Category: 1920s

1920s New Year's Health Brunch

1/14/2025

Our annual holiday party was a grand success, but not everyone was able to attend, so we decided to host a New Year's Day brunch. Of course, being The Food Historian, I didn't want to do just any old brunch! Recently I have been thinking both about the origins of brunch and the 1920s interest in both breakfast and brunch foods, and health foods, so let's do a brief dive into some food history before we get to the recipes.

Breakfast & Brunch in the 1920s

An "Informal Luncheon," according to one of my General Electric refrigerator cookbooks.

The word "brunch" originates in the late 19th century as a combination of the words "breakfast" and "lunch," but the origins of the style of meal go back much farther. British aristocrats in the early 19th century developed breakfast culture around large spreads of cold and fried meats, eggs, porridge, and toast. These breakfasts were often served starting mid-morning and going as late as noon, particularly if the household had been at balls, parties, the opera, or theater the night before.

Gilded Age society in late 19th century America emulated the British aristocracy, but food culture at the time was centered around very rich foods - game meats, butter, cream, and sugary desserts. Late night operas and balls going well into the wee hours of the morning meant that most of America's elite did not rise until quite late indeed, and brunch became the ideal bridge between late mornings, afternoon tea, and late dinners.

The Progressive Era, however, brought a rejection of the excesses of the Gilded Age. Food culture became more austere and more health-focused, although brunch culture continued. Some pitched brunch as the ideal way to curtail meals to two per day. Others emphasized the importance of a filling breakfast to weather increasingly demanding white collar jobs.

Adorable 1920s children getting ice cream from their new G.E. electric refrigerator, from my copy of the General Electric refrigerator cookbook.

The main influence on breakfast culture in the late 1910s and early 1920s was the rise of the electric home appliance. Refrigerators allowed for eggs, milk, fruit, and salads to be chilled, and also led to the rise of icebox cookies and cakes. Electric coffee percolators allowed for fresh coffee tableside, and electric toasters took the labor and much of the difficulty out of toasting bread, English muffins, and other breakfast breads. Chafing dishes allowed omelets, eggs, hash, and creamed meats to be cooked tableside, and even electric juicers allowed for freshly squeeze orange juice.

Many of these electrical appliances were designed to replace the manual labor of household servants, who were increasingly scarce as the 20th century wore on. Advances in industrial food production, particularly with canned fruits and vegetables and commercially produced gelatin, allowed ordinary Americans to access foods historically reserved for the wealthy.

Agricultural advances also influenced breakfast foods. The expansion of the cultivation of citrus fruits, nuts, and Mediterranean fruits like apricots, dates, plums, and grapes as well as the growing of "salad bowl" vegetables like lettuce, radishes, cucumbers, and tomatoes in California, Florida, and Arizona gave more Americans access to more fresh foods than ever before, especially during the winter months. The advent of refrigerated railroad cars allowed fresh foods to be transported over much greater distances, giving people in more northerly climes access to citrus and fresh vegetables in winter. The expansion in the 1910s of commercial poultry production dramatically increased egg production, and the rise of pasteurization allowed milk to be transported over greater distances. Pork production increased during the First World War, and Americans adopted bacon as an ideal breakfast food post-war.

Both California and Florida loomed large in American culture of the 1920s. California thanks to the shift in movie production from New York and New Jersey to Hollywood, and Florida thanks to a real estate bubble and an interest in tropical weather. The US annexation of Hawaii in 1898, US involvement in the Banana Wars in Central America, and US military intervention in the Cuban Revolution of 1917 all increased access and affordability of tropical fruits including pineapple and bananas and interest in tropical foods and cultures.

The confluence of the availability of fresh foods year-round great influenced diet culture in the 1920s.

Health Foods in the 1920s

Aerial postcard of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Battle Creek Michigan, 1928. Willard Library Collection.

The Progressive Era brought a number of health trends to the forefront of American consciousness. Vegetarianism had long been advocated by a variety of religious groups, including the Seventh Day Adventists - the most famous of whom was John Harvey Kellogg, director of the Battle Creek Sanitarium.

Kellogg was a proponent of the ideas of Dr. Sylvester Graham, who first advocated for the healthfulness of whole grains in the early 19th century. Battle Creek Sanitarium patient C. W. Post also touted the healthful effects of whole grains. Graham flour - also known as entire wheat flour - became a popular ingredient in breads both quick and slow, but also in recipes as diverse as puddings and pies. Whole grains were seen as better sources of fiber, and fiber was seen as an important component of digestive health for a nation often plagued with constipation and dyspepsia throughout the 19th century. Dried fruits were often touted as digestive solutions - which is where prunes get their reputation.

