N.B. I first published this piece four years ago. In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I’ve brought it back for your holiday enjoyment. Enjoy!

It was was generally acknowledged in the second half of the 19th century that few things were worse than an Irish cook. Their awfulness was proverbial.

“Many things are called crimes that are not as bad as the savagery of an Irish Cook.” ~Amelia Barr

American newspapers and ladies magazines were filled with stories about burnt roasts, inedible white bread, tardy dinners, and insolent servants. The “domestic problem”, i.e. the problem with Irish domestics, was the topic of the day, and there seemed to be no solution.

But what was one to do? In post-Civil War, Industrial America, urban, middle-class women were overwhelmed with domestic duties. The keeping of a respectable home was not something to be essayed alone. In the era before labor-saving appliances, a housewife needed a young woman who could cook and clean at her direction. Unfortunately, native-born Americans, the citizens of a free republic, generally declined to go into service. It was beneath their station, no matter how destitute they might be.

So, the middle class was booming, labor was scarce, domestic help was dear, and the Irish were available. A young Irish woman who could make her way to America could command a pretty wage, three dollars a week with room and board, or more if she were clean and her references good.

And, make their way they did, by the hundreds of thousands. In the decades after the Civil War, single women comprised the largest category of Irish immigrants, 53% of the total. The Irish were the only immigrants in the entire 19th or 20th century whose women coming to America outnumbered the men.

Unfortunately for the husbands and children of their new nation, these young women did not know how to cook, at all, and seemed resistant to learning.

Biddy is to Bridget as Paddy is to Patrick, the catchall name for an Irish worker. This young “Biddy” soon became the villain of many a domestic comedy, called out as such because of her surly independence and cack-handed ways at the stove.

More than a bad cook, Biddy was also, according to Diocletian Lewis, the Dr. Oz of the 1870’s, a threat to national health.

In a chapter entitled “Biddy O’Flaunnigan as Cook,” Dr. Dio Lewis touches upon a subject of the greatest importance to every one of us, man, woman, and child. It is that of entrusting the preparation of our food, which is to form the brains, bones, and muscles for ourselves and our children, to an ignorant Irish woman who, perhaps, a month ago was living in a mud hut on a diet of potatoes…”

~Philadelphia Evening Telegraph, December 12, 1870

The first and biggest problem was that Biddy arrived in America uneducated in the ways of keeping house, and the American housewife, the dainty “Miss Lucille,” was charged with whipping her into shape, whether Biddy wanted to be whipped or not.

They have had no experience in nice housework, no habits of cleanliness or economy – for the lowest laboring class is never saving – nor even an education often in the simplest kinds of cooking . . . The consequence is that each house is, at some time or other, a kind of philanthropic ‘Servants’ Institute’, where a blundering, slovenly, strong-armed maiden is educated into a neat, handy, serviceable house-helper.

~ New York Times, 13 December 1863.

It’s not surprising the Irish girl couldn’t cook. The average age of the young Irish women who immigrated in the 19th century was 21 years old. Many of them were in their mid-teens, 15 or 16 years old, from impoverished rural homes, unused to the lack of autonomy and long hours of drudgery required in domestic service, where 14-hours days, six-and-a-half days a week, was the norm.

Oddly, despite being ignorant of middle-class domesticity, at the same time, Biddy was surprisingly literate.

Although they generally came from poor farming families, many had the rudiments of literacy, especially in comparison to immigrants from the continent.  In Ireland, both the traditional “hedge schools” and the National Schools, which opened in 1831, emphasized literacy. During the nineteenth century, the percentage of Irish with basic skills in reading and writing rose from around 30 percent in the 1830s to 75 percent by mid-century, culminating in a rate of 97 percent in 1900, higher than for the general American population. These averages tended to be highest among the young, and most immigrants were young.

And this was probably the real root of the problem.

"For several years, Irish incapables have reigned in our kitchen and general discomfort has pervaded the house.” ~Louisa May Alcott

You know things are bad when even the wonderfully sympathetic Louisa May Alcott is complaining about you.

“No Irish need apply,” said Louisa May Alcott, because she had another solution to the problem of keeping house. She would hire an American woman and treat her like a sister.

My little Miss S. was one of the family, for in the beginning I said to her, “I want someone to work with me as my sisters used to do. There is not mistress or maid about it, and the favor is as much on your side as mine. Work is a part of my religion and there is no degradation in it, so you are as much a lady to me, cooking my dinner in the kitchen, as any friend who sits in the parlor. Eat with us, talk with us, work with us; and when the daily tasks are done, rest with us, read our books, sit in our parlor and enjoy all we can offer you in return for your faithful and intelligent service.”

And that’s exactly what Alcott did, to her great satisfaction, and to the benefit of an otherwise destitute American woman.

This is the most peculiar, Dickensian, part of this whole story, when you realize that in the middle of a historic labor boom, when Irish girls, fresh off the boat, could command sumptuous wages for mangling dinner, there were respectable American women who were going hungry for lack of work. Women who were experienced and capable cooks.

In the years after the Civil War, starvation, or at least malnutrition, was a real possibility for many women. Thanks to bloodbaths like the battles of Antietam, Shiloh and Chickamauga there weren’t enough young men to go around, and impoverished widows and spinsters were legion. No level of desperation, however, could force these women into domestic service, they were too American, too republican, too proud for that. They’d rather starve than become a domestic.

This is why Louisa May Alcott is treating her cook, “little Miss S.”, with such exaggerated civility. (“I always gave her her name as she gave me mine, and returned the respect she gave me as scrupulously as I could.”) It is only by pretending that their relationship was not that of mistress and maid that Miss S. was able to maintain her dignity and work for Alcott. They pretended Miss S. was not the cleaning lady and cook. She was just a friend who was helping out at $3 a week plus room and board.

By the way, this is the same reason why, today, American waiters always insist on introducing themselves by their first names, and why middle-class American women prefer maids who aren’t native speakers of English.

Which brings us back to Biddy and her rebellious ways.

Biddy was a native speaker of English, comically accented English, but English nonetheless. And Biddy was literate and pretty darn smart, even if she didn’t know how to cook. Most importantly, she was, above all else, an American in embryo.

In English popular culture, on the stage and in novels, the Irish servant was caricature of fun, inept but good natured and not especially querulous. But in America, the Irish Biddy was a terror, she wrecked your meal and bullied your family. The difference is, Britain had a well-developed class system, one in which everyone knew their place. While in America, not so much. (Andrew Urban of Rutgers University has a good paper on the phenomenon of the rebellious Biddy.)

In other words, Biddy bridled because Biddy was becoming American.

Biddy was becoming American. How could it have been otherwise? The Irish girls made good money, read a lot of books and newspapers, and had no intention of going back to Ireland. They were dead set on becoming American, and being American meant republicanism, egalitarian manners, and showing and being shown proper respect. Imagine how prickly our little Miss S. would be if someone tried to boss her around. She absolutely wouldn’t stand for it, and neither did Biddy after a few months in America. There were plenty of desperate housewives in 19th century New York and Boston, and jobs for cooks who couldn’t cook were plentiful.

One more point, this is an urban problem, the problem of a fast-rising, newly-urbanized American middle class. In the 19th century, out in the country, most prosperous farms had servants—farmhands and maids— who ate at the same table with the owners, and expected their condition to be temporary. Eventually, the farmhand would buy his own farm and marry the maid, who would then keep house for their new family. And thus republican dignity was maintained.

This new urban middle class, however, wanted a permanent servile caste, one which had no hope of advancement up the ladder. If you were rich enough, you could import as your servants an English butler and nanny, a French cook and maids, people who were accustomed to a rigid class system and knew their place. That was the ideal to which the middle-class American housewife—reading her English novels and mimicking the English manners—aspired. But Biddy O’Flaunnigan would not conform to that. She was determined to be American, with all that implies, and no lady novelist putting on airs was going to stand in her way.

And, worse, Biddy was going to remain Catholic. Another element of the tension between housewives and their Irish cooks was the religious differences between the two. At a moment when American missionaries were triumphantly converting “heathens” in China, the Irish domestics remained intractably papist, despite being subjected to, “a most trying ordeal of temptation and persecution on account of their religion.” If I were more talented, I’d write a one-act comedy about Louisa May Alcott trying to explain Protestant Transcendentalism (“work is part of my religion”) to Biddy, then giving up and tricking a meek Presbyterian woman in to doing the drudge work.

What finally ended the terror of the Irish cook was two things, the Great Migration and modern appliances. By the turn of the century, Blacks had begun to move from the south to the north in record numbers, supplanting the Irish as the preferred domestics in the Northeast. And, unlike the Irish girls, the black women who replaced them in middle class homes had reputations for being uniformly good cooks. (There’s a lot more to say here about this, a lot more, but I’ll come back to it in the future. It is, as you would imagine, a very fraught topic.)

Eventually, of course, machines replaced everyone except the lone and lonely housewife. The washing machine, dishwasher, vacuum and microwave took over completely, to the point that unless you’re quite wealthy, the only domestic seen in most middle class homes today is a Central American woman who shows up once a week to clean the bathrooms.

But, back to Biddy at the stove one last time. I want to point out, in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, that the glory of Irish-American cooking is boiled meat.

Literally, the easiest and most foolproof dish possible is the pinnacle of Irish-American cuisine. I do not think this is a coincidence.

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!

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In Santiago, Chile, young lovers have a curious habit of consecrating their affection by placing a padlock on the railing of a local bridge and tossing the key into the Rio Mapoche, thus supposedly insuring that their amor will endure forever.

I discovered this in January, shortly after I arrived in the city, when during one of my long walks I crossed the Puente Racamalac (also called the Puente Condell), a rainbow-shaped footbridge in the Parque Balmaceda. I was reminded of it again on Valentine’s Day, when near the end of another long walk I crossed the bridge while two TV news crews were shooting some footage, presumably for a timely feature on the love locks, which I presumably wrecked by being a stout, sweaty, middle-aged American.

What’s most interesting to me, as a social historian, is that this custom is not an ancient one, but rather very new. In fact, it seems to have arrived in Chile only in 2012, following the release of the Spanish romantic drama, Tengo ganas a ti. In that movie, the main male character pledges his love to the main female character with a lock on a bridge, in this case the Pont d’en Gómez in Girona, Catalonia. Here’s the scene:

The 2012 Spanish movie Tengo ganas de ti (In English, I Want You) is based on a hit Italian movie from 2007, Ho voglia di te, which in turn was based on a 2006, best-selling romance novel of the same name by the Italian screenwriter and novelist, Frederico Moccia.

For a social historian, or a cultural anthropologist, what makes the spread of this custom so interesting and amusing is that Moccia invented the whole ritual of love locks and thrown keys from scratch when he wrote his romance.

Moccia, 44, says he just dreamed up the ritual. “I liked the idea of tying locks to love because it is more solid, tangible,” he said. The book sold 1.1 million copies, the movie version came out – and soon life began imitating art.

The original lock scene of the book and the Italian movie was the famous Ponte Milvio over the Tiber River, built in 115BC, and site of the battle that made Constantine the first Christian emperor in 312AD.

As testament to how fast things spread in the modern world, within a few months of the Italian movie appearing, the city authorities in Rome had to start cutting locks off the bridge, lest the weight of them collapse the ancient structure. A similar dynamic has played out across Europe. In Paris, a footbridge over the Seine near the Louvre, the Pont des Artes, was also recently in danger of collapsing from the weight of Moccia’s love locks. The Parisian authorities responded with bolt cutters and a social media campaign. The lovers of Paris responded by moving to the Pont de l’Archevêché near Notre Dame.

Curiously, Moccia’s novel has not yet been translated into English, despite doing very well in French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Russian and Chinese. However, as we’ve seen with the spread of roadside memorials to traffic victims, something introduced to American roads via Mexican immigrants, sentimental customs have a way of getting to the USA and spreading rapidly.

So, look for love locks on an American bridge near you, coming soon.

N.B. Moccia’s novel was finally in 2021 translated into English as Two Chances with You.

Few things are more distressing or funny than watching a fat man labor up a steep hill. And at the end of February 2015, at the height of the Chilean summer, when temperatures in Santiago were in the mid-90s, I was that fat man.

I was dragging myself up Cerro San Cristobal, the steep hill with the statue of the Virgin Mary on top, because I had foolishly agreed to accompany two dozen 19-year-olds to Torres del Paine, a trip that would include, I had been told, an 18-mile hike into the mountains of Patagonia. I was thus preparing myself by taking long daily walks—five or more miles—through Santiago, walks punctuated by stops at various picadas and fuentes de soda for nourishment and refreshment, usually in the form of a lomito italiano and a fanschopp or three.

I was trudging up Cerro San Cristobal because I had at last concluded that long sidewalk strolls in the flatlands of Santiago were insufficient preparation for mountain climbing. And, so there I was, mid-morning, two-thirds of the way up the hill, out-of-breath, red-faced and sweating like a prize sow, and the worst part was, that I was not alone. Cerro San Cristobal was packed with bikers, walkers, picnickers, and tourists, and because of that, I was being repeatedly accosted.

“Sir. Are you okay,” asked a park volunteer in a green vest, “Do you need help? A drink of water?”  He held out a plastic bottle.

“No, I’m fine. Thank you.”

Two hundred paces up the hill…

“Do you need assistance, Sir,” said a young woman with a clipboard, “there’s a bench right there.”

I waved her off with a grunt.

Another three minutes trudge and a pair of Carabineros in a patrol car slowed to crawl next to me, both of them gawping. Just when I was sure they were going to ask if I needed a ride to the hospital, the one in the passenger seat pointed to the front and they accelerated away. I suspect they thought I was going to die, and were worried they would have to lift my body into the ambulance.

My biggest mistake was thinking there would be a motero, someone selling mote con huesillos every few hundred meters on the way up Cerro San Cristobal . I had not brought along any water. My entire rehydration plan was based on mote con huesillos. I expected that, like everywhere else in Santiago, mote con huesillos would be available for purchase from a cart at frequent intervals.

I was wrong.

Mote con huesillo is one of those things that doesn’t knock you out, so much as sneak up on your blindside and grab you in a bear hug.

When you first encounter mote con huesillos, on your first trip to Chile, you don’t think you will like it, but you order it anyway because everyone around you has one in their hands. And when you try it, you notice the intense sweetness, but not much else. Yet, by the end of the second week, you’ve ordered it several times and can’t stop thinking about it, hoping you’ll have have another one soon.

Mote con huesillo is the most peculiar libation since bubble tea. It’s a sweet syrup of caramelized sugar water, served ice cold, with a pair of rehydrated dried peaches and a fistful of mote, wheat slow-cooked in an alkaline solution, i.e. nixtamalized.

It sounds like something concocted by German naturists as a breakfast food, except it’s sweeter than honey, more filling than spatzel, and more refreshing than anything found in Germany that isn’t served in festive, one-liter steins.

As the advertisement says, mote con huesillo is the “drink of Chile”, a fact that may be disputed by the patrons of the pisco sour, but not by me, and not by hundreds of thousands of Santiagueños who support a motero on every corner. “More Chilean than mote con huesillos,” is a popular saying, the equivalent of  “more American than apple pie,” and liking it is the ultimate test of chilenidad, of Chileanness.

The story of how mote con huesillos found its way into the Chilean diet starts, as do so many of these stories, with the Mapuche, the native people who held off the Spanish and remained independent of colonial control for nearly 300 years.

As I’ve said elsewhere, the Mapuche were one of the few New World peoples who readily adopted Old World crops. In 1544, Pedro Valdivia, the Spanish conquistador who founded Santiago, distributed a large amount of wheat seed to the caciques of the Mapuche, as part of the effort to pacify and civilize the natives. The Mapuche planted it and loved it. Wheat grew especially well in the soil and climate of the Mapuche territory, and added a dimension of flavor and food security to the Mapuche diets. It provided enough extra food that it actually enabled the Mapuche to better resist the Spanish. So, it is with some justification that the Chilean historian José Bengoa calls the Mapuche “la gente del trigo“, the “Wheat People”, which as far as it goes is a half-accurate description of a badass people who came very close to defeating the Spanish.

Oddly, although wheat became a major staple in the Mapuche diet, it was not usually served in the form of bread. That came later, in the late-17th century, likely introduced by Spanish and creole women who had been captured by the Mapuche.

One famous example of such a captive is Isabel Vivar y Castro who was captured in 1633 and made the wife of the Mapuche cacique Curivilú. Two years later, she gave birth to his son, Alejandro. A few years after that, Isabel and Alejo were “rescued” by the Spanish and taken back to Concepción, where Isabel was ostracized for having been the wife of an indio, and Alejo for being a mestizo. Her response was to become a nun, and to give the boy to the Franciscans to raise. Alejo grew to adulthood, joined the Spanish army as an arquebusier, was denied promotion because he was a mestizo and deserted, returning home to his father. Once back in Araucanía, Alejo became an important war chief, a toqui. He introduced up-to-date Spanish military techniques and lead an army that destroyed Spanish forts and massacred settlements. In 1660 he was killed by his two native wives for getting drunk after a victory and raping a captive Spanish woman. (Chilean history, largely unknown, is wild.)

So, bread arrived late and was first enjoyed by the chiefs, who were most likely to have captive white women around the camp. Early European and Chilean visitors, both voluntary and involuntary, rarely mentioned bread in their accounts of Mapuche meals until the 18th century. Instead of bread, the Mapuche enjoyed their wheat as mürke, or mulke (in Spanish, harina tostada), toasted wheat ground into a coarse flour and then made into a gruel called ulpo, which is mixed with any variety of liquid, from honey to milk to water to jam, and served hot or cold.

Today, harina tostada makes its appearance in some odd places. Chileans like to sprinkle it onto watermelon as a condiment. They add a tablespoon or two of toasted wheat to cold water as a summer beverage, or into beer or wine as part of a native cocktail called the chuplica. It’s also added to stews as a thickener, served with sugar as a candy, or with fried onions as a snack. There's even a toasted wheat ice cream.

