The Stomach of Man Under Socialism: A Culinary History of Socialist America

Huh, if "the war" is some time after the revolution of the 1920s and as implied truly international in scope, then this is the big one. Now maybe history has so changed around that WW2 is relatively conventional powers duking it out just for material resources, perhaps 'just' a reactionary military junta Germany brawling with fascist Italy and nationalist Poland and France going through a full Spanish style meltdown and civil war or something, in which case the Americans not giving a shit as the dumb capitalists set all their assets on fire to shoot at other capitalists and just reaping the rewards a la Switzerland or Spain in ww1 makes complete sense. But crucially even in a scenario with off brand notzis and diet fascists or even without nazis at all would still have a lot of vehemently anti-Communist chaps very interested in restoring the glory of Germany/Poland/Spain/Romania/etc..., etc... and crushing Wilson's pet abominations and the disease of socialism once and for all. Combined with the name drop of the Allied Nations means I don't really think this timeline's WW2 would be just an ideologically tepid soup of state conflict like the return of the 18th century cabinet wars or something. So this atl WW2 is still WW2.

Plus, even in the build up to revolutionary consciousness and politicization of the proletariat, the IWW was founded only in 1905, and would take years of bitter toil to successfully eat up the chunks of the AFL that would have turned to the CIO otl and survive the immense pressure placed on the organization by Pinkerton legbreakers and sheriffs' posses, labor-busting courts and legislatures, and the FBI and its predecessors, so even if the various union boys and labor socialists that would become the atl IWW attempted major protests and general strikes, it's quite likely that the then governing institutions of the old America could have easily powered through and still grabbed all those delicious Spanish colonies for America's new empire. And so within American socialism, even the more reformist right and center of the SLP itself, would come a lot of the same bullshit as afflicted the British Labor Party or the French Radical-Socialists and SFIO, where anti-imperialist mandates would be officially placed on the party manifesto, but a lot of the language of eugenic scientific racism and "white man's burden" civilizing rhetoric would bleed in from the right and be adapted by not explicitly anti-racists and Filipino revolutionaries just utterly dismissed and told to wait until the revolution has emancipated America's working classes before talking about maybe perhaps freeing America's colonies. Thus even with the burgeoning muscles of a large organized socialist movement in American politics I wouldn't expect the effect of the SLP's anti-imperialist to be that much more effective than that of the contemporary Democratic Party, maybe even less effective atl as a lot of the immigrant political machines and northern Democrats are captured by a different party and thus divide the anti-imperialists between two different organizations.

So as the confused nascent mess eventually turns into the Cooperative Commonwealth, the new America still largely has the same dynamic as the old in relation to promising eventual independence and sovereignty for the Philippines and waxing and waning on the exact timeline and generally playing hot and cold with the most misshapen half-formed colonial empire of the great powers. This means that the Commonwealth's interests are still thrust directly into the Pacific theater and are intimately intertwined with the similar and opposed interests of Japan and Britain, along with several new grudges formed by the probable shenaniganry of the various other powers supporting American governments-in-exile and hoping for a Blue counter-revolution and also trying to "police" Guam and Panama while the revolution was ongoing.

All this is a very very long winded way to say, it's super weird that America never got involved and at least officially declared war on the worst fascists trying to throw the rest of the Comintern into camps, even if this timeline has no Barbarossa invading the Soviet Union, or exploding into a hot conflict with Japan over the reign of terror over China and Japanese attacks on the colonies America had rightfully stolen. Even if the official war might not be much deeper than being the "arsenal of democracy" they already were, it would be absolutely crucial to projecting American strength over its sphere of influence so threatened by worldwide war and also a much more important tool to help comrades across the world decolonize their captive nations and build themselves into "People's Commonwealth" American clients than our otl America needed, being deprived of Marshall Plan and Bretton-Woods levels of intimacy inside the financial systems of the colonial powers and not having the ability to wave around their debts if they pull a Suez Crisis. It's a whole lot easier to train, arm, supply, and support cadres of anti-colonial pro-Commonwealth partisans under the banner of WW2 military mobilization, after all.
 
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Found the link to this TL yesterday, and I gotta say it's an extremely intriguing and in-depth read! It's a quite unique way to explore a timeline. Also, there's something amusing about Coca-Cola enduring in socialist America, considering its symbolic connotations IRL.
 
