I found out about the restaurant from my brother, who was supposed to work there but had another job. It was only going to be for one day but the owner asked if I could work all week. After that, she hired me and I started working with her regularly as a prep cook in her San Francisco restaurant.

At first, the owner was kind, and there weren’t any issues. But, after about a year of working with her, I noticed things changing. She would yell at me for nothing. There were times when I didn’t receive my breaks and I had been working all day.

Then, she stopped paying us.

That was hard. But trying to get wages that are stolen from you turns out to be even harder.

Initially, the owner started delaying our checks. Supposedly, she was going to give them to us on Mondays, then she changed it to Wednesdays and then to Fridays. Then she started saying, “I’ll pay you the next week,” but it didn’t happen. Still, she kept saying that until it accumulated.

My co-workers and I—there were four of us in the kitchen—kept asking her for our payments and she kept saying she would pay us but she never did.

I thought about leaving but it was the pandemic and there wasn’t much work available, so I stayed. But the whole situation was very stressful. I was very frustrated because, if I already worked for the money, why was I not getting paid?

In October 2021 all of us workers decided we’d had enough. We joined together and told the owner that if the checks did not arrive that day, we would not show up for work. She still did not respond. At this point she stopped coming to the restaurant. At one point, she promised to send the checks with someone else, but we never received them.

We called her and her husband and they didn’t answer us. At one point, the owner’s husband offered to pay a portion of what was owed to us but we declined. We wanted to be paid in full and we were not willing to negotiate that. The owner owes me $12,157.90 in wages, plus penalties for not paying me when I was working for her.

That was when she closed the location, without notice, in December 2021. We kept trying to contact her but neither she nor her husband responded.

It affected me greatly because it was the last few months of the year. I got depressed, I got frustrated, my blood pressure went up, I couldn’t sleep. I was very angry with the owner.

That year was the saddest Christmas I ever had. Christmas without money is very sad. It’s a time of year when you try to send a little extra money back home. I’m 34 years old now. And, in my 10 years of living in the United States, that was the first time I was not able to send a dollar back home to Guatemala.

I send money to my sisters and grandparents, who raised me. I fully support them and the money I send is for everything they need—but in 2021, I couldn’t. My good friend had to lend me money just to be able to settle my bills. I couldn’t do anything and I felt tied by the hands.

My co-workers and I kept looking for someone to help us. We didn’t know what to do. We went to local organizations that can help workers, but they were closed due to COVID-19. Eventually, I came across a church and that’s where someone gave me the phone number for Trabajadores Unidos Workers United.

TUWU, as it’s known, is a worker center, funded by grants and grassroots donations. It finds itself at the intersection of economic justice and immigrant rights—all while holding companies and bosses accountable.

A TUWU organizer talked to me that same day I first called. My co-workers and I were able to share our situation. In time, TUWU helped teach us how to organize.

TUWU helped me prepare a case seeking the wages stolen from me. I filed the case with the San Francisco office of the state’s Labor Commission in February 2022. I wish I could tell you that my case was quickly processed and that I got the money I was owed.

But that’s not how things work.

The Labor Commission, at least its office in San Francisco, has huge backlogs of cases. So, the only thing I’ve received since my filing is the news that the commission has approved my case for a hearing.

That’s right—all I know is that I’ll have a hearing, someday. I haven’t received a date for the hearing. I haven’t been informed if the commission will investigate my claim. This is not uncommon. It typically takes years to receive the money lost in wage theft cases in California.

So, I don’t know if I’ll ever be paid the money I’m owed. But I do know that I’m not going to sit and wait in line for my case to be heard.

I’m continuing to fight for the restaurant owner to pay me back. It’s not easy. She continues to hide from us, even though she still owns a pop-up restaurant in San Francisco, and sometimes appears on TV cooking shows.

Since I became a member of TUWU, we’ve had many meetings and tried many different strategies on how to make the owner accountable. I’m hopeful that some of those will work.

I also learned the word “organize” at TUWU. Along with the word, I’ve learned that, since getting justice takes years, it’s important to organize other workers so that they are aware of their rights and how to move quickly when an employer doesn’t honor those rights.

Now, I know how to advocate and organize with my co-workers. I also feel like a part of the community now and I am able to support other workers experiencing the same situation.

It’s still very discouraging. But I hear from other workers who have had cases with the Labor Commissioner’s Office and eventually had their stolen wages paid.

If I get paid, or I should say when I get paid, I’m going to send money to my grandparents and sisters. I will also save the rest for emergencies because you have to be able to cover any situation that may occur. There are times I worry it could happen to me again.

Early in this process, when I thought of what had happened to me at the restaurant, I would feel like crying. Now, I say that it’s like a mountain and I’m going to keep climbing as high as I can. Why would I not try to reach the peak and get my reward? Now, I share my experience with other workers.

The post My Boss Owes Me Over $12,000 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When I open an old cookbook, one of the first things I look for is a “splash page”—one covered with decades of food splatter. It’s a strong indication that the recipe on that page is a good one, well-loved, and often used. Drops of red sauce on yellowing paper become marginalia, a notation from readers past, and a way to commune with previous generations in the kitchen.

Several years ago, I began collecting and cooking from community cookbooks I found in the bottom of boxes in thrift stores and at estate sales around Los Angeles. At first it was the covers, not the recipes, that caught my eye. Like the hand-drawn rendering on the front of a 1950s cookbook from All People’s Christian Church in South Central. But soon, I was cooking from the books weekly, often Googling the recipe contributors to try to learn more about them. In California Cooking, recipes compiled by the Art Museum Council of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1986, I found the name of a dear friend’s recently deceased grandmother—a happy surprise.

I started digitizing these books, and my personal collection grew into the Community Cookbook Archive: LA, which now houses over 400 recipe books from Los Angeles clubs, collectives, and organizations. These self-published books weren’t from famous chefs or instructors but instead shared how non-professionals cooked at home. While many of them are not in libraries or other institutional holdings, they were preserved on home bookshelves, passed between generations, and now serve as amazing records of Los Angeles culture.

The term “community cookbook” conjures images of volumes spiral-bound in the 1970s, filled with instructions for Jell-O molds and tuna casseroles. But collective recipe books are a far older phenomenon, dating back long before coil binding was even invented. The books in the Community Cookbook Archive span three centuries of Los Angeles. Indeed, as soon as there was hardcover book printing in this city, there were community cookbooks. Early community cookbooks were typically sold as a creative fundraising tool for women’s clubs and church auxiliaries who did not have access to more traditional modes of funding. However, by the mid-20th century, all sorts of groups were compiling recipes—a bridge club in Inglewood, a bowling league in Long Beach, docents at the Natural History Museum, and the Universal City cast and crew of the TV show Murder She Wrote.

The books in the Community Cookbook Archive document Los Angeles stories through the lens of food. Recipes chart neighborhood demographic shifts, technological innovations in the kitchen, and wartime scarcity. Featured ingredients speak to Southern California’s unique food history. In Cooking the Native Way, produced in 2018 by the Chia Cafe Collective, you’ll find recipes utilizing acorn flour from native oaks, amongst many other Indigenous food sources. Southern California’s Spanish Mission-driven colonization of land and shift to agriculture is also evident, especially in the abundance of citrus recipes. The Pomona Centennial Cookbook from 1987 includes a recipe for “Hollywood Parade” punch, calling for one-quart orange juice and one-quart orange sherbert. Ahead of the recipe, the contributor, Marjorie Souther, writes, “My grandma Woodard moved to Pomona in 1923. She packed oranges all her life. This drink was served under the shade trees in the summertime before the days of air conditioning.”

