12 Historical Foods That Used To Be A Sign Of Wealth

Food has long been an indicator of wealth or poverty, but many dishes that once signaled a person was very wealthy are now seen as cheap and available for everyone. Given how food production techniques and import processes have changed over the centuries, this actually makes sense. Way back when, before you could waltz into a supermarket and wander aisle upon aisle of abundant food from across the globe, you were at the mercy of time and distance. If you didn't have the time to make something, if it was the wrong time of the year for certain fruits, or if an ingredient had to be brought in from very far away, you weren't going to have that food unless you were very, very rich.

But once colonization and industrialization (and in at least one case, a change in social structure) made it easier for people to obtain ingredients or make those foods, something happened: More people started making them. More people could get the ingredients, prices dropped due to better availability, and new production processes made the foods so easy to cook that time and distance were no longer barriers. Appliances became cheaper, new food-processing factories opened, and improved transportation and preservation technology (TV dinners, anyone?) made it easier to bring far-away foods home, thus increasing supply and removing the cachet that hinted at money. With that in mind, let's take a look at 12 historical foods, spices, and meal types that used to be a sign of wealth.

Something that separated food for the wealthy from food for the masses was effort. If it took a lot of effort to make an ingredient, cook the food, or even acquire the food, that food was going to cost a lot. Aspic is one of these foods. While basic aspics were often used by everyone to preserve food — boiling animal parts like pig's knuckles produced a jelly that preserved the scraps of meat — the fancier creations were only possible in households where someone had enough time or household staff to focus on the intense cooking and elaborate presentation. Yes, even those basic aspics took time to boil and gel. But the effort needed to properly create a fancier version signaled that you had money. 

When Knox powdered gelatin and boxed Jell-O were invented in the late 1800s, making jellied food became much easier. Marketed to busy housewives as a time-saver, Jell-O quickly grew in popularity. Early on, Jello-O salads were still associated with wealth and status. Knox and Jell-O had test kitchens, and the cooks there came up with a lot of strange combinations presented as foods that women should aim to replicate. When the Great Depression and World War II required people to cut back on food spending, Jell-O was marketed as the perfect budget food. One classic dish even used ginger ale to add snap, sparkle, and pop to Jell-O salads. Aspics effectively became disconnected from one's position in society.

If you were rich, you had options, and you wanted those options as much as possible. Why restrict yourself to, say, one specific meat for your main meal when you had the money to provide several meats? Something that a lot of meals for the wealthy had in common was the sheer amount of food available. Sometimes the food was fancy and rare, but the choices you had could also be very plain. What counted was that you had a lot of choices and never wanted for variety. For example, in Tudor England, having literally 20 varieties of meat dishes at dinner was considered a given; having any less would have been an insult.

Even non-royals closer to home had similar meals. In 1700s America, a wealthy family might have a two-course meal with at least five dishes in each course. Kitchens weren't run by one or two people but by several, and if you couldn't finish all the food, that was no problem. Luckily, those cooks were very good at saving leftovers. The amazing spreads of all these different foods continued to be the norm for meals in the late 1800s and early 1900s in the U.S. Over the next century, however, events like the Great Depression and World War II, plus a growing focus in the latter 20th century on not wasting food, made these excessive meals much less common. 

Macaroni and cheese likely descends from two dishes. One is a Swiss recipe from the 1400s in which cheese, cream, and butter are stuffed into pasta. The other is an Italian dish of pasta, tomato sauce, and Parmesan cheese that nobles ate at least as far back as the 1500s. Macaroni wasn't cheap, even in Italy; the flour used to make it had to be imported from specific regions, which meant you made the noodles only if you had money.

When Thomas Jefferson had his slave and cook, James Hemmings, learn how to make macaroni and cheese in France in the 1700s, even Jefferson had to search for the ingredients when he returned home. Companies in the U.S. that made macaroni were few and far between, contributing to the high cost of the pasta.

Cheese was also expensive then because it wasn't made on a wide scale. Batches could easily fail. It wasn't until the mid-1800s that a U.S.-based cheese factory opened, making cheese easier to obtain. But people who weren't rich considered the dish too expensive to make, even into the early 20th century. However, in 1911, two Swiss cheesemakers found a way to process cheese so that it wouldn't spoil. And in 1937, James L. Kraft discovered that he could dehydrate processed cheese into powder. He packaged this cheese powder with dried macaroni, priced it cheaply, marketed it very well, and soon, the once extravagant macaroni and cheese became a quick, cheap meal.

