Select the History Cookbook tab on Cookit! for quick educational references. Enjoy food facts and cooking videos from different time periods including:
Reference
Skip the introduction to 4:00 minutes into the video, and listen to the enjoyable lecture by Dr Megan Elias about the history of lunch.
Culinary Historians of Canada, dedicated to researching, interpreting, preserving and celebrating Canada’s culinary heritage, offers an online newsletter, annoucements of events, and a list of historic kitchens in Canada including:
1860s New Cooking Gadgets
- Eggbeater with rack-and-pinion movement
- Chuck wagon 1866
1860s New Foods
- Perrier water
- Canned pork & beans
- Canned soup
- Tabasco Sauce
- White Rock Spring Water
- Peerless Wafer
- Cold breakfast food (Granula)
- Gulden Mustard Fish & Chips (England)
- Folgers coffee (pre-roasted & ground)
- McDougall flour (English) in US
- Peanuts as snack food
- Text printed on “Conversation” candy
- Fleischmann’s compressed yeast
- Eggs Benedict (Delmonico, 1860)
1860s New Food Companies
- Arm & Hammer
- Cargill
- Bassett
- Schrafft
- DelMonte
- Bay Sugar Refining
- Royal Baking Powder
- Chase & Sanborn
- Goodman’s Matzohs
- Ghiardelli
- Nestle
- Tobler
- Armour meat-packing factory: 1868
- Chicago Union stockyards: 1865
- Louis-Dreyfus, grain trader
1860s Food Industry Beginnings
- Pasteurization – sterilization by heat & pressure: 1864
- Demonstration of starch produced by photosynthesis
- Roller mills (stone)
- Flour mill with middling (bran & outer grain layer) purifier
- “Patent” flour (double ground)
- Mechanical refrigerator: 1861
- Ice machine: 1865
- Ovaltine testing
- Salmon cannery: 1864
- Tin can with key opener
- Thinner steel for cans
- Machine-cut cans
- Calcium chloride added to boiling water, speeding canning time
- US Pretzel bakery 1861
1860s Farming Progress
- US Department of Agriculture Homestead Act
- Marsh reaper
- Check-row corn planter
- Massachusetts Agricultural College (UMass)
- British Food & Drugs Act
- Union starves South during Civil War
- Wheat futures
- Wide-scale cattle theft (rustling)
- Steam trawlers import fish to England (thus, “fish & chips”)
1870s New Foods
- Saccharin
- Cubed sugar
- Synthetic vanilla
- Rootbeer
- Wheatena
- Nestle’s Infant Milk Food
- Milk chocolate
- Ice cream soda
- Commercial production of margarine
- Japanese beef-eating taboo ends (c. 1870)
- Chewing Gum from chicle
- Tone Brothers [spices and coffee]
1870s New Cooking Gadgets
- Can opener with cutting wheel.
- Four-tined silver fork, beginning the end of eating with knife.
- Square bottomed paper-bags.
1870s New Food Companies
- Lipton
- Pillsbury & Co.
- F. & J. Heinz
- Quaker Mills
- Hills Brothers
- Grand Union Tea Co.