Among the old 19th century ideas of health foods were new ones - vitamins. Vitamin C was isolated in 1912-13, and both tomatoes and citrus fruits were quickly adopted as important sources. Influenced by French cuisine, greens-based salads with vinaigrette were also elevated in popular society. Dressed salads like crab, chicken, tuna, egg, ham, and potato salads tossed with cream-based boiled dressings or the newly commercially available mayonnaise, were still popular. But lettuce- and vegetable-based salads gained ground as fresh foods produced in California's "salad bowl" region meant that delicate fresh tomatoes, cucumber, and lettuces were no longer restricted to the summer months and those with gardens. Low-acid vegetables like peas, corn, lima beans, green beans, and asparagus which were difficult to can safely at home, were easily available from commercial sources. Combined with commercially available gelatins, gelatinous salads and aspics, which were previously the labor-intensive purview of the wealthy with servants, became not only incredibly available, but inexpensive. Gelatin salads were made easier by electric refrigeration as well, although they would set just as well in an ice box. Combined with fresh vegetables, canned vegetables and fruit, gelatin was an ingredient in many, but not all salads.

This was the history percolating in my head when I decided to do this brunch. I researched a number of period cookbooks. I found and discarded a number of typical health food recipes of the period, including Boston Roast (1927) Doctor Salad and C.C.C. Salad from the extremely fashionable Edgewater Beach Hotel Salad Cookbook (1927), Ginger Ale Salad (1916), Prune Whip (1910), and even Pineapple Upside Down Cake (1927), a new, albeit less healthful fad of the 1920s. I wanted the meal to be vegetarian, to fit in with both period interest in vegetarianism (although it was still considered relatively fringe in the 1920s) and my modern interest in it. I also wanted the meal to be balanced, with richer and lighter flavors, different textures, etc. I also wanted a meal that could be made without a lot of assistance the morning of. Although I have no household servants, I did get assistance from my husband (washing dishes, table setting) and our friend (lettuce chiffonading, plating, washing dishes), for which I was exceedingly grateful! Some recipes turned out far better than expected (homemade hollandaise sauce) and others didn't go quite as I'd hoped (fruit puffs). All in all the menu turned out delightfully, so here it is!

1920s Health Brunch Menu

Sunland Salad (1927)
sectioned oranges, grapefruit, pineapple, and raisins over lettuce

Eggs Benedict (1905) with Walnut Sausage (1927)
toasted whole wheat English muffins topped with walnut sausage, fried eggs, and hollandaise sauce

Grilled Asparagus

Rye Fruit Puffs (1917)
rye biscuit spirals filled with dates, pecans, and cinnamon

Stewed Apricots With Cream

Spiced Apple Sparkler
French sparkling spiced apple beverage with spiced syrup-soaked cranberries

Hot Chocolate
in antique porcelain dating to 1906

I won't overwhelm you with all the recipes at once, but I will link back to this post as I publish them in separate blog posts.

The table settings were more happenstance than planned. Because we were celebrating the new year, I wanted some metallics. The coupe glasses were a Target find, believe it or not, but everything else was vintage and thrifted. Most gorgeously of all was my friend's prized chocolate set from her grandmother. A beautiful lightweight porcelain with real gold details, my husband discovered from the maker's mark that it was Noritake and dated back to 1906! Precious cargo, indeed. The hot chocolate was some my husband had received as a gift for Christmas, livened up with hot milk and heavy cream. The spiced apple sparkler was Rieme brand, and it was delicious! I added some syrup-soaked cranberries leftover from Christmas' sparkling sugared cranberries (which I have been making for years) for color. The grilled asparagus was actually delicious leftovers from New Year's Eve tapas and added color to the plate of eggs benedict.

In all the crowd favorites were, surprisingly, the Sunland Salad and Walnut Sausage. The hollandaise sauce turned out wonderfully as well. Stay tuned for all the recipes over the coming days!

And if you'd like to learn more about the history of health food and vitamins, check out my podcast episodes "Full of Pep: The Controversial Quest for a Vitamin-Enriched America" part I and part II. Happy listening!

Until next time...

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Happy New Year! Looking back on 2021 (and 1921)

1/3/2022

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Political cartoon published in the "Buffalo Times," December 31, 1921. Old 1921 directs baby 1922 toward a sign that says "Normalcy" and tells him, "I must stop here, son - I couldn't quite reach it so I'll turn the job over to you. NOW MAKE GOOD!" Courtesy Reddit.

