"Grocery" is derived
from "gross", twelve dozen, from the Latin "grossus" meaning large, bulky, thick
or coarse. This also gives us the slang term as in "Boy, is that gross!" The
term also came to mean without refinement or deductions, hence "gross income."
A "grocer" was one who sold items that were countable, as
opposed to the butcher, who sold by the pound, although today we buy meat in a
grocery store.
Prior to the railroads, the
American diet consisted mainly of salted pork, corn, beans and occasional
produce in season. Railroads made it possible to bring fruits and vegetables
from the South and California all year round. Frozen meat came via rail from the
Great Plains. Fresh milk came in daily from the surrounding countryside, rushed
to the big cities in special hot-shot milk trains, which increased the health of
everyone, especially children, while dropping the bottom out of the market for
spices used to flavor rancid butter.
In the 19th century,
being overweight was a sign of prosperity. By 1920, being slender was a sign of
eating right, and overweight, of not being able to afford the right foods. The
concept of healthy eating has dominated advertising ever since, with all sorts
of health claims implied for their products or even outright lies.
Over the course of
evolution, animals can lose the ability to manufacture certain compounds found
in their diet. Humans evolved from the primate family, whose diet was high in
fruits and vegetables, and the particular nutrients we lack are found in those
foods. Cats and meat eaters have a different set of nutritional requirements.
(Of course, animals lose the ability to make compounds not
found in their diet, but then they don't prosper to pass on those genes to the
whole
population. If insulin-containing foods were part of our diet, but citrus fruits
weren't, we might consider diabetes a vitamin deficiency from lack of "vitamin
I" affecting everyone, and scurvy would be a rare hereditary disease.)
Studies of nutrition
around WWI showed the relation between certain vital nutrients needed in trace
amounts and diseases such as beriberi or rickets. These were at first mistakenly
thought to be part of the amine class of chemicals, hence "vital amines" or
"vitamines", coined by C. Funk.
People with a
traditional mind-set don't understand how a college student can eat cold pizza
for breakfast. However, the American standard meal fare reflects previous
limitations in food storage and preparation.
We accept that lunch and
dinner are interchangeable, but breakfast has certain foods unique to it. Most
of our energy needs (calories) come from carbohydrates. Simple carbohydrates are
sugars, which are small enough molecules that they get absorbed into the
bloodstream right away. Complex carbohydrates are sugars that are attached
together in long chains, which are called starches. For the body to absorb them,
they have to be broken down, which is time consuming. This starts in the mouth
to a certain degree. If you chew bread for an extra-long time, it begins to
taste sweet.
The problem with refined
sugar is that is goes directly into the bloodstream all at once, you get a
sudden "sugar rush" and then drops off. Starches take longer, but then provide
energy over a long period of time.
After sleeping for some
eight hours, you need to end the long period of not eating, literally "break
(your) fast". (Coffee or tea gives the chemical caffeine to help wake you up,
but no nutrition.) The meal is therefore heavy in sugars to give the quick
source of energy. We accept pastries, donuts, sweet rolls, coffee cake, toast
with jams or jellies, or waffles or pancakes with maple syrup, since they all
provide starches and sugars.
A traditional breakfast
probably leaned toward pancakes, as they are made from dough without having to
wait for it to rise. The other products would either be made the night before,
or by a servant who got up early to go to this trouble. Notice they are
individual small units, which take much less time to cook than a loaf of bread
would. Non-sweet dough products, specifically bread, can be served for breakfast
if toasted and spread with jam or jelly.
With every meal we
include protein. Protein contains the building blocks of life, but also can be
broken down to yield energy if need be. Before refrigeration, to have any fresh
meat - such as a roast - meant slaughtering, dressing, and cooking the animal.
By the time you did this to include it in breakfast, it would be lunchtime at
least. One source of fresh protein is eggs, which are generally collected in the
morning, and require little preparation. (I think of a chicken as a daily egg
dispenser.) They are included in any dough product, but of course generally are
their own dish, too.
