Summer Smith (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
somethingwithturquoise) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomhigh2024-09-20 05:12 am
somethingwithturquoise) wrote in fandomhigh2024-09-20 05:12 am
The Weird, Wonderful, and WTF World - Friday, First Period [09/20].
The class today would not be meeting at portalocity, but rather inside the school's kitchen classroom itself, a familiar place for anyone who'd taken several of Summer's classes in the past, which she hoped would be triggering a little bit of a sense of dread for what was ahead of them for today's class.
And that sense of dread would be very well-founded as she smiled beatifically from the front of the classroom, surrounded by....what else?....shining, gleaming cloches.
"Welcome back, everyone," she said. "This week, we're going to be leaning much more heavily into the Weird and the What The Fuck of the class, with something that has become a special interest of mine for many, many years now, and that will surprise none of you who have likely taken any of my recent classes. Today, we're going to be talking about the weird, what the fuck world of vintage retro recipes and the bizarre shit people used to do to food back then.
"Now," she said, "there is actually some pretty interesting discourse on why the dinner tables of the time were so....let's be generous and say interesting, but at the center of it is the fact that these recipes are usually pulled from cookbooks for special occasions, so it's not like they were eating these things every day, but the mid-century was also a post-war period of economic revival. Not only that, but there was a good deal of marketing magic going on at the time, and a lot of interesting and innovative products being made available and new access to more 'exotic' ingredients and spices that people were just itching to try out and show off to their friends that they could have the privilege to really bring it, literally, to the table.
"This all comes into focus really strongly with the explosion of interesting jello molds at the time, to bring it back around to my own interest in all of this. It's all about the Jell-O, baby! Because before this time, gelatin or aspic was actually a whole difficult process to produce, but then they started mass-marketing gelatin powder, and, ohmygod, it was off to the races then. Everyone wanted to take advantage of this incredibly versatile and now extremely convenient new thing in interesting and exploratory ways....that the advertisers were pushing. A lot of these trends did not start organically in the kitchens of housewives, but, instead, in marketing boardrooms a lameta forMad Men. Add in with that an interest in an added interest in 'fancy' cuisine thanks to the likes of Julia Child and an eagerness to combine it with the modern convenience foods starting to show up on grocery shelves, and you have an interesting little microcosm of a food trend that marked a whole era. Sort of like adding bacon to everything in the 2010s or currently making highly realistic versions of things entirely out of chocolate and cake.
"So today," she concluded, "I've gathered some of the most notorious terrifying retro recipes for us to all try and discuss and, for a lot of you, revisit, and we'll talk about some of our own weird recipes that we may have grown up with, or ones that I didn't include, and just sort of discuss weird food in general while we....erm...ha! Enjoy."
And that sense of dread would be very well-founded as she smiled beatifically from the front of the classroom, surrounded by....what else?....shining, gleaming cloches.
"Welcome back, everyone," she said. "This week, we're going to be leaning much more heavily into the Weird and the What The Fuck of the class, with something that has become a special interest of mine for many, many years now, and that will surprise none of you who have likely taken any of my recent classes. Today, we're going to be talking about the weird, what the fuck world of vintage retro recipes and the bizarre shit people used to do to food back then.
"Now," she said, "there is actually some pretty interesting discourse on why the dinner tables of the time were so....let's be generous and say interesting, but at the center of it is the fact that these recipes are usually pulled from cookbooks for special occasions, so it's not like they were eating these things every day, but the mid-century was also a post-war period of economic revival. Not only that, but there was a good deal of marketing magic going on at the time, and a lot of interesting and innovative products being made available and new access to more 'exotic' ingredients and spices that people were just itching to try out and show off to their friends that they could have the privilege to really bring it, literally, to the table.
"This all comes into focus really strongly with the explosion of interesting jello molds at the time, to bring it back around to my own interest in all of this. It's all about the Jell-O, baby! Because before this time, gelatin or aspic was actually a whole difficult process to produce, but then they started mass-marketing gelatin powder, and, ohmygod, it was off to the races then. Everyone wanted to take advantage of this incredibly versatile and now extremely convenient new thing in interesting and exploratory ways....that the advertisers were pushing. A lot of these trends did not start organically in the kitchens of housewives, but, instead, in marketing boardrooms a la
"So today," she concluded, "I've gathered some of the most notorious terrifying retro recipes for us to all try and discuss and, for a lot of you, revisit, and we'll talk about some of our own weird recipes that we may have grown up with, or ones that I didn't include, and just sort of discuss weird food in general while we....erm...ha! Enjoy."
Re: Class Activity: Discussion. And Trying at Least Something, Come on! - WWWTF, 09/20.
And then just gonna...facepalm and slowly slide down her seat until the floor opened up and swallowed her.
Which it didn't seem to be doing. Fucker.
"My, uh. Thought," she said belatedly. "Soul food uses a lot of parts of animal that most folks wouldn't because of its links to the food fed to the enslaved in the South."
Re: Class Activity: Discussion. And Trying at Least Something, Come on! - WWWTF, 09/20.
"Yeah, no," she then said, "no worries there, white cookie cutter suburbia is where I was born and bred and I know how to stay in my lane. The worst I could do is dredge up some Betty Crocker bullshit attempt at soul food that uses, like, the tiniest whisper of seasonings for the fifties housewife whose feeling a little saucy and bold when she invites the PTA over for a Tupperware party.
"But," she said, because she was a teacher, dammit, and this was a real class, so that meant introspectively looking at the topic at hand, "is it just sort of the visceral thought of 'ew, ugh, why those ingredients together in that order?' that made you draw the connection there? Or something else, do you think?"
Re: Class Activity: Discussion. And Trying at Least Something, Come on! - WWWTF, 09/20.
Good save, babygirl.
"But yeah. I was thinking of foods that folks - me included - eat without thinking twice and how other folks would react and I realized that soul food has a lot of that. Cause they got the scraps and had to work to make it palatable, and, when possible, could connect it to dishes from their homes back in Africa. And then we get hamhocks, pigs feet, chittlins...okra came from Ethopia..."