Grog to Grits

Clarence Saunders revolutionized the way we shop for food.

In the early 20th century you shopped at the local market, where the staff got the food for you (most of it was behind a counter) and calculated how much you owed (most prices weren’t marked). Shopping was a long process with lots of give-and-take between the shopper and store owner over prices and which brands to buy.

Clarence Saunders worked to change all of that. In 1916 he opened a new kind of store where customers did most of the work themselves.  They retrieved the food from various places in the store and they chose which brands to buy. In return for customers doing more work, they got lower prices, which were clearly marked on the items. The store had the odd name of Piggly Wiggly, and it was a success, capping out at over 2,600 stores at the height of its popularity.  Piggly Wiggly wasn’t the only company offering low prices in exchange for customers doing more of the work but they were the largest example of what became known as supermarkets.

Unfortunately for Saunders, his business got too big and he was forced out of the company.  Standing himself right back up again he started a new grocery store named “Clarence Saunders, sole-owner-of-my-name,” which, alas, eventually went out of business.

In 1945, the last year of World War II, he opened a new store which could have been as groundbreaking as Piggly Wiggly but which ended up going the way of Clarence Saunders, sole-owner-of-my-name.  The name of the grocery store was Keedoozle, and it was staffed by robots.  Customers walked along glass displays where they could see the food, and complicated contraptions gave them the food they selected.  However, the machines were too complicated and the whole experience was probably too strange.  It, too, went out of business.

Saunders died in October, 1953, while working on yet another project: a “Food-electric” store, which presumably would have also offered automated food dispensing to interested customers.

Ever wonder what it was like to eat on an American steamboat in the 1830s?  No need to keep wondering; James Logan, a Scotsman who traveled through America in the early 1830s, described it.  He traveled deck passage, which meant that all you got was a place on the deck amidst whatever cargo was also being shipped.  You had to bring your own food, although a stove was supplied so passengers could stay warm.

He traveled on the Ohio River.  He paid $8 for a ticket up the Ohio and $3 more for some bread, cheese, and apples, which lasted him for the four day voyage from St. Louis to Louisville, but then his food ran out.

“We remained here for a day,” he wrote, “and my store of provisions being exhausted, I purchased a coffee-pot, some ham, Indian flour, and a sack, from one of the passengers….Some coffee, bread, and apples, cost nearly two dollars more, and my stock was now reduced to two dollars, on which I had to travel nearly three hundred miles.”  To avoid paying another dollar to keep traveling he gathered wood for the steamer, which had a wood-fired boiler.

Later, when he got off the steamer, he thought back on cooking for the trip.

Three other passengers, who had no coffee-pot, joined me at meals, but I used to cook for all, as the rest were not so good at it.  I kneaded the Indian corn into cakes, fired them, fried the ham and sausages, and prepared the coffee.  Besides all this, I frequently wooded twice a day, and thus was kept in exercise.  Although I cooked only twice a day, about eight in the morning, and five in the evening, we found the two meals quite sufficient.

All in all, though, he found the trip uncomfortable, and the first thing he did on disembarking in Pittsburgh was eat a big breakfast.

Source: James Logan, Notes of a Journey Through Canada, the United States of America and the West Indies (Edinburgh: Fraser and Co., 1839), pages 117-118, 124.

I wrote about popcorn previously, but I was looking through some old issues of Good Housekeeping magazine and saw a few popcorn recipes that I thought I’d pass on.

The recipes are from 1913, and from reading the introduction to the recipes it’s apparent that new ideas about nutrition are becoming popular.  This is just before they discover vitamins but after they’ve realized food can be divided into proteins, carbohydrates, and fats.

As the article says, “We have lately begun to recognize important food values in things which used to be regarded strictly as knickknacks.  Witness the recipes which require dates, figs, bananas, nuts, etc., as a foundation.”  The author goes on to say that “Perhaps the newest recruit to the ranks is pop-corn.”

And there are lots of popcorn (or pop-corn, as they apparently used to write back then) recipes.  It starts with popcorn cereal for breakfast, which could be served “with cream and sugar, fruit juices or plain fruit.”

A “Dressing for Fowl” required the cook to soak equal parts stale bread and popped corn in water, then squeeze the resulting mass dry and add eggs, salt, pepper, onions and celery.  All of that was cooked in a frying pan (“stirring and turning often”) over low heat for 20 minutes, and then stuffed into a bird.  I can’t imagine what that stuffing must have been like.

There are two recipes in particular that are odd, and while I assume they are variations on existing recipes, I’ve never seen modern recipes like these.

The first is for “Corn-nut Loaf,” which, instead of being a bread recipe, is closer to being a variation on a meatloaf recipe.  It started by having the cook mix together one cup each of ground popcorn, soft stale bread crumbs, and broken nut meats, then adding “salt and pepper to taste and a teaspoonful of sage.  Bind together with two beaten eggs and enough cold water to hold the mixture together.”  Make that into a loaf and bake 45 minutes in a greased pan, “in a hot oven…Serve with a brown or tomato sauce.”  Sadly, I’m allergic to flour and eggs, or else I’d try to make it.

