Depression Era Recipe// Meat & Potato Patties// Great Depression Stories!

[Music] thank you [Music] [Music] hi guys and welcome back to Whippoorwill holler and welcome back to miss Laurie's kitchen today we're going to be making one of those old vintage recipes that pretty much dates back to back in the Depression era the the air back when things were just very very frugal when there wasn't a lot of meat going around and uh you just you had to make do us what you had that's for sure this is one of those depression uh air recipes and you know sometimes I kind of laugh at that because I didn't grow up during the Depression my grandmother did and we ate things that that were so good to me but I never even thought about it being something that she was so used to cooking or what she had ate back then during the Depression and we would just have it for our own suppers and I just always thought it was so good but um you know I do a lot of research on different recipes and I have so many cookbooks and some of them date back to the Depression era and I seen this recipe and this has been a long time ago and I thought well you know Grandma made that all the time but you know it was just something we just ate because number one it was good and because putting all these different ingredients with the hamburger meat really stretched the hamburger out and we didn't have hamburger meat even when I lived with Grandma we did not have we didn't eat a lot of beef so she had to make it stretch and I just think in my own heart in my own mind that that she was just used that's how she grew up so this is going to be one of them recipes it's easy it's pretty much what you've already got in your pantry and your refrigerator and it comes together really fast and it will feed quite a few people if you have a big family um you know hamburger meat anymore is so expensive but a lot of times you can buy it in bulk and get it cheaper by the pound or I think people go in and buy it in the big tube I think it's a little bit cheaper by the pound but you know used to hamburger meat was one of the cheapest things you could feed your family and you could make it stretch so far and it's just not that way anymore so when we're using hamburger meat we want to try to make it stretch and this is just another way of doing it and you just got some simple ingredients here but it just it tastes so good and will also make a gravy to go on top of it and gravy is one of those things that pretty much back then even Me growing up we had it every day if it wasn't for breakfast it was for it was for supper gravy was just something that you had because you had flour and you had milk most the time if you didn't have milk you made water gravy so it's just something that you had that would fill your belly up so let's get to cooking this this depression air recipe it is meat and potato patties is what it's called and you'll be really surprised how easy it is to put it together so let's get started the first thing I'm going to do is the recipe it calls for you to use grated potatoes and the recipe wants you to put raw grated potatoes in with your hamburger meat and I'm thinking I wonder how them potatoes get done because you know it don't take long for hamburger patties to get done so what I'm going to do is change it up just a little I'm gonna go ahead and saute my onions my bell peppers now back then they may not have had a bell pepper unless they had some out in their Garden they had a green bell pepper and what's funny about this recipe is it only calls for a three-fourths pound of hamburger instead of a whole pound and it calls for a 3 4 cup of shredded potatoes instead of a whole cup a fourth of an onion and like two tablespoons of green peppers and it doesn't have a lot of different spices and stuff in it no no seasonings really except salt and pepper and one egg so it's almost like they were trying to take you know as what they had if they had a small potato on it made three-fourths of a cup that's what they used if they had a bell pepper that they need to really stretch you know they only use two tablespoons instead of half of a bell pepper a whole bell pepper like we would do because we love it so much but anyways let's get started on this recipe and um first like I said I'm gonna go ahead and saute my onions my bell peppers and I'm also going to go ahead and saute my potatoes just a little bit then I'm going to cool them down and put them in with my hamburger mate so I got my iron skillet here and I'm just going to pour a little bit of vegetable oil because more likely they didn't use olive oil because well they didn't have it you know and they may have had a little bit of lard or maybe they had just a little bit of butter or something like that from the milk cow but we're going to be using just a little bit of vegetable oil and I'm gonna go ahead and put my my onions now I'm gonna go ahead and use a whole onion because I've got a whole onion that I need to use I've also got some different colored bell peppers but back then they probably just had mainly green bell peppers that they probably wouldn't picked out a garden their their victory garden and I'm also going to go ahead and put migrated potatoes my hydrate them a little bit too soon and I didn't put them any water so they're turned kind of pink on me but they're okay now what this potato is going to do is it will make your hamburger meat go a little bit farther plus it's going to be a binder because we're going to make patties out of it so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to saute this just for a little while just to get you know everything a little bit tender and then I'm going to take it out of the pan because this will be the pan that I make my patties in let let all this cool down then I'll mix it up with my hamburger meat in just a few seasonings and an egg and a we'll get them fried up and then we'll make our gravy go on top of it my potatoes and onions and bell peppers are cooking up pretty good and I just want to cook them till they're getting tender and I'll take them out of my out of my skillet I just think that I have I just think that you know they're going to be good and done I just I guess I just question the fact of how good the potatoes would be done putting them in there in your patties raw but same words no more than I do do about that stuff so I've never put raw