Crawfish étouffée. Image courtesy of Flickr user mhaithaca.

The Cajuns are one of Louisiana’s unique subcultures. They are descended from French settlers exiled from Acadia. For a long time, they were met with derision. Holding onto their French heritage, the Cajuns were discriminated against by the English-speaking population, and it wasn’t until the late 1960s that efforts were made to preserve Cajun culture. One major development came in the 1980s, when chef Paul Prudhomme earned Cajun foodways some long-overdue attention and respect. His restaurant, K-Pauls’s Louisiana Kitchen, and a number of cookbooks pushed this unique cuisine to the forefront of the American consciousness. If you’ve yet to have the pleasure, of if you have only had the pleasure of eating a bowl of gumbo, queue up some Beausoleil and crack open your pantry to make the following classic Cajun meals.

Blackened Redfish: This is the dish that put Cajun food on the cultural map in the 1980s and is the thoroughly modern invention of Prudhomme. He aimed to recreate the taste of food cooked over an open fire by using a searing hot cast iron skillet and a mix of herbs and spices that creates a sweet crust on the outside of the filets. Part of his original Louisiana Kitchen cookbook, and later refined in The Prudhomme Family Cookbook, the recipe was often imitated in restaurants at the height of the Cajun craze—although not necessarily well, with some interpreting Cajun cuisine as anything that is ridiculously over-spiced. When done properly, the fish is supposed to taste sweet and smoky.

Boudin: These are specialty Cajun sausages, usually served as a snack food, that blend hog meat with rice, onion, bell pepper and spices. They come in two varieties. Boudin rouge incorporates blood into the mix and, given federal food regulations, is nearly impossible to find due to public health concerns—although you might have some luck if you go directly to a slaughterhouse. Boudin blanc is the widely-available, bloodless variety, recipes for which are available. Recalling my family making homemade Italian sausage, I would count on this being an all-day affair, but the results will surely be worth the effort.

Étouffée: Étouffée is another relatively modern dish that sprang up in Cajun cooking sometime in the 1930s in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. From the French word for “to smother,” étoufées are similar to gumbos and start with a roux—a mix of flour and butter—that classically engulfs a mix of onion, bell pepper, celery and crawfish tails and is served over rice. Lots of variations exist, including one that subs in alligator meat for the crawfish.

Jambalaya: This dish comes in two varieties: if it’s red, you’re noshing on the tomatoey Creole variation, but if it’s brown—of slow-cooked meat drippings—it’s Cajun. One story goes that this stew of vegetables, spicy andouille sausage and seafood originates from Spanish settlers in Louisiana’s French Quarter trying to create a New World approximation of paella. And should you be down in Gonzales, Louisiana, later this month, the Jambalaya Capital of the World will be hosting its annual jambalaya festival, where you can sample a number of variants on the stew from cooks who are all vying for a world champion title. Could there be a better opportunity to introduce yourself to this stew?

Macque Choux: No one seems to be entirely sure about the origins of this corn dish. The name alone is confusing, with “maque” maybe being a Natchez Indian or Creole word for “corn,” and “choux” being French for “cabbage,” even though that veggie isn’t usually used, at least not in modern iterations. Where there is some consensus is that when the French Acadians came down to Louisiana once upon a time, they adapted corn, a distinctively American Indian crop, into their cuisine. Whatever its origins, this spicy corn and tomato stew laced with peppers and onions can include meats such as chicken or crawfish or can be completely vegetarian.

Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man by Mark Kurlansky, available through booksellers on May 8.

In a local supermarket, a frozen food section is a matter of course, but have you ever wondered who had the idea to make a business out of preserving food this way? The short answer is right there in the freezer aisle when you pick up a package of Birsdeye frozen vegetables. For the long answer, consult the latest book by Mark Kurlansky. The author who gave us biographies of everyday objects such as salt and cod now delves into the entertaining history of Clarence Birdseye, an adventurer and entrepreneur who revolutionized the way we eat. I spoke with Kurlansky by phone about the mastermind behind frozen food and the place these products have in a culture that increasingly prefers food that’s fresh and local.

People had been freezing foods well before Clarence Birdseye, so why write a book about this one person?

He did not invent frozen food but he clearly invented the modern frozen food industry. Before Birdseye, hardly anybody ate frozen food because it was awful. New York State banned it from their prison system as inhumane. It was mushy and terrible because it was frozen just at the freezing point so it took a day or so to freeze. Also you couldn’t commercialize it because they would freeze a whole side of beef or something. Nobody figured out how to put it in a packagable, marketable form. On a number of levels he truly was the creator of the frozen food industry.

How did Birdseye make frozen food a desirable product?

In history, most of the inventors aren’t the ones who invented the thing. They’re the ones who figured out how to make it profitable. (Robert Fulton didn’t invent steam ships, he just had the first profitable steam ship.) You see a lot of that. Birdseye first of all had to figure out how to make frozen food a good product, which he did by realizing that when he lived in Labrador the food he froze for his family was really good—not like the frozen food that was available everywhere. He realized that that was because it froze instantly because it was so cold—that was the key to making frozen food good. An old principle that salt makers know is that the quicker crystals form, the smaller they are. So if you get really small crystals the ice doesn’t deform the tissue. So that was the first important thing. But then he had to figure out a way to package it so it could be frozen in packages that were saleable size that people in the stores could deal with and did a lot of experimenting with packaging and packaging material. He actually got the DuPont Company to invent cellophane for cellophane wrappers. Then there were all these things like transportation, getting trucking companies and trains to have freezer cars and getting stores to carry freezers. There was absolutely no infrastructure for frozen food. He had to do all of that and it took more than a decade.

Was this a difficult book to research and write?

