Extra! Extra! Eat All About It!
Recipes and Culinary Curiosities from Historic Wisconsin Newspapers
By Jane Conway and Randi Julia Ramsden
Fifty retro recipes—and the history behind them—to inspire and delight home cooks everywhere
A blend of cookbook and bite-size history, Extra! Extra! Eat All About It! offers a unique glimpse into the Midwestern culinary landscape between 1870 and 1930. Fifty recipes selected from Wisconsin newspapers are served alongside brief essays that dig into the history behind the food trends of the time. In lively prose, historians Jane Conway and Randi Julia Ramsden reveal how coconuts and oysters made their way to 1800s Wisconsin, how the state came to lead the nation in commercial pea canning, how bakers gauged the temperatures of their wood-burning stoves, and how our predecessors really did slip on banana peels, among other flavorful facts.
In addition to capturing quirky food fashions, like breakfast parties and paper-bag cooking, the recipes provide insights into regional cooking traditions. Each original recipe appears alongside the authors’ updated, easy-to-follow version. Mouthwatering modern photographs showcase the revived dishes for the first time in their long history, and newspaper clippings, ads, and illustrations give the book a charming vintage look.
Featuring a variety of recipes, ranging from trendy (Barbecued Ham with Bananas) and tempting (Pickled Walnuts) to traditional (Pumpernickel) and tantalizing (Apple de Luxe), Extra! Extra! Eat All About It! will satisfy the appetites of history lovers and home chefs alike.
Find Extra! Extra! Eat All About It! at your favorite book retailer or in our online store.
ENDORSEMENTS
“Such a fun and fascinating book! Extra! Extra! Eat All About It! deftly delves into Wisconsin’s long-ago food fads, evolutions, and absurdities. Don’t be surprised if this book inspires new trends that are riffs on some of these century-old ideas. Pickled walnuts, anyone? Or mock pumpkin pie, with prunes?”
—Mary Bergin, author of Wisconsin Supper Club Cookbook
“Both cookbook and chronicle, Extra! Extra! Eat All About It! is an ingenious, illuminating tasting menu of our culinary past. Sourced from nineteenth and early twentieth century Wisconsin newspapers, its fifty vignettes serve up historical insights, forgotten fads and bygone recipes. From paper bag cookery and ‘oyster saloons’ to fire-baked eggs and maple taffy, I ate this book right up.”
—Terese Allen, coauthor of The Flavor of Wisconsin
“This beautiful, fun, and informative book is a masterclass in how historical cooking opens a window onto wider historical themes, including mechanization, the impacts of war, immigration, globalization, and changing nutritional advice.”
—Eleanor Barrett, author of Leftovers: A History of Food Waste and Preservation
“Conway and Ramsden do a great job of using historical documents to demonstrate what people were eating and how they entertained. They describe recipes as interaction and community, as well as how food trends change over time. The writing is smart and clever. A wonderful read.”
—Kimberly Wilmot Voss, author of The Food Section: Newspaper Women and the Culinary Community
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
For two years, Jane Conway and Randi Julia Ramsden worked together on the National Digital Newspaper Program at the Wisconsin Historical Society. In 2019, they began researching, cooking, and writing for the “Cooking Up History” series, which appeared on the WHS website and provided the inspiration for this book. Conway has a bachelor’s degree in art history from the University of Oregon, and Ramsden has a master’s degree in American studies from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.
AN INTERVIEW WITH JANE CONWAY & RANDI RAMSDEN
The two of you clearly share a love of food and historical newspapers. How did your partnership begin?
We worked together for the National Digital Newspaper Program at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Our job was to digitize historic Wisconsin newspapers which entailed browsing thousands of pages of news publications. That’s when we started noticing the recipes hidden within these pages. We began taking note of them, sharing our favorite finds with each other, and eventually decided to try some. Since we both have a background in history, that’s how we approached cooking. It was as much a matter of studying the recipes’ historical context and interpreting their meaning as it was a culinary exercise for us.
What can readers expect to learn from these recipes, which were printed in newspapers, that may be different from what they might learn from recipes that appear in historical cookbooks?
In contrast to cookbooks, newspapers had a very short turnaround time. They could capture even the briefest of cooking trends and were able to adjust or select cooking content based on the seasons or food shortages at any given time. Many printed recipes were part of governmental campaigns or based on the latest nutritional research. Some newspapers also featured recipes submitted by local community members.
There are a lot of surprising, and sometimes strange, recipes included in this book. Can you each name a dish that you found particularly intriguing?
Randi: “Swimming Island” is definitely a strange one. I never thought I’d prepare a hard-boiled egg for dessert, but you add layers of deep-fried pancake batter, cinnamon, and sugar, then douse it in sweetened wine.It’s surprisingly tasty.
Jane: “Barbecued Ham with Bananas” was a recipe we were both a little apprehensive to try! It was a questionable combination of bananas, ham, and jelly, but it turned out to be the perfect combination of savory and sweet. It was also one of the rare recipes that had a photograph accompanying it in the newspaper, so naturally we couldn't resist the appeal of recreating it for ourselves.
As you were testing the recipes and translating them into modernized versions, what was one of the most interesting things you learned about how home cooks used to prepare food?
We have been spoiled by standardization. Whether it’s temperatures or measurements, modern recipes allow for us to cook just about anything in any standard modern kitchen. Without thermometers and thermostats, historically, people really needed to know their stoves and the meaning of a “hot,” “quick,” or “slow” oven in their particular kitchen. They needed to be able to build a fire and keep it consistent. That takes skill and time. We were fortunate to cook some recipes on historic stoves at Old World Wisconsin, and it definitely made us appreciate modern technology more.
You took all the color photos of the dishes in the book. Was this your first time acting as food stylists and photographers? How did that element of the project enhance your appreciation or understanding of the recipes?
Yes, it was our first time venturing into food photography and styling. We learned some tips and tricks from friends who have more photography experience, but it was exciting to be so deeply involved in the creative work of this book. For us, it was important that the pictures of the food showed only the edible elements we used to cook. There are a lot of tricks in food styling—it’s an art form in itself—to enhance different aspects of dishes, and we decided not to get into the depth of that. However, it was still a challenge to portray dishes that were unfamiliar to us and had, for the most part, never been visually captured because there was very little food photography at the time. Additionally, we strove to capture these dishes in a way that makes them appealing to an audience that is now constantly surrounded by beautiful food that takes color composition into account in the photography as well as the cooking process.
In what ways do you expect the book will help readers understand the connections between history, media, and foodways?
We often think of historical cooking as using simple, local, and seasonal ingredients. While that’s true to a certain extent—there was a lot of making do with what was available—the culinary world of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was much more globalized than we think. Wisconsinites had access to coconuts and bananas or fresh saltwater seafood like lobster and oysters, and they could go to their local grocery store for all sorts of delicacies.
We also hope that readers will see how recipes were often shaped by the current events of the time. Although they were often relegated to their own section, away from the reportage on “serious” national and world events, the recipes were intertwined with the world that was being reported on—for example, the introduction of “Meatless Monday” and “Wheatless Wednesday” during World War I.