(3) No massive migration means that California would not become the agricultural center it is in OTL, producing 50% of all vegetables and fruits. This was only possible through the influx to cheap labor from the Dust Bowl, so no Dust Bowl means no rise of California as the fortress from which to keep the nation fed.
The thing is that fruits and vegetables don't keep the nation fed. They're important, no doubt, in ensuring a healthy diet and preventing malnutrition, but it is, to be a little pat, wheat and meat that keeps nations fed, not citrus and almonds. The key regions are the Great Plains and Midwest, to a lesser extent the rice-growing regions of the South, and the ranching regions of the dry West. California is only important to the extent that it retools towards ranching or grain-growing.
 
If I quote you at length then like Marx I hate you, or like Engels I wish to…

that honor went to a Haitian visitor in the 1970s
The revolution spreads its wings to the birthplace of American revolutionary politics: Haiti, not Brownston.

this was a natural outgrowth of their material conditions- European settlers simply did not have access to the domesticated livestock of Europe
*cough*. Well if we assume *cough*. *cough*.
Given the confluence of party and union, we must admit this.

the Cooperative Commonwealth stresses these continuities, asserting that Americans on the frontier lived, ate, dressed, fought and thought more like the natives whose homes and fields they occupied
*cough* *cough* *tb* *cough* *cough*
However in the 1980s this will have a performative difference in more than a tear.
People going backwards in paradise wasting away going backwards once in a while give it a try what do you believe what do you believe what do you believe is true. You take what Hawke gives you you give what Keating takes. Oh oh the power and the passion.
a veneer of performative ‘whiteness’
Well. The intelligentsia of the union have been better off than historical. They've realised a number of things that weren't performed for the state (despite marines, despite navy) historically.
Another factor was the light hand of government and the lack of nobility across the Atlantic- early Americans had rights to the bounty of the forest in a manner unseen in England or across Europe. British and European peasants of the era would have eaten more game- if it wouldn’t have cost them their hand or their head.
ha. ha. ha. nice one punchy.
product of the reforesting of New England
Now that's an innovation we wish our states had engaged.
the long hangover of a history of anti-Black pogroms during the Revolution and after
*cough*. One hopes the union and party weren't involved. One hopes. One hopes? one hopes. Ma Bakers body be hanging on the wire her truth be soldiering on.
Black American Vernacular English is routinely taught to American schoolchildren and has been since the 1970s.
1970s eh. Transformation within the PMC in the 1970s crisis. Non-revolutionary transformation. Peaceably engaged transformation eh?
one of the many ‘wildflowers’ which ‘bloomed’ from the Nearing Movement of the 1960s
Nearing seems to have taken close to be too close.
Forged By Fauna: Memory and Genocide on the White Frontier by John O'Brien (University of Alabama Press).
Well either UAP either got purged or UAP either got authorised retrospectively even if wrong.
[6] A common joke goes that the first generation of SLP officials were intellectuals and agitators forced to be administrators, that they were followed by a generation of administrators who wished they were intellectuals and they are now being followed by a generation of intellectuals who wish to be agitators.
Granpa made it, pa maintained it, son betrayed it.

Yours in union eternal,
You can take my IU and my Number but you can only take my freedom from our cold dead hands
Sam R.
 
Does anyone else get the sense that the author's views on Americans, drinking, and bourbon (as expressed in Chapter One) are perhaps unreliable?

An American will begin the evening meal, no matter whether it is at home or at a white tablecloth hard-currency establishment, with a ‘shot’, a quick quaff of the golden treacle-coloured spirit he calls ‘bourbon’.

This to me sounds a lot like classic "get the foreigner drunk" behaviour... the kind of thing a foreign correspondent is going to experience at every meal, but ordinary Americans will reserve for special occasions.
 
Does anyone else get the sense that the author's views on Americans, drinking, and bourbon (as expressed in Chapter One) are perhaps unreliable?
I suspect this is to be expected--after all, we do not rely simply on guidebooks for tourism.
It's also part of the charm, I suspect--looking into a different world through others and having to sift through the reliable and unreliable ourselves.
 
A lot to talk about here. I apologize for the delay.

