28 Surprisingly Delicious Great Depression Recipes You Should Try - Page 2 of 2 (2024)

FAQs

What were common dishes from the Great Depression? ›

Peanut butter sandwiches

Peanut butter is a nutritional dynamo in more ways than one, after all, as well as a consistently cheap food item that fits into any budget. With that in mind, it can't be shocking to discover peanut butter sandwiches were a common school lunch staple during the Great Depression.

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.

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.

Food was always home cooked, and people usually ate bread, vegetables, meat, etc. The most common meal was made of a composite dish with one portion of proteins (meat, eggs, fish, cheese, pulses), one portion of potatoes, pasta, or bread, and two portions of vegetables, followed by fruit as dessert.

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.

"Even in the Depression, people were so inventive," Cass County Historical Society President Marilyn Fry says of the durable food brands born in the depths of the 1930s. Birds Eye Frosted Foods, sliced Wonder Bread, Hostess Twinkies, Mott's Apple Sauce, Snickers candy bars, French's Worcestershire Sauce.

They included: Kool-Aid powder drink, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, Bisquick, Spam (precooked canned pork), Twinkies, Ritz Crackers, Lay's Potato Chips, cereals of Cheerios and Chex and Three Musketeers Bar. Maybe the most favorite item coming from the 1930s was the new Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies developed in 1938.

1930s: School lunch and the New Deal

A typical school lunch at the time included items like veggie soup, peanut butter sandwiches, and the occasional piece of fresh fruit.

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 the word for eating when depressed? ›

Emotional eating is described as a “tendency to eat in response to negative emotions with the chosen foods being primarily energy-dense and palatable ones” [15]. This condition can be caused by different factors, such as coping with stress and other negative emotions such as depression and feeling loneliness [15,27].

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.

Mageirocophobia is derived from the classical Greek noun mágeiros (μάγειρος), which means chef or butcher and phobia meaning fear of. Someone suffering from this phobia may expect to experience a very high influx of anxiety when merely thinking of cooking, let alone actually cooking themselves.

They included: Kool-Aid powder drink, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, Bisquick, Spam (precooked canned pork), Twinkies, Ritz Crackers, Lay's Potato Chips, cereals of Cheerios and Chex and Three Musketeers Bar. Maybe the most favorite item coming from the 1930s was the new Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies developed in 1938.

Dumplings were a filling addition to complement the soup. For some families, soup was the evening meal every night. Beans—navy, pinto, white, black-eyed—were a good substitute for meat during the Depression and were even an actual lifesaver in the 1930s.

Radio programs, music, dancing and dance marathons, and cinema were popular forms of entertainment during the Great Depression. Many people affected by the economic downturn sought inexpensive ways to pass the time and distract themselves from the challenging circ*mstances.

Inexpensive amusem*nts included backyard games, puzzles, card games, and board games such as Monopoly, which was introduced in 1935. Even the national pastime, baseball, changed profoundly during the Great Depression.