Posts Tagged ‘St. Louis World’s Fair’
“You can’t just eat good food. You’ve got to talk about it too”*…
In the long timeline of human civilization, here’s roughly how things shook out: First, there was fire, water, ice, and salt. Then we started cooking up and chowing down on oysters, scallops, horsemeat, mushrooms, insects, and frogs, in that general chronological order. Fatty almonds and sweet cherries found their way into our diet before walnuts and apples did, but it would be a couple thousand years until we figured out how to make ice cream or a truly good apple pie. Challah (first century), hot dogs (15th century), Fig Newtons (1891), and Meyer lemons (1908) landed in our kitchens long before Red Bull (1984), but they all arrived late to the marshmallow party — we’d been eating one version or another of those fluffy guys since 2000 B.C.
This is, more or less, the history of human eating habits for 20,000 years, and right now, you can find it all cataloged on the Food Timeline, an archival trove of food history hiding in plain sight on a website so lo-fi you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a GeoCities fanpage. When you look past the Times Roman font and taupe background, the Food Timeline happens to be the single most comprehensive inventory of food knowledge on the internet, with thousands upon thousands of pages of primary sources, cross-checked research, and obsessively detailed food history presented in chronological order. Every entry on the Food Timeline, which begins with “water” in pre-17,000 B.C. and ends with “test tube burgers” in 2013, is sourced from “old cook books, newspapers, magazines, National Historic Parks, government agencies, universities, cultural organizations, culinary historians, and company/restaurant web sites.” There is history, context, and commentary on everything from Taylor pork roll to Scottish tablet to “cowboy cooking.”…
The Food Timeline, in all its comprehensive splendor, was the work of an obsessed person: a New Jersey reference librarian named Lynne Olver. Olver launched the site in 1999, two years before Wikipedia debuted, and maintained it, with little additional help, for more than 15 years. By 2014, it had reached 35 million readers and Olver had personally answered 25,000 questions from fans who were writing history papers or wondering about the origins of family recipes. Olver populated the pages with well-researched answers to these questions, making a resource so thorough that a full scroll to the bottom of the Food Timeline takes several labored seconds….
The entry for soup alone spans more than 70,000 words (The Great Gatsby doesn’t break 50,000), with excerpts from sources like Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat’s A History of Food, John Ayto’s An A-Z of Food and Drink, and D. Eleanor Scully and Terence Scully’s Early French Cookery….
For nearly two decades, Olver’s work was everyone else’s gain. In April of 2015, she passed away after a seven-month struggle with leukemia, a tragedy acknowledged briefly at the bottom of the site. “The Food Timeline was created and maintained solely by Lynne Olver (1958-2015, her obituary), reference librarian with a passion for food history.”
In the wake of Olver’s death, no one has come forward to take over her complex project, leaving a void in the internet that has yet to be filled — and worse, her noble contribution to a world lacking in accurate information and teeming with fake news is now in danger of being lost forever…
The internet’s most comprehensive archive of food history — a passion project of one dedicated librarian — predates Wikipedia. Now, it needs a new custodian: “Who Will Save the Food Timeline?”
* Jailbird
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As we contemplate comestibles, we might recall that it was on this date in 1904 (as the Library of Congress notes) that the first ice cream cone was served.
On July 23, 1904, according to some accounts, Charles E. Menches conceived the idea of filling a pastry cone with two scoops of ice-cream and thereby invented the ice-cream cone. He is one of several claimants to that honor: Ernest Hamwi, Abe Doumar, Albert and Nick Kabbaz, Arnold Fornachou, and David Avayou all have been touted as the inventor(s) of the first edible cone. Interestingly, these individuals have in common the fact that they all made or sold confections at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, known as the St. Louis World’s Fair. It is from the time of the Fair that the edible “cornucopia,” a cone made from a rolled waffle, vaulted into popularity in the United States.
Another claimant, Italo Marchiony, actually received a patent in 1903 for a device to make edible cups with handles. However the patent drawings show the device as a molded container rather than the rolled waffle seen at the Fair. Although paper and metal cones were used by Europeans to hold ice cream and pita bread was used by Middle Easterners to hold sweets, the ice-cream cone seems to have come to America by way of “the Pike” (as the entertainment midway of the St. Louis World’s Fair was called).
