Religion, Food, and Eating in North America

KATE HOLBROOK

WHEN IT COMES to diet, two religious groups considered outsiders by mainstream Americans have more in common than perhaps anyone imagined. Members of the Nation of Islam (Nation) have been marginalized as much for their perceived militancy and racism as for abstaining from sweet potatoes and pork, and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) are as infamous for a past that included plural marriage as for prohibitions against coffee and alcohol. Yet both religious groups choose what to eat by hallmarks as similar and American as apple pie: the attainment of self-sufficiency and the pursuit of good health.

As historian R. Laurence Moore has persuasively argued, religious outsiders in the United States are, in many respects, true insiders.¹ To rebel, to create one’s own movement—these acts are consummately American. Through their rebellion on issues of food and drink, both the Nation and the Latter-day Saints have proved themselves to be American religious insiders. In fact, recipes for the marginalized Mormons and members of the Nation flesh out Moore’s account of American religious identities. Close readings of recipes and favorite dishes show that the American values of self-sufficiency, economy, and health have influenced the cuisine of the Nation and the Latter-day Saints at least as much as the specifics of their religious dietary codes have. What this means is that even when groups purport to reject American culture, or when popular culture rejects them, religious groups born in America are deeply influenced by American sensibilities.

WHAT THE OUTSIDERS FOUND BAD TO EAT

For Nation of Islam members, a series of articles in the official Nation newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, set the dietary code, which was eventually published in 1967 as two slim volumes entitled How to Eat to Live. Nation leader Elijah Muhammad taught that he had received these guidelines from his mentor W. D. Fard, who was also God incarnate, and thus they were revelation. Like Mormons, Nation members were instructed to abstain from alcohol and tobacco, and like Muslims and Jews they were to abstain from pork. Also forbidden were sweet potatoes, quick breads (like biscuits, cornbread, and pancakes), leafy greens, and most legumes (particularly lima beans and black-eyed peas), although Elijah Muhammad encouraged eating small pink navy beans. Those who would follow the diet were promised increased spiritual strength, freedom from disease, and longevity.

For Latter-day Saints, the dietary code is the Word of Wisdom, a short passage of just thirty-nine verses in the Doctrine and Covenants, a book of scripture based primarily on God’s revelations to founding prophet Joseph Smith. Recorded on February 27, 1833, these verses recommended a diet of fruits, vegetables, herbs, and grains in season, with limited meat intake.2 Prohibitions against “hot drinks,” “strong drinks,” and tobacco were familiar among dietary reformers of the day such as Sylvester Graham but set Mormons apart from mainstream Americans. Mormons spent the next one hundred years grappling with what it meant to obey the Word of Wisdom. (Should they be vegetarian? Were beer and wine permissible?) Church president Heber J. Grant spelled out the details in the 1920s, making obedience to the principle a firm requirement for temple attendance, hence full church membership, and defined the minimum standard of compliance as abstinence from tea, coffee, alcohol, and tobacco. Church members believed obedience to these guidelines and God’s law would bring spiritual blessings, as well as physical blessings such as increased health and strength.

The uniqueness and stringency of these dietary codes set Nation members and Mormons apart from mainstream Americans. But concurrently, leaders and members justified them by making links with inherently American values of the period, particularly health and self-sufficiency.3

HOW DIFFERENT RELIGIOUS CREEDS LED TO COMMON RESPONSES AT THE TABLE

Bringing these two groups into apparent conversation may seem counterintuitive. There are obvious and important differences between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Nation of Islam. Formed one hundred years apart (Mormons in 1830, the Nation of Islam in 1930), these groups were distanced by geographical roots, membership profile, and theology. Where Mormons were predominantly white in their beginning,⁴ the Nation was almost exclusively African American. Where Mormonism saw itself as reforming Christianity, the Nation explicitly rejected it. Mormons defined eternal life as eternity spent in God’s presence, the Nation taught that there was no afterlife.

On the other hand, each group actively set itself apart from the mainstream. The Nation read mainstream culture as racist and corrupt, citing the horrible legacy of American slavery and the bitter present of Jim Crow laws and discrimination. Mormons also saw mainstream America as corrupt, citing what they saw as Protestant heresies and persecution. Both groups, not unlike mainstream Protestants and Catholics, took to heart the Christian New Testament teaching (Romans 12:2) to be “in the world but not of the world,” believing they were called to keep themselves more pure than the status quo.

As a result, both Nation members and Mormons held a common wariness about mainstream behavior and influences. Both saw peril in government financial assistance, for example. Both Mormons and Nation members believed their lives should demonstrate a spiritually higher way of living than mainstream Americans. Their pursuits of good health and self-sufficiency were not to make them like the mainstream, but better than the mainstream. Their priority, albeit practiced differently at their marginalized tables, was to please God and create their own mode of living for God’s sake, not to impress their American neighbors.

