In the “disgusting food you like” thread, a number of the foods that were mentioned were vegetables that I like if cooked properly, but I agree that they’re disgusting if they’re overcooked the way that a lot of older people do when cooking them.
My question is, why did people used to cook these vegetables for so long if that makes them less appealing to so many people?
Do you know that older people did used to overcook vegetables? It’s possible that now that they’re older, they cook them more because it’s easier to chew, and their teeth are going.
Did you live through the 1950s? People everywhere in the U.S., including restaurants, used to overcook vegetables.
This was a culinary “tradition” inherited from England, but I’m not sure why they did it.
I think they used to think that raw or slightly cooked vegies were “unwholesome”, in that they could induce indigestion. If I ate a diet of bread and salt beef and boiled potatoes and beer, the occasional raw cucumber or slightly cooked carrot might disagree with me, too, because I wouldn’t be used to it. I think the concept carried over even to our parents’ time.
The 19th century fiction I like to read has occasional references to this - in particular, Louisa May Alcott’s works. LMA loved to preach about what sort of “wholesome” food one should eat.
I think my undereducated grandmother subscribed to the “wholesome” thing because she thought raw-ish foods might not have all the germs killed yet. On the other hand, my *other *grandmother got a bachelor’s degree in Home Ec, and she never overcooked vegetables.
Also, safe home canning procedures can lend themselves to overcooking: high temperatures while canning are needed to make the seals tight, and if you have a lot of stuff to can, or aren’t fast, the end of the batch might get pretty soggy.
I get the feeling it’s something like this story. (stolen shamelessly from memory from a 1980’s Reader Digest)
Susie always used to pull out cans and turn them over and open them from the bottom instead of the top. She used to do so because her mom used to.
One day her husband asked her why she did it. When she stopped to think on it, she didn’t know why. So she called her mom and asked her.
Mom said, I did it because Grandma did it. Susie called Grandma.
Grandma laughed and said, we used to keep the cans down cellar, and dust would build up on the top. I was too lazy to dust them off, so I would just turn them over to use the bottom.
And thus was a tradition born.
I think several somebodies along the line got the idea that overcooked veggies=safe veggies, then just passed it along, to their children, their friends and family, and no no one knows how to cook veggies just right.
I think modern cooks are simply spoiled by the good food available.
Not so long ago, all vegetables in winter were retrieved from root cellars, where they would be dry and hard.
And people would all of a vegetable, not just the hearts.
If you put the tough end and root of a celery plant in soup or stew, it takes a long time to break down the cellulose so you can digest it.
It’s really easy to NOT overcook vegetables if you cook them in the microwave. They steam, and the timer turns them off automatically. Before the microwave was in wide use, the revolutionary tool was that petaled steamer that was held above the water in the saucepan, and you couldn’t ignore that puppy, because the pot would boil dry.
If your option for cooking vegetables is to dump them in a pot of boiling water, you can kind of let them go for as long as you need. Boil the broccoli for 20 minutes while you wait for the roast to finish and mashing the potatoes? Why not. Even if you boiled it for 5 minutes and turned the burner off, it would still overcook sitting in the hot water.
My mother-in-law made a version of chicken chow mein that involved dumping chicken, canned LaChoy vegetables, and sliced fresh celery and onions in the “deep well” (like a built-in crock pot) of her stove and letting it cook for hours. The concept of stir-frying was completely foreign (no pun intended!) to her.
I was going to leap in with a knee-jerk denial of this, but I think it’s probably substantially true. People really did thoroughly/over cook their food - not just veg - in fairly recent history.
I think some of it does derive from basically ignorant mythology about nutrition and digestion - but going back a little further, there was a distinct class division - you had the richer folks eating a fair bit of meat, and any vegetable accompaniments being subject to lengthy and elaborate preparation - to make them conspicuously fancy.
At the other end of the scale, you had poorer folks eating mostly vegetables, but to make the small amount of meat go further, they might cook it all together in potage, stew, or pudding - one of the advantages of these is that they can be left to cook unattended while other household tasks are taken care of.
Going back further still, it would have been the case that many vegetables needed extended cooking - just to make them palatable - early forms of cultivated vegetable (or wild ones gathered for sustenance*) would often have been coarse, fibrous, bitter or pungent and a long simmer in the pot would have rendered them pleasant. Old habits die hard.
