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Ice Crushers
How To Store Soft, Gooey Cookies... And KEEP them Soft
I shared this on my mom blog- BananaBlueberry a while back,
and it deserves another 'share the wisdom' post!
Defrosters
The electrical appliance manufacturers spotted the opening for an appliance to assist this process. During the 1950s U.S. companies produced a line of electric defrosters that could be plugged in and then placed in the freezer. Most were small electric heaters encased in aluminum bodies with wooden handles, such as those manufactured by Howell & Company and the Shane Manufacturing Company. Some models had metal and plastic casings. The Osrow Products Company of New York produced an infrared version in the early 1960s.
Deep Fat Fryers
The main disadvantage with these models was that left unattended an overheated pan full of fat could cause a dangerous fire. Electric fryers were introduced into the U.S. market in the late 1940s. By the early 1950s rectangular models included Dormeyer’s Fri-well and Dulane’s Fryryte. Sunbeam produced a circular model that also doubled as a roaster and a casserole. Most were thermostatically controlled so that the oil remained at a constant temperature. Cheaper models did not have this feature and relied on the experience of the cook or a fat thermometer. They could also be used without the frying baskets as electric casseroles and soup cookers.
Like other appliances the fundamentals of the earlier electric models remain but plastics replaced steel or aluminum as the outer casings in the 1970s and additional refinements and safety features have been added. Models in the 1990s featured locking lids, vertical oil drainage, “coolwalls” similar to toasters, replaceable or washable filters in the lids to absorb grease and odors, and controls to raise and lower the baskets without lifting the lids. The main manufacturers are De Longhi, Tefal, Moulinex, and Morphy Richards.
These appliances continue to compete with the traditional fryer, and both now have to meet the challenge of the even-more-convenient ready-cut frozen “oven” or “microwave” fries, which can simply be heated up.
Margarine
In its original form, margarine was merely cheap and no more convenient than butter. The first margarine was developed by a French chemist, Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès, in response to a national competition in 1867 to find a cheaper alternative to butter. The name came from the Greek word for pearl, as margarine was whitish rather than yellow. It was based on animal fats such as suet. In Britain, an improved version, developed by the Dutch butter merchants Jan and Anton Jurgens was marketed as “butterine” until 1887, when that was forbidden. In 1903, the development of a process called hydrogenation by the French chemist Paul Sabatier made it possible to use vegetable oils as the main ingredient of margarine. By bubbling hydrogen through liquid oils in the presence of nickel, which acts as a catalyst, the oils are hardened. However, hydrogenation also had the effect of changing unsaturated oils to saturated fats, which are less easily metabolized. The introduction of healthier margarines that were high in polyunsaturated oils, such as sunflower or safflower oil, had the added benefit of producing a softer, more spreadable margarine. The convenience of spreading “straight from the fridge” was used as a major selling point for soft margarines. The more recent spreadable butters are actually a more or less equal mixture of butter and vegetable oils.
Instant Foods
The term “instant food” covers any dried product that is prepared for cooking simply by adding a measure of liquid, usually water or milk. The first ready-mix food was Aunt Jemima’s pancake flour, produced in St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1889. Other instant baking products, such as cake mixes, had their heyday in the 1960s, when the level of female employment rose. These products were marketed on the basis that home baking was a badge of good housewifery, so instant mixes enabled the busy working woman to cheat a little. In 1946, the R. T. French Company of Rochester, New York, introduced the first instant mashed potato product. General Foods introduced Minute Rice, a dried precooked rice, in 1950.
Before the 1950s, all instant products were produced by traditional air-drying, either at ambient temperature or with added heat. By 1940, a new method, freeze-drying, had been developed in Sweden. Food was rapidly frozen and then placed in a vacuum chamber to dry, because, at low pressures, water passes directly from the solid state to the gaseous state, a process known as sublimation. This was particularly effective for any foods with a high water content, as the water is removed rapidly without damaging the structure of the food. The freeze-dried food is sponge-like in texture and therefore absorbs water rapidly. However, the high speed of freezing and drying required for effective results means that the food pieces need to be no more than 2.5 cm (1 inch) thick. The first factory for freeze-drying food opened in Russia in 1954. Freeze-drying is used commercially for drying vegetables and meat, as well as coffee.
