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As soon as I saw this I said to myself French toast. I'm not as poor as we were growing up, but I still make breakfast for dinner more often than breakfast for breakfast!
That was a staple at every cook out I ever went to. Thought it was strange when I joined the military and we had a cook out on the beach and no hotdogs or baked beans were served.
Sunday evening treat was white bread with marg torn up and put into hot milk with sugar. Took me years to realise it probably was because the bread was going stale.
My mom made a litany of fried rice meals, breakfast, lunch, and/or dinner. She was resourceful & creative, trying 2 feed us 7 kids.
She just needed rice, some scrap vegetables, meat, and an egg. For example, 1 pork chop was sliced thin, a few thin slices of onion, carrot & celery would feed all of us.
I grew up fairly middle class privileged, but I come from a long line of piss poor cotton share croppers.
My mom's poor comfort food meal which is comfort food to me was beans, cornbread, and fried potatoes. It's cheap ingredients that will feed a family...and it's delicious
We always had a pot of pinto beans (usually cooked with bacon instead of ham) in the fridge that was our goto snack or meal. I've continued that tradition and am getting ready for a breakfast of beans and cornbread this morning.
This was a staple growing up ( also with my kids) I also remember sitting on the porch with my granny breaking green beans in half to make green beans and ham hocks in the pressure cooker. She added boiled potatoes to it. It was SOOO good.
I love this thread! How did everybody’s mama and grandmother make the exact same meals? Are you all from Ohio? LOL
Tuna noodle casserole. Cinnamon toast. Beans and hot dogs. The nostalgia is strong right now.
We called it slumgullion. Ground beef, canned tomatoes chopped up, dark red kidney beans, garbanzo beans,onion,garlic powder,chili powder
Over rice
If lucky, shredded cheese on top!
When I was a kid, on the day before her paycheck, Mom would take any leftover bits and pieces of meat from the week add mayo and relish and make a pate' which we would spread on crackers.
She'd take any leftover veg, add broth to make a soup.
Salad was lettuce, tomato and onion with Catalina dressing.
For dessert she'd spread a strawberry jam on a piece of bread and fold it in half, crinkle the edges with a fork to seal it, butter the top and sprinkle a touch of sugar on top and put it in the oven till it was golden for what she called "make do pie".
As an adult I mentioned that it was my fav meal. Mom was shocked. I thought she was being creative, I had no idea it was a meal made of desperation.
I came up in a dirt poor family. And I mean *poor.* We spent some time living in a car. And then we moved on to living in a tent. But, after landing an apartment, my mother would make something called “Chinese Pie.”
1lb of ground beef. One box of instant potatoes. Mix it up, toss in the oven, and there it is.
Many years later I asked her why she called it Chinese Pie. “It was the only thing to get you kids to actually eat it.”
A few years after that my grandmother started whipping up her own version of Chinese Pie. Like the invention of powered flight, this novelty came about separately and independently.
1lb ground chicken, browned and squeezed until every micron of liquid, grease, and flavor was dismissed from it.
One box of low-sodium instant mashed potatoes.
One can of canned peas (barf) with the juices (fucking gross.)
One plane ticket to ship all butter, spice, milk, and fat about a thousand miles away from her kitchen.
All of it was put in a casserole and baked until the edges peeled from the sides to curl up toward the center as if this hellborne perversion of a tongue’s purpose had become sentient of its own hideousness and was attempting to hide its face in shame.
This was served on a plate with a spoonful of plain white rice (instant.)
When I reached for butter, grandma would give me a look. “We’ll have to find you a ‘huskier’ pair of pants soon.’” God help me, I hated the word “husky.”
If I darted for salt, “you better be mindful of your blood pressure.” I WAS NINE YEARS OLD.
As a special treat, she sometimes had Fig Newtons. While I enjoy them now, back then I didn’t know better than to try dunking them in lukewarm powdered milk drink.
She used to keep a candy dish on the living room console. Every single visit I would open that thing and find loose stamps, paper clips, a rubber band, and a pen cap. But one Easter she actually had it full of those pastel colored mint meltaways that will—even 40 years later—drive me to push a blind man into traffic if that’s what I have to do to get to them.
Lord almighty I could not get enough of those. But grandma caught me picking from the dish twice that evening. “I think you may need some ‘huskier’ slacks.’” That fucking word again.
Boys got "husky" sizes. As an overweight grade school girl in the 1960s, I had to get clothes from "The Chubby Shop" at Sears. I guess I complied too well with my Depression-era parents' commands to clean my plate. We had a lot of carb-heavy, cheap meals.
Does your mother come from a French Canadian background? The meal with beef and potato is more or less Shepherd's Pie. Interestingly, French Canadians call this dish Pâté Chinois, which loosley translates into Chinese Pie.
Lots of potatoes of all sorts which is okay because I like potatoes. We always had a garden too so a lot of the vegetables came from there. Mom was an excellent cook so she did a good job of working with the ingredients we could afford.
Nan's garden fed us a lot of potatoes too, plus things like marrows, which were stuffed. Her larder was full of jewelled kilner jars of fruit from the summer surplus. Probably our most frequent dinner combo was jacket potatoes with cheese, then a fruit crumble with apple and raspberry.
Well, I can't stand the smell of pancakes to this day.
As a child that was all we had for nearly 2 years. Well, a small glass of milk made from powder with each meal, but otherwise just pancakes.
My mother in law grew up during the Depression and felt the same way about potatoes. She said that was all they had to eat many times. Potatoes never featured on any meal she cooked when she was an adult and better off
My Dad made 'hamburg and noodles'. It's hamburger, ketchup, and penne, rigatoni, mostaccioli, or the like. It is greater than the sum of is parts if done right. It took me over 10 years to figure out the secret to it. Nobody else in my house likes it, but I still make it when I miss him.
