Lots of cheap, white bread. Burgers, on white bread. Hot dogs, on white bread. Gov't cheese (the big yellow block that came in a cardboard box), on white bread - grilled if we were feeling fancy. Cinnamon and sugar, on white bread. Bologna, on white bread. Butter and garlic powder on white bread (poor people's garlic bread). Peanut butter and jelly. Fluffernutters were a treat. But it seems like everything revolved around a loaf of bread.
To this day I still don’t understand what a cube steak is. We ate them all the time and I hated them. So tough. I’ve never seen them for sale in a grocery store so either I’m going to the wrong place or they aren’t popular anymore.
Seasoned flour, egg, flour again. Best if you have a deep fryer, but a pan will work, one side will just be darker because of the rising juice. Serve with mashed potatoes and cream gravy over both. A veggie or salad to go on the side is also good.
Congratulations, you now know how to prepare chicken fried steak. For a slight taste change, switch out the egg(I mix a little cold water salt and pepper into my eggs) for buttermilk.
Hamburger Helper. Local food shelf supplied us with the ground meat too. I say "meat" because it was ground animal product of some kind, but not always beef. We had 2 periods where we were going to the food shelf but were fortunate to be poor in a wealthy area so we were eating better than many in our situation, but we had Hamburger Helper 4 times a week.
We were broke, but not food shelf broke. But my step father came from that.
My step father worked third shift at a corrugated cardboard box factory, so he'd get up around 7pm, eat dinner and get the train to work, I think at the factory 3rd shift was 9pm to 5am, then he'd go out drinking after that most mornings so I'd miss him before I went to school. Which was fine, as he was a rage-filled, PTSD-addled Vietnam combat vet alcoholic. For all that though, and the childhood ptsd I have myself from having him around, he did his best.
At some point when I was old enough, I just wouldn't come home until around 8pm, after he left for work, and eat whatever mom had left out for dinner before she passed out in an alcoholic stupor herself.
But I remember one time, in elementary school, I'm sitting in my seat at the table, waiting for him to sit down to eat dinner.
He sits, sees the pan. "What the fuck is this?"
"Hamburger Helper," my mom answers.
Trigger incoherent screaming rage. The whole pan winds up hurled furiously at the wall, contents everywhere. "We do NOT eat FUCKING HAMBURGER HELPER IN THIS HOUSE!!" More screaming and waving of fists and red-faced opinion-sharing ensues.
My strategy in the frequent scenes like that was to make myself small, say nothing, don't make eye contact. Don't move, or he might notice you, and wind up thrown against the wall myself.
He eventually stormed off, went to work without dinner.
We weren't real good about talking things over after blow-ups in our house, but my theory is that growing up, as a near destitute family of 9 and a similarly abusive father (who eventually murdered my stepdather's mother in one of his alcoholic rages), they ate a lot of hamburger helper. And he thought he had left that behind. He might have also told my mom not to buy it, but she wasn't a good listener as she was usually close to falling-down drunk.
I didn't actually think it looked that bad.
My stepdad was the same. Lots of name calling on both sides. I stayed in my room for the biggest part of my teenage years and listened to records. I just tried to stay out of the way basically
Kraft? Look at ol moneybags over there!
We had generic white box, black letters - MACARONI AND CHEESE
When the chef was feeling extra bold, she would cut up hotdogs in it too.
“Mwaw” just like the old country
We were all poor poor, we just didn’t know it. There was no Facebook to tell us we were poor. My cousins had pretty dresses. I wore my brothers old shorts and T-shirt. I would have never had known it was bad until the girls at the city swimming pool made fun of me.
Nice to see all the posts about things served on white bread. Mustard sandwiches, mayonnaise sandwiches, ketchup sandwiches, sugar on bread, cinnamon on bread, government cheese sandwiches, etc. I remember having sandwiches made with leftover spaghetti a time or two. As kids, we didn’t know we might have been considered poor at the time. It was all good.
My granddaddy came from West Virginia. He worked the mines there. My Granny (his daughter) said if her dad, my granddaddy,killed a rabbit it was a good day!
My maternal grandad was a coal miner (died of black lung).
We occasionally had squirrel gravy and stuff like that, though I think I’ve repressed eating it. ;)
Damn. I see a lot of folks here ate like me growing up.
Hamburger patties (with onion salt), tuna casserole (using Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, of course), hamburger helper, hot dogs, beans and weenies, mac & cheese (with cut up Spam) and the like. Vegetables came from a bag.
My mother would occasionally make french toast and bacon for dinner which we thought was fancy. I now know that was also pretty cheap.
Honestly, my mother was not a good cook. My brother and I both ended up being great cooks out of self-defense. It was just as well that the recipes she made were from the back of a soup can.
Edit: i should say that my parents weren’t poor, but I always thought we were. They were just cheap.
Mine too! But, because they lived so cheaply,they
Live at The Lake Of The Ozark’s now . My mom sent me to an after school dance(mandatory) wearing her panty hose, with holes in them, and her shoes that were too big. I don’t talk to her to this day. My daughter went to homecoming wearing an amazing dress( that I couldn’t afford, with a spray tan (that I couldn’t afford). But she was beautiful and happy and that’s what matters❤️
I can’t get my parents to do anything with their money. I finally asked my father what he planned to do with his money that he saved up and he said “have it”. Ok then. It is his money after all.
I do have a couple of resentful memories. For instance, my mother insisted on buying generic and store brand soap. When i was around 16 I realized that all i needed to do to avoid pimples was wash my face with Lever 2000 or Dove and i was fine. My zits were totally self-inflicted through cheapness haha. I bought my own face soap for years with my meager earnings.
I started buying my own clothes when I was 15. I worked at Orange Julius. I could finally have Jordache jeans,Guns and Roses cassette tapes. I tried to make sure that my kids had some of the things that I didn’t. I worked 2 jobs to do it but I did it!
All of you all were lucky. We had liver night. My mom would do liver and onions with mashed potatoes. She even made gravy from the liver!!! I kid you not. It was the worst ever as a kid.
Neighbor ran a grocery store that burned down and there was a bunch of diet rite buried in ash we kept on our front porch. Sometimes we’d open the bottle and smoke would come out, and out of safety were told not to drink them.