Frozen Foods
The pioneer of frozen foods was Clarence Birdseye, who based his freezing process on the natural freezing of meat and fish that he had observed in the Arctic zone. He noted that naturally frozen meat and fish seemed fresh when cooked and eaten months later. After returning to the United States, he formed Birdseye Seafoods in 1922 and initially concentrated on chilling fish fillets at a plant in New York. By 1924, he had developed a method of “flash-freezing” by placing cartons of food between metal plates under pressure. He formed the General Seafood Corporation to exploit the flash-freezing technique. In 1929, he sold his company to the Postum Company for $22 million, on the condition that his surname was used as two words, hence the Birds Eye brand name. The expanded company was renamed as the General Foods Corporation. In 1929, cartons of Birds Eye frozen vegetables went on sale in the United States. They were intended to be eaten on the day of purchase, as refrigerators, which were found in only a minority of homes, were only suitable for short-term storage of frozen foods. In 1930, twenty-six varieties of Birds Eye Frosted Foods were test-marketed in Springfield, Massachusetts. The line that was introduced across the United States in 1931 consisted of fish, meat, peas, spinach, loganberries, raspberries, and cherries.
By 1933, 516 stores were stocking Birds Eye Frosted Foods. In 1939, Birds Eye introduced precooked frozen dishes based on chicken, beef, and turkey. As consumption of frozen foods began to increase rapidly in the 1940s, the first specialist self-service frozen-food centers appeared, initially in the New York area in 1945. In Britain, frozen foods became available for the first time in 1946, after a Birds Eye plant was set up in Great Yarmouth. The U.S. company Sara Lee Kitchens produced the first frozen baked foods for the mass market in 1953. A year later, the complete frozen meal appeared when C. A. Swanson & Sons of Omaha, Nebraska, launched TV dinners. In 1957, a new method of cooking frozen foods emerged when the U.S. company Seabrook Farms launched Miracle Pack Prepared Foods, the first boil-in-the-bag frozen foods. The first frozen food to make a major impact in Britain was Birds Eye Fish Fingers, introduced in 1955. These cod sticks coated in breadcrumbs became a favorite children’s food.
In the energy-conscious 1980s, a new competitor to frozen foods appeared—chilled foods. The chilling process involves keeping cooked foods at constant temperatures of 0° to 4°C (32°F–40°F), the recommended temperature range for refrigerators. Although chilled foods have a shorter storage life than frozen foods, they are also quicker to cook and therefore save energy.
Frozen foods have had a profound effect on both the food industry and consumer behavior. For growers of food crops, selling produce to frozen-food companies meant reducing wastage and loss of income through natural decomposition. Some farmers may therefore prefer to sell their whole crop to the frozen food industry. One consequence of this has been that some types of fruit and vegetables are less widely available as fresh produce. The convenience of stocking up on food less frequently is another factor that has reduced the role of fresh food in the diet. An advantage of frozen foods for consumers, however, is that foods are available out of season, thus providing a more varied diet all year round. Calorie-counted, nutritionally balanced frozen or chilled meals may be a boon to the busy consumer, but traditional cooking skills have suffered as a result. Today, for many people, traditional cooking has become a hobby rather than a necessity.