The way the Mapuche prepared wheat was the same way they prepared maize: toasted over a fire and milled on a stone mortar with a stone pestle. And, if you’re toasting wheat the same way you’re toasting corn, why not also slow-cook whole kernels of wheat in a pot filled with wood ashes?  Although, wheat flour, unlike plain corn meal, has no trouble making a dough, nor is it deficient in niacin or protein. But, if you nixtamalize wheat the result is mote, a plump bit of chewy goodness, not unlike pearled barley or bulgar wheat. It can be added to stews and soups to provide more body and extend the dish cheaply, or mixed with green beans as porotos con mote, or with potatoes in papas con mote.

By the 19th century, moteros, the sellers of mote, were a fixture in Santiago, with a large number of them congregating in the Barrio Mapocho around the Cal y Canto bridge, near the present-day Mercado Central. There, near the river, they had ready access to water, a necessity as the production of mote required a great deal of it.  Their technique for processing wheat into mote would have been exactly the same as shown in the video below (except for the plastic buckets), where Señora Herminda Diaz Riquelme of Los Sauces in the Araucanía Region (old Mapuche territory) makes artisanal mote in the old fashioned way.

At 0:43, you can see Sra. Diaz R. sifting wood ashes, the key ingredient in the alkaline solution that nixtamalizes the wheat. The last half of the video is devoted to the extensive washing of the mote.

Another major agricultural product of colonial Chile was dried peaches, huesillos, which were mentioned in various sources as early as the 17th century, and were one of the items regularly exported to the more opulent colonial city of Lima, Peru.

The real conundrum for food historians of Chile is when mote met huesillos, the Chilean version of who got chocolate in my peanut butter.  The best guess is that mote con huesillos was something cooked up in the late 19th century, in Santiago, as a summertime refreshment for city dwellers. There’s a good consideration of the problem at the blog Eating Chilean written by a retired American professor of anthropology.

However it got together, by the second decade of the 20th century, mote con huesillos was well established, as evidenced by this postcard from 1915:

That gawping look on the faces of the boy and the man on the far right of the photo, that’s exactly how the Carabineros looked at me as I trudged to the top of Cerro San Cristobal, as a curiosity that might turn into something unpleasant and dangerous.

It was my fault I hadn’t brought any water on my hike up San Cristobal. I thought it likely that there would be moteros all along the way, dispensing their sugary Balm of Gilead to the needy. But also because the best place in the world to have a mote con huesillos is at the top of Cerro San Cristobal.

In my mind, Cerro San Cristobal and mote con huesillos go together like dried peaches and nixtamalized wheat.

At the top of San Cristobal, after you get off the funicular, but before you head up the flight of stairs to the base of the Virgin Mary statue, there is a patio with a half dozen stands selling souvenirs, snacks, drinks, and mote con huesillos. Buy a mote con huesillos, go to the edge of the patio, sit on the wall, and gaze at the city spread out beneath you. It’s a view that will reward you many times over, and a mote con huesillos is the best thing to drink while you look at it.

But, whatever else you do, take the funicular up to the top of Cerro San Cristobal. Please, take the funicular!

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I wrote and published this piece a few years ago, but I think it’s one of the better things I’ve written and needs to be shared more widely. I’ll be back next week with something new.

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Idiocies is a strong word, but hear me out. For some reason, writer/director Dallas Jenkins has decided that all of the actors portraying Jews must speak in the most phony-baloney “Aramaic” accent possible. It’s sort of Fiddler-on-the-Roof as filtered through a Los Angeles kombucha bar. Meanwhile, all the Roman characters speak the plainest, Midwestern American, a hilarious detail that implies the story is being told from the point of view of a random centurion. The silliness is laid on even thicker when we find that, at the court of Herod Antipas, the official Chuza and his Christian wife Joanna look and sound like patrician Yankees, John Cheever’s high WASPs in fancy dress, while the few Greek characters who wander on stage speak with British accents. The effect of this directorial decision is to emphasize the foreignness of Jesus and his runty followers. We viewers are outsiders, gentiles, looking on as these people with their funny accents enact their melodramas.

On the other hand, the costumes look great and the sets are quite handsome and atmospheric, although certainly too luxurious. The Apostle Simon, a humble fisherman—hammily played by the Israeli actor Shahar Isaac—lives in a lavishly appointed home, a multi-room Restoration Hardware townhouse with well-made furniture and lots of space. The problem here is that most moderns gravely underestimate the pervasiveness of poverty in the pre-modern world. In Ancient Rome, something like 90 percent of the population would have been near, at or below subsistence level, most of them earning what little bread they received as peasants working the land directly. Another 8 percent—some merchants, traders, a few artisans and officials—enjoyed a “moderate surplus”, leaving the vast majority of the resources for the remaining 2 percent, the elites. According to the historians Peter Garnsey and Richard Saller this was “the Roman system of inequality.” It’s also why economic matters figured so importantly in Jesus’s message, something The Chosen doesn’t really deal with, preferring instead to portray the Apostles as being drawn from the prosperous burghers of Galilee.

Aside from the furniture, one way this disregard for historical poverty shows up is in the domestic lighting budget. The Apostles burn candles like Jesus is made of money. It’s a small detail, but one that I find very annoying. In the first place, beeswax candles have always been relatively expensive. In the second place, 1st century Judaeans used almost nothing but small pottery lamps that burned olive oil. In fact, lamp fragments are one of the most commonly found things in Near Eastern archeological sites, and archeologists keep finding lamp workshops because lamps were such a common household article. This candle profligacy won’t register with most people, so I suppose this is a me problem, not a problem for the people who keep the Yankee Candle Store in business.

I don’t want to keep talking about The Chosen’s many historical inaccuracies and errors, not even its cockeyed, thoroughly modern view of gender roles, or literacy. I don’t want to do that because I want to get to what this production does right, and what it does right most of all is the actor Jonathan Roumie, the charismatic center of this production. Roumie has a handsomely sympathetic face with soft eyes and a sweet smile. As an actor, he so completely transcends the pedestrian writing that you find yourself wishing he’d been cast in a more competent production. Writer-director Dallas Jenkins has a tin-eared talent for clunky phraseology, best displayed in his version of The Sermon on the Mount, delivered at the beginning of Season 3. In the Bible, the Sermon on the Mount is an electrifying moment of divine instruction, rendered in The Chosen as a plodding series of Jesus’s greatest one-liners. “Consider the lilies of the field.” Yet, we don’t blame Roumie for the failure of the dialogue nor the silly accent. He’s too engaging and too sympathetic, his emotions seem too true. You can’t help but like him, even when the writers are doing him dirty.

Jenkins, however, does do a few things well dramatically. The first is that he delivers Jesus to us in small doses, keeping us in suspense and making Roumie’s on-screen time precious. Jesus is a mystery in The Chosen, and rightly so. And the mystery of Jesus, and why he chooses these 12 men to be his Apostles, is the motive power behind the series, not the small-stakes soap operas that are the lives of the Apostles. The second thing is that the miracles seem genuinely miraculous. Jenkins wisely choose to underplay them. No angelic music, or radiant light, just Jesus putting his hands on the afflicted and a few seconds later they realize they’re healed. It’s a shockingly effective and moving technique, one that brought me to the brink of tears a couple of times.

Of course, the real success of The Chosen has more to do with it being a soap opera than a true reflection of Jesus’s ministry. Jenkins’s smartest decision of all, from an entertainment standpoint, is inventing personalities and complicated backstories for the twelve Apostles. Instead of simple fishermen, tentmakers and reformed tax collectors, we get Matthew the autist, estranged from his parents, Thomas the caterer, hot to marry the headstrong Ramah, and Simon the reformed Zealot assassin with the crippled brother. These subplots provide grist for the Jenkins mill, soap opera complications that play out while we’re waiting for Jesus to do his thing. It’s emotionally manipulative and, as these things frequently are, addictive.

Ultimately, The Chosen is a near perfect reflection of American Christianity in the first half of the 21st century, blandly therapeutic and middle class. The Apostles are not desperate religious revolutionaries, fanatics following the Messiah, they’re your neighbors on the cul-de-sac with the same petty concerns and family complications. One of the most revealing subplots is when Zebedee, the father of James and John, decides to start an olive oil business to “support the ministry”. For those outside the current Evangelical zeitgeist, this is known colloquially as a “kingdom business” or “business-as-mission”, an American innovation that transforms business success into spiritual ministry, capitalism as a form of Christian witness. So, Jenkins succeeds completely in making the Apostles relatable to the average American mega-church-goer, but at the cost of both historical accuracy and spiritual truth. In doing so, he inverts the values of the New Testament, in which desperate men and women, sinners, sailors, thugs, and reformed prostitutes, living on the edge of starvation and death, upend the world with a message of salvation. Jenkins’s Apostles seem to risk little and gain less from the arrival of Jesus. Their lives are barely disturbed, which is pretty much the current American model of Christianity.

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An Eccentric Culinary History is good description of the general content of this newsletter, pieces that reflect my odd and wide-ranging interests, primarily culinary and historical in nature. Take a look at the archives for a better sense of what you’ll get twice a week.

I bring this up because last month I went home to Northern California for the first time in six years, and one of the only things I could think about was eating a tostada at La Hacienda, an old-school Mexican restaurant, a place that would be dismissed as too Americanized by online hipsters.

Chico is a small city 90 miles north of Sacramento in the Central Valley, a place that’s had the same relaxed hippyish vibe for the past 50 years. La Hacienda is the oldest restaurant in Chico, founded in 1948 by Nate and Tomasa Ybañez, who, according to a 1977 advertisement, “brought old family recipes to Chico and soon became known for their authentic Mexican cuisine”; family recipes brought from Fresno, it should be noted.

The tostada itself is impressively large and delightful, a crispy, plate-sized corn tortilla mounded over with beans, shredded iceberg lettuce, red onion rings, cheddar cheese, and slices of tomato and avocado, all of it very fresh. Your only decision when ordering is chicken, beef, pork or more beans. This is not a spicy dish. The meat carries what spice there is, a subtle undercurrent of chiles and cumin. I have historically wavered between chicken and pork, both of them very tasty.

What sets the dish and La Hacienda apart is the secret sauce, a sweet, very sweet, addictively delicious pink dressing served in a squeeze bottle. Back when Sunset Magazine was dispensing West Coast cool to the world, the Ybañez family refused to disclose the recipe to them at any price. Today, it’s only known by two people, who guard it like the crown jewels. Online spoilsports suggest it’s just honey, mayo, red wine vinegar, garlic and cumin. I’m dubious. The flavor seems more complex than that. It’s certainly more addictive than those ingredients suggest.

You’ll note, in the photo above, that there’s a single black olive nestled among the onions, which brings me back to that original discussion of authenticity and whatever that means. That black olive is a clue that this might be more than an Americanized knock-off of a muy autentico Mexican dish, that this tostada might be its own thing with its own noble history.

Black olives aren’t just that garnish your great aunt trots out at Thanksgiving, they’re a marker of Californio cuisine, of a distinctly California version of Spanish-Mexican food that developed in the 19th century. Here’s the writer Georgia Freeman describing it in her piece The Secrets of California’s Oldest Recipes

Marianne began cooking from these recipes four decades ago, when she married Jim Poett, a seventh-generation cattle rancher, and moved with him to the family’s 181-year-old ranch near Santa Barbara, on California’s Central Coast. The notebook was a trove of family history, as told through the recipes that the women of the family were eating and cooking in the ranch’s early years. And Marianne found that many of them have an important ingredient in common: black olives. “Olives are the sign of a California-style recipe,” Marianne explains to me as she juggles a variety of jobs, taking phone calls from the local newspaper (where she is the editor), improvising a recipe for tomatillo salsa, and arranging homegrown flowers in cans to decorate the table for the feast she is cooking for the two dozen friends and neighbors who are on the ranch to help brand the family’s cattle today. “If you see olives in a recipe for enchiladas or tamales, you know it’s from here.”

And if you need further proof of the importance of olives in Californio cuisine, here’s an excerpt from an English newspaper, The Pall Mall Gazette, January 15, 1894.

Note that the location, here, is Santa Barbara, California, where a tamale is a “mixture of chicken, cheese, chillis, olives, raisin and corn-flour,” a combination that would be impossible to find in Mexico City. Same for an enchilada, which the same author describes as being made of “layers of chillis, olives and cold meat well mixed with pepper sauce” and rolled up like a “French pancake.”

What confuses people obsessed with authenticity is that olives do not play much of a role in Mexican food in Mexico, where for a variety of reasons, some cultural, some climatological, they aren’t much seen. But, in California, 250 years ago, when Father Serra established the missions he immediately planted grapes and olives, both of which flourished in a climate that was closer to Spanish than Mexican. Which is why olives and raisins were in those tamales in Santa Barbara.

This means that generations of oven-baked chicken enchiladas, cooked up in Omaha and Oklahoma City, and garnished with sliced black olives from California, are more authentic than tacos al pastor cooked on a shawarma trompo, something that only arrived in Mexico in the 1930s.

See what I mean about authenticity being a crock? Culture is too polymorphous and mutable to pin down with a blunt term like “authenticity”. You can’t bludgeon a living cuisine into your square hole with prescriptive rules about what is and isn’t “authentic”. Things get away from you, and take on a life of their own, out-racing you and out-living your needless ire.

As a historian of food and culture, I care about the truth and about trying to untangle the Gordian knot of influence and counter-influence. As an eater of some repute, I care about taste. I don’t care much about authenticity. It’s too much of a slippery eel to get my hands around. All I can tell you is that the tostada at La Hacienda is delicious, something proven by the generations of diners who’ve kept that place in business. I can also speculate, with some justification, that that tostada, with that single black olive, is the remnant of an older food tradition, of a very old California way of cooking lying just out of view, hidden by our mania for the “real”.

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P.S. I’m almost positive there were a lot more black olives on the La Hacienda tostada 40 years ago, when I first had one, but I’m not sure if that’s a real memory or not. What I am sure of, however, is that I’ve got a lot more to say about the topic of Mexican food in America and the role of California in its dissemination, but I’ve got more work to do before I spring that on you. In the meantime, if you haven’t subscribed, please do so. Also, hit me up on Twitter. See you next week!

P.P.S Georgia Freeman’s substack, The California Table has a lot of great recipes from the Golden State.

It’s amazing what incels could accomplish in the era before the internet and building codes. Back before video games, Twitter and obtrusive county bureaucracies, men without women would sometimes engage in heroic acts of folk architecture, art brut, using nothing more than a pick and shovel, or maybe a Fresno scraper and mule.

Such were my thoughts on Memorial Day as I was guided around the Forestiere Underground Gardens in Fresno, where the main topic of the tour was how, in the first half of the 20th century, a smallish Italian bachelor named Baldassare Forestiere carved an underground paradise out of a plot of $1-an-acre, Central Valley hardpan. It’s an impressive achievement, scraping an unforgiving land with hand tools into more than a mile of tunnels and rooms, all so he could plant grapes and kumquats.

Happily, it was wonderfully temperate last Monday, 80 degrees and clear skies. The best time to visit, however, is in the middle of July, when it’s 110 and the sun beats down, making it easier to understand why a man might burrow into the earth and take his fruit trees with him. The Central Valley in summer is not a place for the weak or easily discouraged.

The perpetual bachelorhood of Baldassare Forestiere was at the forefront of my mind because, of course, he’d have to be bachelor to do what he did, the ultimate incel. No man with a wife would be allowed to waste so much time and energy on such a ridiculous obsession. More than that, I would imagine that Forestiere would not just be wifeless, but that he would have to have been grievously disappointed in love; spurned, jilted, dumped or dismissed. I’m not alone in guessing that. The novelist T. C. Boyle imagined that very thing in a 1998 short story version of Baldassare’s life, having him rejected by the stout, cockeyed niece of a Greek short-order cook, thrown over for Hiram Broadbent, heir of the Broadbent poultry fortune.

Boyle’s account of Forestiere’s origin story is explicitly fictional but seems functionally true, the sort of detail that could not be false. Great heartbreak often occasions great works of art, or at least heroic feats of effort, however misdirected. Even if not true, the key thing is that Forestiere was wifeless, a man without a woman, likely through no choice of his own. Thus, to use the graceless modern term, he was an “incel”, an involuntarily celibate man, consigned to loserdom in world in which all the Chads and Stacys have paired off. Today, he’d likely find rough solace in video games and pornography, the misogynistic musings of pickup artists and online malcontents. But, in the first half of the last century, none of those outlets were available. All he had was a pickax, a shovel and 80 acres of nearly worthless land.

And here’s the thing, Baldassare Forestiere was not alone in his madness. There were other heroic incels building their own fantastical landscapes at exactly the same time. Consider, Edward Leedskalnin, a tiny Latvian mason who built a castle out of coral in southern Florida, a magnificent edifice erected on the ruins of a crushed romance.

Leedskalnin’s muse/anti-muse was Agnes Skuvst, a 16-year-old Latvian girl who broke their engagement on the night before their wedding, sending Ed into a tailspin that would last the rest of his life. His “Sweet Sixteen”—frequently mentioned in his eccentric writings on magnetism—was the motive power that propelled Leedskalnin to America, where he carved out and stacked 10-ton blocks of porous stone, building a monument to his own tender emotions.

Or consider Sam “Simon” Rodia, who, in South Central Los Angeles, turned being dumped by his wife into a soaring assemblage of detritus, towers of repurposed trash reaching for the heavens. Asked to explain his motives for building his 99-foot-tall Watts Towers, Rodia simply answered, “I wanted to do something big, and I did.”

That sentiment, “I wanted to do something big,” is the key to understanding the impulse that produced such monumental and monomaniacal works. Besides being womanless, Forestiere, Leedskalnin and Rodia were remarkably similar, all three immigrants, craftsmen and laborers, born between 1879 and 1887, and conspicuously tiny, a fact often commented upon in newspapers.

The “little man” Baldassare Forestiere was 5’4”, Edward Leedskalnin “just over 5 feet tall”, and Sam Rodia “a tiny man, at 4’11”. Imagine being an immigrant, a working man, a man of smallish stature competing for girls with the Hiram Broadbents of America, your opposite, “a big, fat man…Wears a straw hat winter and summer…Always got money in his pocket.” Your chances are not good.

So, how does a man leave his mark on the world? That’s the question. How does a man leave his mark on the world?

