With all of our forums, I still had no idea where to post this. It's food, it's not technical but probably not of general interest, it's health -- but not current. So please, move this anywhere you see fit
I thought I'd start here.
In a recent bout of cleaning, I found a cookbook from 1903 called "The Settlement Cookbok" (subtitled "The way to a man's heart") It was published in Minneapolis by goodhearted women who wanted to help the new immigrants become Americans and have clean houses. These were definitely middle-class immigrants. They ate a lot of steak and had chafing dishes. There's an outline of cooking classes at the beginning. They started with toast, worked their way through kuchen, fried breads right on to puddings, cakes and pies. This was not a low carb life.
However, the nutrition comments fascinated me. This was a time before vitamins. These had not yet been identified. Yet there was a sense of what was good for you and what not.
Here are their food groups:
Food is either inorganic (salt and water) or organic (everything else).
Under organic, you have your Nitrogenous or Proteids, which are Albumens (found in juices of meat and fiish, eggs, oysters); Fibrine (lean meat); Gelatine (bones, meat, fish); Caseine (cheese, milk, peas, beans); and Gluten (grain). Non-Nitrogenous foods are Carbohydrates: Starches (potatoes, grains) and Sugars: Fruit, honey, cane sugar) or Fats and Oils (butter cream nuts and salad oil)
The average adult requires 3.2 oz proteid, 10 oz starch, 3 oz fat, 1 oz salt, 5 pints water. My God! It sounds like Weight Watchers!!!!
And now for a quote: "Relative Value of Foods: It has often been claimed that an egg was equal to a pound of beef in nutrition. Such is not the case, though eggs stand high on the list. The following comparisons will no doubt be interesting."
They break foods down into "Water, etc." "Muscle Making" and "Heat and Fat Making" and so
Beef is 50.0 water, 15.0 muscle making, and 30.0 heat and fat making
oatmeal is 13.6 water, 17.0 muscle making, and 66.4 heat and fat making.
Not so far off from our concept (heat would be energy). The authors are experimentresses; they look at things under microscopes and boil them to find their properties. They advise that meat is more nutritious than fish, but fish is more digestible. And they urge one not to eat potatoes unaccompanied by meat, for potatoes provide "only needed bulk" and not muscle-making material.
The wording is very different, but the thoughts are very like today's, I thought. And the ease they have with cooking -- oh, I envy them. They whip and beat all day long; hollandaise holds no terrors. I have cookbooks with 3 pages of instructions for hollandaise; they manage it in a paragraph.
There are ads in the back of the book. John Fath sells Fish, Game and Fruit on Juneau Avenue (No. 32) while Rubel Bros are purveyors of Ladies' Cloths and Linings over on Milwaukee Street.
Nutrition, 1903
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