Book Review: A Square Meal – Part I: Foods of the ‘20s and ‘30s – SLIME MOLD TIME MOLD

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Full Title: Book Review: A Square Meal – Part I: Foods of the ‘20s and ‘30s – SLIME MOLD TIME MOLD
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URL: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/04/04/book-review-a-square-meal-part-i-foods-of-the-20s-and-30s

Highlights

Delicatessens and cafeterias, which we take for granted today, were strange new forms of dining. The reaction to these new eateries can only be described as apocalyptic. Delicatessens were described as “emblems of a declining civilization, the source of all our ills, the promoter of equal suffrage, the permitter of business and professional women, the destroyer of the home.” The world of the 1920s demanded an entirely new vocabulary for many new social ills springing up — “cafeteria brides” and “delicatessen husbands” facing down the possibility of that new phenomenon, the “delicatessen divorce.” The fear was that your flapper wife, unable to make a meal in her tiny city kitchenette, or out all day with a self-supporting career, would feed you food that she got from the delicatessen, instead of a home-cooked and hearty meal.
In all of these cases, the idea was that new ways of eating would destroy the kitchen-centric American way of life — which, to be fair, it did. Calling a deli “the destroyer of the home” seems comical to us, but they were concerned that these new conveniences would destroy the social structures that they knew and loved, and they were right. We think our way of life is an improvement, of course, but you can hardly fault the accuracy of their forecasting.
The writer George Jean Nathan claimed that before the 1920s, there existed only eight basic sandwich types: Swiss cheese, ham, sardine, liverwurst, egg, corned beef, roast beef, and tongue (yes). But by 1926, he “claimed that he had counted 946 different sandwich varieties stuffed with fillings such as watermelon and pimento, peanut butter, fried oyster, Bermuda onion and parsley, fruit salad, aspic of foie gras, spaghetti, red snapper roe, salmi of duck, bacon and fried egg, lettuce and tomato, spiced beef, chow-chow, pickled herring, asparagus tips, deep sea scallops, and so on ad infinitum.”
this sandwich craze led directly to first the invention of special sandwich-shaped loaves with flattened tops, and then to sliced bread, which hit the market in 1928.