For most of us—big, fat men with money in our pockets—we get married and have children. Most of us are content that our monument to the future survives in our lineage. That’s the best we can do, have our genes continue. But if you’re a small man with work-hardened hands and a broken heart, unable to find a woman who will have you, you might pick up a shovel and get to work.

Or, at least, in that specific moment, in the first half of the 20th century, on the edges of the continent where land was cheap and foreigners were welcome, you might buy a piece of scrub land and build something big; you might harness the power of your inceldom, into a gesture of heroic creation; leaving your mark in the most direct way possible, by transforming the very earth into something fantastical.

Or, if you are middle class and formally trained, you might transmute your pain into the highest art, as the Catalan architect Antoni Guadi did. Rejected by Pepeta Moreu, her hair the “color of old gold, almost mahogany,” the daughter of a patron, Gaudi’s disappointment “left a lasting mark.” So, he remained a lifelong bachelor, saying, “I have never felt a calling for marriage”

Thus, Gaudi is the patron saint of incels, a rejected man who embraced his celibacy and tamed Eros, channeling his passions into a lifelong devotion to God and art. In doing so, he produced one of the most startling and sacred architectural visions of the modern era, the Sagrada Familia, a work that carries the hopes of man heavenward, and Gaudi’s mark upon the world into eternity. If, in the elemental scheme, Forestiere is earth, Leedskalnin water and Rodia air, then Gaudi is super-celestial, the architect of the realm beyond the stars.

Like the three amateurs, Gaudí rejected the straight lines and reproducible forms of the machine age, the standardizations of the 20th century. Like them, his work took organic forms, curving, eccentric, inwardly animated and natural. But where theirs was raw, improvised and private, his was ordered, transcendent and very visible. If they carved their pain into private mythologies, Gaudí turned his into a public liturgy, aided by patrons, clients and a public that cheered him on.

Suffering is not the only way to achieve artistic greatness, nor was romantic rejection the only motivation for a figure as complex and pious as Antoni Gaudi, but to deny the role they played in producing works of art is to miss something our comfortable and connected 21st century no longer values. The therapeutic methods of the modern medical system have done little for art, and not much more in easing our existential pain. Only faith in God, connection with our fellow humans, hard work and art can do that.

Finally, notice that I’ve used the term “incel” throughout this essay deliberately, as a provocation. I want you to see that the frustrated desires—physical and spiritual—that manifested as untutored greatness in Rodia, Forrestiere and Leedskalnin are the same impulses that manifest as baseness in the modern Internet incel. The difference lies not in the depth of anguish or loneliness, but in the ability to howl at the world. Before the internet, a lonely man might speak through stone, steel and shovel. Today, he shouts anonymously into the void and his voice is echoed and amplified back to him, his worst and bleakest thoughts incorrectly reinforced as “reality”.

Not only has the Internet allowed us to shout, it has also stripped us of our ability to endure in silence, to sit quietly with our grief and process it, to take our loneliness and boredom and transform them into something more noble. Likewise, so few of us engage in hard physical work anymore, thus few of us know that a body exhausted by labor can make us forget, that work is, in Poe’s words, “respite and nepenthe from thy memories.” And physical labor is exactly one of the things you think about when you’re visiting the Forestiere Underground Gardens, of how much physical effort it took for Baldassare Forestiere to dig out that much dirt. Thanks to the internet, the modern incel is detached from himself, his body and his innermost thoughts. If he clings to his phone, has no way of coping with his condition except formless rage and bad behavior, instead he needs to disconnect and pick up a shovel.

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In my article, “California’s Vanishing Lakes and the Hunger of the Mines”, I made frequent reference to the one dollar eggs of the Gold Rush, a staple of 49’er anecdotes and 19th century California culinary history. In fact, while doing the research for what would turn into a 5,000-word article, I found more information about eggs and poultry than I could use in a single piece. I put much of this research aside for a later project, although, one question kept sticking in my mind:

Why hadn’t a sustainable poultry industry appeared in California earlier than 1880?

I cite 1880, three decades after the Gold Rush, because that’s when Petaluma, the self-proclaimed “Egg Capital of the World”, really got going, taking off after Canadian immigrant Lyman Byce invented the temperature-controlled incubator in 1879.

This evident slowness to capitalize on the demand for eggs and chickens is odd, because everyone in the Western Hemisphere, from the King of Hawa’ii to the hacienderos of Chile, cashed in on shipping food to California, while local farmers in the Bay Area made fortunes on fresh vegetables. In comparison to poultry, the demand for beef and the consequent high prices for cattle (whose per head value jumped nearly 2000% between 1848 and 1849) gave rise to the empire of Henry Miller, the cattle baron who by 1878 controlled a million acres of western land and the water rights to most of the San Joaquin Valley.

For eggs and chickens, however, the commercial explosion happened a generation later, after the Gold Rush had ended.

It was not because chickens were completely unavailable in California. Mary Ballou, a New Hampshire woman who kept a boardinghouse near Sacramento, wrote a letter in the fall of 1852 to her son in which she mentioned feeding the chickens in her backyard, and serving roasted birds at four dollars a head and eggs at three dollars a dozen. Likewise, there are many other references to kitchen-yard hens in the letters and diaries of the era.

Yet, eggs remained stubbornly expensive in California, so much so that hen’s eggs were being shipped from as far away as Chile, the Eastern United States and China well into the early 20th century. This, even though by 1910, Petaluma was already producing more eggs than anywhere else in the world, making it one of the richest cities in America per capita.

The slowness of commercial egg farming to develop in California was also not because entrepreneurs hadn’t tried to start chicken farms, it was just that none of them had succeeded until the late 1870s. Until that point the demand for fresh eggs was largely satisfied (to the extent it could be) by importing eggs from great distances, or by seabird eggs, gathered from the giant (but fast declining) colony of murres that roosted on the Farallon Islands, 30 miles due west of San Francisco.

The artist Eva Chrysanthe, who is working on a fun graphic novel about Italian immigrants and egg collecting in the Farallones, Garibaldi and the Farallon Egg Wars, states the problem well.

By now, we all know that the 19th-century poaching of murre eggs on the Farallon Islands was spurred by the lack of poultry – and thus a dearth of eggs – in San Francisco.  But few people have been able to explain why there was no poultry industry in San Francisco.

.It’s conceivable that all existing chickens in Yerba Buena had been consumed in the first year of the Gold Rush, given the arrival of tens of thousands of men to a town whose population had stood at only 1,000. But why was there no effort to restock the yards? Were chickens simply not hardy enough to make the lengthy sea voyage to San Francisco? If so, could no chickens be carried overland from Mexico?

Chrysanthe thinks she’s solved the riddle by quoting an excerpt from Sebastian Fichera’s book, Italy on the Pacific: San Francisco’s Italian Americans, about an Italian immigrant named Pier Giuseppe Bertarelli who failed to make a go of it as a poultry farmer. Here’s Fichera on Bertarelli:

In April 1852, after escaping yet another fire, he made an auspicious start on a new scheme, raising and selling chickens at three dollars apiece. Though admitting, in his correspondence, that he was now spending most of his time looking through garbage dumps in search of feed for his chickens….

the summer of 1852 seems to have been the high point of Bertarelli’s California adventure. But it proved to be just another illusion: his unlucky star, this time in the form of a plague killing off all his chickens, caught up with him again and his resolve to stick it out began to falter.

For Chrysanthe, the absence of chickens is attributable to their vulnerability to disease. And, indeed, when crowded together chickens are susceptible to various avian plagues, which is one reason why modern battery hens are continually dosed with antibiotics. It’s also possible that chickens brought from elsewhere might not have had immunity to the diseases of California wild birds, causing the die-offs that are occasionally mentioned in California farming journals.

I think, however, there is a more fundamental reason why the egg industry didn’t take root until three decades after gold was discovered: it wasn’t profitable enough.

The clue to the insufficient profitability of local hen’s eggs is not the poultry disease, it’s that the hapless Signore Bertarelli was searching garbage dumps for chicken feed.

A few chickens kept behind a boarding house can live on kitchen scraps and pecking around for insects. Several hundred hens can’t do that. Feed has to be purchased in bulk, and chickens eat things that humans also consume — vegetables, corn and grain — all of which commanded premium prices in Gold Rush San Francisco, hence the need to scour the garbage dumps for scraps. In fact, chicken feed was so expensive that Boston eggs, shipped around the Horn, and murre eggs from the Farallones were cheaper than hen’s eggs after the cost of feed.

In other words, egg farming couldn’t be scaled up to commercial production. At least not until the murres were depleted and grain and produce prices dropped.

In 1859, the editor of the California Culturist, a new farming journal debuting in May of that year, urged his readers to take up chicken farming, promising that fortunes might be made from “hens’ eggs alone.” Similar opinions appeared regularly in American poultry journals until at least the 1890s. But the biggest problem to overcome was always the same, the economics of expensive feed and competition from nature and elsewhere.

As for chickens for the table, a similar dynamic was likely in place — domesticated birds were more expensive than wild birds or birds shipped from the East Coast.

Prior to the mid-20th century, when the broiler industry took off in America, the majority of chickens were dual-purpose birds, like the Dominque above, raised in barnyard flocks for both eggs and meat. The cockerels were eaten young, roasted or broiled, and the tough old hens stewed after they’d stopped laying, usually around eighteen months. Hens would rarely have been eaten before that, especially not in California where eggs were so valuable.

It’s well known that until recently American’s didn’t eat that much chicken reserving the bird for special occasions, holidays or the odd Sunday dinner. In fact, as recently as 1978, Americans were still eating twice as much beef as chicken per capita (87.1 lbs of beef annually versus 44.7 lbs of chicken),  and not until 1992 did chicken finally surpass beef as the American protein of choice.  (The story of how we were converted to chicken-eaters is a good one, and perhaps someday I’ll tell it.)

Mostly, if pressed, people who think about these things will say that Americans didn’t eat chickens because the birds were valued more for their eggs than meat. But that’s not true.

Europeans ate both plenty of eggs and plenty of chickens. For example, Eastern European Jews, forbidden pork by their dietary laws, favored chicken meat. The development of the American broiler industry in the 1920s was, to some extent, a by-product of the Jewish immigrant taste for chicken, especially on the Delmarva Peninsula where kosher chickens were grown for the New York market. (After 1905, there was also a large community of Jewish egg farmers in Petaluma.) Likewise, from the 18th century forward, the French ate chicken avidly, and by the middle of the 19th century, French farmers had figured out how to mass produce eggs, capons, and young hens, poulardes, for the table. Some of these ingenious farmers got very rich.

Americans didn’t eat much chicken not because they didn’t like it, but because in North America, and especially in California, the conditions and economics were against it: other forms of meat were easier to produce and market, and game abounded, especially game birds.

Chickens are small, delicate, highly-evolved creatures. They must be housed at night to protect them from foxes and they’re susceptible to heat stroke, frost bite, the common cold and a grab bag of exotic ailments. In their favor, however, they will eat almost anything, although it must include odd things like calcium for shell formation, and somethings, like corn, must be milled to be edible.

And, crucially, chickens can’t be herded hundreds of miles to market; they couldn’t walk themselves into California, as cattle and sheep did in the 1850s, nor walk themselves to slaughterhouses on the edges of the cities.

The high value of eggs pushed American farmers to try to overcome some of these limitations, but  beef and pork were still cheaper, as were game birds, especially in California where the Pacific Flyway brought tens of millions of waterfowl into the state each year.

Because the great wetlands of California had not yet been drained, their sources channelled into irrigation, massive flocks of waterfowl — ducks, geese, teals. swans, cranes — still landed within shotgun range. And, market-hunters outdid themselves by bringing these birds to the table right up until the beginning of the 20th century when bird populations plummeted and the market hunting of migratory birds was outlawed.

One of the figures who helped bring an end to legal market hunting was William Temple Hornaday, a Smithsonain taxidermist turned conservationist, and the first director of what would become the Bronx Zoo. Starting in the late 1880s, Hornaday wrote and spoke extensively about protecting American wildlife, using every opportunity to harangue Americans about overhunting. By 1910, Hornaday and other conservationists had had conspicuous success in saving such iconic species as the pronghorn antelope and the American bison (which Hornaday had personally rescued from extinction).

But, there was still plenty to do, and in 1913, Hornaday published, Our Vanishing Wildlife: Its Extermination and Preservation, a call to action for Americans who loved their native animals. Heavily illustrated with photographs and written in a clear, emphatic style, the book was a sensation with the American public, and led directly to the passage of the Weeks-McLean Migratory Bird Act of 1913, which federalized waterfowl protection, outlawing the killing or sale of endangered species. Hornaday, himself, testified at the hearings, distributing copies of his book to lawmakers before his appearance.

Here’s an example, taken from Our Vanishing Wildlife, of the sort of damage a single pair of market hunters could do in a single day in California.

Very many enormous bags of game have been made in a day by market gunners: but rarely have they published any of their records. The greatest kill of which I ever have heard occurred under the auspices of the Glenn County Club, in southern California*, on February 5, 1906. Two men, armed with automatic shot-guns, fired five shots apiece, and got ten geese out of one flock. In one hour they killed two hundred and eighteen geese, and their bag for the day was four hundred and fifty geese! The shooter who wrote the story for publication (on February 12, at Willows, Glenn County, California) said: “It being warm weather, the birds had to be shipped at once in order to keep them from spoiling.” A photograph was made of the “one hour’s slaughter” of two hundred and eighteen geese, and it was published in a western magazine with “C.H.B.’s” story, nearly all of which will be found in Chapter XV.

With market gunning not just continuing into 20th century, but getting more efficient with automatic shotguns, is it any wonder that California restaurants charged more for chicken (or three eggs!) than wild duck or goose? Or that chicken was often the most expensive item on the menu?

By the 1880s, when William Temple Hornaday (who had once shot 24 orangutangs on a scientific trip to Borneo, bringing home enough skins to have “carpeted a good-sized room”) converted to conservationism, the collection of murre eggs was already on the wane.  In 1854, 500,000 murre eggs had been taken to San Francisco; in 1886, the take was a fifth that size, 108,000 — only 9,000 dozen — sold at 12 cents per dozen.

At the same time, California chicken ranchers had finally figured out how to profitably raise chickens in California. In 1879, 5.77 million dozen eggs were grown in the state; in 1889 – 13.68 million dozen; and in 1899, 24.44 million dozen. Although eggs from elsewhere continued to be brought in, with nearly 2.5 million dozen shipped in from the Midwest in 1890.

What was the secret to raising hens in California?  Interviewed in the Rural New-Yorker in 1898, Petaluma poultryman C. Nisson (author of the book Nisson on Incubation) said it was the “California slipshod method” that had succeeded where the more intensive and “scientific” methods imported from the East Coast had left behind nothing but Ozymandian ruins.

-“Eastern people do not see how California poultrymen can help getting rich on these prices, and if they don’t, it must be because they don’t know how to manage. So they will rush over here to make the money which we California henmen have not the wit to make.”

-“Well, how do they usually come out?”

-“Within ten miles of my farm, are two large poultry plants, started a few years ago on the true eastern methods. Everything was calculated and figured out before starting.”

-“Where are they now, planted?”

-“Only the ruins of these large poultry farms are to be seen. Probably their owners have sunk $100,000 in these few years. At the same time, within the same distance, I can count a score of poultry farms were from 500 to 5,000 hens are kept in the seemingly slipshod fashion of California. But these are all doing well. They are not getting rich very fast, it is true, but they make good wages and have a good time.”

What was the  California slipshod method?  In a word, free-range. Nisson’s version of the practice involved colonies of 100 mixed-age birds in mobile coops, moved a couple times a month onto fresh ground in fields planted with barley or corn. There were no fences, lots of room to peck and scratch, and regular delivers of water, grain, soft mash and  “meat, beans, peas, potatoes, and whatever else we have or can buy, cooked or uncooked, as seems best.”

-“Then your so-called slipshod California method consist chiefly of making the hen take care of herself.”

-“That’s just about what it amounts to.”

In other words, the solution to the high cost of feed in California had been to replicate kitchen-yard chickens on a grand scale!

***

*Glenn County and the town of Willows are not in Southern California, but in Northern California, 70 miles north of Sacramento, a couple dozen miles from where I grew up.

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One thing I try to teach my students is that to be a good historian, you have to have some sympathy for the people of the past. You have to try to understand what motivates and moves them on their own terms, even while you might be inclined to laugh, scorn, or be angered by them.

Take, for example, this letter to the editor, written 70 years ago by Mrs. Norma Thomas of Merced, California. If you’re like me, your first inclination is to chuckle at the phrase “sex fiend”, it being both old fashioned and somewhat ludicrous, the sort of phrase that smart people made fun of in the 1970s, during the era of sexual liberation and license.

Language changes, right? Words and phrases come in and go out of fashion, the old terms being replaced by newer, shinier words. And because the old language gets discredited, we thoroughly modern geniuses are tempted to laugh at the panicky hausfraus of 1955. But, maybe, if you were historically minded, you might also want to try to figure out what was bothering Norma Thomas.

Two horrifying stories in California newspapers in June and July of 1955, stories that help us understand that, in the 1940s and 50s, “sex fiend” was the phrase most commonly used to describe what we might call a “sexual predator”, or even a “serial killer”.

As far as I can tell, having searched the archives of Central Valley newspapers, this is the only letter to the editor Norma Thomas ever wrote, evidence that she was powerfully agitated by what she was reading in the newspapers. But she was not the only one. Letters expressing worry about “sex fiends” were common that summer in newspapers across the country, proof of a wider moral panic kicked off by stories like the two above.

Curiosity…

I also tell my students that a historian must have the logic, tenacity and curiosity of a great detective, because historians, like detectives, try to answer questions about past events.

So, now, having read Norma Thomas’s letter to the editor and those two terrible stories, your curiosity should be engaged. Why? What was happening in America in the decade after the Second World War that brought on this moral panic about sexual predators? Were there actually more sex crimes in the 1950s than in previous decades?

One thing we can say, is that 1955 was a remarkably safe year in America, with a homicide rate more than half of what it had been just 20 years earlier.

So, what was going on? Crime rates were sharply down, but emotions were up? Why?

As historians, we’re taught to prefer primary sources when considering causality. Here’s one, again from the Fresno Bee, July 29, 1955.

