Recipes of Survival: What People Ate During the Great Depression (History, Recipes & True Stories)| The Strange History Podcast

0:00 Speaker 1: Picture this. It's October nineteen twenty nine. You've just finished dinner,

0:05 Speaker 1: maybe roast beef, mashed potatoes, and green beans, a normal

0:09 Speaker 1: weeknight meal. You kiss your kids good night, sit down

0:13 Speaker 1: with the evening paper, and read the shocking headline, stock

0:17 Speaker 1: market collapses. You don't know it yet, but the world

0:21 Speaker 1: you're living in is about to vanish within weeks. Banks

0:25 Speaker 1: will close within months. Neighbors will lose their jobs within

0:30 Speaker 1: a year. Entire families will wonder not what they want

0:34 Speaker 1: to eat, but whether they'll eat it. All. Tonight, we're

0:37 Speaker 1: telling the story of food in the Great Depression, not

0:41 Speaker 1: just what people ate, but how they survived through ingenuity, foraging,

0:46 Speaker 1: and recipes that sound strange to us today. Along the way,

0:51 Speaker 1: we'll hear true accounts from survivors, walk through the kitchens

0:55 Speaker 1: of the nineteen thirties and discover how food was both

0:58 Speaker 1: the greatest hardship and the strongest glue holding families together.

1:03 Speaker 1: So grab your plates. Dinner is about to be served

1:06 Speaker 1: Depression style.

1:08 Speaker 2: The crash that emptied the pantry.

1:11 Speaker 1: The Great Depression wasn't caused by a single event, but

1:14 Speaker 1: historians often mark its beginning at Black Tuesday, October twenty

1:20 Speaker 1: ninth nineteen twenty nine, when over sixteen million shares of

1:24 Speaker 1: stock were sold in a frenzy. Banks had over extended credit.

1:29 Speaker 1: Ordinary people had borrowed money they couldn't repay, and the

1:33 Speaker 1: speculative bubble burst. By nineteen thirty three, unemployment hit twenty

1:39 Speaker 1: five percent nationwide, over nine thousand banks failed. Farm prices

1:44 Speaker 1: fell by sixty percent, meaning crops rotted in fields, while

1:47 Speaker 1: families starved. Average household income plummeted by forty percent. Those

1:53 Speaker 1: hit hardest farmers in the Midwest and South, factory workers

1:57 Speaker 1: in industrial cities, and black and imas grant families who

2:01 Speaker 1: already lived closer to poverty before the crash. One Kansas

2:05 Speaker 1: farmer told a WPA interviewer in nineteen thirty six, we

2:09 Speaker 1: had food, yes, but no money. I could grow one

2:13 Speaker 1: hundred bushels of corn, but I couldn't get five cents

2:15 Speaker 1: for it, so I fed it to the hogs, And

2:18 Speaker 1: sometimes we just ate the corn meal ourselves.

2:22 Speaker 2: Empty plates, new recipes.

2:25 Speaker 1: When money dried up, food traditions had to change. Families

2:28 Speaker 1: learned to stretch ingredients, swap in cheaper substitutes, or forage

2:33 Speaker 1: what they could find. But this wasn't just about feeding

2:36 Speaker 1: the stomach. It was about dignity. Many depression recipes were

2:40 Speaker 1: about pretending to have something better. Fake it till you

2:43 Speaker 1: make it, but with food. Let's look at some of

2:46 Speaker 1: the most popular and strangest depression dishes.

2:50 Speaker 2: Hoover stew the Politics of Hunger.

2:54 Speaker 1: Named mockingly after President Herbert Hoover, blamed for the Depression.

2:58 Speaker 1: This dish was cooked in soup case across America. Here

3:02 Speaker 1: is the recipe, as recorded in a nineteen thirties community cookbook.

