History Through…

…Food

Every era has its own distinctive cuisine. Yet what seems laughable today was considered delicious in its time.

Today’s chefs celebrate ingredients that are natural, organic, authentic, and local. Not so, during the 1950s.

As young families flocked to the country’s booming suburbs following World War II, many strove to break free from the ethnic cooking favored by their mothers and grandmothers. Young suburban mothers, who married at around the age of twenty and were raising three, four, or five children born in rapid succession, saved time by preparing many dishes by assembling canned and pre-prepared and frozen ingredients, like tuna noodle casserole or chicken a la king.

World War II had given enormous impetus to the food processing industry, which had to feed the 16 million troops stationed overseas. When the war was over, these companies sought new markets, and using newly developed preservatives, food colorings, artificial flavors, and additives, combined with new techniques for deep freezing and quick canning, reached out to a rapidly expanding consumer market. A plethora of convenience foods suddenly appeared, such as sugared cereals for kids, like Trix, or processed cheese, like Velveeta.

Today, the nutritional quality of many of these processed and prepared foods—laden with salt, sugar and fat—has been called into question. But at the time, these seemed to symbolize American abundance and progress.

Processed food was something to be celebrated. These included Wonder Bread, a sponge-like, highly processed enriched white bread, Jell-O, a prepared gelatin dessert, Pillsbury refrigerated biscuits, and Miracle Whip, a sweet, mayonnaise-like dressing, which seemed more sanitary and modern than dishes prepared from scratch. Sauces might be made from canned soup. Scalloped potatoes might be made from reconstituted potato.

What’s striking in retrospect is how colorful and imaginative many of the dishes were.

There was Fonduloha, a mixture of pineapple, turkey, mayonnaise, curry, peanuts, coconut and canned mandarins, put back into a pineapple shell. 

Cuteness was valued. Dinners featured pearl onions, button mushrooms, and cherry tomatoes. Many of the dishes were whimsical: Cookies were molded into various shapes, food coloring was added to icings and cakes, and Rice Krispy treats combined marshmallows with the rice cereal. These were popular dishes like polka-dotted macaroni and cheese. A box of the electric orange sticky pasta, which included artificial preservatives and synthetic colors, was combined with hot dogs.

Families could not yet count on a wide variety of fresh fish or fruits and vegetables year round. Foods we take for granted today, like fresh asparagus, were available for very limited seasons. As a result, there was a greater reliance on items like canned peaches or fruit cocktail.

People ate at restaurants less often and prepared dishes that were meant to look fancy and festive. One example was Cherry Pineapple Bologna, consisting of instant mashed potatoes, bologna glazed with crushed pineapple and maraschino cherry, dyed extra red with food coloring.

Adults entertained at home much more than they do today and the presentation of the food was important. For the first time, couples with relatively modest incomes could afford to host dinner parties, with appetizers prepared from frozen cocktail franks or cheese balls, and desserts meant to be spectacular, liked Baked Alaska or Jell-O molds.

In retrospect, one is especially struck by the absence of “exotic” foods. Bagels, egg rolls, and tacos, let alone curries, were not yet part of mainstream diets. Pizza had only been introduced into wide circulation as a result of the second world war. Spaghetti was commonly served with a sauce made from ketchup.

In recent years, the American diet has grown much more diverse, partly as a byproduct of immigration. Some foods, including bagels, egg rolls, and tacos, are widely embraced by the mainstream culture, but other foods, such as knishes (dough that is baked or fried and is typically filled with mashed potato, ground meat, sauerkraut, onions, and buckwheat), or menudo (a spicy tripe soup), or ris de veau (sweetbreads, or calf’s pancreas) are not.

---

History Through…

…Holidays: Halloween

Masks, costumes, trick-or-treating, haunted houses, black cats, spiders, cobwebs, ghouls, ghosts, and bobbing for apples—these are the symbols of Halloween, this country’s most popular (if also the most contentious) secular holiday and the largest seasonal marketing event outside of Christmas.

