Title: This Is the Plate: Utah Food Traditions
Author: Carol A. Edison, Eric A. Eliason, and Lynne S. McNeill
Publisher: The University of Utah Press
Genre: History, Religious Studies, Folklore Studies
Year Published: 2020
Number of Pages: 379
Binding: Large paperback
ISBN: 9781607817406
Price: $34.95
Reviewed by Christopher Carroll Smith for the Association for Mormon Letters
This Is the Plate: Utah Food Traditions offers a delicious buffet of scholarly work on Utah foodways. Thanks to some skillful design work and a publication grant from Brigham Young University’s Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, the book is as remarkable for its plating as for its flavors. Scores of full-color illustrations adorn its glossy pages, and gelatin-green page borders make for an attractive layout. Fifty-seven recipes invite hands-on learners to explore Utah foodways by trying them out at home.
The first-ever book-length treatment of Utah foodways, This Is the Plate boasts seventy-four chapters on subjects such as food law, food history, Mormon foodways, counterculture foodways, ethnic and immigrant foodways, and local specialties. The predominant disciplinary lens is folkloristic, but the collection also boasts some excellent historical writing and personal narrative. The contributor roster boasts nearly twice as many women (thirty-three) as men (eighteen), including several Asian Americans and a Shoshone woman. Chapters are of uneven quality, with a few hardly warranting publication, but the editors ensured that the most important topics received thorough coverage and that some ethnic voices were represented in discussion of ethnic foods.
I was pleased, for instance, to find indigenous foodways covered in several chapters, including a superb summary of native horticulture and resource management practices by Danielle Elise Christensen that was one of the standout chapters in the book. Christensen puts pioneer traditions into perspective and turns stereotypes on their heads. Pre-pioneer Utah was no wasteland, and its native peoples were no primitives.
Whereas pioneers experienced cricket swarms as plagues, indigenous peoples used them as a food source. In addition to hunting and gathering, Utah’s indigenous peoples used sophisticated agricultural techniques including “irrigation, terracing, crop rotation, installment of windbreaks, and stewardship of wild plants.” To survive their first few hard winters, hungry pioneers devoured native plants that indigenous people had carefully cultivated. Livestock uprooted the lily bulbs and devastated native grasses, and Mormon farmers fenced off food and water sources that native peoples depended on. Eventually, indigenous people were confined to reservation lands that were too small to support the migratory lifestyles of their ancestral populations (96-101).
Another set of standout chapters look at alcohol production and consumption in Utah. Contrary to the popular misconception that Utah is a “dry” state, Lynne S. McNeill argues that Utah’s liquor laws are of only middling restrictiveness. The state’s reputation stems more from the weirdness and “perceived illogic” of liquor laws than from their restrictiveness. For instance, restaurant-goers can’t buy an alcoholic beverage without also buying food, and restaurant bartenders couldn’t mix drinks in front of customers until 2017. Of course, sanctions against drinking don’t begin and end with the law, and informal cultural behaviors contribute to Utah’s “dry” stereotype as well. The restaurant manager who chewed a customer out for ordering a mimosa before noon isn’t doing the state’s reputation any favors in the eyes of non-Mormon visitors (17-23).
Modern Mormon teetotaling has contributed to a lively counterculture drinking culture. “Many ex-Mormons see their first alcoholic drinks as a serious rite of passage,” and non-Mormons eschew Pioneer Day celebrations in favor of “Pie and Beer Day.” Wasatch Brewery’s “Polygamy Porter” (“Why have just one?”) is only its most famous satirical beer label; other offerings include an Imperial Stout called “Outer Darkness” and a pale ale called “Live and Let Live.” The latter’s label admits that “this beer is not for everyone,” but promises that it “is not a threat to traditional beers” and that “we will not force it on those who prefer more traditional brew styles.” Some may disapprove of the brewery’s business model, but it’s hard to fault its sense of humor (23-24).
If alcoholic beverages today are mostly a symbol of non-Mormon culture, it has not always been so. Latter-day Saints in the nineteenth century occasionally deprecated drinking, but they did not regard the Word of Wisdom as a commandment, as they do today. In the 1860s Brigham Young sent a mission to St. George in Southern Utah to establish wineries there to supply wine for medicine and the sacrament. Some of these Mormon vintners also opened distilleries (311-12). Utah Territory developed a proprietary whiskey called the Valley Tan by 1872, and in 1873 the territorial legislature granted Brigham Young the exclusive right to make and distribute hard liquor. In the 1870s Utah had some of the largest breweries in the American West (17-20).
Of course, This Is the Plate isn’t all booze and Native Americans. It covers most of the topics you’d expect, from green Jell-O and Postum to gardening and Mormon food storage. On these subjects, there are plenty of surprises to be had. For instance, the popular association of Utah with green Jell-O and fry sauce is a surprisingly recent development, popularized at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, and Postum is a Seventh-day Adventist, not a Mormon, invention (27-28, 37-38, 267-68).
Telling themes that emerge from the essays include Utahns’ fondness for sugar (perhaps as a self-medicating alternative to drugs, booze, and caffeine), and the tension and interplay between popular and corporate culture. Utah foodways are continually commodified and decommodified in a virtuous cycle as businesses borrow from people and people borrow from businesses (5, 9). Rare gaps in the topical coverage include Diet Coke, A-1 Steak Sauce, and Mormon/Brigham Tea, none of which receive their own chapters.
I’ve offered enough samplers, so it’s time to conclude with a hearty recommendation. At $34.95, this beautiful, well-edited, first-of-its-kind collection is a steal. Not the kind of steal that will get you sued for copyright infringement by Utah Fresh-Mex chain Café Rio, as competitor Costa Vida was in 2005 (355). This is the okay kind of a steal, like when you cook “Café Rio Copycat Pork” for non-commercial purposes at home with the grandkids, using the provided recipe (356).