Ancestry Magazine

I remember a story about a woman who always cut the end off the roast. Asked why, she said it was because her mother did. Someone asked her mother, and the mother said the same thing—because her mother did. Grandmother, tracked down and asked the same question, said, “Because I never had a pan big enough.”
Tradition lives on in our kitchens, at least through some of the foods we eat. But how has the process of making something to eat changed over the past 200 years?
Today, we have microwave ovens, refrigerators that make ice and deliver it and filtered water through the door. We have electric and gas ranges, we have juicers and blenders. We have freezers that keep things from spoiling for months. And if we want breakfast, we can easily access fresh milk and eggs. Or at least make a quick piece of buttered toast.

Simply Toast, Right?
Toast seems simple. You just drop the sliced bread into the toaster and jam down the handle, right? But before 1905, there was no electric toaster.
People have been eating bread for more than 5,000 years, and they toasted it long before the electric toaster was invented. Toasting bread made it crunchy, which some people liked, and it made bread last longer, which was important because wasting food was a threat to life and health. Bread was toasted over open fires somewhat precariously with the help of a basic tool—a wire rack for the bread and a handle long enough to allow a person to hold the bread near the fire without being burned.
The modern kitchen in the early 1800s would have contained many food items that were prepared to last—canned goods, salted items, shelf-stable things that wouldn’t go bad if they weren’t eaten immediately. A great deal of effort went into preserving foodstuffs that we throw out today. What wasn’t eaten was fed to the animals or turned into something else that could be eaten later. If you couldn’t put it up, you had to trade it to someone who could use it now. Extra eggs were sold at the market, and the money saved for when the housewife needed something she didn’t have, like butter or bread—that’s the origin of the term “egg money.”
We have found butter dating back to the 1600s buried in bogs in northern Europe. The Norse countries flavored it with garlic for taste. Butter would keep, buried, for so long that it is said that people planted trees to mark the burial places of butter. It took 21 pounds of milk to make a pound of butter. Some deposits contained 100 pounds of butter, implying that the maker started with a ton of milk, and further implying a cooperative or community activity.
Up until 1850, most families had a cow that provided milk, cream, and butter for the family—but all of the dairy activities were women’s work. The word “dairy” is related to the middle English word “dey,” meaning a female servant. A man looking for a wife before 1850 often valued strength over speed, and a girl’s talents for the difficult chores associated with homemaking were her best assets.
Making butter wasn’t a simple task. First, someone would have to milk the cow. Then the milk would sit in pans, the wife would skim the cream off the top, and the cream would go into the churn. A good housewife would force her sons to work the churn. When those boys grew into men, they never doubted how much work being a housewife was—from beginning to end, it might take 45 minutes to make butter from cream.

Now That’s Progress
By the middle of the 1800s, if your family lived in town, they might have had an iceman who brought blocks and sheets of ice to their home so they could keep food cool. A current disaster manual says that 50 pounds of dry ice will keep your food fresh in your refrigerator for two days. Imagine needing that much ice every other day and you might better understand the amount of effort needed to preserve fresh food—and the amount of water that had to be removed from the icebox.
From about 1850 until 1930, ice was harvested in the winter, packed in sawdust or other insulators, and shipped to warmer climates. I remember seeing an icehouse at the governor’s mansion at colonial Williamsburg. The ice was stored at the icehouse, a cool dark place, then loaded into horse-drawn wagons for delivery.
City families didn’t have space for a cow, so commercial dairies sprang up around the time of the Civil War. When I was young, we had a milkman. Milk would spoil quickly so regular deliveries were needed. As the icebox helped people keep milk longer, it could also be used to keep butter cool and fresh longer. Add that to the invention of the electric toaster in 1905 and making toast gets much easier.

Enter the Imposter
We had butter at the table when I was very young, but I don’t remember anything except margarine by the time I hit my early teens. But why would anyone bother to invent a butter substitute?
Around 1870, French Emperor Napoleon III held a contest for a butter substitute, something that would keep better on a ship than butter did and be cheap and tasty. The prize was won by Hippolyte Mege-Mouries, who mixed suet fat with skim milk and created margarine.
Margarine was made in the United States shortly thereafter, and by the 1880s, butter producers were feeling pressure on their sales—margarine cost about half the price of butter. In 1880, Harper’s Weekly joked “Affrighted epicures are informed that they are eating their old candle-ends and tallow-dip remnants in the guise of butter.” Dairymen implied that margarine was being sold as butter, and that it was a health risk. They sought a ban on margarine in New York, but the courts overturned the ban in 1885. So, if you can’t ban ’em, tax ’em.
The federal government passed the Margarine Act of 1886. It required a license for manufacturing margarine and the licensing fee was high, as were the fees for wholesaling and retailing margarine. The act also imposed a two-cents-per-pound tax on margarine sales. President Grover Cleveland, from the Great Dairy State of New York, called the measure a revenue bill.
But steps to reduce the appeal of margarine went beyond mere finances. By 1902, there were 32 states with margarine color bans. Butter is yellow; margarine, which at the time was produced with animal fat, was gray. Dairy producers opposed coloring margarine yellow. So margarine took on lots of colors, and, in some instances, margarine was sold with a home coloring kit. Eventually margarine’s animal fat was replaced with vegetable oil, the gray-tone went away, color bans were lifted, and margarine and butter both found a place on American tables, but not without their fair share of bad-health press. But that’s another story.
Today it’s easy to butter our toast. We take a slice of bread from the bag, drop it in the electric toaster, press a lever, and go about our business until the evenly-browned and crisped piece of bread pops up. We take a plastic tub of margarine or a stick of butter from the refrigerator, spread some of it on the toast, and we sit down to eat. Never once do we worry about hours of milking, wood chopping and hauling, and butter churning. Nor do we consider the potential hazards of toasting the bread over an open flame, (or making the bread—fermenting the sugars, harvesting and grinding the grains, waiting for it to rise, making a fire hot enough to bake the bread—but again, another story). We just eat our buttered toast, continuing a tradition dating back through generations of our ancestors. Well, sort of.

Beau Sharbrough is a popular genealogical writer and lecturer. Reach him through www.rootsworks.com.