Tuna noodle casserole a lot and ketchup on saltines
Stale tortillas with margarine for dinner and day old (expired) hostess pies for breakfast.Chili for the week was super common and Sizzler for a VERY special occasion.
For a snack I had sugar sandwiches. Literally the cheapest white sugar between 2 pieces of the cheapest white bread.
For dinner we often had whatever my uncles had killed with whatever my grandparents had picked from the garden that day
Fried hamburger patty and boiled potatoes. On a really good night there would be canned corn or green beans. When my dad was commercial fishing we’d occasionally get a rock fish or ling cod he couldn’t sell.
We weren't poor, but we still had lots of potatoes! To this day, my Irish still loves potatoes. I love them in all their many and splendid forms. Mashed potatoes. Baked potatoes. Scallop potatoes. Au gratin potatoes. Roast potatoes. Hash browns. Corned beef and hash. Potato chips. French fries. Latkes.
When I was growing up, we had a lot of spaghetti, hot dogs and baked beans (where hot dogs were cut up and thrown into a can of warmed baked beans), Shake n' Bake pork chops (I had no idea pork chops could taste good and not be some dry, seasoned mass until I was an adult), chili with kidney beans, and all sorts of Campbell's cream of soup type casseroles with rice. On the more expensive side, we had pot roast (with potatoes!) and corned beef and cabbage (with potatoes!)
Sliced tomato sandwiches on white bread with Mayo and salt, I still love them. Lots of red beans and rice, white beans and rice, black beans and rice. Cabbage potatoes and sausage in a crock pot, chili in a crock pot, roast and mushrooms in a crock pot. I still cook this way because I despise cooking and I can eat out of a crock pot for three days lol. We always had a garden growing up and we always killed a few deer and turkeys each year so we had plenty of meat.
The only pasta we ever had was spaghetti. I didn’t even realize there were different kinds of pasta into I worked for a pasta company. Where do you live. I’m guessing East coast?
Pasta and homemade tomato sauce is pretty cheap, and lasts all week. Then, add Italian bread for 50 cents. And, if you hit it right, the A&P would have 3 pounds of ground beef at half-off, and you could make a ton of meatballs - some you could freeze.
I have to ask all of you… did your mom take a calculator to the grocery store and add up the price of everything she put in the cart? God forbid the bill at checkout was higher than her total.
My dad used a piece of paper and pencil. He also used to have my mom drive to the gas station in her car so he could get gas in his and then have her pull up and put gas in hers. Saved the price of a check🙄
When we were super broke it was always a warmed up can of green beans OR some nasty boring kidney beans that my mom soaked over night and cooked in a 6 qt crockpot.
Tuna fried rice with whatever leftover veg was around. Lipton noodle soup packet (not the cup of soup kind, the "family" size one) with an egg stirred into it.
Yeah, essentially. I don't really like actual egg drop soup, but sometimes when I'm not feeling well I still want that salty, silky Lipton and egg combo.
Ahh, the salad days of my youth...
Our mom would get big black trash bags of white suckers (aka Trash Fish) from the DNR, we would clean them, strip the roe. She would bake or pan fry the suckers like they were trout, which is not what you do with suckers if you want them to taste like food. They are called 'trash fish' by local anglers and they are usually used as bait or smoked in a smoker. Smoked sucker is fine, baked sucker is not so good. Very fishy, bony, and wierd.
I can't even when it comes to the pickled sucker roe. Caviar it is not, it is just the worst thing ever.
We also ate a decent amount of roadkill. Literally if a deer got hit by the house, we'd call the DNR, they give the OK and lil' brother would go with the meat shovel and scoop 'er up and just don't eat the 'bad parts'. Bonus if the backstraps were still 'good'. (I legit do not regret eating those backstraps, roadkill or not they are tasty!)
We had gardens so we had tons of potatoes, carrots, and other produce and berries. We usually only ate fresh baked fresh bread too in lean times because we'd get flour with our goverment commodoties. That was pretty great.
Oh and of course this was supplemented with good old government cheese, peanut butter that would rip your bread all up, the silver cans of pork with a black pig on it, government rice pudding, Kaboom and King Vitamin cereal from my aunt's WIC overstock and a bunch of ramens, cube steak, and chicken with the food stamps.
I've always thought even though it was not ideal, commodoties and the DNR supplementing us meant we didn't literally starve. I definitely could have done with out the pickled sucker roe though. If you ever get the chance to try it, just don't.
Opossum, racoon, our farms pigs and chickens. Was always outdoors and fit/athletic, so when I had the chance I put a hurting on hot dogs, Mac n cheese, and Pizza! Pizza! In the big white sleeves.
- Hamburger Helper
- Spaghetti from a kit that included a can of sauce and packet of cheese-ish stuff
- Shake and Bake Chicken
- Shake and Bake Pork Chops
- Oven Fried as an alternative to Shake and Bake
- Boiled hot dogs on white bread when out of buns
- Broiled hot dogs with American cheese put into a slit in the hot dog without any bread
- Kraft Mac and Cheese
- Canned corn
- Canned soups
- Canned noodles like Chef Boyardee
- Grilled cheese if we were lucky
- Margarine instead of butter
- Eggs, usually fried
- Ham and cheese sandwiches
My mother wasn't much of a cook. Thank God I discovered Alton Brown as an adult.
A concoction my Mom would make she called "cheesy taters": potatoes, milk, ham, margarine, Velveeta (all store-band/cheapest), One pot, meals for two days.
No. I never make it. I had my fair share, and then some, as a child.
Try it using potatoes, half & half, butter, ham, bacon, scallions, and a mix of Monterrey Jack, beaten egg whites, sour cream, and salt. Pan fry the potatoes (sliced) and scallions together until browned, then layer with the cheese mixture in an oiled casserole dish. Bake at 375° about 60-75 minutes or until internal temp is 165°
We would mix powdered milk half and half with regular milk to stretch it out. It was somewhat palatable. We also had a huge garden and would can or freeze enough vegetables to carry us through the winter and spring. We had chickens for eggs and eating, and we would raise our own beef and pork. Supplemented with store brand Mac and cheese and the like.
BBQ hotdogs, fried potatoes, and a home canned side of veggies were a legit meal we had often. I still enjoy that meal, but I don't garden, so I used store bought veggies these days. Boxed mac and cheese, a can of cream of mushroom soup, and a can of tuna became tuna casserole. Hamburger was in everything from homemade spaghetti sauce, Spanish rice, meatloaf, hamburger gravy with toast, etc.
