Turtle Soup

Turtle soup remains a delicacy around the world, particularly in China and Singapore, and it was a mainstay of fine dining in the U.S. from the colonial era through the mid-20th century. Sometimes described as a clear consommé with large diced turtle meat, other times a tomato-based broth thickened with a medium-dark roux, it was nearly always served with a glass of sherry to add to the dish. Turtle soup was once so prestigious that it was served at Abraham Lincoln's inauguration, and it was a favorite of President William Howard Taft. It also reliably appeared on menus throughout the country, including New York’s storied Delmonico’s. 

Though the dish’s popularity was long and its pedigree high, its decline was quick, caused by a confluence of factors. Prohibition meant the sherry that provided a key seasoning flourish was no longer available. The rise of factory farming consolidated America’s meat production to beef, chicken, and pork, due to the easier processing methods involved with those meats. Anthropomorphic turtle characters appeared in the media and created an unintended perception shift against the idea of eating turtles. And finally, the green sea turtles the dish was originally made from were classified as endangered in 1973. Turtle enthusiasts switched to the more abundant snapping turtle, but turtle soup was all but nonexistent as a fine dining item by the 1980s. 

Creamed Chipped Beef on Toast

Creamed chipped beef on toast was a breakfast food, also known as S.O.S. — an acronym for a profane (and even less appetizing!) name for the dish. This meal was made from sliced dried beef (a sort of bovine-based textural equivalent of pepperoni or salami) simmered in white gravy until softened, and then ladled over a piece of toast. The ease of preparation and long shelf life of its protein made it an ideal military ration — it appears in U.S. Army cooking manuals from as early as 1910 — as well as an easy meal for households seeking frugality. This made S.O.S. particularly popular in the 1930s and ’40s during the Great Depression and World War II, when conservation was front of mind. In the middle of the 20th century, S.O.S. was a standard menu item at most diners, but it began fading with the rise of nutrition consciousness around the 1970s — perhaps because it’s neither a health food nor as indulgent as the comparable biscuits and gravy. 

Limburger Sandwich

Another 20th-century diner staple, the Limburger sandwich was a classic deli sandwich (read: a cold sandwich) of Limburger cheese and raw onion on rye bread. Limburger cheese was one of the five main cheeses produced in the U.S. during the late 19th and early 20th centuries (in addition to Swiss, brick, cheddar, and American cheese), and it was known to a point of infamy for its foul aroma. It was the subject of gags by Charlie Chaplin and the Three Stooges, and earlier, Mark Twain compared its odor to that of a corpse in his short story “The Invalid’s Story.” 

Considering the already off-putting smell of Limburger cheese, the question may not be why a sandwich of raw onion and Limburger cheese is no longer popular, but rather, why was it ever popular? Perhaps its sharp taste was enough for the appeal, odor be damned. Or maybe eating it represented a sort of machismo similar to the spicy wings of today (with pungency instead of heat). In any case, changing tastes and the odorless convenience of sliced American cheese relegated the Limburger sandwich to a strictly regional rarity in parts of Wisconsin.  

Vinegar Pie

Vinegar pie is commonly placed in the category of “desperation pie” (or “make-do pie”), a Depression-era dessert made with basic pantry ingredients substituting for traditional ingredients that may have been unavailable or too expensive. Other examples of “desperation pie” include eggless sugar cream pie, green tomato pie, and oatmeal pie, which mimicked custard pie, apple pie, and pecan pie, respectively. In that context, the acid from the vinegar pie’s namesake ingredient would be a resourceful replacement for lemon.

The origin of vinegar pie wasn’t the Depression, though. A recipe for it appeared in Colorado’s The Herald Democrat as early as 1905, in cookbooks such as Maud C. Cooke’s Three Meals a Day starting in 1892, and in the 1874 compendium The Home Cook Book of Chicago. The dessert was around enough that perhaps there was more to it than sheer utility. In recent years, James Beard Award-winning chef Chris Shepherd revived vinegar pie at his Houston, Texas restaurant Underbelly, and it became the restaurant’s signature dish, with an appealingly contemporary presentation. But Underbelly closed in 2018, and with it, the vinegar pie reverted back to obscurity.

