Ever looked into your great-grandma’s recipe box and been surprised? Although some contemporary chefs like to think that culinary creativity is new, food culture has always been diverse. Throughout the ages, people have eaten just about everything they could from the land, sea, and air.

10Fish Bladder Jelly

The Victorians gave the world many things: piano covers, huge advances in plumbing, and PBS dramas about people getting engaged and disinherited. But they were not known for their culinary advances. They used the bladder of the sturgeon fish to make a sweet jelly dessert.

The process involved isolating a substance called isinglass from the bladder. It was originally an ingredient in glue but gained popularity in England as a foodstuff in the late 18th century. It is still used to make some beers and wines, including Guinness beer.

Isinglass acts like gelatin or pectin to congeal liquid and make it thick. To make sugary jellies, Victorians boiled down filtered isinglass with water, sugar, lemon juice, and fruit. The time-consuming process took a lot of labor, but people have been known to do a lot more to satisfy a sweet tooth.

9Muktuk

For people living in the Arctic, the ocean is the source of most food. Traditionally, people fish year-round, with seasonal whale and seal hunts. Muktuk is a dish consisting of whale skin with the layer of blubber attached. The skin of the bowhead whale is considered the most delicious, next to the narwhal and the beluga. It can be eaten many different ways: salted, fresh, fried, or pickled. The flavor of the whale fat is described as nutty, with the skin a little rubbery.

The food played an important role in traditional diets, since muktuk contains a huge amount of vitamin C, which prevents illnesses like scurvy. Many Arctic cultures have their own traditions of eating muktuk, including aboriginal Greenlanders, Canadians, Siberians, and Alaskans. In recent years, the food has all but died out because of generational tastes changing and concerns about ocean toxins, which can be concentrated in marine life.

8Vinegar Pie

Everybody has heard that when life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade. But did you know that when life gives you vinegar, you can make pie?

Nobody knows exactly who first made a vinegar-flavored pie, or where, but it dates back to at least the mid-1800s and probably originated in the Deep South. People think that thrifty cooks first started to use apple cider vinegar as a flavoring because it was cheaper than fruit or lemon juice. Vinegar pie is nicknamed “the poor man’s lemon pie.” It is closely related to chess pie, which uses cornmeal as an ingredient.

American cooking features a huge variety of both sweet and savory pie. During the Great Depression, people combined crackers and lemon juice in their pies to make a filling that tasted like apple. In recent years, vinegar pie has experienced a comeback, and some restaurants serve upscale versions with flavored balsamic vinegars.

7Jell-O Salad

The ’50s craze for packaged convenience foods led to the popular gelatin salad, often served in an attractive mold. Although people have been encasing foods in gelatin or aspic since at least the 1600s, in the 1950s and 1960s, a Jell-O craze took this to new heights. Magazines published recipes for “congealed salads” with ingredients like shrimp, rutabaga, meats, and vegetables.

Packaged, powdered, and canned foods were making important technological advances. For the first time, people had mixes for foods that they had always made from scratch. The Jell-O salad was seen as a new and exciting way for families to eat their vegetables. One serving suggestion depicts a healthy (and horrifying) topping of mayonnaise.

At one point, the Jell-O company released tomato- and cucumber-flavored mixes, which didn’t last long on the market.

6Stuffed Dormice

You might think of a dormouse as a sleepy little hamster or a character in Alice in Wonderland, but to some people, they were actually food. In ancient Rome, dormice were roasted as a special delicacy. The Romans raised them in a special terra cotta jar called a glirarium.

In the wild, dormice hibernate for the entire winter. In the glirarium, which was kept dark, the dormice hibernated all year, which is how they were fattened. The jars had little staircases for the dormice, places for them to deposit food, and air holes.

When they were really fat, the dormice would be stuffed with nuts and roasted with honey and spices. Usually, they were served as an appetizer. Consuming dormice was eventually banned, but Romans still went on mouse hunts for dinner.

Today, wild dormice are still hunted and eaten in some parts of Slovenia and Croatia and considered a delicacy.

