Arts & Crafts Kitchens The Birth of the Modern Kitchen

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When we started building kit­chens many years ago, no one wanted an Arts & Crafts look. They wanted to replace their Arts & Crafts kit­chen with something "modern". We spent hours talking Bungalow owners out of colonial-style and country kit­chens – then all the rage.

Sometimes we succeeded. Mostly we failed.

Things have definitely changed. Today, over 60% of the kit­chens we build are some version of the Arts & Crafts styles: the Crafts­man, Mis­sion, or Prai­rie kit­chen.

We are in the middle of an Arts & Crafts revival. Even houses that do not otherwise have a hint of Arts & Crafts styling feature Arts & Crafts kitch­ens. As to why, well, they are simply beautiful, functional kit­chens.

The Evolution of the Arts & Crafts Kitchen

Of course, what we now call the Arts & Crafts kit­chen is actually a modern interpretation – the invention of contemporary designers applying Arts & Crafts design elements and features to modern kit­chens.

No such kit­chens existed during the actual Arts & Crafts era if for no other reason than much of the technology we take for granted now did not exist then.

Prior to the First World War, Arts & Crafts kit­chens barely differed from their rather Spartan Vic­tor­ian antecedents. A wall sink, a few drawer chests, and a table or two for food preparation along with a wood- or coal-burning stove or, possibly, in some urban areas one of the new natural gas ranges, completed the kit­chen.

Still, compared to all prior kit­chens, it was a marvel.

It had conveniences never before seen in a home kit­chen. Indoor plumbing, the premier innovation of the Vic­tor­ian Age, allowed water to be brought into the house. Gone was the laborious process of hauling water in buckets for cooking and washing up.

Almost as impactful was the cookstove which replaced the iron kettle in an open hearth for cooking.

First heated by wood or coal, early stoves were large, complex, and dangerous but a huge improvement over the Colonial fireplace.

Natural gas in the latter part of the 19th century made possible stoves that were safer and simpler to use, requiring much less maintenance.

The icebox, cooled by blocks of ice, was not very convenient, but made it possible to store perishable foods safely for longer periods, a capability that dramatically improved the Amer­ican diet.

But, one important technology was missing in Vic­tor­ian kit­chens: electricity. Only the very wealthy had it before 1900 (using household generators).

But a scant thirty years later it was available to almost everyone in urban areas at the flick of a switch. And, by the end of the Arts and Crafts period in 1941, even most rural areas were electrified thanks to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and its Rural Electrification Act legislation spearheaded by Sen. George W. Norris of Nebraska.

Electricity made possible the modern kit­chen of the late Arts & Crafts period, differing only in fairly minor details from the kit­chen of today.

Social, Cul­tur­al, and Tech­no­lo­gi­cal In­flu­ences on the Arts & Crafts Kitch­en

kitchens of the early part of the Arts & Crafts period rarely had built-in cabinetry.

There was very little need for extensive storage. Most food was grown or produced locally and purchased fresh daily. The milkman delivered fresh milk, the butcher provided cuts of meat to order, the greengrocer fresh vegetables to supplement whatever was growing in the back garden.

Very little food needed to be stored. The little storage that existed was devoted to kit­chen implements, staples, and possibly dinnerware.

But, things were beginning to change. A number of distinct trends converged during the first half of the 20th century that radically altered the Amer­ican diet and the Amer­ican kit­chen.

Electricity: The widescale availability of electricity led to reliable and convenient home refrigeration and powered appliances that had an enormous influence on kit­chen work and on how kit­chens were outfitted and organized.

Commercial refrigeration: Fresh food could be transported across the country and safely stored for days and weeks, radically changed the American diet, food preparation, and kit­chen storage needs.

Hygiene and Sanitation: The demand for improvements in hygiene and sanitation that began in the Vic­tor­ian era reached its zenith during the Arts & Crafts period., influencing the materials and fixtures deemed suitable for a kit­chen.

Efficiency: The push for better organization and time management, which also took its first hesitant steps during Vic­tor­ian times, came into full flower after 1910, propelled by the efforts of pioneering home economists.

Food Safety: The demand for better food safety began late in the Victorian Era. But, our usually laggard Congress dragged its feet until 1906 when it finally passed the first national food safety laws: the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.

These laws and their successors helped ensure that processed foods were safe for the first time in Amer­ican history and resulted in a growing abundance of easy-to-prepare foods that not only reduced a homemaker's time in the kit­chen but enabled her to provide healthier and less expensive meals for her family. The food revolution lauched by these Acts is still ongoing today.

All of these sometimes tidal changes had their impact on the design and organization of home kit­chens so that, by the end of the Arts & Crafts period, trecognizably modern kit­chens had come into being, preparing for the avalanche of state-of-the-art kit­chens that were a feature of the post-war housing boom.

Health and Sanitation

The flu pandemic of 1918-19 on top of the adulterated and impure food scandals ^[1] of the late 1800s and early 20th century badly frightened the country and created a national clamor for better health and sanitation.

The movement was, as many trends have been both before and after, co-opted by merchandisers and fueled by widespread product advertising. Like today's passion for all things "green", in the 1920s and '30s, it was everything "hygienic".

All manner of products were suddenly "cleaner", "healthier", "more sanitary" and even "sterile"; or at the very least "polished", "sparkling" or "gleaming".

Listerine^® was essential for clean breath, and Johnson Wax for sanitary floors – which were not really clean unless they were "Spic 'n Span"^®.

Warnings against the more odious personal habits, such as spitting on the sidewalk ("you cannot expect to rate if you expectorate!") appeared on trams, billboards, and posters alongside exhortations to weekly bathing, and daily teeth cleaning.

Spitoons (or more politely, cuspidors) disappeared from restaurants, bars, and hotel lobbies almost overnight.

In 1890 they were everywhere, by 1910 they were quickly becoming curiosities.

Massive public works projects provided clean water to almost every city and town in North America and sanitary sewer systems made the flushing toilet a ubiquity rather than a novelty by 1910.

Sanitary improvements continued throughout the Arts & Crafts period. By its end in 1941 rare was the urban household that did not have running water.

Households in rural areas were quickly catching up due to New Deal programs that brought modern amenities to Amer­ican farmers.

Safe and Wholesome Food

Food was a very big part of the health and hygiene movement, and the federal government's regulation of the nation's food supply played and still plays a pivotal role in ensuring safe and wholesome food.

The drive for safer food was already decades old by the turn of the 20th century, starting during the Amer­ican Civil War when more soldiers on both sides were killed from disease and tainted food than from enemy bullets.

Harvey Wiley and the Food Safety Movement

It was given a boost with the appointment in 1893 of Har­vey Wash­ing­ton Wil­ey as head chemist of the U. S. Dep­art­ment of Agri­cul­ture's Division of Chem­is­try (renamed the Bureau of Chemistry in 1901).

Founded in 1862 with five employees the bureau had paid little attention to food safety until Wiley's appointment. Under his stewardship, it made pure food its first priority.

In addition to laboratory analyses of foods suspected of adulteration, the Bureau developed clinical trials to isolate the effects of adulterants on human health – most of which were then completely unknown.

Volunteer test subjects, 12 young men "in good health" known popularly as the "poison squad", were a public sensation and the trials received wide notoriety.

Wiley also used the "bully pulpit" afforded by the USDA's Technical Bulletins to inform the public about food adulteration and safety issues.

The son of a part-time preacher, Wiley was a gifted orator, and by regularly addressing women's groups and pure food rallies, he gained widespread support for his crusade against adulteration.

Fanny Merritt Farmer, for example, head of the influential Boston Cooking School, advocated Wiley's ideas in the Boston Cooking School Cook Book, the most widely read culinary text of its time (and still in print), including step-by-step simple home tests for detecting harmful adulterants in food.

National women's magazines, such as Col­lier's Week­ly, Wo­man's Home Com­pan­ion, Mc­Call's, and Good House­keep­ing, aroused public opinion with cartoons, articles, and editorials.

Progressive food producers like Hen­ry J. Heinz recognized that safe, wholesome food is not only good for the consuming public but is also good business.

He stood nearly alone among the manufacturers of his day in supporting pure food laws. Heinz products were advertised as free of additives and adulterants – a claim confirmed by Wiley's laboratory sleuths – and consumers were implored to ask for Heinz products by name.

Progressive women's organizations including the Gen­er­al Fed­er­a­tion of Wo­men's Clubs, the militant Wo­men's Christ­ian Tem­per­ance Un­ion, and the Na­tion­al Con­sum­ers League were vocal in their support of food safety.

