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 ...
NUM.
I do this in the spring - but with fiddleheads and brookies -
Grilled potatoes in tin foil on open fire. Add lard or butter,salt,pepper, onions and peppers.
Got recipe from parents. They were born in the early 1930's in a very poor part of extreme cold northern Maine.
Other recipe was "Ploye", A pancake made out of buckwheat mixed with water(no milk) wrapped in butter.
Thanks for the info, storing it away until early spring next year, God willing.
***He was so ashamed because he could never “trade” lunch with the other kids, lest they find out how poor he was***
One of my supervisors joked about how he was so poor he took lard sand witches to his one room school. One day he decided he would steal someone’s lunch and have a feast!
He excused himself to go to the outhouse, and on the way out he lifted each lunch in the coatroom. He took the heaviest one he could find and ran deep into the East Texas woods. When he opened the sack, he found...... six hickory nuts and a hammer. ;-D
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...
The neat things you learning living in the Obama era.
Memories are made of this.
I think about that whenever I have to cook dinner for the family and don't feel like it.
Well, at least it was sung about.
Blue Champagne--Glenn Miller, 1941
Tomato gravy on a bed of steamed rice is my favorite comfort food. I hurt myself when we have that.
My family calls them ‘birds’ nests’.
To this day, I love it. When I go to Cracker Barrel and have their pot roast w/ mashed potatoes and gravy, I always have them bring me an extra bowl of gravy. After dinner, I have them bring me 2-3 slices of white bread.
I think know I'd love that as entire meal.
I made honey with dandelions for the first time this past summer. It was a learning experience, yield could easily have been better. I’ll be doing it again this spring.
I don’t recall the butter or the sugar - but it was toast in WARM milk. Come to think of it - it might not even have been toast! Just bread and warm milk.
Everytime my wife serves up some good meat I have to tell everyone how when we had meat for dinner, it would be sliced about twice as thick as bacon and we would each get two or three slices. I suppose mom bought one cut of meat from the farm up the road and sliced it so as to serve all six of us.
I don’t recall her growing potatoes, but lettuce and tomato was from the garden. She’s 93 now and has a better memory than I do. Always interesting to hear her talk of the old days.
She was not in dire straights though back then. Her father was a tailor - so perhaps did better than some with people wanting to mend their old clothes rather than buy new. She said it was something that everyone needed - and a lot of it was for barter. Including doctors, dentists, farmers, etc.
**I bought three of those frying pans and a boiling pot at a garage sale today...for almost nothing.***
Griswold? Wagner? SK?
I still have my mom’s huge Griswold skillet, Griswold pancake cooker, and an unnamed skillet she bought on the high plains in 1945.
I have also collected quite a few Wagner skillets I use. I’ve got my children using good quality cast iron!
MMMMMM! You betcha ;0)
Donuts were invented well before the depression. The Krispy Kreme business STARTED during the depression.
You know, I eat dirt all the time: lake dirt, garden dirt (this is on accident) and it really doesn’t taste bad or weird. Never occurred to me to cook with it but I wouldn’t have a problem trying if times got that hard.
Dirt recipes?
A true creation of the Devil himself. There was only one request that I gave to my wife, after our marriage 45 years ago: "Never bring a can of spam into our house". I have not eaten spam since the 1950's, as a young child.
My Dad called them “toe sacks”.
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