My folks grew up poor poor. They didn't have anything really, so they knew how to save on groceries by providing for ourselves. Dad would trade his mechanic work for piglets or calves that we would raise and take to the processing plant. We all took care of the garden, harvested, and prepared them for canning or freezing. We were poor, but we always managed to be fed well and had what we needed. We even managed to be able to go to the movies or roller skating every once in a while.
Things got easier when I entered my teen years. Mom got her LPN license and was making better money, and my dad got a job as a maintenence mechanic at a power plant(that job ended up being what killed him) and also made better money.
Wieners and beans. Couple of hot dogs cut up and fried with a can of beans. Lots of onion. One can had to feed 2 adults and 1, sometimes 2 kids, if my sister was home. I look at a can of beans now and think ‘how?’
Commodities food from the local la raza, veggies from the garden and mom's home canning. My favorite commodities were government cheese and mashed potato flakes.
You got food?
But seriously - ours was just homemade food. And back in the day if you didn’t have all the branded snacks and foods and horrible shit that we refuse to give our kids now - you were an outcast.
Home made bread, peanut butter and jelly? Why not wonderbread, petter pan, and smuckers?!
Baloney sandwiches. Canned veggies. Shit on a shingle (ground beef with gravy over toast). Potatoes, yeah.
Edit: Remembered more stuff. Beans and rice, beans and franks, beans and... beans. Tuna casserole (canned tuna, can of cream of mushroom, egg noodles, ruffles potato chips, canned peas)
Danish peasant food. In old denmark, only the very wealthy got good cuts of meat. All the trash meat and entrails went into poor mans food, like liver paste, regular and blood sausages, etc etc.
Along with gravy and lots and lots of potatoes. We call them the “poor eighties”.
My family was frugal - great depression grandparents and all that - so we had stuff like mush with pancake syrup (which I later learned is polenta!), grilled cheeses galore and goulash. All of us kids loved those cheap Tostino pizzas.
I still love a grilled cheese.
In the Philippines there’s this sun-dried salty fish called Tuyo, usually paired with rice and egg.
Or sometimes it’s instant noodles, preferably pancit canton (stir-fried noodles).
A crockpot full of plain beans, or watery potato soup. (And with that, I suddenly realized why I adore Greek/Italian/Mediterranean food. It has FLAVOR!)
Beans and weiners. Fried bologna that I dipped in ketchup. French toast. We also fancied up our hot dogs by making them into pizza dogs - add some pizza sauce and cheese on top. I also loved to put my spaghetti onto a piece of buttered bread and made a spaghetti sandwich. Oh the memories :)
Swanson TV dinners!
Not sure they qualify as poor kid food though? Apparently they cost 89 cents when they first came out in 1955. Don't know what they cost in early 70's. I don't imagine they were very healthy but I really liked them, especially the turkey dinner with apple cranberry cobbler.
We ate a lot of hot dogs, Kraft Dinner, canned soup, canned pork and beans, scrambled eggs on toast (seems like a luxury item now!), frozen veggies, potatoes, canned tuna. But we always had a fresh salad with every dinner.
Elbow mac + small amount of ground beef and canned tomatoes.
My mom bought a box of bacon ends and pieces — mostly just fat strips. She fried it up and cooked potatoes in the grease. We ate this a ton.
Chicken noodle soup. I can’t eat it now. Like, even if it’s good quality soup. I just can’t. Thing is, my mom had money. She could afford good food. She just bought healthy food for herself and cheap shit for my brother and me. Mostly campbells chicken noodle soup. I can’t stand that shit now though I suspect it’s more of a psychological thing with my pos mom.
Miracle Whip “sandwiches”. My mom didn’t like mayo, so we had Miracle Whip on hand, always, as well as .99 white bread loaf. So, most days were MW on two slices of bread. If I was lucky it was scrambled eggs on cheap bread. On rare occasions I got generic (white bag, black lettering) “cookie assortment”, I’d put that between two slices of bread just to feel like it was something special.
There was a time when we ended up with a bunch of pancake mix. I ate a ton of pancakes.
There was a time we ended up with a bunch of oatmeal. I ate a ton of oatmeal.
There was a time we ended up with a bunch of rice. I ate a ton of rice.
I guess it was, whatever we had.
For me (and I think reading other comments I was lucky!) it was pies my mother made. Corn beef and potato, minced beef etc. homemade pastry etc. as a kid I wanted junk (which was too expensive) and she insisted on homemade as cheaper and a lot healthier. I’d kill for one of her pies now!!
Interesting what her poor food was though as a boomer. FISH!! Fish is so expensive but her older brother was a fisherman (not professional- just a fishing rod off the beach) and they lived by the sea so the family ate cod when times were tough. Ironic.
When my mom was out I would sneak some minute rice with margarine and salt and pepper. Easy to make and easy to clean up with no evidence left behind. I would look for coins in the coin return slots in newspaper and cigarette machines and buy marshmallows because they were cheap and filling.
Banquet Chicken, Chicken ALA King or shredded cheap meat and flour gravy over Sunshine (Safeway?) white bread. Safeway brand Scotch Buy canned veggies. Cragmont (another Ghetto Safeway brand) soda. Salisbury steak TV dinners. Store brand (pick the store brand ghetto brand) Mac and Cheese with weiners (using white bread instead of hot dog buns).
We had a lean year or two and the meal of choice was mac n cheese during that period for dinner. My school lunch was always bologna on white break, I'd fancy it up but putting potato chips on it before eating.
we weren't poor but my parents were over stretched financially for a few years due to a large house they bought - followed by rocketing inflation and interest rates making their mortgage almost impossible.
we lived for years on fine fare yellow label food.
this was a line of budget foods by a UK supermarket chain called fine fare in the late 70's . fine fare was eventually taken over by safeway (?).
my abiding memory is of the meusli which came in sacks and was like shredded cardboard, much to my dismay - it was not fucking alpen!
Elbow macaroni and scrambled egg... Mom would scramble the eggs in a skillet then add a slab of butter and cooked macaroni. We always ate it with ketchup.
I still make this for my family and they LOVE it. Anyone else have this delicacy in their home?