3:06 Speaker 1: One box of macaroni cheapest pasta available, two cups canned tomatoes,

3:12 Speaker 1: one sliced hot dog, sometimes stretch to feed six people,

3:16 Speaker 1: one cup canned corner beans if available. Boil macaroni, add

3:21 Speaker 1: everything else, Simmer until it looks edible. A woman named

3:25 Speaker 1: Clara Canucchari, later famous on YouTube as Depression Cooking with Clara, remembered,

3:32 Speaker 1: my mother would take one hot dog, slice it into

3:35 Speaker 1: seven pieces, and tell us each it was enough. We

3:38 Speaker 1: knew not to complain. You don't complain when there's food

3:41 Speaker 1: on your plate. Mock apple pie dessert without fruit. Apples

3:46 Speaker 1: were expensive in cities, so Nabisco pushed a recipe that

3:49 Speaker 1: became legendary mock apple pie. The ingredients were simple, thirty

3:55 Speaker 1: six ritz crackers broken up, two cups sugar, two teaspoons

3:59 Speaker 1: cream of time harder, two tablespoons lemon juice, a few

4:02 Speaker 1: pats of margarine. You boiled water, sugar and tartar into syrup,

4:07 Speaker 1: poured it over crackers, added lemon juice, and baked the

4:11 Speaker 1: crackers softened to mimic apples. Nibisco even printed the recipe

4:16 Speaker 1: on the ritz box, bragging that it was as good

4:19 Speaker 1: as grandmother's apple pie. Vinegar pie and water pie. When

4:24 Speaker 1: you don't have fruit, butter or eggs, what do you make?

4:27 Speaker 1: Pies made from almost nothing? Vinegar pie sugar flour, butter

4:32 Speaker 1: substitute water, and a splash of vinegar for tartness. The

4:36 Speaker 1: water pie was literally just sugar, flour and water baked

4:40 Speaker 1: into something resembling custard. One Missouri woman remembered it didn't

4:45 Speaker 1: taste like much, but it was sweet and sweet was something.

4:50 Speaker 1: Bread and gravy, the meal that defined the era For

4:54 Speaker 1: many children. The most common meal wasn't a recipe at all.

4:57 Speaker 1: It was just bread with gravy, flour, lard, and water

5:01 Speaker 1: made a thin sauce poured over stale bread, filling, cheap

5:06 Speaker 1: and at least in memory, comforting. In nineteen thirty seven,

5:11 Speaker 1: the WPA interviewed someone in Kentucky. My mama used to say,

5:15 Speaker 1: as long as we got flour, we got supper. She

5:19 Speaker 1: made biscuits out of lard and water, and we ate

5:21 Speaker 1: them with milk gravy. That was breakfast, lunch, and sometimes

5:25 Speaker 1: dinner too.

5:27 Speaker 2: Regional survival recipes.

5:29 Speaker 1: The Great Depression didn't look the same in every state.

5:32 Speaker 1: What you ate depended on where you lived and what

5:35 Speaker 1: you could scavenge.

5:36 Speaker 2: What it looked like in the Midwest and dust Bowl states.

5:40 Speaker 1: The dust Bowl nineteen thirty to nineteen thirty six turned

5:44 Speaker 1: fertile land into barren dust. Families ate cornmeal, mush, fried potatoes,

5:50 Speaker 1: and beans. Recipes included cornmeal mush, cornmeal boiled into a porridge.

5:57 Speaker 1: When cooled, it was sliced and fried, milk toast, toast

6:01 Speaker 1: soaked in hot milk, sometimes with sugar. True account, an

6:06 Speaker 1: Oklahoma mother told her children to choose slowly so they'd

6:09 Speaker 1: feel full longer. Then we get to the South. In

6:13 Speaker 1: the South, cornbread and beans ruled. Hunting and foraging were

6:17 Speaker 1: common squirrel, stew, rabbit pot pie, poke salad, boiled pokeweed leaves,

6:23 Speaker 1: and kilt lettuce, wild greens wilted with hot bacon grease.

6:28 Speaker 1: One Tennessee man said, we ate squirrel three times a week.

6:32 Speaker 1: We joked we knew each one by name.

6:35 Speaker 2: The Northern States and cities.

6:38 Speaker 1: City families relied on soup, kitchens, church charity, and immigrant traditions.

6:43 Speaker 1: Italians made cabbage pasta, Jewish families made potato coogle. Polish

6:47 Speaker 1: families relied on pirogies stuffed with potatoes. In Detroit, auto

6:52 Speaker 1: workers who lost jobs often scavenged bruised produce tossed behind

6:56 Speaker 1: grocery stores. One woman recalled, We'd wait until after dark

7:01 Speaker 1: to gather the lettuce leaves the grosser threw away. We

7:04 Speaker 1: made salad out of garbage.

7:06 Speaker 2: The wild Wild West.