There are two other
sources of protein, grilled ham or sausage. Both are pork products, reflecting
the former dominance of pork in the American diet. One way to preserve meat is
to smoke it, and ham traditionally is the most common smoked meat. Sausage is
ground-up animal leftovers, heavily seasoned and I think salted (the word is
derived from Latin meaning "seasoned with salt"). It is stored in prepared
intestines, which acted as a container long before there were tin cans or
Tupperware. I'm not sure if it was the cooking that preserved the contents, or
if the salt and seasonings were sufficient. Sausages can also be smoked, of
course.
I think smoking
preserves meat in a complex fashion. The dry heat partially dries the meat, and
the gases kill off the microorganisms that would spoil it.
Grains such as oatmeal
or corn (mush) can also be mixed with water and cooked. These are served with
milk (protein) and lots of sugar or syrup. In Victorian times, several people
were concerned about sexuality in children, which they thought came from eating
too spicy food. (My aunt used to tell my sister and me not to put too much
pepper on eggs the few times she made us breakfast.) Concerned Victorians
invented such bland foods as the graham cracker, a semisweet cracker made of
whole wheat flour invented by Dr. Graham. C. W. Post and J. H. Kellogg both
invented precooked cereals which were intended as breakfast for children. Notice
that sugar is added to breakfast cereal, either by the consumer, or by the
producer ("frosted" cereals).
The other two meals
traditionally ended with dessert, so that the sugars go into the bloodstream and
tell the body that you've eaten. If you eat sweets at the beginning of the meal,
it would "kill your appetite" as your mother always threatened. Without the
sweets, it would take much longer to feel satisfied.
Oranges and lemons probably came from the Orient, and were
introduced to the Arabs via trading. They in turn planted lemon trees in Spain
during the Moorish occupation, and Christopher Columbus is said to have planted
oranges in the New World, and orchards were planted by Spanish settlers. The
English Navy had realized lemons and limes prevented scurvy, I think, in the
1700's. (Their sailors were required by law to drink lime juice daily, earning them and
eventually English in general the nickname "limeys". This health advantage may
explain in part the rise in dominance of English sea power.) However, citrus
fruits were considered a delicacy for the rich in America for many years. In
1832, a large shipment from Sicily (not the Americas) introduced many Americans
to these fruits. Since they don't grow in the more temperate regions, they had
to be transported in a speedy enough manner to prevent spoilage. I think that
even in the late '20's, when my mother was a child, an orange was considered
special enough to be given as a Christmas gift. Dave Messer points out that even
today baskets of fruit are often sent as holiday gifts or for other
celebrations.
In WWI, immigrant and
southern soldiers were introduced to a more balanced diet, as the science of
food was gaining acceptance.
Pineapples were little known until Del Monte began to
market them aggressively in 1923. Asparagus was similarly pushed by California
growers at about the same time. Until then it was little known outside the
state. (This is according to Harvey Green, The Uncertainty Of Everyday Life,
1915-1945, but I question this. "Like asparagus in May" is a line from
Gilbert and Sullivan's Gondoliers, written around 1890, although perhaps it
was known in England but not America.)
Any chemical dissolved
in large quantities in water draws water out of living cells, thus killing off
bacteria. This includes salt (a solution is called brine), sugar, acetic acid
(vinegar), or alcohol. Alcohol preserves fruit juices or grain solutions (beer
and ale). Brine or vinegar protects cucumbers (pickles), and tomato sauce
(catsup). Sugar and vinegar protects the ingredients in sweet pickles and
relish. Sugar alone protects ground fruit (jam, the name came from the process
of squeezing the fruit) or fruit juice firmed with pectin and gelatin (jelly,
derived from gelatin).
The word "can" comes
from the Latin word meaning small vessel, which also came to mean a pipe, giving
us the words "cane", "canister", "canal", "channel", "cannon", and "canyon". At
first, food that had been heated high enough to destroy any microorganisms were
stored in earthenware containers, but these weren't airtight. Supposedly the
Roman upper classes used lead for their water pipes ("plumbing" comes from Latin
for lead) and for their wine and cooking containers, slowly poisoning themselves
as the lead dissolved, making them sterile, and thus leading to the fall of the
empire.
