Grog to Grits

I like looking through old magazines, and while paging through a copy of The American Kitchen Magazine, from October, 1902, I saw an article about kitchen designs that made me think about how kitchens have changed over time.

The article featured two kitchen designs, the graphic for one of which is below. Simply looking at the graphic brings out a few differences between then and now. The kitchen is effectively separated from the rest of the house–no open floor plan here–which makes sense.  The defining feature of most kitchens was the stove, and in 1902 most stoves still burned wood or coal, although the gas stove was making inroads. The great thing about the gas stove was that the fire went on or off in an instant, keeping the kitchen from becoming overly warm, but for most people the wood or coal fire kept the kitchen uncomfortably hot for much of the year. Kitchens were usually located at the back of the house, and many families went a step farther and constructed a summer kitchen in an outbuilding. The design below included a flue above the oven, both to take away fumes from the stove and also to take away cooking heat.

Taking the idea of separation a step further, the kitchen is broken up into two areas: a kitchen and a pantry area, which could be separated by a swinging door.  The main function of the pantry was to hold groceries, but it also included a pastry board for making pastry. Putting the pastry board in a separate room made sense because the heat from the oven might melt the butter in the pastry as the dough was being handled.

Another major difference between this kitchen and the kitchens of today is the lack of countertop space. Some shelves are included, particularly around the stove, but one entire wall in the kitchen has only a table and no countertop. Reading the article brings out another difference in the shelves: they are to be covered with zinc, with the zinc running two inches up the wall where the shelves join the wall. The pastry board, in contrast, was to be a solid glass slab, which would probably help keep the dough cold while making pastry.

This kind of kitchen design was completely reworked by the middle of the 20th century. Kitchens were moved to the front and center of the house, which had a more open floor plan, so mothers could cook and watch children at the same time. Air-conditioning and the popularity of gas and electric stoves, not coal or wood stoves, made it so the heat from the kitchen was much less of an irritation. Zinc and glass were cast aside as building materials for other man made and natural materials, and countertops and cabinets grew to cover all the walls in the kitchen. Many old houses are still around with this kind of floor plan in the kitchen, and while they are charming they can also be somewhat annoying to actually cook in.

Source: Nina C. Kinney, “Two More Kitchens,” The American Kitchen Magazine, October 1902, 14.

I’m writing a book on the history of barbecue in America, and for research I’m looking through the Better Homes and Gardens Barbecue Book from 1965.  A couple of thoughts about the book:

-In the steak section, they call for maybe three pounds of steak to be cooked, and the pictures show it as a single three pound steak being cooked.  It’s insane—I’ve never seen a single piece of steak that size.  Obviously, this is from back when you went to the butcher and they cut the steak to whatever size you want.

-A number of recipes call for spiced crab apples, which I’ve never heard of.  A Google search shows recipes on canning spiced crab apples, so it’s certainly possible to do, but it’s another example of foods that are vanishing, or have vanished, from American tables.  Of course, sometimes the recipes they’re used in are a little sketchy: the book I’m looking through calls for them to be used along with chunks of canned luncheon meat (I’m assuming that means Spam) and preserved kumquats, on skewers, grilled on the grill, and then glazed with a glaze made from crab-apple syrup (another thing I’ve never heard of) and brown sugar.  I can’t quite wrap my mind around what all that would taste like.

My wife and I made yogurt a few days ago. Making yogurt is quite easy, especially if you have a yogurt maker. All you need is milk, yogurt yeast, and some time. While it takes hours to make yogurt, most of that time the milk simply sits in the yogurt maker, warmed to a precise temperature, while the yeast grows like crazy and somehow converts the milk into yogurt.

Making yogurt reminded me of a passage from Warren Belasco’s Appetite for Change, which looks at how the counterculture of the 60s and 70s influenced the foods we eat today. Belasco points out that the counterculture subverted the dominant food beliefs of that time, beliefs that had been building since at least the early 20th century. During that time, the predominant belief was that food should be absolutely microbe-free, and that this could be accomplished by adding amounts of preservatives to foods.

As Belasco writes, “Inverting established notions of spoilage, the countercuisine equated preservatives with contamination and microbes with health…..brewer’s yeast, acidophilus milk, kefir, soy sauce, miso, tempeh.”

Yogurt, for example, is as far from microbe-free as you can get. It’s swimming with them, and that’s how you get from regular milk to yogurt. They work to turn the liquid milk into a jell-like solid. Bread, too, is filled with microbes—they’re what puff it up and make the little holes in a loaf of bread. Same with any sort of alcohol—microbes work hard to convert the juice they started with into alcohol (and don’t forget vinegar, which is just alcohol that went bad during the fermentation process).

This was Belasco’s point in his book: that at a time when the dominant idea coming from food companies was that everything should be microbe-free, the counterculture reminded us that, wait, there’s a set of foods that are good and valuable, and which are certainly not microbe-free. You can thank the counterculture for the popularity of yogurt, kefir, and lots of other foods like that.

