Happy Valentine's Day, Food Historian friends!

​If you spend way too much time on social media (like me), you've probably seen this meme crop up in the weeks before Valentine's Day. I think I started seeing it in January! But it piqued my interest, so here we are. What is it about Sweethearts (a.k.a. Conversation Hearts) that inspires to much hatred? 

As far as I can tell, the meme was created by Molly Hodgdon in 2019, and while it got some attention on Twitter, it wasn't until someone screenshotted it (without attributing Molly, sadly - cite your sources, people!) that it started to go viral on social media. 

NECCO, which makes the very similar Necco wafers, is the acronym of the New England Confectionary Company. NECCO was formed in 1901 as a conglomeration of multiple regional confectionary/candy companies, the oldest of which was Chase and Company, founded in 1847 by British pharmacist Oliver R. Chase and his brother Silas Edwin, both based in Boston, Massachusetts. That year, Oliver apparently patented a machine designed to cut out candy lozenges (although no one can seem to find the original patent), and the pair went into business producing sugar-and-gum lozenges in a circular shape. 

Although several sources claim the Union Army supplied soldiers with "hub wafers" during the American Civil War, I can find no primary source references, and neither could Heather Cox Richardson, so take that claim with a very large grain of salt. It is possible Union soldiers consumed the candy wafers, but unlikely they were issued by military supply, which was pretty decentralized at that point anyway. "Hub" was a nickname for Boston, and the phrase "hub wafers" shows up mostly in newspapers in the 1910s, right when NECCO was heavily advertising. "Hub wafers" were the phrase used to get around the use of the brand-name Necco. 

Boston was a major candy-making center for one primary reason - ready access to sugar. Since its founding, Boston had been a major port for the Triangle Trade - enslaved Africans in the Caribbean labored on sugar cane plantations - the sugar and molasses were shipped to Boston, where the sugar was further refined and the molasses made into rum - and then the rum was used as a bargaining chip or payment taken on Boston sailing ships to the coast of West Africa, where people were captured and enslaved, and delivered to the Caribbean, hungry for slave labor as the brutal conditions dramatically shortened the lifespans of the enslaved. The ships picked up sugar and molasses and headed north again. 

Even after the abolition of slavery, Boston remained a primary shipping hub for sugar, and therefore candy. Second NECCO company Ball & Forbes was founded in Boston in 1848, and Bird, Wright, and Company in 1856. The three companies consolidated in 1901 into NECCO.

At any rate, the wafers (not to be confused with wax wafers used to seal envelopes for sending through the mail), got an upgrade in 1866, when another Chase brother - Daniel Chase - created "conversation candies" - which may or may not have been heart shaped, but had sayings printed on the candies (I think - sources conflict). I've been hard-pressed to determine what exactly these looked like, but "conversation hearts" in reference to candies show up as early as 1859 in newspapers. The original candies were larger than today's, and not all were in the shape of hearts - some were shaped like horseshoes, pocket watches, postcards, and seashells, among others. 

Even by 1907 the "conversation lozenge" was considered old-fashioned. In an article entitled "Fads that Were: The Conversation Lozenge," The Brooklyn Citizen writes:

"First Aid to Making Love" is what the conversation lozenge really was, hence its extremely long sway in candy stores. It is estimated that the conversation lozenge has lasted fifty years, and it isn't so dead yet that the candy factories have stopped making them. A nickel's worth of conversation lozenges made the most freckled, bashful swain the candy kid.

Were you too timid to express your feelings to Luella, there was a subtle, painless way of doing it. You asked her if she liked candy. Sure. You passed her a lozenge inscribed: "It's a Pleasant Day." She admitted it was, and ate the lozenge. Would she have more candy? Would she? You slipped her one, "You are Fair as the Lily." She couldn't deny that, either. As thins warmed up you pressed on her in succession, "My Thoughts Are of Thee," "Sweets to the Sweet," "The Ivy Clings to the Oak," "Your Face Haunts Me," "May I Dare?" "I Love Only Thee" and "Kiss Me." After that you didn't need any more conversation lozenges, except to let her draw them from the bag at random. You could afford to laugh when she brought out one labeled "I Love Another." You knew better than that at this stage of the game.

Ask your pa and ma about the conversation lozenge. 

To see examples of what the original conversation lozenges looked like, check out this collection from the Genesee Country Village & Museum in Mumford, NY. 

Most of us today probably also consider conversation hearts old-fashioned, but more likely because we encountered them in grade school rather than associating them with the 19th century! Those self-contained, inexpensive, non-melting boxes of candy were too easy for parents to purchase for the days when you had to get a Valentine for everyone in the class. But the texture and flavor is definitely a hallmark of centuries past. 

And, of course, that's what the meme at the start of this article is referencing, isn't it? "Wild clayberry" aside, the original flavors of Necco Sweethearts were quite 19th century indeed - peppermint and wintergreen only. 

At some point the flavors and colors were expanded. It's not clear what flavors were instituted when. Some sources indicate the original flavors included banana, cherry, and wintergreen. Another source lists wintergreen, orange, lemon, banana, grape, cherry, and blue raspberry, but clearly that last one doesn't date to the early 20th century. These flavors read as more modern, as opposed to Necco Wafers, whose original flavor lineup was wintergreen, lime, clove, orange, chocolate, lemon, cinnamon (the white ones, curiously, and wintergreen was pink), and licorice. Talk about 19th century flavors. Necco did also make all-chocolate, all-peppermint, and all-cinnamon rolls of wafers early on. 

In the 1960s, Brach's Candy Company got in on the conversation hearts game - their recipe is a bit softer but the flavors are nearly identical to Necco Sweethearts - lemon, banana, cherry, grape, orange, and yes, wintergreen. Gotta keep the minty roots intact. 

It's not clear when precisely Sweethearts became so sharply aligned with Valentine's Day, but given the candy's long romantic history, it's not surprising. 

Necco continued to consolidate throughout the 20th century - buying up candy companies right and left. But eventually the size became untenable and Necco went bankrupt in 2019, and production of Sweethearts and Necco wafers, among other candies, briefly ceased. The company was acquired by Spangler Candy Company in 2020 and they managed to crank out an uneven production, despite the pandemic and manufacturing woes. Spangler also saved Mary Jane candies from extinction. Today, Sweethearts are back in business.

The meme begs a larger question than I think most people would consider: What role does nostalgia play in our food consumption choices? Do people buy and eat (or not eat) Sweethearts and other nostalgic candy simply because they really love the taste/texture? Or do they simply evoke pleasant memories of childhood? Or perhaps they represent a childhood or some validation never fully acquired?

I would argue it's probably some combination of all of the above. Like smell, taste can be a powerful trigger for memories - happy or otherwise. So if you grew up associating Sweethearts with Valentine's Day, you might want to continue that association, or pass on the tradition to a new generation. But as we've discussed before (here and here), I'm a firm believer that on person's "gross" can be another person's "delicious." 

For me, while Sweethearts aren't my favorite, they're not awful either. But if I'm going to consume chalky historic candies, I'm going to sit and eat a whole can of creamy butter mints (which we called dinner mints, and which were a feature of nearly every wedding reception I attended as a child), rather than a box of Sweethearts. Although my mom's homemade cream cheese mints (also a feature of weddings, molded into pink roses and white bells and the peppermint flavored ones were green leaves) would be even better. But then they're not chalky and storebought, and wedding/dinner mints are a tale for another blog post.

What do you think? Are Sweethearts delicious? Nostalgic? Disgusting? Weigh in in the comments, and Happy Valentine's Day to everyone, regardless of your relationship status. 

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We're getting into some of the more obscure WWI posters now! This poster is from the United States Department of Agriculture, specifically the Bureau of Biological Survey. "Feed the Birds This Winter: They will repay you by destroying thousands of insects that harm gardens, trees, and crops" is the main message of this poster. Suggesting that ordinary Americans feed birds "especially during and after storms," provide shelter, and protect feeding areas from bird predators, the poster connects "our native birds" to their insect-eating abilities. 

This is a very text-heavy poster, so I've transcribed it all so you can know what it says!

"EVERY LOCAL BIRD you keep from starving, when cold weather, snow, and ice shut off its natural food supply, will repay you by destroying hundreds of caterpillars, grubs, borers, beetles, and insects that would prey on your flowers, vegetables, fruit, foliage, or field crops. Birds more than pay for their keep. It is better to feed birds a little now than to grow crops for insects later.

"FEEDING BIRDS IN WINTER costs little in time, food, or equipment. It attracts birds all winter to flit and chirp around your dooryard. It is one of the most important means of preserving birds. An increase in the number of birds means that more of them will nest in your trees next spring and become your summer companions. They will sing their thanks and contribute to the beauty and charm of your neighborhood.