As both groups worked out what this meant in everyday patterns of eating, each developed a cuisine that represented its deeply held religious priorities. Until now, the Nation’s interpretation of black American racial identity has been seen as the primary influence on its cuisine, and bystanders have assumed that the Word of Wisdom most strongly influenced what Mormons ate. Yet a closer look at recipes and favorite foods of the Nation and Mormons shows that each group’s cooking was deeply influenced by mainstream American values, rather than religious mandates. For the Nation, the American value of physical health was prioritized; for Mormons, the American value of self-sufficiency most strongly influenced their foodways.

THE NATION’S PURSUIT OF HEALTH

The Nation’s regulations prohibited many foods that were typically identified as “southern” and that were historically prepared by enslaved African Americans, including collard greens, black-eyed peas, pork, and corn bread. As a result, most observers have viewed the Nation’s food habits as a rejection of “slave food” and a deliberate embrace of foreign foods that crafted a new non-American identity. In contrast, evaluating Nation practices more broadly, historian Edward E. Curtis IV contends that rather than adopting non-American habits (African or Middle Eastern), Elijah Muhammad incorporated middle-class Protestant values into a new Islamic framework as a method of empowerment.5 I argue that one of those middle-class values was an emphasis on cuisine as crucial to health; the Nation sought to make familiar dishes healthier. The changes were not necessarily healthier by today’s standards of nutrition science, but Elijah Muhammad taught that they were scientifically better for health. A close reading of favorite dishes and recipes illustrates the rhetoric of health that attended the substitutions of nonslave for slave foods. For example, mashed sweet potatoes became carrot fluff, because Elijah Muhammad taught that carrots were healthier than sweet potatoes. Similarly, sweet potato pie turned into higher-protein bean pie. Barbecued ribs were made from beef instead of harmful pork. These substitutions were about keeping to the Nation’s dietary code because it was healthy.

The Nation’s genesis and evolution make it harder to see the connection between its new foodways and health. Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad became acquainted in 1931 with a mysterious man named W. D. Fard. For three years Fard took Muhammad under his wing, teaching him truths about the black man’s real identity. Fard explained that black people in the United States descended from an honorable tribe; their true nature was noble, and they were Muslim; and that he, Fard, was the incarnation of Allah himself. Fard’s teachings were to be trusted as more thoroughly true than traditions that relied on less-explicit inspiration, prophecy, or centuries of scriptural interpretation.6 Elijah Muhammad founded the Nation of Islam to help black people in America relearn and acquire their birthright. Elijah Muhammad knew that centuries of mistreatment by oppressors—slavery in the American South in particular—had left a toll on black people in America. From his perspective, they had no understanding of their worthy origins, they were largely unexposed to the correct Islamic faith of their ancestors, and whites had encouraged addiction and vice to keep blacks from realizing their splendid destiny. Worship and praxis therefore focused on the rehabilitation of and provision for the black race—in other words, the construction of a Nation of Islam. Culinary ideals, particularly proscription of particular foods, were central to realizing this goal of racial rehabilitation.

Scholars have downplayed the significance of Elijah Muhammad’s rhetoric about health to reveal the “real” reason for food habits, which they have seen as the construction of non-American identity.⁷ Elijah Muhammad did write in How to Eat to Live that the slave diet hurt both body and spirit, and that slaves had been forced to eat certain foods by masters with two main motives: a desire to economize (by finding a use for foods that were inexpensive and that the wealthy were not willing to eat), and the “devilish” aim to undermine slaves’ well-being (through the consumption of polluted food). There were clearly strong racial themes in Muhammad’s culinary directions, but he did not tell his followers to eat small navy beans in search of a new, postslave, post-American identity. He taught them to eat small navy beans because they were healthy. Muhammad’s significant emphasis on health has been underinvestigated. But the health emphasis is important, not least because the attainment of good physical health was a priority of mainstream American culture.

