[Content warning: Food, culture shock, milk]

They say that the past is a foreign country, and nowhere is this more true than with food. 

The book is A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression, recommended to us by reader Phil Wagner. This book is, no pun intended, just what it says on the tin, a history of food during the 1920s and 1930s. Both decades are covered because you need to understand what food was like in the 1920s to understand what changed when the Great Depression battered the world in the ‘30s. 

Home is where the lard-based diet is

We read this book and were like, “what are you eating? I would never eat this.” 

The book picks up at end of World War I, and the weird food anecdotes begin immediately:  

Their greeting back in American waters—even before they landed—was rapturous. Local governments, newspapers, and anybody else who could chartered boats to race out to meet the arriving ships. When the Mauretania, carrying 3,999 troops, steamed into New York Harbor late in 1918, a police boat carrying the mayor’s welcoming committee pulled alongside. After city dignitaries shouted greetings to them through megaphones, the troops who crowded the deck and hung from every porthole bellowed en masse: “When do we eat?!” It became a custom for greeting parties to hire professional baseball pitchers to hurl California oranges at the troops—some soldiers sustained concussions from the barrage—to give them their first taste of fresh American produce in more than a year.

Not that the soldiers weren’t also well-fed at the front lines: 

Despite the privations they had undergone, the Americans held one great advantage over both the German enemy and the soldiers of their French and British allies. They were by far the best-fed troops of World War I.

The U.S. Army field ration in France varied according to circumstances, but the core of the soldiers’ daily diet was twenty ounces of fresh beef (or sixteen ounces of canned meat or twelve ounces of bacon), twenty ounces of potatoes, and eighteen ounces of bread, hard or soft. American troops were always proud that they enjoyed white bread, while all the other armies had to subsist on dark breads of various sorts. This ration was supplemented with coffee, sugar, salt, pepper, dried fruit, and jam. If supply lines were running, a soldier could eat almost four pounds of food, or 5,000 calories, a day. American generals believed that this was the best diet for building bone, muscle, tissue, and endurance. British and French troops consumed closer to 4,000 calories, while in the last months of the war the Germans were barely receiving enough rations to sustain themselves.

The overall food landscape of the 1920s is almost unrecognizable. The term “salad” at the time referred to “assemblages made from canned fruit, cream cheese, gelatin, and mayonnaise,” which the authors note FDR especially hated [1]. Any dish that contained tomatoes was called “Spanish” (a tradition that today survives only in the dish Spanish rice). And whatever the circumstances, there was ALWAYS dessert — even in the quasi-military CCC camps, even in the government-issued guides to balanced meals, even in school lunch programs that were barely scraping by. 

This book also has some interesting reminders that constipation used to be the disease of civilization. In fact, they mention constipation being called “civilization’s curse”. This is why we have the stereotype of old people being obsessed with fiber and regularity, even though that stereotype is about a generation old now, and refers to a generation that has largely passed.

In the countryside, farm diets were enormous and overwhelmingly delicious: 

In midwestern kitchens, the lard-based diet achieved its apotheosis in a dish called salt pork with milk gravy, here served with a typical side of boiled potatoes:

On a great platter lay two dozen or more pieces of fried salt pork, crisp in their shells of browned flour, and fit for a king. On one side of the platter was a heaping dish of steaming potatoes. A knife had been drawn once around each, just to give it a chance to expand and show mealy white between the gaping circles that covered its bulk. At the other side was a boat of milk gravy, which had followed the pork into the frying-pan and had come forth fit company for the boiled potatoes.

The first volume of their oral history, Feeding Our Families, describes the Indiana farmhouse diet from season to season and meal to meal. In the early decades of the century, the Hoosier breakfast was a proper sit-down feast featuring fried eggs and fried “meat,” which throughout much of rural American meant bacon, ham, or some other form of pork. In the nineteenth century, large tracts of Indiana had been settled by Germans, who left their mark on the local food culture. A common breakfast item among their descendants was pon haus, a relative of scrapple, made from pork scraps and cornmeal cooked into mush, molded into loaf pans and left to solidify. For breakfast, it was cut and fried. Toward fall, as the pork barrel emptied, the women replaced meat with slices of fried apples or potatoes. The required accompaniment was biscuits dressed with butter, jam, jelly, sorghum syrup, or fruit butter made from apples, peaches, or plums. A final possibility—country biscuits were never served naked—was milk gravy thickened with a flour roux.

Where farmhouse breakfasts were ample, lunch was more so, especially in summer when workdays were long and appetites pushed to their highest register. With the kitchen garden at full production, the midday meal often included stewed beets, stewed tomatoes, long-simmered green beans, boiled corn, and potatoes fried in salt pork, all cooked to maximum tenderness. At the center of the table often stood a pot of chicken and dumplings, with cushiony slices of white bread to sop up the cooking broth. The gaps between the plates were filled with jars of chow-chow; onion relish; and pickled peaches, cauliflower, and watermelon rinds. The midday meal concluded with a solid wedge of pie. Like bread, pies were baked in bulk, up to a dozen at a time, and could be consumed at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Ingredients were prepared in ways that sound pretty strange to a modern ear. Whole onions were baked in tomato sauce and then eaten for lunch. Whole tomatoes were scalloped on their own. 

Organ meats were considered perfectly normal, if somewhat tricky to cook. The book mentions how food columnists had to teach urban housewives about how to remove the “transparent casing” that brains naturally come in, the membrane from kidneys, and the arteries and veins from hearts — not the sort of thing you would expect from a modern food columnist. On hog-killing day, an annual event all over the rural United States: 

The most perishable parts of the animal were consumed by the assembled crowd, the brains scrambled with eggs, the heart and liver fried up and eaten with biscuits and gravy. Even bladders were put to good use—though it wasn’t culinary. Rather, they were given to the children, who inflated them, filled them with beans, and used them as rattles.

There are a lot of fascinating recipes in this book, but perhaps our favorite is this recipe that appears in a section on the many uses of pork lard: 

Appalachian farm women p