I got a cookbook from the 1930s from eBay. Some things were long gone by the 50s. Two i can recall Turkish eggs (scrambled eggs with honey) and chicken fricassee (basically chicken boiled in a shallow pan).
Thus the wholesale embrace of convenience foods. Cooks of the 50s and 60s grew up on shortages, non-affordable meats and all the Depression had wrought. The idea of a meal being just “pop in the oven” easy was a siren-song.
I bet people sixty years from now will be making fun of our ‘make everything from Kale’ movement, mason jar salads, and pintrest cupcakes, while pondering why early 2000s food in America was so weird.
Great story! Wow this makes me happy. Seriously.
Polish roses are Satan’s catheter
Set in Britain, not in America, but I love the recipes Ruth et al. cook in the … Farm series (Victorian, Edwardian, Wartime). Last week, the guys made steak stuffed with oysters, which looked yummy! I don’t imagine American recipes of the time were much different.
Going even farther back (Tudor Farm), they really did make the most of what they had.
I had to Google this, they don’t sound THAT bad, but bad enough.
I think we are all overestimating what was available in homes and markets back then. I had a conversation with my father-in-law (born 1919) about eating cold turnip greens for breakfast. I asked why he chose that, and he tartly informed me that the cold turnip greens and a small chunk of cornbread was what was available to be eaten.( :smack: <–Me) I remember grocery stores in the early to mid 60’s and selection was much much less than it is now, and very little in the way of fresh fruit or vegetables were available year round except for bananas and apples, carrots and potatoes.
My mother was a good cook and we always had a kitchen garden with fresh veggies in season, plus she canned and pickled lots of stuff for winter.
Availability was fine, being able to afford it was something else entirely. The 30s was a time of great privation and the effects lingered for decades. A round of oil shock hits and currency devaluations and inflation hit in the 70s. We were by no means poor but things like butter, milk, meats, and juice became very expensive. We ate a lot of generic type foods and substitutes like powdered milk, and store brand cookies and the like.
Restaurants weren’t on every corner, going out to eat was kind of a rarity. Maybe 2 or 3 times a year. It was kind of a big deal, and we kids had to get dressed up (even a bath, darnit!) to participate. Here’s where I tell you kids to get off my lawn… 
Your parents and grandparents etc, weren’t as benighted as you might think. There’s very often very sound reasons why they did (or didn’t) do what they did.
Heh. These two threads were back to back in my User CP:
Why was 1950’s / 60’s American food so terrible?
My 2 year old grandson is an extremely picky eater, how do we change that?
Perhaps some of the memories of 50/60s food is influenced by what age you were at the time. If you were at that “picky” stage of your development…maybe that’s part of why so many things from that era seem “yucky”. 
This is a wonderful thread. Gee, and I thought the bad American food of the 50s-60s was a regional thing. In my neck of the woods,–New England–food was dreadful almost on principle, coming from a culture whose faith was in large measure based on the virtue of suffering (or is it the suffering of virtue?,–anyway, either way you’re fvked).
Local food was pretty awful aside from a few things, such as corn on the cob. Fried clams were good, but in general home cooking and restaurant food was awful. Restaurants with good reputations could make you sick. I associated eating with suffering till well into my adult years. I’ve long since grown out of it. In my youth alcohol made eating a lot more fun since it sort of killed the bad taste and made you feel happy. But killing the taste of food is a lousy reason to get loaded, eh?
Things are so much better now. They began to improve in the 70s, and the rise in the popularity of real ethnic food–not those phony baloney Italian restaurants with spaghetti that tasted like it came from a can–and other nationalities as well. The growing interest among younger people, such as myself, in natural food, organically grown fruits and veggies, things like granola instead of the usual corn flakes and rice krispies for breakfast. It took a while, but we got there.
Googles Polish roses. shudder. :eek:
Perhaps the reason I am remembering 1950s and '60s food with such fondness is, paradoxically, because my mother was such a rotten cook. We ate out a lot, and that food was pretty good.
thing is my grandma was a good cook but sometimes used premade canned bottled or jarred or boxed stuff as shortcuts (sort of like the Sandra lee "semi homemade motif) I think a lot of 30s and 40s parents did too like the soup/gravy starters
what made later food bad is their kids just used the short cuts …
oddly enough except for grandma most of the men in my family learned how to cook in the military dad even won commendations when he ran the mess hall at the late 70s
what he was known for was having a working relation with the local farmers …turns out that he was trading pot back and forth for fresh veggies and such … they just ignored it mainly… once in a while hed get a slap on the wrist …when he left supposedly the area food joints experience a boom …
Is there another “Polish roses”? I’m finding ham with cream cheese and green onions. Sounds pretty good…
In my opinion, the “boil the vegetables to mush” mindset was probably a sanitation issue. Before refrigeration and vacuum-packaging, people worried a lot about food poisoning. Ptomaine, salmonella, botulism, listeria, e. coli, etc. They might not have been able to name all of the germs, but they were wary of under-cooked food. City dwellers were afraid of raw eggs, and landlubbers were afraid of raw oysters.
