We Ate 1950's Recipes For A Week • Mom In Progress

Oh my God, there are scales. It's kind of like chicken nugget. Toss the salad, shall we? Oh boy. Strong pot pie vibes. I have dinner party feast. Hi, I'm Hannah. I'm the world's okayest mom. And the other night I had a thought. Thank you, pregnancy insomnia. I love making wacky foods for my kids and interesting new foods for them to try. So for an entire week, I'm gonna only cook recipes from the 1950s. I really wanna put myself to the test and see if I can withstand this 1950s challenge. Well, I tried my best to get a variety of proteins, really get a good sense of what the cuisine was like in 1950s America. So I really wanted to accumulate this week with a giant 1950s dinner party. So of course I had to reach out to my mom. I had to find all of my old vintage cookbooks. I had to definitely pick her brain for some advice. Hi mom. Hi honey. So I need some help because I'm planning to host a 1950s themed dinner party for my friends. And I just wanted to know if you have any advice. Time of the party, have your hair done, your makeup done, you're ready. You know, you've got your little hostess apron on and have all the ambience, like fifties, right? I don't have a tablecloth or an apron. Is that necessary? Yes. Yes, honey, it is. You don't do fifties without that. I wanna buy that for you because I know you probably won't. I don't wanna send you the cash for it though. What should I do? Oh, you can actually just send me the money with Zal because we already enrolled you. Do you remember? I do remember. It makes it so easy. All you have to do is add my phone number and click. The money will go to my bank account in minutes. Oh my God. You've been trying to get me to buy a tablecloth. I know, you won't regret it. It's gonna be so much fun. Thank you for sending me money, even though I'm in my thirties. Anytime, honey. All right, love you mom. Love you, honey. I'm armed with a very lengthy grocery list and we'll see if I can find anything. It wasn't complicated, but there were a lot of items that I had never purchased before. So I'm gonna head home and sort through all these groceries and hope I didn't forget anything. And we will see what's up. It is dinner time and I'm gonna make something that actually sounded really fancy when I saw the recipe title, but it actually is really, really simple. So the first recipe I wanted to try was chicken croquettes. I've never made a croquette personally. I definitely wanted to start this week off with something that everyone would enjoy. And so it's got some of those core foods that everybody likes. A lot of these fifties recipes are very chicken heavy. A lot of chicken going on. There's not a whole lot of vegetables. So I think I'm gonna have to pair this with a salad of some sort. Two tablespoons of minced celery, which is basically the equivalent of if I thought about celery while I was eating this dish. There are some ingredients that feel like they're just there to be there. I was a little confused over the celery, but at the end of the day, it was something fresh. This feels very under seasoned. I will just say that. Okay. One patty. Now these are not cooked in butter. These are fried in shortening. How very fifties. Oh, are you hungry? Yeah. Okay. You like it? What would you give it out of 10? What number? 10? Two? Yeah. Going in for another bite, so that's good. Okay, let's see what the biggest kid likes. You know what? I'm getting like strong pot pie vibes. Oh, poultry seasoning is very timey. It's very good. It was something that my family didn't even realize might've been out of the norm for this day and age. It's all ingredients that everyone's very familiar with. Everyone enjoyed it. Everybody ate it. It was really tasty and really easy. This morning, I'm making a classic fifties breakfast. You see it at every American diner. It's kind of still here, like the classic fifties breakfast. But what I did not factor in is that I have a 9 a.m. doctor's appointment and I didn't time manage well enough. I was very tired this morning. So I'm a bad fifties housewife. What do you think of when you think of like a classic American breakfast? Because for me, it's eggs, bacon, and pancakes. Okay, Jackson requested a smiley face. This reminds me of a Doofy movie. Look how cute. It's lunchtime and you know what we're having for lunch? Vegetables? No. No. Some hearty ham sandwiches. I mean, sometimes in life, you just throw together a ham sandwich and that's lunch. And so I felt very realistic to me. Are you redressing your sandwich? Yes. I don't know if mustard is something that... Oh yes? You have a deconstructed ham sandwich. Wouldn't be a fifties week without a little bit of tuna. I couldn't let the week go by without making a tuna noodle casserole. It's tuna, yes. What do you think? It's good. Oh, this is a little full. Okay. What am I doing? Oh, I made a mistake. The final thing that my mom said I cannot forget is crushed potato chips on top. Close your mouth. What do you think? You don't like it? You like it? Yeah, okay. Both Henry and Wyatt were hesitant to try it at first. I think just because tuna is a strong smell. But once everyone got that first bite in, everybody loved it. What do you think? Really good. Tasty? Yeah. Oh yeah. While we were on a roll with fish casseroles, I had to try one other fish casserole that I had seen in a couple recipe books, which is a salmon surprise. My hope is that the surprise is it sounds very bland, but it's actually very flavorful. I bought this like bougie can of salmon. And when I opened it, it had all of the bones and skin in it. Oh my God. There are scales. But I wasn't gonna let this salmon go to waste. So I spent a lot of time picking out all of the bones. I realized my mayo is vegan. I hope this is okay. Parmesan. So I found a lot of these recipes from family recipes, and I feel like the Parmesan is an addition after the fact. It doesn't seem too authentically 50s. Maybe we're cheating a little bit with this Parmesan, but most of the recipes I've seen are like American cheese or cheddar. So