May 17, 2024

Fleshing out names and dates on your family tree with more personal information can be difficult. It’s especially difficult if your ancestors left no letters, journals, or diaries. Finding information on the female side of your family is often nearly impossible since they left fewer documents. Social Histories can help fill in some of the blanks.

Michael and Jane Stern are a married couple who co-authored a series of social histories that are especially relevant to women’s lives. Many of their books deal with food customs in America throughout the 20^th century.

All of Jane and Michael’s books are great reads, full of lively descriptions of bygone meals from earlier times. I especially like American Gourmet: Classic Recipes, Deluxe Delights, Flamboyant Favorites, and Swank “Company” Food from the ‘50s and ‘60s. The title says it all. This book is quirky and fun to read. It also gives real insight into how your parents or grandparents transformed American meals from staid meat and potatoes dishes like beef stew to sophisticated entrees like chicken cordon bleu.

Best of all, the book includes recipes for many of the foods of the era. This lets you recreate a Mad Men dinner that would thrill Don Draper. It also describes some of the new swanky restaurants that Americans were beginning to frequent during the period.

My favorite part was the description of the nationwide craze for Polynesian food in the 50s and 60s. During my teen-age years, restaurants like The Polynesian and The Hawaiian in Salt Lake City gave pre-prom teen-age diners the illusion that they were sophisticated diners. They thought they were far removed from their mother’s humdrum pot roasts.

Those restaurants with their thunderstorm sound effects and periodic tropical rainfalls trickling down the bamboo covered walls were silly. Still, it’s fun to remember an era when I thought a restaurant entrance flanked with giant plastic tikis was sophisticated.

American Gourmet is filled with anecdotes and gourmet history that may remind you of your own youth or maybe your mom or grandma’s.  You may even recall your mother’s Chinese hamburger. That was a casserole of hamburger and noodles doused with a dash of soy sauce and served over canned Chinese noodles. Today the dish is passe, and no one would call it gourmet.

In her own small way, your mom was participating in a food revolution that affected the whole country. Looking at old family recipes as part of this revolution can open your eyes to a whole new side of your ancestors. They saw themselves as modern, swank eaters who were not tied down to old-fashioned cooking ideas.

If you want a glimpse into the societal forces behind your family’s eating habits, social histories are a great way to learn about them. American Gourmet and the other Michael and Jane Stern books can help you flesh out your family’s history. Their books are available on Amazon and can be found in many public libraries as well. They’re worth a read.

Carol Stetser

Researcher

Larimer County Genealogical Society