25 Forgotten Crockpot Dinners from the 1970s No One Makes Anymore!

In 1971, at Chicago's National Housewares Show, a Kansas City company called Rival unveiled a squat little electric pot nobody had ever heard of. A rebranded version of an appliance that had spent 30 years failing to sell under a different name, the Naxon Beanery. They called it the Crock Pot, printed up a booklet of recipes, and quietly hoped somebody would notice. In its Four years later, that number was 93 million. One dinner on this list has a name so strange, so full of showbiz nonsense, that you would never guess it came straight out of a professional test kitchen. The microwave, the drive-thru, and the instant pot eventually pushed it off the counter for good. Hit that subscribe button and let us count down 25 forgotten Crock Pot dinners from the 1970s that no one makes anymore. Crock Pot Baked Beans. No dish in 1970s America connected further back than this one, and you will find out exactly why before this countdown is over. Soak a pound of dry navy beans overnight in cold water, then drain them and load them into the Crock Pot. Add a chunk of salt pork, diced onion, molasses, brown sugar, and dry mustard, and pour in just enough water to barely cover. No more, because nothing evaporates under that lid the way it would on a stove. Cover it and cook low for 8 to 10 hours without lifting the lid once. Every peak costs 20 minutes of heat. The beans came out tender all the way through, the sauce dark and syrupy, clinging to each one instead of running thin. A pound of dry beans cost pennies and fed a whole crowd. This was the dish that proved a pot could be trusted to work an entire day without a single person watching it. Hungarian Goulash. When one pot had to feed everyone on a tight budget, this is what a 1970s mother reached for. Brown beef chuck cubes hard in a skillet with onion and green pepper. This step is not optional, because nothing browns inside a Crock Pot, and the flavor comes from that crust. Scrape everything into the pot, then stir the paprika into the hot drippings before adding the tomatoes, so the spice blooms in the fat instead of going bitter. Add crushed tomatoes and tomato sauce, cover, and cook low for seven hours. The beef fell apart at the touch of a spoon. The sauce ran deep red and warm with paprika, best ladled over buttered egg noodles. Every household had its own version, and every version was defended fiercely. Real Goulash asked for hours of low heat, precisely what the Crock Pot handed over for free. Chicken and dumplings. This was the pot that warmed the whole house on a cold night, and it needed almost nothing from the cook. Load bone-in chicken pieces into the Crock Pot with broth, sliced celery and onion, and cook low for six hours until the meat falls from the bone. Pull the chicken out, strip the meat, and stir it back in. Now turn the pot to high. The dumplings need real heat, and drop spoonfuls of biscuit dough across the surface. Cover and cook 30 minutes more, and do not lift that lid, because the steam is what cooks them. The dumplings came out pillowy on top and silky underneath, thickening the broth as they cooked. Dumplings had always demanded a watchful eye on a stovetop. The Crock Pot did the eight hours of work first, leaving only 30 minutes of actual attention at the end. Swiss steak. Here is the dinner that took the toughest, cheapest cut in the meat case, and made it the most tender thing on the table. Pound round steak thin with the edge of a saucer, then dredge it in seasoned flour and brown it hard in a hot skillet. That flour coating does double duty. It builds the crust, and it thickens the gravy over the next eight hours. Lay the steak in the Crock Pot, top it with a can of stewed tomatoes, sliced onion, and green pepper, cover, and cook low for seven to eight hours. The beef fell into soft shreds under the fork, the gravy thick and savory with tomato and onion. Round steak was cheap precisely because it was tough. Eight patient hours fixed what no skillet ever could, and nobody at the table ever guessed it cost less than a dollar a pound. Stuffed green peppers. This is the dish that finally escaped the oven for good, and every summer kitchen in America was grateful. Slice the tops off green bell peppers and hollow them out. Mix raw ground beef with cooked rice, diced onion, and half a can of tomato sauce, then pack the peppers full. Stand them upright in the Crock Pot, shoulder to shoulder so they hold each other up, and pour the remaining sauce over the top. Cover and cook low for six hours. The rice must go in already cooked, or it will drink the sauce and leave the filling dry. Ham and scalloped potatoes. When the Sunday ham was down to its last slices, this is where the rest of it went. Slice the potatoes thin, a quarter inch at most, or they will still be firm after seven hours, and layer them in the Crock Pot, alternating with diced ham. Whisk a can of cream of mushroom soup with a half cup of milk, and pour it over each layer as you build, so the sauce reaches all the way down instead of sitting on top. Cover and cook low for seven hours. The potatoes drank up the creamy sauce, the ham gave it salt and smoke, and the edges caught and browned against the sides of the crock. Nothing wasted, and no oven required. Last week's ham, reborn as this week's entire dinner. Assembled in five minutes flat, before the school bus