'Foreign Foods': Culinary Exchanges during the Depression

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).