"Feeding birds in winter is a delightful and inexpensive recreation as well as an excellent investment. Children particularly enjoy and benefit from this form of applied nature study."

"Feed the Birds this Winter. They will repay you by destroying thousands of insects that harm gardens, trees, and crops.

"How to Help Birds in Winter

"1. Supply food frequently, especially during and after storms.

"2. Provide feeding shelters where birds can find food and eat comfortably during sleet and storms

"3. Protect feeding stations against cats which will kill or frighten the birds.

"Every Destructive Insect is on the Bill of Fare of One or More of Our Native Birds.

​"BIRDS feed upon almost all kinds of injurious insects. They lead active lives and require much food. A single bird often eats more than 100 insects at a single meal and sometimes consumes several thousands small insects. Birds on a 200-acre farm in North Carolina destroyed a million green bugs or wheat aphids daily. There are many localities where birds have saved certain trees, garden crops, or farm fields from total destruction.

"Encourage all kinds of birds, as the various species prey on different kinds of insects. For example, the hair and downy woodpeckers render a special service in the protection of trees. They glean pests from beneath the bark and from within the wood. They account early for many a scale insect, bark beetle, borer, caterpillar, and ant. The bobwhite, one of the most important of our game birds, renders particular service in cultivated fields by destroying large numbers of potato beetles, wireworms, clover weevils, bollworms, cut-worms, army worms, and other crop pests. The bobwhite suffers particularly from hard winters. A little suet or a little cracked corn and grain will keep these valuable feathered servants in your employ.

"FOR bobwhites, build low hutches with roofs that will keep out snow, or make wigwam-like stacks of grain sheaves with openings below. Keep the entrances free from snow and scatter within cracked forn or small grains or seeds. Putting out food on a bare spot on the ground is an easier method, but not so useful.

"For woodpeckers, place suet under wire netting on trees; pour a melted mixture of suet and grain or seed in cracks in bark or in large holes bored in thick pieces of wood accessible to the birds; or make a 2-inch hole in a coconut and fill the interior with chopped suet and nuts and suspend from a a branch.

"For small birds in general, make food shelves at windows or on trees, sheltered from the wind, and with raised edges to keep food from being blown off. Better still, put the food in a hopper, which will protect the supply from the weather and let it down gradually. Small birds will feed also at the coconut larders mentioned above and upon the suet mixtures. 

"The Best Winter Food For Birds

"Suet or other fat, pork rinds, bones with shreds of meat, cooked meats, meal worms, cut-up apples, birdseed, buckwheat, crackers, crumbs, coconut meat, cracked corn, broken dog biscuits or other bread, hemp seed, millet, nut meats of all kinds (especially peanuts), whole or rolled oats, peppers, popcorn, pumpkin or squash seeds, raw or boiled rice, sunflower seeds, and wheat.

"Full information as to feeding and attracting birds and providing nest boxes, houses, and shelters for them will be furnished on receipt of a postal card addressed to U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE, Bureau of Biological Survey, Washington, D.C.

"Begin to Feed the Birds To-Day - The Singing Laborer is Worthy of His Hire." 

Much of this advice is still sound today! At the time, of course, it was marrying not only nature study for children (a VERY popular topic during the Progressive Era) but also advocating for more natural forms of pest control in a time when pesticides existed, but had limited applications, and the availability of which was likely curtailed by more important wartime manufacturing. Birds do require an incredible number of insects to survive (bats, too), and even seed and fruit-eating songbirds feed their nestlings insects to give them the protein and fat they need to grow. 

Today, more and more farmers are returning to birds - from raptors to songbirds - to address pest issues, from pest birds (like starlings and seagulls) and rodents to insects. In some instances, the birds outperform pesticides.

And contrary to what most people put in their bird feeders, birds eat a LOT of insects. Which is why I was surprised and happy to see mealworms on the list of recommended foods for birds, alongside suet and nuts. 

I've been feeding the birds in winter and early spring (we take the feeders down in the summer) to support the population, but also to let up a little on the insect population. Unlike 100 years ago, we're currently facing an insect apocalypse, which could have huge repercussions across the planet, including, but not limited to, agriculture, as many of our favorite crops rely heavily on pollination from wild insects. 

Which is why, even though I'm not a farmer and we're not at war, I still feed the birds in the winter. You can see my setup in the photo above - I have several squirrel-proof feeders (determined squirrels can get by even the baffles, but they provide shelter for the birds during the rain) with different mixes. One is a fruit, nut, and shelled sunflower seed mix with mealworms. Two more are just straight black oil sunflower seed. One has suet, and another feeder, which we're trying new this year, is just straight mealworms and beetles. Sadly, that one has been less popular. Maybe those insects don't have enough fat in them. Our half-dead holly tree provides enough spreading branches for the feeders but also cover from predators like hawks. Birds like to have cover they can escape to when predators come calling. And yes, that includes cats! Outdoor and feral cats are the number one predator of songbirds in suburban and urban areas. So keep your kitties inside or build them a catio. If they knew it in WWI, we should know it now.

It is most important to support native birds, and not pest birds like starlings (who, while fascinating, are native to Europe and can out-compete native birds), so keep your food focused on native seeds, fruits, and nuts whenever possible. Just watch out for inexpensive fillers that aren't eaten by most songbirds. Sunflower seeds, peanuts, pecans, walnuts, raisins, blueberries, and cracked corn are all great. Suet (raw or rendered beef fat) is also good, as is natural peanut butter (avoid the hydrogenated kind, the kind with palm oil, and sugar), for providing the fat needed to keep birds warm and well-fed during the coldest winter months.

I have set up our bird feeders right outside the kitchen window, and like Progressive Era nature study enthusiasts knew, they do provide a great deal of joy. I love coming to the kitchen every morning and checking to see what birds are at the feeders, and which ones need refilling. Since it has been incredibly cold and icy here in the Hudson Valley of New York this winter, our feeders have been almost as busy as Grand Central! We've seen cardinals, blue jays, tufted titmice (my favorites!), nuthatches, chickadees, sparrows, purple house finches, gold finches (they're mostly brown in the winter), downy woodpeckers, red breasted woodpeckers (whose breasts are actually just pink - it's the heads that are red!), dark-eyed juncos, mourning doves, and yes, even the occasional starling. More rarely we've seen cedar waxwings, rose-breasted grosbeaks (another favorite!), phoebes, and even the rare overwintering bluebird (though not actually on the feeders). 

Another way to support native birds (and insects!) is to plant native plants, especially fruit-producing shrubs for birds. For insects, native trees, especially oaks, can host up to 400 species of insects, including moths and butterflies. 

Okay, I'll get off my soapbox now! But always nice to see good sense from a century ago still holding true today. 

Do you feed the birds? Have a favorite winter visitor? Tell us in the comments!

It's been so bitterly cold lately, I thought I would finally share this stunner of a vegetarian brunch with everyone. A few weeks ago we had a friend over for brunch. It had been a long couple of post-holiday weeks, and everyone was playing catchup at work. So I thought having something delicious and comforting for brunch would help take the edge off. A favorite local Italian restaurant of ours has an appetizer I adore - waffle fries fried with sage and rosemary with a side of gorgonzola cream sauce for dipping. It's divine. I wanted to replicate something similar at home, but brunchified, and with a little lighter hand. So I decided to roast some red potatoes with sage and rosemary and olive oil. I had intended to pick out the herbs as I'm generally not a fan of whole rosemary leaves, but everything fried up in the olive oil so beautifully that we devoured the herbs alongside the potatoes.

I topped the potatoes with a fried egg, to make things feel more breakfast-y, with a side of broiled grapefruit for a vintage feel and to cut the fat a little. Sadly I used brown sugar, so instead of caramelizing it just melted everywhere. Still tasted yummy though. We had faux mimosas (the friend doesn't drink alcohol) which were also delicious. The star of the show, though, was the potatoes and cream sauce. Divine. 

I used a fancy flake salt flavored with wild garlic, so if you're using regular sea salt, maybe add just a dash of garlic powder or some minced garlic.

6-8 medium red potatoes
1 container/bunch fresh sage
1 container/bunch fresh rosemary
olive oil
coarse sea salt

Preheat oven to 450 F. Scrub the potatoes, cut off any eyes or bad parts, and cut into similarly-sized cubes. Wash the herbs and strip the leaves off of the rosemary stems. Pop the sage leaves off of their longer stems. On a large half sheet pan, spread the potatoes, and drizzle with olive oil. Add the herbs and using your hands, gently toss everything to combine (you can do this in a bowl if it's easier) and spread out in one layer, making sure the potatoes all have a cut end facing down. Sprinkle with salt and put in the oven. Roast for 20-30 minutes, or until potatoes are perfectly tender, with crisp brown bottoms. When ready to serve, use a very flat spatula to scrape up the crispy bits and put the whole shebang, potatoes, herbs, and all, into a serving dish.

