Hot Dogs, Heroism, and Burgoo: Memorial Day Foods History and Surprising Stories

Hello, Sylvia.

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It's Memorial Day weekend and my gosh, there's so much food and tradition around the

holidays and yes, celebration of our veterans over the years too.

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Well, you know, there's like three things that happen out of Memorial Day and why it kind

of converges to be this like super holiday that we never really thought of except as the

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gateway to summer, right?

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But the sacrifice of our soldiers kicked this off after the Civil War.

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ah Then it soon became and over time became a holiday for observation of the passing of

our loved ones, not necessarily just veterans.

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Okay.

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I think that our transition, because we've been a little banter in the beginning, a little

bit sort of connection, and then we go into it.

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um But this time you just went right into it.

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So let's sort of back up a little bit and.

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If that's all right.

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Okay, because I just heard it's like, you know, it's like, it's like, started this and

you're like, yeah, like, here's interesting, like, just boom.

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Let's Hey, Nancy, it's good to see you again, kind of like, or whatever.

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um Just to soften it up a little bit in the beginning.

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All right, let's one, two.

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Hello, Sylvia, happy Memorial Day weekend.

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Gosh, I love this weekend.

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It's the beginning of summer and yes, lots of food tradition, but it is the celebration of

our veterans and at least memorial or memorializing our veterans, right?

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Sure, and it's a kickoff to our summer.

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Yes, such a great time, such a great time.

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School's out, time to hit the road, all kinds of reasons that we celebrate Memorial Day.

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Well, absolutely.

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And it's start of vacation time.

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But let's go back to the food traditions because there's so much that's going on during

this time.

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And well, you've got a whole lot of research that you've done on Memorial Day foods that

are really interesting, a lot of which I didn't know.

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Sure, sure.

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But I think we start with what it originally was.

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It was Decoration Day.

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And that was when you put flowers on the graves and you just ate a lot.

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I went to my grandmother's house and we would celebrate Decoration Day and we ate all the

good stuff.

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I just never knew a whole lot about what the good stuff is that we ate, know.

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Biscuits and gravy, fried chicken, potato salad, coleslaw, all have a history with

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wartime celebrations of a sacrifice and all of those things.

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And then, you know, decorating the graves, marching up the hillside and visiting the

ancestry grave sites.

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I mean, that was my tradition.

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I just never knew about all the food and what it meant.

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And when I was a kid, the parades were always big, of course, and Girl Scouts.

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I mean, you know I was a Girl Scout.

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So I was a goody two shoes, let's say.

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least, well, I made it look like I was a goody two shoes.

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But the Memorial Day parades were big in our community and we decorated the graves.

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So we'd all march down to the war memorial areas uh or statues and we placed the flowers

on the graves during that time.

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and then I'll go back for hot dogs and hamburgers and everything else that happened at

home.

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sure you have hot dogs, burgers, grilling out, barbecue with ties even back to the

Revolutionary War.

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ah And you know, that was the only way to cook in the Revolutionary War was outside on an

open fire, not on a blackstone.

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ah And corn on the cob, apple pie, as American as you can get.

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But there's a lot of foods.

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Uh-huh.

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There are foods that come up.

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ah You know, some of the some of the things that happen, for instance, if you

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if you bring wars forward, beginning with the Civil War, that was really the beginning.

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And that was when it was said to be Decoration Day.

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And it was in 1971 that was made Memorial Day.

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And by that time, it evolved into celebrating the lives of loved ones passed on in

addition to wartime and just the whole idea of survival, resilience, renewal, all of those

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things.

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But some of the foods during the Civil War,

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Hard tack bread, as they called it, molar breaker, made of flour, water, and salt.

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But here was the deal.

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The foods in the Civil War, as you can imagine, and in World War I, World War II, had to

be very portable.

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You had to be able to carry them for a long time.

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So something made of flour, water, and salt was simple, right?

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Johnny cakes.

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I loved the idea of Johnny cakes.

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Ho cakes.

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And you know why they were named ho cakes?

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ask me, I'm afraid.

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Okay, now two theories.

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It was all about a hoe that you hoe in the garden and the flat surface of the hoe.

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No, not the other hoe, but the flat surface was what they oftentimes cooked Johnny cakes

on.

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Imagine that, that's all they had, right?

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So they would stick that in the fire.

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So that was how they became known as hoe cakes.

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But they're also known as

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journey cakes because they would go on long journeys with the soldiers, right?

