Gripped is not exactly the word for what I felt when I first encountered the Tenement Museum in New York City. Swept away is more like it, the museumization of the poor and undocumented, as opposed to the official biographies of 300 white guys in Paris, being unprecedented.
Today's NYT brings news of a book of the recipes of five families who lived in the tenement before it was closed in 1935. The Amazon review calls 97 Orchard Street: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement a book of "forensic gastronomy", which actually suits more the contents of the Ice Man's stomach than documenting the foodways of five immigrant families who lived at 97 Orchard between 1850 and 1935.
(I've been thinking about the Ice Man, too. He was almost lost to posterity due to the idiocy of the Italians. The first cop on the scene tried to extract him from the ice with a chain saw, which destroyed like half the evidence before the cretin's saw ran out of gas. A tourist stole the penis of the unsecured treasure. Having extracted the 10,000 year old non-mummified body, they entertained reporters who smoked cigarettes while he thawed on a slab and started to grow fungus from dirty humans' breath.)
Aaaaaanyway. I have learned half of what I know by reading recipes and cookbooks. The significance of it came to me years ago as I pondered my Sicilian mother-in-law's meatball recipe. It calls for mint. Other allegedly Italian meat dishes she made had cinnamon in them. This is what people in north Africa eat. Cinnamon and mint. Recipes are an oral and sensual history which historians until recently have been too snotty to credit as evidence of trade routes and so on -- the so on being, ohhhh let's say the curiously nappy texture of my husband's Guido hair -- dining parochially and locally as they do on roast beef and claret.
I am interested also -- I have been thinking, in honor of our mutual friend![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fj, about the genius of the Dutch. Huizinga is not exactly a Nouvelle Vague historian -- I think he died, like so many of his courageous countrymen, in the 1940s during a stint in a Nazi prison camp -- but he made the remarkable sane historiographical point that history is not simply the vintage store you go to, to identify the origins of what you're wearing now. It also contains many other things, including recipes, which are about trends which were dying then and happenings that had no historical resonance of which we are aware at all. In other words, it was like reality, not full of portents. Backshadowing historical events, that is, blaming Jews for not getting out of Europe before the Nazi genocide, is one of the historiographical issues historians of genocide have been told to grapple with but which they pretty much don't. You can't know how bad the genocide is going to be in 1937, and you can't blame people who stayed in Europe -- the other former husband's, referred to here as the Old Husband, seven aunts and their entire families -- for being stupid.
In short, history has been run by the white boys way too long, still is, and the history of recipes and Huizinga and the possibilities of 1937 are still grossly underestimated.
( NYT Review of Jane Ziegelman's Book )
Today's NYT brings news of a book of the recipes of five families who lived in the tenement before it was closed in 1935. The Amazon review calls 97 Orchard Street: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement a book of "forensic gastronomy", which actually suits more the contents of the Ice Man's stomach than documenting the foodways of five immigrant families who lived at 97 Orchard between 1850 and 1935.
(I've been thinking about the Ice Man, too. He was almost lost to posterity due to the idiocy of the Italians. The first cop on the scene tried to extract him from the ice with a chain saw, which destroyed like half the evidence before the cretin's saw ran out of gas. A tourist stole the penis of the unsecured treasure. Having extracted the 10,000 year old non-mummified body, they entertained reporters who smoked cigarettes while he thawed on a slab and started to grow fungus from dirty humans' breath.)
Aaaaaanyway. I have learned half of what I know by reading recipes and cookbooks. The significance of it came to me years ago as I pondered my Sicilian mother-in-law's meatball recipe. It calls for mint. Other allegedly Italian meat dishes she made had cinnamon in them. This is what people in north Africa eat. Cinnamon and mint. Recipes are an oral and sensual history which historians until recently have been too snotty to credit as evidence of trade routes and so on -- the so on being, ohhhh let's say the curiously nappy texture of my husband's Guido hair -- dining parochially and locally as they do on roast beef and claret.
I am interested also -- I have been thinking, in honor of our mutual friend
fj, about the genius of the Dutch. Huizinga is not exactly a Nouvelle Vague historian -- I think he died, like so many of his courageous countrymen, in the 1940s during a stint in a Nazi prison camp -- but he made the remarkable sane historiographical point that history is not simply the vintage store you go to, to identify the origins of what you're wearing now. It also contains many other things, including recipes, which are about trends which were dying then and happenings that had no historical resonance of which we are aware at all. In other words, it was like reality, not full of portents. Backshadowing historical events, that is, blaming Jews for not getting out of Europe before the Nazi genocide, is one of the historiographical issues historians of genocide have been told to grapple with but which they pretty much don't. You can't know how bad the genocide is going to be in 1937, and you can't blame people who stayed in Europe -- the other former husband's, referred to here as the Old Husband, seven aunts and their entire families -- for being stupid.In short, history has been run by the white boys way too long, still is, and the history of recipes and Huizinga and the possibilities of 1937 are still grossly underestimated.
( NYT Review of Jane Ziegelman's Book )
