This is the fifth post in a series reflecting on the world of 1920s as a background for discussing the early issues of Weird Tales. Imagine that you’re an American in a big city in 1923, and you’re taking a walk to the newsstand to buy the first issue of a new pulp fiction magazine. What sort of things might you see? What do those things suggest about ways people think? What do they say about the stories they tell?

Let’s say you get hungry as you walk along, and think about getting some food later. Maybe you see a restaurant, and a grocery store near it. What kind of food will you be able to buy in the store? And what sort of a restaurant are you looking at? There are a lot of potential answers to that second question, but I want to focus on one admittedly unusual possibility. If you’re in the right city, especially New York or Philadelphia, maybe you have the chance to pop into an automat. And in New York, you might even spot a future Weird Tales writer drinking the hot chocolate.

(Some disclaimers before we go further: I am neither American nor a historian, though I’ve written pop history in the past. These posts are reflections on things I’ve read about the 1920s, and things I’ve come to think about the time; things I find interesting, and things I think underlie the fiction in Weird Tales. If I repeat here things that are common knowledge among Americans, my apologies; I can only say they seemed relevant to me as a foreigner.)

An automat has a dining area, a kitchen area, and between them a wall with glassed-in boxes, each with some foodstuff in it — a sandwich, a piece of pie, specialties like baked beans or Salisbury steak. A customer puts a coin (typically one or more nickels) in a slot, which opens the front window so they can take the food. Through a back window kitchen workers replace the food that’s been taken out, then cook more. If you as a customer deal with any of the staff at the automat, it’ll probably be the cashier who makes change at a booth, and even they don’t talk much.

The very first automat, or automatic restaurant, opened in Germany; dumbwaiters raised food from kitchens up to customers. The first American automat was founded in Philadelphia in 1902 by restauranteurs Joseph Horn and Frank Hardart, and a decade later they opened two more in New York City. Automats spread over the following years across the northern United States; Horn & Hardart remained the best-known automat chain, but there were others.

The mechanised nature of the automat appeals to Americans in the first half of the twentieth century. The coin-operated restaurant feels almost futuristic. Horn & Hardart dining halls are spacious, and the architecture bright and elegant: high ceilings, balconies, white marble floors, brass frames on the windows, dolphin heads on the coffee-machine spouts. It is, as the name implies, automatic; you don’t have to deal with people. Immigrants don’t have to worry about their poor English. Working women, who exist in new numbers at around this time, can go alone or in groups. Unusually, automats cut across social class — you can find beggars and the upper class and artists all at neighbouring tables. At Horn & Hardart in particular the quality’s not just consistent, but good enough people decades later will rave about the taste. Prices are right; a nickel isn’t much, even in the 20s, and it gets you a respectable portion of food. Plus, of course, you don’t have to tip.

If there are other restaurants near the automat, what would you see? Unless you’re in Wichita, Kansas, you won’t see a fast food restaurant — the first White Castle restaurant was founded there in 1921, and that became the first American fast food chain. As White Castle expands through the decade, they’ll pioneer a new approach to hamburgers, and to food preparation across a restaurant chain, emphasising the cleanliness and above all the standardisation of their outlets. The food you get at one White Castle will be the same as you’ll get at any White Castle, and the meat will be cooked on the grill in front of you.

Hot dogs and hamburgers have both become popular in the last twenty years, and it is around this time that people start adding cheese to hamburgers to create the cheeseburger, but the reason for the success of White Castle is the cleanliness. Americans are still shocked by Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle, which graphically depicted horrific unsanitary procedures at meat processing plants. The book led first to public outcry and then to legislation including the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. Although watered down by the influence of the meat-packing industry, these laws did curb some of the worst abuses; food and drink are safer than they’ve ever been, but consumers still want reassurance.

Similarly, in 1908 — only fifteen years before you walk down the street in 1923 — Jersey City became the first American city to begin routine disinfection of community drinking water. Other jurisdictions followed over the next decade, and infectious disease dropped; typhoid fever went from 100 cases per 100,000 people in the United States in 1900 to 33.8 per 100,000 in 1920 (by 2006, there would be 0.1 case per 100,000 Americans). In 1907 Pittsburgh introduced pasteurised milk. Soon after, cows began to be tested for disease.