That’s one potential answer to the question, provided by Alice Ketcher: women were wearing more revealing clothing, thus inciting “sex fiends” to act out. And while I might be tempted to dismiss this with another chuckle, as a historian who tries to be sympathetic, maybe I shouldn’t.

Fashion reflects society, and more revealing clothing, while perhaps not causative in the way Alice Ketcher claims, may nonetheless reflect changing attitudes about propriety and sex, changes that leave some people morally disturbed and lead others to believe they have license to do things they shouldn’t.

Perhaps, another reason for moral panic might be that, after World War Two, newspapers were more explicit in their descriptions of sex crimes. Before the war, rape was more likely to be described in veiled terms, such as “violated” or “outraged”. After the war, details were not spared. The two clippings I pasted above are much more circumspect in describing the condition of the bodies than stories found in other newspapers, many of which were sickeningly graphic.

The question now is, are the newspapers responding to a public that wants more sensational material? If we’re building a case for that, I’d remind you that film noir peaked as an artistic genre in the 1950s, and the violent crime novels of Mickey Spillane were huge bestsellers, indicating a wider taste for explicit stories about criminal brutality and moral ambiguity.

Speaking of movies about criminality, what does it say about changing attitudes that one of the biggest hits of 1934 was Little Miss Marker?

If you don’t know, the film stars Shirley Temple as a young girl left with her father’s bookie, Sorrowful Jones, as a "marker", collateral, for her father's gambling debts. When her father commits suicide, the gruff Sorrowful and his colorful gang of crooks and ne’er-do-wells reluctantly take her in, only to be charmed and transformed by her spunky innocence.

Get that? At the height of the Great Depression, people believed that small children could be safely left with degenerate gamblers and criminals, this despite the fact that child murders were not especially rare, and the homicide rate twice as high as it would be in 1955. In fact, it’s only twenty-one years from Little Miss Marker to 1955, but the world seems radically different.

Finally—not finally, there is no finally in writing cultural history of this sort, only more threads to pull at—you’ve got to consider the possibility that an entire generation of Americans has been traumatized by World War 2, young men directly in combat, young women indirectly, while waiting for news of their classmates and lovers, many of whom never returned.

To go back to the writers of our letters, a little digging shows that in 1955, Norma Thomas was 31 years old and Alice Ketcher was 66. Norma Thomas was of that WW2 generation and had small children at home. She wasn’t complaining about skirt lengths, she was terrified (justifiably or not) for the safety of her children, just as she might once, a decade earlier, have been terrified for the safety of her brother, young husband or high school sweetheart.

Finally, not finally, the reason I say that there is no “finally” when doing this sort of cultural history is that history, like real life, is enormously complex and our sympathy and curiosity necessarily finite. We have to prioritize what we consider important when weighing causality. Pull at one thread and you loosen another—crime, fashion, journalism, movies, war and trauma are all tangled up together, each helping us understand a specific moment in American history, each helping us answer a specific question: Why was Mrs. Norma Thomas of Merced, California, so agitated?

I’ll be back next week with another post. See you then!

I was skeptical because stories of Polynesian visits to the west coast of South America have been floating around since Europeans first began to encounter Polynesians in the late 17th century. Indeed, such stories once had the power to send photogenic Norwegians off on harebrained voyages. But, last I’d checked, a dozen years or more ago, such stories had been largely discounted by the professional archeologists.

But, off I went, scampering after updated information about the settlement of the Polynesian triangle (i.e. New Zealand, Hawa’ii, and Rapa Nui). It turns out that there’s a lot more to some of those old stories than I thought. For example, it seems likely that Polynesians got the sweet potato, one of their staple crops, from the Americas via an early contact. And the old story about domesticated chickens (a South Asian bird) being found in South America when the conquistadors arrived is getting another look. There’s even a serious expedition to look for evidence of contact starting up on the Isla Mocha, a little bit further up the Chilean coast from Chiloé.

So, while our guide wasn’t yet proven right, he might not have been entirely wrong. The jury is still out.

The reason for all of these new discoveries is better technology for DNA sequencing. While hunting around, I came across a fascinating book, DNA for Archeologists, by Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith and K. Ann Horsburgh, who are at Otago University in New Zealand. (Matisoo-Smith is the person leading the project to study the Isla Mocha). The book explains, in remarkably clear terms, how archeologists can use improved genetic-mapping technology. Here’s the description of the book:

The ability to use DNA evidence is revolutionizing our understanding of the past. This book introduces archaeologists to the basics of DNA research so they can understand the powers and pitfalls of using DNA data in archaeological analysis and interpretation. By concentrating on the principles and applications of DNA specific to archaeology, the authors allow archaeologists to collect DNA samples properly and interpret the laboratory results with greater confidence. The volume is replete with case examples of DNA work in a variety of archaeological contexts and is an ideal teaching tool for archaeologists and their students.

This is a theme I touch upon in my World Civ I classes, that DNA evidence has radically changed our understanding of our prehistoric past. Until recently (by which I mean the last two decades) archeologists and anthropologists did not have anything half as accurate or half as direct as DNA evidence, and so they developed proxies for understanding ancient human migrations. The best example comes from linguists, where something like the spread of Indo-European languages can be used to roughly track the movement of the Indo-European peoples out of the supposed Urheimet, on the Pontic steppe.

As you would imagine, there are a lot of fundamental problems with such an approach, although it’s a remarkably clever way of addressing a remarkably difficult problem.

Now, thanks to DNA, we can go at some of these problems head on, and we’re learning some interesting things as a result, things which comes as a complete surprise to me. Here’s Matisoo-Smith and Hursburgh again:

While most human codispersals are associated with humans moving domesticated animals such as dogs, cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, plants and other organisms by or in association with human populations. Studies of these species have been most valuable for tracking prehistoric human migration and interaction, particularly when humans translocated species to regions where they would have been unable to disperse independently, such as the movement of animals across islands. Accordingly, islands provide excellent environments across which to track the movement of plants and animals. Tracing their human-mediated movement across continents is more difficult. The study of the distributions and genetic variation of animals and plants and their use as proxies for tracking human movement has most widely been applied in the Pacific but is increasingly being undertaken elsewhere.

Get that? Even if you can’t find prehistoric human DNA, you can often find prehistoric DNA from domesticated animals. Find a heap of old pig bones buried in a cave, take a DNA sample, and see what they’re related to. Do they correspond to domesticated breeds found elsewhere in the world, and if so how did they get where you found them? Polynesia islands are really good for this sort of study, because pigs can’t swim across the Pacific Ocean.

So far, so good. Nothing I didn’t already know in a general sort of way. And then, in the next paragraph, they drop this (to me) bombshell:

The earliest documented human translocation of an animal species anywhere in the world substantially predates the earliest evidence for animal domestication and involved the introduction of the northern common cuscus (Phalanger orientalis) from New Guinea to New Ireland approximately 20 KYA (Grayson 2001).

And this is why it’s good to read outside of your discipline, because you learn things that completely upset what you thought you had known.

Last time I’d checked, the dog (our first non-human companion) was domesticated only 13,000 years ago (although I see now that some scholars are claiming 33,000 years ago). The big news to me is that 20,000 years ago prehistoric humans grabbed some wild animals, specifically a cat-sized marsupial called the cuscus, tossed them on rafts, floated across a hundred miles of open ocean, and then released them into the wild.

This, that human moved animals around in the late Pleistocene, is something I had not expected or understood, although this process has been well-known to specialists for at least 30 years, even before high-quality DNA testing was available. Here’s a pdf of the paper from University of Washington anthropologist Donald Grayson that Matisoo-Smith and Horsburgh cited in that last excerpt. It’s an interesting read, especially if you’re unfamiliar with this theory. Here’s another excerpt:

While translocations began during the Pleistocene, however, those that occurred during the Holocene have had the most impact. On the islands of the Mediterranean, for instance, endemic terrestrial mammal faunas were routinely replaced by mammals introduced by people (Cheylan, 1984). On Corsica, to take a very well-studied example, the seven or so species of mammals that were present at the end of the Pleistocene gave way to a suite of mammals, large and small, that began to arrive soon after 9000 B.P. with the earliest documented human occupations here. This process has been so thorough throughout the Mediterranean that only two, relictual Pleistocene species remain, both of which are shrews (Blondel and Vigne, 1993; see also Payne, 1995 and Alcover et al., 1999).

Corisica, too? All I have to say is, why wasn’t I told about this sooner?

Finally, since this is a culinary history blog, I thought it’d be interesting to see how to cook a cuscus (pronounced cuss-cuss, after the way they hiss when threatened). Now native from Indonesia, to Papua New Guinea, down through northern Australia, the cuscus is the marsupial equivalent of a primate, sort of lemur or loris with a pouch, occupying the same evolutionary niche in the tropical rainforest. They’re also one of the favorite foods of native peoples throughout their range, who hunt them for both their soft fur and their toothsomeness.

As an older version of the Lonely Planet Guide to East Timor says, “unfortunately for the cuscus, for the Timorese it’s usually associated with one adjective: delicious.”

Westerners who’ve tried cuscus report that it’s not bad. For example, the Victorian writer of boy’s adventure storiess, W.H.G. Kingston,  writes in his 1871 book, In the Eastern Seas: Or the Regions of the Bird of Paradise,

At first I had some repugnance to eating a new animal. However, the steaks which Macco cut from the creature’s fat sides looked so tempting that I did not refuse to portion he offered me, and found it very delicate.

Likewise, the Dutch zoologist Leo Brongersma reports,

I had the experience of eating a small piece of cuscus meat and it proved quite palatable. It had been stewed in its skin to prevent the loss of any of its juice.

Stewed in its skin is probably a euphemism for the easiest way to cook a cuscus, which is to just, “lob it on the fire,” a specialty of Papua New Guinea cuisine, a method of cooking that seems to be used there for anything smaller than a pig. According to the Victorian naturalist, Henry Nottidge Moseley,

The cuscus is also roasted, and is carried about cold, roasted whole with head, tail, and legs intact, ready for eating by tearing it with the teeth at any moment.

So, the cuscus is a portable snack, toted around and noshed on when needed.

One other method of preparation is noted in Papua New Guinea: placing a skinned cuscus in a bamboo tube with a little water, sealing it and putting it near the fire, effectively steaming the meat.

Unfortunately, I’ve yet to find any Indonesian, or Timorese recipes, although I suspect that there are some good ones.

Finally, the most amazing thing about the spotted cuscus is that it is not the least bit endangered. We’ve been eating it for more than 20,000 years and it seems to be doing just fine. It’s a tasty, widely-hunted, slow-moving animal with little fear of humans that seems to be thriving in its native habitat. It’s a wonder it hasn’t been eaten to extinction.

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Thanks for reading! I’ll be back next week with something new.

An excerpt from the Albemarle Enquirer, Murfreesboro, North Carolina, December 19th, 1878.

—After the ceremony of the distribution of prizes at the Paris Exhibition, M. Mataugata, Minister of Finance in Japan, and M. Maeda Masana, Commissioner General, gave a luncheon a their official residence.  Three Japanese dishes were served; the gokioku-sousi, a sort of sausage of cooked rice and dried raw fish in a skin made of seaweed; the maki sousi, a salad of highly seasoned rice, smoked meat and fish; and the some, a rich vermicelli soup very thick. These preparations are described as very delicate in flavor, and by no means repugnant to European palates.

By the second half of the 19th century it had become common for American newspapers to fill out their pages with short snippets of news and trivia from other sources, domestic and international. For example, this short item is buried down in the bottom right corner of the second page of the Albemarle Enquirer, and is obviously copied from another source. With a bit of digging, I was able to find the original, which is a nearly identical item in the London and China Express, October 25th, 1878.

And, with a little bit more digging, here’s the French original of this article, from the Parisian newspaper Le XIXe Siécle, dated October 24th, 1878.

If you want a sense of how fast news got around in the 19th century, note that it’s one day from French publication in Paris to an English translation and publication in London, and 55 days from London to rural North Carolina.

What’s really important, however, is that this is probably the earliest mention of sushi, here spelled sousi, in an English-language general interest publication. There’s an earlier mention of the word sushi in a  Japanese-English dictionary published in 1873, but thus far, I’ve found nothing earlier in a newspaper or magazine. It also seems likely that this is the earliest mention of sushi in French.

A few details in this account need to be straightened out. First, the dishes are mixed up. The two sushi dishes being served are probably gomoko sushi and maki-sushi with the descriptions switched in the piece.  Gomoku sushi is a type of chirashi, a preparation in which a variety of ingredients are scattered on top of a bed of sushi rice, in other words, a salad. Maki-sushi is the familiar sushi roll.

And now we have to take a moment, here, to admire the absolute perfection of that description: “a sort of sausage of cooked rice and dried raw fish in a skin made of seaweed.” Brilliant!

My suspicion is that the final dish, somé, is somen noodles in some kind of thick sauce—Le dernier enfin est un vermicelle au gras très-épais—but I don’t know for sure. If you’ve got a better idea, leave it in the comments below.

As for the occasion and the two dignitaries who hosted the meal, the Third International Exposition in Paris is generally considered one of the most important international events for Japanese interests and image in the West. It was a major success in terms of public relations, and Japanese craftsmen and artists won major awards. Given the stakes in terms of PR, it’s not surprising that Japan would send ministerial level officials to oversee their pavilion.  Matsukata Masayoshi was one of the most important statesmen of the Meiji period, someone who modernized Japan’s financial system. While Commissioner General Maeda Masana’s success in Paris gave him a leg-up to an important career in late 19th century Japanese politics.

And the party these two gentlemen gave was so successful that it became international news.

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P.S. For more unexpected sushi history, please check out my two-part series: The Great Sushi Craze of 1905.

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I’ll be back next Wednesday with something new. Cheers!

An excerpt from the first book of the Iliad:

His prayer went up and Phoebus Apollo heard him.
And soon as the men had prayed and flung the barley,
first they lifted back the heads of the victims,
slit their throats, skinned them and carved away
the meat from the thigh bones and wrapped them in fat,
a double fold sliced clean and topped with strips of flesh.
And the old man burned these over dried split wood
and over the quarters poured out the glistening wine
while young men at his side held five-pronged forks.
One they had burned the bones and tasted the organs
they cut the rest into pieces, pierced them with spits,
roasted them to a turn and pulled them off the fire.
The work done, the feast laid out, they ate well
and no man’s hunger lacked a share of the banquet.
When they had put aside desire for food and drink,
the young men brimmed the mixing bowls with wine
and tipping first drops for the god in every cup
they poured full rounds for all. And all day long
they appeased the god with song, raising a ringing hymn
to the distant archer god who drives away the plague,
those young Achaean warriors singing out his power,
and Apollo listened, his great heart warm with joy.

One of my all-time favorite classes to teach is something I’ve given the title “Loyalty, Honor and Violence in Homer’s Iliad”, which while being well out of my area of expertise still makes my great heart warm with joy.

The only required text is the Iliad in Robert Fagles magnificent translation and all we do is sit around and read it out loud to each other. And if everything goes well, by the end of the semester, two things will have happened: we will have read about 80% of the epic out loud in class, and the majority of the students will tell me that it was one of the best, if not the best, class they’ve ever taken.

The secret to the whole project is that I add historical, artistic and literary context as we go along, stopping the reading for a few minutes, making some observations and inviting conversation. So for example, at the end of the sacrifice scene quoted above — the famous hecatomb made when Agamemnon’s men return Chryseis to her father — I talk about the nature of sacrifices in the ancient world. One of my goals is to get students to make the conceptual connection between ancient animal sacrifice and the death of Christ and the Eucharistic feast. Doing this puts those two things back into the historical context in which they occurred. So, students now understand that when Jesus took up the bread and says, “take, eat: this is my body”, everyone at the table, Jew and gentile, knew what was going on, because everyone was familiar with what happens at an animal sacrifice, as it was a very common thing.

We have to remember that the great temples of the Near East and the Mediterranean were emphatically places where blood was shed, to the point that one wag has called the altar in the Second Temple in Jerusalem, Jehovah’s “barbecue pit”, and another has referred to the Oracle of Delphi as a “great and ever active slaughterhouse.”

My other goal when discussing this scene is to point out animal sacrifice meant eating meat, usually lamb and goat, but for the big sacrifices, beef and lots of it. Most people, not just students, don’t know that the burnt offerings given the divine guest of honor were not the choicest cuts, but rather the fat, bones and offal, essentially the variety meats we grind up and cram into wiener casings. The good stuff, the ribs, steaks and rump roasts, were reserved for the mortals, usually preceded by an appetizer of grilled kidneys, liver and chitterlings, skewered and roasted over the sacrificial fire.

There is much, much more that can be said here about the sacrifice and consumption of animals in Ancient Greece. Classicists have written books about the topic, and their scholarly debates will likely never end.  I, however, am intrigued by all of that beef roasting on those Homeric spits, and choose to leave the arguing about details to the detail minded.

One of the topics we sometimes detour into in my class is the domestication of the auroch, a process that must have been harrowing for the neolithic humans who tried to do it. The auroch is the wild predecessor of the domesticated cow,  a nearly ubiquitous beast that once roamed a swath of North Africa and the Eurasian landmass, from Spain to Central Asia and down into India. It was also the last of the major wild animals to be domesticated, coming into the human sphere probably around 10,000 to 8,500 years ago, and one of the first to be eaten completely into extinction, the last one having died in a Polish game preserve in 1627.

The key thing to know about the auroch is that the male of the species was big, usually over six-feet at the shoulder, deep-chested, long-legged, swift, with a giant set of horns and a bad personality. That last fact is what would have made our ancestors admire and fear the auroch. Despite all of that, they were also really tasty, and thus worth the risk.

Ancient hunters stalked big game at some personal cost. The skeletons of male paleolithic hunter-gatherers show an enormous amount of blunt-force trauma, broken bones and depressed skull fractures that have healed or killed them. The discovery of this widespread ancient damage has caused anthropologists to compare Neanderthals to modern professional bull-riders, for the same reason, because they both have to get up close and personal with large animals.

