Reading a cook book from the 60s

[spinbaby]

I lived through the 60s and didn't think the food abnormal at the time, but I'm perusing a cookbook from the era and wow! The most popular ingredients seemed to be hamburger, condensed soup, and cheese. Fruit came in a canned format, tuna came with instructions to drain off the oil, and fresh vegetables seemed to be virtually non existent. Seasoning consisted of mainly salt, pepper, MSG, and curry powder. To make food classier, you added a splash of sherry or embedded it in a jello mold.

No wonder none of us were fat back then--the food was awful!

[LiberalEsto]

1. Is it "The I Hate to Cook Book" by Peg Bracken?

I learned basic cooking with that one -- it was very funny and the recipes were extremely easy.

My battered copy still sits with the other cook books, but I never use it because we no longer eat meat, and try to avoid processed foods.

[spinbaby]

5. Actually..

It's the Appendix to the I Hate to Cook Book. Found it at a garage sale this weekend.

[LiberalEsto]

7. When you mentioned condensed soup, I guessed!

My early ventures into cooking were all about pouring the correct condensed soup over the correct meat and baking it according to Peg's directions. Sometimes I'd add a little wine to the condensed soup. Ugh.

[harmonicon]

47. I think a tipoff to the recipes being unhealthy could be that the entire book is battered.

Thanks, I'll be here all week.

[HarveyDarkey]

2. Here you go

all on one site: http://www.lileks.com/institute/gallery/index.html

[Arugula Latte]

3. Yep. My mom cooked like that in the 60s and 70s.

Lots of ground beef and Campbell's soup "casseroles." Lots of canned veggies (why if you don't have to?!), Jell-o with crap in it, and Velveeta and Cheez Whiz.

We had Italian neighbors who would invite us over for dinner. That gave me a glimpse of what "real" cooking/eating was.

[Auggie]

4. What is the cookbook? Many were sponsored/published by Packaged Goods Companies,

and promoted canned/frozen food ingredients over fresh.

On the other hand, there was Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child ...

[Arkansas Granny]

6. Back in the 60's, fresh fruits and veggies were pretty much locally grown, seasonal items .

If they were trucked in they were really expensive, so most cooks used canned or frozen.

There weren't a lot of prepared foods on the shelves for women who were just beginning to enter the workforce in numbers and cream of mushroom soup was a versatile ingredient when it came to getting a quick meal on the table.

Seasoning was not very sophisicated (I remember when my mother first discovered oregano to add to spaghetti sauce), but the meat was not raised on factory farms and actually had good flavor on it's own. When you fried a pork chop or hamburger meat, it actually sizzled instead of releasing a lot of "solution" that had to boil off first.

[dballance]

8. Yep, Our Fresh Veggies Came out of the Garden in Summer

Any other time of year vegetables were out of the mason jars my mom canned or out of tin cans from the grocery.

That was when a pound of ground beef was stretched to feed 6 people and we had a lot of spaghetti Fridays.

[Worried senior]

29. There was nothing

better than the old fashioned pork chops, I really miss those. I still cook with some of the ingredients of the 60"s as well as trying to use healthier products but there are times that comfort food is what we need.

[Arkansas Granny]

41. I just loved that little layer of fat in the edge of the pork chips.

It's would get a little crispy and was delicious.

[KamaAina]

31. Mom still makes a pot roast with cream of mushroom soup.

It has stood the test of time, as have some of her other classics from that era, like knockwurst and barley with BBQ sauce. She lives in NYC, so she can get real knockwurst!

[pipi_k]

9. Jello molds...

hahahaha

OMG...it seemed like anything that could be suspended in Jello...was.

OK so my mom's idea of macaroni and cheese in the 60s

boil the macaroni

put 1/3 in a casserole dish

layer slices of American cheese on top

second third in casserole dish...another layer of cheese

final layer of macaroni, top with more cheese, then pour some milk over the top and bake.

Being a kid with mostly damaged taste buds from all the crappy food, I really liked her concoction...

[Arugula Latte]

13. Jell-o ... Mmmmm ... Who could resist?!

Celery-flavored Jell-o! Hell yeah!:

[pipi_k]

14. Aughhhh!!!!

I had an aunt who made those things!

They showed up at church potluck suppers...

picnics and barbeques

family reunions

I think that anyone who never had to eat one (let alone actually look at it) can ever know the terror...

[Art_from_Ark]

48. My mom always put either canned pineapple, fruit cocktail,

or fresh banana slices in the Jello she made. My favorite was the Jello with the pineapple pieces.

[LiberalEsto]

18. Aaaaaaah! It has EYES!

That first one...that alleged Jello mold...it's watching us!