7:09 Speaker 1: Migrants fleeing the dust Bowl to California often lived in camps.

7:13 Speaker 1: They survived on beans, tortillas, and oranges. One California boy

7:18 Speaker 1: later recalled, we ate oranges until our mouths were raw.

7:22 Speaker 1: But we were lucky. Other kids had nothing. Nineteen twenty nine,

7:27 Speaker 1: the fall. At first, the depression wasn't obvious. Families still

7:32 Speaker 1: had savings store shelves were full, and most believed the

7:36 Speaker 1: crash was temporary. Dinner tables still looked normal, a roast

7:41 Speaker 1: chicken on Sundays, bread and butter, maybe apple pie. But

7:45 Speaker 1: behind the scenes, the ground was shifting. The average wage

7:48 Speaker 1: dropped by three percent in nineteen twenty nine, and in

7:52 Speaker 1: rural states like Kansas, wheat prices collapsed from one dollar

7:55 Speaker 1: in three cents a bushel in nineteen twenty eight to

7:58 Speaker 1: sixty four cents by the end of the following year.

8:01 Speaker 1: Farmers suddenly couldn't afford their own harvests. Recipes stayed familiar,

8:06 Speaker 1: but families started cutting corners, watering down milk, saving bacon

8:10 Speaker 1: grease in a tin on the stove, reusing coffee grounds.

8:13 Speaker 2: Twice nineteen thirty, hunger arrives.

8:18 Speaker 1: By nineteen thirty, unemployment doubled, banks began collapsing, and for

8:23 Speaker 1: the first time, families really felt it. One Chicago man

8:27 Speaker 1: told a WPA interviewer, we had sausage once a week before.

8:31 Speaker 1: By nineteen thirty, it was only potatoes, onions, and bread.

8:36 Speaker 1: You could make one hundred meals with a loaf of

8:38 Speaker 1: bread if you tried. Here is a typical recipe from

8:41 Speaker 1: nineteen thirty potato soup, four potatoes, one onion, water, pinch

8:47 Speaker 1: of salt. That was it. Maybe a splash of milk

8:50 Speaker 1: if you were lucky. This was the year bread with

8:53 Speaker 1: milk gravy became a staple. Flour, lard, water, and whatever

8:57 Speaker 1: milk was available.

9:00 Speaker 2: Nineteen thirty one, Shanty kitchens.

9:03 Speaker 1: Shantytowns mockingly called Hooverville's sprang up around cities. Families built

9:09 Speaker 1: stoves out of bricks and cooked whatever they could scavenge.

9:13 Speaker 1: Unemployment hit fifteen point nine percent. Farm prices continued to fall.

9:19 Speaker 1: Cotton dropped to six cents a pound, wheat to thirty

9:22 Speaker 1: eight cents a bushel. Recipes turned into foraging meals, dandelion greens,

9:28 Speaker 1: wild onions, cattails. One woman in Ohio remembered, we ate

9:32 Speaker 1: dandelion salad every spring. Daddy said God put it there

9:37 Speaker 1: for poor folks.

9:39 Speaker 2: Nineteen thirty two rock bottom.

9:43 Speaker 1: This was the worst year of the depression. Unemployments soared

9:47 Speaker 1: to twenty three point six percent. Soup kitchens fed thousands daily.

9:53 Speaker 1: Kids wrote in school essays that their favorite meal was

9:56 Speaker 1: bread with sugar water recipe nineteen thirty two, two milk toast,

10:02 Speaker 1: one piece stale bread, one cup hot milk, sprinkle of sugar.

10:06 Speaker 1: It was called comfort food. To us today, it sounds bleak.

10:10 Speaker 1: One boy in New York remembered crying when his teacher

10:13 Speaker 1: offered him an extra serving of soup he hadn't eaten

10:16 Speaker 1: in two days.

10:17 Speaker 2: Nineteen thirty three, fdr and hope on the plate.

10:22 Speaker 1: Franklin D. Roosevelt became president and launched the New Deal.

