The Economics Behind Grandma's Tuna Casseroles
November 4, 2015 8:23 AM   Subscribe

"All too often, cooking is explained in terms of social norms about femininity, or immigrants, or, in one recent New York Times column, the Cold War. This is all very well for sophomore sociology classes, but why does no one ever offer simple theories such as 'they liked it'; 'they thought it looked pretty like that'; or 'that was what they could afford'? Having read quite a lot of the era's cookbooks and food writing, I find these the most likely reasons for the endless parade of things molded, jellied, bemayonnaised and enbechameled."
posted by clawsoon (63 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
"All too often, cooking is explained in terms of social norms about femininity, or immigrants, or, in one recent New York Times column, the Cold War. This is all very well for sophomore sociology classes, but why does no one ever offer simple theories such as 'they liked it'; 'they thought it looked pretty like that';

Yes, but why did they like it? Why did they think it looked pretty like that? It's not like aesthetic choices spring fully formed from the brow of Zeus.

(Oh, it's Megan McArdle. Nevermind.)
posted by asterix at 8:30 AM on November 4, 2015 [16 favorites]


"It's all they could afford" is a pretty common explanation for food-stretching recipes like casseroles, meatloafs, and immigrant "peasant food."
posted by soren_lorensen at 8:34 AM on November 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


You know, for a McArdle piece, this wasn't too bad. If you read it as "here are some material things that contoured cooking choices and that are not always considered in these conversations", there are some decent ideas in there - the "more bad cooks" one, for instance, wasn't something I'd thought of before. And people don't take food distribution or the limits of photography into account very often when talking about the foods of the past.

The subtext of "everyone is much richer now" was pretty hilarious. McArdle is presumably richer than a middlebrow journalist would have been in 1950, but that doesn't say much about the working class.

I will say, though, that for the first time I thought to myself "you know, I could probably have a good conversation with this person", since I too love to bake from 1950s cookbooks.

I personally quite like eggs on toast with a sauce. Eggs on toast with a sauce is a perfectly good dinner in my book.
posted by Frowner at 8:34 AM on November 4, 2015 [12 favorites]


All I know is that I am going to try to work in the word enbechameled in as many sentences as possible from here on out.
posted by haunted by Leonard Cohen at 8:37 AM on November 4, 2015 [11 favorites]


I personally quite like eggs on toast with a sauce.

Wait, did McMegan actually argue that people don't like Eggs Benedict?!?! Oh "[t]he modern foodie" doesn't. That would come as a giant surprise to roughly 900 brunch spots in San Francisco.
posted by asterix at 8:38 AM on November 4, 2015 [13 favorites]


People don't start eating pig's ear or tete de veau because those things are particularly delicious. They eat them because the alternative is not eating.
posted by mhoye at 8:39 AM on November 4, 2015


asterix: "Oh "[t]he modern foodie" doesn't. That would come as a giant surprise to roughly 900 brunch spots in San Francisco."

Well, wait until they read this piece and we'll see.
posted by boo_radley at 8:41 AM on November 4, 2015


We were the sort of people who did our grocery shopping like a trade caravan moving from oasis to oasis. You started, perhaps, at Fairway Market in the 70s, for produce, and then you moved methodically up Broadway from point to point: Bruno’s for fresh pasta, Citarella for meat, Zabar’s for cheese and deli sundries, H&H for bagels, the Korean vegetable market on the corner for staples you might have forgotten to grab at some earlier stop. Then you cooked. Unless it was her busy season (my mother sold real estate when she was not simmering blanquette de veau), we had a fresh cooked meal from scratch every night.

This is still what I do (and this is my neighborhood). I'm lucky to live in a city where this is possible, I guess, but I don't think of it as precious.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:42 AM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


This article has an awful lot of speculation without any data to back it up. Was the price of cinnamon or oregano much more expensive in the 1950s than it was now? Some elementary googling found this article about the changing family budget, but this doesn't mean that the specific spices that are a bigger part of our meals now were hard to come by back then. Also, there was tons of immigration to the US before 1950, and it certainly influenced cuisine.
posted by demiurge at 8:43 AM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


"I have eaten plenty of Jell-O salad, and liked it."

That right there is a symptom of Stockholm Syndrome.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:44 AM on November 4, 2015 [11 favorites]


Wait, did McMegan actually argue that people don't like Eggs Benedict?!?!

