[fgummett]

Recently Michele Obama announced a school lunch initiative, so this blog post by Tom Naughton over at FatHead just caught my interest...

http://www.fathead-movie.com/index.php/2011/06/04/school-lunch-1946/

A reader sent me a link to a site promoting an exhibit at the National Archives titled What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam? Here’s a brief description from the site:

From the farm to the dinner table, explore the records of the National Archives that trace the Government’s effect on what Americans eat.

Without actually seeing the exhibit, I’m going to guess whoever created it has a more positive view of the government’s effect on what we eat than I do. But as I clicked around the site, I found this school-lunch recipe from 1946, which the exhibit states was the first year of the nationwide school lunch program:

Eighteen ounces of flour. Okay, not my favorite ingredient, but it’s not much for 100 portions. Now look at the rest of the recipe: 2 ¼ pounds of table fat, 2 ¼ gallons of milk, 18 eggs and 10 pounds of ham.

If that was on the menu in schools today, my girls might not be packing their own lunches.

The comments are well worth a read also :hippie:

for example...

I like that the milk is just called milk, nothing about it being 2%, 1%, or skim.

and again...

Using data from the USDA Food Nutrient Report, SR23, and assuming the table fat was lard, the per serving composition was:
Protein 13 g
Carbs 9 g
Fat 17 g

... to which Tom replied

That’s 63% fat by calories. Serve that to school kids today, and you’d be brought up on charges.

 

[Shanny]

Five years after THIS school lunch menu, I started first grade & found the school kitchen manned by one single cook, a lady who had cut her teeth cooking for the big ranches up in the Sandhills. I'm sure cooking one meal a day for 75-80 kids was child's play compared to three meals a day for ravenous ranch hands. And OMG she could cook. And this ham "shortcake" sounds just like something she'd fix . . . ladled generously over cornbread - I LOVED her cornbread.

Thanks for this post, Frank . . . I hadn't thought about Ethel in a long time!

 

[Patdart]

My mother was not a cook, and I loved the school lunches and they were GOOD! I remember smelling the rolls cooking before lunch and loved the food that was right after WW2. A big change from today's menus. I got a friend who was a lunchroom cook to come and teach me some recipes one year and copied some of those, but that was in the early '70's when they still served real food!

 

[Shanny]

I worked in school lunch from mid-70s to mid-80s, and yes - it was real food, cooked from scratch all the way. That's where I perfected my mayonnaise-making skills - we even made that from scratch - the recipe made ten gallons!

 

[Chesney]

My great aunt was our lunch cook... Loved a lot of her food... My favorite was her rolls... When we were home about 5 years ago she made a small batch just for me