Two Great Depression Ways to Extend a Few Eggs

Meals Tested Tasted And Approved, Good Housekeeping, 1931

I got the go-ahead to eat most of our normal foods today at my one-week post-op visit with the surgeon. I still can't have things like carrot sticks or nuts, but most of the rest of our foods are now a-okay. I came home and had a slice of bread, all in one piece (not cut up into small cubes). And I didn't puree our chicken noodle soup plus ate the biscuits as is. It was only a week, but I was really tiring of everything blended, pureed, liquified, or made soggy in liquids.

from page 59, Meals Tested Tasted and Approved

Anyway, one of the foods I did eat when needing things to be very soft were eggs, prepared in two ways that were popularized in the Great Depression: 1) soft scrambled eggs stretched with water, and 2) eggs with bread crumbs (as in the recipe above for Crumb Omelet).

The first egg variation, with lots of water, was a way to stretch a few scrambled eggs to look like more food for a family. Obviously, one would be filling out the egg meal with cheap starches like macaroni, biscuits, or potatoes, plus whatever vegetables or fruits the cook might have access to. The upside to stretching eggs with water (besides looking like more eggs) is that they come out very soft and easy to mash against the roof of one's mouth with their tongue. 

To extend eggs with water, I used 2 tablespoons of water for 1 large egg, beating well together, adding salt and pepper then scrambling in a hot skillet with fat. I cooked the egg until it was set, but not dried out. The water in the egg not only extends the egg, but it also creates steam which puffs up the egg, making it look like more volume. Most instructions for adding water to eggs recommend between 1 and 2 tablespoons of water per large egg.

The second egg variation extended the few eggs with bread crumbs, again making a few eggs look like many. For my purpose, I incorporated the bread crumbs this past week as a way to add soft grains to my meals. 

The recipe above calls for making this omelette-style. I made mine as scrambled eggs. As you can read in the recipe, this omelette was made with 4 large eggs, yet it served 6 people. That's 2/3 of an egg per person. Again, I would hope that the cook would be filling out the meal with lots of other filling and nutritious foods, perhaps a dandelion salad and a dish of fried potatoes.

Many home-cooks weren't fortunate enough to have a lot of eggs to work with each week in the 1930s. Stretching the eggs one did have to feed a large family was a bit of a challenge. We're rather spoiled in comparison, with the idea of two eggs as the normal serving per adult. In the cookbook pictured at the top of this post, most recipes provide 1 egg per serving, but there are a couple of other recipes that call for 5 eggs to feed 6 people.