Print

Email story

Comment

Letter to the editor

Food for thought

A massive new archive at the University of Michigan is proof that the United States has a culinary history worthy of study.

By BILL DURYEA
Published June 8, 2005

ANN ARBOR, Mich. - For a nation alternately yoked to fast food and fascinated by international flavors, it may be tempting to think the United States doesn't have much to show in the way of native dishes.

The first time Jan Longone, 71, encountered that dismissive attitude was nearly a quarter century ago at a food symposium in Oxford, England. "America doesn't have any history, much less culinary history," she was told.

But the Boston native and self-proclaimed "digger" had come prepared for battle. She presented a list of quintessentially American dishes - Rhode Island Slump, Florida Guava Preserve, Idaho Miner's Bread and perhaps the most unique of all, Kansas Poor Man's Pudding.

"They didn't even know what succotash was," Longone said recently, her indignation still fresh.

Since that encounter, Longone, an antiquarian book dealer by trade, has staked a claim as a standard-bearer of U.S. culinary history by amassing an archive of 20,000 items that she donated to the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan. Since 2000, she has been the museum's culinary curator and also serves on the editorial advisory board of the University of California at Berkeley's book series "Studies in Food and Culture."

The Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive, as it is formally known, contains several centuries of material. There are cookbooks (the first authored by an African-American woman, Melinda Russell, in 1866), advertisements (for Jell-O, and the New York Excelsior Steam Cracker Bakery), posters (from World War I, entreating people to help "re-chickenize devastated France"), photographs (of bean pickers in Florida and the vast kitchen staff of the Biltmore Hotel), menus, travel guides, diaries, maps and histories of every imaginable food, and where and how to consume it.

"Clements has the milestones of American cookery and we have everything else," Longone said. The collection is so vast that it will take until 2009 before each item is cataloged.

For a visitor from Florida, Longone (pronounced Lawn-GO-nee) quickly gathered a dozen or so books: memoirs, charitable cookbooks and promotional pamphlets. She does similar searches for researchers and chefs.

"Perhaps no industry in the state of Florida makes a stronger appeal to the imagination than the raising of frogs for the large markets, where there appears to be an ever increasing demand for fresh carefully selected and properly graded frog meat," reads a 1936 pamphlet from the Florida Department of Agriculture titled "Bullfrog Farming and Frogging."

There's a 1938 book of citrus recipes compiled by Jesse Chandler Coachman, the owner of the Kumquat Sweet Shop in Clearwater. A cheesy-looking spiral-bound book called Cracker Cookin' from 1984 includes a 45-rpm record of the song I Want To Be a Florida Cracker as well as this defense of authentic Florida cuisine:

"We must take issue with Waverley Root's assessment of Florida food "as characterized an overwhelming abundance of raw materials and a rather spectacular absence of good cooking.' "

Longone picked up a small volume, The Working Band Cook Book, from the pile. It was a charitable cookbook, one of thousands put out after the Civil War for local fundraising. The significance of this one by the Working Band of the First Presbyterian Church in Jacksonville in 1902 is that it is the oldest known example from Florida. But it doesn't appear in any published bibliography.

"Until we record it (in the archive) it doesn't exist," she said.

The Clements Library celebrated the public opening of the Longone Center for Culinary Research with a three-day symposium last month. The first of what will be n every-other-year affair, It brought together about 250 food writers, aficionados and academics to peruse the collection, talk about food and, of course, eat. (The 2007 symposium will be on the subject of "Regional and Ethnic Culinary Americana.")

Menus abounded with American foods: wines from northern Michigan, Iowa Maytag blue cheese, Vermont maple-glazed pecans, seasonal mushrooms. But if there was an overarching objective it was to put to rest the notion that the study of foodways, though relatively new, is somehow a second-rate version of real history.

"I would say the field is in its teenage years, high in hormonal levels and excitement, but not possessing the knowledge of full adulthood," John C. Dann, director of the Clements, told the crowd. If there are parents of this field of history, they are probably Longone and her husband, Daniel, a professor emeritus of organic chemistry at the university and an authority on wine and winemaking.

