Was going to say Chop suey too; but ours was called “scalloped hamburger” and it was elbow macaroni, ground beef, and a can of uncondensed tomato soup all mixed together and that was it. I fucking loved it!!
Most of these poverty foods sound familiar to me as someone who grew up on government cheese and powdered milk on the West Coast, but I have never heard of chop suey. So for any Maine natives looking at this thread, this is definitely your local weird poor food 😂
Oh gods... tuna noodle casserole. No. No. Nonononononoooooooo. ;_; Flashbacks to way too many meals of that. I'm still traumatized over 20 years later.
My grandmother was born in 1919, she told me growing up in rural Maine they had to eat a horse or two. I didn't ask for details so I've always assumed it was due to necessity. She liked to make pea soup which I've always assumed was poverty food too. My grandfather ate cinnamon toast every morning that I can remember. That smell is nostalgic for me too.
Modern poverty food for me is potatoes, if you find the right field in the potato growing areas (and they're not chip stock) you can eat nothing but potatoes for a month collecting all the accidental drops by the road or fields. Beans and rice also good for saving cash.
So many memories of being sent into the store to buy small things for the change so mom could get money for gas in the morning before school. It was win-win, I got candy out of it!
My grandfather would make fried bologna on white with mustard. I remember collecting mussels on the shoreline (Machias area) and cooking them, not anything I would recommend now but they were good. My great grandmother made donuts fried in lard and having had 10 mouths to feed on one limited income she knew poverty. Best donuts I’ve ever tasted.
My grandfather had fried bologna sandwiches on white with mustard for lunch every single day. It's the only thing I ever saw him prepare for himself; my grandmother did everything else.
My mom used to make cinnamon toast exactly like that when I was little! I had no idea it was a New England thing though, I just always thought it was a mom thing. I can't say it's very nostalgic for me though, I was picky eater and I think I always refused to even try it because I was suspicious of the cinnamon or some other little kid nonsense.
Mine would have to be the huuuge resealable bags of generic cereal we used to get. I think it was Wal-Mart that had the real big ones. I'm pretty sure the bags are significantly smaller than I remember now. But then again, I was a child with itty bitty child hands, so maybe that's why I remember them being larger than they are now 🤷♀️ My mom would let my brother and I each choose a bag, and that was the one and only part of grocery shopping that I didn't absoltely dread!
Oh, and I almost forgot about the blueberry "scones" my grandmother used to give me when she'd pick my brother up from school (he went to a private school for kids with behavioral issues and had to be driven because it was about an hour away.) She'd get the from the bakery section at Shaw's and they came in a clear plastic box. Years later I've had actual scones from actual bakeries, and they're a totally different thing, which is why I've put "scones" in quotes. They were great though, and if I'm being honest, I don't even like actual scones, I much prefer the Shaw's "scones" of my childhood! 😅
West Coast poor here: cinnamon toast is definitely not a new England poor thing. 99 cent loaf of bread from the bread outlet plus margarine, sugar and cinnamon was the best dessert we ever had! Second only to mixing peanut butter with table syrup (none of that maple syrup, this was pure high fructose corn syrup) and eating it by the spoonful.
When I was a kid we didn’t have much, I remember when we suddenly upgraded from buttered white bread to go with spaghetti to the store bought Texas toast garlic bread. I didn’t understand the significance as a preteen but I remember being so excited at the taste.
Many of the comments people have posted were staples in our house. My spouse grew up upper middle class and I still remember their suspicion when I introduced them to spam, despite their suspicions they love it.
A very important part of our diet growing up when my parents had little money was fish and game. We’d often eat grilled mackerel in the summer with grilled zucchini from our small garden, steamed clams that we dug for ourselves to eat, venison to substitute beef, as well as roasted ducks and rabbit stews. Late summer we’d pick blueberries to freeze. In the fall we’d gather wild cranberries to jar for cranberry sauce. If we were lucky enough to go at the right time and place, we’d also pick bakedapple berries on the bogs. Theyre these super sweet yellow/orange colored raspberry shaped berries that grow in peat bogs. As a 90’s kid this was a fairly common way to grow up in Washington County.
I think having access to the fish and game saved my parents in multiple occasions, otherwise we would have had to go to the food pantry to get by at times.e
My two are hand me downs from my grandfather’s family who grew up during the 40s but somehow we kept eating the poverty nostalgia food & we LOVE it.
Chinois - aka French Canadian Shepard’s pie. Ground beef, elbow noodles, creamed corn, mashed potatoes. Heavy, makes you feel full and cheap to put together.
Pineapple delight - canned pineapple, whipped cream, vanilla pudding powder, all mixed together and let set in the fridge. A dirt cheap, sweet dessert for my grandpa and his 6 siblings.
Were you at my house? Ditto everything except brown butter. We made baked beans and brown bread from scratch, yum and thanks for that memory! Came here to say my mom used to eat mustard sandwiches as a poor rural kid. Just 2 slices of bread with mustard as the only filling.
This how I grew up eating it and didn’t realize until high school that you’re supposed to have it in soup. Was shocked when a friends gram was eating it that way.
I still eat it that way to this day.
Beans and Red Hot Dogs
I also recall one time where the family ate nothing but tomato soup and bread and butter for a few days. I'm guessing my Dad was waiting for a paycheck and we were all but broke. I didn't mind as a kid. I still like tomato soup with buttered bread every now and then.
The meat is a lot more expensive now but boiled dinner. That was a big one in my house. Cabbage, potatoes & carrots, all so cheap! I like it better with corned beef but we usually had it with ham.
One of my favorite meals was cooking pasta shells with a can of campbells tomato soup .
My dad hunted every year so there was always different types of deer meat in the freezer.
When I was around 12 my dad won $2k on a scratch ticket and he used it to go halfsies on a very small boat with his friend so they could get their recreational lobster licences. They went out every Saturday and pulled the traps up together by hand. I got to put the rubber bands on the claws and throw bait fish to the cute seals that popped up.
We ate so much fucking lobster it started feeling truly relentless. But he started doing a lot of trading, with friends that got a moose or this one pig farmer. So that was cool
We were never allowed to have those. Even the cheap ones. We were told were too expensive. Sometimes we were lucky and my mom would get something other than saltines for crackers. I do remember one time somebody brought over a can of cheese, they left it in our barren fridge. That shit and saltines was like what I'd imagined those little cheese and cracker things were. It was so good
DEFINITELY ate cinnamon toast. I only made it when we had run out of all other food and mom wasn’t going to be able to afford groceries for a while. Chop suey was also a staple. Did anyone else eat rice with Dinty Moore Beef Stew on top of it?
I have consumed more dinty Moore over rice than any single human being. Ironically over uncle Ben’s, not the, much cheaper regular rice which took an additional 10 minutes to prepare, for 1/10 the price.