It really was detective work. Birdseye didn’t write an autobiography. Nobody has ever written a biography on him. Almost everything on the internet is wrong and they keep repeating the same mistakes, which shows you that internet articles keep copying each other. So anytime I could really document something was exciting. Just going to Amherst and I found his report cards, it was exciting to see how he did in school. One of his grandsons had—I forget now how many—something like 20 boxes from the family that he somehow inherited and were in his attic and he had never opened them. And by threatening to go to Michigan and go through his attic myself, I got him to go up there and look through the boxes and he found a lot of letters and things that were very interesting. Going to the Peabody Museum and looking at the whale harpoon he built—one of his inventions. It was very illuminating because it was so completely mechanical and kind of simplistic. You could see that this was a 19th century, Industrial Revolution guy who built mechanical things out of household objects and things that he could get in the hardware store. I started off sort of dreading how little there was available, but it became just great fun unearthing things.

In your book, Birdseye comes across as someone who was prone to exaggerating events in his life a bit. How difficult was it to write about someone who embellished his life stories? 

I don’t know that Birdseye did that more than other people. What you seem to find when you get into this biography business is that people tend to have an image of themselves that they want to project and they want to color statements by this image. It’s not so much that he was a wild liar. He just had a certain view of himself that he liked, so he would emphasize certain things. He always emphasized himself as an adventurer and a wild guy. He always described his years in the Bitterroot Mountains and talked about the hunting he did there and the incredible amount of animals he shot—over 700 animals one summer—and he loved to talk about that stuff. He never talked very much about the fact that this was a major medical, scientific research project on Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever and that he played an important role in this research, which is an important chapter in medical history. What they learned about controlling that disease later had an impact on dealing with malaria and even later in Lyme disease. It was important scientific work, but typical of Birdseye, he mainly talked about himself as the mighty hunter. Fortunately that was the chapter of his life that was easy to document.

And in certain ways he didn’t talk about himself very much. When he was in Labrador, he kept a daily diary, and this was during the period that he courted and married he wife, and he barely ever mentioned her. There’s a letterhead clipped to a page in his diary without any comment. Well there’s a description of staying in a hotel and the things he did but what he didn’t mention was that it was his honeymoon. So there are lots of gaps. I could never find out if he was a Republican or a Democrat. And interestingly, his family doesn’t know. Even his daughter-in-law, who’s still alive and was quite close to him, didn’t really know what he was.

Was there an especially fun moment you had while working on the book?

The New York Public Library has every directory ever printed of New York, so it took me about five minutes to find out which house he grew up in in Brooklyn, in Cobble Hill, and I went there and it didn’t seem to have changed much. It was still a single family dwelling, it had chandeliers and a lot of late 19^th century décor and a kind of elegance. It solved a mystery for me because everybody who’s ever met Birdseye talked about what an unpretentious, easygoing guy he was, and yet in Gloucester he built this pompous mansion with pillars up on a hill. And I always wondered: If he really was so unpretentious, why did he build such a pretentious house? Seeing the house he was born in, I realized that this was the way he was raised.

In your book, Birdseye’s frozen food products are desirable, but over time attitudes have changed. Our modern culture is placing a lot of emphasis on fresh foods and eating locally.

I don’t think that we are really going to go back to that world. To begin with, there were drawbacks to that world that nobody in the foodie world thinks about. Like most places where you live, there isn’t much fresh food available for a number of months of the year. So unless you use frozen food or canned food, which is what they used to do, you can’t be a locavore all year round except for a few climates. You could be a locavore in Florida or southern California. But I tried that. It was really limiting.

So does Birdseye’s frozen food innovations still have a place in our modern culture?

Oh, it has a huge place—bigger than ever. And now you see more and more sophisticated versions of frozen food—frozen gourmet food. Places like Trader Joe’s, where you can get frozen truffle pizza and things like that–that’s one of the things that has changed public perception.

To us, frozen food isn’t like fresh food. We know the difference. But when somebody in Birdseye’s day tasted frozen food, they weren’t comparing it to fresh food; they were comparing it to canned food or dried, salted food. And by that standard, it was so like fresh food. But today we tend to compare it to actual fresh food. While it comes a lot closer than canned food, it’s not really as good as fresh food. One of the things that has happened with that market is that they have figured out how to make frozen food a middle priced or even inexpensive product so that’s one of its selling points is that it’s easily affordable and it’s often cheaper than really good fresh food. So it has taken a completely different place than where it started off.

Check in tomorrow for Part II of our interview with Mark Kurlansky about his masterpiece on the history of salt, the only edible rock on the planet.

With the political season going full tilt and food fights coming to a head over eating dogs and questionable cookies, there’s another place you might find signs of the nation’s red-state blue-state political divide: the advertising on potato chips bags.

In a study published last year in Gastronomica, student Josh Freedman and linguist Dan Jurafsky of Stanford examined the language found on 12 different brands of potato chips. They discovered that six less expensive brands of chips had fewer words on the bags and that those words emphasized the food’s authenticity through tradition and hominess, making claims like this: “Family-made, in the shadow of the Cascades, since 1921.” (In much the same way politicians aren’t prone to usin’ highfalutin language around down-home audiences.)

More expensive potato chips—the ones you might expect to find at health food stores—tended to distinguish themselves with longer words. Their descriptions focused more on health and naturalness, emphasizing how they were different: “No artificial flavors, no MSG, no trans fats, no kidding.” Indeed, for each additional “no,” “not,” “never,” “don’t,” or “won’t” that appeared on the bag, the price of potato chips climbed an average of four cents an ounce.

In a post about the research (in which he notes readers should take the study “with a grain of salt”), Jurafsky writes: “These models of natural versus traditional authenticity are part of our national dialogue, two of the many ways of framing that make up our ongoing conversation about who we are.”