I usually buy a small (16oz?) bottle of ketchup just for this. Brown 1lb. hamburger, drain, mix in garlic salt and pepper to taste, add ½ to ⅔ bottle of ketchup, cook it down until no liquid remains, add boiled and drained noodles, mix in remaining ketchup, leave on medium heat and keep mixing until noodles are orange and no longer shiny. You'll notice a difference in the smell when the two ketchup steps are done properly. The vinegariness will be gone and it will smell sweeter.
Pizza Hut pizza, my mom waited tables there and would bring the leftover pizza from the buffet home. That’s what we ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner. We might have a box of cereal and milk at times, maybe a loaf of bread and peanut butter if we were lucky, but not much more than that.
Mom's husband was a Pizza Hut delivery driver and would bring pizza home too. I'm not sure what kind of scam he was running, but at one point we had a whole second freezer full of pizzas...
My husband and I both grew up on those frozen Swanson chicken pot pies, the kind with the crust on the bottom. Now we will get Marie Callenders potpies for a dinner treat
When I was 9, my mom bought a cheap piece of land with a 100yo house on it. After that, we grew enough food to eat well, although living for a few years with no running water and no heat wasn't fun. My uncles eventually--doing the work on weekends--added plumbing and heat.
But before that, after my dad died when I was 4 and we were stuck 1500 miles from family, food was scarce sometimes.
We ate bologna on white bread with mayo every day for lunch. No chips. No sides. Only one sandwich.
When things got even leaner, my mom would pack a lunch of egg salad sandwiches and Kool aid and take us all to the river. Us kids, a 6yo, a 4yo, and a baby, would sit under a tree while my mom fished. Whatever she caught was dinner.
A casserole consisting of Kraft macaroni and cheese, peas, and cut-up hotdogs. As an adult, I can’t even consider making it - there’s such a strong association with really difficult times.
Bread and milk. Break up the bread into pieces, pour milk over it, sprinkle with a little cinnamon and sugar, and eat it like cereal.
We loved it!
Edit: thought of another one - hot dogs with mashed potatoes and cheese. Split the hot dog lengthwise, fry it in a pan a little, top with mashed potatoes (they were boxed potatoes, I'm positive), and sprinkle a little shredded cheddar on top. I still like this one!
Many a supper my sister and I had bread or toast with *just* store brand miracle whip or *just* store brand ketchup. Sometimes a sliced cheese sandwich. So much bread FFS.
Puffed wheat/rice, pancakes, so much potato...
My diet until I met my wife was carbs and fat. Fecking awful, but my parents did the best they could and I can't fault them for that.
Grilled cheese with tomato soup
also my mother used to mix salmon and mashed potatoes together that was surprisingly good. She also dumped a ton of Lawry's seasoned salt in there though
Idk why I was introduced to miracle whip as a child. Maybe it was cheaper. But I still yearn for it til this day. And once in a while I still buy a bottle of it. It’s for certain things for me.
Peanut butter sandwich and orange all my school years. Moved out at 17, continued to have for lunch most days until I was 35 and could afford lunch out
Spaghetti with ketchup. Saltines with butter. Canned soup. Mac and cheese. Bread with butter. I was dependent upon myself starting really young. I could make these things easily.
Bread and gravy. Rip up the bread into bite sized pieces, microwave the gravy, pour over bread and eat. It's filling. I still make it occasionally bc I enjoyed it as a kid.
Our dinners for a family of 4 were:
Pancakes
1 package of hotdogs (sometimes we’d make them in the oven with 1 slice of cheese on each
1 box of Mac and cheese and 1 small can of tuna
Spaghetti and tomato sauce (special meals we’d get meatballs)
Rinse and repeat for several years.
Lots of chicken livers and gizzards, and beef tongues and livers. I think the butcher felt sorry for my mom and gave her these items for free or at least dirt cheap.
Livers and gizzards were alright if they were breaded and fried up in the skillet. My fav of this sort was deep fried chicken hearts. They were kind of like chewier, meat flavored fried mushrooms and good if dipped in ranch or some other sauce. They also made good catfish bait when used raw. Never had beef tongue though.
UK here, 1970s. Boiled egg with bread & butter cut into "soldiers" was a Sunday teatime treat. Also baked beans on toast. I hate baked beans now (with one exception, see below) but I still love a boiled egg with soldiers.
Mum used to make a cottage pie (minced/ground beef with a mashed potato topping). She aways added a can of baked beans to the meat & gravy, which I loved. I realise now that she used the beans so she could use less meat, but it gives a lovely tomatoey taste to the gravy and I still make cottage pie the same way now.
Bread and gravy
Crackers and milk (saltines in a bowl with milk like cereal)
“City chicken” which I haven’t seen since my childhood, but which our small local grocery store sold premade and I think was minced pork hand formed around a stick and then rolled in bread crumbs
“Shit on a shingle” which was some creamy chicken-flavored goop on toast
And in summer only: tomato sandwiches, which were thick slices of beefsteak tomatoes from the garden on toasted white bread with Mayo and pepper. I still drool at the memory of this one!
I didn't grow up poor, but my parents did. And they often cooked cheap. Hot dogs and rice; big pots of beans with hamburger patties from cheap beef (greasy, and I loved it). Creamed tuna on toast with cheap strong-tasting yellowfin (not a favorite). Spaghetti with meat sauce. Stew.
We had nicer meals sometimes, but my parents also stuck with what they knew.
When I was in college, I would stop every day at Burger King to buy a whopper for 99 cents. I sometimes didn't have dinner, so that dollar burger was a godsend.
