My mother-in-law stays sharp and active in retirement by scouring estate and yard sales, shining/fixing items up and selling them for a hefty mark-up at an antique consignment shop. Casino money!
She knows I find quirky old cookbooks amusing, especially the kind produced by amateurs for book clubs and such. So she brings oddball vintage cookbooks to me, even though our house is always on the verge of being overtaken by books.
I was reading one yesterday that was published by a women’s club in a small North Dakota town in the late 1970s. Y’all. Here’s a sample:
Holy shit, that’s repellent. All of it.
My mother loved tapioca pudding, and my grandmother loved eating at buffet restaurants. (She liked to see what she was getting.)
One time at a giant buffet with the family, Mom was overjoyed to find tapioca pudding, and she came back to the table with a big bowl of it. She took one bite and froze, spoon in mid-air. It was tartar sauce.
Anyhoo, on to dessert:
I just cannot.
It’s not snobbery that makes my gorge rise. I spent my early life in Florida trailer parks eating deviled ham on Wonder bread, Kraft singles with bologna and delicacies like canned Vienna (pronounced VYE-inna) sausages.
But good lord, Kool-Aid pie? Tapioca goulash? What was WRONG with those people?
Open thread!
Jack Smith Files an Appeal
Ken
I note two hot dish recipes. If this is the sort of horror that Walz considers normal, I may have to reconsider my voting plans.
zhena gogolia
It’s the Cheap Chow Mein with the raw potatoes that’s getting to me.
But tapioca is one of the most disgusting substances on earth.
lowtechcyclist
Frist? Nope, thrid.
mrmoshpotato
Yikes.
Elly
This stuff belongs in the “Gallery of Regrettable Food.”
VFX Lurker
LOL at those fantastic scribbled notes on the photos.
Open thread: I tested negative Saturday after testing positive for COVID-19 for thirteen days. My husband tested positive yesterday after 14 days, though we both hope he tests negative tonight.
We will get the updated vaccines in November, three months after we first both tested positive mid-August. That’s the CDC recommendation, because the odds of reinfection within three months is “low.”
lowtechcyclist
@zhena gogolia:
I used to like tapioca pudding when I was a kid, but it’s been 60 years or close to it since I had any. So I have no idea what I’d think of it now.
wjca
Gotta remember that the “experienced cooks” who were writing these had grown up during the Depression. Their baseline was far worse even than yours. To the point that, on some level, these sorts of recipes seem like clever bits of luxury.
Betty Cracker
@zhena gogolia: What the fuck even is it?
The Audacity of Krope
@lowtechcyclist: I love tapioca. Doesn’t change the flavor much but adds some texture, basically like gelatinous beads or even just a thickening agent.
Tapioca pudding is almost always vanilla flavored and definitely fits the gelatinous beads model.
Omnes Omnibus
The tapioca is added as a starch. They are not advocating adding tapioca pudding.
Parfigliano
Poverty. They vote for it .
MinbariSafari
I suppose this is not the right time to mention the excellent slow cooker recipes from America’s Test Kitchen my husband and I love that make use of small amounts of tapioca as a thickener…. It works really well and you would have no idea it was there if you didn’t see the recipe, honest! It does not result in pudding, I promise!
Having grown up in Wisconsin in the 70’s, I found the presence of a shrimp recipe in a North Dakota cookbook of that era pretty amusing. All of it is great Midwest nostalgia – my mom had many books just like this.
KatKapCC
“Cheap Chow Mein”
boy howdy, they’re not kidding.
SatanicPanic
I like tapioca pudding
My dad used to tell a story of how one time my grandpa took the family to a steakhouse. My dad was scarfing down peas and asked my grandma- “what are these? They’re so good!”. She was like, “I make them all the time…” she was bummed. She apparently was cooking them so much they no longer looked like peas.
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
Yes. Kool Aid pie. I wish I could say I never tasted this, but we have a lunch at our Quaker meeting every Sunday, and a few weeks ago, somebody brought Kool Aid pie. I thought it was some kind of custard pie. But it wasn’t it was Kool Aid pie. So, yeah, I’ve unwittingly had it. Not a fan.
Betty Cracker
@MinbariSafari: I like the America’s Test Kitchen show and love my slow cooker. Tapioca is a bridge too far though. ;-)
AndyG
The History Channel has a show called “The Food That Built America”, and every episode describes the planning and execution of a food crime against humanity.
JCJ
Find Dylan Hollis on TikTok. He makes videos where he takes old cook books and actually makes the recipes no matter how gruesome the ingredients sound. He is pretty funny
Example
https://youtu.be/eWyDYL5U1gU?si=v23-TZ3P4LgSOHFW
Danielx
North Dakota, what would you?
Scandahoovian cooking, doncha know. Like a Finnish salad recipe: first you fry half a dozen potatoes in bacon grease…
CaseyL
Echoing what wjca said: First there was a Depression, then a global war that rationed everything, and then a couple decades of people “cooking” mostly from canned or boxed ingredients and inflicting jello desserts on their families.
