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'Foreign Foods': Culinary Exchanges during the Depression

Author:

Elizabeth Zanoni

During the Great Depression, while many fearful native-born Americans looked with skepticism at the foods of newcomers, they simultaneously found much to admire in immigrants' frugal eating practices and in the exotic experiences offered by ethnic restaurants and so-called "foreign foods." Conflicting attitudes toward newcomers' food traditions during the 1930s reveal ongoing debates over what it means to eat and be American.
 
These debates, in fact, have a long history. Since the Colonial Era, the foods and traditions of the foreign-born had influenced the development of "American" cuisine. The ingredients and culinary knowledge of European settlers, indentured servants, and enslaved Africans, combined with indigenous practices and native food staples to forge a North American cuisine based on diverse regional foodways. However, by the late-nineteenth century, culinary elites attempted to link national identity to Anglo-American food traditions exclusively, just as some 30 million immigrants from a wide array of sending regions were entering the country. As their predecessors had done, these immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia, Mexico, and elsewhere brought foods and ideas about food with them, and they used them to maintain cultural, social, and economic connections to their families and villages left behind. Immigrants also increasingly used the foods of their homelands to create importation, production, and food retailing businesses that served a multi-ethnic clientele.
 
By the 1930s, however, the number of newcomers had slowed to a trickle. That was due especially to the 1924 passage of restrictive immigration legislation, an achievement that anti-immigrant nativists had sought for decades. Furthermore, high tariffs designed to protect domestic industries during the Great Depression only made it harder for immigrant merchants to import homeland ingredients. The United States, like other countries around the world, responded to perceived threats to its economy and national sovereignty by raising barriers to both foreigners and their foods.
 
In earlier decades, throughout the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, culinary gatekeepers had largely denounced immigrants' food cultures. Labor leaders deemed Asians' cheap rice-based diets unmanly and un-American, and Anglo-American reformers in cities across the United States disparaged immigrants' cooking as unhygienic, non-nutritious, and sometimes morally corrosive. For instance, municipal authorities in San Antonio denounced that city's famed and sexualized "chili queen" street vendors as dangerous menaces to public health. Even the Prohibition amendment that came into force in 1920, effectively banning alcohol, was the result of a hard-fought struggle against alcohol that triumphed in part because its supporters characterized the wine- and beer-drinking cultures of groups like Germans and Italians as foreign and immoral.
 
And yet, during the Great Depression, many Americans were actually taking a second look at immigrants' diets. Traditions of preparing thrifty meals with little meat, cultivating vegetables and fruits in small garden plots, and canning and pickling foods to preserve them took on a noble character during the 1930s, as they had during World War I food conservation campaigns. It turned out that immigrants had much to teach native-born Americans about eating well during lean times – and about eating deliciously. In fact, increasing numbers of curious Americans during the 1930s entered immigrant enclaves and restaurants in search of both exotic food experiences and economical, quickly prepared meals. At Chop Suey joints and spaghetti houses both native-born and immigrant eaters enjoyed tasty, abundant, and affordable dishes. Immigrant food entrepreneurs expanded their market beyond ethnic neighborhoods in search of new customers. Some restaurateurs adjusted homeland foods to satisfy the expectations of American eaters, as Chinese restaurant workers did when they created Chow Mein, an Americanized version of a Chinese dish. Cookbooks written by first- and second-generation immigrants introduced U.S. audiences to recipes for ethnic foods, recipes that increasingly appeared in mainstream English-language cookbooks. While these food exchanges sometimes reinforced derogatory perceptions about foreigners, overall, cross-cultural eating during the 1930s encouraged culinary experimentation and helped make multi-ethnic eating a hallmark of American cookery.
 
The 1930s also witnessed the commercialization of an expanding number of the foods that had originated in immigrant enclaves. Like others, immigrant entrepreneurs capitalized on industrial technologies, distribution channels, and advances in marketing to produce ethnic food on a mass scale. While some of these foods retained their ethnic affiliation after going corporate, many immigrant businesses found little room for ethnicity in America's increasingly homogenized foodscape, or at least only found room for a narrow version of it. For instance, to help non-Italians pronounce and remember his name, the Italian entrepreneur Hector Boiardi changed his company's name in the 1930s to the phonetically straightforward "Chef Boyardee;" even after Boiardi sold his firm to a large U.S. business after World War II, his products continued to retain an ethnic association. Conversely, a Hungarian Jew named Charles Louis Fleischmann, who had started his career in the early twentieth century by selling yeast to immigrant bakers, had by the 1930s established brands such as Royal Baking Powder and Chase and Sanborn's Coffee that had no obvious links either to Fleischmann's ethnicity or to the Hungarian foods of his homeland. Sometimes, too, entrepreneurs with no ethnic connection to a particular immigrant group succeeded in producing commercial versions of foreign foods for regional and nationwide markets. The canned tamales popularized by Texas-based Anglo-Americans, for example, seemed a far cry from the actual foods eaten by Mexicans in both Texas and Mexico. By the 1930s, Chicago-based meatpacking giant Armour and Company advertised its Italian-style cured meats in Italian-language newspapers, and U.S. food corporations sold kosher pancake mix, chocolate, and Crisco to Jewish eaters. Then as now, immigrants also played crucial roles as workers in the U.S. food system. Big food processors like Armour, as well as large agribusinesses, came to rely on cheap immigrant labor to harvest and process the standardized foods Americans were increasingly eating.
 