Elijah Muhammad did not believe in life after death. There would be no blissful eternity in Heaven. “We only have one life,” he taught, “and, if this life is destroyed, we would have a hard time trying to get more life; it is impossible. So try to keep this life that you have as long as possible.”8 In Elijah Muhammad’s view, proper nutrition was essential, and members internalized this emphasis.⁹ For example, Sister Pattie X testified: “Messenger Muhammad has taught me how to eat, when to eat, and what to eat; therefore, my life has been prolonged.”¹⁰ Those who adhered to the Nation’s creeds for diet could also ameliorate already existing medical conditions, like diabetes, and be free of additional complaints. “If you eat the proper food—which I have given to you from Allah (in the Person of Master Fard Muhammad to Whom be praise forever) in this book—you will hardly ever have a headache.”¹¹

In Sonsyrea Tate’s autobiography about growing up in the Nation during the 1960s and 1970s, she confirmed that the idea of eating well for health was deeply ingrained. She recalled eating at a Nation-run school as a child, with “wholesome smells” emanating from the cafeteria as workers prepared nutritious beef burgers and wheat doughnuts. After Elijah Muhammad’s death, when Nation schools (called the University of Islam) closed, Tate transferred to a public school, where she came to dread the stench escaping cafeteria doors.¹² She said that the priority of good nutrition was so ingrained in members that even after her mother left the Nation to practice an alternate form of Islam, she continued to prioritize nutrition.¹³

Similarly, Betty Shabbaz, wife of Malcolm X, focused on the health aspects of diet both before and after her husband’s martyrdom. Her daughter recalled, “My mother, as a rule, did not allow us to have much candy. Being a nurse and a Muslim she was extremely health-conscious and carefully monitored what we ate.”¹⁴

Elijah Muhammad also stressed that healthy eating led to achieving another American value: physical beauty. He wrote: “Eating the proper food also brings about a better surface appearance. Our features are beautified by the health that the body now enjoys from the eating of proper food and also eating at the proper time.”¹⁵ For the Nation, the healthy appearance a Muslim derived from eating well was even seen as God’s blessing. The Nation had held this value in common with some Evangelical Christians, who viewed slim bodies as evidence of personal righteousness, but the Nation took things a step further.¹⁶ Elijah Muhammad taught that slenderness was more than a blessing—it was a priority.

One former member of the Nation described a penny tax implemented at temple meetings under Elijah Muhammad’s leadership. Brothers had to demonstrate specific, scientifically determined standards of appropriate weight according to their height. They would weigh in at meetings, standing on a scale, and pay one penny for each pound that exceeded the standard.17 In that odd and stern encounter stands a potent reminder of just how thoroughly the Nation of Islam had implemented, in its own distinctive way, the American emphasis on physical health and beauty as markers of success.

MODIFYING SOUL

Nation practices and mainstream American traditions began to intersect in another way too. Recipes show that popular Nation foods were derived mainly from southern tradition, instead of looking extensively to the Muslim world for culinary guidance.¹⁸ Recipes are a reliable source for understanding praxis in the Nation because they had hierarchical support and were prescriptive. Sisters in the temple developed recipes intended to fulfill Elijah Muhammad’s culinary standards, then taught them to newcomers in their own kitchens with the expectation that they would then feed their families in the same way. Thus women in the Nation learned to cook from one another, under the shaping influence of Elijah Muhammad. Tate, for example, confirmed that this is how her grandmother learned to cook according to Nation standards in the 1950s.¹⁹ Eventually this training became more formally organized at the temples in courses called Muslim Girls Training (MGT). Women and girls attended this gender-specific training once a week, often on Saturdays, and learned how to cook as “Muslims.”

The original MGT classes dissolved along with the University of Islam not long after Elijah Muhammad’s death in 1975. One former student, Reda Faard Khalifah, saved her MGT recipes and published them in 1995 as The Muslim Recipe Book: Recipes for Muslim Girls Training and General Civilization Class (MGT/GCC) of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad—a hallmark work containing recipes used by the Nation’s women throughout the movement. Because Khalifah felt she was only reporting recipes taught to her, and that they were based on Elijah Muhammad’s teachings, she listed Elijah Muhammad as her coauthor.

The brief introduction to The Muslim Recipe Book reinforces the fact that the American value of pursuing good health was more central to the Nation’s food habits than idealized racial identity. Khalifah highlights how recipes should facilitate health when she says, in the spirit of Elijah Muhammad’s priorities, that even healthier cooking options have developed since the recipes were created. For example, she explains that the old technique of browning rice to improve its nutritive value was outdated since “wholesome naturally brown rice” was now readily available. She also makes a disclaimer about the book’s high proportion of meat recipes—that people are now catching up to what Elijah Muhammad already knew: “that meat is one of the major causes of sickness and disease.” Her introduction calls attention to vegetable and vegetarian recipes in the book because they “build radiant health.”20

