Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Eight Flavors
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.fourpoundsflour.com/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.fourpoundsflour.com/about/ * http://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Sarah-Lohman/425699221 * http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/12/06/502172541/how-just-eight-flavors-have-defined-american-cuisine * https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/11/eight-flavors-sarah-lohman-review/508577/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2016050772
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2016050772
HEADING: Lohman, Sarah
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PERSONAL
Born c. 1982, in Hinkley, OH.
EDUCATION:Cleveland Institute of Art, B.F.A., 2005.
ADDRESS
CAREER
New York Magazine, video producer for blog Grub Street, beginning 2006. Consultant for programs focused on food for companies and institutions, including American Museum of Natural History, New York Public Library, Brooklyn Brainery, Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Institute for Culinary Education, Genesee Country Village (Rochester, NY), Preacher Gallery (Austin, TX), Museum of Science (Boston, MA), and the Boston Athenaeum. Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Curator of Food Programming. Appeared in The Cooking Channel’s Food: Fact or Fiction.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, websites, and radio programs, including New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NY Post, Atlantic and NPR.
SIDELIGHTS
Sarah Lohman was born in Hinckley, Ohio, and graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art, with a B.F.A. in 2005. A “culinary archeologist” of sorts, Lohman has put on programs focused on food for companies and organizations all over the country, including American Museum of Natural History, New York Public Library, Brooklyn Brainery, Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Institute for Culinary Education, Genesee Country Village (Rochester, NY), Preacher Gallery (Austin, TX), Museum of Science (Boston, MA), and the Boston Athenaeum.
In 2016, Lohman published Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine, the history of what she considers the eight major flavors in the United States: black pepper, vanilla, chili powder, curry powder, garlic, soy sauce, monosodium glutamate, and sriracha. While she admits that there are actually two more major flavors–chocolate and coffee–she feels that so much has already been written about them it was unnecessary to include them in her book. She researched old cookbooks, as well as regional and ethnic recipes before determining her list.
Reviewers were enthusiastic in their praise. A Kirkus Reviews contributor wrote: “Readers will find a treasure trove of spicy trivia, ranging from staggering statistics on the amount of black pepper sold in the U.S. each year–158 million pounds–or how much garlic is consumed–annually, two pounds per person–alongside entrepreneurial tales. … A tantalizing look at flavors of the American table that foodies will absolutely devour.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer commented: “Lohman’s book gives fascinating new insight into what we eat.” Susan Hurst, in Library Journal, called Eight Flavors “A lively compendium of facts and trivia about essential ingredients.”
Atlantic Online reviewer Jiang Hongyan wrote of Eight Flavors: “Almost more fascinating than the countless odd facts Lohman reveals … are the people whose work had a profound impact on the way Americans eat, but whose biographies have been almost completely forgotten. In that sense, American food, which Lohman describes as ‘the most complex and diverse cuisine on the planet,’ offers a unique and surprising view of American history.” Spoonful website reviewer Sarah Grey concluded her lengthy review by saying: “‘The American is not static,’ writes Lohman; ‘it’s cumulative, and it evolves.’ As a country changes, so does its cuisine, and each new group that arrives has something important to offer. What was once terrifying and foreign to some becomes familiar and friendly, a part of American culture so basic that it’s hard to imagine this country without it.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2016, review of Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine.
Library Journal October 15, 2016, Susan Hurst, review of Eight Flavors, p. 105.
Publishers Weekly, October 31, 2016, review of Eight Flavors, p. 67.
ONLINE
Atlantic Online, https://www.theatlantic.com/ (November 23, 2016), review of Eight Flavors.
Spoonful, http://spoonfulmag.com/ (December 4, 2016), review of Eight Flavors.*
Four Pounds Flour
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RETHINKING HISTORIC CUISINE: a brief introduction to Four Pounds Flour
“I don’t know why old recipes are so evocative, since many of the ingredients are unknown to me or difficult to get, the processes laborious beyond belief, and the results, quite honestly, often nothing I’d want to eat. But they read like a poetry of lost specifics, in which you learn old words and ways to boil, bone, braise, devil, hash, jelly, pot, roast, sauce, steam, stew, and stuff…” (The Education of Oronte Churm)
Why bother deciphering a historic recipe?
You can take a collection of words and measurements written long ago, and turn it into a physical object. You can create something that looks, smells, and tastes just like it did hundreds of years in the past. And that’s the next best thing to time travel: it lets you understand a little bit about another way of life. When I recreate a historic recipe, I not only establish a connection to the past, but I rediscover long-forgotten flavors that inspire my contemporary cooking.
I first learned how to cook historic recipes over a wood stove at my first job in high school. Later, they inspired my thesis, a restaurant reinterpreting historic cuisine for a contemporary audience. Now, it’s led to my first book, Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine.
This blog will focus on, but not be limited to, the history of American cuisine. Sometimes delicious, occasionally disastrous, this is my personal investigation into the history of Americans and their food.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
sarah_lohman_photo1Sarah Lohman is originally from Hinckley, Ohio (near Cleveland), where she began working in a museum at the age of 16, cooking historic food over a wood-burning stove. She graduated with a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2005 and for her undergraduate thesis, she opened a temporary restaurant/installation that reinterpreted food of the Colonial era for a modern audience.
