In one of my favorite books, If At All Possible Involve a Cow: The Book of College Pranks, by Neil Steinberg (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), on page 77, the author says this of an incident involving Carrie Nation at Yale:
[sub]If you don’t know who Carrie Nation is, she was an anti-alcohol crusader and religiouis zealot known for vandalizing saloons with a hatchet around the turn of the century.[/sub]
What I don’t get is why Ms. Nation lectured against foreign foods. Drinking, smoking & short skirts I get (were I to put myself in Ms. Nation’s shoes, that is), but the concept of opposition to foreign foods eludes me. Other than a severe case of xenophobia (not unlikely in this case), what would posess a person to oppose foreign foods on religious grounds?
And when we get right down to it, all American food (such as was available in 1902) was foreign food. Even such simple fare as chicken pot pie, mashed potatoes and chocolate pudding were “foreign.”
Can anybody provide any more information on Mr. Steinberg’s rather enigmatic statement?
There was a diet fad a few years back (it my still be popular), the name of which I can’t recall. The idea is that you should eat only foods that evolved in the same place your ancestors did. Tropical African foods for people whose ancestors came from the African tropics, temperate-zone European foods for people whose ancestors came from Europe, etc. Maybe Carrie Nation was an early supporter of such a plan.
I suspect she meant highly spiced foods, which were believed to inflame passions. Sylvester Graham, whose belief system resembled Nation’s, certainly believed that. It led him to invent the Graham Cracker. Nation lived a century later, but extreme abstinence types probably still held that view.
Nation didn’t oppose all that stuff on religious grounds, but on moral grounds.
In her heyday, the main goal of American Kitchen Art was to provide the proper amounts of nutrients three times daily to maintain optimum energy for work. The idea that the grub should taste good was secondary, if it made the list at all.
Certain foreign foods were seen as heretically flavorful…the sight of greasy immigrant Mediterranean types enjoying bowls of garlicky, highly spiced meats, starches, and vegetables, often as a prelude to dancin’, must have excited the Teetotal Crowd to a frenzy of disapproval.
For a good social history of modern American home cooking, see Laura Shapiro’s Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century, recently reprinted by Modern Library.