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Table of Contents
About The Book
Haber's secret weapon is the cookbook. She unearths cookbooks and menus from rich and poor, urban and rural, long-past and near-present and uses them to answer some fascinating puzzles:
Why was the food in Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt's White House so famously bad? Were they trying to keep guests away, or did they themselves simply lack the taste to realize the truth? It turns out that Eleanor's chef wrote a cookbook, which solves the mystery.
How did food lure settlers to the hardship of the American West? Englishman Fred Harvey's Harvey Girls tempted them with good food and good women.
How did cooking keep alive World War II Army and Navy POWs in the Pacific? A remarkable cookbook reveals how recollections of home cooking and cooking resourcefulness helped mend bodies and spirits.
From Hardtack to Home Fries uses a light touch to survey a deeply important subject. Women's work and women's roles in America's past have not always been easy to recover. Barbara Haber shows us that a single, ubiquitous, ordinary-yet-extraordinary lens can illuminate a great deal of this other half of our past. Haber includes sample recipes and rich photographs, bringing the food of bygone eras back to life.
From Hardtack to Home Fries is a feast, and a delight.
Product Details
- Publisher: Free Press (May 11, 2010)
- Length: 256 pages
- ISBN13: 9781439137598
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Raves and Reviews
Julia Child What a pleasure to have an illustrated peep into Amer-ican history through the treasures of the Schlesinger Library's culinary collection. Barbara Haber, the library's distinguished culinary curator, gives us here a short tour through some fascinating insights that we would most probably never have known about were it not for the cookbooks involved.
Why was the F. D. Rooseveltian food so notably bad, for instance? What about celebrity diets, Dr. Kellogg and his vegetarian and health legacy, and food reformists in general? There is the miserable life of the Irish immigrants and the veritable slave labor they performed. We see rare aspects of black history through its cooking, Jewish life through Jewish cooking. History becomes more meaningful when we can relate it to life, and food is indeed life.
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- Book Cover Image (jpg): From Hardtack to Homefries eBook 9781439137598