Thanksgiving foods you could do without

[Nanohedron]

Sweet potatoes with marshmallows and/or brown sugar. Sweet potatoes DON'T NEED MARSHMALLOWS OR BROWN SUGAR.

Ii remember introducing my mother to sweet potatoes that didn't come in a can. What happened to cooking in the 1950's-1970's?

If you mean "what happened?" in the sense of "where did it go?", well, I don't know about you, but I have my figurative hands around its figurative throat and am squeezing HARD, myself.

If you mean "what the hell were they thinking?", I think we'd probably need some sort of scholarly thesis to explain THAT little bit of history away. But come to think of it: canned goods prevailed in a day when shipping fresh was the dicier proposition, and more expensive especially in regions like ours. Canned goods are kind of like lutefisk, when you think about it, only not necessarily as awful.

But the food stylings that arose out of the days of befinned Buicks have indeed become a tradition, and I know people who are lost and adrift during the holidays without it.

[Lambchop]

Yes, I think it had something to do with the problems inherent in delivering fresh, seasonal goods. Cans seemed to be attractive because they were "modern," and I think they may have seemed quite the ticket for women who had spent hours slaving over a pressure cooker and canning jars in late summer, risking botulism with every jar. Marketing convinced them that canned was the way to go. All you needed was a can opener. The cooked-to-death consistency didn't bother them because their own canned (jar) products were cooked-to-death and then boiled to smithereens before consumption. You could eat commercially canned stuff straight from the can!

To this day, my mother thinks that canned and, now, frozen produce is "safer" than fresh. There is no cleaning, no trimming, and no waste. She worries that people might have touched the fresh stuff and she is concerned that the store might have bought it from somebody who grew it in their back yard over the septic tank. Or worse. Bird's Eye, Marie Callender, Libby's, and Del Monte would never do that, she's sure.

[I.D.10-t]

Those are the reasons I have heard before, the thing is, sweet potatoes travel well, so I do not see that as a compelling reason to buy those canned. The thought that it was more "modern" and that it was quick and easy seem to be the only things that apply.

[rebl_rn]

I watched part of an interesting show on Thanksgiving morning. In the US anyway, canned goods definitely became popular because of the convenience and time saving factor. Frozen foods didn't become popular until WWII, when women went to work and the metals that canned goods were made out of became scarcer and therefore so did the cans. I can't remember the exact years now the TV show used, but in something like 1900 it took a woman over 8 hours everyday to prepare meals for her family, and that went down to like 3 hours somewhere in the 1930's or 1940's.

I don't know, but if it took me over 8 hours just to cook everyday (and I like to cook), I would be happy to reach for a can of something rather than have to do all the prep work myself.

[I.D.10-t]

I guess one of my questions is was it constant work, or was it intermittent. Making bread, pot roast, and baking beans takes time, but much of it is unsupervised. 8 hours every day, I wonder how that was split up. 1 for breakfast and 3 for lunch and 4 for dinner? I do have a few meals that are weekend only recipes. Chili, gumbo, jambalaya, pot roast, kebab with chutney and nan, baked chicken, and several others all take time, but I can usually get other things done while they are cooking.

I also wonder about the change of family size. Cooking for 10 is different than cooking for 3.

[dwest]

I cooked for seven until I graduated high school. If the ingrediants didn't all fit into one pot it didn't get made. Sometimes I'd pull another pot out to make rice or pasta just for the halibut. Prep time: 30 minutes, cooking time: until it looked done. One of things I hated about this Thanksgiving was trying the find a clean pot the morning after for porridge. The lazy punks said they would clean-up, I just forgot to ask them when.

[s1m0n]

Her husband's also the cook in her domicile, but he comes from Cincinnati, and from a family in which most food came from a can. .

Now wait a minute - that's NO reason for him to not know how to cook.

I realize. His mother was very ill for much of his life, because she was a cancer surviver who also needed a transplant, and her insurer demanded that she prove she'd survived the cancer by living for ten years before they'd authorise the kidney operation. Basically, she had to endure until dialysis failed before they'd allow her son to donate a kidney.

