Chronicle: Food for Thought

One summer day in 2009, educator Clare Burson walked into the Lower East Side Tenement Museum offices with a 114-year-old piece of cheese. It was a family heirloom, a regional specialty lovingly packed by a mother for her son, who was leaving Lithuania for South Africa.

Kept as a connection to the homeland, the cheese eventually made its way to Memphis, Tenn. Desiccated and wrapped in tin foil, it sat in Burson’s grandmother’s attic for years until she passed away and left this piece of history to her granddaughter. Burson wanted to keep the cheese wedge as a tangible connection to her family’s immigration story, so she came to the first person she could think of with knowledge of conserving objects—her colleague Derya Golpinar, the Tenement Museum’s collections manager and registrar.

“When I first heard from Clare, I thought, ’Wow!’” Golpinar says. “It was remarkable how well preserved the cheese was. Her family had done a good job caring for it.”

Golpinar is familiar with conserving items long lost to the public eye: The Tenement Museum’s collection contains artifacts found in a shuttered tenement at 97 Orchard Street in Manhattan. Digs in the tenement’s rear yard and under its floorboards have resulted in the discovery of poultry bones, fish scales, garlic cloves, fruit pits and orange peels. In 2007, work on 97 Orchard Street’s fourth floor yielded the crust of an old bagel and a small paper bag containing shriveled raspberries, both discovered in a boarded-over fireplace filled with ash and dust.

These objects give insight into the eating habits of the Lower East Side’s late 19th- and early 20th-century immigrant communities, who hailed from places like Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Italy and Germany.

“Finding something like that bagel—it’s just another piece of evidence about the foodways of the everyday people who lived in this building,” Golpinar notes.

But conserving food can be a challenge. After all, edibles can decay or attract pests.

At the Tenement Museum, the organic objects in the collection are desiccated, many of them discovered in dry, dusty places—perfect for removing moisture. Golpinar stores these items in acid-free boxes in the museum’s climate-controlled collection storage area.

At the Durham Museum in Omaha, Nebr., Collections Manager Sarah Swain has conserved a piece of Civil War-era hardtack, two metal tins of Nebraskit Survival crackers, and many cans of soda and beer. While the hardtack shows signs of previous pest infestation, there is nothing active, and Swain double-bags it and checks it occasionally. The cracker tins were supplies from a Cold War-era bomb shelter. Careful observation revealed no rust or degradation of the tins, and they are still properly sealed, so Swain has left the containers intact, with no plans to open them.

Not so with the soda and beer cans. The collections department placed holes in the bottom of each can to drain out the liquid. “We’ve found that an unopened can will leak and create a sticky mess after just a few years,” says Swain. By puncturing the cans, these artifacts are minimally damaged and can still be displayed. In this case, the packaging has more value to the museum’s curators than the contents.

The Wing Luke Museum in Seattle has canned and dried goods, pickles and other jarred food on display in the recreated Yick Fung Co. store. While Collections Manager Robert Fisher says the museum is still developing a long-term preservation policy for these items, for now they have been left in their original packaging. Similarly, curators at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford, Conn., display a jar of pickled peppers and empty spice containers in the Stowe House kitchen. As the peppers are in a sealed glass bottle, “there has never been a problem with pests,” Collections Manager Elizabeth Burgess says.

Keeping food items completely sealed, and therefore out of reach of mice or mold, seems to be an approach many collection managers take. Removing a food from its container and conserving both separately is another option.

But some institutions have a more difficult problem: properly conserving items without a wrapper or package. How should a museum deal with these objects?

Gary McGowan, an objects conservator at New Jersey-based Cultural Preservation and Restoration, recommends freeze drying as a good way to desiccate any organic material for preservation. A vacuum freeze dryer first brings the item’s temperature down, then draws off moisture in the form of ice crystals. McGowan has successfully used this method to preserve, among other things, a lemon tart baked on board the Titanic.

Items can also be infused with glucose or resin, a technique that Metropolitan Museum of Art Conservator Emily Hamilton recommends. In some cases, freeze drying can change the shape or composition of an object, which is problematic for art pieces or artifacts whose value lies in their physical appearance. Preserving items with resin can retain their structural integrity while, if done with a light hand, not affecting the object’s form.

Not long ago, Hamilton worked on two historically significant pieces at the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society: a slice from President Grover Cleveland’s 1886 wedding cake, stored in a satin box, and an accompanying sugar-paste cake topper. The cake slice was starting to crumble, while the topper had been partially crushed. As both items occasionally travel to presidential libraries, the historical society decided to stabilize them so they could safely be exhibited.

To conserve the cake slice, Hamilton used a mixture of resin injection and surface application. When conserving an edible piece, aesthetics are often an important part of the job. A controlled drying process (in a sealed glass aquarium) prevented the substance from evaporating too quickly and creating an unnatural shine.

“Sometimes there can be a restoration component involved—the cake topper, for instance, is a decorative object,” notes Hamilton. She replaced a piece of the fragile sugar bell with a plaster mold that matched the design. She also treated the cake box’s satin and lace materials, which had yellowed, and created a clear barrier that separates the fabric from the food so they can be exhibited together.

Why are such items worth saving? For many museums, they are an important interpretive choice, offering visitors a realistic glimpse into a restored kitchen, shop or home. They tell a story of the past and exist as part of the historical record. Conserving them completes a central part of the missions of historical museums.

As for Burson and her century-old cheese, the Tenement Museum’s Golpinar did a little research. She found out that cheese is made of water, fat and protein—specifically casein, a substance that is also used in some plastics and paints. The cheese was completely desiccated, so Golpinar treated it as she would a casein button: She recommended keeping it cool, dry and out of sunlight. For now, it’s been sealed in a bell jar after humidity conditioning in the Tenement Museum’s archives, and Burson has it on display in her apartment.