Ready for another "100 Years Of . . ."?

November 19, 2015 6:28 PM

Too bad! This time, it's 100 Years of Dinner -- from roast beef and potatoes to quinoa and salmon.
posted by Countess Elena (47 comments total)

The 80s will always mean round croutons in soups and salads to me.
posted by prize bull octorok at 6:37 PM on November 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

Chicken Kiev is not MERELY "breaded," it is also stuffed.
posted by blnkfrnk at 6:46 PM on November 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

I really wanted to like this, and it was really cool in some ways...but it made sushi not look fun :(

I'm sure there were tastier dishes, or these same dishes are actually very good but not presented really well? I mean, spam and a baked potato actually sound awesome, especially if you crumbled it into spam crumbles and topped it off. Also why is the lighting so sad and grey and muted? And also this needs to be noted as like, White America. My ancestors were eating great multi-course dinners for a long time.
posted by yueliang at 6:47 PM on November 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

I feel like I'm being too negative about it though - I appreciate the fact that this was made and someone did this, and that Countess Elena took the time to share it.
posted by yueliang at 6:52 PM on November 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

They didn't even get the fancy TV dinner with the cobbler dessert, where you had to peel back the foil earlier!
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:59 PM on November 19, 2015 [6 favorites]

Right, the TV dinner with the little brownie in it that warms up and gets delightfully chewy? Like, where was that?!

Also, not one thing made of Jell-O? Really? I still enjoyed it, though. I think a lot of these videos are "100 years of" filtered through the eyes of 2015, which is just a whole other layer to consider.
posted by blnkfrnk at 7:05 PM on November 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

In a 100 years maybe they'll do "100 years of 100 years of".
posted by clvrmnky at 7:07 PM on November 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

This confirms my belief that my mother's cooking skills were right out of 1935. Cream chipped beef on toast with (canned!) peas was a staple at our house, and it was my least favorite dinner ever.

Also, people eat their Sloppy Joes with Kraft Mac & Cheese?? That's like two main courses right there!
posted by mudpuppie at 7:08 PM on November 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

I wanted "typical" meals, but I don't thing those hit that mark. For instance... I can't imagine that Sloppy Joes were ever served with Mac and Cheese...that's two entree's in one meal... life wasn't like that...

or, what muppuppie said...damn...
posted by HuronBob at 9:03 PM on November 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

And... let's just come out and say it... it was never "chipped corned beef on toast", it was "shit on a shingle"...
posted by HuronBob at 9:05 PM on November 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

And... let's just come out and say it... it was never "chipped corned beef on toast", it was "shit on a shingle"...

I'm actually interested in this. My folks never called it SOS. That's either because of some inherent prudishness (which they have), or because there's no military service to speak of in either of their families. It would be interesting to know what the demographic breakdown is among people who call it "cream chipped beef/creamed chip beef" vs people who call it "shit on a shingle/SOS," and where familial military service overlaps.

Someone get on this, please.
posted by mudpuppie at 9:38 PM on November 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

As someone who's never had it, the chipped corned beef on toast looked really good. But the wikipedia article on chipped beef has damped my enthusiasm a bit. It looks like a fruit roll up made of meat.
posted by ryanrs at 10:02 PM on November 19, 2015

also, yeah, these dinners are white as fuck
posted by ryanrs at 10:03 PM on November 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

Sure, fondue is stereotypically 70s as it was a fad then, but when I think of "70s cusine" as iconic to the period I think of that first wave of hippie veggie cookbooks and wooden bowls and everything is lentil and mushroom and all the vegetables are covered in cheese.

It seems like they took a basic "Meat and 2 starch " format and found things that fit it, which is good for avoiding cliche but it doesn't make the differences stand out. Like chow mein instead of TV dinner might be better, or even pizza which is so standard everywhere it's hard to remember it was once an exotic novelty that Emily Post had to inform people how to eat (with a knife and fork, because it's a pie)

I did like the emphases on home cooking trends rather than eating out trends so that may negate that tho ..but as people have noticed they don't really read as "typical home dinners" either.
posted by The Whelk at 10:29 PM on November 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

I wonder if you averaged out something like Good Husekeeping or another super popular source of recipes in ten year chunks and sorted them by common ingridents you'd get a better picture of the national palette......
posted by The Whelk at 10:34 PM on November 19, 2015

I sure miss that home-cooked sushi of the middle aughts
posted by prize bull octorok at 10:35 PM on November 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

According to my grandmother, who spent quite a lot of 1945 in a kitchen, you chopped up the spam and fried it with potatoes and maybe some onions. Spam and a baked potato was not a thing.

According to me, bright orange macaroni and cheese is a main course. No need for bizarre sandwiches.
posted by betweenthebars at 10:40 PM on November 19, 2015

Yeah, this is a decent idea, but only half done. 60's would have been all about trying to emulate Graham Kerr and Julia Child, 70's would have seen the first wave of easy home Chinese food (Chung King makes everything...swing American style, or somesuch)...80's would have, all of a sudden, been microwaved leftovers. Tacos was spot on, but sushi, at home, and salmon...those are all of a sudden pretty high end for tuesday night dinner. No pizza?
All of this from my, admittedly, very white middle class perspective.
posted by OHenryPacey at 10:41 PM on November 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

I think you could do this from a white middle class perspective but better like...

