Entertaining from Ancient Rome to the Super Bowl ... - Historia Antigua

Entertainingfrom Ancient Rome tothe Super BowlAN ENCYCLOPEDIAVOLUME 1: A–GEdited byMelitta Weiss AdamsonandFrancine SeganGREENWOOD PRESSWestport, Connecticut • London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataEntertaining from Ancient Rome to the Super Bowl : an encyclopedia / edited byMelitta Weiss Adamson and Francine Segan.p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978–0–313–33957–8 (set : alk. paper)ISBN 978–0–313–33958–5 (v. 1 : alk. paper)ISBN 978–0–313–33959–2 (v. 2 : alk. paper)1. Entertaining—History—Encyclopedias. 2. Cookery, International—History—Encyclopedias. 3. Food habits—History—Encyclopedias. I. Adamson, MelittaWeiss. II. Segan, Francine.TX731.E5824 2008641.3003—dc22 2008030543British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.Copyright © 2008 by Melitta Weiss Adamson and Francine SeganAll rights reserved. No portion of this book may bereproduced, by any process or technique, without theexpress written consent of the publisher.Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 20080305043ISBN: 978–0–313–33957–8 (set)978–0–313–33958–5 (vol. 1)978–0–313–33959–2 (vol. 2)First published in 2008Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.www.greenwood.comPrinted in the United States of AmericaThe paper used in this book complies with thePermanent Paper Standard issued by the NationalInformation Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984).10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1The publisher has done its best to make sure the instructions and /or recipes inthis book are correct. However, users should apply judgment and experience whenpreparing recipes, especially parents and teachers working with young people. Thepublisher accepts no responsibility for the outcome of any recipe included in thisvolume.

ContentsList of EntriesviiGuide to Related TopicsixPrefacexiiiThe Encyclopedia: A– G 1Bibliography 551About the Editors and Contributors 569Index 579

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List of EntriesAmerican FrontierAncient GreeceAncient RomeAnniversary PartiesAntipastoAztec EntertainingBaby ShowerBachelor PartyBar/ Bat MitzvahBarbequeBarn RaisingBeer Halls and Beer GardensBeeton, IsabellaBetty CrockerBirthdaysBlair HouseBlock PartyBook ClubsBooks on Entertaining and Dining,History ofBrazilBridal ShowerBrunchBuffetCake and CandlesCateringCeltic FeastingChafing DishChampagneCheese Course, History ofChildhood in South IndiaChildren’s Birthday PartiesChinese BanquetsChinese New YearChocolateChopsticksChristmasCivil WarCocktailsCoffeehouses in LondonCoffee KlatchesColonial AmericaColonial MexicoCookbooks, History of

viiiList of EntriesCookbooks, Tools for EntertainingCordials and LiqueursCruise ShipsDay of the DeadDebutante BallsDeepavali, Festival of LightsDessertDim SumDinner PartiesDoilies and CoastersDoor County Fish BoilDutch TreatEasterEdible CenterpiecesEgyptEtiquette BooksFast Food, History ofFinger BowlsFood NetworkFourth of JulyFranceFuneral FoodGarden PartyHalloweenHors d’oeuvres and CanapésIncaIndiaInvitationsItalyJapanese Cherry Blossom FestivalJuneteenthKaiseki RyoriKentucky DerbyKitchen Staff DressKwanzaaLa QuinceaneraLuauMardi GrasMasqueradeMedievalMesta, PerleNew Year’s EveParisian CafésParty FavorsParty PlannersPhilippine FiestasPotluck SuppersProgressive Dinner PartiesProhibitionRenaissanceRent PartiesRestaurantsRussiaSaints’ DaysServing PlattersSinglesSoul FoodSt. Patrick’s DayStewart, MarthaSub-Saharan AfricaSugaring Off PartySuper Bowl PartiesTable Service, French versus RussianTable SettingsTapasTavernsTeaTearooms in AmericaThanksgivingTheme PartiesToastsTupperware PartyValentine’s DayWedding ReceptionsWineWorld War IIZakuski

Guide to Related TopicsAccoutrementsChopsticksDoilies and CoastersEdible CenterpiecesFinger BowlsInvitationsKitchen Staff DressParty FavorsServing PlattersTable SettingsToastsBeveragesBeer Halls and Beer GardensChampagneCocktailsCordials and LiqueursProhibitionTavernsTeaTearooms in AmericaWineCelebrationsAnniversary PartiesBaby ShowerBachelor PartyBar / Bat MitzvahBirthdaysBridal ShowerChildren’s Birthday PartiesDebutante BallsJuneteenthKentucky DerbyLa QuinceaneraTheme PartiesWedding ReceptionsCountries and CustomsBrazilChildhood in South IndiaChinese BanquetsChinese New YearColonial AmericaColonial Mexico

xGuide to Related TopicsDeepavali, Festival of LightsDoor County Fish BoilDutch TreatEgyptFranceIndiaItalyJapanese Cherry Blossom FestivalKaiseki RyoriPhilippine FiestasRussiaSub-Saharan AfricaTable Service, French vs. RussianTeaZakuskiBar / Bat MitzvahBirthdaysBridal ShowerThanksgivingWedding ReceptionsFestivalsDeepavali, Festival of LightsJapanese Cherry Blossom FestivalLuauMardi GrasMasqueradeRent PartiesSugaring Off PartyCoursesAntipastoCheese Course, History ofDessertDim SumHors d’oeuvres and CanapésKaiseki RyoriPotluck SuppersTable Service, French versus RussianTapasTeaDomestic OccasionsBarbequeBarn RaisingBlair HouseBook ClubsBrunchChafing DishCoffee KlatchesDinner PartiesFuneral FoodGarden PartyPotluck SuppersProgressive DinnersSinglesTupperware PartyFamiliesAnniversary PartiesBaby ShowerFoodsAntipastoCakes and CandlesCheese Course, History ofChocolateDim SumFast Food, History ofHors d’oeuvres and CanapésSoul FoodTapasHistoriesAmerican FrontierAncient GreeceAncient RomeAztec EntertainingCeltic FeastingCivil WarColonial AmericaColonial MexicoCruise ShipsIncaIndiaMedievalProhibitionRenaissanceWorld War IIHolidaysChinese New YearChristmasDay of the Dead

Guide to Related TopicsxiEasterFourth of JulyHalloweenKwanzaaNew Year’s EveSaints’ DaysSt. Patrick’s DayThanksgivingValentine’s DayHostessesBeeton, IsabellaMesta, PerleParty PlannersStewart, MarthaMediaBetty CrockerBooks on Entertaining and Dining,History ofCookbooks, History ofCookbooks, Tools for EntertainingEtiquette BooksFood NetworkParty PlannersPublic PlacesBeer Halls and Beer GardensBlock PartyCoffee Houses in LondonCruise ShipsDutch TreatFast Food, History ofParisian CafésRent PartiesRestaurantsTavernsTearooms in AmericaServing StylesBuffetCateringChafing DishPotluck SuppersTable Service, French versus Russian

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PrefaceThroughout history humans have enjoyed dining and entertainment withfamily, friends, and strangers, in the privacy of their homes or in publicplaces. They have interrupted their daily routines by celebrating religiousor secular holidays, or such personal rites of passage as birth, coming-of-age,marriage, and death. Food plays a central role in all these activities. It is themost basic human need, but as the study of entertaining practices shows,food is much more than a means for survival. Imbued with symbolic meaningsince the beginning of human history, food defines our individual selves.Not just what we eat, but how we eat it has traditionally determined ourmembership in a group, and our status and power within that group. Thestructures and rules we have built around our use of food make it a formof communication not dissimilar from language. And like language, food isa shared experience. The goal of this encyclopedia is to present to a generalreader the dining and entertaining practices and traditions of cultures fromaround the world from ancient times to the present, at festivals and familyevents. The work has an anthropological perspective in that it seeks toexplain the links between a culture’s political, economic, religious, or socialcircumstances and its method of dining and entertaining, with ample spacebeing devoted to popular culture.The encyclopedia is arranged alphabetically from A to Z. Its 120entries range in length from several hundred to over 5,000 words. They

xivPrefacewere written by 64 contributors who are all experts in their respectivefields. The encyclopedia has a worldwide focus and offers the followingspecial features: a Guide to Related Topics, cross-references in theentries whenever appropriate, a list of printed and /or digital sources foreach entry to facilitate further research on the topic, and sidebars to22 entries. The two-volume set is also richly illustrated and provides anextensive general bibliography for further study.The individual entries cover cultures as diverse as Brazil, Sub- SaharanAfrica, Italy, or Russia; popular customs found in cultures from around theworld, such as the Cherry Blossom Festival in Japan or Deepavali in India;time periods from antiquity to the present; dining-related objects such aschopsticks, finger bowls, or serving platters; a variety of foods, beverages,and courses that figure prominently in entertaining; domestic entertainingfrom barbeque to coffee klatch and Tupperware party; family celebrationssuch as birthdays, baby and bridal showers or bar / bat mitzvahs; holidaysand festivals from Christmas to Kwanzaa to Sugaring Off Parties; entertainingin public places from the beer garden to the Parisian café; the role of themedia in entertaining; as well as famous hostesses. Given the wide range andmultifaceted nature of the topic of entertaining through world history, an effortwas made to include as much material as is possible in a two-volume format.The encyclopedia is intended to provide a stepping stone for readers interestedto delve deeper into the rich and fascinating world of entertaining.The alphabetical arrangement of the work makes it easy to retrieveinformation on a particular subject, but the encyclopedia also invites browsing.With the help of the Guide to Related Topics, the cross-references, illustrations,and bibliographic information, it furthermore provides the userwith a powerful tool for larger research projects on any of the many aspectsconnected with entertaining, a topic everybody can relate to in their dailylives. By widening the view from North America to the world, it is hopedthat the encyclopedia contributes in its own small way to our understandingand appreciation of world cultures with their many similarities and differences.Multiculturalism and mobility are the hallmarks of our age, and themore culturally literate we are the better we can understand our fellowhumans with whom we share the planet.ACKNOWLEDGMENTSThe realization of this project would not have been possible withoutthe efforts of its many contributors and the enthusiastic support of the editorialstaff at Greenwood Press. Special thanks go to Lindsay Claire, SeniorDevelopment Editor, who managed to keep the publication of the encyclopediaon track. She was not only a model of efficiency but an absolutepleasure to work with.Melitta Weiss Adamson

AAmerican FrontierIn the early nineteenth century the new American republic underwent extraordinarytransformations in every aspect of its life. Not least of these wasthe transformation in American ideals about who Americans themselveswere and the new society that they were creating: a democratic republic inhabitedand run by people with equal rights and opportunities. Such ideals,whether realized or not, flowed through the rules and practices of hospitality.Whether in lodging or dining, nowhere than on the new frontiers weredemocratic notions better seen and remarked upon by both visitors to thenewly established United States and by Americans themselves.AMERICANS ON THE MOVEIn 1794, Moreau de Saint-Méry, a French jurist of Santo Dominicanbirth who lived in the new United States for a few years observed, “One isastonished at the rapidity with which Americans have formed settlementsin the interior. . . . He emigrates, especially if he be a northerner, to go Southor West, to the backwoods of the United States on the Ohio, disposing ofhis property, selling the house, the wagon, the horse, the dog, anything thatwill fetch a price” (Moreau de Saint-Méry 1947).

2 American FrontierAmericans were on the move as the nation’s population soared, mainlythrough immigration but also high birth rates. Census figures for 1790give 3,918,000, living mainly along the eastern seaboard. Thirty yearslater it had risen to 10,086,000, and by 1840 it was 17,018,000. By thelatter date 800,000 were foreign born. The West— west of the AlleghenyMountains, the Northwest Territories—beckoned. Land was abundant, cheap,and increasingly cleared of American Indians. The new state of Illinois, forexample, had 55,211 white inhabitants in 1820 and 476,183 by 1840, butdisease, war, and removal to areas west of the Mississippi River reducedtribes of the Illinois Confederacy to almost zero.To accommodate hunger for land and, as Moreau says, a ravening desirefor money (all visitors from abroad noted Americans’ avarice as a centralfeature of their lives), America became the world’s center for innovationsin transportation. Water and roads provided the first links to the gleamingwest. The Ohio River, flowing from Pittsburgh provided a main highway tothe Mississippi River and along it rose cities such as Wheeling, West Virginia,and Cincinnati, Ohio, in addition to numerous towns and villages. Familiessuch as Abraham Lincoln’s followed the Ohio River from Kentucky to Indianaand Illinois, living in crude backwoods settlements with cooking andhospitality to match.As a young man Abraham Lincoln floated a flatboat down the MississippiRiver to New Orleans and returned by steamboat. By then, the 1820s,steamboats were plying U.S. rivers and lakes in large numbers. Dangerous asthey were—explosions, fires and consequent fatalities were common—thesenew boats carried many passengers, all of whom needed feeding, hence therise of America’s first floating restaurants, catering to Americans’ peculiardining habits.Steamboats were not wholly responsible for the most important constructionfeat of the period: the Erie Canal. Funded by the state of NewYork and finished in 1825, the 364 mile–long canal linked Lake Erie (atBuffalo) to New York City via the Hudson River. The canal brought goodsfrom the Midwest and, in return, sent people from the east. If not for thecanal, Chicago would not have developed into a major metropolis.Crudely made, rutted, mud and dust filled, roads were always a problem.Means of transport were either horseback, wagons (including Conestogas),and coaches, the latter two hardly knowing the comfort of cushioningsprings. If ever the interior of the continent were to be developed, decentroads were necessary. The first federally funded road building project, theNational Road (US Route 40 today) began at Cumberland, Maryland, in1815, and reached Vandalia, Illinois, by the early 1830s. Thus was the Midwestopened further to settlement. Along the National Road route and manyother new roadways, taverns, inns, hotels, hamlets, and towns sprang up. All,to one extent or another, catered to travelers, and a literature describingtheir journeys developed.The railroad was another—and one of the most amazing to contemporaries—aspectof the transportation revolution. From the first, the Baltimore

American Frontier 3and Ohio Railroad (B & O) in 1830, rails spread like spider webs across thecountry. Naturally, eating places and watering holes appeared at every stop:what may be the first lunch counter appeared at the Chicago rail terminusin the early 1850s. At railway stations, as along roads, rivers, and canals,hospitality and entertaining took on distinctly democratic American styles.HOSPITALITY ON THE ROAD ANDIN NEW SETTLEMENTSCharles Woodmason, an Anglican minister, provided the earliest accountsof back country hospitality and culinary customs in rural NorthCarolina. His 1768 journal describing his efforts to civilize the Scotch–IrishPresbyterians of the region is a classic of dark humor, irony, and satire—afascination with horrors. “These people eat twice a day only,” he said, “as fortea they know it not . . . neither beef nor mutton nor beer, or anything betterthan water.” In the back settlements people had stronger drink; Bourbonwhiskey, distilled from the ubiquitous corn, rather than Scotch barley, wasthe common table drink. “Even little children were served whiskey at table,with a little sugar to sweeten its bitter taste” (Woodmason 1953).Wooden trenchers and wooden mugs, accompanied by hunting orscalping knives and big spoons, provided table settings; tables themselveswere rough wooden trestles. There were only two meals a day, breakfast andmidday. Even so Woodmason claimed that the food “and their ProvisionsI could not touch—All the Cookery of these People being exceeding filthy,and most execrable.” On one occasion he recalled:In this plight wet to the skin [I] rode to and fro till night came, whengot to Cabbin of a poor Old Dutch Woman, who inform’d me that I wasgot into the Waxaw Distric among a tribe of Presbyterians . . . She had noRefreshments. Not a grain of Corn for the Horse, nor the least Subsistance.We left the Horse to shift for himself and to feed on the twigs andBushes—Her Son was from home—She dry’d my Cloaths, and I sat up allNight by the Fire, quite tired and spent, having nor made what could becalled a Meal for some days—Nothing but Indian Corn Meal to be hadBacon and Eggs in some Places—No Butter, Rice, or Milk—As for Teaand Coffee they know it not. These people are all from Ireland, and livewholly on Butter, Milk, Clabber and what in England is given to the Hogsand Dogs. (34)This fare and the rough digs are reminiscent of many, but not all, travel storiesfrom this time period. Bed and board in public hostelries varied greatly;stable, settled towns offered better accommodations.Bernhard Karl, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, a German traveler toUtica, New York, in 1826 was pleased by his stay at Shepherds Hotel, whichhe described as tidy and cheap. The food served tells another story familiarto visitors of the time:Breakfast is announced a half hour after rising time. The table is set in thedining room and laden with beefsteak, mutton, a chicken or other roasted

4 American Frontierfowl, fish, and boiled potatoes, generally of good quality. The waiters, or, insome places, the waitresses, pass around tea or coffee. Since the Americansare usually reticent people, such a meal passes very quickly and silently.Dinner is normally served at two in the afternoon and tea at seven. Thetable is then set as at breakfast, with the addition of stews and pastry. Wineis never drunk at meals. On the table are water and whiskey which mixedare considered the healthiest drink in the summer. Everyone must reachfor what he likes, since the food is never passed around. There are no napkins;the tablecloths must fill their place. Apart from the spoons, there is nosilverware on the tables. The two-pronged forks and the knives are made ofsteel with handles of staghorn. A praiseworthy usage absolves the travelerof the necessity of tipping at his departure. (157)Travelers with any sophistication—Europeans, especially—noted Americans’lack of interest in fine dining, leisurely eating, and good dinner conversation.Rather, Americans ate fast, drank lots of hard liquor, smoked andspit tobacco (spittoons were fixtures in all public places), and wanted copiousquantities of food. The main difference between the poor and wealthierappears to have been the latter, in the amount of food consumed. That mostmodern Americans today consume large quantities of cheap food shows theso-called progress of gastronomic democracy.In 1810 Margaret Van Horn Dwight left her home in New Haven, Connecticut,to find a new home in the new town of Warren, Ohio (along witha new hometown, she also found a husband and had 13 children). As describedin her journal, the hospitality she received during the six-week longtrek by wagon and by foot was abysmal. It makes one wonder why anyonewould have chosen to undertake such a journey. Here is a description ofwhat she experienced in West Chester, Pennsylvania:I should even rather drink clear rum out of the wooden bottle after thedeacon has drank & wip’d it over with his hand, than to stay here anothernight (The house is very small & very dirty—it serves for a tavern, a store, &I should imagine hog’s pen stable & every thing else—The air is so impure Ihave scarcely been able to swallow since I enter’d the house—The landladyis a fat, dirty, ugly looking creature, yet I must confess very obliging—Shehas a very suspicious countenance & I am very afraid of her—She seems tobe master, as well as mistress & storekeeper, & from the great noise she hasbeen making directly under me for this half hour, I suspect she has been“stoning the raisins & watering the rum”—All the evening there has been astore full of noisy drunken fellows. (7–8)Down the road, the hosts were more pleasant but the surroundings wereno better:The house by day light looks worse then ever—every kind of thing inthe room where they live—a chicken half pick’d hangs over the door—&pots, kettles, dirty dishes, potatoe barrels—& every thing else—& the oldwoman—it is beyond my power to describe her—but she & her husband &both very kind & obliging—it is as much as a body’s life is worth to go nearthem. The air has already had a medicinal effect upon me—I feel as if I had

American Frontier 5taken an emetic—& should stay till night I most certainly be oblig’d to taketo my bed, & that would be certain death—I did not think that I could eatin the house—but I did not dare refuse. (64)After slogging over the Alleghenies, through almost impassible streamsand mud-clogged roads, and having to listen to lewd and blaspheming“Dutchmen” teamsters, Margaret, cold and tired, reached the promised land,a town much more pleasant than she had expected. The town was able toprovide her with a good cup of lady-like tea.If travel overland was rough, all that was to change with steamboatsand railroads. Steamboat accommodations and food ranged from crude toluxurious. Of the latter, an Ole Munch Raeder, Norwegian visitor crossingthe Great Lakes from Buffalo to Milwaukee in 1847 observed:On the Great Lakes there is only one means of travel, for immigrants aswell as for others, and that is the steamship. The elegance of such a shipis quite remarkable. The vessel is equipped in every possible way for theconvenience of the passengers; there is, for example, a barber shop. Thereis also a band. (205)Raeder liked America, Americans, and even American pigs, which hepraised for their fecundity and garbage-cleaning ( by consuming it) habits.Other visitors were not so pleased.In 1827 Frances (Fannie) Trollope, an English author and mother ofrenowned author Anthony Trollope, came to America to seek a better life inCincinnati, Ohio. Embarking on a grand ship, she soon discovered a carpetmade filthy with spittle and wrote: “Let no one who wishes to receive agreeableimpressions of American manners, commence their travels in a Mississippisteam boat; for myself, it is with all sincerity I declare, that I wouldinfinitely prefer sharing the apartment of a party of well conditioned pigs tothe being confined to its cabin.” Food was often not much better, hard venisonand peach-sauce, and “hung beef, ‘chipped up’ raw being staples” (12–13).Charles Dickens was as famous on the west side of the Atlantic Ocean ashe was at home in England. The demand to see him in the flesh was so greatthat in 1842 he did a tour, making a huge sum of money (needed to supporthis 10 children). His impressions of his adoring fans, as published in MartinChuzzlewit and American Notes for General Circulation, chilled their enthusiasm.Boarding the Messenger bound for Cincinnati he found that “at each[meal], there are a great many small dishes and plates upon the table, withvery little in them; so that although there is every appearance of a mighty‘spread,’ there is seldom really more than a joint: except for those who fancyslices of beet-root, shreds of dried beef, complicated entanglements of yellowpickle; maize, Indian corn, apple-sauce, and pumpkin” (170).Dickens further described the eating habits of Americans:Some people fancy all these little dainties together (and sweet preservesbeside), by way of relish to their roast pig. They are generally those dyspepticladies and gentlemen who eat unheard-of quantities of hot cornbread (almost as good for the digestion as a kneaded pin-cushion), for

6 American Frontierbreakfast, and for supper. Those who do not observe this custom, and whohelp themselves several times instead, usually suck their knives and forksmeditatively, until they have decided what to take next: then pull them outof their mouths: put them in the dish; help themselves; and fall to workagain. At dinner, there is nothing to drink upon the table, but great jugsfull of cold water. Nobody says anything, at any meal, to anybody. All thepassengers are very dismal, and seem to have tremendous secrets weighingon their minds. There is no conversation, no laughter, no cheerfulness,no sociality, except in spitting; and that is done in silent fellowship roundthe stove, when the meal is over. Every man sits down, dull and languid;swallows his fare as if breakfasts, dinners, and suppers, were necessitiesof nature never to be coupled with recreation or enjoyment; and havingbolted his food in a gloomy silence, bolts himself, in the same state. Butfor these animal observances, you might suppose the whole male portionof the company to be the melancholy ghosts of departed book-keepers,who had fallen dead at the desk: such is their weary air of business andcalculation. Undertakers on duty would be sprightly beside them; and acollation of funeral-baked meats, in comparison with these meals, wouldbe a sparkling festivity. (170)Travelers on antebellum railroads could not expect better bed and boardthan early road voyagers. Train travel was slow (15 miles per hour in the1830s), seats were hard, and in warm weather open windows allowed in allmanner of cinders and smoke from the locomotive, plus dust that coveredpassengers from head to toe. Dining cars were not even thought about untilthe later 1860s, so passengers got snacks from vendors when trains stoppedat stations (to take on water and fuel). In 1848, railroads from Chicago toGalena in the western part of Illinois had sheds at depots where passengerscould buy food. Long trips necessitated overnight stays in hostelries wherethe food varied. For instance, in 1857, Stephen Sharply wrote about a tripon the Erie Railroad to Cleveland, then onto New York for his sister’s wedding.He described stopping in Oswego, New York, at the American Hotelfor what he hoped would be a good dinner and a good night’s rest: “Theyserved me at the American with a little hard nubbin of steak, whether beef,or venison, or mutton, I cannot say. And the Irish maid who served it in along, cold ball accepted to think that I was coming the genteel strongly to beeating warm meat at that hour” (3). At least he did not have to share a bedwith more than one fellow traveler, as was often the case in the nineteenthcentury.In the morning Sharply breakfasted upon the remains of that steak. Butmost of the passengers were less irritated than they might have been due tothe liberal amounts of brandy with which they were fortified. Virtually everytravel account by foreigners and many Americans mention how much liquorAmericans drank everywhere but in church, and in the back country, peoplesometimes even drank in church.Charles Dickens did not return to the United States for another 20years and Fanny Trollope never looked back once she returned to her nativeEngland. Both, along with many of their social class, disliked the rough,

Ancient Greece 7unschooled, masculine-egalitarian, avaricious culture that they found inthe new United States. Such ideas, taken by contemporaries as embodyingdemocracy itself, were borne out in hospitality. One frontier town wasa model for hospitality: Chicago. In 1833, the year it was incorporated asa town, Chicago consisted of 200 people and about 40 buildings. Amongthem was the Sauganash Tavern, a two-story clapboard hotel-dance-halltavernoperated by a colorful character named Mark Beaubien, who said, “Iplay de fiddle like the devil and keep hotel like hell.” Every night was dancenight as Beaubien fiddled dance tunes for guests—Yankees, French-Canadians,Southerners, Potawatomis—all men without benefit of class and regard less oforigin. Beaubien charged 50 cents a night for a space on the floor and ablanket, along with food and lots of whisky. Food was mainly game all yearround but also included local beans, corn, fruit, and fish. The proprietor’smost celebrated lines about his restaurant service was: “I eats 50 people fordinner every day, by gar” (Hurlbut 332). Charles Dickens might have createda character like Beaubien, but Dickens wouldn’t have wanted to dinewith him.Further Reading: Bernhard Karl, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. Reise . . . durchNord-Amerika in den Jahren 1825–1826. . . . Cited in Handlin, Oscar, ed. ThisWas America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949; Dickens, Charles.American Notes for General Circulation. New York: Penguin Classics, 1991 [1842];Dwight, Margaret Van Horn. Ed Max Farrand.A Journey to Ohio in 1810. Reprint.Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991 [1912]; Fischer, David Hackett.Albion’s Seed Four British Folkways in America. New York. Oxford UniversityPress, 1989; Hurlbut, Henry H. Chicago Antiquities, Comprising Original Itemsand Relations, Letters, Extracts, and Notes Pertaining to Early Chicago Embellishedwith Views, Portraits, Autographs, Etc. Chicago: Printed for the author, 1881;Moreau de Saint-Méry, Meredec. Ed. Kenneth and Anna M. Roberts. Moreaude Saint-Méry’s American Journey, 1793–1789. New York: Doubleday and Co.,1947; Raeder, Ole Munch. Trans and Ed. Gunnar J. Malmin. America in theForties, the Letters of Ole Munch Raeder. Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1929; “Three Days on the Erie Road,” Chicago Tribune, January 28, 1857,p. 3; Trollope, Frances M. Domestic Manners of the Americans. Ed John LauritzLarson. St. James, NY: Brandywine Press, 1993 [1831]; Woodmason, Charles.Ed. Richard Hooker. The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution: TheJournal and Other Writings of Charles Woodmason, Anglican Itinerant. ChapelHill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953.Ancient GreeceBruce KraigArchaic Greece was a collection of sovereign states in the classical Aegean.The Greeks included those living in the Balkan peninsula and alsothose settled in Asia Minor, southern Italy, southern France, and numerousAegean islands. What bound them together were a common language,religious beliefs, and kinship. Those who lived outside these areas were

8 Ancient Greeceregarded as “barbarians.” As in the case of the Romans, Greeks outside theBalkan peninsula assimilated some traits of their neighbors but many keptto the accustomed ways of their ancestors. In the Balkan peninsula theGreeks never formed a nation or a country as a united whole until theywere conquered first by Macedonia and then by Rome. Within the Balkanpeninsula the land was divided into city-states, of which the greatest wereAthens, Sparta, and Thebes. Each city-state was determined to remain independentand was usually ruled by an elite group, but it was probablySparta that had the most individual lifestyle and customs.During the Archaic Age (c. 630 – 480 B.C.) Athens suffered drought that ledto uprisings, but these uprisings were put down by the lawgiver Solon, whoalso prevented famine by forbidding the export of corn and agriculturalproducts. Only olive oil could be exported because there was a surplus of it.His tactics succeeded, and he also created the development of a city elite,which controlled many Greek states over several generations, thus ensuringstability. This stability enabled the Greeks to defeat the attack of thePersians in the fifth century B.C., and after the first Peloponnesian War, thestability led to the rise of the Athenian statesman Pericles. Pericles createdan empire of states, dominated by Athens. Starting in 446 B.C., the age ofPericles lasted for 30 years, during which time the population of Athens andof other states was adequately fed.During the historic period of Greek history, the food eaten would obviouslyvary from area to area, but there seem to have been certain commonfoods and food products. When basic foods were available they providedgreat variety, especially for Athenians. A minor cereal in Greece was millet.The major cereals were einkorn and emmer (both are ancient varieties ofwheat), and barley, the latter being both the two-row and six-row variety.The Phoenicians imported durum wheat into Greece. All these grains couldbe used to thicken stews, make a pottage or, more often, ground into flour.From the flour a large variety of breads and cakes were made. The Athenianswere able to import more wheat than other cities, thus allowing them tohave a preference for white bread (artos). Both wheat bread and flat, barley,griddle cakes (maza) could be easily obtained from city bakers or, as incountry areas, be baked on flat stones. Poorer people subsisted on maza,which often served as a plate similar to the bread trencher of the medievalperiod. City bakers produced a variety of bread and pastries. In households,dough was put under a pot on which hot ashes were piled thus causing thedough to rise. Much of the bread, however, was unleavened, producing flatbreads, although froth from beer could be used as a raising agent.Some wealthy households had their own specialized bakers. Cappadocianbakers were considered the best. Phoenician bakers would provideleavened bread as they worked with yeast or a yeast substitute. Bread was astaple to accompany opson, a variety of relishes—olive oil, onions, sheep orgoat’s milk cheese, garlic, eggs, fish, smoked or pickled in brine, and, morerarely, tiny pieces of meat. Not all of these would be eaten at one meal. Oneproduct, trachanas made of boiled milk and coarsely ground millet, dried

in sheets in the sun and then stored in tightly sealed jars was probably partof the diet.Other basic foods especially for the poorer elements of society werepulses. Many were gathered from the wild before being cultivated, such asvetch, peas, and lupines. Beans, lentils, peas and chickpeas were useful becausethey could be dried and stored as well as being used fresh. Chickpeasif roasted or eaten very young could be eaten as a dessert. Classical writerscommented on the fact that they could cause intestinal gas but this downsidewas thought to be balanced out by their high nutritional value. Beansand peas could be added to meat stews; lentils, in particular, were used tomake a filling stew or could be served on their own.Vegetables were plentiful and were often preferred to meat. These includedcabbages, carrots, artichokes, chicory, onions and garlic, lettuce, leeks,celery, cucumber, and spinach. Both leaves and roots of beets and turnipswere eaten. A wild form of asparagus was available. Herbs could enhancecooking of dishes. Thyme, dill, sage, basil, mint, rue, and hyssop were gatheredfrom the wild or cultivated in gardens. Mushrooms and nettles wereavailable in the wild. Some foods were used only by the poor: including fathen, fennel, wild chervil, wild spinach, hoary mustard, and nightshade, all ofwhich were mostly gathered rather than cultivated.The ancient Greeks enjoyed a wide variety of fruits, including grapes,figs, pomegranates, medlars, quinces, apples, and pears. Fruits were regardedmore as appetizers at a meal than as dessert ingredients, although myrtleberries were an exception to this. Together with nuts fruits were regardedwith pleasure at the end of a symposium. Apples may have been broughtfrom Anatolia or Iraq, although wild, and presumably small and sour apples,were known in Greece. Other fruits included the wild and cultivated plum,cherries, watermelon and the musk melon, probably imported from westernAsia, and a variety of berries. Dried figs and dates were imported fromAnatolia, and their leaves were used as a wrapping for meat dishes. Medlarswere eaten when they were so ripe that they were almost rotting. Nutsincluded almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts, and sweet chestnuts. Lentisk nuts,which were also chewed to cleanse the breath, and terebinth nuts are lessknown today but were popular with the ancient Greeks. Both the trees havetender shoots, which can be pickled before being eaten. Pine kernels wereoften used both as dessert and as an ingredient in cooking.Dairy products were rare apart from being made into cheese. Cheese,probably made from sheep and goat’s milk, was eaten throughout Greece.It was not eaten alone but with honey, figs, and olives. It could also beincorporated into bread baking. Oxygala, however, a form of yogurt, waseaten and sometimes mixed with honey. Ancient Greek and Roman cuisinedid not rely on non-cultured milk products, which can be explained in partbecause without refrigeration milk becomes sour very quickly and hencewas difficult to transport to more urban areas. Non-cultured milk productswere, however, a regular part of the diet of shepherds and peasants whokept sheep and goats. The Greeks, similar to the Romans, regarded milkAncient Greece 9

10 Ancient Greecedrinking as a feature of the barbarians, (the Greeks referred sneeringly tothe Thracians as “Butter-eaters”). This might be due to the climatic fact thatthere was a line beyond which olive trees could not be grown. The southernEuropean regions relied on olives and olive oil for cooking and other purposeswhereas the northern areas were compelled to rely on milk productsfor their fats.Honey was the natural sweetener and preservative, and beekeeping, anadmired skill, was a major occupation in Greece. The Greeks knew howplants from which the bees gathered pollen could flavor honey. Attic honeywas flavored by thyme. Honey from Mount Hymettus was highly prizedand was supplied to markets mainly in the form of honeycombs. In Athensit was eaten smeared on flat cakes. Mead produced by the fermentation ofdiluted honey was produced in Lydia.Meat was expensive. The killing of a kid, for example, meant a loss of amature goat, which would produce milk and cheese; suckling pig was alsoconsidered a luxury. Athenaeus (c. A.D. 200), an Egyptian Greek author ofthe Deipnosophistae, a tale of 16 men dining together in Rome and discussinga broad variety of subjects including food, in commenting on Greekmeals, wrote that goat’s meat was for slaves but wild boar meat should bekept for oneself and a friend. Butter and cheese made from sheep and goat’smilk was more appreciated than cow’s milk. Beef was more of a rarity becauseoxen were sacrificial animals. When they were slaughtered at religiousfestivals the meat would be distributed amongst those gathered to worshipthe deity. Dogs and asses were sometimes eaten. Whether this was a regularoccurrence or done in times of famine is not certain. Meat was sometimeseaten in the form of sausages, of which the Greeks were inordinately fond.Animals such as hares, wild boars, wild goats, deer, and birds werehunted for food. Birds were best served spit roasted with cheese and oilsprinkled over them, perhaps eaten more of a snack than a full meal. Theseincluded domesticated fowls and geese as well as game birds—grouse, mallards,pigeons, and pheasants. Very few birds were safe from the culinaryattentions of the ancient Greeks. Small birds of every variety includingthrushes, blackbirds, chaffinches, sparrows, and larks were sold in markets.The eggs of these birds were also appreciated, either hard or soft-boiled.Both yolks and whites were used in preparing dishes.Most ancient Greek communities had some means of access to the seaso that fish was relatively cheap and plentiful. All types of fish were eatenincluding tunny, grey mullet, conger eel, dogfish, angel shark, and swordfish.Mackerel, mullet, and sturgeon could be imported from the Black Sea, thelast more of a delicacy than a regular meal. Eels from Lake Kopaïs provideda more expensive dish; meals, which included this delicacy, were an exampleof conspicuous consumption. The Athenians despised small fish preferringto eat larger fish such as turbot and bream. The annual migration of tunnyprovided ample opportunities for catching large quantities of this fish, and itwas eaten fresh and salted. Some of the smallest fish, however, were servedas a fry called aphye, which could include squid and crabs.

Shellfish was also abundant in coastal regions. Even cuttlefish couldmake a good meal. Oysters were particularly prized as they were by theRomans and were eaten in great quantities. Liquamen, the fish sauce, whichwas prized by the Romans, seems to have been devised in Bithynia, as aprofitable way of making use of small fish, which might otherwise have beendiscarded. From there it spread to Greece, but it was the Romans who exploitedand made use of it in so many of their dishes, as indicated by therecipes in the Roman cookery book of Apicius.Wild olive trees have been known in Greece from Neolithic times, butthe first cultivated olives, with the intention of pressing olive oil, were grownin Crete and soon spread throughout Greece. The trees were prized becausethe goddess Athena was reputed to have raised an olive tree on the Acropolisin a contest with the god Poseidon for dominance of the land. Olive oil,which came in a variety of tastes, was most important for cooking, as a marinadeand as a dip for bread.Wine was equally important. Grape pips are known from 4500 B.C. butthis may indicate dried or fresh fruit and may not be connected with viticulture.Cultivation of vines appears to have been started about 2000 B.C. atMytos in Crete. Evidence of wine-lees and grape pips was found in jars atMycenae. Vineyards were usually small and the property of aristocraticproducers until Solon encouraged the peasantry to plant vines. The Greekphilosopher Theophrastus of Eresus (370–287 B.C.), who wrote on a widevariety of subjects, in his De Causis Plantarum (On Plant Physiology), explainedthe quality of soils and discussed the best conditions for planting,grafting techniques, and pruning methods. He advised that in hot climatesgrapes should be sprinkled with soil to shelter them from the sun.Harvesting took place in September. At first as elsewhere slaves treadedthe grapes in a huge vat, but in the sixth century B.C. the Greeks inventedthe screw and the beam presses, which allowed more efficient extractionof the juice. Wine was then transferred to jars (pithoi) or amphorae for transportation.The handles would be stamped with the merchant’s name andperhaps names of local officials who could guarantee the quality of thewine. The smaller the jar, the more expensive and the higher the qualityof the vintage. Pig and goat wineskins were also used as containers. In hisplay Cyclops, Euripides made Odysseus put wine into wineskins to ply theCyclops Polyphemos and make him drunk.The climate of Greece allowed harvests producing wine of even quality,unlike the more variable climate of northern Italy and Gaul. The Greeksadded water to their wine, a feature that was also characteristic of the Romans.Different areas produced a variety of wines. Some areas added seawaterto the wine; some added herbs and flavorings. Theophrastus noted thatthe mixing of aromatic Heracala wine with the salty Erythraean wine produceda strongly tasting wine. On the island of Thasos wine was mixed withhoney to produce a sweet taste, and the result was regarded as a fine wineas were those of Lesbos, Lemnos, and Rhodes. Cheapest wines were akinin taste to vinegar but this was acceptable to Greek tastes as also was freshAncient Greece 11

12 Ancient Greecegrape juice. The best wines were left to mature. The poet Homer said thatOdysseus’s strong room contained jars of old sweet-tasting wine, packedin rows along the wall. The Greek wine trade soon developed into a hugeindustry and was almost a monopoly until the second century B.C. whenthe Romans invaded Greece. As wine production expanded throughout theRoman Empire, prices dropped, and the Greek wine trade became a part ofthe Roman economy.The Greeks had a thriving agricultural economy, which on the wholeprovided them with ample food and drink. As with most other civilizationsmeals were determined by daylight hours. For both breakfast and lunchGreek eating habits remained simple. Breakfast was the breaking of the fastafter a night’s sleep taken soon after sunrise; lunch (deipnon) might be amain meal or one that provided some nourishment, as a break from work.The evening meal was the time for relaxation and later became more elaborate,becoming the main meal (deipnon). This became the preliminary tothe symposium, which was the time for entertainment, feasting, and winedrinking.For the Greeks the symposium was the ideal form of entertainment anddrinking. This followed the main evening meal and became an all-male, aristocratic,social drinking party. The aim of these gatherings was to share pleasure,release tension, forget the cares of the outside world, and promote goodRed-figured Attic terracotta bell-crater from the fourth century B.C. Depiction of asymposium: guests are drinking from rhytons, while a girl plays the flute. BildarchivPreussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY.

fellowship. Vase paintings of women enjoying a symposium do exist, butthese are probably indications of male fantasies. Women were present at thesymposium as musicians, entertainers, loving companions, and even as attendantswho looked after men who could not hold their wine. There were alsobetrothal symposia, usually held in the spring, at which eligible bachelorsdiscussed the relative merits of girls who might become their brides withthe girls’ fathers or brothers. The girls were not present but their marriageprospects would have been considered beforehand. On the island of Delos,an important festival to Apollo was held in May where games and sacrificeswere followed by symposia at which suitors were chosen and girls betrothed.Alexander the Great, in what might be considered a parody of this, tookwith him a large tent that could hold over a hundred couches, which heused for lavish symposia and other entertainments, including the one whenhe forced his troops to marry Persian women.A symposiarch, or organizer, was in charge of arranging a carefully chosenguest list and then controlling the symposium while it occurred. A guestcould ask to bring a friend, but he might just turn up with one and therewere always gatecrashers seeking a free drinking session. The organizer, whokept a strict watch on the proceedings, would have no hesitation in expellinga guest who became objectionable. He controlled the pace of drinkingand the entertainment and for this would have to have a commanding presence.According to Plutarch, who wrote a series of dialogues and questionsin the first century A.D., including some which explained the symposia, thesame spirit was required in marshalling a line of battle as in presiding at asymposium.The formalities of the symposium had to be strictly observed. Symposiausually took place in a square or oblong private dining room (andron),which opened directly onto the street or a courtyard, yet provided an intimatedrinking place. The floor was usually composed of an elaborate mosaicor a design of pebbles. A small raised platform ran round the walls, andthis seemed to have supported one side of the couches, usually 7, 9, or 11,which lined the walls. Guests reclined on these, one or two persons to acouch, and in front of each couch was a table. The custom of reclining oncouches seems to have been adopted from the Near East, where the customhad been a royal prerogative. In Greece, it developed as early as the seventhcentury B.C. Youths aged 18 and over were deemed capable of attending asymposium and had the right to recline. There was an art in reclining. InAristophanes’s play The Wasps a sophisticated young man, Bdelykleon, exasperatedlyinstructs his father, Philokleon, in the method of reclining andrearrangement of the legs. Reclining at meals set elite society apart from thelower classes and slaves. In Macedonia, for example, no man was allowed torecline until he had shown his prowess by capturing or killing a wild boarwithout the aid of nets.Before entering the room guests had to remove shoes and have their feetwashed. Garlands of flowers might be offered as crowns or necklaces. Theguests could then take their places. The chief guest sat on the first couchAncient Greece 13

14 Ancient Greeceto the right of the entrance next to the host. To begin the symposium thehost sprinkled wine on the floor and the guests commended themselves toeach other in a fixed order. Refreshments and drinking vessels were placedon low tables and at the beginning three toasts were made. The first mightbe to the Olympian Gods, the second to the Heroes, and the third to ZeusSoter. The symposiarch then decreed what should be the ratio of wine towater and the speed of drinking.Water and wine were mixed in a ratio of 1:3, 1:5, and 2:3. Because thewine was not drunk at full strength, large quantities could be drunk. Todrink wine undiluted was considered the action of a barbarian. Athenaeus(Deipnosophistae 436 e–f ) said that King Cleomenes of Sparta urged on byScythian envoys drank wine undiluted and as a result in a fit of madnessslashed himself to death with a knife. In his book The Laws, the Greekphilosopher Plato thought that no one under the age of 18 should drink asit might inflame his high spirits. From 18 to 40, wine should be drunk inmoderation. After 40, a man could drink as much as he liked to revive hisyouthful spirit and forget everyday worries.Wine was carried from storage to the symposium in decorated amphoraewhere it could be chilled in a psykter, a vessel with a rounded body, a shortneck, and a high foot; the psykter could be placed in a large krater filledwith cold water. The water was carried in a bronze or pottery two-handledhydria. Wine and water were mixed in a large krater, placed in the centreof the room. The krater was usually an elaborately decorated piece for itwas the focal point and symbol of the symposium. The elaborate imageryexpressed on the kraters often displayed events and experiences occurringat symposia. It was not unusual for revelers to drink three full kraters eachevening. Liquid was drawn from the krater by a ladle ( kyathos) and placedin a shallow two-handled pottery drinking bowl ( kylix) or a two-handledcup (skyphos) of gold or silver.The aim of the symposium, however, was not drinking for its own sake;the aim of the symposium was to promote discussion on any subject. Thesymposium as described in Plato’s Symposium, for example, was concernedwith defining the meaning of love. Athenaeus (Deipnosophistae 188 c–f )said that Homer’s account of the symposium of Menalaus had young menproposing questions to each other as though they were in the company oflearned men so they could hold civilized conversations. Plutarch in hisBanquet of the Sages said that men did not attend symposia like vases to befilled but to speak seriously or to jest, and to hear and deliver speechesas the occasion required, especially if the participants are to take pleasurein conversing among themselves. Not everyone enjoyed symposia. Plutarch(A.D. 50–129), a priest at Delphi for 30 years, in his Moralia (2.2.147e) saidthat Pericles consistently declined invitations; he made one exception—thewedding feast of his cousin—and he even left that when libations were beingpoured at the beginning.Evenings ended with music, poetry, recitations, and playing games. Amyrtle wreath was passed from one man to another until the host decreed

a stop. The last man to hold the wreath had to recite or sing. A drinkermight balance a wine cup on one arm or in the crook of an elbow and thenattempt to pour wine into this cup from a cup held in his other hand. Theaim here was obviously to balance the first cup successfully, and successmight depend on the amount of wine consumed. Kottabos entailed throwingdrops of wine at a metal disc placed on top of a column. Below was alarger disc. A guest hooked a kylix round the index finger of his right handand spun it round in the air. Drops of wine would be flung out with the aimof knocking the disc off the column to hit the larger disc and make a greatnoise. Both accuracy and elegance with handling the kylix were taken intoconsideration. The prizes offered were simple—eggs, fruit, sweets, a pair ofsandals, a cup, and cake.Other entertainments were less decorous. Courtesans, who had beenwell trained for their roles, played instruments, danced, or other wise entertainedthe guests. Youths also took provided entertainment, many from distinguishedfamilies, probably as an introduction to the symposia. The Greekhistorian Xenophon (c. 428–354 B.C.) recorded that once two dancers acteda love scene between Ariadne and Dionysus so realistically that the subsequentembarrassment made the symposium end quickly.Even worse could happen if things got out of hand. Guests were reportedto vomit and dance drunkenly through the streets and to crash othersymposia, resulting in fights. Athenaeus reported that at Agrigentum in Sicily,some young men so overindulged with liquor that they imagined theywere sailing in a trireme in a bad storm, tossed all the furniture and beddingout of the house to lighten the presumed ship. A crowd gathered outsideand began to run off with this supposed jetsam. Even then the revelers didnot stop but poured out of the house to cause mayhem in the street. Nextday when still only half sober they were questioned by the magistrates andexplained that they had only been trying to save themselves and the ship.The magistrates, probably remembering bouts of drinking when they hadbeen young men, pardoned the revelers but said they must never drinkso much again and this was promised. From then on, however, the housewhere the festivities had occurred was known as The Trireme.An even greater disaster occurred when Alexander, inflamed at a symposiumby a passionate speech of a hataera (courtesan) by the name of Thais,led his companions on a drunken revel and set fire to the palace of Xerxesat Persepolis. In Plato’s Protagoras Socrates deplored this kind of behaviorsaying that where the drinkers are worthy and cultured men there will beno dancing or music or even dancing girls. These men would enjoy theirown company without any frivolity, using the occasion to speak and listenin turn to each other. Yet in Xenophon’s version of a symposium, Socratesloved watching dancing girls and even tried to copy their movements.Symposia also might be places for plotting, for men were off theirguard. Plutarch in his Parallel Lives (1.9.8) said that when Pelopidas, theTheban general, and his companions wished to get rid of the tyrants atThebes, they proposed to carry out this action at a symposium. They woreAncient Greece 15

16 Ancient Greecewomen’s clothing over their armor and garlands of pine and fir to hide theirfaces. The symposium was so popular that it was adopted by the Romansbut never to the same popularity possibly because the Romans preferredto have a banquet where food and drink were consumed together, ratherthan be kept just for social drinking. For the Greeks it was a male and elitepleasure, part of their cultural importance.One Greek state, however, had a completely different lifestyle thatwas based upon communal living and harsher societal rules in which thesymposium had no part. This was Sparta. Spartan men ate one large meala day in dining groups or messes (syssitia) of 15. Syssitia were compulsoryand designed by the state to promote the Spartan ideology of hardliving and male bonding amongst equals, although the men were dividedby age and by their social status, which was determined by their martialprowess. Boys were separated from their mothers at the age of seven sothat they could be included in their own separate messes. Admission to themess was by lot. When a candidate was proposed, each Spartan in that particularmess took a piece of bread and put it into a bowl. If he had screwedup the bread, this meant he disapproved of the candidate, and a majorityof screwed up pieces meant that the candidate would be rejected and excludedfrom that mess. He had to wait until he had proved himself eitherin warfare or by excelling in martial exercises before he could be presentedagain. Wine was permitted but any Spartan who became drunk or indulgedin riotous behavior was immediately excluded from his mess.Unlike meals taken elsewhere in Greece, the men did not recline oncouches but sat on hard wooden benches. Their main food consisted of barleybread, cheese, wine, figs, and the infamous black broth, a basic pork stewconsisting of pork, pigs’ blood, and vinegar. This black broth seems to haveacquired some reputation that only the Spartans could eat it. The Greekhistorian and philosopher Plutarch commented that a certain king of Pontushired a Laconian cook to make this broth. When the king tasted it, he spatit out whereupon the cook said, “King, this soup should only be taken aftera dip in the Eurotas,” a remark that seemingly indicates that the Spartanswere in the habit of taking a bath before a meal. Athenaeus said that a Sybarite,after dining in a Spartan mess, remarked that it was reasonable for theSpartans to be the bravest of men since any sensible man would choose todie ten thousand deaths than have to eat such a wretched diet again.The food was not provided entirely by the state. A man had to bring to hismess each month a bushel of barley, eight gallons of wine, five pounds ofcheese, two and half pounds of figs, together with opson, the relishes whichcould be made from meat, fish, and vegetables. When any person made asacrifice to the gods it was expected that he would send a portion to hismess. Olive oil was provided by the state, and the Spartans ate barley cakesoaked in olive oil. Calculations of the food provided have assumed thatthere were large surpluses, especially of wine. Some food must have beenpassed to the women, who kept houses for their men. Each Spartan warriorhad a helot (a free laborer), who served him and could be called on to

support him in times of war. Food and drink were given to the helots, andthey were encouraged to drink as much as possible, including wine fromthe first pressing so that they would reel through the streets vomiting andmaking obscene gestures. Their drunken behavior would act as a warning toSpartan warriors both to show what could happen if they drank wine notmixed with water and also to remind them of their general behavior.In Crete men also sat to eat and ate their meals in common, with youngermen serving the older ones. Sons sat on the floor by their fathers’ chairs andwere served half the food of the father. All the food was served plain withoutany sauces. A separate table was allotted to strangers and foreigners. TheGreek philosopher Plato admired this type of meal as being ideal for equalityin a state although he preferred the Greek symposia for encouraging freediscussion amongst equals.The symposium, however, never entirely lived up to Plato’s ideals. OnceGreek freedom had collapsed under the Macedonian conquest in the fourthcentury B.C., the symposium became, if it had not been before, little morethan a vacuous session of drinking and talking shop. In 359 B.C. Philip II becameKing of Macedon. He quickly saw that the Persian wars had weakenedthe grip of both Athens and Sparta on the Greek City states and acceptedan invitation from the Thessalians to come to their aid and take over controlof the sanctuary of Delphi. He found himself in opposition to Athens anddefeated her in 338 B.C. at Chaeronea in central Greece. He did not destroyAthens; rather he preferred to create a federation with himself at its headso that he could lead an expedition to defeat the revived Persian Empire.Before this could happen, Philip was murdered in 336 B.C.His son, Alexander, then aged 20, intended to finish what his father hadbegun. He moved swiftly to defeat the Persians in three great victories. Afterthe third in 331 B.C., the Persian King, Darius, was murdered, which leftAlexander to press on with expeditions to Bactria and India. Here his troopsrefused to go any further. Alexander died in Babylon in 323 B.C. leaving anempire stretching from the Adriatic in the west to the Ganges in the east.In 12 years he had extended the boundaries of the Greek world far beyondwhat anyone could have imagined. He had destroyed the Persian Empire,burnt the great city of Persepolis and founded at least 70 cities called Alexandria,although the one in Egypt was to become his main legacy.Alexander had spread Greek culture throughout his empire. In manyareas the influence of Greek culture was superficial, and local customs continuedto exist. Alexander’s death in 323 B.C. left a vacuum, and his generalsfought amongst themselves to establish their own territorial rights. Eventuallythree kingdoms were created. Macedonia, in the north, was formed underthe Antigonid dynasty. In the south, Egypt was ruled by the Ptolomies, andin the east, Turkey, central Asia, Babylonia, and Syria were ruled by theSeleucids. These newly formed kingdoms were to face a more tenaciousenemy. By 280 B.C. Roman armies were expanding into Greece. Several ofthe advances were the result of an appeal by a king or chieftain for helpagainst an enemy, which only led to them succumbing to Rome.Ancient Greece 17

18 Ancient RomeFurther Reading: Dalby, Andrew. Siren Feasts. A History of Food and Gastronomy inGreece. London and New York: Routledge, 1995; Davidson, James N. Courtesansand Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens. New York: HarperCollins, 1997; Flacelière, Robert. Daily Life in Greece at the Time of Pericles. London:Phoenix Press, 2002; Freeman, Charles. Egypt, Greece and Rome. Civilizationsof the Ancient Mediterranean. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999;Jasny, N. The Wheats of Classical Antiquity. Baltimore: John Hopkins UniversityPress, 1944; Lissarrague, François. The Aesthetics of the Greek Banquet: Images ofWine and Ritual. Translated by Andrew Szegedy-Maszak. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1987; Murray, Oswyn. Early Greece. 2nd ed. London: Fontana,1993; Slater, William J, ed. Dining in a Classical Context. Ann Arbor: Universityof Michigan Press, 1991; Xenophon. Symposium. Translation and commentaryby Anthony J. Bowen. Warminster, England: Aris and Philips, 1998.Joan P. AlcockAncient RomeOn the whole the eating habits of ordinary Romans were sensible and abstemious.Quite obvious these habits changed throughout the long history ofthe Republic and the Empire and when the Romans conquered other areasand peoples. In the hotter parts of the Roman world most people ate frugallyduring the day and especially if they needed to keep their wits aboutthem; in the colder areas more food might be necessary. Eating was alsogoverned by when work could be done during the day. Most of the workingclass rose with the sun and went to bed with the sun, as lighting in the eveningwas so poor. In wealthier households, evening banquets and feasts wereheld, sometimes as part of political propaganda, to win support for politicalparties, and as a way for patrons to reward clients.In theory and probably in practice the Romans ate three meals a day.During the day, food was necessary to sustain the body, to provide energy,and to satisfy hunger. Breakfast (ientaculum) was the breaking of thenightly fast, food being taken as soon as a person got up, and therefore waslittle more than a piece of bread washed down with water and possiblywine. Lunch (prandium), which could be eaten any time between 10 A.M.and 2 P.M. according to when breakfast had been taken, was a snack meal—vegetables, fruit, bread, and a drink. The main aim was restorative.The evening meal (cena) usually consisted of three courses. The first(gustatio) was a taster—something like prepared vegetables, shellfish, andeggs. The main course (primae mensae) was roast, boiled, or braised meats,poultry, sausages, rissoles, and vegetables, flavored with herbs, spices, and liquamen,the ubiquitous Roman fish sauce. The last course (secundae mensae)consisted of desserts—small pastries, puddings made with pulses, egg dishes,fruit, and even more shellfish and oysters. Snails were especially popular aswere dormice stuffed with spices. This last course could be a time for moreluxurious eating and soft foods, for the softer the food—such as eels and

fish—the more this indicated the wealth of the host. Yet there might be adanger in this food because the softness often verged on putrefaction, whichcould cause at the least an upset stomach and at its most virulent, death.Wine was the main beverage, though both beer and wine were drunkin the northern parts of the empire and in army camps. Wine could accompanyall the courses but more abstemious Romans kept the custom ofadding water to wine. The Romans expressed themselves as being shockedby the Celtic habit of drinking wine undiluted, but diluted wine allowedsome Romans to drink more than might be normally expected. Drunkennessoften accompanied a feast given by an emperor but ordinary householdsdisapproved of drunkenness. The poet Martial was caustic aboutSextilanus who drank twice the allowance of wine allotted and did notdilute it with water. Heavy drinking can lead to health problems, and casesof gout have been found in some skeletal remains of ancient Romans.Drinking vessels could be of glass, pewter, or silver. Drinking cups madeof silver were highly prized because they indicated the high social statusof the host. Excavations have revealed the silver treasures of the House ofMenander at Pompeii and of the Villa della Pisanella at Boscoreale. Mostof the silver consisted of drinking cups, some in pairs others in sets of four,intricately decorated, presumably chosen in accordance with the host’s tasteas well as with regard to providing something for the guests to talk about,especially with admiration.Not all Romans had three meals a day. Poorer people existed on breador pottages made from grains and pulses, fortified by pieces of meat or fishto give some protein. Bread was usually unleavened and baked in a crockover the fire but the dough might be given some raising agent such as frothfrom beer, sour grape juice, or sour dough left over from a previous unbakedbatch. Bread was enriched by honey or cheese (placed in the middle); itwas sprinkled with poppy or sesame seeds or enriched with fruit. In townspeople bought bread from bakeries, which ground their own grain in a donkeymill and sieved the flour carefully, so that the bread produced was lessgritty than that ground in the home rotary quern. Simple though the mealswere, for dinner, some attempt was made to provide something extra, suchas meat or fish, and vegetables grown in the adjoining garden.Dinner in wealthier households was the time for relaxation when friendsjoined the family gathering and were entertained. The poet Martial (ca. A.D.40–103), a Spaniard who lived in Rome and wrote a book of Epigrams,invited his friends to dine at the ninth hour but the meal could be taken atany time after 4 P.M. Dinner, like a feast, was essential in binding togetherthe family or the community. Dining together implied similar social status.Entertainment after the meal was expected. This could consist of singers,dancers, and reciters. The contents of a grave at Colchester (England) includedfour reclining figures, obviously the diners, and five other standingfigures reading from a scroll, presumably the entertainers. Athletes mightalso be hired. A torn bikini, found in a well in London (England), may havebeen the remains of one or two garments covering a dancing female athleteAncient Rome 19

20 Ancient Romewho entertained appreciative guests. Hosts might entertain guests—not alwaysvery successfully. Seneca knew a freedman Calvisius Sabinus who paidhis slaves to memorize the works of Hesiod and Homer, but he bored theguests by repeating half- forgotten lines learned from the slaves.The physical layout of spaces that are used for dining affect ability forcommunication as well as indicate relationships within a society. Hence, thecouch and the position of the diners were very important. The Roman historianLivy (History 39.6) indicated that a number of foreign customs cameto Rome from Asia Minor, and that the triumph of the Roman GeneralGnaeus Manlius Vulso in 187 B.C. over the Galatians intensified this customwhen he brought booty back to Rome; luxuries such as couches, precioushangings, furniture, gold and silver vessels, and even cooks who specializedin a variety of culinary activities. The couches seem to have been the firsttriclinia couches to be used in Rome, but the custom of reclining almostcertainly came from Greece.There were usually three couches, one placed on each of three sidesof a small table. Each couch had places for three people, although couchesplaced in a semicircle were not unknown. The fourth side was left free forthe slaves to place food on the table or to allow guests to watch any entertainment.Larger banquets and feasts would replicate this arrangement.The middle couch (summus) was for the most important guests; the middleplace (imus in medio) was reserved for the guest of honor. The next importantguest was placed at the nearest corner to the middle table on the righthandtable. If a consul or an important dignitary was present, who mighthave to receive an urgent message, he sat to the right of the important guestso that he could easily be reached. The host sat next to him at the cornerof the left-hand table ready to issue orders to servants. Presumably this arrangement,which meant that a diner was placed diagonally, almost in thelap of his neighbor, was part of a networking society.The Romans adopted the custom of reclining while eating from thepractice of symposium, in which men in Ancient Greece gathered togetherto eat, drink, and talk, while reclining on couches. It’s possible that the Romansdeveloped this custom around the third century B.C., when they cameinto contact with the Greeks of southern Italy, although the Etruscans hadalso adopted the custom. Adult males stretched out on couches, leaningon their left elbows and eating with their right hands. Boys might reclinewhen they assumed the toga virilis, the toga of manhood, usually by theage of 16 or 17 but the privilege also implied that, as they had reached fullcitizenship, they had to restrain their teenage passions and submit to guidancein the rules of dining. Plutarch in his Moralia (679e – 680b) attemptedto answer a question about the possible squashing together of diners oncouches. He suggested that diners first lay flat on their stomachs to allowthe right hand to reach for the food. When they had taken the food, theylay on their sides to give their neighbors more room. Probably people wereso used to this way of dining that they thought nothing to it. If there wereany discomfort, it would be worth it for a good meal.

Slaves were permitted to recline during the festival of Saturnalia whenroles were reversed and slaves were masters for that festival. Columella(active A.D. 60 – 65), who wrote a treatise on farming, De Re Rustica, advisedthat a bailiff should encourage farm workers to take meals with him in hishouse, but he should not recline except on feast days.Reclining meant total relaxation of the body. Sitting—a posture halfwaybetween lying and standing—is only semi-relaxing. The Roman statesmanand moralist Cato (234–149 B.C.) showed his stoicism by sitting at tableand reclining only to sleep. Martial despised Maximus Syriscus not only fordissipating his fortune of 10 million sesterces but also for sitting on tavernstools and not reclining while he ate and talked. Lucian, a second-centuryA.D. prose essayist, was positive that the ability to imbibe while recliningdistinguished a man from a beast and a gentleman from a slave. It is possiblethat Lucian included barbarians in this for on tombstones found in thenorthern empire people are portrayed sitting in chairs or on stools roundtables on which a meal is laid. This seems to have been a custom adopted byRomano-Gallic or Romano-British people.Dining was the prerogative of social equals. Freeborn Romans did notdine with slaves. Slaves served guests. Slaves approached guests with bowlsof water and napkins as soon as the guests entered the room and betweencourses; in an extravagant gesture slaves could offer the guests wine forwashing. They could serve the food, press the guests to food and drink,anoint their feet, and spread coverlets. By the late empire handsome youthswith long flowing hair were preferred, especially to pour out wine, andthese “luckless boys,” as Seneca (Epistolae Morales 95.24, 47.5–8) said,had to “suffer shameful treatment” after a banquet was over. He also mentionedslaves standing silently while their masters dined: “When we reclineat a banquet, one slave mops up the disgorged food, another crouches beneaththe table and gathers the leftovers of the drunken guests. Anothercarves priceless game birds, and this is his only job.”At the end of the meal slaves had the right to consume leftover foodand drink if they still had the stomach for this. A mosaic, now in the VaticanMuseums and dated to the second century A.D. shows food debris lyingon the ground—fish and chicken bones, seafood shells, lobster claws, fruits,and nuts at which a mouse is gnawing. Most guests dropped food on thefloor expecting the slave to clear the debris; dregs of wine and vomit wouldnot be unexpected. The sordid debris portrayed was probably depicted toamuse the guests but it was a reminder to the slaves that they must cleanthe floor after a meal or be punished.All slaves served their master warily as they did not know what couldhappen to them if they did not. Minor punishments were given for droppinga cup or spilling food; more brutal punishments were not unknown.One slave at a dinner given by the Emperor Caligula stole a silver plate.He had his hands cut off and was forced to parade among the guests witha placard round his neck proclaiming his offense. Emperors, in a customcopied by the wealthy, used a slave called a vocatur to watch the guestsAncient Rome 21

22 Ancient Romefor their behavior. Unseemly behavior would ensure that they were not invitedagain. This man also checked what the guests were eating so that hecould tell the emperor which food was liked by a guest so that he could beserved it again or even which food he disliked so that he could be humiliatedand forced to eat it next time.A vocatur was in charge of issuing invitations and allocating place sittings.This laid him open to bribery. One wealthy provincial secured aninvitation to one of Caligula’s dinners by paying a vocatur 2,000 gold pieces.Such moneys made certain slaves very wealthy allowing them to progress intheir careers, buying their freedom, and becoming freedmen. The majoritywere men, although women servants or slaves wearing long dresses appearin banqueting scenes on sarcophagi. A tombstone of M. Ulpius Phaedimus,who died in Rome aged 28, and was a freedman of Trajan, records his career.He began as a server of drinks, moved on to become a tricliniarch, anorganizer of feasts, before being chosen to carve roasts and fowls for statebanquets.In the early days of the Republic the Romans had a pride in self-relianceand frugality; eating and drinking was on a small or frugal scale. After theconquest of Sicily in 241 B.C., the Romans could indulge in the more exotictastes of the Near Eastern regions. Public dinners now became fashionable.The term epulum, given to a Roman feast, was first a meal associated withsome religious function such as the Ludi Romani, which included a feast inhonor of Jupiter. In time its religious connotation diminished, and the termbecame associated with any opulent meal provided by a man, and occasionallyby a woman, for friends or for the public. Another public feast, called aconvivium, in its simplest form was based on the symposium of the Greeksalthough it could follow the symposium pattern. It was a meal for friends,held outside a household, and was intended both to express a relationshipbetween equals as well as be an opportunity for patrons to entertain clientsand show off their wealth.Freedmen and slaves were not admitted but they could eat together inguild (collegium) dinners. Joining a guild protected these men, who had nofamily ties, provided like company for entertainment, and ensured that theywould be given a decent funeral with the correct rites. In Gabii, decurionsand members of the priestly college of the Severi Augustales banqueted inpublic on their separate triclinia. Collegia buildings have been identified atPompeii and Ostia. One building at Ostia founded in the reign of Hadrianseems to have been the collegium of the carpenters (fabri tignuarii). A centralcourt, surrounded by rooms, is extended by a wing containing four tricliniawith masonry couches, was almost certainly the dining area.A story by the historian Livy shows both the power of a guild and aguild’s overall love of the good things in life. In 312 B.C. the censors forbidthe guild of flute players from holding these regular feasts, probably becausethey were too rowdy. The guild promptly went on strike and decamped toTibur. The Romans tried to entice them back, to no avail, but the Tibertinesknew the weakness of the members. They plied the players with drink until

they were intoxicated and fell asleep, packed them into carts, and sent themback to Rome. The flute players congregated in the Forum, but their appallinghangovers soon drove them home.Cicero wrote that Cato the Elder praised the early Romans for choosingthe term convivium (con-vivere) to describe the relaxing and reclining offriends at feasts as it implies “a communion of life which is a better designationthan that of the Greeks who call it sometimes a drinking together (symposium)or an eating together (syndeipon).” Cicero said that he enjoyed evenan afternoon banquet—that is, one that began early and cut short businessdays—possibly the modern equivalent of the long lunch. In time the termsepulum and convivium both eventually came to mean large public feasts ina variety of contexts, for feeding and entertaining many more people thansimply friends of the host.Some Romans might invite guests after a public feast to come to theirown home. The Roman general Sulla (c. 138–78 B.C.) often followed a dinnerwith a drinking party in his own house where dancers and musiciansentertained the guests.Women and children did not take part in dinners but women sometimeswere allowed to join the convivium and could recline on couchestogether, although this was unusual. They could give elaborate dinner partiesand even feasts for other women. There was still a gender problem. In7 B.C. Livia, the wife of Augustus, wanted to entertain both senators and thewives of senators together but her son Tiberius objected, as this might beconsidered unseemly. She had to entertain the wives while her son Tiberiusentertained the senators at a dinner in the portico of Livia.Unexpected guests posed another kind of problem. In 45 B.C. Cicerowrote to Atticus (Letters to Atticus 13.5 [353]) that he had been asked toentertain Julius Caesar after he had stopped overnight at Philippus placeon his route from Pozzuoli. Unfortunately this included all Caesar’s retinue,who had to be put in three dining rooms. Caesar also brought withhim 2,000 soldiers, although Cicero probably did not have to feed thesemen. Caesar had a bath, oiled his body, and came to dinner. As he was “followinga course of emetics,” he was able to partake of “a fine well appointedmeal” and he indicated that he had dined well. Cicero provided his guestswith all they had wanted and boasted that “I showed that I knew how tolive.” He added wryly that “they were not the kind of person to whom onesays, ‘Do come again when you are next in the neighbourhood.’ Once isenough.” He added hastily, “it was a visit or should I call it a billeting, whichwas troublesome to me but not disagreeable.”Private banquets became notorious for their ostentation in entertainment.In the first century B.C., the soldier and administrator Lucius Lucullus’sextravagance became notorious. Once when Caesar and Pompey methim in the forum, Lucullus invited them to dinner. They said they woulddine with him that day, but they would not allow him to give notice to hisservants, hoping that he would be forced to give them a simple meal. Lucullusoutwitted them, for he merely told his servants he would dine withAncient Rome 23

24 Ancient Romethem “in Apollo.” Each of his dining rooms had fixed allowance for dinnersand in Apollo was served the most costly of foods. A banquet was thereforeready when the two guests came to dine.Such extravagance was satirized by one of the most famous accountsof a banquet. Titus Petronius, the presumed author of the Satyricon, wholived a life of notorious idleness, was attached to Nero’s court, probably inthe 60s A.D. The Roman historian Tacitus records that when Petronius fellout of favor with the emperor in A.D. 66, he attempted to commit suicideby slitting his veins. He then bound them up, talked with his friends, had agood dinner, and slept for a while so that his death should appear natural,then resigned himself to death. His major work, The Satyricon, is a satiricalwork that records an extravagant, vulgar banquet given by Trimalchio, withits seven courses of 62 items, some served with Falernian wine said to bea hundred years old. Tricks included the outpouring of sausages and bloodpuddings when a pig’s belly was slit, and out of a boar’s slit belly, thrushesflew and were caught by fowlers and then cooked for the guests.Public feasts and banquets, often on a lavish scale, were intended to be apublic affirmation of power and wealth. They were held by magistrates beforeelections and by family members to commiserate deaths or to celebratebirthdays. Status mattered. Cocceia Vera from Cura allocated money for afeast to be held in public on her birthday; the guests were arranged strictlyin order of status. Decurions were placed on 10 triclinia, seviri were seatedon two or more, and so on, thus reflecting the social spectrum. Accordingto an inscription in Corfinium, a donor left a legacy to set up a carefullydelineated fund for both the city council and the populace with the interestto provide a feast to remember him on the anniversary of his birthday.Decurions and their children got 30 sesterces each for a feast wherethey reclined. The Severi Augustales got 20 sesterces each and the plebeians8 sesterces each for a dinner. The different choice of words indicates thedifferent ranks of society. Only the decurions reclined; the rest sat. The seatingarrangements indicate the privileged setting and the reinforcement of asocial hierarchy.Generals held feasts for their troops after battles, senators fed their clients,and decurions and aediles entertained fellow citizens or their peers orgave public banquets to secure votes. Distinguished citizens also providedfeasts for the populace. To take part in the festivities was to acknowledge,whether consciously or not, the superior power of the provider as well asthe achievement of a collective identity. The three-day festival of the ArvalBrethren, a high status brotherhood in Rome, made sacrificial offerings tothe Dea Diva. After a libation had been made to the deity, the president ofthe brethren ate, followed by other members in order of status. On the thirdday slaves and freedmen were allowed to eat, but they were provided withgood white bread instead of meat.In Rome generals and senators were expected to provide feasts. In45 B.C. Julius Caesar gave a feast with 22,000 dining couches. Allowingthree people to a couch, this would mean 66,000 people were feasted.

Crassus in 70 B.C. held a feast for 10,000 tables of people after a sacrificeto Hercules and gave each person an additional allowance of grain for threemonths. In 74 B.C. Lucullus drove King Mithridates out of Bithynia andaccounting this a triumph he gave a banquet for the senate and providedsacrificial feasts for the people, which included 1,000,000 jars of Greekwine, probably equivalent to four million liters. Such generosity was notconfined to the elite. An inscription at Ostia records that P. Lucilius Gamalagave a feast on 217 dining couches, and on two occasions provided a lunch(prandium) for the coloni. C. Iunius Priscus at Arles gave two days of showsand a wild beast hunt for the citizens, a feast for the decurions on 13 tricliniaand another on 34 biclinia for the advocates and other officials.Much of this feasting was linked to fierce competition for both publicand private support. Emperors thought that this entertainment was a vitalnecessity to maintain power. Claudius entertained hundreds of guests andeven went so far as to pass an edict allowing flatulence at banquets after helearned that one of his guests was acutely uncomfortable due to modesty.Domitian felt the need to provide entertainments in the Coliseum and theCircus Maximus. One of his most memorable feasts, given in the Coliseumon the Kalends of December A.D. 84, was recorded by the Latin poet PubliusStatius. First, slaves handed out white napkins to the crowd. Then fruitswere given—plums from Damascus, dates from Pontus and Palestine, figsfrom Asia Minor, and apples and pears from Amorica—all luxurious items.Pastries included some in the shape of human figures. Flamingoes, pheasants,and guinea fowl were tossed into the crowd for people to take home.Wine flowed freely, and the crowd was entertained by troops of dancingLydian ladies and Syrians, and by gladiatorial fights, that included severalby pigmies.The Emperor Caligula’s banquets were welcomed for their opulencebut feared for what could happen, as he loved playing cruel jokes, especiallyreversal of roles where senators were stripped of their togas and dressed asslaves, then made to wait at table. On one occasion in A.D. 40, Caligula suddenlyburst out laughing. The two consuls present nervously asked the reasonfor his mirth. Caligula replied that this was because he had just thoughthe could have had their throats slit before they had finished the meal.Both private and public dining was clearly appreciated, especially thelatter. The first-century A.D. compiler of anecdotes, Valerius Maximus (Factaet Dictu Memorabilia 7.5), noted the hypocrisy: “For while the people approvedof private frugality, publicly they set more store by an handsomeshow.” Seneca argued that the Roman people loathed private luxury, especiallyextravagant banquets, but they loved public splendor and expectedsome share in it. Cicero claimed that Cato the Elder disapproved of feasts,not surprisingly indicating that feasts could be seen as bribery to promotegoodwill by providing food. Not all political intentions got results. QuintusAelius Tubero was asked by his cousin Quintus Fabius Maximus to organizea funerary banquet for the people of Rome on the death of his uncle, ScipioAemilius. Tubero, however, was a stoic who disapproved of extravagantAncient Rome 25

26 Ancient Romeentertainment. He therefore covered the couches with shabby goatskinsand served food in poor Samian ware, which was declared by the peopleto be more appropriate for the death of Diogenes the Cynic than to honorthe death of the mighty Africanus. The result was that Tubero was defeatedwhen he stood for the office of praetor in the next election.The Romans extended the concept of feasting to the world of thedead. There were three aspects to this: meals provided for the dead and themourners, meals provided to sustain the dead in the tomb, and food necessaryto sustain the dead on the journey to the afterlife and in the afterlife.This applied both to burials and cremations. The funerary cult was basedas much on fear as on piety, for it was believed that the dead were proneto resentment, even vengeance, if they felt they were neglected. To forestallthis, the correct rites had to be carried out. In these rites food played animportant part. Once the deceased had been cremated or placed in thetomb, a libation of wine to the Manes (spirits of the dead) was poured out.Offerings of food were taken at the tomb to be eaten in a funerary meal(silicernium) by members of the family. Sometimes poor strangers waitedclose to the tombs to partake of the feast after the mourners had departed,even though this was considered sacrilege.The period of mourning included purification ceremonies and meals,sometimes elaborate, eaten at the graveside, nine days after the funeral andthen on personal anniversaries, such as birthdays, and annual festivals whenthe dead were commemorated. These celebrations had a dual purpose, ensuringthat memories of the dead survived in the minds of friends and relations,and reassuring the dead that they were not forgotten by inclusionin the refreshment provided. Often money would be left in a will for thenecessary food and drink—bread, cakes, meat, fruit, and wine.The Parentalia, held February 13 to 21, was the feast of parents andkinsfolk, when the dead were appeased by feasts and food offerings, includinga family meal eaten at the grave. The Parentalia ended in the publicfestival of the Feralia, when the Manes (the spirits of the dead) were honored.The Lemuria, held on May 9, 11, and 13, was when hungry ghosts, theLemures and the more dangerous Larvae (malevolent ghosts and evil spiritsof the dead), gathered round the house. Meals were prepared for the ghosts.At midnight, the head of the family washed his hands in clean water andthrew away black beans, while keeping his face averted, saying nine times:“These I cast, with these I redeem me and mine.” As he made his way out ofthe house, touching water on his route, the ghosts were believed to pick upand eat the beans.On anniversaries, relations and friends ate commemorative meals at thetomb, with a share provided for the dead person. The fact that it was noteaten did not mean that the dead spirit was not partaking of its share; itwould be nourished either within its bones or its ashes. To prepare suchmeals, kitchens were sometimes provided at mausolea so that the food mightbe as elaborate as when eaten by the deceased when alive. Kitchens can beseen attached to certain tombs at Isola Sacra, the cemetery attached to Ostia,

Ancient Rome 27Tombstone of Druisius with the representation of a funeral banquet, A.D. 80. ErichLessing/Art Resource, NY.the port of Rome. These tombs present the appearance of the dwellings of awell-to-do bourgeoisie.Meals shared at the tomb with the dead might not be enough to satisfythem. The tomb was the home for the dead, where they would expect allthat they had had in life and food replenished their energies. Nourishmentwas provided by food placed within the tomb at the moment of intermentor on the funeral pyre. Future nourishment from the human world camein the forms of food placed in tombs, and libations and burnt offerings atthe tomb. These burnt offerings liberated the spirit of the food so that itpassed to the dead. Libations could be delivered through pipes. For poorerpeople this meant the mouth of a flagon protruding above the ground

28 Ancient Romeserving both as a grave marker and an entrance for liquid nourishment.These can still be seen in situ at the Isola Sacra cemetery at Ostia.The funerary feast seems to have extended throughout the empire. Inthe catacombs of Kom el-Shuqqafa at Alexandria, Egypt, dating from thesecond century A.D., the dead were interred in a vast necropolis, reachedby a spiral staircase, descending to a depth of 35 meters. A triclinium withthree stone benches was provided, where meals could be eaten before thedead persons underwent the ritual Egyptian custom of evisceration andmummification, the processes of which are graphically represented onthe wall of the principal tomb. When the catacombs were first excavated,wine amphora and tableware were found on a central wooden table in thetriclinium.The premise of a tomb as an eternal home was constant in the Romanworld. Trimalchio declared the importance of decorating one’s tomb carefully:“It is wrong to look after the house in which you live and to neglectthe house in which you will stay much longer” (Petronius, Satyricon 71).Containers for ashes were placed in urns shaped as houses. The elaboratetombs at Ostia and those south of Rome, along the Via Latina near to itsconvergence with the Via Appia Nuova, are large square buildings, whichtake the form of rectangular houses. Some of the buildings have an undergroundburial chamber surmounted by a two-story building.Funerary gardens were also created round tombs where meals could beeaten. Trimalchio, who would have expected a funerary banquet on a grandscale, when giving directions for his future tomb, said that he would like tohave an orchard with “various kinds of fruit growing round my ashes andplenty of vines” (Petronius, Satyricon 71). This concept can be seen in theRoman belief that the Elysium Fields were regarded as an idyllic landscapewith abundant flowers and heavenly banquets.Some tombstones show the Totenmahl or funerary banquet. The deceasedlies on a couch, holding out a cup as if to toast the living. A smallthree-legged table is in front, on which rests food. Such tombstones werepopular in the Rhineland and Eastern Gaul. On one of the finest tombstonesat Cologne, Germany, Gaius Julius Maternus, veteran of Legion I Minervia,reclines on a high-backed couch, with a pet dog at his feet. He raises a cupin his right hand and holds a serviette in his left. A meal of fruit and bread isset on a three-legged table covered with a fringed cloth. A banquet indeedfor those who are about to enter the afterlife. Servants stand to left and rightto wait on him. His wife, Maria Marcellina, seated in her basket chair, holdsa bowl with more fruit.The dead expected to be nourished by these meals. Even so, none couldescape the implacable reality that the pleasures of eating and drinking wereephemeral. Titus Flaminius, soldier of Legion XIV Gemina, on his tombstonein Britain at Wroxeter, Shropshire, was uncompromising: “I did myservice and now I am here. Read this and be either more or less fortunate inyour lifetime. The gods prohibit you from the wine-grape and water whenyou enter Tartarus” (Collingwood and Wright no 292).

Anniversary Parties 29Further Reading: Alcock, Joan P. “The Funerary Meal in the Cult of the Dead inClassical Roman Religion.” In Harlan Walker (ed). The Meal: Proceedings ofthe Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. Totnes, England: Prospect Book,2001, pp. 31– 41; Aldrete, Gregory S: The Roman City: Rome, Pompeii, and Ostia.Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004; Apicius. The Roman Cookery Book: ACritical Translation of the Art of Cooking by Apicus for Use in the Study and inthe Kitchen. Translated by Barbara Flower and Elisabeth Rosenbaum. London:George Harrop & Co., 1961; Brun, J. P., and A. Tchernia. Le Vin Romain Antique.Grenoble, France: Glénat, 1999; Collingwood, R. G., and R.R.P. Wright (eds.).The Roman Inscriptions of Britain. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965; Donahue,John F. The Roman Community at Table during the Principate. Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press, 2004; Dunbabin, Katherine. The Roman Banquet:Images of Conviviality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; Giacosa,Ilaria Gozzini. A Taste of Ancient Rome. Translated by Anna Herklotz. Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1992; Gold, Barbara K., and John F. Donahue (eds.).Roman Dining: A Special Issue of American Journal of Philology. Baltimore: JohnsHopkins University Press, 2005; McGovern, Patrick E., J. Fleming, and S. H. Katz(eds.). The Origins and Ancient History of Wine. Amsterdam, The Netherlands:Gordon and Breach, 1996; Meiggs, Ronald. Roman Ostia. 2nd edition. Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1972; Nielsen, H. S., and I. Nielsen (eds.). Meals in aSocial Context: Aspects of the Communal Meal in the Hellenistic and Roman World.Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 1998; Petronius.: The Satyricon.Translated by J. P. Sullivan. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1965;Suetonius. The Twelve Caesars. Translated by Robert Graves. Harmondsworth,England: Penguin Books, 1957; Toynbee, J.M.C. Death and Burial in the RomanWorld. London: Thames and Hudson, 1971.Joan P. AlcockAnniversary PartiesAnthropologists believe that early marriage was characterized by thecapture of young women while out gathering food for their tribes or clans.Since tribes and clans were groups of extended family, a woman’s friendswere often siblings, cousins, and other kin. A woman would be seized by aman from another tribe or clan who was assisted by his kinsmen while theother young women ran back to the village to get help from their fathers, brothers,and other male family members. Meanwhile the young woman and her captorwould be in hiding until the search for her was terminated and, according tolegend, the bride would be presented with a ring composed of braided grassthat denoted her “taken” status. This period of hiding out usually lasted30 days or one full cycle of the moon during which the new couple drankwine with honey and, at the end, the new bride was usually with child.From this initial explanation one can see the origins of brides, grooms, thebridal party, and the wedding band, in addition to the honeymoon.In time, this form of marriage by capture was replaced with a form ofbartering for wives. Men and their brothers would approach fathers with

30 Anniversary Partiesdaughters from neighboring clans or tribes to negotiate the exchange ofgoods for a bride. The price a groom would pay to the father of a woman tomake her his wife was called bridewealth or wed and is considered the rootfrom which the term wedding originates. This exchange of goods or wealthwas to serve as compensation for the father who was losing a householdworker rather than gaining a son-in-law; it is hypothesized that this conceptof the father having to give up the labor contribution of his daughteris the origin of the term “giving away the bride.” Bartering for wives grewinto the formation of alliances between fathers and leaders to create verylarge extended families that often chose to intermarry if they were aristocraticin an effort to create stronger blood ties to the crown, or enlargingand fortifying kingdoms. Bridewealth was complemented by the conceptof the dowry, where fathers gave money to grooms to help financially supporttheir daughters in married life. These dowries included everythingfrom monetary gifts to tracts of land, and sometimes even the right to collecttaxes from those that resided on the property. As brides became theproperty of their husbands these gifts also fell under his jurisdiction. Thesearranged marriages were often tactical maneuvers orchestrated by the aristocracyand confirmed by the church in an effort to legitimize them, as wellas to curb some of the more flagrant behavior. As a result it was more likelythat the anniversary honoring a ruler’s reign would be celebrated, instead ofthe marriage that may have helped to ensure his throne.The engagement ring is Western culture’s modern tie to bridewealth. Itserves not only as a token of affection but puts forth an offer of marriage.The acceptance of the engagement ring begins the cycle of preparations toenter married life with its responsibilities and future duties of family. Bridewealthis a rarely practiced custom in scattered parts of the world, and thedowry system, though still practiced in many places, has also begun to diminish.Originally, the dowry included a financial arrangement between thebride’s father and her groom, while also including the items in the trousseauor hope chest, prepared by the bride. The groom provided daily careand the home in which they would dwell while the bride was responsiblefor daily housekeeping, raising of the children, and the décor of the home.Home décor items included bed linens, towels, and so forth, that were embellishedwith needlework featuring flowers, monograms, and other artisticelements attesting to the proficiency of decorative fine arts. In parts of theMiddle East and Asia there is a complex system of laws codifying the ritualor limiting its practice, but there are groups that still use dowries. The socialcodes dictating the behavior of the medieval upper class did not pertain tothose below them. Slaves were forbidden to marry but merchants, workers,and other lower class citizens were equally encouraged by economic necessityto marry. However, the nature of these unions differed greatly comparedto their aristocratic cousins. Some historians suggest that the idea ofa love match originated during the lower classes at this time. In time, thisromantic notion swept through all classes and became an essential componentleading to the celebration of the wedding anniversary.

Anniversary Parties 31The first anniversary of acouple’s wedding is celebrated by Anniversary Milestones and Giftsconsuming the top layer of their Anniversary American British Modernwedding cake. In addition, there1 paper cotton clocksis also the ceremonial exchange ofgifts. These gifts change with eachyear and have been modernized toreflect the availability and usefulnessof the items. The first anniversaryis traditionally celebrated withthe gift of paper in America whilethe British equivalent is cotton andmodern gift givers offer clocks.Traditionally, certain anniversarieshave been recognized as23456789cottonleatherlinen, silkwoodironwool, copperbronzepotterypaperleatherfruit, flowerswoodsugarwool, copperbronze, potterypottery, willowchinacrystalappliancessilverwarewoodendesk itemlinens, laceleatherbeing milestones and are accompaniedby parties to honor the10 tin, aluminum tin diamond11 steel steel jewelryoccasion. The silver and goldenanniversaries, the 25th and 50threspectively, are often cause forchildren to fete their parents’ maritalachievements. In cases such asthese, the parties can run the spectrumto simply enjoying cake andcoffee to something much morelavish like a catered meal withdancing or other forms of entertainment.Like the bridal showerand bachelor party that welcomedthe couple into matrimonial life,this celebration should be a gifthonoring their achievement.1213141520253035404550silklaceivorycrystalchinasilverpearlcoral, jaderubysapphiregoldlinen, silklaceivorycrystalchinasilverpearlcoralrubysapphiregoldpearlstextiles, fursgoldwatchesplatinumsterling silverdiamondjaderubysapphiregoldAccording to some Germanic 55 emerald emerald emeraldtraditions, anniversaries are celebratedmore often. Because so60 diamond diamond diamondmany Westerners are divorcing andremarrying, celebrations may occurat earlier intervals, such as at 5, 10, or15 years. These celebrations, as wellas the yearly ones, can be as simpleor elaborate as the couple likes. Forsome, this may be dinner at home or65707580blue sapphireplatinumdiamondoakblue sapphireplatinumdiamondoakblue sapphireplatinumdiamondoakan evening out to a favorite restaurant and the exchange of gifts.Further Reading: Ackerman, Diane. A Natural History of Love. New York: RandomHouse, 1994; Metrick, Sydney Barbara. I Do: A Guide to Creating Your Own

32 AntipastoUnique Wedding Ceremony. Berkeley, CA: Celestial Arts, 1992; Packham, Jo.Wedding Parties & Showers: Planning Memorable Celebrations. New York: SterlingPublishing Co., 1993; Waggoner, Susan. I Do! I Do! From the Veil to the Vows:How Classic Wedding Traditions Came to Be. New York: Rizzoli, 2002; Wallace,Carol McD. All Dressed in White: The Irresistible Rise of the American Wedding.New York: Penguin Books, 2004.Alexa Reynolds JohnsonAntipastoAntipasto is the singular form of the less often used, plural term antipasti.It literally means before (anti) the meal (pasto). Antipasto is considered theItalian equivalent of the appetizer course and defined as an assortment ofhot or cold dishes served at the beginning of the meal. Despite the modernassumption of its similarity to American appetizers and French horsd’oeuvres, traditional antipasto has a much more complex purpose, as theactual intent of the dish is to heighten the anticipation for the meal to come,stimulate the palate without overwhelming it, and aid digestion.The term antipasto first appeared in the sixteenth century in the writingsof Domenico Romoli, a gastronomic writer. Originally, antipasto wasserved specifically for gustato, or digestion, but it evolved to include all firstcourse dishes.Antipasto arose from the menu crisis of a new bourgeois class. The aristocracyhad a very complicated order to their meals serving very specificentremets following or preceding certain main dishes such as roasts. Thebourgeois wanted to maintain the digestive functions of the upper-classfeasts but needed to simplify them. From the nineteenth century on theyaltered the order of their menus and, following in the steps of the trattorie,finally decided on the three-course outline that is still used today. Whilethere was some struggle to assign certain dishes to a specific course, antipastodeveloped easily, as any palate-stimulating dish was assigned to thenew course. As the three-course bourgeois meal cemented itself, the idea ofAn antipasto display at a wedding in Italy. LarrySt. Pierre/Shutterstock.

keeping the appetite alert and aiding digestion remained the only commonthreads connecting the gastronomic habits of both classes.Antipasto and hors d’oeuvres first became synonymous in the nineteenthcentury when international chefs tired of the strict boundaries ofpalate stimulations. Upscale French restaurants replaced the lighter Italianbasedfare with more costly assortments of oysters, caviar, foie gras, andheavier hot morsels such as beignets, tartlets, fondue, and croquettes.Like appetizers and hors d’oeuvres, antipasto is served before the mainmeal, as the first course. Additionally, the number of dishes served has fluctuatedthroughout history. In past centuries, a spread of numerous disheswould normally be served, whereas now one sees smaller, more individualportions.Antipasto dishes always include seasonal ingredients and very simpleflavors. The minimalism of the dishes entails very little preparation as mostof them are served in the form in which they are purchased. Marinadesand dressings consist of simple oils, vinegars, and other acids such as lemonjuice; the addition of salt and herbs is also welcome; however, intense spiceand bold flavors should be reserved for the main course because they damagethe palate, making the following courses seem bland. Moreover, heavydishes inhibit digestion, rather than promote it, and cause fullness too earlyin the meal. Drinks may be paired with antipasto, but along the same linesas the food served, they should be light and complement the food while notdisturbing the palate; usually white wines are appropriate, as well as bitterssuch as Campari and Lillet or vermouths.The varieties of food offered in antipasto have a fairly vast range includingeverything from vegetables to seafood, and can range in temperaturefrom cold to room temperature to hot. While the dressings are confined tooil, vinegar, lemon juice, and herbs, a selection of antipasto can be quite assorted.A high vegetable ratio, usually half of the dishes, is common for theantipasto course because it is an easy way to keep the course light. The otherhalf of the course should be split between seafood, meat, and hot dishes.Salads can include a mélange of vegetables, seafood, or meats, and can beserved chilled or lukewarm (legumes or greens are tossed with cooked meat,fish, other vegetables, or starches). Vegetable dishes simply consist of, amongothers, such traditional ingredients as artichokes and fennel, usually servedwith pepper and oil. Mushrooms are served with oils and a few drops oflemon juice, and truffles are shaved over other antipasto, such as cheeses, toadd and intensify the flavor. Cooked beans are made into salads or servedover biscuits or small toasts. Bruschetta are round toasts, usually made fromday-old or stale bread, brushed with olive oil, garlic, and pepper, toppedwith fresh tomatoes and basil, seafood, or cheese.Fish and seafood are also very common in antipasto spreads. The Italiancoastline offers a rich array of fish that are not substantial enough for maindishes but that make excellent first course dishes. Fish carpaccio and crudodishes such as tuna crudo (raw tuna) are common. Bottarga, air-dried tunaor millet roe, is also popular. Seafood salads include a medley of marinatedAntipasto 33

34 Aztec Entertainingshellfish and mollusks including shrimp, squid (seppie, calamaretti, totani,moscardini), mussels, clams, sea truffles, oysters, crabs, scallops, and lobster.Another well-known antipasto category is salumi, salted and curedmeat, mostly pork. Since Italy is so well known for cured meats like prosciuttodi parma and Genoan salami, and such delicacies can simply besliced and served on a platter (termed affettato misto), salumi is a very popularappetizer even outside of Italy. Other meats that can be included in theaffettato misto are soppressata, speck, bresaola, coppa, and testa. They can alsobe dressed with oil and vinegar, or served with fruit such as the internationallyfamous dishes of prosciutto with melon or figs.Hot antipasto, because they are traditionally rather unusual, are lessoften seen among antipasto spreads, but are no less welcome. They arecomforting in cold weather and can be part of lunch or dinner. They mustbe kept simple and maintain the qualities of cold and room temperaturedishes. Hot dishes can include crostini (little toasts). Crostini are synonymouswith bruschetta, but tend to be associated with the warm varieties;toppings include cheese, anchovies, cooked shellfish, or, more traditionally,chicken liver sauce. Small pizzas, or pizzette, also fall into this category, butto remain antipasto, they must be small and not too heavy. Fritelle are smallfritters stuffed with various ingredients such as cured meats and cheese.Also, left over bits and pieces of meats, vegetables, and organ meats can befried into small morsels.Although in the past 50 years, antipasto, appetizer, and hors d’oeuvrebecame completely interchangeable, traditional Italian antipasto are stillserved in Italy and in America, in many Italian restaurants and homes aroundthe country. They are much appreciated at large parties, by the guests andhosts alike, as they require little preparation, can be made ahead of time, butare still tasty and easy to eat. They make the perfect first course for a hostdoubling as cook as they allow less time spent in the kitchen and more timespent with the guests. For a group of 10 or so a selection of 15 to 20 dishes ofantipasto is appropriate; guests should always be allowed ample time, at leastan hour, to enjoy the antipasto along with the company of the other guests.Further Reading: Bastianich, Lidia Matticchio, and Christopher Styler. Lidia’s ItalianTable. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1998; Capatti, Alberto, andMassimo Montanari. Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History. New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2003; David, Elizabeth. Italian Food. New York: PenguinBooks, 1999; May, Tony. Italian Cuisine. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005; TheSilver Spoon. New York: Phaidon Press, 2006.Allison GreenAztec EntertainingThe foodstuff available to the Aztecs prior to the arrival of the Spanish in1519 consisted of the Mesoamerican trinity of corn, beans, and squash, with

chili peppers for flavoring on the side. Meat came in the form of variousbirds, including turkeys; dogs; and the occasional deer. The Aztec diet wasessentially a vegetarian one, with an astonishing variety of foods used inunique and creative ways. Although the Aztecs are known mostly for theirpractice of human sacrifice, research now indicates that—contrary to someof the disturbing accounts written by the early Spanish chroniclers like FrayBernardino Sahagún and Bernal Díaz del Castillo and modern researcherslike Michael Harner—human sacrifice was not meant to supply scarce proteinto the protein-deficient Aztecs, but was rather a ritualized form ofviolence. Only certain priests and warriors ate human flesh in the form ofritualized cannibalism.Ritual feasts, royal banquets, and daily meals all carried different obligationsand practices. Common to all three were the sources for the food: thehuge market in Tenochtitlán, with much food grown in “floating gardens”called chinampas on Lake Xochimilco, and the tribute required of the outlyingareas around the capital of Tenochtitlán. So rich was the food culturethat ready-made foods like tamales and stews were available for people tobuy and take home to eat.Corn was such an important food, so necessary for the physical survivalof the people, that it underwrote much of culinary practice as well as religiouspractice. Nobles and poor peasants alike ate corn every day, in manyguises. Atole, a sort of porridge more like a beverage made with ground corn,was a staple beverage, and tortillas were the “bread” of life.Feasts dedicated to the gods occurred monthly and special foods andmeals were prepared to note the significance of each god. Most of the celebrationsmarked some aspect of the harvest. In the months before the harvest,wealthy nobles were required to share the surplus of their granarieswith the poor by holding fiestas. Poor people stood in line for handfuls oftamales and atole. At the harvest itself, food offerings of fresh tortillas andchilies were made to the corn goddess, and the celebrants had to eat thesefoods at the feast. For the Lord of Rain and Thunder, the god Tlaloc, theAztecs celebrated a special feast called the Great Vigil. In addition to an offeringof the blood of a sacrificial victim, the Aztecs placed stews, chocolate,and tamales at the base of the statue of the god. Guards posted around thetemple guarded the food from marauding enemies. Defilement of the mealwas believed to bring terrible punishment to the Aztecs by the god.One of the most important feasts occurred every 52 years at the NewFire ceremony. This event meant that the cycle of the world would beginanew if the correct foods were offered to the gods in abundance. Somepriests fasted for an entire year prior to this ceremony, others for 80 days,while the Aztec lords fasted for 8 days.Spanish accounts of the feasts enjoyed by the Aztec ruler Moctezumaemphasize the large number of dishes prepared for him. Daily meals includedover 30 different dishes for him alone, with a thousand dishes concoctedfor his entourage. After a ritual washing of his hands by four maidens,Moctezuma ate alone behind a golden screen. Chronicler Bernal Díaz delAztec Entertaining 35

36 Aztec EntertainingPage from the Codex Fejérvár y-Mayer. Top panel depicts the fortunes of the maize plant during the last twoyears of a four-year period. In the third year (right), Tlaloc is dominant and blesses the plant, which is shownas Chalchihuitlicue. In the final year (left), Xipe Totec rules the maize and the plant fails. Werner Forman /Art Resource, NY.Castillo provided one of the more detailed renditions of what a daily mealfor the Aztec ruler entailed. “Every day they cooked him fowl, wattled fowl,pheasants, native partridges, quail, domestic and wild ducks, deer, peccary,reed birds and doves and hares and rabbits,” and that was just the beginning.He ended his meals with a form of hot chocolate, made from groundcacao beans. As in many places in the Americas, Aztec banquets took placeearly in the morning. Presentation of the dishes was an important part ofthe dining experience. Cooks decorated tamales with seeds and beans, andtortillas were often baked in different shapes, including that of butterflies,an important animal for the Aztecs, since they believed that butterflies werethe returned souls of warriors.Aztec nobles and upper-class people held banquets for various nonritualizedoccasions, and Fray Bernardino Sahagún left one of the most

Aztec Entertaining 37detailed descriptions of Aztec eating habits, including two accounts of banquetsrelated to him by Aztec informers. One banquet was held for a baptism,and the other, given by a merchant, was a unique and costly occasion.The baptism banquet, not detailed in the account, probably featured toastedmaize and beans with a sauce of chili, as well some meat and fish. Even here,the gods demanded their portion and each guest dropped a small amountof food on the ground for the god Tlaltecuhtli. Servers received the leftoverfood. Sahagún states that the men drank chocolate after the meal, while thewomen took atole. Sahagún’s comments about the use of alcohol are especiallyinteresting. If guests were unhappy with the meal, etiquette requiredthe host to hold another banquet the following day and in the meantime,the older people—both men and women—were served weak pulque, an alcoholicbeverage made from the maguey plant. Allowed to imbibe as muchas they wished, unlike the rest of the population, soon the inebriated olderpeople would start singing and telling jokes and stories.The extraordinary banquet held by the merchant required intricatepreparations, including special treatment for the chocolate to be served. Thehost recruited his friends and family members to assist him with all facets ofthe banquet, including serving and seating the guests. Tobacco use demandedspecial smoking tubes, the banquet area had to be purified by a priest withincense, and the men ate hallucinogenic mushrooms and retold their visions.The food served is not described in detail, but it was likely a meat stew withchili and tortillas. The next day, the leftovers appeared and it was a good omenif enough food was left, signifying prosperity for the host and his family.The common people ate much differently than did the Aztec lords andwealthy merchants. Celebrating the festival of Tlacaxipehualiztli, similar toEaster, called for offerings of food and many of the poor could not offermore than stale tortillas and rank bitter sauces. The daily eating patterns ofthe poor included chili, salt, tortillas, and beans or other vegetables availablemade into stews. In his account of Aztec culture, Sahagún includes someof the short pithy lectures for children’s good behavior so characteristic ofAztec literature, warning children of the need to be moderate and prudentin all things related to eating and drinking, including ritual hand washingand cleanliness at meals.Further Reading: Coe, Sophie D. America’s First Cuisines. Austin: University ofTexas Press, 1994; Cortés, Hernán. Letters from Mexico. New Haven, CT: YaleUniversity Press, 2001; Díaz del Castillo, Bernal. Historia verdadera de laconquista de la Nueva España. México: Nueva Mundo, 1943; Long-Solis, Janet,and Luis Alberto Vargas. Food Culture in Mexico. Westport, CT: GreenwoodPress, 2005; Pilcher, Jeffrey M. Que Vivan Los Tamales: Food and the Makingof Mexican Identity. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998;Rojas de Perdomo, Lucía. Cocina Prehispánica. Santafé de Bogotá, Colombia:Editorial Voluntad, SA, 1994; Sahagún, Bernardino de. General History of theThings of New Spain: Florentine Codex. Santa Fe, NM: School of AmericanResearch. 1950.Cynthia D. Bertelsen

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BBaby ShowerIt has long been the custom to present gifts to newborns, although the giftingusually took place after the child was born, commonly when the childwas presented or was christened. In the late nineteenth century it becamepopular for new mothers to host a tea for friends a month or so after thebirth of the child. Victorians discouraged visitors during the first weeks followingdelivery. Many obstetric texts of the period recommended nine daysof complete bed rest for the new mother. This was particularly true forupper-class women, who were thought to be more delicate and more susceptibleto post-partum complications. The length of time that a womanremained “a bed” after delivery varied with her constitution, personality, andeconomic situation.Victorians would never have hosted a party prior to the birth of thechild. Pregnant women were expected to avoid the public view as muchas possible. Women of the leisure class remained indoors during the lattermonths of their pregnancy. Infant mortality in the last decades of the nineteenthcentury ranged from 15.1 to 21.4 percent, and it was not until theearly twentieth century that the infant mortality rate fell into to the singledigits. In a time of such high infant mortality, families would never have presumedto celebrate prior to the birth.

40 Baby ShowerThe traditional baby shower, where mothers-to-be are “showered” withpresents for the awaited child, can be traced to the American post–WorldWar II era. As soldiers returned home, women resumed traditional roles.Marriage and childbearing became cultural and career goals for most womenin the decade immediately following the war. The surge in the birthratethat occurred in America in the postwar period has been dubbed the “babyboom,” and launched a child-centered culture that celebrated children. Advancesin prenatal and neonatal care had reduced infant mortality rates tothe point where celebration of a birth could be done in anticipation of theactual event.Baby showers are traditionally held only prior to the birth of the firstchild, but in recent years, smaller events, sometimes referred to as sprinkles,are held for subsequent childbirths as well. Originally only one showerwould be given for an expectant mother. Now, some women receive severalshowers due to the fact that they may have a wider variety of friends, coworkers,and family than in the past. Each group may elect to give a smallershower composed only of members from that group. Baby showers are alsonow given for mothers who are adopting a baby. Sometimes “WelcomeBaby!” showers are held after the baby arrives when health issues exist or ifkey participants cannot attend the event prior to the birth.Showers are usually given a month or two prior to delivery while themother-to-be is still comfortable and to anticipate unexpected early arrivals.Typically they are held in the afternoon. This harkens back to theVictorian teas for the new baby. Showers range from casual to very elegantevents. They can be hosted in someone’s home or they can take place ina restaurant, country club, or community hall. Generally, they only last afew hours. Traditionally, showers are all female events but in more recentyears couples showers have become acceptable. Sometimes the showerstarts as an “all girl” event with the father-to-be arriving with the other menA pregnant woman reacting with delightas she opens a baby shower gift.© Glenda Powers | Dreams time.com.