Well, she was really talking about eggs on toast points with white sauce rather than Eggs Benedict - white sauce is no hollandaise. But I have nothing against a decent white sauce, although if I were making eggs on toast I would jazz it up with some paprika or something.
posted by Frowner at 8:45 AM on November 4, 2015


There is no excuse for aspics.
posted by bgal81 at 8:48 AM on November 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


You know, she could have done a little research before she wrote this. Other people have written extensively on these topics and back up their work with evidence. Is she just too lazy to bother?
posted by borges at 8:49 AM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


hi you must be new to the internet
posted by entropicamericana at 8:52 AM on November 4, 2015 [25 favorites]


So my prize cookbook is a French countryside cookbook with provincial recipes. What is more evident in the recipes - as well as wine pairings - is that every dish is predominantly made with ingredients that are from that region. Cows milk separates from goats milk. Fish dominates the coast... it is crystal clear as to where things are grown. I see no difference in 1950s and 1960s cookbooks which featured modern! items. It picked what was cheap, affordable, readily, available in order to pair with the idea of what modern! life was supposed to be like.
posted by Nanukthedog at 8:53 AM on November 4, 2015 [4 favorites]


Is she just too lazy to bother?

This *is* Megan "my calculator was broken" McArdle we're talking about.
posted by asterix at 8:54 AM on November 4, 2015 [6 favorites]


but this doesn't mean that the specific spices that are a bigger part of our meals now were hard to come by back then

Actually, I think it's much more that people talk about Foods of the Past as though what you would be eating in California in 1950 would be the same as what you'd be eating in International Falls, Minnesota, and as if the spices someone in SF's Chinatown bought would be the same as what someone bought in, like, Oakland.

Now, I know from living memory that you could not get galangal, lemongrass, thai basil, five spice, variety hot sauces or paprika in a tube in vast tracts of suburban Illinois as recently as the nineties. Those things were not available except, perhaps, in specialty stores. Now you can get almost all those things at the lousiest Cub in Minneapolis, the one gets the worst produce and the least staffing. Distribution has changed.

I remember, what's more, when variety apples came in. I grew up with Red Delicious (ew), Granny Smiths and Golden Delicious for a treat. We didn't live in apple country, and we didn't start getting variety apples until the nineties. If we'd lived in Minnesota, that would have been different.

And I maintain that McArdle's photography point is a good one. I've lost count of the times that I've seen links to all those "foods of the fifties so gross lol" image sites, and since I've actually cooked a reasonable amount of lol-fifties food over the years, I know how it looks in the flesh versus how it looks in fifties technicolor. People routinely point to gaudy photos done with passe techniques to illustrate that food of the past was terrible.
posted by Frowner at 8:54 AM on November 4, 2015 [12 favorites]


Median American household income in the '50s was around $5,000, and now it's around $50,000. So as a rule of thumb, multiply prices by ten to compare. Here is a random list of grocery prices from the '50s.

How does $5.90/lb for T-bone steak sound? Or five pounds of onions for your onion belt for $1.50? A half-pound plate of beans to overthink for $2.40?
posted by clawsoon at 8:58 AM on November 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


Now, I know from living memory that you could not get galangal, lemongrass, thai basil, five spice, variety hot sauces or paprika in a tube in vast tracts of suburban Illinois as recently as the nineties.

Hell, you couldn't get tofu in vast swaths of the Midwest in the 90s. I count its appearance in chain grocery stores in the early 2000s as one of the great culinary landmarks and wonders of my lifetime.
posted by ryanshepard at 8:59 AM on November 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


The Economics Behind Grandma's Tuna Casseroles

I read this and it meshed with what I've been ruminating on about the Authenticity of my ancestor's recipes. One is something called "Hungarian goulash", which looks pretty much like this and not like this and definitely not like this.

Now, "stew beef with spices over noodles" is a pretty good way to stretch a food dollar, but what do I call it? Grandmother's "Hungarian" "Goulash"? It's not gulyás. If I use smoked paprika instead of regular, doers that count as the family recipe? If I made any of a hundred minor substitutions, is it still "the same?"

The Goulash of Theseus, I guess. Authenticity is a mug's game.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:12 AM on November 4, 2015 [3 favorites]


I find the tone of this weird because on the one hand she's defending Jello salad, but on the other hand, oh, lest we think ill of her, she's not the sort of person who stoops to cooking with condensed soups.

Much is often put down to the materials, but I think skills were also an issue, at least for my grandmother. I wish we could have gotten her more comfortable with the internet so she could have discovered the wealth of cooking information out there. She likes experimenting, but she's experimenting with a range of things she knows how to do. She understands how a condensed soup works when you add it to something. Her generation would have learned how to work with gelatin. They did not learn how to brine poultry. Which worked for her, and I don't love all of it, but some of those things are still comfort food for me. I just can't see saying that oh, well, yes, we did like some of those things, but don't get me wrong, we did make our own croissants, and we had access to fresh bagels, and it's not like we were those animals who actually liked cream of mushroom soup.
posted by Sequence at 9:15 AM on November 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


Great timing; I just read this fascinating NYTimes article about a woman who has dedicated her life to reading cookbooks and compiling a database of every recipe she can find, ever.

