Biggest Deal Since Sliced Bread
My interest in history, a house, and food, converge into a mystery.
In 1928 Elisha Craft of Wellsburg, West Virginia, was issued a patent for his bread slicing machine. Five years later, by 1933, eighty percent of all bread sold in the US was sliced. “Biggest deal since sliced bread” is talking about a business opportunity - making and selling automated bread slicers and sliced bread. Food has always been a most important business. Now it’s a big, important business. Sliced bread is emblematic of what has happened to our food. Food is convenient now. Let me illustrate.
Should I submit this to Kitchen Beautiful? I own this kitchen - it’s in a beautiful house built in 1928 by a Dr. Julian E. Meyer on what was then the edge of our town, Columbus, Nebraska. It's located close to the terminus of the old trolley line and is about a five-minute walk from the old Lutheran hospital. I ask you, what is this awful kitchen doing in a stately, beautiful, old house? This is one, small, ugly, kitchen. Muy feo. You can see into the breakfast nook which was added the same time as the remodeled kitchen, circa 1958. Sliced bread is responsible for this disaster? I expect you want me to explain. The rest of the house is pretty much original, untouched by the barbarians. Before I continue, please observe the steam radiator in the cupboard!
I bought this house as a project last year, (sort of an investment - the banker and my wife wonder about that). I couldn’t figure the kitchen out. What did it look like originally? It was challenging. Finally, I started looking online at kitchens from the 1920s. I found this one.
Okay, that explains the steam radiator inside the cupboard. There was a window above the radiator when the Meyer’s house was built. The length of that wall must have had a huge integrated sink and drainboard across it. Those sinks were ideal for serious dishwashing. The radiator would keep the sink warm creating a secondary, heat-radiating surface. Notice the cupboards in this picture? Me neither. When I looked at actual 1920s kitchen pictures, I didn’t see many cupboards. Looking forward in time, I saw more cupboards, backwards, I saw fewer. Looking at the old photos, I saw shelves in kitchens, and not so much for dishes, more for mixing bowls and cooking utensils. Shelving was dominant. The famous Hoosier cabinets with flour bins, built-in sifters, and tin-lined drawers were in some of the pictures. I began to realize these 1920 kitchens were designed as workrooms, not storerooms, certainly not family rooms. It was getting obvious nobody was keeping much food in those tiny, little, 1920 kitchens.
The Meyer’s built a very nice-looking house, attractive, inside and out.
It was built with what had to be one of the first all-electric kitchens. It had a refrigerator, not an icebox. It was probably a GE Monitor, first introduced in 1927 they were very popular, like sliced bread, but way more expensive. GE didn’t call it a Monitor. Everyone else did. The compressor housing on top reminded the public of the Civil War ironclad warship, USS Monitor. With a capacity of five cubic feet, it was about the same size as my daughter’s dorm refrigerator. Still, it was bigger than your average icebox.
Where did Mrs. Meyer keep the food? My grandfather was born in ‘97. He grew up in rural Iowa. He told me home canning, and canned food in general, didn’t get going until the twenties, after the war. He said prior to that, some people tried to dry a little sweet corn. People had caves for potatoes. “Mostly, we ate from the garden in the summer, and we ate meat in the winter.” Full disclosure: There is a small room with shelves at the bottom of the basement stairs in the Meyer’s house that looks like it was designed for managing glass canning jars.
Mrs. Meyer wasn’t keeping house on the farm. Farms had to be their own grossiere. Living in town, I suppose she would call and place an order with one of the grocers three or four times a week. The hallway has a small telephone alcove, the perfect size for a candlestick phone and a notepad. It’s very near the kitchen. She called, or her servant/housekeeper called. The census records always show a servant living there. The grocer would deliver the order. He might have two delivery boys working. Grocery stores in the 1920s and 30s never said, “we don’t deliver.” I remember seeing a WWI ad asking women not to order groceries so often. Seems grocery boys were needed at the front. Mrs. Meyer would order the same way from her butcher. The milk would be delivered on a schedule, early in the morning. This kitchen was originally designed to be a just-in-time kitchen. Evidently by 1958, the eating and food preparations habits of the Meyer household had changed so much, a new kitchen with lots of cupboards was needed - and a cozy little breakfast nook too, where one could dine informally, or alone, and snack.
