Food

The Fourth of July is coming up, and that means hot dogs and hamburgers, so every year around the fourth of July, I buy a can of hot dogs (yes, hot dogs come in a can, or jar, over here; I have proof), and every year on the fifth of July I am disappointed. Yet I always do it, because food traditions are important, and this year it set off a nostalgia binge, dredging up memories of the Foods of Childhood. What follows is a brief list, roughly categorized, that shows what we used to eat back in the day.

Hot Dogs in a can. Told ya so.

This is, by no means, a comprehensive list, but I hope it gives you an inkling of what we had to put up with:

Early Foods

One of the first food I remember was a rectangular box (mostly blue in color) containing frozen fish. The brand name was Boston Bonny (though I can find no evidence of it now) and my sister and myself—the only two around at this time—used to call it Boston Boney, because of the many bones we had to pick out of it, and our teeth.

I also recall Lamb Chops in my early days (the tasty meat, not the adorable Shari Lewis puppet). I liked them a lot, but they disappeared very early on. I can only assume they were, at one time, plentiful and cheap, but then either became too expensive, or unavailable, or both.

Left: Shari and Lampchop. Right: Lamp Chops. Know the difference.

One of the things I recall from early on that stayed, and stayed, and stayed, was Carnation Powdered Milk: powder that you mix with water to make milk. It tasted just like it sounds. To be fair, Mom used to mix it with real milk, but it still tasted foul. I think it was supposed to save money, but she had a strange sense of thrift, as you will see in the following paragraphs.

Milk in a box. Just add water.

Minute Rice was another Just-Add-Water type of food, but it was mainly to save time. Never mind that it tasted nothing like real rice. Even as a kid I used to wonder why she was so fond of it. What was she going to do with the time she supposedly saved. She didn’t have a job; it’s not like she was wanted in surgery or anything.

Rice in a box. Just add water.

We also used margarine instead of butter. This was a cost-saving decision because we were impecunious. Thing is, it wasn’t that much cheaper than butter, and it tasted less like butter and more like the white library paste we used to eat during craft time at school. Come to think of it, the library paste was better.

This isn’t our library paste. That came in a big white jug,
but it’s sorta the same. Tasted good. Kinda minty.

At least the margarine generally looked like butter, in that it was yellowish. Raw margarine looks more like the aforementioned library paste because it has no color. In Mom’s day, she used to tell us, you had to break a dye capsule and knead it into the margarine to make it look more like butter, though it still tasted like paste.

Notice the handy Mixing Bag, and steps 3 and 4 where you
have to physically form it into a rectangular block.

SPAM. Really? SPAM? I put up with it as a kid because I had to. Then one day, as an adult, I thought that maybe my taste buds had matured, and that SPAM was really tasty. It isn’t.

Seriously, don’t.

Something else we did early on, as I only recall my sister and myself partaking of it—both the making and the eating—was Chef Boy-Ar-Dee’s Make-at-Home pizza. You mixed the dough powder with water, rolled out the base, poured the sauce on it, then sprinkled on the synthetic Parmesan cheese. It was tasty enough, like spaghetti sauce on cardboard.

If it looks small, it was. Made what would be
considered today a tiny pizza with inadequate toppings.

Dog Biscuits. You heard me right. We bought a particular brand of flavored dog biscuits for our various dogs, and very soon we learned that they were pretty tasty. There was liver (a brown wedge, which was better than the real thing), chicken (a yellow oval), vegetable (a green square), and some others. The green ones were the best, with a gritty, earthy taste. We’d eat them when we didn’t have any cookies available.

If it’s good enough for the dog…

Another recurring dish was liver, which Mom cooked until it had the consistency of shoe leather and, to me, tasted like mud. I hated it.

One of Mom’s specialties (which went into our later years, as I recall my brothers complaining about this, as well), was her version of Spanish Rice. This consisted of Minute Rice cooked up in her electric skillet, with cubes of SPAM cut into it and a can of Campbells Tomato Soup (not even a jar of spaghetti sauce) dumped in. There are several things to note about this: First, it was vile, and we all hated it. Secondly, we ate it, anyway, because the option was nothing. Thirdly, she made it in her electric skillet, for five of us (at least four of us kids, and herself), so there wouldn’t have been much to go around.

This is what Mom’s electric skillet looked like.
Not really big enough for a meal for five.

And, present before, during and after all this, was the bread: Sunbeam Batter Whipped. It was all we knew, so I didn’t realize that bread wasn’t supposed to stick to the roof of your mouth. It was, however, serviceable and versatile, becoming, as required, sandwich bread, a hamburger bun, or a hot dog roll.

Give us this day out daily Batter Whipped Sunbeam…

My school lunch, 1964 thru 1973.

Saturday night dinner. Chips optional.

Also makes a fine hot dog roll.

Before I go on, I need to point out that, in addition to all this, there were lots of vegetables. We ate our fair share of greens, and orange: broccoli, carrots, potatoes, cabbage, cauliflower, string beans, corn, spinach, peas, and more. Much of it was canned in the early days, or grown in our backyard, but later it came in frozen blocks.

