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Creamed chipped beef......or as we called it.....sh*t on a shingle.
Lordy that picture is cute.
Here in the Florida panhandle, several animals were just about made extinct. Deer, Wild Turkey, Gopher Tortoise (Hoover Chicken), even alligators.
All of them except the Gopher have made spectacular comebacks and even the Gopher is not really in danger.
My dads family could afford anything as fancy as a freezer when he was a kid in the depression. They would often send him to buy a block of ice which would be half as big by the time he got it home. This was put into the “ice box” to keep food cool.
Corn bread crumbled into a glass, then covered in milk. One of my favorite snacks until I figured out how many calories was in that. Cornbread was white, no sugar or eggs. To this day I cannot abide yellow corn bread with eggs and sugar. That’s a muffin, not corn bread.
I was very fortunate.
I was a kid on my Grandparents farm in the north woods...so, tho’ there was no money, we always had plenty of food: in the gardens, in gleaming jars and barrels in the cellar; eggs and meat in the hen house; milk, beef and pork in the barn, fruit in the orchards; meat and fish from the woods and waters and “wild” greens (fiddleheads, dandelions, sorrel, lambs quarters, mushrooms, etc, from the fields and woods.
What we couldn’t grow, hunt or fish, we traded for: eggs and butter for flour, sugar, coffee, molasses, etc.
Today, I still make my own lard (though from fat back I get from a farm, not from butchering my own pig! I make ghee from butter (for storage). I still forage in the spring for fiddleheads, dandelions and such, and mushrooms in the fall.
And nothing beats mincemeat made with venison...for a hot piece of pie with coffee.
I still have my kerosene lamps and wood stove for power outages. Well, I’ve been burning only my wood stove so far - no furnace until the snow and ice cover up my wood pile.
I have my own well for water.
If the SHTF, I won’t be in near the trouble city folk will.
My grandfather worked for GE through the Depression so he and Grandma and their kids were never super poor, but they did struggle. But even when times were tough, Grandma always fed the destitute men who came to the back door seeking work or something to get them through the day.
Times were so different then...
My grandmother was a widow with 5 children. Mother said they ate corn meal mush twice a day. Grandma would cook it fresh in the morning and then after the leftover had set up they would slice it and fry it for supper. Lunch was usually beans, Sunday dinner was usually spagetti- rarely with meat in the sauce.
My aunts were older than my mother and one year they were really upset about not being able to have a real Christmas dinner so they stole two chickens from a neighbor. My grandmother was very angry with them and by the time she knew they had killed and were plucking the chickens. Grandma made them go to the neighbor and confess and work off the chickens. The neighbor let them work off the chickens but grandma made them cook them and take them to another neighbor that was hard up.
When my parents were just married (in the late 60s) my grandmother (father’s mother) stopped in while my mother was cooking dinner. She saw that my mother was cooking a fish soup that my father liked. The next day Grandma came back with bags and bags of groceries. My mother had no idea why she had done this until my father came home and told her that fish soup was apparently something the family had eaten when times were tough and feeding the 8 kids was difficult. Since they lived almost right on the lake the fish were free and they ate them almost every day when times were tough. My father still loves it though.