Electoral Politics and Food: The Gilded Age

Chicken and cornmeal dumplings soup, recipes below

I started talking about the role of food in electoral politics on Wednesday. Yesterday post talked about get out the vote machines and food and drink during the antebellum period. The practice continued here in the United States until roughly the end of the Reconstruction period—1865-1877. It wasn’t until after that period that states started using secret ballots. Previous to the 1880s each political party used different colored ballots which allowed them to know how each eligible male voted (women remained disenfranchised until 1920). It wasn’t until cost of buying votes with a meal and stiff drink became too expensive that party leaders championed the secret ballot during the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century. Historian Joe Gray Taylor insists “the most striking fact about the diet of the New South, from the Civil War through World War II, is not that it changed, but how little it changed.” Some traditional get out the vote meals I found included chicken and biscuits, turkey dinners, roast beef dinners, and soup and sandwiches. Here are some hearty chicken and dumpling soup recipes

Chicken and cornmeal dumplings soup recipe: http://shesinthekitchen.blogspot.com/2010/03/chicken-vegetable-soup-with-cornmeal.html

Vegan Chicken and dumplings soup recipe: http://vegweb.com/index.php?topic=26554.0