American tea-service and the home economics schools?

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mbanu
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Sat Nov 28, 2020 3:18 pm

I wasn't quite sure whether to put this in general or groups, but I figured since I am describing a particular tea sub-culture it might be best here.

Does anyone know anything about how American tea-service and home economics are connected? I came to the conclusion that they must be while trying to figure out the origin of an odd dish that was shared by both American Bed & Breakfasts, American "church tea" culture, the Red Hatters, the Junior League, and the recipe books of older American tearooms like the Wenham Tea House, something called an "Ambrosia Salad", which depending on who you ask is a mixture of marshmallows and mayonnaise or oranges and coconut cream, or Cool-Whip and pineapples, or perhaps all of those jumbled together. :)

The common thread was the connection to home economics classes, where this dish was often used as an example, apparently, and then it being preyed on by various magazine advertisers over the years to add or replace ingredients with branded products.

(The original 19th century version seems to have been fresh cut oranges topped with sugar and freshly grated coconut, and then allowed to sit so that the coconut softened in the residual juices and sweetened in the sugar, making a sort of orange cream of coconut fruit dessert, as far as I can gather, and was just called Ambrosia. Then dried coconut rehydrated in milk or cream replaced the fresh in some places, and the new canned pineapple out of Hawaii was added to the mix, and the marshmallow manufacturers tried to insert themselves as a replacement for both the sugar and coconut, only partially succeeding, and leading to various recipes that include both coconut and marshmallow, marshmallow and alternate nuts like pecans, or all of them together. The mayonnaise variant seemed to develop after the name changed from Ambrosia to "Ambrosia Salad", possibly through another of those advertiser battles vs. cream, sour cream, and later Cool-Whip to be the new dressing. :) )

Was learning how to serve tea a common part of these classes? How were these courses developed? I know that if tea was given any attention at all, it would only have been one part of a larger package, but I doubt that America had it's own version of the tea ceremony masters who kept the lights on teaching young ladies how to make tea at Japanese finishing schools where they were also learning about incense and dance, but I could be wrong there. The closest I can think of is Dorothea Johnson of the Protocol School of Washington, who became famous for her presence at diplomatic teas.

Any advice here other than a few days spent browsing Google Books?
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mbanu
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Sat Nov 28, 2020 4:10 pm

And then there's these:


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mbanu
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Sun Nov 29, 2020 10:45 am

Surprisingly little information online about Marion Moss Burbank, the technical adviser for these videos. She was an instructor at Los Angeles City College and the first chairman of their Home Economics department. What was her role in this style of tea-service? Was she a popularizer, or the creator of original ideas? She graduated from Iowa State University in 1919 with a degree in Home Economics -- did she develop her understanding of American tea-service here? Supposedly its home economics school dates back to 1871, when the field was called "Domestic Science".

Given the time-frame, there is a good chance that she learned tea-service using green and oolong teas, popular during that era in America but thoroughly old-fashioned in 1946, tricky to get due to postwar chaos in Japan and Taiwan, and soon to be unavailable from China due to trade embargo...
karma
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Mon Nov 30, 2020 2:14 am

I have nothing to add other than appreciation for this post, and now I’m curious too.
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mbanu
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Wed Dec 02, 2020 9:01 pm

It looks like maybe I was mistaken in seeing the home economics example recipes and the advertiser modifications as being things that happened at separate times, as it looks like by the 1920s at least the two were so jumbled together that it would be hard to separate the two.

For instance, the Ambrosia recipe and marshmallow variant were promoted as vehicles for selling Sunkist brand oranges, which they did by sending out Sunkist Bulletin "Food Lessons" and publishing books like their 1924 "Sunkist Recipes for every day".

I'm not having much luck understanding the relationship, however. Did tea with lemon become popularized due to pressure from companies like Sunkist, or was it more that they amplified existing trends in tea instruction?
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mbanu
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Wed Dec 02, 2020 9:07 pm

There were only two tea recipes in the 1924 book, for instance. The afternoon tea recipe is interesting because it is an almost-but-not-quite Constant Comment.
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Bok
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Wed Dec 02, 2020 9:18 pm

mbanu wrote:
Wed Dec 02, 2020 9:01 pm
I'm not having much luck understanding the relationship, however. Did tea with lemon become popularized due to pressure from companies like Sunkist, or was it more that they amplified existing trends in tea instruction?
I think it's more to do with the low quality of the tea. Adding lemon or milk made it palatable... For example, I can't stomach(literally) a cuppa of PG tipps or Yorkshire, without adding milk and sugar. It's just not drinkable...
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Sun Dec 06, 2020 2:30 am

A few things to add as an American southerner, and I don’t know whether or not this will help you at all:

1) Ambrosia was served at every family get together or church function. I never saw the mayonnaise variation but the coconut-mandarin-marshmallow version was very common. This dish obviously comes from the convenience-minded cooking movement that required little more than dumping various finished commercial products into a casserole dish and calling it done. I think a lot of home ec classes focused on these “just dump it” meals, especially in the 1950s.