Americans have always eaten foods that are the result of culinary exchange. But by the end of the 1930s, more people than ever were coming to view multi-ethnic eating as compatible with Americanness. Nevertheless, many of the foods immigrants and their descendants ate continued to mark them as not yet completely "American." Indeed, documents in the America Eats project suggest a continuing confusion over what counted as "American" food.  Despite attempts by project overseers to deny "foreign foods" a place at the American table, writers found evidence of interethnic culinary exchanges, widespread use of immigrant foods, and even wholesale adoption of select immigrant dishes like Norwegian lutefisk (codfish) during Midwestern Christmas celebrations. Studying immigrant foodways during the Great Depression shows how foreign foods continued to link the United States to the rest of the world even during isolationist times, and they demonstrate Americans' contrary impulses to both embrace and reject those international linkages.
 
Elizabeth Zanoni is assistant professor of history at Old Dominion University. She is the author of Migrant Marketplaces: Food and Italians in North and South America (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming).
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A Hungry South: Poverty, Malnourishment, and Racial Inequity, c. 1930s

Author:

Marcie Cohen Ferris

The U.S. South in the 1930s was a place defined by a tragic irony: it was a region of great agricultural wealth and productivity that had struggled for decades to feed its own people. This fundamental irony was bound to the seismic shifts in southern farming that altered food availability and access across the South.

Since the end of the Civil War, former plantations throughout the South had been divided into rental shares where poor black and white farmers worked land that belonged to someone else – usually a white man. In the twisted sharecropping and tenant-farm systems that emerged, poor farmers went into debt to pay for overpriced supplies like seeds and groceries and shoes, and very often they never made enough money from the sale of their meager crop shares to climb out of debt. Falling deeper into debt with every year, black and white workers were, in practice, reenslaved to large landowners. For poor sharecroppers and tenant farmers stripped of control of the land they worked, food was at a premium.

Cotton became the crop of choice in the growing cash economy of the New South, with tobacco a close second.[1] Cotton was popular for a reason. It was easy to grow, it did not spoil, it required no special equipment or methods, and it could be quickly turned into credit for the farmer and cash for the merchant. Yet for all its virtues, cotton was not edible.[2] Black and white farm families raised cotton and tobacco instead of growing food that could have fed their families.[3] A garden also required cash to buy seeds, time to tend it, and a patch of soil—and most poor farmers had none of these. Many landlords of the New South forbade their tenants from using rented land for anything other than cotton—even a small garden patch. Instead, tenant farmers bought the cheapest and most filling food they could from their landlords or from a store in town —usually some combination of cornmeal, salt pork, field peas or beans, and molasses.[4] Groceries bought on credit were expensive, but children had to eat. This system of sharecropping, tenancy, and debt was the most significant factor in the degeneration of the early twentieth-century southern diet.

Severe malnutrition throughout the early twentieth-century South made dietary diseases common. Pellagra, caused by lack of niacin and vitamin B3, resulted in painful skin lesions and dementia. Rickets, caused by lack of vitamin D and calcium, resulted in bone deformities and fractures, particularly in children. In the early 1920s, public health crusader and physician Dr. Joseph Goldberger determined that the substandard southern diet of the three “m’s”—meat [cheap pork], meal [substandard cornmeal], and molasses—rather than germ contamination, was the cause of pellagra.[5] A diet enriched with fresh lean meat, field peas, fresh garden vegetables, canned tomatoes, eggs, and buttermilk helped to cure and prevent the disease.[6] The problem was that few poor southerners by the 1920s and 1930s had access to such a diverse and healthful diet. That was true even in places like the southern mountains, where in the past hunting, fishing, raising a few pigs, tending a patch of corn and vegetables, plus trade and barter with one’s neighbors, had once provided a comfortable subsistence for working families.[7] Agrarian self-sufficiency had faded throughout the South not only because of sharecropping but also as new railroads and extractive industries like timber and coal changed the rural landscape.[8]

In the 1930s, the New Deal made many of these changes in southern agriculture permanent. President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was a string of economic programs designed to provide “Relief, Recovery, and Reform” from the Depression. In the South, New Deal policies helped cement the transition from plantations and small family-owned farms to large-scale, industrial agriculture.[9]Industrial agriculture further boosted cash crops like cotton and tobacco, which then further reduced food production and food access for the majority of the South’s working poor. Increasingly, poor people turned to government assistance in desperate times.  Mildred Cotton Council grew up in rural Chatham County, North Carolina, and remembered when her father reluctantly received “Roosevelt’s WPA food,” including cheese, whole wheat flour, yellow cornmeal (they were used to white), and canned meat.[10] Resolute about his family’s ability to provide for themselves, Mr. Cotton thanked the government agents and asked them to not bring any more. 

