It amuses me to read the Ellery Queen novels set in New York City in the post-war 1940s, and see that “pizza” and “bagel” are in italics–for the authors, these were foreign words for exotic, foreign foods.
Handy, yes, but how much was the postage? IIRC, allowing for inflation, postal rates were much higher back then than today. I’d bet parcels were even worse.
I adore heart - I have shared an old comfort food recipe my mom made here a few times [upshot - cut beef heart into 1 inch cubes, dump into a bowl of icy cold salt water and squidge around squishing out any remaining blood and clots, drain and rinse. Into a casserole with a lid dump the heart cubes, an equal amount of coarsely chopped onion, season with pepper, herbs <I prefer italian herb blend> and as much whole clove peeled garlic as you want/tolerate and cover with red wine. Bale covered low and slow, like 300 degrees f for 4 or 5 hours, serve with salad and bread, over noodles is great, over baked potato chunks is good too.]
I have another traditional food her family simply called ‘cabbage soup’ that is from Altekirchen Germany ca the early 1600s at minimum [and probably generations older] that I believe is deriven from ricet, see page 10. The original bronze age food is simply beans, barley, onion, millet, cabbage and herbs, in my mom’s recipe I can see the intervening centuries of food imports. Her recipe is white beans, barley, carrots, celery, onion, cabbage, turnips/rutabagas/parsnips/potato [whatever is handy] greens [i prefer spinach, mom preferred mustard greens] garlic, black pepper, garlic, thyme, summer savory and parsley, water or broth, and as protein whatever doesn’t get away [had everything from squirrel to bambi, I prefer hot italian sausage or keilbasa, or beef or pork chuck roast meat. Salmon would be good, but trust me, NO salted cod …] Simmer til done.
As a practitioner of food historical recreation [hey, 30 years in the SCA has to be good for something, and the cooks list is right up there. CHeck Stefan’sflorithingyfor long discussions over ancient foods ranging from Roman, to Persian, to European.] Some things are amazingly common in history - french toast is there in a number of ways from balls of shredded bread crumbs fried, to slabs of bread. Gingerbread is there from something more resembling ginger gooey hard tack to soft fluffy gingerbread cake, pasta is represented with cheese in a number of forms [including one where strips of alternately colored pasta is woven in a mat and dressed in cheese sauce, to diamonds of pasta layered with cheese and baked] Custards savory to sweet, colored and flavored with all sorts of stuff ranges from Roman to modern. Beef y-stewed, roast pork, pork pies, fruit pies, cheese and spinach pies … ravioli - called cuskynoles got a lot of discussion, but are simply ravioli.
Oh, sure, clearly a lot of traditional recipes have been adapted to take advantage of the abundant supply of proteins and other items that may have been dear and scarce in the country of origin.
No, I don’t think postage rates for parcels were much higher back then. According to the Great Britain Philatelic Society, in 1910 it cost eight pence to send a 1 kg parcel, and today it costs £3.45. Back in 1910, there were 240 pence to a pound, so the price in decimal pennies would be 3⅓. Using the Bank of England’s inflation calculator, we see that works out to £3.73 in today’s money, a very modest difference of just 29p.
I stand corrected, then. Perhaps it was getting the order to the store in the first place. No internet, no phone, just swift-footed messenger boys.
Authenticity of old-country food, the truth:
(Nobody actually said this.)
“In the old country we used what we grew, or what we had fairly easy access to. And so, if we started growing different things, or if we suddenly got easy access to something better, the recipes all shifted to match. We just made the best food we could, with what was available. God didn’t write us a recipe for goulash/vareniki/pizza/moussaka/beer/wine/gefilte fish/deep-fried Mars bars, when our people were created. We needed to eat, so we made dinner.”
What’s wrong with using the post? With deliveries twelve times a day, you could conceivably post your order and receive the package within a few hours.
Of course, phone orders were certainly possible in 1910.
You know when you have only three ingredients in the house, and you’re definitely not going out again so those three things have to become food somehow?
You have now become an authentic traditional cook. 
The traditional part is not what you come up with, the traditional is that there are only three ingredients in the house.
Looking at my mother’s (and her mother’s) cookbooks, from the early 1900’s, many recipes included either lard or bacon drippings. Lots and lots of lard, which they had when growing up from butchering hogs. She also kept all of the bacon fat in a can next to the oven.
Looking through some cookbooks from the 1960’s for cookie recipes (for example) called for using shortening instead of lard, and by the 1980’s they had switched to margarine/butter.
The shift from lard to shortening to butter has certainly affected many aspects of baking and cooking. I doubt you’d want to eat the lard-based baked items today.
Speak for yourself! (I’m a city boy and I have a pint of rendered lard in my fridge right now! Well, half of it. 
Now, I don’t use it for baking all that much, but you’d be surprised at how tasty the lard crusts are, though you’re ideally using leaf lard from around the kidneys.)
Lard is shortening. It’s just that once Crisco vegetable shortening became common, “shortening” started to take on that meaning exclusively. But you can’t tell from old recipes which is which unless they’re more specific.
Hell - within those areas of Italy, people will argue that the way they prepare the dish in THEIR village is the one true way, and the way they prepare it in the village next door is heresy…
Yeah, the country we call Italy was kind of cobbled together and unified in 1861 from a whole bunch of city-states and regions which consider themselves unique from their neighbors.
Kind of like chili or BBQ wars in this country.
The two strangest things my German grandmother made was a type of salad with a bunch of different beans in it. I called it taco salad, but I’ve never seen a recipe for it. The other was a sausage and rice dish. When I do a search the only sausage and rice dish I find is jambalaya. Whatever it was, it wasn’t jambalaya.
When we convinced her to make jumbo lump crab cakes, she started pulling apart the lumps until we stopped her.:eek:
I think the biggest surprise when visiting one of the Williamsburg kitchens was how fatty the ham served back in the 1700’s was.
Growing up, I thought that green bean casserole was a traditional Thanksgiving dish, when actually it was invented by Campbell’s to sell mushroom soup the year before I was born.
I also didn’t realize that the way my extended family makes it is somewhat different, and I think much better, than Campbell’s recipe. We use french cut green beans and real onion rings.
The actual Thanksgiving tradition is to make dishes that are really cheap and easy to do for a whole lot of people. Campbell’s green bean casserole fits right in with that tradition.