BackStory; Three Squares: Mealtime in America

Major funding for Backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is Backstory. Welcome to Backstory. I'm Brian Balla. I'm Nathan Connolly. And I'm Joanne Freeman. We're going to spend the next hour talking about food. And since we're a history show, let's start things off in the 18th century with a fiery newspaper essay written by Benjamin Franklin. Now, Ben Franklin had strong opinions about almost everything, including what Americans ate. Okay, let me see that I can do my best Ben Franklin impersonation here. This is historian Katrina Wester. She says that in his essay, Franklin rushed to the defense of an American food that a British writer had mocked. Benjamin Franklin with a German accent. Okay, here we go.

Pray, let me, an American, inform the gentleman who seems ignorant of the matter, that Indian corn, take it for all in all, is one of the most agreeable and wholesome grains in the world. That's right, corn. That it's green leaves roasted or delicacy beyond expression. That Sam, hominy, succotash, and knockahawk made of it are so pleasing varieties. And that Johnny or Hokek, hot from the fire, is better than a Yorkshire muffin. Sam, hominy, knockahawk? Sam, hominy, succotash, and knockahawk are all corn-based dishes. And why has Ben Franklin defending their honor? Well, by 1766, when Franklin wrote this piece, Great Britain's relationship with its American colonies had started to fracture. The English levy taxes that Americans basically didn't want to pay. Colonists responded by trying to organize boycotts of British goods.

It was in this context that Franklin came across the offending item in the British press. Claiming that the English don't have to be afraid of a boycott staged by the American colonies because to eat their indigestible cornmush for breakfast, they need English tea to swallow it down. What? That's cold. This infuriated Franklin, so he fought back with his pin. Western says the Europeans often mocked the way that American colonists eat. The food habits, the etiquette, the table manners. But going after corn was a bridge too far. Indian corn, as Franklin called it, was indigenous to the American continent and it was a staple of the colonist diets. And who could possibly not like corn? Yeah, what's with those English? In Europe, corn was considered to be animal fodder or food to feed the very poor. The fact that it was Indian corn was also part of the problem in European eyes.

And so was often connoted with being savage. And so if you ate a food that was indigenous and it was connoted with savagery, the idea was that it would turn your savage yourself. Franklin turned these ideas on their head and offered a challenge of his own. Benjamin Franklin answers defending American food but also making a political point at the same time. All this corn eating that the Americans do in different regions is something that connects them. So there is something that unites the colonies that is, of course, not only corn, but also political agency, but basically uses food as a metaphor to bring this point home. After the revolution, Western says corn became the signature food of the new nation, enjoyed by rich and poor alike. Embracing corn also meant that Americans distanced themselves from the European heritage

and embraced a new world heritage. And for this they heavily appropriated Native American culture. It's ironic after the European settlers in a new world have committed genocide. But there is also a late recognition that they also owe to the new world their culture. Make no mistake, food in America is complicated business. It's not just about eating, it's also about cultural identity and cultural appropriation and has been since the country's founding. So today on the show, we offer up some iconic American foods from Johnny Cakes to cake mixes. We'll hear about the sacred meaning of wild rice to the Ojibwe people in northern Minnesota. And I'll bite into an ethnic food, it's been totally Americanized, the burrito. But first, we're taking you to an 18th century feast.

Historian Kelly Fanto Deets writes about food ways on Virginia plantations. She says that feasting was the major form of entertainment for wealthy planters. You would find multiple tablecloths laid out. You would have several courses of food. You would have puttings, you'd have roasted meats, you'd have fruit from all over the place. You'd have, I mean the spread was all about showing off your wealth. There was more food than anyone could have ever eaten at these things. Guests would sit down to eat in the mid afternoon after the mincement several hours drinking in the parlor. Deets says alcohol was every bit as important as the food. Oh my goodness, they had rum from the Caribbean, they had tons of brandy, they had wines that were made on grounds, mid out of blackberry. And so you'd get pretty drunk before dinner. Now of course all of this bounty from the imported rum to the meats in the pudding served at dinner was produced, cooked and served by enslaved people. Our co-host Ed Ayers sat down with Kelly Fanto Deets to talk about these plantation feasts

