Department

Ethnic, Gender, Historical, and Philosophical Studies

Document Type

Poster

Abstract

While hot dish is often defined as an Upper Midwestern casserole, casseroles and hot dishes have independent histories defined by unique discursive relationships with the foodways of the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. Dishes called casseroles entered American foodways by the 1830s, and the term “hot dishes” entered national discussions around food and nutrition in the 1890s, but both terms only started to consistently describe these dishes in their recognizable forms in the 1930s. By the end of the 1930s, recipes with “casserole” and “hot dish” in their titles were most often scalloped dishes (dishes prepared by layering all ingredients in one baking dish and baking that dish in an oven), which was not a consistent form of these dishes in either of their histories. Although they came to resemble each other materially, national discourses that invoked casserole (such as the foodways of the emerging middle class) and regional and national discourses around hot dishes (which ultimately addressed the roles of women in feeding communities) demonstrate that these dishes were functionally and meaningfully different from each other, the legacy of those differences persisting through the twentieth century to the present day. In order to represent historical food discourses, this project summarizes trends in prescriptive rhetoric (direct and implicit instructions on how to cook, how to eat, and who should be cooking) observed in thrity-three cookbooks, along with other works written with the purpose of informing and affirming norms around food and society. In order to demonstrate the persistent legacies of the food discourses around casserole and hot dish in the first half of the twentieth century, this project interrogates the assumptions of secondary (contextualizing) sources written in the twenty-first century and discusses how they demonstrate the legacies of these discourses in their attempts to chronicle the histories of these dishes. By using materials in this way, this project also intends to demonstrate better historical research practices and highlight the limited research scopes of previous studies.

Publication Date

Spring 4-15-2025

Comments

Spring 2025: Student Research Conference - "Most Creative Research Award"

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