5Roasted Heron

One of the first cookbooks published in English was written around 1390 and was called The Forme of Cury. “Cury” was an old English word for cooking. It has a lot of variety in its 196 recipes, some for familiar things like white cake and chicken, and also for seals, porpoises, whales, cranes and . . . herons.

Nobody knows for sure who wrote the cookbook, but given the wide variety of rare, rich ingredients, people think it was the royal retinue of cooks. A little like reality show contestants, they worked with whatever fish or fowl was brought to them, trying to make food as good as possible for the king’s table. The cookbook is notable for being the first English cookbook to incorporate techniques from other cultures, essentially inventing fusion cooking.

An adult heron only weighs about 2 kilograms (5 lb), so you would need quite a few to make a whole royal feast. The Forme of Cury cookbook advises you to pluck and roast the heron whole, wrapped in bacon and ginger.

4Black Iguana Eggs

It’s a safe bet that when you think of the source of an edible egg, you think of something with feathers. However, you wouldn’t be wrong if you named a reptile. The leathery, rough exterior of the black iguana’s egg makes it seem inedible to most people, but in the Mayan culture, iguanas were farmed for their rich, all-yolk eggs.

The first Europeans to make contact with the Maya described their eating habits as being like Lent, as they ate so little meat. The Maya domesticated plants, bees, and insects but had no large mammals for protein sources.

The black iguana spends less time in the water than the green iguana, and it is possible to keep one alive for a long time without food or water, which made them an ideal provision for the trip back home. Today, hunting and farming iguanas is illegal in many parts of Central and South America, so the taste of the black iguana egg will probably stay in the past.

3The Toast Sandwich

Although not one of the grossest items on this list, the toast sandwich deserves a mention for sheer weirdness.

As everyone knows, the Earl of Sandwich’s gambling problem and subsequent need for one-handed food created the original sandwich. In 1861, Miss Beeton’s Book of Household Management was published, featuring a recipe for the toast sandwich. Like the name suggests, it is made of a buttered slice of toast with salt and pepper placed between two slices of untoasted bread. Variations include adding eggs, beans, sardines, or carrots. The toast sandwich is associated with snacking or breakfast, although some people eat it for lunch or dinner.

The cookbook remains one of the most popular cookbooks ever sold and is still in print today, toast sandwich included. In 2011, Britain’s Royal Society of Chemistry hosted a toast sandwich banquet and named the dish “Britain’s Cheapest Meal,” a title that it still holds.

2Ambergris

In ancient China, chunks of ambergris found washed up on shores were believed to be dragon saliva. Ambergris actually comes from whales—the other end of whales. This mixture of fat and bile forms when whales try to digest hard, difficult substances (such as squid beaks). It passes through the whale, a little like a gallstone might. As it floats on the ocean’s surface, the ambergris becomes hard and waxy.

The powerful, musky scent of ambergris makes it a key ingredient in many perfumes, including the famous Chanel No. 5. In the past, ambergris was eaten in many different traditions. In ancient Persia, it was served with lemon sherbet. The French put it in hot chocolate, and some people claim that Casanova used it as an aphrodisiac.

With the decline of sperm whale populations, ambergris is rare today and is even illegal in America. But if you can get your hands on some, devotees say that the flavor is unforgettable.

1So

This dish is a rarity from Japanese cuisine. It’s a dairy specialty. In fact, so is the only dairy dish known to Japanese history. So was produced between the eighth and the 14th centuries in Japan, mostly for people in the noble classes. It was made by boiling down milk until it became a semisolid paste-like substance. For the noble classes in Japan, it was a status symbol and not a staple for nourishment.

It was originally dreamed up as a way to preserve milk so it would last longer in the days before refrigerators and pasteurization. Records show how it was produced but not how it tasted. It probably tasted a little like yogurt but extremely concentrated, thin, and sour.

Historically in Japan, cattle were raised for plowing or pulling carts, never for meat and milk. With the dying out of the aristocracy, so died out, too.

