Reply #48: 20th century mass cookbooks used cheap, brand name ingrediants in lots of foods -

[haele]

It was assumed that the cook wanted to make the "fancy" high class meals and offered brand substitutes for what used to require the family or a special pantry or still-room servant to make the preserves for the house. Evaporated milk, margerine, candied fruit, canned veggies - home-made or hand made from the farm tastes different than what you got at the store. And cookbooks tended to create "traditional tastes" - what is now considered a dessert used to actually be a type of meal for over the winter months when fresh food wasn't easily availible.

Mincemeat and Fruitcake are primary examples. Mincemeat was origianlly a type of pickle - a way of preserving a good, leftover cuts of meat (or the not so good leftovers, like suet, the stewed up fatty and gristly bits)for lunches and other snacks for protien weeks later. If you wanted a light but filling pocket meal to take with you to work or on the road, you'd make a pie of it and instead of turning it into a pasty, with preserved greens and starches (beans or turnips), include preserved fruit, nuts, and spices during the winter months. Putting dried or preserved fruit also made it seem more a treat as well as a way of keeping the immune system healthier during a time when the average person did not have access to fresh fruits and veggies.
Almost everyone would have some form of preserved fruit for year-long use, whether as preserves, candies, pickle, or baked into some form of cakes to be able to create a mobile food source. It has been long understood that eating fruit staved off debilitating health problems such as scurvey or ricketts.
Early fruit cakes were generally bread-like, flavored and sweetened generally sweetened with spices and honey or treacle to cut the bland bread taste and highlight the preserved fruit's taste.
Moist cakes were difficult to make and used only for special occasions,when the produce was harvested, the average cook would make drier cakes for everyday use; bread-like, mostly used as breakfasts or afternoon snacks. The older recipes, like stollen breads or various raisin/apple breads indicate this. For parties, dry fruit bread would often be stewed with milk into a pudding mold and served with cream. If you knew you were going to have parties over the winter and wanted more of a cake texture as a special treat, for your guests, you would make your moist cakes during the harvest, wrap them in alcohol soaked cheesecloth, and then pack them in an airtight container to preserve them until you were ready to serve them later on.
As for using alcohol - in the winter, if you didn't have refrigeration, when you set up your preserved foods, you needed to soak most of what you were going to be eating from November through April in alcohol to keep it from going bad. Especially if you were going to start out with fairly fresh produce during August/September.

Sorry for the long-windyness, but I went into this little bit of preserving history to commisserate the current state of holiday foods. If you used something like the Betty Crocker Cookbook or the back of a cirtron container to make your mincemeat or fruitcakes, you would be getting 1930's or 1940's era recipes that reflected a world where housewifes who were trying to make the house party look "higher class" than they really were while making due with rationed or mass-produced cheap ingredients. Since sugar was hard to come by, the sweeter you could make it - using candied ingredients, the higher class it would seem. At that time at least.

If you had a 19th century or earlier recipe book, you could see a drastic evolution of cookery and food preperation - even with the same recipes you see in a Betty Crocker book. (real Marachino cherries come to mind...) And that evolution wasn't necessarily for the better.

Haele