30 Soul Food Dinners Under $5 That Fed the Whole Family in the 1970s

Friday was payday and by dark that money had already turned into supper for six. A five dollar bill went into a paper sack at the corner store and came back out as rice, a bag of dried beans, a piece of smoked meat, and a bag of cornmeal. That was a normal week. The same plates that came out of those pots now sit on restaurant menus under names nobody in that kitchen would recognize. At prices nobody in that kitchen would pay. Number 23 fed a house full of children on a meat most people now would not put on a plate. Over at number 17 sits the supper every child in the family voted for. At number four is two skillets, no meat at all, and a table that still got quiet. None of this disappeared on its own. The food companies sold convenience, the grocery chains reorganized the meat case, and the cheap cuts that carried black households through the 70s got renamed and marked up. So hit subscribe and count these down with us because here are 30 soul food dinners under five dollars that fed the whole family in the 1970s. Number 30 neck bones over rice. The vertebrae of the hog sold in a butcher paper bundle for pocket change because there was more bone in the package than meat. They went into a heavy pot with an onion, a shake of black pepper, and enough water to cover, and they stayed there until the meat let go of the bone on its own and the liquid turned dark and thick. Poured over a pot of long grain rice that bundle fed everybody at the table and left enough for a plate in the refrigerator. Today the same package sits in a case labeled slow cook cuts and it cost several times what it did then. The bone did not change, the price tag did. Number 29 chicken and dumplings. One hen stewed until the meat could be pulled apart with the fork and the broth left behind became the whole meal. Flour, a little fat, and a splash of that broth got worked into a stiff dough, rolled out on a floured table, and cut into strips with a butter knife. Those strips went into the boiling pot and swelled until the whole thing turned into something between a soup and a supper. It stretched one small bird across a family. It cost almost nothing after the chicken was bought and it went down easy for anybody at the table with a bad tooth or no appetite. The dumplings were the tail. Rolled thin, they came out delicate. Cut thick, they came out heavy enough to hold a working man until morning and every cook chose on purpose. Number 28 smothered chicken with rice. The words smothered did the heavy lifting. Cut up chicken got dredged in seasoned flour, browned hard in a black skillet, then set aside while onions cooked down in the same pan. The flour left in the skillet became the gravy, loosened with water and stirred until it turned the color of a paper bag. The chicken went back in, the lid went on, and the low fire did the rest. Nobody counted pieces. The gravy was the point and the rice underneath was what turned three quarters of a chicken into a meal for a full house. Number 27 salmon croquettes with grits. A can of pink salmon cost less than a piece of fresh fish and kept in the cabinet for months. It got mashed with the bones and all, mixed with a beaten egg, chopped onion, and enough cornmeal or cracker crumbs to hold a patty together, then fried in a shallow pan until the edges went crisp. Served over grits with a spoon of the pan drippings, one can made six patties. It was supper on a Thursday when the money was thin and breakfast on Saturday when there were leftovers. Every household had a slightly different ratio and every household believed theirs was correct. The bones in the can were the reason it was worth eating. They mashed down into nothing and carried more calcium than anything else the household could afford that week. Number 26 liver and onions with brown gravy. Beef liver was one of the cheapest things behind the glass because most shoppers walked past it. Sliced thin, dusted in seasoned flour, and laid in hot grease, it cooked in minutes. The onions went in after, cooked down until they were soft and sweet, and the pan was finished with water and a stir until a gravy formed. Children argued about it. Adults ate it without discussion because a doctor somewhere had told them it was good for the blood. It was iron. Rich. It was fast and a small package of it covered every plate on the table. Cooked one minute too long it turned to leather and that is the whole reason a generation of children swore they hated it. Cooked right it was tender and it was gone in ten minutes. Number 25 pinto beans and cornbread. A bag of dried pintos cost less than a pound of any meat in the store and swelled to several times its size in the pot. They soaked overnight then simmered all day with a piece of salt pork and half an onion until the liquid turned into its own gravy. A skillet of cornbread came out of the oven at the same time and the cornbread went into the bowl not beside it. That was the whole supper. It was filling. It cost about the same as a loaf of bread and it stayed hot on the back of the stove for whoever came home late. The pot got better on the second day. That was not a saying. The starch kept breaking down overnight and the liquid tightened and the leftovers were the meal everybody actually wanted. Number 24 hoppin' john. Black-eyed peas simmered with a piece of smoked meat and served over rice with the pot liquor spooned across the top. It was the new year dish that people knew from the calendar but in a 70s household it showed