10:26 Speaker 1: Relief began to trickle in. The Federal Surplus Relief Corporation

10:30 Speaker 1: started distributing flour, beans, rice, and canned beef. School lunch

10:35 Speaker 1: programs expanded. Kids got bean soup, cornmeal mush, and peanut

10:40 Speaker 1: butter sandwiches. Here's a recipe from the nineteen thirty three

10:44 Speaker 1: WPA cookbook, Cornmeal mush one cup cornmeal, four cups water,

10:51 Speaker 1: one teaspoon salt, boil, pour into a loaf pan, Let set,

10:57 Speaker 1: slice and fry the next day. Suddenly, many families could

11:01 Speaker 1: count on something every day, even if it was the

11:04 Speaker 1: same mush. Over and over.

11:06 Speaker 2: Nineteen thirty four, dust Bowl desperation.

11:10 Speaker 1: The dust bowl reached its peak. Crops failed, livestock, dyed,

11:15 Speaker 1: dust storms buried fields. Families abandoned farms by the thousands.

11:21 Speaker 1: One survivor from Oklahoma remembered, we ate cornbread three times

11:25 Speaker 1: a day, sometimes with molasses, sometimes with beans, sometimes with nothing,

11:31 Speaker 1: just cornbread. An example of a recipe from nineteen thirty

11:34 Speaker 1: four corn bread without eggs or milk. One cup corn meal,

11:39 Speaker 1: one cup water, one tablespoon lard, pinch of salt, baked

11:43 Speaker 1: in a skillet. Hard, flat, but edible. Nineteen thirty five,

11:48 Speaker 1: Government beans the Work's Progress Administration WPA expanded relief. Families

11:56 Speaker 1: received sacks of navy beans, flour, lard, and powdered milk.

12:01 Speaker 1: Government beans became both a joke and a lifeline. What

12:04 Speaker 1: did they do with all those beans? Here is a

12:07 Speaker 1: recipe from the nineteen thirty five WPA Homemaker Guide. Baked beans.

12:12 Speaker 1: Two cups dried navy beans, one tablespoon lard, two tablespoons

12:17 Speaker 1: molasses or syrup if affordable, salt, slow cooked all day.

12:23 Speaker 1: This is also when Eleanor Roosevelt became infamous for promoting

12:27 Speaker 1: thrifty White House meals like prune pudding and cottage cheese salad.

12:31 Speaker 1: Critics mocked her, but her point was clear. If the

12:34 Speaker 1: First Family could eat cheaply, so could you.

12:37 Speaker 2: Nineteen thirty six, kilt lettuce and wild food.

12:42 Speaker 1: Appalachia and the South leaned heavily on foraging and garden greens.

12:46 Speaker 1: I swear I paid eighteen dollars for this very salad

12:50 Speaker 1: last week at a local restaurant. It's a recipe from

12:53 Speaker 1: nineteen thirty six. Kilt lettuce, one bunch wild lettuce, two

12:57 Speaker 1: tablespoons hot bacon, grease or lard if no bacon, splash

13:02 Speaker 1: of vinegar, the hot fat over the lettuce, making a

13:05 Speaker 1: warm salad. WPA interviews from Kentucky described entire families living

13:11 Speaker 1: off pokeweed, beans and cornbread. Meat was rare, reserved for Sundays.

13:17 Speaker 2: Nineteen thirty seven stretching meat.

13:20 Speaker 1: By nineteen thirty seven, unemployment had improved to fourteen percent,

13:25 Speaker 1: but meat was still expensive. Enter the meat stretcher recipes

13:30 Speaker 1: meat loaf with oats or rice, hamburger gravy over mashed potatoes.

13:34 Speaker 1: Bolgonia stew, a recipe from the nineteen thirty seven Community

13:39 Speaker 1: cookbook Oatmeal meat loaf one pound ground beef, one cup oatmeal,

13:45 Speaker 1: one onion, one egg if available, salt, bacon loaf, pan

13:50 Speaker 1: slice thin.

13:52 Speaker 2: Nineteen thirty eight. Mock Foods Boom.

13:56 Speaker 1: As the economy recovered slightly. Mock recipes explode in popularity.

14:01 Speaker 1: People had more ingredients, but habits of thrift remained. Mock

14:05 Speaker 1: apple pie, mock chicken made with veal or even rice,

14:10 Speaker 1: and mock banana sandwiches appeared in cookbooks. One Nebraska woman

14:15 Speaker 1: laughed in an interview, I didn't taste a real banana

14:18 Speaker 1: until I was twelve. Before that, it was turnips with

14:21 Speaker 1: banana flavoring.

