 So the American plate is actually a chronology of American history told through food. There are ten chapters and in each chapter there are ten little stories or appetizing anecdotes I like to think. And it begins in 1400 before the arrival of the Europeans in North America or in the New World. And it goes all the way up to current day. So on this afternoon I'm going to walk you through a little bit of a tour because I believe that the past is another country. And for those of you who've been to other countries or different cities or different places, I hope like to explore things. You walk down the streets, you visit the marketplaces, you might go and enjoy the local food and you get a taste of the culture. Well, the past is another country and to really have a new understanding and a deeper understanding, I really recommend learning about the food the way you would in any other foreign country. Because every food tells a story, a story of its origins, of migrations, of technological change or cultural development. History, I define history as change over time. And food provides an intriguing window through which we can examine the sometimes slow, sometimes dramatically fast changes to how we lived and how we ate. Some of the things that we learn when we're studying food history or the history of a country through its food is how certain metaphors or the way we speak about food define who we are. One of my favorite sayings is as American as apple pie. And the reason why I like this so much is because I think that people misuse that phrase. It's actually not as old as you'd think. You first start seeing it being used in the 20th century. And of course GM in advertising for Chevrolet cars used the phrase that GM was as American as hot dogs, apple pie. And nothing was more American than hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet. So as American as apple pie, what does that really mean though? Because when you deconstruct an apple pie, you'll realize that there is not one ingredient that is indigenous to what we call the continental United States. You've got apples. Apples come all the way from Turkey. They cross the continent of Europe and thrive in the cool climates of France and Great Britain. And when the first settlers come over from there and from Spain as well, they're bringing apple trees, little slips. They're called rootlings of apple trees with them on the boats and they plant those and those are our first orchards. There were no apples. There were little very sour, bitter crab apples here. But the eating apples that we associate with apple pie came over with the Europeans. So apples weren't here. The sugar that's in an apple pie was not here. Yes, there was maple syrup. There was also honey. No, no honey. There was agave. A little curious about honey. We can't quite pick that out yet. But no sugar. The sugar arrives later with European settlement. No flour for the crust made out of wheat. No wheat flour and certainly no shortening. Because shortening that is used in crust is usually butter or lard. And those come from domestic animals that the Spanish brought. One of the things that happens very as soon as Christopher Columbus takes a look at the New World as he goes back to Spain, bringing food with him, but he brings food back in his second voyage and what does he bring? He brings domestic animals, cows, pigs, goats, chickens, sheep and horses. This is going to revolutionize how the native population eats. It's also going to have a huge impact on the environment as you can imagine. So none of those that lard from the pigs or dairy or butter from the cows, that didn't exist until Columbus brings those back. And the spices are primarily from the Southeast Asian. Cinnamon nutmeg. Cinnamon might be from Vietnam, could be from India. The spice islands provide nutmeg. And the only spice that you might use, some recipes don't call for it. But the New World would be all spice. But that's from Jamaica, so that's not as American as apple pie. So Ashley, I love telling that story because I think it's a good introduction to food, heritage and American history. Because American history is made up of all of these different countries coming together and all this diverse culture that we have here. So instead of saying that America is a melting pot, maybe we should be talking about America as apple pie. Because that's certainly a good description of all of us coming from around the world. One of the basis of diet and nutrition for the indigenous populations here was corn. It's part of the three sisters, the corn, beans and squash. The oldest types of corn came in these multicolored cobs. The old corn cobs of course were a lot smaller. But just in case you think that this is a new type of hybridizing, that hybridizing is a new idea, we know that Native Americans were breeding for popcorn 6,000 years ago. So they were really able to point to certain, okay, the Hopi's want their blue corn. They don't want anybody else's corn. They want to grow blue corn. There is a culture of popcorn enjoyment that spreads in north and the south. And they're finding they have found traces of popcorn in pottery shards in the NASCAR desert in the really, really dry part of Peru where things last for a long time because it's so dry. And it's a special type of corn. It's called maize in Bertha. And it happens to really puff up when you pop it. That gives you a sense of how finely tuned First Nation cultures were to corn. They had their varieties. They knew what they wanted. And almost all of them grew it from low down South America up through to really what we call the Canadian border today. Fortunately for the British and Spanish and French settlers and the Dutch as well, the Native Americans were very generous and shared their corn. And they also taught them what we call today milpa agriculture. That's the field system that isn't as structured as European, you know, the rectangular fields with the straight rows of wheat or oats in Native American culture. They're going to grow their corn with the maize, with the squash. The beans growing up the corn stalks, the squash shading the ground with their big leaves and keeping the weeds down. It reduces the need for water around corn. And the beans help restore nitrogen. Corn is a very heavy feeder. So it's a very, very well balanced system of what we call permaculture in a way that it feeds itself. And it was, it worked for thousands of years and it still works today. One of the oldest foods that comes from maize is tortilla. Corn tortillas have been used for, eaten for thousands of years in the new world. One thing that happens is that the corn tortilla is part of a traditional diet when you are eating it with beans. Because corn and beans together make a very nutritious combination and a very high quality protein. When the Spanish come, they don't want so much dependency on corn, on maize. They want wheat to be grown and other European grains. If you substitute wheat tortillas for corn and you mix that with the, and you serve that with like a bean tortilla only with the wheat flour, you reduce the nutritional quality enormously. So without intending to have a bad impact on Native American diet, in fact the Spanish really did by encouraging them to learn how to make wheat tortillas instead of the native corn tortillas. In New England, people ate a lot of cornmeal mush. First they didn't like it. They have a tendency, when you read the letters, they complain about the food, the people who first arrived. Just like when we go to, that's not fair, when we go to foreign countries or wherever we're traveling, we usually enjoy different foods. But it's interesting to read these letters home. People say, we have to eat maize. It's really good only for pigs. But eventually they start to really enjoy it. And the Native Americans teach them how to make one pot meals with corn or maize inside the pot too. And also how to grind the corn. Soon Europeans will build mills and they'll grind corn along with later the wheat and the oats