Antique 1920s-1930s Thanksgiving Table Label Set 🦃 Eatmor Cranberry, Brick's Mince Meat, Velvet Rose Pumpkin

🦃 What Was on the Thanksgiving Table a Hundred Years Ago? Cranberry, Mince Meat and Pumpkin, Right Off the Label

Size: Cranberry 10" x 6 3/4", Mince Meat 3 1/2" x 3", Pumpkin 11" x 4 1/2" ~ All three never used.

The three things every Thanksgiving table had to have, each one still in its original paper, and I put them together because together they tell the whole holiday. An American Beauty Eatmor Cranberries barrel label from the 1920s, a Brick's Old Homestead Mince Meat jar label from the 1930s, and a Velvet Rose Pumpkin can label from the 1930s. Frame them in a row and you've got dinner.

Look close and you'll spot something funny: two of the three are selling you food with a rose.

🌹 The Cranberries: Named for the Million-Dollar Rose

The American Beauty was the most famous rose in the country. It was bred in France in 1875 as 'Madame Ferdinand Jamin,' introduced here under the American name in 1886, and sold at two dollars a stem or more when two dollars meant something. They called it the million-dollar rose. Naming your best New Jersey cranberries after it was saying something.

Eatmor was the cranberry growers' big idea. Growers in New Jersey, New England and Wisconsin came together in 1911 as the American Cranberry Exchange, with Joseph J. White of Whitesbog, New Jersey as first president, and in 1916 they started putting the name Eatmor on the fruit. It was a grade as much as a name: at least 90 percent colored berries, no more than 125 to the cup, and fruit that would hold up for 15 days of travel. National ads in Good Housekeeping and Better Homes & Gardens followed, and by the Exchange's own count they took growers from about $6 a barrel to nearly $10. This label went on a quarter-barrel box, a size that came in around 1926, and it has a blank spot marked PACKER'S NUMBER where the grower wrote in their own number.

🏡 The Mince Meat: From 76 Pounds to Three Million

Edgar Brick ran a general store in Crosswicks, New Jersey, and wasn't impressed with the mince meat coming over from Philadelphia. So in 1874 he made his own. First-year total: 76 pounds. By 1879 he'd outgrown the store, bought two local farmhouses, had them moved onto one lot and joined together as a factory. His three sons took over when he died in 1920, and at the World War II peak the firm was turning out about three million pounds a year, more than any other mince meat maker in the United States, from a village of about 850 people today.

Read the fine print on this little oval: apples, sugar, raisins, currants, beef, candied orange and lemon peel, cane syrup, salt, spices and brandy. Real brandy. During Prohibition, Brick's labels carried a federal permit number and an alcohol percentage, and collectors still love telling it as legal liquor sitting on the grocery shelf between the canned peaches and the soup. This oval names the brandy with no permit and no percentage, which is how you know it was printed after Repeal in December 1933.

🎃 The Pumpkin: How Pie Stopped Taking All Day

Velvet Rose was packed by the Brighton Canning Co. of Brighton, Iowa, and the promise in the middle of the label is my favorite part: "all hand washed, hand cut and individually inspected." Canned pumpkin is the reason any of us have pie without roasting and mashing all day. Dickinson and Company of Eureka, Illinois first canned it in 1904, Libby's bought them in 1929, and a recipe by Mary Hale Martin printed on the can turned pumpkin pie into the Thanksgiving standard. Today one Libby's plant in Morton, Illinois makes as much as 95 percent of the canned pumpkin in the country.

That NET CONTENTS 1 LB. 4 OZ. line is federal law at work too. The Gould Net Weight Amendment of 1913 made packers say how much was in the package, after inspectors found about a third of the products they checked were short-weight.

And every pumpkin carries the old Irish legend of Stingy Jack, who tricked the Devil twice and got locked out of both heaven and hell with only a coal in a carved turnip to light his way. The turnip became a pumpkin when the story got to America.

🍽️ Where It Goes

Put these up in a kitchen or a dining room and bring them out every November. Museums have galleries of old food labels like these and more collectors are after them every year, and the lithography on them is unparalleled even to this day, in my opinion. There is no new press run coming. When the last of these are hanging in collections, they will be very hard to track down for sale.