The Secret History of Food

by Matt Siegel

  It augurs well for the future of the ice cream industry131 and its further expansion that the latest comers to the country are acquiring a taste for the characteristic American dish even before they set foot in the streets of New York. It has always been a cause of complaint by many that the recent immigrants do not adopt American standards of living, but the Ellis Island authorities are sponsors for the assurance that in this one respect at least the adoption of the American standard is as instantaneous as could reasonably be expected. Then, too, who could imagine a man who is genuinely fond of ice cream becoming a Bolshevik? Even strawberry ice cream would arouse no latent anarchistic tendencies, while vanilla or peach would be soothing to the very reddest of the Reds. There is as yet no record of a dangerous plot being hatched over a dish of ice cream; the temperature is too low to promote incubation.

  So by the time World War II came around, ice cream (still largely vanilla, which accounted for roughly 80 percent of the market132) had become inseparable from the American way of life, an emblem of American comfort, freedom, and democracy. Once again the rest of the world went back to banning ice cream as part of its rationing efforts (with Great Britain adding salt to the wound by endorsing carrots on sticks133 as the official wartime substitute for ice cream bars).*134 This time, however, the United States doubled down, building pop-up ice cream factories on the front lines;135 delivering individual ice cream cartons to foxholes; spending more than a million dollars on a floating ice cream barge that roamed the Pacific delivering ice cream to Allied ships incapable of making their own; and distributing 135 million pounds of dehydrated ice cream base in 1943 alone.

  And you’re goddamn right we won the war.

  In 1942, when Japanese torpedoes struck the USS Lexington, then the second-largest aircraft carrier in the navy’s arsenal, the crew abandoned ship—but not before breaking into the freezer and raiding all the ice cream.136 Survivors describe scooping it into their helmets before lowering themselves into shark-infested waters. US bomber crews used to make ice cream while flying over enemy territory137 after figuring out that they could strap buckets of ice cream mix to the outside of their planes during missions; by the time they landed, the mix would have frozen in the cold temperature of high altitude and been churned smooth by engine vibrations and turbulence, if not machine-gun fire and midair explosions. And soldiers on the ground took to using their helmets as mixing bowls138 to improvise ice cream from snow and melted chocolate bars.

  Ice cream became so tied to national morale, in fact, that when the most decorated member of the Marine Corps,139 General Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller, called it a “sissy food” in the 1950s140 and tried to convince his marines that they’d be tougher on a diet of beer and whiskey, he drew so much national backlash that the Pentagon had to intervene with an official statement promising ice cream would be served no less than three times a week.

  Even Fidel Castro couldn’t help but notice the transformative effect of ice cream on the American spirit. After a visit to New York in 1959, during which he was photographed licking an ice cream cone at the Bronx Zoo,141 he developed an obsession for American ice cream and dairy. In fact, while Americans were smuggling Cuban cigars into the United States, Castro was smuggling all twenty-eight flavors of Howard Johnson’s into Cuba and building the world’s largest ice cream parlor in Havana, a state-run “ice cream cathedral” named Coppelia142 (after the French ballet Coppélia)143 that occupied an entire city block and served state-subsidized ice cream to more than ten thousand daily customers who would wait in line for hours. Author Gabriel García Márquez even insists he once saw the dictator “[finish] off a good-sized lunch with 18 scoops144 of ice-cream.”

  That last bit might sound a bit like magical realism, but stranger things have happened—like when the CIA tried to assassinate Castro145 by spiking his daily milkshake with botulinum toxin, only to have the toxic capsule break when the would-be assassin tried to remove it from its hiding place in the kitchen of the hotel Havana Libre, where it had frozen to the inside wall of a freezer. Or when Castro got into a fight with the French dairy expert André Voisin146 (known for such works as Rational Grazing and Soil, Grass and Cancer) because Voisin wouldn’t say Castro’s cheese was superior to French cheese—and then Voisin suddenly died of a heart attack in his Cuban hotel two weeks later. Or when Castro spent decades funding the genetic manipulation of a dairy “supercow” to usurp US milk production and the program was marked by failure (including botched plans to develop a breed of miniature cows the size of dogs,147 intended to be kept at home as pets) until the birth of a single cow named Ubre Blanca148 (“white udder”) who produced a record 241 pounds of milk in a single day149, more than four times that of typical American cows. (Castro called Ubre “our great champion,”150 assigned her a security detail in an air-conditioned stable—and after she passed in 1985 eulogized her with military honors151 and a life-size marble statue.)

