Saw it today in the window of my local independent bookstore, then I flipped open today's New York Times and...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/17/di...meal-book.html
By STEVEN KURUTZ
AUG. 12, 2016
First paragraphs:
In March 1933, shortly after ascending to the presidency, Franklin Delano Roosevelt sat down to lunch in the Oval Office. A gourmand, President Roosevelt had a taste for fancy Fifth Avenue foods like pΓ’tΓ© de foie gras and Maryland terrapin soup.
His menu that day was more humble: deviled eggs in tomato sauce, mashed potatoes and, for dessert, prune pudding.
It was an act of culinary solidarity with the people who were suffering, Jane Ziegelman said. Her husband, Andrew Coe, added, It was also a message to Americans about how to eat.
The couple, who live in Brooklyn Heights, are food historians. Mr. Coes last book, Chop Suey, was about Chinese cuisine in America, while Ms. Ziegelman told the story of life in a Lower East Side tenement through food in her book 97 Orchard.
Their new, collaborative work, A Square Meal, which will be published Tuesday by Harper, is a history of American food in the Great Depression. Showing some culinary solidarity of their own, they met a reporter for dinner at Eisenbergs Sandwich Shop, a tiny, no-frills lunch counter in the Flatiron district that has been in business since the year of the crash, 1929.
Ms. Ziegelman, 54, ordered a cream cheese and chopped olive sandwich, while Mr. Coe, 57, had the turkey, mashed potatoes and vegetable medley. When a reporter ordered meatloaf, the couple deemed it fitting for a discussion of Depression-era eating.
Loaves were very popular, Ms. Ziegelman said. There was peanut loaf, liver loaf, bean loaf. They were made from an ingredient and a cheap thing that stretches the ingredient out. Imagine eating enough peanuts to serve as your dinner....
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Lenona.