Reading Historical Cookbooks

If you've ever picked up a cookbook from a few decades ago, you know that there's bound to be some weird stuff in there. The United States has gone through a lot of food trends, often connected to the broader food culture of the time period. The rise in quick and easy consumer foods, for instance, led to terrifying concoctions like a casserole made from hot dogs, canned creamed corn, and cheese. However, food is not confined purely to cultural space, and historical recipes and cookbooks sometimes reflect the political and social circumstances of the time as well. This is generally something that happens unintentionally, or subtly, but that is not the case for the writers (who call themselves "The Committee to Write the Cookbook") who published "The Watergate Cookbook (Or, Who's in the Soup)" in 1973. This cookbook, as is clear from the title, uses as it's premise jokes about Nixon and the Watergate Scandal. An opening section introduces the writers, who claim to have come up with the idea of this politically minded cookbook "after several glasses of wine" as a way to contribute a "touch of humor to offset the intense drama of the hearings." This is not actually just a joke cookbook, however. Though the names of the dishes were created to poke fun at Watergate, the recipes themselves, according the the writers, were "borrowed from our own repertoires, our friends, nannies, grannies and canaries, and we all vouch for their authenticity." Thus, this political joke made through food also clearly facilitated community, and provided a way for regular, every day people to share their home recipes with the world, while also lightening the mood around political scandal. I'm including a few of the recipes with particularly clever names which also sound like they might be fun to make at some point. The first is a cocktail, made with maple syrup, lemon juice, and rye (whisky, I would assume), and the writer quips that this does require you to tap trees, but that's legal. Also on the wire tapping theme is the recipe for hot cross buns, in which the cross buns represent wires which are then "tapped" with frosting. Finally, there's Ellsberg's Leek Soup, which references Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers which revealed information about the Vietnam war that had been hidden from the public, and who was investigated by several of the men who would later be tied up in the Watergate Scandal. All of these recipes are also vegetarian friendly, as long as you substitute vegetable broth into the Leek soup, so I look forward to trying them out and enjoying the delicious taste of government corruption.