One of the miracles of heavy cream is that if you reduce it, it turns into this silky sauce with no need for a roux in sight.

1 pint heavy cream (use more if you like!)
2 cloves garlic
1+ cup crumbled gorgonzola
salt & pepper to taste

With the flat side of a knife slightly crush your peeled garlic cloves, and add them to the heavy cream in a heavy-bottomed saucepan and cook over medium heat. Let the cream simmer, but do not boil, until reduced slightly (it should coat a spoon) and fragrant with garlic. Fish out the garlic cloves and discard. Add the gorgonzola and stir to melt. Give it a taste and add salt and pepper as needed. Keep hot until ready to use.

​To make brunch, pile some potatoes on a plate, add a ladle of gorgonzola sauce, and top with a fried egg. If you're like me (over medium, please!), you like to break the runny yolk. 

If you're entertaining folks for brunch who don't want or can't have alcohol, virgin mimosas are delightful. We had sparkling cider from New Year's Eve that had gone un-opened, but you could just as easily use ginger ale or 7-up instead. 

1 part sparkling cider
1 part high-quality orange juice
champagne flutes

Are they really mimosas without the champagne flutes? Pour half and half into each flute, and don't worry about drinking too many.

Do as I say, not as I did. Brown sugar does not work. Lesson learned!

1/2 fresh grapefruit per person
1 tablespoon granulated white sugar per half grapefruit

Set the broiler to high. Cut grapefruit in half and place on a metal sheet pan or other broiler-safe dish (do not use glass baking dishes under the broiler!). Gently smooth the tablespoon of sugar over the top. Place under the broiler and cook 1-2 minutes (watch them!) until the sugar is caramelized. Serve with grapefruit spoons, if you have them. Otherwise a dessert spoon or butter knife works, too.

In the bleak midwinter, a sunny brunch can really lift the spirits. But don't skimp on the trappings. Light some taper candles. Pull out the champagne flutes and an ice bucket. Dig out the grapefruit spoons (I don't have any yet!). It can really make the difference. Don't have any of that? Make a list and keep your eyes peeled once you feel it's safe to go antiquing again. Fancy glassware can usually be had for a song at thrift shops, and since glass is inert, a quick wash in hot soapy water and it will be fit for use, no matter what shape it was in when you got it (so long as it's not broken or cracked!). 

​Have you been doing anything special lately to make winter seem less dreary? 

The Food and Drug Administration recently announced that it would be de-regulating French Dressing. And while people have certainly questioned why we A) regulated French Dressing in the first place and B) are bothering to de-regulate it now, much of the real story behind this de-regulation is being lost, and it's intimately tied to the history of French Dressing.

A lot of people like to claim that French Dressing is not actually French. And if you're defining French Dressing as the tangy, gloppy, red stuff pretty much no one makes from scratch anymore, you'd be right. But the devil is in the details, and even the New York Times has missed this little bit of nuance. This Times article, published before the final de-regulation went into place, notes, "The lengthy and legalistic regulations for French dressing require that it contain vegetable oil and an acid, like vinegar or lemon or lime juice. It also lists other ingredients that are acceptable but not required, such as salt, spices and tomato paste." (emphasis mine)

What's that? The original definition of French Dressing, according to the FDA, was essentially a vinaigrette? What could be more French than that? 

In fact, that is, indeed, how "French dressing" was defined for decades. Look at any cookbook published before 1960 and nearly every reference to "French dressing" will mean vinaigrette. Many a vintage food enthusiast has been tripped up by this confusion, but it's our use of the term that has changed, not the dressing.

​Take, for instance, our old friend Fannie Farmer. In her 1896 Boston Cooking School Cookbook (the first and original Fannie Farmer Cookbook), the section on Salad Dressings begins with French Dressing, which calls for simply oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper.

She's not the only one. I've found references in hundreds of cookbooks up until the 1950s and '60s and even a few in the 1970s where "French dressing" continued to mean vinaigrette. You can usually tell by the recipe - composed salads of vegetables are the most common. If a recipe for "French dressing" is not included, and no brand name is mentioned, it's almost certainly a vinaigrette. So what happened?

I've managed to track down the original 1950 FDA Standard of Identity for mayonnaise, French dressing, and salad dressing. In it, the three condiments are considered together and are the only dressings identified, likely because few if any other dressings were being commercially produced. Although the term "salad dressing" has been extremely confusing to many modern journalists, it is clearly noted in the 1950 standard of identity of being a semi-solid dressing with a cooked component - in short, boiled dressing. The closest most Americans get today is "Miracle Whip," which is, in fact, a combination of mayonnaise and boiled dressing. Generic brands are often called just "salad dressing" because it was often used to bind together salads like chicken, egg, crab, and ham salad, and also often used with coleslaw. So it makes perfect sense that "French dressing" would be the designated term for poured dressings designed to be eaten with cold lettuce and vegetables - i.e. what we consider salad today. 
​
People have wondered why we needed to regulate salad dressings, but there is one very important distinction in the 1950 rule - it prohibits the use of mineral oil in all three. Mineral oil, which is a non-digestible petroleum product (i.e. it has a laxative effect), and which is colorless and odorless, was a popular substitute for vegetable oil during World War II by dieters in the mid-20th century. I collect vintage diet cookbooks and it shows up frequently in early 20th century ones, especially as a substitute for salad dressings. Mineral oil is also extremely cheap when compared with vegetable oils, and it would be easy for unscrupulous food manufacturers to use it to replace the edible stuff, so the FDA was right to ensure that it did not end up in peoples' food. Mineral oil is sometimes still used today as an over-the-counter laxative, but can have serious health complications if aspirated. 

There were several subsequent addenda to the standard of identity, but most were about the inclusion of artificial ingredients or thickeners, with no mention of any ingredients that might change the flavor or context of what was essentially a regulation for vinaigrette until 1974, when the discussion centered around the use of artificial colors instead of paprika to change the color of the dressing. The FDA ruled that "French dressing may contain any safe and suitable color additives that will impart the color traditionally expected." 

So here we see that by the 1970s, the standard of identity hadn't actually changed much, but the terminology had. "French dressing" went from the name of any vinaigrette, to a specific style of salad dressing containing paprika (and/or tomato). 

When people started adding paprika is unclear, but it was probably sometime around the turn of the 20th century, when home economists began to put more and more emphasis on presentation and color. A lively reddish orange dressing was probably preferable to a nearly-clear one. In 2000, the LA Times made an admirable effort to track the early 20th century chronology of the orange recipes.

By the 1920s, leafy and fruit salads began to overtake the heavier mayonnaise and boiled dressing combinations of meat and nuts. As the willowy figure of the Gibson Girl gave way to the boyish silhouette of the flapper, women were increasingly concerned about their weight, and salads were seen as an elegant solution.

The recipes pictured above are from The Edgewater Beach Hotel Salad Book, published in 1928 (Patreon patrons already got a preview of this cookbook earlier in the week!). The Edgewater Beach Hotel was a fashionable resort on the Chicago waterfront which became known for its catering and restaurant, and in particular its elegant salads. You'll note that several French Dressing recipes are outlined (they are also introduced first in the book), and are organized by color. "No. 4 (Orange Color)" has the note "obesity" not because it would make you fat - quite the opposite - its use of mineral oil was designed for people on diets. Although the fifth recipe does not note a color, it does contain both paprika and tomato "catsup," and all but the original and "obesity" recipes contain sugar. An increase in the consumption of sweets in the early 20th century is often attributed to the Temperance movement and later Prohibition.  

By the 1950s, recipes for "French Dressing" that doctored up the original vinaigrette with paprika, chili sauce, tomato ketchup, and even tomato soup abounded. My 1956 edition of The Joy Of Cooking has over three pages of variations on French Dressing. Hilariously, it also includes a "Vinaigrette Dressing or Sauce," which is essentially the oil and vinegar mixture, but with additions of finely chopped pimento, cucumber pickle, green pepper, parsley, and chives or onion, to be served either cold or hot. All the other vinaigrettes have the moniker "French dressing." 