It's hard to believe it's already 2022. Another year has come and gone, and we're still in a global pandemic. A few days ago this political cartoon from 1921 was posted on Reddit and a whole host of other social media pages. It ended up in my newsfeed and seemed particularly apt. I've written before on the comparisons between a century ago and today (here and here), but the longer the pandemic drags on, the more the comparisons seem spot on.

"A return to normalcy" was the slogan of Warren G. Harding's 1920 political campaign. It promised that Americans could ignore all of the scary things that had happened since 1917, when the U.S. entered the First World War. Although his rhetoric about a return to the mythic, bucolic past (sound familiar?) he won the election by a landslide. Unfortunately for Americans, his strategy of conservative (in the original definition) rhetoric and laissez-faire deregulation after the federal control of World War I ultimately failed. The United States didn't return to pre-WWI normalcy, and while the deregulated economic boom lifted some boats very high, it left other Americans in the lurch and completely on their own. Harding's successors largely followed his economic plans, including World War I Food Administrator Herbert Hoover, who ended up overseeing the crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression.

While I don't think we're headed for another Great Depression (for one, our social safety net is far better than the non-existent one of the 1920s), there has been a strong social reaction to the pandemic that is similar - a craving for a return to normalcy of our own, of wanting the pandemic to be over before it is, and of ignoring many of the traumas it has inflicted on us individually and collectively.

I've felt that a lot this past year. After the frenetic pace of working on reduced hours through the 2020 lockdown, desperately trying to squeeze everything into fewer hours and pushing myself to be more and more efficient, 2021 has taught me the importance of rest. I'm not always very good at taking it, but these last few weeks I've tried my best to not feel guilty about sleeping in and doing nothing, even as I can't stop myself from commenting on food history memes!

2021 was less frenetic than 2020, but it was a lot. Here's the year by the numbers:

Welcome to our new Patreon members, Susan, Elizabeth, Becky, Phyllis, Steve, and Deborah! It's been lovely having your support!

I did FORTY separate food history talks in 2021. All but one was virtual, thank goodness, but it meant that being The Food Historian essentially amounted to a second job on top of my museum day job. And although they weren't quite once a week (there was a blank spot in July and August after I got Lasik surgery), I did actually post exactly 52 blog posts in 2021. Those of you on my email list have hopefully enjoyed regular blog posts in your inbox and look at those website visit numbers!

A few things didn't make it to the end of 2021 - Food History Happy Hour had to be sacrificed to the lecture gods, sadly. We made it to June, but Lasik surgery derailed things. Although I'm very happy with my new eyes and giving up glasses after 25 years, recovery took longer than expected. Guess it was 2021 telling me to rest again.

Despite the two month break, I'm very happy with how many posts I completed! Here's the top ten of the year.

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Food History Happy Hour: Episode 29, Wine Spritzer

4/30/2021

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Thanks to everyone who joined me for Food History Happy Hour tonight! We talked about the history of diets, dieting, and diet culture, with forays into 19th century religious diets (including Sylvester Graham, Ellen H. White, and John Harvey Kellogg), raw food diets, veganism, changes in fashion influencing ideas about body types, the role of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and WWI in informing modern ideas about dieting, willpower, and health, the invention of the calorie, the development of dieting and diet fads in the 1930s and '40s, including juicing and the Hollywood diet, we talked about Dr. Norman W. Walker, Gaylord Hauser, Dr. Weston Price, Adele Davis, the role of animal fats in heart disease research, the history of artificial sweeteners, environmental factors in fatness and obesity, and that diet culture is super toxic! I probably could have talked for another hour on this subject, so we can revisit it, if you want to! Let me know in the comments.

We also made a (red) wine spritzer (I thought it was a bottle of white wine, it wasn't) and the history of wine spritzers.

Wine Spritzer (19th century)

White wine spritzers are the classically low-calorie bar favorite in the late 20th century United States, but they date back to the early 19th century and are likely associated with the health and spa culture surrounding sparkling mineral waters, but may have also been simply an attempt to make an artificially sparkling wine!

Take your favorite wine - red or white - chilled, and cold club soda or seltzer or sparkling mineral water, also chilled. You can combine them in any ratio, but I think half and half is probably best.

Further Reading:

Obviously, I had a blast doing this episode and I think I need to now do some biography blog posts about fad diets and nutritionism and their proponents. Did you know Gaylord Hauser had a TV show? You can alsowatch an interview with Adelle Davis!

