Butter & Cream: A Week of Cooking Century-Old Recipes

Taking literally Michael Pollan's advice to not eat “anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food," The Globe and Mail's Wendy Leung spent a week eating like Canadians a century ago. The good: all her meals were homemade and organic. The bad: she consumed three-quarters of a pound of butter and experienced intense fresh fruit cravings.

So how did people eat 100 years ago?

Pure calorie consumption was the goal of eating before 1912, the year vitamins were discovered and people began eating for nutrients beyond fat. After days of cream-laced oatmeal, mayonnaise-heavy salads and buttery cakes, Leung started daydreaming about apples and cream-free salads.

But there were some perks to her old-fashioned diet, like getting into the habit of cooking breakfast every morning and using only fresh, unprocessed ingredients. Of the meals she cooked, a favorite was Bubble and Squeak, "a classic dish that combines leftover mashed potatoes with boiled greens, fried onions and cold roast beef."

We'll pass on the boiled pork aspic and take seconds of the Bubble and Squeak, please.

• Read the article: Heavy on the butter: A Week of Following Century-Old Recipes

Do you have any favorite recipes your great-great-grandmother would have eaten?

Comments (14)

I should consider myself lucky that my great-great grandmother lived on a farm and had regular access to fresh, in season food. Eating the way she did would by eeirly close to the way I eat now, with far more pecans and not an avacado in sight.

I have an entire handwritten and typed translation, cook book compiled from farm recipes from my Great-Great and Great Grandmother (Grandy and Ninny, respectfully) Ive had to do some updates on ingredients that are not as healthy... But other than that, it is a prized possession.

Michael Pollan said not to eat anything your grandmother wouldn't recognize, not "eat exactly like your great-grandmother." I think that message got a little muddled. That said, it was an interesting experiment. I think it missed a few key points though... at least from stuff I've read, people didn't necessarily cook from recipes all the time and some of that was probably special occasion food. Depending on your class or location you'd eat differently. Also I think often it would be the midday meal that was the heavy one and supper at night would generally be leftovers.

I think it's an interesting experiment but it's super heavy-handed. I think there is a ton of room for a more nuanced look at a historical diet.

The cookbook I have from my grandmother, who lived on a farm is amazing, and utilizes the nose to tail concept of protein. Tattered and battered, it's still a treasure.

Three quarters of a pound of butter a week = bad? Sez who?

Not those of us who are on the Paleo or Primal diet, that's for sure.

My kids have started eating turnips, and popcorn in milk, since reading the "Little House" series.
As for my own family history, I'm more likely to make something reminiscent of my grandmothers than actual recipes since I dont think they had many written down. My mom did transcribe a few things from her mother though, and I use those. Or specific food 'traditions'.

I agree with becka_. While historically, the 19th century diet was not kind to vegetables in formal eating, I think that when it came to an overworked farmwife, if there was a way to eat fresh vegetables in hot summer (when running a woodstove was hell), she would use it.

There are a lot of rural farm recipes that I got from great-grandmothers that could not have appeared out of thin air in the 1930s - things like cream and vinegar dressing for fresh lettuce, fresh tomatoes with sugar and cream, radish and butter and salt sandwiches (okay, there is a dairy theme here, but I come from dairy farmers).

My grandmother has told the story of a common dinner during the Great Depression (and after) for their family of 13 (11 kids plus 2 parents). She would take a large galvanized steel washtub down to the root cellar, fill it with potatoes, add two quarts of canned vegetables, a quart of canned "sauce" (i.e. canned fruit, usually rhubarb sauce or applesauce), and that would all get cooked up into dinner with maybe a little meat, or more commonly, fish. Bread and butter would round out the meal.

I think it's important to keep in mind that people in rural America were burning about twice the number of calories (or more) of the average sedentary American today.

People in Victorian cities? The wealthy and middle-class anyway? Not so much. But manual labor was an everyday occurrence for the average American pre-1912. If you're burning 7,000 calories a day, it's important to eat at least that many.

I'm not defending consuming that much butter (although over the course of a week, I would think that most people who like butter and/or eat a lot of bread consume at least a quarter pound per week), but the Victorian diet was much more nuanced than Fannie Farmer would have you believe.

I love the comment about the kids eating food found in the Little House books--every time it snows I tell my husband about "snow candy" and he rolls his eyes.

I am going to link to my blog about cooking from old cookbooks because I think it is relevant here. And, I have not posted there for a long time, thought I plan to: http://classiccookery.blogspot.com/

classiccook, I grew up reading (and still re-read now) all of my Little House books...I had the cookbook on permanent loan from my public library and went as far as getting a rabbit to stew from my German butcher. I made the snow candy as well! It is a wonderful read of what many struggling claim families ate as well as what more prosperous families ate (Wilder's). Homes were mostly lacking in overall heat back then and people did much more physical labor than now, hence the calorie load. Another good read is, Little Heathens (life on an Iowa farm during the Depression years...last name of author is Kalish).

The bubble & squeak I know of has no meat - potato, cabbage, onion, a little cheese...

I assumed that Pollan meant chemical ingredients and prepared foods, not food that wasn't accessible to people living where my ancestors lived, or food they couldn't afford. If your ancestors were 19th century Norwegians, they probably didn't eat avocados and mangoes; I don't think Polan means we shouldn't either.

Don't forget that staying warm without central heating burned a lot of calories. Fat was good for that. People also used smaller plates and did not eat large meals three times a day.

I recently ate lunch at a traditional German restaurant. It was divine! We shared many appetizers: Spatzen/spatzle, chicken livers, Bavarian red cabbage salad, pickled beets, smoked trout, pumpernickel bread, potato pancakes. My gall bladder was NOT happy! I agree, I forgot the exercise to burn off all the rich food: walking alongside the cart to town, chopping wood, carrying water, scrubbing my clothes, etc.

My mother recently visited Germany after a couple decades away, and the entire pattern of eating in the hometown is still quite different. Lunch is the main meal, there's an afternoon coffee and cake break (cakes are generally not very sweet) and there's a whole different rhythm their still.

The closest I get is making rouladen for dinner :) And walking to the market of course.