Preserves: The Manitoba Food HIstory PODCAST

I’m going to start us off looking at this ad from 1925 for Swans Down cake flour. This really emphasizes the importance of homemade fruitcake and the superior properties of this specific brand and features a recipe to instruct the home cook. And the copy here: “Christmas is hardly Christmas without homemade fruitcake,” right? You know, you better go and make this if you really want your family to enjoy this holiday!

As we move into the post-war period, convenience food products transformed home baking. This is something that I've been looking at in studying the Pillsbury Bake Off: cake mixes, Bisquick, frozen dough, these all change the task of baking at home. So, it's not surprising that by 1958 you might see an ad like this one from Pillsbury where the role of the cook is very different. Now the cook is using a cake mix and using a box of icing to assemble and decorate and personalize something that is a prepared food product. There's still labor involved; there's still skill involved. But the amount of time is different and the types of work that you're doing is very different if you're using a cake mix and then making it look like a present or something like that.

Baking is a holiday tradition. Of course, that has a long history. But food manufacturers were keen to reshape tradition so that mixes and other time saving products could be incorporated into gift giving and celebration. Here, Betty Crocker offers a recipe book that features Betty Crocker brownie mix, date bar mix, gingerbread mix, and macaroon mix in order for you to personalize and make a gift that you can give over the holidays. The ad says this will produce quote “homemade good cookies quick as a wink.” These ads were directed at women as the cooks and bakers within their households, almost without exception. And Pillsbury and Betty Crocker emphasize that you could keep up tradition but save work and time by using prepared food products. So, this still is a lot more work than going to a bakery and just buying some cookies, right? You never get off the hook entirely. But you can save time, and that this will be as good as homemade. And I think it's not an accident that the ad copy here says “Give your own.” So even though this is coming from a mix, you're putting your effort into it and you are making it your own as you produce it.

So, this was the first image that I had in this presentation. This is Pillsbury hot roll mix being used to create Christmas tree bread. This is a very popular recipe. Pillsbury will run this ad very similarly today. You can see iterations of this going for years and years. So, this does become a tradition in many families. But again, using this convenience product to produce something that says Merry Christmas with a quote “home-baked gift,” so it's still homemade, even though you're using this convenience product. Now there's a very famous story about the advertising consultant Ernest Dichter. He was brought in to help boost sales of cake mixes and he advised General Mills to remove powdered eggs from the mix and to require the breaking of eggs so that people feel like they're participating and feel like they're really cooking instead of using too much of a shortcut by buying a cake mix. So, Dichter argued that by making the mix too easy, this was hurting sales. Increasing the baker's workload would give women a better sense of ownership and pride in their involvement. As we move into the 1960s and 1970s, however, we start to see some pushback on this message and a sense that using a mix might be too much of a shortcut and provide too much of an easy way out. The irony here, of course, is that more women at this point were entering the workforce; they had less actual time to bake. And yet here we see a story that ran in the newspaper in 1965 that looks back fondly on the days when everyone used to be snug in their beds and mom would drag herself out in the dark and cold to slave over a woodstove to bake cookies and provide that kind of magic for the families.

Not surprisingly, Fleischmann’s yeast was a company that really pushed back on the idea of using mixes and instead promoted going the extra mile for the family by baking from scratch. This ad: “Make your husband glad he's yours; be the only wife on your block to bake a beautiful wholewheat bran loaf” really plays into this message of home baking as a sacrifice that you can make and that the payoff here is that your family will be happy. And I think the adoring gaze of the woman watching her husband cut this bread, you know that that message is very strong here. Or something like this: “How not to be taken for granted: bake sticky buns from scratch.” And so again, you have the woman offering the baked goods. The women are never eating in any of these ads. It's always they’re baking for other people's pleasure. And this would be something, it's not every wife who takes the time and trouble to bake from scratch. He'll notice, he'll appreciate, so this is a currency within your marriage to, you know, make this effort and your husband will appreciate. So, during the holidays an ad like this: “Simply for the joy it gives, bake from scratch.” Here you don't even have the woman in the frame. Her hands are offering this Christmas stollen to her family but she's not eating it. It's all about her making this effort for others. What do you put into it? Well, time and love and Fleischmann’s yeast. What do you get out of it? Well, love, smiles, and the feeling you're doing something kind of special. You don't get out of it a delicious thing that you get to eat, right? So this is, the woman is very much the labour for everybody else's enjoyment during the holidays.