Perhaps the results are not all that surprising. This is how marketing a President or a potato chip works—you find a target audience and you try to sell them something, using their language, even when your product might not be all that different from its competitors. “No” can tap into yes, indeed.

Colonel Sanders was a real guy, an unemployed one who was forced out of his highway-side restaurant at the age of 65. He started selling the rights to make his pressure-cooker fried chicken, with a secret blend of 11 herbs and spices, from the back seat of a white Oldsmobile. He originally wore a black suit rather than a white one, and his pressure cooker was as much a part of the pitch as his proprietary spice blend.

By 1975, Sanders had sold the franchise, Kentucky Fried Chicken, to a liquor and food conglomerate. He stayed on as a goodwill brand ambassador, raking in an annual salary of $70,000 a year. He put on a white linen suit every morning and rode around in a company-chauffeured Cadillac, visiting the company’s white-columned headquarters. But the colonel was bitter: The quality of his chicken had “slipped mightily” and the whole culture of fast food appeared to disgust him.

“Drive out of any town now and everyone is selling his piece of chicken or hamburger up and down the highway,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “You can’t get a decent meal anymore.”

So the Colonel did what he did best: He started a new restaurant and called it the Colonel’s Lady Dinner House. It had fewer frills and was intended to resemble the average dinner table. Then Sanders launched a vocal campaign against the new owners of Kentucky Fried Chicken. As the Los Angeles Times wrote:

He said he has been disappointed and that the conglomerate has treated him like “the saloon bums they’re used to dealing with rather than a sophisticated Southern businessman.”

In the past, he has insulted KFC’s gravy, called the men he first sold out to in 1964 “the biggest bunch of sharpies you ever saw” and labeled Heblein executive a “bunch of booze hounds.”

Company executives have long ignored such comments. Realizing that the colonel is one the nation’s best known trade names, they’ve handled him with kid gloves.

“He has been doing this forever,” said John Cox, the firm’s vice president for franchising and public affairs. “It comes and goes. The colonel is just a very independent minded individual.”

But there is a more serious issue involved in the current dispute: who controls the use of Sander’s familiar face and Southern gentlemen image.

Sanders is anxious to settle the case. “I only want to find how much of my body and soul they own.”

Once the colonel and the company settled, for a reported $1 million, Sanders promised not to attack the company. “He started to do so practically before the ink was dry on the agreement,” Josh Ozersky writes in the new book Colonel Sanders and the American Dream. Unlike the malleable Betty Crocker, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben and Ronald McDonald—advertising characters concocted in corporate boardrooms—Kentucky Fried Chicken had a real live spokesman, who stood his ground as a corporation reduced his recipes to poor imitations of their former selves.

Ozersky believes the company’s closely guarded “Original Recipe” was probably not the one invented by Sanders. Take this quote he unearths from 1970: A company executive says, “Let’s face it the Colonel’s gravy was fantastic but you had to be a Rhodes Scholar to cook it.” The superhuman grandiosity that gave birth to the colonel’s image, meant to conjure up the magnolia-scented myth of the Deep South, proved to be a double bind. As Ozersky writes, “Oh to have a nice fictional mascot instead!”

Book cover design by Derek George/Colonel Sanders and the American Dream/Courtesy of University of Texas Press.

Blame Martha. Since the early 1990s, when Martha Stewart Living Magazine published a recipe for ramps, the onion-like bulbs have gone from a rite of spring in Southern mountain culture to a compulsory purchase for those buying their way towards a foodie merit badge. Ramps taste sweet, almost like spring onions, with a strong garlic-like aroma. The plant proliferates in woodlands from Canada to Georgia and probably gave the city of Chicago its name; chicagoua appears to be a native Illinois name for what French explorers called ail sauvage, or “wild garlic.” But the recent commercial exploitation may be taking its toll.

Take one case study in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. For years, the superintendent’s compendium allowed foragers to collect a half a peck of ramps. The belief was that small harvests didn’t represent a threat to the sustainability of the ephemeral woodland plant—even though, unlike collecting nuts and berries, ramp foragers dig up the entire plant. “We let this go on because we thought that it was something that was going to die out with the old timers,” Janet Rock, a botanist with the National Park Service, told me. “It turned out that it just became more and more and popular. Rangers were seeing people take a lot out of the park—more than a peck a day for personal consumption.”

Beginning in 1989, Rock and researchers at the University of Tennessee conducted a five-year study. It’s one of the few scientific studies of ramp harvesting out there. Based on what they found—essentially harvesting 10 percent, or less, of a given patch once every 10 years enabled it to regrow—the National Park Service stopped allowing ramp harvests in 2004. This, in turn, pushed foragers into national forests and also coincided with an increase in ramp poaching on private property.

What are the chances that permits could lead to a sustainable solution—could parks issue limited ramp-hunting permits with bag limits, sort of like fishing licenses? “The problem is enforcement,” Rock said. “You can say, ‘Go in and take 10 percent of what you see.’ But it’s not human nature to do that.” Especially when you can sell a mess of ramps for $20 a pound.

[We] encamped on a butifull grassy plac, where the nativs make a portage of their canoes, and wappato roots to and from a large pond at a short distance. in this pond the nativs inform us they collect great quantities of pappato, which the women collect by getting into the water, sometimes to their necks holding by a small canoe and with their feet loosen the wappato or bulb of the root from the bottom from the Fibers, and it imedeately rises to the top of the water they collect & throw them into the canoe, those deep roots are the largest and best roots.

