Frugal Village Forums banner

Poverty Cooking

21K views 69 replies 50 participants last post by  ermadunk 
#1 ·
I saw this on another forum board I frequent and thought it'd be an interesting topic here. Poverty cooking -- think Great Depression, concentration camps, old farm wives, the 1800s, the Civil Wars, pioneer times, or just "dad lost his job and the cupboards are bare". Tips, tricks, recipes, etc. that are still applicable or adaptable today. Would love to hear some thoughts and ideas.
 
#2 ·
~Well, I don't know exactly how well this suits but I absolutely love beans and bread meals. You can do it Southern(black eyed peas and biscuits) or Western(pintos and cornbread) or Northern(baked beans and brown bread)or Far Eastern(lentils and flatbread) or Country(limas and whole wheat bread)and on and on.
Last night as I was making our dinner of chili and cornbread, I realized that we were out of canned tomatoes. So I just made chili without tomatoes or meat. So it was basically just chili spiced beans with onions and peppers. It was awesome! I liked it even better than chili. It was even easier to prepare and more filling too. A generous bowl with a sprinkle of cheese and dab of sour cream along with a sizable chunk of cornbread came to about $.40 a serving and I was stuffed. :)
So basically, running out of an ingredient is an inspiration to me. I think of a substitute or do without and I'm usually very pleased with the results(except that time I was running short on butter so substituted some milk for some of it in my cookies. Tasted good but texture was spongy. bleh.) ~
 
#7 ·
Wiener gravy. Slice wieners and fry, then make gravy in the pan. Serve over biscuits. It's not bad, especially with an onion chopped and browned with the wieners.

My dad talked about carrying lard sandwiches to school for lunch when he was a kid during the Depression.
 
#8 ·
I grew up very very poor. One of our neighbors grew potatoes so my brothers and I would go dig up a shirt full and mom would boil those in salt water and we would eat on those for a week.

We also ate a ton of homemade noodles and pasta. I would roll out the noodles and let them dry out and we would boil those and eat them with a little salt and pepper. On super special occasions, we would even have chicken to put in the pot with the noodles. That was rare. We seldom ate meat. I would not recommend this diet to anyone unless it was truly all you could afford to eat. The problem is that you have energy but you never gain muscle. So, if you have to go a day or two without eating (like in the summer when school was out) you had no energy because you have no muscle on your body. I was 5'8" tall in the 9th grade and weighed between 80-90 pounds most of the year. I left home when I was a junior in high school and lived with friends until I graduated. I had never seen what a balanced meal looked like until I left home.

I guess carbs are cheap and stolen potatoes are free. It's ironic that my husband and I eat no carbs at all now. It's so strange to type that out. It is perfectly normal to me but it sounds like something that happens in a third world country. ha.
 
#9 ·
basic potato soup;

chicken & rice soup: 1 chicken thigh boiled to pieces in 2 qts water, and chopped small, salt & pepper; 2 cups rice cooked in a separate pot of salted water, drained well; combine the chicken, broth & rice & it'll feed several. You can add a couple of bouillon cubes to the broth if you have them.

we saved the leftover pieces of cornbread, biscuits, bread heels in a bread bag in the freezer, which mama used to make cornbread dressing using the cornbread & bread heels, and she made bread pudding out of the saved up biscuits with a little sugar, cinnamon, soured milk & vanilla. She always saved any leftover rice (which usually wasn't much) until she had enough to make rice pudding using just a little sugar, cinnamon, soured milk if we had any & vanilla (imitation).

fried biscuits for breakfast: using leftover biscuits, cut them in half, spread a little butter, margarine or bacon grease on the cut surface of each side and fry until crunchy in a hot iron skillet. I still make this.
 
#10 ·
Plain old milk gravy with bread, biscuits, what ever makes a good filler..Also pasta with what ever you have can be good..Tuna, a piece of chicken (cooked)..cook pasta in the broth of the chicken..If you have any left over veg you can throw it in..anything goes..Rabbit can be used just like chicken..Dandlelions makes a lot of things..The whole plant is good..I have even dryed the root in the winter and used as flour...You will eat a lot of things if your hungery..
 