that they bring along with them. Cornmeal mush is a very standard part of the diet in New England. People like it for breakfast. They'll eat it. I've seen records of people serving it at lunch, what we call lunch, the midday meal, which would be the big meal of the day, and then for supper as well. Because you could fill the family's stomach up with the cornmeal mush. It took a long time to cook, but relatively easy. And you could use it the next day. It made leftovers. And then you would serve the meat and the vegetables and the other things, sometimes in the same pot, sometimes separately, but it was a way to make sure that everybody got their calories. We actually as a nation eat too many calories, I think, often. There is, I know, hunger in this country, but what was a bigger problem back then was people were working hard. They weren't sitting as much as we sit today and they needed fat in their diet and they needed calories as well. There's going to be time for questions after I'm talking. As I'm talking, I'd love to have you think about what more information you'd like to know on some of these topics that I'm touching on. So I always include this slide because it gives you a sense of just how much people really did need fat in their diet. This is a beaver, and beaver pelts were really sought after by trappers and explorers who were coming into the New World in hopes of selling those luxurious beaver pelts back to Europe. Remember, this is a period of time called the Little Ice Age. It was colder then. There are records of fares being held on the River Thames in London. In Amsterdam, people were skating everywhere. It was colder than it is today, and the warmest thing you could wear would be furs. Also, they were luxurious. So it was a very, it gave people status to wear furs just the way some people think that fur coats give them status today. But the thickest fur were from beaver in the wintertime, and that meant the trappers were out in the winter trying to catch trap for the beaver. Well, in the wintertime, that's obviously the hardest time to get food, and you are really going to have some hungry, hungry times. Native Americans have different names for the months of the year. They were mostly on a lunar schedule, but traditionally, in many different tribes, they had a word for that March and February, and it was often called the Hungry Moon or the Starving Moon. The Hungry time of year isn't December, and it's not even January, because often the food stores last until then. But it's just before spring begins that people are at their hungriest. It's also when the beaver pelt is at its most luxurious. So what the Native Americans had learned thousands of years before, and they taught the Europeans when they arrived, is that you see the tail on the beaver? It doesn't have any fur on it. It has what on it? Can you see? Scales, like a fish. So when you've trapped the beaver, you don't want the tail anymore. That's not going to make a nice fur coat. But you can roast that tail over some hot coals, and the scales on the tail will blister up like fish scales. And you scrape off the scales, and you have a nice, fatty slab. And you roast that, grill it over some coals as well. And it made what to those people at that time was a delicious dinner, because they needed fat badly at the end of the winter. They needed to restore their fat supplies, and beaver tail was a well-recognized luxury. Imagine being a trapper stumbling into a Native American village, and they graciously offered you this fatty slab that had been roasted. And there are letters writing home that Jesuits wrote about it. It's in the early, when we called the Pilgrims, wrote about it. They were so pleased. You can just, thank you, Jesus, I'm getting a grilled beaver tail for dinner tonight. It's something that seems so appalling to us today that that much fat on a stick would be desirable. But they really needed that in their diet. One of the ways we learn about history besides letters and the history of food, besides letters and records and, you know, even court records talk about somebody stealing from a bakery, there are artifacts that tell us about the history of food. And there are also words. And one of my favorite approaches is to understand why we call something one word when other cultures call it another word. For example, every English-speaking country in the world, except for the United States, calls a sweet crispy thing, sweet crispy baked good, a biscuit, a sweet biscuit. So if you're in India or you're in Canada or you're in Australia, the packages say biscuits, sweet biscuits. In America, what do we call that? A cookie. Do you know where that word comes from? It comes from the Dutch. The Dutch had a very small colony, but it was quite a vibrant one. It was called New York, or they didn't call it that, they called it New Netherlands. And this is a cookie press from the 1600s in New York. And I look at that and I think it was really made with love for somebody who was working in the kitchen because of the detail and the folk art in there. But the Dutch brought their recipes for baked goods. They were the masters of the South Seas spice trade. And that meant that their population had access to the best spices in the world. So women, and it is primarily women who are baking in the kitchen, that's not a matter of being politically correct, that's just the truth, would be baking and using these very fragrant spices, sweet spices in their baked goods. And they were very proud of their cookies. Other words we get from the Dutch are boss and stoop. I live in New York. Brooklyn has a lot of stups. It's a funny sounding word when you think about it. But cookie is a Dutch word and in the turn of the century, as you came into the 20th century, companies like Nabisco National Biscuit Company labeled their sweet biscuits cookies. And that's one reason why Americans call sweet biscuits cookies because of that Dutch heritage that has lasted over all these years. When the first settlers get to the United States, excuse me, it wasn't the United States. When they get to North America, whether it's Spanish or English or French or Dutch, they're finding that their beer recipes don't work. There's a lot of yeast that's natural in the air in this continent and their techniques of making beer were spoiled by that form. The people who really introduced the beer recipes that would work are the Germans. So America becomes a big beer drinking nation by the 1840s with this large German immigration. But before that, they're drinking hard cider and parry. Parry is made from pears. It's like a hard cider from pears. Most of the apples and pears that were grown early on were for cider and for parry because it was a way of storing the goodness of the fruit. You could either dry the fruit or you could turn it into cider and they chose to turn it into cider because they knew that cider didn't have germs in it. The way you could have tainted water, but you didn't have tainted cider. Cider was so popular that even very Puritan-seeming Americans, somebody like John Adams started every day with a big mug of hard cider. All ages drank this stuff and some of it was what we would call small beer. It would be a lower alcohol, but it could be very high alcohol as well. And starting your day with it seemed perfectly normal. And before you think, you know, this is parallel to starting your day with a tanker to beer and I'm not sure this is a good idea. Remember that many of you may have had an Advil today or an aspirin or something was sort of creaky and you thought maybe I should take a little medicine for that. They didn't have that alternative. So a tanker to parry or hard cider seemed to do very little harm and some good. Along with the consumption of parry and cider, you have a large consumption of rum. Rum is the most popular liquor in America for a long time and it comes from the sugarcane. This is a picture of the Caribbean island where sugar was king. It produced fortunes for the few numbers of Brits and French who