Do It Yourself Food

During the early days, as well as the later years, Do-It-Yourself food was always part of our diet. We lived closer to the land back then and thought nothing of eating what we could find or grow ourselves.

Potatoes: Mom bought potatoes when she shopped, but we also lived next to a potato field, and we were welcome to glean the field after it had been harvested, so we always started the winter with a surfeit of spuds. Loved them then, love them now. A side note: the potatoes we gleaned, as well as the ones bought in the local supermarket, were a particular variety called Lindenwald, which are yellow inside. I was an adult before I realized potatoes were supposed to be white. (I just did an extensive Google search for Lindenwald Potatoes and found nothing, so I can’t actually prove that. You’ll have to trust me.)

Home Grown Stuff: In our back-back yard Mom had a big vegetable garden, where she grew squash, string beans, carrots, cauliflower, pumpkins and even corn. It didn’t provide everything we needed, or course, but it taught us where our food came from.

Rabbit: When we were little, Grandma gave us each a rabbit. Dad made two cages and put the three males in one and the two females in the other. Unfortunately, he wasn’t very good at sexing rabbits. Consequently, we started a rabbit raising business. Dad made cages with removable litter trays, feeders and watering jugs and, at the peak, we had about 200. We sold or gave away a lot of them as pets, but mainly we killed them and ate them. So, for about ten years, we had all the meat we wanted. As a bonus—in addition to, once again, teaching us where our food came from—I learned how to kill and skin a rabbit at a very young age.

Sometime in 1965: All five of us, with me holding a rabbit.
Maybe we ate it later, maybe we didn’t.

Raccoon: This came about when I was a teenager. A friend of Dad’s started trapping raccoons for their pelts. After he skinned them, he put the carcasses in the big freezer in Dad’s shop (where the rabbits were; I wonder if, when I went out to get a dinner, they breathed a sigh of relief when I opened the freezer instead of one of their cages).

As a courtesy for allowing him to do this, he told Dad he could take a carcass whenever he wanted. And so, for about five years, we had even more meat. Raccoon meat is tough and greasy, so Mom would boil it up, drain the water, then boil it again. This produced a stringy, beef-like meat that made great stews. We loved it.

Eat me? Really?

One time, Mom made raccoon stew for a church dinner, and the Pastor made her tell everyone it was beef stew. We all found that hilarious.

Squirrel: you shoot it, you eat it. Not bad, but not much meat.

Possum: This was an accident. Dad wanted to barbecue a raccoon, so he took the smallest one, marinated it, grilled it, and we ate it. It was good and had a lighter texture than usual. Then, when his friend next came over, he looked in the freezer and asked, “Where’s the possum I put in there?”

Kidney Stew: Mom used to make this for Dad; chopped up kidneys and potatoes, boiled up in a white sauce in a pot on the stove. It smelled like urinal cakes (used ones), but it tasted great.

Later Foods

As an older teenager, I don’t recall a lot of the food we ate because I was out a lot and, even if I was home, could make my own food. However, there were a few favorites that recurred during this time:

Fish cakes and tater tots: These were round, breadcrumb-crumb covered patties made of fish bits, along with nuggets of fried potato. Nothing special, but it got us through a Friday night.

Friday night dinner, early 1970s.

Chop Suey in a can: This was another thing we made ourselves, thought it was just a matter of combining the upper can, containing the sauce, and the lower can, containing the supposedly oriental vegetables, in a pot an heating it up on the stove. There was also a bag of egg noodles with it, and it could be augmented with Minute Rice. And, I remind you, this was dinner for at least five people.

Monday night dinner for five.

Better pizza, already made: As teenagers, we ate our fair share of frozen pizza (I mean, we were teenagers, come on). By the late 1960s and early 1970s you could get some good ones, and you didn’t have to make a second-rate, much smaller version from a box. By then we were eating more (though not necessarily more nutritious) food, which may explain why my bothers were both 5’8″ when they turned sixteen, while I was only 5’3″.

No more Spanish Rice on Wednesday; we have pizza!

Final Notes

• While this essay might leave you with the idea that Mom was not a very good cook, you would be correct in thinking that. However, she was a great baker, and I have as many good memories of the wonderful things she baked as I do traumatic episodes of the awful things I was forced to eat for dinner. Someday, I will write praises to her baking to balance this out.
• Mom using Minute Rice led me to believe that real rice was expensive and hard to make. When I grew up and began cooking for myself, I realized that rice is dirt cheap and dead easy to make, which again makes me wonder why she relied so much on Minute Rice.
• Likewise, Mom’s penchant for margarine left me thinking that butter was something only rich people could afford. As an adult, I discovered it is only a bit more expensive than margarine, and also——according to News Medical Net—better for you, as well.

So, what about you. I would love to hear about your fond memories (or horrific ordeals) of childhood dinners.