*I mention this because it’s possible to go out and pick small quantities of delicious, tender and tasty wild vegetables (and this is something I do myself from time to time), but If you’re gathering wild vegetables in large quantities to feed a large family or a small community, you can’t be so discerning as to only pick the tender tips as you skip gaily along the hedgerow.
I expect there are other contributory factors
Another factor might be that selective hybridization has really accellerated producing consistently good crops, compared to varieties that were common even 50 years ago. I don’t know that this is the case, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear it’s a factor.
You only have to go back to Louisa May Alcott books to see carrots where only the middle part was good and sweet and tasty. That was living memory for my grandma, I imagine.
Mangetout had a fine post up there.
The overcooked veg thing of the 50’s & 60’s might have been a result in relying on canned goods, abundant in stores, and utmost in convenience. There’s not a far margin in reducing canned vegs to mush, so most stuff would be kinda overcooked with the usual household distactions.
Cooking style: Pots of stuff on the oven, boiled, lends itself to overcooking, especially when one is waiting for the meat to be done.
Now, we have plenty of fresh vegs, option of microwave, and, awareness of other styles of stove-top cooking, like stir fry. Plus, many more options of restaurant food that trains our palates to other ways of being.
Ka-ching for progress!
I was raised in England in the 60s and 70s and vegetables were indeed generally cooked too much. However, I think things have changed. As an adult I usually had steamed, slightly crisp vegetables. On moving to the states, my tastes proved to be for firmer veg than the locals in general. That could be regional, though - Southern food can certainly cook things to a mush at times.
As to why vegetables were overcooked - no idea.
Australia, 1970s…
My mum used to serve up the traditional “meat and three veg” most nights. A typical main meal would be lamb cutlets, mashed potato, carrots, and peas. The carrots and peas were invariably so close to mush that they were barely holding their shape. And it wasn’t only my mum either - my school friends ate the same stuff.
I remember working in a pub in 1988 and a long-haired hippy kinda guy showed me how to cook potatoes in a microwave. I was amazed!
Didn’t live through the 50s, but my mom learned to cook then, and it showed.
This makes a lot of sense.
Hi there. I’m a refugee from a doctoral program in American history. My field was culinary history. There have been lots of good answers upthread.
Remember, even if a woman did notice that the asparagus tasted good when it was just lightly cooked, she probably wouldn’t dare serve it that way, because everybody would be like “what the heck is this?”
Yes, “digestability” was a HUGE concern for people in the past. They knew very little about either disease or nutrition. As I’m sure a lot of you know, many of womens’ health and mental problems were incorrectly attributed to some vague malfunctioning of the female parts. Similarly, many problems of people of both genders were blamed on the digestive system. So there you go.
The US diet did not include vegetables much until relatively recently, and the feeling was clearly that they had to be cooked a long time. My 1930 vintage cookbook has cooking times for 20 minutes for boiling fresh asparagus (and going back to the Roman times, it was known that asparagus should be cooked quickly). Broccoli and Brussel Sprouts took 30 minutes of boiling, carrots 35, corn on the cob 15-25.
Part may have been the variety of vegetables available, which, if you lived in a city, were probably not young and tender.
Attendee of a British-style boarding school in Australia in the mid-60s here. The vegetables were cooked so long they were virtually indistinguishable; that grey-green splodge could be peas, brussels sprouts, broccoli, spinach, broad beans or on a bad day mashed potatoes (made up from the vast vats of DEB potato powder in the “kitchens”). Everything - veges, beef, dessert - was boiled for hour after hour before being deemed edible. The plate was invariably awash with this thin grey watery paste that flowed off the alleged food. Why, I have no idea, except that’s the way it was always done I suspect.
How we grew past about 4 feet tall I have no idea, there could have been no skerrick of nutrition left in anything there.
Veggies now are far fresher and more tender than in the past. I remember you actually used to send Oranges “Mission Pack” to relatives in the non-sunbelt states for Xmas. *No, really. * :eek:
I think that the veggies then needed more cooking.
When one of my relatives was flying over to America from Austria after the war, she thought we were barbarians because the airline gave her raw vegetables during the flight. Attitudes changed at different rates.