Great Depression Cooking
Ninety-one year-old great-grandmother Clara, a first-generation American from Chicago, shares recipes her mother made during the first Great Depression as well as many stories of the times in Great Depression Cooking with Clara. Below, learn how to make Clara’s mother’s Pasta with Peas.
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I made a Depression-era “Chemical Apple Pie” at Christmas. It uses ritz crackers, cream of tartar and sugar to make a pie filling that tastes like apples. (It really does! It smells like apples too.) I guess apples were not very available during the Depression and this recipe came about. It tasted pretty good.
People were selling apples on the streets during the depression. My mother relied on a Grange cookbook, kind like a farmers cook book. You cook what you grew! Mush made of corn meal was served for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Sugar, coffee and butter were hard to come by in cities and during the war they were rationed. My parents stories of the depression are in my mind everyday as we enter the next one. I fear for anyone living in a big city. My grandchildren coming today, so Nana can teach them how to plant seeds from scratch. Anyone who is not doing container gardening, or plain gardening are fools, now tell me how paranoid I am. My parents saved everything from string, paper bags, newspapers everything was seen to have a purpose and a potential resource.