#12 ·
I am not even sure what this is called. I make it by starting with a rue.

1 can cream of mushroom soup & equal amount of milk (my mother used powder milk)
1 can peas
2 or 3 eggs
1 can of tuna fish.

Served over mashed potatoes. We all loved in! The potatoes were from our garden
 
  • Like
Reactions: oheoh's momma
#13 ·
we had beans, fried taters, cornbread tonite for supper..it was so yummy
my favorite meal is fried taters and an onion almost friend done, drain the grease off and add 2 -4 eggs on top and let sit until soft fried...serve with pork and beans and fried corn bread it was so yummy

baked sweet taters are another favorite here yum

this is going to be a fun thread

oh I forgot about weiner gravy with tomato sauce yummm lol
 
#17 ·
we had hard time growing up. Both parents unemployed and undr-employed at other times. However, dad hunted, every winter we had moose, elk, deer - he hunted with friends, so there was always a variety and it was shared among all. I remember being there to wrap meat, so I don't imagine we paid much for butchering. We also fished year round. Mom gardened and canned, we foraged for wild berries and mushrooms. Baba showed us how to make things from items you didn't realize were edibles. My brothers had a trapline for squirrels, muskrats and beavers, they earned money that way. I didn't have much growing up, but we always ate decent. There are times I wish dh would hunt, but not likely to happen..lol. I grew up in a community with lots of affluent families. We were known to have little, but ultimately, we were fed and healthy, everything else didn't matter.
 
#18 ·
My Mom made Macaroni, cheese and tomatoes. She'd get cheap cheese (and stretch it), and use her home-canned tomatoes from our garden. She'd crush up soda crackers for a topping. Yum. I still love it.
 
#19 ·
Fried egg sandwiches. Fried bologna sandwiches.

I remember my grandma telling me how they got through a really hard winter when she was a kid---on the farm, with 12 kids---they ate bisquits and sorghum a lot. And of course, what they had canned from the farm garden.
 
#20 ·
Fried egg sandwiches.
~Interesting, I don't think I've ever heard this referenced in a poverty cooking conversation. I suppose it makes sense if you keep your own chickens though. We never did and we had these a lot growing up. I still love 'em now, especially if I have a dab of bacon grease to fry them in. Served with ketchup of course. ;)
The price of eggs keeps going up and up. $2 a dozen on regular sale now. :thud: I was lucky to get a special sale coupon for $1.07 a dozen last week and took advantage of that! Cheapest I've seen in a year. But it's still a good bargain for protein, even at $.17 each. A two egg sandwich will give you lots of fuel for less than $.50, even more so and cheaper too with homemade bread. Throw in some fresh veggies from the garden and you have a complete, wholesome meal. ;) ~
 
#21 ·
I have been thinking on this one. I spent a lot of time with my grandparents, both having raised large families through the depression and beyond.

How they cooked was different. And I think I need to really adopt some of those ideas. My grandma's best friend was her pressure cooker. Shred left over meat, add veggies and a little broth and cook. It wasn't a stew, but it was similar but tastier, and the left over meat was always very tender. She shredded carrots and celery and froze it to add to soups, stews, added lots of flavor. She preserved berries, like a runny jam, and used it as dessert with a touch of cream, or toppings for simple cakes or ice cream. Berries were from the garden or wild pickings.

I really wish I had her journal to read through, she shared lots of little information in there on nearly a daily basis. It wasn't a personal journal, but a record of things that happened. Who visited, a new recipe the weather. It is great to read, it was no nonsense, much like her. I hope my mom finds it, I asked for a scanned copy for Christmas but she isn't computer literate, hoping she finds it, she thinks it's in the safe.