A Google Books search reveals an undated but aptly titled "Random Recipes," which seems to date from approximately mid-century, and which includes a recipe for Tomato French Dressing calling for the use of Campbell's tomato soup,  and "Florida 'French Dressing'," containing minute amounts of paprika, but generous citrus juices and a hint of sugar. So maybe people were making their own sweetly orange French dressing at home after all?

There is some debate as to who actually "invented" the orange stuff, but while Teresa Marzetti may have helped popularize it, the general consensus is the Milani brand, which started selling its orange take in 1938 (or the 1920s, depending who you ask - I haven't found a definitive answer one way or the other), was the first to commercially produce it. Confusingly, the official Milani name for their dressing is "1890 French Dressing." The internet has revealed no clues as to whether or not the recipe actually dates back that far, but a 1947 New York Times article claims "On the shelves at Gimbels you'll find 1890 French dressing, manufactured by Louis Milani Foods. It is made, the company says, according to a recipe that originated in Paris at that time and was brought to this country after the fall of France. This slightly sweet preparation, which contains a generous amount of tomatoes, costs 29 cents for eight ounces." This seems like a marketing ploy rather than the truth, but who knows for sure? 

In 1925, the Kraft Cheese Company did sign a contract with the Milani Company to become their exclusive distributor. At least, that's what a snippet view of 1928 New York Stock Exchange listing statements tells me. As early as 1931 Kraft was manufacturing French Dressing under their name, and by the 1940s it had also used the Miracle Whip brand name to create Miracle French Dressing - which had just a "leetle" hint of garlic. 

One snippet reference in the 1934 edition of "The Glass Packer" notes, "Differing from Kraft French Dressing, Miracle French is a thin dressing in which the oil and vinegar separate in the bottle, and which must be shaken immediately before using." Miracle French was contrasted often in advertising with classic Kraft French as being zestier, which may have led to the development in the 1960s of Kraft's Catalina dressing, a thinner, spicier, orange-er French dressing.

In fact, as featured in this undated magazine advertisement, Kraft at one point had several varieties of French Dressing including actual vinaigrettes like "Oil & Vinegar," and "Kraft Italian" alongside Catalina, Miracle French, Casino, Creamy Kraft French, and Low Calorie dressing, which also looks like French dressing. What you may notice is that the "Creamy Kraft French" looks suspiciously like most of the gloppy orange stuff you see on shelves today, and which generally doesn't resemble a thin, runny, paprika/tomato-red dressing that dominates the rest of this lineup. 

"Spicy" Catalina dressing was likely introduced sometime around 1960 (although the name wasn't trademarked until 1962). Kraft Casino dressing (even more garlicky) was trademarked for both cheese and French dressing in 1951, but by the 1970s appears to have left the lineup. Here are a few fun advertisements that compare some of the Kraft French dressings:

Of course by the 1950s other dressing manufacturers besides Kraft were getting in on the salad dressing game, including modern holdouts like:

• Wishbone - the Wishbone Restaurant opened in Kansas City, MO in 1945. Their salad dressings were so popular, they started making them for customers to take home by the bottle. By 1958 Lipton (now part of Unilever) had bought out their salad dressing company and took the dressing national.
• T. Marzetti - Teresa and Joseph Marzetti moved from Florence, Italy to Columbus, Ohio in 1896. They opened an Italian restaurant to great acclaim. Joseph passed away in 1911 and Teresa continued the restaurant, opening several more with her second husband Carl. Her coleslaw and French dressings were so popular, customers begged to buy bottles to take home. By 1947 the second floor of one restaurant was devoted to salad dressing production, and by 1955 they opened their first factory. After Carl's death in 1969, Teresa sold the company to the Lancaster Colony Company, which still produces Marzetti's dressings today.
• Hidden Valley - Working as a plumber and cook in the oilfields of Alaska, Steve Henson invented a buttermilk mayonnaise dressing in an effort to get the roughnecks to eat their vegetables. It worked. In 1956, he and his wife Gayle moved to California and bought a ranch they named Hidden Valley. Although they had planned to run it as a dude ranch (which ultimately failed), it was Steve's dressing recipe which saved the day. The guests loved his dressing so much, Steve and Gayle started producing a mix-it-yourself powder that soon took over the ranch. They sold their mail order business to Clorox in 1972, which started producing bottled liquid dressings, too. And the rest is history.
• Seven Seas - Anderson, Clayton, & Company was founded in 1904 as a cotton company. In the mid-20th century they diversified into food products, including Seven Seas salad dressings. In 1986 Anderson-Clayton merged with Quaker Oats. The salad dressings line was sold to Kraft a year later, which continues to produce a few of the most popular dressings under the Seven Seas name today.

Although many people in the United States grew up eating the creamy orange version of French Dressing, it's mostly vilified today (aside from a few enthusiasts). Which is too bad. As a dyed-in-the-wool ranch lover (hello, Midwestern upbringing - have you tried ranch on pizza?), I try not to judge peoples' food preferences. And I have to admit that while I've come to enjoy homemade Thousand Island dressing, I can't say that I've ever actually had the orange French! Of any stripe, creamy, spicy, or otherwise. I'm much more likely to use homemade vinaigrette from everything from lentil, bean, and potato salads to leafy greens. 

​So to that end, let's close with a little poll. Now that you know the history of French Dressing, do you have a favorite? Tell us why in the comments!

​The Food Historian blog is supported by patrons on Patreon! Patrons help keep blog posts like this one free and available to the public. Join us for awesome members-only content like free digitized cookbooks from my personal collection, e-newsletter, and even snail mail from time to time! Don't like Patreon? Join with an annual membership below, or just leave a tip!

This poster features a long string of Army green military trucks labeled "Food" snaking through snow-covered hills, directed by a soldier. It reads "Keep it Coming" and features a quote by Gen. John J. Pershing - "We must not only feed our Soldiers at the front but the millions of women & children behind our lines." Underneath reads, "WASTE NOTHING" with the seal and title of the United States Food Administration. Almost certainly printed in the winter of 1917-18, the poster was designed by artist George Illian. 

"Keep it Coming" was apparently Illian's first poster for the war effort. He went on to design several others for the United States Food Administration, but none as striking as this one. Sadly, I was unable to dig up any information on Illian other than he was a member of the Society of Illustrators and that he did some commercial art after the war. He died in 1932, but I have not been able to find an obituary. 

The imagery from the poster would not have been unfamiliar to ordinary Americans who had been following the news. By the fall of 1917, American soldiers were in the fields of Europe, led by General John Joseph "Black Jack" Pershing. After three years of brutal war, France and Britain welcomed the Americans, led by Pershing with open arms in June of 1917, but it was not until October of that year that the main bulk of the American Expeditionary Forces would arrive in France. 

Although the United States had officially entered the war in April of 1917, military personnel numbered under 200,000, and military supply and tactics were largely stuck in the 19th century. It took months of stop-and-start mobilization to train American troops (sometimes with wooden rifles) and get them overseas (on borrowed ships). 

The winter of 1917-18 was one of the worst in recent memory during the First World War. On December 29, 1917, the New York Times reported "Cold Snap Over Entire East," reporting temperatures in upstate New York as low as 20 degrees below zero. New York Harbor froze, railroads were backed up across the Eastern seaboard, and Europe was engulfed in snow and freezing rain. The weather conditions meant that nearly all of the supplies for Europe and for major Eastern cities were completely backed up. On December 30th, the New York Times reported coal shortages in New England and New York, blaming railroad backups and the requisitioning of civilian ships and tugs for the war effort. The railroad backups resulted in the nationalizing of the railroad system under William McAdoo. ​

Illian's poster reflects the winter conditions on the front lines, too. Although the true horrors of trench warefare were often glossed over by the press, by 1917 many Americans were hearing from their "boys" overseas first hand. Marching in the abnormally frigid cold and torrential rains of the winter of 1917-18 in Europe was familiar to most of the soldiers. While the Eastern U.S. was brought nearly to a standstill by railroad blockages, coal shortages, and frozen ports, Britain, France, and Spain also experienced unusually cold temperatures, high snowfalls, and blocked railroads in December, 1917 and January, 1918. 

Like many of the propaganda posters of the First World War, "Keep it Coming" exhorts ordinary Americans not only to conserve food for American soldiers overseas, but also to help feed women and children in Allied nations. "Waste Nothing" was part of a campaign to reduce food waste and free up additional supplies to send overseas. American supplies of wheat in particular were low in 1917, and only by reducing consumption could food stocks be freed up for shipment overseas until farmers could increase production. The idea of personal self-sacrifice was part of a larger movement during the war to fund the war effort (through the sale of liberty bonds) and to "do your bit" to help the war effort. By using the wintry backdrop, Illian brought home the message that while Americans might be suffering from cold at home, things were worse in Europe, and American soldiers were doing all they could to help end the war and alleviate hunger and hardship among people who had already suffered four long years of war. 

