One of my favorite Cary Grant movies is the 1951 "People Will Talk". Cary Grant plays a doctor who falls in love with a much younger lady who is dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. Pretty racy stuff for 1951! In a particularly memorable scene Cary Grant is reminiscing about the smell of groceries stores. He states that "grocery stores just don't smell anymore". You used to be able to go into a grocery store and your nose was assaulted by all the different smells of the meat, cheese, vinegars etc. He feels that the modern 1951 grocery stores have become overly sterilized, and slightly inhuman with all the pasteurization and homogenized foods. If you stop to think about it, food preparation processes were undergoing a lot of evolution during this time. He misses all the natural smells of fermentation.
During the early 1900s there were still many farms where all food for the family was raised, slaughtered and preserved by the family. Vinegar was made by putting left over fruit juices in a crock and waiting for it to naturally ferment. My mother made butter in a butter churn on Sundays on the farm after milking the cows. Cottage cheese was also made at home, and there is nothing like the flavor of homemade cottage cheese.
In early American food preparation, most women didn't use recipes because they used a pinch of this and a handful of that. They had their ingredients and amounts memorized. The work day was long, and there wasn't time to experiment with alternate ways of preparing food. But, by the 1960s most people purchased their foods already commercially slaughtered and preserved.
With the advent of grocery stores, and the sterilization techniques, time wasn't being spent planting, picking and preserving anymore. In addition, so many foods were being sprayed with preservatives that many old recipes just didn't work anymore. For example, I have a very old cookbook with a very simple recipe for cherry preserves. It says to put some pitted cherries in a jar with a pinch of salt, and some sugar. You leave it to sit for a few weeks, and when you come back you have cherry preserves that go well with ice cream. A later edition of the same cookbook states that this recipe won't work with cherries purchased from a grocery store because of the preservatives in the store bought cherries.
Many early recipes required the fermentation of bacteria to preserve the food, and this created an abundance of healthy aromas that are missing from todays food. Vinegars were homemade, soda pop was made at home, ketchup was prepared and bottled at home. That didn't leave much time for experimenting with recipes or the use of gadgets. Most kitchens had a few larges pots, crocks, and a good cutting board. Blenders were an unnecessary luxury because you could do all the mixing by hand.
Now the modern kitchen is a gadget encrusted space where food preparation is mostly accomplished by the grocery store. There are multitudes of pre-prepared and partially prepared foods for the working mother, or father. The necessary gadgets include a refrigerator, mixer, coffee maker, convection oven, microwave, and for the truly adventurous, a pasta maker.
Can't help feeling that we are missing out on something now that all the exotic fermentation and preservation smells are gone from our kitchens.