The 1970s were a time of people tentatively emerging from a culinary and nutritional hellscape into a brand new realm of cooking-from-scratch and using some-fresh-ingredients. They had no idea how to do anything. That’s one reason TV shows like The French Chef and the Galloping Gourmet were so wildly popular: people honestly had very little knowledge or experience in cooking. (If they were lucky, they had family recipes – though it occurs to me even that might have been only or mostly true of “ethnic” families with strong cooking traditions. Not WASPS, in other words.)
SiubhanDuinne
I can almost, kinda-sorta, understand the tapioca in the “goulash” recipe. I mean, tapioca all on its own (before you put in the sugar and milk and egg) is just a type of thickening agent. What’s weird is to flag it as the primary ingredient — it’s like creating a recipe for “Corn Starch Stew” or something.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
The tapioca I’ve had most recently is the kind they make in Brazil, which is a batter that they pan fry into something resembling a really white less fluffy pancake or thick tortilla like thing. I haven’t had tapioca pudding in decades but using it as a base for goulash is an… interesting choice.
Kool aid pie sounds like a variant of lemon ice box pie for those too lazy to juice and zest lemons.
Ohio Mom
@wjca: Yup, poor people with poorly-stocked grocery stores. Even today, I bet North Dakotans have limited choices when food shopping — nothing exotic, with a very expansive definition of where exotic starts.
Kofuu
Tapioca is a natural ingredient, with the super-power to congeal other foods. Just because we use it in custard doesn’t mean it can’t serve in other ways. When my daughter was allergic to eggs, we discovered that a main ingredient in Ener-G egg substitute was tapioca flour.
zhena gogolia
@Betty Cracker: Glop with chow mein noodles on top?
thalarctosMaritimus
@Betty Cracker: Have you ever tried boba tea? The boba beads are tapioca.
Paul M Gottlieb
Tapioca is used as a thickening agent. A North Dakota roux
Kofuu
@SiubhanDuinne: The name of the dish is along the lines of what you’d say to someone about what makes it distinctive. “It’s the goulash dish I make that has a 1/4 cup of tapioca in it.”
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: You will reconsider it if you eat tapioca fritters aka sabudana vada
usually served with a fresh coconut chutney (Think Cilantro-Chilli pesto made with fresh coconut)
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: You will reconsider it if you eat tapioca fritters aka sabudana vada
usually served with a fresh coconut chutney (Think Cilantro-Chilli pesto made with fresh coconut)
Betty Cracker
@SiubhanDuinne: Ha! Good point. Headlines matter!
@thalarctosMaritimus: Nope. I find the presence of “beads” off-putting. I prefer regular tea or better yet coffee.
laura
In opposite news, spouse and I did a runner to Sonoma and Marin county last week and last Tuesday, I drove him hill and dale from coastal highway 1 along backroads – the literal golden, rolling hills of California (ht Kate Wolf) on a cheese hunt. First stop was the oldest cheese factory in America; Marin French, then Nicasio Valley, Point Reyes and a produce stand for gravenstein apples and more cheese from Cowgirl Creamery. As such, I had more cheese than has ever been warranted. On Saturday I sent a text to a bunch of friends alerting them of an Emergency Ladies Cheese Eating Party. So yesterday we ate cheese and such like and shit talked the election until we collapsed in joy with a possible touch of gout. I doubt I’ll ever do that again, but we ate so much amazing fresh cheese.
The Audacity of Krope
I use tapioca in kugele, basically a big shredded potato cake. Lithuanian dish.
Nancy
My relatives always have a dish at Thanksgiving dinner that I think is made with canned green beans (to be fair, maybe now they’ve gone to frozen green beans) with canned mushroom soup as sauce, topped with French fired onions that come in a can.
It’s put together, baked and brought to dinner in a large serving dish.
I hope I’m not offending any of you when I say that this dish is the Hamburger Helper of Thanksgiving, possibly even the tapioca pudding of Thanksgiving food.
It appears to be traditional. Some people may eat it for that reason; I think some people like it.
central Texas
I grew up in a military family and it seemed like there was one of these “cookbooks” at every duty station. Desperate attempts to replicate (canned/dried/prepackaged) “american food” in the midst of a bounty of fresh, varied, and tasty local choices; if you would just go to the local markets and get it. The only exception I recall was Alaska in the 1950s (I’m an old fart). It was truly a fresh food desert from Sept ’til June or so. I still remember peeling away 80% of heads of iceberg lettuce in the form of rotten slime to retrieve the core that was still presentable/eatable. It all came by boat from the lower 48. The compensation was that probably 80% of our proteins were in the form of local fish and game. When we rotated back to the lower 48 people thought my sister and I were really odd kids as we would devour any amount of fruits or green salads in preference to most anything else.