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They didn't have the luxury of stopping along the way and cooking something new.

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uh And then you had, uh you know, the Johnny cakes were also a mispronunciation of Shawnee

cakes because the Indian tribe Shawnees, yeah, so anyway, there you go, down a rabbit

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hole.

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I want to go take a quick snap back because my dad talked about the heart attack in World

War II.

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And I guess they ate it when they were out in the field or on ships.

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He was in the Navy.

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But I do remember him talking about heart attacks.

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So that's kind of interesting.

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But I can't imagine that they would provide much nutrition.

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for our soldiers.

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Flour, water, and salt?

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Doesn't seem very good, does it?

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not sure they worried a lot about that.

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was the ease.

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mean, you know, the first celebration, the celebration at Arlington, the first celebration

of this holiday was right after in 1868 in Arlington Cemetery, right after the Civil War,

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1868.

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And they celebrated and they put flowers on 20,000 graves.

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And that's why Civil War is such a pivotal time

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in US history because so much happened there.

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But on a lighter note though, uh here's a quick recipe for a Johnny cake.

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right, plain cornmeal, cornmeal flour if you want it, baking powder, salt, and eggs as a

binder.

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And Johnny cakes, again, were an easy thing to put together in the celebration of corn.

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because corn has figured so much into all of the things that we do with food, right?

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Right.

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So I've got a question for you.

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I have tried to make cornbread in the past over the years, and you get the little like

boxes that you get in the store and it says, you know, cornbread, but it doesn't seem to

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be that the cornmeal is really that rich sort of granular coarse kind of cornmeal.

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It's got a lot of flour in it.

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Have you seen that down where you are in the South?

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It all depends.

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You know, a lot of people really put a lot of flour into it too, because it stretches out.

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And it's harder to cook cornmeal with just pure cornmeal because it is so granular.

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I prefer it, and that means your cornbread falls apart a lot easier.

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I think flour is more fine and more of a binder with the eggs and such.

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But you can do it either way, like...

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Johnny cakes are really thin things, know, they're like pancakes almost.

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didn't know that.

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Okay, sort of like a corn muffin top where you take the top off.

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Hmm.

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So I'm learning something about corn muffins and Johnny cakes.

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Oh, yummy fried, you know, in bacon grease.

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I don't know.

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I don't know if the soldiers had that luxury.

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I don't know if they had that luxury.

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But um so anyway, that was Civil War and World War One.

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We came forward right a little bit.

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And we ought to mention pork and beans.

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Right.

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not, we're not talking franken beans.

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We're talking pork and beans.

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It's very different.

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Yeah, yeah, pork and beans.

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I think you did a little bit of research on pork and beans, didn't you?

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They were also something that was pretty well known and beans were something you could

take with you ah on, you know, in a war time.

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dry-brained beans were easy to take versus what we know in sort of the Campbell's or

whatever it is, the specialty beans that you get in the can.

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So you didn't do that.

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can't imagine that they would.

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Well, first of all, they probably didn't can them.

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They jarred them.

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And I can't imagine taking those into the field, into the battlefield with a chef.

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But in any case, you have the dry beans, right?

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All you need is add water and let them soak for a while and cook them up.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it was simple.

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World War I, I like this, the whole idea of stews, where you could just put anything in a

stew.

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And one of the most popular things was a bonzo, bonza, zoo, B-O-N-Z-A stew.

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It was a catchall stew.

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And I think as we look around, Nancy, stews were popular during times, particularly in

times where you had to stretch food out.

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and you had to cook it in an open pot.

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know, bonza is an Australian slang term for excellent.

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It was an excellent stew.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

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for excellence, but the Australians are on the other side of the world, so they do things

a little upside down here from the States.

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Sorry if you're from Australia, I didn't mean that to be, you know, well, we'll just let

it go there before I dig a deeper hole into the fire pit.

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suspect that stews in many different cultures are called many different things, but they

all were kind of the same thing born of an era where you had to stretch meat particularly,

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like in Kentucky, a delicacy now at the racetrack is like at the Derby and stuff is

burgoo, burgoo.

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And it is everything.

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Well, today it is, you know, today it's kind of one kind of meat.

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But at one time, the old saying went that if you had an open pot cooking burgoo under a

tree and a snake fell out of a limb and fell into the burgoo, it would just make it even

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tastier.

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So there you go.

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That's...

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There you go.

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And then...

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Now, are you ready?

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Yeah.

