For a modest price and with a fraction of the work required before, you could host guests and impress them with exotic delicacies, spectacular techniques and unusual dishes. In a weird way, people were coming back to the subtleties of the Middle Ages. And, most importantly, they bet on exoticism. Spam was able to take advantage of the fact that soldiers had grown used to the weird taste of their canned meat. Jell-O, particularly, was able to capitalize on the low prices of their products and the nostalgia women felt toward the aspics prepared by their grandmothers in the Victorian era. So food manufacturing giants published sponsored cookbooks showcasing different ways to use their products by the dozen. It is in this sort of mindset that gross post-war food appeared: for mothers to not feel bad for buying pre-prepared foods, they had to use them in more inventive ways.

By adding an egg to the process, they could feel satisfied with their purchase of the cake mix. And wives felt that serving ready meals to their families would make them bad wives.Įver wondered why you have to add an egg to Betty Crocker cake mixes? At one time, you only needed to add water, but consumers at the time felt that they couldn’t really take credit for making a cake if all they had done was add water to a mix. Even though women were no longer stuck at home, putting food on the table every night was still her responsibility. However, food manufacturers noticed that while the times were changing, mentalities were staying the same. Cheap and quick to prepare, products offered by companies like Heinz, Jell-O and Hi-Liner were perfectly adapted to this new reality. Soldiers came back from the war with a newly acquired taste for their products, and women were integrating the workplace in droves. So what could they do with surplus and, more importantly, how could they convince people to eat their subpar products rather than real, fresh food? Thankfully for them, the zeitgeist was on their side. This is when the still popular jellied salads began to appear.Īfter the war, all the companies that had made tons of money feeding the army had no intention of slowing down production. It’s cheap, aesthetically pleasing (by the standards of the day), and relatively easy to prepare. Jellied dishes become the perfect food: they allow moms to create dishes formerly associated with the elite while using leftovers and canned food. All these new inventions make a homemaker’s job easier, and the main goal becomes to make everything clean and efficient. After the end of the First World War, most homes have electricity, and an increasing number of families have access to a gas stove and a refrigerator. Near the end of the 1800s, industrialization is booming. Gelatin is more affordable than ever, seasonal vegetables are available all year-long thanks to canning, and same goes for exotic ingredients, such as pineapple,e which quickly became a favorite in the West. The Industrial Revolution also brings in a number of new culinary techniques. Cookbook authors go back and get inspired by trends of yore, and subtleties make their way back into pop culture. As historian Nicola McDonald explains in his book Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Essays in Popular Romance, “these dishes and others like them force the diner to acknowledge that, even if only apparently in jest, has the power to conjure life itself and, by implication, death.”įor the main meal, of course, the host wants to impress. Chefs for the nobility and royalty had to be ingenious and creative, coming up with dishes like pork roasts made to look like hedgehogs, or the famous example of Philip the Good’s chef, who in 1454 encased a full, live orchestra in a pie crust. At a time where rich lords appropriated for themselves most of the nutritional resources of the land, to prepare a feast was not just a reason to eat with friends: it was a way to flex and show off all the money and power we had.Ī popular culinary trend at the time were subtleties, or the art of giving food another appearance, or create a setting for the dish. Like most of the ills of modern man, the origin of these culinary monstrosities can be traced back to the Middle Ages.

Disgusting medieval foods