Boomers: back in the day, what food did you parents rely on (canned, boxed, etc.) (friends, family)

[pathrunner]

I miss the days when I used to bake a cake from a recipe out of the Betty Crocker cookbook. I used to make so many things out of that great book. My aunt (by marriage from a foreign country) used it a lot, and occasionally my mom would use it.

[LittleDolphin]

We three kids loved TV dinners.

[aliasfinn]

TV dinners were rare in my family, so were canned stuff with the exception of Campbell's soup. The only soup I would eat was cream of chicken, cream of potato and bean & bacon. My mom made most of our dinners.
My favorite was pot roast with mashed potatoes and black gravy she made from the drippings. I asked why we didn't have pot roast more often and then my dad told me how much it cost. I replied, " Oh, that's why we don't have it more often."

Many years later, I bought one in the grocery store that was the size of a football that was on sale for half price. I know very little about cooking and didn't have a working oven but did have a huge crockpot that I usually cooked stew and chili in.
My plan was to cook it and then I would have something to gnaw on for the next 4 days. I knew it would take 5-6 hours. After it had been cooking for about 3 hours I got tired and decided to grab a 30 minute nap.

I woke up 6 hours later to a delicious smell filling up my house. I went into the kitchen and saw the lid of the crockpot bouncing up and down. I was shocked and extremely disappointed to see that the roast had shrunk to the size of a softball. It only took me one day to eat it.

I don't remember getting frozen pizza as a kid, my mom would make her own. The same with pies, she made all of them herself, none of that frozen crap. She would always make cookies out of the leftover dough.

[tnff]

I'm not quite a boomer but on the older end of the X'ers. For the most part we ate what we grew. Had about an acre and half garden. Planted everything. Corn, beans, peas, tomatoes, onions, potatoes, okra, watermelon, cantelope, turnips, collards, and I'm probably forgetting stuff, of all different varieties. Picked wild blackberries (of which we ate about half in the field; the rest became either cobbler that day or jam). Grew grapes for jelly, and had a few apple and peach trees. Then mama canned and canned and canned.

Mama cooked from scratch just about every day. Funny how I thought it was a special treat on those days when daddy would be on business and she'd heat up a Hungry Man dinner for me. Saturday lunch, esp during the summer, was usually a sandwich or tacos, or a boxed pizza dough with her own topping added, or in the summer often tuna salad in a tomato fresh from the garden. Sunday she did the full dinner, and oh it was so good.

We didn't eat out often, mainly because there just weren't many places where we lived. I remember the first real pizza I had while on a trip. Of the restaurants around where I lived, most were either roadside BBQ (which I still love) or "fish camps" which were pretty basic places that served all manner of fried fish, shrimp, clams, frog legs, chicken, etc. Usually for one price all you can eat.

Funny how today some of the foods I most crave are some of those simple things she made for Saturday. In fact last night I made tuna salad in a tomato for my wife.

[Lodestar]

Speaking of frozen I was a toddler when the first packages of frozen vegetables came on the market where I lived. I remember it was a small colorful carboard container with a picture of peas on the front and the little Birdseye bird symbol. We thought they were amazing but they were a little expensive.

Mom was a teacher so she rarely had time to bake. We never had homemade bread, donuts, cake, breakfast rolls. She did make a mean pie but they were few and far between.

Dad made my breakfasts - usually hot cereal in the winter and cold in the summer with toast. On weekends he'd make bacon, eggs and hash browns.

My parents put a high value on home-cooked meals and they both came from homes where food meant "love." There wasn't much in the grocery store for fresh fruit and vegetables in the wintertime but Dad always had a large garden and Mom canned some food.

I think the most typical meal we ate for an evening everyday meal was fried meat, boiled potatoes and a vegetable, often canned. She often served sauce or jello on the side.

And being Minnesotans we ate our fair share of "hot dish." Fried hamburgers, meat loaf, bologna, pork chops and cutlets cutlets (the 'real" ones from the cheeks,) Dad's specialty was soups and roasted meat. I believe he always did our Sunday dinner - A roasted capon, or pork or beef, mashed potatoes and gravy.

Mom's picnic specialties were potato salad and chewy brownies.

In the summer and fall we also had fish and pheasant.

DH's family raised hogs and corn and had lavish everyday breakfasts of ham steaks and pancakes. She baked all her own bread and made "lunch" two times a day between meals.

Our school meals were Army surplus. There was a lot of waste. The Government supplied what we would eat so the Superintendent, to keep the cheap stuff flowing, insisted we fill our plates, the teachers tried to make us eat it all and still I saw a lot of wasted food.

I'm not sure if they even had two full weeks of menus. Mondays - goulash, Tuesdays - chili, Wednesdays - chicken, Thursdays - hot dogs and beans, Fridays - fish sticks, like that. The cooks did what they could with it.

I have a lot of family recipes and as we get older now and then we want that comfort food. Sometimes we're eating things we haven't cared to eat for forty or more years - those old, familiar flavors.

[hotzcatz]

The kids in our family learned to cook early in self defense. Campbell's tomato soup over mushy spaghetti noodles isn't really 'cooking' IMHO. Or Velveeta 'cheese' on white bread from the day old store. The absolute cheapest white bread with oleo (cheaper than butter) was always on the table. It wasn't really poverty but bad management which kept the finances tight, I think, although being a kid, we didn't pay much attention to it.