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Now, would you like to go back a little bit to more traditional foods before we move on?

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Because let's talk a little bit about watermelon and things like that that summer brings

on.

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Right?

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So watermelon, watermelon's kind of interesting, right?

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Did you know that watermelon, well, I think we all do that watermelon sparks the, or is

sort of this, I showed the sweetness in the beginning of the summer season for us.

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And it was actually a tradition that you ate watermelon during the civil war times because

it was a sweet treat that could be served to a large population or large breaded groups.

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So can you imagine, well, we did talk about this where people would go and watch the

battlefields and picnic and see all the events that are going on.

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it's not, I don't know.

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This is pretty gruesome.

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This is what I when you think about all the people that would go and watch the

slaughtering that were going on in the battlefields, I can't imagine that's entertainment.

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But you know, we do watch horror shows today on television.

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It's just, anyway, but back to watermelon.

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Do you know that we eat 800 million pounds of watermelon every Memorial Day weekend?

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Can you imagine the size of that watermelon?

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that's just me.

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What do the rest of the people eat?

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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I have never tasted burger.

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Not my thing, not my thing.

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But we also have unofficial Burger Day.

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That's a big deal.

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And hot dogs, all of those things and.

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Yeah.

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Well, wait a second.

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I've got another statistic.

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800 hot dogs are consumed per second on Memorial Day here in the States.

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I wonder if that includes the Nathan's hot dog eating contest, because most of them are

probably consumed there.

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Woo.

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um And it's the birth of barbecue season.

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And that makes sense.

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Because it's summer grilling season.

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But, you know, what 75 % of Americans fire up their grills on the weekend, one of the

biggest barbecue days and and it also goes back to the war times where you cooked

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outdoors.

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So I have a grill story.

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Can I share real quickly?

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Well, one Memorial Day weekend, we had some friends over and we hadn't opened our grill

all winter long.

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Now in the winter time up north, there's snow and there's ice and it all gets piled up on

the grill and you kind of leave it alone.

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there's that grill becomes a nice little house or place for critters to hide.

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So we opened up the grill, Bob's getting ready to throw some fire sticks in there and do

whatever he needs to do.

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And in there was a nest of baby mice in our grill.

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And Bob's like, well, just light the fire.

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like, was like, no, don't light the fire.

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No, he didn't.

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He didn't put the mice on fire, but it was kind of an interesting discovery.

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And at least the fire, once we got them out, did sort of clean out that mess that they

left.

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You don't expect to see a bunch of baby mice staring up at you when you're ready to open

up your grill on Memorial Day weekend.

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you know, those little critters are pretty interesting.

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I've had a couple of them staring up at me one day in the dog food.

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Anyway, but that's another story.

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That's another story, not about Memorial Day, but it certainly was disgusting.

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So there you go.

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My story, that's right.

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They're hungry like everybody else, right?

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um Well, you've got potato salad.

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It was popularized in America by German immigrants.

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it's interesting, soldiers returning from both World Wars brought home a love of the

various potato dishes and making potato salad.

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And you always hear about that, kind of a German influence.

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And so you do that, and coleslaw, and pies, specifically apple pie, of course.

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But we'll talk more about apple pies.

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on the 4th of July, because we have pie contests and all those things going on.

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Well, we haven't gotten there yet, right?

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We're still just cooking outdoors and getting ready to get out of town.

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But one of the places, yeah, I'll go ahead.

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a break.

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Let's take a break and we'll come back and we'll finish up with a whole lot more.

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Well, we'll call them Memorial Day food stories as well as little, well, as well as

traditions that are important, not only to our heads, but our hearts, but our stomachs

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too.

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So hang tight, we'll be right back.

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Well, we've got a lot more to cover Sylvia, don't we, on this whole Memorial Day tradition

and food and stories and well, it's all it's all delicious and yummy, I think.

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But there's also a reason for everything as well behind it, which is kind of interesting.

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Yeah, and of course, I kind of went down a rabbit hole with spam, because I've always,

guess one of the reasons spam is interesting to me is that my father, who is a veteran of

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World War Two, and a veteran of an extremely horrific depression era, very poor, and he

loved spam.

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And I remember those spam cans, I mean, you think about it, they kind of, you know, they

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They're making a comeback.

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I've seen ads about spam.

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But here's what happened for spam.

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During World War II, and the reason this is important is that people actually, Nancy,

grill spam on Memorial Day.

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I don't, and I never did.

