The past that wasn’t

Are we actually eating fatter and less healthy diets today? That’s the common wisdom, but it may not be accurate according to this look.

The recipes in a Baptists Ladies’ Cook Book, published January 1st 1895, by the Ladies of Monmouth, Illinois, do not support the assertion that Americans of a century ago ate a leaner diet. There is hardly a recipe in the collection that does not contain butter, cream, eggs or lard, beginning with the soup chapter and ending with the substantial array of desserts. Most meat recipes call for gravy made with drippings, and occasionally with added cream. Vegetable recipes include asparagus dressed in cream, four versions of cabbage in a cream sauce, corn and eggplant fritters fried in lard, potato balls fried in “good drippings” and parsnips fried in bacon fat.
Sea food recipes include “Fish a la Creme”, “Escalloped Fish”, “Creamed Salmon” and “Cream Fish”. “Sauce for Broiled Fish” calls for “one large spoonful of butter to one gill [one-half cup] of cream”. A whole chapter devoted to oysters includes recipes for deviled oysters made with egg yolks, creamed oyster patties made with eggs and butter, oysters wrapped in bacon, escalloped oysters, oyster pie made with one quart of cream, oyster fritters fried in drippings, oysters fried in hot lard and escalloped oysters made with butter and milk. Organ meat recipes include fried veal liver and sweet breads, both creamed and fried. There are separate chapters for cheese and eggs.

And there’s more, though I feel like I’ve gained ten pounds just reading it.

Of course, there’s a difference between what’s in the cookbook and what people ate on a regular basis. As I tell people who marvel over Margie’s cooking, we don’t (and can’t, and maybe wouldn’t even want to) eat like that every day.

Regardless of what was eaten, there’s caloric outgo to go with the input. I suspect the folks of Monmouth, Illlionis in 1895 led a bit more active life than what many of us do. If you’re burning the fat you don’t store it on your bod, right?

And the odd conclusions at the end of the article that, even if folks really were eating 2900 calorie diets, they were, in fact, healthier than we are today seems unsupported. Gout, for one thing, seems to have been a bigger deal in the past than today. And, for that matter, life expectency was shorter a century-plus ago than it is now (how much of that is from excessive fat consumption may be another question).

Still, it’s an interesting view into recipes that, today, would send people reeling away, clutching their hearts …