From Hardtack to Home Fries: An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals (Hardcover)
Amazon.com Review
Barbara Haber’s fascinating From Hardtack to Home Fries bills itself as “An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals.” More exactly, it locates the recurrent intersection of American women’s history and culinary practice and shows how one shaped the other. In lively chapters like “Pretty Much of a Muchness: Civil War Nurses and Diet Kitchens” and “The Harvey Girls: Good Women and Good Food Civilize the American West,” Haber focuses on the untold female contribution to 19th- and 20th-century food culture, an engrossing story. Readers not only encounter great anecdotes–Civil War nurses guarding barrels of whiskey from thieves, for example, or pioneer chain-restaurateur Fred Harvey’s female service corps in action–but discover a hidden American history.
The vividness of the narratives results, largely, from Haber’s excerpts of contemporary diaries and memoirs, like that of World War II POW Sarah Vaughan, who was held by the Japanese in Manila. (”There is a great rush for spinach juice,” Vaughan reported, “on the days this is served.”) In addition, Haber supplies pertinent recipes, like Ella Kellog’s Savory Nut Loaf, a chilling example of 19th-century food-reformist fare, and Baked Fudge, the formula of Cleora Butler, whose unsung cookbooks first explored African American food in the Southwest. These documents tell truths as no others can. Haber’s final and most personal chapter, “Growing Up with Cookbooks,” explores the importance of cookbooks more explicitly, revealing their “intimate power to make connections between people”–to make culture itself. The authors of most of these recipes are women, a fact not lost on Haber, as the delightful Hardtack shows. –Arthur Boehm
From Publishers Weekly
The tasty graham cracker, a beloved bedtime snack of many children, began its life as the linchpin of its originator Sylvester Graham’s fanatical early-19th-century health campaign to curtail sexual excess, especially masturbation and more then once-monthly marital coitus. Facts such as these, interwoven with informed, witty discussions of social, political and economic history, make Haber’s tour through the history of American food so entertaining. Since food has so often been consigned to the domestic realm of woman, Haber’s study is in essence a history of American women: the “Harvey Girls,” who worked in the chain of reasonably priced railroad depot restaurants that revolutionized public eating in the 1880s and ’90s; how Eleanor Roosevelt and her general housekeeper Henrietta Nesbitt had to balance White House menus, which had to seem both fancy and economical during WWII; the role of a small tea shop, started by faculty wives in Cambridge, Mass., as a boon to women refugees in the 1940s. While Haber doesn’t explore issues in depth (her discussion of why Irish immigrants were antagonistic to African-Americans would have been helped with references to Noel Ignatiev’s 1996 study How the Irish Became White), she does cover a wealth of material with a breezy style and a fine eye for historical detail.
Tags: American, Cooks, Fries, from, Hardcover, Hardtack, History, Home, Meals, Uncommon
December 10th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
4.0 out of 5 stars
Vignettes of the History of American Food
Entertaining and well researched. It is not a history of American food or cooking. Instead, the author has researched a few selected moments in the history of American cooks, with…
December 10th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
Read this “delicious” book slowly and savor it. What a task the author has undertaken; I am dazzled by the amount of research Barbara Haber evidenced. What a wealth of detail. I found the material fascinating — especially as it is a book that would not ordinarily cross my path.
Although I have never actually sat down and read a cookbook, I was familiar enough with the diet books to enjoy Haber’s exploration of them. I, too, enjoy “fat narratives,” but had never before considered diet books as “barometers of culture” It was also interesting to learn more about familiar names: Kellogg, and Graham, for example. And I, too, shared the hope that the magic idea of merely reading diet books would solve weight problems.
It was neat to learn more about the Harvey Girls, whom I only knew through the 1946 Judy Garland movie. The FDR story — completely unfamiliar to me (and I would guess, most readers) — was hilarious, and interesting throughout. What a glimpse behind the scenes with Mrs. Nesbitt, the inept White House cook.
My favorite moments in the book, however, are when the author steps out and speak personally about her own life and work, and I wish the book had more of this personal voice.
Laced with recipes culled from cookbooks, memoirs and diaries, this book a unique contribution to women’s history
December 10th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
3.0 out of 5 stars
“modify” “adapt”… what for???
Some of the history here was interesting…. although she drones on and on about Eleanor Roosevelt’s unqualified housekeeper…
December 10th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lovely and Anecdotal
This is not an intense “History of America Through Food”, but rather a fun and witty serious of anecdotes about various chapters in American culinary history.
December 10th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
This book consists of essays concerning different aspects of the history of food and cooking in the United States, and, much like a buffet, some “dishes” are more appetizing than others. Make no mistake, this is well-written from beginning to end, but the subject matter of some chapters held little interest for me personally, while I found others quite fascinating. As a rule (with exceptions), the better the food, the more interesting the essay, so I found the first two chapters rather tedious. Finally, when I got to the chapter about the health food fads that originated from Battle Creek did I find the writing riveting and quite interesting. Other favorites include the chapter about the FDR White House food, which had a notoriously bad reputation, the essay on the Harvey girls, and the chapter about African-American cooks. In summary, this book is a mixed bag where the good outweighs the bland. What more could you ask for in a buffet?
December 10th, 2009 at 10:49 pm
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best of these insights from the 1840s to modern times
Barbara Haber has spent years investigating stories of changing ways of cooking meals in America: this gathers the best of these insights from the 1840s to modern times, using…
December 11th, 2009 at 12:31 am
Barbara Haber, Curator of Books at the Schlesinger Library, has compiled a basic history of America’s food. The topics covered include the Irish famine, the Civil War, food reformers such as Graham and Kellogg, the abominable food served in FDR’s White House, how food has maintained familial, cultural, and racial bonds, and even cookbook collecting (and I thought I was the only one!). Each topic is a basic history, and for more in-depth study and knowledge, one will likely need to dig through some of the resources provided in the bibliography. But for someone who wants just a basic overview, this book is perfect.