We’re going back to the 1960’s to learn what Americans were eating. We’ll make a classic buffet dinner from the Betty Crocker Hostess Cookbook and flambéed cherries jubilee. We’ll find out what restaurants were popular and what foods were invented. We sent a man to the moon prompting midcentury food and kitchens to get a little more futuristic.The civil rights movement gained momentum in Lunch counters across the southern United States. Hippies at Woodstock kicked off the natural food revolution with granola. President Kennedy encouraged citizens to build home bomb shelters stocked with canned goods in case of nuclear war. More women entered the work force, changing the division of cooking labor. Women started reading a little more Betty Friedan and a little less Betty Crocker. American palates became more cosmopolitan thanks to Julia Child & gourmet publications like TimeLife Books. Sure there were plenty off mid century monstrosities and many meals got their start from a can, but this was surely progress from the conventional 1950’s meat and potatoes.
A day of food in the 1960’s…
Breakfast: No food says 60’s quite like granola. In 1969, Woodstock took place on a farm in upstate New York. to feed the 400,000 hungry hippies, collectives and local farms sold and donated food like granola. Of course there’s breakfast at Tiffany’s…Audrey Hepburn’s pastry and coffee were from popular 60’s restaurant Schrafft’s. In 1969, the Black Panther Party created free Breakfast Programs for kids, distributing food in 23 cities to over 20,000 kids.
Lunch: In New York City, mad men types ate wedge salads, and shrimp co*cktail at their 3 martini lunches…meanwhile in the south Lunch counters became sites of peaceful protest against segregated restaurants giving momentum to the civil rights movement.
Dinner: American palates became more sophisticated thanks to Julia Child, but many 60’s meals were still dominated by convenience foods like this terrifying olive,celery and cheese jello salad. Buffet dinners of beef stroganoff, green beans amandine and flaming cherries jubilee were popular.
Jell-o Salad
Lets make our first recipe… Usually I like to make the absolute best tasting recipes I can find that define an era… sure this was a time when gourmet cooking came to America but I wanted to make something truly… upsetting…like the leftover jell-o salad. Olives, cheese and celery in lime jello, and if you think that’s gross, i found a similar recipe called ring around the tuna…guess what’s in that! Throughout midcentury American cuisine, jell-o salads came in all jiggling shapes and colors. I saw an ad for leftover jell-o salad and knew I had to accept this challenge. I chose a mix of lemon and lime flavored jello to mellow that green color but that artificial green is particularly potent. Jello- introduced a line of savory flavors like celery, Italian salad, & tomato in the 60s. Can’t imagine why they were discontinued.To get the ingredients to suspend in the jello, not just sink to the bottom, you have to give the jello a head start in the fridge before adding them in. Once it’s chilled a bit, you then layer and I’m using a technical jello term here… plop it in. Plop and layer. Then it gets a nice long chill and you’re ready to impress your eager friends and family!
Restaurants and convenience foods
What restaurants and convenience foods were popular in the 1960s? Sprite, Gatorade, pop tarts, and tang were all new to the 1960s market. Tang became incredibly popular when astronauts took it to space! Metrecal was the fad diet of the 1960’s. THey sold meal replacement shakes, cookies and soups. Most people cooked at home in the early 1960s but frozen TV dinners were a popular way to “give mom the night off”. However, Howard Johnson’s restaurants served more meals in the 1960s outside the home than any company or organization except for the US army. With hundreds of restaurants, HO Jo’s became a familiar and reliable place to get a meal of fried clams, chicken pot pie, and 28 flavors of ice cream. The recognizable orange roof called to highway travelers from coast to coast before mcDonalds became more popular in the fast food scene later in the decade. In 1960, there were only 102 McDonalds, mostly in California. By 1966, there were 750. The fillet of fish debuted in 1962 and the Big Mac in 1968. Kentucky Fried Chicken was a major player in the fast food world of the 60s. the Colonel sold his franchise In 1964 for the equivalent of 17 million dollars today. Wendy’s and Taco Bell also opened in this decade. Benihana opened in 1964 by a fascinating man… Rocky Aoki…he sold ice cream in Harlem to save the money needed to open Benihana, the first Japanese teppanyaki restaurant in the untied states, which hosted the Beatles and Muhammad Ali. Steakhouses remained incredibly popular throughout the decade, serving the old standbys of steak and potatoes. A new restaurant entered the scene in midtown manhattan in 1959 that would change modern American cuisine for years to come. The four seasons cost 4.5 million dollars (some 35 million today) to complete and featured decor that reflected the season. It became the place for New York movers and shakers to have power lunches and hosted celebrations like sitting president JFK’s birthday party in 1962. Later that evening Marilyn Monroe sang him happy birthday in front of 15,000 people at Madison square garden. The 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle debuted a new rotating restaurant…at the top of the space needle! Another unexpected location for a nice restaurant?…the airport! Today if you are eating dinner at the airport, it’s likely not a special meal. I love that in the 1960’s, it was chic to eat at the airport because air travel itself was chic and cosmopolitan. This was the golden age of travel. The most luxurious airline, Pan Am was flying to every continent but Antarctica. This golden age of air travel makes flying look like an actually enjoyable experience.
