Reading more, it seems more nuanced than that, so maybe I was jumping at conclusions prematurely.
The Stomach of Man Under Socialism: A Culinary History of Socialist America
- Thread starter JesterBL
- Start date
I want to be very clear that this isn't meant to be a "communism no food haha" or "communism bad food haha" TL. I'm writing this in part because I love American food history, not because I want to write a diatribe about socialism. I think there would be far worse Americas to live in than the one my fictional author writes about here, although I do think it would be far from a utopia.
The Special Period of the 1950s is not just an attempt to slap Stalinist era food shortages onto the United States. The 1950s were a period of intense drought across large swathes of the United States, including Texas, California and the Upper Plains. A United States that had underinvested in agriculture and in rural areas earlier in the 20th Century would have found themselves in a difficult situation, and it could have been compounded by any number of factors, particularly international trade. I wasn't initially going to include a section directly dealing with the root causes of the Special Period (and of the far less severe 1970s shortages, best imagined as a retreat from abundance) but I may do so now.
And finally, American bread and beer are probably better at the time of this fictional book's writing than they were IOTL. (I would like to try the bourbon, myself).
The Special Period of the 1950s is not just an attempt to slap Stalinist era food shortages onto the United States. The 1950s were a period of intense drought across large swathes of the United States, including Texas, California and the Upper Plains. A United States that had underinvested in agriculture and in rural areas earlier in the 20th Century would have found themselves in a difficult situation, and it could have been compounded by any number of factors, particularly international trade. I wasn't initially going to include a section directly dealing with the root causes of the Special Period (and of the far less severe 1970s shortages, best imagined as a retreat from abundance) but I may do so now.
And finally, American bread and beer are probably better at the time of this fictional book's writing than they were IOTL. (I would like to try the bourbon, myself).
The bourbon reminds me of "tuzemský rum/inlander rum", a rum substitute with an unique taste from Central Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuzemák . It was indeed popular under socialism (but a traditional pub will still have it as the only kind of rum they serve!) but actually started in Austro-Hungarian times, due to lack of tropical colonies. We call it tuzemský rum/tuzemák, German speakers call it Inländerrum. Stroh is a fancier Austrian version with sky high alcohol content that is actually made from cane so it can be called a rum under EU regulations.
Yeah I don't like "communism bad grey building bread lines lol" timelines and I don't think that's what you were doing at all. If you look at the history of US food quality and especially US beer your description of ATL whiskey production isn't that far off from the postwar hegemonic reign of US adjunct lagers. You know, the era when beers were all just "beers" made from rice or whatever. (Also not an attack on that era I love US adjunct lagers deeply).
I also love timelines where you have to infer what's going on from given evidence about a sliver of society, so I'm eagerly awaiting the next chapter.
Comrade, you know nothing about the American tradition of the "homer" in industrial production and industrial unions. Often workers individually or in groups suborn collective property for the purposes of producing things for their own use "to take home," "a home[-taking object"]r." This is not unique to America, but is common to all industrial factory systems displaying the exchange of labor for m[…this content removed…].
Workers making homers do so to supplement their own enjoyment of life, they take inputs directly (increasing "losses"), they make more products and take more, they make better products and take those, they make unique products which are works of art or expression and take them, or simply leave them in the factory. When the factory poli[…this content removed…]. And occasionally they can get around them and get them home.
If you have never tasted a "best production" or "art object" American straight bourbon then you have not lived. Additionally as always some bourbon was specifically made for "recallable" "delegates" in their capacity as an administrative cla[…no further content available.]
Faeelin
Banned
I guess there's a decline for a little while in the early 50s, but that chart does not scream droughts in the 50s. http://jaysonlusk.com/blog/2016/6/26/the-evolution-of-american-agriculture
And you're looking at the effects of the 50s droughts after the United States learned the lessons of the Dust Bowl and invested heavily both in crop improvement and soil conservation and after they instituted a system of price supports, crop insurance and direct payment to farmers. The Dust Bowl as a historical event itself was pretty heavily contingent on post-WWI commodity markets and government policies towards agriculture, both of which are going to be very different depending on the choice of POD.
