Food
One of the first things to note about food during the 1910s was that it took more time to prepare than most modern people invest in cooking now. It was necessary because there were fewer pre-prepared meals and ingredients. However, that would start to change during this decade.
Home refrigerators were invented in 1913, but it took some time for them to become a common household product. Prior to the invention of electric refrigerators, people used ice boxes to store foods that had to be kept cold. Unlike electric refrigerators, ice boxes used real, large blocks of melting ice as a coolant, and those ice blocks needed to be replaced as they melted. Households received regular deliveries of ice blocks from their local ice man. This practice continued during the 1910s. It was during the 1920s that refrigerator makers began using Freon as a coolant. Freon refrigerators were both quieter and more reliable than the earlier electric refrigerators, and the appliances became more popular in the following decades, eventually replacing the ice boxes completely (Ice Boxes vs Refrigerators). Refrigerators changed the ways that people cooked and bought food. The more perishable food that people could store for longer periods, the less often they would have to go shopping to buy fresh ingredients. Refrigeration could bring foods to colder temperatures than ice boxes could, helping them to last longer, and foods could even be shipped greater distances than they could before. However, the refrigeration technology used for shipping food in refrigerated railroad cars didn't exist until the 1930s, and many households wouldn't have home refrigerators until the more reliable refrigerator models were produced between 1925 and 1945. Household freezers were a later invention. Until then, ordinary households would not have frozen foods, and people often relied on local growers for their produce. People would buy their meat from a butcher's shop and use it quickly so that it wouldn't spoil (How refrigeration changed our lives).
Most kitchens in private houses in the 1910s were not made with built-in cabinets. Instead, many people used free-standing cabinets in their kitchens, like the Hoosier cabinets.
Many of the recipes made during this time period would still be familiar to people living today. Among the foods that people would have made were roasts, pork chops, stuffed peppers, chicken pot pie, salads, and sandwiches of various kinds. The Larkin Housewives' Cookbook (1915) and Mrs. Rorers's Sandwiches (1912) have some example recipes that you can try.
One thing that you might notice about these recipes and others from this time period is that the directions are a bit sparse, although they're not nearly as sparse or confusing as earlier recipes from the 1800s. One of the reasons is the same reason why people in my family have had trouble re-creating old recipes used by my grandmother and great-grandmother: they were both experienced with cooking and had grown up doing it, learning from their mothers, and they tended to write down only those parts of recipes which they most needed to remember. With basic recipes that they used frequently, they assumed that the cooking techniques would be easy, something everyone would know and do by habit. In other words, they didn't think it was necessary to explain every step. If you're not an experienced cook, and you're not quite sure what to do with one of these recipes, I recommend looking up recipes for similar dishes on the Internet, preferably ones that go step-by-step and provide pictures. You can use modern explanations to fill in the blanks in older recipes. Remember, too, that practice makes perfect. The more you cook, the better you get, and it becomes second nature. Also, you'll notice that cooking instructions in these recipes call for a "moderately hot oven" or a "slow oven" without explaining what that means in terms of gas markings or degrees. As this site by Gail Jenner explains, those recipes were based on old-fashioned ovens that didn't have those markings. She offers some tips for conversions using degrees fahrenheit, and this site from Women's Weekly Food also provides degrees celsius and gas markings. Remember that ovens can vary, so keep an eye on what you're cooking to make sure that it isn't getting overdone. You can always adjust the cooking time as necessary. If the dish includes meat, you can use a meat thermometer to make sure that the meat has reached the appropriate internal temperature.
Some new foods invented during this era include:
- Commercially-made mayonnaise (1911) - Up until this point, people made mayonnaise at home, mainly as a base for sauces and salad dressings. Different recipes could create different flavors of mayonnaise. The very first commercially-made variety was made in 1911 by Schlorer, who owned a delicatessen in Philadelphia. He based his mayonnaise on his wife's recipe and called it Mrs. Schlorer's Mayonnaise. Richard Hellman, another delicatessen owner in New York, began selling his mayonnaise in 1912.
- Salad cream, which is more popular in the UK than in the US, is a little like mayonnaise but contains more vinegar (Miracle Whip is similar but thicker and would not be invented until 1933). It's used for similar purposes to mayonnaise, like salad dressings and sandwich spreads. The first commercially-made salad cream was made by Heinz in London in 1914. One of the advantages of salad cream was that the ingredients were cheaper than mayonnaise, making it more popular during rationing periods in Britain. (The same would also be true of Miracle Whip in the US and Canada later.) Before 1914, people would make salad cream at home. A basic recipe would be a puree of hard-boiled eggs mixed with vinegar, cream, mustard, and salt.
- Oreo cookies (1912) - Oreos were made by the National Biscuit Company, which later shortened its name to Nabisco. They were actually an imitation of the earlier Hydrox chocolate sandwich cookies developed in 1908. Because of Oreo's modern popularity, some people think that Hydrox was the imitator, but it's actually the other way around. The two cookies were very similar, but somewhat different in texture. Part of the reason was that, until the 1990s, Oreos were made with lard, and Hydrox were not. Hydrox were kosher, but again because of the lard, Oreos were not.
- Life Savers candy (1913) - Original flavor: mint.
- Icebox Cake - A dessert made with chocolate wafers layered with whipped cream. Developed in the US during World War I, based on earlier desserts, like charlotte and trifle. The recipe was printed on boxes of Nabisco Famous Chocolate Wafers. It became even more popular during the 1920s and 1930s.
- American cheese - A form of processed cheese developed by Kraft in 1916.
- Moon Pies (1917) - An American snack food, a graham cracker sandwich cookie filled with marshmallow fluff and covered in chocolate.
- Vichyssoise (1917) - A cold leek and potato soup first served at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York
- Hostess CupCakes (1919) - Commercially-made chocolate cupcakes, the first snack cakes made by Hostess. Hostess wouldn't begin making Twinkies until 1930. Tastykake was already making snack cakes, beginning in 1914 in the Philadelphia area.
- Anzac Biscuits - If you live in the United States, you may not have heard of these, but they still exist and are available here, if you know where to look (usually at import stores). Anzac is short for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. Anzac biscuits are a kind of oat cookie that also often contains coconut. The popular story is that women would bake these cookies and send them to Anzac troops overseas during World War I because they were durable cookies and the ingredients wouldn't easily spoil. However, historically, it was more common for people to sell the cookies to people at home in order to raise money for the war effort. These cookies are made commercially now, but you can make the homemade variety the way that people would have made them back in World War I.
Photo by Tracy Christenson
The war also brought some changes to food, including what people called certain foods. Because of anti-German sentiment in the United States during World War I, people started avoiding the German-based words for foods of German origin that had become popular in America. For example, some people also called sauerkraut "liberty cabbage" or "victory cabbage." Instead of saying "frankfurter," people started calling those sausages "liberty sausages" or "hot dogs." Only one of those names stuck and lasted beyond the war years.
Some foods were rationed in Britain during the war, and the cost of food went up. This page from the BBC explains how the rationing worked and what people ate during the war. Once the United States joined the war, American citizens were encouraged to save food for the war effort. Part of the food conservation scheme involved avoiding certain types of food on certain days, like "Meatless Mondays" or "Wheatless Wednesday" (What Did People Eat in the 1920s?). Even wealthy people experienced more deprivation than they ever had before in their lives. People generally had to make do with less, and they became careful not to waste anything.
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The author of this article spent a fortnight trying to live as a woman would in 1916. Much of the focus of the blog is about clothes, but this one has some recipes from the 1910s, and even discusses vegetarianism. The author lives in New Zealand, so she has a focus on life in New Zealand.