2) I never witnessed hot tea served at family gatherings or church functions. It was always coffee or iced tea. The iced tea (contentiously!) would be sweetened or unsweetened. The closer you get to former slave regions the more likely iced tea will be sweetened as slaves were historically used on sugarcane plantations, making sugar historically abundant.

3) It’s oppressively hot and humid in the south so iced tea with lemon helps with the heat just as a gin & tonic does. Both are iced, bitter, and with a bit of citrus.

While I do not like ambrosia I drink a lot of unsweetened iced tea in the summer, with or without lemon. Admittedly, it’s terrible tea but it does help with the heat.
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mbanu
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Tue Dec 15, 2020 11:20 am

Bok wrote:
Wed Dec 02, 2020 9:18 pm
mbanu wrote:
Wed Dec 02, 2020 9:01 pm
I'm not having much luck understanding the relationship, however. Did tea with lemon become popularized due to pressure from companies like Sunkist, or was it more that they amplified existing trends in tea instruction?
I think it's more to do with the low quality of the tea. Adding lemon or milk made it palatable... For example, I can't stomach(literally) a cuppa of PG tipps or Yorkshire, without adding milk and sugar. It's just not drinkable...
One thing it took me a bit to adjust to is that there is Assamica and then there is Assamica. Assam tea proper (or Assam-copy East African tea, which is the main ingredient in tea like PG Tips or Yorkshire) is essentially a condiment; it is designed for drinking with milk and as you've found out can cause stomach trouble if someone drinks it plain. Ceylon tea, which is the sort popular in the U.S., is a sort of Assamica but one that normally can't handle milk well, however, which can make it a non-intuitive tea to folks not used to it, as it needs dairy but can't take dairy.

The way this is normally worked around is by having the tea with food that contains dairy, such as all those cream cheese sandwiches, or the sour cream Ambrosia. I think that other countries have done it this way as well, such as with Turkish tea which is often served with something that has cheese or strained yogurt in it.
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mbanu
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Tue Dec 15, 2020 11:26 am

Baisao wrote:
Sun Dec 06, 2020 2:30 am
A few things to add as an American southerner, and I don’t know whether or not this will help you at all:

1) Ambrosia was served at every family get together or church function. I never saw the mayonnaise variation but the coconut-mandarin-marshmallow version was very common. This dish obviously comes from the convenience-minded cooking movement that required little more than dumping various finished commercial products into a casserole dish and calling it done. I think a lot of home ec classes focused on these “just dump it” meals, especially in the 1950s.

2) I never witnessed hot tea served at family gatherings or church functions. It was always coffee or iced tea. The iced tea (contentiously!) would be sweetened or unsweetened. The closer you get to former slave regions the more likely iced tea will be sweetened as slaves were historically used on sugarcane plantations, making sugar historically abundant.

3) It’s oppressively hot and humid in the south so iced tea with lemon helps with the heat just as a gin & tonic does. Both are iced, bitter, and with a bit of citrus.

While I do not like ambrosia I drink a lot of unsweetened iced tea in the summer, with or without lemon. Admittedly, it’s terrible tea but it does help with the heat.
Thank you very much! I think it does help, as often there are things about a living tea-culture that are hard to see when you aren't around it all the time. This is the near-sighted and far-sighted of understanding tea-culture -- people who are immersed in it have a deep view, but often take it for granted because it is so common-place where they are. Some things are hard to explain when they are done so regularly, seem so unexciting or unremarkable, it is hard to separate them from common sense. People who are far from a tea-culture can easily spot these things as being distinctive, but the details are hazy.
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Baisao
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Tue Dec 15, 2020 1:44 pm

Well said, @mbanu. I'm happy it helped.
karma
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Tue Dec 15, 2020 4:10 pm

