Mr. Cotta has been taking over some cooking duties since he became a sort of house-spouse. It’s been rough since he has absolutely no instincts for it but I gave him one essential rule when using recipes out of the 1973 Betty Crocker book - halve the salt. Feel free to use any other seasonings in good amounts (except the curry*) but go light on the salt.
The regular trips to the in-laws are usually a trip back in culinary time for me. There is more pressure-cooked food, especially beef roasts, canned veggies, store-bought dinner rolls you bake, yam patties, macaroni salads, jello deserts and margarine on the table. I always look forward to getting home for real food.
*We’ve had some regrettable curry incidents that included stained teeth, gagging and curry aversion that are best forgotten.
I’m especially glad to be past the time of nasty gelatin dishes. I hate Jell-O. I REALLY hate Jell-O with stuff in it. No wonder so many people rebelled and joined granola communes in the '60s!
Thanks, granola people, for reintroducing America to fresh produce. For a few decades there, you only used fresh produce as a garnish. “Don’t eat that! It came out of the dirty ground! Don’t you want to be *modern * and *classy * and eat this clean, processed, tin-can food which science has provided for us?”
And thank you for explaining my dad’s until-now-incomprehensible-to-me reluctance to eat food I made using fresh herbs from my container garden. It never made sense to me until now.
Eating food that appears to have come from outside is just unnatural. Safe food comes one of two ways: boiled or burnt. How else will you rid it of filth and disease? Hippie!
I think people in the 30’s, 40’s & 50’s ate a lot more bottled and pickled vegetables. I remember my grandmother made pickled beets that were just amazing heated as a vegetable dish and a pickled beet relish. Actually, she pickled all kinds of vegetables as relish: corn relish, beet relish, cucumber relish… She made dill pickles, sweet pickles, bread & butter pickles, even pickled watermelon rhind. She bottled every kind of vegetable and fruit she could buy from the farmer’s market and the roadside truck stands. She also served them fresh too. I think it had something to do with growing up during the depression of the 30’s.
I suppose I should start a separate thread about this, but is anyone here interested in the Slow Food organization/movement? It is essentially a backlash against horrible fast and/or processed food. They encourage buying fresh, local, seasonal food, and preparing it yourself. They also help organize small local farmers, so that they can compete economically, and establish more farmers’ markets. Best of all (IMO) the organization is a strong defender of maintaining traditional biodiversity in food supplies.
We’re in the process of trying to swear off grocery stores as much as possible (which is impossible to fully achieve, but we’re cutting down.) We’d rather eat good, local food, and see all that money go back into the pockets of local farmers.
We already have a farmer’s market here in town that only allows farmers from the state of Alabama to sell there.
Because of movements like this (and also, I must say, because of things like the Food Network,) I’ve seen Americans start to fall back in love with good food. I couldn’t be happier about it.
Another good read is Jane and Michael Stern’s Square Meals. It gives some background and recipes for dishes from the 20s through the 50s or 60s.
I thought of the pickles and things, too, BMax. Both of my grandmothers made jams, jellies, sauces and pickles when the fruits and vegetables were in season. My grandmother’s house and the house I grew up in both had fruit cellars, too, which were rooms down in the basement where you stored your home-canned stuff and your potatoes and such. We always ate both fresh and canned vegetables and my mom really preferred fresh. She grew up on a farm, though.
When was talapia added to our general consciousness? When I was a kid I remember salmon, whitefish, flounder, mackeral, porgies and a few other varieties.
Talapia seems to be on every menu I see these days. Anyone know when it made it’s debut (or possibly comeback)?
The tilapia industry has risen in the past 10-15 years because it’s easy to farm, it’s cheap, and it is a viable replacement for ocean fish which are becoming massively overfished and increasing difficult to find.
This is definitely a change. We were poor, so soda was special. But even my friends whose families weren’t poor didn’t keep soda around. Water, milk, juice, kool-aid. Maybe club soda or 7-Up to make alcoholic drinks.
I’d forgotten about all the pickled things. Thanks, BMax, for that memory of pickled watermelon rind.
We never ate salads made with greens. I remember fresh greens being exotic and expensive, even lettuce, at least in Iowa. I don’t remember bottled salad dressings either. Most salad dressings were made with mayonnaise or vinegar.
The only food that came in boxes was cereal, cookies, crackers, and cake mixes (for lazy bakers).
My grandparents didn’t think a meal was complete without “sauce”, which was usually applesauce or some other home-canned fruit. There were special dishes for sauce – smaller than today’s cereal bowls or soup dishes.
Anyone remember bone dishes? Little curved things to use for the bones from chicken or pork chops? They were curved so that they’d fit snugly against the dinner plate.
I suggest there were two schools of thought on this: the one you describe, and the “it’s only fresh for a little while, so eat as much as you can of it now.”