Breakfast Cereals
Prior to the 1860s, breakfast cereal came in one variety—oatmeal porridge. This was not a quick breakfast dish, as it needed to be cooked for a long time. The solution was to cook a large batch and then reheat daily. In 1877, prepacked American Quaker brand rolled oats that had a much faster cooking time than oatmeal were introduced. The first ready-to-eat breakfast cereal, Granula, was invented by James Caleb Jackson of Dansville, New York, in 1863. Jackson found that small cooked granules of graham cracker dough made a suitable cold breakfast cereal, served with cold milk. However, it was not until the 1890s that the idea of ready-to-eat breakfast cereal really took off. John Harvey Kellogg had become director of the Battle Creek Sanitarium and, with his brother, Will, had begun to develop easily digestible foods for invalids. They developed a baked wheat flake cereal that was marketed in 1895 as Granose, the first flaked breakfast cereal. Soon after, a second breakfast cereal enterprise came into being in Battle Creek, when C.W. Post, founder of the Postum Company, developed Grape Nuts in 1897.
In 1898, Will Kellogg developed Cornflakes, the cereal that became most closely associated with the Kellogg name. Kellogg’s became the company name in 1922, replacing the Sanitas Nut Food Company (1898) and the Battle Creek Toasted Flake Company (1906). The first ready-to-eat breakfast cereal to reach the British market was Force Flakes, made in Canada, in 1902.
Although early breakfast cereals followed very healthy formulas, with only small amounts of malt and sugar added for extra flavor, as time went on, sugar content increased dramatically and fiber content fell accordingly. Kellogg’s Sugar Smacks, introduced in 1953, had a 56 percent sugar content. In the more health-conscious society of the late 1950s, Kellogg’s did introduce healthier cereals, such as Special K in 1955, but the company no longer had a healthy whole-foods image. Muesli, a favorite Swiss breakfast food that contains nuts and dried fruit, has become the epitome of the healthy breakfast cereal.
Bread
Flour milling and baking became industrialized in the United States in the nineteenth century. Increasingly, bread was not baked at home but purchased from shops and bakeries. One sign of the changing nature of food production and distribution was the formation in the United States in 1898 of the National Biscuit Company (later shortened to Nabisco), which was an amalgamation of 114 bakeries, representing 90 percent of American commercial biscuit production. In Britain, the dominance of national bakery chains is a much more recent phenomenon, with no more than 40 percent of all bread consumed produced in large plant bakeries as late as 1953.
The automation of bread-making began with the introduction of roller milling of flour in the 1870s. Roller mills could produce much finer and whiter flour of a more consistent quality than grindstones. This had two major implications for bread-making: the finer flour could absorb more water, producing a lighter and more malleable dough, and the natural oils in the wheat berry were extracted at an early stage, leaving a flour with a longer life. In the 1920s, the factory bread-making process was accelerated when high-speed dough mixers became available.
The phrase “the best thing since sliced bread” appeared in the United States in the 1930s following the introduction of presliced Wonder Bread. In 1928, after sixteen years of development work, Otto Frederick Rohwedder launched the first practical bread-slicing and wrapping machine in Battle Creek, Michigan. In the same year, the Continental Bakery in NewYork introduced Wonder Bread, the first nationally distributed wrapped loaf of bread. Two years later, using Rohwedder’s machines, it introduced presliced Wonder Bread. Wrapped, presliced bread also appeared in the United Kingdom in 1930. By 1933, 80 percent of the bread sold in the United States was presliced and wrapped.
Sliced bread was convenient and of a standard thickness. Its introduction no doubt helped the sales of electric toasters throughout the 1930s. However, healthfood campaigners argued that the convenience of the presliced white loaf came at the expense of its nutritional value. By the 1940s and 1950s, white bread was routinely enriched by the addition of vitamins and minerals. Stoneground whole wheat flour and unwrapped loaves enjoyed a revival from the late 1950s as a result of the growth of the health foods movement. For example, the American health food guru Gayelord Hauser was a strong advocate of the benefits of wheat germ.
