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