However, the most revealing aspect of these recipes is how Nation menus incorporated what came to be known in the 1960s as “soul food.” Soul food is a fluid category, overlapping with the idea of southern food. When the Black Power movement brought the phrase to popular awareness in the 1960s, restaurants began serving soul food that others deemed simply southern. For example, in an essay for the November 3, 1968, issue of the New York Times Magazine, Craig Claiborne reported that displaced southern devotees of soul food found the offerings in New York soul-food restaurants was “more Southern than soul. The menus mostly feature such typical Southern dishes as fried chicken, spareribs, candied yams and mustard or collard greens. One rarely finds trotters, neckbones, pigs’ tails and chitterlings.”²¹ Others did not care to differentiate between southern and soul. And many argued that the essence of soul food was about emotion—the care that went into the food.²² For people in the mainstream, then, soul food became a more positive term for typical slave fare of chitterlings, mustard greens, black eyed-peas, and cornbread. Soul food improved perceptions of African American identity, celebrating heritage rather than shaming through the derogatory association with slavery.

Elijah Muhammad denounced both categories—southern and soul—at once, deeming all of it “slave food.” Sisters in the Nation then took familiar soul dishes and modified the recipes, substituting acceptable ingredients for forbidden ones, believing these substitutions would safeguard health. These substitutions were viewed as not just safeguards but as transformations of soul food into soul-made-wholesome food. For instance, MGT courses taught that sweet potatoes were unhealthy, full of too much starch and causing gas. So carrots were substituted for sweet potatoes in many soul food dishes. The Muslim Recipe Book was filled with similar ingredient swaps: barbequed meats and barbeque short ribs, similar to recipes for barbequed pork, but with beef substituted for pork.²³

In A Pinch of Soul, a quintessential soul food cookbook, a recipe for barbecue sauce calls for chutney, catsup or tomato sauce, brown sugar, dry mustard, hot sauce, cayenne pepper, garlic powder, and onion to be used with pork.24 The barbecue sauce recipe in The Muslim Recipe Book has a similar flavor base: vinegar (which would add the piquancy of the chutney, above), green pepper (like vinegar, often in chutney), tomato paste, dry mustard, red pepper, garlic, and onion. There is little distinction between the two sauces. The barbecue instructions are also similar, calling for the technique of cooking on top of the stove, then browning in the oven or broiler. The barbecue section of A Pinch of Soul instructs: “Outdoor barbecuing for simple enjoyment has not traditionally been a ‘soul’ thing . . . few of our grandparents indulged in a whole pig or side of beef cooked on an open fire. Soul barbecuing took place mainly in the oven of a wood-burning stove.”²⁵ Like the A Pinch of Soul recipes, The Muslim Recipe Book calls for initial cooking on top of the stove, to be finished in the oven. Cooking time marks the main difference in technique. The soul recipe for “Mrs. Shorey’s Ribs” requires thirty-five to forty minutes in the oven, while the Muslim “Barbecue Short Ribs of Beef” not only cooks in the oven for two hours, “or until the meat is well done,” but specifies the meat as beef.²⁶ Thus the only substantive differences between the A Pinch of Soul recipe and the Nation sauce are abstinence from pork and cooking time, both of which were seen as by the Nation as healthy changes. Elijah Muhammad taught that, for health, meat should be cooked until very well done. In practice, many of the Nation recipes are soul-made-wholesome.²⁷

Some soul food recipes contain substitutions for proper ingredients and do not include a title change. For example, A Pinch of Soul includes a recipe for navy bean soup, one of Elijah Muhammad’s favorite dishes and a classic Nation recipe. A Pinch of Soul’s navy bean soup included streak ’o lean (a pork product, sometimes made into lard) and cubed salt pork, but otherwise closely resembled the MGT’s recipe.²⁸ Because its soup is vegetarian, the Nation recipe calls for tomato paste instead of canned tomatoes and pork; tomato paste imparts a deeper flavor to compensate for the lack of meat.

Of all recipes, though, one stands out most of all: bean pie, the dish emblematic of the Nation of Islam. Often bean pie is all people know about the Nation, because they have seen well-dressed men selling individual pies on street corners in major metropolitan areas. Unlike the overlapping representative dishes of other religious groups (for example, Mormons, Methodists, and Presbyterians might each claim green Jell-O salad), bean pie is unique to the Nation of Islam. Members of the Nation believed bean pie was healthier than sweet potato pie. Comparing the two pies was inevitable as even Nation members described bean pie as sweet potato pie made with mashed up navy beans instead of sweet potatoes (though, technically, bean pie had a custard base and sweet potato pie did not). Elijah Muhammad’s son, Jabir, explained bean pie in these terms on YouTube in 2010.29 Jabir Muhammad worked for years as Nation member and famed boxer Muhammad Ali’s manager and reported that Ali’s personal cook, Lana Shabazzfirst, developed bean pie to safeguard the champ’s health.³⁰

