Struggle Meals

By Guest Author Joyce Oronzio

Watching all the “struggle” meals on the videos posted on the internet near daily by those who grew up on the “poorer” side of Life reminded me of the ones we ate in the 1950’s and 60’s with the 60’s being the poorest for us.

I’ll start with the Tarts. Tarts and Tea. That was a breakfast, lunch and sometimes dinner back in the 50’s when we were still getting the Government Surplus food. It is one of the first struggle meals I can remember. It was made with the government flour, powdered milk, lard or margarine, and powdered eggs. If we were lucky, we would have some sugar to add. Nothing else. My mother made tarts with this combination, and we ate them with grape jelly. This is the same way she made biscuits for meals, and we ate those with margarine. The only difference was that the tarts were rolled dough and the biscuits were dropped dough. They were served with tea and powdered milk. Nothing else.

Spam..........We ate a lot of Spam sliced plain for sandwiches on white bread and maybe a little Miracle Whip, if we had it, or fried up in the government issued lard. These were our packed in wax paper school lunches from jr. High through high school. Six years. I mostly gave mine away and bought a pack of Peanut Butter Tandy Kakes for a nickel or seven cents at the time usually bought with the glass bottle deposit refund pennies, two cents a bottle we were able to scrounge up. By the middle 60’s these made in Philly cakes were ten cents to twelve cents a pack, but you got three decent sized cakes that were way better than Spam and added a little protein too with the peanut butter. If you were lucky enough to afford an RC cola which was about five to eight cents back then, even better. Cheaper than Coke or Pepsi. Usually, we waited for the walk home from school for this because soda and cupcakes were not sold at school. After school time was prime hunger time for us, and the corner Ma & Pa stores were the cheapest. This particular “meal” was a once a week treat, usually on a Friday when you were going to need a bit more energy for the local Friday night dances we never missed.

Another struggle meal was rice. My mother never served us regular plain cooked rice. None of us would eat it that way. Probably because she never made gravy for it and with margarine only, we just didn’t like it. She served rice in a bowl of milk with a little sugar for breakfast, lunch, sometimes dinner or snack. Like the tarts, with tea.

Next is tuna fish. Tuna was really cheap back then, but we didn’t think of it as a struggle meal because we liked it and considered the days it was in our packed wax paper lunch to be a whole lot better than Spam days. I usually ate my tuna sandwich on the way to school or by second period at 10 a.m. We always had Chicken of the Sea and the only thing in it was the ever-handy Miracle Whip. MW was a lot cheaper than mayo back then and was a staple in our house. In fact, I can still remember my brother and I, on the days my mother escaped to go to town, hauling out the Miracle Whip and whatever leftover bread there was, making “mayonnaise” sandwiches and really liking them. I never had real mayonnaise till I grew up and started to like it better because it was less sweet than MW. But as a kid that MW with the sugar in it was good right out of the jar. It perked up Spam which I’d been known to throw away and just eat the MW bread and if we were lucky enough to have bologna, MW really worked there.

However, I never liked it with cheese. Cheese sandwiches being another struggle meal. We ate a lot of those because we got it in the government surplus box. It was a real cheddar, and it was pretty good! Our best struggle meal was grilled cheese and tomato soup. We had it at least once a week, usually on Wednesdays but mostly two or three times a week for dinner. The days my mother tried to switch tomato soup for chicken noodle were “off” days to me because I never thought chicken noodle soup went with grilled cheese. Still don’t. This was a meal we never thought of as a struggle meal.

Pancakes and Karo syrup. You could make a lot of pancakes with a box of Aunt Jemima which was our preference, but we did have the surplus flour pancakes a lot also. These were served for either breakfast {Sundays}, lunch {weekends} or dinner during the week. We knew food was the most scarce on the nights we had these for dinner. Mostly because my mother would not have made sixteen or more pancakes unless she had to. It was just the pancakes, margarine, and Karo. I never even knew there was something called Real Maple Syrup. I did know about Aunt Jemmima’s syrup, but we could never afford it. Karo was good and cheap and was used for many things, not the least was the powdered baby formula my mother added a bit of karo too in the night bottles. My mother would set the bottle right on the table for us though we still made sure not to use a lot of it because that karo bottle wasn’t at all large. We stuck to maybe a tablespoon or 2 so everybody got enough. We were pretty much limited to two pancakes for each older kid, one for the younger kids who got milk instead of tea and again nothing else was served with this except the tea. But two of my mother’s pancakes were very filling. Only my brother would ask for more. None of us were big eaters at a meal anyway. I truly believe that helped save my mother a whole lot of worries when stretching the little food available to us a lot of the time. She only had to make about fifteen or 1sixteen pancakes to feed all eight of us kids and herself, and we really loved pancakes for dinner. Just the sweetness was enough to make it special. I still love pancakes for dinner.

So, these are the struggle meals I can remember now. Those mac & cheese with hamburger and pasta and tomato sauce meals shown on the videos now for struggle meals were luxury meals to us back then.

Not even close.