Nearly a half century earlier, in 1749, botanist Pehr Kalm traveled through New Sweden, now Delaware and southern New Jersey, where he, too, heard reports of Native Americans harvesting hen’s-egg-sized tubers of the broadleaf arrowhead from marshes and wetlands. Baked and boiled, Kalm found the tubers’ flesh to be dry and almost as good as potatoes. The plant reminded him of a species from his native Sweden, which the German botanist Carl Ludwig Willdenow classified as Sagittarius sagittifolia, although Kalm noted the North American tuber far surpassed the European one in size. Kalm reports in Travels in North America [italics and spelling in the original]:

A man of ninety-one years of age, called Nils Gustafson, told me, that he had often eaten these roots when he was a boy, and that he like them very well at that time. He added that the Indians, especially their women, travelled to the islands, dug out the roots, and brought them home; and whilst they had them they desired no other food. They said that the hogs, which are amazingly greedy of them, have made them very scarce.

What was it called? Kalm or his interpreters heard its native name pronounced as “katniss.” And the wild plant wasn’t the only vegetable the Native Americans called katniss. Kalm writes: “When the Indians come down to the coast and see the turneps of the Europeans, they likewise give them the name of katniss.”

Perhaps The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins’ popular young-adult trilogy turned blockbuster film, will foster a renewed appetite for foraging. (The book, which I haven’t read, stays true to the foraging techniques described by many early explorers, although it’s my understanding that Katniss, the heroine of the story, does not go up to her neck for the “small, bluish tubers that don’t look like much.”) Sure, a similar arrowroot (T’zu-ku) can be picked up at Asian groceries during Chinese New Year, but maybe young readers should be encouraged to get their feet wet. After all, in some places, katniss is considered a weedy invasive.

Top drawing from Grundriss der Kräuterkunde zu Vorlesungen (Principles of Botany), 1805. Bottom image courtesy of Tama Matsuoka, who also provides a recipe for katniss.

The Jolly Green Giant statue in Blue Earth, Minnesota. Image courtesy of Flickr user Dougtone.

What ever happened to really great advertising characters? This question popped into my head the minute I saw the Sriracha Flamethrowing Grizzly. The character, designed by The Oatmeal’s author/artist Matthew Inman, is a sheer flight of fancy and is not—at least not yet—the official figurehead for the hot sauce. With the manic look in his eye, the waggling tongue and his strange ability to deftly wield an incendiary device, I would readily send in proofs of purchase for the plush equivalent of this creature. As twisted as the image might be, you have to admit the guy’s got a terrific amount of personality.

Advertisers employ characters to set their goods apart from everyone else’s, giving consumers someone—or something—to readily identify with. Characters can assign gender, class and ethos to otherwise inanimate objects in addition to reflecting the culture at large. (General Mills released their Monster-themed cereals like Count Chocula in response to hit TV shows like “The Addams Family” and “The Munsters,” and while those programs were cancelled decades ago, the foods they inspired remain on store shelves.) The use of characters began to decline in the 1970s as photography became increasingly preferred over illustration to sell goods. Also, the target audience got smarter and required more sophisticated ploys. The naive cartoon characters from the primitive days of television would be hard pressed to sell the same products to a generation of people who have spent their entire lives exposed to televised advertising. Nevertheless, some characters are ingrained in our culture, including the following:

Aunt Jemima: Ethnic stereotyping is an embarrassing and regrettable theme in advertising history. If you can lay your hands on the book The Label Made Me Buy It, there is an entire section devoted to insensitive depictions of ethnic groups, including the Irish, American Indians, Pacific Islanders and African Americans. The Aunt Jemima brand of pancake mix was introduced in 1889, inspired by a minstrel performance that featured the song “Old Aunt Jemima.” For decades, the character represented a romanticized view of slavery, and what part of makes her fascinating—and infuriating—is how she came to have such a pervasive presence. In addition to print ads and the use of her image on boxes of pancake mix, local promotions hired local actresses to portray the character, and even Disneyland had an Aunt Jemima-themed restaurant that perpetuated the image of the happy southern mammy at least until 1970. The NAACP began protesting this mascot in the early 1960s, although it wasn’t until 1986 that she finally shed the headscarf and received a complete makeover. Despite a modernized image—she now sports pearl earrings—some consumers don’t believe the character can shed her intensely racist origins and say that it’s time for Aunt Jemima to retire.

Charlie the Tuna: In the course of conversation, have you ever said—or heard someone say—”Sorry, Charlie”? Even if there isn’t a Charles, Charlie, or Chuck in the room? This particular turn of phrase has its roots in StarKist canned tuna. The company’s signature spokesfish first appeared in animated ads in 1961 and the slogan we associate with him came about the following year. Originally voiced by stage and screen actor Herschel Bernardi, Charlie strives to be a cultured fish with consummate taste—but apparently he himself does not taste good enough to be used in StarKist products. Every time he pursues a StarKist fishing hook, he finds it speared with a simple rejection letter: “Sorry, Charlie.” Seems the tuna company won’t settle for fish with good taste in lieu of fish that taste good.

Mr. Peanut: Anyone who has seen Sunset Boulevard ought to remember has-been silent screen actress Norma Desmond snarling, “We didn’t need dialog. We had faces!” Mr. Peanut seems to share those sentiments—although he ended up having the better career. The mascot of Planters peanuts since 1916, he didn’t get a voice until a 2010 ad campaign set about revitalizing the character for a younger generation. (Iron Man actor Robert Downey, Jr. supplied the voice, and you can even get updates from Mr. Peanut on Facebook.) Although other monocled and behatted goobers predate the Planters character, it is Mr. Peanut who has enjoyed serious staying power, appearing on Planters products—not to mention a horde of spinoff merchandise—and becoming one of the most recognizable advertising characters in existence.