THE MORMON PURSUIT OF SELF-SUFFICIENCY

Mormons, too, have used American values to inform their food habits. In fact, the church’s welfare program, adopted in 1936, has shaped Mormon cuisine even more than has the Word of Wisdom, which is a canonized part of scripture. Established during the height of the Great Depression, the welfare program’s goal was to help Mormons be financially self-sufficient both as individuals and as a church. Its major tenets included frugality, hard work, food storage, and work on behalf of others.³¹ In practice, Mormons were instructed to maintain a one- to two-year supply of emergency food. In daily life this meant rotating food storage staples into everyday cooking, and avoiding luxury items. Members made inexpensive meals from food storage staples like whole wheat and powdered milk, using inexpensive ingredients like peanut butter, canned garden produce, and seasoning mixes. It also meant working hard to cater their own parties (including weddings and funerals) instead of hiring help. In effect, then, Mormons shaped their cuisine with two of America’s most intrinsic and related values: self-sufficiency and frugality.

When one woman yearned for the Mormon food of her past, she requested a dish that exemplified the welfare program’s standards. Trish had not attended church for decades. Her home was big, in a fashionable section of Brookline, Massachusetts. As befits the owner of such a home, she structured her culinary calendar around traditional New England fare like Yorkshire pudding, fruitcake with hard sauce, and corned beef and cabbage. But during the final weeks of her life, these held no appeal.³² Days before liver cancer finally took her life on August 17, 1990, she asked for a dish from her past: tuna noodle casserole. Her family called a church member, Shelley Hammond, who brought the casserole in time for dinner that night. Trish’s sister recalled, “It was exactly as Trish remembered, and she ate with pleasure. . . . My mother and I took turns feeding it to her.”33 But why was tuna noodle casserole quintessentially Mormon?

Tuna noodle casserole could have been found at just about any middle American potluck. But often specific dishes distinguish a particular tradition only because they are believed to be distinctive, not because they actually are; tuna noodle casserole represented Mormon religious priorities, and they appropriated it as their own. It promoted the Mormon goal of self-sufficiency because it was made from items in food storage, economy because it used inexpensive ingredients, and self-sufficiency (within their religious community) because it fulfilled an ideal of food as service—easy to make in large quantities and transport. Tuna noodle casserole was a staple of the Mormon culinary lexicon.

Similarly, Mormons famously ate Jell-O and “funeral potatoes.”³⁴ But Protestants throughout the country also brought Jell-O salads to potlucks, and funeral potatoes were simply a version of cheesy scalloped potatoes that had been assigned a particular name by Mormons. In and of themselves, these dishes were not unique to Mormons—they were, in fact, American, and Mormons helped to create that American identity by applying deeply held Mormon kitchen values that promoted the treasured American quality of self-sufficiency. As Mormons recontextualized and slightly modified these American staples, they were able to reimagine them as outside the mainstream and particular to their own religion.

Just as the Nation’s cookbooks made soul food into Nation food, Latter-day Saint cookbooks interpreted middle American foods, adapting them for rotation of food storage staples and economy, and made them Mormon. A prime example is the collection in Winnifred Jardine’s Mormon Country Cooking (1980), which called for ingredients accessible through much of the Mormon corridor (apricots, peaches, rhubarb, zucchini), and maintained the Mormon ideal of drawing upon a year’s food supply.³⁵ Jardine’s recipes actually came from multiple Mormon sources and represented a shared culinary consciousness. In 1948 Jardine became food editor of the Deseret News, a church-owned newspaper and one of Salt Lake City’s two major dailies, and wrote food columns until her retirement in 1984. Readers submitted many of the recipes to her column and later voted on which Deseret News recipes to include in the cookbook. Jardine even dedicated the book “to our Deseret News readers who contributed many of these recipes.”36

These recipes are not only exemplary because they were gathered from the community; Jardine herself belonged to Mormonism’s inner circle. As her editor wrote: “Winnifred Cannon Jardine’s food-fixing background is as Mormon as the great turtle-shaped Tabernacle on Salt Lake City’s Temple Square.”³⁷ She descended from early Mormon leaders Brigham Young and George Q. Cannon, served on the church general boards, wrote homemaking lessons for Relief Society Manuals, and sang in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. With these qualifications, she maintained a sense of spiritual responsibility for the book, working to present an ideal Mormon cuisine; and she included recipes representative of what Mormons actually prepared and enjoyed.

