Posted on 11/18/2011 7:47:54 PM PST by blam
This Is What People Ate When They Had No Money During The Depression
Vivian Giang
Nov. 18, 2011, 12:25 PM
Image: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection
If you've ever visited anyone's house for dinner and a big, sloppy "secret family recipe" dish is flopped down in front of you, chances are high that the messy goodness could have originated from the Depression era.
Families were taught to creatively stretch out their food budgets and toast, potatoes and flour seem to be the popular, inexpensive ingredients. Expensive meat was typically eaten only once a week.
Some foods were invented during the Depression, such as spam, Ritz crackers, Krispy Kreme doughnuts and Kraft macaroni and cheese, according to livinghistoryfarm.org.
We've compiled some simple, easy recipes from 90-something Clara who shares her childhood dining memories during hard times. They may help you save money during our own Recession.
Click here to see what people ate>
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Your story made me cry. :o(
I live in the NC mountains. Lamb Quarters are delicious cooked or in salads. Chick weed is good and very nutricious in salads, or by the mouthful while you’re in the garden, or on buttered (the real stuff) bread. Chick weed is green in the very early spring under the snow. I make a broth from burdock root. It has an earthy, artichoke flavor...very good
And sleep with your rearend out from under the covers ...
As a kid home from school, the only thing in the fridge was lettuce and bread. With peanut butter in the cabinet, it was peanut butter and lettuce sandwiches. When the bread ran out, it was celery or carrots dipped in peanutbutter.
Don’t forget to add a thick slice of long white radish to the schmaltz on dark bread.
I still make griebens whenever I have enough saved chicken fat and chicken skin. It is wonderful in a casserole of shredded potatoes held together with an egg and baked slowly for a long time. Google “Lacy Potato Kugel”. For non-Yiddish speakers, kugel means *pudding*, but this is more like a hash brown casserole.
For anyone who cannot/will not make griebens, use crumbled good pork rinds, instead. The stale ones will flavor a gravy well.
For another snack, the old folks would make chick peas (garbanzos), drain them well, fry in chicken fat (you could use lard), drain again, salt heavily and eat cold. The beans soak up as much fat as you have and the result is _very_ heavy.
Chicken wings were cheap, back then. A holiday dish was to use the wings to make chicken soup, then drain the wings and brown them in schmaltz. When they are browned, remove from pan. Saute some onion and garlic in the fat, return the wings to the pan, add tomato sauce with some brown sugar and vinegar (essentially a German sweet and sour) and simmer about an hour. When times became better, meatballs would be added to this dish. In my family it was called chicken fricasee. 3# of wings makes a great soup, especially after adding some onion and carrots, then adding matzah balls (just a dumpling made with a cracker-like meal and an egg)or rice, plus the fricasee. Makes a lot of both dishes.
I live in New England where fresh ocean catch like cod and haddock are plentiful. Most fish is more expensive but there is usually something available in the $5 a pound range.
As I’m reading these recipes, I realize how many of them I grew up eating, not realizing they must have come from my grandparents who fed them to my parents, who fed them to us. Cinnamon/sugar toast, mayo sandwiches, American cheese sandwiches, etc.
I hear people talking about in the event of martial law, there is this group of kindly old gentlemen who go door to door to ask for donations...
OK. That’s not what I hear. I hear prophecies about armed people going door to door and seizing things.
I’m having a hard time seeing that happening, even if the “law” allows it.
Just way, way, way too much mortality. Americans are very well armed.
If there was a Road Warrior scenario when all a sudden like we wake up and the store shelves are bare, I would bet that within ten days, the population would be DOWN BY ONE THIRD!
And 99% of them would be various raiders and looters and ne’er do wells.
Yes, the military would be involved. But they would have their hands over-full just dealing with the cities and protecting the infrastructure stuff. (Power plants, hospitals, etc, etc, etc)
My parents always had to be careful when having dinner guests. There were some foods that reminded a lot of people of The Depression (foods they had to eat almost every day), and they would not consider eating those foods. Some wouldn’t eat anything having to do with chickens. Some would not eat rice, etc.
Rommegrot! Yum!
I was born in 33 but my older brothers told me of picking cotton on the family farm near Kerman Calif in 1929 and dad towed the trailer to the gin which was silent and the manager said there was no market for cotton. He told dad to just park the trailer with all the other full cotton trailers in the yard. He had borrowed for the crop plus he owed a payment on the little farm and lost it all and was evicted. He started with AP Gianinni’s Bank of Italy which became Bank of America and I still have his last bank account statement from that era which includes the transition. My brothers told me those trailers rotted in the gin yard...
Anybody else remember the swap shop on radio at noon?
bookmark
Yes, we’ve had a huge population increase of the human kind. I think this last census showed an increase of 30% so it’s no wonder our property taxes are skyrocketing and our school district can’t build new campuses fast enough. It’s mostly northerners coming south and illegals coming north and all meeting right here. And then there’s the Katrina trash which is a whole other story. It wasn’t that long ago you would only pass a handful of cars on the way to town, now there’s real traffic. That’s pushing more wildlife out. We’re seeing more and more different animals around the house that we didn’t even 10 years ago. It makes me sad and angry. So, here’s to your bears.
Described in White Trash Cooking as "Kitchen Sink Sandwiches" because they were typically eaten over the kitchen sink due to the tomato juices running down your arms.
You aren’t kidding about not knowing how to cook. When I started making my own bread earlier this year, it was so surprising how so few ingredients are in it and all very basic. Been practicing with some basic recipes in cast iron cookware on campfires. If worse came to worse, I want to know we can do this without the luxury of electric or gas appliances. Fish, meats, stews, potatoes, no problem. Breads, rices, pastas, beans, all ware wanted skills.
July’s stink and flies.
Actually, “Kitchen Sink Tomato Sandwiches” ... page 74.
So many things that used to be in NYC supermarkets are no longer there, and pigs’ feet and pigs’ knuckles is one of them. Chicken livers, chicken fat, lard, calves’ liver, oxtails . . .
I don’t remember taking the skin off the chicken feet but maybe my grandmother did that before giving them to us.
She once took me to the chicken market. When the butcher came into the area where the cages were, all the chickens would go crazy until he picked one and took it away. Then they would calm down. They all knew what was happening. Country folks would not be amazed but I was.
Man O Man.
I was born in 1943.
My dad told me about hiding the only plow (a one horse plow) they had down the water well when the bank came to repossess it. Dad said that if they had lost that plow, they would have starved.
My dad's family were essentially share-croppers in SE Alabama during the depression. I think I'm 'marked' by their tales and experience from the Great Depression.
It was terrible, absolute unbelieveable in some cases.
I remember when my dad died...I almost cried when I had to throw away his coffee cans full of bent/used, rusty nails that he saved for 'hard times'.
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