The Ultimate Recession Food

Break out the Pyrex—the casserole, America's classic hard-times dish, is hot again.

I was barely out of the bassinet when the country last experienced a recession. Though the economy recovered, my parents’ bank accounts never really did.

I grew up in a lower-middle-class suburb of Kansas City, Missouri, and not a week went by when we didn’t have at least one of three casseroles on the table (and in the refrigerator for days after): broccoli cheese (Velveeta, of course), green bean, or my favorite, classic tuna noodle made with canned tuna, canned peas, and canned cream of mushroom soup.

A casserole is really no more than the sum of a few simple ingredients—canned or fresh—baked together in one dish.

While this didn’t necessarily put me on the path to culinary greatness, I made it through college without opening a single pack of ramen. I could easily survive on $20 a week, even if I was hesitant so share my Midwestern meal secrets with my East Coast, liberal arts peers. But once I finally did, and a food snob friend devoured my macaroni and corn casserole with a plastic spoon, I organized my First Annual Casserole Party. A few parties, a New York Times write-up, a contemporary casserole cookbook, and an economic collapse later, it seems everyone wants to know how we made it in Midwest.

The few family recipes that didn’t come from the back of a soup can were passed down from my grandmother who survived the Great Depression. During the 1930s and up until the end of World War II, many families subsisted on bread and very little meat (sometimes rationed). One-dish meals that could be made on the cheap were the best option for feeding the entire family, plus some random cousin nobody really knew who had somehow ended up sleeping on the floor. Mixing bread crumbs or potatoes with beef and a canned vegetable was the best way to make a little bit of food last a whole lot longer. More people? More potatoes. This was the birth of the casserole as we know it today—a dish that has a bad rap in America’s culinary history but is making a comeback now that the economy has tanked.

Luckily, no longer does a cheap casserole mean the bland hot dishes of Grandma’s generation or the cream-of-mushroom-soup concoctions Mom made. While some of us might still have long-lost family members or recently unemployed college buddies crashing on our floors, we don’t have to eat exactly like our grandparents did. Not only do we have accessible fresh produce—comparable in price to canned or frozen versions—we have more sophisticated palates.

Most of my friends are amazed at the one-dish dinners I can throw together for less than $20—potato and cauliflower gratin, baked risotto with Portobello mushrooms, and a chicken casserole with cheddar cheese and sun-dried tomatoes. Every once in a while, though, I have a hard time convincing people of the contemporary casserole’s merits.

Around this time three years ago, my boyfriend was not-so-subtly discouraging me from making my macaroni and corn casserole for his parents' Upper East Side Thanksgiving dinner. "It's not really the kind of thing they'll go for," he said.

I wasn't all that surprised. Because of the flavorless, colorless canned concoctions that had graced Midwestern dinner tables for the past few decades, in his mind the casserole had become synonymous with Milwaukee's Best and contemporary country music. And in my experience, the comparison was not completely unwarranted.

But what my boyfriend didn’t quite realize—and what I had only gathered a few years earlier when I moved to New York and began cooking for myself—was that casseroles can just as easily be made with fresh green beans and fancy cheese from the farmers’ market. A casserole is really no more than the sum of a few simple ingredients—canned or fresh—baked together in one dish.

"I use good cheese," I urged. "And organic corn." Much to his chagrin, my vintage Pyrex full of elbow macaroni, sweet corn, caramelized onions, sharp cheddar, mozzarella, and gruyere—with a perfectly browned parmesan and butter crust—sat alongside the free-range turkey and $40 bottle of wine on his family’s Thanksgiving spread.

Three years later, that same macaroni and corn casserole was on the menu for the Thanksgiving dinner I hosted—but so much has changed. As food prices increase and wages and hours are cut, families on the Upper East Side and in Missouri suburbs alike are looking for ways to make grocery budgets last longer. In this economy, it wouldn’t hurt to take a cue from those who have survived recessions and depressions before us.

You can make lean ground sirloin last by baking it with pasta, garlic, mushrooms, smoked gouda, sharp cheddar, and fresh cherry tomatoes. Stretch your spicy chorizo for week when you bake it with a can of crushed tomatoes, pasta, Parmesan, and basil. Experiment with new flavor combinations. Or classic ones. And then pair it with a bottle of red in the $10 range.

Earlier this week as I stared at my refrigerator full of vegetables from the Greenmarket, I couldn’t ignore my hankering for old-school tuna noodle casserole, like Mom used to make. Though I substituted frozen, organic sweet peas for canned, and added chopped white onion, the ingredients cost about $10 and I have enough to last me the rest of the week—well, most of the week; I went back for seconds.

Almost Classic Tuna Noodle Casserole | Sweet Potato Not Pie | Seduction (Mac & Corn 2.0)

Emily Farris is the author of Casserole Crazy: Hot Stuff for Your Oven and founder of New York’s Annual Casserole Party. When not slaving over casseroles in her tiny Brooklyn kitchen, she edits Nerve's culture blog, Scanner.