Don’t forget frog-eye salad! My aunt made it with those teeny little ball pasta, canned pineapple, mandarin oranges, fruit cocktail, and cool whip. It’s delicious. Other cool whip Midwest favorites include glorified rice (cooked white rice, pineapple, cool whip) and my future mother-in-law’s fruit salad made of mandarin oranges, orange jello powder, cottage cheese, and cool whip.

I never use it myself, but if such salads are available, I will heartily avail myself. Can’t eat it plain on top of stuff though. It always has a chemically aftertaste that I guess canned fruit covers up.

I’m unemployed and we just threw a holiday party last night. The boyfriend dropped $25 on 5 pounds of beef bottom round roast and I made slow-cooked french dip sandwiches with brown ‘n’ serve rolls (they were on sale and quicker than baking bread), made a honey mustard and creamy dip from a mix for a bag of pretzels, put together a salad with some homemade dressing, cut up a block of cheap sharp cheddar, and made apple cranberry pastries. We had about a dozen people over and it was perfect and low-key. And less expensive, less food, and less work than previous parties I’ve done. If we hadn’t wanted to spend the money on the beef, I totally would have used the crock pot to make dried beans into delicious taco filling and had tacos. But tacos didn’t seem Christmasy enough, hence the french dip sandwiches.

YES. My favorites are rural ones, especially those that are pre-1950. They tend to include fewer recipes based on canned soups and jello, and have lots of from-scratch recipes from older generations.

Dear Melissa Clark,

I finally broke down and bought “Cook This Now” because everyone had been raving about it on the internet. And while not everything is my style, I marked around half of the recipes - which is a lot for me as I’m pretty darn picky (not about types of food, but about styles of cooking). And now that I hear you love both creative writing and history AND food? I think we might be kindred spirits.

I love that you are egalitarian about food - not everyone is. I often ask myself: What do I want to make for dinner tonight? Thankfully, when I ask the same question of my boyfriend, it’s usually “You know me, I’m not picky, whatever you make will be good.” So I get to cook a lot of what I want, which is nice.

Anyway, thanks for writing such a lovely, down-to-earth book. My only complaint? Not enough prosy headnotes!

YES. I learned some cooking skills in home ec. in 7th grade, and while my mom cooked quite a bit, I didn’t learn directly from her.

And just because we have calculators and audio books, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep teaching kids to do math and to read. Life skills are useful no matter how much technology advances.

Home Economics (real economics, not just mixing stuff in a pot), including sewing, canning, laundry, budgeting, and gardening, should be standard in all high schools. If we had that, we might have a better-run society.

The ultimate lesson of all things household and cooking: time is money. You can either spend time or you can spend money and you can definitely spend both, but you can’t usually save time AND money together.

I am currently unemployed, though the boyfriend works, and am in graduate school full-time (and paying my own way). So money’s a little tight in our household. Last night I really didn’t feel like cooking and we didn’t have much in the way of leftovers to scarf, but we didn’t have the money to go out, so I made dinner anyway. And y’know what? It was fantastic. And cheap. I roasted two heads of broccoli (and the stems!) with a little olive oil, a small sliced onion, salt and pepper, and a little granulated garlic. Then I boiled a couple of red potatoes (they boil faster if you cut them in chunks). Once the broccoli was done, I mixed in some shredded cheese and let it melt. I drained the potatoes, mashed them, and topped with the broccoli. It was like a broccoli-topped baked potato, only way faster and more delicious. The broccoli was local and organic and the potatoes were also local. Proof that you can make a good, relatively healthy, from-scratch meal that doesn’t cost a lot in about 20 minutes flat.

Wow - I think it would be more fun to do a $5 total cost dinner. $5/person is kind of a lot. That’s $20 for a meal for a family of four!

Also, I would not consider hard boiled eggs with canned tuna and a salad a “meal.” Maybe it’s because I like my stuff all mixed up together, but when you can get cabbage for $0.49/pound and some places have ground beef or chicken legs for $1 or $2 per pound, I’d have a hard time justifying hardboiled eggs for dinner. Fried egg sandwiches, yes. But not hardboiled eggs.

Polar sodas make a lot of cool, old-fashioned flavors. The double fudge (a chocolate soda) is cool and their creme soda is pretty good. But my favorite is orange dry, which is reminiscent of the French Orangina. I have a feeling it would make a fantastic orange dreamsicle float.

Oh man, can I start my MA over and go for food studies instead of Public History? Lol.... I’ve always want to study and learn more about food and I’m really drawn to historic and ethnic foods. Want a research assistant? Lol...

Nice! Shopping for whole produce in season is much cheaper (and more delicious). I would add shopping for dry goods in bulk at a co-op. Things like dried beans and grains are often fresher there, and because they can buy in bulk, they often pass on the discount. I get all of my baking supplies, spices, nuts and dried fruit from a co-op up by my boyfriends’ parents house. The nuts and organic flours especially are so much cheaper than at the grocery store.

While it’s hard for us to do totally veggie meals, we rarely cook what my mom calls “big meat” - that is, a large hunk of meat cooked separately from veggies and starch. For us, a little meat goes a long way and I mix it in with lots of vegetables, such as in stir-fry, soup, pastas, and casseroles. We use dairy and eggs as meat replacers, too.

I like the new spice idea and shopping at ethnic stores. There’s an Asian grocery store near us, but I’ve never been. Maybe now I’ll have to go!

Soup is a create curer of cooking lethargy. It’s slow without being difficult, simple to prepare but complex in flavor, and you can be as creative or as traditional as you want in making it.

Sometimes I wish I lived somewhere that was cool or cold year-round so I could eat soup all the time.