Disappearing foodways.

[JRinPA]

All I can Tormato is if you feel young again and decide to have a go at it, be selective and careful of splinters.

Ok

50 years, soylent green, number one answer on the board.

Chicken pot pie, a thick greasy dish made with dark meat and very thick, soft noodles.

Meat pie, that is whatever baked in a shell, pastry style.

Dumplings are a biscuit dropped in on top of the pot of chicken stew.

Streudel is something very time intensive to make and is getting less common.

Plenty of options for pizza, but who needs to buy pizza when you can make your own. Yes I buy the mozz and the pepperoni at the store.

From scratch, yeah I consider pizza made from scratch even though I buy the cheese. Heating Ellios was not "from scratch".

If fermenting alcohol allowed human population to reach its current population density, was that a good thing? Bad yeast. Very bad yeast. Yeast should only be used for pizza dough.

[worth1]

Townsend did a video on this type of small beer making to make water safe to drink.
Hardly any alcohol at all.
People back then didn't have a clue as to what was going on.
It just worked.
It's not like the kids were getting trashed or anything.

[karstopography]

Ethanol has 7 calories per gram. Carbohydrates, sugar and starch, 4 calories per gram. Fats, 9 per gram. Turning part of the harvest into an alcoholic beverage preserved it in an era with no refrigeration or reliable canning and was an important source of calories to get people through long winters, not to mention the whole making water safe to drink angle.

https://www.iflscience.com/bread-is-as- ... ohol-67805

Yeast bread has ethanol in it, up to 1.9%. Anyone that has ever eaten bread made with yeast has partaken of alcohol.
Soy sauce has up to 2% ethanol.
Even orange juice has ethanol in it.

No one added it, the yeast did.

[worth1]

Some of the sponges I've made for bread had some serious lovely alcohol smells to them.
I read an article years ago about elephants getting trashed on year old oranges that converted to alcohol.
I've had them myself in orange groves in Arizona years ago.
Yes you can get a buzz on old oranges left on the tree that turned to alcohol.

[karstopography]

Some of the sponges I've made for bread had some serious lovely alcohol smells to them.
I read an article years ago about elephants getting trashed on year old oranges that converted to alcohol.
I've had them myself in orange groves in Arizona years ago.
Yes you can get a buzz on old oranges left on the tree that turned to alcohol.

I’ve seen Cedar Waxwings get completely trashed on fermented loquats. Stumbling, falling over drunk.

Noah(Genesis 9:21) got trashed after the flood, who can blame him having gone through that experience!

One idea for a trip someday is to go to different countries and regions and sample their homebrews and local rather ancient traditions of alcohol making. Normandy with famous Cidre and calvados would be high on the list.

My son has had Chacha, the Georgian Pomace brandy. It’s so vile, that it’s good.
https://eatthistours.com/georgian-chach ... e%20spirit.

[bower]

Just spinning back to dumplings and whatever did they use before baking powder: grandmother had cream of tartar and baking soda, no baking powder in their house before 1949.

Almost every household brewd some sort of weak beer to drink and I've read they used the natural yeast to bake with.
This beer wouldn't be anything like we know of today.

Well my grandmother had her own yeast as well. Barm they called it. You couldn't buy yeast.
She made her own vinegar too, with a 'vinegar plant'.

I don't know if they did any brewing, but I do celebrate it as the, ahem, foundation of civilization.
The cream of tartar is actually a natural product, made from the accretions on wine barrels. Gotta be good stuff....

[JRinPA]

Late summer around here you can see once in a while a buck get drunk eating a pile of apples like that. He'll chase off the other deer that want some.

[JRinPA]

Trying to clear out the pantry, I just opened a can of
Comfort Creek Foods
Dumplings and Chicken

and the picture looks more like what I would chicken pot pie noodles. but a thin clear broth with diced chicken breast.
made by crider inc, stillmore GA

[Tormahto]

I know it's not as long ago as you were thinking, but here are some things I remember from the 1980s and 1990s that seem rare these days:

- Cherry pie made with home-canned sour cherries (it's a lot different than anything from a store mix, and one of my favorite foods ever); FYI, they're supposed to be brown (not bright red)
- Homemade cookies that aren't super fancy
- Homemade cookies that aren't approaching gooey
- Any pizza besides pepperoni (sure, they kind of still exist, in small numbers, but they're very conservative by comparison)
- Miracle Whip (I imagine it's still out there, but I haven't witnessed anybody eat it in since possibly something like 2003; maybe once or twice since then)
- Caramel apples
- Anyone who makes pie crust with shortening (while it's probably unhealthy, it is super easy, and the crust tastes good); nowadays, everyone seems to use butter or lard (which make a totally different crust; there are better alternatives that are closer, though, but I forgot what they were)
- Cantaloupe that looked and tasted pretty great (although garden-fresh was still better)

Cherry pie: even better made from fresh-picked sour cherries! We did this one time and the pies were delicious, but it was an insane amount of work (picking and pitting the cherries, then making the filling), so I'll probably never have one again in my life.

Cookies: The Nestle "Toll House" chocolate chip cookies. Grandma's ice box oatmeal cookies. Chocolate cookies with peanut butter chips.

Pizza: I don't think we have this pepperoni-only problem here in the East. Do you mean at restaurants or in the grocery stores?

Miracle Whip: My mom, who is in her late eighties, is their most loyal customer. It doesn't have much grocery store shelf space any more and is down on the bottom where it's hard for her to reach.

Caramel apples: Oh, how I love these, but I haven't had one in probably fifteen years at least. The grocery stores used to put the bags of Kraft caramels next to the apple display in the produce department in the fall. We would make them once a year, and my mom would say "now don't pull your fillings out!" every time we ate them. I made them myself a few times as an adult and probably still would if they prompted me with the bags of caramels by the apple display. (None of my fillings ever came out.)

