Eighmey offers taste of history
Kylie Saari — Staff WriterArticle Photos
FAIRMONT - Eat more vegetables, more fruit, less meat, and limit sweets.
Sounds like diet advice straight from any modern magazine, doesn't it? It was, however, nutritional advice given in the women's pages of magazines circulated in the Midwest in the post-Civil War era of the 1870s. Another piece of advice from long ago - peanut butter sandwiches are a delicious and easy lunch to pack for children at school.
There are differences as well, of course. Those same magazines had articles on how a woman could feed a family for 15 cents per meal, and how to "can a cow."
It is through learning how people ate that food historian Rae Katherine Eighmey is able to connect the past with the present and highlight the similarities and dissimilarities between our lives and theirs.
"When you talk about what a typical breakfast would have been in the 1860s compared to what we eat now, Eighmey said, "or talk about ladies' social teas in the 1880s compared to what we eat now, or potlucks over the back fence in the 1950s compared to what we eat now, everybody can immediately understand. It is a wonderful way to explain similarity, differences, and contrasts, and you come to understandings of the struggles and opportunities. I like to say history can be understood one dinner plate at a time."
Eighmey will discuss her research and findings at the Martin County Historical Society's annual meeting 6 p.m. Sept. 18 at Red Rock Center for the Arts in Fairmont. Her presentation, titled "150 Years of Minnesota Foods" will discuss how food gives a window into history and provide snapshots of how what Minnesotans ate has changed over the years.
"Minnesota is a wonderful place in which to (study food history)," Eighmey said. "In our 150 years as a state, and even before then, we have been a culinary crossroads for all kinds of foods and ways food is grown and brought into the state."
Eighmey began her career as a public relations specialist and writer and stumbled on her current profession as she was helping raise funds for an antebellum home in Alabama, where she was living at the time.
"There was all this knowledge of how the house was built, but I really wanted to talk about the family," she said. "I went into the library and started poking around in the dusty boxes and found the household notebook of the women who lived there."
As she leafed through the pages, Eighmey found a recipe that intrigued her. It was called a Jumble, and although she was a lifelong cook, Eighmey couldn't decipher what this recipe was for.
"(The woman) had written it down in this notebook as if she was going to open the book and make it and she knew exactly what she was doing," she said.
Eighmey was interested in learning what this recipe was, and used the library at the University of Alabama to work backward through years of tattered cookbooks until she discovered what a Jumble was a "really fabulous little tea biscuit in the shape of a doughnut."
It was in studying those frail cookbooks that Eighmey felt her calling.
"I made photocopies (of recipes from the books) and started cooking from them just to see," she said. " I started to see a whole new relationship of spices and textures, and once I started cooking them it just intrigued me and the food was great and one thing has led to another and I haven't backed away from using recipes as a way to explore history and culture and social trends."
And while ingredients have changed some - bear meat was popular for a while, and many recipes called for saleratus (a type of baking soda) - many of the ways of cooking and reasons for it have not.
Eighmey's research sources vary as the era she is studying changes - from household notebooks, to farmer's magazines, to church cookbooks - but one theme seems to run through them all.
"I think women have always cooked to show off," she said.
Nothing shows this more, according the Eighmey, than the phenomenon of the thresher's dinner. Because no one farmer had enough manpower or equipment to bring in all his grain by himself, traveling groups of farmers would work together to bring in the harvest. Farm wives were responsible for feeding these men.
"There were women where the minute the seeds went into the ground for the crops they were planning what to feed the threshing crew when they came to her farm," Eighmey said.
And while part of that is practical necessity - feeding up to 30 hungry men in the hottest season of the year takes some planning - the women would lay out fancy dinners and linens, even though the men asked for quick fare.
"You know if (a thresher) went home and told his wife, 'All she did was give us a simple plate and we sat under a tree,' the wife would be going, 'tsk, tsk,'" Eighmey said.
She has accumulated a body of work related to Midwestern food history, largely from Minnesota. Her cookbooks, "A Prairie Kitchen" and "Hearts and Homes," are available from the Minnesota Historical Society Press. Two new books are due out soon - "Potluck Paradise," a collection drawn from community and church cookbooks, and a work in progress chronicling food conservation during World War I.
Anyone interested in attending Eighmey's presentation must register with the Martin County Historical Society by Sept. 10.