Bachelor Party 41after all the traditional activities have concluded, but in time for the food.Originally, refreshment at showers was light, such as tea, small sandwiches,and cakes. Today refreshments range from informal finger food to full mealsat restaurants. There usually is a cake honoring the mother-to-be.The focus of the baby shower is the opening and displaying of the gifts.Originally, many gifts were handmade. Women would knit or crochet sweaters,caps, booties, and blankets, or embroider coverlets and bibs for the newbaby. While this handiwork is still done, many baby shower gifts are storebought.Common gifts range from clothing, toys, and disposable diapers tocar seats, strollers, and baby furniture. Generally, guests receive a small partyfavor as a keepsake of the event.Many showers include playing games. Some are event-related adaptationsof traditional wordplay, memory, and trivia games, such as baby namebingo where baby names replace the numbers on bingo cards or gift bingowhere the cards contain the name of a gift and as each gift is opened guestsmark their cards appropriately. A popular memory game displays the contentsof a baby’s travel bag for two or more minutes, then covers the displayand asks guests to make a list of the contents. Some games are morephysical and involve relays or timed competitions, which may be individualor team. Contests may include hands-free passing of a baby bottle orundressing and redressing a baby doll. The clothespin game is also popular.When guests arrive, they receive a clothespin and are informed of therules. If they say the word baby, the person who hears them takes theirclothespin. This continues for the entire party. At the end of the event, theperson with the most clothespins wins.The traditional colors for baby showers are pink and blue or other pastels.Nowadays, many mothers-to-be know the sex of their child so it is common forthe decor to be all pink for a girl or blue for a boy. Symbols used in decorationinclude umbrellas, a play on the term shower, storks, such baby-related itemsas teddy bears, alphabet blocks, baby bottles, rattles, safety pins, and, of course,babies. Some baby showers are themed. Planners select a baby-related symbolsuch as teddy bears, rubber duckies, or Noah’s ark and use theme-relatedimages on invitations, for table settings, and other decorations.Further Reading: Glendenning, Paula. The Baby Shower Book: Etiquette, Decorating,Games, Food. Holbrook, MA: Adams Media Corporation, 1960; Jenkins, Jennifer.The Everything Baby Shower Book: From Surprise Parties to Office Celebrations, Howto Throw an Outstanding Event for the Mother-to-be. Holbrook, MA: Adams MediaCorporation, 2000; Long, Becky, and Bruce Lansky. Themed Baby Showers: MotherGoose to Noah’s Ark. Minnetonka, MN: Meadowbrook Press, 2003; Wai, Joan.100 + Baby Shower Games. Studio City, CA: The Brainstorm Company, 2005.Bachelor PartyDorothy Denneen VoloAnywhere from a few weeks prior to or on the night before the weddingceremony, male guests gather to toast the groom on his upcoming nuptials

42 Bachelor Partyand the end to his days as a bachelor. Traditionally, this event is hosted bythe best man with assistance from the groomsmen, and invitations to attendare issued not only to the groomsmen but also to the male family membersof the bride and groom, as well as any male friends or family members thathave offered emotional support to the groom during his days as a singleman. Most modern bachelor parties involve dinner, drinks, and activities,such as cards, conversation, possibly cigars, and other behavior traditionallyfrowned upon by wives.Legend says the first bachelor parties took place among warriors fromSparta when groups of men would go out and drink a great deal with thesoon-to-be married man, who would pledge his ongoing support and loyaltyto his brothers in arms, despite his upcoming nuptials and the beginningof his life as a married man. As marriages became less about buildingalliances and power, the idea of a mutually accepted match based on lovebecame more established and bachelor parties became more focused onthe end of the groom’s days as a bachelor and on the beginning of hiswife-to-be taking control over their finances. Bachelor parties continuedto celebrate the end of a man’s bachelor days but as time went by alsocollected secret funds so the now married man could continue to havemoney to drink with his friends. With each drink poured at the bachelorparty, the groom and his men toast the bride while collecting money forthe future husband’s social drinking fund. The tradition of smashing theglass after toasting the bride occurred during this time and is based onthe idea that the glass could serve no nobler function after such an event.These convivial and spirit-fueled celebrations may be considered the basisfor the booze-fueled nights of debauchery often illustrated by movies andother popular culture.Since the later half of the twentieth century these celebrations of bachelorhoodhave come to include exotic dancers, strippers jumping out of fauxcakes, and other highly elaborate forms of entertainment that are sometimesmeant to chide and embarrass the groom. While these may be the ideasput forth by Hollywood, the majority of how-to books on the subject offerother thoughts. With more bachelor parties taking place weeks prior to thewedding ceremony and guests having more discretionary income, some partiestravel to destination cities like Las Vegas, New Orleans, New York, andso on. These bachelor weekends might incorporate golf, spa treatments,fine dining, and more opportunities for the men to get together and enjoyone another’s company. Some of the time can be used for visits to clubswhile other guests choose more athletic pursuits like deep sea fishing, attendingsporting events, or even gourmet events such as wine or scotch tastingsled by a sommelier or spirit specialist. As a rule the only gifts exchangedare the other guests covering their own expenses and a portion of those forthe groom-to-be.In the past decade female guests have been invited to bachelor parties.For some couples the bachelor and bachelorette parties have become anextension of the rehearsal dinner and wedding reception, thereby offering

Bachelor Party 43a less lascivious, alcohol-fueled night-of-no-regrets into an evening wherefamilies and friends spend more time talking and visiting together.While bachelor parties continue to be an American activity, their Europeancounterpart, the stag party, also continues to flourish in the form ofgetaway weekends. The hen party, which evolved from the more traditionalbridal or bridesmaid’s luncheon, is the European equivalent to the Americanbachelorette party. The bachelorette or hen party allows women a chance toget rowdy, dance, and have some fun at local pubs, clubs, or bars.It is important to note that some Asian cultures have a unique form ofmale bonding after the ceremony and honeymoon. Upon returning to thebride’s home in Korea, the men of her household ( brothers and cousins)begin rough housing the groom by playfully tackling and punching himuntil the bride or her parents come to his rescue. This introduction ceremonyis called p’ye-back, and scholars have traced its origins to the traditionof marriage-by-capture. Anthropologists suggest that early groomsfrom rival tribes kidnapped women who were out foraging and were thenbeaten by men in her family when the couple was discovered.Another version of male bonding occurs in African and some Caribbeancountries. This custom is called queh-queh and originated in Guyana.Troupes of drummers, dancers, and singers go to the homes of the bride andgroom two or three days prior to the wedding with a big performance thenight before the ceremony. During the singing and drumming, family membersare remembered, stories from African history are retold, and songs aresung to prepare the couple for their wedding night. The ceremony is filledwith heavy sexual overtones highlighting male sexual prowess and feminineattributes.Further Reading: Ackerman, Diane. A Natural History of Love. New York: RandomHouse, 1994; Bachelor Party. Directed by Neal Israel, starring Tom Hanksand Tawny Kitaen. Bachelor Party Productions, Aspect Radio Film and TwinContinental, distributed by Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, 1984;Berardo, Felix M., and Hernan Vera. “The Groomal Shower: A Variation of theAmerican Bridal Shower.” Family Relations, vol. 30, no. 3 (July 1981): 395–401;Costa, Shu Shu. Wild Geese and Tea: An Asian American Wedding Planner. NewYork: Riverhead Books, 1997; Cury, James Oliver. The Playboy Guide to BachelorParties: Everything You Need to Know About Planning the Groom’s Rite of Passagefrom Simple to Sinful. New York: Fireside, 2004; Greco, Gail. Shower Handbook:The Complete Guide to Planning the Perfect Party. Greensboro, NC: Wallace-Homestead Book Company, 1988; Hopkins, Ginny. The Bride’s Book of Showers.New York: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers, 1993; Skidelsky, William. “Food.” NewStatesman, vol. 16, issue 762 (2003): 56; Sturgis, Ingrid. The Nubian WeddingBook. New York: Crown Publishing, 1997; Wallace, Carol McD. All Dressed inWhite: The Irresistible Rise of the American Wedding. New York: Penguin Books,1993; Williams, Clover Nolan. “The Bachelor’s Transgression: Identity andDifference in the Bachelor Party.” The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 107,no. 423, Bodylore ( Winter 1994): 106–120.Alexa Reynolds Johnson

44 Bar/Bat MitzvahBar/Bat MitzvahThe Bar/ Bat Mitzvah ceremony is a Jewish religious ceremony held whena young man or woman reaches the age of adulthood. The word mitzvah isfrom Aramaic and means “commandment.” Bar is son and bat is daughter.Literally, Bar Mitzvah means “son of the commandment,” and Bat Mitzvah,“daughter of the commandment.” The terms are used both to indicate theceremony of initiation and the child who has reached the age of commandment.Under Jewish law, children are not obligated to observe the commandments,although they are encouraged to do so and to learn what theirobligations will be as adults. Adulthood is linked to showing signs of puberty.Boys are considered to have reached adulthood at the age of 13 years andone day. As girls mature earlier, the age for girls is 12 years and one day. TheBar/ Bat Mitzvah ceremony formally marks the assumption of the responsibilityto follow the 613 laws of the Torah. The Bar/ Bat Mitzvah is morally responsiblefor his or her own actions. Among the privileges of the Bar Mitzvahis that he may be counted as one of the number of Jewish adults required formain public prayers. He may also lead the services and read from the Torahat the public reading in the synagogue. He can also own personal propertyand engage in most business and monetary transactions as a full adult.The young man or young woman becomes a Bar/Bat Mitzvah whenthey attain the proper age. No ceremony is required and, in fact, the ceremonyis a relatively modern development. In its most basic form, the occasionis the Bar Mitzvah’s first aliyah, where the celebrant is called up tothe Torah to recite a blessing over the weekly reading. Today, it is commonA young man at his Bar Mitzvah. GordonSwanson /Shutterstock.

for the Bar Mitzvah to learn the entire Haftarah, a chapter-length passagefrom the Torah, and recite it at the service in the traditional ritual chant.In some congregations the celebrant reads the entire weekly Torah portionand leads part of the services, or leads the congregation in certain importantprayers. Being called up to read the Torah is symbolic of having reachedmaturity and is the first public demonstration of the celebrant’s new role asa full member of the community. Most congregational Hebrew schools offerspecial classes to prepare Bar/Bat Mitzvah students.Generally, the celebrant is also required to make a speech, which traditionallyopens with the declaration, “Today I am a man.” The speech may bemade after reading the Torah or it may be part of the celebratory feast, whichtakes place following the ceremony. Often this provides an occasion for thecelebrant to thank his parents for their love and care and the guests for sharingin the celebration. In some denominations it is customary for the audienceto commence singing loudly a short time after the speech has begun. Thisis done to shorten the length of the speech when the celebrant is nervousand would be embarrassed if he could not complete the speech due to stagefright. The father of the Bar Mitzvah recites a prayer of thanks for having beenrelieved of the burden of being responsible for the sins of the son.The Bat Mitzvah is a twentieth-century custom. Most Orthodox denominationsreject the concept that women can read publicly from theTorah or lead prayer service. For them, the Bat Mitzvah is little more than acelebratory party. In non-Orthodox sects, a young woman’s Bat Mitzvah iscelebrated in the same way as a young man’s. This egalitarian format did notgain any real support until after the 1960s.In more modern times it has become customary for a reception to followthe religious ceremony. Historically, the celebration was little more than aglass of schnapps and a piece of angel food cake, but today these celebrationscan be quite elaborate, rivaling weddings with invitations, favors, entertainment,and food. “Mazel Tov” (congratulations) is the traditional toast.It is customary to give a gift to the Bar/Bat Mitzvah to commemoratethe occasion and as a token of appreciation for the Torah speech. Traditionally,gifts have a religious or educational value. Religious items, writingimplements, gift certificates, and savings bonds, which can be put towardthe young person’s education, are popular. Recently, gifts of cash have becomequite common. Monetary gifts are often given in multiples of 18. TheHebrew word for life is chai. The two Hebrew letters that make up theword are chet and yud, which in Gematria, the numerical value of Hebrewletters, equal 18. Giving money in multiples of $18 is symbolic of givingchai or life. These gifts are considered very auspicious. Many Bar Mitzvahsreceive their first tallith or prayer shawl, which is used for the special day,from their parents.Some religious men celebrate a second Bar Mitzvah at age 83. The Torahidentifies the average life span as 70 years. An 83-year-old can be consideredas having reached 13 in a “second life.” Once a person is Bar Mitzvah,he remains so for the remainder of his life, but the occasion can be usedBar/Bat Mitzvah 45

46 Barbequeto reaffirm one’s commitment to Judaism. With more and more peopleremaining vital in later life, the practice is gaining increasing popularity in anumber of different denominations.Further Reading: Lenernan, Helen, and Cantor Helen Lenernan, eds.Bar/Bat MitzvahBasics: A Practical Family Guide and Coming of Age Together. Woodstock, VT:Jewish Lights Publishing, 2001; Marcus, Ivan G. The Jewish Life Cycle; Rites ofPassage from Biblical Times to the Modern Age. Seattle: University of WashingtonPress, 2004; Olitsky, Kerry M. An Encyclopedia of American Synagogue Ritual.Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000; Weinrib, Rabbi Yonah, and Rabbi YaakovSalomon. The Bar Mitzvah Treasury. Brooklyn, NY: Judaica Illuminations, 2005;Weiss, Arnine. Becoming a Bar Mitzvah: A Treasury of Stories. Scranton, PA:University of Scranton, 2005.Dorothy Denneen VoloBarbequeIn the historical context, barbeques were commonly held in association withcommunal activities such as house and barn raisings, birthdays, weddings,funerals, holidays, church socials, and political rallies. Such gatherings—withall the trappings of singing, dancing, music, games, food, and beverages (somealcoholic)—were opportunities for community socialization and family interaction.Yet barbeque is more than just a few happy suburbanites or tailgatingsports fans coming together around grilled meats and beer. No placeon earth is more closely associated with the genuine concept of barbeque—no place summons to the mind the images of the traditional American communityat play—than the nineteenth-century South. Barbeque developedinto a regional symbol of Southern solidarity that is now cherished by many,regardless of race, class, or gender, often unburdened by the negative historyof oppression and slavery in the American South.Nonetheless, as late as 1968, barbeque—this time serving as the nexusof a black–white racial dispute at a black-owned pork barbeque restaurant—played a role in the legislative history of the desegregation in the South. SupremeCourt Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall, siding with the majorityof the court in Newman v. Piggy Park Enterprises (1968), noted that therights of all citizens of the United States guaranteed under the Civil RightsAct of 1964 were to be accorded the highest priority if abridged by state orlocal laws. Today, good Southern-style barbeque draws fans from every class,race, and region.The quintessential ingredient in traditional Southern-style barbeque( barbecue or Bar-B-Q, if you will ) was pork. Those who followed an alternativebarbeque style utilizing beef, chicken, turkey, or lamb (as in Kentuckyand parts of Texas or Virginia) have generally been considered outside theprotocol of genuine Southern-style barbeque cooking. The characteristics oftraditional barbeque were initially set down in the pre–Civil War decades

Barbeque 47and reaffirmed in the postwar period throughout the so-called BarbequeBelt, a region of the Southeast that includes (in whole or in part) all thestates that joined the Confederacy in 1861. Those Americans outside thisregion might “grill” their meats and poultry in open pits or over charcoalbriquettes; they might slather them in hot sauce and molasses; but theydon’t barbeque (8 to 10 hours of slow cooking and basting) in the historicalSouthern style.It has been noted that “as long as there has been a South, and peoplewho think of themselves as Southerners, food has been central to the region’simage, its personality, and its character” (Egerton 2). Despite intraregionaldifferences and arguments over which type of barbeque is best,an old-fashioned pig-roasting remains symbolic of all the good things thatwere, and continue to be, uniquely Southern in the Barbeque Belt. Pork,somehow, is thought to embrace the humble historical origins of Southernfoodways as does no other food. Southerners have maintained strong tiesto pork barbeque and the traditional antebellum recipes associated with itas an expression of their unique heritage of gracious hospitality. Whetherchopped, shredded, pulled, or slabbed, pork barbeque—served with sauceand side dishes of beans, corn, or other vegetables and breads—has becomea Southern cultural icon.A man prepares barbeque chicken at a street festival. © Mike Brake | Dreamstime.com.

48 BarbequeAlthough its etymology is obscure, the term barbeque probably has WestIndian origins. The preparation of pork barbeque is directly traceable—ifnot uniquely so—to a method of slowly cooking meats over hot coals in adeep pit dug in the ground. The West Indian name for this practice is barbacoa,and because the plantation slaves (many with Caribbean ancestry)oversaw the preparations for barbeque in the antebellum period, the termsare thought to derive from the same root. The cultural association of the oldplantation South and the islands of the Caribbean cannot be overemphasized.Almost 100 years ago Gaillard Hunt, a historian of the early 1800s,noted, “In the North one found English manners; in the Middle region athousand shades had colored English manners; [but] in the South the mannerswere those of the West-Indies” (30). Americans from each section ofthe United States were well aware of these distinctions and of their ownregional loyalties, often to the point of being aggressively proud of them.From colonial times, pork was the most common meat consumed in theSouthern diet. In the antebellum period, Southerners ate, on average, fivepounds of pork for every pound of beef they consumed ( Taylor 27). Ironically,a great deal of pork was raised and consumed in other regions of theUnited States as well, but relatively little pork was exported from any sectionof the country because it was a convenient and popular food. Moreover,beef consumption on a national level was not significant until railroads andrefrigerated freight cars made their appearance in the 1870s. Thereafter, beefconsumption became a craze in many of the cities of the Northeast and Midwestthat were connected to the cattle markets by rail, while pork remainedthe so-called other white meat for most of the financially stressed South.Even in colonial times hogs were of great value because they reproducedthemselves in large numbers and fed themselves in the brushwood. Unlikecattle, which needed pasture or fodder during most of the year as well asprotection from predation and the elements, hogs could be set loose in themargins of the fields, in the woodlots, or even in the forests to fend for themselves.Most breeds of hog were capable of defending themselves againstcommon forest predators. Children often collected vegetable refuse andacorns to entice the almost-wild hogs from the woods, and they periodicallydrove the beasts into the farmstead where they could be penned, fattened,and butchered in late autumn. Slaughtering became a time for celebration,and the neighbors might be invited to share in the work and in the largess.Pork was easily preserved by salting, soaking, and smoking, and it maintainedits flavor and condition better than beef under the same conditions. Itwas a common practice among yeomen farmers and upper-class planters aliketo sell their wood-smoked and honey-cured hams and sides of bacon as wellas the surplus lard, chittlins (intestines and other internal organs), ears, feet,and other parts of the hog in order to make a little extra money. In 1856, themistress of a Georgia plantation recorded selling 170 pounds of ham in townin a single transaction.Pork might be served three times a day in some households withoutengendering comment. Poorer families lived on a so-called hog and hominy

diet of bacon or salt-pork, boiled greens, corn pone or grits sweetened withmolasses, coffee, and little else. New York’s Knickerbocker Magazine reportedthat an inn in Georgetown, South Carolina, served “hog and hominy,and corn-cake for breakfast; waffles, hog and hominy for dinner; and hog,hominy, and corn-cake for supper.” However, the “hog” was not likely to befresh pork. Salt-pork, cured ham, and bacon were the staple varieties duringmost of the year, but fresh pork was generally available during the harvestseason or when an individual animal was slaughtered for a barbeque.Those unfamiliar with Southern cuisine erroneously attributed a dietheavy in pork products to a state of financial distress. On the contrary, foodin the South was prepared for its taste and for the satisfaction it broughtto the appetite and the palate. There were few in the South outside theplantation aristocracy who were intentionally making social, economic, orpolitical statements through their dietary choices ( Volo and Volo 230).The nullification crises of the 1820s and 1830s regarding state’s rights,and the secession crisis of the 1850s leading up to the Civil War saw anincrease in sectionalism and Southern nationalism. The groundswell of secessionmade increased pork production an important component of thewar effort, and many Southern families fattened a hog or two on corn cobs,cow peas, or scraps specifically for the Southern cause. Moreover, barbequesquickly became the focus of political rallies during these times of crisis, andthe plantation owners used them as a tool for consensus-building among thenon-slaveowning white population. The traditional Southern barbeque developedfrom gatherings like these, and the gatherings themselves have becomeemblematic of the Southern way of life as seen through the romanticeyes of many writers and the lenses of many cinematographers.Chief among these writers was Margaret Mitchell, who dedicated alarge portion of her novel Gone With the Wind (1936) to the barbeque heldat Twelve Oaks, the plantation of the dashing Ashley Wilkes. In this settingshe developed her characters—especially the flirtatious and controllingScarlet O’Hara and the ruthless and sophisticated Rhett Butler. Against thebackground of the barbeque, Mitchell laid the foundations for the rest ofthe novel. Mitchell’s novel was also made into a significant and influentialmotion picture in the magical cinemagraphic year of 1939, and the colorfulcelluloid scenes of communal merry-making helped to establish for manythe characteristics of the Southern way of life that was lost in the windsof civil war. Gone With the Wind was—unknowingly perhaps—the culminationof an extended public relations crusade, begun during Reconstruction(1865–1877), that attempted to resurrect and repair the image whichSoutherners had of themselves. Although the false romanticism, portrayedin Mitchell’s work and the subsequent film, has largely passed out of modernSouthern culture, barbeques still remain a vital part of Southern society,culture, and politics.While barbeques are generally representative of most things Southern,there are geographic differences in cooking methodology, saucing, andside dishes even among the most “Southern” of Barbeque Belt residents.Barbeque 49

50 Barn RaisingState-by-state and town-by-town variations can be found, and local residentsrevel in and argue over the relative merits and details of their ownrecipes. Nonetheless, the common thread remains slow-cooked pork, whilethe differences are generally found in cooking styles, serving methods,sauces, and the use of side dishes.The coastal Atlantic regions of the South—the so-called tidewaterregions—were the first to develop pork barbeque served with a simplevinegar-based sauce, cornbread, lemonade, and appropriate side dishes, butas barbeque moved west with the flow of settlement during the antebellumperiod these were supplanted by the sweet tomato sauces of Tennessee andMississippi and the fiery red sauces of East Texas and Louisiana. In NorthCarolina, the meat was chopped or sliced and served with a peppery vinegarsauce, coleslaw, and hush puppies. In South Carolina and Georgia, the meatwas also chopped or sliced, but it was served with a yellow mustard-basedsauce, a light bread, and a hash made with rice.So-called pulled pork, initially found mostly in Tennessee and widelyadopted in the Southern borderlands, was shredded by hand and served witha sauce flavored with pepper and molasses. The Alabama variety of pulledpork was developed later and was a good deal spicier. On the western borderof the Barbeque Belt, as in Arkansas, Louisiana, and parts of Texas, the saucesvaried and the pork was sometimes offered in slabs or on the ribs. Nonetheless,the baked beans, coleslaws, and potato salads were almost identicalto those side dishes found in the East. Other sides included butter beans,creamed corn, collard greens, kale, and other slow-cooked vegetables.Barbeque is not just a meal that makes people feel good. It is a conceptthat “binds together the tastes of both the people in the big house and thepoorest occupants of the back end of the broken-down barn” (Bass 314). Itis a gathering, celebration, and manifestation of Southern-ness.Further Reading: Bass, S. Jonathan. “How ‘bout a Hand for the Hog: The EnduringNature of the Swine as a Cultural Symbol of the South.” Southern Culture, Vol. 1,No. 3, (1995): 301–320; Egerton, John, Ann Bleidt Egerton, and Al Clayton.Southern Food: At Home, On the Road, In History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,1987; Hunt, Gaillard. As We Were, Life in America, 1814. Stockbridge, MA:Berkshire House Publishing, [1914] 1993; Taylor, Joel Gray. Eating, Drinking andVisiting in the Old South: An Informal American History. Baton Rouge: LouisianaState University Press, 1982; Volo, Dorothy Denneen, and James M. Volo. FamilyLife in 19th-Century America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007.James M. VoloBarn RaisingA barn raising party is an event at which a community gathers to join forcesto build a barn in one day—a task that would otherwise be unmanageable by

Barn Raising 51the individual members of that community. An important aspect of a barnraisingevent is socializing, celebration, and food.The traditional barn raising most commonly occurs in the Amish, Mennonite,and Pennsylvania Dutch communities in the Eastern states of NorthAmerica. People in these communities are members of religious groups thatoriginated in sixteenth-century Europe during the Protestant Reformation.These groups separated from the established state church and created theirown rules about conservative mode of dress, method of worship; they heldsacred their values of peace, love, and forgiveness.Because of religious persecution, in the 1700s these groups began toestablish settlements in the United States, beginning in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.These farm-centered communities isolated themselves fromneighboring groups, creating self-supporting communities based on theirdependence on mutual aid. It was during this time of early settlement thatthe greatest amount of barn raisings occurred, because each family farmneeded a barn in order to function properly.A typical barn raising occurs after months of planning and preparation,including laying a foundation and cutting lumber. The entire communitycomes together at the farm to raise a timber-frame barn, usually in one day.Amish workers raise a new barn near Tollesboro, Kentucky, 2007. The structure should be ready for use bynightfall. AP/Wide World Photo.

52 Barn RaisingThe skills of every member of the community are utilized, bringing togetherbetween 100 and 200 workers.Older, more experienced men direct the construction, while youngermen provide the labor. The women prepare food and provide beveragesand—sometimes—first aid. Children also participate: the boys bringing toolsand materials to the men; the girls helping with food preparation. Childrenwatch the event carefully in order to learn their future roles as adults.After a morning of building, generally the wooden framework of thebarn is in place. A long line of tables and church benches are brought into seat the workers, or some may sit on quilts under the trees. The womenserve an elaborate lunch including roasted meats and chicken, potatoes, casseroles,and lemonade. After lunch, construction work resumes until an afternoonsnack break is taken for dessert, which may include pies, puddings,and doughnuts. By the end of the day, the barn is usually near being finished.The barn raising ultimately serves as a unifying event for the community. Itis a sort of community-based insurance policy that individual families candepend upon in case of emergency.Today the greatest concentration of Amish and Mennonite communitiesin the United States is in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. To varyingdegrees, modern-day Amish and Mennonites reject modern technology,driving horse and buggies, refusing to use electricity or phones in theirhomes, dressing in their traditional manner, and worshipping in their ownchurches, as they have for centuries.Barn raisings still occur in these communities, mostly for newlywedcouples establishing a working family farm or for families whose barns haveburned or need replacement. Depending on how conservative a particularcommunity is, a modern-day barn raising will appear much the same as ithas for centuries. The men still build the wooden barns without the aid ofmodern construction equipment or electric tools, only their tool belts. Thewomen cook and transport similar menus, preparing a feast without modernkitchen equipment, and transporting it by horse and buggy to the site. Inless conservative communities, skilled workers may occasionally be broughtin from outside the community to fulfill specific needs, and equipment suchas cranes may be brought in to assist.The term barn raising has come to signify the sharing and pooling ofwork, unpaid, for the benefit of one or all. Modern-day examples of suchshared effort in the United States are the nonprofit organization Habitat forHumanity, which assembles volunteers to build homes for lower-incomefamilies in the United States, and schools, which erect new buildings withthe help of all members of the school community and call it a barn raising.Worldwide, there are examples of other cultures practicing the traditionof gathering the community for such events. The Finnish talkoot (workweekend ) is an example of a tradition of voluntary teamwork. The talkootis an event in a traditional Finnish village at which villagers gather and worktogether toward a common goal. The Norwegian dugnad is an event atwhich people voluntarily pull together to help a member or members of

Beer Halls and Beer Gardens 53the community. Every fall there is a dugnad telethon, which raises moneyfor disabled people in Norway. Both the talkoot and the dugnad have theeffect of creating a strong sense of community, similar to barn raisings inNorth America.Further Reading: Adams, Marcia. Cooking from Quilt Country: Hearty Recipes fromAmish and Mennonite Kitchens. New York: Clarkson Potter, 1988; Coleman,Bill. Amish Odyssey: Photographs. New York: Alfred Van Der Marck Editions.1988; Showalter, Mary Emma. Mennonite Community Cookbook; Favorite FamilyRecipes. Philadelphia: J. C. Winston, 1950.Tamara V. BigelowBeer Halls and Beer GardensPeople have gathered in public places to drink beer since ancient times. InGermany, beer halls are more than just a place of entertainment: they arecenturies-old institutions. The beer hall has long been a center of sociallife and often the largest meeting place in town. Some are called Keller orBierkeller, a reflection of the practice during pre- refrigeration days of storingbeer in cellars to keep it cool. Others go by the name Ratskeller (townhallcellar),a term dating back to when the local government stored beer in thecellars beneath city hall and sold it to citizens.Germany’s largest beer halls can accommodate as many as 5,000 drinkers.Some are buildings once occupied by breweries that long ago movedbecause they were fire hazards or because clean water was more availableoutside the city center. The most famous beer hall in the world is theHofbräuhaus, or “royal court brewery,” which was established in Munichin 1579. Munich is also home to two other huge beer halls, the Löwenbräukellerand the Paulaner Keller, which offer traditional Bavarian foodand entertainment. Beer halls can be found in cities and towns throughoutGermany, as well as in other Continental countries such as Austria andthe Czech Republic. U Fleku, one of a number of beer halls in downtownPrague, has stood for more than 500 years. It breaks tradition by serving adark-colored house beer instead of golden-colored Czech-style lager.In the larger cities, huge establishments were built with high ceilingsand filled with trees and plants in an effort to create the atmosphere of anoutdoor park. This way even when it was too cold to drink outside, thereremained a feeling of being in a garden. Although those establishments werecovered and enclosed, they were commonly referred to as beer gardens ratherthan beer halls. The terms were used interchangeably, and still are today. InGermany, many establishments offer both a beer hall and a beer garden, andproprietors bring the beer barrels outdoors and tap them at the first sign ofwarm weather.Communal drinking had fallen out of favor in post– Revolutionary WarAmerica. It was not only unfashionable in that era for large groups of people

54 Beer Halls and Beer GardensThe Court, Hofbräuhaus in Munich, Germany, c. 1890–1900. Library of Congress.to drink socially, but many Americans then associated beer drinking withidleness. The German immigrants who arrived in America during the nineteenthcentury brought with them the tradition of communal beer drinking.In the towns where they settled, the Germans quickly built breweries andlater, beer halls similar to those in which they drank back home. That wasespecially true in the part of America bounded by Cincinnati, St. Louis, andMilwaukee, where Germans settled by the millions, and breweries were asmuch a part of community life as churches, schools, and flour mills.The Germans believed that beer was best enjoyed with food, freshair, and music. Like in Germany, when the weather permitted, immigrantsgathered in beer gardens, outdoor venues that were planted with grovesof trees and filled with rows of shared tables. A beer garden in Milwaukee,which opened in 1843, was typical, offering flowers, promenades, and aband. The success of these early beer gardens encouraged others, includingmany brewery owners, to open their own.Beer halls also could be found outside the Midwest, especially in majorcities such as New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. By the end of theCivil War there were an estimated three to four thousand beer gardens inNew York City alone. The Bowery in lower Manhattan was famous for thenumber of beer gardens as well as their size. Some were immense buildingscapable of accommodating as many as 1,200 guests. Beer gardens alsosprang up outside city centers and attracted visitors in search of a respitefrom urban noise and pollution. Most patrons were German, and the beergarden was part of their so-called Continental Sunday when people engaged

Beer Halls and Beer Gardens 55in sports, entertainment, and drinking as opposed to the Puritan traditionof reserving the Sabbath for prayer and rest. Many of the beer halls calledthemselves “gardens” and their decor attempted to replicate the outdoors,though they were in fact roofed and enclosed and open year-round. Thelarger beer halls, which were described as being of “Wagnerian dimensions,”offered entertainment as well as recreation such as billiards and bowlingthat appealed to young urban men who enjoyed a night on the town.Then, as now, young people were trendsetters, and they popularizedlager beer in this country. Lager beer is a golden-colored, crisper- andcleaner-tasting, and less-potent beverage than the dark, rich English-styleales that Americans had consumed since colonial times. Today, lager accountsfor the vast majority of the world’s beer consumption. Lager beeracquires its distinctive taste and alcoholic content from a strain of yeast thatthrives at lower temperatures. As a result, the beer must be stored for a longperiod of time in a cool place (lager comes from the German verb lagern,which means “to store”). In the days before refrigeration, beer was stored incellars beneath the beer garden, and the shade from the trees protected thebeer from the warm temperatures above.Beer gardens became larger and more elaborate over the years. For example,Schnaider’s Garden, which opened in St. Louis in 1872, featured“wondrous lighting, an abundance of shade trees, countless rows of tables[and] . . . a King Gambrinus-adorned bandstand where the orchestra alwaysseems to be playing a lilting Johann Strauss waltz.” By the century’s end, thelargest beer gardens offered such entertainment as Wild West shows, dancehalls, live animals, and lavish nighttime light displays. Schlitz Palm Gardensand Pabst Park in Milwaukee, which were popular gathering places at theturn of the century, are considered the forerunners of today’s theme parks.In an era when there were vast differences in wealth, beer gardens weredemocratizing institutions. The spirit of Gemütlichkeit, a word that signifiesintimacy and comfort, was one of inclusiveness—all ages and sexes werewelcome—as well as one that discouraged class distinctions. People fromall walks of life had an opportunity to mix on an equal basis inside beergardens. Author Ray Oldenburg called them an outstanding example of asuccessful “third place,” somewhere other than the home and the workplacewhere people could gather. Beer gardens kept costs low so that evenpeople of modest means could take part often. A proprietor who overchargedhis customers was held in as low regard as customers who engagedin drunkenness and fighting.In the United States, the beer hall was a stark contrast to so-called Irishbars, by which the Germans meant dark establishments that catered to anall-male clientele and were dominated by a bar where customers drankstanding up. The Germans, by contrast, viewed drinking places as extensionsof their homes. Their beer halls were well-lit establishments filled withlarge tables, which customers— including total strangers—shared. Sharingtables with strangers is still the custom in Germany. In a beer hall, it was notunusual to find three generations of the same family together. Many non-Germans also considered beer halls more wholesome than taverns because

56 Beer Halls and Beer Gardensof the spirit of Gemütlichkeit that prevailed in beer halls. In addition tolager, beer halls served traditional food such as sausages, sauerkraut, Bismarckherring, rollmops, and Sauerbraten, or marinated pot roast. Thesefoods remain staples of beer hall menus.An article in the December 1864 Illustrated London News noted that patronsof beer gardens were “chiefly well-to-do mechanics and tradespeople,who bring their wives, and children with them, and even the baby is sure tobe treated with a modicum of the ruddy malt.” The presence of wives andchildren in beer gardens helped to curb drunkenness. Buying rounds of drinkswas unheard of; the German custom was for each customer to pay for hisor her own beer, which we now refer to as Dutch treat. Beverages strongerthan beer were rarely served. Most importantly, disorderly behavior was nottolerated: it offended the Germans’ fondness for order, and was incompatiblewith the welcoming spirit of Gemütlichkeit. The Germans believed thatinformal socializing held their communities together. People who formedfriendships over beer often joined in a wide range of voluntary organizations,such as gymnastic clubs and singing societies, that formed the basis ofmiddle-class life in German cities and towns.Thanks to the Germans, many Americans made beer, rather than liquor,their beverage of choice. Beer halls flourished during America’s so-calledgolden age of brewing, the period from about 1870 until the onset of Prohibition,when Americans had a wide choice of both drinking establishmentsand styles of beer. However, Americans of native birth and the Protestantfaith remained hostile to drinking and to the foreign cultures that embracedit. They were especially offended by the tradition of bringing children intobeer halls and setting aside Sundays for recreation and drinking. The brewingindustry responded to the forces of temperance during the Prohibitionby promoting beer as a beverage of moderation and holding up the Germansas examples of responsible use of alcohol. Ultimately, they fought a losingbattle. Anti-German sentiment during World War I proved to be a tippingpoint. Americans questioned the loyalty of German American beer barons,and the political climate swung toward prohibition of all alcohol.Even though the beer garden remains a fixture of social life in Germany,there are far fewer beer gardens in America now than there were beforeProhibition. Nevertheless, the institution managed to survive Prohibition.For example, the Schaefer Center, an immense beer garden, was one of thetop attractions of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Beer gardens that offertraditional food and entertainment still exist in many communities withGerman American populations. One of them, Blob’s Park in Jessup, Maryland,takes credit for having staged the nation’s first Oktoberfest celebrationin 1947. Even today traditional beer halls still can be found, especially incities in the Great Lakes region. In addition, some modern microbreweries,such as the Pennsylvania Brewing Company in Pittsburgh, offer modernversions of the German beer hall; and the Hofbräuhaus has opened smaller,somewhat Americanized versions of the original Munich landmark in theCincinnati area and in Las Vegas.

Beeton, Isabella 57Further Reading: Anderson, Will. Beer, USA: 500 Years of America’s Beer Facts,Beer Folklore, Beer Photos, and Beer Fun. Dobbs Ferry, NY: Morgan & Morgan,Publishers, 1986; Baron, Stanley. Brewed in America: A History of Beer and Ale inthe United States. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1975; Dornbusch, Horst.Prost! The Story of German Beer. Boulder, CO: Brewers Publications, 1997;Gabbacia, Donna R. We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998; Mariani, John. AmericaEats Out: An Illustrated History of Restaurants, Taverns, Coffee Shops, Speakeasies,and Other Establishments That Have Fed Us for 350 Years. New York: WilliamMorrow & Company, 1991; Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafes,Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and Other Hangouts at the Heart of aCommunity. 3rd Edition. New York: Marlowe, 1999.Paul RuschmannBeeton, IsabellaIsabella Beeton, the remarkable author of the most comprehensive nineteenth-centurybook on entertaining, cooking, and household management,was a bright young wife and mother doing her part to make the family businessa success. She was born Isabella Mary Mayson in Cheapside, London, onMarch 12, 1836, the oldest of four children. Her father, Benjamin Mayson,died at age 39 and her mother remarried and moved to Epson, adding fourstep-siblings and, in time, 13 more children to the family. Coming from afamily of 21 children, Isabella must have had the opportunity to learn a greatdeal about organization at an early age. While still in her teens, Isabella wassent to school in Heidelberg, Germany, where she studied piano. Shortlyafter her return to the family home in Epson she visited London and metpublisher Samuel Orchart Beeton. They married in July of 1856 and at theage of 21 she began producing articles about cooking, entertaining, domesticmanagement, and embroidery as well as translating serialized French novelsfor his publications. From 1859 to1861, she wrote a monthly supplementto the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine: An Illustrated Journal CombiningPractical Information, Instruction & Amusement and in October of 1861the supplements were bound together and published as Beeton’s Book ofHousehold Management; Comprising Information for the Mistress, Housekeeper,Cook, Kitchen-Maid, Butler, Footman, Coachman, Valet, Upper and UnderHouse-Maids, Lady’s-Maid, Maid-of-all-Work, Laundry-Maid, Nurse andNurse-Maid, Monthly, Wet, and Sick Nurses, Etc. Etc.—Also Sanitary, Medical& Legal Memoranda; with a History of the Origin, Properties, and Uses of allThings Connected with Home Life and Comfort by Mrs. Isabella Beeton. In thepreface to the book, Mrs. Beeton notes, “If I had known beforehand that thisbook would have cost me the labour which it has, I should never have beencourageous enough to commence it.” She goes on to explain that she did soin order to help housewives compete with the “attractions” their husbandsmight other wise find in “clubs, well-ordered taverns and dining-houses.”

58 Beeton, IsabellaDuring this time, in addition to her work on the publications and managingher household, Isabella Beeton gave birth to four sons. The first two, bothnamed Samuel Orchart, died in infancy. The third, named Orchart, was bornin 1863, and Mayson Moss was born in January of 1865. Within a week ofhis birth, Isabella died at the age of 28. Two years after her death, SamuelBeeton suffered financial problems and sold the copyrights to all his publicationsas well as to Isabella’s book. Starting in 1888 the new publisher madeextensive revisions to the book and has continued to do so for over a century.Facsimile editions of the original are now available.Beeton’s Book of Household Management was not England’s first householdmanagement guide but it immediately became the most important;it sold more than 60,000 copies in the first year and nearly two million by1868. The 1,112-page book is an all-inclusive collection of the latest informationon everything a Victorian homemaker needed to know in order tosuccessfully run a middle-class English household. Still in the process oforganizing a new household herself, Mrs. Beeton had a talent for focusingon the most reliable and useful information. She skillfully selected, compiled,and edited material from many sources and presented it in a uniqueand appealing style that kept readers interested. Recipes were written in amodern, easy-to-use format said to have been borrowed from Eliza Acton.Each included a list of ingredients and a paragraph headed “Mode,” thatA color plate from Beeton’s Book of Household Management by Isabella Beeton, 1859–61. The Art Archive /John Meek.

Betty Crocker 59included clear instructions. Most included an estimate of the time required,the average cost, and a full-color engraving of the finished dish. In her prefaceBeeton notes that “for the matter of the recipes, I am indebted, in somemeasure, to the correspondents of the ‘Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine,’who have obligingly placed at my disposal their formulae for manyoriginal preparations.” She goes on to credit “a large private circle,” “diligentstudy of the works of the best modern writers on cookery,” and “friends inEngland, Scotland, Ireland, France, and Germany” for assistance with thealmost 900 pages of recipes. As with each subject, entertaining etiquettewas covered in detail from planning (“a private dinner-party should consistof not less than the number of the Graces, or more than that of the Muses”);the arrival of guests; seating, food and wine service; dinner conversation; togood-byes. The section starts with a warning to the hostess. “Hospitality is amost excellent virtue; but care must be taken that the love of company, forits own sake, does not become a prevailing passion; for then the habit is nolonger hospitality, but dissipation.” Beeton advises that “the mistress shouldremember that it is her duty to make her guests feel happy, comfortable,and quite at their ease,” and concludes that entertaining “gives a fillip to life”and makes “the quiet happy home of an English gentlewoman appear themore delightful and enjoyable.”Further Reading: Beeton, Isabella. Beeton’s Book of Household Management: A FirstEdition Facsimile. London: Jonathan Cape Limited, 1971; Beeton, Isabella.Beeton’s Book of Household Management. London: Ward, Lock & Company,1888; Davidson, Alan. The Oxford Companion to Food. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1999; Hughes, Kathryn. The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton:The First Domestic Goddess. New York: Anchor, 2007; Project Gutenberg eBook.The Book of Household Management, by Isabella Beeton, http://www.gutenberg.org /files /10136/10136.txt; Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical. TheEnglishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 1852–77, http://www.sciper.org / browse /ED_desc.html.Joanne Lamb HayesBetty CrockerOften called “America’s First Lady of Food,” Betty Crocker has been oneof the most successful and enduring food marketing icons of the last century.She was created in 1921 by the Washburn Crosby Company of Minneapolis(one of many regional milling companies that merged in 1928to become the world’s largest miller, General Mills), and arrived on thescene ready to add a personal touch to the baking and entertaining advicethe company offered to purchasers of their Gold Medal flour. A very successfulpromotional contest had increased the volume of the company’sconsumer correspondence and company directors felt that a warm andfriendly response from a single knowledgeable authority would promote

60 Betty Crockertheir product’s image better than responses from an ever-changing staff ofindividuals using their own names. Samuel Gale, the advertising managerof Washburn Crosby at that time, is credited with her creation. The popularnickname, Betty, was chosen for her first name, and her last name wasinspired by the surname of William G. Crocker, a recently retired directorof the company. A contest was held among the female employees for themost characteristic signature. Secretary Florence Lindeberg won the contestand to this day her Betty Crocker signature is used on all correspondenceas well as on packaging.Supported by home economist Janette Kelley and the company’s HomeService Department, Betty Crocker was able to respond to the hundredsof homemakers who wrote to her each day, making each feel that theywere receiving a personal note from a real woman. From the start, a largeproportion of the correspondence dealt with entertaining. Women whowere comfortable cooking for their families felt they needed help bakingfor special events. To offer hands-on help, the company created a series ofcooking schools all across the country. In 1924, Betty became even morereal with the introduction of her Friday morning radio show, later namedthe Betty Crocker Cooking School of the Air, from Minneapolis radio station,WCCO. Marjorie Husted, the new Director of the Home Service Department,wrote the script for the first 10 years and was the voice of Betty forthe Midwestern show. Before becoming a national broadcast, the show appearedin many other cities with a different actress as Betty in each location.During its 24-year run, the show became a lifeline for American womenstruggling to provide memorable celebrations as well as nutritious mealsfor their families as the country suffered the Great Depression and WorldWar II. Betty Crocker became such a trusted friend and respected advisorin households nationwide that a 1945 Fortune magazine poll named her thesecond most famous woman in America after Eleanor Roosevelt. The radioshow was followed by a television show, the Betty Crocker Magazine of theAir, starting in 1951. An actress, Adelaide Hawley, was the first to becomeBetty Crocker on television and was followed by several other actresses asthe show continued through the 1950s.The Washburn Crosby Company was not new to publishing; in 1880 a60-page version of Miss Parloa’s New Cook Book and Marketing Guide waspublished to promote the company’s flour. (The original, by Maria Parloa,one of the two first directors of the Boston Cooking School, was 430 pages.General Mills produced reproductions of the Washburn Crosby booklet inthe 1970s.) After the arrival of Betty Crocker, the company increased theirpublishing activity and offered entertaining advice with small cookbooksand pamphlets such as Betty Crocker’s $25,000 Recipe Set Featuring RecipesFrom World Famous Chefs For Foods That Enchant Men and Betty Crocker’s101 Delicious Bisquick Creations As Made And Served by Well-Known GraciousHostesses, Famous Chefs, Distinguished Epicures and Smart Luminariesof Movieland, both produced in 1933. From 1941 to 1945, General Millspublished a series of wartime booklets and the Betty Crocker Cook Book of

Betty Crocker 61All-Purpose Baking to help homemakers cope with rationing and scarcity. AsAmerica recovered from more than a decade of hard times followed by theuncertainty of war, Betty Crocker supported the celebration with the 1947introduction of their PartyCake line, the first double-layer butter cake mixes,and more importantly with the release of the comprehensive hardback BettyCrocker’s Picture Cook Book (known as “Big Red” because of the color of itscover). When released in 1950, the book was an overnight success and hasbeen revised periodically ever since. Its tenth edition was released in 2005and has continued the tradition of providing the entertaining menus, recipes,serving suggestions, and kitchen tricks that hostesses count on. Throughthe years, Betty Crocker has continued to produce books focused on entertaining,with titles such as Betty Crocker’s Guide to Easy Entertaining (1959),Betty Crocker’s Hostess Cookbook: A Wealth of Ideas For Today’s Entertaining(1967), Betty Crocker’s Dinner Parties: A Contemporary Guide to Easy Entertaining(1970), Betty Crocker’s Buffets: Menus, Recipes and Planning Tips forEasy and Successful Home Entertaining (1984), Betty Crocker’s Easy Entertaining(1992), Betty Crocker’s Entertaining Basics: Learning to Entertain withConfidence (2001), Betty Crocker Basics: How to Cook and Entertain withConfidence (2005). Many of these have been reprinted over the years andcontinue to appear on bookstore shelves.While Betty Crocker had previously appeared in product advertisementsdrawn by various artists, her first official portrait was commissionedin 1936. Inspired by the features of the General Mills Home Service De-A Betty Crocker cake mix advertisement from1952. © Mary Evans Picture Library/Alamy.

62 Birthdayspartment staff, New York artist Neysa McMein created a quintessential1930s homemaker, serious yet compassionate and quite properly dressed.The original 1936 portrait was revised in 1955, 1965, 1969, 1972, 1980,1986, and 1996 to reflect the style of the era. The 1996 revision, commissionedto celebrate her 75th anniversary, is a watercolor by John Stuart Inglebased on a digital portrait that combined the faces of 75 American womenchosen by General Mills to represent the racial diversity of their customers.Although the Betty Crocker red spoon and signature logo first used in 1954has now replaced her portrait on most Betty Crocker products, she still representsthe personal side of General Mills in marketing materials and in themany cookbooks that bear her name.Further Reading: Anderson, Jean. The American Century Cookbook: The Most PopularRecipes of the 20th Century. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1997; Crocker,Betty. Betty Crocker’s New Picture Cook Book. New York: McGraw Hill, 1961;General Mills. History of Betty Crocker. http://www.generalmills.com /corporate /company/ hist_betty.pdf; Marks, Susan. Finding Betty Crocker: The Secret Lifeof America’s First Lady of Food. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005; reprintedby University of Minnesota Press, 2007; Schenone, Laura. A Thousand YearsOver a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, andRemembrances. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003.Joanne Lamb HayesBirthdaysThere can be no doubt that birthdays are big in America and in many otherparts of the world now. But that was not always true. Once calendars hadbeen established by the Egyptians in around 4000 B.C., it made possible theannual observance of the birth day for those wealthy and powerful individualsfor whom records were kept. The custom spread around the easternMediterranean, and Greeks and Romans adopted it. The Bible mentionsthat the Egyptian pharaoh’s birthday was observed, as was Herod’s birthdayin the first century A.D. Romans stationed in Britain about the same timeas Herod appear to have organized festive events around their birthdaysby inviting friends. As the Roman Catholic Church began to keep records,the celebration of birthdays by others of wealth and position spread intoEurope. Earlier, in those parts of the world where record keeping was lessprevalent, individual birthdays were neither recorded nor observed. Today,modern technology has made birth–record keeping possible throughoutmost of the world, and birth dates are used as one means of identificationfor various governmental functions.Although almost every individual has a recorded birth date, it may notbe observed or celebrated, if that has not been the custom of the community.This is still true in much of rural and village Africa although in urban areas,birthday celebrations are being adopted based on Western customs. In India,

where the time and date of one’s birth are carefully recorded for future determinationof one’s horoscope and auspicious dates for marriages, businessventures, or other important events, birthdays of children or adults, exceptamong the urban affluent, are not celebrated with parties or other similarevents, although on the birthday morning the child may be taken to thetemple with a gift of rice or other food offering. Hindus living in the UnitedStates, however, are more likely to follow Western celebration traditions.In predominantly Catholic nations, where individuals frequently aregiven a saint’s name to assure their protection, the saint’s day, wheneverthat occurs during the calendar year, may be celebrated instead of the actualbirthday. A typical celebration may include feasting for family members andfriends. A particularly elaborately celebrated saint’s day is St. Joseph’s Dayon March 19, in honor of Saint Joseph, the spouse of Mary, when an ItalianAmerican or Mexican American family may prepare a huge feast table andinvite neighbors and friends to partake.Besides saints’ days, the major religions give even more importance totheir founders’ birth dates: the birthday of Mohammed is a national holidayin Muslim nations and is observed by Muslims everywhere; Christmas is areligious and legal holiday in much of the Western hemisphere and Europe,and is observed among Christians elsewhere; and Buddhists celebrate thebirthday of the Buddha.Today, many nations annually honor the birthdays of their past greatleaders or current royalty with special events including parties, communitygatherings, and parades. Such dates may be established as legal holidays ifthe honoree is no longer living.Over the years there have been many ways to observe or celebrate anindividual’s birthday, with the goal of making the honoree feel special andconveying wishes for a long life. Less frequent in earlier times but occurringmore often today, a party of some sort is part of the celebration of abirthday, sometimes regardless of the wishes of the honoree. A party maybe impromptu and very simple or planned over a long period of time andelaborate. In either case it may or may not be a total surprise to the birthdayperson. The latter is especially true of children’s and young people’s birthdays.For adult birthday parties, the opportunity to socialize with friends andloved ones may be the primary purpose of the event. For children’s parties,depending on the age of the birthday child and guests, some form of entertainmentusually is planned: games such as hitting a piñata containing smallgifts or sweets for all the guests; a theme; entertainment such as a clownor a magician; or an interesting or exciting experience. Accompanying thislate-twentieth-century expansion of parties has been the development of anentire industry engaged in the design, manufacture, and marketing of partysupplies: paper and plastic dishes and utensils, party hats, favors, decorations,and other fanciful items. Also easily available are many books and magazineand newspaper articles that advise how to prepare for and conduct a successfulbirthday party, complete with suggested menus. These are usually writtento help with entertaining young children but suggestions for adult partiesBirthdays 63

64 Birthdaysare plentiful, too. Some cookbooks and women’s magazines from the latenineteenth century onward have also included suggestions for celebratingthe birthdays of such American leaders as George Washington and AbrahamLincoln.Food always plays an important role in any celebration. It may be justlight refreshments, usually including a birthday cake, or it may be a full mealthat includes favorites of the honoree. In the last 200 years, a birthday cakehas assumed an increasingly important role in birthday party food, but occasionallythe sweet part of the refreshments or meal does not include cake,but a pie or other foods favored by the birthday person. An early referenceto a birthday party for a young girl appears in the family correspondenceof Margaret Bayard Smith, an American, in a letter written to her sister in1811. It described the special meal prepared for the attendees (about 20adults and children), followed by a birthday cake and ice cream. The dinnerwas preceded by the gathering of flowers and greens to garland every one.Garlanding was an early nineteenth-century custom to honor someone. Itwas mentioned by Louisa May Alcott, writing of being garlanded at herown childhood birthday celebration. Flowers other than garlands also are atraditional birthday gift.Gifts to the honoree are a part of the celebration, too. These may takemany forms. Music as an appropriate gift has a long history. Composers havewritten music in honor of birthdays, whether for a reigning monarch or lovedone, and our classical music has many well-known examples of speciallycomposed music. In some cases, the music was played to awaken the honoreeon the birthday morning. Original poems may be recited, ditties sung,or songs specially written to honor the birthday person may be performed.One song has become traditional and almost ubiquitous at Americanbirthday celebrations: the “Happy Birthday” song, which usually accompaniesthe presentation and cutting of the birthday cake. The song was composedin 1893 as “Good Morning to All” by two kindergarten-teacher sisters,Mildred and Patty Hill. How the original words were changed is unknownalthough some sources attribute it to Tin Pan Alley. Since 1910, “HappyBirthday to You” has been sung at American birthday celebrations and nowis reputed to be the most popular song ever, worldwide.At a party for a younger child, who has grown in height, knowledge, andabilities, the celebration likely will be more focused on those gains. So thesinging of “Happy Birthday” may be followed by the child guests attemptingto spank the birthday child, each administering one spank and finishingwith a pinch, while saying, “And a pinch to grow an inch.” Although thiscustom is of obscure origin, its persistence may be somewhat due to thefact that it permits a mild expression of childish hostility. Another exampleof perhaps hidden hostility is the Spanish custom of pulling the honoree’searlobes, once for each year.Birthday greeting cards are sent through the mail from those who can’textend good wishes in person; cards can also be presented in person or usedto accompany a gift. Johann Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press

Birthdays 65that uses moveable type in the late 1400s led to an easy and relatively inexpensivemeans of printing. By the late nineteenth century, colorful greetingcards were being exchanged among friends at the Christmas and New Yearholidays. This custom achieved wide popularity, and soon after, greetingcards were being produced for birthdays and now for almost every otherpossible occasion. A huge greeting card industry has developed, with birthdaycards that target specific relationships, and may be religious in nature,saccharine, humorous, in bad taste, or mildly insulting.Because a birthday signifies the passage of time, it often involves such symbolsas burning candles, once used to measure time, or special foods symbolicof long life. For example, among Chinese Americans, birthday foods may bebuns, shaped and colored like peaches, with a sweet filling, or wheat noodles,stretched very long and served in soup.Some birthdays are more significant than others and are recognized asimportant rites of passage. Turning 13 (or 12 for a girl) is such a time for ayoung Jewish boy or girl because it’s the age when they rigorously preparethemselves for the Bar/Bat Mitzvah, an important ceremony that will makethem full participants in the religious life of the Jewish community. Followingthe successful completion of the Bar or Bat Mitzvah requirements, acelebratory party is held for the family’s relatives and friends.For a young girl in the Latino community, reaching the age of 15 yearsrequires a special celebration, called la quinceanera. It’s usually an elaborateand costly occasion, with many members of the family’s community offriends and relatives involved in planning, participating in, and paying for it,and it serves as a signal that the honoree has reached womanhood.Both the Bar and Bat Mitzvahand la quinceanera indicate a comingof age. Similarly, a debutanteball is given when a young femaledebutante reaches the age of 18 toindicate that she is now eligible toenter the adult social world.Among family and friends,often extraordinary attention ispaid to birthdays at the ages of 50,75, 80, or older, and special gatheringsare held. Senior citizens mayreceive a congratulatory letter fromthe president (if requested by afriend or family member) startingat age 80.The invention of the camerain the nineteenth century meantthat many American celebratoryevent are now recorded withphotographs taken by one or moreSweet SixteenIn American culture, the celebration of the 16th birthday is animportant rite of passage. In a country where adulthood is legallyacknowledged at 18, the 16th birthday recognizes a youngadult’s burgeoning maturity.Sweet sixteen celebrations have often inspired musicians andfilmmakers. Ray Orbinson, Chuck Berry, Billy Idol, and HillaryDuff have all recorded songs with the theme of “sweet sixteen.”The 1984 film Sixteen Candles, starring Molly Ringwald, remainspopular.Although sweet sixteen parties have traditionally been thedomain of girls, American boys are increasingly beginning tocelebrate their 16th year with a party. Sweet sixteen celebrationsrange from simple family affairs to lavish extravaganzas.A popular reality show on MTV, Super Sweet Sixteen, depicts theexpensive sweet sixteen parties of boys and girls where luxurycars, designer clothes, celebrity entertainment, and extravagantvenues have replaced homemade cakes and parties at home.Wanda Mann

66 Blair Houseof the participants, and birthday parties are certainly no exception. From aone-year-old’s first taste of frosting to an 80-year-old’s attempts to blow outwhat appears to be a cake on fire, all is preserved on film for posterity. Today’sdigital cameras have resulted in a proliferation of such photos, and all thesupplies and equipment to display and store them, yielding yet another recentlydeveloped industry.In the United States, the custom of celebrating birthdays is no longerlimited to humans. Occasionally one receives an invitation for a birthdayparty, or notices a picture in the newspaper of a birthday party, for a familypet. When such occasions occur, invited guests may be similar pets and theirowners, or family members and friends. There may be party hats for the honoreeand guests, the usual kinds of pictures taken and, except for speciallyprepared food for the pets, the usual birthday party refreshments served.Further Reading: Cherkasky, Shirley. “Birthday Foods.” In Solomon Katz, Ed.Encyclopedia of Food and Culture. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003;Ewen, David. All the Years of Popular Music. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977; Humphrey, Theodore C. “A Family Celebrates a Birthday: Of Lifeand Cakes.” In Theodore C. Humphrey and Lin T. Humphrey, Eds. “We GatherTogether”: Food and Festival in American Life. Logan: Utah State University Press,1991; Jernow, Liza. “Birthdays.” In Andrew Smith, Ed. The Oxford Encyclopediaof Food and Drink in America. Vol. I. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.Blair HouseShirley CherkaskySince 1942, Blair House has been America’s most exclusive guest house. Locatedat 1651–1653 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, opposite the Executive OfficeBuilding of the White House, it welcomes visiting heads of state, selectforeign dignitaries, and, on occasion, past, present, and future United Statespresidents and first ladies. The original house has had political connectionssince its construction in 1824. During the nearly 120 years that it was aprivate home, many important political guests were entertained there anddecisions that would change the history of the United States were made inits rooms. Then in 1942, when 24-hour wartime activity made it impossibleto continue to house official guests in the White House and Washingtonhotels were filled to capacity, moving into the townhouses across the streetbecame the ideal solution. Stanley Woodward, chief of protocol for FranklinRoosevelt, arranged for the federal government to purchase Blair House andput it into service immediately. Finding it not large enough for America’s expandingguest list, the adjacent Lee House was purchased in 1943. In 1969and 1970 the complex expanded into two 1860 townhouses on JacksonPlace facing Lafayette Park. Today, under the jurisdiction of the Departmentof State, the expanded Blair House now elegantly hosts guests of the WhiteHouse while they are in Washington. The four original town houses havekept their exterior appearance while the interior spaces have been combined

Blair House 67The Blair House. © Christina Deridder | Dreamstime.com.to make 70,000 square feet of living space, an area bigger than the WhiteHouse itself. There are now 119 rooms including 14 guest bedrooms, 8 staffbedrooms, 35 bathrooms, 4 dining rooms, a kitchen, laundry, drycleaner, exerciseroom, flower shop, and hair salon. A specially trained 24-hour staffprovides for the comfort and safety of guests, making every effort to see thatthey feel at home. When a visiting head-of-state is in residence the flag ofthe guest’s country flies over the Blair House.The original sand-colored limestone townhouse at 1651 Pennsylvania Avenuewas built in 1824 for Joseph Lovell, first Surgeon General of the UnitedStates. Lovell also organized the Army Corps of Engineers. In 1830, AndrewJackson invited Frankfort, Kentucky journalist Francis Preston Blair to moveto Washington to become editor of the pro-administration paper, the Globe.Blair and his family moved to Washington and in 1837 moved into the house.Blair had written pro-Jackson articles before coming to Washington and waspolitically active immediately upon his arrival in the capital. When Jacksontook office in 1829, his cabinet was divided by disagreements between VicePresident John C. Calhoun and Secretary of State Martin Van Buren andwas unable to make decisions. Jackson created an unofficial advisory groupknown as his “Kitchen Cabinet,” and Blair became one of its most influentialmembers. This group functioned as the President’s cabinet until the 1831resignation of Calhoun and Secretary of War H. John Eaton. Blair remainedan influential consultant to Jackson and to Martin Van Buren, who followedJackson as president. In 1834, Blair and John C. Rives started a second newspaper,the Congressional Globe. It first provided a synopsis of Congressionalproceedings but soon took on the recording of all Congressional business. In1873 it became the Congressional Record and is still in publication.

68 Blair HouseWhen James K. Polk became president in 1845, Blair was forced to sellthe Globe. He moved his family to Silver Springs and rented the PennsylvaniaAvenue House first to secretary of the Navy, George Bancroft, andthen to Secretary of the Interior, Thomas Ewing. In 1850, Ewing’s daughter,Eleanor Boyle Ewing, married General William Tecumseh Sherman ina ceremony in Blair House. In 1852 the Blair family returned to the houseand their oldest son Montgomery, a lawyer, returned to Washington andmoved into the house. He would later become Postmaster General underLincoln. In 1859, Blair built the adjacent townhouse, 1653 PennsylvaniaAvenue, known as the Lee House, for his daughter Elizabeth and her husband,Admiral Samuel Phillips Lee. Blair supported Abraham Lincoln inthe 1860 election and became a trusted friend and confidant. During hisPresidency, Lincoln frequently crossed the street to sit in Blair’s study anddiscuss the day’s problems. In that room in 1861, at Lincoln’s request,Blair tried to convince Robert E. Lee to take command of the Union army.Lee refused and several days later accepted command of the ConfederateArmy of Northern Virginia. The room is now known as the Lincoln Room.The Blair family continued to own the home until 1942, a total of 105years.In May of 1942, the first White House guest to stay in Blair Housewas President Manuel Prado of Peru. The extensive list of world leadersentertained in the house includes General Charles de Gaulle (July 6 to 10,1944), when he was leader of the Free French living in England; ChaimWeizmann, first president of Israel (May 24 and 25, 1948); JawaharlalNehru, first prime minister of post- colonial India (December 19, 1956)with his daughter Indira Gandhi; and Queen Elizabeth II of the UnitedThe Blair House in Washington, D.C., 1945. Libraryof Congress.

Blair House 69Kingdom and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (May 14 to 17, 1991). Inaddition, the president-elect often stays in the house on the night precedingthe inauguration. One of the busiest times in Blair House was the morethan three-year residency of President Truman and his family. Shortly afterthe 1948 election, the Trumans noticed structural problems in the WhiteHouse. The family moved across the street to what was then known as theBlair–Lee House, while extensive repairs were made to the White House.During this period, the house was referred to as the “Truman White House,”and many historical decisions were made in its rooms. Although the movecomplicated entertaining, Mrs. Truman was noted for her efficiency andadjusted to the situation by giving a series of small less-formal parties inorder to include all the guests she would have entertained in one largeparty in the White House. The social highlight of the Truman residency atBlair House was entertaining Princess Elizabeth of Great Britain and PrincePhilip. In his book about his years as White House Chef, Alonzo Fields givesthe menu for the luncheon served on November 1, 1951 in the princessand prince’s honor. The meal started with canapés served with a choice ofold fashioneds, martinis, or orange or tomato juice and went on to includehoneydew melon, seminole, smothered pheasant, currant jelly, bread sauce,fried samp (cornmeal mush), broccoli with lemon drawn butter, bakedstuffed tomatoes, rolls, green salad Roquefort cheese bowl with radish garnishand french dressing, toasted Triscuits, Stanley cream molds, and spongedrops, all accompanied by sparkling Burgundy. On this and most Trumaneramenus, dessert was followed by nuts, fruits, candies, demitasse, cigars,cigarettes, and liqueurs. American traditions such as roast turkey, oysterdressing, sweet potatoes, and succotash appear on a number of the menus.The Lee Dining Room, which seats 22 people, was used for Cabinet meetingsas well as for breakfasts, luncheons, and very small state dinners. (Largestate dinners were held in Washington hotels.) Many of the things for whichthe Truman administration is best remembered happened around its largedining table. In 1948 the Marshall Plan was created in that room. In Juneof 1950, the decision to enter the Korean War was made in meetings there,and the decision in April of 1951 to relieve General Douglas MacArthur ofhis command in Korea came from this room. On November 1, 1950, PuertoRican nationalists attempted to assassinate President Truman by stormingthe front door of the Blair House but were stopped by White House police.Blair House was named to the National Register of Historic Places onOctober 15, 1966, and to the National Historic Landmarks program onOctober 25, 1973.Further Reading: Fields, Alonzo. My 21 Years in the White House. New York: Coward-McCann, 1961; http://www.blairhouse.org/; http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel /wash /dc25.htm; http://www.state.gov/s /cpr/what / blair/; Parents Magazine. The FirstLadies Cook Book: Favorite Recipes of All the Presidents of the United States. NewYork: GMG Publishing, 1982.Joanne Lamb Hayes

70 Block PartyBlock PartyA block party is a social gathering organized by residents of a specific streetblock or neighborhood, held in the street or nearby yard or park. It is anoccasion for neighbors, longtime and new to the area, to share conversationover food and drink. Seasonal block parties may mark the beginning of long,hot summer days and many go on to become annual events.Block parties often foster connection within the larger community bycelebrating ethnic and religious holidays and historical events. Some blockparties raise funds for local public school programs, while others supportthe revitalization of a business district or focus on improving neighborhoodenvironmental concerns.Whatever the occasion, block party planners are usually required toobtain city or municipal permits. In many urban areas, fire and police departmentsmanage requests for road closures. Depending upon the numberof participants, insurance coverage may be mandatory.As a courtesy, a petition is circulated door-to-door among residentsto announce upcoming block party dates and activities. Block party–goersmust comply with regulations for recycling and trash disposal and adhere tolocal noise ordinances.The block party by its very nature calls for outdoor cooking methods,and the grill is paramount. Menus feature popular items such as barbequeribs, hamburgers, hot dogs, grilled chicken, sausage, and fish. Ethnic specialtiesare often a highlight, prepared by practiced neighborhood cooks.A bounty of side salads, condiments, and desserts are displayed on foldingtables, and coolers are stocked with soda, lemonade, and beer and wine.Neighbors and friends casually arrange chairs and tables in the street, andothers choose to sit on front porches or curbside. Committees appointedearly in the party-planning process supervise children’s activities and coordinatemusic or live entertainment.In parts of the Caribbean, block parties take the form of lively streetdance parties known as “jump ups.” The general populace and tourists alikedance to the beat of steel drum performers and feast on island specialtiessuch as grilled fish and meat.Early block parties of the 1900s advertised skating and dance contests.The Harlem block party debuted around 1914 and was known for its activesocial scene and live jazz.Block parties also reflected the political climate of the times. Partieswere held in support of candidates running for office and in celebrationof the momentous end of World War II. Subsequent block parties workedto recruit volunteers for Civil Defense groups in the 1950s. Up until the1960s, with the onset of the civil rights movement, block parties were oftenracially segregated by neighborhood.The block party as social occasion continues to thrive and has evolvedinto a viable grass roots effort with potential to initiate change on a neighborhoodlevel and beyond. The national Night Out movement of the 1990surged people to hold block parties throughout the community to ward off

Book Clubs 71crime and increase safety awareness. In college communities, block partieshave become a means for students and residents to build consensus aroundpotentially divisive issues.The virtual block party has appeared in densely populated urban areasin the form of shared online electronic calendars and bulletin boards. Giventhe reality that residents may not know one another, the virtual block partyis an effective tool for sharing information and news pertaining to a veryconcise area defined by address.Block parties of the future are likely to remain rooted in community,one that allows residents to conduct business in the wider world and stillmaintain a sense of community wherever they live. Because people are ableto stay connected with neighborhood issues, the impetus for social participationthrives, as does quality of life, and ultimately, sense of place.Further Reading: “Block Party tonight at St. Nicholas Rink.” Atlanta Constitution.August 14, 1908, p. 7, col. 2; Banks, Marcus. “Block Parties, Street Fairs, StreetFestivals.” August 26, 2005. http://www.gothamgazette.com /article /communitydevelopment /20060826/20/1543; Blackburn, Robert. “Block Dance,”The Magpie. January 1938, v. 22, n. 1, p. 66; Dobson, Charles. Community BuildingActivities, part 2–6. The Citizen’s Handbook. Vancouver Citizen’s Committee.http:www.vcn.bc.ca /citizens-handbook /2_06_block_parties.html; “Skating anddancing at Lake View Casino.” Frederick News-Maryland. September 22, 1908,p. 5; Gertz, Emily. “Neighbornode and Hyperlocal Networking.” August 13, 2005.http://worldchanging.com /archives /003297.html; “Krewe of Boo to hold blockparty, costume contest.” New Orleans City Business, October 26, 2007. CityBusiness Staff Report; “Block Parties to Recruit CD Aides.” Los Angeles Times.January 8, 1956; “City Waves Flag and Cheers Wilson.” “War, Topic of Orators.”New York Times. July 6, 1915, p. 18; Prescott, Carlson. “Old St. Pat’s World’sLargest Block Party.” http://gochicago.about.com /od /eventsfestivalsholidays /p /block_party.htm; Project for Public Spaces. “Changing the World One Block ata Time.” http://www.pps.org /info /newsletter /august2007/one_block; Rollens,Patrick. “Block Parties and the Hyperlocal Urban Dweller.” WorldChangingTeam. August 18, 2007; “St. Croix-Gros Islet ‘Jump ups . . .’ ” Food & Wine. 2006,p. 267; “The Best Block Party.” New Hampshire Business Review. June 8,2007; “In Manhattan, it’s good when it’s the pits.” Restaurant Hospitality. July2006, p. 30; Walljasper, Jay, et al. The Great Neighborhood Book: A Do-It-YourselfGuide to Placemaking. Gabriola Island, B.C.: New Society Publishing, 2007;“Block Parties for Service Men Are Way to Boost Morale.” Washington Post.September 26, 1941; Weidemann, Liz. “Poway: $4.2 million later, Poway to holdblock party.” San Diego Business Journal. June 18, 2007; Wood, Trina. “Campusbuilds a community bridge.” University Communications. October 12, 2007.http://www.dateline.ucdavis.edu /dl_detail.lasso?id=9781.Suzanne C. WeltmanBook ClubsIn the United States, the first book clubs were formed in the early 1700s,and literary discussion groups date back even further in Europe. American

72 Book Clubsbook clubs originally were organized by individuals who wanted privateprintings of books and essays written by members of the group. One suchgroup, which was formed in 1726 and is called The Junto, claims BenjaminFranklin among its founding members. The Junto was the basis for the firstlending library, the Philadelphia Library, which later became the library atthe University of Pennsylvania.Most book clubs do not have such an auspicious background and haveleft obscure historical footprints. Despite this fact, organized discussiongroups have played a significant role in the social history of the UnitedStates. Two groups founded in 1868—The New England Woman’s Cluband New York’s Sorosis—were major, documented organizations createdin response to women’s exclusion from fraternal and professional organizations.These discussion groups connected women to the broader world, offeredan umbrella organization under which new chapters were created, andprovided a model upon which the modern women’s book club was built.In the early twentieth century, the living rooms, porches, and gardenswhere women met to talk about books became a safe place to discuss socialissues. At the time, college was not an option for many women and thesegroups offered access to learning. The awareness and agitation created fromthe discussions initiated some of the first steps toward political reformand social activism on a variety of topics, including abolition and women’ssuffrage.The legacy of social activism deepened over the years and playeda significant role in cultural changes, particularly in the women’s rightsmovement. The consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s and 1970s wereoutcrops of these original clubs. As other outlets for women’s social activismevolved, reading groups became less concerned with political issues.New groups did not feel the same social mandate toward affectingchange.In the 1980s book clubs became wildly popular, and with the increasein popularity the structure of clubs changed. The meetings became less formaland more social. In most modern groups no one is responsible for writingup formal notes. Meeting preparation, if any exists at all, usually consistsof little more than a brief author biography and a few possible discussionquestions.One event that cannot be overlooked in discussing the recent boomin the number of book groups was the formation of Oprah’s Book Clubin 1996. Originally dismissed by critics and the literary elite, Oprah seemsto have won over even the toughest pundits. A passionate reader and booklover, Oprah selects each title herself and has resisted the publishing industries’overtures to market to her readers.Toni Morrison, Nobel-prize winning writer and author of severalOprah’s Book Club selections, credits Oprah with giving the novel back itslife of being talked about. The book club “meets” on air once a month withOprah, the author, and several viewers who are selected by writing to theshow and requesting the chance to participate in the discussion. The shows

are usually taped at Oprah’s house and provide viewers with a conversation,as well as a glimpse into a book-club meeting: the table is covered withlinen, china, and crystal; the food is elegant and looks delicious; and thelocation is serene and lush. Oprah models how to talk about books as wellas how to host a book club.Book clubs are formed at the grass-root level through informal networks.Groups depend on word-of-mouth to recruit participants and haveperformed limited outreach to gain new members. This is beginning tochange as Internet message boards and chat forums gain mainstream users.New groups are easy to form—it is as simple as asking a few friends andcolleagues to get together to discuss a book, picking a time and a location,and creating a setting where people feel comfortable to talk. Once a fewdedicated participants become involved, it is easy to increase membershipby asking new people to join.Surrounded by technology meant to support connections, such as cellphones, e-mail, and instant messaging, it is harder than ever before to keepup face-to-face relationships. This is part of the reason why many womenactive in book clubs feel that the in-person conversation is as important—ifnot more important—than reading the book.Book clubs meet on a regular basis, with each group forming its ownmethod for selecting the date. A rule, such as meeting on the first Wednesdayof the month or any day in the third week of the month, helps to keepthe meetings consistent. It is also good to have a regular time of day in place.Establishing regular meeting times helps members avoid scheduling othercommitments at the same time.Every book club must have a book to discuss for each meeting. Alwaysselected in advance, the book can be picked in a number of ways, includingchoosing books that some members have already read; forming a list ofpotential books and having individuals read them to see if they are right forthe group; selecting books that have won awards or are on best-seller lists;identifying a genre, author, or theme; or letting members take turns pickinga book.Enough time has to be allotted between meetings to purchase and readthe book. If a particularly long work is chosen, it may be a good idea to plantwo sessions for the discussion or allow extra time between meetings. Somegroups have a list of books prepared a few months in advance so memberscan schedule their reading. Sometimes the best discussions are not about thebooks that everyone loved. The debate about why members feel the waythat they do is likely to stimulate talk about the writing style, plot, themes,and characters.Most often book groups rotate their meetings to the homes of differentmembers, but groups can also arrange to meet in a local bar, restaurant, orcommunity hall. The food and beverages vary depending on the time of themeeting and the group’s preferences, but a little something should alwaysbe served. Commonly, the host will offer a spread of light snacks and appetizerssuch as dips with vegetables and pita wedges, cheese and crackers,Book Clubs 73

74 Books on Entertaining and Dining, History ofnuts, chips, mixed olives, and cold cuts. Wine is usually served, but nonalcoholicbeverages should also be available.Some groups try to incorporate the theme of the book being discussedinto the food served. If particular dishes are mentioned in the story, this canbe simply a matter of recreating those dishes. If there isn’t any specific foodmentioned, tying the book to the menu may involve selecting food from theregion where the book is set or picking dishes indicative of the time periodof the story.Whatever the host decides to serve, the important thing is to create acomfortable setting that will encourage discussion of the book. With goodfood and wine, friends, and lively conversation, there is really nothing tostop a book-club meeting from becoming a favorite way to socialize andentertain.Further Reading: Farr, Cecilia Konchor. Reading Oprah: How Oprah’s Book ClubChanged the Way America Reads. Albany: State University of New York Press,2005; Long, Elizabeth. Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in EverydayLife. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003; Rooney, Kathleen. ReadingWith Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America. Fayetteville: The Universityof Arkansas Press, 2005.Erin G. MarrazzoBooks on Entertainingand Dining, History of“Man, it has been said, is a dining animal,” according to Isabella Beeton, theEnglish author of The Book of Household Management, which was first publishedin 1861. Dining and entertaining occur for numerous reasons. Eachhost or hostess, town or principality has motives and reasons for opulent displaysof food. At just about any time throughout history, banquets and feaststook place for many of the following reasons: raw displays of power andpolitical domination; public relations; appeasement of the gods; cementingof social connections; celebration of good harvests; escape from everydaylife, for example, saints’ days; sheer pleasure; and major life passages such asweddings, funerals, and the birth of children.With few exceptions, the people who held these opulent feasts andbanquets throughout history were the elite of every society in which theyoccurred. They possessed the wealth and manpower, in the form of slaves orservants, to create a “court” or “palace” cuisine. Written accounts from manyworld cultures indicate that banquet-givers generally fall into the followingcategories: royalty, nobility, ecclesiastical dignitaries, politicians, and, later,wealthy merchants and traders. Thus these people were the audience formany of the earliest books on dining and entertaining, who used the books

Books on Entertaining and Dining, History of 75to instruct their armies of cooks on how to prepare food and carry out plansfor extravaganzas of all sorts. Later, particularly in the nineteenth century,as women became more literate, and social and economic changes resultedin fewer household servants, books on dining and entertaining shifted to afocus on instructing women in the niceties of dining and entertaining onboth grand and small scales.The first “works” on entertaining and dining were actually nothing morethan words passed down from one cook to another. The oral tradition hasheld sway in the cooking world for most of history; not until the late nineteenthcentury or later did people begin to rely more on the written wordthan on word of mouth for cooking information.The earliest banquet-giver for whom a written record exists was AshurnasirpalII (883–859 B.C.), in Assyria, who feted almost 70,000 people overa 10-day period. The menu was engraved on a sandstone block.The ancient Middle East witnessed a multitude of banquets like thatof Ashurnasirpal II. Athenaeus’s fourth-century work, Deipnosophists, “TheLearned Banquet,” was printed in Europe in 1514, and indicated that banquetingwas common in Ancient Greece. The Greek philosopher Plato(c. 427–347 B.C.), in his Symposium, narrates the conversation at a banquetreplete with drinking. He downplays the importance of food and cooking,stating that cooking is not an art; yet setting the Symposium at a banquetindicates clearly that banqueting was an important part of ancient Greekculture.The Greeks in turn influenced the Romans. Marcus Gavius Apicius wasa Roman gourmet and epicure living around the first century A.D. Apicius, ashe is often referred to, compiled two of the oldest and best preserved cookbooks,De Re Coquinaria (“The Art of Cooking”), also known as Artis MagiricaeLibre X, and De condituris, which treated the preparation of sauces.De Re Coquinaria became available in printed form in Europe in 1498 andwas translated for the first time into English in 1926 by Joseph DommersVehling. In his Natural History (X.133), Pliny said of him, “Apicius, themost gluttonous gorger of all spendthrifts, established the view that theflamingo’s tongue has a specially fine flavor.”Arab cookbook authors, influenced by both the Greeks and the Persians,produced some of the earliest treatises on cooking and entertaining; the intendedaudiences for these early cookbooks were princes and caliphs. In A.D.377, Ibn al-Nadim mentioned a number of early Arab cookery books in hisFihrist, but all have been lost. Mas’ūdõ¯, in his Murõ¯j al-dhahab, mentionshis own lost book—Akhbār al-zamān, which discusses the perfect gentlemanand how to behave. He describes the book as “a sketch of culinary artindispensable to any man who shares his table.” In A.D. 400, Ibn Miskawayh,librarian and Buyid minister, penned a cookbook, indicating that high officialstended to involve themselves heavily in matters of food and drink.In Asia, the Mughals of India also produced handbooks for their rulingclasses. Ain-I-Akbari, a manual similar to Machiavelli’s The Prince, contains

76 Books on Entertaining and Dining, History ofa chapter devoted to recipes. China’s Emperor T’ang of Shang Dynasty (sixteenthto eleventh century B.C.) appointed his chef, Yi Yin, as prime minister.Yin wrote the Annals of Master Lü, where he classified foodstuffs andapplied flavoring techniques to them. Another important culinary work inChina was Li chi, from the Chou period (1050–256 B.C.), containing informationabout how to behave at banquets, how to eat, and how to serve.The Important Things to Know About Eating and Drinking, by Huou, KublaiKhan’s (A.D. 1215–1294) master chef, focused on soups and included informationpertaining to household management. In Japan, families like theKonoe, who served as sessho (regent) and kanpaku (chief adviser) to theemperor, kept manuscript cookbooks in the form of scrolls that date backaround one thousand years. These scrolls still have not been translated intoEnglish.Although China and the Middle East produced a number of the earliestworks touting the protocol of dining and entertaining for powerful people,Europe began to catch up with production of books with the invention ofthe Gutenberg printing press and moveable type. The first German cookbook,Küchenmeisterey, was published in 1485 in pamphlet form in Nuremberg.In what is now modern Italy, food and dining were considered to beworthy of recording, and some of the best records on dining emanate fromthat area.An early Italian manuscript cookbook by Maestro Martino, Libro dearte coquinaria, written in 1425, set the tone for many of the books thatfollowed, in particular for De Honesta Voluptate, by Vatican librarian BartolomeoSacchi di Piadena, called Platina. His 1475 work contains sectionson what to eat for various courses—his prescription for the third course:“A bit of very hard cheese is thought to seal the stomach and stop vaporsfrom seeking the head and brain.” He also advised ending a meal with fruitand nuts, a very modern concept. Platina took approximately 250 recipesfrom Maestro Martino, amply illustrating a common trend that lasted forcenturies, that of borrowing recipes. Giovanni de’Rosselli also pirated recipesfrom Martino when he published his Epulario in 1516. Epulario wentthrough 26 editions, the last being published in Venice in 1682.An anonymous Italian manuscript cookbook dating to the end of thefifteenth century, Cuoco Napoltetano (The Neapolitan Recipe Collection),contains a number of opulent banquet menus. An example of the recipecollections, or “courtly dining guides,” produced for the managers of largenoble, royal, and ecclesiastical households, The Neapolitan Recipe Collectionis representative of many of the books produced by such writers as CesareEvitascandalo (Dialogo del mastro di casa, 1598), Vincenzo Cervio (Trinciante,1593), Antonio Frugoli (Practica e Scalcaria, 1638), Vittorio Lancelotti(Lo Scalco Prattico, 1627), Giovan Battista Rossetti (Dello Scalco, 1584),and Cristoforo da Messisbugo (Banchetti, composizioni di vivande et apparecchiogenerale, 1549). Messisbugo lists all the equipment and other non-foodnecessities to plan and carry out a large banquet for a noble house, based onMessisbugo’s experience as the steward for the Dukes of Este.

Books on Entertaining and Dining, History of 77The work of Bartolomeo Scappi, the1570 Opera di M. B. Scappi: Cuocosecreto di Pappa Pio Quinto (Private Cook of Pope Pius V), included the firstprinted picture of a fork. Scappi worked as a cook for Pope Pius V and includeda sumptuous banquet served in four courses, with over 47 differentdishes. Scappi’s work also included menus for a full year.In addition to advice on banquets, many of these books also linked diningwith health and nutrition, a trend that grew particularly strong duringthe Renaissance.In England, manuscripts on dining for the royal courts and noblehouseholds first appeared with the oldest English cookbook, A Forme ofCury, written by Richard II’s master cooks in 1390 on a scroll that rolledup. This astonishing work mentions many spices and other exotic foodstuffslike whales, seals, and herons. The authors of Cury added that thebook had the “approval and consent of the masters of medicine and ofphilosophy that dwelt in his (Richard II’s) court.” The first printed Englishcookbook, A Noble Boke of Festes Royalle and Cokery: A Boke for a PryncisHousholde or any other Estates, appeared in 1500. Others followed; theiraudience were the noble class wealthy enough to afford them and readthem. Boke on Kervynge de Wynken de Worde, about carving meat for banquetsfor noble feasts, was published in 1508. Thomas Dawson’s The GoodHuswifes Jewell (1585) was written not just for nobility planning banquetsbut for gentlewomen in charge of day-to-day household tasks. One suchhousewife might have been Elinor Fettiplace, author of Elinor Fettiplace’sReceipt Book: Elizabethan Country House Cooking, written in 1604, but notpublished until 1986. Fettiplace’s book presents a valuable picture of lifeduring a time of political upheaval. And Gervase Markham, in his The EnglishHus-wife from 1615, inserts a chapter on banqueting, titled “Banquetingand made dishes with other conceits and secrets.” Hannah Wooley, in1670, published the first successful cookbook written by a woman, TheQueen-Like Closet.The French produced similar books on dining and entertaining, beginningwith Guillaume Tirel dit Taillevent’s Le Viandier (fourteenth century);he served as master cook for Charles V and Charles VI. The Ménagier de Pariswas written over a two-year period (1392–1394) by a husband of somewhatadvanced age for his young, inexperienced wife to assist her in her housekeepingas the mistress of a large, wealthy household. Traces of the recipesin Le Viandier and the Ménagier de Paris can be found in numerous latercookbooks, illustrating the spread of recipes and the massive pilfering of ideasthat occurred.In his Memoirs, Olivier de la Marche—maître d’hotel (steward) and captainof the guards for Philip the Good and Charles the Bold, Dukes of Burgundy—recountshow he planned the Feast of the Pheasant in 1454 andCharles’s wedding feast for his marriage to Margaret of York in 1468. Oneof the most influential French courtly dining guides was kitchen stewardPierre François de la Varenne’s Le Cuisiner François (The French Cook),published in 1651 and dedicated to his patron, the Marquis d’Uxelles,

78 Books on Entertaining and Dining, History offollowed by numerous others, including François Massialot’s Le Cuisinierroial et bourgeois (1691), which was the first cookbook known to arrangerecipes alphabetically. La Varenne’s work appears to be the first cookbookto record a number of techniques that made French cooking the standard inEurope and elsewhere for centuries to come.Early British authors borrowed heavily from the French. Many of theearly French books were translated into English, such as Massialot’s Le Cuisinierroial et bourgeois as The Court and Country Cook (1702) and a versionof La Varenne’s Le Cuisiner François as The French Cook (1653). And manyEnglish authors also wrote books with a noble audience in mind. RobertMay’s The Accomplisht Cook, or the Art and Mystery of Cookery (1660), possiblythe most important cookbook of its time, brought French influencesinto the English cooking repertoire. May cooked for many noble Britishfamilies and came from a family of cooks. William Rabisha, who wrote TheWhole Body of Cookery Dissected (1682), came from a similar professionalbackground. Both May’s and Rabisha’s books went through several editionsand influenced other authors of the time. Other authors and works of noteinclude Patrick Lamb’s Royal Cookery; or, the Complete Court Cook (1710),Robert Smith’s Court Cookery (1723), and Charles Carter’s The CompletePractical Cook (1730).Well-known French pre-revolutionary author François Marin, authorof Les Dons de Comus (1739), included sections aimed at the bourgeoisie.His contemporary Menon wrote La science du maître d’hotel, cuisinier (TheScience of the Steward, Cook; 1749) and La science du maître d’hotel, confiseur(The Science of the Steward, Pastry Cook; 1750), both aimed at largehouseholds.In the American colonies, households relied on dining and entertainingbooks of British and French origin. American cooks consulted books byEnglish female authors like Eliza Smith’s The Compleat Housewife (1727),Elizabeth Raffald’s The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769), and HannahGlasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747). At the end ofthe eighteenth century, men on both sides of the Atlantic began frequentingtaverns and banqueting clubs in large numbers, and entertaining their fellowsoutside of the home. Several chefs at these clubs published their recipes,including John Farley, who wrote The London Art of Cookery (1783).With the ripping apart of social structures caused by the American Revolutionof 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, dining and entertainingbooks took on a different tone. In the case of English books (and subsequentAmerican), courtly cooking took a backseat to a more practical approach,that of the country housewife.Bridging the books written for the aristocracy and the bourgeoisiewere the highly influential books by Antonin Carême, who cooked forNapoleon, the Romanovs, the Rothschilds, Rossini, and King George IV.Carême’s works include L’art de la cuisine française au dix-neuvième siècle(The Art of French Cooking in the Nineteenth Century; 1833); Le pâtissierroyal parisien (The Royal Parisian Pastry Maker; 1815); Le maitre d’hotel

Books on Entertaining and Dining, History of 79français: ouvrage contenant un traité des menus servis a Paris, a Saint-Pétersburg,a Londres et a Vienne ( The French Steward . . . ; 1822); Carême’s worksinfluenced generations of chefs. French author Jean-Anthèlme Brillat-Savarin wrote part of his idiosyncratic and unique book, The Physiology ofTaste, in the new United States after he fled France during the Reign of Terror.Brillat-Savarin’s book had the flavor of some of the courtly handbooksfavored by writers of the courtly dining manuals, but it had a practical sideas well.English authors Eliza Acton and Isabella Beeton wrote two of the mostinfluential books of the nineteenth century. Acton’s Modern Cookery forPrivate Families (1845) listed ingredients and provided cooking times forthe housewife who had no experienced cook to rely upon. Greatly influencedby Acton’s book, Beeton’s The Book of Household Management (1861)contained detailed chapters on entertaining and table settings. Mrs. Beetonassumed the presence of servants in the households of her readers. She includeddiagrams of where to place specific menu items on the table servedà la russe (in the Russian manner).Books also appeared for people with lower incomes and only one servant.Some of the most popular of these books were by Charles Francatelli,a student of Carême’s and chief cook to Queen Victoria. His first book, TheModern Cook (1846) went through 29 editions. A later book, The Cook’sGuide and Housekeeper’s & Butler’s Assistant (1861), provided informationfor managers of nearly any household, including information for entertaining.Alexis Soyer, a French celebrity chef, also wrote A Shilling Cookery Bookfor the People (1855), geared towards people of modest means.In the United States in the nineteenth century, authors began writingmore for the housewife than for the professional cook in a large household.Men took on the role of chef in hotel kitchens, while women held dinnerparties in the home. Books on dining and entertaining focused on smallerhome-based parties and dinners.The Virginia Housewife (1824) by American cookbook author Mary Randolph,a relative of Thomas Jefferson’s, went through many printings andproved to be practical, and at the same time, replete with dishes that couldbe cooked and served by servants. What followed Mrs. Randolph’s workwere several trends in dining and entertaining, impacted by the IndustrialRevolution and the Civil War. Consequently, books on entertaining and ondining began to reflect the demographic makeup of American society. Whilerelatively few books specifically related to entertaining were published inthe nineteenth century, by the turn of the twentieth century and after theFirst World War, books on entertaining skyrocketed in number, particularlyduring the 1950s and afterwards.Early examples of this trend include Mary F. Henderson’s PracticalCooking and Dinner Giving: A Treatise Containing Practical Instructions inCooking; in the Combination and Serving of Dishes; and in the FashionableModes of Entertaining at Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner (1895) and The PartyBook, by Winnifred Shaw Fales and Mary Harrod Northend (c. 1912).

80 Books on Entertaining and Dining, History ofWomen’s magazines published recipes in their pages and books onentertaining, as attested by The New Hospitality: Correct Table Service forBreakfasts, Luncheons, Teas, Dinners, Suppers (1924), written by LillianPurdy Goldsborough for McCall’s. Themed parties became popular as welland books like Putnam’s Book of Parties (1927), by Marguerite Aspinwall,provided women with ideas.Kitchen gadget and processed-food manufacturers produced bookletsmeant to guide housewives, who were increasingly servantless and moreliterate.After World War II, the movement toward servantless households increasedconsiderably and well-known cookbook authors like James Beardwrote about entertaining, as his Hors d’Oeuvres and Canapés (1940) andJames Beard’s Menus for Entertaining (1965) attest. Julia Child bounded inwith her Mastering the Art of French Cooking (volume I in 1961, volume IIin 1970); her work made it possible for people to cook good French food athome. Martha Stewart, starting with the book Entertaining (1982), blazedthe way for authors like Sheila Lukins and Julie Russo and their Silver PalateGood Times Cookbook (1984), as well as the Barefoot Contessa, Ina Gaskin,and her Barefoot Contessa Parties! (2001).As the twenty first century opened, entertaining books focused onquick and easy dishes and menus, using many processed convenience foodsas well as fresh foods from increasingly popular farmers markets. Examplesare Rachael Ray’s Open House Cookbook: Over 200 Recipes for Easy Entertaining(2006) and Marian Burros’s The New Elegant But Easy Cookbook(2003). Entertaining outdoors and grilling rose in popularity, generatingcookbooks like Cheryl and Bill Jamison’s The Big Book of Outdoor Cookingand Entertaining: Spirited Recipes and Expert Tips for Barbecuing, Charcoaland Gas Grilling, Rotisserie Roasting, Smoking, Deep-Frying, and MakingMerry (2006). And the General Mills icon Betty Crocker still spoke withauthority, as in Betty Crocker’s Entertaining Basics: Learning to Entertain withConfidence (2001).Further Reading: Albala, Ken. The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of LateRenaissance Europe. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007; Albala, Ken. EatingRight in the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002; Chang,K. C. Food in Chinese Culture: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives. NewHaven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977; Fisher, Carol. The American Cookbook:A History. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2006; Hunter, Lynette.“Proliferating Publications: the Progress of Victorian Cookery Litera ture.” InWilson, C. Anne, ed. Eating with the Victorians. Stroud, Gloucestershire: SuttonPublishing, 2004, p. 50–67; Masudi, Les Prairies d’or, Paris, 1861–1877, vol. VIII,p. 103–4. M’Abd al-Hamid. Cairo, n.d., Vol. IV, p. 163; Mennell, Stephen. AllManners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Agesto the Present. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985; Pennell, Elizabeth Robins, andBruce Rogers. My Cookery Books. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1903;Quayle, Eric. Old Cook Books: An Illustrated History. New York: E. P. Dutton,1978; Strong, Roy. Feast: A History of Grand Eating. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2002;Symons, Michael. A History of Cooks and Cooking. Urbana: University of Illinois

Brazil 81Press, 2000; Thirsk, Joan. “The Food Scene Captured in Print, 1500–50.” In Foodin Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, Fashions 1500–1760. London: HambledonContinuum, 2007, pp. 11–26.Cynthia D. BertelsenBrazilBrazil stands out among the South American countries both for its size, asit occupies half of the continent, and for having gained its independencewithout suffering any of the bloody wars experienced by the other SouthAmerican Spanish-speaking countries. Many people associate Brazil’s historywith savage cannibalistic tribes and with the traditional celebration ofcarnival. Many are unaware of the interesting progressive history of Brazilianhospitality, ranging from the natives’ welcoming ways to the highly refinedreceptions in the days of the empire. Probably based on the chronicles writtenby the Europeans after their first encounters with the native populationstarting in 1500, the country’s first inhabitants developed a reputation ascannibals. This is especially due to a book written by a German adventurercalled Hans Staden, who recounted the story of being held captive by theTupinamba tribe. The book was originally entitled True Story and Descriptionof a Country of Wild, Naked, Grim, Man-Eating People in the New World,America and published in 1557. Upon its first publication, the book wastranslated into Latin, Dutch, English, Italian, and Spanish, with new editionsbeing published ever since. Such widespread popularity can be attributed tothe interesting topic the book addresses and its simple enjoyable style.Brazil’s association with carnival can be attributed to the more thancentury-long development of the tourism industry, which has devoted itselfto spreading the attractive peculiarities of this festival. These two pictures—practicing cannibalism and celebrating carnival—have hidden very importantaspects of Brazilian social life, which have been consigned to only a fewexperts.THE ENCOUNTER OF EUROPEANSAND INDIGENOUS PEOPLESCannibalistic practices were certainly usual among the inhabitants ofthe Brazilian coastal zones reached by the Europeans in the sixteenth century,but it is also a fact that the victims of such practices were those consideredto be enemies. French Calvinist minister John Lerius (Jean de Léry),who visited Brazil in 1557 and 1558, wrote a detailed travelog, in whichthere is a chapter on the Tupinamba tribe’s hospitality. Léry consideredtheir way to welcome and treat guests particularly interesting. In the firstencounter the natives began by asking Léry his name, eliciting no responseas he did not understand their language. Subsequently, one of the natives

82 Braziltook off Léry’s hat and put it on himself, while another one did the samewith his sword, and another one with his cape—all of which was done whilescreaming and running all around the village. This situation disturbed andfrightened the guest until the accompanying interpreter explained that suchattitude was customary when foreigners arrived. The interpreter confirmedthis after a while when Léry was given back all his possessions. The Mussucá,the head of the family, was chosen as a host and once Léry arrived atthe Mussucá’s house, Léry had to settle himself into a hammock and remainsilent for some time. The native women immediately approached the hammockand sat around the guest on the floor; then they covered their faceswith their hands and started crying and saying, “You worked so hard tocome to see us! He’s good, he’s brave.” As he was European, they would add,“you brought us very nice things we don’t have here.” The expected reactionto this strange tearful welcome was to also be tearful or at least pretendingto be so by emitting profound sighs. After all these odd greetings, the headof the family, who, during this time, had remained quiet in a corner of thehouse making arrows, would ask the guest, “Did you arrive? . . . How areyou?,” which, with the help of the interpreter, had to be answered by saying,“I arrived.” Immediately afterwards, the host asked him if he wanted toeat, and in the case of an affirmative answer, he would order the preparationof tapioca meal served to him in a clay pot as well as some meat, poultry,or fish, and other delicacies. This was placed on the floor, as tables andchairs were not part of their furniture. The guest would be presented withcauin—a fermented beverage prepared with water and tapioca. After eating,drinking and resting or sleeping in their homes, the guest should present thenative males with knives or scissors, the women with combs and mirrors,and the children with hooks. These curious rules governing etiquette had tobe carried out ceremoniously.It is also known that the Portuguese arriving on the Brazilian coasts in1500 as part of Pedro Alvares Cabral’s expedition established a friendly relationshipwith the same native tribe. In one of the first gestures of hospitality,the Cabral expedition invited the natives to the Nao Capitana andoffered them a meal of wheat bread, boiled fish, comfits, pies, honey, and figsin syrup. The Portuguese made the natives sit on chairs around a table to havethis meal, which surprised the natives, who were used to eating on the floorand who, furthermore, rejected these delicacies initially offered. Some daysafterwards, a new invitation was presented, and this time the guests ate theoffered food. And this was the beginning of hospitality on Brazilian lands.FAZENDEIROS’S MEETINGSIn the last decades of the sixteenth century the Portuguese Captaincieshad already settled all along the Brazilian coasts. The economic basisof such a colonization process was the exploitation of sugar cane in fazendas,or plantations, where sugar mills were built to process sugar cane andobtain sugar (not very refined) and eau-de-vie. At the beginning, the natives

70 Block PartyBlock PartyA block party is a social gathering organized by residents of a specific streetblock or neighborhood, held in the street or nearby yard or park. It is anoccasion for neighbors, longtime and new to the area, to share conversationover food and drink. Seasonal block parties may mark the beginning of long,hot summer days and many go on to become annual events.Block parties often foster connection within the larger community bycelebrating ethnic and religious holidays and historical events. Some blockparties raise funds for local public school programs, while others supportthe revitalization of a business district or focus on improving neighborhoodenvironmental concerns.Whatever the occasion, block party planners are usually required toobtain city or municipal permits. In many urban areas, fire and police departmentsmanage requests for road closures. Depending upon the numberof participants, insurance coverage may be mandatory.As a courtesy, a petition is circulated door-to-door among residentsto announce upcoming block party dates and activities. Block party–goersmust comply with regulations for recycling and trash disposal and adhere tolocal noise ordinances.The block party by its very nature calls for outdoor cooking methods,and the grill is paramount. Menus feature popular items such as barbequeribs, hamburgers, hot dogs, grilled chicken, sausage, and fish. Ethnic specialtiesare often a highlight, prepared by practiced neighborhood cooks.A bounty of side salads, condiments, and desserts are displayed on foldingtables, and coolers are stocked with soda, lemonade, and beer and wine.Neighbors and friends casually arrange chairs and tables in the street, andothers choose to sit on front porches or curbside. Committees appointedearly in the party-planning process supervise children’s activities and coordinatemusic or live entertainment.In parts of the Caribbean, block parties take the form of lively streetdance parties known as “jump ups.” The general populace and tourists alikedance to the beat of steel drum performers and feast on island specialtiessuch as grilled fish and meat.Early block parties of the 1900s advertised skating and dance contests.The Harlem block party debuted around 1914 and was known for its activesocial scene and live jazz.Block parties also reflected the political climate of the times. Partieswere held in support of candidates running for office and in celebrationof the momentous end of World War II. Subsequent block parties workedto recruit volunteers for Civil Defense groups in the 1950s. Up until the1960s, with the onset of the civil rights movement, block parties were oftenracially segregated by neighborhood.The block party as social occasion continues to thrive and has evolvedinto a viable grass roots effort with potential to initiate change on a neighborhoodlevel and beyond. The national Night Out movement of the 1990surged people to hold block parties throughout the community to ward off

Book Clubs 71crime and increase safety awareness. In college communities, block partieshave become a means for students and residents to build consensus aroundpotentially divisive issues.The virtual block party has appeared in densely populated urban areasin the form of shared online electronic calendars and bulletin boards. Giventhe reality that residents may not know one another, the virtual block partyis an effective tool for sharing information and news pertaining to a veryconcise area defined by address.Block parties of the future are likely to remain rooted in community,one that allows residents to conduct business in the wider world and stillmaintain a sense of community wherever they live. Because people are ableto stay connected with neighborhood issues, the impetus for social participationthrives, as does quality of life, and ultimately, sense of place.Further Reading: “Block Party tonight at St. Nicholas Rink.” Atlanta Constitution.August 14, 1908, p. 7, col. 2; Banks, Marcus. “Block Parties, Street Fairs, StreetFestivals.” August 26, 2005. http://www.gothamgazette.com /article /communitydevelopment /20060826/20/1543; Blackburn, Robert. “Block Dance,”The Magpie. January 1938, v. 22, n. 1, p. 66; Dobson, Charles. Community BuildingActivities, part 2–6. The Citizen’s Handbook. Vancouver Citizen’s Committee.http:www.vcn.bc.ca /citizens-handbook /2_06_block_parties.html; “Skating anddancing at Lake View Casino.” Frederick News-Maryland. September 22, 1908,p. 5; Gertz, Emily. “Neighbornode and Hyperlocal Networking.” August 13, 2005.http://worldchanging.com /archives /003297.html; “Krewe of Boo to hold blockparty, costume contest.” New Orleans City Business, October 26, 2007. CityBusiness Staff Report; “Block Parties to Recruit CD Aides.” Los Angeles Times.January 8, 1956; “City Waves Flag and Cheers Wilson.” “War, Topic of Orators.”New York Times. July 6, 1915, p. 18; Prescott, Carlson. “Old St. Pat’s World’sLargest Block Party.” http://gochicago.about.com /od /eventsfestivalsholidays /p /block_party.htm; Project for Public Spaces. “Changing the World One Block ata Time.” http://www.pps.org /info /newsletter /august2007/one_block; Rollens,Patrick. “Block Parties and the Hyperlocal Urban Dweller.” WorldChangingTeam. August 18, 2007; “St. Croix-Gros Islet ‘Jump ups . . .’ ” Food & Wine. 2006,p. 267; “The Best Block Party.” New Hampshire Business Review. June 8,2007; “In Manhattan, it’s good when it’s the pits.” Restaurant Hospitality. July2006, p. 30; Walljasper, Jay, et al. The Great Neighborhood Book: A Do-It-YourselfGuide to Placemaking. Gabriola Island, B.C.: New Society Publishing, 2007;“Block Parties for Service Men Are Way to Boost Morale.” Washington Post.September 26, 1941; Weidemann, Liz. “Poway: $4.2 million later, Poway to holdblock party.” San Diego Business Journal. June 18, 2007; Wood, Trina. “Campusbuilds a community bridge.” University Communications. October 12, 2007.http://www.dateline.ucdavis.edu /dl_detail.lasso?id=9781.Suzanne C. WeltmanBook ClubsIn the United States, the first book clubs were formed in the early 1700s,and literary discussion groups date back even further in Europe. American

72 Book Clubsbook clubs originally were organized by individuals who wanted privateprintings of books and essays written by members of the group. One suchgroup, which was formed in 1726 and is called The Junto, claims BenjaminFranklin among its founding members. The Junto was the basis for the firstlending library, the Philadelphia Library, which later became the library atthe University of Pennsylvania.Most book clubs do not have such an auspicious background and haveleft obscure historical footprints. Despite this fact, organized discussiongroups have played a significant role in the social history of the UnitedStates. Two groups founded in 1868—The New England Woman’s Cluband New York’s Sorosis—were major, documented organizations createdin response to women’s exclusion from fraternal and professional organizations.These discussion groups connected women to the broader world, offeredan umbrella organization under which new chapters were created, andprovided a model upon which the modern women’s book club was built.In the early twentieth century, the living rooms, porches, and gardenswhere women met to talk about books became a safe place to discuss socialissues. At the time, college was not an option for many women and thesegroups offered access to learning. The awareness and agitation created fromthe discussions initiated some of the first steps toward political reformand social activism on a variety of topics, including abolition and women’ssuffrage.The legacy of social activism deepened over the years and playeda significant role in cultural changes, particularly in the women’s rightsmovement. The consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s and 1970s wereoutcrops of these original clubs. As other outlets for women’s social activismevolved, reading groups became less concerned with political issues.New groups did not feel the same social mandate toward affectingchange.In the 1980s book clubs became wildly popular, and with the increasein popularity the structure of clubs changed. The meetings became less formaland more social. In most modern groups no one is responsible for writingup formal notes. Meeting preparation, if any exists at all, usually consistsof little more than a brief author biography and a few possible discussionquestions.One event that cannot be overlooked in discussing the recent boomin the number of book groups was the formation of Oprah’s Book Clubin 1996. Originally dismissed by critics and the literary elite, Oprah seemsto have won over even the toughest pundits. A passionate reader and booklover, Oprah selects each title herself and has resisted the publishing industries’overtures to market to her readers.Toni Morrison, Nobel-prize winning writer and author of severalOprah’s Book Club selections, credits Oprah with giving the novel back itslife of being talked about. The book club “meets” on air once a month withOprah, the author, and several viewers who are selected by writing to theshow and requesting the chance to participate in the discussion. The shows

are usually taped at Oprah’s house and provide viewers with a conversation,as well as a glimpse into a book-club meeting: the table is covered withlinen, china, and crystal; the food is elegant and looks delicious; and thelocation is serene and lush. Oprah models how to talk about books as wellas how to host a book club.Book clubs are formed at the grass-root level through informal networks.Groups depend on word-of-mouth to recruit participants and haveperformed limited outreach to gain new members. This is beginning tochange as Internet message boards and chat forums gain mainstream users.New groups are easy to form—it is as simple as asking a few friends andcolleagues to get together to discuss a book, picking a time and a location,and creating a setting where people feel comfortable to talk. Once a fewdedicated participants become involved, it is easy to increase membershipby asking new people to join.Surrounded by technology meant to support connections, such as cellphones, e-mail, and instant messaging, it is harder than ever before to keepup face-to-face relationships. This is part of the reason why many womenactive in book clubs feel that the in-person conversation is as important—ifnot more important—than reading the book.Book clubs meet on a regular basis, with each group forming its ownmethod for selecting the date. A rule, such as meeting on the first Wednesdayof the month or any day in the third week of the month, helps to keepthe meetings consistent. It is also good to have a regular time of day in place.Establishing regular meeting times helps members avoid scheduling othercommitments at the same time.Every book club must have a book to discuss for each meeting. Alwaysselected in advance, the book can be picked in a number of ways, includingchoosing books that some members have already read; forming a list ofpotential books and having individuals read them to see if they are right forthe group; selecting books that have won awards or are on best-seller lists;identifying a genre, author, or theme; or letting members take turns pickinga book.Enough time has to be allotted between meetings to purchase and readthe book. If a particularly long work is chosen, it may be a good idea to plantwo sessions for the discussion or allow extra time between meetings. Somegroups have a list of books prepared a few months in advance so memberscan schedule their reading. Sometimes the best discussions are not about thebooks that everyone loved. The debate about why members feel the waythat they do is likely to stimulate talk about the writing style, plot, themes,and characters.Most often book groups rotate their meetings to the homes of differentmembers, but groups can also arrange to meet in a local bar, restaurant, orcommunity hall. The food and beverages vary depending on the time of themeeting and the group’s preferences, but a little something should alwaysbe served. Commonly, the host will offer a spread of light snacks and appetizerssuch as dips with vegetables and pita wedges, cheese and crackers,Book Clubs 73

74 Books on Entertaining and Dining, History ofnuts, chips, mixed olives, and cold cuts. Wine is usually served, but nonalcoholicbeverages should also be available.Some groups try to incorporate the theme of the book being discussedinto the food served. If particular dishes are mentioned in the story, this canbe simply a matter of recreating those dishes. If there isn’t any specific foodmentioned, tying the book to the menu may involve selecting food from theregion where the book is set or picking dishes indicative of the time periodof the story.Whatever the host decides to serve, the important thing is to create acomfortable setting that will encourage discussion of the book. With goodfood and wine, friends, and lively conversation, there is really nothing tostop a book-club meeting from becoming a favorite way to socialize andentertain.Further Reading: Farr, Cecilia Konchor. Reading Oprah: How Oprah’s Book ClubChanged the Way America Reads. Albany: State University of New York Press,2005; Long, Elizabeth. Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in EverydayLife. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003; Rooney, Kathleen. ReadingWith Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America. Fayetteville: The Universityof Arkansas Press, 2005.Erin G. MarrazzoBooks on Entertainingand Dining, History of“Man, it has been said, is a dining animal,” according to Isabella Beeton, theEnglish author of The Book of Household Management, which was first publishedin 1861. Dining and entertaining occur for numerous reasons. Eachhost or hostess, town or principality has motives and reasons for opulent displaysof food. At just about any time throughout history, banquets and feaststook place for many of the following reasons: raw displays of power andpolitical domination; public relations; appeasement of the gods; cementingof social connections; celebration of good harvests; escape from everydaylife, for example, saints’ days; sheer pleasure; and major life passages such asweddings, funerals, and the birth of children.With few exceptions, the people who held these opulent feasts andbanquets throughout history were the elite of every society in which theyoccurred. They possessed the wealth and manpower, in the form of slaves orservants, to create a “court” or “palace” cuisine. Written accounts from manyworld cultures indicate that banquet-givers generally fall into the followingcategories: royalty, nobility, ecclesiastical dignitaries, politicians, and, later,wealthy merchants and traders. Thus these people were the audience formany of the earliest books on dining and entertaining, who used the books

Books on Entertaining and Dining, History of 75to instruct their armies of cooks on how to prepare food and carry out plansfor extravaganzas of all sorts. Later, particularly in the nineteenth century,as women became more literate, and social and economic changes resultedin fewer household servants, books on dining and entertaining shifted to afocus on instructing women in the niceties of dining and entertaining onboth grand and small scales.The first “works” on entertaining and dining were actually nothing morethan words passed down from one cook to another. The oral tradition hasheld sway in the cooking world for most of history; not until the late nineteenthcentury or later did people begin to rely more on the written wordthan on word of mouth for cooking information.The earliest banquet-giver for whom a written record exists was AshurnasirpalII (883–859 B.C.), in Assyria, who feted almost 70,000 people overa 10-day period. The menu was engraved on a sandstone block.The ancient Middle East witnessed a multitude of banquets like thatof Ashurnasirpal II. Athenaeus’s fourth-century work, Deipnosophists, “TheLearned Banquet,” was printed in Europe in 1514, and indicated that banquetingwas common in Ancient Greece. The Greek philosopher Plato(c. 427–347 B.C.), in his Symposium, narrates the conversation at a banquetreplete with drinking. He downplays the importance of food and cooking,stating that cooking is not an art; yet setting the Symposium at a banquetindicates clearly that banqueting was an important part of ancient Greekculture.The Greeks in turn influenced the Romans. Marcus Gavius Apicius wasa Roman gourmet and epicure living around the first century A.D. Apicius, ashe is often referred to, compiled two of the oldest and best preserved cookbooks,De Re Coquinaria (“The Art of Cooking”), also known as Artis MagiricaeLibre X, and De condituris, which treated the preparation of sauces.De Re Coquinaria became available in printed form in Europe in 1498 andwas translated for the first time into English in 1926 by Joseph DommersVehling. In his Natural History (X.133), Pliny said of him, “Apicius, themost gluttonous gorger of all spendthrifts, established the view that theflamingo’s tongue has a specially fine flavor.”Arab cookbook authors, influenced by both the Greeks and the Persians,produced some of the earliest treatises on cooking and entertaining; the intendedaudiences for these early cookbooks were princes and caliphs. In A.D.377, Ibn al-Nadim mentioned a number of early Arab cookery books in hisFihrist, but all have been lost. Mas’ūdõ¯, in his Murõ¯j al-dhahab, mentionshis own lost book—Akhbār al-zamān, which discusses the perfect gentlemanand how to behave. He describes the book as “a sketch of culinary artindispensable to any man who shares his table.” In A.D. 400, Ibn Miskawayh,librarian and Buyid minister, penned a cookbook, indicating that high officialstended to involve themselves heavily in matters of food and drink.In Asia, the Mughals of India also produced handbooks for their rulingclasses. Ain-I-Akbari, a manual similar to Machiavelli’s The Prince, contains

76 Books on Entertaining and Dining, History ofa chapter devoted to recipes. China’s Emperor T’ang of Shang Dynasty (sixteenthto eleventh century B.C.) appointed his chef, Yi Yin, as prime minister.Yin wrote the Annals of Master Lü, where he classified foodstuffs andapplied flavoring techniques to them. Another important culinary work inChina was Li chi, from the Chou period (1050–256 B.C.), containing informationabout how to behave at banquets, how to eat, and how to serve.The Important Things to Know About Eating and Drinking, by Huou, KublaiKhan’s (A.D. 1215–1294) master chef, focused on soups and included informationpertaining to household management. In Japan, families like theKonoe, who served as sessho (regent) and kanpaku (chief adviser) to theemperor, kept manuscript cookbooks in the form of scrolls that date backaround one thousand years. These scrolls still have not been translated intoEnglish.Although China and the Middle East produced a number of the earliestworks touting the protocol of dining and entertaining for powerful people,Europe began to catch up with production of books with the invention ofthe Gutenberg printing press and moveable type. The first German cookbook,Küchenmeisterey, was published in 1485 in pamphlet form in Nuremberg.In what is now modern Italy, food and dining were considered to beworthy of recording, and some of the best records on dining emanate fromthat area.An early Italian manuscript cookbook by Maestro Martino, Libro dearte coquinaria, written in 1425, set the tone for many of the books thatfollowed, in particular for De Honesta Voluptate, by Vatican librarian BartolomeoSacchi di Piadena, called Platina. His 1475 work contains sectionson what to eat for various courses—his prescription for the third course:“A bit of very hard cheese is thought to seal the stomach and stop vaporsfrom seeking the head and brain.” He also advised ending a meal with fruitand nuts, a very modern concept. Platina took approximately 250 recipesfrom Maestro Martino, amply illustrating a common trend that lasted forcenturies, that of borrowing recipes. Giovanni de’Rosselli also pirated recipesfrom Martino when he published his Epulario in 1516. Epulario wentthrough 26 editions, the last being published in Venice in 1682.An anonymous Italian manuscript cookbook dating to the end of thefifteenth century, Cuoco Napoltetano (The Neapolitan Recipe Collection),contains a number of opulent banquet menus. An example of the recipecollections, or “courtly dining guides,” produced for the managers of largenoble, royal, and ecclesiastical households, The Neapolitan Recipe Collectionis representative of many of the books produced by such writers as CesareEvitascandalo (Dialogo del mastro di casa, 1598), Vincenzo Cervio (Trinciante,1593), Antonio Frugoli (Practica e Scalcaria, 1638), Vittorio Lancelotti(Lo Scalco Prattico, 1627), Giovan Battista Rossetti (Dello Scalco, 1584),and Cristoforo da Messisbugo (Banchetti, composizioni di vivande et apparecchiogenerale, 1549). Messisbugo lists all the equipment and other non-foodnecessities to plan and carry out a large banquet for a noble house, based onMessisbugo’s experience as the steward for the Dukes of Este.

