10 Great Depression Era Recipes for Cheap Meals (2024)

FAQs

What foods were cheap during the Great Depression? ›

Poor man's meal is a quintessential Great Depression-era food. Featuring onions, hot dogs, and potatoes, it provided exactly what people wanted during this time: A cheap, hearty meal.

Soup kitchens and bread lines were methods of feeding the neediest people in the country during the Great Depression. Run by charities, private companies, and the government, many soup kitchens and bread lines served thousands of people a day.

Potatoes were also inexpensive and used extensively. Some meals even used both. One of these meals was called the Poor Man's Meal. It combined potatoes, onions, and hot dogs into one hearty, inexpensive dish, which was perfect for the hard times people had fallen on.

Many cheap foods still common among the poor today made their debut during the Depression: Wonder Bread (1930), Bisquick (1931), Miracle Whip (1933), and Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup (1934). Ragu spaghetti sauce, Kraft mac-n-cheese, and Hormel Spam all appeared during the Roosevelt Recession in 1937.

Mulligan Stew. Mulligan stew, otherwise known as “hobo stew” is survival food at its finest. During the Great Depression, homeless people were often referred to as hobos as they searched for odd jobs to make ends meet.

Kibble + canned dog foods were introduced made out of dehydrated meat and grain mill scraps. Great Depression (30's - 40's): Canned pet food became 90% of the pet food market.

Meat was more of a scarcity and was not served at every Depression meal. When used, it was often combined with potatoes, onions, rice, macaroni, biscuits, and other extenders.

At this time popcorn was often a breakfast food, eaten from a bowl with milk just as we eat cereal today. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, popcorn's popularity as an everyday snack food started to grow. It was a fun and thrifty snack for families who could afford few luxuries.

Celery soup mixed with tuna fish and mashed potatoes. A salad of corned beef, gelatin and canned peas. Baked onion stuffed with peanut butter. Those are just some of the recipes Americans turned to during the Great Depression, when many families struggled to eat enough nutritious food.

What was junk food in the 1930s? ›

: If you judged the 1930s by its snacks alone, you would have no idea that the economy was tanking. Twinkies, Snickers, Tootsie Pops, Fritos, 3 Musketeers, Ritz Crackers, Frito corn chips, 5th Avenues, and Lay's Potato Chips were all produced during the lean years of the Great Depression.

During the Great Depression preceding the passage of the Social Security Act, "soup kitchens" provided the only meals some unemployed Americans had. This particular soup kitchen was sponsored by the Chicago gangster Al Capone.

At his establishment, every item cost a penny: A meal of half a pound of bread, soup, potatoes, pork and beans, and coffee only cost hungry customers five cents. Breadlines, where miserable hundreds waited hours for free food, were an all-too-common sight during the Depression.

Many farmers not destroyed by the Dust Bowl and the inability to produce anything found that they suffered by falling prices and producing too much. No one could afford their products, and the decreasing demand only continued to lower prices so that even trying to sell was unprofitable.

Not only was access to food limited by rationing, many people had to turn to soup kitchens, which are places where people can go and get a free meal, or food stamps, which are booklets of stamps that could be used to buy food, cleaning supplies, and other necessities, to get enough food to feed their families.

We had serious deflation in the Great Depression. The consumer price level fell by 25%; wholesale prices fell by 33%.

In the early 1930s prices dropped so low that many farmers went bankrupt and lost their farms. In some cases, the price of a bushel of corn fell to just eight or ten cents. Some farm families began burning corn rather than coal in their stoves because corn was cheaper.