{"id":11992,"date":"2010-03-26T20:56:17","date_gmt":"2010-03-27T01:56:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=11992"},"modified":"2010-03-26T21:06:12","modified_gmt":"2010-03-27T02:06:12","slug":"mastering-the-art-of-mormon-cooking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2010\/03\/mastering-the-art-of-mormon-cooking\/","title":{"rendered":"Mastering the art of Mormon cooking"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"virtual-jello\"The Atlantic’s food channel<\/a> recently posted an article entitled Jello Love: A Guide to Mormon Cuisine<\/a> (my co-blogger kindly linked to it in the sidebar).\u00a0 The author lived in Utah for a time as child, and she knows whereof she speaks.\u00a0 The piece is charming, nostalgic and mostly reality-based.\u00a0 But I blog, therefore I quibble.<\/p>\n

Classic Mormon fare seems to have crystallized as a cuisine in the 70s or 80s, though I couldn’t tell you why that’s so.\u00a0 In a lot of ways, its provenance is a bit of a mystery:\u00a0 I doubt that any of the dishes originated among Mormons—they tend to be familiar in the Midwest and South—and none of them have obvious connections to Mormon history, except for their suitability for ward potlucks. One might expect Mormon cooking to reflect our practice<\/a> of storing three-month or year supplies of staple foods—and in reality, “food storage” meals incorporating beans, wheat, and powdered milk do rotate regularly across many Mormon dinner tables.\u00a0 But they don’t show up in the stable of “classic” Mormon foods.<\/p>\n

The writer of the Atlantic piece characterizes Mormon cuisine as “bland,” “packaged,” “processed” “convenience foods”—but I think the article is self-refuting on these points, as the dishes noted really don’t fit these descriptions.\u00a0 Some ingredients are processed in the sense that they are canned or dried, but this is not a Sandra Lee-style convenience “homemade.” Nor, of course, are they of the enlightened, organic, local, Whole Foods ilk, as that food culture didn’t exist during the 70s and 80s.<\/p>\n

These days, a ward potluck is more likely to feature an asparagus strata or a Mediterranean salmon pasta salad than a pan of funeral potatoes or a frog-eye salad.\u00a0 But these foods are still native to American Mormon culture, and beloved by many of us. I thought it would be fun to do a “best-practices” exercise and link to what I consider to be superior recipes for the quartet of dishes the piece highlights: Frog Eye Salad, Hawaiian Haystacks, Jello, and Funeral Potatoes. Plus a bonus trio of three more classic Mormon foods. Enjoy!<\/p>\n