Depression Era Food etc

Taken from the Taste of Home Forum

My Dad use to tell us about growing up on a farm in Connecticut the youngest of 4 children, they walked 1 and 1/2 half miles to school, every morning, in the winter when they left for school the would each get two hot baked potatoes out of the oven of the wood stove and put one in each pocket to keep their hands warm for the walk, then at lunch time they would peel the cold potatoes and have them for lunch.

I remember a dish my mother made for us when we weren't feeling well. She heated milk, added broken/crushed soda crackers and a good size lump of butter.

I too was a depression era child. I remember my Dad making onion and mustard sandwiches for an evening snack.

I remember my late mom and dad (especially my mom) telling stories about growing up during the depression and WWII. She used to tell me that meat was a luxury during those times. They grew up on a lot of beans, potatoes, milk, eggs and homemade bread that she baked every morning when she was as young as 9 years old. She was in charge of most of the cooking because she was too young/little to work the fields like grandma and grandpa did.

My mother's family survived by moving to her grandparent's farm. They raised a lot of potatoes and sweet potatoes and each morning they cooked lots of sweet potatoes in the oven and put them in a pan on the back of the stove. When someone got hungry they would just go get a sweet potato and eat it to "tide them over" till suppertime when they had their next "meal". They also poured hot tea with milk over bread they toasted in the oven. My own parents both say they never went hungry, but they didn't always like what they had to eat. They just ate it...

I remember her telling me that she lived on sardines & saltines in NH. She loved baked bean sandwiches. She loved milk toast for when she was sick (buttered toast with hot milk poured over it). She loved anything with cream sauce. Creamed onions, peas, chipped beef on toast.

One of the things I heard from my husband was that when his parents butchered a pig the only thing they didn't use was the squeal. They caught the blood and made blood sausage out of it. Made headcheese from the parts of the head and used the feet and made pickled pigs feet.
These people knew what it was meant to " recycle" before it became popular. Hubbies parents would be in their late 90;s if they would be alive and the made everything they needed. They even grew things for their own medicine, made their own soap, took old clothes apart and made 2 coats for 2 little daughters from an old worn out adult's coat.
Hubbies grandmother had a spinning wheel and spun her own thread and yarn from wool from their own sheep, etc.
Those people work from dawn till dusk and then went to bed because they didn't have electricity.


When my mother was 6 or 7, my grandfather worked in the delivery department of a large department store with a grocery department. Once a month, the store would take the labels off all dented cans (to send them back for a refund) and give him the canned goods themselves to be "hauled away."
Well, he didn't take them to the dump -- he took them home! It was the job of my mother and her younger brother to try to sort the cans (remember there were no labels) and try to make piles of all of the ones that looked the same. Then they would open one can of each pile and write on the other cans so they would know in the future what was in them; and that night for supper, they would eat whatever had been opened.
My mother said this often made for some interesting surprises! Sometimes you would think you were opening tomatoes and end up with a can of beans; or, even worse to the kids, was hoping to have peaches for dessert and ending up with lima beans!
But, she said they never went hungry!

My mother is 80 now and she often told us of stories when she was a child of having Lard Sandwiches. Their lunch pail was a gray metal bucket that the lard came in with a a gray metal handle. I think it was almost a gallon of lard in it. If they were lucky they might get a little corn syrup on it. Their heat wasn't like we have, the homes were drafty , cold and they didn't have central heating like we do. They had a wood or kerosene heater in the center of the main floor and they heated upstairs by the method of heat rising and a register the size of a big round plate that would let heat rise in one area of the upstairs or an old black wood stove, and they walked miles to school and so they had to use more than just clothes to keep themselves warm.

My grandfather was a minister in Arkansas during the depression. Of course no one had money to pay for his services, but many times he'd get paid with corn, beans, peaches, salt pork or sometimes even a chicken. Even in the late 50's I remember being there and the door bell would ring. You open the door and there would sit a bushel of something as payment for a funeral or wedding.

Mother had 9 children and little money. I remember our treat at night before we went to bed was cut up bread in a bowl wilth sugar and warm milk poured over it. I still enjoy it to this day. Brings back wonderful memories of my Mom.

My Mom grew up during the Depression era. She said that sometimes all they had to eat was green beans that they grew. They would eat green beans for every meal for weeks. Also She used to have Melba Toast. Hot milk poured over buttered toast (or if they didn't have butter it would just be lard spread over the toast).

I remember my Grandparents talking about living during the depression. One time they had one egg. Grandma wanted to fix it for Grandpa and he wanted her to have it. Evidently things got a bit out of hand as she ended up throwing it at him!

