Why is mid-century American cuisine so shameful? When did American food actually get good?

Why is mid-century American cuisine so shameful? When did American food actually get good?

these are just abominations made to get people to buy shit like jello and mayo en masse.

few if any people actually made/ate this shit

Likely started off fine and it got bad around this time because canned/jar food was a novelty, people were excited about "food of the future" (the trend now is to look to the past in general, "traditional" cooking and the like, for inspiration) and there was a big emphasis on convenience. It should also be said though that a lot of the food recipes on food packages can be a bit questionable.

American food is actually slowly improving now too.

during ww2 america saw a huge boom in canned and processed foods because food production had shifted entirely towards creating rations with a long shelf life able to be shipped around the world
when the war ended, the production of these foods continued and the american housewife was left with the job of figuring out what to do with all that garbage.

your picture is their best attempt

Thirding. America in the mid-century was all about convenience and novelty. Especially after WWII and the huge spike in middle class wealth. Traditional cooking made people think about the Depression or their poor ancestors from the Old Country.

Do Americans REALLY think that their food "got good" at some point?

Well it's better than british food so clearly we did something

It's mostly because America was (even more so) an Anglo-dominated culture, and for all the great things that come with that, the culinary ability has never been one of those things. That has changes, and so has American food

Apparently aspic abominations and other horrors were actually relatively common in households. Don't you have some old coot in your family that makes shit like this?
It's pretty good in major metro areas, and certain regional cuisines are fantastic. That said, the average person can't cook for shit.

>After ww2 everyone ate MREs

I swear to God millennials are the dumbest people on the planet while simultaneously think they are the smartest

my family is jewish so the weirdest shit we make is kugel

>everyone ate MREs

how did you even get that from that post?

Food industrialization was new. There were all these wild new food products and no one knew what to do with it. What you see are merely the failures. What you eat are the successes.

MREs didn't exist in ww2, they had field rations
you got a can of meat, crackers, a bar of chocolate, and some cigarettes

Got a recipe?
Dunno, some of the failures have definitely crept into contemporary home cooked meals, at least in some regions.

You need to work on your reading comprehensions, bub

Even without all the weird jello molds and party platters, cooking in America took a big hit in the 50s and 60s. There was a big push to toss out traditional family recipes in exchange for homogenized versions created by industrial food companies that emphasized their processed ingredients. Betty Crocker did a number on the American palette.
Veeky Forums likes to rag on foodies and hipsters, but they're ones leading the shift back to things like fresh ingredients and traditional techniques.

My mom makes shredded carrots in orange jello is pretty good.

refrigerators were new. so making things that required refrigeration was in vogue for a short time.

The pendulum started swinging the other direction in the 70s, Julia Child proved that cooking things the old way could be fun and rewarding and she got the cooking show trend really rolling.

Alice Waters, too. But basically as well as advertising and Good Housekeeping sold industrialized trash food to people who'd lived through the Depression and/or WWII people started getting excited about something that might have come from their grandma, or the European grandma they never had.

That said, food was pretty good on farms in 19th Century America, as well as major cities if you had money.

I think if it weren't for PBS, cooking in America would have died off in the 60s.

Huh, that makes sense.
Traditional recipes seemed to pretty bland prior to the war as well, according to my vintage cookbooks. But miles better than these abominations.

Commercialized food culture boomed big after WWII, but it started back in the 20s. Again, there was a big bubble in middle class wealth and a lot of emphasis on convenience and novelty over craft.
Most actual traditional recipes were in the family cookbook, not the ones you bought in stores.

>WW2
>No men home
>Women have to work
>Nobody learns to cook
>Men come home after war
>Eat whatever awful slop women put out
>Deal with it
>Prepackaged food comes out
>People go fucking crazy trying to be fancy with it
and that's about it.

The irony in this post is both amazing and sad

Nobody actually cooked those. Jello marketing just paid some ad agency and chefs to come up with recipes to put Jello in more food things, and this was the results. We still have records of these recipes because people gagged at the sight at that time and nobody has come up with recipe book more disgusting than the one Jello commissioned.

Go to enough garage sales and eventually you'll come across a box of McCall's recipe cards. Buy this shit just for the novelty / nostalgia of a bygone era.

