This Little Piggy…

They say that human flesh tastes like pork.

This is the sort of in-the-field research you always want to farm out to an intern; it is enough to tell them that they are making an important contribution to your work, and that this honor is enough to compensate them for such dreary complaints as long hours, lack of pay, and unpalatable drudgery. This is, after all, what internships were created for. There’s really no need for them to know ALL the details of their duties. Poke that, light this, taste that — it’s all in a day’s work to them.

Think of it this way: you’re feeding them. They should be grateful! Sell the task as a free lunch. Interns jump at that. Label the samples “Mystery Meat” and laugh about how terribly droll you are. Tell them it’s fresh.

Cooking With Kids, Caroline Ackerman, A Gryphon House Book, 1981

How To Please Your Man

An old joke says that if you think the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, you’re aiming too high.

If you get this joke, all it really means is that you’ve replaced one horribly sexist mindset for another: the idea that a man’s love can be won by either feeding or fucking him.

In 1962, recipe books and pamphlets still assumed that a woman was doing the cooking, and that her position within the home was secured by her doing so. Maple Leaf Mills, makers of Monarch brand flour, certainly thought so. Their booklet is full of cartoons such as these which leave no doubt about where the woman’s place is.

The Soft Way to Your Husband’s Heart, Maple Leaf Mills, 1962

A Child Model Speaks

Yes, I was a child model. I did all sorts — clothing catalogues, TV spots, book covers. My Mom took me to all the shoots and they saved the money I earned for a college education. Well, that was the idea; that’s what I was always told. As it turns out, when I turned 18, there wasn’t anything left. My Dad had used it all to pay bills. I think my Mom wanted to be a model herself. You know; same old story. I loved it, actually, because it meant getting out of school. It was my “job.” I thought it was pretty cool. It was easy work, let’s face it.

Ah yes — the Fast Fixin’ Kids’ Recipes, that one was memorable. I did a bunch of stuff for Better Homes and Gardens. They wanted to be “multi-cultural” and all that, so they hired kids who all looked real different. This kid on the cover with me was a sweetheart. He just giggled and smiled. Honestly, I think he was on something — cold medicine or something, Some Moms did that to keep their kids obedient — pliable, you know. Would just smile and smile and do whatever they were asked then fall asleep.

The photographer for this book got some terrible shots. Real clunkers — kids with their eyes closed, weird facial expressions, etc. In one picture a boy dressed up as a cowboy was literally crying when the shot was taken — and they used it! He looked just miserable, my God.

They had this enormous cookie made in the shape of a bear, covered with frosting. This one girl had to pretend to eat it. She was a trooper. She threw up constantly. Her Mom said it was nerves, but it was because she nibbled the entire time.

I’ve got this gape-mouthed, wide-eyed look going. I’m staring at a burger, or was supposed to. In fact, they took this picture when I was looking at the hand puppet the photographer was waving. They do that, in kid’s shoots, to produce the kind of expressions they want. Well, you don’t want to know what he was doing with that puppet.

Seriously, look at that cover. Why would anyone look like that over a burger? Was it made of gold? No. Mostly it was made of glue and lacquer and all the shit they put on the food to make it look fresh. The food never smelled like food, you know — it smelled like fumes; chemical fumes. You never wanted to lean in too close.

Fast Fixin’ Kids’ Recipes, Better Homes and Gardens, 1988

A Spot Of (Batter) Bother

If you start trying to come up with definitions for the word “spot,” you’ll be here all day. That’s what happens when ambitious words want to be good at everything — like that obnoxious kid at school who’s on all the teams, plus the chess club, plus band, plus yearbook, and then decides in his (or her) spare time to run for student government. Spot excels at being a noun; a verb; an adjective; can be found cozied up to anything as a modifier; straddles all classes on the social ladder; and can also boast being an excellent example of onomatopoeia.

Spots even cross existential lines. They can appear as words, in speech, in actions, and as actual stains. While a book which has been spotted is usually considered ruined, like a maid whose reputation has been sullied by a feckless youth, a cookbook is usually considered improved, if not validated, by such attention. It means it has been used — like the maid — but in a good, socially responsible way. The book has served its purpose.

Such is the case with old cookbooks in particular, especially ones which have been used so often over many years that they have become — like a woman — soft, wrinkled, supple, and forgiving. If you can find a pristine first edition of Julia Child’s The Art of French Cooking, that’s great, but not nearly as valuable as a well-loved, well-thumbed, stained and spattered one, its pages a palimpsest of print and dried organic matter identifiable only by the recipe upon which it rests. Those brown spots next to roasted meats are gravy. The ones adjacent to pancakes are batter.

All of them are spots of bother — trouble and love (something akin to what the maid has gotten herself into).

Mastering The Art Of French Cooking, Julia Child, 1961

Also from this book: Breaking Eggs

The Forme of Cury

The notion that illness can be eased with food as medicine is an ancient one. We have the sayings which marry foods with health such as “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” (which sounds like advice dating back to Eden, but is in fact the invention of apple farmers desperate for a way to preserve their livelihoods after Prohibition made cider-making illegal), and “starve a fever, feed a cold” (which people often confuse for the other way around — a bit of bad advice from the 15^th century). But the very words we use for both cooking and medicine come from the same source, and recipes for both food and medicines always used to be found (until very recently) in the same place — cookbooks.

The book compiled in 1390 by “the Chief Master Cooks of King Richard II” and published in 1791, was given the name The Forme of Cury, by its author, Samuel Pegge, which gives us an interesting etymological lynchpin with which to explore this link.

