It’s been too hot to cook, and one thing that’s good to do when it’s really hot is to go to museums. They’re air conditioned and educational and, if you play your cards right, you can go for free! The Harvard Art Museums and the Harvard Natural History Museum/Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology are free for Massachusetts residents on Saturday (Art) and Sunday (Natural History) mornings from 9 until noon.
This post is also brought about by a conversation with my mother about my artistic talents and my sister’s. She studied art history, and has some good Fine Arts skills, while mine tend to the more material: can I make this dress? Can I make this food? What does this tell me about how people lived?
My sister and I experience museums very differently.
So as I was going through the Art Museum, looking for pictures of food, and the Peabody, which among other things has a small exhibit on what their archeological digs have found on food at Harvard University in the 17th and 18th century, I was pondering the various sources we have for “what were people eating?”
For a lot of history, we don’t have cookbooks, per se. And even when we do have cookbooks, it’s not always easy to tell what’s aspirational, and how that might be different from what people actually eating.
Other sources we can use to answer this question are archeology, written sources, and art.
Archeology is limiting, since it can’t give you a complete picture of what remains were leftover from meals and cooking. Some things biodegrade; other things don’t have much left over. Written sources are great, but not everyone writes down everything they ate day after day after day (Samuel Pepys being a notable exception). You can extrapolate from mentions of food in sagas, or poetry, or menus from a coronation. You can look at still-life paintings and know that at the very least, this food, this utensil was known in this place and this time. Was it eaten? Was it eaten regularly? You’ll need to get another piece of the puzzle to make a ruling on that.
In Sweden last year, I picked up a book on Viking-age cookery, An Early Meal, by Daniel Serra and Hanna Tunberg. It is mostly speculative, since we don’t have any written sources for Viking food, but is based on what’s mentioned in the Sagas, and on cookbooks of the same time, but through different places, archeology, and what foods were available in that time period. They explain in great detail how they arrive at their conclusions, have recipes based on those conclusions, and also it’s a beautiful book.
Nowadays, we have approximately a bazillion cookbooks. And people who Instagram their food. And people who blog about food. There’s more than one channel that broadcasts food programming 24 hours a day. There’s 80 think pieces about how Millennials aren’t buying houses because of avocado toast. Of course future historians will know precisely what we ate! Right?
Right?
Well, will they? Some of my cookbooks are on my shelf because they’re pretty, or someone thought I needed it. Or I thought I needed it, but then I tried to use it once and went “Bittman, you’re annoying.” Or I REALLY FULLY INTEND TO USE IT SOMEDAY REALLY. I PROMISE. You can tell some books that I use more than others, because there are stains all over them. When I Instagram or tweet my food, it’s because it’s special in some way. I’m not going to make a record of all the times I ate frozen pizza, or made a perfectly ordinary taco. I don’t need posterity to know that. I really do not.
But there’s also this trend of….randomness that appears in the Taste sections. No, The New York Times, no one has forgotten the peas in guacamole debacle. Or this:
Unicorn pizza! pic.twitter.com/7uBsvp62ip
— Insider Food (@insiderfood) July 24, 2017
I don’t even know what’s happening there. And I don’t want to.
Remember the unicorn frappuccino at Starbucks earlier this year? It came and it left but a future historian might write a whole thesis on what that meant to society for those few weeks. It might even be correct in its conclusions.
Assuming the data survives in some accessible form, I want to see a paper that posits that Chopped and Cutthroat Kitchen represent accurate forms of haute cuisine, and the ultra rich (personified by Simon Majumdar) were eating things made with eel and cotton candy. I want to read a current and a future paper comparing and contrasting the cultural impact of Iron Chef Japan and Iron Chef America (seriously, someone write me that paper now). I want a survey of early 21st century American food dissed by one Gordon Ramsey on Twitter. I want to know how future historians determine the definition of a “home chef.” I WANT ALL OF THESE THINGS.
My ultimate point is that we can piece theories together from the bits of the historical record that survive. We can make some guesses. We’re not going to be 100% right in our interpretations. But I’m going to swipe an analogy from Michael W. Twitty, the author of The Cooking Gene (review forthcoming, but it’s GREAT). He is a food historian specializing in Black American food, specifically slave cooking, and concerns himself with how that cuisine translated through the generations to Soul Food. He compares it to kintsugi, the Japanese practice of repairing pottery with gold. You don’t have all the pieces, so you fill in the gaps with something that makes sense.