potatoes inside of a raw hamburger patty so not sure how they'd cook it but I'm going to see how this works and maybe next time I might do it just the way it says to do it like I said they knew more about it and I did because they grew up in that area era and they know what they needed to do to put food on the table and make make things stretch so I know a lot of y'all that watch our Channel y'all were probably some of y'all were young young kids during the Depression and of course y'all like me and you've had family members that grew up back then and uh you hear so many stories and I'm going to be reading another story out of our our book from uh that was gifted to us that we read just a while back about the Great Depression I thought we'd get back in there and maybe read a few more stories out of that too but it's just it's just going back to the simplicity of our food and you know sometimes that's what I crave you know we love so many different kinds of food me and Danny are not just set on good old you know Country Foods smothered with gravy and all that stuff we kind of venture out I love Italian food and we love Mexican food or or what we might call Tex-Mex and I even like Mediterranean foods and and Chinese and some of the just different I don't know I love I've got some German cookbooks and the recipes in there I've I've done some they're so good and I need to start doing some of those but we just love all kinds of food I guess that's our our downfall we like we like too much but I just like the Simplicity of food just like coming in and making a big old pan of hamburger gravy on toast or sausage gravy on top y'all see Mr Brown in a video do that he makes the best sausage and gravy just coming in and eating a fried egg sandwich eating a leftover bowl of brown beans that you cooked the weekend before just a pan of fried potatoes with onions maybe some cornbread it's just that the simple stuff like that and the thing of it is that's what they had that's what they had today and we look back and we think well that's depression or you know recipes and stuff but I don't know that's that's kind of the way that I grew up eating too so and Danny did too it was just simple simple food Simplicity of of what you've got and uh you know we grow okra in the garden so frying up a big pan of fried okra with some some beans and you don't even have to have meat and you got a fresh tomato with that and you're eating an onion with it and I just don't know of anything any better and so when I make a meal like this it's just simple and it just kind of makes me feel good because you know I just took the simplest ingredients in making a good hearty meal out of it and I'm also going to be making just a couple side dishes that would go along back then um just the Vintage that error of what you would serve probably on the side and it's not going to be anything fancy that's for sure okay I'm going to take out my potatoes and onions and bell peppers and I'm just going to put them out here on a plate and I'm going to let them cool off I don't want to put them in with my raw hamburger meat while it's still hot now if y'all don't want to go through this step if y'all just want to throw it all together just do that and see how it turns out some of the potatoes stuck on the bottom but that's okay that's my favorite part is that crunchy part that gets stuck on the bottom foreign spread this out a little bit and let it cool down then we'll come back and we'll throw all our ingredients together make Our Patties this right here is probably what takes the longest is just getting your ingredients together okay my onions and potatoes and peppers have cooled off so all we're going to do is take our one pound I've got one pound here the recipe calls for three-fourths of a pound I've got one pound of hamburger meat and this is pretty lean hamburger meat put how much pepper you think you might like and some salt now this recipe does not call for a bunch of different seasonings now you know Miss Lori and I would put garlic in here maybe a little onion powder but I want to stick with the recipe as much as possible because back then they may not have had or been able to get garlic if they didn't plant it in their Garden or onion powder but we do have onions in it so it's just simple like I said it's just simple ingredients with it being a meat and potato Patty I might would even put besides garlic a little time in it something like that so now we're just going to add all of our potatoes onions and bell peppers that I saw tight if you choose not to saute it that's fine and if you do that and you make this let me know and then you need one egg and I'm just going to stir this and combine it now if you don't have a large egg and My Egg was not real large it's fresh but my little hens don't weigh really big eggs they lay really good ones but they're not the biggest I might would put two eggs in here if I don't feel like one's enough so you just want to get this startup good get it good and combined I might put just a little bit more salt in it a little bit more pepper salt and pepper is probably something that wasn't too hard to get a hold of back then pepper might have been make sure this is mixed up good so you could put another potato shredded potato in here I think it'd work just fine to make that hamburger meat go even further I'll tell you what I don't know what I'm gonna do about my allergies I'm afraid they're going to be bad this year now what I want to do is I want to fill it go ahead and start out with my hands and I think it's going to come together pretty good the way it feels so I'm going to turn around here and I'm going to turn my my cast iron skillet back on and I've I covered the bottom of my Skillet with oil because this is really lean meat and I'm going to need um some wool in there to make my gravy anyways once my meat Cooks so let's see how many patties we get out of this okay I got my cast iron heating up and like I said I've got uh I just covered the bottom of my Skillet with some with some oil I use peanut oil um use whatever oil that you prefer but if you've got like 80 20 hamburger meat you may not need to put as much as I did this is from stair that we had processed so it doesn't it's not real fatty did I say bay for deer I don't really know what I said well it was not dearest beef if I said deer I'm sorry I'm gonna put these in