Our family–neither commune dwellers nor hippies–fell into the latter camp. I well remember many car trips in late summer to the farming country outside the city so we could stop at umpteen farm stands for fresh corn, peas, potatoes, beans, and other vegetables that were available, fresh-from-the-field, in late summer. And we ate them. We ate far too much of them, IMHO. We ate fresh peaches for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We ate boiled new potatoes every night for weeks. We ate corn-on-the-cob until our teeth ached. And every time us kids said something like, “Boiled green beans again? Like last night and the night before and the night before and so on? Why do we always have to have green beans?” the response was “We got them at the farm stand, so they’re fresh. And they’re only fresh for a little while, then we have to go back to the canned. Don’t you like them fresh?”
Well, yeah. Fresh fruit and vegetables can be nice. But not if I’m forced to eat them daily just because they’re in season.
On the other hand, I was in college before I learned that a home cook could actually make salad dressing- it wasn’t something that just came out of a bottle.
I think I might have been in grad school before I learned that blue cheese wasn’t just a type of salad dressing like Thousand Island or Creamy Cucumber.
What can I say? My mom’s cooking repertoire was very much slanted toward the bland 50s food. She didn’t really like to cook, either, so we ate out as often as possible.
[QUOTE=Merkwurdigliebe
However, in Denmark, one gets the feeling that the Danes are very much like our parents used to be. Obviously there was pizza before, but some things are quite new here. Most “exotic” food is pretty new here. I use quotation marks there, because don’t really consider indian food exotic. Going to a supermarket will result in you seeing foods that are meant primarily for Danes to cook danish food with.[/QUOTE]
Yep! I knew people my own age who wouldn’t eat things like rice or noodles; they were too exotic. OTOH my own family was quite adventurous and we frequently enjoyed spicy meals (indonesiske mad was my favorite!). I’m sure it’s changed quite a bit by now, though.
I am as much of a slow foodie as I can be - organic market vegiis, local produce etc. Being where I am makes thise easier, though - there is local wine, olive oil,seasonal fruits of all sorts, good cheeses, herb-fed succulent lamb & ostrich, handfed duck, fresh seafood, most of which I can get close to source and the rest, at least buy from a supermarket with good chain-of-origin standards.
So I can make good risotto and cassoulet, pasta and seafood dishes, all knowing where the food I eat came from (on a few occasions, meeting the food before slaughter or picking it myself). It’s certainly given me an appreciation for classic European cookery, especially the Provencal, Périgourdin and Italian regional cuisines that suit my cooking style.
By all means, start a thread and I’ll pop in tomorrow.
As to the rest of the thread - I know now where my mother-in-law gets her recipes from.
Some people are emphasizing eating locally grown food rather than eating organic food, since a lot of organic food comes from large, industrial farms at a great distance, so that it has a large environmental cost. Some people (not me, I should note) even make a goal of eating nothing grown more than, say, 200 miles from home.
No expert I, but in Bill Bryson’s book about 1950s Iowa, there’s a picture of a general store on the inside cover. There are animal carcasses hanging. This, to me, is fairly common: butchers’ shops, though they’re dying out slowly here, show us the entire animal, sinews and fat and muscle and all. But I suspect one could live all one’s life these days in urban America and never see a carcass. My ex-girlfriend from Indiana freaked out when I took her to a butcher’s over here. She thought us uncivilised: “In America, our meat comes in plastic!”
Mind you, we English are none to speak, for different reasons. Though our food is great now, back in the mid-1970s, for a treat my mother cooked us the most exotic dish I’d ever tasted: lasagne.
One can certainly live to the age of 32 in urban and suburban America and never see a carcass- I don’t think I’ve ever seen one.
I also lived to the age of 23 without ever going to a butcher shop. I probably wouldn’t go to one now if it weren’t for the fact that I keep kosher. Most Americans buy their meat at the supermarket. Given a choice, that’s what I do too, because the kosher butcher’s prices are a lot higher than Trader Joe’s and the kosher butcher is a lot less convenient to get to. But the kosher butcher has lamb, which Trader Joe’s doesn’t. The kosher butcher does not have animal carcasses hanging anywhere that the customers can see them, BTW.
Do most people in the UK get their meat from a butcher, or from a supermarket?
Sadly, the supermarket. And usually processed in a “ready meal”.
The butcher’s shop in Britain is now for connoiseurs in most places. Though actually the meat quality is usually way higher, and the prices aren’t too much higher. And indeed you can buy a single sausage there, something that is difficult to do in the supermarkets, and they’re cheaper too.
I reckon though, by going to a kosher butcher, you’re probably getting much purer (and I don’t mean spiritually) meat, much less processed, and of a much higher quality than you would from a supermarket.
Here, supermarket meat is usually injected with water, and various nasty shit like preservative salts. The butchers shops near me, especially the halal ones, get the animal straight from the slaughterhouse.
I’m sure it’s changed quite a bit by now, though.