BigJimSlade
The tapioca (it could basically disappear, or add a tiny bit of texture) doesn’t bother me nearly as much as… the complete lack of paprika. I’m pretty sure it’s a defining ingredient of goulash. That’s like a recipe for pepper steak that has no pepper, like:
Pepper steak, ingredients:
– steak(s)
– salt, optional
Anoniminous
And let us take a moment to give a nod to orange jello with sliced carrots and little bitty marshmallows. Add Cool-Whip for the gourmet touch.
bleech
BR
RFK Jr is *today* joining in on twitter chemtrail conspiracies with “We are going to stop this crime.”:
https://xcancel.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1828160428154966286
Glad they now have three weirdos, two of have no message discipline and the other who has the charisma of dog vomit slime mold.
Ten Bears
LOL ~ my g’ma from the Edge of The Rez put browned beef, taco sauce and shredded cheese on soda crackers and called it enchiladas ~ in the sixties.
Jess
When I was traveling through South Dakota, all the food was so grotesque that I was longing for a Micky D’s at the next fuel stop. So scary.
mrmoshpotato
@Danielx:
Go on… 😋
The Audacity of Krope
I don’t know, such a slime mold sounds pretty compelling.
jackmac
Two words:
Fried bologna.
Chief Oshkosh
Ethel, Ragna, Hilma, Marilyn, Betsy, and Lydia have much to answer for…especially Ragna.
Doc Sardonic
VYE-Ana sausages aka The Fingers of Death…Nothing wrong with Deviled Ham, Spotted Dog etc, those are the staples of fox hunting, fishing, and a long night of dipping shrimp.
bbleh
Thing that kinda icks me out is all the happy talk about Tater Tots.
OVER FIFTY PERCENT of the calories in Tater Tots are from fat.
If you’re starving, okay. But as a choice of food to eat or to use in cooking it is Ungood.
BR
@The Audacity of Krope:
It is actually pretty fascinating:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuligo_septica
narya
@CaseyL: I have long contended that the main reason I grew up eating real, tasty food is that my grandmother emigrated from Italy. I was particularly amused when the foodie world discovered polenta; my grandmother’s pot roast and polenta remains a favorite, and it is cheap AF. Also: tasty.
The Audacity of Krope
@BR: No lie told.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@jackmac: Oh god. My stomach just rolled over.
japa21
@BigJimSlade: Frequently, the pepper referred to in pepper steak are green peppers.
CaseyL
Hey – got a question for the Jackalariat.
I’m doing postcards for Swing State project, right now doing postcards for NC.
I want to do some candidate-specific postcards particularly for the close races in Swing States.
I’ve found at least four organizations saying they’re doing postcards for swing state races. But I don’t know if they’re avoiding duplication or some poor voters are going to get, like 6 postcards
Postcards to Voters – the group I have done a fair bit of postcarding for – appears to be focusing on Florida. That’s fine, but I’d rather focus on WI, or MT, or PA, or even NC.
Who have you signed up with? Which organization can you recommend?
MattF
A lot of the now-wealthy European countries were quite poor pre-WWII. My Swiss friend in grad school once made a ‘traditional’ Swiss meal for his new girlfriend. Boiled potatoes.
JoyceCB
Ah, tapioca pudding for dessert! It was a treat, we all liked it, and no-one minded that my father always referred to the little round bits as “fish-eyes”. My mother stirred in mandarin orange segments (drained, from a can) and it was sublime.
funlady75
@Nancy: I make fresh green beans, fresh sliced mushrooms, sour cream, sweet yogurt tossed & onion rings on top in oven……..delish
Rachel Bakes
@JCJ: Took the words right out of my mouth; I was scrolling through to see if anyone else suggested him. We’ve made couple of recipes from his cookbook and they’re…varied. Some good, some edible but regrettable. Chocolate Sauerkraut cake was disturbingly delicious.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@BR:
I had an interesting exchange with a stranger (a Trump supporter, judging from those rubber bracelets people wear) on Friday. A middle-aged white guy, he was watching RFK JR’s announcement on Fox on his smartphone.
“This is going to make history, he was treated so badly by his own party, trying to get him off the ballot in several states.”
When I called Kennedy a loon, he actually asked me why I thought he was one. I wisely declined. He asked me a second time and I still declined.
Guy didn’t see anything nutso apparently about Kennedy. Utterly clueless too. Even talking about him as if he was still a Dem in good standing with the party and D’s were mistreating him or some shit. That guy hasn’t been a real Dem in several years. Even his own family has denounced him
ETA: Oh, and he also doesn’t watch “corporate media”, was only watching Fox because they were the only ones apparently carrying Kennedy’s withdrawal announcement
Jackie
BettyCracker
I laughed out loud and scared the cats!😂🤣😂
anitamargarita
Betty, what’s the name of the town? My mom had cookbooks from a couple of little ND towns where she and her family lived – Richardton, Regent, Dickinson. They were real bad.