Halloween takes place at the boundary between fall and winter. Symbolically, it crosses the divide between superstition and rationality, life and death, and the everyday world and the supernatural.

Popular histories trace its roots back to pre-Christian pagan traditions, but the American Halloween has its roots in an odd mixture of religious and folk traditions. The word comes from a Christian holiday, All Hallows’ Eve. This is the evening before All Hallows’ Day, a day to honor the Saints and the deceased and pray for those in purgatory, where the souls of sinners expiate their sins before entering heaven. Thus, it was a day to commune with the spirits of the dead.

Halloween also falls near Guy Fawkes Night, an annual English celebration held on November 5th, marking the anniversary of the discovery of a plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605. It is commemorated with bonfires and fireworks.

Halloween, in short, was a hodgepodge of various traditions, taking on aspects of May Day, Midsummer’s Night, Guy Fawkes Night, and All Hallows’ Eve. By the early nineteenth century, it had become an occasion for transgression. It was a night for vandalism and rowdiness. Especially between 1880 to 1920, many young men seized on Halloween as an opportunity for rioting and rowdiness.But Halloween also had roots in superstitions that have persisted over hundreds of years as well as in the folk traditions brought by Scottish and Irish immigrants. These immigrants carried with them traditions of autumn revels and ghost lore. 

It was only in the late 1930s that Halloween’s rowdiness was tamed, and October 31^st was transformed into a children’s holiday. As the country slowly emerged out of the Great Depression, there was a growing desire to celebrate childhood innocence. Halloween offered an occasion for children to disguise themselves by donning costumes, pretend to be adults, wrestle with artificial terrors, and demand treats from their neighbors. Costumes and trick-or-treating became Halloween’s defining features.

It did not take long for Halloween to become highly commercialized. During the 1930s, a theatrical-costume maker named Ben Cooper, whose business was suffering from the Depression, struck a deal with the Walt Disney Company to produce costumes based on Disney characters. In the 1960s, his company began to make costumes of superheroes like Spider-Man and Batman and in the 1970s, of characters from Star Trek and Star Wars in the ’70s. Cooper’s example would inspire others to make costumes not only of ghosts and goblins, but of television characters and movie stars.

Haunted houses, designed to terrify visitors, have now become commonplace. But the first, Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion, only opened in 1963.

Today, Halloween scares up big profits for candy makers and costume manufacturers, with $2.6 billion annually in candy sales and nearly $2 billion in costume sales.

In recent years, Halloween has been partly reclaimed by adults. Gays and lesbians were among the first to seize on Halloween as an occasion for costumed revelry, merriment, and parties. This example has been embraced by many twenty-somethings.

To a historian, two aspects of Halloween raise interesting questions. One is why this society, which has great difficulty dealing with the realities of death and dying, has a holiday that fixates on skeletons, ghosts, and haunted houses. 

To be sure, some groups have formal rituals to acknowledge mortality or recall the departed. Each year, on Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, Mexican Americans pay homage to deceased loved ones with processions, vigils, and the creation of altars at home or graves, featuring candles and cutouts called papel picado. Jewish Americans light Yahrzeit candles on the anniversary of a loved one’s death.

Yet while violent death pervades American popular culture, this society has few rituals to remember the dead. Graveyards, once located in the very center of towns, are now relegated to the outskirts. Compared to earlier customs, today’s funeral practices are much simpler and more austere. Rarely are the dead entombed in elaborate memorials. The elaborate ceremonies that marked nineteenth century funerals—when horse-drawn hearses carried the black crepe-covered caskets—have disappeared. Our very language—with phrases liked “pass on”—evades the finality of death.

Yet zombies, ghosts, and tombstones remain central to Halloween.

A second issue that Halloween raises is why a society and that emphasizes rationality and level-headedness has an evening that centers on witches and demons. A little over three centuries ago, American colonists executed witches, but today, in stark contrast, witchcraft and goblins provide an opportunity for parties.