Lohman moved to New York in 2006 and worked Video Producer for New York Magazine’s food blog, Grub Street. Currently, she works with institutions around the country to create public programs focused on food, including The American Museum of Natural History, The New York Public Library, The Brooklyn Brainery, The Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Institute for Culinary Education, Genesee Country Village (Rochester), Preacher Gallery (Austin), Museum of Science (Boston), and the Boston Athenaeum. Lohman is the Curator of Food Programming at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.
Dubbed a “historic gastronomist,” Lohman works with culinary history as a way to make a personal connection with the past. She chronicles her explorations in culinary history on her blog, FourPoundsFlour.com, and her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the NY Post, The Atlantic and NPR. She appeared in The Cooking Channel’s Food: Fact or Fiction.
Lohman’s first book, Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine, is out now–order it here!
Sarah Lohman
Sarah Lohman is originally from Cleveland, Ohio, where she began working in a museum at the age of sixteen, cooking historic food over a wood-burning stove. Lohman moved to New York in 2006 to work for New York magazine’s food blog, Grub Street, and now works with museums and galleries around the city to create public programs focused on food. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR, and appeared in the Cooking Channel’s Food: Fact or Fiction. The author of the blog Four Pounds Flavor, Eight Flavors is her first book.
Devouring (and Drinking) American History
Character Study
By COREY KILGANNON NOV. 17, 2016
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Sarah Lohman at the Tenement Museum in Manhattan. Calling herself a “historic gastronomist,” she finds and recreates forgotten recipes. Credit Alex Wroblewski for The New York Times
In the kitchen of her small apartment in Chinatown, Sarah Lohman worked a mound of pasta dough with a rolling pin.
“She said to roll it out as flat as a 10 cent piece,” said Ms. Lohman, 34, citing the instructions from a century-old recipe.
Ms. Lohman was preparing Sunday dinner as part of a weeklong stint cooking and eating the meals of an Italian immigrant family on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1919.
Ms. Lohman calls herself a “historic gastronomist,” explaining that she searches old cookbooks and other records to recreate forgotten recipes as a way of studying history and the effects of earlier cooking on modern eating habits. Part of her work involves putting herself through eating experiments, which she calls “an elaborate form of performance art.”
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Using recipes from certain periods of American history, she chronicles her cooking and consuming on her blog, Four Pounds Flour.
Ms. Lohman said she had cooked and eaten as a 19th-century domestic servant, and subjected herself to a day of drinking like a man in colonial America, where daily consumption apparently made modern drinkers seem like lightweights. She found historical sources that said adult males at that time typically drank a half-pint of liquor a day.
Her drinking day followed accounts that detailed a series of eye-openers that included whiskey, hard cider and a hot toddy all before noon. Ms. Lohman was drunk in the morning and hung over by 1 p.m. After more hard cider, the posts on her blog became sloppier — she left her spelling errors intact, for authenticity — and she fell asleep by late afternoon. She quit drinking by dinnertime, for her liver’s sake.
Other posts on Four Pounds Flour chronicle unusual early dishes, such as a 1665 recipe for ice cream, which was flavored with ambergris, or sperm whale discharge.
“I found it absolutely revolting,” she recalled.
During the experiments, Ms. Lohman’s blog readers occasionally chime in with helpful information based on their family meals.
“I just do it to see what I can learn,” she said. “They’re not the end point, but the starting point. It all adds to my cumulative knowledge.”
She has compiled that knowledge in a new book, “Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine,” a culinary history of America that uses forgotten recipes to explain how eight flavors — black pepper, vanilla, curry powder, chili powder, soy sauce, garlic, MSG and Sriracha — helped shape American diets.
Photo
Ms. Lohman in her home in Manhattan. She said she had cooked and eaten as a 19th-century domestic servant, and subjected herself to a day of drinking like a man in colonial America. Credit Alex Wroblewski for The New York Times
Ms. Lohman said the book deal came “from me getting drunk for the day.” Her colonial drinking post caught the eye of an editor at Simon & Schuster who suggested that she write a book.
Ms. Lohman is from the Cleveland area. At age 16, she began working at a living history museum in Ohio, playing the role and wearing the costume of an 1840s teenager. She cooked from historical recipes using a wood-burning stove.
As an art student in college, she opened a temporary restaurant as an art installation that reinterpreted colonial-era food for modern times. She moved to New York City in 2006 and worked as a food journalist.
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Now she works part time as an educator at the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side, leading tours and creating food programming.
For the Italian eating stint, Ms. Lohman cooked from an account set down by a social worker who observed the immigrant family for a week and recorded their meals, but not always the ingredients.
So Ms. Lohman consulted two Italian cookbooks from the period to piece together certain dishes.
There is a mention of an “egg tamale,” which she wound up making with polenta.
The diet was a bit carb-heavy for Ms. Lohman. The lunches of soup and bread and vegetables were fine, but breakfasts of hot chocolate and a pastry left her bloated and crashing on sugar.
“It pushed my tolerance for sugar and carbs,” she said.
Ms. Lohman conducts her experiments in her kitchen, which takes up about half of her apartment.
It is a neat, thrifty space with a head-high stack of old cookbooks, which were plucked from flea markets and second-hand stores. On the walls are cooking utensils that go back decades and include meat-carving forks, a utensil for making Mexican hot chocolate, an ice cream slicer, a potato masher and a pair of kitchen shears with handles made of antler horn.