up on ordinary weeknights because dried peas were among the cheapest protein in the aisle and rice made them go twice as far. A pot of it cost less than a movie ticket and lasted two days. The luck story got told to the children. The arithmetic got done by whoever was holding the grocery money. Number 23 fried bologna and fried potatoes. A thick cut ring of bologna from the deli counter sliced at home scored around the edge so it would not curl and laid in a dry skillet until both sides blistered and browned. Potatoes went in the same pan afterward sliced thin and cooked in what the bologna left behind. Bread on the side hot sauce on the table. It fed a house full of children in under half an hour for a couple of dollars and it is a supper that grown adults still cook at midnight when nothing else sounds right. Cheap meat cooked hot does not need an apology. The grease left in the pan afterward went into the can on the stove. Nothing about that supper got thrown away including the part that was technically waste. Number 22 smothered pork chops. The thin cut chops the ones that sold for a fraction of the price of a rib chop because they cook tough if you rush them. Nobody rushed them. Floured, brown, then buried under sliced onions and a little water with the lid on they went soft over low fire while the rice cooked. The gravy that came out of that pan was worth more than the meat. One package of six thin chops covered a family of eight because the gravy went on everybody's rice whether they got a whole chop or half of one. Anybody with a bad hand at the table could cut those chops with the side of a fork which is a detail the recipe never mentioned and the household never forgot. Number 21 fried catfish and hush puppies. Pond raised catfish was cheap and plentiful across the south and a Friday fish fry cost less than feeding the same crowd any other way. The fillets went into seasoned cornmeal and then into deep grease until the crust set hard and the fish inside stayed white. The leftover batter got dropped into that same hot grease by the spoonful and those became the hush puppies. Nothing was wasted not the meal not the grease which was strained and kept in a can on the back of the stove for the next round of cooking. Number 20 chicken necks and gravy. The necks were the part the packing plant could barely sell sold by the bag for almost nothing. They were mostly bone and eating them took patience and fingers. Simmered slow with onion and pepper until the little bits of meat pulled free they made a gravy with real body to it because of everything the bones released. Spooned over rice a bag of necks fed a table that seated six with change left from a single dollar bill. Ask anybody who grew up on them and they will tell you the necks had more flavor than the breast ever did. There was a technique to eating them and children learned it by watching holding the bone with two fingers and working around it without saying much. Something worth stopping on before the list goes any further. Every dinner counted so far shares one quiet fact the cheapest part of the animal was doing the work. Necks backs thin chops salt pork the cuts that the packing houses treated as leftovers. That was not an accident of taste those were the parts made available to black households in the south and in the cities after the great migration and cooks turned them into food worth arguing about. What happened next is the part that stings. Once those same cuts got discovered by restaurants and food writers the price climbed and the households that carried the tradition for a hundred years became the ones who could no longer afford it. Every remaining item on this list carries that shadow. Keep it in mind because the numbers only get more expensive from here. Number 19. Oxtails and gravy over rice. This is the dish that proves the whole point of the list so it is worth slowing down for. The tail of the cow is the toughest boniest hardest working part of the animal and for most of the century American butchers could not give it away. In the 1970s it sat in the case at a price that made it a weeknight option not a special occasion. The pieces got browned hard first then covered with water onion garlic and pepper and left to work for hours on the lowest fire the stove would hold. What happens in that pot is chemistry. The connective tissue that makes the cut tough breaks down into gelatin and that gelatin turns the cooking liquid into a gravy so thick it coats the back of a spoon without a bit of flour added. The meat comes off the bone in dark ribbons. Everything gets served over rice because the rice is what carries the gravy to the far end of the table. Then the food world found it. Oxtails moved from the cheapest tray in the case to one of the most expensive things in the meat department and the families who kept the tradition alive for generations are now the ones who cannot justify buying it. A cut that was thrown in for free with a real order of beef now gets sold by the pound at a price that would have bought a week of groceries in 1975. Nothing about the animal changed. The only thing that changed is who was allowed to afford it. Number 18 Stew Gizzards over Rice Gizzards came in a tub priced below every other part of the bird because they required work and most shoppers were not interested. They got clean then simmered a long time in seasoned water until the muscle gave up and turned tender and then they were finished in a dark gravy with onion and plenty of black pepper. Over rice they went further than