Random Weird Foods People Ate to Get Through Great Depression (14 items)

• 

  (#12) Kids, Especially, Drank a Ton of Milk

  Cow’s milk is supposed to do a body a good, give you a hilarious mustache, and compel you to constantly ask others if they have it. We get it. But the amount of cow’s milk they funneled into school-aged kids during the Great Depression is alarming; the government advised a quart per day.

  Milk-mad nutritionists at the time placed a “tremendous importance” on the stuff and considered it a complete “wonder food.” School lunches almost always featured milk on the plate as well, in the form of kid favorites such as creamed cabbage, creamed carrots, and cornstarch pudding.
• 

  (#4) The First Lady Promoted Spaghetti with Boiled Carrots and White Sauce

  Eleanor Roosevelt was doing the best she could with the hand she was dealt. How would you like to be the First Lady during the Great Depression in a time when Lady Magic in the kitchen was supposed to help us through the crisis? That said, Roosevelt promoted some truly foul dishes in her efforts to promote savvy home economics, such as this off-putting “casserole” made from spaghetti, boiled carrots, and a simple white sauce of milk, flour, salt, and butter.

  The first step is to cook the spaghetti for a sadistic 25 minutes, which in a sane world means Step #2 is to order the biggest pizza Domino's will make. But this is the Great Depression we’re talking about, so the idea is to get the noodles mushy so they pair nicely with the boiled-to-death carrots and the pennies worth of creamy sauce. The result? A “vehicle for nutrition and nutrients” that probably made people want to eat their old Flapper hats instead.
• 

  (#7) "Milkorno" Mixed Milk and Corn for an Unlikely Superfood

  Mad scientists at Cornell University in 1933 invented a gruel called Milkorno, a mix of powdered skim milk, corn meal, and salt, to help families in need “stretch budgets without sacrificing nourishment," promising “Meals For a Family of 5 For $5 a Week.” The name comes from combining "milk” and “corn” with the surprised “Oh!” that guests of Eleanor Roosevelt probably made when she explained what she tricked them into eating at the White House later that same year.

  There were also Milkorno’s step-siblings Milkwheato and Milkoato. Milkwheato, in particular, did big business: the government purchased 25 million pounds of the dystopian dust for use in hunger relief efforts. When boiled, every member of the Milkorno family turns into porridge, which makes you wonder what the Bureau of Home Economics was thinking when it suggested soggy Milkorno as a substitute for noodles in Chinese chop suey.
• 

  (#2) 'Surreal' Peanut Butter-Stuffed Onions Kept Things Super-Cheap

  Food historians Andrew Coe and Jane Ziegelman, authors of A Square Meal, prepared peanut-butter-stuffed baked onions using a Depression-era cookbook and lived to tell the tale to the New York Times. How did the dish turn out? “It was not a popular addition to the dinner table,” Coe said. Ziegelman called the experience “surreal,” noting sagely that “peanut butter has nothing to say to a baked onion.”

  Who’s to blame for this unholy alliance of peanut butter and baked onion, this wretched PB&BO? The well-intended but seemingly palateless Bureau of Home Economics, whose professional home economists published recipes and articles in our fine nation’s newspapers and magazines urging housewives to become “budgeteers” and serve this glop to their families.
• 

  (#13) Creamed Chipped Beef on Toast Was Nicknamed "Sh*t on a Shingle" by US Soldiers

  In their book A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression, culinary historians Jane Ziegelman and Andy Coe think call creamed chipped beef, a revolting combination of "canned corned beef, plain gelatin, canned peas, vinegar and lemon juice," "wrong in every possible way" (though some are still nostalgic for it today).

  Nicknamed "SOS" for "sh*t on a shingle," creamed chipped beef was served on bread or crackers ("shingle" was military slang for a piece of toast). This hearty but unpleasant concoction first became popular during the Depression. Later, World War II servicemen would also dine on creamed chipped beef, and it even became a running joke on the TV show M*A*S*H, set during the Korean War.
• 

  (#9) There Were Loaves Galore

  Food historians say that loaves were “very popular” during the Great Depression because they “were made from an ingredient and a cheap thing that stretches the ingredient out.” There was liver loaf, lima bean loaf, peanut loaf, and, as a “sparingly apportioned luxury,” actual meatloaf. Lima bean loaf allegedly tastes a “bit like falafel” but is best with “lots of highly seasoned gravy.”

  Even actual meat loaf was relatively affordable when it was “padded out” with “bread and crackers, quick-cooking oats, tapioca, breakfast cereal, and powdered sauce mixes.” Meanwhile, like today, “bouillon, canned soup, and Heinz ketchup … added flavor and moistness at small cost.”

New Random Displays    Display All By Ranking