Food

Photo of McCall's Cheese

Part of a nation's history lies in what people eat. Artifacts at the Museum document the history of food in the United States from farm machinery to diet fads.

More than 1,300 pieces of stoneware and earthenware show how Americans have stored, prepared, and served food for centuries. Ovens, cookie cutters, kettles, aprons, and ice-cream-making machines are part of the collections, along with home canning jars and winemaking equipment. More than 1,000 objects recently came to the Museum when author and cooking show host Julia Child donated her entire kitchen, from appliances to cookbooks.

Advertising and business records of several food companies—such as Hills Brothers Coffee, Pepsi Cola, and Campbell's Soup—represent the commercial side of the subject

Place: California

Tomato Pickers

Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
date made
2002
maker
Nahmias, Rick
ID Number
2005.0114.01
catalog number
2005.0114.01
accession number
2005.0114

Ann Miller’s “Heinz’s Great American Soup” Costume

Ann Miller, the vivacious tap-dancing star of such classic screen musicals as On the Town (1949) and Kiss Me Kate (1953) wore this sparkling costume in a famous 1971 TV commercial for Heinz’s short-lived product, Great American Soup.
Description (Brief)
Ann Miller, the vivacious tap-dancing star of such classic screen musicals as On the Town (1949) and Kiss Me Kate (1953) wore this sparkling costume in a famous 1971 TV commercial for Heinz’s short-lived product, Great American Soup. The one-minute commercial, produced and directed by noted humorist and broadcaster, Stan Freberg, was a tribute to the spectacular, Busby Berkeley-style Hollywood musicals of the 1930s and 1940s, with Miller rising up out of the floor on top of a eight feet high cylinder designed to look like a giant soup can. She was backed by spurting red, white, and blue fountains and a staircase filled with singing and dancing platinum blonde chorines. The song featured in the commercial is a Freberg parody of a Hollywood tribute and has, as one of its campy, nonsensical lyrics the following phrase: ”Who’s got its noodles up in lights/ From Broadway to the Loop?/It’s the great – I said the great – the Great American Soup!” At the conclusion of the lavish musical number, Miller whirls back into kitchen setting where the scene began and Dave Willock, the actor playing her husband, remarks, “Why do you always have to make such a production out of everything?”
The costume, created by the Berman Costume Company, is made of red satin and decorated with iridescent red sequins and a glittering white rhinestone filigree pattern trim around the hips and top of bust Another major component of the costume is a bright red silk top hat, decorated with a silver band and blue stars. Both elements of costume, combined with Miller’s sunny, tongue-in-cheek performance style and Freberg’s witty script, make this one of the funniest, most elaborate commercials ever produced.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1970
performing artist
Miller, Ann
maker
Berman Costume Company
ID Number
2002.0268.01
accession number
2002.0268
catalog number
2002.0265.01

1973 Stag's Leap Wine Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon

This bottle of 1973 Cabernet Sauvignon wine was produced by Warren Winiarski, founder, owner, and winemaker at Stag's Leap Wine Cellars, in Napa, California. It is the vintage that outranked some of France's best Bordeaux at a blind tasting held in Paris in 1976.
Description
This bottle of 1973 Cabernet Sauvignon wine was produced by Warren Winiarski, founder, owner, and winemaker at Stag's Leap Wine Cellars, in Napa, California. It is the vintage that outranked some of France's best Bordeaux at a blind tasting held in Paris in 1976. Organized by Steven Spurrier, an Englishman who ran a fine wine shop in Paris, the tasting involved a panel of nine experienced French judges who compared a select group of wines from France and California without benefit of knowing which was which. When the 1973 Stag's Leap Wine Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon placed first, the judges were astonished, and the rest of the wine world took notice.
The "Judgment of Paris" had a huge impact on the California and U.S. wine industry. It crushed the widely-held belief that only the French could make premium wine and inspired American vintners to expand their operations. The aftermath of the tasting played out most vigorously in California, where, between 1975 and 2004, the number of wineries grew from 330 to 1,689. By 2004, California accounted for most of the $643 million in annual U.S. wine exports.
Date made
1973
referenced
Spurrier, Steven
owner
Winiarski, Warren
referenced
Stag's Leap Wine Cellars
maker
Winiarski, Warren
ID Number
1996.0029.01
catalog number
1996.0029.01
accession number
1996.0029

Farmers Market (poster)

David Lance Goines is known as a writer and lecturer as well as an illustrator and printer of both letterpress and offset lithography, his work much exhibited and collected throughout the country.
Description
David Lance Goines is known as a writer and lecturer as well as an illustrator and printer of both letterpress and offset lithography, his work much exhibited and collected throughout the country. But his Arts and Crafts influenced design is best known on his posters and in books. Goines was a recognized activist in Berkeley, associated with the Free Speech and Anti-War movements, and he did poster and book work for these movements.
Alice Waters, who founded the Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, was a founding inspiration of the fresh, local, and organic food movement. She met David Goines in the Berkeley Free Speech movement. They began to collaborate on a column, “Alice’s Restaurant” for the local alternative paper. She wrote the recipes and he provided the artwork. He collected and printed each column as Thirty Recipes for Framing and the entire set and individual prints from the set began to appear on Berkeley walls and beyond, establishing him with enough profits to buy the Berkeley Free Press, rechristened the St. Hieronymus Press.
He issued his first Chez Panisse poster, "Red-Haired Lady," in 1972 and his most recent, "41st Anniversary," in 2012. In between is a series of anniversary posters, plus occasional others celebrating the restaurant's book releases, such as the Chez Panisse Café Cookbook, and other ventures. These works established his place as the primary artist associated with food and wine in the so-called Gourmet Ghetto. His early posters for Chez Panisse were soon followed by requests from other food and wine related sites and events, as well as from many other commercial entities.
His 1991 poster, “Farmers Market” (number 148 in the Goines repertory) was commissioned by Chez Panisse on its twentieth anniversary, and made to honor their purveyors, those who supplied Chez Panisse with the fresh and local food for which they were famous. Goines was inspired by the 16th century portrait, “The Laughing Cavalier” by Franz Hals, a Dutch painter. In this instance, the Cavalier’s stand-in is a beautiful Afro-Caribbean woman, Jennifer Caminetti, with the bounty of nature drawn into and around her magnificent head wrap.
Reimagining American cuisine, which was Water’s dream, involved reviving an old food-distribution system, the farmers market. Chefs, consumers, food producers (of produce, meats, chocolate, cheese, bread), and small farmers came together, marketing to and buying directly from each other. The new farmers markets helped create a community of shared values around the quality of food, inviting collaborations. Between 1960 and 2000, the number of farmers markets grew from around 100 to over 3,000. Increasingly, market organizers are also sponsoring food education programs in their local communities. The maturation of their inspirations into environmental and societal sustainability around food has established a solid foundation for good food to appear throughout the country.
date made
1991
maker
Goines, David Lance
ID Number
2012.0089.01
accession number
2012.0089
catalog number
2012.0089.01

Brose Spoon

Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1840
ID Number
DL.076627
catalog number
076627
accession number
16559

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