I've got a couple books from the 1910's and one from the 1800's. The recipes aren't really commercial or anything, it's just that there's not a heavy use of seasoning beyond salt and pepper (which is fair enough, since there wasn't as easy of access to herbs and spices).

Fun fact. Bananas of that time were a lot sweeter than today. That wouldn't be any different than having pineapple and ham or sweet chutney and ham. google big mike bananas.

There are some good foods from early American cuisine.
The James Townsend & Son 18th Century Cooking channel on Youtube is great: comfy and informative.
And some of the recipes actually yield tasty results. Go watch the mushroom ketchup episode if you haven't. Fuck that shit is good.

That picture looks like a Cavendish to me

I love pbs
No bully please

People in 50 years are going to watch Jack and Epic Meal Time videos and think that's what everyone ate.

Yes, but that recipe book was printed in 1973, you couldn't get big mikes post 50's.

Big Jello strikes again
But yes this post is correct. Mad Men

I'll check it out! My older book has a ton of ketchup recipes.

The aspic isn't the only problem with mid 20th century cooking. Tacky presentation, over-reliance on pineapple, canned tuna, mayo, olives, ham, etc.

pot meet kettle

>Tacky presentation
That was bound to happen when suddenly a bunch of guileless fucks were brought into the middle class led by a bunch of WASP home economists who didnd't give a shit about food, then sold to them by the advertising industry.

Austerity was big in the late 19th century. Lots of reformist movements, tea-totaling, health crazes. Indulgence was a sin, enjoyment was a warning sign. No alcohol, no spicy "ethnic" foods, and certainly not dancing.
Those Kellog Brothers up in Michigan, they've got that corn meal mush. Healthy and cleansing, you know.

Luckily all that went out the window with the Guilded Age.

The depression dealt a mortal blow to American home cooking traditions and the deluge of canned and frozen foods that followed the war finished off what was lef.

Makes sense. Shame it set back our culinary advancement for so long.
Makes sense. Though strangely enough, there's a pretty solid bobotie recipe in the book.

>slurries and other semi-liquid favorites
sounds like something from pic related

"American food" has always occupied kind of a weird space since as a society we haven't been around that long to develop strong traditional dishes. Mostly it was immigrant recipes modified with local ingredients or really simple homestead recipes from poor farmers.

>as a society we haven't been around that long to develop strong traditional dishes.
This. Having a strong culinary tradition seems to coincide directly with being old as fuck. This pretty much precludes anywhere in the Americas from having a strong food tradition except Mexico. Hell most of Spain's colonies haven't moved on from being just bootleg Spain, there just hasn't been enough time.

Which makes me wonder. Is is possible to essentially "meme" a better food culture into existence like the food companies memed prepackaged foods and aspic?

>a can of meat, crackers, a bar of chocolate, and some cigarettes

nice

nice hiss

There's no rancidity on these nuts

It hasn't yet got good. It got indulgent, which many mistakenly think is the same thing.

Places like Taiwan and Singapore are fairly new and full of immigrants, yet they've developed pretty solid cuisines.
Southern cuisine is pretty good, same with cajun and penn dutch. Flyover and general American cuisine isn't the best, though.

Sum of its parts. American food will get good when produce laws get stricter and the things we eat are grown to a decent standard, not just ballooned to an unnatural size and then injected with water and chlorine

Unfortunately I'm not too optimistic that this is going to happen...at best the upper middle-class and above will shell out for locally-grown nasty shit free/humanely raised food while everyone else eats what they can afford. The govt is so deep in Big Agriculture's pockets

Oh no

Yuropoor here, we don't have the same exact issue. We barely had this type of American midcentury "cuisine", but I still dislike the whole foodie culture because they toss away genuinely good traditional recipes because it's too much fucking work or "barbaric" for them while tossing in meme ingredients that contribute little to nothing.
Just a different perspective I guess.

I have family all over the US. Our family recipes are full of spices, peppers, herbs, horse radish, and other strong flavors.

The market will decide

You can still get them, but they aren't grown on an industrial scale anymore. I've been considering visiting the Congo just to get to taste Gros Michel.

I dont think people understand that America has this little thing called variety.
Just because we have shit food doesnt mean we dont have great food.

>im just here to shit on milinials
>what is this thread?

