25 Meals Farm Kids Grew Up Eating When Money Was Tight

I'm Otis Granger. Forty years picking barns and estate auctions across the Midwest, and the kitchen is the last room I clean out. That is where the recipe cards are, tucked in a drawer in handwriting nobody can read anymore, and the church cookbook with a woman's own notes down the margin. This video is what I found in those drawers. Twenty five meals that farm families in this country ate when the money was gone. Milk and bread suppers. Egg dishes stretched to feed six. Gravy that was mostly flour. Beans that sat on the back of the stove all day because that was what there was. I am not going to tell you it was better back then. It was not. These people were broke, and some of this food was thin, and they ate it because there was nothing else in the house. What is worth keeping is not the poverty, it is the cleverness. Somebody worked out how to get six people to the table on almost nothing, and then she wrote it down on the back of a feed store receipt, and fifty years later I am the one standing in her kitchen reading it. Tell me in the comments what your grandmother made when money was short. I read every one of them.