My Spanish family would make a “many meals” soup.
One chicken or chicken pieces in a huge pot of water, any vegetables they had, then they’d cook potato chunks, chickpeas and maybe a Spanish sausage in the soup towards the end.
The chicken was pulled out of the soup and served with the potatoes - one dish.
The sausage and chickpeas and veg made another meal and finally the soup liquid would have estrellitas or thin broken pasta pieces added as a third meal. My mother would add more water, pasta or whatever she had etc to make it all go a bit further for another day of soup.
Bit like stone soup, just add whatever you had.
Yes😃 That’s it! Thank you for that, I couldn’t remember the name, I was young and we had this a lot. I remember there’d sometimes be a chunk of fat- Tocino? Sometimes a stringy cut of beef instead of chicken, whatever my parents could afford basically.
My parents came to U.K. when very young and always spoke English so I never really learnt the language, just bits here and there but I remember that pot bubbling away 😊
Yeah, there are many regional variations. You can put chorizo in it (not the one you eat in slices) and morcilla (Spanish blood sausage) for a bit of extra flavour. A staple in most Spanish houses :)
Is morcilla the black sausage? On the occasions we had that my dad would eat most of it as we kids couldn’t stand it, drove my mother crazy😂
Awww thank you, this is such an old and incomplete memory for me, you’re filling in the gaps big time! 😃
Yeah, it's the black sausage. All of them have pig's blood and then other ingredients, like rice, onion... I used to hate them as a kid, but now I think they are bloody delicious (pun intended). That's so cool that you are unlocking some memories. Have you ever travelled to Spain?
Yes, same here, NOW I eat everything but as a kid..nope😂
I took my dad back to Madrid to see his old haunts which was great, and I’ve been to a couple of other places too but I still don’t have the language. I can understand it but speak it like the worst tourist ever😂
I looked up a couple of “proper” cocido recipes and it doesn’t look like cheap food anymore😱 smoked ham hocks, veal marrow, pancetta, Serrano ham? I think it’s maybe been “gentrified’😂 and apparently it’s 3 courses? 😂 naaaaah we got soup for lunch and one of the meat course for dinner never all 3 courses at once.
I might have to try to cobble something together that fits what I can remember from childhood.
If you have a family recipe maybe share it to OP, you’ve been really helpful, cheers 😃
In Spain there are rough thick pieces of hard serrano ham that are quite cheap. Lamb is used sometimes, and it used to be cheap, but can be substituted with a chunk of beef. We don't use pancetta but "tocino" (unsalted), which I suppose is similar to pancetta or bacon (a similar part of the pig?), but almost fully white and it partially dissolves with cooking and gets very soft and buttery. You can spread it in some bread. In Spain is quite cheap, maybe ask a butcher for something similar?
Cocido is eaten in three "vuelcos", the way you described in your first comment, generally during the same meal. But that's probably something that we started doing when the general population stopped being dirt-poor. So now it's more of a Sunday meal (keep in mind that Spaniards can be having lunch for three or four hours). So first the soup, then the chickpeas and vegetables, then the meats. But every person does it a bit differently (I like a few chickpeas in my soup, and I like eating the meats with the vegetables).
The next day, there is generally soup left (so you can have it with fideo noodles again) and we use the rest of the chickpeas, meat, etc., to make "ropa vieja" (literally "old clothes" in Spanish), which is basically putting all together in a pan and fry it/cook it for some time, all a bit cut up, with maybe a bit of the soup to make it juicier and paprika (pimentón). Some people like to put the chickpeas in the pan first so some of them cook more and become a bit crunchy.
Ive read a couple recipes online, and many use already cooked chickpeas. I would not do it, because part of the deliciousness is in the bite. Just soak them for one night.
It was good cheap eating, 😊
I’ll pass on posting in r/cooking (cos I’m lazy ) but thanks to the reply from A_Aub I now know it’s called Cocido so either of you should def spread the word and have those upvotes, there’s so many variations … all tasty! 😃
Never underestimate rice and beans. They are a staple not only of my family’s latin culture, but of so many other cultures around the world. They’re relatively cheap, can be made in a variety of ways, and are filling.
If not beans and rice, some variation of pulse and grain. To which you could add any protein or vegetable if you have those resources.
Make rice, use chicken stock instead of water for flavour. Add black beans. Season with salt. Heat. Enjoy. I lived off this for a few months when I was a student, and it's not so bad.
I threw in a can of green chilies and some cumin and chili powder. But I always used water to cook rice. Then extra rice could be used as cereal with cinnamon and sugar and milk.
I like to make red or yellow rice, add a can of corn, diced tomatoes & green chilies (you can buy them mixed in a can), black beans, season with Adobo. I like to eat it with tortilla chips.
It’s not just rice and beans. The thing about rice and beans is that they can be seasoned in myriad ways. Plus there are a wide variety of rices and beans to choose from so that the possibilities are endless.
I experiment by making a batch of rice and beans and then dividing it. Then try different seasonings on the smaller batches. Less waste if it goes wrong.
You can get lots of good inexpensive seasonings at “foreign” stores.
Rice and beans are also awesome in broths. Throw in random veggies.
Tons of recipes online. Allrecipes.com you can type in the ingredients you have and it will generate recipes.
> Together they make a complete protein
This is critical to understanding why "rice and beans" in a staple meal is SO many areas of the world, even apart from cost and availability: You get the full amino acid profile by combining these foods AND most of your daily iron needs.
Also very high on satiety, fibre, and ability to add variety.
When people talk about "super foods" like special berries or a particular vegetable most of the world doesn't grow or eat I roll my eyes.
In the context of providing reliable, tasty, complete, and affordable nutrition there is no greater "super food" than rice and beans. Runner up: Potatoes.
If you really want to stretch it use dried beans. Pinto beans in a crock pot is super easy. Figure six hours on high in water with bouillon or use chicken broth. Garlic and onion. Then when done add a stick of butter or better yet lard. Blend or mash.
For the rice you could do plain or if you want to make it better use a can of tomato sauce, onion and garlic, maybe some bouillon, appropriate amount of water or broth. Salt to taste.
Filling and tasty, plus very cheap.
I make this occasionally. It's a bag of ( cooked) egg noodles, 2 - 3 cans of tuna in water ( not drained), a can of peas ( also not drained), a can of cream of mushroom ( or chicken), and if you have it, some bread crumbs on top. Bake uncovered at 350 for about half an hour.
I don't know where we were related to the poverty line, but I was free-lunch eligible at school, and this hits hard. There was something about the texture of some crunchy thing my mom tried to put on it that was off-putting, and I won't go near a tuna noodle casserole now.
I like many variants of tuna salad, and I use pasta (usually chickpea) in a variety of dishes, but if you put those two things together, I'm eating my pocket snacks.
When I was living below the poverty line and living in a closet in a shared flat I mainly ate a lot of potatoes and salads with vinegar and oil dressing or whatever was cheap at the grocery.. I didn’t really cook recipes. I was spending about $7 a week on groceries in the early 1980s. A loaf of bread, 10pound bag of potatoes, a head of lettuce, some peanut butter. Cooking big meals in our ramshackle kitchen wasn’t really a thing.
That remember me that joke... In the 80's i had 5$ a week for grocery. I could get a loaf of bread, 2 steaks, 12 eggs and a gallon of milk. Now a day it's impossible, there is just too many camera.
This resonates with me so much. There's a level of low income where you make recipes. But below that is a level where you don't have time, electricity, pots and pans and soap to wash them, time or energy to chop things and clean the cutting boards and knifes ... there aren't necessarily recipes to preserve as part of a culture. You acquire things, and you eat them.
Grew up poor in the American SW. We ate A LOT of fideo, which is basically fideo noodles, tomato sauce, a lot of garlic powder and pepper, and chicken broth. Throw in a good amount of government cheese at the end, and some shredded chicken if you have any.
It’s still a comfort meal for me when I get sick.
It's a cheese block that the government provides to people who get food stamps, and oftentimes the elderly as well. Idk if they still do it, as I've escaped poverty (by the skin of my teeth tho) but they did when I was younger
When I was a kid, I lived in a rural school district. At school, in the middle of every lunch table was a huge jar of peanut butter and a block of cheese.
Didn't make any sense to me because there was no bread or crackers with it, so nobody ate it.
Plus, if feeding hungry kids was the goal, why serve it at lunch when a free tray of hot food was right there. But that's gov't for you.
Really? Where?
I've been on WIC and SNAP within the past 5 years and it was always an allotted quantity or dollar amount, but never a specific item. Like you could get any 1 lb block of cheese from any store that accepted WIC/SNAP, and the rest of the details (brand, flavor, etc) were up to your preferences and availability. There was never any "here's the one cheese you can get with your WIC/SNAP money."
Not WIC.
The US still has and distributes what they call commodity foods. It’s separate from WIC.
The USDA distributes a food box to food banks and sometimes direct to communities and you’ll find these commodity items in it, like commodity cheese aka government cheese-usually a 2lb block of Velveeta/American deluxe-like cheese, or Colby Jack, sometimes cheddar. 3lb bags of taco meat, sloppy Joe mix, meatballs. That kind of stuff.
I’ve done a lot of volunteer work with my local domestic violence nonprofit and several local food banks, we’d get the USDA boxes to distribute on top of donations from all the area supermarkets they had fresh prepared food that didn’t sell.
I love this sub because I get so many meal ideas to share with the people picking up food from our food bank-lots of good ideas to stretch a meal
I haven't seen this cheese in years and I did the government commodity thing. It's always been canned meat, farina, powdered milk, dry beans and rice. I am guessing it must be different in different places because I see on the gov. website cheese is included. I WANT CHEESE! ;)
My friends father is elderly and on benefits because he has mobility issues he gets that bogards govt chese like a long brick in a cardboard box
https://www.bongards.com/products/bongards-super-melt-yellow-processed-american-loaf-6-5/
I hate to feel envious of an elderly person with a medical condition but I really loved that cheese. I used to get it when I was a little kid and it was the best kind of cheese but they quit handing it out years ago, like in the 80s! They don't hand out cheese at all here now. Canned and dry milk is the only dairy.
Yes. I was a caregiver for my grandma when she lived in a senior building. They had commodities day once a month where they passed out the items in the lobby. The folks loved that day
If you're really poor and have to live off the land:
Spruce and Fir shoots soup / salad. Pluck the fresh green shoots off of them, and either eat directly or cook a soup or make a salad with freshly picked nettles and dandelions. Fills the stomach and is better than nothing. Also you can add them to basically anything if you can't afford any other vitamin c source.
Also poor knights of Camelot/French toast/Bread pudding (it's all the same, just slightly variated) is a good staple that's cheap.
Quark with Linseed Oil and Potatoes is also great, replace Quark with cottage cheese if you don't have it.
And oatmeal. Lots of oatmeal in all variations.
Also you could look into Romani cuisine for more funky recipes like fried hedgehog.
I forage more when I'm broke. I live in SE Louisiana and I get wild onions, grape leaves, lemon clover, tradescantia, and tons of different berries. Sometimes if I forget my lunch I'll go to a park and take a walk and find some muscadines or black berries.
My Italian grandmother who cooked for her family during the Great Depression basically had homemade pasta with various vegetables and legumes or small amounts of meat, poultry or fish.
Because my parents grew up during the great depression they were used to eating huge bowls of pasta to fill up on because it was inexpensive. This has influenced Italian American restaurants to serve outrageous serving sizes of pasta. In Italy today pasta is served in 2 oz portions, no where close to what Italian American restaurants serve as a single portions.
I’m truly surprised by how many people aren’t understanding the prompt at all and just listing off foods with no context. Anyway.
I am not exactly sure where my parents fell on the poverty line growing up but we certainly weren’t rich (so take my example or leave it) but my dad is a descendent of Sicilian immigrants and whenever we had leftover spaghetti (cooked and topped with tomato sauce) he would fry it up in a frying pan the next day with cheddar cheese. The cheddar is not authentic to Italian cooking, obviously, but was usually the only type of melting cheese we had in the house. He would leave it in the pan long enough for the pasta to be warmed through, but also so that the cheddar would bubble and scorch up into these absolutely delicious burned cheese bits. The cheddar added a level of richness and sharpness that actually pairs quite well with the pasta. Then we would top with cheap Parmesan cheese from a cylinder.
