Pancake Tuesday

What do you call it: Carnival? Shrove Tuesday? Mardi Gras? Fat Tuesday? How about...Pancake Tuesday?

Last night, Dear Husband and I gathered with our Bible study to celebrate the beginning of the season of Lent while wearing purple, green, and gold beads. No king cake for us, we all contributed ingredients to several patches of really yummy pancakes. Originally, the point of eating pancakes on the day before Ash Wednesday was to use up the remaining fat in the larder before six weeks of fasting and Fish Fridays. These days few Christians give up truly bad habits for the period before Easter, much less meat. I, for one, will continue to enjoy pancakes with creamy peanut butter and syrup every Sunday morning. But this time we went all out: regular pancakes with blueberries, with pecans, with chocolate and peanut butter chips, and with blueberries AND mango. Also pumpkin pancakes plain, with pecans, with chocolate and peanut butter chips, and with pecans AND chocolate AND peanut butter chips (upper left). The pumpkin pancake recipe is long if you are used to combining a mix out of a box with some water like I am, but the finished result cooks up wonderfully thick and tasty. Here is the pumpkin pancake recipe I used. There was yummy maple syrup with which to top them all off.

Then it was time for dessert: Bananas Foster, a quintessential New Orleans treat on a day that is nearly synonymous in this country with "The Big Easy."

Afterwards we played a game--Banagrams, of course!

The multi-colored sprinkles are a festive touch, don't you think?

Soup for the servants' table

About a month ago I decided that I needed to learn how to make more kinds of soup. Frequent recipes in my old German sources for groat or barley soups piqued my curiosity, so I looked up one from Henriette Davidis and Louise Holle's 1901 cookbook for "Soup from oat groats with potatoes." "Very nutritious," groats are the inner kernels of wheat or buckwheat (actually not related to wheat) with the hull removed; they may also be broken into pieces larger than for grits. Unfortunately, Dear Husband could find no groats at the grocery store, but fortunately the recipe authorized a swap for barley, and "dishes with barley" is also on my list of "things to learn how to cook." More difficult was trying to identify the kohlrabi, celery root, parsley root, fennel root and/or leeks over the phone to each other (they were poorly labeled at the store), so DH came home with one of each of the following mystery vegetables and some onion. Whereas today, Americans eat a lot of "common vegetables" like carrots, broccoli, and tomatoes, these mostly root vegetables were all usual in traditional German kitchens. Can you identify them? (Answers below.)  

Per the instructions, I soaked the pearled barley in some water while chopping the veggies. It didn't say how much, so I started with 2 cups and added more while it was cooking. There were also no suggested amounts for the vegetables, so I just cut up everything I had--even the beets, which weren't in the original recipe and made the broth pinkish orange. DH said he thought it made the soup look "interesting." (!) Because I wanted to make meat-less version soup, I skipped the "good fat" from smoked beef, ham broth, or bacon and just put the soaked grain on to boil for two hours with a large pat of butter and some chicken bouillon. Around 1900, most Germans still valued beef broth or bouillon, sold as "meat extract" (Fleischextrakt), for its supposed nutritional value. It was often recommended to sick people as easy to digest and a food to build up their strength. Unfortunately, that was a misconception developed by Justus von Liebig, a famous German scientist in the mid-1800s, and propagated by Davidis, the most famous German cookbook author from the mid-nineteenth into the twentieth century. As nutritional scientists were discovering around the time this cookbook was published, Fleischextrakt really only tasted good--there was nothing nutritionally redeeming about it.

The last sentence of the recipe I followed is particularly interesting: "If the soup is meant to be filling for the servants' table, then one can measure out 50g [~ 1/2 cup] of oat groats." This is almost twice the amount of groats/barley per person as the original recipe calls for (30g = 1/3 cup), probably because in bourgeois families, this soup was merely the first course of a midday meal that also included one or two meat courses. (Soup was meant to stimulate the appetite.) The servants, however, would have been eating this as their main dish, most likely with bread and beer. We ate ours with a very anachronistic salad of baby spinach, carrots, and celery. It's anachronistic because at the time, raw vegetables were still a curiosity in Germany and widely considered indigestible! Even uncooked fruit was regarded with suspicion, something to warn children away from eating. My how things have changed since then! Part of the fun of my dissertation project is watching the discoveries of vitamins and minerals creep onto the pages of medical textbooks and home health manuals. Authors start in the 1910s by referring to the "so-called vital-amines" and their supposed benefits, and by the 1930s they open such discussions with the confident assertion that, "Because vitamins are so important to a healthy diet, ...." 


