Cuisine a la can

In my perusal of mid-20th century cookbooks, I've noticed the recipes contain a stunning array of canned foods.  It is my guess that when the modern convenience craze began rolling in a big way and homes were being filled with "labor-saving devices," food manufacturers jumped at the occasion with a little too much enthusiasm.  (The very fact that food could be considered "manufactured" should have given someone a glaring clue...)

I suppose housewives, enthralled by the idea of spending an extra hour at Mildred's bridge party, thought they could come home, open a few cans and ta-da!  Dinner!  This sort of cuisine delighted no one ever and thankfully, some of these tinned wonders died along the way as manufacturers stopped canning everything they could squeeze into a cylinder.



If you had been cooking in the 1950s, take a look at these oh, so convenient canned wonders you could have chosen for your main dish (and all these are really found in the "Jiffy Cooking" section of the 1958 Mary Margaret McBride Encyclopedia of Cooking):

lamb stew
beef and kidneys
tongue and tongue loaf
chicken fricassee
chicken a la king
codfish cakes
Welsh rabbit

For side dishes, there were
canned cooked rice
canned tomato aspic
canned dandelion greens

And for dessert, how about some canned fig pudding?

And don't forget potted meat, the particular "delicacy" which is still easily found in stores and, I confess, my cupboard.  Yes, really.  Not everyone has such a thoughtful sister-in-law who will clean out the potted meat shelf at the local scratch-n-dent store and present it to you for your birthday and dare you to find a way to prepare it.

As I walked past the freezer section at the grocery store today, I saw frozen single serve tubs of oatmeal, pre-made for breakfast (sure to entice you out of bed in the morning).  A few shelves away were packages of frozen mashed potatoes.  And then there's the pre-cooked, vacuum packed bacon, non-refrigerated dairy products and a vast number of other foods preserved and packaged for maximum storage time at the expense of taste and nutritional quality.

We've come a long way.

I can still hope that these technological wonders we have accepted as food will one day be as unappetizing as the early canned experiments as we re-learn the old ways of preparing and storing food.

photo source

This post linked to Simple Lives Thursday.