We’re back with another time-traveling dinner experiment! My family and I have been making our way through culinary history, in what I hoped would be a fun way to get my kids to try different foods, maybe learn something new, and have fun as a family, too. Our first meal was a big success — they liked just about everything — and when I announced our next dinner adventure, they were all super excited to try it.
One thing I noticed, with both our last meal and this one, is that it got my kids to be much more adventurous. Even if they didn’t like everything, they were pretty enthusiastic about trying whatever was available on the table.
READ: Dinner Through the Decades: Food from 1900 – 1910
This time, we ate some dishes that were popular from 1910 – 1920 for dinner. A lot of it was surprisingly decadent; in today’s age, I would see some of it as the type of thing I’d make for a Sunday roast, as opposed to a quick and easy weekday meal. On the other hand, some of it was definitely reminiscent of a period when people still sat for afternoon tea
There were mixed reactions; a lot of the meal was more familiar, and so I knew they would like some of it. Other things were perhaps familiar, but prepared a little bit differently, so the reaction tended to be varied. Even though I wouldn’t say everything in this dinner was a home run — where everyone liked everything — they are still really excited about traveling to the next decade in our experiment!
Read on for information on what we prepared, as well as for links on how to make it yourself!
Roast beef
Yup — simple, easy roast beef. A very common dinner that came up when I was doing my research was roast beef and Franconia potatoes, so that’s was one of the first things to go on my list. It appeared to be a staple for families during this period.
I ended up using a round roast to make it a little more affordable, but cooked it much like I would a prime rib. It ended up pretty good, and it was easily something that everyone at the table liked.
Find the recipe for poor man’s prime rib here.
Franconia potatoes
Maybe I have been living under a rock, but I couldn’t specifically recall ever having heard of Franconia potatoes. Essentially, they’re potatoes that are roasted in the drippings from the roast beef, so I thought it would be really tasty.
These didn’t go over as well for us; maybe it was the recipe that I followed, maybe I messed it up somehow, maybe people liked potatoes a little harder in that time period. Who knows? But I boiled them first for five minutes, as directed, and then roasted them in the beef drippings. I thought they would be much more savory than they were, but they were kind of… well, bland. And they definitely were not, in my opinion, cooked through all the way. They were edible, but not soft like I’d expected. Still, some of my kids liked it a lot. Go figure.
If I made this again, I’d probably need to tweak it a bit, starting with boiling the potatoes for longer!
Find the recipe for Franconia potatoes here.
Curried egg sandwiches
I grew up on egg salad sandwiches, so I was pretty psyched to try this one out. It is not quite the same thing as egg salad — there’s no mayo or mustard, for example! — but it was similar. The preparation was different, and just like in the previous decade, the recipe called for onion juice, which, again, I was a little worried about.
You started with a bit of curry powder mixed in with butter, and that — along with the onion juice — gets mixed in with mashed yolks. The whites of the eggs get mashed as well, and then that goes on buttered bread. And that’s it! It was pretty easy to make, and I’d say about half of us liked it, and the other half didn’t. Me? I loved it. I thought the curry gave a great taste to the eggs, and it was much better than your typical egg salad sandwich, in my opinion. About half the kids agreed with me, while my husband and the other half of the kids didn’t care for it too much.
Find the recipe for curried egg sandwiches here.
Shrimp in ramekins
This meal I had to be a little creative on; it called for canned shrimp, and to be baked in individual ramekins, neither of which my local Giant store had available when I did my grocery shopping. So I had to wing it a little, and just used frozen salad shrimp instead, and baked it in a regular baking dish instead. Generally speaking though, I knew that canned food was revolutionary at the time though, so cooking with canned food was a huge thing for a lot of the 20th century.
Anyway, it was really simple: you make a roux, mix in shrimp and canned peas, and bake it. Easy peasy! This took less than 10 minutes to prepare, and for the most part, everyone liked it. This was another one where I felt like… well, it was OK? It was fine, but bland. There was very little flavor to it, but it was cheap, fast, easy, and all the kids were willing to eat it, so I’ll mark that as a win.
Find the recipe for shrimp in ramekins here.
That wraps it up for our 1910 – 1920 dinner! I’m really looking forward to our next decade; the 1920s were a super fun time, and while people may not realize that the 20s had some awesome food, it did. And it’s probably our last fun decade before we get into Great Depression-era food and midcentury gelatin madness!