Yeah, ham, cream cheese, and green onions sounds pretty good to me, too. I’m having a hard time thinking of how one could go wrong with those three ingredients.
I still think the premise of the OP is mistaken, and, at least most people could cook numerous meals from scratch 50 years ago, doubt very much that is the case today. There are whole swaths of some seriously incapable folks out there these days.
Heh. My maternal grandfather was an Army cook in WW2 (served in Europe). Once he got back home, as far as I know, he didn’t cook. That was my grandma’s job. Actually, everything was her job, including having a job, because my grandfather was the town drunk.
All grandpa really wanted to eat was roast beef and potatoes and such. Bland, bland bland. So my mom never learned to appreciate flavorful food, and so, in the 1970s when I was a kid, I hated my mom’s cooking. It was always either the “holy trinity” of meat, vegetable, and starch, or a boring, bland casserole. Her idea of an “exciting” condiment stopped at “mustard”. Her choices of vegetables were always the bland, boring, or downright vomit-inducing (broccoli, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, cabbage … bleh!) It wasn’t until I was an adult that I understood why my dad drenched every damned meal with pepper; he was trying to add some flavor to the food. As a child, I didn’t have the knowledge to explain to my mom that things like onions and bell peppers and were perfectly valid vegetables.
As a kid, I always hated those times when we ended up eating at my maternal grandparents’ house. It was just so awful compared to eating at my paternal grandparents’ house. My paternal grandmother’s family was from the South, and if she was going to cook a meal, she was cooking a fucking spread. It was all “comfort food”, and it all tasted fucking great (and, of course, goes a long way towards explaining why my dad was always a bit overweight and his two sisters fluctuated between “heavy” and “morbidly obese”, while my mom was always right around her ideal weight and her younger sister has always been rail thin).
I was completely gobsmacked a few years after my maternal grandfather died and I discovered that my maternal grandmother absolutely loved hot, spicy, exotic food. See, while she was working to support her family (because Grandpa mostly wasn’t), she was socking away money in savings. And when she had saved up enough money, she traveled the world (alone, because Grandpa wasn’t interested; I guess WW2 was enough traveling for him). She went to England, Ireland, Scotland, France, Italy, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, The Caribbean, Mexico … and she sampled the food everywhere she went.
Shortly before she died, (she was living with my mother by this time), she was staring sadly at her dinner plate one night, at the careful portions of bland food her doctors had recommended to her. She was 89 years old, and had survived major congenital heart problems and breast cancer (including a double radical mastectomy). She said to my sister, “This is ridiculous. How much longer do I have, anyway? I’m going to eat what I want!” And she did. She threw out the diet her doctors gave her and ate what she liked.
It makes me sad that she had to suffer with such bland food at home. But, she was the dutiful 1950s housewife, and cooked what her husband wanted, which of course my mom had to eat, and so my mom never developed a taste for anything interesting (to this day, while she did eventually learn to be a better cook, a freaking green bell pepper is still “too spicy” for her, and at 72 years old, I’m not going to change her mind).
The blandness of that 1950s food, which ended up passed down to me in the 1970s, is probably a huge factor in why I ended up becoming a professional cook. Along with the bland food my mom cooked at home, my family also did not go out to eat very often, and when we did my mom always picked “Chinese” which, in the 1970s, meant a plate of rice topped with soggy celery and a tepid, bland, “sweet & sour” sauce. My first real job, at age 17, was a fast food job at Arby’s, and I fucking looked forward to going to work because my half-price employee shift meal, even when I only had enough change for a basic “Regular Roast Beef” sandwich, was so much more flavorful than what I ate at home. It worked out that I didn’t see that first high school job as “something I did in high school for pocket money”, I turned it into a (so far) 33-year career. I started in fast food and worked my way up until now I’m a “banquet chef”.
All because I wanted to be able to taste my damn food.
You’re making me quite grateful for my grandparents. My paternal grandmother was from Italy, and even though she wouldn’t admit it in public for fear of being mistaken for a Sicilian, at home she had no qualms about cooking good Italian food (though she had to cut back on the garlic in deference to meat-and-potatoes grandpa). And my maternal grandmother, while she didn’t get a chance to travel much, was always open to trying new dishes, and incorporating what she liked into her repertoire, and Granpap had the philosophy that if you’re not the cook, you have no business complaining about what someone else puts on your plate.
Sorry for the delay but I didn’t get back to the thread.
It’s actually quite simple and has beef instead of pork, besides the ham. We had a hand grinder and she would grind both the ham and beef. I’ll have to get a grinder before I can attempt one.
Ham loaf:
1 lb ground ham
1 lb lean ground beef
1 c soda cracker crumbs, crushed fine
2 beaten eggs
3/4 c milk
Pepper and salt to taste
Mix all ingredients. Pack in greased upper portion of double boiler. Steam 3 hours. Watch bottom of double boiler so that it does not burn dry. Pour off fat. Turn out on plate or platter. Serve hot or cold. Serves 6 - 8
Mustard sauce:
5 T mayonnaise
4 T cream horseradish
1-1/2 tsp prepared mustard
Mix and pour into serving dish. Sprinkle with paprika.