Antiquated Cookbooks

I stumbled upon a 1930 cookbook, the New Delineator Recipes.  I love these old cookbooks.  When I find one I’m like Howard Carter when he found Tutankhamen’s tomb in Egypt.   Actually, Carter was exploring the tomb when this book was written.  Cookbooks from the last century fascinate—hidden within are forensic footprints of a national diet gone wrong. It's a crime scene.

The Delineator was a woman’s magazine, founded in 1873, owned by the publisher Butterick, a name still known for sewing patterns.  What were stylish people eating in 1930?  The answer was in New Delineator Recipes, which also included menus.  Here’s what I found:

Canned foods:  Convenience was a big selling point in the industrialization of food.  Ordinary folks couldn’t afford servants to cook so opening a can of factory-prepared food gave at least the feeling of servancy.   A photograph in the cookbook showed the variety of vegetables you could eat in a month—30—a great idea except all were canned.

Flavors:  What spices were used in recipes three generations ago?  It was pretty basic.  Mainly salt and pepper, with occasional paprika, or cayenne.  Add two sauces: Worcestershire and Tabasco.  Cinnamon or vanilla in desserts.  What’s changed in 82 years is the variety of flavors used today.

Dessert:  Maybe it’s because the book came out at the end of the roaring ‘20s, after a boom economy, but the book is big on dessert.  Ten special recipes by the cook Ann Batchelder, for example, included eight desserts; the other two were canned fish entrees.  Pudding were common but there was one healthy dessert from a new import: bananas flavored with lemon juice.

Menus:  Here’s the pattern of the dinner menus—meat, with potatoes, a vegetable, often canned, and, most days, a salad.  Meat was in the center of the plate—usually beef.  Animal products figured even bigger in the diet if you counted eggs and milk (guidance at that time was a quart each day).  And this leads us back to this week’s subject:  a meat sparing diet.

This Week’s Menu

Our menus lag by a week; we eat them first, then publish.  We had family over for the Academy Awards so there were leftovers for Monday, including a bowl of coleslaw.  It’s good to have a salad that will keep a few days.  The cooking adventure this week was beef stew—another way to eat vegetables seasoned with a little meat.

Monday

• Baked salmon.
• Brown rice with sauce.
• Bok Choy, steamed.

Tuesday

• Sweet potato, baked, with butter and brown sugar.
• Coleslaw with peanuts (recipe here).
• Peas (frozen).

Wednesday

• Beef stew (recipe here).
• Cornbread.
• Fresh pears (dessert).

Thursday  (a leftover meal)

• Beef stew
• Spinach salad
• Rice pudding (for dessert, made with the last of the brown rice)

A New Cookbook  

Old cookbooks show the evolution of food processing.  Here are four stages in the industrialization of food reflected in my 1930 cookbook:

1. In the late 1800s grains, once eaten with bran and germ intact were refined: rice was polished, roller mills produced fine white flour, and the corn degermer was invented.  Nutrients critical to health were lost but the grains were sweeter, whiter, and didn’t spoil. 
2. In the early 1900s hydrogenation was introduced resulting in Crisco shortening, margarine, and refined salad oil.  The market for olive oil, butter, and lard declined.  Gelatin was also introduced (think of Jello, a little gelatin, a lot of sugar, plus artificial flavor).
3. After WWI canned foods, a necessity for soldiers on the move but now a labor saving convenience, became part of the public diet.  Canned fruit served in Jello made a fancy if unhealthy dessert.
4. The war made the world a little smaller:  Pineapples were imported from Hawaii, bananas from Central America, and with the application of refrigeration to ships, meat was imported from Argentina. 

These changes continued throughout the 20^th century.  We see change as good, usually.  The late Steve Jobs was a change genius in the caliber of Thomas Edison or Henry Ford.  The beautiful wife loves her iPod; I use a Mac computer.  But the changes brought by the industrialization of food were generally a bad idea that must be reversed in the 21^st century.  It’s time to rewrite our cookbooks. 

Please comment:  What is your favorite healthy cookbook.  Comment and we’ll make a list of the top ten. 

Comments

[Dee]

My favorite is Americas Test Kitchen Healthy Recipes cookbook. There are lots of recipes to choose from. I have made several of the recipes and had succes with all of them. I also enjoy the explanations given on how they made the recipe healthier and why. They also explain what fats they have left in the recipe and why. They've really done their homework and it shows.

[Mar]

I would like to recommend "A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen: Easy Seasonal Dishes for Family and Friends" by Jack Bishop (editor of Cooks Illustrated)