came. Pork chop abracadabra. And here is that name, pure 1970s showbiz nonsense, and a real recipe, a real company printed on purpose. Lay thick cut pork chops in a single layer in the Crock Pot, overlapping as little as possible, so each one cooks evenly. Whisk a can of cream of mushroom soup with a packet of dry onion soup mix, and a quarter cup of water, and pour it over the top. Cover and cook low for six to seven hours. Thin chops turn to sawdust in a Crock Pot. The whole trick is buying them thick. The pork practically dissolved into the gravy around it, savory and rich, with a thick sauce that begged for mashed potatoes. The name was a wink to the housewife who put in almost no effort, and pulled out something that tasted like magic. It is one of the most delightful artifacts of the whole Crock Pot era, and almost nobody remembers it existed. Hot dog perfection. Here is the cheapest crowd feeder in 1970s America, and the exclamation point in the name belonged to the recipe, not to me. Stand the frankfurters upright in the Crock Pot, rather than piling them flat, so they steam evenly instead of sitting in their own liquid. Add no water at all. The dogs release enough on their own. Cover and cook on low for two to four hours. For the loaded version, pour a can of chili and a handful of shredded cheddar over the top in the final hour, and let it melt down through them. They came out juicier than any boiled dog ever managed, the skins snapping and the insides steaming hot. Church fundraisers, little league snack stands, after-school suppers. One pot fed 20 kids for almost nothing. Nobody would think to make them this way now, and that is exactly why it belongs on this list. Crock Pot meatloaf. Here is the classic that finally stopped drying out, and it took a whole new appliance to fix it. Mix ground beef with breadcrumbs, a beaten egg, minced onion, and seasoning. Then shape it into a freestanding loaf and set it directly on the bottom of the Crock Pot. No pan needed. Roll two or three balls of foil and sit the loaf on top of them, so the grease drains away underneath instead of stewing the meat. Glaze the top with ketchup and brown sugar. Cover and cook low for six hours. It came out moist and tender in a way an oven-baked loaf rarely managed. The glaze caramelized into the surface, every bite juicy right through. The one real problem with meatloaf was that it needed checking every 20 minutes, and a working mother could no longer be there to check it. The Crock Pot simply waited patiently until she walked back in the door. Here is what nobody tells you about the 1970s Crock Pot boom. It was never really about the appliance. It was about solving one very specific, very new problem. Through the decade, more American mothers went to work outside the home than ever before in the country's history. Dinners still had to be on the table by six, but now there were no hours left in the afternoon to make it happen. The old rules of homemade cooking assumed a woman standing at the stove all day. That assumption had just stopped being true for millions of families at once. The Crock Pot was the answer, and the company that sold it knew exactly what it was selling. Their advertisements said it plainly, cook all day without being home all day. That's freedom. It was not a shortcut. It was permission. Permission to leave the house in the morning and still put a real homemade dinner on the table that night. We did not lose these dinners because they stopped tasting good. We lost them because we stopped trusting a pot to do the work while we were gone. The countdown continues. Cantonese dinner. For a great many American families, this was their first taste of anything resembling Chinese food at home. Brown strips of pork or beef in a hot skillet, then add them to the Crock Pot with sliced celery, onion, soy sauce, and a spoonful of brown sugar. Cover and cook low for six hours. In the last 20 minutes, stir in a can of drained bean sprouts and a cornstarch slurry. Chicken Lickin' Good Pork Chops. Here is another name that sounds like a joke and produced one of the most copied recipes of the decade. Dredge pork chops in seasoned flour, shaking off the excess, and brown them hard on both sides in a hot skillet. Stack them in the Crock Pot. Pour a can of cream of chicken soup thinned with a splash of water over the top. Cover and cook low for six to seven hours. The flour on the chops dissolves slowly into the soup over those hours and turns it into real gravy instead of watery sauce. The chops turned so tender they collapsed under a fork, sitting in a thick gravy that soaked straight into mashed potatoes. The name was ridiculous. The dish was not. It got passed hand to hand on index cards for decades, and half the people who made it never knew where it came from. Sauerkraut with Kielbasa. This was the smell that filled a Pennsylvania or Ohio kitchen for six hours straight, and it meant supper was handled. Rinse and drain the sauerkraut first, unless you want it fiercely sour. Then spread it across the bottom of the Crock Pot. Lay sliced kielbasa on top rather than buried underneath so the sausage steams instead of boiling away its flavor into the kraut. Scatter over a spoonful of brown sugar, a pinch of caraway seed, and a peeled sliced apple. Cover and cook low for six hours. The sausage turned smoky and rich, the sauerkraut soft and The apple melting away into a faint