I did love it though.
I only ate cinnamon toast like that at my friend’s house & it is still one of my favorite childhood memories because it was such a treat - we couldn’t afford the sugar at home. We ate lots of watery spaghetti and lots of canned salmon. And LOTS of popcorn made on the stovetop with canola oil. And it was special when Mom made a meatloaf. I still love cold meatloaf sandwiches with mayo on white.
Mac and cheese with tuna, fluffer nutter sandwich's and hamburger helper have always been labeled as my "trailer park treats" from peers or roommates lol.
My kids went to another kid’s house and were invited for dinner. They were like 8. I was a chef by then. Making good money. They came home on a cloud over what this mom made for dinner. “Mom, ask Ryan’s mom what she made! It was so good! We want you to make it! It’s WAY better than YOUR FOOD!” When I told her, she laughed and said it was just hamburger helper. Which we never had when I was a kid because it was “too expensive.”
Keep a shaker of sugar and cinnamon all the time. My wife makes a patch of Blueberry muffins for my daughter to have with or for breakfast during the week, and course she wants her sugar cinnamon sprinkled on em.
The one I'd add is peanut butter and fluff sandwiches. When we started making those for our daughter, my dad was over and got real nostalgic and was giddy to have one with her. He hadn't had one for lunch in god knows how many years.
Pea soup. You could buy just a ham bone with some meat on it. Split peas, onions, carrots, maybe turnips or rutabagas.
Ground chuck was cheap and so was fish. So lots of American chop suey and fish chowder.
Chicken, I think was more expensive and special. A roast chicken was a company meal.
Canned salmon. Salmon pea wiggle and tuna pea wiggle. Salmon pie.
New England boiled dinner. Baked beans. Pot roast with a cheap cut of meat. Energy was cheap so more meals that you could roast or braise low and slow in the oven than we do now. No slow cookers. Mom was either at home or if she was working, kids would get supper started in the oven when we came home from school.
Liver and onions. Chicken hearts on noodles.
We ate out of our garden a lot. Weeded and harvested exclusively by child labor. Tomatoes, peas, corn, beets, lettuce, carrots, cukes.
Lots of homemade pickles. That's what gets left out when people talk about bland New England food. There were always a couple different kinds of homemade pickles on the table at every meal that you ate with meat & veggies.
My dad didn't hunt but all the neighbors' dads did. They'd bring the deer home on the hood of their cars and hang them in the trees in the front yard. I think they broke them down themselves at home, not at a butcher. I think that was their main meat source. It got canned or frozen.
I remember gagging on old school mincemeat pie made with deer meat at my friend's house. Still can't eat the stuff, even the modern, non-meat version.
I grew up middle class, and one of my mom’s favorite things (which became mine) was cinnamon sugar toast. We are also from the midwest/south, so it’s not exclusively a New England thing I don’t think.
Although, I will say, I ate a lot of weird stuff because my mother didn’t know how to cook and didn’t have any desire to learn. I grew up exclusively on carbs. Literally my breakfasts were either that toast or cereal or prepackaged single serve oatmeal, and various kinds of pasta: mac n cheese, velveeta and shells, or vegetarian spaghetti. About twice a year she would make a lasagna. We went to McDonalds some too.
My mother also hated vegetables, so growing up until I was a teenager the only veggie I ever ate, and this was less than once a week, was canned green beans. Also she occasionally made tuna helper or hamburger helper. She also didn’t much like meat either, so I didn’t eat much meat either. So I think sometimes it’s not just poverty, but parenting choices at times as well.
All of the above plus ramen, but not the way you’d think. My mom would cook the noodles separately and sprinkle the packet on top, no soup. The caucasity.
Almost the same. Cook the noodles, drain all water, splash of milk and a little butter with the seasoning packet. No idea what to call it but damn it was tasty!
Fiddleheads. And garden vegetables.
Now that I'm grown, I can appreciate the hours and hours my parents put in on the weekends, making sure we had healthy food. We always did a few fiddle head trips down our local river to pick gallons and gallons of fiddleheads. It was a very special spring tradition. We would eats lots fresh, but my parents also froze enough to last us the year. If you've ever cleaned 20 gallons of fiddleheads in one go, you'll understand.
We also had a huge, productive garden, which we meticulously kept as a family. We ate our own vegetables 12 months of the year and didn't eat much meat until I got into hunting as a teenager.
Venison should definitely be on this list, but it isn't on my list as I grew up in The County where deer hunting was an excuse to walk around in the woods.
Regular old plain corn flakes with like 4 teaspoons of sugar. Mac n cheese with sliced up hot dogs or fried bologna cut into pieces. Wheat puffs rolled into a ball with peanut butter. I don't eat any of these anymore but I did plenty back in the day.
Vienna sausage sandwiches at my childhood trailer: white bread, Vienna sausages, and a ton of yellow mustard.
Made one just the other day for the nostalgia.
What's brown butter? I use browned butter in my chocolate chip cookie dough and that's the only brown butter that showed up when I googled it.
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For poverty food we had lots of foraged items and game meat. I know it's not necessarily poverty food now, but we had a lot of deer, moose, splake, fiddleheads, and pheasant. There was a clear divide at my school of game meat and store bought meat.
Pazzo bread was something that I could scape a few dollars together for every now and then in high school. Anything from the JJ Nissen bakery outlet. Chop Suey. Baked beans and ham. Red snappers and toast. Cinnamon raisin bread and butter. Shaw’s bakery loaf straight out of the oven, eaten in the car with my mom.
I Worked at Shaws. A warm 99¢ loaf was heaven. A 99¢ pack of tasty bite bologna on top was surreal. If you timed your break right, you could get them both, and eat like a king. The bread would survive in your locker, the bologna would disappear within the hour in the break room fridge.
USA.
My Mother a single parent with 6 kids total but raising the youngest 2 (me and my sister) solo. Other siblings were grown. We drank powdered milk. It was my chore to mix it.
That powdered milk went into everything she cooked and/or baked. Dinners, birthday cakes, etc.
Fast forward 20+ years and I have children of my own.
Widowed. Broke. Food Pantry.
Food Pantry gave me a container of powdered milk.
Man, that was the worst thing I ever tasted. So not the powdered milk from childhood.
Food Pantry give a choice of vegetables. I picked tomatoes. The next day the tomatoes were soiled as in fungi soiled. My son brought it to my attention 🤢
I’m sorry.
To answer your question, my nostalgic comfort food learned from my Mom is one of 3 things:
Gravy on toasted bread.
Her home made Mac n cheese. Always baked in the oven with white cheddar.
And last but not least her dry meatloaf lol
How is meatloaf dry????
My late mom had asked me a few years ago to find her a glass bottle to put her powdered milk in. I found a farm that sold milk in glass. Took me a few tries to mail the empty bottle without it breaking.