and the enslaved people who prepared them. They started us off in the dining room with the guests. The whole idea is you go and you feast and feasting was central to southern hospitality. If you think about the pineapple that you see all over Virginia, right? Most people don't even realize what that means. If you were wealthy enough to have a pineapple that meant that you had ships probably going to the Caribbean to pick up your rum, to pick up some exotic fruit, to bring it back. And then if you were hospitable enough, you would offer that pineapple to your guests. It does seem strange that you see these wooden pineapples all across the south. They seem to be big in South Carolina as well. Absolutely. But all that means is we're so freaking rich we have pineapples. Yeah, and we're going to let you eat them. Exactly. Exactly. That's the whole thing, right? It's one thing to feast by yourself. It's another to show off your wealth and your willingness to feast with your guests. And you think about this all about overexerting yourself on eating as much as you possibly can. That is exactly what they were doing on these plantations.

So let's talk about that kitchen. I can't imagine what that must have been like producing this cornucopia of endless food. Can you describe this kitchen for us? Absolutely. So the kitchens that I look at in my work are the ones that are on the larger plantations. So larger plantations are also the ones that are going to be doing this kind of entertaining. The balls and all of that. Cooking in one of these plantations was an incredibly challenging task. And if you think about it in terms of menus that were offered, one of the dishes that Virginians ate constantly. And anyone by the water ate constantly was versions of oysters. So oysters stew, fried oysters, just raw oysters, barbecue oysters. Anyway, you could eat an oyster. Virginians were doing this and you can see this in the records. So imagine one of the dishes that you're having at supper is oysters stew. This is one dish of maybe 10 that are on the table of one of the three courses or four if you're really getting fancy. Now, if anyone has ever shucked an oyster, they know how hard it is to get those little things open. So for recipe calls for 100 oysters.

Wow. It's only one bit of labor for one dish that probably took the cook an hour or more to get through. Right. And so it was a constant job to labor in those kitchens and it was also 24 hours a day. Yeah, your work helped me realize just how hard all this cooking was because it's also fire building, pot lifting, animal scanning, all these different kinds of things. It sounded remarkably labor intensive and also maybe even dangerous. Absolutely. And if you think about the ways in which you have to cook on an open horse. Yeah. And the fact that they were cooking the majority of every day. And I guarantee they were exhausted most of the time that they were cooking. And wearing a long dress. Yes, exactly. Exactly, literally in the fire. You know, enslaved cooks died from burns more than anything. Yeah. And one of the things that enslaved cooks had to do was stick their arm in the oven to see how hot it was. And if it was hot enough to bake any baked goods, you would have to pull it out immediately. It only takes one or two seconds of leaving it in there too long to scald yourself in that situation.

As well as, you know, the dull knives they had to use. I mean, cutting yourself with a dull knife is not something that anyone looks forward to. And I guarantee that the crude utensils that they had during this period did no favors to people's body parts. So we have an embarrassment of too much food really when the company comes to the big house. What would daily life have been like for the enslaved people? I'm guessing that they didn't have to worry about having too many leftovers. Actually, a lot of the enslaved people were underfed, you know, routinely for generations. This is something that plagued most enslaved populations. They did not have enough food and this was an intentional way to keep them busy, you know, not running away. You would be eating, basically, you would get your ration from the overseer. It would be, you know, if you were up in Virginia, it would be a little bit of cornmeal and a piece of fat back. And then you basically had to hunt and create your meals with supplemental food. So enslaved folks had to grow their own gardens. And this is on top of working for their enslavers for 12 hours a day.

They would come back to the quarter. They would have to tend to their own gardens. They would have to go hunt possums or raccoons or squirrels or anything they could get their hands on. And this is also something that you see in the tradition of gumbo is having one pot in the quarter. So if each person only had a little bit of something, by themselves, that's not a lot. But when you have communal eating, when you're able to combine all of the fat back and all of the cornmeal, and then you get somebody's possum and you get somebody's squirrel and you have some oysters to throw into that pot, it becomes something that is essential for not only eating and being full, but having a sense of community in these quarters as well. So are there dangers as we imagine this bounty upstairs and this sort of creativity downstairs as we think about culinary history? Are there risks in doing this? Absolutely. I think it's really important to understand that the romance of food is tightly tethered to the pain of slavery. That every single thing that these people were eating came from the exploitation of enslaved African and African descended people.