RandomMonster
It’s not the flavor of tapioca, it’s the texture. It’s like having a bad head cold and swallowing snot.
BR
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
There was a poll I saw recently on favorables, somewhat disturbing — RFK Jr has the most negative net favorability of all the candidates among high information voters and the most positive net favorability among low information voters.
JCJ
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rrrCnk1QItQ?feature=share
This is a YouTube short from B. Dylan Hollis. He is energetic!
He has a bunch of these
Eric S.
Dylan Hollis does a bunch of shorts where he bakes old recipes. I apologize if this has already been posted but I think he’s hilarious.
ETA: And I see I wasn’t the first.
surfk9
@laura: My wife and I did that last month. It was great and we still have some great cheese.
Jackie
@lowtechcyclist:
My Depression Era dad loved tapioca until the day he died – at 99. He was on one hand sad his children and grandchildren didn’t like it; on the other hand, he cheerfully took our abandoned servings and proclaimed “More for me!”
Mel
Oh, Betty! Thank you for a much needed laugh.
This called to mind my mother’s favorite recipe from one of those horrifying 1950s cookbooks: “Italian Delite”.
There was neither anything remotely Italian, nor anything “Deliteful” about it. My brother and I used to try to slip globs of it under the table to the dog, who would recoil from it.
The dog was a farm Beagle who we had to regularly drag away frim his attempts to snack on horse poop and roadkill, but the “Italian Delite” was a step too far even for him.
Omnes Omnibus
You also need to remember that a lot of these recipes came before frozen vegetables were reliable. These are winter foods. Fresh things would be used in the summer and early fall.
RevRick
@JCJ: My wife says he’s hysterical. He actually makes the recipes and comments about the end product.
anitamargarita
@wjca:
yeah, depression cooking, and many of them lived far from any grocery store, so were heavily reliant on shelf stable items to supplement their gardens.
The Audacity of Krope
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Fried bologna was one of my favorite foods in Catholic School. They browned it nicely with caramelized onions. So tasty.
If you’ve ever eaten a hot dog out of the box, you may notice it tastes much like bologna. Frying some is not out of line.
scav
Entry from my father’s stomping ground (downstate IL) probably dating from 90s.
Fabulous Fudge
1 lb Velveeta cheese
1 lb oleo
1 C cocoa
1 tsp vanilla
4 lbs powdered sugar
Basically, melt and mix.
FastEdD
We used to call tapioca pudding TACKY-Opa when I was little.
When I was a starving substitute teacher making $27 a day I’d take a box of Rice A Roni, a pound of hamburger, and an onion and eat it for dinner all week. I survived.
Here is the gourmet recipe for Fried Bologna:
https://youtu.be/4Ltp1J_G8Ac?si=7vkkho2ywdExtbMP
RevRick
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?: My Hungarian grandmother is spinning in her grave. In fact, she may rise from her grave just to strangle Ragna’s corpse.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@BR:
If I had to guess, probably because he has “Kennedy” for a last name
anitamargarita
@Chief Oshkosh:
my mom was Hermine, with sisters Hilda and Ethel, lol.
edit, they all moved away as young women and did not contribute to these books.
Gravenstone
I got one that’ll probably curdle your stomach. In the early 80s someone came to the realization that mixing pre-sweetened drink mix (Country Time lemonade was a big one) with milk made an ersatz milkshake. I quite enjoyed them myself. Of course, I was also a teenager with a correspondently ravenous appetite and could get away eating shit like that.
RevRick
@scav: That made me shudder. It might taste like crap but all that fat and sugar has the brain going whoopee.
Gravenstone
@zhena gogolia: To be fair, in that recipe tapioca is solely a textural element. Just a replacement for the more traditional elbow macaroni. Someone probably gave it a whirl because had the one but not the other.
laura
@surfk9: I’ve just got some scraps left- I asked everyone to “shop the table” before they left to reduce waste and they complied. Did you pick up a cheese trail map? Do you have a favorite?
Jackie
@jackmac:
Another of my dad’s favorites! In fact, he probably would/did enjoy the majority of the recipes we’re mocking. The Depression taught most folks to do lots with little and be grateful.
MinbariSafari
@Betty Cracker: You’ll never notice it, I swear! Have you tried their slow cooker marinara that uses soy sauce? Same thing. It seems totally wrong, but damn if it doesn’t make a subtle but noticeable difference. Their slow cooker beef goulash uses a couple tablespoons of tapioca and all it does it make the sauce nice and silky smooth. Coats the egg noodles just right! :-)
Gravenstone
@scav: No. Noooooo. Just NO!
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
@RevRick: I’ve never looked up an authentic goulash recipe but suspect the real stuff doesn’t contain ground beef either. I’ve had it a couple times at German restaurants and it’s a stew with chunks of meat cooked slowly in a thick liquid until fall apart tender, served over spaetzle.
My mom used to make something called goulash that used ground beef, canned tomatoes and elbow macaroni. I liked it OK as a kid but it wasn’t authentic goulash.