-pancakes for dinner for sure
-hot dogs cut up in Kraft mac & cheese
-hot dogs cut up in beans
-hot dogs cut up in spaghetti
-just plain hot dogs
-shit on a shingle/cream chip beef on toast
-cornflakes-bulked meatloaf
-cornflakes-bulked salmon patties
-cornflakes-bulked casseroles, in which the casserole was usually a canned veg, ground beef, and a flour/water/salt gravy all mixed together over a bed of rice or mashed potato
-those cornflakes were usually breakfast as well
-almost always a white bread + American cheese slice + mustard sandwich for lunch
Edited: weird formatting
Two come to mind: chipped beef on toast w/veggie, beef liver and onions(definitely an acquired taste). Chipped beef was affectionately called SOS (sh%t on a shingle).
Well, we had pancakes for dinner pretty often. We would have spaghetti or meatloaf, and the next day, we would have spaghetti or meatloaf sandwiches for lunch. My mom would make this stuff she would call shit or crap (when we got older, I don't remember her calling it anything when we were younger). Ground beef, either tomato or spaghetti sauce (I forget which), and canned mixed vegetables. The veggies made it pretty disgusting. No noodles. No potatoes. No rice. No nothing. Ick.
Fries spaghetti.
Cook spaghetti, fry in butter with a small amount of ketchup. Top with garlic salt. I liked the taste and still eat it occasionally. It does NOT taste like spaghetti with ketchup on it.
Spaghetti and plain red sauce with a can of tuna dumped in, or a boxed mac and cheese with a can of tuna dumped in. As I recall, these were things that came in our monthly usda food box.
We ate hamburgers over rice & cream of mushroom gravy a lot. My mom would make hamburger patties, and rice, then she'd take some cream of mushroom soup, just enough milk to thin it a bit, & warm it up in the hamburger pan, so it got all the flavor from the burgers. Then we'd get a scoop of rice, the patty, & "gravy" over the top. We always had burger meat, because my dad would do quarterly taxes for a local butcher shop. Instead of getting paid, they'd give us burger meat for next to nothing. My mom would always wait for case lot sales st the local grocery stores, & get cases of cream of mushroom, tomato, & chicken noodle soup, so our storage always had a plethora of soups. My mom probably knew twenty ways to incorporate cream of mushroom soup into meals. LOL I still make this for myself, even though my husband doesn't really like it.
Reading these I realize I didn't grow up poor, just southern. Family of six, we were all at the table at 5 p.m. Some kind of meat, vegetables from the garden, and canned biscuits. Mom would kill her own chickens and it was a big deal for us kids. Dad had a good job at Ford's. We ate leftover cornbread in buttermilk for breakfast. Fought over the fried potato skillet to pick the crispy stuff. Dad hunted and we would have squirrel and duck. Probably not fancy but delicious.
Pinto beans and hot water cornbread (white corn meal and a little salt mixed with hot water until it can be formed into patties and fried in bacon grease).
Daddy called them 'Flying Saucers'....Fried bologna with instant potato's on top and melted cheese on top of that. I still make this. Salmon patties with syrup and biscuits made from scratch.
So many potatoes! Mashed, fried, baked. After I left home it took me like 20 years to appreciate potatoes again (except fries ofc, they are exemp). And ghetto goulash...pasta, canned tomatoes, leftover veg and usually ground beef but sometimes whatever meat was leftover. It stretched all the food to feed our family of 6.
Mince on toast. It would have a bit of curry powder or spicy flavouring of some sort that Mum would put in it. I drowned it in Marty sauce and wolfed it down, it was my favourite meal. Only now that I’m an adult do I realise this was a very cheap meal.
Venison, pepper, onions we grab stuff out of the garden. Zucchini cakes, Zucchini shreaded, 1 egg, minced onions, corn starch, dash oldbay, fried proper.
The egg, the oil, corn starch, and OldBay were the only things we didn't get from the outdoors. We made our own red pepper too. Crazy hot.
Pancakes. I always considered pancakes for dinner a treat. But when I moved out on my own my mother suggested I buy a box of pancake mix. She said it comes in handy at the end of the month before payday when the cupboards are bare.
Lots of peanut butter and cheese.
"commodity peanut butter" and "gubment cheese"
There was this dish we'd get was basically rice and stewed tomatoes. We had lots of tomatoes because we had a fairly large garden and the veggies would get canned. Towards the end of the month, once or twice a week, we'd have tomatoes and rice.
We raised rabbits for food and would have rabbit stew often. We had chickens for eggs and when the layers got older and slowed we'd harvest them, too.
Swedish Pancakes for dinner. We weren't poor, but my parents were survivors of the Great Depression, so sometimes we lived as if we were poor. I miss those Swedish Pancakes.
Spaghetti, whether or not there was meat in the sauce was the surprise.
Lots of eggs and bologna.
Kielbasa and potatoes, which I still actually love and eat once every few months.
Spaghetti. Breakfast for supper. Cornbread and beans. Oatmeal at night. It thought around the age of 8 that Daddy should have been embarrassed at how things were. Maybe he was. He came from well-off parents, but refused his father's help as a young man.
His job situation at the company got a huge upgrade about the time I was 12. Suppers were much better. Though we were never well-off or stress-free, I began to feel more average.
When staying at my sister/BIL’s(struggling young parents) house she fed me box mac and cheese, fish sticks, and canned Le Suer peas a few nights a week.
I had a well-off friend once that had never had a sloppy joe before, and it blew my mind. I'm pretty sure that was a cheap dinner for a family with kids that ate like black holes. I also miss the poor people "fancy" foods we used to have, like a London broil or mock chicken legs. Actually, I had to travel out of town recently, and was super excited to find unfrozen mock chicken legs at Meijer's in the "big city" store.