And so you cannot have a plantation feast without having thousands of enslaved Africans, making sure that you ate whatever you wanted to if you were a free person. So do we know the names and identities of some of these cooks who are making these wonderful feasts? George Washington's enslaved chef I think is really remarkable and I'll tell you why. He was enslaved by George Washington at the age of 16 years old at Mount Vernon. He married a seamstress. He had children there. When Washington moved to Philadelphia to run this new nation, he brought with him chef Hercules. Now Hercules made a splash in Philadelphia. He met a lot of people. He was very well respected. There's rumors that he or there's records of him dressing up in this, you know, extravagant outfit. He had buckled shoes. He had hat. He had a gold cane. And he would walk down Main Street in Philadelphia and people would bow to him. His kitchen was so well known that people bought leftovers out of the back doors up to $200 a year to eat his food, right?

I would argue that. That's a lot of money, right? So I would argue that chef Hercules is America's first celebrity chef hands down. I can't think of anybody during that period that was more well known than him. So you seem to know a lot about this cooking stuff. How did you get interested in this? So it was a combination of things. I was a professional cook for 10 years in California before I decided to be a historian or go dig in the dirt and be an archaeologist. And so I got into it through actually reading the 18th century Virginia Gazette when I was in graduate school trying to figure out what exactly I wanted to write my dissertation on when they came across all of the ads for enslaved cooks. I had a million questions. Yeah. And then it was nice to use my culinary training in the archives by looking at old cookbooks. And something that I've really enjoyed doing was, you know, you get your white gloves on and you're in the Virginia Historical Society and everything's all precious. And you get this cookbook that still smells like smoke, right?

It has this like a very different funk than the diaries and things have because it was in the kitchen. And just like you would do if you got your grandma's church cookbook, you let the thing open the way it opens and the dirtiest pages and the pages that it naturally opened to were the ones that were used over and over and over again. So I used very pragmatic, very common sense, you know, ideas to think about the ways in which food was prepared and also chosen out of these cookbooks. Does it strike you that some ways we're recovering some of the best parts of this food culture? I think that we are, but it's at the same time that we're still continually ignoring the history of enslaved people. And so again, you know, trying to marry those two things is really important. I found that my work looking at enslaved cooks in these kitchens is kind of a gateway drug for people to talk about slavery. Because most folks won't come to a lecture on slavery, but they'll come to a lecture about food because everybody loves food because there's a food network because people are obsessed with it. When people come and listen to me speak, they very quickly realize that I'm talking about labor, that I'm talking about chattel slavery.

I'm talking about abuse, the subversive roles of these enslaved cooks, and then of course the art that they produce, but it's all one and the same. And you cannot tease those out. And you know, if you go to plantation museums today, and this has been the case for generations, you hear about the mistress cooking the food. You hear about this very sanitized version of history. When in fact, you know, if you look closer or just open your eyes a little bit, you realize very quickly that it's more nuanced than that. It's a lot more complicated. Califanto Deets is the author of Bound to the Fire. How Virginia's enslaved cooks helped invent American cuisine. Earlier, we heard from Katrina Wester, a historian at American University. For our next course, we're going to travel north, near the shores of Lake Superior in Minnesota.

It's one of the few places in the country where the grain known as wild rice still grows, well, wild. These days, it's pricey. Those long black grains can fetch as much as $10 a pound at upscale supermarkets. But Minnesota Public Radio reporter Dan Crocker says wild rice is much more than a gourmet food. Like many Minnesotans, I've eaten my share of wild rice, plain, in soups, in castorals. If you've never tasted it, it has this rich nutty flavor. Almost all the naturally growing wild rice in the country is from Minnesota. It's our official state grain. But to most of us, it's just a food. To the Chippewa or Ojibwe people of northern Minnesota though, wild rice or Monoman in their language is much more than that. Then a lot of people will say that if we don't have that, then we cease to exist somewhat culturally as a people. This is Thomas Howes, the natural resources manager for the Fondalak band of Lake Superior Chippewa.