Randolph Smith Lyon, Mildred Frances Lyon, Mrs. Montague Lyon (Frances Robnett Smith Lyon), Montague Lyon, Jr., eating ice cream cones at the 1904 World’s Fair. Snapshot photograph, 1904. (Missouri History Museum)
The 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis: site of the national debuts of peanut butter, the hot dog, Dr Pepper, iced tea, cotton candy– and of course, ice cream cones. (source)
“There is no sincerer love than the love of food”*…
As the rest of the world had begun to (re)discover their own cuisines and innovate, the French restaurant seemed to be stagnating in a pool of congealing demi-glace.
Elsewhere, places such as Balthazar in New York and the Wolseley in London seemed to be doing the French restaurant better than the French. In France, the old guard of critics and restaurateurs remained convinced that French cuisine was still the best in the world and a point of national pride. The bistros cleaved to the traditional red-and-white checked table cloths and chalked-up menus even as they were microwaving pre-prepared boeuf bourguignon in the back. In 2010, when the French restaurant meal was added to Unesco’s list of the world’s “intangible cultural heritage”, it felt as if the French restaurant had become a museum piece, and a parody of itself.
The perceived excellence of their cuisine and restaurants has long represented a vital part of French national identity. It was too easy to ascribe this decline to a certain national conservatism, complacency and parochialism – facile Anglo-Saxon taunts. The real story is more complicated. The restaurant business always has been subject to changes in society and economic circumstances. Food – what we eat and how we go out to eat it – is constantly evolving, according to trend and time…
French food was the envy of the world – before it became trapped by its own history. Can a new school of traditionalists revive its glories? “The rise and fall of French cuisine.”
* George Bernard Shaw
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As we ponder prandial progress, we might recall that it was on this date in 1904 (as the Library of Congress notes) that the first ice cream cone was served.
On July 23, 1904, according to some accounts, Charles E. Menches conceived the idea of filling a pastry cone with two scoops of ice-cream and thereby invented the ice-cream cone. He is one of several claimants to that honor: Ernest Hamwi, Abe Doumar, Albert and Nick Kabbaz, Arnold Fornachou, and David Avayou all have been touted as the inventor(s) of the first edible cone. Interestingly, these individuals have in common the fact that they all made or sold confections at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, known as the St. Louis World’s Fair. It is from the time of the Fair that the edible “cornucopia,” a cone made from a rolled waffle, vaulted into popularity in the United States.
Another claimant, Italo Marchiony, actually received a patent in 1903 for a device to make edible cups with handles. However the patent drawings show the device as a molded container rather than the rolled waffle seen at the Fair. Although paper and metal cones were used by Europeans to hold ice cream and pita bread was used by Middle Easterners to hold sweets, the ice-cream cone seems to have come to America by way of “the Pike” (as the entertainment midway of the St. Louis World’s Fair was called).
Randolph Smith Lyon, Mildred Frances Lyon, Mrs. Montague Lyon (Frances Robnett Smith Lyon), Montague Lyon, Jr., eating ice cream cones at the 1904 World’s Fair. Snapshot photograph, 1904. (Missouri History Museum)
The 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis: site of the national debuts of peanut butter, the hot dog, Dr Pepper, iced tea, cotton candy– and of course, ice cream cones. (source)
“The art of the cuisine, when fully mastered, is the one human capability of which only good things can be said”*…
Every cuisine, while sharing many common elements with others, uses a handful of ingredients that combine for unique flavors.
With Chinese food, you often see soy sauce, green onion, and sesame oil. With Italian food, you often see garlic, parmesan cheese, and olive oil. Vietnamese food uses fish sauce. Korean food uses chili paste.
As I venture into new cooking territories, it’s been fun to discover the flavor bombs from various cuisines. A lot of “where have you been all of my life” moments.
So what are the ingredients that make each cuisine?…
From the ever-illuminating Nathan Yau and his wonderful blog Flowing Data, a deep dive into the Yummly ingredients dataset (which contains ingredient lists for just under 40,000 recipes, from 20 cuisines– amounting to 6,714 ingredient)– the top five ingredients in 20 different cuisines: “Cuisine Ingredients.”