Although small sample size, preservation and a dearth of older individuals with inhibited mobility may contribute to the Neandertal lesion distribution, the similarity to the Rodeo lesion distribution suggests frequent close encounters with large ungulates unkindly disposed to the humans involved.

Scientific understatement is the best understatement.

The average Professional Bull Riders athlete has a 1-in-15 chance of being injured each time he mounts the bull in the chute. We don’t know the odds for the paleolithic hunter, but we do know that the Neanderthals mostly hunted by ambush, in close with thrusting spears, possibly while one of their number grabbed onto the animal, often a woolly mammoth, and held on while it thrashed about.

When the climate warmed and the hairy megafauna of the Ice Age disappeared, the Neaderthals followed them into extinction, out-competed by his smaller, weaker rival, us. We had throwing spears and our prey was smaller (6,000 pound woolly rhinos no longer roamed the forests of ancient France), but there are few things that taste as good as  grass-fed beef, and so we continued to hunt the biggest game we had, the auroch, even as we domesticated the pig, the dog, the sheep and the goat.

As I said, the initial domestication of the auroch must have been a harrowing and difficult thing.  We know this because modern taurine cattle, the European kind, are descended from very few ancient animals, around 80, who were domesticated by farmers, not nomadic herdsmen, over a couple thousand years in a small region in the mountains of Turkey and Iran. There was a separate domestication of the Indian zebu cattle, the humped kind, about 2,000 years later in the Indus Valley, and possibly a third domestication in Africa. The DNA nabobs are still trying to figure all of this out.

The reason that cows were domesticated by farmers and not nomadic herdsmen, who had tamed the pig, dog, goat and sheep, is because you have to keep your auroch breeding stock penned up, lest it kill you. The auroch was famously aggressive. Here’s Julius Caesar writing about them in his Commentary on the Gallic Wars.

There is a third kind [of wild animal], consisting of those animals which are called uri. These are a little below the elephant in size, and of the appearance, color, and shape of a bull. Their strength and speed are extraordinary; they spare neither man nor wild beast which they have espied. These the Germans take with much pains in pits and kill them. The young men harden themselves with this exercise, and practice themselves in this kind of hunting, and those who have slain the greatest number of them, having produced the horns in public, to serve as evidence, receive great praise. But not even when taken very young can they be rendered familiar to men and tamed.

Is it any wonder than, that our Indo-European ancestors revered the bull, worshipping it as a deity, sacrificing it to their gods, and testing themselves against it’s wild ferocity. That last statement is the final classroom digression, humans tested themselves against the wild bull, and they still do.

We’re all familiar with this image from the island of Crete, circa 1700 BC.

There’s a straight line from that image to this image from Madrid, Spain, circa 2014 AD..

Other than costume there is little difference between what those young Minoans are doing and what that young Spaniard is doing. He’s a recortador, a bull jumper, and like the more famous and glamorous bullfighters, the toreadors, he’s testing himself against that dangerous, deadly animal.

And it is a dangerous and deadly and animal. The Spanish toro bravo is not a placid domesticated beeve of the of sort that crushed Lyle Lovett and hundreds of elderly farmers. It’s a wild thing, bred for size, speed and peevishness. It rarely sees humans, and never a man on foot, until it’s taken from the giant ranch on which it was raised and brought to the arena. There, young men will expose themselves to its rage. (Stick with this video below for a few minutes, it gets better as it goes along.)

YouTube is filled with hundreds of these man-versus-bull videos, of Spanish recortadores and toreadores, Gascon French écarteurs and sauteurs, Portuguese forcados, and American and Brazilian bullriders. And just like the Minoans, there are even a few brave women who dance with bulls in Spain and France.

If you watch enough of these videos, not very many, you’ll eventually see men killed or injured, some grievously so. In 2011, the Spanish bullfighter, Juan José Padilla stumbled in the ring, and was gored, the horn going under the jaw and out the left eye socket. The bull dragged him for several yards before it let him go, leaving him blind in the left eye, deaf in his left ear and, after several surgeries, with a skull full of titanium plates and screws, and a face fully paralyzed on the left side. Yet, within six months, Padilla was back in the ring fighting bulls, a black eyepatch firmly affixed to his mauled face.

Think of this the next time you enjoy a steak cooked over split wood in the ancient Greek style, of how the second greatest achievement of our neolithic ancestors, after agriculture, was the conversion of the auroch into dairy cows and draught oxen. Of how the primal fear of this horrible beast, bred into men over millennia by ten thousand deaths on its horns, persisted in our racial memories, side-by-side with the driving desire to master the animal, to make it our servant in civilization.  This is why Juan José Padilla was drawn back into the arena, because there the ancient drama is played out again, as it was in Knossos four thousand years ago, or in Sumer two thousand years earlier when Gilgamesh killed the Bull of Heaven. It is the essential drama of civilized man against nature: the retaming of the wild auroch.

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N.B. This piece was written a decade ago but worth re-sharing with you. I’ll be back next week with something new, a short piece about Korean restaurants in early 20th century America. In the meantime, if you like this sort of thing, here’s one of my favorite articles: Pizza Isn’t Italian.

But, by 8am on Saturday morning, we'd stowed our luggage and lunches, climbed aboard, and juddered off for the Termas Valle de Colina, a famous hot springs at the far end of Cajón del Maipo.

Cajón del Maipo is one of those close-to-the-city places, like Long Island or Malibu, that figures bigger in a nation's consciousness and culture than it does in its geography. A narrow slice of canyon lancing south-eastward from Santiago into the cordillera, the Maipo's been a weekend getaway for Santiagueños, and a source of fresh fruit and odd legends, for more than two centuries.

Because of its ready access to water and a decent climate, the prehistory of the Maipo valley goes back at least 10,000 years, with Indians and Incans, copper smelting and rock art. Its recorded history, begun when Valdavia arrived in Chile in 1542, is mostly stories of prospectors, herbalists, and stockmen running cattle and sheep up into the high meadows in summer. By 1792, the silver mines in the valley were pulling out enough metal to justify the foundation of a town, San Jose del Maipo, at a spot about 30 miles out from Santiago.

Most of the big events in the area happened in the early 19th century. In January of 1817, a tiny detachment of the Army of the Andes crossed the Argentine Paso de Portillo, at 14,200 feet, and the Paso de Piuquenes, (now on the international border) at 13,220 feet, and descended the Maipo so as to divert the attention of the Spanish, allowing the rest of the army to cross further to the north. The ruse worked, and the liberator José de San Martín was able to join up with the other liberator, Bernardo O'Higgins, and win independence for Chile. This high-lonesome route is now popular with people who take a week and do it on foot, mountain bike, or horseback.

Speaking of recreating the trip, in 1835, Charles Darwin left Santiago, went up the Maipo and over the mountains along the same route to Mendoza, Argentina. His observations on the geology of the Andes proved to be, as most of his other observations, ahead of their time and fairly accurate. Here's a sample of Darwin on the Cajón del Maipo:

"On each side of the ridge we had to pass over broad bands of perpetual snow, which were now soon to be covered with a fresh layer. When we reached the crest and looked backwards, a glorious view was presented. The atmosphere resplendently clear; the sky an intense blue; the profound valleys; the wild broken forms; the heaps of ruins, piled up during the lapse of ages; the bright-coloured rocks, contrasted with the quiet mountains of snow; all these together produced a scene no-one could have imagined. Neither plant nor bird, excepting a few condors wheeling around the higher pinnacles, distracted my attention from the inanimate mass. I felt glad that I was alone: it was like watching a thunderstorm, or hearing in full orchestra a chorus of the Messiah"

Rattling up the road out of Santiago I didn't get much of a chance to validate Darwin's observations, concerned as I was with my own observations of Chilean bus-driving techniques.

On the one hand, the Chileans are the most cautious and responsible drivers in South America. Their police are good, their DUI laws strict, and their paved roads moderately well maintained. Compared to Argentines, for whom every traffic sign is a challenge to their masculinity, every pedestrian a potential hood ornament, Chilean drivers are the proverbial little old ladies.

Compared to American drivers, however, the average Chilean bus driver is Dale Junior's evil twin, drafting into the sweet spot behind Kia subcompacts, while playing the maestro on a symphony of horn. And yet, after an hour of gripping tightly to the broken arm rest of my broken seat, I began to relax.

God was with us, and our driver, a man who had appeared at first glance to be a cough syrup addict, was revealed in truth to be a skilled practitioner of the art of driving over rough terrain. By the time we left the paved road, at the head of the canyon near the village of San Gabriel, it had become clear that his skills were mighty indeed. The weaving back and forth I had taken as a sign that the Robitussin was kicking in, was actually a strategy designed to prevent the bus from bottoming out on the boulders that littered the roadbed.

One cultural note: Chileans will drive anything anywhere. They're not afraid to take a Ford Ka (essentially a Hot Wheels car) or an aging, fully-loaded bus and drive it to a distant hot springs at the end of thirty miles of vicuña track. For example, in 2007, pair of Chilenos took a lightly-modified Suzuki Samurai and drove it nearly to the top of the world's tallest volcano, 21,942 feet up, a world record. (Undoubtedly, when they got there, they found a old Chilean woman in a tin shack selling pan amasado and roasted goat.)

So, as we were rumbling down the road, passing and being passed by every sort of vehicle known to Chileankind, I began to get into the trip. Even the threat of death, ever present in the Andes, seemed to recede.

When we finally arrived at the termas, at the end of the road, 9,000 feet in the air, there were no trees, just rocks, sun, dirt, and the muddy brown river racing through a half-mile wide valley. A clear stream tumbled down on the other side, directly opposite us, a waterfall visible at the farthest spot. The hot springs, eight pools arranged on a hillside, from hottest to coolest, were fed from a hole in side of the mountain. The water was salty, not sulfurous, and 160 degrees fahrenheit at the source.

The young people I was with raced off the bus and up the hill to change and dive in. I climbed up after them, felt the water, watched them splash about yelping at the heat, and then sat down in the only shade available, on the porch of the plywood hut that served as a changing room.

The hot springs were not pleasant. Pleasant is not a word you can use in the Andes. The temperature was mild in the shade, but the sun was skin-peeling in the open. The Chileans scooped up gray mud from the bottom of the pools and smeared it on their faces and shoulders, the young people followed their lead. The wind whipped across the valley, blowing hats off heads, and throwing dirt into eyes. The atmosphere was thin and dry. Dust covered everything and I could feel the sharpness of the rocks through the soles of my shoes.

I stared out at the valley, and realized it was exactly as Darwin had described: intensely blue skies, a landscape of ancient rubble, and a profound silence betokening God's presence. Awe is not a pleasant emotion. It's not comforting or kindly. It's unsettling.

We ate our lunch inside the bus, or huddled against it, the only shade we had. And as the afternoon grew late, I hiked across the river and up alongside the creek to within earshot of the waterfall, turning back only when the trail narrowed.

When I returned to the bus, Señor Driver was returning from a dip in the termas, toweling his hair. He had changed into a t-shirt and a pair of denim shorts that fell below the knees, like pedal-pushers, or board shorts. I saluted him, and wished him well. I was not unduly worried about the trip down the mountain. Any man who could wrangle a second-hand bus into the distant Andes could surely wrangle it back down again, no matter what he was wearing.

N.B. This was something I wrote a decade ago. When I reread it last week, I realized it was pretty good, and worth sharing with you, my patient and long-suffering readers. I hope you’ve enjoyed it.

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In other matters, I’ve finally finished my novel, a ridiculous satire about a (former) East German professor of semiotics who enters a reality TV dance contest in America. This was a book I put away for a number of years and finally got the gumption to finish.

And, now, I’ve begun the dispiriting process of approaching agents and publishers with book in hand. Wish me luck, dear friends! If it doesn’t meet with success in traditional publishing, I will likely inflict upon you in a serialized form at this location. In fact, no matter what, I may share a chapter or two with you in the coming weeks. Cheers!

Three weeks ago, on an early spring morning, I had a couple of hours to kill while my daughter went to a tryout for the Under-19 national rowing team. A couple of hours that started with a plate of biscuits and gravy next to the Incline Railway and ended at the International Towing and Recovery Museum.

It was, even before the biscuits and gravy, a beautiful day. Chattanooga in the spring is vastly underrated. The morning was cool and overcast, but the eastern redbuds were in full bloom, a splash of pink on gray and green. Everything seemed sufficiently lovely in the St. Elmo neighborhood, with it’s well-preserved homes and brick buildings. All of it further confirmation of something I’ve come to believe over the past year, that Chattanooga is now much more fun than Nashville.

And what could be more fun than a museum devoted to the art and science of towing?

But first, a moment of seriousness. Out front, we encounter the “Wall of The Fallen”, a memorial dedicated to all of the tow-truck drivers who’ve lost their lives in service to others. Which, when you look at the statistics, is a horrifyingly large number, an average of 60 per year according to AAA. Meaning, tow-truck drivers are more likely to get killed or injured in the line of duty than cops or firefighters.

With that sobering thought behind us, it was into the museum, where a $10 admission bought me all of the tow-truck-abilia I could possibly stand.

The first thing I learned was that the tow truck was invented in Chattanooga by Ernest Holmes, Sr., an auto mechanic who, in 1916, attached a couple of booms and a hoist to his 1913 Cadillac and used it to drag cars out of ditches and back to his shop. Holmes took a drafting course from Georgia Tech, patented his invention in 1918 and then built the tow-truck industry from scratch. It’s a real American story, one of those ones where an Alabama poor boy with a grammar-school education gets rich on a good idea.

The Ernest Holmes Corporation quickly became the largest manufacturer of tow trucks in the world, and Ernest Holmes, Sr., ran the company until his death in 1945, prospering even during the Great Depression. His son, Ernest Holmes, Jr., with an engineering degree from Georgia Tech, was then president until it was sold in 1973.

But that was not the end of Holmes family ingenuity, as Earnest Junior’s sons, Jerry and Bill Holmes, also Georgia Tech engineers, started a new company in 1974, where they developed the first hydraulic wreckers, the current industry standard. (Oddly, the Rambling Wreck from Georgia Tech predates the Holmes family’s association with the institution.) Eventually, the Holmes brothers’ Century Wrecking was acquired by Miller Industries, which still sells wreckers under both the Holmes and Century brands, produced in its manufacturing plant just outside Chattanooga.

This exciting industrial history, of inventions, manufacturing, mergers and acquisitions, is what the International Towing and Recovery Museum specializes in, telling the story of the men (and the few women) who pioneered the towing industry.

As I tell my historiography students, industrial history is really difficult to do, because corporations toss out their records all the time, especially when they go out of business. But, thanks to the Holmes family, the history of the tow truck industry in Chattanooga seems to be remarkably well documented. The museum even has a tow-truck research library!

Of course, you really came to see the trucks, of which there are many. My favorite was a 1929 Packard mounted with a 3-ton Manley crane, just a beautiful machine.

A less exciting part of the museum is the Hall of Fame, where the great men of towing are given their due.

And, yes, the great men of towing look pretty much as you would expect…

Taken all together, the International Towing and Recovery Museum is good for about 90 minutes of solid entertainment and towing industry enlightenment. It’s a thoroughly American sort of place, where the history of cars, innovation and humble people boot-strapping themselves into wealth is well told. It’s not terribly sophisticated, but neither is the story it’s telling. It’s worth a visit if you’re in Chattanooga and have some time to kill before visiting Rock City.

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Who names a high-end restaurant after a Biblical plague? In 12South? You can tell that chef Trevor Moran isn’t from around these parts, because as soon as you mention the word “locust” to a real Southerner they start thinking about painting their door jambs red, not about eating fourteen-dollar, desiccated tuna crackers. Such is the power of Sunday school. (By way of disclosure, I’m not a real Southerner, either, just a life-long member of the Churches of Christ, thus accounting for my encyclopedic knowledge of God’s wrath.)

Speaking of God’s wrath, may it rain down upon the real estate nabobs who are turning 12South into yet one more semi-urban, cookie-cutter Nowheresville. Apparently, in the 21st Century, everywhere is destined to look like everywhere else, as anything local, quirky, or notable is whirled into a pink slurry and extruded into the blandest 5-over-1, mixed-use casings. If the world were just, an Old Testament God would afflict everyone at Cushman and Wakefield with disfiguring boils. Instead, we get Locust the Restaurant—in its own way, one of the lesser plagues of modernity.

Oh, don’t mistake me. The food at Locust is both inventive and tasty, the surroundings are moderately inoffensive, and the service is sufficiently obsequious. The problem is that Locust has nothing that ties it to Nashville. In fact, there’s nothing that ties it to anywhere. It floats in a clear broth of smug self-regard, the amniotic fluid of the international over-class.

You could take Locust, with its Danish-modern design, Irish chef, and sorta-Japanese-inspired menu, and plunk it down in any gentrifying neighborhood in the world, from Buenos Aires to Berlin. It’s as much a franchise outlet of the 21st century’s homogenizing trends as Raising Cane’s or Shake Shack. It’s a byproduct of too much money and too little authenticity, more a phenomenon of social media than physical reality.

“But, it’s the New Nashville,” shout the people who need to be quiet.

“Hush your mouth, dummy. Have some respect for the recently deceased.”

Having said all that, Locust does turn out some pretty good food. I know this because we ate everything on the menu. This is apparently the thing you do at Locust if you’re a party of more than one, the menu being only six items long. The occasion was my youngest daughter’s 17th birthday, and the reservation only had to be made two months in advance. That’s because, last year, the magazine Food & Wine named Locust their “Restaurant of the Year,” a pronouncement best greeted with a shrug.

But back to the food. One thing I do appreciate about chef Trevor Moran is his take-it-or-lump-it attitude to his diners. He’s decided to run this restaurant his way and cook what he wants, presumably within the parameters of owner Strategic Hospitality’s marketing spreadsheets. Happily, that means that we get very good Asian dumplings (made of lamb when I visited), superb steak tartare, and probably the second-best Dover sole I’d ever eaten. (Behind a sole meunière cooked tableside in the old Flamingo hotel in Las Vegas, circa 1992.) I was, on the other hand, underwhelmed by the “crispy tuna”, a piece of dried tuna loin on a cracker, and the shrimp toast.