The New Deal programs included the federally funded documentary work of Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers and Federal Writers’ Project writers, whose images and essays (“Life Histories,” Works Project Administration (WPA) State Guides, and “America Eats”) often featured hardworking southern families’ food production and meals, and more often than not, the lack and absence of food. In a 1942 memo, one government administrator reminded his photographers: “People—we must have at once:  Pictures of men, women and children who appear as if they really believed in the U.S. Get people with a little spirit. Too many in our file now paint the U.S. as an old person’s home and that just about everyone is too old to work and too malnourished to care much what happens.”[11] In this same era, the social realism of works such as James Agee and Walker Evans’ iconic 1941 book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, vividly captured the hunger of working poor white southerners in Hale County, Alabama: “Everything, in fact, fried, boiled, or baked, is heavily seasoned with lard, and flows lard from every pore. So, after even a meal or two, do you.”[12]

The keystone of the New Deal’s agricultural relief programs was overseen by the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, which paid landowners—again, largely well-to-do white farmers—to take land out of cotton and tobacco production and thereby reduce the surplus and raise the value of these crops.[13] In principle, landowners were expected to share half their payments from the government with their tenant farmers and sharecroppers, who desperately needed the money to feed their hungry families. But in most cases, they did not. Instead, landowners used the government funds to purchase tractors, combines, and mechanized cotton pickers. These tools, in turn, allowed landowners to evict tenant farmers and sharecroppers. At the same time, small farmers who could not compete against mechanization went bankrupt and sold their land to larger landowners. President Franklin Roosevelt established the Resettlement Administration to address rural poverty through loans to struggling farmers, commodity adjustments, and resettlement programs that moved farmers from marginal land to more productive regions.[14] Access to food was a critical aspect of these relief efforts.

Under a banner of progress and efficiency, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, and other government farm programs that supported expansion and mechanization represented the growing role of the federal government in American agriculture.[15] The Department of Agriculture encouraged large farmers to plant new food crops like commercial grade soybeans and rice in the Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana Deltas and corn and peanuts in Georgia and Alabama. But these were food crops intended for distant markets, not for local people. Thanks to the “miracle of science,” thousands of acres of new food crops offered no edible return for the remaining field workers.

As it became harder than ever for poor people to scratch out a living on a farm, thousands of white and black working-class southerners moved to towns and cities. But town and city life was hardly better for most people, and sometimes it was worse. Poor people in southern cities continued to face grinding poverty, hunger, and racism. For those working in textile mills and factories, wages made the promise of three meals a day more probable. But textile mills and other southern industries like timber and coal were declining by the 1920s and 1930s. Even as some people fled struggling farms for life in town, many other workers returned home to the mountains, where they still owned property. Dispirited by the loss of employment, they were grateful for gardens and small farms to feed their families.[16]Thousands more left the South completely, drawn by economic opportunities outside the region—blacks pulled by the Great Migration and the chance to escape Jim Crow racism and poor whites looking for steady employment.

Agricultural legislation of this era was historic: it supported important twentieth-century reforms in southern farming andfoodways. Yet because of racism, this new legislation also ensured growing land loss for black farmers. Despite the “good intentions” of this body of legislation and its many initiatives, white men controlled the Department of Agriculture.[17] Their legacy would long privilege well-to-do white male farmers over the working-poor minorities, women, and small farmers of the rural South.[18]

Not until the late 1990s and early 2000s did this racial injustice finally come before the United States Supreme Court. The successful settlement of the Black Farmers Class Action Lawsuit (Pigford v. Glickman) paid $1.25 billion to black farmers who had been denied federal aid or were underpaid by the government.[19]

From the post-Civil War South through the New South of the 1930s, laws created separate land-grant colleges for southern blacks and whites, home economics programs at southern universities, industrial schools, and settlement schools, as well as the food-related initiatives of agricultural experiment stations, county extension agencies, and “home demonstration” professionals. An army of change-minded interventionists brought public health programs, improved food and diet, scientific agriculture, and education to the South. Food was at the core of many of these new programs. These progressive institutions symbolized a cautiously changing South, but one still unwilling to release the chokehold of race and class that characterized the region from the plantation era to the dawn of the New South and beyond.

The culture of racism and poverty that shaped daily meals in the 1930s was profound. It was so pervasive and deep-rooted, in fact, that it continues in the contemporary South, where inadequate wages and lack of food access continue to limit the working poor to the most substandard food options.[20] The diseases are different today—diabetes and heart disease instead of the New South’s pellagra and rickets —but the causes behind these conditions are the same: the poverty and racial disfranchisement of low income southerners.[21]

Marcie Cohen Ferris is a professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This essay is drawn from her book, The Edible South: The Power of Food and the Making of an American Region (The University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 
[1] John Egerton, Speak Now against the Day: The Generation before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994) 20.
    [2] Edward Ayers, Southern Crossing: A History of the American South, 1870-1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 26-27; Rebecca Sharpless and Melissa Walker, eds. Work, Family, and Faith: Rural Southern Women in the Twentieth Century (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006) 8.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Egerton, Speak Now against the Day, 21.
[5] Joseph Goldberger and Edgar Sydenstricker, “Pellagra in the Mississippi Flood Area: Report of an Inquiry Relating to the Prevalence of Pellagra in the Area Affected by the Overflow of the Mississippi and Its Tributaries in Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana in the Spring of 1927.” Public Health Reports(1896-1970) 42, no. 44 (1927): 2712.
[6] Ibid., 2722.
[7] Jacquelyn Dowd, Hall, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones, and Christopher B. Daly. Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987) 9–10.
[8] Egerton, Speak Now against the Day, 22–24, 70–73.
[9] Ibid., 82–85; see also Pete Daniel, Dispossession: Discrimination against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013) 9. Daniel examines the systematic, institutional and government discrimination (from the New Deal through the civil rights movement) against southern minority, women, and black farmers that prevented them from sharing equally in federal agricultural programs. See Clifford Kuhn’s discussion of “high-modernist” efforts of rural New Dealers to transform the southern family farm, in “It Was a Long Way from Perfect, but It Was Working’: The Canning and Home Production Initiatives in Greene County, Georgia, 1940-1942.” Agricultural History 86, no. 2 (2012): 68–69.
[10] Mildred Council, Mama Dip’s Kitchen (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999) 19.
[11] “R. E. Stryker to Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, in particular,” FSA, February 19, 1942, in Roy Emerson Stryker and Nancy Wood, In This Proud Land: America, 1935-1943, as Seen in the FSA Photographs (New York: Galahad Books, 1973) 187–88.
[12] James Agee and Walker Evans, Cotton Tenants: Three Families. Edited by John Summers (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House, 2013) 100.
[13] Jack Temple Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920-1960 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987) 60.
[14] Kuhn, “It Was a Long Way from Perfect,” 71.
[15] Pete Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000) 42.
[16] Jane S. Becker, Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998) 48-49.
[17] Daniel, Dispossession, xii
[18] Ibid.
[19] For more information on the Black Farmers Class Action Lawsuit, see the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, which has fought for the successful resolution of the lawsuit since the 1990s, http://www.federationsoutherncoop.com/. See also Southall, “Senate Approves Payment of Black Farmers’ Claims.”
[20] Ibid., 18–23. See “The State of the South,” for discussion of the social and economic status of southern sharecroppers and tenant farmers in the 1930s.
[21] Ibid., 21.


