Note: The following is part of a series on traveling foods.  Upcoming articles will look at foods eaten while sailing in the 1600s and while traveling through the US in the 1800s.

These days, packing for a long road trip means assembling things you need to wear and things to keep you entertained—t-shirts and shorts, iPods and DVDs for the kids to watch.  If there’s any food involved it’s often added as an afterthought, a few granola bars or a pack of trail mix thrown in with the swimsuit and tanning lotion.

Here’s the list of provisions The Complete Official Road Guide of the Lincoln Highway gave for a four-person road trip in 1924 (everything in parenthesis are comments from the original authors, not from me):

• 1 slab Best Bacon
• 1 can peaches
• 1 can pineapple
• 2 cans tomatoes
• 2 cans baked beans
• 1 dozen eggs
• 2 loaves bread
• 1 sack salt
• 1 can pepper
• 1 lb butter (not necessary)
• 2 lbs rice
• 10 lbs potatoes
• 6 cans evaporated milk (small size)
• 1 lb sugar
• 1 package safety matches (dozen boxes)
• 2 lbs cracked wheat
• 1 pint pickles
• 1 box Graham crackers
• 2 lbs coffee (ground)
• 1/2 lb tea
• 1 roll surgeon’s plaster, 1 in. wide, 5 yards (for sealing cans, etc.)
• 3 cans corn
• fresh fruit, as often as possible.

Things have obviously changed a lot in 90 years.

Cars, for example, are much more reliable than they were in the 1920s.  Breakdowns were frequent and blowouts a common occurrence.  Many heavily-traveled routes these days are divided, multilane interstates or state highways, things which were scarcely even conceived of at a time when a coast to coast trip generally meant a long train ride, not a car ride.

In the 1920s most roads were still gravel and the national highway system was just being set up (the interstate system is a product of the 1950s).  The first coast to coast highway was the Lincoln Highway, which the few motorists brave enough to drive could follow from Times Square in New York City to Lincoln Park in San Francisco, passing through 13 states as they went.

The Complete Official Road Guide of the Lincoln Highway was a guide for motorists driving all or a part of the route.  Not many people in the 1920s would have driven it—cars were still relatively expensive, and the heyday of the family driving vacation was still several decades off—but it’s an interesting book to look through to contemplate what’s changed since then.  The Lincoln Highway is gone, superseded by a series of state and national highways and interstates, and even the idea of crossing the country on anything but interstates is not something that would appeal to many people.

Looking at the list above, it’s quite clear from the suggested rations that drivers would be stopping along the road to make their own meals.  The authors of that section of the guide admitted that, in most places, this was unnecessary since towns of any size would have at least one restaurant or diner, and furthermore motorists could stop at grocery stores along the way to stock up on food.  However, there were some parts of the country, particularly in the west, where towns were few and far between.  While a motorist driving through those areas might see a few towns in the course of a day, they might not pass through a town around mealtime, and the relatively high chance of a car breaking down, especially in desert areas in the summer, could make travel dicey.  Thus, they needed to take some food with them.

The food suggested above was something of a hodge-podge of items that could be thrown together to make quick dishes.  Some of the food, like the baked beans, could simply be warmed and eaten, while other items, like potatoes and eggs, could be thrown together to make a quick meal.  The book did not have any recipes in it so travelers were on their own for figuring out what to eat.

Again, by 1924 the idea of carrying your own food while driving across country was passing from fashion.  The 1920s saw an explosion in the number of cars on the road but it wasn’t until the 1950s that things really got going with car sales—that’s when it could be assumed that every family owned a car.  That was also the time when fast food restaurants, ready to feed busy motorists, sprouted up along well-traveled roads and interstates across the country.  From a dozen eggs and a pound of sugar to a hamburger and french fries, people always need to eat while traveling—it’s just that today, the food is easily obtainable and can be eaten while you drive, instead at a roadside rest park or on a blanket along side the road.