The one commercial product that led to the demise of home cooking

[rooftop1000]

While I realize that home cooking isn't dead, it seems there are a lot of skills that were taken for granted 50 years ago that would get you a blank stare now. I am thinking specifically now about White Sauce.

I am sure there are cooks in large swaths of the country that know how to make white sauce (gravy) or as a cassarole base but there are so many that don't....I am nominating Campbells Cream of Whatever as a skill killer.

What else?

tracey

[weinoo]

Wonder Bread.

[Alcuin]

Boneless skinless chicken breasts. For many people, it seems that bones in their meat are a foreign substance and cutting up a chicken is a major task.

[vengroff]

Gum-stabilized bottled salad dressing.

It takes two minutes to whisk a nice vinaigrette together, and you get to choose which combination of oil and vinegar, and what herbs, spices and/or aromatic to use every time. But 99% of home cooks never do it.

[gfweb]

Campbell's or Kraft are the great Satan

[slkinsey]

The Pill?

Once the two-income family became the norm, there was far less time available for cooking and alternatives had to be found.

[Darienne]

I would have to be starving before I'd cook/eat anything with cream of whatever soup in it. It was the basis for much of the cooking in my family home. Yech.

Asked the DH for his input and his first thought was Bisquick and pancake and other baking mixes.

We were not long married(52 years this March) and one weekend I had run out of Bisquick to make biscuits. Then a light dawned. Maybe there was a recipe in my one cookbook to make biscuits. Made them from scratch that very day. Oh...is that how they taste? Yum.

Still I blame the advent of McDonald's for most of the North American world's culinary ills.

[Panaderia Canadiense]

Down here, it's the Microwave Oven and its partner, the Frozen "Convenience" Dinner. Most people here will choose a frozen precooked dinner (we need a *shuddering* smilie) over a traditional 3-course stovetop meal, and it represents a huge loss of technique and also of recipes. There are now people here who think that Cannas in the garden are purely for ornament - they don't know that the leaves are what humitas and quimbolitos are supposed to be wrapped in, and that's why grannie planted them in the first place.

[SylviaLovegren]

Canned soups, I'd say. Because all the Home Ec departments came up with "casseroles" that just called for slopping a bunch of food together with the canned soup "sauce". Taste buds across the land were corrupted, frazzled home cooks liked that they could make something "elegant" (after all, it had "sauce"!) and it was easy as pie. Cheap, too.

[Norm Matthews]

Historically speaking, I'd think TV Dinners played a significant roll in killing old time cooking.

[Mjx]

Wonder Bread.

I'd extend that to supermarket bread in general.

It is the weirdest stuff, to anyone who's grown up with home-baked/bakery bread, but to those who grew up with it, it is clearly normal. I'm basing this on the contrast in attitude between my sister (and many others I know) and myself to supermarket bread; I grew with bakery bread, and find supermarket bread slighty offputting in flavour and texture – sweet, squishy/compactable – and prefer to avoid it, but to my sister, who grew up with it, it is archetypical 'bread'.

[andiesenji]

I couldn't point to one particular thing that "killed off" home cooking. I think it goes back much further than 50 years as I believe it began with home refrigeration which allowed the advent of frozen dinners, then "instant" mixes, went a step further and then accelerated with the invention of the microwave oven and so on.

I was a young wife fifty years ago and there was already a plethora of quick foods, TV dinners, instant mixes for various things and the refrigerated biscuits in the pop-open cylinders.

I couldn't understand the attraction for the latter because I could mix up a batch of biscuit dough and have them in the oven in ten minutes, and still can. The same goes for cornbread, of which I have written extensively in other threads.

There are people who still choose to purchase and cook fresh foods on a daily basis but the pace of life in modern, industrialized countries has reached the point that it is very difficult for most.

Fifty years ago people were predicting that by this time we would have much more leisure time as automation became more extensive. Instead people are working longer hours (at least here in the U.S.) and seem to have less and less leisure time and are working more years until retirement.

[Porthos]

Gum-stabilized bottled salad dressing.

It takes two minutes to whisk a nice vinaigrette together, and you get to choose which combination of oil and vinegar, and what herbs, spices and/or aromatic to use every time. But 99% of home cooks never do it.

That assumes that everyone likes vinaigrette. I see this statement from time to time here at eGullet. The problem is I detest vinaigrette. I like blue cheese and ranch.

[rotuts]

all of the above thrived because families no longer had 'time' after the WWII

and BTW (not to start an argument ) blue cheese and ranch are very easy to make.

i do it all the time.

now if you insist on making your own mayo/buttermilk, welll

Edited January 28, 2012 by rotuts (log)

[rotuts]

in re-thinking this:

back in the Day when i started cooking (early junior high US) i used to make Coq a Cambell's: chicken spit breats or thighs (on the bone ) with Cambell's CR.of mushroom and chicken with one can of dry red wine. Id add some fresh herbs and then that went into the oven until the skin was brown and the 'sauce' reduced.

nobody complained. and Id lived in France and Spain for several years and ate the regular stuff there, say middle class. this was late '50's

two things: Television and less interest in eating with your family. I loved TV dinners when I was 7 and my mother never bought them ( rarely ) we never had those TV dinner trays which i think were vital to the experience. But I had them a few times a year a loved them. talk about effective marketing.

but I wonder how much sodium there was in the cambells then and those TV dinners.

i bet a lot less than now.

Edited January 28, 2012 by rotuts (log)

[ScoopKW]

Refrigeration.

Only now are some of us going back to the locally-produced, seasonal food that EVERYONE once had to eat. There was no choice, after all. Your food came from a nearby farm. And that's that.

