As I was writing about dinner last night, I started thinking about the balance between prepared foods and whole foods which made up a 1940s pantry. No mistake, commercially prepared foods were out there and becoming cheaper all the time. And I don't want to make my meal preparations take any longer than necessary if I'm making things from scratch that no busy housewife would have been making herself by the '40s. The only trick is deciding which items were commonly being purchased instead of prepared at home. Here are some of the foods I'm still puzzling over:
Juice
Orange juice still seems to have been served fresh squeezed, while grapefruit, apple, prune, tomato and other juices were usually purchased canned or bottled. Orange juice is the only time juice appears on my 1945 menus as "Chilled," so it's as if they're prompting readers to squeeze this one first thing in the morning and chill it in the refrigerator until breakfast time.
Bread
Sandwich bread was certainly available from grocers, though there was probably still a smaller group of housewives who still baked their own bread. Quick breads were still made at home. Rolls? Probably made at home unless you lived in the city where there were lots of bakeries. People living in small towns and rural areas certainly made their own rolls. Middle to upper class folks in larger towns? I'm not so sure.
Salad Dressings
Hmmm... I have never seen any ads for prepared salad dressings in the '40s, but I suspect there were a very few dressings out there - probably not available though in your typical suburban or small town grocery. In one of the new supermarkets in the city? Perhaps. Maybe even by mail order. Here's the puzzler: check out this photo from the early '40s. That totally looks like a bottle of prepared salad dressing!
Preserves and Pickles
Another fine line here. I've seen lots of ads for grape jelly, orange marmalade, and grapelade. Some of the basic items, like strawberry jam and apple jelly, were probably starting to become available. Anything fancier? I'd guess you either bought it from a speciality supplier or made it yourself. Canning and making preserves and pickles was still a popular activity anywhere people had enough land for gardens.
Cookies
Totally available, but I'd venture to say that most families ate homemade cookies.
Crackers
No longer made at home.
Cakes
I can remember from reading a "biography" of Betty Crocker that cake mixes took a while to catch on. It wasn't considered very feminine to use a shortcut like this one if you were going to go to the trouble to make a cake. I'd venture to say that almost every housewife made her cakes from scratch.
Soup
Canned soups seem to have been considered pretty gourmet during the '40s, especially tomato and cream of mushroom. I'm guessing that working class families and rural families might have stuck to homemade soups, but it wouldn't be long before they could afford or had access to canned soups as well.
What do you think? Can you think of any other food items where commercially prepared substitutes were becoming available, but may or may not yet have become "acceptable" in middle class households? There are probably a zillion things that haven't even occurred to me!
14 comments:
Have you found out whether commercial ice cream was available? I imagine that refrigeration would have made this posible, but don't know for sure. My grandmother made her own ice cream in the 1940s.
Kate
Ooh, good one!
Judging from vintage radio sitcoms, people brought home a small quantity of ice cream from the pharmacy for special occasions. People living in rural areas probably made most of the ice cream they ate. I suspect that ice cream was net yet available commercially, at least not during the early to mid-'40s.
How popular was pizza back then? I only ask because it's the one prepared food that we eat without fail. I'm much happier buying a $3 frozen pizza than paying for a delivery. But I can't imagine constantly making my own pizza several times a week.
How about pasta? Were they using store bought or still making their own? I know lots of people who make fresh pasta, but again cannot fathom how tedious it must have been!
Emer - I am hooked on the history channel's American Eats. I remember when they talked about pizza - Pizza places started showing up after the war because many of the returning men had tried Pizza in Europe and liked it. There were a few small pizza places before the war, but it was the returning men that made it populr. The first shops were concentrated in the larger cites, but really took of nation wide in the 50's. I don't know when frozen pizza came out, but I would guess that was in the 60's.
I wonder if that bottle on the table is olive oil?
Roxanne
I know this was probably a rural thing, but jams for everyday use were made from leftover berries and fruits fairly regularly. You need one part fruit, one part sugar (by weight, not volume), boil it down, and put it in a jar in the fridge. It is fresh, tasty and uses up leftovers. You don't need to can your jam if you will use it up within the week. We have wild blackberries and lots of apple trees and rhubarb around here, and people make jam as-you-go even today. We buy jam a lot, of course, too. But it is really simple to make.
You inspsired me over the weekend. As a "woman of a certain age" I should have this housekeeping thing down pat by now, but unfortunately I that skill (is it a gene?) passed me by. But over the weekend I got almost caught up with my laundry and ironing (and that was about 6 loads - crazy for just two people!) and in the process found the bedroom floor! I also made my bed and did the dishes every day.
I went out to a local antique store on Saturday and whilst I was looking around I saw the cookbook you have but felt I couldn't afford the $25. Now, I'm kicking myself that I didn't splurge for it, and I'm going to try and go back next Saturday to see if it's still there.
