Good morning, all. Happy Sunday!
I’ve been rewatching some old videos I’d seen a long time ago, and I came across one of them that I thought would be appropriate for the open thread this morning. The videos are from a fantastic YouTube series called Great Depression Cooking—a guy took videos of his grandmother recounting childhood stories and cooking recipes from the Depression. I was immediately smitten because the lady in the videos, Clara, reminded me so much of my own grandmother, who had plenty of her own stories from the Great Depression. The historian in me just loves this kind of oral history, too. A friend and I binge-watched all of the videos one night. Later, that friend bought me Clara’s book (Clara’s Kitchen: Wisdom, Memories, and Recipes from the Great Depression), for Christmas. The recipe for breakfast, interestingly, is a sugar cookie recipe. From the book (even her writing and storytelling style is like my grandma’s):
For breakfast, we usually only had bread with butter and coffee. We used to dip our bread in the coffee and eat it. We always had evaporated milk. But sometimes on Sundays we’d have these special sugar cookies, which Ma baked that morning, with our coffee. That was a real treat.
Sunday really was the sweetest day of the week. We’d always have some kind of dessert on Sundays. Sometimes my aunt would bring us a box of sugar wafer cookies. My brother and I would count them out one by one, and divide them evenly. If there was an extra, we’d cut it in half. We’d have them with a little coffee. Ma didn’t want us to have a lot of coffee, so she’d give us a drop of coffee and mostly milk. But we had our cookies, day and night, so we were happy.
She is just the cutest lady you’ll ever see. Here is the video in which she makes the recipe and talks about breakfast during the Depression:
The coffee and bread she talks about seems to be a common poor family breakfast experience. My mom, while not from the Depression era, still has a taste for it from her childhood.
Sadly, Clara died a few years ago, bringing her channel to an end. But if you like that video, there are plenty more where that came from.
What do you want to chat about this morning?
All are welcome to join the fun, the silliness, the conversations. If you don’t know...just ask! Some things really do require a bit of explanation.
There will be a few surprises along the way, all good ones, we hope.
We are here to keep building the Daily Kos Community.
We post Mon-Sun at 10:30 a.m. Eastern. On Sunday we go to the C!U!A! posting to show support for all the work for November’s elections. Please to join us there, as well.
Pie fights will be met with outrageous ridicule and insults. Trolls will be incinerated and served at the next group BBQ. As briquettes.