Make 'good food out of practically nothing' with recipes from the Great Depression

Editor’s note: This is one of Grace’s favorite columns, first printed 4 years ago. While she is out of the office, here it is again for anyone who may have missed it, or lost it. Grace says the Delores’ Apple Cake brought raves the first time it ran.

For the past couple of weeks, I have been reading an interesting book, “Stories and Recipes of the Great Depression of the 1930s,” by Rita Van Amber. The book was loaned to me by Chris Williams of Oregon and it is a real eye-opener. I was born toward the end of the Great Depression, and I have heard a lot of stories about it, but I have no memory of the hard times my family experienced. It is the same with many children of the Great Depression – they were not aware of the problems, as the parents did the best they could and made do. Many recall the wonderful meals their creative mothers made from what they had.

“My parents had a large family and not much else, but they managed to be happy,” wrote one person. “That warmth still extends to the entire family today. Mom made good food out of practically nothing.”

The drought came, the locusts invaded, but they somehow survived. Their motto became:
"Eat it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without."

They toasted the ground barley and drank it when they couldn’t get or afford coffee. They learned to enjoy the rich toasted flavor of the grain.

Many of those who lived on the farm had plenty of bread, eggs and milk and practically lived on bread pudding. “We had plain bread with milk poured over it for supper,” one said.

Many farm households were so strapped for cash that all cream had to be sold and none used for meals. One person remembers looking forward to a very special treat on Sundays. Her father allowed cream skimmed off the milk to be used that day.

“We didn’t have beef very often at all, unless the cow didn’t get pregnant or broke a leg or something,” another farm family member said in the book.

“When everything else was dried up, our beans still survived. So we had a lot of soup and baked beans,” said another.

“When the gardens were burned up, only weeds grew. We ate the weeds,” was a common statement in the book, where people speak of eating dandelion greens and lamb’s quarters, an herbal plant with mealy, edible leaves. Some called it pigweed.

But the odd thing is that some of these sparse meals became favorites of many people who grew up eating them and still eat them today. I will share with you some of the basic dishes served during the Great Depression. I tried Delores’ Apple Cake this week and it is delicious.

Oatmeal for
breakfast, supper

Oatmeal was a staple during the Great Depression, prepared in a large pan in the morning so there would be plenty for the evening. The leftover oatmeal was packed into loaf pans and chilled. That night it would be sliced and fried in lard until brown on both sides and served with corn syrup from a half-gallon pail. Children of that era even today say they never tired of this delicious fried oatmeal supper. The oatmeal used was the old-fashioned long-cooking variety – quick-cooking oatmeal does not lend itself to many of these dishes.

Cornmeal also was a staple in the cupboards during this time and it was used like oatmeal, prepared for breakfast, placed in a pan and cooled, then sliced and fried for supper.

According to the cookbook, to cook mush with no lumps: “Mix 1 cup cornmeal with 4 cups of water. Bring to a boil, add 1 teaspoon of salt and cook gently for at least 30 minutes to get the best flavor. Serve with top milk (half-and-half) and sugar.”

There are several recipes for Johnny Cake, a popular cornmeal dish served for breakfast and supper, all similar to this one:

Buttermilk
Johnny Cake

Sift together:

1 cup flour, sifted

1 teaspoon salt

3/4 teaspoon soda

1 teaspoon baking powder

Mix with:

1 cup cornmeal

Combine:

1/4 cup shortening, melted

2 eggs, well beaten

Add to:

1-1/2 cups buttermilk or sour

Combine with flour mixture and beat only until smooth. Fill well-greased shallow pan. Bake at 425 degrees for 25 minutes. For those who enjoy their Johnny Cake sweet, 2 tablespoons brown sugar or 3 tablespoons white sugar can be added. But real die-hard Johnny Cake eaters did not use a sweetener.

Serve with syrup and fried pork or sausages. The children ate this with milk and sugar for supper and others with milk only. This was one of the basic foods for supper.

Sourdough pancakes

Using a glass or pottery bowl, mix:

1 cake yeast

2 cups flour

2 cups warm water

Beat well. Let stand in a warm place or closed cupboard overnight, at least 8 hours.

Add and beat well:

2 eggs

1 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon sugar

Add:

2 tablespoons melted fat

Bake on hot griddle

Grot

“My mother always made grot for supper,” said one woman. “That was always true when the homemade bread was gone.”

