The Truth About Baked Beans

The Truth About Baked Beans: An Edible History of New England- Meg Muckenhoupt
Washington Mews Books
Release Date: August 25, 2020

Rating:
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Synopsis:  Meg Muckenhoupt begins with a simple question: When did Bostonians start making Boston Baked Beans? Storekeepers in Faneuil Hall and Duck Tour guides may tell you that the Pilgrims learned a recipe for beans with maple syrup and bear fat from Native Americans, but in fact, the recipe for Boston Baked Beans is the result of a conscious effort in the late nineteenth century to create New England foods. New England foods were selected and resourcefully reinvented from fanciful stories about what English colonists cooked prior to the American revolution―while pointedly ignoring the foods cooked by contemporary New Englanders, especially the large immigrant populations who were powering industry and taking over farms around the region. 

The Truth about Baked Beans explores New England’s culinary myths and reality through some of the region’s most famous foods: baked beans, brown bread, clams, cod and lobster, maple syrup, pies, and Yankee pot roast. From 1870 to 1920, the idea of New England food was carefully constructed in magazines, newspapers, and cookbooks, often through fictitious and sometimes bizarre origin stories touted as time-honored American legends. This toothsome volume reveals the effort that went into the creation of these foods, and lets us begin to reclaim the culinary heritage of immigrant New England―the French Canadians, Irish, Italians, Portuguese, Polish, indigenous people, African-Americans, and other New Englanders whose culinary contributions were erased from this version of New England food. Complete with historic and contemporary recipes, The Truth about Baked Beans delves into the surprising history of this curious cuisine, explaining why and how “New England food” actually came to be.

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The Truth About Baked Beans is an incredibly detailed and well-researched book on the history of food in New England and the people who ate it.  Here we take a look behind the "traditional" New England foods, from maple syrup and lobster to cod and baked beans, and discover what New Englanders have actually been eating throughout history.

It will probably not come as a surprise to discover that the "traditional" New Englander and their dinners were invented in the late 1800s.  Times were changing, people were moving to cities, immigrants were moving to the United States, and a few Victorians began to think that life must have been better back in the day.  Their racism, classism, and outright xenophobia erased the Irish, Italian, Polish, Greek, and other European and African immigrants and slaves from the region, replaced them with a few helpful Native Americans who showed the Pilgrims how to plant corn before conveniently disappearing into the mists, and behold! The "traditional" New Englander and his food was born.  This attitude blended with the new scientific approach of the late 1800s-early 1900s where a few "experts" worked hard to convince poor people that what they were eating wasn't healthy and that they could eat better and cheaper with plain, boiled, tasteless meals that required hours of cooking and no vegetables.  

The book is a social, environmental, and cultural history of New England since the 1600s.  It tries to answer questions about what people were living in the region, what they were eating, what they had access to, and how attitudes towards different foods changed over time.  However, I didn't find myself as interested in this book as I expected to be.  Possibly this was because there was so much research that, despite Muckenhoupt's humor throughout the book, it ended up reading more like a scholarly work than a light food history read.  There was also a lot of repetition, some due to how the book was structured, and the combination made it a much more difficult book to get through than I expected.  The pacing dragged and I had a hard time staying interested for long periods of time.  Overall, this is an interesting book, but maybe more for intense thesis scholars than the rest of us.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

Lady Romeo

Lady Romeo: The Radical and Revolutionary Life of Charlotte Cushman, America's First Celebrity- Tana Wojczuk  
Avid Reader/Simon & Schuster
Release Date: July 7, 2020

Rating:
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Synopsis: From the very beginning, she was a radical. At age nineteen, Charlotte Cushman, America’s beloved actress and the country’s first true celebrity, left her life—and countless suitors—behind to make it as a Shakespearean actress. After revolutionizing the role of Lady Macbeth in front of many adoring fans, she went on the road, performing in cities across a dividing America and building her fame. She was everywhere. And yet, her name has faded in the shadows of history.

Now, for the first time in decades, Cushman’s story comes to full and brilliant life in this definitive, exhilarating, and enlightening biography of the 19th-century icon. With rarely seen letters, Wojczuk reconstructs the formative years of Cushman’s life, set against the excitement and drama of New York City in the 1800s, featuring a cast of luminaries and revolutionaries that changed the cultural landscape of America forever.

A vivid portrait of an astonishing and uniquely American life, Lady Romeo reveals one of the most remarkable women in United States history, and restores her to the center stage where she belongs.

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The story of a little known, but pioneering actress, Lady Romeo introduces the reader to Charlotte Cushman- perhaps the greatest actress of her age and a woman who proved to the world that America was ready to embrace culture, theater, and especially Shakespeare.  Her triumphs and setbacks built Charlotte into a strong and determined woman- determined to provide for her family, determined to prove her own talent, and determined to prove America's cultural place in the world.  She befriended politicians and authors, actors and sculptors, and helped support other women in their professions.  Described here by Tana Wojczuk as America's first celebrity, Charlotte Cushman also had to learn to balance her public and private lives.  Especially when she was young, Charlotte worried about the effect on her American career if it was discovered that she had married another woman.  But in Europe as a leading actress her relationships with women and tendency to wear men's clothes were less remarked on.

I loved learning about the enterprising, determined, and pioneering Charlotte Cushman.  Wojczuk is at her best when writing about Charlotte's time on stage, bringing to life Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth or Romeo.  At these times Charlotte herself comes to life, much as she breathed life into her characters.  Wojczuk describes how Cushman left an entire generation of women (including Louisa May Alcott) star-struck; redefined Romeo and reintroduced the original Shakespearean text of Romeo and Juliet to English audiences; and broke restricting 19th-century gender roles on both sides of the ocean.

 I would have enjoyed a deeper exploration of Cushman's inner life- her emotions and thoughts, her family, and her romantic relationships- instead of the often flat or surface look we get here.  Lady Romeo is often so fast-paced that it feels like we've skipped years of Cushman's life and development.  At other times repetition or time-period hopping take away some of the emotional impact of scenes like Cushman's final performance- beautifully written and detailed but put in the beginning of the book, before we get to know Cushman, and then ignored completely at the end when it might have had an even larger emotional impact.  The people around Charlotte had no life to them, we get no real idea why Charlotte loved someone, what attracted her to a person (platonically or romantically).  Whether this is because there wasn't anything in the resources used to flesh out the people, or often Charlotte herself,  is impossible to say. But Lady Romeo definitely left me wanting to know more about Charlotte and her world- how she fit into it and how she changed it to fit her.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review