100 Years of American Food

[Silversage]

I stumbled on this article at David Leite's site, Leite's Culinaria, this morning. It's on my top 10 favorite food sites. It's a little long, but a great read.


100 Years of American Food: 1900 to 1999

 

[Silversage]

Why did that Share, Tweet and Facebook stuff show up at the bottom of my post? I don't think I put it there and I can't remove it.

 

[Addie]

I was talking with one of my kids about all the changes they and mostly me have seen in our lifetime. I told him we went from the outhouse to outer space in less than 50 years. And then we got on the food. From growing our own in the back yard to running to the store and buying it all cooked and frozen. I learned to cook on my mother's wood burning stove. I can still to this day, stick my hand in an oven and know if it is the right temp for the food. Now look at the stoves that prepare our food. When I have the time I will definitely read the article.

 

[Mad Cook]

I stumbled on this article at David Leite's site, Leite's Culinaria, this morning. It's on my top 10 favorite food sites. It's a little long, but a great read.


100 Years of American Food: 1900 to 1999

That was very interesting and well worth the time to read it

 

[Andy M.]

Thanks for sharing!

 

[Cheryl J]

That was a very interesting read. Thank you, Silversage. Wow...how things have changed over the years.

I saved that to send to my daughters.

 

[CraigC]

"American Food" started well before the date presented and closer to home.

 

[Steve Kroll]

Good article.

One thing I found a little odd was this:

One commodity that crossed class boundaries was sugar. By 1909, America had an aching sweet tooth, with the average person consuming 65 pounds of sugar annually. The culprits: chocolate brownies, apple pie, devil’s food cake and baked Alaska. Sweetened tea and coffee (and its newly invented decaf cousin) also contributed to our ancestors’ passion for sugar.

According to the USDA, average per capita consumption of sugar is now 156 pounds, or about two and a half times what it was a hundred years ago.

 

[Cooking Goddess]

Steve, I want to know who is eating my share of sugar! Himself and I might ingest 65 pounds a year together. Making most meals from scratch sure beats buying packaged convenience food, which must be loaded with that stuff.

Silversage, that article was very interesting. I was amused by the comment that Beef Stroganoff fell out of favor in the 1970s. It was one of my Mom's regular rotation meals, and was what I cooked for Himself's very modern, career-woman aunt when she came to visit us early on in our marriage - probably somewhere around 1976. When I told Himself I was making Beef Stroganoff all he could think of was the Stouffer's on the Square in Shaker Heights, OH. He was surprised at how good from-scratch could be - AND Aunt Ann was duly impressed.

And, thanks to you, I seem to have acquired another food blog to read when I have time...and remember. The "remember" part is getting harder.

 

[Steve Kroll]

Steve, I want to know who is eating my share of sugar! Himself and I might ingest 65 pounds a year together.

No kidding! And the newer number is 156 lbs a year, or 3/4 of a bag of sugar each WEEK. And that's per person?

I haven't bought sugar in 6 months now but, even when we were eating it, I think it took three of us around 2 months to go through a bag, which works out to only about 8 pounds a year for each person in our house. But that's not counting sugar in cereals, treats and everything else.

 

[Cooking Goddess]

I might use two bags a year for the two of us - and I bake occasionally. Himself has Special K some days, and each time they increase the sugar he notices it right away. It was 2 grams a serving when we moved here 15 years ago, but it has been at 4 grams for the longest time now. My downfall is chocolate, but I now usually substitute red wine.

We can always be optimistic and consider that the total sugar intake includes naturally occurring sugars in fruits? One can hope.

 

[Addie]

Well, it is 2 a.m. and I took the time to read the article from start to the very end. At my age, I can relate to many of the decades. Now if the author would write an article covering all the labor saving devices that were coming our way. If it had a plug and cord, I wanted it for my kitchen. But I was able to bring food to the table just like my mother did by making them from scratch. No fancy mixer was in her kitchen. She had two good hands and arms to beat those batters. And so did I.

But the foods of my childhood also became the foods of my children's childhood. The memories I have are the same ones my children will have. I still get requests for homemade Boston Baked Beans. I no longer have the six quart brown bean pot with the cover. But I just make them in another vessel. And they taste just as good.

As long as we have cookbooks, the recipes that are well received over the years, will never really go out of style. If you want to try some of the foods that your parents grew up eating, get a cookbook. Somewhere the recipes are in one. And if you really want a meal that will wake up your taste buds, make the whole meal from scratch. No mixer, no food processor. Do it the way your mother did. You don't have to do that for every meal. Just every so often.

Thank you Julia Child. You woke up the palates of America.

 

[Gravy Queen]

So not so much about "American " food but rather how we started to embrace new foods from other countries . When I say we I mean all of us from different parts of the world. I can vaguely remember boxes of Chinese and Indian foods arriving in the UK and they were considered deeply exotic . Although I doubt now they barely resembled a Chinese or an Indian but it was all quite exciting .

 

[RPCookin]

But the foods of my childhood also became the foods of my children's childhood. The memories I have are the same ones my children will have. I still get requests for homemade Boston Baked Beans. I no longer have the six quart brown bean pot with the cover. But I just make them in another vessel. And they taste just as good.

I had forgotten - my mother had a brown bean pot, but it was electric (actually it was more like the pot sat on a low heat hot plate - the two pieces were separate for easier cleaning). She made beans in it about once a month. Sometime after I left home, it must have been broken or it quit working, because I last saw it a long time ago, and it was not in the kitchen after she passed.

Mom's heritage was English and Welsh, and her family came from New England, so she had some of those traditions in her distant background.

 

[puffin3]

The reason the sugar intake is so high per person is virtually every processed food has some form of sugar in it. Lots of people basically eat sugar/fat/salt exclusively every day. Those are the consumers who are skewing the number so high.

 

[Addie]

Steve, I want to know who is eating my share of sugar! Himself and I might ingest 65 pounds a year together. Making most meals from scratch sure beats buying packaged convenience food, which must be loaded with that stuff.

Silversage, that article was very interesting. I was amused by the comment that Beef Stroganoff fell out of favor in the 1970s. It was one of my Mom's regular rotation meals, and was what I cooked for Himself's very modern, career-woman aunt when she came to visit us early on in our marriage - probably somewhere around 1976. When I told Himself I was making Beef Stroganoff all he could think of was the Stouffer's on the Square in Shaker Heights, OH. He was surprised at how good from-scratch could be - AND Aunt Ann was duly impressed.

And, thanks to you, I seem to have acquired another food blog to read when I have time...and remember. The "remember" part is getting harder.

I am. I don't eat sweets of any kind. Once a year I treat myself to a York Peppermint Patty and a Mounds. All the other sugar I take in is for my never ending cup of coffee.