I’ve written about Thanksgiving history here many times (2005, 2006, 2008, 2010) and this year it feels like time to write again.
It is clear that the holiday was created by President Lincoln after Civil War to bring the pro-slavery rebels back to the table with their American neighbors and family.
Don’t know if I can do the topic any more justice, however, than a 2019 New Yorker article citing historians. So here is the TL;DR
Fretting over late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century immigration, American mythmakers discovered that the Pilgrims, and New England as a whole, were perfectly cast as national founders: white, Protestant, democratic, and blessed with an American character centered on family, work, individualism, freedom, and faith.
The new story aligned neatly with the defeat of American Indian resistance in the West and the rising tide of celebratory regret that the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo [B.A. Harvard College, 1963; Ph.D., Harvard University, 1971] once called “imperialist nostalgia.” Glorifying the endurance of white Pilgrim founders diverted attention from the brutality of Jim Crow and racial violence, and downplayed the foundational role of African slavery. The fable also allowed its audience to avert its eyes from the marginalization of Asian and Latinx labor populations, the racialization of Southern European and Eastern European immigrants, and the rise of eugenics. At Thanksgiving, white New England cheerfully shoved the problematic South and West off to the side, and claimed America for itself.
Shocking reversal. Lincoln brought the pro-slavery forces back to the table and they pivoted on his gesture to a false cover-story while still enacting divisive racial violence.
Just days before this article appeared, professor of history David Silverman also gave an hour-long lecture called “This Land Is Their Land” to the Massachusetts Historical Society, which highlights how the myth of Thanksgiving was formulated in the 1840s as a white supremacist narrative:
I’m going to provide you with everything you need to ruin your family’s holiday. […] War is the most basic feature of the Wampanoag-English relationship that the Thanksgiving myth studiously ignores. […] English promises of mercy [turned into] terms harsher than colonial officials had pledged… surrendering natives learned too late that colonial authorities would not spare any Indians… Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Rhode Island held public executions through the summer of 1676, including 50 hangings on Boston Common alone. There is no memorial to this event by the way. I think there should be. The English even exacted retribution on the dead. […] From the late 1600s through the mid 1800s white merchant creditors, courts and government appointed guardians colluded to force the Wampanoags and their children into indentured servitude to white farmers, householders and whaling markets with the terms often lasting for decades. Such court ordered servitude — one historian favored the term “judicial enslavement” — made it nearly impossible for the Wampanoags to sustain their normal social patterns, including the process of raising children. […] Throughout the colonial era, Thanksgiving had no association whatsoever with pilgrims and Indians. None. The link between the holiday and the history appears to date to 1841. […] The pilgrim saga took hold because it had use in the nation’s culture wars… IT WAS NO COINCIDENCE THAT THE PILGRIMS EMERGED AS NATIONAL FOUNDERS AMID POPULAR ANXIETY THAT THE UNITED STATES WAS BEING OVERRUN BY CATHOLIC AND THEN JEWISH AND ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN IMMIGRANTS. SUPPOSEDLY UNAPPRECIATIVE OF THE COUNTRY DEMOCRATIC PROTESTANT ORIGINS AND VALUES. ADDITIONALLY, TREATING THE PILGRIMS AS THE EPITOME OF COLONIAL AMERICA SERVED TO MINIMIZE THE COUNTRY’S RECORD OF RACIAL OPPRESSION PAST AND PRESENT. BETTER TO HIGHLIGHT THE PILGRIMS RELIGIOUS AND DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPLES INSTEAD OF THE INDIAN WARS AND SLAVERY MORE TYPICAL OF COLONIES. INCLUDING THE NEW ENGLAND COLONIES. THROUGH SUCH MEANS, NORTH EASTERNERS COULD REDEFINE THE SO-CALLED BLACK AND INDIAN PROBLEMS AS SOUTHERN AND WESTERN EXCEPTIONS TO AN OTHERWISE INSPIRING NATIONAL HERITAGE. SO THEY SANITIZE THE HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND AND THEN MAKE NEW ENGLAND THE MODEL FOR THE REST OF THE UNITED STATES.
