Mark Twain's favorite food

Everyone,
Check out this article from Huffington Post:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-beahrs/mark-twains-feast-vanished-foods_b_733586.html .

Our Daily Bread

During our first week of class, Professor Brittenham had us list movies we've watched about food production. I mentioned a documentary that contained no voice-over narrative or sound track that focused solely on the practices of the food industry. I finally recalled the title of the film.

Our Daily Bread is a 2005 documentary by Nikolaus Geyrhalter that examined the production techniques of some very mainstream companies. Geyrhalter intentionally excluded music and narration to allow you, the viewer, to make conclusions based solely on what you are seeing.

This documentary touched my partner and I; some interesting conversations ensued. I think this is a valuable documentary to watch. It exposes to us something that is vital to our survival, our food, and the way it is produced. We have a strange relationship with food - it is something we touch and experience on a daily basis; we use it to enhance our lives by serving food to guests and at parties, or only to reward ourselves yet it has for so long been this "white noise". Only recently have we become concerned and fascinated with the way our food makes its way to our tables. Maybe this documentary won't surprise or inform you in anyway, but it is still worth watching if only for the feeling of not being told how to feel about what's presented to you.

I have included some clips to whet your appetite:

This clip is more graphic:

These clips focus on meat production, but this documentary also examines vegetables and fruits.

We rented this from Netflix, so look it up if you've got Netflix. If you don't have Netflix, see if you know someone who does, and ask them to get this film for you!

Extra, Extra: Harried Mama Makes Dinner!

As a single mother of two school-aged athletes, I am always on the go. A typical day finds me waking up at 6 am and not stopping until usually 11 or 12 pm. Between classes, homework, mentoring, my sons' school obligations and sports practices and activities, I am rarely home and always tired.

There is, however, a small window of about an hour and a half between the time I get out of class in the afternoon until I shuttle my youngest son to his football practice when I can cook and feed the kids. Some nights, we don't get home from their sports goings-on until after 9 pm. During the first week of school, I'll admit, we ate an embarassing amount of sandwiches. I decided, though, that there's really no reason I can't cook a "real" meal for myself and the boys, even on nights they have practice (Monday through Thursday), and I've begun planning meals on the weekends so this can be possible.

While I've always enjoyed cooking, the years since my divorce have changed the way we share our meals. We still eat together at the table, but now we eat dinner around our busy schedules. We try new things, and the boys help out in the kitchen. I don't sweat it if we end up eating eggs or a sandwich (or an egg sandwich) for dinner, but cooking supper has actually become a nice respite during my busy day.

This evening, I decided to prepare spaghetti with homemade meat sauce, which is one of my boys' favorites. It's a recipe my grandmother, called "Mammaw," created in the late 1950's in an attempt to re-create a meal she had at her favorite restaurant. It's spicy and sweet and oh so good. The sauce only takes about thirty minutes to throw together from start to finish and is even better the second and third day.

I like to listen to music while I work in the kitchen, so sometimes, like tonight, I'll prop my laptop on the counter, open up iTunes, and rock out (or mellow out, or emote, whatever). In case you're wondering, it was a Genius shuffle based on Lissie's "Everywhere I Go," and it was quite mellow. Think Bon Iver and Ingrid Michaelson.

Once the music's going, it's time to get out all the ingredients. I've prepared this meal so many times that I don't even have to think about it anymore; I've written it down so often that I know it by heart. I always spice the meat as it's browning, always put in the dry ingredients first, always the same order, always the same way. Comfortable and familiar, this is my favorite meal to craft. Before I know it, the spaghetti is al dente, the sauce has come together, and it's time to eat.

The boys are called to wash their hands and get their drinks, and we sit together and talk about our days. Some days I may learn about a new girlfriend, others about a particularly hard assignment. Almost always, there's something that's been "forgotten," such as a progress report or a permission slip that needs to be signed, or money needed for tomorrow. This is our time, though, and it is precious.