Just as Khalifah made notes in The Muslim Cookbook when community recipes did not fully meet Elijah Muhammad’s ideal for health, so Jardine tried to address similar inconsistencies in Mormon Country Cooking recipes. For example, when the book failed to represent the Word of Wisdom standard of limited meat intake, Jardine still looked to the ideal. The introduction to “Eggs and Cheese” reminded readers, “Eggs and cheese together make a nutritious, delicious combination that is grand for a people who have been counseled to use meat ‘sparingly.’”³⁸ In her introductory section on “Meat, Fish and Poultry,” she wrote, “Although counseled to eat meat and poultry ‘sparingly,’ Mormons still build many of the main meals around them. But they do not seem to eat large quantities.”³⁹ Jardine’s assessment about the quantity of meat consumption likely reflected her wishes more than actual fact, as well as her discomfort when practice failed to match ideal.

THE MORMON PURSUITS OF ECONOMY AND INDEPENDENCE

Jardine’s recipes stemmed directly from Mormon practices informed by American values: using food storage staples and inexpensive ingredients to promote self-sufficiency. Mormon recipes relied greatly on wheat—more than recipes in other twentieth-century American cookbooks, which used all-purpose flour instead. Wheat was especially important to Mormons both because it was perceived as providing superior nutrition and because it was a popular component of food storage owing to its long shelf-life.40 Jardine theorized that the penchant for bread making and baking with wheat may have come to Mormons from their pioneer ancestry. More likely the reliance on wheat came from the church’s welfare program, which encouraged hundreds of pounds of wheat to be stored in the cool basements of Mormon homes. Such provision was intended to sustain families not only during natural disasters but also during personal crises like unemployment, disability, and financial reverses. Wheat was a source of security for Mormons, a convenience, and an economic advantage, since quantity buying generally meant lower prices and buying ahead slowed down the bite of inflation.⁴¹

Food storage practices inevitably shaped Mormon cuisine. For example, a recipe for carrot cake included no all-purpose flour and incorporated a number of items with long shelf lives: vegetable oil instead of butter, canned pineapple, preserved stock like raisins, and coconut. Mormons could store these items with staggering amounts of wheat, testifying to their commitment to self-sufficiency and economy. Other food recipes demonstrated the deliberate Mormon food choices for independence and frugality too: bread recipes from more typical middle American cookbooks called for fresh milk, whereas Mormon recipes were just as likely to use powdered or evaporated milk.

Aside from the stored foods, growing your own food was an essential element of the Welfare Program, and some recipes emphasized the use of garden produce. “Rhubarb Iced Cocktail,” for instance, which involved rhubarb, sugar, and ginger ale, apparently existed solely as a means for keeping stalks of rhubarb, a fixture in Utah gardens, from going to waste. Parenthetical recipe instructions to use the extra drained rhubarb in pie or cobbler was a declaration against waste. Since drained rhubarb would not have much flavor, adding it to another dish would not improve flavor, which shows economy trumping pleasure. The “Rhubarb Iced Cocktail” recipe took a vegetable that flourished in the Utah climate and made of it a nonalcoholic party beverage. A recipe for Italian seasoning also invoked cooking with garden produce and focused on the value of frugality, since making your own Italian seasoning was supposed to save money. In her cookbook Jardine told readers in a chapter heading that this recipe, along with others for dried onion soup and French herbs, “can be made in quantity for a fraction of the supermarket price and are excellent for seasoning food storage dinners.”⁴²

Why not just buy Lipton onion soup mix or Italian seasoning and keep those in one’s food storage? Because exercising frugality was as much a priority to Mormons as food storage, and making one’s own mix or seasoning was less expensive. What is interesting here is how these values were combined with the Word of Wisdom instruction to use vegetables and herbs in season. Making one’s own seasonings and mixes meant using fresh herbs from the garden but also using products like lemon pepper and garlic powder, which were obtained through the workings of a factory. Making one’s own seasoning was not, therefore, about purity but about frugality. Many a well-stocked Mormon pantry prioritized self-sufficiency over other values. In some respects the Word of Wisdom was marginalized to better attain American values like economy, independence, and self-sufficiency.

Mormon eating habits did reflect Word of Wisdom standards to some extent—Mormon cookbooks contained recipes neither for tiramisu (lady-fingers soaked in cappuccino) nor boeuf bourguignon with its reliance on red wine. But whereas the Word of Wisdom text itself emphasized eating foods in season, Mormon cookbooks contained recipes for preserves and pickles, so that food could be eaten out of season.43 The Word of Wisdom urged restrained meat eating, but cookbooks were replete with ideas for dressing viands, which fed large groups and were easily purchased when on sale and stored in the chest freezer.⁴⁴ Instead of a strict implementation of Word of Wisdom ideals, Mormon cuisine reflected practicality, frugality, and the need to assemble food stores for an ever-uncertain future.

