As you get ready to kick back and celebrate Thanksgiving with wine and turkey, we invite you to take a look at how America celebrated Thanksgiving in the early 20th century...
1901 black and white print ad for Libby’s natural flavor food products. The ad has a nice vintage illustration of a cook preparing a Thanksgiving or Christmas turkey.
1905 black and white print ad for Quaker Oats Cereal – “A Thanksgiving Breakfast Every Morning.” The ad features the well-known Quaker Pilgrim icon.
1913 black and white print ad for Onyx Ware by the Columbia Enameling and Stamping Company, located at 211 Beach Street in Terre Haute, Indiana.
1920 color print ad for Mazola Salad and Cooking Oil with a suggested six-course Thanksgiving menu by A. Louise Andrea that includes recipes for cheese dumplings, bread dressing, steamed fruit pudding, and cider sauce.
1922 two-color print ad for the Joseph Campbell Company of Camden, New Jersey; this ad features their Campbell’s Condensed Tomato Soups.
In 1889, during a visit to Naples, Queen Margherita of Savoy, wife of King Umberto I, was bored with French gourmet food, the traditional royal fare of Europe at the time while staying in Naples’ Capodimonte Palace. She saw many of the local people eating large flatbread and grew curious. The queen found it to be delicious.
According to legend, Queen Margherita summoned the most famous pizza-maker in Naples, Raffaele Esposito, to bake a variety of pizzas. Her favorite was the one with tomatoes, mozzarella slices, and basil, which perhaps, was made in her honor and so contained the colors of the Italian flag.
The queen loved it so much that she sent a letter of compliments. Esposito was so proud that he named the pizza after her.
And the Margherita Pizza was born!
Queen Margherita was the wife of King Umberto I, who reigned from 1878 until his assassination in 1900. She was born Princess Margherita Maria Teresa Giovanna of Savoy just after midnight on November 20, 1851, at the Palazzo Chiablese, part of the Royal Palace of Turin. Margherita was the daughter of Prince Ferdinando of Savoy, Duke of Genoa, and Princess Elisabeth of Saxony.
On January 9, 1878, Margherita became the first Queen of Italy when her husband ascended to the throne following his father’s death. Immensely popular with the Italian people, Queen Margherita was very active with many cultural organizations, promoting the arts, and working extensively with the Red Cross. She is credited with introducing chamber music in Italy and often helped up-and-coming musicians with their education. These included Giacomo Puccini, who was able to study at the Conservatory of Milan thanks to a scholarship granted to him by The Queen.
Always possessing an adventurous spirit, in 1893 she climbed the Punta Gnifetti for a ceremony in which a mountain hut – the Capanna Regina Margherita – was named in her honor. She later became President of the Ladies’ Alpine Club.
Margherita was widowed on July 29, 1900. While visiting the city of Monza, King Umberto I was shot and killed by an anarchist who was avenging the deaths in the Bava-Beccaris massacre. The throne passed to the couple’s son, Vittorio Emanuele III, and Margherita settled into her new role as Queen Mother. She devoted herself to her charity work and the advancement of the arts in Italy. She maintained her official residence at the Palazzo Margherita in Rome and also lived in the Stupinigi Hunting Lodge.
Queen Margherita died at Villa Margherita on January 4, 1926. She is buried beside her husband in the Pantheon in Rome.
Eating a horse was considered less disturbing during the Second World War when beef was rationed. As rationing made it more difficult for families to find beef, American butchers across the country sold horse meat, and consumers literally ate it up.
Republican leaders, eager to use the new equine diet to embarrass President Truman, took to derogatively calling him “Horsemeat Harry.” As this 1942 Pittsburgh Press article suggests, Philadelphians were denied the pleasure of eating horse due to a state law. At roughly half the cost of beef, horse was served as a protein supplement until well after the war in some places, though. Time reported that during the inflationary years of the early 1970s, a butcher shop in Connecticut was wholesaling about 6,000 pounds of horse meat every day.
Horse meat is not only high in protein, but a good cut has about half the fat, less cholesterol and twice as much iron and Vitamin B as beef. It also contains fewer calories, and a significantly higher omega-3 fatty acid concentration (that’s the good fat)—with 360 mg per 100 grams serving, compared to just 21 mg in a beef steak.