Thanks for the inspiration!
I definitely think pizza was not even an all american idea until well into the 1950s, though I now it existed in 1940s. The answer to 'store bought pizza' that I have discovered with my own project was a kit you would buy that would have a tin of sauce, a package of 'cheese' (really just dehydrated parmasean) and the dough dry ingredients. Even the recipes in my cookbooks in mid 1950s show pizza looking very different than we see it today, usually stips of cheese and no pepporoni or even, surprisingly, bacon. I mean they loved bacon and none on the pizza. Even in my 1955 cook book they call it pizza pie and it was probably more like a sort of one crust pot pie. I know in the 1950s we have frozen oj concentrate, frozen tv dinners etc, cake mixes were becomeing more accepted. I have a recipe to make your own make ahead brownie mix, so I don't know if they had that available commercially yet. It is really amazing the vast amount of change from one decade to the next, however, I guess when you think of 1990s and now the 2000's it also seems far apart when you consider the internet. All very interesting.
Also, I bet that bottle is like HP sauce or worcsteshire or maybe piccalilly. I think these types of sauces were available bottled since as early as 1900.
Emer, the things everybody's said so far about pizza sound right in keeping with what I might have said myself. Unless you were Italian or lived in a city with a large Italian-American population, i.e. Boston with its North End, you'd probably never even have heard of pizza prior to the late '40s. My 1945 cookbook doesn't even consider pizza.
Their conception of foreign foods in general was pretty limited. Americans were still entranced with French cookery in the '40s. Or at least what they perceived as French. Only three kinds of pasta are mentioned in 1945: macaroni and spaghetti. And no directions for making your own. I suspect these basic kinds of pasta were pretty widely available in boxes.
Roxanne and 50s gal, you may be right about that bottle being some other type of condiment. It suprised me to see it in the photo as it looks so much like a modern bottle of dressing!
prairieknitter, "jam-as-you-go" sounds so good! My cookbook does suggest dried fruit jam in one of its menus - without giving a recipe - so it must have been fairly well-known to housewives.
Jackie, you should look about online for a copy of that cookbook -- I don't think I paid more than $7 or 8 for mine.
Jitterbug, the Heinz people and their 57 varieties were firmly entrenched in middle-class, middle-American kitchens by the twenties.
(I have a Heinz promo cookbook from the thirties and am going to be posting some of the pictures and recipes--which are a hoot, shamrock salad anyone?--on my blog)
In the 1940's when people had money (because the war gave a huge boost to employment) but not time, canned soups, preserves, pickles and salad dressings would have been the rule rather than the exception.
Somebody has written a great book about the post-war kitchen's takeover by the packaged food industry and if I can find the name of it (I have a great memory but it's short), I'll send it along. Fascinating read.
Heinz has a "Salad Cream" that they sell in the UK and Canada (don't know if you can find it in the US whether now or then?). The only place that I have found it online so far, was at the Vermont Country Store. Its a bit expensive, much cheaper to find it in the stores obviously. Its very similar to coleslaw dressing from what I gather. They still sell it here (Canada) in the glass bottles!
Hope this helps!
Jennifer
Btw. My grandmother worked in a grocery store post war, and staff were encouraged to take new things home and try them. Gram remembered using Snacking Cakes (or similar). Gram was married in 1944 at 17 years old, so perhaps young brides would have been interested in short cuts? More so than their mothers? (Can't imagaine Great Gram buying a box of cake mix!)
Shay, I'm glad you mentioned Heinz... I came across this list of the varieties of goods they were producing as of 1934 and it's quite a group!
http://www.advertisingcookbooks.com/home/heinz57.htm
Baked beans, soups, pudding, peanut butter, canned pasta, jelly, pickles, baby food, olives, ketchup, sauces, mustard, mayo, vinegar, cereal, tomato juice --- I'm not sure if they had added any salad dressings to their line (other than mayo) by the '40s, but if any manufacturer was doing so, it sounds like they'd be the one!
The lack of advertisements for salad dressings in period mags leads me to think that this was one of the items people were still making at home (unless they were using mayo). Even in the mid-50s, Kraft had only just begun marketing a French dressing and a Miracle French dressing. Nothing more. The salad dressing ads really pick up in the '60s and '70s. At that same time, I doubt there were many people at all still bottling homemade ketchups or some of the sauces companies like Heinz were producing. Pickles? Probably still being made at home by those living where they could garden. It's a mixed bag.
Jennifer, I'll bet you're right on the money about younger homemakers being more inclined to use prepared foods than their mothers were. Those crazy kids!
This is the Heinz UK site that I found for Salad Cream. They first made it in 1925.
http://www.heinz.co.uk/products/heinz_salad_cream.aspx
I've been tempted for years to try this stuff and the next time I see it I'm going to grab a bottle. :-D
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