[Arugula Latte]

24. Praise its Gelatinous Glory.

Amen.

[snagglepuss]

40. Shivers me timbers. I had no idea there was celery Jello.

[LancetChick]

10. Peanut butter and Fluffernutter sandwiches

And sardine and ketchup sandwiches, which I actually liked! (No more, though). The Better Homes and Gardens cookbook had illustrations of housewives with pastel dresses with tightly-cinched waists who bought beef by the side and cut it into the perfect size portions for freezing, and who baked their own white bread and dinner rolls. My mother made tuna noodle casserole with crushed potato chips on top and I remember when my parents had a party my mother would sometimes make this really modern dessert called "Grasshopper Pie", which was all green on a chocolate cookie crust.

On the other hand, there was a great vegetable stand in the summer which sold really delicious vegetables that are nonexistent in today's supermarkets. Good tomatoes, good corn, good peaches and apricots, and good watermelon with seeds you had to spit out. Seasonal, though, and so local the guy would bring loads directly from the fields on his tractor. I also remember the most delicious beefsteak tomatoes from the half-attempt at gardening my mother did.

I found a recipe for tuna noodle casserole with crushed potato chips several years ago (have since lost it), and it REALLY took me back. And, by the way, it was delicious!

[spinbaby]

11. Tuna noodle casserole

I learned how to make it in home-ec class. Back then, all the girls had to take at least one semester of home ec, where we learned to sew an apron and a skirt and how to make Jello and tuna-noodle casserole topped with potato chips. I remember that our teacher advised us to add a small can of peas to liven up the casserole.

[LiberalEsto]

19. The best thing to liven up a tuna-noodle casserole

is a LOT of wine. In it, and with it.

[Chan790]

20. By the early 1990s when I got to middle school...

some of the parents had (rightly) begun to complain that the "boys take workshop class and the girls take home ec" model of education was sexist...but rather than doing the smart thing and letting us take whatever educational-crafts (craft-ed) class we wanted, someone had decided the best solution was to make the boys take home ec too and the girls had to take shop class...right before or after sex-segregated gym class each for a half year.

I'd like to think we ruined that idea for the benefit of the children after us because it lasted exactly one year of boys making aprons decorated with fake blood-stains and the shop teacher seeming awkward and clueless about what to teach the girls. (I think he honestly had no idea how to relate to 12 year old girls or what in a shop class could possibly interest them. They wanted to play with the power-tools.)

I think perhaps they should have just let us take whatever craft-ed we wanted to instead.

[LeftinOH]

12. There's an online gallery devoted to this kind of food:

http://www.lileks.com/institute/gallery/index.html

[pipi_k]

16. That's not food...

It's the Beast in a Grade B Creature Feature movie...

[hifiguy]

33. That is horrifying

on a molecular level.

[AnneD]

15. Julia Childs...

changed everything.

[kentauros]

23. And fitness guru Jack Lelanne

I can remember watching both Julia and Jack when I was a kid. I didn't learn much from either, but did watch Julia Child throughout the years, especially later on when she had guest chefs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_LaLanne

[AnneD]

36. Ah yes...

Jack LaLanne and his faithful dog Storm.

[csziggy]

46. And the Galloping Gourmet - Graham Kerr!

Not the revamped, health conscious one that resurfaced in the 80s - the original one with multiple bottles of wine per episode and dishes made with buckets of butter and cream.

[Art_from_Ark]

49. I remember the old Galloping Gourmet

He certainly loved his wine, butter and cream. And he'd always invite some lady from the audience to share his concoctions with him.

[olddots]

17. Some of the funiest reading you can find

I have a friend who collects old cookbooks and even if you have never boiled water some old cookbooks are so funny you get a stomach ache looking at the pictures and reading the text.

[Arkansas Granny]

42. My daughter has my mother's old cookbook, circa 1941.

The recipe for toast begins "slice bread 1/2" thick". She treasures it.

[Populist_Prole]

21. Blechh! No wonder I was such a bad eater growing up then. The food sucked and I knew it then too

It sure is much better today, as even the most ho-hum "waspy" food is is like haute cuisine compared to the crud I had to eat when I was a kid.

[WolverineDG]

22. post-Depression & WWII

that's all they knew how to cook.

[Paulie]

25. In the 80s it turned into hamburger helper.

So even less "cooking".

[Sanity Claws]

26. We weren't fat back then

Take a look at old news stories and you see very few fat people back then.

Frankly, a lot of the canned food we used back then was a lot healthier than the processed food that you see in the supermarket aisles or get at fast food places (I cannot call them restaurants.)

