What first caught my eye about the “American Century Cookbook: The Most Popular Recipes of the 20th Century” (Clarkson Potter, $35) was its author, Jean Anderson. Her “New Doubleday Cookbook” (written with Elaine Hanna; Doubleday) has been my kitchen bible for years.
Anderson’s name recognition aside, I was intrigued by the book’s mission: to tell the story of cooking in the United States over the past century in prose, pictures and, most of all, recipes–more than 500 of them.
Virtually every page offers fascinating tidbits: from a vintage advertisement for a $39.95 Sears, Roebuck kitchen cabinet (complete with 50-pound-capacity flour bin) to a brief history of M&Ms (named by and for Forrest Mars, son of the inventor of Milky Ways, and Bruce Muries, son of a Hershey’s CEO).
A timeline woven through the text has hundreds of entries, beginning with the 1900-1910 “mainstreaming” of Jell-O and ending with the 1998 opening of the Jell-O Museum near Rochester, N.Y. Along the way we learn that Horn & Hardart opened its first Automat in Philadelphia in 1902 and closed its last one in New York in 1991.
As for the recipes, they are as retro as Mamie Eisenhower’s million-dollar fudge and FDR inaugural-day favorite Mongole soup, a sherry-spiked amalgam of green pea and creamed tomato soups. And they’re as current as foccacia and compote of leek and wild mushrooms.
“So much happened this century–more than in all the others combined–in the way of cooking equipment and recipes,” Anderson said from Chapel Hill, N.C.
Here are a few more tidbits to whet your appetite:
– Nachos were invented by Ignacia “Nacho” Anaya, chef at the Victory Club in Piedras Negras, Mexico, a favorite lunch spot for day-tripping women from San Antonio and other Texas border towns in the 1940s and ’50s.
– The name Spam–from “spiced” and “ham”–won its creator $100 in a name-that-canned-meat contest sponsored by Hormel in the 1930s.
