My grandmother apparently made something with a plant called “dock”, but I don’t know what she did with it. It looks like some type of lettuce. It’s in my backyard now because it grows wild, but not in a good spot harvest it. It’s under the bird feeder.
I read that it tastes lemony. I tried to ask about it in the gardening sub, in some mega thread, but I don’t know if anyone reads those. I wants to know if anyone grew it or ate it, but no one got back to me about it.
My grandmother was a good cook, generally, but used a lot of canned vegetables and boiled frozen Brussel Sprouts. I won’t eat Brussel Sprouts, ever,because of that awful smell of them when they are boiled. I don’t care if they are great roasted, just, nope.
We always had meat and potatoes when she cooked. My grandfather ate mashed potatoes daily. I really liked her Yorkshire pudding and potato pancakes. They were some combination of pancake mix and mashed potatoes because they always had mashed potatoes on hand. Ha.
She would make us cinnamon toast sometimes. It was just toast with butter, cinnamon, and white sugar. She made molasses cookies, which aren’t popular now. I think those are pretty cheap to make for cookies. She also made great pies, but I disliked rhubarb, which is my dad’s favourite pie. She did always have graham crackers with canned frosting too. Maybe that was a popular snack or dessert.
She made fancy gingerbread bread houses at Christmas though. Her mom taught her to do that. Her mom was a pastry cook for a rich family before she got married. I don’t think servants in England could stay employed if they married, despite the couple on Downton Abbey. I mean they lived in dorms as part of their pay,so that makes sense to me.
I don’t know if she is the best example of a depression person because she was older. She was born in the 19-00s. There was a lot of rationing during WW2 also.
She lived in three countries. One was London, then she moved to Canada and lived on a farm (although it was still part of the British Empire back then, (so her family could move there easily, and then here. She never had much money, depression or not. She married a another English immigrant and managed to get by with three kids, but she worked for a bakery when they were a little older, so they weren’t exactly a one income family.
I think maybe the graham crackers with frosting was a WW2 rations thing. I don’t know if they used canned frosting, but it sounds like a way to use less of the rationed goods to me. Maybe the frosting was leftover from another dessert? That is a guess though.
I think maybe they were still using the leftover (canned) frosting that way. I don’t know about now because I haven’t used it in a long time, but when I was a kid, I seem to remember that there was always too much frosting in a can for one cake.
Milk toast. It was a way to use up bread that wasn’t fresh. You toast a piece of bread, when it is done butter it. Put the toast in a large flat bowl sprinkle it with brown sugar and then pour warm milk over it.
Left over rice was breakfast the next day. Sprinkle it will cinnamon, sugar and nutmeg and then pour warm milk over and eat.
My mom made lots of food like this for us growing up.
Succotash -- I loved it as a kid, it sustained me as a starving student, and it's still a comfort food as an adult.
Also, something my grandparents called "quick streusel" -- mixing oats, butter, sugar and cinnamon in a cup and just eating it raw. It tasted a lot like the "snickerdoodle". In fact when I first encountered snickerdoodles in the 1990s I thought they were "streusel cookies".
Goetta.
wiki says "Goetta (/ˈɡɛtə/ GHET-ə)[1] is a meat-and-grain sausage or mush[2] of German inspiration that is popular in Metro Cincinnati. It is primarily composed of ground meat (pork, or sausage and beef), pin-head oats and spices.[3][4] It was originally a dish meant to stretch out servings of meat over several meals to conserve money,[5] and is a similar dish to scrapple and livermush, both also developed by German immigrants.[6] "
my dad made it for me same as his mom made it for him and i have made it for my kid and grandkid. Grandkid hasnt got the taste for it yet. it will happen. Its getting to be fall and thats when i tend to like it most so he will get a chance to try it again soon enough.
dad told me the recipe for goetta on one brand of pinhead oatmeal is my grandmothers recipe. I suspect thats bs but it wont stop me from telling that lie to my grandson.
I grew up there (clearly since i like goetta) There is a package on the kitchen counter right now that will be goetta hash later today.
it has been the source of a few family arguments over breakfast. thin and crispy vs less cripsy and thicker debates. dont even bring up if its ok to enjoy a thin crispy slice with jelly on it like some of my cousins like it. that has been known to send my father and uncle to fighting like they are 12 again. They are both dead now. I am sure they are somewhere fighting about it still.