Huh, if "the war" is some time after the revolution of the 1920s and as implied truly international in scope, then this is the big one. Now maybe history has so changed around that WW2 is relatively conventional powers duking it out just for material resources, perhaps 'just' a reactionary military junta Germany brawling with fascist Italy and nationalist Poland and France going through a full Spanish style meltdown and civil war or something, in which case the Americans not giving a shit as the dumb capitalists set all their assets on fire to shoot at other capitalists and just reaping the rewards a la Switzerland or Spain in ww1 makes complete sense. But crucially even in a scenario with off brand notzis and diet fascists or even without nazis at all would still have a lot of vehemently anti-Communist chaps very interested in restoring the glory of Germany/Poland/Spain/Romania/etc..., etc... and crushing Wilson's pet abominations and the disease of socialism once and for all. Combined with the name drop of the Allied Nations means I don't really think this timeline's WW2 would be just an ideologically tepid soup of state conflict like the return of the 18th century cabinet wars or something. So this atl WW2 is still WW2.

I will say I considered calling the Allies something else (considered calling them the Powers of St. James, based on the fact that OTL's Declaration of St. James's Palace notably excluded the US and the USSR) but I believed that doing so would bury the lede and obscure what I was saying here- which is that the Cooperative Commonwealth sits out a European WW2 that is in broad strokes similar to our own. It is a conflagration which drags down all of Europe and which is centered on a revanchist Germany (Nazi or not, doesn't actually make a difference here) running roughshod over Europe before finding themselves bogged down in a (much less materially prepared) Russia, and eventually giving up many of their gains in the East before eventually finding their Western flank being rolled up by the UK, the Commonwealth and France (and a perfidious Italy, because why not?). It is a war of exhaustion and as the author has mentioned in the text, rationing in Europe remains in place even longer than IOTL.

I don't think a committed anti-communist government and movement in Europe is going to sway America to intervene. Historically, Marxist parties ran the spectrum on views on the war in Europe, with Barbarossa and the changing opinions of the Comintern* being a key turning point in which they came around to the idea of war. Before that, they really did just view it and explain it as one of the many crises of capitalism, a dying gasp of a dying world order. Given also the context presented here (the timing of the Second American Revolution should give some hint on its relation to the last war and demobilization) I think non-intervention makes absolute sense, even if we assume a period of repression of "fellow travelers" across the continent.

*Russia being a nominally non-Marxist country here, it just doesn't have the same ability to sway those opinions, although there is still something like Lend-Lease in the 1940s to Russia

Plus, even in the build up to revolutionary consciousness and politicization of the proletariat, the IWW was founded only in 1905, and would take years of bitter toil to successfully eat up the chunks of the AFL that would have turned to the CIO otl and survive the immense pressure placed on the organization by Pinkerton legbreakers and sheriffs' posses, labor-busting courts and legislatures, and the FBI and its predecessors, so even if the various union boys and labor socialists that would become the atl IWW attempted major protests and general strikes, it's quite likely that the then governing institutions of the old America could have easily powered through and still grabbed all those delicious Spanish colonies for America's new empire. And so within American socialism, even the more reformist right and center of the SLP itself, would come a lot of the same bullshit as afflicted the British Labor Party or the French Radical-Socialists and SFIO, where anti-imperialist mandates would be officially placed on the party manifesto, but a lot of the language of eugenic scientific racism and "white man's burden" civilizing rhetoric would bleed in from the right and be adapted by not explicitly anti-racists and Filipino revolutionaries just utterly dismissed and told to wait until the revolution has emancipated America's working classes before talking about maybe perhaps freeing America's colonies. Thus even with the burgeoning muscles of a large organized socialist movement in American politics I wouldn't expect the effect of the SLP's anti-imperialist to be that much more effective than that of the contemporary Democratic Party, maybe even less effective atl as a lot of the immigrant political machines and northern Democrats are captured by a different party and thus divide the anti-imperialists between two different organizations.
America's imperial possessions c. ~1917 are basically the same, but that doesn't mean America keeps them post-Revolution.
So as the confused nascent mess eventually turns into the Cooperative Commonwealth, the new America still largely has the same dynamic as the old in relation to promising eventual independence and sovereignty for the Philippines and waxing and waning on the exact timeline and generally playing hot and cold with the most misshapen half-formed colonial empire of the great powers. This means that the Commonwealth's interests are still thrust directly into the Pacific theater and are intimately intertwined with the similar and opposed interests of Japan and Britain, along with several new grudges formed by the probable shenaniganry of the various other powers supporting American governments-in-exile and hoping for a Blue counter-revolution and also trying to "police" Guam and Panama while the revolution was ongoing.

