16 Old-Fashioned Recipes Through The Decades (2024)

FAQs

What was a typical meal in the 1930s? ›

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.

Try finger foods like devilled eggs, tea sandwiches, salted nuts, prawn co*cktail and canapés. Cakes were also very popular in the 1920s with red velvets, pound cakes and devil cakes popular.

Sure there was meat, potatoes, Jello, mayonnaise, and desserts, but, in practice, if we are to believe our mentors, wise 1940s eating included a whole lot of fruits and vegetables, too.

Nettle Pudding

Originating in 6000 BCE, England; it is the oldest dish of the world that's rich in nutrients. Nettle pudding is made with stinging nettles (wild leafy plant), breadcrumbs, suet, onions, and other herbs and spices.

First found in a tomb in Ancient Egypt, honey is about 5,500 years old. Revered in ancient Egypt, honey remains edible over long periods. In 2015, while excavating tombs in Egypt, the archaeologists found about 3000-year-old honey that was fully edible.

Among the culinary delights served were lobster canapés, caviar rolls, crabmeat co*cktails, shrimp patties, oyster toast, anchovy molds, radish roses, devilled eggs, and savory cheese balls. A variety of sweet treats were available, including powdered sugar-topped fruit co*cktail cups or marshmallows.

The cuisine that the counterculture took to in the late 1960s, and then helped introduce to the mainstream in the 1970s, embraced whole grains and legumes; organic, fresh vegetables; soy foods like tofu and tempeh; nutrition-boosters like wheat germ and sprouted grains; and flavors from Eastern European, Asian, and ...

“On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold.” Gatsby convinces Nick to invite Daisy Buchanan to tea, but in the moments before she arrives, Gatsby begins to worry.

As you can see from the decade's top recipes, the 1950s were all about the intersection of comfort food and convenience—casseroles and quick dishes like Chicken a la King and Welsh rarebit reigned supreme.

What was the most common meal in the 1930s? ›

Food was always home cooked, and people usually ate bread, vegetables, meat, etc. The most common meal was made of a composite dish with one portion of proteins (meat, eggs, fish, cheese, pulses), one portion of potatoes, pasta, or bread, and two portions of vegetables, followed by fruit as dessert.

Beech-Nut Baby Foods, Bisquick (General Mills), Ballard Biscuits (cardboard tube packed refrigerator dough), Wyler's Bouillon Cubs, Tootsie Pops. Frito Corn Chips, Skippy Peanut Butter, 3 Musketeers and Heath candy bars.

Including ingredients like lobster, squab, oysters, tongue, crab, fruit punch, prunes, peaches, pineapple, honeydew melon and orange marmalade in the menu helped gentrify the meal and add that touch of elegant refinement that was so important.

A typical Depression-era breakfast consisted of a piece of seasonal fruit, milk and cereal, and eggs or toast with butter. The noon meal was usually a sandwich with salad or some soup. Dinner was meat and veggies, followed by dessert.

During the Great Depression, corn meal was one kitchen staple that was typically easily accessible and cost-effective. To utilize this ingredient during hard times, home cooks began making Johnny cakes, a Northeastern bread that became particularly popular during the Great Depression.