Milk Toast

A popular New England breakfast dish in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, milk toast may date as far back as the Middle Ages when bread soaked in liquid was known as “sop.” The contemporary version was made by pouring warm milk over bread that had been toasted, buttered, then cubed. The dish could be served sweet or savory, with the addition of sugar, vanilla, and cinnamon, or salt, pepper, and paprika. The word “milquetoast,” meaning a timid or ineffectual person, was derived from a 1924 cartoon character named Caspar Milquetoast, who was named for this mild, quintessential comfort food.

Pork and Beans

Canned versions of this classic American side dish can still be found on grocery store shelves, but it was once popular on the breakfast table, served alongside johnnycakes, a type of fried cornmeal pancake. In the 1886 cookbook Practical Housekeeping: A Careful Compilation of Tried and Approved Recipes, author Estelle Woods Wilcox recommends adding a few tablespoons of molasses and salt pork to a pot of beans and baking it for six hours or longer. Noting, “This is the Yankee dish for Sunday breakfast,” the author recommends the pork and beans be baked the day before, left in the oven all night, and browned in the morning, though they could also be eaten cold.

Codfish

Whether breaded and fried as cakes or balls or served with cream on toast, codfish was once considered a popular breakfast food in American homes and luxury hotels alike. On its 1914 breakfast menu, New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel offered codfish in cream for 50 cents, while Fannie Farmer’s 1916 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book included recipes for creamed salt codfish, fish balls, and salted codfish hash. While those recipes called for picking codfish “in very small pieces, or cut, using scissors,” salted and cured shredded codfish was also packaged and advertised as a “dainty” and “sweet-flavored fish” whose price was “naturally high” because of the limited quantity of high-quality cod.

Meat Hash

Breakfast hash has been around for centuries and is still enjoyed today, but it was particularly popular during World War II, when meat rationing required home cooks to get creative. Traditional home-cooked hash was made of “chopped cooked meat” and cooked vegetables (usually potatoes and onions) mixed with broth and fried on the stove. While it was served at lunch and dinner as well, hash for breakfast was an economical way to use up dinner leftovers and stretch those precious quantities of rationed meat by adding flavorful fillers. In wartime ads, Armour and Company, the first company to produce canned meat, reminded Americans that “our war needs make it vital now to save every bit of food left over,” and offered a free booklet called “69 Meat Ration Recipes” that included breakfast hash recipes using a variety of fresh and canned meats.

By the 1920s, it’s estimated there were about 125,000 soda fountains serving up fizzy concoctions across the U.S. Egg creams were a defining staple of this era, especially in New York City — Louis Aster’s alone was so popular that he’s said to have sold up to 3,000 of them a day. But the egg cream’s popularity waned with the decline of soda fountain culture. By the 1950s, mass-marketed bottled and canned sodas had become the norm. Increasing car ownership and postwar suburbanization prioritized roadside eateries, and as independent drug stores were overshadowed by big chain stores, soda fountains became too costly to install and maintain. By the 1970s, soda fountain culture was all but obsolete, and so was the egg cream.

The egg cream remained a symbol of nostalgia for many New Yorkers and classic Americana aficionados for years after its demise. In 1991, the drink appeared in an episode of Seinfeld. Sesame Street boasted about Mr. Hooper’s egg cream recipe in episodes in 1978 and 1984. In 1996, New York music legend Lou Reed even titled a song “Egg Cream” on his album Set the Twilight Reeling. Traditional soda fountains have become a rarity, but in New York City, older establishments such as Ray’s Candy Store in Manhattan and the famed Jewish deli Russ & Daughters still serve classic egg creams. Modern interpretations have also popped up, as nostalgic eateries such as the Brooklyn Farmacy and Soda Fountain, built in an original 1920s apothecary, have put the quintessential New York beverage front and center.