The message of feeling guilty for not doing things from scratch had a slightly different twist from Pillsbury by 1967. So, who has time to decorate cakes and cookies for the holidays? I think the expression of this cookie that looks kind of disgusted at having to do all this work over the holidays is quite notable. And the woman, of course, is wearing a Santa hat: she's the one that has to do the magic behind the scenes to make this happen for her family. Luckily, Pillsbury has a solution by offering this product that will make it so that she can bake cookies at home. She can't go and buy cookies; that would be too easy. So still, the work of managing the holidays is still something that you can't escape, but you can make it a little bit easier with this product. And even—this is another yeast. So yeast companies are really, you know, suffering in the 1950s and ‘60s as everybody is using cake mixes. And so, they're trying to get people back using yeast. And so, re-formatting recipes and saying that you can have a “no time to bake” holiday baking, that you can have a recipe that makes it so easy, it makes it possible for you to do this for your family. So, I'm just going to end here with this image of the Pillsbury Doughboy, which again has this message that “Santa has little helpers, why shouldn’t you.?” That the mix or prepared food could be something that is a shortcut for women but is never allowed for— There's no sense here that you could just give up holiday baking entirely! That you're still going to have to put in this kind of work and that sense of guilt. And, you know, the sort of emotional work as well as the work of cooking really falls to the women that these ads are addressed at. So, the underlying message that the holidays require a lot of effort, that baking is an expression of a woman's love for her family, remain remarkably persistent. And that guilt is part of the holiday experience for women. Thanks.

JANIS THIESSEN: Yes! Korinek’s Roughing It in the Suburbs and Contois’ Diners, Dudes & Diets. Great books! Our next reflection is from Erin Weinberg, an instructor in the Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media at University of Manitoba. She shared some of her family’s Ashkenazi Jewish experiences of Hanukkah foods.

ERIN WEINBERG: So, tastes of home. As a white Ashkenazi Jew, I both have a sense of home and very little sense of home. There's this idea of the “old country.” But where that is exactly? Where my people come from, I can't be sure. Somewhere maybe like Ukraine, Poland, Austria, Romania; that's like a very vast region. And my family—I think that perhaps because of the antisemitism that my ancestors perhaps ran from, that there isn't this idea of holding on to that heritage. Only when I got to university did I meet somebody who was genuinely proud to be Polish. And I never thought of my grandmother, my only, my only grandparent who had been born in Europe: it never occurred to me that she would ever be proud of that because of that antisemitism that she was running away from, an antisemitism that predated the Holocaust, that that was just like a cherry on a discrimination sundae. And that often, when I ask my grandparents, they'll just say, “The borders have changed.” That that's kind of—So there are things that tie us to the past. But really, a lot of the way we observe holidays, as diasporic Eastern European Jews, is making our traditions as we go along. So, I wanted to talk about the dreidel which is a symbol; it's a toy that we play with on Hanukkah. We gamble with the chocolate money. And there are four different symbols which represent the initials for “a great miracle happened there.” In Israel, it's “a great miracle happened here.” The dreidels are literally different. So, in this item, we have this encapsulation of this diasporic experience of this distance. Remembering but at the same time, not really sure what we're remembering. Just knowing that we were unsafe and found a way to be safe. So, I would argue that the food that we eat on Hanukkah is how we both look towards the past and the past discriminations, and also celebrate the miracle of freedom.

So, I'll start with the jelly doughnut. So, we call those sufganiyot. And I just think that there's something so fantastic about celebrating with jelly doughnuts! That this is a food that in all other times of the year would be considered the junky-ist type of junk food. But on this day, it's special.That it's like, the calories don't count because we're celebrating our, like, survival over discrimination. And then there's latkes. And latkes are potato pancakes, and my experience with them is making them with my late dad. And the really wonderful thing is that, even though we didn't have, you know, a recipe from the old country, every year we tried something different. Every year, we managed to mess it up a little bit in a different way. To burn ourselves on the hot oil. But it was exciting to try new things. There was the year when we made the latkes on a griddle. There was the year that my dad finally got his dream come true: the deep fryer. Okay, deep fried latkes: suddenly they were 3D, and that was so great. And even now that he's gone, I'm still looking for ways to switch it up, that there's room to switch it up. So, like, making latkes in my waffle iron. Okay, so and then adding to that: we dip the latkes in either sour cream or applesauce. Why? I don't know. But the decision making about whether one prefers sour cream or applesauce is this self-fashioning, is saying, “This is my Jewish identity. I get to choose one of those.” And I don't know, it's as iconic within the Jewish diasporic existence as Chinese food on Christmas Eve. That there might have been an essential reason for it somewhere, but now it's something that we just do. But I would argue that these innovations, like, in making the latkes, trying new recipes, every like five years trying to make like a healthy version with zucchini or sweet potato and it's just really not the point of the fried food at the core. That innovations are self-determination. That there is something really special about, even though we don't have a full sense of where we're from, we are deciding where we're going.

