… the food choices of different people at different times and places. After all, I’ve eaten roasted grasshoppers (chapulines) in Oaxaca, smoked eel (rauchen aal) and blood sausage (blutwurst) in Germany, along with haggis in Scotland.

But I hadn’t appreciated how much our commonplace and customary dishes have changed over the past 60 years. Haven’t we always been a land of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? I recognize that it’s very common to eat boiled soybeans (edamame) these days, and it’s easy to find sushi in your local grocery store. That’s a big shift over the past couple of decades.

So I was surprised when I happened to discover that a few popular dishes from the 1950s were broiled liver pudding and boiled calf’s head with brain sauce, which seem a bit over the top. (Although I do admit that my father enjoyed scrambled eggs and brains, so go figure. I didn’t inherit that dietary preference.)

Fascinating. And this leads to today’s Search Challenge:

1. If you were in New York City in the mid-1950s, how much would you expect to pay for a good meal of broiled liver pudding or boiled calf’s head with brain sauce?

2. (Open ended) WRT the place you live, can you find something that was commonplace to eat in the 1950s or 1960s, that is very rare now? Or vice-versa (something common now that was rare back then)?

In all cases, you have to tell us (A) how you found the prices, and (B) some evidence that a food item was rare (or common) in the time-frames we’re interested in. (For instance, evidence might be an advertisement in a newspaper from 1959 in your locale.)

Search on!