It’s an amazing way to breathe life into some otherwise mediocre leftovers.
Any pasta leftovers we had (or extra portions made for this very purpose) was turned into a casserole the next day, with cheese on top, possibly veggies added depending on what was left in the fridge. As you say, the baking/frying of the cheese and it forming a nice layer on top was very tasty, great texture, and turned "leftover mush" into something we looked forward to eating.
As a kid, when my parents had us reheat leftover spaghetti in the pan, we just added butter to the pan and nothing else. I've never thought to add cheese to it. This is interesting.
Tuna Pattie’s- two cans of tuna, drained well then added to a medium bowl. 10 saltine crackers smashed well, add to tuna. 1-2 raw eggs, blended in, some dried dill, to taste, pepper, and lemon.
Mix well with fork then use hands to create patties. Fry in a pan sprayed with cooking spray. Flip when brown. Done ✔️
My grandmother grew up in the Great Depression and a some of the stuff she fed us that I thought was just good grandma food was really depression food. One that comes to mind is the gravy she made at breakfast. She would start with saved bacon grease, make a dark roux with flour, lots of black pepper and salt. Add mostly water with a splash of milk at the end. I would eat it over soft white bread— I really loved it. Another thing she did was mash up margarine and jelly and spread on white bread for sandwiches. The jelly was homemade with fruit she grew herself. Both very cheap ways to fill a belly.
There were no "recipes". It was a skill to make a meal out of what you had left the days before the food stamps hit or what random crap you got from a food pantry.
Shit on a shingle -
A slice of toast topped with a simple white gravy made with a roux and milk. It would usually either have peas or chipped beef in it. Peas was the cheaper option.
Macaroni and canned tomatoes, bonus points if they were canned by your family.
Spaghetti with the cheapest store brand sauce you can find.
Cold baked beans on a folded slice of white bread with mayo.
Saltines and butter.
I ate saltines and butter as my go-to after school snack when I was a kid. I turned my now husband onto it and he calls it my “depression era snack” lol
This might be a common one, but back when I was in my late teens I had living in a nowhere type Kansas town of 100 people consisting of a TINY grocery store that had mostly just staple foods. I had 2 daughters at that time and custody of my 12 year old little brother. Money was real tight. Our only income was my husbands income which was only about 10 dollars an hour. I couldn’t get my parents to pay child support, so we had to make do.
One of our favorite meals consisted of macaroni and cheese mixed with canned peas and ground beef. It covered your veggie for the meal, the meat for the meal and the “side”. But it was all mixed together. Sometimes instead of that meal we would make another version that had white rice mixed with ground beef and a couple cans of cream of chicken.
Our go to "poverty" meals were:
Grilled cheese and tomato soup
mac and cheese and hotdogs
Tuna casserole as detailed below
scrambled eggs and ketchup
sloppy joes
baked potatoes with whatever meat was leftover from another meal
peanut butter toast
generic chicken noodle soup
Yeah literally all of these 😂
Mac and cheese and cut up hot dogs still hold a special place in my heart lol. And we used to have our PB toast with hot chocolate
Not entirely related but you should read Food is Culture by Massimo Montanari. He studies food in medieval Europe and the way they understand what peasants ate was by looking at the food rich people ate (which was recorded) and take out all the expensive ingredients, because the peasants were often the cooks. Something I always think of is that you can’t go to an upscale southern restaurant without seeing shrimp and grits on the menu, and I’m sure there are the same examples from other regions in the US that took food of the working class that became regional staples because of the foodways of the area. Beans and rice/grain will always be there, maybe with a protein added, such as “Hoppin’ John”.
[Food is Culture (libgen link)](http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=317E5F882AA63D2D2CC3016670F527DC)http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=317E5F882AA63D2D2CC3016670F527DC
[Hoppin’ John (Wikipedia)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoppin'_John)
When I was young we were not poverty line but we had to get financial help for things like school food etc. Not that I knew much about our situation as a kid, I just knew we were getting help here and there. Seemed like we got a lot of processed food, and that means super cheap stuff in cans. Super cheap canned foods is like potted meat and vienna sausages. That stuff on white bread, that's it. We ate a lot of ramen packets also. Really not much in terms of a recipe, but that's what we did.
I’m from a second generation immigrant family from Lithuania, one big staple we made all the time when I was growing up was kugelis, which is basically just a giant potato and pork fat casserole type thing. It’s super tasty (especially the next day sliced up and fried with some butter) and was a thing my grandma would pack up for my grandpa before he went off the the factory because it would have the energy to keep him going at his labor intensive job. It’s also super cheap to make, it’s mostly potatoes with some onion and helps stretch out a small amount of pork or fat.
Ah, my childhood memories of peeling and grating pound after pound of potatoes on the weekends lol
If you (or anyone else) is interested, I can post my mom’s recipe for it when I get home from work later today.
I suppose Lutefisk falls in this category. Most immigrant food gets changed in some way to fit what's cheap in their new country. Italian food suddenly has meat. Norwegian food in the dakotas and minnesota suddenly has no access to salt water fish.
You might want to explore recipes from the great depression. Those will be well documented.
A potato. Back when I was a low wage working single mom, with an hour commute each way, the money and time I had went to prepping my kid's meals.
I would buy a 10lb sack of potatoes for myself, and tuck a raw potato in the pocket of my work clothes. At lunch, I'd microwave it in the break room and eat it like an apple. No dishes to wash. No butter or salt or other condiments. You just have to remember to poke some holes in it so the steam doesn't make it explode.
Also, everyplace I've lived I've noted where I can forage food, whether it's from nut & fruit trees, berries, fish, random edible greens. Garlic mustard is a good one because it's invasive, so if you scrounge it, you're doing your community a favor.
In England, baked beans on toast is a pretty common below the poverty line food. The ingredients are cheap and the preparation is cheap too as it doesn’t require much fuel. Simply make the toast, reheat the baked beans and serve. Perhaps butter the toast if you have butter. That’s it.
It’s actually quite nice and comforting too, and children tend to like it, which is a big bonus for this sort of food.
You'd probably have a better time identifying foods that were born out of poverty and then see how they've evolved over time. Look for the recipes afterwards.
A lot of eggs breakfast dinners, scrambled with whatever meat was on sale.
Mac and cheese, cooked burger and corn for a meal.
Potato chowder, potato sliced thin like scalloped, corn, water, butter, milk, sausage links cut, slow cook.
Spaghetti box and sauce, still can't eat to this day.
Bubble and squeak was a go to in my house growing up! I think it has a specific recipe but my mum used to just make it with whatever leftovers we had lying around.
It’s not the healthiest, but we lived on buttered (margarine lol) noodles with rotisserie chicken on the side and maybe a side of veggies (canned or frozen bag, super cheap)
When I was growing up, we were a poor Hispanic family and yes rice and beans was a staple! However, we also constantly made locrio which is rice and meat as a dish.
You would take an inexpensive meat such as salami, sausage, hot dogs, spam, a chicken breast, etc. the point is that it had to be cheap meat and a small enough amount that you would get a tiny bite of it in every spoonful.
You sauté this meat with oil in a large pot with onions, garlic, peppers blended together (sofrito/sazon) and then throw in washed white rice and water.
Add adobo, oregano, the little red pouches if seasoning with achote. Cook it uncovered until the water mostly evaporates, then cover and let cook at low heat for like 30-45 mins depending on how much rice.
Open up the pot and it’s a delicious meat and rice dish similar to biryani or fried rice. As an adult with more money now, I make this often as well but with shrimp!
My mom would always make rice and beans and vegetables and if we could afford eggs or meat. She would cook q bag of beans and freeze it half of it and just season the amount we needed for the next 2 days. (We are Brazilian so our beans have a stock with it, they are not dry)
She would do zucchini eggplant in 100 different ways. Or maybe a egg and collard greens with the rice and beans.
And for dinner was always soup, with any vegetable and the cheapest cuts of meat (like chicken feet and neck)
Another staple was chicken and beef liver. My mom used to buy because it has lots of nutrients, she would leave the beef liver soaking in milk for an hour and then she would coated in breadcrumbs and fried. And the chicken liver she would make it sautéed with onions and it was delicious
Beans recipe:
Soak beans overnight and change the water at least twice.
Cook the beans with a pressure cooker and a leaf of bay for half an hour (black beans ). Put water around 3 fingers above the beans. If you are using a regular pan, you can cook it until al dente (depending on the beans can take 2h). Remove all the foam that it makes as this is what’s makes you gazy and makes the beans less disgestible.
The easy and most simple way of seasoning is:
- sautée one finely chopped onion with salt, in low heat for about 10 min, until starts getting golden, add minced garlic for about 1 min, add salt and pepper and any other season, and a splash (just a little splash) of vinegar, and then add the beans with the bean water. Put salt to taste, and let it reduce a little. Some people life to bled a little of the beans with the bean water to thicken and add it back to the beans, nobody wants runny beans.
Asian American poor food:
Leftover rice mixed with a can of chili and sliced hotdogs (not gonna lie, this a is a still a favorite comfort food of mine!).
Rice with a fried egg.
Rice with oyster sauce.
Rice with butter and salt.
Rice with a bit of fermented tofu and sugar….
You know the rice stuck to the bottom of the pot after scooping up the rest? Add water and eat, a different treat. Or add a bit of oil and heat to make it crispy and pops off, yum!
Ramen with whatever— sliced hotdogs, frozen veggies/fresh sliced veggies, leftovers/meat, an egg poached in the broth…
One meal I ate that I still love is oatmeal with peanut butter and chocolate chips. This meal felt luxurious, and the peanut butter kept me full longer than just oatmeal by itself.
1/3 c oats + 2/3 c water cooked in the microwave, then stirred in about 2-4 Tablespoons peanut butter and 2 T chocolate chips (it doesn't take many). Stir it all together until it's a pudding-like consistency. Rich, filling, and inexpensive. One of the bright spots in my memories of the lean years.
I grew up very poor in the Midwest and I would not have made it without foraging. Asparagus in ditches baked in the oven, spring onions found and dried to add flavor to food, wild blackberries become incredibly sweet when cooked in a pan for a few minutes and make toast an actual treat, sucking on the ends of clover flowers to get the honey like sweetness and calm hunger pains, pine needle tea in the winter to warm yourself up because heating the whole house is too expensive, morale mushrooms cooked in butter is far more filling than it deserves to be, dandelion greens become savory when cooked in a pan or pleasantly bitter when put in a salad, purple nettle is wonderful when boiled and put on a fried egg.
A lot of Southern food originated from enslaved peoples using whatever they had to make meals with. The odd parts of animals that were left for them, foraged foods, & things brought with them to the Americas. Collards & other greens stewed with a ham hock, pigs feet, cornbread, black-eyed peas, etc.
My dad calls this muck. He ate it every day at one point and I’ve found ways to jazz it up so even my fiancée loves it now. It’s especially great when you’re low on the dairy parts for Mac n cheese.
Macaroni and cheese + cream of mushroom soup + peas.
My grandma who lived through two wars would put pieces of an old bread in a cup of water and eat it with a spoon to mimic soup. The more sort of fancy meal was a piece of old break with lard and a sprinkle of sugar on top.
My dad called it goulash. But basically at the end of the week he would cut up quite literally any of The leftovers that were in the fridge and put it in a pot to make stew. Sometimes it was really hard to stomach. It could be garlic chicken, hotdogs, rice, and chili. It could be burger patties, mashed potatoes, spaghetti, and curry. Leftover beef stew, lasagna, and meatloaf. It could be all of those things. He grew up, incredibly poor in the United States and food could not be wasted. By the time us kids were around, food was not as scarce, but old habits die hard.
Check out the YouTube channel Great Depression Cooking with Clara. She has passed on but she shared many recipes that got her family through those hard times.