[spinbaby]

27. I don't remember eating healthy food

I remember a lot of fried potatoes, pork chops rimmed with fat, slabs of overcooked fatty beef, soggy spaghetti with a kind of a sweet tomato sauce and powdered "Parmesan" cheese, iceberg lettuce with thousand-island dressing, cottage cheese topped with canned peaches, Spam and eggs fried in Crisco, vats of baked beans containing little sausages, doughnuts every Sunday, and gravy, lots of gravy. Yet hardly anyone was fat.

[Sanity Claws]

28. And none of that food was GMO or laden with corn syrup.

High fructose corn syrup didn't start to replace regular sugar until the late 1970s.

As for meat, cattle was not confined to corn feeding pens laden with antibiotics back in the 1960s. They ate at least some grass and as a result, beef had a much healthier mix of Omega oils.

[kentauros]

38. Not only all of that,

but we were more active back then. We played and worked outside more. We didn't have VCRs yet, and, of course, no Internet, much less portable computers.

And as even younger kids, we ate dirt!

[Populist_Prole]

35. EeK! Yer giving me PTSD bad food flashbacks

Gawd it was horrific! Overcooked unappetizing crud. I used to literally retch at the smell of it all being cooked. Fatty meat cooked till it was battleship gray inside. Vegetables boiled till they were greenish gray. Macaroni or noodles cooked till it was so mushy you could hang wallpaper with it, with jewel-like little droplets of vegatble oil all over them. All of it slathered in butter, butter, butter. Mashed potatoes made with like a gallon of milk ( I hated milk ) with lumps the size of asteroids. No wonder I was short for my age till my mid teens.

[RILib]

37. not fat because

People didn't have their faces glued to displays.

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[Bucky]

39. My parents stayed trim by fighting communism.

[Nye Bevan]

30. I was blown away the first time I had tuna that wasn't out of a can.

For a long time I never knew that such a thing existed.

[lastlib]

32. this is a load of crap! (he said, smiling!)

My grandparent's regular daily diet would've horrified most of you vegan-types. Breakfast was typically sausage, scrambled eggs, hash browns, or bicuits/sausage/gravy. Lunch might've been pork chops, green beans, fried potatoes, and supper was maybe a hamburger (sometimes two) or t-bone steak, baked or mashed potatoes, corn, squash, with cucumbers and/or tomatoes sliced on the side. My grandfather died of lung cancer at age 82 (he was a smoker--heavy on cigars). Grandmother died of respiratory failure as a complication of hip-replacement surgery at age 95. Grandma was slim and trim as she could be, and Granddad was tall, lean and had the physical strength of an ox. At 75, he could work circles around a lot of people in their 40s.

In the laste 80s, I drove my grandmother to California. We got breakfast in Denver on the way out, and Grandma ordered her usual sausage/eggs/hash browns with coffe and juice. A man and woman about her age sat at the next table; the woman leaned over to her and said, "Young lady, if you eat like that all the time, you won't live to be seventy!" My grandmother looked at her and said, "I eat like this every day--and I'm eighty-two now!" Shut that busy-body up in a hurry!

Meat & potatoes made America strong!! .

[Moondog]

34. A grilled steak was haute cuisine. I lived in Miami

so some pretty nice fresh seafood was commonplace. A Caesar salad now and again. Otherwise it was bland, bland, bland.

[tavernier]

43. Not fat because people walked.

Most families had one car and walking was still considered a functional, as opposed to strictly decorative, activity; when dad was at work with THE car, I walked to school, mom walked to the grocery store, we all walked to doctor and dental appointments, friends houses, drug store, shoe maker (all that walking required new soles quite often), etc. etc. etc. But then again, there were mom and pop shops everywhere, within easy access to neighborhoods. No Walmarts and super malls five miles away.

[pokerfan]

44. Reading a cook book from the 1140s

From today's io9...

A 12th-century manuscript contains the oldest known European Medieval food recipes, according to new research.

The recipes, which include both food and medical ointment concoctions, were compiled and written in Latin. Someone jotted them down at Durham Cathedral’s monastery in the year 1140.

It was essentially a health book, so the meals were meant to improve a person’s health or to cure certain afflictions. The other earliest known such recipes dated to 1290.

Many of the dishes sound like they would work on a modern restaurant menu. Faith Wallis, an expert in medical history and science based at McGill University, translated a few for Discovery News:

http://io9.com/oldest-european-medieval-cookbook-found-476977031

[grasswire]

45. the old recipes that I find amusing are the attempts at ethnic foods.

Example: tortillas made from Bisquick dough.

And a tamale pie made from hamburger, creamed corn, catsup and olives, with a topping of cornbread.

America was largely culinarily sheltered until the 70s.

[KT2000]

50. Now that is funny!

Love the creamed corn for that ethnic flavor.