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I'm really obsessed with that time period and I love watching recipe vids on youtube where they show you how women shopped and cooked in the 1950s. Stuff like casseroles, meatloafs, and desserts. Some of the recipes have weird ingredients or others are very simple. I also like watching those videos because a lot of times they include some history in there as well or talk about how much things cost back then, which is nuts because everything was so cheap compared to now!
Anyone here have any 50's recipes they could share? I'm making a list that I could try eventually.
I was born in the late 1950s and my first food memories began in the early 60s.
There is always decade hangover - which seems to last through the first five or so years of the next decade.
Here are some foods that I remember -
Tuna Noodle Casserole with crumbled potato chips on top.
Salisbury Steak
Shrimp Newberg
Green Bean Casserole with French Fried onion rings on top.
Lime cream cheese jello mold with mini-marhmellows and fruit.
Anyone here have any 50's recipes they could share? I'm making a list that I could try eventually.
I have an old tattered copy of the 1953 edition of the Joy of Cooking. I found it in a junk store several years ago. Most of the recipes from that editon do not appear in the current edition of Joy. Food has changed too much over the past 60 years.
Ironically, I was thumbing through this cookbook a few days ago. It even has a very graphic series of drawing that show you how to skin a squirrel and turn it in to "fricassee of squirrel."
Me and my siblings find it disgusting but both our parents love it.
HEAD CHEESE....... Yuk. It's neither cheese nor made with any part of a head, maybe it used to be. They probably smoked the head of a pig and took all the bits and pieces of meat and made this with it... Nothing wasted on the farm.
My cousin makes and a gifts a bunch of it to my parents every so often. Oscar Meyer used to make it and sell it in packages like bologna. I haven't seen it in decades.
It's made with plain gelatin and vinegar with bits of ham suspended in the gelatinous mix.
Head cheese is most definitely made from a pig's head. My favorite Junior League Cookbook, Charleston Receipts has a distant relative's recipe. My grandmother made it and it would stink up the entire house.
My mom used to make this for dad who was in the Marines and they served it often there. Creamed chipped beef on toast.... Don't know how to make it..
One thing that kind of reminds me of that, mom used to "make". Cream of mushroom (Campbell's) soup spooned of white bread thats been well toasted. Still eat on occasion, kind of a comfort food thing.
Creamed corn, don't see that much anymore.
Anything home canned/pickled, except store bought.
Izzie - it's about as simple as it gets (creamed chipped beef). Let me know if you want a ",recipe"
Like Nita said, there were a lot of Jello salads, which I personally could not stand...hate the texture. Jello poured into molds to make a fancy shape were very popular. Just about everything was put into jello...walnuts, canned fruit, mini-marshmallows, shredded coconut. For awhile I remember that there was jello in vegetable flavors!
I remember a lot of “comfort food” like meatloaf, salmon loaf (made with canned salmon), tuna noodle casserole, chicken a la King. Most vegetables were in a can, due to “convenience” (still have nightmares about canned spinach).
There were also comfort food desserts like rice pudding, bread pudding, tapioca pudding.
I remember some strange salads like Waldorf Salad...chopped-up red delicious apples with chopped celery & mayo...it was supposed to have been created at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in NYC...but, why? I also remember a salad made with grated raw carrots, raisins & mayo. It seemed like iceberg was the only lettuce available.
Fried bologna & fried Spam were popular as the meat course for dinner. Instant mashed potatoes were very popular...to me, they tasted like glue, & I never understood what was so hard about peeling, boiling & mashing real potatoes. When my daughter was growing up, she asked for instant potatoes. I had always made mashed potatoes fresh & from scratch, even though I was a working mother, so I asked her why...she said they had them at her friend’s house, so she wanted to try them “for the experience”
I’m sure I can think of more, but I’m remembering why I was such a skinny kid.
hahaha, that's just how it was. The food wasn't very good but the desserts were great.
The big molded jello salad on Thanksgiving and Christmas, lol. It had canned pears and walnuts as well as those bright red maraschino cherries. Our food was mainly meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and two vegetables, or mac and cheese made with orange Kraft cheese or shepherd's pie with two vegetables, a plain hamburg with home made French fries and two vegetables, or beef stew or pot roast that had cooked for hours. Rinse, repeat. (Sundays there would be roast beef or roast chicken and the leftovers would be beef hash or chicken a la king over rice.)
Desserts were wonderful though. Tapioca pudding with milk. Sometimes you got a dollop of strawberry jam on the top. Custard was made on the stove but it took a lot of stirring. Sometimes there was baked custard. Custard was creamy and good and it was given to you when you were sick too, made being sick not so bad at all. We had rice pudding a lot, warm from the oven, loaded with raisins and sprinkled with nutmeg.
Now that I think of it, food was more about the desserts than the meal. If you could gag the meal down, you got dessert. And besides the above, we had homemade apple pie or blueberry pie--pies were made with nourishing fruit and pie did not include ice cream like today. Or we'd get apple crisp hot from the oven. We'd have this delicious heavy chocolate cake with heavy chocolate frosting--I never did get her recipe but that cake was a sheet cake and it was always on hand at family gatherings. There was something called fudge batter pudding--wow--dollops of chocolate batter dumped into a fudge sauce and baked, then served hot with real whipped cream. Rice pudding was served with milk and so was tapioca pudding. We had raspberry tarts made from the leftover pie crust folded over with jam inside.
That was in winter and with the oven going most of the time, it helped to warm the house too. What did we eat in summer? Did we eat in summer? I guess it was vegetables from the garden--corn on the cob, fresh peas, fresh beans, fresh carrots, everything. We didn't have salads. It was always a hot meal even on a hot day. I guess summer desserts were sliced cantaloupe, popsicles--maybe we didn't have dessert in summer...it was more like, "Go outside and play!"
Like Nita said, there were a lot of Jello salads, which I personally could not stand...hate the texture. Jello poured into molds to make a fancy shape were very popular. Just about everything was put into jello...walnuts, canned fruit, mini-marshmallows, shredded coconut. For awhile I remember that there was jello in vegetable flavors!
I remember a lot of “comfort food” like meatloaf, salmon loaf (made with canned salmon), tuna noodle casserole, chicken a la King. Most vegetables were in a can, due to “convenience” (still have nightmares about canned spinach).
There were also comfort food desserts like rice pudding, bread pudding, tapioca pudding.
I remember some strange salads like Waldorf Salad...chopped-up red delicious apples with chopped celery & mayo...it was supposed to have been created at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in NYC...but, why? I also remember a salad made with grated raw carrots, raisins & mayo. It seemed like iceberg was the only lettuce available.
Fried bologna & fried Spam were popular as the meat course for dinner. Instant mashed potatoes were very popular...to me, they tasted like glue, & I never understood what was so hard about peeling, boiling & mashing real potatoes. When my daughter was growing up, she asked for instant potatoes. I had always made mashed potatoes fresh & from scratch, even though I was a working mother, so I asked her why...she said they had them at her friend’s house, so she wanted to try them “for the experience”
I’m sure I can think of more, but I’m remembering why I was such a skinny kid.
Ambrosia! The best kid-centric salad ever, filled with mini marshmallows and pineapple and coconut
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