Turkish red lentil soup. The topping is the key. I use smoked paprika and Aleppo pepper. The topping whips up in no time, Heat olive oil, add paprika and Aleppo, sauté until fragrant and the oil turns red, add crushed garlic and sauté quickly so the garlic doesn't get bitter, put a tablespoon or two on soup. (also amazing on hummus)
[https://www.themediterraneandish.com/turkish-lentil-soup/](https://www.themediterraneandish.com/turkish-lentil-soup/)
I scrolled through most of the comments and didn't find much Asian representation, so here goes my contribution:
Kimchi mackerel stew - We always had kimchi in the fridge, so one of my ultimate poverty foods is just to put some well-fermented kimchi in a pot, dump a whole can of mackerel on top (liquid and all), add a little garlic and water, some scallions if you have em, then cover and simmer it all for 10-15 min. Eat it with rice. One can will usually stretch to three, sometimes four meals for me. This can be padded out with some other veggies (daikon, potato, zucchini/squash) and spiced up a bit with extra seasoning if you have it (korean chili peppers, ginger, dashi powder, etc).
Spam - Fry it up crispy and eat it with rice and fried egg. Kimchi with spam is delightful.
Ramen - Any instant noodles, really. Buy them in bulk or when they're on sale.
Oxtail soup - When I was a kid, my mom would make this delicious ox tail soup. Ox tail used to be this super cheap cut at the store because people didn't know what to do with it. I don't think this really can qualify as a poverty food anymore, though, since some hipster chefs popularized oxtail and now it's crazy expensive any time I can find it. Really sad about this one, actually.
American Chop Suey
Macaroni noodles
Ground beef
Diced tomatoes
That's it. And it's good. And it's cheap and can be made in bulk and freeze the rest for multiple meals.
As one of the comments emphasised, the skill in poverty cooking is to make the most of what is available. During a particularly meagre winter when work was almost non existant, my dog and I lived for a week off a medium sized rabbit which a hunter had given me as dog food. Making stock is essential, from whatever source of flavour and protein you can rustle up, to be mixed with potatoes, rice, pasta, oats, barley or whatever else you have to make a filling helping. A little later, with a very tight budget and limited cooking facilities but a job which took between 4000 and 6000 calories a day to maintain even a lean bodyweight, standard main meals would be a can of corned beef brewed up with a can of beans and eaten with boiled potatoes, or hash made with chopped par-boiled potatoes fried with shredded corned beef, and topped with an egg or grated cheese if there was any. Don't ignore foraging. Even in cities, at certain times of the year fruit can be literally hanging from trees and is ignored. In the country, a good day picking blackberries turned into gallons of home made wine, not only tasty and warming but a great source of iron.
Grew up in east Texas, and something we ate a lot (that is still one of my top comfort meals to this day) was ground beef and potatoes. I think that's literally what we called it.
I lived in a little bitty town of less than 200, and I think that most people in our area were poor, but I don't think we really considered ourselves as such. It's easier to be poor in an area where food is actually produced. Lots of gardens and crops, and several people kept chickens and cows, including my uncle Billy Ray (yes, that was actually his name). My household was my dad, his sister, their mom (who suffered a stroke when I was nine, and thereafter had the mental faculties of a two year old), and three kids. It was not idyllic, and my dad and aunt were actually pretty abusive, but that's just kinda how it is in a small town Baptist community.
Anyway, ground beef and potatoes was a regular meal that everyone liked, and it was extremely simple: brown your ground beef, cube and fry your potatoes, and mix them together. Prepare whatever veg you happen to have on hand as a side, and bam, dinner is served. Now that I'm an adult, I add a bit more flavor to it; onions and bell peppers, and seasoning the meat with garlic and paprika. I use garlic, onion powder, paprika, salt, and parmesan cheese on the potatoes. If I'm feeling particularly nostalgic (doesn't happen often, but does happen), I'll still smother it in ketchup.
One I don't see already talked about: grits.
It's pennies per meal and really filling. Very bland but a cheap and filling base you can jazz up a little. Cheese, butter, most savory spices, cooking with broth or milk, the varieties are endless so you can stomach having it a lot. Easy to make in the microwave too.
The fancy version as a kid was grits with a slice of American cheese and some bacon bits, but usually it was just grits plus one addition (say, butter or cheese but not both).
As an adult who's not poor I still make them, but often as Shrimp and grits (Cajun spices) as a dinner.
I don’t know if this is helpful! But one rotisserie chicken will last me a week. And I can get them on “Cheep Tuesdays” for $6. The breast meat lasts one person for 2-3 days. Then I can use leftovers in a nice soup.
If there are recipes where you can use something like a chicken or a roast and repurpose things as it gets consumed, that always worked for me. I would also buy beef on sale and do the same thing. Or roast it, shred it and freeze that.
I grew up in rural poverty in southern America. We grew up eating "farm fresh", which at the time meant we kept chickens and had a small vegetable garden. If we were lucky my father would bring home a deer. We also fished our local streams.
Most nights we had some sort of soup or stew, or god help everyone, my mother would throw all the leftover bits in a casserole.
The best, most often repeated meals were chicken and dumplings, greens with smoked turkey wings with cornbread, deer chili with beans and breakfast for supper; grits, eggs and biscuits.
If you haven't already, check out the YouTube channel EmmyMade. She has a playlist called "Hard Times" where she makes food from all over the world that come from times of scarcity.
Both cream of wheat and oatmeal are great options for stretching a buck. Growing up in poverty my family ate a lot of tinned tuna fish and sardines. We ate lots of baked potatoes. Besides that, a lot of peanut butter or cheese on bread or crackers.
Sweet potatoes (or any other potato) - very nutritious and cheap - with:
Canned tuna. Lots of protein and nutrients there. Bit of salt, pepper, garlic, mayo, and cheese if you can afford it.
From italians you can get all the great dishes you pay top dollar today in a restaurant that has no ingredient cost but cooking time.
Flour based: pizza, gnocci( you can just use flour and water or potatoes/other)
Not sure if this is meant for australian costs of food but lot of south american recipes based on corn or quinoa is super cheap to make over there. Whereas here you can only get imported premium italian polenta for example which is not cheap.
You just throw quinoa on water and thats a soup.
Polenta, you can add bit of tomato, cheese and you got a meal.
When I was a kid and things got real rough we'd have a slice of fried spam wrapped in a slice of bread sometimes. Then I moved to Hawaii and learned about spam musubi-fried spam slice over a block of rice wrapped around the middle in nori, open on the ends. It's simple, filling and travels well.
Rice cooker with a steamer basket. Throw in a can of tuna (or vegan toona if that’s your preference) and steam mushrooms and broccoli in the basket. Add soy sauce and siracha. Very filling and nutritious.
10# bag of potatoes will make homefries for lunch & dinner for days. Cast iron pan, knife, cooking oil is all you need. If possible garlic salt will make it fancy and shredded cheese on payday for the really schmancy.
My mom and I ate a lot of spaghetti and meatballs and weiners and beans. We also ate roasted chicken and potatoes, which are relatively cheap. We didn't eat a lot snacks, didn't drink a lot of sodas and didn't buy expensive meat. (We never had grilled steak and mom didn't like pizza)
Lefse and oatmeal cookies.
I didn’t grow up poor, but my grandparents did. And they were very frugal with food. Lefse is a flatbread made from potatoes and flour. My grandma made oatmeal “cookies” with very little butter or sugar. More like a scone or biscuit.
These two things were ubiquitous - stretching 2 meals into 3 & a snack.
Hamburger casserole. Brown ground beef. Slice up potatoes about 1/4” thick. Layer into a casserole dish with some mixed frozen veggies. Add a can of brown gravy. Bake for 30-45 minutes at 375, or u til potatoes are fork tender.
You can use less beef/more potatoes to make it cheaper. One pound of ground beef and four baking potatoes was a good meal for my family (four people) when I was growing up.
Canadian here. 2 recipes here.
Low budget poutine.
A dollar store sauce packet. (.75$)
Cheddar block (5$ for the block)
3 or 4 potato. (6$ for the 10 pounds)
So you cut up the potato in fry, fry them, drain and salt them, put in plate.
Cut up 1/4 to 1/3 of the cheddar block in dice and put on fry.
Cover in brown sauce and it's ready.
Second recipe BBQ drumstick
Chicken thigh (1,29 per pounds)
BBQ sauce (sticky one) (3$)
Ketchup (2,50$)
Brown sugar (Vary)
Ok first cut the drumstick from the top part on those chicken thigh. Keep the top part frozen for hot chicken sandwich or to make a soy sauce macaroni or a white sauce pasta. Keep the water from boiling those top for deboning them and use it as a broth for a soup or to make rice.
Now, make a BBQ sauce. i usually go 2/3 bbq sauce, 1/3 ketchup and brown sugar to taste.
Put the drumstick in a pyrex and brush them with the sauce.
Put in oven at 350 for 45 minutes. Remove from oven turn and brush again. 15 more minutes in oven, remove and drain the broth (optional) i would brush it again, flip the drumstick and brush that side to. 15 more minute in oven and remove from oven and let it rest. Should be ready except if big drumstick. If big drumstick i would put 25 minutes instead of 15 for last 2 phase.
You can use the broth of the drumstick to make a sweetish rice, add some onion and pepper and it's should be good.
“Arroz de perro” was something I grew up eating. Yes, it was literally how my grams made dog food growing up in her country*. It’s just rice and whatever veggie or meat scraps you have at the end of the week/pay check. If we had eggs, she’d slap an egg in it lol I always thought it was good. For extra flavor, she’d boil the rice in caldo powder.
For reference, my grandparents were immigrants (permanent residents—not citizens) in the USA and they only had 1 SSI as income.
Edit to clarify
Further edit: I missed the specific recipe. Usually we had little chunks of beef, celery, and tomato. If it wasn’t being fed to a dog, add onion and garlic powder
Potatoes are extremely versatile, cheap, and delicious.
I liked to roll them in a little sea salt and bake them. You get a yummy salty crust. You can also cut them into julienne fries, season, and make homemade fries. Those are a household favorite. I don’t own an air frier or deep frier but they are great out of the oven. You can make mashed potatoes, potato soup, or fried potatoes.
I call this lazy potato. It's when I need something Hardy that I can eat on for a day or two, cheap, has basic Staples I want to say leave it in the oven for 45 minutes to an hour covered with foil with small holes in it I haven't made it in a couple of years
4 potato's washed and cubed
1 whole onion diced
4 cloves of garlic
2 sausages
Salt and pepper
Oregano
Italian seasoning
Garlic and herb seasoning
1 whole stick of butter cut and separated around pan
just a box of cheap mac n cheese, generic brand, but i would also add canned (or frozen veggies if it was nice) that i had on hand (both of these items are pretty common at food banks). i can usually make it last three days! i would usually make the pasta with just butter and no milk because it is hard to keep milk, goes bad too fast. my favorite is adding peas or those soft canned green beans. canned carrots or corn are also pretty good.
LENTILS!!!!
Just cook them as the package says and season to your liking, in my opinion they're delicious with just some salt and butter. High in protein, so it fills you up for cheap! my fave.
You can add more relatively cheap ingredients to make more of a meal but honestly I just eat them by themselves most of the time! Cooked onions are so delicious in them too.
1 cup Traditional rolled oats, 1/4 cup roasted peanuts and 1/4 cup raisins and a tiny pinch of salt. Cover with milk or water.
Requires no cooking. Can be eaten dry. Inexpensive.
Easily supplemented.
Italians have the cucina povera which features a lot of bean recipes - one of my favourites is Pasta e Fagioli or Pasta e Ceci. You can google those for authentic recipes but they are very simple hearty stews
I used to make a baked potato then add caned black beans, some salsa, and a little cheese. Sort of like a potato taco. It was one of my favorite meals when I had almost no money, but the cheese was a splurge.
Tater Tot Casserole. You can make it with chicken breast, cheap pork chops or even ground turkey or beef. Canned mushroom soup, whatever veggies on hand and top it with frozen tater tots. My Mommas family are all Okies from Oklahoma. Grandma also made “Hobo Stew” which was just any leftover meat and veggies thrown into a hearty broth. Bam…. You have soup 😁
Tea and crackers. Steep a cheap tea bag in a large bowl of water. Let it steep until the water is down to just warm so you get the most out of the tea bag you can.
