Home Cooking in the Old Days: '40s and '50s Stuff

Maybe it's a result of my weekly grocery shopping--seeing so many tasty, organic, imaginative (also, expensive) food items--but lately I've been thinking about what we used to eat.  Simple fare.  What my mother made for us back in the '40s and '50s.  You know, stuff like Jell-O molds with canned fruit cocktail.  A supper of creamed chipped beef or creamed tuna on toast.  Chicken fried in bacon grease.  Boiled-to-bejezus vegetables.  So I got to thinking about the old food we don't eat anymore.  (Like the above.)  And the old food we do.  Baked potatoes.  Meatloaf.  Home-made split pea soup with ham-bone and a bit of dried sage. All of which seem like comfort food today.

We didn't know the term "stay-at-home-mom" then.  My mother called herself "a homemaker."  But it meant the same thing.  It was what the women in her family had been and were.  Her mother, grandmothers, aunts, cousins.  She was a pretty good cook, managed three meals a day (all made from scratch!), and produced a conscientious variety ... though once she said that if she had to think about all the meals she'd have to cook for the rest of her life, she'd never get out of bed again.  I think I was 11 at the time.

We were fortunate to live in a part of the country where one could literally pluck fruit off the trees.  In fact, in one of our many houses (I think we moved 10 times in about 10 years), we grew persimmons, plums, apricots, tangerines, mandarin oranges, figs, cherries, strawberry guavas ... and we even had a jujube tree.  The landscape was filled with avocado and lemon groves ... walnut and orange groves, though many of those got bulldozed to make way for suburbia.

Lemon groves (with smudge pots for when the temperatures went below freezing).

So what were some of the things we ate?  I'll include a list at the bottom, but there are a few particular (even goofy?) items I want to mention.  The first was a lime Jell-O concoction (it had to be lime) with a ball of cream cheese tucked into each halved canned pear.  Sometimes my mother rolled the cream cheese balls in chopped walnuts.  If she then put a scoop of that onto a lettuce leaf (ice-berg lettuce), it was a salad.  If into a bowl with a sprinkling of confectioner's sugar, it was dessert.

No, those aren't marshmallows.

A serving of same.  Sometimes, my mother rolled the cream cheese balls in walnuts.

She was good about the toppings on things.  She liked things to be done well, to be pretty.   She'd put a dusting of paprika on top of mashed potatoes--always served in a serving dish, never helped out individually in the kitchen.  Chopped parsley on stuffed peppers.  (Grocery stores didn't charge for parsley.)  She always had lemon slices to go with glasses of iced tea.  And, while we're talking about things being done well, we always ate together at the table with napkins (sometimes napkin rings) and a full setting of table-ware.  And we children were admonished to sit tall and straight at the table, not hunched over.  Bring the food to us, we were told, don't go to the food.  We were shown how to hold a spoon, a fork, how to eat soup (spooned away from us, not toward) ...

Another special dish was what she called Eggs Goldenrod.  She'd had them as a girl and thought they were pretty elegant.  For this, she made a cream sauce, dropped in chopped chunks of hard-boiled egg whites, scooped it onto a piece of toast, and (here's the best part) topped it with the hard-boiled egg yolk which she mashed through a sieve to give the dish a sprinkly, sunny look.  She might then top that with a hint of paprika.

Eggs Goldenrod with all that cute mashed hard-boiled egg-yolk on top.  Oops, forgot the paprika.

Holidays, she stuffed dates with walnuts and rolled them in confectioner's sugar.  She rolled more cream cheese balls--plain and pimiento-flavored--in chopped nuts.  Her turkey stuffing was always the same--and what I prefer today:  stale bread bits, sauteed onion and celery, chopped parsley, melted butter, a bit of water, and enough poultry seasoning so that it smelled nice when still in the mixing bowl.

Walnut-stuffed dates for special occasions with a dusting of confectioner's sugar

I don't know if she made up the next recipe or got it someplace, but she liked to mix maraschino cherry juice with peanut butter, slather it on a banana slit down the middle, and put that on a lettuce leaf.

We only ever ate iceberg lettuce.  For pasta we only ever had spaghetti or macaroni and cheese.  Legs of lamb were always served with mint jelly out of a jar.  Chicken à la king (creamed chicken, mushrooms, peas) always elicited her memories of inviting her high school crowd over for dinner, then throwing the rugs back and dancing afterwards. We had no yogurt in the '40s and '50s.  No pizza until maybe 1956.  No fast food until a soon-to-be-popular company began selling hamburgers for 15¢ each.  And except for some olives my uncle grew and cured, we only ever ate black olives out of a can.  Sometimes, for the sake of economy, we had gravy on bread for supper.  And though my mother made good soups, we often opened a can of chicken noodle or alphabet vegetable.  Oh, and our hot dogs always came with classic yellow mustard and sweet pickle relish.

I continued some of these dishes when I had my own family.  (As well as era-specific dishes that have now gone the way.)  One family member was highly accepting of just about anything I cooked.  He was a good eater.  But there were two dishes from my childhood that he asked me to delete from my menu-planning.  One was stuffed peppers.  The other was stewed tomatoes.  I'd always sort of liked them but never made them again.

So here's my list of Forties/Fifties food that we commonly ate:

Meat:  chicken à la king, creamed chipped beef or tuna on toast, chicken and dumplings, chicken dusted in flour and fried in bacon grease, leg of lamb with mint jelly, meat loaf, spaghetti, stuffed peppers, ham, hot dogs, hamburgers

Non-meat:  Welsh rarebit on toast, gravy on bread, baked beans, mac and cheese

Potatoes:  scalloped, baked, mashed

That good soup in the can with the red and white label ... I still love it.

Soups:  green pea, canned chicken noodle (plus all the rest)

Veggies:  boiled all to hell, stewed tomatoes, boiled green beans with bits of bacon or a glob of bacon grease, cauliflower with cheese sauce topping

Salads:  a wedge of iceberg lettuce with mayonnaise, Jell-O molds with canned fruit cocktail, potato salad, tomato aspic (see below)

Bread:  white bread, Parker House rolls (my aunt was particularly good at making these), canned Boston brown bread, home-made corn bread and banana bread

Desserts/candy:  fudge, brownies, oatmeal cookies, chocolate chip cookies, lemon meringue pie with graham cracker crust, apple pie, two-egg cake, refrigerator ice cream (made with gelatin)

Special:  canned black olives, dates stuffed with walnuts, cream cheese balls rolled in chopped walnuts, cheese-straws

Breakfasts:  Eggs Goldenrod, pancakes, homemade biscuits, waffles, bacon, eggs fried in bacon grease, porridge, hot chocolate

Sandwiches:  peanut butter and jelly, chopped olive, tomato and cucumber, avocado and mayonnaise, peanut butter and raisins, tuna, bologna

Here's her recipe for Jiffy Tomato Aspic:

     2 envelopes gelatin
     juice of 1/2 lemon
     1 thin slice of onion
     1/2 c. hot chicken broth
     4 drops Tabasco sauce
     2 T. Worchestershire sauce
     1/2 t. celery salt
     2 c. tomato juice
     1 c. crushed ice
Blend in a blender for 30 seconds.  Pour into a 4-cup ring mold, chill for 10 minutes.  Fill with vegetables or seafood if desired.  Then chill until firm.