Thank you for sharing these. I have not had a salary for 2 years but had a pantry full of things like baked beans and tomatoes and corn and rice and oats. My prep was inspired by generations of relatives who lived through the Depression and WWII food rationing and poverty, and eventually fixed income with social security of less than $8000 per year, that generation is why I prepped the way I did. But you have just added to my understanding of how to add in things like vegetables in a tasty, cheap way.
Grew up with some of these recipes. We had a (small) large family. But my mom came from a large family. Installed in me the way to make something out of "nothing". LOVE IT
Mom said her family didn't have that many leftovers to cook. She was also asked what they did with their garbage. She answered that they didn't have any. They ate it. Anything else went to the animals.
My grandma grew up during the great depression. Her family owned a farm so they made it through with enough food, but still had to stretch it sometimes, especially in the winter. Every week of her life, until her mid 80s at least, she made a ham for sunday dinner at church and then monday used the ham bone to make ham and beans. Just great northern beans/butter beans, an onion, a bay leaf, the ham bone, and water. She loved ham and beans.
My grandpa talked about eating biscuits and ‘sawmill gravy’ made from flour, water, and bacon fat. He said that’s all they had to eat during the worst of the Depression years. He said his family almost starved to death.
@@trishaporteIt is a special kind of rude and tone deaf to hear someone say their family nearly starved to death and you completely skip that part and act like what they survived on is preferable (“Delicious!!” even) to having nutritious food. Have some respect.
My grandmother’s cooking never went outside the depression era resources. Their farm house always smelled amazing and the food was delicious. She used to make this raisin bread in a soup can at Christmas and her own mints. She taught my mom and my mom taught me. ❤
I just downloaded it. I'm 70 and we had 9 kids from 1949 to 1967 that survived. Every 2 months we received government surplus food, and had a quarter acre garden
@laurellewis1638 I thought so, too. The only possible excuse in my mind is if there were large number of Italian immigrants. Still, if you are using olive oil, you can't be doing that bad!
New Yorkers already cooked in olive oil in the 1930s as they were extremely wealthy compared to the rest of the country. Now IRONICALLY millenial New Yorkers pine for lard, butter and suet!!
I've made and eaten every one of these! All are delicious, fast and easy to make. My mother was an incredible cook and could turn almost anything into a "gourmet" meal. Thankfully she insisted that both my brother and I learned to cook. I taught my son and he's very accomplished in the kitchen too. My husband is spoiled and doesn't like eating out much.
My mother and grandmother made rice pudding with raisins. They were from the north, but I was raised in Texas. I discovered bread pudding in college and fell in love with it! No more rice pudding for me! Also, my mother-in-law used only half the cheese that came in the Kraft Mac and cheese. I'm getting pretty good at making homemade minestrone soup, but also eat canned. 👍🤠
These are recipes from the 60's and 70's not the depression. My father said a common meal when working outside during the depression was lard on homemade bread.
I agree, this is far from depression era cooking, especially with the images portraying chefs and plating. In the depression, you were lucky to have a cast iron skillet and a soup pot.
I grew up in the 1940s, the most delicious thing was dripping on toast...that's the dripping saved from the roast meat , definitely with crunchy bits! Mum bottled fruit,made jam, but we did live on a farm, with our own milk etc.
I never understood how people couldn't like raisins they are so sweet and harmless not bitter or funky tasting . Now liver I could understand even though I love it
The recipes you suggest are good, but my Fathers family of 7 grew up in the great depression and those recipes would not have been known to them. He did talk about shooting pigeons on the Boston Garden and his family sharing one block of cream cheese for dinner.
I have endless Respect for the great Ladies that cooked for their families during this hard time in our Country! Including both my grandmothers who somehow kept everyone fed. (& fed Well) on a little of nothin!! I think they could have made an old Shoe taste good! Not to mention Big families! Back then it was about Survival & they came through just Fine!! ❤🇺🇸
My mother who died at 95 had all sorts of good tales from The Great Depression in southern Indiana. They ate anything on 4 legs that moved......possum. racoon (she said racoon was very greasy). squirrel, . To this day I can't get my corn bread and apple pies to taste as good as hers. She knew all kinds of tricks.
@@loisruthstrom8143 I use the Jiffy mix with 2 eggs, melted butter, 1/3 cup "1/2 and 1/2" cream and 3 table spoons sugar. Comes out pretty good......but I'm always looking other good ideas. Sometimes I'll put a tablespoon of white cake mix in the batter.
These are things that people eat today in most countries and are not considered poor man's meal. Americans have to re-evaluate their priorities I feel.
Sad my mom only had biscuits and onions for lunch. My mom said never again and she n my dad gave us anything we wanted a brand new car when I was 16. Miss n love them
My mother in law kept leftover bits of meat and vegetables in a freezer container. When it was was close to full, she made Garbage Soup!!! Used V-8 or Tomato juice and chicken or beef broth!