[Lisa Shock]

I can't name one thing, but, what I will say is that I believe that most of it is due to the corporations that helped feed the troops in WW2 and who wanted to keep sales growing following the war. So, rather that scaling back operations, they looked for ways to market processed foods to the home front and began relentless advertizing campaigns to convince housewives that real cooking was too difficult for them to manage on their own.

[annabelle]

This will all be solved when none of us can afford our utility bills and have to return to heating and cooking by fire.

I dislike these kinds of threads since my own mother, now 79 years old, has always hated to cook, but she did it anyway. We ate in nearly every night of the week and went out to a moderately priced restaurant once or twice a week. Still, we had hot breakfasts, packed lunches and a home-cooked dinner every night during the week even after my mother went to work full-time. We also so had a kitchen garden and fruit trees that my brothers and I were to tend to when we were old enough to do so.

The "good old days" never were for women like my mother and her sister who dislikes cooking as well, but still did it since she had six children and a husband with a crummy job.

[rotuts]

My Mother might be similar to yours. She is no longer with us but would be 100 this year.

she did not like to cook but as a family we had a 'home cooked meal' every night.

she told me in her later year thats not what she wanted to do but did it

she wanted to spend her time in her own garden. a garden she did on her own with no 'instruction'

granted she lived as I did with my family in the SF bay area, we had lots of fruit trees etc.

her goal was to cook and have a lot of left overs, which went into the over with saved tin foil for several days.

but we ate together every night.

[DanM]

Chicken nuggets and other glued together meat products. Is it really that hard to roast a little chicken for dinner? And if you really want fried chicken fingers, it is not that hard to dredge slices of chicken, dip them in egg, and then coat with bread crumbs. I can probably make 2 lbs in a minute.

Another is canned crescent rolls, biscuits, and similar pastry products. This stuff is pure lazyiness I cannot remember what I was watching but the Mayor of Cininatti was visiting an after school program at a civic center and was praising the work they were doing... teaching kids to roll up hot dogs and processed cheese slices in crescent rolls. I felt bad for the kids and pissed at the city for letting kids eat this crap.

[alex james]

It is surely the availability of home refrigeration plus the existence of semi-edible pre-cooked "food" in the supermarkets. Thus those (married or thereabouts) ladies who thought that they had to cook (because of maternal/cultural influences) but were no use at it could revert to "convenience" foods. A century ago,that was impossible. So now cooking is for the hobbyist - me for example.

And there continues to be the problem (in the UK at least which is where I am posting from) that the vast majority of the population have no, or limited perception, of decent food. Such people eat garbage from birth and do not appreciate or are unaware of the good stuff.

I speak as a victim - I was well into my twenties before I realised that food was anything more tham fuel. Most folk never get beyond that point. So they eat garbage with no awareness of any alternative.

Most regrettable but not all bad. Do I want more folk competing for my supply of Dexter beef? Do I f##k!

Edited January 29, 2012 by alex james (log)

[Porthos]

now if you insist on making your own mayo/buttermilk, welll

I do make home-made mayo.

FWIW I do cook almost all meals from scratch and have for 45 years. Notable exception: Costco sells ready-made carnitas and carne asada that is very tasty.

[kayb]

Got to put one plug in for "cream of." I made a chicken pot pie at least once a week when my kids were small; a cup or so of shredded or diced chicken, a can of Campbell's Cream of Chicken Soup, a cup of grated cheddar cheese and a bag of frozen mixed veggies, plopped between two Pillsbury pie crusts.

Fast forward a few years, and Daughter No. 3, now grown, asked for one. In the interim, I had gravitated away from "quick and dirty" cooking and to more "artisanal," if you will, dishes, with local, fresh ingredients. So I made one with fresh carrots, corn and green beans; meat from a roasted organic bird; good cheddar (as opposed to supermarket brand) and a bechamel made with a combo of homemade chicken stock and heavy cream. And homemade pie crusts.

You know what? It wasn't THAT much better than the "cream of" version. Ditto for a homemade version of the canonical holiday green bean casserole with cream of mushroom soup.

So a can of cream of chicken soup usually resides in my pantry, and a two-pack of Pillsbury pie crusts in my freezer, against the day the kid wants another chicken pot pie. Beyond that, I have little if any use for the Campbell's stuff of any variety, except for one can of Golden Mushroom at the holidays.

[ChrisZ]

I think it's a much more complex question than simply identifying one product.

I am a huge fan of the author Bill Bryson, my two favourite books of all time were written by him ('a short history of nearly everything', and 'at home').

In his biography - "The life and times of the thunderbolt kid" he is essentially writing about what it was like to grow up in the 1950's, and he discusses the impact of refrigeration and processed foods on the average family. He quotes an article from Time magazine published in 1959:

"A few years ago it took the housewife 5 1/2 hours to prepare daily meals for a family of four. Today she can do it in 90 minutes or less - and still produce meals fit for a king - or a finicky husband".

It wasn't any one product that changed everything, it was an overall cultural change in attitude to technology. Technology was embraced simply for the sake of it - if something was considered new, it was assumed to be better. Bryson happily gives the example of experiments in delivering mail by rocket - wildy impractical, not cost effective, but they did it because they could! And in his other books, such as 'at home', he talks about the revolution that was processed cheese - when it was first developed it cost more than 'real' cheese and was considered a gourmet delicacy!

There were a number of technological innovations, such as ice, refrigerated railway cars, and believe it or not the can-opener (canning didn't really take off until someone figured out how to open the cans easily, which took decades), that were a lot more influential than any individual food product.

[IowaDee]

Bill Bryson is a god in this house. I agree with anything he writes, even if I haven't read it .