Sarah Lohman | |
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 Sarah Lohman with copies of her book | |
| Born | |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation(s) | historian, author |
Sarah Lohman is an American historian, specializing in the history of food. [1] She is the author of Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine. [2] [3] [4]
As a teenager, growing up in Hinckley, Ohio, Lohman worked, in costume, as a historic re-enactor. [1] [5] [6] Her duties there included showing visitors how Americans used to prepare food. In 2005, she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Cleveland Institute of Art. [7]
She traveled to New York City in 2006. [1] She worked for Grub Street, upon her arrival, and worked at the Tenement Museum from 2009. [7] [8]
In 2016, she told The New York Times that she "searches old cookbooks and other records to recreate forgotten recipes as a way of studying history". [1] [9] She then prepares food, according to those recipes. She called eating those foods "an elaborate form of performance art".
Her book, Eight Flavors, published in 2016, has eight chapters, which each trace a signature taste crucial to the development of modern American cooking: black pepper, vanilla, curry powder, chili powder, soy sauce, garlic, MSG, and Sriracha. [3] Several reviewers praised Lohman's deep research and the wide travel that had gone into it. [8] [10] [11]
Lohman was one of the food historians used as an expert in a PBS documentary series, The Poison Squad, first broadcast in 2020. [12] Her second book, documenting American foods at risk of disappearing, is called Endangered Eating: Exploring America’s Vanishing Cuisine and was published by Norton in 2023.
Now she works part time as an educator at the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side, leading tours and creating food programming.
Smile's biography is revealed in Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine, a new book by Sarah Lohman that unpacks the diverse history of a nation's palate via eight distinct ingredients.
But a young historical gastronomist named Sarah Lohman discovered that American food is united by eight flavors: black pepper, vanilla, curry powder, chili powder, soy sauce, garlic, MSG, and Sriracha.
When Sarah Lohman describes herself as a "historic gastronomist," she is being too modest. She is, in addition, an accomplished writer, an intrepid traveler, dogged researcher and pundit. She knows what Americans eat, what our ancestors ate, and why.
Sarah Lohman has made everything from colonial-era cocktails to cakes with black pepper to stewed moose face. She is a historical gastronomist, which means she re-creates historical recipes to connect with the past.
Sarah Lohman is a culinary historian. She was introduced to the idea back in high school when she worked at a living history museum. Back then, it was a summer gig she did in costume and in character.
Sarah Lohman is originally from Hinckley, Ohio where she began working in a museum at the age of 16, cooking historical food over a wood-burning stove. She graduated with a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2005. For her undergraduate thesis, she opened a temporary restaurant/installation that reinterpreted food of the Colonial era for a modern audience.
I've also worked for the last seven years at the Lower East Side Tenement museum, which has made me aware of and connected to immigration in a way I never was before -- it underlies everything in American culture. So I knew that in writing the stories of these flavors, I was going to be writing American stories -- and in the process, making an argument for a broader definition of what America is and who Americans are.
Here's how Sarah Lohman talks about them in her new book, 'Eight Flavors, The Untold Story of American Cuisine.'
As Lohman continues with her blend of food and travel writing, history and chemistry, personal memoir and thumbnail biographies, the reader finds out how soy sauce enjoyed an early popularity in this country only to be replaced by ketchup and Worcestershire sauce. Then, later waves of Chinese and Japanese immigrants reintroduced soy sauce, paving the way for Kikkoman to start manufacturing it in Wisconsin and popularize its use.
She's also impressively plucky, traveling, for example, to a remote Mexican vanilla plantation, where she's subject to a full-body mosquito attack (par for the course, the woman who runs it admits).
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