I'm still really focused on the early part of my period (1890 or 1900 to 1930 or 1935), but maybe later I will try to recreate some of the dishes I found in ladies' magazines at the end of the period, when these came with black-and-white or false-color photographs of vegetable or meat dishes arranged "just-so." It's hard to get inspired to decorate serving platters when it's just the two of us eating, but perhaps for Easter or another get-together I will use the opportunity of feeding many people to try my hand at this once-important cooking and hostessing skill.

Answers: DH came home with kohlrabi, a beet, a celery root, a leek, an onion, and a turnip. I knew I liked kohlrabi, but the turnip and celery root are also good. The leek in particular I find tasty. It's a pity neither of us has really taken to beets, which seem to take forever to cook and soften, because they have such a gorgeous garnet color to them. I also like the purple on the turnip skin, although it's plain white on the inside.

It feels GOOD!

THIS is the first chapter of my dissertation, as outlined on little pieces of scrap paper taped to our dining room wall. I finally assembled it Thursday night, and Friday I typed everything up and inserted all the bits of text I have been working on since early January. The good news is that I have almost 40 pages! The bad news is that 40 pages is the upper limit for the length of a chapter, and the analysis is only half written. I have a LOT of editing and cutting to do, but it feels really good to have gotten this far after only officially writing for six weeks. I have at least another six weeks to whip this chapter draft into shape, in time to workshop it in mid-April. I am quite pleased, because after all of the reading in primary sources I have done since last semester, it turns out I actually have many interesting things to say. I am a little daunted by the handful of important books (auf Deutsch!) still left to read, but the professors have advised me that my analysis is most important and can be supported or tweaked by what others have written, later. I am taking a break this weekend to work on grading and other academic projects, like syllabi and a conference poster, so that I can approach the chapter with fresh eyes on Monday. I am also whipping up another traditional German dish tomorrow, so come back to see photos and read my entry about that!

Marriage advice

chocolates we made, with out-of-season strawberries

In my role as a Frau (wife), I was recently asked for some general marriage advice. Granted, Dear Husband and I have only got 6.5 years of experience in that area--a whole order of magnitude less than my grandparents--but I agreed to share the short essay below. I post it here in honor of Valentine's Day, which DH and I will be celebrating "Eastern Orthodox"-style this weekend. (Before we got married and while we were still living in separate states, we used to wait until Spring Break to celebrate, rather as Eastern Orthodox Christmas and Easter fall a little later than their counterparts in the Western Christian church.)

~ * ~ * ~ * ~

Dear Husband and I are high school sweethearts. My friends used to ask how it was that I knew Dear Husband and I were in love and right for each other. Unfortunately, the surest measure I knew then or now of the quality of a relationship is time. If you are still together next year after all the good and the bad, and the year after that, and the year after that—then you have a successful relationship. Of course you should treat each other well, but we have all seen seemingly happy partnerships fall apart. Marriage requires more stick-to-it-tive-ness than Americans are used to exercising, and I hope if/when the two of you ever find the glue between you getting thin, you will turn to your friends for a nudge back together, like the pieces of a plate or bowl you superglue back together after dropping in the sink, because although you could afford a nicer set of dishes, you are used to and still like the one you already have.

One of our coping strategies is that we refer to each other as “partners in life, for life.” That means that we have committed to help each other out with mundane things like household chores, to ensure that each of us can achieve the things we want for our careers and our family. As a church musician, DH is particularly busy during the months of November-December (Christmas season) and April (Easter), so I make sure he gets a meal between rehearsals and mastermind our holiday plans so he doesn’t have to. He does the same for me during the stressful parts of the semester. Because we (usually) manage the little things well, we are individually poised to accomplish big things better. So we joke that although he works several part-time jobs without benefits, DH is my “sugar-daddy” putting me through medical and graduate school; but I’ll return the favor: once I make a physician’s salary, I’m his retirement plan!

A less romantic but more useful measure of the quality of a long-term relationship than time is…your ability to assemble furniture together. This life skill is particularly tested after buying a house, as you finally have the space and an excuse to splurge on a nice set of shelves from IKEA. You know, the kind that look the same from both sides and come with one of those crooked little wrenches and picture instructions without any words? Are you still speaking to each other an hour later? DH and I think we set a record for the 3.5 hours necessary to put together the large, wheeled island in our kitchen from a set of instructions that possessed merely a superficial  resemblance to English. The key to getting through some difficulties in your marriage is to recognize when it is the other person's fault and when it is not. If you two can unite against a common enemy (such as a furniture assembly guide in Engrish), then you really have a strong relationship!

