225: What's Cooking? A History of Food in America

BackStory

History, Education

4.7 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 29 November 2019

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s the holidays — that time of the year when food is everywhere. So, Brian, Joanne, and Nathan sit down to discuss some of America’s many homegrown culinary traditions and what the food we eat says about American identity.

In this episode we talked to Pati Jinich of “Pati’s Mexican Kitchen.” Find her recipe for Chilorio Burritas (and more) on her website. We also talked about Maida Heatter’s “Best Damn Lemon Cake.” Learn more about Heatter and find her lemon cake recipe (as well as a few other desserts) in this 1982 story from the Washington Post.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment
0:05.7	for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.
0:12.9	From Virginia Humanities, this is backstory.
0:22.4	Welcome the backstory.
0:23.4	I'm Brian Balla.
0:24.4	I'm Nathan Connolly.
0:25.9	And I'm Joanne Freeman.
0:26.9	We're going to spend the next hour talking about food.
0:31.1	And since we're a history show, let's start things off in the 18th century, with a fiery
0:36.7	newspaper essay written by Benjamin Franklin.
0:39.6	Now, Ben Franklin had strong opinions about almost everything, including what Americans
0:46.9	ate.
0:47.9	OK, let me see if I can do my best.
0:51.0	Ben Franklin impersonation here.
0:53.4	This is historian Katrina Wester.
0:55.8	He says that in his essay, Franklin rushed to the defense of an American food that a British
1:01.2	writer had mocked.
1:03.2	Benjamin Franklin with a German accent.
1:06.4	OK, here we go.
1:11.1	Pray let me, and then, American inform the gentleman who seems ignorant of the matter,
1:16.5	that Indian corn, take it for all in all, is one of the most agreeable and wholesome grains
1:21.5	in the world.
	...

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