any package of chicken breast ever did. There were households where the children were told they were eating something else entirely and there were households where the children knew exactly what it was and asked for seconds. Number 17 Baked Spaghetti not the version in the restaurant window. A pound of ground beef stretched with onion bell pepper and a can of tomatoes mixed straight into cooked spaghetti poured into a deep pan covered with whatever cheese was in the refrigerator and baked until the top brown and the edges went crisp. It fed 12 people out of one pan and cost about what one plate of it costs today. It went to the family reunion, it went to the neighbor with a new baby and it came back to the house in the same dish washed with something else inside it. There was always a corner piece somebody claimed before the pan hit the table. Every family had a person who ate only the crisp edge and everybody else let them have it. Number 16 Smothered Turkey Wings turkey was priced for the holidays but the wings sold cheap all year because nobody wanted to build a dinner around them. They got seasoned heavy browned in the oven then covered with onions water and a lid and cooked until the meat pulled clean off the joint. The pan liquid turned into a gravy dark enough to color the whole plate. Three wings covered a family a whole turkey did not have to be bought and the holiday flavor showed up on a Tuesday in March which is exactly what the cook intended. Number 15 Hamburger steak with onion gravy ground beef and egg and a handful of crushed crackers or day-old bread worked together and shaped into patties thick enough to hold up in the pan. They browned in a skillet then finished under a blanket of sliced onions and a gravy built from the drippings. Over rice or mashed potatoes one pound of the cheapest ground beef in the case became eight servings. The cracker crumbs were not a shortcut they were the reason the meat went that far and they kept the patties from drying out on the fire. Everybody had an opinion about the onions some cooks wanted them nearly dissolved into the gravy others wanted rings you could still see on the plate. Number 14 Cabbage cook down with smoked meat a head of cabbage was among the cheapest things in the produce section then and it still is now. Cut into wedges and dropped into a pot with a piece of smoked turkey or a scrap of salt pork a splash of water and a spoon of sugar it collapsed into something silky and savory that tasted far richer than its cost. Served with cornbread that pot was dinner it also softened enough to be eaten with a fork alone which mattered in a house where the oldest person at the table had trouble with anything tougher. There is a modern footnote here the same head of cabbage still costs about as little as anything in the produce section which makes this one of the few dinners on this list that has not been taken away by the price tag. Number 13 Pickled pig feet with bread and hot sauce the jar sat on the counter at the corner store next to the register and a foot cost less than a candy bar. At home they were simmered soft or eaten straight from the vinegar with white bread to catch the drip and hot sauce shaking over the top. It divided households half the table waited on them all week the other half left the kitchen when the jar opened. What nobody disputed is that a package of them turned into a full supper for the price of a bus fare. Number 12 A chitterlings supper this one takes a paragraph because no other dish on this list asked more of the person cooking it. Hog intestines came in a bucket sold at a price that reflected exactly how much labor was still ahead. The cleaning was the job every length had to be turned scraped and rinsed then rinsed again then rinsed a third and fourth time until the water ran clear and that alone took most of a day standing at a sink. The smell went into the curtains and stayed there then came the cooking hours of it with onion vinegar and red pepper until the texture turned tender and the sharpness cooked down into something rich. They were served with vinegar on the side hot sauce on the table and a piece of cornbread that nobody skipped. In the 70s they were still cheap and a household could put a full holiday spread in front of 12 people around a bucket that cost a few dollars. That is the part the price tag never showed. The money was low because the work was enormous and the work was done by women who had already put in a full week somewhere else. Today the same bucket costs many times what it did and the number of people willing to do the cleaning drops with every passing year. When that skill goes it does not go into a cookbook it goes into the ground with the last person who knew how long to keep rinsing. Number 11 salt pork gravy over rice. A slab of streak of lean sliced thin and fried until the fat rendered and the strips curled and crisped. The grease left in the pan got a spoon of flour stirred into it then water then a long stir until it thickened into a pale brown gravy. That gravy went over rice and the crisp pieces went on top. There was no other meat in the meal that did not need to be. A piece of salt pork cost a fraction of anything else in the case and seasoned three separate pots before it was finished. There is a reason it tasted like more than it was. The fat carried every bit of flavor the pork had and the flour caught it and spread it across the whole plate. Here is the piece of this history that gets left out of every nostalgic television special. These suppers