There is a decidedly old-world feel to sitting and watching Ms. Lohman cook recipes and elaborate on the social and historical context of the dishes.
As Ms. Lohman simmered a veal shank and prepared a huge pork chop she had bought from Di Palo’s fine food store in Little Italy, she discussed the marginalization of Italian newcomers at the time and how they were affected by the Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, which set annual quotas on how many immigrants could be admitted from certain countries.
Switching back to the pasta, Ms. Lohman said it was her first time making it. She took no chances.
“I bought some pasta from Di Palo’s,” she said, “in case it’s a disaster.”
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
How Just 8 Flavors Have Defined American Cuisine
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December 6, 20166:30 AM ET
ALAN YU
Japanese Chemist Dr. Kikunae Ikeda is credited with discovering MSG — one of the eight ingredients Lohman explores in her book.
Peter Van Hyning
Eight Flavors
Eight Flavors
The Untold Story of American Cuisine
by Sarah Lohman
Hardcover, 288 pages purchase
Sarah Lohman has made everything from colonial-era cocktails to cakes with black pepper to stewed moose face. She is a historical gastronomist, which means she re-creates historical recipes to connect with the past.
That moose-face recipe dates back to the 19th century, and it wasn't easy. She recalls spending hours trying to butcher the moose from Alaska in her kitchen in Queens, New York. She tried scalding the face in hot water to remove the fur, but it didn't quite work and her apartment stunk of wet moose.
But "at the end of the day, people showed up and ate it, someone actually liked it, and then we ordered a pizza," she says.
Spurred by her friends' enthusiasm, she started a blog. "Every time I made something, a conversation would start. It was just this gateway ... as soon as they were eating, they were asking questions," she says. "They loved the good recipes and the schadenfreude of the bad ones."
Lohman's work got her wondering about the flavors that represent American cuisine and where they came from. That's the subject of her new book, Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine.
"Chili powder spread across the country because of entrepreneurial Texan-Mexican women who fed soldiers and tourists, and a clever German immigrant who was looking for a culinary shortcut," Lohman writes.
Peter Van Hyning
She made a list of common flavors from many historical cookbooks, and used Google's Ngram viewer to count how often the various flavors were mentioned in American books from 1796 to 2000. Eight popular and enduring flavors emerged: black pepper, vanilla, curry powder, chili powder, soy sauce, garlic, MSG and Sriracha.
"I didn't so much choose the flavors that appear in this book, as discover them," Lohman writes.
Researching the book "really upended my idea of these flavors that always stood on the shelf in my kitchen," she says. "I would always pick up a pepper grinder or a bottle of vanilla extract and would never think about what it was and where it came from."
Many historical recipes don't exactly work now — like one for black pepper cake from Martha Washington. Lohman says the original recipe is "really gross" because it used as much ground spice as flour.
She reworked it for our modern tastes, and says more people should be open to adapting recipes to taste rather than following instructions to the letter.
"I find when I'm teaching cooking classes ... my students are often afraid of doing something so massively wrong in the process of cooking that will be irrecoverable that they don't even try in the first place," she says. "I would love to get back to a world where we can be a little bit more relaxed and confident in the kitchen."
Why Hunting Down 'Authentic Ethnic Food' Is A Loaded Proposition
THE SALT
Why Hunting Down 'Authentic Ethnic Food' Is A Loaded Proposition
But Lohman quickly discovered there was much more than translating historic recipes for modern use: "I didn't realize I was going to be telling the story of disenfranchised people in America throughout history."
She says food study "wasn't really seen as a real way of looking at society and culture" until recently, because it's mostly a history of women, slaves and immigrants — "the people that have been cooking for the people that have been enfranchised for the past 200 years."
She hopes the book is "a successful ode to these people that have affected our history in this country just as much as the establishment, but up till this point, have not gotten the attention they deserved."
For instance, "vanilla is here thanks to a 12-year-old slave who figured out a botanical secret no one else knew. Chili powder spread across the country because of entrepreneurial Texan-Mexican women who fed soldiers and tourists — and a clever German immigrant who was looking for a culinary shortcut," she writes.
Slave Edmond Albius and a vanilla plant: "Vanilla is here thanks to a 12-year-old slave who figured out a botanical secret no one else knew," Lohman writes.
Peter Van Hyning
One story that stands out to her is the creation of Sriracha, which, according to the book, has "seen a meteoric rise in popularity" since its debut in 1980. Lohman notes sales of bottled Sriracha exceeded $60 million in 2014.
She calls it a "quintessentially American story" — founder David Tran is ethnically Chinese, but he is also a Vietnamese refugee. He combined elements of French and Thai cuisine, using peppers grown on a farm north of Los Angeles to make a hot sauce produced entirely in Southern California.
After the Vietnam War ended, the new government systematically targeted and forcibly expelled ethnic Chinese from the country, while charging each person $11,500 for the "privilege" of leaving. Tran, along with his immediate family and more than 3,000 refugees, boarded a Panamanian freighter called the Huey Fong.
After arriving in the U.S., Tran needed to support his family. He was a hot-sauce maker in Vietnam, so he decided to try that in his new home. Now Tran's company is called Huy Fong Foods.
"This ... says immigrants are our culture; they are who we are," Lohman says. "We have to broaden our idea of what an American is."
