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12-23-2009, 10:33 AM | #1 |
Bunion
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Foodie flame wars not new
[A friend sent me a link to this article on the NYTimes website, http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.c...dence-of-1872/ which is about a scrapple flame war in the newspaper in 1872. I find the article quite enlightening. I didn't edit out any of the links and don't know where they go.]
The Way We Ate: The Great Scrapple Correspondence of 1872 For more than a century and a half, The New York Times has been recording the pleasures and prejudices of the American palate. “The Way We Ate” is a weekly tasting menu of vintage food writing from The Times’s archives. In the winter of 1872, the Letters page of The New York Times was briefly invaded by scrapple. It all started with one reader’s paean to his favorite breakfast food. Calling himself “EPICURE,” he pronounced the dish—a Spam-like slab of cornmeal and pig parts—both delicious and inexpensive. If anyone was interested, he continued, he’d be delighted to share his good lady’s recipe. Two days later, at the urging of several readers, the recipe ran. Over the next two weeks, The Times published more than two dozen letters on the subject of scrapple, which, taken together, form a sort of steampunk prototype for online food discussion. It’s all there: the pseudonymous “usernames,” the off-topic ranting, the preoccupation with pork fat. In short, it’s a modern-day food thread in very slow motion. In thoroughly modern fashion, EPICURE’s recipe was almost immediately wikified. PORCUPINE warned against over-frying the scrapple, A HOUSEKEEPER swapped in Graham flour, and MIDDLETOWN gave her method for removing excess grease. Only PHYSICIAN seemed content with the dish as it was, calling it “a positive luxury, throwing the Frenchman’s pâté de foie gras entirely into the shade.” As always, the haters far outnumbered the fans: One reader declared that he’d just as soon fry bread in lard and eat it than partake in what others called an “abominable mess,” a “culinary fraud upon the stomach” and a great way to contract trichinosis. Participants in the discussion didn’t just object to scrapple, of course. They also objected to each other. In what may be the earliest recorded example of a “flame,” H.G. punned on A GOOD LIVER’s pen-name, suggesting that he be “boiled and chopped up” for his ignorance. By the fifth day, most letters paid only lip service to scrapple. The frugal nature of the dish became an opportunity to hold forth on everything from the rising cost of living to women’s ruinous spending habits. As X. Y. Z. saw it, at the heart of the “great scrapple correspondence” lay the central question of the nineteenth century: “How shall the middle classes live?” Before that question was ever answered, the thread came to an abrupt halt with this provocative rant: To the Editor of the New-York Times:We’ll never know whether the tirade killed the thread or the editors did. Then, as now, board moderators answered to no one. As no message board veteran can fail to note, the technology has evolved, but our behavior has not.
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I refuse to belong to any organization that would have me as a member. ~ Groucho Marx |
12-23-2009, 11:30 AM | #5 |
Bunion
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Re: Foodie flame wars not new
Why, I recall having to use drums to tell one kid how good he had it. By gum, we had to dry our own skins and make our own drums in my day. Young whippersnappers, they never learn.
__________________
I refuse to belong to any organization that would have me as a member. ~ Groucho Marx |
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