1917-18 would be the only winter warfare most Americans would see in Europe - the war officially ended in November of 1918 - but while millions of soldiers were sent home after Armistice, many Americans would remain in Europe until the summer of 1919, part of the demobilization efforts and cleanup (including burial duty) after the war. 

​The Food Historian blog is supported by patrons on Patreon! Patrons help keep blog posts like this one free and available to the public. Join us for awesome members-only content like free digitized cookbooks from my personal collection, e-newsletter, and even snail mail from time to time! Don't like Patreon? Join with an annual membership below, or just leave a tip!

It's the depths of January. And after months of holiday eating, life can feel depressingly uninspiring when it comes to food. But while the imported tropical fruits beckon, it is possible to make a perfectly delightful dinner out of foods that are (mostly) in season here in the northeast.

Enter the butternut squash. I'm typically not a huge fan. Butternut squash soup is usually much too sweet. Mashed squash is insipid and mealy. But when a Patreon patron posted about making Emily Nunn's delicata squash salad with parsley and walnut vinaigrette and raved about it, I was intrigued. 

I didn't have delicata squash, just one lonely little butternut left over from my impulse buy Thanksgiving CSA haul. I did have a big bunch of parsley, but I think it got a little frosty in the frigid temperatures we've been having lately, so bits were crispy and wilted. It would take some sorting. I also had a bottle of walnut oil I'd bought last year, and mostly hadn't used, which was set to expire in February. In the fridge, half a block of the most deliciously creamy, salty, made-in-New-York cow's milk feta (the sheep's kind and I don't get along) was languishing. Inspiration was striking.

I'm an inveterate tinkerer when it comes to cooking. Even the respected science of baking usually has me asking, can I put fruit in this? Can I substitute some whole grain flour? Do I really have to beat the eggs for three whole minutes? Even as I don't mess with the ratios otherwise. So it's no surprise that I would be clinically unable to replicate Emily's recipe as she wrote it. The bones were good, though, so I stuck to those. Here's what I came up with:

This recipe seems complicated, but once the vegetables are cut and in the oven, it's a fair amount of waiting. You can do a pan of dishes or start a load of laundry or watch most of an episode of your favorite television show while you wait.

1 smallish butternut squash
2 smallish yellow storage onions
walnut oil
pink salt
garlic powder
black pepper
dried sage
walnuts
feta (the good-quality, locally made wet kind)
fresh flat leaf parsley
fresh baby spinach
balsamic vinegar
Dijon mustard
maple syrup

Preheat the oven to 400 F. Generously coat a half sheet pan with walnut oil (you can use olive or canola, if you prefer). Wash butternut squash and cut neck into one inch rounds. Cut in half and with a sharp knife remove the peel. I left the bulb end, cut it in half, scooped out the seeds, and roasted the halves whole with the rounds. Flip the half moons of squash in the oil so they're well-coated. Peel and halve the onions, cut into rounds, and add to the oiled pan. Combine about 2 tablespoons of pink salt, at least a teaspoon of black pepper, a few shakes of garlic powder and dried sage, and sprinkle the mixture all over the squash and onions. Roast for 30 minutes, flip, season again if you like, and roast for another 10 minutes or so, until the squash is crispy on one side and very tender, and the onions are tender. Scatter a generous handful of walnuts across the pan and roast another 3-5 minutes, until the walnuts are fragrant.

Meanwhile, assemble your plate with the baby spinach topped with just the whole leaves of washed and dried parsley. Make a vinaigrette of about 3 tablespoons walnut oil, 2-3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar, and 1 tablespoon each Dijon mustard and maple syrup (add more syrup or a tablespoon of water if it seems too sharp). Top the greens with slices of squash, onions, and walnuts, drizzle over the vinaigrette, crumble feta on top, and serve while the vegetables are still warm. ​

This salad is divine. The butternut squash came out silky and rich, the onions soft and not-too-sweet, the walnuts pleasantly crunchy, the parsley added some fresh, grassy tones to the milder spinach, and the sweet-sharp balsamic vinaigrette tied everything together. There was one slice of butternut squash left on the pan, so I tried it with some of the leftover onions and walnuts (which I stuffed in the cavities of the squash halves with the rest of the vinaigrette, for lunch tomorrow). To be honest, the squash was so good I could have eaten it just like that. But it really added so much satisfying heft to the salad. 

I don't think I'll ever make butternut squash any other way again. It was too delicious this way, and I could see it being the star of any number of other salads as well. 

It's hard to find satisfying, fresh recipes for winter eating that don't involve ingredients flown in from thousands of miles away. And while I love the wintertime treat of beautiful citrus, it's nice to be able to make something so delicious out of locally grown storage foods, too. I hope you enjoy this recipe as much as I did!​

Somehow, I missed the Golden Girls growing up. The show first aired in 1985, the year I was born, and went off the air in 1992, when I was seven. But despite the fact that it was apparently syndicated on broadcast television all through my elementary and high school years, I missed it. I did not watch a single episode. Oh, I knew that it existed, and by college, thanks to the virality of the internet, I got the references. I watched Betty White on Hot in Cleveland and watched with glee as she roasted William Shatner and essentially became a saint of the internet age. Thanks to the internet, I knew that Bea Arthur was a patron saint of LGBTQ+ youth, too. But I never saw the show, even when I finally did get access to cable.

When Betty White passed away on December 31, 2021, just a little over two weeks shy of her 100th birthday (coming up on January 17th), I decided to see what all the fuss was about. 

Just one episode in, I was totally hooked. Rose reminds me of Minnesota (I almost went to St. Olaf!), I love Blanche's Southern charm and unapologetic sexuality, and while I'm not a huge fan of how often the show made fun of Bea Arthur's appearance, I appreciate Dorothy's whip smarts and New Yorker bluntness and sarcasm. And who could say no to firecracker Sophia?  

I've been binging episodes ever since. Thank goodness there are so many of them. But one thing that really struck me was the division of household labor, which features fairly prominently in the first few episodes, as well as subsequent flashbacks (once the gay male cook in the pilot episode disappears, that is). The ladies grocery shop together, and argue over what to buy. There's discussion of household budgets. When people come to visit, the ladies help each other clean. And someone or another is always in the kitchen washing dishes, cooking, or having a late-night snack. And although Sophia, with her small-village-in-Sicily background is queen of the Sunday gravy, other characters cook, too.

The four ladies on the show are mature adults - they've all run their own households, raised children, managed husbands, etc. It can't have been easy for them to come to an agreement on how to run the house, but they did. And it reminded me very strongly of a passage I read in a book I now can't remember and can't find (the perils of a historian's mind. If anyone knows this reference, please let me know!) - it described a home economics college program where in their senior year, the girls lived together in a house and put into practice all the skills they had learned in class. But, as the author pointed out, the girls shared the workload together, which may have given them unrealistic ideas about the labor of managing their own households. 

In our last evaluation of memes, we talked about how convenience foods in the 1950s and '60s were in part adopted quickly in reaction to a reduction in available household labor. With no servants/hired help and fewer children, alongside changing expectations of childhood, more and more women were shouldering the burden of household labor alone. 

Which is why Golden Girls is so refreshing: four adults pulling together relatively equally to maintain a household and keep everyone fed. There are occasional hints at people's economic statuses. For one, if any of them were independently wealthy, I doubt they'd need roommates. But while Blanche having a nanny for her children becomes a plot point, as does Rose keeping a secret that her husband was terrible with money, Dorothy and Sophia seem chronically on a budget, unable to afford some of the things the others can. Although that may just reflect Sophia's addiction to the races. But still, everyone is able to afford a rather shocking amount of eveningwear and certainly there's always enough money to keep the fridge stocked with cheesecake. 

The women are all in their 50s and 60s in the show (Sophia purportedly in her 80s, although Estelle Getty was a year younger than Bea Arthur), which means that they were in high school in the 1940s or earlier. In particular, Rose mentions her dismay at being rejected for joining the WACs during WWII. That means they all likely had at least some home economics training in school. And while the show is quintessentially '80s, there are hints of the 1940s and '50s everywhere, from the décor to the clothing (especially the robes). 

That home economics training likely served them in good stead when living with other women. They probably all had similar experiences, maybe learned how to wash dishes or make beds or do laundry a certain way. Because despite the fact that the characters come from very different backgrounds, they celebrate their differences, instead of letting them divide them (for the most, part, anyway). 

