BBQ Chef's Hat
notes: label: Description
content: After World War II, many newly affluent Americans flocked to the tropics, visiting Pacific islands, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia, as well as warm places closer to home, including Mexico, California, Hawaii, and Florida. People developed a taste for casual living and the distinctive local foods and drink. Returning home, they re-created these experiences in their new suburban backyards, with patios, tropical drinks, and the grill, where they cooked meals craved by a postwar meat-mad America.
label: Description
content: By the late 1950s, American manufacturers and retailers were promoting new tools, clothes, furniture, and serving ware to go along with grilled meals on the patio. Just as the lust for the tropical life inspired experimentation in food and drink (in what we ate and who cooked it), clothing took a tropical turn in the 1950’s and 1960’s, especially in menswear. The aloha shirt, with its tropical motifs from Hawaii and the cool cotton guayabera from the Caribbean, topped the more casual shorts (Bermuda) that men had traded in from their long pants. Summer grillers, through the ‘60’s at least, even had barbecue/grilling shirts, hats, and aprons developed for them, outfits that often poked gentle fun at the aspiring backyard chefs. Aprons, in particular, often carried titles that boasted of the culinary accomplishments of these Daddios of the Patio, these Grill Masters. Others joked about the wearer’s presumed interests in both alcohol and women.
label: Description
content: Others, like the hat pictured here, around 1965, which went with a shirt of the same design, pictured the new tools and possessions, even food and drinks of the new life on the patios, decks, and lanais. This chef’s hat, a modified version of the classic French chef’s toque blanche (white hat) and its matching shirt pictured watermelon, pickles, skewers of meat (shish kebabs/Shish-ka-bobs), grill racks with steaks and hot dogs, spatulas, flippers, and even corn on the cob on its decorative design.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
topic: label: Subject
content: Food Culture
label: Subject
content: Eating
setName: label: See more items in
content: Home and Community Life: Domestic Life
label: See more items in
content: Food
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content: FOOD: Transforming the American Table 1950-2000
creditLine: label: Credit Line
content: Nanci Edwards
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: 2011.0210.01
label: catalog number
content: 2011.0210.01
label: accession number
content: 2011.0210
objectType: label: Object Name
content: toque
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: cotton (overall material)
label: Measurements
content: overall: 11 in x 12 1/2 in; 27.94 cm x 31.75 cm