Dinner
Let’s make some dinner. I wanted to create a dinner that the average American might serve for a dinner party… not overly ambitious…definitely something from a can. Definitely Betty Crocker. Buffet dinners were popular for parties because you could assemble them ahead of time and let the chaffing dishes keep everything hot. This is a dinner that is not overly ambitious. For a truly impressive dinner, a host would attempt beef Wellington or something more cosmopolitan like paella. I chose Stroganoff Superb, from the 1967 Betty Crocker Hostess Cookbook. Stroganoff was popular in the 50’s and 60’s so by 1967, this would have been a well known staple of American cuisine. JFK’s chef Rene Verdon even served stroganoff in the White House, aparently quite shockingly was known to use canned soup in his sauce. I followed this recipe very closely (which is so hard for me because i don’t “lightly brown my meat and vegetables”.) And there is no pepper in this recipe!….and it uses …ketchup! What have i gotten myself into?... But I followed it and I have to say, it’s very good! I was surprised! (in the recipe, I noted all the changes I would make as well as the original recipe). I served this with classic egg noodles and the easiest side of all…green beans amandine. Slivered almonds were very big in the 60s. To steamed green beans, simply add butter and slivered almonds and salt and pepper. It’s a really simple retro side dish. With that wacky jello salad, you’ve got yourself a 60’s dinner party! Stick around for dessert!
Civil Rights Movement
The civil rights movement and food have a close connection. In 1960, 4 black college freshmen sat down at a whites-only lunch counter at Woolworth’s in Greensboro North Carolina. This peaceful protest of segregation and racial discrimination led to 19 more students the next day, then 80 students joining the following day. By the end of 1960, 70,000 people had participated in sit-ins across the Southern United States, giving the civil rights movement momentum. I visited the Lunch Counter Exhibit at the Center for Civil & Human Rights in Atlanta , which allows visitors to be immersed in the sit-in experience. The audio recreates the fear and violence that these protestors faced while asking for the right to be served at a restaurant. If you can’t make it to the museum, i linked the audio file in the description so you can listen at home. In New Orleans, in a secluded upstairs dining room of Leah CHase’s restaurant, civil rights leaders, Freedom Riders and activists met to strategize over a delicious meal. it was truly unique…a black owned fine dining restaurant. Leah has hosted many presidents, political figures, celebrities and in 2016 received a James beard lifetime achievement award. Leah even inspired Disney’s Princess Tiana in the Princess and the Frog.
Restaurants like Paschal’s in Atlanta became a meeting place for civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King. The owner provided Dr. King with a room in the adjoining Pascal’s hotel to meet with civil rights leaders like John Lewis. The owners often bailed protestors out of jail and provided them with complimentary meals. Finally, the civil rights act of 1964 mandated desegregation in public accommodations. Famous soul food restaurant Sylvia’s opened in 1962 in Harlem. The term soul food was coined in the 1960s. Soul was a term referring to African American culture as a whole in the 60’s and soul food became a way to represent African American cuisine which is a combination of southern, west African, Western European and Native American cooking practices & ingredients. If you’re looking for more information, I recommend a great book called Soul Food by Adrian Miller, that outlines soul food history in greater detail.
Hippies & Counterculture
The natural foods & consumer counterculture movement became increasingly important to many. Organic and biodynamic became known terms of the decade. Natural food stores and collectives sold alternatives to the traditional market. If mainstream American food culture was meat and potatoes, the counter culture movement inspired many to bake their own bread and make granola. Vegetarian diets filled with brown rice, sprouts, vegetables and tofu became increasingly popular later in the decade. In 1962, Rachel Carson’s revolutionary book Silent Spring kicked off the modern environmental movement and made us look at what was being sprayed on our food. In 1965 consumers boycotted table grapes to show their support of farm laborers. This encouraged grape companies to offer farm workers better pay and improved working conditions.
Dessert
Let’s end our dinner party with a little show…Cherries jubilee flambéed with brandy. In true 60’s fashion, canned cherry pie filling was a clever cheat..but don’t tell my guests…Dressed up with a little orange juice & zest, its surprisingly good. This dessert was created by Chef Escoffier for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee 1897 but regained popularity in the 1960’s with the flambé craze…midcentury diners were obsessed with tableside spectacles and anything that could be lit on fire was… food writers used the Fire and Ice test to judge restaurants …if they had iceberg salads and flambéed food, it would certainly be overpriced and overrated. 60’s hostesses loved showing off their pyrotechnical talents as a surefire way to end the night on a sweet note…that is unless someone’s bouffant caught on fire! With all that hairspray, I’m sure there were a few casualties. It was traditionally served over vanilla ice cream. Ok…To my knowledge no one did this in the 60s but do you know what makes a great topping? That hippie granola!
Influences on 60’s Cuisine
The first major wave of gourmet food came from France. JFK and Jackie O’s French chef, Rene Verdon served classic French cuisine at the while house. Julia Child was perhaps the most influential chef of the decade. Her book mastering the art of French cooking and her tv series The French Chef revolutionized the way that Americans learned about cooking. I’ll keep it brief because I’m going to do an entire Julia Child episode. Not everyone was so pleased with Julia’s culinary enthusiasm. Author of the Feminine Mystique Betty Friedan, believed that the kitchen was a prison and cooking was mindless drudgery. For some women, cooking for their families without hopes and dreams of their own outside the home may have been their reality but If i were a 60’s woman watching Julia’s cooking show, I would feel inspired and excited to see a woman sharing her passion with the world. I considered my own grandmothers, newly married in the early 1960s…both working mothers. They got their guidance from the Joy of Cooking. Many new 60’s brides received cookbooks as wedding gifts like Joy of Cooking, and the Betty Crocker’s Hostess Cookbook. Before the internet and food network, cookbooks were vital resources for learning to cook. The Time Life series from the 60s and 70s opened up American palates on a global scale. Contributors to this series ranged from James Beard to MFK Fischer to Julia Child. I have several and they are still beautifully written evergreen works of art I’m happy to own. Thank you thrift shop and whatever chic 60’s woman donated them. For those not interested in cooking, there was Peg bracken’s The I Hate to Cook Book. She says “This is the book for those who want to fold our hands around a dry martini instead of a wet flounder come the end of a long day”.