And my last Hanukkah tradition is lighting the candles. And every night, you sing at least two blessings. But on the first night, you sing a third. And I'll read it in English, which is: “Blessed are you, Adonai our God, sovereign of all, who has kept us alive, sustained us, and brought us to this moment.” And as the years go by, this prayer isn't just rote to me, it's something really special that reminds us of survival and the necessity of celebrating where we're at now and what we can do from here. Thank you.

KENT DAVIES: So, holiday food can be a way of both remembering the past and creating a future.

JANIS THIESSEN: Yes. Those foods, and the ways they change over time, can be particularly important for diasporic groups as ways to remember and perpetuate their heritage. Our final speaker, Jennifer Dueck, is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Manitoba where she writes and teaches about food, statelessness, and refugees in the Middle East. She begins by talking about historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger and their concept of “invented traditions.”

Every year I try to convince my sister not to celebrate Christmas. I tell her we're not Christians. The family is Druze not Christian. We were raised in a tradition that is not supposed to have silly manifestations of faith. The only feast we celebrate is [Eid al-] Adha, Abraham's sacrifice. We don't have a food orgy at the end of Ramadan. We don't flagellate ourselves during Ashura. And for Christmas, we certainly don't shower our children in gold, frankincense, and Dolce and Gabbana.

His mother always wanted to celebrate Christmas; his father grumbled and disliked it. She, the mother, had been taught by French nuns in Jerusalem where she grew up. The father was Druze from the Lebanese mountain and wanted to stay that way, however much he liked his single malt scotch and worldly travels. So, the mother's tree remains simple. There always was a Christmas tree for the children, he said, but he writes, “my mother's tree has remained simple”—but now he's talking about the next generation—“but not my sister's.”

So, my sister always wants to have the best tree in all of Beirut. Sometime in late November, my sister's home is transformed into a holiday monster. She has a collection of at least two dozen Santa Claus dolls. She has a life-sized red reindeer. She puts lights not just on the tree, but on every plant in the apartment including the cacti. She covers every object in sight with a bowed red ribbon so that it looks like a present. And then she buys a present for every child she's ever met. She drives me crazy. I tell her we're not Christians. She says Christmas has nothing to do with Christianity. I tell her Christmas is a celebration of the birth of Christ. She asks, “Who?” She doesn't stop at Christmas. Of course, she cooks lamb for [Eid al-] Adha, she paints, she hides painted eggs for the children on Easter. She has an orgiastic dinner for all her friends at the end of Ramadan. This year she cooked a giant turkey for American Thanksgiving. I told her she's not American. She told me to stop being a Lebanese peasant from the mountain.

For my part, I spent what are arguably the most formative years of childhood living in East Jerusalem, age six to eleven. My family is Mennonite, not Arab. We're from Winnipeg. My childhood Christmases took place with a walk through the Old City of Jerusalem to attend the midnight candlelight service at the Lutheran church whose tower marks the old city skyline to this day. As most of us find of our childhood worlds, this particular world of my childhood is largely lost to me. And yet that rupture and others that life inevitably brings leave space for the reinvention of traditions that animate and energize. Much like the Lebanese whom I've described here, I take Christmas as a time to generate miniature worlds upon worlds of tradition within my household. I, too, have a nativity set that I set up, one made of olive wood and purchased many years ago in Bethlehem. My Christmas is theologically promiscuous and culinarily eclectic. Alongside my regular impulse to roast a turkey and bake a thousand cookies (yes, the woman in the kitchen!), I also always find myself reaching for my Middle Eastern cookbooks: kibbe this year, bastilla the next. The food production is always a little off scale. My ambitions are always greater than my energies. I can never get the timing right. And there's always a sense of impending chaos in the kitchen. But surely, I tell myself, this space of creativity that I find both raucous and numinous is what holiday cooking is really all about.