Books on Entertaining and Dining, History of 77The work of Bartolomeo Scappi, the1570 Opera di M. B. Scappi: Cuocosecreto di Pappa Pio Quinto (Private Cook of Pope Pius V), included the firstprinted picture of a fork. Scappi worked as a cook for Pope Pius V and includeda sumptuous banquet served in four courses, with over 47 differentdishes. Scappi’s work also included menus for a full year.In addition to advice on banquets, many of these books also linked diningwith health and nutrition, a trend that grew particularly strong duringthe Renaissance.In England, manuscripts on dining for the royal courts and noblehouseholds first appeared with the oldest English cookbook, A Forme ofCury, written by Richard II’s master cooks in 1390 on a scroll that rolledup. This astonishing work mentions many spices and other exotic foodstuffslike whales, seals, and herons. The authors of Cury added that thebook had the “approval and consent of the masters of medicine and ofphilosophy that dwelt in his (Richard II’s) court.” The first printed Englishcookbook, A Noble Boke of Festes Royalle and Cokery: A Boke for a PryncisHousholde or any other Estates, appeared in 1500. Others followed; theiraudience were the noble class wealthy enough to afford them and readthem. Boke on Kervynge de Wynken de Worde, about carving meat for banquetsfor noble feasts, was published in 1508. Thomas Dawson’s The GoodHuswifes Jewell (1585) was written not just for nobility planning banquetsbut for gentlewomen in charge of day-to-day household tasks. One suchhousewife might have been Elinor Fettiplace, author of Elinor Fettiplace’sReceipt Book: Elizabethan Country House Cooking, written in 1604, but notpublished until 1986. Fettiplace’s book presents a valuable picture of lifeduring a time of political upheaval. And Gervase Markham, in his The EnglishHus-wife from 1615, inserts a chapter on banqueting, titled “Banquetingand made dishes with other conceits and secrets.” Hannah Wooley, in1670, published the first successful cookbook written by a woman, TheQueen-Like Closet.The French produced similar books on dining and entertaining, beginningwith Guillaume Tirel dit Taillevent’s Le Viandier (fourteenth century);he served as master cook for Charles V and Charles VI. The Ménagier de Pariswas written over a two-year period (1392–1394) by a husband of somewhatadvanced age for his young, inexperienced wife to assist her in her housekeepingas the mistress of a large, wealthy household. Traces of the recipesin Le Viandier and the Ménagier de Paris can be found in numerous latercookbooks, illustrating the spread of recipes and the massive pilfering of ideasthat occurred.In his Memoirs, Olivier de la Marche—maître d’hotel (steward) and captainof the guards for Philip the Good and Charles the Bold, Dukes of Burgundy—recountshow he planned the Feast of the Pheasant in 1454 andCharles’s wedding feast for his marriage to Margaret of York in 1468. Oneof the most influential French courtly dining guides was kitchen stewardPierre François de la Varenne’s Le Cuisiner François (The French Cook),published in 1651 and dedicated to his patron, the Marquis d’Uxelles,

78 Books on Entertaining and Dining, History offollowed by numerous others, including François Massialot’s Le Cuisinierroial et bourgeois (1691), which was the first cookbook known to arrangerecipes alphabetically. La Varenne’s work appears to be the first cookbookto record a number of techniques that made French cooking the standard inEurope and elsewhere for centuries to come.Early British authors borrowed heavily from the French. Many of theearly French books were translated into English, such as Massialot’s Le Cuisinierroial et bourgeois as The Court and Country Cook (1702) and a versionof La Varenne’s Le Cuisiner François as The French Cook (1653). And manyEnglish authors also wrote books with a noble audience in mind. RobertMay’s The Accomplisht Cook, or the Art and Mystery of Cookery (1660), possiblythe most important cookbook of its time, brought French influencesinto the English cooking repertoire. May cooked for many noble Britishfamilies and came from a family of cooks. William Rabisha, who wrote TheWhole Body of Cookery Dissected (1682), came from a similar professionalbackground. Both May’s and Rabisha’s books went through several editionsand influenced other authors of the time. Other authors and works of noteinclude Patrick Lamb’s Royal Cookery; or, the Complete Court Cook (1710),Robert Smith’s Court Cookery (1723), and Charles Carter’s The CompletePractical Cook (1730).Well-known French pre-revolutionary author François Marin, authorof Les Dons de Comus (1739), included sections aimed at the bourgeoisie.His contemporary Menon wrote La science du maître d’hotel, cuisinier (TheScience of the Steward, Cook; 1749) and La science du maître d’hotel, confiseur(The Science of the Steward, Pastry Cook; 1750), both aimed at largehouseholds.In the American colonies, households relied on dining and entertainingbooks of British and French origin. American cooks consulted books byEnglish female authors like Eliza Smith’s The Compleat Housewife (1727),Elizabeth Raffald’s The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769), and HannahGlasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747). At the end ofthe eighteenth century, men on both sides of the Atlantic began frequentingtaverns and banqueting clubs in large numbers, and entertaining their fellowsoutside of the home. Several chefs at these clubs published their recipes,including John Farley, who wrote The London Art of Cookery (1783).With the ripping apart of social structures caused by the American Revolutionof 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, dining and entertainingbooks took on a different tone. In the case of English books (and subsequentAmerican), courtly cooking took a backseat to a more practical approach,that of the country housewife.Bridging the books written for the aristocracy and the bourgeoisiewere the highly influential books by Antonin Carême, who cooked forNapoleon, the Romanovs, the Rothschilds, Rossini, and King George IV.Carême’s works include L’art de la cuisine française au dix-neuvième siècle(The Art of French Cooking in the Nineteenth Century; 1833); Le pâtissierroyal parisien (The Royal Parisian Pastry Maker; 1815); Le maitre d’hotel

Books on Entertaining and Dining, History of 79français: ouvrage contenant un traité des menus servis a Paris, a Saint-Pétersburg,a Londres et a Vienne ( The French Steward . . . ; 1822); Carême’s worksinfluenced generations of chefs. French author Jean-Anthèlme Brillat-Savarin wrote part of his idiosyncratic and unique book, The Physiology ofTaste, in the new United States after he fled France during the Reign of Terror.Brillat-Savarin’s book had the flavor of some of the courtly handbooksfavored by writers of the courtly dining manuals, but it had a practical sideas well.English authors Eliza Acton and Isabella Beeton wrote two of the mostinfluential books of the nineteenth century. Acton’s Modern Cookery forPrivate Families (1845) listed ingredients and provided cooking times forthe housewife who had no experienced cook to rely upon. Greatly influencedby Acton’s book, Beeton’s The Book of Household Management (1861)contained detailed chapters on entertaining and table settings. Mrs. Beetonassumed the presence of servants in the households of her readers. She includeddiagrams of where to place specific menu items on the table servedà la russe (in the Russian manner).Books also appeared for people with lower incomes and only one servant.Some of the most popular of these books were by Charles Francatelli,a student of Carême’s and chief cook to Queen Victoria. His first book, TheModern Cook (1846) went through 29 editions. A later book, The Cook’sGuide and Housekeeper’s & Butler’s Assistant (1861), provided informationfor managers of nearly any household, including information for entertaining.Alexis Soyer, a French celebrity chef, also wrote A Shilling Cookery Bookfor the People (1855), geared towards people of modest means.In the United States in the nineteenth century, authors began writingmore for the housewife than for the professional cook in a large household.Men took on the role of chef in hotel kitchens, while women held dinnerparties in the home. Books on dining and entertaining focused on smallerhome-based parties and dinners.The Virginia Housewife (1824) by American cookbook author Mary Randolph,a relative of Thomas Jefferson’s, went through many printings andproved to be practical, and at the same time, replete with dishes that couldbe cooked and served by servants. What followed Mrs. Randolph’s workwere several trends in dining and entertaining, impacted by the IndustrialRevolution and the Civil War. Consequently, books on entertaining and ondining began to reflect the demographic makeup of American society. Whilerelatively few books specifically related to entertaining were published inthe nineteenth century, by the turn of the twentieth century and after theFirst World War, books on entertaining skyrocketed in number, particularlyduring the 1950s and afterwards.Early examples of this trend include Mary F. Henderson’s PracticalCooking and Dinner Giving: A Treatise Containing Practical Instructions inCooking; in the Combination and Serving of Dishes; and in the FashionableModes of Entertaining at Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner (1895) and The PartyBook, by Winnifred Shaw Fales and Mary Harrod Northend (c. 1912).

80 Books on Entertaining and Dining, History ofWomen’s magazines published recipes in their pages and books onentertaining, as attested by The New Hospitality: Correct Table Service forBreakfasts, Luncheons, Teas, Dinners, Suppers (1924), written by LillianPurdy Goldsborough for McCall’s. Themed parties became popular as welland books like Putnam’s Book of Parties (1927), by Marguerite Aspinwall,provided women with ideas.Kitchen gadget and processed-food manufacturers produced bookletsmeant to guide housewives, who were increasingly servantless and moreliterate.After World War II, the movement toward servantless households increasedconsiderably and well-known cookbook authors like James Beardwrote about entertaining, as his Hors d’Oeuvres and Canapés (1940) andJames Beard’s Menus for Entertaining (1965) attest. Julia Child bounded inwith her Mastering the Art of French Cooking (volume I in 1961, volume IIin 1970); her work made it possible for people to cook good French food athome. Martha Stewart, starting with the book Entertaining (1982), blazedthe way for authors like Sheila Lukins and Julie Russo and their Silver PalateGood Times Cookbook (1984), as well as the Barefoot Contessa, Ina Gaskin,and her Barefoot Contessa Parties! (2001).As the twenty first century opened, entertaining books focused onquick and easy dishes and menus, using many processed convenience foodsas well as fresh foods from increasingly popular farmers markets. Examplesare Rachael Ray’s Open House Cookbook: Over 200 Recipes for Easy Entertaining(2006) and Marian Burros’s The New Elegant But Easy Cookbook(2003). Entertaining outdoors and grilling rose in popularity, generatingcookbooks like Cheryl and Bill Jamison’s The Big Book of Outdoor Cookingand Entertaining: Spirited Recipes and Expert Tips for Barbecuing, Charcoaland Gas Grilling, Rotisserie Roasting, Smoking, Deep-Frying, and MakingMerry (2006). And the General Mills icon Betty Crocker still spoke withauthority, as in Betty Crocker’s Entertaining Basics: Learning to Entertain withConfidence (2001).Further Reading: Albala, Ken. The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of LateRenaissance Europe. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007; Albala, Ken. EatingRight in the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002; Chang,K. C. Food in Chinese Culture: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives. NewHaven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977; Fisher, Carol. The American Cookbook:A History. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2006; Hunter, Lynette.“Proliferating Publications: the Progress of Victorian Cookery Litera ture.” InWilson, C. Anne, ed. Eating with the Victorians. Stroud, Gloucestershire: SuttonPublishing, 2004, p. 50–67; Masudi, Les Prairies d’or, Paris, 1861–1877, vol. VIII,p. 103–4. M’Abd al-Hamid. Cairo, n.d., Vol. IV, p. 163; Mennell, Stephen. AllManners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Agesto the Present. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985; Pennell, Elizabeth Robins, andBruce Rogers. My Cookery Books. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1903;Quayle, Eric. Old Cook Books: An Illustrated History. New York: E. P. Dutton,1978; Strong, Roy. Feast: A History of Grand Eating. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2002;Symons, Michael. A History of Cooks and Cooking. Urbana: University of Illinois

Brazil 81Press, 2000; Thirsk, Joan. “The Food Scene Captured in Print, 1500–50.” In Foodin Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, Fashions 1500–1760. London: HambledonContinuum, 2007, pp. 11–26.Cynthia D. BertelsenBrazilBrazil stands out among the South American countries both for its size, asit occupies half of the continent, and for having gained its independencewithout suffering any of the bloody wars experienced by the other SouthAmerican Spanish-speaking countries. Many people associate Brazil’s historywith savage cannibalistic tribes and with the traditional celebration ofcarnival. Many are unaware of the interesting progressive history of Brazilianhospitality, ranging from the natives’ welcoming ways to the highly refinedreceptions in the days of the empire. Probably based on the chronicles writtenby the Europeans after their first encounters with the native populationstarting in 1500, the country’s first inhabitants developed a reputation ascannibals. This is especially due to a book written by a German adventurercalled Hans Staden, who recounted the story of being held captive by theTupinamba tribe. The book was originally entitled True Story and Descriptionof a Country of Wild, Naked, Grim, Man-Eating People in the New World,America and published in 1557. Upon its first publication, the book wastranslated into Latin, Dutch, English, Italian, and Spanish, with new editionsbeing published ever since. Such widespread popularity can be attributed tothe interesting topic the book addresses and its simple enjoyable style.Brazil’s association with carnival can be attributed to the more thancentury-long development of the tourism industry, which has devoted itselfto spreading the attractive peculiarities of this festival. These two pictures—practicing cannibalism and celebrating carnival—have hidden very importantaspects of Brazilian social life, which have been consigned to only a fewexperts.THE ENCOUNTER OF EUROPEANSAND INDIGENOUS PEOPLESCannibalistic practices were certainly usual among the inhabitants ofthe Brazilian coastal zones reached by the Europeans in the sixteenth century,but it is also a fact that the victims of such practices were those consideredto be enemies. French Calvinist minister John Lerius (Jean de Léry),who visited Brazil in 1557 and 1558, wrote a detailed travelog, in whichthere is a chapter on the Tupinamba tribe’s hospitality. Léry consideredtheir way to welcome and treat guests particularly interesting. In the firstencounter the natives began by asking Léry his name, eliciting no responseas he did not understand their language. Subsequently, one of the natives

82 Braziltook off Léry’s hat and put it on himself, while another one did the samewith his sword, and another one with his cape—all of which was done whilescreaming and running all around the village. This situation disturbed andfrightened the guest until the accompanying interpreter explained that suchattitude was customary when foreigners arrived. The interpreter confirmedthis after a while when Léry was given back all his possessions. The Mussucá,the head of the family, was chosen as a host and once Léry arrived atthe Mussucá’s house, Léry had to settle himself into a hammock and remainsilent for some time. The native women immediately approached the hammockand sat around the guest on the floor; then they covered their faceswith their hands and started crying and saying, “You worked so hard tocome to see us! He’s good, he’s brave.” As he was European, they would add,“you brought us very nice things we don’t have here.” The expected reactionto this strange tearful welcome was to also be tearful or at least pretendingto be so by emitting profound sighs. After all these odd greetings, the headof the family, who, during this time, had remained quiet in a corner of thehouse making arrows, would ask the guest, “Did you arrive? . . . How areyou?,” which, with the help of the interpreter, had to be answered by saying,“I arrived.” Immediately afterwards, the host asked him if he wanted toeat, and in the case of an affirmative answer, he would order the preparationof tapioca meal served to him in a clay pot as well as some meat, poultry,or fish, and other delicacies. This was placed on the floor, as tables andchairs were not part of their furniture. The guest would be presented withcauin—a fermented beverage prepared with water and tapioca. After eating,drinking and resting or sleeping in their homes, the guest should present thenative males with knives or scissors, the women with combs and mirrors,and the children with hooks. These curious rules governing etiquette had tobe carried out ceremoniously.It is also known that the Portuguese arriving on the Brazilian coasts in1500 as part of Pedro Alvares Cabral’s expedition established a friendly relationshipwith the same native tribe. In one of the first gestures of hospitality,the Cabral expedition invited the natives to the Nao Capitana andoffered them a meal of wheat bread, boiled fish, comfits, pies, honey, and figsin syrup. The Portuguese made the natives sit on chairs around a table to havethis meal, which surprised the natives, who were used to eating on the floorand who, furthermore, rejected these delicacies initially offered. Some daysafterwards, a new invitation was presented, and this time the guests ate theoffered food. And this was the beginning of hospitality on Brazilian lands.FAZENDEIROS’S MEETINGSIn the last decades of the sixteenth century the Portuguese Captaincieshad already settled all along the Brazilian coasts. The economic basisof such a colonization process was the exploitation of sugar cane in fazendas,or plantations, where sugar mills were built to process sugar cane andobtain sugar (not very refined) and eau-de-vie. At the beginning, the natives

Brazil 83were the work force of these establishments, though not for long, as theywere soon replaced by the slaves brought from Africa, who were thoughtto have greater physical resistance, thereby theoretically allowing for higherproductivity. Some cities had already been founded, but the largest groupsof people were in the plantations. This is where elite social life mainly tookplace, guided by the landowners or senhores de engenho. There is an earlytestimony from a resident of Pernambuco in 1584 saying that the owners ofthese farms loved banquets and that 10 or 12 of them would usually meetin one of the plantations to eat and to drink many different wines broughtfrom Portugal. These colonists’ feasts would go on until the nineteenth century.Travelers passing by the property could have a rest and cool themselvesdown, as they were usually offered food and lodging. These houses at theplantations could even be considered inn-like as they warmly welcomedtravelers. Long conversations would take place, which kept the residentsinformed of the latest news and events that had occurred in the surroundings,in the cities, and in far-off places. Moreover, when there was a religiousfestivity, birthday, or wedding, big parties were thrown, to which neighboringlandowners and visiting travelers were invited. The weddings could goon for a whole week, and so cows, pigs, and turkeys were slaughtered, whilepies, puddings, and varied desserts were prepared in the kitchen. Music anddance would provide entertainment at such celebrations—not only Europeandances, but also samba or dances of African origin.The female cooks of the sugar mill estates, mainly Africans, were incharge of the preparation of the dishes to be served, which were the resultIllustration of a sugar mill from Voyage pittoresque et historique au Bresil. Jean BaptisteDebret, 1835. Giraudon/Art Resource, NY.

84 Brazilof the mixture, adaptation, or appropriation of ingredients and recipes fromthe Europeans and the natives, with some African contributions. Wheatbread was virtually replaced by farinha (tapioca flour), while beans, game(venison, peccary, and armadillo, among others) and tropical fruits (papaya,guava, avocado, pineapple, etc.) were incorporated into the landowners’ cuisine.The main cooking methods were boiling and frying. The latter wascarried out with palm oil or dendé, a word that came to mean “tasty or veryprized thing.”It was during this colonial period when the Brazilian repertoire of traditionalcuisine took form. The manners observed at the table by the plantationowners were still very primitive: they used knives and spoons, but noforks, as they commonly used their fingers to bring food into their mouths—similar to what their European contemporaries did. Urban etiquette, as itwas known afterwards, began to be incorporated in the eighteenth century,especially in the cities and with the arrival of the viceroys sent by the PortugueseCrown. It was customary that only the men would sit at the table andthat the women and the children would be seated to one side and commonlyon the floor. However, housewives gradually began to be accepted at mealswhen there were guests, especially during the eighteenth century.The slaves working at the sugar mills mainly lived on tapioca flour orcornmeal, depending on Brazil’s geographical zone—the former in the northand the latter in the center and the south. They would also eat some meat orbacon once a week or some game or fish when possible, and in some placessalted fish. The main beverage was garapa, made with water and honeyfrom sugar cane. This simple diet was complemented with the fruit thatcould be found locally, mainly bananas. Despite their servant status, the Africansorganized their own small parties when they had the time, in whichthey danced and sang to the rhythm of the drums and other instruments.THE PORTUGUESE MONARCHY MOVES TO BRAZILAs a result of Napoléon’s threats and invasions to the Iberian Peninsula,the royal Portuguese Braganza family, protected by England, decidedto move to its main South American colony. In 1807 Maria I and João VIarrived in the New World and transferred their court to Rio de Janeiro,marking the beginning of Brazil’s political separation. During their reignthe colony enjoyed extraordinary prosperity. In 1821, King João VI decidedto return to Portugal, leaving his son Pedro I as regent in Brazil. On September7, 1822, with the support of the colonists, Pedro I declared Brazil’sIndependence— remembered as the day of the Grito do Ipiranga.Brazil’s imperial period lasted from 1822 until 1889 with the abdicationof Emperor Pedro II. Such a long-lasting monarchic period broughtabout significant changes, especially within the elites living in the cities.As expected, the lifestyle of monarchs and emperors in the court incorporatedEuropean aristocratic patterns, which gave rise to the numerousnobility that transformed the habits of social relationships. From 1808 and

on, painters, sculptors, musicians, architects, scientists, but also chief waiters,cooks, and confectioners started to travel from Europe to Brazil, manyof them hired by the crown. In Rio de Janeiro, the capital city, the monarchsand the nobility began to build big residences endowed with spacious kitchens,halls equipped with luxurious furniture, china dinner services, glasswareand silverware brought from Europe. This gave rise to a sort of competitionamong aristocrats and families with great economic power, who flauntedtheir wealth when socializing.Something similar occurred inland, when the Emperor Pedro II promotedthe creation of a small summer city 37 miles north of Rio de Janeiroin the Serra da Estrela valley, which had a very cool climate. In 1857 themonarch named this city Petrópolis (city of Peter) and, because that is wherehe spent the hot summer days, he decided to have a palace built there. Followinghis lead, some of his courtiers also built beautiful villas there. Thisnew city became the center of summer social life; parties were held whichinvolved dancing, listening to music, and enjoying banquets. Although followingin the tradition of European courts, Emporer Pedro II’s court mannerswere not always as regal as one might expect, as least according to Maximilianof Austria, who, during his visit to Brazil in 1860, shortly before he wasnamed Emperor of Mexico, had the opportunity to get to know the customsof Pedro II. In a letter sent from Rio de Janeiro, Maximilian said he had beenshocked when he saw that the Brazilian monarch had no qualms about attendingcertain commoner parties and mixing with his most humble subjectson such occasions. This shows a clear difference between the attitudes ofthese two monarchs toward the people: the Brazilian establishing a democraticrelationship and the Austrian keeping an aristocratic distance.In 1840, during the empire days, the cookbook O Cozinheiro Imperialwas published in Rio de Janeiro—a book that released subsequent editionseven afterwards, in the Republican times. This first sample of the Braziliangastronomic literature included not only a large number of recipes butalso an appendix on table manners. The anonymous author—concealinghis or her identity through the initials R.C.M.—describes very well in theforeword of the book the importance of this art and its state in Brazil atthat time: “From the innumerable and indispensable arts that are useful tothe life of civilized human beings, there is one that has advanced by leapsand bounds in a few years. This art, culinary science, whose great influenceat the same time contributes to the healthy state of our body, strengthenssocial bonds, multiplies the number of relationships, boosts trade and industry,eases habits, and joins people in festive and brotherly gatherings. . . .The most industrialized and civilized nations constantly promote this noblescience and make its mysteries appear in numerous publications that buildup the manual of cuisine artists. Brazil lacked a treaty that specifically dealtwith culinary arts. With merely one or two compilations published in Portugalmany years ago, which were no longer satisfactory for the lack of varietyin the dishes and necessary explanations, the number of recipes, all of whichwere very delayed in relation to the current state of sciences, such need forBrazil 85

86 Brazila culinary treaty was already felt by all” (R.C.M. v). The author goes on tosay that Brazilian fish, poultry, and fruits have a great reputation for theirvariety, taste, and delicateness, including recipes with these ingredients. However,most of the recipes presented in the work have a European origin, andmany others correspond to the French cooking style. The book also containssuggested menus for banquets, ranging from what is called a “Common banquet”to a “Model banquet to be presented to an important figure,” including“Special French-style banquets,” as well as banquets for those accompanyingthe invited figures, such as the cooking staff or the servants. The menus forimportant guests had to include at least 10 types of delicacies or iguarias, aswas the case of special French-style banquets, for which it was suggested: potau-feu,chicken, hen and chick meat, rabbit, artichokes, truffles, ham, capers,and kids, followed by braised ducks, stewed tongue, and partridges; then, turkey,asparagus, calf’s head; and then other preparations finally followed by thechoice of two desserts, including a liquid fudge called manjar blanco, creamtarts, curd cheese pies, pears, cherries, almonds, and a variety of cakes. Theywere real Pantagruelian proposals. It is possible to get an idea of the abundanceof food suggested for these banquets by taking a look at the servant’smeals, which include six starters, six soup dishes, six roasted dishes, six pastrydishes, six sweet dishes, and six fruit dishes. Obviously, the idea was to emulatethe customs of the European royal families.In big reunions there was not only food, but also music, interpretedby professionals that had been hired for that special occasion or by guestswho stood out for playing certain musical instruments— especially thepiano or violin—or who were outstanding singers. Poetry recitals were alsoperformed, in which literary young people would present their creations.These were luxurious receptions where the main families competed amongthemselves, gaining regular practice. Some of them rose to fame for the refinementof conversation, music, and, of course, the contribution of culinarygifts. Native traders and those coming from England, France, and Germanywho settled in Brazilian cities could supply a great variety of householdgoods that were particularly sought after by Brazil’s well-off inhabitants.The reigning families or those from the empire were therefore able to acquireor expressly order a luxurious set of household goods that includedsolid gold or silver sets of dishes, fine porcelain, and glasses made of expensivecrystals.REPUBLICAN HOSPITALITYThe establishment of the Republic in Brazil—known as “The CoffeeRepublic” due to the culture’s dominant role in the plantation activity—didnot imply the disappearance of feasts or the interruption of literature beingproduced on gastronomic matters. The great politicians of this new period,as well as traders and plantation owners, did not stop imitating the sumptuousnessof the empire, but it is a fact that more and more often their cuisineand that of many other Brazilians started to feature the typical meals that

Brazil 87had originated during colonial times. At the end of the nineteenth century,a cookbook entitled Cozinheiro Nacional was published in Rio de Janeiro bythe H. Garnier house, with no mention of the author, although creditedby scholars to Paulo Valle. This book—which is extremely difficult to findboth in bookstores and libraries—emerges as a sort of antagonistic workcompared to the one that had thus far been deemed representative of theBrazilian cuisine, namely the above-mentioned O Cozinheiro Imperial. Theauthor of this new cookbook decided to start it with a foreword, the significanceof which has not been appreciated by those who have studied theSouth American food history. As the work is so difficult to find, it is worthtaking a look at these introductory lines, which build up a new declarationof independence, but this time in the culinary field:Incidentally, we will not servilely copy the cookbooks crawling in foreignbookstores and simply provide them with a national stamp resulting fromthe language in which we write; neither will we provide our work with afake cover and literally translate word for word from other books that arefound in the whole world, thereby choosing the unknown road of despicableplagiarism and destroying the importance we give to our work andthe usefulness the reader is rightly expecting from it. Our duty is a differentone; our objective is far more reaching than this; and by including theword “national” in the title of our work, we believed to be making a solemncommitment, namely presenting a cuisine that is Brazilian from all pointsof view. We will thus indicate the country’s methods used to prepare themeat from the numerous mammals that live all over its mountains andfields, birds that inhabit its diverse climates, fish that cross its rivers andseas, reptiles that slither under its vast verdant groves, and, finally, the innumerablevegetables and tubers that nature’s liberal and prodigal handspontaneously scattered on its blessed soil. These mammals, birds, fish, reptiles,plants and tubers are totally different from the European ones in taste,appearance, form and virtue, and therefore are required to be prepared incertain ways.The author then admits this is a difficult task and confesses his/her awarenessthat, despite the efforts made, the objective will remain far off and with theconviction that the way would be paved for other more learned authors whowould follow this course with greater success.And the author goes on:It is time for this country to emancipate from the European tutelage, underwhich it has lived until the present; it is time for it to be described as natureprovides, free and independent of foreign influences, giving account ofits own ways to cook the countless products of its vast flora, the deliciousand delicate meat from its quite varied fauna, putting an end to the anachronismof simply conforming to foreign books explaining preparations ofsubstances that cannot be found in the country or that can only be acquiredat very high costs . . . and so as we believe to be doing a great serviceto Brazil by publishing this work, we suppose we will also be doing it toother nations by making known a great number of delicious, healthy andrevitalizing dishes that have been so far unknown, but that from now on

88 Brazilwill be public knowledge and thus adequately appreciated by the people.And just as Brazil has been and still is a customer of other countries, fromwhich it has bought their food, it will now be able to provide them withthe different products that this book will make known and which will providethem with health, robustness and a long life.If you take a look at the index of the book in question, you will findnumerous recipes that show the author’s stance: 16 recipes of tapir, includingone in which it is lightly fried with hearts of palm, another one preparedwith yam as a soup, another one as a steak, and another one as an ingredientof a moqueca (a stew seasoned with coriander, lemon, onion, coconutmilk, palm oil, and pepper), among others; 7 recipes of capybara, with itsmeat ranging from roasted to stewed; 6 recipes of a rodent called cutía; 3 oflontra or nutria; 7 of macaco or monkey, with its meat ranging from roastedto braised with bananas; 12 of agouti or paca, including meatballs, as well asroasted, braised, and stewed dishes; 32 of queixato or peccary, in which itshead, spareribs, sirloin, and legs are prepared using many different seasonings;9 of prea—a kind of hare; 4 of coati; 4 of frog; 5 of cayman; 6 of tatú orarmadillo; 26 of venison; 8 of macaw and parrot; and 5 of a freshwater fishcalled surubi. This is just a brief sample from the book of the repertoire ofdishes that are made with ingredients that are native to Brazil. While thisnationalist offering included particular dishes from the country, all in all itdid not succeed in gaining authority in the urban cuisine. If we take a lookat the whole work, we will see that the author had already anticipated this,as most recipes are of Portuguese-Brazilian or European origin. And this isunderstandable, because the book was actually read in the cities, where itwas not easy at all to find the wild native animals proposed in the recipes.Moreover, among the menus suggested at the end of the book is the AlmoçoBrazileiro (Brazilian lunch), which recommends roasted sucking pig, mixedpickles (in English in the original), Nantes sardines, olives, salami slices, friedeggs, chicken fritters, fillet steak, roasted calf, refried hen meat, oranges, marmalade,and bread, among other things. The same happens with a BanqueteBrazileiro (Brazilian banquet), despite the fact that it also includes dishessuch as roasted monkeys, parrots with rice and salad, and hearts of palmpies. Finally, it is important to note that the book presents the feijoada—abean-based stew that, since then, has invaded Brazilian cuisine becomingBrazil’s national dish.Of great importance is the fact that the European immigrants—mainlyGermans, Austrians, Poles, Italians, and Arabs—who arrived in Brazil sincethe end of the nineteenth century, kept their customs for a long time, creatingvery exclusive communities whose members continued to celebratetraditions and to take part in the wine and dine customs from their homelands.For example, the Italian immigrants kept the custom of their filós ormeetings, where acquaintances or neighbors came together to chat, play,and sing, as well as eat the typical Italian dishes. It was only during thelast four decades of the twentieth century when the descendants of thoseimmigrants mixed among themselves and with the rest of the Portuguese-

Bridal Shower 89Brazilian population, generating a high degree of homogenization, obviouslyfostered by urban development and the key role of mass media. Today, sucha melting pot is considered to have resulted in the so-called friendly people,as Brazilians are labeled. Hospitality and generosity have become typicalfeatures of the Brazilian character. And it should be added that this tendencyto treat others cordially does not necessarily imply that they show courtesy,but rather that they treat others in a down-to-earth way.Further Reading: Fernandes, Caloca. Viagem Gastronômica através do Brasil. SãoPaulo: Senac, 2004 (Bilingual Edition Portuguese–English); Freyre, Gilberto.Brazil: an Interpretation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945; Freyre, Gilberto. NewWorld in the Tropics. The Culture of Modern Brazil. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,1959; Freyre, Gilberto. The Masters and the Slaves: a Study in the Development ofBrazilian Civilization. Translated by Samuel Putnam. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,1946; Harding, Bertita. Southern Empire: Brazil. New York: Coward-McCann,1948; Hernâni, Donato. Frutas Brasil Frutas. São Paulo: Empresa das Artes, 1991(Bilingual edition Portuguese–English); Kidder, Daniel P., and James C. Fletcher.Brazil and the Brazilians portrayed in historical and descriptive sketches. Boston:Little, Brown, and Company, 1868; Léry, Jean de. “Extracts out of the Historieof John Lerius a Frenchman, Who Lived in Brasill with Mons. Villegagnon, Ann.1557 and 58.” In Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes. Samuel Purchas,ed., vol. XVI, 518–579. Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1905; Ribeiro,Darcy. The Brazilian People: The Formation and Meaning of Brazil. Translatedby Gregory Rabassa. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000; R.C.M. OCozinheiro Imperial. 5th ed. Rio de Janeiro: Eduardo y Henrique Laemmert,1866; Staden, Hans. The True History of His Captivity, 1557. Translated andedited by Malcom Letts. New York: Argonaut, 1929; Valle, Paulo. CozinheiroNacional. Rio de Janeiro: H. Garnier, n.d.José LoveraTranslated by Ainoa LarrauriBridal ShowerAccording to legend, a young Dutch girl was in love with a poor young manwho was so generous to others that he was unable to accumulate a fortuneof his own. Because of this lack of wealth the girl’s father considered herlover a poor marriage prospect, and the girl’s father refused to give them adowry, the financial stake promised to the groom upon marriage to a womanby her family. The dowry was intended to pay not only for her upkeep butalso her future, should her husband pass. Dowries can include everythingfrom money and land to cloth needed to make all the clothing the bridewould wear during her life. According to the legend, sympathetic villagersdecided to help the young couple by making up the dowry themselves. Eachperson gave a treasured possession of his own until they had contributedall the household goods a bride was expected to bring to her new home.Another story tells of a hostess who took a parasol and, after filling it with

90 Bridal Showersmall gifts, opened the umbrella over the head of a bride thus, literally showeringthe bride with gifts.Historically, bridal showers are often associated with the dowry system,trousseaus, and hope chests. Men were responsible for providing a dwellingand furnishing it. In addition to the dowry, the young bride-to-bes werealso expected to prepare for their upcoming marriages by acquiring theskills necessary to run a household, keep up a house, and raise a family.While daily chores and caring for siblings would have helped to preparewomen for these duties, they were also expected to show a mastery overmore artistic elements. For upper-class families who could afford tutors,the daughters learned how to read, speak foreign languages, and, in somecases, play musical instruments. All young women were expected to mastera variety of types of needle and thread handwork to decorate aprons, linens,and so on. These items were put aside in storage, often in what is called ahope chest, until the wedding day, when the bride-to-be would be requiredto set up her own house. The French cousin to the hope chest is called thetrousseau. Delicately embellished items would offer the first elements ofdecor to new homes and attest to the refinement of the women dwellingwithin. Brides brought bed and table linens in addition to quilts, handkerchiefs,and dresser scarves. Early nineteenth-century brides could have asmany as 24 sets of the linens made from fine damask and embroidered witha monogram, whereas raw linen and crochet detail were more prevalent inearlier or less affluent times. Personal items, such as chemises, corset covers,nightgowns, petticoats, and so on, would also be stored in large quantities.Women were expected to bring enough clothes to last the first year of themarriage, and these greater amounts were possible due to widespread use ofthe sewing machine in the 1850s. They were also necessary due to the harshcleansers and bleaches used to care for the items.Trousseau or hope chest items were set out on display for the womenin attendance to admire at a quilting bee where the women assembled aquilt for the bride-to-be. In time, these bees became the wedding or bridal,shower, and sometimes the trousseau items were even chronicled in newspapersand department store windows for the general public dependingon the renown of the couple. American pioneer women would gather toadmire the items in a bride’s hope chest and participate in an activity calledpounding, where each woman would bring a pound of butter, flour, sugar,or other necessary ingredient to set up a properly stocked kitchen. Thesepounding parties showered the bride with essential baking and cookingitems necessary to provide the first meals in her new home. Guests wouldnot give everyday gifts such as house linens for fear it would imply the bridewas ill equipped with basic needs.The modern bridal shower began to emerge in the 1920s when departmentand other specialty stores set aside space for wedding itemsand named specific staff to attend to young brides. In time the gift registrywas born and has since been adopted by department stores coast tocoast, as well as home and building stores; shops specializing in gourmet

cookware, kitchen- and bath-related items; and mass retailers such as Targetand Kmart. With the advent of Internet shopping, couples can registerfor virtually anything if they work with retailers who suite their interests.This level of flexibility allows couples of all ages and circumstances toparticipate in this tradition. In addition to purchasing gifts there is also atradition called wishing well. If these words are on the invitation, guests areencouraged to bring a smaller, inexpensive but useful gift, such as a can ofcleanser, sponges, or batteries. These gifts do not have any tags on them butare placed in a mock wishing well container created by the hostess so theselittle useful items are given to the new bride to wish her well.These traditionally all-female parties serve light food and drinks whilefriends and family chat with the bride regarding her wedding plans, visitamong themselves, and sometimes play party games or participate in contestsarranged by the hostess of the shower. The bridal shower is usually hosted bythe maid or matron of honor, but can also be hosted by a close friend or relativeof the bride in someone’s home, a restaurant, or party room. It is possiblefor a bride to have multiple showers but it is important not to schedulethe showers too close to the wedding itself, invite too many guests, or overwhelmguests with too many gift requests. Traditionally, showers includefemale relations, friends from school, work or social clubs, and neighbors, aswell as anyone else the bride suggests to the shower hostess(es). Light menusinclude salads and tea sandwiches; refreshing punches, sparkling cocktails,coffee, and tea; and cake or some other desserts with fruit that would bestreflect the theme of the event. Themes for showers can be tailored to fit thebride and her interests. Some popular themes include gardening, bed andbath, fine dining, gourmet cookery, and so on. Gifts from the registry, giftcertificates, or items related to the theme are welcome. Hostesses can usethese themes to devise short games that encourage guests to mix and meetone another. For many brides this is an excellent opportunity to chat witholder relatives and the female members of her soon-to-be husband’s family.One important detail to note, near the end of the shower the groom shouldappear out of respect to those gathered and proffering gifts to help fill hishome. This is an excellent opportunity for him to thank the guests for theirkindness. He may also want to assist the bride with loading of the presentsand transporting them from the hostess’s home.One activity called loading the bride has the bride-to-be in the centerof a circle surrounded by married and widowed women. Each womantakes a turn offering marital advice and life lessons to help assist and preparethe woman as she goes from being a single woman to a married one.This intergenerational experience is one way in which female knowledge ishanded down and the bride-to-be is welcomed to the sisterhood of beinga wife. Historically brides were often young and uneducated about sexualrelations.During queh queh, a custom originating in Guyana, troupes of drummers,dancers, and singers go to the bride’s home two or three days priorto the wedding with a big performance the night before that often includesBridal Shower 91

92 Bridal Showerthe groom and his family and friends. During the early performance thereis a great deal of information shared with the bride regarding sex and whatto expect from her wedding night with some of the lyrics, dancing, anddrumming rising to a fevered pitch while highlighting male sexual prowess,virility, and sensuality. In other cultures the brides are schooled in these lessonsby aunts or other female relatives in anticipation of the wedding. Butnot all customs during this time prior to the wedding are joyous: there canbe a great deal of emotion during this transitional period between single lifeand marriage.An ancient Chinese custom called a sisters gathering or sisters party offersa different emotional experience for the bride-to-be. During earlier times,marriage was an uncertain fate for young women who were preparing toleave their homes, friends, and everything they had ever known. The anxietythis produced was further complicated by the fact that the young bridewould be living with the groom and his family, answering not only to herhusband, but to her mother-in-law. The bride-to-be was allowed to expressthis range of emotions for three days prior to the wedding with kuge, weepingsongs and marriage laments. These dirges were memorized or prompted bythe sisters, her actual sisters, cousins, aunts, and friends, who gathered to hearher lamentations through crying, weeping, cursing, laughter, and so on, untilthe bride was spent and thus emotionally resigned to her new status.A new trend in America is to make the pre-wedding event one of mixedgenders. The new co-ed wedding shower allows for couples to invite friendsof all ages and interests to shower them with gifts. It also addresses thechanging relationship between men and women as more couples celebratetheir vows later in life and have close friends of both genders. This style ofshower also address the need for finding gifts for brides and grooms whohave already set up homes or are re-marrying and are now in the process ofintegrating household items. New registries have emerged to help couplessave for homes, donate to charity, or purchase trips and more luxuriousgoods. Changing times are reflected in the gifts couples register for as theirwants and needs differ from earlier brides and grooms.Further Reading: Adams, Michele, and Gia Russo. Wedding Showers: Ideas and Recipesfor the Perfect Party. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000; Arnold, Caroline,and Jane F. Kendall. How People Get Married. New York: Franklin Watts, 1987;Benedict, Ruth. Showers. Milwaukee, WI: Reiman Publications, 1980; Clark,Beverly. Bridal Showers: Special Touches and Unique Ideas for Throwing aFabulous Shower. Carpinteria, CA: Wilshire Publications, 2000; Costa, Shu Shu.Wild Geese and Tea: An Asian American Wedding Planner. New York: RiverheadBooks, 1997; Greco, Gail. Bridal Shower Handbook: The Complete Guide toPlanning the Perfect Party. Greensboro, NC: Wallace-Homestead Book Company,1988; Hopkins, Ginny. The Bride’s Book of Showers. New York: Grosset & DunlapPublishers, 1973; Packham, Jo. Wedding Parties & Showers: Planning MemorableCelebrations. New York: Sterling Publishing Co., 1993; Sturgis, Ingrid. TheNubian Wedding Book: Words and Rituals to Celebrate and Plan an African-American Wedding. New York: Crown Publishing, 1997; Wallace, Carol McD.

Brunch 93All Dressed in White: The Irresistible Rise of the American Wedding. New York:Penguin Books, 2004.Alexa Reynolds JohnsonBrunchBrunch, a portmanteau of breakfast and lunch, is the quintessential Americanweekend overindulgence. Essentially both urban and urbane, brunch ischaracterized by the eating of several courses, mid-day, usually consumedwith generous amounts of alcoholic beverages. With roots in working-classGermany, and origins in nineteenth- century New Orleans, brunch has becomea distinct phenomenon of the English-speaking world; a reoccurring(non-holiday specific) meal as celebration, a celebration (of luxury)as meal.Brunch, as a term, first appeared in Punch magazine (August 1, 1896)and has been attributed to several sources: British university student slang;a writer by the name of Guy Beringer; and a flurry of in-vogue, post-huntlunches enjoyed by upper class men. Punch, a satirical literary periodical,outlined the meal’s auspicious beginnings, “To be fashionable nowadayswe must ‘brunch.’ ” Teasingly the article comments on the new high-fashionmeals, “At Oxford . . . an important distinction was drawn. The combinationmeal,when nearer the usual breakfast hour, is ‘brunch,’ and, when nearerluncheon, is ‘blunch.’ ”According to Colin Spencer’s history of British cuisine, as the wealthof the late-nineteenth-century empire grew, so did its range of breakfastprovisions. More privileged households observed as many as four differenttypes of breakfasts, from family style to an opulent feast of roast meats andbirds. Brunch’s fashionable restaurant settings, though, can be traced to theAmerican South.The restaurants and eateries of New Orleans, Louisiana, have longclaimed to be the inheritors of the birthplace of brunch. In New Orleans,lunches are famous for indolently turning into dinner, with diners conversingand eating from noon to night. Though famed century-old establishmentssuch as Brennan’s continue to serve a multi-course, mid-morningmeal in New Orleans, it was a now long-defunct eatery named Begué’s thatstarted the tradition.Madame Begué raised the morning meal to a fine art, spanning severalcourses and, often, including bottles of wine. She called the repast a “secondbreakfast.” At Begué’s, those customers fortunate enough to procure one ofonly thirty reserved seats at the 11 A.M. mealtime served each day, could lookforward to a four-hour feast, six to seven courses downed with chicory coffeeand champagne. Omelets, which fortified the spread, were filled with heartyingredients: oysters, veal, or fried potatoes. The menu changed daily and wasalways a table d’hôte (or “host’s table,” a multi-course menu with limited

94 Brunchchoices and a set price), but the house specialty liver à la Begué—beef liverfried in lard—was invariably served on Saturdays.Madame Begué, born Elizabeth Kettenring, emigrated from Bavaria,Germany, to New Orleans in 1853 and married Louis Dutrey, a butcherof Gascon descent. At Dutrey’s Coffee House, Elizabeth and Louis servedhungry French Market vendors a quick midmorning snack. She combinedthe Bavarian meal of brotzeit, bread-time—a bite of bread, sausage and beerbefore lunch—with the French omelet.After the death of Louis, Elizabeth married another Gascon, HypoliteBegué, and renamed the eatery. Begué’s restaurant was then expandedand table service added. The changes were made in time for New Orleans’post–Civil War renaissance and the World’s Fair and Exposition of 1884.The local gentry were soon struggling with tourists for the few availableseats. Begué’s “second breakfast” enjoyed national prominence and accentuatedtwo cookbooks by the madame of the house.Around the turn of the century, brunch became a fixture on otherAmerican metropolitan dining scenes. In New York City noshing on thebagel brunch—cream cheese, capers, tomato, red onion, and lox—becamethe highlight of a social weekend. Eggs Benedict—poached eggs, Canadianbacon, and English muffin smothered in hollandaise sauce—also originatedin New York, but how it first began is a still a matter of contention. Someaccounts credit playboy Lemuel Benedict, who placed an order—thoughon toast—at the Waldorf Hotel in 1894. Others place the creation of eggsBenedict in the kitchen of chef Charles Ranhofer at the famed Delmonico’srestaurant.Today, a brunch eater is just as likely to find huevos rancheros and frittatasalongside the traditional stuffed omelets. Mexican, Southern UnitedStates, and Chinese (dim sum) interpretations of brunch have become particularlypopular with the upscale crowd. However, breakfast items such asseasonal fruit, pancakes, waffles, and French toast are still taken at brunch,as are seafood, roasted meats and poultry, sausages, sandwiches, soups, andsalads. Along with freshly squeezed juices and coffee, alcohol is still commonlyquaffed with brunch: champagne cocktails (mimosas) and tomatospicedBloody Marys are the most common. Ever overindulgent, brunch isnow seen as an occasion to eat dessert in the afternoon, sometimes afterbreakfast fare.Brunch remains a celebratory act of feasting. Holidays—Easter, Mother’sDay, Valentine’s Day—are popular brunching days. Brunch has disseminatedand can now be encountered on fast-food menus and throughout theworld. McDonald’s take on the eggs Benedict, the Egg McMuffin, enlargesthe ordinary drive-thru breakfast. The French, always adverse to adoptingAmerican habits, do now eat a grand petit déjeuner or ‘big breakfast.’ InSouth Korea, where the official work week was recently reduced to fivedays, residents of Seoul celebrated the newfound weekend by socializingover pancakes and bagels at brunch. And true to form, in New Orleans andNew York brunch may still be had seven days a week.

Buffet 95Further Reading: Beyer, Gregory. “Was He the Eggman?” The New York Times.April 8, 2007, Section 14, 1; “Brunch v. Blunch!” Punch, Or the London Charivari.August 1, 1896, 58; Fertel, Rien T. “Beginning With Begué’s.” New Orleans TheTimes-Picayune. December 8, 2006, Lagniappe Section, 34–37; Lee, Su Hyun.“A New Lifestyle in South Korea: First Weekends, and Now Brunch.” The NewYork Times. November 2, 2007, Section A4; Spencer, Colin. British Food: AnExtraordinary Thousand Years of History. New York: Columbia University Press,2002, 259–261.Rien T. FertelBuffetThe word buffet originally referred to a sideboard or a tiered table. Restauranteursoften presented a tiered table loaded with various types of meat, fish,fruit and vegetables, and delicate pastry at the entrance to their restaurants.This opulent and elegant presentation served to please the patron visuallyand also to showcase what riches the restaurant had to offer in the meal tocome. In modern usage, a buffet is a way of serving food, in which a varietyof food is presented on a large table to be picked up and eaten by guests asthey please. Buffet can also mean a piece of furniture used to display expensivesilverware, or a sideboard on which to stack plates, silverware, andnapkins to be used in this type of self-service meal.A buffet, a sideboard covered with fancy linen and costly silverware,was an important part of medieval banquets. No guest actually ate at thissideboard, and it served no purpose other than displaying the host’s wealth,but in a broader cultural context, it played a significant role in the banquetas a political opportunity to impress, threaten, or coax those in power. Thispractice of displaying rich fabric and silverware (called “court cupboard”in England, buffet in France, referring both to the practice and the piece offurniture used for this purpose) was observed well into the Baroque period;Louis XIV’s collection and display on his luxurious buffet is one of themost famous.In the old days, when traveling took longer than it does today, providingnourishment in the car of a train or at a station (buffets de gare) mighthave had more urgency and significance than it does today. Especially inthe case of the buffet car, the service took advantage of the convenience ofthe buffet-style meal, that is, self-service, inasmuch as the food was alreadymade and often portioned. There are, however, some legendary buffets degare, such as the gare de Avignon, Lille, Lyon, and Valenciennes, some ofwhich have attracted travelers and non-travelers alike. In the Gare de Lyona restaurant called Le Train Bleu was established to impress tourists visitingthe Paris Exhibition of 1900 (the establishment flaunts art-deco gildedarches, an opulent ceiling, and wall paintings depicting scenes from thetrain’s route); it was designated a historical monument in 1972. They havea formal restaurant upstairs, and the space underneath the stairs, where an

96 Buffetinformal café is situated today, used to be a place where servants would waitwhile their masters and mistresses dined above.The word Smörgåsbord is today used interchangeably with buffet. TheSwedish tradition of Smörgåsbord (the word literally means “sandwich, orbuttered-bread, table”) can either consist of various finger foods to be eatenbefore the meal, or the meal itself. The food, which can be either hot or cold(famous examples include cured herring, an open sandwich, a salad withanchovies, vegetable gratin, and sautéed kidney), is attractively displayedon a board. When it is a meal, although everything is laid out on the tableall at once, guests follow the traditional order of bread, butter, and herringfirst; cold fish, cold cuts, and vegetable salad second; followed by hot dishes(such as herring au gratin, filled omelets, meat balls, etc.); and then finishedwith cheese.Middle Eastern mezze (meze) can be said to resemble the buffet onsome level; it is an assortment of food to be enjoyed at guests’ discretionand traditionally is served on a special table called the raki table. However,the practice of meze significantly differs from that of buffet or Smörgåsbordin that the emphasis of meze is on the consumption of alcohol (raki is aTurkish, anise-scented spirit), and the food is enjoyed (at least originally) inorder to alleviate the strong taste of raki.The buffet is today carried out in different venues, while its main advantagesremain the same: namely, that guests can choose what they want, oftenas much as they want. Buffets also require fewer servers than a sit-down servicesince the former incorporates more self-service elements. Moreover, thedisplay at a buffet can enforce a specific theme of a venue or an event. Eachvenue makes use of these advantages with its own different emphasis.Among various types of restaurants, one might say that buffets aremost commonly seen at Chinese and Indian restaurants. It is also a populartype of service for brunch. In some restaurants, buffet and à la carteservices are carried out simultaneously, increasing guests’ choice evenmore. Restaurant buffets attract guests through their wide range of choice.Guests can sample as many dishes as they wish by controlling the portionA woman enjoying an Indian lunch buffet. ©Shaileshnanal | Dreamstime.com.

size of each item, which it is not possible to do in à la carte service. Allowingguests to sample is a good way for a restaurant to advertise, since guestswho liked little bits of what they experienced are likely to return eitheragain for a buffet, or for a more formal sit-down meal, for a different kindof experience.The buffet is today most commonly enjoyed at school or company cafeterias.Having a large component of self-service, buffets can be managed withless staff than table service and are therefore appealing to those who haveto feed a large number of people with a limited amount of time and funds.Since cafeterias tend to feed a large number of people, it is important to haveoptions catering to specific needs such as a low-fat diet, vegetarianism, andreligious restrictions. Cafeterias once had a reputation of serving unhealthy,not so fresh food, but these days, they are often part of a corporate effort tomake their employees healthier and more fit, and better options are increasinglyavailable. A movement to purchase from local growers is also a recentdevelopment, improving both the relationship between the company/schooland the local people and the freshness of the food at buffet.The buffet is also often enjoyed at a catered event such as a weddingreception, corporate holiday party, or birthday party. Anything that can beserved as an hors d’oeuvre is appropriate for this type of service. In addition,since this type of buffet meal is often consumed sitting down at a table enablingthe use of plate and silverware, the choice is wider. The buffet tablemay quite practically contain anything that can be served in a meal—salad,roasted meat, warm vegetables or gratins, and even soup. While it might bemore convenient to have roasted meat pre-sliced, or soup already portionedin cups in order to make the flow of customers smoother, the most importantthing may be to keep the food looking fresh. A major advantage of abuffet meal over a sit-down kind of meal is that a buffet allows the gueststo eat in the order or at the speed they prefer, when they please, which alsoincreases the number of patrons a meal can accommodate. That means, inturn, that the food consistently needs to be fresh and kept at appropriatetemperatures over extended periods of time.The fact that a buffet was once thought of as a display at a restaurantentrance, not necessarily for gustatory consumption, or a table for displayingsilverware, should remind one of the importance of the visual aspect ofa buffet table. For this reason, a tray half-empty is often exchanged with awhole tray, or refilled, and similar care is taken to ensure that the wholetable remains visually appetizing at all times throughout the service. Whileusing a mirror or a marble slab as a plate might be an attractive idea, itmight not be practical to carry those around whenever refilling is necessary.Using inserts is one solution, or, smaller plates may be grouped into clustersin order to facilitate refilling and also to avoid leaving food exposed and leftout for too long. On an economical note, some manuals recommend thatmore expensive items such as shrimp and oyster be placed at the end of thebuffet table, the expectation being that guests tend to pick more food andfill up their plates at the beginning of the table.Buffet 97

98 BuffetFurther Reading: Casas, Penelope. Tapas: The Little Dishes of Spain. Revised Edition.New York: Knopf, 2007; Gisslen, Wayne. Le Cordon Bleu Professional Cooking.5th ed. New York: Wiley, 2002; Hazelton, Nika Standen. Classic ScandinavianCooking. New York: Scribner, 1987; The Culinary Institute of America. GardeManger: The Art and Craft of the Cold Kitchen. 2nd ed. New York: Wiley, 2004.Chika M. Jenkins

CCake and CandlesToday a cake with candles is the most widespread and popular symbol of abirthday celebration for a child and also often for an adult, especially in theUnited States. It takes pride of place in many other Western countries, too,although it is more likely to be part of the festivities for a child’s birthdaythan for an adult’s.Cakes, colored decorations, and candles all have long histories, but theirconfluence as a birthday celebration symbol is more recent. The meaning ofthe term cake evolved from very early times when a cake was a small diskshapedobject, to be held in the hand for eating. Originally it was baked on agriddle and, later, in an oven. English cookbooks from the eighteenth centurygive recipes for “cakes” that we might now call cookies (from the Dutch).Large cakes that required many hours of baking time were called great cakesand, until appropriate baking pans were devised at the end of the nineteenthcentury, small leavened cakes, actually baked in cups, were called cup cakes.Cakes have been used for centuries as dramatic centerpieces of importantevents and, by the fifteenth century in Europe, huge cakes, leavenedwith ale yeast or distilled spirits and composed primarily of dried fruits andnuts, were being created for notable occasions. With the development byFrench and Italian pastry cooks in the 1500s of other means—eggs beaten

100 Cake and Candleswith sugar—to leaven batters using wheat flour, the character of cakes beganto change. But, as the expansion of world trade in the eighteenth centurymade fruit and nuts from the Mediterranean and spices from Asia more easilyavailable, great cakes continued to be popular, particularly in England.At the time America was being colonized and through the eighteenthcentury, great cakes, known in the United States today in their much smallerversions as fruit cakes, were still appearing as symbols of the prestige, wealth,and importance of an individual or an event. But after the American Revolution,instead of simply reprinting En glish cookbooks such as those byHannah Glasse or Mrs. E. Smith, Americans gradually began to producetheir own.Lighter and more porous-textured cakes became possible due to a varietyof factors: the availability of recipes for egg-and-butter-leavened poundcakes, the invention of iceboxes, and, especially, the introduction of castiron stoves in the early nineteenth century. Although chemical leavens suchas potash, pearlash, and hartshorn had been used for some centuries, particularlyin Germanic and Dutch areas, they were not satisfactory for moredelicately flavored baked goods. By the mid-1800s, the search was on in theUnited States for a flavorless leaven and eventually, after saleratus, cream oftartar, and bicarbonate of soda (all termed yeast powders) were developedfor baking, two pharmacists in Indiana persisted in the search and devisedthe first baking powder. In 1889, other researchers figured out how to makedouble-acting baking powder, a boon to bakers everywhere.At the end of the nineteenth century, there was a push to invent andprofit from new technologies. Improvements were made in refrigeration;the use of gas and electricity to heat ovens became controlled by thermostats;measurements and baking pan sizes and shapes were standardized;new tools were created for whipping eggs and mixing and beating batters.These advances in technologies made it possible for cooks at home to createan extravagant array of cake shapes, sizes, and flavors. By the early yearsof the twentieth century, home cooks could produce pound cakes, angelfood, and sponge cakes, as well as the new layer cakes made possible bytemperature-controlled ovens—white, gold, spice, chocolate, or devil’s foodcakes, and many variations of these, all embellished with a dazzling arrayof fillings and frostings. The terms, icing and frosting, are thought to havegrown out of the original finish for fruit cakes, which, after being baked,were briefly returned to the oven with a light coating of beaten egg whitesprinkled with sugar that crystallized and sparkled so it looked like iceor frost.Many of these new cakes appeared in the U.S. South, where homebakers took great pride in their ability to turn out a cake fantasy for acommunity event or a birthday party. These efforts reached a new high inthe 1920s but even greater advances were to come at mid-century. Chiffoncakes, promoted by General Mills in 1948, caught on quickly in thepost–World War II years, prepared cake mixes entered the picture a year ortwo later, and other time-savers like canned frostings and products such as

Cake and Candles 101Dream Whip and Cool Whip made baking a cake of any size and frostingit into an eye-popping fantasy relatively quick and easy. The second-placewinner of the 1966 Pillsbury Bake-Off, a “Tunnel of Fudge Cake,” createdsuch a demand for bundt pans that manufacturers couldn’t keep up; bundtcakes remain popular today.An important quality for a celebratory cake is that it be dramatic in appearance,because of its size, its color, or its decorations. Birthday cakes, liketraditional wedding cakes, may be formed in layered tiers, but even in suchcases, the differences between the two are immediately visible. A birthdaycake, though it may be heavily embellished with frosting and decorationslike a wedding cake, is rarely all-white; bright colors are often used; thereoften are words or messages on it; and, last but not least, a birthday cakemust have candles.The use of color to enhance the appearance of food has a long history.Some historians posit that Arab traders first encountered it along the SilkRoad in China, from Taoists who believed that ingesting gold and cinnabar(red mercuric sulfide) would lead to immortality. Other historians theorizethat Arabs may have borrowed from early Greek ideas on alchemy andthat Arabs expected the substitution of gold- or red-colored foods to alsopromise immortality. Some historians believe that Arab conquerors introducedthe use of color into Spain and from there it spread through Europe.Others believe that French and English Crusaders encountered the practiceduring their long sojourns in Mediterranean areas and took it with themwhen they returned to their home countries in the eleventh and twelfthcenturies. The presentation of brightly colored foods, not limited to red andgold, produced excitement and admiration at the great banquets of Englishand French courts of the sixteenth century and after, and, eventually, in thehomes of the more affluent.Eleanor Roosevelt cuts her birthdaycake in the Hotel Roosevelt at a dinnerheld under the auspices of the AmericanAssociation of the United Nations,1954. Library of Congress.

102 Cake and CandlesSo popular was the practice that it was brought to America by Englishcolonists. Long before then, of course, saffron or egg yolks had been used forgilding foods, and various plants, some as harmless as spinach and some lessbenign like alkanet, were being used as col orants. Recipes for food colorantscontinued to appear in early English and American cookbooks through thenineteenth century.Besides colorants, other early contributions of the Arabs to the contemporarycelebration cake are gum paste and marzipan. The small, sweetflavored,colored, hard decorations (letters, numbers, candle holders, flowers,leaves, and myriad other fanciful objects) that are available in stores everywherenow (and mostly manufactured overseas) are still formed from gumpaste, which was being used in the Middle East when the crusaders werethere. Marzipan, a sweet paste composed primarily of sugar and almonds,was also being used and is still much used today by commercial and homebakers. The crucial element of gum paste and marzipan is sugar. Sugar wasintroduced into the Mediterranean region from Indonesia via India by Arabtraders before the twelfth century, and from the Mediterranean the use ofsugar spread relatively rapidly throughout Europe.By the early twentieth century, our contemporary form of cake hadbecome realizable due to technological advances in equipment (temperature-controlledstoves, mechanical beaters, standardized measuring devicesand pans) and ingredients (chemical leavens, refined sugar in granular andpowdered form, finely milled flour made possible by the new roller mills),and creative home bakers were able to employ all the available technologyto create luscious layered cakes in a fantasy of flavors, colors, and decorations.Highly decorated cakes were being promoted in cookbooks, and cakedecorating sets and cake recipe pamphlets were being given away with flourpurchases as a promotional effort by flour-milling companies.Candles, the other almost essential component of a birthday or celebrationcake, go far back in time as symbols for the significance of an occasion.The use of fire, or the flames of burning oil or candles, has contributedto the celebratory, mystical, religious, or awe- inspiring character of manyimportant rituals of human society since prehistoric times. Candles, in particular,also have been used to measure time or to signify its passage. Smalltapers still have that latter purpose today in some religious observances, forinstance, among Lutherans for Advent, and among Jews for Hanukkah. TheMoravians use very small tapers in their Christmas Eve ceremonies, andGermans have a tradition of illuminating Christmas trees with miniaturecandles.Candles were being used with birthday cakes in Germany by the eighteenthcentury, judging by a letter from Johann von Goethe to a friend abouta celebration for his 50th birthday in 1799, given by a princely admirer. Itdescribes the “torte” with 50 flaming candles and comments that such a cakewould be more appropriate for a child’s birthday observance.It is difficult to find any other written accounts of birthday cakes, withor without candles, until the latter part of the nineteenth century in the

Cake and Candles 103United States, when an occasional mention of a birthday cake for a childoccurs in literature. In published women’s diaries from the eighteenthand nineteenth centuries, if an entry noted that it was their birthday andsometimes mentioned a gift or gifts received on that day, there is no mentionof any kind of other festivity such as a party or cake. But by the earlytwentieth century, cookbooks, either by well-known writers or produced bycommunity organizations, sometimes included recipes for birthday cakes.By mid-century, after the Great Depression and World War II, a perceptibleshift was occurring. Since then there has been an explosion of ways tocelebrate birthdays not only for children but also for adults, and today nobirthday celebration for a person of any age seems to be complete withouta birthday cake.These celebrations have acquired certain rituals: the singing of the“Happy Birthday” song to the honoree who is expected, after making a secretwish, to attempt a serious effort at blowing out all the candles on thecake, regardless of the number, with one breath. Myth has it that this willguarantee the realization of the wish.Unlike for a wedding cake, there does not appear to be any universaltradition designating who should cut the cake or the order in which it shouldbe apportioned. But a family or other celebratory group may make its ownrules over time, thus establishing a tradition to be faithfully observed. Otherrituals develop around the determination of who, in a family or friendshipgroup, provides the celebratory cake, whether from a commercial bakery ora home kitchen.The birthday cake tradition has proliferated around the world, exceptin those areas where individuals’ birth dates may not be of importance,or where an individual’s saint’s day may be celebrated instead. Of course,some birthdays may be more significant than others, and a birthday cakemay reflect that. For example, in the United States a 21st, a 50th, ora 75th birthday can be particularly significant. For a girl in the Latinocommunity, the 15th birthday is cause for a special celebration called laquinceanera.Today an entire industry has grown up around the making of birthdaycakes by ambitious home bakers, with specially shaped pans, extensive batteriesof cake decorating tools, other supplies and equipment, gum pastedecorations of every shape and color, instruction books and videos, schoolsand classes, as well as beautifully shaped and colored candles both large andsmall. Commercial bakeries offer for sale an almost infinite variety of fancifulbirthday cakes.Further Reading: Cherkasky, Shirley. “The Birthday Cake: Its Evolution from a Riteof the Elite to the Right of Everyone.” In Food and Celebration: From Fasting toFeasting. Edited by Patricia Lysaght. Ljubljana, Slovenia: ZRC Publishing, 2002,pp. 215–224; Cherkasky, Shirley. “The Mediterranean’s Colourful Contributions toContemporary American Confectionary.” Mediterranean Food: Concepts and Trends.Edited by Patricia Lysaght. Zagreb, Croatia: Biblioteka Nova Etnografija, 2006,pp. 221–233; Davidson, Alan. The Oxford Companion to Food. Oxford: Oxford

104 CateringUniversity Press, 1999, pp. 123–124; Jernow, Liza. “Birthdays.” Edited by AndrewSmith. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, Vol. 1. New York:Oxford University Press, 2004, 98–100.Shirley CherkaskyCateringAt present, there is no single definition of the term catering. Internationallythe term is used to refer to food service in hospitals or large institutions,including airlines, but in the United States the word encompasses a rangeof other options: banquets are offered in hotels and resorts, private clubs,restaurants, and by contract food services in corporations and institutions;catering departments operate within hotels, corporations, and hospitals;so-called eventeur companies create large-scale special events held in arange of facilities, including dedicated catering hall venues, private spacesrented for gatherings, in parks, under tents, at the beach. The range of businessconcepts described as catering services began to expand at the end ofthe twentieth century. There are independent service businesses that offercustomized parties served in homes. Specialty food stores, supermarkets,individual caterers, and delis deliver preprepared platters to offices or thehome.Because so many businesses offer different forms and styles of food andservice, it is difficult to assess the real size, total value, and economic contributionof this part of the food industry. Even the ancillary businesses, whichprovide goods and services used by caterers and prepared food businesses,can overlap with businesses that sell preprepared food directly to consumers.The business of catering is difficult to define, in part because of the variedinterpretations used to describe a range of services, and in part becauseof the varied ways government and industry associations have collected datato identify this work.In medieval western Europe, meals for hunting parties and travelers wereoften prepared in one location and then moved to another location, wherepeople set up temporary kitchens to finish and serve the meal. In currentparlance, this would be called off-premise catering. Among royalty and thewell-to-do, the birth of the first-born son, a marriage, a burial, were all eventsthat called for gathering, for feasting, for menus out of the ordinary, and, insome cases, for extraordinary spectacles. These events could be defined ason- premise catering, where foods are prepared at or adjacent to the locationwhere they are to be served.Through most recorded history, cooking was a part of women’s dailychores, or was at least supervised by women, and family health depended onthe skills of the cook. However, cooking for banquets, feasts, and, later, forrestaurants, was transformed into a man’s commercial field. While food inhomes was often grown, processed, cooked, and served by women, women’s

commercial roles in the food industry were limited by gender, race, andclass status. While some women established boarding houses, which wereacceptable enterprises when it came out of genteel necessity, there was lingeringdoubt about the moral character of those women who served foodto the public. In the finest hotels, few women were cooking and none wereserving.During the nineteenth century, if working people organized celebratoryevents, they might hire a hall or a beer garden, local tavern, or religious orcommunity center for their events. People contributed pot luck, or someexcellent home cook might have run the kitchen. Small bakeries or individualswould provide the breads and cakes: the term for individuals whoprovide part of the meal in today’s parlance would be subcontractors. AfterEmancipation, African American men and women worked in the kitchens ofhotels, on the Pullman railroad cars, and in restaurants. Some opened theirown specialty businesses, baking, and catering services, but they rarely hadthe financial support to increase the size of their businesses beyond theirown individual or family’s capacity to produce.Other ethnic minorities and immigrant workers also participated incommercial food preparation and service, and in the first half of the twentiethcentury more casual restaurants, lunch counters, and tea shops openedto serve more working people. The variety of opportunities to work in thefood industry increased. As the economy boomed after World War II, morerestaurants, restaurant chains, and public catering hall facilities opened specificallyto accommodate special events, providing on-premise catering services,now available to a broader population.Then, in the 1960s, as the women’s movement progressed, more womenreturned to the labor market. High profile industries such as fashion, entertainment,sports, and publishing were among the first to respond to thissocial change, which directly impacted catering. These industries neededfood and beverages for longer work hours, off-site locations, cocktail parties,and the like. There had to be finger foods, foods that are easy to eat whilestanding up (i.e., foods that are not messy and won’t drip and that don’trequire the use of cutlery). The desire for unusual foods, and the creativeopportunities for unique décor and presentation, presented increasing optionsfor catering businesses.As the demand for creative events extended to fund-raising for arts andcultural organizations, and then to corporate entertaining, the events weremoved out beyond hotels and private homes into museums, public gardens,and historical mansions. The inventive companies capitalized on the increasingsophistication of clients, the expanding economy, and the increasingavailability of a global food supply.As more educated women moved into the labor market, they left a voidin the traditional functions of homemakers. Fewer women were home tomake dinner, to entertain a husband’s business associates, or to coordinatecommunity events. Independent catering companies started to fill this needas well.Catering 105

106 CateringAt the end of the twentieth century, gender roles, class boundaries, racialprejudices, and attitudes toward food work were changing throughoutAmerican society. The stereotypes of those who served and those whocooked—women primarily in home kitchens creating cuisine de la femme,and men, as chefs, in restaurants making cuisine gastronomique—were challengedwhen well-educated food professionals seized the opportunities presentedby the societal changes to step into someone else’s home kitchen andcreate personal-service businesses.In the 1970s and 1980s women’s changing work roles caused some toshed their so-called second shift domestic responsibilities. In addition tolarge corporate entertaining and social events, many women hired caterersfor family meals and private events when they no longer had the time or theinterest to prepare food themselves. While minority and immigrant womentook on much of this domestic burden, no agency has collected informationabout this so-called female economy work, about the services and productsthat began in response to the social changes and challenges of the 1980s,or about what specialty food businesses and professional cooking meant forwomen entrepreneurs. Women who wanted to cook professionally in restaurantsin the 1980s faced barriers to their professional advancement anddifficulties gaining financial support for their own businesses. The choice forany educated woman to work in commercial food service was considerednontraditional.But as opportunities were opening for women in business, the professions,academia, and government, some women sought entrepreneurshipin the food industry. Some chose to create their own work structures andenvironments, to explore different foods and different client relationshipsthan were possible in more traditional hospitality settings. New ideas forcustomized services, such as businesses providing so-called home meal replacements,were germinating. The plethora of prepared foods, sauces, andcondiments available in every supermarket today emerged in response tothe needs of families who had less time on their hands to cook.Professional cooking, outside restaurant kitchens, continues to offer employmentattractive to students training in culinary schools. The cateringservices of the late twentieth century crossed class boundaries, supportedand challenged women’s traditional and professional roles, and offered a fascinatinginsight into some of our society’s changing cultural markers: familyfeeding, support of the arts, women’s conferences, and various ritual andcelebratory events. How we eat, what and where we eat, and who feeds usnow, began to change rapidly at the end of the twentieth century.Further Reading: Halvorsen, Francis. Catering Like a Pro. New York: John Wiley &Sons, 1995; Lawrence, Elizabeth. The Complete Caterer: A Practical Guide to theCraft and Business of Catering. New York: Doubleday, 1987; Vivaldo, Denise.How to Start a Home-Based Catering Business. 1993. 5th ed. Guilford, CT:Globe Pequot, 2005.Carol G. Durst-Wertheim

Celtic Feasting 107Celtic FeastingThe Celts were a warrior race who spread across Europe from 1200 B.C.and eventually settled in fortified hill forts, which became towns, and infortified homesteads or villages with outlying fields, where they cultivatedcrops. What we know about the Celtic dietary habits comes in part fromarcheological studies, including the study of bones and of remnants of humanlife, as found in these homesteads and in the contents of the graves. Muchof the evidence for Celtic eating habits and feasting comes from classicalwriters such as the Egyptian-Greek writer Athenaeus (active ca. A.D. 200),who obtained his information from the accounts of the Syrian historianand traveler, Poseidonius (ca. 135–51 B.C.). He had visited Gaul and obviouslyseen some Gallic customs first-hand. Other evidence comes from theCeltic legends and mythological tales, especially those that have survived inIreland.Food was plentiful in summer, and preservation methods ensured sufficientfood throughout the winter. Grain, for example, was stored in pits,lined with clay or wickerwork, and sealed with clay lids. These pits could beopened and resealed to take out what grain was required. Meat was coatedwith honey, and then smoked or dried, as was fish from the sea, lakes, andrivers.The basic food was probably pottage, made from boiled grain or groundpeas and beans. Tollund Man, a body found in a bog in Jutland, Denmark,dated to the second century B.C may have been a ritual sacrifice. He hadeaten a pottage, which included seeds of fat hen. This plant, often foundon Celtic sites, is rich in iron and calcium and may have served as a mainvegetable as its leaves can be cooked like spinach. Other foods includedcharlock, black bindweed, silverweed, dandelion, nettles, and ransoms, aform of wild onion. Though considered weeds today, they provided foodin the Celtic world. Wild seasonable fruits, such as strawberries, bilberries,and crab apples, and wild vegetables like parsnips and carrots added variety.The vegetables were thinner and tougher than their modern counterparts;but they could be softened being pounded with a mortar and pestle. Nutsincluded chestnuts, hazelnuts, beechnuts, and walnuts. Cultivated foods includedpeas, beans, and lentils.Bread was made from a variety of grains: emmer, einkorn and speltwheats, rye, barley, and millet. The grains were pounded on a saddle quern, aflattish stone so called because it had achieved a saddle shape by having thegrain rolled across it with a long stone. In the later Iron Age the grains wereground by women and slaves in a rotary quern, often taking two grindings.As the flour contained grit from the grinding, it had to be sieved throughwicker baskets or cloth. But the ground-down teeth found in skeletal remainsshow that the method was not very successful.Dairy foods were particularly important and are particularly mentionedin feasts, and it was this that divided the Celts from the Romans and Greeksof the classical world. The Romans did not like milk and preferred olive oil

108 Celtic Feastingto butter. The Elder Pliny (A.D. 23–79), a prolific writer on natural history,stated that the Celtic barbarians have lived off milk for centuries but theydo not know the blessings of cheese. In stating this he did the Celts an injusticebecause cheese could be made from the milk of cows, sheep, and goats.Cheese was well known in Ireland. “The Vision of Mac Conglinne,” a poemwritten in the twelfth century A.D. but believed to be part of an earlier tradition,refers to a fort that is described in culinary terms including outworksof thick custards, a bridge of butter, threshold sides of cheese curds, smoothpillars of old cheese, and beams of yellow cheese.Columella, a Roman writer who wrote a book on agriculture, De Re Rusticain the first century A.D., said that because nomadic tribes had no cornand sheep provided their diet, the Celtic tribe of the Gaetae were calledmilk drinkers. Pliny said that butter for the Celts was the choicest food andthat the more butter the Celts ate, the wealthier they were. Cow’s milk wasappreciated but sheep’s milk gave a richer butter. Milk supplies decreasedduring the winter, but in Ireland and Scotland the problem was overcomeby putting butter into wooden casks that were then buried in bogs. Caskscontaining butter, some as much as 40 pounds, have been recorded. Thereare historians who believe that some of the material found in these caskswas adipocere, a waxy material formed from animal fat, but the other caskscontain material that has a pale yellow color and a grainy consistency, whichwould seem to be butter.Meat was essential: beef, lamb, mutton, pork, and goat meat. Accordingto Poseidonius ordinary meals were taken by the Celts sitting on driedgrass with the meals served on low tables, loaded with bread and meat. TheCelts ate cleanly but in a leonine fashion, biting off chunks of meat from thejoints held in their hands. They also used a small dagger to cut hard piecesof meat from the bone. Those Celts who lived near rivers or the sea ate fish,often baked with cumin, salt, and vinegar (presumably weak ale or wine).Diodorus Siculus (active 60–39 B.C.), a Greek historian, said the Celts sat onwolf skins, forming a circle with the bravest warriors sitting in the middle,served by the youngest children, but this custom seems to have been forordinary meals.The Celts loved feasting. According to Irish legends there were fourmain festivals in the Celtic year. Probably similar feast days were held inother parts of the Celtic world. Imbolc (February 1) was a festival dedicatedto fertility, marking the renewal of spring and the coming of a ewe’s firstmilk. It was dedicated to the god Brigit, later christianized as St Bridget.Beltain (May 1), linked to the Celtic god Belenos, was a fire-cleansing festival.Fires were lit or renewed in houses and lighted in the fields so thatcattle could walk through them and be cleansed. Grass and rush beddingwas burned, so that household tasks started afresh. This was the best wayto stop infection as pests were burned with the straw. Lughnasa (August 1),dedicated to the god Lugh (Ireland) or Lugnos (Gaul), lasted for almost40 days. This, as might be expected, was the greatest festival for it was the timewhen crops were harvested and food and drink were available in abundance.

Celtic Feasting 109A woodcut of an Irish banquet from John Derrick’s “Image of Ireland,” 1581. © North Wind/North WindPicture Archives—All rights reserved.The last festival of the year, although it was the first in the Celtic calendar,was Samain (November 1), a sober and dangerous time, marking the end ofthe old year and invoking the dead, who could become visible to the humanworld. The Christian church transmuted it to All Souls’ Day (November 2)when it was propitious to remember deceased relatives and friends. Thistradition still continues through much of Catholic Europe.At feasts, plenty of meat was eaten and beer and wine was drunk. Thestory of Lludd and Llefelys in the Welsh Mabinogion mentions a year’s provisionof food and drink for a feast, although this was taken by a supernaturalbeing who packed it into a huge basket to carry it away. The Irish tales,however, provide the best evidence available for descriptions of Celtic feasting.The amount of food gathered for a feast could be prodigious.There was a social purpose to the feasting. Feasts were highly structured,social gatherings where hierarchy of status and its public affirmationcould be tested. There was a pattern in the seating. Warriors sat in acircle, with the host sitting beside the most important man, a king, a nobleor a famous warrior. Others sat round the circle in accordance with theirimportance. Behind each man might be his shield man and his spearmanwhose duty was to guard their lord. Strangers were invited to feasts, buttheir hosts waited until after the meal to ask them who they were and whatthey wanted. This tradition was often abused by Celtic enemies, when forexample, King Mithradates VI of Pontus invited 60 Celtic chieftains to meethim at Pergamum for a feast, but then slaughtered them as they ate. Even

110 Celtic Feastingso, this tradition was basic to Celts and one that seems to have continuedthroughout the following centuries.According to Poseidonius and the Irish tales, one of the main purposesof a feast was to allow Celtic warriors to boast of and exhibit their prowess.The greatest warriors had the best cuts of boiled or roast meat, but theparamount warrior laid claim to the champion’s portion that is the thigh orhindquarters of a boar. If another man claimed it and thus impugned thehonor of the first man, both warriors could fight in single combat, often tothe death.In the tale of Bricriu’s Feast, an Ulster Cycle tale, Bricriu, known asPoison-tongue, made a feast for the men of Ulster and their chieftain, Conchobarmac Nessa. Preparations for this took a year. For this feast he builta house at Dun Rudraige in which to serve it. The feast was to be massive,and food included five score (100) cakes of wheat cooked in honey. In givingthis feast, Bricriu intended to set the men of Ulster at odds, making itlikely for them to fight each other to the death. Although King Conchobarknew what Bricriu intended, the Ulstermen had to accept the invitationto his hospitality or run the risk of being thought cowards. For his deviouspurpose, Bricriu provided a seven-year old boar fed on fresh milk andfine meal in springtime, curds and sweet milk in summer, nuts and wheatin autumn, beef and broth in winter. The resulting fight and difficultiesconnected with the contest over the champion’s portion extended beyondBricriu’s house until eventually Cu Chulainn was accepted as champion.Archaeological evidence confirms the literary tradition, as bones of a pig’sthigh have been found in graves in Britain and Gaul indicating a grave ofa Celtic warrior.A second purpose in the feasting was to continue the tradition of singlecombat where men had to accept a challenge and fight each other, often tothe death. Many Irish heroes were challenged during the course of a feast,over the claim to the thigh portion of the particular meat being served, andhad to accept otherwise they might be branded as a coward by a satirist.A man could also pledge his life for gold, silver, and some jars of wine. Hetook the pledges and then handed them to his kinsmen and friends to acceptthe gifts. For this he had to be sacrificed and pay the price. He lay down onhis shield and resigned himself to having his throat cut with a sword in orderthat the gifts would be valid.During the feasts nothing was lacking to ensure that the heroes gotdrunk and merry. The Irish tale of The Intoxication of the Ulstermen describeshow, on the feast of Samain, the tribal King Conchobar gave a feastat the stronghold of Emain Macha. This included a hundred casks of everykind of ale, which led to the indulgers leading a furious ride through Irelandleveling every hill, clearing every forest, cutting the roots of great trees,and drying up every river. There are few wilder descriptions in literatureof this drunken ride, but allowing for the hyperbole, both this and theother tales indicate that if food and drink were available the Celts indulgedthemselves to excess. This also was part of the jockeying for position in the

social structure where a feast had been the occasion for young warriors toattest their prowess.Beer drinking was part of this social activity and so it was drunk in greatquantities. The Celts normally drank beer, presumably barley or a wheatenbeer mixed with honey, which was probably mead, although DiodorusSiculus commented that they drank water with which they had cleansedhoneycombs. Poseidonius noted that the Celts drank from a common cup,drinking a little at a time but rather frequently. Diodorus said that the Gaulswho normally drank beer became addicted to wine when it was importedinto the country, but drinking it unmixed and without moderation, as hesaid, “by reason of their craving, when they are drunken they fall into astupor or a state of madness. Consequently, many of the Italian traders, inducedby the love of money which characterises them, believe that the loveof wine of these Gauls is their own salvation. . . . they receive in return forone jar of wine a slave, a servant in exchange for a drink” (History 5.26). Headded that the Celtic fulsome moustaches are so long that they act as a kindof strainer. Poseidonius also said that the wine is unadulterated althoughsometimes a little water could be added. In fairness, Ammianus Marcellinus,a fourth-century A.D. historian, reported that Cicero said in an aside, whendefending Fonteius in 121 B.C., that the Gauls did mix wine with water,but once they had thought wine was poison. He added that the Gauls were“a race fond of wine, and disposed to numerous drinks resembling wine.”Some, when drunk, rushed around in “aimless revels.”Literary evidence of this love of wine is again confirmed by archaeologicalfinds. A burial of a noblewoman found in a tomb at Vix, near MontLassons (France) and dated to the sixth century B.C., contained an Etruscanflagon and Attic cups, apparently used in wine drinking ceremonies. Inpride of place was a huge bronze krater, a 5-foot-4-inch-high vessel usedfor wine, often in the Greek symposium, obviously imported from Greeceor Southern Italy. Given its size it would probably have been conveyed toGaul in pieces and assembled on site, possibly to enhance Celtic feasts. Aburial at Hochdorf in Baden-Württemberg (Germany) reveals that Celticaris tocracy had suitable equipment to indulge in feasting on a grand scale.The richly endowed burial chamber included a cauldron, which couldcontain up to 110 gallons of honey beer or mead. The site also revealedtwo u-shaped trenches containing a large amount of pure hulled barley,which was probably deliberately germinated as if there was a brewingestablishment there.A tomb at Apremont in France also contained a huge cauldron togetherwith drinking cups. Finds at sites in central and southern Gaul, indicate thatconsumption of beer or wine was on a heroic scale. A tomb at Lexden (England)contained 17 amphorae, some which had brought wine from Pompeii.One held 4.8 gallons. The site of Beuvray (France) has produced vast quantitiesof amphorae, most imported from Italy, which indicates the prodigiousamount of wine consumed by the Celts. At the Sheepen site adjoining thepre-Roman site of Camulodunum (Colchester, England) pieces of amphoraeCeltic Feasting 111

112 Celtic Feastingrevealed that wine was imported from at least 19 different sources, includingItaly, the Iberian Peninsula, southern Gaul and Rhodes.Chieftains were expected to entertain their followers to great feasts.Poseidonius commented on the feasting habits of the Avernian leader,Louernius, father of Bituis, who was dethroned by the Romans. He held agreat feast lasting many days for his followers set in a large square enclosure,one and a half miles each way. Within this he prepared a vast quantity offood so that for many days all who wished could enter. Attendants wouldserve the food and expensive drink from vast vats without a break. A bardwho arrived late was required to run behind the chieftain’s chariot but wasthrown a bag of gold for his attempts to keep up. He rewarded the chieftainwith a song that extolled that even the tracks of the chariot gave goldand largess to mankind. This was obviously part of Louernius’ attempt toindicate both his power and an example of conspicuous consumption onthe grandest scale. In Galicia, which was also settled by the Celts, Ariamnesgave a feast, which was said to have lasted a year, held in temporary hallsthroughout the country to which even travelers were invited.Entertainment was important. Satirists were allowed great license beingable to insult or make fun of the warriors’ foibles. It was one way of incitingmen into single combat or perform other deeds. Bards were hired toentertain the guests but mainly to extol the feats of the heroes. Boastingwas inevitably part of the entertainment, hence the fights which broke outduring the feasting. In the tale of Mac Datho’s Pig the warriors of Ulsterwere boasting about their achievements and which of them should have thehonor of carving the pig. One of the warriors, Cet, claimed it but Conall theVictorious approached him and claimed the pig for he had never been a daywithout slaying a Connachtman or a night without plundering, nor had heever slept without the head of a Connachtman under his knee. Cet agreedthat Conall was a better warrior than he but that if his brother Anluan waspresent he would match Conall contest for contest and that it was a shamethat he was not there that night. But he was, said Conall, drawing the headof Anluan from his belt and throwing it at Cet so that blood flowed overhim. So Cet had to leave the pig and allow the men of Ulster to carve the pigand suck up the total meat so that only the skin and membrane remained.Further Reading: Alcock, Joan P. Food in the Ancient World. Westport, CT: GreenwoodPress, 2006; Biel, Jorg. Der Keltenfürst von Hochdorf. Stuttgart, Germany: KonradTheiss, 1985; Brothwell, D., and P. Brothwell. Food in Antiquity: A Survey ofthe Diet of Early Peoples. New York: Praeger, 1969; Cross, Tom Peete, and ClarkHarris Slover, eds. Ancient Irish Tales. New York: Barnes and Noble Book, (1936)reprinted 1996; Cunliffe, Barry. The Celtic Word. London: Constable, 1992;Cunliffe, Barry. The Ancient Celts. Oxford and New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1997; Gantz, Jeffrey. Early Irish Myths and Sagas. Harmsworth, UnitedKingdom: Penguin, 1981; Jackson, Kenneth Hurlstone. The Oldest Irish Tradition:A Window on the Iron Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964;James, Simon. Exploring the World of the Celts. London and New York: Thamesand Hudson, 1993; Jones, Gwyn, and Thomas Jones, trans. The Mabinogion.

Chafing Dish 113London: Dent and Sons, 1974; Kruta, V., O. Frey, B. Raftery, and M. Stabo, eds.The Celts. New York: Rizzoli, 1991; Nelson, Max. The Barbarian’s Beverage: AHistory of Beer in Ancient Europe. New York: Routledge, 2005; Powell, T.G.E.The Celts. London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1958; Raftery, B.: PaganCeltic Ireland: The Enigma of the Irish Iron Age. London and New York: Thamesand Hudson, 1994; Rankin, H. D. Celts and the Classical World. London: CroomHelm, 1987; Rees, Alwyn, and Brinley Rees. Celtic Heritage: Ancient Traditionsin Ireland and Wales. London: Thames and Hudson, 1961; Reynolds, Peter J.Ancient Farming. Aylesbury, Great Britain: Shire Publications, 1987; Ross, Anne.The Pagan Celts. London: Batsford Ltd., 1986; Stead, Ian, J. B. Bourke, and DonBrothwell, eds. Lindow Man: The Body in the Bog. London: British MuseumPress, 1986.Joan P. AlcockChafing DishThe chafing dish (from the French, chaufer, meaning “to warm”) is an ingeniousdevice for cooking or keeping foods hot away from the stove (orin earlier times, the fireplace). It can be as simple as a skillet on a tripodover hot coals or as elaborate as a carved gold or silver stand holding a heatsource such as an alcohol lamp or candle and topped by a covered doublevessel in which the food in the top bowl is gently warmed by simmeringwater in the bowl underneath.Elegant chafing dishes were imported from Europe and used for entertainingin the American colonies well before the Revolutionary War, butchafing dish suppers, by that name, became popular in the United States atthe end of the nineteenth century and again in the 1950s and 1960s. Thechafing dish makes so much sense as a method of keeping food hot that asa method of serving, it has existed since Roman times and possibly before—and not just in the so-called Old World. The concept of chafing dishes wasbeing used in the Western Hemisphere before the European conquest. In1520, Bernal Diaz who was traveling with Cortez describes a meal in theAztec capital of Tenochtitlan in which the more than 300 dishes servedwere placed “on small low clay braziers so that they would not get cold.” Inthe North American colonies, the name chafing dish was used for either arustic brazier of coals used in the kitchen or outdoors as an auxiliary cookingappliance or the ornate warming device used for serving. The rusticform was recommended for preserving strawberries by Amelia Simmons inher 1796 American Cookery, the first cookbook written in America by anAmerican. In The Virginia House-wife, Mary Randolph also recommends achafing dish for making preserves. However, the more elegant version of thechafing dish is the inspiration for the chafing dish party or supper. In OnehundredRecipes for the Chafing Dish published by the Gorham Silver Companyin 1894, Herbert M. Kinsley (chef of the restaurants Holland House inNew York and Kinsley’s in Chicago) suggests that the use of the chafing dish

114 Chafing Dishfor entertaining coincides with periods of peace and prosperity such as the1720s and his own period, the 1890s, when “life in America shows a fullerexpression of beauty, refinement and artistic development.”From the 1890s through the first decade of the twentieth century,chafing dish entertaining was considered the height of sophistication inthe United States. Big city restaurants served special late-night chafingdish suppers, chafing dish specialtiesstarred at high society events,Cookbooks Inspired by the Conceptof Chafing Dish SuppersGood Things from a Chafing Dish by Thomas J. Murrey (Providence, RI:Livermore & Knight for Gorham, 1890)What One Can Do with a Chafing Dish by Henriette L. Sawtelle (NewYork: H. L. Stilwell & Co., 1889)Cookery with a Chafing Dish by Thomas J. Murrey (New York: FrederickA. Stokes Company, 1891)The Chafing Dish Supper by Christine Terhune Herrick (New York: JohnIreland, 1894; Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896)Chafing Dish Recipes by Gesine Lemcke (New York: Appleton, 1896)The Bachelor and the Chafing Dish by Deshler Welch (New York: F. TennysonNeely, 1895)Chafing Dish Possibilities by Fannie Farmer (Boston: Little, Brown & Co.,1898)The Gorham Chafing Dish Book (New York: Gorham ManufacturingCompany, 1899)Salads, Sandwiches, and Chafing Dish Dainties by Jane McKensie Hill(Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1899)The Peerless Cookbook: New and revised edition. With Recipes for ChafingDish by Mary J. Lincoln (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1901)Louis’ Salads and Chafing Dishes by Louis Muckensturm (Boston: H. M.Caldwell, 1906)365 Chafing Dish Recipes (Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Company,1912)How to Use a Chafing Dish by Mrs. S. T. Rorer (Philadelphia: Arnold & Co.,1894)Salads, Sandwiches, and Chafing Dish Recipes by Marion H Neil (Philadelphia:David McKay, 1916)All these extolled the virtues of the chafing dish but none more thanThe Cult of the Chafing Dish by Frank Schloesser, who dedicatedhis book “to the only Woman who could turn me from Bachelordom”and declared in the first chapter that “every bachelor has a wife ofsome sort. Mine is a Chafing Dish; and I desire to sing her praises”(London: Gay and Bird, 1905).and chafing dish lunch and dinnerclubs formed across the country.Chafing dishes added a touchof class to Sunday night suppers ofWelsh Rarebit or Creamed ChippedBeef as America struggled throughthe Depression and World War IIand returned to the social scene inthe 1950s and 1960s as Americaprospered. Women had returnedfrom wartime jobs to a kitchenwithout servants and chafing dishentertaining was an efficient wayto achieve the informal yet elegantstyle of the times. Recipes such asBeef Stroganoff, Sukiyaki, SwedishMeatballs, Chop Suey, SteakDiane, Chicken à la King, anddesserts such as Cherries Jubilee,Crepes Suzette, and Bananas Fosterwere chafing dish favorites.Further Reading: Coe, Sophie D.America’s First Cuisines. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994; Kinsley,H. M. One Hundred Recipes for theChafing Dish. New York: Arno Press,1973 [Reprint of the 1894 edition.Introduction and Suggested Recipes byLouis Szathmáry]; Lovegren, Sylvia.Fashionable Food: Seven Decades ofFood Fads. New York: Macmillan, 1995;Simmons, Amelia. American Cookery.Greens Farms, CT: Silverleaf Press,1984 [Recreation of the 1796edition published in Hartford, CT byHudson & Goodwin. Introduction andUpdated Recipes by Iris Ihde Frey];Randolph, Mary. The Virginia Housewife.Columbia: University of South

Champagne 115Carolina Press, 1984 [Facsimile of the 1824 edition with additional material fromthe 1825 and 1828 editions. Notes and Commentaries by Karen Hess].Joanne Lamb HayesChampagneThe word champagne evokes images of gaiety and celebration; however, theterm champagne may only be used for sparkling wines that are made in aregion approximately 90 miles to the northeast of Paris. Other sparklingwines are made in Spain, Germany, Italy, California, and New York State,but these wines are said to be made in the Champagne-style (exact languagevaries with the country of origin).Champagne is produced in four main areas (or departments) of theChampagne region in France: the Vallee de la Marne, Montagne de Reims,Cote des Blancs, and the Aube, although the departments of Aisne, Seine-et-Marne, Coteaux des Sezannais, and Haute Marne contain a smaller numberof vineyards.Three varieties of grapes are used to make champagne: Pinot Noir, PinotMeunier, and Chardonnay. Each grape contributes special characteristicsthat influence the style of resulting champagne. Pinot Noir adds strengthand body to a wine, along with red fruit aromas; Pinot Meunier providesfragrance, spiciness, and roundness; and Chardonnay modulates with finessefloral and mineral overtones.Champagne begins as a still wine that lacks the carbon dioxide to makeit sparkling. The still wine is then blended with other wines (sometimesfrom other vintages) and a liqueur de tirage (solution of sugar, yeast, and oldwine) and then set aside for a second fermentation; these two steps are consideredto be the most influential in determining the style of the individualchampagne house. Champagne is available in 10 different bottle sizes, rangingfrom one- quarter bottle (187 ml) to the gargantuan Nebuchadnezzar(15 liters, or 20 standard 750 ml bottles). In great years, a wine will be specifiedas vintage; otherwise Champagne is NV, or non-vintage.Champagnes differ according to dryness (or conversely, sweetness).From driest to sweetest are the following categories: Extra Brut, Brut, ExtraDry, Sec, Demi-Sec, and Doux; note that Brut and Extra Brut are drier thanExtra Dry.Because different Champagnes exhibit different qualities, they areconsidered to have different styles: light and delicate, light to medium,medium, medium to full, and full and rich. They have also been groupedas so-called families, such as those with body, spirit, heart, and soul: Thosewith body are matched with heavier foods such as foie gras, stews, and poultry;Those with spirit are lighter and go well as an aperitif, or with light fishor shellfish or light chilled or frozen desserts; Champagnes with heart canpair with lamb, warm desserts, piquant (but not spicy) sauces, and gratins;

116 ChampagneHuge wicker baskets filled with bottles of champagnein a wine cellar in France, while a man andtwo U.S. Army nurses talk to the proprietor of thewinery. Library of Congress.Champagnes with soul are considered to be so special, it is encouraged thatthey be appreciated alone.Champagne service begins with proper chilling. Champagne bottlesare of a thicker glass than still-wine bottles, and require additional time(20 to 40 minutes) in a bucket filled with ice and water (desired temperatureis 43 to 48 degrees Fahrenheit). After adequate chilling, the foilaround the top of the bottle can be removed, and, while keeping one handon the top of the cork, the wire can be removed or left on, and with a clothnapkin, the cork gently released. The goal is not to make a loud noise orpop, which allows carbon dioxide (and bubbles) to escape. Once the bottlehas been carefully opened, the napkin should be used to wipe the neckof the bottle, before pouring. Champagne is drunk slowly, and therefore,each pour is relatively small. The glass used for champagne service shouldbe elongated so as to augment the passage of bubbles upward in the glassand to strengthen the aromas. Tulip-shaped or fluted glasses are consideredmost complimentary to the enjoyment of champagne. An appropriateamount of champagne comes to approximately one-inch in from the bottomof a champagne glass. Pouring seconds should be carefully executed,so there is only a sip or two left. This way, the champagne in the glass willstay chilled.Two quaint stories surrounding the coupe or saucer-shaped glass haveevolved according to which the glass was modeled after or cup-shape of

Cheese Course, History of 117Marie-Antoinette’s or Helen of Troy’s breasts. Sadly, the coupe does not enhancethe flavor of champagne, as it allows the bubbles to dissipate.Champagne might be considered a global symbol for celebration, asit is used to inaugurate a newly built ship’s launching, is poured over winningsports teams, and is even used at the end the Grand Prix. Coronations,inaugurations, and parties of any size and scale feature champagne. A weddingtoast is seldom made without a glass of champagne, and champagne isordered at restaurants for any number of celebratory reasons.Historically, champagne has been present at momentous occasions sincethe year A.D. 496, when Clovis, the King of the Franks, was converted toChristianity, and was anointed with champagne. French kings were crownedin Reims, a city in the middle of the Champagne region, between 898 and1825, and these celebrations included copious amounts of the sparklingchampagne wine. The Frenchman Jean-Loup Chretien celebrated his landingafter a trip on the Soviet space station with champagne. Champagnehas even found its way to the top of Annapurna and Everest, carried up bymountain climbers wishing to celebrate their accomplishments. Somber occasionshave also been marked with champagne: Philip of Orleans drank the“wine of kings” prior to meeting with the Revolutionary Tribunal in 1793,knowing his fate was sealed.Further Reading: Edwards, Michael. The Champagne Companion. Toronto: QuintetPublishing, 1999; MacNeil, K. The Wine Bible. New York: Workman Publishing,2001; Vu d’ici et Benoit de La Brosse. “The Wines of Champagne: FromLifestyle to Wine Styles.” New York: Vignerons et Maisons de Champagne,Champagne Wines Information Bureau, 1998; http://www.champagne.fr.“An Unusual Wine: A Special Wine for Celebration”; http://www.intowine.com. “Celebrating Champagne: The Region”; http://www.intowine.com.“Celebrating Champagne: How to Serve Champagne”; Zraley, K. Windows onthe World Complete Wine Course 2006 edition. New York: Sterling PublishingCo., 2005.Deborah WindersCheese Course, History ofThe cheese course, which consists of one cheese or a selection of complimentarycheeses, is typically served at the end of dinner, before, after, or in placeof a sweet dessert. It has an established place in Western European dining,and it is growing in popularity in the United States, both at dinner partiesand in restaurants. At private homes, guests usually help themselves to cheesefrom a communal platter. In restaurants, diners receive their own plates withindividually sized portions of cheese, usually selected from a cheese cart thatis wheeled to the table at the conclusion of the meal. Bread, crackers, nuts,dried and preserved fruits, honey, and pickled vegetables often accompanythe cheese course, and wine is the standard beverage.