were not slow because anybody had time. They were slow because the cheap cut required it. A woman came home from a full day of work and put a pot on the stove that needed three more hours and she gave it those three hours because the alternative was more money than the household had. That is what the low price actually bought. Convenience food arrived in the 70s and sold itself on exactly that gap. Boxer dinners, canned meals, and the drive-through window all promised to hand those hours back and plenty of families took the trade because they were exhausted. What went with those hours was the technique and technique that is not practiced does not survive the generation that stopped using it. Number 10. Tuna and noodle casserole. Two cans of tuna, a bag of egg noodles, a can of soup, and whatever was left of a block of cheese baked in a dish with crushed crackers across the top. It was not old country cooking and nobody pretended it was. It was a 70s supper built out of what was on sale that week and it fed a house for about the price of a gallon of milk. It also came out of the oven hot in half an hour which mattered on a night when the shift ran late and everybody was already hungry. It also traveled. A covered dish of it went to a sick neighbor or awake and it held up in a car and reheated without falling apart which is more than most suppers could do. Number nine. Fried whiten with grits. Whiten was the cheapest fish on the ice sold in flat frozen boxes and every Friday it came out of those boxes into a bowl of seasoned cornmeal. Fried hot and fast until the tail went crisp it landed on a plate beside a pile of grits with butter melting into the middle. Two boxes fed everybody in the house. Around the corner the fish sandwich sold out of a storefront window carried a neighborhood on Friday nights and cost less than a dollar. Whiten never got a fancy name because it never needed one. Number eight. Stretched meatloaf. One pound of ground beef and a great deal of ingenuity. Oatmeal or crumbled bread went in as the extender along with onion, bell pepper, an egg, and a can of tomato sauce. Half mixed in and half spread across the top before it went in the oven. Sliced thick it made supper the first night, sandwiches for the lunch pail the second day, and a piece crumbled into a pot of something on the third. That was the design. Nobody planned a meal in the 70s without also planning what it would become tomorrow. The tomato sauce on top was doing a job. It kept the surface from drying while the middle cooked through and it gave the whole loaf a sweet crust that children fought over. Number seven. Big lima beans with a smoked turkey wing. Dried limas were sold in bags and cost almost nothing and one bag turned into a pot large enough to feed a family twice. They simmered for hours with a smoked wing and onion and black pepper until the beans broke down and made their own thick liquor. Ladled over rice with cornbread on the side it was a complete plate with barely any meat in it. This is the kind of cooking that gets called plant forward now and gets written up as a discovery. In that kitchen it was called Tuesday. Number six. Stewed tomatoes and rice with smoked sausage. Home canned tomatoes from a jar in a pantry or a can from the store when the garden was done. Cooked down with onion, a little sugar to take the sharp edge off and a few coins of sausage sliced in. The rice went in at the end and drank up everything in the pot. It came together in one pan on one eye of the stove in the time it took the children to set the table. In August it used the tomatoes that were about to turn. In February it used the jars that August had put up. It also came together in one pan with nothing to soak and nothing to scrub afterward which mattered on a night when the person cooking had already been on her feet since morning. Number five. Chicken backs and rice. The back is what is left after every sellable piece has been cut away and it went out the door in bags for the smallest price in the store. Boiled with onion and pepper until the scraps of meat came loose then thickened into gravy and poured over rice. It turned the least valuable part of the bird into a hot dinner. There was no elegance in it. There was strategy. The cook who bought backs on Friday knew exactly how many people would sit down on Saturday and exactly how much money was left until the next check. Number four. Fried corn and skillet potatoes. Two pans on the stove and not one piece of meat between them and the table still got quiet. Fresh corn cut off the cob scraped the second time to get the milk out of it then cooked in a skillet with a little grease and a pinch of sugar until it turned creamy without any cream. Alongside it potatoes sliced thin and fried with onion until the edges caught. Cornbread finished the plate. The entire supper cost less than a dollar in the summer and children who were handed it never once thought of it as a meal that was missing something. Sweet corn in season cost nearly nothing at a roadside table and the potatoes were already in the bin which is how a full plate got made out of two things that were already in the house. Number three. Collard greens with pot liquor and cornbread. The greens got washed three and four times because sand hides in the ribs and everybody knew somebody who had served a gritty pot once and never lived it down. They cooked slow with a piece of smoked meat until the leaves went dark and tender. The liquid at the bottom of that pot was not waste. It was the most nourishing