Your story reminds me of the hard times we had growing up, living on a dump before I was born though, the egg hatchery would haul in eggs that had not hatched. Back then they set the dumps on fire to burn, rather than bury the rubbish. Well the eggs would get hot and burst, sometimes the baby chicks just had not been able to break their shells themselves. My Mom and oldest sister would go down with their aprons on and gather baby chicks and bring back to the orange crate shack, Mom wall papered with newspapers, they lived it at the time and would raise this chicks to eat, and Mom was always canning chicken.

Your story about the goose fat sandwiches reminded me of the stories my grandfather used to tell about going into the woods in central Pennsylvania for weeks at a time to cut timber (a very necessary "cash crop" in those times). Of course, they had no refrigeration but had to take enough food to last the entire time since there was nothing "out there" other than perhaps a rabbit or squirrel which they could shoot.
They took LARD sandwiches! (The though chills me as it did you!!!) He said they spread lard thickly on slices of homemade bread and would wrap the sandwiches in "greased" (larded?) brown paper and they would keep for days. Another thing they would take was a large onion which was sliced thinly down to the root, but left whole, and had salt sprinkled between the slices. It was also wrapped in the greased brown paper and they would unwrap it and eat it like an apple!

One dessert was to put stale bread in a coffee cup and pour enough coffee over it to make it moist and mold to the cup. They would then invert the cup and sprinkle with a little sugar for a sweet treat.
Another one, which was plentiful because my granparents had laying hens, was to whip egg whites, beat in a little sugar and the yolks, then eat it...can't do that these days because of salmonella, but Mom said it was a really special treat in those days.
Another one, which just gives me the willies, was when they would gook a goose, then render the fat. It would be chilled then spread on bread and sprinkled with salt for a goose fat sandwich.

My grandmother said some people were so bad off during the depression that they ate gar soup. Gar is a fish that was always thrown back in the lake. Both of my set of grandparents and their parents had big gardens, canned, raised chickens and hunted. Dairy was traded for fish, produce or eggs with the folks that had cows. She said there were always the shiftless that had no gumption to fend for themselves with a garden or doing field work for food. She said the kids of those families looked half starved. The women folk would gather up food and take it to them.

Today we have videos!

From Britannica.com


Fantastic 10 plus minute montage with a plethora of pictures.


Short montage of videos and pictures made by a young boy in tenth grade.


This last one was made by a history teacher. I really liked the added commentary.

Welcome to Hooverville pop. 14.5

The sign reads House of Unemployed

Hello Hoovervilleians! This took me a bit longer than planned but it's finally come together.
Over the next few days I'll be updating different subjects.
Today you'll find some basic Depression Era links as well as a link to help you find a name for your character. Why don't we all commit to having these by the run through on Thursday October 16?

Still need a name for your character? Go here. Remember the show takes place in 1933 so take the age of your character and subtract :) Then find your characters birth year and click the link next to it that says "names."

The Great Depression (1929-1939) -- The National Parks Service, Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site webpage. Not all the links work. I'll be posting the good and working ones.

A Scrapbook of Me : Trip to Washington, DC during the Depression -- Personal blog of a woman recounting her parents trip to DC in 1940. Vehicles and fashion remain fairly true to 1933.

Depression Era Soup Kitchen Close-up - St. Louis, Missouri -- This is a link to a personal Flickr site. if you do some exploring in rodnial1's photostream you'll find some different takes on this photo.

Child of the Depression -- A few memories and a few good pictures of the 1930s

Streetscapes: Central Park's 'Hooverville'; Life Along 'Depression Street' -- some of my favorite quotes from the article

• "We work hard to keep it clean, because that is important," said one man. "I never lived like this before." The next day seven of the men were arrested as vagrants, but the charges were dismissed.


• But it was still open Oct. 3, when Patrick McDermott, an unemployed bricklayer, was given six months in jail for dancing and singing along the top of the reservoir wearing "less clothing than deemed proper." He earlier reported that he had collected $47 from 3,000 visitors who had come to see the shantytown.


• Government could seem benign but also cruel. When the East River colony was cleared in 1933 (with 10 days' notice) "old John Cahill" told a reporter: "Nobody's askin' us where we're goin'. There's not a soul thinkin' about us."


• Then, as now, there were many homeless people who refused to accept the officially sanctioned help. When their camps were broken up, they moved peacefully on, with only mild protest and certainly no revolt. And in the end, as everyone else seemed to hope, they just sort of disappeared.

A letter to the editor of the NY Times in response to the previous article -- It's brief but a nice example of an outisder's memory of what the Hoovervilles looked like.