That's also a bit of a misleading graph because it pegs to 2014 levels of production- is a drop from ~42% of 2014's level to ~38% of 2014's level significant or not? If you're in 2014, it doesn't look like it. But if you are in the 50s, it is a 10% drop.
That's also a bit of a misleading graph because it pegs to 2014 levels of production- is a drop from ~42% of 2014's level to ~38% of 2014's level significant or not? If you're in 2014, it doesn't look like it. But if you are in the 50s, it is a 10% drop.
On the other hand, if you managed to avoid the dust bowl or something similar, it probably means you have a more robust agriculture that hasn't fallen prey to the monoculture and soil exhaustion traps?
Unless you decide to merely delay it and have the 50s be your dust bowl equivalent wake up call about failing agricultural management. I could see that, if things remained smooth before that.
Maybe not a large dust bowl in this case but something lower intensity ?
Nick P
Donor
Some kind of Potato Blight or grasshopper invasion?
You know what works well for a modern industrial Socialist America that believes in knowledge of its scientists?
A new chemical fertiliser that is mixed so well and yet so badly it turns out to be a slow acting crop killer.
I think the second case (grasshopper invasion) is more likely if you consider that as you say "the United States learned the lessons of the Dust Bowl and invested heavily both in crop improvement and soil conservation". If not, the first case (Potato Blight) I think in the case of a industrialist agriculture.
Chapter 2: The Closest Thing To Home
Chapter 2: The Closest Thing To Home
“Sacred cows make the finest hamburger.”- graffiti author unknown
I had my first hamburger at the American Club in London in 1964, right next to the far more famous In and Out on Piccadilly. The burger was served on a dense potato bun with ketchup, onion and pickle. It was absolutely dreadful. Last I’ve heard the burgers at the American Club still are.[1] I don’t order hamburgers in Britain, and I don’t think you should either. The American expat, hungry for home, will often search in vain to find a hamburger abroad. He will invariably wander into the American Club in London, the Hotel Adlon in Berlin, or Sloan’s New York Bar in Paris. He will be disappointed but still glad to have this pale, drab imitation of the taste of home. I do not blame him for his striving. In truth, a well-made hamburger is one of those rare transcendent culinary experiences, alongside losing oneself in a first growth bordeaux or a prosciutto di parma.
So where lies the difference between the hamburger on American soil and abroad? The first is the meat. Much of the beef here in Britain still comes from Argentina and while Argentine beef is of fine quality if one makes roast beef out of it, the meat is lean like the animals that range and feed themselves on the abundant grass of the pampas. A hamburger made of Argentine beef tends towards dryness with an unpleasant grassy note which could be pleasant elsewhere. The beef found in France suffers a similar problem, with the most popular Limousin breed tending towards leanness. German cows like Germans themselves tend towards plumpness and I have been told the hamburger at the Hotel Adlon is passable as a result. American cows are a different class altogether. They are raised on grass, but they are fattened and finished on corn, soy and whey, depending on commodity cycles. The end result of this is that American beef is milder in flavor, fattier in composition and perfect for forming the patties of a good hamburger. I mentioned in the prologue that many American hamburgers will include vegetable origin fillers. Soy flour and potato flour are the most common fillers, and either of them results in a patty that is delicate, crispy, caramelized, equal parts tender and crunchy. Pork may also find its way into the American burger, depending on meat prices and local conditions and this often intensifies the fattiness of the patty. This rather raises the average quality of an American hamburger over a hamburger abroad, which is likely to be dry, gray and uniform, a hunk of unseasoned beef on bread, the impact of which we now move on to.
Bread choices are far from uniform in American hamburgers, but the bread which they use is universally better than that which a hamburger abroad will be served on. This is broadly true of American bread and their strong networks of local bakeries, a holdover from the Special Period. Buns may be light and airy, soft and dense, they may be hard rolls or what Americans curiously call ‘English’ muffins. Whatever bread the American establishment uses, they may toast it or they may not- I prefer mine toasted, but will always defer to the cook. In my experience, hamburgers abroad are served on hypermarket buns or buns which resemble hypermarket buns, which invariably become greasy and wet even when pressed against the dry puck of a hamburger abroad. They are never toasted, and I don’t know that toasting would save them.