Ancient Corn Has Been Compared to Dry, Raw Potatoes

Corn's ancient ancestor was teosinte, a grasslike plant that grew kernels in small, tough shells. Cobs weren’t peeled like they are today; the outer shells had to be hammered open, and the kernels are said to have had a starchy texture that resembled dry, raw potatoes. The transformation from teosinte to modern corn was a triumph of selective breeding by Indigenous communities in Mesoamerica. Researchers believe corn was first domesticated around 6,000 to 9,000 years ago in the Balsas River Valley of southern Mexico. Over time, the vegetable was cultivated to be much longer and have bigger kernels, a softer outer layer, and, of course, more sugar content, resulting in the golden sweet corn that’s now a staple crop around the world.

Peaches Used to Be Harder and Less Sweet

This popular tree fruit is beloved for its sweet, juicy profile, but it once had hardly any flesh — and what it did have was less juicy with a more earthy taste. Peaches originated in China; fossils indicate that they even predated humans. Originally, wild peaches were greenish and much smaller. The pit took up most of the space, the skin was waxy, and they had 4% less sugar than today’s varieties. Over time, peach cultivation traversed continents and cultures, each refining its best traits to give us the fuzzy, rosy treat we love today.

Bananas Were Once Nearly Inedible

Bananas are easy to peel, nutritious, and sweet, but in their original incarnation they were tougher, stockier, and full of hard, black seeds. In fact, instead of the banana itself, people once ate the tree’s flowers or shoots. There are now more than 1,000 banana varieties, but the one we’re most familiar with is the Cavendish banana. It was named after English nobleman William Spencer Cavendish, the 6th Duke of Devonshire. Though researchers have traced the domesticated banana’s origins to Papua New Guinea, the Brits were key figures in the variety’s cultivation into the banana found in most grocery stores year-round.

Champagne Pioneer Dom Pérignon Was a Benedictine Monk

Though he’s best known today for being the namesake of a famous fancy Champagne brand, Dom Pérignon was once a humble Benedictine monk living in 17th-century France. Pérignon was born in 1638 in France’s Champagne region, and though some sources erroneously credit him with inventing sparkling wine, he undoubtedly helped improve its production methods while living at the Abbey of Hautvillers. Pérignon made his way to the monastery in 1668, and at the time, Champagne’s wines were deemed inferior in color, quality, and flavor to products from the more popular wine regions of Burgundy and Bordeaux. 

Pérignon worked to improve the region’s winemaking reputation — he invented a press to make clear wine from dark grapes, and reintroduced corks as reliable seals for bottles. Ultimately, however, it was Pérignon’s work on a process known as “méthode champenoise” (roughly translating to “the Champagne method”) that solidified his legend. He sought to better understand how the region’s cold weather impacted wine, and how the buildup of carbon dioxide caused certain bottles to explode. Pérignon went on to produce fizzy wines that the French were initially less fond of, but proved to be extremely popular with his English customers.

George Washington Ran a Successful Whiskey Distillery

The history of whiskey long predates the United States, as the first written record of any whiskey liquor dates back to 1324 in a medieval manuscript known as the Red Book of Ossory from Kilkenny, Ireland. Over the next several centuries, the liquor expanded internationally, becoming one of the most popular alcohols in America. In 1797, one very famous American opened up a whiskey distillery of his own: the first President of the United States, George Washington. 

After stepping down from the presidency earlier that year, Washington was encouraged by his plantation manager James Anderson to use the vast expanse of his Mount Vernon estate to open a whiskey distillery. Anderson believed doing so would be a wildly profitable endeavor, and he was right. A stone house large enough to contain five whiskey stills was built on the founding father’s estate in October 1797, and by 1799 the distillery was producing nearly 11,000 gallons of the liquor. That’s a sizable chunk larger than the 650 gallons produced on average by other Virginia-based distilleries at the time, making Washington’s distillery among the largest in the nation. Mount Vernon produced whiskeys flavored with additives such as cinnamon, not to mention some apple and peach brandies as well. The distillery forwent the bottling process, instead delivering the drink to local merchants in 31-gallon wooden barrels. Unfortunately, Washington passed away in 1799 right as the business reached its apex, and the distillery ceased operations shortly thereafter.