  But at least Castro recognized the contributions of dairy and ice cream; notice there’s no national US monument to ice cream. (There’s the Cotoni-Coast Dairies National Monument outside Santa Cruz, but that has more to do with the indigenous Cotoni and Swiss dairy farmers in the 1900s.)152

  None of this is to suggest that ice cream was the only food to provide comfort during the war—or that it was easily obtained. “No G.I. who passed through Europe in 1944 or 1945153 could have failed to notice the plight of its inhabitants,” writes historian Lee Kennett, who describes GIs going through chow lines two or three times to grab extra food for impoverished locals and guards turning their backs while food and fuel supplies mysteriously went missing.

  Meanwhile, for American POWs being held captive overseas—where they were often forced to survive on things like maggot-infested rice, stale bread, rotten vegetables,154 and often far less or far worse—comfort food was, in the words of one POW, “as obtainable as a slice of the moon.”155

  “Somebody listening in may have heard us talking156 about politics or sport, or anything else,” recalls British World War II veteran Harold Goulding, who spent more than three years in Japanese POW camps, “but I think really those were just symbols and we were really talking about food all the time.”

  Other symbols, says Goulding, were less cryptic, like pictures of food they tore from old magazines and plastered to the walls of bunks in place of pinups.157

  Recalls 4th Marine Jorg Jergenson, “Perhaps it was just our rundown physical conditioning,158 but, after the first year and a half or so, in general, girls and femininity did not, any longer, enter into the POW’s thought process.”

  “Belly empty think of food,159 belly full think of women,” explains another POW.

  Others passed the time by sharing recipes and filling scrap paper with menus for the elaborate Christmas dinners they’d cook if they made it back home.

  “During the forty-three months that I was a POW160 I spent a lot of time just writing out food and holiday menus to keep myself somewhat sane and focused,” recalls Mess Sergeant Morris Lewis:

  I don’t know if I did this because I was craving food or to keep myself up to the task of being the Mess Sergeant. . . . Imagine being asked by your soldiers to tell them what was going to be on the Christmas menu, all knowing that there would never be such a meal. But here we were with each soldier coming to me and asking if they could put their dish on the menu. It did give us all a sense of what we were remembering most and the will to go on another day. We were planning more than meals, we were providing a sense of hope for what should be or would be again someday.

  And while these menus included far more than just vanilla ice cream, they also highlight what it is that makes it so comforting.

  Explains Sue Shephard, who cataloged many of these menus in her paper “A Slice of the Moon,” presented at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, “Few tried to recall the elegant meals,161 in restaurants, of scallops and oyster, Dover soles, pheasant or Chateaubriand steaks. That wasn’t the food they wanted to rem
ember; it was home food of childhood which represented unconditional love, without cares or responsibilities.”

  And few foods represent that better than ice cream.

  As food historian Margaret Visser so brilliantly describes in her book Much Depends on Dinner:

  There are today two main kinds of nostalgia,162 and ice cream appeals to both of them. The first looks back to past time. Ice cream is the delight of children and therefore evocative of childhood memories; eating it makes people feel young and at least temporarily secure and innocent. Ice-cream stalls are decked with striped awnings and gingham, merchants use clowns, stuffed toys, cartoon characters, and balloons, not only to please children but also to draw adults to indulge in childhood for a while.

  The second, she writes, looks back not just to past time but to past ideals and a sense of bygone simplicity:

  Ice-cream sellers also like to pretend that they are very old-fashioned folks, and they give their premises not only a nursery air but a nineteenth-century look as well . . . black-and-white tiled floors (the tiles preferably hexagonal), bentwood chairs, “Tiffany” lamps, mirrors, cushioned booths, marble counters and so on.