Which brings me to my final point: laughter really is the best medicine. Laugh with each other at each other. Pick your battles, walk away from the unnecessary ones, and use humor to diffuse tense situations—for instance, by talking to bad drivers in a syrupy, sing-song-y voice as if they were stupid puppies: “Did you just cut me off? Yes you did! Yes, you did! Don’t f*** with me today, buddy, I’m on my way home from my in-laws’.”* Read to each other: on picnics, on long car trips, in bed before falling asleep at night. That way, no matter else you do individually, you will always have one thing in common as a conversation-starter. Bonus points for reading something so funny that you have to stop because you’re gasping for air from laughing so hard.


I love being married, and I love being married to Dear Husband. We wish you the same happiness—and intelligible furniture assembly directions.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~

So, that's what I know about marriage. In honor of the holiday, I would love to hear your stories and advice as well. Don't worry if you're "late" responding--remember, we're not celebrating until Saturday!

*--I actually have about the best in-laws in the country; I used this as a figure of speech for comedic effect only.

The Menu, please!

Dear Reader, I have started writing my dissertation. No, really, I mean it. You may recall that in a post last October, I revealed that the assertion "I'm writing my dissertation now" is sometimes a socially acceptable platitude for explaining why a graduate student still hasn't graduated. But earlier this month, while traveling to the medical library at another university to photograph yet more books for the chapter I am writing, I realized that my motto needs to be "READ LESS, WRITE MORE." (Yes, it must necessarily be written in all caps, like an internet troll posting the same four words over and over again in the message board of my internal narration.) Now, I knew while I was in Germany that there were some published sources I could get in the United States, so it was not a surprise or change of plans that took me there. Actually, I have been trying to conduct a survey of old German textbooks and cookbooks for about 3 years now, so I was excited that over the winter break I could finally devote time to finding out what turn-of-the-last-century physicians could actually do to treat illness in the pre-anti-biotics age, verses what the alternative practitioners were offering, verses what home remedies were recommended. More on that in a later post.

ANYway, while on that trip I decided to sit down and just start writing the thing already. After all, eating an elephant begins with the first bite. So I expanded the chapter outline from one of my many grant proposals into three whole pages of text. I was 1% done! More importantly, it felt really good to have gotten "over the hump," as if I had finally acquired enough activation energy to start the reaction of writing. You see, I had been planning to wait until I had read "everything" and had a bird's eye view of my sources to draw out an argument. But that sort of wait-and-see methodology risks becoming procrastination while reading "just one more book," because I know that I prefer the passivity reading to the activity writing. So I feel good about exercising some discipline to write about things as I encounter them and have about 20 pages now.

From reading colleagues' work, I know that first dissertation chapters tend to run on the long side (60+ pages), as the author figures out what he or she is arguing. As my undergraduate thesis adviser told me, "You can't edit what you haven't written yet." So some of the pages I have written will probably be condensed down into paragraphs, or even sentences, as I distill my notes into a concise argument in 30 or 40 pages. I can't help but feel a little miffed, however, that the effort that went into all those pages will likely go unnoticed, and I am tempted to workshop a long version of my first chapter, just so that someone read all this stuff that I've been writing!

Here is where you come in, Dear Reader. I assume most of my ramblings are not interesting to you until I figure out what it is that I am arguing, but the following snippet of text will at least give you an idea of the shape of the project. While in a punny mood one evening, I realized that--if I didn't over do it--I might be able to present my dissertation using the metaphor of multi-course meal. At the end of the Acknowledgments section I lay out what amounts to a menu of what will be served in the pages to come:

In keeping with the theme of food and foodways, one could describe this dissertation as an eight-course meal, with each section or chapter representing a different course. The Acknowledgements are like the soup course: “to stimulate the stomach, not weigh it down.”* The Introduction to my theory of the “telescopic body” is meant “to flatter the gums,” as Henriette Davidis thought appetizers should. I will build my case in the succeeding chapters. With Chapter One, the starter, we have reached the main courses. Davidis suggested a light meat such as steamed poultry, or fish; I will review the by-now familiar history of the development of the New Knowledge of Nutrition in the first three decades of the twentieth century and offer a novel case study on the rations for the sick in Dresden during World War I. According to Davidis-Holle, the entree should be the most complicated dish and the highlight of the meal; Chapter Two will attempt to close the reception loop from producers of scientific information about the healthiest way to preapare vegetables to uses of that same information, namely housewives and the canning industry. By convention the next course consisted of either a roast with compote or a warm pudding: comfort food for a chapter that takes place at home. Chapter Three explores foodways in the ordinary kitchens in both city and countryside. Chapter Four returns to the topic of eating for health/food for the sick (Krankenkost), an apt parallel for the course of light vegetables without meat. The seventh, dessert, course concludes the meal; whereas a middle-class German Hausfrau might have served a torte or ice cream, I will summarize my argument and indicate what changed between 1900 and 1933/5 and what remained the same. The Epilogue looks at the concept of the Volkskörper and its fate up to the present; those who are sated may skip this course, as one may pass on the cheese, fruits, and sweets at the end of long and filling banquet. Finally, to give the reader a “taste” of early-twentieth-century Germany, I have opened each chapter with a representative selection of recipes. Guten Appetit!


*--Davidis-Holle, Das Praktische Kochbuch (1901), 740.

Ein deutschsprachiges Weihnachten

DH and I, with "the gang" (our Bible study group), after

decorating the house and Christmas tree

"A German-language Christmas," reads the title of this blog post. Now that I am back in the United States, it's easy to see that Christmas here is a lot like Christmas over there. You are probably aware that many of our cherished traditions have their roots in that Teutonic nation: decorated fir trees, braided Christmas bread, "Silent Night." For my Christmas Eve entry this year, here is a medley of Christmas celebrations from various places in Europe, ending in Deutschland:

The best of European Christmas:
http://www.viennaforbeginners.com/

This blog carries lovely photographs of Vienna, accompanied by nostalgic or quirky verse. (My favorite references US Poet Laureate Billy Collins.) Although I have spent only three days there, it makes me impatient to go back this summer!

The worst: In the Netherlands, Sinterklaas (Santa Claus) arrives on 5 December on a large ship, then transfers to a white horse. He is accompanied by Zwarte Piet (Black Peter), "a Moor," an actor in blackface.
Once a slave to Saint Nicholas, the many Peters (yes, he's been cloned) now each have a particular job to do: while one wraps presents, another bakes cookies; while one navigates, another still plays the fool to rouse the crowd while they wait for the Big Man. The Netherlands used be a great sea-faring nation, which included trade not just in spices but in people, too.

Fun fact to know and tell: when DH and I were in Chicago recently to attend the Lyric Opera and visit a few museums, we saw the 50 national Christmas trees in the Museum of Science and Industry. Each was decorated by members of a local heritage group to represent Christmas in Kenya, Egypt, Belize, Russia, Japan, and Scotland. Although the trees were spread out, it was easy to see that neighboring countries share some traditions, like the parades of children re-creating Mary and Joseph's search for room at an inn in Central and Latin America, or the emphasis on Epiphany in Eastern Orthodox countries like Greece and Ukraine. One fun fact we learned is that in Hungary, finding a spider web in the house on Christmas Day brings good luck. DH has been teasing me about (not) cleaning the house, just in case!

It's Academic: Joe Perry, UIUC History PhD, Christmas in Germany: a cultural history
Finally, I share with you a brief summary of a first book, just published by someone who graduated from my department a few years ago. In Christmas in Germany: a cultural history, Joe Perry reconstructs two hundred years' worth of holiday rituals and celebrations, from the Christmas tree (der Weihnachtsbaum) to Father Christmas (der Weihnachtsmann) to "the Christmas spirit" (die Weihnachtsstimmung), in order to explore how these seemingly timeless and universal traditions were constructed in the early 1800s as a reaction to the tumultuous Napoleonic Era. Like many Europeans whose lives and countries had been rearranged by the ambitious Emperor of France, Germans turned inward toward the private sphere and created the modern Western ideal of (bourgeois) family life. Perry shows how Germans developed a national emotional culture around the combination of Western Christianity and pagan festivals; however, this common culture still allowed for differences in class, confession (Catholic vs. Protestant, Jews), and politics. Ancient faith in the birth of God's son combined with modern consumerism (Kauflust--the desire to buy) and medieval pagan emphasis on light during the darkest time of the year--strands we still find in our American Christmases. Moreover, Perry argues that "This book moves beyond public/private dichotomies to argue that Christmas, supposedly a private family celebration, was and is Germany's national holiday" (7). It is the private, "feminine" side of national belonging, which historians have tended to ascribe to the more obvious, masculine militarism of public German nationalism. For the last 200 years, it has been one thing most Germans had in common, as whomever claimed to speak for "the nation" (Social Democrats, National Socialists, Cold War liberals, Communists) tried to shape how private individuals did or did not celebrate it. Perry also tries to write the history of German Christmas "from below," showing how some Germans pushed back against the contemporary narrative of what Christmas was supposed to be. In other words, the "war on Christmas" began as soon as it was invented as we know it.

