Many big city municipalities demanded that
Repeal-era taverns serve food with their products. What constituted "food" seems to
have often been left to the interpretation and imagination of tavern owners,
drink trade organizations and their lawyers. This brought about a new
industry of tavern snack foods. Like the pre-Prohibition offerings of the "free
lunch," they were most often salty, pickled, cheap and abundant, and if done
right, bypassed the need for a kitchen in the back of neighborhood
bars.
I touch upon this in Beer & Food: An
American History, (Jefferson Press, February 28, 2007,
ISBN-10: 0977808610), a book that demonstrates how
American beer and food came together, beginning with an examination of receipt
books of the 18th and 19th centuries. Upon Repeal, small food recipe booklets
were put together by the United States Brewers Association with templated food
recipes that allowed breweries to substitute the name of their flagship products
when a food recipe simple called for "beer," and later by the breweries
themselves as they too began to publish numerous beer-in-food cookbooks.
The heart of this movement was to get the
consumption of beer into the house and to nuture the growing trend of women as
beer consumers. Pre-Prohibition saloons frowned upon women as customers. From
the rise of saloons and through the Prohibition-era speakeasies, the consumption
of beer at home was a rarity. It's amusing to look back at brewery-sponsored
booklets of early Repeal years that describe how to hold a "beer party" or even
a "Lager Lunch." Before the development of food recipes that used beer as an
ingredient, Repeal-era brewery booklets were simply composed of tips on the
chilling and serving beer, proper glasses for different beer styles, beer party
themes and appropriate party decor, and suggestions of appropriate beer snacks
to accompany beer.
It took until a short time before WWII to expand
the concept of consuming beer and food together, to include more elaborate food
recipes that used beer as an ingredient, not just setting out bowls of nuts,
pretzels and potato chips and chilled beer. As the portability of beer increased
with canning (1935) and improvements in bottling machinery and pushed draft
beer sales down (if I recall, 1941 was the first year that packaged beer beat
draft sales), it also slowed down tavern sales, and as a result, the sale of
tavern snack foods too. This would explain the peaking and then slipping sales
of beer of tavern snack foods during the period of late 1933 to the opening of
WW II. Beer had become a household staple.
The concept of presenting beer and food together
has been somewhat resurrected by the craft beer industry, more so by writers
like myself.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2008 8:41
AM
Subject: Prohibition, Bar Snacks and
Cashew Nuts
Dear Colleagues,
I am an interloper on your list. My partner Norman Bennett who
writes on the Port wine trade is your member.
I have an odd query for you. I am a urban labor historian who works
on Lourenço Marques Mozambique (today Maputo).
In the late colonial era Mozambique was one of the leading producers of
cashew nuts, and I'm writing a history of the women workers in the nation's
largest factory.
Here is the dilemma:
For some reason, American demand for cashew nuts spiked in the 1930s
driving up the price for the nut when depression prices for most
agricultural products were in the basement. The sharp increase in the
price / demand from America was the lift off for the industry in Mozambique
and India.
The only theory I have found to account for WHY demand spiked (thus
driving up the price) was Paulo Soares' suggestion that the end of prohibition
in the U.S. saw a spike in interest in bar snacks. Since salted nuts are a
favorite bar snack, perhaps it was the return of bar culture that drove up the
price of cashews.
Does anyone know anything about this? Any suggestions for
readings?
Thanks so much,
Jeanne Penvenne
Jeanne Marie Penvenne
Associate Professor of History
Tufts University
Sabbatical 2007-2008