She started many years ago, as per the thread, with Campbell’s condensed TS and Velveeta or “American cheese” on white bread cooked in margarine. One of her great “comfort foods.”

Now when she’s gloomy I fix her Progresso Hearty Tomato Soup and aged cheddar on some kind of “artisan” bread sauted in real butter (or, occasionally, bacon grease).

Plus ca change, plus c’est le meme chose. Or not.

[Sprinkle in diacritics to taste.]

Back in the 1930s, Campbell’s was famous for buying some huge percentage of New Jersey’s tomato crop. New Jersey, if you didn’t know, is still The Garden State. The trucks at the plant backed up for miles. and they did huge batch runs and cranked out a year’s worth of soup inside of a month. Remember, if you wanted tomato products before then, you either had to wait for late summer, own a heated greenhouse or can your own. Campbell’s tomato soup was part of a nutritional revolution. The 19th century diet was much more seasonal, and for a lot of the year, it was pretty god awful.

It’s easy to put down industrial food now that we worry about poor people getting too fat rather than too skinny, but something amazing happened between 1890 and 1930. Manufacturing, which includes food processing, increased in efficiency by two or three orders of magnitude. All those pipes and tubes and cams and gears and electric eyes and automatic temperature controls were revolutionary, as were home refrigerators, automatic gas ranges, and electric toasters. In the 1930s, and the post-war 1950s those conveniences and convenience food really were part of the brave new world, it’s just that most of us are too young to remember what it was like before then.

We’ve been going through some old family recipes from the 1950s. (I’ve been scanning them so I can find them on my computer.) The one for crab imperial was great, even if it didn’t call for cream of mushroom soup. We’re trying the Coca Cola cake next, but I doubt we can find real Coca Cola anymore.

(P.S. You can substitute butter, cream and mushrooms for cream of mushroom soup, and you can cook down a few fresh tomatoes in olive oil if you don’t have any Campbell’s handy. We’ve also found that a good farmhouse cheddar makes a good substitute for those American cheese slices or Velveeta. Hmm, I may have an idea for a cookbook here.)

The dirty culinary secret in our house is that my mother thickens her soup (chicken and vegetable made with homemade stock and pureed fresh veg) with Thick Chicken packet soup and also thickens her stew with either Scotch Broth or Beef and Vegetable packet soup, depending on whether it’s lamb or beef stew. And they’re all absolutely delicious.

So that you can eat the slices of apple with slices of cheddar cheese on top, of course. Still my favourite snack!

I grew up in the 70’s eating an amazing dish called “Six Can Casserole” – one can cream of mush, one can cream of chick, evap. milk, chow mein noodles (another great 70’s food), and two small cans chicken. Mix and heat. I still make it every five years or so as a tribute to my small town midwestern roots.

frozen grated cheese + frozen (or fresh) flour* tortillas + a hot griddle + about 3 minutes = enough calories to tame the ravening horde.

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*Theron@43—seems to be a regional variation. For us, corn tortillas for enchiladas and other baked recipes; flour for quesadillas and burritos.

My nephews used to give little onion-chopping machines for Christmas. Some of the devices were rather admirable in their useless ingenuity, but they were all harder to clean than the knife I use to chop up an onion in maybe 30 seconds.