Eating Out

You know what I forgot? Those sodium- and preservative-packed lunches actually make it pretty easy for me to get in that workout at lunchtime on weekdays. Today was my day off from walking, but it took me a good 10 minutes to assemble my lunch in the kitchen at work. That's going to be tough to pull off the rest of this week when I've only got about 20 minutes to eat... It also took me long enough to make my vintage lunch this morning that my whole sense of timing was thrown off and I actually had to leave the house without my bed made and with dirty dishes in the sink. Eek! Just one little change and everything's a mess. Here's the menu I adapted from the original:

Organic Creamy Broccoli Soup
Open-faced Egg Salad Sandwich on Whole-grain Bread with Lettuce and Tomatoes
Green Pepper Strips
Fruit Salad (Apple, Strawberries, Blueberries)

First, I'll have to say that it was a yummy, filling meal. Even without the Crackers, a second slice of bread, and the Cup Cake. What I might have eaten for lunch today without this mission in place is an Amy's Broccoli Pot Pie with some fruit for dessert. So let's do some basic nutritional comparisons of the non-raw fruit/veggie components of these lunch menus:

Typical pre-mission lunch
Calories: 430
Fat: 22g
Sodium: 630mg
Carbohydrates: 46g
Protein: 11g

Vintage lunch, adapted
Calories: 260
Fat: 19.5g
Sodium: 690mg
Carbohydrates: 32g
Protein: 14g

Interesting... My vintage lunch was better in every respect except for sodium. Boy, that soup sure packs a wallop! I'd bet if I was making the soup from scratch with a low sodium broth, I could make a difference there. I'm loving the drop in the number of calories. Will my lower calorie lunch make a difference in my ability to resist the temptation to snack tonight? It didn't make any difference this afternoon.

I'm sure I'll get better at packing these lunches. It'd help ginormously if I actually owned some good lunch-packing equipment. The American Woman's Cook Book (1945) has some serviceable sounding suggestions on preparing and packing lunches.

Sandwich-making tips:

• Whole grain breads should be used for sandwiches. Graham, whole wheat, oatmeal, brown, raisin, and nut bread are excellent. [I guess they hold up better to sandwich fillings!]
  
  
• Pack lettuce separately, to be added just before eating.
  
  
• Fillings for sandwiches may be packed in small jars and buttered bread in waxed paper included for spreading just before eating.
  

Adding a hot or cold dish:

• Special vacuum containers make it possible to include hot cocoa or hot soup in the lunch, also a creamed vegetable, a hot pudding, or other hot food. The containers should never be filled the night before the lunch is prepared.
  
  
• In the winter have something hot and invigorating in the thermos bottle: Hot soup, coffee, tea, baked beans, hot chocolate, or stew. Something cool and refreshing in the summertime, such as lemonade, tomato juice, fruit juices, chocolate milk shake, milk, iced tea or iced coffee, canned fruit juices.
  

General packing advice:

• Stewed or canned fruits may be carried in any small screw-top container. Cold puddings, custards or similar desserts may also be carried in this manner.
  
  
• All foods not in containers should be wrapped separately in waxed paper before being placed in the box. The neatly wrapped articles should be placed, so far as is possible, in the order in which the lunch will be eaten, so that those found first may be eaten first without disturbing the remainder. The heaviest foods, however, should be placed at the bottom of the box.
  
  
• Articles should be packed compactly in order to prevent the food from shaking about.
  
  
• Lunch boxes should be washed, scalded and aired daily. Those made of lightweight metal are best. Many attractive boxes are now made with a vacuum bottle which fits the box.

It is a bit hard to imagine toting one of those old-fashioned black metal lunchboxes to work with me everyday. (Imagine if I ran into Curly with one of those in my hand!) And yet most of the soft-sided lunch bags I see out there these days don't provide much support for items wrapped in wax paper. The only tools I've got right now are a few plastic sandwich-sized containers and some custard cups with lids. Usually I just toss a few things in my tote bag --- but they're frozen, so no big deal. That arrangement isn't going to cut it when I've got soup to carry along! I'd like to find something that doesn't really look like a lunch box, but provides the same protection to my noonday meal. Any ideas?

Commercially Prepared Foods

So here's the plan for the week ahead... I've made it through the last two - going on three - days with all my chores intact. If I can get through the next three to four days and am able to keep up with everything I was doing before I got sick, I'm going to go ahead and add a new mission to my routine at the end of the week. I've just got to talk myself through each day and focus very hard on what needs to be done each morning or evening and what I need in order to get started the following day. This evening? I've got laundry to sort in preparation for tomorrow's wash and, of course, my usual evening chores.

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!