The Latin cura means care. The derivative curare means to take care of. The middle English curen from which we get cure means both to heal and to preserve — which are of course one and the same, as both seek to prolong a state of being. To cure is to fix, and to fix is also to set in place. (It is worth noting that we also use the word fix to mean a problem, as in “a right fix.”) To take the time and effort to cure something then — to fix it — takes care. Care implies both thoughtfulness (as in careful) and an investment (as in to care for or about something).

Pegge’s word cury comes directly from the French cuire — to cook, boil or grill (i.e. the application of heat). It is from this root we get cuisine, and culinary, from the Latin culinarius, meaning pertaining to the kitchen (culina being both kitchen and food). Although the word culinary was in use by the 1630s, 160 years later Pegge chose to use cury, which shows us that the language for the pursuits of the kitchen was still hovering between the middle English and the French — with so few literate people, it was primarily oral terminology, especially when used by cooks. The concept that one could both nourish the body and heal it from same source was very much in place, since the ingredients were often the same.

Nowadays we divorce medicine from food into different realms, though both are variations of chemistry. The vitamins and minerals we take as supplements are to be found in food, and indeed, were understood long before we isolated them to figure out why they worked. Foods rich in vitamin C were widely used to prevent scurvy long before we knew that scurvy was caused by a lack of vitamin C. Penicillin was utilized long before Alexander Fleming discovered it, because people used moldy leather to bandage wounds. Honey is both food an medicine being an antiseptic and antibacterial substance as well as a preservative.

If the words cury and culinary and cuisine remind you of the word curious, it’s because they too come from the same place. In Latin we have curiosus, meaning to be careful, diligent, inquiring and meddlesome — all of which are necessary attitudes to employ when developing recipes and cures. The old French gives us curios, meaning solicitous, anxious, inquisitive, odd and strange. All of these describe someone attempting to diagnose a condition and find a cure for it. A curio is an object of mystery and interest, much like a sick person whom the gods have smitten with an invisible ailment we now know to be a disease. The word curious dates from the 14^th century — around the time Richard II was being fed by his master cooks — though by Samuel Pegge’s time in the late 1700s, it had taken on a slightly salacious connotation in that being curious implied wanting to see something forbidden a dangerous and possibly sinful act — after all, curiosity killed the cat. It is no surprise then that in publishing, the word curious is shorthand for erotic or pornographic.

History is littered with people whose curiosity got them in a lot of hot water with the powers that be, for whom accepting things at face value meant stability and the preservation of power. Looking too closely at the stars or into the body meant uncovering the apparatus of life — the province of God. Telescopes and microscopes — made possible by grinding glass to see what was once invisible to the naked eye drew the veil away from the mechanics of things allowing humans to manipulate them instead of leaving it to the cosmos, much like Dorothy coming upon the Wizard of Oz at the controls. Curiosity is what ate at Dorothy, and what cured her. Curiosity is what got Eve into a fix, though the apple has undergone a significant rehabilitation since her story was told as a warning against temptation. 

Glass is made by cooking sand and curing it. It transforms the opaque into the transparent. By cooking, we are able to shed light on ourselves.

The Forme of Cury, Samuel Pegge, 1791

Cooking By Encyclopedia

If you want a quick glimpse into American social mores, crack open a cookbook. Recipe books have always reflected the lives of the people who compose them — whether it reveals the importance of summer fruit preservation in 17^th century family cookbooks, with their page upon page of nearly identical recipes for making marmalade (in order to allow the rare ripe oranges from southern Europe to last the winter in the north), or the newly hip shabby chef attitude brought to the kitchen by today’s Dads (see Jamie Oliver).

The ability to publish large books for a reasonable price allowed books on cookery and household management to find their place in the homes of literate women, who were able to expand their repertoire of dishes beyond those which had formerly been passed down within the family. In addition to the recipes for food, certain ideas about how to run a home —how to manage a household economy, how to decorate, how to entertain — became codified according to this new source of knowledge from experts.

In Victorian England, the young Isabella Beeton became an authority on all things related to the feminine art of household management (from mistress to maid), launching the ascendency of women into an area of expertise (cooking) previously limited to men.

As late as 1970, the same sorts of ideas about how to run a kitchen were being reproduced in Better Homes and Garden’s Encyclopedia of Cooking. In the front, there is this rather lackluster photograph of the food editors engaging in one of their evaluation meetings which determine the suitability of a recipe for inclusion into their cooking Bible. What an unhappy and joyless bunch they are.

These ladies might be wearing the latest in feminine fashion, but they are still relegated to the kitchen, rather than the boardroom. The introduction states: “Within the Encyclopedia of Cooking are dishes to delight the lady who wants to stay slim or help her husband and children to eat right.” Is that all? Is that an acceptable sentence construction?

Sadly, something intrinsic had been lost in the move from cookbooks written by individuals to ones written by committee — passion and a vocabulary as rich as the food and personality of the person cooking it. Antique cookbooks feature quaint instructions that lend the dish a flavor of their own, especially the 15^th century recipes which all seem to end with the requirement that one “serve it forth.”

There is something honorable in that particular intonation that implies all that the Encyclopedia has to spell out — there was no need to stay slim or help a family “eat right” back then. There is a difference between simply putting the dish on a table and serving it forth. Is it a coincidence that it comes from the same era of self-serve everything and the TV dinner?

Encyclopedia of Cooking, Better Homes and Gardens, 1970

Also from this book: It’s A Green, Green, Green, Green World, Teddy Bear’s Picnic, Seafoam Cantaloupe Pie