Golden era restaurants & cuisine of the era

[Haversack]

Corned beef hash and eggs is still pretty common at breakfast places out here in Northern California and Oregon. A couple butcher shops here in San Francisco pretty regularly sell corned beef has as well. Take it home, fry it up in a cast iron skillet so that it gets a good crust, plop a couple of poached eggs on top, and my wife is happy. Some fancy places do a trout hash or duck hash for breakfast as well.

Growing up my mother would occasionally make hash from the leftover Sunday roast. Cold roast beef, cold roast potatoes, cold roast carrots all run through the hand-cranked meat grinder screwed to the edge of the kitchen table. I always preferred it to poultus, (fried up onions and ground beef simmered with worcestershire sauce and water to create a gravy and served with mashed potatoes). Usually leftover roast beef was reserved for sandwiches.

 

[St. Louis]

A few of the ladies have been discussing Golden Era cookery over in the Powder Room. We've been trying out healthy recipes, particularly for lunches and sandwiches, mostly with great success. I collect cookbooks & recipes from the 30s and 40s, and I think I'm getting a handle on the popular flavors of the era. It seems to me that people liked smooth, slightly sweet, savoury dishes for dinner -- they seem to put more sugar in sauces and salad dressings than I'm used to. Many of the recipes call for interesting combinations of those flavors, too, and it's been an eye-opening experiment. Peanut butter and ham, cottage cheese and preserved ginger, that kind of thing. I've loved most of the recipes I've tested out.

The one thin I can't quite get used to, though, is jellies and aspics. I'll keep trying for a while. There's something about the texture that puts me off a bit. They do look very elegant, though.

I've found some surprises, too -- recipes for bean curd and soy milk, for example. I've never been one for making fun of the past, so I won't bother describing the failures, but almost all of the dishes I've made from my old cookbooks have been very pleasant & mostly very healthy, too. We did talk about the fact that people living in the 20s-40s needed or wanted more calories than we do today. I try as much as I can to reproduce the recipes precisely, so that I can get a clear picture of how these dishes would have tasted at the time, but that's one thing I modify: I do minimize the fat content.

 

[Stanley Doble]

I like smoking. It's a hobby with staying power, you can enjoy it from the age of 11 until you die. If it didn't cost a fortune and ruin your health I would still be a smoker.

 

[tonyb]

I like smoking. It's a hobby with staying power, you can enjoy it from the age of 11 until you die. If it didn't cost a fortune and ruin your health I would still be a smoker.

Yup. If it weren't so deadly, I'd be smoking yet.

 

[Fading Fast]

...We did talk about the fact that people living in the 20s-40s needed or wanted more calories than we do today. ...

I can think of at least two contributing factors to this. One, many jobs were much more physically demanding then than now / more people worked in physically demand jobs then than now. Driving a truck in the '30s - pre power steering / power brakes / etc. - was a much more physically demanding job then. Also, there were less power tools, lifts, etc. in use, so many jobs required more physical exertion. Also, we have fewer manual labor jobs and more "information" jobs, so less assembly line workers and more call center operators, etc. today. So, the first reason is, I think, people burned more calories in their jobs.

The second reason is more a hypothesis - people were hungry in the depression, even many middle class people who had jobs and homes, so eating more was probably both a survival instinct - get the calories when you can - and a emotional response - I know what true hunger is and now that I can afford food, I want to eat heavy satisfying foods.

I put my Dad in the second category as I think for him, and many like him in the depression, fear of not having enough too eat never completely left their psyche even decades after the depression and when they were reasonable financial secure (not rich, but in a position to not have to worry about being able to buy food). This is an absolute guess, but I doubt their was a lot of anorexia in depression era people who struggled to find food even years later when food was plentiful for them. My Dad probably didn't let two weeks go by before he told me again that "you don't know how lucky you are to grow up not worrying about where your next meal will come from."