thing in the kitchen and it got sopped up with cornbread down to the last spoonful. A bunch of greens cost less than a candy bar. What came out of the pot kept a household standing through a winter. Number two. Rice and gravy. Not aside the meal. A pot of rice and a gravy built from whatever fat and brown bits were in the skillet from the last thing that was cooked in it. Loosened with water and stirred until it was smooth. On the nights between paychecks that was what went on the plate and it went on hot. Anybody who grew up on it knows the taste and knows that a good gravy was never about the meat that was missing. It was about a cook who understood exactly what a hot skillet and a spoon of flour could still be turned into. Number one. The stretch itself. There is no single dish here because the thing that actually fed those families was not on any one plate. It was a way of thinking that treated five dollars as a plan instead of a limit. Buy the cut nobody else wanted. Cook it long enough to change what it is. Put rice or cornbread underneath so it reaches every seat. Save the grease. Save the liquor. Save the bone and use them to start tomorrow. Nobody wrote that down and nobody called it a system. It was simply how supper happened. Week after week in houses where the check was small and nobody at the table ever went to bed hungry. That is the recipe that actually mattered and it is the only one on this list that never needed a stove. Nobody in those kitchens ever called this budget cooking. It was just cooking and the budget was simply the shape of the world it happened in. Number 23. A stewed hen with rolled dumplings. One hen stewed until the meat fell off was made to feed six people because of what went in after. Flour, a little of the fat skimmed off the top and water rolled thin on a flour table and cut into strips with a knife. Those strips went into the boiling broth and swelled until the pot went from soup to something you ate with a fork. That is the arithmetic of the whole decade. A little meat, a lot of flour and a cook who knew how to make the second one carry the first. Rolled dumplings or drop dumplings divided households the way nothing else in the kitchen did. Number 14. Smothered pork chops over rice. Thin bone-in chops were the working. Cut the ones that cost the least and dried out the fastest which is why nobody in a black kitchen ever just fried them and called it done. They got seasoned and dredged in flour, browned hard on both sides in a heavy skillet so the flour left a crust on the bottom of the pan then lifted out. Sliced onions went in and cooked in the drippings until they slumped and turned sweet. A spoon of the same flour went in next then water or whatever broth was in the house stirred until the brown scraped up off the bottom and the whole thing turned into gravy. The chops went back in, the lid went on and the fire went down to almost nothing for an hour. That hour is the entire technique. Smothering was how a cheap cut was made tender when there was no money for a tender cut in the first place and it worked on chops, on steak, on chicken, on potatoes, on anything that would hold up to a lid. The chops came out soft enough to cut with the side of a fork and the gravy went over rice because rice stretched further than potatoes and there was always a bag of it. Two chops fed four people that way. One chop and enough gravy fed two. Every household on the street had a version and every version tasted like the particular pan it was made in. The skillet was never washed with soap. It was wiped, greased and put back on the eye of the stove ready for the next night and it usually outlived the person who seasoned it. Number 24 fried bologna. Long before it became a punchline, this was an honest meal that kept many families going. During the depression, bologna was often the only meat a household could afford and it was frequently the only meat on hand. Cooks would slice it thick, cut little slits around the edge so it would not dome up in the pan and fry it in a hot skillet until the edges curled and browned. That crisp ring around the outside was the whole reward. Pressed between two slices of light bread with a smear of mustard, it became a sandwich that a child could carry to school or a worker could fold into a lunch pail. Sometimes it went over rice with a little gravy made from the drippings. Cheap, fast and filling, it stretched a few cents into a real plate of food. A humble meal that asked for nothing and gave back plenty. Number 25 smothered cabbage with salt pork. A head of cabbage cut rough. A piece of salt pork sliced thin and rendered down first so the fat coated the pan. Then the cabbage piled on top with a splash of water and a lid clapped over it. It cooked down to a quarter of its size and turned sweet in a way raw cabbage never suggests. Cabbage held its price when everything else climbed which is exactly why it showed up so often on a fixed income. With a wedge of cornbread to catch the pot liquid, that was supper for two nights. The smell filled the whole house and told the neighbors nothing about how little it costs. Number 10 stewed chicken gizzards over rice. Gizzards are muscle and muscle that worked hard is tough until time is applied to it. They were floured and browned then covered and left to simmer with onion until a fork went through them easy which took a good while. The gravy that came out of that pan was dark and deep and tasted like it had been cooked far longer than it had. Gizzards were sold cheap because most shoppers