Wasn't the 90s full of George Foreman grilled chicken breasts? With the fat drained off? Just my house?

Also I feel like shrimp had a huge rally in the 80s as an easy weekday meal? Like paella style it also maybe grilled?

Salmon and kale quinoa salad feels like it's on the right track for 2015, but that's still more a special event kinda prep, not Tuesday night.
posted by The Whelk at 10:48 PM on November 19, 2015

According to my grandmother, who spent quite a lot of 1945 in a kitchen, you chopped up the spam and fried it with potatoes and maybe some onions. Spam and a baked potato was not a thing.


Yeah I've read ..a lot of stuff in food from that period that whenever they mention spam just mentally consider it a cooked ground meat or sausage cause that's how it was used, usually chopped up as a topping or mixed in...not served in steaks with a baked polato ( I felt so bad for the 40s! C'mon, not liver and onions? Not something to really lengthen meat ideally with a TON of cabbage? Not apple crumble which was easier to make with less precious fat than apple pie? Grumble mumble)
posted by The Whelk at 10:52 PM on November 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

It might have been fun to make 1915's meal close to 2015 cause soooo much of the turn of the century stuff like pickles and mustards and terrines have lopped back into being popular.
posted by The Whelk at 10:54 PM on November 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

Those are all the same dish until the 90s, right? It's just meat/some sort of cream sauce/starch/peas (or other starchy veg). Was it really peas all the time? I think maybe they just liked how they came off on screen.
posted by cotton dress sock at 2:05 AM on November 20, 2015

Aha yes thank you.
posted by cotton dress sock at 2:06 AM on November 20, 2015

Salmon and kale quinoa salad feels like it's on the right track for 2015, but that's still more a special event kinda prep, not Tuesday night.

yea, though, I do a salmon dinner that's close to that, but with lemon-pepper broccoli noodles on the side that only takes 1/2 an hour so is a good tuesday-night sort of meal. (I bet mine is better, though) (what? I cook good)
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 2:10 AM on November 20, 2015

Previously, on Ask Me . . .
 
posted by Herodios at 3:47 AM on November 20, 2015

Cute, but anachronistic. Except for the fondue and the raw fish on a square plate, I had every one of these meals offered to me in school cafeterias in the 1960s.

My mother made fondue in the early 1970s, but never cheese fondue, always the hot oil fondue where you'd pointlessly have to cook your own chunks of meat on little forks.

I've never eaten raw fish when l wasn't cast adrift in a lifeboat, so I cannot really address that one. I don't think I saw people eating this on purpose until the late 1970s or maybe a bit later.
 
posted by Herodios at 4:10 AM on November 20, 2015

The opened TV dinner actually looked like the picture on the package?!?
posted by klarck at 4:25 AM on November 20, 2015

always the hot oil fondue where you'd pointlessly have to cook your own chunks of meat on little forks.

hey we did something like that in the 70's too, but it was an electric frying pan full of broth you cooked your food in. How we didn't end up poisoning ourselves with all us kids waving bits of raw meat around on spindly little forks I'll never know.
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 4:29 AM on November 20, 2015

Creamed chipped beef on toast with a side of peas is awesome. And Stoffers makes a mighty fine SOS.
posted by pushing paper and bottoming chairs at 4:56 AM on November 20, 2015

But BROB (bring your own bread)
posted by pushing paper and bottoming chairs at 4:57 AM on November 20, 2015

I can't believe I'm saying it but I wished that was a photo gallery.
posted by A Terrible Llama at 5:14 AM on November 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

Heck some of those I still cook now. Just a couple weeks ago I made Jacques Pepin's "poulet a la crême" (chicken and mushrooms in cream sauce) and as I was eating it realized it's "chicken a la king" by a different name.

Mom still has her 70s fondue set. With the wooden double decker turntable and the curved glass dishes that fit around it. That I think we maybe used twice when I was a kid? I've called dibs on it already, just have to figure out where to put it in my tiny apartment.
posted by dnash at 5:31 AM on November 20, 2015

Yeah, that didn't need to be a video.

Data point - In my house it was SOS until we were old enough to say "shit" in front of my mom without her losing her . . . shit. My dad was former Army. SOS was camping food.
posted by Seamus at 5:51 AM on November 20, 2015

Chipped beef is soooooooo salty. But it can be really good. The stuff they sell now is more akin to spam in its level of processedness. But it used to be salted, smoked meat that was shaved thin. Hell, you can make it yourself. This is on my list of things to do soon. I always loved SOS but I would rather feed my family something less processed.

In my family, fondue was bagna cauda (yeah . . . Italians). It was a mixture of butter and olive oil mixed with a shit-ton of garlic and smashed anchovies. Salty, garlicky, boiling oil into which you dip chunks of raw meat and raw vegetables to cook. Everyone had two or three long forks to keep a few things cooking. When the cooked food was done, you would pull it out and carry it (all of two feet?) to your plate over a piece of crusty bread. After a while, you would have eaten a small pile of meat and a slightly larger pile of peppers and broccoli and then you ate this piece of bread sopping with salty, garlicky OH GOD I WANT IT NOW.