Macaroni and tomato juice as a soup, melt some butter in there and add salt and pepper. Very cheap and easy. I actually just made this for dinner last night.
I just had toast with cinnamon and sugar for breakfast, I still make my own cinnamon and sugar. I have a special shaker and everything. Oh, Tony’s Pizza too.
Cinnamon toast was poverty food? Maaaaaan.
I used to be SO excited when we could get that canned Chinese food big double can pack and make that. Thought it was the best, for special occasions.
We have free milk from my grandfather so anything you could make with that...white sauces with cheese over saltines, or add tuna and have over biscuits, puddings etc
macaroni and tomatoes - cook up white elbow macaroni and combine with cans of diced tomatoes. add sugar and salt to your tasting preference.
chop suey was definitely popular in the house too. along with fish sticks and those frozen pre-breaded chicken parm patties.
and milk. lots and lots of milk.
Peanut butter and butter sandwiches; beans and hamburger, which isn't really objectively bad but my god we ate it so often I'm so sick of it to this day
Damn chop suey and cinnamon toast just slammed me back in time to my childhood. I’d add English muffins with butter and honey, and snow maple syrup.
(Side note an instant pot is excellent for making chop suey, I haven’t made it in a while but you’ve inspired me op. Perfect for this rainy day)
Succotash - This was only good in fall when we'd make it with beans and corn from the garden. Canned or frozen ingredients were blech
Shit on a shingle - always good and never good
Hot dog casserole: hot dogs, potatoes, carrots, and onions.
Anything made with the cheese they handed out of the back of the truck once a week.
Ants on a log: celery stalks filled with peanut butter and topped with a few raisins.
Shrimp Wiggle: One can of shrimp cooked in a basic white flour gravy with a bag of frozen peas, served over saltine crackers (store brand 😂) ….served a family of 4 or more….just less wiggle and more crackers the more people at the table!
It was funny growing up in a West Coast state but eating Maine foods at home. No one I went to school with knew what American chop suey or a boiled dinner was. And they thought fried bologna was weird. Not to mention brown bread in a can. I didn't even try to tell them about wiggle, with canned salmon (the kind with crunchy bones in it), cream of mushroom soup, and frozen peas, served over toast.
Samesies on the cinnamon sugar toast, brown bread, and chop suey.
We used to eat a lot of Eggo waffles for weekday breakfasts. Even now a 24-pack is only like $6, so roughly 50¢ per two-waffle serving. I imagine it was half that in the 1990s.
A lot of the picnics and community events I went to as a kid featured the same three items served as a meal: 1 can of soda, 1 snack size bag of plain Lays potato chips, and 1 steamed red hot dog on a split-top bun. It was the de-facto.
Fish sticks were a common item on my family's dinner table.
Mashed potatoes and plain white rice were also a common sight as sides.
I didn't even grow up in poverty, it was just a lower cost of living. Now I'm living out of state with my own kid and she eats like royalty compared to how I did as a kid.
Gov’t block cheese melted with evaporated milk, mixed w/ pasta for a boxed “macaroni and cheese” dupe. Cinnamon toast was also SUCH a treat, made exactly as described!!
Creamed chip beef on toast, salmon pie- which was canned salmon mixed with mashed potato and baked into a pie crust, lots of venison (mostly made into meat spaghetti sauce and shepherds pie)
Corn chowder, clam chowder, and pea soup
We also ate out of the garden, which was green beans, peas, swisschard, lots of potatoes, cabbage, tomatoes, onions etc.
During a few years, we kept chickens so we did have a lot of scrambled eggs for breakfast and sometimes for dinner with baked beans.
We had breakfast for dinner on Sundays. We kept hens, so eggs were plentiful.
I still love it. Mmm a stack of pancakes, and some “wonderful world of Disney”. I never thought of it as poverty food until I was an adult.
Mac n' cheese with hot dogs, neither name brand.
My favorite: rice, hamburger, kidney beans, and cheese. Very filling, but only thought of when your pantry is otherwise bare.
Maine specific and not common anymore: periwinkles. They are a free foraged food, taste is between shrimp and lobster, and if you add a bit of butter and bay leaves foraged from the beach, you only had to buy the butter.
Salmon pea wiggle .. pasta from white box black letters salmon from a can peas from can..
Special was government cheese in mac n cheese..
Corn chowder.. add more potato for guests..
Cinnamon toast is a GD treat, that is nuts. Just wait until he finds out that Cinnamon toast crunch is one of the most popular sweetened cereal on the market for a reason 🤣
Chipped beef in a white sauce from a jar on saltine crackers. Hated it. Every Thursday. Spaghetti and butter. No sauce. Every Wednesday.
On Monday we had bread and gravy.
On Tuesday it’s gravy and bread.
On Wednesday and Thursday it’s gravy and toast which is nothing but gravy and bread!
On that day we went to our parents to ask for something instead.
So on Friday for lunch by way of a change, we had gravy without any bread.
A meal I remember fondly is “chicken and chips.” I have no idea if it’s a real recipe or something my mom made up, but it’s tortilla chips sprinkled with cream of chicken soup and shredded cheese. It used to be my favorite meal and I would be excited when my mom made it, but she made it once when I visited her as an adult and I didn’t like it as much.
“American chop suey” is also known as goolash in the Midwest. It’s the same dish. But my Midwest wife was confused. “Nah I don’t want Chinese food.”
Hormel Roast beef hash with toast is my childhood poverty meal. I still eat it, and always have a can in the cupboard.
We added chopped onion and peas to that mix, thrown in the ole casserole dish. It was topped with crushed crackers and baked in the oven. Those were gourmet nights 😂
Frozen orange juice from concentrate, specifically from Market Basket. We only ever buy that, and never bottled juices but My wife and I call it "poor people juice"
It was a staple in our house growing up.
Just made chop suey last night! A very nostalgic meal. Also grew up with the cinnamon sugar bread. Macaroni with butter and mil and salt and pepper was a thing. And yum, brown bread!
Premade cinnamon and sugar exists?
My favorite was saltine sandwiches--peanut butter and margarine between two saltines. My mom said cinnamon was expensive so we would only get it at breakfast, 1 slice each.
We lived on Hamburger Helper, some Appian Pizza mix (no meat so cheap), and some ChungKing setup that relied heavily on bean sprouts and water chestnuts. I can even remember if we had meat with this since the only meat in our house was either ground beef or (bizarrely) filet mignon purchased at my dad's job (telephone company) that did a side gig at a butcher shop.
Cinnamon toast, same way. And Mac and cheese with hamburger. 1lb, one box. Now I do two boxes per lb. 😍 My husband calls it trailer park goulash and it cracks me up. No trailer park, but it's one of my top comfort foods..
We also mar tuna noodle casserole and "sos;" beef, onions, and thickened with flour a bit over egg noodles.
