ysabetwordsmith | Hippie Books

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From:

siberian_skys

I can't wait to look through these links. I'm wondering what I've read. I've always thought that I was born 15 years give or take too late.

From:

ysabetwordsmith

There are a lot of great old books, but if you're looking for a new one, I highly recommend Hippie Food. It's fascinating to see how much impact the hippies had.

Though drat it, I wish good multigrain flour had stuck around. It used to be readily available in food co-ops and now is all but impossible to find anywhere.

From:

siberian_skys

Thank you. I'll check that book out.

I don't use a lot of flour so I hadn't looked or the multigrain, but I remember seeing recipes that called for it. I wondered why it disappeared.

From:

ysabetwordsmith

Around the end of the 1970s there was a dip in hippie / Bohemian culture. A lot of things became unavailable at that time. Then in the late 1980s and 1990s, people started trying to revive some of what had been lost, and some of those results were horrible. Among the things that went badly were multigrain and wholegrain products. It is possible to make great versions, but easier to make awful ones; they need a bit different handling than the white flour goods. Honey is great for that, which is why you see "whole wheat honey" or "7-grain honey" on breads.

So people started thinking that health food was inherently awful, which made it harder to keep in stock. Eventually, more people figured out how to make good versions, although even now there are bad versions of health food more often than average. There are some lovely granolas, mueslis, and manygrain breads available now. There are some decent quickbreads in a few of the most popular versions, like banana and pumpkin. Single flours are now more widely available for things other than wheat. But I've seen very little multigrain flour. If you want it, you have to shop the bulk aisle and blend your own -- which makes it very tricky to get the proportions right. A commercial blend usually has been pretested to make sure it balances well.

A more modern problem in the last 5-10 years is that the gluten-free craze has made a bunch of companies drop wheat from their multigrain blends, which makes it much harder to create a blend that is easy to use, produces good results, and tastes yummy. I've had excellent gluten-free products, but not very many ... like two or three that I bought regularly while they were available. Some of the best mixes were 1/3 to 1/2 wheat flour and the rest other things such as rye or barley.

Sometimes a mix would combine white and whole wheat, which is another way to improve handling, texture, and flavor. That at least is easy to replicate because wheat flour is now readily available. A lot of wheat bread recipes use that combination, and you can tinker with yours until you find a proportion you like.

I do like the wider range of grains, though. I don't think we ever had quinoa when I was little. People grew chia as a houseplant but I doubt we ate it more than once or twice. That's sad, because I love chia pudding. Spelt turned up sometimes in wholegrain mixes or multigrain flours, but I don't think I had emmer or einkorn wheat until after college. I only found purple rice ... maybe 5 years ago? and only at Core Life, which I think closed that restaurant. I've looked and looked but couldn't find it anywhere else.

Nuts are available in much wider variety too, and most of all, nut butters! I got to try a lot of different nut butters when I was little, but they were 1) from tiny hippie health stores, 2) from friends who made some, or 3) Mom making things in a blender. (We killed one blender making zucchini milk in summer. We probably killed another with nut butter.) I found a recipe for nut'n'seed butter that is just awesome, and similar to the hard-to-find blends from hippie days. There is now an Amish store not far away that has bulk grinders; they make regular and honey-roasted peanut butter, and usually a few other things. Honey-roasted peanut butter is glorious. Our food co-op sells nut butter in little snack packets as well as jars.

From:

siberian_skys

I was never exposed to those things in the 70s unless you count the Chia Pet. :o. I wasn't even allowed to watch Sesame Street. My parents ad some strange ideas. I think the rest of the town must have, too, because I remember the first time I saw a hippie in person. I was probably 5 or 6. I put the book in my shopping cart so I can order it after I finish figure out what else I need to get that I can't get or it's hard to get. That post was fascinating.

From:

ysabetwordsmith

>>I put the book in my shopping cart so I can order it after I finish figure out what else I need to get that I can't get or it's hard to get. That post was fascinating.<<

I'm so happy I could help, and introduce you to more of my culture! :D

If you're starting more or less from scratch, then you might want to look for "top 10" lists because some of the ones I linked have dozens or hundreds of titles. I can tell you that all of the "big three" hippie cookbooks are usually available cheap from used book stores: The Vegetarian Epicure, The Moosewood Cookbook, and Diet for a Small Planet. Some of the recipes are dated, but our favorite dal recipe is the lentil dal from The Vegetarian Epicure.

To find books that are hard to locate:
https://www.abebooks.com/

From:

siberian_skys

I vaguely remember reading Diet For A Small Planet. I think I saw the author on a talk show, very likely Phil Donahue. I watched.a lot of Phil Donahue back in the day. :-)

Have you read Food Rules? It was the abbreviated version of Michael Pollen"s? longer book.

I always wondered if I was a reincarnated hippie. I was born in 1968 and have always been called toward the music of that time. I saw Peter. Paul and Mary twice and had tickets for a third time. I was too too sick to go the third time. I even tried. I got a couple of blocks from my apartment and it wasn't going to happen. I was very sad.

From:

athaia

I'm a book addict, and this list is DANGEROUS...

From:

ysabetwordsmith

Perhaps I should have included Dangerous Visions.

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