THE ECONOMICS BEHIND GRANDMA’S TUNA CASSEROLES: Megan McArdle writes, “I’m always a bit bemused when I read articles pondering why our grandparents cooked such dreadful food:”
The foods of today’s lower middle class are the foods of yesterday’s tycoons. Before the 1890s, gelatin was a food that only rich people could regularly have. It had to be laboriously made from irish moss, or calf’s foot jelly (a disgusting process), or primitive gelatin products that were hard to use. The invention of modern powdered gelatin made these things not merely easy, but also cheap. Around 1900, people were suddenly given the tools to make luxury foods. As with modern Americans sticking a flat panel television in every room, they went a bit wild. As they did again when refrigerators made frozen delights possible. As they did with jarred mayonnaise, canned pineapple, and every other luxury item that moved down-market. Of course, they still didn’t have a trained hired cook at home, so the versions that made their way into average homes were not as good as the versions that had been served at J. P. Morgan’s table in 1890. But it was still exciting to be able to have a tomato aspic for lunch, in the same way modern foodies would be excited if they found a way to pull together Nobu’s menu in a few minutes, for a few cents a serving.
Over time, the ubiquity of these foods made them déclassé. Just as rich people stopped installing wall-to-wall carpeting when it became a standard option in tract homes, they stopped eating so many jello molds and mayonnaise salads when they became the mainstay of every church potluck and school cafeteria. That’s why eating those items now has a strong class connotation.
In his 2012 book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, Charles Murray had a fascinating couple of paragraphs on the early 1960s life of wealthy socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post (1887-1973), in which he mentioned what she served her guests when entertaining:
Heiress to the founder of the company that became General Foods, one of the wealthiest women in America, she owned palatial homes in Washington, Palm Beach, and on Long Island, furnished with antiques and objets from the castles of Europe. She summered in the Adirondacks, at Camp Topridge, surrounded by her private 207 acres of forest and lakes. She took her sailing vacations on Sea Cloud, the largest privately owned sailing yacht in the world, and flew in her own Vickers Viscount airliner, with a passenger cabin decorated as a living room, probably the largest privately owned aircraft in the world.
Hers was not a life familiar to many other Americans. But, with trivial exceptions, it was different only in the things that money could buy. When her guests assembled for dinner, the men wore black tie, a footman stood behind every chair, the silver was sterling, and the china had gold leaf. But the soup was likely to be beef consommé, the main course was almost always roast beef, steak, lamb chops, or broiled chicken, the starch was almost certainly potato, and the vegetable was likely to be broccoli au gratin.
In her article, McArdle writes that midcentury “photographers hadn’t yet figured out how to make food look appetizing on camera. Nor were the Technicolor hues then in fashion very kind to their culinary subjects.” In the early naughts, after discovering James Lileks via Instapundit, my wife and I had lots of laughs over the hideous-looking fare presented throughout Lileks’ Gallery of Regrettable Food. We frequently told ourselves, there’s no way we could give this as a Christmas gift to my mother, who was then in her early 80s — she simply wouldn’t get the humor and would either find the book insulting — or use it as a cookbook! After she passed away in 2012 while cleaning out her house in southern New Jersey, we came across one of the giveaway books from Jell-O printed in the early 1970s, which Lileks had featured.
As long as I could return to the 21st century world of PCs, ubiquitous broadband streaming media — and good chow! — I would love to spend some time in the swank Mad Men era of the JFK/Rat Pack pre-Beatles early 1960s. But I wouldn’t go for the food.