Antique Bloomingdale's 🏪 Garden Restaurant Brandied Mince Meat Label New York 1910s–1930s Food Ephemera

What Did It Mean When Bloomingdale's Put Its Name on Your Pantry? 🏪 An Antique Garden Restaurant Brandied Mince Meat Label, New York

Size: 2 1/2" x 1 1/2"

A shimmering gold border, a cream panel with Garden Restaurant in loose green script and TRADE MARK underneath, a little round seal with BOB in the middle, and then a pink panel in navy type: BRANDIED MINCE MEAT. "Combines Apples, Sugar, Raisins, Currants, Beef, Peel, Salt, Spices and Old Brandy. Add one half cup of water to contents. Net Weight 1 3/4 Lbs." And at the bottom, DISTRIBUTED BY Bloomingdale's NEW YORK, with that big flourished B. Beef and old brandy in a department store jar - that's a holiday pie the way your great-grandmother made it. These were printed for jars or tins of the store's mince meat and never used.

🏷️ Bloomingdale's own

The seal is printed in the same brown-gold as the border: BOB in the center, THE SEAL OF QUALITY around the bottom of the ring, and the store's name with the word BRAND around the top. That makes it Bloomingdale's own house brand. And read the foot of the label again - "distributed by," not "made by." Somebody else packed this mince meat, and the store put its own name, its own seal and its own restaurant's name on it.

Garden Restaurant was the name of Bloomingdale's restaurant. Cornell University Library's archives hold a Bloomingdale's Garden Restaurant menu dated September 7, 1937, and the store carried the same name over as a trademark on the prepared foods it sold - there's a Garden Restaurant olives label out there too. So when a New York cook set one of these jars on the counter, she was bringing a little of the store's dining room home with her.

📅 How old is it?

I've always had these as 1910s to 1930s, by the type and the printing, and the label backs that up. The Gould Amendment to the Pure Food and Drugs Act, in force from March 3, 1913, said packaged food had to show its weight, measure or count plainly on the outside, and "Net Weight 1 3/4 Lbs." is that line. The Garden Restaurant name was in use in 1937.

🗽 The store on 59th Street

It started with hoop skirts. Benjamin Bloomingdale opened a hoop skirt and ladies' notions shop in 1861, with his sons Lyman and Joseph minding the counter, and on April 17, 1872, Joseph B. and Lyman G. opened their own Great East Side Bazaar. In 1886 they moved up to 59th Street and Lexington Avenue, and by the end of the 1920s the store filled the whole block. Bloomingdale's joined Federated Department Stores in 1930 - today's Macy's, Inc. - and it's been part of that company ever since.

The subway changed everything for those stores. It opened in 1904 and carried shoppers uptown from the old dry-goods blocks around 14th Street to the new stores near 34th, and on up to Bloomingdale's. Macy's, Gimbels, Saks, Lord & Taylor and Bloomingdale's kept adding floors and services to win the same customers, and a house-brand food on the pantry shelf was one more way to do it. Bloomingdale's even brought the subway inside: the Public Service Commission got the right in July 1915 to build an entrance to the Lexington Avenue and 59th Street station in the store, trains started stopping there on July 17, 1918, and when the store grew in 1930 it added another entrance and paid for a passage under the local tracks, dedicated November 11, 1930. Under one roof you could buy fabric, order furniture, book a caterer, have lunch, and go home with the store's own mince meat.

🥧 Mince meat with the meat still in it

Mince meat goes back to medieval England, when it really was meat - chopped meat with fruit, spices, and alcohol to help it keep. Vinegar and wine gave way to brandy by the 1700s, and the meat hung on a lot longer than most people think. Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management in 1861 still calls for lean beef and beef suet along with raisins, currants, apples, candied peel and brandy, and most recipes didn't drop the meat until the middle of the twentieth century. Line her list up against this label's and it's nearly the same mince meat, beef and old brandy included.

Not every jar had the brandy. Heinz, selling mince meat since 1877, used cider vinegar where plenty of recipes of the day called for rum, and temperance cooks had been leaving the liquor out since at least 1852, when Mrs. L. G. Abell's Skillful Housewife's Book promised a mince pie was every bit as good without wine or brandy. "Old Brandy" on the label told you this was the good stuff. Then Prohibition made it even better: food wasn't covered by the ban, some tinned mincemeat ran over 14 percent alcohol, the wets mocked the brandy-free version as "18th Amendment pie" after the dry law passed in 1919, and in 1922 the catering and liquor trades went to court for a cooking exemption, arguing mostly that the public had a right to a proper slice of mince pie. They won. Old-timers who remember mince pie on the Christmas table will tell you the brandy wasn't just for flavor - it was what kept the filling good.

🎄 About these labels

Every one I have is unused, 2 1/2 by 1 1/2 inches, with the gold border bright. It's a rare one, too - nobody else has this mince meat label out for sale. Frame it small with a holiday recipe card or a pie tin, put it with other New York department store pieces, or give it to somebody whose family never let a Christmas go by without mince pie. The supply is finite - Bloomingdale's hasn't put up mince meat under the Garden Restaurant name in generations, and once these last unused labels are framed, they'll be very difficult to acquire.