The History of American Food
Starting with the first English settlements in the 17th Century, this podcasts traces how we went from barrels of salted meat & peas to Korean bbq tacos and the largest grocery store selections ever seen anywhere in the world. We'll go everywhere - and it is full of surprises.Show Notes: https://thehistoryofamericanfood.blogspot.com/Email: TheHistoryofAmericanFood@gmail.comInternets: @THoAFood
144 Early 19th Century Apples - the Fruit of Progress & Propaganda
This week - it’s time to look at the connection between westward American Expansion and the apple. How is the apple all tangled up with our creation of the 19th century tall tales we started to tell on and about ourselves?
So get ready for a visit from some of the features/specters of that myth making that inhabited a huge part of the 20th century.
Links:
Johnny Appleseed Cartoon (1948)
Paul Bunyan Cartoon (1958)
John Henry Cartoon 1 (1973 – narrated by Roberta Flack)
John Henry Cartoon 2 (2000 - Disney)
Pecos Bill Cartoon (1948)
Davy Crockett Disney TV...
143 Oats & Hay - Grass Runs the Early 19th Century World
As odd as it sounds, there was a time in American Food before oatmeal.
And while that's wild on it's own, even more impossible to imagine is how much of agriculture used to be dedicated simply to growing food to feed the animals that allowed you to run the farm. Having solar panels and biodigesters to create power on the farm now is pretty wild... but it wasn't that long ago, all things considered when all the energy used on a farm was grown... on the farm!
But it does help put into perspective how much e...
142 Are Chickens Alternate Reality Pigs?
Finally - Recipes for early 19th Century Fried Chicken - sorta.
IT's time to learn some chicken history and face the reality about what chickens were really for in the early 19th century - eggs!
If you wanted bird meat there were lots of better birds out there to eat above and beyond the scrawny backyard chcicken.
But that was about to change as the worlds chickens began to come to America.
To learn about all that and more - listen in.
And the old Temple in Turkiye / Anatolia
Göbekli Te...
141 The Forking of America - When We Start to Stop Eating with our Hands
Ever notice that fabulous dinner parties depicted on screen rarely take place earlier than the 1800's - and in America pretty much always after the Civil War?
Well! That's because in just about every one of those situations the eating etiquette would look so different it would be unrecognizable - in fact it's likely people would be eating with their fingers!
Americans have only been eating with forks - on a regualr basis for about 150 years!
The earliest Americans ate with their hands - becasue so did almost everyone else.
Oh - and I a...
140 Tasty Preseerved Pork - Early 19th Century Ham & Sausage plus Scrapple
Yes yes... tasty pigs.
But as you might have gathered I'm not entirely OK right now. Will there be a National Park Service -NPS.gov by next episode?
Will I have access to the library of congress or is it going to get "Alexandira'd"?
I don't know, but at least I do know that I can hook you up with both old school and modern methods of preserving pork when the power grid goes down.
I the mean time take care, love your local food producers and be kind. Even and possibly especially to th...
139 How to Eat Pork in the Early 19th Century
Turns out all I was able to squeeze in to this episode was the fresh pork - more or less.
How to keep pork will be around next time.
But the big lesson is - boy do we need our hands held when it comes to recipes.
Is 50 words not enough for you to prepare boiled poik and pease porridge?
It certainly isn't enough for me. I'd be absolutely sunk.
Though it does explain why enslaved cooks could learn the recipes that were read to them out loud. The recipes weren't that long...
138 19th Century Pigs - Greasng the Way to the Future
To Market to market to buy a fat pig
Home again home again jiggety jig...
But how did those pigs get to market in the first place?
On their own 4 feet! That's right, there's more than one way to concentrate corn down for better transport and not all of it is Bourbon / Corn Whiskey.
Also learn about how early mechanical America only kept moving due to the presence of pigs.
Big contributions to the script from Mark Essig's _Lesser Beasts_
Be sure to look up the Canadian Super Pigs... an...
137 American Crackers – Biscuit by Another Name or Another Thing?
This week I've gone crackers. I've wondered for awhile why it's biscuits everywhere else - but sometimes ... it's crackers.
I mean, the most British of British claymation - Wallace and Grommit, when they go to the moon to get cheese, even they bring crackers.... not biscuits.
That, and a few other things had me wondering if crackers and biscuts DIDN'T come from the same source? Rather did the two just meet in America. Turns out - that's what it was.
It was Douglas Mack of The Snack Shack that got me stared with this post on bi...
136 America is Made of Bread & Steel
Sure - people say America is built on A LOT of things, but the rise of Industrial America depends on two things - Bread and Steel. Steel to make the Great American Dessert into the Great American Bread Basket - and all that wheat would make the steel of the railroad make lots of sense very quickly.
If you are curious just what steel is - and how all that early American iron is related, this is your episode. Sure - I'm a food podcast, but this time it's all about Geology, Steel and some bread.
Th...
Crossover… PART 16 - Is This too Many Locations? Zorro S1E6 on Amazon Prime
For those of you listenting along at home - a little reminder, these are just filler episodes from the other podcast project I was playing around with. If you want that feed and not this one - hop over there.
But for those of you who need something to tide you over - listen along to the Hot Nonsense (and a little Cristo Fernandez appreciation).
Again - this is not the safe for everyone part of the feed. And some of the bonus contect will be just fine. But this is to simply avoid a blank spa...
