The wonderful foods of the Golden Era

LizzieMaine said:

I loved chipped beef, but it was Buddig's, the kind that came in a plastic pouch. I'd eat it cold, just as it came from the pouch, and that was my lunch on many many days -- no toast, no bread, no sauce, nothing but the meat itself. I had the jarred salty kind a few times, but it wasn't the same.

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Ah, reminds me, that I always wanted to try stockfish!

I went back to the first page of this thread to see what prompted me to start it. I skipped the next five pages, so I hope I don't repeat myself. I do that a lot, though, because I haven't been creating many new memories lately.

Something I ate a lot of growing up, was canned biscuits, which are still available. Even now I think they're rather better than (most) homemade scratch biscuits. Nearly all of the homemade biscuits that I've eaten are heavy and tend to be rather greasy. I've tried making them myself and don't use lard (but cooking oil instead) with mixed results but at least they aren't really greasy. But I was told that my grandfather insisted on having biscuits in his lunch. Likewise, my wife insists that "ham biscuits" are the only ethnic food native to her culture she can think of. I dare not suggest any others, not that I can think of any.

There was mention early on of "fast food." While there have been many posts about drive-ins, meaning the kind with a carhop that brings out your food on a tray that hooked onto the car window, that wasn't thought of as fast food when I was little. It was just a "drive-in." I have no memories of menus but chances are, it would have been limited and included little more than hamburgers, french fries and milkshakes as well as soft drinks. The most exotic thing on the menu would have been french fried onion rings.

We had a drive in a block away from where I grew up, and it certainly wasn't fast food -- you went up to the window to order, and then sat in your car until they called your number over a PA microphone. And then you'd walk up to the window again to get your chow. The entire transaction between placing your order and getting your food might take fifteen or twenty minutes, because all orders were prepared fresh. The traditional menu for drive-ins here included the usual hamburgers and hot dogs, but also fish and chips and "fried chicken in a basket." All fried foods were deep fat fried, so the chicken was usually very crunchy and very dry. The first time we had KFC, it was a revelation -- we never knew fried chicken could be moist and juicy.

We never had a drive in here with carhops -- they were always walk-up window service. Many of the drive-in lots were gravel instead of pavement, so roller-skate service was never an option.

I think the real definition of fast food is a place where the food is cooked ahead of time in anticipation of orders rather than everything being cooked to order. White Castle and its clones were doing this in the twenties with hamburgers, but the chain lunchrooms of the Baltimore Lunch/Waldorf Lunch/Automat variety were doing it even earlier with their pre-cooked meals distributed from central commissaries for reheating at the restaurant.

Oh, the place I'm thinking of, just outside of town on the main road, had a gravel lot, too (partly paved with bottle caps), so there was nobody on roller skates. There was a roller skating rink just over the hill from there, as it happened, but I never once went roller skating. Some things in my memory are vivid but other things are totally absent. That was true while I was still in school, too. Anyway, I always thought the food, such as it was, was much better than that served in any fast food place, possibly because the buns were steamed (or seemed to be) and weren't wrapped, which tends to degrade the sandwich. Hamburgers that come in little cardboard boxes are a little better for that, but fast food hamburgers aren't all that bad.

None of the hamburgers in drive-ins or fast food places compare very well with hamburgers served even in a chain restaurant like Applebee's, which are usually twice as big and have more extras.

In one or another thread I had mentioned that bars are now practically family-friendly places, at least during the hours that children are likely to be out with their parents. That's certainly true of Applebee's. But I wonder about Hooters. I've never been in one, even though the closest restaurant is a Hooters.

You can actually get some pretty good food at fast food places these days -- I'd kill for a Popeye's spicy chicken po'boy right now, but there's only one Popeye's in the entire state, and it's a hundred miles away. And I'll gladly eat KFC until the last gnawed bone slips from my grease-laden fingers.

"Theme restaurants" seem like a modern thing, but they existed in the Era. It was very common for cocktail lounge-type places to be decorated with pre-packaged theme decor. The "beachcomber" type restaurants that heralded the start of the Tiki movement were done this way, but there was also a sort of pre-packaged "sophisticated/Hollywood" type of decor that you could buy out of catalogs. You could walk into a "lounge" in a small city and see walls covered in caricatures of celebrities a la the Brown Derby, and you might get the impression that these personalities had dined there -- but in fact, there were artists who made a good living churning out generic celebrity caricatures for sale in "decor packages" to cocktail lounges wanting to project a Hollywood/show biz image.