Caviar - A First-Timers Tryst

The infatuation was there, growing. I was unaware of its presence, buried deep in my id, swelling toward my ego to be “dealt with”. Experimental for years, I longed for something more exotic, elusive, rare; hard to get. I had tried sardines slathered in tangy mustard, anchovies sloppily bedded with capers and all manner of fresh, melt-in-your-mouth naked sushi. But, I had never had the forbidden fruits of the sea. Before I knew it, I found myself giving in to my curiosity in the middle of the night, indulging on a mouthful of black lumpfish trying desperately to quench my insatiable appetite for culinary companionship.

***leave comments for more***

Mom's Modern Rice Pudding

One may often ask what the principal components of family, Christmas, or even more abstract ideas such as love, are. It is often the case that such questions are never answered satisfactorily. There is, however a unique opportunity to define these terms, no matter how abstract they are, using the family recipe. As in any literary interpretation, depending on the method of interpretation, context is the key in examining the family recipe, even more so when the object is to define an idea which can have many interpretations. In the case of the cart family; Christmas and even more to the point the love within a family has a simple recipe: two eggs, a half cup of sugar, one fourth a tea spoon of salt, and two cups milk.

Examined in a more concrete light, these ingredients make rice pudding. To be more concise, they make Hazel Cart’s rice pudding or as it is self-titled, Mom’s Rice Pudding, a staple of Christmas dinner for the Cart family. This recipe was young as far as family recipes go, although it is unknown in its exact age as that was never a topic of conversation, but its significance is profound. Within the context of the Cart family, who for many years has put very little emphasis on culture in general and even less on cooking, trans-generational or not, having such a recipe at all is indicative of its importance. It can be easily said that a cultural item such as a family recipe is made more important but the sparse usage of such things. Other than this rice pudding dish, the only culture evident in the Cart family was American, which was mostly indicated by the liberal consumption of burgers and hotdogs, mostly prepared by a fast food establishment. In this light it can be seen that this recipe is one of the very few things that show some of the European background in the Cart family.

When examining the recipe itself it should be noted that the creator refers to herself as “Mom.” This shows a strong orientation towards family, perhaps as far as family being the principal defining factor in the author’s life. It should also be noted that within the family the recipe received the unofficial name of “Mom’s Rice Pudding,” which places even more emphasis on family in relation to the recipe. While the recipe is hand written and personalized, it can be seen from the detail of the instructions that this recipe was never meant to be a secret. Coupled with the emphasis on family this shows that the reason for the creation of this recipe was to spread joy to the Cart family and that this joy should not end with the author. Instead it is meant to be passed on, almost as a gift. The recipe directs the reader, in exacting fashion, how to create the original rice pudding, but at the same time it welcomes changes. This is evidenced by the listing of alternatives within the recipe. For example, four egg yolks may be used instead of two eggs and vanilla may be added if desired. According to Jack Goody in his essay, “Recipe, Prescription, and Experiment,” is a prime example of peasant cooking,

“In this respect peasant cooking is different. Firstly it relies less on precise quantities, which tend to be specified exactly in the written recipe. Secondly, it tends to be less tied to specific ingredients; one can substitute more easily if one does not think one is preparing tripe a la mode de Caen, but simply cooking a dish of tripe for supper. Thirdly, there is more flexibility in regards to preparation,” (Goody).

This connection to peasant cooking is also shown by the fact that, while rice pudding has been a staple of many cultures, it is almost universally a simple dish that is associated with the underclass. This particular recipe is most definitely of the European variety and more specifically it most likely has its roots in English cooking tradition. This shows that the Cart family likely has mundane roots. This of course is a very broad indication of the Cart family’s roots, but given the lack of other cultural or even concrete indicators such as birth certificates and family trees, it is a veritable break-through. It should also be noted the literary significance of rice pudding. It is included in several works and in such works it is mostly served to the downtrodden. For example Charles Dickens used rice pudding in at least one of his works and given the normal subject matter Dickens wrote of, it would hardly be something a king would eat. A more recent example is the use of rice pudding in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a novel by Douglass Adams, as a counterpoint to complex tasks or thinking, thus emphasizing its simplicity.

