My collage Constant Cravings is a smorgasbord of mixed media messages about food and appetite and the mid-century world of women’s troubled relationship with it. Utilizing appropriated vintage images depicting the conflicted, chaotic cultural messages to women about food and dieting, the art work is composed of hundreds of appropriated images from adverting and illustration, comics, etc from the 1950’s, 60’s and 1970’s.  Original size 43” x 75” sallyedelsteincollage.com

Our eating really got disordered over half a century a go.

In a culture where many still feel unempowered, where rigid beauty standards and body shaming run rampant  and women still learn to nurture others while neglecting to nourish themselves, the breeding ground for eating disorders to flourish is fertile.

With a nod towards World Eating Disorders Action Day today, a day to raise awareness of eating disorders, I take a look at the mid-century media world of women’s conflicted relationship to food and appetite.

Detail Collage- Constant Cravings by Sally Edelstein. Collage composed of appropriated vintage images from the 1950’s, 60’s and 1970’s

While the mid-century lady of the house was determined to serve up man pleasing menus wrestling with the age-old problem “How do you handle a hungry man?” it was her own appetite she was wrestling with. Once again America was setting a torrid pace in pioneering a new trend for the housewife.

Dieting

More or Less

Detail Collage- Constant Cravings by Sally Edelstein. Collage composed of appropriated vintage images

Cheerfully loading up her cupboards with sugar frosted, candy coated, make you-happy-to-eat jolly snacks for her growing children, the modern housewife stocked her avocado green frost-free Stor-Mor– Amanna Food Freezer and her side by side Food-a-rama refrigerator with enough food to satisfy any man-sized appetite.

She however was left to nibble on some celery sticks and Melba toast.

Cold War Cravings

Detail Collage- Constant Cravings by Sally Edelstein. Collage composed of appropriated vintage images

Her cold power freezer could store months of food but the cold facts were in this Atomic age of abundance, in this land of good ‘n plenty-try-it-you’ll-like-it-betcha-can’t-eat-just-one-culture, the one place American abundance was frowned upon was m’ladys waistline.

Hopping on and off her Deteco scale she watched her weight as carefully as her husband watched the fluctuation of the Dow Jones.

Calorie Blast Off

Detail Collage- Constant Cravings by Sally Edelstein. Collage composed of appropriated vintage images

With the dawning of the Space Age women were busy with their own countdown – calorie counting. The long lean lines America was loving, wanting, and buying in their car designs and trim line phones was now the new body ideal.

You owed it to yourself to drink Metrical but only with Slender do you not miss anything… except a lot of calories,

Wishful Thinking

Yes mam’ isn’t it time to do more than wish for the lovely figure you lost?  Fun is just waiting everywhere when you’re slender, so drink that one crazy calorie Tab and  silently sip Sego …what have you got to lose?

I Can’t Believe I Ate the Whole Thing

Detail Collage- Constant Cravings by Sally Edelstein. Collage composed of appropriated vintage images

Women were swallowing it all, whole,  undigested. But they weren’t the only ones taking in these messages.

Go Figure

Detail Collage- Constant Cravings by Sally Edelstein. Collage composed of appropriated vintage images

The same sugar and spice and everything nice little girls who learned their ABC’s with Post Sugar Sparkled Alphabets soon began worrying not only if Barbie would still be alluring to Ken after all those dates to the malt shop, but if her own mini skirt was a wee bit tight, would she still be “Bobby’s Girl?”

Even though there was always room for Jell-O, baby boom daughters who watched their mothers opting for D Zerta instead, started slowly absorbing all the negative qualities associated with overweight, ie being fat.

This Is the Age of Automatic Control

Before long girls who not long before would “munch, munch, munch a bunch of Fritos” were joining their mothers in the Metrical for lunch bunch

One Size Fits All

Detail Collage- Constant Cravings by Sally Edelstein. Collage composed of appropriated vintage images

Teenage girls envying Seventeen Magazine models never felt thin enough. No matter how much Tab they drank they still could never get themselves to look like Twiggy, but at least that one crazy calorie helped them from looking like Little Lotta. Or Mama Cass.

Alongside articles asking the reader  “Am I Normal” were ads for modeling schools with stick thin girls, posing their own questions :”Why not you?  Turn it on and start turning heads!”

Take It Off…Take It All Off

Detail Collage- Constant Cravings by Sally Edelstein. Collage composed of appropriated vintage images

By the liberated 1970s we could let it all hang out, just not our bodies.

As bodies became more liberated, the pressure to keep them thinner grew stricter. There was tighter security than ever before when it came to unsightly bulges. By tossing out their bras and girdles women could no longer count on those miracle magic control panels to mold, hold, and control to give them flattering figure perfection.

If you wanted to be the kind of girl  girl watchers watched in your swingin’ low Landlubber hip-huggers, along with Diet Pepsi you had to rely on strenuous exercise as well as dieting.

A Weigh We Go

Detail Collage- Constant Cravings by Sally Edelstein. Collage composed of appropriated vintage images

To cope with constant cravings, nothing helped soothe frazzled nerves like a soothing cigarette. But no fat male cigarettes for this slenderella! Just in time for her new svelte figure appeared Virgina Slims, the new slimmer cigarette tailored for the more  feminine hand.

But if you were looking for real body control, then the rise of anorexia and bulimia was right for you.

The news was big because it’s about a wonderfully different way for you to be small. Here was the magic you’ve been wanting,  to make you look wonderful, feel wonderful in a swim suit…an exclusive technique for creating lovely curves in all the right places.

Why put up with less modern ways when you can have the easiest most automatic weight loss possible.

All the girls were dying to try it.

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Happy National Doughnut Day

Doughnuts to dollars, this is a favorite day of celebration for many.

From coast to coast, thousands are lining up outside their local Dunkin Donuts and Krispy Kremes for a free doughnut.

Donuts or Doughnuts, glazed or  powdered sugar, Americans are nuts about these circular doughy treats larded with nostalgia and sprinkled with goodness.

Donuts are a fad that haven’t faded

The first Friday in June is designated National Doughnut Day  and was first celebrated in 1938. Organized by the Salvation Army in Chicago, it was to raise funds during the Depression in remembrance of the women who served donuts to the doughboys on the front lines in WWI.

A Nutritious Treat

More importantly  who knew these deep fried goodies were a healthy treat…good and good for you?

That is, according to Crisco  who boasted that  doughnuts were as digestible as they were delicious… if they were prepared with their product.

Vintage ad Crisco 1938 .Handy recipe for Dandy Mincemeat Doughnuts

This 1938 ad explains to the reader  the importance of fat in a growing tykes life.

Don’t say “No” when your youngsters beg for grown up foods. Don’t dismiss their craving for pastries and fried foods with “they’re not good for you.”

Remember children spend their energy much more recklessly than you do. Winter demands that little bodies be “well stocked” with foods that contain extra energy in other words with foods containing fats.

That’s why foods containing fats should be on the diet of growing children- if these foods are digestible. Your doctor will tell you, too, that light tender pastry such as Crisco makes is better for you than the heavy greasy kind.”

Yes, your small fry will love em’; it’s never too early to start building up their cholesterol count.

A hot dog can make you lose control

Hot dogs, that very symbol of culinary democracy took on a special meaning during the cold war, especially in the summer of 1961.

The fate of Nathans Hot Dogs hung in the balance.

Barbecue Brigade

Backyard barbecues

Summer barbecues were a family staple in my childhood suburban backyard, and they often took on the precision of a military exercise.

With the precision used to plan a bombing mission in the south pacific, Dad calculated the wind velocity, temperature and cloud coverage when making the perfect fire, skills learned as a meteorologist in the Army Air Corp while serving in New Guinea.

While wives stayed safely behind the lines, the men folk were recruited and deployed to the front, where Dad was CO in charge of the Barbecue Brigade.

Well fortified to do battle with gin and tonics firmly in hand, they mobilized around the Weber grill in a primal huddle of their own as they anxiously awaited orders.

Like the infantry sent to do battle, these buttoned down bar-b-que enthusiasts, combat ready in their comfort-in- action-perma- press Bermuda shorts, gathered on all sides of the roaring fire.

The torch had indeed been passed to a new generation, our war hero President Kennedy had  informed us, and passed directly into the hands of these bespectacled men in clingy ban-lon, all of whom had served our country in the Second World War.

Strategically wielding the Big Boy barbecue tongs, Dad was ready for any BBQ maneuver. A king size cigarette dangling from his lips, barbecue apron round his regulation plaid Bermuda shorts, his smart masculine styling rated a fashion 21 gun salute.

GI Joe in Suburbia

That summer as the melodic sound of Connie Francis longingly asking “Where the Boys Are” drifted over the lilacs from a neighbor’s transistor radio, the men at my family barbecue could be found shvitzing over the red-hot coals of the grill, shooting the breeze.

When tired of arguing the un likelihood of  N.Y.C Mayor Robert Wagner running for  a third term successfully without the backing of Tammany Hall, libations were replenished as  the men brooded over the storm gathering in Berlin.

As the world poised for a showdown between those two cold warriors the USA and the Soviet Union, the risk of military conflict between them heated up that summer of 1961 over the crisis in Berlin. The city divided up between the victors of WWII was located deep in the Soviet occupied parts of Germany and now the Soviets were threatening to drag it behind the iron curtain.

Only sixteen years ago these sunburned suburban schmoozers had all been soldiers who had happily helped defeat Der Fuehrer in that greatest of all wars WWII.

Now with their missions done, their tooth-notched stainless steel rectangular dog tags with the letter H embossed on them safely tucked away, the roar of guns and bombs a dim memory now displaced by the whirl of a Lawn Boy mower and the effervescent bubbling of Canada Dry quinine water, they seemed willing to risk nuclear war to protect the former capital of that former enemy country from the evil clutches of our former comrades in arms, the Russians.

As if shifting gears between enemy and ally was as effortless as the automatic transmission in your Chevrolet, the considerable fury and fear that had fueled our hatred of those bloodless Nazi  had been seamlessly and swiftly re-routed to those God-less Russian Commies.

A Hot Dog Makes You Lose Control

Eagerly biting into a tongue scalding frankfurter hot off the grill, Mom’s cousin Milton, a short and stubby man, his GI regulation washboard abs having long gone AWOL leaving his ever-expanding belly stretching the outer limits of his Acrylan shirt, offered up a compelling reason why we needed to step up and protect West Berlin from the clutches of the soulless Russians.

“I have just one word for you-Nathan’s!” he stated firmly, gobbling his hot dog with as much gusto as he perceived the Soviets would gobble up Berlin.

The men nodded knowingly.

Vintage Schlitz Beer Ad

A Wonderland of Wieners

Ignoring the fact that the former Wehrmacht was a wonderland of wieners and wursts, its rowdy, German beer gardens filled with boisterous, red-faced patrons washing down their bratwurst with thirst quenching weizen glasses of dark amber Dinkel Acker, if Berlin got dragged behind the iron curtain, he argued, the poor Berliners would be deprived of one of life’s great pleasures – noshing on a Nathan’s hot dog.

No one needed reminding of that near-international incident a few years back when Assistant Secretary of State Averill Harriman went to the Soviet Union and was denied a simple request.

N.Y.’s  patrician former governor had asked the hot dog mavens at Nathans to airmail their specialty to him in Soviet Union, but the heartless Russians stopped the shipment of juicy franks at the border, fearful perhaps that if they let the poor Soviet people get even a whiff of good American hot dogs they’d revolt.

Nathans  was banned behind the Iron Curtain.

Nathan’s of Coney Island

That  was ironic considering those same Nathan franks  had once catered the big “Carving up the Post War World” party hosted by FDR at Yalta where along with Churchill and Stalin, the 3 big powers greedily chowed down on some red hots while redrawing the map. Only a few years earlier, Roosevelt had successfully served those “Kings of Coney Island” to British royalty, the King and Queen of England at his home in Hyde Park.

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev enjoying a hot dog in Iowa when visited in September 1959.

The poor Russians may have been deprived of  a good American dog, but that didn’t stop Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev from enjoying a hot dog on U.S. soil when he visited in the fall of 1959. During the same trip in which he promised to “bury us” pounding his shoe on a podium of the UN, the rotund premier devoured his first American hot dog in Iowa declaring it “excellent.”

Tear Down That wall.