She points out the Italians, who brought us garlic, were initially "considered a separate race of people that were damaging to the climate of our country."
She says that attitude is still playing out today.
"Food is something that is often accepted in this country before we accept the immigrants themselves. ... We happily buy hummus in our grocery store, but in the meantime, they were going to ban Muslims from entering this country."
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Why Kitchen
LUNCH DATE
Lunch Date: Interview with Sarah Lohman
Posted on February 18, 2016
ld-sarahlohman
Lunch Date is the post series where you get to hang out with the coolest people in the food scene–all from the comfort of your own computer. This week, Sarah Lohman from Four Pounds Flour dropped in to share how she went from cooking 19th-century food in a living museum to eating a moose’s face (in the name of historic gastronomy!)
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I grew up in a small town in Ohio–Cleveland was about a 30 minute drive north, and Amish country about a 30 minute drive south.
My mother is an award-winning baker, and as soon as I could stand, I was baking next to her. She never let me have an Easy Bake Oven because she said I could do it myself in the kitchen. So I’ve been baking on my own since maybe 8 or 9.
Cooking came a little later–I was probably 13 or 14. When my brother went to college, my mom went back to work, so it became my responsibility to start dinner, following detailed instructions she would leave me.
When I was 17, I went to work with her at a “living history” museum–we were in costume, and in character [as people from the 19th century]. It introduced me to the idea of social history, and I also got my first experience there with cooking on antiquated equipment from historical texts .
Someone from the 19th century has time-traveled into your office. How would you describe your work to them?
They would understand it pretty easily; there was a ton of nostalgia in the 19th century for the food and life of the 18th century and before. For example, Thanksgiving officially became a holiday during the Civil War, and it sprang from a place of wanting to unify the country–but also mostly out of adulation for America’s “founders,” the Pilgrims (in fact, the word “Pilgrims” was first used to referred to the Plymouth Puritans in the 19th century).
And at the 1864 Sanitary Fair, a fundraiser to send care packages to Union troops and provide sanitation in their camps, the most popular attraction was a sort of Revolutionary War-era dining hall. People in 18th-century costumes cooked and served 18th-century food from a giant open hearth, and did other romanticized things like spin and weave.
So they’ve also reinterpreted the past; and in a sense, that’s what I do.
Article from Sarah’s senior BFA show, where she served visitors contemporary interpretations of historical dishes.
You describe yourself as a “historic gastronomist.” How did you get into that line of work, and why that particular title?
After I moved to NYC in 2006, I started working at New York Magazine as their video producer. I worked a lot with Josh Ozersky, the first editor of Grub Street, and it gave me a peek into the New York food scene. I was in some of the best kitchens in the city and meeting some of the most famous chefs, like Eric Ripert at Le Bernardin.
I noticed that many chefs looked to the past for inspiration, and I realized I had a unique perspective on the history of food from my time working in a museum. So after I started freelancing (about 7 years ago) I launched my blog, Four Pounds Flour. It caught on quick, because nobody was quite looking at food the way I was: through this experimental, first-person, historical lens.
I chose the title “historic gastronomist” because I wanted to distinguish myself from a chef (who has formal training and/or has worked in a restaurant) and a culinary historian (who often operates only within academic circles).
I wanted to cook and connect with people, teach and make links to the present. The title encapsulated all those things for me.
What’s the best situation historic gastronomy has gotten you into? The worst situation? The weirdest situation?
I get a lot of really interesting promotional invites. I sat in the VIP section drinking sake at an Asian food festival in Times Square; I saw a turducken prepared in someone’s apartment.
I think I pretty regularly do a lot of weird shit to experiment with historic recipes–like once I made a jello-mold with ground corned beef; and another I ate a moose face.
But I think the best part about it is the community the blog has built around it, and the amazing people I get to interact with. On February 11th, I hosted a panel with cocktail historian David Wondrich and three mixologists I deeply respect–St. John Frizell, Tom Macy and Del Pedro. Getting to work with them was very exciting.
The above-mentioned Jell-O Corned Beef Loaf. "Of course I was intrigued to try this recipe; something so bizarre and unthinkable in today’s culinary world begs to reexamined, brought to light for the wonder or horror it truly is."
The above-mentioned Jell-O Corned Beef Loaf. “Of course I was intrigued to try this recipe; something so bizarre and unthinkable in today’s culinary world begs to reexamined, brought to light for the wonder or horror it truly is.”
Are there any old-timey cooking tricks you use today, or that you recommend to your friends?
I think that working with food history has made me a much better cook all around. I’ve had to teach myself so many basic cooking techniques to be able to interpret the recipes of the past.
And it’s also taught me to relax in the kitchen. Recipes today are so EXACT–to a point where people feel intimidated by cooking because they think they’re going to ruin something. Historical recipes leave so much open to interpretation, so much room for personal taste.
It’s also changed my idea of when something is “done.” We set a timer and set a temperature, and when the timer goes off it’s “done.” For me, something is done when it looks right, feels right, smells right. I once asked my mom how to tell when a cake was done, and she said, “When it smells like cake.”
A practical tip: add a dash of cayenne pepper to gingerbread, and chili flakes to your pasta water if you’re making macaroni and cheese.
What projects are you working on right now?
I’ve got a book coming out!! I’m just wrapping up the final draft. It’s called Eight Flavors: The Secret History of American Food and it’s coming out December 6th with Simon & Schuster.
