Gnoshing through the Larder

Little did Columbia prof James Harvey Robinson foresee, when he wrote The New History in 1911 that 75 years later some 5,000 Phillies would be eating their way through three centuries of local foods. But that’s an offshoot of what happened after he told his fellow historians to stop concentrating on the history of politics for fresh looks at social and intellectual trends.
 
And when Fernand Braudel was creating the luminous The Mediterranean in the Age of Philip II out of his head in a Nazi concentration camp, did he think that his annaliste style of everyday life history would prompt two staid antiquarian institutions—the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania—to organize scrapple fry-offs, local beer and wine tastings and ice cream supersocializings?
 
But that’s what they did for “The Larder Invaded: Three Centuries of Philadelphia Food.” The exhibit-plus closes with a bang-up finale on Saturday April 25—a full day of lectures, workshops and panels. For registration, call Anne Broussard at 732-6201.
 
Anne is the kind of flack who, when she sends you a copy of the show’s catalog, describes it as “fresh out of the oven, I mean, hot off the press.” If you can’t make it on Food Freakout Saturday, get the $10 catalog—it’s the tastiest trip I’ve made since I went fortune cookie-ing in Shanghai.
 
Like the Super Sommelier who worked the Marriage Feast at Cana, these party-throwers have saved their best vintages for last. Curious about how the hoagie came to be? Let William Woys Weaver in the catalog be your guide:
 
“Since the Centennial, the hokey-pokey man has become a curbside institution in Philadelphia. In him, the black pepper hawker was replaced by the Italian selling ices, sandwiches, sausages, fresh breads, ‘Zoologicals’ (animal crackers), and little salads that were in fact miniature antipastos. Ever sensitive to current fads, he became a barometer of shifting public tastes. When H.M.S. Pinafore first played Philadelphia in 1879, the city’s Vienna bakeries cracked out a new loaf called the ‘Pinafore.’ But the hokey-pokey man left the most lasting impression with a brilliant bit of street savvy, for when his antipasto went into the boat-shaped Pinafore loaf, the hoagie was born. In name, hoagie evolved from hokey-pokey.”
 
Makes you want to break out in a G and S aria almost, don’t it? Ain’t this history good enough to eat? This is also the first “populist” catalog I’ve seen with all the 1,000 captions for the show miniaturized on microfiches slipped into the back cover. As ingenious as a hokey-pokey man with a mini-Vienna.
 
Especially interesting to me was the way turtle turned from “slave” food into Bookbinder luxe. And they conquered the seasonality of the green sea turtles, which came in aboard ship only when they were running, by pressing the local terrapin into service, sometimes veneering their “lowly” flesh with green sauces. The rise of the colored caterer in the late Revolutionary period is also instructive these days when idiots and not so artful Dodgers are theorizing that blacks are not capable of management.
 
It’s a sign of Philly’s structural sense of inferiority that only 5,000 visitors (barely 40 a day) have hit the happy train to 13th and Locust. Those venerable institutions deserve better audiences than that. People who would mortgage themselves at Le Bec Fin somehow find the Free Lunch hour at “The Larder Invader” infra dig.
 
Phooey. I can’t hardly wait to see what those magicians of the dusty stacks have up their sleeves for our edification and amusement next. Dulce et utile, folks. Step right up. The dyspepsia you lose will only be your own.
 
Reprinted from Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, April 22, 1987