sweetness through the whole pot. Polish, German, and Czech families brought this to America and kept it going. The Crock Pot let their grandchildren keep making it without giving up an entire afternoon. Glazed ham. Here is the dinner that turned an ordinary Sunday into something that felt like a holiday without ever touching the oven. Set a bone-in ham into the Crock Pot cut side down, and score the top in a so the glaze can sink in. Whisk brown sugar, mustard, and a little pineapple juice together and brush it over the surface. Cover and cook low for four hours, spooning the collected juices back over the top once if you happen to be home. Add no water. The ham makes its own. The glaze caramelized into the scored surface, and every slice came out sweet, salty, and glistening. The best part was what it freed up, the oven, on a day when a mother almost certainly needed it for something else. No basting, no checking, no timer, and a centerpiece dinner waiting when the family walked in. Braised short ribs. Here is the cut that punished impatience and rewarded absolutely nothing else until this pot came along. Brown the short ribs hard on every side in a hot skillet, then set them bone side down in the Crock Pot. Pour off most of the skillet fat, cook the onion and garlic in what remains, stir in a spoonful of tomato paste until it darkens, then deglaze with beef broth and scrape every browned bit into the pot. Cover and cook low for eight hours. Skim the fat off the top before serving. Short ribs render a great deal of it. The meat pulled clean off the bone, and the liquid reduced into a dark, glossy sauce worth spooning over everything else on the plate. Short ribs were cheap in the 1970s because nobody had eight hours to cook them properly. The Crock Pot supplied those hours for free while the family was out of the house entirely. Down south barbecue. This is how a family with no smoker and no backyard pit still put barbecue on the table. Rub a pork shoulder all over with salt, pepper, and paprika, and set it in the Crock Pot fat side up so it bastes itself as it renders. Add only a half cup of liquid barbecue sauce thinned with cider vinegar because the shoulder releases plenty of its own and too much makes it soupy. Cover and cook low for eight hours, then shred it with two forks right in the pot and let it sit 20 minutes in its own juices. The pork came out smoky, tangy, and falling apart. Every shred soaked through with sauce. Real barbecue meant tending a fire for half a day, which almost nobody could do on a Tuesday. This delivered nearly the same result from a cheap cut and a bottle from the grocery store. Brisket dinner. Nothing on this list rewarded patience quite like a brisket, and nothing punished a rush more. Season the brisket generously and lay it fat side up on a bed of thick sliced onion. The onions lift the meat off the bottom and melt away into the sauce over the day. Add beef broth to come only a third of the way up the meat and drop in a bay leaf. Cover and cook low for nine or ten hours. Let it rest before slicing and always cut against the grain or all those hours are wasted. The brisket fell into tender strands, the juices ran deep and beefy, and the onions had disappeared entirely into the sauce. Round steak casserole. Here is the workhorse dinner of a thousand 1970s weeknights, and it left exactly one dish to wash. Cut round steak into strips, dredge them in flour, and brown them quickly. Layer the crock pot in order. Sliced potatoes and carrots on the bottom where the heat is strongest, then the onion, then the beef on top, then a can of tomatoes poured over everything. Root vegetables take longer than meat, so they go beneath it. Cover and cook low for eight hours. Everything cooked into everything else, hearty and unfussy, the vegetables rich with beef juices, and the whole meal sitting in a single pot. One dish, one cheap cut, one round of dishes. On a Tuesday in 1975, that combination was worth more to a working mother than almost anything else in her kitchen. Stuffed cabbage rolls. This was a whole Sunday's work in a Polish or Czech kitchen, until it became a Wednesday. Boil a whole cabbage head for a few minutes and peel the leaves off as they soften, then shave down the thick rib on each one so it will roll. Mix ground beef with cooked rice and diced onion. Spoon it onto each leaf, fold in the sides, and roll it up tight. Arrange them seam side down in the crock pot in tight layers so they cannot unroll. Cover them in a tomato sauce sweetened with a little brown sugar and sharpened with vinegar, and cook low for seven hours. The cabbage went soft and sweet, the beef and rice filling soaking up the tomato through every hour. Cabbage rolls carried an entire heritage inside a single leaf. Moving them to the crock pot meant a granddaughter with a full-time job could still put her grandmother's dish on the table. Welsh rabbit. Here is cheese on toast turned into an entire supper, and the pot solved the one problem that always ruined it. Grate the sharp cheddar, rather than cubing it, and set the crock pot to low, never high, because cheese breaks and turns grainy the second it gets too hot. Add a splash of beer or milk, a shot of Worcestershire, and a pinch of dry mustard, and let it melt slowly for an hour, stirring every 20 minutes or so, until it turns thick and glossy. Ladle it hot over toast, and slide it under the broiler if