Automats and the White Castle system of food preparation are two responses to the fear of food-borne illnesses. Chain restaurants, as distinct from fast-food, are another partial answer and exist in several forms. Notably, the Childs’ Restaurant chain, founded in 1889 and at its peak in the 20s, has well-designed dining spaces known for their cleanliness and white-clad waitresses; it established the cafeteria-style tray line format. Howard Johnson’s orange roofs will appear in 1925. The first A&W restaurant will open in 1923, with drive-in service provided by ‘tray boys’ and tray girls,’ and frosty mugs for their root beer kept in a freezer until serving; A&W will develop into a franchise in 1925.

Also popular at this time, for different reasons, are tearooms. Not necessarily primarily focussed on tea, tearooms are typically owned and run by women, and hire women as staff. This makes them friendly spaces for women diners. They also often have homemade goods for sale, and the use of female waitstaff has helped make waitressing acceptable as a profession for women. Again, this is a time when more women are working, meaning there are more women in downtown cores to eat meals during the workday.

To put some numbers to that last point: in the early 1920s more than 20% of the workforce are women. There were 387 employed men per 100 employed women in 1920, and that’ll drop to 354 working men per 100 working women in 1930. The percentage of women participating in the labour force has been slowly but steadily increasing, sometimes in new occupations — not only are waitresses becoming more common, so are women clerical workers. On the other hand, in 1920 only 4% of married white women around the age of 30 worked; 33% of married nonwhite women worked. The ratio of women’s earnings to men’s is only a little more than half.

More numbers: In 1890, the census found 3.3 percent of married women worked for wages; in 1920 there were 9 percent. In 1920 less then 2 million of 8 million wage-earning women were married; in 1930 more than three million of ten million will be. So marriage and work are not always viewed as necessarily incompatible. In 1922 a third of women college graduates expected to become teachers, as opposed to three-quarters a generation previously, and every graduate expected to land a job. And by 1920 more than 12 percent of wage-earning women worked in offices, compared to 2 percent in 1900. The most common jobs for women are as domestic servants (cooks, housekeepers, children’s nurses, and the like), teachers, stenographers, clerks, and farmworkers. More and more women are working; by 1929 more than a quarter of women, and half of all single women, have jobs. One writer has said that in 1920 “the farmer’s daughter is more likely to leave the farm and go to the city than the farmer’s son.” Add this up, along with the general mobility the automobile is bringing, and you have a new audience of women diners at a time when many eateries, notably taverns and hotels, don’t allow unaccompanied women patrons. That began changing before the Great War, and chain restaurants like the automats are more welcoming, but there is a reason tearooms have become a phenomenon in recent years.

Luncheonettes are also exploding in popularity. These are lunch counters opened in drug stores and five-and-dime stores, offering simple food as a way for store owners to gain a new revenue stream. Often they grow out of the longstanding drug store fixture, the soda fountain. Soda fountains serve soft drinks and beverages made from syrups mixed with water and ice; you can ask the server, a ‘soda jerk,’ to add, say, cherry syrup or grenadine to your cola. In 1922 the blender was invented to make milkshakes at soda fountains, though it won’t be developed for home use until the mid-1930s. Bottled soft drinks can also be bought; since 1915 Coca-Cola’s been available in a distinctive contoured bottle, setting it apart from copycats. There’s a range of other soft drinks, though — among them carbonated root beer (as opposed to the original medicinal beverage drunk warm) from 1876, Doctor Pepper (locally available in Texas in 1885, nationally from 1904), ginger ale (from Canada Dry starting in 1904), and Orange Crush (from 1911).

As some things grow, others decline. Oddly, New York traditions in particular are suffering. Between Prohibition and the rise of nightclubs in Harlem, it’s seeing the decline of the lobster palace, richly-appointed restaurants specialising in the eponymous crustaceans. Delmonico’s, a chain of restaurants appealing to the upper classes, will close its four restaurants later in 1923 (in 1926 it’ll reopen under new management with a speakeasy in the lower levels). And the traditional all-male New York beefsteak banquet is, if not fading, at least changing; what had started as a working-class political fundraising event in the mid-19th century, marked by drunkenness, gluttony, and an absence of table manners, has opened its doors to women and, very often, become genteel. “At a contemporary beefsteak it is unusual for a man to do away with more than three pounds of meat and twenty-five glasses of beer,” one chronicler of the meals will mournfully state in 1939, recounting old-time beefsteaks without napkins or utensils or indeed tables or chairs: “They sat on beer crates and ate off the tops of beer barrels. You’d be surprised how much fun that was.”