Pie crust: Crisco pie crust was the absolute best, before they changed the Crisco formula to eliminate (almost) trans fats. It still makes pretty good pie crust, better than the alternatives I've tried. Unfortunately, it's getting hard to find at a reasonable price.

Cantaloupes: The normal-looking round cantaloupes in the grocery store year-round now are pretty terrible around here. Luckily, for about a month in early summer, we get "Athena" cantaloupes from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and they're fantastic.

Same here with caramel apples, likely about 15 years ago (at the age of about 50). I bought one at the state fair, remembering childhood times of going yearly to the fair, and late in the evening all of us would get a caramel apple as the last thing we did, just before leaving. I'm wondering if I'll get one this year (at 65), and wondering what the price will be.

The supermarkets sell caramel apples at that time of the year, and caramel apple "kits" to make your own, that have additional treats to be be rolled in. But, it wouldn't be the same as the caramel apple at the fair.

If I remember correctly, the blue candy apples were the ones to worry about damaging one's teeth on.

[worth1]

Something I've never liked are those blasted candy and caramel apples.
The the stuff was too sweet for the apple inside.
Never had one from the fair or carnival but maybe once.
But they did look pretty.

[Tormahto]

Trying to clear out the pantry, I just opened a can of
Comfort Creek Foods
Dumplings and Chicken

and the picture looks more like what I would chicken pot pie noodles. but a thin clear broth with diced chicken breast.
made by crider inc, stillmore GA

Hmmm, they seem to be the only honest advertiser from the brands that I've seen. Others call it chicken and dumplings. And, if I remember correctly, most are very high in sodium, although I'll admit, quite tasty for something out of a can.

[Julianna]

My grandma's fudge recipe is milnot fudge. It is a marshmallow cream version using Milnot which is filled milk. Apparently, it is regional and very limited. I wanted to make it for my son's birthday and had to bizarrely order it off ebay at $25 for 4 cans. The other choice was amazon which was pricier. Seems only a few states are left that sell Milnot now and so it is disappearing as are all its recipes. You can sub evalorated milk but it is not the same.

[Tormahto]

Last winter, I finally decided to make a mince meat pie (partially canned, partially from scratch filling). Last winter, the one US producer decided to discontinue the canned filling.

[karstopography]

Last winter, I finally decided to make a mince meat pie (partially canned, partially from scratch filling). Last winter, the one US producer decided to discontinue the canned filling.

My dad loves minced meat pie. I never quite got the attraction.

[worth1]

Last winter, I finally decided to make a mince meat pie (partially canned, partially from scratch filling). Last winter, the one US producer decided to discontinue the canned filling.

My dad loves minced meat pie. I never quite got the attraction.

My Mom made real mince meat pie with meat and suet in it.
I love the stuff.

[karstopography]

Last winter, I finally decided to make a mince meat pie (partially canned, partially from scratch filling). Last winter, the one US producer decided to discontinue the canned filling.

My dad loves minced meat pie. I never quite got the attraction.

My Mom made real mince meat pie with meat and suet in it.
I love the stuff.

@worth1 My dad’s people were all English/Great Britian colonials, in his case via South Africa or NE Yankees. The English no matter where they ended up seemed to like mince meat pie.

[Tormahto]

That's the thing about mince meat pie, it has changed drastically over the centuries. From what I've read, it's gone from meat to non-meat, spices and flavorings have either stayed the same, completely changed, or there's a mix of traditional combined with the new.

Like almost everything I cook for the first time, it's getting three or more recipes, seeing what ingredients are common in all recipes, and absolutely using those. Then it's deciding on what ingredients, that are not in all recipes, to use. And finally, it's what amounts of each ingredients to use.

On the plus side, I lucked into 5 pounds of oxtails at less than half price. They'll be in the freezer until September, giving me time to come up with some recipes. I'll likely cook a big batch with ingredients standard to all three recipes. Then I'll divide that into three separate portions, and add different spices and the amounts of spices to each pot. Someone has to suffer under the labor of this burden, and it looks like it's me.

[worth1]

I can't remember a Christmas without mince meat pie.
It has some my favorite spices in it.
Like cinnamon cloves nutmeg and so on.

[JRinPA]

...

Like almost everything I cook for the first time, it's getting three or more recipes, seeing what ingredients are common in all recipes, and absolutely using those. Then it's deciding on what ingredients, that are not in all recipes, to use. And finally, it's what amounts of each ingredients to use. ...

That's what I did for my pizza sauce recipe. It is flat out awesome.

Same thing with venison summer sausage. Such a great flavor and consistency even with just 10% pork in that. I didn't do that, someone else did the legwork on the common ingredients. It was good work.

[Tormahto]

...

Like almost everything I cook for the first time, it's getting three or more recipes, seeing what ingredients are common in all recipes, and absolutely using those. Then it's deciding on what ingredients, that are not in all recipes, to use. And finally, it's what amounts of each ingredients to use. ...

That's what I did for my pizza sauce recipe. It is flat out awesome.

Same thing with venison summer sausage. Such a great flavor and consistency even with just 10% pork in that. I didn't do that, someone else did the legwork on the common ingredients. It was good work.

Pizza sauce is strange. Tasted by itself, it's not good. Put it on a pizza, with cheese and other toppings, and it tastes fantastic.

So, I had this idea to make a pizza sauce that tasted fantastic all by itself. I made a pizza with Bolognese sauce, sort of an in-between Italian and American sauce (with milk and lots of tomato). The pizza was awful.

What goes into your homemade pizza sauce?