Depression Era Cooking Tricks

John F Dean wrote:I can't remember having too many hamburgers as a kid. They were all meatloaf burgers.  We also had lots of soups and stews.

Yup! Those meatloaf burgers were what my mom did. My stepmom just made 'slider' sized ones, and my dad HATED hamburger night, because she always made them hard as hockey pucks. I think it was incredibly strategic, on her part! Something along the lines of, 'if they hate 'em, I won't have to buy as much!'

My mom and dad both came from a background of beans, cornbread, hamhocks for flavor (when they could), biscuits, whatever they could grow (from their own saved seeds) and/or hunt, and gravy made from whatever meat drippings they had available, because all my grandparents were depression era folk, when they all wore hand-me-downs, the girls wore the flour-sack dresses, and they all went barefoot, all summer, and got 1 pair of 2 size-too-big shoes, when school started, that had to last them until they could get barefoot, again. A few generations of my family on both sides lived like that.

recent events involving eggs (avian flu, but also economic weirdness) have had a lot of recipes floating around involving fewer (or no) eggs.
For 10 years I made amazing baked goods with no eggs (or milk, for that matter). It is absolutely possible to make pretty much anything without eggs, and when the price of eggs gets crazy I pull out those recipes. In most cases you can just leave them out (things like angel food or egg tarts excepted, of course) and don't need anything special to replace them with.

We are staring down the barrel of what looks like a very bad year here (major flooding across the country's ag zone after spring planting, plus political turmoil that promises to get worse no matter who wins next week's election) and I am so glad that I know how to be flexible and use what I have and what I can get easily-- and that the people I feed are good sports and willing to eat most anything. Many of my family members simply don't know what to eat if they don't have a piece of beef to center their meal around and I'm glad I learned how to work around that before it was crunch time.