The image Day laborers picking cotton, near Clarksdale, Miss. by Marion Post Wolcott is part of the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540. Please see http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa1992000146/PP/ for more details on this image.

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America Eats: Pioneers of Food Writing

Author:

Camille Bégin

America Eats was a pioneering food writing project conceptualized in the middle of the Great Depression by the editors of the state-sponsored Federal Writers' Project (FWP). Already by the 1930s, many considered local foodways to be endangered by the industrialization of the food system and the growing influence of nutrition science on how Americans chose their foods. To counter this standardization of taste, the Federal Writers' Project launched an audacious quest to document the core of American foodways, independent of the economic downturns of the late 1930s, health advice, and dietary fads. The project mobilized writers in every state of the country to document local habits and preferences. 
 
Goals and Scope
 
The aim of America Eats was to produce a simultaneously mouth-watering and educational account of American foodways and local taste. The editors were inspired by recent scholarly breakthroughs in the fields of anthropology and folklore and were looking for "patterns of eating." They wanted the essays to be descriptive, precise, and sensorial – as we would expect to find in the best of today's food writing. They understood food as a central part of culture and aspired to show the uniqueness of the American table, particularly how it differed from European cuisines. This last goal became increasingly important as the project grew. With the looming involvement of the country in World War II, America Eats, while keeping its documentary aim, became much more about strengthening patriotism. Writers from western states latched onto this new goal, celebrating the meat-heavy, masculine character of their diets: food fit for a nation at war. 
 
The America Eats project was shaped by tensions and constant back-and-forth between federal editors and state-based writers. The editors were educated, liberal new dealers. We know less about the writers. They were impoverished white-collar workers whose literary talents varied greatly. A small number became famous after World War II, such as Nelson Algreen and Richard Wright. But most of the writers, apart from a name or cultural reference here and there, remain generally hard to track. The correspondence linked to America Eats is key to understanding its strength and weaknesses. For instance, the editors hoped to produce a book of the collected essays, but they did not want to produce a cookbook. They wanted to create a book that would be read in the living room – not one that would be used in the kitchen. Yet despite consistent instructions to state-based writers, many kept sending in recipes. The project was never completed, and we are left with a hodgepodge of sources: essays, recipes, letters, photographs, and the occasional newspaper clipping.
 
The editors explicitly stated that the purpose of America Eats was not to report on the hunger and hardship of the Depression years. If writers documented the Great Depression, it was only incidentally. For instance, many essays from the Midwest described community dinners put together to raise money and feed the community at a cheap price. "Fun feeds," "school picnics," and "box-dinners" are good examples. For box-dinners, each girl would make dinner for two and put it in a box. The boxes would then be auctioned off and the buyer would have dinner with the cook. At the end of the America Eats project, the focus shifted to how to make do in hard times, but that was because of impending wartime restrictions, not the Depression.
 
Regional Foodways: Towards a National Cuisine?
 
America Eats carved the nation into five culinary regions: the Northeast; the South; the Middle West; the Far West; and the Southwest. The editors envisioned that the America Eats book would document food events such as clambakes in the Northeast, farm dinners in the Middle West, and church picnics in the South. Some regional American foodways were already part of the popular imagination by the 1930s: for instance, cookbooks on Southern food and Pennsylvania Dutch cooking were popular. Mexican food was strongly associated with the Southwest, though not fully understood as a regional American food yet (the concept of Tex-Mex emerged only in the 1960s). 
 
Why this insistence on regional foodways? America Eats was a reaction to the standardization of taste and food habits. Industrial food, such as hot dogs and canned fruits, were popular nationwide. Nostalgia for an allegedly more wholesome era of regional cooking and eating was ubiquitous throughout the project. Further, the Federal Writers' Project's effort at documenting regional foodways can be understood as an attempt to define a national cuisine. National cuisines are often the results of political and cultural developments that rely on the codification of regional foodways. This process was underway in France and Italy in the 19th and early 20th centuries. America Eats inaugurated this trend in the United States, where the existence – or non-existence – of a national cuisine is still debated. 
 
