Recipes in event of Republican takeover.

[RandySF]

Last edited Sun May 21, 2023, 03:49 AM - Edit history (1)

America found itself at the heart of the Great Depression and within a year a quarter of the population had no employment. To make the most of the dire food shortages, people found highly inventive ways to combine foods to create some truly memorable and oftentimes bizarre recipes to survive. Gear up those tastebuds as we tuck into some of the oddest Depression-Era recipes!



https://www.heraldweekly.com/get-a-taste-of-the-most-bizarre-depression-era-foods/2?xcmg=1

[murielm99]

1. Some of those look disgusting.

Others are okay. I know my mother and grandmother made some of these dishes.

[betsuni]

2. "A Square Meal, a Culinary History of the Great Depression," Jane Zeigelman & Andrew Cole.

Recommended.

[3Hotdogs]

3. Yeah, we had some in the 50's.

I'm inspired to try some over the next few weeks.

[GoCubsGo]

4. We'll have to re-name Hoover Stew to "McCarthy Stew."

The hot dogs will be tainted, thanks to the rollback of meat industry regulations. And, who knows what veggies will be added with climate change wreaking havoc on farming? Odds are, unless they're home-grown, they'll be loaded with pesticides and E. coli, and god knows what else.

[BumRushDaShow]

5. You made me go through the whole thing (took a long time)

One of my retired former-coworkers emails recipes and many of these appear on the "Taste of Home" (and other sites) that have compiled "themed" recipes.

My parents were Depression-era babies so some of these were in our meal rotation. Since the article mentioned "rabbit", I'm surprised they didn't mention the analogous "rarebit", another simplistic (meatless) meal.

[woodsprite]

6. Thank you so much for posting!

It was like a trip through my childhood! My brother and I grew up in an extended family in the 50s-60s. My gmom (due to health reasons) was the one who did the cooking in the house. Mom did the household chores that were more physical (cleaning, laundry, taking care of my brother and I.

I recognized quite a few of those recipes and was actually looking for a cake similar to the boiled raisin cake the other day. I even think the article clued me in on a missing ingredient for what my gmom call chili-con-carne — tomato soup! I hadn’t been able to get the flavor quite right.

A few that were missing based on what our family prepared was cucumber sandwiches and Pot pie which was mainly potatoes, a few onions, a thin watery broth, and a bit of some kind of meat (rabbit, squirrel, Guinea, beef, chicken), then topped with biscuits. Fried sweet boiled sweet potatoes dusted with sugar were a treat.

My mom was pretty lucky during the depression since her grandfather had a small farm and raised chickens, so they had a reliable source for food and would share with neighbors and passers-by. My dad’s family wasn’t as lucky - 4 kids raised by a single father who made his living doing odd jobs. Dad would tell us about taking jello or hotdog spread sandwiches to school, a shared can of mashed beans/onion on toast, milk toast, or boiled cabbage for days on end for dinners.

[onethatcares]

7. when you're hungry

not just the I need a snack hungry, you'd be surprised what you can eat.

My mom made fried dough and when she made chicken soup she would sub ketchup for tomatos.

There were no left overs. We were a family of 5 kids and 2 adults.

[2naSalit]

8. We ate a lot of that stuff when I was a kid.

If my mom wasn't making many of those things, my grandmother was.

I still make some of them myself. And the demeaning of aspic is unfair, not all gelatin is sweetened and the writer has little historic knowledge of how some things were prepared. Baked beans were baked with molasses and onions, the bread was brown bread and sometime hot dogs or sausages of some kind were added. as and example.

I have a cookbook published during the depression and it has a lot of these dishes included in it as well as an appendix in the back called "Wartime Cookery" where it tells you what's in the tin cans - they didn't have labels on them during the war - and which cuts of meat to buy that aren't compatible with being shipped to the troops and how to substitute honey for sugar in recipes.

[crazylikafox]

9. I think this article was written by a kid who was raised on big macs and never saw anyone cooking

With a few odd exceptions these are just typical recipes for frugal housewives of the 50’s. Find an old betty crocker cookbook and you’ll find most of those recipes.

Toast for breakfast instead of chia smoothies as an example of depression era subsistence??? Gimme a break.

[2naSalit]

10. Exactly.

[Hortensis]

11. His descriptions definitely sound like he's never had them,

and of course was never forced by desperation to make biscuits without buttermilk.

I happened to wonder that there was no mention of kudzu. All parts are edible but more worthy of the "desperation times" theme than potatoes and bananas with milk and sugar. I looked, and although introduced in the 1800s, it wasn't suitable for farming and only became widespread during/AFTER the depression when the Civilian Conservation Corps planted it everywhere it'd grow to stabilize the banks alongside the new damns, roads and railroad lines being built.

So there for kudzu, except it's here now for much of the country (and spreading north with global warming) if leftover mashed potatoes become in short supply.

Thanks, crazylikeafox.