here and I'm I'm made um that's five I ended up making nine patties I probably could have made them smaller and got ten what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna cook them then I'll come back and cook my other four but they look good they smell good I can see the potato and onion and everything in there so we'll let these cook get good and brown on each side cook in the middle and I'll get all those done then we'll come back and we'll make our gravy that goes with our meat and potato patties okay we've got all of our hamburger patties cooked I've got just enough oil left here in my pan that I'm gonna make some gravy now the gravy that they would make would have been milk gravy or water gravy um but you could change this up and you could put your little bit of beef broth and make you a brown gravy but they would have done it differently they would have used like I said made of milk gravy or Watergate so I know there was a good good probably three tablespoons of oil and that was a little bit too much you could take a little bit of it out but I want quite a bit of gravy [Applause] so that was probably about a fourth of a cup of flour and you can see that because I left all the the good bits on the bottom of the pan I didn't take anything out it's going to be a darker milk gravy and I want this to cook just a little bit because I don't want it to be I want the flour to cook just a little bit I'm going to turn my heat down just a little bit so at this point this is up to you whether if you want milk gravy water gravy or if you want to make a beef broth I mean a beef a brown gravy I'm sorry you can see how dark that is I'm gonna go ahead start pouring some milk in thank you and I'm gonna let this cook and thicken up just a little bit and put a little bit of salt and pepper in it you can season it up to your taste or do it how they would have done it just all simple ingredients when this gets to the right consistency I'll turn it down really low then I'm going to put my my meat patties back in here in the gravy and then I'm gonna put a lid on it and I just might let it simmer on low probably about five minutes not very long but it won't take long for your your gravy to thicken up just keep us stirring it and if y'all wonder about my my whisk here all y'all that's been with me not miss me Mr Brown love these whiffs I got several of them they're in my Amazon store my gravy's starting to thicken up I'm gonna go ahead and put my patties back down in this gravy so this is pretty much done it just makes to simmer just a little bit with your patties in there this would be delicious with some rice or with mashed potatoes on a piece of light bread and what I'm gonna do is get me bone or you can just kind of turn them over just like this in your pan that way yeah it's all covered with gravy now how can this not be good simple ingredients simple recipe fill your belly up won't that look good Tim will put a lid on this like I said I'm just going to let it simmer for just about five minutes maybe so a few videos ago we were reading some stories from Priceless Memories of the Great Depression we had everything but money this book right here very interesting and today we've got a little bit different take on what the depression meant to some people it says here I like the depression no more priority for me I've had more fun since the Depression started than I ever had in my life I had forgotten how to live and what it meant to have real friends and what it was like to eat common everyday food fact is I was getting a little too high hat it's great to drop into a store and feel that you can spend an hour or two or three or even half a day just visiting and not feel that you're a wasting valuable time I like the depression I'm getting acquaintance with my neighbors and following the the Bible to love them some of them have been living next door to me for three years now we butcher Hogs together I like the depression I haven't been out to a party in 18 months my wife has dropped all her clubs and I believe we are falling in love all over again I'm pretty well satisfied I'm I'm feeling better since the depression I get more exercise because I walk to town and a lot of folks who used to drive Cadillacs are walking with me I like the depression three years ago I never had time to go to church I played Checkers or baseball all day Sunday besides there wasn't a preacher in Texas that could tell me anything now I'm getting to church regularly and never miss a Sunday then here's another account memories bring more laughter than tears some things in life must be experienced for one to truly grasp their meaning like the Great Depression although I was very young at the time my memories of those years bring more laughter than tears I remember it was rare to be able to afford a meal in a restaurant in those days but when you did go you always look for a seat by the window the proprietor always gave larger portions to the diners with window seats so a passerby would think it was a good place to eat Our Father would sometimes take us to the Bronx Zoo but never on Mondays that was the only day the zoo charged a mission which was a nickel charging a mission kept attendance low so the zoo employees could do the cleaning an Italian family lived downstairs from us and on Fridays the family three boys would go across the street to the pizza shop where they could buy a very large pizza for 25 cents think about how remarkable that was feeding three boys for a quarter for adults most socializing consists of people visiting one another whenever a woman became engaged for instance a steady stream of women would visit her house my mother always baked a cake for such occasion putting a ring from the dime store inside it the girl who got the ring was supposed to be the next one to get married and finally I'll never forget a toast my uncle used to make while holding up a glass of my mother's home brew may you all live to be 150 years old and May the last voice you hear be mine John Ford Wellesley Hills Massachusetts well I hope you enjoyed Story Time with Paul Brown maybe before too long we'll read another one until then keep on keeping on [Music]

Channel: Whippoorwill Holler

Views: 79,081

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Id: W4tXU3KaSYw

Length: 29min 10sec (1750 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 03 2023