you want the top to bubble. The cheese soaked into the bread, the mustard gave it a bite, and the whole thing was so rich it almost felt like cheating. Cheese sauce scorches the second you look away from a stovetop. The crock pot's low, even heat fixed that completely, and then America forgot the dish anyway. Haluszki. Four cheap ingredients, and a lot of patience. This is peasant food in the purest and best sense. Shred a whole head of cabbage and slice two onions thin, then load them into the crock pot with a full stick of butter cut into pieces, and several cloves of minced garlic. Do not add a drop of water. The cabbage releases plenty of its own, and any extra turns the whole thing to soup. Cover and cook low for four to five hours, stirring once or twice, until the cabbage collapses to a fraction of its volume and goes golden at the edges. Stir in cooked egg noodles in the final 20 minutes, and season heavily with black pepper. The cabbage came out sweet and buttery from those long hours, the noodles soft and slick, the pepper cutting through all that richness. Haluszki fed Polish and Slovak families across the American rust belt for generations. It cost almost nothing, made a mountain of food, and the crock pot kept it on the table long after the grandmothers were gone. Beef stroganoff. Here is the dish that stopped being a dinner party and started being a Wednesday. Brown strips of beef with sliced onion and mushrooms in a hot skillet, then scrape everything into the crock pot with beef broth and a packet of onion soup mix. Cover and cook low for seven hours. Then comes the one rule that separated a good stroganoff from a curdled mess. Turn the pot off completely and let it cool for five minutes before stirring in a full cup of sour cream. Dairy added to a hot crock pot splits every single time. The sauce came out velvety and tangy, clinging to every strand of egg noodle underneath, the beef falling apart at the touch. The secret was a can of condensed mushroom soup, and every cook in America knew it. A dish that once meant candles and good china became something you started before work. Spare ribs, cabbage, and kraut. This is winter food from the German Midwest, and it demanded the exact hours nobody had left. Brown country-style spare ribs in a skillet first, then build the pot in layers. Sauerkraut and shredded cabbage on the bottom, ribs laid across the top. The meat has to sit above the kraut, not buried in it, or the acid draws out all the juices and leaves the pork stringy. Scatter a spoonful of brown sugar and a pinch of caraway over everything. Pot roast. Here is the dish that convinced a whole generation of skeptical cooks that this strange little pot actually worked. Sear the chuck roast hard on every side in a screaming hot skillet. The crock pot browns nothing, and without that crust, the whole thing tastes gray. Lay quartered potatoes, carrots, and onion in the bottom of the pot and set the roast on top of them. Then sprinkle over a packet of onion soup mix and add just a cup of broth. It needs far less liquid than a stovetop braise because nothing evaporates under that lid. Cover and cook low for eight hours. The meat pulled apart with a fork. The vegetables came out rich and savory from sitting in the beef juices all day, and the whole house smelled like Sunday dinner on an Wednesday. It asked for no skill and no attention and delivered a dinner that tasted like hours of careful tending. For most people, it is still the first dish that comes to mind, right before the one at the very top of this list. Beef stew. Here is the one. Of every dinner this appliance ever made possible, this is the single one people still dream about, and the woman who tested recipes in rival's own kitchen said it best decades later. Beef stew transcends the whole United States. Cut beef chuck into large cubes, toss them in seasoned flour, and brown them hard in batches. Crowding the skillet steams the meat instead of searing it, and that crust is where every bit of the flavor comes from. Load the crock pot with the beef, quartered potatoes, thick cut carrots, celery, and onion, and pour in just enough beef broth to barely cover. Cover it and cook low for eight to ten hours. The flour from the dredge thickens the broth on its own across those hours. No cornstarch, no roux, nothing to stir in at the end. It came out exactly the way stew is supposed to. The meat falling into soft shreds, the vegetables tender enough to cut with a spoon, the gravy thick and deeply beefy, tasting like it had simmered all day because it truly had. There was nothing regional about it, nothing that belonged only to the South or the Midwest or New England. A pot of beef stew started before work and finished by supper was the one dinner that looked the same on tables in every state in the country. That is the real reason beef stew sits at the very top of this list. It was never fancy. It never needed to be. It was simply the dish that proved this whole strange, humble invention, born from one immigrant engineer's memory of his mother's Sabbath stew, could genuinely feed an entire country, one working family at a time. We did not lose it because it stopped tasting good. We lost it the moment speed became more important than the eight quiet hours it took to make it right. And most of us never noticed the trade we had made until dinner stopped smelling like anything by the time we got home.