Home Cooking

[haele]

121. Home cooking goes in cycles, has to do with work and time rather than economy.

Your question is actually rather back-wards. It also doesn't really cover the range that "Home Cooking" really consists of - what is a "home cooked meal"?

Prior to the "30 minute meal" concept and the introduction of meal kits (where the time-intensive portion was already taken care of), home cooking was pretty much for families where there was one person who could dedicate a block of time - anywhere from one to five hours a day (I've got a few "Weekend" recipes that take up to 14 hours for a Sunday meal) - to prepare and cook. Typical "Grandma's cooking" required a lot of time and effort - especially with prep, no matter how big or small the kitchen was.

So, you'll have a lot of poor families making filling meals that can stretch out over several days, using beans, rice, cheap cuts of meat or frozen veggies, and wealthy families might have a wider range of different specific entrees as meals that they can plan for over the week.
The amount of "turn on the stove" activity depends on how much prep time they have dedicated to cooking and what quantity and types of produce they have to prepare the meal with.

Back in the day, single people tended to eat out or pool together and have one person do the cooking for everyone else when they wanted a meal; otherwise, they'd eat food "on the go" - cooking at home for singles was usually left overs from one major weekly cooking effort (like a casserole or crock-pot meal), the stereotypical "beans from a can and beer", a sandwich or some other simple open a can or a package meal.
Only recently has the concept of regular home cooking for singles started taking off - and yes, I know some people will claim they made their meals regularly when they were single, but really - me and most people I know would maybe make a casserole, roast, or other main food item on Saturday or Sunday if they knew how to cook, and eat off that with maybe a side salad for the rest of the week.
As a single, there were many times it was just cereal for breakfast, a bit of fruit and sandwich for lunch, and soup, salad, and a cheesy tomato melt piece of sourdough bread for dinner - and that didn't matter if that was a year I made $15K or $85K.

I've got an old Home Ec. cookbook from the 1920's - "How to Please a Family" - that has a "year in the life" storyline about a housewife, her kids, her husband, her husband's young co-worker, and the new schoolmarm from the big city who never learned to cook, and it goes into shopping, storing, meal (and event) planning and preperation as well as the recipes.
It's interesting to read some of the side stories about how the two singles were presumed to have made due with meals and kept their households, and from what I have read from other sources, it was not too different an experience from others who lived alone household pre-appliances.

A family budget only really answers your question if there's not enough money to eat out if one feels like it or if they can fill their pantry and freezer with whatever they want.
Not if one does a lot of home cooking or not.

The amount of available time to cook actually answers your question about how much home cooking goes on in a household.

Haele