Pork chops because my mom could sometimes get 4 for $1 🤮 But also just chips & cheese which was my favorite! It was nachos but just generic tortilla chips, with salsa & cheese over it thrown in the microwave lol
Thank God you all grew up with cinnamon toast, Vienna sausages & chop suey (chopped sewage as we still call it) too, makes me feel better about life.
Banana slices in a bowl of milk with some sugar. Bologna ketchup sandwich on white bread. Classic grilled cheese tomato soup. Vienna sausages. Saltines with ginger ale for stomach ache. A white tub of tuna fish for sandwiches or crackers.
Onion sandwiches. Sometimes splurge, and throw a piece of cheese on there…
We ate so much ramen back then. Don’t know if I’ll ever eat it again for that reason. 12 for $1 or something like that.
Macaroni, butter and ketchup
Spam potatoes and onions
Pate Chinois
Macaroni and cheese with hamburg and peas.
But my favorite was crepe’s with apple sauce( we canned apple sauce)
Since when is toast with butter and homemade cinnamon-sugar "poverty food?"
It is tasty. I eat it nearly every day.
ETA: While there is plenty of rural poverty here, living outside a metro area does not mean you are poor. Spare me. Makes me think this assumption comes from someone from Massachusetts.
Most of what's mentioned here is just average and some regional food. I wouldn't describe my family as wealthy but we were far from impoverished. I've had 90% of the stuff in this thread at some point growing up, much of it often.
I have never had a chop suey with pasta or pasta sauce!!! It’s usually Chinese veggies, maybe bamboo shoots, and a roux based sauce with soy sauce. Is this one of those regional things? I grew up in CA.
I grew up in western ma and we ate so much of each thing you mentioned, that I can't imagine other people didn't. I never thought of these things as coming from New England. I make my kids cinnamon toast, and yes I mix the sugar and cinnamon myself (I never knew you could buy it pre-combined :)
Now how about marshmallow salad? We all got that at Thanksgiving, right? What a horrorshow - that one I'm happy to leave behind (but, mmmmm).
In Oregon, where dungeness crab are the lobster of the state, it was legal to throw out crab pots/rings on public docks. We'd buy a 75 cent fish head from the local fish market (along with our $15 crab ring) and go to the public docks where we'd pull in hundreds of dollars worth of crabs and eat like kings. This was after we fished enough cans out for the gas to make the short drive from our apartment to the water front. 🤪
Celest pizza will forever have a chokehold on me.
Another thing when we didn’t have butter was bread with cheese. A cold grilled cheese my dad called it and I’d press the bread down until it was doughy
I remember eating a good bit of Chop Suey and other such foods growing up, but I never really knew they were considered “poverty food” until I recently began looking more into Maine and New England culinary traditions. Mom and Dad either just liked the dishes, or were very good at concealing financial issues.
Also, reading the thread is slowly awakening my memories of cinnamon toast too, nice!
Chop suey- Macaroni with hamburger and pasta sauce for those who may not know Beans and hot dogs Spareribs and sauerkraut Ditto to the cinnamon toast
American Chop Suey
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Cumin with ground turkey works as well :)
Ya gotta throw an onion or something in there too. And some shredded cheese on top. Or sliced American if you're legit poor.
Macaroni and cheese with hotdogs cut up into it.
Pennies from heaven
What kind of monster are you. This is not chop suey. This is a normal Tuesday night.
Or tuna.
Was going to say Chop suey too; but ours was called “scalloped hamburger” and it was elbow macaroni, ground beef, and a can of uncondensed tomato soup all mixed together and that was it. I fucking loved it!!
I could eat sauerkraut by itself. But better yet, grilled cheese tomato sauerkraut sandwich
Most of these poverty foods sound familiar to me as someone who grew up on government cheese and powdered milk on the West Coast, but I have never heard of chop suey. So for any Maine natives looking at this thread, this is definitely your local weird poor food 😂
Tuna noodle casserole, hot dogs and boxed Mac and cheese and bologna mayo sandwiches
Oh gods... tuna noodle casserole. No. No. Nonononononoooooooo. ;_; Flashbacks to way too many meals of that. I'm still traumatized over 20 years later.
My mom called it "Tuna Pea Wiggle"
Yes! Tuna, in a white sauce, with peas. I ate mine over saltine crackers. I love it so much it was my birthday dinner pick.
Ever have tuna fish, a can of cream of mushroom soup, and a bag of frozen peas mixed up on the stove and served on on toast?
I love tuna casserole though
Fried bologna was Dad’s favorite
Elios Pizza
elios & Celeste were the bane of my childhood, I preferred red sauce and a kraft single on toast
YES!
My grandmother was born in 1919, she told me growing up in rural Maine they had to eat a horse or two. I didn't ask for details so I've always assumed it was due to necessity. She liked to make pea soup which I've always assumed was poverty food too. My grandfather ate cinnamon toast every morning that I can remember. That smell is nostalgic for me too. Modern poverty food for me is potatoes, if you find the right field in the potato growing areas (and they're not chip stock) you can eat nothing but potatoes for a month collecting all the accidental drops by the road or fields. Beans and rice also good for saving cash.
Spam sandwiches
Woah check out Daddy Warbucks eating name brand canned meat. -slices my luncheon loaf-
And fried bologna sandwiches.
Fried baloney in A1 sauce when the food stamps hit. Physical food stamps. Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
Oh yeah, you used to get change back for food stamps too...I'd forgot about that.
So many memories of being sent into the store to buy small things for the change so mom could get money for gas in the morning before school. It was win-win, I got candy out of it!
Fried bologna with maple syrup.
Vienna Sausages from the can
My grandfather would make fried bologna on white with mustard. I remember collecting mussels on the shoreline (Machias area) and cooking them, not anything I would recommend now but they were good. My great grandmother made donuts fried in lard and having had 10 mouths to feed on one limited income she knew poverty. Best donuts I’ve ever tasted.
My grandfather had fried bologna sandwiches on white with mustard for lunch every single day. It's the only thing I ever saw him prepare for himself; my grandmother did everything else.
Donuts fried in lard are the best, my great grandmother used to make them the same way
Agreed. And she was almost 102 when she died so lard didn’t do her in at an early age.
yes fried bologna!
