Everyday Dinners: Frontier Fare to Fast Food

Dinner. What to cook? How to cook it? When, where and how to serve it? Such questions have bedeviled Johnson County cooks ever since settlement of the county, and the answers have changed with the times.

On the Kansas frontier, women prepared mainly pork and corn dishes. They served them in portions hefty enough to fuel the tremendous amount of energy the entire family needed to put dinner on the table. Today, Johnson County families no longer work the land to produce their own food. Most parents now work in offices and children work at school, and families purchase their food from supermarkets and fast-food places. What now is served for dinner is quick and easy. What once was for dinner was time-consuming and back-breaking. And nothing short of technological revolution helped bring about this change.

Frontier Fare

Frontiersmen and their sons, age ten and older, raised the corn on which the frontier diet depended. They also tended the livestock, mainly hogs. Hardy hogs were the favored livestock because they foraged for themselves and required little care — important qualities during a time of lean resources and plentiful work. Whenever extra hands were needed, frontierswomen and their daughters helped tend the livestock and worked in the fields. Mothers also raised garden produce and, with their children, gathered wild greens and fruits. Most of a woman’s time, however, was spent preserving and cooking the food her family produced.

Food preservation took place mainly in the summer when vegetables and fruits ripened, hens were laying and cows had not yet gone dry. The most common ways to preserve food were drying and salting. These two methods were effective because bacteria cannot live without moisture or in high concentrations of salt. So, in those days before refrigeration, Johnson County pioneers cured pork and corned beef by packing them between layers of salt. Meats, as well as vegetables and fruits, also could be pickled by soaking them in brine, a heavily salted water. Strips of beef, slices of fruit and whole green beans were dried in the hot sun. Eggs preserved in equal parts of coarse salt, unslaked lime and water could keep up to three years. Dairy products placed in a bucket and lowered into a cool well might last for days.

By winter’s end, though, little except pork and corn still made a daily appearance on the pioneer table. Women mixed cornmeal into various concoctions from johnny cakes to hasty pudding and served them alongside some type of pork. Meals were monotonous and heavy. So was the preparation of them. Cooking began around dawn with the building of a fire on the open hearth. It took about two hours for the log fire to generate the coals needed for cooking first breakfast, then dinner at noon, and finally, in the evening, supper. Women spent much of the day in front of the open hearth — bending down to lift pots in and out of the fire, to add more logs, to poke them, to shovel out hot coals and place them beneath the three-legged kettles that sat on the hearth and cooked several of her made-from-scratch fixings.

The Coming of Technology

At the same time that Johnson County women were cooking everything from scratch, inventors were concocting machines that would change both cooking and diet. Tin cans had come into being in 1825. Henry Evans hurried up food processing in 1849 by inventing a machine that turned out these cans. The Civil War boosted America’s new food industry by getting soldiers — at least those with the rank to rate it — accustomed to the taste of tinned edibles. Industrialists put five million cans of food on the market in 1860, 30 million in 1870 and 120 million in 1880. By 1900, processed food was big business and canned goods stocked middle-class pantries.

Fast-moving trains brought these prepared foods to Johnson County, just as they carried away its agricultural products to far-flung regions of the United States. Trains also brought fresh fruits and vegetables from Florida, Georgia, California and even South America. Meats, dairy products and other highly perishable foods started to trek across the rails in the decades after the first refrigerated car was patented in 1867. Such innovations expanded the availability of a wide variety of food year-round and helped to transform the American diet.

The New Balanced Diet

New views toward what constituted a good diet emerged in the mid-1800s when German scientist Justus von Liebig discovered that food is comprised of chemical elements. American scientists used Liebig’s discovery to study the American diet. By the 1870s they found it lacking in nutritional value. Americans, these scientists concluded, needed to change their food ways and eat what was good for them. About this same time, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology introduced home economics.

The home economics movement created an army of white-aproned crusaders eager to carry the “eat-what-is-good-for-you” message into America’s kitchens.

By the early 20^th century, lighter and better balanced meals were what most Johnson County housewives served their families each evening. Dinner now occurred around 6:00 p.m., after husbands returned home from work. An ordinary dinner consisted of three courses: soup, a meat entree accompanied by vegetable side dishes, and dessert with coffee. Dinner had become a formal affair. It also was more nutritious and appealing than the monotonous frontier fare and less time-consuming.

