This is a super interesting post about the long history of recipes in the United States. It goes over many of the events that influenced cooking styles, such as the World Wars, slavery, the Great Depression, refrigerators, and more. It starts with a reference to B. Dylan Hollis, a popular TikToker who cooks vintage recipes:
(via: Vellum and Vinyl)
Blaming slavery, without knowing anything. How utterly liberal.
How is it ‘blaming’? I would much rather understand it as ‘thanking’. The absolute best traditional recipes come from slaves. Take Brunswick Stew for example, not the veggie soup you get at any restaurant today: no, real, Southern stew. Back then it was know as Hash, and it was started by slaves along the Savannah River. I would never blame anyone for it, much rather thank them for the opportunity to enjoy such an awesome meal!
There were a LOT of Southerners who were not wealthy enough to have slaves as cooks. I am a Southerner and feel qualified to make this statement.
Interesting comment on mutton. I come from a sheep farming area in California, but think many of the animals end up out of the area, since lamb isn’t that popular where they are raised. Personally like lamb, but finding is not so easy and honestly find few people that know how to prepare it. My mother in-law served lamb at Christmas. Too bad she didn’t know how to cook it…
I am a historian too and this popped up in a group discussion with some colleagues and I am going to be the well actually person here because despite being very left in my politics, I am tired of social media reinventing history.
There are so many errors in reasoning here, I am just going to tackle a couple. First let’s talk about the demographics of slavery. The highest estimate is that about 30% of families owned slaves. So let’s go with that. That leaves 70% of the white families in the south doing their own cooking. The numbers are roughly the same in the North. About 30% of families were weathy enough to hire help or buy indentured servants from the brokers.
Even in these families some women knew how to cook. There are university collections all over the world of handwritten receipt books which illustrate that the wealthy European women who wrote them knew their way around a kitchen just fine.
Let’s pretend for a minute that you are right though and the women didn’t know how to cook, because some did not. The idea that slavery was abolished and suddenly these wealthy women started cooking for themselves is ridiculous.
When slavery was abolished the rich in the south did what the rich in the north were already doing, they hired help. And with the system of peonage that filled the void in the South, they had plenty of cheap labor to exploit. There were no rich ladies standing in their kitchens wringing their hands and trying to bake bread.
Now let’s talk about ingredients since that came up. European women started regularly mentioning ingredients like “that newfangled corn” in their cookbooks in the late 1500s. So by 1860, they had been working with new world foods for over 300 years. Think about it. The blight that started the potato famine in Ireland was before the civil war.
The potato famine affected much of Northern Europe. Ireland (and part of the Scottish highlands) suffered more as they were more reliant on growing potatoes.
Maize (corn) was rarely grown in Britain before the 1970s, so when the British government ordered £100,000 for Ireland of it from the USA at the start of the potato famine, it was not popular. Mills in Ireland were not set up for grinding it and the Irish did not have recipes for cooking with it.
Just found this several months later after everyone else read and commented. The slavery discussion is fascinating and insightful but there’s another addition to the food culture: The Great Immigration Wave of 1870-1920. [First wave really starting 1840 with the Irish Famine.] The influx of Eastern and Southern Europeans brought new food tastes and food products to America: Irish, Italian, German, Polish, Russian, Jewish. (And of course the Chinese that built the railroads later built restaurants.) All brought their traditions with them and learned how to cook their favorites in a new world. Proteins that were once scarce were now staples. New vegetables, new spices, new ways to improve old favorites. It’s why bagels, pierogi, wontons, and pizza are now as American as apple pie — which was originally German. 😉