I think I would've called it "leftovers soup" or "potluck soup". "Garbage soup" sounds like that's where the ingredients came from. And during that tough time, many homeless people did resort to that!
Here in Oklahoma during those times my grandparents had gardens and small farms with livestock so when they couldn't afford to go to the stores they improvised the best that they could especially with vegetables, flour, cornbread, dairy and other rural Oklahoma ways of keeping everyone fed during these times thanks for the great delicious memories of the past thank you.😋🍖🥒🌽🍅🫑🥓😋
My Uncle put his crops in at my Grandparents, he had cornfields Grandma pick field corn before it got hard and passed it off as sweetcorn to us grandkids! My mom recalls of Lard sandwich and ketchup sandwiches for school lunches!
So many of these are still my favorite meals. The one I especially reacted to was the Johnny Cakes. If you mix the ingredients together, pat out flat patties and drop them on top of Collards or cabbage, they become yummy dumplins!!! Thank you for these reminders. My mother grew up in the depression and we ate so many of these regularly. Yum. :)
Loved this video, great food, great narration! I still make many of these iconic recipes as many still do i.e. grilled cheese sandwiches, mac and cheese which was actually made in colonial times! I was born in 1948 and we ate some of these in the 1950s and 60s and continued to make them for my kids. The recipes here on this video are very healthy. My late paternal grandmother born in 1879 was a Blue Ribbon winner for her pies at the country fairs in Pennsylvania Dutch country, her native background and she made great homemade corn or apple fritters and her homemade donuts were to die for, puts Dunkin Donuts to shame! My other maternal grandmother born in 1887 was also a fabulous cook and baker from Cape Cod so I grew up eating both homemade from scatch Penn. Dutch foods and Yankee New England foods, many recipes from the 1700s-1800s! Thanks for jogging my memory of many of these foods! ♥♥♥🥘🍲🍲🍳🍳👩🍳
My mother in Bavaria, Germany, on my parents farm, often cooked these foods, or some very similar to them, in the 1960s n 70s still, i remember the rice pudding with raisins, egg drop noodle soup, cabbage rolls, e.g.
My grandma refused to toss out food like we tend to now. I had a lot of French toast as a little kid because she didn't want to let the bread go stale.
It was. We got the recipe before she passed. But it's not the same. She used a little bit of maple syrup and sometimes a little bit of milk in the egg then wisked. Then added cinnamon while it was cooking.
NO food leaves my household in the trash. ALL food is used, with us humans consuming my useups, leftovers, makedos etc then things like vegetable and fruit peelings, eggshells, tealeaves, bones from fish, lamb or beef soup, stews etc going to the chooks, wormfarm or garden compost. My chooks repay me in eggs.
My grandpa was born in 1936 and he said he was still eating like the depression growing up i guess cause of the big one but he told me about victory gardens and shooting and skinning gophers for his neighbors he got a bag of veggies and got to keep the gophers for ridding his neighbors garden of them and his dad remembered being a teen just married and riding the rails to feed his family and I think he stopped by Capones soup kitchen..so I honestly remember hearing about the depression and big one growing up and eating nearly all of this stuff and still make some of it i guess they were trying to make me not feel so bad lol...but by the 80s we were doing slightly better than them
Perhaps from the many Italians in California who taught the Okies and Arkies from the Dust Bowl to use chick peas. I don't think Southerners or Midwesterners were familiar with garbazo beans.
Haha!! "The thought of raisins makes me want to retch." Some of your comments are hilarious! Remember, raisins are nature's candy... 😂🤭 Thanks for sharing all of these, they do actually give me dinner ideas and are appreciated!
Baked apples go a lot farther and are more filling if they are made into pie with 2 crusts or cobbler with one crust. Depression era cooks stretched all ingredients so would add pastry, not just serve apples.
I make a soup like the first one frequently- I call it "Waste Not Soup.' Its great for using up little bits in the pantry. I always make sure I have a grain, a bean or legume, and two veggies, and if I have a bit of meat, even better. Its never the same soup twice, and paired with fresh French Baguettes, is a fantastic and wholesome meal that can give us some leftovers too!
I grew up eating or making most of these dishes. I liked rice and raisins until one day my dad wanted me to reheat the leftovers and the “raisins “ were moving and crawling about. I tossed it out…Dad was very upset over it lol to this day I refuse to make, or eat it lol. Even white rice I won’t touch it nor raisins by themselves lmbo. Back then if there were leftovers they were left on the warmer..a shelf built into the old wood burning cook stove. So yes bugs would get into food from time to time. Yes I am an old woman now, we were a large family…so we did most things differently then most. Most of the recipes I still use from time to time. I do believe we will be seeing those times again. At least I know how to squeeze that buffalo nickel until it craps lol.
