What would taste better in 1960 than it does now, and what would taste worse?

Cafe Society
81

Well, all the chicken from Kroger and Meijer (unless you pay 3x the price for their “organic” stuff) are injected with up to 15% salt water. The fact that six weeks is how long it takes from hatching to butchering probably figures into it also.

About Red Delicious- the only time they’re any good is about the same day they’re picked. The only way to get them that way is at an orchard. Back in the '60s, there were half a dozen apple orchards near where I lived. My dad and I would go to them every weekend in the fall. I still hit the orchards there in Indiana (the few that are left) and also in north Georgia every fall, but the varieties I used to like are hard to find. Winesaps are still available and good as they ever were, but the orchards that have Cortlands leave them on the tree too long. There is only one orchard I know of that still has King David apples, my favorite apple of all time- it tastes like the apple a Granny Smith or Braeburn weakly aspires to be.

82

I existed back then, but was pretty young (born 1954). It’s kind of hard to say what was better back then, because my tastes as a child were so different from my adult self. Fish sticks, for instance – I actually loved those! Now, not so much.

What I most remember of food back then was how unadventurous it was --Mexican food, for instance, was regarded as a bit exotic. The diet was mainly meat, potatoes, and overcooked vegetables, with occasionally forays into mediocre Italian or Chinese. Fish was for Fridays and Lent, and, unless breaded, deep-fried and smothered with tartar sauce, viewed with distaste. A special dinner out was usually at a steak house.

On the other hand, the old-fashioned milkshakes were definitely better than the stuff that comes out of a machine. And, it might be my imagination, but the hot dogs were a lot better tasting.

83

I can’t comment on US food in 1960, but by 1970 it was a bland mess. Coffee was brown dishwater, anything more exotic than bad Chinese or Mexican was unheard of and any spice beyond paprika was viewed with suspicion. Vegetables were cooked to mush and then cooked some more and mushrooms came in a can.

Now, I have farm fresh vegetables delivered to my office through a CSA, I can eat Ethiopian, Vietnamese, or Iranian for lunch within walking distance of my work. Sure, people can stuff themselves on processed goop from fast food or Walmart, but that is an extension of a trend that began in the 50s.

84

This. I pay $1.29 a bottle for Mexican Coca-Cola because it’s made with real sugar. Since it’s only a treat for me (I have one a couple of times a week), the expense is worth it.

I feel bad for those of you eating overcooked veggies back in the day, though. My mom grew up eating that variety of veggies (often from a can, BLEH!) as a kid in the 40s-50s. But starting in the 60s she learned to prepare them from fresh so they were NOT bland mush.

85

Certainly there is plenty of pretentious crap at Whole Foods (asparagus in water), but there are also some really good things there that are, not surprisingly expensive. I think it’s important to remember that until the 70s, food took up a much bigger chunk of people’s income. High prices for artisinal food might be more in line with what food cost before the death of the family farm and small scale production scattered around the country.

The mass produced goop that most Americans think of as food is pretty bad, but cheap (which is why we’re so fat). Yes, the factory raised chickens injected with water are flavorless, and yes the free range alternative is more expensive, but that 1960 chicken off the farmer’s truck was pretty expensive too. Americans’ diets and when and how much poultry and meat they consumed changed when food got very cheap.

86

The Gallery of Regrettable Foods is funny because Lileks is funny. The various imitators, not so much. Those old timey recipes, if you make them today, are generally pretty bland. Tastes change and grocery stores carry a much wider variety of stuff these days, so such dishes are out of favor. The “people back then were teh stoopud” vibe a lot of those articles have does get old in a hurry for me. Why were molded dishes popular then? Same reason rolling stuff up in a white tortilla and calling it a wrap is popular now. There are fashions in food.

87

No argument that frozen dinners are better these days although I’d argue the opposite about the microwave. Most frozen stuff tastes much better when heated in the oven and the crispy stuff actually becomes crispy and the baked stuff can actually bake, etc. No one wants to spend the time on that, of course, but if you ever find yourself with 30min on your hands before you starve to death, give it a shot.