The time savings came from not having to produce the food. Olathe housewives merely had to phone W.C. Elders & Co. at 123 for “prompt delivery” of the groceries they needed for dinner. Cooking dinner, however, remained a long, hard and hot task. Cast-iron stoves required constant feeding of fuel (either coal or wood) plus skill in manipulating a temperamental system of flues and dampers. These huge black stoves had several potlids which made it possible to prepare multi-dish, multi-course dinners. Expectations for bigger and better dinners increased with the number of potlids. Expectation for beautifully served dinners expanded as well. Immaculate white linen, exquisite china, sparkling crystal and gleaming silver became the standard for everyday dinners.

Convenience Comes to the Kitchen

By the 1950s, informality and practicality had become the hallmarks of daily dinners. Washable place mats, earthenware dishes, plastic tumblers and stainless steel flatware now typified the well-set table. Placed upon this casually set table was a variety of convenience foods prepared with the assistance of a gas or electric range and a squadron of small appliances. Electric skillets, mixers, blenders, knives, can openers and percolators speeded up food preparation. TV dinners, frozen vegetables, brown 'n serve rolls, bottled salad dressings, and desserts made from store-bought mixes eased cooking chores.

The convenience of prepared mixes and frozen foods was new, but the kind of food Johnson Countians wanted for dinner was not. Like other middle-class Americans, Johnson Countians still wanted meat — preferably beef — as the centerpiece of their evening meal. And, like their predecessors who had adopted balanced diets fifty years earlier, they still preferred to get their nutrition from milk, white bread, fruit and a few vegetables — namely potatoes, lettuce, corn, peas and green beans. Food manufacturers simply had made America's traditional diet more convenient. They also made it more homogenous, weakening class and regional differences. The midwestern, middle-class diet common in Johnson County, Kansas, became accepted nationwide.

The newest New Diet and the Fastest Fast Food

The latter part of the 20^th century brought concerns about the need for leaner and healthier diets. These concerns arose in the 1960s and 1970s when scientific studies linked particular diseases with certain foods. Americans now worried about what beef and dairy products were doing to their vascular and coronary systems. Actually, Americans did more than worry; they changed their eating habits. Between 1965 and 1977, they consumed 33% less butter, 10% less sugar and 20% more fish and 33% more chicken. After 1976, men between the ages of 19 and 50 reduced their beef intake by about 35% and women in this age group decreased theirs by nearly 50%.

The late 20^th century also brought a greater need for convenience foods. The majority of women were now in the labor force. But the Families and Work Institute reported that neither employment nor earning power relieved women of kitchen duty. Double duty on the job and in the kitchen made women more dependent on convenience foods.

There was plenty of it. A cornucopia of factory-prepared entrees required only a quick zap in the microwave before being placed on the dinner table. Extra convenient were the carry-out foods available at supermarkets and fast-food restaurants. Frequently, Johnson County women stopped on their way home from work to pick up hamburgers and fries from McDonald’s, pizza from Godfather’s, or chicken and a salad from their supermarket’s deli. Supermarkets and fast-food franchises lined Johnson County’s thoroughfares, making it easy to rustle up dinner and drive it home.

At home, few families eat dinner together on a regular basis. It was a phenomenon that had rolled in with the automobile and youth culture of the 1920s, accelerated in the 1950s, and went into high gear in the 1980s. families in the Reagan era often ate their meals on the run, with each member grabbing a bite of this or that, depending on taste and time. Grazing is what social commentators call this new eating habit. Some predict that it will become a mainstay of the future, when individual members of two-career families — busy with varying activities and schedules — will graze on a series of mini-meals throughout the day.

Today’s ease in getting food to the dinner table is a continuum of the technological revolution that started with the industrial canning of foods more than a century ago. So is the year-round bounty Johnson Countians now enjoy. Regardless of the season, dinner can be lively in taste and healthy in nutrients. What's for dinner in the 1990s is more than a matter of convenience; it’s one of unparalleled choice.