My husband and I occasionally grocery shop together now. I used to think that was something only dorky newlyweds did, but that premise was a trick by my husband to get out of helping me shovel two carts of groceries into our house every week. Back when our kids were young, if he were to get entrenched in grocery shopping, we would have invested in a fork lift and just put the pallets from Sam’s Club right into our garage.
For the most part, grocery shopping was my job and I did it without complaint for many years. But now he sometimes comes along and helps by getting the wine while I start in the Meat and Expensive Cheese sections. Then he picks up hummus and pita chips while I do Aisles 2-9. He’s back to the wine aisle because “it’ll keep.” Who are we kidding? It won’t make it to Thursday. And then we meet up in Canned Goods and Processed Formerly Living Things, and move on to Produce, where I complain about how hard it is to get through the aisles and how the overpriced Organic Produce is deceivingly mixed in with the regular priced stuff. And my husband stands by the bagged lettuce and goes on Facebook and texts me “Are u almost done.”
A couple weeks ago, he took a picture of a can of Spam and it got me to thinking about how weird it is that Spam is even still sold. Why are people still eating the food that was invented to feed soldiers in the Napoleonic Wars and scare little girls at church camp with foreshadowing of all that sucks about being an adult?
I got to thinking about all this food from the 1960s that I grew up with. What happened to all of it? So I decided to re-create some of the foods my mom made us when I was growing up in the ’60s.
My mom’s recipes are freaking awesome
For one thing, they are full of oleo and organ meats and yeast that comes in blocks. To make some of these recipes today, you’d have to substitute and adapt a lot. Also you’d have to go to a couple of flea markets to get the equipment.
My mom kept recipes in so many different formats. She had a small tin index card box. She had a big purple plastic envelope-type folder. She had a box. She had a buttload of cookbooks with other recipes tucked randomly in pages. When my mom died, my four siblings and I divided up her recipes. The promise was that we would each scan what we took and share with all. But we haven’t gotten around to that and no one is surprised. But it’s OK. It’s enough that I have hundreds of recipes from my mom, some in her handwriting, and some in the recognizable handwriting of my sisters, my aunts, and my mom’s friends Betty Page, Betty Hanrahan, Betty Walker and Margie Pishkur. I’m proud to say that I can recognize the penmanship of the Bettys and Margie and I could probably guess which recipes were each of theirs without looking.
I learned that my generation didn’t invent every single trendy food. No we did not. I found a pamphlet touting the benefits of Portobello mushrooms from 1968.
Portobellos – What a Good Idea.
Portopizzas – What a Good Idea.
Portoburgers – Another good idea.
They may have been ahead of their time in making a delicious casual supper for teens using gourmet mushrooms, but they hadn’t yet invented the use of the exclamation point in marketing.
I didn’t have a lot of luck finding my mom’s original recipes for the staples that made up an average dinner at the Laney house in the ’60s. No matter. I wasn’t going to find a lot of the ingredients anyway.
Shopping for liverwurst is an embarrassment
Maybe it’s because I live in California. Or maybe it’s that I live in the world in the 21st century. But I could find very little of my mom’s go-to meals from way back when.
There was no liverwurst. I asked. I got a blank stare. I didn’t ask again. (Although the same stock boy gave me the same blank stare when I asked if Snapple was with juices or soft drinks.) There was no liver. TV dinners, which we thought were very forward thinking, ended up to be not so futuristic after all. There was no sign of them. I also couldn’t find buttermilk.
I couldn’t find “hot spaghetti,” the boxed Kraft spaghetti & seasoning that we gobbled up like there was no tomorrow. Its official name was Zesty Spaghetti, I believe. It was spaghetti cut in half, with an unopenable envelope of spices (seriously, you needed a machete to open the thing), which you were instructed to mix with a can of tomato paste and water. It was spicy hot and good. It was even better the next day, heated over in a frying pan in a stick of butter.
I did find Carnation Instant Breakfast, but it’s now called Breakfast Essentials. At $8, I wasn’t about to buy a whole box on the off chance it was still palatable. I bought what I could and set aside a week to make some of my old favorites.
My report on the cooking of the ’60s food
To: People of 2015
From: Diane, child of the ’60s
Re: I made a bunch of food from the 1960s and here’s what happened
Sardine sandwiches: The week I cooked the ’60s food, my handyman, Window Jason, was working on some things in my house. On the first day, I know he smelled sardines, since that was the day I made sardine and mayonnaise sandwiches on white bread, a family favorite until my sister got sent home from school with sardine breath. Jason didn’t say anything, but he’s a classy guy.
The sardine sandwiches were not bad. What struck me was the skimpiness of it all. That little tin only held 5 1/2 sardines. I swear my mom made lunch for 5 kids with a tin of sardines, a loaf of Schwebels and a cup of mayonnaise. What we were having weren’t really sardine sandwiches. They were more mayonnaise sandwiches with a sardine garnish.
Fish sticks: The second day I’m pretty sure Window Jason smelled the fish sticks I had in the oven. So the guy who used to think of me as someone who hung out with the Obamas (thanks to well placed photographs around the house) now thinks I’m the lady who eats like Howard Hughes. And not the cool pilot Vegas guy Howard Hughes. The creepy hermit one who had to get Meals on Wheels because he refused to leave his hotel room. The fish sticks were not bad.
Pot pies: I made both a turkey pot pie and beef pot pie. They haven’t changed much. The edge crust is still the best part, probably because it’s 90 percent Crisco. There’s something wrong about a food that tastes best when it’s burned. But because I love food that is overcooked to charcoal proportions, the pot pies were not bad.
Creamed stuff on toast: Not bad! I know now why my mom made this. It’s surprisingly easy. And cheap. Creamed tuna on toast is butter, flour, milk, peas and tuna. Creamed chipped beef on toast is butter, flour, milk and whatever that red stuff is in the glass jar that says BEEF, next to the Spam and the sardines. I cut the crusts off the toast and cut it into triangles. The presentation was spectacular. The BEEF was too salty.
Other stuff: There is a lot of ’60s food that has stood the test of time, some of it that I eat with regularity. Like grilled cheese and tomato soup (always with a pat of butter and black pepper on top — thanks mom!), meatloaf that has more bread crumbs than meat, and chop suey. Conclusion: Creamed tuna on toast was probably the best thing I made all week. Sadly, you’ll have to take only my word for this. My focus group, which consisted of my husband, wouldn’t try even a bite. He’d be happy to photograph it, but only if it’s still on the 2015 grocery store shelves.