The Audacity of Krope
@scav: Cheese doesn’t belong in fudge. Then again, Velveeta isn’t cheese.
JMG
I worked at a company whose main role was digitizing previously all-print publications, or archives, or whatever. One of my assignments was the back editions of “Dakota Sportsman,” a monthly about hunting and fishing in the Dakotas. Boy, did those people hate the Army Corps of Engineers. Anyway, it had a monthly recipe feature, and golly, they were all as horrible as the one cited above. The things they did to venison were crimes against humans and animals.
Peke Daddy
@zhena gogolia: It is pretty much a vehicle for sugar and vanilla, but I still like it.
Peke Daddy
@JCJ: Horrified half the time, pleasantly surprised to pleasantly shocked the other half.
RandomMonster
@Jackie: German immigrants would know about “Leberkaese”, which is just a kind of fried bologna. And quite tasty!
Betty Cracker
@anitamargarita: Towner, ND.
The Lodger
@zhena gogolia: In other words, chow mein.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat: Those do look good!
karen marie
I’m sorry, you’re picking on kool-aid pie when that fucking “shrimp and rice hot dish” is waving it’s disgusting arms at you?
Canned mushrooms, cooked shrimp, cubed cheese, and cooked rice baked together for 30 minutes.
I can only imagine the absolute fucking horror of that being set in front of me to eat
A kool-aid pie would be a welcome relief.
EarthWindFire
We called that American Chop Suey in my house and I have no idea where that horrible name came from.
Delk
Fried bologna
People wait in line for it.
Phein64
@jackmac: What are you saying? Fried baloney was a delicacy in our 1960’s kitchen, much better than headcheese, sauerkraut casserole, or brownie stew (ground beef and vegetable soup).
CaseyL
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?:
@EarthWindFire:
Isn’t… isn’t that basically Hamburger Helper?
BigJimSlade
@japa21: Ah, I was thinking of a steak pretty much coated in ground pepper, but my recipe still works as an example of goulash with no paprika (but at least it did have a green pepper).
Kayla Rudbek
@bbleh: as my sibling would joke to the non-Minnesotans, eating whole sticks of butter is how we deal with the winter temperatures. And honestly, Midwestern cuisine was designed to put meat on your ribs.
Jackie
@RandomMonster:My dad was an Okie and moved west during the Dust Bowl. Fried baloney was a real luxury and treat for his family.
Elizabelle
Grateful my mom was a good cook!
RandomMonster
@Jackie: Honestly, what’s not to like?
Jackie
@CaseyL: Probably well before Hamburger Helper became the novelty of the ‘60s.
frosty
@Ohio Mom: I’ve just been through North Dakota on this year’s Road Trip. Yep. The grocery stores don’t have all the stuff we’re used to.
Jackie
@RandomMonster: Not my cuppa tea. I don’t care for Spam, either🤷🏼♀️
stinger
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Fried baloney is much better than cold! Were you never a poor college student? LOL
frosty
@Nancy: Yes, you’re right. Green beans, mushroom soup and french fried onions is the traditional Thanksgiving dish. When I suggested abandoning it my son got the recipe and started making it!
CaseyL
@Jackie: Just wondering if that’s where General Mills got the idea!
Regarding tapioca pudding: I loved it as a kid, and have had it a couple times as an adult and loved it then, too.
“Tapioca as a thickener” solves the mystery of why there’s tapioca flour in non-grain flour mixes. I saw it on the list of ingredients and was baffled.
surfk9
@laura:Yes we did. We just did Napa county. Will use the map when we go to Sonoma county. We spend five or six weeks there each year and cheese tasting is not something we have done before. It was awesome.
We ended our excursion at Marin French. We had lunch by their lake. Just so sublime
surfk9
@laura: Our favorite for the cheese was Point Reyes, but for ambiance, Marin French
Mousebumples
@CaseyL: I’d expect Postcards to Voters to have more swing state campaigns as we get closer to voting and early voting. Their “mail in 3 days” policy makes it hard to do active GOTV for candidates in August.
No idea what’s on their agenda, but something is probably coming.
Might be able to put you in touch with a WisDems county party. I’m mostly not sure if they need you to get THEIR postcards, or if any generic GOTV postcards will work.
I can try to do some follow up, if you’re interested. Not sure on their messaging either. May be more “vote for MVP Harris, Senator Baldwin, and Dems up and down the ballot”. 🤷♀️
karen marie
@narya: I think the commentariat should make a cookbook. I want your grandma’s recipe for pot roast and polenta.
JeanneT
@JCJ: My 5 year old grandkid LOVES Dylan Hollis. Dylan makes cooking horrible food fun!
Kay
This whole post is hysterical.