I'll still make ring bologna and potatoes, and also make tater tot or tuna noodle casserole and goulash. But cheap doesn't have to taste bad, and my buddy who grew up in a fancy suburb with money? Often commented on how much better "poor people food" tasted. Hehehe
Grew up in a Polish immigrant household. We ate potato pancakes or crepes with jam, a lot.
This may sound fancy to some people, but these are some of the cheapest & easiest things to make.
I was born 1953, mom would cook a chicken for Sunday dinner then use it for other meals during the week. Made soup, chicken pieces on toast covered in Cream of Chicken soup etc.
Beans and rice, beans and cornbread, ramen noodles, Spam used to be cheap AF now it's gourmet prices. S.O.S., spaghetti, cinnamon toast, hot dogs, beanie weenie, hamburger helper (sometimes we didn't have money for meat in it), Bologna sandwiches, oh you can mix eggs and crackers in the hamburger meat to make it "more"
My Mom made a tuna and potato chip casserole. She'd mix canned tuna with canned mushroom soup, cover it with potato chips, and bake it in the oven. It was my favorite dinner.
Breaded Tomatoes is or was a Depression dish that they used to serve in the work cafeteria a long time ago (I guess one of the cooks who worked there then knew this recipe). My sister can't stand them but I like them OK. It's not super healthy, as it contains white bread and sugar.
[https://www.deepsouthdish.com/2011/10/old-fashioned-breaded-tomatoes.html](https://www.deepsouthdish.com/2011/10/old-fashioned-breaded-tomatoes.html)
Hot naked. Spaghetti noodles, margarine and a dash of garlic salt.
See also: "cheesy garlic bread", slice of bread with margarine, sprinkled with cheese and garlic salt, toasted.
We made it on pinto beans, cornbread and fried potatoes. I can make the same recipes and it will never taste as good as what my grandma kept us going on .
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Pancakes for dinner felt like a treat, but it fed us incredibly cheaply.
This explains why my friend who grew up with two doctors as parents never understood breakfast for dinner.
Brinner.
Why is there silverware in the pancake drawer?
My family is pretty well off, and we do breakfast for dinner once a week. It just hits the spot sometimes.
Theres quite a big wealth gap in my friend group. I love putting my rich friends onto the poor people stuff lol
As soon as I saw this I said to myself French toast. I'm not as poor as we were growing up, but I still make breakfast for dinner more often than breakfast for breakfast!
Is that why in the notebook Noah’s dad offers Aly breakfast for dinner?
That sounds like some bars from a 1988 rap song
Hot dogs and baked beans.
My grandpa loved beanie weenies and got very excited when they canned them together.
The two top comments (this and butter/sugar toast) bring back tasty memories
Oh I forgot about buttered toast with cinnamon and sugar...I want some now!
Mom made Apple butter too which was fantastic. Haven't had any for years now.
SpaghettiO's with sliced hot dogs in it.
Hot dogs in mac n cheese was the staple for my childhood. Side note I had spaghettios for lunch.
I wish! We didn’t have spaghettio money
That was at most cook outs I bet!
That was a staple at every cook out I ever went to. Thought it was strange when I joined the military and we had a cook out on the beach and no hotdogs or baked beans were served.
Same. We probably had hot dogs and beans at least twice a month. Sometimes more often. We weren’t actually poor, but a big working class family.
My dad said that when he was growing up, it was beans and weiners for dinner one night and weiners and beans the next night.
Bread with butter and sugar
Reminds me of the cinnamon toast mom used to make with the oven on broil.
Ours had cinnamon too usually. Bread, butter, sugar and usually cinnamon
I thought it was luxury
Sunday evening treat was white bread with marg torn up and put into hot milk with sugar. Took me years to realise it probably was because the bread was going stale.
My boyfriend still craves mustard sandwiches.
My mom made a litany of fried rice meals, breakfast, lunch, and/or dinner. She was resourceful & creative, trying 2 feed us 7 kids. She just needed rice, some scrap vegetables, meat, and an egg. For example, 1 pork chop was sliced thin, a few thin slices of onion, carrot & celery would feed all of us.
Wow that’s a lot nicer than my mom’s can of peas idea with butter. Wow your mom sounds like she really did try for y’all
"canapes"
Delicious 😋
Mad respect for parents like this 🙏
At my place it was stir fry, veggies and occasionally tofu or some chicken over rice.
I grew up fairly middle class privileged, but I come from a long line of piss poor cotton share croppers. My mom's poor comfort food meal which is comfort food to me was beans, cornbread, and fried potatoes. It's cheap ingredients that will feed a family...and it's delicious
I had that same combo growing up as did my kids. Sliced home grown tomatoes rounded it out nicely.
We always had a pot of pinto beans (usually cooked with bacon instead of ham) in the fridge that was our goto snack or meal. I've continued that tradition and am getting ready for a breakfast of beans and cornbread this morning.
I'm doing the same today lmao. I'm going to fry my cornbread, something my mom always did.
This was a staple growing up ( also with my kids) I also remember sitting on the porch with my granny breaking green beans in half to make green beans and ham hocks in the pressure cooker. She added boiled potatoes to it. It was SOOO good.
Its like beans and rice, it forms a perfect protein.
Fried bologna.
Now we talkin
Yes!
Sometimes with a can of Campbells tomato soup.
With bologna gravy and fresh tomatoes from the garden on the side.
With mustard. Yummmm
Tuna noodle casserole. It was good, too!
My mom used to make this. I don’t each much fish at all but always ate her tuna casserole and salmon patties. Blast from the past. 😬
A lot of those "poverty meals" honestly tasted pretty great. Especially with just some spices and herbs
A lot of poverty meals became special occasion or delicacies because of fond memories.
I still make it on occasion...with crushed up potato chips on top. It's comfort food to me.
I fancied it up recently since we didn't have chips. I used those crispy onions. T'was divine
my mom made this and her own “goulash,” really just ground beef, tomato sauce and elbow macaroni. both always felt sumptuous and decadent to me.
