Many visitors have enjoyed the “Have You Eaten Yet?” interactive since it was installed in 2023 as part of the new Creating Community: 400 Years of Fairfield Stories exhibition. Here, campers play with the wooden blocks to “assemble” each dish and learn more about the local community. photo: Fairfield Museum

By Michelle Cheng and Chelsea Garth

Sharing food brings communities together. Food can nourish us, offer comfort, help us celebrate special occasions, and inspire us to pass down stories and traditions. The Fairfield Museum and History Center in Fairfield, Connecticut, developed a fun and unique hands-on gallery experience for its award-winning, newly renovated, and reinterpreted flagship exhibition, Creating Community: 400 Years of Fairfield Stories. The new exhibition, a decade in the making, was a direct result of the Fairfield Museum’s long-term commitment to shining a light on previously hidden stories to cultivate a stronger sense of community identity and civic engagement. The stories featured in Creating Community deepen our understanding of New England’s past and give voice to the many people who make up our community.

Owned by Nellis Sherwood (left), the onion farm photographed here in 1880 was on Mill Hill in Southport. In the foreground are hundreds of harvested Globe onions. photo: Fairfield Museum Photographic Collection

One of the interactive gallery experiences is named for a question immigrant mothers commonly ask as a gesture of love: “Have you eaten yet?” In the gallery, visitors are invited to have a seat at a table and use a series of wooden block puzzles to assemble dishes that represent different communities in Fairfield. As a nod to how food brings different people and cultures together, the museum wanted to create an experience that celebrated the region’s diversity while offering a different entry point for engaging with local history. In creating this interactive experience, we prioritized collaborating with community members to identify Native American, Hungarian, and Peruvian dishes while also sourcing other recipes from the museum’s archives.

“Have You Eaten Yet?” features five dishes:

Succotash is a celebration of several vegetables that ripen in the summer. Its ingredients are inspired by the “three sisters”: corn, beans, and squash. This recipe honors the history of long-standing horticultural practices of Native American communities and their deep knowledge of companion planting. There are many variations of succotash, and the Fairfield Museum worked with Indigenous consultants, including Shoran Waupatukuay Piper, Clan Mother of the Golden Hill Paugussett Tribe, and Candyce Testa from the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, to identify a local version of the dish. We found a recipe that was originally collected by Cherokee, Creek, and Powhatan food historian and author E. Barrie Kavasch and published by the Institute for American Indian Studies in Washington, Connecticut. The succotash puzzle also offers an opportunity to share a story about the Southport Globe onion. Visitors learn how this famous variety of onion became a major crop in the 1840s because it could be easily dried and shipped to far-off destinations.

Now in Fairfield Museum’s research library, Anne Elizabeth Jennings’s collection of recipes from the 1800s includes this pumpkin pie recipe that inspired the pumpkin pie puzzle in the exhibit. image: Fairfield Museum Manuscript Collection, Anne Elizabeth Jennings Papers, MS B17

Our pumpkin pie recipe connects to the colonial period and shows how recipes have been influenced by the interaction of different communities. Pumpkins originated in Mexico but were traded by Indigenous people to become widespread across North America. This squash was added to English pie recipes after contact with Native American communities. Variations of pumpkin pie were made in colonial America as early as the 1600s. The pumpkin pie that we know today first appeared in 1796 in Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery. We identified a pumpkin pie recipe in Fairfield resident Anne Elizabeth Jennings’s 19th-century recipe book in our research library’s manuscript collection.

Chicken paprikash is a Hungarian staple. The dish combines traditional flavors like sour cream and paprika for a warm, hearty meal made by Hungarian immigrants, many of whom settled in Fairfield and Bridgeport in the 20th century. For this dish, our curator identified a recipe from her Hungarian great-grandmother, Mary Sandor Seamen, who lived in Bridgeport’s Black Rock neighborhood. These cooking traditions were passed down for generations, reinforcing the idea that food can bring people together and help immigrant communities remain connected to their heritage, even in a new place. As part of the chicken paprikash puzzle, we included illustrations of different stages of development of the Hungarian red pepper and conducted in-depth research to trace the ingredient’s journey to Fairfield to tease out the ideas of trade and immigration for a younger audience.

