THE COOKBOOK TEST #0003:’THE GILDED AGE COOKBOOK’ BY BECKY LIBOUREL DIAMOND

INSTALLMENT #0003 (PAID) / COOKBOOKS THROUGH HISTORY / THE GILDED AGE COOKBOOK: BOSTON BROWN BREAD, AND CROWN ROAST OF LAMB

Dear Subscribers,

This week’s cookbook was a challenge for me to write about without getting angry. I think we have a tendency to associate our own anger with righteous, evil-scouring power, and I don’t want to make that mistake - I don’t intend to review THE GILDED AGE COOKBOOK with scorched earth ferocity because that wouldn’t be fair to the book, the author, or you, my readers. But I do want to call attention to some of the many ways history can get framed - for the benefit of the author and/or publisher, for the benefit of the readers, or for the benefit of the truth - as much as objective “truth” really exists, of course. A little bit of ire can help light up some of the contrasts between these approaches.

I didn’t expect food writer and research historian Becky Libourel Diamond to dig into the details of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, but a little more focus on labor and exploitation during the great era of westward expansion - through the lens of food, of course - would have been nice. I didn’t expect her to touch upon the 1897 Lattimer massacre of unarmed striking miners, but some exploration of miners’ families lunches versus their opulent boss’s meals would have been welcome. And while covering the end of the Reconstruction Era and the re-imposition of white supremacy over the South would have been a buzzkill, a look at the birth of American barbecue cuisine and continuation of Black culinary traditions - from Africa to the Caribbean into the Gilded Age - would have been a great chapter that could have been tied into the greater themes of the book. Instead we get a catalog of the food of the white middle and upper classes, from Asparagus Salad with French dressing to Waldorf Salad. “Elite” Black Americans make a brief appearance in a sidebar about Black social clubs, but the food of white social clubs dominates the chapter.