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I'd guess most everything tasted fresh, yummy but on the bland side. I know I miss foods from my childhood and it isn't just that my mom and grands were better cooks but that they had better quality foods.
Those foods had to have tasted better. Maybe people then didn't have the variety we have now and they couldn't eat fruits and vegetables out of season (unless they canned), but I know all their fruits and vegetables had to have tasted a million times better than today's crap from the supermarket.
I know when I grew my first watermelon, I couldn't believe how great it was. Likewise strawberries, tomatoes, and corn. I brought a friend blueberries last year from the Farmer's Market and she said she couldn't believe they were the same thing she got in a grocery store. I just finished making a Danish with cream cheese and blueberries and it was like dying and going to heaven, it was so good. I tried making the same thing with canned and frozen blueberries. Not even close. Grass fed beef, and milk and butter from grass fed beef is supposed to be delicious. And I can't even imagine how good home cured bacon would taste.
if you could compare basic foods from back around 1895 -1900 to foods now, do you think some of the foods would still be about the same?
would a fresh cold glass of milk back in 1895 taste the same as todays milk?
how about bacon , ham & eggs, toast , butter? bowl of oatmeal
steaks would probably be tough and chewy back then? baked goods would probably taste richer from the lard?
It would certainly depend on how you eat today, compared to then. In the late 1800s most everyone lived on farms and grew their own food, so everything was fresh in the summer and fall. They used a lot more things like bacon fat and other types of lard, so much of what they ate was richer, but probably not really as tasty. I don't know why you would think steak was tough and chewy anymore than today?
We use a lot more spices than families did, thus my guess is food tastes better today or to us it does. If our ancesters were to come for dinner today, they might think we had lost our minds.
One advantage we have: because we are an industrial nation now with technology, we are able to eat a lot more variety year around. Their produce, for the most part, in the winter and early spring was simply what they had canned the summer before and put in the celler.
I'm sure they tasted better. I remember food 50 to 60 years ago tasting better. It wasn't so processed. In the spring you could taste the new grass that the cows ate in the milk. Regular beef from the store had more marbling and better flavor. Pork wasn't the "other white meat" back then. I had a distant relative who raised pigs in the country. We visited him once and I saw the food the pigs ate.They ate real vegetables, he had big mounds of corn cobs for them and other vegetables. Now pigs eat "feed". Animals used to run around and eat real recognizable food and grasses. They tasted so much better than they do today. Blackberries were full of blackberry flavor. Now they taste like raspberries. Corn tasted like corn and not overly sweet like today.
To get food close to that today you have to find the good producers at farmers markets and farmers who use the older methods. It costs more. Factory farming has bred the flavor out of so many of our foods today.
They don't even taste the same today as they
did in the 1970s and before.
Well, that is a good point...me I would say the 50s -70s!
I was pulling weeds in our garden by '59.
Cucumbers, tomatoes, high corn...some sort of beans and peas..
I don't remember fresh lettuce back then, maybe it got eaten so we didn't plant it in
Central NY?
My dad bought a half side of beef as needed...I remember packaging it and marking it
from the butchers. No hormones given back then!
Prob grain fed, tho.
Milk wasn't homogenized, and wasn't pasteurized. So each area had different tasting milk. (Go to northern Europe for an idea how dairy in America once tasted.)
Many foods we take for granted (like oranges and bananas) were SERIOUS luxury items, unless you lived near the citrus belt. Baked goods were better -- whole grain flour, lard, real butter (and real cultured buttermilk) tend to do that.
HOWEVER -- it wasn't all "milk and honey"
That era had vermin problems that would churn the modern consumer's stomach. Their drinking water was often unsafe. There was no USDA or FDA -- so some foods were quite literally toxic. Food borne illness was a killer. America had a severe cholera problem. And the average life-span was 50 years old.
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