And the other strange recipe is for popcorn soup.  The complete instructions are:

Scald one quart of milk in a double boiler with one can of corn [no, it doesn’t say what size corn, and I assume it’s sweet corn].  Press through a sieve and add salt, pepper and a tablespoonful of butter.  Thicken with cracker crumbs and a handful of pop-corn.  When serving put one tablespoonful of whipped cream on each plate of soup with a few kernels of the pop-corn.

If anyone is brave enough to try these recipes, let me know.

All of the quotes above come from “Meals from the Corn-Popper,” by May Belle Brooks, page 119 in the January, 1913, edition of Good Housekeeping.

I’m feeling under the weather, so the topic today is medicine and the kinds of recipes people used to make for medicinal purposes.

Back in the 1800s, most cookbooks had a section on sickbed recipes.  There were lots of different kinds of recipes: some for plasters which were smeared on the person’s body, some for foods for sick people (which were usually things like gelatin or Cream of Wheat), and some for actual medicines that were consumed in some way.

The medicines, by today’s standards, were pretty weak in terms of actually curing the patient, but they certainly tried.  An example of medicine from the period is this recipe, from 1869’s Domestic Cookery, by Elizabeth Lea:

Warner’s Cordial for Gout in the Stomach

Take one ounce of rhubarb, two drachms of senna, two of fennel seed, two of coriander seed, one of saffron, and one of liquorice; stone and cut half a pound of good raisins, and put all in a quart of good spirits; let it stand in a warm place for ten days, shaking it every day; then strain it off and add a pint more spirits to the same ingredients; when all the strength is extracted, strain it and mix the first and last together. Take from two to four spoonsful of this cordial in as much boiling water as will make it as hot as you can take it; if the pain is not removed in half an hour, repeat the dose, and if your stomach will not retain it, add 10 drops of laudanum. (page 248)

Really, it’s a number of spices infused in liquor for a week and a half, then strained.  While it wouldn’t cure gout, it probably would make the sufferer feel better (especially after adding the laudanum, which was from the same poppy plants that heroin comes from).

While I wouldn’t try Warner’s Cordial for gout, I certainly have tried a modern day variant of the recipe, and it’s quite good.  It does seem to help a sore throat, and since it’s mostly liquor, it does make you feel good.

Ginger Honey Cordial

Makes 6 cups – takes 1 month to make

1/2 oz fresh ginger root, peeled and sliced into rounds, about 1 tablespoon
2 cardamom pods (discard papery membrane) (I’ve never actually found
cardamom pods at the store, I always use about 1/2 teaspoon of ground
cardamom)
2 whole cloves
1/4 teaspoon coarsely ground pepper
1 tablespoon raisins
1 quart brandy
1 1/2 cups honey

Put ginger root, cardamom, cloves, pepper and raisins into a clean,
dry bottle with a tight-fitting cap.  Add the brandy, cap the bottle
and shake well.  Let steep for one week, shaking every few days.

After the week, filter the cordial into a clean bottle using a funnel
lined with a coffee filter.  Add honey and shake well.  Let cordial
mature 2-3 weeks, then filter again.  This doesn’t need to be
refrigerated and will keep for well over a year.

In general, the foods we eat aren’t like the foods from a hundred years ago.  Foods are processed today in all sorts of different ways, and fads and trends affect what we choose to eat.  Simply put, Americans’ food preferences have shifted over time.

That’s why it’s so amusing to me to come across an account of a meal from about 150 years ago that’s quite similar to a meal today.  The description comes from a Scot named Patrick Shirreff, who visited America in the 1830s and wrote a book about it later.

He took what was then a fairly typical tour of the states: landing on the east coast, traveling east across New York state, Ohio, and Indiana, and then going south via stagecoach and boat through the south.

As he approaches Chicago in a stagecoach the party stops at a house for breakfast, and he describes the scene:

A kettle and two frying-pans were put on the fire, and two others over some ashes, removed from the general mass by means of a shovel, and placed on the hearth. Into one of these pans some small loaves were placed, which had been prepared beforehand, and covered with a lid, on which hot ashes were placed; and in the other, batter-cakes, called flap-cakes, were prepared. In one of the frying-pans on the fire bacon was dressed, and in the other potatoes; so, in less than half-an-hour, a breakfast of the best the house could afford was prepared.

So this is what they ate for breakfast: fresh bread (prepared in what was essentially a Dutch oven), pancakes (or flap-jacks), bacon, and fried potatoes.  This isn’t much different from what you can get at IHOP, just without all the sugary stuff they add to it.

There are some things we eat for breakfast that Americans in general didn’t eat back then, such as yogurt or cold cereal, but quite a bit of breakfast, especially the hot foods, were fairly common.  The only reason I can think of for why breakfast hasn’t changed much is that it tends to be a very profitable meal for restaurants, given that the ingredients (eggs, bread, potatoes) are very inexpensive.  While you might not have pancakes every morning your local diner will have them available, along with eggs, fried potatoes, oatmeal, and all the other traditional breakfast foods.  This may be one instance where capitalism is keeping a tradition alive instead of changing or getting rid of it.

The above quote was taken from A Tour Through North America…, by Patrick Shirreff (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, et.al., 1835), page 221.  You can download the book for free from Google Books.