In the text, I have made no reference to Hawaii as part of the Cooperative Commonwealth, nor to the Philippines. Regional burgers do not include the loco moco, pineapple is not mentioned as a burger topping. In fact, the only parts of America's nascent empire which I have made any reference to are Cuba (which is also the only country directly stated to have their own capital-R Revolution, albeit after a period in which they are definitely not being ruled by the Reds but are instead firmly aligned with the Blues) and Haiti, both of which happen to be a lot closer to the shores of the USA than the Philippines, Guam* or Hawaii. If America would briefly lose control to reactionaries in Cuba, what makes you think they would maintain control in Honolulu or Manila, where their presence was more or less exclusively military?

It is of course worth asking what a scattershot scramble for mandates in post-American territories would do to public opinion of the countries involved (Britain, Japan) and worth questioning whether any of the countries to participate in America's post-Revolution national embarrassment are named Germany. Regardless by the time of OTL's WW2, America's only Pacific possession (which Japan may envy) is Alaska, with the others having gone their own way in the intervening years (and each one probably having a book I am not going to write about it).

*which depending on the exact timing of the Revolution, would have had more German POWs on it than American servicemen

All this is a very very long winded way to say, it's super weird that America never got involved and at least officially declared war on the worst fascists trying to throw the rest of the Comintern into camps, even if this timeline has no Barbarossa invading the Soviet Union, or exploding into a hot conflict with Japan over the reign of terror over China and Japanese attacks on the colonies America had rightfully stolen. Even if the official war might not be much deeper than being the "arsenal of democracy" they already were, it would be absolutely crucial to projecting American strength over its sphere of influence so threatened by worldwide war and also a much more important tool to help comrades across the world decolonize their captive nations and build themselves into "People's Commonwealth" American clients than our otl America needed, being deprived of Marshall Plan and Bretton-Woods levels of intimacy inside the financial systems of the colonial powers and not having the ability to wave around their debts if they pull a Suez Crisis. It's a whole lot easier to train, arm, supply, and support cadres of anti-colonial pro-Commonwealth partisans under the banner of WW2 military mobilization, after all
The idea that you would spread socialism through military occupation by a sovereign state is a historical anomaly brought on by the Soviet experience. I think you presume an American desire to dominate the world that is in reality, very contingent on the post-WW2 order and which isn't really consonant with the roots of the Revolution presented here or with the tone and tenor of American socialism both before and after TTL's POD. It doesn't line up with the deterministic and fatalistic ideas of most Marxist parties and thinkers (which even had an influence on Soviet thinking- they believed capitalism was prone to crisis and they didn't need to work for its collapse, just wait and see) and America doesn't have the same historical fear of 'encirclement' as that feared by the Soviets. Not every America in every timeline wants to solve the world's problems for them.

That being said, I do believe that when the enormity of the European conflagration and of the separate Sino-Japanese Wars become apparent to Americans that there will be a lingering cultural obsession with what may be termed 'peace guilt', but that doesn't come to have any more significance than a certain romanticism about the period and a faddish interest in asking "what if America had joined the war in Europe?".
 
Fair enough, and those are some cognizant points. But surely one of the most important early goals of the revolutionary Commonwealth's foreign policy would be to get the rest of the world to recognize it as the legitimate American government and stop supporting the Blue government(s?)-in-exile and treating it like its not a sovereign state. I mean its just standard revolutionary state shit that (at least for the first couple years) the great powers react with banking freezes and repudiations of debts beholden to America and also indirectly the vacuuming of a lot of hard specie and foreign currencies out of American financial systems and into sanctuaries abroad through the Blue diaspora and elements of the previous state in places like Cuba and Hawaii. And that's not getting into anything worse like Canada becoming the source of a couple of Bay of Pigs style shenanigans with MI6 in the place of the CIA as the Revolution and the uncontrollably vast American border frightens Canadian leaders with threats to their national security. Plus there's always less materialistic grievances too like the liquidation of a lot of private and even public cultural institutions and historic works of Americana as Blue expatriates evacuate like the Smithsonian and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I think a lot of people would hold grudges if London plays gracious host to the Blues that "saved" the White House's paintings from the incoming red hordes, and especially if the theft of America's imperial possessions (and the almighty British Navy) was the means by which these things were taken and denied to the American people and its rightful government.

