How Tuna Salad Sandwiches Became A Staple For Middle-Class Women In The 19th Century

In addition to some of the best music, life itself, and countless other gifts, foodies also have to thank women for the popularity of the tuna salad sandwich. Zoom back with us to the 1800s: Grocery stores were still only newly cropping up. The first supermarket (Piggly Wiggly) wouldn't open until 1916, and even the word "grocery" itself would change several times by the end of the century.

Before the arrival of easy-access groceries, thrifty, zero-waste American kitchens were centered around using up every scrap of leftover food, which often resulted in far-fetched concoctions like "olive relish" or, more appealingly, fish salads. Cold seafood- and mayonnaise-based salads had been prepared in the U.S. since the country's beginning, inspired by traditional European recipes. Scraps of prepared fish from dinner the night before were revitalized by mixing with mayo and leftover veggie scraps for lunch.

Meanwhile, as the late 1800s rolled in, urbanization was bringing women out of the physical confines of the house. Now making regular outings, middle-class women were suddenly able to hit museums, department stores, and just generally hang out — which meant grabbing lunch in public. The issue, however, was that until the mid-1900s, many saloons required women to be "chaperoned," sitting in the back of the establishment while a man approached the bar to place their order. Enter: lunch counters peddling familiar fare to newly liberated women on the go. Fish salad sandwiches appealed to the patrons' familiar palates.

The fundamental human need to eat lunch was complicated by the fact that, in the 1800s, public spaces were still very much political terrain. Women were then socially forbidden from entering the saloons where middle-class men typically ate their lunches between work hours. Homoerotic repressions notwithstanding, this neo-modern oppression helped pave the way for the popularity of the tuna salad sandwich. To appeal to this new wave of clientele, lunch counters began offering the same fare that women of the time might have been used to eating at home.

When women entered the workforce a few years later, they converted those familiar fish salads into portable, handheld sandwiches that kept lunch counters moving and busy folks in motion during their short lunch breaks. Canned tuna hit the market with gusto in the early 1900s and, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, women represented about 20% of the national labor force by 1920.

This advent ostensibly allowed for packed lunches, and canned tuna remained America's most popular seafood for 50 years, as reported by The Washington Post. A 1913 article published in the Christian Science Monitor (via Food Timeline) writes, "Tuna Salad Popular. In California the tuna is being introduced generally in the best restaurants, not only because it is new, but because people are beginning to value it for what it is. Tuna salads are getting to be popular. The housekeeper can prepare the fish in a dozen different ways."