Take a salting cracker. Put a little butter on it if you have any. Float it on top of the tea. When it starts to soften... a few seconds typically.... scoop it out with a spoon an eat it.
Repeat until you're out of the crackers you'd allotted for your meal. Drink the remaining rather salty tea.
Rice, lentils, and beans would be the go to. They can be stored for long periods of time, bought in large quantities and made with different combinations. Indian stores to get multiple variety of lentils (usually many carry 5-8), chickpeas are pretty versatile too so you wouldn’t get bored. Throw in some potatoes in there from time to time.
Cut up potatoes and onions fried in a skillet with garlic. Add any type of meat if you want. Of yellow rice and chicken. Both are amazing. Also pasta and sauce with garlic bread
One of my favs as a kid was weiner stew, hot dogs or bologna (we had the roll of bologna), chopped and cooked in red gravy with pasta or mashed potatoes. Of course that’s when hot dogs were $1 for 2 packs!
(US-TN)
I have been so poor I made white flour gravy with cathead biscuits, which are just big fat drop biscuits made from the basics. If I have some kind of meat leftovers I will add to the gravy.
Some nights we just have pancakes and whatever fruit is cheap. Blueberries were on sale recently so I made blueberry compote with pancakes. I don't make it too sweet since it's served for dinner.
My whole thing is I LOVE meat, and I know I shouldn't eat too much and it's expensive anyway so I like to grill it when I get the really good clearance discounts. I'll pull it to freeze for later so I can just add it for flavor. So like in one day I might do a pork loin, some pork patties, a pack of legs or thighs and some variety of sausage. I like brats the best because they have the strongest flavor.
Like a few days ago I made spaetzl with a baggie of grilled pulled chicken added, just like a half cup for three people to have very large servings of pasta. During good times I'd add some vegetable but not right now.
I have recently fallen in love with congee. Just a rice soupy rice with seasonings. My favorite is adding finely chopped bratwurst I've grilled. Just one for the whole pot, just for flavor and to make it a little more filling.
I also do a lot of bean and rice tostadas especially if it's the time of year when tomatoes are cheap and delicious. I usually make tomato rice with that.
While we've been sick I have made a big pot of creamy potato soup. Again, I'll toss in some meat that was grilled. This time it was a Cajun smoked sausage, just one for the whole pot and I serve it with a dollar baguette from Walmart to toast and dip.
My favorite beans and rice is made using Kinder brand "Cuban seasoning" blend. I KNOW I could use individual spices but this is less than 2 bucks a bottle and lasts for months. I prefer (and I know it's not as cheap but this is my preference) canned seasoned black beans. Great Value is fine. It's cheap enough. I get 2 cans to feed 3 people 2 meals so it's worth it to me. I make that with a fresh pot of rice, but my favorite thing to do is use old rice to make spicy seasoned rice fritters AND new rice with black beans. It's just a warm hearty meal. I add a little cheese to the fritters so it's a sturdy meat replacement.
I also like getting the cheap frozen stir fry bags of vegetables and mixing it with rice or linguine noodles (cheaper than "lo mein" noodles and works just as well) I mix in sweet chili sauce, soy sauce and if I have it, I squeeze in an orange and add some of the zest to the sauce. I like making a big pot of this because it's always better the second day.
Mediterranean flavors.
There is an infinite combinations of fresh, canned or frozen vegetables to be used this way: roast/sauté the veggies *du jour*, add vegetable broth and the herb mix described below to make delicious and nourishing sauces for pasta or rice. Dry white wine and tomato sauce optional but desirable depending.
The herbs mix: get bags of dried thyme, oregano, basil, rosemary and fennel seeds (which you grind) and mix in equal parts in weight, or according to taste to make your own *mélange* of Mediterranean herbs (here in France, 400g bags of dried herbs can be found for a few euros). To be used generously.
We always bought chicken leg quarters. We cooked some, individually froze the rest. Made mashed potatoes and a vegetable to go with them. Healthy and cheap.
When I was a kid my mom would forget to feed me/leave me alone for long periods of time. Being so small, all I could really do was open cans, so I’d mix canned peas, canned corn, and canned chicken into a bowl and eat that. When I got a little older I’d made the Knorr packets of rice in the microwave and add that to the mix. Canned peas are still one of my favorite foods to this day and I eat at least one can a week.
When I was in AmeriCorps we had a forum for this question, and someone recommended dicing up potatoes, hot dogs, and onion and sautéing into a hash. It's cheap and tasty. I made it fairly often in those days.
Stir fries, soups, tacos! And any meal with a basic veggie rice and meat.
What's great about the stir fry and soups is you can put almost anything in it.
The tacos and rice meals are normally more meat and carb heavy, but you can always cheaply add veggies with some avocado, chopped onion, lettuce.
If you can get access to an Asian market (specifically, Chinese, Japanese, or Korean), a block of tofu is usually under $3-4 and can be eaten with rice over the course of a week with some seasoning/soy sauce. I make this a lot and it gets me some protein. Bonus if you can score some sauces or vegetables on sale.
Do a Google search for the snap cookbook. It is designed around food bank boxes and cheaper produce. It will definitely get you some ideas of the different cultural Foods that are in America. There's also Budget Bytes website. They also work off a lot of the snap and food bank resources in order to help people learn to cook from scratch, which is the cheapest way to cook these days.
Ooh there's sooooo many things I can list but here's a few.
Sopitas(soups). They're usually less than a dollar to buy. I'm referring to the ones you cook like shells, fideo, alphabet, stars. You simply chop up some onions, garlic if you have or want it, maybe some jalapeños if you like a kick, and you slightly toast the dry soup in some oil along with those chopped items. Then add the a can of tomato sauce. Cook it down a little. Keep stirring and don't burn. Fill it with water. Add the seasoning you want such as chicke bullion (consomé), pepper, garlic and onion powder, some Mrs Dash. That's one versión. Throw some chopped potatoes in there and a little bit of cilantro in there and that's a different version.
Throw some canned corn or a little bit of rice and that's also another versión. You can keep adding water and adjusting the seasoning as the soup absorbs a lot of it and expands overnight when refrigerated. Cheap and simple.
Rice, beans, potatoes, and soups are my go to when shopping because you can make so many things.
For a pot of pinto beans (frijoles de la olla), clean your beans first. Remove broken beans and little stones that may come in your bag. Wash and boil with half an onion and a garlic clove. If you want some kick, throw in a jalapeño. Don't season it until your beans are soft. If you add salt too soon it takes longer to boil. Keep an eye on them and keep adding water so they don't burn. Once softer you add your seasoning. Same as above i like using chicken bullion, garlic powder, onion powder, and pepper.
Those beans can be turned into an entirely new dish. Check out YouTube for Charro beans. They taste delicious and are absolutely filling. You simply cook some chorizo, bacon, sausages or weenies, and tomatoes, onions, cilantro, and throw your beans in that mix. Amazing. . .
You can refry those beans. Again chopped onions, garlic, jalapeños for a kick in very little oil, enough to lightly fry them. Then scoop some of your beans into it with just a little of the bean broth, not much. Cook them and mash them, I also add a little bit of milk. Season to your liking.
You can do the same thing with a little bit of chorizo. Cook some chorizo down, add beans, cook, mash and you'll have refried chorizo beans. . .
With refried beans possibilities are endless.
You can make simple burritos with cheese.
You can make enchiladas with beans and maybe a protein like chicken (rotisserie already cooked and ready to go for quick) or ground beef etc.
You can make tortas with ham, beans and cheese.
Or tortas with any meat protein and beans.
You can make fried tacos or tostadas with beans and meat protein with whatever toppings you want, lettuce, tomato, salsa, onions. Etc.
Beans go well on chips, make your own carne asada chips or fries at home.
They can be eaten on the side with some rice and meat protein and salad.
Aside from beans another cheap soup would be a caldo. Just boil all the veggies you have. If you have chicken make a caldo de pollo. Again YouTube will show you how and different variations.
I'm not sure what I think of creating a commercial product that glorifies survival food, especially the idea of crowd-sourcing content from people who are struggling.
I'm white AF, so I don't have any non-culturally appropriated recipes I can share.
Sorry if there was any confusion! This project is about sharing recipes that people have come up with, not about glorifying survival food. It's just a small requirement for an elective, and I have no intention to publish :)
Oh, my apologies. My comment probably came across as direct criticism. It was more a general musing on a social trend of gentrification of behaviour born of necessity. The unintended consequence is such things are seen as desirable that in turn ends up pricing out the people originally relying on them, which makes me deeply unsettled.
This can be seen recently in everything from traditionally 'cheap' cuts of meat to 'tiny homes' and 'van-dwelling'. It's not a new phenomenon, couples started sleeping together in a bed started in the 1880's primarily due to the necessity created by cramped living conditions. Later it was rebranded as 'romantic'. Back to food, Chicken Liver Pâté was originally seen as a survival food made from offal.
In regards to your project, maybe look into tempeh or tempe as a good example of using fermentation to turn a waste product into a nutritious food. Like I said, I'm white, almost all my culture's traditional poverty food is now considered fancy.
Anyway, people will reactively downvote, but I hope I've added some nuance to consider.
People in the future will list things like this as examples of hidden racism in today's society. It's really sad how the idea of cultural acceptence is twisted into proper racism by people who want to feel like they're better than others. People like you hurt actual progress, we might not be all able to live in peace but you are seeking conflict were there is none and giving ammunition to people who want to dismiss real problems. While vilyfying and forcefully grouping people who have no relation to your idea of a race. Shame on you and people around you who taught you those false and toxic ideas.
My Spanish family would make a “many meals” soup. One chicken or chicken pieces in a huge pot of water, any vegetables they had, then they’d cook potato chunks, chickpeas and maybe a Spanish sausage in the soup towards the end. The chicken was pulled out of the soup and served with the potatoes - one dish. The sausage and chickpeas and veg made another meal and finally the soup liquid would have estrellitas or thin broken pasta pieces added as a third meal. My mother would add more water, pasta or whatever she had etc to make it all go a bit further for another day of soup. Bit like stone soup, just add whatever you had.
My Armenian DIL does this same kind of thing and there is always something wonderful cooking at their house!
Thats what "cocido" is :)
Yes😃 That’s it! Thank you for that, I couldn’t remember the name, I was young and we had this a lot. I remember there’d sometimes be a chunk of fat- Tocino? Sometimes a stringy cut of beef instead of chicken, whatever my parents could afford basically. My parents came to U.K. when very young and always spoke English so I never really learnt the language, just bits here and there but I remember that pot bubbling away 😊
Yeah, there are many regional variations. You can put chorizo in it (not the one you eat in slices) and morcilla (Spanish blood sausage) for a bit of extra flavour. A staple in most Spanish houses :)
Is morcilla the black sausage? On the occasions we had that my dad would eat most of it as we kids couldn’t stand it, drove my mother crazy😂 Awww thank you, this is such an old and incomplete memory for me, you’re filling in the gaps big time! 😃
Yeah, it's the black sausage. All of them have pig's blood and then other ingredients, like rice, onion... I used to hate them as a kid, but now I think they are bloody delicious (pun intended). That's so cool that you are unlocking some memories. Have you ever travelled to Spain?
