Specialty Foods Once Common in America

Today, America is known as the country of note when it comes to consumer choice. Americans have an absolutely incredible amount of products available at their fingertips every moment and infrastructure in place to quickly get a lot of things they cannot find locally. However, there are some drawbacks to this convenience as well. To begin with, Americans also have mostly processed foods available to eat, and due to the country’s assembly line infrastructure, many ingredients once popular have now almost completely fallen off the map.Whether due to rarity, legislation, overfarming, overfishing, or preference, here are 10 specialty foods that were once more common—and less expensive—in America.

Black Currants

When people from the United Kingdom come to visit the United States for any length of time, one of the things they miss from home is their black currant jam. In the UK, black currants are extremely popular—especially in the aforementioned jam for use on scones. However, in the United States, you simply will not find this jam in a grocery store, nor will you find black currants in general without going to a lot of effort. Many from the United Kingdom wonder why Americans don’t have this delicious fruit, and the truth is America once did.By 1629, it was already popular in Europe and was brought to the New World, where it quickly became popular as well. This love of black currants actually continued in America for hundreds of years and was a common ingredient in colonial recipes.Unfortunately, in the 20th century, the United States federal government became worried about a fungal disease called white pine blister rust that the black currant plants produced as part of its life cycle. So they banned the fruit from production in 1911 out of concern for the pine trees it might infect. The ban was recently lifted, but several states still have it banned, and true commercial production has not ramped up yet on any kind of scale.

Hazelnuts

Americans already know what hazelnuts taste like. They eat a lot of Nutella and also enjoy plenty of Ferrero Rocher candies, all of which are coincidentally sold by the same company. Americans will also put hazelnut flavoring in their coffee and occasionally use it in a delicious dessert. However, if things had gone a bit differently in America’s past, hazelnuts might have been way more common, cheap, and easy to get your hands on. So, where are all the hazelnuts, and why don’t we have cheap handfuls we are munching on right now?

Well, it turns out that Oregon currently produces 99% of the United States’ hazelnuts, most of which are used for the candy products mentioned above and sold on a commercial basis. And yes, Nutella is candy.

At first, you might think that Oregon is somehow special for growing this item. But the truth is that many states are good for producing hazelnuts. In fact, there were once several states that had a significant population of the trees. Unfortunately, in the 1960s, a disease known as Eastern Filbert Blight ripped through most of the country’s hazelnut trees, including some of the ones in Oregon, nearly wiping out the entire lot

Suet

If you are are American, you likely either haven’t heard of this ingredient, or you have, but not in conjunction with any kind of edible human cuisine. Namely, most of the time in America, if you actually see suet for sale, it is the backbone of a suet cake used as bird food. If you want to buy suet in the United States today, you will have to find it online and pay a premium, and you may not even be getting 100% of the genuine article. This is because apart from people trying to reenact historical recipes, there is no demand for it in the country anymore.

For those of you who are not familiar with it already, suet is a hard fat taken from the kidney and loins of a cow. It is used in baked goods, especially to help give them a light and spongy texture. In the United Kingdom, it is still used fairly often and is easy enough to find for many recipes that it is traditionally used in. For Americans who wish to imitate period recipes or recipes from the UK that still use suet and cannot find it, lard is about the closest thing easily on hand. However, this will never give you the exact same results as using real suet.

Salmon

Salmon were once abundant all over the coastal streams in the United States, and Native Americans could use them as a plentiful food source and as a tool for trade. They were seen leaping upstream when the season was right all over the country. In addition, you could get them easily and smoke a whole bunch to keep for later. Now, while there are plenty of salmon worldwide, and lots in Alaska if you are counting parts outside the contiguous United States, they are all but gone from the mainland of the country.

So, where did all the salmon go, and why aren’t Americans able to buy salmon as cheap as chicken? Well, the problem is that in its haste to expand and become gigantic, America did some damage to certain parts of the ecosystem. While overfishing and pollution did hurt them some as well, one of the biggest factors was all the dams, hydroelectric or otherwise, that were built up around the country. These dams killed some salmon outright and disoriented and shocked others who survived their turbines.

Today, Maine is the only state left in the mainland United States to have wild Atlantic salmon, and they are not being hunted in the hopes their population will bounce back. The populations of West Coast salmon are also endangered and much less abundant than in the past. Most of the salmon produced in the world is farm-raised salmon—about 70%!