Jules Reich writes about food at AwayWithFood.com.

It has been said that “the past is a foreign country”. When we consider some of the dietary proclivities of the 19th century, however, the past starts to seem more like an alien planet. In this list we’ll explore the sad, the bad and the vomit-inducingly vile foods the Victorians used to eat.

If we get beyond the cringing “ickfactor” of some of these quintessentially Victorian dishes (fear not, we will certainly concentrate on that too – there are plenty of entries that will make your modern palette want to curl up and die), we also find a fascinating relationship with food in the 19th century. At the intersection between nutrition and culture, we can observe the clash between the old world and the modern. This is certainly evident in some of the stranger tendencies and dishes of the age.

That’s where the horror lies – these foods tell us of the lives lived, social conditions and mores. Sometimes it was downright horrific.

Top 10 Disgusting Foods The Chinese Eat

10The Poor Diet Of The Urban Poor

Less fortunate members of society had it rough in the Victorian era, often going hungry.

Uh-huh. So what’s new?

Well, in the prior centuries, England’s lowest classes had a feast-or-famine existence – they either had bread, cheese and meat or they didn’t. In the Victorian era, things weren’t quite as clear cut. Industrialisation had all but ensured a steady level of food production, making famine (in England, at least) a thing of the past.

Individual cases of starvation, however, were not dispelled. The cost of food was high, even the burgeoning middle class had to fork out around 50% of their income on food. For the poorest families it was a life of potato peelings, animal fat on low-quality bread, rotten veg and the stringiest offcuts of meat, if that. This stunted growth and contributed to considerably lower life expectancy for the urban poor. Add in a nice dose of food adulteration scandals, no or low safety precautions and a population boom and you have a recipe for disaster (pun very much intended).

But they did drink tea – this was England, after all.

9Delicacy Fit For A Zombie

Whether it’s at a fast-food restaurant, from a back yard barbecue grill or wagyu patties served slathered in wasabi mayo, gold leaf and shaved truffles at a fancy (poser) restaurant, everyone loves a good burger. Some things don’t change—if you were a Victorian housewife wanting to put on a bit of a ‘do’, you could make some ‘braincakes’ – burger-like fried meat patties… made with brains.

This recipe comes from ‘Modern Cookery for Private Families’ by Eliza Acton, the most Victorian-sounding lady of her age:

“Wash and soak the brains well in cold water, and afterwards in hot; free them from the skin and large fibres, and boil them in water, slightly salted, from two to three minutes. You then mash the brains with some seasonings and egg yolks and fry in butter. The recipe finishes by adding “A teaspoonful of flour and a little lemon-grate are sometimes added”.

Yes, that lemon zest will make all the difference – prion diseases are commonly cured by lemon, every doctor knows that…

8Gruel? Try Stirabout

Orphans, workhouse inhabitants or ball-and-chain dragging prisoners, all forced to eat gruel; this is the image of hard times in the Victorian era. Thanks, Dickens!

This is a misconception. The diet of these poor, unfortunate souls was actually quite sustaining, especially compared to the nutrient deficient diet of the working poor. They also had a (slightly) more varied diet – wholegrain bread, small beer, even fish and dairy from time to time (as pictured).

This doesn’t mean they always enjoyed their fare whilst institutionalised—gruel was plain, but downright fancy compared to the hated ‘Stirabout’ – gruel’s tasteless, grim, weirdo cousin. Sure, if you couple a daily ration of watery mush made from cornmeal, oatmeal and salt with a long day of physical labour, you’ll leave the institution with a lean physique, washboard abs and triceps that bulge like baby heads. But your taste buds will be shrivelled-up husks on a desertscape of a tongue.