owned these very, very productive plantations. But it also gave African slavery a strong foothold in the New World. And that's there were slaves in up and down the coast of the British colonies. But it was in the West Indies where sugar was king that slavery really became the dominant workforce in those places. And they were raising sugarcane. The rum became hugely popular. And switch this to and in fact people drank almost twice what we drink today in terms of hard liquor. That statistic comes from the National Archives. They just had an exhibit called the Spirited Republic and I was fascinated by the data they were able to put together. The example that I always talk about is how rum becomes so popular, the only thing that will ever challenge it is bourbon. Bourbon's invented in Bourbon County, Kentucky around the time of the American Revolution. And it's made of a mixture between rye and corn, maize. That's what makes bourbon a very American spirit is because it's made on the most native grain that we grow, which is maize. So it grew in popularity so much that this style of whiskey becomes synonymous with the American South. Rum drinkers will stay very popular right along the coast where you get the sugarcane imported along there. But inland rye and bourbon whiskey dominate. George Washington served 75 gallons of whiskey to potential voters when he ran for a seat in Virginia's House of Burgess in 1758. This is an eye-popping number. Imagine somebody running for office today just serving shot glass after shot glass and that's how it was served of whiskey. But the idea of offering drinks to your voters was a tradition in Britain and it migrated here and it encouraged voter turnout apparently. They didn't have any problem with voter turnout, maybe that was their problem. After his precedent setting two terms as the first president, Washington's Scottish farm manager took him aside and pointed out that if he'd built a distillery, he could make more money out of his grain crops by producing whiskey. So eventually our first president became the nation's largest whiskey distributor, which is something they forget to tell us in the textbooks. Another popular drink and this was more for the elite was Madeira. Our founding fathers and mothers were very fond of Madeira, from John Hancock in Boston to Ben Franklin in Philadelphia, of course George Washington on the Potomac and Thomas Jefferson. This is a picture of Jefferson's dining room reinterpreted to the documents that are available to us now. When Jefferson was in the White House, which was called the Executive Mansion back then, his liquor bill included $42,000 spent on Madeira. The reason why they love Madeira so much is that it's wine from the Madeira Islands in Portugal, but they added some brandy to it and then they heated up. It makes the wine more stable so that when it's brought across the Atlantic it doesn't go bad. Wine is expensive, Madeira is expensive, but these guys would rather spend the equivalent of $20 on a bottle of Madeira because they know it wouldn't have gone off. You spend $20 on wine, it's an expensive bet because they didn't have refrigeration and if things were being brought over and it got too hot in the ship's hold it could sour the wine. Madeira didn't care. That's one reason why it was so popular. If you are making stew or soup at home and you want to make it taste like the 18th century, add a quarter cup of Madeira and a little bit of allspice. Those were very, very popular flavorings in food. Jefferson was really a gourmet and an adventurous eater. He popularized new foods to the young United States such as macaroni. This is also from the National Archives. This is a picture of Jefferson's macaroni maker and he saw it in Italy and he sketched it and he wrote out how to do it and he brought it back. He did not introduce the first macaroni in the new world, but what he did was make it more popular and he helped develop the first recipe that was published for macaroni and cheese. His cousin, Martha Randolph, wrote a book called The Virginia Housekeeper, The Virginia Housewife, and it included a recipe for macaroni and cheese. I have made that recipe and it's a really good one. It's just you cook up some macaroni, cook the macaroni, add a lot of butter, some salt, great cheese on top and put it in the oven until the cheese is melted. Okay, that's all. It works. One of the things I wanted to mention about Jefferson is that he's always trying to improve things. So he strove for excellence in political theory, also in vegetable gardening, and also in the kitchen. When he was assigned to France, he brought James Hemings, who was one of his slaves, with him to Paris and had James trained as a chef by a master chef in Paris on the condition that when James would come back to America with him, he would train through other cooks to the French level of gourmet cooking and then he would get his freedom. And so that was the bargain he made with James Hemings. James Hemings, incidentally, is the older brother of Sally Hemings, who came over as a nanny for his girls. And you may or may not be familiar with that story, but we're not talking about that right now. We're going to stick with the food. Not that it shouldn't be talked about. It's just that we have other things to talk about tonight. This is a picture of a rice plantation outside of Charleston, South Carolina. Rice is interesting because it was a crop that was made possible through the skills of Africans who were brought over to work in the farms outside of Charleston. They brought with them the skills of having grown rice in Sierra Leone for 500 years. When they were first kidnapped and brought to the New World, that was not the goal. The goal was that they were going to grow sugarcane there or tricotten. It didn't work so well immediately, but when they taught, they essentially taught the culture there how to grow rice. Rice takes over as one of the most valuable crops grown in America. It will also lead to new dishes being created in the kitchen. Here's some gumbo or okra soup because in the kitchen, these really talented cooks would combine their African traditions with the New World foods like corn and create these stews and soups and fry vegetables and do different things than British people were used to. But the people in Georgia and South Carolina who were in the Plantation Society adopted that type of food without realizing they were eating some of the best African-influenced food that will appear in the New World. And that's what we consider the classic food of the low country, Southeast colonies, as well as in Louisiana. It's this combination of African influence, of Native American ingredients, and European flavorings, as well as African flavorings, and what we would consider the chili peppers from Central and Mexico. That's a shot of Jefferson's garden, and I just put that in once again to talk about his stunning vegetable garden. But one of the things he did, somebody earlier this morning when I gave this talk, they said, what about food trends? How do you get food trends? Well, Jefferson grew kale. He had six types of kale. Has anybody wondered about how does kale get so popular these days? We see it everywhere. It's been grown in the New World since the British brought it over in little twists of paper in the 1700s, and it's been grown ever since. And that was one of the places where he was trying to grow seven or eight different types of kale, because it was a fall crop and you could plant other things in your garden, and when you harvested the lettuce you could put in the kale and it would keep growing really until November and you could harvest it and eat it then. At the White House, Jefferson made sure his chefs produced elegant gourmet meals like he had received in Europe. He offered them with French wines, and he had a tradition of inviting small groups of people together at a dining room, say 12 people, and he always wanted to invite people from the same political group, because he felt that if people kind