I hadn’t considered that point. My mother to this day seems to have this thing that some vegetables are salad vegetables and OK to be eaten raw (lettuce, tomato, cucumber etc) but others must be cooked.
She likes carrot but when I put some raw carrot straws to eat with tzatziki there was zero chance she would even try it. She grew up on a farm in the 40’s with a wood stove and kerosene lamps.
And LOL at Swampspruce. 
Here’s one that is pretty close. It is based on mostly processed/convenience foods.
Here’s another.
I own that one! It’s actually not bad - has some pretty interesting recipes from all sorts of sources. And you can’t make the assumption that most of the recipes are full of processed stuff. Most of the time the jar or can is just one small part of the recipe, like a container of french-fried onions on top of a casserole that was made from fresh ingredients. The “Pirate Bean Soup” recipe they include rocks.
You might need a couple of minutes, but you’re right. The thing is that people thought you needed to cook them thoroughly to prevent them from making you sick. It didn’t have a lot of science behind it.
Yes, and when fruit or veggies were in season, they were tastier. No tomatoes picked green then artificially ripened. Strawberries had a short season, but were far tastier.
Pot roast is still good. Pizza was popular.
My Dad always ordered his Steak Medium Rare. My Grandfather wanted his blood rare or blue.
But it’s true, my dad was a avid fisherman, so he hated restaurant fish. If you took him to a seafood place, there would be NOTHING ON THE MENU HE COULD EAT other than the shrimp cocktail. He only liked his chicken fried.
We ate Italian, Mexican, Chinese and even Japanese. (Gardena CA).
Too true.
I’m 62, spent 21 years in the military, and have never had it. 
My wife spent seven years in Ireland (late '70s-early '80s). She swears the proper way to make an authentic Irish stew is to cut the meat and potatoes into chunks and then boil them until you can’t tell them apart…
I enjoyed it when I was a little kid (still do), and was surprised when my dad, who had it when he was in the Army during WWII, called it SOS (and told me what that meant). I said it still tasted good, and he replied “Yes, but not when you have to eat it** all the time**.”
Do they call them “tatties” in Ireland?
Stew is different. It’s OK to boil veggies if you’re going to use the liquid they’re boiled in, too, and flavor isn’t exactly potatoes’ strong point to begin with. I’ll bet, though, that there are other veggies in that stew that aren’t boiled that much.
There’s a difference between boiling veggies and boiling them into oblivion, though. Stew should have veggies (including and especially potatoes–that’s why I use red potatoes in stew, as they will hold their shape well in stews) that still retain their shape, not dissolve into an indistinct miush with the rest of the meat.
Mom wasn’t a bad cook at all, but what really sucked were the early versions of industrial foods. Remember Banquet and Swanson frozen dinners in the aluminum foil packaging? The choices early on were quite limited - either chicken or Salisbury steak. God knows how they made those ‘mashed potatoes’ but the texture was more reminiscent of some sort of synthetic fabric than any food. And the mixed vegetables were disturbingly cardboard-like in both flavor and texture.
Speaking of industrial foods, Jello was a pioneer in the field. Jello created their own cookbook featuring delicious and delightful culinary offering such as lime cheese salad. Mmmm mmm!
What I remember from my parent’s cooking in the early 1970s: over-reliance on the pressure cooker.
Yes, my mother went through three pressure cookers in her lifetime. I bought her a new one at Sears about 5 years ago and she was more thrilled over that than anything I ever gave her. (But she never used it as she was starting to decline into dementia and couldn’t figure out how to use it, which was just as well! I was terrified of the thing and gave it away.) She did make the best beef stew in a pressure cooker, none I’ve ever had or made could match it.
Bad teeth. I think midcentury cooks boiled vegetables to death because of the state of dentistry–or the state it had been in when their mothers/grandmothers learned to cook. Victorian cookbooks often have vegetables being cooked to death and then passed through a sieve for serving, essentially turning them into baby food. I’m pretty sure bad teeth is why.
Something to consider is that we’ve become really really good at breeding non-poisonous vegetables now (although, in the case of the Lenape potato, it’s the thought that counts). This was not always the case in the past. Early varieties may very well have required extensive cooking to become safe. Some foods (kidney beans) will become MORE toxic if they are undercooked.
Could rising standards of dental health and better dentures explain this? Most people aren’t cooking for people, even in their twenties, with missing teeth, abscesses, cavities, etc. A tasty crunchy vegetable can quickly turn into a torturous chewing ordeal to someone with less-than-perfect teeth.
edit: too slow, what that guy ^^^ said
When people complain about the foods of the 1950s, I have to wonder… just what do they imagine Americans were eating 20, 30, 50, 100 years earlier?
The average person wasn’t eating particularly wholesome, delicious dinners before the 1950s.
However uninspired Fifties food now seems, most ordinary Americans were probably thrilled that there was plenty of edible, sanitary, affordable food on the shelves of all the supermarkets. Those are things people who’d lived through the Depression didn’t take for granted.
