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My parents also had a milk man (in fact, we still had home milk delivery in California well into the 1970s). My dad even remembered the ice man who brought blocks of ice for people's iceboxes. He broke his collarbone falling off the wagon after trying to hitch a ride.
But otherwise, being city people, they walked or took streetcars to stores to get their groceries. When they moved to Mississippi in the 1950s, they had one car, but Dad needed it to get to work, so Mom would put my two oldest siblings in a wagon and pull them to the store.
I think that’s a good point: city folks back then, if they even had a car, usually had only one, which the husband took to work. The wives/moms usually walked to nearby grocery stores to get food supplies, if they weren’t delivered.
In fact, my in-laws had only one car up until the mid-80s, and MIL walked or biked with DH in tow in a stroller, pulled wagon, or bike seat, to get groceries from the local Co-op a couple blocks away. (He ended up working there later as a teen.) Another opportunity to burn off those meat ‘n potatoes diet of olde.
This was in an older suburb of upstate NY, where the community developed along more urban lines of pre-WW2, before the development of more car centric post-WW2 communities.
My grandparents talked about eating vegetables out of the garden in the summer. Lots of fried stuff: okra, squash, green tomatoes. My grandmother canned green beans and butter beans, tomatoes, pickles. My grandaddy would talk about having tomato sandwiches for lunch every day when tomatoes were ripe. Eggs were big on their table because they had chickens.
And these things weren’t deep fried, but pan fried. Mom made fried green tomatoes yearly. Slice the tomatoes, dredge in flour, salt and pepper. Pan fry in hot cast iron pan, using a couple of pats of butter, till brown. As you fry them, you will have add to add butter as needed.
I had forgotten this: in our family, I never remember eating real butter. We ate margarine because it was cheaper. My mother might have put out a stick of butter for company.
We baked with Crisco or margarine.
I imagine this began in the 1940s. My parents were always price conscious about food.
I don’t remember jello before the fifties. But I was very young in the late 1940s.
We always had margarine, but mom kept a little butter in the freezer for my uncle. I guess he made a fuss about the margarine once.
I hated liver but liked beef tongue. I fixed it once as a newlywed. We had a friend who frequently showed up uninvited at dinnertime; that was the last time he ate at our house.
Husband didn't like it, either, so I never made it again.
There have been food fads throughout history. I suspect people who didn't produce their own food were more likely to try fads, while country folk ate what they grew.
I can only assume that my parents fed us, in the 1950s, on foods that they ate in the 1940s. One thing I remember is macaroni and cheese was the main dish, not a side dish. A snack was bread with butter and sugar on it. Breakfast was cereal and milk.
Dinner was usually, meat, potatoes and a vegetable, but the vegetable could be something I’d never serve today, like canned stewed tomatoes. I think most vegetables were canned because the freezers were so tiny.
I remember going to Sunday dinner at my mother's mother's house on occasion. She would make a pot roast and mashed potatoes and corn and string beans. The post road sat in a gravy that had about a half-inch of clear fat floating on the top.
Then we have cookies and cake for dessert. Her cakes were heavy. She must have used a stick of butter in each one. She kept a full candy dish.
When she was 92, my mother needed surgery. Nana lived with my parents by then but needed help with getting her clothing and making meals. I took two months family leave to take care of her. She wanted Spam for lunch and those salmon cakes made with canned salmon and bread crumbs cooked in butter because her mother used to make them.
She lived to be 94 years old, eating grease and sugar for most of her life. But she drank tea with sugar and milk all day long. Maybe that did it.
Yeah but this was talking about a different time period. The 60-70 are pretty well documented.
Buy us.
I was born in the 50s. I don't remember them. I was told I liked Beechnut Banana and Gerber sweet potatoes, as well as either brand's chicken. And peaches. I can't remember the brand.
I can only assume that my parents fed us, in the 1950s, on foods that they ate in the 1940s. One thing I remember is macaroni and cheese was the main dish, not a side dish. A snack was bread with butter and sugar on it. Breakfast was cereal and milk.
Dinner was usually, meat, potatoes and a vegetable, but the vegetable could be something I’d never serve today, like canned stewed tomatoes. I think most vegetables were canned because the freezers were so tiny.
Canned vegetables were cheaper, too. I grew up on meat, potatoes, and a vegetable also. Once in a while we would have rice or those wide, flat egg noodles instead of potatoes. The noodles were good with gravy.
I think I was an adult before I ever tried macaroni and cheese. That's not something my mother ever made. I probably wouldn't have eaten it anyway. I didn't start to like cheese at all until adulthood. I was shocked that my daughter liked cheese as a toddler because I thought that was something kids just didn't eat.
We sometimes had cinnamon toast for breakfast. That was toast with margarine (which we called butter, but it wasn't) sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. Otherwise, cereal and milk or chocolate Instant Breakfast. Sometimes on weekends my mother would make eggs for breakfast.
Yeah but this was talking about a different time period. The 60-70 are pretty well documented.
Buy us.
I was born in the 50s. I don't remember them. I was told I liked Beechnut Banana and Gerber sweet potatoes, as well as either brand's chicken. And peaches. I can't remember the brand.
Same here. Born in 1958. I don't remember the actual 50s, but my oldest sister just turned 70 two weeks ago, so maybe I'll ask her if she ate anything different! But I'm pretty sure my grandmother was eating that way all her life, not just in the 60s and 70s.
But one thing I do know. Some years ago my mother came across a little brown notebook where she had begun recording what she fed me as an infant. I was breastfed for six weeks or so like most of my siblings (my mother for some reason didn't have enough milk after that) but in that little book, she wrote that she gave me orange juice in a bottle at five days old when she brought me home from the hospital.
Pediatricians would have a heart attack over that one now.
I can only assume that my parents fed us, in the 1950s, on foods that they ate in the 1940s. One thing I remember is macaroni and cheese was the main dish, not a side dish.
Mom also served macaroni and cheese as a main dish. Hers always had browned, crumbled ground beef in it--we never ate just noodles. The meat, noodles and cheese were baked in a casserole dish with buttered crumbs on top. I recall Mom putting those buttered crumbs on lots of things.
My Dad grew up in the 40s, he used to say how much we take for granted seasonality of fruits and veggies. If he wanted an apple in the winter, tough luck. Canned peaches was the closest he could get.
These days since so much imported fruit and nationwide distribution networks it doesn't matter as much. Sure there are seasons where the strawberries are fresh etc. but generally you can go to the supermarket in January in a northern state and go buy bananas, oranges, apples, etc. it might be a banana from the Dominican Republic but it's still a banana.
I'd assume intl variety was way less back then. These days almost every smaller city in USA has Mexican, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Indian, Greek, etc and bigger ones will throw in Ethiopian, Burmese, Salvadoran, Colombian, Lebanese, Turkish, Armenian, Filipino, whatever. USA was always a melting pot but it's gotten a lot more so over the past 80 years.
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Solly says — Be nice!