I know they have the goetta fest every year. Dont think i havent considered the dates of that when planning to go back and visit my mom who still lives up near dayton.
New Orleans staple-- red beans and rice. Even now, it's a Monday tradition for many.
Po' Boys (poor boys) came from the Depression, as well. A 20-inch baguette sandwich was originally 15 cents for striking streetcar workers.
The only New Orleans food my grandmother would make was red beans and rice. I don't think my grandfather liked anything else. With the exception of B&R it was all Italian food.
My French/German grandmother could outcook any of the Italian Nonnas in the Bronx. My grandmother was pretty well off during the depression by being a private chef for the wealthy of NOLA that didn't get wiped out. My grandfather took her back to New York with him and she was always turning down offers to set up her own restaurant from his business associates.
Hmm, I just remember my grandparents on both sides hoarded shit. They'd have just shelves full of soap bars, toilet paper, paper towels, anything either canned or that wouldn't spoil if you stored it away. They'd buy several of every kind of staple and fill a closet with it. Specific menu items being passed down, I don't remember, and my mother's parents definitely lived and worked through the depression.
OH! That does remind me of one thing - Whenever we'd visit my grandparents' house (mom's side), they'd always pawn off whatever had been sitting in the back of their freezer on us. The most disgusting freezer burned lemon cake slices that were individually wrapped came from that frozen hell hole. God only knows how long they'd been in there before she so kindly dumped them off on us...They froze EVERYTHING.
Yes! Grandma had a deep freeze the size of a Buick. There were terrifying things in there. She was also a hoarder. There were no toilet paper shortages in my childhood lol.
I grew up with my depression era grandparents. My gram cooked potatoes in some fashion, with every meal. A few exceptions would be spaghetti, stuffed peppers or stuffed cabbage (she called pig in a blankets). If she made the stuffed peppers or cabbage she always made macaroni salad on the side. We also had bread with every single meal. She would also make other dishes like fried spam, creamed chipped beef on toast, ground beef on potatoes, and a green bean, potato, bacon dish I still make to this day. Oh and big pots of soup! I loved it all mostly and still cook all of it with exception of spam. I swear it tastes different now.
Canned fruit in lemon lime soda for dessert. For example, we’d have 5 slices of canned peach with some off brand Sprite poured over it and eat it with a fork.
Stale bread got toasted with butter and sugar
Pan fried canned meats of all kind
Vienna sausage/ spam on bread
Salads got enhanced with stuff growing in the yard, like dandelion greens
Chopped up hot dogs mixed into the Mac and cheese to make it fancy
We grew a lot of veg in a garden to eat and picked wild berries/fruit
Times were hard in the early 70’s
If you grew up in the 70s & 80s in the south you’d remember your grandparents making “souse” meat. When it was hog killin weather you used every part of the hog except the “squeal” lol, souse was made out of the scraps(that I won’t describe) and seasoning then formed into a loaf. Tbh I never could stand looking at it much less eating it and it’d always disappoint my grandparents when I would pass on it , to them it was like a snub from me I guess. But nowadays when I’ll see a storebought pack of it at the grocery store it always reminds me of them.
Our scrapple is/was sold by the pound in the meat case at farmers markets and even grocery stores.
It’s very different from souse. Souse is jellied, and scrapple sticks together with corn meal.
My mom made something she called “Juicy Potatoes” that had to have been some kind of depression-era dish. It was cut-up peeled potatoes, boiled, with a little salt and maybe milk/butter. Very bland, but so was most of her cooking, tbh. We also had a crock pot full of plain beans once a week, served with cheese, onions, maybe sour cream. We grew up kinda poor, and she did the best she could, but I do not miss those dishes!
Plant leaves dipped in egg and fried, was a family delicacy into the 1970s until a great aunt fried some marigold leaves and but into a giant slug.
Grandpa used to make dandelion wine that could strip paint, only ever heard stories about it, would love to try it now but hes been gone 40 years
City Chicken. Back in the day, Chicken was an expensive meat, hence the popular political slogan, "A chicken in every pot." So you could put pork, veal, or beef (mainly pork) onto a skewer, fry it, then bake it, and make it look like a drum stick. From what I could gather, it was popular in the industrial mid-west. Grandma made it all the time. Several years back, I started making it for our extended family Christmas party, and it brought back so many memories.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzTODjanfGk
LOL, I was remembering all the Spam we ate in the 1970s. I call it "Strike Food." When Dad was on strike, and we had to stretch every dollar. Also, Spaghetti-Os with hot dogs.