7Ass Milk

If we get to drink the pale mammary drippings of cows, goats and, erm, soybeans, then why not donkey milk? In fact, there isn’t much wrong with donkey milk, per se. It’s becoming a bit of a fad foodstuff again, used as both a healthy alternative to regular milk and in the making of upscale cosmetics. In fact, donkey milk has been used by various cultures since ancient times. So how has it made its way onto a list of horrific foods? Get ready for a disturbing mental picture…

The Victorian age had a lot of orphaned babies. In France, motherless infants were often neglected, dying at an alarmingly high rate. One man who identified this issue was Dr. Parrot of the ‘Hospital des Enfents Assistés’ in France. He proposed killing two birds with one stone – combatting the lack of motherly contact and the nutritional deficiencies in orphaned babies. Genius!

Parrot would take babies directly to a donkey and allow them to suckle directly from the beast’s teat. Jeez.

Donkey milk was used all over Europe for ailing patients, the elderly and babies well into the twentieth century. Allowing babies to suck on donkey nips (thankfully) never quite caught on.

6Love In Disguise

Paul Simon’s classic song ‘Mother and Child Reunion” took its title from a dish that Simon had seen on the menu at a Chinese restaurant. It was a dish that included chicken and egg; hence the mother was reunited with her child. If you find this name a little distasteful, wait until you realise what lies behind the fun wordplay of the Victorian dish ‘Love in Disguise’.

This “pretty side dish” is to be found in ‘The Complete Economical Cook, and Frugal Housewife’ written by Mary Holland, 1837. It comprises of a ‘stuffed’ calf’s heart (cleaned well) encased with forcemeat (pureed lean meat, like the inside of a sausage) and rolled in in crushed vermicelli noodles. You then pop it in the oven in a dish filled with a little water. Once a nice heart-juice liquor has formed, you serve. One question remains…

‘Stuffed’ with what?

5No, This Is Food, We Swear!

To an American, a biscuit is a soft, puffy dough-bed upon which some satiny gravy can rest. To an Englishman, they are crunchy, sweet little buggers that are best dunked in tea before eaten. To a Victorian-era seaman, they were perdition incarnate—indestructibly hard, plain-as-all-hell dullcakes.

Ship’s biscuits, or hardtack, were a staple aboard English ships from as far back as the Tudor period. They became a ubiquitous mainstay in the gallies of the quickly professionalising Victorian-era Royal Navy; valued for their caloric density, ease of mass production and ensuring morale remained low. Ok, not the last one, but that was an unfortunate outcome of months and years eating these bricks.

But, at least the seamen could expect a little extra protein from consuming ship’s biscuits – the lack of modern storage technologies guaranteed weevil infestation. These bugs added some much-needed texture and a refreshingly bitter flavour to the otherwise dull biscuits. Or it convinced sailors that drowning might not be so bad.

It took until the end of the 19th century for experts to work out a solution for such infestations – the biscuit tin!

4Chaudfroid Delights

The term ‘Chaudfroid’ (hot-cold) is a term within French cuisine that denotes a dish/sauce made hot but served cold.

Using gelatin or aspic. Of course.

Given some of the creations and concoctions from this era, it seems a little more schadenfreude that chaudfroid. Famed gastronaut Monsieur Antonin-Carême brings us this classic French sauce, one that will send a shiver down your spine. Here’s a modernised recipe:

“Remove the skin of the chicken and set it to cool in the strained cooking liquid. Soak 3 gelatin leaves in cold water until soft. Plunge half a bunch of tarragon in the cooking liquid and reduce it to 40 cl (12/3 c). Add the gelatin to dissolve it. Stir in 30 cl (11/4 c) of cream, 1 egg yolk, and the juice of half a lemon. Spread out a thin layer of the sauce over a plate. Put it in the refrigerator to see if it jells. Cut the chicken into eight pieces. Bone the thighs. Dip the pieces of chicken, one by one, in cooled sauce, then drain them on a rack placed over aluminum foil. Place them in the refrigerator for 30 minutes. Cover the chicken pieces a second time followed by a third layer of sauce chaud-froid, while allowing the coating to jell between each coating. Decorate with pine nuts and some tarragon leaves. Set aside for 5 or 6 hours. Serve with a salad of very fine French beans or a salad of well-seasoned purslane.”