88

I’m pretty convinced it’s a change in the way produce is sold (and expected to be sold).

Even when I was a child in the 70s and 80s, produce was mostly seasonal- strawberries in the spring, peaches and grapes in the summer, apples and pears in the fall, etc… And, I suspect a lot of the seasonal produce was obtained locally when possible, especially things like berries.

Nowadays, produce is expected to be available year round, so a system of more southerly growers in Mexico and S. America, as well as advanced storage systems for US-grown fruit facilitate this. In both cases, the fruit isn’t necessarily at the peak of ripeness, because the rigors of shipping and/or storage don’t make for good looking fruit if they’re picked fully ripe. About the only thing seasonal about fruit anymore is the price- when something’s in local season, the price is usually lower.

For some fruits that keep well, like apples, this has actually translated into better fruit and more variety, but for others that don’t, like strawberries, this means considerably less flavorful fruit. Others, like pears and citrus seem about the same as they’ve always been.

Even strawberries are still delicious if you can get them grown locally / picked when they’re actually ripe, even if they’re commercial hybrid cultivars. The key is the ripeness, not really the cultivar. This is even true for tomatoes- when I grow commercial standbys like “Celebrity” or “BHN 444” in my garden, people rave about them… because they’re actually ripened on the plant, not because of the variety.

89

Born in 1967, so take my opinion for what it’s worth…

But I can’t really think of much that was “better” back in 1960 which is unavailable today (excepting product reformulations), and I can come up with a lot that is worse about 1960’s food, availability, and preparation techniques:

  1. Water pipes made of lead
  2. Cooks smoking while they’re prepping. People smoking while they’re eating.
  3. Lack of restaurants
  4. Lack of ethnicity, authentic or otherwise.
  5. Jello molds
  6. 50+ year old nutrition, cooking, and labeling standards. “Did you just dump lard in that?”
  7. Grocery stores
  8. Lack of specialized cooking equipment like woks, microwaves, modern coffee pots, etc.
  9. Dinner dress.
  10. Lack of specialty spices, condiments, etc.

Would somebody living in Charleston, WV in 1960 be able to go to the grocery store and buy the fixings for a burrito? If you were in Chicago in 1960, what were your Thai restaurant options? How much partially hydrogenated fats will you eat unknowingly? Without nutrition labels (which, apparently, is a 1990 innovation), how do you know what you’re eating - just going to assume “hey, it’s 1960, so it’s gotta be better!”?

Ugh. Yes, some things might be fantastically fresh, but the overall experience of eating will greatly suffer.

90

Maybe it was my Mom’s cooking, but some of her recipes I’ve tried to duplicate just don’t taste as good. Or maybe the ingredients have changed. I remember when young, once a month or so, the Sunday pork roast, with a crisp edge of salt-and-peppered fat, and stuck all over with onion slices, almost burned, it was so delicious! The lean, pretty little pork loin roasts they sell now are mostly dry and tasteless if I try cooking it old-school. Or maybe its just our tastebuds deteriorating. I cooked a box of chocolate pudding for the first time in years, and it was meh. Not inedible, but not tasty. My own pudding recipe is just as easy to make and much tastier.

91

<Crude joke involving oral sex on a woman who was much younger in the 1960s/>

92

When was the Stephen King book written? I was born in 1967, and while produce was locally grown (even the stuff we got in Manhattan), things like melons weren’t available year-round, and other thing varied in quality by season. Tomatos in season were heavenly, but winter tomatos were like cardboard soaked in water. Now, tomatos are pretty much always the same, which is to say, worse in the summer, better in the winter. Unless you grow your own.