It’s not uncommon for the books to take on a scrapbook quality with maps or custom artwork, such as the hand-stamped cover design of Comidas Mexicanas from 1937, a bilingual cookbook with recipes from women living in Pasadena’s Mexican communities. Many cookbooks also contain yearbook-style photographs of club members, places of worship, and images of significant Los Angeles architecture. A photo of the Philanthropy and Civics Club on S. Wilton Place—the former home of real estate developer and Crenshaw Boulevard namesake George Crenshaw—is featured in the opening pages of the club’s 1933 cookbook. The recipe collection preserves this since-demolished home’s grand facade, making it an unexpected vehicle for civic memory.

Often passed between individuals as gifts, community cookbooks also became trojan horses for personal histories. How We Cook in Los Angeles, published by the Ladies’ Social Circle of Simpson M.E. Church in 1894, features first-person essays amongst recipes for dishes like walnut cake and cucumber pickles. Almost a century later, The Maryknoll Cookbook, published in 1983 by downtown L.A.’s Maryknoll Japanese Catholic Center, also offers recipes for walnut cake and cucumber pickles. Yet this book, too, also gives us a window into Angelenos’ lives. It opens with a dedication to and profile of Sister Mary Bernadette Yoshimochi, who was born in Shiga, Japan, at the turn of the 20th century. Sister Bernadette became a nun in 1928, arriving in California a few years later, where she helped care for Japanese tuberculous patients at Maryknoll Sanitorium in Monrovia. The U.S. government incarcerated her in Manzanar during World War II, and afterward, she joined Maryknoll in Los Angeles.

I consider many community cookbooks to be subversive narratives, through stories like Sister Bernadette’s. They offer information that undermines or supplements the dominant, contemporaneous history of Los Angeles. In community cookbooks, local names appear in print that may not have been published anywhere else—even in phone books, which frequently only listed a household’s men, or in census data, due to systemic undercounting of certain demographics. A community cookbook’s list of contributors is, then, an alternative record of who lived, worked, cooked, and ate here.

Beyond being primary source documents, community cookbooks are instruction manuals meant to be used in the here and now. Their “splash pages” are a testament to the volumes’ original utility. There’s something powerful about sitting down to a meal shared with someone who is no longer here. This is true whether you’re making suffragist and poet Eva Carter Buckner’s cheese straws, from the Federation Cook Book, published in Pasadena in 1910, or Anne Brunell’s “Pleasure Dome” liverwurst and cheese appetizer from UCLA Engineering’s Enjoy! Cookbook, undated, but likely from the late 1960s. Every time I cook from these books, I learn something new about Southern California—and see food as both a way of commemorating the past and an avenue for gathering together in the present.

The post Finding L.A. in Food Splatters and Spiral Bindings appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Food can connect us to the earth, our community, and ourselves. But first, we need to open a space to listen to and be in exchange with the ingredients.

As a professional chef, I have spent years learning to do this with the plants I grow and cook with. This practice has profoundly changed the way I think about my work and the world around me.

Looking back, one of my most important teachers on this journey, in the kitchen and in life, was the tomato.

Growing up, I struggled with my relationship to this beautiful plant and its magic fruit, even as I found myself drawn to it. It was only after I learned how to truly listen to tomatoes and give them what they need to thrive, that I experienced the true magnificence, amazing flavors, and powerful energy they have to share with us all.

The first dish I ever learned how to make was salsa. I was 5 years old, and I can still remember picking the juicy tomatoes, serrano chilies, and fragrant cilantro from my parents’ garden in Ojai, the Southern California valley at the base of the Topatopa Mountains. I kept tasting the salsa over and over again, adding a little more chili, then a little more salt, then a little more lemon. Adjusting and experimenting with the balance of flavors until it tasted just how I wanted it: delicious.

But a tomato on its own? That grossed me out. Now I know that the culprit was store-bought tomatoes—pink, mealy, store-bought tomatoes. I still cringe when I think about their watery, bland flavor. The worst were the slices that sat goopy and soggy in my sandwich, waiting to be eaten in my lunchbox at school.

What I didn’t realize then was that these weren’t a proper reflection of the tomato family. They were the industrialized representatives. There are actually more than 10,000 types of tomatoes out there—way more than the two to three varieties you see in the average grocery store.

The revelation that there was a whole other world of tomatoes out there came to me when I went away to San Diego for college and started working at my first fine-dining restaurant, NINE-TEN. I’ll never forget the heirloom tomato salad on their menu. Who knew tomatoes came in so many colors and variations? I took my first bite, and the bright, sweet, sharp flavors of their tomatoes opened my eyes to what high-quality ingredients can do for a meal, and how limited my understanding of the plant had been up to that point.

After college, I returned to Ojai, where I got focused on growing my own food. With my mom as my mentor and advisor, I started to develop a deeper relationship with plants, and saw how they could thrive when they received the love and nutrients they needed.

The work thrilled me. Every morning, I woke up early to check on the land, inviting friends to come and garden with me. We planted all kinds of vegetables in the beautiful soil we created by composting our food and garden scraps.

Through gardening, I learned that all food needs good food and good vibes to flourish. The same can be said for humans. For years I hadn’t been taking my health as seriously as I should have, and it was around this time that I realized I needed to make some drastic changes myself if I wanted to feel strong and capable in my body and keep doing the things I loved—like surfing, playing in nature, and growing my garden.

At this point, I had been growing over 40 varieties of heirloom tomato plants. I had been so excited to see them fruit, and find out what it would be like to cook with them and how they would taste. Unfortunately, after a few weeks of chowing down on them, my chiropractor recommended that I take a break from eating plants from the nightshade family, as they can be inflammatory.

Author Evan Rilling. Photo by Natalie Karpushenko.

It was a total bummer to stop eating tomatoes after we’d come so far together, but by overindulging in them and then cutting them out of my diet, I actually became even closer to tomatoes. The experience taught me to listen to my body and find out how to develop a healthier relationship with the plant that worked for me. I can now eat tomatoes freely when it feels good for me to and know when to stop when I need to. I recommend this exact method to clients who really want to understand how food affects them. It’s true, I tell them, after you take some time away from an ingredient, try going all in if you truly want to understand how the food is affecting you. Even junk food: I dare you to eat a whole bag of Doritos and see how you feel! I bet you won’t be going back for seconds.

I am grateful to tomatoes for all of the gifts they’ve shared and the lessons they’ve taught me, and am honored to now share these teachings with you.

Here’s how anyone can connect to ingredients in a deeper way:

First, choose an ingredient that you feel called to and would like to build a stronger connection with.

Then place the ingredient in front of you. Look at it. What did you see?

Touch it. What did you feel?

Listen to it. What did you hear?

Smell it. How would you describe it?

Taste it. How would you describe the experience?

How have you worked in harmony with it?

How could you work in harmony with it?

These teachings will expand your abilities and awareness of what you eat.

Developing your own relationship with any plant or ingredient—whether you’re cooking, gardening, applying a wellness technique, or working with them for healing—can be powerful, not to mention fun.

