Most people eat out several times a week, and many get take-out a few additional times. This differs from a hundred years ago when a much higher proportion of meals were eaten at home. Back then, most cooking was done by women, many of whom were homemakers. I’ve often heard it said that women in the early 1900s cooked 3 time a day, 365 days a year. This is an exaggeration, but probably not too far from the truth.
A hundred years ago, people sometimes ate out – at a lunch counter, a nice restaurant, or something in between. From time to time, people also ate at church or community picnics or pot lucks, family reunions, or holiday gatherings – though each of the women attending probably often made one or more dishes at those events. Home-packed lunches (often packed by the women in the family) were the norm for the mid-day meal for many workers and students.
The huge number of meals that many women prepared each year back then affected which dishes were made, and how they were prepared. Tasty dishes, which were also simple to make and used readily available, inexpensive ingredients, were generally preferred. Cooks also often needed to prepare meals on a very tight budget, so they planned carefully to avoid waste. Left-overs were reheated or repurposed as an ingredient in a new dish. For example, left-over potatoes might be used to make soup.
Many people today want to eat home-cooked meals, but find it challenging. They believe that they make healthier choices when they cook at home, and that it’s less expensive. They also believe that eating together improves the well-being of family member. But there are many reasons why a lot of people don’t often make home-cooked meals. They are busy, and it takes time to cook. Family members may not have time to eat breakfast or other meals together, and they may be exhausted at dinner time after working all day. Some may find it less stressful to eat out or buy take-out. Older individuals, who once regularly cooked, sometimes “retire” from cooking and now go out or purchase prepared foods.
I don’t advocate that we go back to cooking 3 times a day, 365 days a year (frankly, that sounds boring and exhausting), but there are many health and economic benefits from cooking more meals from scratch. A friend believes that individuals today see beautifully presented dishes on blogs, Instagram, TikTok and other social media, and that they are disappointed when the dishes they make using the same recipes don’t turn out to be the “the best ever, most amazing [insert food name].” After being disappointed a few times, they decide that it’s too hard (or stressful) to cook and shift to purchasing mostly prepared foods.
Perhaps social media needs to give cooks permission to make foods that are less than perfect. Each food cooked from scratch is a learning experience. Often, they are still quite tasty, even if they don’t look perfect.
Like so many things, balance is key. It’s important to figure out the right balance between eating out, take-out foods, and home-cooked meals. A hundred years ago, cooks generally made tasty, simple, economical dishes. We can learn something from those cooks of yore.
I had to chuckle at this post. I’m the cook in our household. I cook almost entirely from scratch seven days a week. We’ll order take out once every couple of weeks which is usually pizza on a Friday.
When I was first married 28 years ago, I would get home from work about 3:30pm and my bride not until almost 6. I wanted to eat, so I began cooking and here I am years later still doing all the shopping and cooking. We’ve always packed a lunch for the kids when they were unschool and pack leftovers for ourselves (though occasionally we’ll all oder out lunch at my workplace).
I really enjoy cooking and the older, simpler recipes. My favorite cook book is “The American Woman’s Cookbook, Wartime Edition (Victory Binding) c. 1942. I received it passed down from my grandmother.
A fascinating read on the evolution of American eating is “Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal” by Abigail Carroll, c. 2013.
Robert Carignan
Portland, Maine
Three meals a day is NOT an exaggeration. Everyone in my area cooked exactly that way and as recent as 50 years ago. Breakfast was shortly after 4:00 am, dinner at noon and supper around 5:00 pm. Gas or electric heat were not options so a wood stove was a necessity. Mom had a nice big range with a water tank on the end to keep hot water for cleaning up, always at hand. Sometimes on the hottest days of summer, the mid-day meal provided leftovers for supper so that the house cooled down more for sleeping. (No electricity meant no fans, and only the night breezes for comfort!)
A tough life indeed!!!
Good post! Yep, I know some who did do that all their lives. Especially in areas in the country where there were no places to eat out and no money for it anyway.
And good point on when you find good recipes and yours doesn’t look like the ones pictured. We rarely eat out, I make some from scratch, but am not opposed to buying it ready made when it is more economical and less time consuming! It is why I use the stock photos – things always turn out different so when they do, I don’t want folks disappointed that theirs didn’t look the same as mine. I find I can follow my own recipe and it looks different each time depending on humidity, higher or lower temps, cook time, a little more or less of this and that, and so on. I like to experiment as I go! ~ Rosie
Amen! And learning to love cooking as well as sharing the duties among family members can help to make a daily drudgery a lot easier and more fun.
My mother, born in 1910, was the 3rd eldest of 12. They lived on a farm out in the country, and my grandmother and her 6 daughters cooked 3 meals per day, EVERY DAY. There were no restaurants or take-out in our area. They grew everything they needed on the farm except sugar. I was told that Grandma would bake 3 dozen homemade biscuits every morning. 6 boys and 6 girls, all with chores as children, then became farm workers there as they grew older. That meant lots of hungry mouths. And amazingly….. never asked for, nor received a hand-out of any kind. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” Some folks today could learn from that old motto.
I know my mother cooked 3 meals a day and so did I when all my kids were at home although I used my slow cooker for porridge which meant no burnt pans plus whatever time anyone sufaced the porridge was still hot…I used my slow cooker a lot and batch cooked…
I also agree that many of the food images can be disheartning when ours isn’t quite the same however the food in those images has been posed …the light is perfect and the food is most probably cold as its taken so long to get the perfect image 🙂
I know my mother cooked 3 meals a day and so did I when all my kids were at home although I used my slow cooker for porridge which meant no burnt pans plus whatever time anyone sufaced the porridge was still hot…I used my slow cooker a lot and batch cooked…
I also agree that many of the food images can be disheartning when ours isn’t quite the same however the food in those images has been posed …the light is perfect and the food is most probably cold as its taken so long to get the perfect image 🙂
I keep hearing about how ‘busy’ everyone is these days as an excuse not to prepare one’s own food. My mother had a full time job in a hot and dusty factory, she came home and cooked from scratch every night for the family of seven, and packed lunches for the next day. She did not have a microwave, clothes dryer, or any other conveniences. Never would she have said she was too tired to cook – your family needed to be fed, so you prepared food. Restaurants were for very special occasions, and take-out never happened. What she didn’t have was facebook and instagram accounts, the internet, cell phone texting, and a world of so-called ‘friends’ she’d never really met sending emojis and notifications of all the wonderful things that could be bought around the next block.
We’ve let these things become more important than our families and that is a shame.
Rant over.
It can’t be true that people these days eat out several times a week? That’s just plain unaffordable – here at any rate. Most people I know only eat out on high days and holidays – it’s a treat. Take out and takeaways from the supermarket is a different story, and many people rely on that to quite a big extent. We’ve never cooked three times a day – unless you count making porridge for breakfast as cooking, and even that’s not every day. Lunch is often a soup, and although made from scratch hardly counts as cooking in my book, ‘cos you can do it on autopilot. And I’m lucky, I really find cooking relaxing (something my husband can’t understand – it’s Top Level Stress for him!) so it’s always a good way to work towards the end of the day. Hooray for home cooking!