The History of American Food

As a child reader, I always thought it was so quaint that "dinner" was this old-timey word for lunch.  It was a "Dinner Pail"  - which was a crude Indian Tiffin - only 1 chamber - vs. a Lunch Box. But I had never spent any tme thinking about why and how Dinner was the big meal of the day, and supper was toast dipped in cooling stew. Until I thought about it in terms of cooking in the dark.  When t...

Celebrate National Public Lands Day by finding a place to visit and get involved at  NEEFAUSA.og or NPS.gov And get into what was getting to be popular as vegetables in the early 19th century. How did Avocado Toast become a thing?   Well, it would never have gotten the traction it did with out practice runs by spinach or even more glamourously by celery. And those would have never had a chance if...

Wake up America!  Coffee is on its way to becoming the drink of the people.  Sure Cider and Beer are out there... but coffee is coming up on the outside. But how did one brew coffee in the 19th century? And just how weak was it? To find out, tune in. Music Credit: Fingerlympics by Doctor Turtle Show Notes:  https://thehistoryofamericanfood.blogspot.com/ Email: TheHistoryofAmericanFood at gmail dot...

Last show on the substandard mic - but the paper towel as popfilter helped some. Let's talk tea - what tea were people drinking in the early 19th century?  The answer was almost uniformly, "bad tea".   Ignorance lead to people needing sugar in their tea b/c they were drinking the bad stuff.  In fact a whole grade of "export quality" tea was invented to fulfill the growing global/European/American...

First of all - sorry about the diferent mic.  But this way we get the episode.  I'll see what I can do to make things better for next ep - and all will be back to normal by the one after that. Anyway - 19th Century Chinese Food? What can I tell you?  It would have looked much the same as lots of the food you will find right now around the Pearl RIver Delta, the old district of Canton - now known a...

Think you're fancy with your lobster roll... or did you get it from a Massachusetts McDonalds? All are possible... and much more - including death by lobster poisoning. To get more of the story - tune in to early 19th century lobster Music Credit: Fingerlympics by Doctor Turtle Show Notes:  https://thehistoryofamericanfood.blogspot.com/ Email: TheHistoryofAmericanFood at gmail dot com Threads: @TH...

Have you ever thought how we got here - that farm land is all AWAY and houses are all in close? That products come to you... and packaging is often more important than the thing inside? That didn't happen over night.   The fact that farms are there, house are here, and manufacturing stuff is a third place altogether is not an accident.  Instead it's something that has been developing in America fo...

What happens when you grow more cows to make more milk to make more cheese and butter? You end up with more oxen that can't make milk - but are useful as a source of beef. And this works out well when you are living in a society that craves more meat,  and are in a place with apparently wide open spaces that are just fine for feeding said cattle. A bonus when you have lots of growing industries th...

So you are a typical early 19th Century American type...  Is there a dairy scene?  Yes. But are you drinking milk?  Maybe... and probobly only for breakfast. Ok... but is it Raw Milk?  Most likely not. In the early 19th century, most milk products were at least heated (cheese) or outright cooked - almost everything else - or downright boiled - your breakfast milk. Funny thing is, Americans have re...

Check out the NCPTT... while it's still there, and maybe find an unexpectedly cool place to live.  Or maybe a cool woodworking job. https://www.nps.gov/subjects/ncptt/index.htm Hey - so were early Americans eating mushrooms? Yeah.  But not all that much.  Just enough for a mushroom industry to spring up in the end of the century - but only in one place, and only for one kind. But in the meantime -...

While last episode was drowning in information - this week when hunting down mushroom info... it's a bit of a desert.  But no worries, there's still fun stuff to be learned - mainly just what is a mushroom?  And how have humans crossed paths with it - in ways besides tripping out? Also - how is the lack of information and the limited presence of mushrooms in AMerican food related? Some answers are...

This week - it’s time to look at the connection between westward American Expansion and the apple. How is the apple all tangled up with our creation of the  19th century tall tales we started to tell on and about ourselves? So get ready for a visit from some of the features/specters of that myth making that inhabited a huge part of the 20th century.   Links: Johnny Appleseed Cartoon (1948)   Paul...

