with Andrew Haley, PhD
In first decades of the twentieth century, no issue inspired more acrimonious discussions and heated editorials than tipping. The American middle classes, eager to participate in the burgeoning restaurant culture of American cities, resented paying gratuities. Continue reading
with Carrie Roy, PhD
Podcast courtesy of WBEZ’s Chicago Amplified
Join us for Carrie Roy’s lively talk, “Lutefisk Traditions in the Upper Midwest,” and showing of her DVD, “Where the Sacred Meets the Quivering Profane: Exploring the Public and Private Spheres of Lutefisk.” (If you think you’ve heard it all on the subject of lutefisk, you have not!) Continue reading
with Robert Dirks, PhD
Podcast courtesy of WBEZ’s Chicago Amplified
Tracing the course of the history of cooking and dining in McLean County, Illinois and the Bloomington-Normal area takes us back 180 years. Early settlers from the Southern states and parts of the Northeast brought with them divergent tastes, but irrespective of their culinary leanings they generally made do with foods they either raised or collected themselves. Continue reading
with David Strauss, PhD
Podcast Courtesy of WBEZ’s Chicago Amplified
As journalist Lucius Beebe remarked, it had taken “a stout heart and a sound stomach” to create a magazine of good living in 1941 as the Depression ended and Americans entered World War II. The success of Gourmet, however, depended even more on sound strategizing. Among potential readers, the staff targeted those who would replace the recipes of the ladies magazines, based mainly on processed food, with a mix of traditional American cooking and classical French cuisine. This reformulation of gourmet dining was timely in view of the Franco-American collaboration against the Nazis. And, it presented a great opportunity to staff and readers alike to devise a food regime based on un-rationed, mostly American, ingredients, which was far more patriotic than the government’s own rationing program.
David Strauss taught U.S. history, with an emphasis on cultural and diplomatic themes, from 1974 to 2002 at Kalamazoo College in Michigan. In addition to his most recent book, Setting the Table for Julia Child: Gourmet Dining in America, 1934-1961 David Strauss has also published Percival Lowell: The Culture and Science of a Boston Brahmin and Menace in the West: The Rise of French Anti-Americanism in Modern Times.
Program hosted at Kendall College.
Presented by Lori Grove, President, Maxwell Street Foundation
Maxwell Street cul-de-sac
South of Roosevelt Rd., ½ block west of Halsted St.
Chicago, IL
The Maxwell Street Market, created by a city ordinance in 1912, transformed an early residential street into a thriving marketplace for nearly one century in Chicago. Although its geographic boundaries shifted over time due to urban renewal and expressway construction, the informal bartering on Maxwell Street and discount shopping on Halsted Street remained constant. Continue reading