Thirty years later as the Cold War began to thaw in 1989, not only did the Berlin Wall finally come down, but Muscovites could finally chow down on some genuine Nathans hot dogs. That same year as the wall fell, the cry of  “Get your red hots comrades” could be heard when Nathan’s began selling their famous dogs in the heart of Red Square. Credit Perestroika for helping to  bring the King of Dogs to the Soviet Union.

 © Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Junk Food Jubilee. A page from This Years Girl by Sally Edelstein. A paper doll romp through the life of a baby boomer

Junk Food a go-go circa 1966. “Happy National Junk Food Day” from “This Years Girl. “

The scariest part of Halloween for many parents is the prospect of all the candy their children will consume once they’ve brought home their haul.

Relax.

In mid-century America a Snickers bar would have been greeted with the same encouragement as chowing down a serving of kale.

“Little masqueraders love to be greeted with heaping variety of Halloween Candies.” Vintage ad Brach’s candies

Vintage ad 1955 Milky Way Halloween

Vintage Halloween ad 1956 Curtiss Candy baby Ruth and Butterfingers

Nothing to Snicker At

Vintage Ad 1946 Candy Council of America

It may be hard to swallow but once upon a time candy was not the unhealthy villain it is viewed today but a wholesome food. Through the first half of the 20th century, sweets and  sugar were deemed essential to health- good tasting and good for you. “Modern nutritionists agree,” we were happily informed,  “that when the body calls for energy, candy is one of the quick and happy answers.”

Candy Will Win the War

Candy was an important part of nutrition and moral in WWII ( L) Vintage Milky Way ad 1944 (R) Vintage ad Council on Candy of the National Confectioners Association 1944 Candy Important Food for Work

Eating candy was also downright patriotic.

Adding candy to your diet was considered  good wartime eating rule.

In fact during WWII sugar was sanctioned by Uncle Sam as part of the 7 essential food groups during WWII. No wonder the government rations for our fighting men included candy as a dietary supplement.

And  those on the home front were urged to keep candy handy to help through long hours of war work. “Running a welding torch or typewriter, pushing a pencil or a hand truck, making meals or machines of war today’s work is longer harder and calls for extra energy,” read the copy from the Council on Candy of the National Confectioners Association Candy in an ad touting candy for war work.“There’s  a good wartime rule add easy to eat good to eat fatigue fighting candy as your food for extra energy.”

Rosie the Riveter made sure to keep a snickers bar handy while wielding that blow torch.

 Sugar Rush

In a nation of can-do Americans nothing was more can-do than candy!
Vintage Candy Ads Mars Bar 1950

Flush with victory after the war, can-do– Americans were ready to surge into the post-war future and candy would be there to facilitate the rush.  In a nation of can-do Americans, nothing was more can-do than candy! And conscientious mothers made sure America’s youngest citizens had adequate supplies of this energy producing miracle.

Sweet Dreams

Mother’s made sure their children had adequate supplies of energy candy
Vintage advertisement Milky Way Candy 1948

In 1946 Dayton,Ohio housewife Dotty Draper was an up to date homemaker, schooled in the latest scientific nutritional facts.

As chief cook and dietician, she understood that if hers was to be the perfect American family, her husband and her children must be perfectly fed. All those home-ec classes she had excelled in during High School would really come in handy.

Vintage ad Ovaltine 1948

When Dotty’s thoughts turned to preparing her children for life of course she thought of their  health – to keep them rosy, robust, chubby and strong.

Sometimes she felt as if the bold headlines of the advertisements in her magazines screamed out just at her: “And remember if a child becomes thin and nervous, frail or under par, the cause is your fault mothers, faulty nutrition. Remember always that the most common correctable cause is faulty nutrition- even among supposedly well fed children. And this cause is one that you the mother can do something about”.

Dotty understood that an active child might need twice as much energy food as an adult and according to the experts, a child’s craving for sweets shows that this need is unsatisfied. The answer: Candy.

Real nourishment which quickly translates into action.

“Candy contains not only pure sugar for energy building,” she would read, ” but from orchard and field, and from dairy farms, it takes the products that make candy the wholesome, flavorsome colorful food that it is.”

Dotty had taken a solemn oath: “There is nothing more important in this world,” she was fond of quoting to her brood of freckled face kids,“than the feeding of your ladies and gentlemen of tomorrow! And your fathers and mothers realize too that on your healthy strength and growth depends not only the happiness of the family but the future of the nation.”

That’s why in-the-know-Dotty was sure to load the kids up on plenty of  wholesome candy!

Sugar Shock

Vintage Baby Ruth Ad 1927

When Dotty was a child during the late 1920’s, nutritionists began touting candy as a good source of nourishment, a handy and quick source of nutrition. As healthy as an apple or a glass of milk.

Candy was good for the whole family, as described in this 1927 ad for baby Ruth:

When the chill blasts of winter keeps you inside, there is always cozy comfort with baby Ruth around. The whole family – grandma, dad, mother and the young folks, even the tiniest tot-enjoys this delicious candy and finds real nourishment and health building energy in its wholesome goodness.

Quality Food. Curtiss Candy were proud of their quality dairy farms and the quality milk that went into their Baby Ruth candy bars. and Butterfingers. And rich in dextrose too! A glass of milk or a candy bar…you choose.

By the 1930’s candy’s place in the diet had been firmly entrenched with the dietary authorities recognizing its nutritional food value. Home Economists – especially those in the employ of candy manufacturers – were quick to point out the nutritional value of candy aiming to show candy as good wholesome food..

Modern nutritionist’s called it a muscle food. It’s carbohydrates “were as important to the human body as coal or oil is to the furnace.”

Full Steam Ahead: Stoking the Engine

Vintage Nutrition Booklet 1944
You and Your Engine by Laura Oftedal National Live Stock & Meat Board

All Mothers understood that food was foremost fuel.

Because we were told to think of our body as an engine, mothers were instructed that they were the engineers of the worlds finest kind of engine- their childs.

Vintage illustration-from Nutrition Booklet 1944
You and Your Engine by Laura Oftedal National Live Stock & Meat Board

Before you fill your child’s tank again, mothers were warned, you better read and learn and remember. A good railroad engineer or automobile driver, knows what fuel is best for his engine. So if you wanted to be a good mother it was imperative to learn what fuel is best for your child’s engine to keep your children streamlined and in good condition.

The best fuel was the food which gives your child engine muscle, heat, and energy.

Wholesome Candy provides energy, muscle-building protein and healthy protective minerals.
Vintage ads (L) illustration from Carnation Milk ad 1942 (R) Mars Bar Ad 1957

Candy was wholesome energy food with muscle-building protein and health protecting minerals. “You’ve burnt up energy you need energy refuel. That’s the fundamental story of candy-quick energy for bodies that need energy more.”

“If your body never sent out an “SOS” for energy  there would be no call for candy…except for pleasure purposes. But bodies do need energy, and candy is steam on the job, whether you’re working at a factory, on the job in an office or at home, or playing football on the corner lot.an energy food.”

“Yes, America, we are growing beyond those stern days which ruled, “If it tastes good to you, it mustn’t be good for you.”

In the know-modern nutritionists now agreed that when the body called for energy candy was one of the quick and happy answers.

Candy Land Trick or Treat

Vintage Ad 1946 from the Council on Candy of the National Confectioners Association . “The crave for Candy is a call for energy! The fundamental story of candy- quick energy for bodies that need energy. Candy is dandy-keep it handy!”

In 1946, The Council on Candy of the National Confectioners Association ran an aggressive ad  campaign titled: The Crave for Candy is a Call for Energy.

Headquartered in Chicago The Council on Candy  was “an organization devoted to maintaining high standards of quality in candy and the dissemination of authoritative information on its use as an energy producing, morale building food.”

“By All means, let em’ eat cake…and candy too!” Illustration from Vintage 1946 ad for Dextrose Sugar who encouraged the benefits of sweets. Corn Products Refining Company, producers of Dextrose fanned the sugar flame with their own heavy advertising

“Isn’t it true that you often have a hankering for candy”? the  Council on Candy asks in one of its ads.

“Well here’s the reason.”, they explains.  “Scientists have learned that bodies hanker for foods that contain elements they need when they need them. Whether your golfing mowing the grass or going to the store, you need Can Do– and Candy is the can-do food!”

“Modern nutritionists now agree that when the body calls for energy candy is one of the quick and happy answers. That’s why we remind you in rhyme when its energy time: Candy’s Dandy/ Keep it Handy !”

Nutrition You Should Know

1945 Vintage Ad children’s Candy Quiz – Council on Candy of the National Confectioners Association

The Council eagerly provided a handy quiz for parents on the value of candy.

It explained the wholesome, nutritious value of candy:”Candy contains not only pure sugar for energy building but, from orchard and field and from the dairy farm it takes the products that make candy the wholesome, colorful food that it is.”

“When you know the answers don’t you get a brand new picture of candy’s place in nutrition?” the ad asked the reader.

“Yes, candy has a definite part to play. Naturally its outstanding usefulness is providing quick energy in a most inviting pleasant and handy form. “If you followed the experts advise “you would send your children off to school with a surge of power that will thrill you!”

“We call this the can do” of candy.”

Wholesome candy…trick or treat? You be the judge.

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

When it came to First Ladies hawking products did Dolley Madison trump Melania?

Melania Trump is getting a lot of heat for  promoting her jewelry line on a government  site.

But is Melania the first First Lady to cash in on her husband’s name?

Rutherford  B. Hayes wife Lucy, an advocate of temperance popularly known as Lemonade Lucy sure didn’t take the opportunity promote her own brand of citrusy products and Jackie Kennedy wouldn’t  have dreamt of selling a millinery line of pill-box hats.

However when it came to hawking products did Dolley Madison trump Melania?

Melania may be selling her fashion jewelry on QVC but another First Lady preferred to sell her wares on the aisles of A&P.

Hello Dolly

“Nowhere can you find creamier elegant ice cream. It’s quality is uncompromising . Naturally Dolly Madison costs a few pennies more.” Vintage ad

What baby boomer  doesn’t  remember Dolly Madison ice cream packaged in its  container bearing a colonial style silhouette of her likeness? Sure it cost a little more, but it was endorsed by a First Lady, for chris sake. And an Aladdin  lunch box packed with  Dolly Madison  cup cakes just wasn’t complete with out it.

Sure Dolley was the hostess with the mostess, but it would be  nearly a century and a half  for the chilly strawberry confection bearing her name, the very ice cream that she served  at the White House to be served up in suburban rumpus rooms across the country.

Clearly, Dolley’s dainty hand had little to do with this.

Let Them Eat Cake

“Cakes make your outing a gay affair with Dolly Madison Cakes. Festive, delicious. Everyday is fresh cake day with Dolly Madison.” Vintage ad 1958

A historically popular  First Lady, by mid-century the name  Dolly Madison was used to brand  hats, shoes, luggage and of course,  ice cream and baked goods.

James Madison’s better half  may have served baked goods to the likes of Thomas Jefferson but the brand bearing her name ( sans the e)  Dolly Madison Bakery  was formed in 1937. The company created snacks including the famous cupcakes “fit for a socialite like Madison yet affordable for everyone.”

Though that motto might work for Melania’s line of low-cost costume jewelry, the same can’t be said for First Daughter Ivanka who is also cashing in on her soon to be Presidential Pop . This bone fide socialite’s jewelry  sold at astronomically high prices are least affordable for those “little people” who voted her dad in to office.

What would Dolley Madison think?

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

After Tony the Tiger took on Pepe the Frog, Breitbart the populist home for the alt right has declared all out war on Kellogg’s.

Once Kellogg’s pulled its advertising  from that popular  platform for white nationalists, deciding the site was not in alignment with its company’s values, Breitbart felt bullied and fought back. Arguing that Kellogg’s was turning its back on “family values,” they started a  #DumpKellogg’s campaign.

Breitbart proudly calling itself the number one site for “pro family content, stated emphatically that Kellogg’s “serves up bigotry at your breakfast table.”

And there was no sugar-coating this – anyone continuing to enjoy a bowl of Frosted Flakes and not boycott the products  were clearly against traditional family values.

Family values? Sure if racism, anti-immigration, anti antisemitism is part of your family tradition.

The Choice is Yours

Vintage Kellogg’s Variety Pack cereal 1959

The only ones serving up a heaping helping  of bigotry and intolerance is Breitbart itself with its racist rhetoric and incendiary articles.