walked past them. That is the pattern under this entire list. The parts that got walked past became the parts that got perfected. Number 23 hot water cornbread. When other supplies ran out this was the meal that stood between a family and an empty stomach. The recipe could not be simpler. Cornmeal, a little salt, a spoon of fat, and boiling water stirred in until it formed a soft dough. The cook patted it into small cakes by hand and dropped them into a skillet of sizzling grease where they fried up crisp and golden on the outside and tender in the middle. Made with only cornmeal, water, and salt it was the emergency supper when the cupboard was nearly bare. It went alongside a pot of greens to sop up the pot liquor or stood alone with a slice of onion when there was nothing else. Quick, simple, and filling it carried families through the leanest stretch of the Great Depression. A few cents a meal turned into bread that ate like a meal. Number 30 tomato gravy over rice. A spoon of bacon grease in the skillet, a spoon of flour stirred into it until it smelled like toast. Then a can of tomatoes broken up with the side of the spoon and a pinch of sugar to take the bite out. It went over rice or over a split biscuit and it was breakfast on the mornings when there was no meat in the house to fry. The color alone did the work. A plate of white rice looks like nothing. That same plate under red gravy looks like somebody cooked for you. Tomatoes were the one thing almost every household had either put up in jars from the summer before or bought by the can for pocket change. Nothing about it was fancy, it was hot, it filled you, and it asked for almost nothing back. Number 11 baked spaghetti with a half pound of ground beef. This is where southern kitchens took an Italian dish and made it their own thing entirely. Ground beef browned with onion and bell pepper, canned tomatoes and tomato paste stirred in with sugar and plenty of black pepper, boiled spaghetti folded through it. All of it turned into a pan covered in cheese and baked until the edges went crisp and the middle set firm enough to cut into squares. It was not saucy and it was not supposed to be. Half a pound of beef fed eight people that way. It showed up at every repast and every family gathering and it still does. Number 25 neck bones and rice. This was the dish that proved the family could eat well on the scraps the butcher almost threw away. Pork neck bones were the bones left after the good cuts were sold off, sold cheap because there was barely a bite of meat clinging to them. But black southern cooks knew the secret was the long simmer. They covered those bones in water, dropped in an onion and a little garlic and let the pot go for two or three hours until the meat fell off and the broth turned dark and rich. Then they cooked the rice right in that stock so every grain soaked up the flavor of the bone. What looked like nothing on the cutting board became a steaming bowl that filled a grown man up after a day in the field. The trick was patience, not money. Tender meat, savory rice and a broth worth keeping. A whole supper out of what others called waste. Number 29 whole cakes with cane syrup, cornmeal, a pinch of salt and water hot enough to scald the meal into a batter that will hold together on a greased griddle. No eggs, no milk, no leavening. They came off the iron with a crisp laced edge and a soft middle and they got a pour of dark cane syrup that spread to the rim of the plate. Children in the 1960s ate them for supper and never knew they were eating the cheapest bread in the south. The recipe traveled straight out of field cooking where a man carried his meal on a whole blade over a fire because he had nothing else to cook it on. By the 60s the fields were behind most families. The bread stayed. Number 28 the fried bologna sandwich. A thick slice off a chub of bologna, four small cuts around the edge so it would not dome up in the pan and a minute aside in a dry skillet until the rim curled and It went between two slices of light bread with mustard, sometimes with a slice of onion, sometimes with nothing at all. Every corner store in a black neighborhood sold that bologna by the slice cut to order on the same machine that cut the cheese. For a widow living alone it was a whole supper for a dime and no leftovers to spoil. Restaurants sell it now on brioche for the price of a steak plate and call it a throwback. Number 15 pinto beans with fatback and onion. A bag of dried pintos went into a pot of water with a chunk of fatback and half an onion in the morning and was still on the stove in the afternoon. No soaking for some cooks. Overnight soaking for others and that argument never got settled. What was never in doubt was the ending. The beans went soft, the broth went brown and salty and the whole thing got served over rice or with cornbread crumbled into it. A bag of pintos cost less than anything else in the store that could feed a family that many times. It sat on the stove for days and it got better on the second day. Number 22 smothered potatoes and onions. If there were potatoes in the bin and an onion on the counter supper was already settled. Smothering was one of the great techniques of the southern kitchen. A slow braise that turned a plain ingredients into something soft and savory. The cook sliced potatoes and onions thin, laid them in a heavy skillet with a spoon of bacon grease and let them cook down low and slow with the lid on. The steam trapped under that lid did the work melting the onions into