The Casseroles, Dips, Convenience Foods, and Family Recipes That Defined Midcentury America

Part of The American Time Capsule — remembering the foods we ate, school cafeterias and the “lunch ladies”, the restaurants we loved, the meals we shared, and the family traditions that made ordinary moments around the table unforgettable.

We Didn’t Know We Were Eating Midcentury Food

Nobody in our house ever announced:

“Tonight we’re having classic midcentury American cuisine.”

Mom was feeding a family.

That was the assignment.

Some of what appeared on our table came from cans.

Some came from boxes.

Some were homemade.

And quite a few recipes seemed to begin with instructions that might as well have said:

Open a can of Campbell’s soup.

America’s kitchens were changing during the 1950s and ’60s.

Convenience foods were everywhere, while dishes that sounded exotic or sophisticated—fondue, Swedish meatballs, Chicken à la King—were finding their way onto ordinary American tables.

Some of them made it into the Schaefer house.

Some became family favorites.

Some disappeared almost as quickly as they arrived.

And a few…

we probably should have kept to ourselves.

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The TV Dinner Never Stood a Chance

One of the most famous foods of the era barely made an appearance in our house.

The frozen TV dinner.

Swanson introduced its TV dinner in 1954, promising Americans an entire meal divided into little compartments on an aluminum tray.

It was convenient.

It required almost no cleanup.

And best of all, according to the advertising, you could eat it while watching your new television.

There were two problems with that idea at our house.

First, our refrigerator had one of those tiny freezer compartments that didn’t hold much.

And what precious frozen real estate we had was reserved for considerably more important things.

Ice cream.

Popsicles.

The second problem was Dad.

The television was turned off during dinner.

Dad wanted everybody at the table talking about school, friends, the neighborhood, and whatever had happened during the day.

For Dad, dinner was never just about eating; the ritual of having everyone together mattered more, something I remember in When the Dinner Table Held Families Together

Swanson may have invented dinner in front of the television.

They apparently forgot to consult my father.

TV dinners always seemed to me like they had been invented with bachelors in mind.

You know the type of man we imagined back then—the guy who couldn’t boil water, much less prepare a nutritious meal for himself.

For him, the TV dinner was perfect.

Put the aluminum tray in the oven.

Eat directly from it.

And when you were finished…

throw the whole mess in the trash.

No dishes.

No pots and pans.

No cleanup.

Families were different, at least in our house.

Families had Moms who cooked meals, and dinner meant everybody sitting together around the table.

Interestingly, the TV tray actually arrived before the TV dinner. Folding television trays were being mass-marketed by 1952, and before long they were commonly sold in sets of four with a little storage rack. As television became the center of the American living room, those trays became a familiar piece of household furniture.

Then came the frozen TV dinner, forever linking television and eating in the American imagination.

But not at our house.

Dad wouldn’t allow TV trays at dinnertime.

The television went off.

Everybody came to the table.

And we talked.

Dad had his own opinion about people who sat in front of the television with dinner balanced on a tray.

“Eating while watching TV is for old people.”

Which seemed perfectly reasonable to us at the time.

Of course, now that I’m one of those old people…

I’m beginning to think Dad may owe us an explanation.

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Then We Learned to Nuke Dinner

Eventually another appliance arrived that changed the American kitchen even more than the TV dinner.

The microwave oven.

Early microwave ovens had been around for years, but once affordable countertop models began showing up in ordinary American kitchens, they changed the meaning of leftovers forever.

Suddenly you didn’t have to put last night’s dinner into a pan, turn on the stove or oven, and wait for everything to heat up again.

You put it on a plate.

Pushed a few buttons.

And a couple of minutes later…

dinner was ready.

We didn’t even say we were going to microwave something.

We had a much better word for it.

We nuked it.

“What are we having for dinner?”

“I don’t know. Let’s nuke some leftovers.”

Nobody had to explain what that meant.

The microwave also created an entirely new category of kitchen experimentation.

Could you microwave this?

How long?

Should that foil be in there?

Apparently not.

And everybody eventually learned the lesson about putting something in for five minutes, taking the first bite…

and discovering the outside was approximately room temperature while the center had achieved the temperature of the sun.

Before long, frozen foods were being designed specifically for microwave cooking, leftovers became easier to save, and reheating yesterday’s dinner stopped feeling like cooking at all.

For Mom, an appliance like that would have been a tremendous convenience.

For Dad…

I’m not so sure.

This was a man who double-dipped his onion rings, blended cottage cheese for baked potatoes, added horseradish to onion dip, and believed recipes existed largely so he could improve them.

I suspect “push three buttons and wait for the beep” wouldn’t have impressed him much.

But America loved it.

The TV dinner had promised us dinner without much cooking.