But before you try this process, I invite you to take a moment, center yourself, and let yourself be open to the possibilities that may present themselves to you. Because by letting yourself truly connect and listen to a plant, you may find it has many lessons for you, just like the tomato has had for me.

The post Where I Go<span class="colon">:</span> My Teacher, the Tomato appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Soul food is famously revered for pork and barbecue, for savory side dishes cooked in lard. I am a Black man who grew up loving my mother’s cornbread dressing and my aunt’s macaroni and cheese. I found comfort in these foods. Then I became a vegan. At first, I wondered, if I did not eat soul food as I had historically conceptualized it, what kind of Black person would I be? Where would I belong?

Cultural identities are baked into culinary identities. This is especially true for people of color: What you choose to eat, and not to eat, speaks volumes about where you belong. The culinary term “soul food” can be traced back to the 1960s, when Black people who moved north during the Great Migration began referring to their musical and culinary experiences as “soul music” and “soul food.” As “soul” became a linguistic signifier for Black culture, it became a self-empowering shorthand for being able to survive in a racist society, and to resist the dehumanization of Black and African culture. The roots of soul food are antiracist.

I know that not eating meat can be antiracist, too, and that veganism aligns with these self-empowering principles. Not consuming animal products resists factory farming’s dehumanizing forces and disproportionate impacts on Black people and on the Earth. But there have been moments when my evolving diet has compromised my ability to feel like part of my community—even part of my family.

For us, soul food consists of the classics so often associated with the term: fried chicken, collard greens, dirty rice, jambalaya, okra, cornbread dressing, and pretty much anything one can eat off a pig. Over the years, these foods have given me comfort. When the pervasive reality of racism knocks me off-center, the red beans and rice I grew up with is the ground from which I remember myself as beloved and belonging. For me, red beans and rice feels like home.

When I left Battle Creek, Michigan, to attend graduate school in the outskirts of Los Angeles, my family was concerned that the move would “change” me, or make me some kind of hippie. They may have been right. When I arrived in Claremont, I was your typical, grilled meat-loving omnivore. Three and a half years later I was a vegetarian, and not too long after that, I was a vegan. I grew dreadlocks and a beard.

I dreaded my first trip back home after I became a vegetarian. I knew my family would question my diet and challenge my cultural authenticity. Sure enough, my dad made a show of cooking meat to add to the beans and rice I had prepared for Christmas dinner—despite the fact that there were plenty of other meat dishes for him to choose from. My beans and rice were not authentic to our family, and he made sure everyone knew it.

My experience is not unique. Countless other people of color feel alienated for being vegan, even though their veganism may be rooted in a commitment to community. In America, food has long been—or been mixed up with—an engine of oppression, and the Black body serves as a constant reminder of it. Black people were enslaved because of our agricultural and culinary acumen. Economic exploitation of traditional farm and factory farm laborers, who are predominantly Black and Latinx, persists today. So does housing discrimination, which makes it hard for Black, Indigenous, and other people of color to shop for affordable fresh fruit and vegetables near their homes.

Soul food is how Black people define ourselves, and celebrate the stories of how we survived. And yet, soul food’s overwhelming cultural power presents a strong argument for reexamining it. Are the stories we tell ourselves about traditional notions of soul food still useful? Is the idea of soul food really about the food itself, or is it rooted in the wisdom of the communities that created it? How might soul food be used to tell stories about who we want to become, and not only who we once were?

I suggest that we begin by decolonizing soul food—unearthing the ways white American stereotypes around Black food and culture have shaped our understanding of the cuisine of our Black ancestors. We don’t have to look farther than Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben—stereotypes created to normalize segregation—to see the influence of white assumptions about Black cookery. De-linking these images from our ideas about soul food helps us uncover knowledges that have always existed on the margins.

For instance, there is no static definition of what it means to eat in a way that is “Black.” In his book Hog and Hominy, culinary historian Frederick Douglass Opie writes that what Americans think of as a traditional West African diet, consisting of “darker whole grains, dark green leafy vegetables, and colorful fruits and nuts” supplemented with meat, evolved because during slavery and its aftermath, Black folk had to eat what they were able to access. They had to learn how to make inexpensive cuts of meat taste wonderful.

If we think about the history of Black food as a window into surviving the racism that is foundational to our domestic food system, we tap into deeper meanings that can easily be overlooked. We might say that what animates soul food isn’t the chicken, or the hog, or any foodstuff in and of itself—but rather a spirit of preservation and promotion of the Black community. And this realization should prompt ethical reflection and response.

I suggest that veganism, particularly Black veganism as other activists and I have described it, shows one powerful way. By opting to not consume animal products, Black veganism forces us to examine how the language of animality and “animal characteristics” has been a tool used to justify the oppression of any being who deviates, by species, race, or behavior, from white cultural norms. By challenging the racist stereotypes within these norms, Black veganism invites us to learn more about the history and development of Black food and food culture beyond the terror that was slavery, tenant farming, and picking cotton. I find parts of myself in the stories of chefs such as Hercules Posey and James Hemings, and food justice activists such as Fannie Lou Hamer.

Studying the history of African and Black culinary and agricultural acumen, in conjunction with changing my diet, gave me the confidence I needed to lean into my Black as well as my vegan identity. And I think it helped my family along, too. Discussions about the way we eat provided an opportunity for my family to remember the stories of our ancestors. Over dinner, we talked more about the foods of my grandfather’s childhood in Mississippi—rice, beans, vegetables, stews, eggs, and occasionally meat. We also learned that one reason he worked on farms, despite the abuse he faced, was to decrease his own food insecurity.

These stories offered us more than any of us could have imagined. Telling and retelling these stories allows Black people to understand our food within the context of our own histories—and to continue to ensure that our dietary changes preserve and promote the communities we come from.

The post Is Black Veganism the Future of Soul Food? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Likhachev was not the only person who recalled gifts of food during detention. While researching concentration camps around the world, I learned that even the memory of food helped sustain prisoners, linking them to distant friends and family and building bonds between detainees. Through interviews, written memoirs, and even archival “recipes,” the way in which imaginary feasts created community in places that were beyond hope came up again and again, revealing how even in its absence, food defines and shapes the most rudimentary forms of society.

Real food, of course, offered more sustenance than reminiscence could provide. But many concentration camp systems failed to feed prisoners enough to survive, and administrators wielded food as a weapon of control. Enduring forced labor as a teenager at Monowitz—part of Auschwitz—Elie Wiesel described hunger reducing him to “nothing but a body. Perhaps less: a famished stomach. The stomach alone was measuring time.”

Though his experiences were horrifying, Wiesel was fortunate enough to have avoided the gas chamber during selection. But extermination through labor—a combination of brutal work and deliberately limited rations—further culled prisoners assigned to the worst work details. Detainees died of gastroenteritis, pneumonia and a host of conditions that easily took hold as prisoners slowly starved to death.

In these conditions, access to additional food was critical. A post working in the vegetable cellar of a camp, such as the one German communist Margarete Buber-Neumann found in the Soviet Gulag in 1939, could provide a way to expand on the watery soup and bread typically allocated to prisoners. Buber helped to keep herself and others alive with stolen food.