Heat to boiling:

1 quart of milk in heavy saucepan

Mix:

1/2 cup flour with a little cold milk till smooth

Dilute with hot milk and return to saucepan. Add pinch of salt and boil gently for at least 10 minutes. Cooking brings out the true flavor of this dish.

Norwegian dumplings

Bring to a boil:

1 cup water

1 heaping tablespoon butter

Pinch of salt

1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

Add:

1 cup of flour, all at once

Stir till mixed. Remove from heat. Add 3 eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition until batter is smooth. Drop by teaspoon into hot soup at slow boil. Cook 10 minutes with cover on.

Baked macaroni and tomatoes

Combine:

2 tablespoons fat, melted (bacon fat is good)

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 jar canned tomatoes

Arrange in layers with:

2 cups cooked macaroni

Cover generously with buttered bread crumbs. Bake in hot oven till heated through and crumbs are brown.

Dum Dum Depression casserole

In a buttered casserole dish, arrange sliced potatoes and onion rounds. Fry pork sausage and pour off grease. Alternate with a jar of corn and seasoning. Pour a jar of tomatoes on top. Bake till done.

Dandelion dinner

No meal was more eagerly awaited than the springtime dandelion dinner, according to the book. The tender young dandelion greens were placed in a large pot, washed thoroughly and drained.

Bacon or side pork was fried and removed to a serving dish. Vinegar was added to an equal part of the drippings in the pan. Several hard-boiled eggs were sliced over the greens and a potato was crushed into them, hot from the boiled potato kettle, and the vinegar dressing was poured over, hot from the stove. The large salad was tossed lightly and served with boiled potatoes and side pork or bacon, the book states. “No gravy was ever needed or even wanted with this dinner. The unique piquant flavor of the greens blended just right with the plain mealy potatoes.”

Very large bowls of this salad were consumed as long as the dandelions were in season. Today we use fresh endive. Dandelion greens also were prepared by steaming them and adding a similar dressing. They were popular in most communities, along with lamb’s quarters, which were steamed and prepared like spinach.

No eggs? No milk? No butter? No problem!

Eggless, milkless, butterless cake

Boil 5 minutes and cool:

2 cups sugar

2 cups raisins

2 cups water

2 tablespoons lard

Add:

1 tablespoon molasses

Sift:

1 teaspoon soda

1 teaspoon nutmeg

1 teaspoon allspice

3 cups flour

Add to sugar-raisin mixture and bake in a greased 8-inch square pan at 350 degrees for 35 minutes or toothpick test shows it’s done. There are many variations of this in the book. The cake is almost like an applesauce cake – spicy, fruity and moist.

Delores’ apple cake

This is a recipe which the owner of the book, Chris Williams, recommended to me, so I tried it.

3 eggs, beaten until thick and lemon-colored

Add:

1 3/4 cups sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

Along with:

2 cups sifted flour

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 cup vegetable oil

2 apples, sliced and unpeeled

1/3 cup nuts

Bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour or until done. Sprinkle with powdered sugar.

NOTE FROM GRACE: I tried this cake two ways. The recipe does not say what size pan to bake it in, so I used a 9-by-13-inch baking pan for one, and I sliced the apples with the peel on, just as the recipe says. When the cake was done, I sprinkled it lightly with powdered sugar.

Then I baked another in a Bundt pan. I doubt if they had Bundt pans in that era, but I don’t know. For this one, I peeled the apples and chopped them into about half-inch pieces. I lightly sprinkled the cake with a cinnamon/granulated sugar mixture after it was done.

On both cakes, I beat everything with the mixer before folding in the apples and nuts.
The batter will be thick, since you can see it has no liquid except the oil.
My cakes did not have to bake the full hour. The Bundt cake was done in about 50 minutes and the 9-by-13 in about 40 minutes.

I liked the Bundt pan cake the best, it seemed to be more tender and I liked the apples cut smaller and peeled. And Bundt cakes are so pretty.

The 9-by-13 cake with the unpeeled apple slices was more like a thick apple crisp, still very good, especially while it was warm, and would have been even better with a scoop of ice cream. My daughter liked this one best. Now I have no idea who Delores is or was, but her cake, both ways I made it, is one of the best I have ever eaten. Soft and very tender with a kind of crusty edge and a strong cinnamon taste, with just the 1 teaspoon of cinnamon. I really would encourage you to try this cake. I did not even have to go to the store because the ingredients are all something we usually have in our kitchens.