food, and the Oldways Preservation and Exchange Trust, advocating traditional approaches to diet and nutrition, also provided occasions for me to test out my ideas about the place of food in history, literature, and popular culture. Most of all, they have vindicated my natural inclination to focus on food and to use that focus as a way to illuminate some of the major events of American history.

Food was my way of discovering unforeseen but revealing aspects of otherwise well-documented events. So, for example, the importance of food in defining life came home to me in diaries written by Americans who were herded into Japanese prison camps in the Philippines after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and had to reconstruct their lives around whatever food they could find to eat. Later, looking at cookbooks written by African Americans, I was struck by how, when virtually every other vestige of a people's heritage has been viciously removed, food remains to preserve their identity and connect them with one another and their homeland.

My approach in this uncommon history has been to follow the food in published and unpublished memoirs, diaries, and oral histories that came out of some of the most defining moments of our country's past. So, for example, a manuscript collection from the Schlesinger Library allowed me to document the life of a famous Viennese restaurant in Harvard Square that gave welcome work to World War II refugees. Cookbooks have been especially valuable as primary sources and sometimes even more reliable than traditional scholarly evidence. In one instance, a cookbook written by FDR's housekeeper proved more revealing than her memoir of her Washington years, its dull recipes proof that White House guests had been justified in complaining about the food.

Cookbooks, which I consider to be a vastly underutilized resource, have been relied upon throughout this book. As historic artifacts they bring to life the American past through accounts of what foods were available, how they were prepared, and the meanings people gave to them. Finally, individual recipes are also included to allow the reader to connect directly with the figures in this book and what they cooked and served and ate — or longed to eat when the food they loved was no longer available.

Continues...

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Excerpted from From Hardtack to Home Fries by Barbara Haber Copyright © 2003 by Barbara Haber. Excerpted by permission.
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