Sometimes prisoners were buoyed by food from loved ones, as Likhachev had been touched by the present of a cake. Held with thousands of other suspects at the National Stadium in Santiago, Chile, in fall 1973, Felipe Agüero recounted the joy of receiving a care package in detention, but also how the meagerness of what was sent—a few cigarettes or a little bread, maybe some chocolate—revealed that hard times had come for family on the outside, too.

Where they could not scrounge or steal real food, captives turned to their imaginations. Despite the most desperate conditions, concentration camp inmates routinely spent their fleeting idle moments discussing recipes. At Neuengamme, not far from Hamburg in northern Germany, after work in factories, digging in clay pits, or dragging rubble out of bombed-out streets, during the only time they had to try to remain human, detainees talked about their homes and families, their previous lives that had vanished forever, and their favorite meals. They had little else to live on. As the war dragged on, life expectancy for new arrivals at Neuengamme dwindled to 12 weeks.

Shared recipes preserved from this era of camps found improbable publication with In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin. This 1996 compilation included a series of recipes that had been collected in the Nazi camp of Theresienstadt. A detainee named Mina Pachter had gathered recipes from inmates in the camp and given them to a friend to carry to her daughter, if he found a way to survive. After Pachter died, the collected recipes took more than 20 years to make their way into the hands of her daughter in New York, who eventually decided to publish the instructions for making such dishes as chicken galantine, liver dumplings, stuffed goose neck, asparagus salad, plum strudel, and chocolate torte.

The book was condemned by some who called it “sick,” wondering if cookbooks from Auschwitz or Treblinka would soon follow. The recipes themselves were often missing key ingredients or had completely mismatched measurements that made them useless. Others lauded the publication as Holocaust literature rather than a literal cookbook, a memory of how detainees consoled themselves in humanity’s darkest hours.

More cookbooks emerged over time, but not necessarily for publication. At the age of 12, in the women’s camp at Ravensbrück in Germany, Nurit Stern listened to adults commune with each other. “Hungry people can only dream about food,” she explained in 2016. “I was a child. I didn’t know anything about cooking. I memorized the recipes and wrote them down.” The small notebook she cobbled together out of stolen materials ended up enshrining the women’s recipes—chopped liver, goulash, stuffed cabbage rolls, and cholent with kishke—for posterity in Yad Vashem’s archive. Stern explained the role the recipes played for people struggling to maintain their humanity. “These women used their memories and imagination to memorize this most basic experience… Many chose this way to protect their sanity.”

Nurit Stern made this recipe book as a child to record the recipes she heard adults discussing in the Ravensbrück camp. (The letters “FKL” stand for Frauenkonzentrationslager, or “Women’s Concentration Camp.” Courtesy of the Yad Vashem Artifacts Collection.

While recipes and fantasies about unlimited food helped detainees endure the everyday horrors of the camps, the issue of food has also been used as a tool of propaganda to keep the public from sympathizing with detainees.

During internment of Japanese-Americans in the Second World War, a series of allegations about detainees being “pampered” in camps centered around food. One New York Times headline from May 1943 reads, “Wyoming Senator Asserts Japanese Go Unrationed and Have Vast Stores of Food.” While much of the U.S. was using ration tickets to buy food, Senator Edward Robinson accused detainees of hoarding meat and mayonnaise in the camp at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, claiming they had enough supplies on hand to feed the camp population for “three years, seven months and fourteen days.” The actual historical record on Heart Mountain, not surprisingly, contains references to late food shipments in insufficient quantities.

The very idea of food for detainees remains a highly politicized subject—partly because detention is seen as a way to punish a targeted group, even when governments deny that punishment is the goal. In 2005, a group of political activists who saw reports on American torture as “military bashing,” assembled a book of their own: The Gitmo Cookbook. Gathering recipes for halal meals including curried eggs, tandoori chicken, and Lyonnaise rice that the Navy had developed to serve those held on the Cuban base, the book’s authors aimed to show just how well detainees in American custody were treated. Nearly a decade would pass before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Torture Report verified many of the worst accusations of torture and abuse of detainees.

Why do propangandists feel the need to ascribe gluttony, extravagant meals, or hoarding to detainees? Food is so basic to existence that our common need for it provides the root of our ability to empathize with one another. This empathy lies at the heart of how society functions. When propagandists want to show that those held without trial do not deserve empathy, or are abusing it, they use stories of lavish food as a way to further isolate detainees from society.

A similar principle is at work when prisoners take comfort from the shared ritual of imagined meals. Written and spoken recipes offer a performance of survival when survival is uncertain. They provide detainees the kind of social interactions that camps are typically created to prevent. Sharing the desire for a specific food prepared a specific way further takes the animal impulse to survive and transforms it into art, reasserting the shared humanity of both the teller and the listeners.

Food offers those closed off from society a way to resurrect its ghost behind barbed wire. In China’s Xihongsan Mine labor camp in 1961, prisoner Harry Wu recalled “food-imagining parties.” Inside stone barracks atop a tamped mud floor, Wu described how one person would take a turn, and the next night, another detainee would reciprocate.

Wu was himself altogether ignorant of cooking but joined in, using invention where experience failed him. Before going to sleep, inmates lovingly narrated the creation of a favorite dish, sometimes a secret recipe from childhood or something specific to their home province. “We would explain in detail how to cut the ingredients, how to season them, mix them, and arrange them on the plate.” Once the dish was ready to eat, the detainee would first describe the smell, and then the taste. Decades later, Wu recalled the spell that was cast. “Everyone,” he wrote, “would listen in silence.”

The post How Concentration Camp Prisoners Found Comfort in Imaginary Feasts appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Americans have always been distinguished by their love of meat. Where does that love come from?

One short answer: our ethnic heritage. Among whites, the English and Germans were two of the greatest meat-eating cultures in Europe.

But that answer is about as satisfying as an overcooked steak. So there is a longer and tastier explanation: Americans’ relationship to meat production and consumption is long-standing, and built on core beliefs that meat is not only tasty but essential to good health and an indicator of economic well-being. Indeed, Americans and much of the rest of the world by the mid-20th century believed meat eating was a defining characteristic of civilization. Meat, and lots of it, has stayed a constant throughout our history—though our preferences for particular kinds of meat have changed as the country, people, technologies, and health concerns have shifted.

Today, the United States’ identity is tied up with beef. But the country started out devoted to pork and remained that way for more than half of its history. This originally made sense—pork was the most popular meat among Germans, the second most common ethnic background of white Americans for most of our history. But our pork preference also reflected livestock practices and regional tastes. In the North and South, pork was popular, especially among rural folk who allowed their pigs to forage. In fact, pigs foraged even in New York City until the municipal government banned the practice in 1849.

Pork’s enduring advantage was its price. Americans shared with many other meat-eating people around the globe a preference for cheap meats. But, unlike the Europeans who settled in the Caribbean and South America, North Americans did not eat salted or jerked beef. In 18th- and 19th-century America, urban and rural residents alike typically consumed wet-cured pork.

This preparation style required hogs to be cut into pieces that were placed in barrels filled with a brine solution of salt, saltpeter, and sugar or molasses. Barrel salt pork was ubiquitous in American cooking. For instance, it was an ingredient and flavoring in Boston baked beans and navy bean soup. Fried salt pork was a garnish in recipes for chops and stews. Strips of salt pork, called “lardoons,” were threaded into beef, veal, and poultry to add flavor. Likewise, bacon started the 19th century as a poor person’s food but over time became an item that all Americans ate.

