25 Forgotten Ground Beef Suppers Every Appalachian Mother Made in the 1970s (I Never Learned 3)

My mother could take one pound of ground beef and put supper on the table for nine people, and I never once watched her do it. I was seventeen and I was on a shift. I came in at six, the food was on the stove, and I ate it without ever asking how it got there. Her name was Verna. She cooked in that kitchen through the whole of the nineteen seventies, which was the worst decade this country ever had for the price of meat. In nineteen seventy three beef went up so fast that housewives organized and quit buying it for a week, and the president put a ceiling on the price of it in March of that year. None of that reached our table as news. It reached our table as smaller portions. Two years before that, a company put a box on the shelf of the store down in town. Inside it was dry macaroni, flour, salt, dried onion and a little paprika. Every one of those things was already in my mother's kitchen. They sold her back her own pantry, in a box, for about half again what the meat cost, and they called it helping. In this video I go through twenty five suppers that came out of one pound of ground beef in that kitchen, in the order she went to them. Hamburger gravy where the grease is the roux. Poor man's steak pressed flat overnight and cut into nine squares that look like meat on the plate. Macaroni cooked in the tomato instead of beside it. A potato bake that fails if you cut the potatoes one shade too thick, and I ruined it for seven years before I worked that out. Stuffed peppers where the rice is the point and the pepper is not. The cabbage skillet that is a cabbage roll without the forty minutes of rolling. Meatloaf built on two slices of light bread soaked in milk instead of crackers. Hamburger steak where three onions do more work than the beef does. Chili that is a bean dish with beef in it. Friday soup. Cornbread pie with the batter poured straight over the meat. Fried cabbage on half a pound. Hash that is only hash if you leave it alone. Noodles rolled and cut with a water glass. Meatballs that go into the tomato raw. Hamburger pie under a biscuit quilt. Green beans in their own canning water. Rice meatballs that grow by half while they cook. Cornbread and cold buttermilk on the hottest night of August. And soup beans, where the meat is not the food, the meat is the seasoning and the beans are the food. Three of them I never learned. I ate them for years and I cannot make them, and there is nobody left alive I can ask. The drop dumplings she made on Saturdays while I was on shift. The cabbage rolls with a sour underneath the tomato that is not vinegar and is not kraut and that I have spent thirty years failing to find. And a Christmas pie with ground beef and apples in it that was not soaked in liquor and was not too sweet. If one of those three is in your family, tell me down below. I bought the box too. For about nine years, after I was married. Not because I was lazy and not because I had forgotten any of these. Because my wife was on at the plant and I was on at the mill and there were evenings with thirty five minutes between the truck coming up the road and two children needing to be fed. That box did not sell food. It sold thirty five minutes. And if my mother had been on a shift in nineteen seventy three, she would have bought it too. But it was a lie about the arithmetic. About half of these suppers are faster than the box was, and not one of them needed anything that was not already in the house. She never wrote a word of it down, and she did not need to, because she thought I was watching.