Finally, we come to toppings. For whatever reason, the platonic ideal of a hamburger for export is topped with ketchup, pickles and raw onions. This is not an uncommon topping choice but greatly limits the varieties you will find across America. What’s more the ketchup imported to Europe tends towards the sickly-sweet and lacks the vinegary tang of ‘domestic’ American ketchup. I prefer mustard and grilled onions, for my part. Lettuce and tomato on a hamburger are one of the preferred means of ingesting fresh vegetables for the American workingman and are never seen in foreign examples of the dish. One of the more interesting preparations which I saw was in New Mexico- a region of the country largely forbidden to foreigners- in which a mixture of cheese and green chiles adorned the hamburger. In northern New York, they will serve the hamburger on a hard roll with caraway and salt and will top the hamburger itself with vinegar and horseradish. The possibilities are endless and varied across the American landscape, and I find myself discovering a diamond in the rough every time I must stop at a road-house in Oklahoma (where they cook the patty with onions laced throughout, crisped to perfection in the fat of a pan which has likely never been emptied) or a union canteen in the wilds of Minnesota (where they put cheese in the center of the patty and call it a Juicy Lucy).
We have established, I believe, that the hamburger is superior when the patties are formed by American hands and served on American soil. But what exactly is the hamburger? Where did it come from? Why is it so ubiquitous across the American culinary landscape? Is the hamburger a product of socialism?
Hamburgers predate socialism in America. Their place on the American Club menu is one clue to that- the American Club of yesteryear was notoriously Blue in political leanings, although this has changed as the Blues have gone grey and faded out of existence beyond old romance novels and thrillers. The menu even today makes few allowances for the culinary innovations of post-Revolution America. Smoked tofu is nowhere to be found, as one example.
Hamburgers, like socialism, came to America’s shores by way of Germany. The hamburg steak, the ancestor of today’s American hamburger, was a cousin of the German frikadelle (a kind of meatball) and the French steak tartare. The exact reason why it was identified with the city of Hamburg is debated, with some believing it to be merely a reference to the German origins of the dish and others placing it more specifically to the city and the famed Hamburg-Amerika Line. The theory that it was simply a generic reference to the German origins of the dish is supported by the uniquely American habit of declaring everything shaped like a sausage a ‘frankfurter’. The evidence for any specific connection to the city of Hamburg is thin. The hamburg steak was no hamburger as we know it- it was a mixture of beef and onion, which could be served cooked or raw and was eaten with a knife and fork. Like they did with socialism, Americans improved what was handed to them by the Germans. They made the hamburger accessible to the working classes by consistently cooking the meat [2] and by putting it between two buns. It became a food which could be eaten on the go and which could be made on the quick.
Who precisely did this first- or whether it was part of some ineluctable historical process of culinary progress in America and occurred many times over- is likewise debated. The official American position is that the hamburger was created by a Dane, Louis Lassen, to serve workers at his small restaurant, Louis’s Lunch in 1900. The name in this version of events was suggested by Germans who saw something of home in the sandwich of ground beef and toasted bread. Industrial Union No. 460 (Hotel and Restaurant Workers’ Section) owns and operates Louis’s Lunch at the original location, as somewhat of a historical curiosity. Other origin stories place the birth of the hamburger at locations as far afield as the World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri (1904) Seymour, Wisconsin (1885), Hamburg, New York (1885) or Athens, Texas (1884). I am inclined to believe the earliest possible origins attested to in the historical record, and count myself as a believer in independent origination of the concept. I believe the variety of hamburgers across the American landscape would negate the possibility of an origin so close to the Revolution and that something like a hamburger sandwich was part of American food from the first printing of the words “hamburg steak” in the Delmonico’s menu of 1834.
Why hamburgers remained a part of the American food landscape after socialism can be more easily understood when you know where they are cooked and eaten. Hamburgers are not served at Le Carnaval or Delmonico’s or even in the fraternal supper clubs of Middletown, America. They are served from road-houses, union canteens, food carts. They are scarfed down during or on the way to work shifts, eaten while walking or in a train or a street car. They are brought home in greasy bags when Americans must ‘storm’ for a monthly or quarterly quota. Hamburgers are a food of convenience in a culture that tends to push a dogged devotion to work.
