Spanish Salad

This recipe sounds terrific. I had no idea there were recipes back then where you'd cook the spinach in the water from washing -- I thought that was a modern innovation! When I was growing up, the general consensus seemed to be that people in the nineteenth and early twentieth century wouldn't eat fresh foods, but rather cooked greens and other vegetables to death. Which would actually be the sensible thing to do, a lot of places, especially if they used night soil or some other potential hazard to grow them in. Although I've also seen it argued that Americans ate a lot of fresh vegetables, but greens weren't fancy enough to mention, so cookbooks just offered dressings and sauces and expected people to know which greens they'd go best with.

Very exotic - pine nuts in the 18th century!

The Washoe and other American Indians practically lived on pine nuts sometimes, so I'm guessing many Americans in the west were familiar with them by the late nineteenth century (although whites were more interested in cutting the pines for lumber, I'm afraid). Easterners probably had to wait for the Italians to introduce them in the twentieth century. I would guess pine nuts were considered a local food and a cheap food, so never carried much cachet. The media nowadays tends to pay more attention to faddish food than to everyday food, and that was probably the case back then as well.
 
Back
Top