118 Cheese Course, History ofThe origins of the contemporary European cheese course can be tracedback to Ancient Greek and Roman banquets. For ancient farmers and soldierson campaign, for whom meat was scarce, cheese might count as the mainmeal of the day, along with grains, relish, and vegetables, but for the wealthy,cheese would be just one part of a larger, leisurely dinner. Cheese could beserved before the main meal as part of the appetizer course, after the mealwith dessert, or during the drinking party, which concluded the dinner. TheGreeks believed that cheese helped stimulate guests’ thirst for wine. Manydesserts were made with cheese, so cheese would make an appearance in oneform or other at the end of a banquet.Just like most refined and cultured things from the classical period,cheese suffered in the Middle Ages and was later rediscovered and championedin the Renaissance. In the Middle Ages cheese remained a dietarystaple in some areas, like the north, and for the poor. For the elite, however,cheese—and most dairy products—was regarded with suspicion, chiefly forreligious and health reasons. It was the Humanists around 1500 who elevatedcheese as a mark of connoisseurship, and by the mid-sixteenth centuryin Italy, cheese was a regular item at banquets, a term which referredto the elaborate final course of a dinner party. At these banquets, cheesewas often sculpted into elaborate shapes, like towers and castles; banquetsaimed to impress with spectacle.Physicians in the early modern period recommended that cheese beeaten at the end of the meal to close the stomach and ensure safe digestion.As the historian Ken Albala hypothesizes, this purported salutarypractice may be the origin of the contemporary European custom—andgrowing American trend—of ending a meal with cheese. Increased cheeseGruyère cheese production in Switzerland, illustrationfor a reference book on natural sciences,France, 1909. The Art Archive/Private Collection/Marc Charmet.

Cheese Course, History of 119consumption during this period also marks the end of medieval cooking. Bythe eighteenth century, the richness of dairy products was preferred overthe heavy meats and exotic spices of the Middle Ages. Modern Europeancooking had begun.Modern science confirms the healthful benefits of eating cheese aftera meal. Cheese, especially if consumed after something sweet, can helpprevent tooth decay and even reverse the early stages of tooth decay. Thecalcium in cheese keeps teeth strong, and the protein and fat protect toothenamel from the harmful acids produced from eating sugars. Furthermore,eating cheese produces saliva, which can also retard decay.Whatever the reason for concluding a meal with cheese, a cheese coursehad become so entrenched in Continental dining by the early nineteenthcentury that Brillat-Savarin declared that “a dinner which ends withoutcheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye.”Britain, on the other hand, did not necessarily share the French enthusiasmfor cheese. Upper-class Victorians eschewed eating cheese at the end ofthe meal, claiming that its consumption undesirably reflected working-classeating habits and that cheese was hard to digest. Proper young Victorianladies were further cautioned to abstain from cheese, as well as game and savories,because it tainted their breath and made them less desirable to men.Despite their reservations about cheese, the Victorians invented a specializedcheese knife that had two small points at the tip, like a fork, andwas used to spear a chunk of cheese and transport it to one’s plate (neverdirectly into one’s mouth). These knives are still common in Britain, wherethe cheese course has regained fashion.The Victorians were not the first to create specialized utensils or specificrules for eating a cheese course. At Renaissance banquets where makingan impression was paramount, there were decorative knives for cutting,serving, and eating cheese, especially Parmesan, which was very popular.These utensils were just as much about practicality as they were about declaringone’s wealth, class, and taste. The French today have rules about theproper way to cut cheese. Guests should cut a wedge, like a slice of cake,from a triangular chunk of cheese, so that no single guest hogs the desiredcenter part of the cheese.In America, there are fewer prescriptions today about the proper wayto serve a cheese course. A host can select cheeses depending on the winebeing served with dinner (a cheese course is a traditional way to finish thelast of the wine before moving on to a sweet dessert) or by a wine specificallychosen to go with the cheese course. It should be noted that not allwines go with all cheeses. There can be a theme to the selection (e.g., allAmerican cheeses) or a particular goal (e.g., stimulate dinner conversation,compliment the main meal, or aid digestion). A cheese course can also beserved before the meal, as is traditionally done in the United States, alongwith a cocktail or aperitif. A cocktail can even be drunk with a cheese courseserved at the end of the meal, in place of wine, and a cheese course can staras the main meal itself. Despite there being a large variety of specialized

120 Childhood in South Indiacheese knives on the market today, any small knife that can cut hard cheeseor spread a soft one will do. There are no set rules, but it is best to serve nomore than five cheeses to avoid overwhelming the palate.In countries like Britain, France, Italy, and Spain, however, with theirlongstanding culinary traditions, there tends to be an established way toconclude a meal with cheese. In France, a single, regional cheese will befeatured, along with wine from that area. For example, in Alsace, a heartymeal of choucroute (cabbage and sausages) ends with a wedge of Munstercheese and a local Riesling or Gewürztraminer. In Britain, a festive meal isnot complete without the classic pairing of Stilton and port.The contemporary conception of the cheese course is very Western,but the cheese course has a history in Asia as well, a continent not knownfor dairy products. In China, the bon vivant Zhang Dai, wrote nostalgicallyof his hedonistic life in Nanjing after the fall of the Ming (late 1500s, early1600s) when he ate, among other things, cheese infused with orchid blossoms.There are other accounts in early modern China of eating cheese asits own course. As a more contemporary example, Zahidul Hakim, a cheesemongerin New York City, used to eat a simple cheese, made by his mother,as a separate course at home in Bangladesh. Just as in Europe, cheese can beconsidered a delicacy and good for health.Further Reading: Albala, Ken. The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of RenaissanceEurope. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007; Dalby, Andrew,and Sally Grainger. The Classical Cookbook. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum,1996; Tarlov, Richard, and Janet Tarlov. “Discover the Pleasures of a CheeseCourse.” Fine Cooking 25 (1998): 54–59; Visser, Margaret. The Rituals of Dinner:The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities and Meaning of Table Manners. New York:Grove Weidenfeld, 1991.Diana PittetChildhood in South IndiaThe richness of cultural histories and symbolic rituals is threaded throughsouth Indian celebrations of life, whether it is the birth of a baby, namingceremony, first meal, birthday, puberty, marriage, or the observance of ananniversary. Celebrating every stage in life of a newborn is a big part ofIndian Hindu culture. The manner in which these occasions are celebratedmay differ from region to region, but sharing the joy of each milestone inlife, however small, is a great source of happiness. And all celebrations, regardlessof the occasion, have one thing in common—food. These ancientcustoms have stood the test of time in spite of changed lifestyles from extendedfamilies to nuclear families.Celebrations begin even before a baby is born. A pregnant mother ispampered with gifts of sweets, new clothes, and jewelry during certainstages of pregnancy. A woman’s first pregnancy, and the imminence of her

Childhood in South India 121giving birth to the next link in the family chain, is celebrated in various ceremoniesin India. In Southwestern India, among Kerala Hindu Nayars theceremony is called Puliyoonu. The expectant mother’s brother ceremoniouslyfeeds her puli, a type of sour soup made with five kinds of sour fruitsfrom a spoon made with a jackfruit leaf. After the mother-to-be drinks thepuli, her father and husband present her with new clothes. The event iscelebrated with a feast.The birth of a baby, the link that perpetuates the family, is indeed an occasionfor celebration. Small packets of sweets are distributed to the entirecommunity to announce the birth of a newborn. Two weeks later the babyis placed in the cradle for the first time, and again it is an occasion to rejoice.An array of sweets is displayed in trays under a cradle decorated with flowers,and the new mother places the baby in the cradle. She rocks the cradleto the accompaniment of songs.On the 28th day after a birth (the end of the first lunar month) a ceremony,Irupathettu, is celebrated. The baby is given its name, its first pieceof jewelry, its first meal of sweet porridge, and even its first chance to weareye makeup. The mother sits on the floor, facing east, with the baby onher lap. The baby is then fed a small spoonful of a freshly prepared herbalconcoction called vayambu, which is believed to stimulate good digestion.Then the baby is fed a sweet porridge of kora (millet) or dried raw-plantainpowder cooked with milk and a touch of sugar. Finger millet is consideredeasily digestible, high in protein, and babies are fed small quantities, oncea day, from the time they are one month old. Indians have a tremendousfascination for jewelry. Traditional jewelry pieces at this ceremony includean aranjanam (a gold chain for the midriff ) and vala and thala (gold banglesfor arms and ankles). A black glass bangle is also included to ward off theevil eye. In some families, the baby’s father or maternal uncle whispers thebaby’s name three times in his or her ears. Others wait to name the babyuntil the ceremony of feeding the first meal of rice (see below). A sumptuousvegetarian feast follows the ceremonies. In the past, Irupathettu wasalso the time for ear piercing and adorning the baby with his or her first setof earrings.Chooroonu, the occasion when rice is fed to the baby for the first time,is celebrated six months after birth. An astrologer is consulted to selectan auspicious day for the ceremony. The baby is bathed, dressed in festiveclothes, and taken to the temple. There, the baby is seated on the lap of hisor her uncle or father. After offering special prayers for the baby, the priestladles out a serving of paal paayasam (rice pudding that has been offered atthe temple) onto a banana leaf. The baby is fed this paayasam. On this day,the baby also gets his or her first necklace. Needless to say, a sumptuousvegetarian feast follows this ceremony, to which extended family membersare invited.It is not just the major events in one’s life that get celebrated; even thesmall milestones are celebrated. When a baby starts crawling on its kneesit is again an occasion for celebration. In most old south Indian homes the

122 Children’s Birthday Partiesthreshold to each room is covered with a smooth and slightly elevatedwooden piece called an ummarappadi. When a baby starts crawling andclimbs over this wooden piece to enter the next room, this event is celebratedby showering the baby with tiny, sweet rice dumplings. As the poor,confused child starts crying, the adults laugh and pick the child up fromthe floor, all the while enjoying the little dumplings. In some communitieswhen the baby has its first tooth, the paternal aunt makes these dumplings,makes the baby sit on a decorated low ummarappadi, and the dumplings areshowered on the head.Every pirannal, or birthday, is observed with special prayers at the temple,followed by a sumptuous feast; the first birthday is observed with moreceremony. Prayers are offered at the temple, and several guests are invitedto the house for a festive meal. A banana leaf laden with a festive meal isplaced in front of a lighted lamp as an offering to the Hindu god Ganapathi,destroyer of all obstacles. Mothers consider it a sacred duty to serve rice tochildren on their birthdays. They stand behind their son or daughter andserve rice on a banana leaf while praying for the long life, welfare, and happinessof the child.By the time the child is three years old Vidyarambham, which literallytranslates to “propitious beginning of education,” is the celebration of bothreading and writing. Children are initiated into the world of letters at thetemple. They are seated on the lap of their uncle or father, and the adultwrites the auspicious words HARI SRI on the child’s little tongue with thegold ring of one of their relatives, while praying for the goddess of learningto bless him or her with the skills for reading and writing. Then they holdthe children’s little fingers and help the child write the same words in rawrice spread in front of them.Despite the differences in the styles and forms of celebrations observedby different regions in India, there is an underlying similarity in how theycelebrate a new life with age-old rituals and sumptuous feasts.Further Reading: Day, Francis. The Land of the Perumals; or Cochin: Its Past andIts Present. New Delhi and Madras: Asia Educational Services, 1990 [firstpublished in 1863]; Fawcett, F. Nayars of Malabar. New Delhi and Madras:Asia Educational Services, 1990 [reprinted from 1901 edition]; Menon, C.Achyuta. The Cochin State Manual. Government of Cochin, 1911; Playne,Somerset, and J. W. Bond, comp., and Arnold Wright, ed. Southern India: ItsHistory, People, and Industrial Resources. Reprint. New Delhi and Chennai: AsiaEducational Services, 2004 (first published by Foreign and Colonial Compilingand Publishing Co., London, 1914–1915).Ammini RamachandranChildren’s Birthday PartiesChildren’s birthday parties commemorate the anniversary of the child’sday of birth and are celebrated in many cultures around the world. Most

Children’s Birthday Parties 123birthday celebrants are treated specially on their birthday and the day’scelebrations generally include a party with friends and family, decorations,gifts, activities, and food.The widespread celebration of birthdays was begun by the Mithras cult,which is believed to have originated in Persia, and whose practices werespread across Europe by the soldiers of the Roman Empire. The moderndaychildren’s birthday party tradition began over two hundred years ago inGermany with the Kinderfest (in German, Kinder means “children” and Festmeans “festival”). Children’s birthdays were celebrated simply with sweetcakes decorated with candles. By the early twentieth century this traditionhad spread to many Western cultures, where children’s birthdays began toinclude a gathering of the child’s family and friends for a party that extendedbeyond the immediate family.The commercialization of children’s birthday parties in the UnitedStates began in the 1900s and soon developed into the modern type ofcelebration we know today. Birthday guests receive written invitations bymail or given out by hand. Participants are expected to bring wrapped giftsto their friend’s home, and often leave the party with party favors or goodybags filled with candy, cookies, and small, inexpensive toys. The party roomis often decorated with balloons, streamers, and banners. Depending on theage group, simple games such as “pin-the-tail on the donkey,” musical chairs,or charades may be played. Common birthday party foods are pizza, hotdogs, potato chips, and punch or soda. However, the most important partMona Grimm celebrates her second birthday in Buffalo, New York, 1943. Libraryof Congress.

124 Children’s Birthday Partiesof the modern-day Western birthday party is the birthday cake, generally alayer cake with rich fillings, creamy frosting, and colorful decorations. Birthdaycakes are also often accompanied by ice cream. The birthday child’sname is often written, along with a birthday wish, in frosting on top of thecake. This type of cake was first popularized in women’s magazines in theearly twentieth century.Birthday parties in the mid-twentieth-century United States developedinto more extravagant events, sometimes involving themes such as sports,animals, or characters from popular children’s books. Matching room decorations,games, and cakes might be purchased to create a theme party. In thelate twentieth century, venues such as McDonald’s and Chuck E. Cheeserestaurants began to offer parties outside the home. At these events childreneat, drink, and play, with minimal set-up time or clean up for parents.Today, children’s birthday celebrations in middle- to upper-class familiescommonly take place in bowling alleys, gymnasiums (some with basketball,gymnastics, or rock climbing), skating rinks, swimming clubs, cookingschools, arts and crafts stores, or movie theaters, and often include hiredenter tainments such as musicians, disc-jockeys, magicians, ponies and pettingzoos, face painters, puppet shows, and costumed characters made popularby children’s films and television shows. Surprise parties are anotherpopular form of celebration. The birthday celebrant’s friends and familysecretly plan a party, and then bring the child to a location where everyoneis already gathered, ready to celebrate.Birthday celebrations have developed in different ways throughout theworld. In Brazil, for instance, children tug on the ear of the birthday childto bring luck. An egg broken on the head of the birthday child is a symbolof new life. In Russia, children receive a double-crusted pie instead of acake, with their name carved decoratively into the top crust. Popular Russianbirthday food is pirozhki, a dumpling filled with beef, hard cooked eggs,potatoes, or cheese. Party favors are pinned to a clothesline.In Mexico, the tradition of piñatas is still popular. Blindfolded childrenuse a stick to hit a papier-mâché animal or figure filled with candies andsmall toys. When the piñata is finally broken open, the goodies fall to theground and the children rush in to gather them. Younger children enjoypull-string piñatas that are equipped with multiple strings hanging fromthem. Each child pulls a string until the piñata finally breaks open. Piñatasare also very popular in many parts of the United States.Celebrating children’s birthdays with lavish parties is by no means auniversal phenomenon. Many African countries and some Middle Easterncountries do not mark birthdays except at certain times of life in ritesof passage. In Asian countries such as China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam,birthdays are celebrated on the lunar New Year. At the New Year everyoneconsiders him- or herself one year older. In China, actual birthdaysare celebrated minimally, with long wheat noodles symbolizing long life,and boiled eggs to bring luck. In some countries birthdays are religious

Children’s Birthday Parties 125occasions. On specific significant birthdays in Japan, children are dressed intheir best traditional clothes and taken to the Shinto shrine to be blessed.In Sri Lanka, children also go to the temple and offer traditional foodsto the gods. In India, the birthday child is also taken to the temple and ismarked with a black dot on the forehead by the priest to show that he orshe has received a birthday blessing. A child’s ears are pierced on eithertheir third or fifth birthday, which is believed to endow their spirits withhealth and wealth.Many cultures celebrate specific birthdays as coming-of-age ceremoniesor to mark a state of semi-independence of the young adult. In some culturesa child’s first birthday is considered especially important; in Hawaii, achild’s first birthday is often celebrated with a luau. The family will throwan elaborate party with some traditional Hawaiian foods, live entertainment,and dancing late into the night. Honoring the first birthday in many culturesis a remnant of times preceding the development of modern medicine wheninfant mortality rates were much higher, and it was less common for a childto actually reach its first birthday. In Judaism, the 13th birthday (for boys)or the 12th birthday (for girls) is celebrated with a Bar Mitzvah (for boys) ora Bat Mitzvah (for girls). Modern day Bar and Bat Mitzvahs are often celebratedwith elaborate parties marking the birthday child’s spiritual maturityand coming of age. In Latin American countries and communities inthe United States, a girl’s 15th birthday is honored with a la quinceaneraparty, a celebration that marks a girl’s entry into womanhood with religiousrituals and a grand ball that resembles a wedding reception. At these parties,the celebrant dances with her father and other boys for the first time.In the United States and Canada, it is common for girls to celebrate their16th birthday with a sweet sixteen party, and affluent families in Australia,England, Ireland, and the United States sometimes celebrate a girl’s 18thbirthday with a debutante ball—also referred to as a coming-out-party—premiering the young woman into society. This practice began in Englandas an opportunity to present young ladies into society, indicating that theyhad reached a marriageable age.In spite of the differences between birthday celebrations worldwide,the global spread of fast food restaurants like McDonald’s that often serveas birthday party venues, and the popularization of American birthday partiesin films and other media have contributed to the spread of Americanstylebirthday parties around the world. Children in many countries nowcelebrate birthdays at franchises of these same restaurants or at home withWestern-style birthday cakes, foods, and entertainment.Further Reading: Dennis, Matthew. Encyclopedia of Holidays and Celebrations: ACountry-by-Country Guide. Facts on File Library of World History. New York:Facts on File, 2006; Wallace, Paula S. The World of Birthdays. Milwaukee, WI:Gareth Stevens Publishing, 2003.Tamara V. Bigelow

126 Chinese BanquetsChinese BanquetsA Chinese banquet presents a convivial atmosphere, but its structures approacha Japanese tea ceremony in their formality and precision. The guestlist, the greetings, the menu, the chef, the drinks, the toasts, and even theleave-taking follow strict conventions. The host plans the event and all of itscomponents to achieve specific social goals. Guests are expected to knowthe rules and follow the lead of their host; when they do, a shared, warmexperience may result. When they do not, intentionally or through inexperience,tensions may arise that last beyond the final farewells.Over two thousand years of imperial culture, banquets emerged as a sophisticated,ritualized art, with gorgeous tableware and ever more elaboratedishes, showcasing the vast resources of the Chinese empire. By the twelfthcentury of the common era, a rising class of merchants were holding theirown grand feasts, and the taste for banqueting has only spread since then.For ordinary people in China, who rarely had enough to eat, let alone accessto remarkable cuisine, an invitation to a banquet provided a treasured opportunityto enjoy renowned delicacies cooked by professional chefs. Today,people around the world can hope to be invited to a Chinese banquet, dueto the wide dispersal of Chinese emigrants, along with their cuisine andtheir far-flung social networks.A nineteenth-century Chinese painting of a marriage feast. The Art Archive/Victoriaand Albert Museum London/Eileen Tweedy.

Banquets are held for many reasons, to celebrate a holiday, a joyous familyevent, or the visit of an honored guest. Whatever the occasion, the banquetis a crucial part of a culture of social relationships, framed by the linkedideas of guanxi and ganqing, or social networks and the personal sentimentwhich strengthens those networks. Hosting a banquet can help cement tieswith a local official, for instance, or with a business executive visiting fromBeijing. Because these social relationships may work to circumvent statedgovernment policies against favoritism, official documents frequently disparagebanqueting as linked to corruption. But corruption is not the point.Banquet hosts do not coldly calculate the return on their investment; theyare sharing food as a way to share values and build community.Both generosity and ambition can play a role in determining who isinvited to a banquet. The guest list is organized from top to bottom, fromguests of honor to guests as appreciative audience. In earlier eras, invitationsarrived on formal red paper and included the full guest list.When the appointed hour comes, the guests arrive on time. Their hostsmay applaud the entrance of the guests of honor; the appropriate responseis to applaud back and wait to be shown where to sit. Seating arrangementsare planned as deliberately as the guest list. The most honored guest sits tothe right of the host, facing the door. At a large banquet, each table of guestshas a host representative, to take on the serving responsibilities of the hostand to honor the guests. Tables usually seat 8, 10, or 12 people.The banquet formally begins with the host saying a few words of welcomeand making the first toast. The main guest responds with a shortspeech and a corresponding toast to the host. During the course of the meal,both sides will continue to make toasts. Drinking plays an important roleat banquets and has historically been a particularly gendered part of theevent. Male hosts and guests drink hard liquor together, toasting each otherand emptying their glasses if the toaster calls out “gan bei.” To toast, liftyour glass with both hands, catch someone’s eye, smile, and drink together.Toasts may thus be made from person to person, or with the whole group,but drinking hard liquor without toasting is offensive, as is filling your glasswithout first filling the glasses of those around you. Generally, the observanthost refills a guest’s glass as soon as it is empty.Not drinking when appropriate may also be taken as an insult, so Westernmen are advised to apologize and blame an allergy or medication if theychoose not to participate in the drinking. The obligation to keep up withother drinkers may be challenging, especially as men sometimes use drinkingas a social but distinctly competitive game. Women will not be pressedto drink and are not expected to drink heavily; they may, however, findthemselves handicapped in their business or official duties by this exclusionfrom the crucial social drinking. In recent years, some Chinese women havebeen keeping up with the drinking at banquets, to earn the respect of theirmale colleagues and be treated as equals.After the initial toast, the host starts the meal by raising his or her chopsticksto indicate to the assembled guests that they should do likewise. TheChinese Banquets 127

128 Chinese Banquetshost serves choice tidbits to the guest of honor and may offer the guest thefirst taste of every new dish that is brought to the table.Today’s Chinese banquet usually consists of 10 to 12 courses, not the300 courses of a Han dynasty extravaganza. The first course is composed ofcold appetizers and may come in the form of “stars around the moon,” witha delicacy such as abalone in the center, encircled by four or five other colddishes such as sausages, liver, cut vegetables, olives, and nuts. This may befollowed by a selection of hot appetizers, such as dumplings or spring rolls.Then come a succession of main courses, including special dishes to communicatethe importance of the banquet. An ordinary banquet will haveat least eight main dishes composed of seafood, poultry, and pork or beef.Banquet specialties vary across China’s broad regions, so that northernersmight include Peking duck and sweet and sour fish; the Cantonese mighthave Jade Chicken (sautéed chicken strips sculpted with greens and ginger)or deep-fried prawns; the Fujianese might have stir-fried jellyfish andkidney; and Sichuan banquets might include stewed beef with hot beansauce.Aside from these regional specialties, an elaborate banquet usually alsofeatures some very expensive ingredients such as shark’s fin, bird’s nest, seacucumber, or monkey head mushrooms. A very grand banquet will haveeven more of these prestigious dishes. Some high-status ingredients likebear’s paw or shark’s fin appear much less often today, due to concernsabout endangered species. The sequence and composition of the courses ata sophisticated banquet reveal the art of the chef and the knowledge of thehost. Each element of the meal can be a reference to a classical menu; or themenu as a whole can resonate with some celebrated culinary triumph.Food is eaten with enthusiasm rather than stiff elegance. If you emptyyour plate or bowl, your host will assume you are still hungry and offer youmore. You may say “wo chi bao le” to indicate politely that you are full. Unlikean ordinary meal, where a primary rule is not to waste even a grain ofrice, at a banquet you are not bound to clean your plate; the leftover foodshows that the meal was satis fying and honors the host’s wealth and generosity.A good guest eats steadily, not taking too much of any one dish andleaving room for the later courses. Refusing to try each new dish is impoliteas it breaks the bond of sociability.The conversation during the meal is not as scripted as the menu, butit does follow a certain protocol. The hosts apologize repeatedly for themeal’s inadequacy, while the guests rave about the meal’s extravagance andmagnificence. The food itself is a constant topic, as diners discuss the chef’sorigins and training, tease out each dish’s ingredients, and make comparisonsto other meals they have enjoyed. Such banter remains on a light andlively level throughout the meal. Not wanting to offend, guests rarely touchon politics or raise cultural comparisons. Similarly, no one will mentionbusiness out loud, although the participants’ official roles are present ineveryone’s minds. Alliances and assurances made at a Chinese banquet areno less real for having been unspoken.

Chinese New Year 129The last main course is a simple one, usually of rice or noodles. Thecustom is to eat lightly from this course, to show that you were alreadysated by the more elaborate dishes which came before. After a final dish offresh fruit, the main guest thanks the host on behalf of the assembled guests.The host may say a few final words in response, or may simply stand up tosignal the end of the banquet. The guests say their goodbyes quickly, whilethe host remains to pay the bill. The main guest may offer once or twice topay but should accept the host’s refusal and leave promptly. The bill for thebanquet is never split between the host and the guest of honor. The properway to repay one’s host is to invite him to a similar banquet at a later date,though in the culture of guanxi and ganqing, there have always been manyways to show one’s appreciation and affection after a wonderful banquet.Further Reading: Farquhar, Judith. Appetites: Food and Sex in Postsocialist China.Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002; Fletcher, Nichola. “Chinese Banquets:An ancient food culture and a Chinese New Year feast.” In Charlemagne’s Tablecloth:A piquant history of feasting. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005; Newman,Jacqueline M. “Banquets: Feasts for Every Occasion,” Flavor & Fortune WinterVolume: 2000 Issue: 7(4). Available online at http://www.flavorandfortune.com/dataaccess/article.php?ID=257; Newman, Jacqueline M. Food Culture inChina. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004; Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui. Gifts,Favors, and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China. Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press, 1994; Yutopians Chinese Banquet Page. http://www.yutopian.com/cooking/banquets.Erica J. PetersChinese New YearUsually falling during January or February of the Western calendar year,Chinese New Year starts with the first new moon of the New Year andends on the full moon 15 days later. It is celebrated by Chinese around theglobe and is considered the most important holiday of the year. Many entertainments,celebrations, and religious activities occur during this period,through which the common themes of auspicious beginnings, superstition,and Confucian values of hierarchy and community responsibility occur. Superstitionand symbolism are also important to most activities, behaviors,and routines during this time.As with the solar calendar New Year, the Chinese celebrate their ownNew Year’s Eve. Extended family will often reunite at home or at a restaurantto share a meal and close out the old year together. The time leading upto New Year’s Eve is spent cleaning the house, repairing or replacing brokenobjects, settling debts, washing old clothes, and buying new clothes if theycan be afforded. Cleaning is done because it is believed that any dust or dirtleft lying about might fly into someone’s eye and blind him, while the otheractivities are associated with preparing for a completely fresh start for the

130 Chinese New YearNew Year. This time is also considered to be magical, with ghosts and spiritslurking about that have to be defended against or appeased with protectivesymbols, visits to temples, and incense burning.Not as common today, it was once a New Year’s Eve tradition to tellchildren stories of the “bitter moon,” referred to as such because of thedifficulty of this period for many of China’s poor. (In order to pay debts,households would find themselves having to sell their valuables or eventheir children, but it was believed that money given away during the bittermoon would be returned during the New Year.) These stories, similar tofairy tales, would usually emphasize values such as family unity, sacrifice,and selfless contribution.On New Year’s Day in Chinese cities and in Chinatowns around theworld, lion dances scare away bad spirits or troubles of the old year andwelcome the new year, bringing good luck to all. Colorful acrobatics, loudcymbals, gongs, pipes, and drums, and the accompanying firecrackers makefor a very festive scene. Aside from delighting onlookers, firecrackers arealso meant to keep evil spirits away and humor the immortals with livelynoises. In the evening, fireworks are usually scheduled and start off the NewYear with a literal bang. Lion dances are not the only entertainment, though.Chinese New Year’s parades are events to look forward to. Whether on theDragon performers in the Chinese New Year parade, celebrating Year of the Rat, Los Angeles, 2008. JoseGil/Shutterstock.

Champs Elysees of Paris, Orchard Road of Singapore, or Canal Street inNew York, the Chinese New Year parade is a sight to behold. San Francisco’sChinese New Year parade is one of the most famous parades in the world,complete with floats, marching bands, stilt- walkers, a 201-foot GoldenDragon, Chinese acrobats, and an appearance by that year’s Miss ChinatownUSA.It is not until the sixth day of the New Year that the Chinese go outto visit friends. Like all other aspects of the New Year, the practice of thesevisits, referred to as bainian is a highly ritualized affair, reflective of theConfucian values imbedded in the culture. Younger Chinese visit the homesof their elders to pay their respects. Students visit their teachers, employeesvisit their employers, younger brothers bring their families to their olderbrothers’ homes, and so on. Each household will also have a Tray of Togetherness,a round, shallow lacquered box. The inside is divided into segments,with a circular segment in the middle. Traditionally there are a total of eightcompartments, each of which was filled with a special food item of significanceto the New Year season; sweet dried fruits such as candied melon,lychee nuts, kumquats, longan, and coconut are interspersed with dyed redmelon seeds, lotus seeds, and salty peanuts. Each food represents somethingto hope for in the New Year: health, family, prosperity, happiness, fertility,filialness, and longevity. Upon arrival, tea, holiday foods, and all the foods onthe tray are always offered to the guests. The visitors, in turn, always comebearing gifts. The gifts usually consist of sweet items such as tins of biscuitsor candies because sweetness is also associated with good things.Hong bao, literally “red packets,” or envelopes filled with cash, are alsoexchanged. Chinese children look forward to this time of year as only marriedadults give out hong bao, and at every home the child visits, he or she canexpect to leave with a windfall of red envelopes. Red is considered lucky,and not only do many wear red during the course of the New Year, but giftsare wrapped in red paper and lucky money is contained in red envelopes.The 15th and last day of Chinese New Year is traditionally markedby a parade of lanterns. The origin of the festival stems from a legend, oneversion of which has it that the Jade Emperor in Heaven was so angry ata town for killing his favorite goose that he decided to destroy it with astorm of fire. Upon learning of his plans, a fairy sympathetic to the townspeopleadvised them to light lanterns the evening of the planned storm. Thetownsfolk acted accordingly, and for the Jade Emperor watching from theHeavens, it looked as if the village was ablaze. The townspeople had evadedthe Jade Emperor’s wrath and from that day forth, people celebrated theanniversary of their deliverance by carrying lanterns through the streets onthe first full moon of the year. The lanterns come in various shapes and colors,and are made out of different kinds of materials. They provide a colorfulbackdrop for lion dances, dragon dances, and fireworks that accompany thelantern parade.Modern festivals are no less spectacular. Elaborate lanterns (usually litwith electric bulbs) created in the shapes of horses, birds, dragons, and otherChinese New Year 131

132 Chocolateanimals delight onlookers crowded on both sides of streets and avenuesclosed off for the procession. In northern China, lanterns carved from iceare not uncommon. The sheer scale and wattage of the event in major citiessuch as Taipei would surely appease any pyrotechnically inclined immortaland is a fittingly grand ending to the holiday.Further Reading: Bredon, Juliet. Chinese New Year Festivals: A Picturesque Monographof the Rites, Ceremonies and Observances in Relation thereto. Shanghai: Kelly andWalsh, 1930; Bredon, Juliet, and Igor Mitrophanow. The Moon Year; A Recordof Chinese Customs and Festivals. New York: Paragon Book Reprint Corp.,1966; Lai, Kuan Fook. The Hennessy Book of Chinese Festivals. Kuala Lumpur,Malaysia: Heinemann Asia, 1984; Newman, Jacqueline. Food and Culture inChina. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004; Jin, Hailin, Xuefei Bai, andYoanzhi He. The Traditional Chinese Festivals and Tales. (Chinese-Englishedition) Chongqing: Chongqing Publishing House, 2001.Karen Lau TaylorChocolateChocolate today is so much a part of our everyday lives, whether in the formof the candy bar, specialty grand cru bonbons, or exquisitely crafted dessertpastries, that we soon forget the many transformations that this producthas undergone to arrive at its present place on the table. The cacao treeis one of the domesticated plants used by native peoples in pre-ConquestMesoamerica that has spread to the fields and kitchens of the Old Worldand then circled back to the factories and kitchens of the New. In the UnitedStates, where hot chocolate has become a mass-market, marshmallowladendrink for children, it is difficult to envision the beverage as a luxuryor exotic delicacy limited to the top strata of European society in the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries. Yet in an even earlier time and place,chocolate was not only the drink of Aztec and Mayan elite but also a formof currency and a means of exchange, in which large sacks of cacao beanswere used for taxes or tribute.The difference between cacao—the bean and commodity—and chocolate—theprocessed product—is important to our understanding of thisluxury drink turned popular food. In 1753 the Swedish naturalist Linnaeusgave the plant its binomial scientific name, Theobroma cacao: theobromafrom the Greek means “food of the gods,” while cacao is a loan word fromthe Mixe-Zoquean family. Conventionally, the term cacao is used to refer tothe plant, the almond-shaped beans encased in the multi-hued pod, and allits raw materials before processing. In the next stage, whether in liquid orsolid form, the beans become chocolate—a word that went through a processof linguistic hybridization, similar to the creolization of the drink itself.While the derivation and etymology of the term chocolate from cacahuatl inthe Nahuatl language may be in dispute, the word nonetheless refers to the

Chocolate 133cold, bitter, water-based beverage of the native Aztecs that the Spaniardslearned to drink hot and sweetened with cane sugar. With some exceptionsin American and British usage, the term cocoa refers to the defatted powderafter separating cacao butter from the cacao solids. This process, inventedby the Dutchman Conrad Van Houten in 1828, thereafter revolutionizedchocolate preparation.The harvesting and initial treatment of the beans—cutting cacao podsfrom the cacao tree with machetes, fermenting the seeds with their surroundingpulp, drying and packing the beans for storage and shipment—havechanged very little over the last few centuries. While there have been fewimprovements in the basic methods of processing cacao beans into nibs orkernels, a lot has changed in the preparation and consumption of chocolate.Over the past five centuries, food rituals, the roles of eating and cooking ingender relations, hospitality, and social exchange have changed markedly.Chocolate currently plays an important and symbolic role in everyday foodroutines, subtle variations of life, and quotidian performances with respectto gift-giving and entertaining.MESOAMERICAN ORIGINSThe early history of cacao and chocolate culture is rather obscure becauseSpanish conquistadors and Catholic missionaries in Latin Americawere intent on destroying native religious and social systems along with therelics, written and engraved, that held the secrets to the beans’ use. Archaeologistshave tried to piece together evidence of the domestication, cultivation,processing, and level of trading of cacao prior to the Spanish Conquestthrough pottery remains (or chards), Mayan hieroglyphics, art work, andartifacts.Identification of the place of origin of the cultivated species of Theobromacacao is hotly contested, obscured by the question of whether socalledwild plants of the species have been found in Mesoamerica, the areathat in pre-Conquest times included the southern part of Mexico, Belize,Guatemala, and portions of El Salvador and Honduras. While there aremany scholars who accept the existence of wild Theobroma cacao in Mesoamerica,others claim it was either domesticated in South America and thentaken to that region, or first taken there in wild form and then domesticated.According to anthropologists Sophie and Michael Coe, authors of thedefinitive work on the subject, the fact that no pre-Columbian inhabitantof South America used the plant for anything beyond making a wine fromthe white pulp surrounding the seeds, and using that same pulp as a nibble,would seem a convincing argument against a South American origin andsubsequent transportation to Mesoamerica.The first European encounter with cacao took place on August 15, 1502,when Columbus, on his fourth and final voyage, came upon a great Mayantrading canoe with cacao beans in its cargo on the island of Guanaja, some30 miles north of the Honduran mainland. Later in 1517 Hernán Cortés

134 ChocolateDetail of a Diego Rivera mural of Native Mexicansharvesting cocoa, 1951. © Banco de MexicoTrust. Schalkwijk/Art Resource, NY.encountered Moctezuma II, the Aztec ruler, for whom chocolate occupiednot only an enviable place at his table but required careful attention to itspreparation. Chocolate, however, did not originate with the Aztecs, as mostbooks on the subject would have us believe, but with the remarkable Mayaand their distant predecessors, the Olmecs, in the humid lowlands of theMexican Gulf Coast around 1500 B.C. Based on evidence from historicallinguistics more than archaeology, scholars believe the Olmecs first domesticatedthe plant in the favorable environment of the humid tropical rainforest.A DRINK IN MAYA AND AZTEC RITUALSIn the Classic Maya period, from A.D. 250 to the ninth century, writtenevidence for the use of cacao survives in the form of so-called cacao glyphsand hieroglyphs on elegantly painted or carved vessels that accompaniedthe elite in their tombs and graves. Chocolate drinks played a very importantrole in Maya rituals and banquets as well as in betrothal and marriageceremonies, much the same way as champagne serves today in ourown culture. One of the things people did at such festivities was to “drinkchocolate together” (known as chokola’j). Pre-Conquest chocolate was not asingle concoction to be drunk but a vast and complex array of drinks, gruels,porridges, and probably solid substances, to all of which could be added awide variety of flavorings. The drink existed in two forms: one for ordinaryconsumption, the other offered to the gods.The basic Aztec method of preparing chocolate was about the same asthat prevalent among the Maya of the Yucatán, the only difference beingthat it seems to have been drunk cool rather than hot. A description of thisdrink written by a man known to scholars as the Anonymous Conqueror,or Gentleman of Cortés, is as follows:These seeds which are called almonds or cacao are ground and made intopowder, and other small seeds are ground, and this powder is put into certainbasins with a point, and then they put water on it and mix it with aspoon. And after having mixed it very well, they change it from one basin

Chocolate 135to another, so that a foam is raised which they put in a vessel made for thepurpose. And when they wish to drink it, they mix it with certain smallspoons of gold or silver or wood, and drink it, and drinking it one mustopen one’s mouth, because being foam one must give it room to subside,and go down bit by bit. This drink is the healthiest thing, and the greatestsustenance of anything you could drink in the world, because he whodrinks a cup of this liquid, no matter how far he walks, can go a whole daywithout eating anything else. (Anonymous Conqueror 1556: 306a, in Coeand Coe 86–87)The pouring from one vessel or jar to another was essential to produce a“froth” on the drink which was caused by the fats or “butter” in the grilledand ground cacao nibs. Much like the Maya, the Aztecs varied the preparationof chocolate with flavorings, spices, and other ingredients such asmaize; the ground seed of the ceiba or silk-cotton tree; dried and groundchili peppers; dried and ground flowers with vanilla; achiote (annatto) seed,which was used for its bright red color; allspice; the sapote seed; and as asweetener, honey or sap from the heart of the maguey plant. The drink wasgenerally confined to the elite—the royal house, lords and nobility, longdistancemerchants, and warriors. At banquets and the more ordinary mealsof the elite, chocolate was never sipped or drunk during the repast butserved at the end, in hemispherical bowls of polychrome ceramic, paintedor lacquered calabash gourds, or even gold.Cacao had not only economic and gastronomic value among the Aztecsbut also deep symbolic meaning. The cacao tree was part of the four directionsof their cosmology—being the Tree of the South, the direction of theLand of the Dead, associated with the color red, the color of blood—andthe cacao pod was used in rituals as a symbol for the human heart torn outin sacrifice. Sir Eric Thompson, the most influential Mayanist of the twentiethcentury, suggested that this might be due to the vague resemblance inshape between the two, but a more likely explanation is that both were repositoriesof precious liquids: blood and chocolate. The question of whetherchocolate had mind-altering effects remains unanswered. The biologistJohn West mentions that since pre-Columbian times the Zapotec Indians ofOaxaca have added the dried aromatic flowers of Quararibea funebris to achocolate drink called tejate, used to treat anxiety, fever, and coughs.INTRODUCTION IN EUROPEAt the time of the Conquest, the Spaniards did not like the chocolatedrink of the Aztecs, as they found it to taste bitter. In time, with the crossfertilizationof cultural elements between the Amerindian and Spanish cultures,chocolate was absorbed into the colonial cuisine of New Spain andeventually transplanted to Old Spain with a number of notable transformations.The drink was taken hot and regularly sweetened with cane sugar,and Old World spices such as cinnamon, anise seed, and black pepper weresubstituted for native Mesoamerican flavorings. The vogue of chocolate is,

136 Chocolatetherefore, complicit with sugar. Both were processed products of plants cultivatedin European tropical colonies through African slave labor.Regardless of how and when chocolate actually was introduced to theIberian Peninsula (some say with Cortés around 1528), with Spain’s monopolyon cacao production and trade in the New World, chocolate remainedan exclusively Spanish phenomenon for the next century. There isgeneral agreement that the drink became acclimatized in the Spanish courtduring the first half of the seventeenth century, where it was appreciatedas a kind of status symbol and a standard feature of Spanish courtly style.Before the days of Versailles, Madrid was the trend-setter for the rest of aristocraticEurope, and eventually chocolate’s secret spread to other Europeancountries, through marriages between the royals or via Catholic friars asthey traveled between monasteries. Schivelbusch (91) attributes the marriageof the Hapsburg princess Anna of Austria to Louis XIII in 1615 forbringing chocolate to the French court for she had grown up in Madrid.West (111), on the other hand, writes that French interest in the Americannovelty was cemented in 1660 when Marie-Thérèse of Spain married LouisXIV. Thus the true story and date of chocolate’s introduction to France, aswell as other countries, must be left to lore. Some say chocolate’s introductionto France came through the region of the southwest (Bayonne) and wasassociated with Sephardic Jews.THE CATHOLIC, SOUTHERN COUNTERPARTTO COFFEEOver the course of three centuries, chocolate was to conquer Europe,and with the new demand for the drink, cultivation of cacao spread to thecolonies. In The Tastes of Paradise, Schivelbusch refers to chocolate as theCatholic, southern European counterpart to coffee, which was a Protestant,northern drink. Its great nutritional value made it such a significant commodityin the Catholic world. “On the principle that liquids do not breakfasts (liquidum non frangit jejunum), chocolate could serve as a nutritionalsubstitute during fasting periods, and naturally this made it more or less[a] vital beverage in Catholic Spain and Italy” (87). In 1569 Pope Pius Vunleashed the controversy within the Church of whether chocolate shouldbe considered a drink, which would not break a fast, or a food, which wouldbreak a fast.What may have begun, then, as a clerical fasting drink, became a fashionablesecular beverage. The chocolate breakfast or morning chocolate, drunknot at the breakfast table, but ideally in the boudoir, in bed if possible, wasthe custom of the aristocracy in the ancien régime. Breakfast, in this case,did not start off a workday but rather marked the start of a day of carefullycultivated idleness. Breakfast chocolate had very little in common with thebreakfast coffee of the bourgeoisie, not only because the drinks were quitedifferent but because the etiquettes were as well. “Whereas the middle-classfamily sat erect at the breakfast table, with a sense of disciplined propriety,

Chocolate 137the essence of the chocolate ritual was fluid, lazy, languid motion. If coffeevirtually shook drinkers awake for the workday that lay ahead, chocolatewas meant to create an intermediate state between lying down and sittingup” (Schivelbusch 91).The idle class’s morning-long awakening and studied leisure over chocolateare represented in many European paintings of the time: Pietro Longhi’sLa cioccolata del mattino (Venetian, 1775–1780, Museo Correr, Venice)depicts an informal and relaxed scene of break fast participants, includingthe abbé and gallant, around the bed of the mistress of the house as chocolatecharms the conversation; Jean-Baptiste (le Vieux) Charpentier’s La familledu duc de Penthièvre, ou La tasse de chocolat (French, 1768, Châteauxde Versailles et de Trianon) reflects the tastes and manners of French societyof the Louis XV epoch; and Jean-Etienne Liotard’s most famous painting,Das Schokoladenmädchen or La Belle Chocolatière (Swiss, 1743–1745, “AlteMeister” Gallery in Dresden), is a pastel portrait reputedly of Anna Baltouf,which was later used as the trademark of the American firm, Baker’s Chocolate.The theme of the cup of chocolate was also taken up by French artistsEdgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.The association of chocolate with eroticism was a popular motif of Rococopaintings. According to an old but perhaps unfounded belief, chocolatewas an aphrodisiac and quite the opposite of coffee. Coffee gave to themind what it took from the body, whereas chocolate was considered todo the reverse, nourishing the body and one’s potency. “It represented theBaroque, Catholic acknowledgment of corporeal being as against Protestantasceticism” (Schivelbusch 1992, p. 92). The letters of Mme de Sévigné(1626–1696) captured the popular vision at the time that the drink contributedto feminine health and happiness; and chocolate was deemed to havemedicinal value as a remedy for numerous ailments.FEEDING DESIREBefore the early modern period, the social drinks of Europe had all beenalcoholic. Increased contact and direct trade with Asia, Africa, and Arabia,along with the so-called discovery of the Ameri cas, meant that Europeansbecame introduced to tea, coffee, and drinking chocolate. The popularity ofchocolate as a social and exotic beverage in the seventeenth century gaverise to the chocolate parlor or chocolate house. This was the meeting placefor an odd mixture of aristocracy and the demimonde; they were thoroughlyanti- puritanical and perhaps even bordello-like places. The chocolate housecontrasted with the coffeehouse with its bourgeois and puritanical characterwhere guests sat at a table, and the innkeeper served coffee out of a jugwith drinking bowls initially without handles. This calm scene contrastedwith behavior at a tavern where alcohol was served but was also differentfrom the chocolate parlor with its higher-class clientele and decidedly moreexpensive beverage. London’s first chocolate house opened in 1657, run bya Frenchman. Similar to the coffeehouses, which had been established a few

138 ChocolateMen and women drinking chocolate ina Leipzig coffeehouse, eighteenth century.Library of Congress.years earlier, chocolate houses increased in number and became centers ofpolitical, economic, and social debate for the wealthy and powerful.A great variety of new utensils and containers were developed in whichto serve these new drinks, first for great households or high society andthereafter for the popular market. The response of silver smiths, potters,and other artisans to the demand created by these new beverages can beseen in the exquisite creation of silver, gold, pewter, and porcelain objects.Chocolate pots (chocolatières) and services emerged, similar to tea and coffeeservices, but with slight decorative or functional changes. They had swizzlesticks (moulinets in French) to whip the heavy chocolate. The groovedwooden beater for the production of the much-prized foam must have beenintroduced from Spain to Mesoamerica during the sixteenth century, andthe Spanish molinillo later became important in chocolate preparation inEurope and America. Chocolate drinks were made by combining hot waterwith a dried cacao mass, which came in the form of cakes, rolls, or bricks.The water and cacoa mass were then beaten together. A special jug or chocolatepot was created, fitted with a lid pierced in the middle to hold thehandle of the swizzle stick, making the drink easier to mix.NEW FORMS AND PATTERNS OF CHOCOLATECONSUMPTIONExpansion of chocolate to the masses was accomplished in the nineteenthcentury, largely through changes in chocolate processing and

Chocolate 139mechanization as a result of the Industrial Revolution. The advent in 1828of hydraulic presses to extract cacao butter from the cacao mass allowedfor the development of cocoa powder for use in making hot chocolate.Hot chocolate could then be made by just adding hot water or hot milkto the soluble powder. Hence solid and liquid chocolate were no longerthe same. With this transformation, chocolate pots and services prettymuch disappeared from use, so that today they can command astronomicalprices.As chocolate became easier, faster, and less expensive to produce, theproduct penetrated into the daily life of the middle and working classes, in alteredform (i.e., cocoa powder andmanufactured chocolate bars), andit lost its class identity. Chocolatesoon became a nutritious morningdrink highly recommended bydoctors for children. For example,the French cocoa brand Banania(better known today for its use ofpromotional images that were derogatoryof people of color, muchlike that of Aunt Jemima for pancakemix or Uncle Ben for rice)was a popular breakfast drink consumedthroughout France and itscolonies and promoted by Frenchadvertising posters in the early twentiethcentury.Throughout much of the lastcentury, chocolate re mained largelystatic. Although the products didnot change, marketing becameincreasingly more important. Inthe 1980s, brands like Valrhona inFrance began to create chocolatemade from selected high-qualitybeans and regions in an attempt toemphasize their local character (orgout de terroir). Around the sametime, Lindt of Switzerland launcheda 70 percent cocoa content chocolatebar that was the first supermarketbrand to promote cocoapercentage. Thus began the newinterest in creating chocolate fromsingle-estate beans and cacao varietals(e.g., forestero, trinitario, criollo),The Evolution of the Chocolate BarA number of important dates in the evolution and popularizationof chocolate and the manufactured chocolate bar include thefollowing:1765—The first chocolate mill was established by John Hannon on theNeponset River in Dorchester, Massachusetts, using water power togrind beans (West 115). Hannon is credited with getting chocolateproduction started in North America and founding the company thatlater became Baker’s Chocolate (incorporated in 1895).1828—Conrad Van Houten developed a way of mechanically extractingmost of the fat from the cacao mass or cacao liquor, thus creatingcacao butter, which can be used for soap products, and rock cocoa,which can be ground into powder.1831—John Cadbury, a Quaker, begins manufacturing drinking chocolateand cocoa in the United Kingdom. He launched a business empirein the chocolate trade that has dominated this food line in Britainand the Commonwealth for over 200 years.1875—The world’s first milk chocolate is created by adding milk todark chocolate.1879—The Swiss Rodolphe Lindt added the conching stage to thegrinding process. By agitating the ground cacao mass for a periodof one to three days in a sloshing-and-kneading apparatus called aconche (inspired by the Mesoamerican metate, or concave grindingstone), a much smoother, finer, and more aromatic chocolate isproduced. Conched chocolate proved to be much easier for use inbaking.1894—The American company Hershey makes the first mass- produced,affordable chocolate bar.1913—The first filled chocolates appear, thus paving the way for fancyganaches, bonbons, and couverture chocolates.1930s—Famous candy bars, such as the Mars Bar and Kit Kat, areinvented. Other varieties and brands of chocolate products soon followedas chocolate candies became an inexpensive daily snack andlater an energy source and army ration in war time.

140 Chocolateas well as labeling specialty chocolate bars for eating or baking with thesource of the bean and the percentage of cacao.FROM THE LOCAL TO THE GLOBALIn the history of tropical commodities, it is frequently emphasized howpeople produce what they do not consume and consume what they do notproduce, thus pointing to the disconnect between producers, consumers,and product. The history of chocolate production provides exceptions tothis. In Mexico, the land of chocolate’s origin, cultural transformations andculinary inventions have led to the popularity and use of chocolate as aflavoring in savory dishes, including moles. Yet the cacao and chocolate adventureis not limited to the New World or Europe.In the seventeenth century cacao seedlings spread westward from Acapulcoto Manila, where cocoa became a traditional food. From the Philippines,it spread to the Dutch East Indies, Java, and Sumatra. Countries inAfrica, Asia, and the Pacific are now cacao producers. Today families inthe Philippines grow several trees in their yards and use the beans to makechocolate disks for home consumption or for sale in local markets. Thesedisks are the foundation for hot drinks or for champorado, a delicious dessertand breakfast dish consisting of warm sticky-rice sweetened with sugar andflavored with chocolate. The methods used for preparing cacao at home areidentical to those used by the Spanish in sixteenth-century Mexico. Beansare roasted in a wok over a wood or gas fire until the shells can be removed.They are then rolled and crushed lightly with a wooden roller or glass bottleand finally winnowed on a rattan tray to separate the shells from the nibs,or bean fragments. Everything is utilized in the process: the shells are fed tochickens, the pods to pigs or goats, and the nibs are ground in a corn mill tomake a warm paste that is punched into two-inch disks with a metal cutterand placed on a banana leaf to cool (West 109).Chocolate has entered seasonal festivities with both religious and secularsignificance. At Easter, chocolate bunnies and eggs symbolize fertilityin keeping with the Christian Lenten and agricultural calendars. St. Valentine’sDay on February 14 has become a contemporary chocolate-centered celebrationin the United States, although we do not know when this customdeveloped. Valentine’s season is a period of peak chocolate sales and chocolateadvertising, with some specialty chocolates costing as much as $2,000a pound. The custom has spread elsewhere, such as Japan, where it has becomea business obligation for women to present gifts of candy to their malecolleagues. In the search for excellence, chocolate gifts are becoming moreexpensive, trendy, and sought after, and the gifting of chocolate is closelyassociated with class. According to Mary Killen, who parses upper-crust etiquettein her advice column in the British magazine The Spectator, the sortof chocolate people bring as house presents when going for the weekendto an old-family country house is a litmus test of social class. She writes:“There is a fashion for Quality Streets,” referring to a low-rent chocolate

Chopsticks 141assortment available in every gas station in Britain, but buying an expensivecollection from Fortnum and Mason looks as if you tried too hard.Chocolate has come full circle as a new luxury commodity with buyersseparated by class and status. Consumption of chocolate is increasing in theWest, and new chocolate products are on the market. Much like wine, andto a lesser extent coffee, chocolate has become a cherished product—withtastings pairing chocolate varieties (dark, bittersweet, semi-sweet, and milkchocolate) with wine or port, while new empirical research seeks to discoverand cultivate the best cacao beans for processing into the finest, exclusivederivationchocolates.Further Reading: Bachollet, Raymond, Jean-Barthélemi Debost, Anne-ClaudeLelieur, and Marie-Christine Peyrière. NégriPub: l’image des Noirs dans la publicité.Paris: Éditions Somogy, 1992; Bourgaux, Albert. Quatre Siècles d’histoire du cacaoet du chocolat. Bruxelles: Office International du Cacao et du Chocolat, 1935;Coe, Sophie D., and Michael D. Coe. The True History of Chocolate. London:Thames & Hudson, 1996; Doutre-Roussel, Chloé. The Chocolate Connoisseur:For Everyone with a Passion for Chocolate. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin,2006; Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in ModernHistory. New York: Penguin Books, 1985; Presilla, Maricel E. The New Taste ofChocolate: A Cultural and Natural History of Cacao with Recipes. Berkeley, CA:Ten Speed Press, 2001; Scharffenberger, John, Robert Steinberg, Ann KruegerSpivak, and Susie Heller. The Essence of Chocolate: Recipes for Baking and Cookingwith Fine Chocolate. New York: Hyperion, 2006; Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Tastesof Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants. Translated fromthe German by David Jacobson. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992; Terrio, SusanJ. Crafting the Culture and History of French Chocolate. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2000; West, John A. “A Brief History and Botany of Cacao.” InChilies to Chocolate: Food the Americas Gave the World, edited by Nelson Fosterand Linda S. Cordell. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992, pp. 105–121;Yall, Sarah. “Classism Still Vexing British,” New York Times News Service,Deseret Morning News, April 27, 2007.Ellen M. SchnepelChopsticksChopsticks originated roughly five thousand years ago in China, when peoplebegan using paired sticks to lift hot pieces of food out of the cooking pot.From the Han period at least (200 B.C.), chopsticks as we know them becamepart of Chinese high culture. Like the writing brushes they resemble,the simple utensils symbolized a move from warrior values toward morehumanistic ideals. Knives would no longer be needed or welcomed duringthe meal, as the food had been cut into small pieces by the cook. Instead,meals would become opportunities for conversation and for the developmentand display of formal manners.

142 ChopsticksAs Chinese ascendancy spread across East Asia, so too did the use ofchopsticks (kuàizi in Mandarin, hashi in Japanese, jeotgarak in Korean, anddua in Vietnamese). For these Han-influenced cultures, chopsticks becamea marker of civilization.One explanation for why chopsticks became so prevalent within somecultures, while remaining unknown to others, is that chopsticks form one elementof a unified food system. Just as two chopsticks are needed to pick upa morsel of food, a small rice bowl is also needed, held close to the mouth.Chopsticks are for food served with rice, but not just any rice. The grainsneed to have particular qualities: sticky, but not so glutinous as to demandthe use of fingers.Chopsticks differ somewhat from country to country. Japanese chopsticksare shorter, lacquered, with pointed tips; Korean ones are mediumlength and often made of metal; and Chinese and Vietnamese chopsticksare longer, often made of un-lacquered wood or bamboo, and taper to bluntends. How one uses chopsticks also differs somewhat from country to country,although some broad rules apply generally.The key to manipulating chopsticks is to move only the upper one,using it to pinch the food against the lower one, which stays still. In this waya diner can dexterously procure a morsel from a common serving bowl, dipit into a shared sauce bowl, and bring it to an individual’s bowl. A pair ofchopsticks may also be used to break off a bit from a large, tender portionof food, or to sweep rice or noodles into one’s mouth. Chopsticks alwaysoperate as two parts of a whole. Like scissors, when they are at rest, they arekept together, lying parallel to each other. If one chopstick falls to the floor,etiquette says one should get a new pair.When eating as part of a group, chopsticks are used to pick food fromcommunal bowls, placed within everyone’s reach. To avoid collisions andimproprieties, diners should exercise great alertness to each other’s intentions:they should plan out their own motions with care, while beingprepared to make sudden adjustments to avoid any unexpected mid-air encounter.They should also select their morsel quickly and elegantly: one’schopsticks may not hover above the table, nor poke around a dish, nor speara morsel of food.Chopsticks are used for certain gestures, such as when the host invitesguests to start eating, or when guests hold them up flat to thank the hostfor a delicious meal. Aside from those specific customs, however, chopsticksshould not be used for gesticulating or pointing. Chopsticks should notbe used to pass food from one pair of chopsticks to another, or should notbe stuck upright in a bowl. Both of these resemble funeral customs and arethus distasteful at a meal.In China, Japan, and Vietnam, chopsticks serve to push rice into themouth from a bowl held right below or at the lips. In Korea, however, therice bowl should not leave the table, and people often eat their rice witha spoon. In Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese etiquette, people may takefood from the common dishes with their chopsticks reversed, to avoid

130 Chinese New YearNew Year. This time is also considered to be magical, with ghosts and spiritslurking about that have to be defended against or appeased with protectivesymbols, visits to temples, and incense burning.Not as common today, it was once a New Year’s Eve tradition to tellchildren stories of the “bitter moon,” referred to as such because of thedifficulty of this period for many of China’s poor. (In order to pay debts,households would find themselves having to sell their valuables or eventheir children, but it was believed that money given away during the bittermoon would be returned during the New Year.) These stories, similar tofairy tales, would usually emphasize values such as family unity, sacrifice,and selfless contribution.On New Year’s Day in Chinese cities and in Chinatowns around theworld, lion dances scare away bad spirits or troubles of the old year andwelcome the new year, bringing good luck to all. Colorful acrobatics, loudcymbals, gongs, pipes, and drums, and the accompanying firecrackers makefor a very festive scene. Aside from delighting onlookers, firecrackers arealso meant to keep evil spirits away and humor the immortals with livelynoises. In the evening, fireworks are usually scheduled and start off the NewYear with a literal bang. Lion dances are not the only entertainment, though.Chinese New Year’s parades are events to look forward to. Whether on theDragon performers in the Chinese New Year parade, celebrating Year of the Rat, Los Angeles, 2008. JoseGil/Shutterstock.

Champs Elysees of Paris, Orchard Road of Singapore, or Canal Street inNew York, the Chinese New Year parade is a sight to behold. San Francisco’sChinese New Year parade is one of the most famous parades in the world,complete with floats, marching bands, stilt- walkers, a 201-foot GoldenDragon, Chinese acrobats, and an appearance by that year’s Miss ChinatownUSA.It is not until the sixth day of the New Year that the Chinese go outto visit friends. Like all other aspects of the New Year, the practice of thesevisits, referred to as bainian is a highly ritualized affair, reflective of theConfucian values imbedded in the culture. Younger Chinese visit the homesof their elders to pay their respects. Students visit their teachers, employeesvisit their employers, younger brothers bring their families to their olderbrothers’ homes, and so on. Each household will also have a Tray of Togetherness,a round, shallow lacquered box. The inside is divided into segments,with a circular segment in the middle. Traditionally there are a total of eightcompartments, each of which was filled with a special food item of significanceto the New Year season; sweet dried fruits such as candied melon,lychee nuts, kumquats, longan, and coconut are interspersed with dyed redmelon seeds, lotus seeds, and salty peanuts. Each food represents somethingto hope for in the New Year: health, family, prosperity, happiness, fertility,filialness, and longevity. Upon arrival, tea, holiday foods, and all the foods onthe tray are always offered to the guests. The visitors, in turn, always comebearing gifts. The gifts usually consist of sweet items such as tins of biscuitsor candies because sweetness is also associated with good things.Hong bao, literally “red packets,” or envelopes filled with cash, are alsoexchanged. Chinese children look forward to this time of year as only marriedadults give out hong bao, and at every home the child visits, he or she canexpect to leave with a windfall of red envelopes. Red is considered lucky,and not only do many wear red during the course of the New Year, but giftsare wrapped in red paper and lucky money is contained in red envelopes.The 15th and last day of Chinese New Year is traditionally markedby a parade of lanterns. The origin of the festival stems from a legend, oneversion of which has it that the Jade Emperor in Heaven was so angry ata town for killing his favorite goose that he decided to destroy it with astorm of fire. Upon learning of his plans, a fairy sympathetic to the townspeopleadvised them to light lanterns the evening of the planned storm. Thetownsfolk acted accordingly, and for the Jade Emperor watching from theHeavens, it looked as if the village was ablaze. The townspeople had evadedthe Jade Emperor’s wrath and from that day forth, people celebrated theanniversary of their deliverance by carrying lanterns through the streets onthe first full moon of the year. The lanterns come in various shapes and colors,and are made out of different kinds of materials. They provide a colorfulbackdrop for lion dances, dragon dances, and fireworks that accompany thelantern parade.Modern festivals are no less spectacular. Elaborate lanterns (usually litwith electric bulbs) created in the shapes of horses, birds, dragons, and otherChinese New Year 131

132 Chocolateanimals delight onlookers crowded on both sides of streets and avenuesclosed off for the procession. In northern China, lanterns carved from iceare not uncommon. The sheer scale and wattage of the event in major citiessuch as Taipei would surely appease any pyrotechnically inclined immortaland is a fittingly grand ending to the holiday.Further Reading: Bredon, Juliet. Chinese New Year Festivals: A Picturesque Monographof the Rites, Ceremonies and Observances in Relation thereto. Shanghai: Kelly andWalsh, 1930; Bredon, Juliet, and Igor Mitrophanow. The Moon Year; A Recordof Chinese Customs and Festivals. New York: Paragon Book Reprint Corp.,1966; Lai, Kuan Fook. The Hennessy Book of Chinese Festivals. Kuala Lumpur,Malaysia: Heinemann Asia, 1984; Newman, Jacqueline. Food and Culture inChina. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004; Jin, Hailin, Xuefei Bai, andYoanzhi He. The Traditional Chinese Festivals and Tales. (Chinese-Englishedition) Chongqing: Chongqing Publishing House, 2001.Karen Lau TaylorChocolateChocolate today is so much a part of our everyday lives, whether in the formof the candy bar, specialty grand cru bonbons, or exquisitely crafted dessertpastries, that we soon forget the many transformations that this producthas undergone to arrive at its present place on the table. The cacao treeis one of the domesticated plants used by native peoples in pre-ConquestMesoamerica that has spread to the fields and kitchens of the Old Worldand then circled back to the factories and kitchens of the New. In the UnitedStates, where hot chocolate has become a mass-market, marshmallowladendrink for children, it is difficult to envision the beverage as a luxuryor exotic delicacy limited to the top strata of European society in the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries. Yet in an even earlier time and place,chocolate was not only the drink of Aztec and Mayan elite but also a formof currency and a means of exchange, in which large sacks of cacao beanswere used for taxes or tribute.The difference between cacao—the bean and commodity—and chocolate—theprocessed product—is important to our understanding of thisluxury drink turned popular food. In 1753 the Swedish naturalist Linnaeusgave the plant its binomial scientific name, Theobroma cacao: theobromafrom the Greek means “food of the gods,” while cacao is a loan word fromthe Mixe-Zoquean family. Conventionally, the term cacao is used to refer tothe plant, the almond-shaped beans encased in the multi-hued pod, and allits raw materials before processing. In the next stage, whether in liquid orsolid form, the beans become chocolate—a word that went through a processof linguistic hybridization, similar to the creolization of the drink itself.While the derivation and etymology of the term chocolate from cacahuatl inthe Nahuatl language may be in dispute, the word nonetheless refers to the

Chocolate 133cold, bitter, water-based beverage of the native Aztecs that the Spaniardslearned to drink hot and sweetened with cane sugar. With some exceptionsin American and British usage, the term cocoa refers to the defatted powderafter separating cacao butter from the cacao solids. This process, inventedby the Dutchman Conrad Van Houten in 1828, thereafter revolutionizedchocolate preparation.The harvesting and initial treatment of the beans—cutting cacao podsfrom the cacao tree with machetes, fermenting the seeds with their surroundingpulp, drying and packing the beans for storage and shipment—havechanged very little over the last few centuries. While there have been fewimprovements in the basic methods of processing cacao beans into nibs orkernels, a lot has changed in the preparation and consumption of chocolate.Over the past five centuries, food rituals, the roles of eating and cooking ingender relations, hospitality, and social exchange have changed markedly.Chocolate currently plays an important and symbolic role in everyday foodroutines, subtle variations of life, and quotidian performances with respectto gift-giving and entertaining.MESOAMERICAN ORIGINSThe early history of cacao and chocolate culture is rather obscure becauseSpanish conquistadors and Catholic missionaries in Latin Americawere intent on destroying native religious and social systems along with therelics, written and engraved, that held the secrets to the beans’ use. Archaeologistshave tried to piece together evidence of the domestication, cultivation,processing, and level of trading of cacao prior to the Spanish Conquestthrough pottery remains (or chards), Mayan hieroglyphics, art work, andartifacts.Identification of the place of origin of the cultivated species of Theobromacacao is hotly contested, obscured by the question of whether socalledwild plants of the species have been found in Mesoamerica, the areathat in pre-Conquest times included the southern part of Mexico, Belize,Guatemala, and portions of El Salvador and Honduras. While there aremany scholars who accept the existence of wild Theobroma cacao in Mesoamerica,others claim it was either domesticated in South America and thentaken to that region, or first taken there in wild form and then domesticated.According to anthropologists Sophie and Michael Coe, authors of thedefinitive work on the subject, the fact that no pre-Columbian inhabitantof South America used the plant for anything beyond making a wine fromthe white pulp surrounding the seeds, and using that same pulp as a nibble,would seem a convincing argument against a South American origin andsubsequent transportation to Mesoamerica.The first European encounter with cacao took place on August 15, 1502,when Columbus, on his fourth and final voyage, came upon a great Mayantrading canoe with cacao beans in its cargo on the island of Guanaja, some30 miles north of the Honduran mainland. Later in 1517 Hernán Cortés

134 ChocolateDetail of a Diego Rivera mural of Native Mexicansharvesting cocoa, 1951. © Banco de MexicoTrust. Schalkwijk/Art Resource, NY.encountered Moctezuma II, the Aztec ruler, for whom chocolate occupiednot only an enviable place at his table but required careful attention to itspreparation. Chocolate, however, did not originate with the Aztecs, as mostbooks on the subject would have us believe, but with the remarkable Mayaand their distant predecessors, the Olmecs, in the humid lowlands of theMexican Gulf Coast around 1500 B.C. Based on evidence from historicallinguistics more than archaeology, scholars believe the Olmecs first domesticatedthe plant in the favorable environment of the humid tropical rainforest.A DRINK IN MAYA AND AZTEC RITUALSIn the Classic Maya period, from A.D. 250 to the ninth century, writtenevidence for the use of cacao survives in the form of so-called cacao glyphsand hieroglyphs on elegantly painted or carved vessels that accompaniedthe elite in their tombs and graves. Chocolate drinks played a very importantrole in Maya rituals and banquets as well as in betrothal and marriageceremonies, much the same way as champagne serves today in ourown culture. One of the things people did at such festivities was to “drinkchocolate together” (known as chokola’j). Pre-Conquest chocolate was not asingle concoction to be drunk but a vast and complex array of drinks, gruels,porridges, and probably solid substances, to all of which could be added awide variety of flavorings. The drink existed in two forms: one for ordinaryconsumption, the other offered to the gods.The basic Aztec method of preparing chocolate was about the same asthat prevalent among the Maya of the Yucatán, the only difference beingthat it seems to have been drunk cool rather than hot. A description of thisdrink written by a man known to scholars as the Anonymous Conqueror,or Gentleman of Cortés, is as follows:These seeds which are called almonds or cacao are ground and made intopowder, and other small seeds are ground, and this powder is put into certainbasins with a point, and then they put water on it and mix it with aspoon. And after having mixed it very well, they change it from one basin

Chocolate 135to another, so that a foam is raised which they put in a vessel made for thepurpose. And when they wish to drink it, they mix it with certain smallspoons of gold or silver or wood, and drink it, and drinking it one mustopen one’s mouth, because being foam one must give it room to subside,and go down bit by bit. This drink is the healthiest thing, and the greatestsustenance of anything you could drink in the world, because he whodrinks a cup of this liquid, no matter how far he walks, can go a whole daywithout eating anything else. (Anonymous Conqueror 1556: 306a, in Coeand Coe 86–87)The pouring from one vessel or jar to another was essential to produce a“froth” on the drink which was caused by the fats or “butter” in the grilledand ground cacao nibs. Much like the Maya, the Aztecs varied the preparationof chocolate with flavorings, spices, and other ingredients such asmaize; the ground seed of the ceiba or silk-cotton tree; dried and groundchili peppers; dried and ground flowers with vanilla; achiote (annatto) seed,which was used for its bright red color; allspice; the sapote seed; and as asweetener, honey or sap from the heart of the maguey plant. The drink wasgenerally confined to the elite—the royal house, lords and nobility, longdistancemerchants, and warriors. At banquets and the more ordinary mealsof the elite, chocolate was never sipped or drunk during the repast butserved at the end, in hemispherical bowls of polychrome ceramic, paintedor lacquered calabash gourds, or even gold.Cacao had not only economic and gastronomic value among the Aztecsbut also deep symbolic meaning. The cacao tree was part of the four directionsof their cosmology—being the Tree of the South, the direction of theLand of the Dead, associated with the color red, the color of blood—andthe cacao pod was used in rituals as a symbol for the human heart torn outin sacrifice. Sir Eric Thompson, the most influential Mayanist of the twentiethcentury, suggested that this might be due to the vague resemblance inshape between the two, but a more likely explanation is that both were repositoriesof precious liquids: blood and chocolate. The question of whetherchocolate had mind-altering effects remains unanswered. The biologistJohn West mentions that since pre-Columbian times the Zapotec Indians ofOaxaca have added the dried aromatic flowers of Quararibea funebris to achocolate drink called tejate, used to treat anxiety, fever, and coughs.INTRODUCTION IN EUROPEAt the time of the Conquest, the Spaniards did not like the chocolatedrink of the Aztecs, as they found it to taste bitter. In time, with the crossfertilizationof cultural elements between the Amerindian and Spanish cultures,chocolate was absorbed into the colonial cuisine of New Spain andeventually transplanted to Old Spain with a number of notable transformations.The drink was taken hot and regularly sweetened with cane sugar,and Old World spices such as cinnamon, anise seed, and black pepper weresubstituted for native Mesoamerican flavorings. The vogue of chocolate is,

136 Chocolatetherefore, complicit with sugar. Both were processed products of plants cultivatedin European tropical colonies through African slave labor.Regardless of how and when chocolate actually was introduced to theIberian Peninsula (some say with Cortés around 1528), with Spain’s monopolyon cacao production and trade in the New World, chocolate remainedan exclusively Spanish phenomenon for the next century. There isgeneral agreement that the drink became acclimatized in the Spanish courtduring the first half of the seventeenth century, where it was appreciatedas a kind of status symbol and a standard feature of Spanish courtly style.Before the days of Versailles, Madrid was the trend-setter for the rest of aristocraticEurope, and eventually chocolate’s secret spread to other Europeancountries, through marriages between the royals or via Catholic friars asthey traveled between monasteries. Schivelbusch (91) attributes the marriageof the Hapsburg princess Anna of Austria to Louis XIII in 1615 forbringing chocolate to the French court for she had grown up in Madrid.West (111), on the other hand, writes that French interest in the Americannovelty was cemented in 1660 when Marie-Thérèse of Spain married LouisXIV. Thus the true story and date of chocolate’s introduction to France, aswell as other countries, must be left to lore. Some say chocolate’s introductionto France came through the region of the southwest (Bayonne) and wasassociated with Sephardic Jews.THE CATHOLIC, SOUTHERN COUNTERPARTTO COFFEEOver the course of three centuries, chocolate was to conquer Europe,and with the new demand for the drink, cultivation of cacao spread to thecolonies. In The Tastes of Paradise, Schivelbusch refers to chocolate as theCatholic, southern European counterpart to coffee, which was a Protestant,northern drink. Its great nutritional value made it such a significant commodityin the Catholic world. “On the principle that liquids do not breakfasts (liquidum non frangit jejunum), chocolate could serve as a nutritionalsubstitute during fasting periods, and naturally this made it more or less[a] vital beverage in Catholic Spain and Italy” (87). In 1569 Pope Pius Vunleashed the controversy within the Church of whether chocolate shouldbe considered a drink, which would not break a fast, or a food, which wouldbreak a fast.What may have begun, then, as a clerical fasting drink, became a fashionablesecular beverage. The chocolate breakfast or morning chocolate, drunknot at the breakfast table, but ideally in the boudoir, in bed if possible, wasthe custom of the aristocracy in the ancien régime. Breakfast, in this case,did not start off a workday but rather marked the start of a day of carefullycultivated idleness. Breakfast chocolate had very little in common with thebreakfast coffee of the bourgeoisie, not only because the drinks were quitedifferent but because the etiquettes were as well. “Whereas the middle-classfamily sat erect at the breakfast table, with a sense of disciplined propriety,

Chocolate 137the essence of the chocolate ritual was fluid, lazy, languid motion. If coffeevirtually shook drinkers awake for the workday that lay ahead, chocolatewas meant to create an intermediate state between lying down and sittingup” (Schivelbusch 91).The idle class’s morning-long awakening and studied leisure over chocolateare represented in many European paintings of the time: Pietro Longhi’sLa cioccolata del mattino (Venetian, 1775–1780, Museo Correr, Venice)depicts an informal and relaxed scene of break fast participants, includingthe abbé and gallant, around the bed of the mistress of the house as chocolatecharms the conversation; Jean-Baptiste (le Vieux) Charpentier’s La familledu duc de Penthièvre, ou La tasse de chocolat (French, 1768, Châteauxde Versailles et de Trianon) reflects the tastes and manners of French societyof the Louis XV epoch; and Jean-Etienne Liotard’s most famous painting,Das Schokoladenmädchen or La Belle Chocolatière (Swiss, 1743–1745, “AlteMeister” Gallery in Dresden), is a pastel portrait reputedly of Anna Baltouf,which was later used as the trademark of the American firm, Baker’s Chocolate.The theme of the cup of chocolate was also taken up by French artistsEdgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.The association of chocolate with eroticism was a popular motif of Rococopaintings. According to an old but perhaps unfounded belief, chocolatewas an aphrodisiac and quite the opposite of coffee. Coffee gave to themind what it took from the body, whereas chocolate was considered todo the reverse, nourishing the body and one’s potency. “It represented theBaroque, Catholic acknowledgment of corporeal being as against Protestantasceticism” (Schivelbusch 1992, p. 92). The letters of Mme de Sévigné(1626–1696) captured the popular vision at the time that the drink contributedto feminine health and happiness; and chocolate was deemed to havemedicinal value as a remedy for numerous ailments.FEEDING DESIREBefore the early modern period, the social drinks of Europe had all beenalcoholic. Increased contact and direct trade with Asia, Africa, and Arabia,along with the so-called discovery of the Ameri cas, meant that Europeansbecame introduced to tea, coffee, and drinking chocolate. The popularity ofchocolate as a social and exotic beverage in the seventeenth century gaverise to the chocolate parlor or chocolate house. This was the meeting placefor an odd mixture of aristocracy and the demimonde; they were thoroughlyanti- puritanical and perhaps even bordello-like places. The chocolate housecontrasted with the coffeehouse with its bourgeois and puritanical characterwhere guests sat at a table, and the innkeeper served coffee out of a jugwith drinking bowls initially without handles. This calm scene contrastedwith behavior at a tavern where alcohol was served but was also differentfrom the chocolate parlor with its higher-class clientele and decidedly moreexpensive beverage. London’s first chocolate house opened in 1657, run bya Frenchman. Similar to the coffeehouses, which had been established a few

138 ChocolateMen and women drinking chocolate ina Leipzig coffeehouse, eighteenth century.Library of Congress.years earlier, chocolate houses increased in number and became centers ofpolitical, economic, and social debate for the wealthy and powerful.A great variety of new utensils and containers were developed in whichto serve these new drinks, first for great households or high society andthereafter for the popular market. The response of silver smiths, potters,and other artisans to the demand created by these new beverages can beseen in the exquisite creation of silver, gold, pewter, and porcelain objects.Chocolate pots (chocolatières) and services emerged, similar to tea and coffeeservices, but with slight decorative or functional changes. They had swizzlesticks (moulinets in French) to whip the heavy chocolate. The groovedwooden beater for the production of the much-prized foam must have beenintroduced from Spain to Mesoamerica during the sixteenth century, andthe Spanish molinillo later became important in chocolate preparation inEurope and America. Chocolate drinks were made by combining hot waterwith a dried cacao mass, which came in the form of cakes, rolls, or bricks.The water and cacoa mass were then beaten together. A special jug or chocolatepot was created, fitted with a lid pierced in the middle to hold thehandle of the swizzle stick, making the drink easier to mix.NEW FORMS AND PATTERNS OF CHOCOLATECONSUMPTIONExpansion of chocolate to the masses was accomplished in the nineteenthcentury, largely through changes in chocolate processing and

Chocolate 139mechanization as a result of the Industrial Revolution. The advent in 1828of hydraulic presses to extract cacao butter from the cacao mass allowedfor the development of cocoa powder for use in making hot chocolate.Hot chocolate could then be made by just adding hot water or hot milkto the soluble powder. Hence solid and liquid chocolate were no longerthe same. With this transformation, chocolate pots and services prettymuch disappeared from use, so that today they can command astronomicalprices.As chocolate became easier, faster, and less expensive to produce, theproduct penetrated into the daily life of the middle and working classes, in alteredform (i.e., cocoa powder andmanufactured chocolate bars), andit lost its class identity. Chocolatesoon became a nutritious morningdrink highly recommended bydoctors for children. For example,the French cocoa brand Banania(better known today for its use ofpromotional images that were derogatoryof people of color, muchlike that of Aunt Jemima for pancakemix or Uncle Ben for rice)was a popular breakfast drink consumedthroughout France and itscolonies and promoted by Frenchadvertising posters in the early twentiethcentury.Throughout much of the lastcentury, chocolate re mained largelystatic. Although the products didnot change, marketing becameincreasingly more important. Inthe 1980s, brands like Valrhona inFrance began to create chocolatemade from selected high-qualitybeans and regions in an attempt toemphasize their local character (orgout de terroir). Around the sametime, Lindt of Switzerland launcheda 70 percent cocoa content chocolatebar that was the first supermarketbrand to promote cocoapercentage. Thus began the newinterest in creating chocolate fromsingle-estate beans and cacao varietals(e.g., forestero, trinitario, criollo),The Evolution of the Chocolate BarA number of important dates in the evolution and popularizationof chocolate and the manufactured chocolate bar include thefollowing:1765—The first chocolate mill was established by John Hannon on theNeponset River in Dorchester, Massachusetts, using water power togrind beans (West 115). Hannon is credited with getting chocolateproduction started in North America and founding the company thatlater became Baker’s Chocolate (incorporated in 1895).1828—Conrad Van Houten developed a way of mechanically extractingmost of the fat from the cacao mass or cacao liquor, thus creatingcacao butter, which can be used for soap products, and rock cocoa,which can be ground into powder.1831—John Cadbury, a Quaker, begins manufacturing drinking chocolateand cocoa in the United Kingdom. He launched a business empirein the chocolate trade that has dominated this food line in Britainand the Commonwealth for over 200 years.1875—The world’s first milk chocolate is created by adding milk todark chocolate.1879—The Swiss Rodolphe Lindt added the conching stage to thegrinding process. By agitating the ground cacao mass for a periodof one to three days in a sloshing-and-kneading apparatus called aconche (inspired by the Mesoamerican metate, or concave grindingstone), a much smoother, finer, and more aromatic chocolate isproduced. Conched chocolate proved to be much easier for use inbaking.1894—The American company Hershey makes the first mass- produced,affordable chocolate bar.1913—The first filled chocolates appear, thus paving the way for fancyganaches, bonbons, and couverture chocolates.1930s—Famous candy bars, such as the Mars Bar and Kit Kat, areinvented. Other varieties and brands of chocolate products soon followedas chocolate candies became an inexpensive daily snack andlater an energy source and army ration in war time.

140 Chocolateas well as labeling specialty chocolate bars for eating or baking with thesource of the bean and the percentage of cacao.FROM THE LOCAL TO THE GLOBALIn the history of tropical commodities, it is frequently emphasized howpeople produce what they do not consume and consume what they do notproduce, thus pointing to the disconnect between producers, consumers,and product. The history of chocolate production provides exceptions tothis. In Mexico, the land of chocolate’s origin, cultural transformations andculinary inventions have led to the popularity and use of chocolate as aflavoring in savory dishes, including moles. Yet the cacao and chocolate adventureis not limited to the New World or Europe.In the seventeenth century cacao seedlings spread westward from Acapulcoto Manila, where cocoa became a traditional food. From the Philippines,it spread to the Dutch East Indies, Java, and Sumatra. Countries inAfrica, Asia, and the Pacific are now cacao producers. Today families inthe Philippines grow several trees in their yards and use the beans to makechocolate disks for home consumption or for sale in local markets. Thesedisks are the foundation for hot drinks or for champorado, a delicious dessertand breakfast dish consisting of warm sticky-rice sweetened with sugar andflavored with chocolate. The methods used for preparing cacao at home areidentical to those used by the Spanish in sixteenth-century Mexico. Beansare roasted in a wok over a wood or gas fire until the shells can be removed.They are then rolled and crushed lightly with a wooden roller or glass bottleand finally winnowed on a rattan tray to separate the shells from the nibs,or bean fragments. Everything is utilized in the process: the shells are fed tochickens, the pods to pigs or goats, and the nibs are ground in a corn mill tomake a warm paste that is punched into two-inch disks with a metal cutterand placed on a banana leaf to cool (West 109).Chocolate has entered seasonal festivities with both religious and secularsignificance. At Easter, chocolate bunnies and eggs symbolize fertilityin keeping with the Christian Lenten and agricultural calendars. St. Valentine’sDay on February 14 has become a contemporary chocolate-centered celebrationin the United States, although we do not know when this customdeveloped. Valentine’s season is a period of peak chocolate sales and chocolateadvertising, with some specialty chocolates costing as much as $2,000a pound. The custom has spread elsewhere, such as Japan, where it has becomea business obligation for women to present gifts of candy to their malecolleagues. In the search for excellence, chocolate gifts are becoming moreexpensive, trendy, and sought after, and the gifting of chocolate is closelyassociated with class. According to Mary Killen, who parses upper-crust etiquettein her advice column in the British magazine The Spectator, the sortof chocolate people bring as house presents when going for the weekendto an old-family country house is a litmus test of social class. She writes:“There is a fashion for Quality Streets,” referring to a low-rent chocolate

Chopsticks 141assortment available in every gas station in Britain, but buying an expensivecollection from Fortnum and Mason looks as if you tried too hard.Chocolate has come full circle as a new luxury commodity with buyersseparated by class and status. Consumption of chocolate is increasing in theWest, and new chocolate products are on the market. Much like wine, andto a lesser extent coffee, chocolate has become a cherished product—withtastings pairing chocolate varieties (dark, bittersweet, semi-sweet, and milkchocolate) with wine or port, while new empirical research seeks to discoverand cultivate the best cacao beans for processing into the finest, exclusivederivationchocolates.Further Reading: Bachollet, Raymond, Jean-Barthélemi Debost, Anne-ClaudeLelieur, and Marie-Christine Peyrière. NégriPub: l’image des Noirs dans la publicité.Paris: Éditions Somogy, 1992; Bourgaux, Albert. Quatre Siècles d’histoire du cacaoet du chocolat. Bruxelles: Office International du Cacao et du Chocolat, 1935;Coe, Sophie D., and Michael D. Coe. The True History of Chocolate. London:Thames & Hudson, 1996; Doutre-Roussel, Chloé. The Chocolate Connoisseur:For Everyone with a Passion for Chocolate. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin,2006; Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in ModernHistory. New York: Penguin Books, 1985; Presilla, Maricel E. The New Taste ofChocolate: A Cultural and Natural History of Cacao with Recipes. Berkeley, CA:Ten Speed Press, 2001; Scharffenberger, John, Robert Steinberg, Ann KruegerSpivak, and Susie Heller. The Essence of Chocolate: Recipes for Baking and Cookingwith Fine Chocolate. New York: Hyperion, 2006; Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Tastesof Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants. Translated fromthe German by David Jacobson. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992; Terrio, SusanJ. Crafting the Culture and History of French Chocolate. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2000; West, John A. “A Brief History and Botany of Cacao.” InChilies to Chocolate: Food the Americas Gave the World, edited by Nelson Fosterand Linda S. Cordell. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992, pp. 105–121;Yall, Sarah. “Classism Still Vexing British,” New York Times News Service,Deseret Morning News, April 27, 2007.Ellen M. SchnepelChopsticksChopsticks originated roughly five thousand years ago in China, when peoplebegan using paired sticks to lift hot pieces of food out of the cooking pot.From the Han period at least (200 B.C.), chopsticks as we know them becamepart of Chinese high culture. Like the writing brushes they resemble,the simple utensils symbolized a move from warrior values toward morehumanistic ideals. Knives would no longer be needed or welcomed duringthe meal, as the food had been cut into small pieces by the cook. Instead,meals would become opportunities for conversation and for the developmentand display of formal manners.

142 ChopsticksAs Chinese ascendancy spread across East Asia, so too did the use ofchopsticks (kuàizi in Mandarin, hashi in Japanese, jeotgarak in Korean, anddua in Vietnamese). For these Han-influenced cultures, chopsticks becamea marker of civilization.One explanation for why chopsticks became so prevalent within somecultures, while remaining unknown to others, is that chopsticks form one elementof a unified food system. Just as two chopsticks are needed to pick upa morsel of food, a small rice bowl is also needed, held close to the mouth.Chopsticks are for food served with rice, but not just any rice. The grainsneed to have particular qualities: sticky, but not so glutinous as to demandthe use of fingers.Chopsticks differ somewhat from country to country. Japanese chopsticksare shorter, lacquered, with pointed tips; Korean ones are mediumlength and often made of metal; and Chinese and Vietnamese chopsticksare longer, often made of un-lacquered wood or bamboo, and taper to bluntends. How one uses chopsticks also differs somewhat from country to country,although some broad rules apply generally.The key to manipulating chopsticks is to move only the upper one,using it to pinch the food against the lower one, which stays still. In this waya diner can dexterously procure a morsel from a common serving bowl, dipit into a shared sauce bowl, and bring it to an individual’s bowl. A pair ofchopsticks may also be used to break off a bit from a large, tender portionof food, or to sweep rice or noodles into one’s mouth. Chopsticks alwaysoperate as two parts of a whole. Like scissors, when they are at rest, they arekept together, lying parallel to each other. If one chopstick falls to the floor,etiquette says one should get a new pair.When eating as part of a group, chopsticks are used to pick food fromcommunal bowls, placed within everyone’s reach. To avoid collisions andimproprieties, diners should exercise great alertness to each other’s intentions:they should plan out their own motions with care, while beingprepared to make sudden adjustments to avoid any unexpected mid-air encounter.They should also select their morsel quickly and elegantly: one’schopsticks may not hover above the table, nor poke around a dish, nor speara morsel of food.Chopsticks are used for certain gestures, such as when the host invitesguests to start eating, or when guests hold them up flat to thank the hostfor a delicious meal. Aside from those specific customs, however, chopsticksshould not be used for gesticulating or pointing. Chopsticks should notbe used to pass food from one pair of chopsticks to another, or should notbe stuck upright in a bowl. Both of these resemble funeral customs and arethus distasteful at a meal.In China, Japan, and Vietnam, chopsticks serve to push rice into themouth from a bowl held right below or at the lips. In Korea, however, therice bowl should not leave the table, and people often eat their rice witha spoon. In Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese etiquette, people may takefood from the common dishes with their chopsticks reversed, to avoid

Christmas 143putting the eating end into the shared food. In Korea, however, the chopsticksmay not be turned around—the thicker ends are viewed as unsanitary,having touched one’s fingers. In all of these cultures, chopsticks ideally haveonly touched the piece the diner has selected, which virtually eliminatesany chance of contamination whether or not the chopsticks are turnedaround. Still, some hosts provide special serving chopsticks to get aroundthe difficulty.Even within a single country, not everyone agrees on chopstick etiquette.One question is where to put the chopsticks after eating. Some saythe chopsticks should be placed across the rice bowl, parallel to each otherand parallel to one’s body. Others insist they should never lie on the ricebowl, but only on a chopsticks rest, perpendicular to one’s body. Still otherssay they belong on the table, parallel to one’s body, with the tips to the left.The best chopsticks advice for those being entertained is to wait for othersto start before you do, watch carefully, and do your best to follow yourhosts’ example.Further Reading: Hashi-San. Chopsticks: An Owner’s Manual. Berkeley, CA: ConariPress, 1991; “Chopsticks.” Origins Of Chinese Food Culture. Illustrated by FuChunjiang, and translated by Qiu Yao Hong. Singapore: Asiapac Books, 2003.Erica J. PetersChristmasThe Christmas season conjures all sorts of images of holiday feasting, fromthe “visions of sugarplums” immortalized in Clement Moore’s 1823 poem,“The Night before Christmas,” to the great roast turkey that formed thecenterpiece of the Cratchit family dinner in Charles Dickens’s A ChristmasCarol. Steaming plum puddings, gingerbread men, eggnog, candy canes,and cookies all have honored places in the culinary lore of Christmas, andthe contemporary Christmas-keeper often assumes that Christmas is themost traditional, joyous, and family-oriented holiday. Yet much of the historyof Christmas celebrations is a complex story involving religious conflictand class struggles, a far cry from the benign domesticity of popular imagination.In centuries past, assuming that one’s religious scruples allowedthe celebration of Christmas, the question was what form should thoseentertainments take.TO CELEBRATE OR NOT?Part of the reason why Christmas got off to a rocky start was that earlyChristians were unsure of when Christ was born; different Church leaderssuggested dates in every month of the year. The first linkage of Christmas toDecember 25 traces to 336, when a Roman Church calendar made that datea Nativity Feast. The Catholic Church may have chosen this early winter

144 Christmasdate to coincide with the pre-existing pagan holidays of either Saturnalia ordies natalis invicte solis (the birth of the conquering sun). The former wascelebrated in mid-December, whereas the latter marked the winter solstice,which fell on December 25 according to the Julian calendar. Saturnalia wasa beloved Roman holiday, marked by feasting on sweetmeats and pork anddrinking much wine, as well as public spectacles, gambling, and ribald behavior.As the Roman Empire evolved from a pagan to a Christian statein the third and fourth centuries, these December holidays morphed frompagan to Christian observance.Christmas has been a season of feasting since the early Middle Ages. In567, the Council of Tours proclaimed the period from Christmas to Epiphany(January 6) a feasting season, giving rise to the Twelve Days of Christmas.Twelfth Night continues to mark the end of the Christmas season in manyplaces, particularly those with a strong Catholic heritage. Others see NewYear’s as the endpoint of the season, although early December feasts such asthose of Saints Nicholas (celebrated by the Dutch on December 6) and Lucia(celebrated by the Swedes on December 13), move the Christmas seasonforward. By the millennium, European rulers declared Christmas a season ofpeace on earth; King Ethelred of England (991–1061) promulgated laws thatall Christian men temporarily lay down arms during the Christmas holidays,and Christmas truces have been a recurring battlefield intermission.The Christmas season came at the end of the agricultural year, coincidingwith the final task of slaughtering animals that could not “overwinter”and salting their meat to last until the spring. Slaughtering generallystarted in November and continued until the weather made it impossibleto keep animals in pasture, often stretching until Christmas. Fresh meat,often the last of the season, was plentiful on the great feudal estates thatformed the core of medieval society. Moreover, rents from tenant farmersoften became due, with the peasantry delivering barnyard animals or cropsin payment for the right to cultivate part of the lord’s land for themselves.Lords of the manor would host great feasts during the season, or otherwisesupply food and drink to their vassals and tenant farmers. The exact formand distribution of foodstuffs could vary depending on one’s social status,and the food exchanges helped cement bonds of interdependence and reinforcedthe hierarchical nature of medieval society. The scale of the medievalChristmas feast in England was impressive, at least if one was hosted by agreat lord. Henry III feted more than 1,000 knights and peers in 1252; tohelp the king, the archbishop of York provided 600 fat oxen and significantfunds to defray the cost. Richard II, infamous for the extravagance of hiscourt, required the daily slaughter of 26 oxen, 300 sheep, and numberlessfowl to feed an estimated 10,000 retainers during the Christmas season,with 300 servers employed to keep the food and drink flowing. Among themost famous English medieval dishes associated with Christmas was brawn,the roasted head and shoulders of wild boar: the dish was seasonal and signaledthe end of the hunting season; by the sixteenth century, the forestshad been depleted of wild boar, so that domesticated boar was substituted

Christmas 145as a requisite for the elite Christmas dinner. Those lower on the social scaledid not dine as elegantly, although they did receive food gifts at Christmas:fourteenth-century records indicate a hearty meal provided to tenant farmersconsisting of white bread (an elite form of the staple normally availableonly to the well-to-do), fresh beef and bacon with mustard, chicken pottage,cheese, and ale—as much as could be drunk on Christmas day.This bottomless tankard of ale sheds light on another aspect of theChristmas season, which was the licentious behavior and drunkenness thatwas accepted as part of the holiday. While more traditional tournaments,pageants, and jousts were part of royal holiday entertainments, great tolerancealso was shown for extraordinary behavior that otherwise would havedestroyed the fabric of medieval society. Cross-dressing, bizarrely costumedpageants, and the deliberate inversion of the accepted order were all partof the medieval English Christmas. Boy Bishops and Lords of Misrule, thetemporary appointment of youths and social inferiors to positions of mockauthority for the holiday season, could be found through the realm in wellto-dochurches and households, demanding boons, often sweets and drink,from the established Church and political authorities. More ominous weremummers, roving bands of disguised men who could knock at one’s door,barge into the home, and perform a brief dance or offer a small present; inexchange, mummers expected food and drink or other valuables. At the endof the Twelve Days of Christmas, exhausted from the constant partying, everyonewas supposed to return to their traditional roles, although pockets ofsocial disorder sometimes lingered. Medieval English Christmas was oftenmore secular and vulgar than religious and spiritual.Christmas merriment in an old English manor, 1500s. © North Wind/North WindPicture Archives—All rights reserved.

146 ChristmasReligious strife brought on by the Reformation interrupted the celebrationof Christmas in many Protestant countries. In the Puritans’ zeal tostamp out all traces of Catholicism, the public celebration of Christmas wasdeclared illegal during the English civil wars; similarly, the Massachusetts BayColony outlawed Christmas celebrations between 1659 and 1681, and NewAmsterdamers were forbidden to gather in public with candy, drink, andother eatables on St. Nicholas’s Day. Christmas maintained its vibrancy inCatholic countries and among Protestant denominations such as the Anglicans.In America, however, Puritans, Quakers, Calvinists, Presbyterians, andCongregationalists were likely to ignore the Christmas season through themid- to late nineteenth century because of its “popish” connotations. Foodstuffsthat were once common but are now associated almost exclusivelywith the Christmas feast, mincemeat pies and plum puddings, were particularlysuspect when served at Christmas: the rich, spiced concoctions werethought to symbolize the gifts of the Magi to the Christ Child. Popular loreholds that the Puritans made unsuccessful efforts to suppress them as holidayfare because of their evocations. By the nineteenth century, American cookerywriters such as Sarah Josepha Hale condemned excessive indulgence inmincemeats and plum puddings on physiological, not theological, grounds.She felt the mixtures impeded digestion and urged concerned housewivesto limit consumption to the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays.Those who celebrated Christmas, however, did so with gusto. Englishcookbook author Robert May, in his Accomplish’t Cook (1685), listsa bill of fare for Christmas asWigilia, Polish Christmas FeastDespite the social and political upheaval in Poland in recentgenerations, or perhaps because of it, the Polish celebration ofBoze Narodzenie (Christmas) is essentially unchanged from acentury ago. In this overwhelmingly Catholic nation, the holidayis preceded by the four-week liturgical season of Advent. Christmasparties and get-togethers, making and sharing snacks andsweets, would be socially odd and religiously offensive.This spirit of anticipation culminates on the day before Christmaswith a dawn-to-dusk fast. Last-minute preparations includesetting the table with a spotless white tablecloth over a scatteringof hay, to symbolize the holy, sinless Christ Child placed in amanger. When the first star is spotted in the sky, the festivities ofWigilia (from the same Latin root as the English word vigil ) begin.The evening meal is the centerpiece of Wigilia. Traditionallyit’s shared only with family. The exception is an extra place setat the table for the unexpected guest—a stranger or someonewith no family of their own. This custom hearkens to the Gospelaccounts of Jesus’ parents, looking for lodgings in Bethlehembefore the child was born. In some families, the empty settinghonors deceased or faraway loved ones.celebrated “before Hospitalityleft this Nation.” May liststwo courses of dishes destinedfor the aristocratic tablethat boggle the imagination.In the first course were some20 dishes, including oysters, theobligatory collar of brawn, a“grand Sallet,” roast swan, mincedpies, a kid with pudding in hisbelly, a turkey roasted and stuckwith cloves, and two large capons,one larded. The second coursewas a similarly dizzying kaleidoscope,including a swan pie,dishes of anchovies, mushroomsand “cavieate,” a standing tart ofpuff pastry with preserved fruits,dried meats’ [calves’] tongues,jellies, and dishes of exotic, importedoranges and lemons.