What the America Eats editors had not foreseen was the extent to which immigrant "ethnic" foods were woven into regional eating habits and tastes by the 1930s. Throughout the America Eats essays, writers and editors grappled with the fact that Italian, Greek, or Chinese food could not be considered the food of migrant enclave communities anymore, but had become American food in their own right, and often, American regional food. In a period during which legal definitions and vernacular understandings of race and ethnicity were fast evolving, this caused a lot of confusion. For example, would an essay on Southern foodways include the Italian community of Tontitown, Arkansas, where people regularly ate spaghetti and fried chicken together? The question remained unanswered. 
 
Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in the America Eats Project
 
Stereotypes, especially around gender and race, influenced the style and content of America Eats. Contributors had to write fast and they seldom questioned their cultural assumptions. For instance, stereotypes about African Americans were commonplace and America Eats' writers often included disparaging comments about African Americans' allegedly "primitive" tastes. Yet, this stereotype could also be deployed to explain that they were the best cooks, apt at satisfying white taste buds. In this logic, African Americans' allegedly unrefined natures made them superior cooks, uncorrupted by the modern evils of nutrition science and industrial food. In fact, racist stereotypes could obscure the role of systemic discrimination, legal segregation, and class in shaping foodways and taste.
 
America Eats material also romanticized difference. This is particularly noticeable in material from the Southwest describing Mexican American tastes and foodways. Although a small number of Spanish-speakers participated in America Eats, most essays on Mexican food described a tasty, spicy cuisine worth trying for the thrill and as a demonstration of manliness. Mexican Americans were, in these descriptions, standing apart from the speed of modern life, a romantic and colorful backdrop to American progress. 
Women had an ambiguous place in America Eats. They were both celebrated for their scrumptious layer cakes and blamed for the demise of the American table as they had allegedly surrendered to the sirens of the food industry. The pendulum kept swinging. 
 
America Eats' Legacy
 
Most states sent in material for American Eats to the federal office in Washington, D.C., in the fall and winter of 1941-42, just as the United States was entering World War II. The book never made it into print. When the Federal Writers' Project closed, the bulk of the material was sent to the Library of Congress, where it remains to this day. A number of local state archives also received America Eats material. The vast majority of them have been digitized and regrouped on this website, giving you exceptional insight into 1930s American food writing. 
 
Until recently, America Eats was more or less forgotten. Yet its relevance to Americans today is becoming evident. America Eats was 70 years ahead of its time with its celebration of local, homemade fare and sensuous food writing. It is also an object of its time: a time of legal racial segregation, prescriptive gender roles, and evolving notions of identities. America Eats' limitations do not undermine its narrative; they are key to understanding the history of food in the United States and need to be acknowledged as part of the project's new status as an American classic. 
 
Camille Bégin is a lecturer at the Culinaria Research Center at the University of Toronto Scarborough and the author of Taste of the Nation: The New Deal Search For America's Food (University of Illinois Press, 2016).
 
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Community Cookbooks as a Socio-Historic and Cultural Documents...

Author:

Janice Bluestein Longone

…but, for many years they were not so considered. Sometimes called community cookbooks and sometimes called charity cookbooks, these books were most often cooperative projects with recipe contributions coming from different individuals. Groups generally produced the books as fundraising ventures, with profits from their sale going to selected charities or to support the organizations that had produced them. Now they are primary sources for food historians. Each book has a unique history: they are not only culinary instructional manuals and repositories for traditional dishes, they also reflect food habits of a population, act as historical markers of major events, and record technological advances in a society.

Community cookbooks from the Depression era present an informative picture of what Americans were eating as well as the groups that produced them. By 1930, all forty-eight states, the territories of Alaska and Hawaii, and the District of Columbia had published community cookbooks in large cities and in small towns. The times were changing rapidly: women had the vote and were able to participate in the body politic, Prohibition was still in force, and the Depression that started in 1929 was altering everyone’s lives. New kitchen equipment (especially the electric refrigerator), new foods, new immigrants, large national food and equipment companies, and national advertising all combined to change life in the States.

Interestingly, almost all of the causes for which fundraising cookbooks were published in the nineteenth century are still with us today. And many of the early themes in American cookery are as well: vegetarianism, diet, nutrition, health, temperance, regionalism, baking, sweets and desserts, economy and frugality, management and organization, and international recipes. Many 1930s community cookbooks offered foreign recipes: Arabian, Argentinian, Armenian, Australian, Austrian, Bohemian, Bolivian, Brazilian, Bulgarian, Canadian, Chinese, Croatian, Cuban, “Czeckoslovak”, Danish, Dutch, East Indian, Egyptian, English, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Guatemalan, Hungarian, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Jewish, Lithuanian, Malaysian, Mexican, Middle Eastern, Norwegian, Oriental, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Roumanian, Russian, Scottish, Spanish, Swedish, Swiss, Syrian, and Turkish, among others.

Under Prohibition, there were some books on temperance but many books still used alcohol in their recipes. After Prohibition’s repeal in 1933, there is much more about alcohol, especially wine and cocktails. Many books offered menus and household hints, and they discussed etiquette and manners, quantity cooking, and cooking for the sick and for children.

As more women became educated they joined sororities, participated in Parent-Teacher Associations, sponsored scholarships, and offered student loans, and many devoted their time and energy to helping other women to further their education. During the Depression, more and more women became involved with helping the poor. Some authorities suggest that women deserve much of the credit for many of the major social movements in America, with perhaps the most striking example being the degree to which the New Deal and the development of the modern welfare state were the result of the agenda of women’s reform movements. Charity cookbooks were part of these efforts.

