Culinary Historians

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Description

This group is for people interested in culinary history. Blogs, articles, recipes, books of note, events to remember, are all welcome as posts to this group.

Publications

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Having been invited recently to a party celebrating the end of Prohibition, I was reminded once again (by comments in the invitation) of how little anyone actually knows about Prohibition and why it happened. And as a historian, I feel moved to elucidate folks on the reality of why we had Prohibition.



Prohibition was, in fact, a feminist issue. If you notice, Prohibition was passed one year after women got the vote. That’s because there were no women’s shelters, and women didn’t...

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One thing of which we are all relatively certain here in the U.S. is that European settlers learned about corn from American Indians. Right? Well, not really. What they learned about from the indigenous peoples of the New World was maize, not corn. Sound like double talk? Well, as it turns out, the word corn may not mean what you think it does, at least not if you’re an American. The term corn actually means the most important cereal crop of a region. Hence, wheat was traditionally the corn of...


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There are few other phrases that so quickly conjure images of pirates riotously celebrating another Caribbean conquest as that hearty “yo ho ho.” But why rum? Quite simple, really—because, beginning in the 1600s, the Caribbean (or West Indies, as the region was then known) was all about sugar, and what better thing to create from sugar by-products than rum? But rum was more than just a nice way to blind oneself at the end of a successful day of pillaging. For a few hundred year...


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