[Retrograde]

16. You can make perfectly good biscuits

without buttermilk - they taste a bit different, and they're a little flatter, but they're edible.

My favorite (?) Depression food story: when I first met Mr. Retrograde he would not eat peaches, because his mother told him they caused pellagra. Turns out a neighbor of hers back in the Depression, in rural Alabama, had nothing to eat but peaches, since that's what they grew. Of course that led to vitamin deficiencies.

[Hortensis]

17. One of those stories that reminds of how short human time

spans really are and how close "the past," worlds long gone as they mistakenly seem, really is.

I live in the south these days, so it would feel disloyal to defend biscuits without buttermilk.

[Retrograde]

15. What research done seems to have been limited

to websites featuring bizarre recipes - and a lot of them seem to be late 1930s or later (that beef wrapped in foil is very similar to what's touted as a brand new fad in Bracken's "I Hate to Cook Book - 1960). I've never seen hash-browns that contained peas and carrots. The author has no idea what a hot water crust pastry is, even though he tries to describe what he calls a "water pie, and what he calls a "boiled cake" looks like a traditional English steamed pudding. Buying bread was not limited to the "very rich": bread was widely available from bakeries in cities and towns. The "chop suey" looks like what my mother called "goulash" - and has many other names around the country. I gave up when the author started to analyze Southern recipes.

What you ate during the Depression depended a lot on where you lived. Mr. Retrograde's grandparents were farmers, so they ate what they couldn't sell. Mine worked in factories, so they relied on what they could buy - to the end of her life my mother hated sardines because that was what was cheap. And while refrigerators with small freezer compartments were available, many people depended on ice boxes, which meant someone - usually the daughters of the house - had to regularly empty the pans of melted ice water.

[llmart]

13. Same here.

I still have a cookbook (more like a pamphlet) called Wartime Cookbook which talks about how to use your ration coupons to get the most out of them. I also have my mother's Betty Crocker which I used extensively as a young wife and mother. Looking through these recipes posted here I find that I'm familiar with a lot of them. My parents refused to eat or buy Spam though, thank goodness. My mother was German so we ate a lot of potatoes in all forms. We were a family of seven children and two parent, so nine mouths to feed every single day for three meals a day. I just can't imagine my poor mother trying to stretch what little money we had to feed all of us. We were relatively poor and I remember being hungry and it being towards the end of the week (she always shopped on Saturday for an entire week's groceries) and having to fill up on whatever we could find in the almost empty cupboard. Fried egg sandwiches, fried bologna sandwiches, lots of her canned stewed tomatoes in the winter time. I remember being hungry often.

[Midnight Writer]

12. My parents were children of The Great Depression. We ate a lot of these growing up.

Lard Bread-Take a baking sheet. Arrange stale bread on the bottom. Apply a thick coating of lard to the bread. Bake in the oven and enjoy. Fills up an empty belly fast.

If the milk turned, Dad would pour it into a bowl, cover the bowl with cheesecloth, and let it sit out for a couple of days until it got firm.
Then he would pour in sugar and stir it up. Eat it with a spoon. Don't know what he called it.

Karo bread-Mix Karo syrup and butter together into a bowl. Spread the mixture on slices of bread. One of my favorites.

Every so often, us kids were assigned to gather dandelion greens for Mom's Dandelion soup. Kept us kids busy and the yard neat.

There was local bakery where we could get stale bread nearly free. And there was a local dairy where they would pour out the "blue milk" in the evening. Mom would walk us kids down there with pitchers and the guys at the dairy would let us fill our pitchers with blue milk for free.

[betsuni]

14. Depression Cake

No eggs, butter or milk:

"Ethel looked at the pan of raisins stewing on the stove. ... When the raisins had partially cooled, she carefully measured a cup of the juice and poured them into a mixing bowl, adding a teaspoon of soda, a half a teaspoon of cinnamon and nutmeg, a pinch of cloves, ginger and allspice. A heaping tablespoon of bacon drippings went next, and she watched the mixture bubble and froth, wondering if the stuff would explode. She sifted one and three fourths cups of common flour and a cup of sugar, a pinch of salt and a teaspoonful of baking powder, added them to the volcanic mass in her mixing bowl.

"After greasing and flouring a loaf cake tin, she spread the batter in the pan. ... Spices -- no odor from the old world ever smelled more delicious. The cake -- for by all the Gods it was a cake -- had risen, round, light, brown, shrinking away from the pan, proclaiming to the world that it was sufficiently baked. ... When the men came in weary and hungry from work, they were greeted at the door with the odor of that cake, which held the place of honor in the middle of the table. 'How?' asked the man of the house, well aware of the lack of provisions. 'Eat it first,' answered Ethel. 'I'm afraid to talk.' After the cake had been eaten to the last crumb, the brother inquired cautiously, 'Gosh, Ethel. Do you reckon you can do it again?' Ethel nodded assent. The Fourth of July celebration was a success, and that's how 'Depression Cake' came into being."

From Mark Kurlansky's "The Food of a Younger Land"