As the decade progressed and war in Europe loomed, some women turned their philanthropic energy to helping suffering Europeans. Groups raised funds with books like Old and New British Recipes…to Aid British War Relief; Favorite Recipes from the Ladies of the United States Navy Yard, Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Victory Cookbook (“Norristown Garden Club offers this timely collection of tested sugarless and sugar-saving recipes to meet a need felt by all.”); El Cocinero Español (“Sold for the Benefit of Milk Fund for Spanish Babies, Published by Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy.”) As knowledge of the Holocaust spread in the United States, Jewish organizations issued or re-issued charity cookbooks to preserve their heritage and to help those in peril.

Protestant church groups had long produced cookbooks, but by the 1930s many more Catholic and Jewish books were appearing, too. Indeed, all sorts of groups produced community cookbooks in this decade. Some were published by home demonstration clubs, hospitals, unions, museums, orchestras, women’s clubs and federations, garden and farm groups, harvest festivals, missionary groups, PTAs, and groups such as the Daughters of the America Revolution, Junior Leagues, Dorcas, Veterans of Foreign Wars, and American Legion Auxiliaries. There is somewhat less advertising in the books of this decade than in earlier ones. The books of this decade are diverse: large and small, beautiful and ugly, most with recipes attributed to individual contributors. Many of the books are enhanced by Art Deco illustrations.

Among my favorites of this decade is The Congressional Cook Book: Favorite National and International Recipes…Special Articles by Eminent Government Authorities, revised edition, 1933-4. The Congressional Club was an elite Washington, D.C., women’s club incorporated in 1908, whose active membership was limited to the wives and daughters of senators, representatives, cabinet members, Supreme Court justices, delegates, and commissioners in Congress. Club members published their first cookbook in 1927 in order to raise funds to refurnish the club house. Six years later, they published a new edition to commemorate the club’s twenty-fifth anniversary and to raise money for the building fund. It is striking to see how each edition of the book reflected changing social and political values. For instance, the 1927 first edition noted that one particular dish was “[s]o easy to prepare you won’t need to rely on a maid.” It also had instructions for “Substitutes for Intoxicating Liquors in Food Products” and provided a “recipe” called “How to Preserve a Husband,” a poem found in hundreds of community cookbooks for many years. And there was so much more: the book also included recipes of Thomas Jefferson; Camp, Mess, and Outdoor Cookery; Invalid-Convalescent-Children Cookery; and recipes from a plethora of foreign ambassadors, ministers, consuls, military attaches, governors – from Argentina to Yugoslavia, covering 40 different cultures. The 1933-4 edition was a handsome book of 834 pages, bound in Eleanor Blue cloth with silver embossing on the spine and front cover, with more than 40 pages of advertisements, including one in color.

Eleanor Roosevelt herself wrote the foreword for the 1933-4 edition of the Congressional Cookbook, arguing, “Cooking should be considered as an art, and the arts should certainly be of assistance to the government; therefore it seems particularly appropriate that the wives of our lawmakers should get out a cook book, for good cooking means good health and good health is the basis of all good work.” A famously poor cook herself, Roosevelt also contributed recipes for Italian Rice, Pecan Pie, and Kedgeree, a curried rice dish made with flaked fish and hard-boiled eggs.

Since the first community cookbook was published in the mid-nineteenth century, American women have found them to be effective ways both to raise money and to participate in local and national public life. Through voluntary organizations – charitable, educational, cultural, civic, professional, and religious – they created networks of mutual support, training grounds for organizing and networking, and acceptable platforms from which to influence American life.

Janice (Jan) Longone is Adjunct Curator of Culinary History at Special Collections at the University of Michigan.

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Domestic Workers in the South

Author:

Rebecca Sharpless

Between the Civil War and World War II, millions of African American women earned their livings as cooks in white people's homes. Enslaved African Americans had cooked for their owners long before 1865, but after emancipation, many former field workers left the countryside and then had to find ways to make their livings in growing towns and cities. They quickly discovered that white families were willing to pay for domestic work, particularly laundry, child care, and cooking, and the women seized the opportunities before them. While most of these cooks were in the South, a large number moved North during the so-called Great Migrations that began during the 1910s.
 
By the 1930s, many African American women had found other means of supporting their families, but the majority of those employed still worked as domestics. In many ways, the work that these women did remained similar to what their mothers and grandmothers had done for more than half a century.
 
Many cooks balanced their daily meal preparation with tasks such as house cleaning and child care, but their primary work was to prepare two or three meals a day for their employers. If breakfast was part of her expected labor, as it often was, a typical cook left home while her own family was still in bed so that her employer's husband could have a hot breakfast before leaving for his workplace. The cook then turned her attention to the large mid-day meal, commonly known as dinner. Some cooks finished work by cleaning up from dinner, and others remained through the simpler evening meal, known as supper. In some households, cooks were at times expected to stay on to fix elaborate meals for company. They often dreaded preparing for guests, as the employer's reputation was at stake, and tensions and expectations often ran dangerously high.
 