There used to be a recipe magazine called “Taste of Home” – it may still exist. It was like combinations of processed foods, so cream of mushroom soup, ground beef and tater tots, like that. Marshmallows, graham cracker pie crust, melted Hershey bar, Cool Whip. I received it free for some reason, or maybe it was a secret gift, anyway, it came to my house for a while and I never paid for it.
When my daughter was a teenager she has SUCH contempt for that kind of food – she would be “it’s canned chicken glop in a crock pot- I’m not eating it”.
Kayla Rudbek
@karen marie: yeah, canned shrimp and canned mushrooms do not go together in my opinion. Although I am spoiled, having married into a New Orleans family.
Kayla Rudbek
@Jackie: my Depression-era grandfather would eat the MREs that my father brought home from Army Reserve duty.
kindness
Mom used to send us to school with sandwiches in small brown paper bags up until High School. Bolongna was common and we didn’t complain. One thing my Ma used to make were cream cheese & olive sandwiches. She would cut the olive in slices so each piece had some pimento. It was really good. I haven’t had one since I was a child but….
anitamargarita
@Betty Cracker:
thanks, not my people, tho their food wasn’t any better. Now I’m wondering if one of my sisters still has that cookbook. We had casseroles, not hot dish. Mostly German-speaking large families in the southwest corner of the state. I think they all used the same printer for their cookbooks.
Jackie
@Kayla Rudbek: My dad would have probably enjoyed, too!
Wake Hackle
My mother grew up in Duluth; her brother LOVED lime Jello with mayonnaise. When he was in hospice he asked for it but the staff refused to make it for him.
Jackie
One of my dad’s favorite treats was breaking up cornbread into big chunks and pouring buttermilk over it. Blech!
But we daughters and later, my daughter always made sure he had homemade cornbread and buttermilk 🥰
Tehanu
@The Audacity of Krope: I love tapioca pudding … YMMV.
@CaseyL: That was my mom. She didn’t like cooking but of course being a housewife with 4 kids she had to do it. I remember in the mid-1980s when my dad had a double bypass operation, I gave her the American Heart Association cookbook so she could cook healthier stuff for him. A few months later I asked her how she liked it, and she said, not very much, because every recipe required cutting up fresh vegetables. (To be fair, she did make some things that were terrific that her Jewish mother-in-law, my dad’s mom, who was a professional cook in a deli, taught her.)
Jackie
@Wake Hackle: My MiL from Crookston, MN introduced me to that concoction; thankfully I only had to “enjoy” once a year when the in-laws visited us in WA.
bluefoot
My aunt used to make jello pie: some mixture of Cool Whip and jello in a graham cracker crust.
However, I think people forget how difficult it was to get fresh ingredients back then. My parents grew a whole bunch of fruits and vegetables in our smallish suburban backyard, which is how I grew up eating good produce in season. But winters….that was mostly canned or frozen vegetables. Otherwise it was cardboard produce from the grocery store. We did eventually get good grocery stores (including Wegmans) but that wasnt until the 80s. My parents or their friends would make periodic trips to large cities w Asian markets to get spices and other ingredients we couldn’t get elsewhere.
When I went away to grad school, the produce in the grocery stores on Long Island was disgusting and the bins were black on the bottoms with a layer of rot. Someone once told me that the chain was mafia-owned (Pathmark? Waldbaums? I forget which.) and man, I could believe it. It was safer buying canned greens than fresh, even in the summer. moving to Northern California was such a welcome relief when it came to food.
Zelma
I grew up with recipes like that. My mother was a terrible cook and I fear I took after her. When my kids were young, I made lots of things with hamburger and condensed soup and canned tomatoes. I’ve been making the same meat loaf recipe since I was ten, 70 years ago. Here’s the funny thing: my daughter came for an extended visit and wanted me to make all the old favorites. And so I did. However, I drew the line at tuna noodle casserole.
Gin & Tonic
@The Audacity of Krope:
“Fish eggs in glue” is the best description I’ve ever heard.
Jackie
@bluefoot: Same here; dad migrated west from OK during the Dust Bowl as a child and he, his younger brothers and dad followed the growing seasons from CA up to WA and back, ending up in southeastern central WA. We always had fruit trees and a vegetable garden. We teased him about being a frustrated city farmer, but grew up appreciating fresh fruits and veggies (later in life after recognizing the difference between store bought vs farm to table.)
Betsy
@Jackie: Oh, that’s one of my favorite things to eat as an afternoon snack on a hot day, leftover cornbread crumbled into a nice glass of buttermilk, very re-energizing, just a tiny bit salty and full of calcium and potassium electrolytes to fill you back up when you’re wilting.
A name for it is “Tennessee Milkshake.”
Naturally, it’s got to be made with real (iron-skillet-made, no-sugar) old-fashioned cornbread, and good real buttermilk, or it would be nasty.
Mel
@Betsy: Cornbread in a bowl, topped with. sliced strawberries and a good pour of milk is my go-to summertime comfort food. So good!
jackmac
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
@Phein64: Fried bologna (or baloney, if you prefer) was also one of my dad’s mainstay meals and he seemed to love it. Dad and my mom were shaped by the Depression and cheap eats ruled in our South Side of Chicago two-flat.
