I’ve previously written about several, including Sicilian Fig Cookies parts one and two, Depression breakfast, dandelion salad, pasta with peas, and poorman’s meal.

In the video above, Clara prepares Eggplant Parmesan, though she says right off the bat that she actually makes it with Romano cheese instead of Parmesan, but that it still tastes the same! She recounts how eggplant was cheap and easy to prepare, but that even if something cost a little more it just meant they had less of it.

She begins by cutting the eggplant into slices about 1/4″ to 1/2″ slices before shallow frying them in some oil in a pan until they turn crispy and brown. When the eggplant is done frying, drain them on paper towels to get rid of the excess cooking oil.

She then puts some homemade sauce over each slice of eggplant and sprinkles with some Romano (or Parmesan!) cheese. She recommends letting them sit for just a bit to cool down enough to eat. Since her family grew the eggplant themselves and served it with dandelion salad, she says the meal was virtually free. I love easy recipes like this that don’t require any kind of recipe, and this would be great with a slice of crusty bread on the side, too!

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Cooking With Clara: Eggplant Parmesan

She and her granddaughters, for whom this is a yearly tradition, prepared all of the fruits and nuts before letting them sit overnight in the fridge.

Part two, above, picks up with Clara making the dough for the cookies. She measures out ten cups of flour and mixes it with a pound of lard before adding a cup and a half of sugar. She then adds one cup of cold milk, two tablespoons of baking powder, one tablespoon vanilla extract, and twelve beaten eggs before letting the whole thing rest for one hour. This is one gigantic batch of cookies!

The oven is preheated to 350 degrees while Clara works a little more flour into the sticky dough. I need to get one of those huge bowls — it would make quite a few things a lot easier to work with!

She then puts flour on the board and begins rolling out the cookies, using just a portion of dough at a time. She forms the fig mixture into a tube and place it on the dough and rolls it up together before using a fluted pastry cutter to section them off. She cuts each roll into shorter pieces and places them on a cookie sheet for baking. The cookies are baked for 8-10 minutes on the bottom rack before being moved to a top rack for five more minutes. She cools the cookies on a clean sheet laid over her bed (love it!) and then ices them.

Though it looks really time consuming and involves a lot of ingredients, I really want to give these a try this holiday season. Have you ever made Sicilian Fig Cookies? Was it worth it?

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Cooking With Clara: Sicilian Fig Cookies II

In this video, Clara shows how to prepare Sicilian Fig Cookies, a treat that her family only made once a year around the holidays. She mentions that it was pretty much something they only did after the Depression ended, since the ingredients were so expensive!

Using flour, sugar, lard, milk, baking powder, eggs, powdered sugar, vanilla, hazelnuts, almonds, walnuts, pecans, candied fruit, raisins, dates, oranges, tangerine peel and figs, Clara recreates a truly mouthwatering cookie that’s sure to get anyone in the holiday spirit.

During the preparation process, Clara talks with her granddaughters about Christmas during the Great Depression, and how they would celebrate and the gifts the children would receive. She also talks about how food was stored and how they used a genuine ice box, with an ice man who would come down the street to deliver blocks of ice.

Clara then toasts the nuts together, and boils water and sugar on the stove. She then combines all the fruits and nuts together and puts them through a food processor in batches to make a dense, crumbly dough. Whiskey is then added (optional, of course!) along with a cup of the sugar water, and then it’s all stored overnight in the refrigerator.

Stay tuned for part two!

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Cooking With Clara: Sicilian Fig Cookies

Two years ago, Clara’s grandson decided to videotape Clara preparing meals that she and her family ate when Clara was a young woman during the Great Depression, and so far we’ve seen Dandelion Salad, Pasta with Peas, Egg Drop Soup, and Peppers and Eggs.

In this video she prepares a typical Sunday breakfast that she and her family would have enjoyed. She starts out making a sugar cookie, made using 3/4 cup of sugar, 3 beaten eggs, 1-1/2 cup flour, a pinch of salt, and then mixes to combine. She then forms the dough into a tube, incorporating another 1-1/2 cups or so of flour to make them more manageable. She then cuts the dough into little shapes and places them on an ungreased cookie sheet and bakes at 350 degrees until they’re golden brown. Then they sit to cool for a bit.

I love her story about how for a typical breakfast they’d have just bread and coffee, but that these cookies were a special treat on Sunday mornings, along with wafer cookies that she and her brother would split up.

She also shows us some old pictures while she makes the pot of coffee using an “old Depression pot” and freshly ground coffee. She says her and her siblings’ coffees were mostly milk with just a drop of coffee, and that they used evaporated milk (though later on she says it’s condensed milk).

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Cooking with Clara: Depression Breakfast

Great Depression Cooking with Clara is pretty self-explanatory: In an effort to preserve his grandmother’s recipes as well as her memories of growing up during the Great Depression, one of Clara’s grandsons started video taping Clara as she prepares an economical meal and talks about what life was like many years ago.

Clara’s videos so far have included Poor Man’s Meal, Peppers and Eggs, Pasta with Peas, and Egg Drop Soup.

To get things started, Clara digs up the dandelions with a knife right from her own yard. She trims off the roots, the dead leaves and the flowers (you don’t have to let the flowers go to waste, though!) before soaking and washing the remaining greens several times. If you’re going to try her method (commercially bagged dandelion greens are available in most super markets these days) make sure you haven’t used any pesticides on your lawn!

During this process, she talks about how she kept a knife in her purse when she worked at a Hostess bakery so that on her way home she could stop and harvest dandelions to take home to her mother. She also tells a story about food “falling from the sky!”

After several washings, Clara dries the greens and prepares the salad by drizzling lemon juice, olive oil and a sprinkle of salt over them. Clara says it tastes just the same as it did when she was a child, and she stresses again how good dandelion greens are for you.

Have you ever had a dandelion salad?

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Cooking With Clara: Dandelion Salad

Here’s another sweet video of Depression Cooking with Clara, preparing Pasta with Peas. While she fixes the food she recounts memories of what it was like to live through the Great Depression and how her family survived.

The inexpensive meal consists of potatoes, onion, canned peas and pasta, with a little tomato sauce added at the end. I actually think this sounds really good, though I’d use frozen peas instead of canned!

I really love watching these videos of Clara. They not only remind me of my own grandparents who also lived through the Depression and would talk about it once in a while, but also her style of cooking (cutting in the air over the pot) reminds me so much of one of my grandpas and my mom that I can’t help but smile.

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Clara Prepares Pasta with Peas

Clara, a 91-year-old great-grandmother, talks about growing up during the Great Depression and the meals she and her family prepared then in the video above.

She also fixes a “poorman’s meal” of potatoes, hot dogs and onions, which I remember my grandpa also making!

What cheap and delicious meals do you like to make?

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Depression Era Cooking with Clara