But they didn’t stop at the claim that Kellogg’s was being anti family,  the company was downright un-American too.

Breitbart blustered: “Kellogg’s decision to blacklist one of the largest conservative media outlets in America is economic censorship of mainstream conservative political discourse. That is as un-American as it gets.”

Pro Choice

Is this same all American cereal that has been keeping family breakfasts happy for eons

What is more American than freedom of choice? Kellogg’s went  head to head against monotony and uniformity  at the breakfast table and won.

Vintage ad Kellogg’s variety Pack Brings harmony to the family

All one need to do is look at Kellogg’s 70 years of promoting diversity and harmony at the family table with their famous Variety Pack, a clever packaging of multiple choices for everyone.

Vintage Kellogg’s Cereal ad 1955. Kellogg’s famous variety pack made for fun breakfast eating and appealed to different tastes for different folks offering choice and diversification at the breakfast table.

Besides which, Kellogg’s is already battle tested, when they went to ear against another group of white nationalists in WWII.

Variety Helps Victory

Vintage ad 1943 WWII

Kellogg’s Variety packs cleverly containing small individual boxes of their popular cereals made their first appearance en 1941.  it wasn’t long before they were part of patriotic wartime meal planning.

Uncle Sam wanted everyone  on the home front to be in tip-top shape for all the extra burden of war work.

For the first time he devised  a nutritional guide promoting the Basic 7 food groups to maintain nutritional standards especially under the burdens of rationing and food shortages.  The government encouraged vitamin and mineral enrichment of food to improve out health.

Snap, Krackle and Pop fight WWII Vintage Rice Krispies ad 1943

Like other food companies Kellogg’s took heed. Cereals like Rice Krispies were restored to the whole grain nutritive values of brown rice. Vitamins like niacin and iron were added to other cereals too  so children could return to school the “Victory Way.”

Because Mothers were soon enlisted in the safekeeping of their family’s health,  favoring any foods that saved time work and fuel, all scarce commodities in wartime.

Kellogg’s Variety pack fit the bill.

Vintage ad WWII 1943 Kellogg’s Variety Cereals. Variety packs were soon being touted as the answer to many meal time dilemmas saving the all important time work and fuel that were scare in wartime.

Cereals save time-work and fuel – They’re all ready to eat!No cooking or preparing is required, no messy pans skillets or stove to clean up- even the dishes are easier to wash! And you know how those things count these busy war-time days!

Save Space cuts waste- Individual size packages in handy tray carton gives you a man-sized meal in a jiffy. No half eaten packages…and you’re assured of s new package freshness every time! Variety tempts youngsters!

With food shortages and rationing, cereals offered another help to the harried housewife:

Stretches meat – make milk go farther. In addition to serving cereals as meatless meals use them to extend meat in meat loves hamburgers croquettes etc. Cereals help stretch precious milk too…you use less than a glassful per serving.

Kudos to Kellogg’s for being on the right side of history.

From the Holiday Archive:

Like Johnson & Johnson’s Baby Shampoo, Lipton’s Onion Soup Mix produced no tears.

That dehydrated marvel of mid-century cookery was a staple in my Mothers repertoire. Mom joined the legion of happy homemakers who were overjoyed at the development of dehydrated soup cooking.

Besides being the backbone of the classic California Onion Dip, that pride and joy of every self respectable suburban hostess, my mother prepared her Passover Brisket using that Onion Soup Mix from a recipe supplied by Lipton’s published in Ladies Home Journal and endorsed by the Nassau Community Temple Sisterhood Cookbook.

Why spend hours peeling, chopping, slicing and dicing and sauteing reducing the onions down to a turn, when Liptons had come to m’lady’s rescue. Add water and voila…. onion stock!

So it was with modern pride that my Mother prepared her holiday brisket in that E-Z fashion.

I on the other hand, being just as contemporary, sniff at the notion of using a packet of dried onions, insisting on peeling, chopping, slicing and dicing the real McCoy sauteing them down til they are reduced to a golden hue.

But the copious onions required for the meal, along with the copious tears it produces, now co-mingle with great tears of sadness at the loss of my Mother.

As I prepare the Seder for which she will never again attend, it is lit by the glow of a yartzeit candle, a shining light of tribute and memory to her passing on this day.

So it is a day of tears, that even Lipton’s Onion Soup could not help.

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2017. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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Crisco and Kosher Kitchen Culture

Many were on the warpath over the use of the offensive name Redskins.

Now, our long national debate over the Washington football team Redskins is finally over.

Score one for the racists!

With a Supreme Court win for The Slants, the All Asian American rock band, the door is wide open for potentialy offensive trademarks. Cleveland’s Chief Wahoo as imagined in other ethnicity Source: www.clevescene.com

In a nod to making America great again, the Supreme Court held a pow wow ruling that the government can’t refuse to register trademarks that are considered offensive on racial, religious or similar ground.

Pale-Face Profits

When it comes to heap-big offensive names the NFL franchise isn’t the first franchising organization to utilize questionable Native American imagery in its merchandise.

Many moons ago, a company called Franchise International offered mid-century American go-getters  the opportunity to own a fast food restaurant of their own with the dubious name Heap Big Beef.

Return Of The Red Man

“Hippies have re-discovered the Indian,” explains Life Magazine in this December 1. 1967 issue.” Viewing the dispossessed Indian as America’s original ‘dropout’ and convinced he has deeper spiritual values than the rest of society, hippies have taken to wearing his costume and honing in on his customs….Some claim to have found a precedent for the “be-in” in the Indian powwow. ..The hippies infatuation with the old Native American Return of the Red Manways of braves and squaws has not gone unappreciated by real Indians.”Graphic by Milton Glaser

In 1967  businessman William “Buffalo Bill” Brody had an eagle eye for opportunity.

According to Life Magazine,  the Red Man was red-hot.

At the same time that Native Americans were discovering their cultural history and  questioning their long heritage of violence, social disruption and neglect, Americans  fell in love with the noble Redskin.

Not only were headband-wearing, feather-donning, peace pipe smoking hippies re-discovering Indians – sporting a feather was believed to provide “good vibrations” during an LSD trip according to Life,- fashion designers were on the warpath producing all sorts of Indian garb for both braves and squaws.

Back to school musts – Pocahontas head bands were in as were fringe benefits from leather. Vintage ad Fashion Under 21, 1968

“The hippies involvement with Indian ways has infected the non hippie world,” Life announced.

Heap Big Profits

So when an ad appeared in the magazine  offering the chance to own your own Indian themed restaurant, Bill  knew a heap big business opportunity when he saw it.

In 1967 Franchise International ran an ad for the franchising opportunity to own a Heap Big Fast Food the coast to coast chain of roast beef restaurants of your own. No tipping, no deciding ( kind of like how we treated the Indians) No waiting. Heap Big Beefs swift and courteous service make your dining stop a relaxing refresher for the entire family. And for mighty little wampum!

“He man profits can be yours – make plenty of wampum with the ownership of your own Heap Big Beef Restaurant.”

Like any red-blooded American, who could pass on the chance to be their own chief and make heap big wampum?

Not this pale-face!

The offer to own your own franchise was irresistible.

Happy Trails

From coast to coast all along Americas best trafficked trails,tepee-dwelling  suburbanite were flocking to this latest food franchise. Guaranteed to satisfy a savage appetite, folks were happy to shell out 59 cents for an Honest Injun taste of the old west “sliced hot right before your eyes.” The mouth-watering meal  washed down with a wholesome Shawness shake or genuine Indianaid could be enjoyed amidst “sparkling Indian décor. ”

The Indian themed restaurant didn’t offer Bison burgers but the heaping he-man sized roast beef sandwiches spelled he-man profits .

So chief, pack your squaw and her papoose in your Pontiac and head on over to Heap Big Beef !

Big Taste….  even bigger tastelessness.

All for little wampum!”

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2017. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

A summer staple at my 1960’s family barbecues was the ritual hot dog competition not in competitive eating but dissecting who made the best toothsome well turned frank.

The mouth-watering aroma of grilling franks wafting through the suburban air sparked the inevitable debate about who made the best hot dog.

There was fierce loyalty and intense competition.

A Hot Dog Makes Them Love Control!
Vintage advertisements (L) Del Monte Catsup 1961 (R) Gleam Toothpaste 1950s

The faithful kosher deli coalition whose Hebrew National dogs were grilled flat on a gas griddle to a crispy puckering finish, scoffed at the sacrilege of the  “dirty water dogs” languishing in a warm water bath sold by the city street vendors, whose devotees swore by the steamed Sabretts, heaped high with rich day-glo orange-colored sweet-tart onion sauce.

Loyalists to N.Y.C.’s  West Side Gray’s Papaya formed an unlikely alliance with their East Side rival Papaya King, both of which thought it blasphemous to  wash down a frank with anything but papaya juice, certainly never an orange drink, even if the frank dressed with mustard relish and nestled in a buttered toasted bun was “Good…like Nediks!”

For some the pontificating took on the seriousness of a rabbinic argument, though in actuality it more closely resembled a bunch of kids arguing over which were the best baseball cards, Topps in the nickel wax pack  or Bazookas cut from panels on the gum boxes, and like both discourses, no one ever won the dispute.

But on one point they agreed.

Vintage Photo Nathans Hot Dog Stand, Coney Island, NY

No one dared tamper with that most sacrosanct of hot dogs the one consumed on Coney Island on Surf and Stillwell Avenues – Nathans.

It’s the Wurst

 With the dexterity and skills of a fencer, Dad nimbly poked and prodded the franks on the grill. Normally the only dogs to sizzle on our Weber were those approved by a Higher Authority, Hebrew National, but as a surprise my grandfather had brought us cartons of gen-u-ine New York Yankee- approved-Stahl Meyer hot dogs direct from their Ridgewood Queens factory.

The boxes of pork and beef frankfurters were more than likely a token of thanks to my pawnbroker grandfather from a Stahl Meyer delivery truck driver with a penchant for poker who had pawned his Timex for the umpteenth time.To show his appreciation for my grandfathers leniency, he had made an unscheduled “delivery” to Edelstein Brothers Pawnshop on his regular route supplying dogs to Yankee stadium

The very mention of a Stahl Meyer hot dog brought boyish grins across generations of Dodger and Giants fans, instantly transporting my curmudgeon great Uncles and their broad beamed sons from the comfort of their webbed aluminum lawn chairs to the hard, gray painted, wood slatted seats of the bleachers of the old Polo Grounds and Ebbitt’s Field.

Even those observant Jews like my Great Uncle Leo who would never dream of eating a hot dog that wasn’t kosher, crossed a sacred boundary with ease at a baseball game.

Like eating at a Chinese Restaurant, age-old prohibitions were suspended for the day, as he willingly succumbed to the enticing aroma of a steamy Stahl Meyer dog fished out of rapidly cooling water by vendors dressed in white lugging around iron trays shouting “They’re skinless and boneless and harmless  and homeless”  as they bounded up and down the narrow aisles.

Not everyone was so enthralled.

For some members of my family any hot dog that wasn’t a kosher Hebrew
National, might well have been the same as barbecuing bacon.

As Dad casually nudged the plump Hebrew Nationals to one side of the grill, my  great Aunt Rena watched like a hawk making certain that a rogue Stahl Meyer frank did not accidentally defect over to the other side of the barbecue. It wasn’t just that these franks were not sanctified by rabbinic law, no it was far worse.

These dogs had Deutschland written all over them.

As if the factory was on the Rhine and not Ridgewood Queens, Aunt Rena shuddered at the thought of some former Bund Deutscher Madel blue-eyed blonde, meat-packing Fräulein fondling the Fuher’s frankfurters in their natural casings, while lustily humming the Nazi anthem “Horst Wessel song.”

Vintage Ad (L) Skinless Franks 1948 (R) Vintage Saturday Evening Post Cover 7/31/43 illustration Kenneth Stuart

Ridgewood, where the hot dogs were manufactured was a notoriously German neighborhood.

Not surprisingly, Aunt Rena was not the only family member who was convinced its many multi family row houses built-in the 1920s by Germans for Germans , brick by golden-colored Kreischer brick, was still populated by men in brown shirts, black Jack boots and wide Sam Browne Belts, rank and file members of the German American Volksbund who 25 years earlier, believed in Nazi power and strength to conqueror the world who still refused to embrace Aus der traum.

