Eat well on a budget.

I was raised in the aftermath of the Great Depression, and the years of World War II.

Those were the days of shortages, of making do, budgets, stretching a dollar. Food became an issue.

When I was a little boy, I was always hungry. My family tried to feed us well, but money was always tight. We found what we could afford to buy, and then ate it almost every night.

My school lunches were always the same. Brown paper bag, a wrapped sandwich, peanut butter and jelly on whole wheat bread, for weeks and weeks without variation. We learned to make our own lunches. Then, after what seemed like months of the same, we switched to cheese sandwiches, for months of the same. “American cheese,” because it was cheaper, and a smear of mayonnaise on brown wheat bread.

Some kids brought sandwiches on white bread, but we sneered at that “bread” because it wasn’t real bread. It was fluffy, you could squeeze it between your fingers and it was like paste. Unfortunately, I learned to be judgmental, saw that other children’s families settled for the cheaper inferior product and cared less about wholesome quality. I could feel superior because we read labels and looked for nutrition. We were aware of the latest discoveries of quality in food. I may have been poorer than my contemporaries, but I proudly ate better.

Some kids brought their lunches in lunchboxes, some with Thermoses included. I brought lunch money for milk, a shiny nickel. I told you in an earlier post about the Divine Priscilla with the Golden Locks, and what happened to my nickel.

Other kids who brought cheese sandwiches had cheese that came pre-sliced. The slicing cost more. We bought blocks of “American cheese” and sliced it ourselves. We could control the thickness, and cut a little extra to fill the corners of the bread so the coverage was even and didn’t stick out over the edges.

We always bought real mayonnaise. We didn’t succumb to the lure of “progress” and technology, that produced such things like Miracle Whip. We wanted the original, not the fake new substitute. We were purists, consumers of quality, counted calories, read the labels and assessed the ingredients.

There was controversy even about the pronunciation of mayonnaise. I remember Ed McMahon, Johnny Carson’s announcer and sidekick who made a good extra living for himself as promoter for AFP, American Family Publishers, which we all confused with Publisher’s Clearing House, where he would show up at your door with a giant check made out to you. He chuckled over the controversy about how to pronounce his name. He likened it to mayonnaise, is it manayse, or myowneyes. I tended toward the latter as the more “civilized” pronunciation, influenced I’m sure by my background in literature and reading books. I never called it mayo.

We did give in on some things. During the war, when our troops had first claim on food, margarine replaced butter. It came packaged in heavy plastic bags, an amorphous pound with a little capsule inside of yellow dye. You’d squeeze and break the capsule to release the dye, and then you’d knead it like dough until the whole mass inside the thick plastic was a uniform yellow and looked like butter. I liked working the mass with my hands and felt proud of my yellow.

Commercials said, “I can’t believe it’s not butter!”

It was given a classy name which I don’t remember but chosen to give it respectability as the daily spread.

We could put it on bread and baked potatoes and canned peas.

My parents were both food conscious and money conscious. They shopped for the perfect meal, and when they found the formula, they stuck with it.

So every night we ate the same, with only slight variations.

We had soup. Barley soup. Because barley was cheap, Americans hadn’t discovered it yet, and it boiled up real good. You could throw in a chopped stalk of celery, some onion that cooked through ready when it was translucent, a little salt, some pepper, sometimes a sliced carrot, and after boiling it for just long enough, was ready to fill our bowls as a first course.

We did know that could be the whole meal, and sometimes it was, especially early on before my Father got a steady job with the post office delivering mail. He wore uniforms made of the cloth that never wears out, and I would wear his hand-me-downs. I still have a shoulder patch.

When the family economy was better and stable, approaching the middle class from the underside, we always had potatoes, one each. Sometimes they were boiled to submission. But because we had a stove with an oven, the potatoes were usually baked. You would scrub them to get off all the dirt, cut out the eyes, then poke holes with a fork and wrap them tightly in aluminum foil and put them on the oven rack for 45 minutes. The fork holes were to let the steam out so the potato wouldn’t explode when the temperature reached steam.

Then we’d take them out, unwrap them onto our plate, slit them down the middle and mash the sides with a fork, add butter when we could afford to graduate from margarine, add salt, sprinkle pepper, and heaven! The butter melted and the potato cut into bite size, the flavor was one of the glories of childhood. I suppose if that was all you had to eat, it would be like Irish famine, but I thought I could live on potatoes and be absolutely happy.

For a balanced meal, we needed a vegetable. It was usually a can of peas. We experimented until we found the right choice, and then we stuck with it. The peas had to be full size, but not too big when they lost their quality and got stiff. Too small, and they were too hard like little BBs or buckshot. Cook them just long enough to be heated, because over cooking made them too hard and starchy. We found the formula and stayed with it. Butter, salt, ready to eat.

The peas were cooked in the water from the can. Then the juice was drained off and put into the barley soup. We never wasted food and ate everything on our plate until it was empty and clean.

My Father did much of the cooking, because for years at a time my Mother was off looking for other husbands with more money. That’s another story.

As our economy rose, my Father provided a main course. He loved meat. Who doesn’t? I did, and do.

Beef was the meat of universal choice. Steak was meat at its best. But steak was expensive. My Father discovered chuck steaks, the least expensive cut. They were looked down on as “poor people’s food,” but we decided that was just because rich people didn’t know. Chuck steaks tend not to be as thick as New York Steak, or those cuts that were several inches high without any fat. The fat gives the flavor. Later on in life when I had a steady income teaching school, I discovered the rib eye. That’s the inner cut of a porterhouse, and has marbling that gives the flavor and has an even better texture than chuck steak.

But chuck steak, practically every night, became a staple of quality eating like kings and queens. That’s when I learned about the sauces, Worcestershire and its American competitor, A1. I lean toward the latter, but enjoy both. I learned the barbeque technique of when to turn the meat. People asked me over to man the barbeque. I was as popular as meat.

Life was good for years on end. We had graduated from margarine to butter. We had meat. And I ate so much that I developed the ability to eat everything to conclusion. I became famous for it, able to out-eat anyone else. My blog details my legendary eating triumphs.

My quality of life improved so much that on a trip to Mexico I could afford to learn to eat lobster.

But that’s another story.