This is a good website also, if you like to hear stories about Farming Life in the 30's. Not much to do with cooking, I'm afraid. ... It's a bit hard to navigate, so here are 3 of the more interesting story tellers. Carla Due, on Farming with Mules, and other stories Helen Bolton, on Butchering and Cooking, plus Elroy Hoffman, on Cream and Eggs, plus
"Written in 1933 by Bill Cox, N.R.A. Blues was inspired by FDR's National Industrial Recovery Act of the Great Depression, which promised relief, reform and recovery. The Great Depression was the most severe economic downturn of the 20th century."
We grew up poor and I can still remember eating Grandma's depression onion sandwiches, made with sliced onion,sliced white bread, and saved bacon fat for a spread.
Simply amazing ! I would have NEVER considered pizza as a depression meal, but I guess in areas where it was a common food, then it would have been. I never tasted pizza (or even knew it existed) until well into my teenage years, and then it was those little boxes of pizza mix (Apian Way ?) that we bought at the grocery store. They had flour and yeast for the dough, a tiny can of pizza sauce, and a little packet of shredded cheese to put on the top, and that was what we kids made for pizza. We all wondered why it was called a “pie” , since it didn’t even begin to resemble any pie we had ever seen. When I was in high school, our chemistry teacher decided to open a Pizza Parlor in Sandpoint, and it actually went over really well. Many people in our little town had never had real pizza before, and even though it was expensive (at least to us) we loved having pizza with more stuff on it than just tomato sauce and shredded cheese. When I was out riding on my horse, I would collect the sponge-type mushrooms, bring them home and wash and chop them, and they were great on the homemade pizza.
Fried Tomato Cakes Made with ripe tomatoes, onions, and saltine crackers Recipe (click image to enlarge)
I was born at the height of the depression, but we weren't poor. Nor was anyone else I knew in my immediate neighborhood. As I was growing though, just a few blocks from where I lived, you could see poor kids all over the place. People who had some money were always giving them food and clothing especially to wear to school. There were two kids from a couple of blocks away who kept wandering into our block and my mom scrubbed them from head to toe, fed them and sent them home with clothes and food. They returned a couple of weeks later and the routine began again. We moved just before the war broke out, but things were on the uptick by then.
My mom and dad went through the Great Depression. they lived out in the country, so they had a milk cow and a garden, and were able to go hunting for meat (in season). In fact, the game warden would give my parents extra ammunition so that they could hunt for a deer for families that were not able to hunt and get their own meat that way, and he know that my folks would not take a shot unless they knew it would killl the deer and lot wound it and let it run away to die eventually. Even though I was not born until 1945, we probably still ate about the same kinds of meals that my folks had during the depression. One of my favorites was Spanish Rice, which was rice seasoned with cayenne and red pepper, and cooked with green pepper and onion, (or at least onion) and hamburger if we had that. I was making this for us to eat today, and that reminded me of my mom making it way back when I was a little kid, and how much I enjoyed Spanish Rice, even back then. We have pretty much only been making one main meal each day, and it is often a one-pot meal , like the Spanish rice. We eat as much as we want, and then snack on something else if we are hungry later on.
Oh, I remember Spanish rice well, Yvonne. We had that often as kids. As a matter of fact I will probably make some this week. I've run out of frozen pizza, and pasta.
Here is another old time meal that I just discovered, tried, and really, really like ! It is basically cabbage and noodles, although I had some leftover chicken, which I added to the recipe, since I needed to use up the chicken. I have been having a lot more cabbage lately, and I find that it is a veggie that I really like and didn’t truly know the versatility of . Except for adding cabbage to soup sometimes, I mostly just made coleslaw with it. Now, I have found that I like it for breakfast sautés, and maybe with rice or an egg on top (or both). Anyway, here is the cabbage and noodles recipe.
I remember sometime during the 60s finding and old cookbook of of my mom's, 365 ways to cook hamburger. It was published during the depression as apparently that was the olny meat available at the time plentiful enough for everyone to buy. Some of those recipes were pretty good as I recall.
I used to have my mom's cook book that she got when in high school. It was a Betty Crocker cook book. I've apparently had a senior moment or two and misplaced it.