American Doctors Prescribed Alcohol During Prohibition

From 1920 to 1933, the manufacturing and sale of alcohol was strictly forbidden in the United States — except in the world of medicine. With Americans desperate to acquire libations by any means necessary, a clever workaround was devised by the medical industry. During Prohibition, the U.S. Treasury Department authorized doctors to write prescriptions for alcohol, which in turn led to liquor being prescribed as a “cure” for ailments ranging from indigestion to cancer. 

These boozy prescriptions cost around $7 (roughly a little over $100 today), half of which was paid to the doctor to write the prescription, with the rest going toward actually acquiring the medicinal pint. Even British statesman Winston Churchill took advantage of this loophole, acquiring a doctor’s note for alcohol use during a visit to America in 1932. His doctor Otto C. Pickhardt wrote, “Churchill necessitates the use of alcoholic spirits especially at meal times,” allowing the Brit to skirt past America’s Prohibition laws and imbibe as he pleased. The prescriptions proved to be a massive moneymaker for the medical industry before Prohibition was repealed in 1933 by the 21st Amendment.

What’s So Old-Fashioned About an Old Fashioned?

The old fashioned whiskey cocktail, usually referred to as just an old fashioned, is considered by many mixology experts to be the original cocktail. In fact, the 1806 definition of a “cock tail” is the basic recipe for an old fashioned, minus the orange peel, which came later. In the late 18th century, when imported wine was expensive in the U.S., domestic rye whiskey became the drink of choice, and its harsh taste could be mellowed with the addition of water, sugar, and bitters. The simple recipe was designed to make low-quality whiskey tastier. Of course, this predecessor of the modern cocktail didn’t get its name until decades after its creation. As new versions of the whiskey cocktail (and other mixed drinks) became popular, it’s likely that bartenders and enthusiasts of the original version would make the distinction by referring to the “old-fashioned” recipe.

The Golden Age of Cocktails

Starting around the middle of the 19th century, Americans fell in love with cocktails. During this “golden age” — which lasted until Prohibition began in 1920 — a number of mixology guides were published, most of them written by well-known bartenders who worked in popular clubs and hotels. These celebrity bartenders had fans and rivals and turned mixology into a form of entertainment. “Professor” Jerry Thomas, as he was known, is considered the “father of American mixology” and was the first mixologist to take an oral tradition and put it in writing. His book, How to Mix Drinks: Or, the Bon-Vivant’s Companion, was first published in 1862 andincluded directions for mixing over 600 drinks, many of them acquired on Thomas’ travels through Europe and America. The result was a compilation of traditional and obscure cocktails, including the Philadelphia fish-house punch, Baltimore eggnog,  Italian lemonade, as well as Thomas’ own signature creations, such as his flaming Scotch cocktail, the blue blazer.

Shaken, Not Stirred

Prohibition may have ended the golden age of cocktails, but the popularity of mixed drinks has shown staying power. Cocktails remained popular in various forms ever since, from the speakeasies and cocktail parties of the Prohibition era, to the tiki bars of the 1940s and '50s, to the three-martini lunches of the '60s. A decline occurred in the late '60s and '70s, followed by a resurgence beginning in the 1990s. Modern pop culture icons such as James Bond, Carrie Bradshaw, and Don Draper have helped immortalize their favorite drinks (a vodka martini, cosmopolitan, and old fashioned, respectively), and savvy restaurateurs have reinvented Prohibition-era speakeasies. On social media, celebrity mixologists and “cocktail influencers” introduce the next generation of cocktail enthusiasts to exciting new trends, such as extreme beverages that burn, cool, or tingle, contemporary twists on the classics, and inspired mocktails that bring all the flavor without any of the booze. Shaken or stirred, frosty or aflame, cocktail culture endures.