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 ...
As a child my Grandma would make that for us too only we got a whole banana and sprinkled the sliced banana and milk with regular sugar. Sounds good and I forgot about it. I think I will get some bananas and try some again for old times sake.
You are eating the more expensive, higher nutrition version ;-)
Dad said they ate boiled cabbage a LOT back in those days, they hunted squirrels, fished, found wild onions, mustard greens and turnip (salad).
Ireland is the only country that has less population today than it had in 1840.
My mom, from Tennessee, told me they raised hogs at that time. Thanksgiving was not a day for feasting, it was hog killing time.
My dad, who was raised on the high plains during the dust bowl, told of eating lots of fried rabbit.
Hamburger was mixed with oatmeal and beef heart was ground to mix with it.
Lard was used to fry everything in and even as late as 1965, my aunt would make soap because she could not stand to see it wasted.
Then there was any wild meat you could find. Armadillos were not called “Hoover Hogs” for nothing. While armadillos were not in their corner of the state, others ate raccoon and woodchuck. Many of the garden vegetables were cooked green and are considered a delicacy today. Fried Green tomatoes, squash,various other gourd plants and nothing was wasted.
One of my favorite foods in the 1960s when money was short was brown beans and fried potatoes.
We ate lots of brown beans, often three times a week. Even today my brother will not touch a brown bean.
We cooked eggs from our own chickens, and my sister loved sliced bread with a hole in it, fried with an egg in it.
My kin on the high plains ate lots of biscuits. They ate so many when they went to town they hoped they would be late getting home. Their mom would then buy store bought bread instead of making biscuits.
After they all grew up and left home, they often wished they had some of their mom’s home made biscuits.
One of my aunts would go back to visit every few years, and insist on being taken to the old home place. There she would cry and have a nostalgia fit as she went through each room.
One day she visited and had them take her to the old home place when the wind dust happened to be blowing.
She was shocked to see the dust filtering in through the cracks in the windows, hanging in the air, collecting on everything. She remembered how it was when she was small. She went out, got into the car, and said...”I NEVER want to see this place again!”
Kraft mac and cheese is NOT edible food and Ritz crackers are probably the worst crackers in the entire world.
It really makes me wonder sometimes what type of pallet can find this stuff enjoyable.
“I don’t know why they call this stuff ‘Hamburger Helper,’ It does just fine by itself, huh?”
I don't trust the fish available at supermarkets, but I've never gone wrong with the fish I've purchased at Trader Joe's, a specialty food market.
IKN, when I was growing up my dad always used to say you need to eat a meal that will “stick to your ribs” LOL
My Dad said they ate a lot of potato soup and farina hot cereal.
I love chipped beef on toast.
Yep, Corn Bread need not contain sugar to my pallet either.
Potato peelings are the most nutritional part of the potato.
‘American’ cheese was invented because it was cheap to make, and didn’t require refrigeration that may or may not exist back then.
I have a 2lb block of it right now, sitting next to some $22/lb aged peccorino.
My grandmother cannot ditch her Depression ways. I’d take high-end stuff and make dinner, and she’d replicate it but stretched with tons of starches which kills the dish.
I can feed a ton of people on next to nothing because she raised me with a depression mindset, and I’m thankful for that.
***I occasionally enjoy a bowl of bread and milk, a depression-era staple which I picked up from my Dad.****
I like buttered toast and milk. My dad ate lots of it. I also love crackers and milk, and cornbread and milk.
Oh I want some toast and milk now! Better wait till tomorrow.
Had cornbread and milk yesterday along with ham and brown beans on the side.
I happened to come across a youtube video where they were interviewing an old guy, and how poor he was. But out in back he had several dogs and I thought (”get rid of some of your dogs”).
Turns out they were coon dogs. The old guy had a freezer full of coons. One for $15, 2 for $25. Detroit!
Ah the old SOS - from the War days. Believe it or not, we still have it on occasion - on toast. When I was small we used to have what my mom called weiner gravy. Not exactly sure what the meat was since we lived on a farm but it was something round that had been sliced and was the color of a weiner. Brown it and then use the drippings to make gravy. We also had a lot of milk toast for breakfast because we had cows. Hot milk loaded with home churned butter and served in a bowl with chunks of toasted bread.
Been there and done that and from a very early age. I have a photo of me picking cotton into a burlap sack my mother sewed a shoulder strap on when I was about 6. We didn't have running water and the outhouse was 75 feet from the house. My folks lost their small Calif farm in 29 or 30 and had to move into basically a abandoned home.
slice and boil some potatoes. Fry up some hamburger in a large skillet, with a little bit of onion.
Poor off the grease, add the potatoes to the hamburgerand add a can of cream of mushroom soup. warm up the ingredients together.
Seldom, very seldom, there's left overs.
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.
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