You could also buy generic "Italian Restaurant" decor packages, complete with red and white checkered tablecloths, basketed chianti bottle candleholders, and framed lithographs of the leaning tower of Pisa. Or "Greek" packages, which were very popular in independent lunchrooms, since many of these were run by Greek immigrants -- you'd see the same dusty photos of the Acropolis in dozens of little hole-in-the-wall places, and they all came out of the same catalog.

Without detracting from what you just said, I think small towns may have been a little more sophisticated than they are today. But this goes back a ways, probably from before 1950 and in some ways, well before then. There was style and it may have been something copied from a big city thing and not original in the least but it was still something, the sort of thing preservations like to have restored. Although this isn't what I'm thinking of, I have been in little restaurants with photos of important people (rarely movie stars) on the wall.

It's hard to say when it began or when it ended and in either case, it was unlikely it happened overnight. There was a time, or so I am led to believe, when relatively small towns had a relatively big hotel with a ballroom and live music, sometimes even with a traveling band (but probably not an orchestra). That was when people still went out for dinner and dancing or dinner and a show. Some towns, usually not really small towns, might have a theater with live entertainment. I've visited one or two and they were showplaces in more ways than one. One such place that I've visited was in Red Wing, Minnesota, a town of only about 16,000, twice what my home town was. That was in the days of vaudeville.

All that notwithstanding, it may not be a good argument for a small town being "sophisticated," but a road trip through even a place like West Virginia will yield a surprising number of very stylish houses. I always wondered who lived in those houses but I never found out. Whoever it was, though, surely had taste--and money.

The White Castle in my town had microphone/speakers on stands next to parking slots... you'd order and then "the girl" would bring out the order...

Growing up there was a Stewart's Drive In near us, but they, oddly, didn't serve you in your car - you went in and either sat at a table and had waitress service or could do take out (there might also have been an outside takeout window that you walked up to as well, but my memory is vague on that). And there were outdoor picnic tables that you could bring your takeout to and sit at to eat (and then throw your stuff away in garbage cans nearby). Based on the design, the place was built in the round, so I'd bet, at one time, they did do car service, but that had stopped by the time I was going to it.

The place had a very '50s look and feel (this was the late '60s / early '70s, so it wasn't "retro" just hadn't been updated since built) and the food was a step up from fast food overall. It was cooked to order, but when they were busy, I think they just threw a lot of burgers on the flattop and kept making fries to keep up with demand - so your wait time from ordering to getting your food varied and was actually faster when they were busy for the reason just noted. I also remember hotdogs and some sandwiches, but don't have a full memory of the menu. It definitely wasn't fast food in the way McDonalds was - pre-prepared food, systemized process, homogenous food (the Stewart's burger and fries varied a bit in size, taste, quantity, etc., from visit to visit).

I didn't go to it often as all "eating out" was a treat in my house. I do have one memory of my school closing early one day / or having a half day or something for some reason and my mom picking me up (I always took the bus to and from) and taking me to Stewarts for lunch. It was very out of the ordinary and has stayed with me as it felt fun and special. While I had none of the historical perspective I do now, even as a kid it was clear I'd be a future Fedora Lounge member because I remember thinking this place felt a bit like a step back in time versus McDonalds or, even, Friendly's and I liked that.

vitanola said:

"Correct Beer Glasses":

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Not all that correct, they misspelled "Weizen" (wheat).

The drive-in/through service-points at the european fastfood-restaurants are basically of course a good idea, but Mc Donalds, Burger-King and Co. are inconsequent. A clean Drive-through, without additional restaurant would be the real consquent thing, to me. Typically, the german parks his car, went in the restaurant, munches his food in less minutes and that's it. So, who really needs the drive-throughs, here?? Either only a restaurant, or only a drive-through.

But, the modern fastfood-chainstores could never really compete with all the other classic butcherys, bakerys, cafés, which you can find on every corner in the cities, here. Newer Burger-Kings, for example, already disappeared from city-centers, here. The people prefered always other food.