Americans loved beef, too, but it was a luxury item since it spoiled quickly and refrigeration was not cheap. When they could afford fresh beef, they bought it, usually for special occasions. This was a nod to many Americans’ roots in 19th-century England, where eating roast beef on Sunday symbolized affluence and good health.

America would switch to beef as its meat of choice slowly and only once it became cheap. The Great Depression brought change. While meatpackers tried to convince Americans to eat expensive ham and dry-cured pork products, consumers began to devour newer and cheaper forms of meat, especially hot dogs and hamburgers. A descendant of much older European sausage traditions, hot dogs were usually made from finely processed pork or beef trimmings—i.e., byproducts like hearts, cheeks, tongues, lungs, kidneys—and generally encased in sheep intestines cleaned in packing plants’ offal departments.

World War II accelerated the transformation, boosting overall meat consumption in the process. The Army provided ground beef, and so American GIs ate much more of it than Americans back home. When millions of soldiers returned to the states, they wanted to continue to eat hamburgers. Growing affluence made higher-quality beef more affordable, and the rise of the fast food and restaurant sectors propelled meat sales. By 1990, 45 percent of all beef that Americans ate was hamburger.

This doesn’t sound healthy to modern ears. But for most of our history, Americans assumed that eating any meat was essential for good health. German chemist Justus von Liebig was particularly responsible for stressing animal protein’s significance for human health. Like many 19th-century physicians and scientists, Liebig believed beef juices and teas were nutritious and powerful restoratives for sick people. He supported the industrial production of beef extracts as a means to encourage meat sales among those who could not otherwise afford to eat it. Specifically, Liebig promoted a thick, syrupy, dark brown spreadable form of condensed beef, with his Extract of Meat Company, established in 1865 with production facilities in Fray Bentos, Uruguay.

Although beef extract was not popular in meat-rich America, Liebig’s work on animal protein influenced many American scientists. One of these was Wesleyan University chemistry professor Wilbur O. Atwater, who stressed the importance of cost-efficiency in human diets in his work, which included service as the first director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of Experiment Stations from 1888 to 1891. He advised working people, who needed more energy than wealthier Americans, to eat meat, but in cheaper cuts, including salted and canned meats. The USDA published Atwater’s Food and Diet in 1895, and home economists and others taught his moral economy of meat and nutrition.

But the science around meat and health changed—so the dominance of beef in America was relatively short-lived, only a half-century or so. The U.S. Senate’s Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs’ Dietary Goals for the United States, published in 1977, warned that diets rich in meats and other sources of saturated fats and cholesterol were associated with killer diseases like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and obesity. After the livestock and meat industry protested the blunt language about meat’s dangers in the Dietary Goals’ first edition, the government issued a second edition in the same year moderating some of the language. But Americans took heed.

In the 1970s, beef’s fall, due in large part to Americans’ health concerns, led to our shift to being a nation of chicken-eaters. In 1961, almost half of Americans’ meat consumption was beef and less than 20 percent poultry. Fifty years later, less than one-third of Americans’ meat consumption was beef and almost half was poultry.

Americans—concerned about health and the dangers of meat-borne diseases, including those caused by bacteria, viruses, and parasites, but especially bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or “mad cow” disease—began eating less red meat, i.e., beef and pork. Our fat intake also declined over the rest of the 20th century. However, concerns about eating red meat did not translate into a great upsurge in vegetarianism or veganism. Most affluent nations’ citizens, including Americans, have increasingly turned to poultry, ostensibly because it is less fatty than beef or pork.

Although poultry production creates less greenhouse gas than cattle production, chickens and turkeys produce a great deal of dangerous waste materials, and chicken nuggets—one of the most popular types of poultry consumption—are quite high in saturated fat and calories. Americans may believe their poultry choices are healthier than red meat, but eating chicken and turkey may be more symbolic than real in achieving greater health.

All of this American meat-switching has had an outsized impact on the world, because our love of meat has been one of the country’s great cultural exports, especially to China, which is fast becoming a significant meat consumer.

But will Americans ever give up their meat eating entirely? Maybe Americans will rethink their meat habits again when the alarming health and environmental consequences of China’s desire for meat become more apparent. Or maybe Americans’ love of meat—of bacon, hamburgers, hot dogs, and chicken nuggets—will endure, a legacy of the meaty history of the land of the free, and the home of a people brave enough to eat meat, despite its risks and costs.

The post What Our Gargantuan Appetite for Meat Says About America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“We need to forget about this so we can heal,” said an elderly white woman, as she left my lecture on the history of enslaved cooks and their influence on American cuisine.  Something I said, or perhaps everything I said, upset her.

My presentation covered 300 years of American history that started with the forced enslavement of millions of Africans, and which still echoes in our culture today, from the myth of the “happy servant” (think Aunt Jemima on the syrup bottle) to the broader marketing of black servitude (as in TV commercials for Caribbean resorts, targeted at white American travelers). I delivered the talk to an audience of 30 at the Maier Museum of Art in Lynchburg, Virginia. While I had not anticipated the woman’s displeasure, trying to forget is not an uncommon response to the unsettling tale of the complicated roots of our history, and particularly some of our beloved foods.

It is the story of people like Chef Hercules, our nation’s first White House chef; and Emmanuel Jones, who used his skills to transition out of enslavement into a successful career cooking in the food industry, evading the oppressive trappings of sharecropping. It is also the story of countless unnamed cooks across the South, the details of their existences now lost. But from its most famous to its anonymous practitioners, the story of Southern cuisine is inseparable from the story of American racism. It’s double-edged—full of pain—but also of pride. Reckoning with it can be cumbersome, but it’s also necessary. The stories of enslaved cooks teach us that we can love our country and also be critical of it, and find some peace along the way.

It’s not easy uncovering the histories of enslaved cooks, who left few records of their own and whose stories often appear in the historical record as asides—incidental details sprinkled through the stories of the people who held them in bondage. In my recent study of enslaved cooks, I relied on archaeological evidence and material culture—the rooms where they once lived, the heavy cast iron pots they lugged around, the gardens they planted—and documents such as slaveholders’ letters, cookbooks, and plantation records to learn about their experiences. These remnants, scant though they are, make it clear that enslaved cooks were central players in the birth of our nation’s cultural heritage.

In the early 17th century, tobacco farming began to spread throughout Virginia’s Tidewater region. Before long, plantations were founded by colonists, such as Shirley Plantation, constructed circa 1613; Berkeley Hundred, and Flowerdew Hundred, whose 1,000 acres extended along the James River. These large homes marked a moment of transition, when English cultural norms took hold on the Virginia landscape.

Traditions surrounding dining and maintaining a grand household were part of those norms, and the white gentry began seeking domestic help. At first, the cooks they hired on plantations were indentured servants, workers who toiled without pay for a contractually agreed-upon period of time before eventually earning their freedom. But by the late 17th century, plantation homes throughout Virginia had turned to enslaved laborers, captured from central and western Africa, to grow crops, build structures and generally remain at the beck and call of white families. Before long these enslaved cooks took the roles that had once been occupied by white indentured servants.