But what I really was getting at is that while the food of my very early childhood was very good (and home-cooked from scratch much more often than children have ever had since, I suspect), it went into a decline that lasted through the 90s; however, and this is just my opinion, food has improved a lot in the 21st century over the late 20th. Now, some of this is me. I became a vegetarian around 1988, and choices were extremely limited, and much of the cooking skills I had been taught didn’t include 35 ways to season beans, nor how to use a pressure cooker, albeit, my aunt and uncle in Indiana had gotten fairly adventures as far as meatless meals went, just because kosher meat was hard to get in Indiana.

Anyway, I learned to use a much broader spice palate than my mother ever dreamed existed, plus, I go to all kinds of ethnic restaurants that offer vegetarian entrees. I go to the Indian grocery, the Chinese grocery, and so forth.

I don’t know if soy hot dogs are better now than they were in 1960, because I don’t know if they existed then, but they are better than they were in 1990. Ditto commercially available yogurt (I usually make my own, though). And anything low-sugar or sugar-free got a huge boost in quality, IMO, when Splenda (sucralose) came on the market. Aspertame and saccharine just taste like chemicals to me, but I like Splenda.

If you do any niche buying, like kosher food outside of a place with a large Jewish population, or food for a medical diet, like a diabetic diet, or celiac diet, your world got a lot bigger in the 21st century.

93

Most Americans live in environments where citrus won’t grow anyway, so we’ve always had to ship them from more southerly regions. In that regard, nothing has changed. What has changed, though, is that now that it’s the expectation to eat all produce year-round, there’s a much greater infrastructure in place for shipping, and so the long-distance citrus we eat is now considerably cheaper than it used to be. An orange used to be a rare luxury, something to put in a child’s Christmas stocking. Now, you can have them pretty much whenever you want.

94

See post #51

95

Lots of really interesting answers! Some themes that seem to be recurring:

Meat- chickens were smaller but tastier back then; pork was fattier, (for better or worse). Anything cooked in or made with animal fat back then tasted better (ironically switching to shortening over beef tallow or lard was thought to be healthier, but now we know trans fats are actually very bad for us, and saturated fat in moderation not so bad).

Fruits and vegetables- more year-round availability, but often lower quality taste-wise now. Some hybrids like corn (and those baby carrots), have been bred sweeter for modern tastes, for better or worse. Other varieties have been bred for transport and quicker and larger growth over flavor.

Preparation and availability: things were more often made from scratch with fresher, more “real” ingredients back then (cane sugar vs. HFCS, real cream and butter over cheaper substitutes, etc). stuff considered “artisanal” now, like cheese, may be what was routinely available then. BUT, there was much less variety-- many more styles of cuisine, seasonings, types of beer, coffee, etc, available today. Things were more likely to be overlooked to tasteless leather (meat) or much (veggies) back then.

As I suspected, it sounds like “everything tasted better back then” is far from universally true.

96

There’s a 50-50 chance that in a blind taste test, you could not tell the difference.

97

Or, according to Kenji’s test, one is more likely to prefer HFCS Coke:

98

Yes, I did see it. I added information in the form of a link to a chart with temps and cooking times, as well as summarizing without a click how quickly trichinosis dies at what temperature. I didn’t see that information directly in your post and thought it would be helpful to provide it in response to Rick Kitchen’s statement.

99

The problem with both the original recipes and the site’s recreations is they are trying to emulate recipes from classic French cuisine and failing because of ingredient substitution and/or misunderstanding how to actually make the original recipe.

Using jello as aspic is wrong in many cases - aspic is not always fruit flavored - some of the vegetable and meat salads are being recreated with lemon jello instead of being effectively null flavored knox [to use one common neutral/unflavored brand] made with chicken stock and brightened with lemon zest which comes out tasting a hell of a lot better than lemon jello. [I actually will make aspic for special occasions.] The ‘salad rings’ are also just all dumped together instead of deliberately arranged and single serving or deliberately arranged display piece.

100

Puddings with lovely firm gooey skins on them, as kids my little brother and I would fight over the stuff on the edges of the pans. Today’s puddings are too uniform in texture.