Living Like A Tenement Family – by Jessica Glazer
Tenement Family from Jessica Glazer on Vimeo.
Recipes teach us about culture and society – even if the recipe is from the 1870s. Sarah Lohman digs through old cookbooks and pamphlets to discover how we live today. Sometimes the discoveries are not so sweet.
Transcript :
I had come across a reference to a pamphlet from the 1870s when the country was in a very bad depression and it was teaching people how to eat on a very restricted budget and it laid out three meals a day for seven days. So I saw that and I was like, oh, I want to do this. I want to live this life. I called it Living Like a Tenement Family.
It was actually a really, really smart menu. And in 1870s money it worked out to about three dollars for, well, that’s even for a family of six. I spent, I think $21 to feed myself for seven days, three meals a day. So to think that I was doing this 1870s diet, which was really smart, And I actually was getting a lot of fiber because I was getting a lot of beans.
On the other hand, I was only taking in about 800 calories a day and ended up spending about the same amount as someone on food stamps, except that I was slowly starving. I lost 3 pounds in a week.
So it, the amazing thing about these projects is that although I am looking into the past, there are often these very, very important connections to the present day. They’re very reflective on the contemporary, and that’s very important to me.
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Sarah Lohman is a foodie and a historian. In 2008 she started a blog called FourPoundsFlour.com to write about food and recipes from the 18 and 19th centuries. An early experiment she called Living Like a Tenement Family stirred up a lot of excitement in the foodie and the historic worlds and led her to continue blogging her findings. For the experiment, Lohman got her recipes from a pamphlet in the 1870s that explained how to live in a tight budget.
Called “Fifteen Cent Dinners” and distributed in 1878 for free in New York City, the pamphlet planned out one week’s of meals for a family of six. It was intended for working class families to whom the author, Juliet Corson, writes: “This little book may not be a welcome guest in the home of the man who fares abundantly every day; it is not written for him; but for the working man, who wants to make the best of his wages, I pray it may bring help and comfort.”
Lohman adjusted the recipes for one and discovered just how well that menu would nourish for a family of six. What she found was not so pleasant, and has resonance to today’s working poor.
