Category talk:Antebellum cuisine

Scope of category

@Spudlace, Andrew Dalby, and Valereee: On Talk:Fricassee, there's been some discussion about the appropriateness of this category for that dish.

Beyond that, there's the question of what exactly this category is supposed to mean. Is it:

• Dishes which were invented in the US Antebellum period?
• Dishes which were characteristic of that period?
• Dishes which were popular during that period but neither before nor since?
• All dishes which were consumed in that period?

I think it will be hard to find any good evidence of particular dishes being characteristic of this period, or popular during this period but not before or after. The existing articles in this category all rely on sources which indicate that the dish existed during that period, but I don't think any of them have reliable sources showing that they were characteristic of or unique to the period. And if they don't have to be characteristic of or unique to that period, why not also list dishes like sausage and soup which were certainly consumed in that period -- as well, of course, as pretty much every other period!

Fricassee, for example, is a perennially popular dish in French, British, and US cookbooks, as shown in Google ngrams. So it's not clear why we would attribute it to any specific period, whether it's pre-revolutionary, antebellum, post-bellum, or even 19th century. ... or to any specific country. And surely we're not going to have categories for every combination of country and period (Nineteenth-century Danish cuisine; Eighteenth-century Spanish cuisine; etc. etc.). I note, by the way, that fricassee is listed in Category:Medieval cuisine...why? If it's in medieval cuisine, shouldn't it also be in Modern cuisine?

There's also the question of why this category is called "antebellum", as that word is often associated with the southern U.S. Here on WP, Antebellum period redirects to Antebellum South, and we have articles on Antebellum South, Antebellum architecture (which is specifically about antebellum southern architecture), Antebellum Virginia, etc., but no articles on Antebellum New England, Antebellum literature, Antebellum economy, etc. And the history articles use a different periodization: History of the United States (1789–1849); History of the United States (1849–1865). Certainly scholars do use the adjective "antebellum", as in the first chapter of Levenstein's Revolution at the Table (cited in Cuisine of Antebellum America) and for that matter the title of the Tuckers' Industrializing Antebellum America. Amusingly, even though the Cuisine of Antebellum America article is not specifically about the South, in its first sentence, it links to Antebellum South (I have corrected that).

All that to say that it doesn't seem useful to have categories which periodize dishes so narrowly. It is probably useful to have Category:Medieval cuisine (though it is full of errors, such as categorizing the Renaissance chef and writer Bartolomeo Scappi as medieval -- I have corrected that), but narrower categories are problematic. --Macrakis (talk) 17:58, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

I'm not sure about this one. The category is about the Category:Cultural history of the United States, not the Middle Ages, so it's not covered by any of our existing categories that I know about. But, our periodization for American history categories is narrower than "Antebellum" for the years leading up to the Civil War. I think this is because there are hundreds of articles for this era but it's completely new to me so maybe some of the American history regulars will have more information why it was done that way. The cuisine, unlike the rest of country, remains more or less consistent until around 1890s. Given the choice between the multiple narrower categories and the broader category Category:Antebellum cuisine, I thought that one category would be better. Spudlace (talk) 02:01, 21 September 2020 (UTC)

The article Cuisine of Antebellum America is interesting, and seems well sourced, but I don't think it cites a single book which is devoted to this precise topic or whose title uses this name. Before seeing this discussion I would have expected "Antebellum cuisine" to mean the cuisine of the South before the Civil War, and I would have doubted whether the war was a turning point in the cuisine of the North. I'm happy to be told that all these points are mistaken -- I'm no expert on American cuisine or indeed American history -- but the small number of articles in this category inclines me to say it could be merged into Category:History of American cuisine. Andrew Dalby 08:41, 21 September 2020 (UTC)

I agree that there were many changes in American cuisine starting in the late 19th century (Spudlace mentions 1890), but they vary a lot by geography and social class. For example, in the cities, many office workers stopped going home for the midday meal (which was often called "dinner") and instead ate in lunchrooms. Industrially canned and packaged food also became more prevalent. I am not sure that the Civil War (and thus antebellum/postbellum) is a useful cut-point. Levenstein, for example, covers 1880-1930 as his period (after a first chapter setting the stage).

In any case, I am not sure what would usefully or meaningfully be categorized in chronological slices. Salt pork and cornmeal were the staples in the South for most of the 18th and 19th century (per Levenstein); is it useful to categorize them as "19th century cuisine"? In New England, the diet switched from being corn-based to being wheat-based with the opening of the Erie Canal (1825) and later the railroads, so the chronology is quite different.

Are there specific dishes that are typically "antebellum" or typically "19th century"? The category currently includes fricassee, which has been widely popular in France, Britain, and the US for about 300 years, apple dumpling, which are widely popular in Central Europe as well as the US, and so on.

Washington pie does seem to be "historical" in the sense that you don't hear much about it these days, but it is first documented in the decade before the Civil War, and its popularity seems to have peaked from 1880-1945, not antebellum at all, if we're to believe Google nGrams [1].

So even if the temporal scope were widened, and the geography made more explicit (e.g., 19th century American cuisine), I'm not convinced that it's a useful category. --Macrakis (talk) 17:47, 21 September 2020 (UTC)