The microwave finally gave us dinner without much waiting.

The Great American Casserole

If there was one food category perfectly suited to feeding a big family, it was the casserole.

Mom had her own version of tuna casserole.

She started with extra-wide egg noodles.

Then came cream of chicken soup, butter, and that Parmesan cheese that came out of a shaker.

But Mom understood something important about casseroles:

They needed a good top.

So she crushed up the potato chips from the bottom of the bag.

You know the ones.

The little broken pieces nobody wanted to eat because there wasn’t enough chip left to dip into anything.

Mom didn’t throw them away.

Those were casserole ingredients.

She scattered the crushed chips over the top, added cheddar cheese, and baked the whole thing until it was golden brown.

Suddenly the potato-chip crumbs nobody wanted had become one of the best parts of dinner.

Mom understood recycling before recycling was fashionable.

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Green Bean Casserole Wasn’t Just for Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving and Christmas had their own mandatory casserole.

Green beans.

Cream of mushroom soup.

French-fried onions from a can.

Green bean casserole.

For years it was simply part of the holiday table.

Turkey.

Mashed potatoes.

Gravy.

Stuffing.

And somewhere among all those dishes…

the green bean casserole.

Later, we started turning our noses up at it.

Not necessarily because it tasted bad.

We had simply figured out the secret.

It was too easy to make.

Apparently once we knew somebody could dump a few canned ingredients into a baking dish, cover them with French-fried onions and call it a holiday tradition…

some of the magic disappeared.

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Ketchup on Mac and Cheese

Here’s something I’ve wondered about for years.

Did anybody besides the Schaefer family put ketchup on macaroni and cheese?

We did.

And we thought it was perfectly normal.

A plate of hot macaroni and cheese…

and ketchup over the top.

I’m sure somewhere a chef would consider that an act of vandalism.

We considered it dinner.

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Tomato Soup and Grilled Cheese

Not everything needed a recipe.

One of our favorite meals was also one of the simplest.

Campbell’s tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches.

There was something about dunking that toasted sandwich into hot tomato soup that made the two foods inseparable.

You could serve tomato soup by itself.

You could serve grilled cheese by itself.

But together…

that was a meal.

No fancy ingredients.

No elaborate preparation.

And nobody at our table complained.

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Mom’s Chicken à la King

Mom also made Chicken à la King.

But she didn’t put ours over rice or noodles.

She baked Pepperidge Farm puff-pastry shells until they were golden and flaky.

Then she filled the hollow centers with creamy Chicken à la King.

To us…

that was how Chicken à la King was supposed to be served.

Years later I discovered people put it over toast, rice and noodles.

Fine.

They could do whatever they wanted.

Mom had already established the standard.

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Fondue Arrived…and Left

Like millions of Americans, I eventually got caught up in the fondue craze.

I bought a fondue set.

There was something wonderfully sophisticated about the whole idea.

A communal pot.

Long forks.

Pieces of food being dipped into melted cheese.

It felt vaguely European.

Modern.

Maybe even a little classy.

There was just one problem.

We didn’t use it very much.

Eventually the fondue set became one of those kitchen objects that seemed like a terrific idea when you bought it and considerably less essential six months later.

Fondue had arrived.

Fondue had conquered America.

And at our house…

fondue quietly went back into the cabinet.

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When Company Was Coming

You could always tell when Mom and Dad were having company.

The food changed.

This wasn’t ordinary dinner food.

This was what we called finger food.

One of their favorites was what we called little pizzas.

Small slices of rye bread topped with pizza sauce, ground beef and cheese.

Small enough to hold in one hand.

And apparently small enough that eating six of them didn’t count as eating six pizzas.

There were shrimp cocktails.

Celery stuffed with blue cheese.

Bacon-wrapped water chestnuts.

Deviled eggs.

And, of course…

Dad’s potato chip dip.

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Dad Had to Fix the French Onion Dip

America discovered that you could combine Lipton onion soup mix with sour cream and create French onion dip.

Dad apparently tasted it and decided:

Almost.

So he added horseradish.

Just enough to give it some bite.

That became Dad’s version.

Lipton onion soup mix.

Sour cream.

Horseradish.

Potato chips.

Simple.

But once we’d eaten Dad’s version, regular onion dip always seemed to be missing something.

This was typical of Dad.

Give him a perfectly acceptable recipe…

and sooner or later he’d start tinkering with it.

That habit followed Dad into almost everything he cooked, including the recipe that became a family legend in Dad’s French Toast Was Worth Going to Church For.

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Swedish Meatballs, Schaefer Style

We made Swedish meatballs too.

But naturally we couldn’t simply leave them alone.

Instead of using strips or chunks of beef in stroganoff…

we added Swedish meatballs.

