How Food That I Fed My Kids in the 70's was Better

Yes! The food that I fed my kids in the 70's  was better food than any mom can feed her kids today.

At the typical Safeway, say the one on Washington St. before it turned into Von's and then halfway back again, the meat counter alone was a miracle of choice and diversity. There before you was spread the treasure of a rich continent, and the only  thing holding you back was cost and talent.  Nothing held me back in those days, fortunately. I was still in my honeymoon of motherhood, in the seventies, when my husband lived at home, earned good money, and I didnt have to leave my little children in order to be liberated at work. And I loved to cook!

There before us was:
1. Veal shanks--oh how yummy to make osso bucco!
2. Veal chops and stew meat. Veal is delicious and was not criminal in those days.
3. Seafood in great variety: West Coast fish, oysters in little glass bottles if you wanted to get them that way, shrimps huge and pink from Texas or the Pacific, crayfish/lobster tails from South America (anybody remember those?), 
4.Beef both young and mature, huge steaks with BONES those anthropological mysteries that have disappeared from the grocer's meat counters, roasts of all sorts including seven bone roast which can be put into the oven in the am with a little onion and water, and left all day at two fifty degrees while you go to the zoo and aquarium and wherever else you choose to, returning home to the most delicious dinner ever at five or six...
5. Pork, pink and yummy...it was different. Pork chops were different. Or, I should say that pork is different now, for then they were of the quality that pork has been throughout the millenia...something just delicious and not hard as a brickbat after it's been grilled as now.
6. Lamb! Exotic, innocent lamb..delightful tiny chops, wonderful roasts and even wonderful lamb shoulder stew..(NOT exotic, but GOOD!)
7. Ground meats of all sorts...that did not give people e-coli for some reason even though processing was not what it now is...hmm...think of that...it was local and fresher, that's why!

The vegetable bins were less full of colorful stuff. Asian products were not in evidence much. But the vegetables that existed were huge, fresh and fine. Nothing had yet been genetically tampered with. Imagine that! If you didnt eat it expediently, it would rot or die...It was real.

The bread you made your 2000 cheese sandwiches or beef sandwiches or tuna sandwiches or chicken sandwiches with was  MUCH better food than what it is today.  It's probably, with oils, one of the most genetically altered substances that we are eating now.  Watch out. We must either give it up or go to a great deal of trouble and watchfulness to buy good flour and make out own.

I havent covered all foods (focussing on meat I know) because what made me think of all this is:
Veal Marengo.  Veal Marengo was invented by Napoleon's cook when they were out on the battlefield; The General was hungry, and the chef didnt have much at hand. It must have been during the Italian campaign because what evolved as the chef desperately threw a dish together was Veal Marengo.  Pimentoes are the crowning mark of Veal Marengo for me. I love pimentoes, the ordinary jarred kind by Dromedary, which I always have around.

I invented Chicken Marengo before I heard about the veal version, using chicken, onion, mushrooms, wine, and pimentoes. It was one of those dishes that you remember all your life when the flavors come together just right and it's perfect. When I read about Veal Marengo in a cookbook, I knew that I'd invented a good thing and Napoleon would have enjoyed it.

I thought about all that this morning when I made my egg, gently fried on a thin thin glaze of butter in the skillet, with a generous spoonful of pimentoes sizzling beside it. Try it. You'll like your Eggs Marengo. It will take you back to the days when food was actually better and could stand on its own in a simple, simple dish just like that. YAZZYBEL