As the Stahl Meyer dogs rolled perilously close to the Hebrew Nationals, a shiver of terror went through some of my relatives, as if Joseph Goebbels himself had cheerfully stuffed those plump terra-cotta tubes with not only pork and spices, but a hefty serving of Nazi propaganda for good measure.

When it came to Germany, a wall had already been built by my family, beating the Russians by a full decade.

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It was a post war Passover plot worthy of the Russians; a cold war caper to rival anything Julius and Ethel Rosenberg cooked up.

A top-secret stolen – during the Jewish holiday of  Passover nonetheless – riveted my suburban neighborhood in the spring of 1958

Known as  Operation: Matzoh Ball  it was filled with more than matzo meal – it was loaded with espionage, scandal and treachery. The stuff of legends, this Passover plot was hotly debated over kaffeee klatches for years.  Some claimed foul ball others dismissed it as pure paranoid fantasy.

The dispute continues to this day.

Long before we worried about the infiltration of Russian bots, cold war Americans panicked about Russian spies

By the late 1950’s the cold war had congealed as quickly as a cold bowl of chicken soup.

Americans were still simmering in a brew of paranoia, fear  and suspicion when it  came to the Ruskies.   Communists were sneaky plotters – Russian  spies  could be lurking undetected right in your own backyard. Still haunted by the specter of the Rosenbergs, tried and executed for their treasonous act only a few years earlier,  remnants of the red scare still dictated the mindset of the public.

It was against this backdrop that this mid-century  matzoh ball mystery occurred.

Passover Plot

In late March of 1958 with Passover only weeks away, my mother was felled by a surprise attack of a migraine.

Since she was a teen, poor Mom suffered from migraine headaches which along with the excruciating pain made her sensitive to both light and noise. Sometimes her headaches burst upon her with a terrifying suddenness, others, like that day a bright flash of light would give her a  20 minute warning signal. No matter how much Anacin she stockpiled in her arsenal of pain relief, it was woefully inadequate in the face of this massive headache.

Manhattan Project

Bedridden and burdened with the preparation of a big family Seder looming ahead, Mom called in for reinforcements. Always on 24 hour standby, my grandmother Nana Sadie marched in from Manhattan. Loaded down with shopping bags full of holiday goodies she was prepared to do battle on the kitchen front.

A massive cooking effort began.

It wasn’t long before Nana’s rich chicken soup with its golden color  and soothing aroma  filled the house, gently wafting out the open windows for all the neighbors to savor.

But even more famous than her chicken soup, was Nana’s matzo balls which were legendary in their melt-in-your-mouth lightness and fluffiness.

Matzo balls were for my grandmother the measure of a good cook’s ability.

Her balls were always Boombeh (huge) and never Shtickels (little pieces).

Top Secret

The matzo ball recipe, handed down from her mother, my Great- Grandma Posner, was closely guarded, so top-secret, no one but Mom had access to the highly classified information.

Now access to the kitchen required security clearance, and was determined by need-to-know.

No one doubted that something dramatic had been cooking in the kitchen.

Kitchen Confidential

Her recipe was highly coveted – the manner in which she got her batter to reach those heavenly heights was strictly confidential. All the women of B’nai Brith begged her, and the Hadassah ladies tried to hondlen with her. Neighbors nagged and friends became frosty, when she refused.

Mom too, was used to the sidelong glances from the gals of Sisterhood who scrutinized, and analyzed trying to break the code for the sacred recipe. Which brand of matzo meal- Horowitz Bros.& Margareten, or Manishewitz? Maybe Streits was the secret.

Did she use Cotts Club Soda, or stiffly beaten egg whites; oil or schmaltz or, God-Forbid-butter?  No matter how hard others tried to cajole, coerce, and extract the information, their lips were sealed.

Second Rate

It rankled our neighbor, Natalie Moscowitz  especially with Passover approaching. Her matzo balls were puny, the size of golf balls and almost as hard; they had to be skewered with a fork, while digging in with a spoon to avoid shooting them out of your bowl across the table.

More than anything else, the coveted recipe had become a symbol throughout the neighborhood of  Mom’s prowess in the kitchen; those  soft, voluptuous orbs bobbing in a sea of broth, those bewitching balls, a demonstration of her religious fitness and  holiday efficiency.

As a powerful symbol of Mom’s technological might, the matzo ball recipe was ipso facto something Mrs. Moscowitz had to have.

The Outsider

As Mom regained her strength and her migraine dissipating, exchanges between my brother Andy and myself heated up. Small skirmishes continued to erupt throughout the day.

Exasperated and still sensitive to noise, Mom decided an outside, rapid response force needed to be called in to deal with us.

Mrs. Moscowitz  had helpfully suggested the services of her teenage niece Julie who lived not far away on Verona Avenue. Julie Rosensweig could be deployed on a short notice and since she had previously baby sat for us she wouldn’t need clearance.

Or so we thought.

Fowl Play

In retrospect, how were we to know that something dangerous would be entering our house undetected ? Like the sneaky Communists, treacherous decoys could infiltrate as friends and neighbors setting off a chain reaction that would reverberate for years.

It didn’t take long before Nana had proof positive that the Moscowitzes were up to no good. Someone had stolen her secret matzo ball recipe.

Within a few days there was a sudden proliferation of fluffy, light-as-air matzo balls up and down the block. Before you knew it, every neighbor would be serving Nana’s chicken soup and matzo balls for Passover.

Loose Talk Is a Chain Reaction For Espionage

Since the formula was top-secret and Nana prohibited dissemination of information about the matzo balls construction, it must have been espionage that allowed Natalie Moscowitz to penetrate our kitchen and test it. Stealing the recipe confirmed for Mom the Moscowitz’s general duplicity and untrustworthiness.

Each new disclosure, fully substantiated or not, was greeted with a kind of knowing sneer  by Mom.

On the defensive, Natalie said that to imply that she stole the recipe, would suggest that Nana Sadie was the only source of kneidel knowledge  and therefore anyone who learned to do it must have discovered the Posner’s secret formula.

But yes, Mrs. Moscowitz did in fact learn by espionage at Moms house, information about the physics of matzo balls.

A good ball has a solid central mass; the correct leavening was essential  to produce the trapped gases and ultimate release of carbon dioxide, providing the propulsion required to expel the  large amounts of energy locked up in the ball’s nucleus. The timing, and cooling period had to be carefully monitored, the density and ratio of fat to liquid to matzoh meal had to be precisely calculated.

Chain Reaction

It was Julie with her infiltration tactics, who provided specific data on the design of the Matzo Ball.

Julie’s mother, Ethel Rosensweig, a Home-Ec teacher  was a top-secret formula  breaker, who upon questioning, seemed to have substantial knowledge of the recipe.

Julie provided  Mrs. Moscowitz a good deal of information on the correct placement of ingredients most likely to start a chain reaction in order for the spheres to implode on impact resulting in  matzo balls that were Boombeh’s.

She provided a considerable packet of information including several sketches of molds that could be used to make the proper size, critical to the balls implosive core. The correct diameter was crucial; a few centimeters off in either direction, and the mission would have to be aborted.

Natalie Moscowitz found the material of inestimable significance and was willing to share it with the neighbors.

Natalie and the other neighbors disagreed for a time over whether they had allowed for sufficient compression in shaping the balls in order to produce adequate implosion. The problems were solved  and a few days before Passover they were ready to test.

Blast Off

As the balls were dropped into the scalding broth, shock waves were sent though the kitchen.

The correct trajectory of these spheres into the boiling liquid was crucial. Would the balls sink to the bottom of the chicken soup or float delicately over the surface? Did they produce floaters or sinkers?

Almost immediately, the balls themselves swelled so much they filled up the entire pot! BOOMBEH!!

Debate

Was it only through underhanded means that Mrs. Moscowitz gained the information they needed to make the delectable dumplings? Was Julie Rosensweig merely a willing patsy?

Of course both Mom and Nana had underestimated the ability of Natalie Moscowitz to gear up so quickly for the production of  perfect matzo balls for Passover. They also underestimated her talent, resources, and resourcefulness.

There was substantial evidence that Mrs. Moscowitz had keen kneidel knowledge and a research program of her own, way before Nana’s visit.

But she lacked the real know how – using crude margarine where Nana insisted on fine schmaltz.

Nana refused to believe it happened, dismissing the intelligence that indicated it had.

She tasted it to authenticate it. Despite the fact the matzo balls were the regulation two inches in diameter, light as clouds, delicately disintegrating into a fluffy mass, they had missed the critical element.

Nana Sadie smiled dismissively.

Years later I would learn the secret, handed down for generations, until finally it was my time to be entrusted with it. It wasn’t about the seltzer, the stiffly beaten egg whites or even the schmaltz.

The one ingredient you must put in everything you cook, according to Great Grandma Rebecca, is love. If you do, everything you cook will be delicious.

Only then, she claimed, would it be a “meichel for the beichel!” ( a gift for the stomach).

A Happy Passover to all my friends who celebrate it!

Copyright (©) 20018 Sally Edelstein Envisioning the American Dream All Rights Reserved -Excerpt From Defrosting The Cold War:Fallout From My Nuclear Family

As America entered the Great War in 1917, Uncle Sam encouraged all his hyphenated American nieces and nephews to join him in fighting this war to end all wars.

“You came here seeking Freedom,” he told the masses of immigrants living on our bountiful shores “and now you must help to preserve it!”

And on the home front nothing was more patriotic than the battle on food conservation.

“Food will win the war,” Uncle Sam proclaimed, exhorting all patriotic American women to help win the war in their kitchen by voluntarily restricting precious food commodities so that the dough boys and our allies would be well fed.

Vintage WWI Poster US Food Administration

While we were fighting “over there” over here it was all out war on scarce wheat, meat, sugar and animal fats; it was, also all out war on anyone remotely appearing un patriotic, i.e. un American.

If conserving on wheat would help our fighting boys it was a small price to pay to show you were 100% American.

Enlisting the help of housewives by making them soldiers of the kitchen, women were on the front lines on the home front including my great-grandmother Rebekah and her daughter, my then 17-year-old grandmother Sadie

Pledge Drive

The newly formed the Food Administration relied on patriotic propaganda to reduce food consumption in the U.S. Uncle Sam persuaded, not forcing Americans to cut down on their consumption of white wheat flour and meat as well as butter and sugar.Besides pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, American women were asked to sign a pledge card promising to restrict their food choices.

Young girls were eagerly sought after to be part of Wilson’s infamous Call to the Women of the Nation” and my then teenage grandmother Sadie eagerly stepped up.

Literally

One way that Uncle Sam was able to persuade people into volunteer food conservation efforts was to sign a pledge card.

When the first Pledge Drive began in late October 1917, my high school student grandmother answered Uncle Sam’s call to canvass her Brooklyn neighborhood collecting signatures. From October 29th to November  4th,  Sadie and her classmates tramped up and down Bedford Avenue, brownstone to brownstone, house to house, encouraging housewives to sign the pledge cards during Food Pledge Week.

No one wanted to be accused of having questionable dietary choices which became synonymous with being unpatriotic. Just as the government had whipped a very reluctant country to go to war in order to “make the world safe for democracy,” so Uncle Sam became skilled at food shaming the American public.

Americans agreed: We shall cheerfully deny ourselves.

We Answer to a Higher Authority

Corn as well as other grains were encouraged as substitutes for scarce wheat. WWI Food Conservation poster

Returning home from school one late October afternoon in 1917, my then teenage grandmother Sadie found her mother standing at the coal cook stove in the spotless, onion scented kitchen, rendering chicken fat (schmaltz) in the “fleyshik” (meat) frying pan, and frying cheese blintzes in the milkhik (dairy) pan, never ever confusing one cast iron pan for the other.

The rambling house in Williamsburg Brooklyn was alive with the odors of burning carrots, frying onions, cooking cabbage and fermenting sauerkraut ( now patriotically called liberty cabbage.)  Without even looking up from the stove, Rebekah handed Sadie a piece of challah, schmeered with schmaltz, – a nosh before dinner.

Sadie was bursting at the seams to tell her mother not only what she had learned in her Home Economics class and how it could help win the war effort, but the importance of the pledge drive.