of agreed about the big issues, they would talk more frankly at the dinner table, and that way he would get the most information from his guests. His wife had died, so often his hostess was his Secretary of State's wife, Dolly Madison. And when Dolly Madison became First Lady and her husband James Madison was President, Dolly Madison clearly took her husband aside and said, look, I know how Mr. Jefferson ran his parties, but now that we're in charge we're going to do the opposite. We're going to have big parties. We're going to invite both sides of the aisle because we want people to get together in social situations and open dialogue, they wouldn't say that then, but that's what we mean. Get that dialogue going in a social setting instead of it only being in Congress where they couldn't agree and in fact they were coming to blows occasionally on the floor of Congress. So she sets up these big receptions where she's serving lots to eat, lots to drink, and she often served ice cream. And Dolly Madison ever since then has been associated with serving ice cream at the White House and in fact popularizing. It was a very gourmet food at the time because it required freezing and ice, and that wasn't available all year round. Incidentally, a free African-American cook at the White House during the Madison and Monroe administration, this guy named Augustus Jackson invented something very close to the modern ice cream churn and he went on to a very productive career running the first, a new type of restaurant called an Ice Cream Parlor in Maryland right outside of Baltimore. And I bring that story up because we forget that there were lots of different ways society mixed and worked together and the idea of a free cook, free black man in a slave state opening a very successful ice cream parlor may seem very different to how we imagine life in the 1840s, but in fact that is an example of something that is, was happening at the time. It may have been unusual but it was going on. The next slide I have particularly for this California audience. This is just to show you some of the photographs that are available and talk about life in early California. And I wanted to point out the Chinese laborers here. While a lot of the Chinese worked in the gold fields, they also would work on the railroads, they brought a style of eating and nutrition that was unknown to the Spanish and the British settlers who were here in the early days of California. And one of the things that they developed were two dishes that you may have heard of. One is called chow mein and one is called chapsui. And doing a little research on this, we've learned that if you went to China and you asked for those dishes they would have no idea what you were talking about. It's sort of leftovers on rice or leftovers on noodles. Main is, you know, means noodles. But they developed a special type of food just the way Italian Americans came here and they put great big meatballs in their spaghetti and we think spaghetti and meatballs is an Italian dish. Well, those big meatballs are only in America because it's the only place where you have all that meat to put into your spaghetti sauce. And the chow mein and the chapsui are really American Chinese made to please the people who were coming into these little restaurants or little shacks that were serving hot food at the time and it was leftovers served over noodles or rice. Anyway, one of the stories about the Chinese workers that when they're here, as you may know that during the days of the railroad, the mostly Irish but also Irish and German workers were given labor contracts to work for the railroads and included in those labor contracts were food provisions. They were provided with food. The Chinese workers were never provided with food and the owners of these railroad gangs felt that they were getting a really good deal by essentially exploiting the Chinese workers. But the Chinese brought their own food and they brought their own traditional nutrition habits. For example, they ate vegetables. They brought chickens with them. They had fresh eggs and they boiled water and they drank boiled water. They didn't have tea for that water but they made sure it had been boiled. So at the end of the day, the Irish were eating rotten canned meat and rotten potatoes and getting really sick and having a very difficult time with diarrhea and the Chinese were bathing, which was shocking to these people who rarely bathed. They were staying clean. They were eating clean food and they were eating a balanced diet and they had a much higher standard of health. And it's ironic because the railroad owners thought that they were getting a great deal by not feeding the Chinese hot, you know, they thought they were getting away with something and the truth is that the Chinese fared much better than the workers who were being fed by the labor, the railroads. And that's a picture of Hangtown Fry. I made that in my kitchen but you may remember those stories from Placerville of the guy who sentenced to death for horse thieving and he wants to prolong his life. He's allowed the last meal and he tries to think of what is the meal that's going to take the longest to get to me all the way over, you know, in Placerville, which was called Hangtown back then because that's where the jury sat. So he ordered for his last meal eggs and egg and oyster omelet because it took so long to bring fresh oysters across inland in California and I always wonder did they keep the oyster on ice? The oyster is on ice or do they bring it along and it get, but I think really when you're facing the hangman's noose you don't really care whether it's that fresh you just want those extra three days. Hangtown Fry is still served here by the way. It's served at Sam's Grill and it's also served at the Tadich Grill. I have done a taste test and probably shouldn't go in public but Sam's Grill better. It's a great omelet. I just had it today as a matter of fact. And this last very California picture, of course it doesn't take place in California. This is at promenatory point and the golden spike. There's one guy as Leland Stamford and the other is David Hughes, H-E-W-E-S who was the financer of the Transcontinental Railroad on the California side. They're celebrating the meeting of the two railroads and the golden spike, the whole celebration. The reason why I put this picture in is because you can see all the bottles around. See the guys holding up the bottles there? This picture was photoshopped. They didn't call it photoshopped back then but this is the original plate. And when the picture went public the railroads said, God, I take the bottles out because of the rise of the temperance movement at this time. This is 1869 and there was more and more argument that Americans were drinking too much. We should have fewer. The first emphasis was to cut down on the drinking of hard liquor and the drunkenness in public bars. I didn't realize that when you see these pictures of guys holding the liquor bottles, that actually looks like a bottle of wine or champagne. They cleaned it up so the public didn't think that railroad... They didn't want the public to think that railroad drinkers were drinkers. I'm sorry, but if you ever thought about railroad workers, remember that temperance wasn't that a strong reform movement from their point of view. This was also the rise of the railroads is all part of something called the Gilded Age. That's a label that was given to this era from after the Civil War to almost 1900. Mark Twain made up that label and he meant that if you looked at it all, you saw a lot of wealth and things were gilded on the outside but there was rusty iron inside. In my book, The American Plate, I call it the Gilded Gritty Age because it was a time of great contrasts, very similar to how our society is structured today. You have a small group of people at the top, very extraordinarily wealthy, and then you have most people who are working really hard to hold body and soul together. This is the first time you have