- Confectioner’s Journal
1870s Food Industry Beginnings
- Milking machines
- Glass milk bottles
- Orange crates
- Pressure cooking in food canning: 1874
- Frozen meat shipments: 1877
- Mechanical cream separator
- Porcelain rollers make roller-milling flour (wheat germ removal) standard practice
- William Underwood first to register U.S. food trademark (Red Devil)
1870s Farming Progress
- Bison herds disappearing
- Large US agricultural exports
- European farm land shortage
- Quantity banana imports to US
- Long-distance cattle driving
- Barbed wire fences
- Vast US acreage for farming and cattle ranches
1880s School of Cookery
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1880s New Cooking Gadgets
Hand cream-separators
Lenox China
Ball-Mason jars introduced [invented in 1857]
1880s New Foods
- Malted milk
- Powdered pea and beet soups
- Evaporated milk
- Aunt Jemima Pancake Flour
- Coca-Cola
- Moxie
- Dr. Pepper
- Thomas’s English muffins
- Oscar Mayer wieners
- Salada Tea
- Tetley Tea
- Log Cabin Syrup
- Morton’s salt
- Canned meat and fruit in stores: 1880
1880s New Food Companies
- McCormick Spices
- R. T. French
- Maxwell House
- B. H. Kroger
- ConAgra
- White Lily Foods
- Lever Brothers
- Calumet Baking Powder
- Diamond Crystal Salt
- American Cereal
- Manischewitz
- Pillsbury-Washburn Flour Mills
- L’Ecole de Cordon Bleu
1880s Food Industry Beginnings
- Packaging of grain commodities
- Efficiencies in railroad meat shipments
- Pea-viner and podder machine
- Commercial aluminum production
- Ice-making plants start replacing ice-cutting industry
- Self-service restaurant
- Vending machines for gum 1888
1880s Farming Progress
- Long cattle-drives end as railroads enter Texas
1890s New Cooking Gadgets
- Electric range (though unreliable)
- Aluminum saucepan
- Chantilly silver pattern
1890s New Foods
- Minute Tapioca
- Condensed soup
- Fig Newtons
- Canned pineapple
- Knox’s Gelatin
- Shredded Wheat
- Canada Dry Ginger Ale
- Grape Nuts
- Cream of Wheat
- Postum
- Jell-O
- Tootsie Rolls, 1896
- Swans Down Cake Flour
- Uneeda Biscuits
- Entenmann bakery products
- Pepsi-Cola
- Wesson Oil
- Cracker Jacks
- Bottled Coca-Cola
- Crepes Suzettes
- Oysters Rockefeller
- Published brownie recipe
- US brunch fashionable English lunch
- S&H Food Stamps
- Public school hot lunches
- Beef Stroganoff
1890s New Food Companies
- Quaker Oats
- Beech-Nut
- Beatrice Foods
- National Biscuit
- Baker’s Coconut
- Smucker
- Hobart
- American Beet Sugar
1890s Food Industry Beginnings
- Bottle capping machine
- Vacuum flask
- Automatic bottle-blowing machine
- Electric coffee mill
- Diner
- Full page food ad in national magazine (Van Camp in 1894)
- Coca-Cola Company bought for $2,300
- US pizza parlor
- 57 Varieties ad campaign
- Campbell adopts red & white labels (inspired by Cornell football uniforms)
1890s Farming Progress
- US gasoline tractor
- Butterfat measurement
- Wheat futures hedging
Great historic cooking posts about the 1900 farm at the Living History Farms in Urbandale, Iowa (just North of Des Moines)! At least four time periods are represented at the working kitchens. Below are photos of the 1870s kitchen and the 1850s cabin.
From President Washington’s chef Hercules to the birth of Rice-a-Roni, NPR offers online podcasts of Hidden Kitchens
Hearthcook.com created by Pat Reber — An extensive reference guide to locate museum cooking classes and demonstrations, historic recipes and more.
Try the Google ngram for words used in print. Great to discover kitchen trends. The chart is based on millions of books scanned by Google Books. Thought provoking, but as with all statistics, please treat it with a grain of salt. Like
Jan Whitaker writes this fabulous blog on restaurants from the 1700s onward. Click here to read Restaurant-ing through history.
Eva Eliscu as an expert on the history and customs of Western dining. Eva is an etiquette expert for the 21st century. Instead of simply telling us to “mind our manners,” she explains where manners came from – why we dine the way we dine.
By reading the newsletter articles by Bruce Kraig, President of the Culinary Historians of Chicago you will find many interesting sites, including
Key Ingredients: America by Food.
Do you want to share your interest in food history? Become a member of a Culinary History organization — Boston, New Orleans, Washington DC, Austin… See a list at the Culinary Historians of Boston website.
The Food Timeline
A great reference. PDF will open in a new window.
Open hearth cooking created by Pat Reber
Extensive reference guide to locate museum cooking classes and demonstrations, historic recipes and more.
Food Timeline created by Lynne Olver
Excellent. Scholarly. Recommend.
Alton Brown
Besides the scientific aspect of cooking, Alton Brown frequently and clownishly reenacts historic cooking and the history of foods. Alton Brown Fan Page: see left column “INDEX: Title” for Good Eats scripts.