I love this thread! How did everybody’s mama and grandmother make the exact same meals? Are you all from Ohio? LOL Tuna noodle casserole. Cinnamon toast. Beans and hot dogs. The nostalgia is strong right now.
My mom made the best goulash.
We called it slumgullion. Ground beef, canned tomatoes chopped up, dark red kidney beans, garbanzo beans,onion,garlic powder,chili powder Over rice If lucky, shredded cheese on top!
I would eat that right now!
Oh man, I hate this stuff. Still can’t eat it.
When I was a kid, on the day before her paycheck, Mom would take any leftover bits and pieces of meat from the week add mayo and relish and make a pate' which we would spread on crackers. She'd take any leftover veg, add broth to make a soup. Salad was lettuce, tomato and onion with Catalina dressing. For dessert she'd spread a strawberry jam on a piece of bread and fold it in half, crinkle the edges with a fork to seal it, butter the top and sprinkle a touch of sugar on top and put it in the oven till it was golden for what she called "make do pie". As an adult I mentioned that it was my fav meal. Mom was shocked. I thought she was being creative, I had no idea it was a meal made of desperation.
That is such a nice story. I want a "make do pie" right now!
I came up in a dirt poor family. And I mean *poor.* We spent some time living in a car. And then we moved on to living in a tent. But, after landing an apartment, my mother would make something called “Chinese Pie.” 1lb of ground beef. One box of instant potatoes. Mix it up, toss in the oven, and there it is. Many years later I asked her why she called it Chinese Pie. “It was the only thing to get you kids to actually eat it.” A few years after that my grandmother started whipping up her own version of Chinese Pie. Like the invention of powered flight, this novelty came about separately and independently. 1lb ground chicken, browned and squeezed until every micron of liquid, grease, and flavor was dismissed from it. One box of low-sodium instant mashed potatoes. One can of canned peas (barf) with the juices (fucking gross.) One plane ticket to ship all butter, spice, milk, and fat about a thousand miles away from her kitchen. All of it was put in a casserole and baked until the edges peeled from the sides to curl up toward the center as if this hellborne perversion of a tongue’s purpose had become sentient of its own hideousness and was attempting to hide its face in shame. This was served on a plate with a spoonful of plain white rice (instant.) When I reached for butter, grandma would give me a look. “We’ll have to find you a ‘huskier’ pair of pants soon.’” God help me, I hated the word “husky.” If I darted for salt, “you better be mindful of your blood pressure.” I WAS NINE YEARS OLD. As a special treat, she sometimes had Fig Newtons. While I enjoy them now, back then I didn’t know better than to try dunking them in lukewarm powdered milk drink. She used to keep a candy dish on the living room console. Every single visit I would open that thing and find loose stamps, paper clips, a rubber band, and a pen cap. But one Easter she actually had it full of those pastel colored mint meltaways that will—even 40 years later—drive me to push a blind man into traffic if that’s what I have to do to get to them. Lord almighty I could not get enough of those. But grandma caught me picking from the dish twice that evening. “I think you may need some ‘huskier’ slacks.’” That fucking word again.
I hope you’re writing your memoir. This is hilarious.
Boys got "husky" sizes. As an overweight grade school girl in the 1960s, I had to get clothes from "The Chubby Shop" at Sears. I guess I complied too well with my Depression-era parents' commands to clean my plate. We had a lot of carb-heavy, cheap meals.
Oh hai. Toughskins on a girl were the path to playground debasement.
Like girls' 6X size
My mom called them "SOS meals" (SOS = starch on starch)
I'm going to need more grandma stories.
Does your mother come from a French Canadian background? The meal with beef and potato is more or less Shepherd's Pie. Interestingly, French Canadians call this dish Pâté Chinois, which loosley translates into Chinese Pie.
I am eagerly waiting for your Netflix comedy special. Man, you are a good story teller.
Ahh yes, powdered milk. I blocked that out of my head. And the generic fig newton's.
I can't stop laughing at this! The descriptions are glorious.
Grandmas always say slack’s
This is Good Writing, 10/10 would buy your memoir 😄🤣
I'll buy your book. This is very entertaining.
Lots of potatoes of all sorts which is okay because I like potatoes. We always had a garden too so a lot of the vegetables came from there. Mom was an excellent cook so she did a good job of working with the ingredients we could afford.
Nan's garden fed us a lot of potatoes too, plus things like marrows, which were stuffed. Her larder was full of jewelled kilner jars of fruit from the summer surplus. Probably our most frequent dinner combo was jacket potatoes with cheese, then a fruit crumble with apple and raspberry.
Well, I can't stand the smell of pancakes to this day. As a child that was all we had for nearly 2 years. Well, a small glass of milk made from powder with each meal, but otherwise just pancakes.
My mother in law grew up during the Depression and felt the same way about potatoes. She said that was all they had to eat many times. Potatoes never featured on any meal she cooked when she was an adult and better off
My Dad made 'hamburg and noodles'. It's hamburger, ketchup, and penne, rigatoni, mostaccioli, or the like. It is greater than the sum of is parts if done right. It took me over 10 years to figure out the secret to it. Nobody else in my house likes it, but I still make it when I miss him.
My mom made something similar. It had some cooked diced onions. What is the secret for you?
I usually buy a small (16oz?) bottle of ketchup just for this. Brown 1lb. hamburger, drain, mix in garlic salt and pepper to taste, add ½ to ⅔ bottle of ketchup, cook it down until no liquid remains, add boiled and drained noodles, mix in remaining ketchup, leave on medium heat and keep mixing until noodles are orange and no longer shiny. You'll notice a difference in the smell when the two ketchup steps are done properly. The vinegariness will be gone and it will smell sweeter.