But while these things are struggling, theme restaurants are thriving, a novelty invented in Paris and brought over to North America in the early 20th century. In 1908 Murray’s opened, a restaurant themed around ancient Rome; 1917 saw the advent of the Pirate’s Den, with three ‘decks’ got up with Jolly Rogers, and cutlasses on the walls, and treasure maps for tablecloths. And also emerging at this time is the diner, small prefabricated restaurants, often repurposed train dining cars. They serve cheap food but are developing or popularising their own distinctive slang: 86, a cup of mud, greasy spoon.

And immigration is slowly introducing eaters to new kinds of food. Italian restaurants are beginning to reach beyond Italian communities, aided by the fact that a number of cities have blue-collar Italian neighbourhoods next to bohemian sectors of town — New York City’s Little Italy right next to Greenwich Village, as an example. 1920s hipsters buy foods at Italian markets and eat at Italian restaurants; spaghetti is a hipster food. It will become more popular later in the decade, when, in Cleveland in 1928, chef Ettore Bioardi will start selling canned tomato sauce under a slight variation of his actual name: Chef Boyardee. The first pizzeria in the United States opened in 1905, but they’re still relatively rare. Some of these restaurants are distinguishing themselves by selling sandwiches on long rolls, called, from the shape of the rolls, ‘submarine sandwiches.’ (This is a good time for sandwich shops generally, as new kinds of sandwiches are developed; by 1926 there’ll be over 5000 sandwich shops in New York, and it is about this time that the delicatessen becomes a major Jewish-American fixture.)

Similarly, although Chinese immigration is severely restricted, certain kinds of businesses can get visas for their employees, and starting in 1915 restaurants became one of those businesses. The number of Chinese restaurants in the United States doubled from 1910 to 1920, and then will double again by 1930, aided by low-priced food and the late hours the restaurants stay open. Conversely, despite a brief craze for sushi in 1905, and records suggesting that by 1910 Japanese restaurants were not uncommon in the United States, increasing restrictions on Japanese immigration caused those restaurants, and the nascent white American taste for Japanese cuisine, to vanish.

Underlying the development of restaurants is a change in diet over the last few decades, particularly in the north and west, which affects what people eat at home as well. In the 1880s, refrigeration improved to the point that rail cars were able to transport fruits and vegetables across significant distances before they rotted. New varieties of vegetables followed; for example, the ‘iceberg’ lettuce (in 1894 or 1903, depending on what source you prefer) designed for frozen transport. The amount of meat eaten by Americans declined, especially pork, traditionally the main meat for many Americans — although beef production increased dramatically in the late nineteenth century, driven by the increased ability to preserve meat in shipping, and this was one of the factors behind the popularity of the hamburger in the opening decades of the twentieth century. Also, in the 1920s:

Americans began to consume fewer starches (like bread and potatoes) and to consume more fruit and sugar. But the most striking development was the shift toward processed foods. Instead of preparing food from scratch at home (plucking chickens, roasting nuts, or grinding coffee beans), an increasing number of Americans purchased foods that were ready-to-cook. Important innovations in food processing occurred during World War I as manufacturers learned how to efficiently produce canned and frozen foods. Processed foods saved homemakers enormous amounts of time in peeling, grinding, and cutting.

Some habits have not yet changed; olive oil hasn’t become a standard part of cooking for most Americans, for example, with lard or butter still stand-bys. Corn starch and corn bread are still unusual for any but the poor. Still, change is coming from a number of different directions. So, for example, science is developing new understanding of nutrition. Scientists had worked out that food contained proteins back in the nineteenth century, but it was only a dozen years ago that they identified the first ‘vitamine’ (the ‘e’ was only dropped three years ago). On July 1, 1923, President Harding will create the Bureau of Home Economics to research “the scientific basis for the mechanics of living.” Its head, Louise Stanley, will be the highest-ranking woman in the federal government, and her bureau the largest employer of women scientists in the country. There is in fact a need for women trained in home-ec, among journalists, food companies, department stores, and the like.

(Worth noting in passing a recent major scientific advance in food production that’ll only play out in later decades. In 1909 Fritz Haber developed a new process to create ammonia from nitrogen in the air; scaled up to industrial use by Carl Bosch the next year, this would eventually become vital in ensuring enough food was produced for a world of billions of people, and incidentally win both men Nobel Prizes. The use of the Haber-Bosch process is in its early days in 1923, and is more notorious for having been useful to the German military in the Great War.)

