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14. Tools and Spaces: Food and Cooking in Working-Class Neighborhoods, 1880–1930
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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Chapter 14 Tools and Spaces: Food and Cooking in Working-Class Neighborhoods, 1880–1930 Katherine Leonard Turner Three women of immigrant families who lived in Pittsburgh between 1900 and 1930 had very different experiences with home cooking. One, born in 1901 in what is now Serbia, emigrated with her parents in 1905. In America her mother helped run the family confectionery store, cooked for her boarders , and put up enormous quantities of food for her family. Her daughter remembered , “In the fall [her mother] would make her own sauerkraut, make her own wine and butcher a 300-400 pound hog. Then she would have that smoked and some meat, it would be fresh. She would salt it down and garlic it and everything. She would buy two, three sacks of potatoes and cabbage and kidney beans [to preserve]. . . . Every year.”1 The second woman, also born in 1901 but to Italian parents in Pittsburgh, remembered her mother’s cooking. The mother made all her own bread and pasta and took the children foraging for wild dandelion greens. The daughter also had vivid childhood memories of a woman who lived across the street; who had had a stroke and so could not cook. That woman bought day-old bread from the bakers rather than baking for herself.2 The third woman, an Italian, born in Termini in 1892, emigrated in 1922 around the age of thirty. Her husband sold fruits and vegetables, and they lived above their store near Pittsburgh. She baked no bread because she was too busy helping her husband run the store. Family meals were mainly sandwiches and almost never featured the traditional Italian festival dishes.3 These women, like other working-class women of the time, made different trade-offs between expending effort and spending cash when they provided food for their families. Some threw themselves into home production, buying nothing if they could make it for themselves. Some were too busy with businesses and wage work to cook much. Others, like the woman with the stroke, simply did not have the luxury of cooking. Studies of working-class foodways during this period often privilege ethnicity , since the working class was largely composed of recent immigrants and their children.4 For these Pittsburgh women, access to resources such as stoves, barrels, open land, and baker’s bread was as critical as cultural heritage when they made everyday food decisions. Despite immense cultural differences, working-class people shared many characteristics of their material culture. Tools and spaces—the sorts of kitchens, cooking tools, houses, and yards people had—mattered as much as their ethnic heritage when it came to day-today , practical food decisions. Further, their houses, yards, and utilities were directly related to the size and density of their neighborhoods and cities. The cooking and eating habits of working-class people in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and New York demonstrate that although ethnic differences suggested what to eat, class and material culture decided how to get it. How did working-class people cook in American cities in the years 1880 to 1930? Who did most of their cooking at home, and who bought prepared food? Food straddles production and consumption: it is (and was) commonly produced at home, but it is also purchased ready to eat. The decision about whether to make food or buy purchased food is really about the allocation of resources (cash and labor). The Pittsburgh working-class women could have spent a few hours baking bread or they could have spent a few nickels to buy baker’s bread. Susan Porter Benson argues that for working-class people, consumption was not an individual decision but part of a complicated family economy that included earning wages, producing food and other items at home, and buying, selling, trading, and sharing goods and services with neighbors . The family economy was both complex and contested: contributions and benefits were unequal, and a constant lack of financial security sharpened the conflicts around money that arose in families.5 Stereotypically, women made the decisions about buying and serving food. In Benson’s evidence (which echoes the work of Progressive-era social workers such as Margaret Byington), working-class women constantly faced the difficult task of stretching the food dollar—combining home food production, shopping, and trading in order to serve appetizing, satisfying meals on a limited budget.6 In actuality, the responsibility for food buying probably did lie most often with wives and mothers. However, one can easily...