Vintage WWI Poster US Food Administration

Sitting at the oil-cloth covered kitchen table nibbling on the rich, greasy, bread, Sadie excitedly explained to her mother how scientists had devised new rules of nutrition classifying food into groups like proteins and carbohydrates and were now telling folks what was good for them to eat based on the foods recently discover chemical make up.

Relying on these principles of new scientific nutrition, Uncle Sam had established rules for how and what to eat for the war effort.

Happily cooking with Crisco was not only kosher, economical and digestible it was patriotic. Whether baking challah or pastries, Jewish housewives could avail themselves of Crisco. Vintage Crisco ads WWI 1917

Home economists from the newly formed U.S. Food Administration had prepared a hefty textbook for high school students explaining not only the theories of new nutrition, but devising war-time recipes and menus which would use substitutes for scarce precious wheat, beef, butter, and sugar.

We All Must Do Our Share

Holding up a pledge card, Sadie explained how Uncle Sam was now politely asked housewives to voluntarily sign pledge cards to obey the food conservation rules set out by the Food Administration, suggesting one wheatless day a week, one wheatless meal a day, one meatless day a week, and one meatless meal each day.

WWI Pledge card from the Food Administration signed by First lady Edith Wilson.The second pledge card campaign in late October 1917 managed to sign up nearly half a million out of 24 million families.

Proudly she told to her mother that Mrs Wilson was the first woman to sign this important food pledge card, setting the example for all American women to follow.

“There was no better way to support and show your Americanism than to sign a pledge card like our first lady,” Sadie urged her mother.

Besides which nowadays dietary transgressions, Sadie implied, were close to treasonable. “But all a patriotic housewife had to do was walk right up and ask Uncle Sam to show me how!”

Separate But Equal

But Rebecca had already signed a pledge card of sorts.

She had walked up to her own higher authority, the laws of Kashruth, the ancient Jewish Dietary laws and asked them to show her how.

In an Orthodox Jewish household like my Great Grandmothers, the only important rule- one that was non negotiable was the time-honored rule of Kashruth, keeping kosher an elaborate system of rules that dictated the kinds of foods that were permissible to eat and even the way the foods are prepared.

She needed a scientist or Uncle Sam to tell her about food, like she needed “a hole in the head.”

But no one wanted to be thought unpatriotic. In an age of heightened xenophobia this Russian immigrant dared not be thought un-American. Besides, if a mensch like Uncle Sam asked, who could refuse?

A proud citizen she embraced her Americanism. By signing the pledge card, she joined thousands of immigrant Jewish housewives all over Brooklyn who would hang the cards in their windows attesting to their oath (“the service tag of American women”)

Meaning of America

Vintage WWI posters Uncle Sam and Woodrow Wilson

One couldn’t say that our land-of-the-free-government didn’t take the needs of the melting pot masses in to consideration.

Thoughtfully, Uncle Sam had printed out a whole batch of pledge cards especially for his “Hebrew Sisters” conveniently translated into Yiddish, so that they would understand what they were signing.

Along with the door to door canvasing the cards were distributed in the local synagogues, along with government posters in Yiddish proclaiming, “You came here seeking Freedom. You must now help Preserve it – Waste Nothing!”

This was all part of President Wilson’s Committee on Public Information in an effort to solicit support for the war.
As part of the program, an army of volunteers called the Four Minutemen gave brief speeches typically 4 minutes long to spread support for the war, speaking wherever they could find an audience such as at theaters, nickelodeons, lodges and churches.

A Four Minute Shtik

The local Four Minute Men organization tried to  tailor speeches to immigrant communities.

In N.Y.C alone some 16 hundred speeches addressed half a million people each week in their native tongues. Italian was popular but it came in second to Yiddish.

Yiddish speaking Four Minute men spoke at Yiddish theaters, playhouses, and synagogues, including my great-grandparent’s temple.

The jingoistic talks were called “The Meaning of America” and the appeal to patriotism was essential. Utilizing themes of shared sacrifice and responsibility of citizenship encouraging every American, adult and child, to “do your bit.”

This was the Great Crusade, the most insistent call for citizenship and participation the nation had ever seen.

The Great Crusade.

We would sacrifice for our Dough Boys – the crusaders of democracy. Vintage photo Ladies Home Journal

A handsome rosy-cheeked shtarker strode deliberately into the synagogue meeting room filled to capacity with Sisterhood members, and without any kibitzing got down to business.

“I am glad to join you in the service of food conservation for our nation,” he read aloud from a pledge card to the group of mostly former Eastern European Jews like my great-grandmother who listened intently. “Who could refuse? See what it says? You do not need to promise wheatless day.”

“Remember too, this pledge card is sent direct to Washington. It helps our boys and is an honor for every patriotic American woman.”

WWI Vintage Poster US Food Administration – “Don’t Waste Food”

Continuing in Yiddish, the young man explained that the American people should eat plenty, but wisely and without waste.

“It is our job, yours and ours to save food so that millions of starving people in Europe may have something to eat. (He got the Jewish guilt down right.) To buy or cook to eat more than you need to waste a single morsel of food that can be used –is a crime.”

“It was,” he said without a bit of irony, “the greatest crime in Christendom!”

It’s a Shame

Vintage Yiddish Theater Poster “Hard to be a Jew by Sholem Aleichem

It was only later when Sadie carefully read the card that she was asking her neighbors to sign, that she was shocked to see that in fact it wasn’t very kosher at all. Not only was it full of incorrect words in the translations, but her kosher mother had signed an oath promising to try to eat (in lieu of meat) shellfish, a violation of Kosher law.

The melting pot really started to simmer over that.

But if that wasn’t enough, an official circular from The Food Administration, signed by Mr. Hoover himself, was sent to the Sisterhood of the Synagogue-of which Rebeka was a member of good standing, urging them to convince the congregants to give up, just for the time being, mutton (forbidden ) and pork (really forbidden!) Rebeka also a member in good standing of the melting pot, really started to boil over on this one.

Thanks a lot Uncle Schmulie!

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Women and Food Will Win the War- WWI PT I

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2018. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

For most American servicemen and women serving in the military overseas their holiday wish is simple: to be home for Christmas.

Soldiers sacrifice much for the sake of others, not the least of which is being able to spend the  holidays with their loved ones.

No Christmas song captures the soldier’s heartfelt longing more than  “I’ll Be Home for Xmas.”

The melancholy words of the soldier overseas writing a letter home, echos generations of  soldiers who long to be home but are unable to e because of the war.

The wistful holiday classic written during WWII was the perfect sentimental war-time song holding deep meaning to U.S. troops overseas and it rings as meaningful today as it did over 70 years ago when it was first recorded in 1943. It was so popular it became the most requested song ar USO shows.

Christmas on the Home Front

“Well! Look at Jimmy…pitching in on a man-sized job! Dad will be proud, when he knows” Vintage ad Carnation Milk 1943

Unlike today when service in the military is not shared by most Americans, WWII was a time when most families had at least one empty chair around the Christmas dinner table.

In the winter of 1943 the U.S. was a long way from victory despite the Allied victories at Guadalcanal, Tunisia and the surrender of Italy.

Wartime Christmas was different from the jolly ones we remembered.

Sure there were evergreen trees, and bright red  holly,  but grim necessity had forced so many things to change, now that war time rationing and shortages were in full swing. Ass the war continued nearly every item Americans ate, wore, used or lived in was rationed or regulated.

Christmas shopping continued if not with a heavy heart, then a with a strong back since shoppers were encouraged to carry all their packages home no matter how large due to cuts in delivery services. Even Xmas cards were scarce due to the paper shortage.

Guns and Butter

Holiday meals took on a war time footing

Our traditional holiday standing rib roast would have to wait till after the war since fighting men needed muscle-building meat more than we did. Unless you had an in witha butcher or patronized Mr. Black  ( on the Black Market) housewives often trudged from butcher to butcher seeeking a decent cut of meat.

Christmas would be less sweet without all the sugary treats since both sugar and butter were rationed too.

Of course we were better off than most of the boys overseas who would be eating Christmas dinner from a mess kit, so it was unpatriotic to complain.

But Uncle Sam tried to be a genial host over the holidays for our fighting soldiers and he promised a Christmas dinner with all the trimmings. In fact Armour promised its readers in the 1942 ad that: “This Christmas, millions of men in the service will find their holiday meal as bountiful as they enjoyed at home.”

So many traditional gifts were also unavailable.

That new pair of roller skates for Jr. would be hard to find since metals were desperately needed for war duty,  perfume for Mom was near impossible to get since the alcohol used to produce  it was vital to the war, and the holiday Whitman’s box of chocolates for Grandma was hard to come by because so many were going to our fighting men here and abroad.

A new Hoover vaccum always on M’Lady’s wish list would have to wait. Manufacturing had halted turning to making material s of war.  In its stead Hoover suggested a gift War Bonds for Christmas:

This Christmas a war Bond is just about the finest present we can think of.

Some day there’ll be Victory…Some day those War bonds will turn into US currency, …for when the Good Day comes to pay for new electric cleaners and automobiles and refrigerators and stoves.”

Fondly remembered things would mean more than ever.

The Ghosts of Christmas Past

Vintage Christmas advertisement Stromberg Carlson 1943
The company was currently devoting all their energy to making communications equipment to help speed victory so new radios were not. being produced. “If there are families who are getting courage from their pre war Stromberg Carlsons this Christmas,” the copy reads, “we are deeply thankful.”

The all too familiar trajectory of the American family’s Christmas in wartime was summed up in one sentimental wartime ad.

This Stromberg-Carlson radio that ran during Christmas time 1943 tugged at the heartstrings. It featured one such war-torn family, that gained strength thanks to the music from their Stromberg Carlson radio.

It seemed the only thing that got Lorraine Babbitt through Xmas that year was music.

Bing Crosby had really out done himself last Christmas season with his dreamy White Christmas.” How could Der Bingle possibly top himself this year,” she wondered.

The baritone crooner didn’t disappoint.

His Christmas time offering for 1943 “I’ll be Home for Christmas” caused lumps to form in everyone’s throats from the home front to the front lines.

The heartfelt words of the soldier overseas writing a letter home could have been anyone’s son, brother or husband. It certainly could have been Lorraine’s husband John.

 I’ll Be Home for Xmas

You can plan on me

Please have snow and mistletoe and presents on the tree

I’ll be home for Xmas, if only in my dreams

Lorraine would play that 78 record of the melancholy song over and over as if merely wishing John home for Xmas would make it so. Lorraine grew forlorn, her  thoughts drifting back to a happier time , Christmas 1940, a full year before Pearl Harbor and our last Christmas of peace for a while.

Silent night, Holy night…All is calm…”

“She was back three years ago and John was leading her into the room…and then she saw it the radio with a big red ribbon around it! She hadn’t said a word…just turned and kissed John…the kids had squealed with delight.”

The Caisson” go rollin along”…

By 1942, her husband John had been drafted  but was granted a Christmas furlough much to the delight of Lorraine.

”Last year, John came home from camp unexpectedly…it was last-minute leave and they’d had no warning. That was a wonderful Christmas…with the kids wearing Johns uniform and marching to the music. If war were only marching and music…”Lorraine muses to herself wistfully.

“There’s a long, long trail a-winding…”

Illustration from Vintage WWII Christmas advertisement Stromberg Carlson 1943

Now it was Christmas 1943.

“In a few minutes it will be Christmas again… Christmas without John,” Lorraine shares with the reader. “Tomorrow will be bad…there will be memories that hurt…but the children must have a real Christmas…the children. Tonight she’d sit and listen to music…and, in the soft sweet strains, she’d reach across the world and be with John…tonight.”

If only in her dreams…..

Merry Christmas to all and to all who can’t be with their loved ones for the holidays.

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2018.

The image of a gleeful Donald Trump serving up greasy fast food  on glittering silver platters to college football Champions in the splendor of the White House State Dining Room caused quite a social media stir.

For some it was nothing short of a democratic homage to Great American fast food, while others were aghast at the tackiness of it. Still others couldn’t help but take note that serving junk food on silver platters is a perfect metaphor for Trumps entire presidency.

But there is a precedent for President’s serving  guests a more laid back fast food feast.

When it comes casual cuisine, Donald T loves his Mickey D’s but it may come as a surprise that FDR fancied Nathan’s hot dogs. When it came to enjoying the food of the common folk, Frankie D.’s heart was all a flutter for frankfurters.