She made a really good point about gender and cheffery:
One of the more startling patterns is the difference between cookbooks written by men and women before the 20th century. Wheaton says she has come to see them as almost two separate cuisines. Male chefs — who had professional status — were mainly concerned with how to satisfy a master’s jaded palate. It was said that ancien régime French chefs aspired to give fish the flavor of meat, meat the flavor of fish and vegetables no flavor at all. Robert May in ‘‘The Accomplisht Cook’’ (1660) urges his readers to use only the best: ‘‘fine flour,’’ ‘‘good thick sweet cream,’’ ‘‘handsome’’ fishes. By contrast, the women’s books are much humbler. They include such compromises as ‘‘cheap rice pudding’’ and ‘‘cheaper fruitcake.’’ These are books about what to do when life gives you lemons — or when it gives you mediocre ingredients and limited time. The female authors assume that their readers, who are servants or wives, will be managing the cooking alongside other household tasks like the laundry and child care. Their recipes often display a brutal pragmatism. Mrs. Randolph’s ‘‘The Virginia Housewife’’ (1824) has a recipe for chicken soup — soup of ‘‘old fowl’’ — that starts with keeping the bird in a coop for two weeks before killing it and chopping it up, discarding the back because it is ‘‘too gross and strong for use.’’
And even more telling:
Most cooks, especially female ones, have been illiterate, unable to record their kitchen experience. Wheaton has found just nine surviving Italian cookbooks by women from before 1900. It is as if all those nonnas rolling gnocchi and cutting tagliatelle never existed.
posted by St. Hubbins at 9:29 AM on November 4, 2015 [20 favorites]


Sequence: I think skills were an issue in my family as well. I'm at the earliest end of GenX, and grew up with parents who were children in the Depression and a grandmother who did most of the cooking for my household until I was about ten or so. Neither my mom or grandma were adventurous cooks at all until my mom took a Chinese cooking class and we actually had seasoned food for once! My dad had digestive problems and my grandma thought that anything beyond salt and pepper was fancy and Just For Company, so I grew up on bland food.

And here's where the lack of skills come in: I think between the Depression frugality mentality, and the fact that food cost so much more relative to the household budget, not only was creativity not encouraged, but young girls were not allowed to flex their cooking muscles beyond peeling the potatoes - because experimentation gone wrong or childish missteps = waste, and waste was Not To Be Tolerated. No wiggle room in the budget for throwing out a cooking experiment gone wrong, or eating hot dogs that night because teenage daughter's recipe bombed and wasted several meals' worth of food (counting leftovers and sandwiches). So you get bland, boring, repetitive cooking, and LOL new bride who doesn't know how to cook (because mom kept such a tight rein on the cooking).

Not only are far more spices and food items available now (as Frowner points out), the internet allows for exchange of tips and recipes (as Sequence points out) - sites like America's Test Kitchen have bailed me out more than once - food is cheaper for many families, and parents not on a knife-edge budget are much more OK with their kids experimenting with cooking.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 9:30 AM on November 4, 2015 [12 favorites]


She doesn't even mention what I think is a big reason people cooked and ate what they did: in many cases, they didn't understand the negative health consequences.

Take the referenced tuna casserole. In my house, growing up in the 50s and 60s, it was called Tuna Surprise. It was a cinch to make: mix canned tuna with Campbell's Condensed Cream of Mushroom Soup, plus a small can of sliced black olives. Bake until bubbling. Top with potato chips and bake a little bit more.

Sure it was tasty, but talk about a salt bomb. I'd make it again just for fun, except merely thinking about it kicks my heart into arrhythmia.
posted by Short Attention Sp at 9:37 AM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


And here's where the lack of skills come in: I think between the Depression frugality mentality, and the fact that food cost so much more relative to the household budget, not only was creativity not encouraged, but young girls were not allowed to flex their cooking muscles beyond peeling the potatoes - because experimentation gone wrong or childish missteps = waste, and waste was Not To Be Tolerated.