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Meatless Monday: Creamy Kitchen Sink Soup

3/1/2021

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It's been cold and snowy lately here in the northeast, and sometimes you just have to have soup. But going to the grocery store in a snowstorm is ill-advised. This recipe lets you use up all kinds of bits and ends that might be languishing in your refrigerator.

This particular recipe is my own creation, based on what was in my kitchen, but is entirely inspired by history. Several parts of history, in fact.

The first is reducing food waste. Historical peoples did not throw out potatoes just because they were starting to sprout, or lettuce because it was a bit wilted, and neither should you. Putting lettuce in soup is also extraordinarily historic, and a practice that should be revived.

Another is that this recipe is based on one of my favorites, "Green Onion Soup," from Rae Katherine Eighmey's Hearts & Homes: How Creative Cooks Fed the Soul and Spirit of America's Heartland, 1895-1939 (2002). Eighmey read hundreds of agricultural magazines and gleaned recipes and wisdom from the farm home sections. Found in the December 26, 1924 issue of Wallace's Farmer, Green Onion Soup is a unique recipe. A combination of simply green onions and potatoes, the soup is cooked in a small amount of water, and then partially mashed right in the pot without draining. Cream and milk are added to thin the soup and add richness. The soup is comforting and nourishing and retains all of the vitamins and minerals that might otherwise be lost by draining away the cooking water.

Which brings me to the final inspiration - vitamin retention in the style of recipes from World War II. By cooking the vegetables in the water that becomes the broth, you lose far fewer nutrients and flavor. Plus, other aspects of the soup are also quite appropriate to WWII - it's meatless, in line with rationing, and makes good use of milk, a favorite 1940s ingredient.

Creamy Kitchen Sink Soup Recipe

I had a number of foods that needed using up that made their way into this soup: a few red potatoes, a head of wilted red lettuce, the fresh bits of baby spinach out of a box that was on the verge of getting slimy, a whole celery root starting to go a bit soft, some garlic starting to go green in the middle, and the tail end of a gallon of milk. The only fresh addition was two bunches of green onions. You could modify it pretty much however you want - any kind of greens, any kind of onion, any kind of root vegetable.

4 red potatoes
2 bunches green onions (scallions)
1 celery root
3 cloves garlic
1 head red lettuce
1-2 cups baby spinach
water
salt
pepper
1/2 cup half and half
1 cup buttermilk
whole milk

Scrub and dice the potatoes, cutting away any eyes or bad parts, but leave the skin on. Slice the green onions, white and green parts. Cut away the knobbly skin from the celery root, then cut into small dice. Mince the garlic, wash and chop the whole head of lettuce. Add it all, with the spinach to a large stock pot and add water not quite to cover. Add at least 1 teaspoon salt (I used wild garlic flavored crystal salt languishing in a drawer) and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer hard until all vegetables are very tender and potatoes fall apart when pierced with a fork. Do not drain. Using a potato masher or sauce whisk, mash vegetables in the pot until blended with the water, leaving some chunks.

Add a the half and half and buttermilk (or you could use part heavy cream, or leave out the buttermilk, or just use milk) then add milk to thin out the soup and to taste. Taste for salt and add more if necessary, along with pepper and whatever other herbs and spices you like. Serve nice and hot with buttered bread or toast.

The buttermilk does add a nice, distinctive tang. If you don't have any, add a dollop of sour cream, or some plain yogurt, or a splash of lemon juice.

You could make this vegan with plant-based milk and butter. For a different flavor, add whatever fresh herbs you have lying around - dill, parsley, basil, and cilantro would all be good here. Add vegetable broth and some lemon juice instead of milk for a bright, brothy soup instead of something creamy. Use sweet potatoes or squash and tomato broth with the greens. The possibilities are really endless.

The finished creamy, savory, vitamin-rich soup.

If you'd like more interesting recipes, you can purchase Eighmey's book from Bookshop or Amazon - either way, if you do, your purchase will support The Food Historian!

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Food History Happy Hour: New Year's Eve

1/2/2021

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Finishing my vanilla fig bourbon and ginger ale post-happy hour in front of the Christmas tree.

On New Year's Eve with broke with tradition a little and did a surprise THURSDAY Food History Happy Hour at 11 PM. Because it was spur of the moment, we didn't really have a specific topic, but we did talk about comparisons between 1920 and 2020, an update about my office/cookbook library, my family New Year's Eve traditions old and new, some of the "lucky" foods of NYE, the Swedish celebrations I grew up with, including Tjuegondag Knut and Sankta Luciasdag, 19th century New Year's menus, what I missed most in 2020, and hopes for 2021.

