We Have Moved

The Magic of Milk

A peasant’s utopia, as imagined in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, includes a mountain of grated Parmesan cheese. Peasants do nothing else except make macaroni and ravioli all day long in the imagined fairyland. In the book of Exodus, the Promised Land is one of “milk and honey.” And according to Hinduism, during the creation of the world, the Cow of Plenty emerged during the Churning of the Ocean – literally the changing of the white ocean into butter. Deborah Valenze explains in Milk: A Local and Global History, how the “elixir of immortality” changed from a staple of the gods to a staple of nutrition textbooks.

The Cow of Plenty is one of many sacred females associated with the “virtuous white liquor’s” powers. Valenze shows us various forms of ancient heavens and their inhabitants’ fascinating relationships with a Great Mother, or a “benevolent cow,” or a milk goddess. Isis, most famously a goddess of ancient Egypt, was “the source of the milk of life,” and the Virgin Mary modeled fecundity and piety for medieval women. Juno, the Roman queen of the gods, created the Milky Way when her breast milk was scattered accidentally when she woke up to a rather awkward situation: her husband, Jupiter, had attempted to feed his illegitimate son, Hercules, at her breast while she slept. Interestingly, Jupiter’s Greek counterpart, Zeus, nursed from the goat Althea as a baby.

Although “the culture of milk” lost some of its mystical qualities through history, in its secular role it was (and is) no less “magical.” Doctors admired it through the centuries, from George Cheyne’s milk diet (at one point the physician and writer weighed 448 pounds) in the early eighteenth century to the Victorians’ prescriptions of milk-soaked biscuits for their patients. The Dutch came the closest to actually reproducing Dairy-land here on earth during, appropriately enough, their Golden Age. With Cheesetopia finally realized, Dutch painting actually depicted the “mountains of food” – which included if not Parmesan at least other forms – that “stood as bountiful evidence of God’s providence.”

Even today, Valenze points out, milk still satisfies “[t]he wish for a miracle food” by some foodie camps. Its constant presence in our “dairy-rich Western countries,” she notes, is just as extraordinary as the food itself. We may not be able to produce endless quantities of butter, which was Saint Brigid’s first recorded miracle, but perhaps that’s just because mass-production has already beat us to the magic.

Don’t Kick Back with Your OJ Just Yet

A cool, refreshing glass of orange juice is the perfect top-off to your breakfast, but maybe there are a few things you might want to know first about its history: how it got to you and what “100% pure orange juice” actually means. Both of these have to do with OJ’s sudden rise to popularity in the last half-century—hard to imagine breakfast nowadays without it—as Alissa Hamilton explains in her book, Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice. Why are Florida oranges coming from Brazil? Is OJ as fresh as we think? Hamilton has recently recorded a Nutrition Tidbits podcast on Healthcastle.com. Listen and be sure to check out more of her interviews and media appearances on the “Squeezed” blog.

The Anthology of Rap, Only Edible

Every year, we here at Yale University Press have a bakeoff contest at our holiday party.  Categories change from year to year but the one constant is a prize for the Best Book Based on a YUP title.

Some highlights in the past have included a cake shaped like an electric guitar, another in the shape of New England with state-specific toppings on each state…people definitely get into it.

So what better to take home the Book Based prize for the holiday party this year other than a turntable cake based on Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois's Anthology of Rap.  Pretty sweet.

Notes from a Native New Yorker: For Those Who Mix Breakfast with History

Michelle Stein

Whether eaten on the go, or leisurely enjoyed on a weekend morning, bagels are a vital part of most New Yorkers’ eating habits.  So, it only made logical sense to turn to Maria Balinska’s The Bagel for my next encounter with New York City in Yale Press’s books.  Of course, before sitting down to write, I grabbed a hot bagel (and its frequent pair cream cheese) from the famed H & H Bagels (which even appears in a photograph in the book) to prevent my appetite from growing, a problem I had while reading.

New Yorkers will realize immediately from the story Balinska tells that the bagel is not a New York invention, but an immigrant to the city.  The bagel’s heritage matches the melting pot that is the New York City we tend to see as its home, having peers in countries as far reaching as Italy and China.  Balinska looks most closely though at the development of the bagel in Poland as a product and part of culture, and the bagel’s ties to labor disputes in New York City.  One can look through the bagel to many of the societal questions in these two places.

Another fascinating element of the book, especially for those interested in the history of trends and marketing, is the story of the bagel’s developing popularity in America.  Today, few do not know what a bagel is, but this was not always the case, and the wide variety of marketing techniques that spurned on its nationwide popularity demonstrate the creative tactics used to make the bagel the well-known food it is today.  Just as the labor issues found in bagel-baking matched questions in the broader labor force, bagels’ increasing popularity also matched some of the same changes in the broader American food landscape.  Frozen bagels were both a major impetus for the travel of bagels across America and into homes in the same way other foods were frozen to increase their convenience.

For those looking to dig into both their meals and what is behind them, The Bagel is an essential addition to the current trend of food histories.  As we always forget while eating, our food takes a long journey to our plates, and in some ways the bagel took an especially far one.

 

Michelle Stein is a former Yale Press intern and recent Vassar College graduate.  She lives on the Upper West Side in New York.

Two Icons of America authors on YouTube

A recent unexpected celebrity endorsement is just the latest in a string of successes for Yale's Icons of America series, which presents brief, lively volumes on our nation's major cultural touchstones. Past works have covered the Empire State Building, Gone with the Wind, and Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech

For those unfamiliar with the Icons series, we've dug up a pair of YouTube clips highlighting how entertaining—and sometimes prescient—these books can be. The first features Josh Ozersky, author of The Hamburger, in an ABC Frontline piece on the booming business of the burger in the midst of the current recession. Watch as Ozersky and the anchor revel in the humble decadence of America's favorite sandwich: