By Harley Rogers
The Margaret Chase Smith Recipes Research Collaborative is an interdisciplinary group of faculty, students, and staff at the University of Maine. Members represent a wide range of disciplines including history, sociology, folklore, anthropology, public policy, food science, and business. Senator Smith was a trailblazer, passionate about bringing people together through civil discourse, often over a home-cooked meal. She was a proud homemaker throughout her thirty-three years in office, and she maintained an extensive recipe collection, using recipes from her collection to entertain fellow policymakers in Washington and at home in Maine. The collaborative formed to support students and faculty interested in issues of food, recipes, politics, history, and their intersections.
This post is part of a series of student research projects exploring a recipe from Smith’s collection from an Honors tutorial taught by Dr. Rachel Snell in Spring 2019. Combined the students’ insights provide a new window into Sen. Smith’s private and public persona as well as the cultural, social, and scientific context of her lifetime.
Introduction
Maine has a rich history of prominent female politicians. One of the most significant in the twentieth century was Margaret Chase Smith. Sen. Smith took her late husband’s position in the U.S. House of Representatives after his untimely death in 1940 and was then reelected through her own campaign. She served in the House of Representatives for three more terms before successfully running for a spot in the U.S. Senate, thus making her the first woman to serve in both chambers of Congress, and the first female senator to represent Maine. She later ran in the 1964 Republican presidential primary, becoming the first woman to run for president in a major political party. She served until losing reelection to the Senate in 1972 and went on to work as a visiting professor until retiring to her home in Skowhegan, Maine. Research on Sen. Smith has focused on her political life. However, what about her at home or as a woman in the twentieth century? Like many women then and still today, she had a personal recipe collection, filled with recipes of foods for sharing, for convenience, for special occasions, and a few odd recipes.
Recipe Analysis: Blueberry Supreme
As a member of the Margaret Chase Smith Recipe Research Collaborative (MCSRRC), I’ve worked closely with Sen. Smith’s recipes and adapted several. For this recipe analysis, I sought a new challenge. I’ll admit I am partial to dessert recipes, and as a native Mainer myself, I’m especially inclined to the ones with blueberries. Some of my favorite memories of summer in Maine take place in the blueberry fields behind my childhood home. My family and I would fill 5-gallon buckets of the berries and head back home to freeze them. For the rest of the year, we would enjoy blueberry pancakes, muffins, occasionally a blueberry pie, and my personal favorite, a bowl of frozen blueberries with milk and sugar. Sen. Smith potentially shared my proclivity for blueberry desserts: her recipes for blueberry muffins and blueberry cake were her standard response to recipe requests. Looking through the recipes, a card labeled “Blueberry Supreme” in the casserole section caught my eye. The recipe stood out not only because of the blueberries, but its location amongst recipes for hominy and almond casserole and a mushroom onion casserole. This was not a cooked casserole, nor was it filled with vegetables. To my delight, this recipe was very much a dessert.
The recipe card describes a four-layer blueberry casserole. Starting with a base of ground up vanilla wafers, next a cream layer, then the blueberry filling, topped with whip cream and pecans. The recipe seemed simple enough until I read the recipe more carefully and realize the cream layer was composed of butter, sugar, and two raw eggs. When I called my grandmother about the recipe, she dismissed the concerns of eating raw egg and the chance of salmonella, as Sen. Smith probably did as well. When replicating this recipe today, there are concerns over the use and consumption of raw eggs in one of the layers to the casserole. In order to limit the possibility of salmonella, it is recommended to use farm fresh eggs, and for added reassurance pasteurize the eggs for raw consumption. While the FDA still warns against any raw egg consumption, it provides methods of heating eggs still in the shell to 63 degrees Celsius in order to eliminate bacteria that could be in the egg.[1]This greatly lowers the chance of contamination and makes the dish as safe as possible to eat, while still following the recipe.
Conclusion
The Blueberry Supreme was a complete hit! The members of the MCSRRC enjoyed the dessert during a collaborative meeting in mid-April. The layers came together to create a light and sweet dish to enjoy with friends and family. When I noticed Sen. Smith never distributed this recipe, as she did with her blueberry muffin and blueberry cake recipes, I wondered if she had ever made it. As women increasingly left the home, quick and easy meals had to become staples in order for women to do both domestic and public responsibilities. As a result, recipes increasingly included processed foods to shorten preparation times.
Smith’s collection includes many such recipes, including the Blueberry Supreme recipe, which relies on vanilla wafers as a crust, premade pie filling, and whipped cream to top it off. This recipe is a perfect demonstration of how working women managed careers while also tending to their domestic responsibilities. While Sen. Smith may not have made this recipe herself, the chances of it having actually been made are quite high because of the simplicity and reliance on premade foods in the recipe. Despite living in Maine, the recipe calls for blueberry filling from a can. This is particularly interesting because all her other recipes call for fresh blueberries, which in this case would have significantly increased the preparation time.
This analysis demonstrates how this recipe would have been financially achievable and could have easily fit within the senator’s life. With Sen. Smith’s busy schedule, a dish like this one, which could be made a day or two in advance and served to a large group, could have fit into her lifestyle. I’d like to imagine Sen. Smith serving the dish to government dignitaries on a beautiful spring afternoon at her home in Skowhegan. While this may not have been the case, it certainly fits her love of blueberries and desire for recipes that fit her busy schedule.
Harley Rogers is a fourth-year Political Science major with minors in Leadership Studies and History and member of the Honors Collegeat the University of Maine. Her Honors thesis, titled, “Female Political Campaigns: Just the Right Amount of Femininity,” compares media coverage of Smith and Hillary Clinton during their presidential runs.
[1]Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. “Safety of Eggs and Menu and Deli Items Made From Raw Shell Eggs.” Assuring the Safety of Eggs and Menu and Deli Items Made From Raw, Shell Eggs.