FOOD

By SHARIE PYKE
For The Outpost

No person who’s lived hungry forgets the experience. My grandfather Dorow, who lost his job as a carpenter due to the crash of 1929, taught me many helpful tips on how to live on nothing.

First of all, and most important, he preached priorities. First, you buy food. Then, pay the rent. Have some more money? You pay the utilities.

After that come other debts and medical bills. I’ve used this formula for the past 30-odd years.

Even with that plan, my grandparents lost their house. But it was a time when people helped each other. Grandpa’s former employer, Louie Rose, would just show up periodically with a trunk full of groceries. Whenever there was work, Louie gave it to my grandfather.

Every family has its own stories. And along with the tales come “recipes” for what I call Depression food. Those simple meals carried on to the next generation.
Debs (Depression Era babies,) World War II babies and Baby Boomers whom I talked with expressed as fondness for fried bologna, which is just a chub of bologna, sliced thick and fried.

Fried mush also received good review. Depending on your ethnicity, mush was either oatmeal or cornmeal. You cook the cereal, pour it into a greased loaf pan and chill it. Sliced and fried, it makes a grand meal with butter and syrup.

An after-school treat: catsup sandwiches. Believe it or not, I LIKED catsup sandwiches.

Another staple in most homes: what my family called escalloped tomatoes. This consists of a can of tomatoes cooked up with all the leftover, dried up bread, seasoned with salt and pepper. Creamed celery was pretty blah–just sliced celery stewed in milk with a little butter and salt and pepper. Celery uses more calories in the digestive process than it contributes to the operation of a human body. Still, even wilted celery wasn’t wasted.

You will note that none of these dishes comes from the freezer. They are all prepared from scratch. There are no exotic ingredients, either. Depression Era cooking used whatever was on hand.

During the 1930s the problem wasn’t the cost of food, but that people had no money to purchase it. Both meat and fruit, even canned fruit, were scarce. Oranges arrived once a year, for Christmas.

Meat was often served only once a week. A stewed Sabbath chicken stretched through most of the rest of the week, reappearing as chicken and rice, chicken stew and pot pie. With each meal, the meat decreased while the fillers increased.

You will remember that Herbert Hoover promised “A car in every garage and a chicken in every pot.” Forget the car. By the mid ’30s, many families couldn’t afford that chicken, let alone red meat. Hotdogs and beans on Saturday night was the big meal of the week.

The Victorians with pretensions to gentility left a few bites on their plates. The Depression put an end to that. Like Jack Sprat and his wife, everyone licked the platter clean.

I once asked Grandma Pyke what she did with leftovers before plastic containers. She looked at me like I was daft. With a family of seven, including two teenage boys, there weren’t any.

Soup became an answer for those attempting to help the homeless and out of work. In Chicago, Al Capone’s soup kitchens (Yes, that’s old Public Enemy No. 1) fed hungry people generously.

The New York Times reported: “Three meals are served each day, including Sundays. Breakfast consists of coffee and a sweet roll, and dinner and supper of soup, bread and coffee, with a second or third helping permitted.”

People also cut down from three meals to two, and dinner parties disappeared.

Milk consumption was reduced, eggs took the place of meat, drippings stood in for butter. Each ethic group fell back on staples: pasta and beans for Italian-Americans, corn meal for Southern blacks and whites, beans and pancakes for Northern native-born whites, beans and rice in Louisiana and the Southwest.  The food was filling and boring.

Eighty years later, as we wend our way through the crash of 2008-???, the cost of food, rather than stabilizing or declining as in the 1930s, continues to rise. A 12-ounce can of name brand mushroom soup a week ago cost $1.25. My favorite Pecan Sandies were $4.39. A loaf of store brand bread was on sale at $1.99.
A dollar buys less and less in the grocery store, at a time when shoppers’ resources are shrinking as well. It’s time to simplify.

Remember the story, “Stone Soup?” The wily soldier plops a stone in a cauldron of boiling water and cons a little of this, a little of that, out of the hostile villagers and they all eat well. That’s soup. It can be as desperate as hot water and catsup or as lavish as gumbo with several kinds of shellfish and sausages. And it’s a communal thing. Add a cup of water and you have one more serving.

To soups, add casseroles, pot roast, meat loaf ... the list is endless and encourages creativity.  Get out the crock pot, which also saves energy, keep it simple, and start saving money.

Cheap, simple and good:

Sausage and Tomatoes

Brown a pound of sausage links, piercing the casings to let out the fat, pouring it off. Add a large can of tomatoes, salt and pepper, and heat for 10-15 minutes. Serve with hot buttered toast to soak up the juice.

Ham Salad

One can of processed pork like Spam or Treet. Grate and moisten with mayonnaise and pickle relish. Makes at least six sandwiches.
Scalloped Corn:
1 can cream corn
1 egg
1/4 cup milk
enough crumbled saltines to make a semi-thick mixture when stirred into the above.
Pour into 8-inch square greased pan. Bake at 350 for about 30 minutes until nice and puffy.

Creamed (hard boiled eggs, peas, tune, chipped beef, etc.) on toast

Make a white sauce, add your choice of fillers, and serve on toast.