Dining Through the Decades

The Sixties Nouveaux Gourmets Menu Crab And Artichoke Casserole Elegant String Bean Casserole Tang Pie The sixties decade in the book was thick...so many directions I could go. Julia Child was fresh on the scene. There were the committed gourmets that cooked mainly French foods. Fondue was considered sophisticated and fun, the fad of health food and f lambé. Now I grew up in the health food clan, so I wasn't super excited to try that and Jeremy wasn't thrilled about the  f lambé...even though I think he was completely overreacting. I have successfully put out every kitchen fire I have started. The thought of making french food from scratch with ingredients I've never heard of, don't know what they are and no idea where to get them was completely overwhelming. We had no fondue equipment, which was a bummer because that would totally have been my first choice and later Hannah suggested I could use a crockpot and cheap skewers. Which is EXACTLY why I s...

The Fifties - Revisited If there is one thing that is becoming more and more evident as I read about cooking and food through the years (and also discussing it with people) that it is not so cut and dry as to "this was popular". There were regional differences, and economic factors. A very wealthy family in New York City would eat very differently from a ranch family in Colorado.  Which brings me to my mom and her family. She was the ranch family in Colorado. They were the hired hands on the ranch. Their typical 1950's dinner looked quite different from my dad's suburban Chicago 1950's food. Although at that time they might have still been living in Miami. Anyway, the point is, this isn't so cut and dry as I thought.  So last weekend we went to visit my mom for her birthday and she surprised us with her 1950's meal! A typical meal she would have eaten growing up. As I said, she grew up on a ranch and they ate what was available to them. They...

1950's Menu (As appearing in July 1956 Good Housekeeping)  Sauteed Spam  Instant Mashed Potatoes Frozen Buttered Peas Fruit Trifle This meal was proudly served on my grandmother's china that was passed down to me. The china was manufactured after the war. She couldn't remember the story of how she got it, but she was married in 1947, so I'm pretty sure this china was used throughout the 1950's.  So I won't lie. When I was reading through the fifties and planning a meal, I was feeling tired and lazy and I chose this menu because it looked easy. And I can't believe I'm putting this out there in a public forum...but I like spam. I'm sorry if I lose any friendships over this well hidden secret. Also, I wanted to try out my new frying pan.... It worked as advertised. The fifties were really big on outdoor barbecue and our current living situation doesn't allow for such, so there went half the recipes for the decade...

I've always enjoyed listening to our grandmother's tell stories of growing up during the war, from Jeremy's grandma telling about the rare coke they would get (in glass bottles, obviously) to my grandma making her wedding dress out of a parachute (which I had the honor of wearing 51 years later on my wedding day), so I was excited to try some food typical of what they would have eaten. That was until I actually opened the book and realized that indeed, they WERE resourceful, often eating every part of the animal. I do realize that when your belly is hungry you get far less picky, but honestly, I think I would happily turn vegan before eating some of the things they did. I was going to have to pass on the lynx (even if it was soaked in wine for a month) , the "White Market Lamp Neck Casserole" and "Boiled Tongue" and settled on "Patriotic Pinwheel Meat Roll" , green beans and "Sheila Hibben's Orange-Lemon Pudding Cake From Florida...