The men and women who often make these burgers are the all-American lumpenproletariat, that element of American society often called “the bummery”. American socialism was born on the backs of itinerant workers, bindlestiffs and hoboes, but the mature American socialism of today still has clear distinctions between different grades of worker. The temporary and low-skilled work of the road-house attendee or the union canteen line cook are on the bottom of the hierarchy, just above the anti-social and the criminal. The hamburger is a food perfectly suited to being made in a system of rote mechanization- the labor of one man for another is nearly perfectly interchangeable. One need not be skilled- or sober- to turn out a perfectly passable burger. Karl Marx himself could not create a more perfect example of estranged labor than the hamburger maker. This is not merely my speculation- it is a matter of public record. “The hamburger is the perfect American food,” writes Albert Slabaugh in The Industrial Worker (1973) “because any man may take his place behind the road-house grill in turn.” Slabaugh would go on to serve as an All-Union Industrial Congressman for Industrial Union No. 310 (Railroad, Road and Tunnel Construction Workers) and would later serve as a rotating delegate on the Executive Committee. He knew his way around a road-house and around a hamburger. Hamburgers are a food that any man may make, and every man in America eats.
One can find a hamburger at almost any hour no matter where one is in America. It will more than often be good. That is in and of itself remarkable and without any real parallel here in Britain. I have lived and worked in America for decades and still manage to find myself surprised by the variety within the humble hamburger. It has come a long way from the German frikadelle or the Hamburg steak of Delmonico’s. It predates socialism, but its ubiquity and variety across the American landscape is in many ways, a consequence of that system. If you have not had the chance to try one in America, I would recommend the experience. For my part, I will have to join the Americans in hoping for a good hamburger to make its way across the Atlantic.
[1] Apologies to the American Club, although they know my estimation of their hamburgers and I believe they agree with me. If you want a taste of America at the American Club, order the Oysters Rockefeller with a Schlitz and tell them I sent you.
[2] In the region of Wisconsin, they prepare an atavistic relative of the hamburger named the ‘cannibal sandwich’ consisting of raw ground beef, salt, pepper, and sliced onions, normally served on toasted rye. Elsewhere, the raw beef origins of this dish faded into historical memory and had vanished from restaurant menus and cookbooks by the early 1900s.
“Sacred cows make the finest hamburger.”- graffiti author unknown
I had my first hamburger at the American Club in London in 1964, right next to the far more famous In and Out on Piccadilly. The burger was served on a dense potato bun with ketchup, onion and pickle. It was absolutely dreadful. Last I’ve heard the burgers at the American Club still are.[1] I don’t order hamburgers in Britain, and I don’t think you should either. The American expat, hungry for home, will often search in vain to find a hamburger abroad. He will invariably wander into the American Club in London, the Hotel Adlon in Berlin, or Sloan’s New York Bar in Paris. He will be disappointed but still glad to have this pale, drab imitation of the taste of home. I do not blame him for his striving. In truth, a well-made hamburger is one of those rare transcendent culinary experiences, alongside losing oneself in a first growth bordeaux or a prosciutto di parma.
So where lies the difference between the hamburger on American soil and abroad? The first is the meat. Much of the beef here in Britain still comes from Argentina and while Argentine beef is of fine quality if one makes roast beef out of it, the meat is lean like the animals that range and feed themselves on the abundant grass of the pampas. A hamburger made of Argentine beef tends towards dryness with an unpleasant grassy note which could be pleasant elsewhere. The beef found in France suffers a similar problem, with the most popular Limousin breed tending towards leanness. German cows like Germans themselves tend towards plumpness and I have been told the hamburger at the Hotel Adlon is passable as a result. American cows are a different class altogether. They are raised on grass, but they are fattened and finished on corn, soy and whey, depending on commodity cycles. The end result of this is that American beef is milder in flavor, fattier in composition and perfect for forming the patties of a good hamburger. I mentioned in the prologue that many American hamburgers will include vegetable origin fillers. Soy flour and potato flour are the most common fillers, and either of them results in a patty that is delicate, crispy, caramelized, equal parts tender and crunchy. Pork may also find its way into the American burger, depending on meat prices and local conditions and this often intensifies the fattiness of the patty. This rather raises the average quality of an American hamburger over a hamburger abroad, which is likely to be dry, gray and uniform, a hunk of unseasoned beef on bread, the impact of which we now move on to.
