Feel Good Friday: National Angel Food Cake Day

Tomorrow, October 10, the United States will celebrate the annual National Angel Food Cake Day. How did this amazing confection, which manages to delight despite containing no butter or oil, come into our world?

Historians agree that the angel food cake is a truly American food, born in the United States. Some question remains, however, about the exact circumstances. An impressive number of angel food cake pan molds, dating to the 1800s, have been found in Pennsylvania Dutch country, fueling speculation that this fat-free dessert was invented there. Others believe that the enormous amount of physical labor involved in creating the batter in a time without electricity means it likely originated in a state with legalized slave labor.

An 1839 recipe published in “The Kentucky Housewife” appears to be the missing link connecting the modern angel food cake to traditional sponge cakes. According to Joy of Cooking, angel food cakes are unique because they contain “no chemical leaveners such as baking powder or baking soda,” which means the “main sources of leavening . . . are air and steam, so the volume of air beaten into the egg whites is of utmost importance (75th Anniversary Edition, p 705).” This means angel food batter is extremely difficult to create by hand.

In 1856, we see the first patent for a rotary egg beater. The idea for a mechanical egg beater continued to be perfected over the ensuing decades, and the 1870 advent of the dual whisk egg beater set the stage for the explosion of the angel food cake in American home cooking. An angel food cake recipe that would be recognizable to modern readers was printed in the New York Times in 1880. We know it was a White House favorite of then-First Lady Lucy Webb Hayes.

While angel food cake has its roots in the adolescent days of our republic, its perfection and widespread popularity were only made possible through the mechanization of home cookery.

Further Exploration

• Read more about the history and nature of angel food cake at MarthaStewart.com

National Taco Day: Let's Taco 'Bout Tacos

How your Harris County Law librarians spend their weekends.

This Sunday, October 4, Americans will set aside their differences and join together in honor of the humble but mighty taco. We owe this annual celebration to a Texan, Roberto L. Gomez.

Gomez, a San Antonian, was a force in the 1960 “Viva Kennedy!” JFK campaign movement in the southwest. Once Kennedy was in office, Gomez used his connection to the President’s brand to promote various Mexican foods familiar to the San Antonio community, starting in 1961 when he sent President Kennedy a 48 pound tamale, guarded by a motorcade, as a birthday gift. Gomez continued to build on this idea, and in 1965 he sent President Johnson, a dedicated Texan, a 55 pound taco. Shortly thereafter, Gomez helped found the National Taco Council. In 1968, San Antonio’s Congressman Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez stood on the floor of Congress and called for the first National Taco Day to occur that year on May 3. After some hopping around, in 2004 National Taco Day landed on October 4.

Some have speculated that the taco, in its perfect simplicty, must have come to us from deep in the past. In reality, it’s a modern miracle; an early example of fast food, born of industrialization and the need for a quick lunch break.

The taco’s origins are in 18th century Mexico, where silver miners toiled in caves. To extract silver, they would wrap a bit of gun powder in a piece of paper, then slide that into a crack in the rock face. They referred to the gun powder and paper wrap as a “taco.”

Then at some point in the 19th century, a genius Mexican mind, now anonymous due to the fog of history, decided to mimic this by wrapping meat inside a tortilla, and called their culinary innovation a “miner’s taco.”

Fast forward to San Antonio in 1905, where historians have found the first recorded mention of this food taco in the United States. The taco, a true and authentic Mexican food, likely came to San Antonio with Mexican migrants coming for work. It was one of the exotic examples of Mexican cuisine served by so-called “Chili Queens,” whose pushcarts provided Americans with an opportunity to sample culinary life south of the border.

If you travel to Mexico, don’t expect to find a hardshell taco. The crunchy, u-shaped taco shell was an innovation of United States entrepreneur Glen Bell in the 1950s, as he came up with the idea to sell gringo-friendly “Mexican food” to the masses through a franchise business he called Taco Bell.

Another American franchise operation, Subway, made international news yesterday when an Irish court ruled its baked loaves are too confectionery to legally be called “bread.” Is there a similar legal defintion in the United States of a taco?

The answer is that while lawmakers here have yet to define what a taco is, a Worcester County Superior Court in Massachusetts ruled in 2006 that a taco is NOT a sandwich. Thus the taco continues to reign supreme in its own right.

Further Exploration:

• Watch Ruth Bader Ginsburg (may her memory be a blessing) discuss the nature of a sandwich with Stephen Colbert

In Celebration of Punctuation

A lot of the work we do as librarians is investigative in nature. Secretly, there are many detectives among us. We are a curious lot who always want to know more. We can also be a fussy bunch who like words and language and who insist on using the most appropriate reference sources to get. things. right. We appreciate the rules of grammar, spelling, syntax, and punctuation and enjoy discussing the merits of various style guides. Copy editing, at least for this librarian, holds great appeal (as does the lost art of sentence diagramming).