Seventy years ago the lowly hot dog was ennobled by Royalty when it was served by President Franklin Roosevelt at a picnic at his country home for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of England.

A diplomatic visit made gastronomic history. The Royals ate their first hot dog.

History is Made

It was not an insignificant visit. For the first time in American history a King of England set foot on U.S. soil.

The Royals had been on a hectic 4-day American tour in the spring of 1939. Arriving in Washington DC in June, the King and Queen had been treated to all the formalities one would expect from a State visit. In the same opulent State Dining room where 70 years later platters of Big Macs and McNuggets would be served by the glow of ornate candelabras, the Royal couple were feted with a formal state dinner.

After a whirlwind tour of DC, and a visit to the N.Y. World’s Fair where they were given the red carpet treatment,   FDR invited the weary Monarchs to a casual picnic at his bucolic home in Hyde Park, N.Y. The Hudson Valley provided an informal backdrop for this visit of the British sovereigns and the nation’s first family.

Eleanor Roosevelt decided no All American picnic would be complete without hot dogs.

But these would be no ordinary dogs.

No, these would be Coney Island hot dogs. Since Nathans considered itself “the king of hot dogs” it made sense that their dogs were fit for a King. So straight from Surf Avenue in Brooklyn to upper crust Hyde Park the hot dogs were ordered.

When word got out that plebian hot dogs were to be served to the King and Queen of England  the public was dubious at best.

Snobs everywhere including Roosevelt’s own mother balked at the thought of a hot dog being presented to His Majesty.  His proper mother Sara Delano  was horrified not only at the choice of food  but of inviting cooks, gardeners and other staffers to the picnic.

Snooty folks looked down on the lowly frankfurter, though in fact the hot dog could trace its family history farther back than any living king.

A Hot Dog Makes Him Lose Control

But the pearl clutchers could relax.

King George VI and Queen Elizabeth loved it. For the royal couple this was a novelty never having sampled a hot dog before. The King it was said had been looking forward to sampling “this most favorite American snack.”

Sitting on the front porch of FDR’s new stone cottage overlooking the Hudson River was the perfect relaxed setting to enjoy the picnic.  The hot dogs were served on a silver tray but the Royals like everyone else ate off paper plates,  albeit on a table and not balancing it like others on their laps.

Unsure how to properly chow down on a hot dog encased in a doughy bun,  the Queen politely asked the President for some etiquette advise how to navigate a hot dog.

“Very simple. Push it into your mouth and keep pushing it until it is all gone,” the President  was supposed to have said. Demurely, the Queen elected to use a knife and fork instead.

The King seemed to have no such reservation and enjoyed it with gusto, so much so he asked for seconds, which made front page headlines the next day. The “N.Y. Times”headline announced: “King Tries Hot Dog and Asks For More.” According to the article, “the King enjoyed his 2 hots dogs with beer.”

It was in fact front page stuff when King George VI attacked the hot dog at the Little White House picnic at Hyde Park. Wires burned with descriptions of the event and wireless, radio, and cable carried the word around the world.

Headlines ranged from “King Bites Dog;” “With Mustard, is Royal Order” and “First Lady Triumphant; Royalty Eats Hot Dogs.”

Hot Dog Summit

Crafty as always, FDR had more on his mind than a menu when he called for this picnic . To him this would be an opportunity. Call it hot dog diplomacy.

The trip was undertaken in the shadows of WWII and Britain needed U.S. support. At the time, U.S. foreign policy was isolationists. On the brink of war, FDR realized the necessity of fostering closer political and social ties with Britain.

He needed to win the hearts of the American people.

Roosevelt  planned every minute detail of the visit to ensure the King’s success in winning over sympathy and support of the American people. The picnic was the perfect setting  for FDR to show that despite being royalty they were “just folks”

FDR hoped the visit would change the perceptions of the American people which in turn allowed him to do more for Britain.

Three months after the picnic England declared war on Germany and FDR was able to convince Congress and the American people to take steps to aid Britain while still maintaining American neutrality.

Did these hot dogs help save the Western world from Nazis?

That’s hard to say but several years later entrenched in the War ourselves, Roosevelt was such a fan of Hot Dog Diplomacy he had Nathan’s hot dogs sent to Yalta when he met with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin.

The rest is history.

I just finished my Passover shopping at Fairway and I feel very Farklempt.

Preparing for Passover brings up a multitude of feelings and like most daughters, the holiday is deeply tied in with my mother. With the loss of my beloved mother who passed away the day before Passover several years ago, the holiday takes on a bittersweet quality.

Today while doing my annual shopping at Fairway Market for my seder, my mother was on my mind. As I browsed the rows of matzo meal I suddenly felt lost. Which was the brand that my mother always used?  Horowitz Bros.& Margareten, or Manishevitz? Maybe Streits was the secret.

My mothers matzoh balls which were legendary in their melt-in-your-mouth lightness and fluffiness. Her balls were always Boombeh (huge) and never Shtickels (little pieces).

The matzoh ball recipe, handed down from my Great-Grandma Posner was closely guarded, so top-secret, no one but Mom had access to the highly classified information.

Her recipe was highly coveted- the manner in which she got her batter to reach those heavenly heights was strictly confidential. All the women of B’nai Brith begged her, and the Hadassah ladies tried to hondlen with her. Neighbors nagged and friends became frosty when she refused.

She was used to the sidelong glances from the gals of Sisterhood who scrutinized and analyzed trying to break the code for the sacred recipe.

Did she use Cotts Club Soda, or stiffly beaten egg whites, oil or schmaltz or, God-Forbid-butter?  No matter how hard others tried to cajole, coerce, and extract the information, their lips were sealed.

Now I had access to the recipe but I couldn’t recall the proper brand.

A Chance Encounter

Another woman at Fairway browsing the shelves seemed to be struggling with the same dilemma. What brand had her mother used? We debated the issue like Talmudic scholars, but the longing for our mothers advise was palpable. We both so despertly wanted to call our Moms.

We laughed and comforted one another, ending with a tearful hug.

My tears were made that more powerful because placed right next to these items were the stacks of yartzeit candles ( memorial candles)  which have now become as necessary to Passover as fresh horseradish and Gefilte Fish.

But even more meaningful was the music playing over the loudspeaker as all this was going on. It was the soulful Hawaaiian rendition of  “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”  the very song sung at my mother’s funeral by my dear friend Jason  with his angelic voice and Hawaiian ukelee.

It seemed a signal from my mother. She was still there to guide me through holiday preparation.

I picked up the box of Streit’s with a renewed confidence but very teary eyes.

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2019. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific

This morning I stumbled out of bed groggily to get to the 6:30am Senior shopping lalapalooza at my local Stop & Shop supermarket and I hit the jackpot.

It was nothing short of being like a contestant on Supermarket Sweep, racing through the aisles attempting to pack my carefully disinfected cart full of the most valuable items. There before me was a vision  – fully stocked shelves as far as the eye could see, with toilet paper and paper towels aplenty, the meat department brimming with packages to make any carnivore’s heart skip a beat and that most coveted of items, I scored a lone bottle of Purell.

After countless visits to grocery stores in the past few weeks where bare shelves have been picked clean, I felt the same wonder and glee of a Soviet-era visitor to a 1950’s American s supermarket, overwhelmed by the consumer abundance.

To now have that freedom of choice,  so uniquely American and unparalleled anywhere in the world suddenly snatched away, has been startling.

Long a showcase for the American way of life, supermarkets are a symbol of American affluence and freedom of choice. Each shopper free to select from the thousands of dazzling array of options.

During the Cold war, when Americans and Soviets were battling ideologically for the hearts and minds of people,  the American supermarket was held up as the very embodiment of our capitalist system and the American way. American housewives the luckiest and most liberated gals on earth were given free rein to pick and choose between the thousands of new and improved no-fuss-no muss giant-sized selections available to her.

She stood in stark contrast to the poor, downtrodden  Soviet woman already overworked from long hours in a factory who was forced to confront a barren grocery shelf day after day. Their bleak communist shelves so stark and empty compared to the technicolor snap crackle and pop of an American supermarket filled to the brim with the wonders of American corporate know-how.

These comparisons were constantly used in pitting the 2 systems against one another.

1955 was a milestone in food shopping history marking the 25th year of supermarkets and the silver anniversary was met with appropriate celebration.

“The Silver Jubilee Supermarket Cook Book” (“Dedicated to Maimie Dowd Eisenhower, the housewife of Americas No. 1 Household”) gushed that:  “The supermarket is a symbol of America’s attainment of a high standard of living through democracy, and is so looked upon as one of the great institutions in the world.”

Life magazine ran a  special issue devoted to the country’s “mass luxury”, food, described shopping in supermarkets as a major weekly ritual in American family life.

But, nothing paid homage to the supermarket more an article entitled The Lady is Queen of the Supermarket that ran Better Living Magazine  May 1955. A veritable love letter to the dazzling world of mid-century supermarkets and the fortunate housewives who frequented them.

Even now, when supermarkets account for nearly half the groceries sold in the US, they continue to dazzle the ladies with new products and new methods of using familiar products. The supermarket is a cornerstone of the American woman’s economic existence as well as her home life.

To the woman of today (1955) the grocery store is not a challenge but an inviting place to spend an hour. Every week her supermarket features a new product just on the market: a dehydrated potato preparation, perhaps or a new kind of processed cheez.

“By making the housewife queen for the hour she buys she does a better job of selling herself than a dozen eager clerks. She likes the privilege of pulling a can off a shelf”.

That privilege came right after our right to vote and doesn’t even need an amendment to the Constitution for it.

“She has put most of her imaginative faculties to work in the hour she spent doing the weeks shopping. She has made 40 or 50 decisions one way or another as to the purchases; she has envisaged certain products as they will appear when served hot at the table.

“Yes, the woman of today is self-reliant as never before, sweeping aside old barriers winning new freedom. And when she shops for food she wants to be free to choose for herself!

Modern American supermarkets were more democratic than old fashioned grocery stores according to the article, because, for example, self-service meat counters allowed the customers to choose the cut they wanted rather than submit themselves to the whim and favoritism of an autocratic butcher, which now reeked of Communism.

In winning the Cold war, supermarkets would prove to be as powerful a weapon as a missile to showcase America’s might.

Supermarkets could show the Soviet Union and the rest of the world just how mighty the US was, a physical palace devoted to the bounty of the land built on freedom, liberty, and capitalism.

The United States was itching to display this abundance. Since the average citizen living under Communism wouldn’t have access to a supermarket, the U.S. government brought the supermarket to the communists. In 1957, the United States created a Supermarket U.S.A. exhibit in then-communist Yugoslavia at the Zagreb International Trade Fair t. The exhibit featured a fully functional supermarket full of affordable frozen and packaged foods, and fresh produce airlifted in from the United States.

The results were all they could hope for. The Communist housewive’s heart weres sent a flutter. At least according to a New York Times article from September  8, 1957, reporting the event.

“Typical American Supermarket is the hit of the Fair in Yugoslavia” ran the headline.

A typical American neighborhood supermarket the first ever shown in a Communist country was the rage of Zagreb. Scorning the heavy machinery and outmoded consumer goods displayed by the Soviet Union Yugoslav housewives jammed the new US Pavillion at the Zagreb International Trade Fair to see for themselves how American women do their shopping in a “veletrznica” ( supermarket in Serbo Croatian)

Their comments and those of the husband’s present- left no doubt that this year’s U.S. exhibit was the hit of the show. “Look at the meat,” said one goggle-eyed visitor. “its all packed and assorted, the price is marked on it and you  just know its clean.

Say what you like but we don’t have such grapes in Yugoslavia,” a second woman remarked to her husband. “here we get those green sour grapes.

One Zagreb philosopher attracted by the crisp green vegetables flown over from the U.S. was moved to remark, “Here one can see the strength of the Americ soil, the influence of man over nature.

The most beautiful corn,” said one woman stroking the husk to assure herself it was real.

Compare this poor Soviet woman swooning over the produce to the lucky American counterpart where freedom was all around her. Aisle after aisle of fresh, pesticide produced produce, cheap hormone enhanced meat, chemical-laden processed foods, and sugary sweet cereals.

Shopping is a  Social Adventure

Shopping for food in the age of COVID19 is far from the social adventure of the mid-century housewife

“The supermarket is the woman’s store”  waxed The Lady is Queen of the Supermarket  article.

