Let’s be clear before going any further… the vast majority
of us have never experienced true poverty.
We don’t really know what it is like to be truly poor. We don’t know what it is like to really not
know if there will be food on the table tonight or even tomorrow. Too many people do know this feeling as we
enjoy reading about food-inspired travel, expensive ingredients, and elaborate
feasts. We need to keep in mind both our
good fortune and responsibility to help those in need. As I title this entry “Po’ Folks’ Eatin’”
please do not mistakenly think I am making fun of those less fortunate.
While fortunately few of us have experienced true poverty,
many of us do remember times when our families were not as affluent or as
worldly as they are now. And if we look
back on these times we can probably remember a few dishes that made the most of
leftover ingredients and created some odd combinations. And if we are really honest with ourselves,
we recognize that these dishes remain sentimental favorites. We might tell our foodie friends about them,
not will we long for them with that amazing bottle of wine we just found…but we
love them just the same. Here are some
of the simple, efficient, economical yummy eats I remember…and might still enjoy,
not that I would ever tell.
American Chop Suey
– this was as standard as anything could be in my family. Spaghetti, some ground beef, stewed tomatoes,
tomato sauce, maybe a hint of cream. It
was a wonderfully simple, inexpensive, quick meat sauce or Bolognese
imitator. And until living in Europe as
an adolescent I knew no different. As
for the name…God only knows!
Macaroni and Cheese
with hot dogs – yes, Kraft! Have you made it from scratch?! All that cheese gets expensive! Besides, as a kid I didn’t like the “real”
thing, only the stuff in the blue box. The
crust on the “real” thing grossed me out.
Now I get it, it really is the best part. The hot dogs…cut into disks or quartered
longwise and heated up quickly in a frying pan…and we called them nickels and worms. Why?
Watch the long ones curl as they cook.
I still love this with the kids.
S.O.S. – a
delicious combination of white bread, topped with turkey, some stuffing, maybe
some cranberry sauce and doused in turkey gravy. Wonderful post-Thanksgiving! The name…?
Look it up. I think this was the
first dish that I knew by a name other than its ingredients. I also seem to remember my dad doing
something like this with leftover sauerbraten – a subject for a later entry.
Turkey Mornay –
or something like that – This was a creamy, baked combination of turkey meat, broccoli
(I think) and maybe some pasta or rice… My memory has been blocked on this
one. We seemingly had it once a week
from 7th to 10th grade.
Every guest ate this. If you were
a guest more than once, you ate it more than once. My mom is laughing right now – and telling me
I am wrong – and that it was delicious.
Elbow macaroni and
Hunts tomato sauce – mix together and done.
This was pretty standard too. You
can feed a family of four on $3 with this unless you insist on a salad. In college I could make this stretch for a
couple days, though I used two pounds of pasta!
Later I started adding some olive oil, garlic, and pepper and it
actually became quite yummy. The thought
of this dish automatically makes me feel like I am 8 years old.
Chinese Chop Suey
– I actually haven’t had this in years and I think it is best kept in the
past. Rice topped with a sautéed
combination of a recent roast chopped into small bits, celery, sprouts and some
sort of brown sauce. I am pretty sure
there’s a good reason I haven’t had this in a while.
There were other possibilities for dinner. Scrambled egg sandwiches, grilled cheese,
cereal…you probably did some of these too.
I will bet your family has some spectacular creations. My wife’s family has Irish Burritos. What…? Never heard of that? Left over corned beef gets turned into
amazing hash and thrown in a tortilla with some hot sauce. Didn’t know the Irish used tortillas, did
you? (Actually the corned beef is an Irish-American tradition, but that’s for
an entry in March.)
So what were your childhood
dishes of efficiency and low cost?
