Vintage Dinner Inspiration
My fantastic meal-planning book* gives a menu for every single breakfast, lunch, and dinner of the year. Let's take a look at March 26:
Breakfast: Bananas, oatmeal with milk and sugar, waffles with syrup and butter, coffee, and cocoa.
Lunch: Baked beans, cole slaw, catsup, cornmeal muffin with butter, milk, and canned peaches with cream.
Dinner: Meat pie, creamed onions, buttered turnips, radishes, bread and butter, coffee, and cherry pudding with sauce.
I think you are meant to eat everything on the menu. Not choose between, say, oatmeal and waffles. Eat them both. Go ahead. If you can.
*The American Home Diet, or, What Shall We Have for Dinner?, (1920)
18 comments:
WOW! That is one filling menu, obviously meant for more physically demanding times (long before we sat in front of computer screens at work for hours each day!). These dishes are so reminiscent of things my grandmother might prepare for her boarding house.
I'm sure I gained weight just from reading it.
Lisateresa (but, coffee AND cocoa? Maybe that's what keeps the pounds off - so much caffeine!)
If you can indeed! I certainly couldn't eat all that. And couldn't do all that for breakfast. I'm a toast and yoghurt girl.
I love looking at vintage menu plans! This one has me a little stumped though - what's the catsup for at lunch?
I am just fascinated by this book.
I wondered about the catsup, too. Maybe the recipe for baked beans doesn't have catsup in it and you're to add it on your plate?
I'm also wondering about that catsup. But on baked beans? Ick!
Food inspiration at it's finest!
Be thinking I need to make some baked beans now...the funny thing is, my mother-in-law always served her's with coleslaw, and now my husband won't eat the beans without!
no wonder our elders embraced convenience food! Think of the time the women spent preparing all that.
I bet their portions were a lot smaller than ours. And they were more physically active. . . but still: it gives me pause to see what they considered a meal!
thanks for a fascinating bit of history.
Well, considering cars did not go very fast at that time, I bet most women walked to the grocery store and had the orders delivered then, right?
It sounds like a hearty meals for hard working people!
Sounds like my Grandma's menu. Except hot tea with condensed milk at around 2:00 p.m. before she would start making supper.
Anna,
I just downloaded a free copy from Google books. It can be read online or download the .pdf file.
http://books.google.com/books?id=pwkPAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+american+home+diet&hl=en&ei=C7KQTfWLF5O3tgeOyaiICQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CEQQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
What a great sounding cook book! It would be fun to pick a day and totally follow the entire meal plan.I am adding this to my list of cook books I wish to acquire.
There are seriously a few people in my household who could eat a menu like that..... :)
That ketchup part is strange...do you put the ketchup on the coleslaw? Ew, in my opinion!
I love this! And just to pass on to other curious readers- I was looking for a copy of this based off of Anna's previous posting of her vintage menus and the book is available on Google Books, the year of menus starts on page 116.
In Christ,
Dawn
So far I'm thinking this is the strangest book I've EVER ordered. Trusting you, that it will come in handy. Maybe I need to look at it a bit more slowly, to figure out how to use it. At first glance it seems like SO much food for one day.
Well, I can't say that I recommend you eat everything on their lists! Please, use common sense! :)
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