A lot of things came out of cans, mostly Campbell's soup as a variety of sauces. Frenched green beans (from a can) with cream of mushroom soup over it with some sort of bread crumbs on top was a fancy dish. Neither parent was a very good cook, although one was more adventuresome than the other. I'm not sure if the trying to make soup out of birdseed was an actual attempt at good results or more of a 'let's see what we can get them to eat' sorta thing.


Kool-Aid instead of sodas, the kind made with a lot of sugar. Jell-O as well, sometimes weird combinations like lime Jell-O with grated carrots and raisins in it.


There was a huge vegetable garden and lots of canning in late summer. Fishing and foraging for wild berries along the roadside. But, mostly food was from cans and boxes and poorly prepared.

[Clemencia53]

Kellogg's Corn Flakes?

[Bette]

Originally Posted by Mightyqueen801

None of that. My mother cooked from scratch. No, this is not some post about how superior my mother was. She cooked meat to shoe leather. She's the only person I ever knew who dried out a leg of lamb.

We had mashed potatoes with whatever overcooked meat was on the menu five out of seven days a week, but she made good gravy. Rice was an occasional different changeup, as well as noodles, like egg noodles. Sometimes they were in a casserole with canned corned beef glued together with a white sauce and topped with potato chips. Once every other month or so, my mother would make spaghetti with meatballs and a jar of Ragu.

But she grew up during the Depression and did not buy convenience foods other than canned goods. I remember the commercials for those foods, but we never had them. We did not get takeout food, either, until maybe when I was a teenager.

I was nine years old before I had pizza. I was in the Girl Scouts, and there was an end-of-year trip for all the troops to go to a local pizza place. Everyone was excited and I pretended to be, too, because I was embarrassed to tell anyone that I'd never actually had pizza before. And that day, I fell in love with it!

But not stuff out of boxes, ever. As a matter of fact, when my sister had a kid and fed her Kraft Mac n Cheese (known where I am now as "KD") I thought it was a new product. I had no idea it existed for decades!

Like MQ801, my mother cooked from scratch. Standard midwestern fare. However, I laughed at the pizza part. My mother seriously did not know how to make pizza. I thought I hated it. When I was in HS and had my first date, my boyfriend took me to a pizza place in Fort Lauderdale. We were meeting other couples there and it was a very popular place. Well, I was dreading it because I thought I hated pizza. This place did the squares so when I saw it and it looked so different from my mother's, I tried it. WOW!! It was amazing. To this day, I love pizza. (Too much LOL).

I loved it. I could not wait to get home and tell my dad. I knew not to tell my mother but a couple of weeks after this, my dad pretended to have go to that same area and he and I went there. He loved it too and years later, we would meet up there for a quick bite.

(The place just got sold last year after almost 60 years in business). I was sad.

My mother had to do her own cookbook when she doing her MBA at the University of Chicago. She had these 2 cookie recipes - one was called "Krinkles" - they were mostly oatmeal but so good. Brown sugar in there also. Anyway, until just a couple of years before her passing, if I came over to her condo, she would make us a cup of tea and always had the Krinkles ready to go. I'd take about 20 for the road LOL.
It was our thing.

If we went shopping together, she'd want to stop at the restaurant of the store and have a cup of tea.
(She was Canadian). I loved it because getting those few minutes by myself with her was glorious.

[Bungalove]

Originally Posted by hotzcatz

The kids in our family learned to cook early in self defense. Campbell's tomato soup over mushy spaghetti noodles isn't really 'cooking' IMHO. Or Velveeta 'cheese' on white bread from the day old store. The absolute cheapest white bread with oleo (cheaper than butter) was always on the table. It wasn't really poverty but bad management which kept the finances tight, I think, although being a kid, we didn't pay much attention to it.



A lot of things came out of cans, mostly Campbell's soup as a variety of sauces. Frenched green beans (from a can) with cream of mushroom soup over it with some sort of bread crumbs on top was a fancy dish. Neither parent was a very good cook, although one was more adventuresome than the other. I'm not sure if the trying to make soup out of birdseed was an actual attempt at good results or more of a 'let's see what we can get them to eat' sorta thing.


Kool-Aid instead of sodas, the kind made with a lot of sugar. Jell-O as well, sometimes weird combinations like lime Jell-O with grated carrots and raisins in it.


There was a huge vegetable garden and lots of canning in late summer. Fishing and foraging for wild berries along the roadside. But, mostly food was from cans and boxes and poorly prepared.

Oh yes, Jello. My Mom used to make some of the weird Jello creations as well, mostly with canned fruit in them. Pretty much everything else she cooked or baked was excellent though. We even ate quiche for dinner, although Mom just called it egg pie. She was a fantastic baker as well, making custard, fruit, and meringue pies, cakes, and many varieties or cookies at Christmastime. She'd fill up empty large potato chip cans with cookies layered on waxed paper and store them under the basement stairs until the holidays. Us kids would see how many we could snitch without her noticing, which required a lot of rearranging of the cookies. I suspect she knew anyway.

[springfieldva]

Oh my gosh, some of those Jello salad concoctions were the worst. I could deal with the canned fruit. But those "salads" with the lime Jello, cottage cheese, Green Goddess salad dressing, mayo and who knows what all else were an absolute horror.