Beverages
Even simple processes like brewing tea and coffee could be simplified by processing. The flavor in coffee beans is a volatile essence, which begins to dissipate when the roasted bean is ground. Hence, traditionally, coffee beans would only be ground immediately before use. In 1878, Chase & Sanbourn of Boston, Massachusetts, packaged ground, roasted coffee in sealed cans to preserve its flavor. In 1901, a Japanese-American chemist, Satori Kato, produced the first soluble instant coffee for the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. Eight years later, George Constant Louis Washington of New York produced a soluble coffee powder, which he sold under the George Washington brand name. However, instant coffee was not mass-produced until the late 1930s. The Swiss food company, Nestlé, developed a mass-production method for instant coffee in order to exploit the surplus of Brazilian coffee beans. Nestlé mass-marketed their instant coffee as Nescafé from 1938. The American food giant General Foods produced an instant coffee in 1942 specifically for supply to the United States Army. It was marketed to the public as Maxwell House instant coffee after World War II. However, the American public tended to shun instant coffee, whereas in Britain and Japan, it made up about 90 percent of coffee sales. The standard drying technique involves spraying brewed coffee into a rising column of heated air, which removes the water as steam, leaving a powder residue. Freeze-drying technology improved in the 1950s and was applied to instant coffee in the mid-1960s. Freeze-dried coffee retained more flavor because the volatile oils remained.
Although coffee is the dominant hot beverage in the United States, the British public has always preferred tea. This may explain why the idea of the tea bag originated in the United States, where consumers needed more persuasion to drink tea. In 1904, a New York tea and coffee merchant, Thomas Sullivan, decided to send customers tea samples in muslin pouches. It was in this form that tea bags were first commercially produced in the United States in 1919. At first, manufacturers saw the catering industry, rather than private consumers, as the main market for tea bags, but by the mid-1930s, Tetley, of NewYork, was mass-marketing tea bags. In Britain, the public at first shunned the tea bag as an inferior product. This was justified insofar as tea bag manufacturers were able to use the fine “sweepings,” previously treated as a waste product. These sweepings would have leaked out of the paper cartons used to package loose-leaf tea. Improvements in tea bag technology, giving improved infusion, helped to sell the concept of the tea bag. By 1993, over 80 percent of tea sold in Britain was in the form of tea bags.
Convenience Foods
Convenience food is very much a twentieth-century concept. In the nineteenth century, the main reason for processing food before sale was to increase its shelf life. This was a matter of increasing concern, given that the growth of the urban population meant that food had to be transported from further and further afield to the place of consumption in order to meet rising demand. Bottling, canning, and drying were methods that assisted food preservation and were amenable to mass-production and distribution. The archetypal canned food is Heinz baked beans, made by the U.S. H. J. Heinz Company, which is now sold all over the world. The disadvantage of canned foods was that the high temperatures at which the food was cooked, in order to kill enzymes and bacteria, also destroyed some vitamins. Canned foods also have a high content of sugar and salt, which are used as flavor enhancers.
Increasing production of preserved foods containing additives led governments to impose legal standards. In Britain, the Sale of Food and Drugs Act of 1875 imposed much stricter guidelines and penalties than earlier legislation. In the United States, the Pure Food and Drugs Act was passed in 1906. A number of minor religious sects stressed the importance of a healthy diet. Notable amongst these were the Seventh-day Adventists, whose headquarters were in the small town of Battle Creek, Michigan. The name of Battle Creek became familiar internationally owing to its emergence as the center of breakfast cereal production. The Adventists championed breakfast cereals because of their nutritional value, but the cereals became popular in the twentieth century because of their convenience. It was the convenience factor that spurred the development of new preservation techniques, including deep-freezing, irradiation, and freeze-drying. These techniques not only extend the life of food, making fewer shopping trips necessary, but also shorten the cooking time, an increasingly important factor as more women went out to work. The convenience of bulk buying led to a shift in food retailing from the local store offering personal service to the self-service supermarket. By 1959, supermarkets accounted for 69 percent of American food sales. In Britain, supermarkets were slower to take hold, but were dominant by the 1970s.