This recipe is a prime example of how context allows for something mundane to take on a greater importance. The care and love associated with this recipe allows a dish, which is essentially the dessert equivalent of meat and potatoes, to be special and to take on meaning beyond the ingredients contained therein. It shows that a family recipe, while largely delicious, can have meaning beyond its taste. In this case the recipe shows the roots of the Cart family. They most likely come from a working class background, with most certainly a European background. The recipe also shows what was important to the writer, family, as well as her willingness to pass it on and allow changes to it. To the writer, Hazel Cart, the feelings associated with the recipe and in turn the dish, were much more important than the actual dish. So to her it was more of a recipe for love and family togetherness, than a simple rice pudding dish.

Two Families, Blending Traditions

First, spread the dough thinly across the breadth of the table.

Something that has become familiar to me in the past few months is casualness with food preparation –

1) stretching homemade dough across a table, healing any breakages or holes that may develop,
2) grinding up beef with diced onions, or instead shredding cheese, and
3) layering these contents lazily to and fro across this large pattern of bread, followed by
4) rolling it all up into one long cylindrical tube of stuffed bread and
5) winding it into a spiral shape in a circular pan to bake for one estimated hour.

My Croatian family calls this pita. These are all the details I have ever received to make it: use either hand-shredded cheese (never told what type of cheese) or “well-seasoned” ground beef (ambiguous) with diced onions, followed by layering the contents across the stretched bread, and so on. Never mind that the recipe for the actual bread – the foundation – is not included!

Recipes have been realized in a more abstract – or at least vague – form, in both of my families. My biological family is a mixture of cultural heritages – what many Americans would call a “mutt” – consisting of, but not limited to: Irish, Native American, Dutch, German and Greek. Of the chosen five (the five greatest percentages in my blood), the two greatest are, calculably, Irish and Greek (though I am the only in my family to really strive to seek out my Irish heritage). My mother refers to herself as Greek, though the last to know the language was her grandfather, as the traditions, too, probably died with him. What is even more interesting, of what we have left to define us, is the food that we eat. For a Grecian family, we eat and prepare a lot of Italian food. Though it cannot be matched by every family tree source, there is expected to be some Italian heritage within my mother’s bloodline; but whether or not there actually is a bloodline streaming from Italy in my family, whether or not many foods carry their similarities between Greece and Italy, the foods we eat are distinctly Italian. I believe this may be a tradition started and continued purely by my mother and myself, however. That I can find, both my mother and father’s sides of the family keep very little contact and certainly do not share recipe cards. Much of what is created within our household can only be repeated by memory between the two of us or if one of us thinks to have the gusto of writing down the recipe as we create it.

This is very similar to my new family’s traditions. My husband, Dragan’s, family is much more “consistent” in their heritage. His mother’s side of the family is half Croatian and half Bosnian, while his father’s side of the family is half Croatian and half Italian (so, his Italian roots are obviously very happy with my cooking choices). Even with the disparity of four cultures in their bloodline, there is still much consistency to be considered. Bosnians and Croatians share not only a country border but many similarities in their cultures and languages (the two practically identical in most ways); and Italians and Croatians have many similarities in their cultures and values – particularly familial values – and some of their food choices, much the same as overlaps in Italian and Grecian foods.

What has been a difficult obstacle for me, however, is their recognition of their heritage and my family’s lack thereof. Dragan’s family remains very close-knit when it comes to family and food. When it comes purely to experimentation when my mom and I do not write down recipes, it is a choice within his family to not write down the recipes but instead rely upon oral tradition. In spending time with his family, I can see how the choice to rely strictly upon oral tradition is a bonding mechanism between family members. In order to learn the recipe they want to use at their next dinner, Dragan’s sister and sister-in-law have to approach his mom, ask her, and then create the meal with her before they can make it themselves. It also acts as a mechanism to maintain privacy within the family, as a form of hierarchy. At family dinners, family members will automatically ask after Dragan’s mom’s pita if she does not prepare it, for they do not know how to make it themselves. I, myself, only know the steps after the dough is made but do not know how to properly prepare the dough (beyond the fact that it is not made in the same fashion as typical bread). Jack Goody, in his essay, “Recipe, Prescription, and Experiment,” describes this as “the mode of preparation [being] deliberately hidden from the outside world…[as] a deliberate way of concealing the secrets of the trade” (85). Though this may have a negative connotation for those outside of recipe-holder’s family, it creates a surprising amount of closeness and safety within the family. While I do not know all the steps yet for the recipe, only knowing a few other recipes at this point, I know that I will continue to learn in steps, to create dishes and meals with Dragan’s mom, which will create stepping stones of encouragement within a less-than-structured means of recipe-keeping.

