That one-time simplicity

By John Gould | February 28, 1963

“You know,” I said, looking up from the vast bookkeeping connected with my many philanthropies, “It’s been a long time since we’ve had a mess of dried beef on potatoes.” Truth is, it has. Used to be almost a staple in the old days – made a good, hearty meal that everybody dove into, and all at once it came to me that it’s been a long time.

“Well,” she welled, “I was going to give you a three-way choice for supper tonight – hummingbird tongues on Melba toast with Turkish Delight, Mongolian pheasant tinder glass with kumquat soufflé, and dried beef on potatoes with hardtack.”

“I would take the dried beef,” I said, and she said, “It’s the most expensive.”

This turns out to be disturbingly so. What, from the memories of youth, was always a great way to stretch short pennies into the greatest good for the greatest number has become an epicure’s ne plus ultra of the age of enlightenment, and she has been hanging back on dried beef so she might have more money to spend for food.

When I hear somebody ask, “What is the world coming to?” I always make answer that I do not know.

She observes, too, that when she does buy some dried beef these days it is not the same as it used to be. It used to come in fairly large slices, rolled together adroitly so it would fill the bottle or can. Now it is otherwise; you get two-three sheets wrapped around a gorm of shreds and crumbs, and pride of workmanship is gone. The bundle doesn’t open out into the same product.

It has variously been observed by astute observers that a great many of the good things to eat that adorned the simple life back on the farm were cheap. This fact was known to the custodian of the family exchequer, but was not suspected by the others. We thought we ate those things because they were the best things in the world to eat. Take baked beans. On a farm that regularly laid out 10 to 15 acres of baking beans there wasn’t anything any cheaper. But when adorned with honest pork, laced with dark molasses, and suitably infused with love and ginger, a pot of beans on the supper table was about as high off the hog as anybody wanted. We thought that was pretty good.

In the days when hands were busy all day at outdoor work and exercise was a process of life an appetite was a presumption of ingestion. And if you figured it cost maybe a quarter of a cent a portion to set baked beans before a family, you figured it high because there were always some left over for breakfast. And you were serving something the Waldorf chefs couldn’t match, and can’t. Put a pan of buttermilk biscuits alongside, some crisp, juicy sour pickles, and an apple pie, and if you listened you could hear mighty Zeus on high Olympus whimpering in envy as he toyed with his plain old nectar and ambrosia. This is true, because I was there.

Dried beef didn’t cost much. It was supposed to be some kind of an orphan of the packing industry, and although it had a Chicago by-line on it we understood it was really South American meat and a by-product. For a few cents Mother could get a big jar of the stuff, and with the magic of her kitchen wand could translate it magnificently.

If she wanted to raise supper into the million-dollar category, she could bake the potatoes, but usually she just boiled them. Understand that we had potatoes pushing up against the floor timbers down cellar and the cows and pigs helped us eat them, so 10 or 15 bushels one way or the other worried nobody. So there was a big iron pot for boiling potatoes, and it never cooled off. People today don’t use potatoes the way we did. We put them in bread, and made soup of them – not the cold, clammy stuff with the fancy name, but real hot soup. We had fried potatoes for breakfast, even, and with a bacon fat flavor they’re hard to beat. And for dried beef the boiled hot potato was just the checker.

It got smashed on the plate, with a gob of butter on top, and then we dipped into the bowl to cover it with creamed dried beef. The top-notch kind would have a half-dozen hard-boiled eggs worked into the sauce, and the little chunks of yolk would look up and grin at you like a burst of sunshine. Everything was fine and dandy. The dried beef had a smoky, salty flavor that suggested the exotic; giving you a Westphalian ham or Labrador gasperaux effect.

Everybody got up full as ticks, replete and surfeited, convinced this was the best of all possible worlds and that fortune had favored us with the greatest cook ever to grasp a spoon.

Well, she argues that when she goes to the store to spend $25 for a little bag of modern goodies to stave off starvation, and her thoughts turn to dried beef, prudence suggests there are better ways to spend the last digits in the budget. As an occasional experience with the expensive, yes; but the one-time simplicity of dried beef and boiled potatoes has been priced out of sight in the great progress of logistics. “If we were millionaires,” she says, “We could have it every meal,” and I can’t think of a better reason to be a millionaire.