American Kitchens, 1910
From Home Life in America by Katherine Graves Busbey.
From: 1910 C.E. To: 1910 C.E.
Location: United States of America
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From Home Life in America by Katherine Graves Busbey, 1910.
Granite ware kitchen utensils and many conveniences for cooking are very cheap in the United States. Five pounds will buy as complete a kitchen outfit as any fastidious housewife could desire; but the coarse crockery is dearer, and not nearly so decorative as that on the pantry shelves in England or Germany.
Coming to the details of the cost of food, I cannot find warrant for the statement made on both sides of the Atlantic that “everything is cheaper in England.” After considerable investigation, I return to the conclusion expressed by a cook in London, who said, “English eats big and hearty. America eats light but terrible fancy,” and believe that it holds a balanced equation.
The housekeeper in America has a greater choice for the same, even for less money, but variety rules her table to such an extent, and she includes what a coloured servant terms “frivolous cooking” in the daily diet, that the expense is equal to that of the substantial food purchased for an English household of the same circumstances.
The American, listening to an Englishwoman's interview with her trades-people, is impressed by the amount that will be ordered for even a small family. The separate orders for the children’s dinner and the servants’ meals seem to her extravagant; for the roast that she would order for the family dinner in America (children, of course, dine with the elders) would “last so long,” as the expression is, if only served at the main table, that, lacking the prodigies of thrifty transformation of the French kitchen, it would be relegated to the waste long before its material finish. But when the American sees that everything that is ordered for the English household is used, she is still more amazed.
The substantial pudding in England is unknown in the United States, and the English tart—called a “deep-dish pie,” to distinguish it from the flat type of pastry supposed to have been copyrighted at the board of the Pilgrim Fathers—appears but seldom. But the variety of meringues and ices and puff paste, cream-filled fantasies from the bakery crowning the usual American dinner, and, above all, the infinite variety of the American breakfast, reveals something of the details which tip the scale of table expense somewhat toward the lighter-eating nation.
"Coffee is half the breakfast,” is the American’s verdict, but only in the sense that, like tea in England, breakfast would be nothing without it, not in the literal sense of the Continental breakfast, for, in place of that coffee and rolls, or the tea, toast, eggs, and marmalade of the orthodox English breakfast, the American breakfast always includes fruit—either oranges, grape-fruit or small melons; some sort of cereal, for Americans are great consumers of cereals, though not the old-fashioned oatmeal (you could almost reckon the number of Canadians and loyal Scotchmen in New York City by the demand for that), but the “ready-to-serve,” "prepared-by-patent-process” varieties of “breakfast foods” which are, except for the cream and sugar on them, about as nourishing as pine shavings; then follows the main course of cutlet or sweetbreads, or calves’ brains, or kidney stew, or shad roe, or some fish like the American “smelts,” which resemble a foreshortened eel and taste like imitation white bait, with bacon and eggs as the Greek Chorus element in the housekeeper’s menus. Also the American breakfast is not complete without “biscuits” (scones), muffins, or “poppers,” and the finishing flourish of “hot cakes” served with butter and maple syrup.
Lunch is a negligible item in the American household expense, and dinner corresponds more to a rather elaborate English luncheon than the heavy late dinner as it is known in England, while the so-called “snack” in the way of a supper just before retiring, which is so often looked for in the English household, does not feature in the American regime as yet.
Meat, with the exception of fillet and sirloin, which is the same in both countries, is dearer in England than in the United States. The Scotch-fed beef, from which comes the wonderful juicy joint served in "London homes, is superior to anything found under the name of Chicago beef, but it is also higher. Poultry is cheaper in the United States. I have a witty Englishwoman’s testimony to this: “Oft have I sighed for the flesh-pots of Egypt, as I contrasted the eighteen cents, per pound for prime chicken and turkey in America as against three shillings for a skeleton pullet or twelve shillings for a lean and lanky turkey. The one becomes fact in flesh and the other is bought on hope.”
Milk, butter, and eggs are the same, but coffee and flour cost less in America. Even moderately good tea is 2s. 5& in tire States; but as coffee, not tea, is used to undermine the nervous system here, that expense is not serious.
In regard to fruit, there is nothing in America to compare with the English grapes, strawberries, cherries, currants, and pears. But fruit is much cheaper in America, and there is a greater variety of the ordinary kinds. The “Concord” grapes, with their clusters of deep blue berries (a variety first known in the old New England town that Emerson made famous), can be bought in five-pound baskets for a shilling. As for apples, pears, peaches, and, above all, bananas, they are among the cheap fruits in America, and are quite as good as much higher-priced products in England.
For turbot and the unique sole the American market offers oysters that do not taste like sucking a brass key—if I may be pardoned that comparison with the English bivalve—and lobsters which are no more expensive than the English fish. And of course an American will always protest the superiority of terrapin and canvas-back, even of the so-called “puddle” duck, which range in price with game in the English markets.
America has a great advantage in the variety and cost of vegetables. The sun never sets on the kitchen garden of America, and with rapid transit and cold storage to revolutionize “local” markets with products from all ends of the continent, there is hardly a noticeable “season” for any one vegetable, for some part of this enormous country is producing it at every season. Truth compels me to add, however, that while we have green peas and asparagus all winter and the distance from the source of these supplies makes a surprisingly small rise in cost, the green peas ripened under the gray skies of England from June to September have no equal for sweetness in the United States.
Climate has such an important bearing upon comparative household economics that in this connexion I offer again a comment of the witty Englishwoman who evidently knows her America as does Baedeker.
“One could live like a lord in Florida on five dollars a week; vegetables and fruits seemed, like Jonah’s gourd, to spring up in the night; the cow cost nine dollars, and yielded creamy milk; the rent only ten dollars a month for a good house with the proverbial three acres for the cow; a whole chicken costs twenty cents, and a side of mutton, weighing twelve pounds, only one dollar and fifty cents. Society was charming, and it was bliss to be alive from October to April in bowers of roses, lilies, camellias, and such flowering views as once seen can never be forgotten. Half the year! but oh for the other half!”
Busbey, Katherine Graves. Home Life in America. The Macmillan Company, 1910.
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