Christmas 147American tables likewisegroaned with domestic and wildfowl, game, meat pies, oysters, preservedvegetables, and sweets; thediaries of William Byrd II, the governorof Virginia, describes guestssitting down to Christmas dinner in1709 of “turkey and chine [meat,possibly pork, attached to thebackbone of an animal], roast applesand wine, tongue and udder,”as well as other meats and seafood.The dinner was preceded bya hunt, and outdoor noisy revelries.In the context of the Southernplantation, such raucouspartying largely was innocent; inthe cities, however, especially asurbanization and industrializationbegan to take hold, Christmasentertainments took on amore sinister cast. In cities suchas New York and Philadelphia,the old habit of mumming continuedto be practiced, but nowthe participants were underemployedgangs of youths roamingthe streets and demanding“Christmas cheer,” that is, food,drink, and money, from intimidatedmiddle-class householders.Gunfire, public drunkenness, andparades with ghoulish, crossdressingcharacters were commonin small villages and larger townsalike, but they often verged out ofBefore the meal, the head of the family offers a prayer ofthanksgiving. Special wafers of unleavened bread, called oplatek,are broken and shared around the table, a sign of family unity,harmony, and forgiveness. It’s a deeply emotional ritual, as familymembers wish each other peace and blessings for the yearahead.The Wigilia dinner is a simple but ample feast. No meat isserved. A typical menu includes fish, especially pickled herringand carp. (It’s said that the bones of the carp, carefully removed,resemble a cross, a hammer, and nails, foreshadowing Christ’scrucifixion.) The red beet soup barszcz (borscht) may be servedwith sour cream. Kapusta (sauerkraut) is made with dried mushrooms.For kutia, a favorite dessert, cooked wheat and poppyseeds are sweetened with honey and studded with fruit and nuts.Also found are boiled potatoes, noodles with a poppy seed sauce,and fruit compote of dried plums and apples.FURTHER READINGHughes, Melissa. “Polish Christmas Traditions.” Senior News & Views.Dec. 2003, p. 4.Klos-Sokol, Laura. Shortcuts to Poland. Warsaw: International PublishingService, 2005.Knab, Sophie Hodorowitz, and Mary Ann Knab. Polish Customs, Traditions,and Folklore. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1996.Krysa, Czeslaw Michal, S.T.L. A Polish Christmas Eve: Traditions AndRecipes, Decorations And Song. Lewiston, NY: CWB Press, 2003.Nowakowski, Jacek, and Marlene Perrin, eds. Polish Touches: Recipesand Traditions. Iowa City, IA: Penfield Press, 1996.Strybel, Robert. “Polish Christmas Game (or Quiz).” Polish News. [online],Dec. 2005.Strybel, Robert. “Recipes.” Polish American Journal [online]. January 15,2007. http://www.polamjournal.com/Library/Recipes/recipes.html.control in anonymous urban settings. These public disturbances led manywho held no theological objection to Christmas to question whether thetraditional community holiday was antiquated and ill-suited to the modernworld. Adding to the objectionable nature of the holiday was the perceivedprofligacy of the upper classes at Christmas. Evening collationswith pyramids of candied fruits piled high, sweet cakes, great bowls ofpunch, and cold platters of meats refreshed well-to-do Philadelphians atholiday balls in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, much to the consternationof those who saw immoral waste in the giddy atmosphere.Christine Venzon

148 ChristmasCHRISTMAS AS A FAMILY HOLIDAYThe Victorian focus on the family rescued Christmas from extinction,although it changed the nature of Christmas from a public festival in whichall classes mixed, often with topsy-turvy social inversions, to one celebratedin the bosom of the home and with friends. Dickens’s A Christmas Carol(1843) provided the model for the Christmas celebration in the second halfof the nineteenth century, and the images he drew still resonate nostalgically.One of Dickens’s legacies was his prescription of the family dinner asa central component of Christmas. Complete with a single, glorious roastbird, either the goose in the Dream of Christmas Present or the turkey ofEbenezer Scrooge’s real life gift to the Cratchit family, Dickens created anappealing meal affordable by most without reliance on the charity of a feudallord. Mashed potatoes, gravy, sage-and-onion stuffing, and applesauce,all crowned by a perfectly boiled plum pudding, became standard fare forChristmas dinner in Anglophone lands. Within a few years of the publicationof A Christmas Carol, cookery writers in America began recommendingChristmas menus that had, at their core, the Dickens formula. For thosewith limited means, turkey would be the only meat offered and a specialtreat. Cheaper versions of the spice-heavy plum puddings were created sothat virtually everyone could partake of this dish that had moved from regularfare to its status as a Christmas icon: indeed, many recipes now weredenominated “Christmas plum pudding.” For those with heavier purses,copious banquets reminiscent of the bountiful meals of the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries still held sway. It was not uncommon for midlatenineteenth century cookbooks to recommend multiple meat or poultrydishes, although the turkey, sometimes described as of “uncommon size,”now traditionally formed the centerpiece, supported by poultry pies, boiledham, roast pig, roast or braised beef, or smaller game birds. The essence ofChristmas dinner, however, was turkey, potatoes with gravy, cranberry orapple sauce, and mince pies, and sharing in this menu was part of what itmeant to be an American: from the public kitchens feeding immigrants onEllis Island to prisons and soup kitchens, newspapers diligently reportedthat all of the downtrodden were given a charitable Christmas dinner composedof these elements.By the late nineteenth century, chic hostesses and fashionable restaurantswere moving away from strict homage to the Dickensian meal, althoughit would remain popular in cookery books geared to middle- andworking-class households through much of the twentieth century. Forthe well-heeled, a very self-conscious evocation of a romanticized medievalfeast, complete with pageantry, became an alternative Christmastradition. As part of the neo-Gothic revival, nineteenth-century antiquarianwriters explored English customs from the medieval and baroque periods,which were then popularized in the burgeoning national presses.American magazines such as St. Nicholas gave detailed instructions forcreating a medieval-style celebration, complete with costumes and even

Christmas 149recommendations to find a compliant dog to nap beneath the dining tablein homage to the Middle Ages. Elite cookbook authors recommended a“noble roast of venison” in lieu of the turkey, and by the early twentiethcentury, virtually any meat was considered appropriate as the centerpieceof Christmas dinner.Menus for Christmas dinner shrank by the early twentieth century, asdietary concerns and the decline of domestic help in all but the wealthiesthomes changed the way most people ate. To compensate for the lessabundant choices on the table, Christmas dinners became an opportunityto fashion foods into edible totems. Cookbooks boasted fanciful dishes inthe red and green colors emblematic of the holiday, sporting recipes forgrape salad with guava jelly; tomato aspic with green pepper rings; redand-greenfrosted cakes; and even grapefruit wreaths, in which grapefruitshells were filled with sweetened and sherried orange and grapefruit segments.The edges of the grapefruit shells were coated with green-tintedsugar; maraschino cherries dotted the center to form poinsettias; and silverdragées were placed on the sugared edge to emulate mercury glass ornaments.Another elaborate creation was the Christmas pear salad, a favoriteof the Fannie Farmer cookbooks. It involved cutting a pear into an evergreenshape, coating it with green mayonnaise, inserting slivered almond“candles,” and placing cream cheese cubes at the base; when painted withribbons of food coloring, the cubes looked like wrapped presents underthe tree.TRADITIONAL CHRISTMAS FOODS AND DRINKOnce Christmas was reestablished as a common holiday, certain traditionalfoods that otherwise were falling from fashion became associated nostalgicallywith the Christmas season. Most of these seasonal treats are bakedgoods and confections, echoing the abundant use of costly sugar during theChristmas season in late medieval and baroque kitchens. Already mentionedis the plum pudding ( plum meaning virtually any dried fruit, not the freshfruits of the prunus genus). Although recipes varied greatly over the centuries,plum pudding generally was an elaborate concoction of candied ordried fruits, especially raisins, figs, or currants; animal fat, usually suet; spicesand sweeteners; eggs; bread crumbs; flour; and some form of alcohol thatwas gently boiled in a pudding cloth. Plum puddings were served flambéedwith liquor. Traditionally garnished with sprigs of holly and marched intothe dining hall with great fanfare, the dish preceded the boar’s head in alate medieval meal. It moved to the dessert course in the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries, with the increasing segregation of sweet from savorydishes. Plum pudding continued its distinctive place in the Christmas repertory,notwithstanding American cookery writer Eliza Leslie’s claim in her1857 New Cookery Book that the “foolish” custom of setting plum puddingsablaze was dying out. Fashionable ladies’ magazines such as Harper’s Bazaarkept the blazing plum pudding alive in the early twentieth century as a

150 Christmasspectacular dish to parade into a darkened dining room, and the flamingdish still appears on restaurant Christmas menus.Another food common from medieval times through the nineteenthcentury was mincemeat. Like the plum pudding, its composition changed,but traditionally it was comprised of bits of finely chopped fish or meat(often leftover or from thetongue, other organs, or evenPreparing Plum PuddingPreparation for this time-intensive undertaking begins severalweeks before Christmas. One custom says that plum pudding isprepared on “Stir-Up Sunday,” one week before the start of theAdvent season. Named for a prayer in the Anglican Church thatasks that the faith of the people be “stirred up,” Stir-Up Sundaytradition dictates that each family member take a turn tossing ina handful of ingredients, stirring the pudding batter clockwise,and making a wish.Once mixed, the batter is placed in a covered ceramicor tin pudding mould and gently steamed in a water bath forseveral hours. The steam melts the fat in the beef suet andcauses the flour particles to expand creating a dense, cake-likeconsistency.Once prepared, plum pudding is often aged for severalweeks and then served drenched with brandy and ignited as thegrand culmination of the Christmas feast. It is frequently accompaniedby hard sauce, a sweet topping of whipped butter, citruszest, liquor, and confectioners sugar that melts into the warmpudding on contact.Various legends surround the preparation and decoration ofthe plum pudding. A branch of holly adorning the dessert is believedto ward off witches. Decorative holly branches might besaved from one season to the next to light the fire for steamingthe next year’s plum pudding.Modern recipes may suggest placing a coin or trinket into thebatter before the plum pudding is steamed, which is supposed toafford good luck to the guest who finds it in his or her portion.FURTHER READINGCrump, William D. The Christmas Encyclopedia. 2nd edition. Jefferson,NC, and London: McFarland & Company, 2006.Gulevich, Tanya. Encyclopedia of Christmas & New Years Celebrations:Over 240 Alphabetically Arranged Entries Covering Christmas, NewYear’s, and Related Days of Observance. 2nd edition. Detroit, MI:Omnigraphics, 2003.Rombauer, Irma von Starkloff, Marion Rombauer Becker, and EthanBecker. Joy of Cooking. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007.T. W. Barrittthe “scraggy neck”), suet, choppednuts and apples, dried fruits,spices, and sweeteners that werebaked in individual pastries orlarger pies for sharing. In the earliestrecipe collec tions, mincemeatswere listed among themeat pastries; like plum pudding,the dish began its migrationto the dessert courseby the eighteenth cen tury.Among the earliest Christ masmenus published in America,Mrs. Crowen’s American Lady’sCookery Book (1847) prescribedamong the desserts“two very large and ornamentalmince pies, one sufficientlylarge that each of the companymay be helped from it,in token of common interest.”By the early twentieth century,all vestiges of meat largely hadbeen dropped from the recipes,leading to the renaming of thepies “mince.”Fruitcakes originated nolater than the Middle Ages asfruited breads, slightly leavenedby barm, the yeasty by-productof fermenting malt liquors. Oldvariations on this theme includethe panettone and stollen, enrichedyeasted breads speckledwith dried or candied fruits.By the eighteenth century, thenew technique of texturizingcakes by the lengthy beating ofeggs, butter, and sugar spread:

Martha Washington’s cookery notebook contains a “great cake” recipe withcandied and dried fruits, spices, and spirits, and by the nineteenth century,cookbooks abounded with recipes for such cakes, which might be called“Christmas,” “Twelfth Night,” “Great,” “Wedding,” or “Bride’s” cake. The laborinvolved (recipes often called for 30 minutes to an hour of beating) and thegreat quantities often used meant that these cakes were prepared for celebratoryoccasions when large numbers of guests would be present. They oftenwere iced and decorated, and some recipes called for molasses to darken thecake, resembling the modern fruit cake. By the 1830s, recipes denominatedfruit cake began to appear. The sugar and alcohol in the cakes gave them along shelf life, one that has resulted in the urban legend that fruit cakes arepassed from generation to generation.Gingerbread is another treat with origins at least as far back as the MiddleAges; late fourteenth-century English manuscripts offer several recipesfor unleavened mixtures of ground ginger, honey, and breadcrumbs, oftencolored with saunders to give a warm reddish brown tone to the confection,while in Germany and Switzerland, Lebkuchen and Läckerli, heavily spicedhoney wafers, were pressed into ornate molds to form intricate confections.Gingerbreads were made for a variety of holidays, including Christmas; legendcredits Elizabeth I with bestowing highly decorated gingerbread menon courtiers, although gingerbread figures had been made earlier on the continentand their production eventually became the prerogative of Nuremburg’sLebkuchen Baker’s Guild, as well as a highly protected product forFrench bakers in Paris, Reims, and Dijon. In particular, German immigrantsto America brought recipes for these cookies, although most homemade varietieswere plain cookies until the later nineteenth century, when cheapermolds and cutters made articulated shapes affordable for the average home.Molasses often substituted for more expensive honey in cookie recipes incolonial areas under British control. Cookies made with molasses resulted ina crisper cookie than those made with honey. Gingerbread men, decoratedwith royal icing, continue to be used as ornaments on Christmas trees, amodern holdover from the nineteenth-century custom of decorating treeswith candies and small edibles.Gingerbread houses are thought to be German in origin and may haveeither reflected or inspired the folk tale of Hansel and Gretel. The gingerbreadhouse is a lingering expression of the medieval subtlety, a food sculpturedesigned to entertain elite diners between courses. Constructed of stiffgingerbread and decorated with sugar, candies, and other edibles, the housesform a centerpiece that is consumed at the end of the holiday season. Oncethe province of highly skilled pastry makers and still the subject of competitionamong bakers, simplified versions have become a parent-child activityor the focus of holiday craft parties.In addition to gingerbreads, there is a tremendous range of Christmascookies. Traditional Christmas cookies are flavored with spices: Englishjumbles (anise or caraway), Dutch Speculaas and German Spekulatius andPfeffernüsse (mixed spices), Springerle (anise), and the “Christmas cookie,”Christmas 151

152 ChristmasSanta Claus on a rooftop carrying a decoratedChristmas tree, 1860s. © NorthWind/North Wind Picture Archives—All rights reserved.likely of Dutch origins, first identified in Amelia Simmon’s 1796 AmericanCookery (coriander seed). But as chocolate and vanilla came to dominatepastry-making in the later nineteenth century, so too, did these flavors jointhe pantheon of Christmas cookies. By the 1960s, cookies of virtually anydescription were baked for the holiday. The custom of “cookie exchanges”was first documented in 1963 in the Betty Crocker’s Cooky Book, in whichhousewives brought dozens of cookies to a party early in the holiday season,swapped cookies with the other guests, and enjoyed coffee and a samplingof the baked confections. The idea rapidly took hold, with ladies’and cookery magazines promoting the parties as part of the neighborlycelebration of Christmas.Sugarplums, small candied seeds and nuts, have been served as part ofwell-to-do dinners and banquets since the late Middle Ages; in the nineteenthcentury, they were associated with Christmas in the popular imaginationthrough works of art such as Moore’s Christmas poem and the 1892ballet The Nutcracker, with its Sugar Plum Fairy. Moreover, small candiesheld in little baskets or paper cones were among the earliest and most populardecorations for Christmas trees. The trees originated as table-top ornamentsand became popular during the nineteenth century, although theyquickly outgrew their table size to become the full height trees popularnow. The earliest versions of these hard sugar candies were small, white, andcame in a variety of flavors. In the twentieth century, the familiar peppermint-flavoredred or green-striped disks or canes were perfected. Popularlore reports that these stick candies originated in Germany in the seventeenthcentury as the brainchild of a choirmaster determined to amuse hisyoung charges with little shepherd’s crooks during long services. The storyis charming but dubious due to the high cost of sugar and laborious stepsneeded to refine sugar at that time; indeed, through the first half of thetwentieth century, even after refined, inexpensive sugar was widely available,

Christmas 153candy canes remained a handmade confection distributed locally. Only inthe 1950s, when a mechanical process was invented for their manufacture,did candy canes turn into a common Christmas treat.On a grander scale, elaborate sugar sculptures designed for Christ masgraced wealthy tables well into the nineteenth century. Whether made ofpure sugar or marzipan, these sugar works could be architectural centerpieces,such as the church dome illustrated in the December 1858 issue ofGodey’s Lady’s Book describing “Christmas for the Rich” or smaller figuresplaced atop of Twelfth Night Cakes, especially in England. These largecakes were often sent as gifts and formed a decorative focus of the Christmastable, to be consumed at the end of the holiday season, much in the natureof the German-inspired gingerbread houses that have proved more popularin the United States. Another illusion food is the French bûche de noël,a sponge cake that is rolled, iced, and decorated to look like a snow-coveredyule log. Meringue mushrooms, marzipan leaves and acorns, and other forestflora garnish the striated buttercream frosted that evokes the bark of anoak tree.Two drinks are uniquely prepared at Christmas, and both have a longand murky history. Wassail likely originates in Anglo-Saxon and pagan observancesand was related to health and fertility rites deemed auspiciousaround the winter solstice or shortly thereafter. Offerings were made togods by pouring libations (spiced wine, ciders, or ales, often with toastedbread, cakes, or roasted apples added to the mix) at the bases of fruit treesto insure an abundant crop the following year. The term wassail is Old Englishfor “your health,” and the beverage was gulped from great bowls thatwere passed among the participants. The tradition continues in rural England,although there is little evidence of it in colonial America, where rumpunches and harder liquors were preferred holiday drinks.Eggnogs (called in earlier times syllabubs and possets) are rich, dairybasedalcoholic drinks that date back hundreds of years and take variousforms: milk or cream is combined with spirits, cider, or ale. Sometimeswhipped egg whites would be folded in, and the mixture frequentlywas garnished with fresh nutmeg, an especially popular spice in the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries. Eggnogs were essential Christmas morningrefreshments, especially in the antebellum South, where the plantationmaster mixed the nog himself to be brought to guests still in bed. Soldiers’diaries from the Civil War describe drinking eggnogs on Christmas morningbefore rising, while in the North, revelers parading in the streets demandedthe highly alcoholic drink from homeowners and shopkeepers. The origin ofthe term eggnog is debated; it may be a contraction of egg and grog, or it mayrefer to the noggin, a wooden cup in which the egg-based drink was servedin colonial America.Further Reading: Hadfield, Miles, and John Hadfield. The Twelve Days of Christmas.London: Cassell, 1961; Hammond, P. W. Food and Feast in Medieval England.Phoenix Mill, Gloucestershire, England, and Dover, NH: Alan Sutton Publishing,1993; Henisch, Bridget Ann. Cakes and Characters: An English Christmas

154 Civil WarTradition. London: Prospect Books, 1984; Kaufman, Cathy. “The Ideal ChristmasDinner.” Gastronomica 4:4 (2004), 17–25; Kaufman, Cathy. “Christmas.” In TheOxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America. Edited by Andrew F. Smith.Volume 1, pp. 246–250. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004; Miles, ClementA. Christmas Customs and Traditions: Their History and Significance. New York:Dover Publications, 1976 [republication of Christmas in Ritual and Tradition,Christian and Pagan, 1912]; Nissenbaum, Stephen. The Battle for Christmas.New York: Alfred A. Knopf House, 1996; Olver, Lynn, ed. Food Timeline. http://www.foodtimeline.org/christmasfood.html [an excellent Web site with manylinks and bibliographic information]; Rodgers, Rick. Christmas 101: Celebratethe Holiday Season From Christmas to New Year’s. New York: Broadway Books,1999; Shoemaker, Alfred L. Christmas in Pennsylvania: A Folk-Cultural Study.Kutztown, PA: Pennsylvania Folklife Society, 1959; Snyder, Phillip V., and RoyCoggin. The Christmas Tree Book: The History of the Christmas Tree and AntiqueChristmas Tree Ornaments. Harmondsworth, England, and New York: Penguin,1977; Turgeon, Charlotte. Cooking for Christmas. New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1950; Weaver, William Woys, and Jeremy Orabona. The Christmas Cook:Three Centuries of American Yuletide Sweets. New York: HarperPerennial, 1990.Cathy K. KaufmanCivil WarSOUTHERN HOSPITALITYSouthern hospitality set the American standard for entertaining duringthe middle of the nineteenth century. It was born of necessity in theSouth where sweeping distances between plantations produced few travelersand left the intervening countryside bereft of the small villages, taverns,inns, and other so-called public houses that dotted the New Englandlandscape. While the North had grown in the number of towns and eatingestablishments found along its entangled by-ways during the nineteenthcentury, the South had developed largely as a series of county seats—populated only on so-called court days and anchoring a widespread networkof largely self- sufficient plantations. Few accommodations appearedanywhere in the South except in large cities like Charleston or New Orleans,or along the most heavily used commercial lines of travel. FrederickLaw Olmstead traveling in the South in the 1850s noted that during asix-month journey he had come upon public accommodations less thanonce a week.It was a generally recognized custom in the South that a traveler mightask for lodging at any private home happened upon as nightfall approached.There was often a considerable gap between the expectation of hospitality andits reality, however. Some Northern travelers found Southern homeownersstandoffish or rude, and their fare wretched. Southerners deeply resentedsuch representations. Part of the problem arose from inaccurate Northernexpectations that hospitality meant receiving and entertaining guests

without remuneration, and they were repelled by forthright demands forpayment. Southerners saw hospitality as the kindness extended to a completestranger with regard to food and shelter (much like that expected ofa tavern or inn keeper), and they had no compunction about declaring anexact price expected of an approaching traveler who suddenly appeareduninvited at their door. Many reports of inhospitable Southern homeownerscan be regarded as mere misunderstandings of this sort, but as the secessioncrisis loomed larger at least some Southerners vowed to show any Yankeewho approached seeking hospitality just how paltry the situation could be.One of the best newspaper sketch artists of the Civil War period wasWilliam Waud, a Northerner. Waud worked for Leslie’s Illustrated Magazineand proved particularly adept at ingratiating himself with the socialelite of South Carolina during the antebellum period. Because of his paper’sgenerally uncommitted stance on secession, and its balanced coverage ofthe war thereafter, wherever Waud traveled he found individuals to be cooperativeand helpful. The paper’s owner, Frank Leslie, instructed Waud touse the utmost care in making his sketches and to avoid giving any indicationof political sympathies toward one side or the other when staying in aSouthern household. Waud noted that he usually received hospitality freeof charge if the household was one of means; or that he was asked to payonly a token charge of just one dollar for which he was furnished withsupper, lodging, breakfast, and fodder for his horse.Travelers from the South, especially those of “quality,” may have beentreated differently below the Mason-Dixon Line than those from othersections of the country. Southerner travelers commonly reported warm receptions,which always found “room for one more” in even the humblestabodes, and gracious hostesses, who seemed to be able to repeat the miracleof loaves and fishes for any number of unexpected guests.Certainly, what elevated the concept of Southern hospitality to its exaltedstatus was the repeated report of lavish presentations and courtesiesextended to invited guests, distant relations, and sudden visitors, who presentedformal letters of introduction to prominent plantation owners. Suchguests were a grade above the itinerant traveler and could anticipate a fineroom, the assistance of servants or slaves in preparing their dress, luxuriantpresentations of abundant food and drink, and the free use of the plantation’samenities such as the use of a horse or a carriage, access to the library,and freedom among the gardens and grounds.Period letters and journals often described a daily regimen of multicoursemeals that in other sections of the country would normally be reservedfor holiday feasts or special occasions. One breakfast descriptionfrom the late antebellum period included cornbread, buckwheat cakes,boiled chicken, bacon, eggs, hominy, fish (both fresh and pickled), oystercasserole, and beefsteak all served at a single sitting. An equally impressivedinner began with a rich soup and continued with a saddle of mutton, ham,beef, turkey, duck, eggs with greens, potatoes, beets, and hominy. Afterwardschampagne was circulated followed by desserts including plum pudding,Civil War 155

156 Civil Wartarts, ice cream, preserves, and brandied fruits. In the late evening figs, raisins,and almonds were made available along with wine, port, or Madeira;brandy and cigars for the men in the drawing room; and sweet treats specificallyreserved for the ladies in the parlor.The threat of war and the opening of hostilities in 1861, of course,brought about many shortages in the South, and it effectively and quicklyimpoverished the plantations. A poor system of transportation prevented theConfederacy’s small resources from being effectively distributed throughoutthe South. Furthermore, the blockade of Southern ports ordered byPresident Lincoln caused great hardship with respect to the finer luxuriesnormally stocked on the plantation. Nonetheless, the dedication totraditional hospitality seemingly survived, if with a limited palette ofamenities.At the commencement of the war, virtually all of the South’s mostfertile land was devoted to agriculture. The North, which relied so much onindustrialization, might thereby be seen to have been at a disadvantage withregard to food but the reverse was true. Northern and Midwestern farmersincreased their planting to support the war effort putting into productiona great deal of virgin land. The Homestead Act was quickly passed in 1862,granting free land to anyone willing to plant it. This virgin soil producedimpressive yields, unlike the over-farmed Southern soil. As the war progressedand was continually fought on Southern soil, Southern crops weredestroyed. Cornelia Peake McDonald, a Southern diarist, described a visitby federal troops. She reported that they pulled up the potatoes and did notstop after getting enough for dinner, but continued, amid roars of laughterand defiant looks, to pull them till all were lying on the ground to witherin the sun. The destruction of the spuds, which were no larger than peas,seemed so wanton that she was provoked beyond enduring.The war placed the institution of hospitality under a siege equally asviolent as any that occurred on the field of battle. The hard hand of wardrove many Southern families to flee from the Yankees as they occupiedincreasingly larger portions of the South. It has been estimated that up to200,000 Southerners, mostly refugees, were on the move during the waryears. White refugees often took their slaves with them to keep them fromthe hands of the Federals. Many refugees looked to family, relations, andfriends to provide hospitality and a safe haven. The states of the trans-Mississippiwest like Texas and Arkansas seemed the safest, but riding herd ondozens of slaves through unfamiliar territory was difficult with a Federalarmy on your heels offering immediate freedom to your bondsmen.Dense crowds of people thronged the streets moving their meagerbelongings in carriages, carts, wheelbarrows, or piled high on the backs ofslaves. Every sort of man, woman, or child made their way to the railwaycars, or trudged down the dusty roads away from the advancing Federallines. Economic shortages, strained agricultural productivity, and social upheavalbeset civilians in various forms. Like brave soldiers themselves, manycivilians managed to stand apart from the war and cope with its vagaries

Civil War 157while trying to preserve some semblance of their social order, standard ofliving, and values. Thus, even though the war might rage at their very doorsteps,the civilians lived through it and in spite of it.As the war dragged on from months into years, Southern soldiers undertookthe “terrible necessity” of depriving friendly families of most of theirstock of food in order to feed the army. Yet, some soldiers voluntarily cutcord wood, helped with harvesting the garden patch, repaired farm machinery,or toiled at any other farm work in repayment for the willing donationof food. A favorite ploy of Southern soldiers was to linger about the house ofan unsuspecting farm family until they were at supper, “and then modestlyapproach and knock at the door.” This procedure almost always resultedin an invitation to dinner as “honored guests.” Such hospitality was evenextended to a Federal soldier, who wrote in his diary, “I succeeded in gettinga meal from a lusty colored woman who lived in a small cabin; gave her fiftycents and had a fine meal of fresh pork, sweet potatoes, and pones.”HOLIDAY FEASTINGDuring the prewar period, holidays like the Fourth of July, New Year,and Christmas were marked by feasting. In New England, the feasting anddrinking that characterized the celebration of the Christmas season wasthought sinful. But some attitudes began to change when Queen Victoriaand Prince Albert began to celebrate the holiday in the 1840s and made suchobservances fashionable. Nonetheless, it was not until 1856 that Christmaswas recognized as a legal holiday in Massachusetts, where it had once beenlegally prohibited. In the South, Christmas was a particularly importantpart of the social season and was celebrated with balls, hunts, and extendedvisits. The first three states to make Christmas a legal holiday were in theSouth, and by 1865 more than two dozen Southern jurisdictions observedit as a legal holiday.Holiday guests on remote Southern plantations at Christmas time usuallycame for an entire week. One plantation mistress noted that some ofher neighbors had 30 and sometimes 40 guests in the house “all the holiday.”Preparations for such extravaganzas commenced weeks in advance of thearrival of any guests and would have been impossible without a staff of reliableand efficient servants or slaves. The mistress, anticipating the extensionof the household, would stockpile puddings, fruitcakes, and preserves; bedlinens, towels, and napkins; and sufficient attire for herself and her familyto satisfy the social scene throughout the holiday.Christmas Eve day might feature a hunt for pheasant or blue-wingedteal. That night the Yule log was brought in and springs of holly might bethrown into the fire to ward off evil spirits. Cinnamon-soaked apples werehung from a string from which the children were to try to secure themwith a hands-free bite. Successful youngsters were rewarded with the entireapple. Finally, the children hung their stockings from the mantel before retiringhoping to find them filled with surprises the next morning.

158 Civil WarSlaves, working under the supervision of the plantation mistress, werehard pressed during the preparations for such a holiday; and they were keptbusy picking up after guests, clearing and cleaning, making additional meals,and doing added laundry. Nonetheless, in all but the meanest plantationhouses, slaves were generally given extra holiday rations of rice, sugar, coffee,tobacco, and other treats at holiday time. They, in return, sometimespresented the mistress with items that they had raised in their own littlefarm patches, handmade baskets, or carved wooden items like candlesticksor animal figures.While the length of the holiday period given to slaves varied, even theharshest masters seemingly allowed their slaves at least a three-day holidayat Christmas time. The planter’s family usually supplied an ox and otherprovisions to their slaves for these festivities. Slave owners often passed outbolts of fabric known as yardage to their slaves on the day after Christmas.From these slaves were to fashion a new set of clothes. Some slaves barteredwith other members of the black community or with members of thewhite household for castoff clothing so that they might be better attiredfor evening festivities among the slave cabins. Slaves often decorated theslave quarters with natural materials such as greenery, gourds, shells, andpersimmons, and many slave communities brought in their own Yule log.Slave children were entertained with storytelling, music, singing, dancing,and sweet treats.NORTHERN CORDIALITYNearly all Americans in the nineteenth century ate their meals at homeor in the homes of their hosts. Regardless of the menu, home-cooked dinnerswere heavy meals filled with meat, potatoes, eggs, and vegetables. All thesemight be fried in butter, lard, or bacon grease. Moreover, Northern familiestended to eat quickly. The only leisurely portion of the daily meal coming atnoon when fathers returned home from their shops or lay down in the fieldsfor a short nap. Otherwise, Northerners generally bolted their food as if ona schedule. There was often little ceremony associated with family eatingbeyond a rigid adherence to what was widely called “manners.”Families that indulged themselves at the table generally ate light mealscomposed of cold cuts of meat, potato salads, and fresh fruit. Vegetableswere rarely eaten without first being cooked or combined into salads orrelishes. After washing the supper dishes the family, and any guests, settleddown to a quiet evening of reading, music, or an occasional table game.Schoolwork was usual for the children; the newspaper for father; and letterwriting for mother. Reading aloud to the group from a novel was a popularactivity. Board and card games were just becoming popular at midcentury,and there was a seemingly overwhelming necessity that such gameshave a moral or educational purpose. Boarders, most of whom were unrelatedto the family by blood, might join in these activities, and neighborsmight stop by for a chat. Few Northern families were so liberal as to spend

any part of their evening among the servants. These would gather in thekitchen or in their own living quarters.Saturday evenings often found families entertaining friends at home.Visitors might share a meal followed by many of the same diversions pursuedon a weekday evening. These weekend gatherings called for the hoststo follow the period’s rather unforgiving rules of etiquette, and middle-classfamilies attempting to move up the social ladder were sometimes pretentiousin their manner. High tea often became a late-afternoon or earlyeveningalternative to the fashionable dinner for middle-class families.Upper-class households in the North and Midwest were as fully capableas any Southern plantation of putting forth an extravaganza. The formaldinner party was a highly ritualized event appropriately begun in the lateevening. Etiquette demanded that guests be no more than 15 minutes late.Everyone assembled in the drawing room, and the host told each gentlemanwhich lady to escort down to dinner. Couples were not seated together andmade conversation with others. Since the guests did not stay over night,these fashionable late dinners were largely restricted to urban communitiesand were somewhat unsuited to country life, where visitors would have totravel large distances in the dark to get home.In rural areas eating a meal in public—outside the immediate family—was an unusual event. Public dining was offered only in taverns or ordinarieswith the exception of community outdoor dinners on special occasions suchas the Fourth of July. Travelers were forced by circumstances to take theirmeals at taverns and inns. While local men also frequented these establishmentsto drink, they generally did not eat there unless the establishmenthad been catered for a dance, a party, or a ball. Meals at these establishmentswere not brought out on demand, but were served only during specifiedtimes. A British visitor to America complained, “At each house thereare regular hours for breakfast, dinner and supper and if a traveler arrivessomewhat before the appointed time for any one of them, it is in vain to callfor a separate meal for himself; he must wait patiently until the appointedhour, and then sit down with the other guests that may happen to be inthe house.” The food served in taverns could be considered home cooking.It was unpretentious and very much in the style of the Northeast region.Both food quality and portion size varied greatly from establishment to establishmentand seems to have been generally considered parsimonious andunremarkable unless it was very bad.After eating at a tavern in Massachusetts, author Nathaniel Hawthorneremarked that the meal included no meat and was about the worst he hadever had to eat. Some offerings were incredibly meager. Hawthorne recalledseeing a group of young college students being served what was typically achildren’s breakfast of bread and milk, with a huge common washbowl ofmilk and a platter of bread in the center of the table, and a bowl and spoonset for each guest. Other meals were reported as being quite substantial.A full-scale New England breakfast at one inn reportedly included ham,beef, sausages, pork, bread, butter, boiled potatoes, pies, coffee, and cider.Civil War 159

160 Civil WarBy the time of the Civil War, many taverns in the North had been replacedby hotels offering guests breakfast and supper as well as a room. Oneof the unique features of nineteenth-century urbanization was the appearanceof commercial hotels. Among the first luxury hotels was the Astor House ofNew York City and the Tremont House of Boston. The latter was consideredby many to be the best hotel in the country at the time. Its 170 rooms featureddoor locks, a wash basin, and a pitcher of water. A free cake of soap wasgiven to each guest. There were eight indoor toilets and bathrooms distributedthroughout the building. The Tremont had a highly trained staff that includedthe first bell-boys and 24-hour hotel desk-clerks. The hotel was noted for thefine French cuisine to be found in its restaurant.Good food soon became a common feature in major hotels and urbandwellers flocked to hotel restaurants just to eat or entertain friends. Hotelsbecame a gathering place for men of politics and business, and the lobbies,salons, and dining areas became places of public and private business. In responsea growing number of city restaurants began to serve midday meals tobusinessmen in an attempt to compete with the high quality cooking foundin the hotels. Delmonico’s was soon recognized by the New York elite forits culinary excellence, and the upper classes flocked to eat there. The UnionIllustration by Thomas Nast of Abraham Lincoln in Willard’s Hotel in Washington, on the eve of his inauguration,1861. Library of Congress.

Oyster House restaurant opened its doors in Boston at a time when thenation was seemingly in the throws of a raw shellfish craze. In addition tooysters, clams and scallops were served in season. The owners of the UnionOyster House installed a semi-circular oyster bar where the fabled SenatorDaniel Webster was a regular customer.One of the best-known hotels was Willard’s Hotel in Washington, D.C.,which served during the Civil War as a meeting place of politicians, generals,and presidents. Abraham Lincoln first came to Willard’s as a congressmanin 1849 to attend a meeting of the supporters of President Zachary Taylor,and he stayed there rather than at a rented house prior to his own inaugurationin 1861. The First Family occupied Parlor No. 6, a pricey corner suiteof rooms on the second floor, and they entertained persons of importancein the Willard’s fine set of public rooms and parlors. The bill for the 10-daystay was more than $770 (U.S. dollars). Lincoln departed from Willard’s forhis inauguration and returned there afterwards for a celebratory luncheonconsisting of mock turtle soup, corned beef and cabbage, parsley potatoes,and blackberry pie. While president, he conducted official business at Willard’smany times, and he entertained visitors in Willard’s wide variety ofsuites and public rooms.Hundreds of officers and men were engaged in the day-to-day duty ofproviding food for the troops. The overall responsibility fell to the SubsistenceDepartment in Washington, headed by a commissary general whocontracted for the various types of rations with private manufacturersor packers. The foodstuffs were then apportioned to the respective armycommissaries, and by them, in turn, to the corps, brigade, and regimentalcommissaries. They were then distributed to the troops.The government rations distributed to the troops varied slightly withthe season and the availability of local supply. Nonetheless, a complete listof all the possibilities is short. These included hardtack, coffee, sugar, softbread, flour, rice, cornmeal, dried peas, dried beans, desiccated vegetablesor dried fruits, fresh or dried potatoes (called chips), salt pork, bacon orham, pickled beef (called salt horse), fresh meat, and occasionally onions,molasses, salt, pepper, and vinegar. With only a rudimentary understandingof balanced nutrition, it is a wonder that any soldier survived the war onsuch a diet. However, the standard ration provided a daily average of over3,000 calories, heavy in carbohydrates and fats, but providing few vitaminsor complete proteins.There were two standard rations in the federal army. One was thecamp ration, and the other was the campaign or marching ration. The campration tended to be more diverse, and for one soldier in the federal armyconsisted of meat (1¼ lbs. of salted or fresh beef, or 3/4 lb. of pork orbacon); and bread (1 lb., 6 oz. of soft bread or flour, or 1 lb. of hardtack, or1¼ lbs. of cornmeal). He also received approximately 1½ ounces of driedvegetables, rice, dried potatoes, peas, or beans. Fresh potatoes were to behad, but fresh vegetables were rare and allotted in only very small quantities.Salt and pepper were allowed in minuscule quantities. About1/2Civil War 161

162 Civil Warounce of vinegar was provided for each man daily to help prevent scurvy.About the same amount of molasses was allowed when available. Themarching ration consisted of 1 lb., or 8 crackers, of hard bread; 3/4 lb. ofsalt pork, or 1¼ lbs. of fresh meat; sugar, coffee, and salt. The beans, rice,and so on, were not issued to the soldier when on the march, as he couldnot carry them.When fresh meat was not available the enlisted men were providedwith a basic preserved meat ration of pork—boiled ham, salt pork, or baconbeing most common.The vitamin deficiencies and the lack of protein in the rations of thecommon soldier could have been devastating. An unrelieved diet of cornmealand salt pork, while sufficient in calories, would ultimately producesuch diseases as scurvy and pellagra. Fresh meats will provide protein butcannot afford sufficient protein to make up the deficit alone. Both beansand cornmeal are high protein sources but are individually incomplete inamino acids; yet, in combination they are complementary and provide allthe essentials needed to sustain health. Rice and peas are another complementarypair with similar characteristics. In offering these pairs among asmall variety of foodstuffs, the government unwittingly supplied a nearlycomplete diet to its soldiers, yet the unresolved question of a lack of essentialvitamins had serious health consequences that cost many lives.With respect to camp cooking, Johnny Reb and Billy Yank found themselvesin surprisingly similar situations. Each soldier was obliged to use onlythe limited array of cookware that he could carry. A coffee boiler of somesort was considered a necessity, and any utensil that could serve as a fryingpan became indispensable. A particularly common cookware solution wasto unsolder the seam between the two halves of an extra canteen acquiredfrom the battlefield. Each half served as a tolerable lightweight frying panor plate and could be carried strapped over the canteen. Tin cans with wirehandles served as tolerable coffee boilers. As with the soldiers of most wars,Civil War soldiers quickly adopted any serviceable device that proved lightto carry and easy to replace.Further Reading: Haskell, E. F. Civil War Cooking: The Housekeeper’s Encyclopedia.Mendocino, CA: R. L. Shep, 1992; McIntosh, Elaine N. American Food Habits inHistorical Perspective. Westport, CT: Greenwood / Praeger Press, 1995; Mitchell,Patricia B. Cooking for the Cause. Chatham, VA: Sims-Mitchell House, 1988;Root, Waverly, and Richard de Rouchemont. Eating in America: A History. NewYork: William Morrow, 1976; Spaulding, Lily May, and John Spaulding, eds.Civil War Recipes: Recipes from the Pages of Godey’s Lady’s Book. Lexington:University Press of Kentucky, 1999; Swartwelder, A. C. “This InvaluableBeverage: The Recollections of Dr. A. C. Swartwelder.” Civil War TimesIllustrated. October, 1975, pp. 10–11; Trager, James. The Food Chronology. NewYork: Henry Holt, 1995; Volo, Dorothy Denneen, and James M. Volo. Daily Lifein Civil War America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998; Volo, DorothyDenneen and James M. Volo. The Antebellum Period. Westport, CT: Greenwood

Cocktails 163Press, 2004; Williams, Susan. Food in the United States, 1820s-1890. Westport,CT: Greenwood Press, 2006.CocktailsJames M. VoloA cocktail is a drink made up of an alcoholic beverage mixed with otheralcoholic beverages and/or fruit juices or sodas. At a cocktail party thesedrinks are the main attraction, supplemented by hors d’oeurves and lots ofso-called cocktail chatter. The story of the cocktail and the parties that weredesigned around it begins with the discovery of the new world, and the introductionof sugar. The sugarcane that Christopher Columbus introducedsparked quite a trade between the colonies and the West Indies. Sugarcanewas a hot commodity. American colonists found many uses for the spice,but one of their favorites was to use the molasses left over from sugar productionto make rum.The first still was erected on Staten Island in 1640 to make gin. The colonistswere also drinking imported wines, Madeira, port, sherry, champagne,and brandy. Locally, they started to make cider from the native apples. In1698, a Scottish distiller named William Laird began to distill brandy fromhard apple cider, making America’s first branded native spirit, Applejack(apple brandy.)People have been combining alcohol with other liquids for centuries.The Ancient Romans mixed wine with honey, herbs, and spices, and theElizabethans mixed beer with eggs and spices. The British Navy drank grogin the seventeenth century. Grog, water and rum, was popular during longvoyages at sea, to get the sailors to drink water, and in particular, water thatwas stale. The drink is dated to 1655, the year Jamaica was invaded by thenavy, and instead of loading up with beer and wine at port, it was rum thatwas available. Grog got its name from Vice Admiral William Penn (fatherof the founder of Pennsylvania), who was known for wearing a black waterproofcloak made of grogam, and hence nicknamed, “Old Grog.” A Sling,circa 1675, added one more ingredient and was comprised of one half waterand one half rum, with sugar to taste.Punches were quite elaborate in comparison. Dated to the end of theseventeenth century, punch was most likely a mix made by En glish sailorsand merchants who experimented with the Indian spices discovered duringtheir travels. The word punch comes from the Hindi word, panch meaning“five.” A traditional punch is made from five ingredients: liquor, sugar, citrusjuice, tea (or other spice), and water.According to historian Dave Wondrich, it was in the late 1700s andearly 1800s, somewhere in the commercial and legislative triangle of Albany,Boston, and New York, that rumblings of the cocktail began. In 1806the New York publication, Balance and Columbian Repository answered a

164 Cocktailsreader’s query asking about a new word, cocktail. The publication respondedby defining the word: “Cocktail is a stimulating liquor composed of spiritsof any kind, sugar, water and bitters—it is vulgarly called bittered sling.”This statement is considered the official birth to the cocktail as printed onMay 13, 1806.Although the true origin of the word cocktail is unknown, there havecertainly been some fun theories like that of tavern-keeper Betsey Flanagan,who supposedly served drinks to French soldiers in 1779 garnishedwith feathers she had plucked from a neighbor’s rooster. The soldiers thentoasted her by shouting, “Vive le cocktail!” Or, H. L. Mencken’s citing ofa more plausible theory in his The American Language, “The word comesfrom the French coquetier, an egg cup, and was first used in New Orleanssoon after 1800.” This makes reference to the once favored notion thatthe cocktail stems from the drinks served by Antoine Amedee Peychaud,a New Orleans pharmacist who sold drinks out of his Royal Street apothecaryusing the French coquetiers and featured his famed Peychaud Bitters.And thus, overtime, the French word was simply mutated into a Creole orAmerican pronunciation of cocktail. A theory now rendered implausiblebecause further research proves that Peychaud was not born until 1803.Wondrich claims that the best explanation for the term comes from theworld of horse racing. A horse that was of mixed-breed was known as acock-tail. Therefore, it would not be too much of a leap to assume that thedrinking set of the time would also be the sporting set attending races.Also, in a literal adaptation, cocktails were a “mixing” of ingredients.By the 1820s the roster of cocktails had grown to include the AppleToddy (apple brandy, baked apple, sugar, hot water), Gin Cocktail (gin, gumsyrup, bitters, Curacoa), and Mint Julep (brandy or rum, mint, sugar). Theice plow was invented in 1830 and gave the “cocktail” its life force. Bartendersof the time were professionals and specialists who apprenticed to learntheir craft, which now included the hand carving and shaving of ice. Theyserved their concoctions in the finest social setting, the hotel bar. Americawas growing up and becoming sophisticated, and the cocktail became theliquid resemblance of sophistication.In 1862 a major milestone was achieved in the life of the cocktail. Abartender named Jerry Thomas wrote the first cocktail book, How to MixDrinks or The Bon Vivant’s Companion. Thomas, who was dubbed the “Professor,” had traveled extensively and compiled a list of 230 drink recipes.He followed up with a second edition of his book, and his writings weresoon followed by those of other talented barmen of the day. These booksdocumented the evolution of the cocktail and listed new recipes and ingredients,as well as new improvements in bar-ware, and standards of bar service.The golden age of the American drink and bar culture had arrived.Many of the cocktails that we celebrate today come from the late1800s: the Alexander, the Champagne Cocktail, the Grasshopper, the Fizz,the Gimlet, the Highball, the Manhattan, the Martini, the Old-Fashioned,the Sour, the Stinger, and the Sazerac. Each one of these cocktails has a least

one story of origin but one thing is certain: these cocktails are the classics,from which all others are derived.After the Civil War the decline of the cocktail began as the TemperanceMovement came into being. In 1893 the Anti-Saloon League was formedgiving strength to the movement. As author Gary Regan writes in his bookThe Joy of Mixology, “By 1910 almost half the people in the United Stateswere living in ‘dry’ states or towns, and after America declared war on Germanyin 1917, distillation of beverage alcohol was made illegal so that thegrape and grain would be eaten rather than sipped.” On January 17, 1920,the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act formally commenced andProhibition went into effect.If the so-called morally sound were concerned that Americans weredrinking too much before 1920, they could not imagine the thirsty trove theyhad just awoken. With the dry legislation barely in effect the landscape ofdrinking culture had already adapted the rules. On January 18, 1920, the50–50 Club opened in Manhattan. The 50–50 Club was soon followed byother clubs called speakeasies, like the Cotton Club, the Hi Hat, and the21 Club. Drinkers were sent in a hush behind closed doors where they intermingledas never before. Women, who were previously shut out of thesaloons and men’s clubs, were standing cocktail to cocktail with men of allstandings.Much can be written about the 13-year experiment of Prohibition, butwhat was important about this time, in relation to the cocktail, was thedecline in popularity of the profession of bartending. Many of these professionalshad gone off to war and the ones remaining were now jobless. Althoughcocktails were somewhat readily available at the nicer speakeasies,no self-respecting man, especially a family man, would continue to work inthe now marred industry. The more passionate and astute bartenders foundthemselves leaving the country and exporting with them the American craftof the cocktail.They left the States and headed to lush hot spots like Cuba, London,Paris, and Venice. One example was Harry Craddock. A steadfast NewYork bartender, Craddock had worked at the Hoffman House and HollandHouse—two of the finest hotel bars of the Golden Era. Overseas he wasemployed at the American Bar in the Savoy Hotel in London. From behindthe mahogany bar of this new venture Craddock helped usher in a new eraof cocktails by using the foreign ingredients and exotic liquors that were nativeto Europe. Many were the standard pre-Prohibition cocktails from theAmerican bar, but there was also a list of some 280 “perfected” cocktails thatfeature the new European mixtures.Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected in 1932 and within the first yearshe was in office the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed (December 5,1933). President Roosevelt was known for having an afternoon Martini andwas the first to popularize adding olive brine to his gin and vermouth.Unfortunately, although most Americans had never stopped drinking,Prohibition had left a terrible scar in the culinary traditions of drink culture.Cocktails 165

166 CocktailsSome of the most popular cocktails are:Old Fashioned2.5 oz bourbon or rye whiskey1 sugar cube2 dashes Angostura BittersFew drops of waterCombine, add ice, and garnish with an orange peel.Tom Collins2 oz dry gin3.75 oz freshly squeezed lemon juice3.75 oz simple syrupCombine, shake, and strain over ice. Top with club soda and garnishwith a lemon wedge and cherry.Manhattan2 oz rye whiskey1 oz sweet vermouth1 dash Angostura BittersCombine and stir with ice, strain into a chilled glass, and garnish with acherry, or lemon peel.Martini2.5 oz dry gin0.5 oz dry vermouth1 dash orange bittersCombine and stir with ice, strain into a chilled glass, and garnish withlemon twist.Margarita2 oz tequila1 oz Cointreau3.75 oz freshly squeezed lime juiceThe professional bartender was a thing of the past. Many of their methodswere lost to the men at war or to men who had long since found a new wayto make ends meet. The 13-yearCombine and shake with ice, strain into a salt-rimmed glass with freshice, and garnish with a lime wedge.dry spell fostered a new breed of uneducateddrinkers with naive thirst.The two cocktails that made itout of Prohibition with the leastamount of damage were the simpleand strong Martini and Man -hattan.Throughout the 1930s and1940s, the embattled cocktailpersevered. It was ever the symbolfor elegance and seduction.The cocktail was a leading lady inHollywood, featured in the handsof celebrities such as HumphreyBogart and Bette Davis. The cocktailwas the ultimate heroine toHemingway and Fitzgerald, andwas serenaded by the likes of ColePorter and Duke Ellington. Supperclubs, including the Brown Derby,El Morroco, Sardi’s, and the StorkClub, had also emerged, and it wasin these sophisticated haunts thatthe Martini, Daiquiri, and SideCar reigned supreme.During Prohibition, Americanstraveled to get a drink. Fromthose travels came a fascinationwith tropical and Polynesian-styledrinks. In 1934, an enterprisingyoung gent named Ernest Beaumont-Ganttopened a bar andrestaurant called Don the Beachcomber,located in Hollywood. Itwas an exclusive and expensiveaffair that was frequented by acelebrity set that included CharlieChaplin, Groucho Marx, andHoward Hughes. Not long after, aman named Victor Bergeron, whowas inspired by Don’s, reinventedhis existing bar called Hinky-Dinks located just outside of

Cocktails 167Oakland, California, and called itTrader Vic’s. These two landmarkbars shepherded in an entirelynew genre of drinks and a newsub-culture. The Mai Tai, ScorpionBowl, and Zombie are a fewfrom this era, as well as glimpsesof the Tequila-based cocktail, theMargarita.As America settled into theCosmopolitan1.5 oz citron vodka0.5 oz Cointreau1 oz cranberry juice0.25 oz freshly squeezed lime juiceCombine and shake with ice, strain into a chilled glass, and garnish withan orange peel.1950s, the Martini was still the favorite tipple, but the landscape hadchanged. The clear, odorless, Russian spirit, vodka, had stealthily maneuveredits way into the beloved Martini. The instantly fashionable spirit wasthe base of the cocktails of the day: the Bloody Mary, the Moscow Mule,and the Screwdriver.The 1960s and 1970s were dismal years for the cocktail. America wasinvolved in the Vietnam War abroad and an idealistic counter-culture warraged at home. The only real drink that was hanging around in the 1960swas the Vodka Martini and that was mostly due to the film endorsement ofJames Bond. The youth of the time did not want to embody anything thatwas associated with the generation before them. Cocktails were out anddrugs were in. If the cocktails of that era are any indication, those Americanswho were drinking seemed to be drinking to get drunk, as the cocktails—Cape Codder, Harvey Wallbanger, Rusty Nail, and Tequilla Sunrise—areextremely potent.In the 1980s there seemed to be a collective ideal change among manyof the innovators in the food and beverage world. No longer satisfied withthe prepackaged, canned, and engineered ingredients, a shift was occurringto fresh, local ingredients and high-quality produce, with fewer additives.In the kitchen, chefs were going back to basics, using classic methods toreinvigorate the culinary world.In 1987, a legendary restaurateur, Joe Baum, opened the PromenadeBar in the newly restored Rainbow Room in New York City. Baum had avision of creating an old-style bar that mattered, where drinks were classicand made to perfection. His goal was to use only fresh and natural ingredients,not pre-made mixes, and he hired bartender Dale Degroff to realizethat vision. Thanks to the grand bar in the Rainbow Room, Dale Degroffbegan the restoration of the cocktail to its former glory.Another resounding moment for the cocktail came in the early 1990swhen, thanks to the resurgence of classics like the Martini, a new cocktailappeared on the scene, the Cosmopolitan. All of a sudden the pink blendwas everywhere! The Cosmopolitan became the mediator that got Americadrinking cocktails again. It also helped that it was the official mascot forCarrie Bradshaw and the Sex in the City generation. Now, patrons couldwalk into almost any bar, lounge, or restaurant, and expect to find a cocktaillist: a list that usually included a variety of classics, and, more importantly,

168 Coffeehouses in Londonnew house cocktails. Innovation and artistry had finally made their wayback to the bar and into the cocktail.Further Reading: Baime, A. J. Big Shots: The Men Behind the Booze. New York: NewAmerican Library/ Penguin Books, 2003; Baker, Charles H., Jr. The Gentleman’sCompanion. New York: The Derrydale Press, 1939; Conrad, Barnaby, III. TheMartini. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1995; Coulombe, Charles A. Rum:The Epic Story of the Drink that Conquered the World. New York: Citadel PressBooks / Kensington Publishing, 2004; Craddock, Harry. The Savoy Cocktail Book.London: Pavillion Books, 1930, 1999 [updated edition]; DeGroff, Dale. The Craftof the Cocktail. New York: Clarkson Potter Pub lishers / Random House, 2002;Esquire’s Handbook for Hosts. New York: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers, 1949;Grimes, William. Straight Up OR On the Rocks: A Cultural History of AmericanDrink. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993; Haigh, Ted. Vintage Spirits & ForgottenCocktails. Gloucester, MA: Quarry Books, 2004; Lanza, Joseph. The Cocktail: TheInfluence of Spirits on the American Psyche. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995;“Mixellany.” Mixologist: The Journal of the American Cocktail, Volume One, 2005.Jared Brown. http://www.mixellany.com; “Mixellany.” Mixologist: The Journal ofthe Ameri can Cocktail, Volume Two, 2006. Jared Brown. http://www.mixellany.com; Regan, Gary. The Joy of Mixology. New York: Clarkson Potter Publishers/Random House, 2003; Steed, Tobias, and Ben Reed. Hollywood Cocktails.Minocqua, WI: Willow Creek Press, 1999; Thomas, Jerry. The Bartender’s Guide:How to Mix Drinks, or the Bon Vivant’s Companion. New Day Publishing, 1862[reprinted 2004]; Wondrich, David. Esquire Drinks: An Opinionated & IrreverentGuide to Drinking. New York: Sterling Publishing, 2003.RECOMMENDED WEB SITEShttp://www.cocktailchronicles.comhttp://www.cocktaildb.comhttp://www.cocktailtimes.comhttp://www.drinkboy.comhttp://www.lairdandcompany.comhttp://www.martinirepublic.comCoffeehouses in LondonChristy Pope and Chad SolomonCoffeehouses emerged in the major cities of Western Europe after 1650as venues for the consumption of the newly introduced beverages coffee,tea, and chocolate. They proved hugely popular and by 1700 there weremore than 500 such establishments in London alone. Ostensibly based onthose of the Moslem Middle East from whence coffee had come—many ofthe early London houses had Eastern-sounding names such as The Turk’sHead and The Sultanese—they also followed in the mold of taverns, beingplaces where men from a wide section of society could meet, drink, andconduct business.

Coffeehouses in London 169However, coffeehouses quickly developed their own atmosphere andfunctions that were in many ways in stark contrast to those of taverns. Coffeehad brought with it from the East a reputation for promoting calm,rational, intellectual debate and was believed to stimulate mental activityand heighten perceptions. It was also believed to be good for one’s health.Concerns about healthy living were associated with the increasingly importantmiddle-class virtue of respectability. In addition, drinking coffee wasfashionable because of its exotic origins and because royalty, for example,the court of Louis IX of France, were among the earliest Western consumersof coffee.As a result, participating in coffeehouse society strongly appealed tourban middle-class males—clerks, merchants, businessmen, and the like—who were in need of a venue to display the respectability that drinking coffeeconferred but who were also interested in being fashion able withoutspending a lot of money. Coffeehouses were popular with the literati, intellectuals,artists, and philosophers as a place for serious and enlighteningdiscussion. Noted diarist Samuel Pepys recorded many visits to various coffeehousesaround London. A poem of the time referred to them as “pennyuniversities”; places where for the price of a cup of coffee, a man couldimmerse himself in discussions of current developments in art, literature,and thought.The decor attempted to reflect this intellectual bent. Coffeehouseswere often pleasantly furnished with bookshelves and framed pictures, andwere generally clean and bright compared to the dark and dirty taverns.The “Rules and Orders of the Coffee Houses” set down in 1674 encouraged“brisk” conversation but forbade arguments—whoever started a conversationhad to buy a “round” of coffee. Such behavior was also in starkcontrast to taverns where the authorities regularly intervened to keep thepeace. Indeed, the clientele themselves may have seen their coffeehousesas a sort of Utopia—democratic institutions, peopled by intelligent mendiscussing matters of great significance, subject to their own rules. Presumably,it was this sort of thinking that in 1672 led Charles II to issue aproclamation attempting to close coffeehouses on the grounds that theywere a breeding ground for sedition. Public outcry meant that it was neverenforced.Although coffee was the most important drink served at the houses,tea and chocolate were also available and apart from a brief dabble withtemperance before 1690, so too was alcohol. Originally coffee was servedblack without sugar although flavorings such as honey, cloves, cinnamon,and spearmint were available at extra cost. However, sugar and milk quicklybecame popular since arguably these “softening agents” are a natural additionto the bitter liquid.After the turn of the eighteenth century, the character of coffeehousesbegan to change. Eloquent intellectual discourse gave way to a greaterfocus on conducting business, and on exchanging news and gossip. Groupsof men with similar business interests, or similar professional or political

170 Coffeehouses in LondonAn engraving showing the interior of Jonathan’s Coffee House in London, a place frequented by dealers instocks, public and other shares. Library of Congress.affiliations met at particular houses and it was there that votes were cast,stocks and bonds sold, and lobby groups created. Those interested in insuringshipping ventures met at Lloyd’s Coffee House in London; poolingtheir resources, they set up an insurance exchange. London stockbrokersfrequented Jonathan’s, and there they would meet with their clients, asdid lawyers and even doctors at their coffeehouse of choice. A coffeehousewas the place to read the latest newspapers and broadsheets (someeven produced their own), and in the case of a particularly newsworthyevent, runners would do the rounds of a city’s coffeehouses spreadingthe details.But by 1730, many coffeehouses, particularly those in London, were nolonger recognizable as such. Some had turned into taverns or chop houses,as the proprietors found that the serving of food and alcohol was the mostprofitable part of their business. Others began to demand subscriptions torestrict clientele and emerged as the gentlemens’ clubs so popular in Londonin the nineteenth century. Still others emerged as business institutions;

Coffee Klatches 171the insurance firm Lloyds of London, still in business today, is an exampleof this. Although these evolutionary processes were longer and slower elsewhere,almost everywhere in northern Europe the importance of the coffeehousebegan to wane by the end of the eighteenth century.Further Reading: Burnett, John. Liquid Pleasures: A Social History of Drinks inModern Britain. London: Routledge, 1999; Cowan, Brian. The Social Life ofCoffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse. New Haven, CT: Yale UniversityPress, 2005; Ellis, Markman. The Coffee House: A Cultural History. London:Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004; Smith, Woodruff, D. “From Coffeehouse toParlour: The Consumption of Coffee, Tea, and Sugar in North-western Europein the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” In Consuming Habits: Drugs inHistory and Anthropology. Edited by Jordan Goodman, Paul E. Lovejoy, andAndrew Sherratt. London and New York: Routledge, 1995, 148–164.Kirsten TaylorCoffee KlatchesThe phrase coffee klatch is an Americanized version of the longstanding Germantradition known as the Kaffeeklatsch. Kaffee is the German word forcoffee, and the word Klatsch implies a type of casual conversation or discussion,often gossipy in nature. The two words together describe the banterand chitchat that occurs when drinking coffee in a communal setting.Coffee klatches may be routine or impromptu, often serving as a breakor respite from the day’s work and activities. In Germany it was customaryfor families to gather over freshly brewed coffee and homemade or storeboughtcake on Sunday afternoons, another occasion for a coffee klatch.The evolution of the coffee klatch as social event is rooted in the Germancoffeehouse culture of the mid-seventeenth century. It was essentiallya central meeting place where upper-class men could read newspapers anddiscuss current news in politics, society, commerce, and the arts. Althoughwomen relished coffee, strict cultural mores deemed it inappropriate andunacceptable for females to appear in such public settings.Early coffee activities in the eighteenth century were modeled after thearistocratic salon, a fixture for philosophical, religious, economic, and later,scientific discussions. A well-to-do hostess could oversee such conversationswithin the realm of her own home, tastefully outfitted with coffee brewingThe newly designed Starbucks cup isseen at a Starbucks location in California,2008. Starbucks Corp. said its fiscalsecond- quarter profit fell 28 percent in2008 as U.S. consumers responded to risingfood and gas prices by making fewerlatte runs. AP/ Wide World Photo.

172 Coffee Klatchesapparatus and serving accouterments. As coffee became more affordablefor the middle class, a comparable female coffee drinking culture began toemerge in the household.Such meetings were dubbed Kaffeekränzchen, or “little coffee circles”(from “Caffé-Cränzigen,” circa 1715), small informally organized women’sclubs that met daily or weekly to play a lively game of cards, share word oflocal news, and consume their fill of coffee. The first coffee klatches werereputedly held by wives of high-ranking city officials who would call uponfriends after fulfilling their obligatory care-taking duties.A woman who took part in these social occasions came to be called a Kaffeeschwester,literally, a “coffee sister,” one who was notably fond of taking coffeein combination with a generous serving of gossip or scandal. Some sourcessuggest that coffee klatch was coined by husbands who, expressing their inherentdispleasure of being excluded from the inner female coffee sanctum,used the term as a disparaging reference to their coffee-drinking wives.In the postwar baby boom years of American suburbia, the coffee klatchserved as a means for the stay-at-home mother and nonworking marriedwoman to build relationships and communicate with other women, thus easingthe sense of isolation for some. The term may have returned along withGIs formerly stationed in Europe. German immigrants seeking the familiarcontinued to practice the custom by inviting their newfound neighbors.By today’s definition, coffee klatch participants are wide-ranging fromwhat once was the exclusive domain of the housewife. They can be singleand married parent(s), career professionals, childcare workers, blue-collarworkers, artists, retirees. College students schedule so-called coffee klatchesas time to meet with their professors. Coffee klatch sites have expandedfrom the kitchen and dining room table to the contemporary coffeehouse,where laptop computers are de rigueur. The Internet has become an onlinevehicle for electronic coffee klatches.For many, the beverage of choice remains coffee in its various guises.Traditional coffee klatch fare has expanded from coffee cake, streuseltoppedbabka, and cinnamon-spiced apple Kuchen (cake), and fruit tarts, tohearty muffins, jumbo-sized cookies, and savory offerings such as upscalesandwiches and salads.While the coffee can be virtual via the internet or steaming in-hand,caffeinated or not, and the discussion face-to-face or live on screen or cellphone, the coffee klatch continues to pay homage to its age-old legacy offostering conversation and conviviality over coffee.Further Reading: Ellis, Markman. The Coffee House: A Cultural History. London:Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004; Jacob, Heinrich Eduard. Coffee: The Epic of aCommodity. New York: The Viking Press, 1935; “The Internet in a Cup.” TheEconomist. December 18, 2004. http://www.economist.com/world/europe.cfm; Pendergrast, Mark. Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How ItTransformed Our World. New York: Basic Books, 1999; Steinberger, Regina. Derbitter-süße Wohlgeschmack: zur Geschichte von Kaffee, Tee, Schokolade und Tabak.

Colonial America 173Städtisches Museum Göttingen, 1994, pp. 63–65; Ukers, William H. All AboutCoffee. New York: The Tea & Coffee Trade Journal Company, 1935.Suzanne C. WeltmanColonial AmericaEntertaining among the gentry and middle class in the American Colonieswas an elegant theatrical performance characterized by strict protocol,elaborate table settings, and lavish, multi-course meals. The home was thecenter of most activities and the act of dining was an important ritual and aprimary means of social interaction among colonists. Colonial entertainingwas influenced by fashionable European trends, growing consumerism, andperceptions of social status and cultural identity.The Colonial period in American history encompassed the years 1607 to1776 and began with the settlement of Jamestown, the first English colonyin Virginia. The period concluded with the signing of the Declaration ofIndependence and the start of the American Revolution. The 13 Britishcolonies included New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina,South Carolina, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maryland, Georgia,Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Delaware.For the social elite, the act of entertaining was a means to showcasegood breeding, intellect, wealth, and prosperity. The dining room was thewell-provisioned theater in which conversation and debate occurred. Wellto-docolonists benefited from the agricultural bounty of the New World,and with significant household support from the African slave system, theycould afford to present elaborate entertainments for their guests. However,as the relationship between Great Britain and the colonies began to deteriorate,entertaining practices would shift as colonists assumed a new identityas citizens of the United States of America.THE FIRST SETTLERSThe earliest settlers of the New World had limited means and few opportunitiesto entertain. Their focus was on sustenance and survival. When144 settlers and sailors comprising the Virginia Company landed in May1607 on what was to be named Jamestown Island, their goal was entrepreneurial.The group had received a charter the previous year by King JamesI to establish the first permanent English settlement in North America, primarilyto take advantage of the abundant natural resources in the region.Jamestown settlers were poorly equipped to manage in the wilderness. Theyfaced disease, hunger, and attacks from hostile natives. The settlement mighthave failed if not for the establishment of tobacco farming, which generatedregular income.

174 Colonial AmericaDutch colonists also sought the promise of prosperity. Henry Hudson’sexploration of the New York state region in 1609 on behalf of the DutchEast India Company led to the establishment of New Netherland and multipleDutch settlements including Manhattan Island, which was called NewAmsterdam.The Dutch experienced financial success with farming and the fur tradeand built comfortable middle-class homes. They brought with them a varietyof family-based traditions and holiday celebrations that made use ofagricultural resources and established a foundation for hospitality and entertainingpractices that emerged in the colonies. A well-provisioned afternoontea table satisfied the Dutch fondness for sweet treats. Saint Nicholas Evewas celebrated as a children’s holiday prior to the feast day of December 6th,and featured a variety of special breads and baked goods. Sappaen was asingle-dish recipe of bread or cornmeal and milk shared with guests that wassimilar to corn mush recipes prepared by Native Americans.Many travelers journeyed to the New World seeking religious freedom.A group of 102 English Puritans, now referred to as Pilgrims, arrived in Massachusettsin 1620 and established the Plymouth Colony. The Plymouthcolonists encountered great hardships in building a community but perseveredin shaping a new life that allowed them to worship according totheir own beliefs. They traveled with simple functional items to managea household such as kitchen tools, books, clothing, bedding, and farmingdevices. Their religious beliefs prohibited most types of celebration and entertainment.They did not follow the traditional ecclesiastical calendar andEaster and Christmas were forbidden, but they did observe an annual secularautumn harvest celebration, as well as a holy day of thanksgiving.A harvest celebration held by the Plymouth colonists in the autumnof 1621 marked one of the earliest forms of communal hospitality in theNew World. The Plymouth colonists invited the native Wampanoag peopleand their leader Massasoit, and for three days the two communities feastedtogether. Roasted and boiled dishes were likely served, and venison and wildfowlare mentioned in a single eyewitness account by colonist Edward Winslow.The celebration is now referred to as The First Thanksgiving.By the year 1666, the English had taken control of New Amsterdamfrom the Dutch, renamed it New York, and established political controlover the region. The inhabitants of the American colonies now reflecteda diverse set of cultures including British, Dutch and Swedish, German,French, Native American, and African. The strongest cultural connectionsexisted with Great Britain. Colonists were English subjects. They tendedto emulate English customs and practices in entertaining and social activityand were now enjoying an improved quality of life.A CONSUMER ECONOMYAt the start of the eighteenth century, consumerism was on the rise.Industrialization and mass production in Europe and the expansion of trade

outes now offered a greater selection of lower-priced household goods andexotic foodstuffs to colonial homes.Meanwhile, three clear social classes were emerging. The lower classincluded whites who did not own land, sailors, apprentices, indentured servants,and African slaves. The lower class had little money and few utensilsor cooking equipment. Meals were prepared in single pots, and includedsoups, stews, and porridges. Meat was costly, and usually used to supplementa one-pot meal. Meals were served in trenchers—flat, shallow woodenbowls—and eaten with a knife or spoon.The middle class was comprised of farmers, merchants, artisans, andshopkeepers. Meals were prepared by slaves, or the woman of the house.The upper class or gentry were wealthy, educated land owners, merchants,and professionals such as doctors and lawyers. For both the middle class andgentry, behavior, manners, and possessions were visible signals of wealth andsocial status.The gentry were near the top of the social structure and image was important.Their stature in the community was demonstrated, in part, by theirability to set an abundant dinner table of meats and desserts. They werewell-supported by household staff and slaves who were experienced in foodpreparation and service. The elite, such as community leaders and governmentofficials, served the highest quality foods. Their meals were influencedby French trends and culinary practices, and they employed large householdstaffs and professionally trained cooks.British style was enormously popular among the gentry and Americancolonists were emulating their British counterparts in all manners of lifestylefrom fashion, to etiquette, to entertaining. Cooking methods mirroredtraditional English techniques. Colonists snapped up English-made goodsas symbols of social status. Reputation was measured by prosperity, andentertaining offered an ideal opportunity to design and stage a public performancefor one’s peers that showcased all the trappings of wealth.Home entertaining focused on dining made good sense in colonial society.The home was the center of activity for the family, and much of thehousehold activity revolved around the kitchen. While the lower class atemeals and performed most activities in the kitchen, the wealthy were expandingtheir homes and adding dining rooms to serve as a distinct andseparate venue for entertaining. Mass production of matching sets of diningchairs began to encourage the move towards dining as an importantsocial event. Table design evolved from the traditional square or rectangulartables, to round or oval tables offering greater intimacy among guests. Mostlandowners lived a good distance from their neighbors or relatives, so it wasa common practice for wealthier families to travel and visit relatives onSundays.Dining as entertainment took on added importance as one of the fewevents that allowed for interaction among individuals beyond weekly religiousservices. As the practice increased, mass-produced tableware gainedin popularity, and merchants and purchasing agents moved to meet theColonial America 175

176 Colonial Americademand. The broader availability of decorative tableware and accessoriesin the Colonies allowed for a style of entertaining at home previously unimagined.In earlier times, colonists carried their own portable utensil toan engagement. Now, a proper host provided a guest with a full place setting,often consisting of multiple utensils, plates, glassware, soup bowls, andserving items. Forks were used increasingly as wealthy colonists looked toenhance their table settings. The amount and quality of serving utensils allcontributed to perceptions of social standing.The inventory lists found in upper-class colonial homes illustrate justhow important tableware was in terms of household possessions. The inventoryrecords at Gunston Hall Plantation in Mason Neck, Virginia, documenthuge collections of silver ware, ceramics, glassware, and specialized servingvessels. Inventories show multiple items for the service of the main meal;china plates, soup bowls, serving vessels such as chafing dishes and platewarmers, bowls, and tureens. Documentation lists multiple sets of cutlery;knives, forks, spoons, and soup spoons, as well as carving utensils, often withprecious material used to construct handles and finely crafted storage cases.The more extravagant families owned specialty items, such as butterboats, bread baskets, cruets, salt forms, and mustard pots, as well as platebaskets for bringing clean plates to the table and removing dirty ones. Thereare listings of customized dessert items such as custard cups, pudding dishes,tart forms, fruit forms, dessert glasses, jelly glasses, and pyramid salvers todisplay sweets in a dramatic tiered presentation. As new food products becameavailable to colonists, craftsmen developed unique vessels and containersto serve those products.According to records kept at the home of George Washington inMount Vernon, Virginia, orders for luxury tableware were often placed onan annual basis. Washington spent 40 years acquiring silver, ceramic, andglass tableware for the frequent entertaining that occurred at Mount Vernon.Correspondence and invoices from purchasing agents abroad showthat Washington was intimately involved in selecting the patterns, materials,and designs that decorated his table. Early in his military career, Washingtonbegan a lifelong acquisition of tableware to support the social andentertaining needs of a proper gentleman. From the time he was a youngman, until the start of the American Revolution, Washington retained apurchasing agent in London. Large orders were typical of the future firstpresident and individual items were often customized with the Washingtonfamily crest.In 1759, Washington married Martha Dandridge Custis, a widow witha large family fortune. Their combined holdings made them one of thewealthiest couples in the colonies, and their dining table reflected that fact.Mr. and Mrs. Washington were the first Colonial Americans to purchasethe stylish Wedgwood pattern of cream- colored Queen’s Ware and spentmore than 30 years building a collection of highly desirable blue-and-whitepatternedChinese porcelain.

Colonial America 177FRENCH STYLE SERVICESophisticated eighteenth-century households choreographed the diningritual with service à la française, or French-style service, which outlinedthe hierarchy of specific entrees and assured balance and symmetry in theplacement of dishes at the dinner table. The practice originated in medievaltimes and was adopted throughout Europe. Status-conscious Colonistscarefully followed the tenets of service à la française, which prescribed thatbetween two and four courses should be offered to guests, with an evennumber of dishes placed symmetrically around a centerpiece entree, suchas a large cut of meat. One dish would always be balanced with another onthe opposite side of the table.Service à la française offered a hierarchy for class-conscious colonists.Menu items were divided into classes, with minor dishes surrounding dishesconsidered of a higher caliber. The number of guests dictated the number offoods served. As the number of guests at the table increased, the numberand variety of foods presented increased as well.DOMESTIC MANUALSColonial women of privilege took particular pride in setting an impressivetable and sought out advice on how best to do so. Fashionable hostessesrelied on cookbooks and domestic manuals published in England toguide their menus and social entertaining. The Compleat Housewife, or AccomplishedGentlewoman’s Companion, by Mrs. E. Smith, first published inEngland, offered the mistress of the house a comprehensive manual forelegant cuisine, proper table settings, and household operations.The Compleat Housewife had already been through several printings inEngland when an abridged edition was printed in Williamsburg, Virginia, in1742 by William Parks. Parks based his version on the fifth edition of theLondon work originally published in 1727 and eliminated recipes containingingredients that could not be found in Virginia. The publication achieveda modest level of success in the colonies.A review of The Compleat Housewife illustrates the level of detail followedand complicated techniques used by ambitious colonial hostesses.The 18th edition of The Compleat Housewife contained more than 700 recipes,including a new section on “foreign cookery” to appeal to readers whowere fond of the French style of cooking. A first-person preface writtenby Mrs. Smith described how cookery had become an art, and she notedthat the content of her book was based on her 30 years of experience. Sheprovided a monthly “bill of fare” for every season of the year, each includingmore than 30 menu items. There was a heavy emphasis on all types ofmeat preparation, a staple in the colonial diet. A section on “Terms of Artfor Carving” reinforced the ceremonial importance of carving skills properlydemonstrated by the host at the dining table.

178 Colonial AmericaFour illustrated diagrams offered directions for balanced and symmetricalplacement of food at the table. Mrs. Smith recommended that the firstcourse of a Summer Menu begin with a venison pasty—or savory meatpie—at the center of the table, flanked by a soup and fish dish and a servingof mutton. On one side of the grouping was placed an orange pudding anda dish of tongue and cauliflower. On the other side a white fricassee and adish of bacon and beans were strategically placed. This is followed by anequally detailed second course, with a main dish at the center of the table,surrounded by secondary dishes of meat, poultry, and vegetables. A dessertcourse was also recommended, perhaps with a pyramid display of confections,encircled by jellies, fruits, and nuts.Other domestic manuals attempted to rival Mrs. Smith. The Art ofCookery Made Plain and Easy by Mrs. Hannah Glasse was published inEngland in 1747 and eventually made its way to the colonies. While thefirst American edition was published in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1805,George Washington had already purchased an edition published in 1771,and Thomas Jefferson was reported to own a copy as well. Mrs. Glasse alsosuggested a monthly bill of fare, offered direction on the order that disheswere to be placed on the table, and provided some innovative recipes forice cream.THE MIDDAY MEALThe colonial midday meal was the focal point of entertaining. Dinnerwas the main meal of the day and was served around two or three o’clockin the afternoon. With food and conversation, it could last for several hours.The food was set out in symmetrical displays before guests were allowedto enter the dining room. Typically, the woman of the household presidedover the meal. She was seated at the head or top of the table, although somehistorians suggest this was the spot reserved for the master of the house.Serving dishes remained in place and plates were passed to those guestsseated nearest each dish of food. The commencement of the meal was anestablished ritual. The woman of the house initiated the first course by servingthose nearest her. The gentleman seated at the foot of the table did thesame. Guests at the center of the table served the dishes closest to them.Following the first course, a servant would remove the dishes and crumbthe table, in preparation for a second course. In some households, dessertwas placed on the table, or set as a separate buffet. Following desert, thedishes and tablecloth were removed. Dishes of nuts, sweetmeats, fruit, andwine were placed on the bare table. At the close of the meal, women wouldrecess to the parlor for tea and men might continue to drink and then jointhe ladies for tea.During the winter season, dinner would begin with soup. When guestshad consumed their soup, the tureen was cleared from the table, and wasreplaced by a dish called a remove, which was either a serving of meat orfish. The menu could offer up to five varieties of meat, including ham, roast

Colonial America 179beef, veal, venison, or leg of lamb. Domestic fowl—chicken, duck, goose,and turkey—were served as a supplement to the primary meat dish, andfish, seafood, and game were offered in season.Colonial cuisine reflected the ingredients and resources of a fertileand abundant new land. The estates of wealthy landowners were self-sufficient,with vegetable gardens, food crops, and livestock in plenty to providefor the table. Pork was widely available and was preserved for longperiods by salting, pickling, and smoking. Venison, bear, and buffalo wereavailable, and maritime communities had easy access to oysters, clams,and codfish. Corn and rice were important food crops. New importationroutes had cut the price of sugar and made it available to more colonists.Chocolate was imported, but consumed primarily by the wealthy whocould afford it.For beverages, wealthy colonists imported canary claret, Madeira, port,and sherry. Madeira and port were fortified with brandy, which preservedalcoholic beverages during long trips across the Atlantic. East India Madeirawas considered the finest available on the market. Rum was servedin punches and toddies. Tea imported from China was hugely popular inEngland, and the habit was fully embraced in the American colonies, withregular shipments arriving from British trading companies.SOCIAL GRACESMastery of the social graces was expected of the wealthy, and entertainingprovided a showcase for those well-practiced in good breeding. Goodmanners reflected the personal capital of the upper echelon, with fine clothing,elegant dining habits, and possessions. Wealthy colonists learned to performtable rituals with precision, as they knew the host or hostess was thefocal point of an event.In “Rules of Civility” a young George Washington copied down a lengthylist of rules for behavior he’d found in a Jesuit textbook. Of the 110 rulesnoted by Washington, 18 directed a proper gentleman in manners, conversation,and behavior at the dinner table. These were skills that would serveWashington well throughout a long career in public service. Washington’srules advised against eating with one’s mouth full or blowing on hot broth inthe presence of guests. He noted procedures for serving meat to guests, theproper use of utensils, offering toasts, and the importance of good posturewhile eating. Above all, Washington directed himself to always maintaina cheerful demeanor at the table.The art of conversation was highly valued. Dining was one of the fewcircumstances that allowed colonists the opportunity to share personal experiencesand family news or discuss opposing viewpoints and debate theissues of the day. As tensions mounted between the colonies and Great Britainover issues of taxation, conversation would likely turn to the injusticeof the Townsend Act and Stamp Act or the horror of the event dubbed theBoston Massacre.

180 Colonial AmericaCOLONIAL DANCEDancing was a leading form of public entertainment. Dance requiredprecision and grace and provided gentry with another showcase to presentwell-honed personal skills and abilities to influential members of the community.Dances were held in public halls, and the wealthy hosted privateballs in their homes.Dancing served a very practical function in colonial society as one ofthe few public events that brought men and women together to socialize.Through this ritual, friendships were made, leading to courtship andmarriage. Organized dance allowed gentlemen and women to show offtheir natural grace. Gentility was considered a highly desirable trait amongstatus-conscious colonists. The most adept performers could customize standarddance forms, showing off a higher level of creativity and skill. Dancingwas so popular in colonial society that many books were published andhandmade collections were gathered documenting key steps.Signature dances included the French Minuet, for two partners, used forceremonial events. The English Country Dance was a group dance piecefor multiple couples. The Cotillion was commonly performed in a square offour couples and eventually inspired the American Square Dance in thewestern territories. Musical accompaniment was typically provided by asingle violinist but could include several musicians for larger functions.TAVERNS AND PUBLIC HOUSESFor city dwellers and travelers, taverns and public houses offered opportunitiesfor interaction with friends and associates and served an importantfunction in urban life. Taverns provided overnight accommodations, food, entertainment,formal dinners, and musical performances. The clientele was mixedin terms of social rank and could include the middle and lower class. Whilethey were typically the domain of male customers, several notable womenwere the proprietors of large enterprises, including Christiana Campbell andJane Vobe, who did business in Virginia’s capital city of Williamsburg.The tavern culture emphasized stimulating conversation. Gossip, news,and issues of the day were often discussed, and local newspapers might beread aloud. Some offered scholarly lectures, musical entertainment, lessonsin fencing, or even the chance to view unusual animals. The finest tavernkeepers built reputations for excellent fare and would be asked to plan andimplement celebratory dinners hosted by affluent male patrons wishing toentertain honored guests.Many taverns were the site of intense political activity. The GreenDragon Tavern in Boston served as the meeting place for the revolutionarygroup the Sons of Liberty. City Tavern in Philadelphia was a large establishmentthat included five levels, a bar room, coffee rooms, a dining room, anda ball room. With its close proximity to Carpenters’ Hall and the PennsylvaniaState House—now known as Independence Hall—City Tavern was

Colonial America 181frequented by the political leaders of the day from John Adams to GeorgeWashington. Fraunces Tavern—first known as the Queen’s Head Tavern—was a center for food, drink, and commerce in the city of New York. OwnerSamuel Fraunces hosted New York members of the Sons of Liberty, and severalpolitical events took place there. Fraunces Tavern gained a permanentplace in history, when on December 4, 1783, General George Washingtonhosted a farewell dinner in the tavern Long Room for the officers under hiscommand during the Revolutionary War.HOLIDAYSHoliday entertaining relied on traditional customs but was also influencedby trends in table settings and social aspirations. The rhythm of dailylife coincided with the agricultural calendar and colonists recognized fourholidays that marked religious observances and paralleled the seasons ofthe year. Lady Day, the British name for the Christian Feast of the Annunciationof the Virgin Mary, occurred during spring on March 25. With thearrival of summer, June 24 was celebrated as Midsummer. During autumn,on September 29 colonists marked Michaelmas, the feast of St. Michael theArchangel. December 25 was the winter celebration of Christmas.In the Tidewater region of Virginia, where colonists were members ofthe Anglican Church, the Christmas season was one of great feasting andenjoyment, but the holiday was not universally celebrated in the colonies.Christmas had been legally banned by the Puritan society in Massachusettsin 1659. In Virginia, seasonal agricultural chores were winding downin late December and the 12 days of the Christmas season offered numerousopportunities for entertaining and community fellowship. The slaughterseason was underway and fresh meat was plentiful for celebrations. Weddingfeasts were often held during the last week of December to coincidewith the presence of friends and family already gathered for the holidays.In addition to Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, the final celebration ofthe season, Twelfth Night on January 6, featured games and revelry, a rich,decadent cake, and a competition among guests for designation as King andQueen of the celebration in the subsequent year.Holiday tables also followed the rules of symmetry and balance thatwere so important in colonial society. Special emphasis was put on the artistryof the dessert table, with the wealthy creating elaborate decorationsand displays out of sugar, pastry, and marzipan. Multi-tiered presentationsof fruit and sweets were favored. Family heirloom figurines made of porcelain,marble, or wax might appear on the holiday dessert table annually.SOCIAL CHANGE ON THE EVEOF THE REVOLUTIONFrom late 1773 to autumn of 1774, a series of events and politicalactions would converge to eventually change the consumption habits of

182 Colonial Mexicocolonists, influence entertaining practices, and begin to shape a new nationalidentity separate from Great Britain.Taxes imposed by the British on items ranging from paper to tea hadinfuriated colonists who protested “taxation without representation” andpromptly organized a boycott of British goods. The monarchy eventuallyrepealed most of the taxes but retained a tax on tea. Colonists organized aboycott of tea imported by Great Britain. On December 16, 1773, in theultimate act of defiance, 50 rebels dressed as Mohawk Indians boarded threeBritish ships stocked with tea and dumped its contents into Boston Harbor.The British retaliated by closing the port, a move colonists described as “TheIntolerable Acts.”Reacting to the closing of Boston Harbor, colonial leaders convened inPhiladelphia between September 5 and October 26, 1774, as delegates ofthe First Continental Congress. The 55 delegates voted on September 27,1774, to adopt a resolution that banned the import of goods from GreatBritain, ceased the export of goods to Britain, and established the ContinentalAssociation to enforce the new boycott within the colonies.British commercial goods, once a coveted tool of entertaining and asymbol of social standing with wealthy colonists, had now become the leveragein a heated political confrontation that would shortly lead to theAmerican Revolution.Further Reading: Brookhiser, Richard, ed. Rules of Civility. Charlottesville: Universityof Virginia Press, 2003; Curtain, Kathleen, and Sandra L. Oliver and PlimothPlantation, Inc. Giving Thanks: Thanksgiving Recipes and History, from Pilgrimsto Pumpkin Pie. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2005; Donavan, Mary, and AmyHatrak, Frances Mills, and Elizabeth Shull. The Thirteen Colonies Cookbook.Montclair, NJ: Montclair Historical Society, 1982; Garrett, Wendell, ed. GeorgeWashington’s Mount Vernon. New York: The Monacelli Press, 1998; Hendrickson,Charles Cyril, and Kate Van Winkle Keller. Dances of Colonial America [Online,September 18, 2001]. The Colonial Music Institute Web Site http://www.colonialmusic.org; McWilliams, James E. A Revolution in Eating: How the Questfor Food Shaped America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005; Oliver,Libby Hodges, and Mary Miley Theobald. Williamsburg Christmas. New York:Harry N. Abrams, 1999; Rose, Peter G., ed. The Sensible Cook: Dutch Foodways inthe Old and the New World. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998; Salinger,Sharon V. Taverns and Drinking in Early America. Baltimore: The Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 2002.T. W. BarrittColonial MexicoIn 1519, when Hernán Cortés anchored his ships off the coast of whatis now Mexico, near present-day Veracruz, he and his men relished thethought of fresh food and water after leaving Cuba with cassava bread, saltpork, and olive oil in their larder. The Spanish had been in the New World

Colonial Mexico 183for several years by that time and were becoming familiar with the indigenousfoodstuffs available on the ground: corn, beans, squash, chilies, andvarious fruits.After the conquest of Mexico, the Spanish created the Viceroyalty ofNew Spain and the influx of Spanish culture and its mixing with nativeIndian cultures began in earnest. Three different facets of colonial Mexicanculture influenced dining and entertaining: the office of the viceroy (viceking) with its splendor; the haciendas or large ranches or farms; and theconvents and nunneries, where well-bred young women learned to cook,generally from Spanish nuns influenced by the culinary knowledge of othernuns belonging to the convents founded by St. Teresa of Avila.In the beginning were the Aztec foods described by Fray Bernardino deSahagún—“pots with chilies, tomatoes and smashed pumpkin seeds calledpipian, birds, fish, frogs, tadpoles, ants with wings and maguey worms, grasshoppersand shrimp; fruits such as plums, zapotes, and anonas, tree roots,batatas, green leaves, mazamorres and thick beverages made from chili andhoney”—that the Spanish merged with their pork, oil, onions, garlic, wheat,sugar, beef, citrus fruits, and wine to create a veritable mestizaje (mixture)of a diet, including influences from 800 years of Arab rule of the Iberianpeninsula. The medieval atmosphere of the Spanish court still prevailed.And thus there were the foods served by Hernán Cortés at a sumptuousand widely cited banquet to celebrate the downfall of the great Aztec cityof Tenochtitlán, where the hosts served hogs and wine, as well as copiousMexican women making tortillas, 1800s. © North Wind / North Wind PictureArchives—All rights reserved.

184 Colonial Mexicostews, salads, and roasted meats of all types, including young steers roastedand stuffed with various poultry and preserved pork like chorizo and bacon.Animal heads adorned the tables and roasted birds arrived at the table bearingsilver or gold beaks and silver feet.In 1538, Cortés as the Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca played hostagain, this time to the first viceroy, Don Antonio de Mendoza. According tochronicler Bernal Díaz del Castillo, the banquet was inferior in no way to thebanquets of the Spanish court, which the conquerors were trying to emulatein the viceregal palaces, the haciendas, and convents of New Spain. Cortés’sfeast included the following dishes to celebrate the signing of a treaty betweenSpain and France: olives, cheese, turnips, garbanzo beans, numerousbirds, and meats—and especially the native American bird, the turkey—salads,radishes, turnovers, cakes, and dishes in casseroles. There were also goldand silver cups filled with red and white wines, chocolate drinks and Spanishsherry, accompanied by a multitude of delicacies including pepitoria,royal torte, and escabeche. Sweets ended the meals and included marzipans,almonds, confites, citron, and various fruits.Dining in the seventeenth century was baroque, after the style predominantin Spain. Table settings began to take on some elements of the nativeculture. For a banquet in 1669 for the viceroy count of Montezuma, thetable was set with medium-quality earthenware pottery, jugs, and pitchersmade in Guadalajara, glasses from China, caldrons with feet and lids madeof silver, tablecloths, and napkins. Heavy silverware marked each guest’splace and Indian servants watched to make sure that guests did not pockettheir silver when leaving. Usually, though, everyone drank to excess and sothe problem of theft was miniscule.Natives shelling corn, Guadalajara, Mexico, 1903.Library of Congress.

Colonial Mexico 185The convents of Mexico, the first established as early as 1540 in MexicoCity, provided a number of the sweets and other dishes that embellished thecolonial Mexican tables and viceregal banquets. One of the legendary dishesis the famous mole poblana. Many legends attempt to explain this dish, asymbol of mestizaje of the Mexican kitchen. One myth has it that in 1680Dominican nuns in Puebla created the dish in honor of the current viceroy,Tomás Antonio de la Cerda y Aragón. Except for the nuns in the convents,very few women could read or write, and so the passage of recipes fromwoman to woman was even more crucial as the cuisine of Mexico evolved.The role of the convents cannot be overemphasized. The nuns trained manyof the young Indian and mestizo girls who became cooks for affluent familiesand stayed with these families for a lifetime.Because so few cookbooks were published in Spain—John C. Supermaintains that there were probably no more than eight cookbooks publishedin Spain in the first 350 years after the printing press was invented—the transmission of cooking knowledge from person to person was vitallyimportant for the households, palaces, and ecclesiastical institutions of colonialMexico. Diego Granado’s cookbook, Libro del arte de cocina, publishedin 1614, was one of the first cookbooks used in Mexican kitchens.This book contained a large number of Italian-inspired recipes and thusItalian food influenced Mexican cooking and dining far more than Frenchfood did.On the haciendas, the liturgical calendar of the Church also influencedthe celebrations and the choice of foodstuffs served at meals. Family feastingfollowed the calendar of saints’ days, weddings, baptisms, birthdays, engagements,la quinceanera (coming-of-age parties for 15-year-old girls), funerals,and just plain Sunday dinners. A typical family feast might include alight soup to begin with, followed by a “dry soup” or sopa seca consistingof rice, tortillas, or pasta, then a stew-like entrée. Meat came next, oftenroasted, served with various side dishes and sauces. Ending the feast, dessertsand candy appeared on the table, accompanied by tea or coffee if available.Tableware often came from Mexican potters and the silverware fromMexico’s own silver mines.Further Reading: Ayala T., Roberto Arturo. Cocina Mexicana de los siglos XVI alXIX. El rescate de la cocina colonial con ingredientes originales, pero fáciles deconseguir. México: Editorial Libra SA de CV, 2001; Díaz del Castillo, BernalHistoria verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España. México: Nueva Mundo.1943; Pilcher, Jeffrey M. Que Vivan los Tamales: Food and the Making ofMexican Identity. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998; Pinedo,Encarnación. Encarnación’s Kitchen: Mexican Recipes from Nineteenth-CenturyCalifornia. Edited and translated by Dan Strehl. With an essay by Victor Valle.Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003; Valle, Victor M., and Mary LouValle. Recipe of Memory: Five Generations of Mexican Cuisine. New York: NewPress, 1995.Cynthia D. Bertelsen

186 Cookbooks, History ofCookbooks, History of“The government of a family bears a Lilliputian resemblance to the governmentof a nation,” Mary Randolph wrote in her book, The VirginiaHousewife (1824). Cooking is part of that governance. Before writing andliteracy became common, and in cultures relying on oral tradition, the first“cookbooks” existed in the form of word-of-mouth instructions passedfrom mother to daughter, father to son, across generations and withinwork groups similar to guilds, one person to another. Later, after literacytook hold, early cookery manuscripts often appeared in the form of scrolls,but also in codex format or just in shredded fragments. De Honesta Voluptate,the first printed cookbook, compiled by Vatican librarian BartolomeoSacchi di Piadena, called Platina, led the way in 1475 for all those thatfollowed.Cookbooks reflect many things, and not necessarily what peopleactually ate:• Family size• Societal changes• Literacy and mathematical skills• Technological changes• Women’s roles and accepted behavior• Ingredients available locally• Ingredients acquired through trade• Upper-class values• Middle-class and lower-class imitations of upper classes• TraditionThree major stages in the historical development of cookbooks can bedetermined. Within each stage are a number of sub-stages and trends.Until the nineteenth century, most cookbooks were written by men, witha few exceptions like Hannah Woolley’s The Queen-Like Closet (1670). Themale cookbook authors wrote for the maîtres d’hotel of the large, wealthyhouseholds and palaces they managed for kings and queens, powerful noblefamilies, and high-ranking church officials. Cookbooks served primarily asaides memoires for these cooks, a sort of archive to pass down necessary informationabout ingredients and techniques for carrying out large banquets,as well as every day menus. An anonymous Italian manuscript cookbookdating to the end of the fifteenth century, The Neapolitan Recipe Collection(Cuoco Napoltetano), contains a number of opulent banquet menus. An exampleof the recipe collections, or so-called courtly dining guides, producedfor the managers of large noble, royal, and ecclesiastical households, TheNeapolitan Recipe Collection is representative of many of the books producedby such writers.These recipe collections were for use by the master / head of the householdin instructing the cooks. In the earliest manuscripts, cooking times,ingredient quantities, and number of servings were not mentioned. Later,especially in the Italian manuscripts emerging in the late fifteenth century,

Cookbooks, History of 187Frontispiece of Le Patissier Royal Parisien,an 1815 cookbook by Marie AntoninCarême. The Art Archive.authors began to include this information, albeit sporadically. Early cookerybooks show many commonalities, not at all surprising considering the copyingand borrowing that occurred constantly.Compilers organized these books in various ways, usually by ingredientor part of the meal, as in many early cookbooks as well as modern cookbooks.Some early cookbooks were organized alphabetically by the nameof the recipe. And sometimes there were no names for the recipes. Much ismissing because the commonest dishes and procedures were so well knownthat no one thought that they needed to be recorded or mentioned. A casein point are vegetables and fruits, which are shown in abundance in paintingsof various periods, but are often lacking in the recipe collections. Illustratedcookbooks came into vogue in the 1700s.The second stage of cookbook development came in the form of householdmanagement books written by men and women for housewives, witha very rigid and rule-encrusted, prescriptive tone. In England, in one of thefirst cookbooks to address women’s cooking, Thomas Dawson’s The GoodHuswifes Jewell (1585) was written not just for nobility planning banquetsbut for gentlewomen in charge of day-to-day household tasks. Other earlyexamples of this trend include French chef Menon’s La cuisinière bourgeoise(1746), and Traité historique et pratique de la cuisine Ou le cuisinierinstruit (2 vol., 1758). Isabella Beeton’s The Book of Household Management(1861)—an encyclopedic 1,112 pages—contained detailed chapters on ingredientsand how to prepare a variety of different dishes. The book alsoincluded information about medicine, legal terms, and the like.

188 Cookbooks, History ofLater, as women’s literacy increased, and the Industrial Revolution heldsway, women began to write cookbooks meant for women’s use in smaller,less affluent households. Within the trend lie several subgroups of cookbooks:(1) charitable or community cookbooks to raise money for the CivilWar soldiers, (2) promotional or advertising cookbooks printed by companiesseeking to sell food products or kitchen wares, and (3) publicationsfrom the cooking school, home economics, and domestic science movement,including health and nutrition topics. This trend is most apparentin the United States, which had less of a tradition of wealthy householdsfestooned with servants. Because of the move westward, many women nolonger could access the oral tradition of recipes being passed down frommother to daughter and so family manuscript cookbooks became important.And published cookbooks took on a greater role in educating women abouthousehold management and cooking because their family members werenot there to teach them. Reprints of numerous books and the many editionsissued for various works speak to the popularity and usefulness ofthese books to women across America.Charitable or community cookbooks, a uniquely American invention,began during the Civil War years as women sought to contribute to thewar effort. The first charitable American cookbook, A Poetical-Cook Book(1864), edited by Maria J. Moss, was dedicated to the Philadelphia SanitaryFair of 1864. By the end of the twentieth century, thousands of these bookshad been published by churches, civic groups, women’s groups, politicalgroups, and others. A few of the most popular of the twentieth-centurybooks were Charleston Receipts (1950), which went through 32 printingsand raised over one million dollars, and River Road Recipes: The Textbook ofLouisiana Cuisine (1959) boasted 72 printings.Cookbooks developed by food and kitchen equipment companies appearedas food processing and technological advances changed the landscapeof the kitchen. The Washburn Crosby Company (now General Mills)produced the Gold Medal Flour Cook Book in 1903, and it was the WashburnCompany that created Betty Crocker, the mythical ideal Americanhousewife. Not to be outdone, the Pillsbury Company created Ann Pillsburyin the mid 1940s and published numerous books using her “personality,”including 55 Favorite Ann Pillsbury Cake Recipes (1952). Flour was justone product among many (e.g., raisins, oil, baking powder, canned milk,molasses, chocolate, and, of course, Jell-O) for which cookbooks and bookletsappeared.Representatives of the cooking school, home economics, domestic sciencemovement included Sarah Tyson Rorer’s Mrs. Rorer’s PhiladelphiaCook Book (1886), Mrs. Rorer’s New Cook Book, a Manual of Housekeeping(1902), Mrs. Rorer’s Key to Simple Cookery (1917), among several titles; Mrs.D. A. (Mary) Lincoln’s Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book (1884); and FannieMerritt Farmer’s Boston Cooking School Cook Book (1896). While trainingwomen in home economics and USDA extension, the movement alsospawned the academic discipline that became the study of human nutrition.

Cookbooks, History of 189Marion Rombauer Becker looks overthe 1951 edition of The Joy of Cookingwith her mother, Irma Rombauer,at left. This mother and daughter teamhas co-authored this edition of The Joyof Cooking. AP/ Wide World Photo.The USDA published dozens of small cookbooks, bulletins really, with suchtitles as Home Canning of Fruits and Vegetables (1929), Money-Saving MainDishes (1955), and Aunt Sammy’s Radio Recipes (1927). The perennial bestseller,Joy of Cooking, was born out of this era. Originally self-published in1931, Joy has been revised seven times and reprinted many times. Each revisionmirrors changes in the American food scene.Health and nutrition began to take on a more important role in cookbooks,reflecting the progress of science in the medical and health fieldsthat began in the years surrounding the Civil War. Dr. Susana Dodds publishedHygienic Cookery: Health in the Household in 1883, and many of thefresh food issues she addressed were still being debated at the beginning ofthe twenty-first century. Another book, Science in the Kitchen (1892), byMrs. E. E. Kellogg, the wife of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg of Battle Creek,Michigan, tackled the questions of defining a healthy diet.The vegetarianism and health concerns that molded many works of thenineteenth century continued to influence many twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury cookbook authors. Countless numbers of diet cookbooks weigheddown the shelves in bookstores, testifying to the American obsession withweight loss, diet, nutrition, and healthy eating.Nutritionist Adelle Davis published a number of books, including Let’sCook it Right (1947). Her work influenced the 1960s hippie counterculture,which drew attention to the deficiencies in the American diet. In 1973,the American Heart Association produced the American Heart AssociationCookbook, a book that continued to be revised and used for several decades.Anna Thomas wrote her farseeing book The Vegetarian Epicure (1972), inwhich the recipes overcome some of the tasteless recipes of Ellen BuchmanEwald’s Recipes for a Small Planet (1973), which sprouted from FrancesMoore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet (1971). Laurel’s Kitchen: A Handbookfor Vegetarian Cookery & Nutrition (1976), by Laurel Robertson et al., wasdeveloped in Berkeley, California, out of concern for correct nutrition andwas one of the first books to address vegetarian nutrition in a practical,tasteful, and accessible way. Deborah Madison published numerous bookson vegetarianism, including Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone (1997) and TheGreens Cookbook (2001).

190 Cookbooks, History ofBerkeley, California, also gave birth to another nutrition-related movement.Emerging from its vegetarian antecedents, the eat-local movementessentially began with Alice Waters at her Berkeley, California, restaurant,Chez Panisse. The Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook (1982) and Chez PanisseVegetables (1996) heralded a new preoccupation with fresh food grown locally.English food writer Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking (1960)impressed Alice Waters so much that she decided to try to cook food thatshe saw on the cover of David’s book. Beginning around the turn of thetwenty-first century, scores of cookbooks about farmers markets appeared,including Fresh from the Farmers’ Market: Year-Round Recipes for the Pick ofthe Crop (1997), by Janet Fletcher with an introduction by Alice Waters;Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America’s Farmers’ Markets (2002),by Deborah Madison; and Pillsbury’s Farmer’s Market Cookbook by Pillsbury(2000), written by Jackie Sheehan.In tandem with the growing interest in whole foods, the publication ofethnic cookbooks took off with classics like Julia Child’s Mastering the Artof French Cooking (1961), Diana Kennedy’s The Cuisines of Mexico (1972),Elizabeth Lambert Ortiz’s The Book of Latin American Cooking (1979),Marcella Hazan’s The Classic Italian Cook Book (1976) and More ClassicItalian Cooking (1978), Julie Sahni’s Classic Indian Cooking (1980), ClaudiaRoden’s A Book of Middle Eastern Food (1980), and Penelope Casas’s TheFoods and Wines of Spain (1983). These works anticipated the burgeoningAmerican interest in other food cultures that began with the groundbreakingTime-Life “Foods of the World” series (1968–1976).Feeding into the local foods and ethnic cuisine trends, numerous cookbooksbegan to appear, written by chefs who owned restaurants, starred incooking shows on television, or both. Early examples of these works includeJacques Pepin’s The Art of Cooking (1987); André Soltner’s The Lutece Cookbook(1980); Wolfgang Puck’s The Wolfgang Puck Cookbook—Recipes FromSpago, Chinois And Points East And West (1986); Charlie Trotter’s CharlieTrotter’s (1994); and Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry (1999). Mostof the chefs advocated using only the freshest ingredients, following theexample of Alice Waters.The phenomenon of TV cooking shows produced an onslaught of cookbooksby TV food show stars such as Rachael Ray’s 30-Minute Meals (1999)and Classic 30-Minute Meals: The All-Occasion Cookbook (2006); MarioBatali’s Simple Italian Food (1998), Mario Batali Holiday Food (2000), TheBabbo Cookbook (2002), and Molto Italiano: Simple Italian Recipes (2005);and Paula Deen’s Paula Deen & Friends: Living It Up, Southern Style (2005).Other trends in cookbook publishing in the United States included anincrease in personalized memoir cookbooks and cookbooks based on singleappliances, ingredients, or specific meals. Michael Lee West’s ConsumingPassions: A Food-Obsessed Life (1999), Colette Rossant’s Memoirs of a LostEgypt: A Memoir with Recipes (1999), and Marlena de Blasi’s A ThousandDays in Venice (2002) provide recipes alongside stories and insights intocultures and private lives. Not Your Mother’s Slow Cooker Cookbook by Beth

Cookbooks, Tools for Entertaining 191Hensperger and Julie Kaufmann (2005), One Potato, Two Potato 300 RecipesFrom Simple To Elegant by Roy Finamore and Molly Stevens (2001), andSimple Italian Sandwiches Recipes: From America’s Favorite Panini Bar byJennifer and Jason Denton (2006) illustrate the shift to detailed and specificcookbooks.Further Reading: Arndt, Alice, ed. Culinary Biographies. Houston, TX: YES Press,2006; Capatti, Alberto, and Massimo Montanari. Italian Cuisine: A CulturalHistory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003; Fisher, Carol. TheAmerican Cookbook: A History. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2006;Fordyce, Eleanor. “Cookbooks of the 1800s.” In Dining in America: 1850–1900.Edited by Kathyrn Grover. pp. 84–113. Amherst: University of MassachusettsPress, 1987; Gold, Carol. Danish Cookbooks: Domesticity & National Identity,1616–1901. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007; Lowenstein, Eleanor.Bibliography of American Cookery Books, 1742–1860. Worcester, MA: AmericanAntiquarian Society, 1972; Rodinson, Maxime. “Studies in Arabic ManuscriptsRelated to Cookery.” In Maxime Rodinson et al. Medieval Arab Cookery:Essays and Translations. Totnes, Devon: Prospect Books, 2006, 91–164.; Root,Waverly, and Richard de Rochement. Eating in America: A History. Hopewell,NJ: Ecco Press, 1994; Schenone, Laura. A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: AHistory of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances. NewYork: W. W. Norton, 2003; Scully, Terence. The Art of Cookery in the MiddleAges. Woodbridge, England: Boydell Press, 1995; Shapiro, Laura. Perfection Salad:Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century. New York: Farrar, Straus andGiroux, 1986; Theophano, Janet. Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives Throughthe Cookbooks They Wrote. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002; Wheaton,Barbara Ketcham. Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to1789. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983.Cynthia D. BertelsenCookbooks, Toolsfor EntertainingThe cookbook has existed as a separate genre for over 500 years—aslong as any other type of printed book. But until the nineteenth century, arelatively small number of cookbooks were printed, and their use as handbooksor guides for entertaining is a more recent phenomenon. Some ofthe first truly popular printed cookbooks were sold during the eighteenthcentury in multiple editions in Britain and America. Eliza Smith’s CompleatHousewife: or Accomplish’d Gentlewoman’s Companion first appearedin London in 1727, and Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plainand Simple was first published in 1747. Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery(1796), the first cookbook written by an American, was an instructionmanual for the cooking duties required of domestic life in the new republic.Like its predecessors, it focused not on entertaining, but on the day-to-dayroutine of preparing food for a household.

192 Cookbooks, Tools for EntertainingIn the nineteenth century, numerous regional American cookbooks appeared,such as Mrs. Mary Randolph’s The Virginia Housewife: or MethodicalCook (1824), Sarah Rutledge’s Carolina Housewife (1847), and Susan HarrisColeman Hosmer’s Nantucket Receipts (1874). The domestic economymovement in the nineteenth century aimed to encourage the preparationof nutritious food in the home under sanitary conditions. The purchasingpower of the growing American middle classes created markets for manydifferent domestic economy cookbooks, such as Lydia Maria Child’s AmericanFrugal Housewife (1829); Sarah Josepha Hale’s The Good Housekeeper,or The Way to Live Well and To Be Well While We Live (1839); and CatharineBeecher’s works A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841), The DomesticReceipt Book (1846), and The American Woman’s Home (1869; co-authoredwith her sister, the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe). Early attempts at authoritativereference works such as the first cookery encyclopedia, TheCook’s Own Book (1836), were also published. In each of these works, asingle chapter or section might consider table settings, service patterns, ordomestic entertaining, if such subjects were considered at all.In Britain, Mrs. Isabella Beeton’s bestselling Book of Household Management(1861), a comprehensive manual for the middle-class household,treated entertaining as one of several components to the successful managingof a household. The growth of cooking schools toward the end of thenineteenth century also helped spread new recipes and professional cookingtechniques to American homes. Fannie Farmer’s famous Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896) was initially used as the school’s textbook but waswidely adopted outside the school for domestic use.A unique perspective on managing the domestic household is containedin two books written by free African American servants: RobertRoberts’s The House Servant’s Directory, or A Monitor for Private Families(1827) and Tunis Campbell’s Hotel Keepers, Head Waiters and Housekeeper’sGuide (1848).By the late nineteenth century, as print culture in all genres expandedin format and quantity, a literature of entertaining began to develop. Mary F.Henderson’s Practical Cooking and Dinner Giving. A Treatise ContainingPractical Instructions in Cooking; in the Combination and Serving of Dishes;and in Fashionable Modes of Entertaining at Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner(1876) is possibly the first true manual for dinner parties and domesticentertainment. It was popular enough to undergo at least 10 reprintings, thelast as late as 1904.Fashionable restaurants in America’s urban centers also began to publishtheir own cookbooks, a trend that continues unabated today in the ageof the celebrity chef. The first, The Epicurean (1894), included bills of fare,recipes, and service instructions from Delmonico’s Restaurant, the epicenterof Gilded Age dining in New York City, and was authored by its chef,Charles Ranhofer.Many of these now-classic works have been reprinted over the years, oftenas contemporary photo-facsimiles, and are available through out-of-print

Cookbooks, Tools for Entertaining 193and antiquarian booksellers. Original copies are increasingly sought after bycollectors.In the twentieth century, the numerous changes in how Americans ateare reflected in their cookbooks. Specialized cookbooks and guides for hostinga cocktail party (with a heavy emphasis on hors d’oeuvres recipes), andfor the dinner party became widely available. Thomas Bullock’s The IdealBartender (1917) and Harry Craddock’s majestic art deco The Savoy CocktailBook (1930) are two of the most notable early manuals in mixology, providingcomprehensive collections of newly developed recipes for cocktail parties.As processed and packaged foods gained wide acceptance and use, titleslike Poppy Cannon’s The Can Opener Cookbook (1952) and its several successorvolumes became widespread. Other popular cookbooks in this periodused different proportions of canned or processed foods to fresh ingredients,depending upon their author’s viewpoint and the cookbook’s aims.By mid-century, the dinner party became an established middle-classnorm, and manuals for party-giving for all occasions, for chafing dish cookeryfor group parties, and for entertaining for specific targeted audiences allwere published in large quantities. Titles such as Margot Finletter Mitchell’sThe Busy Girl’s Cookbook: Easy Recipes and Simple Directions for Good Mealsand Small Parties (1953) and Esquire’s Handbook for Hosts (1949 and manysuccessive editions) were addressed to singles and served as stylish socialetiquette books in addition to their collections of recipes. James Beard hadthe first cooking show on American television, teaching America how toenjoy complex recipes and share them at home. Gourmet magazine, firstpublished in 1941, initially targeted an exclusively male audience interestedin the arcana of complex recipes but quickly was adopted by a wider demographicof home cooks.The tremendous success of numerous editions of Irma Rombauer’s TheJoy of Cooking (1931) and Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book (1950) establishedbenchmarks for cooking basic family meals and more elaborateproductions for entertaining guests. The publication in 1961 of Julia Child’sMastering the Art of French Cooking had a significant impact on changing theway middle-class Americans thought about food. Not only did Child’s bookbring a new awareness to the subtleties of French cuisine (at a time whenthe Kennedys famously hired the first French chef in the White House),but the recipes, many of them complex and focused on using fresh ingredients,allowed home cooks to demonstrate to their friends and neighborstheir sophistication in the mastery of complex recipes and techniques.Similarly, Elizabeth David’s works, beginning with Mediterranean Food(1950), helped change the way the British thought about food and ate inthe postwar years.Martha Stewart’s breakthrough book Entertaining (1982), a direct successorto earlier mid-century efforts, emphasized the totality of domesticentertainment, of which cooking was one part. Complexity and simplicityare equally appreciated, with an emphasis on the host’s creating an “authentic”experience for his or her guests. For Stewart, it is as important to

194 Cordials and Liqueursknow how and when to serve a good basic omelet as it is a delicate, complexsoufflé.As travel outside the United States increased in the postwar years, sotoo did Americans’ interest and appreciation of world cuisines. French foodin the 1960s, Thai food in the 1970s, Japanese and California cuisine in the1980s, and Pacific Rim or “fusion” cuisine in the 1990s all influenced homecooks through their popularity in restaurants. The 1990s trend of purchasingprofessional kitchen appliances for the home, whether for use or forshow, shows how we look to restaurants and the professional culinary industry,and their cookbooks, as our main guide for domestic entertaining.Today, with an increased interest in organic, natural, and locally producedfoods, the future of entertaining and the enjoyment of good food andcompany is certainly secure, if ever changing, and the attendant cookbookswe use continue to reflect popular tastes and interests.Further Reading: Brown, Eleanor Parker. Culinary Americana: Cookbooks Publishedin the Cities and Towns of the United States of America During the Years From1860 Through 1960. Newcastle DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1999; Feeding America:Historic Cookbook Project at Michigan State University. http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/; Hess, John L., and Karen Hess. The Taste of America.Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989; Lovegren, Sylvia.Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads. New York: Macmillan, 1995.Jeffrey MakalaCordials and LiqueursAlthough today we think of these sweet alcohol-based after-dinner drinksas merely a pleasant way to conclude a formal meal, the name cordial revealstheir true origin. These were first invented as medicinal drinks meant tosoothe the heart (cor in Latin, also the root of cardiac in English). The logicwas that alcohol was considered the vital essence of wine, itself a substancethat nourishes the blood, hence the name aqua vitae or “water of life.” Combinedwith sweetness, considered to be hot and moist in terms of humoralphysiology, and various herbal or fruit extracts, cordials were intended tobe a medicinal corrective to the labors of the day as well as the meal itself.The fact that they have manifest ability to “lighten the spirits,” so to speak,was taken as concrete evidence that they do in fact thin the thick andgluey humors that traverse through the body, taxing the heart and causingheavy pensiveness in the mind and sluggishness in the limbs. A cordial isthus good for the heart—and should be distinguished from other originallymedicinal drinks such as the aperitif—which scours and opens thebody’s passages readying it for a meal to come, or the digestif, which ismeant to strengthen the digestive heat of the stomach, and cause it to corregateand better “concoct” the stomach’s contents, which is why digestifsare bitter.

