/ck/ - Food & Cooking

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

>>9554151
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

>>9554154
>>9554173
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?

>>9554202
Well it's better than british food so clearly we did something

>>9554173
>>9554184
>>9554190
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

>>9554154
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?
>>9554202
It's pretty good in major metro areas, and certain regional cuisines are fantastic. That said, the average person can't cook for shit.

>>9554184
>After ww2 everyone ate MREs

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

>>9554225
my family is jewish so the weirdest shit we make is kugel

>>9554235
>everyone ate MREs

how did you even get that from that post?

>>9554151
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.

>>9554235
MREs didn't exist in ww2, they had field rations
you got a can of meat, crackers, a bar of chocolate, and some cigarettes

>>9554269
Got a recipe?
>>9554278
Dunno, some of the failures have definitely crept into contemporary home cooked meals, at least in some regions.

>>9554235
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.
/ck/ likes to rag on foodies and hipsters, but they're ones leading the shift back to things like fresh ingredients and traditional techniques.

>>9554151
>>9554154
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.

>>9554636
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.

>>9554587
Huh, that makes sense.
>>9554554
Traditional recipes seemed to pretty bland prior to the war as well, according to my vintage cookbooks. But miles better than these abominations.

>>9554945
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.

>>9554235
The irony in this post is both amazing and sad

>>9554151
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.

>>9555005
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).

>>9555063
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.

>>9555138
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.

>>9555178
That picture looks like a Cavendish to me

>>9554685
I love pbs
No bully please

>>9554151
People in 50 years are going to watch Jack and Epic Meal Time videos and think that's what everyone ate.

>>9555195
Yes, but that recipe book was printed in 1973, you couldn't get big mikes post 50's.

>>9555052
Big Jello strikes again
But yes this post is correct. Mad Men

>>9555180
I'll check it out! My older book has a ton of ketchup recipes.

>>9555217
The aspic isn't the only problem with mid 20th century cooking. Tacky presentation, over-reliance on pineapple, canned tuna, mayo, olives, ham, etc.

>>9554235
pot meet kettle

>>9555240
>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.

>>9555138
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.

>>9555254
Makes sense. Shame it set back our culinary advancement for so long.
>>9555256
Makes sense. Though strangely enough, there's a pretty solid bobotie recipe in the book.

>>9555240
>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.

>>9555474
>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?

>>9554284
>a can of meat, crackers, a bar of chocolate, and some cigarettes

nice

>>9555594
nice hiss

>>9555775
There's no rancidity on these nuts

>>9554151
It hasn't yet got good. It got indulgent, which many mistakenly think is the same thing.

>>9555474
Places like Taiwan and Singapore are fairly new and full of immigrants, yet they've developed pretty solid cuisines.
>>9555818
Southern cuisine is pretty good, same with cajun and penn dutch. Flyover and general American cuisine isn't the best, though.

>>9555878
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

>>9555904
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

>>9555209
Oh no

>>9554554
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.

>>9555138
I have family all over the US. Our family recipes are full of spices, peppers, herbs, horse radish, and other strong flavors.

>>9556005
The market will decide

>>9555211
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.

>>9554202
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.

>>9554235
>im just here to shit on milinials
>what is this thread?

>>9554554
>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.

>>9556269
the cost to yourself both financially and physically doesn't seem worth it for a banana

>>9556358
Start a new thread when you get to it.

>>9556300
that wasn't til the 70s.

>>9554235
>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

>>9554202
>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.

>>9556869
Quick! What was the average person in the colonial days eating day to day

>>9554151
Am*rican food has literally never been good.

>>9556287
>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

>>9554151
>>9554154
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?

>>9556887
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.

>>9556887
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

>>9554945
>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.

>>9556913
I was mostly asking what specifically people ate, day to day

>>9556920
I couldn't have said it better myself.

>>9556917
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.

>>9555878
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.

>>9556927
Your PA Dutch cookbook is a perfect example of what I was talking about here >>9556920

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.

>>9554488
Then they are not failures.

>>9557058
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.

>>9554154
my grandma made this shit until like 2009

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

>>9556922
>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.

>>9557152
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.

>>9556920
>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.
>>9557050
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.
>>9557058
Here's an example:
macaroni salad
>>9557111
Can confirm that the standard American pork chop is an insult to the animal that it came from.

>>9557111
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.

>>9558414
I've had the homemade stuff before (repressed memory until this thread), and it was still shit.

>>9554235

Wait, people don't like green bean casserole?

What the hell? Casseroles in general are top notch.

>>9556922
it varies by a lot depending on where you live

>>9558579
Also what time of year.

>>9558521
Anon, 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

>>9558739
this

>>9554154
>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.

>>9560003
It's still a corporate test kitchen recipe, which is legacy Home Economics. That shit was never about good cooking.

>>9560077
>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?

>>9560003
>Rough-textured, watery beans and half-charred onions bound together with processed slime
no thanks

>>9560595
post your dinner

>>9560096
>A lot of their stuff was taking decent dishes and turning them to shit in order to accommodate the use of their products
I think it was more pulling shit out of thin air based on the ideals of Home Economics, which valued efficiency over flavor and tradition. The goals were not the pleasures of the dining experience, the goals were efficiency of prep and maximizing nutrition based on the inexact science of the day. Vitamins had just been discovered, along with the realization that large chunks of the population were vitamin deficient. The effort was aimed at modernizing how people ate, and tradition was seen as backwards. After those minds that gave us grim Depression era dishes they ended up working in test kitchens with corporate money behind them and advertising to sell the results to a newly minted (and very credulous) middle class who pretty much took whatever they read in Good Housekeeping as gospel. That's where this particular kind of foodgore came from.