The Jolly Green Giant: The Jolly Green Giant always seems like such a personable guy, but would you ever expect him to be nice enough to get someone out of a legal bind? When the Minnesota Valley Canning Company wanted to start canning a variety of especially large peas under the name “green giant,” it tried to trademark the title but couldn’t because it was merely descriptive of the product. But they could conjure up an image—a character even—with which to stake a legally binding claim on the name of their goods. The Green Giant was born in 1928—although in his initial incarnation, he was Neanderthal-looking and strangely non-green in appearance. With a little redesigning by Leo Burnett, he became a jolly, verdant fellow by the mid-1930s and by the 1950s he became so popular that the Minnesota Valley Canning Company re-dubbed itself Green Giant. 

Spongmonkeys, the Quizno’s Rodents: I would not lump the Spongmonkeys in the same class as the other characters mentioned above, but if nothing else they show how advertising reflects trends in current popular culture. The creatures are animals—maybe tarsiers, perhaps marmosets—that have been photoshopped to have human mouths and bulging eyes. They also have a fondness for hats. The brainchild of Joel Veitch, who created a video with the spongmonkeys hovering in front of a hydrangea bush singing about how much they love the moon. It’s over-the-top bizarre. And perhaps that was the quality Quizno’s was looking for when the sandwich chain used this work of internet video art as the basis for a national ad campaign. Some people loved the spongmonkeys, others weren’t quite sure what to do with them—but at the very least, people were talking about Quizno’s. And isn’t that the mark of a successful piece of advertising?

Constantine Rafinesque, a young French botanist, came to Philadelphia in 1802 and soon set off for Appalachia, walking at least 8,000 miles on foot in search of previously unclassified flora. He would name 6,700 species in a manic quest for fame, an exuberance that would ultimately undermine his reputation among his peers (Harvard’s Ava Gray would mock him for finding twelve species of lightning). As John Jeremiah Sullivan writes in “La-Hwi-Ne-Ski: Career of an Eccentric Naturalist,” an essay collected in Pulphead, the French polymath also advanced ideas far ahead of their time. He proposed a deviation of species, which preceded Darwin’s theory of evolution. And, as Sullivan writes, “Rafinesque was the first person ever to deny in print the very existence of race as a meaningful social construct.”

He also published books on North America fauna, ancient Mayan hieroglyphics, and the Walam Olum, an apparent hoax about origin of North American Indians. Rafineseque established himself as an expert in medicinal plants. His Medical Flora; Manual of the Medical Botany of the United States was sort of Merck Manual of its day. In 1829, the self-taught naturalist and self-proclaimed lung expert wrote The Pulmist; or, Introduction to the Art to Cure and to Prevent the Consumption and began selling a sweet-smelling herbal concoction as a cure for tuberculosis.

Rafineque’s concoction leaves us with something of a cautionary tale about a fleeting taste of early spring: the furled pinnae of the wild, fiddlehead fern*, one of the first wild edible plants to emerge.

Rafinesque did not patent his Pulmel concoction to avoid revealing its contents, so the exact recipe is a mystery. Elsewhere he named the plants in the auxiliaries—“Syrup of Lycopus, Pectoral Syrups of Lanthois, medicated oak bark”—and Charles Ambrose, a scholar at the University of Kentucky, writes in the Journal of Medical Biography that Rafinesque may have added two native ferns:

Both ferns were abundant in Pennsylvania where Rafinesque likely collected plants used in Pulmel. He was especially familiar with Adiantum (maidenhair fern) because of its common usage in France in a beverage and a medicinal syrup. He extolled its virtues as “a popular pectoral remedy throughout Europe, although little known in America” and wrote, “My own experience has tested the value of this plant and its syrup.”

But the long-term self-medication may have taken its toll. Gastric cancers have since been linked to eating bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum) or drinking milk from bracken-fed cows. Ferns are one of the few, if only, edible plants known to cause cancer in animals. While Rafinesque’s dose, despite unknowns about the recipe and the carcinogenicity, appears to have taken its toll: He died of stomach cancer at the age of 57. Until researchers assess the dregs of a bottle, yet to be unearthed, we’re left to wonder: Did the wild ferns do him in?

Portrait courtesy of the New York Public Library. Drawing of the American Maidenhair fern (Adiantum pedatum), from Medical Flora, vol. 1. Thumbnail image of ostrich fern courtesy (cc) of Flickr user LexnGer.

Now that I’ve got your attention, I’d like to explore a quintessential sound of summer climbing in your window, snatching up your sanity: the incessant chiming of ice cream trucks everywhere.

The tune you’re hearing—“Mister Softee (Jingle and Chimes)”—was written by Les Waas, who had been working for Grey Advertising, a small Philadelphia ad agency, in the late 1950s. He worked as a kind of one-man band of an adman. One day, his boss asked for a jingle for Kissling’s sauerkraut. Waas came up with one (“It’s fresh and clean, without a doubt. In transparent Pliofilm bags, it’s sold. Kissling’s Sauerkraut, hot or cold.”) The jingle played on kids’ TV shows and eventually got him in trouble, he says, when sauerkraut sales outpaced production and the company pulled its ad. Anyway, in 1960 (or thereabouts, he’s not so sure, it could have been as early as 1956), he wrote the lyrics for a regional ice cream company called Mister Softee:

Here comes Mister Softee
The soft ice cream man.
The creamiest, dreamiest soft ice cream,
You get from Mister Softee.
For a refreshing delight supreme
Look for Mister Softee…
S-O-F-T double E, Mister Softee.

