Culinary historian traces cooking throughout the years
ROANOKE – You might call Joe Carlin a food tour guide. The Massachusetts nutritionist whose passion is culinary history took a room full of food lovers on a journey “From Plum Pudding to Pad Thai.”
Carlin subtitled his talk “The Untold Story of the American Cookbook” when he spoke at a luncheon – what else? – the week before Thanksgiving.
Culinary historian Joe Carlin of Massachusetts and Dorothy Herndon, president of the Peacock-Harper Culinary History Friends, share a laugh over a serving of real plum pudding before Carlin's talk at Friends' meeting at Roanoke Country Club. Photo by Meg Hibbert
His 40-minute talk he spiced with humorous tidbits and images of some of the earliest cookbooks came after a hearty lunch that ended with real plum pudding, which, Carlin pointed out, there has “Never, ever been plums in plum puddings.”
The name “plum” comes from the verb “plump” and refers to raisins or currants, he said, that are plumped in liquid before they are added to the pudding that is steamed.
The luncheon at Roanoke County Club was a meeting of the Peacock-Harper Culinary History Friends in the Roanoke Valley, an organization that meets three or four times a year, explained President Dorothy Herndon of Roanoke.
Later the afternoon of Nov. 16 Carlin gave the same talk, without food, at Virginia Tech’s Newman Library where the Peacock-Harper Culinary History Collection is housed. The collection started with a donation in 1999 brings more than 300 years of historical information about “domestic sciences,” including customs, eating behaviors, food choices and social and economic history.
Carlin talked about the evolution of recipes, including “receipt books,” the old name for recipe books or cookbooks, some of which are part of the collection at Tech. Among the photographs he showed was an Abyssian clay tablet with marks that indicate it was “a 5,000-year-old recipe for how to make a good beer,” he said.
Carlin led his audience from Apicius’s cookbook in 100 A.D. and a Vatican cookbook from the 15th century, to explanations of what a sugar loaf was and how pot ash was first mentioned as leavening in a 1796 cookbook.
An 1896 manual for cooks in the Army at Fort Lee in Virginia showed enormous pots of food for soldiers being cooked over an outdoor fire.
Other cookbooks are more whimsical. The cover of an early Jell-O cookbook proclaimed “Even if you can’t cook, you can make a Jell-O dessert.”
Although a 1742 cookbook was printed in Williamsburg, Carlin believes it was originally printed in 1727 in London. One of the earliest American cookbook of American cookery published in 1796 by Amelia Simmons was the first use of the term “cookies” in a cookbook.
When asked how many cookbooks he has in his own collection, Carlin responded, “Too many, around 1,000.
He said half of his collection of charity cookbooks, put out by church groups and other organizations to raise money, went to two different groups. The rest of his collection is on exhibit in Maine, Carlin said.
And what are some of his favorite foods? “I’ll eat anything Asian,” he said. “I like robust flavors where I’m tasting lemon grass, ginger, hot peppers, even fish sauce.”
He also enjoys fruits and roasting fresh vegetables he selects from local farmers’ markets near his home in Ipswich, Mass., such as heirloom carrots he picked up the week before, Carlin said. “They come in colors such as white, purple and yellow,” he added.
Carlin and his wife of 40 years, Harriette, have two sons and two daughters who all enjoy his cooking. Carlin said he became a dietician later in life: “I waited until I was in my 30s before I went to graduate school. I took the GI Bill.”
His day job is a supervisor of nutrition for the elderly in 16 states, including Virginia. He said his love for food books began while he was a student librarian in the Campbell Library of the Academy of Food Marketing. His first job in the food business was as a candy maker on the Wildwood, N.J., boardwalk.