Slaughtering horses for human consumption was illegal until 2011, when President Obama signed a bill lifting a five-year ban that had kept federal inspectors out of slaughterhouses. According to David Duquette, president of the United Horsemen, which lobbied for lifting the prohibition, prior to the ban, meat (most all of it for export) made up 80 percent of the more than $100 billion a year horse-processing industry.
Until 2007, only three horse meat slaughterhouses still existed in the United States for export to foreign markets, but they were closed by court orders resulting from the upholding of aforementioned Illinois and Texas statutes banning horse slaughter and the sale of horse meat.
Butchers cutting up horses for use as meat, 1943.
Butchers cutting up horses for use as meat, 1943.
Butcher carving hunk of horse meat, 1943.
Horses standing in corral prior to slaughter, 1943.
Photograph depicting the sale and consumption of horse meat during WWII.
Signs advertising horse meat (“NOT RATIONED”) outside a Seattle butcher shop sometime during WWII.
This butcher shop at 1417 Gratiot in the 1940s - when meat was rationed during World War II - was the first horse meat market in Detroit.
Mustaches flourished all throughout the Victorian years. Great gobs of wax were melted and then applied to the mustache to keep the curls intact.
And therein lay a problem that cropped up when steaming hot cups of coffee or tea were carried up to the mouth for sipping. The steam melted the wax and sent it right into the cup. Another problem soon became apparent. Sipping hot tea or coffee, mustaches often became stained.
Finally, Harvey Adams, an innovative Englishman, in 1860 made an unusual invention, “the mustache cup”. The mustache cup had a ledge, called a mustache guard, across the cup. The guard had one semicircular opening against the side of the cup. The pampered mustache rested safe and dry on the mustache guard sipping hot beverage through the opening.
A later addition was the mustache spoon, invented in the latter half of the 19th century to allow the man to consume liquids without spillage onto either the mustache or clothing.
The first patented mustache spoon was claimed in March 1868 by New York spoon designer, Solon Ferrer, and was a soup spoon with a guard to hold the mustache free and unsoiled of the liquid beneath it.
In the letter patent No. 135,141, dated January 21, 1873, a mustache spoon is described as:
“...the shield being such that, while it permits the user of the spoon to receive into the bowl by the usual dipping process a proper quantity of soup, the latter can be conveyed to the mouth without any portion of the liquid being brought into contact with the mustache... The shield extends longitudinally from the tip of the bowl to the point where the latter is united to the handle, so as to leave about one-half of the bowl exposed. The shield, however, is so cut away as to leave an opening of such dimensions that it can be easily overlapped and underlapped by the lips, and yet permit the contents of the bowl, when the latter is tilted, to flow freely into the mouth...”
Mustache spoons, known as “etiquette spoons”, were highly popular in the Victorian era and more than twenty patents were obtained in the US to improve and ameliorate their use. Mustache spoons were made for left and right-handed gentlemen and some have detachable guards.
The majority of mustache spoons date from the late 19th century through the early 20th century at which time the favor of mustaches began to decline.
Reed & Barton is one of the main American makers, with their late 19th century “Master Mustache Spoon”. Other known makers in the UK include George Adams and John Round and Son, Ltd. A later reproduction (20th century) of the original "Master Mustache spoon" was issued by Reed & Barton and offered in gift or collector’s box with a red flannel blanket.
“A lip without a mustache is like a body without clothing.” – Guy de Maupassant
The late 19th century was a heyday for impressive mustaches, but it presented various challenges for mustachioed tea lovers. The heat of the drink melted the mustache wax, making its corners droop. Mustaches, and their owners, were literally getting into hot water. The solution to this problem arrived in the form of the mustache cup.
The mustache cup was almost certainly invented by the British potter Harvey Adams in the 1860s. Adams patented a butterfly-shaped ledge that was set inside the cup with a hole to drink through. These sold in great quantities, first in the UK, then throughout Europe. In the U.S., they were sold everywhere from Sears to the department store Marshall Field’s, later owned by Macy’s.
The cups came in many shapes and sizes. “Farmers’ cups” held as much as a pint of tea, while smaller porcelain pieces were sculpted like conch shells or embossed with the name of the owner. Most had saucers to match. But these weren’t nearly as prized as the cups themselves. A British newspaper classified of the time reads: ‘‘REWARD—If the Lady who STOLE A GENT’S MUSTACHE CUP on Saturday Night from the Little Dust Pan will apply at once, she can have the SAUCER FREE.”