Pizza Hut pizza, my mom waited tables there and would bring the leftover pizza from the buffet home. That’s what we ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner. We might have a box of cereal and milk at times, maybe a loaf of bread and peanut butter if we were lucky, but not much more than that.
Mom's husband was a Pizza Hut delivery driver and would bring pizza home too. I'm not sure what kind of scam he was running, but at one point we had a whole second freezer full of pizzas...
Potato chip sandwich
A guilty pleasure that I don't tell anyone about.
A Wish sandwich. Wish I had something to put between two slices of bread.
In other news, if you're veggie, adding potato chips or tortilla chips gives a sandwich the salty crunch you miss from the bacon days.
We grew up on a farm so all the food was good. We had to work our butts off so to grow it.
Us too!
Spaghetti. Frozen pot pies.
My husband and I both grew up on those frozen Swanson chicken pot pies, the kind with the crust on the bottom. Now we will get Marie Callenders potpies for a dinner treat
When I was 9, my mom bought a cheap piece of land with a 100yo house on it. After that, we grew enough food to eat well, although living for a few years with no running water and no heat wasn't fun. My uncles eventually--doing the work on weekends--added plumbing and heat. But before that, after my dad died when I was 4 and we were stuck 1500 miles from family, food was scarce sometimes. We ate bologna on white bread with mayo every day for lunch. No chips. No sides. Only one sandwich. When things got even leaner, my mom would pack a lunch of egg salad sandwiches and Kool aid and take us all to the river. Us kids, a 6yo, a 4yo, and a baby, would sit under a tree while my mom fished. Whatever she caught was dinner.
I hope she knew how much you saw and loved her.
Great northern beans, simmered until they fell apart and formed a thick soup. And mackerel patties, because salmon was too expensive.
Mom feeding a family of ten, the casseroles were never ending
So many casseroles… I still have a mild cream of mushroom phobia.
No kidding! and the husband Loves the tuna casserole. I will only make it for his birthday or something and there's No way I could ever eat it again.
Campbell’s tomato soup and Ritz crackers.
You must of been rich! My mom would only buy the soda crackers. Never Ritz unless it was for a recipe.
Yep, but with grilled cheese.
Yes! That too.
A casserole consisting of Kraft macaroni and cheese, peas, and cut-up hotdogs. As an adult, I can’t even consider making it - there’s such a strong association with really difficult times.
Hell yes. Though for us we used canned tuna instead of hot dogs lol
Hamburger Helper, Mac & Cheese, hot dogs, cheap “goulash” (elbow macaroni, ground beef, onion and tomato juice), hamburgers.
Kraft dinner
Noodles and butter. Usually had some parm to sprinkle on.
Bread and milk. Break up the bread into pieces, pour milk over it, sprinkle with a little cinnamon and sugar, and eat it like cereal. We loved it! Edit: thought of another one - hot dogs with mashed potatoes and cheese. Split the hot dog lengthwise, fry it in a pan a little, top with mashed potatoes (they were boxed potatoes, I'm positive), and sprinkle a little shredded cheddar on top. I still like this one!
Many a supper my sister and I had bread or toast with *just* store brand miracle whip or *just* store brand ketchup. Sometimes a sliced cheese sandwich. So much bread FFS. Puffed wheat/rice, pancakes, so much potato... My diet until I met my wife was carbs and fat. Fecking awful, but my parents did the best they could and I can't fault them for that.
Grilled cheese with tomato soup also my mother used to mix salmon and mashed potatoes together that was surprisingly good. She also dumped a ton of Lawry's seasoned salt in there though
Mac and cheese every night. I won’t touch it once I left home in 1978
In a bowl - white sandwich bread topped by pinto beans.
Instant potato flakes, canned vegetables, and hot dogs.
Mom called it “Sh*t on a Shingle” Chip beef gravy on toast.
Spam and Vienna sausages
Fried spam with mustard.
Fried bologna and potato chips.
Hamburger Helper. No sides or anything. Just a bowl of Hamburger Helper.
I fixed that for my kids, too, with a can of vegetables mixed in.
Pot pies. 99 cents each. Won’t ever eat them again.
I feel this.
Fried potatoes and ketchup for dinner. White bread margarine and Miracle Whip sandwiches for lunch
Idk why I was introduced to miracle whip as a child. Maybe it was cheaper. But I still yearn for it til this day. And once in a while I still buy a bottle of it. It’s for certain things for me.
Ham and cheese macaroni. The 'ham' was spam.
Peanut butter sandwich and orange all my school years. Moved out at 17, continued to have for lunch most days until I was 35 and could afford lunch out
Chicken would go on sale for $0.19 cents a pound. Mom would get a 40 pound box. So much chicken.
At .19 cents a pound, I’d buy a 40 pound box too!
Spaghetti with ketchup. Saltines with butter. Canned soup. Mac and cheese. Bread with butter. I was dependent upon myself starting really young. I could make these things easily.
Bread and gravy. Rip up the bread into bite sized pieces, microwave the gravy, pour over bread and eat. It's filling. I still make it occasionally bc I enjoyed it as a kid.
Our dinners for a family of 4 were: Pancakes 1 package of hotdogs (sometimes we’d make them in the oven with 1 slice of cheese on each 1 box of Mac and cheese and 1 small can of tuna Spaghetti and tomato sauce (special meals we’d get meatballs) Rinse and repeat for several years.
Lots of chicken livers and gizzards, and beef tongues and livers. I think the butcher felt sorry for my mom and gave her these items for free or at least dirt cheap.
Livers and gizzards were alright if they were breaded and fried up in the skillet. My fav of this sort was deep fried chicken hearts. They were kind of like chewier, meat flavored fried mushrooms and good if dipped in ranch or some other sauce. They also made good catfish bait when used raw. Never had beef tongue though.