Bread choices are far from uniform in American hamburgers, but the bread which they use is universally better than that which a hamburger abroad will be served on. This is broadly true of American bread and their strong networks of local bakeries, a holdover from the Special Period. Buns may be light and airy, soft and dense, they may be hard rolls or what Americans curiously call ‘English’ muffins. Whatever bread the American establishment uses, they may toast it or they may not- I prefer mine toasted, but will always defer to the cook. In my experience, hamburgers abroad are served on hypermarket buns or buns which resemble hypermarket buns, which invariably become greasy and wet even when pressed against the dry puck of a hamburger abroad. They are never toasted, and I don’t know that toasting would save them.
Finally, we come to toppings. For whatever reason, the platonic ideal of a hamburger for export is topped with ketchup, pickles and raw onions. This is not an uncommon topping choice but greatly limits the varieties you will find across America. What’s more the ketchup imported to Europe tends towards the sickly-sweet and lacks the vinegary tang of ‘domestic’ American ketchup. I prefer mustard and grilled onions, for my part. Lettuce and tomato on a hamburger are one of the preferred means of ingesting fresh vegetables for the American workingman and are never seen in foreign examples of the dish. One of the more interesting preparations which I saw was in New Mexico- a region of the country largely forbidden to foreigners- in which a mixture of cheese and green chiles adorned the hamburger. In northern New York, they will serve the hamburger on a hard roll with caraway and salt and will top the hamburger itself with vinegar and horseradish. The possibilities are endless and varied across the American landscape, and I find myself discovering a diamond in the rough every time I must stop at a road-house in Oklahoma (where they cook the patty with onions laced throughout, crisped to perfection in the fat of a pan which has likely never been emptied) or a union canteen in the wilds of Minnesota (where they put cheese in the center of the patty and call it a Juicy Lucy).
We have established, I believe, that the hamburger is superior when the patties are formed by American hands and served on American soil. But what exactly is the hamburger? Where did it come from? Why is it so ubiquitous across the American culinary landscape? Is the hamburger a product of socialism?
Hamburgers predate socialism in America. Their place on the American Club menu is one clue to that- the American Club of yesteryear was notoriously Blue in political leanings, although this has changed as the Blues have gone grey and faded out of existence beyond old romance novels and thrillers. The menu even today makes few allowances for the culinary innovations of post-Revolution America. Smoked tofu is nowhere to be found, as one example.
Hamburgers, like socialism, came to America’s shores by way of Germany. The hamburg steak, the ancestor of today’s American hamburger, was a cousin of the German frikadelle (a kind of meatball) and the French steak tartare. The exact reason why it was identified with the city of Hamburg is debated, with some believing it to be merely a reference to the German origins of the dish and others placing it more specifically to the city and the famed Hamburg-Amerika Line. The theory that it was simply a generic reference to the German origins of the dish is supported by the uniquely American habit of declaring everything shaped like a sausage a ‘frankfurter’. The evidence for any specific connection to the city of Hamburg is thin. The hamburg steak was no hamburger as we know it- it was a mixture of beef and onion, which could be served cooked or raw and was eaten with a knife and fork. Like they did with socialism, Americans improved what was handed to them by the Germans. They made the hamburger accessible to the working classes by consistently cooking the meat [2] and by putting it between two buns. It became a food which could be eaten on the go and which could be made on the quick.
Who precisely did this first- or whether it was part of some ineluctable historical process of culinary progress in America and occurred many times over- is likewise debated. The official American position is that the hamburger was created by a Dane, Louis Lassen, to serve workers at his small restaurant, Louis’s Lunch in 1900. The name in this version of events was suggested by Germans who saw something of home in the sandwich of ground beef and toasted bread. Industrial Union No. 460 (Hotel and Restaurant Workers’ Section) owns and operates Louis’s Lunch at the original location, as somewhat of a historical curiosity. Other origin stories place the birth of the hamburger at locations as far afield as the World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri (1904) Seymour, Wisconsin (1885), Hamburg, New York (1885) or Athens, Texas (1884). I am inclined to believe the earliest possible origins attested to in the historical record, and count myself as a believer in independent origination of the concept. I believe the variety of hamburgers across the American landscape would negate the possibility of an origin so close to the Revolution and that something like a hamburger sandwich was part of American food from the first printing of the words “hamburg steak” in the Delmonico’s menu of 1834.