***

Goody, Jack. “Recipe, Prescription, and Experiment.” Food and Culture: A Reader. Eds. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik. New York: Routledge, 1997. 78-90. Print.

***

~McKenzie Lynn Sanders

My Mother's Oatmeal Muffins

      Sometimes on Sunday mornings after church, my mother would whip up a batch of oatmeal muffins as a treat to accompany the scrambled eggs, sausage, canned orange juice, and coffee that were the more regular features of our post-fast spreads. The muffins were large and solid; pried from their tins with a knife, each one could take command of a plate in its golden brown majesty, flecked with nutty specks of warmed oatmeal and exuding a buttery moist and crumbly charm. We ate them lathered with still more butter and dolloped with the homemade raspberry jam that my mother made from the berries we picked in the overgrown alley behind our suburban house. Eating one felt like encountering the answer to faith’s mysteries, coming home to the holy grail of satiety, ultimate pleasure, comfort, and hominess. They felt healthy even though we seven children had only the vaguest sense of what healthy meant; we only knew that feeling of solid well-being we got from eating them.

      Years later, when I moved across the country to graduate school, my mother sent me the
recipe:

She loved sending me recipes for the foods I missed most—loved knowing that these core family
experiences had stayed with me on my solo travels into the foreign worlds of higher education.
She always wrote them out carefully in her looping left-handed script and frequently enclosed
them in a care package of homemade cookies and fudge, so I could have an immediate tangible
link to the family source while trying my uncertain hand at the baking process.

      My mother lumped muffins somewhat dismissively into the category of “quick breads,”
breads you tossed off on the fly without really thinking about it, breads you slammed together
with a few practiced strokes and hurtled carelessly into buttered tins or deep, rectangular bread
pans, breads that obediently plumped and browned and scented the kitchen on demand. Her real
glory as a baker was in yeast breads, and in the year before I left for graduate school she tried to
pass the kneading art along to me.”You have to feel the bread,” she’d say, humping up the mass
of dough and patting it like a loved baby, “feel when it needs more flour or a dash of water. Pull
it toward you and turn it like this,” she’d say, expertly pressing the mass away and back, fort and
da. Although I tried to learn, yeast breads never took to my unpracticed caresses, but I did learn
to make passable imitations of her quick breads: zucchini bread, banana bread, cinnamon crumb
coffee cake, apple cobbler, popovers, muffins. In the last year, when she knew she was dying,
she tried to teach my father how to cook his meals as well. Carpenter that he was, he took readily
to the measuring of precise ingredients but, like me, failed at the Zen of production and ended up
eating mostly out of cans.

      In the years after my mother died, my three sisters and I gradually discovered that her
muffins, like many of the recipes she had carefully written out for us over the years, were
basically plagiarized from the Betty Crocker Cookbook.

