28 Surprisingly Delicious Great Depression Recipes You Should Try - Page 2 of 2 (2024)

FAQs

What type of food did they eat during the Great Depression? ›

Celery soup mixed with tuna fish and mashed potatoes. A salad of corned beef, gelatin and canned peas. Baked onion stuffed with peanut butter. Those are just some of the recipes Americans turned to during the Great Depression, when many families struggled to eat enough nutritious food.

Many cheap foods still common among the poor today made their debut during the Depression: Wonder Bread (1930), Bisquick (1931), Miracle Whip (1933), and Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup (1934). Ragu spaghetti sauce, Kraft mac-n-cheese, and Hormel Spam all appeared during the Roosevelt Recession in 1937.

Perhaps one hobo acquired a few carrots from a charitable person, while another stole an onion off a box car, while another had a few potatoes from a farm he worked on briefly… From this concoction, a “hobo stew,” also known as “Mulligan/Mulligatawney stew” was born and became the traditional food of the hobo.

Water Pie. Water pie — made with just six ingredients: water, flour, sugar, vanilla extract, butter, and a pie crust — may seem like a fun hack today, but during the Great Depression, it was simply a dessert that reflected the circ*mstances for many Americans.

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.

Meatloaf became a staple during The Great Depression

Meatloaf allowed families to stretch the small portions of food they had, especially protein, into a meal that would otherwise be consumed quicker.

Almost all farm families raised large gardens with vegetables and canned fruit from their orchards. They had milk and cream from their dairy cattle. Chickens supplied meat and eggs. They bought flour and sugar in 50-pound sacks and baked their own bread.

The Great Depression was the world's worst financial crisis, causing mass unemployment and poverty. Soup kitchens and bread lines were created as a place where people who could not afford to eat could get a meal.

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.

Why don't people with depression eat? ›

A person with depression will often lose interest in activities they once enjoyed. Sometimes, this means that the pleasure they used to gain from preparing or eating food disappears. People tend to feel low in energy when they're depressed – this can mean that having to cook or eat may feel like too much for them.

Depression cake is a type of cake that was commonly made during the Great Depression. The ingredients include little or no milk, sugar, butter, or eggs, because the ingredients were then either expensive or hard to obtain.

Hobo meals usual consist of meat and lots of veggies. Then they are wrapped up and cooked in the coals. The steam that gets locked in the foil cooks the food, and it stay moist and flavorful. This is my new twist on the traditional Hobo Meal – Sweet and Sour Meatball Hobo Meals.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal.

Mulligan stew, also known as hobo stew, is a type of stew said to have been prepared by American hobos in camps in the early 1900s. Another variation of mulligan stew is "community stew", a stew put together by several homeless people by combining whatever food they have or can collect.

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.

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.

Big families could be fed with soups from leftover meats, beans, and home-grown vegetables. Homemakers made many varieties of soup from available foods. The results included split pea, chicken-rice, potato-onion, bean, hamburger, and all vegetable. Dumplings were a filling addition to complement the soup.

Almost all farm families raised large gardens with vegetables and canned fruit from their orchards. They had milk and cream from their dairy cattle. Chickens supplied meat and eggs. They bought flour and sugar in 50-pound sacks and baked their own bread.