Step aside peanut butter and jelly. A rival recipe arrived during the Depression Era: the peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwich. At this point, it becomes evident that taste variety was as scarce as ingredients and people had begun experimenting rather wildly.
As straightforward as it comes, this recipe only had peanut butter and mayonnaise added to a sandwich with lettuce leaves. Somewhat of a cult classic, this throwback makes an appearance every so often in modern food literature and wins over adventurous tastebuds to this day.
Rabbit Stew
This dish marked a shift in the American attitude towards rabbits and sums up the saying ‘desperate times call for desperate measures’. Generally considered a pet and not fit for eating, the traditionally European meal of rabbit stew made an appearance during the Depression Era due to the availability of wild rabbits.
Known as a “peasant dish”, the stew would be made by adding rabbit meat to whatever vegetables were available to boil together.
Boiled Cake
Very similar to Wacky Cake, Boiled Cake required no eggs, no dairy, and no yeast. The difference with the Boiled Cake was the tantalizing addition of the very wintertime-inspired spices of nutmeg, allspice, cloves, and cinnamon, and raisins.
In fact, the raisins are responsible for the peculiar name of this cake as they would need to be boiled to create a syrup, in conjunction with the other spices, to be added to the flour and baking soda before baking.
Jell-O Ice Cream
A very pertinent question, to begin with, would be “Why is there Jell-O in ice cream?” Modern-day ice cream has many varieties of thickening agents that are used, guar gum is an example of one.
These thickening agents help prevent the formation of ice crystals. Now being the Depression Era, cream and the like was almost impossible to come by. The Jell-O would be the thickening agent that prevented ice crystals from forming. It would be a roundabout way to get flavor while inhibiting ice crystals.
Garbage Plate
Ironically, the name “Garbage Plate” was assigned to this meal a decade before the Great Depression. And unlike with Mulligan’s Secret Recipe, there was nothing in it that actually made it garbage!
First popularized as a student meal in New York, the Garbage Plate would be a mixture of absolutely any leftover usually topped with mustard and tomato sauce. As with other all-in-one meals, the Garbage Plate was consumed regularly as not a single leftover would go to waste.