Cordials and Liqueurs 195Europeans began distilling these medicines some time in the MiddleAges, and we know that figures like Roger Bacon and Raymond Lull experimentedwith various forms of alcohol in an effort to discover a longevitydrug. By the era of print, recipes for these drinks were published and wellknown. Hieronymus Braunschweig’s book on distillation is among the earliestof these. Other alchemists such as Walter Ryff composed complex cordialrecipes. Such recipes are also contained in a handbook written by theSwiss botanist Conrad Gessner under the pseudonym Euonymus Philiatrusin the mid-sixteenth century. For example he offers a recipe for a rose water(meant as a cordial, not a baking ingredient) that soothes the heart and liverand is excellent for inflammations (roses being cold humorally). This is essentiallythe ancestor of rosolio, still popular in Italy.Contemporary cookbooks containing menus and banqueting guidesprovide evidence that “waters” such as these came out with the last courseof fruits and sweets, though whether they were taken medicinally or merelyfor pleasure cannot be known. Gessner’s comments suggest that it is forboth: “Aqua ardens, or aqua vitae, is extracted from wine, among us from thelees, so much of which is sold by common folk, and from which they practicallymake a meal.” The drink he is speaking of we would today call grappaor marc. But he also discusses other ingredients macerated in the wine andthen distilled: cinnamon, sage, absinthe, gentian, iris, and even juniper, whichhe believes gives the most pleasing aroma. The latter is the ancestor of gin.Other recipes include several dozen ingredients—one has cloves, nutmeg,ginger, coriander, galangal, long pepper, juniper, orange, sage, basil, rosemary,mint, lettuce, laurel, pimpernel, gentian, elder, white rose, spikenard, lignumaloes, cardoons, cinnamon, absinthe, as well as fruits, and plenty of sugar.Later distillers would not be so open with their “secret recipes.”Few of the modern manufacturers of cordials mention their medicinalorigins, but they do frequently point out their monastic roots, though monkswould have been creating these for the sake of health rather than pleasure,presumably. The legends surrounding the origin of many cordials must beconsidered just that, though there may be a grain of truth in some of the stories.Chartreuse is named for a monastic order, as is Benedictine. The latteris said to have been invented in 1510 by Brother Bernardo Vincelli in theAbbey of Fécamp in Normandy and includes some 27 herbs and spices, notunlike Gessner’s recipe at all. Chartreuse, the lurid green or sweeter yellowcordial from which we get the name for the color, is said to contain 130 herbsand traces its origin to an alchemical manuscript bequeathed to the Carthusianmonastery at Vauvert in 1605. The cordial later made its way tothe headquarters at Voiron where production on a large scale commenced.Manufacture underwent various vicissitudes over the years, especially whenthe monks were expelled from France, but Chartreuse is still made today.Although precisely defining a liqueur today is difficult, in general itrefers to a sweet dessert beverage with an alcohol content of about 25 to30 percent, that is, twice as much as wine, but not as much as straight spirits,which are about 35 to 50 percent (or 70 to 100 proof ). But there are

196 Cordials and Liqueursstronger and weaker liqueurs as well. The leading manufacturers of liqueurscontinue to be French and Italian, though the Dutch Bols (since 1575) andDeKuyper companies have long had lines of flavored schnapps, and the GermanJägermeister from Wolfenbüttel has an ardent following (Jägermeisteris technically a digestif, as are the Italian artichoke-based Cynar, and thementholated Fernet, a dark bitter brooding herbal concoction). Below is asampling of the range and variety of better-known choices, which excludesaperitifs like Vermouth, Campari, and Pimm’s. New flavors are of coursebeing introduced every day, far beyond the now fairly staid peppermint androot beer.There are a number of herb- and spice-based liqueurs that can be considereddirect descendants of the original cordials. These include the cloyingyellow Italian drinks Strega and Galliano. Darker and more redolent of herbsare two Eastern European liqueurs: Unicum from Hungary, Becherovkafrom the Czech Republic—both technically bitters rather than cordials. Althoughthe impalatable Goldschlager and Goldwasser with flecks of actualgold may seem a modern novelty, it does in fact vaguely replicate the centuries-oldaurum potabile, or drinkable gold, a longevity drug often flavoredwith cinnamon. With more noble pedigrees are the various liqueurs basedon anise. These range from the sweet French anisette and Italian sambucawhich also includes elder, to the more potent pastis, Greek ouzo and Turkishraki as well as the whole range of absinthes. The latter, although often drunksweetened and cut with water, is not an after dinner drink, but an aperitif—but it does have roots extending back hundreds of years. Made with wormwoodabsinthe gained notoriety in fin de siècle France among artists, poets,and other louche types, until it was banned in most of Europe in the twentiethcentury. It is, however, enjoying a resurgence today.Liqueurs have also historically been based on nuts, nocino being traditionallymade by steeping green walnuts in alcohol. There are commercialvarieties of these drinks nowadays. Other nut-based liqueurs include amaretto,which most people believe is flavored with almond, but is actuallymade with apricot kernels or bitter almonds. The Amaretto di Saronno companyclaims that their formula dates back to 1525 and was given to artistBernardino Luini by his grateful model turned lover. Frangelico is a similarliqueur based on hazelnuts, with pretensions to monastic origins.Fruit bases are far more common among liqueurs. The grandest of theseare without doubt those based on orange, with Grand Marnier clearly outstanding,Cointreau following behind, and various others generically calledTriple Sec, suitable only for mixed drinks. Curaçao is made from a Caribbeanorange peel (laraha), cultivated on the island of the same name, andcolored brightly for reasons that are elusive. Chambord is a raspberry liqueurwith a distinctive orb-shaped bottle said to date back to 1685 whenLouis XIV visited the Chateau de Chambord in the Loire Valley. Similar tothis is cassis, based on black currant, often mixed with champagne to makea kir royale. Other fruit liqueurs include the Italian limoncello based onlemons and maraschino based on sour cherries, though there are a number

Cruise Ships 197of other cherry liqueurs such as Cherry Heering. Sloe gin, not a gin despitethe name, is based on a type of plum. Midori is a more recent inventionbased on green melon.Liqueurs may also have other flavorings. Some are merely sweetenedversions of popular spirits, such as Drambuie, which mixes Scotch whiskywith flavors of heather honey and spices. It is said to have been concoctedfirst by Bonny Prince Charley, who, while in exile on the Isle of Skye,shared the recipe with his protectors. Southern Comfort is a bourbon-baseddrink with peach, orange, and other flavorings. Kahlua, likewise is a coffeebasedliqueur with hints of coconut and other tropical aromas, and so tooTia Maria and Starbucks have their own coffee liqueurs. There are also awide range of cream-based liqueurs like Bailey’s Irish Cream and its manyimitators; the Dutch advocaat, which is something like egg nog; as well aschocolate liqueurs promoted by confectionery manufacturers, like Godiva.Recently even fine tobacco has been distilled into a liquor, named Perique.Browsing the liquor store shelf one will find many strange new flavors: sourrazzmatazz, pomegranate for those interested in antioxidants, as well assome truly remarkable offerings such as organic lavender- and tea-flavoredliqueurs. What tomorrow will offer one can only guess.Further Reading: Forbes, R. J. Short History of the Art of Distillation from the Beginningsup to the Death of Cellier Blumenthal. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1997;Walton, Stuart. The New Guide to Spirits and Liqueurs. London: Lorenz Books,2000; Walton, Stuart. The Complete Guide to Cocktails and Drinks. London:Lorenz Books, 2003.Ken AlbalaCruise ShipsIn the nascent days of ocean travel during the early 1800s, sailing ships,also known as packets, provided a means for human transportation and maildelivery between New York and Liverpool. Typically there were fewer than25 paying travelers per ship, with a much larger working crew. The journeycould take an average of a month, sometimes more, depending on theweather and wind. It was a very long trip for seasick passengers who wereunable to concentrate on reading or writing. To pass the time they playedgames such as charades or card games, listened to lectures, or sang songs. Allof these pastimes were passenger generated.Shipboard life was centered in a large room known as the saloon. All diningand activity took place in this one room. Although the constant rolling ofthe ship kept attendance in the saloon to a minimum, those who were ableto get out of bed found that meals, at least at the beginning of the voyage,were fresh and filling. Dinner regularly consisted of three simple courses andwas served with little ceremony. There was no such thing as room serviceat this time. Meal service was abandoned altogether during a storm.

198 Cruise ShipsJust as the sailing ships were reaching their peak in speed, a developingtechnology was about to replace them. This was the harnessing of steam,which was the Industrial Age’s most significant form of energy. By the mid-1840s not only could the mail get to its destination in a timely fashion butso could people get to theirs.For several years transatlantic travel, for the most part, was still not verycomfortable. When Charles Dickens was a passenger on an early steamship,the Cunard Line’s Britannia, he found his stateroom to be “an utterlyimpracticable, thoroughly hopeless and profoundly preposterous box.” Thefood in the Britannia’s communal dining saloon was carelessly prepared andnot very fresh. This contrasted greatly with another early Cunard steamship,the Columbia. The Columbia’s food was delicious and varied, and wasserved with care on fine porcelain. Guests devised all of their own amusements.With musicales, dances, backgammon, and deck games such as shuffleboardand nine pins, the passengers managed to stave off the boredom ofa two-week long voyage.As the years went on, cuisine and service greatly improved aboard ship.As early as 1851 a passenger on a Collins Line vessel could count on mealsdesigned to delight the palate and fill the stomach. A standard dinner menuconsisted of green turtle soup, roasts in sauce, fresh fish, fresh fruits and vegetables,and numerous desserts. Meals were served as they were in the past,in communal dining rooms at two long tables and with mingling among alltypes of people. If they were able to do so, some passengers attempted tochange their clothes for dinner as they would do on land, but given the tightquarters in their cabins this was difficult to accomplish. Fresh flowers decoratedthe tables, and the dining room service became more polished.When all was well, passengers looked forward to eating every threehours or so. When the seas became rough, however, everyone retreated totheir rooms. Meals were sparsely attended during a storm. In an attempt tokeep plates and glasses from sliding away, three inch strips of wood wereplaced across each place setting in the dining saloon. The lack of room servicedid not matter much to seasick passengers.The ship that is widely considered to be the first modern liner, the Oceanic,was launched in 1870. Along with the new technology it used, therewas an increased level of service for most passengers. Certainly more attentionwas paid to the cuisine in what had become known as the cabin classes.By this time great waves of emigration to the United States were beginning.Many, if not most, immigrants were unable to afford cabin class. Thecheapest fare gave them a small space in the steerage section of the ship.They were expected to supply their own provisions, although low-qualityfood from the ship’s kitchen was sometimes available. Thus began an erain which sharp distinctions between rich and poor were drawn on the highseas, as it always had been on land.By the turn of the century, a new kind of ship was being built. Huge insize and running on turbine engines, these fast ocean liners put the steamshipsof the nineteenth century into the history books. Concurrent with

Cruise Ships 199these developments was an even greater emphasis on cabin-class comfortand amusement. Ships were being designed with gymnasiums, swimmingpools, winter gardens, smoking rooms, card rooms, and libraries. Not onlywere there tables seating no more than 10 people in the first-class diningrooms, but there was usually at least one other restaurant or café aboardthe ship.In the early 1900s and pre–World War I it was customary for wealthytravelers to dress for dinner in their more spacious cabins. Part of the firstclassdining room ritual was to scrutinize each woman’s gown as she madeher entrance. As a result, the dresses were glamorous and eye-catching, andbecame part of the entertainment in the dining room. The food was carefullyprepared and served, and indulgence was the order of the day. Teatime and room service evolved over time, along with the tradition of havingbouillon at 11 A.M.Luxurious trips on ocean liners before World War II were universallyaccepted as the province of the elite. The amenities of first class and theother cabin classes made the tripmuch more bearable, and by the1920s even the “tourist” (formerlysteerage) passengers traveled in amodicum of comfort.The decades between the twoWorld Wars were golden years forthe great transatlantic ocean liners.Along with existing passenger shipssuch as the Mauretania and Berengaria,there was a proliferationof new vessels. The Ile de France,the Bremen, and the Europa, alllaunched in the late 1920s, set newstandards for luxury and speed.Cunard’s super-liner Queen Marywas in the final stages of development.But the one which wouldeclipse them all in every way wasthe French Line’s 1935 masterpiece,the great ship Normandie.Normandie was never intendedas a ship for the generalpublic. Most of its passenger cabinswere identified as first class, withfar fewer in the tourist and thirdclasses. Captains of industry, moversand shakers in the worlds ofbusiness and politics, persons ofgreat wealth, imagined royalty, andNormandieIt is interesting to note that the ship, which was named for theprovince of Normandy (in French, la Normandie), carried neithera le nor la before her name. Although it was maritime custom torefer to any ship as a she, the French Journal of the MerchantMarine was opposed to the idea of giving a la to the new ship. “Allships,” it wrote, “no matter what their names may be, are mas -culine in France. In spite of all the official circulars and all thegrammarians of France, never can we be forced to say anythingbut Le Normandie.” As a compromise, neither gender term wasattached, and Normandie became the ship’s name.The ship’s technical design was the marvel of its day with itsunique hull shape, its method of propulsion, and its distinctivebow. It was the glamorous and magnificent interior, however,that drew the most attention. The ship was the epitome of artdeco design. This style was developed primarily in France between1910 and 1925 as a reaction to the art nouveau movementand was used for years afterward throughout the world.Instead of stylized glass flower lamp shades for the light fixturesin the first class salle á manger, for example, there wouldbe 12 simple but elegant cascading “light fountains” illuminatedfrom within. These stunning structures, designed by artist RenéLalique, stood in two straight rows of six each on either side ofthe room. Vertical hanging lamp fixtures and crystal columns oflight attached to the walls filled the immense, windowless roomwith glorious radiance. The design elements employed throughoutthe ship would show the world just how luxurious and sophisticatedocean travel could be, and no expense was sparedin showcasing the French aesthetic at its very best.

200 Cruise Shipsreal royalty were its target clientele. Such deluxe surroundings would be anappropriate setting for their journeys, taking them to their destinations ina style most suited to their unique needs. It was said that the French builta beautiful hotel and put a ship around it. Those who sailed on Normandiecertainly must have found that to be true.A first-class guest on Normandie never lacked for activities and smalladventures during the four days of the crossing. Comfortable deck chairswere situated on the Promenade and Sun Decks for reading, relaxing, orspotting passing celebrities, and there were also plenty of group deck sportssuch as Ping-Pong tournaments and shuffleboard. Bridge, backgammon,chess, and many other board games were always available. A guest couldtake all manner of lessons from swimming to boxing to fencing. There wereshooting galleries on the Promenade and Boat Decks, and movies wereshown throughout the day in Normandie’s theater. Wireless-telephone andradiogram services were available if needed or desired.The most popular activity by far was partaking of the continuous mealservice. Beginning at 8 A.M., breakfast could be taken in the dining room orin the privacy of one’s stateroom. At 11 A.M. dining service personnel wouldtour the ship with carts bearing beef bouillon, sandwiches, and cookies. Thiswould take care of a guest’s hunger until lunch service began at 12:30 P.M.Although Normandie was a French ship, traditional British tea time was rigorouslyobserved at 4 P.M. with the serving of ice cream, cakes, sandwiches, andtea. The same red-jacketed stewards who delivered the 11 A.M. snack deliveredafternoon tea to all parts of the ship. The dining room opened for dinnerat 7:30 P.M. First-class guests wore formal dress during dinner for most of thevoyage, and watching sumptuously gowned women and tail-coated men descendthe grand staircase was an important part of the dining room ritual.Dinner was the most highly anticipated repast of the day. It was servedby a small army of waiters and prepared with meticulous care by Chef GastonMagrin and his well-trained galley crew. The meal would customarilybegin with soup, where no less than five soups were offered every evening.The fish and meat courses followed. A favorite of Normandie’s guests wasLe Caneton à L’Orange. It would be the only item listed in capitals andqualified as a Specialité Regionale.Fine French wines were generously poured, a boon to post-Prohibitionera, wine-starved Americans. Mineral waters and other non-alcoholic drinkswere also available.Not to be neglected was the cold table. All manner of salads had theirplace here, as did poached salmon, turkey with cranberry sauce, and hamsfrom five different sources. A chef stood by to carve each roast. This abundanceof riches was arranged and served in the most attractive and temptingstyle imaginable. It was truly a delight to the eyes as well as the palate. Allselections were chosen by the guest but served by the waiter.The grand finale of every dinner service was dessert. Here was the pastrychef’s moment of glory, an opportunity to display his talents. Ice cream

was a trendy favorite. Vanilla was the favored flavor and was served in acoupe, or saucer-shaped glass, along with a dessert sauce, perhaps black cherriessoaked in brandy.With a staff eager to meet one’s every wish, a dining service second tonone, and a setting of unusual beauty and grace, Normandie was the FrenchLine’s star. Normandie was only in service for four years, but those four yearswere enchanting, exciting, and exhilarating.With the onset of World War II, the era of the great ocean liners andthe lifestyles they represented was effectively finished. After the war endedin 1945, however, some ocean-going passenger vessels were back in business.Until the commercial airplane successfully made the first non-stop transatlanticflight in 1959, ship travel was still the principal mode of transportationfrom one continent to the other.The advent of the jet age made leisurely ocean voyages obsolete. Reorganizationand redefinition of ocean travel was the order of the day.Today’s large-scale cruises are meant for rest and relaxation, or for adventureand excitement, or a combination of many elements. Casino gambling,art auctions, lectures, and cruise line–organized activities abound. Onecan do everything and one can do nothing. It is entirely up to the passenger.Most cruise lines produce Broadway-style extravaganzas, and for late nightdining there is always a bountiful buffet.Entertainment is not confined to the ship as many people choose todine and sight-see in port. Others remain on board and have their mealsin the dining room or in their cabins. Cruise ships have added interestingrestaurants, sometimes for a supplement, in addition to the traditional diningroom experience. Dining as entertainment has appeared once again, athrowback to the days of fine dining on the great ships of the past, althoughone is not usually expected to dress for dinner.The meal service on contemporary cruise ships is no longer slanted towardfirst class or any other class as these distinctions, for the most part, nolonger exist. Guests have their choice as to where and when they’d like to dine.There is something for everyone. Fish, fowl, beef, and vegetarian optionsare always on the menu. Menus change every day, as they did in the days of thestoried ocean liners, but they do tend to cater to predictable, mainstreamtastes. Except for certain luxury cruise lines, where the meals are usuallytailored to the individual diner, mass-produced cruise-ship food is tasty butnot particularly memorable.On the smaller, more upscale ships the food is prepared and presentedwith the care more typical of voyages of the 1920s and 1930s. Sometimesthe chef will refer to historic menus and create modern versions of classicshipboard cuisine. Dining room personnel aim to please their guests at alltimes, no matter what the cruise line.The Cunard liner Queen Mary 2 promises somewhat of a return to thelegendary past of ocean travel. Other than two of the restaurants, whichare for the exclusive use of the highest-end guests, all the other restaurantsCruise Ships 201

202 Cruise Shipsare accessible to the rest of the passengers for a small fee. The QueenMary 2, in service since 2004, has one staff member for every couple inorder to maintain a superior level of service. Dining services are varied andrange from in-room meals to the grandest of grand ballroom parties. It isentertainment and dining on the most lavish scale.Further Reading: Ardman, Harvey. Normandie, Her Life and Times. New York:Franklin Watts, 1985, p. 12; Braynard, Frank O., and William H. Miller, FiftyFamous Liners, Vol.1 and Vol. 2. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1982and 1985; Edington, Sarah. The Captain’s Table. London: National MaritimeMuseum Publishing, 2005, p. 80; Fox, Stephen. Transatlantic; Samuel Cunard,Isambard Brunel, and the Great Atlantic Steamships. New York: HarperCollins,2003; Maddox, Melvin. The Great Liners. New York: Time-Life Books, 1978;Maxtone-Graham, John. The Only Way to Cross. New York: MacmillanCompany, 1972; Miller, William H. Jr. The Great Luxury Liners 1927–1954, APhotographic Record. New York: Dover Publications, 1981.Joanna Barouch

DDay of the DeadMexico’s famous November 2 celebration, Día de los Muertos or Day ofthe Dead, is not the same as the North American Halloween, although thefestivities associated with Halloween are beginning to make some inroadson the traditional Mexican holiday. Known by a number of other names(Día de Animas, El Día de los Finados, and Día de los Fieles Difuntos), theDay of the Dead has grown over the centuries to be an integral part ofMexico’s national identity.Sugar skulls, vibrant orange marigolds, and elaborate homemade altarsheaped high with fruit, bread, and salt sum up what the tourist sees in Mexicoduring the Day of the Dead festivities. But Mexican poet and diplomatOctavio Paz suggested a very different scenario in his classic work, The Labyrinthof Solitude: “The word death is not pronounced in New York, in Paris,in London, because it burns the lips. The Mexican, in contrast is familiarwith death, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it; it is one ofhis favorite toys and his most steadfast love. True, there is as much fear in hisattitude as in that of others, but at least death is not hidden away: he looks atit face to face, with impatience, disdain or irony.” Death, to the forbearersof modern Mexico, was just one step around an endless circle, part of thecycle of creation.

204 Day of the DeadEach region of Mexico, indeed, each village and town, has its own specialway of celebrating the Day of the Dead. In some parts of Mexico, chieflywhere Nahua tribal descendents live, festivities actually begin on October 27,when villagers welcome back the spirits of those with no descendents byputting bread and jugs of water outside the house. In some cases, peopleleave water and bread in the corner of the village church for these souls.On October 28, food is left out for those killed in accidents, murdered, orwho died in other violent ways. For the Feast of the Little Angels, the spiritsof dead children arrive on the evening of October 31, but must leave bynoon on November 1. Once the spirit children leave, church bells ring towelcome back adult spirits on the afternoon of November 1.But the celebrations of Day of the Dead feature certain key elementsregardless of the region: attendance at Mass, the construction and display ofhome altars with their ofrendas or offerings, candlelight vigils (la velación)at families’ graves in the community cemetery, and the now less popularpractice of el doble, best described as a form of ritualized begging accompaniedby the sound of the incessantly ringing bells of the local parish church.The spirits may return for a short time, to commune and give comfort tothe living, but they must not stay or interfere with the lives of the living. Theliving owe their dead relatives the best of what they can afford to provide,displayed conspicuously on intricate home altars.Determining the connection between modern-day Day of the Deadpractices and those of the Aztecs and their predecessors is difficult to accomplishbecause the Spanish priests who observed Aztec society wroteaccounts that must be taken with a grain of salt. Their mission was toconvert the Indians to Christianity, not necessarily to record accurateethnographical accounts. The Aztecs celebrated their dead in a monthlongritual surrounding the god Mictecacihuatl (“Lady of the Dead”) thattook place in July and August. The Little Feast of the Dead, or Feast ofFlowers, focused on dead children, while the Great Feast of the Dead, orFruit Falls, remembered dead adults. The importance of food in the Azteccelebrations, reflected in the offerings included in the elaborate moderndayhome altars, suggests a harvest and fertility connection. Skull motifsand other mortuary images commonly appeared in pre-Columbian art.Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, a principal Spanish priest-chronicler, relatedthat the Aztecs created anthropomorphic representations of their gods indough made from amaranth, a grain.The most likely explanation for the origin of Mexico’s Day of the Deadcelebrations lies in a fusion of Aztec folk traditions with early Catholic practices.Pope Boniface IV introduced All Saints’ Day in the seventh centuryand celebrated it in May. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III movedthe date to November 1. By the ninth century, this day was earmarked tocelebrate the saints and martyrs of the Western Church. In the eleventh century,Pope Gregory VII gave the day its current shape and by the fourteenthcentury, it was quite popular, with Spain being parti cularly partial to it.

Saint Odilo introduced the concept of All Souls’ Day ( November 2) inCluny, France, around 1030. By the thirteenth century, the holy day tookhold and was designated for the “faithful departed,” or those who died inthe bosom of the Church. Many aspects of the celebrations came out of amelding of ancient fertility and harvest rites combined with the rituals ofthe Catholic Church.European practices date back to the Celts and the Druids, as in Allhallowsmas,when the thin veil lifted and the spirits could return for ashort time. Catholic ritual also borrowed from practices surrounding theEgyptian god Osiris. The Roman god Bacchus, essentially Osiris by anothername, played a role in forming European traditions surroundingdeath. Skeletons appeared in European art, particularly as memento moriin the fifteenth century, as in “Death and the Maiden” in Renaissance art,danse macabre, and the oft-quoted phrase Mors omnibus communis (deathis common to all). Artists often depicted Death as a woman, as in thecase of nineteenth-century Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada’s “LaCatrina,” with her plumed hat and fancy tiny-waisted dress. In Spain, forinstance, cemetery visiting was common and dated back to Romanpractices of visiting cemeteries and eating what would be called a picnic.St. Augustine frowned on these practices as early as the fourth century.Huesos de santo, breads and sweets in the shape of bones, flourished inSpanish kitchens and markets frequented by the mothers and sisters ofthe conquistadores, and in the convents as well. By the middle of theeighteenth century in Mexico, the Day of the Dead celebrations resembledtoday’s practices.Mexicans celebrate the Day of the Dead by preparing sumptuous multilevelaltars in their homes to welcome the dead. In the afternoon or theevening, families go to the cemeteries to clean family gravesites, eat a picnic,and spend time together as families (la velación), remembering the dear departedwith prayers, stories, flowers symbolizing the shortness of earthly life,pan de muertos ( bread baked in the shape of bones or human shape), candyskulls called calaveras, photographs and mementos, candles (four representingeach of the cardinal directions and one for each dead relative), incenselikecopal to guide the dead home, and mountains of food and drink.Basic and essential foods for home altars tend to be water, salt, andbread, all highly symbolic in Catholic liturgy and purification ceremonies.Water refreshes the souls, salt purifies them, and bread sustains them. Paperbanners ( papel picado) draped over the altars reveal a number of lace-likedesigns, usually of skulls or other mortuary symbols. Flowers, especiallyorange marigolds called cempasuchil with their strong odor, help to guidethe dead home, as do the odors of their favorite foods and the burningcopal. Families often sprinkle marigold petals across the threshold of thehouse, right up to the home altar created to the honor of the dead. The tianguis,or Day of the Dead markets, bulge with candy skulls and other itemson sale.Day of the Dead 205

206 Day of the DeadFamilies strive to prepare their dead relatives’ favorite foods, and for deceasedmales, liquor or cigarettes may stand on the altar next to pots of spicychicken mole. Popular offerings include mole with turkey, pan de muertos inthe shape of humans and even dogs, candied pumpkin, chocolate coffins andskulls, tamales, champurrado (a sweet chocolate drink thickened withcorn masa harina and flavored with anise), posole and atole (drinks madefrom cornmeal), moles, and horchatas (drinks made with seeds). An arco,or arch, often fashioned out of sugar cane, frames the home altar. Fruit ofall kinds, particularly oranges and bananas, hang suspended from the arch.Other ofrendas, or offerings, include seasonal produce, such as lemons, corn,tangerines, squash-like chayotes, and yellow tejocotes that taste like plums,along with cinnamon, tortillas, chocolate, corundas (a type of tamale fromMichoacán), and peanuts.Wandering groups go from house to house, presenting amusing skitsand plays, and singing songs, all similar to the posadas of the Christmas season.The people in the houses offer the revelers food and, sometimes, smallamounts of money.Once the spirits leave late on the afternoon of Day of the Saints, November2, the living may eat the abundant food on the home altars, but notbefore. Families also send food to friends and neighbors, a practice termedmandando muertos. To make sure that the dead leave, masked mummers,dressed in a manner similar to that in the North American Halloweentradi tion, take to the streets on the night on November 2, wearing fearfullookingmasks and creating frightening noises.At the night-long vigil in the graveyards, the darkness pierced by thefluttering of symbolic candle flames and highlighting the bright yellows andpinks of flowers like those painted by Mexican artist Diego Rivera, the passingof rituals from generation to generation takes place. The Day of the Deadcontains elements of conspicuous consumption, but at the same time thisfeast day pays homage to the fragility and finiteness of life. “Mexican deathis the mirror of Mexican life,” wrote Mexican poet /diplomat Octavio Paz.Day of the Dead celebrations on Olevera Streetin Los Angeles, California. Bobby Deal /RealDealPhoto/Shutterstock.

Debutante Balls 207Papier-mâché figure for the Day of the Dead celebrations on Olevera Street in LosAngeles, California. Bobby Deal/RealDealPhoto/Shutterstock.Further Reading: Andrade, Mary J. Through the Eyes of the Soul, Day of the Dead inMexico—Michoacan. 2nd ed. [n.p.]: La Oferta, 1999; Brandes, Stanley. Skullsto the Living, Bread to the Dead: The Day of the Dead in Mexico and Beyond.Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006; Carmichael, Elizabeth, and Chloë Sayer. TheSkeleton at the Feast: The Day of the Dead in Mexico. Austin: University of Texasat Austin, 1992; Fletcher, Nicola. “Feasts for the Dead: Conqueroring Fear.” InCharlemagne’s Tablecloth: A Piquant History of Feasting. New York: St. Martin’sPress, 2004, pp. 210–215; Garciagodoy, Juanita. Digging the Days of the Dead: AReading of Mexico’s Días de Muertos. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2000;Greenleigh, John, and Rosalind Rosoff Beimler. The Days of the Dead: Mexico’sFestival of Communion with the Departed. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991;Norget, Kristin.Days of Life, Days of Death: Ritual in the Popular Culture of Oaxaca.New York: Columbia University Press, 2006; Paz, Octavio. “The Day of theDead.” In The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico. New York: GrovePress, 1961, pp. 47–64; Salvador, R. J. “What Do Mexicans Celebrate on the Dayof the Dead?” In J. D. Morgan and P. Laungani, eds. Death and Bereavement inthe Americas. Death, Value and Meaning Series, Vol. II. Amityville, NY: BaywoodPublishing Co., 2003, pp. 75–76 (Available online at: http://www.public.iastate.edu/~rjsalvad /scmfaq/muertos.html); Santiago, Chiori. El Corazon de la Muerte /Altars and Offerings for the Days of the Dead. [n.p.]: Heyday Books, 2005.Cynthia D. BertelsenDebutante BallsA debutante ball is a social event that introduces a young woman into society.The word debutante comes from the French, debut, which means, “beginning.”

208 Debutante BallsThe young woman is said to be “coming out” when she is introduced, implyingthat she is leaving the sheltered world of family life to join a wider society.The tradition of formal presentation of a young woman is rooted in anold English practice where daughters of the aristocracy, who married withina very small circle of elite families, were presented to those of similar socialstanding when they reached a marriageable age. The practice continues to beassociated generally with wealthy and socially prominent families.In England, presentations took place during “The London Season,” whichusually coincided with the sitting of Parliament. Generally, it began afterEaster and continued until August when the grouse-hunting season started.Families of wealth and position made a mass migration from their countryestates to London for “The Season,” to exchange their quiet life of limitedentertainment for days of shopping, riding, and visiting; and evenings oftheater, dances, and balls. It was regarded as the chance for young men andwomen of position to mingle and find a marriageable partner. Marriageswere more likely to be made on the basis of social connections, eligibility,and finances rather than common interests, compatibility, and love. Thistheme can be found in novels like Jane Austin’s Mansfield Park, in whichSir Thomas Bertram rebukes his niece for rejecting a suitor, reminding herthat as a poor relation, with no property or money, she is fortunate to havereceived an offer at all.Attendance at Almack’s Assembly Room was a “must” for young womenseeking a suitable husband. This was particularly true during the Regencyperiod. Almack’s opened in 1765 and was named for its founder, WilliamAlmack. For a subscription fee, men and women of fashion could attendweekly balls with a supper on Wednesday nights during “The Season.” Ballsand dances commonly started at 10 P.M. and continued until 3 A.M. Dinnerparties included huge numbers of people and often encompassed six or sevencourses. Prospective members had to face the Patronesses of Almack’s. ThePatronesses arbitrarily decided the social acceptability of anyone desiring toenter Almack’s, and this “seal of approval,” in turn, extended even to London’shighest social circles. Rejection could undermine a debutante’s socialstanding. Debutantes who chose to make a “coming out” appearance at an Almack’sball would have their partners selected for them by the Patronesses.Before a young woman could join in the social activities of “The Season,”she had to be presented at court to the queen. This typically took placewhen she reached 18. Prior to that time the activities of a young woman ofsocial position would be restricted to attendance at school and limited participationin any social functions. While the actual presentation would onlytake a few minutes, preparations for the event were extensive. There wererigidly prescribed rules for presentation that extended to dress and accessories.Unmarried women were expected to wear a white gown, although softcolor over a white background was permitted. The gown had to have a train.The headdress had to have feathers and a tulle veil long enough to reach thetrain. The number and size of the feathers on a headdress varied with thewhim of the monarch. Queen Victoria favored three large feathers.

Hours were spent learning how to walk wearing a gown with a trainthat extended three yards. The young woman also had to learn how to executea full bow, where her knee almost touched the floor, and to rise withoutlosing her balance. She had to back out of the room without tripping onher train, as she was not permitted to turn her back to the queen. Liveriedservants were stationed strategically to assist the young woman in makinga graceful exit.Those being presented had to be accompanied by an older woman ofrank and respectability who had already been presented. For most debutantes,this was her mother but a young woman could be taken under thewing of any socially prominent matron. After the Industrial Revolution, somemembers of the middle class amassed considerable fortunes. Daughters ofsuccessful middle-class families could be presented at court if they couldfind a sponsor from among the aristocracy. Aristocrats were anxious to makealliances with wealthy entrepreneurs, and the bourgeois wanted acceptancefrom high society. Sponsorship created a mutually beneficial arrangement.Presentations usually began between 2 and 3 P.M. The young womenwould sometimes have to wait for hours before their carriages would be permittedto enter St. James Palace where the presentations were made. Theyoung women would then be led to the Gallery where they would have toremain until they were summoned. Title and rank dictated the order in whichpresentations were made. Queen Elizabeth II abolished the presentation ofany woman at court in 1958. Some attempts have been made to keep thetradition alive by organizing parties for the young women, who would otherwisehave been presented at court; however, lacking royal sanction the partieshave become indistinguishable from other events of the social season.In the United States, the practice of presenting young women can betraced back to 1748, when 59 Philadelphia families held “Dancing Assemblies.”Unable to present their daughters to the court in En gland, the colonistsbegan their own custom. Debutante balls usually were private affairs held inthe family home or a fashionable hotel. By the end of the nineteenth century,however, many affairs had become ostentatious showcases of family wealth,typical of the Gilded Age. Wealth and age were not enough for a youngwoman to be presented, according to an 1883 etiquette book, The MannersThat Win, which stated that a debutante should have graduated from schooland have a complete understanding of the rules that govern polite society,should be able to sing or play an instrument gracefully and dance elegantly.By the 1920s the rules governing a debut had somewhat relaxed in reactionto the more modern attitudes of the time. In Etiquette: The Blue Book of SocialUsage of 1922, etiquette authority Emily Post described ways, alternative tothe ball, that a young woman could be introduced to society. She suggestedan afternoon tea with dancing, a small dance, or a small tea without music. Posteven included the very modest suggestion that a mother might simply havejoint calling cards made. By this time, public balls or cotillions, as they weresometimes called, where young women from prominent families were invitedto make their debuts collectively, had generally replaced private debuts.Debutante Balls 209

210 Debutante BallsAfter World War II, debutante balls spread to almost every city in the UnitedStates, reaching an all-time high in popularity during the Eisenhower years.The sexual revolution and feminist movement of the following decades ledmany young women to abandon the event. Debutante balls had resurgenceduring the prosperous 1980s, and by the close of the twentieth century manywere sponsored by charitable organizations and linked to fundraising events.While historically, the purpose of presentation was to find a suitable marriagepartner, today a debutante is usually presented for her accomplishmentsand to introduce her to the adult philanthropic world.Debutante balls are held in almost every major city in the United Statesbut tend to be more popular and elaborate in the South. Some cities have multipleballs during the season, which generally runs from November throughJanuary. In the North, some families host a private party as an alternative tothe formal ball. This “coming out” party can be scheduled any time duringthe year but is often planned to coincide with the young woman’s birthday.An event such as this differs from a ball in that the event is smaller and theguests are commonly limited to the friends of the young woman.Many formal traditions persist for these events, and there is a particularetiquette for dress. Debutantes are expected to wear white gowns and glovesmade from satin or kid leather. The dress should be light, airy, and young. Itshould never be overly elaborate. If white is unbecoming, the debutante maywear a very pale color gown. Strong colors such as red, dark blue, and black areunacceptable. The debutante’s mother wears a ball dress and gloves as well.Miss Barbara Hight, chairman of the debutantes’committee, fitting one of the costumes on FannieDial, daughter of the former senator from SouthCarolina, c. 1920–1932. Library of Congress.

Deepavali, Festival of Lights 211The debutantes to be presented stand in a receiving line at the beginningof the affair to greet and welcome the guests. It is customary for thedebutante to invite a few of her best girl friends to receive with her. Theseyoung women wear evening dresses but do not actually stand in the receivingline. With no official duties, they are there merely to share in thecelebration. It is customary for family, friends, and business associates to senddecorative flowers in the form of bouquets or baskets to the debutante. Thesefloral arrangements are usually displayed near the receiving line. The debutanteholds one of the bouquets while she is standing in the line.When it is time to be presented, the debutante is announced and walkedaround the stage accompanied by her father, who makes the presentation. Asthe presentation is made, the debutante makes a deep bow or curtsy. This issometimes called the “St. James’ bow,” harkening back to the court presentations.A male escort then joins the young woman and walks her away. Somedebutantes have two escorts. Many balls select and pair the debutantes andtheir escorts. The debutante goes to supper with her escort. Her most intimatefriends and their dinner partners are seated at her table. The debutante tablesmay be larger than the tables for the other guests in order to accommodate herfriends, and they are usually located in the center of the room. After the meal,the debutante has no special responsibilities and is free to enjoy the party.The prom is a modern outgrowth of the debutante ball. Proms beganin the elite Northeastern colleges. Middle-class parents admired the poiseand composure displayed by debutantes and their escorts at the balls. Theybegan to institute formal dances as a means of showcasing social skills andelegance for their children and celebrating their emergence into society.Further Reading: Marling, Karal Ann. Debutante: Rites and Regalia of AmericanDebdom. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004; Post, Emily. Etiquette: TheBlue Book of Social Usage. New York, NY: Funk & Wagnalls, 1922; Tuckerman,Nancy, Nancy Dunnan, and Amy Vanderbilt. The Amy Vanderbilt Complete Bookof Etiquette. New York: Doubleday, 1985.Dorothy Denneen VoloDeepavali, Festival of LightsDeepavali, the festival of lights, is the most famous of Indian festivals. It isa festival of jubilation and togetherness celebrated by young and old, andrich and poor, throughout India as well as in Indian communities around theworld. Innumerable communities with varying customs mingle together tomake Deepavali celebrations a very happy occasion for all.The date of Deepavali is based on the Hindu calendar, which has solaryears and lunar months. Deepavali always falls either in the months of Octoberor November, just the day before the new moon. During Deepavalicelebrations in India, houses are decorated with myriads of little clay lamps.Lamps are placed around the home, in courtyards, and gardens, as well as on

212 Deepavali, Festival of LightsTypical Indian temple roof decor during the Deepavalifestival. iCEO/Shutterstock.rooftops. The glittery light from the lamps creates a festive and fantasy-likeatmosphere. A wide assortment of sweets are prepared at home or boughtfrom sweet shops and shared with everyone. The night sky on Deepavalilights up with fireworks streaking up like bolts of lightning, splintering intoa million rainbow petals before vanishing in a never-ending dazzle of flashingsmoke. Everywhere, there are signs of the renewal of life, and it is commonto wear new clothes on the day of the festival.Sweets prepared with various nuts and flours, milk, dried fruits, andfragrant spices, such as saffron and cardamom, are an important aspect ofall Deepavali celebrations. In times past, preparations for Deepavali beganweeks ahead with the cleaning, roasting, and powdering of rice and lentilsin the grindstone; making ghee (clarified butter) at home; and buying freshoil straight from the press. The irresistible aromas of barfi, peda, jilebi, laddu,mysorepak, and a host of other sweets lingered in the air. Today, sweets areoften bought from commercial manufacturers. It is the busiest season forthe sweet shops in India. Sweets packaged in beautiful containers are exchangedwith friends and neighbors.India is a vibrant land of mythological tales of gods and goddesses, andDeepavali signifies many different things to people from different backgrounds.In north India, Deepavali celebrates Lord Rama’s homecomingafter killing the demon king Ravana. In Bengal, the celebration of Kali Pujais an integral aspect of Deepavali. It is believed to be the night to honor departedancestors, and the lighted lamps are meant to serve as a guide tothese departed souls. In Gujarat and neighboring states, the festivities continuefor a week. On Dhanteras, the first day, Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth,is worshipped. This day is believed to be auspicious to purchase metals.Often gold or silver are bought or at least one or two new metal utensils.

Dessert 213Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and prosperity, is worshipped in the eveningwith lighting of tiny lamps of clay. For the business communities ofGujarat, Deepavali also marks the beginning of the new financial year. Theycelebrate New Year on the day after Deepavali.In the southern states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, andKerala, Deepavali celebrates lord Krishna’s triumph over demon king Narakasura.Festivities start very early in the morning with entire householdswaking up around three in the morning. The first ritual is to wash oneself,applying plenty of oil to the hair, followed by taking an auspicious bath. Afterthe bath, everyone dresses in festive new clothes, and sweets are served firstat a sumptuous breakfast. Traditionally a south Indian breakfast is anythingbut sweet; but on Deepavali, sweets take the center spot. Children run out,with shouts and yells, as each tries to be the first to burst firecrackers. In thestate of Maharashtra also, early morning baths with oil and fragrant powdersand serving sweets are the traditions of Deepavali.The significance of Deepavali extends beyond Hinduism; it is celebratedby Jains and Sikhs. The foundation of the Golden Temple of Sikhs at Amritsaris believed to have been laid on Deepavali day in 1577. With warmerdays turning into a mild winter, the fun-filled Deepavali is celebrated byeach community in its own special ways.With more and more Indians migrating to various parts of the world,the number of countries where Deepavali is celebrated keeps increasing.Because it is not a public holiday outside India, Deepavali celebrations oftentake place on a weekend close to the actual festival. In major cities acrossthe Untied States the festival takes the form of a great fair with vendors sellingIndian goods as well as food, cultural performances, and fireworks. Thewhole area surrounding the festival is often decorated with a spectaculardisplay of lights, tinsel, and garlands.Whatever may be the fables and legends behind the celebrations ofDeepavali, and the stark differences in the styles and forms of celebrationsobserved by different regions, there are common threads that run among themany versions of this festival. Deepavali, no matter where it is celebrated,marks the victory of good over evil. Various gastronomic and aesthetic delightsmark all versions of the celebrations. People exchange sweets, wearnew clothes, and children rejoice in lighting firecrackers at this festive time.The festival of lights symbolizes a reaffirmation of hope, a renewed commitmentto friendship and goodwill.Further Reading: Stutley, James, and Margaret Stutley. Harper’s Dictionary of Hinduism:Its Mythology, Folklore, Philosophy, Literature, and History. San Francisco,CA: Harper & Row, 1984; Flood, Gavin. An Introduction to Hinduism. NewYork: Cambridge Uni versity Press, 1996.DessertAmmini RamachandranIn contemporary usage the term dessert describes a course or meal in whichfoods of a predominantly sweet character are consumed, or, more generally,

214 Dessertit describes the sweet foods themselves. Foods called or featured in dessertmay include a wide range of preparations: ice creams and sorbets, custards,cakes, pies and tarts, cookies and small pastries, and confections of all types.The word dessert is derived from the Middle French word desservir, “ ‘toclear the table,” or, more literally, “to un-serve.” The term originally described acourse at or near the conclusion of the meal in which fruit, cheeses, and sweetfoods were served. Though the term appears to have originated in the late sixteenthcentury, the consumption of sweets, particularly at the end of formalmeals, has a long history. To Romans the dessert course was known as secundaemensae, the Latin translation of the term that the Greeks used before them,deuterai trapezai, “second tables.” And there is evidence of the dessert coursegoing back even further than Classical Greece and Rome, to the eighteenthcentury B.C., when a Mesopotamian royal banquet, described on an ancientcuneiform tablet, concluded with a course comprised of a selection of fruits,along with sweet pastries filled with fruits and nuts and lavished with honey.This custom of relegating sweet foods to the end of meals belies the factthat desserts have rarely been eaten for nutrition or substance, roles usuallyfulfilled primarily by grains and meats. Rather, desserts have been eaten asindulgences, eaten for the sake of enjoyment after the essential business ofsustenance has been addressed. Being non-essential and often expensive,desserts have historically had a more sub stantial position in the diets ofthe rich and privileged than those of the poorer, working classes, for whomsweets were generally rare luxuries. Regardless of class, the preciousness andostentation inherent to dessert has ensured its association with special occasionsfor much of human history, from the aforementioned Mesopotamianbanquet to the extravagant, multitiered wedding cakes and so-called dessertstations of contemporary wedding celebrations.SWEETENERSIn their early development, which is to say the first several millennia ofcivilization, desserts were predominantly sweetened with honey, the productionof which was extensively domesticated by the Egyptians by thethird millennium B.C. Though the sweetness of sugar cane had been exploited,particularly in Asia and the Middle East, for millennia, it was notuntil after the Persians made refinements in the production of solid sugarmade from its juice in the seventh century A.D. that an overall shift fromhoney- to sugar-based desserts would occur. Old recipes and techniques wereadapted and expanded, and new sweets appeared.Cane sugar was particularly influential on European desserts, where itsintroduction led not only to the relatively rapid development of new typesof sweets but also to the indoctrination of new customs for enjoying them.With time desserts were freed from the boundaries of formal meals and specialoccasions, to be enjoyed on a more quotidian basis, not only at the endof the meal but also as snacks and restoratives throughout the day, in somecases becoming the basis of small, secondary meals themselves.

Dessert 215During the nineteenth century, with the development of beet-derivedsugar and further advancements in the refinement of both beet and canesugars, sugar prices dropped to an unprecedented low with the result thatvirtually anyone could enjoy sweets, just about any time.EARLY PRACTICESIn Ancient Egypt, though poorer citizens had limited access to sweets,which were largely limited to date-based preparations, privileged citizensenjoyed a range of desserts, including sweet breads, fried pastries, and simplesweetmeats. These would have been accompanied or enriched by the gamutof fruits, nuts, seeds, and aromatics available, including figs, dates, grapes andraisins, pomegranates, pine nuts, doum fruit (the product of a native Egyptianpalm tree), sesame seeds, and aniseed.The repertoire of sweets enjoyed by affluent citizens of the Greek andRoman empires was similar to that of their Egyptian predecessors. Fruits,nuts, and seeds remained central, both as desserts unto themselves, andas ingredients in breads, pastries, compotes, and sweetmeats. As in Egypt,honey was the preferred sweetener. Dairy products, however, specificallygoat- and sheep-milk cheeses, became much more prevalent than in Egyptand were cherished dessert components. As such, cheeses were consumedon their own, adorned with honey and accompanied by nuts and fruits, orincorporated into cakes and fritters. Common fruits and nuts enjoyed fordessert were figs, grapes, apples, medlars (a fruit with Persian origins that ismost often enjoyed in a cultivated state of decomposition), myrtle berries(the bluish fruit of the myrtle shrub), walnuts, almonds, chestnuts, and pinenuts. Sesame and poppy seeds were also common dessert ingredients.Cakes were held in special regard by the Greeks, who presented specificcakes as offerings to deities during rituals. Examples include the Atheniancake known as amphiphon, a round cheesecake studded around its circumferencewith lit candles or torches and presented during a spring ritual tothe goddess Artemis, and the Delian honey cake basynias that was decoratedwith one dried fig and three walnuts and offered to the goddess Iris.In addition to their dessert courses, Greeks also enjoyed sweets at eventsknown as symposion. A range of precious bites would be offered at a symposium,including dried fruits, cheeses, and honeyed cakes. With wine beingcentral to these important all-male social and intellectual gatherings, the accompanyingfoods were primarily meant to stimulate and prolong drinking,more so than to satiate hunger and impart nutrition.THE MIDDLE AGESThroughout the late Middle Ages, generally the thirteenth through fifteenthcenturies, affluent Europeans became increasingly enamored withsweets. Such was the demand for desserts at this time that guilds were formeddevoted to the production of special types of sweets. In Paris, specialists in

216 Dessertcookie making known as oubloyers were acknowledged as early as 1270. Andin other parts of Europe, particularly along the Mediterranean, guilds devotedto making various types of candies and confections began to crop up—marzipan makers, nougat specialists, and dragee (sugar-coated confection)experts among them.Though desserts were certainly enjoyed at the end of meals, they werealso enjoyed as snacks, particularly in the morning. And at the banquetsthat served as important social institutions, sweet dishes were interspersedthroughout the meal, juxtaposed with the savory courses. Such arrangementswere largely the result of the dietary guidelines of the time, whichheld that every food possessed certain overall qualities or humors and that itwas important for one’s health and well-being to achieve humoral balancein their diet. For instance, fruits tended to be classed as moist and cool andthus would be paired with foods considered dry and hot, such as spices,wines, or certain roasted meats. Thus the actual flavors of the food were notas important as their perceived character, so it was that a turnip might beconsidered a wholly acceptable substitute for a pear in a medieval recipe. Itwas not until the seventeenth century that the boundaries between sweetand savory were explicitly drawn, and the value of balancing humors gaveway to the value of balancing flavors.Despite the increasing popularity of cane sugar during the latter centuriesof the Middle Ages, its production remained difficult and costly. Assuch, it became a symbol of status and power and displays of it becamede rigeur at banquets and celebrations. At the height of ostentation werecolorful sculptures made out of sugar or marzipan (a paste of almonds andsugar), which were used at banquets as centerpieces, props in the theatricsthat accompanied the meal, or as edibles unto themselves.THE AGE OF EXPLORATIONDuring the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as Europeans developednew trade routes and discovered new lands. A number of consumables wereintroduced to the European pantry that changed dessert customs, formingmany of the sweet dishes and the practices around them that may be observedto this day. Many of these new items came from the New World,including vanilla, pineapple, and chocolate; from Africa, by way of Turkey,came coffee; and from China, tea.CoffeeIn mainland Europe, where coffee became immensely popular, particularlyas a mid-afternoon restorative, it was a matter of course that the ownersof cafés (establishments where coffee was consumed) would begin to offerfoods to their long-lingering guests. Providing a balancing foil to the bitterbeverage and an additional boost of energy to buttress the effects of caffeine,sweet foods were a particularly welcome addition to the café repertoire.

Dessert 217In bustling Vienna the daily ritual known as Jause explicitly paired coffeewith desserts for a mid-afternoon social respite. The practice is still observedtoday, though mostly on weekends and during holidays. The dessertsfeatured in the Jause, then as now, might include any number of Austrianspecialties, including complex layered sponge cakes like the Sachertorte; delicatestrudels; crumbly nut-meal cookies; or homey fruit-filled dumplings.TeaThough coffee maintained prominence virtually everywhere else in Europe,in England tea became a favorite in the early eighteenth century (dueat least in part to the campaigning of the British East India Company, whichimported large quantities of tea and had obvious motives for promoting itsconsumption). The British generally enjoyed their tea sweetened with sugarand enriched with milk, and soon took to enjoying it alongside sweet foodsas well. By the nineteenth century sweet-laden afternoon tea had became acommon social custom. As the accepted creation story goes, Anna, the seventhduchess of Bedford requested that her servant bring a pot of tea accompaniedby a selection of biscuits and various sweets to her chambers toremedy a “sinking feeling” that she experienced in the afternoon. Perhaps toassuage the guilt of such an indulgence, she began inviting friends to join herin this restorative practice, and thus the afternoon tea began. Still enjoyedtoday, though much less often, a formal afternoon tea generally includes afreshly brewed pot of tea accompanied by milk, sugar, and a selection of smalledibles, often arranged on a tiered tray, with delicate sandwiches occupyingthe lower tiers and the upper tiers being primarily occupied by fancy cakesand pastries and scones accompanied by sweet jams and clotted cream.ChocolateFor centuries after its introduction to Europe, chocolate was consumedprimarily in the form of a sweetened beverage. The first shipment of cocoabeans (chocolate in raw form) from the New World arrived in Spain in1585. From there and from Italy, where it arrived at around the same time,chocolate was gradually introduced to points north. While it was acceptedwith alacrity here and there (as in the French court of Louis the XIV, ahearty advocate of chocolate), eventually finding tentative use in some softdessert preparations (e.g., mousses and puddings), chocolate remained onlya minor foodstuff until the nineteenth century.In 1828 Conrad Van Houten, a Dutch engineer, intro duced a processwhereby cocoa butter, the plentiful fat naturally present in cocoa beans,could be extracted from the cocoa mass ( ground whole cocoa beans), yieldingchocolate that was much more pleasant to eat in solid form and morereadily adapted to a range of sweet forms. The process also made it possibleto isolate cocoa powder, a product composed almost entirely out of flavorfulcocoa solids that would become an important dessert ingredient in its

218 DessertMarshmallowsOriginally, the sweet, sticky juice pressed from the root of themarsh mallow plant was used in Europe for medicinal purposes.Eventually, the French learned to combine it with sugar andwhipped egg whites, to form sheets of pate de guimauve, usedto embellish small cakes. This innovation was soon picked up byconfectioners who found a way to substitute gum arabic for themallow root sap as it made its way to the United States.In 1884, a book published for retail candy makers listed arecipe for marshmallow drops. In a two-inch-deep, carefully leveledbed of sifted cornstarch, impressions were made with a rowof small metal, plaster, or wood forms, where still-warm and fluidmarshmallow foam was dropped and left to cool and firm up beforebeing removed and dusted with powdered sugar.By the early twentieth century the idea of toasting marshmallowsover a fire was introduced and “marshmallow roasts”became popular entertainment. As electrical power was introducedinto homes, it spurred the invention of small appliancesand marshmallow toasters were being offered for sale by about1910.By 1917, cookbook writers were calling for marshmallowsas essential ingredients. A suggestion for use in a recipein a Jiffy-Jell ad was a prediction of the future happy union ofmarshmallows and Jell-O. To promote their product as a “food,”marshmallow manufacturers began distributing small pamphletswith recipes for marshmallows as ingredients not only in elaboratecakes, fanciful frozen desserts, and ice cream toppings,but also in sauces, sandwiches, and salads using a variety offruits and vegetables.For those seeking a more exotic menu, a manufacturer’spamphlet included recipes for desserts from the executive chefof the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu. The manufacturers’inventiveness didn’t stop there. They gave away small printedpamphlets showing how to fashion small party favors, or to usemarshmallows with other foods to produce fanciful figures aspart of a composed salad, or to decorate a cake. The pairingof marshmallows and sweet potatoes was discovered in the late1920s, and recipes from that period still appear in cookbooksof today.In 1955 marshmallow manufactures made a great leap forwardin efficiency and economy when Alex Doumakes patenteda method for extruding the marshmallow foam through a tubeinto a long rope and then cutting it into uniform pieces. Thismade possible the now-familiar miniature marshmallows. Otherdevelopments followed and now marshmallows can be purchasedin a myriad of shapes, colors, and consistencies.Today, the various forms of marshmallow are as popular asever: for toasting over campfires, for constructing s’mores, forown right. When, in the 1870s, twoSwiss companies, Tobler and Nestle,perfected a method for incorporatingmilk solids into chocolate, thuscreating milk chocolate, the popularityof chocolate as a dessert inits own right was solidified. Thenuts and fruits that had constitutedthe primary flavoring componentsin desserts for millenniawere eventually subsumed by chocolatein all types of desserts, fromcakes to custards.BEYOND EUROPEIn Japan, desserts generally possessrelatively subtle sweetness,and are often made with gel- (usuallyextracted from seaweed),rice-, or bean-bases, with commonflavors being derived from greentea, cherry blossoms, soy beans, andazuki beans (sweet red beans, commonin Japanese and Chinese cuisine,particularly sweets). Desserts,generally known as okashi, comein a range of colors tending towardpastel and are often of a precious,jewel-like appearance, presentedin delicate paper wrappers andboxes. These are generally enjoyedas snacks or as accompaniments totea, particularly at the end of a formalmeal.In China, desserts are not integralto the traditional daily mealand are most often enjoyed in thecourse of celebrations or as occasionalsnacks. Delicate molded pastriesknown as mooncakes have avenerable position in Autumn MoonFestival celebrations, when theyare exchanged among family andfriends. Though traditional fillingsare lotus or various bean pastes,

Dessert 219modern mooncakes can be filledwith or made out of a limitless rangeof flavors and ingredients. Pao-paofan, “eight treasures,” is a generallychewy (rather than creamy) ricepudding enjoyed on special occasions.The “eight treasures” of notevary, but traditionally include suchitems as red dates, candied plumsand other fruits, watermelon seeds,almonds, and lotus seeds.topping hot cocoa, for the Thanksgiving table’s mashed sweetpotatoes, or as the main component of confections designedto be sold as holiday specialties, colored and molded into animalforms. They also are pantry staples as ingredients in RiceKrispy Treats, and Fluffernutter sandwiches (filled with peanutbutter and Marshmallow Fluff ).In general, sweets found in East Asian cuisines rely heavily on rice, beans,nuts, and fruits, eschewing the cream, butter, and other dairy products thatare so central to desserts elsewhere.Indian cuisine boasts a plethora of desserts. These vary regionally buttend toward rather sweet, rich preparations, and are regularly eaten at theend of the meal or as snacks. Common flavorings and ingredients include,but are in no way limited to, condensed milk, mild fresh cheeses, rice, cardamom,cashews, and coconut.In the cuisines of the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean, includingthose of Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, and Iran, sweets have a long history, datingback in many instances to the earliest civilizations. Baklava is a widelycherished dessert in these regions, probably dating back to the fifteenthcentury, if not before. Though recipes vary regionally, baklava generally consistsof layers of extremely thin dough ( phyllo), interspersed with crushednuts—often pistachio, almond, or walnut—and saturated with a honey orsugar syrup. Some versions also include flavorings of cinnamon, clove, cardamom,or rose water. Halva is another common sweet with a history goingback to the Middles Ages. In its most basic form, halva consists of honey orsugar and ground sesame seeds; today there are also chocolate, pistachio,and coconut versions, to name a few.Sweets are also a cherished component of many Central and SouthAmerican cuisines. Due to strong Portuguese and Spanish colonial influences,Latin American sweets are often similar to those found in southwesternEurope: the sugar-dusted, deep-fried pastries known as churros,the ubiquitous flan (a baked custard, generally accompanied by liquid caramel),and the much cherished dulce de leche (a rich caramel made fromcondensed milk) are all examples of such influences. Chocolate, cinnamon,vanilla, and tropical fruits, such as pineapple and mango, are commondessert flavorings. In many regions festive, brightly colored cakes are keycomponents of birthdays, weddings, and other important celebrations. InMexico, where Day of the Dead (Dìa de los Muertos) celebrations originatedand remain particularly significant, a range of sweets are featuredin these festivities, including fancifully decorated sugar skulls and pan demuerto ( bread of the dead), a sweet egg-enriched bread, often flavored withanise and orange.Shirley Cherkasky

220 Dim SumTECHNOLOGICAL CHANGEOver the course of the last few centuries, dessert production has becomeeasier and more efficient, making sweets less expensive and ephemeral,and more widely available. With the introduction of the gas range inthe 1850s, baking cakes, cookies, and pastries became infinitely easier. Electricmixers, developed in the first few decades of the twentieth century,drastically reduced the labor and time involved in mixing batters, creams,and doughs. Refrigerators, home models of which started to become popularin the 1920s, made it possible to make or purchase everything fromgelatin desserts to ice creams in advance and to keep them for much longerthan had been possible in the past. And the rise of the microwave oven inthe 1970s made it not only easier and faster to melt chocolate and butterand heat liquids and sauces, facilitating recipe production and dessertpresentation, but they gave rise to a battery of mass-produced, ready-madedesserts that required little more preparation than removal from the packageand the pressing of a few buttons to serve.New ingredients and additives have also been sources of change. Forexample, the production of consistent leavened goods such as cakes andbreads became much easier beginning in the mid-nineteenth century withthe commercial availability of baking powders, followed by the introductionof standardized commercial yeasts around the turn of the century.Further Reading: Amendola, Joseph, and Nicole Rees. Understanding Baking: The Artand Science of Baking. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003; Bloom, Carole. TheInternational Dictionary of Desserts, Pastries and Confections. New York: HearstBooks, 1995; Der Haroutunian, Arto. Patisserie of the Eastern Mediterranean.London: Macdonald Orbis Ltd., 1988; Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power:The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin Books, 1985; Morton,Marcia Colman. The Art of Viennese Pastry. New York: Doubleday & Company,1969; Schinz, Marina. Book of Sweets. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994.Amanda Lynn ClarkeDim SumDim sum is part of the Chinese tradition of xiao chi (snacks) that datesback to the reign of the Sung Dynasty (A.D. 960–1279). Palace chefs inventeddishes like minced pheasant, lark tongues, and sweets made fromsteamed milk and bean paste to appease the palates of royalty and hopefullytouch their hearts as well. Dim sum translates as “touch the heart” or “heart’sdelight.”During the thirteenth century, Mongol invaders forced the royal courtsouth and the custom of dim sum went along, eventually finding a place toflourish in Canton. Canton was a large port city where foreign nations traded.A temperate climate, a coast that yielded fresh and tropical ingredients, andan abundance of money made Canton a fertile ground for experimentation

Dim Sum 221in both food and entertainment. Here street vendors and teahouses soldvarieties of dim sum.CONFUCIANISM AND DIM SUMTo the philosopher Confucius (551–479 B.C.), the enjoyment of foodwas one of the things that contributed to the peace and harmony of society.He established culinary standards and proper table etiquette still often consideredto be the standard today. The gathering of friends and family fordim sum is a natural extension of his philosophy, in which getting togetherwithout food was considered incomplete and improper.HARMONY AND BALANCEDim sum also adheres to the Chinese concept of balance ( yin and yang)in cuisine that is referred to as fan /t’sai. Fan, or starches and grains, are balancedby meats and vegetables, or t’sai. Each piece of dim sum is supposedto contain the balance of fan / t’sai, with sauces for dipping served on theside. Balance also occurs between foods that are considered hot and thosethat are cold, and harmony should be achieved between the five flavors—bitter, hot, sour, salty, and sweet. Balance is also obtained by combining thedrinking of tea with the eating of dim sum.THE TRADITION OF THE TEAHOUSEDim sum is traditionally consumed with tea at yum cha, or tea lunch.At first it was considered inappropriate to combine tea with food. In thethird century A.D., Hua Tuo, one of the most respected Imperial physiciansof ancient times, advised that “eating food and drinking tea at the same timeonly results in excessive weight gain” (Global Gourmet). Over time, tea’sability to aid digestion and cleanse the palate became known, and teahouseproprietors began adding a variety of dim sum.In Imperial times in Northern China, the teahouse was the meetingplace of gentlemen of leisure who talked and drank tea, accompanied bytheir caged songbirds, hung on a bamboo rod. A large teahouse could boastof more than 1,000 dim sum varieties. Over time, businessmen would cometo visit teahouses to negotiate deals sealed in the relaxed surroundings.Teahouses were also a place for disputes to be settled harmoniously over teain the presence of a mutually respected arbiter.During the Ming Dynasty (A.D. 1368–1644), the Tea and Horses Bureauwas created to monitor tea production. This improvement in tea qualityalso resulted in an improvement in teahouses.The teahouse was a natural adjunct to the migratory nature of Chinesesociety. Travelers journeying along the famous Silk Road needed a place torest, and teahouses along the route accommodated them. Local workers

222 Dim Sumwould also stop in for conversation, tea, and dim sum, after a hard daytoiling in the field. Here the merits of particular dim sum chefs and theirculinary prowess would be enthusiastically debated. Dim sum was usuallyserved from midmorning to midafternoon, a tradition that continues today.THE MIGRATION OF DIM SUMOver the years, where Cantonese migrated, dim sum went along. Familyand friends would gather to visit, gossip, or do business over tea and dim sum.In the nineteenth century, dim sum migrated to the west along with Chineseimmigrants, mostly from Canton, and settled with them on both the Eastand West coasts of the United States. When the communists came to powerin China, many dim sum chefs fled to Hong Kong, and the refinement of theart of dim sum was taken to a new level.DIM SUM TODAYToday, the so-called traditional teahouse may be rare in China, replacedby chains and other institutions. In Canton, dim sum may be seen more asan entire meal. The once quiet, reserved atmosphere of the teahouse hasbeen transformed into a boisterous combination of loud conversation, clatteringcarts and dishes, and gesticulating waiters.The new place for dim sum “palaces” today is in major cities like HongKong, San Francisco, Boston, Toronto, and New York. During the week, dimsum is the domain of students and office workers who catch a quick breakfast,businessmen who drop in for meetings, or the elderly who drop inafter exercises. But it is on the weekends that dim sum comes into its ownas a sort of Chinese brunch. Entire families (often several generations) orparties of friends gather to consume small plates of dim sum and drink copiousamounts of tea as they exchange gossip and catch up on the week’sevents.DIM SUM CUSTOMS AND ETIQUETTEDim sum consists of many small dishes transported on wheeled carts.Women call out the name of each selection, often only in Cantonese, holdingout dishes, or lifting covers of steamer baskets to show the contents.Dim sum is eaten family style, and tables are often shared with others.Etiquette mandates how to share dishes: one end of the chopstick isused for taking food from the communal dish, while the other is used toeat. Toothpicks are used to clean particles between the teeth so the distinctflavor of the various dishes comes through.Tea is poured upon seating and is also used to clean out and heat thecups. Whoever is closest to the teapot pours for everyone else first. Teacupsdon’t have handles because it is believed that if the cup is too hot to hold,the tea is too hot to drink. When the teapot needs refilling, custom mandates

Dim Sum 223A variety of dim sum in bamboo steam containers.Hywit Dimyadi /Shutterstock.putting the lid back on askew. The story behind this custom involves a poorstudent who hid a bird in his teapot. When the waiter came to refill the potand lifted the lid, the bird flew away. The student made a loud fuss, claimingit was a very precious bird and that the restaurant owed him compensation.After this, the restaurant—and all others—decided to wait for customers tolift the lid of an empty teapot if a refill was needed.When the teapot or a cup has been refilled, thanks are expressed witha tap of the fingers on the table. This tradition has its origins in the QingDynasty when an emperor made incognito visits throughout his empire.Visiting southern China, he switched roles with a companion and went intoa teahouse. The disguised emperor would pour tea for his companion, andthe companion, concerned about revealing the true identity of the emperor,would tap three fingers on the table in gratitude—one finger representinghis bowed head and the other two his prostrate arms.Dim sum items are not chosen all at once but continuously throughoutthe meal. Savory items are interspersed with sweet ones like dessert. Thecreations reflect the artistry of the chef and may include steamed shrimpdumplings (har gao), steamed pork and shrimp dumplings (siu mai), springrolls (cheun gyun), steamed barbecued pork buns (cha siu bau), rice noodlerolls (cheong fun), green pepper stuffed with shrimp ( yern chang chew), andcongee (jook). More exotic dishes include chicken feet ( fung jow) and curriedsquid (ca lay yao yue). Desserts range from sesame seed balls (gee magyun) to egg custard tart (dan tat). Potstickers (guo tie), which are oftenserved, are northern Chinese in origin, and not considered traditional.The cost of dim sum is tallied in one of two ways. Traditionally, emptydishes are stacked on the table and tallied by size and /or color at the end ofthe meal. But today, a slip of paper often replaces this method, with eachdish being recorded on it when served.DIM SUM AT HOMEToday, dim sum has migrated from the teahouse and palace into the home.Premade dim sum can be purchased at many Chinese groceries or large urban

224 Dinner Partiessupermarkets. Entire cookbooks are devoted to dim sum’s myriad forms, allowingit to become a tasty addition to parties, brunch, or everyday meals.Further Reading: Anderson, E. N. Food of China. New Haven, CT: Yale UniversityPress, 1988; Blonder, Ellen Leong. Dim Sum: The Art of Chinese Tea Lunch.New York: Clarkson Potter Publishers, 2002; Global Gourmet. “Hong Kong:Teatime Traditions—Yum Cha and Dim Sum.” http://www.globalgourmet.com /destinations/ hongkong/ hkteatime.html; Grimes, Lulu, food editor, JustineHarding, editor. The Food of China: A Journey for Food Lovers. North Vancouver,BC, Canada: Whitecap Books, 2005; Liley, Vicki. Dim Sum. Boston, MA: PeriplusEditions (HK), 1999.Stephanie FogelDinner PartiesBoth social entertainment and domestic theater, the dinner party is the actof planning and serving an elaborate meal to invited guests. Performed withthe proper flourishes, it can be an act of creative hospitality, an indicatorof gender roles, and a demonstration of social status. Throughout history,people have gathered to enjoy special feasts and the pleasures of the table,but the dinner party is considered an event and a jewel in the entertainingrepertoire of any host. The host who choreographs a flawless dinner partyis admired by guests as a person of good taste and congeniality. The memorabledinner party weaves together several crucial elements—a thoughtfullyconsidered guest list, a theme, cocktails, a menu plan, a visually appealingtable and thought-provoking conversation.Home entertaining experts agree on several fundamentals that comprisea successful dinner party. Table décor and place settings should attractthe eye, and china, glassware, and utensils should be placed symmetricallyon the table. Table linens add a creative dash of color and a floral centerpieceprovides a natural accent. Colors and patterns of plates, stemware,and serving pieces can be mixed. Flatware should be set in the order itwill be used by guests for each course. Place cards give the host the abilityto strategically seat guests and choreograph the dinner conversation.Tradition dictates that a woman guest of honor is seated to the right of thehost, while a male guest of honor is seated to the right of the hostess. Foodshould be served from the left and beverages poured from the right.Nearly all of the rituals associated with the modern dinner party canbe found in the earliest evidence of the form. The confluence of food anddrink, status, ceremony and social interaction is evident throughout history,mostly as an amusement of the wealthy. While the poor went hungry, therich had an ample supply of food and all the trappings to enhance the diningexperience for themselves and their friends.In Ancient Greece, a social gathering called a symposium was held inboth public and domestic settings and frequented by aristocratic males. The

evening was structured with rules and rituals. Guests reclined on couchesthat surrounded low tables. They engaged in political dialogue and sharedwine and some food, with a distinct emphasis on alcohol consumption.Similarly, in Ancient Rome, the convivium was an event structuredaround conversation, but the focus was also on dining and collegiality. Citizensof diverse social standing and women participated. The Roman banquetwas well-known for its extravagant feasting and exquisite tableware, anddinner menus were sometimes made available in advance of a meal to enticeguests. Romans dined together reclining on sets of three couches groupedaround a common table. The couches were arranged according to the statusof those present at the table, from highest to lowest. Dinners were servedin three courses that included extensive appetizers, roasted or grilled meatsand desserts, all accompanied by wine.Throughout Europe during the Middle Ages, royal banquets perfectedextravagance in food and attire. The aristocracy was the leisure class, andthe act of dining grew to become a form of lavish entertainment, whereceremony, exquisite feasting, and social skills were practiced as a rarefied artform. During the Renaissance, classic culinary texts from antiquity were rediscoveredand new flavors and tastes were brought to the table transformingmenus, along with an increased emphasis on the art of conversation.Sensory pleasures were at the heart of the dinner party, whether thetable belonged to the wealthy or the middle class, and for some, the dinnerparty became a kind of grand artistic canvas. The renowned French pastrychef Antonin Carême pioneered spectacular table décor for the guests ofTallyrand and Emperor Napoleon with his extravagant palladio de patisserie,a dessert tableau that lined the dining table of formal state dinnerparties.The rank-conscious Victorian society established the dinner party asa form of class competition, with the upper class hosting meals often on aweekly basis. A social-climbing guest knew he had achieved a level of acceptancein elite circles when he received an invitation to dinner at the homeof a wealthy host. Likewise, the reputation of the host was carefully measuredaccording to the comportment of the family, the number of servants,the quality of food, and the finery of the dinner table.The protocol for presenting and serving food at times attained a levelof significance equal to the pedigree of important guests. Two distinct formsof service were compulsory throughout European society beginning in theMiddle Ages. Service à la française, or French-style service, was establishedin France among medieval nobility and stressed principles of hierarchy, balance,and symmetry at the dining table. The practice remained popular forseveral centuries and involved some complicated mathematics and largequantities of food. The meal was presented in three or four courses. Thenumber of dishes served was prescribed by the number of guests. A threecoursedinner for eight could involve more than 20 dishes. Each spread hadto be arranged symmetrically and types of food had their own accepted hierarchy.If a plate of vegetables was placed on one side of the table, it had toDinner Parties 225

226 Dinner Partiesbe balanced with a similar plate on the other side of the table. This ensuredthe appearance of a bountiful table with a wide variety of food that signifiedthe wealth and stature of the host. Affluent, status-conscious Europeansand American Colonists firmly embraced French-style service as central tothe dinner party experience but guests complained that the food quicklygrew cold as it sat on display.By contrast, service à la russe, or service in the Russian style, came intovogue during the 1880s. Believed to have been introduced to France by theRussian Prince Alexander Kurakin, service in the Russian style dictated thateach dish was brought to the table individually retaining its maximum heatand flavor. Service in the Russian style allowed guests to savor and enjoy theappearance and taste of each dish. Over time Russian-style service replacedFrench-style service as the preferred practice.By the mid-nineteenth century, the dinner party was the domain of thewoman of the house, whom the community often judged based on her abilitiesas a hostess. Noted domestic experts from Isabella Beeton to CatharineEsther Beecher served up extensive advice in domestic manuals for homemakershoping to establish themselves on the social scene, offering guidanceon menus for large parties, etiquette, table settings, and conversation starters.Monthly women’s journals and magazines also delivered a steady streamof suggestions for menus, decorations, and after-dinner amusements suchas word games and simple competitions between male and female guests.Dinner party themes, menus, and recipes continue as a mainstay of women’smagazines and cookbooks to this day.Dinner parties were often influenced by current events and reflectedthe mood of an era. During the Depression of the 1930s, Sunday night suppers,featuring one-dish meals were embraced as an economic form of entertainingin the United States. Throughout wartime austerity, informality,cooperation, and a sense of community were the order of the day. The trendtowards informal settings inspired so-called hobo parties where baked beanswere served, barbeques, potluck suppers, and neighborhood victory gardensuppers. The progressive dinner party spread the work and expense of amulti-course meal among several households. When home entertainmentsystems were introduced in the 1950s, TV parties were organized aroundmeals prepared in advance and then served to guests during a televised drama.As prosperity returned after the war, dinner party dishes turned fancy andtraditional. Classic, time-consuming gourmet entrees like Beef Wellingtonbecame the centerpiece of the dinner party, once again reflecting theculinary skills of the hostess. Houseware manufacturers offered sleek andsophisticated products that would enhance the home dinner party, fromelegant chafing dishes, to stylish covered casseroles that moved from ovento table with ease. Electronic appliances like waffle irons, sauce pans, andtoasters were brought to the tabletop with space-aged features designed toimpress and entertain guests.While the starchy protocols of formal dinner parties are still practicedin high society and political circles, the contemporary dinner party is within

Doilies and Coasters 227reach of most households and can range from formal to casual and evenparticipatory. The primary focus of today’s dinner party is mostly social, butit still borrows from a number of the traditions established by the Europeanelite.In her pivotal book Entertaining, published in 1982, domestic guru MarthaStewart used her experiences as a successful caterer to give the traditionaldinner party a neoclassic interpretation. Stewart echoed a sentimentonce expressed by Isabella Beeton that a host’s primary responsibility is tomake guests comfortable. Stewart also restored the art of fussy food andelaborate table settings to the form, but she argued that rules and regimenswere no longer mandatory and that hosts should let dinner parties reflecttheir individual styles. Stewart still gave detailed attention to the provenfundamentals of a dinner party—lively conversation, creative table settings,flowers, and ambience. But, in redefining the genre for a new era, Entertainingoffered a roadmap for a range of variations, including the archetypalformal dinner party for 24, an outdoor omelet brunch for 60, or a casualkitchen salad party for 30 participants.Today, every dinner party experience is as diverse as the personality ofits host. With the rise of two-income households and trends suggesting thatfewer families are cooking at home, catering is considered an acceptable andconvenient method for staging the present-day dinner party. However, thereare still many households who treat the home-cooked meal as an occasionfor family and friends, and kitchens and family rooms have also becomepreferred locations for socializing at home. Entertaining experts suggest dinnerparty themes that reflect the traditional and the trendy, ranging frombackyard barbeque, to Spanish paella dinner, to environmentally friendlydinners parties, in which all the dishes are prepared with locally grown produce.Technology offers new options for the time-starved host who can nowsend customized digital dinner invitations and track RSVPs through servicesavailable on the Internet. Some digital programs even calculate the cost ofparty expenses or the amount of alcohol needed, and allow hosts to createprofiles of guest preferences and offer electronic maps and directions tothose who must travel a distance to the event.Further Reading: Lovegren, Sylvia. Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads.New York: Macmillan, 1995; “Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management.”Available at http://www.mrsbeeton.com; Stewart, Martha, and ElizabethHawes. Entertaining. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1982; Strong, Roy. Feast,A History of Grand Eating. New York: Harcourt, 2001.T. W. BarrittDoilies and CoastersBy the middle of the fifteenth century, English dining tables were coveredby fine diamond- or damask-patterned white linens, with specific types of

228 Doilies and Coastersnapkins for diners and a multitude of servers. The rules for the setting oftables were more formally codified in France, in the seventeenth centuryin the court of Louis XIV, and became even more elaborate until reachingtheir peak during England’s Victorian era.All that fine linen needed to be protected from stains, so doilies andcoasters were invented. While the functions of these two items are similar,their histories are quite different.Doilies, originally known as “doily-napkins,” were created to protectfine linens from staining fruit juices, so they were often used under desserts.This tradition continues to this day (although it is usually seen in the formof paper doilies under baked goods, or on trays to reduce sliding of glasses).The name is derived from D’Oyley—a prosperous seventeenth-centuryLondon draper who supplied inexpensive fabrics to be used in place ofnapkins, when white linen napkins might be stained. His simple swatchesof wool were soon embellished with decorative crocheted borders, and laterthe wool itself was replaced by lace. By the late nineteenth century, doiliesand placemats began to appear on bare tables, their linen-protective functionredirected to the table itself. Antimacassars may look like doilies, butthey were invented to protect upholstery from hair-oils that were popularin the nineteenth century—they were never used on tables.Paper doilies were first created in early nineteenth-century France butdidn’t really become popular until after the American Civil War. BenzionKarfiol—a Russian immigrant in New York—imitated seventeenth-centuryVenetian lace designs on paper, using steel engravings. He became very successful,even though he started by selling his paper doilies from a pushcarton the streets of Brooklyn. Today, die-cut paper doilies have almost completelyreplaced crocheted or lace doilies, many of which have become treasuredheirlooms that are rarely, if ever, used for the purpose for which theywere originally intended.While created to serve much the same purpose as doilies (in fact, gobletrounds were lace doilies that were used as coaster), coasters—also knownat one time, as casters—are descended from bottle stands used to holddecanters of wines, especially port. These were popular in the eighteenth century,in England and in the American colonies, in fashionable households.They were supposed to make it easier to pass the bottle around the table. Perhapsthe earliest coasters were smooth underneath, and could glide acrossthe tablecloth. Indeed, some had wheels, which would explain the namecasters. They were made of various materials, some more precious (such assilver or rhinoceros horn) than others. In the nineteenth century, machinestampedmetal could be easily plated with silver and, as a result, the varietiesof tableware proliferated. Coasters became part of the general excessthat was the Victorian table.While one occasionally sees such coasters in use under wine bottlestoday, the word is usually associated with shallow disks of glass, metal, orplastic that are placed under glasses to prevent the formation of rings onwooden surfaces.

Door County Fish Boil 229Even more common now are the stamped disks of blotter-like cardboardon which beer glasses are served, which were not created for use informal dining rooms. Dresden’s Robert Sputh invented these coasters, calledBierdeckel, in 1903, for use in German beer gardens. Wealthy Germans usedlids of silver or pewter to keep insects and other outdoor debris from fallinginto their beer ( hinge-lidded beer steins remain familiar, but simple decoratedlids could be used on glasses as well ). Poorer folk had to get by witha bit of felt or other cloth. For them, Herr Sputh’s invention was a majorimprovement. When the Bierdeckel’s absorbency was discovered, the lidsmoved from the tops to the bottoms of beer glasses, where they could catchthe inevitable over-flows of foam, and they became an omnipresent part ofbars and taverns everywhere. Katzcoaster International is the largest manufacturerof beer coasters, producing some 1.4 billion per year.German Bierdeckel are square, with rounded corners, while Americanbeer coasters are generally round. When breweries replaced the originaldecorations with their brand names and logos, they became souvenirs andcollector’s items.Further Reading: De Worde, Wynkyn. The Boke of Keruynge ( The Book of Carving ):With an Introduction, Drawings and Glossary by Peter Brears. East Sussex,England: Southover Press, 2003.Gary AllenDoor County Fish BoilThe narrow 75-mile-long peninsula that pokes northward into Lake Michiganfrom Wisconsin’s eastern shore, with Green Bay on its left, is knownthroughout the Midwest as a favorite vacation spot. Small villages dot itsshorelines and mention of its name, Door County, usually recalls memoriesof happy times. It was not always so.In the late 1800s, after extensive logging had removed most of its trees,early settlers turned to fishing to survive, using first oars or sails and then steamto power their fishing boats in the warmer months, and fishing throughholes in the ice in both the bay and the lake during the frozen months. Laketrout and whitefish were plentiful until sea lampreys gained access to theGreat Lakes through the Saint Lawrence Seaway and preyed on the trout,and few were left by the 1950s. But the whitefish survived and, thoughfewer in numbers than in the early days due to over-fishing and other factors,they became the basis for a well-entrenched tradition of Door County:originally called a trout boil, now simply called a fish boil.Door County, with its limestone base and its spring weather temperedby more than 250 miles of coastline, also is the cherry-growing area of Wisconsin.Although once first in production of tart red Montmorency cherriesin the United States, it has fallen to fourth place as farming and fishing are

Dessert 217In bustling Vienna the daily ritual known as Jause explicitly paired coffeewith desserts for a mid-afternoon social respite. The practice is still observedtoday, though mostly on weekends and during holidays. The dessertsfeatured in the Jause, then as now, might include any number of Austrianspecialties, including complex layered sponge cakes like the Sachertorte; delicatestrudels; crumbly nut-meal cookies; or homey fruit-filled dumplings.TeaThough coffee maintained prominence virtually everywhere else in Europe,in England tea became a favorite in the early eighteenth century (dueat least in part to the campaigning of the British East India Company, whichimported large quantities of tea and had obvious motives for promoting itsconsumption). The British generally enjoyed their tea sweetened with sugarand enriched with milk, and soon took to enjoying it alongside sweet foodsas well. By the nineteenth century sweet-laden afternoon tea had became acommon social custom. As the accepted creation story goes, Anna, the seventhduchess of Bedford requested that her servant bring a pot of tea accompaniedby a selection of biscuits and various sweets to her chambers toremedy a “sinking feeling” that she experienced in the afternoon. Perhaps toassuage the guilt of such an indulgence, she began inviting friends to join herin this restorative practice, and thus the afternoon tea began. Still enjoyedtoday, though much less often, a formal afternoon tea generally includes afreshly brewed pot of tea accompanied by milk, sugar, and a selection of smalledibles, often arranged on a tiered tray, with delicate sandwiches occupyingthe lower tiers and the upper tiers being primarily occupied by fancy cakesand pastries and scones accompanied by sweet jams and clotted cream.ChocolateFor centuries after its introduction to Europe, chocolate was consumedprimarily in the form of a sweetened beverage. The first shipment of cocoabeans (chocolate in raw form) from the New World arrived in Spain in1585. From there and from Italy, where it arrived at around the same time,chocolate was gradually introduced to points north. While it was acceptedwith alacrity here and there (as in the French court of Louis the XIV, ahearty advocate of chocolate), eventually finding tentative use in some softdessert preparations (e.g., mousses and puddings), chocolate remained onlya minor foodstuff until the nineteenth century.In 1828 Conrad Van Houten, a Dutch engineer, intro duced a processwhereby cocoa butter, the plentiful fat naturally present in cocoa beans,could be extracted from the cocoa mass ( ground whole cocoa beans), yieldingchocolate that was much more pleasant to eat in solid form and morereadily adapted to a range of sweet forms. The process also made it possibleto isolate cocoa powder, a product composed almost entirely out of flavorfulcocoa solids that would become an important dessert ingredient in its

218 DessertMarshmallowsOriginally, the sweet, sticky juice pressed from the root of themarsh mallow plant was used in Europe for medicinal purposes.Eventually, the French learned to combine it with sugar andwhipped egg whites, to form sheets of pate de guimauve, usedto embellish small cakes. This innovation was soon picked up byconfectioners who found a way to substitute gum arabic for themallow root sap as it made its way to the United States.In 1884, a book published for retail candy makers listed arecipe for marshmallow drops. In a two-inch-deep, carefully leveledbed of sifted cornstarch, impressions were made with a rowof small metal, plaster, or wood forms, where still-warm and fluidmarshmallow foam was dropped and left to cool and firm up beforebeing removed and dusted with powdered sugar.By the early twentieth century the idea of toasting marshmallowsover a fire was introduced and “marshmallow roasts”became popular entertainment. As electrical power was introducedinto homes, it spurred the invention of small appliancesand marshmallow toasters were being offered for sale by about1910.By 1917, cookbook writers were calling for marshmallowsas essential ingredients. A suggestion for use in a recipein a Jiffy-Jell ad was a prediction of the future happy union ofmarshmallows and Jell-O. To promote their product as a “food,”marshmallow manufacturers began distributing small pamphletswith recipes for marshmallows as ingredients not only in elaboratecakes, fanciful frozen desserts, and ice cream toppings,but also in sauces, sandwiches, and salads using a variety offruits and vegetables.For those seeking a more exotic menu, a manufacturer’spamphlet included recipes for desserts from the executive chefof the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu. The manufacturers’inventiveness didn’t stop there. They gave away small printedpamphlets showing how to fashion small party favors, or to usemarshmallows with other foods to produce fanciful figures aspart of a composed salad, or to decorate a cake. The pairingof marshmallows and sweet potatoes was discovered in the late1920s, and recipes from that period still appear in cookbooksof today.In 1955 marshmallow manufactures made a great leap forwardin efficiency and economy when Alex Doumakes patenteda method for extruding the marshmallow foam through a tubeinto a long rope and then cutting it into uniform pieces. Thismade possible the now-familiar miniature marshmallows. Otherdevelopments followed and now marshmallows can be purchasedin a myriad of shapes, colors, and consistencies.Today, the various forms of marshmallow are as popular asever: for toasting over campfires, for constructing s’mores, forown right. When, in the 1870s, twoSwiss companies, Tobler and Nestle,perfected a method for incorporatingmilk solids into chocolate, thuscreating milk chocolate, the popularityof chocolate as a dessert inits own right was solidified. Thenuts and fruits that had constitutedthe primary flavoring componentsin desserts for millenniawere eventually subsumed by chocolatein all types of desserts, fromcakes to custards.BEYOND EUROPEIn Japan, desserts generally possessrelatively subtle sweetness,and are often made with gel- (usuallyextracted from seaweed),rice-, or bean-bases, with commonflavors being derived from greentea, cherry blossoms, soy beans, andazuki beans (sweet red beans, commonin Japanese and Chinese cuisine,particularly sweets). Desserts,generally known as okashi, comein a range of colors tending towardpastel and are often of a precious,jewel-like appearance, presentedin delicate paper wrappers andboxes. These are generally enjoyedas snacks or as accompaniments totea, particularly at the end of a formalmeal.In China, desserts are not integralto the traditional daily mealand are most often enjoyed in thecourse of celebrations or as occasionalsnacks. Delicate molded pastriesknown as mooncakes have avenerable position in Autumn MoonFestival celebrations, when theyare exchanged among family andfriends. Though traditional fillingsare lotus or various bean pastes,

Dessert 219modern mooncakes can be filledwith or made out of a limitless rangeof flavors and ingredients. Pao-paofan, “eight treasures,” is a generallychewy (rather than creamy) ricepudding enjoyed on special occasions.The “eight treasures” of notevary, but traditionally include suchitems as red dates, candied plumsand other fruits, watermelon seeds,almonds, and lotus seeds.topping hot cocoa, for the Thanksgiving table’s mashed sweetpotatoes, or as the main component of confections designedto be sold as holiday specialties, colored and molded into animalforms. They also are pantry staples as ingredients in RiceKrispy Treats, and Fluffernutter sandwiches (filled with peanutbutter and Marshmallow Fluff ).In general, sweets found in East Asian cuisines rely heavily on rice, beans,nuts, and fruits, eschewing the cream, butter, and other dairy products thatare so central to desserts elsewhere.Indian cuisine boasts a plethora of desserts. These vary regionally buttend toward rather sweet, rich preparations, and are regularly eaten at theend of the meal or as snacks. Common flavorings and ingredients include,but are in no way limited to, condensed milk, mild fresh cheeses, rice, cardamom,cashews, and coconut.In the cuisines of the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean, includingthose of Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, and Iran, sweets have a long history, datingback in many instances to the earliest civilizations. Baklava is a widelycherished dessert in these regions, probably dating back to the fifteenthcentury, if not before. Though recipes vary regionally, baklava generally consistsof layers of extremely thin dough ( phyllo), interspersed with crushednuts—often pistachio, almond, or walnut—and saturated with a honey orsugar syrup. Some versions also include flavorings of cinnamon, clove, cardamom,or rose water. Halva is another common sweet with a history goingback to the Middles Ages. In its most basic form, halva consists of honey orsugar and ground sesame seeds; today there are also chocolate, pistachio,and coconut versions, to name a few.Sweets are also a cherished component of many Central and SouthAmerican cuisines. Due to strong Portuguese and Spanish colonial influences,Latin American sweets are often similar to those found in southwesternEurope: the sugar-dusted, deep-fried pastries known as churros,the ubiquitous flan (a baked custard, generally accompanied by liquid caramel),and the much cherished dulce de leche (a rich caramel made fromcondensed milk) are all examples of such influences. Chocolate, cinnamon,vanilla, and tropical fruits, such as pineapple and mango, are commondessert flavorings. In many regions festive, brightly colored cakes are keycomponents of birthdays, weddings, and other important celebrations. InMexico, where Day of the Dead (Dìa de los Muertos) celebrations originatedand remain particularly significant, a range of sweets are featuredin these festivities, including fancifully decorated sugar skulls and pan demuerto ( bread of the dead), a sweet egg-enriched bread, often flavored withanise and orange.Shirley Cherkasky

220 Dim SumTECHNOLOGICAL CHANGEOver the course of the last few centuries, dessert production has becomeeasier and more efficient, making sweets less expensive and ephemeral,and more widely available. With the introduction of the gas range inthe 1850s, baking cakes, cookies, and pastries became infinitely easier. Electricmixers, developed in the first few decades of the twentieth century,drastically reduced the labor and time involved in mixing batters, creams,and doughs. Refrigerators, home models of which started to become popularin the 1920s, made it possible to make or purchase everything fromgelatin desserts to ice creams in advance and to keep them for much longerthan had been possible in the past. And the rise of the microwave oven inthe 1970s made it not only easier and faster to melt chocolate and butterand heat liquids and sauces, facilitating recipe production and dessertpresentation, but they gave rise to a battery of mass-produced, ready-madedesserts that required little more preparation than removal from the packageand the pressing of a few buttons to serve.New ingredients and additives have also been sources of change. Forexample, the production of consistent leavened goods such as cakes andbreads became much easier beginning in the mid-nineteenth century withthe commercial availability of baking powders, followed by the introductionof standardized commercial yeasts around the turn of the century.Further Reading: Amendola, Joseph, and Nicole Rees. Understanding Baking: The Artand Science of Baking. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003; Bloom, Carole. TheInternational Dictionary of Desserts, Pastries and Confections. New York: HearstBooks, 1995; Der Haroutunian, Arto. Patisserie of the Eastern Mediterranean.London: Macdonald Orbis Ltd., 1988; Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power:The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin Books, 1985; Morton,Marcia Colman. The Art of Viennese Pastry. New York: Doubleday & Company,1969; Schinz, Marina. Book of Sweets. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994.Amanda Lynn ClarkeDim SumDim sum is part of the Chinese tradition of xiao chi (snacks) that datesback to the reign of the Sung Dynasty (A.D. 960–1279). Palace chefs inventeddishes like minced pheasant, lark tongues, and sweets made fromsteamed milk and bean paste to appease the palates of royalty and hopefullytouch their hearts as well. Dim sum translates as “touch the heart” or “heart’sdelight.”During the thirteenth century, Mongol invaders forced the royal courtsouth and the custom of dim sum went along, eventually finding a place toflourish in Canton. Canton was a large port city where foreign nations traded.A temperate climate, a coast that yielded fresh and tropical ingredients, andan abundance of money made Canton a fertile ground for experimentation

Dim Sum 221in both food and entertainment. Here street vendors and teahouses soldvarieties of dim sum.CONFUCIANISM AND DIM SUMTo the philosopher Confucius (551–479 B.C.), the enjoyment of foodwas one of the things that contributed to the peace and harmony of society.He established culinary standards and proper table etiquette still often consideredto be the standard today. The gathering of friends and family fordim sum is a natural extension of his philosophy, in which getting togetherwithout food was considered incomplete and improper.HARMONY AND BALANCEDim sum also adheres to the Chinese concept of balance ( yin and yang)in cuisine that is referred to as fan /t’sai. Fan, or starches and grains, are balancedby meats and vegetables, or t’sai. Each piece of dim sum is supposedto contain the balance of fan / t’sai, with sauces for dipping served on theside. Balance also occurs between foods that are considered hot and thosethat are cold, and harmony should be achieved between the five flavors—bitter, hot, sour, salty, and sweet. Balance is also obtained by combining thedrinking of tea with the eating of dim sum.THE TRADITION OF THE TEAHOUSEDim sum is traditionally consumed with tea at yum cha, or tea lunch.At first it was considered inappropriate to combine tea with food. In thethird century A.D., Hua Tuo, one of the most respected Imperial physiciansof ancient times, advised that “eating food and drinking tea at the same timeonly results in excessive weight gain” (Global Gourmet). Over time, tea’sability to aid digestion and cleanse the palate became known, and teahouseproprietors began adding a variety of dim sum.In Imperial times in Northern China, the teahouse was the meetingplace of gentlemen of leisure who talked and drank tea, accompanied bytheir caged songbirds, hung on a bamboo rod. A large teahouse could boastof more than 1,000 dim sum varieties. Over time, businessmen would cometo visit teahouses to negotiate deals sealed in the relaxed surroundings.Teahouses were also a place for disputes to be settled harmoniously over teain the presence of a mutually respected arbiter.During the Ming Dynasty (A.D. 1368–1644), the Tea and Horses Bureauwas created to monitor tea production. This improvement in tea qualityalso resulted in an improvement in teahouses.The teahouse was a natural adjunct to the migratory nature of Chinesesociety. Travelers journeying along the famous Silk Road needed a place torest, and teahouses along the route accommodated them. Local workers

222 Dim Sumwould also stop in for conversation, tea, and dim sum, after a hard daytoiling in the field. Here the merits of particular dim sum chefs and theirculinary prowess would be enthusiastically debated. Dim sum was usuallyserved from midmorning to midafternoon, a tradition that continues today.THE MIGRATION OF DIM SUMOver the years, where Cantonese migrated, dim sum went along. Familyand friends would gather to visit, gossip, or do business over tea and dim sum.In the nineteenth century, dim sum migrated to the west along with Chineseimmigrants, mostly from Canton, and settled with them on both the Eastand West coasts of the United States. When the communists came to powerin China, many dim sum chefs fled to Hong Kong, and the refinement of theart of dim sum was taken to a new level.DIM SUM TODAYToday, the so-called traditional teahouse may be rare in China, replacedby chains and other institutions. In Canton, dim sum may be seen more asan entire meal. The once quiet, reserved atmosphere of the teahouse hasbeen transformed into a boisterous combination of loud conversation, clatteringcarts and dishes, and gesticulating waiters.The new place for dim sum “palaces” today is in major cities like HongKong, San Francisco, Boston, Toronto, and New York. During the week, dimsum is the domain of students and office workers who catch a quick breakfast,businessmen who drop in for meetings, or the elderly who drop inafter exercises. But it is on the weekends that dim sum comes into its ownas a sort of Chinese brunch. Entire families (often several generations) orparties of friends gather to consume small plates of dim sum and drink copiousamounts of tea as they exchange gossip and catch up on the week’sevents.DIM SUM CUSTOMS AND ETIQUETTEDim sum consists of many small dishes transported on wheeled carts.Women call out the name of each selection, often only in Cantonese, holdingout dishes, or lifting covers of steamer baskets to show the contents.Dim sum is eaten family style, and tables are often shared with others.Etiquette mandates how to share dishes: one end of the chopstick isused for taking food from the communal dish, while the other is used toeat. Toothpicks are used to clean particles between the teeth so the distinctflavor of the various dishes comes through.Tea is poured upon seating and is also used to clean out and heat thecups. Whoever is closest to the teapot pours for everyone else first. Teacupsdon’t have handles because it is believed that if the cup is too hot to hold,the tea is too hot to drink. When the teapot needs refilling, custom mandates

Dim Sum 223A variety of dim sum in bamboo steam containers.Hywit Dimyadi /Shutterstock.putting the lid back on askew. The story behind this custom involves a poorstudent who hid a bird in his teapot. When the waiter came to refill the potand lifted the lid, the bird flew away. The student made a loud fuss, claimingit was a very precious bird and that the restaurant owed him compensation.After this, the restaurant—and all others—decided to wait for customers tolift the lid of an empty teapot if a refill was needed.When the teapot or a cup has been refilled, thanks are expressed witha tap of the fingers on the table. This tradition has its origins in the QingDynasty when an emperor made incognito visits throughout his empire.Visiting southern China, he switched roles with a companion and went intoa teahouse. The disguised emperor would pour tea for his companion, andthe companion, concerned about revealing the true identity of the emperor,would tap three fingers on the table in gratitude—one finger representinghis bowed head and the other two his prostrate arms.Dim sum items are not chosen all at once but continuously throughoutthe meal. Savory items are interspersed with sweet ones like dessert. Thecreations reflect the artistry of the chef and may include steamed shrimpdumplings (har gao), steamed pork and shrimp dumplings (siu mai), springrolls (cheun gyun), steamed barbecued pork buns (cha siu bau), rice noodlerolls (cheong fun), green pepper stuffed with shrimp ( yern chang chew), andcongee (jook). More exotic dishes include chicken feet ( fung jow) and curriedsquid (ca lay yao yue). Desserts range from sesame seed balls (gee magyun) to egg custard tart (dan tat). Potstickers (guo tie), which are oftenserved, are northern Chinese in origin, and not considered traditional.The cost of dim sum is tallied in one of two ways. Traditionally, emptydishes are stacked on the table and tallied by size and /or color at the end ofthe meal. But today, a slip of paper often replaces this method, with eachdish being recorded on it when served.DIM SUM AT HOMEToday, dim sum has migrated from the teahouse and palace into the home.Premade dim sum can be purchased at many Chinese groceries or large urban

224 Dinner Partiessupermarkets. Entire cookbooks are devoted to dim sum’s myriad forms, allowingit to become a tasty addition to parties, brunch, or everyday meals.Further Reading: Anderson, E. N. Food of China. New Haven, CT: Yale UniversityPress, 1988; Blonder, Ellen Leong. Dim Sum: The Art of Chinese Tea Lunch.New York: Clarkson Potter Publishers, 2002; Global Gourmet. “Hong Kong:Teatime Traditions—Yum Cha and Dim Sum.” http://www.globalgourmet.com /destinations/ hongkong/ hkteatime.html; Grimes, Lulu, food editor, JustineHarding, editor. The Food of China: A Journey for Food Lovers. North Vancouver,BC, Canada: Whitecap Books, 2005; Liley, Vicki. Dim Sum. Boston, MA: PeriplusEditions (HK), 1999.Stephanie FogelDinner PartiesBoth social entertainment and domestic theater, the dinner party is the actof planning and serving an elaborate meal to invited guests. Performed withthe proper flourishes, it can be an act of creative hospitality, an indicatorof gender roles, and a demonstration of social status. Throughout history,people have gathered to enjoy special feasts and the pleasures of the table,but the dinner party is considered an event and a jewel in the entertainingrepertoire of any host. The host who choreographs a flawless dinner partyis admired by guests as a person of good taste and congeniality. The memorabledinner party weaves together several crucial elements—a thoughtfullyconsidered guest list, a theme, cocktails, a menu plan, a visually appealingtable and thought-provoking conversation.Home entertaining experts agree on several fundamentals that comprisea successful dinner party. Table décor and place settings should attractthe eye, and china, glassware, and utensils should be placed symmetricallyon the table. Table linens add a creative dash of color and a floral centerpieceprovides a natural accent. Colors and patterns of plates, stemware,and serving pieces can be mixed. Flatware should be set in the order itwill be used by guests for each course. Place cards give the host the abilityto strategically seat guests and choreograph the dinner conversation.Tradition dictates that a woman guest of honor is seated to the right of thehost, while a male guest of honor is seated to the right of the hostess. Foodshould be served from the left and beverages poured from the right.Nearly all of the rituals associated with the modern dinner party canbe found in the earliest evidence of the form. The confluence of food anddrink, status, ceremony and social interaction is evident throughout history,mostly as an amusement of the wealthy. While the poor went hungry, therich had an ample supply of food and all the trappings to enhance the diningexperience for themselves and their friends.In Ancient Greece, a social gathering called a symposium was held inboth public and domestic settings and frequented by aristocratic males. The

evening was structured with rules and rituals. Guests reclined on couchesthat surrounded low tables. They engaged in political dialogue and sharedwine and some food, with a distinct emphasis on alcohol consumption.Similarly, in Ancient Rome, the convivium was an event structuredaround conversation, but the focus was also on dining and collegiality. Citizensof diverse social standing and women participated. The Roman banquetwas well-known for its extravagant feasting and exquisite tableware, anddinner menus were sometimes made available in advance of a meal to enticeguests. Romans dined together reclining on sets of three couches groupedaround a common table. The couches were arranged according to the statusof those present at the table, from highest to lowest. Dinners were servedin three courses that included extensive appetizers, roasted or grilled meatsand desserts, all accompanied by wine.Throughout Europe during the Middle Ages, royal banquets perfectedextravagance in food and attire. The aristocracy was the leisure class, andthe act of dining grew to become a form of lavish entertainment, whereceremony, exquisite feasting, and social skills were practiced as a rarefied artform. During the Renaissance, classic culinary texts from antiquity were rediscoveredand new flavors and tastes were brought to the table transformingmenus, along with an increased emphasis on the art of conversation.Sensory pleasures were at the heart of the dinner party, whether thetable belonged to the wealthy or the middle class, and for some, the dinnerparty became a kind of grand artistic canvas. The renowned French pastrychef Antonin Carême pioneered spectacular table décor for the guests ofTallyrand and Emperor Napoleon with his extravagant palladio de patisserie,a dessert tableau that lined the dining table of formal state dinnerparties.The rank-conscious Victorian society established the dinner party asa form of class competition, with the upper class hosting meals often on aweekly basis. A social-climbing guest knew he had achieved a level of acceptancein elite circles when he received an invitation to dinner at the homeof a wealthy host. Likewise, the reputation of the host was carefully measuredaccording to the comportment of the family, the number of servants,the quality of food, and the finery of the dinner table.The protocol for presenting and serving food at times attained a levelof significance equal to the pedigree of important guests. Two distinct formsof service were compulsory throughout European society beginning in theMiddle Ages. Service à la française, or French-style service, was establishedin France among medieval nobility and stressed principles of hierarchy, balance,and symmetry at the dining table. The practice remained popular forseveral centuries and involved some complicated mathematics and largequantities of food. The meal was presented in three or four courses. Thenumber of dishes served was prescribed by the number of guests. A threecoursedinner for eight could involve more than 20 dishes. Each spread hadto be arranged symmetrically and types of food had their own accepted hierarchy.If a plate of vegetables was placed on one side of the table, it had toDinner Parties 225

226 Dinner Partiesbe balanced with a similar plate on the other side of the table. This ensuredthe appearance of a bountiful table with a wide variety of food that signifiedthe wealth and stature of the host. Affluent, status-conscious Europeansand American Colonists firmly embraced French-style service as central tothe dinner party experience but guests complained that the food quicklygrew cold as it sat on display.By contrast, service à la russe, or service in the Russian style, came intovogue during the 1880s. Believed to have been introduced to France by theRussian Prince Alexander Kurakin, service in the Russian style dictated thateach dish was brought to the table individually retaining its maximum heatand flavor. Service in the Russian style allowed guests to savor and enjoy theappearance and taste of each dish. Over time Russian-style service replacedFrench-style service as the preferred practice.By the mid-nineteenth century, the dinner party was the domain of thewoman of the house, whom the community often judged based on her abilitiesas a hostess. Noted domestic experts from Isabella Beeton to CatharineEsther Beecher served up extensive advice in domestic manuals for homemakershoping to establish themselves on the social scene, offering guidanceon menus for large parties, etiquette, table settings, and conversation starters.Monthly women’s journals and magazines also delivered a steady streamof suggestions for menus, decorations, and after-dinner amusements suchas word games and simple competitions between male and female guests.Dinner party themes, menus, and recipes continue as a mainstay of women’smagazines and cookbooks to this day.Dinner parties were often influenced by current events and reflectedthe mood of an era. During the Depression of the 1930s, Sunday night suppers,featuring one-dish meals were embraced as an economic form of entertainingin the United States. Throughout wartime austerity, informality,cooperation, and a sense of community were the order of the day. The trendtowards informal settings inspired so-called hobo parties where baked beanswere served, barbeques, potluck suppers, and neighborhood victory gardensuppers. The progressive dinner party spread the work and expense of amulti-course meal among several households. When home entertainmentsystems were introduced in the 1950s, TV parties were organized aroundmeals prepared in advance and then served to guests during a televised drama.As prosperity returned after the war, dinner party dishes turned fancy andtraditional. Classic, time-consuming gourmet entrees like Beef Wellingtonbecame the centerpiece of the dinner party, once again reflecting theculinary skills of the hostess. Houseware manufacturers offered sleek andsophisticated products that would enhance the home dinner party, fromelegant chafing dishes, to stylish covered casseroles that moved from ovento table with ease. Electronic appliances like waffle irons, sauce pans, andtoasters were brought to the tabletop with space-aged features designed toimpress and entertain guests.While the starchy protocols of formal dinner parties are still practicedin high society and political circles, the contemporary dinner party is within

Doilies and Coasters 227reach of most households and can range from formal to casual and evenparticipatory. The primary focus of today’s dinner party is mostly social, butit still borrows from a number of the traditions established by the Europeanelite.In her pivotal book Entertaining, published in 1982, domestic guru MarthaStewart used her experiences as a successful caterer to give the traditionaldinner party a neoclassic interpretation. Stewart echoed a sentimentonce expressed by Isabella Beeton that a host’s primary responsibility is tomake guests comfortable. Stewart also restored the art of fussy food andelaborate table settings to the form, but she argued that rules and regimenswere no longer mandatory and that hosts should let dinner parties reflecttheir individual styles. Stewart still gave detailed attention to the provenfundamentals of a dinner party—lively conversation, creative table settings,flowers, and ambience. But, in redefining the genre for a new era, Entertainingoffered a roadmap for a range of variations, including the archetypalformal dinner party for 24, an outdoor omelet brunch for 60, or a casualkitchen salad party for 30 participants.Today, every dinner party experience is as diverse as the personality ofits host. With the rise of two-income households and trends suggesting thatfewer families are cooking at home, catering is considered an acceptable andconvenient method for staging the present-day dinner party. However, thereare still many households who treat the home-cooked meal as an occasionfor family and friends, and kitchens and family rooms have also becomepreferred locations for socializing at home. Entertaining experts suggest dinnerparty themes that reflect the traditional and the trendy, ranging frombackyard barbeque, to Spanish paella dinner, to environmentally friendlydinners parties, in which all the dishes are prepared with locally grown produce.Technology offers new options for the time-starved host who can nowsend customized digital dinner invitations and track RSVPs through servicesavailable on the Internet. Some digital programs even calculate the cost ofparty expenses or the amount of alcohol needed, and allow hosts to createprofiles of guest preferences and offer electronic maps and directions tothose who must travel a distance to the event.Further Reading: Lovegren, Sylvia. Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads.New York: Macmillan, 1995; “Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management.”Available at http://www.mrsbeeton.com; Stewart, Martha, and ElizabethHawes. Entertaining. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1982; Strong, Roy. Feast,A History of Grand Eating. New York: Harcourt, 2001.T. W. BarrittDoilies and CoastersBy the middle of the fifteenth century, English dining tables were coveredby fine diamond- or damask-patterned white linens, with specific types of

228 Doilies and Coastersnapkins for diners and a multitude of servers. The rules for the setting oftables were more formally codified in France, in the seventeenth centuryin the court of Louis XIV, and became even more elaborate until reachingtheir peak during England’s Victorian era.All that fine linen needed to be protected from stains, so doilies andcoasters were invented. While the functions of these two items are similar,their histories are quite different.Doilies, originally known as “doily-napkins,” were created to protectfine linens from staining fruit juices, so they were often used under desserts.This tradition continues to this day (although it is usually seen in the formof paper doilies under baked goods, or on trays to reduce sliding of glasses).The name is derived from D’Oyley—a prosperous seventeenth-centuryLondon draper who supplied inexpensive fabrics to be used in place ofnapkins, when white linen napkins might be stained. His simple swatchesof wool were soon embellished with decorative crocheted borders, and laterthe wool itself was replaced by lace. By the late nineteenth century, doiliesand placemats began to appear on bare tables, their linen-protective functionredirected to the table itself. Antimacassars may look like doilies, butthey were invented to protect upholstery from hair-oils that were popularin the nineteenth century—they were never used on tables.Paper doilies were first created in early nineteenth-century France butdidn’t really become popular until after the American Civil War. BenzionKarfiol—a Russian immigrant in New York—imitated seventeenth-centuryVenetian lace designs on paper, using steel engravings. He became very successful,even though he started by selling his paper doilies from a pushcarton the streets of Brooklyn. Today, die-cut paper doilies have almost completelyreplaced crocheted or lace doilies, many of which have become treasuredheirlooms that are rarely, if ever, used for the purpose for which theywere originally intended.While created to serve much the same purpose as doilies (in fact, gobletrounds were lace doilies that were used as coaster), coasters—also knownat one time, as casters—are descended from bottle stands used to holddecanters of wines, especially port. These were popular in the eighteenth century,in England and in the American colonies, in fashionable households.They were supposed to make it easier to pass the bottle around the table. Perhapsthe earliest coasters were smooth underneath, and could glide acrossthe tablecloth. Indeed, some had wheels, which would explain the namecasters. They were made of various materials, some more precious (such assilver or rhinoceros horn) than others. In the nineteenth century, machinestampedmetal could be easily plated with silver and, as a result, the varietiesof tableware proliferated. Coasters became part of the general excessthat was the Victorian table.While one occasionally sees such coasters in use under wine bottlestoday, the word is usually associated with shallow disks of glass, metal, orplastic that are placed under glasses to prevent the formation of rings onwooden surfaces.

