Food
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Emanuela Scarpellini, A tavola! Gli italiani in 7 pranzi (Rome, 2012). The first part of the title is a summons to come eat, and the second part translates as “The Italians in Seven Meals.” The book begins approximately with Italian unification in 1861 and runs to the present. The English translation will be published by Palgrave Macmillan later this year. ↩︎
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Scarpellini, chap. 5. ↩︎
Not looking forward to higher fuel and food prices here in Northern New England just because Orange Turd doesn’t understand how regional markets work among friends and allies. #TrumpsEconomy #MoscovianCandidate
I love this image of reading. We’ve all been there, if not with a donkey in tow.
Source: [Pursuit of knowledge under difficulties] by Wordsworth Thompson, chromolithograph (L. Prang & Co.), 1878., Library of Congress, Popular Graphic Arts Collection, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016649779/.
According to the Frankfurter Rundschau today, Russian food producers are adding banned “meat glue” (transglutaminase) to products to increase their volume in the face of the inflation that Putin’s illegal war is bringing them. HT @[email protected]
History and the Packaged Gnocchi
One evening after work recently, I was half-starved and wanted something I could cook quickly. I saw some packaged gnocchi in the cupboard, made by De Cecco, which I thought would fit the bill, until I started reading the directions. Unfortunately, these were quite long, and they mentioned all kinds of ingredients not in the package, so I gave up. I didn’t want a detailed recipe. I just wanted to know how to cook the gnocchi. A few days later, while editing an English translation of a book about Italians and food in the modern era, I learned something that made me go back to the gnocchi.1
In the early post–World War II decades, when the Italian food industry was trying to get consumers—in this context mainly women—to buy its new, ready-made food products, it decided that offering detailed preparation suggestions for the integration of other foods into its packaged products would improve the image of the new products, that is, make them more legitimate and appealing. But consumers bought ready-made foods for their convenience, not for the opportunity to prepare something elaborate. If one wanted to make something more involved, one could do it the old-fashioned way, from scratch, even if one might use certain intermediate manufactured goods like bouillon cubes or dry pasta.2
With this nugget about Italy’s food history in hand, I went back to the gnocchi package whose directions had thwarted me earlier. I still found only one very detailed paragraph, nothing short about the gnocchi themselves, as pasta packages in this country have led me to expect. But this time I decided I had better skip ahead in the directions, and, sure enough, what I needed was there, buried near the end: “In the meantime, cook the gnocchi in plenty of boiling salted water, remove them as they rise to the surface …” So that was what the “ready in 2 min.” label on the front of the package was referring to. Apparently this step is such common knowledge in Italy that there is no reason to highlight it in readily accessible instructions, even if the manufacturer still feels the need to make its product more attractive to potential customers with a detailed recipe.
But the package in my hand was for the American market, so why attach the same, apparently decades-old assumptions about food and gender in Italy to it? It hardly makes sense, except if explained in terms of the product’s postwar Italian history. Language from that context seems to have been translated into English without giving much thought to this context. Or is this a way to market something very ordinary, little potato dumplings, as something special? In any case, I’m pretty sure that the packaged gnocchi my European spouse bought for the pantry still carry part of their history in the accompanying directions, which at least I can read now.
Consumption History Again
Park & Shop Shopping Center, Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, DC, via Library of Congress.
Yesterday I asked how I could integrate the consumption history I’m learning into my teaching, and I pointed to a couple examples where it’s already there. But I missed a glaringly obvious one: the Great War.
Consumption is a vital part of the story in Gerald Feldman’s classic Army, Industry, and Labor in Germany, 1914—1918 (1966), insofar as the purchasing power of labor was inextricably linked to Germany’s social and political stability and, therefore, the country’s ability to produce sufficient armaments to continue fighting. The point is more accessible in Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914—1918 (1998 and 2004), which I have used in a course on the Great War and will use again next fall in one on modern Germany. There is also Belinda Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (2000), which I will be using in a graduate course on war and society this summer.
I also usually bring up a much earlier aspect of consumption history when I address the Enlightenment and the public sphere: coffee houses. To make this point, there is a delightful reading from before the Enlightenment on the Internet Modern History Sourcebook: “The First English Coffee-Houses, c. 1670—1675.”
Of course, none of this is informed by a specific historiography of consumption history, but it does point out how this topic is already in my teaching. But there’s a difference between including a topic and addressing it systematically. To think about war and society in Europe, I can at least draw on the periodizing nomenclature of “cabinet war,” “people’s war,” and “total war” to help describe the level of societal involvement in interstate conflicts over the past few centuries (Stig Förster et al.). If such language and periodization exists for understanding consumption history, I have not yet learned it.
Perhaps the main point is to recognize modern consumer societies as having a history in the first place, instead of taking them as a direct reflection of human nature and, hence, rendering them ahistorical, as too often happens in simplistic political rhetoric that opposes capitalism and communism—rhetoric that invariably finds its way into student spoken and written comments. I sometimes try to do this with economic thought in the early modern period, but historicizing capitalism should be a central historiographical problem for the modern era, too.
Generous Farm Share Yesterday
Our weekly farm share feeds two people with room to spare, and often it works okay for three. There is less diversity than at the grocery store, because we eat what is in season, but a lot is in season in the summer. Yesterday’s share was particularly amazing: Asian greens, salad mix, spinach, kale, spring onions, cauliflower, beets with greens, zucchini, broccoli, kohlrabi, and turnips. These items from our farm were supplemented with couscous, black beans, maple yogurt, shell peas, and blueberries. Yummy!