He says he has a 20 pound bag of wild rice in his pantry and a 40 pound bag of rice in his basement waiting to be processed for regular meals and for special ceremonies. From the time the baby is born, there's ceremonies until we send people off to make their journey into the afterlife. Monoman is a central component of those and everywhere in between, every spring, every fall. There are certain ceremonies we hold and Monoman has to be part of that. The Fondalak band is one of seven Ojibwe bands in northern Minnesota and the reason they're all here in Minnesota is because of wild rice. They migrated to the Great Lakes region from the northeast about 500 years ago. Their oral traditions tell of a prophecy that told them to journey west until they came to a place where food grew on the water. We came here from the east coast of the United States and we're told that we'd find our permanent home where we found this wild rice or this Monoman, this food that grows out of the water and that's held to be true. Earlier this fall, I met Howes at a canoe landing of a small lake on the Fondalak reservation which was created in 1854.

Today I'm looking at what we call Joggenashi and so double-winning or dead fish lake in English. It was almost completely covered with the tall green stalks of wild rice plants. You know, you essentially don't see water when you're looking at this. You just see what looks like a field of grasses. That's because wild rice is actually a grass. Early explorers dubbed it wild rice. What looks like a rice kernel is really the slender black cereal grain inside the top of the plant that grows out of the muck in the bottom of shallow lakes and rivers. As we talk, a pair of men pull up in a canoe, including 58-year-old Ed Jocola. He says he's been rising as long as he can remember. His partner, Jared Ojibwe, helps scoop about 80 pounds of green rice out of the canoe bottom into big plastic bags. To harvest it, one man pulls the canoe through the rice. His partner uses wooden sticks to knock the grain off the stalks into the bottom of the canoe.

It's hard work and once it's dried in process, it will be a much smaller pile. Ojibwe says he worries that young people nowadays aren't willing to put in the work needed to keep the tradition alive. The younger ones are all on Facebook somewhere. Or they're scared of the water, scared of bugs, he says. The annual harvest of rice on the reservation is actually a revival of a tradition of a sacred food that nearly disappeared. This particular lake at Deadfish, before 20 years ago, rice like this wasn't very common. And so you'd have rice here, one out every six, eight years, just dependent. You'd have to get lucky with the weather. How says in the early 1900s, the county government began digging a network of drainage ditches, part of a failed effort to make the land more suitable for conventional farming. The idea was that you were going to make land more, settleable, basically make some of this landscape less wet.

It's 50% wetlands roughly out here on the reservation. And so that's a tough challenge. But those drainage ditches disrupted the flow of water in and out of the lakes and nearly destroyed the wild rice. In the 1990s, the tribe began experimenting with ways to revive rice habitat. They put in dams and holding ponds to try to mimic the area's hydrology before all the canals were put in. And that's really seemed to work. And then now what we see, you know, for the last 20 years is that rice essentially is here almost every year, the suffer real catastrophic precip events. And not just here, the Fondelac Chippewa have cleared out aquatic vegetation that's crowded up the rice and other lakes. They've spread seed to help it grow back. And now the band is helping other tribes restore wild rice elsewhere in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. We're on to something. Much of wild rice management is left to nature. But there is, for bringing rice lakes back, there is a little piece that certainly humans can play. So it's, in our mind, it's like we want to try to keep these lakes as healthy as possible for as long as possible.

Because we have so few lakes that have it. But you can see from talking with the community members how important it is. It's so much of our unique sort of Ojibwe, Fondelac Ojibwe identity. Later, another canoe pulls up to the landing at Deadfish Lake. 20-year-old Bruce Martino heaves it onto shore. He says it's his fifth year rising, first with his grandfather, now with his dad, Francis Martino. He's definitely not afraid of bugs, and not spending all his time on Facebook. I ask him why he does it. If we lose this, then we lose, being as a people, I guess. Can't lose this or the language. A lot of sure that food that grows on the water. It's like culture. The first rice he harvested this year went to his grandmother, a young person helping an elder keep the tradition alive. Dan Crocker is a reporter at Minnesota Public Radio.

