You can read a culture’s history in its cookbooks and in its supermarket circulars, on its menus and on its potato chip packages. That fascinating intersection of food and history is what’s on the menu in this column. Meet Betty Crocker (marketing creation) and Duncan Hines (real, but not much of much of a cook). Uncover Tennessee’s cave-dwelling moonshiners and Wisconsin’s margarine smugglers. And feast on banana coffee, the official “hotta meat pies” of Louisiana and the lost (and found) classic cocktail of Gold Rush San Francisco.