I would think that rectifying these grievances and making right the injustices the Commonwealth citizens so believes that the outside capitalist world has afflicted on them would make being recognized as the sovereign American state with all the rights and privileges of a legitimate state in the international order a pretty high priority. But how then can the Cooperative Commonwealth truly ask for or receive recognition from the world if parts of its claimed sovereign territories are presently occupied by other powers? How can the Cooperative Commonwealth drop the claims to its Pacific territories without looking weaker than the old Blue order, especially to less internationalist and more bullishly American-particular activists on the right flank, and condemning American territorial residents to damnable capitalist imperialism, which is of course completely different then the Commonwealth's Enlightened Socialist Mandates(tm) it planned for the residential proletariats.

I'm not saying that these are unsolvable or must inevitably lead to military confrontation or even that they won't have been resolved by the time that WW2 comes on the scene, heck if nothing else the Americans could have just added the indemnities they wanted to the bill for Lend-Lease stuff back in '39. But as it was being resolved through the 20s and early 30s, it would have laid the stage through which the SLP Communists and the Capitalist world constructed their views of each other and colored future interactions. Even as the loss of Hawaii and the gold reserves of the Treasury become ancient history new conflicts of interest over American citizens helping organize the SLP-Canada getting arrested for espionage or French companies getting their assets forcibly nationalized in Haiti with American backing carry the torch into the beginnings of WW2. Though I guess if the Americans remain smolderingly discontent by the flares of hostility with Entente capitalists, that might just carry that into a feeling of equal disdain for both the bourgeoise democracies and the new fascists, so I guess I might have just argued myself into agreeing with you @JesterBL
 
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The thing is that fruits and vegetables don't keep the nation fed. They're important, no doubt, in ensuring a healthy diet and preventing malnutrition, but it is, to be a little pat, wheat and meat that keeps nations fed, not citrus and almonds. The key regions are the Great Plains and Midwest, to a lesser extent the rice-growing regions of the South, and the ranching regions of the dry West. California is only important to the extent that it retools towards ranching or grain-growing.
Cheap abundant water from the Colorado helped a lot.
 
Here's what the fictional author has said so far (I may have missed some but these are really the key quotes about the Special Period):






*this one is somewhat funny because the fictional author doesn't know that moonshine production IOTL switched to sugar in a completely different set of circumstances

I think there's a lot of room for interpretation on the Special Period because the fictional author is not writing "The Special Period In The Cooperative Commonwealth: A History", he is writing a Britlit genre piece about food in America.

It is a sort of fascinating exercise in historiography of famines though, given how widely the estimates and interpretations of historical famines/food crises in historically socialist countries vary.

I'm somewhat fond of this one, sans the references to Lenin:
There seems to be no discussion of corn and beans. the food of the poor and lean times. Pork is far more efficient at turning plant calories into meat than cattle ditto for chickens,but factory chicken raising is based of modern antibiotics. In lean times pork would have been far more important. I suspect a hamburger would be a beef pork mix more like a meatball flattened.
 
There seems to be no discussion of corn and beans. the food of the poor and lean times. Pork is far more efficient at turning plant calories into meat than cattle ditto for chickens,but factory chicken raising is based of modern antibiotics. In lean times pork would have been far more important. I suspect a hamburger would be a beef pork mix more like a meatball flattened.
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.

The author does not explicitly connect this to the Special Period, but it's there.
 
Sidebar: They're Red Hot!
Sidebar: They’re Red Hot

It's hot tamale, whoo! Molly Man!
Molly man's comin', I hear his voice
He's got hot tamales and they is my choice, red hot!
Come on, boys, and don't wait too long
All my Mollies soon will be gone, red hot!
I can judge by the way you act
Somebody 'round here been had on a cotton-pickin' sack, whoo!
Feelin' little tired and shoulders gettin' sore
If you see my Lil, goin' to pick some more, red hot, whoo! Molly Man!

-lyrics from ”Molly Man” (1928), Reverend Red Hot Ol’ Mose Mason

Wander into a union cafeteria anywhere in the Cooperative Commonwealth and you are likely to find the rather strange dish known as the mother-in-law sandwich, a dish that has spread across the American landscape from its origins in Mexico, stopping only briefly in Mississippi and Chicago to arrive on your plate and the plates of our American cousins.