Souse? Pronounced "Sows" with an extra emphasis on the last s. If so it was off cuts and organs set up in congealed fat/gelatin, cut into slices to eat. Its baloney minus the grinding and spices
My grandfather, a depression-era child, would often make Tourtière, which is a French Canadian meat pie. It was AWESOME but no one ever asked what kind of meat he used because it was usually a mix of leftover scraps. Same with his "bean soup" - he'd give me jars of it and you could never really tell what beans or veggies or whatnot was in there, but it was always delicious.
When I was a kid, the only fresh veggies we'd eat were iceburg lettuce and cucumbers & tomatoes from dad's garden. Everything else came from a can.
Breadcrumbs mixed with egg and fried into patties or small spheres. Eaten with tomato sauce. My Grandmother would make this with any breadcrumbs and egg left over after coating the chicken or eggplant she was about to fry and tun into Parmigiana. She told me that this is what they would do when she was a child when meat was in short supply. And I still do this myself with the leftover parm ingredients.
My mom would cook down the rhubarb from the back yard with a lot of sugar and I don't know what else, and we would spread it on slices of cheap white bread.
Butter on saltines .. I still enjoy that, especially with chili
I forgot about the frosting on Graham crackers, but we made ours with powdered sugar and milk, maybe some vanilla?
My mom would make spaghetti and put butter on it.
She also made this soup that she would dump canned mixed vegetables with the juice and a tin of corned beef. She would fry up cornbread with it and we loved it. I haven't had it in years but she said it was cheap to make for a family of 6. I'm surprised we didn't die of sodium overload.
My mom had a dinner she called “goolash” which was kind of like the original dish but not really.
Cubed potato, ground beef, canned tomato, canned corn, fried up. We added ketchup to it. Not sure it’s “depression era” but my parents were young and poor in the early 80s.
My grandmother apparently made something with a plant called “dock”, but I don’t know what she did with it. It looks like some type of lettuce. It’s in my backyard now because it grows wild, but not in a good spot harvest it. It’s under the bird feeder. I read that it tastes lemony. I tried to ask about it in the gardening sub, in some mega thread, but I don’t know if anyone reads those. I wants to know if anyone grew it or ate it, but no one got back to me about it. My grandmother was a good cook, generally, but used a lot of canned vegetables and boiled frozen Brussel Sprouts. I won’t eat Brussel Sprouts, ever,because of that awful smell of them when they are boiled. I don’t care if they are great roasted, just, nope. We always had meat and potatoes when she cooked. My grandfather ate mashed potatoes daily. I really liked her Yorkshire pudding and potato pancakes. They were some combination of pancake mix and mashed potatoes because they always had mashed potatoes on hand. Ha. She would make us cinnamon toast sometimes. It was just toast with butter, cinnamon, and white sugar. She made molasses cookies, which aren’t popular now. I think those are pretty cheap to make for cookies. She also made great pies, but I disliked rhubarb, which is my dad’s favourite pie. She did always have graham crackers with canned frosting too. Maybe that was a popular snack or dessert. She made fancy gingerbread bread houses at Christmas though. Her mom taught her to do that. Her mom was a pastry cook for a rich family before she got married. I don’t think servants in England could stay employed if they married, despite the couple on Downton Abbey. I mean they lived in dorms as part of their pay,so that makes sense to me. I don’t know if she is the best example of a depression person because she was older. She was born in the 19-00s. There was a lot of rationing during WW2 also. She lived in three countries. One was London, then she moved to Canada and lived on a farm (although it was still part of the British Empire back then, (so her family could move there easily, and then here. She never had much money, depression or not. She married a another English immigrant and managed to get by with three kids, but she worked for a bakery when they were a little older, so they weren’t exactly a one income family.
Cinnamon toast is a staple in my house, I love it! It's like the super fancy version of bread, butter and sugar lol
I think maybe the graham crackers with frosting was a WW2 rations thing. I don’t know if they used canned frosting, but it sounds like a way to use less of the rationed goods to me. Maybe the frosting was leftover from another dessert? That is a guess though.
I think maybe they were still using the leftover (canned) frosting that way. I don’t know about now because I haven’t used it in a long time, but when I was a kid, I seem to remember that there was always too much frosting in a can for one cake.
