FOOD REDUX

Food preferences change over the decades.  Depending on what part of the country you come from and how old you are now, you probably have different food memories than I do.  

What did long suffering parents feed a large family back in the 1940s and 1950s when my six brothers and sisters and I were growing up?  A lot of stuff, actually. Comes down to whatever they would eat!

We had a “victory garden” during WWII.  The Ohio summers were hot and vegetables grew well.  No deer to be seen but the rabbits thought the garden was their own supermarket.

Photo credit: x-ray delta one / Foter.com / CC BY-SA

My three little sisters didn’t have epicurean tastes.  Looking back it seems they were raised on scrambled eggs, applesauce and macaroni and cheese.

Because of rationing during WWII a lot of foodstuffs were difficult to come by. An old recipe for Butterless, Eggless, Milkless Cake was revived. A strange conglomeration of ingredients were substituted.  My mother was not an adventurous cook and didn’t give it a try.

We raised chickens.  As the oldest I was designated to feed the flock before I left for school.  Years later I had a pet chicken with a real personality but a flock of chickens and hungry ones, at that, were something else.

The cafeteria lunch at school seemed to be mainly Sloppy Joes.  Lunch brought from home would be a peanut butter and shredded carrot sandwich. It sounds weird but it was good!

Fresh fruits were not available all year long as they are now. Our Christmas stockings always had a tangerine or an orange tucked in the toe along with some walnuts.

I don’t recall ever eating out at a restaurant.  Dinners at home included such staples as meat loaf, mashed potatoes or chicken.  My mother liked using a pressure cooker. Her specialty was meat balls mixed with rice. We called them porcupine balls.

Always a turkey or baked ham at Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Ordinary fare included tuna casseroles(really tasteless), and tomato cheese rarebit.  We all referred to that as tomato cheese rabbit.

We drank a lot of milk and eagerly awaited the parents coming home with bags of groceries. They’d be torn into before they could be unloaded.  I was especially fond of whole heads of lettuce!
We never ate hamburgers, yoghurt, spaghetti or pizza.  Not that they were forbidden: we didn’t know they existed.  We did eat a lot of white bread though.

“Butter” was fortified margarine.  It came in a block that looked like lard with a packet of yellow food coloring to mix in.

Essentials for a good life were cornflakes, peanut butter and cookies.  We all had a sweet tooth.

New products were introduced during the 1940s: Cheerios, Tootsie Rolls, frozen orange juice, Dannon yoghurt and something called SPRY which was pure vegetable shortening.

It was not a wide spectrum of fascinating foodstuffs back then but I think it was typical Midwestern fare and we all survived pretty hardily on it.

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Next Post, Next Monday.

Thanks for stopping by!

Joan