There’s two categories: stupid-lazy poor food and smart poor food
stupid-lazy poor: preprocessed corner store crap, fast food, “kit” anything, takeout, and pizza
smart poor: hoppin’ john (beans, rice, and some kind of salted fatty pork), pastas, and basically all cheap dry or canned ingredients that you cook yourself to taste as good as these plain staples possibly can.
The cheapest things I can make (and thus poverty foods for me when I was in school) are:
Beans and cornbread
Spaghetti
Veggie quesadillas
Ramen noodles
Oatmeal
Biscuits from scratch
And I genuinely like all of those foods.
I hesitate to call rice poverty food per se – it’s the foundation of some of the great foods of the world. But, as I’m a little strapped for cash, I go for weeks eating nothing but rice – and lucky for me, I have stores of spices (curry mixes, other stuff, including especially salt) and fats (vegetable oil, bacon grease, and, lucky for me, butter). About once a week I’ll have a big thing of orange juice for the vitamins.
I’m usually too strapped for time to bother cooking beans from dried, and canned beans are too expensive for me right now, otherwise they’d be included as well.
Some people eat really expensive puttanesca. Doesn’t change where it comes from, or what the word means. In addition, the really fashionable French cuisine is, you guessed it, the traditional French poverty food from Provence.
drastic_quench: Sounds like your ‘smart poor’ is more like ‘has-time-to-cook poor’ or, more importantly, ‘was-taught-to-cook poor’.
But mostly I would say the most telling ingredient of any poverty dish is also the most ubiquitous: leftovers.
We weren’t poor when I grew up, far from it, but grandma did most of the cooking. Grandma grew up with WW2 rationing and never really got over the whole don’t waste a iota or you’ll starve thing. Most of our meals involved leftovers thrice removed (as in: half of Wednesday’s dish was leftovers from Tuesday’s dish that was mostly made from what was left from Monday).
But even that has its limits, and in the fullness of time leftovers organically morph into one of three things: purée, stew, or ratatouille.
None. Anything over that means we’ve eaten.
One year, when I was little, we had hot dogs for Thanksgiving. Years later I wished we had some.
Crock pot. I ate that stuff from a $22 Crock Pot for a year. Seasoning never got more complex than salt, pepper, red pepper, garlic, and onion. Sometimes I used curry powder if I was making rice and lentils. Sometimes I used stock powder. It’s not a daily thing either. A batch - which took as much prep time as putting on a shirt and jeans - could last three days worth of lunches and dinner. Sometimes I put in a can of tomatoes. None of that was taught. I referenced a few recipes online - which I could have done from a public library if I really had to. But it’s the sort of food you can wing really easily.
I’ve been poor a few times, but I’ve never lived in poverty. So my idea of poverty food, comes from my mom. She was one of 18 kids, and they were share croppers during the depression.
It wasn’t unusual for them to have a meal of flour fried in lard.
During my own lean times, I would have breakfast 3 times a day. Eggs are cheap and 20 years ago breakfast meat was considerably cheaper than other meat.
Beans, rice, ramen, and spaghetti. While I was a single mom, spaghetti was the go-to cheap, quick, kids-will-eat-it balanced meal. It’s only within the past few months that I can bring myself to eat spaghetti again!
Most po’ folks’ food, though, I like and cook willingly. A meals of rice and beans and cornbread hits the spot on a cool evening. And cheap chicken parts (especially thighs) are tastier than more expensive breast meat. And then there are the classic long-braised meat dishes like pot roast, designed to make cheap tough cuts more palatable. Yum! Or chicken and dumplings, which is the final destiny of the over-aged and stringy (and usually mean) old rooster. (Ditto coq au vin. Despite the highfalutin French name, it’s just a way to make a tough ol bird edible.) Not poverty food to the degree of ketchup sandwiches, but definitely poor people food.
(Mind you, when I was a kid, we were legitimately poor, but we were “country poor.” So we ate produce from our garden, home-raised pork and chicken, fresh eggs, game, fresh fish, honey and pecans and blueberries and peaches from my grandparents’ farm, blackberries and muscadines from the woods nearby. Etc. Being poor in the country wasn’t bad eating, and I wish I could afford to feed my kids that well.)
Samp and beans
Watery vegetable soup with stodgy dumplings
Pap with native spinach
Spam or bully-beef
Cat
Ramen is precooked and can be essentially rehydrated from the hot water tap of the kitchen sink, in general any pasta larger than pastini [flakes] needs to actually be boiled. Ramen also comes with a flavor packet of varying flavors, pasta arrives in a box plain, you need to get some other ingredients to flavor it.