In honor of National Punctuation Day, which falls every year on September 24, we at the Harris County Law Library are paying tribute with a list of resources that highlight the important role of punctuation and grammar in the drafting and interpretation of the law. Few disciplines outside of law rely so heavily on the written word. Disputes over misplaced (or missing) commas, especially in contracts and legislation, and even in the United States Constitution, are just some of the persnickety punctuation problems to plague the process. See below for examples of apostrophe catastrophes, comma bombs, and more.

·         The Law and Punctuation — In Custodia Legis, Law Library of Congress

·         Punctuation and the Law — American Bar Journal

·         Punctuation and the Interpretation of Statutes — Connecticut Law Review

·         How A Comma Gave Americans The Right To Own Guns — Business Insider

·         The Commas That Cost Companies Millions — BBC

·         Commas in Court Cases — Online Writing Training, Mary Morel

·         The Most Expensive Typo in Legislative History — Priceonomics

·         The Supreme Court is Split on Apostrophes — ABA Journal

·         Supreme Court Splits…on Grammar Writing and Style — Scribes Journal of Legal Writing

·         The Apostrophe's Battle Is Mountainous — The Atlantic

Celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month

Each year, from September 15 through October 15, the United States recognizes National Hispanic Heritage Month. Texan President Lyndon Johnson first instated National Hispanic Heritage Week in 1968, and President Ronald Regan expanded it to an entire month in 1988.

We begin our celebration on September 15 because that is Independence Day for several Central American countries: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Chile and Mexico mark their Independance Days later that same week. The national month therefore kicks off on the 15th of September, and then runs through the middle of October, when the world, but particularly the Western hemisphere, marks the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the Island of Hispaniola.

While the United States’ official observance of October 12th emphasizes Christopher Columbus and his Italian heritage, the nature of how this day is marked throughout the Americas has evolved significantly in recent years. In Latin America, the day generally celebrates the distinctive ethnic and cultural influences of Hispanic culture.

Further Reading:

• National Park Service

• Fast Facts Celebrating Hispanic Culture from Census.gov

• 2020 National Proclamation

Lone Star Labor Day

Texas is well known as a Right to Work state with a long and successful history of anti-union activity, but the Lone Star state has a parallel history of organized labor that has improved worker conditions stemming back to the Republic of Texas.

As Anglo settlers began to stream into the territory on the heels of the Texas Revolution, they brought significant knowledge of the labor organization occuring in their home states and territories. Texas’ first strike occurred in the fall of 1838, when the Texas Typographical Association won a 25% wage increase only a few months after forming.

Still, Texas did not experience widespread labor organization until the Philadelphia-based Knights of Labor managed to recruit not only farm workers, but over half of the state’s non-farm workers, by the middle of the 1880s. Per capita, this was the peak of union participation in Texas. By late 1886, however, the Knights of Labor found itself irrevocably damaged by its connection to the Haymarket riot in Chicago, and this impacted its influence in Texas as much as anywhere else, and the demise of the Knights likely contributed to the inability of Texas organized labor to stop the use of anti-union labor to build the state house in Austin.

In January of 1900, years of attempts to form a statewide union finally came to fruition when the Texas State Federation of Labor formed in Cleburne. However, Texas employers also organized through the Open Shop movement, and proved a formidable match for organized labor throughout the state. Texas workers additionally found themselves outmatched by the national influence and strength of the railroad tycoons who provided so many of the Lonse Star state’s jobs.

World War I brought a proliferartion of manufacturing jobs and other types of labor-based work to Texas, and while this resulted in some relatively improved conditions, Texas workers were unable to match the success of workers in other states. For example, in 1917, offshore workers in California successfully used strikes to negotiate $4, 8 hour days. Faced with extreme anti-labor tactics, however, Texas offshore workers were unable to hold a strike long enough to be effective, and could not improve upon a $2, 12 hour day.

As a result of changed national leadership, as well as a shift in Texas labor leadership, unions once again began to experience some success during the Franklin Roosevelt presidency. This notably included Mexican-American agricultural workers organizing for the first time. Still, Texans in this time period could not match the fervor and efficacy of Texas worker organization 50 years prior under the Knights of Labor.

In fact, Texas workers had been organizing for more than a century before they finally managed a major demonstration of political power in 1957 when pro-union Ralph Yarborough was sent to Washington DC to serve as Senator from Texas. That same year, the Texas State Federation of Labor merged with the Texas State CIO Counsel, consolidating union power in the state.

We at the Harris County Law Library wish you a great and safe Lone Star Labor Day! Here is some further reading to fill your holiday weekend:

• Right to Work Laws in Texas

• The Labor Movement in Texas Collection: 1845-1954, at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at UT

• Labor Organizations Handbook at the Texas State Historical Association

• Walking the Line: The Diverse History of Organized Labor in Texas, at the University of Texas at Arlington Libraries Special Collections