“Key Ingredients: American by Food, ” a 500-year history of the development of food in America, explores the procurement, preparation and preparation of what we eat.
Put together by the Smithsonian Institute, this traveling exhibit is on display at the Washington County Rural Heritage Museum at the Washington County Agricultural Education Center through Aug. 4.
Exhibit curator Dr. Charles Camp, a native Marylander, uses a combination of artifacts, photographs, and illustrations to examine the evolution of the American kitchen and how the food industry has evolved to allow Americans to enjoy a greater variety of frozen, prepared and fresh foods.
The exhibit shows not only home preparation of foods, but also how restaurants and diners prepare foods and how social and holiday traditions were born.
George Crum, for example, with Native American and African American ancestry, created the first potato chip in 1853. He was a cook at the Moon Lake Resort in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. He made French fries for a customer, who then complained that they were too thick. A second batch did not please this customer either. Then Crum cut the potatoes so thin that they could not be eaten with a fork. The customer loved them.
Think Chinese fortune cookies originated in China?
Wrong!!!
They are actually an American invention, “possibly the brainchild of Makoto Hagiwara, who served cookies with notes at his Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco in 1914.”
Restaurants as we know they today did not exist until the mid-1800s. People usually ate at home unless they were traveling. Then they relied on inns and taverns. There the food was simple and the atmosphere was often loud and crude. Raising food and farming has changed greatly over the years.
Native Americans farmed varied crops in small plots for thousands of years. When the English settlers arrived in the new land, they could choose to farm the crops of the Indians like maize and squash, or they could plant what they knew, like wheat and barley. They chose the familiar.
What’s the difference between New York pizza and Chicago pizza? New York pizza can be “easily folded in half and eaten with one hand,” while Chicago pizza has “more dough, more sauce, more everything.”
Think tomatoes came from Europe?
You are partly correct. They did come to America from Europe, but they came to Europe from South America.
Toll House Cookies originated through a random occurrence. At the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Mass., Ruth Wakefield was baking cookies and ran out of the regular baker’s chocolate that she normally used. For a substitute, she used a bar of semi- sweet chocolate which she cut into small pieces that she thought would melt as the cookie dough baked. Of course, the pieces did not melt and the cookies were full of sweet chocolate “chips.”
Thanksgiving was not recognized as a national holiday until 1941. Lots of myths exist about the origin of Thanksgiving. The Mayflower Pilgrims prepared a one-time harvest celebration in the fall of 1621, following a treaty between the Pilgrims and the local Wampanoag nation. They dined on fowl, including geese and turkey, native vegetables and fruits, and five deer provided by the Wampanoag. About 90 to 100 Wampanoag men attended.
An added bonus of attending “Key Ingredients: America by Food” is that there are two other special exhibits currently at the Museum: Gramma’s Aprons (a collections of aprons) and a display of antique potato mashers. The regular museum collection is also on display, too.
The local showing of this Smithsonian Exhibit will give visitors the opportunity to explore the unique “regional” foodways that are Washington County’s Heritage. Here you can visit a recreated country store setting, poke through a vast collection of nineteenth and early twentieth century farm equipment, explore women’s roles through a unique display of aprons, or gather by the log cabin’s open-hearth to watch cooks prepare recipes handed down from the area’s early German settlers.
All Key Ingredients events are free.
In addition to the Key Ingredients exhibit, there will be a number of related activities that will occur during the time of the exhibit and after.
Look for hearth cooking demonstrations, presentations on Civil War rations, Hagerstown’s famous City Market, and church suppers. The Master Gardeners will also be working with local children to plant heirloom vegetable gardens.