Cooking through the years

"Great-grandma had a farm, grandma had a garden, mother had a can-opener." n Jean Anderson's aphorism affirms that a lot has changed in the last 100 years.

At the Southeast Missourian we've been given lately to examining the developments of the last century as the newspaper celebrates its centennial. And, as Anderson suggests, nowhere have developments been more consuming than in the field of food.

Thus, if you were reading this paper at the breakfast table a century ago, the biggest difference you'd notice would be breakfast itself. Instead of Dannon low-fat yogurt (available only since 1942), or a pop-tart (not invented until 1964), or granola (which didn't go mainstream until 1972), your first meal of the day might include steaks, roasts, chops, mounds of oysters and fish. Gorging was so trendy back then that a popular book was titled "How to Be Plump." (Just my luck to be born a half-century too late!)

The diet of a hundred years ago was a meat and potatoes one, with emphasis on the meat. As Lowell K. Dyson observes, "No meal was much without meat of some kind at its center." And when it came to meat, beef reigned supreme.

When it came to vegetables, boiling to death was the preferred method of cooking. For example, an early 20th-century cookbook directed the cook to simmer green peas in boiling water "until tender -- from twenty to thirty-five minutes."

This would have been done not on a modern range but on a wood stove or perhaps one fueled by coal or petroleum. Even in city apartments, some home cooks still prepared meals in a fireplace. Refrigerators of the era were, literally, ice boxes. Indoor running water was still a novelty.

Shopping for food, not to mention prices, was also considerably different 100 years ago. The first self-service grocery wouldn't open until 1916, so until then customers relied on clerks to fetch items from the back of the store -- if they went to a store. Much shopping was done at the public market. Meat was cut only when someone placed an order. You could buy only a whole chicken. Shrink-wrapped packages of various cuts and pieces were still a long way off.

Perhaps most significantly, our attitude toward food was decidedly different 100 years ago. Then people merely looked for something hot and filling when they sat down to a meal and putting food on the table was nothing but a chore. Today we are enthusiastic about eating and cooking. As Laura Shapiro notes, gustatory pleasure has become fashionable. That's the primary reason I'm glad to be living -- and eating -- now and not a century ago.

Beef a La Mode

If you want to get a feel for what the food scene was like 100 years ago, try following this recipe, reproduced here exactly as it appears in Sarah Tyson Rorer's "1904 World's Fair Souvenir Cook Book."

Take a piece from the round weighing about seven pounds. Remove the bone. Cut deep gashes into the meat about one inch apart, being careful not to cut all the way through. Mix together one teaspoonful of salt, half teaspoonful of pepper, same of cinnamon, a quarter-teaspoonful of mace, the same of cloves, and rub them into the meat on both sides, sprinkling a little into the gashes. Cut fat salt pork into pieces the size of the gashes, put a piece into each gash. Make a filling from a half-cup of stale breadcrumbs, one small onion, grated, and moisten with vinegar. Work a portion of this into the gashes by the side of the pork. Mix three tablespoonfuls of olive oil with one and a half of vinegar, and moisten both sides of the meat; stand away overnight. In the morning, bind it together with a piece of tape. Put it in a baking-pan with one onion, sliced, one carrot, a bay leaf, piece of celery and a sprigg of parsley. Partly cover it with boiling water; then cover with another pan, and cook in the oven for four hours. Baste every twenty minutes. When done remove the meat, and stand aside to cool. Strain this liquor in the pan and add to it a quarter-box of soaked gelatine. Season to taste and put it into a square pan to cool. This should form an amber jelly, and may be cut in blocks and used as a garnish for the beef a la mode.

Listen to "A Harte Appetite" at 8:49 a.m. Fridays on KRCU, 90.9 FM. Write A Harte Appetite, Southeast Missourian, P.O. Box 699, Cape Girardeau, Mo., 63702-0699 or tharte@semissourian.com.