Cruising food today sure is lush compared to the grub journalist Robert Carter and three friends took with them in the summer of 1858 when they chartered a thirty-three foot sloop named Helen for a recreational cruise from Provincetown, Massachusetts,
to Bar Harbor, Maine. As described in Carter’s Coast of New England, their provisions were very simple, basic necessities
really: salt pork, crackers and biscuit, which they called hard tack, plus ale and whiskey. They talk about coffee; claret; lemons to add to the whiskey; potatoes and onions and they must have taken flour because they mention flapjacks once in a while and I bet they stowed a cask of corned beef, too, though it isn’t mentioned.

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Our beloved chowder cracker has been eliminated–again! Eleven years ago or so, Nabisco stopped making Crown Pilots and all heck broke out in Maine, especially Chebeague where Damon Miller Damon was the first to raise perpendicular dickens about it. CBS and Tim Sample came to interview several of us and they featured the dust-up on Sunday Morning. Nabisco saw a promotional opportunity and brought it back.

But now it is gone, yet again, and we feel crumby about it.

What’s the big deal with a cracker? Pilot crackers are a largish cracker, 2 1/2 x 4 3/4 inches, made primarily of flour, a bit of shortening but not much, some molasses, malted barley flour, baking soda. That’s pretty much it. Several decades ago, this kind of cracker was de rigeuer in chowder because it was the closest thing around to seafarer’s hardtack, one of the original ingredients in chowder, predating potatoes which eventually replaced it.

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From a historical point of view, we at our house are being very genteel these days, what with the eating of so much asparagus. Our patch is about 17 years old, and we can tell that it is beginning to wobble in orbit, but still fine green stalks are there for the taking, both for dinner every other night and for freezing.

Two hundred years ago, asparagus was the territory of the well-to-do and genteel who had the time, and mainly the labor, to plant it, and then wait a while as it occupied valuable garden space until it bore sufficiently to begin cutting. Simmered and served on toast, actually in the 1700s and early 1800s, asparagus was cooked until tender but not mushy. Mushy came later in the 1800s as cooks, fearful of fairly newly discovered germs, thought it wise to cook almost anything very well.

I have become such a maniac about eating asparagus fresh that I treat it like corn — get the steamer hot first, then go pick the asparagus. Please note that I do not ever, ever buy out of season so-called fresh asparagus so our own is a much anticipated, gratefully received, and celebrated vegetable. We ate the first few stalks almost reverently, and now as the stalks are more numerous, I make asparagus risotto, or a warm asparagus and pasta salad with parmesan on it. We even eat it with breakfast in an omelet.

Sandy Oliver, Food Historian, Author, MF&L columnist: The Way Things Were

Gary Nabhan and Renewing America’s Food Traditions (RAFT) cropped up in the New York TImes Dining section this Wednesday. RAFT is a consortium of several foodie organizations, around the country, most notably Slow Food, dedicated to preserving heirloom edibles, (fruits, veggies, critters). Slow already has created a mechanism for identifying endangered anythings anywhere and additions to its Ark come from around the globe.

I had the distinct pleasure last summer of traveling to Vermont with Russell Libby, head of Maine Organic Farmer’s and Gardeners Association, to meet with Gary and others from Northern New England and New York State. We were there to help list significant foodstuffs in our region for Gary and RAFT to incorporate into a yet another of his several profiles of American regions. RAFT has drawn a perhaps somewhat tongue-in-cheek map of North America divided into Food Nations. Russell and I represented Clambake Nation, as did a few others, essentially the New England Coast, and others came from Maple Syrup Nation which extends inland wherever there are hardwood forests from Canada to Pennsylvania.

Now we can quibble whether we live in Clambake or in Lobster, of which I’d personally prefer the latter which does not yet exist, and I think there ought to be a Baked Bean Nation carved out of Maple Syrup, but these are minor points. The really interesting thing about the RAFT map (just google it) is that by basing food traditions on iconic regional foods or dishes, it comes a lot closer to showing what is distinctive about a regions foodways, because otherwise you have people from all over the place claiming that their particular food is cornbread, or apples, or  pot roast or whatever.

Nabhan and RAFT tie a region’s food habits to climate, vegetation, and culture. They come a lot closer to discovering the real outlines of our food boundaries. Then he lists some of the particular foods endangered, particular kinds of apples, or turnips (as in the Waldoboro Green Necked Turnip), or fish, berry, etc.,  because so doing encourages its production. If you live in Waldoboro (or Nobleboro,  Wiscassett, or Union) and your farmer’s market starts sporting a Green Neck turnip you might just decide it is the right thing for dinner. The more you buy the more the farmer grows, and a good old turnip is saved for the future.

Sandy Oliver, Food Historian, Author, MF&L columnist: The Way Things Were

Garlic is relatively new to Yankee cuisine. I love garlic so much that practically every recipe I use, except those for dessert, begins with “fry a little onion and garlic in olive oil….”  But this was not always so.

My mother reported that in the Depression, my grandmother learned how to make spaghetti sauce from an Italian neighbor, and while my gram, grandpa, and mom liked tomato sauce on pasta, mom said, “Of course, your grandmother left out the garlic.” Of course.

Garlic smelled like poverty and foreigners. It was not genteel.

A glimpse of this attitude appears in the 1849 journal of a Yankee sailor who with some shipmates went ashore in the Azores looking for a nice hot meal. After months eating salt beef and hardtack, Nelson Haley and his friends eagerly anticipated the chicken stew  set in the middle of a table laid with a white cloth, plates, flatware and tumblers, with even a bottle of wine set at each place. Alas, after the first mouthful, each fellow laid down his fork and knife, disgusted and disappointed.

Haley wrote, “The one who had cooked it had stuffed it full of garlic, and to all of us, if rotten eggs had been in it, the taste no doubt could not have been worse.” Haley convinced the proprietor to bring a dish of stew made without garlic, but the sailors still could detect the flavor from the cooking pot . Nonetheless, they got it down, probably aided by extra wine served up to soothe their dissatisfaction.

A hundred and fifty years later, Haley’s descendants would likely relish the garlicky stew and maybe even welcome a side of garlic bread.

Sandy Oliver, Food Historian, Author, MF&L columnist: The Way Things Were

All this talk about good Maine oysters prompts me to point out that oysters have a long and glorious history as early American fast food. Cities like Boston and New York in the early 1800s sported oyster vendors on the streets who sold freshly shucked oysters on the spot, or tossed them on a grill to roast them. Oyster saloons cranked out oyster stews in a jiffy –  some butter, oysters sizzled until the edges curled, some hot milk, and a roll to  go along side, and customers served in jig time.

Modern people are amazed to learn that oysters were packed in New England, fitted into containers that had an ice-filled liner and sent by rail to the West — Chicago, and even further, so popular were they.

In fact, eating oysters at all is pretty amazing. But humankind has been been doing it for millennia: witness the oyster shell heaps in Damariscotta: thousands of years of oysters-by-the-sea with Native populations trekking in annually to gather and eat and eat and eat. Almost anything looks more edible than an oyster, but there you have it. Oysters appear consistently in the top four or five favorite sea foods consumed  by the mid-1700s, right alongside cod, salmon, and lobsters.

Sandy Oliver, Food Historian, Author, MF&L columnist: The Way Things Were