It might seem like a silly time to look backward, just when American food is finally getting good. After a couple of dark decades of foods that were fast and frozen or French continental, this country’s cooking isn’t an international joke anymore, the kids’ meal in the fancy restaurant of the world.

Oh, yeah, there are still plenty of arches and kings and huts on our highways. But there are also a whole lot of Americans psyched to taste regional traditions or indigenous flora and fauna, or to learn about cooking in neighborhoods and communities that were formerly ignored by everyone who didn’t live in them. Maybe the biggest and best change is that a lot of us are now finally opening up to sharing a meal (or at least some flavors) with Other People Who Don’t Look Like We Do.

As my friend Gabrielle made clear in her 2017 book on contemporary cooking in the United States—it’s called America: The Cookbook, and it contains eight hundred recipes—American food today is not just “national standards,” as in hot dogs and meat loaf and mashed potatoes. Which is why in her book you’ll also find recipes for American foods like falafel, plantain chips, pho, and injera.

But this book does not document our ever-evolving future, even though that is a very delicious thing to do. This one reconsiders our past. And with a focus on things so common that they might not even seem so interesting, at least at first. You may think you already know all there is to learn about Buffalo wings, eggs Benedict, submarines and hoagies and heros, yellow mustard, Green Goddess salad dressing, or even shrimp and grits. You might think they have little to say about who we are becoming, foodwise, or even who we are today.

But old things nearly always tell new stories. In fact, I should admit that my collaborator Kim and I chose our subjects at random, more or less—picking one well-known American food item for every letter in the alphabet. We had guessed that almost any food eaten in this country would have a multilayered history, some forgotten twists and turns. Thankfully, we were right.

And Kim was the perfect partner, as her art helps tell new stories, too. Her own work has always focused on the beauty of the ordinary— the seemingly mundane little items of the kitchen, the old community cookbooks set out with the recycling. We believe the history of American food is a lot like those community cookbooks, full of half-remembered stories and substitutions that have spiraled off into their own thing. Like those books, Kim’s hand-drawn illustrations have a rough, human vibe that brings a human connection to stories about a very human topic: food.

Maybe I should warn you that not all these new stories are 100 percent positive—which is maybe why they’re the stories we should be telling the most. A lot of times in the not-so-distant past, we didn’t give credit where credit was due. We forced and we stole. We ignored. We dismissed, we straight-up dissed. We even corralled and encamped. And we tend to assume what we think we know about all the latter is true.

“We” is often me. As in, a white American with Colonial-era roots in this country. I don’t really have another home country or culture to identify with, unlike a growing majority of Americans. I resemble the sentiments expressed by social historian Alfred Crosby in the introduction to his thirtieth-anniversary reissue of The Columbian Exchange. He wrote that over the years he learned that “people who didn’t look like me had been appallingly mistreated by people who did look like me . . . and there were big pieces missing from the kind of history I was teaching.” He also makes the point that looking at commonly accepted things from a new perspective is “like replacing the standard film in your camera with infrared or ultraviolet film. You see things you have never seen before.”

And so it was for us, working on this book. I hope it’ll be the same for you.

I know what you’re thinking. How deep can a book go that begins with a fluffy fruit salad called ambrosia, whose most controversial element is whether you go mayonnaise or whipped topping instead of mini marshmallows? And, actually, that is kind of a big deal for traditionalists who consider the ur-ambrosia to be orange slices, white sugar, and hand-grated fresh coconut, as per the nineteenth-century original.

Those ingredients were still expensive when Maria Massey Barringer published the first known recipe in her 1867 cookbook, Dixie Cookery. Coconut and oranges were rare, and even the sugar may have had to be prepped and pounded because it came in a giant loaf rather than cubed or granulated.

But Maria, who perhaps optimistically subtitled her work a Practical Cook-Book for Southern Housekeepers, could probably afford it. She and her husband—a lawyer, state senator, and major in the Confederate army—would have been boldfaced names in Maria’s Old South town of Concord, North Carolina. In fact, she once hosted a dinner with Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America, when he crashed at her home with nearly a dozen members of his posse while fleeing Virginia after General Robert E. Lee surrendered to the Union Army in 1865. Though Maria’s cook, Ellen—almost certainly an enslaved woman whose freedom Davis was fighting to deny—was the one who had to make it.