But the golden age of mustaches, and mustache cups, came to a close during the First World War. It ended, as it had begun, in the British army: the former stipulation was scrapped, as men struggled to maintain good grooming in the trenches. More importantly, a hairy face made it near-impossible to get a decent seal on a gas mask. Industry shifted to serving the troops and the war effort, and the mustache cup fell first from favor and then from sight.
The irrepressible mustache wouldn’t stay down for long. By the late 1920s and early 1930s, it was back on screens and in magazines—think Salvador Dali’s two-whisker wonder, Clark Gable’s miniature handlebar. Men’s philtrums were cosy once again, but the mustache cup was all but forgotten.
If you’re looking for a way to scare your kids straight into eating healthy, this original McDonalds commercial might help. Apparently that’s the first Ronald McDonald, although he looks more like a clown that has crawled out of a dumpster in my nightmares!
When McDonald’s was first built in the 1940s, they decided to make the very first commercial ever for it, but it took until the 1960s until the commercial was released.
To everyone it was fun watching the new commercial of old Ronald McDonald (Willard Scott), but nowadays people everywhere are frightened and disturbed by this commercial of the creepy Ronald McDonald wearing a cardboard box for a hat, pieces of straw for hair, a paper cup for a nose and red face paint.
Narrator: Introducing the world’s newest, silliest, and hamburger-eatingest clown, Ronald McDonald! Now, where is that clown? Oh, Ronald… Ronald…”
Ronald McDonald: Here I am kids! (Ahhhhhh!!!) Hey, isn’t watching TV fun? Especially when you got delicious McDonald’s hamburgers!
Narrator: Ronald, you can’t be on TV and watch it at the same time! Now come on and meet the boys and girls!”
Ronald McDonald: Oh, we’ve already met. I know we’re going to be friends, too, ’cause I like to do everything boys and girls like to do, especially when it comes to eating those delicious McDonalds hamburgers. A magic tray here keeps me well-supplied, McDonalds hamburgers, fries, and milk shakes. Watch for me on TV, we’ll have lots of fun! (Squeek! Squeek!)
Jingle: He’s Ronald McDonald, the hamburger-happy clown… a McDonalds drive-in restaurant, is his favorite place in town!
Yes, the creepy clown is none other than Willard Scott who was asked to come up with a character similar to Bozo the Clown, whose show had just gone off the air. Willard would later become famous as the weatherman for NBC’s Today Show, although McDonalds never credited him with originating the character of Ronald McDonald.
“The smile known around the world,” Ronald McDonald is second only to Santa Claus in terms of recognition. According to one survey, 96% of all schoolchildren in the United States of America recognize Ronald.
Scott wrote in his book The Joy of Living that he originally created the Ronald McDonald character at the fast-food restaurant chain’s request. On March 28, 2000, Henry Gonzalez, McDonald’s Northeast Division President, thanked Scott for creating Ronald McDonald, during a taped tribute to Scott on the Today Show.
In his book Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser claims that McDonald’s replaced Scott on account of his weight, supposedly concerned about McDonald’s image. Scott has denied the claims, citing other commitments at the time.
In 1977, Vogue published this “crash diet” for women:
The recipe originally appeared in 1962, in the New York Times best selling book, Sex and the Single Girl, by American writer (and later the editor of Cosmopolitan) Helen Gurley Brown. It offered advice on dating, “sexual friendships,” affairs, work-life balance, economizing, styling, eating, and drinking. It was then republished in the Vogue Body and Beauty Book in 1977.
Gurley Brown’s diet was for just three days, which she recommended for a weekend as it makes you “fuzzy.” But on the upside, she promised that if you consume nothing but eggs, wine, steak, and black coffee, you’ll shed 5 pounds.
This is the plan, which is undertaken over three days.
Breakfast: 1 hardboiled egg, 1 glass of white wine (dry, preferably Chablis), black coffee
Lunch: 2 eggs (hardboiled is best, poached if necessary), 2 glasses of white wine, black coffee
Dinner: 5 oz steak, grilled with black pepper and lemon juice, remainder of white wine (one bottle allowed per day), black coffee
sitophilia (food play) – a form of sexual fetishism in which participants are aroused by erotic situations involving food.
