Pillsbury tries for a creative spin on budget-friendly

Dwindling enrollment during the pandemic means fewer classes for me and less money than usual this spring. That means it's time to see what 1970s families did when prices for everything were rising and paychecks were not!

Pillsbury's Money Saving Meals (ed. Dianne Hennessy King, 1970) provides entire money-saving menus that try to make thrifty 1970s favorites seem exciting.

Sometimes, the book just suggests that making staples look fancy will buoy the family's spirits. Want some fancy-looking breads so dinner will seem sophisticated rather than cheap?

Nope, that's not a basket of specialty breads from the local bakery.

They're Quick Biscuit Braids: refrigerated biscuits cut up, rolled out, braided, and topped with seeds or other goodies for a little flavor/ texture, so it wouldn't be so immediately obvious that they were canned biscuits. I have to admit that I'm still kind of in love with this super-easy plan that would have seemed like the height of sophistication to me when I was a kid and thought that an Easy Cheese ruffle on a Wheat Thin was about as classy as a snack could get.

The suggestions aren't usually going for sophisticated, though. They are just attempts to make it less noticeable that there are only so many really cheap ingredients. The best a cook can often hope for is a way to recombine those well-known budget ingredients so they will at least seem new-ish, like this Saturday Night Supper menu.

Beef 'n Bean Roll-Up is not quite sloppy joes. It's not quite baked beans. It's not quite pot pie. It's kind of all of those things, but not quite any of them, so it's new, right? And there are countless variations if this is a little too close to whatever usually gets made on budget night.

Okay, so there are four variations, and they're basically for different types of biscuits on top or to allow for whatever protein is on hand if the ground beef already got used up.

On the side, why choose either the budget-friendly cole slaw OR gelatin salad when you can have both?

And again, there are so many variations! Maybe try canned carrots if you don't have cabbage? How about grapes and oranges with cabbage? Who knows? The point is that you can chuck whatever you have into the Jell-O and call it a day. 

These are not sexy recipes, but they'll give the family something to eat and leave enough gas money for the parents to get to work.

Sometimes the book tries a little too hard to sell the ideas, though. On another Saturday Night, diners are offered Glazed Tuna Burgers.

I get it. Canned tuna is pretty cheap, especially if you go with chunk light and fill it out with plenty of cracker crumbs. Pretending that you're "treat[ing] the kids to tunaburgers instead of hamburgers for a change," though, is not going to fool anyone. They will just not be more excited by the idea of canned fish and crackers than they would have been by a burger.

And if the kids in question are anything like I was as a child (or as an adult, TBH), dumping gloppy, hot crushed pineapple on top is only going to make matters worse! 

At least I would have happily chowed down on the Broccoli with Cheesy Egg Sauce.

So maybe that's the moral of this? Keep looking at budget ingredients long enough, and surely something will eventually be edible, even if it is just broccoli under a layer of cheese soup and chopped-up eggs? A little paprika can even make it seem semi-fancy, just like a little extra shaping and some sesame seeds can make canned biscuits seem handmade.

Now I'm going to try to apply this logic to the rest of my life. Fewer classes also means more free time to dig through old cookbooks, and more incentive to see what I can make of all those canned beans that I neatly stow in the pantry and promptly forget about....