I think that one result was that her husband suddenly had to figure out 'food', without much help, and he went for what seemed obvious.

[s1m0n]

Frozen foods didn't become popular until WWII, when women went to work and the metals that canned goods were made out of became scarcer and therefore so did the cans.

I'm sure rural electrification helped, too.

[Nanohedron]

...the thing is, sweet potatoes travel well, so I do not see that as a compelling reason to buy those canned.

Not so! Temperature conditions for maintaining optimal sweet potato quality are apparently tight. From page 7 on this link to an HTML of a PDF page:

A temperature of 40 degrees Fahrenheit, although more than 10 degrees above the freezingpoint of the sweet potato is definitely harmful. When sweet potatoes are chilled, even thoughnot frozen there is a very marked increase in their susceptibility to infection by certain rot-producing organisms. If the temperature stays as low as 40 degrees for 3 weeks or more, 40to 90 percent of the sweet potatoes may rot. One of the difficulties in connection with rotting asa result of chilling is that the damage does not appear at once but several weeks after theproper storage temperature of 55 to 60 degrees has been restored.A second effect of chilling is an internal discoloration and breakdown of the root that mayoccur even though it is not attacked by rots. This trouble also may not develop for severalweeks after chilling unless the sweet potatoes have been held at a temperature near thefreezing point. An exposure of only 4 days at 40 degrees Fahrenheit has resulted in thedevelopment of this discoloration.

Trucking uncanned, raw sweet potatoes without temperature control - especially in late autumn or winter in the northern climes such as ours - would almost guarantee at least some ruined product, depending on transit time and time from purchase to preparation.

[I.D.10-t]

I stand corrected, I was thinking of problems of being crushed and the fact that they don't seem to need refrigeration.

[Nanohedron]

I stand corrected, I was thinking of problems of being crushed and the fact that they don't seem to need refrigeration.

Well, it was news to me, too. I thought that you were probably right, but then I got curious. It hit me that there could be a bigger practical reason beyond mere convenience for the proliferation of canned sweet potatoes hereabouts prior to the advent of better roads and temperature/humidity-controlled shipping.

Usually when I buy raw sweet potatoes I use them that same day, or I do store them in the fridge (GASP!) for only a few days at most but they go right into the oven with no warmup time spanning some weeks. So, I never would have otherwise known about this.

The big problem with raw sweet potatoes chilled to 40F and below would be in those cases where one would buy in bulk and store them long-term for household consumption, or keep them on the grocer's shelves. Even if one grew one's own, cellar storage might be problematic unless one could guarantee a consistent temperature range of 55F to 60F. Higher than that they start sprouting, but best as I can tell that's just more of an inconvenience at worst, and you get free edible greens at best.

[rebl_rn]

I guess one of my questions is was it constant work, or was it intermittent. Making bread, pot roast, and baking beans takes time, but much of it is unsupervised. 8 hours every day, I wonder how that was split up. 1 for breakfast and 3 for lunch and 4 for dinner? I do have a few meals that are weekend only recipes. Chili, gumbo, jambalaya, pot roast, kebab with chutney and nan, baked chicken, and several others all take time, but I can usually get other things done while they are cooking.

I also wonder about the change of family size. Cooking for 10 is different than cooking for 3.

The show didn't break it down, but I figure it may have been intermittent - but there was other housework to be done while the bread was rising or the pot roast simmering. My guess this could include butchering meats, churning butter, etc.

[Doug_Tipple]

My wife likes to put left over food in a freezer bag and throw it in the freezer and forget about it. My lectures on food management have been falling on deaf ears. That bag of frozen pumpkin pulp, that has been in the freezer since Thanksgiving two years ago, has got to go. She is never going to use it, and I'm tired of looking at it. I'm sure the squirrels will like it. I need to make room for chocolate ice cream with moose tracks.

[feadogin]

I pretty much hate all Thanksgiving foods: turkey, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie. I mainly eat mashed potatoes on Thanksgiving. One year my husband (then boyfriend) made me Thanksgivng dinner with ham instead, and only with foods I liked. I guess he was trying to impress me cause he never did it again though.