Nobody who remembers the Depression of the 1930’s will be impressed by the heroism of boycotting meat for a single week. During all the years of that era there must have been one or two pieces of beef, a pan-fried steak somewhere in 1934 or 1935 surely, but if so it left no imprint in history.
Canned salmon, on the other hand, remains vivid in memory over almost forty years. It must have been ridiculously cheap then—ten or eleven cents for a big can. It now costs ten times as much, as does chipped beef, which was another staple of Depression diet.
With chipped-beef gravy one night and fried salmon cakes another, we were eating fairly well, the meat boycotters might say. We certainly thought so. We did not feel deprived on the third night when the main course was macaroni and cheese.
Chicken was the luxury meal at our house, as in a great many American households of the time, and this treat was invariably served on Sunday. Sunday was the day for noble dining in America, and most of us who were children then probably grew up believing that when some fancy writer referred to “a Lucullan feast,” he was talking about chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy and peas.
The chicken was always either fried or roasted. Fried was best. Roasted meant it was going to be leathery, and the elders at the table who remembered the glorious eating of the 1920’s would make jokes about its being rooster.
Looking back, one realizes that they may not have been joking, that the leathery fowl really may have been roosters, but there was so much joking at that table—joking with gaiety in it and not the embittered undercurrent that distinguishes the humor of our present age—so much joking that my memory of the period hears laughter everywhere.
That is a mystery still. It was such a bad time. What were they laughing about? They had one foot in the serene stability of the Edwardian age and the other in the mess of 1914–1929. They had been badly wrenched out of one time into another, but with nothing really damaged much. Perhaps their survival had left them permanently delighted.
Our children will probably not, at ages forty and fifty, hear us laughing in their memories. Oh, we are a glum bunch! Where did it come from, that glumness of ours that already echoes from our children’s music and in the mission of moral uplift to which so many have dedicated themselves?
Those are deep questions, and on the theory that a deep question deserves a frivolous answer, I would suggest that the gloom we exude comes not from our Depression childhoods, but from our turning in early adulthood into a generation of beefeaters.
This beef madness began during World War II when richly fatted beef was force-fed into every American warrior. Meat twenty-one meals a week was the formula for beating the Axis, although the men who really did the job, of course, were living on good old Depression foods, like Spam, while they were at work.
After the war there was no tapering off. We had become a nation of beef-a-holics. By the 1950’s the smell of barbecued beef hung like smog over 100,000 American suburbs. A social crisis was no longer your relief check’s failure to arrive before the rent was due, but the arrival of a steak cooked medium rare when you had ordered it rare.
This was not a crisis met with a gay smile on the lips, and a joke. Tension prevailed over the table. One was aware that his manhood had been challenged by the chef. Did one dare to threaten nuclear retaliation by demanding to see the manager? Would one lose face if…
One sweated.
One? We all sweated. It was the age of sweating. When people were relaxed, which was rare, they acknowledged it by saying, “No sweat.” And beef and all those other meats every day of the year—they kept us sweating, and grim.
Nowadays if you want to hear laughter, you must think of macaroni and cheese and listen very carefully, and it may—just may, mind you—come dimly through the beef-clotted memory.