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Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Eating History

As I’ve casually mentioned, my passion for the title subject will be how I’ll be spending my time, once this blogging thing is behind us.  It is, loosely, social anthropology, but focused more narrowly on the history of food, and how it is a reflection of society’s status, customs, and culture.

I have a lot to study to catch up, and have a library of books waiting for time and energy to align.

If I won the lottery, I’d probably spend a few years at a University.  Bologna, Italy seems to be where the focus of this field of study is best represented.  There are similar experts in France, but the academics are not as prominent as the Italians… and rightly so.  The Italians were the first to create a fictional, regional cookbook, to unite a culture under a common cuisine.  (Of course the people didn’t know it was fiction at the time, so it had its intended result.) Either would require that I learn a new language, sufficient to enroll and study.  Currently, I’m at the mercy of translators and book publishers, who translate only those works they feel would provide a suitable ROI. 

It will be a few years before I run out of material and have to decide to learn to speak and read Italian, so there is no immediate urgency… and since winning the lottery is a fantasy, I’ll never get to Bologna University… and will have to suffice with the home-school equivalent of university-level studies in this field (not the least of which is the fact that I have to work to make a living, so full-time student is not a possibility, and this will be my “hobby").

Related to all of this is Thanksgiving, and probably explains the field and discipline in the most simplest terms.

Your family’s Thanksgiving menu, the one that has been handed down, is as accurate as DNA in defining your family heritage and lineage.  Food studies is an alternate method of getting to the same goal as the Human Genome project is in genealogical studies. 

What is included in the handed-down version says where your people were from.  For example, if you include cornbread stuffing, rather than herbed dressing, your people settled in the South, not the Northeast.  Ditto for the strange inclusion of lemon meringue pie (which is about as un-pilgrim-like as anything could be--they didn’t have citrus fruits.) If you add oysters to your dressing, your people came from Boston (and thereabouts).  At some point, I suspect, that my family dropped the oysters from the dressing, but kept oysters on the menu (showing their Massachusetts roots).  My mother got married during WWII, and learned to cook while my father was stationed in Texas, so she added pecan pie to the menu… but we would know that there was a Southern influence (but only an influence, not a derivative) because of the inclusion of that type of pie.  Apples and mince are other common ingredients in some stuffings, mostly from the really old colonies.  My family did something weird with the minced meat (at some point), and that was to have it as a pie, rather than as part of the dressing (and “minced” became applies/fruit rather “minced meat” which is closer to something like the dreaded haggis in its original form.)

Every year I create the menu.  I don’t change it that much, but I add or subtract items from the list.  How close I get to the original (meaning, how many dishes I prepare) has a lot to do with how many people are joining us.  Regardless, the meal is huge.  Even a scaled down version would feed a dozen people… but leftovers are much enjoyed, regardless.

The menu (regionally adjusted, of course) is also closer to ancient (Medieval) cooking than any of our more modern recipes.  Pumpkin pie or pumpkin bread, most especially.  The tastes don’t occur in nature… meaning that pumpkin doesn’t taste anything like pumpkin pie or pumpkin bread.  Pumpkin, steamed, tastes terrible.  We doctor it, and only delude ourselves into thinking that pumpkin bread tastes anything like pumpkin, although that is a layer in the final, multi-layered flavor we create.  Cooking, until the 18th century, was about creating new tastes, rather than serving food that tastes like it did in its virgin state.  Gravies, of course, are a modern invention, as is the inclusion of corn and potatoes, but that is what makes it American (and appropriate for Thanksgiving).

Essentially, regional cooking (or “national” cooking) is an historical myth, and a modern convention.  There was no such thing as “Italian” or “French” cooking… there was just cooking.  The Spice Trade had homogenized cooking, and the methods of cooking were fairly uniform.  What has changed are the ingredients (from the original and over time as new ingredients were introduced, such as corn and potatoes).  There have been two major cuisine revolutions, one occurring at the beginning of the Spice Trade (but the dates of its origin were revised on the discovery of the Ice Man) and the French one, I mentioned earlier.

So as we sit down to our Thanksgiving Feasts, preparing the old dishes the old or in new ways, we’re Eating History… and it is because of that, and my enthusiasm for the subject, that I hold the menu (and the preparation of it) in greatest regard and respect.  (My great-grandmother took the Temperance Pledge, so she dropped all the alcohol from the menu, but I did not take the pledge, so they are restored.)

This year, because of my health, I’ll be calling upon the kids to do most of the work… and the baton will be passed to a new generation, unlike ever before.  I remember the first year that my mother sat it out, only called upon to give advice and to taste and perfect the gravy.  We’ll see how close we get to that this year.

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