what did people snack on back in the old days?

green papaya · Dec 14, 2009

like back in the 1840's - 1890's

what kind of food would a person have available like

fast food of the day? chips, candy , etc?

they must have been very hungry doing all that manual labor

what would they eat while taking a break?

what would the native americans have eaten? flat bread or something

I wonder because people these days have it so easy getting food, also after watching the movie Jeremiah Johnson trying to survive up in the mountains during winter with barely enough food.

Foofoogal · Dec 14, 2009

rock candy, jerky, biscuit and molasses?
http://www.worldwar1.com/dbc/hardtack.htm
Hardtack. yummy....

they had a lot of other baked goods and delicacies but if you mean on the go.
Plum pudding. All kinds of goodies and dishes to boot to cook them in.
Candied fruit, figs, oranges, apples.
I want to go to an old fashioned Christmas place after this thread.

ThesFlishThngs · Dec 14, 2009

I picture a jar of peanuts in the shell kept close at hand.

vitanola · Dec 14, 2009

Well, in the cities one would have hot-corn sellers. "Murphies" (cold baked potatoes, usually served with a bit of salt) were common, Meat pies were known, and quick-lunch wagons could be found in industrial areas, but really, in those days more eating was done at table and less "on-the run", as regularly eating between meals was widely believed to spoil the digestion.

Bill Taylor · Dec 17, 2009

green papaya said:
like back in the 1840's - 1890's

what kind of food would a person have available like

fast food of the day? chips, candy , etc?

they must have been very hungry doing all that manual labor

what would they eat while taking a break?

what would the native americans have eaten? flat bread or something

I wonder because people these days have it so easy getting food, also after watching the movie Jeremiah Johnson trying to survive up in the mountains during winter with barely enough food.

Fast food - there wasn't any such thing
Breaks - they didn't exist
1840s to 1890s -don't know other than historical data
But:
I started to school in 1937, and for the most part, snacks didn't exist, except perhaps for a bottle of coca cola or a candy bar maybe once every few weeks. Eating was done at meal time, period. I was elevated from 1st grade to 2nd grade in 1937 as that was the year the 12th grade was added and all students in school at that time were moved up one grade(states added the 12th grade at various times during the 1930's, starting with New York and New Jersey in about 1931and some states in the south not until the mid 1940's. Actually, I think California was also one of the later states (in the 1940's) to add the 12th grade as population wise it was a very small state at that time.

One thing I remember about that year is my school teacher brought a Hershey Candy Bar to school every Monday, and each day she would break off one of the little squares to eat at recess time and wrap the bar back up for the next day. It would take her 10 or 15 minutes to eat that tiny little square. That is definitely savoring one's food.

Mostly I walked home for dinner at noon, but when the weather was bad, our cook packed a lunch pail for me to eat at school. It usually consisted of three biscuits cut open and a piece of sausage inserted in each, two or three hard boiled eggs and a freshly made fried pie (peach was always my favorite). Sometimes it would still be a little warm by noon. It was expected I would drink water from the water fountain. The lunch was packed in a Molasses pail. I don't think the little bags of potato chips existed then, only the big bags and they were not often seen. I was a little embarrassed because some of the kids actually had sandwiches made with STORE BOUGHT bread, which I wanted so badly. Alas, our cook would not allow store bought bread into her kitchen, so I had to put up with home made bread, biscuits or cornbread every day. It was not until the mid 40's, during the WWII years, that those old habits started slowly changing. Although even in the 1940's when I was in high school, snacks were not the usual fare. I graduated from high school in 1948. There was no school cafeteria; that didn't come about until the mid 50's, long after I was out of school.

As an addendum, my wife, who was in the grade ahead of me, just advised me that sausage was a guy thing, and she always got sliced ham between her biscuits and usually an apricot preserve fried pie. And there it is, after 77 years and 55 years of marriage, still trying to one up me.:eusa_doh:

Bill Taylor

Miss 1929 · Dec 17, 2009

Cities ALWAYS had street food vendors!

In New York, you could get pretzels, bagels, hot roasted chestnuts, hot garbanzo beans (chick peas) in a paper cone, popcorn. Probably lots of other stuff.

Of course, in other cultures, like Asia, there have always been lots of street food vendors, and people snacked as much as they can afford. This thread I guess relates more to the North American/Western European people? I know in Mexico there have been people selling tacos on the street since well before the conquest.

dhermann1 · Dec 17, 2009

Peanuts

The Civil War was fought almost entirely on peanuts. Well, almost. There's a great old song called "Goober Peas" (which is what southerners called them in those days. Hence the candy called "Goobers"). The words go, "Goodness how delicious, eating goober peas!" They would have been unshelled, in a bag made of cloth.
Southern soldiers had a harder time nourishing themselves. Often they would walk along eating kernels of hard field corn right off the cob. You could call it a snack, they would have called it rations.

Marc Chevalier · Dec 17, 2009

.

Fresh fruits and dried fruits. Dry sausages. Cheese. Dried peas. Nuts, as many here have said. Dry bread.

.

Marc Chevalier · Dec 17, 2009

Bill Taylor said:
Fast food - there wasn't any such thing
Breaks - they didn't exist
1840s to 1890s -don't know other than historical data
But:
I started to school in 1937, and for the most part, snacks didn't exist, except perhaps for a bottle of coca cola or a candy bar maybe once every few weeks. Eating was done at meal time, period.

All of which point to why practically no Americans were obese back then.

.

Tiller · Dec 17, 2009

In Brett's Holmes series Holmes yells at Watson for bringing Humbugs to a stake out during The Adventure of the Six Napoleons (Lestrade is also disappointed since Holmes won't let him smoke during the stake out lol ). Humbugs are a kind of candy. Whether they actually had Humbugs in 1899 though I have no idea.

