Customer Reviews

Square Meals

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
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Length:: 2:17 Mins

We love the recipes in SQUARE MEALS. We cooked the Victory Garden Supper Home Front Vegetable Plate, but we changed the ingredients to the ones we preferred. Of course as editors of The Collard Patch we included collard greens.

This cookbook contains some practical ideas for dishes to cook on a budget. Just as the people in our great nation learned how to cook great meals without spending very much, our people today can meet the challenges that face us because of shrinking grocery budgets. Here is a book to help survive the economic slowdown.

SQUARE MEALS with the great tastes of yesterday has many retroactive dishes that we enjoyed in our childhood and in our early adult years, when we wanted to eat well while living within small budgets. I confess that we tend to eat spicier foods these days and that it may be necessary to give some of the old standards some pep.

The Chocolate Bread Pudding recipe is something I've been looking for, and I found it here. Also there are some good old-fashioned tuna casseroles. I remember enjoying Cherry Coke Salad as a teenager, and the recipe is here. I can't wait to try Lemonade Fried Chicken.

I highly recommend this book. It has good stuff in it. Also the text with the recipes fascinates us. This book is one of those interesting cookbook readers.

We have the 1985 edition, which is listed as unavailable; it is, however, available at Amazon Marketplace. There are newer editions.

Absolutely one of my favorite cookbooks of all time, Square Meals is fun to read and the recipes are delicious. Jane and Michael Stern clearly love food, love fun and love our culinary history. Several of my best dependable recipes are in these pages - Mom's Best Pot Roast, Perfect Mashed Potatoes, and Mary Jane's Rice Pudding with Cream. (I can't quite bring myself to prepare "Undescended Twinkies", however.) As a cookbook collector and an avid cook, I can tell you that these recipes stand the test of time. Long after truffle oil and wasabi mashed yams have lost their appeal, you will still pine for Deep Dish Apple Pie and the memories it conjures. And I hope your copy, like mine, is inscribed "from your sweet-lovin' daddy."

There are cooking cookbooks and reading cookbooks, and this is my all-time favorite reading cookbook. This is the kind of cookbook that it's fun to curl up with on a cold night, just to soak in all that good comfort food. Of course, there are many wonderful cookable recipes - the Cincinnati Chili, for example, is absolutely outstanding, and authentic. The roast pork with sinner stuffing is also superb. This is the antithesis to 90's low-fat nouvelle cuisine and other overly fussy fare. Fun illustrations, too.

I was in the mood to read the other day but nothing seemed to strike my fancy when I spied my well-thumbed copy of SQUARE MEALS. This is not just a cookbook, but a history of food and culture that takes us back to the white-gloved "ladies who lunch" of the 1940's to the suburbanites of the 50's and 60's. The recipes are wonderfully familiar with pot roast, mac and cheese, and chicken noodle soup taking center stage. These are foods your grandmother cooked and there isn't a bean sprout in sight! Not only are the recipes great the stories and the history make for wonderfully satisfying reading. I would urge anyone with a love of food and a passion for kitchy history to get this and add it to their library.

Length:: 1:12 Mins

Square Meals is a great story cookbook about pot roast, biscuits, old fashioned chocolate fudge, tuna casserole, chocolate malts, pan fried chicken. . . . The old recipes go on and on. While I like all this old style food, I usually need to add a little spice to bring the food up to speed. I am a certified Spice Mouth(TM).

Mary Lou and I wrote The Collard Patch, and when we cook a vegetable medley, we are not happy unless we include collard greens. We had fun cooking the Victory Garden Supper Home Front Vegetable Plate. Traditionally people used to cook a big roast and line it with vegetables. This recipe substitutes a cauliflower head for the roast.

It is a healthy vegetarian variation of a great main dish, and it also is an economical one.

I hope this review helps.

There are so many good recipes and stories in this book that you are sure to enjoy it.

I have hundreds of cookbooks (yes, it's a bit silly, but I'm addicted!) and this is my absolute favorite: the one I go back to again and again. Almost everything in it is a good, basic, stick-to-your-ribs kind of dish of the kind that even Martha or Nigella would be a step above. But food fads come and go, while so many of the recipes in this book are classics that work again and again.

The different sections are varied enough that no matter what you're looking for, it's here. When I'm having a bad day, I look through the Nursery Treats section for comfort food. When I had to cook for someone with severe lactose intolerance, this was the first book I went to, because it has a whole chapter of WWII ration recipes. My husband and I love a good Sunday dinner, and lo and behold there's a whole chapter on that! And who doesn't love the kitsch appeal of 1920's lady lunches or 1950's suburban cuisine?

It's such a shame that this book is out of print. The recipes are so simple, and so good, and so completely classic.