The surprising history of leftovers
SalonIf I’m being honest, my favorite part of Thanksgiving is the leftovers. This isn’t a novel declaration, as evidenced by the number of guides out there for making the perfect leftovers sandwich as well as slightly more involved fare: burritos, hashes, turkey noodle soup, casseroles, Hot Browns, empanadas and this new Thanksgiving Leftovers Hot Pocket by J. Kenji López-Alt, which I’m dying to try. “It was unthinkable to throw away food during the Great Depression, and refrigerator sales grew thanks to discounted prices offered by manufacturers,” wrote Emma Grahn of the National Museum of American History. “The real bump in refrigerator sales, however, started in 1935, when New Deal loans encouraged Americans to make the switch to electric.” Fast-forward a few decades, however, and leftovers had lost their luster. The 1963 edition of “The Joy of Cooking,” featured a section dedicated to leftovers that was drastically condensed when compared with the original 1931 edition which author Irma Rombauer said she created “one eye on the family purse.” As food and nutrition historian Helen Veit wrote for The Atlantic in 2015, this new edition opened with a joke: “‘It seems to me,’ the minister said, after his new wife placed a dubious casserole on the table, ‘that I have blessed a good deal of this material before.’” “The truth was that by the 1960s leftovers were becoming a joke to a lot of people, with a grumbling husband and a mystery casserole playing stock roles,” Veit wrote.
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