But side tracked. This is really a good thread. I have the cookbook, More-With-Less. It really fits this theme. It's really about cooking with less in it. Basic simple foods. The irony, of all my cookbooks, this one is the go-to. I haven't had it that long,but I have used many many recipes in it. It's the perfect cookbook for camping, as you don't need all that many add-ins. It's a book that is so worth having. And the introductory chapters are worth the book, even without the recipes.
 
  • Like
Reactions: nuisance26
#23 ·
My husbands family was very poor. He was one of 5 boys. His Dad would bake beans and homemade bread. If he could he would make a pie for dessert. Yes his Dad did that when he had no work and his mother worked in the shoe factory when he was unemployed.
 
#24 ·
I grew up dirt poor, and raised by depression era parents (mom was also Native American). . . We were poor, but we were never hungry. Supper might only be vegetable soup (veggies raised in our huge garden) with cattail biscuits - but ate.

we foraged for lots of our food -- cattails are a gold mine , depending on the season - salads, pollen for flour, roots to eat like potatoes, etc. . . dandelions - greens, friend blossoms, roots for "coffee", etc. . . lamb's quarters, , morell mushrooms, nettle, etc. . . we also ate lots of berries, nuts etc. . .

We raised rabbits, chickens, pheasants, but we ate very little of them - mostly we sold them for cash.
 
#25 ·
~I just learned about many of the things you mentioned at an introduction to plant foraging for our area at the library. I am super excited to try cattail! It really has a lot of recipe variety doesn't it? I just need to find a harvesting area that isn't next to road runoff or other pollutants. Dock, yucca and dandelion are also a big favorites for foragers out here as well.
I did a fair amount of foraging in South Jersey but the plants are most definitely different here. Not many berries here like in the Pinelands area although I did see wild raspberries last year on a mountain creek hike. ~
 
#27 ·
My parents both grew up pretty poor and both in very rural areas so a lot of the food we ate and still eat comes from their youth. Anything from the garden or canned. I remember eating a ton of tuna or salmon patties, bean patties and potatoes cakes. Lots of friend potatoes with onions and ramps, always a side of cornbread and slices of onions with most meals. Beans of some sort at least twice per week. As a kid I think this was just what we ate, we were lucky my father had a great job so these meals were what we now call just good ole country cooking. I still ask my mom to make me tuna patties/cakes, chicken livers, pintos and cornbread for my “birthday meal”. I can and at times will make these, but mine are nowhere as good as my moms. We also ate a lot of deer and squirrel. DH was so surprised when I told him as he grew up much different than I and never had a lot of these foods, but over the years he has enjoyed the good ole country cooking. Also, we loved apple butter sandwiches as a kid!!
 
#28 ·
I just ate the last piece of leftover cornbread and a tomato from the garden and I am perfectly satisfied. Anyone who needs meat at every meal wasn't taught as a child the value of all foods.

My dh has a hard time if there isn't meat but he is 6'6 and weighs at 260 lbs and needs a good meal to function but if we have a big egg breakfast or beans rice and cornbread he is happy.

Lots of great stories here. I am enjoy reading them.

My mom used to brown about half a pound of ground beef and add tomato sauce celery and onion and serve it over mashed potatoes and to this day both my sisters and I will request it when we all get together. She laughs at her throw it together and get us fed meal is such a great memory for us.
 
#29 ·
My parents never had any $ problems but I do remember eating some of the items mentioned at my Grams on mom's side. My dad insisted on meat 3 times a day since he had grown up literally starving and scavenging to eat. His parents had plenty of $ but just chose to drink it up and not feed their kids. My mom's parents were quite well off but lived through the depression and were always very prepared and frugal with certain things. My Gram had so much bargain Kleenex stocked by the time we had to put a halt to her stockpiling that it lasted her 8 years and there was more left that when she passed. I never knew as a kid thers were depression era foods and frugal recipes we were eating at here place. We just knew they were good!

I still would love to eat my Grams dilly beans, bean burgers, potato dumplings with salt pork , fried tomato sandwiches and lefsa
 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top