The Scholar’s Lunch in 1893
Woman in the Middle | June 12, 2014I was going through the Jan 3, 1893 edition of my local paper, doing research, when I came across an article about what to serve your child when they come home for lunch on a school day. I think it is fun to see these little windows into the “good old days.”
The first dish the author suggested was boiled rice with beef consomme. This didn’t seem like a very hearty lunch to me. They were just having the reader make a teacup full of rice and saving the leftovers for the next day. Hum, I may be hitting on the key as to why people were thinner back then….
The next lunch suggestion was to serve the left over rice in little mounds on a plate and pour stewed prunes around it or put a spoonful of jam on each little pile of rice, with milk to drink on the side. Again, is this really enough for lunch?
The third lunch suggestion was to cook spaghetti or macaroni and serve it with gravy, leftover clear soup, or the beef consomme. I was surprised to see that spaghetti noodles were common enough back then to be mentioned, but otherwise was not really impressed with this lunch suggestion either.
The most appealing thing they suggested for a school child’s lunch was tomato toast. That was stewed tomatoes poured over small squares of toast. When I was a kid I loved anything with tomatoes and my mother would buy cans of stewed tomatoes for me to eat when I was home in the summer and getting my own lunch.
Of course, especially back then, just because it was in the newspaper doesn’t mean it reflected what the regular folks were eating. It was certainly an article intended for city folks, as children who lived in the country wouldn’t be coming home for lunch. I think I will just have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Maybe they didn’t have that much food to serve the children, and they had to economize. BTW: What is beef consomme?
It is beef broth.
Yuk! PB&J is better!
I don’t think I have ever come across anything like these samples of recommended lunches in the 1800′s! I wish I could ask if the kids came home starved. Peanut butter and jelly does sound scrumptious by comparison. Fascinating post!
I think sometimes what was int he newspaper did not reflect what people actually ate. But I thought it was interesting, too!
I read somewhere about a child taking a leftover sweet potato and some bread to school in a pail. I’m sure they ate a lot of left overs back then. Leftovers are what I usually have for lunch.