The Longones have no children, but they have nurtured the study of culinary history with single-minded devotion. They spend their birthdays and anniversaries visiting libraries and historical societies around the country, tracking rumors of lost manuscripts and authors who live on only in their collection.

"She started out as a wide-eyed enthusiast and is now a bibliographer," Dann said. "She took risks, spent money she didn't have, put her neck on the line and no doubt convinced some people she was a bit nutty."

By bringing her archive under the same roof as one of the nation's most extensive collections of Americana, Longone has offered the ultimate rebuttal to those, who for decades, even centuries, have scoffed at the importance of food in this nation's history.

Soon after donating her archive, the curators at the Clements set about combing through their collections for food references. Well-known pieces were seen with new eyes.

For example, one of the very first images of life in the Americas is an engraving by Theodore DeBry from 1591, depicting Indians in Florida sowing seeds.

"The Indians look like they've stepped out of a Botticelli painting, but the details are accurate," said Clayton Lewis, the graphics curator at the Clements.

When combined, the items in the collection capture the sweep of social change in the country, everything from wars to westward expansion, the Great Depression to diet fads. But despite its obvious relevance to other subjects, culinary history has been held back by the chauvinism of male historians who focused on politics and war, and even by feminists who thought it demeaning to focus on the activities of women in the home.

"They weren't just cooks," Longone said in defense of the female cookbook authors of the 18th and 19th centuries. "They edited newspapers. They were active in immigration reform. They advocated for women's rights."

On the morning after the symposium, Ari Weinzweig, the co-owner of Zingerman's, a deli in downtown Ann Arbor with a nationwide reputation for its mail-order catalog, nursed a pot of Nilgiri tea from the Blue Mountains of southern India and ruminated about the interplay of history and food.

Since 1982 when he and his partners opened Zingerman's, Weinzweig has made periodic trips into the Longone's archive to resurrect the forgotten foods and preparation techniques that have made Zingerman's menu a foodie's delight.

Every item on the menu, from the Irish soda bread to the Key lime pie to "really wild wild rice," gets a thorough historical vetting, the results of which Weinzweig, who majored in history at the University of Michigan, often details in his monthly newsletter. Subscribe at www.zingermans.com.

Not infrequently, his research takes him to Jan Longone's basement bookstore a short walk from the deli.

"Say I'm learning about long peppers," Weinzweig said. All he had to do was travel a few blocks to Jan's Ann Arbor Wine and Food Library.

"She had it in her head. She'd tell me there's references here, there's references there, I've got an advertising thing from the 1920s, that kind of stuff."

The payoff, he says, is reconnecting modern eaters with Colonial-era recipes. On the first night of the symposium, a couple arrived at Zingerman's Roadhouse (the restaurant corollary to the downtown deli, bakehouse and creamery), looking for one thing: Indian Pudding. The baked desert of cornmeal, molasses and egg has been a regular on the menu for the past year.

The recipe, however, has been around a good deal longer than that.

Amelia Simmons, thought to be the author of the first wholly American cookbook in 1796, included a version in her American Cookery. As with other items on the menu, Longone's archive was instrumental in bringing the recipe to life. As the couple were leaving, Weinzweig asked if they had enjoyed the dessert.

"It was great!" Weinzweig said, imitating the way the man punched his fist in the air. "That's the kind of reaction you see at a Michigan football game, not over a dessert."

"We've created this organizational existence where the history and the intellectual engagement is what we do," Weinzweig said. "Having this resource in town is an amazing thing. Now it won't be just the people in the know who use it. It'll be open to everybody.

"Jan never says, "You're not allowed in here, you don't have a degree in culinary history.' She makes it accessible and fun. It has to be fun."

Bill Duryea can be reached at 813 226-3322 or duryea@sptimes.com

The Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive is located at the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.

It holds more than 20,000 items from the 16th to 20th centuries, including cookbooks, menus, magazines, maps, manuscripts, diaries, letters, advertisements and reference works.

Web site: www.clements.umich.edu/culinary/

[Last modified June 7, 2005, 08:45:48]