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My grandma lived through the depression, her cooking was god awful, I had to teach my mom how to cook and season food. She didn’t know why people used paprika.
Some family recipes are heirlooms. Others are evidence.
That’s the one really positive thing about the internet. One doesn’t need a grandma who could cook to have access to good recipes any more.
Down with big grandma
Case in point:
Never has there ever been a more load-bearing-linchpin use of the word “salad”.
to be fair, it’s a molded salad, much more structurally sound that way.
I’m still convinced that those were used as gag gifts at the time and that nobody actually prepared those ridiculous things, even in the US.
Bill Bryson in his biography of growing up in Iowa tells how his grandmother in rural Iowa used to serve these dishes. He concedes that they all vere regular dishes with copious amounts of the food the advertisers sold. He also called Jello the state fruit of Iowa
The power of US marketing never ceases to amaze me (not in a good way, mind).
I’ve heard some gnarly things about Midwestern “cuisine”
If only that were true.
The 70s were interesting times… My mom made so many odd dishes from good housekeeping magazine. The jello salads are probably more normal. Have you ever had ‘bbq’ chicken that was cooked in a pot of coke and ketchup? You just cook it until the liquid reduces away.
My mom was a great cook by the way. She made those dishes primarily for budgetary reasons.
The corn pie is structurally weird, but the ingredients list looks pretty sane. It’s basically just meatloaf in an unusual shape.
That’s the one that I’m actually interested to maybe try someday.
Extra tasty ham loaf… as opposed to a regularly tasty ham loaf? Huh.
That Christmas Tree Salad looks like a glob of jizz that is standing up and getting ready to gain sentience.
Looks delish
did you know you can buy those jelly soaked weenies? and dont let them convince you they were made in vienna
Turns out I don’t actually dislike vegetables, I just dislike how my mother’s and grandmother make them. Did you know they can be served with colour still on them?
Do you mean to tell me vegetables can be cooked some other way besides boiling? And you can put seasoning on them?!? My grandfather would be disgusted by the thought.
I got fucking microwave steamed frozen veggies with no seasoning at all not even butter and if I didn’t eat the freezer burnt slop I wasn’t allowed to leave the table.
Trauma bonding hell yeah. 👊
I get the microwaved steamed veggies now. But I at least toss them in some olive oil or butter and season them. Usually I’ll microwave them halfway to thaw them then fry them in some oil to get a nicer char. Not gourmet, but perfectly fine.
I used to stir fry my veggies, but they’d end up soft due to the resulting moisture.
Then I baked them in the oven hoping that’d be better, but I’d overcook them just a bit and they’d be too hard.
I finally decided to air fry my veggies, and they were juuuuuuuuuuuuust right!
Even boiled vegetables taste good if you don’t go stupid mode about it.
I’ve made delicious strawberry ice cream. One way to get the strawberry flavor in there is to steep the milk/batter with berries and let the berry juice seep out of the berry. Fun fact! If you do this, you get white ghost berries so strain them out. If you want berry chunks, add new berries afters.
Turns out I love Brussels sprouts, so long as you don’t cook them til they’re grey.
Also, the new cultivars are WAY less bitter. You can still grow the old type yourself at home, and it’s really a huge difference.
This is the important part. Modern Brussels sprouts are NOT your grandma’s sprouts from the 1990s or earlier. From wikipedia :
In the 1990s, the Dutch scientist Hans van Doorn identified the chemicals that make Brussels sprouts bitter: sinigrin and progoitrin.[11] This enabled Dutch seed companies to cross-breed archived low-bitterness varieties with modern high-yield varieties
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2241/
Goddamn. They really do have a comic for everything.
I really like boiled Brussel spouts from the 70s.
Boggles my mind oven roasted asparagus and broccoli were not a thing as a child.
My gourmand grampolycule even did grilled lemon almond mzithra broccoli once in the 90s. They spoiled us.
Well that sounds like a good… someone. Gourmet grandpa?
oh sorry. i forget not everyone was here for the full explanation. one of my bio grampas was in a polycule and i call it the grampolycule because i had So Many Grampas
Oh, lol, I was wondering how autocorrect might create that. So what’s Gourmand?
*Someone who likes food.
a gourmand is a fat gourmet. that is my definition and it is the best definition
This was me with soup. My mom would use all the dregs of whatever she had around to make “soup,” and it was disgusting. Real soup made with the good parts of fresh ingredients is amazing, and I didn’t even know until I was in my mid-20’s!
Frozen is way better than canned
Canned veggies aren’t that bad. But my mom used to treat them like they fresh.
So instead of just warming them up in the liquid, she would rinse them, then boil them like normal (which was already too long).