We know this from a letter Maria wrote to her sister years later:

I had a few minutes talk with Ellen (the cook) who told me she had just taken from the oven a large loaf of rolls and one of our largest hams and these supplemented by poultry and vegetables and a tipsy cake pudding and fruits with cream furnished the simple dinner, ready in a half hour after their arrival.

And this is where things start to get contentious: Like most wealthy white women in the Old South at the time, said Helen Zoe Veit, an expert on antebellum American food and a professor of history at Michigan State University, Maria might have known what to ask for on the table, but most likely couldn’t cook it. The well-off, even those without plantations, owned at least a few slaves until emancipation. They also employed black domestic servants afterward, when they “pretty quickly ended up back on top of the social ladder,” said Veit, who included an explicated version of Dixie Cookery (and some of Maria’s letter) in her series of books on food in the Civil War.

“Almost certainly” most of Maria’s recipes were told to her by Ellen, Veit explained to me, adding that Maria wrote much of the book during the early 1860s, during the Civil War. As an enslaved woman, Ellen couldn’t write them down herself—by law, she couldn’t be taught to read and write. So Maria’s book, said Veit, could be considered born not of pride or practicality, but also self-preservation. As in, lose your slaves, you lose your recipes, too.

Ellen doesn’t even rate a mention in Maria’s book. (This is true of nearly every cookbook until 1904, according to food writer and scholar Toni Tipton-Martin, who has written extensively about black and African cooks and American food history.) In fact, Maria’s introduction made the false and “racist assertion common at the time,” said Veit, that as a white Southern homemaker, her duties were even more complicated than those of her Northern contemporaries, even though she grew up with a lot of built-in labor. Maria wrote that:

There is a very mistaken notion at the North and West, about the domestic life of Southerners, Southern women especially. The common idea is, that we are entirely destitute of practical knowledge of household affairs. This is a great mistake. The contrary is true. A Southern woman must know how to prepare any dish, for she finds no cooks made to order; they must be of her own training, in the minutest particulars of every department.

Of course we don’t know for sure if Ellen had a hand in ambrosia’s ideation. Maria did thank “an English friend” for many of her recipes, but given the rampant copying and lack of effusive headnotes in cookbooks in this period of history, not to mention the lack of Southern books from this period at all, said Veit, we may never know who really invented it, unless we come across some previously unknown letter or text.

We do know that there were similar sliced-orange salads in cookbooks before this one. It could have been Maria’s idea to add the coconut, it could have been the English friend’s idea, and it could also have been Ellen’s idea. (This is intriguing when you consider that the enslaved were of West or Central African and possibly West Indian descent and likely knew a hell of a lot more about “cocoa-nuts” than Maria did.) Like most other cookbook authors of the time, Maria didn’t even think to tell her readers how to open a fresh one, probably because she’d never had to do it herself.

Given Maria’s light experience in the kitchen, she might even have appreciated modern-day ambrosias made entirely of industrialized, processed foods—things that are already canned, cut or bagged, served for very little money and with even less labor. If the first additions to ambrosia were modest, a little sherry and pineapple and banana or pecans and coconut milk, by the mid-twentieth century, recipe books show no restraint. (See the 2016 NPR story: “When Ambrosia Salad Spells Dread.”)

By the mid-twentieth century, noted Veit, ambrosia had gone from “this impossibly hard-to-source recipe for people” to something “so democratized.” Today it’s made across the country, eaten by all colors and classes, and served from the buffet table at grand Southern mansions and from the salad bar at all-you-can-eat buffets.

Which should serve as a gentle reminder to all the haters of canned fruit and Cool Whip that the modern form of ambrosia doesn’t represent status, but freedom.