A few years ago, Dan met a Fondelac tribal elder named Jim Northrup at a wild rice camp. Tribal members had gathered to dry and process their wild rice harvest. Next to a crackling campfire, Northrup recited his poem about rice and rice. It's called Monoman. tobacco swirled in the lake as we offered our thanks. Calm water welcomed us. Rice heads nodded in agreement. Ricing again. Be which money do. Seed or caress the heads. Right rice came along to join us in many meals this winter. The rice bearded up. We saw the wind move across the lake, an eagle, a couple of coots. Sun smiled everywhere. Relatives came together. Fingers stripping rice well, laughing, gossiping, remembering.

It's nearly easy to feel a part of people that lived here before. It felt good getting on the lake. It felt better getting off, carrying a thin new load of food and centuries of memories. That's Jim Northrup reciting his poem, Monoman. Northrup died last year. He was 73. Hey, Joe Han, Nathan. We've been talking a lot about food.

But I didn't want to just talk about food. I wanted to eat some food. Will you put that down? We have a show to do. Very funny, Nathan. But you might be surprised to hear that I actually did some hard hitting reporting on one of my favorite American dishes, the burrito. Well, now wait a minute there, Brian. Isn't that technically a Mexican food? Huh, Joe Han, always the historian. You certainly got into the crux of things as usual. But I don't want to say more. Can we just roll the tape? Hola. Hi, Brian. Hi, Brian. How are you? Comostas. Nice to meet you. Ramona. We paid a visit to Patti Hinnich, the host of Patti's Mexican table on PBS. Beautiful house. Oh, thank you. Thank you. It's a little bit not Mexican outside, but once you come in, it feels very... She takes us a newer kitchen and picks up something that looks kind of like a bell pepper.

So this is the poblano chili. And it's my favorite chili. Because it's adorable. Just look at it. It's like super curvy. It's chubby. It's shiny. This is my favorite, really, of them. Well, no. No, I don't know. I mean, I love the poblanos. So this is fresh and then... Hinnich is passionate about Mexican food. She grew up in Mexico City and she's lived in the US for 20 years now. So I was anxious to hear her thoughts on Mexican food in the US, especially the American burrito. I don't know who decided to add everything into the burrito, which was, you know, the meat, the seasoned meat, or chicken, or whatever protein. And then, oh, if you're going to eat the rice and the beans, why don't we throw it in there too? So it's the rice and the beans and the guacamole. And then these other American garnishes are added. You know, the sour cream and the cheddar cheese and more salsa.

And I think that Americans absolutely love the burritos. And Mexicans look at the American burritos and think, oh my God, what did they do to this dish, you know? So I want to show you the Mexican way. So you might have found something like the burrito in the 16th century when Spanish conquistadors introduced wheat flour to the native diet. So in the south of Mexico, everybody was making corn tortillas. And there was no way to, to, you know, add flour tortillas to that repertoire because the south of Mexico adores its corn tortillas. But from the center to the north, they started adapting the tortilla to the flour tortilla, which was also sort of a variation of the pan anave or pita bread that the Spanish had brought with them. It turns out the American burrito is a direct descendent of the Mexican burrito. Always made with a flour tortilla that is fresh, you know, either just made or from the tortilla.

And it's always heated. It's never served cold or as a wrap. And it only has one ingredient, but the ingredient is one exquisite ingredient. You know, it's not a piece of meat that you throw in there. It's chilloria, for example, which is what I made for you, which is pork butt or shoulder. You have to use meat that still has fat in it, and it has orange juice and water. And so the meat first cooks in that until it's completely cooked and it starts caramelizing. And then you shred that meat and you finish it off in an anchochili sauce or a dobo. And the anchochili sauce or a dobo has anchochili. You have to remove this stem. And then after you remove this stem, you open it up.

And then you let all of the seeds out. White onion, garlic cloves, parsley, oregano, a juicy amount of cumin, a black pepper, and vinegar. I like to add a splash of apple cider vinegar. And then you just let that cook until the liquid has become very thick and the meat has really absorbed it. And then you have this. Potty rolled the chilloria in a flour tortilla. And when I finally got to taste it, that's amazing. What does it taste like? It tastes succulent and spicy and the flavors just keep exploding.