14:23 Speaker 2: Nineteen thirty nine the turning point.

14:27 Speaker 1: The depression wasn't fully over until World War II, but

14:31 Speaker 1: by nineteen thirty nine, food security improved. The food Stamp

14:35 Speaker 1: program launched that year, letting families buy surplus goods cheaply.

14:40 Speaker 1: Menus grew more varied. People still ate beans and cornbread,

14:44 Speaker 1: but meat and fresh produce slowly returned. One WPA diary

14:50 Speaker 1: ends with the line, we had chicken on Sunday, first

14:54 Speaker 1: time in four years. Tasted like heaven.

14:58 Speaker 2: School lunches a life.

15:01 Speaker 1: For millions of children. School lunch programs saved lives. Menus

15:05 Speaker 1: from WPA reports that kids survived on Monday navy bean soup,

15:11 Speaker 1: bread apple, Tuesday cornmeal mush with milk, prune pudding, Wednesday

15:18 Speaker 1: peanut butter, sandwich, carrot sticks, milk. One boy in West

15:22 Speaker 1: Virginia told a reporter, he ate so fast because I

15:26 Speaker 1: ain't had nothing since yesterday.

15:28 Speaker 2: The strange sweet tooth.

15:31 Speaker 1: Even in hard times, people crave dessert, prune pudding promoted

15:35 Speaker 1: by Eleanor Roosevelt, water pie, sugar, flour, water and butter,

15:41 Speaker 1: baked thin vinegar pie tart, custard like using vinegar instead

15:46 Speaker 1: of fruit. These weren't luxuries, they were morale. A spoonful

15:51 Speaker 1: of sweetness made hunger easier to bear.

15:54 Speaker 2: The legacy of depression cooking.

15:57 Speaker 1: Strangely, many depression foods never left us. Meat loaf, mac

16:02 Speaker 1: and cheese, casseroles, even ritz pies. These became comfort foods.

16:08 Speaker 1: They remind us of a time when America learned to

16:11 Speaker 1: live with less and found dignity in making something out

16:15 Speaker 1: of nothing. As one survivor, missus Ruby Davidson of Arkansas, said,

16:21 Speaker 1: it didn't matter what it was. If Mama put it

16:23 Speaker 1: on the table and we were all there, it was

16:26 Speaker 1: a feast. The Great Depression was more than an economic collapse.

16:30 Speaker 1: It was a daily struggle at the dinner table. But

16:33 Speaker 1: it also showed us the resilience of families the ingenuity

16:37 Speaker 1: of home cooks and the way food, no matter how simple,

16:41 Speaker 1: can hold us together. My parents were born right after

16:45 Speaker 1: the depression ended, so as a result, their parents were

16:48 Speaker 1: still in thrifty mode. They made do with less and

16:51 Speaker 1: made the staples in the pantry stretch. My dad always

16:55 Speaker 1: had a coffee can next to the stove with bacon

16:58 Speaker 1: grease in it. My mother stretched me up with pasta

17:00 Speaker 1: and potatoes. We never went without, but the signs that

17:03 Speaker 1: they came from a generation that did go without was

17:06 Speaker 1: very apparent. There are entire generations of us out here

17:10 Speaker 1: that have no idea how good we have it, and

17:13 Speaker 1: that may be a good thing, but it also may

17:15 Speaker 1: be a bad thing, as we live for today and

17:17 Speaker 1: never for tomorrow. The older generations have some stockpiles and

17:21 Speaker 1: food stores just in case. So if you are young

17:24 Speaker 1: and you are listening to this episode, next time you

17:27 Speaker 1: grocery shop, pick up an extra bag of rice, a

17:30 Speaker 1: few extra cans of something you love, because you never

17:34 Speaker 1: know what is around the corner. We are always just

17:37 Speaker 1: one historical event away from economic strife. So the next

17:42 Speaker 1: time you sit down with a hot meal, remember history

17:45 Speaker 1: isn't just written in books. Sometimes it's simmering quietly in

17:49 Speaker 1: the kitchen. Give us a like, subscribe, tell your BFFs

17:53 Speaker 1: to listen. It all helps. Till next time, my dear

17:57 Speaker 1: strange listeners, be well and in joy your eighteen dollars

18:01 Speaker 1: wilted salads because apparently it's a historic recipe,