I come from a family of eaters. Food was often at the center of family stories and celebrations. I first became fascinated with apples while I was working on my Ph.D. in history, and my interest has since expanded to include all things related to food history. I’ve taught classes on food history, and a few years ago, I started collecting cookbooks. I blog about my cookbook collection and other historical food oddities on my website.
I wrote
The Washington Apple: Orchards and the Development of Industrial Agriculture
This book made me want to pour a glass of cider. Diane Flynt writes about her hunt for heirloom apples as the owner of Foggy Ridge Ciders in Virginia. Along the way, she shares the rich history of apples in the South.
Her writing is poetic. I could almost taste the apples and smell the evening air in the orchards as she checked on her trees. Flynt makes a strong case for why we need agricultural diversity and how the terroir of place is important for the food we produce.
My only regret in reading this book is that Flynt is retired, so I’ll never be able to taste her fine ciders.
For anyone who's ever picked an apple fresh from the tree or enjoyed a glass of cider, writer and orchardist Diane Flynt offers a new history of the apple and how it changed the South and the nation. Showing how southerners cultivated over 2,000 apple varieties from Virginia to Mississippi, Flynt shares surprising stories of a fruit that was central to the region for over 200 years. Colorful characters abound in this history, including aristocratic Belgian immigrants, South Carolina plantation owners, and multiple presidents, each group changing the course of southern orchards. She shows how southern apples, ranging from northern…
I love books that challenge our accepted knowledge of the past. For over 100 years, textbooks have told children that Cyrus McCormick invented the mechanical reaper. Spoiler alert—it turns out the textbooks were all wrong.
Ott takes us through the whole story—how the reaper was actually invented, how the McCormick family created a monopoly on farm equipment, and how they eventually created a monopoly on history. I especially enjoyed the final section of the book, which explains exactly how historians preserved and manipulated history to serve the McCormick company’s ends.
Harvesting History explores how the highly contentious claim of Cyrus McCormick's 1831 invention of the reaper came to be incorporated into the American historical canon as a fact. Spanning the late 1870s to the 1930s, Daniel P. Ott reveals how the McCormick family and various affiliated businesses created a usable past about their departed patriarch, Cyrus McCormick, and his role in creating modern civilization through advertising and the emerging historical profession. The mythical invention narrative was widely peddled for decades by salesmen and in catalogs, as well as in corporate public education campaigns and eventually in history books, to justify…
I think Sanora Babb is an underappreciated author. During the 1930s, Babb worked for the Farm Security Administration and was inspired to write a novel about Dust Bowl migrants. Unfortunately, her publishing contract was canceled when John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath.
As much as I love Steinbeck, I love Babb’s novel more. She paints a vivid picture of life in small-town Oklahoma through small, domestic details. I appreciated the range of characters across the economic spectrum. Her characters are strong, but they are also aware that they are cogs in a machine, caught in circumstances beyond their control. She manages to highlight the plight of farm workers while maintaining their dignity as human beings.
Sanora Babb's long-hidden novel Whose Names Are Unknown tells an intimate story of the High Plains farmers who fled drought dust storms during the Great Depression. Written with empathy for the farmers' plight, this powerful narrative is based upon the author's firsthand experience.
This clear-eyed and unsentimental story centers on the fictional Dunne family as they struggle to survive and endure while never losing faith in themselves. In the Oklahoma Panhandle, Milt, Julia, their two little girls, and Milt's father, Konkie, share a life of cramped circumstances in a one-room dugout with never enough to eat. Yet buried in the…
The family stories in this book bring history to life on a personal level. The five families are connected by their immigrant experience, but they approached food in different ways, from family-oriented German biergartens to kosher delis to imported olive oil. Each new wave of immigrants brought their own unique traditions to America, and the neighborhood evolved as each successive group brought something new to the metaphorical table.
I find the tension between maintaining food traditions and adapting them to a new nation fascinating. It also made me think about how much each group contributed to the American diet.
“Social history is, most elementally, food history. Jane Ziegelman had the great idea to zero in on one Lower East Side tenement building, and through it she has crafted a unique and aromatic narrative of New York’s immigrant culture: with bread in the oven, steam rising from pots, and the family gathering round.” — Russell Shorto, author of The Island at the Center of the World
97 Orchard is a richly detailed investigation of the lives and culinary habits—shopping, cooking, and eating—of five families of various ethnicities living at the turn of the twentieth century in one tenement on the…
This book is delightful. Shapiro is one of my favorite food historians. I recommend all her books, but if you’ve never read her before, start here.
It’s full of surprising and unexpected stories. Eleanor Roosevelt extracts culinary revenge, Eva Braun drinks champagne while worrying about her weight, and Helen Gurley Brown binges on sugar-free gelatin. These stories left me thinking about my own relationship with food and what that says about the society we live in.
'If you find the subject of food to be both vexing and transfixing, you'll love What She Ate' Elle
Did you know that Eleanor Roosevelt dished up Eggs Mexican (a concoction of rice, fried eggs, and bananas) in the White House?
Or that Helen Gurley Brown's commitment to 'having it all' meant dining on supersized portions of diet gelatine?
In the irresistible What She Ate, Laura Shapiro examines the plates, recipe books and shopping trolleys of six extraordinary women, from Dorothy Wordsworth to Eva Braun. Delving into diaries, newspaper articles, cook books and more, Shapiro casts a different light on…
My book is the history of how Washington became the leading apple producing state in the nation. Many people think Washington is green, but the areas where apples are grown commercially are deserts. I explore how the landscape was transformed in the early 1900s by irrigation, rail transportation, and real estate developers to create the apple industry that exists today. Not only did Washington growers have to figure out how to grow apples, but they also convinced consumers to pay a higher price for their fruit through clever marketing campaigns and by producing the most perfect fruit possible.
If you ever wondered how apples are produced or how certain varieties of apples, like Red Delicious, came to dominate grocery stores, this book is for you.
Magnolia Merryweather, a horse breeder, is eager to celebrate Christmas for the first time after the Civil War ended even as she grows her business. She envisions a calm, prosperous life ahead after the terror of the past four years. Only, all of her plans are thrown into disarray when her secret lover returns and starts asking questions she can’t answer without disaster following.
Bryce Day comes home to Alabama after he’s discharged from the First Alabama Cavalry USA with guilt weighing on his heart. His neighbors won’t cotton to his Unionist bent, and the woman of his heart likely…
One terrible lie, a desperate measure to save her past, just might destroy her future…
Award-winning author of historical fiction presents a new novel of love and lies, secrets and sensuality, and the hands of fate weaving it all together.
The American Civil War is finally over and Christmas beckons. Magnolia Merryweather, backyard horse breeder, is eager to celebrate for the first time since the war began even as she continues to grow her business. She envisions a calm, prosperous life ahead after all the terror of the past four years. She’s preparing to follow in her mother’s matriarchal footsteps,…
