Reader Tips

Reader Tips 36 Comments

Several years ago Kate wrote an essay in the National Post suggesting that a good famine would cure our whiny nation, and teach us to be “grateful for what we have, accept our own burdens, and mourn quietly for what we lose.” Her prescription might have been half tongue-in-cheek, but when you watch Clara Cannucciari, the 94-year-old star of tonight’s video from the online series Great Depression Cooking, it’s hard not to think that the proposed cure would indeed pay such dividends. Growing up during the Great Depression, when a lot of food ingredients were unavailable or beyond reach financially, the young Clara and her parents and siblings had to make do with whatever was available; to this day she takes pleasure in preparing simple meals, using whatever ingredients are tastiest and cheapest. Tonight, using a recipe from chapter three (“It’s a Hot Meal, Stop Complaining“) of her new cookbook, the commonsensical, good-natured, self-reliant, and adorable Clara Cannucciari demonstrates how to prepare and cook The Poorman’s Meal. Is it any good? Well, why don’t you ask her grandson and his friends!
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36 Replies to “Reader Tips”

  1. News Item from England:
    “Householders who clear snow ‘should not be sued‘”
    “Snow-hit householders should be able to clear the pavement outside their home without fear of being sued, a Government report has said.”

  2. Michael Mann is back in the news. You can hear what he has just done by searching for: Michael Mann Daily Caller
    But it’s much more enjoyable to hear science reporter, Bob Zimmermann, describe the whole tale. You can listen to it here beginning at about 18:45. The segment goes on for a while but listen to it and you’ll learn how completely corrupt some “peer reviewed” science has become!

  4. Robert I’m not economically astute other than my own household budget. But just the title of that article convinces me that we should be paying close attention to Clara’s Depression Cooking!
    Thanks EBD!

  5. Anybody going to be watching “The View” tomorrow? BHO is going to be the guest star, vying for attention with Baba’s heart and Whoopi’s deep intelligence. Should keep late night television titilated for at least as long as Lindsay has to stay in jail.

  7. A lot of people don’t realise that many cuisines have dishes rooted in famine or other hardships. It’s not that (for example) the Japanese or Koreans are too enlightened to eat meat and, therefore, rely on pulses and grains. During times of famine, meat was scarce and rice- the staple- was probably wiped out in some disaster so millet was mixed in. We’ve had it far too good for far too long to realise this.
    Just some thoughts.

  8. thank GAWD ‘rule britannia’ no longer applies.
    except in britannia and which the royalty fart catchers richly deserve.

  9. robert w in vancouver:
    it isn’t ‘most americans’; it’s ‘most MSM’ giving that impression.
    how is lindsay doing anyway? last I heard her fellow incarcerants were giving her a real hard time about those crying jags and the jailers put her in isolation. my Q is, if the jails in L.A. really are that crowded, why is it the celebs get popped out in a day and not the person who has been there longest? you know, like the programming FIFO concept ‘first in first out’.
    jist askin’ . . . .

  10. Hagai Mazuz, in Hudson New York:
    “Trying to find solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict, politicians and statesmen have spent endless hours with experts on Islam to understand the roots of the conflict. They have usually heard two answers: ‘The root of the problem is territorial,’ and ‘The root of the problem is religious; it stems from the classic Islamic view of Jews as evil.’
    “Muslims often accuse Jews of harassing and plotting against Muhammad, Islam’s founder and prophet, a charge abundantly clear since the start of classic Islamic writings, which are filled with anti-Jewish imagery.
    “In our ‘post-modern’ age, most Western scholars, who are secular, find it difficult to accept the idea that medieval texts can dictate the lives of, or even inspire, people today. They criticize those who see the conflict as religious, arguing that scholars who see the conflict as religious, place too much emphasis on these ancient texts, as both the times and circumstances have changed. For them, these texts are outdated. In short, secular scholars find it difficult to believe that people even still regard religious ideas as relevant.
    “In talking with the common people in the Arab and Muslim world, however, it becomes clear that for them, these classical texts are as relevant today as when they were written. For the overwhelmingly majority of Muslims, these texts indicate that the conflict is indeed religious, not territorial.
    “As Muslims view the world, Muhammad was the ideal Muslim. How he acted is how all Muslims should act. So how Muhammad acted towards the Jews in Medina and Khaybar is how Muslims should act towards Jews.
    “How, then, did Muhammad act? In 622 CE, Muhammad….
    The rest here.