Grandma’s cookbook had two categories: comfort food and culinary crimes.
i have a ‘gold cookbook’ inherited from my grandma that covers pretty much anything that was available in the 50s
Don’t forget the middle ground where they cross. War time ration crime against God that your parents swear is comfort food but is actually why they are missing brain cells.
Boiled “skinned” hotdog in cabbage soup… Was my grandmother’s. Funfact its broth was made of bullion cubes and hot dog skins… Its very beefy…
If your lucky you get navy beans added.
My grandmother would put food in the oven before turning it on. When the timer would go off, she’d be frustrated that the food was dehydrated and undercooked, so she’d try her best to salvage it by starting the timer again for the same amount of time. Then she’d ask “what smells funny?” before pulling the food out from the oven, and complaining that the recipe was bad.
She never cooked before she got married, but she was married for somewhere around 70 years.
70 years.
In 70 years, she was never able to understand the concept of preheating the oven. When I was a child, she’d come over to my parents’ house. If my mom was preparing dinner, and the oven was preheating, my grandmother would turn off the oven and tell my mother that she shouldn’t leave the oven on. My mom tried so many times to explain preheating the oven, but my grandmother insisted that it was a waste of energy.
Sounds like granny was a full blown dumbass.
Or had early onset Alzheimer’s. Or both.
that’s not a waste of energy, but i bet there was also other habit that is: unless you want to specifically evaporate water, things will get boiled just the same on low or high heat. (heating up to boiling point is most economical using high power) there’s zero reason to keep thing boiling on high heat then add water. also, using hot tap water. water heater is much better at heating water than open gas flame, yet i see people insisting on heating entire pots and kettles of cold tap water
I’ve always heard not to drink hot tap water or cook with it because of the risk of nasty things leaching from the pipes. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-07/is-it-actually-bad-to-drink-warm-water-from-the-tap/102812252
depends on your buildings construction, if you have steel piping then it should be fine as long as you boil it. if it’s chlorinated then it shouldn’t even matter too hard
Legionella specifically. If you’re going to drink hot from the tap, go all the way to boiling first
legionella dies after 2min at 60C tho
do i look like i’m made of thermometers?
don’t look in my barbecue drawer look at the thing in front of you that is meat
where i live it’s a part of building code that hot water has to be hot enough that legionella doesn’t survive in it. depending on the place it might be different and whether building is up to code is a separate thing entirely
If you have legionella in your hot water, the issue isn’t going to come from drinking it, but inhaling it when you shower. As long as you don’t have a dead leg in your water system or a circuit that stagnates for long periods of time, legionella is pretty much a non-issue in the vast majority of homes, even older homes.
It can’t be overstated how many of those recipes were some con to sell canned shit that Grandma cut out of a magazine. There’s very little “in the old county we cooked like this…” that made it through the Boomer food filter. Best case scenario is it’s Betty fucking Crocker.
All my family recipes come from my male ancestors. Sure it’s also various ways of making canned food work, but it’s also been an evolving process since the 1800s so it’s evolved from somewhat edible to outright good. All of them are trail/camping recipes for context, lots of meat, starche, and grain.
Utah, is it?
The Jello thing must be American.
In the UK we made everything with potatoes and Spam.
I believe it used to be called “aspic” if you’re looking for colloquially similar fads. Jello is an American brand name, so obviously that’s going to appear mostly in American fads.
In Norway peas, carrot bits and shrimp in aspic is called “Cabaret”. It is not bad, but not so great you choose it over almost anything else
I think we only have Jellied Eels in that category, and nobody eats that because it’s vile.
Usually we just use jelly for pudding foods. We used to have lime jelly with tinned orange segments in it, called “fishes in the pond”.
I’ve absolutely no idea if that is a UK thing, or a my family thing. Google seems to deny all knowledge of it, but that could just be how Google is these days.
Yea, and TBF, a lot of these recipes are gonna be from the 50s and 60s, and most are probably dead and buried where they should be. They were mostly all vile abominations of gelatin and mayonnaise.
Gelatin was used plenty in UK. Iv watched plenty of British cooking shows that focused on the 40s-80s to know that for a fact. But it just got REAL fucking big here cause of name brand jello.
So it’s just truely absurd here state side.
Spam is fucking delicious though… Just be sure to get the “less sodium” version
Mormons.
My grandparents ate boiled potatoes with boiled vegetables and watery meat. When I lived at my parents we often at the same. Thank god that we’ve adapted the cuisine from countries that actually discovered that food can have taste
You need to understand that back in those days, you simply couldn’t buy but maybe a third of what you take for granted in your favorite grocery store today. You can’t cook with what you can’t get.
