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did you know you can buy those jelly soaked weenies? and dont let them convince you they were made in vienna
That’s the one really positive thing about the internet. One doesn’t need a grandma who could cook to have access to good recipes any more.
Down with big grandma
Utah, is it?
Some family recipes are heirlooms. Others are evidence.
Grandma’s cookbook had two categories: comfort food and culinary crimes.
i have a ‘gold cookbook’ inherited from my grandma that covers pretty much anything that was available in the 50s
Don’t forget the middle ground where they cross. War time ration crime against God that your parents swear is comfort food but is actually why they are missing brain cells.
Boiled “skinned” hotdog in cabbage soup… Was my grandmother’s. Funfact its broth was made of bullion cubes and hot dog skins… Its very beefy…
If your lucky you get navy beans added.
And here I am in Spain, laughing, and crying, and barfing a little in my mouth.
The Jello thing must be American.
In the UK we made everything with potatoes and Spam.
Gelatin was used plenty in UK. Iv watched plenty of British cooking shows that focused on the 40s-80s to know that for a fact. But it just got REAL fucking big here cause of name brand jello.
So it’s just truely absurd here state side.
I believe it used to be called “aspic” if you’re looking for colloquially similar fads. Jello is an American brand name, so obviously that’s going to appear mostly in American fads.
In Norway peas, carrot bits and shrimp in aspic is called “Cabaret”. It is not bad, but not so great you choose it over almost anything else
I think we only have Jellied Eels in that category, and nobody eats that because it’s vile.
Usually we just use jelly for pudding foods. We used to have lime jelly with tinned orange segments in it, called “fishes in the pond”.
I’ve absolutely no idea if that is a UK thing, or a my family thing. Google seems to deny all knowledge of it, but that could just be how Google is these days.
Yea, and TBF, a lot of these recipes are gonna be from the 50s and 60s, and most are probably dead and buried where they should be. They were mostly all vile abominations of gelatin and mayonnaise.
Mormons.
Spam is fucking delicious though… Just be sure to get the “less sodium” version
Case in point:
The corn pie is structurally weird, but the ingredients list looks pretty sane. It’s basically just meatloaf in an unusual shape.
Extra tasty ham loaf… as opposed to a regularly tasty ham loaf? Huh.
That Christmas Tree Salad looks like a glob of jizz that is standing up and getting ready to gain sentience.
Looks delish
Never has there ever been a more load-bearing-linchpin use of the word “salad”.
to be fair, it’s a molded salad, much more structurally sound that way.
I’m still convinced that those were used as gag gifts at the time and that nobody actually prepared those ridiculous things, even in the US.
The 70s were interesting times… My mom made so many odd dishes from good housekeeping magazine. The jello salads are probably more normal. Have you ever had ‘bbq’ chicken that was cooked in a pot of coke and ketchup? You just cook it until the liquid reduces away.
My mom was a great cook by the way. She made those dishes primarily for budgetary reasons.
Bill Bryson in his biography of growing up in Iowa tells how his grandmother in rural Iowa used to serve these dishes. He concedes that they all vere regular dishes with copious amounts of the food the advertisers sold. He also called Jello the state fruit of Iowa
The power of US marketing never ceases to amaze me (not in a good way, mind).
I’ve heard some gnarly things about Midwestern “cuisine”
If only that were true.
yeah, depression / ration era cooking for anyone not of reasonable wealth was pretty bad, and they stuff they dreamed up on the far side where they were no longer rationed.
My grandmother took a pack of 15 bean soup, added butter beans and lima beans, the broth was basically butter with a touch of milk/cream and a touch of salt. Then a dish of Mrs Weiss kluski noodles also served in butter occasionally with a little chicken. My father always raved about it.
Funny part, she always complained about how long it took her to make the noodles, told us all they were hand made. After going up there for over a decade, one day she left the bag in the sink. That dinner was a HOOT
Meanwhile my sister and I have frantically searched for our großoma’s recipes and are trying to figure them out. Nobody else in the family had recipes worth passing down other than my mom’s specific vibe for chex mix, which I maintain. Any niblings will get a copy of my recipes upon request.
And yeah my grandma that’s better at cooking doesn’t use salt and hasn’t cooked a meal my wife and I both can eat since we got together.
My Irish American grandma on my dad’s side had two recipes. 'Roast Butt ', some pale greasy meat that was boiled until it was falling apart, yet still resisted cutting and chewing once it cursed your plate: the left overs of this were tossed into a pot with a can of La Choy ‘Oriental Style Vegetables’ and a bottle of some sweet sauce and dubbed ‘Chop Suey’, which was probably from a recipe she got out of an ad in the back of a TV guide in the 60s.
The woman could boil a mean potato, though.
My Oklahoma dust bowl era meemaw never really cooked anything that didn’t come from a can, but she baked bread and ‘English Muffins’ from scratch that held up well when frozen.
The bread was really dry and tasteless unless you really slathered on condiments. The ‘muffins’ were flattened little lumps of dough that were as dense as a dying star, not a single nook or cranny in sight, with a chewy raw consistency not unlike chewing gum.
I actually liked those a lot, and was disappointed later in life when I had store bought English Muffins, which were more like a mutant crumpet than anything else.
My mom and sister have the recipes, but neither have attempted making them. I’m afraid to read them because they’ll probably just say:
One box Jiffy baking mix, water, salt. Bake until done.
You have a way with words. I’m dying at “as dense as a dying star” lmao
My grandparents ate boiled potatoes with boiled vegetables and watery meat. When I lived at my parents we often at the same. Thank god that we’ve adapted the cuisine from countries that actually discovered that food can have taste
You need to understand that back in those days, you simply couldn’t buy but maybe a third of what you take for granted in your favorite grocery store today. You can’t cook with what you can’t get.