Vanilla Fig Bourbon Recipe

No historic recipe this time, but the fig bourbon turned out quite nicely! If you want to make your own, here's a nice recipe:

2 cups dried mission figs
1 vanilla bean
bourbon to fill a quart jar

Put the figs in a quart mason jar. Cut the vanilla bean in half and add to the jar. Fill with enough bourbon to cover the fruit. Let age 3-12 months before consuming.

I had some on the rocks with ginger ale. And some of the figs may make their way into a boozy fruitcake at some point.

Episode Links

Not too many this time around, but here are a few to whet your whistle:

The next Food History Happy Hour will be on Friday, January 15, 2021 at 8:00 PM EST. We're gonna discuss more in-depth January holidays, including revisiting New Year's, Twelfth Night, Tjuegondag Knut, and my birthday, with a discussion of birthday cake history! See you next time.

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2020: A Year in Review

12/31/2020

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What a year this has been. A global pandemic, flailing economy, the end of truth as we know it, and the abject failure of political leadership in our country (to the point of cult-like devotion to a would-be dictator) - I don't think anyone thought 2020 would turn out like it did. But, surprisingly, it has a lot more parallels to 1920 than we might think. I've already written about comparisons between the coronavirus pandemic and WWI and the Spanish Flu, including eerie parallels with struggling onion farmers (similar things happened with milk and dairy farmers, but I didn't manage to get a blog post up about that!), and as 1920 was the start of Prohibition, I wrote about the Temperance movement and our road to Prohibition. Other parallels to 1920 include a widening income inequality, including struggles with stagflation (a.k.a. the "high cost of living"), the politics of laissez faire economics that favored big business over ordinary people, a post-war recession as European agriculture and manufacturing rebounded, racial tensions and violence and the rise of the KKK (including the work of the Daughters of the Confederacy to rewrite textbooks and put up Confederate monuments). All of these as-of-yet unaddressed issues that are all rising up again, 100 years later.

When the year first started, I was looking forward to our own "Roaring Twenties" decade, but what I had in mind was more jazz, loosening social strictures, and feminism. Not global pandemic, economic and racial strife, and crazy politics.

My 2020 New Year's Resolutions didn't turn out quite as I'd hoped. My goals were to write more, teach, organize, and form a food historian community. I didn't get as much writing done on Preserve or Perish as I wanted. I underestimated how much a global pandemic would hamstring the intense higher thought that is required for the complicated task of original research and book editing. I DID make progress though, and that's what counts. What I did to was write a lot more about cookbooks and historic recipes, which WAS one of my goals, as I look back.

Although I did not get any online courses up (although at least two are percolating as we speak), I DID do a lot of virtual teaching, both informally through Food History Happy Hour, which was often the highlight of my week or month, and more formally with the incredible number of virtual speaking engagements I did this year (and already 2021 looks like it might outstrip 2020, now that people are used to Zooming).

The organizing I didn't get much of a chance to do until this month! Some Christmas money meant I could afford to order 3 more bookshelves to match my existing ones in my guest-bedroom-cum-office-and-library, and that's about it in terms of what I can fit up here. I also rearranged where my desk is and made room for the new shelves, which should arrive next week.

And while I didn't go about creating an intentional food historian community, I have watched with pleasure the new folks joining in on Facebook, the food history community on Instagram, and of course everyone who has supported me on Patreon.

My goals in 2021 are a little more modest - keep Food History Happy Hour going as long as I can, keep plugging away on the book, and keep this blog going. And finish reorganizing my library and making my office more functional and cozy. I didn't expect to spend nearly as much time up here as I did, but working from home does that to a girl. Do you have any 2021 goals? Or don't want to jinx it?

Food History Blog

1920s New Year's Health Brunch

Breakfast & Brunch in the 1920s

Health Foods in the 1920s

1920s Health Brunch Menu

Happy New Year! Looking back on 2021 (and 1921)

Top 10 Blog Posts of 2021

Tip Jar

Food History Happy Hour: Episode 29, Wine Spritzer

Wine Spritzer (19th century)

Meatless Monday: Creamy Kitchen Sink Soup

Creamy Kitchen Sink Soup Recipe

Food History Happy Hour: New Year's Eve

Vanilla Fig Bourbon Recipe

Episode Links

2020: A Year in Review

Top 10 Posts of 2020

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