Recipes in event of Republican takeover.

[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.