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An Historical Treatment of Leftovers

Favorite Recipes from Country Kitchens :... (by Stefano Zappettini)
Two Hundred Recipes for Cooking in Casse... (by Hulse, Olive M)
The Family Save-All. : Supplying Excelle... (by Bouvier, Hannah Mary)
Elementary manual of practice : Civil Wa...
How to Cook in Casserole Dishes (by Neil, Marion Harris)
Left-Over Foods and How to Use Them, Wit... (by Hiller, Elizabeth O.)

Pease porridge hot,
Pease porridge cold,
Pease porridge in the pot,
Nine days old.

This nursery rhyme alludes to the fate of food when a meal’s abundance exceeded the capacity of the people it fed. The ubiquitous use of leftover food in everyday cooking and eating didn’t merit a special term. Fragments or remains of the previous night’s supper found their way into the next morning’s breakfast and/or lunch and into soups and stews.

Without the benefit of refrigerators, freezers, and microwave ovens, people--especially those for whom food was often scarce--worried about food spoilage. Food was expensive. Middle class families spent around 40 percent of their incomes on food purchases. Better nutrition directly related to higher incomes resulted in healthier, taller, and stronger bodies.

Part economy, part pragmatism, housewives and cooks adhered to the biblical caution of “waste not, want not.” According to The Atlantic, Irma Rombauer, the author of the iconic cookbook The Joy of Cooking, first published in 1931, “inventoried all the recipes in the book that could serve as vessels for leftovers.” In fact, the common practice of using leftover foods did not merit special attention until the 20th century and the common use of refrigeration.

As stated in The Atlantic, “It was no accident that the term “left-overs” was coined in this era, or that one of the first cookbooks devoted to them, the 1910 Left-Over Foods and How to Use Them, was commissioned by a refrigerator company.

During World War I, patriotism conferred morality upon housewives who did not waste food. Efficient and practical use of leftovers took on the same moral prestige that “green” and “sustainability” do today. Reliance on leftovers declined amid the prosperity of the Roaring Twenties, but saw another resurgence in the Great Depression of the 1930s as wives developed creative ways to preserve and transform leftovers into new delicious meals.

The 1940s brought yet another wave of food preservation, particularly useful in an era of rationing during World War II. Earl S. Tupper debuted his famous plastic containers: Tupperware. A less expensive option for storing leftover food came on the market with Dow Chemical Company’s launch of Saran Wrap in 1953 and Ziploc storage bags in 1968.

The patriotic and moral perception of leftovers faded during the 1950s with parodies that showed husbands facing mysterious casseroles made from an unappetizing conglomeration of ingredients assembled by a penny-pinching wife. Leftovers fell out of fashion until the 1970s and the innovation of affordable microwave ovens that could reheat leftovers in a fraction of the time of previous cooking methods.

Many popular dishes originated from lowly beginnings as leftovers: casseroles, paella, fried rice, shepherd’s or cottage pie, pizza, and chop suey. The World Public Library contains cookbooks for inventive and tasty treatments of leftover food that are definitely worth investigating when you’re wondering what to do with all the food remaining from holiday feasting.

How to Cook in Casserole Dishes by Marion Harris Neil
Veribest Pork Recipes Casseroles and Combinations by Michigan State University
Two Hundred Recipes for Cooking in Casseroles by Olive M. Hulse
Favorite Recipes from Country Kitchens by Stefano Zappettini
The Family Save-All by Hannah Mary Bouvier.

By Karen M. Smith