large sections of the population who are working in factories instead of working in the fields. Most of the population is still agricultural in nature, but there are significant numbers of men and women who are working in factories. One symbol of the Gilded Age is the rise of the elite restaurant. The amount of capital, the money that people could spend meant that you had fancy restaurants that would take the money of rich people who wanted to spend it. This is a very vivid example. This is Delmonico's. Some of these guys, you've heard their names. It's the Vanderbilts, the Carnegie's, the Asters. They liked to party like it was 1899. The pictures of parties that I found are just amazing. Here are a bunch of guys hanging out celebrating somebody's birthday, James Fisk. That was at Delmonico's too. They had enough money to patronize these type of very elite restaurants and places like Delmonico's flourished. It was also when Antoine's in New Orleans was developed and there were very fine restaurants in San Francisco as well. Today we think of the celebrity chef that you see on the food channels and they're always having competitions between chefs. This guy invented the concept of the celebrity chef. You can tell he enjoyed his cooking. His name was Charles Ranhofer. He invented a lot of dishes that are still famous today like Eggs Benedict and Lobster Newberg. He modified a Parisian dessert and rechristened it baked Alaska. What was he a great chef? This guy was a brilliant marketer. The United States Secretary of State, William Seward, had just purchased millions of acres from a bankrupt Russia. Russia had gone bankrupt and needed money. The United States said, we're going to give you millions of dollars by five. You give us this place called Alaska. It was a very controversial move. The United States announced it as a frozen wasteland or Seward's Folly. Alaska was in the press a lot. This leads to Ranhofer naming an elegant frozen dessert enrobed in white meringue which benefited from the visibility of this whole public debate. That is a picture of the baked Alaska still made at Del Monaco. I was down there and I took that picture. It vividly illustrates the contradictions of the Gilded Age. In today's dollars, this cost about $40 per serving. I have never been in a restaurant where one serving of dessert costs $40. That is very steep, even for today. Originally, Ranhofer made it from walnut spice cake topped with rich banana ice cream. Bananas were a big food trend. People were just starting to eat bananas. You go back and read the documents of immigrants coming to America and they're handed bananas. A lot of these are in the National Park Service has kept track of some of these documents. The immigrants coming in, they're handed bananas and they look at each other because they don't know what to do. They've never seen a banana. People will write in their memoirs, so I took a bite and I didn't like it. I saw the Czechoslovakian family and they were peeling it, so I tried that. Bananas were a big hit. They were very popular. They used that in the ice cream for the baked Alaska and then they cover it in the swirls of meringue. Remember, this is a really complicated dessert to make. Double egg beaters, the hand egg beaters, those hadn't been invented yet. If you're doing a lot of meringue, you're using a hand whisk to make ice cream. Where are you getting your ice? You're bringing it in from the mountain. You're harvesting ice. You bring it down from the mountains in the springtime and you store it in big sawdust in cabins stuffed with sawdust or underground in caverns. Ice has a luxury product in the summer and really ice cream is something that's enjoyed primarily in the warmer weather. You have to get your stove heated to just the right temperature. You're using wood and coal to heat your ovens. This is a really labor-demanding dessert. This is a picture of the basements in Delmonico's where you've got, in this case, these two guys here are very skilled workers, but there are a lot of guys working to make sure that the ice is chopped, that the coal is in the oven, that all of this can take place at Delmonico's. But it was not a celebrity chef with his slew of apprentices who really changed the way most Americans cooked it and ate. It was an earnest Bostonian named Fanny Merritt Farmer. Can you guess what she's holding, anybody? What is she holding, do you know? Yeah, but what is that that she's a measuring cup? She taught at the Boston Cooking School and published a new edition of its cookbook in the 1890s, and that was the cookbook that introduced the concept of systemic, systematic measurements, level measurements. A little half a cup, a quarter of a cup, level tablespoons instead of saying butter the size of a walnut, right? Or pour in some water until it reaches the right consistency. Well, that's not very helpful if your grandmother or mother didn't teach you how to cook. The right consistency doesn't have much meaning, right? But I want to tell you something about American culture that I think is so interesting. Cookbooks were written around the world. There was a cookbook in Rome, in ancient Rome. It's not that we invented cookbooks, but because so many people come to these shores without their mothers and grandmothers, their family recipes that they needed to learn how to cook from books. That's why the scientific method starts in this country. One of the funniest pieces of data I ran across doing the research on Fannie Merritt Farmer is that in America, the first book with this scientific measurements was in the 1890s. In Italy, it's not until just before World War II. It's not until the 1930s. That's almost two generations of people thinking, why do those Americans always level things? We just do it the way I saw it when I was growing up. But so many women, they wanted to cook right. They had meals for their family, but they came over without having a strong culinary heritage. When I say they came over, I mean when they immigrated. Today, nutritionists point out that it was Farmer who influenced American cooking in another way. She added sugar to many different kinds of food that previously had not been sweetened. So items like sandwich bread and salad dressings, which today often contain a lot of sugar, they show the influence of this lady who taught over 100 years ago that sweetened foods had a broader appeal. So you're right, it's her fault. She's one reason why the American diet is so sweet. Her background was as a medical nutritionist. She was one of the first women to teach at Harvard Medical School. She taught nutrition to nurses who were taking care of patients who were having trouble digesting and who needed to eat more. They were not having trouble digesting. They were having trouble eating and wanting to eat. She was looking at people who were too thin. They needed to get healthier. So she would encourage people to add a little bit of sugar to make them more palatable. Blame her. I included this part in my presentation today because it's 9-11, and I wanted to do something that addressed that story and that moment. When I was first writing the book, I had planned to end it in the year 2000. But my editor said, Libby, we're going to pitch this to television shows and to magazines. You have to make it from 1400 to today. And I said, no, no. I'm a historian. We'll do it 1400 up until post-war, because I believe that you have perspective and analysis as historians, because you can bring that. The time has gone. You have a sense of who won the argument. But if you bring it up to today, it's just a bunch of opinions. And I love to give my opinion. I bet that surprises you. But that's not history. There's a difference. But I lost the battle. So I had to bring it up to today. One reason why I did not want to bring the book up to 2015 is because of 9-11. I was in Manhattan at that time. I didn't want to have to deal with that topic as an historian. It's a very painful time for me. And I'll never forget it. So I happened to remember one