The history of food has interested me for a long time. I wrote a paper at Temple University on the roots of American cooking, how the first Europeans adapted their traditions to the foods available in the New World.
Meg Muckenhoupt's The Truth About Baked Beans: An Edible History of New England caught my eye a looked like a fun read. I expected it to cover regional and social history and regional foods and cooking.
I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the author goes further--considering the wide variety of immigrants whose contributions to American cooking have been overlooked and eclipsed.
The first European settlers did not have sweeteners available. They imported honey bees! Later, maple syrup and molasses were added to the kitchen basics, and plain recipes using cornmeal and baked beans became sweetened--and sweetened!
Corn, squash, and beans are considered essential New England foods...and they all came from Central America.
Mythic idealizations of historical New England cooking arose during the Centennial and 'scientific' movements promoted non-ethnic foods in favor of white, bland foods.
Readers learn of the real first Thanksgiving foods and how the traditional eating holiday developed over time. And, finally, settled the question of what are 'real' New England foods; would you believe it includes Marshmallow Fluff and Whoopie Pies?
The book includes recipes for those mentioned in the book, including historic, updated, regional favorites, and restaurant favorites.
I found the book to be as enjoyable to read as I had hoped.
I was given a free egalley by the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.
The Truth about Baked Beans: An Edible New England History
by Meg Muckenhoupt
NYU Press
Pub Date August 25, 2020
ISBN: 9781479882762
hardcover $29.95 (USD)
Meg Muckenhoupt begins with a simple question: When did Bostonians start making Boston Baked Beans? Storekeepers in Faneuil Hall and Duck Tour guides may tell you that the Pilgrims learned a recipe for beans with maple syrup and bear fat from Native Americans, but in fact, the recipe for Boston Baked Beans is the result of a conscious effort in the late nineteenth century to create New England foods.
New England foods were selected and resourcefully reinvented from fanciful stories about what English colonists cooked prior to the American revolution—while pointedly ignoring the foods cooked by contemporary New Englanders, especially the large immigrant populations who were powering industry and taking over farms around the region.
The Truth about Baked Beans explores New England’s culinary myths and reality through some of the region’s most famous foods: baked beans, brown bread, clams, cod and lobster, maple syrup, pies, and Yankee pot roast.
From 1870 to 1920, the idea of New England food was carefully constructed in magazines, newspapers, and cookbooks, often through fictitious and sometimes bizarre origin stories touted as time-honored American legends.
This toothsome volume reveals the effort that went into the creation of these foods, and lets us begin to reclaim the culinary heritage of immigrant New England—the French Canadians, Irish, Italians, Portuguese, Polish, indigenous people, African-Americans, and other New Englanders whose culinary contributions were erased from this version of New England food.
Complete with historic and contemporary recipes, The Truth about Baked Beans delves into the surprising history of this curious cuisine, explaining why and how “New England food” actually came to be.