The company gave him a 12-inch bell, which he took to New York to record an infectious three-minute earworm of an ad—with an original melody, recorded in one take. Some years later, again the date is unclear, company employees took the jingle’s melody and made a 30-second loop to put on their trucks. Waas says he received a telegram from Mister Softee saying it would have been only a tiny company with two or three trucks in South Jersey if it weren’t for the indelible sonic branding.

Now, for a quick refresher: Ice cream’s immense popularity in America dates to the 19th century, in the wake of the Civil War, when street vendors hawked a scoop of ice cream, or frozen milk, for a penny. Some wheeled carts; others employed goats. They sold their wares with catchy nonsense phrases: “I scream, Ice cream” and “Hokey pokey, sweet and cold; for a penny, new or old.” (Hokey pokey appears to have derived from a children’s jump-rope chant, including one derisively directed at kids who didn’t have a penny for ice cream.) As Hillel Schwartz writes in Making Noise, “Street vendors stretched their call into loud, long, and progressively unintelligible wails.” In the Babel of Manhattan, the cries were an “audible sign of availability.”

“If these cries were not enough to attract attention, many hokey pokey men also rang bells,” Anne Cooper Funderburg writes in Chocolate, Strawberry, and Vanilla: A History of American Ice Cream. Perhaps the ding! ding! in Waas’ proprietary jingle became a cultural icon because the bells conjured up the hokey pokey street vendors jingling about their ice creams.

What’s strangest about this story of the adman and his sprightly little jingle that endured: Waas claims that he has only heard it played on ice cream truck once. He was out at a Phillies baseball game with his son and went up to a truck. Waas again: “I said, ‘We both want a popsicle, but we’ll buy it only if you play the jingle.’ The guy says, ‘I can’t. I’m on private property.’ So we start to walk away and the guy stops us and says, ‘What the hell.’ And then he plays it. That was the only time I heard it and, of course, it was only the melody.”

Photo (cc) Flickr user Focht. Audio from YouTube user vidrobb.

This is the first in a series on sound and food. Stay tuned for more bells and whistling melodies.

Henry D. Perky is best remembered as the inventor of Shredded Wheat, one of the first ready-to-eat cereals and a food that’s changed the way Americans think about breakfast. Perky was a devout vegetarian who believed that good health came from simple, wholesome foods. His whole-wheat biscuits were not intended exclusively as a breakfast cereal—the biscuits were a health food that could be paired with mushrooms, or even sardines. Despite claims that the Shredded Wheat Biscuit was “the Wonder of the Age,” a cure-all for societal and personal woes, the little edible brown pillows did not immediately take off.

In order to get grocery stores to stock Shredded Wheat, Perky began publishing booklets—millions of booklets. And by emphasizing the link between health food and industrial efficiency, he accomplished something else: Perky published the earliest images of American ships in the Spanish American war—in a cookbook.

His 1898 book, The Vital Question and Our Navy, featured recipes for shredded wheat along with an addendum about the U.S. Naval exercises in the Philippines and Cuba. The photos “have nothing to do with the rest of the book,” Andrew F. Smith, a culinary historian and author of Eating History, said at the recent Cookbook Conference. “As far as I know, they’re the first pictures that appear of these battle cruisers and destroyers that are public.” To think, health foods and war once went hand in hand.

U.S.S. Indiana/Photograph by F. H. Child/The Vital Question and Our Navy

Nicholas Appert, a Frenchman, first preserved food without refrigeration in 1810, and an English immigrant named William Underwood first brought the technology to America. He set up a condiment business on Boston’s Russia Wharf. Despite Underwood’s legacy as a purveyor of deviled ham (and a pioneer of the term “deviled,” which he reportedly trademarked in 1870, the inaugural year of the U.S. Patent Office), he initially put up seafood. In Pickled, Potted, and Canned, Sue Shephard writes, “He first bottled and later canned lobster and salmon, which he exported using the label ‘Made in England,’ presumably to make the consumer feel it was a well-tried safe product from the old country and not something suspect from the ‘new.’”

By the late 19th century, Underwood had a problem—a rather disgusting problem that manifested itself as “swelling” cans of clams and lobster. These cans could be distinguished by their sound. In an 1896 paper, Underwood writes, “[U]nsound cans which have not yet swelled give a characteristic dull tone when struck.” At their worst, the dull cans spoiled without swelling. “Such cases are sometimes found in canned clams, and more frequently in lobster, in the latter case being known to the trade as ‘black lobster.’”

With the help of MIT food scientist Samuel Prescott, Underwood spent months in the lab in 1895 examining the source of spoilage. The two found a type of bacteria that formed heat-resistant spores that caused bacterial blooms; these spores could be killed by canning at 250°F for 10 minutes—a process that would transform the science and technology of canning, ushering in a world full of safe canned vegetables or meat. The canning innovation also left another lasting impression: Foods are safe only when sterilized.

The rise of the “tin can civilization,” Shephard writes, “relegated most traditional food preservation to quaint practices of undeveloped regions.” In this light, it’s worth remembering what canning does not preserve: The microbial biodiversity that once gave rise to the domesticated species we now use to leaven breads and brew beers. That, too, is worth preserving.

Sliced bread. Image courtesy of Flickr user MikeNeilson.

If you were to point to the most marvelous product kicking around in your pantry right now, would it be your loaf of bread? It is one of the most mundane staple foods, but as Aaron Bobrow-Strain shows in his book White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf, the lowly loaf is so much more than the sum of its simple parts. In American culture, bread is a status symbol, and the book provides a fascinating look at how store-bought white bread rose and fell in prominence. The book also answers the big question: Why do we have pre-sliced bread, and why it was the greatest thing to hit grocery store shelves?