Just as with the Nation, the Mormon diet—a complex merger of slightly modified American cuisine recontextualized within the religious community’s values—served as a simultaneous emblem for a distinctive, outsider subculture and the broader American culture.

MORE AMERICAN THAN APPLE PIE

In the kitchens and dining rooms of mid-twentieth-century America, members of two outsider groups negotiated relationships with America’s mainstream in creative ways. Even as they explicitly savored their outsider status, Nation of Islam Muslims and Latter-day Saints subtly bought in to mainstream American values. The ways they altered familiar American staples like sweet potato pie or tuna casseroles reflected their endorsement of broader American ideals. Two main processes were taking place in the kitchens and dining tables of these groups: the construction of difference, and a striving to be better than the mainstream according to the rules of the mainstream.

The space these outsiders created for themselves within twentieth-century America speaks to just how complex and subtle are the differences between insider and outsider groups, and how dependent they can be on the assertion that they are indeed different. Carrot fluff and funeral potatoes look and taste much the same as the American staples they are meant to replace, but in the deliberate appropriation of these and other dishes, Nation of Islam and Mormon people assert their distinctiveness. Simultaneous with their assertions of difference, Mormons and Nation members brought a fervent commitment to excellence to the mainstream. At times outsiders seem to incorporate a hypertrophied version of the insider culture. If good Americans value physical health, Nation Muslims will bring health to bear on every dish they consider at the table. If good Americans value self-sufficiency, then Mormons will build a cuisine around inexpensive, durable goods.

Watching Nation Muslims and Mormons cook and eat provides important new insights into the ways participants in American society negotiate the paradoxes of fitting in and intentionally failing to fit in, a potent reminder of the importance the perception and practice of otherness plays in the construction of American society.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. What cultural currents guide what you eat? How does food connect or disconnect you with broader American culture?

2. What kind of power do culinary differences have on relationships—even differences that might be more imagined than real?

3. How might it affect a person to begin making substitutions in the main ingredients of foods he or she had eaten and cooked since childhood?

4. What does storing a year’s supply of food tell you about what Mormons value?

NOTES

1. R. Laurence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

2. “And again, verily I say unto you, all wholesome herbs God hath ordained for the constitution, nature, and use of man—Every herb in the season thereof, and every fruit in the season thereof; all these to be used with prudence and thanksgiving. . . . All grain is good for the food of man; as also the fruit of the vine; that which yieldeth fruit, whether in the ground or above the ground.” Doctrine and Covenants, section 89.

3. For a description of the transition in American Protestantism from a notion of physical suffering as evidence of God’s love to God’s love as a means to physical healing, see Heather D. Curtis, Faith in the Great Physician: Suffering and Divine Healing in American Culture, 1860–1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

4. Newell G. Bringhurst, Saints, Slaves, and Blacks: The Changing Place of Black People Within Mormonism (Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 1981), appendix c.

5. Edward E. Curtis, Black Muslim Religion in the Nation of Islam, 1960–1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 127–30.

6. Karl Evanzz, The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad (New York: Pantheon, 1999).

7. Algernon Austin, Achieving Blackness: Race, Black Nationalism, and Afrocentrism in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 35; Richard Brent Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 159; Edward E. Curtis IV, “Islamizing the Black Body: Ritual and Power in Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam,” Religion and American Culture 12, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 167–96; Curtis, Black Muslim Religion in the Nation of Islam, 1960–1975; and C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Muslims in America, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich: Eerdmans, 1994), 22, 25, 47.

8. Elijah Muhammad, How to Eat to Live, Book No. 1 (Phoenix: Secretarius, 1997), 19. Original edition: Fard Muhammad and Elijah Muhammad, How to Eat to Live. Book One (Atlanta: Messenger Elijah Muhammad Propagation Society, 1967).

9. Martha Lee has argued convincingly that the Nation’s fixation with this-worldly reform qualifies it as a millenarian movement: “At its core was millenarianism, the belief in an imminent, ultimate, collective, this-worldly, and total salvation.” The Nation of Islam, An American Millenarian Movement (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1988).

10. Pattie X, “Original Black Woman Is Proud of Natural Heritage,” Muhammad Speaks, July 28, 1967.

11. Muhammad, How to Eat to Live, Book No. 1, 22.

12. Sonsyrea Tate [Montgomery], Little X: Growing Up in the Nation of Islam (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), 120.