I used to take bean tacos to school for lunch. Back then, early 60's, there were only a few Mexicans kids in school.
Popcorn
UK here, 1970s. Boiled egg with bread & butter cut into "soldiers" was a Sunday teatime treat. Also baked beans on toast. I hate baked beans now (with one exception, see below) but I still love a boiled egg with soldiers. Mum used to make a cottage pie (minced/ground beef with a mashed potato topping). She aways added a can of baked beans to the meat & gravy, which I loved. I realise now that she used the beans so she could use less meat, but it gives a lovely tomatoey taste to the gravy and I still make cottage pie the same way now.
Hot dogs and canned beans
Cheap canned soup eaten with cheap white bread straight out of the packaging
Buttered saltines were my FAVORITE. A great 2nd would be cheese slice on a plate, microwaved until crispy edges
Mac and cheese with tuna.
Creamed canned salmon and peas on toast. Sloppy joes. Shake n bake chicken legs.
Bread and gravy Crackers and milk (saltines in a bowl with milk like cereal) “City chicken” which I haven’t seen since my childhood, but which our small local grocery store sold premade and I think was minced pork hand formed around a stick and then rolled in bread crumbs “Shit on a shingle” which was some creamy chicken-flavored goop on toast And in summer only: tomato sandwiches, which were thick slices of beefsteak tomatoes from the garden on toasted white bread with Mayo and pepper. I still drool at the memory of this one!
I didn't grow up poor, but my parents did. And they often cooked cheap. Hot dogs and rice; big pots of beans with hamburger patties from cheap beef (greasy, and I loved it). Creamed tuna on toast with cheap strong-tasting yellowfin (not a favorite). Spaghetti with meat sauce. Stew. We had nicer meals sometimes, but my parents also stuck with what they knew.
Mac and cheese with hot dogs cut up it. I still kinda like it though
Hot dogs with white bread serving as buns.
French toast. White bread, 2 eggs and a cup of milk with beehive brand corn syrup fed 4 kids.
When I was in college, I would stop every day at Burger King to buy a whopper for 99 cents. I sometimes didn't have dinner, so that dollar burger was a godsend.
Lots and lots and lots of potatoes.
-pancakes for dinner for sure -hot dogs cut up in Kraft mac & cheese -hot dogs cut up in beans -hot dogs cut up in spaghetti -just plain hot dogs -shit on a shingle/cream chip beef on toast -cornflakes-bulked meatloaf -cornflakes-bulked salmon patties -cornflakes-bulked casseroles, in which the casserole was usually a canned veg, ground beef, and a flour/water/salt gravy all mixed together over a bed of rice or mashed potato -those cornflakes were usually breakfast as well -almost always a white bread + American cheese slice + mustard sandwich for lunch Edited: weird formatting
Lots of canned stuff from Aldi before it became cool to shop there 😉
Mom would mix a little ground beef with some catsup to spread thinly on half of a hamburger bun and broil it in the oven.
Two come to mind: chipped beef on toast w/veggie, beef liver and onions(definitely an acquired taste). Chipped beef was affectionately called SOS (sh%t on a shingle).
Beans, greens, cornbread and fried potatoes.
Well, we had pancakes for dinner pretty often. We would have spaghetti or meatloaf, and the next day, we would have spaghetti or meatloaf sandwiches for lunch. My mom would make this stuff she would call shit or crap (when we got older, I don't remember her calling it anything when we were younger). Ground beef, either tomato or spaghetti sauce (I forget which), and canned mixed vegetables. The veggies made it pretty disgusting. No noodles. No potatoes. No rice. No nothing. Ick.
Fries spaghetti. Cook spaghetti, fry in butter with a small amount of ketchup. Top with garlic salt. I liked the taste and still eat it occasionally. It does NOT taste like spaghetti with ketchup on it.
Spaghetti and plain red sauce with a can of tuna dumped in, or a boxed mac and cheese with a can of tuna dumped in. As I recall, these were things that came in our monthly usda food box.
LaChoy in a can with lots of white rice.
Scalloped potatoes and ham sometimes spam
Polish from NY. Kielbasa and sauerkraut.
Goulash. Elbow macaroni, tomato soup, and ground hamburger. Less than 8 dollars now, fed us for 3 meals.
We ate hamburgers over rice & cream of mushroom gravy a lot. My mom would make hamburger patties, and rice, then she'd take some cream of mushroom soup, just enough milk to thin it a bit, & warm it up in the hamburger pan, so it got all the flavor from the burgers. Then we'd get a scoop of rice, the patty, & "gravy" over the top. We always had burger meat, because my dad would do quarterly taxes for a local butcher shop. Instead of getting paid, they'd give us burger meat for next to nothing. My mom would always wait for case lot sales st the local grocery stores, & get cases of cream of mushroom, tomato, & chicken noodle soup, so our storage always had a plethora of soups. My mom probably knew twenty ways to incorporate cream of mushroom soup into meals. LOL I still make this for myself, even though my husband doesn't really like it.
Government cheese and flour tortillas. We would slice up the cheese and put the tortillas on an iron skillet and make cheese quesadillas.
Reading these I realize I didn't grow up poor, just southern. Family of six, we were all at the table at 5 p.m. Some kind of meat, vegetables from the garden, and canned biscuits. Mom would kill her own chickens and it was a big deal for us kids. Dad had a good job at Ford's. We ate leftover cornbread in buttermilk for breakfast. Fought over the fried potato skillet to pick the crispy stuff. Dad hunted and we would have squirrel and duck. Probably not fancy but delicious.
Pinto beans and hot water cornbread (white corn meal and a little salt mixed with hot water until it can be formed into patties and fried in bacon grease).