By the end of September, there were few fresh greens or vegetables beyond root crops. If you wanted a tomato, you needed to open a can or jar. And smoked paprika? Nobody had ever heard of it, let alone tasted it.
I had an elderly aunt that made “oyster stew” on special occasions. The recipe was as follows:
One gallon of 2% milk
One 16 oz. jar raw oysters with juice
Salt and pepper to tasteThat’s literally all that was in it. She’d mix it together, heat until steaming, then serve. Just a big pot of hot, oyster scented, salty milk, served with oyster crackers. Everyone hated it and none of her children carried on the tradition.
That recipe deserved to die.
Edit: oops, broken line breaks.
Oyster milk! It’s fight milk but you get a refreshing seaside holiday while you drink it
It’s fight milk
I didn’t see any crow eggs in the recipe.
…oh my g*d what a horrible day to have eyes…
Your god, maybe.
The god of chaos demands at oyster milk sacrifice!
Church potluck every Sunday when I was a kid. A whole buffet line of jello based not dessert dishes. Usually peas in green jello, shredded carrots in orange jello,or hotdog in jello abominations. If not jello, there were at least 10 mayonnaise based atrocities.
I ate a lot of dinner rolls.
I must have lucked out, the oddest thing at my childhood churchs’ potlucks were the ambrosia/watergate salad where they used ingredients that they liked instead of what the typical recipe calls for, or waldorf salads which had just a little too much mayo and not enough whipped cream.
I still can’t do potlucks because my parents forced me to eat all sorts of random bullshit at the church potluck, because they felt like being seen eating someone’s dish conferred some weird church status.
“Go over and tell Miss Borley how much you liked her chicken liver and salmon casserole.”
On the other hand, this also contributed to my powerful disdain for church, so I guess that’s something. The only way out is through… a senile lady’s disgusting casserole, or something.
“Go over and tell Miss Borley how much you liked her chicken liver and salmon casserole.”
Okay, Mommy!
goes over and vomits all over Miss Borley
Sometimes the holy spirit just moves through you.
Nah, that’s the liver.
I was a stubbornly picky eater. So thankfully my parents never made me do that, as I would have simply accepted a punishment rather than take a bite of any of that shit.
God, I feel for you folk. When my parents forced me to try something, it was like sushi, fried okra, or pesto.
In defense of my old church:
Pizza biscuits.
Get Pillsbury biscuit dough, slap down one, slap down mozzarella, marinara, pepperoni/sausage, slap down another biscuit over top, do this 12 times, cover and bake.
Sorta like a poor man’s calzone… or, arguably, they’re just super sized pizza pockets.
Don’t pair well with grape juice imo, but they were honestly pretty good.
We did eventually get an Italian soda station bar type thing, no clue if we just aped that from the Mormons or came up with it independently.
Dude! We made those exact pizzas as kids after temple. They were quite good.
Ahem.
Cheesus Crust.
That is all.
I would have eaten those for sure.
Y’all’s churches were weird. Growing up catholic in a German part of America we just did fish fries with beer battering and pig roasts, both with copious beer, though the kids had to stick to a single sip of wine. My wife’s catholic upbringing was more Italian American and her church did meatballs in tomato sauce.
I’ve always thought this was some sort of mass hysteria. Who ate any of that stuff and thought “oh, hell yeah, so good”? Who would make it twice? Let alone more?
I once read a theory that those recipes were a form of protest by women in the 1950s-60s. "I can’t get a divorce, have my own bank account, or get a credit card? Then enjoy this jello, mayonnaise hotdog salad motherfucker. "
How to quiet quit life: hotdog jello.
I’ve always figured it was a remnant from the depression that overstayed it’s welcome. A lot of those horrid old recipes feel like some of the old depression recipes with too many resources, like buying up all the potions ingredients in Skyrim to make random shit. Hope you like 33 flavors of damage stamina and damage health.
WWII for the canned food. That’s why them and Boomers hold onto a bunch of food items that only happened for 15-20 years.
I feel like the food rationing for some things during WWII wasnt enough of a large scale change from the depression era rationing to be notable. Regardless that’s still about 15+ years of food scarcity to have a major cultural impact especially since much like right now the buildup to the great depression fully stetting in started as early as 1925 in some areas.
I mean that GIs got adapted to liking canned food and took that home.
Mayonnaise PLUS jello, with hotdogs. Perfect.
Ha. I know where you went to church.
Probably. Because we were there together. I think. Those were nasty jellos
Apparently I missed out. Post church social time was coffee and pastries. The big meals were normal (turkey with mash, green beans, and cranberry sauce, for example).
But I’ve read the cookbooks.
And here I am in Spain, laughing, and crying, and barfing a little in my mouth.
