Frugal and Filling Depression Era Breakfast Recipes (2024)

FAQs

What was a popular breakfast in the 1930s? ›

1930s: Toast, coffee, and Bisquick

A regular breakfast circa 1935, as outlined in Ida Bailey Allen's Cooking, Menus, Service, might include: Pears, cracked wheat, top milk, creamed codfish on toast, coffee, and milk.

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.

During the Great Depression, soup kitchens were established to serve meals to those who could not afford them. For many, this was the only way to get a hot meal.

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.

What was a common breakfast that peasants ate in medieval times? Bread, cheese, and a liquid (ale, beer, or watered wine) was a common breakfast for most folks in medieval England. Breakfast — literally to break the fast (non-eating hours of sleep) — was not the main meal of the day.

In the early 1920s, the typical American breakfast consisted of coffee and maybe a slice of toast. Breakfast was typically light, without much substance. It was not the most important meal for many people.

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.

Perhaps one hobo acquired a few carrots from a charitable person, while another stole an onion off a box car, while another had a few potatoes from a farm he worked on briefly… From this concoction, a “hobo stew,” also known as “Mulligan/Mulligatawney stew” was born and became the traditional food of the hobo.

Where did homeless people get food during the Great Depression? ›

There were soup kitchens raunchy by churches and private organizations but many people went hungry, the homeless (many people were homeless) lived in encampments called “Hoovervilles”, while still struggling to get work, often at miserable wages.

A common depression cake is also known as "Boiled Raisin Cake", "Milkless, Eggless, Butterless Cake", or "Poor Man's Cake".

From Hunger to Hope. From frozen foods to Jell-O molds, the 1930s and 40s saw a huge upsurge in convenience foods. Building on the popularity of brands like Wonder Bread, Kool-Aid, Velveeta Cheese, and Hostess Cakes, American supermarkets stocked up on mass-produced items.

In the 1920's Americans typically ate light breakfasts of coffee, orange juice, rolls. In order to increase bacon sales Bernays wrote to 5,000 physicians asking whether a heavy breakfast was better for health than a light breakfast.