Smart? Maybe... but at least it's entertaining

Yes, I want budget cookbooks because they often have terrible recipes, but I also have a soft spot for books like Loyta Wooding's Smart Shopper's Cookbook (1972) because they are unpretentious and they do try to serve a genuinely useful purpose for cash-strapped families.

I'm sure you can't get any menus for six that cost only $1.05 anymore! Even the comparatively pricy "Serves 2 for $1.68" recipe seems unlikely....

And yes, some of the recipes are just as grim as you might imagine.

Nothing says "We are out of money" quite like boiled cabbage and hot dogs under a layer of thin white sauce.

The book often goes out of its way to try to make cheap food seem more appealing, though. Wooding's idea of a Poor Man's Crown Roast certainly seems closer to a real crown roast than the Campbell's soup version. 

Sometimes, the book tries to make diners feel special by including at least a taste of a food they are unlikely to afford servings of.

Whether people's appetite for shrimp will be sated with the few bites in the red snapper stuffing is an open question, but I find it kind of touching that Wooding is consciously trying to include at least bits of more expensive foods the audience might crave. 

Sometimes when even smidges of pricier fare are beyond reach, it seems as if Wooding just hopes that the application of extra labor will somehow make cheap food tastier.

Will beating seasoned hamburger vigorously for five minutes before adding tomato sauce really make it better? I'm not sure, but at least the whipping will give the cook a chance to work out some aggravation over not getting decent paychecks.

Of course, this book also goes for the mid-century trick of making old standby recipes seem new by encasing them in gelatin.

No, peaches and cottage cheese is not a sad, boring staple of cheap diets, something to count as lunch when paired with a cheap cigarette! It's a "treat" of a "new-styled salad"!

And of course, there's always the option of pretending one can afford a Hawaiian vacation via the time-honored method of dumping canned pineapple on whatever's for dinner.

This is a less common variation that includes not only the usual pineapple, green pepper, and soy sauce, but also sauerkraut, and the protein of choice is the budget staple frankfurters. It's Hawaii by way of Germany. Dinner might still be pretty sad, but it will also be entertaining.