Black cooks were bound to the fire, 24 hours a day. They lived in the kitchen, sleeping upstairs above the hearth during the winters, and outside come summertime. Up every day before dawn, they baked bread for the mornings, cooked soups for the afternoons, and created divine feasts for the evenings. They roasted meats, made jellies, cooked puddings, and crafted desserts, preparing several meals a day for the white family. They also had to feed every free person who passed through the plantation. If a traveler showed up, day or night, bells would ring for the enslaved cook to prepare food. For a guest, this must have been delightful: biscuits, ham, and some brandy, all made on site, ready to eat at 2:30 a.m. or whenever you pleased. For the cooks, it must have been a different kind of experience.

Enslaved cooks were always under the direct gaze of white Virginians. Private moments were rare, as was rest. But cooks wielded great power: As part of the “front stage” of plantation culture, they carried the reputations of their enslavers—and of Virginia—on their shoulders. Guests wrote gushing missives about the meals in they ate while visiting these homes. While the missus may have helped design the menu, or provided some recipes, it was the enslaved cooks who created the meals that made Virginia, and eventually the South, known for its culinary fare and hospitable nature.

These cooks knew their craft. Hercules, who cooked for George Washington, and James Hemings, an enslaved cook at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, were both formally trained, albeit in different styles. Hercules was taught by the well-known New York tavern keeper and culinary giant Samuel Frances, who mentored him in Philadelphia; Hemings traveled with Jefferson to Paris, where he learned French-style cooking. Hercules and Hemings were the nation’s first celebrity chefs, famous for their talents and skills.

Folklore, archaeological evidence, and a rich oral tradition reveal that other cooks, their names now lost, also weaved their talents into the fabric of our culinary heritage, creating and normalizing the mixture of European, African, and Native American cuisines that became the staples of Southern food. Enslaved cooks brought this cuisine its unique flavors, adding ingredients such as hot peppers, peanuts, okra, and greens. They created favorites like gumbo, an adaptation of a traditional West African stew; and jambalaya, a cousin of Jolof rice, a spicy, heavily seasoned rice dish with vegetables and meat. These dishes traveled with captured West Africans on slave ships, and into the kitchens of Virginia’s elite.

You also see evidence of this multi-cultural transformation in so-called “receipt books,” handwritten cookbooks from the 18th and 19th centuries. These were compiled by slaveholding women, whose responsibilities sat firmly in the domestic sphere, and are now housed in historical societies throughout the country. Early receipt books are dominated by European dishes: puddings, pies, and roasted meats. But by the 1800s, African dishes began appearing in these books. Offerings such as pepper pot, okra stew, gumbo, and jambalaya became staples on American dining tables. Southern food—enslaved cooks’ food—had been written into the American cultural profile.

For the women who wrote and preserved the receipt books, these recipes, the products of African foodways, were something worthy of remembering, re-creating, and establishing as Americana. So why can’t we, as Americans today, look at this history for what it was? Colonial and antebellum elite Southerners understood fully that enslaved people cooked their food. During the 19th century, there were moments of widespread fear that these cooks would poison them, and we know from court records and other documents that on at least a few occasions enslaved cooks did slip poisons like hemlock into their masters’ food.

Depiction of Aunt Jemima, 1920, in the Saturday Evening Post. Courtesy of Internet Archive Book Images, via Wikimedia Commons.

But the country began recalibrating its memories of black cooking even before the Civil War, erasing the brutality and hardships of slavery from a story of Old Southern graciousness. The revisionism went full throttle during the era of Jim Crow, when new laws made segregation the norm. Post-emancipation America still relied heavily on the skills and labor of newly freed African Americans. In a highly racialized and segregated America, still grappling with its guilt over slavery, white people created a myth that these cooks were—and always had been—happy. Advertisers leaned on characters like Aunt Jemima and Rastus, stereotypical black domestics, drawn from minstrel song.

While newly free African Americans fled the plantations to find work as housekeepers, butlers, cooks, drivers, Pullman porters and waiters—the only jobs they could get—Aunt Jemima and Rastus smiled while serving white folks, enhancing the myth that black cooks had always been cheerful and satisfied, during slavery and with their current situation. You can find their faces throughout early 20th-century black Americana, and they are still on the grocery shelves today, though modified to reflect a more dignified image. 

My angry audience member was likely raised on the old enslaved-cook narrative in which these images took root, where the cook was loyal, passive, and purportedly happy—a non-threatening being whose ultimate goal was to help a white woman fulfill her own domestic vision. But to be an American is to live in a place where contradictions are the very fibers that bind a complicated heritage divided sharply by race. It is to ignore the story of Chef Hercules, or the real story of Aunt Jemima. By forgetting enslaved cooks’ pain to soothe our own, we erase the pride and the achievements of countless brilliant cooks who nourished a nation.

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You may have asked yourself that as poke—the chopped raw fish salad—begins to appear everywhere, from Paris to Pennsylvania. The short answer is, poke is another global food with deep roots in Hawai‘i.

Native Hawaiians have long known the pleasures of seasoned raw seafood. Being surrounded by the ocean probably has something to do with it. Centuries before Western contact, native Hawaiians would prepare i‘a maka (raw fish) and chop up reef fish (as in the striped and brightly colored fish you see when snorkeling in Hawai‘i), bones and all.

They would season it with sea salt dried in the sun; limu, or seaweed; and ʻinamona, roasted and crushed kukui nut, or candlenut. Without refrigeration, adding salt was both a method of seasoning as it was preserving, while the other elements gave the raw fish extra oomph: the ‘inamona, an oily nut, lent richness. Edible seaweeds—at one time, there were an estimated 70 types of seaweed along Hawai‘i’s coast, from soft and fuzzy to fine and hairlike to thick and crunchy—added flavor and texture.

But it wasn’t until the 1970s that the dish really gained popularity. At that time, the word “poke,” which in Hawaiian simply means to slice, or cut crosswise into pieces, came to be associated with the raw fish preparation we know now. Poke became more ubiquitous as advanced, commercial fishing techniques made fresh, deep-sea fish like ‘ahi, or tuna, more accessible. ‘Ahi’s ruby red, firm flesh is a lot more appealing than some of Hawai‘i’s near-shore fish, such as ‘ōʻio, with its gray and paste-like meat. Poke, once made primarily at home, and at a few Hawaiian restaurants, proliferated at the seafood markets, which started to offer varieties of poke in the glass refrigerated cases.

Hawai‘i’s multicultural influences mixed into the dish naturally. Today, in the islands, we still eat ‘inamona and limu seasoned poke, usually called Hawaiian or limu poke. But it’s the ‘ahi shoyu poke that’s the most popular. This dish—a mix of raw tuna, soy sauce, sesame oil, green onions, white onions, and chili pepper—gives a timeline of modern Hawai‘i. The chili peppers and onions came by way of explorers from Europe and missionaries from America. Descendants of the Japanese, Chinese, and Korean laborers—who were originally brought to work Hawai‘i’s sugar and pineapple plantations—influenced poke with their own raw fish traditions, and replaced the salt and ‘inamona with shoyu and sesame oil.

These days poke continues to evolve, with Hawai‘i’s seafood counters offering endless varieties. Poke flavorings may include wasabi, spicy mayo, kimchi, or oyster sauce, and the seafood encompasses everything from salmon to clams to raw, chopped crab, shell and all.

Poke doesn’t even have to be raw: Cooked octopus poke is a local favorite, and legendary poke chef Sam Choy makes a fried poke, transforming yesterday’s poke into today’s fought-over leftovers. It also stretches beyond seafood these days, with tofu poke and even a beet poke right at home alongside ‘ahi.