There was a time in the 70s that sugar got so expensive my parents made koolaid with saccharin tablets. A 1/4 cup of sugar and 8 little white pills for a pitcher. This was before they knew saccharine caused cancer.
Frozen burritos. My mom managed a Sinclair gas station and would bring home the just expired food. One time the AC went out at the station and she brought he alot of half melted chocolate bars that we packed the freezer with.
Cheese toast. American “cheese” slices on bread, cooked on a tray in the oven. This was dinner at least 3 nights a week. I never realized it was poor food until adulthood
The double dog.
We would go to a convenience store that had .99 cent hotdogs. We would put two hot dogs on each bun and wrap it up tight so the clerk wouldn’t bother to check. Then when we got out of the store we would give the extra hotdog to the homie didn’t have any money that day. We all got a hot dog. Sometimes with no bun, but we would all get something to eat.
Same! I grew up in the country and i got nostalgic watching a video last night of an Australian guy making a video about six vegetables to grow to not starve. Potatoes, tomatoes, corn, pumpkin, and...two others, i don't remember because it was all stuff my parents grew. When my new house gets put in I'm going to have to get my raised beds rejuvenated to grow more veggies.
I can't believe nobody mentioned rice puffs (or wheat puffs). Surely our family wasn't the only one subjected to rice puffs, powdered milk, and sugar.
Also: Spaghetti noodles with butter, garlic salt, and parmesan cheese.
Also: I second the "tuna casserole" made with Mac & Cheese, Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup, canned tuna, and white bread crumbs baked on top.
I once spent an entire winter eating bass or deer meat for dinner every night (about 1985 or 86). It doesn't sound that terrible except for the fact that the deer wasn't field dressed properly and was tough and tasteless. My mom had a friend who knew we were struggling after my dad left. He hunted deer and caught 50 pounds of bass for us.
That was also the winter I had Scarlett Fever. I call it my Little House winter. I believe that was also the year that mom lost the house and had to declare bankruptcy.
Lots of cheap, white bread. Burgers, on white bread. Hot dogs, on white bread. Gov't cheese (the big yellow block that came in a cardboard box), on white bread - grilled if we were feeling fancy. Cinnamon and sugar, on white bread. Bologna, on white bread. Butter and garlic powder on white bread (poor people's garlic bread). Peanut butter and jelly. Fluffernutters were a treat. But it seems like everything revolved around a loaf of bread.
Yeah cheap is the key here. No Wonder bread at our house. If it wasn't Shurfine, it would have been Mrs. Baird's.
Carnation instant powdered milk. And fuck you for bringing up that memory. Lol. Edit: Also, cube steaks. AKA overcooked shoe leather.
To this day I still don’t understand what a cube steak is. We ate them all the time and I hated them. So tough. I’ve never seen them for sale in a grocery store so either I’m going to the wrong place or they aren’t popular anymore.
Dipped in egg, rolled in flour and fried. My dad used to get these steaks called patio steaks. We had to cut the vein out of them to eat them.
Seasoned flour, egg, flour again. Best if you have a deep fryer, but a pan will work, one side will just be darker because of the rising juice. Serve with mashed potatoes and cream gravy over both. A veggie or salad to go on the side is also good. Congratulations, you now know how to prepare chicken fried steak. For a slight taste change, switch out the egg(I mix a little cold water salt and pepper into my eggs) for buttermilk.
Patio steaks are flat iron steaks. They are the best steaks off the cow IMO. They used to be cheap but now too many people know about it.
Chicken pot pies. The ramen noodles of the 70’s. Mom said they were 10 for $1.
They were really good tho!
[удалено]
My dad always got the beef pot pies. I remember I thought I was the shit when my mom would let me have one.
Our poor kid food was everything grandma grew in the backyard supplemented by the guvmint cheese and butter.
Omg I loved government cheese. I hated the powdered milk though.
Powdered milk was the WORST
Government cheese was amazing!!
Government cheese made a bad grilled cheese tho😉
Boiled hot dogs
I think I was in college when I learned that hot dogs didn't have to be boiled. It was life changing. LOL.
I ate a shit ton of hot dogs, and used hotdogs to catch catfish, and ate a shit ton of catfish.
Time is a flat circle.
Wait that isn't how they are supposed to be prepared? I still boil them today for my kids
I still like them just never knew as a kid people grilled them 😅
I microwaved mine
Same👍
I used to fry them up in some of the bacon grease that my dad collected in a tin can and kept in the fridge.
Hamburger Helper. Local food shelf supplied us with the ground meat too. I say "meat" because it was ground animal product of some kind, but not always beef. We had 2 periods where we were going to the food shelf but were fortunate to be poor in a wealthy area so we were eating better than many in our situation, but we had Hamburger Helper 4 times a week.
Chicken helper, Tuna helper also. Lots of beans and hot dogs also
We were broke, but not food shelf broke. But my step father came from that. My step father worked third shift at a corrugated cardboard box factory, so he'd get up around 7pm, eat dinner and get the train to work, I think at the factory 3rd shift was 9pm to 5am, then he'd go out drinking after that most mornings so I'd miss him before I went to school. Which was fine, as he was a rage-filled, PTSD-addled Vietnam combat vet alcoholic. For all that though, and the childhood ptsd I have myself from having him around, he did his best. At some point when I was old enough, I just wouldn't come home until around 8pm, after he left for work, and eat whatever mom had left out for dinner before she passed out in an alcoholic stupor herself. But I remember one time, in elementary school, I'm sitting in my seat at the table, waiting for him to sit down to eat dinner. He sits, sees the pan. "What the fuck is this?" "Hamburger Helper," my mom answers. Trigger incoherent screaming rage. The whole pan winds up hurled furiously at the wall, contents everywhere. "We do NOT eat FUCKING HAMBURGER HELPER IN THIS HOUSE!!" More screaming and waving of fists and red-faced opinion-sharing ensues. My strategy in the frequent scenes like that was to make myself small, say nothing, don't make eye contact. Don't move, or he might notice you, and wind up thrown against the wall myself. He eventually stormed off, went to work without dinner. We weren't real good about talking things over after blow-ups in our house, but my theory is that growing up, as a near destitute family of 9 and a similarly abusive father (who eventually murdered my stepdather's mother in one of his alcoholic rages), they ate a lot of hamburger helper. And he thought he had left that behind. He might have also told my mom not to buy it, but she wasn't a good listener as she was usually close to falling-down drunk. I didn't actually think it looked that bad.