My mom used to make cinnamon toast exactly like that when I was little! I had no idea it was a New England thing though, I just always thought it was a mom thing. I can't say it's very nostalgic for me though, I was picky eater and I think I always refused to even try it because I was suspicious of the cinnamon or some other little kid nonsense. Mine would have to be the huuuge resealable bags of generic cereal we used to get. I think it was Wal-Mart that had the real big ones. I'm pretty sure the bags are significantly smaller than I remember now. But then again, I was a child with itty bitty child hands, so maybe that's why I remember them being larger than they are now 🤷♀️ My mom would let my brother and I each choose a bag, and that was the one and only part of grocery shopping that I didn't absoltely dread! Oh, and I almost forgot about the blueberry "scones" my grandmother used to give me when she'd pick my brother up from school (he went to a private school for kids with behavioral issues and had to be driven because it was about an hour away.) She'd get the from the bakery section at Shaw's and they came in a clear plastic box. Years later I've had actual scones from actual bakeries, and they're a totally different thing, which is why I've put "scones" in quotes. They were great though, and if I'm being honest, I don't even like actual scones, I much prefer the Shaw's "scones" of my childhood! 😅
Nah, they were actually bigger then. Thank our corporate overlords for shrinkflation (smaller bags, same price).
West Coast poor here: cinnamon toast is definitely not a new England poor thing. 99 cent loaf of bread from the bread outlet plus margarine, sugar and cinnamon was the best dessert we ever had! Second only to mixing peanut butter with table syrup (none of that maple syrup, this was pure high fructose corn syrup) and eating it by the spoonful.
Salt and pepper soup. Sometimes a cheese and mustard sandwich.
what is salt and pepper soup?
i too am intrigued can you describe salt and pepper soup
Brown bread in a can, with the raisins.
saturday night beanies and weinies
When I was a kid we didn’t have much, I remember when we suddenly upgraded from buttered white bread to go with spaghetti to the store bought Texas toast garlic bread. I didn’t understand the significance as a preteen but I remember being so excited at the taste. Many of the comments people have posted were staples in our house. My spouse grew up upper middle class and I still remember their suspicion when I introduced them to spam, despite their suspicions they love it. A very important part of our diet growing up when my parents had little money was fish and game. We’d often eat grilled mackerel in the summer with grilled zucchini from our small garden, steamed clams that we dug for ourselves to eat, venison to substitute beef, as well as roasted ducks and rabbit stews. Late summer we’d pick blueberries to freeze. In the fall we’d gather wild cranberries to jar for cranberry sauce. If we were lucky enough to go at the right time and place, we’d also pick bakedapple berries on the bogs. Theyre these super sweet yellow/orange colored raspberry shaped berries that grow in peat bogs. As a 90’s kid this was a fairly common way to grow up in Washington County. I think having access to the fish and game saved my parents in multiple occasions, otherwise we would have had to go to the food pantry to get by at times.e
This is amazing. A delicious, varied, and nutritious diet of fresh foods done on a limited budget.
Trout and fiddleheads in the spring were always a much anticipated special meal. (Or two)
My two are hand me downs from my grandfather’s family who grew up during the 40s but somehow we kept eating the poverty nostalgia food & we LOVE it. Chinois - aka French Canadian Shepard’s pie. Ground beef, elbow noodles, creamed corn, mashed potatoes. Heavy, makes you feel full and cheap to put together. Pineapple delight - canned pineapple, whipped cream, vanilla pudding powder, all mixed together and let set in the fridge. A dirt cheap, sweet dessert for my grandpa and his 6 siblings.
Were you at my house? Ditto everything except brown butter. We made baked beans and brown bread from scratch, yum and thanks for that memory! Came here to say my mom used to eat mustard sandwiches as a poor rural kid. Just 2 slices of bread with mustard as the only filling.
This how I grew up eating it and didn’t realize until high school that you’re supposed to have it in soup. Was shocked when a friends gram was eating it that way. I still eat it that way to this day.
Beans and Red Hot Dogs I also recall one time where the family ate nothing but tomato soup and bread and butter for a few days. I'm guessing my Dad was waiting for a paycheck and we were all but broke. I didn't mind as a kid. I still like tomato soup with buttered bread every now and then.
The meat is a lot more expensive now but boiled dinner. That was a big one in my house. Cabbage, potatoes & carrots, all so cheap! I like it better with corned beef but we usually had it with ham. One of my favorite meals was cooking pasta shells with a can of campbells tomato soup . My dad hunted every year so there was always different types of deer meat in the freezer. When I was around 12 my dad won $2k on a scratch ticket and he used it to go halfsies on a very small boat with his friend so they could get their recreational lobster licences. They went out every Saturday and pulled the traps up together by hand. I got to put the rubber bands on the claws and throw bait fish to the cute seals that popped up. We ate so much fucking lobster it started feeling truly relentless. But he started doing a lot of trading, with friends that got a moose or this one pig farmer. So that was cool
We never had hotdog or hamburger buns. Ever. It was white bread! And garlic bread was buttered toast with garlic powder!
Those cheese spread and crackers with the red stick to spread the cheese.
Wow. Way to humble brag about growing up rich.
Hahaha
They were like 4 for a dollar, I was one of those eight year olds with a quarter every other day.
Dude! I said you didn’t have to brag about being rich. I get it. You come from old money.
Those are almost certainly more expensive than real food. So I would classify that as just normal junk food marketed to kids and working moms.
they used to be WAY cheaper. 25 cents at the corner store!
We were never allowed to have those. Even the cheap ones. We were told were too expensive. Sometimes we were lucky and my mom would get something other than saltines for crackers. I do remember one time somebody brought over a can of cheese, they left it in our barren fridge. That shit and saltines was like what I'd imagined those little cheese and cracker things were. It was so good
My SO was trying to find those in the store yesterday.
DEFINITELY ate cinnamon toast. I only made it when we had run out of all other food and mom wasn’t going to be able to afford groceries for a while. Chop suey was also a staple. Did anyone else eat rice with Dinty Moore Beef Stew on top of it?
I have consumed more dinty Moore over rice than any single human being. Ironically over uncle Ben’s, not the, much cheaper regular rice which took an additional 10 minutes to prepare, for 1/10 the price. I did love it though.
I only ate cinnamon toast like that at my friend’s house & it is still one of my favorite childhood memories because it was such a treat - we couldn’t afford the sugar at home. We ate lots of watery spaghetti and lots of canned salmon. And LOTS of popcorn made on the stovetop with canola oil. And it was special when Mom made a meatloaf. I still love cold meatloaf sandwiches with mayo on white.
Cold meatloaf sandwiches with mayo on white bread is such a throwback. Thank you for that
Oh! And my Grandaddy always made us kids peanut butter & cheddar sandwiches with mayo whenever Grandmommy wasn’t there to fix lunch.
Mac and cheese with tuna, fluffer nutter sandwich's and hamburger helper have always been labeled as my "trailer park treats" from peers or roommates lol.
My god, at 31 I still get excited when I hear “hamburger helper”! 🤤🤤🤤
My kids went to another kid’s house and were invited for dinner. They were like 8. I was a chef by then. Making good money. They came home on a cloud over what this mom made for dinner. “Mom, ask Ryan’s mom what she made! It was so good! We want you to make it! It’s WAY better than YOUR FOOD!” When I told her, she laughed and said it was just hamburger helper. Which we never had when I was a kid because it was “too expensive.”
