Taste Makers

Fly Market (ca. 1699 - 1821)

March 28, 2023

The Fly Market was an old meat market in lower manhattan; the name comes from the Dutch word Vly which meant marsh—the marsh market. The market opened in 1699, and by "1736, it contained six butchers' stands [and] a slave market." (New York Daily Tribune, 1858). The enslaved were bought and sold at the Fly Market, and auctions were held weekly. (McManus) Before the abolition of slavery in 1827, posters read as follows, "To be sold at public vendue, on Saturday morning next, at 10 o'clock, at the Fly Market, a negro man, who can cook and do all sorts of household work." (De Voe, 1862) In 1741, there was a revolt by Africans and the Irish against slavery and the enslavers. (De Voe) Jared Day, an academic researcher, pointed out that storage rooms and cellars below the slaughterhouses were rented out to "food vendors, women and the poor, particularly African Americans." (Day) Prominent cattle butchers of the fly market were John Pessenger, who supplied meat to George Washington's Army (Wilson), and Henry Astor, the brother of John Jacob Astor, the Opium King of New York. Richard Green, Isaac Varian, John Stockyard, Peter Jay, and Samuel Lawrence were other successful Fly Market butchers. In the nearby corridors of the Fly Market lived Mary Simpson Washington, a formerly enslaved woman freed by George Washington. She was a widow and grocer at 11 Rutgers, and "she sold butter and eggs, cookies and pies….” and a giant cake called the Washington Cake. Simpson was responsible for popularizing Washington’s birthday. (The Sun, 1898) Other grocers and businessmen sold goods and produce at the Fly Market, like, Henry Brevoort, who "cultivated a garden" on the bowery and sold "onions, cabbages, game, cocks” in the Fly. (Morning Herald, 1840.) According to the early New York City directories, fruiters, grocers, merchants, and tin men were selling at the market. Nearby hotels such as the Fly Market Hotel and Mrs. Cuyler's offered a boarding and lodging house for the gentleman at 45 Fly Market. (Franks, 1851) There was also Mr. Halsey's Inn at 125 Fly Market. (Alliot) The last bovine butcher moved out around 1821, and the century-old market was torn down shortly afterward. The Fly Market has an intriguing and complex history, covering the slave trade, meat markets, and early merchants in the lower east side. A dedicated researcher must write about this historical site for modern readers. Plenty of digitized research materials are available online; it's just heavily scattered across the internet. The Market Book from 1862 by Thomas Farrington De Voe was the most comprehensive document discovered during my research. 

• New-York daily tribune. [volume] (New-York [N.Y.]), 26 May 1858. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030213/1858-05-26/ed-1/seq-3/> 
• The sun. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]), 02 July 1898. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030272/1898-07-02/ed-1/seq-7/>  
• Morning herald. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]), 29 Jan. 1840. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030312/1840-01-29/ed-1/seq-2/> 
• De Voe, T. F. (Thomas Farrington). (1862). The market book: containing a historical account of the public markets in the cities of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn, with a brief description of every article of human food sold therein, the introduction of cattle in America, and notices of many remarkable specimens. New York: Printed for the author. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.32044014320675 
• BOND, R. E. (2007). Shaping a Conspiracy: Black Testimony in the 1741 New York Plot. Early American Studies, 5(1), 63–94. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23546545 
• Franks, David (1851). The New York Directory. John Doggett & Co. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015065409503 
• Alliot, Paul (1804). Founders Online: To Thomas Jefferson from Paul Alliot, 14 April 1804. National Archives. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-43-02-0200 
• Ulmann A. (1931). Maiden lane: the story of a single street. Maiden lane historical Society. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433058783246&view=1up&seq=9 
• Wilson, R. R. (1902). New York: Old & New: Its Story, Streets, and Landmarks. (n.p.): J.B. Lippincott. 
• McManus, E. J. (2001). A History of Negro Slavery in New York. United States: Syracuse University Press.
• Day, J. N. (2005). Butchers, Tanners, and Tallow Chandlers: The Geography of Slaughtering in Early Nineteenth-Century New York City. Food and History, 3(2), 81-102.