Today, more and more Millennials, cash-strapped by an economy that underpays them and bogged down with student loan debt they were promised would get them good jobs, are joining forces to purchase or rent homes with fellow adults they aren't married to. And as my generation contemplates retirement, many of us have thought about purchasing homes or property in concert with friends (Boomers and Gen-Xers are, too). The family/friend "compound" is becoming more and more of a thing. 

Communal living certainly has a lot of historical precedence. The nuclear family is a lot newer (and less effective) than most "traditional family values" folks like to admit. Which features prominently in several Golden Girls plots as the ladies struggle with deadbeat exes, estranged children and siblings, and the sting of sexism and ageism. And while home ownership is still the American Dream for many people, it makes a lot of economic sense to share household resources and labor. In this housing market? Sometimes it's the only way people can afford a place of their own.

Even in the 1980s, Miami was expensive, so roommates made as much sense then as it does in most cities now. But what makes the Golden Girls TV show work is the relationships the ladies build with each other, how they support each other, and how they work together. In our modern era, it's a lot harder to find community than it once was. 

So if you want something similar in your life or your future, tell any naysayers, "Hey! It worked for the Golden Girls!" Just don't forget to hash out your differences with honesty and lots of late-night snacks. ​

​The Food Historian blog is supported by patrons on Patreon! Patrons help keep blog posts like this one free and available to the public. Join us for awesome members-only content like free digitized cookbooks from my personal collection, e-newsletter, and even snail mail from time to time! Don't like Patreon? Leave a tip!

Well friends, I said I was contemplating a part two to last week's examination of 1950s food, and this meme kept popping up on my socials, so here we are again! This one isn't quite as inflammatory, and no fun illustration to catch your eye, but it makes a similar claim nonetheless. Here's the original text:

If you haven't seen any of Dylan Hollis' TikTok videos, I recommend them! He's hilarious. Not a food historian, but he cooks historic recipes and taste tests them. Some are horrific, but most are delicious - and while Dylan's reactions are 99% of the fun, his shock when things are actually tasty, while hilarious, does grate a little sometimes. Yes, people in the past really did know what they were doing!

The meme claims that the food of the 1910s and the Great Depression were better than the 1950s, and were made with love, working with limited ingredients, whereas 1950s recipes were made to sell products during the McCarthy era.

And while those ideas aren't necessarily wrong, they're definitely not the whole story. 

The time period of 1900 to 1950 is my favorite time period for cookbooks. They usually have decent instructions with things like measurements and oven temperatures, but are still from scratch. USUALLY being the key word there. Because starting in the 1870s, corporate food brands started publishing cookbooklets to sell their products. One of the earliest adopters of this sales tactic? Cottolene brand shortening. Not exactly lard, but pretty darn close!

A lot of the corporate cookbooks and cookbooklets of the late 19th and early 20th century were primarily for ingredients. Different brands of flavorings and spices, baking powder, flour, shortening or lard, etc. were the main branded food products at the time. A lot of major food companies today started out as flour companies, including General Mills. So the cookbooks were largely normal scratch recipes that just recommended the cook or baker use the branded ingredients, but it was easy to substitute whatever you had on hand. 

And then, we started to get corporate food products like Campbell's canned soups, and Libby's canned corned beef, and powdered Knox gelatine and Jell-O, and other foods that were closer to finished foods already. You can only eat so much soup in a week. So how was Campbell's to get people to eat more of it? 

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, we had more and more women graduating from food and nutrition schools and college programs. Domestic scientists and expert cooks and home economists happily filled the role of cookbook authors and test kitchen managers for food corporations. Which is how we got things like tomato soup spice cake (Dylan Hollis does a recipe from the 1950s, but it was actually invented in the 1920s!), cream of whatever soup casseroles, and marshmallow mayonnaise. 

While tomato soup spice cake is probably delicious (at least, Dylan Hollis thinks it is!), and cream of whatever soup is a lot easier than white sauce, I'm not sure about the marshmallow mayonnaise, but the cookbook says to serve it with fruit salad, so maybe it is? Who am I to judge?

The point being, by the 1910s, there were plenty of marketing cookbooks and advertisements with recipes for processed foods for housewives to choose from. And while home economists were cranking out recipes that were sometimes smash hits and sometimes abject failures, there was a bit of a storm brewing in households around the country. Mainly, the "servant problem."

​​For most of the 19th century, middle and upper-middle class families had at least one household servant (or enslaved person, prior to the Civil War) who did the bulk of the heaviest household labor. Middle class women and their daughters did household work too, but were generally spared things like scouring pots and scrubbing floors and hauling water and coal. But at the turn of the 20th century, we started to get pink collar jobs - being a shop girl or secretary or teacher or nurse was preferable for many women to the 24/6.5 schedules of being in service. 

Rural families usually had lots of children to help with agricultural labor, but in a family of 6 or 10, the older girls always helped care for the younger children and everyone did household chores. As families shrunk and household servants became harder to find and more expensive, more and more women had to do with less and less help at home. 

At the same time, education levels for women were rising. Girls stayed in school beyond the elementary level and attended high school and college in larger and larger numbers. Many parents also wanted better lives for their children than they had, and wanted to spare girls the drudgery of household labor. Upper and upper-middle class girls, in particular, had been raised in households with servants and mothers who spared them all but the basics of running a household. So when they married, all of a sudden girls with college educations had to figure out household budgets and weekly grocery shopping and cooking on their own, without many skills or resources to help them.

Enter the ad man and the home economist. 

Swearing to save the clueless young bride from a lifetime of drudgery, while still pleasing her husband, all sorts of companies targeted young, inexperienced women just starting their households, but none perhaps as diligently as Spry, which manufactured first lard and later shortening (there's that lard reference again!). Aunt Jenny was the fictional grandmotherly character who knew just everything and would teach it all to her clueless niece. And of course, the secret was always a giant can of Spry. While Spry cookbooklets joined the legion of competitors, it was their cartoon-style print ads and extensive radio shows and advertisements that helped sway millions of American women to the Spry way of life. 

Is it any wonder that women who married in the 1930s and '40s raised children in the 1950s on corporate foods? Untrained, without the household help of their mothers and grandmothers, and with high expectations for home cleanliness and cooking three meals a day, 364 days a year would be enough to drive anyone into the arms of kindly home economists and fictional characters like Aunt Jenny, Mary Lee Taylor, Betty Crocker, and others. 

Recipes as advertisements for corporate foods did NOT start in the 1950s by any means. But the meme is somewhat correct in that scratch cooking was more prevalent in the Great Depression in particular, largely because at the time industrial foods were still more expensive than cooking from scratch, and because women who were adults in the 1930s were more likely to have been born into households that still taught them something about cooking and household management. And although the balance of population in the United States tipped from rural to urban in the 1920s, we still had a huge population of people primarily involved in agriculture, meaning families were larger (my mom's parents, born to farmers in the 1930s, came from families of 9 and 10 children, respectively), so women had more household help. Rural areas were also slower to adopt new fashions, including fashionable food, and often had less access to industrial goods of all sorts, including processed foods. Rural families were also much more likely to grow and preserve the bulk of their own food, well into the 1970s, than the rest of America. If you had land and free labor, it was certainly cheaper than buying commercially canned goods. 

If your grandmother grew up in a rural area during the Great Depression, like mine did, she probably learned how to cook from scratch. But by the 1950s, she was raising kids on her own, and maybe had a career of her own, or was supporting her husband's career, which meant less time to cook from scratch as she cared for her own children and a house with higher standards of cleanliness and fashion than her mother's with a lot less help. At the same time, in the 1950s, the general consensus was that industrial foods were the wave of the future - they were boons to help a busy housewife, not things to be scorned and rejected. And as incomes rose, it was much easier to purchase foods than doing your own home preserving.

And while the Great Depression did result in a lot of creative cooks (banana bread, for instance), I find the mention in the original meme of Saltines ironic. Although Saltines and cracker companies like Ritz didn't invent cracker-based mock apple pie (that dates back to the 1850s, believe it or not), they sure hopped right on that bandwagon and used it as a selling point. 

Necessity is the mother of invention. But rising incomes are the mother of convenience. And while McCarthyism probably did prevent the spread of some delicious and interesting foodways through its xenophobia and rigid conformity, the road to corporate convenience foods was a long one. They didn't appear overnight once the calendar ticked over from 1949 to 1950.  