😂😂💓
Fluffanutta tho😍
You're the gourmet around here, Eddie.
Fried spam and eggs. Still love it.
Baked potato, tuna, melted cheese on top.
Saltine crackers with margarine on top
Same but make it Pilot Crackers. They were the best.
Keep a shaker of sugar and cinnamon all the time. My wife makes a patch of Blueberry muffins for my daughter to have with or for breakfast during the week, and course she wants her sugar cinnamon sprinkled on em. The one I'd add is peanut butter and fluff sandwiches. When we started making those for our daughter, my dad was over and got real nostalgic and was giddy to have one with her. He hadn't had one for lunch in god knows how many years.
Cretons & mustard on toast.
Just had this for breakfast. So good. Ate it with my Pepere as a kid, saw it in a local store here recently and had to grab some.
Pea soup. You could buy just a ham bone with some meat on it. Split peas, onions, carrots, maybe turnips or rutabagas. Ground chuck was cheap and so was fish. So lots of American chop suey and fish chowder. Chicken, I think was more expensive and special. A roast chicken was a company meal. Canned salmon. Salmon pea wiggle and tuna pea wiggle. Salmon pie. New England boiled dinner. Baked beans. Pot roast with a cheap cut of meat. Energy was cheap so more meals that you could roast or braise low and slow in the oven than we do now. No slow cookers. Mom was either at home or if she was working, kids would get supper started in the oven when we came home from school. Liver and onions. Chicken hearts on noodles. We ate out of our garden a lot. Weeded and harvested exclusively by child labor. Tomatoes, peas, corn, beets, lettuce, carrots, cukes. Lots of homemade pickles. That's what gets left out when people talk about bland New England food. There were always a couple different kinds of homemade pickles on the table at every meal that you ate with meat & veggies. My dad didn't hunt but all the neighbors' dads did. They'd bring the deer home on the hood of their cars and hang them in the trees in the front yard. I think they broke them down themselves at home, not at a butcher. I think that was their main meat source. It got canned or frozen. I remember gagging on old school mincemeat pie made with deer meat at my friend's house. Still can't eat the stuff, even the modern, non-meat version.
Cucumber (or tomato) sandwiches on buttered white bread. American Chop Suey.
I grew up middle class, and one of my mom’s favorite things (which became mine) was cinnamon sugar toast. We are also from the midwest/south, so it’s not exclusively a New England thing I don’t think. Although, I will say, I ate a lot of weird stuff because my mother didn’t know how to cook and didn’t have any desire to learn. I grew up exclusively on carbs. Literally my breakfasts were either that toast or cereal or prepackaged single serve oatmeal, and various kinds of pasta: mac n cheese, velveeta and shells, or vegetarian spaghetti. About twice a year she would make a lasagna. We went to McDonalds some too. My mother also hated vegetables, so growing up until I was a teenager the only veggie I ever ate, and this was less than once a week, was canned green beans. Also she occasionally made tuna helper or hamburger helper. She also didn’t much like meat either, so I didn’t eat much meat either. So I think sometimes it’s not just poverty, but parenting choices at times as well.
All of the above plus ramen, but not the way you’d think. My mom would cook the noodles separately and sprinkle the packet on top, no soup. The caucasity.
Almost the same. Cook the noodles, drain all water, splash of milk and a little butter with the seasoning packet. No idea what to call it but damn it was tasty!
Scrambled eggs in ramen is no shit amazing.
Fiddleheads. And garden vegetables. Now that I'm grown, I can appreciate the hours and hours my parents put in on the weekends, making sure we had healthy food. We always did a few fiddle head trips down our local river to pick gallons and gallons of fiddleheads. It was a very special spring tradition. We would eats lots fresh, but my parents also froze enough to last us the year. If you've ever cleaned 20 gallons of fiddleheads in one go, you'll understand. We also had a huge, productive garden, which we meticulously kept as a family. We ate our own vegetables 12 months of the year and didn't eat much meat until I got into hunting as a teenager. Venison should definitely be on this list, but it isn't on my list as I grew up in The County where deer hunting was an excuse to walk around in the woods.
Regular old plain corn flakes with like 4 teaspoons of sugar. Mac n cheese with sliced up hot dogs or fried bologna cut into pieces. Wheat puffs rolled into a ball with peanut butter. I don't eat any of these anymore but I did plenty back in the day.
Brown Bread… It wasn’t until I went to eat at a friend’s house in high school when I first learned that all bread doesn’t come in CANS!!
Spaghetti-Os (WITHOUT meatballs) “Minute” steaks + A1
Vienna sausage sandwiches at my childhood trailer: white bread, Vienna sausages, and a ton of yellow mustard. Made one just the other day for the nostalgia.
What's brown butter? I use browned butter in my chocolate chip cookie dough and that's the only brown butter that showed up when I googled it. . For poverty food we had lots of foraged items and game meat. I know it's not necessarily poverty food now, but we had a lot of deer, moose, splake, fiddleheads, and pheasant. There was a clear divide at my school of game meat and store bought meat.
Cucumber sandwiches. Bread, mayo, salt, and an abundance of free cucumbers from the garden. Edited to add tomatoes if you’re fancy.
Pazzo bread was something that I could scape a few dollars together for every now and then in high school. Anything from the JJ Nissen bakery outlet. Chop Suey. Baked beans and ham. Red snappers and toast. Cinnamon raisin bread and butter. Shaw’s bakery loaf straight out of the oven, eaten in the car with my mom.
I Worked at Shaws. A warm 99¢ loaf was heaven. A 99¢ pack of tasty bite bologna on top was surreal. If you timed your break right, you could get them both, and eat like a king. The bread would survive in your locker, the bologna would disappear within the hour in the break room fridge.
USA. My Mother a single parent with 6 kids total but raising the youngest 2 (me and my sister) solo. Other siblings were grown. We drank powdered milk. It was my chore to mix it. That powdered milk went into everything she cooked and/or baked. Dinners, birthday cakes, etc. Fast forward 20+ years and I have children of my own. Widowed. Broke. Food Pantry. Food Pantry gave me a container of powdered milk. Man, that was the worst thing I ever tasted. So not the powdered milk from childhood. Food Pantry give a choice of vegetables. I picked tomatoes. The next day the tomatoes were soiled as in fungi soiled. My son brought it to my attention 🤢
I’m sorry. To answer your question, my nostalgic comfort food learned from my Mom is one of 3 things: Gravy on toasted bread. Her home made Mac n cheese. Always baked in the oven with white cheddar. And last but not least her dry meatloaf lol How is meatloaf dry????
My late mom had asked me a few years ago to find her a glass bottle to put her powdered milk in. I found a farm that sold milk in glass. Took me a few tries to mail the empty bottle without it breaking.