Electric refrigerators have been invented, though they’re expensive and still taking their modern shape; freon has not yet been developed. Instead many houses have iceboxes, wooden cabinets with zinc or tin shelves that hold a large block of ice in the top of the cabinet. Icemen travel through cities and towns every day selling blocks of ice that by 1923 largely come from artificial ice plants; apartments are still being built with ice doors to facilitate the delivery, while signs put in the window will tell the iceman how many pounds to deliver. Iceboxes only became common in the late 19th century, and in 1914 cities in the North used five times as much ice as they had in 1880 (around two-thirds of a ton per person per year).

Because refrigeration’s so primitive, milkmen provide daily deliveries of milk in glass bottles. Pasteurisation of milk without spoiling the taste was perfected in 1906, but it’ll take until well into the 1930s before pasteurised milk becomes standard even in urban areas. In 1923, apartments might have small doors to allow milk to be delivered inside, while some houses have small milk boxes on the porch or built into the side of the house. Note that the thermos was developed in 1904, and in 1920 the American Thermos Company began selling metal lunchboxes specifically for children.

One gets most food and drink from the store, but there are differences there as well. Butchers, bakers, dry grocers (canned and non-perishable goods), and green grocers (produce) are still frequently separate shops and typically fairly small; the supermarket will not exist until 1930. Usually one goes into these shops, goes to a counter, tells the shopkeeper what one wants, and then the shopkeeper or employee will fill the order out of goods kept behind the counter. A chain named Piggly Wiggly, founded in Memphis in 1916, has created the concept of “self-service shopping,” where the customer selects items at will from prestocked shelves and pays at a cash; other stores are experimenting with the same thing.

The last three decades or so of the nineteenth century had seen a dramatic increase in processed (prepared) foods, as various technologies like canning and mason jars became more common; so several kinds of foods and still-surviving brand names developed. Canned goods are becoming cheaper, though the double-wheeled can-opener won’t be invented for years yet. Cellophane was invented 15 years ago, and DuPont licenses the right to manufacture and sell the stuff in the United States in 1923; but although it’s waterproof, suitable for wrapping candy and perfume and cigarettes, it will not be moisture-proof until 1927, at which point it leads to revolutions in food packaging. Loaves of bread often come wrapped in wax paper, though something like half the bread in the country is homemade; in 1928 presliced bread will be introduced, advertised as “The Greatest Forward Step in the Baking Industry Since Bread Was Wrapped.” The popularity of sliced bread increases along with the popularity of the electric pop-up toaster, patented in 1921 and on sale by 1926.

As for what else is on the shelves, there are some familiar things to be found and some things that haven’t yet been invented. Among the latter: Creamy peanut butter will not exist until 1928, and s’mores will be first written about in 1927. Bubble gum won’t come along until 1928. This year the Pillsbury family will reacquire their milling company, but we’re decades away from them packaging biscuit dough. In 1922 Frank Epperson sold a new confection of sweetened fruit ice on a stick; he’ll get a patent for the “Epsicle” in 1924, and soon renames it the “Popsicle.”

But the first doughnut-making machine was invented in 1920. Jell-O is slowly gaining popularity. The H.J. Heinz Company has advertised 57 varieties for almost three decades. Campbell’s soup is sold with its familiar carnelian-and-white labels. Note that marketing and branding of these companies are as important as they will be a hundred years later, and successful innovations are swiftly copied. Thus the 1920s are seeing a vogue for what has been called “living trademarks” — fictional characters who serve as both spokespeople and images. The first was Aunt Jemima, played by Nancy Green at the 1893 Chicago World’s fair, but 1920 brought, among others, ‘Marie Gifford’ for Armour canned meats, ‘Mary Blake’ speaking for Carnation, and ‘Ann Bradley’ for Spic and Span. In 1921 a flour company introduced ‘Betty Crocker.’

Copycat foods from different companies also exist. One notorious example came from the National Biscuit Company (which in later years would shorten its name to Nabisco), a massive conglomeration of baking companies founded in 1898. Defectors from the company founded the Loose-Wiles Biscuit Company in 1902, later renaming themselves Sunshine. In 1908 they invented a cookie they named for the purity of the hydrogen and oxygen of water: Hydrox, made of two chocolate wafers with a white cream filling. In 1912 Nabisco came out with a knockoff cookie: Oreos.