The mother-in-law sandwich as traditionally served across the Cooperative Commonwealth is a ‘hot dog’ bun wrapped around a roll of boiled or steamed cornmeal, lightly seasoned, and meat. Toppings vary- most commonly it is served with a chili sauce[1] or that most American of condiments, ketchup and may further be adorned with mustard, pickles or pickle relish, chopped white onions and sliced tomatoes. In Chicago, where it originated, it is most often served simply with chili sauce, lettuce, onion and tomato.

How the mother-in-law sandwich came to grace cafeteria menus across America is rather simple. It was a relatively common convenience food in Chicago for decades beginning at least in the 1920s and it is likely that Party planners in the administrative heart of the Commonwealth were well aware of it. During the early months of the Special Period, the mother-in-law sandwich came to a renewed prominence among the street vendors and night lunch wagons of Chicago, a reaction to the declining availability of meat even ahead of the discriminatory price increases in favor of ‘socially administered’ food purveyors. The mother-in-law sandwich has a certain economy which soon recommended it to the planners of the Cooperative Commonwealth. In lean times, you simply put less meat and more cornmeal between the bun. In addition, the primary ingredient could be shipped easily and supplemented locally with whatever meat- if any- was available. The mother-in-law sandwich first appeared in the 1954 revision of Principles of Cookery for the Cooperative and Home and was soon being prepared in relief bakeries and cooperative kitchens across the Cooperative Commonwealth.[2] Nowadays, the tamales used in a mother-in-law sandwich are most likely frozen and shipped directly from an industrial extruder somewhere in Chicago or Kansas City to a union cafeteria or roadhouse.

Why the mother-in-law sandwich was the preferred form for dissemination rather than a more traditional tamale- which certainly existed within Chicago at the time- is a good question. There were intimations at the tamale in the American culinary repertoire- they appear in the Manual for Army Cooks (1896), filed under Spanish recipes, between Brains (Spanish Style) and “Tortillas”, and in revisions thereafter. Many of the early efforts at cooking for the masses came from such manuals, but the tamale did not appear in post-Revolution manuals until the Special Period[3]. The most likely answer is that of legibility- an American not already familiar with tamales could understand a sandwich and perhaps imagine it contained more than a hunk of boiled cornmeal and a memory of meat. The American social critic Anne Decker has a theory more broadly about the reaction of the Party to the Special Period- she contends that the ‘virile socialism’ of that generation of elites and administrators led them to reject solutions which did not conform to broadly held ideas of what ‘the American workingman’s diet’ should be. The mother-in-law sandwich in this view was a sleight of hand- a foreign food of rural poverty dressed up in a manner to conform to ideas of ‘acceptable’ American fare. Critics of Decker’s analysis would contend that if you have tamales and you have bread, why not put them together?

How the tamale arrived in Chicago is another story altogether. It came to Chicago through the human movements precipitated by that great city’s steel industry. Amid the dross of the foundries and the coke-tinged airs of the Windy City, two distinct tamale traditions met- one from Mexico, the other from the Mississippi Delta.

The tamale was an ancient food in Mexico, where it had its origins. The relative lack of fat in the pre-Columbian Mexican diet even means that it likely predated the tortilla, which is only attested to after contact with the bread-eating culture of the Spaniards. This outwardly simple dish of pounded and formed masa, wrapped in a corn husk and steamed, would spread throughout Latin America and in Mexico can be found with a variety of fillings and flavorings. There is even a Mexican cousin to the mother-in-law sandwich- the torta de tamal- although there is no evidence it directly lead to the creation of Chicago's sandwich. The tamalero- the roving vendor of tamales- was plucked from the streets of Mexico and placed alongside his brothers on the streets of East Chicago.

The tamale of the Mississippi Delta was similarly carried along by Black Americans pulled to the gaping maw of industrial capitalism in pre-Revolution Chicago. How it arrived and thrived throughout the Mississippi Delta is itself something of an enigma. Some connect it to an Indigenous tradition, the banawha of Chocktaws or Chickasaws or the ‘broadswords’ and ‘bean bread’ of the more thoroughly Anglicized Cherokee. Others say it was imported from Mexico by the Spanish in Louisiana, or that it was carried back to the Delta by gringo veterans of the Mexican-American War. However it arrived there, the Delta tamale became its own distinct expression of Mexico’s ancestral cuisine- a roll of cornmeal boiled in a broth so heavily spiced that the tamales and the corn husks came out stained a bright red. The Mississippi Delta even spawned their own tamalero, the Molly Man, typically a Black American, slinging ‘red hots’ to hungry workers, immortalized in plaintive song.

