Bygone Foods and Flavors

Foods and flavors, very much like fashion, have trends that come and go.  Some stay forever, like the perennial jeans and t-shirts of the food world.   But other dishes have gone the by the wayside ala hot pants and bell-bottoms.

In the late 1950’s through the early 1970’s no respectable hostess would neglect to put out onion dip made from a powered mix to serve with heavily salted potato chips. (If she was particularly clever in the kitchen, she might even add the mix to hamburger meat on a weeknight).  In those days “sodium counts” were relatively unheard of.

I have not attended one party in the last twenty years where this bygone dip was served.   With it’s passing was the equally popular clam dip.   I must admit that I DID have clam dip about 17 years ago. On the last day of school at University of Hawaii Laboratory School in Honolulu where I was teaching at the time, we had a student potluck party.  I can just picture the scene between a busy working mom and her 12-year-old son as they drove to school that morning.

Kid—Mom, I just remembered I have to bring something for the potluck today.

Mom—Thinking an expletive, but not saying it, she swings the Dodge Caravan into Safeway and says: Stay here; I’ll be right back.

Kid—What’s this?

Mom—Clam dip.  Just take it. Someone will eat it.

And that someone was me. ( I do know that it’s supposed to be “I” but it just sounds so stiff.)

These two former staples have been replaced by the likes of hummus, salsa, guacamole and pita chips.  Their popularity was briefly threatened by the new dip invention called “layered bean dip.”  But in today’s world, this takes too much time, unless one buys it premade in a supermarket.  There was a passing fad of dumping various substances on a block of cream cheese.  I have tasted a jalapeno jelly version and another with canned shrimp and cocktail sauce…but not recently.

Another food coup d’état took place in the early 1980’s.  Most people in Silver Lake bought their Italian dressing as a dried powder, mixed it with oil and vinegar and had a specially made bottle on hand to shake the mixture.  This was the only kind of salad dressing we had at Angus Street.  It was in restaurants that we learned of the likes of blue cheese, Russian and Thousand Island dressings. 

I vividly remember sitting in, ironically, a Mexican restaurant with my family.  After we had ordered salads, my father spun a tale of Roquefort cheese.  According to him, a shepherd had left some cheese in a cave and returned months later quite hungry.  Even though the cheese was moldy, he ate it and, voila, a future salad dressing was created.

But in the 1980’s a new food bully emerged:  balsamic vinegar.  Yes, I know, Europe was using it all along.  But not at Angus Street.  Today, my cupboards hold perhaps four different types of balsamic vinegar and one bottle of fig vinegar.  There is not one packet of dried Italian dressing.   And those shaker bottles have gone to the kitchenware cemetery.

When was it exactly that “noodles” became “pasta”?  Or bread, which in the early days of Silver Lake came in white or brown, became baguettes and chibattas?  When was it that sherbet went out of favor—except in the punch at Mormon weddings—and sorbet took over the throne?  When did canned mandarin oranges and pineapple loose favor?  When did Neapolitan ice cream get lost in the dessert wake of Ben and Jerry and Hagan Daz?  Not that one single of these changes wasn’t for the gastronomical better.

I spent five years during the 1970’s living in Europe.  When I finally moved back to the United States in 1979 I noticed quite a few changes.  I had never heard of such a thing as a Born Again Christian.  Desperate for a teaching job, I applied at a Christian school.  On the application form, it asked for my personal relationship to Jesus.  I wrote down “brother-in-law” and crossed that job off my list.  It was almost as embarrassing as applying to a Christian Scientist School and asking about health benefits.  But I digress.

In the America to which I returned, blacks had names like Jaquwana or La Toya, cocaine was becoming the drug of choice and a few new food selections poked their ways through the crowd.

Until my return, I had never heard of taco salad, mahi mahi or Chinese chicken salad.  The closest we got to this at Angus Street had been packaged, hard shelled tacos made with a powdered mix, halibut and chow mien out of can sprinkled with crunchy, curly topping.   Today halibut is too expensive and the taco salad and Chinese chicken salad are the mainstays of many restaurants.  In the entrée area, dishes like beef stroganoff and Swedish meatballs disappeared.  Dinners of roast beef and fried chicken went by the wayside.   At least at Angus Street.   My mother, always interested in new cooking ideas and recipes, experimented with red snapper, water chestnuts and Sara Lee coffee cakes. Not all at the same time.

  I remember the absolute worst meal I ever cooked for my family.  I was in college and had a free afternoon.  I thought I’d cut my mom some slack and cook dinner.  I set the table with my favorite place mats from Sweden, my Mom’s blue glassware and went out to the back yard and cut some color coordinated Agapanthus for the centerpiece.  Then I started cooking.  I used what was in the fridge.   Red snapper, sour cream and red wine.   Although my family was very polite, it was the most God awful purple meal anyone had ever eaten.  But, at least, it coordinated with the colors of the place settings.

Sometimes I miss the simple foods of Silver Lake in the 1950’s and 60’s.   I have not had a bologna and onion sandwich with mayonnaise since childhood.  Nor have I have “weenies”, as, much to my embarrassment, my mother called them.  I did buy some a few months ago when my grandson visited.  I sampled a few bites and though they tasted good, the gristle reminded me why I no longer ate them. 

I would love a good beef Stroganoff and plan to make one soon.  My mother’s recipe is about as far from Russia as Honolulu, but it’s the best one I know.