If you think that cold, jelly sauce chicken is shudder-inducing, why not try ‘turbot chaudfroid’? Cold, jellied fish—what are you, a cockney?

3A Big Plate Of Burlington Whimsey

What a delightfully quaint name for a dish! This is perhaps the quintessential example of the Victorian proclivity of giving the grossest dishes the prettiest names.

“Set aside until quite cold half a calf’s head dressed by the preceding receipt. If, on cutting it, the gelatinous part should not appear perfectly tender, pare it off closely from the head, weigh and mince it; put it into a pint of good gravy, and stew it gently from ten to fifteen minutes. Mince as much more of the head as will make up a pound in weight after the edges are trimmed of, and part of the fat is taken away” Then you add some spices and a little grated ham…using your trusty ham grater.

The recipe continues by adding “slices of the tongue have been evenly arranged, and when quite cold it will turn out very firmly. It may be garnished, before it is sent to table, with branches of parsley, which should, however, be perfectly dry; and when served for supper or luncheon, it may be accompanied by a salad dressing”.

2Frontier Foods

Some foods that were once consumed at the edges of the increasingly colonized world were a bit gross, even if they tasted OK – ‘pemmican’, we’re looking at you; dried reindeer meat with rendered fat and foraged berries, anyone? It actually tastes pretty good.

At the fringes of the various 19th century empires, dealing with foraged food was often best left to those who’d lived in such places for eons. Want to try those purple berries, weary explorer? Get ready for it to “taste like burning”. Painful death by poison resulted from a simple lack of knowledge (or wisdom). Your fancy maps, elephant guns and handlebar mustaches won’t keep you from a death by ignorance, suh.

Take the ill-fated expedition of Burke and Wills from 1860-61. On their return from a cross-country expedition in Australia, the men found themselves out of food. Local Yandruwandha people tried to help the party, preparing them some ‘cakes’ made from the seed pods of a fern called nardoo. After some time, Burke had a sudden fit of ‘Victorian-gentlemanly-rage-at-the-indigenous’, a common condition back then, and drove off the party’s would-be saviours. When the men tried to make their own nardoo cakes as they trudged onwards, they neglected to do one thing – know what the hell they were doing. The cakes were improperly cooked, thus failing to remove the deadly enzymes in the way the aboriginal tribes did. Wills and Burke soon died, their bellies full, but starved to death. Another man in their party, a Mr. King, was the only one to survive. How? By returning to the Yandruwandha, who did know what the hell they were doing.

1All The Little Birdies

For an era when many kids were expected to go down the mines or up the chimneys, one can imagine that there was no such thing as a ‘childhood’ in the Victorian age. How wrong you are!

In fact, rural sprogs were free to enjoy nature’s bounty. But this was not so much the ‘picking blackberries with grandmama’ type of fun. Queen Victoria’s chief cook, Charles Francatelli, noted how young boys would entertain themselves in rural England back in 1852:

“Industrious and intelligent boys who live in the country, are mostly well up in the cunning art of catching small birds … pluck them free from feathers, cut off their heads and claws, and pick out their gizzards from their sides with the point of a small knife, and then hand the birds over to your mother, fried in butter then encased in suet and boiled”.

This is less “Tom Brown’s School Days” and more Chairman Mao’s ‘Four Pests Campaign’, with added knife-wielding toddlers.

Top 10 Disgusting Foods Westerners Eat

About The Author: CJ Phillips is a storyteller, actor and writer living in rural West wales. He is a little obsessed with lists.

The Great Depression lasted in the United States from 1929 to 1933. Many people lost their money during that time due to Wall Street’s stock market crash. The economy slowed down, and jobs dried up. Many people had a hard time scraping money together to feed their families. Soup kitchens sprung up across the country to ensure that those out of work got at least one meal daily.

People learned to make do with what little they had, which often meant planting gardens, raising chickens, and keeping cows; men took to the woods and hunted wild game or fished. Creativity was a necessity for many parents who had children to feed. New recipes were concocted, and foods that people didn’t consider eating were now consumed without question. Food scarcity was real, and some people who lived through the Depression never overcame the fear of going to bed hungry.

