This week we’re going to eat like it’s 1955…or thereabouts. I spent a couple of hours this weekend looking through old cookbooks and family recipes. Let me just say – they ate some weird stuff back then. And they had a strange compulsion to put all manner of food stuffs in gelatin. Still, I think I’ve come up with a menu we can live with, for a week, anyway.
This post may contain affiliate links and as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Read more here.
Dee’s Menu – 1950s Style
Monday
Apparently folks in the 50s hadn’t developed much of a palate for herbs and spices. The recipe for spaghetti and meatballs in my 1950s-era Better Homes and Gardens cookbook relies solely on a single bay leaf to season the simple tomato sauce. I’ll have to tweak that a bit to our tastes.
- spaghetti and meatballs
- green beans in crumbs
- tossed green salad with oil and vinegar dressing
- garlic toast
Tuesday
- baked pork chops
- baked cauliflower topped with white sauce and cheese
- buttered corn
- baked apples
Wednesday
- chicken pot pie
- pineapple salad (will share recipe later)
Thursday
I asked my mom the other day what sort of meals she grew up on. Both of her parents were incredible cooks and in fact, many of my cookbooks had belonged to them. My grandpa was a scuba diver and they spent most of their weekends on the beach near the Santa Monica pier. He then cooked his catches – my mom recalls complaining about having lobster “agaaiiin!”. Grandma loved to bake and tended to do more casseroles. Stuffed bell peppers was something she made often. And because no 1950s menu is complete without gelatin, I’m including her Cranberry Star Salad.
- stuffed bell peppers
- lettuce and tomato salad with homemade Thousand Island dressing
- Grandma’s Cranberry Star Salad (I’ll share the recipe soon)
Friday
- Swiss Steak
- scalloped potatoes
- buttered carrots
- peach and cottage cheese salad
- pineapple upside down cake
Saturday
We’ve been invited to our daughter and son-in-law’s house for dinner. I’ll bring a dessert.
Sunday
- pot roast
- mashed potatoes
- broccoli with Hollandaise sauce
- tossed green salad
- hot rolls
- leftover dessert (either pineapple upside down cake or chocolate cake)
~~~~~
This sounds like a LOT of cooking and a LOT of dirty pots and pans. I’ll report back on my impressions after the week is over. If you have a favorite vintage recipe I’d love to hear about it. Leave me a comment and a link if you have one.
This post is linked up at I’m an Organizing Junkie. Take a peek for more menu ideas!
And check out this FREE printable menu planner from Joyful Homemaking:
There was always bread and butter on the table, and a jar of “table syrup,” which is a sort of un-maple maple syrup I think, to put on the bread and butter as a side. Also pickles and olives. Growing up in the northeast, we rarely had salads until summer when we got veggies from the garden; but when we did have salad, it was ALWAYS iceberg lettuce. Quarters of iceberg lettuce with salad dressing over them — impossible to cut and eat daintily. Your menu looks very familiar to me — it is close to what our school lunch menus looked like!
I was talking to my parents about this menu Friday night and my dad made the comment that they always had bread and butter with their meals. He dated my aunt before my mom and ate dinner at their house occasionally. The first time he ate there he asked where the bread was – that wasn’t something they did. He grew up in Oklahoma and then moved to California where my mom was born and raised. Very different food cultures.
Like you, our salads were always iceberg, too, although not in quarters. We also had tomato on them.
Do you give links to all of these recipes? I’ve recently started my own journey to back to basics meal planning and would love to try these recipes, if you wouldn’t mind sharing them!
For the most part they were from family recipes or old cookbooks so I don’t have links for all of them. However, you’ve given me a good idea. I’ll start going through them, remake each one and share the recipe. Then I’ll be able to link to them in this post. I do have a few of these I made recipe posts for. I’ll link them. 🙂
Thank You, Something special about the old recipes.
