When you look up peasant food on Wikipedia you will see this brief description. “Peasant foods are dishes eaten by peasants, made from accessible and inexpensive ingredients. In many historical periods, peasant foods have been stigmatized. They may use ingredients, such as offal and less-tender cuts of meat. One-dish meals are common.  I grew up in a very loving home where my mom made dinner for us every night. I also grew up in a home where money was tight and we couldn’t afford name brand products and the best cuts of meat, but that never stopped her from making us three meals a day with all the love she had to give. whether it was Great Value mac’n’cheese with Bar S hot dogs cut up in them or Goulash with ground beef, ketchup, mustard, onions, brown sugar, egg noodles. still to this day my personal favorite family size tomato soup in which I put an entire sleeve of saltine crackers. 

  When I go into any kitchen and smell yeast baking, I am immediately transported back to my childhood home where I know that smell means we are in for a treat because mom made Crescent Rolls, a mock croissant that was a yeast roll that was rolled into a crescent shape. Something my grandma would provide at any family gathering. I grew up on Proletarian cuisine. Food for the mass’s food that not only fed our bodies, but also fed our souls because they were either recipes best down from our grandparents who survived the great depression, or they were made out of necessity because pay day is on Friday and its only Tuesday. What I want to do here is broaden this definition to include comfort food or poverty food. I want to celebrate the food our parents made to sustain us and to elevate some of these dishes to their proper place and to dig into the history of them and their ties to more traditional dishes.