Creamed chipped beef on toast.
HAVE MERCY! 
American food of the 50s also included fried chicken and prime rib. BBQ and steak. We are suffering from a bit of selective memory here.
I strenuously disagree with needscoffee’s remark. Cuisine in 1950’s America was probably better on average than it had ever in anyplace ever before in history, in terms of nutrition and flavor. In fact, far from being a time of “boring” or “standard” fare, this was actually a time of considerable innovation in cooking. There was enough emphasis on home life, along with new labor-saving devices that allowed better meals and do while spending less time cleaning and so forth.
People mostly remember the less palatable foods, or those which were used in weird ways. (Also, most of the joke images in The Gallery of Regrettable Food would have been pretty tasty - it was photography which had’t quite caught up with the times, not the cooking.) Gelatin, which everyone nowadays thinks of as a very basic, even dull, food, was something new and exciting in the '50’s. Previously it was been extremely time-consuming and difficult to make, so people were trying out something that for many had previously been unattainable.
And during this time, people had the money to spend on it for once. It’s hard to imagine today, but putting food on the table had been a real struggle for much of the preceding generation. For many in the Great Depression and WW2, a simple chicken dinner would have represented a rare treat.
You should watch the April’s Fool episode of Season 3 of the “Adventures of Pete and Pete.” Adam West gets sprayed by a giant stream of creamed corn.
Ah, here it is.
Did it ever. I used to own a 1953 Duncan Hines guide to restaurants across the country, and they ALL served fried chicken and steak, even the Mexican places in Tucson and the top-rated Chinese places in San Fran and New York.
You didn’t want to get your lord-and-master husband to take you to dinner and have him find there was NOTHING ON THE MENU HE COULD EAT, just crazy foreign stuff. Poppa wants his well-done steak and baked potato.
Aka Shit on a Shingle. 
Also damn near everyone smoked at that time and that also had an effect on people’s taste buds. More concerned with filling than taste.
Oh man, love the stuff and I’ve never been in the military. Or perhaps that’s why I love the stuff.
Yeah, I think this might help explain the thought process that makes it ok to dump mushroom soup on otherwise edible food.
And it is, of course, people.
I grew up in the fifties and sixties. My mom was a farm girl, and cooked mostly from scratch rather than using prepackaged or processed food. She was widowed at an early age and with five children, money was tight. TV dinners and the like were expensive. We got some stuff from the farm, which had gone to the oldest of her siblings, pretty often, and Mom canned stuff for the winter.
I worked in a breakfast restaurant for several years (1990s- present) and this was a popular item. It wasn’t close to the cheapest thing on the menu, either. I liked to have it myself occasionally, though I liked it over biscuits, bagels, homefries, french fries, eggs, and lots of other things.
In fact there were at least 2 super busy restaurants in town that were mostly about homemade cream chipped beef. They had lines down the block in the summer.
We just used the Stouffers stuff in the industrial sized pans from Sysco.
Every once in awhile I will grab some from the Stouffers frozen food section and eat it out of nostalgia.
That might help. I used to eat it out of the tray it came in.
No discussion of this type is complete without Mid-Century Menu. Absolutely, easily my favorite source of food-related weirdness on the internet.
Egad burpo the wonder mutt! The memories. The horror. I’ll be sleeping with the light on for the next week.
My mother was a child of the depression, so lots of our meals were canned, either from our own garden or from the store. All of the vegetables were oversalted and overcooked. At least we had fresh-from-the-garden in the summer, and the new potatoes and the tomatoes back then were terrifically delicious. Also she baked from scratch all of our bread and weekly cinnamon rolls, which were great but as kids we of course liked Wonder Bread better (we know better now).
I think the meats were better: there was real ham, real pork that hadn’t had all of the fat bred out of it, fresh farm eggs and chickens. We lived on a farm, so weren’t always limited to processed food.
Cite? Thinking of traditional cuisines in many parts of, e.g., France, Italy and China—and even traditional farm cooking in much of pre-20th-century America—this statement seems simply ridiculous.
Maybe what you’re trying to say is that due to the midcentury boost in prosperity and economic equality, midcentury American food overall for everybody including the poorest people was an improvement on poor people’s fare in earlier times. Sure, a Kraft dinner is preferable to a handful of burnt weevilly rice, but that’s not really what people generally mean by comparing cuisines.
[QUOTE=smiling bandit]
In fact, far from being a time of “boring” or “standard” fare, this was actually a time of considerable innovation in cooking.
[/quote]
Well, perhaps in the sense that home cooks were attempting to imitate prestigious “fancy” dishes, whose preparation traditionally required a good deal of care and skill, using mass-produced convenience-food ingredients (often in recipes created and promoted by the ingredient manufacturers to encourage consumption of their products). Also, the diminishing role of domestic servants in the postwar era meant that more middle-class women who had grown up in families with hired cooks were taking on the role of primary meal preparer for their own families, with limited experience or training in the sort of skills that hired cooks possessed.
Hence Jell-O salads instead of aspic, canned condensed soups as a binder in place of bechamel and similar sauces, soft-keeping presliced breads like Wonder Bread in place of new-baked bread, boxed cake and pudding mixes instead of fresh cake and pudding ingredients, and so on.
“Innovative”, yes. “Improved”, not so much.
I was born in '54, the first of 5 kids. Our rather boring meals were mostly a product of budgeting. Mom made a little extra money by sewing for some women who saw her ad in the local paper. But other than that, we had to make do on what Dad brought home. We never went hungry, but we ate lots of meals centered around ground beef because it was cheap.
In the summer, we had fresh tomatoes and cucumbers from the garden, but most of the veggies we ate were canned. Mom did like to try recipes she found in magazines, and some were pretty good, but I think mostly she got discouraged because we kids liked the same old boring stuff. To give an example, one of the biggest hits was the time she put spaghetti sauce on minute rice - WE LOVED IT!!! :rolleyes:
After the 3 oldest of us moved out, Mom started to cater - she’s actually quite a good cook now, altho I think she relies far too much on canned foods. My brother and I are probably the best cooks of the batch, while one sister has never broken away from the foods of our childhood. Anything beyond salt is too spicy for her. As for me, I absolutely refuse to use cream-of-anything soup in any recipe. ick.
My dad - who grew up in the 50s/60s - is very much like this. He does not like “foreign” food, with a few exceptions for things like Chinese.
I’ve eaten the sort of food Dad grew up with - typically roast beef/lamb and three veg sort of affairs - and yeah, it’s all staggeringly boring, but generally edible. A lot of it is also breathakingly unhealthy - one time on a family trip we stopped off at a pie shop in his home town which still made pies exactly the same way as when my Dad was a kid.
While he happily nommed a pie-shaped piece of nostalgia, I was looking at the fact the paper bag said pie had come in was now entirely translucent. Why yes, I was imaging Dr Nick Riviera’s thoughts on the subject too, funny you should mention that.
We once had a thread discussing British cuisine. In it, one British doper said, “We prefer to taste the meat itself, rather than some sauce which might be used to conceal an inferior cut of meat.”