A Depression Meal A "romantic" look back at the depression! -Milk or Water -Cornbread with Apricot Jam and Butter -Fresh Cucumber Pickles -Garden Tomatoes -Hoover Stew -Baked Bean Sandwiches -Cottage Cheese and Prune Sandwiches -Tootsie Pops -Whitman's Chocolate Sampler -Crazy Cake
Joe, that Hoover Stew (from your link) looks like something I might throw together when the cupboard is bare, or nearly. Things look so much better in color. lol I've been hoping someone would start some threads on the depression. The old photos are so interesting. Hope this fits here. Soup kitchen The Schade Brewery, Spokane, WA, vacant because of Prohibition, became a soup kitchen for hundreds of transients camped near the Spokane River.
I'll take a baked bean sandwich with onions and ketchup on white bread!!! I've always been interested in day to day life during the great depression. A series of 5 cookbooks by Rita VanAmber and her daughter called The Stories and Recipes of the Great Depression of the 1930's are filled with interesting little stories about family life with recipes. Another great little book is called. A Nickel's Worth of Skim Milk: A Boy's View of the Great Depression by Robert J. Hastings. Young fellas like these grew up fast in those days.
91 year old cook and great grandmother, Clara, recounts her childhood during the Great Depression as she prepares meals from the era. Learn how to make simple yet delicious dishes while listening to stories from the Depression.
My mom and dad went through the depression on their farm up in Idaho (same place where I have talked about living in my little trailer), and they used to talk about some of the things that life was like for them. Since they had a cow, they could walk to town with pails of fresh milk, which they sold, or traded for something else that they needed that another person was selling. People had to depend on wild game for meat most of the time, even when it was not hunting season, and the game wardens pretty much ignored it because they knew that families had kids to feed. However, not everyone was a good shot with a hunting rifle, and sometimes, the deer was only wounded, and then would go off somewhere and die, which didn’t help anyone to have food, and it depleted the supply of meat that was feeding people. Because both my mom and my dad were excellent shots, the game warden would supply them with ammunition so that they could help other families have a deer to feed their family with. My dad with his hunting rifle. After mom and daddy passed away, their old rifles went to my sons, and they cherish them. My oldest son now hunts his venison each year, using the same old 30:30 rifle that his grandfather used back in the Great Depression.
93 year old cook and great grandmother, Clara, recounts her childhood during the Great Depression as she prepares meals from the era. Learn how to make simple yet delicious dishes while listening to stories from the Great Depression. Great Depression Cooking - Depression Breakfast
In the1940 movie "The Grapes of Wrath", the migrant sharecropper families coming to California from their ruined Dust Bowl farms ate Fried Dough to keep alive. I was born in the Great Depression year of 1936. The worst year was 1933, when FDR was inaugurated President. He did not attend the Inaugural Ball, but instead launched on a frantic program to provide emergency relief for the unemployed and disenfranchised. The emergency measures swiftly enacted were known collectively as the "New Deal". Hal
I'd say this lady came from a well-to-do Depression family, as she had sugar, butter, and condensed milk. My wife's and my family did okay as they were gardeners and farmers. They had potatoes, chicken (on Sundays), and home-produced eggs, but sugar was a rarity and butter was available only if you had a cow and a churn. If things went bad again, we could get by okay as we have heat and water available, and we raise much of our own food, but it wouldn't be pleasant.
I had to smile, when we sat done to supper, tonight. We had a favorite: Wiener Bean Pot.... a casserole with baked beans, wieners cut up, with ketchup, mustard, water, brown sugar, and minced onions. We had a couple of buttered biscuits with it. I had to tell my Wife "we're having a depression meal! ....made us both smile.
Pass the creamed peas, please!!! A roux of bacon grease or butter and flour, milk, a can of peas with the liquid and a little S&P. Serve over baked potatoes, noodles, rice, toast, biscuits or even pancakes. If times are good toss in a can of tuna packed in water.