Indeed, scratch cooking and baking continued well into the 1950s, and many of the foods we associate with the 1950s (Cool Whip, anyone?) weren't actually invented until the 1960s. For instance, the Pillsbury Bake-Off baking contest didn't start until 1949, and while modern incarnations of the contest are usually dominated by mutated versions of whatever convenience food Pillsbury has cooked up (usually crescent rolls or cinnamon rolls or canned biscuits), the original contest was meant to promote Pillsbury flour, so the recipes are all from scratch. And looking at my food historian library shelves, the 1950s section has plenty of community cookbooks filled with can-of-this, box-of-that recipes, and advertising cookbooklets galore, but there are also cookbooks like The Magic in Herbs (first printed in 1941 but on its seventh printing by my 1950 copy) and The Peasant Cookbook (1955, and my copy was from the library of the Ladies' Home Journal!), and Whole Grain Cookery (1951) and those community cookbooks always had scratch recipes in them, too. And my 1930s section? I have more corporate cookbooklets from the 1930s than any other era!

​Like most of history, individual decades might be changed and marked by big events, but history is complicated. In the Progressive Era we had brutal strikes and food riots, but we also had Gibson Girls and Vanderbilts and Rockefellers. During the Great Depression we had the Dust Bowl and migrant workers, but we also had the glamour of Hollywood. And yes, in the 1950s we had McCarthyism (and sexism and racism) and processed food, but we also had folks like James Beard and Julia Child and plenty of scratch cooking.

So let's stop stereotyping decades and accept them for what they are - complicated, messy, and fascinating time periods with both good food and bad. And the next time you see a corporate food cookbook from the 1950s - give it a gander. You might be surprised by what you find inside. There are good recipes in just about every cookbook, if you take the time to look.

​The Food Historian blog is supported by patrons on Patreon! Patrons help keep blog posts like this one free and available to the public. Join us for awesome members-only content like free digitized cookbooks from my personal collection, e-newsletter, and even snail mail from time to time! Don't like Patreon? Leave a tip!

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.

1. The Real Story Behind the "Gross" Black and Orange Halloween Taffy
I posted this one in the fall of 2020 just before Halloween, but it was by far the most popular, racking up over 9,000 unique pageviews. A number of older blog posts were also popular, but this is a review of 2021, so I'm not including the others! 

2. Before Nestle: A History of White Chocolate
I posted this one on Valentine's Day. And while it was a bit of a slow burn, it was the most popular of my 2021 blog posts. Inspired by a comment about who "invented" white chocolate, it sent me down the research rabbit hole. 

3. Visiting Home & a Brief History of North Dakota Caramel Rolls, a.k.a. Dakota Rolls
This was my first blog post after Lasik surgery and after a trip home. I hadn't been home in several years, and seeing (and eating!) giant North Dakota-style caramel rolls made me wonder what the history was, but there wasn't much on the internet, so I wrote one!

4. What's the Difference Between Hot Chocolate and Hot Cocoa? With Recipes!
One of the first posts of 2021! Posted in conjunction with a talk I do on hot chocolate, this was a fun one to put together, and answered a burning question!

5. When Kitchens Worked: The Rise and Fall of Functional Kitchens
This post was inspired by a wonderful 1940s film on YouTube outlining the ideal kitchen layout. I fell in love, and clearly other folks did, too!

6. Meatless Monday: Easy Rice Pudding
2021 was a year for comfort foods, and this simple recipe was one of my favorites. Clearly it resonated with other people, too. 

7. World War Wednesday: The Mystery of Carter Housh
I originally wrote this post in 2020, but the mystery kept bugging me. In 2021, I decided to revisit Carter Housh's biography, tracking down little snippets and finding as much information as I could! It inspired me to do research on subsequent poster artists for WWI and WWII. 

8. Food History, Slavery, and Juneteenth
This one was a look into some of the quintessentially American foods created by enslaved people and made accessible by the global slave economy.  

9. World War Wednesday: Eat More Milk
It's always interesting to see which post make the list, and I think this one is in the top ten solely because of the stunning WWI poster. 

10. Making Their Own Way: Black Women Cooks in the 19th Century
​This was one of my favorite posts of the year, and I'm so glad it made the top 10! It was inspired by the compelling story of the first known published Black woman cookbook author - Malinda Russell.

I did also make some progress on last year's goals! Once again the uncertainty of the pandemic and the nation's attempted return to normalcy meant I didn't have a ton of mental space to work on the book, although I have gotten several tasks done and I'm getting ever closer to completion. I did, however, get my bookshelves up and my library organized! 

Getting my library catalog updated is going to take a little longer (anyone want an internship? Lol.). But having spent the last year working from home two days a week my little garret office is as cozy as can be, with lovely lamps and my matching bookcases, and a little green velvet chair and footstool, and a vintage-looking bluetooth speaker for lovely music. And for Christmas I got an ergonomic cushion for my chair and my husband got me a very fancy second monitor, which will make transcribing newspaper articles and editing videos so much easier! 

And although getting published in the popular press was NOT one of my goals for 2021, it happened anyway! I was invited to select historic cookies and write about them for TheKitchn.com, and an editor friend asked me to write for a local arts weekly back home. The pieces were published in December and you can find them below:

• "From the Church Basement: Scandinavian Baking Traditions Fit for a Saint" High Plains Reader
• “Classic 1920s Orange Drop Cookies” TheKitchn.com
• “1930s Vintage Pinwheel Cookies” TheKitchn.com 
• “Honey Cookies with Lemon and Nutmeg (1940s)” TheKitchn.com
• “Classic Spritz Cookies (1950s)” TheKitchn.com
• “The Original Peanut Butter Blossoms (1960s)” TheKitchn.com
• “Classic Moravian Christmas Cookies (1970s)” The Kitchn.com
• “Classic 1980s Seven Layer Bars” TheKitchn.com
• “Simple Espresso Shortbread (1990s)” TheKitchn.com
• “The Original Chocolate Brownie Cookies (2000s)” TheKitchn.com
• “Classic Salted Caramel Thumbprints (2010s)” TheKitchn.com

My goals for 2022 are more modest. Make progress on the book (hopefully finally finish!), keep up the blog, and try to get some more work published. I've got lots of post-book plans, so go to hurry up and turn it in to the editor! 

A friend of mine chooses a word every year to aspire to. This year I decided to follow suit! My word of the year is "cultivate." Appropriate for a food historian and someone who is hoping to start a garden this spring. But it also represents the slow, steady pace of growing The Food Historian, planting seeds for the future, and, in terms of the book manuscript, weeding! If you pick a word of the year, tell me in the comments!

2021 wasn't a dumpster fire for me, but the last two years have been pretty destabilizing, globally. I hope you'll all be a little kinder to yourselves and the people around you. Try to get some more rest, sleep in, drink lots of water, get outside, stretch every now and again, and do the things you love. Here's to a year of finishing what we start, and making a new beginning, rather than trying to go backwards. Normalcy is overrated. 

​The Food Historian blog is supported by patrons on Patreon! Patrons help keep blog posts like this one free and available to the public. Join us for awesome members-only content like free digitized cookbooks from my personal collection, e-newsletter, and even snail mail from time to time! Don't like Patreon? Leave a tip!

There's this weird trend in modern America where we love to mock the foods of the 1950s (and, to a lesser extent, the 1960s and '70s). Everyone from James Lileks (here and here) to Buzzfeed-style listicles to internet memelords have weighed in on how terrible food was in the 1950s. 

But was it? Was it really? Or are we just expressing bias (conscious or not) about foods we haven't tried and don't understand? 

I have seen this meme all over my social feeds lately. Including, regrettably, in some food history and food studies groups. 

Some clever memer stole an image from Midcentury Menu (which is a delightful blog, please check out Ruth's work) and added their own commentary. The author of the meme is unclear, but it appears to have been posted about a week ago. 

Whenever I challenge the idea that maybe 1950s foods aren't nearly as bad as we think they are, I often get accused of engaging in nostalgia (spoiler alert, I was born in the 1980s) or romanticizing the past, usually accompanied by an assertion that these foods are "objectively" bad. But I can't help but thinking of how our concepts of disgust are much more a product of the society and time period we were brought up in, than anything resembling objectivity. 

The New York Times Magazine just published an article about the science of disgust earlier this week, but what I find interesting about the article is how many of the examples centered on food, and yet how little food is actually discussed. Indeed, almost all of the science of disgust seems focused entirely on evolutionary factors, such as protecting us from spoiled foods, from acquiring diseases from bodily fluids and corpses, or from weakening our gene pool through incest. Very few people outside of the food world discuss the cultural reasons behind disgust that have nothing to do with biology and everything to do with cultural, racial, religious, and ethnic factors.

