Unusual Foods People Used to Eat All the Time
In American culture, food is a lot like slang and pop music, in that it’s changed drastically over the years. Several American foods from the past come from a time of such different cultural, technological, and generational sensibilities that it can be hard to imagine encountering them today, let alone understanding their appeal. The following foods were once popular staples in the U.S. — but they might be difficult items to convince modern diners to try.
Poke Salad
Not to be confused with the differently pronounced Hawaiian dish of marinated raw fish, poke salad (sometimes spelled “salet” or “salud”) was made of pokeweed, a wild leafy green that has grown in Appalachia for centuries. It was a simple dish containing the boiled leaves and stalks of pokeweed, along with bacon grease, and its preparation was crucial: Pokeweed is poisonous, so boiling the plant at least twice (with new water each time) was necessary to render the greens safe to eat.
Because of the abundance of wild pokeweed and its association with toxicity, poke salad was primarily eaten in impoverished communities, and it endured as a staple well into the 20th century. In 1969, Tony Joe White’s hit song “Polk Salad Annie” positioned the dish as an emblem of rural toughness and resourcefulness in the face of poverty. Nowadays, the easier-to-prepare and similarly seasoned collard greens have endured in place of poke salad, though there are some who predict that the local foraging movement may lead to a resurgence of cooking with pokeweed.
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Turtle Soup
Turtle soup remains a delicacy around the world, particularly in China and Singapore, and it was a mainstay of fine dining in the U.S. from the colonial era through the mid-20th century. Sometimes described as a clear consommé with large diced turtle meat, other times a tomato-based broth thickened with a medium-dark roux, it was nearly always served with a glass of sherry to add to the dish. Turtle soup was once so prestigious that it was served at Abraham Lincoln's inauguration, and it was a favorite of President William Howard Taft. It also reliably appeared on menus throughout the country, including New York’s storied Delmonico’s.
Though the dish’s popularity was long and its pedigree high, its decline was quick, caused by a confluence of factors. Prohibition meant the sherry that provided a key seasoning flourish was no longer available. The rise of factory farming consolidated America’s meat production to beef, chicken, and pork, due to the easier processing methods involved with those meats. Anthropomorphic turtle characters appeared in the media and created an unintended perception shift against the idea of eating turtles. And finally, the green sea turtles the dish was originally made from were classified as endangered in 1973. Turtle enthusiasts switched to the more abundant snapping turtle, but turtle soup was all but nonexistent as a fine dining item by the 1980s.
Creamed Chipped Beef on Toast
Creamed chipped beef on toast was a breakfast food, also known as S.O.S. — an acronym for a profane (and even less appetizing!) name for the dish. This meal was made from sliced dried beef (a sort of bovine-based textural equivalent of pepperoni or salami) simmered in white gravy until softened, and then ladled over a piece of toast. The ease of preparation and long shelf life of its protein made it an ideal military ration — it appears in U.S. Army cooking manuals from as early as 1910 — as well as an easy meal for households seeking frugality. This made S.O.S. particularly popular in the 1930s and ’40s during the Great Depression and World War II, when conservation was front of mind. In the middle of the 20th century, S.O.S. was a standard menu item at most diners, but it began fading with the rise of nutrition consciousness around the 1970s — perhaps because it’s neither a health food nor as indulgent as the comparable biscuits and gravy.
Limburger Sandwich
Another 20th-century diner staple, the Limburger sandwich was a classic deli sandwich (read: a cold sandwich) of Limburger cheese and raw onion on rye bread. Limburger cheese was one of the five main cheeses produced in the U.S. during the late 19th and early 20th centuries (in addition to Swiss, brick, cheddar, and American cheese), and it was known to a point of infamy for its foul aroma. It was the subject of gags by Charlie Chaplin and the Three Stooges, and earlier, Mark Twain compared its odor to that of a corpse in his short story “The Invalid’s Story.”
Considering the already off-putting smell of Limburger cheese, the question may not be why a sandwich of raw onion and Limburger cheese is no longer popular, but rather, why was it ever popular? Perhaps its sharp taste was enough for the appeal, odor be damned. Or maybe eating it represented a sort of machismo similar to the spicy wings of today (with pungency instead of heat). In any case, changing tastes and the odorless convenience of sliced American cheese relegated the Limburger sandwich to a strictly regional rarity in parts of Wisconsin.
Vinegar Pie
Vinegar pie is commonly placed in the category of “desperation pie” (or “make-do pie”), a Depression-era dessert made with basic pantry ingredients substituting for traditional ingredients that may have been unavailable or too expensive. Other examples of “desperation pie” include eggless sugar cream pie, green tomato pie, and oatmeal pie, which mimicked custard pie, apple pie, and pecan pie, respectively. In that context, the acid from the vinegar pie’s namesake ingredient would be a resourceful replacement for lemon.
The origin of vinegar pie wasn’t the Depression, though. A recipe for it appeared in Colorado’s The Herald Democrat as early as 1905, in cookbooks such as Maud C. Cooke’s Three Meals a Day starting in 1892, and in the 1874 compendium The Home Cook Book of Chicago. The dessert was around enough that perhaps there was more to it than sheer utility. In recent years, James Beard Award-winning chef Chris Shepherd revived vinegar pie at his Houston, Texas restaurant Underbelly, and it became the restaurant’s signature dish, with an appealingly contemporary presentation. But Underbelly closed in 2018, and with it, the vinegar pie reverted back to obscurity.
