There is far more history in a plate of food than most of us ever stop to consider. A recipe carried across an ocean can survive generations. An ingredient that feels essential to a national cuisine may have begun thousands of miles away.
Even something as familiar as peach cobbler can prompt questions about who first made it, what they had available, and how the dish became one we now think we’ve always known.
Those are the kinds of questions that interest Jeanie Jo Cullip, Galveston Monthly’s new food writer, though food history wasn’t part of any grand plan.
“I really did not set out to become a food historian. I set out to make dinner,” Cullip said.
Around 2020, she realized cooking had become much more than something she did because people needed to eat. She enjoyed planning meals, shopping for ingredients, trying restaurants, and deciding what she might cook next.
At the same time, she was working on a master’s degree in history, and the two interests began to overlap in ways she couldn’t ignore.
She became particularly interested in the Columbian Exchange and the movement of plants, animals, and foods between the Old and New Worlds. Ingredients she had always associated with specific cultures turned out to have histories that crossed continents and centuries.
Then it became personal. Cullip’s grandmother had taught her to make Ukrainian dishes, and that connection eventually led her to research the history of the potato - tracing its journey from its origins to Ukraine and later to the United States with Ukrainian immigrants.
“That research changed the way I looked at food,” Cullip said. “I began wondering not only where a dish came from, but who carried it with them, why it mattered, and what it might have meant to another family sitting around another table.”
Cullip was born in Kewanee, Illinois, but grew up in Puyallup, Washington, where her family lived on a blueberry farm. She and her husband, Chad, spent most of their lives in the Pacific Northwest and have a blended family of five children, now ranging in age from 17 to 26.
As the children grew older and began building lives of their own, Cullip and her husband started thinking about what a different kind of life might look like for themselves. After enough years of snow, ice, and long gray winters, they were ready for water, sunshine, and the chance to live outdoors without needing vacation plans first.
Chad, a paramedic, found a service opportunity in Galveston, and Cullip was offered a position at an elementary school. The island took hold quickly.
“What surprised me most was how fast Galveston became home,” she said.
They settled downtown, became involved in their church and the community, and Cullip began volunteering with the Real Food Project through Groundswell, formerly Galveston’s Own Farmers Market.
For a food historian, Galveston is fertile ground. Its table has been shaped by the Gulf, immigration, commerce, tourism, and families who arrived from elsewhere and brought their food traditions with them. Cullip is still making discoveries.
“The first time I ate a kolache, I remember looking at Chad and asking, ‘Where have these been all my life?’” she said.
Her columns will explore those discoveries, but readers shouldn’t expect restaurant reviews dressed up with a little history. Cullip is interested in where foods came from, how they changed, and what evidence exists for stories repeated so often they’re accepted as fact.
Her background in English and history has made her wary of a good story without documentation. When researching peach cobbler for the August issue of Galveston Monthly, she went looking for early references and found an 1839 recipe in Lettice Bryan’s The Kentucky Housewife.
“If I can trace something back to a primary source or credible historical research, I feel comfortable telling that story,” Cullip said.
“If I find a story repeated over and over but cannot find reliable evidence behind it, I would rather call it tradition or folklore than present it as fact.”
Each column will also bring the subject back to Galveston. Cullip plans to show readers where they can taste the food she’s writing about locally, then offer a “Food Souvenir” - a recipe they can make at home.
A topic might begin with a restaurant meal, something she’s been thinking about cooking, or a historical detail that sends her in an unexpected direction.
She already has plenty she wants to explore here: seafood, of course, but also the island’s Mexican food traditions, its Italian and Cuban influences, bakeries, markets, family restaurants, and recipes that have quietly survived in Galveston kitchens.
“What did immigrants bring with them? What changed when they arrived here? Which recipes stayed within families, and which became part of the island’s shared food culture?” Cullip said.
Cullip has also given herself another formidable food assignment. Inspired partly by Julie & Julia - the book and 2009 film about Julie Powell’s quest to cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking - she launched the Jeanie Jo & Joanna Project in 2020, setting out to prepare all 457 recipes in Joanna Gaines’ three Magnolia Table cookbooks.
The experiment has led her to dishes and techniques she might never have tried otherwise, including beef bourguignon and a biscuit topped with chicken and carrot gravy over mashed potatoes. Seaweed soup still awaits its turn.
“I am honestly approaching it with a little curiosity and a little hesitation,” she said.
Cullip is also a student again. She began the Culinary Arts program at Galveston College in August. She wants professional training in technique, kitchen practices, ingredients, timing, and presentation - all of which she expects will strengthen the way she writes about food.
Her earliest food education, however, happened long before graduate school or culinary school.
Every Christmas, her family made pierogi - the filled dumplings common in Ukrainian and Polish kitchens. Holubtsi, the cabbage rolls her grandmother prepared, and borscht, the beet soup she grew up eating, still bring her grandmother to mind.
Growing up on a blueberry farm meant blueberry jam, jelly, muffins, pies, and just about every other use anyone could invent for a blueberry.
Her mother made meatloaf, rhubarb-strawberry dump cake, and a sausage wrap from a recipe clipped from a magazine that the family renamed “Christmas Logs.” The meals were practical, homemade, and rooted in using what was available.
Those foods remain important to Cullip because they carry something a recipe card alone cannot.
“A recipe can travel through generations, sometimes changing along the way, but still carrying a little piece of the person who first made it,” she said.
That idea may explain better than anything what Cullip hopes to bring to Galveston Monthly. “I hope readers come away curious,” she said.
She wants them to discover a restaurant they’ve passed but never tried, order something unfamiliar, or learn something new about a food they thought they knew. “I would love for someone to finish a column and think, ‘I have never looked at that dish that way before.’”
And for readers who want to follow her work beyond these pages, Cullip shares more of her food history explorations - along with recipes, stories, and her ongoing Jeanie Jo & Joanna Project - at foodandthestory.substack.com.