The 19th Amend­ment giving women the right to vote in elections was still decades in the future but they did have the right to vote with their purses – a right that they exercised liberally.

GFWC members were asked to refuse to buy any canned product that is not distinctly labeled with the name of the manufacturer or for which the local grocer will not give a guarantee of purity.

Group actions were also encouraged.

The confrontational Wo­men's Christ­ian Tem­per­ance Un­ion organized members to closely monitor food merchants and report violators of state pure food laws.

The more genteel Gen­er­al Fed­er­a­tion of Wo­men's Clubs established innocent-sounding "visiting committees" charged with persuading merchants to stock only properly labeled, unadulterated foods.

Where lady-like persuasion did not work, uncooperative retailers faced mass boycotts and picketing.

"The Jungle"

But, it took Up­ton Sin­clair's shocking revelations of the unsafe and unsanitary practices in the meatpacking industry in his novel, The Jun­gle, published in 1905 to tip the balance in favor of national food safety laws.

The result was the swift passage by a usually laggard Con­gress of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat In­spec­tion Act in 1906. The statutes were widely referred to in the popular press as "Har­vey Wi­ley's Laws".

The new laws prohibited "interstate and foreign commerce in adulterated and mislabeled food…" A product in violation could be confiscated and the seller fined or imprisoned.

Adulteration was defined to include the "removal of valuable constituents from food", the substitution of ingredients that reduced quality, and the addition of "deleterious ingredients" including spoiled animal and vegetable products.

Misleading, deceptive, or false labeling was considered "misbranding."

Later amendments to the Act made corporate executives personally liable for any adulteration of food products, even if they did not know about them on the legal theory of "willful ignorance", that is, if they did not know, they should have.

Criminal penalties attached to gross or repeated violations, making the Pure Food and Drug Act one of the few federal laws holding violators to for what are potentially criminal acts.

The Bureau of Chem­is­try, later recast as the semi-autonomous Food and Drug Ad­min­is­tra­tion, grew to a staff of 630 by 1924, half of whom were chemists, bacteriologists, microscopists, engineers, and food safety inspectors.

Charged with the Herculean task of ensuring the safety of the nation's food supply, the Bureau did so vigorously.

There had already been 12,000 seizures and prosecutions by 1924, and it quickly became clear to all concerned that the new sheriff in town was not kidding even a little bit about food safety.

U.S. vs. Coca-Cola

Even, popular consumer products felt the weight of the new law.

Coca-Cola's president, Asa G. Cand­ler, having seen the writing on the wall, had already banished cocaine (the "coca" in Coca-Cola) from its soft drink formula.

But Wiley's chemists found massive quantities of caffeine in the beverage which they considered a dangerous and habit-forming adulterant in a drink advertised and sold to children.

Wiley wanted Coke to remove the caffeine and made his point unmistakable by ordering U.S. marshals to seize a batch of Coke syrup, which resulted in a lawsuit quaintly entitled United States vs. 40 Barrels and 20 Kegs of Coca-Cola.

The lawsuit ended up in the Supreme Court in 1916 where Coke argued that Caffeine was not an "additive". It had always been an ingredient in Coke and was not an "added" ingredient subject to regulation under the new legislation.

The argument was not persuasive.

In a blistering opinion, written by Justice Charles Evans Hughes Sr., the court unanimously (less one abstention), sided with Wiley and returned the case to the lower court for retrial on the sole issue of whether caffeine was harmful.

In the meantime, however, Asa Candler had died and his less obdurate son, Charles, now the head of the company, offered to settle the lawsuit by reimbursing all of the Government's expenses of litigation and reducing the amount of caffeine in its product to a level acceptable to the Government.

Today's Original Coke still contains caffeine. Caffeine-free Coke was not introduced until 70 years later in 1983 when Coke was forced to market a caffeine-free product to compete with its arch-rival's Pepsi Free.

Then, in 1985 the company introduced New Coke with a formula that included vastly reduced caffeine. It nearly caused rioting. Coke quickly reverted to its original caffeinated formula.

Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval

Wiley resigned from the De­part­ment of Agri­cul­ture in 1912 and went to work for Good House­keeping Magazine as its director of the Bureau of Foods, Sanitation, and Health. He remained at the magazine for the next 18 years.

Good Housekeeping had already introduced its Seal of Approval in 1909. Only foods tested in the magazine's state-of-the-art laboratory and earning its Seal could be advertised in the magazine. The Good Housekeeping Institute also certified products that were not advertised in the magazine as a public service.

Other magazines, noticing the popularity of the Seal, began offering their own guarantees. Better Homes and Gardens began a money-back guarantee on products advertised in the magazine in 1925. Parents Magazine beginning in the 1930s issued a "Seal of Commendation" for advertising meeting the magazine's requirements. McCall's offered the Use-Tested Symbol program.

But the Good Housekeeping Seal remained the flagship, shaping American buying habits and becoming one of the most important consumer guides to safe and wholesome food throughout most of the 20th century.

Pure Food Standards

Pure Food Laws were not universally admired, especially by food processors. Some found ingenious ways to get around the requirements of the new laws.

Peanut butter with few peanuts avoided misbranding prosecutions by labeling the product Peanut Spred.

Salad Bouquet, advertised "for use like vinegar" actually contained very little vinegar. It was mostly water and dangerous when used for pickling since it allowed the pickles to spoil.

Bred-Spred, which looked and tasted like strawberry jam, was devoid of strawberries (or any other fruit). It was compounded of water, sugar, coal tar (for color), artificial pectin (to aid jelling), artificial flavoring, and grass seed.

Attractively packaged and heavily advertised, these products were often popular with the buying product, and while they were certainly adulterated, they did not fall within the original jurisdiction of the FDA.

This changed in 1930 when legislation to combat product dilution was belatedly passed by Con­gress.

The new law permitted the FDA to establish food standards. Any product that did not meet the standards was required to carry a conspicuous warning label that identified the product as "Be­low U.S. Standard but not Illegal".

All such products soon disappeared or were reformulated to meet FDA requirements.

The Food Revolution

History proved Henry Heinz and other progressive food processors totally right: pure food was indeed good business.

With increasing food safety came increased consumer confidence in processed foods and people began buying a lot more of them.

This, in turn, encouraged the food industry to introduce an ever-increasing number and variety of processed and prepared foods.

By the eve of the U.S. entry into the World War in 1941 almost all of the major food brands familiar to us today were already on grocery shelves. Many are now well into their second century. (See, Familiar Foods From the Arts & Crafts Era on this page.)

The overall effect was nothing less than a food revolution – one that radically changed the Amer­ican diet in the span of a single generation – and which continues yet today.

The foods available to Amer­icans were no longer limited to what happened to be in season locally. Packaged, canned, and (after 1930) frozen foods made wholesome, nutritious meals universally available.

Exotic foods – many virtually unknown in the U.S. a scant decade earlier such as apricots, artichokes, mangos, pineapple, and canned tuna – became commonplace at the corner grocery and available year-round.

In 1900 over 90% of the food consumed in the U.S. was locally produced. By 1941 the proportion of the Amer­ican diet that was locally grown had dropped below 20% in urban areas and was still falling. Today it is below 8 percent.

Universal Elec­tri­fi­ca­tion

Indoor plumbing was the transformational technology that created the first modern bathroom by bringing it indoors during the Vic­tor­ian period.

In the Arts & Crafts age, it was universal electricity that made possible the modern kit­chen.

In 1897 Thomas Ed­i­son's electric street lights illuminated Wall Street.

By 1900 a few major cities could boast electricity made possible by Nikola Tesla's development of altnernating current which p;roved more economical when transmitted over long distances than Ed­i­son's direct current.

By 1941, however, all but the most remote areas were electrified.

The New Deal extended this modern luxury to America's rural marches. The Rur­al Elecur­tric Adr­minr­isr­trar­tion (REA) had brought electric power to over 33% of the nation's farms by 1941.

Electricity powered lights, fans, and, most importantly for food safety, refrigerators.

Home Re­fri­ger­a­tion

The original home refrigerator was simply an insulated box that held a block of ice used to keep food cool.

It began to appear in the nation's homes in the 1850s, and was, as would be expected of a Vic­tor­ian device, an often very ornate ash or oak cabinet lined with tin, zinc, or por­ce­lain.

The Ice Box

Iceboxes worked surprisingly well.

Warm air rises, so a block of ice placed in a compartment at the top of the box absorbed heat from warm air, cooling it.

The now heavier cool air fell to the food compartments below where, once again warmed as it absorbed heat from food, it rose back to the top of the box to again be cooled by the ice.

The melting ice also produced moisture that helped keep fresh food crisp.

