Food and Entertainment from Every Corner of the Globe: Bourgeois U.S. Households as Points of Encounter, 1870-1920

This essay considers bourgeois U.S. kitchens as places of transnational encounter. Although they are often regarded as quintessentially domestic, kitchens also have served as contact zones. This became increasingly apparent in the years between the Civil War and World War I - a time when imperial expansion, international commerce, tourism, and mass migration contributed to a rise in food imports, a swelling pool of immigrant domestic service workers, and frequent references to "foreign" dishes in cookbooks and other cooking writings. This was the age in which Indian curries, Mexican chilies, Italian macaronis, Chinese chop-sueys, and numerous French dishes became staples of the middle-class American culinary lexicon. The internationalization of bourgeois American cookery had implications that went far beyond the gustatory pleasures of bygone dinners. Food writings and food infused daily life with geographic consciousness. They turned kitchens into sites of geographic education and women into creators and purveyors of geographical knowledge. Although food writings and "foreign" entertainments (often involving costumes and decorations as well as "foreign" foods) taught lessons about hierarchy and difference that resembled those conveyed by world's fairs, museums, and other sources of popular geography dominated by men, they also encouraged an appropriative outlook toward the wider world. Beyond complicating Americanization narratives that emphasize exports over imports and production over consumption, this essay demonstrates that bourgeois American women were more than just beneficiaries of globalizing developments - they were also active contributors.