  Vanilla, in particular, takes us back to a time when life and ice cream felt simpler—even if the process of making ice cream might not have been: a time before the intrusion of artificial flavors, colors, stabilizers, emulsifiers, and preservatives.

  Clinical research seems to confirm this. Researchers testing the neurological effects of ice cream, chocolate, and yogurt163 found that only ice cream inhibited the human startle response across genders with statistical significance, leading them to theorize that there’s more at play than fat, sugar, and cold temperatures and that a large degree of ice cream’s comfort is psychological: a result of learned associations from memories pairing ice cream with things like summer, vacations, and friendship.

  Not to get too Freudian, but it’s possible our comforting memories of ice cream and vanilla go back even further, all the way back to our very first comfort food, given what we learned in the first chapter about vanilla being a common flavor in human breast milk (and theoretically in amniotic fluid)—and the tendency of such flavors to impact lifelong food preferences. Indeed, human breast milk isn’t really much different from vanilla ice cream base, minus the ice crystals, considering that human milk is significantly sweeter than cow’s milk164 and also contains more fat.165

  Both breast milk and vanilla have also separately been shown to have calming and pain reduction effects in infants given heel pricks,166 while another study found that when nursing mothers ingested vanilla just prior to breastfeeding, their infants “spent significantly more time attached to their mother’s nipple”167 and consumed 20 percent more milk; the study also found that when vanilla was added to bottled formula, infants tended to suck harder.

  Perhaps that’s why, at least in one POW camp, “ice cream” was the code for “news from home”—because, writes ex-POW Russell Braddon, that was “what all prisoners of war crave more than anything else.”168

  Chapter 7

  The Ghosts of Cockaigne Past

  It has been an instinct in nearly all peoples,1 savage or civilized, to set aside certain days for special ceremonial observances, attended by outward rejoicing. This tendency to concentrate on special times answers to man’s need to lift himself above the commonplace and the everyday, to escape from the leaden weight of monotony that oppresses him.

  —Clement A. Miles

  A couple of flitches of bacon2 are worth fifty thousand Methodist sermons and religious tracts. The sight of them upon the rack tends more to keep a man from poaching and stealing than whole volumes of penal statutes, though assisted by the terrors of the hulks and the gibbet. They are great softeners of the temper, and promoters of domestic harmony.

  —William Cobbett

  There’s a lot more to comfort foods, of course, than just childhood innocence and nostalgia; while some comfort foods play to memories of childhood and home, others play to excess and indulgence, providing—like the alcohol replaced by ice cream during Prohibition—a ritual and illicit escape from the crushing constraints of reality and adulthood.

  In fact, many of the guilty pleasures listed on prisoner-of-war Christmas menus in the previous chapter were exactly that—guilty pleasures—and the tradition of gathering to feast on them in late December isn’t rooted in chaste morality or religious doctrine but hedonic harvest festivals (hedonic not in the balanced sense of Epicurus but more with a Mötley Crüe connotation, meaning gluttony, ritual sacrifice, political dissent, and sexual excess).

  This isn’t to suggest that the modern Christmas doesn’t have wholesome and nostalgic comforts of its own; it’s just that “Christmastime” was associated with presents, vacation days, and gluttonous feasts of carved meats, stuffed birds, and decorative pastries long before the advent of Christianity, Santa, or even Christ, for purposes that were both practical and primal. Ever since the onset of farming and stock raising, December has been peak comfort food season because it meant winter was coming, which meant livestock had to be slaughtered before snow covered the seasonal grasses that made up their food supply and fresh meat and vegetables had to be either eaten or preserved before the winter frost.3 Generally, November was the month for harvesting crops and fattening animals, while December was for baking the resultant grains and slaughtering animals at their fattest. In fact, the old German and Anglo-Saxon names for November4 were Slagtmonat (“slaughter month”) and Blodmonath (“blood month”).