To understand sliced bread, one must first understand the dramatic shift in bread making habits in America. In 1890, about 90 percent of bread was baked at home, but by 1930, factories usurped the home baker. Considering that bread making had been a part of domestic life for millennia, this is a fairly rapid change. In the early 20th century, Americans were highly concerned with the purity of their food supply. In the case of bread, hand-kneading was suddenly seen as a possible source of contamination, and yeast—those mystical, microscopic organisms that causes dough to rise—were viewed with suspicion. “Bread rises when infected with the yeast germ because millions of these little worms have been born and have died,” Eugene Christian wrote in his 1904 book Raw Foods and How to Use Them. “And from their dead and decaying bodies there rises a gas just as it does from the dead body of a hog of any other animal.” Images like this hardly make someone want to do business with the local baker.

Mass-produced bread, on the other hand, seemed safe. It was made in shining factories, mechanically mixed, government regulated. It was individually wrapped. It was a product of modern science that left nothing to chance. It was also convenient, sparing women hours in the kitchen to prepare a daily staple. Factory loaves also had an attractive, streamlined aesthetic, dispensing with the “unsightly” irregularities of homemade bread. Americans fed on factory bread because the bread companies were able to feed on consumer fear.

But factory breads were also incredibly soft. Buying pre-wrapped bread, consumers were forced to evaluate a product under sensory deprivation—it’s next to impossible to effectively see, touch and smell bread through a wrapper. “Softness,” Borrow-Strain writes, “had become customers’ proxy for freshness, and savvy bakery scientists turned their minds to engineering even more squeezable loaves. As a result of the drive toward softer bread, industry observers noted that modern loaves had become almost impossible to slice neatly at home.” The solution had to be mechanical slicing.

Factory-sliced bread was born on July 6, 1928 at Missouri’s Chillicothe Baking Company. While retailers would slice bread at the point of sale, the idea of pre-sliced bread was a novelty. “The housewife can well experience a thrill of pleasure when she first sees a loaf of this bread with each slice the exact counterpart of its fellows,” a reporter said of the sliced bread. “So neat and precise are the slices, and so definitely better than anyone could possibly slice by hand with a bread knife that one realizes instantly that here is a refinement that will receive a hearty and permanent welcome.” The bakery saw a 2,000 percent increase in sales, and mechanical slicing quickly swept the nation. With Americans all agog at the wonders of the mechanical age, sliced bread was a beacon of the amazing things the future might hold. At least that was the mindset. “Technology,” Bobrow-Strain says, “would usher in good society by conquering and taming the fickle nature of food provisioning.”

Chiquita Banana's Recipe Book, 1947/Photo courtesy of Christina Ceisel

In 1947, the United Fruit Company released the Chiquita Banana’s Recipe Book. The book was a strategic attempt to market the still “exotic” banana and make it palatable for the entire American family. How did they do it? Well, the banana would appeal to everyone (“Doctors recommend fully ripe mashed bananas for infant feeding”; “Old folks find bananas a pleasant, satisfying treat because they are a bland food, easy to chew, easy to digest, and low in fat content”). The book’s recipes include ham banana rolls with cheese sauce, salmon salad tropical, broiled bananas with curry sauce, and an obligatory Jell-O mold with bananas.

In a recent paper, “The Banana in the Tutti-Frutti Hat,” Christina Ceisel, a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, writes, “While these recipes have fallen to the wayside, the United Fruit Company succeeded in making the banana as commonplace as peanut butter and jelly.”

The cookbook also showcases Miss Chiquita (originally drawn in 1944 by Dik Browne, who’s probably better remembered as the creator of the comic series “Hagar the Horrible”). Her character invokes Latin American women such as Carmen Miranda, and this, Ceisel argues, symbolically links the banana to a prevalent stereotype of Latin America and the Caribbean as “tropicalized“—marked by bright colors, rhythmic music, and brown or olive skin. Miss Chiquita’s ruffled skirt and fruit basket hat have become icons of Caribbean ethnicity.

Of course, Chiquita’s spokeswoman also acts as a kind of distraction—weaving a trope of the tropics as lazy and primitive, Ceisel argues. Miss Chiquita is a piece of the symbolic groundwork for the enduring involvement of the United States government and multinational corporations in Latin America. Ceisel again:

The image of Miss Chiquita as a tropicalized Latina does the cultural work of providing Americans with an affordable, exotic fruit year-round, while masking the labor of the very real Latin Americans who provide these foodstuffs. Thus, while Miss Chiquita’s 1947 recipes sought to include the banana in the everyday vernacular of the American household, today they also function as a none too subtle reminder of the history of cultural representation and US hegemony and intervention in Latin America.

It’s a reminder that cookbooks are not merely books filled with recipes for foods—even uncommon recipes for everyday fruits—they’re also conduits for potent political ideas.

"Squirrel Stewed"/Gulf City Cook Book, 1878

Last weekend, I attended the Cookbook Conference in New York. One panel of historians and scholars extolled the value of texts traditionally relegated to the basements and attics: community cookbooks. Recipes collected by churches, clubs, and occasionally hippie communes. These books occupy a middle ground between printed manuscripts and word-of-mouth recipes, said Sandy Oliver, the editor of Food History News and author of Saltwater Foodways. “They’re a little bit closer to what people really cooked.”

One of these collection—the Library of Congress’s American Church, Club and Community Cookbooks—includes an 1878 book from Mobile, Alabama entitled Gulf City Cook Book Compiled by The Ladies of the St. Francis Street Methodist Episcopal Church, South. As Alison Kelly, the reference librarian who curated the collection, said, “if you thought community cookbooks were just chicken croquettes, this book will change your mind.”