Below are some photographs of Robert Plant enjoying an ice cream cone in front of a “Happy Birthday, America” sign during Led Zeppelin’s 1977 North American Tour stop in April at Chicago Stadium. This was the eleventh and final concert tour of North America by the English rock band. The tour was divided into three legs, with performances commencing on 1 April and concluding on 24 July 1977. The tour was originally intended to finish on 13 August, but was cut short following the death of Robert Plant’s son.
It comes as no news to those familiar with his work that Švankmajer has something of an obsession with food. From his very earliest works traces of both food itself and the mechanisms needed to use it (mastication, digestion etc.) have played frequent and large roles in many of his films.
So in 1992, with a short simply titled Food (Jidlo), it seems the great animator has finally decided to devote an entire short simply to the topic. The result is rather dizzying and incredibly dense with detail; too much to go into here. Divided into three chapters the film depicts the three major meals of the day. It examines the human relationship with food by showing breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Breakfast
A man enters a room, sits down, and brushes the previous diner’s leftovers onto the floor. Across from him sits another man with a placard attached to a chain hanging around his neck. The diner stands up and reads the placard one line at a time and follows the instructions. He puts money down the man’s throat and pokes him in the eye. The man's shirt unbuttons itself, and a dumbwaiter rises up into where the man's chest should be. The diner takes his food, and punches the man in the chin with his third knuckle for his utensils. When he is done eating, he kicks the man’s shin for a napkin. After wiping off his mouth, the diner convulses, and then goes limp. The man now comes to life, stretches, and places the placard on the former diner. He stands and puts another tally mark on the wall. Another diner comes in and the scenario is repeated with him. At the end, we see a line stretching down the hall and around the corner.
Lunch
Two diners, a business man and a vagabond, are unable to get the waiter’s attention. They proceed to eat everything in sight: the flowers, their shoes, pants, shirt, underwear, plates, table cloth, table, and chairs. The vagabond watches the business man and then eats what he eats. All the while they are eating whatever is on or around them, they try to get the waiter’s attention whenever he passes by, but to no avail. In the end with everything else eaten, the business man eats his utensils. The vagabond also eats his. The business man then smiles, pulls his utensils from his mouth, and advances on the vagabond (who recoils in horror).
Dinner
An interior of a luxurious restaurant is shown. A wealthy gourmet sits at a table adding many sauces and spices to his dish, which is hidden by the sheer number of condiments (this is the scene shown in the film poster). This continues for a long time, and then we see him hammer a fork to a wooden left hand. He then starts to eat his own hand. In a series of short and violent scenes, we are then shown an athlete eating his lower leg, a woman eating her breasts (this is also shown in the film poster), and the last eater, who is about to eat his genitals. As he realizes the presence of the camera, the man covers his genitals and shoos the camera away with his hand.
A New York Times review called the film “caustically witty but slight.” It goes on to say that “Švankmajer conceived the film in the 1970s, when it seemed too risky a political allegory to be made [...] it now seems too simple a statement about how people are devoured by mechanistic states and each other.”
A drive-in is a facility (such as a restaurant or movie theater) where one can drive in with an automobile for service. At a drive-in restaurant, for example, customers park their vehicles and are usually served by staff who walk or rollerskate out to take orders and return with food, encouraging diners to remain parked while they eat. Drive-in theaters have a large screen and a car parking area for film-goers.
Carhops serving at drive-in diners
It is usually distinguished from a drive-through, in which drivers line up to make an order at a microphone set up at window height, and then drive to a window where they pay and receive their food. The drivers then take their meals elsewhere to eat.
The first drive-in restaurant was Kirby's Pig Stand, which opened in Dallas, Texas, in 1921. In North America, drive-in facilities of all types have become less popular since their heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, with drive-throughs rising to prominence since the 1970s and 1980s.
The largest Drive-In still in operation is The Varsity of Atlanta, Georgia.
These amazing drive-in photos that offer a glimpse into the era of dining in one's car from between the 1930s and 1960s.
A carhop pouring milk from a bottle into a glass, at McDonnell's Drive-In, circa mid-1930s
McDonnell's Drive-In at night, circa mid-1930s
The Montlake Drive-In Market, opened in 1931, Seattle, Washington, 1937
Kau Kau Korner Drive-In, Hawaii, circa 1940s
A late night at the drive in, a couple and their young son watch a film while they sit in their '41 Buick coupe, with almost an equally large canister of popcorn