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But apparently, spam burgers, for those who kind of remember back, and maybe we'll start a

trend here, right?

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because in World War II, this is all about the sacrifice that people did.

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So spam was a very common, the US Army spent, armed services spent like $150 million, and

at that time, that was probably a huge amount of money on spam because it was very

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portable.

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It was made up of pork shoulder, which was considered by many to be a waste product, and

ham blend, potato starch as a binder, salt, and sodium nitrate.

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Well, that sounds so nutritious, right?

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man.

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And so it kept going, it kept gaining in popularity and ah it was manufactured, it just

made Hormel into an overnight success, right?

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In 1937, it was marketed as a convenience food and that was again, kind of the beginning

of all of that.

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ah But this is, I love this, how it was named, because today's spam, most people know it

as that unwanted message.

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that you have a spam folder, right?

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Uh-huh.

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So there was a contest that the Hormel's held, and it was a name contest.

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Name this particular product.

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they, win $100, which again, was a big deal back then, right?

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And so, you won $100, and somebody said the word spam, which was a meaningless word.

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And,

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the rest is history, right?

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But the soldiers grew tired of it.

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They said the soldiers grew tired of it.

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Yeah.

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It was ham that didn't pass the physical, meatballs without basic training, but became a

symbol of American ingenuity and resilience.

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So there, more than you ever wanted to know about spam.

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And World War II.

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it's more like how much crud can you, oh I'll be polite, how much crud can you stick in a

can and sell it under a name that people like?

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I don't know, but I'm still not a fan of Spam.

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can do with that.

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Or that ham that's like in the fake shape of a ham.

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It's kind of like a triangle thing.

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My mom used to do that and make it look like a fake ham, but it's okay.

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So you've got some other things as well besides spam.

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I mean, we're talking about really the traditions and some of the hardships that took

place over the war times that impacted our families over the generations.

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And we don't see that as much today, although, well, with the price of eggs right now,

maybe I guess some people are talking about hardships and well, a lot of people are

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talking about food, food related hardships.

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And that's, that's pretty sad, but there are also some interesting things that took place

on how

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we took care of our soldiers related to food.

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And you've got one about kind of, well, it's just the opposite of Rosie the Riveter.

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It's women who worked in the fields.

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Tell me about that one, because I thought that was a fascinating story.

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Yeah, uh World War II not only was known for spam, but it was known for the Victory

Gardens and that's significant.

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Memorial Day is usually at least up north and I'm sure in your neck of the woods as well,

is when we really start these gardens going.

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Well, Victory Gardens sprung up all over.

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was a movement to supplement families during sacrifice and rationing.

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There was rationing during World War II.

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I didn't know that or I'd forgotten it or something.

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and you got stamps to spend on coffee and basic things and all of that.

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And the Women's Land Army of America was established in 1917 to train women as ag workers

to take the jobs men had previously held.

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We're now off to war, right?

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So it started in World War I.

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And I love this.

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I love this.

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I want to be one of these.

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A farmerette, that's what they were known as.

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Farmerettes.

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That sounds like a review uh in a nightclub, right?

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The Farmerettes.

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Farmerettes.

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can just, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

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I can see the high kicking, you know, all of that.

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uh And even Barnard College, upscale college trained middle to upper class women to

participate.

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Don't you love that though?

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The Farmerettes.

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I think digging in the dirt is good for all of us on many ways and just being able to see

vegetables grow in your backyard or your garden is, you know, it's so rewarding.

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We've just put in some raised garden beds in our backyard.

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So we're getting ready to plant and see what that's going to do.

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Like here in zone nine, we're in zone nine, we're up north, we're in a totally different

zone.

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So it's a little experimentation of hopefully what will work and what won't work.

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But we tried that at one point when we first got down here and planted cabbage.

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Well, the size of these cabbage, my god, it was like cabbage on steroids.

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So I guess if we plant cabbage, we'll be making Memorial Day coleslaw and see what

happens.

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But next, you never know.

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What?

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cabbage sauerkraut.

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It was called Liberty Cabbage in World War I.

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So there you go.

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There's something to make, red cabbage sauerkraut.

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uh

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right?

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And a little red and green cabbage to make it even more interesting.

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You know, people don't know too that um if you don't have time for a garden and you don't

have the kind of land you can do, you can do an herb garden inside.

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And people don't even think about that, you know, tiny little things.

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grow in plain water.

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So you can stick them in a little glass and see what happens and watch the sprouts or the

roots grow at the bottom.

