Pizza rolls, Steak-umms, and Chef Boyardee pizzas were basically survival food in the 80s as many of us were left to fend for ourselves for days at a time during the school week.
Exactly. These were foods for US "latchkey kids" in the 1970s and 1980s, not "midcentury" (think Mad Men early 1960s) foods. During this time the rise of having two working parents (or because of rising divorce rates, a single working parent) combined with inflexibility of employers to allow "flex time" as they often do today, meant that many children often had to prepare their own meals. So simple frozen foods were common as even a grade school child could prepare them.
My mom worked a split-shift (3 hours in the morning, and 5 hours in evening Wed-Sun). My dad was in the army and was deployed to far-away lands for a significant portion of my life between 8-16 years old. My mom hired a couple of "minders" - but the first one made a baby in our bathroom with her boyfriend, and the second one did nothing but watch TV and sneak some shots of whiskey between TV shows (on the three networks then available).
Long story short, I was left to my own devices a lot. My mom tried to make dinner for me - but sometimes (being a growing boy) I was just really hungry - so chef-boy-r-dee pizza was a staple - at least until I learned that one could phone in an order for pizza and have it delivered! Now we were cash-poor, so when wanted spending money, I'd have to go house-to-house to ask if they needed their lawns mowed. I'd get somewhere between $5 or $10 depending on the lawn size and would use the money for pizza delivery once or twice a week.
Pretty amazing to think about it - a kid between 10-15 years old being left alone for hours a day and having to go house-to-house to mow lawns for extra money! (let's not forget it was the 70s so things like bike helmets, seat belts and non-smoking areas didn't exist either).
Same here. But the meaning of a "latchkey" kid is a kid who has to unlock their door to get in their home (because nobody is there when they get home from school) -- this is independent of the concept of a "free range kid" (who may or may not have a parent at home but are just allowed to roam)
My Mother's pizza is famous amongst my friends and family. It is started from the chef boyardee pizza kit and surprisingly little has changed in her version.
My brothers and our childhood friends are all in our 40's and 50's now, have had pizza all over the world, and momma pizza still ranks.
They aren't the same thing because they are quite a bit more costly, but a butcher somewhere in the region makes circular frozen sliced steaks for sandwiches. So much better than Steak-umms.
Similar to what you would get from a butcher for frozen philly cheese steak sandwiches, but not the same.
Before youtube was invented there were these things called "books".
Also, most things come with some sort of cooking instructions, like pasta or rice or whatever.
Is it unusual that my parents (and pretty much all my friend's parents) made sure we grew up knowing how to cook and eat really good food? Maybe it's a UK vs US thing, maybe it's because the nearest "convenience stores" were a couple of hundred miles away.
People who like working on electronics were exposed to it.
Rarely does anyone do stuff independently. You saw someone else do it and that’s what got you into it. It has never mattered that libraries existed. Libraries are mostly for researching something that you’ve already taken an interest in. A library is literally massive.
If you and your parents emphasized cooking, then that’s good. But you know, a really rich family would expose their kid to everything while a poor one wouldn’t. And what you get exposed to determines your life’s path, so that’s how the cookie crumbles.
I don’t think most of us who identify as “latchkey” kids had a ton of parental guidance around the house. Often there wasn’t anyone around to teach us to cook anything outside of the relatively child-proof microwave.
The stove I learned on had numbers from 1 to 10... so medium was 5... eg half way through. 1 was marked low, and 10 high. This deduction has worked just fine for me for the next 40 years of cooking. Is it wrong? who cares... it worked. The books always talked about high, medium and low. Not hard, I figured it out at 6 when I wanted to make an omlette and my mom gave me 2 cartons of eggs, cream, julia child and the trash can.
The trash can was actually the biggest part of the lesson, don't be afraid of failure.
"Medium heat" is when the ring is half-way up. "High heat" is when the ring is all the way up.
I knew shit like this when I was nine years old, because I knew what words like "medium" and "high" and "heat" meant.
This whole thread is just reinforcing the impression I have that Americans are just permanent children, forever eating scaled-up versions of the children's menu.
> "Medium heat" is when the ring is half-way up. "High heat" is when the ring is all the way up.
This is incorrect.
Medium is when the surface of the pan is around 350°F. High is when it's around 450°F. (Low is 250°F.)
How to get and then maintain the surface of the pan at that temperature is probably one of the trickiest skills there is for people to learn. Because obviously if you put an empty pan on the middle of your gas burner dial and just leave it there it will quickly heat up to ultra-hot (550°F+). While if you dump a bunch of watery vegetables in there to sauté it will just go down to like 150°F and not heat up further.
In the end setting the right burner strength to maintain your desired temperature is a crazy nonlinear function of heat, pan temperature, pan material (both conductivity and thermal mass), food quantity in pan, food temperature, food water content, and lid on/off. That you learn through just a lot of trial and error, involving a lot of listening for sizzle and seeing bubbles and browning and feeling for radiant heat with your hand. Not by setting the dial to a particular setting.
