Railroad Pie

In the mid-19th century, most trains would stop for 20-30 minutes at mealtimes in whatever city or town they happened to be passing through. In the cities, competition between multiple eating establishments seems to have raised the quality of the food. However, the majority of these meal stops were made in places where hungry passengers had few options to choose from and a short time to do it. With no competition, one can only imagine the poor quality of food offered to captive passengers. Food historian James D. Porterfield describes the offered repasts:

James D. Porterfield, Dining by Rail:
The History and Recipes of America's
Golden Age of Railroad Cuisine

"These early eating stops were nearly always described as terrible. The bitter black coffee may have been brewed only once a week. The ham could be dry, salty, and tough. Hard-cooked eggs were stored for an indeterminate period of time in limed water to keep them from discoloring. Fried eggs may have been cooked in rancid grease and certainly were served on stale bread. Here also one found leaden biscuits--their nickname, 'sinkers', giving a clue as to their quality--and something which earned the euphemism 'railroad pie'. The recipe was thought to be to take two crusts of cardboard and fill them with thickened glue." (58) --John P. Hankey, "Riding on the Rail,"  Rails Across America: A History of Railroads in North America, quoting James D. Porterfield's Dining by Rail: The History and the Recipes of America's Golden Age of Railroad Cuisine

Pass Some of that Spicy Sauce, Please!

A spice market in Istanbul. (From: Wikipedia)

"The twentieth-century American, taking for granted refrigeration, ease and rapidity of transport, and the resulting extraordinary variety of diet, may find perplexing his ancestors' lust for spices. We must remember some of the foods Europeans lacked. They had no rice, no corn, no potatoes; little cheese or butter; fresh fruits and green vegetables only in season, and few of these in the larger cities; almost no sugar. Fresh meat was relatively plentiful at the moment of massive slaughter in the autumn. At other times of year meat was salted and more than a little high; and since its source was excess work animals, it was hardly of prime quality. The ordinary diet was based on bread and gruel, enlivened by pickled cabbage, turnips, peas, lentils, and onions. The entire art of cookery lay in the sauce, and the piquancy of the sauce lay in its spices. Men wanted spices because they teased the palate, disguised the disagreeable or dull, gave variety to the menu. They wanted them for medicines and drugs, for perfumes and for use in religious ceremonies. The result was a most powerful demand for camphor, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, mace, cardamom, and, above all, for pepper and cloves--all products of Asia and excessively rare in Europe." (36) --Eugene F. Rice, Jr. and Anthony Grafton, The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460-1559 2nd edition

I might also add that medieval Europeans had no tomatoes. Tomatoes are native only to South America. So, for hundreds and hundreds of years before the 16th century, Italian cooks had no tomatoes!

Gutter Rabbits & Other Parisian Delicacies

"By October [1870, during the Siege of Paris] whatever social stigmas previously inhibited the well-to-do from buying horsemeat were abandoned amid its packaging in the accouterments of haute cuisine. At the commencement of the siege, there were 100,000 horses at Paris; at the end only one-third of that number remained. Towards mid-November, signs began to appear advertising dog and cat butchers, with cats being advertised as 'gutter rabbits.' It has been estimated that over 25,000 cats were eaten during the siege, often boiled and seasoned with pistachios, olives, pimentos, and cornichons. During the second to last week of November, a rat market opened up at the Place de l'Hotel de Ville, with rats selling for 10-15 sous, or one-third to one-half of a National Guardsman's daily salary. The rats were almost assuredly destined for the infamous salami de rat." (49) --David A. Shafer, The Paris Commune

"Cantine municipale pendant le siege de Paris"
by Henri Pille

The Siege of Paris occurred during the Franco-Prussian War that began in 1870. As the Prussian army closed in on and surrounded Paris in September 1870, they cut off all supply lines to the city. Parisians were forced to survive on their existing food and other supplies until the end of January 1871. As you can see, the food situation became very difficult. Their situation became even more pathetic when the extremely cold winter of 1870-1871 began. It was one of the coldest winters of the 19th century in Europe, being more than 2 degrees Celsius colder than average. (Shafer, 50) This meant that fuel for fire to keep warm and cook food was scarce. Lower class Parisians were likely eating either raw or undercooked cats and rats part of the time. Shafer also describes how all the animals in the city zoo were slaughtered in late December because zookeepers could no longer sustain them. The meat was sold to wealthy Parisians.

Peasants and Potatoes

"More efficient methods of land use [in 19th century Europe] were accompanied by the rapid development of improved strains of wheat and other traditional crops... Far and away the most important of the new crops, however, was the potato (also originally imported from America), which could be grown on poor soil, was comparatively insensitive to the vicissitudes of weather, and yielded from two to four times as much food as grain crops. Although cultivated throughout Europe, the potato became the staple diet of poorer peasants in the northern and central regions along a broad front from Ireland to Russia, a dependence which was to prove a disaster when the potato crop failed." (2)  --Norman Rich, The Age of Nationalism and Reform, 1850-1890

Potatoes originally came from South America. They were
brought by Spanish explorers to Spain in the mid-16th
century. From there, the crop gradually spread throughout
Europe. 

Having had plenty of exposure to Polish cuisine and its heavy reliance on potatoes, I am curious to discover what Polish and other peasants of northern Europe ate before the arrival of the potato around 1600!