Good writing isn’t improved with autobiographical embellishment. Unfortunately, I can’t escape that trap in this article. This is a story about my house, but not my home. Our home is out in the country, fifteen miles north of Columbus. It’s an even older farmhouse and has its own interesting history. We’ve lived there thirty-five years. The story I’m telling is a story about my thinking. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to keep me out of the story.
Food storage had become the dominant utility in a kitchen by 1958. A kitchen with cupboards was needed to store the groceries which had undergone ‘processing’ and were being purchased at the new supermarket. A Safeway, right across the street from Meyer house, had opened in 1952. Sliced bread and a bag of chips - Herman Lay had not quite got his start in the snack business in 1928. Fritos, ‘little fried things,’ and a good use for stale tortillas, was patented in 1932. Herman Lay bought the Fritos and the Cheetos in 1958. I don’t like to use the word ‘revolution’ to describe domestic change, but, in 1958 eight percent of all steel production in the US was going into ‘tin’ cans. Frozen orange juice concentrate was invented in 1947, and by 1966 it’s futures were being traded on the New York Board of Trade.
It seems to me in 1928 Dr. Meyer couldn’t do much snacking. There weren’t any snack foods, and the word “leftovers” essentially didn’t exist. If he was hungry, he waited until mealtime. Food had to be prepared. He had no choice. Maybe he smoked because he couldn’t snack. He died of a heart attack at sixty-one. I doubt he chewed tobacco, but who knows? Hard candy had been around for about a hundred years. Doc could have snacked on that. You look at pictures of crowds in the 1920s and 1930s and there are very few obese people, everybody is thin. Maybe the reason so many people are fat these days is because anybody can eat something tasty about any time they want. Exercise was more integrated into daily life for most people back in 1928, but I’m guessing eating habits are the biggest differentiating factor between obesity then and now.
Here is some of the Meyer family history: The first Mrs. Meyer, Tarris (Terrie) Threefoot Meyer died in 1944. She was fifty-three. The Meyers were married under a canopy in Meridian, Mississippi in 1921. She was about twenty-seven years old when she arrived in Columbus, NE. Tarris Meyer is buried in Beth Israel Cemetery in Meridian, MS. She was Jewish. Dr. Julian E Meyer was born in Selma, Alabama in 1894. He entered military service in August 1917 as a First Lieutenant and an MD. He died in 1956. He, like his wife, was Jewish. He is buried at the Columbus Cemetery in Columbus, Nebraska. The second Mrs. Meyer, a widow named, Martha A. Jourdan, married Dr. Meyer in 1952. It is she who redid the kitchen around 1958. The second Mrs. Meyer lived in the house until around 1970. She was a dowager, and never the titled owner. The son of the first wife, Julian E. Meyer, Jr. held the title until the house was sold at auction in 1970. Their only child, Julian E. Meyer, Jr., remained in Columbus until his death in 2010, he was a banker and a graduate of Harvard. He is buried at St. Bonaventure’s Catholic Cemetary in Columbus. I’m guessing now, but probably Dr. Meyer had a Nebraska doctor army buddy who wanted Meyer to join him in his practice after the war. As soon as Dr. Meyer got settled in Columbus, he went down to Meridian, MS and married his bride. In the 1950 census, the second Mrs. Meyer (the widow, Martha Jourdan) was living in the house where Dr. & Mrs. Meyer lived when they first moved to Columbus, at 2911 20th Street. Just down the block from where my wife, Janette and I lived when we first moved to Columbus, thirty-nine years ago. Dr. Meyer evidently married his tenant in 1952, a year after his son married and moved out of his house. The thread of all those years runs through less than ten square blocks.
I’ve decided to restore the kitchen to the 1920s style and size, with plenty of accommodation for modern use. There is nothing much sensible about my decision. The sensible thing to do is take out the wall between the kitchen and the dining room and use the whole space to make room for all the modern conveniences that attend our current eating habits and kitchen use. Building a kitchen for aesthetics, rather than utility, is unserious, it certainly was in 1928. Unserious; that’s what my wife and the banker think about me as an investor. But trying to imagine/remember the past does me good. There is a lot of substance to the past. Remember the future? We’ll have to wait and see.
And I’m going on a diet. Again. And again, we will have to wait and see if I’m serious this time. I find it easy to snack.