Meat and other foods that needed to be kept very cold were stored on the bottom shelf where the very cold air accumulated.

But, while ice as a cooling medium worked well, it was not very convenient.

It melted and because it melted wastewater had to be disposed of at least once each day and the ice had to be replaced every day or two.

Ice was delivered in 50 or 100 lb. blocks by the leather-aproned iceman in his horse-drawn insulated ice wagon.

Quite often the icebox was built into an exterior wall with a door that opened to the outside so the ice-man could replace the ice without disturbing the household, or tracking water into the house.

Mechanical Refrigeration

Mechanical refrigeration, powered by electricity, worked better and was much more convenient.

It had been invented in the 1840s but the machinery was large, used ammonia as the cooling agent, and steam-power to drive the machinery — not at all suitable for home use.

One of its first commercial applications, however, was to make the ice that went into home iceboxes.

Before "artificial ice", natural ice had been harvested from fro­zen lakes and rivers and stored in insulated warehouses.

Artificial ice was beeter if only because it did not contain dead vegetation, fish, and tadpoles which were a common feature of natural ice, or midges that, once thawed, returned to life and swarmed the icebox.

It could also be made colder than natural ice, the so-called "hard ice," and lasted longer.

Large ice-making plants were common even in smaller cities by 1900.

Small, mechanical chillers suitable for use in the home arrived in 1910. They were retrofitted to existing iceboxes not to replace ice but to provide supplemental cooling that made the block of ice last longer.

Magazines like Pop­ular Mech­anics advertised kits that enabled handy homeowners to convert their iceboxes to supplemental electric cooling.

The GE "Monitor"

The cooling mechanism in these conversion kits was an electric or natural gas compressor motor attached to the top of the box. This compressor-on-top arrangement was adopted by Gen­er­al Elec­tric for its "Monitor Top" ^[2], the first widely accepted home refrigerator introduced in 1925.

One million Monitors were sold by 1931 for $230.00 each. This might seem cheap to 21st-century pocketbooks. It wasn't. In today's inflated dollars, it would be about $3,700. A Ford Model A Roadster cost just a few dollars more.

Competition soon drove the cost down, however.

By 1933 the price was just under a hundred dollars for the innovative Crosley Shelvador refrigerator – with shelves in the door).

So many of these refrigerators were sold that they are still widely available as rebuilt, fully functioning antiques with modern, energy saving compressors, for use in restored Arts & Crafts kit­chens.

According to a federal government report published in 1940, a full-size refrigerator sold for an average of under $50.00, a price affordable to most.

In 1930 just 8% of U.S. households owned an electric refrigerator. By 1935, refrigerator sales had risen to 1.6 million per year. Mechanical refrigeration was a fixture in 44% of Amer­ican kit­chens by 1941 and shortly after the War, in 1946, electric refrigerators became universal in new housing.

Advances in Home Refrigeration

It did not take long for competitors to challenge GE's early hegemony.

Elec­tro­lux, Fri­gid­aire, Hot­point, Kel­vin­ator, Leon­ard, Ma­jes­tic, May­tag, Norge, Sears, and West­ing­house battled GE and each other by introducing improvements, new features, and lower prices.

The Kelvinator Four refrigerator, introduced in 1929, featured a compressor cleanly encased inside a simple white enameled steel cabinet.

This much quieter and more sanitary design became the model for all future home refrigerators. Even GE capitulated in 1933 with its own flat-top design by Henry Dreyfuss, the most prominent industrial designer of the age.

Elec­tro­lux premiered a more efficient heat absorption system in 1926 which permitted smaller, quieter compressors. The smaller compressor, in turn, meant more room inside the refrigerator for food storage.

Sears unveiled its redesigned Cold­spot Sup­er Six by Ray­mond Loewy in 1934, The modernist streamlined design, evoking images of race cars and airplanes, caught the imagination of the times and influenced refrigerator design for most of a quart­er-cent­ury.

As the century progressed, the early two-ice-tray freezer compartment grew large enough to hold frozen foods and ice cream, which greatly boosted sales of pre-packaged ice cream at the grocery but also put most Vic­tor­ian-era corner ice cream parlors out of business by 1941.

The original coolant was sulfur dioxide, a toxic gas but one that smells so vile you would have plenty of time to escape after one whiff. Other early refrigerators used methyl chloride, also lethal but odorless.

By the middle of the 1930s, most companies had adopted Fre­on^® R-12 (di­chlo­ro­di­fluo­ro­me­thane), a stable non-toxic gas invented by a consortium of Gen­er­al Mo­tors (owner of Frig­id­aire) and Gen­er­al Elec­tric scientists in 1928 as a "safe" coolant.

It turned out to be not so safe for the environment, however, and was outlawed in the 1970s because the chlorine in its formula depleted the ozone layer of the atmosphere.

The current refrigerant is HFC-134a (1,1,1,2-Te­tra­fluo­ro­e­thane), which uses fluor­ine in place of chlor­ine and has no known adverse health or environmental effects.

By the late 1930s, Frig­id­aire dominated much of the home refrigeration market. The Frig­id­aire name became so closely associated with home refrigeration that it eventually became a part of the common language.

In many places in the U.S., particularly in the Old South, a refrigerator is a "frig­id­aire" no matter who makes it, An expression like "my new G.E. frig­id­aire" makes perfectly good sense to folks in Sel­ma, Ala­bama, even if it is a little confusing to natives of Far­go, North Da­ko­ta.

Appliance manufacturers pu­blished pamphlets and booklets that showed housewives how to use the new electric devices, complete with re­ci­pes and hints on how to store leftovers.

The booklets were packaged inside each new refrigerator. GE published The Silent Hostess Treasure Book (1930), West­ing­house The Re­frig­er­a­tor Book (1933), and Frig­id­aire Famous Dishes from Every State (1936).

All of these are still in print and available from sources such as Amazon, Abe Books, and Good Reads. Original booklets appear for sale every so often on eBay and Etsy.

Some companies sold special storage dishes for use in their refrigerators.

GE, for example, sold glass dishes with flat lids that could be easily stacked. They could also be used in the oven, making it simple to reheat leftovers.

Refrigerator purchases were encouraged by electrical utilities and the federal government. Un­der the Na­tion­al Hous­ing Act of 1934, the gov­ern­ment-sub­sid­ized low-interest loans to homeowners looking to improve their houses and add modern conveniences.

Local electric utilities, seeking more electricity customers, often sold large appliances at barely above cost; or stimulated their purchase with rebates and rate discounts.

By the eve of World War II, 44% of Amer­ican homes, about 15 million households, had at least one mechanical refrigerator, and a growing number were equipped with a separate food freezer.

The icebox was quickly becoming an interesting historical curiosity relegated to the very few parts of the country that did not yet have the convenience of electricity.

Commercial Refrigeration

Even more important to the Amer­ican diet, however, was the expansion of commercial refrigeration, especially refrigerated rail cars that permitted long-distance shipping of meats, seafood, and produce.

The idea of shipping fruit and produce long distances by rail and ship using blocks of ice to preserve the perishable freight was a Victorian innovation, and already nearly a century old by the 1920s.

It had been pioneered by Fred­er­ic Tu­dor (see: The Vic­tor­ian Ice Age) and was by the turn of the 20th century already a nationwide system of ice-making factories and icing stations alongside mainline railroad tracks.

Refrigerated rail cars incorporating large ice bins or hoppers made the importation of fresh foods from distant parts of the country reliable and safe.

Produce companies, such as the Western Fruit Express and Fruit Growers Express rapidly transported citrus fruits, lettuce, asparagus, watermelons, cantaloupes, green onions, strawberries, peaches, nectarines, cherries, and tomatoes grown in California and Florida, and apples from Washington State as far as 3,000 miles in refrigerated rail cars or "reefers" attached to fast, cross-country, passenger trains.

Oranges in December became a common sight at the grocery by 1930, a welcome addition to every child's Christmas stocking, and an ongoing Christmas tradition in many parts of the Country yet today.

The system was so efficient that mechanical refrigeration in rail cars did not gain a foothold until the 1950s when the refrigeration units became small enough and efficient enough to complete with ice as the preferred refrigerant.

Since 1941 the system has continued to expand and get faster. Long-distance shipping is the rule rather than the exception in our modern food system.

The Worldwatch Institute estimates that almost everything in the average Midwest Thanksgiving dinner except the turkey travels 2,500 miles from sources in California and New England.

Over 85% of New Zealand's apple crop is sold in the U.S. – and travels 10,500 miles by ship and truck – nearly halfway around the world – to get to your neighborhood supermarket's produce section.