It would be a global heavy hitter not like the soft recession we got now. If we get stuff with tariffs 200%+- on goods, we will be far back in 1930 with project 2025 making even more worse. Also with China economy practically on the verge of collapse, we could get hit that way as a rebound effect. At least now, while maybe not great, it’s still fixable. 2020 left so many after effects because later 2019 and 2020 was so badly handled. Who waits four months to tell the country about a global pandemic or undermined doctors?! Just so the rich could sell their stock before crashing the economy
I was not part of great depression, however we were not rich, I grew up on creamed peas on toast, and creamed SOS on toast lots of potatoes fried baked mashed and cabbage soup with carrots and potatoes and some ham bone my mom would freeze. We also had rice pudding but with no raisins, Thanks for the memories.
i m not poor, but this homemade soup, and versions of it (i like to fry the veggies in my soup pot before adding water, e.g., to get that roasted flavor) have been my go to food for decades, i m sometimes too tired or just too lazy to cook, so i always have a pot of alredy prepared veggie soup in my fridge, add a llitte smoked tofu or some other vegan protein, and it s even a non-expensive whole meal. If you prepare it in a hygienic way, this soup stays edible for 1 week in the fridge easily...
If you fry finely chopped carrot 🥕and onions 🧅before adding your tomatoes 🍅🍅to it, your tomato soup will not only taste better, you will also avoid heartburn. The carrot balances the acidity of the tomatoes much better than sugar. 🥣
The safest way to handle rice after you cook some is to refrigerate it right away. Letting it sit out for too long allows the bacteria to start growing. Then when you want to use it again, make sure you heat it thoroughly. I use leftover rice in stir fries and to make various patties (bean, mushroom, etc.) Have never had a problem.
I grew up in the 70s with a depression era Mama. One of our gotos was macaroni with oleo and garlic. I had no idea that spaghetti with meat sauce existed until free school lunches came along.
It's amazing how during depression era people no food available but the blokes were still smoking and some even drinking. So they couldn't be that hard up right.
We were poor sometimes, but we didn’t know it. We ate vegetables soup a lot, with bread or potatoes. We had fruit soup for dessert or snacks. We ate a lot of pancakes too.
My meals growing up in the 50s were many of the same you are showing here. We were not in a depression, but my parents grew up in the depression, my father fought in ww2, so i think many of these recipes were "comfort" foods for them.
I remember my grandpa used to put leftover food on a tea cup plate that amounted to 3 tbsp. I asked my dad why my grandpa was saving such a small amount of food. He told me that he lived through a time when he didn't eat for days so he saved everything.
I had a can of carrots that I had no idea what to do with. So I used them to make Carrot Croquetts with some mushrooms. My roommate at the time thought it was great!
My 96-year-old friend told me his mom made "son of a gun soup." She kept a pot of broth/water simmering on the back of the coal stove constantly and all the left overs from meals were scraped into that pot. On Saturday, this was served up as soup.
Depending on where you lived in the US determined just how deprived you were of food sources. The east coast and Midwest suffered the most. Very few families had access to the food in this video. Most of these meals are just regular 50's on through the 70's and even 80's....and EMERSION BLENDERS DIDNT EXIST.
Many of these are/were usual in Argentina, but not because of the depression. Minestrone, as many others, was common when all people used to cook from scratch & eat home food. Mac-and-cheese is "fideos con manteca", (pasta with butter + grated cheese of course, unless you are really counting cents). Cabbage rolls are called "niños envueltos" 😁 which means "wrapped children" but they are a rarity these days. Too much work. Spaghetti with garlic & olive oil is spaghetti aglio e olio, which my Italian dad loved (well, he loved pasta everything, but he couldn't pass a day without meat actually) Deviled eggs. My mom used to make them for every special day or gatherings, but without pickles. She used to mix the yolks with pâté de foie, maybe something else that I don't remember. Rice pudding with raisins is "arroz con leche" (rice with milk) which is delicious without the raisins and without anything but cinnamon and vanilla. And if you leave it cook until the milk gets more creamy and looking brown, you get arroz with dulce de leche 😋😋😋 The best rice is double Carolina (thicker grains and more starch) but if you aim to get to dulce de leche, you need a rice that needs a longer cooking to get creamy.
My grandma, 9 at the time would take her sister 5 at the time to the soip kitchen and sit with the 'tramps' as she called them? And her mother got cross when she found out, because her husband had a job and they didnt 'need' too, they had foos... My nan said she went there because the soup was tasty, and it was warm inside. Bless her. 🌼✨
We'd crack an egg, mix with a little milk (if available) and throw it in as well, giving a protein component. This is called German potatoes at least by us. If you had a little ham, so much the better to potato & carrot hash.
My grandma used to tell us every so often that many a time they had nothing but lard.....LARD spread on bread sprinkled with salt and pepper and whatever greens they could find in the yard or at the side of the fields sauteed in bacon fat and sprinkled with vinegar. Another dinner great-granny used to make was squirrel stew, and once in a while great-grandpa would shoot a raccoon and smoke it.
HINT: To instantly make a grilled cheese taste better : sprinkle some salt on it after you take it from the frying pan.......not too much now just a little salt on top.