But they're really absolutely amazing. So some people will also add some avocado slices on the side or guacamole. But the thing is, when you don't pack everything together, you can really shine a light on the taste of the chilloria and well-made flour tortilla. When you throw everything in there, you can't appreciate, I think. It sounds almost like a philosophy for life. Right, right. Paddy, I must tell you, this is really the most amazing food. And this is really low-key Mexican food. I mean, this is nothing sophisticated. This is really burritos or buritas made with chilloria or machaca. I really workers, you know, constructions, side workers. Yeah, but there's this pride, you know, for all Mexicans that no matter who you are,

where you come from, food is fabulous, you know? There was one final step in my burrito investigation. We brought a pork burrito from a popular national chain, which I will not name, for a taste test. You know, for a scientific rigor. I'm game. Okay, let's open this up. I'll give you instructions, too. Okay. First you open the bag. Right. Then you, many would throw the bag out their car window. So, no, I'm just kidding. We would never do that. So, already, you can see the difference. This is gigantic. Right. It's our Gantuan. You might say, even after we cut it in half. The tortilla is probably the size of like a pizza, right? This is the burrito that ate Chicago, apparently. Oh my gosh.

Right? Okay. You can say, and mind you, whoever assembled this didn't begin to put all the possibilities in yet. There are what? At least five, six, seven different ingredients. I want to taste the meat that went in. Okay. Okay, let me see. You know, this is the first time I've seen you stop smiling since we walked into the house. I don't love it. This, I think, is like if you're starving, and they give this to you, you eat it, and you're thankful. You know, but I don't think this is something that you stop and sit down for. Right. Entirely forgettable. Right. But I'm very grateful that you brought it. Paddy Hinnich hosts the award-winning PBS show Paddy's Mexican Table.

You can find a recipe for Chilorio Buritas on our website at backstoryradio.org. And we have one more podcast you may be interested in. It's called Battle Scars. Battle Scars is a podcast for veterans from many countries and all branches of the services to share their stories. Here are some examples of the kinds of things you'll hear. Host Tom Tran talks to those who saw action on the front lines and in the elite fighting units, but he also interviews those whose contributions are often overlooked, but whose stories are no less riveting. You'll hear from Vets, like the badly burned soldier, whose five-year-old daughter, actually taught him how he shouldn't be embarrassed by his injuries. You'll hear about a soldier who killed in battle, and the morbid curiosity civilians have about her experience. A combat medic explains how he feels God heard his battlefield prayers,

and intervene to save the lives of the wounded men he treated, and why the memories of one particular casualty still upset him. And Tom shares his own experiences of fighting in Iraq, and how he struggled to make the adjustment to civilian life. Sometimes there are tears, sometimes there are laughs, and just occasionally there's some salty language. To listen to the show, just search for Battle Scars in Apple podcasts or whichever podcast app you use. As with any good meal, we're going to finish things off with something a little sweet. Food historian Laura Shapiro has a special place in her heart for one dessert in particular. Hey Laura, this is Brian. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having me do this. I love thinking about cakes. Now, I've actually tried to make some cakes over my life, and they've failed miserably. I made the mistake of trying to make them more or less from scratch, so I know how hard they are. Well, what went wrong? Tell me what went wrong.

Well, you name it. One came out incredibly flat. It just never rose. And my, let's just say, backseat driver who was advising me nonstop insisted it was because I kept opening the oven to take a pick. Your backseat driver was absolutely right. Oh, yeah. No, no, she makes great cakes. There's no question. And the other came out weighing about 120 pounds. Surely I'm not the only person who failed miserably at cake making. Not at all. In fact, you were just one in a very long line of struggling home cooks. Shapiro says cakes were notoriously difficult to make, even after measurements and ovens became standardized in the early 20th century. Back then, women often rode into flower companies to ask what had gone wrong with their cakes? Why is there this weird crack across the top? Why didn't it rise? Why does it sink in the middle?

All these things that are just, you know, people who bake are supposed to know these things and they didn't. In fact, one company, General Mills, invented the iconic character of Betty Crocker to answer these kinds of questions. But then flower companies introduced a new product that could make those worries vanish in a heartbeat. It was the cake mix. The cake mixes really came about because flower companies were trying to figure out ways to sell more flower. Though first invented in the 1930s, cake mixes didn't really take off until the late 1950s. And the food companies were standing around trying to figure out why more cake mixes were not flying off the shelf. They knew from surveys and from the things that people said that it was a treacherous proposition to make a cake from scratch. And a lot could go wrong. Things could, just what happened to you, things could fail to rise. The oven could be wrong.

