Welcome friends! It is Sunday morning so we're going to do another in our series
of pre World War two, Depression era recipes from one of these old cookbooks.
This is: 'My Favourite Recipes' courtesy of the Stayner Sun and Julie's Grandmother
picked this up in March of 1938. So we are going to do a full on Depression era
recipe. We are going to make chop suey. This one is pretty
straightforward, we melt some butter in a cast-iron frying pan and then dump in
some chopped onions and we just want to fry those off to soften them and give
them a little bit of colour. I hear you this is not Chinese Chop Suey this
is an American Chop Suey Recipe, it's a dish that's very prominent in sort of
the Northeast in Maine and so on. It crosses over into southern
Ontario where we're based, and this is from Stayner southern Ontario, and it's a
mix of ground beef, onion, elbow macaroni, and tomatoes. This one includes rice
which is a little bit different than any chop suey I've ever had and also
breadcrumbs because it's going to get baked in the oven. This is also a distant
cousin to American Goulash which is sort of the same thing in the Midwestern
states like Minnesota, and we also do a recipe on our channel for a chili mac
which is which is fairly closely related to this as well. So those onions have got
some nice colour they're almost ready to go. Next in is some ground beef and in
keeping with depression-era pricing we got the discount ground beef. So that
goes into the frying pan and we'll just break that up and fry it off.
Now there are two chop suey recipes in this recipe book, the other one doesn't
have tomatoes, and it doesn't have breadcrumbs, and interestingly enough it
asks for 10 cents of hamburger meat.
I have done searches through old newspapers trying to find out what 10
cents of hamburger meat in 1938 was, and the closest I can come
is I think it's about a pound, of hamburger was 10 cents. Some of the
prices I had were in the sort of twelve to fifteen cent range I had one from the
Toronto Star from 1938 that was 35 cents a pound. So it was all over the map, I
have no clue so I chose the one that gave an actual amount. I'm gonna say this
has browned up nicely so next in is the rice and I'm pretty sure that I have
chosen the incorrect frying pan for this. I'm using one of my grandmother's
cast-iron pans and I don't think it's big enough. So the rice goes in sort of
mix that around, in goes the macaroni and
then it asks for canned tomatoes and this led to a bit of discussion in our
family about what it meant by canned tomatoes. Both for Julie and I, our
grandmothers and our great-grandmother's and our mothers canned tomatoes every
summer. We had giant gardens we canned tomatoes for the winter and we made two
different kinds of canned tomatoes. It's interesting because our families
are from different parts of the province yet we did exactly the same thing.
We made chili sauce and canned that down, and then we canned stewed tomatoes .
So this is tomatoes with onion, celery, salt and pepper. So there's other flavours in
there other than just tomato. And we're pretty sure that that's what
they're asking for because there's no other flavour in this dish save for the
salt and pepper that I'm about to put in. There's no herbs, there's no spices and
I think that's fairly indicative of...
I would say it's fairly indicative of our family backgrounds, of early English
settlers in Canada. My family, my mother's family arrived here in the 1700s and
Julie's family arrived sort of late 1700s early 1800s and there's a common
theme between our family cooking in that our grandmother's made very sort of
plain food. Very plain food, on my mother's side. So following the
instructions we put it into this dish now I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to mix
this together really nicely in the frying pan but I think I'm gonna have
much better luck mixing it in the dish that goes in the oven. So I think I've
got this mixed up pretty nicely just smooth out the top next on our bread
crumbs. Pretty sure I'm using the wrong breadcrumbs, 1930s someone cooking on a
farm would have stale bread that they have made their own breadcrumbs and they
might not have been ground as fine as this. But I'll put those on anyway and
just like every other recipe we've encountered so far it just says to bake
for 40 or 45 minutes. Doesn't say what temperature, but at least it tells you to
bake it, and kind of how long so I'm gonna say 350 degrees and we'll see what
happens?
All right, so I'm expecting this to be on the bland side, definitely on the bland
side. But I'm also expecting it to be really filling. You know what it's bland...
No I shouldn't say bland. It's plain it is plain but there's
something very comforting about it.
Something really warming and inviting and to use a term from you know 2018
it's it's 'more-ish' like it i know that a lot of people are gonna say there's
there's no spice in it there's no there's no spice! And there is no spice.
But yet i still feel like i just want to keep eating it.
I'm kind of surprised by that, i am really kind of surprised by that. At the
same time it reminds me of a lot of things i ate as a child which i think is
probably a really big part of the comfort for me. So I really like this
chop suey recipe, I was all expecting to say to you this sucks...
try out our chili mac recipe which is loaded with flavour, and it is. Both of
those dishes: that chili mac dish and this chop suey, are related but this is great
on a different level. Yeah I really like this, so thanks for stopping by, don't be
afraid to give this a try. I think this would be a really inexpensive easy to
make weeknight meal, that would work great for lunches for a couple days
afterwards. And it's one of those things that you're just going to want to
keep eating. Thanks for stopping by see you again soon.
1938 Depression Era American Chop Suey Recipe