You forgot one that my parents had a lot when I was young and that was pork and bean sandwich with pickles, onions, and mayonnaise. They would mash the beans mix it with mayonnaise and put it on bread and eat it back then I didn’t like it. I might eat it now, but I didn’t really like legumes much back then
Don’t be surprised by fried green tomatoes. In the South we fry everything. Yellow squash, zucchini, okra , pickles, green beans,eggplant and yes green tomatoes.
You did not mention, macaroni and tomato juice. It's based on the Mac & cheese dish. I hated it, but my mom was born in 1935, she and her family were raised on it.
Do you see any economic challenges today that remind you of the Great Depression?
tRUMP
@@ellisprescott1415Scary story 😳
Thank you for sharing these. I have not had a salary for 2 years but had a pantry full of things like baked beans and tomatoes and corn and rice and oats. My prep was inspired by generations of relatives who lived through the Depression and WWII food rationing and poverty, and eventually fixed income with social security of less than $8000 per year, that generation is why I prepped the way I did. But you have just added to my understanding of how to add in things like vegetables in a tasty, cheap way.
Bread pudding was dry bread soaked in milk
Cinnamon and raisins with sugar made it delicious
Ask again in a year after Trump and Elon Musk ruin the economy.
I was raised by women who lived through the great depression and I have and still do cook all of these meals. All are delisious.
Ate these foods growing up n the 60's. Still do. Never considered anything a "poor man's meal."
Grew up with some of these recipes. We had a (small) large family. But my mom came from a large family. Installed in me the way to make something out of "nothing". LOVE IT
Mom said her family didn't have that many leftovers to cook.
She was also asked what they did with their garbage. She answered that they didn't have any. They ate it. Anything else went to the animals.
On this topic, I still cook with this mindset. Don't waste anything and make a recipe using what I had. I was taught that.
Z
My grandma grew up during the great depression. Her family owned a farm so they made it through with enough food, but still had to stretch it sometimes, especially in the winter. Every week of her life, until her mid 80s at least, she made a ham for sunday dinner at church and then monday used the ham bone to make ham and beans. Just great northern beans/butter beans, an onion, a bay leaf, the ham bone, and water. She loved ham and beans.
I make some of these recipes now and learned about a few new ones! Simplicity at its finest and not wasteful- we should all practice these ideas
The point is that this person is lying these are not & were NOT part of the GREAT depression MEALS
My grandpa talked about eating biscuits and ‘sawmill gravy’ made from flour, water, and bacon fat. He said that’s all they had to eat during the worst of the Depression years. He said his family almost starved to death.
My dad used to eat ketchup sandwiches and my mother ate mayonnaise sandwiches.
Good heavens! That’s the only way to make decent gravy!! That said, I have always used corn starch rather than flour.
Delicious!!!
@@trishaporteIt is a special kind of rude and tone deaf to hear someone say their family nearly starved to death and you completely skip that part and act like what they survived on is preferable (“Delicious!!” even) to having nutritious food. Have some respect.
@@gelatinpacket Not certain what you’re talking about.
My grandmother’s cooking never went outside the depression era resources. Their farm house always smelled amazing and the food was delicious. She used to make this raisin bread in a soup can at Christmas and her own mints. She taught my mom and my mom taught me. ❤
This video is relevant today.. Price of groceries becoming difficult feeding a family
I just downloaded it. I'm 70 and we had 9 kids from 1949 to 1967 that survived. Every 2 months we received government surplus food, and had a quarter acre garden
A lot of these meals that you are showing us some people actually eat today.
Yes, like soup!
Colcannon (cabbage and potatoes) quite normal in Ireland
I still eat many of these
That’s because a lot of these aren’t what they ate then. I don’t know who wrote this list but it’s way off.
Who on earth had olive oil during the Depression? Maybe it is just a regional thing. We would have used grease or lard here.
agreed. Bacon grease or lard
@@scrabtr67 I agree, this is not historically accurate at all, insulting to the folks who actually survived the Depression
@laurellewis1638 I thought so, too. The only possible excuse in my mind is if there were large number of Italian immigrants. Still, if you are using olive oil, you can't be doing that bad!
New Yorkers already cooked in olive oil in the 1930s as they were extremely wealthy compared to the rest of the country. Now IRONICALLY millenial New Yorkers pine for lard, butter and suet!!
I don’t think there were ‘expiration dates’ either
rustic veg soup
corn fritters
mac and cheese
tomato soup w rice
Bread pudding w veg
spagh w garlic n olive oil
deviled eggs w pickles
carrot n potato hash
onion n potato fritatta
rice pudding w raisins
baked apples w cinnamon
fried rice w veg
grilled cheese sandw
egg drop soup
mashed potato patties
vegetable pancakes
sw potato bisque
fried green tomatoes
baked potatoes
cabbage potato stew
chickpea salad
minestrone soup
Veg stir fry w rice
Cabbage rolls
Potato leek soup
Thank you paragraph guy.
