Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Food History
Many of our food-safety laws arose after healthy young volunteers became sick when they tried commercial foods containing toxic additives.
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Roast pig, boiled rockfish, and apple pie were among the dishes George and Martha enjoyed during the holiday in 1797. Here are some actual recipes.
A menu for a 1779 New England Thanksgiving included dishes from turkey and venison to pumpkin pie.
Daisy Bonner, who cooked for Franklin Roosevelt for twenty years in the Georgia White House, recalled his favorite dish.
American barbecue is more than a way of cooking — it’s myth, folklore, and history
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Once the most famous Chinese dish in America, chop suey helped spur the growth of Chinese restaurants. A Smithsonian curator is now criss-crossing the country to research its beginnings.
The restaurant that changed the way we dine—
When Charles Dickens first came to the United States in 1842, he did not like our clothes, our speech, or our manners. But he reserved perhaps his deepest scorn for our dining habits.
Back from France with an epicure’s knowledge of haute cuisine , our third President served the most lavish dinners in White House history
I dined a large company once or twice a week, Jefferson dined a dozen every day,” remarked the frugal New Englander John Adams in recalling early hospitality in the “President’s House” in Washington. “I held levees once a week.
A history of the food reformers and cereal kings who made Battle Creek the center of a revolution in Americans eating habits
At one of the first American “health resorts” in upstate New York, shortly before the Civil War, a bilious health seeker named Albert Wheeler munched his Graham cracker and committed his thoughts to paper:
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