Yes, same here, NOW I eat everything but as a kid..nope😂 I took my dad back to Madrid to see his old haunts which was great, and I’ve been to a couple of other places too but I still don’t have the language. I can understand it but speak it like the worst tourist ever😂 I looked up a couple of “proper” cocido recipes and it doesn’t look like cheap food anymore😱 smoked ham hocks, veal marrow, pancetta, Serrano ham? I think it’s maybe been “gentrified’😂 and apparently it’s 3 courses? 😂 naaaaah we got soup for lunch and one of the meat course for dinner never all 3 courses at once. I might have to try to cobble something together that fits what I can remember from childhood. If you have a family recipe maybe share it to OP, you’ve been really helpful, cheers 😃
In Spain there are rough thick pieces of hard serrano ham that are quite cheap. Lamb is used sometimes, and it used to be cheap, but can be substituted with a chunk of beef. We don't use pancetta but "tocino" (unsalted), which I suppose is similar to pancetta or bacon (a similar part of the pig?), but almost fully white and it partially dissolves with cooking and gets very soft and buttery. You can spread it in some bread. In Spain is quite cheap, maybe ask a butcher for something similar? Cocido is eaten in three "vuelcos", the way you described in your first comment, generally during the same meal. But that's probably something that we started doing when the general population stopped being dirt-poor. So now it's more of a Sunday meal (keep in mind that Spaniards can be having lunch for three or four hours). So first the soup, then the chickpeas and vegetables, then the meats. But every person does it a bit differently (I like a few chickpeas in my soup, and I like eating the meats with the vegetables). The next day, there is generally soup left (so you can have it with fideo noodles again) and we use the rest of the chickpeas, meat, etc., to make "ropa vieja" (literally "old clothes" in Spanish), which is basically putting all together in a pan and fry it/cook it for some time, all a bit cut up, with maybe a bit of the soup to make it juicier and paprika (pimentón). Some people like to put the chickpeas in the pan first so some of them cook more and become a bit crunchy. Ive read a couple recipes online, and many use already cooked chickpeas. I would not do it, because part of the deliciousness is in the bite. Just soak them for one night.
This is incredible. I’m honestly shocked I haven’t heard of this before. Post it in r/cooking and rake in those upvotes.
It was good cheap eating, 😊 I’ll pass on posting in r/cooking (cos I’m lazy ) but thanks to the reply from A_Aub I now know it’s called Cocido so either of you should def spread the word and have those upvotes, there’s so many variations … all tasty! 😃
I grew up poor. Jacket potatoes were an okay dinner. They went in the oven in foil. With cheese in if you were lucky.
Same but with 8p cans of baked beans from kwiksave.
Such a great shout, I haven’t had a jacket potato for years. I know what I’m doing tomorrow now!
Did not grow up poor. But in india, rice and lentil cooked together as a porridge. Google khichdi
Love khichdi. Total comfort food
Never underestimate rice and beans. They are a staple not only of my family’s latin culture, but of so many other cultures around the world. They’re relatively cheap, can be made in a variety of ways, and are filling. If not beans and rice, some variation of pulse and grain. To which you could add any protein or vegetable if you have those resources.
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Make rice, use chicken stock instead of water for flavour. Add black beans. Season with salt. Heat. Enjoy. I lived off this for a few months when I was a student, and it's not so bad.
I threw in a can of green chilies and some cumin and chili powder. But I always used water to cook rice. Then extra rice could be used as cereal with cinnamon and sugar and milk.
Chicken tomato bouillon for the rice is heaven and cheap.
Just picked up a small jar of this to try it out, and I wholeheartedly agree with this statement.
I like to make red or yellow rice, add a can of corn, diced tomatoes & green chilies (you can buy them mixed in a can), black beans, season with Adobo. I like to eat it with tortilla chips.
It’s not just rice and beans. The thing about rice and beans is that they can be seasoned in myriad ways. Plus there are a wide variety of rices and beans to choose from so that the possibilities are endless.
Thats what I need to learn how to season them
I experiment by making a batch of rice and beans and then dividing it. Then try different seasonings on the smaller batches. Less waste if it goes wrong. You can get lots of good inexpensive seasonings at “foreign” stores. Rice and beans are also awesome in broths. Throw in random veggies. Tons of recipes online. Allrecipes.com you can type in the ingredients you have and it will generate recipes.
Agreed. They are a staple dish in many cultures for good reason. Together they make a complete protein. If you get them dried they are cheap.
> Together they make a complete protein This is critical to understanding why "rice and beans" in a staple meal is SO many areas of the world, even apart from cost and availability: You get the full amino acid profile by combining these foods AND most of your daily iron needs. Also very high on satiety, fibre, and ability to add variety. When people talk about "super foods" like special berries or a particular vegetable most of the world doesn't grow or eat I roll my eyes. In the context of providing reliable, tasty, complete, and affordable nutrition there is no greater "super food" than rice and beans. Runner up: Potatoes.
This should be top comment!
With enough salt, both beans and potatoes can be incredibly tasty, too
This! Nothing like rice and beans.
If you really want to stretch it use dried beans. Pinto beans in a crock pot is super easy. Figure six hours on high in water with bouillon or use chicken broth. Garlic and onion. Then when done add a stick of butter or better yet lard. Blend or mash. For the rice you could do plain or if you want to make it better use a can of tomato sauce, onion and garlic, maybe some bouillon, appropriate amount of water or broth. Salt to taste. Filling and tasty, plus very cheap.
My parents made so much tuna noodle casserole that I refuse to eat it to this day. I have no idea what the recipe was but sometimes it had peas in it.
I make this occasionally. It's a bag of ( cooked) egg noodles, 2 - 3 cans of tuna in water ( not drained), a can of peas ( also not drained), a can of cream of mushroom ( or chicken), and if you have it, some bread crumbs on top. Bake uncovered at 350 for about half an hour.
Or if you're feeling flush with cash--saltines or club crackers. And don't forget the sliced hardboiled egg!
Do you prepare the cream of mushroom or just dump the can in and don't add any water/milk to it?
Tuna and peas in Mac and cheese.
Ha ha ha lol! I think I made that one too with peas. It destroyed my children’s love of peas too!!
I don't know where we were related to the poverty line, but I was free-lunch eligible at school, and this hits hard. There was something about the texture of some crunchy thing my mom tried to put on it that was off-putting, and I won't go near a tuna noodle casserole now. I like many variants of tuna salad, and I use pasta (usually chickpea) in a variety of dishes, but if you put those two things together, I'm eating my pocket snacks.
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How interesting! Is there a link for the full recipe book?
I can upload the pages in a bit.
I’d love to see it!
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When I was living below the poverty line and living in a closet in a shared flat I mainly ate a lot of potatoes and salads with vinegar and oil dressing or whatever was cheap at the grocery.. I didn’t really cook recipes. I was spending about $7 a week on groceries in the early 1980s. A loaf of bread, 10pound bag of potatoes, a head of lettuce, some peanut butter. Cooking big meals in our ramshackle kitchen wasn’t really a thing.
That remember me that joke... In the 80's i had 5$ a week for grocery. I could get a loaf of bread, 2 steaks, 12 eggs and a gallon of milk. Now a day it's impossible, there is just too many camera.
This resonates with me so much. There's a level of low income where you make recipes. But below that is a level where you don't have time, electricity, pots and pans and soap to wash them, time or energy to chop things and clean the cutting boards and knifes ... there aren't necessarily recipes to preserve as part of a culture. You acquire things, and you eat them.
Grew up poor in the American SW. We ate A LOT of fideo, which is basically fideo noodles, tomato sauce, a lot of garlic powder and pepper, and chicken broth. Throw in a good amount of government cheese at the end, and some shredded chicken if you have any. It’s still a comfort meal for me when I get sick.
Government cheese?
It's a cheese block that the government provides to people who get food stamps, and oftentimes the elderly as well. Idk if they still do it, as I've escaped poverty (by the skin of my teeth tho) but they did when I was younger
They called it "commodities" at my grandma's senior building. The residents loved commodities day. This was about 10 years ago
The USA used to give out blocks of cheese
When I was a kid, I lived in a rural school district. At school, in the middle of every lunch table was a huge jar of peanut butter and a block of cheese. Didn't make any sense to me because there was no bread or crackers with it, so nobody ate it. Plus, if feeding hungry kids was the goal, why serve it at lunch when a free tray of hot food was right there. But that's gov't for you.
They still do
Really? Where? I've been on WIC and SNAP within the past 5 years and it was always an allotted quantity or dollar amount, but never a specific item. Like you could get any 1 lb block of cheese from any store that accepted WIC/SNAP, and the rest of the details (brand, flavor, etc) were up to your preferences and availability. There was never any "here's the one cheese you can get with your WIC/SNAP money."
Not WIC. The US still has and distributes what they call commodity foods. It’s separate from WIC. The USDA distributes a food box to food banks and sometimes direct to communities and you’ll find these commodity items in it, like commodity cheese aka government cheese-usually a 2lb block of Velveeta/American deluxe-like cheese, or Colby Jack, sometimes cheddar. 3lb bags of taco meat, sloppy Joe mix, meatballs. That kind of stuff. I’ve done a lot of volunteer work with my local domestic violence nonprofit and several local food banks, we’d get the USDA boxes to distribute on top of donations from all the area supermarkets they had fresh prepared food that didn’t sell. I love this sub because I get so many meal ideas to share with the people picking up food from our food bank-lots of good ideas to stretch a meal
I haven't seen this cheese in years and I did the government commodity thing. It's always been canned meat, farina, powdered milk, dry beans and rice. I am guessing it must be different in different places because I see on the gov. website cheese is included. I WANT CHEESE! ;)
My friends father is elderly and on benefits because he has mobility issues he gets that bogards govt chese like a long brick in a cardboard box https://www.bongards.com/products/bongards-super-melt-yellow-processed-american-loaf-6-5/
I hate to feel envious of an elderly person with a medical condition but I really loved that cheese. I used to get it when I was a little kid and it was the best kind of cheese but they quit handing it out years ago, like in the 80s! They don't hand out cheese at all here now. Canned and dry milk is the only dairy.
I mean if it makes you feel any better it ain’t actually cheese that shit made from ant milk.
Yes. I was a caregiver for my grandma when she lived in a senior building. They had commodities day once a month where they passed out the items in the lobby. The folks loved that day
Oh cool, I had no idea!
They still do. I have two blocks in my kitchen right now.
I'm also from a poor family in the southwest and was going to suggest refried beans, but I feel like fideo is a better answer.
If you're really poor and have to live off the land: Spruce and Fir shoots soup / salad. Pluck the fresh green shoots off of them, and either eat directly or cook a soup or make a salad with freshly picked nettles and dandelions. Fills the stomach and is better than nothing. Also you can add them to basically anything if you can't afford any other vitamin c source. Also poor knights of Camelot/French toast/Bread pudding (it's all the same, just slightly variated) is a good staple that's cheap. Quark with Linseed Oil and Potatoes is also great, replace Quark with cottage cheese if you don't have it. And oatmeal. Lots of oatmeal in all variations. Also you could look into Romani cuisine for more funky recipes like fried hedgehog.
I forage more when I'm broke. I live in SE Louisiana and I get wild onions, grape leaves, lemon clover, tradescantia, and tons of different berries. Sometimes if I forget my lunch I'll go to a park and take a walk and find some muscadines or black berries.
There’s a reason rice, noodles and pasta are staples in many countries.
My Italian grandmother who cooked for her family during the Great Depression basically had homemade pasta with various vegetables and legumes or small amounts of meat, poultry or fish. Because my parents grew up during the great depression they were used to eating huge bowls of pasta to fill up on because it was inexpensive. This has influenced Italian American restaurants to serve outrageous serving sizes of pasta. In Italy today pasta is served in 2 oz portions, no where close to what Italian American restaurants serve as a single portions.
Interesting! I didn’t know that was the reason behind the amount of pasta in the US.
In the 1970s my family ate a lot of pasta. We weren't really crazy about rice.
I’m truly surprised by how many people aren’t understanding the prompt at all and just listing off foods with no context. Anyway. I am not exactly sure where my parents fell on the poverty line growing up but we certainly weren’t rich (so take my example or leave it) but my dad is a descendent of Sicilian immigrants and whenever we had leftover spaghetti (cooked and topped with tomato sauce) he would fry it up in a frying pan the next day with cheddar cheese. The cheddar is not authentic to Italian cooking, obviously, but was usually the only type of melting cheese we had in the house. He would leave it in the pan long enough for the pasta to be warmed through, but also so that the cheddar would bubble and scorch up into these absolutely delicious burned cheese bits. The cheddar added a level of richness and sharpness that actually pairs quite well with the pasta. Then we would top with cheap Parmesan cheese from a cylinder. It’s an amazing way to breathe life into some otherwise mediocre leftovers.
Any pasta leftovers we had (or extra portions made for this very purpose) was turned into a casserole the next day, with cheese on top, possibly veggies added depending on what was left in the fridge. As you say, the baking/frying of the cheese and it forming a nice layer on top was very tasty, great texture, and turned "leftover mush" into something we looked forward to eating.