And with a cake, you know, you can't cover it up with mayonnaise and pretend that it was supposed to be that way. No, no, no. I suggested that we hang that flat one on the wall before it was rejected out of hand. So if you blow it with a cake, you have blown it. And the cake is a, it's a gift from the heart. You're baking that cake for someone you love. The Pillsbury Company summed it right up in their very famous advertising slogan at that time. Nothing says lovin' like something from the oven. And they, they really put that across in the advertising and companies glombed onto that idea. If it comes out of the oven, if you baked it with your own two hands and you pulled it out of the oven, you were giving a little bit of your heart. You were showing your love, especially for your sweetheart or your husband. He's going to think you are great when you show him this beautiful cake that you made. And that was the idea of a lot of that early advertising.

So to bake a cake was to confirm that you were the ideal housewife. Yes, absolutely. Because it was such a heavily symbolic thing, because it was so important to turn out a beautiful cake. The idea of doing it with a shortcut, getting it from a box, this was a huge guilt producer. Also, the early cake mixes weren't that good. So you were getting a product that was full of guilt and not that great cake. Not, not ideal. So what did marketers do to address that issue? Well, there are some competing theories about this. I think the thing that turned cake mixes around was frosting. Well, come on. I mean, what do we really eat cake for anyway? Well, yes. So the frosting was obviously the thing that people wanted. Besides, if it's a cake mix cake, frankly, it does taste kind of disgusting. And the frosting could be the only good thing about it though, after well, they figured out how to make frosting mixes. And those were terrible. I mean, tasted terrible. So I'm not a fan of cake mix cakes or frosting mixes.

But as soon as they started advertising, not only the frosting and the way that you could turn these cake mix cakes into something that looks like it came out of their side with elaborate shapes and characters and people. So this was the personal touch. That is exactly what the advertising and what the women's magazines were pitching. Make the cake. That's the least important part of this. And then make it your own. This is creative. That is you are the little Picasso of your cake. Now, were these mixes part of a broader trend that they lead the trend towards processed foods? I know that when I talk about the 1950s with my students, I talk about TV dinners. For instance, you got your meat, you got your potato, you got your vegetable, you got your dessert. Well, they're different from TV dinners in an important way. They were part of that whole way of post war packaged foods absolutely. And they were a prime example of that TV dinners never became dinner. They people stayed away from them at first. They were they didn't were not a hit right out of the market at all. And then gradually people started to use them.

You'd give them to the kids when you were going out or the babysitter would. Yeah, exactly when we got them. Yes, exactly. And it was great. We rooted for our parents to go out much better than than home cooking. But nobody in a gazillion years, you would not have put a TV dinner in front of company. Cake mixes unlike many other packaged products actually became cake. They became in the American mind and imagination, the thing that they originally imitated. Well, if I were in your family, I would challenge you to a taste test. Has anybody done that? Have you ever done a blind comparison of a homemade cake and a store bought mixed cake? I did do a taste test once. I did it to a group of women who were gathered to hear me speak on the wonderful topic of Betty Crocker in Michigan. And I baked a simple cake from scratch and a simple cake mix cake. And I brought them both to the talk and I cut them up and I had people taste them.

And I asked them which they preferred and could they identify the cake mix to a woman. They identified not only the cake mix cake. They knew exactly the brand was and within that brand and they preferred it hands down over the scratch cake. Wait, wait, wait, wait a second. I did not see that coming. Why did they prefer to hands down over the scratch cake? Because our palettes have changed in response to this. I think that is the real role of packaged foods in this country. They have changed our palettes. We are now much more responsive to sweetness, to chemicalness and in terms of cakes to that artificially light texture, those cake mix cakes are going to stay light for like a year. My cake. I made them both at the same time and brought them in the next morning and my cake was already starting to dry out a tiny bit, not Betty Crocker.

Her cakes were light forever. So they could taste that and they liked it better. But I think our palettes are now we spring to attention at sweetness and chemical. Laura Shapiro is a food historian. Her latest book is What She Ape, six remarkable women and the food that tells their stories. And if anyone is looking for a relatively easy cake to make from scratch, Shapiro recommends Maida Heater's Lemon Cake. We'll post a link to the recipe on the backstory website. So it seems to me that cake mixes are really about American marketing. It triumphs. Speaking of which, wasn't your daddy marketing, Joanne?