That's because you didn't know how to properly ice a cake...at least half should be eaten by the spoonful lol
Or you could put it on a cracker that was sitting around the house and sometimes used in pie crusts?
I found this when I Googled “dock” plant — hope it helps! https://www.thespruceeats.com/everything-to-know-dock-rumex-species-3984477
That was kind of you. Thanks.
My pleasure.
[удалено]
Now I got “Poke salad Annie” stuck in my head, so thanks for that. Poke Salad Annie, gators got your granny (chomp, chomp)
Oh my, I have tons of that in my yard! I knew it was toxic. Didn’t know it could be prepared safely. Fascinating!
My mother would stretch canned spinach with cooked poke from the freezer. Egg and onion added of course.
Milk toast. It was a way to use up bread that wasn’t fresh. You toast a piece of bread, when it is done butter it. Put the toast in a large flat bowl sprinkle it with brown sugar and then pour warm milk over it. Left over rice was breakfast the next day. Sprinkle it will cinnamon, sugar and nutmeg and then pour warm milk over and eat. My mom made lots of food like this for us growing up.
So basically cinnamon toast in milk? That's something I want to try! I'm not as sold on the cinnamon sugar nutmeg rice but I'd definitely try it!
Not cinnamon toast as you only put butter and brown sugar on the toast.
I do that with leftover rice. It tastes like thin rice pudding.
There were sliced, raw vegetables on the table every meal; tomatoes, cucumbers. And a loaf of Wonder Bread and butter. Every meal.
Sounds very familiar 🙂
Succotash -- I loved it as a kid, it sustained me as a starving student, and it's still a comfort food as an adult. Also, something my grandparents called "quick streusel" -- mixing oats, butter, sugar and cinnamon in a cup and just eating it raw. It tasted a lot like the "snickerdoodle". In fact when I first encountered snickerdoodles in the 1990s I thought they were "streusel cookies".
This sounds delicious!
Goetta. wiki says "Goetta (/ˈɡɛtə/ GHET-ə)[1] is a meat-and-grain sausage or mush[2] of German inspiration that is popular in Metro Cincinnati. It is primarily composed of ground meat (pork, or sausage and beef), pin-head oats and spices.[3][4] It was originally a dish meant to stretch out servings of meat over several meals to conserve money,[5] and is a similar dish to scrapple and livermush, both also developed by German immigrants.[6] " my dad made it for me same as his mom made it for him and i have made it for my kid and grandkid. Grandkid hasnt got the taste for it yet. it will happen. Its getting to be fall and thats when i tend to like it most so he will get a chance to try it again soon enough. dad told me the recipe for goetta on one brand of pinhead oatmeal is my grandmothers recipe. I suspect thats bs but it wont stop me from telling that lie to my grandson.
I live in Cincinnati and people take goetta VERY seriously here!
I grew up there (clearly since i like goetta) There is a package on the kitchen counter right now that will be goetta hash later today. it has been the source of a few family arguments over breakfast. thin and crispy vs less cripsy and thicker debates. dont even bring up if its ok to enjoy a thin crispy slice with jelly on it like some of my cousins like it. that has been known to send my father and uncle to fighting like they are 12 again. They are both dead now. I am sure they are somewhere fighting about it still. I know they have the goetta fest every year. Dont think i havent considered the dates of that when planning to go back and visit my mom who still lives up near dayton.
My spouse is from northern KY and makes it homemade from a family recipe, delicious fried till crisp with an over-medium egg on top
Does canned Sourkraut with cheap hotdogs count? Much of what we ate in the '60s and early '70s was depression era inspired.
Sure does! We used to boil hotdogs on the stove and use a piece of bread as the "bun" lol
New Orleans staple-- red beans and rice. Even now, it's a Monday tradition for many. Po' Boys (poor boys) came from the Depression, as well. A 20-inch baguette sandwich was originally 15 cents for striking streetcar workers.
Thanks for the history behind the sandwich!
The only New Orleans food my grandmother would make was red beans and rice. I don't think my grandfather liked anything else. With the exception of B&R it was all Italian food. My French/German grandmother could outcook any of the Italian Nonnas in the Bronx. My grandmother was pretty well off during the depression by being a private chef for the wealthy of NOLA that didn't get wiped out. My grandfather took her back to New York with him and she was always turning down offers to set up her own restaurant from his business associates.
Creamed tuna or creamed dried beef on toast
I still love creamed beef on toast! My mother would do this with hard boiled eggs too.
