24 Classic Great Depression Era Recipes (2024)

FAQs

What was a typical meal during the Great Depression? ›

One of the most popular dishes today, spaghetti, had a variant to reflect the hard times. Instead of meatballs, mothers would use dried bacon to add a meat flavor, as ground beef prices were high. Salads became a healthy alternative during the Depression for many people who did not have much food.

On Sundays, Clara's family would eat a "Depression breakfast," which included sugar cookies and coffee. To make the sugar cookies, beat three eggs in a bowl and mix them with three-fourths cup of sugar. Add about one and a half cup of flour and mix well until you can't see the flour anymore. Then, add a pinch of salt.

Potatoes were also inexpensive and used extensively. Some meals even used both. One of these meals was called the Poor Man's Meal. It combined potatoes, onions, and hot dogs into one hearty, inexpensive dish, which was perfect for the hard times people had fallen on.

From Hunger to Hope. From frozen foods to Jell-O molds, the 1930s and 40s saw a huge upsurge in convenience foods. Building on the popularity of brands like Wonder Bread, Kool-Aid, Velveeta Cheese, and Hostess Cakes, American supermarkets stocked up on mass-produced items.

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.

They were referred to as 'makeshift sandwiches'. There were butter and sugar sandwiches, onion sandwiches, ketchup sandwiches and raw carrots and salted peanuts sandwiches. Another using nuts were walnuts, mayo and some lettuce on bread.

During the Great Depression, cooking meatloaf was a way for families to stretch the food budget by using an inexpensive type of meat and left-over ingredients.

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.

This Great Depression staple was also known as “Hobo Stew.” Mulligan, being a common Irish surname, completes the recipe stew title because it's an adaptation to a classic Irish Beef Stew. During the depression, this catch-all meal was assembled by whatever anyone could scrounge up.

Why were people starving during the Great Depression? ›

As unemployed workers and their families struggled to get by on scanty savings, dwindling credit, or emergency relief rations, they cut meat, milk, and fresh vegetables from their diets; the food they could not afford piled' up in warehouses or rotted, unharvested, in the fields.

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

During the Great Depression, soup kitchens were established to serve meals to those who could not afford them. For many, this was the only way to get a hot meal.

Household products + essential consumables.

People still need soap and solvents and diapers and gasoline and stuff. And they still need their perceived essentials, too, like alcohol, coffee, marijuana, and … toilet paper. Camel almost destroyed Lucky in the 1930's because people still needed cigarettes.

Casseroles were varied in what was in them and people were glad for the meal. Another meal favorite that filled up the family members was chicken and dumplings. There may have only been a few pieces of chicken but plenty of the dumplings were a flour base food item. A few vegetables added the family was happy.

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.

Town families could not produce their own food. Many city dwellers often went hungry. Sometimes there were soup kitchens in larger cities that provided free meals to the poor. Winters were an especially hard time since many families had no money to buy coal to heat their houses.