White bread and white sugar are now seen as less nutritious than their brown counterparts. But these "white" forms were once considered better than the "brown" forms. White bread grew in popularity thanks to food-safety movements that wanted to promote "pure" foods in the late 1800s. It used to be considered harder to tamper with and contaminate; the consistent light color of white bread was thought to be better at showing if anything had been added to the bread. It was also easier to chew and tasted better, but if you were poor, you were likely stuck eating brown bread because the lack of refining meant it was cheaper. Eventually, white bread became more widely available due to this demand, which meant everyone could have it. 

White sugar has actually been produced for a long time, and it used to be treated as a spice. Doctors started using sugar as a carrier and preservative for medicine hundreds of years ago, eventually switching to selling just the sugary component as candy. But it was still considered a rare thing and not something you'd eat every day, and the cost reflected that. However, in the 1700s, increased production in colonies made white sugar easier to import, and when Germany started growing sugar beets in the 1800s, sugar became widely available. As with white bread, white sugar was preferred due to its supposed association with better hygiene. 

If you were in Europe and spiking your food with imported spices during the Middle Ages or earlier, you were likely very rich. It used to be incredibly difficult to get spices like cinnamon from the East, for example, as they had to be located, negotiated over, bought, and then transported over thousands of miles. If you had gone through the trouble of getting spices that weren't produced locally, you were darn well going to use them, too; food was heavily spiced as a way to show off. If you were poor, you were more likely using garlic and other herbs that you could grow at home.

But once European countries started colonizing other continents, the amount of spices available to those back in Europe suddenly grew. The abundance of spices meant prices fell. People outside royalty and the upper classes could now afford these spices, so those heavily spiced "rich" foods were no longer such a big deal. In an interview with NPR, Krishnendu Ray, an associate professor of food studies from New York University, noted that the upper classes changed the game in the 1600s. "So the elite recoiled from the increasing popularity of spices," he said. The wealthy were soon minimally seasoning their food in an effort to let dishes taste more natural. In other words, when their special foods were no longer so special, they created another way of using spices to make their food seem special again.

Breakfast in bed is a bit of a luxury nowadays but one that anyone can have; your social and marital statuses don't determine whether you're allowed to eat in your bedroom. But if you were a wealthy, married woman in England in the 1800s and early 1900s, it was very common for you to have breakfast in your room brought up on a tray by a servant. Other members of the household, especially the single ones, would gather in another room for their breakfast. This division by marital status and gender received fresh attention several years ago when the TV show "Downton Abbey" became popular.

The reason for this may have had to do with where everyone fit on the household hierarchy. Wealthy, married women were seen as very busy, managing household and social affairs, and breakfast in bed may have been a way for them to have a less demanding start to the day. Having a servant bring you breakfast was also seen as using household resources, something that married women were allowed to do but that single women were not supposed to do. 

The ease with which you can get out-of-season and imported foods now is not what most of humanity experienced until the 20th century. If a food wasn't locally produced (or produced within a reasonable transport distance), you weren't going to have it, and if it was out of season, you'd have to wait for it to be in season — or you'd have to be very wealthy and pay a lot of money to import the food. Depending on where you lived and when, only royals may have been able to access these foods. Even into the 20th century, foods like pineapple, coconut, and citrus weren't available all the time in all parts of the U.S. For example, the dessert known as ambrosia was once considered a luxury in the 1800s and early 1900s because of how rare the ingredients were. It is now considered a vintage picnic food that anyone can whip up.

Fresh pineapple was also once the territory of the wealthy. While it might have been common where it was grown, for Europeans, it was a delicacy. Eventually, people would try to cultivate pineapples in Britain, but the effort it took to grew them meant they were still a food that only the rich could afford. By the mid-1800s, however, increased imports turned pineapple into a common, easily available food. 

Honey's role in human society is old and extensive. It's been a nutritious food, a pure energy source, a component of alcoholic drinks, a primary sweetener before molasses or granulated sugar, a medicine, and even an item in religious rituals. It was so important to so many cultures that it was once used like money in trading. But more importantly, it wasn't that easy to get because retrieving honey from a hive meant destroying the hive and the bees, and given how many bees it takes to produce a jar of honey, that made honey a hot commodity.