13. Interview with Sonsyrea Tate Montgomery, telephone, September 19, 2010.

14. Ilyasah Shabazz, Growing Up X (New York: One World/Ballantine, 2003), 44.

15. Muhammad, How to Eat to Live, Book No. 1, 32.

16. R. Marie Griffith, Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

17. Interview with Sonsyrea Tate Montgomery.

18. Women in the Nation did circulate some recipes that nodded toward Muslim tradition, such as kebabs or carrot halwa. But the bulk of the recipes, including the most popular dishes, closely resembled the foods their female ancestors had prepared.

19. Interview with Sonsyrea Tate Montgomery; Tate, Little X, 15–21.

20. Reda Faard Khalifah, The Muslim Recipe Book: Recipes for Muslim Girls Training & General Civilization Class (MGT/GCC) of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad (Charlotte: United Brothers Communication Systems, 1995), 6–7.

21. Craig Claiborne, “Cooking with Soul,” New York Times Magazine, November 3, 1968, 109; Doris Witt, Black Hunger: Food and the Politics of U.S. Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 80–82.

22. Frederick Douglass Opie, Hog & Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 130–31.

23. Khalifah, The Muslim Recipe Book, 31, 34.

24. Pearl Bowser and Joan Eckstein, A Pinch of Soul (New York: Avon, 1970), 201.

25. Ibid., 197–98.

26. Khalifah, The Muslim Recipe Book, 30.

27. Muhammad, How to Eat to Live, Book No. 1, 64–65.

28. Bowser and Eckstein, A Pinch of Soul, 80; Khalifah, The Muslim Recipe Book, 14.

29. Katharine Shilcutt, “Bean Pie, My Brother?” December 29, 2010, http://blogs.houstonpress.com/eating/2010/12/bean_pie_my_brother.php.

30. Richard Goldstein, “Jabir Herbert Muhammad, Who Managed Muhammad Ali, Dies at 79,” New York Times, August 27, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/28/sports/othersports/28muhammad.html. For recipes, see Lana Shabazz, Cooking for the Champ (New York: Jones-McMillon, 1979).

31. For some members, food storage was a crucial component of preparing for Armaggedon, when stores would be needed during the chaos that would precede Christ’s Second Coming. Heber J. Grant, Gospel Standards: Selections from the Sermons and Writings of Heber J. Grant, Seventh President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1998), 111; Marion G. Romney, “Living Welfare Principles—Ensign Nov. 1981,” http://lds.org/ensign/1981/11/living-welfare-principles?lang=eng; and Garth L. Mangum, The Mormons’ War on Poverty: A History of LDS Welfare, 1830–1990, (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1993).

32. Judith Dushku, Saints Well-Seasoned: Musings on How Food Nourishes Us—Body, Heart, and Soul (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1998), 72.

33. Ibid., 73–74.

34. Funeral potatoes were not known as such until the 1980s, but the recipe, calling for potatoes, cheese, sour cream, onion, and cream of mushroom soup, was in circulation before then.

35. The book’s preface reinforces this fact: “Many of Winnifred’s dishes start right on the Bing cherry tree, peach trees, raspberry bushes, or tomato or zucchini plants in the Jardine home garden.” Winnifred C. Jardine, Mormon Country Cooking (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1980), 9.

36. Ibid., 15.

37. Ibid., 7.

38. Mormon Country Cooking, 65.

39. Ibid., 93.

40. The Relief Society had a long tradition of storing wheat for use in emergency. Brigham Young encouraged Mormons to store wheat against famine since they first put down roots in Utah. When Young gave up on the men following his orders, he put women in charge of this task, which they pursued from 1877 to 1941. Because of this history, wheat is prominent on the Relief Society emblem. Jessie L. Embry, “Relief Society Grain Storage Program, 1876–1940,” Master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 1974; and E. Cecil McGavin, “Grain Storage Among the Latter-day Saints,” The Improvement Era, March 1941.

41. Mormon Country Cooking, 39.

42. Ibid., 209.

43. Doctrine and Covenants 89:11: “Every herb in the season thereof, and every fruit in the season thereof; all these to be used with prudence and thanksgiving.”

44. Doctrine and Covenants 89:12 12: “Yea, flesh also of beasts and of the fowls of the air, I, the Lord, have ordained for the use of man with thanksgiving; nevertheless they are to be used sparingly.”

RECOMMENDED READING

Bowman, Matthew. The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith. New York: Random House, 2012.

Curtis, Edward E., IV. Black Muslim Religion in the Nation of Islam, 1960–1975. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Derr, Jill Mulvay, Janath Russell Cannon, and Maureen Ursenbach Beecher. Women of Covenant: The Story of Relief Society. Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1992.

Tate, Sonsyrea. Little X: Growing Up in the Nation of Islam. San Francisco: Harper-SanFrancisco, 1997.