I've made and eaten every one of these! All are delicious, fast and easy to make. My mother was an incredible cook and could turn almost anything into a "gourmet" meal. Thankfully she insisted that both my brother and I learned to cook. I taught my son and he's very accomplished in the kitchen too. My husband is spoiled and doesn't like eating out much.
Thanks for the list
My mother and grandmother made rice pudding with raisins. They were from the north, but I was raised in Texas. I discovered bread pudding in college and fell in love with it! No more rice pudding for me! Also, my mother-in-law used only half the cheese that came in the Kraft Mac and cheese. I'm getting pretty good at making homemade minestrone soup, but also eat canned. 👍🤠
These are recipes from the 60's and 70's not the depression. My father said a common meal when working outside during the depression was lard on homemade bread.
I agree, this is far from depression era cooking, especially with the images portraying chefs and plating. In the depression, you were lucky to have a cast iron skillet and a soup pot.
I grew up in the 1940s, the most delicious thing was dripping on toast...that's the dripping saved from the roast meat , definitely with crunchy bits! Mum bottled fruit,made jam, but we did live on a farm, with our own milk etc.
My Grandmother said she remembers taking for her school lunch a cornbread sandwich with a piece of fatback or green beans on it.
c.1921
@@bettyrowden3646you do realize the Great Depression was in the 1930s, right??
I never understood how people couldn't like raisins they are so sweet and harmless not bitter or funky tasting . Now liver I could understand even though I love it
Raisins for me tear my stomach up.
@MaureenOLeary-tz1kt wow buddy you need some Fiber then
could be the texture for some. I like them, but like a little not a lot kinda thing.
The recipes you suggest are good, but my Fathers family of 7 grew up in the great depression and those recipes would not have been known to them. He did talk about shooting pigeons on the Boston Garden and his family sharing one block of cream cheese for dinner.
Could have made a bisque with the cream cheese! Add to veggie broth from veggie scraps and shred some pigeon into it, slow cook a bit.
I have endless Respect for the great Ladies that cooked for their families during this hard time in our Country! Including both my grandmothers who somehow kept everyone fed. (& fed Well) on a little of nothin!! I think they could have made an old Shoe taste good! Not to mention Big families! Back then it was about Survival & they came through just Fine!! ❤🇺🇸
My mother who died at 95 had all sorts of good tales from The Great Depression in southern Indiana. They ate anything on 4 legs that moved......possum. racoon (she said racoon was very greasy). squirrel, . To this day I can't get my corn bread and apple pies to taste as good as hers. She knew all kinds of tricks.
We use sweet white cornbread mix but add an extra egg. Yellow cornbread mix needed extra sugar as well, but not as good!
@@loisruthstrom8143 I use the Jiffy mix with 2 eggs, melted butter, 1/3 cup "1/2 and 1/2" cream and 3 table spoons sugar. Comes out pretty good......but I'm always looking other good ideas. Sometimes I'll put a tablespoon of white cake mix in the batter.
My grandparents lived through World War II in Italy, and they would even eat stray cats....
Now in NY millenials eat possum, squirrel and pigeon!
Food in the 60s was similar. Memories here
Rice pudding is a staple in many cultures. My kids love the Indian Versions from India. Almonds and coconut!!!!
Wow! That sounds good!
These are things that people eat today in most countries and are not considered poor man's meal. Americans have to re-evaluate their priorities I feel.
Sad my mom only had biscuits and onions for lunch. My mom said never again and she n my dad gave us anything we wanted a brand new car when I was 16. Miss n love them
I grew up on a lot of these in the 1970s. I actually still make several of them. Maybe Gen X will be the last people to make and eat these.
I still make some of these myself. I'm Gen X who's parents were depression era kids 😂
I'm a millennial making them for my gen alphas! The economy takes a dip and people search for the old survival methods.
I'm also a millennial with gen alpha kids. I make so many of these dishes. Very few on the list that I don't.
@@stewyward5322 the economy will be better soon!! 🥹🇺🇸✊✊✊🥳🙏
My mother in law kept leftover bits of meat and vegetables in a freezer container. When it was was close to full, she made Garbage Soup!!! Used V-8 or Tomato juice and chicken or beef broth!
I think I would've called it "leftovers soup" or "potluck soup". "Garbage soup" sounds like that's where the ingredients came from. And during that tough time, many homeless people did resort to that!
Fits right in for Election Day.
@@Cynthia99911 🇺🇸✊✊✊🥳
I still do this
Most of the foods eaten then were more healthy & organic!
Here in Oklahoma during those times my grandparents had gardens
and small farms with livestock so when they couldn't afford to go to
the stores they improvised the best that they could especially with
vegetables, flour, cornbread, dairy and other rural Oklahoma ways
of keeping everyone fed during these times thanks for the great delicious memories of the past thank you.😋🍖🥒🌽🍅🫑🥓😋
My Uncle put his crops in at my Grandparents, he had cornfields Grandma pick field corn before it got hard and passed it off as sweetcorn to us grandkids!