(And I see how many times I mentioned salt. I'm not usually a salt person, but these two dishes are where I would spend my yearly salt allotment. And fish sauce.)
posted by Seamus at 6:55 AM on November 20, 2015 [2 favorites]

And fondue was a '70s, '80s and '90s thing.
We were always a little behind the times.
posted by Seamus at 6:55 AM on November 20, 2015

I can't believe I'm saying it but I wished that was a photo gallery.

Yeah, that didn't need to be a video.

Most videos don't need to be videos. (Or to exist at all for that matter).

Every time a follow a link from MF that looks interesting and turns out to be a video of people talking my heart sinks. If it turns out to be TED, my liver and onions also sink. I prefer to 'consume' information on my time, not yourn.

Mom still has her 70s fondue set. With the wooden double decker turntable and the curved glass dishes that fit around it. That I think we maybe used twice when I was a kid? I've called dibs on it . . .

Whichever of my sibs ended up with our mother's fondue set can keep it. I don't recall it being particularly well made.

How we didn't end up poisoning ourselves with all us kids waving bits of raw meat around on spindly little forks I'll never know.

Right. I think we ended up with some cubes of meat that were pretty rare on the inside. Fortunately, Mad Cow Disease wasn't an issue then.

In my house [chipped beef on hard-tack] was SOS . . . My dad was former Army.

My father was in WWII and to this day continues to use quite a few colorful expressions from the 1940s. Pretty much any meat on bread would be served up as "SOS, M1-A1". If you asked, I think he'd say, "oh that's 'Same Old Stuff'" or something.
 
posted by Herodios at 6:59 AM on November 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

> Wasn't the 90s full of George Foreman grilled chicken breasts

Absolutely. Mr Corpse and I went through two or three George Foreman grills in the late 1990s, we used them so much.

> SOS was camping food

100 years of camping food would be interesting, actually. Dutch ovens leaving and returning, the arrival of the Clif bar, from drinking from straight form rivers to adding iodine...
posted by The corpse in the library at 10:28 AM on November 20, 2015 [2 favorites]

I really liked seeing all the plates and plate fashions change. That 90's plate was spot on.
posted by rmless at 11:40 AM on November 20, 2015

At our house (I grew up an Army brat in the 60s) my mother made chipped beef (out of that weird sliced corned beef that came in a jar) and my father made SOS (out of hamburger). Neither was popular and canned peas would not have helped. The discussion of the etymology of SOS was fun though.
posted by Bee'sWing at 12:00 PM on November 20, 2015

And sloppy Joes were open sandwiches, no?
posted by Steakfrites at 1:21 PM on November 20, 2015

I've never seen an open-face sloppy joe. Not even one of those NJ-style sloppy joes.
Maybe a regional thing?
posted by Seamus at 3:04 PM on November 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

Back in time for dinner is a neat little TV series that follows a family living and eating as if they're in the 50s, 60s, etc. It talks a bit about the history and how various inventions changed the sorts of things people ate too.
posted by lucidium at 3:18 PM on November 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

Nitpicks aside,those were really fun.

"Creamed chipped beef on toast" - the only one in our family who called it anything else was my father. He was a Marine, though, so maybe "s*** on a shingle" was something he picked up in the mess hall. Anyway the empty chipped beef jars were great for juice glasses or jelly jars.

Ground beef cooked up with vegetables or other ingredients in a cream sauce and eaten over some kind of bread was called "slop gullion" in in our house. I'm sure that was a corruption of "slumgullion," which we just called "American Goulash."
posted by The Underpants Monster at 3:40 PM on November 20, 2015

Anyway the empty chipped beef jars were great for juice glasses or jelly jars.

Those were literally the only juice glasses we ever had in the cupboard.

And sloppy Joes were open sandwiches, no?

That's crazy talk! An open faced sloppy Joe would necessarily be eaten with a knife and fork, at which point it would just become a Joe.
posted by mudpuppie at 6:05 PM on November 20, 2015 [2 favorites]

wooden bowls and everything is lentil and mushroom and all the vegetables are covered in cheese.

Haha, yes, that is a perfect summary of the Moosewood Cookbook. Also, cumin in everything. A lot of my childhood dinners were straight out of Moosewood.

I actually still like to make Moosewood's split pea soup from time to time, because it reminds me of my childhood. I don't think my partner likes it as much as I do.
posted by teponaztli at 6:49 PM on November 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

An open faced sloppy Joe would necessarily be eaten with a knife and fork, at which point it would just become a Joe.

Or maybe a Dainty Joseph.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:07 PM on November 20, 2015 [3 favorites]

I've never eaten raw fish when l wasn't cast adrift in a lifeboat

Wow, I can't believe everyone has let that side. That story could make the thread. Let's hear it.
posted by ryanrs at 11:16 PM on November 21, 2015