Perhaps it was because we ate on a Sunday night, but it seemed like some aspects were being phoned in. For example, the steak tartare wasn’t accompanied by the freeze-dried capers that various reviews had waxed eloquent about. We were given, instead, bits of generic puffed rice that lacked any zip. Likewise, previous manifestations of the Dover sole were served with a seafood butter sauce that included lobster. Our $70 Dover sole came with… a piece of flatbread. Yes, that flatbread was prepared by Jeremy the Hunky Sous-chef, in a tiny Ooni pizza oven close to our table, a fact that thrilled my teenaged daughter. But, no, even if that flatbread were made by an ancient Syrian grandmother from hand-ground heirloom wheat, it wouldn’t have been a good or appropriate side for that wondrously delicate fish.

In general, the price-to-satisfaction ratio was not in Locust’s favor. $360 for three people is not the worst, nor was it a deal, since we left hungry. Happily, I am not paying for my meal. That duty falls to V. Davis Hunt, the XIIIth, the eccentric boy billionaire publisher of the Nashville Pamphleteer, a man who has decided to sacrifice his family wealth on the Altar of Folly (A.K.A. “local journalism”).

A final note, there is one thing that definitely should not be missed at Locust, the kakigori, the Japanese shaved ice. It was everything that the meal was not, under-touted and overwhelmingly good. What arrived at our table was a pillowy mass of shaved ice flavored with passionfruit, salted caramel, honeycomb, and topped with a sweetened egg yolk. It was spectacularly good. If everything else at Locust had lived up to that standard, this would have been counted as one of the best meals of my life. Instead, it was one of the best desserts of my life, and that ain’t nothing.

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Yes, after a lengthy and shameful slumber I am back to writing things that may, or may not, amuse people. Please bear with me as I overcome sloth. Also, follow me on Twitter if you’re so inclined. See you next week.

Two weeks ago, everything looked good out there. I had more tomatoes than I could deal with, but now it’s the Waste Land. (“August is the cruelest month, breeding blight into the tomatoes…”) The plants are keeling over, and the tomatoes are rotting on the vine. Big patches of earth are appearing where there should be greenery.

There are so many tomato diseases—fungi, blights, mildews—that I can’t be certain which of these is ravaging my tomato patch. It’s probably something called "southern blight”, but I don’t know. I’m not an agronomist. I’m not even a very good home gardenist.

My coworker Neal, who lives three or four blocks from me, reports that his tomatoes have likewise been afflicted. So, I’m not alone in this. The whole neighborhood is being punished by God for its presumptuousness. Or, it might be my soil is cursed by the restless Native American ghosts evicted from their graves. I’m open to the possibility of supernatural causes.

Given that southern blight, like most other tomato plagues, stays in the soil over the winter and will reappear in the same spot in subsequent years, I’ll probably have to switch to raised beds next spring. There aren’t enough sunny places in my backyard for me to dig new garden beds, unless I cut down some of my neighbor’s trees. That’s probably impractical, given that she’s a light sleeper and chainsaws are loud.

My neighbor seems like a nice old lady, but she could be a witch who has cursed my harvest. (As a medieval historian, I know that witches are famous for doing just that.) In that case, if she is a witch, it might be possible to solve two problems with one good ducking, but only if I can get the city authorities do their duty regarding witch infestations.

Unfortunately, despite my ignorance of science and latent superstition, crop failure is always a commentary on the farmer and his abilities. Thus, it’s only natural that one would seek to blame others for his misfortunes. Absent supernatural causes, it seems most likely that my garden hygiene was poor. I didn’t stake my plants correctly and didn’t pay attention to how the leaves were drooping onto the damp soil following the big rain we had a couple weeks ago. My reward for laziness is tomato death. That’s harsh.

Yes, of course, if I really wanted some tomatoes I could go to the farmers market and buy tomatoes, but I refuse to do so on principle. I would rather not eat tomatoes than eat someone else’s during the late summer, when my own tomatoes should be bounteous.

The most important thing, however, is that Nature is now depriving me of my daily tomato sandwich. She is a cruel mistress.

Sunday night, I finally got around to watching Baz Luhrmann’s new Elvis movie and it’s a real humdinger. I’ve been a giant Baz Luhrmann fan ever since I saw Moulin Rouge in 2001, and laughed out loud at Jim Broadbent singing “Like a Virgin”. And I still think Romeo+Juliet is the best version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet ever put on film.

Having said that, I consider Elvis to be Luhrmann’s masterpiece, the best movie he’s ever made. It’s both a movie worthy of adulation and a work of peculiar genius.

Like all of Baz’s movies, especially Moulin Rouge, Elvis is a brilliant glittering plaything of a film, completely captivating and chaotic; ridiculous, charming and aggravating at the same time. To fully enjoy this movie you have to let yourself go and bathe in the imagery and music, because if you stop to think about it, if only for a second, you’ll realize how silly it really is. Although, silliness is not a stinging criticism, since Baz cultivates silliness in his movies. (Jim Broadbent singing “Like a Virgin” and Tom Hanks in a fat suit as Colonel Tom Parker.)

Most of the reviews I’ve read of Elvis are dumb. They misunderstand what Baz is about as an artist. For example, this is not a movie about the “real” Elvis Presley, whoever that might have been. Luhrmann is absolutely unconcerned with psychological or emotional depth. He’s obsessed, instead, with entertaining his audience, and Elvis Presley is the mythic vehicle of that entertainment, turned up to the maximum volume.

Like Moulin Rouge, Elvis is a movie about sex appeal and sex-as-entertainment, and Elvis Presley is the pinnacle of 20th century sex-as-entertainment. No one else comes close in terms of raw sexiness, and because of the fracturing of mass media, no one will ever again be as universally sexy as the 20-year-old Elvis. The only serious competitors to young Elvis are 30-year-old Elvis in leather pants, and 40-year-old, Elvis in a sequined white jumpsuit.

And this is even before we acknowledge that he was also a singular musical genius.

Unfortunately, the complete, triumphant sexiness of young Elvis gets lost in the mockery heaped on the tragic fat Elvis. We forget just how sexy Elvis was, because he destroyed himself in the worst way possible, by getting fat and pathetic. James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, who were both roughly half as sexy as Elvis, and one tenth as important, avoided that fate by dying young and beautiful.

It’s obvious to me, as it should be to any decent critic, that Baz is doing everything possible to give us back the sexy Elvis. That’s his objective, to make us understand again how charismatic Elvis was, while entertaining us maximally.

The first thirty minutes of this movie are brilliant, one of the best and most entertaining half-hours ever, and it focuses entirely on the unexpected, God-given sexiness of Elvis. (Elvis’s mother Gladys even says it’s a gift from God.) Elvis doesn’t cultivate it, he doesn’t even intend it, he just has it, like a Greek hero. Like Achilles or Hercules, he’s a demigod, blessed with a gift revealed to him in young adulthood. Or, maybe, not just a demigod, but a real god: primordial Eros, the son of Chaos, who wields a terrifying generative power.

Austin Butler, the best movie Elvis ever, is astonishingly good looking. In repose, better looking than the real Elvis. But, Austin Butler has to be almost super-naturally good looking to convey the almost super-natural charisma of the young Elvis, to give the audience some sense of that mysterious force that, literally—not figuratively— changed America. I’m not joking. American cultural history can be divided into B.E. and A.E., Before Elvis and After Elvis. No American has ever been as culturally important as Elvis. If you don’t believe me, name someone who’s more influential.

So, Baz Luhrmann is giving us back Elvis, the real Elvis. Not the psychologically complex, actual human being Elvis Presley, but the real Elvis Presley of pop culture, as he existed in the 1950’s and 60’s, stripped of the post-death cultural baggage and mockery. Baz is inviting us to see Elvis as he was in his prime, from the viewpoint of a naive viewer encountering him for the first time. And, Baz does it.

I saw the movie on Sunday night with my daughters, age 16 and 18, and both loved it and couldn’t stop talking about it. (Nor could I.) It was the third theater viewing for my sixteen year old. This level of devotion to the movie is apparently not unusual among teenagers. My daughters tell me that dozens of their friends are now obsessed with both the movie and Elvis Presley. One friend of theirs, a sharp young woman of 18, has seen the movie 10 times, and a 19-year-old cousin is now watching all of Elvis’s movies and reading everything ever written about him, starting with the masterful Last Train to Memphis.

Do you get that? Teenage girls (teenagers!) now think Elvis Presley is cool.

Thanks to Baz Luhrmann and his brilliant movie, teenagers understand Elvis Presley better than most American cultural critics do. Sneering at Elvis is the mark of the uncool, Okay Boomer midwit. Understanding Elvis is peak sexiness is the new hotness.

To which I say, thank you, Baz, for putting the King back on his throne.

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Thanks for reading this. I’ll be back soon with something about the Tomatopocalypse. In the meantime, follow me on twitter and subscribe if you haven’t done so already, and thank you if you have. Cheers!

In Part I—published last week—I noted that chicken and waffles is historically three different dishes: creamed chicken and waffles, broiled chicken and waffles, and fried chicken and waffles, each of which had its moment in the sun.  

Of the three, it’s probably broiled chicken and waffles that had the greatest fame in the mid-19th century. The most celebrated purveyor of broiled chicken and waffles was Warriner’s Tavern in Springfield, Massachusetts, an old fashioned coaching inn run by Jeremy “Uncle Jerry” Warriner and his wife Phoebe.

Aside from the fact that people were writing poetry about the tastiness of Aunt Phoebe’s chicken and waffles for decades after her death, what was most interesting was that Springfield, Massachusetts, wasn’t below the Mason-Dixon line. Remember, chicken and waffles are supposed to be the “most complete expression of  Southern culinary skill”, not a dish that made “modest fortunes” in the land of the bean and the cod. So, what was the secret ingredient in Aunt Phoebe’s broiled chicken and waffles that made them so delicious? In two words: runaway slaves.

If you remember your U.S. History I,  Western Massachusetts was a hotbed of abolitionism, and Springfield was ground zero, a place where John Brown sharpened his madness before heading out to make Kansas bleed. The Warriners were staunch abolitionists and their tavern a major stop on the Underground Railroad. We know that Aunt Phoebe’s kitchen was staffed with African-American women who in a previous life had probably been plantation cooks, or at least trained by plantation cooks. As I showed you in Part I, or rather as David S. Shields showed you in his book Southern Provisons: The Creation and Revival of a Cuisine, plantation cooks were likely the best chefs in America, rivaled only by a few French chefs in New Orleans and New York.

We also know the names of at least two of the African-American cooks at Uncle Jerry’s: Mary Sly and Emily, the latter a virtuoso pastry chef.  Emily’s full identity has eluded me. Mary Sly, however, is better known. In 1855, she was one of a number of fugitives who were living in Florence, 20 miles north of Springfield, a village famous for it’s liberty-minded residents such as Sojourner Truth.

Sly, said to have been born in either New Orleans or Natchez, worked for a time at the tavern run by Jeremy Warriner in Springfield; she escaped from her owner, a “Col. Trask,” and it may be at that time that she came to Florence, where she was listed in the 1855 state census.

This is where I ended Part I, noting that the man who had once owned Mary Sly was a congregant at the same church as Uncle Jerry and Aunt Phoebe, the First Congregational Church in Springfield, where the Reverend Samuel Osgood, an ardent abolitionist, presided.

Colonel Israel E. Trask was one of those ambitious, energetic Massachusetts Yankees that turned up everywhere in the 19th century, from Santa Barbara to Shanghai, seizing the main chance with both hands and not letting go. The son of a Revolutionary War veteran and prominent surgeon, young Trask had been educated at Yale, trained as a lawyer, and briefly served in the Army. He was on the edge of heading off to France in 1801 when Alexander Hamilton suggested he go to Mississippi instead, and he did. Once there, he fell in with the right crowd, married a planter’s daughter and acquired two huge plantations, one near Natchez and the other closer to New Orleans. 

In 1812, after making a fortune growing cotton, Trask turned the management of his plantations over to his brother and headed back to Massachusetts, where, in an early example of vertical integration, he opened a cotton mill. Yes, Israel E. Trask was both a southern planter and a Yankee industrialist, a career trajectory that was not as uncommon as you might imagine.

This is the place where I point out something you might not have thought about. Springfield was a hotbed of abolition because Massachusetts fortunes were being made on the backs of enslaved people, directly in the case of men like Col. Trask, and indirectly through the ownership of cotton mills. In fact, the Deep South—Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana—was lousy with transplanted New Englanders, men like Edwin T. Merrick, another Springfield-lawyer-turned-Louisiana-planter, who was the Chief Justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court. Rather than surrender the court to the hated Yankees, when Union General Benjamin “Beast” Butler (another Massachusetts lawyer) entered New Orleans, Merrick took the court into exile in Confederate-held Shreveport and kept it operating until the end of the war.

Because of the close familial and commercial ties between Southern cotton planters and Massachusetts textile barons, and because of the unbearable heat, malaria and yellow fever in the summer, many planters, like Col. Trask, spent their winters in the South and summers in New England.  And when planters like Col. Trask traveled north, they brought their lady’s maids, valets and cooks with them, which meant that the citizens of New England mill towns had more direct contact with planters and enslaved people than most other Northerners. Springfield wasn’t technically a mill town—it specialized in precision manufacturing—but it was a major transportation hub, the first stop in Massachusetts for the steamboats that went up the Connecticut River, with railroads leading outward in all directions by 1845.

State law and friendly judges meant that Massachusetts was effectively a free state; slaves who traveled with their owners could “self emancipate” as soon as they stepped off the boat.  In the case of Col. Trask, self-emancipation seemed to happen more than once. I’ve not had a chance to examine the Israel E. Trask collection at Amherst College (Trask was one of the founders of the college) or the duplicates of the collection at Harvard, so I do not know if there is more to be learned about Mary Sly and whether she ran off or self emancipated. I do know, however, that Uncle Jerry’s was a place where self-emanicpation was encouraged. In fact, one of the most famous cases of recanted self-emanicipation started in the dining room at Warriner’s tavern in August of 1845.

One W. B. Hodgson, a slaveholder from Savannah (Geo.) with his lady and slave by the name of Catherine Linda, came into Springfield about three weeks since and stopped at Warriner’s U.S. Hotel.  At the same time a friend from New-Bedford, a fugitive slave, in company with another family, stopped at the same place.  He fell in with Catherine Linda, and soon found that she was a slave travelling with her master.  She repudiated slavery, and expressed a desire to be free.

That short snippet is taken from radical abolitionist Erasmus Darwin Hudson’s account of the incident as recorded the abolitionist newspaper, The  Liberator. 

Unfortunately, when Catherine Linda was given her moment before a judge who had the power to confirm her freedom, she recanted—probably because her entire family was in Georgia—and returned to the South with her master and mistress.  (Oddly, Hodgson, a scholar and former American diplomat, was a gifted linguist who was familiar with most of the African languages common among slaves, including Mandigo, Ebo, Gullah and Fula.)

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So, by the 1840’s,  broiled chicken and waffles had been spread to the north by runaway or freed slaves, well-trained cooks like Mary Sly, who occupied key positions in celebrated eating houses, such Uncle Jerry’s Tavern.  But what about fried chicken and waffles?

As I noted in Part One, outside of the South, young chicken was an unusual and costly treat. Below the Mason-Dixon, however, it was a common staple on breakfast tables, fried or broiled, and served with a variety of breads and biscuits, including waffles. The reason chicken was more abundant in the South was that chickens long held a special place in Southern slave society, because they were the one type of livestock enslaved people were usually allowed to own for themselves. Andrew Lawler’s 2014 book, Why Did the Chicken Cross the World, gives a good accounting of the southern chicken economy, of dunghill fowls as the key commodity in a lively commerce of eating, trading and selling carried out by enslaved people and freed blacks.

In what likely was a typical exchange, Thomas Jefferson in 1775 bought three chickens for two silver Spanish bits from two of his female slaves who worked at the Shadwell plantation. In the early 1800s, when he was away serving as president of the United States, Jefferson’s granddaughter Ann Cary Randolph recorded each purchase made while she helped manage the estate in his absence. Chickens and eggs were the item most commonly sold by slaves to the white household.

Enslaved people also grew a large range of vegetables in their garden allotments and sold the produce to their masters and others, although nothing was ever as lucrative as poultry. Here’s Andrew Lawler again.

In 1728, a white owner named Elias Ball paid one pound and fifteen shillings for eighteen chickens to his slave Abraham. A savvy businessman, Abraham then threw in one chicken for free. Planters bought up to seventy birds at a time from their human chattel.

Chickens were so lucrative that industrious slaves might, in rare cases, even be able to buy their own freedom with the earnings from their birds. Lawler wryly notes that, slaves often “had a strong economic incentive to encourage their masters to eat more chicken.”

Which brings us, at long last, to the topic of fried chicken and waffles. If you want to know about the history of Southern fried chicken, go read John T. Edge’s book, Fried Chicken: An American Story, and if you want to know, in a general way, about Southern fried chicken and waffles, this passage from Adrian Miller’s book Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine is a good summary of the basic truth.

By the early 1800s, a “Virginia Breakfast,” featuring a combination of fried or baked meats with any sort of hot quick bread, was the gold standard of plantation hospitality. At these meals, fried chicken was a regular star, just as likely to be paired with a biscuit, cornbread, pancakes, or rolls as a it was with waffles. It was enslaved African American cooks who made the Virginia Breakfast possible. After Emancipation, these same cooks frequently made chicken and waffles for social events in the black community, and worked as professional cooks in elite hotels, resorts, and restaurants patronized by wealthy whites. Through their culinary talent, African American cooks effectively mainstreamed chicken and waffles by the early 1900s.

While Adrian Miller’s thesis about the genesis of chicken and waffles is solid, it’s lacking, as most of these accounts are, in specific details, probably because it’s impossible to go back much before the Civil War and find mentions that emphasize the unity of the dish.

What I mean is, accounts of plantation breakfasts might put fried chicken and waffles together on the breakfast table, but they’re usually accompanied by a host of other tasty things—from beaten biscuits to baked meats. Fried chicken and waffles is not a dish because fried chicken and waffles are not yet “a thing”, singular.