My mom recalls of Lard sandwich and ketchup sandwiches for school lunches!
Lard sandwiches are really tasty!
Drippings from roast spread on bread was delicious!
MORE COMMERCIALS PLEASE.
50 was not enough 😅
You actually counted them??
Its free to view, so there are commercials....why moan and grumble ?
get an ad blocker
😂😂😂😂
Between the misinformation, the bots in the comments, and the CRAZY number of ads, this video is just trash
So many of these are still my favorite meals. The one I especially reacted to was the Johnny Cakes. If you mix the ingredients together, pat out flat patties and drop them on top of Collards or cabbage, they become yummy dumplins!!! Thank you for these reminders. My mother grew up in the depression and we ate so many of these regularly. Yum. :)
Nowadays we call that comfort food. And yeah I still love grill cheese sandwiches with either hot dogs or jalapenos.😊
Loved this video, great food, great narration! I still make many of these iconic recipes as many still do i.e. grilled cheese sandwiches, mac and cheese which was actually made in colonial times! I was born in 1948 and we ate some of these in the 1950s and 60s and continued to make them for my kids. The recipes here on this video are very healthy. My late paternal grandmother born in 1879 was a Blue Ribbon winner for her pies at the country fairs in Pennsylvania Dutch country, her native background and she made great homemade corn or apple fritters and her homemade donuts were to die for, puts Dunkin Donuts to shame! My other maternal grandmother born in 1887 was also a fabulous cook and baker from Cape Cod so I grew up eating both homemade from scatch Penn. Dutch foods and Yankee New England foods, many recipes from the 1700s-1800s! Thanks for jogging my memory of many of these foods! ♥♥♥🥘🍲🍲🍳🍳👩🍳
My mother in Bavaria, Germany, on my parents farm, often cooked these foods, or some very similar to them, in the 1960s n 70s still, i remember the rice pudding with raisins, egg drop noodle soup, cabbage rolls, e.g.
❤️💙❤️🇦🇺
You missed bread, butter and sugar for desert
Sounds like bread pudding to me.
My mom said when she was little her and her siblings had a slice of bread with lard spread on it and a little sprinkle of sugar.
My grandma refused to toss out food like we tend to now. I had a lot of French toast as a little kid because she didn't want to let the bread go stale.
But that French Toast was sooooo gooooooood.
It was. We got the recipe before she passed. But it's not the same. She used a little bit of maple syrup and sometimes a little bit of milk in the egg then wisked. Then added cinnamon while it was cooking.
NO food leaves my household in the trash. ALL food is used, with us humans consuming my useups, leftovers, makedos etc then things like vegetable and fruit peelings, eggshells, tealeaves, bones from fish, lamb or beef soup, stews etc going to the chooks, wormfarm or garden compost. My chooks repay me in eggs.
My friend who grew up Mennonite, said they didn't know they were poor, because they liked eating toast and stewed onions with milk.
Yes, grilled cheeses, minestrone soup, fried rice, stuffed bell peppers.😊
Milk might be hard to come by if your broke! Stockpile some powdered milk, at least a little at a time
My grandpa was born in 1936 and he said he was still eating like the depression growing up i guess cause of the big one but he told me about victory gardens and shooting and skinning gophers for his neighbors he got a bag of veggies and got to keep the gophers for ridding his neighbors garden of them and his dad remembered being a teen just married and riding the rails to feed his family and I think he stopped by Capones soup kitchen..so I honestly remember hearing about the depression and big one growing up and eating nearly all of this stuff and still make some of it i guess they were trying to make me not feel so bad lol...but by the 80s we were doing slightly better than them
Tuna casserole was one of my Mom's favorite go to meals. Breakfast for dinner was often requested. 😊
I’ve never heard of chickpeas in the depression. I’ve read quite a bit about the era.
Perhaps from the many Italians in California who taught the Okies and Arkies from the Dust Bowl to use chick peas. I don't think Southerners or Midwesterners were familiar with garbazo beans.
My mother told me about onion and mustard sandwich. I love to have one every once in a while.
Haha!! "The thought of raisins makes me want to retch." Some of your comments are hilarious! Remember, raisins are nature's candy... 😂🤭 Thanks for sharing all of these, they do actually give me dinner ideas and are appreciated!
A lot of these foods are traditional European dishes of working people in normal times.
Ate a lot of these in the 60s but this showed me how those dishes came to be. Very cool.
Baked apples go a lot farther and are more filling if they are made into pie with 2 crusts or cobbler with one crust. Depression era cooks stretched all ingredients so would add pastry, not just serve apples.
I love videos like this ❤
I make a soup like the first one frequently- I call it "Waste Not Soup.' Its great for using up little bits in the pantry. I always make sure I have a grain, a bean or legume, and two veggies, and if I have a bit of meat, even better. Its never the same soup twice, and paired with fresh French Baguettes, is a fantastic and wholesome meal that can give us some leftovers too!