Ravioli and pies (and
maybe even fried chicken) can be thought of as canned food in a pastry
container. The pie dough or pasta is dried out in the cooking process, depriving
any bacteria of water. Crackers, pretzels, egg rolls, pasta, and the hardtack
used on ships were similarly preserved by drying. Crackers and pretzels also
have a layer of salt.
Glass containers go back
to the production of wine. At some point (1600?), an increase in the strength of
the glass allowed a second fermentation to build up pressure of carbon dioxide,
thus creating champagne and other sparkling wines. Iron couldn't be used, as it
rusted. It was found possible to coat the iron with tin, and the tin can (which
is mostly iron or later steel) was patented in America in 1825. A tin can is not
fragile like glass, so most commercially prepared foods were shipped in tin
cans, not glass containers. (Glass containers were hand-blown until about 1903
when automatic machinery was developed, making tin cans much cheaper, too.)
Foods such as olives and pickles, packaged in brine, tended to be shipped in
glass, as brine is corrosive to metal.
According to Thomas Schlereth (Victorian America, 1876-1915) H.J. Heinz
of Pittsburgh at the end of the 19th century began to offer foods which
previously had been canned at home, including pickles, relish, baked beans, and
catsup. (I understand catsup had started life as a patent medicine.) By 1900,
Heinz was producing some 200 products, many more than the "57 Varieties" of
their slogan.
By 1930, the middle and
upper classes were buying fresh bread made commercially and usually delivered
routinely by the bakery. White was considered a sign of purity, so a blander but
whiter product was developed to meet consumer demands. Dark breads like
pumpernickel, rye, etc., were "immigrant" foods.
In 1803, a Maryland
farmer, Thomas Moore, invented a double-walled cabinet that could be used to
store perishable food, using ice. He called it a "refrigerator." The ice was
natural, cut from a local pond in winter. Shortly thereafter, Dolly Madison was
able to serve her guests in the White House a frozen desert called "ice cream"
and America was way ahead of Europe in having ice boxes in their kitchens.
Rudy Volti had an article in the Spring 1994 Science
& Technology
on the development of frozen food. The following information was taken from
that:
In 1876, Carl Linde of
Germany developed a practical artificial refrigerator system, using ammonia as
the refrigerant. At first, it was only used in industry. In 1918, General Motors
introduced a home model, which they called "Frigidaire". This was to become so
popular that the brand name became almost a generic one for all makes, just like
Kleenex and Aspirin. The problem of leaking refrigerant was a concern, but in
the early 1930's, Freon was invented. In 1930, the sale of electrical
refrigerators overtook those of ice boxes, and in 1944, nearly 70% of all homes
had these, even as the railroads were just beginning to try mechanical
refrigeration for their reefer cars.
Clarence Birdseye in
1912 went to Labrador as a fur trader, where he saw that caught fish, which had
frozen in the 50 degree below zero air as they were being pulled from the water,
were fresh - and sometimes even alive - when thawed out months later. In 1923 he
began experimenting with making this a commercial process and formed General
Seafoods Corp. This later became General Foods, when he expanded the concept to
other foods, most notably vegetables.
Birdseye's process took time to perfect, but even longer
to get the physical plant to support it, including refrigerated freight cars
with extra insulation to haul the product, deep freezers for stores to carry
frozen food, home refrigerators with dual temperature areas (introduced in
1939), and a bad reputation gained by producers freezing nearly rotten produce
only as a last resort. Even in the '50's, refrigerators still only had a tiny
freezer. Birdseye had full page ads in the 1940 issues of Life, although the ads cautioned
consumers that the product would be hard to find.
A total of 39 million
pounds of frozen food were sold in 1934, which increased to 600 million in just
a decade.