In Hawai‘i, poke is so much a part of the culinary landscape that it’s sold by the pound at supermarkets, eaten out of plastic containers on the couch with beer, and shared at every social gathering. It’s more often a snack or shared dish than it is a fast-casual meal, as it’s prepared elsewhere. Outside of Hawai‘i, poke is almost always served as a bowl, atop rice or zucchini noodles or even shredded kale in Los Angeles. It’s augmented with all kinds of toppings, from mango to goji berries (in Dusseldorf, Germany). These additions might be more a result of business decisions than of a quest for flavor, as fish outside of Hawai‘i is not as plentiful, cheap, or fresh, and thus needs more adulteration.

But back in Hawai‘i, poke is still primarily characterized by its simplicity—for the most part, it is only a few ingredients—just as it was hundreds of years ago.

The post How Hawai‘i Taught the World to Love Raw Seafood appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The recipe for “Queen’s Cake” was pure social aspiration, in the British mode, with its butter whipped to a cream, pound of sugar, pound and a quarter of flour, 10 eggs, glass of wine, half-teacup of delicate-flavored rosewater, and spices. And “Plumb Cake” offered the striving housewife a huge 21-egg showstopper, full of expensive dried and candied fruit, nuts, spices, wine, and cream.

Then—mere pages away—sat johnnycake, federal pan cake, buckwheat cake, and Indian slapjack, made of familiar ingredients like cornmeal, flour, milk, water, and a bit of fat, and prepared “before the fire” or on a hot griddle. They symbolized the plain, but well-run and bountiful, American home. A dialogue on how to balance the sumptuous with the simple in American life had begun.

American Cookery sold well for more than 30 years, mainly in New England, New York, and the Midwest, before falling into oblivion. Since the 1950s it has attracted an enthusiastic audience, from historians to home cooks. The Library of Congress recently designated American Cookery one of the 88 “Books That Shaped America.”

The collection of recipes, which appeared in numerous legitimate and plagiarized editions, is as much a cultural phenomenon as a cooking book. In the early years of the Republic, Americans were engaged in a lively debate over their identity; with freedom from Britain and the establishment of a republican government came a need to assert a distinctly American way of life. In the words of 20th-century scholar Mary Tolford Wilson, this slight cookbook can be read as “another declaration of American independence.”

The book accomplished this feat in two particularly important ways. First, it was part of a broader initiative, led by social and political elites in Connecticut, that advanced a particular brand of Yankee culture and commerce as a model for American life and good taste. At the same time, its author spoke directly to ordinary American women coping with everyday challenges and frustrations.

The title page of American Cookery. Image courtesy of Library of Congress.

American Cookery was a Connecticut project. There, a still mainly agricultural society of small independent farms was positioned to benefit from trading networks, near and far. But moving beyond mere subsistence farming required an openness to these new markets and to the world of commerce in general. Connecticut’s Federalist leaders were well-connected to influential newspapers, printers, and booksellers, and were able to promulgate a vision of an America where agriculture would flourish with the help of commerce—rather than in opposition to it.

Jeffersonians who disagreed with this outlook emphasized rural life as an end in itself. For them, the future of American society depended on the spread of the smallhold farmer, whose rustic simplicity would inoculate their fledgling country against the corrupting influence of the luxury to which Britain had succumbed.

The two camps took part in a public debate about luxuries—were they totems of prosperity or symbols of social decay? Some American thinkers, such as Joel Barlow, the author of the popular poem The Hasty Pudding, maintained that thoroughgoing simplicity should form the basis of American cooking and eating. But the Connecticut Federalists thought such asceticism left too little room for the aspirations of common people to improve their lot. These moderates preferred to encourage a kind of restrained gentility that would, in time, become the parlor rectitude of Victorian America. For those in the Federalist camp, encouraging education and the modest enjoyment of worldly goods would help build an enlightened society.

While their way of thinking was nothing if not temperate, the Connecticut Federalists promoted their views vigorously. They published Noah Webster’s popular Blue Back Speller (1783), the first American spelling book and primer, so called because of its cheap blue paper covers; Jedidiah Morse’s American Geography (1789), the first general compendium of political and geographic information about the new nation; as well as the writings of a literary circle known as the Connecticut Wits, whose poems allegorized the American Revolution and envisioned a glorious destiny for the new country. Many of these best-selling works were published by the firm of Hudson & Goodwin—which also published the first edition of American Cookery. Complementing this new American literary harvest were other ventures in locally-made goods. Imports were far from rare, but the message was clear: Everything—books, clothing, furniture, and even food—could be given an American slant.

With its new take on a practical topic, American Cookery caught the spirit of the times. It was the first cookbook to include foods like cranberry sauce, johnnycakes, Indian slapjacks, and custard-style pumpkin pie.

Moreover, Simmons had a keen understanding of the care that went into the construction of American household abundance. Behind every splendidly arrayed table lay the precise management of all the fruits and vegetables, meats and poultry, preserves and jellies, and cakes and pies that sustained the home and family—and American Cookery gave cooks and housewives tips for everyday cooking as well as occasions when the aim was to express greater gentility.

Simmons explained how to keep peas green until Christmas and how to dry peaches. She introduced culinary innovations like the use of the American chemical leavener pearlash, a precursor of baking soda. And she substituted American food terms for British ones—treacle became molasses, and cookies replaced small cakes or biscuits.

Above all, American Cookery proposed a cuisine combining British foods—long favored in the colonies and viewed as part of a refined style of life—with dishes made with local ingredients and associated with homegrown foodways. It asserted cultural independence from the mother country even as it offered a comfortable level of continuity with British cooking traditions.

American Cookery also carried emotional appeal, striking a chord with American women living in sometimes-trying circumstances. Outside of this one book, there is little evidence of Amelia Simmons’s existence. The title page simply refers to her as “An American Orphan.” Publishers Hudson & Goodwin may have sought her out, or vice versa: The cookbook’s first edition notes that it was published “For the Author,” which at the time usually meant that the writer funded the endeavor.

Whatever Simmons’s backstory might have been, American Cookery offers tantalizing hints of the struggles she faced. Although brief, the prefaces of the first two editions and an errata page are written in a distinctive (and often complaining) voice. In her first preface, Simmons recounts the trials of female orphans, “who by the loss of their parents, or other unfortunate circumstances, are reduced to the necessity of going into families in the line of domestics or taking refuge with their friends or relations.”

She warns that any such young female orphan, “tho’ left to the care of virtuous guardians, will find it essentially necessary to have an opinion and determination of her own.” For a female in such circumstances, the only course is “an adherence to those rules and maxims which have stood the test of ages, and will forever establish the female character, a virtuous character.” Lest the point somehow be missed, Simmons again reminds readers that, unlike women who have “parents, or brothers, or riches, to defend their indiscretions,” a “poor solitary orphan” must rely “solely upon character.”

The book appears to have sold well, despite Simmons’s accusation on the errata page of “a design to impose on her, and injure the sale of the book.” She ascribes these nefarious doings to the person she “entrusted with the recipes” to prepare them for the press. In the second edition she thanks the fashionable ladies, or “respectable characters,” as she calls them, who have patronized her work, before returning to her main theme: the “egregious blunders” of the first edition, “which were occasioned either by the ignorance, or evil intention of the transcriber for the press.” Ultimately, all her problems stem from her unfortunate condition; she is without “an education sufficient to prepare the work for the press.” In an attempt to sidestep any criticism that the second edition might come in for, she writes: “remember, that it is the performance of, and effected under all those disadvantages, which usually attend, an Orphan.”