Spring Gardens

March 27, 2023

Spring is here, and if you have land or ample natural light in your home, it's a good time to prepare for growing summer crops. This year, I'll plant the usual effortless crops: tomatoes, basil, zucchini, sunflowers, pumpkins, and okra. Nothing too ambitious. Indoors I've already started growing tomatoes and marigolds by seed. Later this week, I'll plant additional seeds for upcoming crops, hoping that frost will stay away until autumn. The past two years have been unlucky: one year, we were hit with drought and advised to conserve water and stop watering plants, and the year before, a major tropical storm washed away all my flourishing produce in sewage-laced garbage water. I'm hoping for a luckier year. My local public library has started a seed catalog, which I'm excited to use. Recently I borrowed tomatillo, kale, and fennel seeds, and I resupplied the catalog with donated onion and lima bean seed packs. Public library seed catalogs are a  fun way to get the community to participate in at-home gardening and perhaps even learn to move away from our dependency on big chain grocery stores. Today, I spent the whole day outdoors, in the sun, away from the computer, thinking and planning my spring and summer harvest. There is no short supply of books about gardening. My favorites are Garden Anywhere by Alys Fowler, Alice Waters's The Art of Simple Food II, and  DK's Propagating Plants. For anyone curious about gardening, volunteering at a local botanical garden or community garden is one of the best free ways to learn about horticulture. 

Cookbooks: Recipes from India

Barbara Kingsolver

The Table Cloth Timeline

The American Woman's Cookbook (1910)

Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526 - 1593)

Break Fast, and Drink a Beer.

March 21, 2023

When I think about breakfast, I think about McDonald's American breakfast packaged in styrofoam containers called the Big Breakfast® with Hotcakes or even the Denny's Grand Slam. Growing up in America, I ate an excess of fast foods, a running theme in my posts. "On-the-go breakfasters—now about 68 percent of the population—might stop at a fast-food restaurant for a cup of coffee, a breakfast sandwich, a bagel, or a doughnut." (Katz) As an adult, I consumed two decades worth of toasted everything bagels with extra cream cheese and huevos rancheros and seconds on cups of coffee. Interestingly, according to the Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, "water was regarded as unsafe to drink from ancient times through the Renaissance, so beer was the beverage of choice for breakfast." (Katz) It's fascinating that beer was the breakfast beverage of choice, later replaced with coffee and tea. The Bloody Mary is the boozy brunch choice in the 21st century. Eggs, french toast, oatmeal, pancakes, sausage, yogurt, fruit, smoothies, and orange juice are other breakfast staples. Granola, Grapenuts, and cornflakes are all John Harvey Kellogg's inventions and the "Quaker Oats Company developed the technology for puffed cereals... introduced ... at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904." (Katz) The British include grilled tomatoes and mushrooms, scones, and marmalade on the breakfast menus; in China, a classic dish is called chicken congee, a rice porridge with chicken stock. Sundays, A Celebration of Breakfast and Family in 52 Essential Recipes by Mark Pupo comes out at the end of March. Pupo is a food writer who writes about cooking Sunday meals with his chosen family and neurodivergent son. Another breakfast book is Chefs Eat Breakfast Too: A Pro's Guide to Starting The Day Right by Darren Purchese, which came out in 2019. To browse the breakfast dishes from the 20th century, the Culinary Institute of America collects over 40,000 menus from various restaurants and banquets; below are a few of the many breakfast menus in their collection. Additionally, the New York Public Library has 25,000 menus from Miss Frank E. Buttolph, now in The Buttolph Collection of Menus at NYPL, many of which have been digitized.

• Katz S. H. & Weaver W. W. (2003). Breakfast in Encyclopedia of Food and Culture. Scribner.
• Dalby A. (2013). The Breakfast Book. Reaktion Books.

Wiedman Ice Cream

March 20, 2023

My family has few connections to the food industry, culinary creatives, and agriculturalists. However, one distant line goes back to a family of German farmers who immigrated to America in the 1800s—the Wiedmans. The patriarch of this family landed in upstate New York, and I believe after a few years, he wanted to return home to his bavarian homeland. However, Germany refused to allow Wiedman to return. Now in exile, he remained an American. John Gottlieb Wiedman, a stoic Lutheran man from the same area as Einstein in Germany, came over in 1850 and settled in the Buffalo area, specifically Allegany, New York. He bought land, started a family, was a wagon maker, and died in 1913. Wiedman also homesteaded farmland with cows in the harsh winters of upstate New York. The story about the family farm has been passed down from my mother, reinforced by a family tree on Ancestry.com and new information found in local digitized newspaper archives. Gottlieb's sons developed his small farm into a budding American food business, turning the family dairy cows into a successful early 20th-century ice cream business. His descendants became the "owners of the Wiedman Ice Cream Corpora­tion of Olean; the Wiedman Milk Products Company of Allegany, and some fifteen well-known retail chain stores, known as the Clayton Dairy Stores, located throughout western New York and northern Pennsyl­vania." (The Allegany Citizen, 1938)The Wiedman ice cream business lasted 61 years and was eventually sold to General Ice Cream Corporation, which continued to be absorbed by conglomerates, becoming part of Kraft Heinz. According to family lore, an enlarged heart condition forced some family members to sell their land and dairy cows and drop out of the lucrative family business. Some members prospered, and some had more tragic fates. Either way, it's a fascinating personal tale to discover in the archives! 

