Yes, this. When you’re told you HAVE to stay at home and clean and cook for your husband…that doesn’t mean that you’re actually going to be a good cook. Other options were limited - restaurants were expensive and for special occasions, delivery meals weren’t really a thing yet, domestic help was diminishing with post war small homes for nuclear households and the civil rights struggle, there were nowhere near as many “convenience foods” in the stores as today - no hot rotisserie chickens for $5, only a few frozen things, No Hamburger Helper or similar boxed meals…
Learning how to cook was hard, too. There were cookbooks, sure, but books are a terrible way to learn the fundamentals of cooking, especially when photography was so bad. Learning the perfect sear, or understanding the difference between a sweat and a sautee - these are things that are much easier to do when you can see someone doing them, on television or - even better - on demand on YouTube.
Given all that - your sheer number of bad cooks was higher. And they would be just as bad today; we can just hide our ineptitude better by not cooking much.
But also this:
Exactly. The good cooks were making good food. Even my grandmother’s rather horrific “chop suey” was actually really tasty, excessive celery and all. Was it authentic? Not even a little bit. Do I sometimes crave it and wish I’d gotten her recipe before she died? Absolutely.
Can you imagine what people will be saying about Bubble Tea in another 20 years? Stuff looks nasty. It kind of is nasty. Yet it is undeniably delicious.
The one that cooks enough to realize that the difference between mushroom soup and Sauce Béchamel aux Champignons is negligible.
I was born in '61 and I never had any complaints about my mom’s cooking until 1972. My dad was put on a special diet of some sort and we all got introduced to the horror that was Adele Davis.
I think it begs the question. I’ve never seen a cookbook based on canned food. Have a bunch of them from the turn of the century till the 80s. There are some great recipes.
The wars screwed everything up. Because of wartime needs preservatives and canning and dehydration or freeze-dried processes were utilized heavily and foisted on an unsuspecting public. The coffee industry only recently emerged from a nearly century long emphasis on canned/freeze dried shit. The depression left a generation or two very frugal, as the threat of outright starvation will do.
Any kind of disruption today would have millions of people starving in less than a week, they can’t even boil water much less cook anything from scratch.
Darn right it can be. My mom had a recipe for ham loaf along with a mustard sauce to go with it. I loved it right out of the oven and even more sliced cold in a sandwich. She generally made it once a year during the holiday season so there might have been some extra omph in the nostalgia-department. About the only thing I could remember about making it was that it had a bit of egg and crushed saltines to bind it, and was done in a double boiler instead of in an oven.
When she passed, my SiL inherited all of her pots, crockery, and recipes so a few years ago I mentioned the Wonderful Ham Loaf Recipe to her and we spent about two hours going through all of the recipe collection, all of the cards in all of the fileboxes, all of the ring binders with clipped out recipes pasted in them, all of the clipped out recipes that hadn’t been put into a binder, and the tables of contents in all of the cook books. Nada. So, sadly, we concluded there was probably a recipe floating around on the web somewhere, but it probably just wouldn’t be Mom’s Ham Loaf.
Then last year, we moved. Way in the back of the storage room was this white box, about a foot in all three dimensions. “What’s in it?”
“I don’t remember but I recall seeing it the last couple moves, at least.”
So we opened it up and inside was a white ceramic double boiler. And inside the inner pot of the boiler were a couple filecards in Mom’s handwriting. Needless to say, I was the ham loaf with mustard sauce recipe. The room got a little dusty then.
None of this explains the overcooked vegetables. Properly (that is, minimally) cooked vegetables are just as affordable as overcooked mush, and quicker to prepare. Both proper cooking and overcooking have been possible since the advent of cooking, so there wasn’t any novelty factor working in either direction. The choice of vegetables can be from any continent, so it’s not a matter of ingredients being exotic or hard to come by. And yet, people ate their vegetables boiled into flavorless unrecognizable pap.