You can a get fresh Alaskan King crab in many Omaha restaurants today that was crawling around in the Bering Sea yesterday, having traveled nearly 4,000 miles overnight by FedEx.

The Convenience of Home Delivery

Ice remained king of long-distance refrigeration throughout the Arts & Crafts era but mechanical refrigeration units quickly replaced ice just about everywhere else.

By the 1920s ice wagons were being supplanted by motor trucks with onboard mechanical refrigerators.

The Milkman

Refrigerated milk trucks had appeared in most cities by 1935. Milk was packaged in sanitary, sealed, bottles – not ladled from unsanitary crocks.

By 1937 the familiar disposable wax milk carton was coming into use to replace the returnable bottle. A number of studies had shown that the disposable carton was more sanitary and less likely to promote disease.

The milkman delivered not just milk and cream but many other products that needed to be chilled: eggs, cheese butter, yogurt, fruit juice, and sometimes soft drinks.

His daily rounds saved the busy homemaker the bother of a trip to the grocery for perishables. All she needed to do was display the milk card in her front window to order exactly what she needed that day.

Many period homes were equipped with a "milk door": a small door that opened directly onto the kit­chen countertop where the milkman deposited his delivery. The milk door allowed safe deliveries even if the homemaker was absent.

(The author's 1920 Four-Square house still has a working milk door, no longer used for milk delivery, but handy for passing food and drinks from the kit­chen to guests on the backyard deck.)

The Good Humor Man

The white-uniformed Good Humor Man in his jingling ice-cream wagon became an icon of Amer­ican pop culture and a summer-day hero to every kid with a nickel in his pocket.

Beginning in Youngstown, Ohio in 1920, the company covered most of the country by the mid-1930s. For five cents you could acquire a coveted ice-cream bar in one of 85 flavors or flavor combinations.

If you did not have a whole nickel yourself, you could pool pennies with friends and siblings and share the prize – although the solemn and earnest consideration of the competing wonders of chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry could take a fair amount of discussion, sometimes resulting in hurt feelings before a group consensus was reached.

The Popsicle

A nickel could also buy that other summer day marvel – the Pop­si­cle^® – a frozen fruit bar on a stick.

The Amazing Piggly-Wiggly

Piggly-Wiggly^®, Amer­ica's first true self-service grocery store, opened in Memphis, Tenn. in 1916 with 605 ¹ different items offered for sale.

Self-service was a revolutionary idea. So revolutionary that Piggly-Wiggly founder, Clar­ence Saund­ers, patented the concept and sold franchises.

In grocery stores of the time, shoppers presented their orders to clerks behind a counter who gathered the goods from the store shelves. Saunders thought this a waste of both time and money since shoppers could gather things themselves more efficiently, eliminating the cost of clerks.

Self-service was an immediate success, including innovations such as,

• A marked price on every item,
• Shopping baskets (later rolling carts),
• Easily identifiable uniformed employees,
• Like-kind products grouped in standardized locations making them easier to find in any Piggly-Wiggly store,
• Multiple brands of the same product, so shoppers would have a choice.

The new retail format forced national brands to pay more attention to product packaging so products would attract a shopper's eye. Before 1916 product packaging was fairly bland with simple black and white printed labels. After Pig­gly-Wig­gly most major brands reworked their packaging into the distinctive and colorful containers with which we are familiar today².

Why "Piggly-Wiggly"? No one seems to know. However, Piggly Wiggly's corporate history reports: "Someone once asked [Saund­ers] why he had chosen such an unusual name for his organization, to which he replied, 'So people will ask that very question.'"

1. By way of comparison, a modern mega-mart stocks about 45,000 different items.

2. Piggly-Wiggly's influence extended far beyond grocery retailing. On a visit to the U.S. in the late 1940s Taiichi Ohno, an engineer at Toyota Cars, visited a Piggly-Wiggly during a trip to Michigan and was impressed by its highly efficient, demand-driven store inventory replenishment system that ordered replacement items only when existing items were sold. He incorporated it into his Toyota Production System (TPS) which in turn became the prototype "just-in-time" (JIT) lean manufacturing system used in automobile manufacturing worldwide, and now reaching throughout the industrial sector of all major economies. It is a basic element of ISO 9000 certification, a must-have credential for any manufacturer hoping to sell internationally.

Pop­si­cles came in six wonderous flavors: banana, cher­ry, lemon, orange, grape, and watermelon.

In the 1930s it was reshaped into a two-stick configuration. It could be broken in half to share with a friend (or a pesky little brother) – making it more affordable as a De­pres­sion-era treat.

Accidentally discovered in 1905 by 11-year-old Frank Epperson who left a soda on the porch where it froze, it was not produced commercially until 1924 but was an instant hit with kids of all ages – and their parents.

In the summer of 1931 alone, when the Great De­pres­sion was nearly at its worst, it sold 200 million bars – an incredible 1½ bars for every man, woman, and child then living in the United States.

Birdseye's "Frosted" Foods

At the new supermarkets (see The Amazing Pig­gly-Wig­gly"), freezers, cold rooms, and refrigerated displays kept food fresh until it was sold, vastly reducing waste and spoilage.

Glass-fronted self-ser­vice coolers and open-top freezers were becoming common features of grocery stores by the 1930s.

Many were leased from Birds Eye frozen foods founded by Brook­lyn-born inventor Clarence Birds­eye.

He had developed a method of flash-freezing food under pressure that, unlike earlier processes, did not alter the taste or texture of the product. Birds Eye brand "frosted" food products first appeared in grocery display cases in 1930.

Birdseye quickly realized that the major impediment to large-scale acceptance of his product was the high cost to grocers of buying frozen food cases.

He solved the problem in 1934 by starting his own company to manufacture cold cases and sell them to grocers on an affordable lease-purchase plan. By 1944, the company was also leasing refrigerated rail cars.

According to the U. S. Pat­ent and Trade­mark Of­fice, the frozen food process developed by Birdseye resulted in 168 U.S. pat­ents, not a record but darn close.

Improved Kitchen Organization

By the late 1920s, a well-organized, efficient kit­chen had become the dream of every homemaker who saw the colorful ads for "modern" kit­chens in the latest editions of the Ladies Home Journal and House & Garden.

Unlike many middle-class households in Victorian times, middle-class housewives of the Arts & Crafts era did not usually have servants.

The waves of mass European migration that had ensured a ready source of low-cost domestic staff had ended with the close of the 19th century and much more restrictive immigration laws.

The children of immigrant families, educated in Am­er­ica's free public schools, had aspirations beyond domestic service. Those that still worked as household help were more costly than most middle-class households could afford.

The "servants crisis" as it was called at the time by those who could afford servants, meant that a typical homemaker did most of the domestic chores herself, as well as watching the children and taking care of the garden.

These added roles meant that it would not be possible to use most of the day preparing, serving, and cleaning up after meals.

In response, the Arts & Crafts housewife was quick to adopt almost any labor-saving device or practice that reduced her time in the kit­chen, and that included better organization of domestic tasks.

The push for a better-organized life ("A place for everything, and everything in its place") started during Colonial times but peaked in the Arts & Crafts period.

Victorian home economists made notable contributions.

The Amer­ican Woman's Home, published in 1869, co-authored by sisters Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe (of Uncle Tom's Cabin fame), was almost entirely devoted to the effective organization of household tasks and included an entire chapter on developing "Habits of System and Order" in household management.

The book continued in print over a dozen editions and was enormously influential.

But, it was not until kit­chens began to be viewed by home economists of the interwar period as meal production centers where principles of industrial design and ergonomics could be applied that the real progress in kit­chen organization and efficiency began.

Christine Frederick: Scientific Household Management

In 1912 Christ­ine Fred­er­ick began a series of articles for the Ladies' Home Journal which explained the evolving principles of time and motion developed by industrial ergonomist Fred­er­ick Winslow Taylor, as they applied to domestic tasks.

Subsequently re-published as a book, The New House­keeping: Ef­fi­ciency Studies in Home Man­age­ment (courtesy Goo­gle Books), the chapter on kit­chen organization and layout introduced basic kit­chen organizing principles still in use today:

"The first step toward the efficiency of any kit­chen is to have the kit­chen small, compact and without long narrow pantries and closets… A good-sized kit­chen for a small house is 10 x 12; the ideal is nearly square…

[T]he next step … is to place the principal equipment of stove, sink, tables, and closets in right relation to each other…

In planning for any kit­chen, I have found, after close study, that there are just two main processes in all kit­chen work… those processes which prepare the meal [and] those which clear away the meal. Each of these processes covers distinct equipment" (Emphases in the original.).