As hard as times were, here are ten weird foods people ate during the Great Depression.

10 Roadkill

“How flat is it?” and “How fresh is it?” These were the two main questions asked when handed roadkill.

We’ve all been speeding down the highway when we happened upon a dead animal in the ditch or on the side of the road. Normally, the animal patrol sends out someone to pick up the dead critter so it can be disposed of properly. Though there are some people today who think this is a waste of perfectly good food.

During the Great Depression, nothing went to waste. Not even roadkill. Rabbit, opossum, squirrel, raccoons, deer, bear, moose, elk, and pheasants are some of the meat collected from roadsides and delivered to a kitchen to be turned into cuisine.

A well-known recipe, Brunswick stew, was made with squirrel and rabbit and was all the more flavorful if the roadkill had been “aged.” The working premise for many who cooked up meals using roadkill was, “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” As long as the meat was still fresh and nutritious, people didn’t care where it came from. If it kept hunger at bay for another day, then it was considered good cooking.

9 Snapping Turtle Soup

Tasting like a combination of pork, clams, and chicken thighs, no snapping turtle was safe during the Great Depression. Snapping turtles are cold-blooded reptiles and a cousin to lizards, snakes, and alligators. On average, they weigh 10 to 36 pounds (4.5 to 13.5 kilograms) each. Capturing a snapping turtle is not for the faint of heart. They hiss like a cat if you get too close, and their jaws can easily bite off a finger. Folklore claims that the head can still bite you even after a snapping turtle is beheaded.

While that may or may not be true, turtles were easily acquired in the spring during mating season when they were on the move and were sometimes seen crossing roads. Being out of their natural water environment made it much easier to catch. To catch one of the hard-shelled creatures, a particularly brave soul would go so far as to get behind a snapping turtle and pick it up by its tail, capturing it to become a meal.

Turtle soup is essentially a vegetable stew with turtle meat instead of beef or chicken. To make the soup, the turtle meat simmers in a water bath with celery, onion, and carrots. When ready, the turtle, with the shell still attached, is lifted from the pot, and the meat is picked off the carcass. Eating turtle soup was a way to survive during the Great Depression. Today it’s considered a delicacy.

8 Coffee Soup

The Amish have been known for their plain and simple meals. Always frugal, they had to be even more so during the Great Depression as it hit them particularly hard during this challenging time in America’s history. So coffee soup was a common breakfast meal, and it’s a little more complex than the extra hot venti latte you’re sipping on now.

Coffee soup was made by placing bite-size pieces of dry or hard bread in the bottom of a bowl. Next, brewed coffee was poured over the bread, followed by sugar and cream or milk, which turned the whole thing into a gruel. Coffee soup was warm to fill stomachs with, and a load of carbohydrates and sugar provided energy for the hard day’s work ahead.

7 Vinegar Pie

Vinegar Pie, also known as Desperation Pie, was a standard during the Great Depression. With vinegar pie, apple cider vinegar is substituted for lemon, which during the Depression would’ve been too expensive for many households. Vinegar pie ingredients are basic: eggs, sugar, flour, and apple cider vinegar.

Although the pie’s name is slightly repugnant, it’s actually pretty tasty with a custard-like texture and sweet and tangy flavor. With a pantry filled with the most basic ingredients, vinegar pie was an easy option when there was little money for treats. We should all be taking some notes on these recipes right about now.

6 Jello Ice-Cream

Desserts were rationed during the Depression. Ice cream wasn’t plentiful. If homemakers had to choose between bread or meat and ice cream, they would spend their money on nutritional food. For mothers, Jello ice cream was an easy, no-churn way to give their families a treat. If a family lived in the country, chances are the family owned their own milking cow leaving only a packet of Jello to be purchased at the store and some vanilla rifled from the cupboards.