Breakfast cereals are especially enthusiastic adopters of new advertising strategies. Some, for example, use testimonials to the healthiness of the product; Wheaties will be introduced next year. In 1877 the Quaker Mill company got the first trademark for a breakfast cereal, “a figure of a man in ‘Quaker garb,’” effectively the first cereal mascot; a 1901 merger would create the firm Quaker Oats, who were one of the companies to introduce premiums giveaways redeemable with a proof of purchase — including, in 1902, very small pieces of land. Last year the Kellogg Toasted Corn Flake Company was renamed the Kellogg Company, and next year will be the beneficiary of a report by the United Fruit Company that bananas and corn flakes represent a supremely healthy breakfast for families, thus introducing the idea of bananas on cereal.

A fruit virtually unknown in North America until the 1870s, the banana has already become popular and will gain a kind of theme song later this year with the novelty song “Yes! We Have No Bananas.” There is a dark history behind the fruit, though. Multinational corporations like the United Fruit Company and Standard Fruit Company (later Dole, who has also built up the pineapple industry) developed plantations late in the 19th century, and the vertically-integrated companies now control distribution networks across the Americas. They’re notorious for the exploitation of workers and for untoward political influence across many countries in the Caribbean and in South and Central America, and are (at the very least) frequently associated in the minds of many observers with American military action in these countries. In 1904, following travels in Honduras, well-known writer O. Henry published a collection of linked short stories called Cabbages and Kings which introduced the term ‘banana republic,’ and the phrase has stuck.

In truth, all kinds of sweet foods, natural and prepackaged, are gaining new heights of popularity, helped by the invention of new kinds of candies. The American Licorice Company introduced red licorice in 1920. The Tootsie Roll came out in 1907. Cracker Jack, arguably the first junk food, has been around since 1896. Just last year, in 1922, Haribo introduced the gummi bear to the world. Pez will be introduced in 1927 (though the dispensers won’t come along until the 50s). Above all, this is the golden age of the candy bar. The first Hershey chocolate bar, the first American-made mass-produced milk chocolate bar, was produced in 1900; after soldiers during the Great War got chocolate bars in their rations, they developed a taste for them. Difficulties in preserving chocolate bars for transport means every major regional centre has its own set of producers and brands. One estimate has around 30,000 different kinds of candy bars being produced across the United States, rising to 40,000 by the end of the decade. Bars are named for celebrities; when the makers of the Baby Ruth bar were sued by baseball star Babe Ruth, they claimed it had been named for President Grover Cleveland’s daughter Ruth (who had died at age 12 in 1904) — then when Ruth tried to sell his own authorised bar, sued him for copyright infringement and won.

A number of things underlie this confectionary explosion. Homemade sweets like candied apples are declining as an increasingly urbanised population buys more prepared food. And science is at this time suggesting that sugar is good for you; it is a carbohydrate, which gives you energy. At the start of the Great War, Americans ate more sugar than anyone else in the world, averaging 85 pounds per person per year, compared with 40 pounds for an Englishman. Wartime controls on sugar may have depressed demand as well as briefly restricting production, and certainly prices swung wildly after the war, leading to a ‘sugar bubble’ in 1920 when the government chose not to buy Cuban sugar at the same time as bad weather in other sugar-producing countries led to a shortfall in production. Those shortfalls are still being felt in 1923, but aren’t harming the American candy market.

This kind of geopolitical background to the everyday food of Americans may seem far away from Weird Tales. That’s not necessarily the case. Consider the story “Shades,” by Bryan Irvine, in the magazine’s fifth issue (volume 2 number 1, July-August 1923). The tale’s about a group of Robin-Hoodish thieves striking back against “the real criminals — the big fellows.” And among the “wealthy men in this city who amassed their fortunes through systematic, ‘legalized’ robbery” is “Dixon Denner, the profiteering sugar king, whose indiscriminate and heartless machinations had been felt in every home in America.” Food is a vital part of everyone’s life, and like everything else in the 20s, it’s changing in ways both superficial and profound, both visible and not.

Find all my posts about Weird Tales here!

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Matthew David Surridge is the author of “The Word of Azrael,” from Black Gate 14. You can buy collections of his essays on fantasy novels here and here. His Patreon, hosting a short fiction project based around the lore within a Victorian Book of Days, is here. You can find him on Facebook, or follow his Bluesky account, @bookofdays.