Like many women of her generation, displaced from Midwestern farm life after World War II
and transported across country to make a home for a stressed husband and a big family, she
turned to the reassuring cookbooks being pumped into the market and directed to the woes of
beleaguered housewives. Betty Crocker was the staple but there was also The Joy of Cooking, Peg
Bracken’s I Hate to Cook for the bad days, and later, post-Sixties infiltrations like The
Vegetarian Epicure, which recommended a toke of pot to stimulate guests’ appetites, and
Laurel’s Kitchen, which extolled the pleasures of baking, canning, and vegetarian cooking as a
holistic lifestyle. Through all these mentoring influences, vegetables remained for my mother the
ideal accompaniments to butter, mayonnaise, or best of all cream. She had grown up on a farm
with cows, whose cream provided the sweet base for life; for us that meant creamed corn,
creamed spinach, fresh cream poured over ripe tomatoes, creamed eggs on toast, even oysters
cooked with butter and cream on Christmas Eve. In her suburban Seattle yard, she created a large
garden and culled every last treasure she could from the surrounding brambles of undeveloped
plots. As part of the same philosophy of practical household management, when she shopped for
our family of nine at grocery stores, she bought everything big and cheap, the cheapest cuts of
meat turning blue under their frost, the value-sized bags of flour, rice, and cornmeal, the
gargantuan boxes of cornflakes and cheerios with no prizes tucked away at the bottom.

    
      I wondered at first why she had taken the trouble to write everything out rather than sending
me a copy of the Betty Crocker cookbook in a Christmas care package, but I gradually realized
that the small changes she had made from the original recipe were, in her mind, the key secrets
she was passing along. For example, she was immensely proud of the household management tips
build into her version of the muffin recipe, letting me know that I could substitute margarine
(cheaper) for the half butter mixture, that I could let the oatmeal soak a bit less if I ran out of
time (which I always do), that I could sour regular milk with a little vinegar if I didn’t happen to
have sour cream or buttermilk in the house (which I never do). She loved, as I have come to love,
being able to whip up a dinner out of nothing, to make something edible out of whatever staples
were in the house—a talent she drew upon frequently (corn meal mush and raisins with rice
became our favorite pre-paycheck meals). Adding the decadent suggestion that I could throw in
half a cup of nuts or raisins and telling me to fill the muffin cups three quarters full rather than
the two-thirds specified by the stingy Betty Crockerites was also typical of my mother’s
abundant spirit. She understood on some fundamental level that cooking was about love and
generosity and family warmth, never to be stinted in terms of time or portion size.

      All this helps to explain the resonance of those faded, batter-spattered recipes I treasure,
but a wonderfully rich essay by social anthropologist Jack Goody, “The Recipe, the Prescription,
and the Experiment,” adds another layer of insight. Digging through the history of recipe use
from the earliest Sumerian medical prescriptions (turns out that RX like the word recipe means
“to take”) to the Egyptian alchemists encoding their secret potions, through the first cooking
recipe in 1500 for “brede graytd, and eggis,” up to modern bourgeois cooking, Goody arrives at
the point that middle class family cooking frequently relied on tradition above and beyond the
written recipe: “Knowledge of cooking acquired by participation rather than by instruction is
necessarily conservative (in one sense of the word) and tied to the ingredients readily available,
placing less emphasis on the fulfillment of a set of written “orders” and more upon the utilization
of the contents of the cupboard in an improvisation upon certain recettes de base (base recipes)”
(Goody 83, 86, 87). This attitude gets at the heart of my mother’s understanding of recipes. In
the end, they only provided a set of proportions—dry ingredients, wet ingredients, fat, and
leavening; once she understood those proportions, the oatmeal muffins could become zucchini
muffins, banana muffins, apple cornmeal muffins, and so on. While she knew with the certainty
of an artist how to riff, ripple and play at the margins of recipes, how to make them serve her in
feeding a large family from the contents of a lean cupboard, she was also well aware of my
limitations as novice—her careful instructions in this recipe were bolstered by numerous verbal
instructions to sift and measure flour precisely and Depression-era reminders to scrape every last
bit of margarine from the wrapping. Goody’s history also helps to pinpoint the mysterious
alchemy that arrived in the mail along with my mother’s recipes and baked goodies. He gives as
the fundamental definition of the recipe “a written formula for mixing ingredients for culinary,
medical or magical purposes,” and looking back, I think my mother’s recipes played all those
roles for me (Goody 84). She wanted me to be safe, happy, and healthy in the strange new place
I had chosen for myself, and she knew that her recipes, written out by hand, contained an elixir
of family identity and certitude. There were not just recipes but talismans that would protect me
from the surrounding evils of New Jersey, and even perhaps from myself.