Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald

It simply can't be that a year has passed since we last posted to our Cooking (and Contemplating) New England blog! We've been cooking up a storm, mind you, just not blogging about it. We're at work on a cookbook--a collection of historic recipes that we've made at home--which leaves little time for blogging, or much else. But our blog tells us it feels neglected . . . so here's something we made recently and just love. We hope this keeps our blog readers happy (and thank you, dear readers) until we can devote more time to this medium!

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As we emphasized in earlier posts on the evolution of Rye and Indian (aka Ryaninjun) bread into Boston Brown Bread, New Englanders from the first years of settlement wished to eat bread made primarily of wheat. (See the first post in the series, Growing Grains and Ingrained Ideas, for an explanation of these corn-related terms and how we're using them.) For centuries, though, this goal was unattainable for most. Wheat did not grow well in the region's rocky soil and what did grow was susceptible to a killing fungus known as "the blast." Imported from the mid-Atlantic colonies, it was an expensive luxury which only the wealthy could consume on a regular basis. The Connecticut River Valley, with rich alluvial soil suited to wheat growing, was the one area in New England where wheat was plentiful. But things changed with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. Wheat imports from farming regions to the west became more plentiful and cheaper. Later in the century, mechanized milling further reduced the cost of wheat, though some began to complain that industrial-milled wheat, shorn of its germ and bran, was tasteless. It was certainly less nutritious. Read More 

If you grew up in or around Boston in the 1950s and '60s, as one of us did, then at one time or another you undoubtedly ate Brown Bread (aka Boston Brown Bread) from a can. Despite the word "brown" in its name, this was not some kind of before-its-time fresh-baked, super healthy bread. No, indeed. We're talking about a mass-produced, steamed, and highly sweetened loaf, sold—yup—in cans. True enough, even the canned variety was, and still is, made with whole grains—cornmeal, rye flour, and whole wheat flour—but its high molasses content will give you in just a single ½ inch slice almost a quarter of your daily recommended dose of sugar. The particular bread we're talking about is made by the B&M (Burnham and Morrill) company of Portland, Maine. There are few truly regional foods left in New England, but these cans of steamed Brown Bread certainly count as one of them, given their one-time ubiquity in the region and the vivid memories many people have of eating warm slices of B&M Brown Bread as children.
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The New Nativism--An Old Story
It has become almost a cliche to say that the present period of American history, beginning around 1975, is similar in many important ways to the period beginning roughly a hundred years earlier. We are living now, it appears, in a second Gilded Age, with pronounced inequalities of wealth and income and with transformative changes in our technology, economy, and the demographic profile of our society.

The last of the trends on this list—the arrival of lots of new people—has received much attention in the past few years from political commentators and is in the headlines almost every day in the coverage of the current presidential campaign, because of the xenophobia that constitutes the primary plank in the platform of the Republican candidate. Read More