One person’s overcooked is another person’s just right. See steak and hamburgers and pasta, for example. (Green beans, for me, are one vegetable that I like what most would probably call “overcooked.” We’re talking a couple hours of simmering before it’s something I want to eat versus something I eat because I should. I actually like mushy peas, too, although I like them just barely steamed through, as well. Carrots, too, to be honest. I like them mashable and best when combined with mashed potatoes, actually. Pasta I like al dente, although I quibble with the definition posted earlier that said it should still be “crunchy.” It should be firm, “to the teeth,” but if it’s crunchy means it’s not quite there yet. And steak, the closer to the moo the better, more or less.)
That seemed to be common in Australia too. Both my paternal grandmother and my mother used to boil the guts out of vegetables and Steak had to be cremated until you could use it to sole your shoes. It wasn’t until my late teens that I discovered that beans and cabbage could actually taste nice when cooked so they still had some crunch.
We never had the weird fascination for making salads with jello though.
Uh, you’re planning on SHARING your Mom’s recipe with us, aren’t you? Or are you hatching a plan to open DesertDog’s Famous Ham Loaf Cafe?
My mother always ground cooked ham through a tabletop hand grinder to make her ham loaf (and ham salad, for that matter). I asked my local butcher to do that for me about 20 years ago and he refused; wouldn’t use it for cooked meats.
Many recipes call for mixing ground pork with the ham. I’m pretty sure Mom didn’t do that, though.
Pulykamell @ #51: Slow-cooked green beans are wonderful. Either southern style with a chunk of smoked pork or some bacon grease plus sliced onion and just enough water to cover – or Greek style with olive oil, onion, garlic, a sprig of fresh thyme, and a couple of cut-up juicy fresh tomatoes. Simmer either over low heat for at LEAST an hour.
Makes enough gravy that you can cook the rest of the meal dry and just spoon some of the juice over.
Overcooked vegetables were a legacy from the 19th century, when cookbooks routinely told cooks that vegetables needed a long cooking time. It’s a legacy from even earlier; fresh vegetables were considered unhealthy (and, considering how no one knew germ theory, they probably were) unless cooked to death. That tradition continued into the 20th century.
Just odd things on egg whites…(I’m looking at you, delicious pavlova…)
But wtf on lamingtons? dry tasteless white cake with blah icing? Also, Vegemite. 'Nuff said.
My mom is English and it took her a while to be disabused of the notion that all vegetables are suspicious and should be boiled to death. Once she came around to not overcooking them in my teens things got much better.
I’m not a microbiologist, but as long as you wash your vegetables and get the water up to boiling, I don’t think that’s right. Are there food-borne illnesses that will survive a few minutes in boiling water but won’t survive a half-hour?
Of course, without good facts or the scientific method, the idea that raw vegetables are dangerous could easily trend toward “boil everything to death”.
This is one of the things that drove me nuts when I was cooking in a retirement home. Our recipes were dictated to us from on high (i.e. corporate offices), and it was plain to me from Day One that they were trying to appeal to Baby Boomers — who they hope will be moving in over the next several years — rather than to the actual people we were currently feeding. So we got all these recipes, along with pre-printed table menus that we couldn’t change, with fancy names on the dishes. And 90% of the time, the current residents would read the menu and see something that looked “foreign” to them, and decide they didn’t like that and order something else.
For example: “Greek-Herbed Pork Loin”. Foreign? It was a pork loin seasoned with lemon-pepper and oregano. If they had called it “Roasted Pork Loin”, the residents would have been all over it. But they saw “Greek-Herbed” and opted for the plain grilled chicken breast instead.
Several of the residents would complain about there being so much pasta on the menu. Those same people would chow down on the spaghetti and meatballs or mac & cheese when we served that, but literally any other pasta was “foreign” and “weird” and they didn’t want it.
The high mucky-mucks making these menus didn’t seem to understand that the residents grew up long before “ethnic” foods became commonplace in the USA.