I’ve often felt Americans lacked pride in their own cuisine–fueled by the fact it’s difficult to define. But I think America has one of the most amazing cuisines on the planet. This book seeks to unite and define American food by looking at its eight most prominent flavors: black pepper, vanilla, chili powder, curry powder, soy sauce, garlic, MSG [Editor’s note: Yes, it’s a flavor, and it’s not scary], and sriracha.
But more importantly, it looks at the stories behind the Americans who made these flavors popular in our food. It’s a portrait of our country and its people through food.
Who are some of your inspirations? (Culinary or otherwise.)
My inspirations are some of the people who have crossed my path and shaped my future. My mom, Karen Lohman, obviously. A college professor of Art History, Dr. Charles Bergengren, who guided me through an independent study in culinary history. Josh Ozersky, who introduced me to being a foodie and showed me it doesn’t have to be all seriousness.
Charlie and Josh both passed away while I was working on my book, and it’s heartbreaking that I can’t show them the results of how they’ve influenced me. But my time with them was very important to me.
What’s something you’ve learned in your line of work that you think could apply to everyone?
When you’re in the kitchen: relax. You’re not going to screw anything up. And even if you do, just bring it to work and feed it to your coworkers. They’ll be thrilled–even terrible food tastes great when it’s free and at work.
Sarah Lohman: EIGHT FLAVORS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Oct. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Sarah Lohman EIGHT FLAVORS Simon & Schuster (Adult Nonfiction) 26.99 ISBN: 978-1-4767-5395-9
A tasty historical study of flavorful mainstays of American cuisine.Serving as a culinary archaeologist of sorts, this self-described food historian
and blogger raided spice cabinets and pantries across the U.S. to produce this fascinating overview of what she believes to be the eight major
flavors of the land: black pepper, vanilla, chili powder, curry powder, garlic, soy sauce, monosodium glutamate, and Sriracha (the only
questionable inclusion, but Lohman makes a convincing case). In her ambitious attempt to characterize American cuisine, the author found it
essential to identify commonalities among the disparate regions and ethnicities that have flourished here. She accomplished this by combing old
cookbooks and researching past and present consumption patterns in the U.S. She admits that there are really 10 dominant flavors in the U.S., but
“so much” has been written about chocolate and coffee as to warrant their exclusion here. The author’s decision to
isolate popular flavors, as opposed to assessing common dishes or particular cooking techniques, allowed her to focus on the history and growth
of their influence on the American palate, making this account often as much about the men and women responsible for introducing each flavor.
Thus readers will find a treasure trove of spicy trivia, ranging from staggering statistics on the amount of black pepper sold in the U.S. each
year—158 million pounds—or how much garlic is consumed—annually, two pounds per person—alongside
entrepreneurial tales like that of the Chili Queens of San Antonio, whose namesake dish sold daily on Alamo Plaza inspired German immigrant
William Gebhardt to try to emulate it and led to his invention of a dry chili powder patented in 1897. Lohman also tells the moving back story of
how the modern cultivation of vanilla derives from a pollination technique developed by Edmond Albius, a slave, and exposes and attempts to
debunk how MSG, the defining savory taste of umami isolated by 20th-century biochemist Kikunae Ikeda, came by its bad rap. A tantalizing look
at flavors of the American table that foodies will absolutely devour.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Sarah Lohman: EIGHT FLAVORS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466551399&it=r&asid=e23a0b0d33ad36e2e8237488b5708f2c. Accessed 8 July
2017.
7/8/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Gale Document Number: GALE|A466551399
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Eight Flavors. The Untold Story of American Cuisine
Publishers Weekly.
263.44 (Oct. 31, 2016): p67.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Eight Flavors. The Untold Story of American Cuisine
Sarah Lohman. Simon & Schuster, $26.99 (264p) ISBN 978-1-4767-5395-9
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Food writer Lohman uses eight key flavors to launch an entertaining tour through the tastes that have made American food the "most complex
and diverse cuisine on the planet." The story of America's embrace of black pepper, vanilla, curry powder, chili powder, soy sauce, garlic, MSG
(monosodium glutamate) and sriracha demonstrates how travel, immigration, science, and technology continue to influence what Americans eat.
From her opening story of John Crowninshield of Massachusetts, who returned to the U.S. from Sumatra with commercial quantities of black
pepper in the early 19th century, to her rousing defense of MSG, Lohman's thoughtful, conversational style and infectious curiosity make the
book wholly delightful. As a bonus for enthusiastic amateurs, Lohman includes well-researched historic recipes, such as Thomas Jefferson's
vanilla ice cream. This Founding Father was responsible for introducing the noble dairy treat to the country, via the French chef he brought home
with him in the 1780s. A more modern but equally heroic tale is that of sriracha, invented in California by an immigrant, David Tran. Tran named
his company, Huy Fong Foods, after the refugee ship he and his family fled Vietnam on--a Panamanian freighter called the Huey Fong. Lohman's
book gives fascinating new insight into what we eat. (Dec.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Eight Flavors. The Untold Story of American Cuisine." Publishers Weekly, 31 Oct. 2016, p. 67. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA470462566&it=r&asid=a86f23dc46bc4156461ab2877f8961e9. Accessed 8 July
2017.