Fred­er­ick founded and directed a laboratory for conducting time and motion studies of domestic tasks and evaluating household equipment.

The Ap­ple­croft Home Ex­per­i­ment Sta­tion investigated 1,800 different products from household appliances to food, looking for labor-saving methods of preparation and use.

Her studies are credited with the standardization of kit­chen countertop heights. The Amer­i­can Na­tion­al Stand­ards In­sti­tute subsequently adopted her kit­chen countertop height of 36 inches from the finished floor as the official U. S. standard.

She endorsed products that her laboratory found useful and her endorsements were widely publicized in women's magazines of the period.

She also worked as a consultant to several kit­chen product manufacturers, including the Hoosier Manufacturing Co. (See Hoosiers below), and was an editor for several publications including The Designer and American Weekly.

Lillian Moller Gilbreth: The Kitchen Triangle

Fred­er­ick was working toward the principle that was later encapsulated in the concept of the kit­chen work triangle but she did not quite get there.

That was left up to a psychologist and pioneering industrial engineer, Lillian Moller Gilbreth, who, in the early 1920s, began applying rudimentary ergonomic principles to household work through her own time and motion studies.

Gilbreth, who was raised in an upper-middle-class household with cooks and servants, could barely cook herself but well-understood that kit­chen work was labor and any labor could be made more efficient.

She discovered that much of the time required for meal preparation involved moving among the three major work centers: sink, refrigerator (or icebox), and cookstove.

If this motion could be minimized, she theorized, the time required to prepare a meal could be vastly decreased.

Ex­peri­ments proved her correct. They showed that a properly configured kit­chen could minimize what she called "circular routing" and reduce meal preparation time by as much as 70%.

Galbreth's "circular routing" became the kit­chen work triangle around 1946, adopted by the Un­i­vers­ity of Il­li­nois Small Homes Coun­cil to graphically illustrated how the three centers should be arranged for maximum efficiency.

The kit­chen triangle is still a major element in kit­chen planning and a permanent part of the Kit­chen Design Guide­lines maintained and published by the Na­tion­al Kit­chen and Bash As­so­caia­tion.

Katharine A. Fisher: The Task-Centric Workplace

But, perhaps even more central to modern kit­chen planning was the development by Katharine A. Fisher ^[4] of the concept of a task-centric workspace.

A director of the Good House­keeping In­sti­tute, author, and columnist for Good House­keep­ing Mag­a­zine, she wrote a series of widely read columns about kit­chen efficiency beginning in 1924 in which she expanded Christine Frederick's ideas for arranging a kit­chen by proposing that kit­chen tasks be organized factory style, according to purpose and materials.

Each task was assigned its own workstation. The basic workstations, food preparation, cooking, and clean-up, would each have cabinets within easy reach that would hold all the implements and ingredients required to complete the task.

Her ideas about kit­chen organization were incorporated into the magazine's enormously influential cookbook, Good Meals and How to Prepare Them, published in 1927, which included Kitchen organizing tips scattered among the many Good Housekeeping-tested and -approved recipes for meals just as wholesome and tasty today as they were nearly 100 years ago.

The key to an efficient kit­chen, she wrote, is ensuring that everything in "daily use" at each workstation should be "in sight" and right at hand.

This meant, as far as possible, storing the ingredients and utensils used at a workstation within easy reach of the station. If an implement is used in two different workstations, rather than waste time walking across the room to get it, buy two of them and store one at each station.

It all seems very basic today but at the time the idea was transcendent, marking a major transformation in kit­chen design theory.

The task-centric workplace is central to today's kit­chen planning, although there is probably not one kit­chen planner in a hundred who knows where this kit­chen planning cornerstone originated.

The idea of the kit­chen-as-workplace took hold very quickly. Advertising in the 1920s had already begun to portray the home kit­chen in industrial terms: as a "production center" for meals.

Ads in popular magazines promoted labor-saving tools and devices as critical to "the business" of food preparation.

For more information on how to arrange task stations in a modern kit­chen, see Mise-en-Place: What We Can Learn About kit­chen De­sign from Com­mer­cial kit­chens.

University research centers began studying household ergonomics, eventually leading to the establishment of the Small Homes Council to research housing issues at the University of Illinois in 1944 which, in turn, led to the first publication of The Kit­chen De­sign Guide­lines in 1949 and the Hand­book of Kitch­en De­sign in 1950.

The Frankfurt Kitchen

The Euro­peans, too, were developing new ideas for kit­chen efficiency and organization, especially the Ger­mans who in the mid-1920s were suffering through a critical working-class housing shortage.

In 1926 Aus­tr­ian architect Mar­gar­ete Schütte-Li­hot­zky (1897-2000) was commissioned to design an efficient small kit­chen for a working-class apartment development in Frank­furt.

Borrowing ideas from Bau­haus designer Ben­ita Koch-Otte, Christ­ine Fred­er­ick (The New House­keeping was published in Ger­man in 1922), and conducting her own time and motion studies, Schütte-Lihotzky designed a small, efficient, and ergonomic kit­chen in the mere 6.5 square meters (70 sq/ft) allowed by the building architect.

Modeled loosely on a railroad dining car kit­chen, it was devoted solely to meal preparation and cleanup, unlike prior Ger­man kit­chens which were often multi-use spaces.

The kit­chen had a window for natural light and ventilation and a food preparation center under the window, adjacent to a zinc sink and wall-mounted fau­cet.

A height-adjusting stool on castors allowed a housewife to sit at a comfortable height while preparing meals and move between tasks by rolling the stool without standing up.

A track light in the ceiling could be moved to illuminate the various task centers in the kit­chen as needed, and racks, shelves, and eighteen wood-fronted aluminum drawers provided sanitary storage.

Oak was used for flour bins because the tannin in Oak repelled mealworms and beech for countertops because it resisted stains and knife damage.

The original was painted blue based pn the belief that sky colors repelled insects (a notion later proven mistaken, bugs are not quite that stupid).

There was no refrigerator – thought to be unnecessary in a city with a grocer, baker, and butcher on nearly every corner – but there was a built-in ironing board that folded up against the wall when not in use.

Her concepts, however, survived. Her small, efficient, compact, task-oriented fitted kit­chen became the Eur­ope­an standard, greatly influencing how kit­chens were sized, organized, and outfitted not just during the reconstruction of post-war Europe but also in the U.S. during America's housing boom of the 1950s and '60s.

During the World War, Schütte-Lihotzky joined the Austrian resistance against the Ger­man occupation but was captured almost immediately and imprisoned.

She was liberated by the U.S. Army in 1945 and lived 55 more years, dying in 2000 at 102 years of age in the city of her birth, Vienna.

She lives on, however, in her kitchens.

Re­pro­duc­tion Frank­furt kit­chens are part of the permanent collections at the Museum für An­ge­wandte Kunst (MAK) in Vienna and the Mus­eum für Kunst und Ge­wer­be (MK&G) in Ham­burg. The Victoria & Albert Museum has an online photo display of the Frankfurt kit­chen in green.

The kitchen was also part of the "New Kitch­en" exhibit at the Mus­eum of Mod­ern Art in New York in 2010 and 2011.

The Impact of Better Design on Kitchen Work

Even though kit­chen design for better organization and increased efficiency was in its infancy during the Arts & Crafts era, it had a dramatic impact on kit­chen work.

Meal preparation and cleanup, which required an average of 44 hours per week in 1900, fell to under 20 hours by 1941.

The full impact of this pioneering work on kit­chen design was not felt, however, until after the Arts & Crafts period when small but very efficient kit­chens became the norm in Post-War house plans.

Model kitchen designs were created by the Levitt brothers for their suburban Levittown developments.

The compact and highly organized fitted kit­chen in Levitt houses drew heavily on the research from the three prior decades and set the standard for much of post-war housing.

With sanitary Formica^® laminated countertops, built-in easy-to-clean enamel-on-steel cabinets, an electric refrigerator with freezer, and a clothes washing machine (with clothes dryer in later versions), all with a view of the kids playing in the backyard, the Levitt kit­chens themselves were a minor revolution in design for optimized kit­chen efficiency and very widely copied.

For more information on the impact of developments during the Arts & Crafts period on post-war mid-century kit­chens, see The Mid-Century Kitchen.

The time and effort required to prepare and clean up after meals have continued to decline.

The weekly 20 hours required in 1941, according to a study by the Or­gan­iza­tion for Eco­no­mic Co­oper­ation & De­velop­ment, fell to 3.5 hours per week in 2011, just 1/2 hour each day, and is still falling, although how it can fall much further beggars the imagination.

