In nineteenth-century New Orleans and environs, Christmas was a two-day affair, particularly among the devoutly Catholic Creoles. From sunset to sunrise on Christmas Eve, the air was pungent with the smell of burning hackberry and cypress from the triangularshaped bonfires burning along the levee, which were kept blazing to light the way for Papa Noel. On the day before Christmas, families set up their tree—a swamp myrtle cut from the batture and trimmed with candles, cornucopias filled with sugared almonds, and ornaments cut from red paper. After exchanging small presents, the young children hung their stockings from their bedposts and were tucked in for the night. Adults and older children then went to midnight Mass, the focus of the Christmas observance, and came home to a formal but (by their standards) light Souper Creole . To twentieth-century diners, the typical menu seems both large and splendid. Christmas Eve Souper on the Bayou, around 1880
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There are dozens of volumes about authentic and traditional New Orleans cuisine, according to Bethany Ewald Bultman, but she suggests that cooks who are unfamiliar with this style of cooking might find the following general cookbooks most useful: The Plantation Cookbook , assembled by the Junior League of New Orleans (Doubleday)—“the recipes are wellselected, well-tested, and well-presented”—and The New Orleans Cookbook , by Rima and Richard Collin (Knopf)—”almost every local recipe carefully deciphered for the nonlocal.”
Commercially made metal toy soldiers date back to the late 18th century, when German tinsmiths began casting two-dimensional or “flat” figures of the sort immortalized by Hans Christian Andersen in “The Steadfast Tin Soldier.” European firms went on to develop sturdier, solid-cast three-dimensional figures of lead alloy, and, in the 1890s, an English toy-maker named William Britain revolutionized the field with a line of less costly hollow-cast toy troops. However, it wasn’t until the 1930s that the United States developed a uniquely American toy soldier. Sold mainly in the five-and-dime stores, especially the F. W. Woolworth chain, they came to be known as dime-store soldiers.
How precise is the educated American’s understanding of the history of our country? I don’t mean exact knowledge of minor dates, or small details about the terms of laws, or questions like “Who was secretary of war in 1851?” ( Answer: Charles M. Conrad.) But just how well does the average person remember the important facts—the laws, treaties, people, and events that should be familiar to everyone?
What follows is not a test; nor are these items necessarily the most important things to know about American history. But these are all things an American-educated person might reasonably be expected to be familiar with. Most of them can be found in my college textbook The American Nation or in any similar work. A good secondary school teacher might mention any of them in the course of a lecture or class discussion.
When, on a spring day in 1935, Elsie Parrish walked into the office of an obscure lawyer in Wenatchee, Washington, to ask him to sue the town’s leading hotel for back pay, she had no idea she was linking her fate to that of exploited women in a Brooklyn laundry a whole continent away. Still less did she think that she was setting off a series of events that would deeply affect President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s plans for his second term. Least of all did she perceive that she was triggering a constitutional revolution that, even today, remains the most significant chapter in the two centuries of existence of the United States Supreme Court. All that Elsie knew was that she had been bilked.
Among the nicer aspects of working at American Heritage is that the editors are paid to look at paintings. We review exhibitions, auction catalogs, museum brochures, and art magazines in hopes of finding historical illustrations for our stories. Inevitably we come across fascinating things that we have no immediate justification for publishing. The Winter Art Show provides that justification. Last winter we ran fourteen pictures that had come to our attention during the previous year. Here, once again, is a gallery of American paintings—some by famous painters, some by unknowns, but all with something interesting to tell us about our past.
Across most of America nowadays the term Creole when applied to food variably conjures up images of charred, blackened fish and meat, overbearing, fiery seasonings, and a ubiquitous red sauce not unlike the kind you buy in a can. As a seventh-generation native of south Louisiana, and as a food writer, I join other locals in feeling a twinge of horror at what has befallen my native cuisine since it became the food fad of the eighties. The dishes for which people happily wait in line outside the local Cajun/Creole guru Paul Prudhomme’s K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen—and for which they gladly pay high prices in restaurants from New York to San Francisco—would shame the men and women who toiled to create America’s preeminent native cuisine. Remaining virtually unnoticed by the majority of the new wave of Creole food fanciers are the Creole delights we’ve enjoyed for generations: succulent oyster patties, hogshead cheese, trout meunière, mirliton stuffed with crab meat, and daube glacé.
Some years ago, I had the opportunity to look through a collection of photographs of New York in the 1920s with the amiable old man who had made them then for a news agency. There were hundreds of pictures of every section of the city, and I was struck with the total absence of black faces in any of the busy street scenes. “Why was that?” I asked.
The old photographer looked at me as if I had lost my mind. He’d worked hard to arrange things that way, he explained; his boss docked his pay five dollars for every image in which blacks appeared; their presence made the pictures unpublishable: “Nobody wanted them.”
I can remember Mickey Mantle before he hurt his knees and the exact spiral of a pass from John Unitas to Raymond Berry, but I’m too young to remember the golden age of the American department store. That age occurred, I gather, from the 1880s to the middle or late 1950s, and people who care about shopping still grow misty at the memory.
And why not? The department stores of the golden age featured “reading and sitting rooms, ‘silence’ rooms for the frazzled shopper, specially lighted rooms where women could examine gowns to determine how they would look in ballroom gaslight,” not to mention “service [that] was defined by personal attention from store employees and in the stocking of exclusive or unique merchandise. …”