A drive-in restaurant as I have described, with "curb service," as it used to be called, tends to lend itself only to certain locations, as do other things. It simply won't work in town, although "the strip," which is still a town location, sort of, is perfect for a drive-in. I've never been in an European town or city that had a strip, although I certainly haven't been to all European towns (but the visiting was exhausting). It can work in a small town, generally somewhere just outside of town or, sometimes, out in the country somewhere. European urban locations as well as the villages tend to be cut and dried. You are either in the town or city or you aren't. There is no inbetween. In some places in the states, the development just goes on and on. You aren't really in town and you really aren't in the city. You're just between shopping centers, almost none of which have drive-ins. Overall, drive-ins depend on an environment that is "car-friendly."

There is no place more car friendly than the United States and yet there are few drive-ins these days. They are and were a unique marketing format, to put it one way, the same way diners were. Not only did they depend on a car-friendly environment, they also depended on local traffic, usually, meaning that interstates did nothing for drive-ins, and certain employment factors. Up until relatively recently, say 20 years ago, fast food restaurants as well as drive-ins and Dairy Queens, depended on teenagers and young adults as their source of labor but I don't that's so much the case anymore. On the other hand, it might also be possible that we have a slightly misconscrued idea of the distant past when we were just ten years old, that diners, drive-ins and drive-in movies were everywhere. Well, they weren't.

BlueTrain said:

Up until relatively recently, say 20 years ago, fast food restaurants as well as drive-ins and Dairy Queens, depended on teenagers and young adults as their source of labor but I don't that's so much the case anymore. On the other hand, it might also be possible that we have a slightly misconscrued idea of the distant past when we were just ten years old, that diners, drive-ins and drive-in movies were everywhere. Well, they weren't.

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Quite so. I'd estimate more than half the staff in our local fast-food joints is over thirty -- in part because of the aging demographic, and in part because today's teenagers are so overburdened with schoolwork, school activities, and school obligations that there's simply no time for an "after school job." I know that it's very near impossible when I'm looking for concession help to find teenagers who can work the schedule I need them to work, and I end up hiring people in their early twenties. One of my "klds" is 29.

It's one of those little things that gets overlooked, that is, the employment of teenagers. I'm not sure why it happened and for that matter, I am only assuming that it happened based solely on what I see with my own eyes. Minimun wage standards may have something to do with it and maybe teens don't even want to work in a McDonald's anymore, if in fact they ever did. My experiences with such things were in a college town environment and most of the employees, all but a couple, were part-time college students. I cannot recall with any certainty if there were high school students working there or not, meaning where I worked the whole time I was in school.

Likewise, I worked on a farm in Massachusetts the summer after I finished high school. It was a tobacco farm and that kind of tobacco (shade grown) needed a lot of hand labor. The leaves were picked by hand, with several passes through the field as the plants matured. Nearly all the summer employees were high school age boys and girls. The girls worked in the barns. I suspect the work is done by immigrants now.

And you know what? They sure talk funny in Massachusetts.

Small towns used to be, (pre-freeway), much more self-sufficient. They would have amenities which we now only associate with cities. Hotel, fine-dining restaurant, department store, theatre w/stage, clothing stores for men and women, hospital, etc. There might only be one each of these establishments, but the town would have them. An example of this can be seen in the Coen Bros. movie, The Man Who Wasn't There, 2001. Set in 1949 Santa Rosa, California, (nowadays one hour north of San Francisco), the town's department store, hotel, and one white-tablecloth restaurant all figure prominently.

There is probably a formula for calculating whether a town retains some vestige of this self-sufficiency. It likely requires the town to be small enough to not have attracted the national big-box stores and to be remote enough in time-distance from larger communities.

A town in Northern California that, (for now), seems to retain some of these features is Willits. Located on Hwy 101, Willits for most of its life has been a lumber mill town, although cannabis is making inroads. Its a couple hours north of Santa Rosa. It still has many of the amenities I listed above. Its one fine-dining place, Al's Redwood Room, has been around since 1901. While it currently serves Thai food, for most of its life it was a steak and Italian restaurant. A drive-in hamburger place that sounds like the one Lizzie grew up near is at the north end of town. It will likely fold soon as a freeway bypass will take the highway traffic around the town.

