Beef will be a lot tougher, because the cattle will have spent more time on the range and much less in a feedlot. Chicken will be gamier, because they weren’t being bred for white meat (and also spent a lot more time running around.)
The Cavendish banana was around but, if you could find them at all, bananas would be starchier and more like plantains. Apples would have a tougher skin and most varieties would be more tart than you’re used to (good for baking, though!)
I had never heard of Chicken a la Maryland, and being a native I was curious. Looking up the recipe, that probably has not been served here since the Titanic sailed. We are a much more fried chicken kind of state.
Of course, you’re speaking as someone born since 1950? as a guess. It was quite the popular dish on restaurant menus throughout the mid-west and the East Coast between 1915-1950.
I always looked on my maternal grandparents as fairly direct links to the Oregon trail days…born ca. 1900 in the Idaho backcountry and lived out their lives there. I don’t think their diets ever changed all that much from what their pioneer parents had. Their cooking was pretty straightforward, heavy breakfast with oatmeal or farina (with cream and brown sugar), then bacon/sausage, eggs potatos. Big meal of the day at noon, farmer style. Steak, or roast pork or beef, or fried chicken, potatos or other root vegetable, salads in season. Fruit pie or tarts for desert, or sometimes stewed fruit. Light supper, usually homemade soup of some kind or sandwiches. All tasty and filling. They ate well, if simply.
The notable thing about their diet was the abundance of wild fare. Huckleberries, blackberries, chokecherries, crabapples, wild mushrooms, etc. And wild game. They hunted and fished all year long. Elk, Venison, pheasant, partridge, trout, salmon, bass. They had a secret method of canning whitefish that tasted just like good-quality albacore tuna. Kept milk cows, so dairy figured prominently in the meals.
They used minimal exotic seasoning…hated garlic and hot peppers. Salt, pepper, celery, onion, cinnamon, nutmeg, mustard, was about it.
All washed down with gallons of coffee strong enough to float a horseshoe.
All in all, quite similar to what one might expect from a well-established pioneer family in the latter half of the 19th century.
SS
I have a book on the Victorian household that goes into great detail about this. Until the later half of the 19th century all classes at their main meal in the early afternoon. Gradually evening dinning became fashionable among the rich. In great houses (ala Downton Abbey, 165 Eaton Place, or Grostcherfield) the family upstairs would have a big meal in the evening, often with guests, served by a staff of footmen. Downstairs the servants would have their main meal around noon (while any members of the family eating at home had a light meal) and a light supper that evening after the family had finished dining. I’d go into detail more, but it’s late and I’m tired.
Yes, if today’s marketers existed then, euphemisms would definitely be used. Just to give it a try myself, I think a name like “Royal Club Class” would probably describe First Class today. Second might be something like “Super Intercontinental Class”; while Third might be “Transatlantic Class.” With these names, I could imagine a shipboard announcement like the following:
“At this time, we invite our Royal Club Class passengers to the Captain’s Reception in the Imperial Lounge, our Super Intercontinental Class passengers to cocktails and hors d’oeuvres in the elegant Promenade Bistro, and our Transatlantic Class passengers to drinks and snacks in the cozy ‘Lion and Unicorn’ pub.”
Everybody in their place, but nobody need feel “Third Class” about it.
At the risk of sounding horribly PC, do you mean that there will only be the ethnic foods of folks of British and German ancestry? It seems to me there’d be plenty of traditional Irish cuisine, in addition to significant southern black cuisine–not to mention French, French Canadians, Scandinavians fleeing religious oppression, etc. Again a serious question: did these folks not set up their own ghettos, and did they not have restaurants within them?
It’s obviously very hard to assess the qualitative difference between ingredients then and now; my best guess would be to find out how ingredients from a third world country taste, working on the assumption that they can’t afford the same industrial scale farms and super powered fertilizer we can.
On a slight off-topic, I remember the Food Network used to air a show by Giles Coren called “Edwardian Super Size Me,” which looked at the shitty foods affluent Brits ate many moons ago. Many birds that aren’t chicken, and liquor with breakfast. Yum. 
Bricker, you live in NoVa…you should try out Jose Andres’ America Eats for a hands-on answer. I’ll have to warn you, though, there is rather a long wait for a reservation.
They may well have. But the problem was, that they were not patronized by those of different cultures–particularly, the WASP culture.