Definitely. I had to shed a lot of what I got from my mom and grandmother as far as attitudes about waste before I started to enjoy cooking, because I had to hit a point where sometimes it was okay for the whole thing to end up in the trash and for me to end up ordering pizza. But one of my grandmother's early-marriage cooking experiments that rendered an entire meal inedible was noteworthy enough that it's a story that still gets brought up like 70 years later.
posted by Sequence at 9:40 AM on November 4, 2015 [5 favorites]


The only thing people hate more than bad old food photos is Megan McArdle apparently. What's up with that?
posted by GuyZero at 9:43 AM on November 4, 2015 [4 favorites]


experimentation gone wrong
the whole thing to end up in the trash

Can I just ask about this? What are you people doing to screw up food so badly that it needs to be dumped? I've had some clunkers across the years, sure, but they're always edible, at least. Maybe not enjoyable.
posted by uncleozzy at 9:53 AM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


No mention of M.F.K. Fisher's "How to Cook a Wolf," Megan? In case you missed it, here is the NYT review from seventy-odd years ago that you might find interesting.

And what of John Thorne, who, with Matt Lewis, has made a career writing about things like baked beans and chowder [MF self-link]?

Pfah...
posted by wenestvedt at 9:54 AM on November 4, 2015


Famously, in my family, using baking soda instead of flour to thicken a sauce.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 10:12 AM on November 4, 2015 [7 favorites]


The only thing people hate more than bad old food photos is Megan McArdle apparently. What's up with that?

For me, I've read many, many of her just-so-stories, where she doesn't do research and trots out a lot of crypto-conservative stuff about gender, rape, sexuality, healthcare, etc. She has not shown herself to be a trustworthy source in the past, and she has absolute confidence (or at least a tone of absolute confidence) in her prognostications. She's not quite David Brooks, but she's not quite not David Brooks, either. She really, really has a track record.

This essay, I think, works much, much better than most of her stuff, because while it could be deepened and improved by a lot of empiricism, it's pretty easy to think through the average conversation about the Bad Old Food Days and see the blank spots, like the role that photographic technique plays. Also, it sounds as though she's actually cooked from some older cookbooks, which gives her an edge over a lot of people.

Can I just ask about this? What are you people doing to screw up food so badly that it needs to be dumped? I've had some clunkers across the years, sure, but they're always edible, at least. Maybe not enjoyable.

Things that were failures: a gluten-free shortbread crust that was an ill-advised adaptation of another recipe; a cake that fell and became a pancake (eaten with jam in one glorious binge by my skinniest housemate; would otherwise have been tossed); gross vegan ice-cream topping that was just viscid and terrible; curry that was way too salty and just weird....some totally mismanaged urad dahl...

MFK Fisher actually has a funny story about an absolute failure with curry eggs.

No mention of M.F.K. Fisher's "How to Cook a Wolf," Megan? In case you missed it, here is the NYT review from seventy-odd years ago that you might find interesting.

But is MFK Fisher really a counter-example? I think she supports McMegan's hypothesis, if anything. I've cooked a number of recipes from How To Cook A Wolf and Fisher's other books, and they're almost uniformly extremely bland and simple by modern standards - but many of them were serious, thoughtful and novel when she was writing them down. Obviously, How To Cook A Wolf is about cheap eats, but even so, they're very different from the cheap eats of today. (I have made a meatless version of her studge (or whatever it is) recipe many times and quite like it.) Also, the fancy ingredients she suggests are things like...paprika. And a modest amount of garlic. If you happen to like broken spaghetti tossed in a chafing dish of melted butter, she's your woman. (I mean, who doesn't, really, but it's not fancy or especially italianate.)

What strikes me about MFK Fisher is that she's almost certainly relying on much tastier basics than we get today - better meat, better vegetables, better fruit. She even talks about this a bit when she says that she could do stuff in Provence that was super simple and delicious, but couldn't replicate it with the produce in the US - and that's with better local produce in, like, 1930.

I bet you could make some hipsters happy with her sorta-recipe for oyster loaf.
posted by Frowner at 10:14 AM on November 4, 2015 [5 favorites]


Yet tripe has absolutely nothing to recommend it as a food product, except that it is practically free

This is a minor point, but I completely disagree. Tripe is definitely not to everyone's taste, sure; but when I order dim sum tripe at a Cantonese restaurant, I'm not thinking "oh man, this is OK but would be way better with filet mignon," I'm ordering it precisely because I like the chewiness and the texture that tripe has and that other cuts of meat don't have.

OK, off my soapbox now. Just got irrationally upset by this.
posted by andrewesque at 10:18 AM on November 4, 2015 [6 favorites]


If there is a particular foodstuff my mother would scruple against entombing in Knox Gelatin, garnishing with mayonnaise in the cup provided for that purpose by the temple maidens of Tupperware, and taking to a church supper for communal oblation, than I've never heard of it. Its olive eyes would gaze, all knowing, full of love and pity for all mankind, from between Mrs. Strobel's green bean and Campbell's Golden Mushroom Soup casserole (plain cream of mushroom soup didn't work - if there had been frankincense mushroom soup or myrrh mushroom soup, who knows what might have been?) and Mrs. Beremer's Glorified Rice. Those green or black orbs would say, "I know, my child. I know. Yours is the plate that passeth understanding."