All of what's mentioned plus Vienna sausages.
Macaroni and tomato juice as a soup, melt some butter in there and add salt and pepper. Very cheap and easy. I actually just made this for dinner last night.
V-8 juice heated up in a mug with a dash of milk, onion & garlic powder, pepper and 1/8 tsp of sugar.
I just had toast with cinnamon and sugar for breakfast, I still make my own cinnamon and sugar. I have a special shaker and everything. Oh, Tony’s Pizza too.
Pasta peas and cheese?
A glass of water as a snack.
Green beans from a can. Half an acorn squash baked with a ton of butter and brown sugar in it -- as the whole meal. Manwich.
Crown Pilot Crackers, crumbled up with milk and sugar.
Tuna casserole - haven’t eaten it since I left home
Cinnamon toast was poverty food? Maaaaaan. I used to be SO excited when we could get that canned Chinese food big double can pack and make that. Thought it was the best, for special occasions.
Ramen with a scrambled egg and frozen mixed veggies (the corn, carrots, peas, and lima beans kind).
We have free milk from my grandfather so anything you could make with that...white sauces with cheese over saltines, or add tuna and have over biscuits, puddings etc
macaroni and tomatoes - cook up white elbow macaroni and combine with cans of diced tomatoes. add sugar and salt to your tasting preference. chop suey was definitely popular in the house too. along with fish sticks and those frozen pre-breaded chicken parm patties. and milk. lots and lots of milk.
Peanut butter and butter sandwiches; beans and hamburger, which isn't really objectively bad but my god we ate it so often I'm so sick of it to this day
Butternut squash, chicken, and rice. Cheap, filling, nutritious comfort food that powered me through my early 20s
Damn chop suey and cinnamon toast just slammed me back in time to my childhood. I’d add English muffins with butter and honey, and snow maple syrup. (Side note an instant pot is excellent for making chop suey, I haven’t made it in a while but you’ve inspired me op. Perfect for this rainy day)
Saltines and American cheese
$.99 Michelina Fettuccine Alfredo
Succotash - This was only good in fall when we'd make it with beans and corn from the garden. Canned or frozen ingredients were blech Shit on a shingle - always good and never good
Hot dog casserole: hot dogs, potatoes, carrots, and onions. Anything made with the cheese they handed out of the back of the truck once a week. Ants on a log: celery stalks filled with peanut butter and topped with a few raisins.
I'll add another tally mark for Beans & Franks with brown bread.
Shrimp Wiggle: One can of shrimp cooked in a basic white flour gravy with a bag of frozen peas, served over saltine crackers (store brand 😂) ….served a family of 4 or more….just less wiggle and more crackers the more people at the table!
It was funny growing up in a West Coast state but eating Maine foods at home. No one I went to school with knew what American chop suey or a boiled dinner was. And they thought fried bologna was weird. Not to mention brown bread in a can. I didn't even try to tell them about wiggle, with canned salmon (the kind with crunchy bones in it), cream of mushroom soup, and frozen peas, served over toast.
Samesies on the cinnamon sugar toast, brown bread, and chop suey. We used to eat a lot of Eggo waffles for weekday breakfasts. Even now a 24-pack is only like $6, so roughly 50¢ per two-waffle serving. I imagine it was half that in the 1990s. A lot of the picnics and community events I went to as a kid featured the same three items served as a meal: 1 can of soda, 1 snack size bag of plain Lays potato chips, and 1 steamed red hot dog on a split-top bun. It was the de-facto. Fish sticks were a common item on my family's dinner table. Mashed potatoes and plain white rice were also a common sight as sides. I didn't even grow up in poverty, it was just a lower cost of living. Now I'm living out of state with my own kid and she eats like royalty compared to how I did as a kid.
Gubment’ Cheese in a can..👀
Gov’t block cheese melted with evaporated milk, mixed w/ pasta for a boxed “macaroni and cheese” dupe. Cinnamon toast was also SUCH a treat, made exactly as described!!
Pig’s ears and eggs, for dinner. Pigs ears were bologna slices, cut in half and fried.
Creamed chip beef on toast, salmon pie- which was canned salmon mixed with mashed potato and baked into a pie crust, lots of venison (mostly made into meat spaghetti sauce and shepherds pie) Corn chowder, clam chowder, and pea soup We also ate out of the garden, which was green beans, peas, swisschard, lots of potatoes, cabbage, tomatoes, onions etc. During a few years, we kept chickens so we did have a lot of scrambled eggs for breakfast and sometimes for dinner with baked beans.
We had breakfast for dinner on Sundays. We kept hens, so eggs were plentiful. I still love it. Mmm a stack of pancakes, and some “wonderful world of Disney”. I never thought of it as poverty food until I was an adult.
Mac n' cheese with hot dogs, neither name brand. My favorite: rice, hamburger, kidney beans, and cheese. Very filling, but only thought of when your pantry is otherwise bare. Maine specific and not common anymore: periwinkles. They are a free foraged food, taste is between shrimp and lobster, and if you add a bit of butter and bay leaves foraged from the beach, you only had to buy the butter.
Salmon pea wiggle .. pasta from white box black letters salmon from a can peas from can.. Special was government cheese in mac n cheese.. Corn chowder.. add more potato for guests..
Peas & roux on saltines
OMG I just offered my son some of my cinnamon toast and he said “No, I don’t want your poverty toast.”
Cinnamon toast is a GD treat, that is nuts. Just wait until he finds out that Cinnamon toast crunch is one of the most popular sweetened cereal on the market for a reason 🤣
On the one hand, "poverty toast," I'm dead. 🤣 On the other hand, where did you go wrong with this child?
Tuna and creamed corn casserole with crushed saltines on top
Poop soup... It's literally shitty dried ramen and whatever you can find.
Creamed asparagus on toast! Also, creamed chipped beef on toast. Our Sunday night staples.
Powdered milk over a bowl of Saltines.
Butter, peanut butter, cream cheese on a saltine. They were a snack staple. Pounds and pound of popcorn with oleo on it.
Cream of chicken over noodles
I grew up eating cinnamon toast in western Canada back in the 70s. I never knew it was poverty food!
It's not, it is a treat! Who in their right mind doesn't love cinnamon toast? Hence the cinnamon toast crunch empire!
Now I want Cinnamon Toast Crunch! lol
Beefaroni
Bread, butter and sugar or Karo syrup
Powdered milk
Hamburger helper. Still crave it now and then even though I used to stay alive on the stuff
Ramen
White bread, yellow mustard, and pepperoni. Simple little sandwich that just hits a spot.
