Laura The Gastronaut > Old Recipes > 1940's Liberal Friday Meal Plan

1940's Liberal Friday Meal Plan

January 11, 2022 | Laura Ehlers

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The Lily Wallace New American Cook Book

You can buy Lily Wallaces's New American Cook Book which contains these recipes here.

Check out the previous 1940 recipes and meal plans I've made!

The views expressed on this blog are my own.

Watch me make these meal plans on my Tiktok!

- Friday Breakfast Video
- Friday Lunch Video
- Friday Dinner Video

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LILY WALLACE NEW AMERICAN COOK BOOK

If this is your first time here, welcome! I'm currently working my way through all of the meal plans listed in the back of the 1946 Lily Wallace New American Cook Book. This cook book is filled with thousands of old recipes- some of them great, some of them not so great. Things like aspics and sea moss pudding are filtered throughout. The wild recipes are some of my favorite ones to cook. You just never know what you're going to end up with!

In order to take a look back into history, I decided to stick with cooking all of the meal plans. Originally I was going to make them all in a week as it is suggested, but I couldn't do it. For one, my grocery list was a mile long, and it was just so time consuming I wouldn't have time for anything else except, well, surviving. A HUGE kudos to any housewife, past or present, that can pull something like this off.

There's four weekly meal plans in the book: Liberal Diet, Moderate-Cost Adequate Diet, Minimum-Cost Adequate Diet, and Restricted Diet for Emergency Use. The Liberal Diet was listed first so that's what I went with. This plan was made for those with $3,000 or over annual income, and "provides abundantly the nutrients needed by young and old for the enjoyment of buoyant health." For reference, $3,000 in 1946 is about $43,000 in today's world.

Each day has breakfast, lunch, and dinner listed. For the liberal diet, I have already completed the Monday meal plan, the Tuesday meal plan, Wednesday's meals, and Thursday's meals. So let's move on to Friday!

1940's FRIDAY BREAKFAST

1940s Breakfast with orange and pineapple juice, french toate, and coffee

I was super excited to see French toast on the menu! The recipe is a pretty traditional recipe. However, I was missing the cinnamon. The meal plan also suggests slathering on jelly rather than syrup. While the jelly on the French toast was good syrup just ties it all together, and it was definitely missed. For the drink, we had a combination of orange juice and pineapple juice. And of course, there was coffee. If children were to be present at the table, they would have been served hot cereal.

1940's FRIDAY LUNCH

1940s Lunch with spinach soup, bacon sandwiches, cookies, and hot tea

The soup for lunch was cream of spinach soup. It only consisted of fresh spinach, a bit of salt, and a basic thin white sauce. It was topped with homemade croutons made from pieces of bread that I fried. Nothing like heating up some oil for a weekday lunch to fry just a bit of food! This spinach soup was okay, but it really lacked seasoning. The croutons, however, were amazing. But I mean it is fried bread- did anybody expect otherwise? Next, we had bacon sandwiches which is a bunch of bacon between two pieces of buttered bread. As expected, these were great. If you're ever unsure of what to eat, there's always the 3 Bs- butter, bread, and bacon. You can't go wrong. To end the lunch, we had homemade ice-box cookies and some hot tea- both of which were very tasty. The children would have received milk with this meal as well.

1940's FRIDAY DINNER

1940s Dinner with vegetable soup, scalloped salmon, green beans, muffins, and fruit geleatin

This was one of those meals that wore me out. Let's start with the soup. The beans, peas, rice, and barley had to be soaked overnight to soften. They were then combined with celery, potatoes, onions, turnip, tomatoes, and salt/pepper. This was all simmered for a couple hours, and a ham bone was thrown in during the last 30 minutes. This soup was extremely and filling. Even in the description they say that it is a meal itself so I'm not quite sure why they had me make so much to go with it. As for taste, it was good, but not amazing- easily forgettable. Next, we had scalloped salmon which consisted of cooked salmon, a thick white sauce, green pepper, and paprika. It was all topped with bread crumbs and baked. This stuff was pretty good. In fact, if you add more seasonings and maybe some cheese on top, you'd have a pretty modern casserole. Green beans were also served. They were simply boiled, buttered, and salted. Lastly, there was whole-wheat muffins. These were so tasty. I would consider them more of a roll rather than muffin. They are made with yeast so they were extra fluffy and delicious.

For dessert, we had fruit gelatin. This was incredibly easy to make. The only ingredients were unflavored gelatin, water, sugar, and mixed fruit. Throw it into a fridge for a couple of hours, and you got yourself some fruit Jello! This tasted exactly how you would expect. It was also very forgettable.

These meals left me worn out, but thankfully nothing was too bad to eat! My favorite recipes from this meal plan were the French toast and bacon sandwiches. My least favorite recipe was the cream of spinach soup- it was just lacking too much for me!

Stay tuned for 1940s Liberal Saturday Meal Plan coming soon!

Make sure to follow me on TikTok where I make all of these recipes plus more!