>There was a big push to toss out traditional family
Lets not forget women were being told not to cook for their familes at this point
>marraige is slavery and children are the shackles

Too bad I'm not on my other laptop, I have a ridiculous amount of food gore. It's my own collection, from mid-century cookbooks I've aquired.

the cost to yourself both financially and physically doesn't seem worth it for a banana

Start a new thread when you get to it.

that wasn't til the 70s.

>shits on melenials about MRE knowledge
>doesnt know they didnt exists in the 50's
wew
why is gen X so retarded? they couldn't even get the boomers to trust them with power

>Do Americans REALLY think that their food "got good" at some point?

I think it WAS good, back in the colonial days until the early 20th century. Then it got a series of serious butt-fuckings: First the depression. then WWII, after WWII by the massive amounts of war-surplus canned foods on the market, the advertising of the '50s, and the changes in "factory farming" in the 70's

I think it has been improving since then. People became more aware of foreign cuisines. Processed food has improved in quality as technology has improved. People have learned more about cooking via TV (at first), and now with the internet.

I don't think we are anywhere as good as the colonial days since most of us are eating flavorless factory farmed food that is the product of industrial agriculture. It's cheap and widely available, but the ingredient quality just isn't there. But on the other hand we do now have much better ingredient availability, knowledge about and influence from foreign cuisines, etc. In that regard we are far better off than we ever have been in the past.

Quick! What was the average person in the colonial days eating day to day

Am*rican food has literally never been good.

>Lol americans have no food culture
Is the butthurt salve of europoors that cant fathom a country this big. The northeast and the midwest and cajun country and southwest all have wildly different food cultures. Lobster rolls arent American, theyre a Maine thing. Tex-Mex isnt American, its a southwest thing. Its like saying "Europe doesnt have a food culture" because you cant get good bouillabaisse in Poland

My grandparents on my mom's side (one was the son of a dust bowl refugee and the other minonites) ate green jello with shredded cabbage in it with a dollop of mayo for topper and red jello with fruit cocktail (this wasn't so bad). Lately I've been thinking about making an upscale red jello based dessert for the holidays that I would spice with cinnamon, cloves, and allspice and boil in raisins, currants, and maybe a couple other dry fruits, add some angostura bitters and optionally some dark rum. Thoughts guys?

Ingredients they grew in their own gardens, supplemented with what people could hunt and farm.

When industrial shortcuts don't exist your only ingredient options--foraging, hunting, and small scale farming--happen to provide the best possible ingredients.

nayrt but let me dig out my PA dutch cookbook here and tell you what people ate in the colony of pennsylvania

>soup
>bread
>pastries
>potatoes
>beans
>cabbage
>beef
>tongue
>liver
>chicken
>pork
>stuffed pig's maw

>Traditional recipes seemed to pretty bland prior to the war
You're forgetting that before industrial agriculture food had a lot more flavor to begin with. If you're starting with heritage breed farm raised pork or chicken and a few seasonal veggies from heirloom seed all you need to make that stuff taste great is a little salt and pepper and maybe some bacon fat or butter. My wife's people are from the Midwest, and she has memories of her grandmother making a dish that she'd learned from her mother. The dish was nothing more than boiled potatoes and peas in a white sauce made from butter, flour, milk and salt. If you make that dish with supermarket ingredients - old potatoes, frozen peas, homogenized milk and industrially produced butter it's lackluster at best. But if you up your game on the ingredients - go to the farmer's market and get some freshly dug potatoes and peas you have to shell yourself - then make the dish with the best butter and milk you can get your hands on it's a different thing entirely. It's a good enough dish to inspire the powerful childhood memories of it my wife has, which include shelling peas from her grandmother's garden.

Of course advertising sold convenience over quality in 20Th Century America. But you also had my wife's mother's generation shopping at the supermarket, and quickly learning that it wasn't worth putting in two or more hours to make the simple recipes they grew up with, because they would NEVER turn out like grandma's when your starting point was supermarket ingredients. So there wasn't much point in cooking that way anymore.

tl;dr Great grandma's recipes suck when made with supermarket ingredients, so in the middle of the 20th Century they invented a new cuisine out of thin air using the ingredients available at the supermarket. It was pretty grim.

I was mostly asking what specifically people ate, day to day

I couldn't have said it better myself.