Door County Fish Boil 229Even more common now are the stamped disks of blotter-like cardboardon which beer glasses are served, which were not created for use informal dining rooms. Dresden’s Robert Sputh invented these coasters, calledBierdeckel, in 1903, for use in German beer gardens. Wealthy Germans usedlids of silver or pewter to keep insects and other outdoor debris from fallinginto their beer ( hinge-lidded beer steins remain familiar, but simple decoratedlids could be used on glasses as well ). Poorer folk had to get by witha bit of felt or other cloth. For them, Herr Sputh’s invention was a majorimprovement. When the Bierdeckel’s absorbency was discovered, the lidsmoved from the tops to the bottoms of beer glasses, where they could catchthe inevitable over-flows of foam, and they became an omnipresent part ofbars and taverns everywhere. Katzcoaster International is the largest manufacturerof beer coasters, producing some 1.4 billion per year.German Bierdeckel are square, with rounded corners, while Americanbeer coasters are generally round. When breweries replaced the originaldecorations with their brand names and logos, they became souvenirs andcollector’s items.Further Reading: De Worde, Wynkyn. The Boke of Keruynge ( The Book of Carving ):With an Introduction, Drawings and Glossary by Peter Brears. East Sussex,England: Southover Press, 2003.Gary AllenDoor County Fish BoilThe narrow 75-mile-long peninsula that pokes northward into Lake Michiganfrom Wisconsin’s eastern shore, with Green Bay on its left, is knownthroughout the Midwest as a favorite vacation spot. Small villages dot itsshorelines and mention of its name, Door County, usually recalls memoriesof happy times. It was not always so.In the late 1800s, after extensive logging had removed most of its trees,early settlers turned to fishing to survive, using first oars or sails and then steamto power their fishing boats in the warmer months, and fishing throughholes in the ice in both the bay and the lake during the frozen months. Laketrout and whitefish were plentiful until sea lampreys gained access to theGreat Lakes through the Saint Lawrence Seaway and preyed on the trout,and few were left by the 1950s. But the whitefish survived and, thoughfewer in numbers than in the early days due to over-fishing and other factors,they became the basis for a well-entrenched tradition of Door County:originally called a trout boil, now simply called a fish boil.Door County, with its limestone base and its spring weather temperedby more than 250 miles of coastline, also is the cherry-growing area of Wisconsin.Although once first in production of tart red Montmorency cherriesin the United States, it has fallen to fourth place as farming and fishing are

230 Door County Fish Boilbeing replaced by tourism; however, whitefish and cherries remain the basiccomponents of the Door County fish boil today.The tradition of “fish on Friday” has a long history throughout Wisconsin,with its large Catholic population observing fast days. In the 1920s, asProhibition took effect, the state’s many taverns, which had served as informalneighborhood gathering places, began to serve food in order to survive.Some offered free fish fries on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday nights todraw in customers. When Prohibition ended in 1932, the Friday night fishfry continued to be popular with many of Wisconsin’s residents. Today, restaurantsand taverns all over the state offer a multitude of opportunities to“go out for fish” on Friday nights. This includes Door County, but that relativelylimited area has an even more well-known and popular way of servingfish, not only on Fridays but also on every other night of the week, especiallyin the warmer months of the year.It all began in the early 1900s, when Door County fishing boat captainsoccasionally sponsored a fish boil on the shore for their crew members andfamilies once or twice during a good fishing season. So it’s not surprisingthat churches and men’s clubs there in the 1930s began to see the fish boilas a potential way to raise funds using cheap and easily available ingredients:whitefish, potatoes, onions, salt, and water, accompanied by coleslaw, ryebread and butter, coffee, and cherry pie for dessert. Many of their memberswere fishermen and already somewhat familiar with the routine. Men didthe “boil”; women made the pies. Tickets were sold to local residents andsome of the summer tourists of that time.By the early 1940s, when World War II rationing was having its effecteverywhere, some Door County taverns were doing occasional fish boils,usually on Friday or Saturday nights, perhaps to attract a crowd earlier inthe evening. But it wasn’t until 1961 that a restaurant in one of the county’ssmall villages, the Viking Grill in Ellison Bay, began to do traditional fishboils several times a week. That continues to the present day, with the Vikingclaiming to be the site of “the oldest continuous fish boil in the county.”Today, among the thousands of visitors and summer residents in DoorCounty, going to a fish boil at least once during their time there is an essentialpart of a successful vacation. It is available in a variety of settings: churchgrounds, taverns, upscale supper clubs, Formica-tabled restaurants, hoteland inn dining rooms, and in the backyards of local families celebratingoccasions such as reunions, birthdays, or anniversaries. The cooking is doneoutdoors to afford sufficient space for the spectacular “boilover.” The fishmay be served on compartmentalized plastic trays at outdoor picnic tables,on attractive china on shaded terraces, in white table-clothed dining rooms,or on paper plates in family backyards.To do a traditional outdoor fish boil, certain pieces of equipment areessential: an extremely large, deep kettle filled with rapidly boiling waterand suspended or set in a metal frame over a fiercely burning wood fireto which more wood is added to keep it built up around the base of thekettle. Incredible amounts of salt are added to the water. There are various

Door County Fish Boil 231theories about the role of the salt but whatever it accomplishes, it does notresult in over-salted food. A steel basket that just fits inside the kettle is filledwith scrubbed but unpeeled new potatoes, usually with a thin slice removedfrom each end, and small onions (the onions are optional). The basket is loweredinto the boiling water by using a pole thrust through the basket handlesand carried by the boil master and his helper. Once boiling resumes and thevegetables have cooked for about 15 minutes, a shallower steel basket containinglarge chunks of whitefish, cut across the backbone into “steaks,” islowered into the boiling water on top of the first basket. More salt is addedto the water and more wood is stacked around the kettle to build up the fire.Once furious boiling resumes, the fish and vegetables cook for another 7 to10 minutes. The timing is important and carefully observed. Then the boilmaster splashes a can of kerosene on the fire and the spectacular boiloverresults. A column of flame and black smoke erupts skyward and the kettleboils over, carrying off excess fish oils and salt and curbing the fire.First the basket of fish and then of potatoes are lifted out, again with along pole thrust through their handles, and carried, dripping, to the servingarea. The waiting diners line up to be served the fish, potatoes, and onionswith melted butter ladled over, lemon slices, coleslaw, bread and butter.Cherry pie and coffee complete the meal. A local Door County family mayhave its own kettle and baskets, scaled down in size to fit its needs. It mayalso end the meal with a celebratory dessert like a birthday or anniversarycake. Cherry pie is customary but not obligatory.There are several theories about how the fish boil started in DoorCounty and became such an important part of its life: one suggests thatScandinavian immigrants brought the custom with them from home (unsubstantiated);another allows that it was an easy way to feed the men workingin the nineteenth-century logging camps (doubtful); or, more likely, thatit was invented by fishermen out in boats who had plenty of water, salt, potatoes,fish, a need for hot food, and a cast iron stove in the cabin. But noneof these accounts for how the colorful and exciting “boilover” developed.In the 1970s, “trout kettles” were sold in kitchen equipment sectionsof department or hardware stores in other parts of Wisconsin. Developedfor top-stove cooking and complete with a recipe and detailed directions,the equipment may have produced a relatively tasty dish of fish, potatoes,and onions, but what makes a fish boil so special was missing: the dramaticboilover. Although this equipment apparently did not sell well enough tocontinue being manufactured, it can be approximated by using a large, deep,straight-sided kettle with a deep steel basket that fits inside it and has ahandle that facilitates its removal from the boiling water when necessary.As the fish boil became famous for drawing in crowds, it is understandablethat some families, churches and other organizations, or commercialestablishments outside the county, especially further south in the state, arenow doing their own fish boils. These may use frozen cod instead of freshlycaught whitefish, and add carrots to the vegetables, and frequently theboilover is omitted. For anyone who is accustomed to a true Door County

232 Dutch Treatfish boil, these seem to be poor substitutes and lacking in the special dramaand spectacle that gives the real thing such a celebratory ambience.Further Reading: Cherkasky, Shirley. “Fish in the Door Way and Cherries on theLedges.” In Food from Nature: Attitudes, Strategies and Culinary Practices. Edited byPatricia Lysaght. Uppsala, Sweden: The Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy forSwedish Folk Culture, 2000, 310–319; Ellis, W. S. “Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula:A Kingdom So Delicious.” National Geographic. Washington, D.C., March 1969,347–371.Shirley CherkaskyDutch TreatDutch treat is an outing, usually a meal, often in the form of a date, inwhich each party pays their own share—in other words, no one is treatedat all. Though its precise origins are unknown, Dutch treat is by consensusa relatively late and uniquely American contribution to the centuries-oldBritish sport of mocking the Dutch; and none of these “Dutch” phrases weremeant to be flattering. Normally associated with a meal today, the Dutchtreat originated as a reference to drink, drawn from the barroom custom oftreating first introduced in the mid-nineteenth century by immigrants fromrural Ireland.One of the earliest printed references to Dutch treat, in an 1877 NewYork Times article, testifies to the rapid embrace of treating, as well as theclose association of Dutch treat with drink. As the article explains:Treating is a peculiarity of our countrymen. It has been said that an Americanis no sooner introduced to anybody than he immediately thinks it incumbentupon him to pay for the liquor of his new acquaintance. At anAmerican club men [women were generally unwelcome in or barred fromsaloons of the period] deem it proper to drink in companies of two andthree. To call for any article of an alcoholic nature without having firstconsulted the appetite of every one present, is thought to be unsocial andsingular. . . . It is true there are ways by means of which this sentiment maybe got round. But a certain sordid character still hangs to that transaction,which has been dubbed a “Dutch treat.” [italics added] (New York Times,March 18, 1877, 6 )Exactly when such “sordid transaction” came to be known as Dutch treat isan open question, but it is near certain that by the time the phrase debutedin the New York Times, it had traveled a long way from the rough-andtumbleIrish drinking establishments where it first took root.Most likely the phrase was coined decades earlier and spread in parallelwith the emergence of treating as a feature of saloon culture. In America’spolyglot metropolises those early Irish immigrants rubbed shoulders withimmigrant populations possessing very different habits of public drinking,most notably the Germans, who confined their drinking to beer halls,

Dutch Treat 233Dutch Treat club logo. Library ofCongress.where families were welcome and beer was looked upon as a dietary staplerather than an intoxicant. In the world of the German beer hall, treating wasfrowned upon as spendthrift and improvident; customers preferred to buytheir own and drink at their own pace.It’s not hard to imagine the negative reception such customs must havereceived from the Irish. But to understand how a feature of German beerhall etiquette became known as the Dutch treat, it’s worth noting a fewthings. First, going all the way back to the fifteenth century, the Englishhad used Dutch to refer to all Germanic peoples. This usage persisted in theNew World colonies; and it was thus, for example, that the Germans whosettled southeastern Pennsylvania in the late seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies came to be known as the Pennsylvania Dutch. Second, one cannotoverlook the close resemblance of Dutch to Deutsch (the German word for“German”) and the confusion that such similarity in sound would have engendered.Third, one must consider the historic enmity between the Britishand the Dutch, dating back to the seventeenth century, when a naval rivalrydeveloped between the two over control of the spice trade. That competitionfor control of the sea routes to the Spice Islands produced three bitterlyfought battles between 1652 and 1674—wars that, among other things,turned New Amsterdam into New York and that linguistically the Englishhave never stopped fighting. Ever since the Anglo-Dutch wars, Dutch hasbeen fixed in the English language as an epithet, connoting all things false,inferior, abnormal, or ungenerous. From the beginning expressions tendedto play on Dutch drinking habits. Examples include Dutch courage (alcoholinducedbravery), Dutch bargain (“one made in drink”), and Dutch feast (“aparty at which the host gets drunk before the guests do”). Dutch treat ismerely an American variation on that well-worn theme.By the time it began appearing in print, Dutch treat (and its cognates)had already ceased carrying much of a sting outside of the Netherlands,where, unsurprisingly, a fondness never developed for such phraseology. In1934 the Dutch government attempted to address the problem; it ordered

234 Dutch Treatall its officials to stop using Dutch and use Netherlands instead, wheneverpossible. Subsequent decades suggest the initiative failed to achieve totalcompliance.Further Reading: Herbst, Philip H. The Color of Words: An Encyclopedic Dictionaryof Ethnic Bias in the United States. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press, 1997;McCrum, Mark. Going Dutch in Beijing: How to Behave Properly When Far AwayFrom Home. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2008; Mencken, Henry Louis. TheAmerican Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the UnitedStates. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1936; Powers, Madelon. Faces Along the Bar:Lore and Order in the Workingman’s Saloon, 1870–1920. Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1999; Rawson, Hugh. Wicked Words: A Treasury of Curses,Put-downs, and Other Formerly Unprintable Terms from Anglo-Saxon Times to thePresent. New York: Crown Publishers, 1989; Wasserman, Suzanne. “Home Awayfrom Home.” In Seaport: New York’s History Magazine (April 1995).Jonathan Milder

EEasterEaster is the annual festival commemorating the resurrection of Jesus Christand is considered the principal feast of the Christian year. It is a movablefeast that is celebrated on the Sunday immediately following the Paschalfull moon and can fall anytime between March 22 and April 25. Easter isthe culmination of the 40-day penitential season of Lent, which begins onAsh Wednesday and ends at midnight on Holy Saturday, the day beforeEaster Sunday. The week prior to Easter is known as Holy Week. It beginson Palm Sunday, the Sunday prior to Easter, includes Good Friday, the dayof the crucifixion of Christ, and it concludes with Holy Saturday.It is likely that Christian missionaries from the second century A.D.,seeking to convert the tribes of northern Europe, noticed that the Christianholiday commemorating the resurrection of Jesus roughly coincided withexisting springtime celebrations, which emphasized seasonal rebirth. ChristianEaster gradually absorbed many of these traditional symbols of seasonalregeneration.Through the ages, eggs have been viewed as symbols of new life and fertility.Christians later used eggs to symbolize the rebirth of Christ. Many ancientcultures, including the Ancient Egyptians, Persians, and Romans usedeggs during their spring festivals. In Medieval Europe it was forbidden to eat

236 Eastereggs during Lent. Eggs laid during that time were often boiled or otherwisepreserved. Eggs became a mainstay of Easter meals, and a prized Easter giftfor children and servants. Many traditions and practices have formed aroundEaster eggs.Eggs are commonly dyed, painted, and otherwise decorated. Manyfamilies today practice the tradition of coloring eggs with commerciallyproduced vegetable dyes. Some incorporate more elaborate techniques andartistic expression by using wax resin and natural dyes made from onionskins,walnut husks, coffee, and other fruit and vegetables. The dyed eggs aredisplayed on tables, baked into breads, or left for children to discover.Many cultures have highly artistic traditions that involve the decorationof Easter eggs. In Armenia eggs are made hollow by piercing the shell witha needle and blowing out the contents. The resulting hand-blown eggs aredecorated with pictures of Christ, Mary, and other religious figures. In Austria,ferns and small plant parts are fastened to eggs while they are boiled.The resulting patterns are striking. The Pennsylvania Dutch traditionallywrapped the pith of the binsegraas, a type of rush, in coils, which were gluedto eggs. Scraps of calico cloth were then pasted on the egg. The Polish alsoused rushes or colorful rug yarn formed into elaborate coils to decorate eggs.Orthodox Christians in the Middle East and Greece painted eggs bright redto symbolize the blood of Christ. Germans gave green eggs on Holy Thursdayand decorated trees with hollow eggs.Some of the most beautifully decorated eggs come from Ukrainian traditions.Pysanky is an ancient form of folk art from the Ukraine that consistsof decoration of eggs using beeswax and dyes. This art is most popular nearEaster time when eggs are created as gifts for family and friends. Hot wax isapplied to the egg creating very intricate designs. The egg is then dyed andthe process is repeated each time submerging the egg into a different colordye bath. Black is traditionally the last color dye. Once the black dye is dry,the egg is held over and the melted wax is wiped off revealing a beautifullydesigned multicolored egg. Finally, the egg is sealed with a coating ofshellac or varnish. Another Ukrainian egg tradition is the krashanky. Unlikepysanky eggs, krashanky eggs are hard-boiled and intended to be rituallyeaten at sunrise on Easter, while pysanky eggs are kept raw, to preserve theirfertility magic. Krashanky, which comes from the Ukrainian word meaningcolor, uses a single color, usually red, to represent the blood shed by Christ,while pysanky eggs are inscribed and dyed with several colors.The most lavish of all Easter eggs are those made by goldsmith PeterCarl Fabergé. In 1833 the Russian Czar Alexander commissioned Fabergéto make a special Easter gift for his wife, Empress Marie. Fabergé made anegg with an outside shell of white enameled platinum, which opened toreveal a smaller golden egg. This smaller egg, in turn, opened to display agolden chicken and a jeweled replica of the Imperial crown. The Empresswas so delighted that Alexander ordered Fabergé to design a new egg to bedelivered every Easter. Alexander’s son, Nicholas II, continued the tradition.In all, a total of 57 eggs were made.

Easter 237In England, Germany, and other countries, children rolled eggs downhills on Easter morning, a game that has been connected to the rolling awayof the rock from Jesus Christ’s tomb when he was resurrected. Immigrantsbrought the custom with them to America. The most famous Easter EggRoll is held at the White House on the Monday after Easter. Originally, publicegg-rolling celebrations were held on the grounds of the Capitol. Newspaperaccounts describe children of all ages rolling eggs on the congressionalgrounds as early as 1872. In 1876, however, Congress passed the Turf ProtectionLaw to prohibit the area from being used for such frivolous activity. In1878, Rutherford B. Hayes, sensitive to the children who were disappointedby the loss of a place for the egg roll, opened the gates to the South Lawnfor the first official White House Easter Egg Roll. The egg rolls have evolvedand changed over the years, with different games and amusements becomingpopular. Near the end of the nineteenth century, children played “Egg Picking,”“Egg Ball,” “Toss and Catch,” and “Egg Croquet.” Soon the event evolvedinto a more elaborate affair, with bands, entertainers, and food. PresidentHerbert Hoover’s wife instituted folk and maypole dances to complementthe egg rolling but they were not continued for long. At her first Egg Rollin 1933, Eleanor Roosevelt greeted visitors and listeners alike for the firsttime over the radio and she also introduced more organized games. In 1974the most famous event of modern Easter Egg Rolls, the egg-rolling race, wasintroduced with spoons borrowed from the White House kitchen. Otherunique activities have included a circus and petting zoo in 1977 and exhibitsof antique cars, Broadway shows, and giant balloons in 1981. Egg huntpits were introduced in 1981. Children could search through straw pits forautographed wooden eggs. It has always been customary for presidents, firstladies, their children, grandchildren, and pets to attend the festivities. Amongthe most eagerly anticipated guests each year, of course, is the Easter Bunny.The character of the Easter hare, or bunny, comes from antiquity aswell. Rabbits and hares are often seen as symbols of springtime, new life,and rebirth, due to their fertile nature. German settlers in America are saidto have brought over the tradition of a bunny named Osterhase, who wouldWarren Sonnemann holds up a prize Easter basketat the White House Easter egg roll, 1923. Libraryof Congress.

238 Eastervisit houses on Easter eve. Children would set out their caps or bonnets,filled with straw. The Osterhase would leave colored eggs in the nests orhide eggs for the children to find. Easter eggs were painted different colorsto represent the sunlight of spring. While the Easter bunny is responsiblefor filling Easter baskets in America, he is not the only one to deliver Eastertreats. A cuckoo brings eggs to Swiss children, and Czech children awaitthe arrival of a lark. Other animals responsible for Easter delights are therooster, stork, or fox.By the 1800s, candies were commonly tucked into the baskets alongsidethe eggs. Molded chocolate eggs, as well as bunnies, chicks, and lambs, began toappear in the 1870s. Such treats were still relatively expensive, and until the1890s, chocolates were more likely a gift given by a man to his sweetheart.Candy makers such as Milton Hershey changed everything when, at the turnof the century, he developed a chocolate specifically designed for children’stastes by adding milk. Hershey also made his chocolate inexpensive, makingchocolate more affordable for everyone. The English firm of Cadbury &Company produced their first cream-filled chocolate Easter egg in 1875.Jellybeans first became popular when in 1861 William Schrafft of Bostonbegan advertising his jellybeans as a gift to send to soldiers in the UnionArmy. Jellybeans quickly grew in popularity and became a standard of thepenny candy glass jars featured in general stores. They were scooped intosmall paper bags and sold by weight, but it wasn’t until the 1930s when jellybeansbegan to find their way into Easter “nests.”In addition to colored hard-boiled eggs there are a number of otherfoods associated with Easter. Hot cross buns have been a Lenten and GoodFriday tradition for centuries. The hot cross bun is a type of sweet spicedbun made with currants and leavened with yeast. The shape of the crosson the top of the bun is generally made out of icing but it can also bemade simply by cutting the shape into the bun itself. In more ancient times,the cross-symbol on top of hot cross buns was made as a representation ofthe moon for Egyptians and Greeks, and for Romans, as a representation of afull moon and its four quarters. The Christian church reinterpreted the icingcross as a symbol of the crucifixion.In 1361, a monk named Father Thomas Rockcliffe began a tradition ofgiving hot cross buns to the poor of St. Albans on Good Friday. ProtestantEngland saw the buns as a Catholic tradition and attempted to ban theirsale by bakers but the popularity of hot cross buns continued. Elizabeth Ipassed a law permitting bakeries to sell them, but only during festivals suchas Easter, Christmas, and funerals. The first recorded use of the term hotcross bun dates to 1733. In England, street vendors could be heard singing,“Hot cross buns! Hot cross buns! One a penny, two a penny, hot cross buns!,”to advertise their wares. Their songs of several verses remain today as achildren’s nursery rhyme.Other cultures serve sweet cakes as well. Kulich, a Russian Easter bread,is a tall and narrow bread made from baba dough, with the addition ofextra sugar and candied peel, almonds, raisins, and saffron. The top is iced

and usually decorated with Cyrillic letters standing for the phrase “Christis risen.” Traditionally, the kulich is taken to be blessed at midnight mass onHoly Saturday. In some families it replaces bread for the entire Holy Week.It is served with paskha, a sweetened confection based on curd cheese. TheGreeks and Portuguese serve round, flat loaves marked with a cross anddecorated with Easter eggs. In Germany and Austria, an Easter stollen withraisins is baked in twisted or braided strands. Poland’s mazurki are sweetcakes made with honey and filled with nuts and fruit.Roast lamb is a popular Easter Sunday dinner. Corresponding to thePassover lamb and to Christ, the Lamb of God, this dish has become a centralsymbol of Easter.Ham is another popular Easter dinner, especially in the United States.Pork that was not eaten fresh during the early winter was cured for preservation.The curing and aging of pork took a long time, and the first hams weregenerally ready around Easter, making them a natural choice for the celebration.In Hungary, a meatloaf made of chopped pork, ham, eggs, bread, andspices crowns the Easter feast.Other symbols of Easter are the chick, whose hatching from the eggis thought to symbolize new life or rebirth and recalls Christ’s emergencefrom the tomb. Lambs are also symbols of new life and recall Christ as the“Lamb of God.” The rooster represents vigilance and resurrection. It is a reminderof Peter’s threefold denial of Christ, before the cock crowed, on thenight Christ was taken into custody. The Easter lily has become the flowermost closely associated with the holiday. Easter lilies were brought to theUnited States in the 1880s and became popular during the closing yearsof the nineteenth century. Lilies are mentioned in the Bible, and the lily’swhite bloom is thought to symbolize the purity of Jesus as well as new life.Some symbols are the product of legend. Dogwoods are closely associatedwith the crucifixion. The four petals are thought to form a cross and the centerof the dogwood flower resembles a crown of thorns. The blood-red spotson the white blossoms of each petal are said to represent drops of Christ’sblood. Legend says that because the dogwood was used for Christ’s cross, itwas later cursed by God so that it would never be used as a cross again, whichis why dogwoods are small and spindly. The robin is said to have acquired hisred breast while Jesus walked to his crucifixion. The bird saw that a hawthornhad pierced Christ’s forehead and flew down to pluck it out. In so doing adrop of Christ’s blood fell upon the bird’s breast, staining it red forever.New clothing or Easter outfits are a traditional part of the Easter celebration.The custom goes back to early Christianity and what was known aswhite week, a period when newly baptized Christians wore white linen robesfor a whole week to symbolize their rebirth and new life. The new Christianswere paraded around the countryside, led by a crucifix, to show peoplethat they were starting a new life. Those already baptized wore new clothesin remembrance. In more modern times, many people wore new clothes toEaster services. Afterwards, they would walk around town, a custom that ledto the American custom of Easter parades.Easter 239

240 Edible CenterpiecesThe most famous of these is the Easter Parade along Fifth Avenue inNew York City. The tradition dates back to the late 1800s when the socialelite would parade down the avenue after attending the services at one ofthe fashionable Fifth Avenue churches. The less well to do would come tosee what new fashions were being featured. Hats became the focus as thefashion trend of the day was towards increasingly ornate headwear. Many ladiestried to outdo each other with hats trimmed with ribbons, lace, flowers,and feathers. Irving Berlin immortalized the Easter bonnet with his 1948song, Easter Parade. Easter bonnets have their roots in the circle or wreath ofleaves and flowers worn to celebrate the coming of spring. The round shapewas symbolic of the cycle of the seasons and the return of flowersand plants after the bleakness of winter. Today, anyone can join the EasterParade down Fifth Avenue, even those without a special bonnet or outfit.The street is closed to traffic for parade participants and people watchersfrom roughly 10 A.M. until 4 P.M. Pets bedecked with the latest doggy fashionsaccompany many parade-goers. While hats do not hold the same fashionstatus today as they once did, some modern Easter bonnets continue to bevery flamboyant.Further Reading: Bradshaw, Paul F., and Lawrence A. Hoffman, eds. Passover andEaster: Origin and History to Modern Times: Two Liturgical Traditions, vol. 5.Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000; Cohen, Hennig, andTristram Potter Coffin, eds. The Folklore of American Holidays. Detroit, MI: GaleResearch Company, 1987; Lord, Priscilla Sawyer, and Daniel J. Foley. EasterGarland: A Vivid Tapestry of Customs, Traditions, Symbolism, Folklore, History,Legend and Story. Detroit, MI: Omnigraphics, 1999.Dorothy Denneen VoloEdible CenterpiecesAn edible centerpiece can be defined as a concoction that is often placedliterally in the center of a table. It is designed to be appreciated for its size,cost, rarity, the mysterious nature of its ingredients, the amusement arisingfrom the question of its edibility, or its resemblance to something other thanitself. The practice of displaying something that is eye-catching and representativeof the host’s ingenuity and wealth has a long history, and one canstill find examples and remnants of this old concept in various guises acrossthe world today.HISTORICAL EXAMPLESHerodotus, traveling to Persia in the fifth century B.C., marveled at theregion’s extravagant culinary culture and described a meal during whichan entire ox and horse were roasted and served at table. Around the sixthcentury, Persians learned the technique of extracting sugar from cane, and

Edible Centerpieces 241sculpture made of marzipan and sugar (one shaped like a tree is noted by aneleventh-century traveler) came to be appreciated as a sign of wealth andartistic skill at feasts. These two customs, the presentation of a whole animaland the presentation of a sugar concoction made to look like what it is not,roughly mark the main trends involving edible centerpieces for centuriesto come.Guests at medieval and Renaissance feasts were fed different numbersof courses and different types of animals according to their rank. Meat suchas beef, swans, and peacocks were reserved for those higher in the socialhierarchy. A stunning example of a meat dish, persistently popular throughoutthe Middle Ages and the Renaissance, is a whole roasted swan (sometimespeacock or pheasant) sewn back in its own plumage with its headstill attached and propped up to appear alive. The beak (and comb if it isa peacock) would be gilded, and this marvelous specimen was carried in asit spewed fire out of its beak (thanks to a piece of cloth soaked in alcoholhidden inside its mouth).A special emphasis was put on the skills of carving, as an importantcomponent of chivalrous knowledge, and there were various carving manualswritten—John Russell’s Boke of Nurture from the second half of the fifteenthcentury being one of the earliest. In Renaissance Italian courts, menequipped with the skills to execute the increasingly complicated ritual ofcarving were valued, and they enjoyed a position in the court hierarchy asimportant as that of a steward.Feasts were typically a part of a bigger occasion (e.g., weddings or coronations),and various entertainments such as plays, music, and jesting werenot only provided before and after the feast but also included during it.On a smaller scale, such mealtime entertainments were called subtleties orentremets, and they sometimes included the presentation of edible cups andplates made of sugar. Sugar became more and more available by the time ofthe Renaissance, and a castle made of sugar housing birds, rabbits, or evenpigs was an immensely popular form of mealtime entertainment, combiningthe passion for live animals and sugar concoctions. Sugar was also made intosmaller and very delicate items such as napkins and tablecloths, and hostsshowed off their wealth by presenting their guests with rings and rosariesmade of sugar.During the English Renaissance, the term banquet had come to meanboth a grand feast and the final course of such a meal. Grander homes hada separate building called a banqueting house on their estate, to which guestsrepaired after their savory courses to enjoy the last sweet course along withthe view from the banqueting house (it was often built for this purpose on aspot with optimal views of the surroundings). In Tudor and Stuart times, thefinal course included an elaborate sugar sculpture, often a replica of a classicalstatue or of flowers. Consumption of sugar was a sign of wealth, andsuch sculptures were meant to display the host’s wealth. On a smaller scale,the anonymous author of A Closet for Ladies and Gentle Women (1611)provides instructions for making marzipan shaped like birds or bacon (using

242 Edible Centerpiecesred saunders as a dye). Cards and nuts were made out of sugar-plate, andall such concoctions flaunted realistic colors and sometimes even employedgold leaf gilding. The use of molds was common, particularly those madeof stone, wood, pewter (made by specialists), or plaster (made by cooksthemselves). By the Georgian period, the dessert course had come to beconsidered part of the final course; accordingly, eye-catching concoctionsbecame less elaborate. A centerpiece was still popular in the form of a pyramidof dried sweetmeats surrounded by creams and fruit, all of which werepresented among other savory entremets.MODERN APPLICATIONSThe concept of the centerpiece (i.e., a concoction more focused onattracting the eye and inspiring wonder than on the ease of consumption,taste, or even edibility) is often incorporated in the practice of the modernbuffet. Ice carving has a history going back to the early modern period andis still found today at lavish banquets. The skills involved in the productionof an ice sculpture and the difficulty of transportation and securing it inits position often inspire awe and conversation. On a more practical level,a centerpiece in a buffet can be a decoratively cut piece of large fruit, forexample, pineapple or melon, studded with crudité on wooden picks, or alarge assortment of pâtés, sandwiches or crudité arranged in an attractivemanner. Although it might be more appropriate to call it a focal point, alarge portion of an item such as a roast or terrine (gross pièce), cut in an attractiveway to reveal its moist juicy inside and colorful and copious stuffing,can serve as a centerpiece on a miniature scale. Such display adds convivialityto a buffet, which otherwise focuses on practicality and variety.In modern homes, holiday feasts perhaps best retain the vestige of traditionalbanquets. Roasted turkey, as served on Thanksgiving and Christmas,acts as a centerpiece. Guests marvel at its size, ask the host about its weight,and the glistering, imposing presence of a giant bird certainly contributes tothe festivity of a gathering. As in old banquets, carving is an important andexciting event, trusted to the honored person, who distributes the meat toeagerly anticipating diners.One might say that the tradition of the flamboyant pastry centerpiece,or banquet in the limited sense of the word, has been passed down in theform of pastry competitions that showcase the inventiveness of chefs, andas in old days, the chefs’ ability to quickly and creatively adopt cutting-edgetechnology, such as silicon molds. Participants in such competitions have toproduce sweets to fit several categories; such competitions generally includethe creation of a showpiece made of pulled-sugar and another made ofchocolate. Examples from recent years’ competitions include a Pegasus inflight, a keyboard, and a giant globe, all made of edible material and sometimessoaring up to five feet.One can find the sprit of experimentation with chocolate, sugar, andtech nology outside competitions as well. One extreme example is a wedding

Edible Centerpieces 243gown made entirely of sugar, designed and executed by textile artist MicheleHester. After studying the properties of sugar and recent technologiesdesigned to manipulate it, she concocted a veil, a satin skirt covered withintricate brocade, a bodice with Venetian point lace, complete with pearls,all out of sugar. The sugar gown was displayed on a live model at a KansasCity art gallery in 2004. One might consider this a case in which a centerpieceoriginally designed to amuse diners walks out of the setting and claimsthe status of an art piece, which many of those centerpieces from previouscenturies were.Cakes at weddings and birthday parties also often flaunt their size,beauty and elaborateness of ornamentation (edible flowers of different colors,sizes, and shapes are often seen and yet never cease to inspire marvel).Cakes are also made to resemble something else than a cake (Louis Vuittonsuitcases, three-dimensional cartoon characters, and even stiletto shoes).Caterers and bakers who specialize in baking cakes and pastry tailored tothe likings of clients constitute a thriving business today, and bakeries oftendisplay their most elaborate concoctions in their windows.Instances of roasted meat being used as a centerpiece can be found invarious Middle Eastern traditions, lamb usually being the meat of choice.Ouzi from Lebanon is perhaps the best-known example. A big piece of lamb(shoulder, leg, or sometimes the entire animal) is roasted with a mixture offragrant spices such as cinnamon, cumin, cardamom, or pepper. A whole lambis traditionally stuffed with dates, raisins, and nuts. Roasting itself has been acooperative, communal event, done in a family courtyard or public pit.The Chinese are renowned for their elaborate and abundant banquets,and the perfectly browned, moist duck in the middle of the table might becalled a form of centerpiece. The Chinese also boast a long tradition of carvingvegetables and fruit into mini sculptures of pagodas, birds, and flowers,among other items. While such creations are often part of a dish, as opposedto standing on their right, they still inspire awe and help draw attention tothe displays of food.In a Japanese feast, food is often served in individual lacquer traysor boxes, but bigger items such as whole grilled fish are presented in themiddle of the table, in what one might call a centerpiece. While a fish ismuch smaller than a whole roasted lamb or duck, it is relatively larger thanthe other items (the lacquer trays and boxes) and its sole presence in themiddle of the table as a shared piece still commands attention and adds tothe sense of festivity at a shared event among families and friends.Further Reading: Albala, Ken. The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of LateRenaissance Europe. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007; Fletcher, Nichola.Charlemagne’s Table Cloth: A Piquant History of Feasting. New York: St. Martin’sPress, 2004; Freeman, Sarah. Muttons and Oysters: The Victorians and TheirFood. London: Victor Gollancz, 1989; Wilson, C. Anne, ed. “Banquetting Stuffe”:the Fare and Social Background of the Tudor and Stuart Banquet. Edinburgh:Edinburgh University Press, 1989.Chika M. Jenkins

244 EgyptEgyptThe Nile valley always yielded enough to feed the country, even when faminewas present in other nearby parts of the world. The ancient Egyptians’basic food and drink, bread and beer, were made from the main crops theygrew, wheat and barley; grapes were the other major crop. It has been saidthat when Rameses went visiting other cities, he took along fifteen hundredsealed jars of wine. There were many types of bread, including pastriesand cakes. Since there was no sugar, honey was used as a sweetenerby the rich and poor people used dates and fruit juices. Egyptians likedstrong-tasting vegetables such as garlic and onions. They thought these weregood for their health. They also ate peas and beans, lettuce, cucumbers, andleeks. Vegetables were often served with oil and vinegar dressing. Figs, dates,pomegranates, and grapes were the only fruits that could be grown in thehot climate. The rich could afford to make wine from their grapes. Ordinarypeople ate fish and poultry. On special occasions they ate sheep, goat, or pig;but there was little grazing land available so meat was expensive and mostpeople ate it only on festive occasions. Egyptians stored their food in jarsand granaries. Fish and meat had to be prepared for storage. One methodwas salting. Another was to hang fish in the sun, which baked them dry.In ordinary families the cooking was done by the housewife, but largerhouseholds employed servants to work in the kitchen and a chef—usually aman—to do the cooking. The Egyptians had ovens and knew how to boil, roast,and fry food. There were few kitchen tools: pestles, mortars, and sieves.The Egyptians ate singly or in pairs at small tables with the children sittingon cushions on the floor. Breakfast was not a family meal, but a breakingof the night’s fast in solitude. However, breakfast was not always a mealeaten alone; there are wall pictures in tombs that show people eating theirbreakfast while having a servant dress their hair.The two main meals were taken early in the day, one at around noonand the other at 4 P.M., after which people did more work, or were entertainedby dancers and singers if they were wealthy. While the Egyptians possessedspoons they ate mainly with their fingers, washing them with waterafter the meal.Wealthy Egyptians did not lack time or money, and they knew how touse these in the most pleasant ways possible. Banquets were given often andwere very lavish. First the kitchen staff was given a menu of what would behad that night. Ox were slaughtered, sauces made, vegetables cleaned andmade ready to cook, ducks, geese, and other wild fowl plucked and placedon grills. Cups made of gold, silver, alabaster, and painted pottery weretaken from cupboards and cleaned. Fruit was piled high in reed baskets,which were covered to keep dust and insects out. Water was put to cool injars, cones of oil incense were prepared for the heads of the guests, and thehouse was scrubbed and cleaned from top to bottom. Wine was a very importantpart of the ancient Egyptian banquet or meal. Temperance was nota virtue in Egypt. Wines were stored in earthen jars, which were bedded on

Egypt 245large pallets and each jar was carefully labeled by vintage. Still consumptionoutran supply, and huge quantities of potent beer where needed to slake thenational thirst (Sheraton, Buehr, and McKenna 34). Egyptians loved havinga party anytime; preparations for one could take place several times duringthe week. If there were important guests to be feted, the host would eitherstand at the entrance to the garden waiting to escort them in or his childrenwould do this job while he sat in a chair in the dining room. Then ritualwords of greeting would be murmured, such as “welcome in the name ofHorus” or “come feast on bread and beer in my house.”While the host sat on his chair, usually made of inlaid wood and semipreciousstones, the rest of the guests sat on small stools or cross-legged onsmall pillows on the floor.Men and women usually sat opposite each other on separate sides of theroom, but sometimes at banquets they mixed. Servants of wealthy guestsaccompanied their masters to banquets. At the banquet, they administeredto their lord and lady, offering them flower garlands and perfumed conesto wear on their heads. The Egyptians were very fastidious and the cones ofperfumed pomade masked offensive smells such as roasted or burnt meat,and body odors. Even the servants were given these cones to wear, whilethey were working.All kinds of delicious food was served: including roasted ox, grilledduck, dried bean dishes (especially lentils), fish with a spicy sauce, bread,beer, and sometimes as many as 30 different sweet cakes.Music was an important part of a banquet. Sistrums (percussion instrumentswith small metal disks attached that could be shaken to make music),An ancient Egyptian depiction of afood offering. © Hartemink | Dreamstime.com.

246 EgyptGuests at a banquet are depicted in these two registers of a wall painting from the Tomb of Nebamun, WestThebes, eighteenth dynasty. Werner Forman/Art Resource, NY.harps, castanets, and lutes were the major music making instruments. Judgingfrom what is depicted on tomb paintings, these instruments were playedusually by beautiful young girls in sheer dresses. People danced to the music.Toward the end of a meal, a small copy of a coffin was carried aroundthe room and shown to the guests as a reminder of their mortality. Theywere told, “Look on this and then drink and take your pleasure, for whenyou are dead thus you will be.”The rites surrounding death were as important to the Egyptians as werethose surrounding life. The deceased was provided with every necessity andall his favorite foods, dishes, and utensils. The funeral was itself a source ofcelebration and mourning at the same time. Mourners tore their clothes,ripped their hair, and covered themselves with dirt and ashes. The processioncarrying the mummified body to the tomb included all the servantscarrying the possessions (Robins 1996, chapter 9) and hired mourners, whowere paid to enlarge the entourage and add to the commotion.When Cleopatra was to meet Marc Anthony, she sailed down the Niledressed as Aphrodite, the goddess of love, in a large boat with silver oars andpurple sails. Egyptian food at this time had many subtle influences from thecuisines of Greece and Rome. Dinner was served on the boat in elaboratesurroundings. Gold and silver dishes had replaced the more common clayplates of the earlier dynasties. Servant girls danced and sang throughoutthe dinner, which included as many as one hundred dishes. Some of the

Etiquette Books 247food served included mussels, oysters, venison, lobsters, and capons cookedin spicy sauces, next came piglets stuffed with quails, whole roasted peacocksand woodcocks, and a never-ending procession of breads, cakes, salads,fruits, and cheeses. Wine and beer were served, although by the time ofCleopatra’s rule wine had become the major beverage of the upper classes,for the Egyptians had perfected the art of winemaking. Bread had also becomemore refined, as they discovered they could make it lighter with theaddition of yeast. This discovery came accidentally when they learned theyeast used in making beer could also be used for raising dough. Cakeswere also more elaborate than in earlier dynasties, and they copied the moresophisticated techniques of the Greeks.Further Reading: Berriedale-Johnson, Michelle: The British Museum Cookbook.London: The British Museum, Company, 1998; Bober, Phyllis. Art Culture andCuisine. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999; Darby, William,Paul Ghaliounghi, and Louis Grivetti. Food: The Gift of Osiris. 2 vols. Londonand New York: Academic Press, 1977; Faulkner, R. O. Ancient Egyptian Book ofthe Dead. London: British Museum Press, 1985; Montet, Pierre. Life in Egypt inthe Days of Ramesses the Great. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press1981; Robins, Gay. Women in Ancient Egypt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 1996; Sheraton, Mimi, Wendy Buehr, and Tatiana McKenna. The HorizonCookbook, Volume I and II. New York: Doubleday, 1968; Tannahill, Reay. Foodin History. London: Methuen, 1973 [Paladin paperback 1975]; Toussaint-Samat,Maguelonne. A History of Food. Translated by Anthea Bell. Oxford, UnitedKingdom: Blackwell Publishers, 1992; Van Vliet, Eugenia. Dinners with FamousWomen from Cleopatra to Indira Gandhi. New York: IUniverse, 2000.Eugenia Van VlietEtiquette BooksRules of etiquette are codes of behavior that govern society. Every culturehas accepted manners, which dictate how one should act in a given situation.The modern notion of etiquette originated in the court of Louis XIV.For example, small signs—known as etiquettes—were posted around Versaillestelling visitors to “keep of the grass.” While walking through the gardens,visitors were expected to “keep within the etiquettes.” Over time, thephrase evolved to mean follow the rules in general.Today, many disregard the term thinking that etiquette refers only tothe arcane edicts guiding the activities of the elite, such as which fork touse first at a formal party. Etiquette, however, encompasses much morethan that. It provides a set of guidelines about how to handle situations thatcome up in everyday life. It reminds us that we are all members of a groupand encourages people to think about how their actions affect others.Despite the fact that rules of etiquette are generally unwritten—andoften unspoken—authors throughout history have attempted to codify themin writing. The first known etiquette book was written by the Egyptian

248 Etiquette Booksphilosopher, Ptah-hotep, in 2400 B.C. The first American manner guide iscredited to George Washington. At the age of 14 Washington transcribedthe Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour In Company and Conversation.Though Washington’s publication is over two hundred years old, theinstructions are still surprisingly applicable to today’s world. His book coversbasic behaviors, as in rule number five, which directs readers that “ifyou cough, sneeze, sigh, or yawn, do it not loud but privately; and speaknot in your yawning, but put your handkerchief or hand before your faceand turn aside.” Ethical tips are also dispensed, such as the one describedin rule number 22: “Show not yourself glad at the misfortune of anotherthough he were your enemy.”In 1922 Emily Post wrote Etiquette: In Society, In Business, In Politics,and At Home. This best-selling book changed the way Americans perceiveetiquette and established the genre of books that are still published today.With advice on a broad range of topics, Etiquette has been updated and revised17 times. The current edition has been completely rewritten by Post’sgreat-granddaughter-in-law, Peggy.Post, a debutante and socialite, was the only daughter of architect BrucePrice. She was educated at home, attended finishing school in New York,married a well-to-do banker, and had two sons. After her marriage endedin divorce, she turned to writing to support herself. She penned newspaperand magazine articles as well as a few travel books and novels before writingher famous etiquette book.The authority on decorum in the United States, Post also wrote numerousnewspaper columns, hosted a television show, and spoke often on theradio. In 1946 she founded the Emily Post Institute, which still strives toaddress the societal concerns of the twenty-first century. Post died at the ageof 86, and her relatives have continued to run the institute.Post’s success set the foundation for a whole new category of books.Notable authors writing on the subject after the publication of Etiquette includeAmy Vanderbilt, Letitia Baldridge, and Judith “Miss Manners” Martin.While these women each have their own unique style, they argue for thesame essential principle: etiquette is important because it improves communicationand helps people feel comfortable in social settings.After five years of extensive research, Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book ofEtiquette ( later re-titled Amy Vanderbilt’s Etiquette), was published in 1952.Considered a standard in the field of etiquette writing, the book is still inprint. Vanderbilt, a distant relative of Cornelius Vanderbilt, was educatedin New York and Switzerland before attending New York University. Sheworked in advertising and public relations, as a newspaper journalist, andfor several government agencies. The book’s success led to her hosting atelevision show in the late fifties and radio program in the early sixties. Shedied at the age of 66 after falling from a window. It is not known whethershe committed suicide or became dizzy and fell.Letitia Baldridge’s first project on the topic of manners was to completelyrevise and update Amy Vanderbilt’s book. Since then she has written

Etiquette Books 249extensively on the subject and in 2003 published Letitia Baldrige’s Guide toNew Manners for New Times. Born in 1926 and educated at Vassar (whereshe was kicked out of the English department), Baldrige served as the WhiteHouse social secretary to Jacqueline Kennedy. She worked in public relationsin the private sector and was the first woman executive at Tiffany & Co. Thefirst etiquette writer to discuss proper behavior in the workplace, she continuesto write and lecture, and commonly makes television appearances.Taking a less formal approach to the subject, columnist Judith Martin hasdispensed tongue-in-cheek advice to readers under the pen name “Miss Manners”since 1978. Born in 1938, she is a graduate of Wellesley College. Shecovered social events at the White House and at embassies and wrote critiquesof films and plays before beginning her manners column. Distributedthree times a week to over 200 newspapers, her column answers questionssent in by readers. She is praised for providing complex analysis and perspectivein her writing, which is filled with wit and humor. She has also authored11 books on the subject, including the freshly updated Miss Manners’ Guideto Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, which was published in 2005.Since the rules of proper behavior are constantly evolving, books onthe subject continue to be published, and bookstores have entire sectionsdevoted to the topic. In addition to the many works in print by Post, Vanderbilt,Baldridge, and Martin, there are many new authors who have writtenabout etiquette. Today’s books usually include discussions of topics Postcould never have dreamed of, including information about how to composeand send proper e-mail communications, how to handle family gatheringswhen the family is made up of step- and half-relatives, and how to behavein a faster, less formal world.Further Reading: Ingram, Leah. The Everything Etiquette Book: A Modern-DayGuide to Good Manners. Avon, MA: Adams Media, 1997; Newton, Deborah.“The History of Etiquette: A Brief History on Etiquette and a Look at WhoToday’s Mavens of Manners Are.” Pagewise. 2002. http://www.essortment.com/all/historyofetiq_rizc.htm; Post, Emily. “Etiquette.” New York: FacsimileEdition; Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, 2006? [Originally published by Funk& Wagnalls Company, 1922]; Washington, George. Rules of Civility & DecentBehaviour in Company and Conversation: A Book of Etiquette. Williamsburg, VA:Beaver Press. 1971. http://www.history.org /Almanack / life/manners/rules2.cfm.Erin G. Marrazzo

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FFast Food, History ofMany American towns have burger and chicken palaces, pizza and sandwichshops, hot dog and taco stands, and fast-food eateries of many descriptions.It can be said that today’s modern American family eats fastfood because it is cheap, convenient, and easy to come by. But the prominenceof these so-called convenience foods in the American diet is nojoking matter.It is commonly thought that modern convenience foods are artificial—lacking somehow in quality and proper nutrition. Moreover, they arethought to undermine traditional family values and speed the decline offamily solidarity. Most analysts argue that fast foods reflect the frenzy andlack of personal interaction characteristic of a modern urban industrial society.However, a deeper look at modern foodways begs the question ofwhether these fast foods are not really modernized versions of older andmore traditional foods of convenience. Humans in the so-called state of natureate easy to come by berries, and they probably consumed most of themon the spot. While there were no drive-thrus, early humans, like Americanstoday, ate what was convenient.

252 Fast Food, History ofTHE ANCIENT FAST-FOOD RESTAURANTFrom the beginning of the first century A.D., there is more compellingevidence that the Romans used both fast foods and convenience restaurantsnot unlike those we see today. According to archaeologists excavating inPompeii, a city frozen in time after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D.,the majority of ancient Pompeians consumed many convenience foods andoften ate them on-the-run. Researchers initially noticed an unusual lackof tableware, formal dining areas, and kitchen facilities within Pompeianhomes—an odd circumstance when the amazing state of preservation inother areas of Pompeian life is taken into account. Instead they found isolatedplates here and there, such as in sleeping quarters, along with manysmall brazier-type ovens (thermospodium). Similar to the microwave ovens,Styrofoam cups and plates, and mini-coffee makers provided in many modernhotel rooms for the convenience of the guests, the thermospodium suggestsconvenience-style dining rather than any extensive regimen of foodpreparation.On the other hand, numerous convenience-food restaurants (so-calledthermopolia, cauporioe, or tavernae) have been found in Pompeii and otherparts of Ancient Rome. It is clear that establishments like these were patronizedby the general population of the city. These places can be likened tosuch present-day favorites as Burger King, Nathan’s Famous, or Pizza Hut.Generally open to the street, each had a large counter with heated receptaclesset in the middle from which food or drink would have been servedmuch like a modern steam table in the school cafeteria. The thermopolium(singular of thermopolia) was a sort of service counter that provided hotfood and beverages for snacking on the run or for take-out meals to eat athome. The thermopolium was the most common of the three conveniencefood outlets in Pompeii and the closest in character to a modern fast-foodrestaurant. The cauporioe, a small sit-down eatery, and the taverna, analogousto a bar, were more like cafés with rooms at the back and benches orcouches for serious dining at table.Pompeii’s citizens, like most Romans, ate three meals a day: breakfast( jentaculum), lunch ( prandium), and an evening meal (cena). Pompeianswere seemingly fond of eating on the run and rarely ate lunch at home. Thebusy Pompeians often consumed their prandium on-site while standing in thethermopolium or outside in the street. Modern urban dwellers would identifywith this concept as they hurry off to Sabrett hot dog carts, McDonald’sdrive-thru windows, and Starbuck’s coffee houses during their all-too-shortlunch breaks.Hundreds of convenience food establishments have been identified inthe ruins of Pompeii, many clustered around bathhouses, markets, and waterfrontareas. More than 200 thermopolia were located in the ash-inundatedarea of Pompeii alone. If the evidence at Pompeii can be taken as demonstrativeof ancient life styles on the Italian peninsula or in the Mediterraneanin general, it can be said that the population of the Roman Empire was no

Fast Food, History of 253more fond of sit-down family diningor hours of food preparationthan many modern Americans.Small establishments mighthave only one warming “hole” ina short marble or stone counterwhile other establishments mighthave half a dozen. The sunken clayjars on one arm of the counterin a typical thermopolium wereheated by charcoal and mighthave contained spiced wines, meatstews, cooked lentils, a groundwheat porridge, or a less expensivehot barley mash. On the otherpart of the counter were displayedbreads, soft and hard cheeses,dates, figs, olives, and other localsnacks. Salt was rare and literallyworth its weight in gold (used topay legionaries, from which comesthe word salary). Yet seasoningsmight include opium poppy, dill,coriander, chervil, pepper, mint,cumin, and a naturally salty liquidcalled garum.Garum may have been ascommon in ancient Italy as moderncondiments are at the selfservicecounter. Romans seeminglydumped garum, an oily fish sauce,on nearly everything. It was madeby soaking sun-fermented anchovies,alice, acciuga, mackerel, orother fish ( heads, tails, guts, andall) in concentrated sea water.Although the ancients were unawareof it, exposure to the sunduring the process increased thevitamin D content. Possibly similarto a thin anchovy paste (eventhe experts are unsure of its exactrecipe), garum was particularlypopular, much like soy, taco, orsteak sauces today, and it was usedin the same manner. It seeminglyHow Fast Food Has ChangedEntertainingThe availability of large amounts of food—fast and inexpensive—hasled to casual, spontaneous entertaining. Americansno longer have to invest a large amount of time, money, andplanning in order to invite and feed any number of guests.Burgers and fries: Hamburgers, French fries, and chickentenders or nuggets are foods that are familiar and well likedby young children. Parents planning to entertain young peopleoften have a choice of picking up the food or entertaining at thefast food restaurant itself. Carl’s Jr., Burger King, and McDonald’sare examples of burger joints that offer to cater parties—including entertainment as well as food and beverages. Hosts ofchildren’s parties can be assured that the guests will be fed andentertained, with no clean up after the guests leave.Pizza: Pizza franchises offer all the fare an American teenagerdesires, often delivering to the door hot pizza with anendless combination of toppings, often accompanied by garlicbread, soda, salad, mozzarella sticks, or chicken wings.Pizza franchises or independently owned restaurants can adequatelycater anything from birthday parties to impromptugatherings for watching movies or sports; or playing cards orboard games.Chicken: Chicken franchises offer packages that are designedto feed large quantities of people. So-called family mealscontain side dishes that complete the meal inexpensively.Sandwiches: Submarine sandwiches (also called wedges,hoagies, grinders, or heroes in different parts of the country)have become popular fare for football parties, backyard gatherings,and beach parties. Franchises offer a choice of sandwichplatters or large six-foot sandwiches to feed a crowd.Peggyann Rogers DíazCustomers line up outside the firstMcDonald’s hamburger stand,which was opened in 1948 bybrothers Dick and Maurice Mc-Donald in San Bernadino, California.Six years later, a Chicagomilkshake mixer salesman namedRay Kroc acquired franchise rights.The world’s No. 1 fast-food chain,McDonald’s has 24,500 restaurantsin 115 countries, and 40 millioncustomers a day generating$12.4 billion revenue for 1998.Foreign operations account fornearly 60% of the company’s salesand profits. AP/Wide World Photo.

254 Fast Food, History ofadded depth to the flavor of food in much the same way that MSG (monosodiumglutimate), a modern chemical additive and flavor enhancer, is saidto do. Large clay jars, called amphorae, filled with the fishy stuff have beenfound in ship wrecks scattered across the Mediterranean, suggesting garum’suse as a trade item. Some of these wrecks are reliably dated many hundredsof years apart, attesting to the continued popularity of the sauce. Althoughsimple to make, garum was probably produced commercially, and it camein many types: garum sociorum was the highest quality type; alec was thecheapest kind; oenogarum was mixed with wine; hydrogarum with water;oleogarum with olive oil; and oxygarum with vinegar ( Vehling 286 ).Much of our knowledge of Roman cookery derives from the great cookerybook of Marcus Gavius Apicius (first century B.C.) called De Re Coquinaria.Written some time near the time of Julius Caesar (d. 44 B.C.), it is the oldestknown surviving cookbook—as old as Imperial Rome itself. Api cius was a culinaryexpert, and his writings provide modern researchers with informationon Roman cuisine. One of the dishes he describes includes putting a variety ofingredients on a flat round base of bread, similar to a present-day pizza.PIZZAPizza is America’s number one snack food, having eclipsed the hot dogas front-runner at the end of the twentieth century. While pizza as we knowit today was a long way off for the Romans, fresh baked bread smeared witholive paste seems to have been a great fast-food favorite at thermopolia. Evidencehas been found of flat wheat-spelt cakes that were baked and widelyeaten not only in Pompeii but also in nearby Neopolis, the Greek colonythat would ultimately become Naples. Also found in Pompeii were shops,complete with marble slabs, flour mills, ovens, and other tools of the trade,which closely resemble those in a conventional pizzeria.Pizza could have been invented by the Phoenicians of Carthage, theGreeks of Sicily, the Italians, or anyone who learned the secret of mixing flourwith water and heating it on a hot stone. In one of its many forms, pizza hasbeen a basic part of the human diet since the development of grain growingand harvesting. This earliest form of pizza was a crude bread that was bakedbeneath the coals of the fire. After cooking, it was seasoned with a variety ofdifferent toppings and used instead of plates and utensils to sop up broth orgravies. It is said that the idea of using bread as a plate (a trencher) came fromthe Greeks who ate flat round bread (plankuntos) baked with an assortmentof toppings. It was eaten by the working man and his family because it was athrifty and convenient food.Pizza has a compelling chronology. At the height of the Persian Empire,it is said that the soldiers of Darius the Great (fifth century B.C.), accustomedto lengthy marches, baked a kind of flat bread upon their shields and thencovered it with cheese and dates. Marcus Porcius Cato (second century B.C.),also known as Cato the Elder, wrote the first history of Rome, and he notedthe common use of flat rounds of dough baked on stones and dressed with

Fast Food, History of 255olive oil, herbs, and honey. The Aeneid written by Virgil (first century B.C.),describes the legendary origin of these cakes or circles of bread: “Beneatha shady tree, the hero [Aeneas, leader of the Dardanians, allies of defeatedTroy and ancestors of the Romans] spread his table on the turf, with cakes ofbread; And, with his chiefs, on forest fruits he fed. . . . Their homely fare dispatched,the hungry band invaded their trenchers next, and soon devouredto mend the scanty meal, their cakes of flour . . . And Aeneas said. . . See, wedevour the plates on which we fed.”Tomatoes and tomato-based sauces were unknown to the Romans andwould not be imported into Europe until the sixteenth century. For manydecades thereafter tomatoes were shunned as poisonous by the English (asindeed the plant is, while the fruit is not). Red-sauce pizza, as we know it,is generally considered to be a product of the seaport city of Naples (thenan individual kingdom among the many Italian city-states). Supposedly thepoor people of Naples had only flour, olive oil, lard, cheese, and herbs withwhich to feed their families. They added the New World tomatoes to theiryeast dough circles to create the first simple modern pizza.In the fifteenth century, Tavernia Cerrigloi in Naples was a hangout forsoldiers, and it is said that they flocked there to feast on the pizza specialtyof the house, making it the traditional first commercial home of Italian-stylepizza. Although other towns made pizza, all of Italy proclaimed the Neapolitanpies to be the best. Queen Maria Lorena (1752–1814), wife of theKing of Naples, Ferdinand IV (1751–1821), had a special oven built in thesummer palace of Capodimonte so that her chef could serve pizzas to herselfand to her guests. After the unification of Italy (1860), King UmbertoI and his wife, Queen Margherita di Savoia, while on holiday in Naplesin 1889, called to their residence the most popular of the pizzaioli ( pizzachefs), Raffaele Esposito, to taste his specialties. He prepared three kinds ofpizza for the royal couple: one with bacon, cheese, and basil; one with garlic,oil, and tomatoes; and another with mozzarella cheese, basil, and tomatoes(arranged in the colors of the Italian flag). The queen liked the last kind ofpizza so much that Esposito named it the “Pizza Margherita” in her honor,and so the type has remained named.Modern American pizza comes in flat-crust New York style, deep-dishChicago style, and all other styles found elsewhere. Gennaro Lombardi, anItalian immigrant, claimed to have opened the first U.S. pizzeria in 1905 inNew York City. This was a walk-up counter on Spring Street. It wasn’t untilthe early 1930s that he added tables and chairs. Lombardi’s is now knownas America’s “Patria della Pizza,” or “home of the pizza.” Chicago-style deepdishpizza (with a flaky crust that rises an inch or more above the plate andsurrounds deep piles of toppings) was created by Ike Sewell in 1943 at hisbar and grill on the Chicago Loop. His Pizzeria Uno has since become afranchise chain.It wasn’t until the 1950s that Americans really started noticing pizza.Celebrities of Italian origin, such as Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, JimmyDurante, and baseball star Joe DiMaggio all devoured pizzas. Martin even

256 Fast Food, History ofincluded a reference to it in his popular love song, “That’s Amore!” Todaythe number of small pizzerias that compete for the American fast-food dollaris astounding, and in many small college towns even bad pizza can take afoothold among the less-than-discriminating student body. Pizza is also thepremiere convenience item for home delivery with franchise establishmentslike Dominos, Pizza Time, and Pizza Hut holding the lion’s share of the deliverybusiness against armies of local pizza delivery outfits.Frozen pizzas were introduced to local grocery stores in 1957. The firstwas marketed by the Celentano Brothers. Pizza soon became the most popularof all frozen foods. Of all the cheese consumed in the United States,mozzarella makes up 83 percent, used mostly on pizza. Moreover, in 1970less than 1.2 pounds of mozzarella cheese were used annually per person inthe United States. Today more than 10 pounds are consumed per person—aneight-fold annual increase.HOT DOGSThere is evidence that the Pompeians also ate cooked sausage on thego and may have sliced it as a bread topping or rolled it in a baked breadcircle much like a thick tortilla. Sausage is one of the oldest forms of processedfood, having been mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey in the ninth centuryB.C. Herein even Homer recognized the expediency of food that canbe prepared quickly: “As when a man besides a great fire has filled a sausagewith fat and blood and turns it this way and that and is very eager to getit quickly roasted.” The Emperor Nero’s (first century A.D.) cook, Gaius, isoften credited with popularizing the first pre-cooked sausage—a predecessorof America’s second favorite fast food, the frankfurter or hot dog. Hestuffed the long washed intestines of a pig with ground venison and groundbeef mixed with ground wheat (filler) and spices, and boiled it altogetherin the casing.Hot dogs range in size from big foot-long stadium frankfurters to tinycocktail-sized Vienna sausages. Also called franks, wieners, and red hots, today’sfast food version of Gaius’s cooked sausage consists of a combinationof beef and pork, or all-beef cuts, which are cured, smoked, and cookedtogether with a filler and spices in a casing. Seasonings—many consideredsecret recipes—may include coriander, garlic, ground mustard, nutmeg, salt,sugar, and white pepper. Modern processors have generally abandoned thecasings made of animal intestine for synthetic ones made of thin edible plastic,and high-quality all-beef, all-natural franks have been made popular bycompanies such as Hebrew National ® that feature fully kosher products.Frankfurters, like Gaius’s sausages, are fully cooked, but they are usuallyserved hot on a soft white-bread bun. A survey of Americans showedthat 60 percent preferred to have their franks grilled while only 20 percentpreferred boiling. Rotary grills, looking like a series of parallel pipes supportingthe slowly turning grilled franks among them, can fascinate both littlechildren and their parents, but their purpose is to keep the franks hot.

Fast Food, History of 257There is a great deal of disagreement concerning the historical developmentof the modern hot dog. The town of Frankfurt, Germany, claimsthat the hot dog was created there in 1487 and celebrated the hot dog’s500th anniversary in 1987. Other Germans credit the making of the modernhot dog to Johann Georg Hehner, a butcher in Coburg, who traveledto Frankfurt to promote his product in the 1600s. In 1852, the butcher’sguild in Frankfurt introduced a spiced and smoked sausage that waspacked in a thin casing, and they specifically called it a frankfurter aftertheir hometown. The sausage had a slightly curved shape similar to thepopular dachshund, which may have helped to generate the term hot dog.Vienna, Austria, points to the name wiener as evidence of the hot dog’s trueheritage.It seems clear that hot dogs came to America with the flood of Germanimmigrants who sold them, along with rolls and sauerkraut, from pushcartsin New York City’s Bowery during the 1860s. Charles Feltman, a Germanbutcher, opened up the first Coney Island hot dog stand in 1867 in Brooklyn.He sold almost 4,000 sausages and rolls during his first year in businessand is credited with the idea of the grilled bun. Feltman built a mini-empireat Coney Island with a hotel, beer gardens, restaurants, food stands, andvarious rides to amuse his customers. At his death in 1910, he left a businessworth over one million dollars. St. Louis, Missouri, credits a German streetUndated photo of people enjoying hot dogs at the Greenwich Village Fair in New York City. Library ofCongress.

258 Fast Food, History ofpeddler, Antoine Feuchtwanger, with introducing hot sausages served in abun to the Midwest in 1889.Nonetheless, it is certain that the hot dog gained its national popularityat the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Thousands of visitors to the fair consumedsausages sold there by vendors. In the same year, the sausages became standardfare at many baseball parks. Some historians claim that a bar owner,Chris Von der Ahe, also owner of the St. Louis Browns baseball team, introducedhis “red hot” sausages at Sportsman’s Park to complement his alreadypopular beer. Today Americans eat more than 24 million hot dogs in majorleague ballparks every year—enough to stretch coast-to-coast from Dodgers’Stadium in Los Angeles (where in 2005 the largest number were sold) toYankee Stadium in New York (which ranked fourth).By the end of the decade of the nineteenth century, hot dog vendorswere selling their wares from carts on many street corners. Students boughtup hot dogs at a fabulous pace outside the dorms at several major Easternuniversities including Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Cornell. They liked thisform of fast food because it was easy to eat, convenient, and inexpensive.A perusal of university magazines from the period suggests that the termhot dog was well known before 1900.A former employee of Feltman at Coney Island, Nathan Handwerker,started Nathan’s Famous, which now calls itself the world’s largest purveyorof hot dogs both at stands and at supermarkets. Handwerker opened hisstand in Coney Island in 1916 near the corner of Surf and Stillwell Avenuesand simply called it Nathan’s. He sold his hot dogs for five cents each, andit quickly became a favorite fast-food stop for beach-goers and the staff atnearby Coney Island Hospital. The annual “Nathan’s Famous Fourth ofJuly Hot Dog Eating Contest” has been held at the original Coney Islandhot dog stand every Independence Day since 1916 without interruption.In 1936, the Oscar Mayer meat company rolled out the first Wienermobile, essentially a truck sporting a sculpture of a giant hot dog, as anadvertising ploy to increase its supermarket sales. The company’s “I wishI were an Oscar Meyer Wiener” jingle is known to millions of Americanchildren and has been translated into countless languages. Hot dog in Spanishis perrito caliente; in French—chien chaud; and in German—heisse Wurst.A first-century Latin-speaking Pompeian might ask for a pastillum botellofartum.The United States Chamber of Commerce officially designated July asNational Hot Dog Month in 1957, and the tradition has been going strongever since. July 20th is National Hot Dog Day, and more than 150 millionfranks are eaten on that day alone. It is estimated that Americans consume20 billion hot dogs a year with retail-sales figures from supermarkets near9 billion individual franks. This works out to between 60 and 70 hot dogs perperson every year. Americans typically consume 7 billion hot dogs betweenMemorial Day and Labor Day. While hot dogs are served in 95 percent ofhomes in the United States, over 25 percent of the total are consumed elsewhere:16 percent from street vendors and 9 percent at ballparks. New York

Fast Food, History of 259City, with its multitude of Sabrett hot dog carts, which appear on almostevery corner and in every public park, is America’s leading hot dog–salescity, followed by Los Angeles and the Baltimore–Washington D.C. area.Mustard remains the premiere hot dog condiment, used regularly by88 percent of all eaters, and sauerkraut (called Liberty cabbage during thetwo wars with Germany) is the most common vegetable topping. It is saidin some regions of the country that no self-respecting person over the ageof 12 uses ketchup on a hot dog. Nonetheless, so-called Texas Wieners (chilidogs) are hot dogs served with brown mustard, hot and spicy tomato chili,and diced raw onions. Ironically, chili dogs are more popular in New Jerseythan in Texas along with an Italian Dog served with fried onions and greenpeppers. The Fenway Frank is steamed, as opposed to grilled or boiled, andis a great favorite of Boston Red Sox fans. It is served with ketchup, mustard,pickle relish, piccalilli (a mustard-based vegetable relish), and choppedonions.As a convenience food, the hot dog ranked number one in the UnitedStates for almost a century ( being displaced by pizza in the 1990s); andregardless of its European roots or the toppings placed upon it, the hotdog has long been the quintessential symbol of American fast food. In the1960s under competitive pressure from Japanese auto manufacturers, GeneralMotors (then America’s largest corporation) included the hot dog in its“buy American-made” advertising slogan: “Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie,and Chevrolet!”BURGERSVying for the top spot as America’s favorite fast food behind pizza and hotdogs is the third-place hamburger. Hamburgers are all American, and there isno doubt about their lineage. The very first hamburger produced anywherein the world was introduced in New Haven, Connecticut, by Louis Lassenat a small lunch wagon called Louis Lunch in 1895. Larsen had been sellingsteak sandwiches on sliced white bread to workers from nearby factories,but he was a very parsimonious business owner. At the end of the day, hecollected all the unsold steaks and the scraps from trimming them, andground them into patties to be cooked on the grill. Today Louis Lunch is anational heritage site owned and operated by third and fourth generationLassens. Only sliced white bread, cheese, tomato, and onions are allowedon the hamburgers, which (contrary to the name) contain no ham or porkproducts.White Castle is one of the oldest hamburger chains in the UnitedStates, founded in 1921 by Walter Anderson and Billy Ingram in Wichita,Kansas. Unlike the major franchise hamburger outfits, White Castle remainsa privately owned company. Their tiny square burgers smothered in steamgrilledonions and individually packaged in a white and blue box (modeledon Chicago’s White Tower) are still fondly known as belly bombs by theirfans, who might eat a half dozen of the unique burgers in a single meal.

260 Fast Food, History ofWhite Castle’s “Selling ‘Em by the Sack” slogan had much to do with developingthe popularity of the company’s take-out restaurants, and the tinyburgers helped to legitimatize the hamburger as a fast food. Since the foodchain concept was new in the 1920s and 1930s, there was no infrastructureto support the company’s outlets. White Castle created its own centralizedbakeries, paper products division, and warehouses. It even created a subsidiarythat manufactured its own prefabricated White Castle super-structuresfor assembling outlets on site. In 1949, frozen patties ( provided by Swift andCompany) supplanted fresh beef, and five small (and now characteristic)holes were put in the patties to facilitate quick and thorough cooking.In 1933, Ingram bought out the Anderson family, thereafter moving thecorporate headquarters to Ohio. In the 1960s, the outlet on Boston Post Roadand Allerton Avenue in the Bronx, New York, was the scene of one of thefirst major civil rights protests in the Northeast. White Castle outlets are notfranchised in the United States, and the participants at the time were protestingthe parent company’s alleged discriminatory hiring polices. The companyfigured in a more positive sense in the modern cult classic movie “Haroldand Kumar Go to White Castle” (2004) and is referenced multi ple timesin the Beastie Boys’s album Licensed to Kill. Unlike the “big three” franchiseburger purveyors (McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s), White Castle hasalso expanded its business into the frozen food market for home preparationof its product.Founder Ray Kroc opened the first McDonald’s fast food restaurant inDes Plaines, Illinois, in 1955, and he began franchising the “golden arches”outlets soon thereafter. The Big Mac, introduced in 1968, was the brainchildof Jim Delligatti, one of Kroc’s earliest franchisees, who by the late 1960soperated a dozen stores in Pittsburgh. Advertising icon Ronald McDonaldwas an early inspiration. In his first appearance in 1963, the happy clownwas portrayed by none other than TV weatherman Willard Scott. RonaldMcDonald and the Big Mac made McDonald’s a household word with its“billions served” advertisement slogan serving as evidence of its leadershipin this area of fast food. The Happy Meal has been pleasing kids since 1979.The Ronald McDonald Houses are noted for their continued good workwith families and children suffering from incurable disease.In 1954, James McLamore and David Edgerton opened their first BurgerKing restaurant in Miami, Florida. America was introduced to the signatureWhopper Sandwich in 1957, and the “have it your way” advertising campaignwas an instant sensation. Today the Whopper sandwich is world renownedfor its fire-grilled taste and the many ways customers can order itto their liking. The great success of the early restaurants and their expandingmenu of items made the Burger King concept a natural for internationalexpansion and franchising. In 1963, a franchise outlet, the first outside thecontinental United States, was opened in Puerto Rico, and in 1969 the firstinternational “Home of the Whopper” opened in Windsor, Ontario.In the 1960s, Wendy’s founder Dave Thomas was offered a chance toturn around a failing chain of KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken) restaurants.

Fast Food, History of 261Working with KFC founder Col. Harland Sanders, Thomas turned four failingstores into million-dollar successes. He thereafter sold his KFC franchisesand opened his first Wendy’s in Columbus, Ohio, in 1969. Thomas’s menuincluded large square hamburgers, thick malt shakes, soup, hot-topped bakedpotatoes, salad bars, and other unique items that made his franchise outletsstand out from their competitors. Thomas named the restaurant chain afterhis two-year-old daughter Melinda Lou, whose nickname was Wendy.THE SANDWICHFourth in the running for favorite American snack food, but coming upfast, is the sandwich. The first recorded sandwich was created by the famousrabbi, Hillel the Elder, who lived during the first century B.C. He started thePassover custom of sandwiching a wine-bound mixture of chopped nuts,apples, spices, and bitter herbs between two matzoh crackers. The filling betweenthe matzohs served as a reminder of the suffering of the Jews beforetheir deliverance from Egypt and represented the mortar used by the Jewsin their forced labor of constructing Egyptian buildings.During the Middle Ages, the sandwich took the form of thick blocksof coarse dry bread called trenchers that were used in place of plates. Meatsand other foods were piled on top of the bread to be eaten by hand andsometimes with the aid of knives. The trenchers, thick and dry, absorbedthe juice, the grease, and the sauces. At the end of the meal, one either atethe trencher or tossed the gravy-soaked bread to the dogs or to less fortunatehuman beggars. These trenchers were clearly the forerunner of theopen-face sandwiches served in diners and restaurants.The term sandwich may refer to John Montague, the Fourth Earl ofSandwich. Montague became First Lord of the Admiralty during the AmericanRevolution and was patron to the explorer Captain James Cook. In1776, Cook named the Hawaiian Islands after him, calling them the SandwichIslands. Montague was a hardened gambler and usually gambled forhours at a time at his club, sometimes refusing to get up even for meals. It issaid that he ordered his valet to bring him some meat tucked between twopieces of bread. Others at the gambling tables began to order “the sameas Sandwich!” According to this story the original modern sandwich was, infact, a piece of beef-steak between two slices of toasted bread. True or not,the sandwich became very popular in the American diet in the nineteenthcentury when bakeries started selling pre-sliced bread, making sandwichesvery easy to create at home. Sandwiches were a portable meal for workersand school children alike. However, American entrepreneurs rarely leave asimple success alone.Today sandwiches—particularly the so-called “submarine” sandwiches—are big business. The names used to refer to subma rine sandwiches arelargely regional: wedges, grinders, po’boys, hoagies, subs, and heroes all referto some form or other of a long roll split down its length and stuffed withgoodies. Subway is a franchise fast food restaurant that sells primarily a wide

262 Fast Food, History ofvariety of these sandwiches packed with salad and fixings. The parent companywas founded in 1965 by Fred De Luca and Dr. Peter Buck and is awholly owned subsidiary of Doctor’s Associates, Inc. ( DAI ). De Luca initiallychose a mediocre location for his shop and called it Pete’s Submarines, eventuallyshortened to Subway. The franchising effort, largely funded by Dr.“Pete” Buck, was remarkably successful, however. In 2000, Subway addedseasoned breads and a line of specialty items to its menu.Today the company has over 28,700 franchised units in 87 countriesand may be the fastest growing fast-food franchise in the world. Currently,Subway is the third largest franchise fast food chain globally after Yum!Brands ( 34,000 locations) and McDonald’s ( 31,000 locations). The companyproduces approximately $9 billion in sales every year. In 2007, Forbesmagazine named DeLuca number 242 of the 400 richest Americans with anet worth of $1.5 billion.Blimpie is the oldest ( by a few months) fast-food submarine sandwichchain. It is headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona, and is the third largestsandwich chain in the United States, behind Subway and Quiznos Subs.Three friends from St. Peter’s Prep School in Jersey City, New Jersey (TonyConza, Peter DeCarlo and Angelo Baldassare) wanted to start a businesstogether. After lunch at a sandwich shop in Point Pleasant, New Jersey, theydecided to open their own eatery. After arranging financing and the supplychain they needed to support it, they finally opened Blimpie’s first storein Hoboken, New Jersey, on April 4, 1964. Blimpie currently has nearly1,600 franchises in the United States. The company is presently owned byKahala-Cold Stone Corporation. For many years Subway and Blimpie werethe only major competitors in the franchise submarine sandwich business.Quiznos Sub specializes in toasted submarine sandwiches. It is thesecond-largest submarine sandwich shop chain in North America, passingthe older and slower-growing Blimpie, but it is still only a fraction of thesize of Subway. The first Quiznos Sub outlet opened at 13th and GrantStreets in Denver, Colorado, in 1981. Today there are over 5,000 shops locatedin the United States, over 300 in Canada, and 100 more scattered in20 other countries. In recent years, the franchise has changed the face of thesubmarine business by focusing on hot, toasted sandwiches. This has forcedSubway and Blimpie to follow suit and include them in their offerings alongwith innovations like tortilla wraps.It is impossible to discuss the history of fast food without a brief historyof the single most iconic figure in fast-food history. Unlike Ronald McDonaldor other fast-food icons, Sanders was an actual person and remained the solespokesman for Kentucky Fried Chicken until his death at age 90 in 1980.The company adopted the abbreviated form of its name ( KFC ) in 1991.Based in Louisville, Kentucky, KFC is a chain of fast food restaurantsknown mainly for its fried chicken. The company was founded as KentuckyFried Chicken by Sanders in 1952 in his gas station in Corbin, Kentucky. Eventually,his local popularity grew, and Sanders moved to a motel and restaurantthat seated 142 people. He worked there as the chef. Sanders was made an

Finger Bowls 263honorary colonel in the Kentucky National Guard by the decree of GovernorRuby Laffon, and he assumed the guise of a nineteenth-century southerngentleman with linen plantation suit and spade beard as an advertising ploy.KFC’s are often coupled with Taco Bell’s, which specialize in Mexican andsouthwestern fast-food items like tacos, burritos, chilis, and wraps.KFC has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Yum! Brands since 2002.Yum! Brands, Inc., is a Fortune 500 corporation, that operates or licensesKFC, Long John Silver’s, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and A&W restaurants. Basedin Louisville, Kentucky, it is the world’s largest fast-food restaurant companyin terms of overall franchise units—over 34,000 outlets around the world inmore than 100 countries and territories. In 2002, Yum!’s global sales totaledalmost $10 billion.As can be seen, fast-food has increasingly become big business, if not anew business in the historical sense. Americans find fast and conveniencefoods desirable, and the expansion of the trade will probably continue intothe foreseeable future. Nonetheless, none of these corporate giants can holda candle to Mom’s PB & J sandwich on processed white bread prepared athome—with love.Further Reading: Jakle, John A., and Keith A. Sculle. Fast Food: Roadside Restaurantsin the Automobile Age. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002;Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005; Smock,Aaron, Lifestyles Editor. “Pompeii represents thriving pride.” The Vanguard( University of Southern Alabama), Monday, February 4, 2008; Vehling, JosephDommers, ed. Apius: Cookery and Dining in Imperial Rome. New York: DoverPublications, 1977.James M. VoloFinger BowlsFinger bowls are small bowls containing a small amount of water. Diners diptheir fingers into them and wipe their hands clean with a dry napkin aftereating a meal. These bowls have hovered on the brink of obsolescence forover a century. However, some elegant hotels still present them on specialoccasions.Making one’s ablutions at the dinner table has a long history. The earliestpeople used no flatware and ate food with their hands. After this, theywiped their hands clean on their own hair, or on the hair of a slave. One ofthe earliest instruments for wiping was a wad of dough the Spartans calledapomagdalie, a mixture cut into small pieces and rolled and kneaded at thetable. This practice led to special bread slices used to wipe hands at the tableearly in the Middle Ages. Once this practice disappeared, diners wiped theirhands and mouths on the back of their hand or on their clothing.Beginning at medieval banquets up until the start of the nineteenth century,people dipped napkins into fingerbowls then wiped their mouths and

264 Finger Bowlschins. Earlier European diners rinsed their mouths with water from fingerbowlsand spat it back into the bowl. Gargling was prohibited. This practiceended at the last of the nineteenth century. Once food was no longer eatenwith hands, cut into smaller pieces, and placed more neatly into mouths, theneed for cleansing diminished.Formal finger bowls are smaller than cereal bowls and may be made ofany material. Some are metal, others appeared in plain or etched crystal, Nipponware, Carnival or Depression glass, Haviland Limoges porcelain, Wedgwood,or cobalt blue glass.After the crumb tray, used to remove crumbs from the table, fingerbowls became known as “pleasant pause before starting dessert.” These daysthey may be used after messy foods such as artichokes, shellfish, corn, asparagus,or any other handheld food.At Western meals around mid-twentieth century, after the crumbingtray, before the formal dessert service, a waiter brought each guest a fingerbowl filled with water. The bowl was set on a small lace doily that, in turn,rested on the dessert plate. A dessert fork and spoon rested on each side ofthe finger bowl. Usually, a slice of lemon, lime, flower petals, mint leaves,even sea shells, or an orchid floated on the surface of tepid water in eachhalf-filled bowl. Once presented, the diner delicately dipped fingertips ofone hand, then the other into the water, with no scrubbing. Next, thesewere delicately dried with a napkin. Diners also delicately blotted their lipsto remove any moisture.Once the diner had finished using the finger bowl, he or she lifted italong with its doily to the upper left of the remaining dessert plate. Theremaining fork and spoon were placed to the left and right of the plate. Ifno silverware arrived with the finger bowl, another course should not beexpected and the bowl was left in front of the diner.Actually, it takes a very aware diner to spot a finger bowl these days anduse it correctly. Because it is so easy for many not to recognize them, there’s awell-rehearsed tale about the guest who picked their finger bowl and sippedfrom it. The host, wishing to show politeness to the guest, repeated the behaviorso as not to embarrass the guest.Currently, finger bowls are rarely used. However, some airlines providefirst class passengers with damp, heated wiping cloths immediately before,and sometimes after, meals. Many restaurants use a latter-day form of tableself-cleansing by offering prepackaged, moistened paper toweling inside airtightplastic or foil packets. Providing rough, hot cloths for wiping handsand faces is a Chinese custom, and its popularity could revive a similar newcleansing ritual in the West.Further Reading: Visser, Margaret. The Rituals of Dinner: The Origins, Evolutionand Eccentricities and Meaning of Table Manners. New York: Grove Weidenfeld,1991; Von Drachenfels, Suzanne. The Art of the Table: A Complete Guide to TableSetting, Table Manners and Tableware. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.Marty Martindale

Food Network 265Food NetworkThe Food Network launched in November 1993 as the first cable channeldedicated entirely to a new kind of programming—food as entertainment.The aim of founder Reese Schoenfeld was to produce shows that combinedfood with lifestyle and television personalities. The channel was created inpartnership with nine cable and communications companies and launchedto 6,500,000 subscribers.Television audiences were already used to watching the likes of JuliaChild on PBS teaching cooking in a how-to style. The main focus was to learna new recipe or technique (Julia’s engaging personality was an added bonus).The Food Network reinvented the cooking show, by introducing storylinesand theme music, paying greater attention to the look and feel of the sets,and making good use of the editing room. Shows began to entertain audiencesand create lifestyles they could either admire from afar or attempt toemulate for themselves.Despite its novel concept, by 1997 the Food Network was reachingonly 19 million households. The channel didn’t have the scope they originallyhoped for.In late 1997, the E. W. Scripps Company bought control of Food Networkfrom the A. H. Belo Company. Shortly after the change in ownership,Judy Girard was installed as the new Senior Vice President of Content Developmentfor Scripps Networks. With her extensive background in thebusiness of TV, it was hoped the network would expand.From 1997 to 2001 increase in viewership rose at a rate of around 10 millionsubscribers each year. Between 2001 and 2002, the Food Networkgained 17 million additional subscribers for a total of 71 million, making itthe fastest-growing ad-supported cable network for that period.Today, over 90 million households tune in to the station and 7 millionusers log on to the Web site each month. The Food Network is headquarteredin New York City and can be seen worldwide in Canada, Australia,Korea, Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines, Monaco, Andorra, Africa,France, and the French-speaking territories in the Caribbean and Polynesia.Scripps is a hybrid media company and owns and operates several cablenetworks including HGTV, DIY Network, Great American Country, andFine Living. In addition, Scripps owns several broadcast television stationsand newspapers across the country, various interactive media services suchas shopzilla.com, and a licensing agency.Early shows on the Food Network modeled the new direction offood television immediately: they were host-based shows delivering foodentertainment. At the time of launch, viewers tuned into David Rosengartenand Donna Hanover as co-hosts of Food News & Views. Robin Leach,best known for his work on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, was the anchorof the call-in show Robin Leach: Talking Food. Getting Healthy, with formersportscaster Gayle Gardner, was another interview and call-in show.

266 Food NetworkA few years into the life of the network, David Rosengarten took on anentire food topic in his show Taste. Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Fenigerbecame the Too Hot Tamales and brought a taste of Mexican cooking to theaudience.Ready . . . Set . . . Cook!, hosted by Sissie Biggers, was a 1995 game showwhere two teams competed against the clock to cook a meal in 20 minutesusing specific ingredients. Each team included a member from the audience(who brought the bag of food they had to utilize, at a cost of $10 or less)and a professional chef. The audience would then vote on a winner. Thiseventually gave way to more sophisticated reality TV shows that make upa large portion of current programming.Emeril Lagasse, now a household name, has been with the networksince the beginning, with the shows Emeril & Friends and the Essence ofEmeril. His popular show Emeril Live! debuted in 1997 and enjoyed a10-year run.The introduction of Rachael Ray’s 30 Minute Meals in 2001 was animportant turning point for the network. She was a self-trained cook whoinstantly appealed to viewers with limited time, cooking skills, and budgets—and that proved to be a lot of people.The current line-up of programs categorizes the shows into “In theKitchen” and “Food Network Nighttime.” The first set airs before 8 P.M. onweekdays and from 7 A.M. to 2 P.M. on weekends. The intention with the “Inthe Kitchen” block of programming is to convey cooking information. Theline-up includes Rachael Ray, Sandra Lee, Ina Garten, Paula Deen, and GiadaChef Emeril Lagasse acknowledges the audience during a taping of one of his programsfor the Food TV Network, 2001. AP/ Wide World Photos.

Food Network 267Food Network host Rachael Ray holdsa copy of her new cookbook, RachaelRay 30-Minute Meals 2, 2003. AP/ WideWorld Photo.di Laurentiis. This style of programming appeals to the core audience—females in the 25 to 54 year age range.The night programming offers reality and entertainment shows such asIron Chef America, Throwdown with Bobby Flay, and The Next Food NetworkStar—a show that cultivates new talent. Nighttime shows, however, appealmore to younger males, which is why the competitive sports-style programsare featured in this time slot.Many of the phrases uttered by the celebrity chefs have become knownin the pop culture vernacular, such as Bam! or EVOO.Biography-style programs that profile chefs, in the style that MTV madepopular, are also well-liked shows, feeding the audience’s curiosity to go behindthe scenes of their favorite programs and learn more personal details ofthe celebrity chefs.The Food Network audience can’t seem to get enough of one-off specialson food festivals, eating competitions, chocolate sculptures, and weddingcakes, to name just a few categories.The Emmy Awards have been friendly to some of the Food Networkstars, in both nominations and wins. Paula Deen, Emeril Lagasse, MichaelChiarello, and Ina Garten are among the lucky ones.In 2003 the Food Network Kitchens launched the first of four cookbooksdeveloped and written by the in-house kitchen team. Recently,the Food Network Kitchens partnered with Kohl’s to bring to the markettheir own brand of cookware and small appliances. Many of the celebritychefs and hosts also have their own lines of cookware, food products, andcookbooks.The Food Network Web site, launched in 1997, is currently the mostpopular food site on the Web. Users can find recipes from all of the shows,read about their favorite stars, and get entertaining ideas.Further Reading: Buford, Bill. “Notes of a Gastronome TV Dinners: The rise of foodtelevision.” New Yorker. October 2, 2006, http://newyorker.com /archive /2006/10/02/061002fa_fact; Jensen, Elizabeth. “Changing Courses at the Food Network.”The New York Times. December 17, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com /2007/12/17/business/media/17/food.html; Kaufman, Debra. “Food Network Grills, Chills andThrills.” Television Week. June 4, 2007, Vol. 26 Issue 23, p. 14–14, 1p, 4c, http://www.tvweek.com/news.2007/06/food_network_grills_chills_and.php; Keeler,

268 Fourth of JulyJanet K. “Food Network, night & day.” St. Petersburg Times. September 13, 2006,http://www.sptimes.com/2006/09/13/Taste /Food_Network_night_.shtml;Marcus, Erica. “Food Network shifts toward gastro-entertainment.” newsday.com. February 11, 2008, http://www.newsday.com /features /food /ny-foodfdcov021308,0,3229646.story.Liz TarpyFourth of JulyAmerican Independence Day—also called the Fourth of July—commemoratesthe 1776 signing of the Declaration of Independence by leaders ofthe American colonies, an act that signaled the start of the RevolutionaryWar with Great Britain and the birth of the United States of America. TheFourth of July is both a national celebration of freedom and a summer holidayfor outdoor family entertaining. It is the only American holiday wherecivic celebrations and home entertaining often coincide, and both publicand private events are typically marked by patriotic decorations, music, barbequesand outdoor dining, and fireworks.The Empire State Building is dwarfed by a burst offireworks, July 4, 1996, during Macy’s 20th annualIndependence Day pyrotechnic display along NewYork’s East River. AP/ Wide World Photos.

John Adams, one of the architects of American independence, predictedthe tone and grandeur of future Fourth of July celebrations when he wroteto his wife Abigail in 1776 that the date should be commemorated withparades, bells, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of the continent tothe other.The very first celebrations of American independence lacked the variety ofevents that occur today. Following ratification of the document, public readingsof the declaration were held throughout the 13 colonies and were met withcheers. By the time of the first anni versary, certain rituals began to emerge. Thefirst organized civic commemoration of the Fourth of July took place in 1777in Philadelphia—the birthplace of independence—and was characterized withthe ringing of bells, a procession of ships on the river decorated in the nationalcolors of red, white and blue, the firing of 13 canons to symbolize the 13 states,and a lavish dinner for members of Congress.From that point forward, Independence Day celebrations started tooccur locally and were commemorated with private banquets and large midafternoonpublic feasts—often held outdoors—where community residentscould gather to offer toasts, eat, reminisce, and debate issues of the day. Thesedinners were usually ticketed events that followed morning military paradesand speeches by pub lic officials. The act of eating together on the nation’sbirthday fostered community and a sense of shared national identity. Priorto the American Civil War, many dinners were for men only. Some Fourthof July dinners attracted several hundred to several thousand guests andrequired elaborate table arrangements to accommodate such large attendance.Enormous quantities of food were required for such numbers andcould include grilled or roasted meats, poultry, baked beans, fresh fruits,pies, and cakes. Alcoholic beverages were also served and consumed inabundance to accompany the patriotic toasts which were offered throughoutthe meal.A variety of foods were associated with American liberty and the annualsummer celebration. In the 1796 second edition of American Cookeryby Amelia Simmons—considered the first American cookbook—a recipeappeared for “Independence Cake,” which called for 20 pounds of flour,15 pounds of sugar, 10 pounds of butter, and four dozen eggs. The massivecake was flavored with a quart of brandy and a quart of wine and decoratedin gold leaf. The recipe was typical of the celebratory Great Cakes of Britainand was adapted in name to commemorate the spirit of the newly unitedAmerican colonies. During the nineteenth century, refreshing summer treats,such as ice cream flavored with fresh fruit and lemonade, were served andsold by vendors at outdoor events and quickly became associated with theholiday. Foods considered distinctly American appeared on menus. Turtleswere plentiful in early America, and turtle soup was served at Fourth of Julydinners because of its association with the bounty of the new nation. Clamsoup was also a popular dish at organized events.If community events were an expression of national pride in life andliberty, the Fourth of July home party was an opportunity for more intimateFourth of July 269

270 Fourth of Julysocializing. As was the case with many holidays, the nation’s magazine editorswould help set the agenda for Fourth of July celebrations and entertainingrituals, and their ideas ran the gamut of decorations, games, and foodpreparation. Inevitably, the meticulously planned home party would culminatewith traditional dancing and fireworks displays. A July 1904 featurestory by Marjorie March in the monthly periodical Women’s Home Companionprovided detailed instructions for a Fourth of July house party. Marchsuggested that the home be decorated in the national colors with blue andwhite china, colored lanterns adorning the piazza, red roses presented in blueand white vases, miniature American flag doilies, and individual white cakesin paper boxes tied with blue ribbon and topped with red candied cherries.March offered tips for a parlor game where guests would be challenged tothink of words that end in “-nation” and suggested that winners of the contestbe awarded prizes of red and white carnations tied with blue ribbon. A separatefeature in the same issue recommended that a hostess create a “mockmuseum” of unusual objects representing great figures in American historyand ask guests to match the names of patriots to the objects displayed.As cooking practices and menus became more relaxed and interest inoutdoor home entertaining increased, grilled foods such as hot dogs andhamburgers took center stage at Fourth of July gatherings and remain astaple to this day. In 2006, the United States Census Bureau estimated that150 million hot dogs would be consumed by Americans on the holiday, or inother words, one hot dog for every two people living in the United States.National colors are continually leveraged as an important visual elementin Independence Day food and decorating schemes. The AmericanFlag is an icon of the holiday and is proudly displayed from most residentialhomes on the Fourth. Martha by Mail, the former mail-order merchandisedivision of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, offered an unusually wideselection of patriotic bunting, various-sized American flags, and party favorsto decorate an outdoor entertaining space in vintage Americana-style.As healthier eating preferences evolved, Fourth of July menu items reflectedthe trend. National magazines like Martha Stewart Living and CountryLiving published annual features and photo spreads on easily prepared,healthful party fare like grilled meats and roasted vegetables, parfaits, sorbets,and lighter summer fruit tarts in red, white, and blue color schemes.At the same time, traditional treats like homemade ice cream and patrioticfrosted cupcakes remained enormously popular.Food and beverage companies have embraced the marketing potentialinherent in Fourth of July entertaining and use the occasion to attempt toget the attention of consumers in a season when they might be distractedby other leisure activities. Kraft Foods offers an annual product promotionfeaturing Philadelphia Cream Cheese, Cool Whip, and Jell-O as the keyingredients in a no-bake “Wave Your Flag Cheesecake” using blueberries,strawberries, and red-flavored gelatin to create an image of the Americanflag in a rectangular cake pan. In 2002, the Distilled Spirits Council of theUnited States promoted a recipe for Martha Washington’s Rum Punch as an

France 271ideal libation for the Fourth of July, noting that George Washington operateda distillery at his Mount Vernon, Virginia, home and that Martha wasrenowned for developing innovative cocktail recipes. The punch recipe callsfor three different types of liquor.The Fourth of July is an ideal opportunity for politicians to be highlyvisible and engage with their constituents at public proceedings. AmericanPresidents beginning with John Adams have a long history of hosting Fourthof July celebrations, from White House receptions to festive family events.In 2004, the George W. Bush White House even published a collection ofIndependence Day–themed recipes on the White House Web site and suggestedstaging a Bush administration holiday gathering. Political party faithfulscould prepare dishes ranging from Secretary Snow’s “Land of the FreeCole Slaw” to Secretary Thompson’s “Bratwurst of Liberty.”Although much of the focus on Fourth of July entertaining now centerson the home, the annual Independence Day celebration is still observed withpublic events that capture the imagination and reflect the collective patriotismof the nation. Most local municipalities sponsor a parade with bands ortraditional fife and drum corp. Community fireworks displays are a mainstayand sporting events are increasingly popular. The Macy’s Fireworks extravaganzaby the Grucci Company in New York City is broadcast to a nationalprime-time television audience, and the Boston Pops has presented a freeoutdoor concert since 1929 on the banks of the Charles River. The New YorkPhilharmonic performs a July 4th concert of American composers as partof its annual “Summertime Classics” series at Avery Fisher Hall. “A CapitalFourth” is the Independence Day Concert held on the lawn of the UnitedStates Capital Building in Washington, DC since 1981. All are exuberantand high-spirited occasions that enhance individual family celebrations andfoster communal enjoyment of America’s annual birthday gala.Further Reading: Heintze, James R. Fourth of July Celebrations Database. http://www.american.edu / heintze /fourth.htm; Heintze, James R. The Fourth of JulyEncyclopedia. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2007; Travers, Len.Celebratingthe Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic.Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1997.T. W. BarrittFranceAn overview of French history in terms of festivity and food reveals thatthis nation fully deserves its exalted culinary reputation. The conviviality andsociability surrounding eating and drinking in this country that straddles theMediterranean and Northern European worlds have been memorialized notonly in the millions of great French meals around the world and in the gastronomiccenters of France via restaurants—with the obligatory guidebooks—and cookbooks but also in literature and painting.