It was the Delta tamale which the mother-in-law sandwich was trying to emulate, the piquancy of chili sauce and chopped onions an attempt at the ‘red hot’ broth for a tamale most likely to be prepared in a ‘hot dog’ steamer. The frozen Chicago style tamales which one may buy for the home and which likely supply the cafeterias with their own tamales ordinarily come in Plain or Red Hot, although the Red Hot carry more colour than heat. A real Delta tamale has quite a bit more spice than the average American could bear (I being an adventurous Englishman am probably well in range of the average American), although the tamale itself has a grittiness which is more unpleasant than the far more fine, masa-like consistency of a Chicago-style tamale. I’ve even had the pleasure of having a deep fried ‘red hot’ in Crystal Springs, Copiah Administrative Region, Mississippi- the grittiness was less jarring in something which you anticipated to have a crunch about it.

I can’t say I am particularly fond of mother-in-law sandwiches or Chicago-style tamales- one etymological myth implies that others are not either, as the mother-in-law is not what you ordered but you get saddled with nonetheless. But I find the story fascinating for what it does show- that even the most bizarre and seemingly industrialized foodstuffs on an American menu can have a history, and that the unique circumstances of the Special Period and reactions to the post-Special Period world could propel a regional quirk to a national staple. What’s more- the idea of the mother-in-law sandwich as a ‘legible’ solution to the problem of the Special Period stands in contrast- or foreshadowing- to the way the food scientists and Party planners of the post-Special Period era would try and push the bounds of 'legibility' to the American palate. So- if you do find the opportunity, try a mother-in-law sandwich and think deeply as you do of what it took to arrive on your plate. I’d recommend it with sport peppers.

[1] Not what you may be imagining- it is in its American incarnation a sort of beefy gravy flavored with dried chili powder and tomato. When not serving as a sauce for ‘hot dogs’ or mother-in-law sandwiches, it may adorn pasta or beans or both.
[2] It never found its way into the hallowed pages of The Science of Easier Living as it is not a particularly easy dish to prepare from scratch at home. It is readily available frozen such that the home cook needs only to thaw and reheat it.
[3] The mother-in-law sandwich and Chicago-style tamales appeared alongside an even more enigmatic American culinary innovation which had bubbled up from community cookbooks- the tamale pie. The tamale pie has no resemblance to any sort of tamale, it refers merely to a cornmeal crust over a bed of seasoned meat and possibly, vegetables, cooked to oblivion in a bed of grease. It is closest in approximation to our cottage pie, although cottage pie at least has the richness of potatoes and butter to recommend it.
 
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Welcome back!

A real Delta tamale has quite a bit more spice than the average American could bear
Plus ca change...

Seems like there's more avenues here: you could probably do a sweet version with a brioche bun and sweet cornbread. And if you make plenty of little corn rolls and fry them, aren't those basically Cheetos?
 
Seems like there's more avenues here: you could probably do a sweet version with a brioche bun and sweet cornbread.
You'll have to wait for the Stilyagi of the late Aughts before anyone wants to do a riff on the mother-in-law sandwich.

And if you make plenty of little corn rolls and fry them, aren't those basically Cheetos?
'Are Cheetos tamales?'- the latest flashpoint in the culture wars sparked by 'are tacos sandwiches?'

More seriously I have some plans for salty and savory snacks in The Protein of the Future- Today! and Popcorn, Indiana (and probably The People's Vegetable if I don't scrap that chapter idea).
 
I guess having these kinds of sandwiches makes sense in a socialist America given how much corn and wheat is produced by the state, but man, these dishes actually make me want to hurl (bread stuffed with bland cornmeal?) Blegh. 🤢

At least hot tamales are still around for the average American, though I wonder if people in the Midwest will adapt the cooking technique of boiling the masa in a broth, albeit with far less spice.
 
Its been an idea I have been kicking around for some time. I'm glad you like it so far and enjoy the literary conceit. I'm not aware of any other culinary history TLs on the website, but if you are aware of any, I would love to read them.

The Forme of Cury (a Richard II SI) is the big one that I'm familiar with.
 
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