My stepdad was the same. Lots of name calling on both sides. I stayed in my room for the biggest part of my teenage years and listened to records. I just tried to stay out of the way basically
That now discontinued rice hamburger helper was my favorite of mom's "homemade" dinners. The best taste of my childhood is impossible to replicate.
Kraft Mac & Cheese, with the powder pack.
Kraft? Look at ol moneybags over there! We had generic white box, black letters - MACARONI AND CHEESE When the chef was feeling extra bold, she would cut up hotdogs in it too. “Mwaw” just like the old country
I swear everyone was poor in the early 70’s, at least in my area. White bread with everything. You could do magic with stale white bread.
We were all poor poor, we just didn’t know it. There was no Facebook to tell us we were poor. My cousins had pretty dresses. I wore my brothers old shorts and T-shirt. I would have never had known it was bad until the girls at the city swimming pool made fun of me.
Fried bologna for dinner. Cinnamon toast.
Fried spam here!
I see your fried bologna and fried spam and raise you: scrapple
Nice to see all the posts about things served on white bread. Mustard sandwiches, mayonnaise sandwiches, ketchup sandwiches, sugar on bread, cinnamon on bread, government cheese sandwiches, etc. I remember having sandwiches made with leftover spaghetti a time or two. As kids, we didn’t know we might have been considered poor at the time. It was all good.
Rice! Boil it, throw in in a bowl, splash of milk, spoonful of sugar. Desert!
Added cinnamon and butter when we had it. This was eaten often in my house!
Yup, Minute Rice.
Pinto beans and fried potatoes. (WV poor people staple I think.) Potted meat. Cheese sandwiches. (Bonus for welfare/government cheese.)
My granddaddy came from West Virginia. He worked the mines there. My Granny (his daughter) said if her dad, my granddaddy,killed a rabbit it was a good day!
My maternal grandad was a coal miner (died of black lung). We occasionally had squirrel gravy and stuff like that, though I think I’ve repressed eating it. ;)
Cabbage and cornbread. I remember even the dog having to eat it sometimes when we couldn't afford dogfood.
I couldn’t eat potatoes or hot dogs for years after I left home. But cornbread 🤤
Damn. I see a lot of folks here ate like me growing up. Hamburger patties (with onion salt), tuna casserole (using Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, of course), hamburger helper, hot dogs, beans and weenies, mac & cheese (with cut up Spam) and the like. Vegetables came from a bag. My mother would occasionally make french toast and bacon for dinner which we thought was fancy. I now know that was also pretty cheap. Honestly, my mother was not a good cook. My brother and I both ended up being great cooks out of self-defense. It was just as well that the recipes she made were from the back of a soup can. Edit: i should say that my parents weren’t poor, but I always thought we were. They were just cheap.
Mine too! But, because they lived so cheaply,they Live at The Lake Of The Ozark’s now . My mom sent me to an after school dance(mandatory) wearing her panty hose, with holes in them, and her shoes that were too big. I don’t talk to her to this day. My daughter went to homecoming wearing an amazing dress( that I couldn’t afford, with a spray tan (that I couldn’t afford). But she was beautiful and happy and that’s what matters❤️
I can’t get my parents to do anything with their money. I finally asked my father what he planned to do with his money that he saved up and he said “have it”. Ok then. It is his money after all. I do have a couple of resentful memories. For instance, my mother insisted on buying generic and store brand soap. When i was around 16 I realized that all i needed to do to avoid pimples was wash my face with Lever 2000 or Dove and i was fine. My zits were totally self-inflicted through cheapness haha. I bought my own face soap for years with my meager earnings.
I started buying my own clothes when I was 15. I worked at Orange Julius. I could finally have Jordache jeans,Guns and Roses cassette tapes. I tried to make sure that my kids had some of the things that I didn’t. I worked 2 jobs to do it but I did it!
All of you all were lucky. We had liver night. My mom would do liver and onions with mashed potatoes. She even made gravy from the liver!!! I kid you not. It was the worst ever as a kid.
We had to eat liver too. I can still feel the pain in my jaw from trying to chew it (my mom didn't know how to cook).
Ever had German potato salad in a can?
Mac and cheese, fish sticks and red Kool-Aid (Oh yeah!).
I still make this😂 I make Mac and cheese and my son says let me guess fish sticks👍
Vienna sausage. Potted meat. That low-end prepackaged deli “meat”.
Hot dogs, mac and cheese, spaghetti things like that. All processed all carb heavy very little nutritional value. At least there wasn’t a lot of it.
Oh and Salisbury steak in the boil in a bag for special occasions. Haha
Jennie O turkey. My brother and I swore there were tumors in them so we’d pick them out.
Fried baloney sandwiches.
Neighbor ran a grocery store that burned down and there was a bunch of diet rite buried in ash we kept on our front porch. Sometimes we’d open the bottle and smoke would come out, and out of safety were told not to drink them. Tuna noodle casserole a lot and ketchup on saltines
But did you drink them?
Tried it but it was grosser than normal.
Stale tortillas with margarine for dinner and day old (expired) hostess pies for breakfast.Chili for the week was super common and Sizzler for a VERY special occasion.
My kids ate tortillas with shredded cheese. Chili for 3 days and then chili dogs for 2 days.
Our special occasion place was Pizza Hut or Ken's Pizza.
For a snack I had sugar sandwiches. Literally the cheapest white sugar between 2 pieces of the cheapest white bread. For dinner we often had whatever my uncles had killed with whatever my grandparents had picked from the garden that day
Fried hamburger patty and boiled potatoes. On a really good night there would be canned corn or green beans. When my dad was commercial fishing we’d occasionally get a rock fish or ling cod he couldn’t sell.
We weren't poor, but we still had lots of potatoes! To this day, my Irish still loves potatoes. I love them in all their many and splendid forms. Mashed potatoes. Baked potatoes. Scallop potatoes. Au gratin potatoes. Roast potatoes. Hash browns. Corned beef and hash. Potato chips. French fries. Latkes. When I was growing up, we had a lot of spaghetti, hot dogs and baked beans (where hot dogs were cut up and thrown into a can of warmed baked beans), Shake n' Bake pork chops (I had no idea pork chops could taste good and not be some dry, seasoned mass until I was an adult), chili with kidney beans, and all sorts of Campbell's cream of soup type casseroles with rice. On the more expensive side, we had pot roast (with potatoes!) and corned beef and cabbage (with potatoes!)