However you do (or do not) celebrate Christmas, I wish you Happy Holidays and a Joyous New Year!

Experimental Cooking, I

I have been wondering how to include you, Dear Reader, in my dissertation research, now that I am home from Germany and spending my days either reading secondary literature--most of it probably uninteresting to you--or doing close reads of primary sources. That may be interesting to you, but only once I have figured out what I think it means in terms of my broader argument about ideas on food and bodies in early-twentieth-century Saxony. Both of my advisers have given me the green light on my dissertation outline, so while you wait for me to fill it in with case studies, here are some gustatory illustrations.

At the moment I am organizing and reading through the photographs I took back in September 2010 at the Dortmund Kochbuch Museum of the most famous cookbook in Germany, the Praktisches Kochbuch. Henriette Davidis (1801-1876) published the first edition of this practical cookbook in 1844; after her death the publisher contracted with a series of editors to continue capitalizing on her famous name. You can still purchase editions on amazon.de; the most recent edition came out last year (2010). What made Davidis's cookbook so famous in an otherwise glutted market of literature for middle-class housewives and daughters was that she wrote for beginners, describing how to prepare even basic kitchen staples like pickles, noodle dough, or flavored butters. Moreover, rather than merely "borrowing" recipes she tested the ones that she published. Later editors retained her name and often the format, but they also updated the recipes to reflect changing tastes, ingredients, and technologies (i.e. gas and electric stoves, refrigerators).

I have heard that one should not try out new recipes for parties or when company comes over for dinner, but that hasn't stopped me--or many of the users of the cookbooks from the early 1900s that I have been reading! I have attended two potlucks in the last week, and for each I tried out a recipe from the Davidis line of cookbooks. What made these recipes particularly challenging was not the translation from German to English or from grams into cups but rather the fact that they were written in the middle of World War I, when due to the incompetency of the various levels of government and the English blockade, many foodstuffs (like pork, beef, milk, wheat, potatoes, eggs, sugar, and coffee) became scarce for many Germans. Workers living in cities usually had it worse than the middle class, who could afford to buy on the black market (Schwarzmarkt), and the farmers, who simply refused to sell what they produced at the government-determined prices. I tried to find a balance between the historical frugality these recipes embody and the fact that I still wanted the results to taste good! Below are two recipes translated more or less literally from Luise Holle's Praktisches Kriegskochbuch (1916), with my comments in brackets.

Christmas Cake [Weihnachtskuchen]
Stir 50 g lard or artificial fat [1/4 cup unsalted stick margarine] until soft, add 100 g fine sugar [1/2 cup] 1 egg yolk and 2 teaspoons of beaten egg powder [Eiersparpulver], a pinch of salt, 50 g diced citron [1/3 cup], 40 g raisins [1/4 cup], 30 g coarsely chopped nuts [1/4 cup chopped walnuts] and 300 g flour [2.5 cups] mixed with 1 packet of baking powder [??] to that and then fold in the stiff peaks of the egg white. Fill a long, prepared [greased] loaf pan with all but 5 teaspoons full of the batter, which one reserves. On the dough spread 3 spoons of breadcrumbs [omitted], then 30 g raisins [1/4 cup--actually, the rest of the bag of golden California raisins] and 30 g of grated nuts [>1/4 cup chopped walnuts] mixed with 2 teaspoons of cocoa powder, and pour the rest of the batter on top. The cake must bake 1 hour at moderate [gleichmässige] heat [on the advice of an older woman at church I settled on 325 F for 25 minutes].

I decided to forgo the historical accuracy of using some kind of powdered egg substitute in favor of one actual egg. Perhaps for this reason, my dough was rather dry--and that was with only half the recommended flour (according to a couple of online measurement conversion sites). However, I am proud of the fact that I beat the egg white into "stiff white peaks" the old-fashioned way.* Plus, it seemed a little silly to use the electric mixer for only a single egg white. Besides the cooking temperature, I also had to guess about the baking powder. Who knows how much and what kind of baking powder was in one packet sold in Germany in 1916? Today they contain 15g, so I went with 1 level tablespoon of my usual double-acting baking powder. However, on account of the dryness, the two halves did not bake together. The result was something more like Christmas Granola Bars than Christmas Cake. (See above.) I think next time I will go ahead and use a whole stick of margarine (or butter) and be even more judicious with the flour. As it is, I ate what we brought home from the party with milk for breakfast. That's an economical way of using leftovers Henriette and Luise surely would have approved of.