The ingredients in each dish feature a hand-drawn illustration and an interesting fact about its origins. The blocks for chicken paprikash highlight paprika, peppers, tomatoes, chicken, and sour cream. image: Fairfield Museum

Green bean casserole has been a popular Thanksgiving side dish since the 1950s, featuring canned or processed ingredients for convenience. Originally called the “Green Bean Bake,” this dish was created by Dorcas Reilly, a chef and inventor at Campbell Soup Company, in 1955. This recipe came from a 1960 elementary school recipe book entitled From the Hearth of Osborn Hill, found in our research library’s manuscript collection. Following World War II, Fairfield rapidly transformed into a suburban community with growing housing developments to accommodate an influx of people looking to start families and stay close to Bridgeport. As men returned from war and women returned to roles at home or remained in the labor force, 20th-century innovations in food production helped make preparing meals easy. This dish focuses on ingredients like frozen green beans and prepackaged fried onions that became staples in recipes that are still popular today.

A long-standing grocery store in downtown Fairfield, Mercurio’s Market was founded by Domenic Mercurio in 1900. By 1962, when this photograph was taken, the store was managed by Mercurio’s sons and would have sold staples like canned foods that made cooking easy. photo: Fairfield Museum Manuscript Collection, Robert S. Bryan Slide Collection, MS B74

The recipe for lomo saltado helps showcase how dishes can change over time, reflecting different people settling in an area. European, Chinese, and Peruvian cultures come together in lomo saltado, both in ingredients and technique. The traditional recipe was served with fried potatoes. After settling in Peru in the early 1800s, Chinese immigrants introduced white rice and the technique of stir-frying in a wok. With these adaptations, lomo saltado, which means “beef stir-fry,” is now considered a signature Peruvian dish. The Fairfield Museum invited El Rocoto, a Peruvian restaurant in Fairfield, to share a recipe for the exhibition. Partnering with a local restaurant was important in highlighting the diverse people who live and work in Fairfield today.

When designing this exhibition, we wanted to offer a durable, low-tech, hands-on activity that could offer even our youngest visitors an opportunity to engage with the new research in the gallery. In this interactive gallery experience, each dish is represented by four wooden blocks, highlighting four main ingredients with hand-drawn illustrations. As outlined in “The Power of Play,” a 2012 research summary on play and learning compiled by Dr. Rachel E. White for the Minnesota Children’s Museum, play involving objects like wooden blocks can offer many benefits. This simple toy can help children practice fine motor skills, such as hand-eye coordination and finger dexterity. The Fairfield Museum’s interactive gallery experience thus borrows from a classic form to engage with children in a developmentally appropriate way. On the surface, this interactive experience is a puzzle for young children, but it also sets up opportunities for intergenerational learning. Adults have an opportunity to engage in play with their children and join in the discovery process. They also leave with fun food facts, additional details about the ingredients, and the ingredients’ connections to Fairfield.

This 1960 collection of family recipes from students of Osborn Hill Elementary School in Fairfield offers a snapshot of what foods may have been popular, special, or comforting to families at the time. image: Fairfield Museum Manuscript Collection, Fairfield Schools Collection, MS B48

Creating Community covers more than 400 years of Fairfield history, with stories organized thematically across the exhibition. This interactive gallery experience offers an opportunity to deepen visitors’ understanding of topics that are explored in the main sections of the gallery. We made specific choices when selecting dishes for this interactive gallery experience, looking to represent different time periods and cultures throughout Fairfield’s history. Incorporating a range of dishes helped us build an inclusive experience for visitors, enabling different communities to identify with the experiences of other groups and to see themselves at the Fairfield Museum. By including recipes from a variety of community members, we highlight the stories of Native American traditions, colonial heritage, 20th-century suburbanization, and immigration through a playful, hands-on experience.

Balancing the serious and the fun is a key element of Creating Community, which opened in June 2023. The exhibition celebrates fascinating stories unique to Fairfield and gives voice to the people who have called Fairfield home. The range of hands-on elements and accessibility features in Creating Community breaks down barriers to learning, making for an inclusive exhibition that aligns directly with the Fairfield Museum’s goal to encourage inspirational experiences for visitors in a safe, welcoming, and enjoyable environment. What has been most exciting is that we have found ways to promote early childhood development, engage entire families, and build community, all while staying true to our mission of inspiring civic engagement by celebrating the diverse history and people of our region.

Michelle Cheng is the deputy director for programs and Chelsea Garth is the curator at the Fairfield Museum and History Center.

Explore!

Creating Community: 400 Years of Fairfield Stories, Fairfield Museum and History Center, 370 Beach Road, Fairfield, fairfieldhistory.org