Whether Sweden or Russia would have approved of this international culinary agreement was never discussed.

We liked it.

That was enough.

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Mom Could Put Almost Anything in Jell-O

Then there was Jell-O.

Mom made lots of it.

Bananas might go into it.

Miniature marshmallows might go into it.

And sometimes we’d chop the finished Jell-O into pieces and add a little milk, sugar and vanilla.

I’m not sure what you’d call that today.

We called it good.

Midcentury America had a remarkable relationship with gelatin.

Once we’d figured out how to make food jiggle…

we apparently wanted to see how many other ingredients we could make jiggle with it.

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Deviled Eggs Never Needed Improving

Some foods didn’t require experimentation.

Mom’s deviled eggs were one of them.

We loved them.

They appeared at family gatherings, holidays and other occasions where putting ordinary hard-boiled eggs on the table apparently wasn’t festive enough.

Mom turned them into deviled eggs…

and suddenly everyone wanted one.

Usually more than one.

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The Astronauts Could Keep Their Tang

We drank plenty of Kool-Aid.

Tang was another matter.

Tang had one of the greatest sales pitches ever presented to an American kid:

Astronauts drank it.

That should have settled the matter.

Astronauts went into space.

Astronauts rode rockets.

Astronauts walked on the moon.

Therefore, anything astronauts drank should have been fantastic.

We tried Tang.

We still didn’t like it.

Apparently there were limits to the persuasive power of the United States space program.

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Fruit Cocktail From a Can

We did like canned fruit cocktail.

Peaches.

Pears.

Pineapple.

Grapes.

And those few brightly colored cherries everybody seemed to notice.

It came out of a can swimming in syrup.

Nobody asked how much sugar was in it.

Nobody read the label.

It had the word fruit in the name.

That was good enough for us.

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Instant Mashed Potatoes Fooled Nobody

Convenience food had its limits.

We hated instant mashed potatoes.

You could put butter on them.

You could add gravy.

You could try to convince us they were just as good as the real thing.

They weren’t.

Some shortcuts worked.

That one didn’t.

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Dad Reinvented the Baked Potato

Dad had another food trick that I’ve rarely seen anyone else use.

Instead of sour cream on a baked potato…

he used cottage cheese.

But not straight from the container.

Dad bought large-curd cottage cheese, put it into a blender and blended it until completely smooth.

Then he’d spoon that creamy cottage cheese over a hot baked potato.

It looked a little like sour cream.

It served much the same purpose.

And we liked it.

Once again…

Dad had been handed a perfectly normal food and decided it needed modification.

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When Bacon Was Too Expensive

With a large family, there were times when the grocery budget determined what appeared on the table.

If bacon was too expensive…

we fried Spam.

Slice it.

Put it into the skillet.

Fry it until the edges became brown and crispy.

Was it bacon?

No.

Did anybody pretend it was bacon?

Probably not.

But when it was fried crisp and served hot…

we ate it.

We didn’t call it a budget substitution.

We didn’t call it processed meat.

We certainly didn’t call it midcentury cuisine.

It was breakfast.

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We Didn’t Know Any of This Would Become Nostalgia

Looking back, some of those foods seem wonderfully old-fashioned now.

Some disappeared.

Some survived.

Some became holiday traditions.

Some were fads that spent a few months in our kitchens before being pushed into the back of a cabinet.

And some—like tomato soup and grilled cheese—haven’t really changed at all.

Eating at home was the everyday experience; going out was something entirely different, which is why I still remember a simple trip for hamburgers as an occasion in When Fast Food Was an Event

We didn’t know Campbell’s soup would someday become shorthand for midcentury cooking.

We didn’t know people decades later would write articles about TV dinners, casseroles, fondue and French onion dip as foods that defined a generation.

Mom certainly wasn’t trying to create culinary history.

She was trying to answer a much more immediate question:

How do I feed seven people tonight?

During the school day, feeding us became somebody else’s problem, which brings back an entirely different collection of food memories in When School Lunch Cost a Quarter.

She opened the refrigerator.

She opened the pantry.

She looked at what we had.

And somehow…

dinner appeared.

Sometimes it was tuna casserole topped with the broken potato chips from the bottom of the bag.

Sometimes it was tomato soup and grilled cheese.

Sometimes it was macaroni and cheese…

with ketchup, whether the rest of America approved or not.

Dad tinkered with recipes.

Mom stretched ingredients.

We ate what they put in front of us.

And most nights…

we cleaned our plates.

Today, I can remember many of those foods.

But just like the other food memories in this Time Capsule…

the food isn’t really what I miss.

I miss Mom making it.

I miss Dad improving it.

I miss my brothers and sisters sitting around the table eating it.

Because somewhere along the way, all those ordinary meals became something none of us realized we were making at the time.

Memories.

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