Yeah, back when we was kids?
My opinion is that a whole lot of the stupid shit I see every damn day anymore is due to the fact that the majority of the population in this country has never been truly hungry even once in their lifetimes.
It’s funny how your priorities and attitude change once you have actually experienced it.
I can say from personal experience that you won’t forget it.
I am afraid they will soon see the light . That Red Horse and then the Black Horse is fixing to ride . They will soon know hunger .
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You left one out. I must have been 10 before I ate French Toast with real
egg bread from a restaurant. I am also so old that pasta meant elbow
macaroni or spaghetti. Nowadays, there are about 35 types. When I
was a kid, half of the shit on the grocery store shelves did not exist and
my mother was very frugal. She grew up as a child in the Great
Depression and she made do with what we could get. She still had
coffee cans on the stove to save lard, grease, and bacon grease. We
had a room under the stairs she used as a pantry and it was filled with
canned goods, dry goods, and canned meats and vegetables, and
homemade canned preserves.
Her generation never wasted anything. We save glass bottles, news-
papers, and anything else she could recycle for a few bucks a month.
She saved trading stamps she got from stores and got free glass tumblers
with every fill-up at the gas station. Potatoes were (4) ten-pound bags
for 4 dollars and 5 bags for the same price on sale. I fucking hated
going to the grocery store and lugging them 2 miles to the house.
We had potatoes with every meal and if I were not already part
Irish, I would have been sick of them!
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Mom and Dad were Depression Kids, too. Outside the occasional cash to see a movie, never had an allowance, we made spending money by returning bottles to the store, mowing lawns, or babysitting.
Mom canned every fruit and vegetable she could. Her cooking was basic but we never went hungry – she could feed seven people with one chicken and still have leftovers. Mom and Dad’s ingenuity taught me so much about economics and survival living. Their motto was “Fix it up or do without”.
We weren’t rolling in dough but we were never “poor” and as a kid, I never knew how rich we were.
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Yep. Mother born in ’13 and Father born in ’16, so everything we did was a result of both Mom and Dad being raised during the Great Depression.
We washed the plastic bags that bread came in and used them for sandwich bags for our lunches. We even went so far as to save Christmas wrapping paper (had to open those presents c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y), and Mom even IRONED the paper to remove the wrinkles.
Oh, the stories I could tell! I learned to hate oatmeal….
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Damn egorr, you are older then dirt we men drool over if we see a sign offering it free..
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Leonard, I read all your comments. For quite a while now I have been regretting not having a lot of those skills they soon will come in handy. I listened to my parents and in laws and miss them dearly. Weekly I have questions they could answer. I have done a lot and learned a lot but it won’t be enough. So be it. Buckeye bob quotes a lot of my upcoming sentiment I can only pray I am in the rapture when it comes. Hope I can hold out. May God bless you and all the people posting and reading here. I know Phil has been blessed by all the recent fun and I am thankful.
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Growing up, Dad was an enlisted man. Mom stayed home to take care of the three of us (my youngest sister is severely handicapped). We didn’t have a lot. I learned to hunt, fish, and forage, because I had to. Bread like that in the meme? We made our bread.
And now I’m going to go start a batch going. You made me nostalgic!
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You have enough for us?
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Big loaf of Russian Black Bread. Come on over, I’ll put the coffee on.
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Real butter too?
You just made my mouth water.
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I don’t keep margarine in the house (I’m a chemist and got interested in food science a while back, plus being raised on a farm. Butter all the way!).
There’s a recipe over on my blog, because you really did inspire me. LOL
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Butter too? I’ll bring the caviar…
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Ooh! Just realized I didn’t have a live link for the recipe: https://www.cedarwrites.com/2021/02/21/russian-black-bread/
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Breakfast before school was ( I was 5 ) a cup of coffee and the left over Italian bread ( 5cents a loaf back than ) to dunk in the coffee.
An egg fried in bacon grease on Saturday.
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Way too easy for way too many kids. Disrupt the food supply and see how many spend %50 a month with Peleton or even go to Starbucks. They have no idea.
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White bread, hamburger, cheese, mayo……in my neighbor hood that was a “trailer trash” hamburger (actually “white trailer trash” but that was before I became ‘enlightened’)
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Did we grow up in the same neighborhood?
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I get the feeling we ALL did!
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We did Egorr ain’t it great. Fell sorry for those who didn’t. My standard statement on that is, “I wonder what the poor people did”.
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Also never used condiments with the burger or dog, those soak into the bread.
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My parents divorced when I was 12 once we moved off the farm (mom) it seemed like we had less to eat,took mom a year to get a good job my brother and I took any small job we could find to help out. We ate alot of peanut butter sandwiches that year ,mom worked hard and ended up retiring as Vp of a major insurance company I’ve been hungry but it taught us to work our asses off for what we want.
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Its a “Wonder” we survived at all. 😊
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nothin like a mayo sandwich on saturday morning. only mayo, couldn’t afford bologna to go on it.
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River. Try peanut butter on the other side, my Dad would put lettuce in between I still eat them today and crackers and milk.
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You know you had some hard patches when you were a kid when you had Sears Roebuck toilet
paper.