dish that I'd forgotten in my book. It's an all-American dish. It's called chili con carne. And I found some interesting information about it. It was developed in Texas before Texas was an independent nation and then obviously before it joined the United States. But the first documented presence of chili con carne is from Texas in the early 19th century. That would be with red chilies with what we call kidney beans and with beef. And that is what was considered a classic chili con carne. Personally, I know you can make it with turkey or you can make it with whatever beans you want to make it with, but this is the classic recipe. Oops, that's the wrong thing. That's what I wanted to do. In the late 1840s, America's boundaries spread across the continent. And chili con carne had its own sense of manifest destiny, spreading from sea to shining sea. Outfitters. You know those great big cattle drives that were coming up from Texas and going up north? Outfitters for those great cattle drives as well as for the pioneer families who were traveling in wagon trains. The outfitters created chili bricks, which were hard rectangles shaped like a brick of dried beef, beans, suet, minced chilies and some other seasonings that could be easily reconstituted with water for meals on the trail. Then the invention of commercially available powdered chili became known. It wasn't that widely spread, but it made it all easier. So these old recipes became spreading around America with different communities. After the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where thousands of Americans ate chili con carne for the first time, people across the country began to dig into chili with huge gusto. This was not the only food that comes from a world's fair. World's fairs were real sources of novelties, like crackerjack. It's invented in Chicago. These guys are taking popcorn and a molasses-based glaze with nuts and mixing it together, and people just adored it, but then it didn't keep very well. Right? It would get soggy. You know how sweetened corn balls just don't taste so good unless they're fresh. But what made this crackerjack possible? They invented something called wax paper. And without the sealed wax paper, you could not ship something like crackerjack. You had to put it in the wax paper bag inside a cardboard box and then they covered that with foil and they copied the idea of putting a toy in the box from the Quaker Oats people who were having a promotion that year of putting a toy surprise in their Quaker Oats containers. But the Quaker Oats people stopped using the toy, but the crackerjack people still put a toy in the box. They launched that at the Chicago 1893 World's Fair as well. Hot dogs were launched there also. Hot dogs in a roll, not the sausage, but the fact that you eat the sausage in a roll that's been split lengthwise, and that's what makes it a hot dog. That type of sausage was developed in Vienna and in Frankfurt. Wieners, Vienna, right? Vienna, they make Wieners and Frankfurters are from Frankfurt. The German tradition of sausage making comes over to the United States, but it's first sold by a vendor at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. Then this guy named Nathan takes it to Coney Island where you really start having the, you know, Nathan's famous hot dogs which are still sold there. Anyway, chili was another dish that was launched to, like, you know, we have food trucks, right? You see them everywhere in San Francisco. Well, there they had these little stalls where they were making chili because chili is a great meal for keeping simmering on the back burner of a stove, right? It'll stay, you can keep it warm. People can come in and help themselves to a big bowl. That's why chili is so popular at firehouses because the firefighters go out and fight their fires, they come back to the firehouse, they're hungry. What are they going to have but a nice stew? That's one possibility, or chili con carne. It's not surprising it fits in to the needs of a firehouse kitchen and so chili gave me the idea I needed to tell the story of 9-11 in my book. I went to my favorite firehouse in New York. It's a gorgeous Beaux Arts building from 1899 down on Great Jones Street off the Bowery. I'm just going to give you a little anecdote about Great Jones Street. You know that phrase, Jones do have an addiction. I had, you know, I had a Jones for this or something. Well, Great Jones Street had so much heroin being distributed down there in the early 20th century that it gave the name Jones to addiction because people were just nodding off up and down that street. It was in a really, really bad neighborhood. Now, of course, it's a very fancy neighborhood, but this is a beautiful firehouse built in 1899 and it still looks beautiful today. When my kids were fresh out of college, they had, they shared an apartment down there and I've always loved, I would walk around the neighborhood with them. I always loved that architecture. Ten firefighters from this firehouse, which is home to Engine Company 33 and Ladder Company 9. Ten firefighters are numbered among those who were lost on that Thursday, 14 Tuesday, excuse me, that lost on that Tuesday, 14 years ago, more than any other single firehouse. They had a huge, huge loss and in the front of the firehouse you can see the plaques and those list the names of the men who died on 9-11. So one day, two years ago, I visited the firehouse and I met Lieutenant Brian Gamoka and a team of terrific firefighters on Great Joan Street and I asked them if they would share their chili recipe. I'm telling the story of America through food, I said, and I want to tell your story too. So in the epilogue of the American plate, I provide the origins of chili con carne, the history of the Great Joan Street firehouse and the recipe that Lieutenant Gamoka gave me for their own version of chili con carne. And let me tell you something, their firehouse chili is really, really hot. So that's the end of my talk. There are lots of avenues I can go down and more anecdotes, origins of graham crackers, one of my favorites. But I thought tonight we could just have this overview and open it up to discussions or questions. Ma'am. You just finished up with the subject of chili con carne. While I'm in a city that's so diversified in terms of what's available, there aren't chili houses. I remember, because I lived in Manhattan a long time, the Alamo chili house, and there were places that you could go out for a bowl of chili. Well, you know what? This is an example of food trends because when you went out back there and the Alamo chili house was there, you couldn't get sushi. And today, you can get a lot of sushi and it's really good. But chili isn't as popular. It's something that's served in your app to get chili if you're up in the mountains. If you're at ski resorts, they're always serving chili. It's cold. It's considered something that warms you up. And you'll find it at diners in New York, too. But it's often a winter specialty. They don't have the old-fashioned chili parlor. A famous chili parlor, though, is called Ben's Chili Parlor. It's on U Street in Washington, D.C. And President Obama goes there every once in a while for a big bowl of chili. There are still chili parlors in Chicago, and we know that he's an avid chili connoisseur. Anybody else? Yes, ma'am. Speaking of Washington, I understand Tattage is about to open a branch in Washington, D.C. I didn't know that. How do you think Dungeon's Crab is going to play there not far from Chesapeake Bay? Well, I know that I don't actually eat crab cakes very far away from... You don't have to... It's because you've had bad ones. If you go right to the Chesapeake, they're really good. I'm not... So, therefore, I'm a little prejudice about taking Dungeon's Crab to Washington, D.C. because you've got it so good here. Why give it a test that far away? Crab. Right. But it's that... It's when people mash up the crab and they put in all the bread that makes it taste awful. If they're just mixing it