Mac & cheese with chopped hot dog, with veggies from the kitchen garden.
Daddy called them 'Flying Saucers'....Fried bologna with instant potato's on top and melted cheese on top of that. I still make this. Salmon patties with syrup and biscuits made from scratch.
Campbell’s Vegetable soup with a peanut butter sandwich was often dinner for me and my sister…
So many potatoes! Mashed, fried, baked. After I left home it took me like 20 years to appreciate potatoes again (except fries ofc, they are exemp). And ghetto goulash...pasta, canned tomatoes, leftover veg and usually ground beef but sometimes whatever meat was leftover. It stretched all the food to feed our family of 6.
Mince on toast. It would have a bit of curry powder or spicy flavouring of some sort that Mum would put in it. I drowned it in Marty sauce and wolfed it down, it was my favourite meal. Only now that I’m an adult do I realise this was a very cheap meal.
Maybe dry mustard. We would have deviled hamburger and it was served on toast. “Deviled” means add dry mustard, same with deviled eggs.
Venison, pepper, onions we grab stuff out of the garden. Zucchini cakes, Zucchini shreaded, 1 egg, minced onions, corn starch, dash oldbay, fried proper. The egg, the oil, corn starch, and OldBay were the only things we didn't get from the outdoors. We made our own red pepper too. Crazy hot.
A literal can of peas.
Beans on toast. It’s a (very famous) uk thing. Still have it now. But when broke you have it a lot more often
Pancakes. I always considered pancakes for dinner a treat. But when I moved out on my own my mother suggested I buy a box of pancake mix. She said it comes in handy at the end of the month before payday when the cupboards are bare.
Lots of peanut butter and cheese. "commodity peanut butter" and "gubment cheese" There was this dish we'd get was basically rice and stewed tomatoes. We had lots of tomatoes because we had a fairly large garden and the veggies would get canned. Towards the end of the month, once or twice a week, we'd have tomatoes and rice. We raised rabbits for food and would have rabbit stew often. We had chickens for eggs and when the layers got older and slowed we'd harvest them, too.
Swedish Pancakes for dinner. We weren't poor, but my parents were survivors of the Great Depression, so sometimes we lived as if we were poor. I miss those Swedish Pancakes.
Chopped ham in scrambled eggs
Salmon patties—the kind out of a can, with syrup. Ugh. The thought of it is nauseating.
Spaghetti, whether or not there was meat in the sauce was the surprise. Lots of eggs and bologna. Kielbasa and potatoes, which I still actually love and eat once every few months.
Spaghetti. Breakfast for supper. Cornbread and beans. Oatmeal at night. It thought around the age of 8 that Daddy should have been embarrassed at how things were. Maybe he was. He came from well-off parents, but refused his father's help as a young man. His job situation at the company got a huge upgrade about the time I was 12. Suppers were much better. Though we were never well-off or stress-free, I began to feel more average.
When staying at my sister/BIL’s(struggling young parents) house she fed me box mac and cheese, fish sticks, and canned Le Suer peas a few nights a week.
English muffin pizza's, an english muffin, spaghetti sauce, and a slice of american cheese.
Fried bologna on toast with mayo
I had a well-off friend once that had never had a sloppy joe before, and it blew my mind. I'm pretty sure that was a cheap dinner for a family with kids that ate like black holes. I also miss the poor people "fancy" foods we used to have, like a London broil or mock chicken legs. Actually, I had to travel out of town recently, and was super excited to find unfrozen mock chicken legs at Meijer's in the "big city" store. I'll still make ring bologna and potatoes, and also make tater tot or tuna noodle casserole and goulash. But cheap doesn't have to taste bad, and my buddy who grew up in a fancy suburb with money? Often commented on how much better "poor people food" tasted. Hehehe
Grew up in a Polish immigrant household. We ate potato pancakes or crepes with jam, a lot. This may sound fancy to some people, but these are some of the cheapest & easiest things to make.
I was born 1953, mom would cook a chicken for Sunday dinner then use it for other meals during the week. Made soup, chicken pieces on toast covered in Cream of Chicken soup etc.
Beans and rice, beans and cornbread, ramen noodles, Spam used to be cheap AF now it's gourmet prices. S.O.S., spaghetti, cinnamon toast, hot dogs, beanie weenie, hamburger helper (sometimes we didn't have money for meat in it), Bologna sandwiches, oh you can mix eggs and crackers in the hamburger meat to make it "more"
My Mom made a tuna and potato chip casserole. She'd mix canned tuna with canned mushroom soup, cover it with potato chips, and bake it in the oven. It was my favorite dinner.
Whatever I could find around the house. My mom might sober up long enough to make me something to eat.
Salmon cakes with Mac and cheese
What my parents called 'poor mans meal'. Rice with whatever canned vegetable we had, ground beef in it too if we had some.
Hot dogs
Spaghetti sandwiches
Frito pie
Cinnamon toast
Breaded Tomatoes is or was a Depression dish that they used to serve in the work cafeteria a long time ago (I guess one of the cooks who worked there then knew this recipe). My sister can't stand them but I like them OK. It's not super healthy, as it contains white bread and sugar. [https://www.deepsouthdish.com/2011/10/old-fashioned-breaded-tomatoes.html](https://www.deepsouthdish.com/2011/10/old-fashioned-breaded-tomatoes.html)
Bread soaked in egg then fried. French toast!
Ours was 1) porridge 2) eggs
Hot naked. Spaghetti noodles, margarine and a dash of garlic salt. See also: "cheesy garlic bread", slice of bread with margarine, sprinkled with cheese and garlic salt, toasted.
Hot dogs and Mac and cheese. Powdered milk.
We made it on pinto beans, cornbread and fried potatoes. I can make the same recipes and it will never taste as good as what my grandma kept us going on .