The typology of pre-freeway dining establishments traditional to towns in Northern California tended to be fall into similar categories. One white-tablecloth restaurant, (usually steak and Italitan), 2-6 diner/cafe/grills that served the sorts of inexpensive occidental food that Denny's has standardized, 1-3 inexpensive Chinese restaurants, (if the town was on the railroad or was a mining town). 1-3 drive-in/walk-in hamburger stands, (usually on the highway or close the one high school), and 1-3 other ethnic eateries depending on the settlement patterns of the last century. i.e. Punjabi, Basque, Cornish, Mexican.

LizzieMaine said:

You can actually get some pretty good food at fast food places these days -- I'd kill for a Popeye's spicy chicken po'boy right now, but there's only one Popeye's in the entire state, and it's a hundred miles away. And I'll gladly eat KFC until the last gnawed bone slips from my grease-laden fingers...

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The two KFC locations closest to our house suffer from the same two problems. First, they've somehow managed to regularly find the smallest chickens in the world for the meals they serve. Second, if they're still pretending to use the Colonel's "11 secret herbs and spices" recipe, they've replaced 10 of those ingredients with salt.

They finally opened a Popeye's location here last year. I'm sure it's no more an authentic representation of "Louisiana" cuisine than Taco Bell is an authentic representation of "Mexican" cuisine, but I like it.

That's an excellent description of a small town of the past, although by small, I'd have to say it would have been at least 5,000 in population. Other factors that you didn't mention might include what is going on in town besides general employment, such as if it were a college town. And it's proximity to a larger town, as well as other factors.

Towns have a somewhat different character depending on where it is; that is, in what part of the country. In some places, towns are crammed into a small space beside a river. In others, they have room to spread out. And so on.

I may have exaggeated my thesis when I said small towns used to be more sophisticated but "self-sufficient" may be closer to the trutch. But even there one has to be careful if you don't go back much before WWI. For instance, while there were no big box stores in my hometown in the 1950s, there were many chains and franchises. They were just small stores. Some, like the A&P and G. C. Murphy's were all that small but they would be by today's standards, I suppose. But there were certainly the men's shops and the lady's shops then, as well as jewelry stores, hardware stores and a few other independently owned stores. There was a bookstore for a little while but the place apparently didn't have the critical mass to support a bookstore. There was no newsstand, either. They're all gone now.

The problem my hometown had after I left (my leaving was incidental) was that the main employer left town. There were a thousand men who worked there until it closed in the 1970s. It didn't move overseas, though, it just went to Roanoke, Virginia. Same difference. However, the place somehow manages to support both a Wal-Mart and a Lowe's, which happen to be next door to one another, as well as a number of chain restaurants and hotels, none of which offer dancing and live orchestras. In fact, I don't know of any hotel anywhere that has a house band these days. The Commodore Hotel near Union Station in Washington used to host a pipe band one night a week in the bar next door but that wasn't what I had in mind.

Zombie_61 said:

The two KFC locations closest to our house suffer from the same two problems. First, they've somehow managed to regularly find the smallest chickens in the world for the meals they serve. Second, if they're still pretending to use the Colonel's "11 secret herbs and spices" recipe, they've replaced 10 of those ingredients with salt.

They finally opened a Popeye's location here last year. I'm sure it's no more an authentic representation of "Louisiana" cuisine than Taco Bell is an authentic representation of "Mexican" cuisine, but I like it.

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I'll take Popeyes over KFC any day. KFC always makes me physically or emotionally ill every time I eat it. Either I'm disgusted by the taste, or by the price per portions. I'm so thankful that a Popeyes opened up in the next town over late last Summer. It's 10 minutes further out of the way, but it's worth it every time. You'll never catch me complaining about their chicken.

BlueTrain said:

That's an excellent description of a small town of the past, although by small, I'd have to say it would have been at least 5,000 in population. Other factors that you didn't mention might include what is going on in town besides general employment, such as if it were a college town. And it's proximity to a larger town, as well as other factors.

Towns have a somewhat different character depending on where it is; that is, in what part of the country. In some places, towns are crammed into a small space beside a river. In others, they have room to spread out. And so on.

