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In my family we had the 'traditional' chipped beef on toast. But not very often. I remember the beef coming in a smaller jar than the one in video. The jar and its lid were not threaded so lid came off with a soda bottle opener. As this lady (Phyllis) says those jars could be saved and used as inexpensive juice glasses. I also think that the beef, at least as my mother bought it, didn't come in slices, but was in shreds as it came from the jar.
If I remember correctly we had it most often for lunch. During World War II chipped beef on toast was a common meal for the troops, which meant my father was sick of it by the time he got home. So mother would mostly fix it for herself and us children for lunch when he was at work. If we had it for breakfast, he ate it, but carefully reminded us kids that in the service it was called S.O.S. And if my older brother waited till he was away from the table to tell me yet again that meant 'Shit on a Shingle,' he didn't get in trouble for cussing.
My mother used a lot of Crisco, too. It's just awful for you, as it's about 100% transfat, but no one knew that then. It probably was worse health-wise than the lard it replaced in people's home, but it would keep longer without going rancid.
Phyllis mentions in another video that her family had milk with every meal in the 1950s. So did we. My mother didn't drink coffee, and didn't really know how to make it correctly. If we had house guests she'd buy coffee and turn the coffee pot she owned over to them to make their own. My father liked coffee, but only had it once in a great while at a restaurant.
My mother pretty much insisted we have potatoes in some form every evening. I don't think young couples, now, would consider having potatoes as often, though they are healthy, filling, vegetarian friendly and so on.
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We always had lots of potatoes, too, and I dearly love 'em, but nowadays my diabetes requires me to have them in strict moderation, being they're wicked carb-heavy. (Same with pasta, which I'm also rather fond of).
My big childhood food fetish that came to haunt me as I grew older was sodas, or "soft drinks" as we called them in my part of the country. We drank plenty of them, as did most people, and especially kids, back then. The other biggee was Kool-Aid, which I clearly remember having literally several CUPS of sugar added to the packet contents and water. Oi!
My teeth very much paid the penalty for that, and even when I cut way back on sugar intake as I got older, I'm sure it contributed to the eventual onset of diabetes, which fortunately I'm controlling with diet and exercise so far.
To this day, though, I adore sodas, and miss them greatly.
Interesting little trivia item from this old sodaholic-- Remember "Wink", the grapefruit flavored soda from Canada Dry? It might even still be out there, I don't know. Back before it was "Wink, the Sassy One!", it was just plain old "Canada Dry Grapefruit Beverage". It was a big fave of mine back in the 60's, but it was a very poor seller. Most people I tried to turn on to it would go, "grapefruit soda? Ewwww!" The general public must have agreed. So the company eventually re-named it "Wink", started the big "Sassy One" ad campaign, and-- suddenly it was popular!
Reminds me of how alkaline batteries didn't sell well despite being more cost-effective than carbon/zinc cells because "They're so costly!!!"
Then came "Duracell" and "Energizer" and suddenly...
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We rarely had soda in the house when I was a kid. Maybe once a month in the summer as a treat, usually to make ice cream floats after supper. I ruined my teeth on soda as an adult, sad to say. My mother might make Kool-Aid once a month in the summer as well. Living in the woods, we had a very big yard that took most of the day to mow with the walking lawn mowers our family had in the 1950s. (Before I was old enough to be running a lawn mower, I'd have to spend the day picking up fallen sticks and twigs out of the lawn so others didn't mow over them.) Mother would make Kool-Aid with a light lunch to cool us off in the middle of the day, before we finished in the afternoon.
And I do remember people balking at buying alkaline batteries.
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They now have "healthy" varieties such as IZZY sodas in all sorts of flavors.
There was also..Mountain Dew, which had more caffeine in it than coke. And some diet soda that starts with a T, that I want to call Tampa, but was something else.
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Are you thinking of Tab? The saccharin sweetened version of Coke? That stuff was just awful. I tried it once or twice at college when the dorm coke machine ran out of everything else. It became a lot more scarce after Diet Coke came out. But, I think you can still get it some places, so somebody must have liked it. Gluttons for punishment if you ask me. ;o)
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Yes, Tab. And it was horrid. But I can't drink diet at all...never could. Diet Coke, I thought was gross. And NutraSweet gave me headaches. Can't stand stevia. Don't know how people tolerate them.
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But alas, can't have any of that now.
Sorry, but the chipped beef thing sounds disgusting. I do however vaguely remember my grandparents with something similar. OR talking about it.
Potatoes...are problematic because high in starch which turns to sugar in the system, also nightshades which play havoc with delicate digestive systems. I can have them sparingly.
My grandfather, being German, and a farmer, was a meat and potatoes sort of guy. My parents weren't that found of potatoes and my father preferred salads. So we had salad with every meal and rarely potatoes. My mother did make scalloped potatoes a lot, a german dish. And fried potatoes.
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Chipped beef on toast was slightly less disgusting than you'd think. But not much... LOL! It's basically a working-class version of poor people's biscuits and gravy. When our family got a little more affluent, we stopped having it all together. Lots of people ate it in those days, but I didn't know anyone who loved it.
My mother studied dietetics in college, and our meals were healthy as far as she knew and usually very predictable:
Breakfast - most days hot or cold cereal, at least once a week waffles or eggs with bacon/sausage, pancakes less often, some kind of fruit every day - bananas, citrus fruit or orange juice.
Lunch - soup and/or sandwich maybe with carrot or celery sticks or canned fruit, milk.
Dinner - salad, potatoes (no gravy except on holidays), a vegetable dish, some kind of meat, milk, when we had dessert it was most often fresh fruit or ice cream.
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My mother studied dietetics in college, and our meals were healthy as far as she knew and usually very predictable
The information has changed a great deal over the years. Also to be fair, a lot things that were healthy back in the 1950s or 1930s or prior to that, aren't today due to the amount of cross-breeding, pesticides, and other compounds that were added over the years. A lot of people can't eat wheat and glutens now that could digest them back then, because the agricultural industry went too far in their development of a hardy wheat protein that would be resistant to bugs and easier to produce.
Same with milk -- the over-pasteurization of milk and over-use of it, resulted in casein intolerance and lactose intolerance.
Many of the canned fruits and canned meats utilized during the war, have since been determined to contain more sugar and various additives that cause things like cancer. But we simply did not know about that back then.
She'd have no way of knowing.
You make a good point about working class foods...this is true now as well. The less healthy options are the cheapest. I discovered that when I was unemployed and even now. The items on sale, that you can get coupons for, buy in bulk, or get cheaply on the street are high in fat, high in sugar, high in additives, and for people like myself - poison. While the healthier items such as fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, fresh organic locally grown meats, etc, are expensive and rarely on sale -- unless they aren't organic.
(Organic means no pesticides, not chemicals, no antiobiotics, no hormones added.)
Example? A hamburger at MacDonalds might cost $1.99 while a salad will cost $5.
This is why in today's world the healthy, thin, fit people have money, while the more heavy-set, often don't.
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And she did try her best to keep up with the latest on the subject.
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As did mine. Even now the information is confusing and contradictory. Every day they are changing their minds. One day - coconut oil is good for you, the next, it isn't. One day meat is, the next it's not. You really just have to experiment and go with what works, and eliminate what makes you sick.
My poor mother had no idea I was ceiliac. It wasn't diagnosed until I was in my late 30s. But she did her best.
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