The quote is from Appetite for Change, by Warren J. Belasco (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989, 2nd updated edition), page 40.

Some time ago I looked through a big book of Gallup polls.  Gallup polls aren’t that well-known anymore, but back in the day Gallup did surveys on (I believe) a weekly basis, and sold the results to newspapers as a syndicated column.

The book, which was actually three volumes with about 2,000 total pages (Gallup did a lot of polls), included several questions relating to food rationing.  It’s been a long time since food was rationed in this country—I believe the last time was during the Korean War in the early 50s, although gasoline rationing essentially happened during the 1970s.  I thought the responses to questions about rationing were interesting.

The first survey was from 1945, the last year of World War II, when rationing was in effect.  The survey question was, “What one product that is now rationed do you find it hardest to cut down on or get along without?”

The results were
Sugar: 20% of respondants
Butter: 19%
Meat: 19
Gasoline: 10
Shoes: 5
Canned foods: 2
Fuel oil: 1
Others: 24

Interestingly, the surveyors noted that “”Women are more inclined to name sugar and butter than men, while a greater proportion of men mention meat and gasoline.”

The second survey was from 1951, which was during the Korean War, although I don’t know what exactly was rationed at that point.  In this survey several questions were asked.

The first question was, “Considering the items you buy from day to day, which one annoys you most because of the high price you have to pay for it?”  The answers were

Meat: 60%
All groceries: 13%
Coffee: 8%
Clothing: 4%
Butter, cheese, eggs: 2%
Milk: 2%
Other: 11%

This was during a time when food prices were increasing, so respondents were understandably irritated by the prices.

The second question asked in that poll dealt with food rationing: “Do you think the Government should or should not ration any of the following: meats, butter, sugar, and fats and oils?” The responses were

Meat: 20% yes, 76% no, 4% no opinion
Butter: 14 yes, 80 no, 6 no opinion
Sugar: 15 yes, 80 no, 5 no opinion
Fats and Oils: 16 yes, 78 no, 6 no opinion

I’m surprised that such a large percentage of Americans favored rationing in one type or another.  I can’t imagine that anyone would favor rationing today, but this was just after the Great Depression and World War II, when the government took unprecedented control of the economy.  Today, we’ve drifted very far from the idea that it’s the government’s role to be in charge of things like food and gasoline, but back then, it was assumed that, in a time of crisis, the government was the best institution to take charge.  Again, things have changed a lot since then.

Source: George H. Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1935-1971 (New York: Random House, 1972), 488 and 993.

I was shopping at World Market a few days ago and saw a book on how to make distillations and infusions.  Distilling means making hard liquor (like brandy or whiskey), while infusing means to take an existing liquor and add flavor to it.  I’m curious about distilling because, for many years in America, it’s been illegal to make your own hard liquor (and I mean very illegal—we’re talking federal prison time here, not just a little slap on the wrist).

I picked up the book and skimmed the introduction and, oops, it’s not actually a book about distilling because that’s illegal, but instead it’s a book about making infusions.  Okay, I understand why it wouldn’t talk about distilling, but why put distilling in the title of the book?  It seems quite lame.

Google Books, though, has lots of old books, and I found Old Time Recipes for Home Made Wines, Cordials, and Liqueurs from Fruits, Flowers, Vegetables, and Shrubs, by Gelen S. Wright, from 1909.

It really is quite a book.  In compiling the book the author went for breadth instead of depth, so there are lots and lots of different recipes, and many of the recipes are copied directly from older books rather than updated for today (or 100 years ago, as the case may be). To make strong mead we’re told to warm spring water “more than blood warm,” and then “dissolve honey in it until it is strong enough to bear an egg, the breadth of a shilling.” There are some drinks that are obviously quite old but that I’ve never heard of, like Ebulum, which seems to be ale with juniper-berries, elderberries, hops, and a number of spices, plus eringo root. I would make it but I’m not sure where to get half of the ingredients.

Looking through the book makes me think of how much variety we’ve lost over the years in terms of making liquors.  The last part of the book has recipes for making liqueurs (including some that need to be distilled), and there’s a bewildering number of different recipes.  There is page after page of ratafia recipes, which are fruit or nut flavored.  Here, for example, is the recipe for Ratafia de Bron de Noix:

Take sixty young walnuts whose shells are not yet hardened, four pints brandy, twelve ounces sugar, fifteen grains mace, fifteen grains cinnamon, fifteen grains cloves.  Digest for two or three months, press out the liquor, filter, and keep it for two or three years.

I’ve never even thought about making a liqueur from nuts.  Sometimes when I’m at a liquor store I check out the shelves stocked with flavored liqueurs, and this book goes far beyond anything that’s mass-produced today.  It’s really quite amazing.

You can check the book out yourself over at Google Books.