By Madison Francoeur
In the summer of 2023, as a part of my work as a research assistant with Young People are the Future, I was tasked with site visits to living history museums and cultural sites across Alberta. As a lover of museums, this was the ideal way to spend my summer. I had had previous experiences with living history museum, as my “day job” was as an education interpreter at Fort Edmonton Park, Edmonton’s own living history museum. I was beyond excited to explore living history across multiple Albertan sites and learn more about this weird and wonderful world.
In these journeys, I developed a bit of an obsession: Food. I began to notice the role that food played in these settings. Food becomes a catalyst for action. History comes alive with smells, tastes, and textures. Food isn’t just food in living history museums. It becomes a vessel for storytelling and performance that acts to enhance the experience of visitors, especially for youth. I collected many observations about the way that food enhances the way that living history is experienced through the addition of multisensory elements that encourage collaboration and participation.
What is a Living History Museum?
Before diving into my adventures and observations, it is important to establish what a living history museum is. Living history museums are institutions that recreate historical settings with historical buildings that are brought to life with interpretive staff, who are typically in historical dress, to simulate different time periods. Interpretive staff, better known as interpreters, communicate with guests about what is in the museum’s exhibits and explain the artifacts and the buildings.
Interpreters lead different activities and programs related to the exhibits of the museum that help to enrich the overall atmosphere of the space. These programs can vary in their content, structures, and audiences, from highly scheduled field trips for school groups to much more fluid drop-in style programs for the general public. A popular theme for this programming is food. Interpreters are often seen working through the various actions that surround food: Gardening, fire starting, cooking, baking, eating, and more. The performance of these actions draws in guests to observe, ask questions, and even try their hand under the guidance of an interpreter.
Interpreters take visitors on a garden tour at the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village to highlight the variety of historically relevant produce that is grown and used onsite (photo from Larysa Hayduk)
Preparing Pierogi at the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village
From butter to bannock, I have made my fair share of food at living history museums. In my own role as an education interpreter, that was just a part of the job. I helped children read their recipes and made sure that everything was measured and mixed correctly. I told stories about how people used to grow their own gardens and shop at general stores. It all becomes a part of the motions of leading a program, and it was easy to forget how impactful the experience of preparing food can be. It wasn’t until I had the opportunity to be the student learning that I was reminded of the feelings that are connected to making food in these historic spaces.
During a visit to the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village, I had the opportunity to learn how to make pierogi with one of the interpreters. She guided me through the entire process: rolling, filling, and pinching shut. She let me know when I added too much flour to my dough, how much filling was just the right amount, and the right way to pinch the pierogi shut. With her years of experience, she didn’t have to think about the right way to do things - she just did it. Working alongside her, I was guided not just by her knowledge but also by the knowledge that her family shared with her, which stretches back so many generations. For her, this was not just food but a piece of her history.
Through this experience, I was reminded of the significance of how the act of preparing food provides a way, especially for young people, to connect with people of the past. For one, it allows young people to not only observe performance in living history museums, but also to participate in the performance themselves. As well, being able to see the way that people used to prepare their food serves to help bring their stories to life today. There is a physical manifestation of one of the most basic parts of the lives of people of the past, one that young people of today can see reflected directly in their own lives and foods that are prepared in their own homes. It invites us to think about the labour and love that goes into the foods we eat, especially those with close cultural and community ties.
An interpreter demonstrates the correct way to roll, fill, and close pierogi at the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village (photos from Larysa Hayduk)
The completed pierogi! (Photo from Larysa Hayduk)
New Tastes at Fort Edmonton Park
Food tastes different at a living history museum. It is not necessarily that food tastes better, but eating something that is part of a larger story and that has a history to tell makes the food taste something more than what it is.
For example, the chokecherries that grow abundantly in Fort Edmonton Park. In a normal setting, the unique berries tend not to play well with young people. They can be bitter and sour, with a large seed in the middle. There are way sweeter, easier-to-eat berries. But at Fort Edmonton Park, chokecherries become the star of their own performance. With the guidance of an interpreter, young people can learn about how to identify the plant and what the fruit will look like when it is ripe and ready to be picked. They can learn about the significance of chokecherries to Indigenous people as a nutritious food source full of vitamins. Finally, there may be the opportunity to taste the berries. Suddenly, the berries aren’t just bitter berries; they have a story and a history.
It becomes less about the flavour of the food today and more about the fact that this is a flavour with history. That butter on a cracker is the same butter that the child who lived in this house 150 years ago ate. That hard candy is the same candy that could have been found at an actual 1920s midway. Those chokecherries are the same berries that Indigenous people have picked, eaten, and dried since time immemorial. The taste of these foods becomes a connection to a child in the past, who tasted the same flavours that are being experienced by a young person today.
Creating Atmosphere at Heritage Park
While there are these intimate moments of the creation of food in living history museums, food also contributes to the overall ambiance at Heritage Park. Walking through the Town Centre, you are met with the delicious smell of freshly baked bread. In the Settlement area, you can smell coffee brewing on the smokey wood stove. While participation in the activities that create these smells is very specific and often limited for many reasons, the very presence of the smells allows you to sink deeper into the idea of the past. During my visit to Heritage Park, these smells enhanced the overall atmosphere of the space, adding a new dimension to the livelihood of the museum.
It wasn’t only smells that Heritage Park provided but also opportunities for tasting that complimented many of the programs and demonstrations across the site. After seeing a demonstration of historical ice cream making, you can head over to an ice cream shop and get a cone for yourself. A warm cinnamon roll from Alberta Bakery is perfect after learning about wood stove baking. While it can be a bit commercial at times, there are nevertheless opportunities to be had for tasting the past as it connects to the rest of the programming offered by the museum.
Through these various activities, Heritage Park is creating a multisensory experience on all levels, which can be difficult to achieve. When engaging the senses with the past, seeing and hearing tend to come easily. Even touch can be relativity easy to engage with. It is smell and taste that are harder to incorporate, especially in a more traditional museum setting. Living history provides a unique opportunity to engage with all five senses.
Sharing Food to Share the Past
Sharing the food itself is a wonderfully special experience, but so is sharing the knowledge and the story that goes along with the food. In the previous examples, it is the element of sharing that brings the foods to life. The stories that are attached to foods allow young people to form deeper connections with the foods themselves and the histories that are associated with them.
Sharing food also allows young people to build connections with their own lives and the past. Young people can draw similarities between the foods that they eat today and the foods of the past. They can see the same ingredients and methods being used in their own homes. In some cases, young people are even able to connect the stories of different foods to the stories of foods that are important to their lives.
Through the variety of food experiences at living history museums, young people are invited to dive deeper into history and strengthen their connections to the past. It allows connections to be built between the foods of now and the past, providing a vehicle for developing questions about the relationship that we have with time and history. Food creates opportunities for exploring history through a level of participation that is truly unique to living history museums.
