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My family was borderline poor. Not starvation or homeless poor, but definitely lower on the economic ladder than many other families. I'm talking late 1940s/early 1950s...
Don't get me wrong. My dad and mom worked hard at the local textile mill. They just lacked formal education (neither made it to junior high school), and were stuck in hard jobs at low pay.
My mom often had to come up with filling meals -- especially toward the end of the month, when money was running low. And she was good at it. Here are some of her "make-do meals" from the hard times I remember...
pancakes with margarine and sugar
ground beef thickened with gravy and poured over stale bread, potatoes, or whatever
bean soup (using navy beans soaked overnight and flavored with bacon scraps)
the leftover roast (beef, pork, or chicken) from Sunday, which became, progressively --
1. Monday -- hot sandwiches
2. Tuesday -- stew
3. Wednesday -- hash
4. Thursday -- thickened gravy over bread or potatoes
5. Friday -- soup (using the bones, etc.)
(Fridays were tough. Saturday was shopping day!!!!)
How about other Forum members? Any poverty menus you'd like to share?
actually we were not poor. Dad was an electrical engineer with 2 masters degrees, but he was also very carefull with his money and lived through the depression, like so many. We ate top of the line sometimes and the bottom of the barrel other times. Never did one part of the meat go to waste. I can remembver having creamed eggs on toast and I remember dinner where neckbones were the main meat dish. Chicken soup was made from the back and wings of the chicken..Daddy was not cheap, but he did work his way through college working in restaurants and after graduation in 1932 he moved to Ca and went to work in a restaurant kitchen until he could get a job using his degree. From him and yes, my mom I learned my love for cooking and my abillity to use all parts of everything. I still do.
I would say the first 12 years of my life were lower middle class to upper class poor financially speaking. Didnt realize it though back in the day.
Just a simple meal of beans and fresh homemade tortillas were very common as a meal filler and sometimes just for dinner with a little cheese and some rice.
We weren't poor but my dad was a farmer and could squeeze 5 cents out of a penny. We had wholesome meals not elaborate. But my mama died when I was age 12 and I was the oldest kid at home so I had to clean our huge house and cook the meals plus help on the farm. Through the day, us kids had lots of butter and sugar sandwiches and ketchup sandwiches or banana sandwiches or even just potato chip sandwiches. I finally learned to cook and then we had pretty much the same thing every week. Plain food cooked by me!
I was born in 1960 and my Mother was on her own with me and my brother and she worked in a factory and my donor was not around. Anyway, we always had food, shelter, clothing and her and the food was great but we did not know it wasn't what was considered "normal" by those who were in better situations financially.
Our go to meals were green beans and potatoes from the garden, pancakes, oatmeal, peanut butter and jelly on toast, chicken legs when she could get them on sale, macaroni and cheese and some sort of roast on Sunday when my Great Grandpa would come down for supper. I'm sure there were others but these are the ones I remember the most.
I grew up in the 50's60's...we were poor, but looking back I wonder... My Mom was from the South Okla...so we had a lot of fried potatoes, pinto beans and cornbread growing up. I just made my white beans and ham w/ cornbread this weekend. Had myself cornbread and milk for breakfast the last couple days.
We routinely had for dinner...meatloaf potatoes, gravy, salad and desert, fried chicken and all the fixins, homemade biscuits nearly daily I can still smell that dough., macarel paddies, goulash, liver and onions, pork steak, pork chops. Our meals were simmered or fried in an old cast iron skillet which I still have...
Summers were spent helping peel, shuck and cut all kinds of vegetables and fruits which my Mom and GrandMA canned to supplement our meaqls all year. I cannot remember a dinner which hadn't included the words......grab me a jar of.....
Turkey and/or ham for holiday dinners.....home made cornbread stuffing and home made pumpkin pies, pecan pies and my GrandMothers minemeat pies. Sunday's at Grandma's house were often fried chicken or ham, and all us cousins would pick the berries for GranMa's home made cobbler. After dinner it was The Wonderful World of Disney on her color TV w/ fresh popcorn and orange juice for our snacks.....
We never had cold cereal unless we stayed the night at GrandMa's...rice crispies, shredded wheat or corn flakes were a treat. We routinely had hot cereal, or eggs and bacon w/ the always incl. biscuits and flour gravy, or homemade pancakes w/ brown sugar syrup... for breakfast. A real treat was chocolate gravy over buttered homemade biscuits.Yum
Mac and cheese was a splurge to us cause it came in a box, as were fish sticks...We didn't have luxuries like lunch meat, instead we had tuna salad sandwiches or we rarely had ready made foods like hamburger. We had home made hamburgers w/ home made french fries...A real treat was burgers bought by the bag full...like 8 for a dollar and we would have kool aid. We didn't know we were poor...We always had a green salad, always had a homemade cake or pie for desert and milk at every meal. My Mom was awesome...I cannot hold a candle to her budget skills. Or her pie crust....
Last edited by JanND; 10-30-2012 at 08:10 AM..
Reason: text add
We were doing better than most in the neighborhood so I never realised that we were borderline poor. There was leftover night, soup night, pancake night, but there was always something on the table.
I loved the split pea and navy bean soup. We never had pancakes for breakfast, so that was a treat.
It's the food forum so I won't talk about the shoes.
Very early on... grits and greens. That was in East Texas.
Later, we ate a lot of middling dinners (bbq chicken thighs, spaghetti w/ground beef in the sauce) but the phone would get shut off. They prioritized food a bit more then.
We are on a tight budget now. Any meat purchase has got to last at least 2 meals. So I do the roast chicken, which comes back as pot pie, which comes back again finally as soup and stock for other meals. I get a lot of mileage out of a lb of ground beef, too. And any pork or beef roast will live again as taco/tamale filling.
We weren't poor but my dad was a farmer and could squeeze 5 cents out of a penny. We had wholesome meals not elaborate. But my mama died when I was age 12 and I was the oldest kid at home so I had to clean our huge house and cook the meals plus help on the farm. Through the day, us kids had lots of butter and sugar sandwiches and ketchup sandwiches or banana sandwiches or even just potato chip sandwiches. I finally learned to cook and then we had pretty much the same thing every week. Plain food cooked by me!
Yup, those sugar sandwiches were pretty good. lol...
During hunting season whatever my dad caught/shot would be on the table that night. I learned at an early age that duck is pretty good and rabbit really does taste like chicken. He would kill one deer per hunting season, have the butcher cut it up, and we'd have deer meat for the winter. Never did like the taste...yuk. We had a huge garden so vegetables were always plentiful.
Otherwise we had alot of caseroles, soups, beans, chilli, spaghetti type dishes.
I was not poor growing up. I would say we were upper middle class or so. Now I did hear my mother and my grandmother talk a lot about the things they had and for the most part, all they seemed to have was potatoes.
I think I am going to have to spend the day with my last living aunt here soon because the stories of my mom and grandma seem to be fading away as I get older.
Its been about 12 years since my mom passed.
I never heard any stories about my father growing up that I can recall. Strange.
Some of the things I remember us eating that I could have done without were span, scrapple, and chipped beef gravy.
As an adult, I like the chipped beef gravy but I don't ever make it.
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