Why hamburgers remained a part of the American food landscape after socialism can be more easily understood when you know where they are cooked and eaten. Hamburgers are not served at Le Carnaval or Delmonico’s or even in the fraternal supper clubs of Middletown, America. They are served from road-houses, union canteens, food carts. They are scarfed down during or on the way to work shifts, eaten while walking or in a train or a street car. They are brought home in greasy bags when Americans must ‘storm’ for a monthly or quarterly quota. Hamburgers are a food of convenience in a culture that tends to push a dogged devotion to work.
The men and women who often make these burgers are the all-American lumpenproletariat, that element of American society often called “the bummery”. American socialism was born on the backs of itinerant workers, bindlestiffs and hoboes, but the mature American socialism of today still has clear distinctions between different grades of worker. The temporary and low-skilled work of the road-house attendee or the union canteen line cook are on the bottom of the hierarchy, just above the anti-social and the criminal. The hamburger is a food perfectly suited to being made in a system of rote mechanization- the labor of one man for another is nearly perfectly interchangeable. One need not be skilled- or sober- to turn out a perfectly passable burger. Karl Marx himself could not create a more perfect example of estranged labor than the hamburger maker. This is not merely my speculation- it is a matter of public record. “The hamburger is the perfect American food,” writes Albert Slabaugh in The Industrial Worker (1973) “because any man may take his place behind the road-house grill in turn.” Slabaugh would go on to serve as an All-Union Industrial Congressman for Industrial Union No. 310 (Railroad, Road and Tunnel Construction Workers) and would later serve as a rotating delegate on the Executive Committee. He knew his way around a road-house and around a hamburger. Hamburgers are a food that any man may make, and every man in America eats.
One can find a hamburger at almost any hour no matter where one is in America. It will more than often be good. That is in and of itself remarkable and without any real parallel here in Britain. I have lived and worked in America for decades and still manage to find myself surprised by the variety within the humble hamburger. It has come a long way from the German frikadelle or the Hamburg steak of Delmonico’s. It predates socialism, but its ubiquity and variety across the American landscape is in many ways, a consequence of that system. If you have not had the chance to try one in America, I would recommend the experience. For my part, I will have to join the Americans in hoping for a good hamburger to make its way across the Atlantic.
[1] Apologies to the American Club, although they know my estimation of their hamburgers and I believe they agree with me. If you want a taste of America at the American Club, order the Oysters Rockefeller with a Schlitz and tell them I sent you.
[2] In the region of Wisconsin, they prepare an atavistic relative of the hamburger named the ‘cannibal sandwich’ consisting of raw ground beef, salt, pepper, and sliced onions, normally served on toasted rye. Elsewhere, the raw beef origins of this dish faded into historical memory and had vanished from restaurant menus and cookbooks by the early 1900s.
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There will be a chapter on beer, but pizza is largely unknown in TTL's America. It relied pretty heavily on post-WW2 cultural exchange with Europe and on car culture to really take off in the United States.
What about stuff like burritos or tacos? If it isn't a popular food item nationwide then it could be a regional Tex-Mex/Southwest item to coexist alongside burgers in utility and deliciousness.
A lot of the specifics of Tex-Mex cuisine kind of rely on continued Mexican immigration to the US and on the agricultural bounty of the post-WW2 US (especially the heavy reliance on dairy products) but in general, a lot of the pre-1910 or so facts about American cuisine can be assumed to have at least some survival into the present day of the TL (burritos were not attested to in print till the 1930s but there was at least some basic continuum of cross-border foodways).
The "author" is not writing a culinary encyclopedia of the US but rather his own tour of the parts he likes and the parts he can tell a story about the connection to socialism in the country. As you may have noticed, he only went to New Mexico once and at least some large portions of the state (and maybe neighboring states) are wholly closed to foreign travel, so he may have limited experience of the Southwest and it is possible that any stories to be told of Southwestern food are part of a different story, if that makes sense.
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And this is the mustard on the rissole: Marxism effectively translated into English, not academic Frencglish