Soft Porn, 1897 edition

You just know that girl is going to get a spanking.

Predictions, 1896 edition

'In the year 1887,' says Mr Edison, 'the idea occurred to me that it would be possible to devise an instrument which should do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear, and that, by a combination of the two, all motion and sound could be recorded and reproduced simultaneously....

...A little more discussion about details followed, and then Edison said: 'I have no doubt whatever of the outcome. Before many years we will have grand opera in every little village at ten cents a head. And the very highest grand opera; you will see and hear Patti in your own parlour. She will be heard a hundred years after her death. The President's inauguration can be treated in the same way. Pope Leo and his cardinals may be seen and heard for a hundred years to come.'

'What a way to write history !' he continued enthusiastically. ' How much more effectively one could convey to future generations an idea of the President than words and writing could! In fact, written records would cease to have their historical importance. Yet,' he added, ' these things are not so wonderful as they seem.'

--From Thomas Alva Edison--

If most people couldn't hear or see most political speeches and had to read them instead, how different would politics be?

YouTube, 1894 edition

2008 version:

Marketing, 1823 edition

OF MARKETING.

It is requisite, in the first place, to know the different parts of those animals which are brought into our markets, ready slaughtered, and generally denominated butcher's meat. The ox, or cow, when killed, is called beef, in which the fore-quarter consists of the haunch...

--From A Modern System of Domestic Cookery--

The chapter on marketing in this book (and all books in this time period) is all about how to purchase items at a market. It explains what all the cuts of meat are and which is considered the best to buy. So, instead of pie charts you get pictures like this:



Our marketing: how to sell things.

Their marketing: how to buy things.

Tainted food, 1852 edition

Coffee, fragrant and refreshing, has almost become a myth...

...with foreign roguery and home roguery, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the sore temptations to cheat the customs, the chances are twenty to one against us, that the brown powder we are at so much pains with, once flourished at the end of a blue flower, on a long stalk under our own hedges, being known where it grew under the name of wild endive, christened in trade chicory, and being in reality a tall and aristocratic sort of dandelion, possessing too the medicinal properties of dandelion, and none whatever of the properties of coffee. But even if people be taken with a liking or this dandelion tea instead of coffee, they cannot even have it pure, the chicory itself is far too costly to content the avaricious roguery of a number of dealers, and so the chicory itself is adulterated with roasted corn, parsnips, manglewurzel, beans, Egyptian lupin seed, biscuit powder, burnt sugar, roasted carrots, oak bark, tan, acorns, mahogany sawdust, and no little sand, the result of the original dirt judiciously left as a make-weight upon the root of the chicory itself.

--From The Illustrated London Cookery Book--

Even the fake coffee wasn't real!

The author goes on to tell us that:

-Mustard was just flour and husks with turmeric.
-Milk might contain ground-up bits of plaster.
-Green tea was black tea coated with a poisonous dye to look green.
-Brown sugar contained dirt.

If someone said your cookies "taste like dirt," they might just be on to something. Of course if you were offended, you could always make them some green tea.

Mac 'n' cheese, 1823 fusion cuisine edition

--Macaroni.

The usual mode of dressing it in this country is by adding a white sauce, and Parmesan or Cheshire cheese, and burning it. But this makes a dish which is proverbially unwholesome: but its bad qualities arise from the oiled and burnt cheese, and the half-dressed flour and butter put in the white sauce.

Macaroni plain boiled, and some rich stock or portable soup added to it quite hot, will be found a delicious dish, and very wholesome. Or boil macaroni as directed in the receipt for the pudding, and serve it quite hot, in a deep tureen; and let each guest add grated Parmesan and cold butter, or oiled butter served hot, and it is excellent; this is the most common Italian mode of dressing it.

--English way of dressing Macaroni.

Put a quarter of a pound of macaroni into a stew-pan with a pint of milk, or broth, or water; let it boil gently till it is tender, and then put in an ounce of grated cheese, a bit of butter about as big as a walnut, more or less, as your cheese is fat or poor, and a tea-spoonful of salt; mix it well together, and put it on a dish—and strew over it two ounces of grated Parmesan or Cheshire cheese—and give it a light brown in a Dutch oven.—Or put all the cheese into the macaroni, and put bread crumbs over the top.

--From A Modern System of Domestic Cookery--

Macaroni and cheese was considered "proverbially unwholesome"; kind of hard not to be if everyone was burning it. The dish seems to have been of Italian origin, originally dressed with butter and cheese. The English innovation was to make it in a rich cream sauce and brown the dish or cover it with bread crumbs.