* Friedrich Durrenmatt
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As we read it and reap, we might recall that it was on this date in 1903 that Italo Marchiony applied for a patent for an ice cream cup mold. Marchiony is credited with inventing the ice cream cone in 1896, when he introduced it in New York City. Initially, he folded warm waffles into a cup shape. He then developed the 2-piece mold that would make 10 cups at a time. (U.S. patent No. 746,971 was granted on Dec 15, 1903).
Several other claimants introduced “ice cream cones” at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, known as the St. Louis World’s Fair. While they weren’t the inventors of the cone, it was from the time of the Fair that the edible “cornucopia,” a cone made from a rolled waffle, vaulted into popularity in the United States.
Catching up on one’s reading…
As Labor Day draws near, your correspondent suspects that at least some readers are staring dolefully (as he is) at the list of still-unread books that were meant to be the meat of the summer. Well, thanks to Book-A-Minute, relief is at hand!
From Classics (“When even the Cliff’s Notes are just too long…”) through SciFi (“Your favorite science fiction and fantasy stories at lightspeed…”) to bedtime books (“Read to your kids without plodding through every last word of those eight page epics…”)– it’s all there.
By way of example, Charlotte Bronte’s heaving Jane Eyre:
(People are MEAN to Jane Eyre.)
Edward Rochester:
I have a dark secret. Will you stay with me no matter what?
Jane Eyre:
Yes.
Edward Rochester:
My secret is that I have a lunatic wife.
Jane Eyre:
Bye.
(Jane Eyre leaves. Somebody dies. Jane Eyre returns.)
(While condensation does have its costs, it can in some cases be– as this example demonstrates– an improvement on the original…)
Tick those tomes off the list at Book-A-Minute.
As we transcend Evelyn Wood, we might spare a thought for Kate Chopin, obvious fan of Flaubert and author of Book-A-Minute candidate The Awakening: on this date in 1904, she spent a long day at the St. Louis World’s Fair, where she suffered the cerebral hemorrhage from which she would die, aged 54, two days later.
Caveat faber…
An e-waste processing center in Bangalore, India. Source: Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition
From PC World, a list of “The Most Dangerous Jobs in Technology“… It won’t surprise readers to see “fixing undersea internet cables” or “communications-tower climbing” on the list. But items like “mining ‘conflict minerals'” and “unregulated e-waste recycling” are reminders of facets of the technology industry of which we too rarely think. Consider, for example, “internet content moderation”:
Think of the most disgusting things you’ve stumbled across online. Now imagine viewing the stuff that nightmares are made of–hate crimes, torture, child abuse–in living color, from 9 to 5 every day. That’s the work of Internet content moderators, who get paid to filter out that kind of material so you don’t have to see it pop up on a social network or photo-sharing site. Demand for the work is growing, especially as more Web-based services enable users to post pictures instantly from their mobile devices.
“Obviously it’s not the job for everyone,” says Stacey Springer, vice president of operations at Caleris. The West Des Moines, Iowa, company’s 55 content moderation employees scan up to 7 million images every day for some 80 different clients. “Some people might take it personally if they have a child and see images of children that might be sensitive to them, or if they see animal cruelty.”
Caleris content reviewers receive free counseling as well as benefits including health insurance, but for some the psychological scars don’t heal easily.
Contemplate the full list here.
As we think twice about replacing that iPhone, we might recall that it was on this date in 1888 that the first baby– Edith Eleanor McLean, who weighed 2 lb 7 oz at her pre-mature birth– was placed in a “hatching cradle””– or as now we call them, “incubator.” Designed by Drs. Allan M. Thomas and William C. Deming, it became a public curiosity before it settled in regular use in neonatal care. One of the most popular attractions at the 1904 World’s Fair, for example, was an “exhibit” of 14 metal-framed glass incubators, attended by nurses caring for real endangered infants from orphanages and poor families (whose care was funded by exhibit admission fees).
The World’s Fair in 1904 included “incubator babies” as one of the main attractions on the Pike. Source: neonatology.com
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