with a little bit of egg to bind it and cook it in butter, I think it's pretty good. But I love crab louis here. Oh, my God. Yes. American food... We explored American food. From my understanding, it would just be like McDonald's burgers. Has American food caught on overseas? I would like to have a French crepe. And that's another thing. But does anybody overseas go, I want to have an American one? Well, I think it's funny because when I talk to my friends who live in Europe about the fact that I've written this book, they say, there is American food. I mean, it's really pretty awful that our food culture is typified by the fast food chains. But also... Or even like donuts, you can get donuts now in lots of places in Europe. Really, this is the best we can do, donuts. Although, you know, I know people love donuts. They're from the Dutch. I see somebody here who has spent five years in Singapore. Are there... Barbecue. Yes, barbecue. Good answer. So American barbecue, that's a good thing. It's something we're all proud of. And he's right. There are barbecue places. But it's not like a whole... So there are barbecue restaurants, but I can't remember seeing an American restaurant in Europe based on American food traditions more than, say, barbecue or something specific. You have great steak houses with Kansas City steaks or something like that. But our culture of food is a very diverse one. So we're not coming to the table with anything that's very linear in its understanding. I think you'll find that if you go to a fine restaurant today, anywhere in the world, there's an influence with some American ingredients. And corn is a great example of that. Anyone else? Yes. I know that okra, originally in Africa, are there other foods specifically that were brought to North America by the people who were enslaved? Yes. There are a couple of things that they bring, and it's not just the food themselves, but the way they prepare foods. One of the things that we think of as being Asian in origin is sesame. And we didn't grow olives or we weren't making oil from different vegetables the way people do today. So in the early period, they were using sesame oil from the Benny plant. Sesame plant, B-E-N-N-E. And that was brought over by African slaves. It was very popular in the South. You still see old recipes for Benny wafers, which just means crackers that have sesame in them. The technique of deep fat frying is brought over from Africa. And that becomes a very strong Southern tradition. Why is that? One theory is that the Africans that are brought over from very hot places, they don't develop the big hot baking ovens that you see in colder climates. They're cooking food really quickly and they're cooking it in oil. You also see this in Southeast Asia. You don't see great big ovens that are kept hot for a long, long time in villages. People are cooking very quickly over a short hot fire just because if it's 100 degrees, you don't want to have this oven producing all the heat. And that's just one theory, but we know that African slaves arrived understanding how to cook with palm oil. And they cooked in deep fat they used that technique of cooking when they got here. There are other ones too, I can talk more about it later. I talked about rice. We don't think of rice as an African food, but it was the these kidnapped Africans who are brought over here and they're the ones that make rice growing possible in the new world. Yes? You were going to ask earlier what about China with rice? Was that something that came from another part of the world and brought to China? No, but it's a good question. Rice is first seen thousands of years ago in China. Soon after that it's seen in India. It then is brought over very sort of like corporate espionage only. It's agricultural espionage. Rice is stolen from Asia by people who want to grow it and it's grown in Italy quite early on. I know that surprises you, but rice is still grown in Italy. It also goes to Africa. The only crop like that is where it's going to find its roots. The sort of very wet land around Sierra Leone is where it thrived. The Po River Valley in Italy is where they still have rice patties. That's where you get water buffaloes. Buffalo milk, cheese, burrata, the mozzarella. Water buffaloes are in Italy because they're helping to raise the rice. So we know that rice predated everybody else. It starts in Asia, but like apples starting in Turkey it comes over to northern Europe. Rice starts in Asia. The Persians call it the breath of the table because it's life. Rice is the breath of life. It's so important as a staple. It's funny to think that it comes to the east coast via Africa, but it's the technique of growing the rice that comes that way. Anyone else? Yes. It's tricky. We don't know exactly how it comes in, but we know that it gets to come from China into the Middle East and then probably the traders from Venice and the Genevies bring it in. Yes. I'm about to sneeze, I'm sorry. As a New Yorker really bagels on pizza. We've done a lot better than that. But I think today, I think you could say that California has had the most influence on how people are reading today. Because it was here that you start getting this demand for local and for fresh and it has really improved the quality of the food that we eat anywhere. I believe it and I know that when I come here and I get to visit my children, I think, wow, the food here is just really good. We have wonderful produce on the east coast, but our growing season is limited and it's right now fabulous. But I'll tell you in a few months, it will not be fabulous. You just don't get the fresh produce that you have in California. And that's really changed how people think. I happen to think that Alice Waters is very important in American diet. She's been very influential in helping to improve diet in schools, introducing kids to vegetables and people say, you know, they're just throwing that food out. They have elementary school students that they throw out their food anyway. I mean, it doesn't matter what you serve them. They're going to throw some of that out. So I think it's changing the way kids understand how much fun it is to eat their vegetables. It's not torture. It's good for you, but it also tastes good too. Alice Waters is a chef from Berkeley and she started a famous restaurant called Shea Panisse. And she today received the National Medal of Honor from the President for her work in cooking. And it's a real, it's wonderful for her and for all of us. She studied cooking in France. It's not like she made this up, but she went back to the United States and to her home in California and said, this is where I can recreate those wonderful fresh flavors because I know there are farmers who are able to supply and develop those relationships with the farmers. You can't just expect to go to a grocery store and say, I want fresh, fresh greens. And they say, no, here's your iceberg lettuce, right? Because that's what we supply. But there's been a real revolution in that. I mean, I'm 60 years old. I can remember when all there was in a grocery store was maybe some romaine and some iceberg lettuce. And today you go into a good, you know, it doesn't have to be a high-end gourmet grocery store. But you'll have arugula and you'll have mixed greens. I understand that getting sourcing really good quality food is difficult for people who don't have the resources. But I do know that it's available in a way that it has never been available in this country for years and years. You know what happened before though they were serving iceberg and romaine lettuce? Lettuce just wasn't there. You didn't have lettuce. If you're living in New York and it's January, you're not going to find the lettuce. So when they figured out a way to ship lettuce across the country from California and places like Florida, people were happy. But now we have the technology, the distribution systems and the ability to get really good quality green vegetables and other produce and it's a delight. So it's pretty