Jackie
@Betsy: My dad would have loved you! He preferred a big cereal bowl of cornbread and buttermilk. He made it into a meal.
Gloria DryGarden
This thread is so funny, but also informative! I just came over from the jack smith thread, and I didn’t have enough swear words in my vocabulary to express my outrage and frustration, other than wanting to call Aileen cannon a puta. I’m pretty sure she’s Latina, and would know what that means. There’s nothing like a great foodie thread to make life seem interesting and hopeful again.
on tapioca: I loved it as pudding. Now that I’ve been baking or eating gluten free for 20+ years, I’m certainly familiar w tapioca, and cassava (the base plant from which tapioca starch is derived) and a whole bunch of other substitute flours. I used to buy the giant tapioca beads, boil them up and put with yogurt and fruit for a cooling fruit salad thing I’d take in my cooler for camping trips to Utah. It was DELICIOUS. That stupid wtf recipe is just misnamed, as many said, tapioca is a fine thickener. Hamburger mock goulash w tapioca thickener. If flour was rationed, you might still have other thickeners on hand, including tapioca.
I was born in 1958, my parents were born in 33. We ate glop often, hamburger w mushroom soup and liptons instant onion soup. Or creamed chip beef on toast. I think we ate spam on camping trips, yuck, but we also had lots of bologna sandwiches, although not fried. So growing up in the Midwest, a grandchild of military folk on one side and Swedish Scottish gardeners on the other, this whole range of cooking with what you have, strange canned cream soups and instant boxed things, and starches to extend the proteins and keep the kids fed, it’s all very familiar. The chow mein noodles, the saltines, the taco sauce from a can, 9 ways to season your ground beef.
It all makes sense now. Some of you have explained the WWll, post depression COOKING so many of us got a taste of. You’ve put it into context for me.
I’d have put the potato slices under the soup in that casserole, so the celery juices and soup liquids could steam it better, on top they might turn out too crispy. Obviously this cookbook needed a little editing for clarity. And canned shrimp, well, there’s no excuse for cooking it any further, they should just put it on top as a garnish, might even taste good, except with that canned food aftertaste.
It just strikes me as a slice of culinary history, very connected with different gradations of making do. My Swedish American grandmother eventually gifted me an old old world war 2 paperback cookbook, full of interesting substitutes and alternatives for flour, and other recipes. It was helpful, but also put in context for me that the war was sort of recent, it made the history of how people were affected, tangible.
I’m truly grateful I haven’t seen jello salad at a potluck in decades, do you remember how vile, how strange the additions were? For example Canned fruit cocktail in red jello, ugh, as bad as kool-aid pie.
in the midst of this context, growing up on glop, and cooking it a lot for the family when I was 7, I learned to cook and make delicious food by pouring a little of each seasoning I was using into my hand, to eyeball measure it. Not ever measuring it w teaspoons. By the time I was in middle school, my mom was helping me make gourmet fancy French food for school projects -including puff pastry from scratch, which takes several days -because I was appalled by the cooking curriculum that started with mixing ketchup and Heinz chili sauce (using measuring spoons) to spread on ritz crackers and baking. It’s a funny mix of contexts, the glop, the canned soups, the instant boxed mixes, the 1960s and 70s canned foods, and the cakes from scratch, the French and Chinese food cookbooks we got recipes from.
I am now desperate to try schrodingers cat’s tapioca fritters w coconut cilantro chutney.
It’s fun to know about great cooking people got from their people’s home countries, Italian, Indian, Hungarian, German. And all these posts made me laugh so hard, thank you, I really needed that.
Gloria DryGarden
@Zelma: please share your meatloaf recipe.
tuna noodle casserole isn’t that bad. I just ate tuna straight from a can a few days back, no mayo, just on crackers, and it was intense. I was in a hurry. It definitely needed something to dilute it.
Gloria DryGarden
On a visit to Sweden, staying with the fallibly of a friend, we ate Wasa crackers broken up into a bowl of buttermilk. It was delicious.
bluefoot
@Jackie: my dad admitted straight up that he was a frustrated farmer at heart, so I hear you on that! He had also been a displaced person in his youth so being able to have a reliable food supply was important to him. I grew up in a big family too – I’m not sure my parents could have fed us sufficiently without growing food. I remember my mom canning tomatoes and pears in the fall, and storing apples in the basement for the winter.
I was just at a farmer’s market today, and was missing the taste of freshly picked fruit and eating peas right off the vine. I wish I owned some land so I could plant fruit trees and grow veggies.
Jackie
@Gloria DryGarden: It IS a fun thread! I was double-wammied as a kid; there was 15 years between my parents, so I grew up with a combo of Depression era + post WWII foods.
Now I really appreciate the abundance and varieties of meats/seafoods and fresh fruits/veggies available at today’s grocery stores we take for granted today!