I may have exaggeated my thesis when I said small towns used to be more sophisticated but "self-sufficient" may be closer to the trutch. But even there one has to be careful if you don't go back much before WWI. For instance, while there were no big box stores in my hometown in the 1950s, there were many chains and franchises. They were just small stores. Some, like the A&P and G. C. Murphy's were all that small but they would be by today's standards, I suppose. But there were certainly the men's shops and the lady's shops then, as well as jewelry stores, hardware stores and a few other independently owned stores. There was a bookstore for a little while but the place apparently didn't have the critical mass to support a bookstore. There was no newsstand, either. They're all gone now.

The problem my hometown had after I left (my leaving was incidental) was that the main employer left town. There were a thousand men who worked there until it closed in the 1970s. It didn't move overseas, though, it just went to Roanoke, Virginia. Same difference. However, the place somehow manages to support both a Wal-Mart and a Lowe's, which happen to be next door to one another, as well as a number of chain restaurants and hotels, none of which offer dancing and live orchestras. In fact, I don't know of any hotel anywhere that has a house band these days. The Commodore Hotel near Union Station in Washington used to host a pipe band one night a week in the bar next door but that wasn't what I had in mind.

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Our town of 8,800 souls, a division point on the NYC railroad, a typical county seat on a river with a college had three hotels before the Great War. In those days it also had a sash and door mill, a chair and table factory, a manufacturer of industrial abrasives, a fur tannery, a worsted mill, a cotton mill, a plant that made men;s ready-to-wear, a manufacturer of stationary engines and lighting plants, a broom factory, a foundry, the railroad roundhouse and machine shop, the largest commercial nursery in the Midwest, the largest exporter of hothouse flowers in the Midwest, one of the largest flouring mills in the Midwest, a manufacturer of baking mixes, three hardware stores, five dry goods stores, a wallpaper store, a carpet and drapery store, five banks, seven grocery stores, two French Dry Cleaners, two pool halls, a cathouse, six restaraunts, two lunch counters, a screen door factory, a light plant, a gas plant, two telephone companies (NOT INTERCONNECTED), an amusement park, an immense Ice House, Three men's wear stores, two ladies wer stores, a Ford dealership, a Willys-Overland dealerchip, a Buick dealership, agencies for KRIT, Metz, and LuVerne automobiles, and a summer resort.

I grew up in a town of two thousand people which had three grocery stores, a full-service drug store with a soda fountain, a hardware store, a family clothing store, three churches, two banks, two-drive in restaurants, a lobster pound, a Western Auto, Maine's Largest Selection of Textiles, a lunchroom, seven gas stations, an alum-processing factory, a fertilizer plant, a Shell Oil depot, and the biggest deep-water port north of Portland.

Well, we had a Western Auto, too. But Vitanola's town sounds very much like our town in some ways, although the dominant industry was the railroad. There was also a Maidenform plant, no longer in operation, at least one sawmill, just outside of town, and it was also the county seat. We even had an airfield, currently the location of the county hospital. There were no doubt other doings in town I knew nothing about.

If one goes back far enough, probably at least before 1930 (or more likely, 1929), there were numerous small industries located around the state, speaking here of West Virginia, based on a review of a state directory of employment from sometime around 1910 or 1920. There were lots of mills, clothing factories, tanneries and so on. They were all small, of course. Only a few places in the state continued to have major industries, mainly along the Kanawa river near Charleston, and they were mainly chemical plants. The railroad yard that I mentioned was the location of two functions, one being locomotive maintenance, the other the manufacturing of cars (railroad cargo cars, that is). All gone now.

I don't think it would be accurate to say that small towns anywhere used to be more independent. They depended on outside markets for their products, either industrial, agriculture or fishing. They likewise depended on outside sources for what they didn't produce themselves. Before the Civil War, though, some may have been more independent in the sense that they interacted less with other places but the prime economic advancement of the country was dependent on transportation. It started with canal building, followed soon thereafter by railroads. The coasts were finally connected by railroads by the time of the Civil War. I don't think it changed much until after WWII when major roadbuilding made trucking competitive with the railroads.

What is true, I think, is that communities were more independent in the sense that in most places, they were more or less free of large and powerful outside interests that came to influence the local economy in subtle ways. Wal-Mart may be an okay place to shop but the store manager has little reason to be interested in local civic affairs and when you buy something there, the money leaves town the next morning on its way to Arkansas. The previous ways local economies worked still made people rich, but not halfway across the country, rather instead over on the other side of town where all the big fancy houses are. And that's why small towns most everywhere have a few nice houses.