9 Depression Era Recipes You Need to Try - Retro Housewife Goes Green (2024)

FAQs

What was a typical meal during the Great Depression? ›

Celery soup mixed with tuna fish and mashed potatoes. A salad of corned beef, gelatin and canned peas. Baked onion stuffed with peanut butter. Those are just some of the recipes Americans turned to during the Great Depression, when many families struggled to eat enough nutritious food.

Many cheap foods still common among the poor today made their debut during the Depression: Wonder Bread (1930), Bisquick (1931), Miracle Whip (1933), and Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup (1934). Ragu spaghetti sauce, Kraft mac-n-cheese, and Hormel Spam all appeared during the Roosevelt Recession in 1937.

Depression Cooking is a zine of easy recipes designed to make mealtime a little easier, in the no-nonsense sense of the word, for depressed humans like me. It demonstrates one of the many lessons that I've learned during COVID: that we can care for one another without being physically present.

Food was always home cooked, and people usually ate bread, vegetables, meat, etc. The most common meal was made of a composite dish with one portion of proteins (meat, eggs, fish, cheese, pulses), one portion of potatoes, pasta, or bread, and two portions of vegetables, followed by fruit as dessert.

1930: 26¢ per gallon

But when the Great Depression hit in 1929, fewer people could afford milk and dairy farmers still had a lot of milk to sell. The price dropped from 35¢ per gallon to 26¢ per gallon.

What did people eat for breakfast in the Great Depression? Corn meal mush & eggs. As they raised there own corn & had chickens on the farm.

A common depression cake is also known as "Boiled Raisin Cake", "Milkless, Eggless, Butterless Cake", or "Poor Man's Cake". "Boiled" refers to the boiling of raisins with the sugar and spices to make a syrup base early in the recipe. However, some bakers do include butter.

Many people turned to newly developed, mass-produced processed foods like canned meats, corn chips, and fruit-filled cakes [1].

What did farmers eat during the Great Depression? ›

Almost all farm families raised large gardens with vegetables and canned fruit from their orchards. They had milk and cream from their dairy cattle. Chickens supplied meat and eggs. They bought flour and sugar in 50-pound sacks and baked their own bread.

During the Great Depression preceding the passage of the Social Security Act, "soup kitchens" provided the only meals some unemployed Americans had. This particular soup kitchen was sponsored by the Chicago gangster Al Capone.

People tend to feel low in energy when they're depressed – this can mean that having to cook or eat may feel like too much for them. People with depression often experience anxiety which can result in gastrointestinal symptoms (such as nausea, diarrhoea or abdominal pain), which can cause a loss of appetite.

Some of the reasons that baking can improve our mood include the fact that it is an activity that requires focus and concentration, which can ensure we stay present in the moment. Following a recipe requires calmness and concentration, which can provide a similar effect to mindfulness.

Big families could be fed with soups from leftover meats, beans, and home-grown vegetables. Homemakers made many varieties of soup from available foods. The results included split pea, chicken-rice, potato-onion, bean, hamburger, and all vegetable. Dumplings were a filling addition to complement the soup.

What did people eat for breakfast in the Great Depression? Corn meal mush & eggs. As they raised there own corn & had chickens on the farm.

Including ingredients like lobster, squab, oysters, tongue, crab, fruit punch, prunes, peaches, pineapple, honeydew melon and orange marmalade in the menu helped gentrify the meal and add that touch of elegant refinement that was so important.

By the time of the Great Depression, people of all classes were routinely eating outside the home. Like other retail businesses, restaurants reduced their prices at the depth of the crisis.