The Greatest Generation Fed Us Well

We grow up with certain things that we come to assume are givens in the world.

It was the most natural thing in the world that my mother made dinner for us every night, and I mean every night. There was no place to eat in the kitchen, so all meals were had at the maple drop leaf table.

For years I thought everyone had their evening meal like this, with parents at each end of the table and us kids along the sides in between. I believed this because the houses I visited were just like ours only some were nicer

There were five in our family. I was the youngest of three brothers. My oldest brother had been born in ’44 during the war, our first contribution to the baby boom. My middle brother came along after my dad’s return from service in the European Theater of Operations (ETO). He was born in ’47. I arrived a few years later, a surprise according to my mom, but welcomed and loved just as much as the others. Sometimes I think I was a little more special, being the baby, but I digress. As long as we lived in New Castle my mom was a stay-at-home mom. When my dad and my brothers were out for the day, I stayed at home and enjoyed the attention and affection of my mother and my grandparents. It was a lifestyle I can highly recommend.

When I came on the scene we lived in a house my dad had built, a ranch style house finished about 1950. It was glazed block on the outside with a seldom-used front porch and a white railing above the porch. It had chrysanthemums and white cedars planted around the outside walls so that when I smell either of those in the fall of the year I am instantly back in the sunny photos from the house on Riley Road in New Castle, Indiana. There was a living room with a fireplace and knotty pine paneling on the walls, one bath and three bedrooms down the hallway.

I never went to school while we lived there, but my brothers did. I remember waiting on them to come home in the afternoon from the same school my dad had attended as a boy. At that time my dad was building houses to help with the housing shortage that followed the end of the war. He bought lots and built the houses himself, selling each one in turn and starting on another.

Our house was 40 or so yards from my grandparents’ farmhouse, and in between was a beautiful garden in muck soil tended by my grandfather with my grandmother’s help. He ruled in the garden and she ruled in the kitchen. This meant that we had a full range of garden vegetables and fruits preserved and available at any time of the year. My grandparents had a large freezer and did a great deal of canning. We had a large freezer and my mother did a good bit of canning, especially of tomatoes and green beans. There was beef, pork, and chicken all raised on the farm.

We had a white Frigidaire range with a large deep well burner that could be set to come on later in the day, and my mom was a good cook, as was her mother. My dad and my brothers and I enjoyed just about everything she prepared for us. It was a long enough list of dishes that there was rarely a repeated meal in a two-week period. It was culinary heaven for boys and their dad. I can see us sitting on the ladder back chairs even now as we bowed and heard a short prayer from our father before diving in. This was the postwar world, in the season of plenty, and it was a good place to grow up.

In no particular order these are among the meals that we enjoyed on a rotation each day of every week of the year.

• Pork chops, green beans, mashed potatoes
• Soup beans with boiled ham, cornbread, greens
• Boiled ham, cornbread, salad, greens
• Hamburger, tomato, macaroni casserole, salad
• Fried cut up chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans
• Hamburgers on the barbeque and later on the grill, salad, baked potato
• Pork roast, mashed potatoes, green beans
• Steaks, baked potatoes, Brussels sprouts, salad
• Macaroni and cheese (from scratch, never from a box), salad
• Broiled pigs in a blanket with cheddar and bacon fastened with toothpicks
• Potato/bacon soup with cornbread
• Chicken and noodles, green vegetable or frozen corn
• Beef and noodles, green vegetable or fresh sweet corn
• Pork roast, fried potatoes, salad or other green vegetable
• Chili with a little spaghetti pasta in it, crackers
• Spaghetti with meat sauce (from scratch according to a family recipe)
• Stewed chicken
• Tuna casserole
• Twice baked potatoes (a rarity, but they were heavenly)
• Hand tenderized pork tenderloin sandwiches breaded with egg and Ritz cracker crumbs on a bun with mayo and a lettuce leaf
• Bacon lettuce and tomato sandwiches
• Beef stew
• Beef stroganoff
• Chipped beef with gravy on toast, what we called dried beef gravy, and what my dad had called SOS in the army.
• Hot dogs cooked in sauerkraut with fried potatoes
• Chicken pie
• Creamed turkey on toast

Any time there was chicken or a pork roast there would be gravy. We guys would tear up a slice of bread on our plates and ladle gravy over it to fill us up. There would be store bread at nearly every meal. Later on my mom would buy Italian bread and make garlic butter spread for it before baking it in foil in the oven.

Eventually my dad took over making slaw using the recipe his mother had used.

For holidays there would be scalloped corn, cranberry salad, jellied cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, turkey or ham, green beans, and both regular cornbread dressing and oyster cornbread dressing.

There was usually something for dessert. It might be cake, tapioca pudding or banana pudding, pie (many different kinds), or cookies.

Once in a great while we would just repeat breakfast for dinner. We thought it was great fun to have eggs, bacon, and toast for the evening meal, always served on the maple table.

For luncheon sandwiches my dad loved the pickle-pimiento loaf lunchmeat from Ekrich. I thought there was nothing better than pan fried bologna with mayo on whole wheat bread.

My dad taught us three boys that we were to thank our mother after every meal and mean it. We did, and were happy that we didn’t have to lie about it. We were well fed all those growing up years, so that now it is one of the ways we remember the folks and that long ago time. This past weekend I had occasion to make a big dish of what I call 1959 macaroni and cheese using elbows and cheddar cheese and milk, just as my mother used to make it, then baking for half an hour. In this way someone else experienced what we knew in those days, and I was right back at the table in the house my dad built on Riley Road.

We were blessed in so many ways, but scarcely paused to reflect on it at the time. Now we go out of our way to recall and relive the best parts of those days so that the memory will live on, even after our time. Among many other things, those 1950s suppers with the family are worth remembering.

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