These parts of the book evoke sympathy. Women of her time seem to have found the combination of Simmons’ orphan status and her collection of recipes hard to resist, and perhaps part of the reason lies in her intimations of evil as much as her recipes. When the pennywise housewife cracked American Cookery open, she found a guide to a better life, which was the promise of her new country. But worry and danger lurked just below the surface of late 18th-century American life, especially for women on the social margins. In a nation still very much in the making, even a project as simple as the compilation of a cookbook could trigger complex emotions. American Cookery offered U.S. readers the best in matters of food and dining as well as a tale of the tribulations facing less fortunate Americans—including, it seems, the “American Orphan” Amelia Simmons herself.

The post The Cookbook That Declared America’s Culinary Independence appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But there are stories of renewal here, too. In 1992, the bakery chain that defined Northeastern Ohio became the latest business to close its doors. As it turned out, that wasn’t the end of the story, but the beginning of mine.

At its height, Hough (pronounced “Huff’s”) Bakery was a $25 million business with 1,000 employees and some 81,000 square feet in operating space spread over 30 locations across our region. Hough’s bakeries were beloved for their cakes, butter cookies, coconut chocolate bars, and “daffodil” cakes, all of them made from scratch and with top-quality ingredients, not mixes.

The business began with Lionel Archibald “Archie” Pile, who was born on August 29, 1879 in Barbados and immigrated to New York City, where his brothers lived, at age 21.

In 1902, Archie Pile moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where he also had relatives living. He worked at a local grocery store on Hough Avenue, earning $8 per week. After saving $57, Pile made a down payment on what would soon become the first location of Hough Bakery.

On May 25, 1903, Pile opened his doors for business on Hough Avenue. Shortly after, he fell in love with and married Kate Welker. Together, they raised their six children during World War I. As their family grew, Hough Bakery also prospered, despite the ensuing Great Depression. The Piles’ four sons eventually joined the family business, and by the 1950s they led the operation with their father’s wisdom.

Archie Pile and I share a first name, and a devotion to quality baking. I was born in 1948 in Wildwood, Tennessee and grew up under the care of my grandmother. There were very few black families in the small rural area. As a young child without many other children to play with, I would watch my grandmother as she baked and helped out whenever she allowed me to. Seeing her make breads, biscuits, and pies fascinated me, and planted a seed that would eventually grow.

I visited relatives in Cleveland every summer and decided to move there in 1966, after I graduated high school. Once I arrived, I knew several people who worked at Hough Bakery, and they were able to help me get a job.

Customers form a line outside of a Hough Bakery in 1945.

My first position was in the sanitation department. As a black person, it was difficult to rise in rank and join the bakery’s production team. I was denied advancement and told I needed more experience—the very experience they were denying me. After I filed a grievance with the union, the Pile family became aware of my situation and immediately promoted me up to production. This was where my passion for baking reignited, and from that point on, I was unstoppable.

The bakers were very temperamental, and wouldn’t teach everything they knew right away. I had to gain the confidence of the two head bakers. So while one baker was off, I would tell the other one working how much more talented he was. Doing that with both bakers led to them teaching me secrets they wouldn’t ordinarily teach anyone.

After working in various departments, I finally landed my dream job as one of the head bakers in the Specialty Bakery department, a.k.a. the Swedish department. It had gotten its name from an old Swedish baker who worked there and who wrote most of his recipes in Swedish. When he left, it was a nightmare trying to translate his work, which helped the name stick around. The department handled all large-scale catering orders as well as any special requests that customers might have.

This was the department that handled the millionaires; we catered all of Bob Hope’s birthday parties back in the ’70s and ’80s. The largest dessert I created was a brownie cheesecake topped with fruit for an event at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, which served approximately 3,000 guests.

Shortly after the Canton party, Hough Bakery closed. The chain had become so large that when the economy took a turn for the worse, it couldn’t maintain. The original owners sold the brand to a Wisconsin company that promised to retain all our employees, but was ultimately unable to do so. They began to consolidate locations, and eventually the whole operation went bankrupt.

It came as a shock that August day, as we discovered our loss of employment on the six o’clock news. The labor union called a meeting for the remaining 400 employees. They wanted to assist us, but the local baking industry could not absorb that many jobs.

I had the idea to reopen Hough Bakery as an employee-owned company, which led to many meetings and the formation of committees. But, unfortunately, we couldn’t raise the capital needed to move forward. The assets of Hough Bakery were then sold in bankruptcy court. Kraft Foods bought the bakery division just so they could lock up the recipes. People had tried to mass-produce imitations of our most renowned desserts, such as our seasonal daffodil cake, but even at twice the price our original recipes kept customers loyal. Getting ahold of those recipes let Kraft remove some of their biggest competition from the market.

Our lack of success left me disappointed, but not distraught. I had always wanted to own my own bakery, so I went around to auctions buying used baking equipment, which I stored in my basement. To pay the bills, I worked part-time in various catering departments as well as doing odd jobs like planting flowers and washing walls. A few people I worked for took a liking to me, and one catering company even went so far as to give me a three-compartment sink for washing dishes, free of charge.

Things seemed darkest as I looked in vain for a place to open up shop. Finally, I stumbled upon an old, unused bakery that still had a working oven, located in the neighborhood of Collinwood on the east side of Cleveland. The area wasn’t that well off, but at the time was a haven for people of Irish, Italian, and Hungarian descent as well as many black families. As soon as I signed the lease, I became paralyzed with fear. Would anyone show up?

The day that I opened Archie’s Lakeshore Bakery in 1994, I knew things were going to be OK. Almost instantly, people flooded the place, many of them from the surrounding neighborhoods. They had feared they were never going to eat their favorite treats again and were grateful to me for keeping the tradition going. We still make everything from scratch and refuse to alter the quality of our ingredients.

Because Hough Bakery had been a much larger operation than mine, my recipes were cut down in size, making them just different enough from the ones that Kraft had purchased to allow me to legally use them. A few years later, Kraft lost the national rights to the Hough brand, at which point I stepped in and acquired the name for myself.

To date, our most popular dessert is undoubtedly our white cake, which blends the taste of almond with other flavors in a way that is only possible to achieve when you make it from scratch. We’re also known for our “Hungarian Delight,” made by sandwiching raspberry and fudge filling between two butter cookies. We can only make them in the colder months of the year, as the fudge will melt in the summer.

The bakery has been open at the same location for 22 years now. People come from all over to visit us, but the majority of our customer base is still from greater Cleveland. Customers often come to share memories about growing up eating Hough baked goods. (The town of Davidson, North Carolina, which is home to many ex-Clevelanders, has asked us to open an outpost there).

One time, a woman walked into our store and demanded that we allow her to cut into one of our white cakes, as she didn’t believe they were really Hough’s. I was working in the back when I heard a noise coming from the counter.

When I investigated, I found the woman in tears. I asked her what was wrong, and she explained that this cake was a part of her childhood, and that she never thought she’d get to taste it again.

But she had. At Archie’s Lakeshore Bakery, we’ve created a bit of magic of our own.

 
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