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Dining Through the Decades: 100 Years of American Food

A century ago someone, much like yourself, was seated at a kitchen table, much like yours, perusing a morning paper, much like this one. The big difference? The meal. While you may be lapping up fat-free yogurt with a café latte and Sweet’N Low chaser, our fictitious centenarian, depending where he lived, filled his plate with porridge, flapjacks, mutton or a heart-stopping amount of home-cured bacon.

How did we in 10 decades go from gruel to Starbucks?

“Quickly,” says Melanie Barnard, a Bon Appétit columnist and author of Short & Sweet (Houghton Mifflin, 1999). “Changes to the food we’ve eaten started slowly but then went into fast forward, mirroring the times.”

This century, more than any other, has been one of staggering transformation. Our population has mushroomed by almost 200 million since 1900. Passenger travel zoomed from the horse to the supersonic. Computers accomplish in hours what took a turn-of-the-century factory crew days. And the foods we’ve eaten have taken an equally remarkable journey.

1900—1909
The 20th century was rung in with contagious optimism. As early as the mid-1890s it was dubbed the American Century. The consensus, at least at home, was that we were an unrivaled world power to whom the future belonged.

Such heady times required heady meals. From the denizens of Newport, Rhode Island’s multimillion-dollar cottages to knockabout American laborers, menus were meat-filled. New York City’s haute restaurants offered elk, caribou, bear, moose and even elephant to intrepid diners. Modest eating establishments in the Midwest served mountains of the same (minus the elephant), albeit with less fanfare and a considerably lower price tag.

A particular favorite along the eastern seaboard was Oysters Rockefeller — baked oysters topped with savory shredded greens. Although not a 20th-century dish by definition (it was invented in 1899 by Jules Alciatore of Antoine’s Restaurant in New Orleans), it reached its zenith in the early 1900s. Because of its rich ingredients, Alciatore chose John D. Rockefeller, one of the wealthiest men in the nation, as its namesake.

Alciatore also (deliberately?) shrouded his creation in mystery — an early and successful marketing coup. He emphatically insisted that the finely minced greens were not spinach, as was commonly assumed. Later his great-grandson, Roy F. Guste Jr., was equally tight-lipped in Antoine’s Restaurant Since 1840 Cookbook (W.W. Norton, 1980). “The original recipe is still a secret that I will not divulge…If you care to concoct your version, I would tell you only that the sauce is basically a purée of a number of green vegetables other than spinach.”

But, as Bruce Kraig, professor of history at Roosevelt University and president of the Culinary Historians of Chicago, cautions, “it’s important to keep in mind that this kind of food was reserved for the wealthy and upper classes. The middle and lower classes ate far more humbly.”

One commodity that crossed class boundaries was sugar. By 1909, America had an aching sweet tooth, with the average person consuming 65 pounds of sugar annually. The culprits: chocolate brownies, apple pie, devil’s food cake and baked Alaska. Sweetened tea and coffee (and its newly invented decaf cousin) also contributed to our ancestors’ passion for sugar.

Recipe
Oysters Rockefeller

1910—1919
Immigration was at an all-time high during these years, bringing new flavors to the kitchen. Italian, German, Jewish, Chinese and Eastern European foods filled millions of tables, mostly in ethnic enclaves in large cities. As a result the 1910s became the “hyphenate decade.” Merrill Shindler describes in American Dish (Angel City Press, 1996) how food descriptors such as Italian-American, Chinese-American and Jewish-American began popping up. Spaghetti and Meatballs, Chop Suey, Chow Mein, Swedish Meatballs and goulashes of every sort crowded specials boards in neighborhood restaurants.

In addition, says Kraig, the 1910s saw the beginning of the proliferation of processed foods. In a scant 10 years, Hellmann’s mayonnaise, Oreo cookies, Crisco, Quaker Puffed Wheat and Puffed Rice, Marshmallow Fluff and Nathan’s hot dogs took a bow. Aunt Jemima’s smile was already imprinted upon the American culinary psyche, as were the Kellogg’s and C.W. Post’s brand names. And lucky Clarence Birdseye — who on an ice-fishing trip noticed that a fish left out in the cold froze instantly and tasted good when cooked weeks later — set about perfecting his “Frosted Foods,” which he would introduce to the world in 1930.

We needed a place to purchase such bounty, and the self-service market was born. Instead of having to hand a list to a clerk and wait as he fetched the items from the back, a customer could amble through the shop’s aisles at her leisure. Stores such as A&P offered up to a thousand items (29,000 fewer than today’s supermarkets), boggling the minds of housewives everywhere.

With such variety and availability, the over-indulgence of the first decade prevailed — at least among the wealthy. Restaurant menus remained chockfull of meats, shellfish, pâtés and mousses, and the girth of the upper classes remained formidable. “Before World War I it was chic to look plump,” says Ruth Adams Bronz, author of Miss Ruby’s American Cooking (Harper & Row, 1989). “Round was in.” The poster boy of the times: our then president, William H. Taft, a hefty 300-pounder. Is it any wonder his favorite meal was Lobster Newburg?

A wildly popular dish of the day was Vichyssoise. Dreamed up in 1917 by Chef Louis Diat of New York City’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Vichyssoise is a heavenly chilled soup of puréed leeks, onions, potatoes and cream.

Vichyssoise’s enduring popularity has as much to do with its superb taste as with its relatively democratic ingredients. It could be made in the most well-to-do as well as the most simple of homes. Granted, leeks weren’t common at the time, but that wasn’t something a resourceful cook couldn’t fix with an extra onion or two.

A death knell sounded in January 1919, when the Eighteenth Amendment — otherwise known as Prohibition — was ratified. Scheduled to go into effect on January 16, 1920, Prohibition was going to save those poor souls whose moral compasses had gone awry. Or so self-satisfied politicians told one another over glasses of port after dinner.

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