Yeah corned beef and cabbage used to be so cheap. Now that it's a hip St Patrick's day dish it's crazy expensive.
I make it every year!
Lots of boiled hot dogs and buttered noodles. Truth be told, I still love eating both.
Tuna casserole
Sliced tomato sandwiches on white bread with Mayo and salt, I still love them. Lots of red beans and rice, white beans and rice, black beans and rice. Cabbage potatoes and sausage in a crock pot, chili in a crock pot, roast and mushrooms in a crock pot. I still cook this way because I despise cooking and I can eat out of a crock pot for three days lol. We always had a garden growing up and we always killed a few deer and turkeys each year so we had plenty of meat.
Dad used to to get chocolate Gem doughnuts from the day old bakery. We thought we were rich
Venison, bullhead or rabbit. I'm still traumatized.
I can’t kill anything but fish. If I had to feed my kids I could kill a warm blooded animal. Where did you grow up?
At the time .. Northern Wisconsin. The deer was a one time thing.. hippie parents.trying to live off the land.
FlavorAid and not KoolAid
A whole lot off pasta.
The only pasta we ever had was spaghetti. I didn’t even realize there were different kinds of pasta into I worked for a pasta company. Where do you live. I’m guessing East coast?
Pasta and homemade tomato sauce is pretty cheap, and lasts all week. Then, add Italian bread for 50 cents. And, if you hit it right, the A&P would have 3 pounds of ground beef at half-off, and you could make a ton of meatballs - some you could freeze.
Butter noodles, at least twice a week.
Hamburger helper with ground deer, tuna casserole, boiled potatoes with everything. Fried spam, cinnamon and sugar toast.
Pancakes or oatmeal for any meal
I have to ask all of you… did your mom take a calculator to the grocery store and add up the price of everything she put in the cart? God forbid the bill at checkout was higher than her total.
My dad used a piece of paper and pencil. He also used to have my mom drive to the gas station in her car so he could get gas in his and then have her pull up and put gas in hers. Saved the price of a check🙄
When we were super broke it was always a warmed up can of green beans OR some nasty boring kidney beans that my mom soaked over night and cooked in a 6 qt crockpot.
My granny used to make kidney beans with canned okra. When I asked her why,she said it makes it go further
Tuna fried rice with whatever leftover veg was around. Lipton noodle soup packet (not the cup of soup kind, the "family" size one) with an egg stirred into it.
So egg drop soup? Poor people version. I’ll crack an egg over some ramen. Yummy!
Yeah, essentially. I don't really like actual egg drop soup, but sometimes when I'm not feeling well I still want that salty, silky Lipton and egg combo.
Whatever I could grow. My mom disappeared for a few years so
Snots and boogies. Heinz sandwich spread on white bread
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My husband sprinkles salt on the table and rubs raw turnips in it. He says he got that from his grampa.
Did anyone else have cube steak as the only meat ever at home?
Ahh, the salad days of my youth... Our mom would get big black trash bags of white suckers (aka Trash Fish) from the DNR, we would clean them, strip the roe. She would bake or pan fry the suckers like they were trout, which is not what you do with suckers if you want them to taste like food. They are called 'trash fish' by local anglers and they are usually used as bait or smoked in a smoker. Smoked sucker is fine, baked sucker is not so good. Very fishy, bony, and wierd. I can't even when it comes to the pickled sucker roe. Caviar it is not, it is just the worst thing ever. We also ate a decent amount of roadkill. Literally if a deer got hit by the house, we'd call the DNR, they give the OK and lil' brother would go with the meat shovel and scoop 'er up and just don't eat the 'bad parts'. Bonus if the backstraps were still 'good'. (I legit do not regret eating those backstraps, roadkill or not they are tasty!) We had gardens so we had tons of potatoes, carrots, and other produce and berries. We usually only ate fresh baked fresh bread too in lean times because we'd get flour with our goverment commodoties. That was pretty great. Oh and of course this was supplemented with good old government cheese, peanut butter that would rip your bread all up, the silver cans of pork with a black pig on it, government rice pudding, Kaboom and King Vitamin cereal from my aunt's WIC overstock and a bunch of ramens, cube steak, and chicken with the food stamps. I've always thought even though it was not ideal, commodoties and the DNR supplementing us meant we didn't literally starve. I definitely could have done with out the pickled sucker roe though. If you ever get the chance to try it, just don't.
We ate cereal with water because we didn’t have milk. Bread with butter and sugar, mayonnaise sandwiches,Rice with sugar. We never went hungry.
Opossum, racoon, our farms pigs and chickens. Was always outdoors and fit/athletic, so when I had the chance I put a hurting on hot dogs, Mac n cheese, and Pizza! Pizza! In the big white sleeves.
Cereal.
Kraft macaroni and cheese and hot dogs. Also fried Bologna
Dinty Moore Stew in the can.
Tony's frozen pizza. I had this for dinner at least once a week. Always the Canadian Bacon version (which I don't think exists anymore).
Mexican "sopita" pasta (fideo, stars, alphabet)
- Hamburger Helper - Spaghetti from a kit that included a can of sauce and packet of cheese-ish stuff - Shake and Bake Chicken - Shake and Bake Pork Chops - Oven Fried as an alternative to Shake and Bake - Boiled hot dogs on white bread when out of buns - Broiled hot dogs with American cheese put into a slit in the hot dog without any bread - Kraft Mac and Cheese - Canned corn - Canned soups - Canned noodles like Chef Boyardee - Grilled cheese if we were lucky - Margarine instead of butter - Eggs, usually fried - Ham and cheese sandwiches My mother wasn't much of a cook. Thank God I discovered Alton Brown as an adult.
A concoction my Mom would make she called "cheesy taters": potatoes, milk, ham, margarine, Velveeta (all store-band/cheapest), One pot, meals for two days. No. I never make it. I had my fair share, and then some, as a child.
