Cooking & Baking
In reply to the discussion: Remembering the food of my childhood [View all]Retrograde
(10,130 posts)Last edited Sat Jan 4, 2020, 05:32 PM - Edit history (1)
lemon juice out of little plastic lemons. Most vegetables were canned as well. Spices and seasonings other than salt and canned black pepper hadn't been invented yet. I remember canned hams, although my grandmother used to prepare real ones with the bones and all: she was a good cook, unlike my mother, who thought convenience foods were the thing. For special occasions she would make steaks: thin cuts of meat placed under the broiler until they were the color and consistency of shoe leather. Hamburger Helper was her favorite: she was so surprised that I didn't have any on hand when she visited that she sent me several boxes.
Living in western New York we did have access to good local cherries, strawberries, apples, and corn in season. Otherwise it was canned green beans, iceberg lettuce, and pale, hard tomatoes in the winter. I saw my first eggplant after I moved out in the early 70s, and never even heard of avocados (except as a color) until I moved to California in the mid 1970s - I would take my parents grocery shopping when they visited and they couldn't identify a lot of the fresh fruits and vegetables.
OTOH, fast food was a special treat, as was eating out. Soft drinks were reserved for weekends: we drank milk or water with meals. And if you knew where to shop there were great sausages and other meats available, along with live poultry (my next door neighbors used to buy live chickens early in the week, let them run around for a few days, then have them for Sunday dinner). And there were daily deliveries of milk and cottage cheese (essential for Lent) as well as bread.
ETA: I had forgotten about the canned Chef Boyardee ravioli and spaghetti. It was years after I left home and was living on the other side of the country that I had ravioli that didn't come out of a can - and I liked it!