And everybody loved them. Cabbage and carrots! Chicken and olives! Rice, cream, and raisins! Noodles and tuna! Apples and cider! Foamy or clear! Jelled Waldorf salad! Ham and pineapple! We never brought home leftovers. My mother is a culinary sorceress. Put her on Iron Chef with a sack of wrinkly old potatoes, a spice rack, three things you grabbed out of the refrigerator blindfolded, and the secret ingredient of last night's road kill, and she'll have Alton Brown cursing his grandmammy's cornbread before the night is over.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:19 AM on November 4, 2015 [5 favorites]


There is no excuse for aspics.

Lies. Meat encased in Meat Jello is delicious.
posted by Dr. Twist at 10:24 AM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


From my experience, over-salting is the only mistake that can ruin a dish to the point where it needs to be thrown away. Any other mistake can be rectified or the food recycled in some fashion, but if you add too much salt, you're Done.
posted by panama joe at 10:25 AM on November 4, 2015 [3 favorites]


Glorified rice proves McMegan's point, too - it's basically four-ingredient riz a l'imperatrice. Actually, I bet you could make a damn good glorified rice if you started with good rice, made real whipped cream, added some kirsch and fresh pineapple - I feel that it needs a crumbly base, too.

Soon will be my Christmas Festival of Non-Vegan Desserts; last year it was tipsy squire and linzertorte, but this year I'm thinking it may be baked alaska and riz a l'imperatrice.
posted by Frowner at 10:26 AM on November 4, 2015


Frowner: Things that were failures: a gluten-free shortbread crust that was an ill-advised adaptation of another recipe; a cake that fell and became a pancake (eaten with jam in one glorious binge by my skinniest housemate; would otherwise have been tossed); gross vegan ice-cream topping that was just viscid and terrible; curry that was way too salty and just weird....some totally mismanaged urad dahl...

All of those things would have been Edible when I was growing up.
posted by clawsoon at 10:35 AM on November 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


This is probably the least offensive McArdle column i've read but it still reads like she's only just now been introduced to the concepts of cooking, dining, and human beings.
posted by The Whelk at 10:37 AM on November 4, 2015 [7 favorites]


All of those things would have been Edible when I was growing up.

I don't know. The pancake might have been, but the vegan shortbread had to be chiseled out of the pan in crumbly pieces and was chokingly gritty, and the curry was literally nauseating. The dahl had a weird chemical taste that actually made me worried about its safety.

I think that all those things were more inedible in part because - unlike a lot cooks of of previous generations - I was really cooking out of my wheelhouse. Things I merely screw up tend to be semi-familiar things with a mistake in them - if I make bad potatoes, they're edible or fixable, for instance.
posted by Frowner at 10:40 AM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


My grandmother was a terrible cook whose life improved when her kids moved out and she got a microwave. Even then, she preferred to go out for her dinners.
posted by emjaybee at 10:42 AM on November 4, 2015


Family lore tells about one Christmastime where someone (my father?) set out to make rum balls. Only they didn't have rum, so they substituted scotch. And they didn't have vanilla wafers, so they substituted Ritz crackers. Apparently the end result was Not Good.
posted by leahwrenn at 10:47 AM on November 4, 2015 [3 favorites]


I am really craving tuna casserole now and I blame you all. And my mother didn't even ever make tuna casserole.

What she did make was something she called "tuna noodle salad," which I ate daily for lunch for years, and I was able to find directions recently only by realizing that most people say "pasta" rather than "noodles" now, and it is not particularly healthy but I was amazed at how cheap it was, and it made me realize I have a much different relationship with "everyday food" than my mother, and probably anyone with kids, does.

On preview: Dammit, now I'm craving her rum balls, too. Which she normally made with bourbon.
posted by jaguar at 10:51 AM on November 4, 2015 [3 favorites]


The subtext of "everyone is much richer now" was pretty hilarious.

But we are, or perhaps better put, goods are much, much cheaper now than they were, and technology has made many things possible that were unimaginable in our grandparents' and ggp's times.

Before they passed away, I spent a fair bit of time talking about cooking with both my grandmothers. My motives at the time were to preserve some of the family recipes. But what emerged was that what they cooked was so interwoven with how they could cook and what they had available. Both learned to cook in the 1930s and 1940s: refrigeration was still new and not always something they could count on. Food spoilage was common enough. Rationing and stretching food was a huge problem for homemakers of the Great Depression and WW2. Both hoarded food and hunted for bargains.