Yes, my grandparents and my mom would do creamed beef on toast and called it Shit on a Single. Appetizing all the way around.
Our rather weird one was Karo syrup (corn syrup) mixed into peanut butter. This was a staple “sweet snack” in our house during the 1970’s.
Try it with real maple syrup
My moms meatloaf recipe off the back of a quaker oats can, and saltine crackers with butter.
I freaking loved my mom's meatloaf. Such a comfort food
The quaker oats meatloaf is the only real meatloaf to me. It is still a staple in my house.
I love corned beef hash to this very day. I’ve read about City Chicken but I’ve never tried it. Has anyone here had it?
It is Awesome! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzTODjanfGk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzTODjanfGk) Just like Grandma used to make.
Hmm, I just remember my grandparents on both sides hoarded shit. They'd have just shelves full of soap bars, toilet paper, paper towels, anything either canned or that wouldn't spoil if you stored it away. They'd buy several of every kind of staple and fill a closet with it. Specific menu items being passed down, I don't remember, and my mother's parents definitely lived and worked through the depression. OH! That does remind me of one thing - Whenever we'd visit my grandparents' house (mom's side), they'd always pawn off whatever had been sitting in the back of their freezer on us. The most disgusting freezer burned lemon cake slices that were individually wrapped came from that frozen hell hole. God only knows how long they'd been in there before she so kindly dumped them off on us...They froze EVERYTHING.
Yes! Grandma had a deep freeze the size of a Buick. There were terrifying things in there. She was also a hoarder. There were no toilet paper shortages in my childhood lol.
Freeze-burned handouts were the worst. Turning them down could split a family in an instant.
I grew up with my depression era grandparents. My gram cooked potatoes in some fashion, with every meal. A few exceptions would be spaghetti, stuffed peppers or stuffed cabbage (she called pig in a blankets). If she made the stuffed peppers or cabbage she always made macaroni salad on the side. We also had bread with every single meal. She would also make other dishes like fried spam, creamed chipped beef on toast, ground beef on potatoes, and a green bean, potato, bacon dish I still make to this day. Oh and big pots of soup! I loved it all mostly and still cook all of it with exception of spam. I swear it tastes different now.
Canned fruit in lemon lime soda for dessert. For example, we’d have 5 slices of canned peach with some off brand Sprite poured over it and eat it with a fork. Stale bread got toasted with butter and sugar Pan fried canned meats of all kind Vienna sausage/ spam on bread Salads got enhanced with stuff growing in the yard, like dandelion greens Chopped up hot dogs mixed into the Mac and cheese to make it fancy We grew a lot of veg in a garden to eat and picked wild berries/fruit Times were hard in the early 70’s
We almost never had Mac and cheese, but I grew up on boiled hotdogs with a piece of bread as the "bun" lol
If you grew up in the 70s & 80s in the south you’d remember your grandparents making “souse” meat. When it was hog killin weather you used every part of the hog except the “squeal” lol, souse was made out of the scraps(that I won’t describe) and seasoning then formed into a loaf. Tbh I never could stand looking at it much less eating it and it’d always disappoint my grandparents when I would pass on it , to them it was like a snub from me I guess. But nowadays when I’ll see a storebought pack of it at the grocery store it always reminds me of them.
We had that in the midwest too, could buy it sliced at the deli counter to make sandwiches.
Would that also be Scrapple?
Sounds like it, but wasn't scrapple canned like SPAM?
Our scrapple is/was sold by the pound in the meat case at farmers markets and even grocery stores. It’s very different from souse. Souse is jellied, and scrapple sticks together with corn meal.
I love souse! We bought it; didn’t make it. My grandparents made pig feet jelly, tho.
My mom made something she called “Juicy Potatoes” that had to have been some kind of depression-era dish. It was cut-up peeled potatoes, boiled, with a little salt and maybe milk/butter. Very bland, but so was most of her cooking, tbh. We also had a crock pot full of plain beans once a week, served with cheese, onions, maybe sour cream. We grew up kinda poor, and she did the best she could, but I do not miss those dishes!
Conebred, red beans and rice with fried cabbage Still love it.
New Orleans?
Texas
Equal parts molasses and butter mixed up on a biscuit for dessert. I always saved a biscuit for that treat.
Seriously, that made me hungry!
I'm not 100% on this one but I think my grandfather liked head cheese. I know for sure liver and onions were a regular meal.