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Lohman, Sarah: EIGHT FLAVORS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Oct. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Lohman, Sarah EIGHT FLAVORS Simon & Schuster (Adult Nonfiction) $26.99 12, 6 ISBN: 978-1-4767-5395-9
A tasty historical study of flavorful mainstays of American cuisine.Serving as a culinary archaeologist of sorts, this self-described food historian
and blogger raided spice cabinets and pantries across the U.S. to produce this fascinating overview of what she believes to be the eight major
flavors of the land: black pepper, vanilla, chili powder, curry powder, garlic, soy sauce, monosodium glutamate, and Sriracha (the only
questionable inclusion, but Lohman makes a convincing case). In her ambitious attempt to characterize American cuisine, the author found it
essential to identify commonalities among the disparate regions and ethnicities that have flourished here. She accomplished this by combing old
cookbooks and researching past and present consumption patterns in the U.S. She admits that there are really 10 dominant flavors in the U.S., but
"so much" has been written about chocolate and coffee as to warrant their exclusion here. The author's decision to isolate popular flavors, as
opposed to assessing common dishes or particular cooking techniques, allowed her to focus on the history and growth of their influence on the
American palate, making this account often as much about the men and women responsible for introducing each flavor. Thus readers will find a
treasure trove of spicy trivia, ranging from staggering statistics on the amount of black pepper sold in the U.S. each year--158 million pounds--or
how much garlic is consumed--annually, two pounds per person--alongside entrepreneurial tales like that of the Chili Queens of San Antonio,
whose namesake dish sold daily on Alamo Plaza inspired German immigrant William Gebhardt to try to emulate it and led to his invention of a
dry chili powder patented in 1897. Lohman also tells the moving back story of how the modern cultivation of vanilla derives from a pollination
technique developed by Edmond Albius, a slave, and exposes and attempts to debunk how MSG, the defining savory taste of umami isolated by
20th-century biochemist Kikunae Ikeda, came by its bad rap. A tantalizing look at flavors of the American table that foodies will absolutely
devour.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Lohman, Sarah: EIGHT FLAVORS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466329149&it=r&asid=4f3f789d1690a5543e2beffdc888bb1c. Accessed 8 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466329149
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Lohman, Sarah. Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of
American Cuisine
Susan Hurst
Library Journal.
141.17 (Oct. 15, 2016): p105.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Lohman, Sarah. Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine. S. & S. Dec. 2016.304p. notes, bibliog. index. ISBN 9781476753959.
$26.99; ebk. ISBN 9781476753980. COOKING
Have you ever wondered about that rooster on your handy bottle of Sriracha, or why vanilla beans are so expensive, (and are they worth it)? This
new work by a noted food writer and blogger looks at eight key ingredients or "flavors" that spice up our meals, including black pepper, vanilla,
chili powder, curry powder, soy sauce, garlic, monosodium glutamate (MSG), and Sriracha. Often it is a highly personal tour, as Lohman goes on
site investigating the backstory of these key recipe components. This informative work is part natural history and part memoir, with a few recipes
thrown in as a bonus. It is also spiked with some seriously useful tidbits; the trick about when to use artificial vanilla could be worth the price
alone. Knowing more about these everyday kitchen items can help us become both better cooks and consumers, plus readers will be able to
astound friends and family with newfound knowledge of soy sauce brewing. VERDICT A lively compendium of facts and trivia about essential
ingredients. Purchase for larger cookery collections.--Susan Hurst, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, OH
Hurst, Susan
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Hurst, Susan. "Lohman, Sarah. Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine." Library Journal, 15 Oct. 2016, p. 105. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466413053&it=r&asid=e9c5a6088a67a71be1743bebfea993f1. Accessed 8 July
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466413053
How American Cuisine Became a Melting Pot
Eight Flavors, the new book by Sarah Lohman, is an absorbing history of food culture in the U.S., and of the people who contributed to it.
Wikimedia / JIANG HONGYAN / Aliaksei Smalenski / Sheila Fitzgerald / Carlos Yudica / Shutterstock / The Atlantic
SOPHIE GILBERT NOV 23, 2016 CULTURE
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The first celebrity chef in America was an Indian immigrant named Prince Ranji Smile. Described by an excitable reporter in The New York Letter as having “clear dark skin, brilliant black eyes, smooth black hair, and the whitest of teeth,” Smile was poached from London by the New York restaurateur Louis Sherry to work in his eponymous Fifth Avenue establishment. Smile’s complex curries enthralled the city, and by 1907 he was touring the nation, performing cooking demonstrations at department stores and food halls. Fans, particularly women, flocked to him. But in the 1920s he left the U.S. after a Supreme Court ruling denied citizenship to Indian natives on the grounds that they weren’t white. No further records of his life remain.
Smile’s biography is revealed in Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine, a new book by Sarah Lohman that unpacks the diverse history of a nation’s palate via eight distinct ingredients. Through chapters focusing on black pepper, vanilla, curry powder, chili powder, soy sauce, garlic, MSG, and sriracha, Lohman reveals how a nation founded by immigrants built its national cuisine on tastes from all over the world, and how those tastes continue to evolve. But almost more fascinating than the countless odd facts Lohman reveals—the Vanilloideae orchid is native to four continents, which suggests it was around before those continents divided; ketchup has its origins in an early recipe for soy sauce—are the people whose work had a profound impact on the way Americans eat, but whose biographies have been almost completely forgotten. In that sense, American food, which Lohman describes as “the most complex and diverse cuisine on the planet,” offers a unique and surprising view of American history.