That’s what food historians do, and I’m very sad I won’t get to see what theories the future historians put together for this era. Because I really think it will be funny as hell.
This is such a fascinating and good post! (Also as someone currently trying to work out what Anne Boleyn would have eaten it’s particularly excellent) And my not so inner history geek is feeling very happy – and pondering if someone will write a thesis on The Great British Bakeoff..
I have nothing against dessert pizza (other than I’m doing keto and can’t eat anything that would go into it), but if you’re making “rainbow” crust, you better ROYGBIV that dough. Sounds of aesthetic offense were made when he put green between orange and red.
The work of future historians will be complicated by the fact that excavations 500 years from now will unearth things like Twinkies that will be perfectly preserved, fresh as the day they rolled out of the factory. “Our predecessors had hundreds of television shows and even entire broadcast networks devoted to the art of cooking, but why would anyone invest time and money in home food preparation when they had cheap, portable, durable miracle food available? We conclude the popularity of such programming was consistent with that of other ‘reality’ entertainment that portrayed a fantasy version of lifestyles people wanted to spectate but not live.”
For free/cheap museum visits, I have a couple of suggestions.
1) Check with your library if you live near any museums. Mine loans out free passes to a bunch. (I live near NYC)
2) Check the rules. At least some of the NYC ones, the admission price is technically just a suggestion. You are allowed to pay far less for general admission. (This probaby doesn’t apply to anything that needs a separate ticket and you may save more paying for the suggested price + special exhibit deal.)
I love, love this post! “Bittman, you’re annoying.” So true. Thank you RHG.
I kinda hate this post. Even though Redheadedgirl is charming. The current food culture is too much!
I am cringing so much. Unicorn pizza might have looked good when I was seven.
Also, I have neither a house or avocado toast (and definitely a milleninal), but hey you old people, get off my lawn.
Michael Twitty is featured on August 1 show of WBUR’s “On Point.” It can be downloaded as a podcast.
I love the Discover & Go program, which allows you to reserve free or discounted museum passes through your library. (I live in northern California, not sure if it’s national.) Some of the more in-demand venues limit you to one or two reservations a year, but then again a pass often allows one or more people to join you. (If you belong to multiple libraries, it’s worth checking what’s available for each one. There can be differences from library to library, even if they’re not far apart. For instance, I can get a pass to San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum from my local library, but not the San Francisco Public Library. Weird.)
On the first weekend of the month, Bank of America and Merrill Lynch customers can show their credit or debit cards for free admission to a number of museums around the US. I think almost every state is represented.
The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond’s Museum District has free admission 365 days a year for the permanent exhibits. The Faberge/Russian art and silver collections are worth the trip. The second floor fine dining restaurant serves yummy, and pricey, artwork-inspired cocktails based on the current special exhibition. Banana-Peanut Butter French Toast, inspired by Wertheimer’s “Elvis at 21” photographs, enjoyed for a birthday brunch at Amuse still haunts my food dreams.
Years ago, my husband and I visited the Jamestowne Settlement archeological dig on a slow, rainy day. We were looking at a case full of recent finds and puzzling over a few of the tools. One was a combination toothpick/earwax remover! A young archeologist came out and started talking to us about the well under excavation and pointed out various bones and shells. Suffice to say, some of the foods the early Virginia colonists ate during the starving time were not listed in my childhood history books nor shown in happy pictures with Pocahontas.
For an inspired guess at how future archeologists will reconstruct our culture (using the word loosely), see the brilliant monologue “Digging the Weans.” Written by Robert Nathan in 1956, I was introduced to it via an LP of Theo Bikel reading it aloud. The Theo Bikel version is on Youtube, and you must listen to it. That is all.
This is a great post. I often wonder about the day to day of the average person from different times in history. The things we know. The things we don’t.
For another amusing look at how future archaeologists might interpret our world see David Macauley’s ‘Motel of the Mysteries’. Originally published in 1979 yet still funny, especially for those of us who remember the Holiday Inns of that era. Sanibands around the toilet seat, anyone?
That avocado toast thing has legs. I only read one story: a news piece describing the initial snark, uttered by an Australian real-estate investor not yet middle-aged.
And I mentally kicked him across the room, because this guy who re-booted the whole “if people can’t succeed it’s their own fault” bullshit started his business with a five-figure loan from his parents.
NOT a credible witness, your honor.