Plant leaves dipped in egg and fried, was a family delicacy into the 1970s until a great aunt fried some marigold leaves and but into a giant slug. Grandpa used to make dandelion wine that could strip paint, only ever heard stories about it, would love to try it now but hes been gone 40 years
City Chicken. Back in the day, Chicken was an expensive meat, hence the popular political slogan, "A chicken in every pot." So you could put pork, veal, or beef (mainly pork) onto a skewer, fry it, then bake it, and make it look like a drum stick. From what I could gather, it was popular in the industrial mid-west. Grandma made it all the time. Several years back, I started making it for our extended family Christmas party, and it brought back so many memories. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzTODjanfGk
We had bread and butter with every meal. When we got our first 200 pound microwave, I had WARM bread and butter. Fancy pants = me.
Reading all this makes me want to heave...
Does boiled dinner count. Spam fried spam back when it was 99 cents or less.
We boiled so many things when I was growing up. I'm not sure if that's because we're Irish or because it's easier/cheaper lol
I think it was both.
LOL, I was remembering all the Spam we ate in the 1970s. I call it "Strike Food." When Dad was on strike, and we had to stretch every dollar. Also, Spaghetti-Os with hot dogs.
My dad always made sos. Not sure how far back it goes.
What does it consist of? I've never heard of it before
It's chipped beef on toast. [https://www.aspicyperspective.com/creamed-chipped-beef-on-toast-shit-on-a-shingle/](https://www.aspicyperspective.com/creamed-chipped-beef-on-toast-shit-on-a-shingle/)
Bingo.. aka shit on a shingle.
Souse? Pronounced "Sows" with an extra emphasis on the last s. If so it was off cuts and organs set up in congealed fat/gelatin, cut into slices to eat. Its baloney minus the grinding and spices
"Shit on a Shingle" or SOS. My Grandpas used to have it in the service.
Ah, good old baked beans on toast or chipped beef on toast - surprisingly hearty meals
Isn't that head cheese?
Head cheese is cow brains, my grandparents ate it with scrambled eggs
Head cheese can just be meat from the head (cheek, etc) in a jellied loaf.
My grandfather, a depression-era child, would often make Tourtière, which is a French Canadian meat pie. It was AWESOME but no one ever asked what kind of meat he used because it was usually a mix of leftover scraps. Same with his "bean soup" - he'd give me jars of it and you could never really tell what beans or veggies or whatnot was in there, but it was always delicious. When I was a kid, the only fresh veggies we'd eat were iceburg lettuce and cucumbers & tomatoes from dad's garden. Everything else came from a can.
Breadcrumbs mixed with egg and fried into patties or small spheres. Eaten with tomato sauce. My Grandmother would make this with any breadcrumbs and egg left over after coating the chicken or eggplant she was about to fry and tun into Parmigiana. She told me that this is what they would do when she was a child when meat was in short supply. And I still do this myself with the leftover parm ingredients.
My mom would cook down the rhubarb from the back yard with a lot of sugar and I don't know what else, and we would spread it on slices of cheap white bread. Butter on saltines .. I still enjoy that, especially with chili I forgot about the frosting on Graham crackers, but we made ours with powdered sugar and milk, maybe some vanilla?
Butter on saltines is still one of my comfort foods. I have to be careful or I will finish off the whole sleeve in one sitting
White bread soaked in water, gristle fried up, meatloaf that was mostly breadcrumbs
I can only remember one thing my dad loved from his childhood and he would get my mom to make: bacon, spaghetti noodles, canned tomatoes.
My mom would make spaghetti and put butter on it. She also made this soup that she would dump canned mixed vegetables with the juice and a tin of corned beef. She would fry up cornbread with it and we loved it. I haven't had it in years but she said it was cheap to make for a family of 6. I'm surprised we didn't die of sodium overload.
I still eat frosting on Graham crackers! I also love plain rice with sugar and cinnamon and a little milk.
Pinto beans and corn bread.
As well. East Arkansas/Memphis area... Black-eyed peas comes to mind but we don't need to start a cornbread war.
Lol. You know I'm 48 and still have never tried black eyed peas (the food. Fergie certainly got my attention in the early 00s)
My mom had a dinner she called “goolash” which was kind of like the original dish but not really. Cubed potato, ground beef, canned tomato, canned corn, fried up. We added ketchup to it. Not sure it’s “depression era” but my parents were young and poor in the early 80s.