Having said all that, my best guess is that fried chicken and waffles achieves thinghood in parts of the South just before the civil war, and then takes off in the North in the mid 1870s, achieving nationwide apotheosis by the turn of the 20th century. Here are the opening lines from an antebellum short story, “Miss Polly Peablossom’s Wedding”, published in 1842 by John B. Lamar, a Georgia planter who dabbled in regional humor and died on a Maryland battlefield in 1862.

“My stars! that parson is a powerful slow a-cominng! I reckon he wa’nt so tedious in gitting to his own wedding as he is coming here,” said one of the bridesmaids of Miss Polly Peablossom, as she bit her lips to make them rosy, and peeped into a small looking-glass for the twentieth time.

“He preaches enough about the shortness of a lifetime,” remarked another pouting Miss, “and how we ought to improve our opportunities, not to be creeping along like a snail, when a whole wedding party is waiting for him, and the waffles are getting cold and the chickens are burning to a crisp”

We can thus establish that chicken and waffles were a dish suitable for serving at country weddings in antebellum Georgia, probably cooked, of course, by the slave women who ably commanded the plantation kitchens.

The big nationwide boom in fried chicken and waffles began in the 1870s, paralleling the rise of a national railroad network that eased the burdens of long-distance travel.

Before the Civil War, travel to the South largely meant taking a steamer down the Atlantic coast to Charleston or Savannah, or down the Ohio River to the Cumberland or Mississippi, and thence inland from one of the ports, sometime by local rail, but mostly by coach. In other words, it was slow and arduous, and not something to be undertaken lightly.

As long distance travel got easier after the Civil War, working in what today is called the “hospitality industry” was one of the fastest way for freed slaves and their descendants to earn a respectable living. George Pullman, of the Pullman car, exclusively hired ex-slaves as sleeping car attendants and porters, men who earned middle class wages by focusing on superior customer service. At rail stations throughout the South, many African American women also earned a decent living by selling prepared food to train passengers.  Amos Gottschall, a patent medicine salesman who roamed the continent after the Civil War, was especially impressed with “waiter-carriers”, women who walked great distances with platters of food balanced on their heads.

About the first words a traveler hears as the cars stop at a station in the South, are these: “Here’s yer nice, tender chicken, hot coffee and waffles!” and the next moment, a good-natured old Sambo or Aunt Hannah comes to the car-window, carrying on his or her head a large waiter containing nicely fried chicken and waffles, as well as a shining coffee-pot full of steaming Java.

The small town of Gordonsville, Virginia, located at an intersection that connected  Richmond with the Shenandoah Valley, gained fame for the quality of its fried chicken, sold trackside to passengers by an army of waiter-carriers.

Resort hotels throughout the country hired freed slaves and their children to staff their kitchens, and canny promoters and hoteliers began to advertise Southern fried chicken dinners as a significant attraction.

By the turn of the century, the cult of fried chicken and waffles had spread to distant parts of country, to places like New York City, Western Massachusetts, and the Hale’iwa Hotel in Hawaii. (The later founded and run by Benjamin Dillingham, another Massachusetts Yankee adventurer who got rich on native land and chutzpah.) By 1920 there were several Southern restaurants,  “tea rooms”,  in New York City,  such as the Yellow Aster, the Adelaide, the Pirouette and the Southern Tea Room, that regularly offered fried chicken and waffle dinners.

Fried chicken, with or without waffles, became so important that Jessup Whitehead, the Mark Twain of 19th century cookbook authors, considered it the essential factor in whether or not a resort succeed.

It is quite appalling to think how many men of means and brains rush into the business of keeping summer resort hotels who are and remain utterly ignorant of the fact that the first principle of resort keeping is

PLENTY OF FRIED CHICKEN

and not knowing this, they fail and the next summer the “unfortunate”, the chickenless hotel remains closed. True, your guests love other things, too. They love music and fried chicken; electric lights and bells and fried chicken; telegraph and post office in the house, and fried chicken; great elevations and pine woods and fried chicken; fine drives, all sorts of amusements and all other modern conveniences and fried chicken; but as nobody expects to get all the good things in this world at once if any of the preliminary inducements should be lacking, still if fried chicken remains, the guests will stay, too.

At the same time fried chicken and waffles were conquering the hotel business, American housewives began to up their cooking game. Post-war industrialization in the North caused wages to rise to the point that middle class families were unable to hire reliable servants at reasonable rates. One response was to import young women from Ireland,  who as I showed in my piece, “The Curse of an Irish Cook”, were woefully untrained in the art of American cookery.

Another, more common response, was for young women to get the training in cooking their mothers—who had benefited from cheap labor—did not provide. Cookbooks were thus published in great number,  ladies magazines proliferated, and cooking schools sprang up across the country.

One of the first celebrity chefs to emerges in this era was Maria Parola, yet another Massachusetts native, who spent five years in Jacksonville, Florida, as a school teacher, before returning to Boston and opening Miss Parola’s School of Cooking in 1877.  Her success as a lecturer, writer of cookbooks and teacher of cooking inspired many rivals, including the more famous Mary J. Lincoln and Fannie Farmer, both also based in Boston.  It was Parola, however, who probably did the most to inspire Northern cooks to attempt Southern dishes.  This excerpt from the St. Paul Globe, May 3, 1886, shows the esteem in which she held southern cookery.

Miss Parola, the famous exponent of common sense cookery has been making tour of the South. As a result of her investigations she declares that the women of the South are better cooks than their Northern sisters. If the lady has allowed her judgement to become prejudiced under the seductive influence of the fried chicken and waffles which form the most complete expression of Southern culinary skill, she is perhaps excusable for her evidently biased statement.

So, there you are. By 1886, fried chicken and waffles was considered, rightly or wrongly,  “the most complete expression of Southern culinary skill.”  The thinghood of fried chicken and waffles had finally been achieved.

Note that praise for the dish was being given to Southern housewives, not to plantation cooks, for the obvious reason that this was a generation after the Emancipation Proclamation, a generation during which the impoverished South, unlike the more prosperous North, had not experienced an economic boom. Miss Parola’s assessment that Southern women were better cooks than Northern women was likely because Southern women had fewer servants after the war and more hands-on experience at the art of cooking. Or, more plainly stated, with talented slave-cooks freed, middle class Southern women had to do their own cooking, and as a result became good at it.

Fried chicken and waffles also gained in popularity among home cooks because of improved technology. Baking powder, newfangled patent waffle irons and gas stoves were making it easier for housewives to prepare waffles at home.

Originally, the old-fashioned yeast batters had to be prepared well in advance of cooking, and long-handled waffle irons wielded in open fireplaces made the actual cooking a difficult and sometimes dangerous task, which was why waffles were considered such as special dish, why they could only be made by people with lengthy training in the art of wafflery and why plantation breakfasts, of which they were a prominent part, were so often cited as the peak of luxury.

Here, I probably should address the Aunt Jemima problem because it ties together so much of what we’ve been talking about: post-Civil War industrialization, housewives cooking breakfast, the spread of Southern food culture and the role of African-American women in it.  But, I’m not going to.  It’s too wickedly complex to treat in a fluffy piece on chicken and waffles. Instead, go read Toni Tipton-Martin’s book  The Jemima Code. It’s worth your while because Tipton-Martin reminds us that there are two sides to the stereotype of the black mammy. On the one side, the offensive racial caricature that reduces African-American women to perpetual happy servitude while reasserting white dominance; on the other, the genuine feelings of warmth that many white Southerners felt for the black women who raised and fed them. The caricature is racially offensive, but the positive emotions were genuine, and both things exist in the same space at the same time.

The letters of Israel Trask, the Massachusetts mill owner/Mississippi planter, catch something of what the novelist Kathryn Stockett refers to as,  “the dichotomy of love and disdain living side-by-side.”

Trask’s letters home speak in familiar terms about the individual slaves, their health, and living conditions. He wrote of slaves’ frequent inquiries about his wife and children—the “Missis” and “Massa Wm. and Ed”—and of sharing food with the “young negroes.” James Trask, a brother who managed the family’s extensive Mississippi holdings, spoke of “our Black family.” The labor force at the Massachusetts mills is never discussed in such personal terms.

As I tell my students, slavery is inhumane but human. It’s an ancient evil system devised by humans in an era before industrialization. But because human emotions are complex and irreducible, familial affection can exist between oppressor and oppressed, which is why slavery is so horrifying and why it corrupts so thoroughly. For the past 130 years, Aunt Jemima has been the echo of that fraught familial connection, ripped from its terrible context and turned into commercial success by advertisers and industrialists.

Let’s end this story where I started Part One, with an American president feasting on chicken and waffles. If you remember, I began by referencing the 1867 meeting of future president William McKinnley and his future bride Ida Mae Sexton, which happened at “a chicken and waffle supper, for which the old hotel at the lake was famous throughout several counties.”  The lake in question was Meyer’s Lake, three miles west of downtown Canton, Ohio. Meanwhile six miles west of Meyer’s Lake was the city of Massillon, Ohio, a hive of Quakerism and one of the most important cities on the Underground Railroad, and a place where many escaped and freed slaves settled, both before and after the war. And, you can see where this is heading… who it is I believe probably cooked the chicken and waffles at Meyers Lake.  Needless to say, there’s more work to be done on the hidden history of African-American cooks in post-Civil War America.

And, now, finally, the denouement. What may be the earliest reference to fried chicken and waffles being eaten together is found in the biography of another American president, History of Andrew Jackson: Pioneer, Patriot, Soldier, Politician, President, written by Augustus C. Buell and published in 1904.

Buell records the following..

They arrived late — about 8 p.m. — at the tavern. The General ate a hearty supper of fried chicken, waffles and sweet potatoes, with coffee. After supper he lounged about on the piazza smoking his corn-cob pipe and chatting with the citizens until 10 o’clock. Then he went to bed, was asleep in ten minutes, and had to be shaken pretty rudely to wake him up at five in the morning. His breakfast was light—only one hot biscuit, two eggs and one cup of coffee.

We know the exact date of this supposed meal, Thursday, May 29, 1806, because the next morning, Friday, May 30, 1806,  Andrew Jackson killed fellow Tennessee planter and rival horse breeder, Charles Dickenson, in a duel at Harrison’s Mills near Adairville, Kentucky. The night before the duel, Jackson had stayed at David Miller’s Tavern, located on the Red River, just across the Tennessee-Kentucky state line. Dueling was forbidden in Tennessee, but not Kentucky, hence the need for overnight accommodations. If Buell’s account of Old Hickory’s dinner is correct, it’s evidence of someone eating fried chicken and waffles at the very beginning of the 19th century.

Unfortunately, it’s almost certainly a fabrication. None of the 19th century biographers of Jackson mention dinner at Miller’s Tavern, and those that that do, like James Parton, are content to say that Jackson “ate heartily,” without naming the dishes.

Far worse, Augustus Caesar Buell, who had written several popular biographies of major American figures, was revealed after his death to have been a fabulist of some ability and industry. He long dined out on having been a lieutenant colonel of a New York regiment during the Civil War, but had never made it past corporal. His best-selling biography of Revolutionary war hero, John Paul Jones, was so filled with lies that Harvard history-professor-turned-admiral, Samuel Eliot Morison, devoted an entire appendix to debunking them.  So Buell’s account of a dinner of chicken and waffles, sweet potatoes and coffee, is a probably a lie.

Yet, I think it’s telling that Buell, a native New Yorker who barely made it to the South, chose chicken and waffles as Jackson’s pre-duel meal. Telling, because by 1900, chicken and waffles had jumped the Mason-Dixon Line and had become a “thing”, a very big thing, in the rest of the United States. In fact, it had become the dish most closely identified with Southern cuisine, avidly desired by millions and widely acknowledged by most as the “complete expression of Southern culinary skill”.

Thanks for your attention and support. I’ll be back soon with something new. In the meantime, please follow me on Twitter and like An Eccentric Culinary History on Facebook. Cheers!

Chicken and Waffles are bacon and eggs: not so much a single dish as an inspired combination of two different things forever joined in glorious union.

As with bacon and eggs, however, finding a single point or origin for chicken and waffles is a fool’s errand, a silly task made triply difficult by the fact that, often enough, historical sources could be referring to any of three different iterations: Southern fried chicken and waffles, the soul food staple turned hipster fetish; stewed chicken and waffles, a delicacy of long standing in Pennsylvania Dutch country; and broiled chicken and waffles, a 19th century preparation that sent diners into flights of ecstasy.

Three version makes for a difficult historical problem. So, for example, this newspaper clipping from The San Francisco Call, May 12th, 1901, doesn’t give us enough evidence to say which of three varieties was served. 

The major’s first impression of Miss Saxton was gained at a chicken and waffle supper, for which the old hotel at the lake was famous throughout several counties. He was particularly delighted with the fact that she ate chicken and waffles as if she had a healthy appetite, instead of affecting the live-on-air style that was the raging fad with young ladies at that particular period. From that moment on his admiration grew and she on her part had a marked admiration for the brave and handsome young major.

This charming story of the dashing young Union veteran and the maiden with the appetite describes the 1867, Canton, Ohio, meeting of future President William McKinnley and his wife-to-be Miss Ida Saxton.

To be clear, I think it’s fried chicken that Miss Saxton may or may not have been gobbling, but I can’t be certain. What I can say, however, is that in the 19th century and early 20th century chicken and waffles, all three kinds, were celebratory food; a special treat not often (if ever) prepared at home, unless your home was a Hudson Valley Dutch farmstead or a Southern plantation.

Before baking powder and cast-iron stoves, good waffles were hellaciously hard to make. The best and lightest waffles were made to rise with yeast and cooked over an open fire in long-handled waffle irons. Making the dough was a laborious process, usually started the night before the breakfast service, or early in the day for an evening “waffle frolic“. The heavy irons were not just expensive speciality items, they were difficult to handle without burning yourself, and getting them to produce a perfect golden-brown waffle was strictly a matter of experience.

The heavy irons had to be propped just so before the fire and turned frequently and, obviously, they had to be watched closely. And according to Peter Rose, a single waffle takes six to eight minutes to bake in a fireplace iron, which means that producing enough waffles to fill a serving dish would take a half hour or more. In early nineteenth-century America, waffles were, in fact, a distinctly upper-class food, and while some privileged women did bake (or have their help bake) them at breakfast for family, they were mostly company fare.

It’s the difficulty of making waffles that is one of the keys to understanding the place of chicken and waffles as festive food in 19th century America. The other is that chickens were not as commonly eaten as they are today, mainly because they were expensive to produce or purchase. I discussed the reasons for this in my long piece on poultry farming in 19th century California. Essentially, chickens were more valued for their eggs than their meat, while game birds (ducks, geese and almost anything that flew) could be purchased more cheaply than chicken from market gunners or game stalls in city markets. Until the migratory flocks of the Chesapeake were depleted, starting in the 1870s, chicken could not compete economically on a grand scale.

Thus, with one regional exception, the South, if chickens were eaten at home it was usually at one of two life stages: broiled as spring chickens, the young males culled from the flock in late spring, or stewed as old hens, after they’d ceased to lay. The thrifty Germans and Dutch (the people of the waffle) took these old birds and slowly simmered them, pulling or shreding the tenderized meat and finishing it in a cream or butter sauce, a preparation that gives us the basis of the Pennsylvania Dutch chicken and waffles.

William Woy Weaver gives a good account of the history of this style of chicken and waffles in the Fall, 2020, issue of Pennsylvania Heritage.

I like Weaver’s version because it acknowledges that the association of this dish with Pennsylvania Dutch and Amish tables is a fairly recent thing, and has more to do with tourism than long tradition. This is made clear with a description of the festive catfish-and-waffle dinners served in taverns and hotels along the Schuylkill River near Philadelphia, a tradition that began in 1813 with the opening of Mrs. Watkins’ Falls of the Schuylkill Hotel and ended six or seven decades later when the river became too polluted to support bottom feeders. The important thing to know is that catfish and waffles (not usually together, but as part of a multi-course meal) were what 19th century, working and middle-class Philadelphians thought of as fine dining, a regional version of a proto-Red Lobster.

Here’s a stanza from Charles Karsner Mills, 1876, The Schuylkill: A Centennial Poem that gives you the low-down.

Far-famed these inns through many a year

For hospitality and cheer

For bill-of-fare peculiar here–

Catfish, and coffee, beefsteak fine,

Broiled chicken, waffles and good wine.

Such fare Savarin sure would glad,

Or drive a monk with pleasure mad.

The white catfish along Wissahickon Creek, a Schuylkill tributary, were especially abundant and judged, “dainty and toothsome and when served with the equally famous waffles brought visions of Paradise on earth.”  Even before the catfish ran out along the Schuylkill, the multi-course meal, with chicken (fried, stewed or broiled), waffles and hot coffee, was a staple of inns and hotels throughout the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast.

In fact, in the mid-19th century,  chicken and waffles were such a draw that substantial commercial reputations and “modest fortunes” could be made on them. In Springfield, Massachusetts, the Warriner Tavern, run by “Uncle Jerry” Warriner and his wife “Aunt Phoebe” became so famous for their broiled chicken and waffles –“known and gratefully remembered in two hemispheres.”– that decades after Uncle Jerry’s death in 1859, people were still talking about his food.

In 1887, a letter appeared in the Springfield Republican from the “Baroness von Oppen”, who as a young woman named Julia Leicester, had lodged with the Warriners nearly 40 years earlier, in 1850.

 Madam is aware that both Mr and Mrs Warriner have long since passed away from this life; but they had a niece named Miss Lydia Bates, and a grand niece, Miss Sarah Moses, both or either of whom the Baroness von Oppen would like to see if she went up to Springfield in October for one more look of that dear, sweet and peaceful place, where God seemed to be in the people’s homes and hearts, in the Indian summer, when the girls used to sit on the verandas and sing the old little quaint songs that nobody ever sings now.  […] Mr. Akin was the manager at Mr. Warriner’s hotel renowned for broiled chicken and “waffles”.

I should note that the Baroness was not a Baroness, was not even Julia Leicester, but rather an Irish-German adventuress named Caroline Henshaw who had been living with gunmaker Samuel Colt’s brother John C. Colt when he murdered his publisher over a dispute about the 5th edition of his text on double-entry bookkeeping. Before taking up with John, Henshaw had previously been Sam Colt’s mistress (and/or wife) and had bore a child that was probably Sam’s. There’s a lot more to this tangled story, including a “marriage” to a young Prussian noble, but by 1887, the Baroness was reduced to living in Londonderry, Ireland, and sending out letters begging for money.  But, despite a life filled with incident and excitement, Henshaw still remembered Aunt Phoebe’s chicken and waffles.