One thing that changed that was when in 1955, C.A. Swanson
& Sons sold an entire meal arranged in an aluminum tray, which could be
eaten when watching the newest fad, television. That year, 70 million of these
"TV Dinners" were sold, starting the change of a family dinner time prepared by
the housewife, to an individual eating experience with one's attention glued to
the "set". (A refrigerator ad in a c. 1948 Life showed a full width freezer compartment, promoted
as a place to store compete frozen dinners, among other items, so the TV Dinner
was not the first, just the first to catch on in a big way.)
In New York City in
1859, George Gilman and George Hartford opened a small tea shop with the
pretentious name "The Great American Tea Company." They gradually added other
prepackaged groceries to their store, and ten years later, in honor of the new
transcontinental railroad, changed the name to "The Great Atlantic and Pacific
Tea Company" which later became known as A&P. By 1876, they had opened a
chain of 67 stores, and supposedly in their peak between 1912 and 1915, they
were opening a new store every three days.
Grand Union was started
in the 1870's, Kroger's in the 1880's and Jewel Tea in the 1890's. The number of
chains doubled during the first two decades of the 20th century, with the actual
number of outlets increased by 8 times during this period.
In 1916, Clarence Saunders opened the Piggly Wiggly chain
of stores, starting in Tennessee. (I think this was a regional chain in the
South, as I don't know of any up here, and had never even heard the name until
the movie Driving Miss Daisy.) This was the first supermarket,
with products set out in aisles (generating impulse sales). It was self-serve,
rather than asking for items across a counter.
Delmonico's in New York
City was the first restaurant where you could order off a menu a la carte. It
opened (I believe) in the 1870's, a much later idea than might be expected.
While it is true that
some diners were converted from passenger cars and interurbans, by far the vast
number were built as such, and were much too wide to ever have been on the
rails. I'm not sure if the similarity of the design was a carry-over of this
concept or a copying of the railroad dining car. Certainly the standard layout
inside of a long counter and grill on one side and booths along the other is not
found in railroad cars.
Modelers love to convert
a passenger car to a diner, but I think this has become a cliché. The buildings
themselves are discussed in their own chapter.
The diner often
reflected Art Deco or Art Moderne styling, indicating the concept arose in the
'20's and continued through the advent of the drive-in and fast food. This would
suggest that the auto was vital to this idea.
For more on diners, see
the diner
section.
The frankfurter, a
German sausage, has become popular at baseball games in New York City. In 1871,
it is introduced at Coney Island. Cart vendors yell, “Get your dachshund
sausages while they’re red hot!” Sports cartoonist Ted Dorgan mocks the vendors
in a cartoon, showing them selling actual dachshunds in a roll, yelling, “Get
your hot dogs!” The name sticks.
McDonalds pioneered the
concept of a chain of fast food stores, opening their first in the mid-'50's
(hence too old for our layout set in 1950). Drive-in fast food stores date back
earlier, related to the rise in driving in general.
In the 1920's, the White
Castle and White Tower chains made their debut. Hamburgers were made extra small
so they cooked faster.
Some items, such as
hamburgers without the special sauce, can be cooked to order, but the modern
concept of fast food is not so much fast cooking (that's what distinguished the
diner), as it is that the food is already prepared for you and kept hot. The
concept actually dates back to the hot dog vendor in ball parks and amusement
parks. Meat that continues to cook, even if slowly under the heat lamps, becomes
tough and stringy. The best meat product to overcome this problem, hot dogs and
hamburgers, are both finely ground so that chewing is not required, and mixed
with large quantities of fat to keep the meat from drying out. For the same
reason, potatoes cooked in hot cooking grease, i.e., french fries, are
universal. The grinding also intimately mixes the fat and meat, as separate
globs of fat as on steak would be objectionable. Grinding disguises the source
of the meat and meat by-products and allows cheaper cuts of meat to be used.
Ordinary slices of bread
were too thin. A thick bun was necessary to absorb the grease so it could be
handled. Handling the meat allows it to be raised to the mouth and cut by teeth,
rather than requiring utensils. Also, if you don't have to press down on the
meat to cut it with a knife and fork, you don't need a clean surface that can
stand the pressure. Thus hot dogs and hamburgers can be served without needing
regular tableware (requiring the cost of a human or machine dishwasher) or the
added cost of disposable utensils and plates. Fast food can be handed directly
to the customer, perhaps in a napkin, when sold at an amusement park, or can be
wrapped in a waxed or foil paper.
