Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century

6. Americanizing the American Diet: Immigrant Cuisines and Not-So-Foreign Foods

123 6 AMERICANIZING THE AMERICAN DIET Immigrant Cuisines and Not-So-Foreign Foods Not only do we meet strange foods when we travel, but if we are patriotic, we have them when we stay at home. —Harvey Wiley, 1918 Around noon one day in the early 1910s, a home economist paid a visit to an immigrant family’s small home. She found the family in a stuffy room, eating lunch while a large cat perched on their dirty table, begging for morsels. The cat, the filth, and the airless room were bad enough. But much worse was what the family was eating, and how. Crowded around a single common bowl, the family members squeezed in together in order to scoop stew into their mouths with their bare hands. To the woman reporting on the incident later, it was a revolting sight, one that revealed many of the problems with immigrant eating and, by implication, many of the virtues of the way she and like-minded Americans ate.1 Today, the idea of a family shoveling stew into their mouths with their hands seems strange, but it is their bare hands that surprise us, not the fact that they were eating stew in the first place. That immigrants to the United States in the early twentieth century often ate things like stews or other mixed, saucy dishes seems utterly unremarkable. But people remarked on it all the time in the Progressive Era. For years, doctors, home economists, and efficiency experts had warned that to eat gloppy, mixed foods containing many ingredients—a style of cooking some native-born Americans had come to define as inherently foreign—was to imperil digestion and to deviate from white people’s so-called natural diet. The conjoined nature of 124 / Immigrant Cuisines and Not-So-Foreign Foods these mixed foods seemed unwholesome and inscrutable, and fears of the unknown combined with fears of dirt, disease, and contagion. During the era of the Great War, Americanization—the movement to induce foreign-born people and their children to adopt “American” customs and habits—reached the height of its power. By 1910, more than a third of the U.S. population had been born outside American borders, and food had become an important part of Americanization efforts.2 Reformers worked to convince immigrants to eat the plain meat and starch pairings that they considered the model American meal, and the physical foundation of American efficiency and success. While immigrants were the focus of such efforts, however, it was not just the foreign born who were hearing advice to eat plainer, more insipid meals: reformers were urging everybody to “cultivate a taste for simple foods” in the name of a supposedly authentic American diet.3 Yet even as Americanization efforts crested in the late 1910s, the whole concept of Americanization itself was changing. In the context of wartime food conservation and out of a growing realization that many immigrant dishes actually offered nutritional and economic advantages, reformers increasingly sought to modify immigrant diets rather than to revolutionize them. And when made with familiar ingredients and adjusted to become less spicy and less saucy, these “foreign” dishes themselves became more acceptable for consumption by native-born Americans. Meanwhile, more native-born Americans than ever were eagerly seeking out exotic tastes. Indeed, at the very high point of Americanization efforts, self-evidently foreign foods were appearing more often in ordinary American newspapers , cookbooks, and kitchens. These two processes seem counterintuitive , but they were not actually at odds. Foods like hamburger casserole, chicken noodle soup, and chili struck many in 1910 as obviously foreign foods. Yet only a few decades later they would strike their grandchildren as comfortingly all-American dishes. In a way, both generations were right. The process of making foreign foods widely acceptable meant producing blander versions using ingredients with which native-born Americans were already familiar. In so doing, Americans domesticated the very foods they thought of as the basis of their newfound culinary cosmopolitanism.4 It is always impossible to identify precisely why or when something as nebulous as the food preferences of millions of people changed. But during the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, large numbers of Americans— particularly middle-class, white Americans—did increasingly seek out what they considered obviously foreign dishes like pasta, goulashes, stews, and casseroles. In part, new interest in the pleasures of the exotic and Immigrant Cuisines...