Modern beekeepers use processes developed in the 1770s and 1850s to preserve the hive and the bees while allowing humans to grab the honey. But previous to this, humans had to kill off the bees and obliterate the hive to ensure that retrieving the honey would be safe. That meant that beekeepers and honey producers would routinely lose their hives and bees and have to keep acquiring more bees, and then they'd have to wait for those bees to build a new hive. As a result, honey actually wasn't that readily available until around the late 1700s to mid 1850s. It commanded high prices, and the people most able to pay those prices were the wealthy.

Go to any supermarket now, count the varieties of salt available, and thank your lucky stars you live in this time in history. Salt used to be so valuable that it was treated as money in more than one culture and even traded for gold in some regions during the 6th century. Roman soldiers received salt as pay, merchants who traveled the ancient trade routes known as the Silk Road described Chinese coins made of salt, and countless civilizations have used salt to preserve food and even dead bodies.

Most salt is cheap nowadays because there are so many ways to get it. From evaporating sea water in surface pools to mining rock salt out of mountains, plain salt is pretty abundant. But before modern mining techniques and technology for industrial salt production were developed in the 1830s, it wasn't easy to get salt. There just wasn't that much on the surface, and civilizations didn't have the processes necessary for massive salt production. While salt was used in cooking, you wouldn't have been able to buy a lot of it unless you were rich.

Celery is so common now that it's hard to believe that it was once something that rich people used as a way to show off. For shoppers nowadays, celery is just a crunchy base for dips and peanut butter or a food eaten to try to reduce calorie intake. But it wasn't that long ago that wealthy people adorned their dinner tables with ornate glass vases filled with celery stalks.

The problem with celery was that it originally wasn't that easy to grow, especially in more northern areas like England. Add to that the fact that people in England prized paler, whiter stalks, and that meant devoting even more labor to caring for the growing vegetable. As a result, celery was to English people in the 1800s what a rare variety of fancy imported fruit that's in season for a week might be to your average American today. It was something to be displayed and display they did; people with money would buy celery vases specifically to show off the stalks they'd managed to acquire. Industrial farming and improvements in growing techniques in the 1880s led to the decline of the celery vase. The fibrous green vegetable soon became a food rather than a decoration, and starting in the early 20th century, more people outside the upper classes could easily buy it.

Chicken is cheap. At least, it is now. If you're on a tight budget, you usually can find a pack of chicken thighs for a relatively low price (forgetting about current inflation for the moment). Or a quick trip to the store will net you a whole rotisserie chicken for not that much more money. But like every other food on this list, that cheap chicken used to be reserved only for special occasions.

An increase in the industrialization of chicken farms in the mid 20th century made chicken much easier to get and thus cheaper to buy. Previous to that, raising chickens for meat was expensive because the feed had to be of good quality, and the chickens themselves needed a longer time to grow. Hens were seen as better for laying eggs, which were more versatile and could be used as a source of protein on their own. If you had a whole roast chicken on the table, that meant something special was happening. Chicken was more of a holiday or Sunday-supper type of food and not the affordable meal that it is now.

Butcher shops and supermarket meat departments overflowing with trays of steaks, roasts, and ground beef have made meat more accessible than ever before. While meat can still be relatively expensive for someone on a tight budget, there are no restrictions on who can buy what type of meat. It wasn't always this way. Meat, especially fresh meat, was traditionally an expensive product reserved for the rich and royal in many cultures. In Europe in the Middle Ages, for example, the rich got the best fresh meat, while those in lower socioeconomic groups were more likely to eat preserved meats like bacon. Hunting for wild game was a pastime for noble families only.

In the late 15th century and 16th century, in Tudor England, your average family would have been able to get fresh meat more often than back in the Middle Ages. But even then, it still wasn't a common addition to their diets; fresh meat was something you'd usually find in royal courts, often in multi-course meals that offered several different types of meat. It wasn't until the Victorian era in the 1800s that fresh meat became widely available to people across the socioeconomic spectrum in Europe. In Asia, too, meat was long considered as just a small component of meals, mainly for flavor. Even if no religious rules forbid consuming meat, it was simply too expensive for most people to make meat a main portion of a meal until the 20th century.