This Is the Plate

The first book-length treatment of Utah's distinctive food heritage, this volume contains work by more than sixty subject-matter experts, including scholars, community members, event organizers, journalists, bloggers, photographers, and food producers. It features recipes and photographs of food and beverages. Utah's food history is traced from precontact Native American times through the arrival of multinational Mormon pioneers, miners, farmers, and other immigrants to today's moment of "foodie" creativity, craft beers, and "fast-casual" restaurant-chain development. Contributors also explore the historical and cultural background for scores of food-related tools, techniques, dishes, traditions, festivals, and distinctive ingredients from the state's religious, regional, and ethnic communities as well as Utah-based companies. In a state much influenced by Latter-day Saint history and culture, iconic items like Jell-O salads, funeral potatoes, fry sauce, and the distinctive "Utah scone" have emerged as self-conscious signals of an ecumenical Utah identity. Scholarly but lively and accessible, this book will appeal to both the general reader and the academic folklorist.

"This is a general interest work edited and compiled by three folklorists that looks at multiple cultural dimensions of foodways in Utah. The contributors to the collection are also predominantly, though not exclusively folklorists. Their subjects, then, particularly concern food and its production and consumption practices as everyday traditions, by which they mean forms of creative cultural sharing and communication, not some measure of age. They intend this book for a broad readership, and they also delve into mass-mediated and commercialized popular culture, whose boundary with folk, or vernacular, culture, especially when it comes to food, is often porous. In fact, they have already generated a substantial amount of popular media interest, particularly with regard to certain foods (such as fry sauce, Jell-O salads, or funeral potatoes) that are widely considered iconic Utah foods. While they deal with such foods, they seek to complicate the Utah menu with a much wider, multicultural range of topics and a broader, deeper folkloristic discussion"--

"One of the delights of the book is the contrast between stereotypes of Utah and its food traditions and the reality as it has unfolded historically. The obvious case is the belief that Utah is a dry state, a myth that the book nicely puts to rest."
--Richard Raspa, author of Italian Folktales in America: The Verbal Art of an Immigrant Woman

"This comprehensive anthology covers every conceivable facet of eating in Utah through a pleasing mixture of voices, topics, authors, and styles. Engaging and well rounded."
--Anne F. Hatch, folk and traditional arts specialist, Wyoming Arts Council