Processed Foods

But, while improved organization and labor-saving technologies made major contributions to more efficient meal production, the biggest time- and work-saver of all were prepared foods.

Prepared and partially prepared foods were heavily promoted by the food industry for their "ease", "speed", "simplicity", and "efficiency". And, the truth is, they were every one of these, and due to the education and enforcement efforts of the Food and Drug Ad­min­is­tra­tion, also safe to eat for the first time in Amer­ican history.

Fully or partially prepared foods often sliced meal preparation from hours to minutes. Busy housewives were quick to adopt these wonderful time-savers almost as soon as they appeared on grocery shelves.

Bisquick

One example is Bisquick, introduced by General Mills in 1931. The blend of Sesame oil (later powdered butter­milk), flour, salt, and baking soda eliminated the tedious process of measuring ingredients to make pastries and turned it into one easy step: add water, an egg or two, and blend.

It took "90 seconds from package to oven," according to the slogan on the box, and made bakers out of nearly every homemaker, much to the dismay of commercial bakeries, two-thirds of which were out of business by 1939.

According to Gen­er­al Mills, Carl Smith, a company executive, returning to San Fran­cis­co by train was impressed by a Pull­man cook's bis­cuit mix that could be made up in advance and kept fresh for a long time in a cooler.

He persuaded the company to develop a mix for home use that did not need chilling.

Initially marketed solely as a convenient and nearly foolproof way to make biscuits at home, company-spon­sored recipes soon appeared in magazines and on Bisquick packages for hundreds of other delights, including pancakes, cas­ser­oles, dump­lings, cob­blers, cookies, and pastry crusts.

Homemakers were encouraged to submit their own favorite recipes to the Home Ser­vice De­part­ment of Gen­er­al Mills (later the Bet­ty Crock­er kitch­en) for evaluation.

The best ones appeared on recipe cards and in various com­pany-pub­lished cookbooks.

By the mid-1930s you could buy a set of Bisquick recipes from General Mills on convenient cards, complete with a handy and colorful metal box to put them in.

By some estimates, there are now well over 10,000 published re­ci­pes featuring Bis­quick as a main ingredient.

Dry Cereal

Kellogg's new Corn Flakes was already a breakfast staple just a few years after its introduction in 1906.

Wheaties, endorsed by major sports figures of the period, became the "Break­fast of Champ­ions" in 1928.

Dry breakfast cereals available by 1941 included

Cereals made a healthy breakfast essentially self-serve with minimal preparation and little help required from mom, Just add milk and sugar, maybe a little fresh fruit on top, and dig in.

Dry processed cereal is still the basic Amer­ican breakfast, and, unless eggs and bacon learn to cook themselves, it is not likely to be unseated any time soon.

Campbell's Soups

The venerable soup pot simmering on the stove had almost disappeared from the country's kit­chens by the 1920s, replaced by Camp­bell's condensed canned soups – three cans for 20¢ in 1930.

The process of condensing soups was invented in 1897 by Dr. John Tho­mas Dor­rance, a chem­ist at the company who would later become its president.

Canned soups were thought to be healthier, and they certainly were much more convenient.

Campbell's familiar red and white label is over 120 years old and has remained substantially unchanged since it was introduced in 1898.

Mix the contents with an equal amount of water or milk, heat, and serve. M'm! m'm! good!

Canned Fruit and Vegetables

The Jolly Green Giant became the symbol of the Min­nes­ota Val­ley Can­ning Com­pany of Le Sueur, Min­nes­ota in 1928, and its familiar, deep-throated, "ho-ho-ho" a radio staple in the 1930s.

Later renamed the Green Giant Com­pa­ny, it was an innovator in industrial canning, introducing among other products, Le Sueur very young small sweet peas and Niblets canned sweet corn.

The Jolly Green Giant was one of the most recognizable brand icons of the 20th century, second only to Ron­ald McDon­ald.

Del Monte, a brand owned by the Cal­i­forn­ia Fruit Can­ners As­soc­ia­tion, came to dominate much of the canned fruit market by the mid-1930s in no small part due to consumer confidence in Cal­i­forn­ia's very strict and vigorously enforced food quality and safety laws.

Company promotions convinced virtually every young post-war mother that no child could be truly healthy without several servings of Del Monte Fruit Cocktail every week.

SPAM

The Geo. A. Hormel & Co. of Austin, Minnesota introduced the nation's first canned ham in 1926 followed in 1937 by its flagship product, SPAM.

Originally called Homel Spiced Ham, the name was almost immediately shortened to the catchier SPAM after an impromptu naming contest at a cocktail party that netted the winner $100.00.

It is manufactured in Min­ne­so­ta and in Fre­mont, Ne­bras­ka, which together turn out 44,000 cans an hour, over 93 million cans a year.

A blend of pork shoulder, ham, and seasonings, SPAM came packaged in a revolutionary rectangular vacuum can, ready to heat, slice, and eat.

Its shelf life of up to seven years made it ideal for military field rations during World War II.

Praised by military planners as the "Miracle Meat", SPAM was welcomed less enthusiastically by soldiers and Marines in the field who grew a little weary of SPAM for breakfast, lunch, and dinner nearly every day of the year.

Yet, its contribution to the Allied victory is undeniable.

It fed not just Allied armies but civilian populations during and after the war, especially in the immediate post-war years when it was instrumental in averting mass starvation in war-devastated Europe and the U.S.-occupied Pacific islands of the former Japanese Empire.

SPAM had a loyal market in the U.S. after the World War.

Many of the thirteen million returning war veterans discovered that they retained a taste for the military's often castigated "mystery meat", and provided Hormel with a massive consumer base for SPAM.^[3]

It became one of the iconic foods of the post-War period and SPAM­wich­es a staple of every workingman's lunch pail.

America's Cheese

Amer­ican Cheese ^[5] was invented by a Can­adian.

James L. Kraft, a native of Stev­ens­ville, On­tar­io, seeking to improve the shelf life of cheese, patented a process in 1916 of adding sodium phosphate to re-pasteurized cheddar cheese.

Canned, it could be kept on the shelf indefinitely.

The U.S. Army appropriated the new Kraft factory's entire production in 1917 to help feed the Amer­ican Expeditionary Forces in France during the First World War.

Six million Amer­ican soldiers and Marines returned home from wartime service with a fondness for the canned cheese that had been issued as military rations and became a reliable market for Kraft's new cheese product.

It was a huge commercial success and spearheaded the formation and growth of the giant Kraft Foods empire.

A modified form of Amer­ican cheese, packaged in the familiar foil wrapper and yellow box, was christened Velveeta.

It was originally a processed Swiss cheese invented by Emil Remigius Frey, a Swiss citizen who fought as an officer with the Union Army in the American Civil War about which he wrote a book detailing his experiences as a war-time Amer­ican soldier.

Returning to Switzer­land after the war, he entered politics and ultimately became that country's ambassador to the United States and, in 1894, Switzerland's president.

After Kraft bought Vel­vee­ta Cheese Comp­any^[6] in 1928, it discarded everything but the name.

Velveeta was reformulated as a creamier version of Amer­ican cheese that melted into a smooth sauce with a "velvety" texture.

The popularity of Amer­ican processed cheese increased throughout the 1930s.

Stud­ies of consumer preference done at the end of that decade found that two-thirds of Amer­icans preferred processed to natural cheese.^[7]

The Army's 70-Year Affair with Amer­ican Cheese

Packaged with four protein-fortified crackers, Kraft canned cheese (Cheese spread, processed w/ crackers (4) in Army talk) continued as a component of military combat rations until 1985 when C-Rations were retired in favor of M.R.E.s (Officially, "Meals, Ready to Eat", unofficially "Meals, Rejected by Everyone").

It was as big a hit among GIs in the Vietnam era as it had been with their doughboy grandfathers in France a half-century earlier.

Amer­ican cheese made the grilled cheese sandwich a North Amer­ican institution, and a favorite of kids of all ages, "Granddad to two-year-olds" claimed a Kraft advertisement.

But, alas, North America's favorite cheese is no longer cheese – at least not officially – not in the U.S.

According to the FDA, it is a pasteurized prepared cheese product, not really cheese but similar to cheese.

As a consequence, Amer­ican Cheese can no longer call itself "cheese", and your grilled cheese sandwich is now, officially, a grilled pasteurized prepared cheese product sandwich.

Oh, well!

Despite today's consumer and industry focus on natural cheeses, which are believed by many to be healthier, Amer­ican cheese remains firmly entrenched in Amer­ican and Can­adian culinary culture.