I hate this fucking mouse, I wasn't done yet

>squabs
>sausage
>scrapple
>basically anything they could because getting food was hard work and less certain of success than today

they also ate whatever they could hunt, like deer, rabbits, squirrels, anything you could shoot or trap and get a half decent amount of meat off of it.

Singapore food mostly just carries on the traditions of the cultures that arrived here. There's been some fusion, and some innovation, but nothing groundbreaking just yet.

Your PA Dutch cookbook is a perfect example of what I was talking about here

Half of my family is PA dutch, and my bro still lives in PA. He's way into the trad cooking of the area. This thread inspired me to call him. He confirmed that he no longer makes many trad recipes involving chicken or pork because they don't turn out right with supermarket ingredients, and buying better meat from local farmers is more money than he wants to spend. He's particularly mad about chicken these days, because all his supermarket sells id birds half the size of turkeys that have no flavor, and he doesn't want to pay farmer's market prices for the kind of chicken he wants.

Then they are not failures.

One could argue that. Look at how low the second half of the 20th Century set the bar for food in much of the US. We now have a generation who grew up on nuggers and tendies but have never tasted what chicken tasted like to their grandmothers - those are the same poor bastards who have never had a pork chop that wasn't tough and dry. Their food preferences are expressed through choice of dipping sauces. The dishes they call home cooking are mostly heating up the contents of convenience food products with maybe a couple other ingredients added. I'd call that failure. Pic related.

I dunno maybe because the entire world, including America was participating in World War the sequel. I'd like to see you're recipe for military grade food.

Nah but really it was just a weird time of magazines for housewifes to be clever and neat by making meme dishes out of MREs. You still see this shit today on normie book on how to make school supplies out of toilet paper rools and a hot glue gun even though notebooks are .35 cents.

my grandma made this shit until like 2009

she also gave me a brownie with orange sherbert one time...

>I was mostly asking what specifically people ate, day to day
That would depend a lot on location. What kind of crops you can grow varies greatly based on geography. So does the availability of wildlife to hunt. Someone living in New England would be eating a very different diet than someone living in the Carolinas. Someone living in a coastal area would be eating very differently than someone living inland.

This. The generation that's pretty much dying off now saw nothing weird about salads made using Jello. Sure, they were dishes your rich aunt and uncle who drank wine and went to the opera looked down their noses at, but that doesn't mean you wouldn't see them at family gatherings.

>You're forgetting that before industrial agriculture food had a lot more flavor to begin with
Shit, you're right. The difference between homegrown tomatoes and hobby farm pigs vs the factory versions is only to be believed through experience.
Same exact experience here; traditional Penn Dutch recipes aren't viable anymore. And many of the recipes just aren't acceptable to the modern palate. They really did eat EVERY part of the animal and gave thanks for the meal whether it tasted good or not.
Here's an example:
macaroni salad
Can confirm that the standard American pork chop is an insult to the animal that it came from.

Green Bean Casserole is a solid flavor foundation though.
You can make a completely homemade version that takes maybe 10 more minutes total than making it from canned shit.

I've had the homemade stuff before (repressed memory until this thread), and it was still shit.

...

Wait, people don't like green bean casserole?

What the hell? Casseroles in general are top notch.

it varies by a lot depending on where you live

Also what time of year.

user, PLS. Casseroles are the embodiment of shitty American cuisine.
>random mishmash of inoffensive, textureless, usually frozen/pre-sliced/canned/packaged produce
>some sort of ground meat
>shitty boxed starch
>all held together with a heavily processed canned soup or sauce

this

>bought it en masse
>few people actually made it

Does not compute
Face it burger, youre food sucks

>all this hate on one style of dish or another
Learning how to cook makes the difference. Two green bean casseroles: one with some semblance of order and technique, the other a la Marie.

It's still a corporate test kitchen recipe, which is legacy Home Economics. That shit was never about good cooking.

>corporate test kitchen stumbles upon a decent concept so long as it's taken out of the context of using sub par ingredients and no technique
A lot of their stuff was taking decent dishes and turning them to shit in order to accommodate the use of their products. It's not a difficult thing to see why it could work in the reverse, is it?

>Rough-textured, watery beans and half-charred onions bound together with processed slime
no thanks