Medline is the state-of-the-art
database that anchors the practice of modern medicine. Originally
it only had articles that were published after 1966, but during
the last ten years that horizon has been pushed back to the 1950s.
The folks at Medline want to push things back even farther and
include articles published in the early twentieth century. Not
everyone thinks that's a good idea. Those folks say that old articles
do not have what they call "practical importance."
We could apply that test of "practical importance" to the decision
of preserving other wisdom from the past besides medical articles.
A far less technological means of achieving that is a Junior League
fund raising cookbook first published in 1950.
One of my favorite dishes is Red Rice.
It's made from rice and bacon and onions and tomato paste. The
woman who introduced me to Red Rice also introduced me to the
Charleston Receipts cookbook where she found the recipe for Red
Rice.
The cookbook was put together by twenty-one members of the Junior
League of Charleston, South Carolina in 1950 to raise money for
the Charleston Speech and Hearing Center. The first printing sold
out in two weeks. Since then it has sold more than three quarters
of a million copies in more than thirty printings.
I asked my favorite preparer of Red Rice why she loved this half-century
old cookbook. She said, "It's a pre-can-of-mushroom-soup cookbook."
The American food industry spent millions during the Second World
War to develop new technology for dried and frozen foods to feed
the troops. After the war they set about recouping their investment.
Before the War, those foods had been sold as luxury items, mostly
to vacationers in resort towns, or as novelty goods. The industry
needed more than that, though. They went after the mass market.
Ads trumpeted the supposed benefits of frozen food, sometimes
claiming that frozen vegetables were better than fresh. These
packaged foods were portrayed as among the "conveniences and economies
of modern-day living." Cooking, by contrast, was portrayed as
drudgery, something to finish in as little time as possible.
The women who created the Charleston Receipts obviously didn't
see cooking as drudgery. Their book tells us how they created
the dishes of a rich culinary tradition as it was practiced before
canned cream of mushroom soup. But there's more here than old
ways of making cornbread.
Anyone who's read a cookbook knows that cookbooks are about far
more than cooking. There are glimpses of history. You get a glimpse
of history from the title. "Receipts" is the old word for recipes.
You also get a glimpse of history from the recipes themselves.
Mrs. Samuel G. Stoney's Black River Pate is described as "an
old French Huguenot dish that has been in our family for years."
Eve's Christmas Plum Pudding recipe, delivered in verse, had,
we're told, been used by the family for six generations in the
United States. There are also Gullah verses and illustrations
of Low Country scenes.
The Charleston Receipts cookbook gives us a window into a culture
and time. It helps us understand our history and enrich our lives.
It offers us a richness and wisdom that our time alone cannot
produce. That's why both old recipes and old medical journal articles
are worth preserving.
The Medline articles that come from what seems like ancient history
include ones that medical professors kept and passed down to their
students as fuzzy reproductions of copies made on ancient photocopiers.
The professors kept them and shared them because they had practical
value. That's worth keeping.
The recipes of Charleston Receipts are different. They give us
a way to reach across time to other folks, much like us and to
understand just a bit of what their world must have been like.
That's worth keeping, too.
Top of page
The "Charleston
Receipts" cookbook is a treasure trove of "pre-can-of-mushroom-soup"
recipes and a window into history.
In addition, the Junior League of Charleston has published two
other collections of recipes. There's "Charleston
Receipts Repeat." and "Party
Receipts from the Charleston Junior League: Hors D'Oeuvres, Savories,
Sweets."
GritLit, based in New Orleans,
is devoted to spreading the word about Southern Cooking. They
also offer a selection of cookbooks and foods you can buy, along
with a newsletter that will alert you to new things they carry.
The Slow Food Movement started in Italy as a reaction to, you
guessed it, Fast Food. The US Slow Food Web site states outlines
things this way: "Recognizing that the enjoyment of wholesome
food is essential to the pursuit of happiness, Slow
Food U.S.A. is an educational organization dedicated to stewardship
of the land and ecologically sound food production; to the revival
of the kitchen and the table as centers of pleasure, culture,
and community; to the invigoration and proliferation of regional,
seasonal culinary traditions; and to living a slower and more
harmonious rhythm of life."
The opposite of the recipes you'll find in books like "Charleston
Receipts" is the "food pill," a staple of science fiction and
futurism for decades. The RetroFuture
site has a wonderful page on "space food" including those
meals in a bag, and commercial products like Space Food Sticks
and Tang.
The
Oakland Museum of California has a wonderful history display
that leads you through time from earliest human settlements in
the state to the "future." One of the neat features of this is
that kitchens are used to illustrate changes over time. You won't
find anything on their Web site about this, but I'm telling you
so you can visit if you're in the area and have a few moments.
There is also an excellent natural history display that illustrates
the environment of the state by taking you on a "walk" from the
coast to the Sierras. This is a great museum and a very well kept
secret.
29 June 2004
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