9 Depression Era Recipes You Need to Try - Retro Housewife Goes Green (2024)

FAQs

What were Great Depression meals? ›

Popcorn was one of those affordable rare foods during the Great Depression. Instead of pouring melted butter over their popcorn, some people poured milk over it and ate it as their main meal. And we're not talking about eating it as breakfast cereal. No, popcorn with milk was eaten as a dinnertime main course.

Potatoes were also inexpensive and used extensively. Some meals even used both. One of these meals was called the Poor Man's Meal. It combined potatoes, onions, and hot dogs into one hearty, inexpensive dish, which was perfect for the hard times people had fallen on.

Perhaps one hobo acquired a few carrots from a charitable person, while another stole an onion off a box car, while another had a few potatoes from a farm he worked on briefly… From this concoction, a “hobo stew,” also known as “Mulligan/Mulligatawney stew” was born and became the traditional food of the hobo.

When I was a little girl in the Depression era, country breakfast is the meal that I most remember! During the corn-husking season my parents used a home smoke-cured ham to feed the men who walked out in the dark each day. Along with the slice of ham, my mother served fried potatoes, eggs and biscuits, milk and coffee.

At this time popcorn was often a breakfast food, eaten from a bowl with milk just as we eat cereal today. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, popcorn's popularity as an everyday snack food started to grow. It was a fun and thrifty snack for families who could afford few luxuries.

From frozen foods to Jell-O molds, the 1930s and 40s saw a huge upsurge in convenience foods. Building on the popularity of brands like Wonder Bread, Kool-Aid, Velveeta Cheese, and Hostess Cakes, American supermarkets stocked up on mass-produced items.

A common depression cake is also known as "Boiled Raisin Cake", "Milkless, Eggless, Butterless Cake", or "Poor Man's Cake".

During the Great Depression preceding the passage of the Social Security Act, "soup kitchens" provided the only meals some unemployed Americans had. This particular soup kitchen was sponsored by the Chicago gangster Al Capone.

What is depression cooking? ›

Depression Cooking is a zine of easy recipes designed to make mealtime a little easier, in the no-nonsense sense of the word, for depressed humans like me. It demonstrates one of the many lessons that I've learned during COVID: that we can care for one another without being physically present.

Your local food bank can help you find food today, even if you need temporary help. They partner with food pantries, soup kitchens, and meal programs in your local community to give away free food. Enter your zip code to find the food bank partnering with Feeding America.

Big families could be fed with soups from leftover meats, beans, and home-grown vegetables. Homemakers made many varieties of soup from available foods. The results included split pea, chicken-rice, potato-onion, bean, hamburger, and all vegetable. Dumplings were a filling addition to complement the soup.

One food item that became very popular, because they grew well and were plentiful were grapefruit. A prepared meal to serve many was casseroles. Here the cook could place all types of food items they could buy and create ad good meal. They were known as 'kitchen sink casseroles' had everything in it.

Including ingredients like lobster, squab, oysters, tongue, crab, fruit punch, prunes, peaches, pineapple, honeydew melon and orange marmalade in the menu helped gentrify the meal and add that touch of elegant refinement that was so important.

By the time of the Great Depression, people of all classes were routinely eating outside the home. Like other retail businesses, restaurants reduced their prices at the depth of the crisis.