Desperation pie, apple porcupines, and other dishes of the 1930s
Hello, Snackers. We’re heading back in time today to the USA of the 1930s for some snacks that reflect the era in different ways.
Also, yes, this is the Monday post and it’s publishing on Tuesday because … well, yesterday was a holiday in the USA (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day) and also my kids are still home and it’s still cold and everything seems to take 20 times longer than anticipated.
Let’s snack.
The time
The 1930s! Here’s where I started; you can play along and find other stories if you have a Newspapers.com account. You can also browse The Food Timeline for free.
The story
Here are some snacks that were developed or popularized in the 1930s, according the The Food Timeline: cheese puffs, Fritos, Marshmallow Sandwich cookies, chocolate-covered pretzels (chocolate-covered potato chips date to the 1920s), Ritz crackers, SPAM, and Cho Cho ice cream treats. (Two other essentials that began in the 1930s: milk sold by the gallon and sliced bread.) That’s all fascinating and perhaps I’ll dig into some of those snacks another time, but I was curious what less-familiar snacks were out there during the Great Depression.
The first things that came up—a jarring number of times, honestly—were reports of people eating bits of metal (bike parts, screws, anything) and, in one case, soap and shoe polish. That’s all, uh, noteworthy, but presumably stems from issues far beyond the hunger and malnourishment of the era, so we’ll move on.
In 1935, the USA’s poverty rate was 64.9 percent, which is just astonishingly, heartbreakingly high (the rate is currently around 13.4 percent) and forced much improvisation. For many Americans, foods that might have been considered a snack in other times became the entire meal for the day, as food historians Andrew Coe and Jane Ziegelman document in their 2016 book A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression:
For some [unemployed young women], hunger was a supremely private affliction. Rather than joining the [bread] lines, they banished themselves to shared apartments and boardinghouses and stayed put, “living on a cracker a day” as long as their rent held out.
The book documents “the ways the nation coped with suddenly not being the land of plenty,” including the dishes Americans created with the ingredients available, which was often not very many things at all and also not many things that typically go together. For example:
“Desperation pies” made with vinegar and mashed-up crackers in place of fruit
Peanut butter-stuffed onions, which Ziegelman tried making herself, concluding that “It was surreal. Peanut butter has nothing to say to a baked onion. It was characteristic of a lot of the home-ec recipes.”
Something called “prune whip,” which was essentially a prune-heavy custard and a favorite of FDR. Here’s a recipe for the pie version, from The Long Beach Sun.
Looking back at the food coverage in newspapers of the era, it’s immediately apparent that many ingredients once readily available are in much shorter supply, and household budgets aren’t stretching as far as the once did—but you don’t get the impression that so many Americans are hurting so much. Instead, at least in these pages of the paper, you get rosier picture. Here, the meal-planning was aspirational (as it continues to be in food media today, although the goals now tend to be less about budget and more about the swagger that comes from sharing something that looks effortlessly amazing on Instagram).
In 1935, right in the heart of the Depression, an upbeat story ran in newspapers around the USA
Those unusual snacks included:
Apple and salami porcupines, which involved taking small cubes of salami and onion, impaling them on toothpicks, and sticking them into an apple. An attractive passed appetizer, or so we’re told.
Sardine pastries, a variation on pigs in a blanket but with, you know, sardines instead of hot dogs.
Ham and asparagus rolls, which start with the asparagus being soaked in French dressing for ten minutes. Then you roll them up inside pieces of ham and served with mayonnaise (obviously).
Celery and crabmeat sticks, a sort of fancy ants-on-a-long, with crab standing in for peanut butter (and no raisins, thankfully).
Baconized Camembert spread, which is literally just crispy bacon chopped finely and mixed into Camembert and spread on crackers. (I might try this one.)
What’s especially interesting, I think, is that some of the foods of hardship have made a comeback, including desperation pie, which was (at least back in 2015) the signature dessert for one James Beard Award-winning chef, while the party foods of the more well-off citizens have faded. Often, there’s an unfortunate imbalance to what foods (or buildings or music or any other aspect of culture) gets preserved in the long-term collective memory. Too often, it’s the tales of the rich and privileged that take precedence and get repeated and remembered. Here, though, is an example of something else. Ham (in various formats) plus asparagus is hardly an unfamiliar combo, but I’ve never seen it presented as something that speaks to a particular era; it’s a dish not remembered in the context of mythology. Meanwhile, I’ve never heard of apple and salami porcupines at all, and I sincerely doubt they’re on any restaurant menus today. And that’s just fine.
Will you like these snacks?
Probably! Maybe? Honestly, hard to say.
Random find
It’s always jarring to look through an old newspaper from your hometown and see a mention of a pretty darn big event that you’ve never heard of. That “Unusual Snacks for Appreciative Guests” story also ran in the Minneapolis Tribune, on the same page as this story (below) about city workers protesting at the Municipal Building (City Hall) and being forced away with tear gas bombs. The city also quickly allocated funding to add 200 new police officers to the force. It’s possible some of this may seem familiar to observant readers!