The food that African American cooks prepared for their employers varied widely with the families' tastes, and each cook had to learn the preferences of her employers. Many southern families ate foods familiar for many generations. Cooks often prepared quick breads from flour, such as biscuits, or from cornmeal, and some continued to make yeasted wheat bread. Urban southerners had access to poultry and beef, as well as pork, which served as seasoning for vegetables as well as an entree. Frequently, town homes featured chicken yards to provide both eggs and meat. A cook could regularly find herself slaughtering and cleaning a chicken early in the morning for her employer's noontime meal. Less commonly, families, particularly in small towns, still kept cows in the yards of their homes during the 1930s, ensuring a supply of fresh milk and butter in season. Very few pigs lived in town, but because the meat preserved easily, pork remained extremely common for the great majority of southerners. Fresh fruits and vegetables varied not only with the growing season but also with the availability of trucks and trains to bring out-of-season produce from other parts of the U.S. Some employers had specific religious requirements, such as the Jewish dietary laws that required cooks to avoid pork and to separate meat and milk, or the prohibitionists who would not allow the use of alcohol in their food. And some cooks learned to work with foods entirely new to them, like avocados and Cornish game hens, for employers with adventurous palates.
 
People who employed domestic workers were often slow to invest in new kitchen technologies, since they were not the ones doing the labor such devices could ease. Despite the reluctance of their employers to provide up-to-date tools, almost all cooks at some point had to navigate changing kitchen equipment. Most southern urban homes by the 1930s had removed wood stoves in favor of gas or kerosene models. While cooking on a wood stove required great skill and care, so did adapting to a stove that used an unfamiliar fuel. Mechanical refrigeration, electricity, and running water spread unevenly through the South, even in large cities. The presence or absence of such utilities had a strong impact on a cook's day.
 
Domestic wage work is always challenging, in part because the work space is someone else's home, and employers have strong opinions about what takes place under their roofs. While genuine affection sometimes existed between employee and employer, friction more often ruled the day. The racial tensions of the South played out daily in the cooks' workplaces, as almost all of the cooks were African American and almost all of the employers were white. A cook might find herself segregated within her employer's home just as she was in public space by Jim Crow laws—limited, for example, to only the kitchen and the dining room. Although cooks spent their days preparing food for their employers, they almost never tasted that food in their employers' presence and in extreme circumstances were even forbidden from touching it with their hands. A cook might be fired for any perceived transgression, and sexual harassment by the male members of the employers' household was rampant. Not surprisingly, the turnover rate was high, as domestic workers often used their limited power to quit and search for better employers.
 
By the 1930s, very few cooks lived with their employers, preferring to have their own households away from their work, even though transportation costs could be great. Hours were generally quite long, from early morning until at least mid-afternoon or later, and many cooks worked six or six and a half days a week. Cash wages varied greatly but were almost always low. Some employers expected their employees to accept old clothing or other used goods in lieu of cash wages. The practice of "toting"—being paid in leftover food instead of cash—continued past the 1930s. While she might take greater care with a meal if she knew her own children would get part of it, a cook also had to wonder each day what she would be bringing to her family for their evening meal. Because of pressure from southern Congressmen, domestic workers and farm workers – who in the South were mainly African American – were excluded from the wage and hour legislation of the New Deal. One result was to make domestic service even less attractive than it had been compared to other occupations. As the 1930s drew to a close, domestic workers found little change in their working situations, and when the United States entered World War II, many eagerly left their employers' kitchens for the new opportunities brought by the wartime economy.
 


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Food Advertising in the 1930s

Author:

Jennifer Wallach

At first glance, advertisements from the Great Depression are stylish, colorful, and appealing – just as their producers intended. But beneath the surface glamour, 1930s advertisements are rich historical sources that yield insights into a range of topics about the era. They not only provide a unique window into the era’s financial anxieties, but they also reveal valuable information about other topics including ideas about race and gender, the state of scientific knowledge about nutrition, and changing food preferences. 
 
Even during the lean years of the 1930s, advertisers presented goods as emblems of aspirational lifestyles. Even when choosing something as simple as a brand of baking powder or type of breakfast cereal, consumers were asked to identify imaginatively with both the settings and the characters portrayed in printed promotions or, increasingly, on popular radio programs, which were often sponsored by food companies such as Crisco. Symbols of financial well-being were all over 1930s food advertisements, ranging from descriptions of elegant dining spaces to images of cherubic and obviously well-fed children. However, some marketers sought to avoid alienating consumers by acknowledging, at least subtly, that the easy prosperity featured in their ads was out of reach for many. Increasingly, advertisers emphasized elegance while also celebrating the virtue of economizing. For example, Purina marketed the "Flavor-Fed Domestic Rabbit," shown served on stylish dinnerware, as a "budget saver," easy on the wallet yet high in precious calories.  
 
When it came to marketing, food producers had an advantage over manufacturers of other consumer goods. While items such as radios or automobiles could be deemed optional during an era of scarcity, food was essential, as even the most cynical critic of the advertising industry had to acknowledge. Yet food marketers still had to contend with the fact that consumers with shrinking budgets had the opportunity to choose between different brand names and specific menu items. In their scramble for market share, food producers were faced with the task of making their products seem simultaneously desirable and practical. The makers of King Midas flour responded to this challenge by proudly labeling their product as a luxury item: the "highest priced flour in America." However, consumers were told that they could both splurge on this high-priced item and yet still practice "true economy" because the baked goods they produced with this superior flour would stay fresher longer. 
 
White, middle-class characters populated most period advertisements. When people of color were featured, they typically appeared in a caricatured form and were used as a source of amusement or as an object lesson for white consumers. For example, Nabisco differentiated the character of Mandy, a dialect-speaking African American woman who cooked by instinct, from their purportedly more intellectual white customers. White cooks, who lacked Mandy’s innate cooking abilities, would  allegedly benefit the most from printed recipes and modern, ready-made ingredients.
 