basically what I think the surprise was is like layered, almost scalloped potatoes on top of the salmon. Two layers down and one to go. I had to add the green salad. I just had to. There was so much beige, but I think the green salad is allowed. I didn't add anything to it. It's just greens. Jackson is my garbage disposal. I say it all the time. He loves everything I make. He's really easy to please. Just give him a plate of food and he's happy. So he was thoroughly impressed with all of these 50s recipes because it was something new. Here you go, love. Jackson's not feeling so good, so we're just being careful. And there's your surprise. It really looks like scalloped potatoes. It does, right? You like it? Yeah. Oh, good. Oh my goodness. You like it? You got creamy potatoes and cheese. It's gonna be good. And the salmon honestly was very mild. It wasn't super fishy. The tuna casserole was a lot fishier in taste. What do you think of your dinner? Do you like it more than the other meals or what's your favorite so far? I think I like the chicken... Croquettes? Croquettes. Today's dinner sounds interesting, but it actually looks very good. It's a ground beef biscuit casserole and it actually has quite a few vegetables in it, so I'm very excited. You know, we're really on a casserole streak here. I feel like it's not all casseroles this week, I promise. It's about one cup of celery and one cup of carrots. It honestly, it was almost like the beef version of a pot pie or like a drop biscuit pot pie. I was supposed to drain and discard the grease and I just added my butter to the grease. Ah, hold on. Oh geez, I dropped you. I'm sorry. What do I put this in? Oh boy, okay. So I really wasn't equipped with the amount of cooking utensils needed or maybe I just wasn't a good enough 50s housewife keeping up with the dishes quick enough. Don't mind my beater whisk. My whisk is always dirty these days. Trying to mix this butter with the flour. Nobody panic. I'm gonna add these veggies. Seasoning with a little garlic powder and I'm gonna bring this to a boil. So I don't have a cookie cutter, so I'm cutting the biscuits out with a glass. This is not as pretty as I envisioned. What did you put in your mouth? That's not food. That's very good. For Wyatt, it definitely was a challenge, but the biscuits on top made it a lot more palatable for him. This tastes really good. Matt said it reminded him of his childhood. Does it please my husband? It pleases me. While I was on a roll with nostalgic foods this week, I had to bring back a classic and make some beef stroganoff. Got some mushrooms and onions cooking down here. This smells absolutely incredible. Got some egg noodles and some steak. I knew it was gonna be a creamy dish. I just didn't realize how much sour cream is in that meal. Another kind of gray dish, but it smells fantastic. Here we have the plated dish, and of course I'm serving it alongside a salad. I think they just called it a salad, like not meaning salad. I think I'm just reading into this, but I love the idea of serving it alongside a salad made out of Jell-O. Everybody loved it, so that's a win for me. That means it's on my list of repeat meals, but it is intense. You leave the table feeling full. Well, someone dug right in. Is it good? This is actually Jell-O. Mm-hmm. Time to serve. Now, the key to a good dinner party is plenty of appetizers and plenty of entrees. All of these recipes had extensive preparations, so I needed to carve out an entire day for dinner party prep. I have this cream cheese, with which I'm going to make olive-stuffed celery. Lot of seasonings for a 50s recipe going on here. So the thing that threw me off for the olive-stuffed celery was it had a ton of chopped pecans in it, which when I'm thinking of a bunch of different types of olives and pickles and like cream cheese and celery, I'm not thinking like, let's throw some nuts on this. Looks and smells very good. It's not a 50s week without an ambrosia salad. Mini marshmallows, I have pineapple tidbits and canned mandarin oranges. So my final dish is potato salad. I've never made potato salad from scratch. I am a very big fan of buying potato salad at the grocery store. And as for entrees, I wanted to make chicken a la king because that was another dish that Matt recognized and remembered. My grandma used to have boxes of it in her freezer. Every 50s dinner party needs like the crown jewel dish. So I decided to make a giant spiral sliced ham. Come on, stay on. Come on, friends. Two more slices. Where should they go? Right now, I'm making a cherry angel food cake. I have my sifted flour. I have my bundt pan. I have my diced maraschino cherries. I have my egg whites. I'm gonna fold the flour in until there are no more streaks. It's got a couple lumps, but I just don't wanna mess with it or deflate it anymore. Doing great, everybody. I'm just gonna clean it up a little, get that straggly stuff and then pop it in the oven. This cake was very touch and go and did not want to come out of the pan. A good dinner party host is put together. She's got her hair done. She's got her makeup done. She's got her cute little apron. And I just, I wanted to look the part. Actually, these rollers are kind of nice. Kind of like them. Wow, I look good. It looks like you're wearing a fancy one, like a business suit. So the final step to an epic dinner party is the tablescape. All right, here we are. Here it is. What did you think of the canapés? They're actually good. You like them? Two different kinds of pickles. Okay. Three different kinds of olives. Wow. I'm gonna, yeah. How's the ham? This reminds me of my grandma. Okay, the chicken ala can is very good. I am so bad at filming when I have people over because I'm trying to host the whole time. But the dinner party was a big success. The food went over really well. So that's all for now. I'm Hannah, and please tell me, would you eat or make any of these 1950s recipes? Let me know on Instagram. And if you'll please excuse me, I'm gonna put my feet up and just be horizontal for a while. Spent a lot of time on my feet. Till next time.