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Lohman organizes her chapters chronologically, starting with black pepper—hugely popular in the 18th century—and ending with sriracha, whose literal and metaphorical hotness as a condiment was enshrined when Bon Appetit named it the Ingredient of the Year in 2010. Early on, she establishes her argument that food is much more than nourishment: It’s an intrinsic part of human culture. “The physiological signals of flavor are interpreted in our brain’s frontal lobe,” she writes, “the part of the brain where emotional reactions are processed and personality is formed. Personal experience, our memories, and our emotions all inform the experience.” No Thanksgiving dish is an island; each one carries its own weight of memory and emotional connection before we so much as take a single bite.
That said, as much as we inherit our sense of taste from our parents and grandparents (Lohman points out that a liking for garlic, for instance, is passed from mothers to babies in the womb), American cuisine is an ever-evolving thing. It shifts and expands rapidly alongside changing patterns of immigration, culture, and even politics. Consider black pepper, which was so commonplace in the U.S. in 1750 that 50 different recipes in Martha Washington’s wedding gift, Booke of Cookery, featured it as an ingredient. After the Revolutionary War, it became impossibly scarce, because the British had imported it directly from the U.K. without revealing where it came from. But in 1790, an American captain from Salem arrived in Sumatra, where he learned that Piper nigrum grew on the northwestern coast of the island. He convinced a merchant to send an expedition to source the spice, and the boat returned 18 months later with more than 100,000 pounds of pepper “shoveled right into her hold like gravel.”
After that, black pepper became ubiquitous on American tables, especially when pre-ground pepper did away with the need to grind it by hand. But 1993 saw the launch of the Food Network, on which viewers watched chefs finish dishes with fresh ground black pepper, which led to yet another boost for the spice. In the two decades since then, Lohman writes, “black pepper consumption has increased by 40 percent. And in the 21st century, we’re buying it whole and grinding it fresh, just like Martha Washington.” Soy sauce has similarly ebbed and flowed in popularity, gaining favor in the 18th century as a British import, then largely disappearing until the Gold Rush in 1848, when Chinese immigrants arrived on the West Coast. It received its biggest boost in 1972, when Kikkoman launched the first Japanese manufacturing plant in the U.S., appealing to American soldiers who’d fought overseas in World War Two and gained a taste for the cuisine.
Sriracha, made in California as a Thai-style sauce by a Vietnamese refugee, has an origin story that’s “more American than apple pie.”
War, Lohman points out, “is a great propagator for new culinary movements.” Mexican cooking was first introduced to American palates in the early 19th century, when soldiers invaded what’s now Texas. Garlic owes its rise in popularity in the U.S. to the First World War, after which American intellectuals flocked to Paris and French cooking became the newest trend (it also helped that James Beard was stationed in Marseille in 1945).
But the key factor that’s defined American cuisine throughout the years is undoubtedly immigration. Chili powder, invented by a German American in 1897 to facilitate making Mexican food in the U.S., is one example of what Lohman describes as the “patchwork quilt” of American food culture. Sriracha, made in Southern California as a Thai-style sauce by a Vietnamese refugee, has an origin story that’s “more American than apple pie.” Fear of immigrants, she argues, is also an age-old American tradition, leading to a decades-long stigma against garlic, which represented Italian immigrants’ supposed refusal to assimilate, and absurd myths that the Chinese eat rats, or that MSG causes headaches (rather than being a chemical additive, Lohman points out, it’s a substance that naturally occurs in everything from tomatoes to cheese).
So it seems appropriate that Lohman dedicates significant portions of her book to the people who helped define American cuisine even while facing discrimination and disdain. There are the “Chili Queens,” impossibly glamorous Mexican women who supported their families by selling chili con carne in the Alamo Plaza in the late 19th century until they were shut down by concerns about sanitation. here’s Edmond Albius, a 12-year-old slave and amateur botanist on Île de Bourbon who changed the flavor of much of the world’s baked goods when he discovered a way to make vanilla plants pollinate. And there’s William Gebhardt, who found a way to manufacture chili powder as a shortcut for home cooks.
There’s also Prince Ranji Smile, whose celebrity and popular appeal couldn’t save him from clashing with the U.S.’s strict labor and immigration laws. In 1922, a profile of Smile ran in the New York Hotel Review, in which the author noted Smile’s contributions to the diverse character of American cuisine. “America has given no attention to the development of a school of cookery of its own,” Mary Pickett wrote, “but it has imported its cooks from all parts of the world, and when the American culinary school is finally developed it will have embodied in it the good points of the culinary art of the world.” Eight Flavors, a richly researched, intriguing, and elegantly written book, is a testament to how accurate Pickett’s prediction was, and how much American food owes to the people who helped a nation make other traditions its own.
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The Flavor of American History – A Review of Sarah Lohman’s Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine
by SARAH GREY 4 DECEMBER FEATURED, REVIEW SHARE 932 VIEWS
History has a flavor, says Sarah Lohman.
She should know—as a food historian, she not only studies but recreates historical dishes from every era in US history. In her new book, Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine, she traces eight core flavors that have shaped U.S. culinary history, using their integration into the national cuisine to tell a wealth of stories about culture, economics, and the waves of immigration and eight-flavors-jacket-image_smallermigration that have always shaped this nation.