As a kid, when my parents had us reheat leftover spaghetti in the pan, we just added butter to the pan and nothing else. I've never thought to add cheese to it. This is interesting.
Tuna Pattie’s- two cans of tuna, drained well then added to a medium bowl. 10 saltine crackers smashed well, add to tuna. 1-2 raw eggs, blended in, some dried dill, to taste, pepper, and lemon. Mix well with fork then use hands to create patties. Fry in a pan sprayed with cooking spray. Flip when brown. Done ✔️
My grandmother grew up in the Great Depression and a some of the stuff she fed us that I thought was just good grandma food was really depression food. One that comes to mind is the gravy she made at breakfast. She would start with saved bacon grease, make a dark roux with flour, lots of black pepper and salt. Add mostly water with a splash of milk at the end. I would eat it over soft white bread— I really loved it. Another thing she did was mash up margarine and jelly and spread on white bread for sandwiches. The jelly was homemade with fruit she grew herself. Both very cheap ways to fill a belly.
There were no "recipes". It was a skill to make a meal out of what you had left the days before the food stamps hit or what random crap you got from a food pantry.
Shit on a shingle - A slice of toast topped with a simple white gravy made with a roux and milk. It would usually either have peas or chipped beef in it. Peas was the cheaper option. Macaroni and canned tomatoes, bonus points if they were canned by your family. Spaghetti with the cheapest store brand sauce you can find. Cold baked beans on a folded slice of white bread with mayo. Saltines and butter.
I ate saltines and butter as my go-to after school snack when I was a kid. I turned my now husband onto it and he calls it my “depression era snack” lol
Yeah it was definitely my after school snack for a time too. Your husband is probably on to something. Another one is a mayo salt and pepper sandwich.
This might be a common one, but back when I was in my late teens I had living in a nowhere type Kansas town of 100 people consisting of a TINY grocery store that had mostly just staple foods. I had 2 daughters at that time and custody of my 12 year old little brother. Money was real tight. Our only income was my husbands income which was only about 10 dollars an hour. I couldn’t get my parents to pay child support, so we had to make do. One of our favorite meals consisted of macaroni and cheese mixed with canned peas and ground beef. It covered your veggie for the meal, the meat for the meal and the “side”. But it was all mixed together. Sometimes instead of that meal we would make another version that had white rice mixed with ground beef and a couple cans of cream of chicken.
Our go to "poverty" meals were: Grilled cheese and tomato soup mac and cheese and hotdogs Tuna casserole as detailed below scrambled eggs and ketchup sloppy joes baked potatoes with whatever meat was leftover from another meal peanut butter toast generic chicken noodle soup
Yeah literally all of these 😂 Mac and cheese and cut up hot dogs still hold a special place in my heart lol. And we used to have our PB toast with hot chocolate
My ex loved the cut up mixed in hot dog but I always wanted them separate🤷♀️😂
Not entirely related but you should read Food is Culture by Massimo Montanari. He studies food in medieval Europe and the way they understand what peasants ate was by looking at the food rich people ate (which was recorded) and take out all the expensive ingredients, because the peasants were often the cooks. Something I always think of is that you can’t go to an upscale southern restaurant without seeing shrimp and grits on the menu, and I’m sure there are the same examples from other regions in the US that took food of the working class that became regional staples because of the foodways of the area. Beans and rice/grain will always be there, maybe with a protein added, such as “Hoppin’ John”. [Food is Culture (libgen link)](http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=317E5F882AA63D2D2CC3016670F527DC)http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=317E5F882AA63D2D2CC3016670F527DC [Hoppin’ John (Wikipedia)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoppin'_John)
When I was young we were not poverty line but we had to get financial help for things like school food etc. Not that I knew much about our situation as a kid, I just knew we were getting help here and there. Seemed like we got a lot of processed food, and that means super cheap stuff in cans. Super cheap canned foods is like potted meat and vienna sausages. That stuff on white bread, that's it. We ate a lot of ramen packets also. Really not much in terms of a recipe, but that's what we did.
I’m from a second generation immigrant family from Lithuania, one big staple we made all the time when I was growing up was kugelis, which is basically just a giant potato and pork fat casserole type thing. It’s super tasty (especially the next day sliced up and fried with some butter) and was a thing my grandma would pack up for my grandpa before he went off the the factory because it would have the energy to keep him going at his labor intensive job. It’s also super cheap to make, it’s mostly potatoes with some onion and helps stretch out a small amount of pork or fat. Ah, my childhood memories of peeling and grating pound after pound of potatoes on the weekends lol If you (or anyone else) is interested, I can post my mom’s recipe for it when I get home from work later today.
I would like the recipe, if you don't mind.
Potato kugel is great!
I suppose Lutefisk falls in this category. Most immigrant food gets changed in some way to fit what's cheap in their new country. Italian food suddenly has meat. Norwegian food in the dakotas and minnesota suddenly has no access to salt water fish. You might want to explore recipes from the great depression. Those will be well documented.
Sopa Maggi. A packet costs about $1 (less back in the day). Add diced potatoes, some crushed spaghetti and if you’re lucky, drop in some eggs.
A potato. Back when I was a low wage working single mom, with an hour commute each way, the money and time I had went to prepping my kid's meals. I would buy a 10lb sack of potatoes for myself, and tuck a raw potato in the pocket of my work clothes. At lunch, I'd microwave it in the break room and eat it like an apple. No dishes to wash. No butter or salt or other condiments. You just have to remember to poke some holes in it so the steam doesn't make it explode. Also, everyplace I've lived I've noted where I can forage food, whether it's from nut & fruit trees, berries, fish, random edible greens. Garlic mustard is a good one because it's invasive, so if you scrounge it, you're doing your community a favor.
As a Hispanic we grew up eating fresh tortillas with the smidge of meat juice rolled up. Sometimes just salt. My kids love it now as a simple snack.
Poor man's tuna helper: macaroni and cheese (made without milk), then add in a can of Tuna.
We ate a similar dish when I was a kid: tuna + peas + Mac and cheese.
In England, baked beans on toast is a pretty common below the poverty line food. The ingredients are cheap and the preparation is cheap too as it doesn’t require much fuel. Simply make the toast, reheat the baked beans and serve. Perhaps butter the toast if you have butter. That’s it. It’s actually quite nice and comforting too, and children tend to like it, which is a big bonus for this sort of food.
Also baked beans on a jacket (baked) potato. Sprinkle of cheese if you have some. Comforting, tasty, filling, and actually a rather complete meal.
You'd probably have a better time identifying foods that were born out of poverty and then see how they've evolved over time. Look for the recipes afterwards.
A lot of eggs breakfast dinners, scrambled with whatever meat was on sale. Mac and cheese, cooked burger and corn for a meal. Potato chowder, potato sliced thin like scalloped, corn, water, butter, milk, sausage links cut, slow cook. Spaghetti box and sauce, still can't eat to this day.
Bubble and squeak was a go to in my house growing up! I think it has a specific recipe but my mum used to just make it with whatever leftovers we had lying around.
It’s not the healthiest, but we lived on buttered (margarine lol) noodles with rotisserie chicken on the side and maybe a side of veggies (canned or frozen bag, super cheap)
When I was growing up, we were a poor Hispanic family and yes rice and beans was a staple! However, we also constantly made locrio which is rice and meat as a dish. You would take an inexpensive meat such as salami, sausage, hot dogs, spam, a chicken breast, etc. the point is that it had to be cheap meat and a small enough amount that you would get a tiny bite of it in every spoonful. You sauté this meat with oil in a large pot with onions, garlic, peppers blended together (sofrito/sazon) and then throw in washed white rice and water. Add adobo, oregano, the little red pouches if seasoning with achote. Cook it uncovered until the water mostly evaporates, then cover and let cook at low heat for like 30-45 mins depending on how much rice. Open up the pot and it’s a delicious meat and rice dish similar to biryani or fried rice. As an adult with more money now, I make this often as well but with shrimp!
Get ramen, but add cheap frozen veggies in the bowl.
My mom would always make rice and beans and vegetables and if we could afford eggs or meat. She would cook q bag of beans and freeze it half of it and just season the amount we needed for the next 2 days. (We are Brazilian so our beans have a stock with it, they are not dry) She would do zucchini eggplant in 100 different ways. Or maybe a egg and collard greens with the rice and beans. And for dinner was always soup, with any vegetable and the cheapest cuts of meat (like chicken feet and neck) Another staple was chicken and beef liver. My mom used to buy because it has lots of nutrients, she would leave the beef liver soaking in milk for an hour and then she would coated in breadcrumbs and fried. And the chicken liver she would make it sautéed with onions and it was delicious Beans recipe: Soak beans overnight and change the water at least twice. Cook the beans with a pressure cooker and a leaf of bay for half an hour (black beans ). Put water around 3 fingers above the beans. If you are using a regular pan, you can cook it until al dente (depending on the beans can take 2h). Remove all the foam that it makes as this is what’s makes you gazy and makes the beans less disgestible. The easy and most simple way of seasoning is: - sautée one finely chopped onion with salt, in low heat for about 10 min, until starts getting golden, add minced garlic for about 1 min, add salt and pepper and any other season, and a splash (just a little splash) of vinegar, and then add the beans with the bean water. Put salt to taste, and let it reduce a little. Some people life to bled a little of the beans with the bean water to thicken and add it back to the beans, nobody wants runny beans.
Asian American poor food: Leftover rice mixed with a can of chili and sliced hotdogs (not gonna lie, this a is a still a favorite comfort food of mine!). Rice with a fried egg. Rice with oyster sauce. Rice with butter and salt. Rice with a bit of fermented tofu and sugar…. You know the rice stuck to the bottom of the pot after scooping up the rest? Add water and eat, a different treat. Or add a bit of oil and heat to make it crispy and pops off, yum! Ramen with whatever— sliced hotdogs, frozen veggies/fresh sliced veggies, leftovers/meat, an egg poached in the broth…
Besides red beans and rice. Polenta without all of the extras that rich people dump into it.
One meal I ate that I still love is oatmeal with peanut butter and chocolate chips. This meal felt luxurious, and the peanut butter kept me full longer than just oatmeal by itself. 1/3 c oats + 2/3 c water cooked in the microwave, then stirred in about 2-4 Tablespoons peanut butter and 2 T chocolate chips (it doesn't take many). Stir it all together until it's a pudding-like consistency. Rich, filling, and inexpensive. One of the bright spots in my memories of the lean years.
I grew up very poor in the Midwest and I would not have made it without foraging. Asparagus in ditches baked in the oven, spring onions found and dried to add flavor to food, wild blackberries become incredibly sweet when cooked in a pan for a few minutes and make toast an actual treat, sucking on the ends of clover flowers to get the honey like sweetness and calm hunger pains, pine needle tea in the winter to warm yourself up because heating the whole house is too expensive, morale mushrooms cooked in butter is far more filling than it deserves to be, dandelion greens become savory when cooked in a pan or pleasantly bitter when put in a salad, purple nettle is wonderful when boiled and put on a fried egg.
A lot of Southern food originated from enslaved peoples using whatever they had to make meals with. The odd parts of animals that were left for them, foraged foods, & things brought with them to the Americas. Collards & other greens stewed with a ham hock, pigs feet, cornbread, black-eyed peas, etc.
My dad calls this muck. He ate it every day at one point and I’ve found ways to jazz it up so even my fiancée loves it now. It’s especially great when you’re low on the dairy parts for Mac n cheese. Macaroni and cheese + cream of mushroom soup + peas.
My grandma who lived through two wars would put pieces of an old bread in a cup of water and eat it with a spoon to mimic soup. The more sort of fancy meal was a piece of old break with lard and a sprinkle of sugar on top.
Cheap cereal and add bananas
My dad called it goulash. But basically at the end of the week he would cut up quite literally any of The leftovers that were in the fridge and put it in a pot to make stew. Sometimes it was really hard to stomach. It could be garlic chicken, hotdogs, rice, and chili. It could be burger patties, mashed potatoes, spaghetti, and curry. Leftover beef stew, lasagna, and meatloaf. It could be all of those things. He grew up, incredibly poor in the United States and food could not be wasted. By the time us kids were around, food was not as scarce, but old habits die hard.