Earlier this year The New Yorker published a piece by Jiayang Fan on the controversial Disgusting Food Museum in Malmo, Sweden. The museum "collects" foods from around the world that its founders deem disgusting, with much controversy. Although the museum includes European foods like stinky fermented fish and salty licorice, it also includes many foods from non-Western societies. Many argue it reinforces cultural prejudices. Fan does not make specific value judgements about the museum itself, but does share her personal experiences as a Chinese person in the United States. I found the following passage in particular to be illuminating for Western audiences.

Asian foodways, especially Chinese foods, are often at the top of the "disgusting" lists - a combination of racism and deliberate misunderstanding of ancient foodways. For instance, lots of ancient Roman foods were also "gross," but are rarely consumed today, so modern Italians don't get the same level of derision. Many people like to argue that foods they find disgusting are "objectively" bad - but these same folks probably don't bat an eye at moldy congealed milk (blue cheese), partially rotten cucumbers (fermented dill pickles), or 30 day-old meat (dry aged steak). It's all about upbringing and perspective - something that folks who fail to recognize their own personal bias don't seem to get.

And certainly, everyone is entitled to their own personal feelings on particular foods. For instance, despite several attempts, I can't stand the flavor of beets. But I know that, because I've tried them. "Disgusting" foods are often vilified by people who have never actually tried them.

While immigrant foodways have often been the target of othering through disgust in the United States (see: Progressive Era Americanization efforts), for some reason the Whitest, most capitalistic of the historic American foodways - the 1950s - is the target of the same treatment today. 

Perhaps it is that in our modern era we have vilified processed corporate foods. And while I'm the first person to advocate for scratch cooking and home gardens and farmer's markets and all that jazz, there's much more seething under the surface of this than just a general dislike of gelatin. 

When processed foods first began to emerge in the late 19th century with the popularization of canned goods, they democratized foods like gelatin, beef consommé, pureed cream soups, and out-of-season fruits and vegetables that had previously been accessible only to the wealthy. Suddenly, ordinary people could afford to have salmon and English peas and Queen Anne cherries year-round - not just the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts of the world. After the austerity of the Great Depression and the Second World, the world seemed poised to combine those lingering ideas of what the wealthy ate with all the convenience modern technology could offer. 

Certainly, as some have argued, corporate marketing and test kitchens played a major role in shaping what Americans ate. But just because it was invented for an advertisement doesn't mean Americans didn't eat it on a regular basis. 

By the 1970s, many of those miracle technologies such as canning, freezing, dehydrating, reconstituting, etc. had become hallmarks of affordable - and therefore poor - foodways. "Government cheese," canned tuna, white bread, canned vegetables, mayonnaise, boxed cake and biscuit mixes, and yes, gelatin and Cool Whip were what poor people ate. Wealthier people ate "real" food - a trend that continues today.

Disdain for poor people and their food seems universal, but even today, certain poor people have their foodways elevated over others (namely, pre-Second World War European peasants and select "foreign" street food purveyors). People living predominantly subsistence agricultural lives are seen as "authentic," while their urban counterparts, who consume processed foods by choice or by circumstance, are "selling out." But even "authenticity" only goes so far with some people. And even when foodies pride themselves on "bravely" eating chicken feet and fermented fish and other foods many would deem "disgusting," there's still an element of othering and disdain at play, a loud proclamation of worldliness and coolness at eating what their peers might avoid, that has little to do with actually understanding the culture behind the food. 

The food of the 1950s, once the clean, efficient, technologically advanced wave of the future quickly became the purview of the poor and working class. And while mid-century foodies like MFK Fisher and James Beard and (to a lesser extent) Julia Child descried processed foods and hailed European cuisines, peasant and "haute" alike, the vast majority of ordinary people ate ordinary, processed foods, and tried recipes dreamed up by home economists in corporate test kitchens. And within two decades, once the futurism wore off and the affordability factor set in, it became perfectly acceptable, cool even, to deride and mock those foodways.

​Which brings me back to the tuna on waffles. Canned tuna in cream of mushroom soup on top of hot, crisp waffles (probably NOT frozen, as frozen waffles weren't invented until 1953) is not something most of us are likely to eat on a regular basis today. However, it is hearkening back to a much older recipe: creamed chicken on waffles, which dates back to the Colonial period in America. Although the history of creamed chicken on waffles isn't crystal clear, this dish is clearly what Campbell's was emulating with their recipe. 

But what's the disgust factor? How is creamed tuna on waffles different from a tuna melt? Creamed chicken and biscuits? Fried chicken and waffles? Perhaps it is because today we associate waffles exclusively with sweet breakfast foods, so the idea of savory waffles is baffling. But they've only been used that way for a fraction of their history, for most of which they were used much more like biscuits or bread than a dessert. 

Or perhaps it's the tuna? Despite being hugely popular in the 1950s, tuna has fallen out of favor nationwide. Concerns about mercury, dolphins, and its association with poverty have helped dethrone tuna. But in the 1950s, it was a relatively new, and popular food. Today, it's a "smelly" fish associated with cafeterias and diners and cheap meals like tuna noodle casserole.

Maybe it's the canned cream of mushroom soup? Cream of whatever soups remain a popular casserole (hotdish, for my fellow Midwesterners) ingredient even today, and the ability to replace the more labor-intensive white sauce with a canned good has helped many a housewife. Today, canned soups are vilified as laden with sodium and, for the creamy ones, fat. But canned goods have also been scorned as poverty food, with modern foodies touting scratch made sauces and fresh vegetables as healthier and better tasting.

In the context of the 1950s, fresh vegetables were not always widely available as they are today, so canned and frozen vegetables took the drudgery out of canning your own or going without. In fact, our modern food system of fresh fruits and vegetables is propped up by agricultural chemicals, cheap oil, watering desert areas, and outsourcing agricultural labor to migrant workers or farms in the global south. Something many foodies like to conveniently overlook.

My ultimate point isn't that people shouldn't reject processed foods in favor of scratch cooking. Indeed, I think that anyone who can afford to cook from scratch, should. But there's the rub, isn't it? Afford to. Because as much as homesteaders and bloggers and foodies like to proclaim that cooking from scratch is cheaper and healthier, it requires several ingredients they take for granted that aren't always available to everyone - a kitchen with working appliances, adequate cooking utensils, access to a grocery store and the means to transport fresh foods (fresh fruits and vegetables are HEAVY), the skills to know how to cook from scratch effectively and efficiently, and most importantly, TIME. As the old adage goes, you can have good, fast, and cheap, but never all three at once. Good and fast is expensive, good and cheap takes time, and fast and cheap is usually not very good. And when you're working multiple jobs to make ends meet, getting decent-tasting food on the table in a timely manner is more important than worrying about cooking from scratch. 

Those were the same concerns many working class people in the 1950s had, too. Even though the stereotypical White 1950s housewife had plenty of time to cook from scratch, plenty of women, especially women of color, worked outside the home in the 1950s. And mid-century Americans spent a far higher percentage of their income on food than they do today. And while fast food was around in the 1950s, it wasn't particularly cheap. For most Americans, it was an occasional treat, and restaurant eating in general was reserved for special occasions. Casual family dining as we know it today didn't exist. So that meant the typical housewife, wage working or not, had to cook 2-3 meals a day, nearly 365 days a year. Is it any wonder they turned to processed foods where most of the work was done for them? 

Maybe I've got a little personal bias of my own - after all I was raised in the land of tater tot hotdish and salads made with Cool Whip (That Midwestern Mom gets me). Foods that are often vilified by (frankly snobbish) coastal foodies, but that are "objectively" quite delicious. I like melty American cheese on my burger and grilled cheese as much as I enjoy making a scratch gorgonzola cream sauce. Fruit salad made with Cool Whip is a fun holiday treat. And while I prefer to make my own macaroni and cheese from scratch, I'd never mock or turn up my nose if someone offered me Kraft dinner. 

I think the driving force behind this pet peeve of mine is the idea that anyone can be the arbiter of taste (or disgust) when it comes to someone else's foodways. As my mom always used to say, "How do you know you don't like it if you don't try it?" 

​Everyone's food history deserves respect and understanding. So let's give up the mean girl attitudes about foods we're not familiar with and let go of the guilt about liking the foods we like, be they 1950s processed foods or 500 year old family recipes.

And the next time someone talks about how "gross" or "disgusting" a food is, or goes "Ewwww!" when presented with something new, give them a gimlet eye, ask them if they've ever had the dish, and then ask, "Who are you to judge?" 

​The Food Historian blog is supported by patrons on Patreon! Patrons help keep blog posts like this one free and available to the public. Join us for awesome members-only content like free digitized cookbooks from my personal collection, e-newsletter, and even snail mail from time to time! Don't like Patreon? Join with an annual membership below, or just leave a tip!