But, NOTHING replaces garden veggies and fruits from the tree and vines.
Ph64n
@jackmac: My dad was the youngest of 11 in a three bedroom house overlooking the steel mills on the north side of Pittsburgh. He knew from headcheese. My moms family had staff, so she never learned to cook until they were married. They met in the air force in japan during the Korean war, and the one thing she did learn was to make chow mein with leftover pork, which she made until he died 40 years later. Strangely, my Norwegian Lutheran wife loved it, too.
Jackie
@bluefoot: I hear you, too!😊
Jackie
@Ph64n: ♥️
bluefoot
@Jackie: To this day I’m a snob about perfectly ripe apples and I still like plums just slightly underripe. As I kid I was never patient enough to wait for the plums to get fully ripe, and eventually preferred them more tart and slightly hard. Amusingly, plums are the one fruit that are almost always fully ripe in the store. I am constantly frustrated. 😁
jonas
@Elly: Lol! I was thinking the exact same thing. The 50’s-60’s food styling and photography are something to behold.
Mark’s Bubbie
@JCJ: Thanks so much for this. The short videos are a little manic for me but I really like the long ones. Lately when I cannot bear any more politics I watch Thee Burger Guy’s videos. Also fun.
Jackie
@bluefoot: I miss eating peaches from the tree. Juices mixed with fuzz running down my chin, to be washed off from the hose. Stores don’t sell peaches like that.
And eating Bing cherries from the tree; spitting the seeds out in the backyard… then stepping on them while barefoot and trying not to cuss from pain within mom’s hearing…
jonas
As people have been pointing out, a lot of these wacky recipes are relics of the Great Depression and WWII-era food rationing when families had to come up with all sorts of substitutes and short-cuts in lieu of real food, especially meat and vegetables. If you didn’t grow your own “victory garden,” choices were pretty limited. So, e.g. the creamy, piquant paprika sauce over tender slices of beef or pork loin that constitutes actual Hungarian goulash became “inexpensive ground beef stretched with your Italian neighbor’s tomato sauce and macaroni”. Or actual lemon meringue pie with lemon juice and egg whites became condensed milk with Jell-O mix thrown in.
My mom remembers a “fancy” pasta dinner prepared (this would have been the 60s) by a college roommate from (IIRC) Ohio or Indiana once that consisted of macaroni topped with a sauce made from thinned-out ketchup and sugar (and maybe butter or oil?). The girl was really proud of herself because she thought it tasted “just like home.” My mom couldn’t quite find the words to describe it…
jonas
Or apricots or plums. They don’t ship well, so they pick them half-green and then hope they’ll ripen up on the 2000-mile truck or train ride before going bad. I once tried an apricot up here in the northeast that had been shipped from California or something and it was like biting into a nasty, hard chunk of bitter sadness.
Jackie
@jonas: As my MiL would have said… Oy!
Jackie
@jonas: I’m in prime fruit tree country and we still can’t get locally grown fruits in the stores. It’s sad. Of course we do have farmers markets, but you’ve got to be there at the crack of dawn to have any chance of scoring before everything’s gone. I usually have young grandkiddos on the wknd – so that’s generally a no-go.
columbusqueen
@Jackie: One of my dad’s, too. He was a Depression baby from northwest Georgia.
Gloria DryGarden
@Gloria DryGarden: family.
what is autocorrect trying to do to me?
It’s trying to change to “autocrat”, I swear, and making word salad like some candidate for dictator (forgot his name)
Manyakitty
@bluefoot: late to the thread, but in case you check back, try container gardening if you have a small patio or balcony. So satisfying.
pluky
@narya: Same reaction I had to the ‘discovery’ of kale. I’m from the Tidewater of Virginia. I’d been eating kale (under the general label of ‘greens’) since I was weaned in the early 60’s.
Colette South
@Ohio Mom: read Molly Yeh’s cookbooks for an interesting and useful account of eating and cooking in eastern North Dakota/ western Minnesota today. You’ll find things you want to make and eat.
Paul in KY
@lowtechcyclist: My mom used to make a nice tapioca pudding.
Paul in KY
@Doc Sardonic: My dad loved vienna sausages & spam. Reminded him of some good times in the military. Plus, he came from the deep depression and would eat anything.
True story: I asked him one time if he’d ever ate a coyote and he said yes. I then asked him what it tasted like and he looked at me like I was an idiot and said “Just like a dog.”
Angua
In the 1950s my mom used tapioca as a thickener. The saltine cracker pie was a recipe that I often saw used somehow as a substitute for apple pies. I never tried it and wasn’t really convinced that it would work.
Pittsburgh Mike
Kool-aid pie made my day!
Pittsburgh Mike
I remember a recipe for “Mock Apple Pie” on a box of Ritz crackers. I never got how it was supposed to work.
The 60’s had great music, but it’s amazing we survived the food.