One grandmother was very conscious of social status and a middling to indifferent cook: the phenomenon of "if you can't make it good, at least make it fancy" is very familiar. She owned many amazing copper gelatin molds. The other was cold-climate european stock, where veg and spices were wondrous and amazing.

Cost was always a priority to them, ingrained in a way that figures much less into our shopping process now. We concern ourselves with nutrition, taste and preparation, they were much more concerned about enough calories per dollar. Being thin was socially derided in much the way that being fat is now: a sign of low income.
posted by bonehead at 10:53 AM on November 4, 2015 [5 favorites]


People don't start eating pig's ear or tete de veau because those things are particularly delicious. They eat them because the alternative is not eating.

Yeah, my 95 year old grandmother and her siblings (1st generation Lithuanian-Americans) like to get together and eat jellied pigs feet around the holidays because it reminds them of their childhood. A childhood where they snuck onto the trains that rambled by their house in Dayton and stole coal to heat their house and cook their food.

I'm sure they'd rather have eaten T-bone steaks every day, but instead it was a lot of jellied pigs feet and cold beat soup.
posted by sideshow at 11:17 AM on November 4, 2015


I just read the last half of that How To Cook A Wolf review linked above, and wow, what a piece of work - mansplaining avant la lettre. Some choice bits:

Of course, for a mere male book reviewer who has never become even a naturalized citizen of that foreign country, the kitchen, a good deal of the ground covered in ''How to Cook a Wolf'' is terra incognita. It sounds like good sense to suggest that when you cook anything in the oven at all you cook a lot of things at once to save gas. But is rubbing a chicken with a cut of lemon, to keep its flavorsome juices inside while cooking, a new and sensational idea that will be a boon to mankind, or is it standard practice for any housewife? I wouldn't know.

One might ask why, if the dude doesn't cook, he's reviewing a cookbook. Or, assuming that he was the last reviewer left in all of New York, why does he spend so much time on saying that he isn't qualified to evaluate large chunks of the book?

But wait, there's more:

She emphasizes that a mirror on the kitchen shelf is a great inspiration to the cook, who can draw reassurance from it or in sudden emergencies use it for hasty hair pokings that make all the difference to feminine self-confidence. But judging from her picture, Mrs. Fisher is one cook who has grounds to be very confident indeed without a kitchen mirror.

It's like an MRA website or something.
posted by Frowner at 11:25 AM on November 4, 2015 [8 favorites]


I think there are some interesting insights here, but it completely glosses over marketing and advertising changing the idea of what cooking actually was. An article was linked here ages ago about how marketers discovered that consumers would feel that a cake made from a boxed mix was more "home-made" if they had to add eggs and/or milk. The author mentions that her Betty Crocker cookbook is her guide to classic American cooking, well those cookbooks were often given away free and heavily promoted the use of canned and packaged ingredients.
posted by lekvar at 11:31 AM on November 4, 2015 [5 favorites]


Just had a look through the comments here, and I'm wondering what you guys think of this plate of bean casserole I made?
posted by duffell at 1:01 PM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


Her attitude towards tripe would be hilarious if it wasn't so sad.

"Dishes without tripe taste identical to dishes with tripe!"
posted by oceanjesse at 1:01 PM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


The article touches on this but I want to reiterate that grocery stores in the 60s had only about 10% of the items on sale in a modern store. Some things I remember: the only mushrooms for sale were canned, yogurt didn't exist, there were no prepared foods. Everything was relatively more expensive--we spend a smaller percentage of our income on food today than at any time in the last 100 years.
posted by Bee'sWing at 1:06 PM on November 4, 2015 [5 favorites]


I find even mediocre articles about changes in food culture fascinating, but the (common) assumption that all of one's readers are coming from the same or a variant food culture is vaguely irritating, and given today's demographics downright nonsensical. Like the tripe thing, or:

True, reading about your grandmother’s idea of what constituted a nice Asian meal is a bit lip-puckering.

Uh, my grandmother's Vietnamese, so... fucking delicious is more like it, actually.
posted by bettafish at 1:53 PM on November 4, 2015 [13 favorites]


That being said, "bemayonnaised" is a word I'm probably appropriating into my own vocabulary.
posted by bettafish at 1:54 PM on November 4, 2015


Family lore tells about one Christmastime where someone (my father?) set out to make rum balls.