the potatoes until the whole thing went tender and sweet. Toward the end the lid came off so the bottom layer could brown and form that prized golden crust against the iron. A little salt, a little black pepper and maybe a splash of water to keep it from sticking was all it took. Served with a piece of cornbread it made a full plate without a scrap of meat. Pure comfort built from two of the cheapest things in the house. Number 20 salt mackerel and gritsi. The fish came out of a wooden bucket or a can packed in salt hard enough to preserve it without ice and it had to be soaked overnight and rinsed before it was fit to cook. Then it went under the broiler or into a skillet with a little grease until the edges crisped. Beside it went a bowl of grits with butter stirred through. Saturday morning in a house full of great migration families smelled exactly like that north or south. Salt fish was survival food that came out of the era before refrigeration and stayed on the table long after the icebox arrived because people had gotten used to loving it. Something worth stopping on before this list goes any further. Every meal counted down so far was built on the same move and it was not thrift. Thrift is spending less. This was different. This was taking the part of an animal or a plant or a week that somebody else had already decided was worthless and finding what was actually in it. The neck, the tail, the liquor, the dry bread, the bone. That is not a hardship story and it does not deserve to be told like one. It is a body of knowledge built and tested and handed down under conditions that would have stopped most people from cooking at all. Those cooks were not making do. They were doing something the people with money could not do and they were doing it every single night without applause. Number 13. Potato and egg hash. Cold boiled potatoes from the night before diced and fried and greased until the edges caught. Then two eggs cracked directly over the top and stirred through until they set. Salt, pepper, hot sauce if the bottle was on the table. It took less than 10 minutes and it used up something that was already cooked which was half the reason it existed. For an older person cooking for one this was the meal that required no planning, no thawing, and no trip to the store. Eggs were the one protein that stayed within reach of a fixed income through the whole decade and this is where most of them ended up. Number 12. Turnip greens with cornmeal dumplings. The greens went into the pot first with a piece of smoked meat and cooked down until they were tender and the liquor was dark. Then a stiff cornmeal dough was pinched off in small pieces and dropped right into that liquid to steam under the lid. The dumplings came out heavy and savory soaked through with everything the greens had given up. It is the same idea as bread on the side done in one pot with one fire which mattered when wood or gas caused money. Turnip greens also came with the roots attached and those got cooked too so one purchase produced two different foods. Here is the part of the story that did not happen in anybody's kitchen. Starting in the years after this decade a great deal of money went into convincing American families that cooking from scratch was a burden they had been carrying for no reason. Boxed mixes, cans with the picture of the finished plate on the label, frozen trays sold as a gift to a tired woman. The advertising was aimed hardest at households with the least because those households were the ones still cooking. What went unmentioned was that a pot of beans on a back burner fed more people for longer for less than anything sold in that freezer case. The meals on this list did not fail they were competed with by companies that needed you to stop making them. Number 27 salmon croquettes. One can of pink salmon bones and all mashed with a fork until the little round vertebrae broke up and disappeared. An egg, a handful of cornmeal or cracker crumbs, chopped onion, black pepper shaped into patties and fried in shallow grease until the outside went dark gold. That can sat in the back of the cabinet in every house on the block because it kept forever and it did not need a refrigerator. It fed a family of five on Friday nights when there was no money for fresh fish. The bones were the whole point soft enough to eat and full of what a body needed though nobody in that kitchen would have used those words. What the list adds up to is 30 complete dinners that came out of a grocery run most people today would consider impossible. Made by people who never measured, never wrote it down and never once apologized for what was on the plate. Some of it is gone. The corner butcher who sold next by the bag is gone in most neighborhoods and the cuts that cost pennies now carry a premium price but the cooking itself is still sitting right there and it still works. Take one of them this month, pinto beans and cornbread or smothered turkey wings or fried corn and skillet potatoes and cook it the long way with the lid on and the fire low. It will cost less than takeout and it will taste like something you have not had in years. Then drop the one your family lived on in the comments. Which supper showed up in your house the most and whose hands made it? Somebody is going to name a dish that never made it onto this list and that is exactly the point. On Friday that five dollar bill went into a paper sack and came home as a week of hot dinners and the people who worked at arithmetic never got credit for a single plate of it.