If you take the time to drive the smaller byways of the South New Jersey Pinelands—a multi-county area that includes a million preserved acres of sugar sand, pitch pine, and white cedar—you’ll find Stevens Blueberries, a seven-acre commercial operation at the end of a white sand road deep in the pine forests of New Lisbon.

When Richard and Connie Stevens bought their small farm in the 1980s, it came with a blueberry hoeing machine made from Ford Model A parts. It also came with some equally old bushes. The farm is now run by their son, Richard Stevens Jr., and the family sells their crop to a packer but also allows pick-your-own. Visitors can still see what was planted there in 1951, said the younger Mr. Stevens, including seventy-year-old Elizabeths, Stanleys, Weymouths, Berkeleys, Bluecrops, and Jerseys, plus a few Rancocas that are off-limits.

“They’re my mom’s pride and joy,” said Stevens. “We’re not allowed to touch them.”

They were once the pride and joy of Elizabeth Coleman White, the cranberry farmer’s daughter who literally founded the industry in 1916. Until then, blueberries were still a wild thing, an indigenous American fruit foraged like ramps or morels. White made taming the northern highbush berries growing in her woods her life’s work, making American agricultural history in the process. Like cranberries, blueberries thrive in acidic soil, which the Pinelands have in spades.

“They were really looking for a second crop for cranberry growers,” said Allison Pierson, director of the Whitesbog Preservation Trust, a nonprofit that runs the three-thousand-acre White family farm now preserved inside New Jersey’s Brendan T. Byrne State Forest. Known as Whitesbog Historic Village, it includes the Whites’ original berries, like the long-forgotten Katherines, Junes, Pembertons, Dixis, and Warehams still planted around her house. (Yes, said Pierson, you can pick them.)

White, who died in 1954, also helped launch Tru-Blu Cooperative Association to distribute and market the fruit across the country, said Pierson, complete with New York City subway ads and fruit-forward galas at B. Altman and Company’s Fifth Avenue department store.

Their first order of business was just to get people to call them blueberries. Mark Ehlenfeldt, a blueberry breeding specialist with the United States Department of Agriculture in nearby Chatsworth who moonlights as the newsletter editor for Whitesbog, said that originally, most people called any blue berry a huckleberry, technically a different plant.

Botanically speaking, there are three types of blueberries, said Ehlenfeldt: highbush, lowbush—still only wild and most famous in Maine—and rabbiteye. Those have fewer “sparkling notes” and are traditionally found in the south, though Ehlenfeldt has quite a few in his vast research collection.

In truth, nearly all nonwild blueberries now in New Jersey, if not most farmed around the world, can be directly traced back to White’s work. Many of the more interesting farms around here can, too.

A few miles west of Whitesbog, for example, is Haines Berry Farm, run by the great-grandson of the Whitesbog superintendent. And just across the road, you’ll find Pine Barrens Native Fruits, run by White’s great-nephew Joe Darlington.

The Darlingtons lease and farm the cranberry bogs at Whitesbog and care for several acres of Elizabeths. Released in 1966 and named after White—who considered it to have exquisite flavor—the Elizabeth is a cult favorite, said Pine Barrens Native Fruits staffer Connie Casselman. She alerts their mailing list when the fruits, which can grow to the size of a quarter, are for sale.

“They’re the sweetest berry you’ll ever have,” said Casselman. “People come from all over to get them.”

Badiacco’s operation may be bigger than the Stevenses’, but he’s still small compared to the average grower in the state, which has at least a hundred acres. “It seems like the days of mom-and-pops like myself are ending,” said Badiacco: Today, he said, farmers and packers are buying up smaller farms like his, accumulating acres across the region, and moving to machine picking.

At the same time, New Jersey went from the country’s number-one blueberry producer to one eclipsed by states like Washington, Oregon, Michigan, California, and Georgia. “But that’s as far as acreage goes,” said Badiacco, reminding me that the Pinelands acidic soils keep his berries at the top of a much more impressive list. “Now, as far as taste is concerned,” he said, “that’s New Jersey.”

*Parts of this story originally appeared in the New York Times.