To add to talking about iced tea with lemon, the lemon is for aiding the thirst quenching and because it tastes good, not necessarily related to the actual quality of the tea. On the occasion I've have had high quality iced tea, lemon is still the appropriate garnish.
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mbanu
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Tue Jan 05, 2021 1:10 pm

I was surprised to find that these schools are still around today, and occasionally produce tea-research. This might not be so obvious, as many colleges have changed their name from "home economics" to "human ecology". However, there no longer seems to be a mechanism for popularizing that research, so in practice it blends together with the market research done by grocers. (An example might be Jeehyun Lee's doctoral thesis on consumer acceptance of green tea based on storage and brewing parameters, which was done at the Kansas State College of Human Ecology in 2009: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/5165701.pdf)


This name change is a bit similar to the earlier name change from "domestic science" to "home economics" -- supposedly these were all originally competing schools of thought; during the Lake Placid Conferences of the late 19th century, it was hashed out that technically "home economics" would describe the field on a collegiate level, while "domestic science" would describe it on a secondary school level, but over time it was all unified under the single term. :) Human ecology developed as a renaming option in the 60s after home economics started receiving criticism for its role in perpetuating negative gender stereotypes.
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Tue Jan 05, 2021 2:50 pm

mbanu wrote:
Tue Jan 05, 2021 1:10 pm
...... Human ecology developed as a renaming option in the 60s after home economics started receiving criticism for its role in perpetuating negative gender stereotypes.
For me, not a matter of perception, rather, a matter of control. Situations & people are often discouraging people from feeling free to take any place in society: Roles being designated, some for males; some for females.... worse before, still prevalent today.

In the 60s in Phillipsburg, New Jersey's high school, girls were not allowed into shop classes that prepared students for jobs in the town's factories or to be car mechanics. Boys were not allowed into home economics classes which prepared students to do housework. Obviously, this policy was not just about perception but about programming people to be in roles assigned by their gender.

In the Philippines this is not only something done at secondary school but also in universities. In the early 90s an American anthropologist's research for his doctorate centered around how the structure of education there works to push Filipinos into jobs abroad. These overseas' workers are sending $ home; are paying fees to the government's Overseas Employment Agency (which is supposed to protect Filipino workers but is only exploitative & extortionate via its official fees & unofficial bribes); are paying huge fees to the private employment agencies (which officially are limited to a reasonable fee that is 10% of what really gets paid by workers & they need much of that $ for bribes); &, the workers supply their families with televisions etc. every time they come home when they are not charged huge custom taxes. People are the greatest export of the Philippines. They keep the country from being a total disaster.

A college education to be a maid in Hong Kong or Singapore or Canada? Yes. Don't call them maids though, say, "domestic worker". Nurses do work as nurses; merchant marines as proper sailors: their educations' are necessary to perform their duties. However, the anthropologist believed that the home economics was a matter of grooming, preparing women psychologically to accept subservient roles. When he applied for a visa extension & casually revealed why he wanted it, the anthropologist was thrown out of the Philippines & not allowed back in.
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mbanu
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Tue Jan 05, 2021 3:34 pm

Ethan Kurland wrote:
Tue Jan 05, 2021 2:50 pm
mbanu wrote:
Tue Jan 05, 2021 1:10 pm
...... Human ecology developed as a renaming option in the 60s after home economics started receiving criticism for its role in perpetuating negative gender stereotypes.
A college education to be a maid in Hong Kong or Singapore or Canada? Yes. Don't call them maids though, say, "domestic worker". Nurses do work as nurses; merchant marines as proper sailors: their educations' are necessary to perform their duties. However, the anthropologist believed that the home economics was a matter of grooming, preparing women psychologically to accept subservient roles. When he applied for a visa extension & casually revealed why he wanted it, the anthropologist was thrown out of the Philippines & not allowed back in.
The closest parallel I can think of is the Japanese tea-ceremony schools, where the reason tea-masters were able to focus on tea was because of the Japanese women who were sent to them as part of finishing school training. As it was subsidized by this practice, its fate became intertwined with it. I think the difference with the American version is the connection to brands and the regulatory capture of the schools; it would be sort of like if the Japanese tea ceremony schools had been sponsored by and reliant on particular pottery-makers and tea producers who shaped the curriculum. This was a part of the criticism of the American home economics schools, I think, that women were being lead into a lifestyle for the benefit of Crisco shortening, Lipton tea, Knox gelatin, and Windex glass cleaner rather than being given educational tools to improve their well-being.
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