As an Okie, I can confirm that it’s normal to see bread and butter with the meal. Sometimes we would even have an extra slice of bread and butter but with one of my grandma’s homemade jams on it, as dessert! My fav jam was her jalapeño mint jelly.
Hi Deanna,
What a fun week, I want to come for sure on Monday, Thursday and Friday, oh well why not all week. It all looks fantastic! Thanks so much for sharing!
Miz Helen
Come on over. I’ll set another place at the table. 🙂
I wonder what it is with the lack of seasoning thing? It’s the only thing I don’t like about my Nan’s cooking, actually.
Fortunately most of us have more developed palates these days. I like my food very well-seasoned. Bland just doesn’t do it for me.
I have noticed savory dishes tend to be bland and not use much seasoning, however, it seems like a lot of sweet recipes are more spiced than our modern recipes. I often find myself cutting back on the amount of cloves, nutmeg, ginger and cinnamon in sweet recipes while adding seasoning to the savory.
Many of the spices we see and use today were not widely available then. ” Foreign foods” were not prepared much at all. I remember revolting ” Chop Suey” from a can served over dry Chinese noodles we had occasionally back then, Mom at least added canned water chestnuts to it.
That’s true. I grew up in the 60s and 70s but even then, we used far fewer spices.
Your menu looks yummy! I grew up eating many of these dishes. We also had gelatin regularly with bread and butter too.
I hope you have a great week!
My dad grew up with bread and butter on the table for every meal.
Thanks for stopping by!
great article! I am hispanic so for us growing up instead of bread there was always fresh homemade tortillas. With every meal there was pinto beans.. And on a side dish for my Father green chile. Occasionally red chile for my Mom.
I love homemade tortillas! I’ve made them a time or two and would love to get in the habit. Do you have any favorite hispanic recipes? I accept guest post recipes if you are interested.
oh my goodness, that is right out of my mother’s repertoire! I spent my childhood in a small town in southern Wisconsin. my mother didn’t work outside the home so these menus were on our table on the daily. being a child, I worked that diet off each day. now in my sixties, I would look like a loaf of ciabatta.
Ha! I was surprised to discover I lost two pounds this week. I don’t know if that’s just a fluke or not but I did find these meals extremely satisfying.
My husband’s grandpa was a chef at a ritzy hotel in the area. My mother in law laughs about all the gelatin desserts served with mayo on top. They definitely had a different style 🙂
Yes, it was a different time – ha! Do you have any of your husband’s grandfather’s recipes? My grandfather learned to cook in a mining camp in Alaska. He was pretty amazing. I have quite a few of his cookbooks which I treasure. I do wish he had lived longer so I could have learned more from him. He died shortly after my first child was born. He lived in California and we had moved to Oklahoma so I didn’t see him much.
I love vintage cookbooks/recipes. I inherited my Grammy’s and Great Grammy’s recipe boxes and cookbooks. Score! Chocolate mayo cake with chocolate frosting is a fave. Add whoopie pie filling between the layers. You won’t be sorry. I make a McCalls Best Sour Cream Pound Cake that is from my Mom’s wedding present from 1969. An old blue hardcover McCalls cookbook. The beef stew in there is awesome!
What a treasure! My maternal grandfather was an incredible cook and I have quite a few of his cookbooks. That pound cake sounds wonderful. I’d love to try it if you’d be so kind as to send me the recipe. deepiercy@gmail.com
Oh my gosh! What fun to see your week of 50s menus! That is EXACTLY my Mom’s cooking back then.
The food I grew up on. There was no fast food and bakery stuff was in bakeries not stores. My parents were active but did not walk or run or go to gyms. Us kids played hard and rode bikes all day on weekends and holidays. There was no TV until late fifties and our first set was located in the basement. I remember if we saw a ” fat” person, they were 5 lbs overweight. Thanks for this trip down memory lane. !!!!
I’m so glad it brought back fun memories for you. 🙂
My comment just now was not meant to have question marks at the end, but exclamation marks!
It changes the whole meaning.????
I fixed it for you. 🙂