By the end of September, there were few fresh greens or vegetables beyond root crops. If you wanted a tomato, you needed to open a can or jar. And smoked paprika? Nobody had ever heard of it, let alone tasted it.
It can’t be overstated how many of those recipes were some con to sell canned shit that Grandma cut out of a magazine. There’s very little “in the old county we cooked like this…” that made it through the Boomer food filter. Best case scenario is it’s Betty fucking Crocker.
All my family recipes come from my male ancestors. Sure it’s also various ways of making canned food work, but it’s also been an evolving process since the 1800s so it’s evolved from somewhat edible to outright good. All of them are trail/camping recipes for context, lots of meat, starche, and grain.
The people who say that about younger women probably had Grandmas who were still in households that could be sustained on a single income.
Not saying it was ideal that their only choice was homemaking, but it stands to reason that a more significant amount of them got good at cooking and baking.
What is it with americans putting everything in jello? That’s just gross. And then they make jokes about fries with vinegar (which is just ketchup without tomato (edit: and sugar)).
It was a mid 20th century fad. Aspic had been very expensive and time consuming for a long time and so was considered a high status food.
Then in the post WW2 era we had immense prosperity the likes of which we hadn’t seen before, not just because we were the largest industrialized nation to not be bombed to rubble and had ramped up our industrial capacity, but also because after the great depression and world wars, this was the first time that our average citizen got to experience the full boon of the second industrial revolution. Even better, the new deal (a massive government program meant to end the great depression, increase food supply, and generally just improve the quality of life) as well as the effects of food safety and purity laws and veterans benefits were all in full force.
People who had had a very difficult life suddenly owned a house, had domestic labor saving machines, time and energy to entertain, and modern mass produced industrial foods of quality we now would consider fit for human consumption. Many of these people didn’t know how to cook with after 15 years of rationing. But not to worry! Modern advertising and marketing also came into being in this time. This is the era of the long form ad, and with it the idea that you could just print recipes on the side of ingredients and people would just try them.
So jello… in the early 20th century gelatin went from being something you have to spend a long time rendering out of bones yourself, using imprecise equipment like a wood fired stove, to an industrial food product you can buy for a few cents. All this came together for ad campaigns of weird savory and sweet and savory-sweet jello dishes, usually using other industrial foodstuffs from the same company like hot dogs, mayonnaise, and canned fruit and vegetables. And people who didn’t know how to cook with these new foods and tools said sure and tried some of them, typically to serve at parties.
This is the equivalent of if suddenly you could buy lab grown lobster and sirloin for a buck or two a pound, and for a while everyone’s poor as shit so they’re stretching their beans as far as the can, but suddenly everyone is able to buy a house and have a few kids with plenty of money left over from 1 person working 20 hours a week. The people selling lobster are going to have to remind you that this is high quality food for cheap, and they have to teach you how to use it. It starts simple, roasted tails with butter, bisque, the classics. Then they start moving into weirder stuff like lobster burgers, before eventually getting into weird shit like lobster chocolate cake. And the weirdest thing here is it’s actually more like if the lobster chocolate cake came pretty early and completely dominated the cultural mindset to the point where people think that the weird savory stuff was gross because lobster is a desert food that’s sometimes used in traditional savory dishes.
Oh and the reason you keep seeing Americans talk about it is because we think it sounds gross as hell
The answer i didn’t deserve. Thanks!
This, exactly. It was a fad because it was almost unobtainable prior to that era.
We were here with our InstaPot chicken wings. Now it’s air fryers and ‘seed oil free’ french fries.
Jello was a big thing in the 1960s and 70s. But now it’s pretty much a regional thing. Oh sure you see it occasionally, but it’s far from the dessert staple it once was in the US.
Your Great Grandmother was all in on it, but your Grandmother not as much. And the odds are good that your mother would need to watch a YouTube video or something to make anything even close.
My 2 Grandmothers were wildly different in their cooking skills. And they both grew up thought the Depression years. So you cooked with what you had, because that’s all that you had.
One could make the most incredible sausages-- oatmeal sausages, blood sausages, various summer sausages and canned beef at home and from scratch without any recipe. But beyond that, it took a very good set of teeth to eat at her table. And forget about cookies or any kind of baked goods. Those she bought.
My other Grandmother was a classic little old Norwegian Lady. A 5-Star Michelin Chef should be that good. She made everything from scratch. Often on an old coal-fired cast iron cook stove and oven despite having a perfectly good electric stove. And the breads and pastries and cookies she would make! In a rural farm neighborhood filled with great cooks, she was considered the best baker of them all. And so many recipes. Church cookbooks galore. Carefully handwritten 3x5 cards filled a dozen metal boxes. Clipped newspaper and magazine recipes, each stored in photo books. And I never ever once saw her use any of them. Everything was in her head.
It was truly a travesty that my own Mother never learned how to cook or even cared about cooking. But, she could sew. And made most of our clothes growing up.
Great grandmothers. Thanks!
On the continent, they called it aspic. It used to be a thing: https://juliachildfans.com/julia-child-aspic-recipe/
Maybe it still is? (vegan alternative): https://www.realfoods.co.uk/recipe/egg-and-green-pea-vegetarian-aspic-agar-agar-jelly
How to starter bit: https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/food/2010/08/how-do-i-make-lovely-jellies.shtml
Its not an American thing, it’s a Mormon thing. It had a very brief period of popularity outside of those freaks but yeah, I’d wager most Americans have never eaten Jell-O with something other than fruit in it.
I’d guess there’s way more ketchup haters than people who even know the deliciousness of make vinegar, too. And “ketchup” here isn’t just ketchup+vinegar, it’s LOADED with sugar. I’m one of the ketchup haters.
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