To be successful, the
items should sit under the heat lamp as short a time as possible, which means a
steady stream of customers. Before cars were used to drive out and grab a meal,
the only place this was possible was at ball games and amusement parks.
In North Chateaugay, we
have modeled a couple of blocks of industries taken from Burlington, VT.
Dominating these was the Burlington Grocery Company. Next to it was the Vermont
Fruit Company, and a Swift plant in between.
"Grocery" is derived
from "gross", twelve dozen, from the Latin "grossus" meaning large, bulky, thick
or coarse. This also gives us the slang term as in "Boy, is that gross!" The
term also came to mean without refinement or deductions, hence "gross income."
A "grocer" was one who
sold items that were countable, as opposed to the butcher, who sold by the
pound, although today we buy meat in a grocery store.
This area is based on
Vergennes, VT on the Rutland RR. The Kennedy Brothers Furniture Company is the
former Sheffield Farms Creamery. Dairymen's League (the gray building) is still
an active creamery. Both shipped milk to New York City. Shade & Roller Co.
shipped wooden dowels off the team track. Feed came in from the West, while
fertilizer was shipped from Boston.
South Hero is a small
farming community. Down by the depot was a corn cannery and a dry bean elevator.
In 1915, the Twitchell & Champlain Company of Maine built a plant here for
the purpose of buying local sweet corn, processing it from cob to can, and
shipping it by rail throughout New England under their brand name, "Maine's
Finest Corn." The steam-powered plant only operated for some 6 weeks every
September. Wagon loads of unhusked corn would draw up and unload for preparing,
cooking, canning, sealing and packaging. Around 1930, the depressed market price
for corn and a plague of ear worms forced the plants to close.
In 1918, the Belden,
Inc. of Geneseo, NY built a plant here to clean, sort, and store dry beans grown
locally. Belden already owned 25-30 such elevators in New England and New York,
including one at nearby North Hero. This seasonal operation, starting in late
October, lasted some 10 to 20 weeks. Ten women employees processed 500 bags (100
lbs. each) for a box car load each week. Around 1930, Belden sold out to Friend
Brothers of Boston, whose baked beans are still sold today.
Prices for the beans
varied between 7 and 18 cents per pound and farmers found it profitable to plant
a portion of their farms in beans. During WWII, the government pegged the price
at 8-1/2 cents/lb. Milk and dairy prices, however, continued to rise, and
farmers no longer planted beans in favor of dairy products. The dwindling supply
of beans forced the closing of both this and the North Hero plant. The South
Hero plant was abandoned and torn down in 1945.
The 19th Century Gilbert
Car Shops contained a large plain building that had tracks running into it.
Although the rest of the plant was eventually taken over by the Manning plant,
this one building was sold separately. By 1950, it had been taken over by Albany
Public Markets as their warehouse and perhaps as also their retail outlet. Today
they are known as Price Chopper, a supermarket chain in the region.
According to Thomas Schlereth (Victorian America 1876-1915), Gail Borden
had grown tired of the limited foods available to him living on the Texas
frontier. After some experimentation, he took out a patent in 1856 for a way to
evaporate milk in a vacuum, and then can it. He was the direct ancestor of both
Elsie and Elmer.
In 1906, the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed. Many
smaller companies could not afford to meet the new sanitation rules, so they
were taken over by National Dairy Products and Borden. Borden became a huge
conglomerate. In 1928 alone, Borden took over 52 smaller companies in just one
week (Harvey Green, Uncertainty of Everyday Life, 1915-1945).
At one point, only
children drank milk. Around 1900, discoveries about the poor sanitation of
store-bought milk scared off consumers, but then they were lured back by "Pure
Milk" campaigns. National Dairy's product was marketed under the name "Sealtest"
in that the containers were sealed and tested. By the mid-'20's, Americans
consumed an average 800 pounds per year.