A third-grade teacher in Illinois discusses marine ecology with his students using a tank designed to be an instructional tool. Source: reef2rainforest
A buried lede in a Wired article caught my attention:
The majority of schools in the area reported higher-than-average student absenteeism due to flu symptoms. Only one school didn’t: The one with the fish tanks. “It really stood out”…
Keeping fish tanks gives new meaning to “defense in depth”.
…it’s important not to think of humidification as any sort of magical fix. You still have to wear a mask and wash your hands and stay socially distant and avoid crowded indoor spaces. “Any one of those alone is not enough,” he says. “But each one is like a card that you’re putting into a deck to stack the odds in your favor.”
I probably should have put a spoiler alert in the title.
A brand new 2020 report from the British Royal Air Force (RAF) warns that they were able to use a swarm of “affordable off-the-shelf decoy to wreak havoc on enemy integrated air defense systems.”
“During the demonstration, a number of Callen Lenz drones were equipped with a modified Leonardo BriteCloud decoy, allowing each drone to individually deliver a highly-sophisticated jamming effect,” according to Leonardo’s press release. “They were tested against ground-based radar systems representing the enemy air defence emplacement. A powerful demonstration was given, with the swarm of BriteCloud-equipped drones overwhelming the threat radar systems with electronic noise.”
You may be wondering if this is the first successful test by an air force of affordable off-the-shelf decoys wreaking havoc on air defense systems.
To answer that quickly, I present to you an account of decoys in a 1946 report called “Paper Bullets” from the United States Office of War Information.
A Mitchell bomber crew, which had been bombing Italian rail communications carried a couple of bundles of leaflets and some wine bottles every time they went out to bomb. Questioned by a psychological warfare officer, who failed to find this particular plane on his schedule, one member of the crew replied: “This is psychological warfare, Mac. Before we hit the target we take a fake bomb run over the nearest flak crew and throw these bottles and the leaflets out. They whistle just like bombs and the flak crew takes cover. Then we go on and bomb as per schedule.”
Set aside the point that maybe the crew was joking and they came up with a funny story to hide the fact that they were alcoholics or at least drank a lot of wine while flying as some form of self-medication.
John Belushi stars in the movie “1941” directed by Steven Spielberg
The idea of dropping whistling bomb decoys over air defense units makes a lot of sense, and wine bottles might disintegrate or disappear enough to avoid suspicion of decoys.
Another perspective from history on “drones” (human pilots seen as disposable) overwhelming air defenses is here:
RAND’s first attempt to model a nuclear strategy ignored so many key variables that it nonsensically called for deploying a fleet of aging turboprop bombers that carried no bombs because the United States did not have enough fissile material to arm them; the goal was simply to overwhelm Soviet air defenses, with no regard for the lives of the pilots.
Looking back again, the 1946 Paper Bullets view of the world ends with these questions:
We are very well aware that the right words properly put together, delivered at the right spot at the right moment, can capture and kill. Why not use words and ideas as an instrument of peace, rather than as an instrument of death? A longing for peace is deep in the hearts of all decent peoples everywhere. There are good arguments for those who insist the best way to maintain the peace is to maintain a war machine to police the world and to keep the peace by force. Why not, then, the establishment of a U.S. Department of Information on the same status as the War Department and the Navy Department? Why not a U.S. Department of Information to police the world with words of truth?
We’ve come a long way from swarms being empty wine bottles, yet it seems also we haven’t moved very far along at all.
And I have to wonder if veterans talking about dropping bottles from planes is the kind of story-telling that inspired the iconic opening scene in The Gods Must be Crazy…
The traditional drop cake (also called drop biscuit) was a popular historic treat in America copied from Europe. However, somehow in America the act of baking a common and popular British drop cake with common and popular chocolate turned into a fancy narrative about how chocolate chip cookies had just been “invented” by a woman in 1938.
