Quotes from Jane Ziegelman

More than a food, the pickle was a kind of drug for tenement children, who were still too young for whiskey.

Unknown to them, spring fever was in fact a vitamin deficiency, mostly likely scurvy, brought on by the winter diet. IN

FDR recoiled from the plebeian food foisted on him as president; perhaps no dish was more off-putting to him than what home economists referred to as "salads," assemblages made from canned fruit, cream cheese, gelatin, and mayonnaise.

Unfortunately, Hoover's calculation rested on an oversight: The distribution of America's new wealth was severely lopsided, the overwhelming share flowing directly into the bank accounts of the very rich, leaving the poor with few or no gains at all.

Lessons in "eating American," it was thought, would not only breed good citizens but also improve the morale, scholarship, and health of the students.

However, not even science could account for all the variables that people introduced to the equation.

They embarked on all kinds of reducing regimens, including the canned pineapple and lamb chop diet, supposedly popular among movie stars: "For breakfast the order is one lamb chop and one slice of pineapple. For luncheon two lamb chops and one slice of pineapple. For dinner two lamb chops and two slices of pineapple.

The Italians arrived with a strong musical tradition; they also had their faith. But food was their cultural touchstone, their way of defying the critics, of tolerating the slurs and all of the other injustices. It was their way of being Italian.

The food authorities who led America through the Depression were overwhelmingly white, Anglo-Saxon women. Not unreasonably, their ideas about food reflected where they came from, culturally speaking. Who but a WASP could think up a diet based around milky chowders and creamed casseroles?

Food, like language, is always in motion, propelled by the same events that fill our history books. Wars, advances in science and technology, and shifting patterns of migration and commerce are continuously shaping and reshaping the foods that sustain us.

For Americans who believed that Italians subsisted on bread and macaroni, the edible delights available in the downtown restaurants came as a revelation.

For city people, time was fractured into finite segments like boxes on a conveyer belt. On the farm, time was continuous, like a string around a tree, one season flowing inevitably into the next. For

In 1928, the Chillicothe Baking Company of Missouri began selling the first loaves of presliced bread under the Kleen Maid Bread brand.

LlVER LOAF 2 pounds liver 4 slices bacon ¼ cup chopped parsley 1 onion 1 cup milk 2 flaked wheat cereal biscuits, crumbed 3 beaten eggs salt and pepper ½ cup tomato ketchup Method—Let liver slices stand in hot water 10 minutes; drain. Grind with onion, parsley and bacon. Add beaten eggs, crumbs and seasonings and pack firmly into loaf pan. Spread tomato ketchup over top of loaf. Bake one hour at 350 degrees. Garnish with broiled bacon slices.

CHOCOLATE CAKE ½ cup butter ¾ cup cocoa ½ cup hot water 1 cup sugar 3 teaspoons baking powder 1 cup honey 4 eggs 1 cup milk 2½ cups cake flour Cream butter, sugar, honey and cocoa and add the hot water, beat well, then add well beaten eggs, flour, baking powder and milk. Bake in a moderate oven (350) for 40 to 50 minutes.2

Manistee was known as a wide-open town, a lucrative stopover for glassware salesmen because lumbermen, when properly drunk, liked to smash their drinking vessels.