272 FranceEven before the Roman invasion, the nation then known as Gaul hada rich and multi-layered culinary and celebratory culture due to the Celtic,Phoenician, and Greek cultures already present. Nevertheless, the interactionwith the Roman conquerors deepened and transformed an already establishedculture of eating and entertaining. One result is that the Roman traditiondid not disappear as fully in the emerging Kingdom of France, namedafter the Germanic tribe the Franks, as it did in much of the rest of Europe.Although France would produce perhaps the most famous chef of the medievalperiod, Guillaume Tirel, known as Taillevent (1310–1395), it wouldbe in the field of literature, especially the work of the immortal Francois Rabelais,that the intimate link between food and festivity in France that haddeveloped over the course of the medieval era was most fully elaborated.In the succeeding age of Louis XIV (1643–1715) and at his palaces of Versaillesand Marley, French food and festive culture reached one of its manyapogees and defined aristocratic elegance into the nineteenth century. Theeighteenth-century Enlightenment, in turn, developed new gastronomicalprinciples that would be elaborated during the French Revolution and afterand would take its most concrete form in the modern restaurant. As a result,France has been at the center of the link between food and entertainmentin the West and for much of the rest of the world over the last centuries.Indeed, as Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson has noted, “it is the tour de force ofFrench cuisine to be defined as at once national and cosmopolitan” (3). Eventhough France already has more competitors in this globalized twenty-firstcentury, it remains a central referent for the link between food and festivityand its meanings.RENAISSANCE FRANCEBy 1500 the medieval banquet culture of the French royalty and aristocracywas being infused with the festive culture of the Italian Renaissanceand with new foods and beverages from the New World. At the top ofthe socioeconomic spectrum, palaces and houses began to dedicate specificrooms to eating and festivity rather than having each room serve manyfunctions as was the case in much of the medieval period. Under the influenceof Catherine de Medici and the Burgundian court eating became acomplex entertainment that included ballet and theater as well as eatingand storytelling. At the opposite end of the socioeconomic and spatial spectrumwas the peasant hut whose center was the hearth with its fire and pot.This common fire provided heat, cooking, and conviviality for the family.The ordinary meal would consist of gruel and/or soup, and at the time ofharvest or holidays, weak wine drawn from the second pressing of the grapesand some sort of boiled beef (the iconic pot au feu).Traditionally, the greatest time of festivity in the ordinary life of thelargest segment of the population, the peasantry, was the harvest. This periodcould stretch from August to October depending on the location andthe crop. Tasks were often but not always segregated by gender, with men

in the fields and women preparing the feast. Long tables were used uponwhich would be placed the harvest goose. But though the goose was commonthroughout France, there were regional variations. In the French Alps,along the Rhône, down through the Isère to the Italian border, foods ofsimilar composition to lasagne, polenta, or macaroni were served to farmersand often to Italian workers who came across the border to work. Jokesand comic songs interspersed with eating. Some of the best evidence comesfrom Francois Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantugral—that boundless archiveof late medieval entertaining and culinary customs that encompasses boththe high and the low and the literate and illiterate cultures of French life.Rabelais (c. 1494–1553) provides one of the most extensive portraits ofthe interrelationship of food and festivity ever penned. In these sprawlingnovels we are at the intersection of the medieval and Renaissance worldand of elite and popular culture. Ironically in an age when French cuisinestagnated—no new innovations appear in cookbooks until the middle of theseventeenth century—we see unprecedented literary creativity on the subjectsof cuisine and celebration. France initially lagged as national cuisines,along with national consciousness, began to emerge during the Renaissance.In this sense one can see Rabelais as the “last Gaul.”Rabelais, however, was far from being the only French writer to explorethe link between food and festivity. Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), the inventorof the modern essay; Pierre Ronsard (1524–1585), dubbed “the princeof poets” and the leader of the Pléiade school; and other poets such as GuillaumeBouchet (1513–1594) and François Bérolade de Verville (1556–1626)also copiously covered sociability at the table. Rabelais’ gustatory genius residesin a playful polyphony in which laughter and mirth stimulated by food anddrink create new turns-of-phrase and double entendres. Rabelais’s work hasbeen expertly analyzed by Mikhail Bakhtin in one of the greatest literary studiesof the twentieth century.In Rabelais the fertility of the French soil and the French imaginationare united. In Michel de Montagine’s essays this notion is developed as heoften uses the word nourish (nourir in French) to talk about nourishing thestomach and nourishing the mind. Montaigne also placed special emphasison sociability of the table as key to a great experience: “One should notso much consider what one eats as with whom one eats it . . . There is nodish so sweet to me, and no sauce so appetizing, as those derived fromcompany” (Jeanneret 27–28). Ronsard in his poetry was in awe of Homerand his inventiveness. He sang in praise of being at the dining and drinkingtable with friends, reciting poetry and having the cup bearer serve drinks.Guillaume Bouchet’s collection Les Serees and Berolade de Vervill’s Lemoyen de parvenus take the free-form nature of table talk even further thanRabelais or Ronsard. By the time the great ancient classic text on cuisineand celebration by Athenaeus had been translated into French in 1680, awhole French tradition had evolved that acknowledged, developed, andtranscended the symposium and convivium. French literary achievement inthis area equaled if not exceeded that of Renaissance Italy.France 273

274 FranceBy 1500 public drinking establishments had become an estab lished partof French social life. The original term for drinking establishments was tavern(from the Latin taberna), and they had been in existence as Gallo-Romanbas-reliefs show from at least the second century A.D. After 500, the invadingFranks restricted tavern use to travelers and residents who bought wineand beer to consume at home. Over the course of the centuries the ban fellinto disuse and by the time of Francois Villon (c. 1431–1463), Paris andother cities had developed a lively tavern culture. Villon himself was a roguepoet, who socialized with thieves and prostitutes. The disrepute surroundingtaverns is evident in Nicolas Delamare’s eighteenth-century treatise onthe Paris police. Taberna, he asserted, originally signified the person who ledanimals to pagan alters for slaughter, and he felt that tavern owners continuedsuch sacrificial rites with their customers. By the fourteenth century theterm cabaret became applied to drinking establishments. Again according toDelamare, the word derived from the traditional custom of putting leaves orcork stoppers ( Latin cobretum) on tavern doors. Unlike taverns, cabarets soldnot only wine but also food to be consumed on the premises, thus attractinga wealthier clientele. But cabarets declined in social status with the arrivalof cafés in the late seventeenth century. Another term, guinguette, dates fromat least the eighteenth century and referred to suburban taverns along theSeine and Marne rivers surrounding Paris.The French Renaissance in terms of court festivity was a period oftransition more than innovation. Francis I (1494–1547), the monarch whobrought the Renaissance to France in the sixteenth century, assimilated thenew style of the Burgundian and Italian courts and patronized a group ofpainters known as the School of Fontainbleau, who memorialized his courtlife. Catherine de Medici has traditionally been overrated as far as changingFrench cuisine is concerned but this powerful queen did play an importantrole in bringing new forms of splendor to French royal ceremonial. Morethan ever the royal dinner became a stage for elaborate masked balls, dance,and theatrical events that encompassed not only the great halls but alsothe emerging classical gardens as venues for pageantry. Catherine carefullydirected these events and gave aristocratic women greater prominence thanin past reigns. In these ways she provided a transition to the golden age ofLouis XIV. In terms of cuisine, however, innovations would occur only withFrançois Pierre (de) La Varenne (1618–1678) and his foundational cookbookfor modern French food, Le cuisinier françois (1651).The long reign of Louis XIV ( personal rule 1661 to 1715) put France atthe center of royal and aristocratic cuisine. Even after the fall of the monarchyduring the French Revolution (1789–1815) France would not fall fromthe pinnacle of culinary reputation. Louis mobilized the resources of thelargest population in Europe to create the epitome of a centralizing monarchialpalace, Versailles, and through glory and intimidation focused all eyesupon his activities. Following his example, the aristocratic and bourgeoishomes of France, and around Europe, focused much of their energy on foodand festivity as the hallmark of culture and power. Although Louis’s meals

may have numbered in the hundreds and involved elaborate presentations,the cuisine shifted from the ostentatious tang of heavily spiced foods withcinnamon, cloves, mace, and nutmeg, to more subtle seasoning with tarragonand other herbs and pepper. La Varenne perfected the modern whitesauce ( béchamel). The goal of his cuisine was to enhance rather than tohide the natural flavors of foods. He also stressed the use of fresh vegetablesand paired foie gras with truffles. The development of extensive gardens atVersailles was key not only to cooking but also entertaining. No king beforeLouis had ritualized meals so fully. He performed by way of his meals, thegrand and petit or even tres petit couvert, or public meal, according to time ofday and year. In most instances a crowd in hats watched in silence, as he atewithout a hat. An entire language evolved concerning who could eat andwatch the king while he ate, and these rituals demonstrated who was in orout of favor with the king.His festivities at Versailles became legendary. One of the most dazzlingoccurred in May 1664 when Louis XIV staged a festival that lasted severaldays titled the “Pleasures of the Enchanted Isle.” It started with a parade andexhibition of aristocratic warrior horsemanship, and also featured a ballet,and nighttime entertainments around the fountains and pools of Versaillesilluminated by fireworks. As a young and athletic king, Louis participatedin many of these pageants but naturally became more of a spectator ashe aged.Cookbooks proliferated by the end of Louis XIV’s reign and becamemanuals on how to translate such great entertainments from the court toless exalted locales of aristocratic estates and town houses and bourgeoishomes. In 1674, The Art of Fine Entertaining, written by “L.S.R.” appeared.Among the author’s recommendations were directions on the correct placementof candles for evening dinners to create the effect of luxury along withminute details on the proper preparation and presentation of the meal. Inhis book and others the serving style that would become known as Frenchservice (service à la française) emerged. This style of presentation consistedof arranging all the dishes at once in what we would now call buffet style.Guests were allowed to choose from whatever dish they liked.The grand scale of Louis XIV’s dinners and ceremonials was not continuedafter his death. Both at Versailles and in Paris, the trend was towardmore intimate dining. From his youth Louis XV shunned the extravagantceremonial of his predecessor and desired to eat and rule in more intimaterooms. The regent for Louis XV, the brother of Louis XIV, the Ducd’Orléans also preferred smaller, more intimate suppers and established thiscustom at his palace in Paris, the Palais Royal. Reflecting this trend the chefof the duke and cookbook author, François Massialot (1660–1733) in hisNouveau cuisinier royal et bourgeois, “The Court and Country Cook” (numerouseditions between 1691 and 1734), detailed instructions for “intimatedinners for twelve.” The Palais Royal, an arcaded palace, became a centerof cuisine, sociability, and prostitution in the late eighteenth century andremained at the center of Parisian life well into the nineteenth century.France 275

276 FranceThe move toward greater simplicity and intimacy is also seen in the firstcookbook directed at women, La Cuisinière bourgeoise (written by a prolificmale cookbook author named Menon). Following its publication in 1746, itremained the most popular cookbook in France for over a century. Scholarsconcur that these eighteenth-century intimate suppers “sought to banishritual” and had an “atmosphere . . . of high fashion, flirtation, wit and gossip”(Strong 2l3).On the question of food and entertaining the French Enlightenment divides,as it does so often, between Voltaire and Rousseau. The former reveledas a youth in the intimate suppers during the regency. While alive, Voltaireenjoyed fame as an exalted and iconic writer. Exiled in Switzerland, he sawhimself as “the hotel keeper of Europe” and praised luxury in his article onthe bon vivant he called Le Mondain (the Mundane). Rousseau, on the otherhand, preached that the simple cuisine and festivities of the world’s peasantpeoples were far superior to anything civilization had developed becausesimple cuisine united individuals and communities in authentic food thatthey had grown and prepared themselves and in festivals that ensured no distinctionbetween the participant and the observer and thus prevented alienation.Where both Voltaire and Rousseau could find common ground was inthe numerous cafés of Paris that had become centers of fashionable societyand avant-garde politics by the 1750s. Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau, aninventor, opened the first restaurant in 1766 and hoped thereby not only tomake his fortune but also to link the Enlightenment’s desire to amelioratesociety through science to a transformation in the daily diet of millions.The French Revolution, which erupted in the spring of 1789, quicklytook fraternity as one of its three guiding principles (the other two beingliberty and equality). In July 1789, the same month as the fall of the Bastille,the Marquis Charles de Villette proposed that the ideal of fraternitybe embodied in collective eating in the streets. Indeed a ‘patriotic meal”eaten by some of the National Assembly occurred during the celebrationof the Federation on July 14, 1790 (marking the first anniversary of theRevolution), with the leftovers being distributed to the poor. Similar mealswere staged at later revolutionary festivities and were made mandatory inJuly 1794. Here was the Rousseauian dream of popular festivity incarnate.But within a few months, as the radical republic gave way to the moderateThermidorians and then the Directory, such measures were abolished. Ofgreat long-term impact was the abolition of the guilds, which freed food anddrink sellers to purvey whichever food and drinks they wished.French society in its reaction to the extremes of egalitarian democracyretrieved past traditions and created new institutions. The upper class recreatedthe private domestic dinner party. Often these dinner parties wouldhave salons attached to them after the fashion of those found in the eighteenthcentury. After Napoleon gained power, one of the means he used toassert his legitimacy was to hold grand dinners on eight occasions during hisrule and to lament that he had not brought back the grand couvert duringhis days in exile. The most important development of the revolutionary era,

however, would turn out to be the consolidation of the restaurant as thenew main ritual and festive site for eating and the emergence of the modernprofessional chef, restaurant critic, and gastronomic theorist.By 1830 Paris would be filled with over 3,000 restaurants and would bewell on its way to defining the modern restaurant not only for the rest of theworld but gradually also for the rest of France. By 1850, however, two-thirdsof the nation’s departments still lacked these new sites of consumptionand celebration. Many of the restaurants opened after 1789 were staffedfrom kitchens of the great aristocratic houses of France, and the result wasthat very quickly a customer, soon to be known as a gastronome, had manychoices to eat. This gave rise to a culinary public sphere in which publicopinion would evaluate, compare, and rank various eating establishments.The first modern restaurant critic was Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimodde La Reynière (1758–1837), who in his Almanach des gourmands collectedhis reviews of restaurants from the 1790s through the first decade of thenineteenth century. Often he would meet with a group of like-minded gourmetsat the Parisian restaurant the Rocher de Cancale that also appears inthe novels of Balzac, who immortalized the restaurant in his multi-volumeseries The Human Comedy.The other great theoretician of cuisine after the revolution was JeanAnthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755–1826). His Physiologie du goût (The Physiologyof Taste) reveals his ambition to create a science of gastronomy. Althoughhe wrote on restaurants, they were not as central to his writings asto Grimod’s. Brillat focused instead upon the full range of sensory, gustatory,and sociable experiences surrounding eating. He believed that meals werethe key to refined entertaining and believed that the first part of a mealshould be devoted to eating and the second part to socializing. AlexandreDumas made similar observations on the effects of fine dining later in thecentury: “Wine is the intellectual part of the meal. Meats are merely the materialpart” ( Toussaint-Samat 277). Though neither specifically links eatingwith the ideals of the French Revolution, they clearly see the table as anideal expression of liberty, equality, and fraternity.Marie Antoine (Antonin) Carême (1784–1833) created the idea ofthe modern professional chef even though he worked mostly for royal andupper-class patrons rather than in restaurants. His first great patron was thediplomatic genius Talleyrand. After the fall of Napoleon Carême superviseda banquet for military and diplomatic dignitaries and then worked for theBritish Prince Regent, later George IV, and then Tsar Alexander I in SaintPetersburg, before returning to Paris, where he was chef to banker JamesRothschild. Though he never worked in a restaurant, his influential cookbooksbecame the staple of chefs’ libraries. He also expressed the democraticwish that all French could share in the joy of a great meal. He sawthe simple pot au feu (in essence beef stew) as one of the greatest of Frenchdishes. His complex but refined system of cooking laid the foundation fornineteenth-century French haute cuisine. Though modern in so many waysin both display and service, his presentations pointed to the past more thanFrance 277

278 Francethe future. His pièces montées, making large and complex structures out offood in imitation of historic buildings or art works, recalled old regime banquetsmore than modern meals. ( However his creations are at the foundationof the modern wedding cake, one of which is described in great detail inGustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.) Moreover, Carême continued to servein the French style (that is, a wide variety of dishes in buffet fashion), ratherthan in the Russian style (that is, courses served sequentially and hot) thatwould become the norm at restaurants.The rise of the restaurant was intimately connected to the growing selfconsciousnessof the French middle class. One historian of the restauranthas noted that it was at restaurant tables that “the nineteenth century beganto define itself; it is à table that business deals are made, ambitions declared,marriages arranged” (Guy 30). Central to festive moments of the upperclasses was champagne. Brandy and cigars were also a key element of theritual of the upper-class restaurant experience as the concluding gesturesthat accompanied after dinner sociability.While restaurants proliferated first in Paris and then slowly across thecountry during the nineteenth century, the phenomenal development acrossthe whole of France was the emergence of what I have called the workingclasscafé. These establishments sold not only the full range of drinks newlyavailable in the post-guild era, they usually also sold lunches and sometimeseven rudimentary dinners. Officially labeled retail drink outlets, debitde boissons, these establishments were usually known as marchands de vins(wine shops), cabarets, or cafés. We can best describe them as working-classcafés. They proliferated at an extraordinary rate between 1789 and 1850rising from approximately 100,000 in 1789 to 350,000 in 1850, during aperiod when wine consumption had risen much more slowly. Restaurantsand cafés had played a role in the French Revolutions of 1789 and 1830but were much more vital during the Revolution of 1848, which in partdeveloped out of a series of antigovernment banquets in early 1848 andwhich then got an added lift from Carnival celebrations in March 1848. By1851 Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, who had been elected president in 1848,saw working-class agitation in cafés as a threat to his bid to become emperorand as a result closed upwards of 50,000 shops after his coup d’etatof December 1851. Even under this draconian regime cafés continued toproliferate and by the time the Second Empire fell in 1870 the numberhad returned to 1848 levels only to rise to 480,000. What worried muchof the French elite during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centurieswas that the rise in the number of cafés paralleled an explosive increase inalcohol, especially wine consumption from 80 liters per capita in the 1830sto 160 liters per capita in the early twentieth century. The great festiveholiday for these popular establishments was Bastille Day, July 14, at whichthey usually hosted balls. They were also extensively used as the venues forworking-class weddings as we see in Emile Zola’s novel L’Assomoir, or TheDram Shop. Impressionist painters also focused extensively on working-classcafés. The paintings often portray a sense of alienation, especially in the caseof absinthe drinkers in the works of Manet and Degas.

While the popular classes seemed to become ever more mired in alcoholconsumption, the upper and middle classes of France continued toindulge in an ever more complex restaurant culture. By the end of the nineteenthcentury, International Expositions, especially those of 1867, 1889,and 1900, stimulated the growth of tourism and helped create the modernluxury hotel. After 1900 César Ritz and especially August Escoffier(1846–1935) pioneered the elegant hotel restaurant. Escoffier refined andupdated Carême’s cuisine for the railroad and hotel age, helped welcomethe growing number of women dining publicly in restaurants (rather than inprivate cabinets noirs, which were often associated with prostitution). Someof Escoffier’s signature dishes were named after the great actresses and singersof the age Sarah Bernhardt and the Australian Nelly Melba, whose namegraces his famous peach desert. The rise of Escoffier also marks the consolidationof a national restaurant culture in France. Born in the southern cityof Nice, he had started his career in a restaurant in his home city and thenhad restaurants on the Riviera, at Cannes and Monte Carlo, before movingup to Paris and then to London. At both the 1889 and 1900 InternationalExpositions in Paris the Third Republic celebrated itself and the growingintegration of France into a modern nation state by hosting banquets forall the mayors of the nation—over 21,000 functionaries. At these banquetsboth Parisian and regional specialties were served.By the 1920s the automobile was starting to transform the gastronomicand celebratory culture of France. National guides to France had emergedfrom the 1840s but only in the 1920s did a gastronomical guide literatureproliferate. By this decade the famous Michelin guides were noting whichrestaurants were worth a trip or a detour and awarding stars. In this samedecade following the carnage of World War I, the Guides Bleues, which hadreplaced the earlier Guide Joane, also mapped the restaurants of France forthe ever-growing number of car owners who viewed gastronomic travelas one of the best ways to appreciate France and to have fun. The greatestmonument to gastronomic regionalism to emerge in this decade wasthe multi volume Le Tour de France gastronomique, written by Curnonsky( pen name of Maurice Edouard Sailland, 1872–1956) and Marcel Rouff.Although they may have traveled by car, these gastronomes stressed theneed to eat food that had been lovingly and slowly cooked and that hadto be enjoyed in the same leisurely fashion. But this new sense of nationalcuisine and the solidarity at the table came not only from Paris but alsofrom the provinces. For example, in 1923 an Association des GastronomesRegionalistes was founded and held dinners, festivals, and colloquia aroundthe nation. International expositions held in France in the interwar era alsocelebrated the integration of Parisian and provincial foodways. For example,the leadership of France in food and festivity was trumpeted in the 1923Salon d’Automne, a celebration of French art and artisanal genius, and theExposition Universelle 1937, a more subdued replay of the great late nineteenth-centuryexpositions.Initially after World War II the privations inflicted by four long yearsof occupation created a desire to return to traditional food preparation.France 279

280 FranceFrench restaurateurs were not as creative in their cuisine as the cafés ofSaint German des Pres in Paris were. Regulars like Jean Paul Sartre, Simonede Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Juliette Greco, and Boris Vian played an importantrole in renewing the café’s intellectual culture. One developmentthat did emerge was the transformation of the bistrot from a term for aworking-class bar to a term denoting a cozy, authentic, small neighborhoodrestaurant. The modern bistrot came of age in the 1950s. This same passionfor authenticity would lead a group of chefs in the 1950s in eastern France,especially in the region around Lyon to lay the foundations for what wasto become known in the 1970s as nouvelle cuisine (this is really the thirdnouvelle cuisine if you count La Varenne and Carême as the first renewersof French food). In Lyon legendary chef Mother (Mère) Brazier trained PaulBoucuse, and in Vienne restauranteur Fernand Point, considered the fatherof Nouvelle Cuisine, trained the Troisgros brothers. Moreover, from theearly 1950s, the new medium of television played a vital role in renewinghome cooking. Chefs such as Raymond Oliver, owner of Le Grand Vefourin the Palais Royal of Paris, became a household fixture as he showed Frenchhousewives new recipes and cooking styles.The rise of nouvelle cuisine occurred after the near revolution of 1968 asthe French, especially the youth searched for a more informal and healthierway to eat and entertain. In March 1969, H. Gault and C. Millau publishedLe Nouveau Guide and within three years the term nouvelle cuisine hadbecome a media staple. This new movement utilized the postwar advancesin farming, refrigeration, and transportation to ensure a fresher and a moreregional range of foods on the table. Improvements in ovens and steamersresulted in meat and vegetables that retained more of their original flavorand that were not overshadowed by the heavy sauces of nineteenth- andearly twentieth-century cuisine. Nouvelle cuisine was influences by the cuisinesof Japan and China. Moreover, artistic presentation of small portionsreplaced the large plates favored previously. Some of the bibles of this newcuisine were the works of chef Michel Guérard, including La Grande Cuisineminceur (1976) and La Cuisine gourmande (1978).In general, French eating has become lighter and more discriminating asthe country has modernized and moved from an agricultural to an industrialeconomy, and finally to a service- and information-based economy. Withthe reduction in manual labor the number of calories needed per day hasdropped from an average of 3,000 to 3,500 in 1900 to between 1,700 to2,000 today. Food now plays a much less prominent role in the average individualand family budget, accounting for only 14 percent of expenses todayas compared to more than double that amount (28.6 percent) in 1960.Between 1970 and 2001 the French also increased their consumption offresh fruit and vegetables and decreased their consumption of bread, meat,and potatoes. Indeed, the French eat more fresh fruit than any other nationin Europe. By 2005 the nouvelle cuisine values of freshness, presentation,and taste topped the list in the qualities the French found most appealing infood. Moreover by 2005 the French drank almost as much AOC wine (the

ate had more than tripled between 1970 and 2001) as they did the lesserqualities (whose rate of consumption had declined by two thirds). Duringthese same years the French doubled their consumption of sodas and mineralwaters and saw an even higher rate of increase for fruit juices.While the foods that the French eat may have evolved over the past40 years, becoming lighter and more varied, the traditions of sociability atthe table have remained largely unchanged. This holds as true in the homeas it does in the restaurant. In general when guests come to dinner at aFrench home they are much more likely to bring flowers than a bottle ofwine (a common American gift) because it is assumed that the hosts havealready paired the wine with the food. In contrast to the average Americanhousehold, the French have a much more distinct set of courses involvingonly one item at a time that is discussed and eaten in a more leisurely andconvivial manner. Salad, for example, is a separate course, rather than beingserved with the main dish. This slow and sociable approach to eating is consideredone of the main reasons for the so-called French paradox—that is,the fact that the French have a lower rate of heart disease than Americanseven though they eat foods, such as pâtés, high in saturated fats. It is commonboth at home, at work, and at school for the French to take betweenone and two hours for lunch. An index of the importance the French governmentattaches to cuisine and sociability is the fact that numerous studies,such as those of 1973, 1981, 1989, and 1997, have been undertaken todetermine how often the French make “gastronomic” meals, go out to restaurants,or have friends and family to dinner. According to the most recentsurvey (1997), half the population tries a new recipe every year, 29 percent“regularly” try new recipes, and 68 percent go to a “gastronomic” restauranteach year (with 34 percent from time to time). The survey also indicatesthat the French are twice as likely to go out at night (from time to time) tosee their friends—30 percent—than to see their relatives—17 percent.Courtship and marriage rituals also remain intimately tied to food andentertaining. Class differences remain very much in evidence with the workingclass conducting much of its dating and courting activity in bars andrestaurants, and the elite having private parties, known as rallyes, usually atexclusive clubs or rented auditoriums. This custom has emerged only afterWorld War II and is found especially in the most affluent sections of Parisand its suburbs. Such social gatherings usually have a diverse buffet withthe most sophisticated snacks offered by French cuisine: choice wines, petitsfours, canapés, éclairs, and bite-size caviar and salmon sandwiches, all fromthe leading gourmet delicatessens (traiteurs) of Paris, such as Lenôtre.As far as weddings are concerned, France has an extremely rich andinfluential heritage. While peasants often gave herbs as tokens of their love,the custom of presenting diamonds to the beloved, if not the betrothed, istraced back to the fifteenth-century French monarch Charles VII’s gift tohis mistress Agnès Sorel. French brides also developed the custom of creatingthe trousseau, from the French word trousse, meaning “bundle.” A trousseauis a collection of clothes for her marriage stored in a chest or armoire.France 281

282 FranceTraditionally in France the wedding veil also serves as the first wrapping forthe newborn baby. The tradition of the white wedding dress is traced backto Queen Anne of Brittany, who wed Louis XII in 1499. But the moderncustom dates only from the marriage of Eugénie de Montijo to EmperorNapoleon III in 1853. Toasts to the new couple are of course ancient but theubiquitousness of champagne toasts dates only from the nineteenth century.Rice, as a symbol of fertility, has not always been what has been thrown orgiven to the newlyweds. In the past wheat has been thrown or bread offered.Not only did French tradition sanction dancing and music after thewedding but also often additional money, food, or drink if the bride was alot younger than the husband. ( This was done to assuage the young menof the village or neighborhood about losing one of the eligible women toa man outside of their cohort.) Naturally the modern elaborate receptionfulfills that function well.Food in early twenty-first century France is becoming as much a fashionand health statement as a marker of festive and sociable exuberance. Oneof the leading French chefs today, Alain Ducasse, views his dishes as artisticcreations, and he has had them trademarked. Owner of 25 restaurantsaround the world and a score of publications, Ducasse is at the forefrontof transforming French cuisine into a global experience. But even with thisglobal reach, he tries to remain true to his native soil. In doing so he is followingin the footsteps of recent French intellectuals, such as Claude LeviStrauss and Pierre Bourdieu, who have plumbed the anthropological andsociological depths of the eating experience and its relationship to humanthought, sociability, and social distinctiveness.Further Reading: Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky.Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984; Blocker, Jack S. Jr., David M. Fahey,and Ian R. Tyrell, eds. Alcohol and Temperance in Modern History, An InternationalEncyclopedia. Vols. I and II. Santa Barbara, CA, Denver, CO, and Oxford:ABC Clio, 2003; Donnat, Olivier. Les pratiques culturelles des Français. Enquête1997. Paris: La Documentation française, 1998; Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst.Accounting For Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine. Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 2004; Flandrin, Jean-Louis, and Massimo Montanari, eds., Food:A Culinary History From Antiquity to the Present. New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1999; Freedman, Paul. Food: The History of Taste. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2007; Guy, Kolleen M. When Champagne Became French: Wineand the Making of A National Identity. Baltimore and London: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 2003; Haine, W. Scott. The World of the Paris Café: SociabilityAmong the French Working Class, 1789–1914. London: Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 1996; Holt, Mack P. Alcohol: A Social and Cultural History. Oxford andNew York: Berg, 2006; Jeanneret, Michel. A Feast of Words: Table Talk in theRenaissance. Trans. Jeremy Whiteley and Emma Hughes. Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1991; Pinçon, Michel, and Monique Pinçon Charlot. Dansles beaux quartiers. Paris: Seuil, 1989; Spang, Rebecca L. The Invention of theRestaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 2000; Strong, Roy. Feast: A History of Grand Eating. Orlando,FL: Harcourt, 2002; Toussaint-Samat, Maguelonne. A History of Food. Trans.

Funeral Food 283Anthea Bell. Cambridge MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1992; Schehr, Lawrence R.,and Allen S. Weiss. French Food: On the Table, On the Page, and in French Culture.New York and London: Routledge, 2001; Vreeland, Susan, Luncheon of theBoating Party. New York: Viking, 2007.W. Scott HaineFuneral FoodFOOD FOR THE DEAD, FOOD FOR THE LIVINGHuman beings not only eat, they think—and one of the things theythink a great deal about is death. The awareness of our own mortality colorsour thinking about everything, including food. We sometimes comparelife after death to a journey—and many cultures try to provide their deadwith everything to make that journey easier or more comfortable. Sometimesthe dead are given real food, and sometimes they are given symbolicfood. The ancient Egyptians, for example, buried their royal dead with completeentourages (in the form of miniature models) to provide the sort ofmeals the departed had enjoyed in life: cooks and other servants, kitchens,granaries, farm animals, and so forth. The funerals of Chinese followers ofConfucius—who have great veneration for ancestors—feature sacrifices ofvarious kinds: not only rice and other foods, but also symbolic money (speciallyprinted for such occasions), and even symbolic cars, servants, airplanesto provide for the decedents’ needs on their journey to be reunited withtheir ancestors.In addition to keeping the dead well prepared for their journey into theafterlife, foods were sometimes used to protect them in other ways. Beforethe eighteenth century, in England and Wales, a sin-eater was called in whensomeone died. Bread and beer were passed across the corpse, and the sineaterconsumed them, thereby assuming all the sins of the dearly departed.Some Chinese families bring complete meals to the cemetery. Thedishes are spread out, picnic-style, before the tombstone—as if the deceasedwas still at the family table—then consumed by the family. This traditionis similar to including an empty chair and place setting at holiday meals forrecently departed family members.Some cultures believe that the dead can return at certain times of theyear and that special foods should be prepared to honor them. In Louisiana,Cajuns celebrate Le Jour des Morts (day of the dead ) by bringing food to thecemetery on November first. The better-known Mexican Dia de los Muertos(Day of the Dead, also known as All-Souls’ Day) is another such occasion.Mexicans spend the day cleaning and decorating graves, and preparinghighly decorated sugar skulls, often marked with the names of the dead.They use special black plates, available only at that time of year. Candyskeletons are often saved for years. Likewise, Italian ossi de morti ( bones ofthe dead ), special hard-baked cookies that resemble sections of femurs, can

284 Funeral Foodbe stored indefinitely. Italian children looked forward to receiving treatsfrom the dead on All-Souls’ Day—usually favi de morti, tiny bean-shapedalmond-flavored cakes (ancient Greeks and Romans believed that the soulsof the dead resided in fava beans, and the notion survives in this Christianpractice). The distribution of Halloween treats, in America, is descendedfrom such Old World traditions.The living have also been concerned about the happiness of the departedfor reasons that are not entirely altruistic. A common fear was thatthe dead, if not properly fed, would come back to haunt the living. Romanians,for example (whose culture has given us many interesting forms ofsuch harassment by the dead ), often brought wine and bread to the graves oftheir loved ones. Their intention was to keep the corpse well fed, so it wouldnot return to feed on the living.FUNERAL FEASTSAfter a funeral, most cultures serve a meal that connects the living (witheach other and with their society), while providing sustenance for theirown journeys home. The most drastic version of a funeral feast involves thepractice of endocannibalism. Essentially this refers to the eating of one’sdeparted loved ones in order to keep their essence in the family. This couldbe as simple as mixing some of a Yanomamo grandmother’s ashes in theplantain soup that the entire family would consume. Herodotus described asimilar conviction among the ancient Scythians, who would have been horrifiedat the thought of placing their dearly departed in the cold ground—when the guest of honor at a funeral could also provide the main course.Most of us would not dream of such a thing, but only because ourfuneral feasts reflect different systems of belief. The “celebration of life”(a cliché found in almost every funeral oration)—actually carried out,through eating, after the funeral—is not logical, but psychologically, it isvery comforting. The transition from somber reflection to celebration can bedramatic (as, in New Orleans, when the traditional funeral marching bandswitches from mournful shuffle to exuberant jazzy dancing). The decidedlyungloomy tone of an Irish wake, for example, has more to do with the joy ofstill being among the living than sadness over the loss of a friend or relative.In a sense, the funeral feast marks the end of the initial shock of loss and thebeginning of continued life for the survivors.Rituals, often involving familiar comfort foods, serve to make difficult oremotionally trying events easier to bear for everyone—and funerals are noexception. One such ritual (which seems, itself, to have died out) was themedieval English funeral feast called the arval. The name comes from theOld Norse words arfl and öl, meaning “inheritance” and “ale.” Arvals could,at least for the wealthy, be huge and sumptuous events—though even thepoor would get eggs, bread, wine, and, of course, ale. Funeral bread, a kindof spice cake, was always included. It was replaced, from the seventeenthcentury on, with funeral biscuits—similar to shortbread, and often stamped

Funeral Food 285with the sentence Dies mortis aeternis vitae natalis est ( The day of death isthe birth of eternal life). Funeral biscuits were commonly given to thoseattending the obsequies. By the early nineteenth century, these were producedin commercial bakeries and came wrapped in paper, printed withappropriate verses, and sealed with black wax. Early Americans continuedthe tradition of funeral biscuits for a time—usually in the form of a kind ofmolasses cookie, instead of shortbread.Comfort foods are often brought to bereaved families, to ease the stressof the immediate mourning period (when mourners are not expected tobe fussing over such earthly functions as cooking—for themselves or forthe many visitors who arrive to console them). Casseroles, like the cheesyscalloped potatoes, are so often brought by Mormons and Midwesternprotestants that they are known as funeral potatoes. Indeed, casseroles areuniquely suited for such purposes, as they are filling, familiar, and easilytransportable.RELIGIOUS VARIATIONS ON THE FUNERAL FEASTSince our collection of beliefs varies with our religious environments, itis not surprising that the nature of our funeral feasts varies accordingly.Ideally, Jewish funerals take place within 24 hours of death. After thefuneral, Jewish families and friends share a meal of consolation (seudathavra-ah) at the home of the deceased. Hard-boiled eggs (symbols of lifeand eternity because of their roundness) are eaten, as is bread, anothersymbol of life. Meat is not eaten, because it symbolizes celebration. Forseven days after the funeral, mourners “sit shivah” (for the Orthodox, literallysitting on short stools or on the floor). Again, foods (often sweet cakesand such foods as may be eaten without need for a sit-down dinner) aresupplied to the immediate family by the family and friends who come toconsole them.Islamic law also requires that burial occur within one day. Friends andrelatives bring food to the immediate family for three days afterwards.Dishes brought are very often made with honey, as it is believed to alleviatethe mourners’ grief with its smooth sweetness. The family, in turn, providesonly coffee to the visitors.Christians do not have the time restrictions shared by Hebrews andMoslems. Christians begin bringing prepared food and drink to the bereavedfamily as soon as they get the sad news. It is customary to have a gathering,the night before the funeral, of family and friends of the deceased. Protestantshave a viewing, usually at a funeral home. Catholic viewings traditionallyinclude a prayer service called a wake, followed by food and drink.It should be noted that not all religions have prescribed culinary traditionsassociated with funerals. No special food rituals accompany Buddhistor Shinto funerals. When a Hindu dies, the body is cremated, not buried.While the Hindu mourning period may last from a few days to a year, nofood is brought to the grieving family—perhaps because of the complex

286 Funeral Foodrules governing food in Hinduism (rules that are not based on forbiddeningredients, but on how the food is prepared and who does the cooking).Further Reading: Barber, Paul. Vampires. Burial and Death: Folklore and Reality. NewHaven and London: Yale University Press, 1988; Breers, Peter. “Arvals, Wakes andMonth’s Minds: Food for Funerals.” In Mason, Laura (ed.). Food and the Ritesof Passage. Leeds Symposium on Food History ‘Food and Society’ Series. Devon:Prospect Books, 2002; Davidson, Alan. “Funeral Food.” In Davidson, Alan (ed.).The Oxford Companion to Food. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999;Purvis, Kathleen. “Funeral Food.” In Smith, Andrew (ed.). Food and Drink inAmerica. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004; Rogak, Lisa. Death WarmedOver; Funeral Food, Rituals, and Customs from Around the World. Berkeley,CA: Ten Speed Press, 2004; Sack, Daniel. Whitebread Protestants: Food andReligion in American Culture. New York: Palgrave, 2000; Thursby. Jacqueline S.Funeral Festivals in America: Rituals for the Living Lexington: University Pressof Kentucky, 2006; Webb, Lois Sinaiko. Multicultural Cookbook of Life-CycleCelebrations. Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press, 2000.Gary Allen

GGarden PartyA garden party is a social gathering held in a park or garden. During the lateVictorian era it became fashionable to hold elegant and lavish social eventsin the out-of-doors. While the Victorians were masters of extravagant diningand entertaining, they also celebrated nature and the out-of-doors. The gardenparty became the perfect solution to the problem of how to experiencenature and extravagant dining simultaneously.The practice of the garden party is thought to be an outgrowth of theweekend getaways that were held at the country homes of the upper classesin England and the United States. In the afternoons and early evenings, thegrounds would be lit with lanterns and long buffet tables would be set forthe guests. These were very festive gatherings, and guests tended to dress upfor the occasion. The concept of the garden gathering was so appealing thatit came to be used for any type of party.Garden parties have been taking place at Buckingham Palace since 1860when Queen Victoria instituted her first “breakfast,” which was actuallyheld in the afternoon. Buckingham Palace Garden is the setting for manyRoyal Garden Parties held by the queen each summer.Contemporary magazines, such as Harper’s Bazaar and Ladies’ HomeJournal, often detailed the extravagant society garden parties, or reported

288 Garden PartyMembers of the British royal family, including King George V and King Edward VIII,gathered around Queen Victoria at a garden party, 1936. Library of Congress.on the preparations for upcoming events. Such events had to be arrangedweeks beforehand, and arrangements had to be prepared in the event of badweather. The hostess usually sent out her invitations two weeks in advance.Invitations were engraved and printed on a sheet of plain notepaper or onethat simply bore the family crest in watermark only. Unless the house wasa very large one, which could accommodate a large group of guests, invitationsnoted that the event was “weather permitting.” Generally, childrenwere not invited to garden parties. It was feared that they would get tooexcited and interfere with the enjoyment of the adults.If the garden party was to take place in a suburban location, local peoplewere expected to arrive by carriage. If guests were traveling from thecity, the invitations would have a card enclosed with the directions plainlygiven as to the hours of trains, which train or boat to take, and any otherinstructions necessary for the guests, such as “carriages will meet the arrivalof the 3:30 P.M. train from Grand Central.” For those events held on out-ofthe-waycountry properties, still more explicit directions would be given.When the carriages arrived, guests would be shown to rooms wherethey could freshen up after their journey. Servants would be available toassist guests and to show them to where the party was to take place. Thehostess would receive her guests on the lawn. They would then be free towander through the grounds.Porches, piazzas, and shaded areas were filled with chairs for guests tosit and chat and enjoy the view. It was not unusual for upholstered furni-

Garden Party 289Minister Griscom’s garden party, 1936. Library of Congress.ture and armchairs to be moved outdoors and intermingled with the wickerchairs and lawn furniture. Often, pieces of stair carpeting were placed infront of the chairs, and Turkish rugs were laid down on the grass to helpprotect long dresses in case the grass was damp. Every effort was made sothat even the elderly and rheumatic could be comfortable and enjoy theparty. Often a platform was laid for dancing. A band, offering a variety ofmusic ranging from formal to popular, was essential to any successful gardenparty.Customarily, a garden party was always held entirely out-of-doors.Often a tent covered the area where the refreshments were served. Forsmaller affairs, refreshments were sometimes placed inside the house, generallyin the dining room. If the hostess planned to serve her menu outdoors,it was important that all her dishes were cold. In the summer of 1882,Harper’s Bazaar suggested salads, cold birds, ham, tongue, pâté de foie gras,cold patties, salmon dressed with a green sauce, jellies, Charlottes (a chilleddessert made from bread or sponge cake, filled with fruit puree or custard),ices, cakes, punch, and champagne as appropriate garden party fare. A cupof hot tea would always be available in the house for those who desired it.

290 Garden PartyFruit was a popular offering. Melons, peaches, grapes, and strawberries wereall served throughout the season. Some parties were conducted much likean afternoon high tea and some included hot cakes and hot broiled chicken.Guests were seated at tables in small groups.Every effort was made to preserve the proprieties of a proper dinner.There were no piles of dirty dishes, knives, forks, or spoons visible to spoilthe bucolic setting. Servants carried baskets so that anything that neededto be discarded could be quickly hidden from view. Sufficient quantitiesof glass, china, and plenty of linen napkins were kept ready, so there wasno delay in serving the refreshments. The lemonade and punch bowls werecontinually replenished. Servants in caps and aprons would watch the table,making sure that sufficient clean cups, spoons, plates, wine glasses, and forkswere available. Every propriety was followed. When strawberries and creamwere served, a small napkin was placed between the saucer and plate, and adessert spoon and fork were handed with each plate.Claret, champagne, brandy, and soda water were all provided on a separatetable for the gentlemen. Although a gentleman could step up to thistable and help himself, a servant was always in attendance to remove thewine glasses, tumblers, and goblets as they were used; to replenish the decantersand pitchers as they were emptied; and to supply fresh glasses. Manyhosts offered old Madeira, sherry, and port as well. Decanters were alsoplaced on the regular luncheon table, and glasses of wine carried on silvertrays were brought by servants to the ladies who were sitting on the piazzasand under the trees. Small thin tumblers were used for the claret and champagne,which were served in silver or glass pitchers. Many hostesses rentedthe necessary glass, silver, and china from the caterer’s best china rather thanrisk having their own broken in the rough setting.Amusements were available for younger guests. Archery targets andequipment would be only one of the activities that would be set up inadvance so that guests could partake in the sport. Croquet was particularlypopular among women, as it required considerable skill but little strengthor technique. Men tended to be less passionate about the sport but appreciatedits social advantage since both men and women played together. Lawntennis was another popular sport. Initially, it involved simply patting theball back and forth without keeping score. Soon, however, players becamecaught up in the competitive spirit. More active than croquet or archery,tennis was viewed as an excellent exercise for mind and body and had particularappeal to men. By the 1880s it had become the rage in fashionablesummer resorts. If there was a lake on the property, boats would be madeavailable and care was taken to be sure that an experienced boatman was onhand. For those less interested in physical activity a card party or a game ofcheckers could be played under the trees.During the late nineteenth century, public garden parties became popular.These were held on semi-official occasions, such as the laying of a foundationstone for a public building, the birthday of a prominent individual,a Sunday school festival, or an entertainment given to a political official.

Garden Party 291These affairs were less formal and invitations were somewhat more general,sometimes even being extended by announcement or public notice.Today, garden parties are no longer only for the well-to-do. The moderngarden party can be very free-form, or use a special occasion or theme asthe basis for the event. They are held in backyards and in public gardensor on the grounds of historic buildings. Even apartment dwellers can hosta garden party on their terrace or patio. Many are used to raise funds forcommunity causes, but even more are simply an opportunity for friendsand family to celebrate a lovely day in the out-of-doors. There are no rulesto dictate foods, music, or activities. Frisbee is more likely than archery. Theone constant is bringing a bit of indoor elegance outdoors.Further Reading: Bales, Suzy Frutig. Garden Parties. New York: Clarkson N. Potter,2003; Snow, Shelley, and Elaine Husband. Gathering in the Garden: Recipes andIdeas for Garden Parties. Sterling, VA: Capital Books, 2003.Dorothy Denneen Volo

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About the Editorsand ContributorsMELITTA WEISS ADAMSON is professor in the Department of ModernLanguages and Literatures and the Department of History of Medicineat the University of Western Ontario, Canada. She has written extensivelyon medieval food and dietetics, and has published five books on the subject:Food in the Middle Ages (1995); Medieval Dietetics (1995); Daz bouchvon guoter spise (The Book of Good Food): A Study, Edition, and EnglishTranslation of the Oldest German Cookbook ( 2000); Regional Cuisines ofMedieval Europe ( 2002); and most recently Food in Medieval Times (Greenwood,2004).FRANCINE SEGAN is a cultural historian who has appeared on numerousradio and TV programs, including Martha Stewart Radio, NPR, NBC’sToday Show, CBS’s Early Show, and Sunday Morning with Charles Osgood.In addition she has done several specials for the History and Discoverychannels and the Food Network. Segan writes a monthly column on traveland food for the Tribune Media Syndicates, which reaches over 65 newspapersacross the country. She has published four books including Shakespeare’sKitchen (2003) and Opera Lover’s Cookbook (2006), which wasnominated for both James Beard and IACP awards. In addition to teachingat Sarah Lawrence College, Segan lectures on various topics, including

570 About the Editors and Contributorsart history, throughout the country for organizations such as the SmithsonianMuseum, Dahesh Museum, Virginia Fine Arts Museum, NormanRockwell Museum, Museum of Natural History, and Newport HistoricalAssociation.KEN ALBALA is professor of history at the University of the Pacific inStockton, California. He has authored many books on food including EatingRight in the Renaissance, Food in Early Modern Europe, Cooking in Europe:1250–1650, The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Late RenaissanceEurope, and Beans: A History. He is currently working on a textbook onworld cuisines for the Culinary Institute of America. He has also editedthree series for Greenwood Press—Food Culture around the World, Cookingthrough History, and Food Cultures in the United States—and has coeditedwith Gary Allen The Business of Food.JOAN P. ALCOCK is an archaeologist and historian who has writtenwidely on Celtic and Roman history, local history, and food history. She isa Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and an Honorary VisitingFellow of London South Bank University. She is at present writing books onthe pagan Celts and life in ancient Rome.GARY ALLEN teaches at Empire State College, is food history editor atLeitesculinaria, and webmaster for the Association for the Study of Foodand Society. His most recent book is The Herbalist in the Kitchen (2007). Healso co-edited Greenwood’s The Business of Food: Encyclopedia of the Foodand Drink Industries (2007).LESLEY BANNATYNE is an author who writes on Halloween. She isalso a journalist who has covered a wide range of subjects from Tibetan immigrantsto education reform. Bannatyne’s books include a history of Halloween,a how-to, an anthology of Halloween literature from the past 400years, and a children’s book, Witches Night before Halloween.JOANNA BAROUCH tested recipes for and contributed to Opera Lover’sCookbook and has also tested recipes for Cook’s Illustrated magazine. Aresident of New Jersey, Joanna is a professional musician and devoted cook.She delights in travel, foreign language study, writing, and the entertainmentof family and friends.T. W. BARRITT is a food writer and communications consultant; he isa member of the Culinary Historians of New York and has studied at theFrench Culinary Institute in New York and Apicius, the Culinary Instituteof Florence. He is also the author of Culinary Types, Stories of Food and FoodEnthusiasts at http://culinarytypes.blogspot.com and http://www.culinarytypes.com.

About the Editors and Contributors 571CYNTHIA D. BERTELSEN is a nutritionist, food historian and researcher,chair of Peacock-Harper Culinary History Friends, cookbook collectorand bibliophile, author of several articles on cookbook indexing andethnic cooking, and editor of The Virginia Culinary Thymes. She has lived andworked in Mexico, Paraguay, Honduras, Haiti, Morocco, and Burkina Faso.TAMARA V. BIGELOW is a culinary consultant in the New York area.She develops consumer recipes and product prototypes for magazines andfood companies. She was raised in Hawaii and attended the University ofMichigan and the Institute of Culinary Education in New York City. Shelives with her daughter in New Jersey.INA B. CHADWICK began her career as a poet with her work appearingin literary publications such as The Paris Review and The Antioch Review.Subsequently she was the managing editor of several major newspapersand trade magazines, winning awards for both writing and editing. Withmore than 500 bylines, she is currently a generalist in both journalism andmarketing writing with a particular interest in lifestyle, trends, health, andbusiness.SHIRLEY CHERKASKY is a culinary historian and founding member ofthe Culinary Historians of Washington, DC, and the Culinary History Enthusiastsof Wisconsin. She is an active member of the International Commissionon Ethnological Food Research and has compiled an internationaldirectory of more than 1,300 food and beverage museums (available onwww.foodhistorynews.com). She was coordinator of public programs at theSmithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History for manyyears and, since retirement, has been an independent scholar, researchingculinary history.AMANDA LYNN CLARKE is a pastry chef, freelance writer, andfood-stylist based in Brooklyn, New York. She is a weekly contributorto seriouseats.com and the author of New York Architecture: A History(as Amanda Johnson). Her food styling has appeared in the New YorkTimes, TimeOut NY’s 2007 Restaurant Guide, and in special promotionsfor CondéNet.JONATHAN DEUTSCH is a classically trained chef and assistant professorin the Department of Tourism and Hospitality at KingsboroughCommunity College, City University of New York. He is the secretary ofthe Association for the Study of Food and Society and the education editorof the journal Food, Culture and Society. He earned his PhD in food studiesand food management at New York University and is a graduate of DrexelUniversity and the Culinary Institute of America. He has worked as a chefin the United States and abroad.

572 About the Editors and ContributorsPEGGYANN ROGERS DÍAZ owns and operates Stir Crazy, LLC and isa full-time chef instructor at Masuk High School in Monroe, Connecticut.CAROL G. DURST-WERTHEIM has taught and served in the administrationof several New York metropolitan colleges and universities, culinary,food studies, and hospitality programs. She was the first director of the NewYork Restaurant School, owned a catering business, and wrote I Knew YouWere Coming So I Baked a Cake. She serves on the board of WCR, has beenactively involved in the New York Women’s Culinary Alliance, worked oncookbook awards and baking contests, leads “Menus at the Movies” at alocal library, and recently completed her doctorate researching women inthe food industry.KATHERINE BLISS EATON has her MA and PhD in ComparativeLiterature from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her publicationsinclude: The Theater of Meyerhold and Brecht (Greenwood Press, 1985);Enemies of the People: The Destruction of Soviet Literary, Theater, and FilmArts in the 1930s (editor, 2002); Daily Life in the Soviet Union (GreenwoodPress, 2004). She was twice a Fulbright Professor in Romania (1982–83 and1990–91). From 1984–1997 she was Professor of English and ESL at TarrantCounty College, Fort Worth, Texas.SIOBHAN FAGAN is a food writer and lives in New York.RIEN T. FERTEL is a native of Louisiana. Born in Lafayette, he grew upin the kitchen of his mother’s restaurant, learning to wash dishes and prepvegetables before he mastered the spelling of his own unconventional name.Later he operated a New Orleans eatery, devastatingly closed by HurricaneKatrina. Rien is now working through the years of his graduate studies inAmerican History. With a foolish sense of pride and purpose, he wants to saveNew Orleans from herself.STEPHANIE FOGEL is a New York City–based writer and craftsperson.In the last few years her writing has focused on health, nutrition, and food.Of special interest are the historical, medicinal, and ethno-botanical aspectsof foods.ALLISON GREEN is a graduate of the Institute of Culinary Educationand holds a degree in Italian from Middlebury College in Vermont. She is afreelance food writer who has worked with Chile Pepper magazine and theDaily Star Journal of Warrensburg, Kansas.KUSUM GUPTA was born in India and received her BA (economicshonors) and post-graduate diploma in economic administration from DelhiUniversity, India. She has been in the United States since 1966 and worked

About the Editors and Contributors 573at IBM for almost 25 years. Her main interest is a balanced approach toeating and living to ensure mental, emotional, and physical health. Shehas published two books: Hindu Spirituality: A Practical Approach Basedon the Bhagavad Gita and Recipes with a Spice: Indian Cuisine for BalancedNutrition.W. SCOTT HAINE received his PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and currently teaches at the University of Maryland UniversityCollege. His books include The World of the Parisian Café: Sociability amongthe French Working Class, 1789–1914 (1996), The History of France (GreenwoodPress, 2000, chosen by Choice as an outstanding academic title for2001), and The Customs and Culture of France (Greenwood Press, 2006).He has contributed articles to other Greenwood encyclopedias such asHistorical Dictionary of World War II France: The Occupation, Vichy, and theResistance (1938–1946) (Greenwood Press, 1998) and Encyclopedia of Prostitutionand Sex Work (Greenwood Press, 2006).JOANNE LAMB HAYES is a New York City food writer, editor, historian,and author or co-author of more than a dozen cookbooks includingGrandma’s Wartime Baking Book: World War II and the Way We Baked andGrandma’s Wartime Kitchen: World War II and the Way We Cooked. Sheholds a PhD from New York University’s Department of Nutrition, FoodStudies, and Public Health and was on the staff of several national magazinesfor over 20 years.KURT HEFFERN has been a landscape designer for more than 25 years,creating majestic yards in California and Arizona. Over the years, Kurt hasgraduated from keg parties to tequila, once a hell raiser, always a hell raiser.Kurt resides in Arizona with his family and three dogs, Delilah, Samson,and Skii.SHANNON HEFFERN has been a registered dietitian for 20 years,working in the areas of menu development, corporate wellness, and healthcoaching. Heffern was raised in North Dakota, experiencing first hand howto garden and cook from her mother and grandmother. Shannon resides inScottsdale, Arizona, with her husband, Kurt, and daughter, Jade.KATHY HUNT’s writings have been published in a variety of nationalnewspapers and magazines including the Chicago Sun-Times, VegNews, TheSun, and Chester County Town and Country Living. She divides her timebetween New York and an 1801 farmhouse in suburban Philadelphia.CHIKA M. JENKINS is a graduate of Columbia University and the Instituteof Culinary Education, both in the City of New York. She has worked atMichelin-starred restaurants in Manhattan as a line cook.

574 About the Editors and ContributorsALEXA REYNOLDS JOHNSON is a graduate of Le Cordon Bleu andholds a degree in Food Studies from New York University. She currentlyworks for Fairway Markets.CATHY K. KAUFMAN is the chairperson of the Culinary Historiansof New York and a professional chef who teaches historical cookery at theInstitute of Culinary Education. She has edited or contributed to numerousencyclopedias and journals and is the author of Cooking in Ancient Civilizations(2006). She is currently writing a history of the dining room.JESSICA KOKINOS-HAVEL is a graduate student at the Institute ofCulinary Education in New York City and works as a freelance food writer.BRUCE KRAIG is Emeritus Professor of History at Roosevelt University,Chicago, who specializes in the history and politics of food, and has publishedwidely in the field. He is also the founding president of the CulinaryHistorians of Chicago and a convener of the Greater Midwest FoodwaysAlliance.JOSÉ LOVERA lives in Caracas. He has traveled the whole world, especiallySouth America. He is the author of Historia de la alimentación enVenezuela (1988), Gastronomía Caribeña (1991), and Food Culture in SouthAmerica (Greenwood Press, 2005), among other books, and has publishednumerous articles in journals and newspapers from Venezuela and othercountries. He contributed to the UNESCO General History of Latin Americain food history matters. He is associate professor (retired ) at the Schoolof History of the Universidad Central de Venezuela.JEFFREY MAKALA is assistant special collections librarian in Rare Booksand Special Collections at the University of South Carolina. His interestsinclude the history of the book in America, contemporary book arts, andAmerican culinary history, especially the intersections of cooking, cookbookproduction, and gender in the twentieth century.WANDA MANN is an events producer in New York City and creator of theMann About Town events newsletter. Wanda is also the founder of FrocksRocks & Cocktails and creates events that showcase fashion, jewelry, wine, andspirits. Wanda has published articles about sports, beauty, fashion, and lifestyle.ERIN G. MARRAZZO is a freelance writer and editor. She splits her timebetween New York City and Bonn, Germany.MARTY MARTINDALE is a food writer residing in Largo, Florida. Shewrites for many sources.

About the Editors and Contributors 575LESLIE A. MEYER is a professionally trained chef, culinarian, and foodwriter with a passion for food and cooking. A graduate of the prestigiousFrench Culinary Institute, Leslie currently owns and operates her own culinaryconsultancy that highlights her skills as a writer, teacher, and foodstylist. She has worked with such notable organizations as Microplane andAmerica’s Test Kitchen to advance their publications through research,writing, and testing.JONATHAN MILDER has worked for the Food Network since 2003,where he is currently research librarian.FRAN OSSEO-ASARE, MSW, PhD, is an internationally recognizedauthority, teacher, and author on Sub-Saharan African food and culture; asociologist; a member of the International Association of Culinary Professionals;an award-winning instructional materials designer; and founder ofBETUMi: the African Culinary Network (http://www.betumi.com) and itscompanion BetumiBlog (http: //www.betumi.com / blog.html).ERICA J. PETERS received her PhD in 2000 from the University of Chicagoand is the director of the Culinary Historians of Northern California.She has published in French Historical Studies and the Journal of VietnameseStudies, and is currently finishing a book on food, drink, and politics innineteenth-century Vietnam.PIETRO PIRANI is assistant professor in the Department of ModernLanguages and Literatures at the University of Western Ontario, London(Canada). He has also taught at Wilfrid Laurier University and McMasterUniversity in Canada. His most recent research project focuses on the impactof culture on politics in Italy post–World War II.DIANA PITTET is a graduate of New York University’s master’s programin food studies. She has worked at a cheese shop in London and has writtenabout the history of cheese in England and the United States. A formerLatin teacher, she is the assistant editor ( production) for Classical World andthe editorial assistant for Alimentum.CHRISTY POPE has emerged as one of the world’s most recognizedand talented people in the spirits industry today. Acknowledged for herpassion for the artistry and history of the trade, she brings the “spirit” toevents around the world by presiding over her and Chad Solomon’s cocktailcatering company Cuff & Buttons. Christy has been featured in, orcontributed to the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the WashingtonPost, Food & Wine, Imbibe, The Robb Report, Lucky Magazine, and ModernBride.

576 About the Editors and ContributorsAMMINI RAMACHANDRAN is a freelance food writer and author ofGrains, Greens, and Grated Coconuts: Recipes and Remembrances of a VegetarianLegacy. She has written for Gastronomica, Flavor & Fortune, the Food HistoryPrimer, http://www.Sallys-place.com and her own Web site http://www.peppertrail.com. Her recipes have appeared in the Providence Journal and athttp://www.leitesculinaria.com.PAUL RUSCHMANN is a writer and researcher who lives in Canton,Michigan. He is one of the creators of BeerFestivals.org, an online beer festivalcalendar. His writing about beer has appeared in a number of print andonline publications, including All about Beer magazine where he writes aregular “Beer Travelers” column.MARY SANKER is a librarian and writer in Cincinnati, Ohio. She contributedto The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America (2004).ELLEN M. SCHNEPEL is an independent scholar and practicing anthropologistin New York City. She has conducted fieldwork in the French WestIndies and Mauritius on language politics, ethnic identity, and changing patternsof food production and consumption. Her numerous articles have appearedin academic journals, including Gastronomica: The Journal of Foodand Culture.AMY SEIFRIED is a writer with a master’s degree in English. She haswritten on a variety of topics, including entertaining, food, theater, and legaltrends. Currently, she lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.RUTH SHIBUYA received her PhD from Purdue University. She is thefounder of the Health Science Department and faculty emerita at WesternConnecticut State University.LAUREN SHOCKEY is a food writer based in New York City. A graduateof the French Culinary Institute and currently pursuing a master of artsin food studies at New York University, she has written about food for avariety of publications including the New York Times Style Magazine, Gastronomica,Elle Girl, and Zink.ANDREW F. SMITH teaches food studies and professional food writingat the New School in New York City. He is the author of 13 books, includingThe Turkey: An American Story and the Encyclopedia of Junk Food andFast Food, and he serves as the editor-in-chief of the Oxford Companion toAmerican Food and Drink.CHAD SOLOMON has emerged as one of the world’s most recognizedand talented people in the spirits industry today. Acknowledged for his

About the Editors and Contributors 577passion for the artistry and history of the trade, he brings the “spirit” toevents around the world by presiding over his and Christy Pope’s cocktailcatering company Cuff & Buttons. They have been featured in, or contributedto the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Food& Wine, Imbibe, The Robb Report, Lucky Magazine, and Modern Bride.MARIA G. STEINBERG graduated with a master of arts degree in foodstudies and food management at New York University. She is currently amarketing manager at a New York–based specialty food company. She alsodoes food writing. Her work has appeared in U.S., Asian, and Europeanpublications.LIZ TARPY is the founder of Teaberry Productions, a company specializingin culinary research, recipe testing and editing, and food writing. Herwritings have appeared in the International Association of Culinary Professionals’newsletter and on StarChefs.com. Her article on German farmhousecooking is slated for publication in Saveur magazine in fall 2008.KAREN LAU TAYLOR earned her BA from Tufts University in internationalrelations and history. She began her career as a government defenseconsultant, honing her research and writing skills. In 2008 she earnedher MA in food studies from New York University and graduated fromL’Academie de Cuisine’s Pastry Arts program. Karen is now a writer based inWashington, DC.KIRSTEN TAYLOR has a PhD in chemistry from the University of Canterbury,New Zealand. Following her scientific studies she moved to NewYork City, where she wrote food articles and studied toward a masters ingastronomy online through the University of Adelaide in Australia. She isback in New Zealand where she and her cousin have recently started thecountry’s first cupcake-dedicated bakery.MICHAEL W. TWITTY is a food historian focused on documenting andpreserving the food and folk traditions of enslaved West and Central Africansand their descendants in the American South. He is author of FightingOld Nep: The Foodways of Enslaved Afro-Marylanders 1634–1864.EUGENIA VAN VLIET is a Seattle-based author who has degrees incultural anthropology and classical archeology. She has written cookbooksfor teenagers on American regional cooking, for Amber Books in the UnitedKingdom, and she is currently writing a column for the Seattle FarmersMarket Newsletter on culinary history. Eugenia has taught food history ofMexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America on the CelebrityCruise Line and is doing culinary dinners based on different cultures andtimes at Cook’s World in Seattle.

578 About the Editors and ContributorsCHRISTINE VENZON is a freelance writer living in Peoria, Illinois. Shespecializes in food, nutrition, and educational writing.DOROTHY DENNEEN VOLO is a teacher and historian. She receivedher bachelor’s degree at the College of Mount St. Vincent in 1971 and herPhD from Berne University in 2002. Dorothy has been intimately involvedin local history in Connecticut for many years, and she has a particular interestin the history of American education. She served as a consultant for theCSPN Yellow Bus series “CSPAN Does de Tocqueville” in 1997. Togetherwith her husband, James M. Volo, she has co-authored almost a dozen referenceworks on American history. These include Daily Life in Civil WarAmerica (Greenwood, 1998), Family Life in the 19th Century (Greenwood,2007), the Popular Culture of the Antebellum Period (Greenwood, 2004),and the Encyclopedia of the Antebellum South (Greenwood, 2000).JAMES M. VOLO, PhD, has been teaching physics, physical science, and astronomyfor the past 40 years. He received his bachelor’s degree from CCNYin 1969, his master’s from American Military University, and his doctoratefrom Berne University. He has taught science education for secondary and elementaryschools teachers on the graduate level for more than 15 years. He isthe author of several reference works regarding U.S. military, social, and culturalhistory, and has served as a consultant for TV and movie productions.SUZANNE C. WELTMAN is Creative Food Officer of Foodways, Inc.,a culinary consulting group. With over two decades in the food industry,Ms. Weltman has worked with manufacturers, corporate test kitchens, andcookbook authors. Recipient of a Julia Child scholarship, Ms. Weltman studiedat the Culinary Institute of America and Le Cordon Bleu, Paris. Sheearned a Master of Liberal Arts in food anthropology from the Universityof Pennsylvania, and taught at New York University’s Department of Nutrition,Food Studies and Public Health. Ms. Weltman was a contributor toEncyclopedia of Appalachia (2006 ) and has published numerous food featurearticles and restaurant reviews.JAN WHITAKER is author of Tea at the Blue Lantern Inn: A Social Historyof the Tea Room Craze in America; Service and Style: How the American DepartmentStore Fashioned the Middle Class; and articles on the restaurant business,food science, and other aspects of commercial and consumer history. Her currentresearch involves restaurant history.DEBORAH WINDERS grew up on a self-reliant farm and learned aboutgrowing and preserving food early in life. She made a late start for a master’sin nutrition, circuitously earning a degree in agronomy. She has also workedin clinical pediatric, community, and long-term care. She has a passion forstudying the cultural aspects of food.

IndexPage numbers in bold indicate main entries in the encyclopedia.Absinthe, 391–93Action, Eliza, 58, 79Adams, Sam, 503Advent, 102Africa: ancient, 469–70; central,473–75; composition of, 469; eastern,470 –72; history of, 469; hospitalityand, 468 – 69; naming ceremoniesof, 473; outdoor ceremonies of, 473;southern, 476 –77; symbols of, 468;western, 472–73African Americans: bachelor partiesand, 43; birthday parties and,children’s celebration of, 124–25;Juneteenth and, 333–34; soul food of,457– 60Africanus, 26Afternoon tea, 507Age, important celebrations of: Bar/BatMitzvah, 44– 45; birthdays, 65, 125Agincourt, battle of, 526Aku poke luau, 351Albala, Ken, 118Alcohol, 411–12, 503Alcott, Louisa May, 64Alcott, William, 517Alexander the Great, 13, 15Aliyah, 44Alley, Tin Pan, 64All Saints’ Day: contemporarycelebration of, 451; defined, 447;festivals, 448; foods and beveragesof, 449–51; history of, 447– 48;importance of, 451; medieval conceptof, 450; preparations for, 449;purpose of, 449All Souls’ Day, 109Almack, William, 208Almack Assembly Room, 208America: bridal shower trends in, 92;cheese consumption in, 119–20;consumerism in, 174–76, 181– 82;

580 Indexcookbooks in, 190, 192–93; cultureand lifestyles in, 3–7; dance and,180; debutante ball in, popularityof, 210; desserts in, 219; dininghistory of, 78; entertainment in, 173;French-style service dining ritualsin, 177; Halloween in, celebrationof, 296 –300; history of, 173;holiday celebrations in, 181, 512;masquerades in, 368; midday mealin, role of, 178 –79; Prohibition in,response to, 413–15; settlers of, first,173–74; social graces of elite in, 179;taverns and public houses in, 180– 81;transportation in, 1–3American frontier, 1–7American Hotel, 6American Notes for General Circulation(Dickens), 5Ancient Greece, 7–18Ancient Rome, 18 – 29André, John, 504Animals and medieval dining, fantasy,375Anna of Austria, 136Anne of Bohemia, 526Anniversaries, 29–31Anniversary parties, 29–32Antipasto, 32–34Apicius, 11, 75Apollo, 13Appetizers, 33Apples, 9Arabs, 75, 102Aranjanam, 121Archaic Age, 8Ariadne, 15Aristophane, 13Armour and Company, 547Army Corps of Engineers, 67Arnold, Benedict, 504Artificial fast food, 251Artos, 8Ashurnasirpal II, 75Asia: bachelor parties in, 43; dessertsof, 219; entertainment and dininghistory of, 75–76Asparagus, 9Aspinwall, Marguerite, 80Astor Hotel, 297Athenaeus, 10, 14, 107Athens, 8Atole, 35Attic honey, 10Atticus, 23Augustus, 23Aunt Jemima, 139Austin, Jane, 208Aztec entertaining, 34 –37Aztecs: banquets of, 36 –37; chocolaterituals of, 134–35; corn, importanceof, 35; feasts of, 35–36; food sourcesof, 35Baby shower, 39– 41Bachelor party, 41– 43Bachelors, 453–54Baci kisses, 529Bagel brunch, 94Bainian, 131Bakers, 8Balance and dim sum, 221Balkan Peninsula, 7– 8Ball, New Year’s Eve, 384Baltimore and Ohio Railroad(B & O), 2–3Baltouf, Anna, 137Bancroft, George, 68Banquet of the Sages (Plutarch), 14Banquets: Aztecs and, 36 –37; formaltable settings and, 491; funerary,28; medieval dining and, 370 –71;Renaissance, 417–18; restaurants and,428 –29; Russian, 432Barbaro, Hermolo, 420Bar/Bat Mitzvah, 44– 46Barbeque, 46 –50; concept of, 50;defined, 46; geographic differences in,49–50; history of, 46, 48; pork, 47–50; southern-style, 46 – 47; tidewaterregions and development of, 50Barbeque Belt, 47Barley, 3, 8Barn raising, 46, 50–53Barry, Beatrice, 295Bars, tapas, 498 –99Bartering, 29–30Baskets, Easter, 238

Index 581Battuta, Ibn, 470Beans, 9Beard, James, 80Beaubien, Mark, 7Bed and board, 3, 6Beer halls and beer gardens, 53–57Bees, 10Beeton, Isabella, 57–59, 74, 79Beeton, Mayson Moss, 58Beeton, Samuel Orchart, 57–58Beeton’s Book of Household Management(Beeton), 58, 74Begué, Hypolite, 94Begué, Madame, 93–94Beistle Company, 298Belching Pig, 502Belenos, 108Benbow, Admiral, 502Benedict, Lemuel, 94Beringer, Guy, 93Berry, Chuck, 65Bertram, Thomas, 208Betty Crocker, 59– 62Betty Crocker Cooking School ofthe Air, 60Beverages. see Food and beverages,history ofBible, 62, 537Bierkeller, 53Birthdays, 62–66; cultures andcelebration of, 62– 63; food and,important role of, 64; greeting cardsand, 64– 65; history of celebrationof, 62; new born celebrationsin India and, 120 –21; parties,age-specific, 65, 122–25; petcelebrations and, 66; picture-takingduring, 65– 66; purpose of, 63– 64;religious celebrations of, 63; Russiancelebrations of, 444; songs and, 64;symbolic meaning of, 65Bishop, Boy, 145Bitters, 33Blair, Francis Preston, 67Blair House, 66 – 69Blair-Lee House, 69Blind tasting, 542Blob’s Park, 56Block party, 70 –71Boat Decks, 200Bon, Philip le, 375Book clubs, 71–74Books, 73Books on entertaining and dining,history of, 74 – 81Boston Cooking School, 60, 514Boston Tea Party, 503– 4Bottarga, 33Bourbon, 3Bowery, 54Bradford, William, 512Brazil, 81–89; birthday parties in,124; cannibalistic practices in,81– 82; carnivals associated with,81; colonization of, 82– 83; foodsof, traditional, 84; history of, 81;Portuguese relationship with, 82,84– 86; Republic of, establishment of,86 – 89; slaves of, 83, 84Bread, white (artos), 8Brethren, Arval, 24Bridal shower, 89 –93Bride and groom, showering of, 534Bridewealth, 30Brigit, 108Brillat-Savarin, Jean-Anthêlme, 79, 119Britain, 78, 119Brotzeit, 94Brunch, 93–95Bruschetta, 33Buddha, 63Buffet, 95–98, 313Bugesses, Virginia, 503Buitoni, Giovani, 529Bunny, Easter, 237–38Buren, Martin Van, 67Burgers, 259– 61Burn, Robert, 294Burros, Marian, 80Business travelers, international, 400Butler, Rhett, 49Byrd, William II, 147Byron, Lord, 521Cabral, Pedro Alvares, 82Cacao tree, 135Cadbury, John, 139Caesar, Julius, 23, 24

582 IndexCafeterias, 97Cake and candles, 99 –104; Arabiancontributions to, 102; contemporaryforms of, 102; food coloring and,use of, 101–2; history of, 99–100,102–3; quality of, importance of,101; rituals and, 103; symbols of, 99;technological improvements in, 100;traditions of, common, 103; typesof, 100 –101Calhoun, John C., 67Caligula, 21, 22, 25Cameras, 65– 66Campari, 33Campbell, Christina, 503Candy, 529Cane sugar, 214Cannibalism, 81– 82Cappadocian bakers, 8Cardboard doilies and coasters, 229Carême, Antonin, 78Caribbean: bachelor parties, 43; blockparties, 70Carnivals, 81Carpe noctem, 301Carter, Charles, 78Cassell, Edward P., 432Castillo, Bernal Diaz del, 35–36Catering, 104–6, 431–32Catherine of Valois, 526Catholicism, 136 –37Cato the Elder, 21, 23, 25Ceiba, 135Celtic feasting, 107–13; beveragesconsumed during, 111–12;chieftains and, 112; entertainmentduring, 112; festivals and, 108 –9;food preservation and, 107; foodsconsumed during, 107– 8, 109;history of, 107; purpose of, 109–10;tales of, 110 –11Centerpieces, 375–76; Chinese, 243;defined, 240; historical examplesof, 240 – 42; Japanese, 243; modern,242– 43Central Africa, 473–75Cereal, 8Cervio, Vincenzo, 76Chafing dish, 113–15Chafing dish suppers, concept of, 114Chai, 45Champagne, 115–17Champarado, 140Chardonnay, 115Charitable (community) cookbooks,history of, 188Charles II, 529Charles the Bold, 77Charles V, 77Charles VI, 77Charlotte, Queen, 431Charpentier, Jean-Baptiste, 137Chase, David, 530Cheese, 9, 117–20Cheese course, history of, 117–20Chef’s clothing, 341– 42Chicago, Illinois, 7Chickpeas, 9Chic restaurants, 430 –31Chieftains, 112Chiffon cakes, 100Child, Julia, 80Child, Lydia Maria, 512Child, Theodore, 390 –91Childhood in South India, 120–22Children’s birthday parties, 122–25Children’s’ celebrations, 130, 298–300.See also BirthdaysChina: bridal showers in, 92; desserts of,218 –19; edible centerpieces in, 243;entertainment and dining history of,76; funeral foods in, 283; New Year’scelebrations in, 129–32; weddingreceptions in, 535Chinampas, 35Chinese banquets, 126 –29Chinese New Year, 129 –32Chocolate, 132– 41; Aztec ritualsassociated with, 134–35; bar, 139;beverages, 137–38; Catholicismassociated with, 136 –37; desserts,217–18; European, 135–36; historyof, 132; Mayan rituals associatedwith, 134–35; Mesoamerican originsof, 133–34; parlors/houses, 137–38;popularity of, 140 – 41; productionof, 132–33Chooroonu, 121Chopsticks, 141– 43Chretien, Jean-Loup, 117

Index 583Christ Child, 146Christenings, 440 – 41Christmas, 143–54; celebration of,143– 49; cookies, 151– 52; food anddrink of, traditional, 149–53; historyof, 143; party favors, 396A Christmas Carol (Dickens), 143Chuck E. Cheese restaurant, 124Cicero, 23, 25Circus Maximus, 25City elite, 8Civil Rights Act of 1964, 46Civil War, 154–63; holiday feastingduring, 157–58; northern hospitalityduring, 158 – 62; southern hospitalityduring, 154–57; taverns’ roleduring, 505Claudius, 25, 525Clothing, 210 –11, 239Clovis, 117Clubs, social, 407Cocktails, 163 – 68; Cosmopolitan,167; defined, 163; history of, 163;origin of, 163– 64; Prohibition linkedto, 165, 166; publications about,164; punch, 163; Roman, 163; salesdecline in, 165; symbol of, 166; typesof, 164Cocoa, 133Coe, Sophie and Michael, 133Coffee, 216 –17, 470 –71Coffeehouses in London, 168 –71;characters of, 169; developmentof, 169; history of, 168; physicalattributes of, 169; society of, 169Coffee klatches, 171–73“The Coffee Republic,” 86Coliseum, 25Colonial America, 173 – 82Colonial Mexico, 182– 85Columella, 21Coming-out-party, 125Communal dining, 428Communal drinking, 54Comparative tasting, 542Complimentary cheese, 117Confections, 529Confucianism, 221Conga, 532Congressional Globe newspaper, 67Congressional Record newspaper, 67Constantinople, 375Consumerism, 174–76, 181– 82Contessa, Barefoot, 80Continental Sunday, 54–55Conversation hearts, 530Convivium, 22, 23Cookbooks: cordials and liqueurs, 195;dining and entertainment, 191–94;Food Network, 267; history of,186 –94; soul food, 460 – 61Cookbooks, history of, 186 –91Cookbooks, tools for entertaining,191– 94Cool Whip, 101Cordials and liqueurs, 194– 97;cookbooks, 195; defined, 194, 195;distilling of, 195; flavorings of, 196 –97; fruits and, 196; history of, 194,196; manufacturers of, 195; typesof, 195–96Corn, 8, 35Cortés, Hernán, 133–34Cosmopolitan cocktails, 167Costumes, 365, 366Couples, dating, 431Court Days, 503Courtesans, 15Cozinheiro Nacional cookbook, 87Crassus, 25Crocker, William G., 60Crop harvesting, 309Croquet, 290Cros, Charles, 390Crostini, 34Crownings, 503Cruise ships, 197–202Crumb trays, 264Cunard Line, 201Cupboards, 371Cupid, 529Cupid’s Messenger, 526Cycle, Ulster, 110Cyclops (Theophrastus of Eresus), 11Dai, bon vivant Zhang, 120Dairy products, 9Dance, 180Darius, 17Dates, 9

584 IndexDawson, Thomas, 77Day of the Dead, 203 – 7Death, 246, 283Debutante balls, 207–11; clothing and,210 –11; defined, 207– 8; history of,208 –10; popularity of, American,210; presentation of, 211De Causis Plantarium (On PlantPhysiology) (Theophrastusof Eresus), 11Declaration of Independence, 504Decurions, 24Deepavali, festival of lights, 211–13Degas, Edgar, 137De Gaulle, Charles, 68Deipnon, 12Deipnosophistae (Athenaeus), 10Democratic National Convention, 379Dennison Manufacturing Company, 298De Re Rustica (Columella), 21De’Rosselli, Giovanni, 76Deschamps, Leon, 390Dessert, 213–20; Asian, 219; Centraland South America, 219; Chinese,218 –19; chocolate, 217–18; coffee,216 –17; customs, 214; defined,213–14; Indian, 219; Japan and, 218;Mediterranean, 219; in Middle Ages,215–16; Middle Eastern, 219; new,exploration and development of,216 –18; practices, 215; sweeteners,214–15; tea, 217; technologicaladvancements in, 220; wine and, 543Diary (Pepys), 526Diaz, Bernal, 113Dickens, Charles, 5, 6 –7, 143Digestion of cheese, 118 –19Dim sum, 220 –24Dinner parties, 224 –27; contemporary,226 –27; current event types, 226;defined, 224; diversity and, 227;Europe and, ancient, 225; Greeceand, 224–25; history of, 224; home,224; presentation of, 225–26;progressive, 408–9; publicationson, 227; Roman, 225; Russian, 226;sensory pleasures and, 225; Victorian,225; women and, 226Diogenes the Cynic, 26Dionysus, 15Dips, 303Distilling, 195Diva, Dea, 24Diversity, 227Dobbins Tavern, 505Dog luau, 350 –51Doilies and coasters, 227–29Dollar dance, 532Domestic manuals, 177–78Door county fish boil, 229–32;equipment required for, 230 –31;history of, 229–30; popularity of,230, 231–32; preparing for,230 –31Dough, 375Doves, 529Dowry, 30Dream Whip, 101Druisius, 27Drunkenness, 19Duff, Hillary, 65Dugnad, 52–53Duke of Edinburgh, 69Duke of Orleans, 526Dukes of Burgundy, 77Dukes of Este, 76Durum wheat, 8Dutch treat, 56, 232–34Dutrey, Louis, 94Dutrey’s Coffee House, 94D’Uxelles, Marquis, 77Dwight, Margaret Van Horn, 4–5Easter, 235– 40; baskets, 238; bunny,237–38; clothing, 239; defined, 235;dinners, 239; eggs, 236 –37; historyof, 235–36; hot cross buns, 238;jellybeans, 238; parades, 240; Russian,238 –39; symbols, 239Eastern Africa, 470 –72Eat-local movement, 190Eaton, H. John, 67Edible centerpieces, 240 – 43Education, 105, 333Eggnog, 153Eggs, Easter, 236 –37Egypt, 244 – 47; cooking in, 244; deathrites, 246; dining in, 244– 45, 246 – 47;food and beverages of, 244; funeralfoods of, 283; music of, 245– 46

Index 585Einkorn, 8Eisenhower, Dwight D., 298Elizabeth I, 151Elizabeth II, 68, 209Elks’ Club, 298El-Shuqqafa, Korn, 28Emmer, 8Employment, 105, 106Engagement rings, 30England: entertainment and dininghistory of, 77; medieval dining and,374–75; Valentine’s Day celebrationin, 527Entertainment and dining history:American, 78, 172; Arabian, 75;Asian, 75–76; authors of, 79– 80;bachelor parties, 42; banquets, 75;bridal showers, 91–92; British, 78;catering, 105; Celtic feasting, 112;chafing dish, 114; Chinese, 76;cooking instructions, 75, 79– 80;dinner parties, home, 224; English,77; English authors of, 79; French,77–78; future of, 80; garden parties,290; German, 76; Greek, 75;Halloween, 294; history of, 74–75;Indian, 310; Italian, 76 –77; medievaldining and, 376; Middle Eastern, 76;purpose of, 74; restaurants and, 426,429–30; Russian, 436, 445– 46; superbowl parties and, 481; tapas and,498 –99; women and, 80; WorldWar II and, 547Epigrams, 19Epiphany, 144Epulum, 22Equal Rights Amendment, 379Erie Canal, 2Erie Railroad, 6Esquire magazine, 454–55Ethelred, King, 144Etiquette: books, 247– 49; chopstickusage, 143; dim sum, 222–23Euripides, 11Europe: bachelor parties in, 43; cateringin, 104; cheese and, 118; chocolateand, 135–36; Day of the Deadcelebration of, 205; dinner parties in,ancient, 225; table settings in, 495;toasts in, custom of, 521Evitascandalo, Cesare, 76Ewing, Eleanor Boyle, 68Ewing, Thomas, 68Fales, Winnifred Shaw, 79Family holiday, 148 – 49Famine, 8Fares, 405Farinha, 84Farley, John, 78Farmer, Fannie, 514Farm Sanctuary, 517Fast food, history of, 251– 63; ancient,252–54; artificial, 251; burgers,259– 61; hot dogs, 256 –59; pizza,254–56; sandwiches, 261– 63; typesof, 251Father Time, 297Faunus, 526Fazendas, 82Feast of the Pheasant, 77Feasts. see also Celtic feasting: Aztec,35–36; during Civil War, 157–58;Feast of the Pheasant, 77; funeralfoods and, 284– 85; Great Feastof the Dead, 204; Little Feast ofthe Dead, 204; medieval dining,373; Nativity Feast, 143; Parentaliafeast, 26; Polish Christmas Feast,146 – 47Feralia festival, 26Fermentation, 539Festival of Eid al-Fitr, 508Festivals. see also Japanese CherryBlossom Festival: All Saints’ Day,448; Celtic, 108 –9, 448; Deepavali,the festival of lights, 211–13; Feraliafestival, 26; Festival of Eid al-Fitr,508; of Tlaltecuhtli, 37Fettiplace, Elinor, 77Fields, Alonzo, 69Figs, 9Finger bowls, 263– 64Fireworks, 384First Night celebrations, 385First Thanksgiving, 516Flaminius, Titus, 28Flavorings, 196 –97Floating restaurants, 2Flowers, 330 –31, 529

586 IndexFood and beverages, history of:All Saints’ Days and, 449–51;Aztec, 34–35; birthdays, 64; bookclubs, 73–74; Brazilian, 84; bridalshower, 91; brunch, traditional,94; Celtic feasting, 107– 8, 109,111–12; Chinese banquets, 128 –29;chocolate and, 137–38; Christmas,149–53; coffeehouses in London,169; coffee klatches, 172; cruiseships, 198, 200; Egyptian, 244;food coloring and, 101–2, 465;Fourth of July, 269; garden parties,290; Inca and, 307– 8; Indian,310 –11; Italian, 319; Juneteenthcelebration, 332–33; KentuckyDerby, 338 – 40; medieval diningand, 374; Russian, 434–35; SaintPatrick’s Day, 464– 65; sugaring offparties, 479– 80; super bowl parties,482– 83; toasts and, 521; wine and,541– 42Food Network, 265– 68Food rationing, 545– 46Football, 516Forks, 493Formal dining, 311, 437–38Fortune magazine, 60Fourth of July, 268–71Francatelli, Charles, 79France, 271– 83; cheese in, 120; diningrituals in, American, 176 –77;entertainment and dining historyof, 77–78; history of, 271–72;Renaissance, 272– 82; table settingsand, 492Franklin, Benjamin, 72Free French, 68French Line, 199– 200Frisbee, 291Fritelle, 34Frosting, 100Frugoli, Antonio, 76Fruitcakes, 150 –51Fruits, 9, 196Funeral foods, 283–86; Chinese, 283;cultures and, 283– 84; death and,journey of, 283; Egyptian, 283; feastsand, 284– 85; hauntings and, 284;religious, 285– 86; Russian, 444– 45Funerary: banquet, 28; cult, 26;gardens, 28Gaetae, tribe of, 108Gale, Samuel, 60Gamala, P. Lucilius, 25Gambrinus, King, 55Game laws, 427Gandhi, Indira, 68Garapa, 84Garden party, 287– 91; beveragesserved at, 290; defined, 287;entertainment and, 290; magazinepublications concerning, 287– 88;occasions for having, 290 –91; outdoor,289–90; practice of, 287; properdining and, 290; suburban, 288 – 89Gare de Avignon, 95Gaskin, Ina, 80Gastronomic democracy, 4Gemütlichkeit, 55–56General Mills, 59, 60, 61– 62, 100Gentleman of Cortés, 134George IV, King, 78Germany, 53– 54, 76Gift giving: anniversaries and, 31; Bar/Bat Mitzvah and, 45; Chinese NewYear and, 131; party favors and, 394;Russia and, 436Gilded Age, 209Gingerbread, 151Glasse, Hannah, 78, 100Globe newspaper, 67Goethe, Johann von, 102Golden Temple of Sikhs, 213Gold Medal flour, 59Goldsborough, Lillian Purdy, 80Gone With the Wind (Mitchell), 49“Good Morning to All” (Hill), 64Gorham Silver Company, 113Grace, William R., 297Grand Prix, 117Grape pips, 11Grapes, 115Great cakes, 99Great Depression, 545Great Feast of the Dead, 204Great Vigil, 35Greece: Archaic Age of, 8; culture andlifestyles of, 8 –18; dinner parties in,

Index 587224–25; entertainment and dininghistory of, 75; peninsulas of, 7– 8;weddings in, 532Green Dragon Tavern, 503– 4Greeting cards, 64– 65Gregory II, Pope, 204Gregory VII, Pope, 204Griddle cakes (maza), 8Grito do Ipiranga, 84Guadalupe, José, 205Guild dinners, 22Gutenberg, Johann, 64Habitat for Humanity, 52Hadrian, 22“Haftarah,” 45Hakim, Zahidul, 120Hale, Edward Everett, 511Hale, Sarah Josepha, 513–14Halloween, 293 –302; Americancelebration of, 296 –98; carpe noctemand, 301; children’s’ celebration of,298–300; history of, 293; parties and,294–96; UNICEF and, 300Hanukkah, 102“Happy Birthday” song, 64Harlem Renaissance, 425Harner, Michael, 35Harold, book of, 62Harper’s Bazaar magazine, 150Hataera, 15Hauntings, 284Hawley, Adelaide, 60Health and nutrition, 188 – 89Hearst, 296Helen of Troy, 117Helots, 16 –17Hemphil, Mayor, 294Henderson, Mary F., 79Hen party, 43Henry V, 526Heracala, 11Herbs, 9Hercules, 25Heros, 14Hersey Company, 139Hill, Patty and Mildred, 64Hippocrates, 373Hofbräuhaus, 53, 56Homer, 12, 14Home Service Department, 60Honey, 9, 10Hong bao, 131Hope chests, 90Horizontal tasting, 542“Horn of Africa,” 471Hors d’oeuvres and canapés, 302– 6;defined, 302, 303; international,304–5; overview of, 302–3;socialization and, 305– 6Horse transportation, 2Hospitality, 3, 7; African, 468 – 69;during Civil war, 154– 62Hot cross buns, 238Hot dogs, 256 –59Hotel/resort party planners, 402House of Burgesses, 504Housing shortages, 387Houten, Conrad Van, 133, 139Howland, Esther A., 527Hunt, Galliard, 48Huou, 76Husted, Marjorie, 60Icing, 100Idol, Billy, 65Iguarias, 86Illinois Confederacy, 2Illiteracy, 316Illustrated London News, 56Imbolc, 108Immigration, 2, 516Importation, 409 –11Inca, 307–10Independent party planners, 402India, 310 –15; buffets in, 313;celebrations in, 311–13; dessertsin, 219; dining practices in,traditional, 311; dressers in, 314–15;entertainment in, 310; foods of, 310 –11; formal dining in, 311; history of,310; vegetarians in, 313–14Injera, 471Inns, 501Intercollegiate Football Association, 516Intimate dining, 491Invitations, 315 –19; history of, 315;illiteracy and, 316; lithographyand, 317; marketplace, 315–16;mass-printed, 317; metal-plate

588 Indexengraving of, 317; method of,316 –17; paper selection and wordingof, 318 –19; postal system and, 316;printing press invention and, 317;verbal, 315; wealth and, 317Ireland, 462– 63Irupathettu, 121Irving Berlin Broadway, 379Italy: 319 –27; entertainment anddining history of, 76 –77; foods of,319; historical overview of, 320 –23;holidays celebrated in, 324–27Jackson, Andrew, 67Jade Chicken, 128James, Frank, 518Jamison, Cherly and Bill, 80Japan: desserts of, 218; ediblecenterpieces and, 243; teas of, 506Japanese Cherry Blossom Festival,329 –31; flowers and, appreciation of,330 –31; history of, 329–30Jefferson, Thomas, 79, 504Jellybeans, 238Joâo VI, 84Jocularity, 338Johnson, Lyndon B., 379Jubilees, 523Judaism, 46Juneteenth, 331– 34; African Americansand, 333–34; celebration of,331–32; contemporary celebrationof, 332; education and, 333; foodsand celebration of, 332–33; growth ofcelebration of, 334; history of, 331The Junto, 72Jupiter, 22Kaiseki Ryori, 335–37Kalua pig luau, 350Karl, Bernhard, 3Kattabos, 15Keller, 53Kelley, Janette, 60Kentucky Derby, 337 – 40Kettenring, Elizabeth, 93–94Khan, Kublai, 76Killen, Mary, 140Kinderfest, 123King Cleomenes of Sparta, 14King’s Arms, 503Kinsley, Herbert M., 113Kissing, 381– 82Kitchen staff dress, 340– 43Kit Kat, 139Kmart, 91Knickerbocker Magazine, 49Knives, 492–93Kora, 121Küchenmeistercy cookbook, 76Kuge, 92Kwanzaa, 343– 46, 460Lager beer, 55Lamb, Patrick, 78Lancelotti, Vittorio, 76Land of the Dead, 135Lanterns, 131–32La quinceanera, 65, 347– 49Larvae, 26Las Vegas, 385Lebkuchen Baker’s Guild, 151Lee Dining Room, 69Lee House, 66Lemures, 26Lemuria, 26Lentils, 9Lentisk nuts, 9Lerius, John, 81Leslie, Eliza, 149Le Train Bleu, 95Life milestones, 121–22, 440 – 45Lille (buffet), 95Lillet (bitter), 33Lincoln, Abraham, 2, 64, 68Lincoln Room, 68Lindelberg, Florence, 60Lindt, Rodolphe, 139Linnaeus, 132Liotard, Jean-Etienne, 137Lipton Company, 303Liquamen, 11Lithography, 317Little Feast of the Dead, 204Livia, 23Livy, 20, 22Llefelys, 109Lludd, 109Loading the bride, 91Lomi lomi salmon, 351

Index 589Longhi, Pietro, 137Lord of Rain and Thunder, 35Louis XIII, 136Louis XIV, 492Louis XV, 137Love knots, 529Lovell, Joseph, 67Löwenbräukeller, 53Luau, 349–52Luce, Clare Boothe, 379Lucian, 21Lucullus, Lucius, 23–24, 25Ludi Romani, 22Lugh, 108Lugnos, 108Lukins, Sheila, 80Lunch counters, 3Lydgate, John, 526Lyon, 95Mabie, Casparus and Yoast, 504Mabie’s Tavern, 504Mabinogion, 109MacArthur, Douglas, 69Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, 517Magi, 146Magrin, Gaston, 200Manes, 26Manners, table, 369–70Manuar blanco, 86Maple sugaring, 478 –79Marche, Olivier de la, 77Mardi gras, 353 – 60; history of, 353,354–55; modern, 359– 60; NewOrleans and, 355–59; religioussignificance of, 353–54Marie-Antoinette, 117Marin, François, 78Marketplace invitations, 315–16Markham, Gervase, 77Marriage, 441– 44Mars Bar, 139Marshall, Thurgood, 46Marshall Field, 509Marshall Plan, 69Marshmallows, 218 –19Martial, 19, 21Martin Chuzzlewit (Dickens), 5Martino, Maestro, 76Mary, 63Marzipan, 102Masked ball masquerades, 364– 65, 367Masquerades, 361–69; American, 368;authors and, 366, 367; concepts of,367– 68; contemporary, 368; costumesand, 365, 366; defined, 361; dresscodes of, 366; fictional charactersand, 368; history of, 361; masked ball,364– 65, 367; politics and, 361– 64;publications and, 367; womenand, 365Massialot, François, 78Mass market thanksgiving, 516 –17Mass-printed invitations, 317Maximus, Quintus Fabius, 25Maximus, Valerius, 25May, Robert, 78, 146Mayas, 134–35Mayson, Benjamin, 57Mayson, Isabella Mary, 57–59“Mazel Tov,” 45McDonald’s restaurant, 94, 124, 125McGinley, Phyllis, 521McMein, Neysa, 62Mead, 10Medieval, 369 –76Medieval dining: animals and, fantasy,375; banquets and, 370 –71;beverages and, 374; centerpieces of,375–76; concepts of, 369; decorationsand, 372; England and, 374–75;entertainment and, 376; feasts, 373;manners of, 369–70; menus and,373–74; table setting and, 371–72Medieval paintings, 452–53Medlars, 9Melville, Herman, 504Menalaus, 14Merman, Ethel, 379Messenger, 5Messes, 16Messisbugo, Cristoforo, 76, 420Mesta, George, 378Mesta, Perle, 376–80Mesta Tool Company, 378Metal-plate engraving, 317Mexico: birthday parties in, 124; Dayof the Dead celebration in, 205– 6;dining in, 184; history of, 182– 83Mezze, 304

590 IndexMidday meal, 178 –79Middle Ages, 118, 215–16Middle East, 76, 96, 219Milestones, 31Milk, 9–10Milk drinkers, 108Millet, 8, 33Ming, 120Mint tea, 508Miracle of 34th Street (film), 517Miskawayh, Ibn, 75Misrule, Lords of, 145Mississippi, 2Miss Parloa’s New Cook Book andMarketing Guide, 60Mitchell, Margaret, 49Mithridates, King, 25Mix-Zoquean, 132“Mock Turkey,” 518Moctezuma, 35, 134Moore, Clement, 143Moralia (Plutarch), 14, 20Morrison, Toni, 72Mother Goose, 297Mullan, Robert, 504Mushrooms, 9Music, 245– 46, 463– 64Myrtle berries, 9Naming ceremonies, 444, 473Nanjing, 120Napkins, 494–96Napoleon, 78, 84National Day of Mourning, 518National Historic Landmarks program,69National Register of Historic Places, 69National Road, 2Nativity Feast, 143Nazars, 372Nebuchadnezzar, 115Nehru, Jawaharlal, 68Neighbors, 408New England Confectionary Company(NECCO), 530New England Woman’s Club, 72New Fire Ceremony, 35Newman vs. Piggy Park Enterprises, 46New Orleans, 355–59New Orleans Turducken, 515New Year’s Eve, 381– 86; ball lowering,384; broadcast, 383; fireworks, 384;First Night celebrations and, 385;history of, 381, 383– 84; kissingtradition, 381– 82; in Las Vegas,385; revelers, 382; singing tradition,382– 83; symbols, 385, 386; toasttradition, 381; Watch Night, 385– 86New York Sorosis, 72“The Night Before Christmas” (Moore),143Night Owl movement, 70 –71Nixon, Tricia, 298Noisemakers, 298Northend, Mary Harrod, 79Nullification crisis, 49Nuremberg Cup, 532–33The Nutcracker ballet, 152Nuts, 9O Cozinheiro Imperial cookbook, 85Odysseus, 11, 12Off-premise catering, 104O’Hara, Scarlet, 49Ohio River, 2Oktoberfest, 56Oldenburg, Ray, 55Old World, 113Old World Halloween, 296Olive oil, 11Olmecs, 134Olympian Gods, 14Omotesenke, 506Open bar, 534Oprah’s Book Club, 72–73Orbinson, Ray, 65Oshun, 460Ostia, 26, 28Outdoors. see also Garden parties:African ceremonies, 473; cooking,70, 270Oysters, 11Paal paayasam, 121Paper doilies and coasters, 228Papier-mâché animals, 124Parades, 240, 462, 463Parallel Lives (Plutarch), 15Parentalia feast, 26Paris Exhibition, 95

Index 591Parisian cafés, 387– 93; absinthe servedin, 391–93; contemporary, 388 – 89;history of, 387, 389–91; housingshortages and, 387; occasions heldin, 387– 88Parloa, Maria, 60Parties. see also Dinner parties; Gardenparties: bachelor, 43; birthday, 65,122–25; block, 70 –71; Halloween,294–96; rent, 424–25; sugaring off,479– 80; super bowl, 480 – 83; theme,518 –19; Tupperware, 522–23; winetasting,542Party favors, 393– 400; Christmascrackers, 396; defined, 394; eventsthat use, 397; extravagant, 398 –99;gift giving and, 394; prizes, 397–98;at weddings, 394–95Party planners, 400 – 402Patriotism, 271Paulaner Keller, 53Peas, 9Pedro I, 84Pedro II, 84– 85Peking duck, 128Pelopidas, 15Peloponnesian War, 8Pennsylvania Avenue House, 68Pennsylvania Brewing Company, 56Penny dreadfuls, 527Penny Post, 527People for the Ethical Treatment ofAnimals (PETA), 517Pepys, Samuel, 526Pericles, 8, 14Perugina, 529Petronius, Titus, 24Pets, 66Phaedimus, M. Ulpius, 22Philadelphia Library, 72Philip, Prince, 69Philip of Orleans, 117Philippine fiestas, 402–6Philip the Good, 77Phillip II, 17Phoenician bakers, 8Piadena, Bartolomeo Sacchi di, 76Pickett Tea Room, 431Pilgrims, 512–13Pillsbury Bake-Off, 101Pine kernels, 9Pinot Meunier, 115Pinot Noir, 115Pirannal. see BirthdaysPirozhki, 124Pius V, Pope, 136Pizza, 254–56Pizzette, 34Platina, 76Plato, 14, 15, 17, 75Playboy magazine, 454–55Plaza Hotel, 508 –9Pleck, Elizabeth, 516Plimoth Plantation, 512Pliny, Elder, 108Plum pudding, 149–50Plutarch, 14, 15, 16, 20Poi luau, 351Polish Christmas Feast, 146 – 47Politics, 271, 361– 64Polk, James K., 68Pompey, 23Poppleton, Mrs., 431–32Pork, 47– 49Portuguese, 82, 84– 86Poseidonius, 107Postal system, 316Postwar singles, 456Potluck suppers, 406 –8Pradesh, Andhra, 213Prado, Manuel, 68Printing press, 317Priscus, C. Iunius, 25Private rooms, 426 –28Privy holes, 503Prizes, 397–98Program line-ups, 266 – 67Progressive dinner parties, 408 –9Prohibition, 409 –15; beer and, 411–12;beer halls and gardens and, 56;cocktails and, 165, 166;history of, 409; importation and,409 –11; purpose of, 412–13;response to, 413–14; tearoomsand, 511Prohibition Act, 538Promenades, 200Protagoras (Plato), 15Protestant Reformation, 51Psykter, 14

592 IndexPuliyoonu, 121Pulled pork barbeque, 50Pulque, 37Pulses, 9Pump Room, 431Punch, 163Punch magazine, 93Puritan Ordinary, 500Puzziks, 527Puzzle purses, 527P’ye-back, 43Queen Mary 2 (cruise line), 201Queh-queh, 43, 91–92Rabisha, William, 78Raeder, Ole Munch, 5Raffald, Elizabeth, 78Railroad transportation, 2–3, 4, 6Raleigh, 503Ramadan, 508Randolph, Mary, 79, 113Ranhofer, Charles, 94Ratskeller, 53Receptional drinking, 505Reclining, 13, 20Red wine, 539Religion: birthday celebrations and, 63;funeral foods and, 285– 86; Mardigras and, 353–54; Philippine fiestasand, 402; tapas and, 498Relishes, 8Remus, 526Renaissance, 417–24; banquets, 417–18;cheese, 118; France, 272– 82; history,417; wealth, 418 –24Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 137Rent parties, 424–25Republic of Brazil, 86 – 89Restaurants, 426 –32; banquets held in,428 –29; birthday parties celebratedat, 125; catering from, 431–32; chic,430 –31; communal dining and, 428;cookbooks used in, 192; dating and,431; entertainment and, 426, 429–30;game laws and, 427; history of, 426;luxury, 427; private rooms in, 426 –28;soul food, 460 – 61; tapas and, 499Revolutionary Tribunal, 117Richard II, 77, 144, 374Richard III, 297, 526Ringwald, Molly, 65Rives, John C. and Blair, 67Road transportation, 2Rockefeller, J. D., 297Romanovs, 78Rome: cocktails in, 163; culture andlifestyles of, 18 –28; dinner parties in,225Romeo, 297Romoli, Domenico, 32Romulus, 526Roosevelt, Eleanor, 60Roosevelt, Franklin, 66, 379Roses, 529Rossetti, Giovan Battista, 76Rossini, 78Rothschilds, 78Royal court brewery, 53Russia, 432– 46; banquets in, 432;beverages of, 434–35; birthdayscelebrated in, 124, 444; dinnerparties in, 226; Easter in, 238 –39;entertainment in, 436, 445– 46; formaldining in, 437–38; funeral foods in,444– 45; gift giving in, 436; historyof, 432–34; holidays celebrated in,438 – 40; milestones celebrated in,440 – 45; sequential table service styleof, 434; women’s’ role in, 436 –37Russo, Julie, 80Sabinus, Calvisius, 20Sahagún, Fray Bernardino, 35, 36 –37Saint James Palace, 209Saint Joseph’s Day, 63Saint-Méry, Moreau de, 1, 2Saint Nicholas’s Day, 146Saints’ Days, 447– 52Salami, 34Salt cellars, 371Samain, 109Sandwiches, 261– 63Santa Claus, 517Sap, 478, 479Saturnalia, 144Satyricon (Petronius), 24Sauganash Tavern, 7Savory, 304Saxon, Anglo, 534–35

Index 593Scappi, Bartolomeo, 77Schivelbusch, 136Schlitz Palm Gardens, 55Schnaider’s Garden, 55Schoonmaker, Frank, 540Schrafft’s, 430Scotch, 3Seafood, 33–34Sectionalism, 49Seneca, 20, 21Sensory pleasures, 225Sequential table service, 434Serving platters, 452–53Sextilanus, 19Sexuality, 456Shang Dynasty, 76Sharply, Stephen, 6Shellfish, 11Shepherds Hotel, 3Sherman, Tecumseh, 68Shieffelin & Company, 541Shield’s, 503Shipboard life, 197Silver, 19Simmons, Amelia, 113, 152Singing, 382– 83Singles, 453 – 57; bachelors and, 453–54;bachelorettes and, 454; Esquiremagazine for, 454–55; history of,456; living standards of, 455; Playboymagazine and, 454–55; populationstatistics of, 456 –57; postwar, 456;publications regarding, 456; sexualityand, 456Sisters gathering custom, 92Sisters party custom, 92Sixteen Candles, 65Sixteenth birthday, 65Slaughtering, 48Slaves, 83, 84Smith, Eliza, 78Smith, Margaret Bayard, 64Smith, Mrs. E., 100Smörgåsbord, 97–98, 304–5, 313Socrates, 15Solon, 8Song Dynasty, 505– 6Songs, 64Soul food, 457– 61; African America,457– 60; contemporary, 461;cookbooks, 460 – 61; defined, 457;restaurants, 460 – 61; types of, 460Southern Africa, 476 –77Southern nationalism, 49Southern-style barbeque, 46 – 47South India, childhood in, 120 –22Soyer, Alexis, 79Spagnoli, Luisa, 529The Spectator magazine, 140Speeches and bar/Bat Mitzvah, 45Spencer, Colin, 93Spoons, 492Statius, Publius, 25Steamboats, 2, 4Stewart, Martha, 80, 465– 68St. Nicholas magazine, 148Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 511–12St. Patrick’s Day, 461– 65; ethnics and,465; foods and beverages of, 464– 65;green food coloring and, 465; historyof, 461– 62; Irish and, 462– 63; musicand, 463– 64; parades and, 462, 463;purpose of, 461; symbols of, 464Strauss, Johann, 55Sub-Saharan Africa, 468 –78Suburban garden party, 288 – 89Sugaring off party, 478 – 80Sugarplums, 152Sulla, 23Super bowl party, 480 – 83Super Sweet Sixteen (television series), 65Sweeteners, 214–15Sweet Hearts candy, 530Sweet sixteen, 65Symposiarch, 13Symposium, 12–14, 20, 75Symposium (Plato), 14Syriscus, Maximus, 21Syssitia, 16Table outfitting, 490Table service, French vs. Russian, 485–91;approaches to, 485– 86; courses and,serving of, 487– 89; evolution of,486, 489; origins of, 486 – 87, 489;publications regarding, 487; style of,history of, 485; table outfitting and,490; tableware and, 489–90Table settings, 491–96; 3; courses and,491–92; European, 495; evolution

594 Indexof, 492; forks and, 493; for formalbanquets, 491; for French styledining, 492; for intimate dining, 491;knives and, 492–93; for medievaldining, 371–72; napkins and, 494–96;Victorian, 494Tableware, 489–93Tacitus, 24Taillevent, 373Talkoot, 52T’ang, 76Tapas, 496 –99; 305; bars, 498 –99;defined, 496 –97; entertainmentand, 498 –99; history of, 497; originof, 497–98; religions and, 498;restaurants, 499; types of, 497Target, 91Taverns, 499–505; advertisements for,502–3; alcohol and, consumptionof, 503; Civil War and, role of, 505;history of, 499–500; inns and, 501;licensing of, 502; physical features of,501–2; profits of, 503; public housesin America and, 180; purpose of, 500 –501; receptional drinking and, 505;social drinking and, 504–5; symbolsof, 504; unity and, national, 503– 4;wine and, 500; women’s’ role in, 504Tea, 505 – 8; afternoon, 507; ceremonies,hosts of, 506 –7; desserts and, 217;Japanese, 506; mint, 508; origin of,505– 6; symbols of, 508Tearooms: decorations of, 509;dim-sum, 221–22; history of, 508;influences of, 509–10; Prohibitionand, 511; use of, 508 –9; wealth and,509; women as ownership, 510Tearooms in America, 508–11Tejate, 135Television, 190, 340Tender shoots, 9Terebinth nuts, 9Thais, 15Thala, 121Thanksgiving, 511–18; America and,culture of, 512; contemporary, 518;dinner of, traditional, 514–16; First,516; football and celebration of,516; history of, 511; immigrant, 516;mass market, 516 –17; Pilgrimsand, 512–13; protests and, 517–18;Sarah Josepha Hale’s tale of, 513–14Theme parties, 518 –19Theophrastus of Eresus, 11Thompson, Eric, 135Tiallevent, Guillaume Tirel dit, 77Tiberius, 23Tlaloc, 35Tlalteccuhtli, 37Toasts, 381, 519–21Tobacco, 37Tofurkey, 518Tollund Man, 107Torah, 44, 45Trachanas, 8 –9Traditional Irish toast, 521Transatlantic travel, 197–98Transportation, 1–3Tricliniarch, 22Trimalchio, 24, 28The Trireme, 15Trollope, Anthony, 5Trollope, Frances (Fannie), 5, 6 –7Trousseau, 90Truman, 69, 379Tubero, Quintus Aelius, 25Tubero, Scipio Aemilius, 25Tuna crudo, 33Tunnel of Fudge Cake, 101Tun Tavern, 504Tupper, Earl S., 522Tupperfairy, 523Tupper Plastics Company, 522Tupperware Home Party, 523Tupperware party, 521–23Tutankhamun, King, 537Twelfth Night, 144Twelve Days of Christmas, 144U Fleku, 53Ummarappadi, 122UNICEF (United Nations InternationalChildren’s Emergency Fund), 300Union Pacific Railroad, 547Unity, 503– 4University of Pennsylvania, 72Urasenke, 506Vala, 121Valenciennes, 95

Index 595Valentine, 525–26Valentine’s Day, 525 –30; candy, 529;colors, 529; conversation hearts and,530; England’s celebration of, 527;flowers, 529; history of, 525; massproduction of, 528 –29; popularityof, 527–28; publications, 526 –27;purpose of, 526; stories, 525–26;traditions, 526; Victorian celebrationof, 527Valle, Paulo, 87Valrhona, 139Vanderbilts, 296Varenne, Pierre François de la, 77Vayambu, 121Vegetarianism, 189, 313–14Vehling, Joseph Dommers, 75Vera, Cocceia, 24Verbal invitations, 315Verlaine, Paul, 390Vermouths, 33Vertical tasting, 542Victoria, Queen, 79, 208, 491Victorians: baby showers and, 39;cheese and, 119; dinner partiesand, 225; table settings and, 494;Valentine’s Day and, 527Vidyarambham, 122Vintner’s Company, 500Virtual block parties, 71Vocatur, 21–22Vulso, Gnaeus Manlius, 20 –21Wagons, 2Waldo, Myra, 541Waldorf Hotel, 94, 509Wanamaker, 509Warhol, Andy, 519–20Washburn Crosby Company, 59, 60Washington, George, 64, 504Washington, Martha, 538The Wasps (Aristophane), 13Watch Night, 385– 86Watering holes, 3Water transportation, 2Wealth: beer halls/ gardens and, 55;cruise ships and, 198 –99; invitationsand, 317; kitchen staff dress and,340 – 41; Renaissance and, 418 –24;tearooms and, 509Webster, Daniel, 503Wedding receptions, 531– 36; Chinese,535; decorations, 531–33; history of,531; party favors used in, 394–95;showering of bride and groom and,534; traditions, 533–35Weddings: favors, 394–95; in Greece,532; during World War II, 547Weizmann, Chaim, 68West, John, 135Western Africa, 472–73Wheat, 8Whiskey, 3White House, 68White wine, 539– 40Wigilia, 146 – 47Wilkes, Ashley, 49Willows, 502Wilson, Woodrow, 378, 379Wine, 11–12, 536– 44; cooking with,540 – 41; dessert, 543; evolution ofculture and, 540; food and, 541– 42;history of, 536; lifestyles and, typical,543– 44; origins of, 536 –38; red, 539;styles of, 538 –39; tasting, 542; tavernsand, 500; white, 539– 40Wineskins, 11Winfrey, Oprah, 72–73Winslow, Edward, 512Wise, Brownie, 523Women, history of: catering roleof, 104–5, 106; cookbooks and,187– 88; dinner parties and,226; entertainment and dininghistory of, 80; kitchen staff dressand, 342– 43; masquerades and,365; Russia and, role of, 436 –37;taverns and, role of, 504; tearoomownership and, 510; Tupperwareparties and, 522–23Woodmason, Charles, 3Woodward, Stanley, 66Wooley, Hannah, 77Wordsworth, William, 512World cuisines, 194World War II, 544 –47; entertainmentand, holiday, 547; family and,546 – 47; food rationing and, 545– 46;history of, 544– 45; socialism and,546; wedding and, 547

596 IndexYeast, 8Yeast powders, 100Yellow Tavern, 505Yin, Yi, 76Yogurt, 9Young, Alexander, 512Zakuska tables: defined, 549;importance of, 550; origins of,549–50Zakuski, 305, 549 –50Zenophon, 15Zeus Soter, 14