And very frequently the Dollar Store [where everything is a dollar, I would assume that there are Shilling Stores and Euro Stores and Yen Stores or the equivalent pretty much everywhere there are poor people on the equivalent of the dole] has jars of spices for a buck each, so you can stock up on the basic blends [I would imagine italian herbs, curry powder, chili powder, montreal steak seasoning and pumpkin pie spice would be my go to blends if I was broke and could only afford $5 + tax]
My mom grew up on a small family farm in Iowa during the depression. We always had a garden, and she made pickles and canned food even though my Dad after retiring from the army was vice president of a major chemical corporation and made more than enough money. My husband’s mom grew up on a small farm in Craig MO that didn’t have plenty of money when she grew up [they finally got electricity in the late 50s, just as she was leaving to go to college.] so mrAru and I are firm believers in gardening, and making pickles and canning veggies and fruits. We stock up on dried foods at our co-op - we have a chest freezer for them [freezing them keeps them bug and vermin free. Most times when you see millers in your flour or grains/grain products it is not because they showed up to infest them but their eggs were in the product already from the factories. Hard freezing them for 3 days is how you kill the eggs. We just also keep them in the freezer for that lovely metal surrounding the product to keep rodents at bay. It is hard to keep rodents out of the barn thanks to random critter feed.]
If you have window sills you can grow herbs in them, and even some veggies to supplement beans and rice - radishes have a 19 day growth cycle to harvest, in my aerogarden I was growing Romaine, and was plucking individual leaves to make sandwiches with so it stretched out the harvest to almost a month of 3 to 4 leaves to a sandwich. I would imagine you can grow romaine in a window box just as easily. You could probably manage to grow a tiny salad a day with perhaps 3 window boxes. A bottle of cheap vinegar, a bottle of cheap veggie oil and a shake of italian seasoning is a basic vinaigrette dressing. A bottle of cheap reconstituted lemon juice, a splash in a glass of water - 1 tbsp per day IIRC is the RDA of vitamin C.
And I mean a window box on the inside, not the outside so it is good through the winter.
Actually, I get it for about 10 cents a pack.
Um… yeah, been eating a lot of “poverty food” myself the past few years.
Bad PR and lazy “cooks”.
Just the noodles with the enclosed “flavor” packet isn’t that good for you - it’s mostly empty starch calories with too much salt and fat in proportion to what nutrition there is.
What YOU showed, with vegetables and some sort of protein combined with it is actually a reasonable meal.
I usually eat ramen with garden-grown greens, some onion and carrot (also from the garden), and egg or beans for protein. I also use my own flavorings, not the mostly-salt in the packet.
Poverty end-of-the-week before payday food: peanut butter, on the last stale slices of 79 cent loaf of white bread (maybe add a packet of jelly snagged from the last meal out at a diner). Washed down with a glass of water. Even worse: the diner jelly packets spread on the handful of saltine cracker packets you pocketed, from the same place.
Generally I think of fast food and any processed goop served in styrofoam.
Oh yeah I love beans on toast, I’ve just always thought it would be my last resort for a meal if I were broke, even though I enjoy it immensely as a millionaire :p.
Tin of beans in Lidl is something like 25c, you can buy bread for 80c or less a loaf.
I’m talking about this, yes. How are they different from regular pasta ? They’re even cheaper, presumably because the really college student-y varieties must be at least 50% made of cardboard and saw dust, and unlike occidental noodles they often come with a mysterious little packet of flavouring… stuff. Don’t know what’s in it and I probably don’t want to, but it tastes pretty good for the price.
Plain grits (no butter or cheese or cinnamon or anything to dress them up.)
Ramen noodles
“Potted Meat” (Don’t know if this counts as it really is dog food.)
Rutabaga soup. My brother still shudders when he remembers that dish. My mother couldn’t afford meat in those days (the late 30s, early 40s), but rutabagas were cheap.
My mom used to take a pound of cheap ground beef and mix in as much bread as it could hold and still be formed into a shape. Them mix an egg into it to help bind it together.
For years after I moved out, I assumed that was just how you made burgers and stuff. One day it dawned on me that, no, it was how you made a pound of beef into enough burgers to feed the family.
Speaking of eggs, if you crack and drop an egg into your cheap ramen as it’s boiling, it’ll cook in the three minutes and add some heft to your meal for all of ten cents. Of course, this might double the per meal price of your cheaper ramen noodles.