  13. CTV (local) just announced that Saskatchewan is funding the vein-clearing MS procedure.
    Can’t these idiots get ANYTHING right?
    An offer to fund a well-designed study has become full funding of the procedure in just a few hours.

  14. http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jGWoH0yGdlHQTl_yZDefw3G72KNw
    Arizona will appeal the ruling of Bolton (she,a Bubba Cigar toy, doesn’t deserve to be called a Judge)
    There are 2 groups that hope to gain by Immigration Reform.. Immigration Lawyers get billions in business, and Unions hope to organize the 10-20 or 50 million.
    The whole immigration system is actually fatally flawed & the Courts are hiding the ugly truth that there is a HUGE hole in the process…
    This looks like a money issue, but the reason we have uncontrolled illegal aliens is that the Hispanic (58%), which does have a reasonable solution, is small potatoes compared to unqualified/dangerous people that have resident Alien Cards (green Cards). The fault lies in a system that depends on the integrity of immigration lawyers. The simple fact is that a corrupt Immigration Lawyer can obtain a Green Card for anyone, the immigration system does not check any of the Factum on the application, no background check, no fingerprint identification…The 2 min interview with an ($14 Hr) immigration clerk is just a verification of the Lawyers Paperwork… Rubber Stamp. The only time they do an FBI/Police check is when a person applies for Citizenship & is fingerprinted.
    IMHO The Immigration Lawyers don’t want their work been checked by police. When a person that has been arrested & convicted of serious crimes, multiple times, and then produces a Green Card that has been recently issued we would know the Immigration Lawyer was Corrupt.
    What ever reform we consider Fingerprints/ DNA “MUST” be part of the Green Card Process.

  15. My father grew up during the depression, he and his twin brother the youngest in a family of eight children. His favourite poor man’s meal was ‘Graveyard Stew’. Burnt toast, broken up into bite size pieces with your hands, scalded milk, couple tablespoons of butter, salt and lots of pepper,the stew was consummed near the boiling point as quickly as possible. A hot dog was a luxury his family rarely enjoyed but he loved them, cold, right out of the package, with ketchup,rolled in plain white bread, eaten in exactly three bites.
    The pictures are great, so much like my mother and father’s albums.

  17. Ah, but you see: she’s Italian.
    During the last recession (late 80s), an Italian reporter for Toronto’s multi-culti CityTV evening news was assigned to live like a poor person for a week.
    So she went to the food bank, picked out basic stuff, then spent the alloted “how much money poor people have for food money” on pasta fixings.
    She made a ton of food and had money left over.
    For which she was roundly scolded by the reps from the Food Bank, the well paid leaders of the local poverty industrial complex and presumably, her bosses.
    She doesn’t work there anymore, I see.

  18. Kathy, I assume you’re referring to Laura DiBatista? I’m not sure what became of her. She was one of the biggest Liberal shills at Citytv — a network that, at times, is worse than CBC in that regard; it’s damage to democracy through bias reporting mitigated only by the fact that Toronto votes solidly Liberal anyway. Perhaps she didn’t shill hard enough.
    Funny thing about her is that she lives — and has most of her life — in the riding of Beaches-East York-Woodbine, one of only 4 Toronto ridings of the 22 held by the NDP and a riding the McGuinty Liberals would like to take in the next election, especially considering that they will lose some in the 905 surrounding the city. Don’t be surprised to see Liberal Laura announced as the Liberal candidate for that riding in the next election, joining her former collegues Ben Chin and Bob Hunter in that regard.

  20. I am always shocked that people who are poor never take the time to learn the basics of cooking. I’ve sat a few people down and shown them how to make very cheap and healthy one pot meals. If they would learn how to make soup and stews then add rice or pasta they would eat cheaper and better.
    I did some work at a food bank briefly. It was very disheartening. The people were grabbing the crap cereal and other terrible food choices. All the great health stuff like tuna, salmon, beans, rice and pasta was ignored.