I grew up in a WASP home in Canada, and our meals were definitely boring. Back in the 60s, our meals tended to be British-based, in content as well as frugality: a roast of some sort on Sunday, and leftovers, accompanied by frozen veg and a baked potato, for the rest of the week. If there was any of the roast left on Friday, it would be made into a stew. Seasonings were salt and pepper; sauces were ketchup and (if we were lucky) Worcestershire sauce. There were exceptions, of course–horseradish went with roast beef, and mint sauce went with roast lamb–but no garlic, oregano, or curry; or indeed, anything “foreign.” On rare occasions, “Italian spaghetti” would be prepared from a Kraft kit and doused with inoffensive Kraft tomato sauce and Parmesan cheese (handily included in the kit), or a BBQ chicken might be purchased from the grocery store. But that was about it, when I was a child.
It simply never occurred to my parents to sample the cuisines of the rest of the world; and if it did, it was tempered by a distrust of what might be offered. Mind, many cuisines were not available locally, though some were–in spite of the fact that Toronto (where I grew up) had a thriving Greek community, complete with restaurants, I never ate Greek food until I visited Greece in my late teens. Takeout Chinese food, as we knew it back then, was wonton soup, sweet and sour chicken balls or spare ribs, and stir-fried beef (with almonds, if you got adventurous)–not the Hunan, Cantonese, and Szechuan (among other) Chinese cuisines we know today. Indian food was available, but right off the radar; it was curry, and that was … too adventurous, shall we say. Cuisines and restaurants from Thailand, Russia, and Morocco, among many other places didn’t exist in our city in those days; and even the cuisine of our friends in French Canada (Quebec, sure, but also the French Canadians in northern Ontario and New Brunswick) never made it to our table. It too, was (sadly) considered “foreign.”
In short, and in my experience, there were a number of things available. Perhaps not as many as today, but enough that we could have had a decent sampling of world cuisines. Yet we never got them. The WASP attitude that I lived under in the 1960s felt that Italian restaurants were for Italians, Greek restaurants were for Greeks, and Indian restaurants were for Indians. When we ate out, we ate at places that had roast beef, roast chicken, and roast pork, accompanied by potatoes and two vegetables, as God and the Queen intended.
:), because I do not mean this snarkily, but it was the attitude we lived with.
Irish cuisine (and I partake in part of this heritage) is basically nil to none. If the blacks had arrived in significant numbers post-Reconstruction, their food might have been the best. I just don’t know. To this day, some of the best food I’ve seen when visiting New York is Charles’s Southern Fried Chicken (q.v.).
This is going to be thoroughly modernist with the flavor of the times and places specified. I’d go to an Achatz restaurant for a tremendous, possibly life-changing meal, but not a historically authentic one. I would have said the same thing for Blumenthal, but now I need to watch Heston’s Feasts to be sure.
Sweet Jesus, this show is wonderful. Thanks, don’t ask.
You might also enjoy the series “Supersizers Go/Eat…”, which kicked off in the UK a few years ago with a one-off called “Edwardian Supersize Me” and spiralled into a couple of series.
The basic idea is that the two presenters spend a week following the diet of a particular time period (e.g. Medieval, Regency, Victorian, Roman). They try to keep it accurate, and to cover a reasonably wide swathe of the social spectrum (although the more spectacular stuff, as always, is at the upper end). Some time periods are longer than others (they have one show on the Seventies, for example).
The food generally looks good, but they’re not shy about saying when they find something revolting (e.g. gall bladder). It’s a bit glib, but usually good fun.
Seriously, a good source for an answer would be to find an organic farm/restaurant or serious locavore restaurant. The menu has to change often to reflect what is in season, but there is a tremendous difference between a tomato just picked that morning that has ripened on the vine and a tomato that was picked green and ripened in a truck on the way from Mexico to someplace in the US. The term “farm fresh” has become another piece of marketing bullshit that we ignore, but when you eat food that was ‘alive’ within the last 24 hours, it’s hugely different. (Descended from a long line of farm folk, and my sister and her kids are keeping up the tradition.)
You want to try and find “heirloom” varieties of vegetables - many supermarket vegetables aren’t at all the same as what came out of a garden 100 years ago. Tomatoes are particularly altered. But apples and peaches have gone through a lot of change, too.
I disagree. You’d probably be eating a Gros Michel which is often described as bigger, softer interior (but with a more sturdy peel that resisted bruising) and creamier.