Yes, indeed. My dad was a market researcher who worked for a while for general foods. And we would always get the food that was trying to be marketed. But of course, for us to be able to give up as kids, the Freeman kids, honest feedback about the food, like any other sort of focus group, we would get like three boxes of like say a snack food. And one would be marked A and one would be marked C and our covers were full of things with white wrappers and letters on them. But we would have to taste the different, you know, A, B and C snack food and then sort of come up with what we thought was, you know, how did it taste to us? What did it make us think about kind of like the Freeman family focus group? And then my father would absorb that kind of stuff. And then somehow it would get twisted around and end up being marketed as the spontaneous expression of how wonderful this food is. It'll make you feel X. It'll make you feel Y. So your flair for language and came from having a taste test everything under your dad's watch.

No, but it's an amazing example, though, too, of the way in which, you know, these big questions about identity and nation end up coming back to like the family breakfast lunch and dinner table, you know. For me coming up, I mean having cereal in the morning on Saturday while watching cartoons seemed like a quintessential American thing to do. But my Jamaican grandmother, you know, coming from a British background just wanted to have like tea and something very different right in the morning. So that was a kind of culture class, I guess one could say in my house. And I was just amazed by the American mainstreaming of the bagel. Today, you in Washington, DC or even in small towns, you'd be hard pressed to not find a bagel chain. You know, when I was a kid, the bagel was a pretty exotic food and you had to go to the delicatessen in certain neighborhoods, certainly to get a good bagel. And I think the embrace by a broad cross section of Americans of any ethnic food certainly is a marker of having arrived. I mean, I am just blown away by the variety of Mexican food that all Americans consume is a regular part of their diet or virtually all.

And of course, you know, the ultimate confirmation is the chain, the taco bell, right? You really made it, right? An entire international corporate chain built around an ethnic food that might have been very hard to find in a lot of places in America, really just 50 years ago. Right? And I recall in South Florida where there's a huge number of West Indian groceries and obviously a large West Indian population, that the arrival of Bahama Breeze, which was this, you know, kind of mainstream corporate take on West Indian food, that you would find, you know, in the parking lot of a giant shopping mall, that that didn't really feel like you had made it, right? That they felt like an adulteration of, you know, really good kind of down home food and certainly wasn't owned by Caribbean people just based on what they had done with the menu. You know, so it's a it's a fraught relationship, I would say, or on one level, it's nice to believe that you can have, you know, a taco bell like KFC and a Bahama Breeze on the same stretch and that means you are now as part of the mainstream, but it also means you've lost a whole lot in terms of the actual stuff that goes into the original take on some of this food.

Well, right, and then you're teaching people that that version of it is the it right that what you get at a taco bell is that is the definition for many Americans of what a taco really is. And it's not right. Well, and then to close the circle, right? So then you have whatever the chain is that has created the sort of Americanized version of some other kind of a food and then that gets exported from America to overseas. And then we teach them, but that's what a taco is to taste like America. That's going to do it for today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your burning history questions. We know you have some. You'll find us at backstoryradio.org or send an email to backstory at Virginia.edu.

We're also on Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter at Backstory Radio and feel free to review the new show in the iTunes store. Whatever you decide to do, don't be a stranger. This episode of Backstory was produced by Bridget McHarsey, Nina Ernest, Emily Gadig and Ramona Martinez. Jamal Milner is our technical director. Diana Williams is our digital editor and Joey Thompson is our researcher. Additional help came from Sequoia Carrillo, Robin Bloom, Anjali Bishash, Emma Greg, Courtney Spania and Aaron Teeling. Our theme song was written by Nick Thorburn. Other music in this episode came from Ketsa, Pottington Bear and Jazaar. Special thanks this week to John Lomon of the Virginia Folklife program and thanks as always to the Johns Hopkins University Studio in Baltimore. Backstory is produced at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Provost's Office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation. Brian Ballow is Professor of History at the University of Virginia and the Dorothy Compton Professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs.

Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connelly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. Backstory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.