  21. O’Iggy. O’Iggy Stalin.
    Socialism, “the same old serpent”, is the religion of the stomach.
    The jaded promises of socialism, the full stomach of socialism, ends in the empty stomachs of starvation in a GULAG.
    H/T Gustave Le Bon*.
    Lincoln also described socialism.
    “Lincoln memorably derided the underlying principle as “the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it.”
    …-
    “An old argument revisited
    Reading the scholarly work of Woodrow Wilson is an educational experience. It is shocking to read the expressions of his disaffection for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. As R.J. Pestritto has demonstrated, the intellectual roots of modern liberalism lie in an assault on the ideas of natural rights and limited government. They eventuate in an administrative state and rule by supposed experts. Obamacare represents something like the full flowering of modern liberalism.
    Wilson’s expressions of disapproval are the precursor to Barack Obama’s disdain for the Constitution and the Warren Court. Obama perfectly reflected Wilson’s views in his 2001 comments on the civil rights movement and the Supreme Court. In the course of the famous radio interview Obama gave to WBEZ in Chicago, Obama observed that the Warren Court had not broken “free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties.” To achieve “redistributive change,” the limitations of the Constitution would have to be overcome by the Court or by Congress.
    Franklin Roosevelt touted welfare state liberalism in the “second Bill of Rights” that he set forth to Congress in his 1944 State of the Union Address. “Necessitous men are not free men,” Roosevelt asserted, and enumerated a new set of rights, among which were the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation, the right of every family to a decent home, and the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.
    Implicitly arguing that the teaching of the Declaration had become obsolete, Roosevelt asserted: “In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.”
    Abraham Lincoln’s argument with Stephen Douglas also came down to a disagreement over the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln articulated this disagreement with special gusto in his critique of Douglas on July 10, 1858.
    According to Douglas, the teaching of the Declaration had no general applicability beyond the immediate situation that confronted the Founding Fathers. Restating Douglas’s argument, Lincoln asked “in all soberness, if all these things, if indulged in, if ratified, if confirmed and endorsed, if taught to our children, and repeated to them, do not tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this Government into a government of some other form.” This is certainly one of the question that is raised in acute form by the doctrine of welfare state liberalism in general and by Obamacare as a case in point.”
    http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/07/026865.php
    …-
    *Le Bon:
    [PDF]
    The Psychology of Socialism
    File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat
    Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 8 ephemeral existence. …… Socialism is in effect nothing but the religion of the stomach.” …
    socserv.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/lebon/socialism.pdf

  22. Poor people don’t WANT to learn that stuff, though. If they did they would have already learned it and then wouldn’t be poor anymore.
    Same with teaching them about budgeting etc. The class is too far from their house, its boring, blah blah blah.
    I grew up surrounded by these people. Believe me.
    In Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell talks about the tedious people (as he saw them) who wrote letters to the editor, explaining (wearily) that poor people could buy lots of fresh food with their meager money, instead of the crap they DID buy.
    Orwell said, correctly, that poor people knew that very well but simply didn’t care. As they saw it, their lives were lousy and they “deserved” the 1930s equivalent of junk food, “something tasty” as Orwell put it.
    So that’s what they bought and ate. Human. Nature. Is. Unchangeable.

  23. EBD – with regard to your ‘ideology’ causes human action – I disagree; that’s superficial.
    Ideology is the ‘topmost’ level of human society; it’s made by man, and can be changed by man. It ‘sits’ on a deeper societal structure which is the economic and political..and demographic..which sits on an even deeper structure which is the biological or ecological.
    Islamic fascism is caused by the exponential increase in population as the ME moved from a peasant horticultural economy into an urban industrial economy..BUT..one that made this move, not by its own population’s actions, but via the technological knowledge and freedom of enterprise of a foreign population.
    The ME didn’t have the knowledge base to find, extract or process what happened to sit underneath the desert: oil. So, it hired the West to do this. Then, rather than educating its own population to take over, it simply took the money, retained the two-class system, with the mass of the population uneducated..and kept the old tribal political system..with the mass of the population without political power.
    This lack of a middle class, which is a free class engaged in an entrepreneurial market economy, and the open repression of such a class – is the basis for Islamic fascism. Islamic fascism uses the ancient texts as a repressive force – since they can’t fight their own govt (see what happens when you try that in Iran and pre-war Iraq)..and a messianic force. That is, Islamic fascism tells its people that they can obtain power by a mythic return to purity – not by moving into the modern world.

  24. Kathy,
    I would say these people might not have been poor enough…If they did prefer to indulge on a 10 cent hot dog that barely feeds one instead of making a carrot and potato stew that could feed 5 in a meal for the same dime.
    Look at EDB excellent color photos site posted up…Look at the few photos of families around a table eating…There seems to be plenty there.
    Of course there’s no TV, DVD and a myriad of other things but one can assume that, like always, tales of how “bad” things were in times like the great depression could have somewhat been exagerated. In today’s context though, a situation like this would be (And will be?) the same as the end of the world, especially for todays totally spoiled youth.
    Today, poverty means theres no TV/DVD/Computer in every air conditioned room…”Time to call my social welfare worker about this intolerable situation” type of thing.
    Oh man could things get ugly if a total social collapse occured nowadays. Millions and millions living in large urban centers who don’t even know how to make a fire let alone cook something simple and nutritious.
    Burger and fries meal lines at every fast food joint…Yeah right.