"Blarney," in progress: potatoes, 
cabbage, carrots (later: another
layer of potatoes, then onion)

For the second event, I knew the meat dish would be a roast, so I decided to make Falsches Irisches Gericht, which literally translates as "False Irish Dish." This cookbook has a number of foreign dishes--Danish Soup, Belgian Oven Dish with White Chicory, and Gypsy Turnips--so I am not sure why the title for this one is modified by "false." I am pretty sure the turnip recipe is no more authentic, but for some reason Holle felt the need to distance this mixture of potatoes, cabbage, and carrots from the Emerald Isle. Dear Husband suggested I should call this one "Blarney"!

False Irish Dish, or "Blarney" In a cooking pot greased with fat, heat 1/8 liter of water, lay finely chopped white cabbage in layers, raw potatoes cut in slices, and some finely chopped carrots in between. Spread salt and pepper on each layer, cook everything together for 10 minutes and put the dish in a cooker [Garkocher] for 2 hours. Only stir some fat into the dish at the very end, after spreading a few spoonfuls of onion cubes cooked light-brown [in butter].

This recipe reads like how I usually cook: with the exception of the strange precise-ness of the volume of water, no amounts or measurements are specified. I ended up using 3 large skin-on potatoes (or 6 the size of your fist), cut into thin-ish slices; several carrots peeled and halved short-ways (and long-ways if the top half was fatter)--I don't know how many(!); and most of a bag of prepared coleslaw mix to cut down on prep time. I hate to have Reste and would have used the whole bag if I could have fit it all in the glass casserole dish. I simply checked the water when testing the dish for done-ness every 20 minutes. In place of the slow-cooker I put it in the oven at 275 F for an hour. Although the butter-cooked onion smelled absolutely delicious, I had forgotten the salt and pepper, so I thought the result was not very tasty. (The other guests assured me otherwise.) Nevertheless, when re-using the leftovers, I am adding the rest of the shredded cabbage and some Kräutersalz [herb salt] that I brought back with me, so now this quasi-Irish dish will definitely taste German to me.

I anticipate doing more experimental cooking, if only because I like trying new dishes. But I wonder what impact this very subjective experience will have on my dissertation, if any. Does(n't) my project require that I know what common foods looked like, cooked like, tasted like--even digested like? If I don't share that sensory experience with my historical actors, if I merely re-use the words they used, I am afraid that my analysis will merely become a sort of citation analysis: "the description süsssauer [sweet and sour] often appeared in recipes for..." or "pikant [spicy] meant different things to different people...." On the one hand, it is objectively impossible to recreate boiled turnips from 1917 or Sauerbraten from 1933: the varieties of vegetables are more homogeneous now, the soil then was more nutrient-poor, my water is softer. More to the point, my taste history is different as an American in the 21st century than that of a woman of my age and class living in early 20th-century Saxony. For one, I have grown up eating more processed and packaged foods; Davidis couldn't know what Pepsi, Chef Boyardee, Pop Tarts, or pixie sticks taste like. Even though I don't eat/drink any of those things anymore, my expectations for sweet, salty, spicy, and other flavors are surely not the same as those of someone who grew up at a time when the recommended daily intake of salt was 15g[!] (it's currently 2.3g/day). This cultural variety is why Coke, McDonald's, and other globalized food commodities taste different in different parts of the world today. On the other hand, historians have long been in the practice of writing about societies of which they are not a part and cultures they have not experienced. Surely I can still come up with something interesting to say about foodways that are so different from mine, just as men can write about women in history, modern citizens can write about slaves, Americans can write about Germans, and so forth. Some scholars assert only personal experience can make one an expert in a particular category of identity, whereas others argue that being an outsider gives one a better perspective. I suppose with my food projects I am straddling the line a little bit. Come back to read more of my philosophizing about food and bodies, with the remove of an ocean and 100 years...

*--Unfortunately, I paid bodily for my re-creation: 2 days later I had shooting pain in my right shoulder, presumably my deltoid tendon complaining about the stress I put it through whipping that egg white. How did all those housewives did it for all those years??