Is the invention story true? Are they even American?
Let’s start by scanning through the typical drop cake recipes that can easily be found in the first recipe book publications in English:
1883: Ice-cream and Cakes: A New Collection
1875: Cookery from Experience: A Practical Guide for Housekeepers
1855: The Practical American Cook Book
1824: A New System of Domestic Cookery
1792: The London Art of Cookery
1765: The art of cookery, made plain and easy
Now let’s see the results of such recipes. Thanks to a modern baker who experimented with a 1846 “Miss Beecher’s Domestic Recipe Book” version of drop cake, here we have a picture.
Source: FourPoundsFlour, Sarah T.
Raisins added would have meant this would be a fruit drop cake (or a fruit drop biscuit). There were many variations possible and encouraged based on different ingredients such as rye, nuts, butter or even chocolate.
Here’s an even better photo to show drop cakes. It’s from a modern food historian who references the 1824 “A New System of Domestic Cookery” recipe for something called a rout cake (rout is from French route, which used to mean a small party or social event).
Source: A Taste of History with Joyce White
That photo really looks like a bunch of chocolate chip cookies, right? This food historian even says that herself by explaining “…[traditional English] rout cakes are usually a drop biscuit (cookie)…”.
Cakes are cookies. Got it.
This illustrates quickly how England has for a very long time had “tea cakes with currants”, which also were called biscuits (cookies), and so when you look at them with American eyes you would rightfully think you are seeing chocolate chip cookies. But they’re little cakes in Britain.
More to the point, the American word cookie was derived from the Dutch word koek, which means… wait for it… cake, which also turns into the word koekje (little cake):
Dutcheen koekje van eigen deeg krijgen = a little cake of your own dough (literal) = a taste of your own medicine (figurative)
So the words cake, biscuit and cookie all can refer to basically the same thing, depending on what flavor of English you are using at the time.
Expanding now on the above 1855 recipe book reference, we also see exactly what is involved in baking a drop cake/koekje/cookie:
DROP CAKES: Take three eggs, leaving out one white. Beat them in a pint bowl, just enough. Then fill the bowl even full of milk and stir in enough flour to make a thick, but not stiff batter. Bake in earthen cups, in a quick oven. This is an excellent recipe, and the just enough beating for eggs can only be determined by experience.
DROP CAKES. Take one quart of flour; five eggs; three fourths of a pint of milk and one fourth of cream, with a large spoonful of sifted sugar; a tea-spoon of salt. Mix these well together. If the cream should be sour, add a little saleratus. If all milk is used, melt a dessert-spoonful of butter in the milk. To be baked in cups, in the oven, thirty to forty minutes.
I used the word “exactly” to introduce this recipe because I found it so amusing to read the phrase “just enough” in baking instructions.
Imagine a whole recipe book that says use just enough the right ingredients, mix just enough and then bake just enough. Done. That would be funny, as that’s the exact opposite of how the very exact science of modern baking works.
Bakers are like chemists, with extremely precise planning and actions.
And finally just to set some context for how common it became in America to eat the once-aristocratic drop cakes, here’s the 1897 supper menu in the “General Dining Hall Bill of Fare” from the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers:
Source: Report of Inspection of State Soldiers and Sailors’ Homes for Year Ending June 30, 1897, by National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers
Back to the question of chocolate chip cookies versus drop cake, and given all the current worry about disinformation, a story researched on Mental Floss explains that a myth has been created around someone making “Butter Drop Do” and inventing cookies because she accidentally used a “wrong” type of chocolate.
