Megan McArdle seeks to debunk the idea that grandma was making traditional peasant food:
Nor does this “good country cooking” really come from the country. As Laudan says: “The dishes we call ethnic and assume to be of peasant origin were invented for the urban, or at least urbane, aristocrats who collected the surplus. This is as true of the lasagne of northern Italy as it is of the chicken konna of Mughal Delhi, the mooshu pork of imperial China, the pilafs, stuffed vegetables, and baklava of the great Ottoman palace in Istanbul, or the mee krob of nineteenth-century Bangkok. Cities have always enjoyed the best food and have invariably been the focal points of culinary innovation.”
Most of our ancestors were not wealthy urbanites; they were peasant farmers. Why are these things, then, so associated in our minds with the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of the teeming shores from which our grandparents emigrated?
I think Megan is either confused or over-generalizing. I would submit that very few of today’s Americans have or had rural peasant immigrant grandmothers. Great-grandmothers or great-great-grandmothers, maybe. Let’s start with my own experience (probably not very typical).
All four of my grandparents were born in the 19th century. One of my grandmothers was born in 1891, the other in 1898. One of my grandfathers was born previous to the fourth quarter of the 19th century. All were born in the United States. None was rural.
One of my grandmothers ran a restaurant but didn’t cook. The other was the daughter of a butcher and a cook and she was an excellent cook. I know and prepare some of her recipes. They weren’t remotely traditional rural peasant food.
I would suggest that most of our grandmothers’ recipes were the same mixes and processed ingredients that people are using now or at least their predecessors. Most were clipped out of newspapers, printed on the backs of commercial packaging, or taken from The Joy of Cooking or The Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook. You open a can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup and dump it over cut up chicken pieces. You bake a beef roast sprinkled with a package of Lipton’s Onion Soup.
I would also suggest that our most recent wave of immigrants are mostly urban rather than rural. Their grandmothers’ recipes are “traditional” rather than being traditional.
In closing, I haven’t had a decent knish in 30 years. I know why. The grandmothers who made them have been dead for a half century and their daughters and granddaughters are doctors, lawyers, and marketing consultants who don’t have the time or inclination to learn their great-grandmothers’ recipes.
Both of my grandmothers lived on farms. One had 14 kids, the other 12 kids. They had huge gardens out of which they fed the family, along with chickens they raised and cows for milk (and meat when they got old). My aunts mostly cooked as you describe (who can forget jello mold?), but not so much the grandmothers, except for later in life when, after their husbands died, they moved into town.
However, most of the food wasn’t that wonderful. The pies from scratch, fried chicken, pork in general was good, but nearly all vegetables were cooked beyond recognition. (Fresh corn being the exception.) Seasoning beyond salt and pepper was uncommon. They made their own corn bread, but by then store bread was the norm. Yay Wonder bread.
Steve
I assume a lot of discontinuities btw/ old world cooking and new world just from the availability of the same ingredients. And cost — a culture’s recipes emerge from ingredients readily available, and there is little reason not to suspect that grandmas in the new world would not immediately begin substituting some of the ingredients for less expensive ones. The road to Campbell’s being paved by the best of intentions.
I would love to eat my wife’s family’s recipe for tamales. They were early Gringo settlers to Arizona and tamales were the Christmas meal. Apparently, it requires all day to cook and many hands; such a recipe is perhaps not long for a world with smaller, diffused families.
My mom’s Aunt Belle made everything her family ate, from bread to jellies to catsup to you-name-it, from scratch. She was a country woman but she wasn’t an immigrant. Her ancestors had been in this country for a century. What did they eat? Who knows?
And that was a century ago.
That’s my point encapsulated in a single product.
What did my Swiss ancestors eat? I actually have no idea. They were milk brokers rather than farmers. I’m guessing a lot of milk, butter, cheese, rye bread, and barley but that’s just a guess. My Irish ancestors probably didn’t eat a great deal differently except that they probably ate oats rather than rye bread and barley. Unless they lived on potatoes like a lot of 18th and early 19th century Irish did. However, the Irish ancestors I know about were cattlemen and may have eaten beef, too.
But now we’re talking 170 years ago. Those are no grandparents.
My dad took our family’s only authentic Old World recipe to his grave-his grandmother’s czarnina (duck blood soup, with prunes.) Dad used to tell us about being sent to the butcher shop on the corner to get the blood.
We were repulsed by the story as kids, so I never thought to ask him for the recipe and now I regret the loss of family history. We have plenty of good Polish recipes, especially for breads and other baked goods, but we’ve just collected those from cookbooks and experimentation.
That’s a loss not just in the family legacy but in the recipe. Good czarnina is hard to come by.