All jumbled up: authenticity in American culinary history

Abstract

This paper explores the history of jumbles, a type of cookies, through the duration of American history from the colonial period through today. The evolution of jumbles illustrates the ways that recipes have been continually adapted and put to a variety of political and social uses. In particular, this essay seeks to further debates in food studies over the nature of authenticity by exploring the constant recreation of a single recipe (the jumble) alongside the cultural factors that shaped a particular iteration of the cookie at a given moment in time (including but not limited to the American Revolution, the partisan political battles in the early 1800 s, post-Civil War anxieties over heritage and identity, or periods of rapid social change brought about by industrialization in the late 19th and early 20th century). Contextualizing recipes in a particular historical moment suggests that there is no true “historical authenticity” when it comes to cookery. Modern cooks who engage in historical cookery are instead creating dishes that are authentic to their own moment in time, not some essentialized version of the dish rooted in a mythic past. Nor, as the study of jumbles suggests, is this a new process. Exploring the relationship between social, economic, and political trends at key moments in the history of the jumble demonstrates that Americans have long engaged in the process of recreating nostalgic dishes in search of historical authenticity that says more about the taste preferences, political agendas, and social geographies of those cooks than those to whom they pay homage.