We used to joke about my Italian aunt's rum balls, that they were more rum than ball. of course, of all the alcoholics in the family, her husband was the most functional, so she must have been doing something right.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 2:15 PM on November 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


Not in the US, but I think wide swaths of the western world were enveloped in hideous food after WW2. And I think both WW's contributed a lot to that: the development of industrial canned food was boosted already during the first WW, and then during the second, other forms of industrial processing were multiplied.
Also during both wars, women went to work, because the men were at war, and in many families, this meant cooking had to be easier and quicker.

I agree that millions of women did not enjoy cooking, but my great-great grandmother was a columnist in a national newspaper, and wrote about all sorts of interesting things, and then recipes. When I retire, I'm going to hunt all those recipes down, because every single one we still cook in our family are beyond delicious. Because of her legacy, industrially processed food has never been approved in my maternal family - though of course some family members tried to cop out and were treated with eternal disapproval. (This is in cold Northern Europe but she was not a protestant farmers wife - still, she did have a nationally distributed platform for good food).

My grandmother, who married into this family as a very young farmers daughter, remembered how there was a pressure from all sides on her to learn to cook and cater for large groups of people. Specially during WW2, when rationing meant skills were even more important, in order to make rare products last and accessible products shine.
Her mother seems to have been an excellent cook, always sourcing the best produce and able to cook a soup on a stone. But as the youngest daughter, my gran learnt nothing, and through the annotated cookbooks I inherited, I can see her progress from canned mushrooms in pastry puffs to the grand classics of Jewish, French and Italian cooking. I can even remember some of that progress. She was a great cook when I was born, but she was always expanding her palette; I distinctly remember a glorious day spent in the kitchen when she was cooking up an extravagant Middle Eastern spread, inspired by a trip to Jerusalem. This must have been in the 70's and I got to know hummus, tabbouleh, and foul, though I didn't know what they were called back then.

What I'm trying to say wth this long-winded story is that the history of bad food is probably more culturally determined than gendered. At least here in Northern Europe. Or what bettafish said
posted by mumimor at 2:35 PM on November 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


I find even mediocre articles about changes in food culture fascinating, but the (common) assumption that all of one's readers are coming from the same or a variant food culture is vaguely irritating, and given today's demographics downright nonsensical. Like the tripe thing

Yuuuuuup. My first thought when I think of tripe is my grandma's heavenly menudo.
posted by fiercecupcake at 2:53 PM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm picturing somone chortling heartily at the 1950s pictures of fancy jello molds and spam birds someone pointed them to online -- while eating a $9 cupcake and drinking a $20 bacon-infused cocktail.

All the superior food trends and gimmicks of today will be where, exactly, in 65 years? Will they feel themselves superior to us? Or maybe the cookbook of the future will specialize in jellyfish recipes since it's the affordable meat the average cook can afford (bounty of the rising acid seas).

I don't mind the Eggs ala Goldenrod much if it's with someone I like. Though, sure, something else might be tastier.

The 50s were coming off of years of a great depression and a world war into an unknown (suddenly more prosperous in the US) future and many did what they could.

People like my grandmother were not attempting to cook Thai or make hummus--they didn't know what those things were. But she made kick-ass bread pudding, homemade bread, dinner rolls, roasts, potatoes, carrots, fresh berries and green beans from the garden (in season) with fresh milk and cream from their cow. You might get jello as a side dish or canned items out of season. She also canned her own jam and preserved many things for eating year round. It wasn't so much a horror show all the time as many people picture. Though it was of limited variety, much of it was very fresh, well prepared and naturally flavorful. I suppose it may have been less the case for the families in the cities or the suburbs.

I wonder if we are patting ourselves on the backs for living through the world as it is now rather than through the 1950s? As though we had any choice when we were born.

Sure, be proud if you've made mindful food choices of your own, but a lot of it is attributable to the world and environment we live in.
posted by clickingmongrel at 12:46 AM on November 5, 2015 [3 favorites]


Can I just ask about this? What are you people doing to screw up food so badly that it needs to be dumped?

Bread that came out roughly the consistency of a brick has happened more than a few times. Stuff badly burnt that I probably could have survived eating at least part of, but all of it tasted scorched and thankfully I had the alternative of not. (Since it's NOT currently the Depression.) Broken mayo that I wasn't able to rescue even with the help of the internet. Quiche that separated somehow into water and rubber. Usually it's not really pitching a whole meal, but if your meal depended on brown rice and you just burned the pot of brown rice, maybe it makes more sense to have pizza tonight and reheat the other stuff tomorrow and try the rice again then. It is absolutely a privilege that I can do this kind of thing, but if I hadn't done it a few times, I wouldn't have ever wanted to try new things. I would have gotten good at a couple things and then avoided straying from what reliably worked to what might not.
posted by Sequence at 9:03 AM on November 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


Can I just ask about this? What are you people doing to screw up food so badly that it needs to be dumped?

