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Depression Era Thanksgiving
‘Mock Duck’ and Other Depression Thanksgiving Delights
By JANE ZIEGELMAN and ANDREW COENOV. 24, 2016
Eighty-five years ago this month, President Herbert Hoover followed tradition and proclaimed the final Thursday of November a day of national Thanksgiving, an unenviable task given the circumstances. America was two years into the Great Depression, the unemployment rate was more than 15 percent, and millions more despaired for the future. The president’s rhetorical strategy was to bob and weave, extolling the country’s “abundant harvests” and downgrading the Depression to a “passing adversity.”
Out in the real world, homemakers faced their own unenviable challenge: how to honor the holiday with a family feast in a time of scarcity. Their questions were answered by Aunt Sammy, a fictional radio persona and spokeswoman for the federal government on all matters culinary. More specifically, Aunt Sammy (Uncle Sam’s sister, naturally) was the voice of the Bureau of Home Economics, a female-dominated branch of the Department of Agriculture created in 1923. The bureau had only 75 employees but, under the powerful patronage of Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of Hoover’s successor, it played an outsize role in guiding homemakers through the Depression’s leanest years.
The traditional Thanksgiving meal was an expression of the earth’s bounty that demanded weeks in the kitchen. Preparation began with the chopping of apples and the pounding of spices for the obligatory mince pie, one in a galaxy of pies made for the occasion. There was pumpkin, of course, but also cranberry, huckleberry, green current, pear, plum and apple. Roast turkey shared the table with chicken pie (a New England classic), roast chicken and vegetables of every hue, stewed, mashed, pickled and preserved.
In this new era, Aunt Sammy called for simple menus simply prepared. In place of oyster stew, she suggested a tomato-juice cocktail, dressed for the holiday with a jaunty sprig of parsley. For sides, Aunt Sammy recommended a more limited and less expensive array of dishes than was traditional — baked sweet potatoes, creamed onions and baby lima beans.
As for the main event, she saw no reason to splurge on turkey when a budget roast would serve the purpose just as well. One economical option: an old hen. Yes, it might be tough, but not if you cooked it properly and gave it a quick boil before roasting. A more novel alternative was “mock duck,” a flank steak spread with a stuffing made from stale bread crumbs, rolled up, tied, seared in fat and roasted in the oven.
Like her cooking, Aunt Sammy was unpretentious and ever practical (she was also heard across the nation: The bureaus sent scripts to nearly 200 radio stations for local Aunt Sammy portrayers to read on the air). But behind the simple recipes lurked a sophisticated agenda, the Thanksgiving tutorial part of a larger campaign to modernize American foodways.
Home economists had long made it their goal to bring science into the kitchen. Replacing culinary folk wisdom with empirical knowledge, they championed a style of cooking that was economical, efficient and nutritious, a cuisine born of the laboratory with no particular regional accent. During the Depression, they found a receptive audience of women desperate for advice on how to feed their families. As their letters poured in to the Bureau of Home Economics, Aunt Sammy helped bridge the cultural divide between government scientists like Louise Stanley, director of the bureau, and the average home cook.
The Depression made simple menus an economic necessity, but, as Aunt Sammy was quick to point out, they also saved precious hours. In the interest of time, home economists urged women to approach their cooking responsibilities like business managers and employ shopping lists and work schedules to keep them on task.
More timesavers could be found on supermarket shelves in the form of new convenience foods that home economists celebrated as better than fresh. Green beans, lima beans, asparagus, peas, sweet potatoes and even brussels sprouts all came in cans, preserved “at the peak of their natural goodness,” as an A. & P. ad promised in 1936, and home economists encouraged women to take full advantage.
A relative newcomer to the world of convenience foods, canned cranberry sauce, was hailed as a glamorous alternative to homemade: “No more need to fret and fuss,” The Boston Globe said in 1936. “Use the canned cranberry sauce which slides out of the can in a solid shimmering mold, tempting enough to please the most exacting housewife.” Likewise, a prescient 1935 article in The New York Times observed that fresh pumpkins seemed to be disappearing from the market: “It appears that canned pumpkin has so displaced the fresh article that the time is not far distant when directions for scooping out seeds, peeling, steaming and draining the big succulent wedges will be as outmoded in the cookery books as instructions on stoning raisins.”
Another kind of convenience food, flavored gelatin used for molded “salads,” was a quick and inexpensive way to bring color to the holiday table. A typical offering was lemon gelatin studded with cranberries, grapes and walnuts and served with cranberry-tinted mayonnaise.
Ritual meals like Thanksgiving are typically resistant to change, but only up to a point. As much as we cling to culinary tradition, the foods we eat also reflect the times we live in. The Great Depression forced women to rethink their Thanksgiving menus and experiment. As for Aunt Sammy, she disappeared in 1934, though the bureau’s housekeeping show continued until 1946; the bureau itself was subsumed into the Agriculture Department in 1962.
In our own time, which prizes anything “artisanal,” “home-brewed” or “local,” the spirit of Aunt Sammy lives on in our holiday Jell-O molds, string-bean casseroles and marshmallow fruit salads, foods we might spurn on any other day of the year. On Thanksgiving, they make their appearance as family heirlooms, edible tributes to our culinary foremothers, women who saw the future in a can of sliced beets.
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.