Advertising copywriters generally imagined that their customers were white, middle-class people who were members of families where traditional gender norms reigned. Attractive and neatly attired mother figures adorned ads in newspapers and magazines and graced the pages of carefully crafted product cookbooks. These imaginary figures provided reassurance to a public eager to have their worries soothed by capable maternal hands. Indeed, advertisers knew that many people experienced the decade’s economic insecurities most sharply through shrinking food budgets, and they responded with tips and reassurance. Ads for Nabisco, for instance, tutored women on using ground crackers as fillers to stretch more expensive food products, allowing them to create dishes that "look expensive" yet  "cost little." The baking company also assured insecure consumers that thriftiness was not only a necessity for some but a proud choice for others, claiming "some of the richest people in the world pride themselves upon their care in spending." Choosing Nabisco crackers was framed as a budget-friendly way for average customers to identify with allegedly like-minded wealthy Americans.
 
The mothers depicted in Depression era advertising were simultaneously traditional and truly modern figures. Some advertisers appealed to a growing instability in conventional ideas about gender roles wrought by forces such as growing male unemployment. For instance, the Heinz company appealed to shifting sensibilities by marketing its products to housewives "whose interests…are more varied" and might well "lie outside the home."  Although some marketers promised that ready-made foods would give women more time away from domestic responsibilities, the advertising of the era overwhelmingly urged modern women not to venture too far from their kitchens – which would ideally be well stocked and full of modern appliances. Women were urged to find contentment by aspiring to the latest kitchen technology built around new appliances such as the "Roper Modern Gas Range" and by using the domestic space to cater to the men in their lives. An advertisement for A-1 Sauce advised: "Don't you dress, make-up and hair-do to please a man? Cook with the same idea in mind."
 
Advertisers for A-1 Sauce were hardly the only ones writing copy based on the presumption that innate gender differences existed. For example, Knox Gelatine knowingly told its female customers not to forget these distinctions, proclaiming: "Men abominate a lot of sugar in salads." Nonetheless, promoters frequently framed homemaking as an occupation that had to be learned rather than as the outgrowth of an inborn set of aptitudes. Housewives were charged with the responsibility of not only feeding their families tasty meals but also with mastering contemporary scientific information about nutrition. Advertisers repeatedly sought to appeal to both the intellect and the vanity of homemakers. For instance, according to the makers of Ball Mason jars, the typical 1930s housewife "faced a bigger responsibility than her predecessor of a generation or two ago. Upon her shoulders rests the burden of keeping her family in good health through the right choice and preparation of food." 
 
References to the latest research in nutritional science abound in 1930s food marketing, which urged savvy consumers to choose items that were not only low in price but also high in food values, particularly in recently discovered vitamins. The California Fruit Growers Association promoted the sale of lemons and oranges, foods high in vitamin C, by exploiting fears of failure made more pressing by rising rates of unemployment: they warned darkly that the malnourished "seriously handicap [themselves] in the struggle for success." Thus consumers could increase their life chances by purchasing citrus fruits. Advertisers also frequently preyed upon the anxieties of parents who hoped to help their children succeed in a troubled economy. The manufacturers of Cream of Wheat cereal, for example, promised that their product "fortifies your children for the day before them. It guards them from the dangers of the underweight... Gives them the energy they need." 
 
Advertisers could appeal not only to the dictates of current scientific information about healthful eating, but they could also create marketing campaigns that tapped into both biological and cultural predispositions toward specific foods. Purveyors of sugar, baking powder, and wheat flour confidently created product cookbooks designed to appeal to the American sweet tooth. Certain that their product was inherently appealing, advertisers for Jack Frost sugar tried to tap into widespread anxieties about health by convincing customers that sugar was not only delicious but also nutritious, describing it as a "wholesome food... [that] conserves protein for body repair… and helps protect the liver from toxic materials." Meanwhile, marketers also used arguments about nutrition to shore up demand for meat at a time when consumers were buying less of it due to rising prices. For instance, Armour and Company capitalized on the predilections of a carnivorous nation by reinforcing the idea that "every well-balanced meal is built around that indispensible protein food, meat." New nutritional information about vitamins gave the marketers of meat an additional selling point when trying to reach those Americans who were reluctant to eat their vegetables. The National Livestock and Meat Board promised that their products would make "savory and interesting the bland vegetables" that accompanied meat in the iconic American meal. Manufacturers of the Presto Cooker exploited anxieties about vitamin deficiencies among children by promising that pressure cooking vegetables would "make vital foods tempting to youngsters."
 
In an attempt to attract customers, industrial food producers not only created marketing campaigns that promoted the nutritional value of their products, they also promised that their companies were just as reliable as the fictional mothers who populated their advertising campaigns. Knox Gelatine proclaimed that it was produced in accordance with standards "more strict than ever before" and promised certainty in a time of turmoil by claiming: "You can always depend on Knox." Marketers frequently referenced a long scope of history when promoting their products, conflating company longevity with reliability while also invoking nostalgia and positive associations with a more carefree economic climate. Durkee Famous Foods celebrated the fact that its dressing, supposedly characterized by a "delightfully distinctive, spicy flavor that defies description," had been pleasing palates for three generations, while Heinz poetically claimed that its products could invoke the "placid late-summer and fall mornings in the old days" of happier, simpler times. Throughout the Great Depression, advertisers claimed that the food items they sold could meet not only the daily physical needs for sustenance but could also fulfill the psychic need for security in an era of hardship and uncertainty. 

Jennifer Jensen Wallach is associate professor of history at the University of North Texas and the author of How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture (Rowman and Littlefield, 2012).
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