  26. Some very interesting posts today, loved the pictures of America. I liked Clara’s cooking and good common sense. As one of 6 kids both parents were childern of the depression, we learned how to work, what was needed and necessary. How to organize a successful hunt, moose mostly. How to butcher, put up all you needed. I have observed to younger folks that if things really went for a shit, what would you do? They think groceries come from a store.
    As for the food bank and choices, well just go past any pizza parlor on welfare wedensday. You will see the overweight, out of shape, freaking giant tatooed, pierced poor people. Not all there are some folks just down on their luck. There is a hard core that have made and continue to make poor choices.
    I watch at my local farmers market when peppers, onions and tomatoes are past their prime, still good I buy enough to make about 10 quarts or 32 cups of really tasty sauce for about 18-20 dollars with meat at least 15 meals either canned or frozen for a little more than a dollar or two a meal. I keep a herb garden going to spice it up a little.

  27. Yes, it’s incredible how many of the poor eat out rather than prepare home meals. They’ll eat out at the fast food places, which seem cheap on the surface for that one meal..but that same money could prepare three to four meals at home.
    As others have pointed out, it’s easy and very cheap to make and freeze pasta sauce, soups and stews, vegetables and fruit stews.
    But as long as you have a govt and other people supporting you..then..why bother?

  28. As the Bishop said, my Vicar is the best crook on my staff.
    Traitors within western civilization.
    Will vicar’s dog collar be ripped off by his Bishop?
    …-
    “U.K. vicar conducted 360 sham marriages
    LONDON – A vicar was found guilty on Thursday of conducting hundreds of sham marriages between African nationals and cash-strapped eastern Europeans to allow illegal immigrants to gain residency in Britain.
    Rev Alex Brown, 61, presided over 360 fake ceremonies over four years, including several cases in which participants cancelled one wedding only to marry someone else a month or two later, and another in which a person was registered to marry two people on the same day.
    Of the hundreds of people Brown married, 90 couples were registered as living in one road in the parish and in some cases several brides and grooms claimed to live in the same house, the Press Association reported.
    Brown’s co-defendant Vladymyr Buchak, 33, was also found guilty of conspiring to breach immigration laws by paying eastern Europeans up to 3,000 pounds ($4,700) to marry Africans, mainly from Nigeria, to allow them to obtain the documents they needed to live and work in Britain.
    The court heard Buchak, a Ukrainian national who had himself been living illegally in Britain since at least 2004, was responsible for “cajoling and persuading” the eastern Europeans into the marriages of convenience, preying on migrant workers in the area who were desperate to earn money.
    FORGOT PASSPORTS
    Although Buchak was seen as the main organiser of the operation, prosecutor David Walbank said there was no doubt Brown must have been fully aware that the majority of the weddings he was conducting at the church were shams.”
    http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2010/07/29/14863741.html

  30. Just ordered that dear ol’ doll Clara’s book at Amazon, EBD; thanks for the tip.
    Man, I love this joint!

  31. I had a business friend, whose wife owned a small food processing co. Her co. made deli items such as potato salad, coleslaw, and etc. in large trays for the deli counters of the major chain stores. One day he gave me a lift to a meeting we were both attending in his 1/2 ton. I noticed the box, was piled high with bags of potatoes and onions and cabbages. I asked why and he told me that the next day was welfare check day and his wife needed these items to make a lot extra of these items for the stores particularly in the poorer parts of town.

  32. Some years we are truly blessed with an abundance of garden produce. One year, in a fit of being generous (and being of the school of never wasting things), I offered the fresh vegetables to the local foodbank.
    They didn’t want them.
    But would like CASH or canned food instead.
    This proved to me that there are no real hungry people only a giant poverty industry that needs to be constantly fed.
    Oh yes…
    What happened to the vegetables?
    I loaded up the box of my son’s pickup and he parked it in the yard where he was working at the time (construction) and told the lads “help yourselves!”. You’d think they had found a goldmine.
    It all went.
    I give to the working class only from now on.

  36. “the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it.”
    hmph. that sounds like a wealthy land owner talking to the always-in-debt sharecropper of not too long ago. if it happens again we can all see it first hand; that would be an education eh?

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