“Self-service is more than just a slick way of selling groceries to the woman customer it makes marketing day an adventure. To the woman of today, the grocery store is not a challenge but a relaxing place to spend an hour.

She enjoys mingling with her friends the store, and when she leaves the check out counter she has a feeling of accomplishment, not just the sense of having a dreary routine chore.

Yes, for my mothers and her generation, the supermarket shopping was an exciting, social adventure. For her daughter today, food shopping is still an adventure, but one she could never have imagined.

“Now That You’re Gone

Never known such unhappiness

Never thought it would be like this

What will I do now that you’re gone?”

Like so many long term relationships, we took supermarkets for granted.

It was bound to happen. We got too comfortable. They were just always there.

Dependable. Predictable.

Never exciting, often dowdy but always reliable. Not sexy like the tiny specialty shops that seduce us with their hand-crafted artisanal goodies sold to us by earnest flannel-clad clerks sporting beards and man buns rhapsodizing about their unique, locally sourced items.

But secretly we still loved those supermarkets for their predictability. We could count on them.

Except now we can’t.

We took for granted not only the variety of foods and household items supermarkets availed us of, but also the convenience and the speed with which these goods were available for consumption.

It is only now when we are urged to stay away from them that we are realizing just how important our supermarkets are to us.

Delivery just doesn’t, well, deliver on its promise. Fresh Direct is hopelessly backlogged, Instacart is too fickle, and Amazon, oh Amazon, you are sorely out of stock of the very thing I desire.

Oh how I long for my old supermarket back.

Supermarkets are so tightly woven into the fabric of our daily lives that it had become practically impossible to imagine the condition of being without them. They are so ubiquitous they have become unremarkable.

Yet remarkable they are.

The evolution of the American supermarket irrevocably and dramatically altered not only the way Americans bought food but how we cooked, shopped, and ate.

Now would be a good time to look back at the evolution of that most American of institutions.

Self-Service

Like all great American innovations, it began with the impetus for freedom.

The first step on the way to the modern supermarket was the innovation of a Self-Service store.  That honor goes to a store with the improbable name Piggly Wiggly, opened in 1916 in Memphis Tennessee by Clarence Saunders.

It was radical.

“ You can take what you please from the shelves- examine it at leisure,”  Piggly Wiggly explained in their ad. “Reach your own decisions. No clerks to wait for- no hurry.”

What Saunders noticed was how much time and money was wasted having clerks wait on each customer individually, filling the order and then delivering the items to their homes.

It was downright revolutionary and unlike any store at the time.

A Piggly Wiggly store exhibits state of the art merchandising for food c.1918. The store was arranged so that customers had to walk through every aisle before reaching the check out counter.

Instead of the usual shopping experience asking clerks to get each item, astonished shoppers were handed baskets ( shopping carts were a few decades away)  in which they placed their own handpicked choices as they meandered through the store’s four aisles selecting easy to reach goods all displayed with clearly marked hanging price tags.

There were no clerks to persuade them and women made their own decisions as they shopped. The tickled customers paid at a check out lane ( cash only no credit) and exited through a turnstile.

It was a novel idea and the ladies loved it.

Grocery Stores

Prior to this, grocery shopping meant going to a counter at a store and being waited on by a clerk who filled their orders.

The store itself was quite small, and you were fenced off from the shelves by counters. Not only did you have to wait for an available clerk to help you with your order, but you had to know exactly what you wanted from a carefully prepared list. Because much of the merchandise was out of the customers reach, impulse buying was limited. Instead of putting groceries into your own cart, you’d ask the shopkeeper to get them for you, and using a long pole with a mechanical hand to reach the floor to ceiling shelves, he would retrieve your item.

Most kitchen staples were sold in bulk, without brand names. A retailer usually carried one kind of flour, sugar butter, etc. Customers trusted their grocer to choose their goods for them. Credit and delivery services were part of the experience.

This small grocery store shows unusual diversity by selling fruits and vegetables

During the early decades of the 20th century, there were a few major grocery chains, the Krogers, Safeway and A&P. But these were all fully clerked with credit and delivery. In 1912 A&P experimented and opened what they called “Economy Stores.”  Clerks remained but credit and delivery disappeared.

Grocery stores were just that – grocery-only stores. No meat, no produce, no baked goods, and no non-food like paper products.

Until the appearance of the combination store after the 1920’s, shoppers purchased all of their meat, fresh produce, and groceries in separate stores. A housewife would have made a half a dozen stops- at the butcher’s, the bakers the fish makers, the fruit and vegetable grocers to complete all her shopping. It was time-consuming.

And a chore.

Through the turnstile to the land of adventure.”

Piggly Wiggly, on the contrary, promised the housewife,  “Shopping was an adventure, not a chore.”

Saunders’s innovation was to admit customers through a turnstile dramatically bringing them into this “land of adventure” and then channel them around the store through a maze of well-stocked aisles past the merchandise. This system forced shoppers to pass enticing displays of food they had not considered buying before entering the store. He redesigned shopping by methodically arranging things in order to appeal to how customers shopped  putting impulse items like candy at the checkout.

The maze of aisles self-service system led to that great American innovation- impulse buying.

Cheap and convenient,  Piggly Wiggly was a great success and by the 1920s there were more than a thousand of them in 800 cities. Other chains like  A&P Kroger and Safeway followed in the self-service style.

Give The Lady the freedom to Choose

The timing of all this was perfect. The post-WWI woman and self-service went hand in hand.

The genius of Piggly Wiggly was it tapped into the new American woman. The newly emancipated lady had just gotten the right to vote and could apply her newly won freedom of choice to her shopping as well. She was a gal on the go who didn’t have time to waste food shopping all day. A Piggly Wiggly ad explains:

The woman of yesterday probably couldn’t have done it at all.

For the woman of today, it is both pleasant and easy. Her new wide knowledge of real value,her new ability to decide for herself, is one of the wonders of the world we live in.

Within a few years she has made this special method of household buying a nationwide vogue

The new post-war woman was a modern woman who wanted to make decisions for herself. She could now drive where she wanted and could manage the household with scientific efficiency

She was no old fashioned kind of gal who would  be restrained by a counter at a grocery aisle

“Mother steps out- in those words a great magazine has pictured the woman of today, self-reliant as never before sweeping aside old barriers, winning new freedoms,” reads the copy in a Piggly Wiggly ad.

When she shops for food she wants to be free to choose for herself. Free to make hew own knowledge count in giving her family more tempting food at  lower cost.

By the mid-1920s this modern housewife didn’t need anyone to tell her what to buy and what to consume

Or did she?

Now that the modern woman had to rely on her own judgment for choosing products it was would be up the corporate food manufacturers to assure her of their quality and her wisdom in selecting their product.

Why depend on the advice and persuasion of a store clerk when she could wander the aisles herself and choose freely,  informed by the many wise corporate food manufacturers at m’ladys service.

Now the products had to do the tempting.

Next:  Packaging spreads the way for supermarkets

Copyright (©) 2020 Sally Edelstein All Rights Reserved

If supermarkets are a showcase for the American way of life, the profusion of colorful packages and containers are the glitzy showgirls winking, shouting, and seducing us to select only them.  Each shopper free to choose from an array of thousands of dazzling options points to our democratic freedom of choice.

Or so we choose to believe. Wink, wink.

Brand names, packaging, and supermarkets form the trifecta of 20th-century food retailing. Codependent, the success of one reliant on the other.  Together they changed not only the way we ate but how we shopped.

Self-Service Grocer -This Little Piggy Went To Market

“Rows of bright, trim packages, individual as people; rows of familiar shining tins and gleaming bottles, colorful, cheerful, gay, each with a host of possibilities- what was more attractive than a well-stocked, well-kept grocery shelf,” rhapsodized General Foods in their 1929 cookbook that was an ode to corporate packaged foods.

Oh, the choices!

That bounty was what awaited the up-to-date homemaker of the 1920s when she shopped at any of the thousands of new self-service grocery stores that were sweeping the nation.

“Along with aeroplanes, skyscrapers, and metal furniture, self-service shopping all tell of swift changing ways of doing things,” General Foods extolled.

Mrs. Modern could pick and choose from the plethora of packaged products on the shelves of her local Piggly Wiggly. Though not quite as large as the soon-to-be-supermarket (that phenomenon was still waiting in the wings) these self-service grocery stores were groundbreaking.

Gone were the days where she had been dependent on the clerk at the grocer to advise and fetch all her items, adhering strictly to her list. Gone where the days of open bins and barrels filled with foods sold in bulk to be doled out by the clerk at his discretion. Grocery stores were now just plain old fashioned.

Why depend on the advice and persuasion of a store clerk when she could now wander the stocked aisles herself and choose what was best for feeding her family.

The forward-looking homemaker filled with all the latest nutritional knowledge didn’t need anyone to tell her what to buy and what to consume.

She didn’t need a salesman.

Or did she?

Out of the Cracker Barrel

Modern Food Packages- Designed For the Housewife. “An amazing amount of care goes into the designing of modern food packages. Each package must give maximum protection to the product, maximum convenience to the housewife.” General Foods Cook Book 1930

 Technology and American know-how would change the physical shape of food purchasing causing a major cultural shift to packaged consumer goods and shelf-stable food.

The big game-changer happened in the 1880s when folding cardboard cartons for crackers and cereal could be made by machines.

But it was Uneeda Biscuit that took the crackers out of the barrel.

National Biscuit Companie’s patented, moisture-proof In-er-Seal wrap for Uneeda Biscuits launched in 1900 promised that their crackers would not get soggy or stale while waiting to be purchased. The airtight container, a  cardboard box lined in wax paper ensured every customer received the same high-quality product at the same price nationwide.

The packaging not only insured freshness, it enabled manufacturers to turn from selling out of cracker barrels to providing individualized, identical packages.

All stamped with brand names.

With a name worthy of a Don Draper, few missed the meaning of the brand name  U-nee-da, the first multimillion-dollar ad campaign.

Packaging which at the end of the nineteenth century was still only a means to protect a product had now become a thing-in-itself.

Who Can You Trust?

The purity of the factories was emphasized by manufacturers. Vintage Postcard Postum Cereal Company stating they are the largest Pure Food Factory in the world.

Like many of her generation, my great grandmother was suspicious of packaged goods. She was used to purchasing things at the small grocery store where food was sold in bulk or shopping at outdoor markets of pushcarts where she could rely on her senses.

With factory packaged food that she could not smell or even see, the products she was buying were naturally suspect. Why should this unseen food, produced in a giant factory by who knows what kind of workers and recommended by no one, be better than homemade or better than food chosen by a local grocer and small local manufacturers?

She did not trust food disguised in packages.

Friendly Persuasion

But you could trust that American ingenuity would come to the rescue.

Clever ad men turned the doubter’s argument on its head.

Not only could factory produced foods be more sanitary they said because they were untouched by human hands and then packed in protective packages, but the customer could rest easy that with its brand name on the package, the company would have the incentive to take responsibility for its products and guarantee its own accountability. Corporate Foods took the guesswork out of not only how to use their product but why only their’s was the best.

To Market and Marketing

 As food and other household products came to be individually wrapped and more easily transportable it was only a matter of time before someone thought of a new way of selling them.

And so in Memphis 1916  Clarence Saunders hit on the novel proposition that he patented under the name Self Serving Store. He called it Piggly Wiggly. The precursor of the supermarket.

 “Choose For Yourself…Help Yourself – Select What You Please…By Yourself”

“At last women are free to make their own decisions when they buy food. There is no one to persuade, to urge at Piggly Wiggly- women choose for themselves –help themselves,” a  1929 ad for Piggly Wiggly promised.

Without a grocer, a clerk, or salesman, the products themselves had to do the tempting and the choices could be perplexing.

Self-service stores all depended on name brands to sell themselves. And only the most dependable names deserved to be on m’ lady’s shelf. But which were the most dependable?

The increasing size of the stores, the increasing number of items, the increasing competition for the buyers’ attention by items displayed so that the buyer could reach them for herself, made branding and packaging into a newly sophisticated industry.

The salesman was nowhere to be seen. Yet he was very much there.

Each colorful item cried out- their’s was grander, more wholesome, more tempting more easily digestible, with more nutritional value than the other one, preferred by more women and thousands of mothers agree.

Bombarded with nutritional information as never before, the homemaker was also bombarded with choices. Who could she trust?

Suddenly there was anxiety about the right choice.