Mac 'n' cheese, 1852 edition

--CHEESE MACARONI.

Take a quarter of a pound of macaroni, a pint and a half of new milk, put it in a stewpan, and let it stew till quite tender, take half a pound of Parmesan, grate it, add it to the macaroni, quarter of a pound of butter, pepper and salt, and a little cayenne, according to taste, mix them well together, and let them stew ten minutes, brown with a salamander, and serve.

--From The Illustrated London Cookery Book--

This sounds delicious and rich. By the way, salamanders were blobs of metal you could heat up in the fire and hold over food to brown it. Much like chefs might use a butane torch today.

Science reporting, 1852 edition (with translations)

With this oxygen our life is in some sort a continual battle; we must either supply it with especial food, or it will prey upon ourselves;--a body wasted by starvation is simply eaten up by oxygen. It likes fat best, so the fat goes first; then the lean, then the brain...

A human is like a fire, you have to keep throwing fuel on it or it goes out.

The reason for this hungriness of frosty air is simply that our lungs hold more of it than they do of hot air, and so we get more oxygen a fact that any one can prove, by holding a little balloon half filled with air near the fire, it will soon swell up, showing that hot air needs more room than cold.

How fast the human fire burns is entirely dependent on the amount of oxygen that comes in contact with the lungs. Since there is more oxygen in a volume of cold air than warm air your body needs more fuel when it is cold. Put a balloon near "the fire" if you don't believe me.

The Englishman in India provokes a make-believe appetite for meat; he has no notion of changing his home-habits because he has left home a few thousand miles away; he goes to war with sun and air, eats meat abundantly; in short, stops up the grate with throwing on fuel where there is but little of the fiery oxygen to consume it, grows sickly yellow, and so pays in suffering the common penalty of ignorance.

If you move from a cold (high oxygen) environment to a warm (low oxygen) environment you need to cut back on cold weather foods, like meat. Otherwise 'fuel' will build up in your body, you'll turn yellow, and die.

--From The Illustrated London Cookery Book--

So far we have these "modern" ideas:

-The food you're eating can make you sick.

-Toxins can build up in your body.

Later on in the book they tell you the ideal food (human milk) and provide a nutritional chart to help you match it. They recognized two main nutrients, the flesh producing and the warmth giving, but you had to navigate an elaborate ratio system (each food has its own ratio of nutrients) if you wanted to eat in a healthy manner.

Easy as pie, 1852 edition

--MARROW PUDDING.

Take half a pound of beef-marrow finely chopped, a few currants washed and picked, some slices of citron and orange peel candied, a little grated nutmeg, a table-spoonful of brandy, and the same of syrup of cloves, and half a pound of Naples biscuits; strain to this a quart of new milk boiled with cinnamon and lemon peel; allow the mixture to cool, and then add the yolks of eight eggs, and the whites of five. Bake it in a dish with a puff-paste round it.

--From The Illustrated London Cookery Book--

Most pies were meat based and recipes for sweet pies were mixed in with recipes for savory ones. They would even make free-standing pies, which almost sounds like an alien idea to me:

Desperate Housewives, 1852 edition

Her first and imperative duty is to make herself acquainted with the extent of her husband's income, its resources and its limits, and to resolve with firmness to regulate her household with such prudent and proper economy as not to exceed it.

From this resolution, as she hopes for the maintenance and continuance of a happy home, unshaken by creditors, unthreatened by poverty, let no consideration, no ridiculous pride, no assumption of a position beyond her means, suffer her to depart; her future welfare, and that of her husband and children, depend in a great measure upon her perseverance in this determination.

--From The Illustrated London Cookery Book--

Reading this book and seeing what kind of ideas would be going through a traditional housewife's mind, I'm wondering if the housewife-dissing feminists were really feminists at all. From the perspective of 1852, they kind of sound like stuck-up rich people.

By the way, the stove pictured was an economy model and took a pound of coal an hour to keep going. It could cook for a dozen people, and was considered portable.

Spam, 1852 edition

--VENISON POTTED.

Put the venison into a pan, and pour red wine over it, and cover it with a pound of butter, put a paste over the pan, set it in the oven to bake. When done take the meat out of the gravy, beat it well with the butter that has risen to the top, add more if necessary, season with pepper, salt, and mace pounded, put into pots, set them in the oven for a few minutes, take them out; when cold cover with clarified butter.

--From The Illustrated London Cookery Book--

To preserve meat, you'd cook it, mash it up with fat and spices, and then cover it with clarified butter. There were many recipes for 'potted meats' as they were called and even suggestions on how to deal with meat that didn't smell good any more. Potted meat is still made today.