By USDA estimates, Amer­ican cheese still accounts for a full third of all cheese sold in the U.S.

Gerber Baby Food

In 1928 Ger­ber Pro­ducts Com­pany introduced its pre-cooked, pureed baby foods with "heat and eat" simplicity, eliminating the time-consuming and labor-intensive process of boiling, mashing, and straining food for the baby.

Invented by cannery owner Dan­iel F. Gerber to feed his own baby, the strained, baby- and mother-friendly, fruits and vegetables (initially peas, prunes, carrots, and spinach) forever changed how infants are fed in the U.S. and Canada (and gave every North Amer­ican child an instinctive loathing of processed prunes in any form).

Gerber offered 5 jars for $1.00 to any mother who would fill out a form giving the name and address of her grocery store. Using this information, Gerber expanded its product into just about every nook and cranny of the United States and Canada within a few years.

(That price was not as cheap as it sounds. Twenty cents in 1928 dollars equals about $3.00 in our present inflation-boated U. S. currency. The current grocery store price is about $1.25.)

Now a subsidiary of the worldwide Nest­lé Com­pa­ny, Ger­ber controls about 80% of the U.S. baby food market, far out-distancing its rivals, Beech-Nut, Heinz, and Del Mon­té.

Macaroni & Cheese

The dinnertime icon, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese appeared as "Kraft Dinner" on grocery shelves in 1937 in response to the need for a wholesome, filling, and inexpensive meal for Depression-era families.

A traditional English dish that had appeared in cookbooks as early as Elizabeth Raffald's The Experienced English Housekeeper in 1770, it was time-consuming to make and bake from scratch.

Kraft cut preparation from hours to minutes – "a meal for 4 in 9 minutes for about 19¢", according to the blurb on the box – by combining dry macaroni with a sealed package of powdered Amer­ican cheese in a box that could be kept on the shelf for ten months or longer.

Eight million boxes were sold the first year it appeared on grocery shelves.

During the 1939-1945 World War a homemaker in the U.S. could get two boxes of Macaroni & Cheese for one meat ration stamp. Fifty million boxes were sold before the war ended, and America had become addicted to "mac-n-cheese", the ultimate "comfort food".

We consume a whopping 700 million boxes of the product each year or about 2.0 boxes per person, which, one would think, should make Amer­icans the world champion mac-n-cheesers.

Not even close.

Canadians are the undisputed ti­tle-hold­ers and have been since forever, downing a whopping 3.2 boxes of Mac and Cheese per person each year, which is 1.7 million boxes each and every single week.

The product still goes by its original name in Canada: "Kraft Dinner", and it is often eaten with a liberal dose of ketchup.^[8]

Many Canadians consider it "the national dish" and a "cultural icon". It is the top-selling single grocery item in Canada where it is often referred to as simply "KD".^[9]

Ragú Spaghetti Sauce

The year 1937 also saw the introduction of Ragú's bottled prepared spa­ghet­ti sauce by the Ro­ches­ter, N.Y.-based Ragú Pack­ing Company.

It quickly replaced the hours-long process of making Ital­ian-style red pasta sauce over a hot stove and introduced "Spa­ghet­ti Night" to meat-rationed Amer­ican dinner tables during the 1939-1945 World War.

It made Italian culinary purists cringe, and its tagline, "That's Italian," sent many scrambling for solace in strong drink.

But, requiring no preparation other than warming, it was an instant home run with busy Amer­ican homemakers who cared not a whit about its lack of authenticity.

Its nearly foolproof simplicity was a compelling reason for its addition to the family dinner menu, often with meatballs. It was hearty, cheap, nutritious, filling, and, oh my, was it tasty.

Ragú is still the best-selling prepared spa­ghetti sauce brand in the U.S. out-distancing rivals Pre­go (owned by Camp­bell's Soup) and Clas­si­co by a considerable margin.

Jell-O

Jell-O was invented in 1897 by Pearle Bixby Wait of Le­Roy, New York.

A carpenter and cough syrup manufacturer, he had not been particularly successful in either business and was looking for a different product to market.

Unfortunately, he was not an overwhelming success in the food business either, and in 1899 sold the rights to Jell-O to his neighbor, Orator F. Woodward, owner of the Gen­e­see Pure Foods Com­pa­ny for $450.00.

The dessert premiered commercially in four fruit flavors in 1900: lemon, orange, raspberry, and strawberry – lime was not added until thirty years later.

Made from powdered gelatin, sugar, and flavorings, Jell-O added to boiling water, stirred, and chilled produced a sparkling, shimmering dessert that delighted children and adults alike.

It was widely marketed as "Amer­ican's most favorite dessert" long before many people had even heard of it.

Posters, billboards, and magazine ads featured Jell-O recipes. Recipe booklets illustrated by famous artists such as Norman Rockwell and Maxfield Parrish offered endless new ways to serve Jell-O.

They were available at any grocery that sold Jell-O and free on request from the company by U. S. mail.

Amer­ican homemakers fell in love with the ease, simplicity, and versatility of the product, and the national fascination with everything Jell-O has lasted well over a century propelled by annual contests that challenge home cooks to come up with new and innovative ways to use the flavored gelatin in family dining.

Jell-O instant pudding followed in 1936: just add milk, "heat, chill and eat". It put dessert pudding on the nation's menu.

Jell-O was manufactured in LeRoy until 1964 when manufacturing was moved to Dover, Deleware. Jell-O is now a General Foods brand.

Kool-Aid

Beginning in 1928, an ice-cold pitcher of Kool-Aid in one of six "sparkling" fruit flavors ^[9] was a stock item in nearly every summertime Amer­ican icebox.

Invented by Ed­win Per­kins of Hast­ings, Ne­bras­ka, it replaced the laborious process of squeezing, pulping, and straining fruit to make wholesome soft drinks.

At 5¢, for two quarts of the sugar-sweetened beverage (with vitamin D added), it was a De­pres­sion-era bargain – and still is today.

Composed of dextrose, citric acid, tartaric acid, flavoring, and food coloring in powdered form, it could be kept on the shelf for years.

Quickly outgrowing its facilities in Hastings, the company moved to Chicago in 1931, where it remains. It was sold to General Foods in 1953 and is now owned by Kraft.

The original name, Kool-Ade was challenged by FDA regulators who deemed the suffix "-ade" to be "misleading" – reserved for drinks containing actual fruit juice.

Perkins changed the name to Kool-Aid in 1934, and everyone was happy.

Food Cost and Life Expectancy

Almost all of these packaged processed foods, in addition to being simple to prepare, healthy, nutritious, and quick, were very easy on the budget.

Food cost as a percentage of America's wages was cut nearly in half during the Arts & Crafts period, in no small part due to the revolution in processing, packaging, and transportation.

At the turn of the 20th century, a workingman spent nearly a third of his take-home wages feeding his family. By 1941 that cost had declined to 18% and was still falling. (Today it is about 7%, the lowest of any nation on Earth.)

At the same time, an increasing variety of wholesome, healthy foods – both fresh and packaged – was available throughout the year in all but the most remote parts of the country, and (after 1930) many basic foods such as milk and bread were fortified with vitamins and other nutrition supplements.

This vastly improved national diet contributed materially to better overall health in North America.

Dietary deficiency diseases that had plagued mankind since the dawn of time were in steep decline by 1941, and within the next decade all but disappeared in most parts of the United States and Canada.

Life expectancy rose sharply. A male born in the U.S. in 1900 could expect to live just 48 years – a number only slightly improved since the Middle Ages.

By 1941 his expected lifespan was 63 years – the largest increase in life expectancy since record-keeping began.

Storage in an Arts & Crafts Kitchen

The massive shift toward refrigerated, canned, frozen, and dehydrated foods that could be kept for days, weeks, even months and years, meant that someplace to store all this bounty had become a critical need in Amer­ican kit­chens by the eve of the 1939-1945 World War.

Small Appliances

Adding to the problem was the dramatic increase in the number of small appliances and kit­chen utensils. The pop-up toaster, waffle maker, blender and electric mixer had all become common kit­chen fixtures, as had the electric percolator.

By the mid-1930s not only were small appliances vastly improved over earlier, utilitarian models, but they also were becoming sleek and stylish enough to be brought right to the dinner table.

Some were to become icons of industrial design.

The 1930 Art-Deco Sun­beam MixMaster^® stand mixer remained virtually unchanged well into the 1960s and has now been revived under a new name with modern innards but the same 1930s "retro" look.

It is the only small appliance ever to have appeared on a U.S. postage stamp.

The T-series "Toast­Master" toaster from Sun­beam enjoyed the same lon­gevity.