Pieter Bruegel the Elder

The Maid

March 18, 2023

For women's history month, it's important to point out the role of the maid. Within the archives, the maid is often portrayed as a young white unmarried happy woman, chipper to serve her employer freshly prepared meals. My knowledge of the role of the maid is limited, except for early Irish indentured servants and storylines popularized by television shows like Downton Abbey. After watching The Maid on Netflix, based on a memoir by Stephanie Land about a mother desperately trying to care for her daughter during an uphill legal battle, abusive husband, and underpaid social role as a domestic housekeeper. It is a reminder of how inequitable such a social system is, which traps women into domestic servitude with limited options for freedom. Housekeepers remain off the books, as unreported income and often paid less, as do mothers who care for children. Gus Wezerek and Kristen R. Ghodsee point out, "Women's Unpaid Labor is Worth $10,900,000,000,000." The role of the housekeeper is historically based on exploitation, as women and mothers are asked to do more for less. At the same time, men continue to benefit financially from the unpaid labor of women and mothers. A new book called Getting Me Cheap: How Low-Wage Work Traps Women and Girls in Poverty by Amanda Freeman and Lisa Dodson addresses such social and economic issues. However, hopefully, gender equality is changing, and more men will take on the burden of housekeeping, cooking, and cleaning to create a genderless social role; nevertheless, I sense the battles for emancipation still linger, as Ruth Reichl points out in one of her memoirs, Save Me the Plums, that a woman can not have it all, even with a successful career, and family, the domestic responsibilities and pressures of health and wellbeing still fall on the woman. In my household, it is a constant struggle to fight for equality, as my husband believes women belong in the kitchen and at home, and men belong hunting or on the battlefield. A woman was once her husband's property, banded with a metal ring to a life of servitude. Perhaps, we can rethink such notions of marriage. Well, I'm off now to wash the dishes and the soiled clothes of others; I shall leave an invoice for my labors. 

Ten Restaurants That Changed America

March 17, 2023

My food blog project has been disrupted, which will delay my research and posts. At some point, I will catch up in between slumbers. Although recently, while driving around New Jersey, I finished listening to an audiobook called Ten Restaurants That Changed America by Paul Freedman, a professor at Yale and a culinarian historian of American foods. The book is about the history of influential restaurants like Delmonico's and Sylvia's in New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area's Chez Panisse, and the Mandarin. The book also mentions Howard Johnson's, Antoine's, Schrafft's, Mamma Leone's, Le Pavillon, and Spago. Delmonico's is recognized as America's first restaurant and mentioned in just about every history book about food; interestingly, in the 1800s, Delmonico's opened a 200-acre farm in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to directly supply farm produce for table dining service. Howard Johnson's history is lengthy, and the franchise restaurant is the cover image for the book. The first Howard Johnson's I went to - if not the only Howard Johnson's - was in Times Square a year or so before it closed down in 2005. My professor met me for coffee in the pastel-decorated restaurant that seemed to be from another era; I still remember the conversation, "... eventually this landmark will close too." I've only walked through the doors of one of the ten restaurants mentioned by Freedman. However, I still enjoyed reading America's culinary history, particularly New York's restaurant history, like the history of Sylvia's, a famous African American soul food restaurant in Harlem since 1962, which white food critics ignored because they felt uncomfortable sending readers to a black neighborhood. Gael Greene retold the story; her "editor at New York initially opposed the idea of reporting on Sylvia's because that would encourage readers to do something dangerous, namely visit Harlem. And Greene recollected that at first she was inclined to agree." (Freedman) Yet, eventually, food critics outside of Harlem ventured out and wrote reviews. Sadly, Gael Greene, a food critic at New York Magazine for three decades, passed away in late 2022. Also mentioned in Ten Restaurants That Changed America is the criticism circling Chez Panisse, which labels it pretentious and bourgeois. I don't know why Alice Waters, a francophile, is taking all the credit for the healthy foods movement. Overall, Freedman's book is informative about America's most famous restaurants. Paul Freedman also wrote Why Food Matters (2021) and American Cuisine: And How It Got This Way (2020), and Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (2009).

Irish Cookbooks