World War I Food Quirks

 

If you read this blog regularly, you know that I’m a stickler for getting the period details right in my historical novels. That includes the foods my characters eat.

I’ve been working on two books that take place in the Midwest during World War I. The subjects are different, but the settings are similar, and so are the meals.

In 1917, the government created the U.S. Food Administration and commenced a heavy propaganda campaign encouraging citizens to grow their own vegetables and eat less wheat, meat, and sugar. While there was no shortage of those items in the United States, the government needed them to feed the soldiers overseas.

Although the restrictions were mostly voluntary, the propaganda campaign was successful and people tried to comply. To do that, Americans learned to be creative.

Some of the substitutions weren’t too bad. Wheat bread was frowned on, but cornbread recipes abounded, muffins could be made with oats or bran, and sugar was often replaced with honey. I cringe at the meatless options, however. Here is a recipe for Mock Sausage, originally published in The Twentieth Century Club War Time Cook Book (1918):

1 cup lima beans

½ tsp powdered sage

½ tsp dried thyme

½ tsp dried sweet marjoram

corn or vegetable oil

salt

pepper

flour

 

Soak lima beans overnight, boil until very soft, drain and mash, season with salt, pepper and a half teaspoon each of powdered sage, thyme, and sweet marjoram; make into rolls about the size of a finger; roll in flour and fry a golden brown in corn or other vegetable oil.

 

I was a fussy eater as a child, but my appreciation for new foods grew as I got older.

Still, I’m very glad I didn’t live during World War I.

__________

The picture at the top of this page shows a poster issued by the U.S. Food Administration during World War I. It is in the public domain because of its age.

Little Things Matter

 

I recently read a historical novel by a writer I’ve always enjoyed, but I was only a few pages in before I discovered an error. The story takes place during World War II, and one of the characters was remembering the books she read as a child. “Her friends had been Anne of Green Gables and Alice in Wonderland, her adventures in Narnia and the Secret Garden.” The problem? C.S. Lewis didn’t publish his first Narnia book (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) until 1950, a decade after the historical novel took place.

When I first read the sentence, I was pretty sure it was wrong, but I didn’t check it out right away. Then I watched Jeopardy on April 1 and saw this Final Jeopardy answer. (If there is anybody out there who doesn’t know how Jeopardy works, the questions are really the answers, and vice versa.) In other words, this was the information the contestants were given to respond to:

A girl in a 1950 novel walks into this & “got in among the coats and rubbed her face against them.”

I knew the question (what the contestants have to guess) right away. The question was “What is a wardrobe?” and the girl was Lucy from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The category was “Novel Title Objects,” so it should have been easy for anyone who has read the Narnia books, but only one of the contestants got it right. The point here, though, is it confirmed my belief that the first Narnia book wasn’t published until after World War II (and I have since verified it from other sources).

I’m not going to call out the writer of the historical novel, however, because unfortunately it is easy to make an error about those very minor details in a historical novel. In one of my early middle-grade stories, I had a character using a ball-point pen before they were invented. I don’t remember what brought it to my attention, but I caught it in time. Since then I have tried to meticulously research even the most minor details. Even so, I can’t guarantee that no errors have slipped in.

Fortunately, fictional details don’t have to be perfect.

But I try.

A Good Friday Declaration of War

 

In 1917, President Wilson declared war against Germany on Good Friday. That’s fine, I guess, except it caused me extra work to get history right.

I spent a lot of time on the first chapter of my current work in progress, and I was pretty happy with it as a first draft. Then I was going through some old hymnals, thumbed through the Easter hymns, and realized that two of the important historical events underlying my story had taken place the first week of April, when Easter sometimes falls. Sure enough, Easter fell on April 8 in 1917, meaning that the United States’ April 6 declaration of war against Germany fell on Good Friday.

So why was that a problem? The first chapter couldn’t have happened the way I wrote it. I started with the paperboy crying “Extra! Extra! U.S. declares war on Germany.” That would have been okay, except my protagonist and her friends heard the announcement as they left her Lutheran school that afternoon. No parochial school—and few, if any, public schools in those days—would have been open on Good Friday.

The fix has them leaving the Good Friday service at their church. Unfortunately, doing involves quite of bit of reorganization as well as both additions and subtractions. I can, however, use some of the cut material later in the story. So the work I had already done isn’t a complete waste.

I’m just glad I caught my mistake in time.

__________

The image at the head of this post is a 16^th century painting attributed to Frans Pourbus the Elder. It is in the public domain because of its age.

Brushing Teeth and Cleaning House

In the last two weeks I saw several of my old colleagues from the Indiana Writers’ Consortium and had a good time visiting with them. During the six years that I ran the IWC blog, I wrote many posts that I never reprinted here. Now that IWC has disbanded, I’m trying to change that. Today’s post originally appeared on the IWC blog on September 18, 2013.

Brushing Teeth and Cleaning House

People look at a picture of a toddler cleaning a toilet and say, “Cute.” Replace the toddler with an adult, and they say, “Who cares.” Fiction works that way, too.

Every scene in every novel—or in any type of writing, for that matter—must have a purpose. In fiction, the scene should either develop a character or move the story along. Everyday details that do neither make the story boring.

I don’t want to read about a character’s morning routine. In fact, I assume it’s pretty much like mine. He gets out of bed, uses the toilet, brushes his teeth, takes a shower, gets dressed, and so on. You don’t have to tell me any of this.

As mentioned above, however, there are two exceptions. I’m willing to pay attention to details that show me something interesting about a character or advance the plot. But even then, I only want those details that make the point.

The mere fact that a protagonist brushes his teeth every morning doesn’t tell the reader a thing. But if you show him brushing them exactly 100 strokes, we might conclude that he is obsessive. And no, I don’t want to count every single one with him.

As a reader I don’t usually care to intrude on a character while she is getting dressed. But I’m interested if she gets up at two o’clock in the afternoon, rummages through the dirty clothes hamper, and pulls on a pair of rumpled jeans and a stained T-shirt without taking off her pajamas. And if she goes to the store that way, so much the better.

Similarly, I don’t usually like to watch the protagonist clean her house. Still, maybe you want to show that she’s a cleanliness freak who wrestles with every piece of heavy furniture so she can pull it out and clean behind it, a sloppy person who only dusts the furniture that is in direct sunlight, or a bored person who cleans an already clean house because she has nothing else to do. Even those characteristics may not matter to the story. If they do, show us the details. But if they don’t, leave them out.

You can also use otherwise mundane details to move the plot along. Maybe your protagonist cleans house and discovers the murder weapon just before the police knock on her door with a search warrant. Or maybe the antagonist injected the tube of toothpaste with poison and the protagonist is one step closer to death every time he brushes his teeth. One caution in the second situation, however. You probably don’t want the protagonist to know he is being slowly poisoned, but the reader needs at least a clue. Otherwise, you can’t count on the reader staying with you until you reveal all.

Do you have Facebook friends who tell you every routine detail about their day? I hide those people from my news feed, and you probably do, too. Nobody wants to read about mundane things like brushing teeth and cleaning house. Not usually, anyway.

If it doesn’t aid the story, leave it out. If it tells me something I need to know, make it interesting.

Because excessive detail creates a book readers won’t finish.