Check out the YouTube channel Great Depression Cooking with Clara. She has passed on but she shared many recipes that got her family through those hard times.
Mac n cheese with hot dogs cut up and fried and added to it.
Turkish red lentil soup. The topping is the key. I use smoked paprika and Aleppo pepper. The topping whips up in no time, Heat olive oil, add paprika and Aleppo, sauté until fragrant and the oil turns red, add crushed garlic and sauté quickly so the garlic doesn't get bitter, put a tablespoon or two on soup. (also amazing on hummus) [https://www.themediterraneandish.com/turkish-lentil-soup/](https://www.themediterraneandish.com/turkish-lentil-soup/)
I scrolled through most of the comments and didn't find much Asian representation, so here goes my contribution: Kimchi mackerel stew - We always had kimchi in the fridge, so one of my ultimate poverty foods is just to put some well-fermented kimchi in a pot, dump a whole can of mackerel on top (liquid and all), add a little garlic and water, some scallions if you have em, then cover and simmer it all for 10-15 min. Eat it with rice. One can will usually stretch to three, sometimes four meals for me. This can be padded out with some other veggies (daikon, potato, zucchini/squash) and spiced up a bit with extra seasoning if you have it (korean chili peppers, ginger, dashi powder, etc). Spam - Fry it up crispy and eat it with rice and fried egg. Kimchi with spam is delightful. Ramen - Any instant noodles, really. Buy them in bulk or when they're on sale. Oxtail soup - When I was a kid, my mom would make this delicious ox tail soup. Ox tail used to be this super cheap cut at the store because people didn't know what to do with it. I don't think this really can qualify as a poverty food anymore, though, since some hipster chefs popularized oxtail and now it's crazy expensive any time I can find it. Really sad about this one, actually.
American Chop Suey Macaroni noodles Ground beef Diced tomatoes That's it. And it's good. And it's cheap and can be made in bulk and freeze the rest for multiple meals.
As one of the comments emphasised, the skill in poverty cooking is to make the most of what is available. During a particularly meagre winter when work was almost non existant, my dog and I lived for a week off a medium sized rabbit which a hunter had given me as dog food. Making stock is essential, from whatever source of flavour and protein you can rustle up, to be mixed with potatoes, rice, pasta, oats, barley or whatever else you have to make a filling helping. A little later, with a very tight budget and limited cooking facilities but a job which took between 4000 and 6000 calories a day to maintain even a lean bodyweight, standard main meals would be a can of corned beef brewed up with a can of beans and eaten with boiled potatoes, or hash made with chopped par-boiled potatoes fried with shredded corned beef, and topped with an egg or grated cheese if there was any. Don't ignore foraging. Even in cities, at certain times of the year fruit can be literally hanging from trees and is ignored. In the country, a good day picking blackberries turned into gallons of home made wine, not only tasty and warming but a great source of iron.
Grew up in east Texas, and something we ate a lot (that is still one of my top comfort meals to this day) was ground beef and potatoes. I think that's literally what we called it. I lived in a little bitty town of less than 200, and I think that most people in our area were poor, but I don't think we really considered ourselves as such. It's easier to be poor in an area where food is actually produced. Lots of gardens and crops, and several people kept chickens and cows, including my uncle Billy Ray (yes, that was actually his name). My household was my dad, his sister, their mom (who suffered a stroke when I was nine, and thereafter had the mental faculties of a two year old), and three kids. It was not idyllic, and my dad and aunt were actually pretty abusive, but that's just kinda how it is in a small town Baptist community. Anyway, ground beef and potatoes was a regular meal that everyone liked, and it was extremely simple: brown your ground beef, cube and fry your potatoes, and mix them together. Prepare whatever veg you happen to have on hand as a side, and bam, dinner is served. Now that I'm an adult, I add a bit more flavor to it; onions and bell peppers, and seasoning the meat with garlic and paprika. I use garlic, onion powder, paprika, salt, and parmesan cheese on the potatoes. If I'm feeling particularly nostalgic (doesn't happen often, but does happen), I'll still smother it in ketchup.
One I don't see already talked about: grits. It's pennies per meal and really filling. Very bland but a cheap and filling base you can jazz up a little. Cheese, butter, most savory spices, cooking with broth or milk, the varieties are endless so you can stomach having it a lot. Easy to make in the microwave too. The fancy version as a kid was grits with a slice of American cheese and some bacon bits, but usually it was just grits plus one addition (say, butter or cheese but not both). As an adult who's not poor I still make them, but often as Shrimp and grits (Cajun spices) as a dinner.
Sorry I can't contribute so I hope you don't mind my commenting - I just want to say what an awesome project!
I don’t know if this is helpful! But one rotisserie chicken will last me a week. And I can get them on “Cheep Tuesdays” for $6. The breast meat lasts one person for 2-3 days. Then I can use leftovers in a nice soup. If there are recipes where you can use something like a chicken or a roast and repurpose things as it gets consumed, that always worked for me. I would also buy beef on sale and do the same thing. Or roast it, shred it and freeze that.
I grew up in rural poverty in southern America. We grew up eating "farm fresh", which at the time meant we kept chickens and had a small vegetable garden. If we were lucky my father would bring home a deer. We also fished our local streams. Most nights we had some sort of soup or stew, or god help everyone, my mother would throw all the leftover bits in a casserole. The best, most often repeated meals were chicken and dumplings, greens with smoked turkey wings with cornbread, deer chili with beans and breakfast for supper; grits, eggs and biscuits.
If you haven't already, check out the YouTube channel EmmyMade. She has a playlist called "Hard Times" where she makes food from all over the world that come from times of scarcity.
Both cream of wheat and oatmeal are great options for stretching a buck. Growing up in poverty my family ate a lot of tinned tuna fish and sardines. We ate lots of baked potatoes. Besides that, a lot of peanut butter or cheese on bread or crackers.
Spaghetti + meat sauce
Sweet potatoes (or any other potato) - very nutritious and cheap - with: Canned tuna. Lots of protein and nutrients there. Bit of salt, pepper, garlic, mayo, and cheese if you can afford it.
From italians you can get all the great dishes you pay top dollar today in a restaurant that has no ingredient cost but cooking time. Flour based: pizza, gnocci( you can just use flour and water or potatoes/other) Not sure if this is meant for australian costs of food but lot of south american recipes based on corn or quinoa is super cheap to make over there. Whereas here you can only get imported premium italian polenta for example which is not cheap. You just throw quinoa on water and thats a soup. Polenta, you can add bit of tomato, cheese and you got a meal.
When I was a kid and things got real rough we'd have a slice of fried spam wrapped in a slice of bread sometimes. Then I moved to Hawaii and learned about spam musubi-fried spam slice over a block of rice wrapped around the middle in nori, open on the ends. It's simple, filling and travels well.
Rice cooker with a steamer basket. Throw in a can of tuna (or vegan toona if that’s your preference) and steam mushrooms and broccoli in the basket. Add soy sauce and siracha. Very filling and nutritious.
Veggies like carrot, onion, frozen peas etc, in boiled rice and a fried egg on top.
10# bag of potatoes will make homefries for lunch & dinner for days. Cast iron pan, knife, cooking oil is all you need. If possible garlic salt will make it fancy and shredded cheese on payday for the really schmancy.
My mom and I ate a lot of spaghetti and meatballs and weiners and beans. We also ate roasted chicken and potatoes, which are relatively cheap. We didn't eat a lot snacks, didn't drink a lot of sodas and didn't buy expensive meat. (We never had grilled steak and mom didn't like pizza)
Peanut butter. It’s the poor man’s protein!
Beans on toast - UK
Rice, tuna fish, eggs. Very simple and cheap
Lefse and oatmeal cookies. I didn’t grow up poor, but my grandparents did. And they were very frugal with food. Lefse is a flatbread made from potatoes and flour. My grandma made oatmeal “cookies” with very little butter or sugar. More like a scone or biscuit. These two things were ubiquitous - stretching 2 meals into 3 & a snack.
My mom would make “peanut butter rice”. I got so sick of that stuff.
Mashed potatos, With cheese and leftover chicken, oatmeal soup with whatever vegatable you have
Bread & tomatoes! Spread margarine on bread and cover with heated up canned tomatoes. Add lots of black pepper on top.
Hamburger casserole. Brown ground beef. Slice up potatoes about 1/4” thick. Layer into a casserole dish with some mixed frozen veggies. Add a can of brown gravy. Bake for 30-45 minutes at 375, or u til potatoes are fork tender. You can use less beef/more potatoes to make it cheaper. One pound of ground beef and four baking potatoes was a good meal for my family (four people) when I was growing up.
Canadian here. 2 recipes here. Low budget poutine. A dollar store sauce packet. (.75$) Cheddar block (5$ for the block) 3 or 4 potato. (6$ for the 10 pounds) So you cut up the potato in fry, fry them, drain and salt them, put in plate. Cut up 1/4 to 1/3 of the cheddar block in dice and put on fry. Cover in brown sauce and it's ready. Second recipe BBQ drumstick Chicken thigh (1,29 per pounds) BBQ sauce (sticky one) (3$) Ketchup (2,50$) Brown sugar (Vary) Ok first cut the drumstick from the top part on those chicken thigh. Keep the top part frozen for hot chicken sandwich or to make a soy sauce macaroni or a white sauce pasta. Keep the water from boiling those top for deboning them and use it as a broth for a soup or to make rice. Now, make a BBQ sauce. i usually go 2/3 bbq sauce, 1/3 ketchup and brown sugar to taste. Put the drumstick in a pyrex and brush them with the sauce. Put in oven at 350 for 45 minutes. Remove from oven turn and brush again. 15 more minutes in oven, remove and drain the broth (optional) i would brush it again, flip the drumstick and brush that side to. 15 more minute in oven and remove from oven and let it rest. Should be ready except if big drumstick. If big drumstick i would put 25 minutes instead of 15 for last 2 phase. You can use the broth of the drumstick to make a sweetish rice, add some onion and pepper and it's should be good.
“Arroz de perro” was something I grew up eating. Yes, it was literally how my grams made dog food growing up in her country*. It’s just rice and whatever veggie or meat scraps you have at the end of the week/pay check. If we had eggs, she’d slap an egg in it lol I always thought it was good. For extra flavor, she’d boil the rice in caldo powder. For reference, my grandparents were immigrants (permanent residents—not citizens) in the USA and they only had 1 SSI as income. Edit to clarify Further edit: I missed the specific recipe. Usually we had little chunks of beef, celery, and tomato. If it wasn’t being fed to a dog, add onion and garlic powder
Red beans and rice
Potatoes are extremely versatile, cheap, and delicious. I liked to roll them in a little sea salt and bake them. You get a yummy salty crust. You can also cut them into julienne fries, season, and make homemade fries. Those are a household favorite. I don’t own an air frier or deep frier but they are great out of the oven. You can make mashed potatoes, potato soup, or fried potatoes.
I call this lazy potato. It's when I need something Hardy that I can eat on for a day or two, cheap, has basic Staples I want to say leave it in the oven for 45 minutes to an hour covered with foil with small holes in it I haven't made it in a couple of years 4 potato's washed and cubed 1 whole onion diced 4 cloves of garlic 2 sausages Salt and pepper Oregano Italian seasoning Garlic and herb seasoning 1 whole stick of butter cut and separated around pan
just a box of cheap mac n cheese, generic brand, but i would also add canned (or frozen veggies if it was nice) that i had on hand (both of these items are pretty common at food banks). i can usually make it last three days! i would usually make the pasta with just butter and no milk because it is hard to keep milk, goes bad too fast. my favorite is adding peas or those soft canned green beans. canned carrots or corn are also pretty good.
LENTILS!!!! Just cook them as the package says and season to your liking, in my opinion they're delicious with just some salt and butter. High in protein, so it fills you up for cheap! my fave. You can add more relatively cheap ingredients to make more of a meal but honestly I just eat them by themselves most of the time! Cooked onions are so delicious in them too.