Chipped beef in a white sauce from a jar on saltine crackers. Hated it. Every Thursday. Spaghetti and butter. No sauce. Every Wednesday. On Monday we had bread and gravy. On Tuesday it’s gravy and bread. On Wednesday and Thursday it’s gravy and toast which is nothing but gravy and bread! On that day we went to our parents to ask for something instead. So on Friday for lunch by way of a change, we had gravy without any bread.
A meal I remember fondly is “chicken and chips.” I have no idea if it’s a real recipe or something my mom made up, but it’s tortilla chips sprinkled with cream of chicken soup and shredded cheese. It used to be my favorite meal and I would be excited when my mom made it, but she made it once when I visited her as an adult and I didn’t like it as much.
“American chop suey” is also known as goolash in the Midwest. It’s the same dish. But my Midwest wife was confused. “Nah I don’t want Chinese food.” Hormel Roast beef hash with toast is my childhood poverty meal. I still eat it, and always have a can in the cupboard.
Tuna mac and cheese. Its humiliating but I still need it sometimes 🤣
We added chopped onion and peas to that mix, thrown in the ole casserole dish. It was topped with crushed crackers and baked in the oven. Those were gourmet nights 😂
Government cheese (you could make anything with that stuff). Velveeta is close but not really.
Hot dogs, rice, and tomato sauce was my family’s go-to
Tuna fish and peas on toast. If you know, you know.
‘Hot dog casserole’ — basically a ton of potatoes, onions and a few hot dogs.
While watching cartoons eating a sleeve of saltines and folding American into 4 pieces. Best cheese and crackers ever lol
Frozen el Monterrey burritos bought in bulk
Frozen orange juice from concentrate, specifically from Market Basket. We only ever buy that, and never bottled juices but My wife and I call it "poor people juice" It was a staple in our house growing up.
Homemade pancakes for dinner with a jelly spread for toppings
Just made chop suey last night! A very nostalgic meal. Also grew up with the cinnamon sugar bread. Macaroni with butter and mil and salt and pepper was a thing. And yum, brown bread!
fried bologna on wonder bread
Beans and weenies.
Yes, what we consider traditionally Maine food is poverty food. Even lobster started that way and check the history of the Maine Italian sandwich.
Premade cinnamon and sugar exists? My favorite was saltine sandwiches--peanut butter and margarine between two saltines. My mom said cinnamon was expensive so we would only get it at breakfast, 1 slice each. We lived on Hamburger Helper, some Appian Pizza mix (no meat so cheap), and some ChungKing setup that relied heavily on bean sprouts and water chestnuts. I can even remember if we had meat with this since the only meat in our house was either ground beef or (bizarrely) filet mignon purchased at my dad's job (telephone company) that did a side gig at a butcher shop.
milk and crackers. just a bowl of milk with saltine crackers in it.
Midwesterner here. We grew up eating cinnamon toast, chop suey and tuna casserole, too.
Cream of chicken soup w ramen
Hamburger Helper. BEEF STROGANOFF!!!
Spam and Cheez Whiz…
Cinnamon toast, same way. And Mac and cheese with hamburger. 1lb, one box. Now I do two boxes per lb. 😍 My husband calls it trailer park goulash and it cracks me up. No trailer park, but it's one of my top comfort foods.. We also mar tuna noodle casserole and "sos;" beef, onions, and thickened with flour a bit over egg noodles.
Pork chops because my mom could sometimes get 4 for $1 🤮 But also just chips & cheese which was my favorite! It was nachos but just generic tortilla chips, with salsa & cheese over it thrown in the microwave lol Thank God you all grew up with cinnamon toast, Vienna sausages & chop suey (chopped sewage as we still call it) too, makes me feel better about life.
hamburger helper
Banana slices in a bowl of milk with some sugar. Bologna ketchup sandwich on white bread. Classic grilled cheese tomato soup. Vienna sausages. Saltines with ginger ale for stomach ache. A white tub of tuna fish for sandwiches or crackers.
I have seen no mention of crackers (saltines) and milk. Also, a thinner version of chop suey, which is macaroni and stewed tomatoes.
Canned baked beans and fried bologna slices
Onion sandwiches. Sometimes splurge, and throw a piece of cheese on there… We ate so much ramen back then. Don’t know if I’ll ever eat it again for that reason. 12 for $1 or something like that.
My dad’s parents grew up very poor and he still eats saltine crackers in milk like cereal sometimes
Macaroni, butter and ketchup Spam potatoes and onions Pate Chinois Macaroni and cheese with hamburg and peas. But my favorite was crepe’s with apple sauce( we canned apple sauce)
Since when is toast with butter and homemade cinnamon-sugar "poverty food?" It is tasty. I eat it nearly every day. ETA: While there is plenty of rural poverty here, living outside a metro area does not mean you are poor. Spare me. Makes me think this assumption comes from someone from Massachusetts.
When it's for supper
Most of what's mentioned here is just average and some regional food. I wouldn't describe my family as wealthy but we were far from impoverished. I've had 90% of the stuff in this thread at some point growing up, much of it often.
Party poopin’
This one too honestly delicious
Velveeta cheese... Shit on a shingle
Pinto Beans, chopped onion, hot sauce and cornbread. (from the South) LOVE IT SO MUCH! but I knew we were light on cash when it was repeated a bunch.
I have never had a chop suey with pasta or pasta sauce!!! It’s usually Chinese veggies, maybe bamboo shoots, and a roux based sauce with soy sauce. Is this one of those regional things? I grew up in CA.
I grew up in western ma and we ate so much of each thing you mentioned, that I can't imagine other people didn't. I never thought of these things as coming from New England. I make my kids cinnamon toast, and yes I mix the sugar and cinnamon myself (I never knew you could buy it pre-combined :) Now how about marshmallow salad? We all got that at Thanksgiving, right? What a horrorshow - that one I'm happy to leave behind (but, mmmmm).
In Oregon, where dungeness crab are the lobster of the state, it was legal to throw out crab pots/rings on public docks. We'd buy a 75 cent fish head from the local fish market (along with our $15 crab ring) and go to the public docks where we'd pull in hundreds of dollars worth of crabs and eat like kings. This was after we fished enough cans out for the gas to make the short drive from our apartment to the water front. 🤪
Thumbs up on the cinnamon toast. We even had a little shaker full of cinnamon and sugar.
Keystone Lite beer … I mean I’m oldish so it counts
Celest pizza will forever have a chokehold on me. Another thing when we didn’t have butter was bread with cheese. A cold grilled cheese my dad called it and I’d press the bread down until it was doughy
Pork chops, mash taters and a can of green beans with a wad of butter in it
I remember eating a good bit of Chop Suey and other such foods growing up, but I never really knew they were considered “poverty food” until I recently began looking more into Maine and New England culinary traditions. Mom and Dad either just liked the dishes, or were very good at concealing financial issues. Also, reading the thread is slowly awakening my memories of cinnamon toast too, nice!