I love road trips. They enable spontaneity and flexibility, and are a wonderful opportunity to explore lots of fascinating places that are off the beaten path. Last week my husband and I got home from a 3,500 mile road trip that went from home to Kansas City to Chicago to the Indiana Dunes National Park to the Cuyahoga Valley National Park to central Pennsylvania to Delaware to Ocean City, New Jersey, and then back home. Our son and two grandsons joined us for part of the trip. It was the stuff that memories are made of.

After I got home, I flipped through my hundred-year-old issues of Ladies Home Journal trying to come up an idea for this post, and was floored when I saw an article about how to eat when taking a “long cross-country motor trip.” My first thought was, “Wow, I had no clue that cars were dependable enough, and roads good enough, in 1926 for people to take long road trips.”

Many of the magazine’s readers were actually probably “arm-chair tourists” who enjoyed thinking about making a cross-country trip, but never would actually do it. Today, we dream of going on a safari in Africa and love to read stories about people who actually take a safari; back then people dreamed of making cross-country motor trips.

According to the old Ladies Home Journal magazine:

Hasty Meals for Hungary Motorists

Three adequate, well-balanced meals daily are essential to the complete enjoyment of long, cross-country motor trips. Yet a great many motorists struggle along on a wretched diet of cheese, crackers, pickles, fruit and candy, rather than attempt to wrestle with the coffeepot and frying pan. While camp and wayside cookery is necessarily limited to dishes that are simple and easy to prepare, by a little effort and forethought substantial daily menus are not difficult to manage.

Supplies, including fresh meat, eggs, vegetables and milk may generally be purchased as needed along the way; so it is unnecessary, except when touring through unsettled districts to stock up heavily with these commodities. However, it is always advisable to anticipate your needs and purchase accordingly, and to start out with the “grub box” well filled with such necessary staples as coffee, sugar, powdered and evaporated milk, salt, pepper, bread, butter, jam, onions, potatoes and bacon, always sliced. And I always tuck in a small bottle each of chili and curry powder to give a pleasing variety to the humble meat stew, baked beans and such.

And while paper napkins do not actually come under the heading of necessities, if you will add a generous bundle to your outfit you will never once begrudge the tiny space they take. They are invaluable for wiping out soiled dishes and greasy pots and pans, to say nothing of rending first aid to sticky fingers.

Your cooking outfit need not be elaborate or expensive. I know three seasoned motorists who have twice crossed the continent, and toured far into Canada and Mexico, with no other cooking equipment than a battered old frying pan, coffeepot, saucepan and a folding camp grid stove!

Ladies Home Journal (July, 1926)

Some things haven’t changed across the years. Just like a hundred years ago, on my recent road trip, we snacked in the car on cheese, crackers, apples and other fruit, and candy. That’s four of the five foods (the fifth item was pickles) mentioned in the old article as being a “wretched diet” for travelers. (Kids really like candy!)

The article emphasized the important role that potatoes could play when preparing meals on  a cross-country motor trip:

To boil potatoes in their jackets seems to the most convenient as well as the favorite camp method of cooking this useful vegetable. Save all left-over potatoes. They are easy to carry in the grub box and will furnish you the nucleus of many a hasty meal. They are delicious fried, creamed, hashed browned, in a salad, or in corned beef hash.

Ladies Home Journal (July, 1926)

Hmm . . . I can’t imagine saving cold cooked potatoes in a grub box which I assume wasn’t a cooler that kept food cold, but apparently it was considered safe back then.

The old article included several recipes. Here are two of them:

Fresh parsley is almost a staple at my house. I generally have a bundle of parsley in a supermarket plastic produce bag in my refrigerator. For the first few days it looks great, and then it gradually begins to wilt, and looks sadder and sadder. Often, when making a dish that calls for parsley, I select the best stems of parsley, and then eventually end up discarding much of the bunch. So, I was pleased to discover a tip for keeping parsley fresh in a hundred-year-old magazine.

The century-old tip calls for washing the parsley in cold water, then letting it stand in the water for an hour or so if it is slightly wilted. The water is then shaken off, and the parsley is stored in a glass jar with a lid in the icebox (or, in today’s terminology, the refrigerator).

I was curious how modern experts recommend storing parsley, so did an online search. Some of methods are similar to the hundred-year-old recommendation, but not exactly the same.  For example, Martha Stewart recommends three different ways to store parsley:

1.  Wash and dry the parsley, then put an inch or so of water in a glass jar. Place the parsley stems in the water (like a flower bouquet). The parsley in the jar can be covered loosely with a plastic bag. Store in refrigerator and change the water every few days.
2. Wrap washed parsley in damp paper towels and put into a resealable plastic bag or other container. Store in refrigerator.
3. Chop parsley and freeze in ice cube trays. The parsley in the trays should be covered with olive oil or water before freezing.

A 1926 advertisement for Morton’s Salt described how iodized salt helped ensure the mental and physical health of children. The information in the advertisement was based on discoveries made a few years earlier. Iodine deficiency is a leading cause of preventable developmental and intellectual disabilities, as well as a cause of goiters, which is an enlargement of the thyroid gland.

In the early 20th century, a Swiss doctor discovered that a very small amount of iodine could prevent goiters. It was also found that salt was an effective way to distribute iodine. Salt does not spoil,  and iodine in salt remains relatively stable when stored or heated. Since very little iodine needs to be added to the salt, it was a cost effective way to prevent disabilities and goiters caused by lack of iodine. Switzerland was the first country to put iodine in salt.

Soon, there was interest in adding iodine to salt in the U.S. In 1924, the Morton Salt Company began offering an iodized salt.