Paisley · Dec 17, 2009

Eating smaller meals and having a nutritious snack between meals helps keep you trim.

LizzieMaine · Dec 17, 2009

Marc Chevalier said:
All of which point to why practically no Americans were obese back then.

.

The snack food industry as it exists today really is an invention of the postwar world -- pre-war, snack products like chips and such were very small-time products: there were no national producers of potato chips, for example, until the late forties. Prior to that, they were all made by small, locally-owned companies with limited distribution -- and if you didn't live within the distribution area of one of these companies, you might encounter them only when you went to a fair or a carnival. With postwar consolidation of many of these small local companies -- and the heavy marketing of such products on television from the fifties onward -- came the national taste for chips, puffs, and other such things.

The most popular salty snack of the pre-war era was packaged salted peanuts. Planters' began putting shelled, skinless peanuts in small glassine bags for a nickel in 1910, and this may have been the first nationally-distributed non-candy convenience-oriented snack food -- the sort of thing you could pick up at any store counter.

Foofoogal · Dec 17, 2009

Fort Smith Arkansas near where I am has a big Planters plant. I can find all kinds of vintage Planters stuff around here.

fftopic:

R.A. Stewart · Dec 17, 2009

This takes me back. Not to the 1840's-1890's (I'm not quite that old) but to the 1950s and 60s. My first thought on seeing the thread was that, in general, I remember there being a lot less snacking and what I might call grazing when I was growing up. Drinking, too, at least during the day, was more something you did at a particular time--a meal or break--or at a drinking fountain. I'm not sure what people of past generations would have made of us with our travel mugs and water bottles that so many of us lug around all the time.

~Rich

(Since I'm pretending not to be all that old, I won't mention the hadrosaur fritters. They were good though. Mmm. But I won't mention them.)

Bill Taylor · Dec 19, 2009

LizzieMaine said:
The most popular salty snack of the pre-war era was packaged salted peanuts. Planters' began putting shelled, skinless peanuts in small glassine bags for a nickel in 1910, and this may have been the first nationally-distributed non-candy convenience-oriented snack food -- the sort of thing you could pick up at any store counter.

During the 1930's and WWII 40's, if you could swing the extravagance, was to buy a 5 cent package of Planters Peanuts and a 5 cent bottle of Coca Cola and pour the peanuts into the coke bottle. It would "fizz up" something fierce. Usually what I got out of that was lots of choking from swallowing the peanuts whole when trying to drink the coke.

Bill Taylor

Chas · Dec 19, 2009

Coke, Pepsi, Canada Dry & Clicquot Club.

I recall candy cigarettes with a candied red tip to look like it was lit. Wickedly un-PC. Ya gotta love it.

DutchIndo · Dec 20, 2009

Bill Taylor said:
Fast food - there wasn't any such thing
Breaks - they didn't exist
1840s to 1890s -don't know other than historical data
But:
I started to school in 1937, and for the most part, snacks didn't exist, except perhaps for a bottle of coca cola or a candy bar maybe once every few weeks. Eating was done at meal time, period. I was elevated from 1st grade to 2nd grade in 1937 as that was the year the 12th grade was added and all students in school at that time were moved up one grade(states added the 12th grade at various times during the 1930's, starting with New York and New Jersey in about 1931and some states in the south not until the mid 1940's. Actually, I think California was also one of the later states (in the 1940's) to add the 12th grade as population wise it was a very small state at that time.

One thing I remember about that year is my school teacher brought a Hershey Candy Bar to school every Monday, and each day she would break off one of the little squares to eat at recess time and wrap the bar back up for the next day. It would take her 10 or 15 minutes to eat that tiny little square. That is definitely savoring one's food.

Mostly I walked home for dinner at noon, but when the weather was bad, our cook packed a lunch pail for me to eat at school. It usually consisted of three biscuits cut open and a piece of sausage inserted in each, two or three hard boiled eggs and a freshly made fried pie (peach was always my favorite). Sometimes it would still be a little warm by noon. It was expected I would drink water from the water fountain. The lunch was packed in a Molasses pail. I don't think the little bags of potato chips existed then, only the big bags and they were not often seen. I was a little embarrassed because some of the kids actually had sandwiches made with STORE BOUGHT bread, which I wanted so badly. Alas, our cook would not allow store bought bread into her kitchen, so I had to put up with home made bread, biscuits or cornbread every day. It was not until the mid 40's, during the WWII years, that those old habits started slowly changing. Although even in the 1940's when I was in high school, snacks were not the usual fare. I graduated from high school in 1948. There was no school cafeteria; that didn't come about until the mid 50's, long after I was out of school.

As an addendum, my wife, who was in the grade ahead of me, just advised me that sausage was a guy thing, and she always got sliced ham between her biscuits and usually an apricot preserve fried pie. And there it is, after 77 years and 55 years of marriage, still trying to one up me.:eusa_doh:

Bill Taylor

That was very interesting thanks ! It is one of those glimpses of the past I am always interested in.

what did people snack on back in the old days?

green papaya

One Too Many

Foofoogal

Banned

ThesFlishThngs

One Too Many

vitanola

I'll Lock Up

Bill Taylor

One of the Regulars

Miss 1929

My Mail is Forwarded Here

dhermann1

I'll Lock Up

Marc Chevalier

Gone Home

Marc Chevalier

Gone Home

Tiller

Practically Family

Paisley

I'll Lock Up

LizzieMaine

Foofoogal

Banned

R.A. Stewart

Familiar Face

Bill Taylor

One of the Regulars

Chas

One Too Many

DutchIndo

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what did people snack on back in the old days?

One Too Many

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One of the Regulars

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