Milk is a water solution of proteins and other nutrients,
and containing little globules of butterfat in suspension. According to an
article on ice cream by Lawrence Joseph in the August '92 Discovery, cow's milk is made up of 87%
water, 4% milk fat, and the rest protein, lactose or milk sugar, and ash. As it
comes from the cow, each tiny fat globule has a phospholipid membrane, which is
negatively charged. The charges repel each other, keeping the globules from
meeting up with each other and separating out from the mixture.
Heating the milk
destroys the membranes, so pasteurizing means the milk will separate out, unless
it is also homogenized. If these globules are broken up much finer
(homogenization), they will stay in suspension much longer. ("Heavy" cream, made
of more butterfat and less water, is actually lighter in weight than milk.)
Heavy cream contains so
much butterfat that the suspension is relatively unstable. While it can be
whipped to a froth if kept cold, if it is "churned" at room temperature, the
suspension changes nature. The butterfat becomes the continuous medium, with
tiny globules of the water solution dispersed throughout, in other words,
butter.
Ice cream came on the
scene only after the invention of the ice box in the early 1800's meant the
development of an industry to harvest ice in the winter and store it over the
summer. Americans were way ahead of Europe with natural ice refrigeration, and
as a result, ice cream became a common part of our diet much earlier. The high
butterfat content of the mix (10% by federal law, 2-1/2 times that of milk),
along with the constant stirring, causes the water to freeze into tiny crystals,
so small the mouth can't detect them, so the product seems smooth. Ice cream
that is allowed to melt and refreeze does so with bigger ice crystals, and
tastes grainy.
Yogurt and cheeses are
milk or cream, acted upon by microorganisms. By the way, while federal law has
standards for ordinary yogurt (and thus a health claim can be made), there is no
standard for frozen yogurt. It can have as little true yogurt as there is
Vermouth in the driest martini, i.e., a little waved over the top.
Milk was delivered to the consumer in glass containers.
According to the November 1939 Pencil Points, the square milk container of heavy
paraffin coated paper had just been developed.
We have a whole major
section devoted to the milk industry (
creameries) and transportation
( milk
trains).
Tomatoes were brought
over to Europe from Mexico about 1550, but mainly were considered ornamental
plants, like gourds are today. Soon afterwards Italians began to use them for
food. In America, they were considered poisonous, as they are a member of the
nightshade family. There is a wonderful short story that I assume is fictional,
about a plot to poison Washington by serving him some tomatoes. The cook/spy
then took his own life by a more effective method even as Washington was sitting
down to his meal.
In the mid-1830's, it
was realized that tomatoes were not deadly. Some promoter ate bushel loads
before an astonished audience (who or when I don't remember), but even then
there was reluctance. It was not until 1900 that tomatoes became popular,
probably as the result of Italian immigrants.
Pizza was introduced
around WWII, but the craze for it was a long time developing after that. In Earl
Stanley Gardener's Perry Mason mystery series, written between 1933 and 1970,
detective Paul Drake would always complain about having to work all night, and
having to living on food delivered to his office. It was always hamburgers,
which were cold and soggy by the time he got to eat them, followed by medicine
for indigestion. He never once ordered pizza (or for that matter, Chinese).
In the late 1800's,
George Crum, a Native American, was working as chef at a fancy Saratoga hotel.
He was an acclaimed cook, the favorite of such guests as Vanderbilt, but
whenever a guest returned a dish that wasn't to his liking, Crum made it a point
to cook up the worst concoction possible. One night, a guest continued to
complain about the french fries, and sent them back to the kitchen to be cut
finer. Crum sliced the potatoes as thin as he could, but to his surprise, the
guest was delighted with the crispy chips. The next day they appeared on the
menu as "Saratoga Chips" and within a few years were a national snack food.
According to Morgan (Symbols Of America), Cortes discovered the Aztecs
wearing popcorn as jewelry (remember corn was a New World plant). Supposedly
popcorn was served at the first Thanksgiving. During WWII, sugar shortages led
to a enormous increase in consumption of popcorn as a candy substitute, and the
tradition of eating popcorn during movies
started.