  Even though these traditions were secular, they still carried over to early churches, and you can sometimes find these “labours of the months”5 depicted in medieval cathedrals and illuminated manuscripts, either through illustrations, e.g., pigs being split with axes or having their blood drained, or Latin calendar descriptions: “Semen humo jacto”6 (“I sow the seed”) for October, “Mihi pasco sues” (“I fatten my pigs”) for November, and “Mihi macto” (“I slaughter my sacrificial victims”) for December. Conveniently, wild birds such as geese—and eventually turkeys—were also at their best when slaughtered in December, having had time to fatten and mature since hatching the previous spring.7 And there was also lots of alcohol to go around, freshly fermented from the autumn grain.8

  So December, for most of recorded history, has been a month of ritual gathering and celebration, when people from various cultures would congregate to stuff themselves with massive amounts of food and drink—and maybe even dedicate some of their toasts and slaughters to various gods or spirits as a way of giving thanks for past prosperity or asking for goodwill in the year ahead. Light, by the way, was symbolically entwined with a lot of these gatherings, as this was also the time of the winter solstice, when days became shorter and darkness seemed to conquer light. And to ensure that light prevailed, various Roman, pagan, and Norse traditions called for rituals9 involving oil lamps, lanterns, and bonfires in tribute to the sun or gods of light. This is also where things like mistletoe, wreathes, and trees came in,10 each symbolic of life, luck, or fertility in a time when winter seemed to turn the world dark and lifeless.

  Yet there was another common reason for these feasts: much like today’s winter breaks and holiday office parties, they functioned as what food historian Ken Albala calls “a kind of safety valve11—allowing people to blow off steam and then return to their proper stations the rest of the year.” So they were essentially holiday bonuses from the elite, sanctioned orgies of excess and indulgence that allowed the poor to live like the rich for a change so they wouldn’t revolt and kill their masters—again, just like today’s office parties, only they would have been even more necessary, as life was more grueling back then (when people actually depended on gruel), and this was before things like unions and paid time off and maternity leave, making harvest festivals a rare, if not singular, chance for the common class to unwind.

  One of these festivals was Saturnalia, from the Latin roots sata (“seed”) and serere (“to sow
”)12, which also gave us “season,” “semen,” “Saturday,” and “sabbath”; this was a weeklong tribute to Saturn, the Roman god of sowing, observed around the time of the winter solstice, from December 17 to 23.13 Essentially, Saturnalia sought to re-create the mythical Golden Age14 of Saturn’s reign, when he introduced the Romans to a utopian period of peace and prosperity by giving them the gift of agriculture, sort of the Roman equivalent of Eden. So it was a time of the year when people were nicer to one another, schools and businesses closed, presents were exchanged, pigs were sacrificed,15 and slaves were temporarily freed and allowed to borrow their master’s clothing. Again, this was largely the burden of the wealthy, who were expected to hold banquets for their servants and open their doors to the poor, and just as we stress out about money around the holidays, so did they.

  Another series of festivals, the Greek Dionysia and Roman Bacchanalia, were held in honor of Dionysus and Bacchus, their respective gods of the grape harvest,16 wine, intoxication, ritual madness, ecstasy,17 and fertility. The food at these festivals may have been a bit more primal than most of our holiday comfort foods, though it was also, perhaps, fresher, rumored by some to consist of raw flesh torn from live animals18 or, some say, sacrificial humans.19 But the good news is that people would have been too drunk to taste or remember it, as it was considered bad manners—sometimes even a crime—to be sober during these festivals,20 which would have shown a lack of gratitude to the sacred giver of wine.

  These comforts might seem the most removed from subsequent Christian feasts (also because they involved drunken orgies, goat-skin loincloths,21 cross-dressing, and statues of penises), but if you think about it, the consumption of raw meat and wine isn’t really that different from the modern Christian sacraments of wine and communion wafers to symbolize the blood and body of Christ; in fact, some scholars have suggested that Dionysian or Bacchanalian worshippers similarly believed that they were consuming the flesh and substance of God22.