Compared to today’s cooking, some of the book’s recipes—turtle soup or terrapin stew, for example—reflect a changing Southern ecology. The recipes also serve as a document of a profound cultural shift: the decline of hunting, wild game, chitlins, and pig’s feet. Perhaps this is best exemplified by the utterly mundane treatment of squirrel. Take “Squirrel Stewed.”

Skin them very carefully, so as not to allow the hair to touch the flesh; this can be done by cutting a slit under the throat, and as you pull it off, turn the skin over, so as to inclose [sic] the hair. Cut the squirrel in pieces (discard the head), and lay them in cold water; put a large table-spoon of lard in a stew-pan, with an onion sliced, and table-spoon of flour; let fry until the flour is brown, then put in a pint of water, the squirrel seasoned with salt and pepper, and cook until tender.

The Joy of Cooking

For decades, squirrel remained one of the last holdovers of a wilder American cuisine. Even the venerable Joy of Cooking contained recipes for squirrel between 1943 and 1996—complete with a drawing of a boot holding down the rodent’s hide. What’s interesting about the 1878 recipe is that its unnamed author calls for the removal of the animal’s head—especially interesting given what may have been the final nail in the squirrel-eating coffin: Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. In an excellent 2000 essay, “Squirrel and Man,” collected in his book Noodling for Flatheads, Burkhard Bilger examines the medical hypothesis suggesting that elderly Kentucky residents who partook in the tradition of eating squirrel brains suffered from spongiform encephalopathy, related to “mad-cow disease.” While Bilger found that “mad-squirrel disease” probably did not exist, the threat—real or imagined—probably helped drive wild game out of our diet.

Recently, Heather Smith issued a call for the resquirrelification of the American diet—an effort to transform the garden-variety rodent into a “drive-through cheeseburger of the forest.” While that may seem somehow exceptional now, the Alabama community cookbook is a reminder that, at least in 1878, there was hardly anything extraordinary about stewing up a squirrel.

“Commune Gothic” Summer 1970. Heidi Bushell and Mike McCarty/©Renaissance Community Archives used with permission/UMass Amherst W.E.B. Du Bois Library

In the fall of 1970, Lucy Horton went to stay with Robert Houriet and his wife in Vermont. Horton learned to type and “made order out of the chaos” that would eventually become the book Getting Back Together. Houriet suggested that Horton write a cookbook. And so, after a brief stint cooking for a wealthy woman in Manhattan the following spring, Horton stuck out her thumb and began hitchhiking around the country to gather material. She visited 45 communes and collected dozens recipes for casseroles, couscous, chickbits and a curious soup that calls for Love.

Country Commune Cooking was published in 1972. The comb-bound book resembles earlier community cookbooks put out by clubs and church groups, except that its instructions sometimes contained an overt recipe for social change. I called Horton, who now runs Autumn Leaves, an online bookselling business in Allentown, Pennsylvania, to ask about the legacy of these commune cooks. “They were the forerunners of something,” she told me. “I went to a lot of places where people had what I thought were nutty ideas. But the basic idea was a diet based on what’s available locally, prepared nutritiously, getting away from meat and fat and sugar. That really has become a mainstream idea.”

Not every idea has been a lasting one, Horton said. “The recipes were all donated. I didn’t really own them. And people had a lot of notions about food. I couldn’t accommodate everybody’s notions.” If there were any notion she would forgo today, Horton said it would be what some communards then considered an insidious chemical toxin. “A lot of people thought that baking powder was a poisonous chemical, so I did all the baking recipes with yeast, which is difficult and not very practical.”

One of the most intriguing recipes comes from the Brotherhood of the Spirit, a commune in Western Massachusetts headed by Michael Metalica, “a youthful guru who in turn receives spiritual teachings from a medium, a retired bus driver” named Elwood Babbit. The Brotherhood (later renamed the Renaissance Community) was one of New England’s longest-lasting New Age communes. They tried to spread their message through rock and roll. Their recipe, too, is an attempt at communicating the group’s social and spiritual ideals through the medium of food.

Whether “Brotherhood Spirit in Flesh Soup” is emblematic of an era or more of a recipe for the future remains an open question. Either way, the collection reflects one of the most lasting legacies of counterculture. As Darra Goldstein said at the recent Cookbook Conference: “They were so much more than cookbooks. They were a way of being in the world.”

Warwick Kitchen, 1972. Meg, “Nutmeg” Rich stirring dinner, probably brown rice, squash or mashed potatoes./©Renaissance Community Archives, used with permission/UMass Amherst W.E.B. Du Bois Library

Brotherhood Spirit in Flesh Soup
From Country Commune Cooking, edited by Lucy Horton, reprinted with permission from the author.

Get everyone together and get a good feeling between you. Work out anything and everything that lies unexpressed. Realize that you are Spirit—and that the health and balance of those you feed depend only on your Thoughts—that balance and order of the body depend upon balance and order of the Mind Positive. The ingredients are of secondary importance, and always in a divine relativity. This soup was made by Alan, Martin, Tam, Lynne and others, and Duh Bear.

1. Two big pots half full of boiling water.

2. Add 2 cups of pinto beans and a little later several handfuls of barley.

3. To each then add a lot of sautéed onions. At this writing the soup isn’t done, but we’ll add 12 canning quarts of squash, carrots and tomatoes from last summer’s garden. Also some green beans someone gave us. Later some salt and seasoning, kelp powder, and a few tablespoons of miso to each. Follow your own Awareness most of all. This soup will feed 130 along with two pots of brown rice and two pots of millet. Pots are about 3 or 4 gallons.

Finally, one last ingredient to be used throughout—Love.

Thanks to Danielle Kovacs, special collections curator at UMass Amherst, for assistance securing permissions for the above photographs and also to Stephanie Hartman, whose article “The Political Palate,” provided inspiration.