The raspberry Jello was dissolved in boiling water, and then sugar, milk, and vanilla were added. Finally, a cup of heavy cream was whipped until it formed stiff peaks. The whipped cream was folded into the Jello mixture. The entire concoction was put in the freezer to set up. This poor man’s ice cream couldn’t compete with store-bought ice cream, but kids didn’t care. It was sweet and tasty and a real cheap treat for cash-strapped households.

5 Dandelion Greens Salad

They say there are no free meals in life, but sometimes, with a little ingenuity, there are. The French are famous for foraging wild, fresh greens. Depression-era homemakers took a page from French cuisine when they started keeping a close eye on their yards after a long winter. One of the early springtime weeds to sprout and pepper lawns with their yellow flowers is the dandelion.

These days, in many parts of the country, lawns are sprayed with weed killers to eliminate this nuisance plant. But many people don’t know that if you pick the leaves of dandelions when they are young and tender, you can create a salad with them. And it’s free.

Depression-era homemakers waited expectantly for dandelions to start popping up out of the ground. The tender leaves were picked in early spring, washed, and made into a nutritious salad. Hard-boiled eggs and bacon bits were often added to the greens. The leftover bacon grease was combined with vinegar to make a dressing. Salt and pepper and voila!

4 Garbage Plate

No, this dish doesn’t refer to dumpster diving. During the Depression, a lot of manual labor was performed, and workers needed fuel to keep working hard. What better dish to fuel a body than a carbohydrate-loaded garbage plate?!

Garbage plates were built from whatever the cook had on hand. For instance, a giant scoop of macaroni salad was slung onto a plate. Then a scoop or two of baked beans. On top of that were some fried potatoes. And on top of all that, a fried hot dog or two. Or maybe fried bologna. To all that was added mustard, chopped onions, or ketchup. Maybe some chili. Whatever was on hand, really.

After eating a garbage plate, a man was fueled up and ready to put in another four or six hours on the job.

3 Onion Stuffed with Peanut Butter

Many people had their own gardens during the Great Depression. Onions were a common vegetable because they were easy to grow and store over the winter months. So, they were essentially free, and peanut butter was cheap. The idea of combining peanut butter and onion makes my brow furl, but the combination was a winner. Plus easy to prepare.

The cook hollowed out the center of each onion and saved the scooped-out onions for other dishes (nothing was wasted). Then peanut butter was mixed with bread crumbs made from stale bread. The bread crumb and peanut butter mixture was then spooned into each hollowed-out onion. After roasting in the oven for an hour, the onion came out flavorful and sweet, while the bread crumbs in the peanut butter stayed crisp and crunchy. These were served as dinner dishes, desserts, breakfasts—heck, just about any meal.

Nothing says ingenuity like making do with very little on hand.

2 Popcorn with Milk

Popcorn was one of those affordable rare foods during the Great Depression. Instead of pouring melted butter over their popcorn, some people poured milk over it and ate it as their main meal. And we’re not talking about eating it as breakfast cereal. No, popcorn with milk was eaten as a dinnertime main course. It turned into another form of gruel, but the dish offered nutrition and kept hunger pangs at bay. There were instances where sugar was sprinkled onto the milk-coated popcorn.

Hmmm… sounds a bit like the forerunner to today’s sugary breakfast cereals, doesn’t it? Give this depression-era combo a try. Maybe you’ll make it an integral part of movie night at your house.

1 Corned Beef Luncheon Salad

Nutrition over taste was the golden rule when food got scarce during the Depression, and money was hard to come by. Food not only had to be cheap, but it had to be filling. Corned beef luncheon salad was made by combining a can of corned beef, a can of corn, and a can of peas. Added to that were plain gelatin, lemon juice, and vinegar. It was poured into a Jello mold or a large bowl and put in the refrigerator until the gelatin was set.

Just reading the combination of ingredients triggers your jaw to clench shut and refuse to open. But then again, if you were a kid who grew up on this dish, maybe all these years later, it brings back a sense of nostalgia for a hard time when families had to pull together and make do with what little they had.

The Great Depression turned out to be a cauldron for great experiments with food today known as “Depression-Era Cuisine,” which amazingly is making a comeback.