Small Home Gazette, Summer 2023
Letter From the Editor: Not Quite a Period Picnic
I could whip up a picnic menu from the past, but I can’t re-create some of the foods as they were experienced then. Many picnic foods of the bungalow era remain familiar fare like fried chicken, potato salad, potato chips, watermelon, cookies and Coca-Cola. Over the decades, items like jellied chicken and dates stuffed with peanut butter have fallen out of the picnic basket.
I’d like to time travel to sample two picnic items in particular that are dramatically different today: Coca-Cola and fried chicken.
Coca-Cola contained cocaine until 1929. Ads touted its “vim, vigor, refreshment and wholesomeness.” Ironically, the soda debuted in 1886 as a temperance drink—a “soft drink” because it contained no alcohol. Many products in the day contained cocaine, including tooth ache drops and throat lozenges. Its widespread use led to an addiction epidemic and narcotics laws ensued.
Much like General Mills devising new ways in recent decades to slowly reduce sugar in its cereal, Coca-Cola took 20 years to fully remove cocaine after public health outcries began. It’s still flavored by coca leaves, but the soft drink now relies on sugar and caffeine to replenish vim and vigor.
I’d like to pair my cocaine Coca-Cola with old-time fried chicken. Not for any secret recipe but for the flavor of the meat. Today’s standard broiler chicken tastes blander than tofu. It might as well be lab-grown.
I recently read the book, The Dorito Effect, about how food and flavor have changed. In the 1940s, the USDA held Chicken of Tomorrow contests. The goal was to make chicken more desirable—more meat for the cooking effort and less expensive than beef or pork. The finalist birds were evaluated on 18 criteria, such as growth rate. Flavor was not among them.
We no longer have “salt and pepper recipes,” found in early 1900s cookbooks, where that’s all you needed to add to make fried chicken shine. Now we need herbs, spices and even Coca-Cola to flavor most chicken.