The traditional tale holds that Toll House Inn owner Ruth Wakefield invented the cookie when she ran out of baker’s chocolate, a necessary ingredient for her popular Butter Drop Do cookies (which she often paired with ice cream—these cookies were never meant to be the main event), and tried to substitute some chopped up semi-sweet chocolate instead. The chocolate was originally in the form of a Nestle bar that was a gift from Andrew Nestle himself—talk about an unlikely origin story! The semi-sweet chunks didn’t melt like baker’s chocolate, however, and though they kept their general shape (you know, chunky), they softened up for maximum tastiness. (There’s a whole other story that imagines that Wakefield ran out of nuts for a recipe, replacing them with the chocolate chunks.)
There are three problems with this story.
One, saying “butter drop do cookies” is like saying butter cake do little cakes. That’s hard on the ears. I mean “butter drop do” seems to be some kind of a misprint or a badly scanned script.
This very uniquely named recipe can be found under a cakes category in the 1796 American Cookery book (and don’t forget many drop cake recipe books in England pre-dated this one by decades).
Butter drop do .
No. 3. Rub one quarter of a pound butter, one pound sugar, sprinkled with mace, into one pound and a quarter flour, add four eggs, one glass rose water, bake as No. 1.
The butter drop cake (do?) here appears to be an import of English aristocratic food traditions, which I’ve written about before (e.g. eggnog). But what’s really interesting is this American Cookery book in 1796 is how actual cookie recipes can be found and are completely different from the drop cake (do?) one:
Cookies.
One pound sugar boiled slowly in half pint water, scum well and cool, add two tea spoons pearl ash dissolved in milk, then two and half pounds flour, rub in 4 ounces butter, and two large spoons of finely powdered coriander seed, wet with above; make roles half an inch thick and cut to the shape you please; bake fifteen or twenty minutes in a slack oven–good three weeks.
And that recipe using pearl ash (early version of baking powder) is followed by “Another Christmas Cookey”. So if someone was knowingly following the butter drop cake (do?) recipe instead, they also knew it was explicitly not called a cookie by the author.
Someone needs to explain why the chocolate chip cookie “inventor” was very carefully following a specific cake/koekje recipe instead of a cookie one yet called her “invention” a cookie.
Two, chocolate chips in a drop cake appear almost exactly like drop cakes have looked for a century, with chips or chunks of sweets added. How inventive is it really to use the popular chocolate in the popular cake and call it a cookie?
Three, as Mental Floss points out, the baker knew exactly what she was doing when she put chocolate in her drop cakes and there was nothing accidental.
The problem with the classic Toll House myth is that it doesn’t mention that Wakefield was an experienced and trained cook—one not likely to simply run out of things, let accidents happen in her kitchen, or randomly try something out just to see if it would end up with a tasty result. As author Carolyn Wyman posits in her Great American Chocolate Chip Cookie Book, Wakefield most likely knew exactly what she was doing…
She was doing what had been done many times before, adding a sweet flavor to a drop cake, but she somehow then confusingly marketed it a chocolate chip cookie. I mean she came up with a recipe sure, but did she really invent something extraordinary?
Food for thought: is the chocolate chip cookie really just Americans copying unhealthy European habits (i.e. tipping) to play new world aristocrats instead of truly making something new and better?
What about the chocolate chip itself? Wasn’t that at least novel as a replacement for the more traditional small pieces of sweet fruit? Not really. The chocolate bar, which precipitated the chips, has been credited in 1847 to a British company started by Joseph Storrs Fry.
Thus it seems strange to say that an American putting a British innovation (chocolate bar chips) into a British innovation (drop cake/biscuit/cookie) is an American invention, as much as it is Americans copying and trying to be more like the British.
The earliest recipe I’ve found that might explain chocolate chip cookies is from 1912 (20 years before claims of invention) in “The Twentieth Century Book for the Progressive Baker, Confectioner, Ornamenter and Ice Cream Maker: The Most Up-to-date and Practical Book of Its Kind” by Fritz Ludwig Gienandt.
Source: Twentieth Century Book for the Progressive Baker, Confectioner, Ornamenter and Ice Cream Maker, by Fritz Ludwig Gienandt