As odd as it sounds, there was a time in American Food before oatmeal. And while that's wild on it's own, even more impossible to imagine is how much of agriculture used to be dedicated simply to growing food to feed the animals that allowed you to run the farm.  Having solar panels and biodigesters to create power on the farm now is pretty wild... but it wasn't that long ago, all things considere...

Finally - Recipes for early 19th Century Fried Chicken - sorta. IT's time to learn some chicken history and face the reality about what chickens were really for in the early 19th century - eggs! If you wanted bird meat there were lots of better birds out there to eat above and beyond the scrawny backyard chcicken.  But that was about to change as the worlds chickens began to come to America. To le...

Ever notice that fabulous dinner parties depicted on screen rarely take place earlier than the 1800's - and in America pretty much always after the Civil War? Well!  That's because in just about every one of those situations the eating etiquette would look so different it would be unrecognizable - in fact it's likely people would be eating with their fingers! Americans have only been eating with f...

Yes yes... tasty pigs. But as you might have gathered I'm not entirely OK right now.  Will there be a National Park Service -NPS.gov by next episode? Will I have access to the library of congress or is it going to get "Alexandira'd"? I don't know, but at least I do know that I can hook you up with both old school and modern methods of preserving pork when the power grid goes down. I the mean time...

Turns out all I was able to squeeze in to this episode was the fresh pork - more or less. How to keep pork will be around next time. But the big lesson is - boy do we need our hands held when it comes to recipes. Is 50 words not enough for you to prepare boiled poik and pease porridge?   It certainly isn't enough for me.  I'd be absolutely sunk. Though it does explain why enslaved cooks could lear...

To Market to market to buy a fat pig Home again home again jiggety jig... But how did those pigs get to market in the first place? On their own 4 feet!  That's right, there's more than one way to concentrate corn down for better transport and not all of it is Bourbon / Corn Whiskey. Also learn about how early mechanical America only kept moving due to the presence of pigs. Big contributions to the...

This week I've gone crackers.  I've wondered for awhile why it's biscuits everywhere else - but sometimes ... it's crackers.   I mean, the most British of British claymation - Wallace and Grommit, when they go to the moon to get cheese, even they bring crackers.... not biscuits. That, and a few other things had me wondering if crackers and biscuts DIDN'T come from the same source?  Rather did the...

Sure - people say America is built on A LOT of things, but the rise of Industrial America depends on two things - Bread and Steel.  Steel to make the Great American Dessert into the Great American Bread Basket - and all that wheat would make the steel of the railroad make lots of sense very quickly. If you are curious just what steel is - and how all that early American iron is related, this is yo...

For those of you listenting along at home - a little reminder, these are just filler episodes from the other podcast project I was playing around with.  If you want that feed and not this one - hop over there. But for those of you who need something to tide you over - listen along to the Hot Nonsense (and a little Cristo Fernandez appreciation). Again - this is not the safe for everyone part of th...

Welcome to the messy alcoholic beverage scene in the early 19th century.  Migration, mechanization and new profit centers are all going to shift how alcoholic beverages are made and regarded in early America.   They are less part of community exchange, and instead become part of the flow of economic life.  Any sense of aged or carefully constructed liquors will never develop.  Instead alcohol will...

*THIS* is the don't listen at work part of the feed.  I'll include this for all the naughty episodes.  And Zorro - he's a Bad Boy?  Bad Girl?  Oh heck... it's just how bad people can be when it all becomes about money, power and entertaining TV. So have you been following along? Now that we have our major players set up - and the relationships are established we can really get the plates spinning:...

This episode wwas one for the books.  So many many books.   And the reading and researching of all those recipes showed me that - once again - some of the assumptions I went in with were way off! Chicken and dumplins... dumplin - are not typical early 19th century fare.  But plenty of other stew type things are.  And there are lessons in the recipes for all us modern cooks - regardless of how we c...

This episode is a not a love letter, more of a crush note about Romania.     I’m at the point of fascination. I don’t know a lot about Romania, really, and they definitely know nothing about me, but what I got to see in a short amount of time has me wanting to know more.      If Romania strikes you the same way – here are all the links I mentioned to look up cool and tasty stuff. Along with the Ru...