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It's a great way to uh actually educate kids on how things grow when you can see the roots

growing in a glass of water, as opposed to just having them be invisible underneath the

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dirt or the earth.

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Yeah, yeah, we would grow our own uh mint, mint juleps, think mint juleps, at our

restaurant.

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And the mint would grow and it was so wonderful.

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Just take a sprig of that mint and just sniff it.

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I mean, it was so wonderful and delicious.

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I mean, wonderful.

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types of mint, but it is very invasive.

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So if you're going to grow it in your backyard, you've never done it.

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I recommend you grow it in a pot so it doesn't take over your entire garden, but it is

delicious.

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Regular mint to spearmint to peppermint.

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It's amazing the different flavors that you can get out of that one.

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That type of plant that is so good and so, so delicious, but it's finger, it's finger

looking good as they say, right?

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Mm-hmm.

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Mm-hmm.

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Hey, hey, and we should also, without ending without this factoid, is beer.

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People love their beer, and they love it on Memorial Day.

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And 60 million cases of beer?

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Wow.

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uh Ranks is one of the biggest beer holidays, second only to Independence Day, which is

the height of summer, right?

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Absolutely.

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There's nothing like a cold beer on a hot day, I have to tell you.

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And you know, there's this whole big, um this popularity that's happening in the beer

industry, beyond the microbeer breweries, which a lot of the microbreweries have been

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bought up, or I'd say a lot of them, but some of more successful ones have been bought up

by the big brands, which is kind of interesting.

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So your microbrewery that you loved years back actually might belong to, let's say,

Anheuser-Busch or some other company that you wouldn't necessarily know about.

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But the microbreweries in the backyards are doing some really delicious and interesting

things.

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And we have a lot of them down here in Florida.

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But the other thing that I find fascinating is the proliferation of non-alcoholic beers,

which have gotten really good.

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So if you're not into necessarily drinking a beer or better yet, if you're partying at

somebody else's house and you don't want to drink and drive, which I highly recommend you

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don't do, is

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Try out some of the non-alcoholic beers.

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They're really delicious.

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And you can still be part of the party and enjoy yourself.

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It always tastes good.

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Cold beer on a hot day.

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Just love it.

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And you know, and back to Memorial Day.

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Yeah, back to Memorial Day.

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You know, strangely enough, as a child, I was raised in Ohio.

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My parents were expats and we went to Ohio for opportunity.

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And it was the greatest holiday ever.

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That is even better than Christmas.

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I don't even remember much about my childhood, but I just remember Memorial Day.

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And surrounded by good food, good people.

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putting together flower arrangements, homemade stuff, you know, and uh I just remember

crossing the Ohio River and going into Kentucky and anticipating what was then known as

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Decoration Day, but it could have been called Eating Day too, because my grandmother was a

great cook.

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She had all the goodies there, know, homemade grape juice.

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I don't know where she got the grapes.

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I hear they grow wild.

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But that was it.

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Well, Memorial Day is a great day for so many people, but it's also a day of remembrance

and a day of sorrow of our but it's also a day remembrance and day of sorrow and

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remembering our fallen heroes and even those that have passed on and didn't fall in

wartime.

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If you are close to any kind of let's say uh if you were close to any of the veteran or if

you're close to any of the veteran or memorial.

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I'm going say this again.

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If you are close to any of the veterans cemeteries, I highly recommend that you go take a

walk and see what they do.

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It's absolutely spectacular.

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My mom and dad are both buried in Bushnell Memorial or Veterans Memorial Cemetery.

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And the amount of flags that are flying there is breathtaking on Memorial Day.

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So perhaps take a picnic and your lunch and maybe a red, white and blue dessert.

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and celebrate Memorial Day with friends, family, and a tribute and a hats off to our

veterans.

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I think that's it, Vesylvia.

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I agree.

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It's a great holiday.

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Great time for both celebrating and also remembering.

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Remembering what's important that we remember.

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Remembrance it's important both to our heads to our hearts and yes to our stomachs and

traditions Take care.

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We'll see you soon and we'll hear you soon Now before we go one more thing like you I'll

put this in the other end before we go We'd like to ask you to share this story before we

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go.

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We'd like to ask you to share and Subscribe to the show so that you don't miss any

episodes going forward.

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There's a lot more in store

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and each one provides a different story, a delicious treat, and yes, a lot of remembrance

and tradition.

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We'll see you soon.

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Take care.

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Bye-bye.