Yesterday morning was my turn to help count out and set up the food for something like 200 CSA members. It was hot, so I don’t remember the exact number, but it was a lot. Still, five of us (including my wife) managed to get the bulk of the work done in something like three hours. Of course, this does not count all the organizational and logistical work to get the food there in the first place, or the work done on the farm.
The results are fantastic. High quality food that is good for the earth at affordable prices, and I get to work with good people too.
Vegetable Goodness
I just cooked some bok choy and something similar whose name I don’t know. I won’t be eating these greens tonight, but they were getting old and needed cooking. I used more water than was probably necessary, which left me with some good stock for a soup. Tonight, however, was one of those nights when the stock didn’t get saved. Instead I just drank it. It is amazing how much flavor goes into the water. Presumably some nutrients are in there too, though I was just in it for the flavor and warmth.
I’m pretty simple when it comes to things like this. Maybe sometime I’ll look for recipes, but usually the food from my farm share tastes good without doing more than cooking up vegetables and potatoes or rice, or maybe making a soup out of what is on hand. This afternoon I did that with some white turnips, carrots, Brussels sprouts, an onion, a potato, and some homemade noodles from my CSA. I used some vegetarian bouillon from Rapunzel too, since I am not methodical enough with saving vegetable stock. I have found, however, that the vegetables from my CSA have so much flavor that I need much less bouillon than usual, one half to a third of what the directions call for.
Waiting by the Oven
It’s the end of a long day, or rather the beginning of a new one, if the passing of midnight means anything. Two squash pies are doing their thing in the oven. These were long in the making. I washed a bunch of dishes and cooked the squash this morning. Usually I make the pies for Thanksgiving with canned pumpkin, but we had the biodynamic squash from our farm share, so I did it the old-fashioned way. This included washing and laying out the seeds to dry. (They’ll make a good snack.) Afterwards, I did my weekly food run to Bethesda, where my CSA is. This evening I filled in for someone at LADO, where I’m teaching English to non-native speakers. Then I came back home, took a break, and began converting the cooked squash into two pies. I have leftover pie mixture too, so I’ll make more tomorrow or Friday.
In case you’re wondering, I used a recipe called Dolly’s Pumpkin Pie in Uprisings: The Whole Grain Bakers’ Book (p. 199). This is the same book that taught me how to bake whole grain bread.
Orange Juice, Apple Juice and Applesauce
We get most of our fruit and vegetables through a local cooperative called a CSA, which stands for Community Supported Agriculture. Unlike a typical buying cooperative though, a CSA also works to support the producers of food, often one farmer. It binds producers and consumers together, so that producers know they have a certain income, and consumers get more or less food, depending on how things are going.
The one to which my wife and I belong is called Spiritual Food CSA. It supports biodynamic farming, which practices more stringent standards than regular organic farming, though I don’t know all the details. The word spiritual comes in, because the CSA is organized by a local yoga ashram, for whom healthy food, a healthy earth, healthy people, and a healthy spiritual life are inseparable. At least that’s what I think it means. I don’t get into the spiritual side of things, but I like taking yoga, and the people at the Shanti Yoga Ashram are just plain good folk. If only I had time for yoga right now. My commute from Northwest DC to Fairfax, VA and my teaching schedule has been keeping me away. Must change that.
Anyway, we pay one price for half a year and then pick up a share of food every week. Apples from the fall harvest had been accumulating in my fridge, as had oranges, which the CSA gets direct from Florida. Today, I decided to take action. I dug out the old juice maker and made orange juice and apple juice. I also made a large glass of apple sauce. Yum!
Baking Bread
We were out of bread, and my wife asked me if I would bake some. It had been a while, so I said yes. Now three small loaves of whole-grain wheat bread are rising on a cookie sheet with a clean thin cotton towel over them. They look beautiful too. If only I had a camera! Of course, then I’d also have to know how to use it. Food photography, I suspect, is not easy.
The bread contains whole-grain wheat flour, yeast, water, barley syrup, oil, and salt. Simple, healthy ingredients. Also good was all the kneading. There’s something satisfying about that. The bread tastes twice as good when I make it myself, maybe because it is part of a more authentic experience than going to the store represents.
One thing I would do, if I had my druthers, would be to grind the flour fresh from wheat berries. But we don’t have a mill like we used to when we were living in Augsburg, Germany back in the early 1990s. Also, wheat berries are expensive and not available here in DC in large quantities. In Augsburg my wife drove with a friend out to a farmer to buy sacks of grain—wheat, spelt, rye, barley, millet, and Grünkern (spelt harvested while only half ripe and then roasted). We ground the grain as we needed it with a little electric mill. We milled fine flour for baking or course stuff for cooking entrees of various kinds.
Now the bread’s in the oven.
Baking bread requires several periods of waiting. First I had to wait for the water and yeast mixture to bubble. During that time I made supper. Then I had to wait for the dough I made rise. During that time I made some whole grain ginger cookies. Then I punched down the dough, made the loaves and had to let them rise. Washed dishes, listened to the news, and began some blogging. Forty-five more minutes till nirvana.
I used to bake a great deal more, and then I went years without doing it. I started again last winter, but the heat in the summer put me off it. Well, winter’s here again, so a hot kitchen feels good.