BECOMING SHOPPERS: NC Food Consumption and Production

Jell-O was all the rage in the late 1920s. This new treat was an instant form of gelatin, which had been around for much longer. Gelatin is an organic material that comes from the skin, bones, and gristle of animals, and had been traditionally difficult to prepare in the kitchen. Jell-O, an easy-to-use powdered version of gelatin, was a big improvement. Women used it to make desserts, salads, and main dishes. Although most recipes were for sweet foods, many were for savory concoctions.

Foods made with Jell-O or gelatin often required the use of a high-tech device found only in the kitchens of the wealthiest North Carolina homes: an electric refrigerator. Refrigerators had been common in middle-class homes since the 1870s, but these early refrigerators were powered by electricity. In fact, they were powered by nothing. Instead, these refrigerators—or "ice boxes"—were usually simple wooden boxes (lined with zinc or tin and sometimes insulated with sawdust) kept cool by large chunks of ice, delivered regularly by ice wagons. The first electric refrigerators introduced to the home market required a large motor be placed in the basement and wired up to the refrigerator, for which toxic and flammable chemicals were often used as coolants. After many incidents of poisoning and fires, Freon gas was introduced to refrigerator models in the 1920s, allowing for much safer and more economical refrigerators with motors placed conveniently on top of the unit itself.

The introduction of these electric refrigerators, in combination with the newly available gas and electric ovens, revolutionized middle-class kitchens of the 1920s. Also popularized during the 1910s and 1920s were the toaster, coffee percolator, waffle iron, and electric mixer (blender). Such new inventions were celebrated for liberating the housewife (or, in come cases, the maids and cooks) from the hours of heavy labor that daily food preparation had previously required. More wives could spend more of their time out of the kitchen, actually joining their families for meals instead of remaining in the kitchen to watch the food as other family members ate.

Bachelors, too, seemed liberated by these new appliances. "In the up-to-date cozy apartments of the bachelor of today you will find that electricity to a large extent takes the place of servants," observed one writer as early as 1907, and appliances do the work that in a married man's house "is daily accomplished by the touch of dainty feminine hands."

For rural and working-class families, though, such home appliances were usually too expensive. Most North Carolina homes of the time had no electricity, and, even if they had, families rarely had the funds for such large investments. Instead, the majority of North Carolina families continued to rely on the old fuel-burning stoves and wooden ice boxes they had long used.