I came home once to a proud announcement from my roommate: "I made carrot cake! Have some!"

I took a bite, chewed once, and found myself motionless with confusion. I swallowed that bite and asked, "Uh... how did you make this? Which recipe did you use?"

She gestured at a cookbook (one of the Moosewood ones, if memory serves). "But I left out the oil, because fat's not healthy. And I cut the sugar in half, because sugar's bad for you. I decreased the spices, because you know I don't like spicy things. And I sliced the carrots instead of grating them. It was quicker."

So this "carrot cake" was actually a bland, damp, unsweet (can't describe it as "savory", because it wasn't) dense matrix surrounding slices of soggy, flavorless carrot.

Even the dog wouldn't eat it.

At least with the pork-and-green-chile stew, in which she used diced canned jalapeños instead of diced mild green chiles, we were able to rescue it by draining off all the liquid, adding a couple of jumbo cans of tomatoes with juice, throwing in a couple of cubed potatoes, and letting it simmer until the potatoes were done. It was still blazingly picante, but we could at least get it down.
posted by Lexica at 3:18 PM on November 5, 2015 [3 favorites]


That "carrot cake" anecdote is horrifying. Why is it so difficult for some people to follow a recipe? It tells you how much of everything and what to do with it. And then you have A Food.

My mother is a terrific cook and a terrible baker. I've been baking my own birthday cakes since I was about 10. I baked professionally for a few years. She can't follow a recipe to save her life, but regularly provokes superlatives with everything from beans to gumbo to enchiladas.

And then I'm in the kitchen calling her to tell me what to do, and she says: Well, two bunches of this and a handful of that! Oh, just put it on to simmer for awhile.

:]
posted by fiercecupcake at 7:52 AM on November 6, 2015


That's the difference between cooking and baking. I was a really bad baker till I figured that out. With cooking, if you have routine, you can just follow your instinct. Even the best bakers I know, cake or bread, follow recipes.
posted by mumimor at 9:17 AM on November 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


Inspired by this thread, I made tuna noodle casserole last night, and it was glorious. Thank you!
posted by jaguar at 10:24 AM on November 6, 2015 [2 favorites]


On the subject of food history, there's a lovely little article on the NYTimes about a ca. 1918 jar of Durkee’s Curry Powder found at the Tenement Museum in New York. (I'm sad they don't reproduce the 1876 recipe for Codfish With Curry, though!)
posted by jetlagaddict at 8:00 PM on November 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


jetlagaddict, maybe it was similar to this recipe, which I found in one of my grandmother's cookbooks - it's printed in 1928, so it was most likely originally her mother's. It was written in 1909 by the founder of a famous home economy and cookery school, and was widely published.

Lobster á l'Indienne (for 6; 269 calories pr. person):
3 lobsters
40 g margarine
40 g flour
1/2 l soup
about 5 g curry
200 g rice

The lobsters are boiled and taken out of their shells. The meat is kept warm with steam, and served on a big garnished with whole boiled rice. Curry sauce is served on the side or poured over the lobster meat.

So many questions! This is the whole recipe, though I omitted the values for fat, protein and carbohydrates which were also given. Obviously, this is a cookbook for someone who knows how to cook. It doesn't really seem like a good recipe (why margarine, which soup?), but the curry sauce would be fairly hot.

Some googling leads me to believe that a similar codfish recipe sometimes may have included either leeks or tomatoes. The rice may have been formed in a ring with some gelatinous stock. I did find very similar recipes to this going back to 1858, for instance one for flounder in curry sauce.

I was surprised to only find metric measures, this is just a few years after they were implemented here, and many cooks and housewives won't have known them.
posted by mumimor at 4:42 AM on November 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


While we're on the topic of nebulously curried items:

MFK Fisher has this story about how she was home alone with her little sister and decided that she would make delicious, delicious curried eggs; and she was going to be all grown up, etc, and increase the amount of curry powder vastly. Eggs, burningly inedible; shame, lasting; career as a food writer, begun (at least per her).

She unfortunately learned them as "Hindu eggs", as the link below makes clear:

But in any case, this page has some historic curried egg recipes.

I grew up (late eighties/early nineties, suburban Chicago) making "curried" things with curry powder. I even cooked (separately) with cumin and other things that one often uses in curries without realizing that they made up curries.
posted by Frowner at 6:18 AM on November 9, 2015


The problems with 1950s colour photography have already been covered, but I'd like to also point out that widespread access to refrigerators may have had an effect on the way people stretched food.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 6:07 AM on November 10, 2015


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