easy to track down Alice Waters. You look her up in Wikipedia and she's been very influential. Arches was a big fad when it went to the East Coast. It was just amazing I remember seeing all that growing up. And then it was fad to learn how to eat fad. Right. Yeah. Yeah. There's another. I'll tell you one of my favorite fads and then how are we doing on time, Lea? Okay. So this is one of, I think one of the funniest stories that helps you understand fads and food trends in America. In about the 1820s there was a food reformer named Sylvester Graham and he believed that if you ate whole grains and vegetables and eschewed liquor and did not drink meat I mean eat meat you would live a longer and happier life. And he developed so many followers that they were called Gramites and people who, he developed a type of cracker that was made out of whole meal and they became known as what they were called Graham Crackers. Many many years later when he dies somebody else takes that recipe and adds sugar and makes it into something that tastes more like a cookie. But he would have been outraged. Outraged. Who put sugar in my Graham Crackers? Because he was opposed to people eating refined sugars. We would think he's a very modern modern guy. But I don't think we would agree with his analysis because what he was doing, he was lecturing. He was an ordained Christian minister, Presbyterian he was way out there though because he felt that if you didn't eat meat and you ate a vegetarian diet based on whole grains it would reduce your sexual appetite and that America was ridden with lust and to get this lust out of America you had to change your diet. And people believed this and they started buying only these whole meal crackers and this whole meal bread and there were he would go on lecture tours and the local bakers would come out with placards and take home Graham because they felt that he was preaching against bread and he was. He was saying white bread the way we buy it in those nice puffy loaves or not so nice puffy loaves or even sourdough bread didn't like that he wanted it to be whole grain very dense but he's a great example of Americans willingness to accept fad diets as the answer to all problems because he felt that once you reduce the sexual appetites of America people would live in peace so you know solve world problems eat Graham crackers that essentially was his theory and he was considered by many people he was considered an outrageous eccentric but other people like the group of people who hung around Concord Massachusetts Henry David Thoreau Nathaniel Hawthorne these literary types they went through a phase of following Sylvester Graham and it's fun you can find these people in any in every generation the Kellogg brothers of Battle Creek Michigan they take their attitude from Graham and they make it a little more commercial and that's how they build their Kellogg products yeah oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah well I think it begins because of something because of Instagram and Facebook and people are sharing these things online with their friends look at the wonderful food that I'm eating and I know some people really care a lot about their food so they want to keep track of it to take it home and try to remake it I sometimes gosh I hate admitting this to you I have been known to take pictures of my food because I posted on my website about the history of food in America but it's pretty it's pretty recent and I don't think it's going to go on I'm seeing a lot of complaints about too many people posting about food but the restaurants like it because it's you know their customers are so into the food they have to take the picture so they find it kind of flattering and I think really anything that makes helps Americans expand the type of food that they enjoy and move them away from junk food and fast food is a positive I think that's more important than whether they're taking pictures I don't really care but I am happy that happy that people are eating I think I think they're eating a healthier diet or at least aware of what makes up a healthier diet how do people who are not the 1% that we talked about earlier how can we afford the organic food when we're on kids' budgets I mean for one thing the reason why for what I understand the reason why there's such a huge increase in organic grown food besides it's healthy for us it's fresher it's better for the planet it's also more profitable but for a person like me and for many residents in the TL we can't afford them and so I went to Safeway today to buy fruit I try to eat as much fruit as I can I can't afford their prices and I go to Safeway because their prices are lower excuse me for mentioning a particular store but and this causes me anguish because I know that I love eating fruits and I like eating vegetables but I'm finding out that I'm being priced out of healthy food that's a good question I have an answer but it looks like somebody here asks an answer and why don't you go to the farmers market at Civic Center I do go yeah but the farmers market sells organic food why can't we just have both I think that it's actually not hard I may be wrong but because I don't shop here to find what's called conventional food but I think that you're absolutely right organic food is more expensive it is helping actually to keep the small farmer alive because the money goes to the small farmer but what I've learned when people ask me this question is that there are certain foods that matter about being organic and other foods that aren't quite as important so something that always surprised me is that it's particularly important if you're going to choose what foods you buy that are organic apples or it's important to buy organic apples because they are sprayed so much under conventional techniques that the poison gets into the fruit through the peel it's not just peeling it so there are some things that are more important if you have to make those choices and most people do have to make choices in life then apples are something that are worth paying for the organic price other things that I've understood is that milk is very important to use organic milk but the price of food here is surprisingly for most people it's actually cheaper than in most countries our food is cheaper than most countries organic food versus conventional I think you have to make choices about which ones you buy naturally grown isn't actually protected as it doesn't really mean much organic is a whole process to get certified as an organic producer you have to show actually a certain number of years that you're following organic practices that means you're not using pesticides that are made out of chemicals you could use red chili spray to keep bugs away but you're not using other chemicals to keep bugs away you're not hurting our honeybee population by spraying other vegetables you're not using chemical fertilizers you're using organic fertilizers that can break down faster and don't stay in the soil so excuse me no I don't think it's liability as people believe that organic food is healthier for you and it's healthier for the soil and that it creates the possibility of being able to farm if you're an organic farmer you are enriching the soil as you farm you aren't just pulling the nutrients out so it extends the life of your farm it makes the food might not be as perfect to see the apples may have scars on them the tomatoes really you are sacrificing taste if you buy a perfectly red tomato because the molecular structure that goes into making a perfectly red tomato takes out some of the flavor yes ma'am certification you know what where I live it's the state so it'd be the state of California so it's not the federal government it's time for book signing yeah and I have to be honest with you about the questions on organic food that is just my opinion that's not historical analysis but that's what I know a lot of people have to do okay thank you so much you're such a good audience and thank you for your good questions