Lohman chose black pepper, vanilla, chili powder, curry powder, soy sauce, garlic, monosodium glutamate (MSG), and Sriracha. (She excluded coffee and chocolate since so much has been written on them.)
Wait. Curry? Soy sauce? Sriracha— these are quintessentially American flavors? It sounds surprising, but Lohman makes a convincing case. Each flavor showcases a historical shift, a change that’s economic or political in origin but that moves people and commodities around, introducing new ingredients, cuisines, and ideas—and permanently changing the way we eat.
Lohman begins with black pepper, a pantry staple the reaches as far back as the colonial period. It was grown in India and Southeast Asia and imported to the Americas by the British East India Company, where cooks combined it with other seasonings to create heavily spiced sauces and even cakes—as part of her research, Lohman bakes Martha Washington’s recipe for “Pepper Cakes That Will Keep Good in Ye House for a Quarter or Halfe a Year.” Before refrigeration, cooks took advantage of spices’ antimicrobial properties.
After the revolution, the newly formed nation cut ties with the British and the ubiquitous spice became rare for a time—until a sea captain and importer from Salem, Massachusetts, John Crowninshield, found out where the British were getting their black pepper: Sumatra. He offered local traders double what the British were paying, began importing black pepper to the U.S., and became fantastically rich.
As for vanilla, we have three people to thank for its introduction: two of them were enslaved, and the other was a slaveholder. Edmond Albius was only twelve and was enslaved to a botanist on the French-owned Île de Bourbon (now Réunion), an island in the Indian Ocean. There, he discovered the hand-pollination method that is still used today to produce all vanilla beans grown outside Mexico (the insects that naturally pollinate the plant only live in some parts of Mexico). Vanilla became popular in France, where Thomas Jefferson—then Minister to France—fell in love with the flavor of vanilla ice cream.
Jefferson brought back a vanilla ice cream recipe to Monticello with the help of his chef, James Hemings (brother of Sally). Hemings was enslaved in Virginia but free in France, where Jefferson paid him wages; he stayed on in France for a time but agreed to return and work for Jefferson on the condition that he would be a salaried free man. Tragically, the stress of life as a free black man in a slave state overwhelmed Hemings, who committed suicide at 36. The culinary innovations he brought back from France remained part of President Jefferson’s table and had a massive influence on U.S. cuisine—macaroni and cheese and gelatin-based desserts were also introduced there.
Lohman makes a point of telling Hemings’s and Albius’s stories alongside Jefferson’s, pointing out that neither man usually receives the credit he deserves. Later chapters also tie beloved flavors to ordinary Americans. The chapter on chili powder traces how Mexican and German culinary influences met and blended in San Antonio, Texas, where the famous Chili Queens served outdoor dinners in the plaza. Texas was part of Mexico until the Mexican War—“soldiers from America invaded Mexico and then lived there, sampling the local food. They returned home with a taste for spicy Mexican cuisine, including chili,” she says. It was a German immigrant, William Gebhardt, who managed to put the flavor of chili into powder form in the 1890s, then gradually began marketing “Southwestern” food to the rest of the US, where it quickly caught on.
In the curry chapter, Lohman tells the fascinating tale of Ranji Smile, a charming, rather mysterious, and apparently devastatingly handsome chef from Karachi (then part of India, now in Pakistan). He introduced South Asian cuisine to the sparkling dining rooms of New York City, and is now considered the first celebrity chef. Garlic became popular as Italian Americans began assimilating into U.S. culture after generations of being considered dirty, smelly foreigners, with the smell of garlic a telltale sign of foreignness.
sarah-lohman-author-photo
Author Sarah Lohman
The stories of soy sauce and MSG, meanwhile, are tied to narratives of Chinese and, later, Japanese immigration to the West Coast, where Asian Americans cooked for diners who loved “chow chow” restaurants and chop suey but regarded the cooks themselves as unsanitary, suspicious, not entirely human, and possibly capable of chopping up and cooking rats and cats. Racism was once official policy, between the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the internment of Japanese Americans into concentration camps during World War II. In later years, though, bias against Asian Americans
became subtler, with the same undertones of suspicion lacing a public panic around MSG, which many white diners insisted made them ill with “Chinese restaurant syndrome.” The “syndrome” was debunked—MSG is a naturally occurring and totally harmless ingredient—and the flavor of umami has since come to be recognized as a fifth sense of taste that makes foods deeply satisfying.
Sriracha, the eighth flavor on Lohman’s list, is its most recent addition and perhaps the one that most encapsulates the concept of the United States as culinary melting pot. She notes it “combines cuisine from France and Thailand with the dreams of a Vietnamese refugee named David Tran, but is produced entirely in Southern California.” Colonization, immigration, war, entrepreneurship, and viral fame—it’s all there in the red bottle with the rooster, the one that once graced mostly immigrant tables but is now ubiquitous in restaurants and home kitchens of all kinds.
“The American is not static,” writes Lohman; “it’s cumulative, and it evolves.” As a country changes, so does its cuisine, and each new group that arrives has something important to offer. What was once terrifying and foreign to some becomes familiar and friendly, a part of American culture so basic that it’s hard to imagine this country without it.