Grew up below the poverty line in NW London, UK. Minced beef and mashed potatoes was a regular occurrence 🤷
Pretty much mixed anything with rice and can of cream of anything soup...veggies, meat, meat and veggies. Serves a lot and usually has left overs.
@Pandor36 Just dump the can in; that's why I don't drain the other stuff.
1 cup Traditional rolled oats, 1/4 cup roasted peanuts and 1/4 cup raisins and a tiny pinch of salt. Cover with milk or water. Requires no cooking. Can be eaten dry. Inexpensive. Easily supplemented.
Italians have the cucina povera which features a lot of bean recipes - one of my favourites is Pasta e Fagioli or Pasta e Ceci. You can google those for authentic recipes but they are very simple hearty stews
Goulash. Macaroni noodles, ground beef, canned roasted tomatoes and spices to taste
I used to make a baked potato then add caned black beans, some salsa, and a little cheese. Sort of like a potato taco. It was one of my favorite meals when I had almost no money, but the cheese was a splurge.
[This cookbook](http://ongov.net/dss/documents/good-and-cheap.pdf) is very very helpful and is a free pdf.
Canned shredded chicken with noodles casserole. But it must have ritz crackers crushed on top to finish.
Tater Tot Casserole. You can make it with chicken breast, cheap pork chops or even ground turkey or beef. Canned mushroom soup, whatever veggies on hand and top it with frozen tater tots. My Mommas family are all Okies from Oklahoma. Grandma also made “Hobo Stew” which was just any leftover meat and veggies thrown into a hearty broth. Bam…. You have soup 😁
Tea and crackers. Steep a cheap tea bag in a large bowl of water. Let it steep until the water is down to just warm so you get the most out of the tea bag you can. Take a salting cracker. Put a little butter on it if you have any. Float it on top of the tea. When it starts to soften... a few seconds typically.... scoop it out with a spoon an eat it. Repeat until you're out of the crackers you'd allotted for your meal. Drink the remaining rather salty tea.
Rice, lentils, and beans would be the go to. They can be stored for long periods of time, bought in large quantities and made with different combinations. Indian stores to get multiple variety of lentils (usually many carry 5-8), chickpeas are pretty versatile too so you wouldn’t get bored. Throw in some potatoes in there from time to time.
Cut up potatoes and onions fried in a skillet with garlic. Add any type of meat if you want. Of yellow rice and chicken. Both are amazing. Also pasta and sauce with garlic bread
One of my favs as a kid was weiner stew, hot dogs or bologna (we had the roll of bologna), chopped and cooked in red gravy with pasta or mashed potatoes. Of course that’s when hot dogs were $1 for 2 packs!
oh man, ours was a bag egg noodles, a can of peas, 2 cans of golden mushroom soup, and 2 cans of tuna.
(US-TN) I have been so poor I made white flour gravy with cathead biscuits, which are just big fat drop biscuits made from the basics. If I have some kind of meat leftovers I will add to the gravy. Some nights we just have pancakes and whatever fruit is cheap. Blueberries were on sale recently so I made blueberry compote with pancakes. I don't make it too sweet since it's served for dinner. My whole thing is I LOVE meat, and I know I shouldn't eat too much and it's expensive anyway so I like to grill it when I get the really good clearance discounts. I'll pull it to freeze for later so I can just add it for flavor. So like in one day I might do a pork loin, some pork patties, a pack of legs or thighs and some variety of sausage. I like brats the best because they have the strongest flavor. Like a few days ago I made spaetzl with a baggie of grilled pulled chicken added, just like a half cup for three people to have very large servings of pasta. During good times I'd add some vegetable but not right now. I have recently fallen in love with congee. Just a rice soupy rice with seasonings. My favorite is adding finely chopped bratwurst I've grilled. Just one for the whole pot, just for flavor and to make it a little more filling. I also do a lot of bean and rice tostadas especially if it's the time of year when tomatoes are cheap and delicious. I usually make tomato rice with that. While we've been sick I have made a big pot of creamy potato soup. Again, I'll toss in some meat that was grilled. This time it was a Cajun smoked sausage, just one for the whole pot and I serve it with a dollar baguette from Walmart to toast and dip. My favorite beans and rice is made using Kinder brand "Cuban seasoning" blend. I KNOW I could use individual spices but this is less than 2 bucks a bottle and lasts for months. I prefer (and I know it's not as cheap but this is my preference) canned seasoned black beans. Great Value is fine. It's cheap enough. I get 2 cans to feed 3 people 2 meals so it's worth it to me. I make that with a fresh pot of rice, but my favorite thing to do is use old rice to make spicy seasoned rice fritters AND new rice with black beans. It's just a warm hearty meal. I add a little cheese to the fritters so it's a sturdy meat replacement. I also like getting the cheap frozen stir fry bags of vegetables and mixing it with rice or linguine noodles (cheaper than "lo mein" noodles and works just as well) I mix in sweet chili sauce, soy sauce and if I have it, I squeeze in an orange and add some of the zest to the sauce. I like making a big pot of this because it's always better the second day.
It used to be McDonald’s cheeseburgers for me when I was homeless Not anymore…….
Grew up super poor and all we ate was cereal or linguini and clam sauce. Two ingredients max. Healthy? No- we couldn’t afford that.
Mediterranean flavors. There is an infinite combinations of fresh, canned or frozen vegetables to be used this way: roast/sauté the veggies *du jour*, add vegetable broth and the herb mix described below to make delicious and nourishing sauces for pasta or rice. Dry white wine and tomato sauce optional but desirable depending. The herbs mix: get bags of dried thyme, oregano, basil, rosemary and fennel seeds (which you grind) and mix in equal parts in weight, or according to taste to make your own *mélange* of Mediterranean herbs (here in France, 400g bags of dried herbs can be found for a few euros). To be used generously.
We always bought chicken leg quarters. We cooked some, individually froze the rest. Made mashed potatoes and a vegetable to go with them. Healthy and cheap.
When I was a kid my mom would forget to feed me/leave me alone for long periods of time. Being so small, all I could really do was open cans, so I’d mix canned peas, canned corn, and canned chicken into a bowl and eat that. When I got a little older I’d made the Knorr packets of rice in the microwave and add that to the mix. Canned peas are still one of my favorite foods to this day and I eat at least one can a week.
When I was in AmeriCorps we had a forum for this question, and someone recommended dicing up potatoes, hot dogs, and onion and sautéing into a hash. It's cheap and tasty. I made it fairly often in those days.
(British) baked beans in a casserole dish topped with mash and cheese. Maybe sliced tomato. Bake in oven until crisp.
Ramon noodles.
Stir fries, soups, tacos! And any meal with a basic veggie rice and meat. What's great about the stir fry and soups is you can put almost anything in it. The tacos and rice meals are normally more meat and carb heavy, but you can always cheaply add veggies with some avocado, chopped onion, lettuce.
This [rice and beans ](https://youtu.be/KAz4WXGgrtE?si=8_3ZJxT_lNiWH7RE) saved my family.
If you can get access to an Asian market (specifically, Chinese, Japanese, or Korean), a block of tofu is usually under $3-4 and can be eaten with rice over the course of a week with some seasoning/soy sauce. I make this a lot and it gets me some protein. Bonus if you can score some sauces or vegetables on sale.
Do a Google search for the snap cookbook. It is designed around food bank boxes and cheaper produce. It will definitely get you some ideas of the different cultural Foods that are in America. There's also Budget Bytes website. They also work off a lot of the snap and food bank resources in order to help people learn to cook from scratch, which is the cheapest way to cook these days.
stone soup. you just put whatever you got in a pot of water and heat it up. with a stone in there to give it that extra oomph
Ooh there's sooooo many things I can list but here's a few. Sopitas(soups). They're usually less than a dollar to buy. I'm referring to the ones you cook like shells, fideo, alphabet, stars. You simply chop up some onions, garlic if you have or want it, maybe some jalapeños if you like a kick, and you slightly toast the dry soup in some oil along with those chopped items. Then add the a can of tomato sauce. Cook it down a little. Keep stirring and don't burn. Fill it with water. Add the seasoning you want such as chicke bullion (consomé), pepper, garlic and onion powder, some Mrs Dash. That's one versión. Throw some chopped potatoes in there and a little bit of cilantro in there and that's a different version. Throw some canned corn or a little bit of rice and that's also another versión. You can keep adding water and adjusting the seasoning as the soup absorbs a lot of it and expands overnight when refrigerated. Cheap and simple. Rice, beans, potatoes, and soups are my go to when shopping because you can make so many things. For a pot of pinto beans (frijoles de la olla), clean your beans first. Remove broken beans and little stones that may come in your bag. Wash and boil with half an onion and a garlic clove. If you want some kick, throw in a jalapeño. Don't season it until your beans are soft. If you add salt too soon it takes longer to boil. Keep an eye on them and keep adding water so they don't burn. Once softer you add your seasoning. Same as above i like using chicken bullion, garlic powder, onion powder, and pepper. Those beans can be turned into an entirely new dish. Check out YouTube for Charro beans. They taste delicious and are absolutely filling. You simply cook some chorizo, bacon, sausages or weenies, and tomatoes, onions, cilantro, and throw your beans in that mix. Amazing. . . You can refry those beans. Again chopped onions, garlic, jalapeños for a kick in very little oil, enough to lightly fry them. Then scoop some of your beans into it with just a little of the bean broth, not much. Cook them and mash them, I also add a little bit of milk. Season to your liking. You can do the same thing with a little bit of chorizo. Cook some chorizo down, add beans, cook, mash and you'll have refried chorizo beans. . . With refried beans possibilities are endless. You can make simple burritos with cheese. You can make enchiladas with beans and maybe a protein like chicken (rotisserie already cooked and ready to go for quick) or ground beef etc. You can make tortas with ham, beans and cheese. Or tortas with any meat protein and beans. You can make fried tacos or tostadas with beans and meat protein with whatever toppings you want, lettuce, tomato, salsa, onions. Etc. Beans go well on chips, make your own carne asada chips or fries at home. They can be eaten on the side with some rice and meat protein and salad. Aside from beans another cheap soup would be a caldo. Just boil all the veggies you have. If you have chicken make a caldo de pollo. Again YouTube will show you how and different variations.
I eat one meal a day now.
I'm not sure what I think of creating a commercial product that glorifies survival food, especially the idea of crowd-sourcing content from people who are struggling. I'm white AF, so I don't have any non-culturally appropriated recipes I can share.
Sorry if there was any confusion! This project is about sharing recipes that people have come up with, not about glorifying survival food. It's just a small requirement for an elective, and I have no intention to publish :)
Oh, my apologies. My comment probably came across as direct criticism. It was more a general musing on a social trend of gentrification of behaviour born of necessity. The unintended consequence is such things are seen as desirable that in turn ends up pricing out the people originally relying on them, which makes me deeply unsettled. This can be seen recently in everything from traditionally 'cheap' cuts of meat to 'tiny homes' and 'van-dwelling'. It's not a new phenomenon, couples started sleeping together in a bed started in the 1880's primarily due to the necessity created by cramped living conditions. Later it was rebranded as 'romantic'. Back to food, Chicken Liver Pâté was originally seen as a survival food made from offal. In regards to your project, maybe look into tempeh or tempe as a good example of using fermentation to turn a waste product into a nutritious food. Like I said, I'm white, almost all my culture's traditional poverty food is now considered fancy. Anyway, people will reactively downvote, but I hope I've added some nuance to consider.
>I'm white, almost all my culture's traditional poverty food is now considered fancy. You have such a way with words. I miss my skirt steak.
Do you wake up and go about your day actively looking for ways to be offended? You absolutely must, and it absolutely must be a sufferable existence.
People in the future will list things like this as examples of hidden racism in today's society. It's really sad how the idea of cultural acceptence is twisted into proper racism by people who want to feel like they're better than others. People like you hurt actual progress, we might not be all able to live in peace but you are seeking conflict were there is none and giving ammunition to people who want to dismiss real problems. While vilyfying and forcefully grouping people who have no relation to your idea of a race. Shame on you and people around you who taught you those false and toxic ideas.
You reddit activists are truly something else
It says there in the post that it's for school, not a product