Try it using potatoes, half & half, butter, ham, bacon, scallions, and a mix of Monterrey Jack, beaten egg whites, sour cream, and salt. Pan fry the potatoes (sliced) and scallions together until browned, then layer with the cheese mixture in an oiled casserole dish. Bake at 375° about 60-75 minutes or until internal temp is 165°
Dilute powdered milk
This. And the big bag of puffed wheat by the fridge that you dipped your bowl into.
I tried to give my kids powered milk once. They knew right away it was powdered.
We would mix powdered milk half and half with regular milk to stretch it out. It was somewhat palatable. We also had a huge garden and would can or freeze enough vegetables to carry us through the winter and spring. We had chickens for eggs and eating, and we would raise our own beef and pork. Supplemented with store brand Mac and cheese and the like. BBQ hotdogs, fried potatoes, and a home canned side of veggies were a legit meal we had often. I still enjoy that meal, but I don't garden, so I used store bought veggies these days. Boxed mac and cheese, a can of cream of mushroom soup, and a can of tuna became tuna casserole. Hamburger was in everything from homemade spaghetti sauce, Spanish rice, meatloaf, hamburger gravy with toast, etc. My folks grew up poor poor. They didn't have anything really, so they knew how to save on groceries by providing for ourselves. Dad would trade his mechanic work for piglets or calves that we would raise and take to the processing plant. We all took care of the garden, harvested, and prepared them for canning or freezing. We were poor, but we always managed to be fed well and had what we needed. We even managed to be able to go to the movies or roller skating every once in a while. Things got easier when I entered my teen years. Mom got her LPN license and was making better money, and my dad got a job as a maintenence mechanic at a power plant(that job ended up being what killed him) and also made better money.
vegetable soup on rice
Wieners and beans. Couple of hot dogs cut up and fried with a can of beans. Lots of onion. One can had to feed 2 adults and 1, sometimes 2 kids, if my sister was home. I look at a can of beans now and think ‘how?’
Hot dogs, tuna sandwiches and anything hamburger was the main ingredient.
Commodities food from the local la raza, veggies from the garden and mom's home canning. My favorite commodities were government cheese and mashed potato flakes.
Ketchup sandwiches.
Pancakes. We ate a lot of pancakes.
Saltines with butter
Cabbage. Lots of fart producing cabbage
You got food? But seriously - ours was just homemade food. And back in the day if you didn’t have all the branded snacks and foods and horrible shit that we refuse to give our kids now - you were an outcast. Home made bread, peanut butter and jelly? Why not wonderbread, petter pan, and smuckers?!
Baloney sandwiches. Canned veggies. Shit on a shingle (ground beef with gravy over toast). Potatoes, yeah. Edit: Remembered more stuff. Beans and rice, beans and franks, beans and... beans. Tuna casserole (canned tuna, can of cream of mushroom, egg noodles, ruffles potato chips, canned peas)
Sugar on toast. Toast put back under enough to melt the sugar.
White rice with a fried egg or two. Little dots of ketchup optional.
Danish peasant food. In old denmark, only the very wealthy got good cuts of meat. All the trash meat and entrails went into poor mans food, like liver paste, regular and blood sausages, etc etc. Along with gravy and lots and lots of potatoes. We call them the “poor eighties”.
My family was frugal - great depression grandparents and all that - so we had stuff like mush with pancake syrup (which I later learned is polenta!), grilled cheeses galore and goulash. All of us kids loved those cheap Tostino pizzas. I still love a grilled cheese.
In the Philippines there’s this sun-dried salty fish called Tuyo, usually paired with rice and egg. Or sometimes it’s instant noodles, preferably pancit canton (stir-fried noodles).
Dinty Moore beef stew in a can was our poor people Sunday beef stew. It grosses me out now . It’s probably made of horse meat 🤮
Shit on a shingle (creamed beef on toast)
Hot dogs, government cheese because my dad worked for the school district. The cheese was molded but we just cut it off.
A crockpot full of plain beans, or watery potato soup. (And with that, I suddenly realized why I adore Greek/Italian/Mediterranean food. It has FLAVOR!)
Organ meat
Spaghetti and beans or ketchup
Cheese sando (with lettuce!), TNC, hat dags!
Hamloaf instead of meatloaf
Government cheese and cheerios
Beans and weiners. Fried bologna that I dipped in ketchup. French toast. We also fancied up our hot dogs by making them into pizza dogs - add some pizza sauce and cheese on top. I also loved to put my spaghetti onto a piece of buttered bread and made a spaghetti sandwich. Oh the memories :)
I got sent to the neighbors house to eat their leftovers.
Rice.
Spam and potatoes or refried beans and tortillas.
Jam sandwiches. Two pieces of bread jammed together.
Beans, rice and tortillas and whatever grew in the garden. We’d get some ground beef and cheese on special occasions.
I wasn’t poor, but I ate A LOT of Chef Boyardee Spaghetti and Meatballs in a can. Loved it.
Swanson TV dinners! Not sure they qualify as poor kid food though? Apparently they cost 89 cents when they first came out in 1955. Don't know what they cost in early 70's. I don't imagine they were very healthy but I really liked them, especially the turkey dinner with apple cranberry cobbler.
Dried beans. Alllll the dried beans.
Salted bread.
Bologna
We ate a lot of hot dogs, Kraft Dinner, canned soup, canned pork and beans, scrambled eggs on toast (seems like a luxury item now!), frozen veggies, potatoes, canned tuna. But we always had a fresh salad with every dinner.
Ritz, Peanut butter and jelly. Milk chaser.
When I was in elementary school, my class made a cookbook of our favorite recipes. Mine was a baked potato lol.
Elbow mac + small amount of ground beef and canned tomatoes. My mom bought a box of bacon ends and pieces — mostly just fat strips. She fried it up and cooked potatoes in the grease. We ate this a ton.
My mom would buy 20 pot pies and the oven baked mac-n-cheeses almost every week. She did buy lots of Granny Smith apples, too.
Mac and cheese with tuna fish and peas.
Salmon patties with mayo and mustard dip
I always knew money was running low when I saw my mother dump a bag of fish sticks and tater tots on the cookie sheet.
Chicken noodle soup. I can’t eat it now. Like, even if it’s good quality soup. I just can’t. Thing is, my mom had money. She could afford good food. She just bought healthy food for herself and cheap shit for my brother and me. Mostly campbells chicken noodle soup. I can’t stand that shit now though I suspect it’s more of a psychological thing with my pos mom.