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“Use it up, wear it out, make do, or do without” Where we grew up in the ’50’s we lived that old Depression era motto. While I never went hungry as a kid, we ate a lot of cheap cuts. Mom’s favorite appliance was the pressure cooker: from freezer to table in under an hour. We only ate in a restaurant when traveling to Grandma’s, and never in our home town (An A&W root beer float maybe once or twice a year).
S&H Green Stamps, cruising roadside ditches on our bikes for bottles to redeem if we wanted a candy bar, yeah, we never thought we were deprived in any way, and we learned self-reliance from day one.
I baked a loaf of REAL bread last night, made from scratch, because there’s no treat quite like fresh and hot from the oven to melt the butter on it.
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To this day, I still prefer toasted bread over a hamburger bun.
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You mean like this? Now that is a true Southern white bread sammich…
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If you’re cutting your baloney that thick, you shittin’ in the tall cotton.
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That is quite common in the south to have baloney that thick! Ain’t nothing better then a baloney and egg and cheese breakfast sammich hot off of the grill!
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I shall now reveal one of the great secrets of life. When frying baloney (and I mean plain old Oscar Mayer) cut 4 ea 1″ radial slits in the edge of the slice distributed evenly around the edge. This will allow it to spread out when frying rather than cupping. This way you get a even carnalized surface on the baloney which comes out shaped sort of like a fan blade. A delicious caramelized fried baloney fan blade. You’re welcome.
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Good point, that is how they do it in the South. I forgot about that. Been awhile since I was living there.
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I learned many strange and wondrous things during my 17 year sojourn amongst the Appalachians.
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You are very fortunate, some of that is undoubtedly priceless knowledge in this day and age.
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Grew up with home made bread. Mom made great hamburger & hotdog buns. Cannot stand store bought white bread.
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Rarely did we get store bought bread, mom always baked it, and it was by far better than any store bought crap. Along with cakes, pies, cookies, donuts, canned fruit, pickles, and on and on and on, even to growing our own popcorn. I remember taking the kernels off the cob during winters, and some red sore hands for it. Man those popcorn kernels were hard. And I would gladly trade those times for the present situation and participate in it 100% if I had the space to do it. 405 sq, ft ain’t a lot of room to be engaging in those activities considering everything else thats Gotta be in that same 405 sq, ft.
What I really miss are the 5 lb buckets of peanut butter we used to get. Actual steel buckets with handles on em. Now all ya got is these cheesy assed skinny necked plastic jars you can barely get a spoon into…..
Yeah, I’m a thinkin here that we ain’t progressed much as we’ve simply complicated our lives more cause it’s more “convenient”…. Yeah, I’m calling’s bullshit on that…
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Tuna casserole was a delicacy, and you knew you were in clover when it had store-bought potato chips on top.
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I’m not a big fan of baking so I make a stovetop version of tuna
casserole. I also just remembered one of my mom’s dishes.
During WWII, her mother made a civilian version of Shit on a
Shingle. It is basically milk gravy with ground beef and a
dash of Worcester sauce. It is amazing how simple those
old dishes were; milk, flour, and pepper. It works with
bacon and sausage based country gravy, tuna casserole,
Alfredo sauce, cream-based soups, etc. The secret to
any gravy is the roux (flour and grease). Wisk the shit out
of it to make it smooth, then add whatever stock or base
you need.
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Yep. Mom’s southern cooking used very little “special” (read: expensive) ingredients. I’m soooooo glad she taught my wife how to cook Southern, I got fat just on my wife’s gravy alone…
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Oh, and she cooks cornbread the Old Southern way, with the exception of not being able to find Sorghum Molasses up here in The Great White Northwest…
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I love this place. Egorr another Dad favorite called Gray jax. Sorghum poured on butter and mixed and mashed with a fork poured on a piece of bread. He said that quite often that is what he took to school for lunch in a metal pail. We did it together as a kid. Man the memories are flowing tonight along with one of Irish’s bourbons.
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We have it here three hours South East of you…
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But then we do have a lot of Idaho hill billies and pure rednecks around these parts…
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Egorr, I get my sorghum from these folks. I will warn you though, the shipping cost can get you (that’s why I usually buy 6 or 8 half gallon bottles at a time): http://www.maasdamsorghum.com/sorghum-syrup.html
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Bueno! Thanks for the linky!!
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You left off (but others above may have already added)
– bread + gravy = meal
– bread + tuna fish & mushroom soup + peas = meal
– bread + tomato sauce + grated parmesian = pizza
– bread + bacon fat = meal fit for a king
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Poor. Try ordering a cup of tea at a dinner at 10pm and then asking for a pot of hot water. Not to refill the cup with tea but to put catsup in the cup and add hot water to make “tomato soup.” I spent grad school arriving about 20 minutes before class and going to professor’s lectures, etc looking for goodies to appropriate. A year of that was hell plus a 75 dollar a month rented room. I failed to maintain a B average and lost my scholarship, but hell I was working 40 hours a week trying to keep my head above water. My one treat was a descent breakfast at said dinner each week. Poor is also making a meatloaf and living on it for a week.
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