Food & Drink

The modern grocery store depends on an invention from the Napoleonic Wars. In the early 1800s a French confectioner named Nicolas Appert worked out that food sealed in a container and heated would keep for months. Tin cans followed soon after, and by the late 19th century canned goods were everywhere in American kitchens.

Campbell's Soup is a good example of what came next. In 1897 a chemist at the company, John T. Dorrance, worked out how to condense soup by removing much of the water, which made the cans smaller, cheaper to ship and cheaper to buy. The red and white label followed soon after and has barely changed since. It was one of the most familiar packages in America long before Andy Warhol painted it in 1962.

Brand-name food was a new idea in the late 1800s. Before then most food was sold loose from barrels and bins, and the buyer trusted the grocer, not the label. Packaged brands, with their trade cards, magazine ads and colorful labels, asked people to trust the company instead. A large share of the food images from this era are advertising, and they are among the most colorful pictures of the period.

The other big group is photographs. Markets, street vendors, bakeries, harvests, county fair displays and family kitchens all show up. During World War I the Food Administration printed posters urging Americans to save wheat, meat and sugar, with slogans about food winning the war. In the 1930s and 1940s government photographers recorded what people actually ate, from farm dinners to lunch counters.

Pies have their own small place here, and it is a deserved one. Pie was the everyday American dessert for most of this period, eaten at breakfast as often as dinner in some parts of the country. Worth noticing in all of it is how food was presented before refrigeration was common. Look for the ice boxes, the root cellars, the jars and crocks lined up on shelves. Keeping food was half the work of cooking it.