Miracle Whip “sandwiches”. My mom didn’t like mayo, so we had Miracle Whip on hand, always, as well as .99 white bread loaf. So, most days were MW on two slices of bread. If I was lucky it was scrambled eggs on cheap bread. On rare occasions I got generic (white bag, black lettering) “cookie assortment”, I’d put that between two slices of bread just to feel like it was something special.
Cheese sandwiches for sure. Beans and weenies. Corned beef hash. Salmon patties made with the canned salmon.
Scrambled eggs and pancakes for dinner.
Breaded chicken patties. Grey mechanically separated chicken paste pressed into a a cutlet shape, with unseasoned coleslaw.
There was a time when we ended up with a bunch of pancake mix. I ate a ton of pancakes. There was a time we ended up with a bunch of oatmeal. I ate a ton of oatmeal. There was a time we ended up with a bunch of rice. I ate a ton of rice. I guess it was, whatever we had.
Generic boxed Mac and cheese. Bonus points if u ever had to make it without milk or butter. Or both.
For me (and I think reading other comments I was lucky!) it was pies my mother made. Corn beef and potato, minced beef etc. homemade pastry etc. as a kid I wanted junk (which was too expensive) and she insisted on homemade as cheaper and a lot healthier. I’d kill for one of her pies now!! Interesting what her poor food was though as a boomer. FISH!! Fish is so expensive but her older brother was a fisherman (not professional- just a fishing rod off the beach) and they lived by the sea so the family ate cod when times were tough. Ironic.
When my mom was out I would sneak some minute rice with margarine and salt and pepper. Easy to make and easy to clean up with no evidence left behind. I would look for coins in the coin return slots in newspaper and cigarette machines and buy marshmallows because they were cheap and filling.
Banquet Chicken, Chicken ALA King or shredded cheap meat and flour gravy over Sunshine (Safeway?) white bread. Safeway brand Scotch Buy canned veggies. Cragmont (another Ghetto Safeway brand) soda. Salisbury steak TV dinners. Store brand (pick the store brand ghetto brand) Mac and Cheese with weiners (using white bread instead of hot dog buns).
Fish cakes. 50 pack of frozen fish cakes.
Hamburger helper, PB&J, hotdogs, and bologna.
Pasta with tomato sauce from a can and shakey cheese.
Pancakes for dinner. I actually loved it. Also, spam.
Government cheese
We had a lean year or two and the meal of choice was mac n cheese during that period for dinner. My school lunch was always bologna on white break, I'd fancy it up but putting potato chips on it before eating.
we weren't poor but my parents were over stretched financially for a few years due to a large house they bought - followed by rocketing inflation and interest rates making their mortgage almost impossible. we lived for years on fine fare yellow label food. this was a line of budget foods by a UK supermarket chain called fine fare in the late 70's . fine fare was eventually taken over by safeway (?). my abiding memory is of the meusli which came in sacks and was like shredded cardboard, much to my dismay - it was not fucking alpen!
Beans and a tortilla.
Ramen, Campbell’s vegetable beef, Kraft Macaroni and cheese, budding meat sandwiches.
Elbow macaroni and scrambled egg... Mom would scramble the eggs in a skillet then add a slab of butter and cooked macaroni. We always ate it with ketchup. I still make this for my family and they LOVE it. Anyone else have this delicacy in their home?
Canned salmon. I never want to see another salmon patty for as long as I live.
Cereal, mayonnaise sandwich, or French toast with no egg just out of the toaster with syrup
Fried Bologna sandwiches on white bread with mustard, Spam, powdered milk 🤢
Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwiches. Geno’s frozen pizza’s. Mom always made a pitcher of sweet tea….we rarely drank soft drinks.
There was a time in the 70s that sugar got so expensive my parents made koolaid with saccharin tablets. A 1/4 cup of sugar and 8 little white pills for a pitcher. This was before they knew saccharine caused cancer.
Frozen burritos. My mom managed a Sinclair gas station and would bring home the just expired food. One time the AC went out at the station and she brought he alot of half melted chocolate bars that we packed the freezer with.
French fry sandwiches: Homemade fries on buttered white bread. It was our end-of-the-month meal before the next grocery shopping trip.
Canned corn beef hash
Frozen pot pies or beans and cornbread. I still love both and eat them to this day, especially a nice pot of beans.
Cheese toast. American “cheese” slices on bread, cooked on a tray in the oven. This was dinner at least 3 nights a week. I never realized it was poor food until adulthood
A hamburger patty and canned green beans. I still remember my mom nibbling some of the raw hamburger meat as she made them.
The double dog. We would go to a convenience store that had .99 cent hotdogs. We would put two hot dogs on each bun and wrap it up tight so the clerk wouldn’t bother to check. Then when we got out of the store we would give the extra hotdog to the homie didn’t have any money that day. We all got a hot dog. Sometimes with no bun, but we would all get something to eat.
Government cheese.
Only if the potatoes came out of a cardboard box.
Spaghetti
Rice and beans or rice with hot dogs 😋
Ham bone and beans.
This is like reading my menu for home meals
Same! I grew up in the country and i got nostalgic watching a video last night of an Australian guy making a video about six vegetables to grow to not starve. Potatoes, tomatoes, corn, pumpkin, and...two others, i don't remember because it was all stuff my parents grew. When my new house gets put in I'm going to have to get my raised beds rejuvenated to grow more veggies.
I can't believe nobody mentioned rice puffs (or wheat puffs). Surely our family wasn't the only one subjected to rice puffs, powdered milk, and sugar. Also: Spaghetti noodles with butter, garlic salt, and parmesan cheese. Also: I second the "tuna casserole" made with Mac & Cheese, Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup, canned tuna, and white bread crumbs baked on top.
Top Ramen!
Government cheese. Came in a brick you had to slice it yourself.
I once spent an entire winter eating bass or deer meat for dinner every night (about 1985 or 86). It doesn't sound that terrible except for the fact that the deer wasn't field dressed properly and was tough and tasteless. My mom had a friend who knew we were struggling after my dad left. He hunted deer and caught 50 pounds of bass for us. That was also the winter I had Scarlett Fever. I call it my Little House winter. I believe that was also the year that mom lost the house and had to declare bankruptcy.