The New Nutrition

The Housewife was now a scientist n the kitchen

Mothers have always fretted about their family’s diet.

What was different beginning in the 1920s were the new attitudes towards nutrition. Food itself entered a modern scientific age. Along with new ways of shopping were new ways of eating. Women absorbed the most up to date information showing her new ways to think about diet and digestion. Exciting scientific advances and discoveries about food seemed to unfold every few weeks.

Although it was a German scientist who had come up with the new idea of classifying foods into proteins,  carbohydrates, and fats, it was American industry that was putting it to good use in the hawking of their products.

Scientists  had recently discovered vitamins, and the corporate food manufacturers jumped on the bandwagon touting their product as “protective foods.” Words like fresh, pure, and wholesome were factory food favorites. Every new product claimed scientific backing for their nutritional theories. These messages were conveyed in advertising and on the packages themselves.

Don’t Take a Chance Take a Name Brand

General Food’s family of fine foods wanted Mrs. Homemaker to be part of their family

Even armed with the latest scientific advice on sound nutrition, the housewife needed assurance she was choosing the right product for her family.

Articles in womens magazines warned: None but the most dependable products – the ones worth knowing- should have a place on your pantry shelves; for here stands that select company you depend upon for everyday needs and emergencies day in day out.

Forward-looking food manufactures, as well as food editors, urge housewives to know the products they buy- know what they are made of and how the important component of food were discerned only in a scientific lab  by a trained expert eye.

The overwhelming new power of packaging then came from self-service.

Now that the modern homemaker had to rely on her own judgment for choosing products it was up to the food manufacturers and the ad agencies to assure her of their quality. And the wisdom of her judgment in selecting the right one. Theirs.

Fortunately, corporate food manufacturers were working overtime, establishing home economic departments and consumer services to assure the American woman of their quality.

You don’t have to trust guesswork anymore, the homemaker was re-assured.  And you don’t have to take just anyone’s say so. The sanitary testing kitchens of food manufacturers were all working overtime to put their knowledge at m’ lady’s disposal. Who could provide more authoritative judgment about a food product than the esteemed directors of the Home economics  department in the many corporate manufacturers of fine food?

For the family’s health and well being, only their product, they claimed, had the exact nutritional elements that offered purity, wholesomeness, and dependability that could be used as vital food by the millions of cells in the body.

Take a Name Brand and Take it Easy

Everyone was vying for the attention of Mrs. Homemaker to entice her to make their product a regular pantry occupant.

“Guesswork has given way to knowledge about food selection, about what to eat.”

And the early Mad Men of Madison Ave would be happy to impart that knowledge.

Every package in the food market was now in competition with every other. Now the package- as well as, or instead of, the product- was what was advertised.

Take a name brand and take it easy!

Next : The First Supermarket. And to better display this abundance supermarkets were waiting in the wing.

You Might Also Enjoy: How Supermarkets Changed Us

Copyright (©) 2020 Sally Edelstein All Rights Reserved

After 67 years, Swanson’s TV dinners may finally be making their rightful appearance as a place of honor at the 2020 Thanksgiving holiday table.

For most of us, this year’s Thanksgiving dinner will be a first.

The first Thanksgiving without family and friends. For many, it will be a solo affair. The single portion convenience of heat-and-eat turkey TV dinner might be gracing more than one TV snack table this holiday.

Turkey TV Dinner – A New Thanksgiving Tradition

Swanson has long advocated that being alone should not prevent you from experiencing a festive spirit. Their very first TV dinner in 1953 was meant to be associated with warm holidays and good times without all the labor-intensive work involved. Imagine, even by yourself you can still savor a full-fledged Thanksgiving feast with all the fixins’ without any of the fuss or muss. Popped into the microwave it’s a far cry from the original 25 minutes one had to wait when cooked in an old-fashioned oven.

The one Thanksgiving experience Swanson can’t provide is that joy of Thanksgiving leftovers.

R) Vintage Swanson TV Dinner Ad

There is a synchronicity to all this. The first TV dinners were an answer to a problem with Thanksgiving leftovers. Swanson’s iconic product had its genesis as a brilliant solution of what to do with an excess of Thanksgiving turkeys.

In 1953 C.A.Swanson and Sons a Nebraska-based poultry processor who sold frozen turkeys and chickens miscalculated the number of turkeys Americans would eat for Thanksgiving. Farmers had overproduced turkeys that year and it left the company with an oversupply of  260 tons of frozen birds sitting in 10 refrigerator Rail Road cars. Swanson didn’t have enough cold storage warehouse to keep the turkeys. This was a major problem

Their executives were frantic, trying to figure out what to do with this excess supply of frozen turkeys. Gerry Thomas a savvy Swanson salesman came up with a million-dollar idea.

Pan Am Stewardess

After a recent visit to Pan American Airways in Pittsburg, he had taken note of the airplane friendly pre-prepared food in compartmentalized aluminum trays used by Pan Am. Developed by Maxon Food Systems in 1945 for military transport and civilian airline passengers, the frozen meals were reheated on the plane in a special oven which took 15 minutes. The complete dinners in 3 separate compartments had equal portions of meat, vegetable, and potato. Called “Strato Plates,” they regionally marketed a consumer version called “Strato Meals” in 1946 which didn’t take off.

Thomas was inspired by these meals and a lightbulb went off.

(L) “The oven cooked meal that tastes home cooked. Now Mom’s on the TV from the start thanks to Swanson’s she’s ready to serve an extra special dinner. ” Vintage Swanson TV Dinner Ads 1950’s

Why not produce frozen turkey dinners in the same system. He excitedly introduced the idea back at Swansons and with smart marketing tying it in with the young technology of television, a TV Dinner was born. The TV dinner was as easy as turning a dial. Mrs. Americ could even throw away the dirty dishes after her family had dined alongside Bonanza

They ordered 5,000 aluminum trays and created a Thanksgiving-like meal composed of turkey with cornbread stuffing and gravy, peas and sweet potatoes ( both topped with a pat o butter another Swanson product. ) Recruiting an assembly line of hair-netted women with ice cream scoops in hand they launched the TV dinner. The price was 98 cents.

Industry Ad for Swanson TV Dinners June 1954

Swanson’s introduced the TV dinner in October 1953 at a national convention of food editors meeting in Chicago. It was a gamble.

“Just what housewives want -no work no thawing needed. Out of the box and into the oven- 25 minutes later a hearty turkey dinner ready to eat on its own aluminum tray. It’s the hottest item ever handled in the frozen food dept.”

Despite their jitter that they had miscalculated again, they were a success  In the first full year of production in 1954 10 million turkey dinners sold.

The idea of a complete meal in one package was novel and exciting. It was revolutionary!

Saturday Night Was Swansons Night

I confess to loving TV dinners as a child. Thanks to wartime research I was the happy recipient of a world of no waiting, no wondering, no defrosting,  no fuss no muss. Though my suburban mother’s cooking repertoire relied heavily on the new and improved with frozen food considered an asset to the mid-century housewife, she never once served us a TV dinner as a family meal. This despite  Swanson’s tagline “Only Swanson comes so close to your own home cooking.” In a world of modern conveniences that was not a stretch.

However, TV Dinners did figure prominently on my Saturday nights as a child.

Like clockwork, my sociable parents spent nearly every Saturday night going out to dinner with friends.  Just as predictable nearly every Saturday night I dined on a Swanson’s TV Dinner. It was a true night off for Mom with no meals to cook, no dishes to wash, no kid’s squabbles to referee. While she busied herself “putting her face on,” readying herself for her night out, she’d simply pop the trays into the GE  wall oven, and relax confident that in under 30 minutes a complete nutritious dinner would be ready for her children.

It was a tradition I relished.

While my mother delighted in dining out on duck a l’ orange elegantly served under a metal serving dome, I was tickled with my aluminum tray filled with just the right portions of thick slices of juicy turkey, gravy, cornbread stuffing whipped sweet potatoes and tender garden peas with a pat o’ country butter . Why it was like Thanksgiving in June!

Jet Set Eating

It was new, it was modern, and pre-dated the Jetsons.

Until I was 10, I had never flown in an airplane so eating a meal out of an aluminum tray transported me to the glamourous world of Pan Am. I could be a jet setter without ever leaving suburbia or my house for that matter. I could imagine myself flying off to some exotic local as I dined on compartmentalized whipped dehydrated potatoes.  Little did I know there was a deep connection between the 2.

Eventually, Swanson included a dessert with their meals, and expanded their menu to include a line of international TV dinners, making the choices as varied as going out to eat at a fine restaurant but in the comfort of your own home.

Shopping with Mom at the supermarket to select my weekly Saturday night TV Dinner was a treat.   I loved the frozen food section of our local Food Fair. The overflowing open top freezer cabinets were like a frozen tundra filled with cardboard boxes of better-buy-Birdseye peas lost in a mass of tangled pot pies, and frozen fish sticks.

But I could always spot the distinctive Swanson’s Box.

The TV Dinners stood apart, gleaming in their  6 color Fidel-I-Tone color cellophane laminated boxes. With the familiar wood-grained TV set complete with 2 turning knobs ( one on the left for USDA inspection the other knob for displaying the retail price) the center screen would be filled with a full color, picture-perfect meal, maybe an appetite-whetting golden fried chicken, or a Salisbury steak sizzling, real enough to melt the ice. Though other companies jumped on the frozen dinner bandwagon, there was no substitute to the gen-u-ine, original TV dinner.

It is one of many traditions now long gone. TV dinners have since slid down the culinary food chain and there is even a sad patina attached to them.  But at their height, it was a revolutionary dining experience.

“It’s good dining and good timing with Swanson,” was their motto. This Thanksgiving the timing might be perfect for a comeback.

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2020.

It was another bittersweet Passover.

Just like the holiday itself, the period around Passover is forever tied in with my mother Betty not only for the beautiful Jewish rituals lovingly passed down but because she passed away Erev Pesach on April 18 the morning before the first night of Passover that year. Unimaginably, it has been 14 years now that I have prepared my seder meal by the light of a yartzeit candle.

Unlike other Passovers, this year there would be no massive cooking preparation for me for a large seder.

Despite considerable jet lag having returned that morning from my week in California, I knew it would not be Passover unless I made my mother’s matzo balls.

Bleary-eyed I stumbled around my kitchen and took down the familiar blue box of Streit’s Matzo Meal from still unfamiliar shelves. Grabbing just the right size Pyrex mixing bowl in just the right mid-century color, I plucked out the well-worn recipe written in my mother’s less than Palmer-perfect script. Though I knew the method by heart seeing it again gave me comfort.

Her recipe was highly coveted – the manner in which she got her batter to reach those heavenly heights was strictly confidential. All the women of B’nai Brith begged her, and the Hadassah ladies tried to hondlen with her.

Mom too was used to the sidelong glances from the gals of Sisterhood who scrutinized and analyzed trying to break the code for the sacred recipe. Which brand of matzo meal- Horowitz Bros.& Margareten, or Manishewitz? Maybe Streits was the secret.

Did she use Cott’s Club Soda, or stiffly beaten egg whites; oil or schmaltz, or, God-Forbid-butter?  No matter how hard others tried to cajole, coerce, and extract the information, her lips were sealed.

Years later I would learn the secret, handed down for generations until finally, it was my time to be entrusted with it. It wasn’t about the seltzer, the stiffly beaten egg whites, or even the schmaltz.

The one ingredient you must put in everything you cook, according to my Great Grandma Rebecca and passed down to my mother is love. If you do, everything you cook will be delicious.

Only then, she claimed, would it be a “meichel for the beichel!” ( a gift for the stomach).

Now as I went to grab a whisk to beat the mix with, I looked up and noticed my mother’s old rotary egg beater staring me in the face, displayed among other vintage kitchenware.

Relegated for years as more decorative than functional, I knew it was time to call the gadget back into active service.

Holding the light blue Bakelite handle and grinding the gears for the spinning blades, was a powerful sense memory, suddenly transporting me back to a yellow Formica table in my childhood kitchen, where I would help my mother prepare for the massive seders she cooked for.

This first Passover in my new home, is filled with sweetness and tears, not unlike like the traditional combination eaten at the seder of charoses and moror.

It saddens me that this is a home my mother would never know, but it is one infused with her memories, her spirit, and her love. For today she was very much with me in the kitchen. And in my heart.