If you want to know why so many people have difficulty doing something so "basic" as frying an egg, this is why. If you want to know why part of the interview to cook in a restaurant is also quite often... just to fry a single egg... that's why. (It's "fizzbuzz" for cooks.)
Also, please don't do things like insult entire nationalities here. It's very much against HN guidelines.
> ”Medium heat" is when the ring is half-way up. "High heat" is when the ring is all the way up.
This hasn’t been true anywhere I’ve lived, except my current house, where I adjusted the gas. In Cupertino, high barely summers. In New York, quarterway turned will sear and instantly burn dry powders. (Also: I grew up overseas.)
Hah, "medium" - based on if the recipe ends up where it should - has been in a different place on the ring on pretty much every brand of stove I've ever had.
Sure you can hack around and get something ok regardless, but...
> maybe it's because the nearest "convenience stores" were a couple of hundred miles away
Gosh, what a wild idea that that would lead to a difference! Combine that with parents without enough free time to be home much in the first place, the rapid availability of processed food that lasts longer and is ready faster, and advertising campaigns that innundated people with these and didn't mention the downsides of the new shit... why are you being so smug about just happening to grow up in a different environment?
> "Medium heat" is when the ring is half-way up. "High heat" is when the ring is all the way up.
Gas or electric? Small or large burner? Cast iron or steel pan?
Kudos to you for being an exceptional nine year old cook, but it's objectively true that most cookbooks are written assuming basic cooking knowledge, the kind one would get from a parent who had time to cook with a child.
As a male American latch key kid in the 80s I learned to cook and made dinner for my parents and myself most nights. There was a ton of cooking shows on PBS to learn from. You can only watch so much Robotech/Voltron and play so many Commodore games. All of my friends made good food too.
Remember when "youtube" only came on that big glass thing in the corner and only had a few dozen things on it, and you had to wait for the right thing to come round?
In the US, girls learned how to cook, starting with Easy-Bake™ Ovens. Boys learning to cook? Sissy stuff. Boys learned to heat up pizza rolls and play CoD.
My dad was a 30 year army reserve veteran (served in both the Gulf War and Afghanistan) I would consider him to be a typical American "mans man" and definitely made a point about my brother and I learning how to cook, because its how you make a good impression on the in laws and girls you care about (his words, more or less).
I credit this with why I know how to cook as well as I do. We grew up poor by most standards in the US, but my uncle was a butcher, both grandparents were farmers, so the one thing we had access to was fruits, vegetables and good meats.
Its also why I think i never learned good portion control as a child and still have trouble maintaining a healthy weight (among other reasons I won't get into here), we made very good savory food all the time because its what we had. We had to cook, as take out wasn't an option, and frozen foods weren't cost effective the same way for us (due to familial professions, we had access to things most people don't in this way).
That's the irony. I feel like I grew up with blander foods I'd be less inclined to eat them so much growing up, feeding a long habit of food being comfort.
My mate's grandad was an army cook. He told me that he was an excellent cook, made amazing meals, but never - after being demobbed - got his head around making not-army sized batches.
So my mate would go round to his grandparents and find his grandad stirring a pot of chilli and a pot of stew and a pot of curry each roughly the size of a dustbin, and be greeted with "Oh hello, young lad, I wish I'd known you were coming, I'd have made you some dinner!"
I got a lot of flak for wanting an Easy-Bake Oven as a boy. My mom was a habitual Burner of Things. Never could quite figure that out. I just wanted to make a brownie that wasn't rock hard crust, you know?
I received similar pushback for taking both Home Ec classes. It was really the only way out of the latchkey kid diet, which, yes, was primarily sandwiches, Steak-Umms, and so on.
I ended up doing drafting as well as woodshop on top of it. It wasn't really a "reclaim my masculinity" thing so much as wanting to be well-rounded and trying things that I wasn't already good at.
When I had to do some photography on appointment and sometimes videography, well, nervous people can mess up their clothes. A number of women were surprised when I whipped out a needle and matching thread to briefly repair a tear in their clothing when time was tight.
I felt pretty annoyed at having to defend these kinds of choices, and a surprising amount of the pushback came not from boys my own age, but girls and women.
Huh? I did my own laundry starting from like 10, and cooking the family dinners most nights (until I reached high school and football practice got in the way). Not sure what 'US' you are talking about, maybe the generation before the 80s?
Yeah, I overstated the reality for rhetorical effect, but it also would depend on what part of the US. Gender roles have changed in some places, but not so much in others.
> until I reached high school and football practice got in the way
Too time consuming. With the microwave, you can have pizza rolls in 5 minutes. Less, if you don't mind the experience of alternating between still almost frozen and mouth-burning hot.
Kits. That was the fun thing about it, you'd mix the dough, and add the cheese and sauce. If you were lucky, there were some leftover scraps in the fridge that you could use to add as toppings. Learned the basics of making pizza that way.