For another encomium to Aunt Phoebe’s broiled chicken, one that’s just too good to omit, here’s Grace Greenwood (a.k.a Sarah Jane Lipincott) describing the merits of dining at Uncle Jerry’s.

But my heart is clamorous to be allowed one sincere and feeling tribute to an article of pre-eminent excellence, delicacy , and sweetnes, which graced the supper and breakfast tables—the broiled chicken!  Why, I had never before conceived to what a state of rare deliciousness that juvenile domestic fowl might be exalted by skillful cookery. I had never eaten broiled chicken before, and whoever, not having breakfasted at Warriner’s, believes himself acquainted with broiled chicken labors under a melancholy mistake.

Chicken for breakfast? In Massachusetts!

Notice, also, that Lippincott, who was 26 at the time of this letter, had never tasted broiled chicken before.

So, what was the secret to Aunt Phoebe’s memorable broiled chicken and waffles?

In order to answer that question I’ve got to open a whole can of very particular American worms, ones that will eventually lead us to the topic of southern fried chicken. But, first, let’s note again that, although Aunt Phoebe died in 1854 and Uncle Jerry in 1859, people really couldn’t stop talking about their food.

Here’s a mention from 1877.

The United States Hotel, afterwards rebuilt and called Warriner’s Union House, was known throughout the continent, being noted for its home comforts and fine cookery, especially the latter, in the good old days when it was done by the first-class American housewives, instead of being entrusted to “Biddy,” or anything but a good cook. Mrs. Warriner was the queen of the household, who presided in the realm of the kitchen, as well as in the parlor, and, like thousands of her countrywomen of that day, was more proud of her rule and triumphs here than ever Victoria was of the throne and scepter of Great Britain

Such fulsome praise for our hostess!

Here’s another, from 1866.

A great revolution in the conduct of a hotel was made in the administration of Warriner of Springfield, who so suffused his table with delicacies, that a week at his house was a perpetual feast—and no one ever sat at his tea table especially, and was waited on by “Emily”—but found a new chapter in the gastronomic life.

There are many more I could show you — including a poetic one from the 1950’s — but I picked these two because they demonstrate how hard it is sometimes to sort out who’s really doing the cooking. Did you catch the meaning of that bitter-tasting line in the first passage?

” …in the good old days when it was done by the first-class American housewives, instead of being entrusted to “Biddy,” or anything but a good cook.”

That’s a complaint about Irish cooks taking over the kitchens of New England. Biddy is to Bridget as Paddy is to Patrick, the catch-all nickname for an Irish worker of low status. Irish servant girls worked more cheaply than Americans, but they were not well-trained in the kitchen, not compared to the people they were replacing. No Irish peasant girl had ever seen a waffle, much less fried a chicken, planked a shad, or soused a hog’s head. Those culinary tasks were best done by “first-class American housewives,” or  “a good cook”.

Aunt Phoebe was a first-class American housewife — the toothsomeness of the food and the cleanliness of the rooms proved it –but no American housewife, however first class, could have single-handedly run an antebellum commercial kitchen. In fact, given the demands of large farm families and open-hearth cooking, antebellum housewives rarely ran domestic kitchens single-handedly. They had daughters and servants to help them.

So, who were Aunt Phoebe’s helpers? Who cooked the waffles and broiled the chickens?

Here’s an important fact I’ve withheld from you: like many people in Springfield, Uncle Jerry and Aunt Phoebe were staunch abolitionists (“zealous workers” for the cause) and their tavern was a major station on the Underground Railroad. There was even a large grain bin in the storeroom  where, in an emergency, half a score of runaways could be hidden from slave catchers.

In 1907, on the eve of the destruction of the old hotel building, the Springfield Homestead published the reminiscences of Julia Lee, the daughter of one of those fugitives.

The way I happened to be born there, my mother, Mrs. Mary Sly, was a cook with Uncle Jerry. She came from Natchez, Miss. up here, and mother was born in New Orleans. Father was a West India man.  Uncle Jerry had all colored help, men and women. Aunt Phoebe’s (Mrs. Warriner’s) aunt used to do the cooking. A colored girl, Emily, did all the pastry.  Jane Hall and I helped wait on table. I used to feel quite proud when some of those big folks would come in on the stage and when they’d sit down at the table would say, “Where’s Julia, I want Julia to wait on me.”  Those folks were generous about tipping, too.  They would leave money around under the plates, often 25 cents and sometimes as much as a dollar.

Among the “big folks” who stopped by Uncle Jerry’s was Senator Rufus Choate, who together with Daniel Webster (both frequent visitors to the tavern) defended Uncle Jerry in a lawsuit in the early 1840’s.  This 1907 account of the eve of the trial is from Sara Moses Warriner Merrick, Uncle Jerry’s grand-niece and adopted daughter.

I remember Rufus Choate coming into the big kitchen night of the argument and saying to Aunte Phoebe: “Give me the strongest cup of tea you ever made, Mrs. Warriner, and some of Mary Sly’s” (she was an old black cook that lived her life there) “best waffles and broiled chicken, and I’ll carry it through,” and he did.

So, Aunt Phoebe’s kitchen help was her spinster niece, Lydia Bates (“Aunt Lydia”), presumably trained to be a “first-class American housewife”, and a pair of African-American women, Mary Sly, responsible for chicken and waffles, and “Emily” the pastry chef, the same one who supplied the tea table with its delights.

Except for a handful of French chefs scattered around the country, there were few chefs as well-trained as the best plantation chefs. David Shields’s remarkable book on the history of Low Country cuisine, Southern Provisions: The Creation and Revival of a Cuisine, details the extensive apprenticeship some of these chefs underwent, apprenticeships overseen in Charleston by prosperous free people of color, such as Eliza Lee. Once fully trained, these African-American chefs, both male and female, were at the top of any Southern household’s black hierarchy.

[A] plantation cook excelled through the consistency of her preparations and her economy; an urban cook for elite households excelled in the abundance of ingredients, and in her ability to maintain the latest culinary fashions and technological innovations in the kitchen. The best city practitioners were designated “complete cooks,” and their skills commanded such respect that free cooks won a regular clientele. In some cases, enslaved cooks could even be “hired out” and potentially accumulate their own money

Outside of Charleston, there were other plantation chefs with exceptional training and ability. At Mount Vernon, George Washington’s chef, Hercules, was widely acknowledged to be a “celebrated artiste“.  And Sally Heming’s brother James went to Paris with Thomas Jefferson and came back the chef de cuisine of Monticello.

Paris was then the culinary capital of the world, and Hemings spent five years in the city, mastering the art of French cuisine. His training was extensive: He apprenticed with a caterer, a pastry chef and even a chef of the Prince de Conde, who was known for the splendor of his table.

Famously, Jefferson also brought back a quartet of waffle irons from Europe, which James undoubtedly knew how to operate.

If they weren’t formally trained away from home, plantation cooks usually underwent lengthy, practical apprenticeships working in plantation kitchens as assistants to the head cook. (Kelly Fanto Deetz’s chapter, “Stolen Bodies, Edible Memories”, in the Routledge History of Food is very good on this topic.)

No matter how they were trained, in the Southern slave economy good cooks were worth a lot of money, in fact, the only enslaved people worth more were experienced carpenters. Cooks were worth so much because entertaining and food were so important to southerners, so, for example, if on a moment’s notice you wanted to celebrate the return of James Monroe from two years in Paris, your “negro cook” could walk straight into the parlor of your elegant Richmond home…

…holding before her an immense tray of batter, while behind her came a negro boy with two or three pairs of long-handled waffle-irons. Nothing abashed by that goodly company, the old cook walked straight up to the fireplace where a wood fire was burning and then and there proceeded to make her waffles with a dexterity, quickness and perfection which some other Virginia cooks might have equalled but which none could surpass. They were served ‘pot and hot’ with superb butter and other accompaniments, and enjoyed intensely by all present, but by none more than Mr. Monroe. The lady of the house confessed that the proceeding was rather odd. ‘But,” said she, “I knew Mr. Monroe — poor man — hadn’t had any waffles fit to eat since he left Virginia; and I was determined he should have some.”

In Springfield, Massachusetts, the waffles produced by Emily the pastry chef and Mary Sly the cook were worth a lot of money to Uncle Jerry.  I’ve not been able to learn much about Emily. I suspect that she was a former enslaved person, but I can’t say for sure. Mary Sly, however, was a former slave, either a runaway or self-emancipated, one who had an interesting history.

In the 1840s and 50s, Springfield was probably the second most anti-slavery town in the entire country, behind Oberlin, Ohio. John Brown was there worshipping at a black church and going spectacularly bankrupt. And Sojourner Truth was just down the road in Northampton, in a utopian commune trying to grow silk worms. Even before that, however, starting in the early 1830s, the Reverend Samuel Osgood of the First Congregational Church — attended  by Uncle Jerry and Aunt Phoebe — had begun speaking out and organizing against slavery.

What’s odd about that last fact is that, until his death in 1835, Mary Sly’s one-time owner, a man with plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana, was an active member of that congregation.

But, that’s a story I’ll have to tell in part two, as the search takes us south of the Mason-Dixon, where in 1806, we’ll find what might be the earliest appearance of fried chicken and waffles, as a footnote in a dramatic incident in the life of a future American president.

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Thank you for reading. I’ll publish part two of “A History of Chicken and Waffles” next Monday. In the meantime, subscribe for regular updates if you haven’t already done so, and be sure to follow me on Twitter and like An Eccentric Culinary History on Facebook.

Regarding my last piece on new potatoes from my garden, this is my third summer gardening. We had just moved into our current house in March of 2020 when the pandemic sent me out into the backyard with a shovel and an ambitious plan. Enthusiasm carried me through several weeks of digging, and by the time I was done, I had carved out six decent-sized garden beds in a moderately sunny part of the yard.

I say “moderately sunny”, because my backyard is dominated by three enormous trees squatting right in the middle, one of them a black walnut. Worse, the sunniest part of the yard, about a fifth of the whole, is covered in six inches of gravel, left over from when previous occupants (college students) had parked in the back yard. You can see it on the Google Street View from 2009.

That gravel is still there, 13 years later, now covered by a thin layer of grass.

I’ve nibbled at the edges of that gravel deposit, to the extent of digging out a narrow strip along one side, now planted with onions. But it was a laborious effort for a stout, middle-aged man with a shovel, and the soil underneath the gravel wasn’t worth the effort to reveal. I had to bring in a few bags of garden soil to make the space useable. Someday, when I’m made of money, I’ll hire a backhoe to come in and scrape it clean, then follow up with a load of fresh soil. Until then, I’ll have to be satisfied with what i have.

Cucumbers

In that photo above, taken this morning, you can see that I’ve planted cucumbers on the fence to the right of the gate. This year, I planted two varieties: Marketmore 76, a table cucumber famous for its vigor and productivity, and Boston Pickling, an old-fashioned pickling cuke. Despite its reputation, the Marketmore has been underwhelming. It started slowly from seeds, and seemed sickly and stunted when I transplanted it, and is now, in mid-June, barely reaching halfway up the fence. Unfortunately, the Boston Pickling is not a good fresh-eating cucumber. It’s too dry and tends to bitterness. (The jury is out on its pickling qualities.) So, I’m not enjoying fresh cucumbers like I should be in June.

In the previous two years, I’ve planted a variety called Arkansas Little Leaf, which produced abundant yields and was both a good eating cucumber and a good pickler. I should have stuck with that.

By the way, my asparagus patch is directly behind the cucumber fence.

Southern Insects

As a Californian, I’ve long been astounded at the fauna of the South, specifically the insects. I’ve spent something like 17 of my 40 adult years living in the South, between Virginia, Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee, where I’ve been for more than a decade, and in all that time, I’m still surprised by the bugs.

We don’t have fireflies in California. Catching them in jars was not part of my childhood. We caught other, less exiting bugs in jars. I have a stitches-shaped scar between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand where a steak knife that should have been punching holes in a jar lid accidentally punched a hole in my hand when I was 9. So, I know all about putting insects in jars, and would have loved a chance to put a firefly in one when I was 10.

The consequence of not having a childhood with fireflies is that I’m still excited by the first flash of light in late spring. God has filled this part of the world with whimsical, bumbling insects that can barely fly and light up at dusk? How hilarious and delightful!

Unfortunately, Southern entomological abundance is not just fireflies. Two years ago, as spring turned to summer in my backyard, I rediscovered the chigger, an insect I first encountered in my grandparents’ East Texas pecan orchard in 1974.

I had forgotten how horrible chiggers are.

I was recently trying to explain the chigger to my sister-in-law who lives in Boston and hasn’t spent much time in the South. People don’t believe you when you tell them that chiggers, tiny bugs you can’t see, will mess you up. I was tempted to send her out into the backyard to stand around in the deep grass between my garden beds, so as to experience them first-hand.

It’s all fun and games in the garden until you fall into a patch of hungry chiggers.

Appiza in South Carolina?

Regarding something I had written a few weeks ago, about how you can’t get real New Haven pizza (apizza!) outside of coastal Connecticut, I recently received this email from Cliff Garzzillo of Aiken, South Carolina.

Good morning one of my customers brought me your article about New Haven Apizza.

You end your article with a question, why is it so difficult to duplicate New Haven style pizza outside of coastal Connecticut? If you’re ever down in Aiken, South Carolina, please come in to Apizza Di Napoli and try our New Haven pizza. I guarantee you you will not be disappointed and you will be reminded of what you had while in New Haven.  Having grown-up in Fair Haven and visited the pizzerias that you mentioned, we have captured the essence of New Haven pizza.  

Even Road Food famous food critic Michael Stern agrees, our New Haven is probably one of the best outside of the city of New Haven. Please don’t hesitate to give us a try if you’re ever in the area.

Thanks,
Cliff Garzzillo
Owner
Apizza di Napoli
Aiken, SC 29803

I don’t know if Mr. Garzzillo’s pizza will rival Sally’s or Frank Pepe’s, but I do know that the next time I’m in South Carolina, I’ll be detouring to Aiken to give Apizza di Napoli a try. I especially appreciate Mr. Garzzillo’s enthusiasm for his own food. A restaurant owner who tracks down random internet writers to brag about his pizza is someone who loves what he does, and that’s a big plus in my book. His pizza has to be good if he cares about it that much.

If any of you readers have been to Apizza di Napoli in Aiken, SC, let me know what you think in the comments below.

Thanks for reading! I’ll be back on Thursday with something new. Cheers!

I am, however, pretty good at producing potatoes. Probably because they’re ridiculously easy to grow. Extra easy, since I’m employing something called the “Ruth Stout Method”, which involves throwing pieces of seed potato onto the ground and covering them with straw. It really works, and as a consequence, Ruth Stout’s 1961 book, Gardening Without Work: For the Aging, the Busy & the Indolent (of which I am two out of three) has become my manifesto.

In late March, at planting time, I’m not even bending over, but, two months later, Nature delivers her bounty.

Just-dug new potatoes are amazing. The complexity and freshness of taste are like nothing else I’ve ever eaten. The best way to prepare them is the simplest: boiled in salty water until fork-soft, then served with lots of good butter.

Homegrown tomatoes get all the adulation and love, but new potatoes from your own garden are just as good, if not better.

I’ve eaten plenty of supermarket new potatoes and farmer’s market new potatoes—at four dollars a pound—but none have ever been as tasty or as sweet as those I’ve just dug from my own garden. Either I’m high on my own supply, or the sugars and flavor compounds in fresh potatoes are highly perishable, unable to survive the brief trip from commercial farmer’s field to consumer’s table, because I’ve never eaten any potato that comes close.

Last year, I was talking about this with my lawn guy, Doug, one of nature’s sovereign aristocrats, who tells me that as a child he remembers eating new potatoes straight from the garden, uncooked, and being delighted with them.

I, unfortunately, do not remember eating potatoes from our childhood garden. We usually had a garden when I was a child. I remember being frequently chain-ganged by my parents into weeding that garden—dreary, hot, dusty work in the Central Valley sun. But I don’t remember eating any potatoes from it, new or old, cooked or raw. I don’t even remember my parents growing potatoes. Maybe they didn’t.

So, it was a complete surprise when, two years ago, I pulled my first small potatoes out from under Ruth Stout’s straw, boiled and ate them. It was like a whole new category of flavors were opened up to me. I had never tasted anything so perfectly potato-y and delicious.

That’s why, I suppose, people used to go bonkers for new potatoes. If you read old newspapers, as I frequently do, you’ll see that in the early spring, they were being shipped in from places like Bermuda at great cost. And you’ll find oddities like multiple warnings about counterfeit new potatoes.

Fifteen cents for a small container of potatoes in 1901 is serious money, which is why the above is not the only story about fake new potatoes…

On the one hand, exposing these scams falls into the general turn-of-the-last-century movement to clean up America’s grossly adulterated food supply. (See Upton Sinclair for more details.) On the other hand, if someone sold me old potatoes masquerading as new, I’d be pretty cheesed off.

Of course, the punchline is that all of the “new” potatoes in our supermarkets are old potatoes, picked in the spring in distant fields and held in storage, like apples, to be trotted out later. New potatoes aren’t just undersized potatoes, they’re super fresh potatoes, dug out of the ground a few hours before eating. Their skins are paper thin and peel off when you wash them too vigorously. Let them sit for a couple of days, and the skins get thick and the sweetness goes away. This is now a supermarket “new” potato, another mundane lump of starch.

I am adamant on this point. If your presumptuous/fancy restaurant menu mentions “new potatoes” they better have been in the ground, or under a layer of Ruth Stout’s straw, earlier that day.

New potatoes, fresh asparagus and the simple pleasures of spring, are things that almost can’t be bought. You have to grow them yourself if you really want to taste them.

Thanks for reading! Be sure to follow me on Twitter and like An Eccentric Culinary History on Facebook. I’ll be back next week with something new.