Monday, December 28, 2009
Bites / Cooking the Books Home Cooking 30 Years Ago
Posted by Nicki Wood on Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 8:03 AM
Unearthed here at the West side branch of the Smithsonian is this uh, cultural document of Southern suburban eating habits of the mid-twentieth century.
Eight typed, mimeographed pages of family recipes from second-graders provide a glimpse at the cooking repertoire of Nashville circa 1970. Every page has a spaghetti recipe and either a chuck roast, mac-and-cheese or tuna casserole recipe. One kid's mom evidently overlooked or ignored "Look What's Cooking, Mom" subtitle (either something kids love or something they can cook themselves) and sent in recipes for chilled artichokes with hollandaise and lobster thermidor. There's one in every bunch.
One family let its freak flag fly by submitting a recipe for Indian Curry and Orange Rice. Wild and crazy times in Oak Hill.
It all made me wonder how long, in decades, it takes for technology, grocery supplies and travel to completely change a society's repertoire of regularly served dishes. Our parents didn't eat souse, cornmeal mush or hominy as often as their parents did, and our generation doesn't serve liver or tuna casserole any longer.
It's hard to imagine a day when macaroni-and-cheese will seem old-fashioned, but maybe in 70 years, my daughter will say to her grandchildren, "Yep, back in my day, our moms served us mac-and-cheese twice a week, and it was on every restaurant menu." And they will look at her as if she had two heads.
What dish was a a regular in your childhood home, or grandparents' home, that is absent from yours and how do you explain it?
Comments (5)
Showing 1-5 of 5
*sighs and shakes head*
i wouldnt want to live in a world without mac and cheese.
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Only good memories of mac & cheesse - it is still my #1 comfort food.
However too many childhood meals of salmon patties and beets. (Not served together but they were served weekly.) They are banned from my house & life forever. To this day the smell of beets makes me physically ill.
pot roast cooked in one of those oven baggies. my mom would put the meat, seasoning, potatoes and carrots in the bag and let it slow cook. they all tasted like each other. carrot-flavored beef is gross.
Hippo--
As the former second-grader whose class created this little timepiece of a cookbook, I could not agree more. My Mama, of sainted memory and often-wicked kitchen chops (her Eggs Benedict remains unparalleled), inflicted that pot roast on us without mercy. Off to the side on a little plate were canned mandarins buried in runny cottage cheese, tomato aspic with parsley meant to hide the imprint of the can, pink frozen-fruit salad and similar monstrosities. Mom, wherever you are, I'm sorry. It sucked.
Then there was the Shake-N-Bake. My dear wife mistook Proustian curiosity for Proustian delight when she covered our SNB encounter on her blog a couple of years ago, but the wave of revulsion that emerged from her foodie peeps was impressive:
http://www.the-wood-family.org/tupperware_avalanche/?p=70.
If any fellow survivors of the white-flight paradise that was Oak Hill School circa 1971 want to see their recipes from Mrs. Chance's cookbook project, lemme know and I'll scan them in for you.
Liver and onions will never, ever be served at my house, and my mother served it pretty regularly to us growing up. It makes me gag just thinking of it now, but I don't think I really detested it as a child.
We also had salmon patties and beets quite often, and I still to this day love them both!
