What was cooking like in the 1940s?

Answer 1

First Answer:In the 1940's, cooking was very different than how it is today. people would often eat such foods as baked plums, frozen corn, carrots, pigeons, and bananas. The most common way to cook your food was by frying in grease and then freezing it overnight. Better Answer:In the 1940s, cooking was very much the same as it is today. Meat, poultry and fish were commonly served as entrees, with vegetables (fresh or canned), rice or potatoes on the side. Fresh fruit was popular, when in season, and canned fruit when it was not. Prepackaged frozen vegetables were available, but not as popular as they are today. Many cooks, particularly in areas with good farmer's markets, would purchase fresh beans and peas in large quantities, when in season, and blanch and freeze them at home. Cooking methods were the same as today: roasting, braising, grilling, poaching, boiling or frying. The primary differences between then and now: TV dinners had not been invented, nor were there any microwave ovens.

Answer 2

They ate a lot of what they had. Like on farms they ate a lot of the animals they had. My grandma told me once that when she was a kid this chicken escaped from someones place and was over in her yard and it was roosting all day and finally it got up in a tree to rest and her mom went out to catch it because they were so poor that is all they could get to eat. From another writer in Georgia: They spent far more time cooking than we do now, and preparation was lengthy, because just about everything had to be prepared for cooking, and then was cooked "from scratch." Many people had gas or electric stoves, but lower income people were still cooking on wood-fired or coal-fired stoves, which made it hard to control temperatures. People were still doing a lot of home canning and making jellies, jams and preserves themselves. Many people still had ice boxes, but refrigerators were heading toward being the norm. They were half the size of the ones we have now, and had no freezers other than a small space to hold a couple of ice cube trays. There were still a lot of backyard gardens. In my childhood (which was in the 40s in the south) we had what is now generally called "soul food" -- turnip and collard greens, field peas of different sorts, sweet potatoes and what we called "Irish"potatoes (just a name for the white ones). These all came from the garden. The potatoes were stored outdoors in a "potato hill" and had to be dug out. The onions were kept year round on screens under the house. My grandmother raised chickens, and thus we had both eggs for general cooking purposes and chicken for meals. I doubt many cooks today would go through the work required to get from a live chicken to fried chicken. I know I wouldn't, and it's no accident that Col. Sanders got rich. Pork was usually a treat when my grandmother's farmer brothers had a "hog killin'" We had baking powder biscuits and corn bread (often "hoe cake".) The only yeast bread we had was "store bread." My mother, who was from the north and had some creative cooking skill, did introduce new foods. She bought stew beef and ground it in a meat grinder to make Hamburgers, ground beef dishes like chili, Spanish rice with meat and spaghetti sauce. She also made mayonnaise from scratch, which was pretty horrible. The chicken pie we had was stewed pieces of chicken (bones still in) laid out in a baking pan. Hot white sauce or gray was then poured over the chicken. Eggs were broken carefully into the sauce all around the chicken pieces, and the whole thing was topped with biscuit dough and baked in a hot oven. My grandmother also made something called a "blackberry buckle" in blackberry season. This was biscuit dough (we lived on biscuit dough) rolled out and covered with sweetened blackberries and butter -- then rolled up like a jelly roll and baked. It was served with cream. "Salad" in most households did not mean a green tossed salad. It meant chicken salad, grated carrot salad, Waldorf salad, or "congealed salad" made with Jell-O. We had cole slaw mainly with picnic foods. The first salads I remember that involved lettuce was a wedge of iceberg lettuce with a thousand island type dressing made with ketchup, mayonnaise and pickle relish. A big memory of mine is margarine, which was white, and had small packets of food coloring to make it yellow. One of my jobs was to mash the food coloring into the margarine until it was evenly yellow. We had Campbell's soup back then, Jell-O, Kool-Aid, Cheerios, and other foods still on the shelves. We had canned vegetables at times -- particularly canned green peas (which I hate to this day). It may be my childhood perspective, but I believe that all cakes were better then. My mother a standing mixer and made a simple from-scratch yellow cake which was always good. Huge amounts of work went into some cakes -- like coconut cake made with fresh grated coconut or seven-layer cakes. We occasionally had fudge made from scratch or Divinity. Conveniences like sticks of pie crust (you added water) and cake mixes were just arriving on the scene in the late 40s. We had very little variety in cheese -- which may have been a regional thing. Basically, it was all what was called "rat cheese" -- a sharp waxy cheddar. I don't believe there was a cookbook in my house -- and the older cooks took a very superior attitude when more young women were using cookbooks, clipping recipes, and trying convenience items. Older members of my family even scoffed at the use of self-rising flour, and I remember my mother-in-law (in the sixties) hiding cake mixes so that her family wouldn't see she was using a mix. In other words, there was a lot of pride involved in one's cooking skill. (Or sometimes in the skill of one's hired cook.) Not to get nostalgic, I am 70 and much prefer today's options. Much of the food I grew up eating was oversalted and overcooked. Until I was grown, my assumption was that all vegetables tasted the same -- i.e. like bacon fat and salt. Some of the soul food vegetables needed that long slow cooking, but my mother would also overcook cabbage and cauliflower, green peas, spinach and other veggies that need a shorter cooking or steaming. Most meat was fried or stewed. The foods I still enjoy and eat that I ate as a child are: black eyed peas on rice (hoppin' john), collard greens (I use frozen) and cornbread. I also love fried chicken but do not eat it, and am well aware that all the fried and oversalted foods we had probably led to high blood pressure and heart attacks. Lard, which few people would think of cooking with today, was a kitchen mainstay, and salt pork was the seasoning of choice.