My Grandmother’s Old Recipes: Disastrous Food

[dragonlady7]

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plaidadder:

So, when I talk about food and my family here, I’ve usually been talking about my mother’s side of things. But today, let me tell you about my paternal grandmother and cooking.

She was a main line Protestant, born in 1917, grew up in Pennsylvania and lived all over the midwest because her husband worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad. When my father married my mother in 1966, my paternal grandmother gifted my mother with a box of my father’s favorite recipes. 

My mother made some of them for us growing up. The best one was her lemon lush bars. We also had a lot of three bean salad, which I disliked.

 When I became an adult my mother passed a folder full of my maternal grandmother’s recipes on to me. I think it must have been one that she had kept until she moved into her retirement community, because a lot of this stuff seems like it’s from later than 1966. At any rate, it was given to me when I got out of college.  When we were in grad school and living on nothing, I made some of these recipes–they use a lot of canned food and they often make quite large quantities. My paternal grandmother talked a lot about her “thrifty German upbringing,” and of course she would have been a teenager during the Great Depression. 

So I went back to her recipe folder today to see if she had any suggestions for how to cook during a disaster.

I was fool enough to start with the “Appetizers, Soups & Sauces” section.

Let me transcribe some of these gems.

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??? All of these except the chipped beef dip are things I’ve had and liked??? I’m not a huge fan of cheez whiz but the beef dip is probably fine.

Heavenly Salad is clearly an older version of the ambrosia salad that’s been at every picnic I’ve ever gone to– by the 80s, when I was stuffing myself into epic sugar highs at picnics, we used Cool Whip but it’s just a more-raw-ingredients version. And the “beef stew” is just a stroganoff recipe. None of these are that bad! Savory-sweet Jell-O salads are super standard cuisine; my grandma’s version was lime with shredded carrots and black pepper, and I think there was a layer in the mold that had some sort of cream substance in it to kind of be a topping but I might be confusing that with the creamed onions she used to make too.

I get that the lurid photos of 70s dinner party publications make it look really sensationally awful but I promise you, old American food is by and large not that bad. 

My grandmother was born in ‘17 as well, and for her, the innovation of canned and jarred and dried and powdered foods and food mixes in boxes and envelopes and such were a hugely liberating development, freeing her from her mother’s lifelong servitude to a hot oven where she had to process all the food she grew into meals. Great-Grandma had to house lodgers to pay her bills and that chained her to the stove even more, but Grandma worked as a secretary outside the home (she was Vital To The War Effort at one point, thanks, working in a locomotive yard), and it was an enormous boon to her that she could make good food reasonably inexpensively out of things she bought prepackaged. 

I’m not saying that I’m not super grateful that when my mom got married in 1977 someone gave her a copy of the Fanny Farmer cookbook and she taught herself how to make real food from scratch like her grandma had, but her mother’s way of living wasn’t really that bad either. I know it’s funny and trendy to laugh at Weird Old People Food but it’s a valid cuisine given the context, and honestly if you really try it it’s not that bad.

And, I mean, really, ambrosia salad! Is not weird! It’s a fruit salad with a cream base and it’s usually got marshmallows and shredded coconut and kids love it. I haven’t seen it at a potluck lately so probably my mom’s generation are the last ones making it but i would totally totally eat it if someone made it.

Tomato ketchup plus grape jelly equals barbecue sauce. Like, that’s how “weeeeiiirrd” and spooky that recipe is; it’s a really basic variation on fucking barbecue sauce. This is a classic recipe in my boyfriend’s family only they use mini meatballs instead of cocktail weenies. You serve it in a crock pot so it stays warm all the way through and it’s fucking delicious. And it’s just barbecue sauce. It is really not in any way bizarre, I do not understand the theatrical horror over it; Sweet Baby Ray’s has nastier shit in its ingredient list than what you’d find in a jar of Welch’s and some Heinz, we don’t really need to perform disgust over this. 

Comments

[unicornduke]

Chipped beef is the best flat meat and I don't understand the horror. It's basically beef ham. Stays good in the fridge for up to 2 months, better than slimy lunch meat on sandwiches and you can make cream chipped beef which is the best comfort food. Plus no one else buys it so I can buy it.

[heartofoshun]

Chipped beef gravy on toast or egg noodles. I'd eat that right now. The sauce as my grandmother cooked it was creamy and peppery--a great contrast.

I had that bargain basement barbecue sauce on mini hot dogs at middle-class cocktail parties in Mexico City (with Mexico having one of the world's most complex cuisines!). Another surprise in Mexico--when people were entertaining--was to pour Cheez Whiz on almost anything and call it estilo americano. And people often made those things for us as a courtesy or an appeal to our presumed taste.

The things that you are describing for the most part are things that could be made from canned or at least partially prepackaged food. In the summer my mother and grandmother canned like crazy during the month of August. So we never bought canned food. We had shelves and shelves of it in the basement, including ketchup, tomato sauces, whole tomatoes, diced tomatoes, corn, green beans, peaches, applesauce, etc., etc. And bins of potatoes, apples, and carrots. A kid's chore was to check for spoilage and pick out any that looked like they were going soft--that went a long way to preserve them for most of the winter. The idea of buying fresh food out of season was unheard of in my childhood where I was raised. And our refrigerators had a freezer with held two ice cube trays and not much more.

My oldest brother transcribed my mother's recipes for all of the siblings one Christmas. He was working from a source like looks like your photo!

My mother's cooking was fancier than my grandmother's but that was because there was a class difference interjecting itself there. My mother came from an upper middle-class family. But she did all of those recipes (which they called Depression Cooking) at popular request along with some very awesome French country cooking and Alsacien dishes (kind of Frenchified German cooking).

[krait]

That ambrosia salad thing always popped up at big holiday dinners with relatives when I was a kid! Honestly, the only thing I'd change about it as an adult is to leave the marshmallows out.

I am grateful my mother taught me how to cook from scratch, but some days I am also grateful that Cup Noodles exist. :D (I add to mine a little! Put frozen mixed veg in a bowl, microwave, then toss in a dab of chicken soup base and pour the prepared Cup Noodles in. Voila, lunch with actual vegetables!)

[j00j]

My Israeli sister in law and my Indian/Canadian step mother in law (I have a lot of in-laws ok) have both made Ambrosia for family events within the last few years.
It's too sweet for me but I'm glad they're enjoying exploring this era of American cooking.