I make grilled cheese sandwiches with only a tiny bit of butter inside and out, using a toaster bag! Great recipes here, thank you.
I grew up eating or making most of these dishes. I liked rice and raisins until one day my dad wanted me to reheat the leftovers and the “raisins “ were moving and crawling about. I tossed it out…Dad was very upset over it lol to this day I refuse to make, or eat it lol. Even white rice I won’t touch it nor raisins by themselves lmbo. Back then if there were leftovers they were left on the warmer..a shelf built into the old wood burning cook stove. So yes bugs would get into food from time to time. Yes I am an old woman now, we were a large family…so we did most things differently then most. Most of the recipes I still use from time to time. I do believe we will be seeing those times again. At least I know how to squeeze that buffalo nickel until it craps lol.
I think that the USA is closer than ever to another Great Depression.
What makes you say that?
I’d say that’s true for most of the world, especially as we see more extreme weather patterns and damage.
It would be a global heavy hitter not like the soft recession we got now. If we get stuff with tariffs 200%+- on goods, we will be far back in 1930 with project 2025 making even more worse.
Also with China economy practically on the verge of collapse, we could get hit that way as a rebound effect.
At least now, while maybe not great, it’s still fixable. 2020 left so many after effects because later 2019 and 2020 was so badly handled. Who waits four months to tell the country about a global pandemic or undermined doctors?! Just so the rich could sell their stock before crashing the economy
@@That.Lady.withtheYarn well said.
Not just the USA
I was not part of great depression, however we were not rich, I grew up on creamed peas on toast, and creamed SOS on toast lots of potatoes fried baked mashed and cabbage soup with carrots and potatoes and some ham bone my mom would freeze. We also had rice pudding but with no raisins, Thanks for the memories.
Love and Respect 🙏 Thank's and Bless you 🙏 ❤️ Congratulations 🙏 ❤️
i m not poor, but this homemade soup, and versions of it (i like to fry the veggies in my soup pot before adding water, e.g., to get that roasted flavor) have been my go to food for decades, i m sometimes too tired or just too lazy to cook, so i always have a pot of alredy prepared veggie soup in my fridge, add a llitte smoked tofu or some other vegan protein, and it s even a non-expensive whole meal. If you prepare it in a hygienic way, this soup stays edible for 1 week in the fridge easily...
They didn't have bake potaoto bars in the great depression, where are you getting your info from?
If you fry finely chopped carrot 🥕and onions 🧅before adding your tomatoes 🍅🍅to it, your tomato soup will not only taste better, you will also avoid heartburn. The carrot balances the acidity of the tomatoes much better than sugar. 🥣
i love raisins.
I loved rice pudding but my grandmother always made some without raisins for me because I hate raisins UGH
14:53 does anyone know about using leftover rice? I feel I heard it’s a food poisoning risk? Thank you
The safest way to handle rice after you cook some is to refrigerate it right away. Letting it sit out for too long allows the bacteria to start growing. Then when you want to use it again, make sure you heat it thoroughly. I use leftover rice in stir fries and to make various patties (bean, mushroom, etc.) Have never had a problem.
@ thank you
I grew up in the 70s with a depression era Mama. One of our gotos was macaroni with oleo and garlic. I had no idea that spaghetti with meat sauce existed until free school lunches came along.
You just dont know how many of these meals I can relate to.
It's amazing how during depression era people no food available but the blokes were still smoking and some even drinking. So they couldn't be that hard up right.
Excellent videos and interesting to see bits of videos from other RUclipsrs I follow in this one 😂
We were poor sometimes, but we didn’t know it. We ate vegetables soup a lot, with bread or potatoes. We had fruit soup for dessert or snacks. We ate a lot of pancakes too.
To her dying day, my granny used to put a half cup of cooked macaroni in each bowl when serving vegetable soup. "You stretch it that way!"
Cheese and fresh vegetables are very expensive today.
Anyone going to talk about the foil covered stovs
Yes, someone please explain
My meals growing up in the 50s were many of the same you are showing here. We were not in a depression, but my parents grew up in the depression, my father fought in ww2, so i think many of these recipes were "comfort" foods for them.
I remember my grandpa used to put leftover food on a tea cup plate that amounted to 3 tbsp.
I asked my dad why my grandpa was saving such a small amount of food. He told me that he lived through a time when he didn't eat for days so he saved everything.
I had a can of carrots that I had no idea what to do with. So I used them to make Carrot Croquetts with some mushrooms. My roommate at the time thought it was great!
My 96-year-old friend told me his mom made "son of a gun soup." She kept a pot of broth/water simmering on the back of the coal stove constantly and all the left overs from meals were scraped into that pot. On Saturday, this was served up as soup.
Mashed potato patties. We called them potato cakes. Love them. We ate potato soup a lot as a kid and cheap meal when I was in college.