The 1930s design was made well into the post-war period and has also been revived to once again take its proper place in thousands of restored Arts & Crafts and "retro" kit­chens (See: Postwar Housing Styles: Cape Cod, Colonial, and Ranch).

But, the undisputed king of small appliance lon­gevity is the Kitchen Aid Stand Mixer. First sold in 1919, it has remained essentially unchanged for over a century.

The company brags that any accessory made today will fit any mixer ever made, all the way back to 1919.

The distinctive bullet silhouette of the appliance has been copyrighted, and it is, as far as we know, the only small appliance made that has its own cult following.

The Hoosiers

Traditional kitchen storage – a few cup­boards and some hooks on the wall, was already inadequate by 1920 and overwhelmed by 1930. There was no place to put all the stuff.

Amer­ican industry responded to the problem with better-designed and organized kit­chen furniture. The most remarkable were the all-in-one workstation cabinets developed by The Hoos­ier Manu­fac­tur­ing Com­pany of New Castle, Indiana.

The Hoosier cabinet, or just "Hoosier", was invented by J. S. McGuinn in 1899, modeled on the commercial baker's cabinet that was a mainstay of the company's business.

Offered for sale beginning in 1903, it was designed to give the homemaker a self-contained task station that held her cooking and baking needs, plus a sanitary surface on which to work.

McGuinn, a creative marketer, sold the relatively expensive cabinets on an affordable time payment plan of a dollar a week.

Although the Hoosier eventually came in a great many sizes and styles to suit any kit­chen and any budget, its basic three-section configuration never changed.

The base section was typically 2 feet deep and 4 to 5 feet wide. It initially contained a large storage area with one slide-out shelf. In later versions, up to six drawers were available in the base, at least one would be a bread drawer, lined with zinc or tin with a lid to keep mice out.

The top section was set back, usually about 12", and contained a center storage compartment that could be closed off with one or more doors (sometimes a tambour or roll-up door since swing-out doors could interfere with the work surface)

Above this compartment were metal bins and lidded glass jars for sugar, coffee, tea, and spices; and a metal flour bin with a built-in sifter.

Between these two sections was the pull-out countertop. Originally wood, then zinc, and finally a type of enameled steel called "porceliron". Porceliron was very popular because it was easy to clean and considered very sanitary. Some later Hoosiers were built entirely of porceliron.

Cabinet doors held racks for storing small items. Glass storage jars were designed to exactly fit the cabinet and its racks.

Sneath Glass Comp­any was a major manufacturer of Hoosier glassware. Original sets consisted of coffee and tea canisters, a saltbox, and four to eight spice jars which fit in a revolving rack.

No space was wasted. Even doorbacks were pressed into service to display cards that contained useful information such as measurement conversions, basic menus, cooking hints; or today's shopping list.

Extra blank cards allowed Mom to write down and display her own recipes at eye level for quick, hands-free, reference while she worked.

Other manufacturers soon copied (and sometimes improved on) Mcquinn's design.

The Coppes Bros. & Zook Co. of Nappanee, Indiana, began offering the Napanee Dutch Kitchenet around 1913. (According to Coppes historian, Bill Warner, the single "p" in Napanee was deliberate. At the time "the proper name of a city could not be used in a trademarked name". Hence one "p" rather than "pp" in Napanee of Nappanee, Indiana). The Na­paa­nee cabinet was nearly as popular as the original Hoosier.

Sears offered its own version of the Hoosier Cabinet in its 1908 catalog.

Its Wilson kit­chen cabinet was a workstation and drawered hutch that organized baking tools, a grinder, a food scale, and serving pieces in a single cabinet. The basic model sold for $5.45, while more elaborate models intended for use in a dining room were fabricated in walnut and other fine woods for as much as $19.50, freight extra.

By 1923 the Wilson cabinet had evolved into a six-drawer, four-door workstation with a sanitary white enameled steel top, featuring sugar and flour bins with see-through windows to keep track of how much was left, a feature copied by Hoosier cabinets a few years later.

Altogether, as many as forty different companies were manufacturing Hoosier-style cabinets by 1920. These manufacturers included Ar­i­el, Boone, Car­din­al, Dia­mond, Ideal, Ketch­er, Kitch­en Maid, Kom­pass & Stoll, Lark­in, Marsh, Mc­Dou­gall, Min­nea­po­lis Furn­i­ture, Na­pa­nee, Per­kins-Rhoades, Queen, Ran­ney, Sel­lers, and Sho­wers.

As competition grew, the various manufacturers strove to outdo each other with useful (and sometimes not-so-useful) features.

In 1921, The Mc­Dou­gall Co., of Frankfort, Indiana introduced a cabinet with shelves that automatically extended when the door was opened. The Mc­Dou­gall "Auto-Front" cabinet sold from $14.50 to $54.00 and could be purchased "on approval" for 30 days and paid for on the installment plan.

G. L. Sellers & Sons of Elwood, Indiana manufactured a line of popular cabinets that trumped Mc­Dou­gall by not only offering an Auto-Front device but also an automatic lowering flour bin and 13 "other long-missed" features, including a recipe card box and porceliron rather than wood shelves.

Built-in Cabinetry

By 1925, however, the glory days of the Hoosier cabinet were over.

Sales dropped off and most of the Hoosier manufacturers either went out of business or turned to making other things.

Hoosier manufacturing struggled along until the eve of the World War. It was purchased in 1941 out of liquidation by a Cincinnati company and its facilities were used to make wood cabinets and lockers for the military.

By the time it closed, however, the company had manufactured over two million cabinets, about 600 a day at its peak.

What knocked Hoosiers out of the box were built-in cabinets, which by the mid-1920s were becoming the must-have standard in most new kit­chens and the envy of every homemaker with an older kit­chen who aspired to a new-style kit­chen pictured in popular magazines with numerous fitted cabinets.

For a few dollars more than the cost of a Hoosier, she could have a kit­chen full of built-in cabinets with continuous countertops as work surfaces and niches exactly sized to appliances.

Hoosiers became "old fashioned" relics almost overnight, relegated to the back porch, basement, or garage to store dad's tools and paint.

Some Hoosier manufacturers tried to adapt by offering pre-made fitted kit­chen cabinets as an adjunct to their regular furniture products.

Hoosier, for example, showed fitted cabinets in its advertising after 1930. Sellers began offering built-in cabinets made to order as early as 1927 and exhibited its built-in kit­chen at the 1939 New York World's Fair.

Its catalog for that year offered fitted cabinets along with its updated Art-Deco Hoosiers, chrome-legged tables with linoleum and Porceliron tops and matching chrome and plastic chairs.

But, manufactured cabinets were not well received by a public that wanted the better fit and quality of custom cabinetry. So built-in cabinetmaking during the Arts & Crafts era remained largely a local enterprise.

A skilled cabinetmaker built cabinets on site, first locating the kit­chen sink under a window (for keeping an eye on the kids in the yard), then building pantries and cupboards to fit around appliances. Sometimes his efforts were guided by an architect or designer but more often not.

Some of the features in these early cabinets were ingenious: adjustable shelves, slide-out trays on wooden glides, fresh bread drawers with zinc lids, and pull-out cutting boards were common, and often cleverly designed and well-built – very well-built as anyone who has ever had to tear out these cabinets will readily but unhappily, attest.

But, more often the storage was primitive, awkward, and inconvenient – a giant step back from the very organized and efficient Hoosiers.

It is astounding to us that cabinetmakers of the period did not adopt the various organizational technologies that had been pioneered by the Hoosiers over the prior quarter-century but for some reason, they often did not.

It took the post-war housing boom to bring industrial-scale cabinetmaking into full bloom. Nearly all of today's major cabinet manufacturers were started after the World War.

But, the basic cabinet standards that made large-scale post-war cabinet manufacturing possible were firmly established during the Arts & Crafts period.

Cabinet dimensions such as the standard 36" countertop height, 24" deep base cabinets, and 12" deep wall cabinets were exactly the dimensions used in Hoosiers after trial and error found that they were the most convenient dimensions for most homemakers and the most economical to build.

Recreating the Arts & Crafts Kitchen

The modern Arts & Crafts kit­chen is only a distant relative of the actual kit­chen of the Arts & Crafts period. In fact, the contemporary kit­chen is more accurately a modern kit­chen in the Arts & Crafts style.

What kit­chen designers have done is take the best design elements of the Arts & Crafts house and combine them with modern kit­chen features to produce a hybrid kit­chen that looks and feels like it could have been completely at home in the Arts & Crafts era.… (Continues)

Rev. 02/05/24