Mashed potatoes mixed with some flour and braised cabbage and onions, made into patties and fried. Yum.
We ate beans. Rice.. kidneys...sweet potatoes. Welfare cheese, and Tuna casserole Tomato soup, and cinnamon toast. Don't forget oatmeal.😅🤗
Growing up, we ate bologna, either fried or with peanut butter in a sandwich. Stuffed peppers too.
Being from England, all these meals looking fancy! 😆 Feel like half these ingredients didn't even exist here until atleast the 90's 😂
Fried green tomatoes were a staple of my household in the 70's and 80's. We grew up just as poor as those kid's of the 30's!
Depending on where you lived in the US determined just how deprived you were of food sources. The east coast and Midwest suffered the most. Very few families had access to the food in this video. Most of these meals are just regular 50's on through the 70's and even 80's....and EMERSION BLENDERS DIDNT EXIST.
Many of these are/were usual in Argentina, but not because of the depression.
Minestrone, as many others, was common when all people used to cook from scratch & eat home food.
Mac-and-cheese is "fideos con manteca", (pasta with butter + grated cheese of course, unless you are really counting cents).
Cabbage rolls are called "niños envueltos" 😁 which means "wrapped children" but they are a rarity these days. Too much work.
Spaghetti with garlic & olive oil is spaghetti aglio e olio, which my Italian dad loved (well, he loved pasta everything, but he couldn't pass a day without meat actually)
Deviled eggs. My mom used to make them for every special day or gatherings, but without pickles. She used to mix the yolks with pâté de foie, maybe something else that I don't remember.
Rice pudding with raisins is "arroz con leche" (rice with milk) which is delicious without the raisins and without anything but cinnamon and vanilla. And if you leave it cook until the milk gets more creamy and looking brown, you get arroz with dulce de leche 😋😋😋 The best rice is double Carolina (thicker grains and more starch) but if you aim to get to dulce de leche, you need a rice that needs a longer cooking to get creamy.
My grandma, 9 at the time would take her sister 5 at the time to the soip kitchen and sit with the 'tramps' as she called them? And her mother got cross when she found out, because her husband had a job and they didnt 'need' too, they had foos... My nan said she went there because the soup was tasty, and it was warm inside. Bless her. 🌼✨
My Mom used to make corn fritters. They were delicious. I miss both.🥹
We call cabbage rolls, pigs in the blankets and I enjoyed them many times in my youth!
I ate most of these dishes when I was growing up and still make most of them now . Thee one I still make alt is gravy and biscuits
Thank you ❤
We'd crack an egg, mix with a little milk (if available) and throw it in as well, giving a protein component. This is called German potatoes at least by us. If you had a little ham, so much the better to potato & carrot hash.
My grandma used to tell us every so often that many a time they had nothing but lard.....LARD spread on bread sprinkled with salt and pepper and whatever greens they could find in the yard or at the side of the fields sauteed in bacon fat and sprinkled with vinegar.
Another dinner great-granny used to make was squirrel stew, and once in a while great-grandpa would shoot a raccoon and smoke it.
HINT: To instantly make a grilled cheese taste better : sprinkle some salt on it after you take it from the frying pan.......not too much now just a little salt on top.
Grilled cheese my favorite❤
also....let us not forget good old Oscar Myer slice of baloney slathered in yellow mustard. That got me through brown bagging it in grade school.
These are delicious meals. This is about all anyone can afford these days. We eat several of these meals. I have more things to try.
Cheap? ... I see it as inexpensive and vryyy good. I eat like this normally (I'm a cyclist, good nutrition is a must to me). I love this Thanks
You forgot one that my parents had a lot when I was young and that was pork and bean sandwich with pickles, onions, and mayonnaise. They would mash the beans mix it with mayonnaise and put it on bread and eat it back then I didn’t like it. I might eat it now, but I didn’t really like legumes much back then
Don’t be surprised by fried green tomatoes. In the South we fry everything. Yellow squash, zucchini, okra , pickles, green beans,eggplant and yes green tomatoes.
Mac and cheese and grilled cheese sandwich back in the late 1960's and the 1970's.
People during the depression had potatoes and peas for lunch and peas and potatoes for dinner.
We had a garden, zucchini was in a lot of bread items for 6 weeks every summer.
'Sarma' is a Turkish word that means 'wrapping'. The same term is used for wine leaf wrappings.
Great video.
I learned to live today by living in that era.
I learned how to make Corn Fritters in Home Economics Class, Junior High School 1970. 😂😊
No poor person during the great depression owned a FRIDGE😮
You did not mention, macaroni and tomato juice. It's based on the Mac & cheese dish. I hated it, but my mom was born in 1935, she and her family were raised on it.
Potatoes have gotten expensive now.
I would have been THRILLED to eat like this when I was a kid. I question the availability of most of these foods during the depression.
Watching this November 2024. Our local version of vegetable fritata is called Okoy in our country.