Crafty Depression-era bakers created wacky cake as a way to maintain a bit of sweetness in the face of egg and dairy shortages. In the communities of Northeast Missouri, many families still remember the wacky cake made by homesteaders at Sandhill Farm, an agricultural collective founded in the 1970s. Known for its sorghum syrup, the farm would churn out cakes sweetened with the toasty, nutty nectar. Today, sorghum syrup-based wacky cakes continue to be a potluck staple in the region. Local farmer and food writer Benjamin Brownlow—working with his longtime neighbor and down-home patissier Alline Anderson—developed this wacky cake recipe as an homage to Sandhill’s version, the exact specifications of which have been lost to time. Look for sorghum syrup at specialty grocers, or online.

Featured in “The Anabaptist Community Taught Me Everything I Know About Sorghum Syrup,” by Benjamin Brownlow.

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The simple smashed cucumber salad is a perennially popular appetizer in Chinese restaurants, but Jing Gao, founder of chili crisp brand Fly By Jing, likes to add layers to zhuzh it up. One of her favorite ways to incorporate textural contrast is to toss in slippery, chewy pieces of yuba, or tofu skin. Look for the ingredient in dried sheets at your local Asian supermarket, or online. If you can find fresh tofu skin, that also works well (just skip step one).

Adapted with permission from The Book of Sichuan Chili Crisp: Spicy Recipes and Stories from Fly By Jing’s Kitchen by Jing Gao, copyright © 2023. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

Featured in “A New Kind of Asian Grocer Has Arrived,” by Megan Zhang.

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Frybread is both a beloved dish and complicated cultural symbol among Native American communities, particularly the Navajo Nation, with whom the dish is thought to have originated. After the U.S. government forcibly removed thousands of Navajo people from their homeland in New Mexico, these Native communities lost access to their traditional foods. Families had to subsist on the meager commodities the government provided, like flour and lard, and they invented frybread as a simple means of sustenance. Though the dish is traditionally fried, chefs Lois Ellen Frank and Walter Whitewater reimagined it as a dry-fried, pan-cooked recipe—with similarly chewy, puffed results. Also called “tortilla bread” by some members of the Pueblo tribes in New Mexico, this flatbread is a tasty accompaniment to hearty stews, like this Three Sisters Stew.

We recommend using a 12-inch (or larger) skillet or griddle, so you have room to cook more than one frybread at a time.

Excerpted from Seed to Plate, Soil to Sky: Modern Plant-Based Recipes Using Native American Ingredients by Lois Ellen Frank. Copyright © 2023. Available from Hachette Go, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Featured in “The Indigenous American Ingredients That Changed the Course of Food History,” by Megan Zhang.

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Named for three of the staple crops of many Indigenous nations—corn, squash, and beans—this rich, restorative stew is adapted from food historian and cookbook author Lois Ellen Frank’s book, Seed to Plate, Soil to Sky: Modern Plant-Based Recipes Using Native American Ingredients. Frank and Walter Whitewater, a Diné chef and the book’s culinary advisor, consider the trio a beautiful example of the interconnectedness of nature: Beans provide nitrogen to the soil, helping the corn to grow, while corn offers beans a pole to climb up; meanwhile, squash’s large leaves give shade to the soil, maintaining its moisture and keeping weeds at bay. The rib-sticking dish makes splendid use of this trifecta of Indigenous ingredients—and further enriches their aroma with a nutty, earthy blackened garlic paste. Serve this three sisters stew recipe with a side of bread, like Frank and Whitewater’s no-fry frybread recipe.

Excerpted from Seed to Plate, Soil to Sky: Modern Plant-Based Recipes Using Native American Ingredients by Lois Ellen Frank. Copyright © 2023. Available from Hachette Go, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Featured in “The Indigenous American Ingredients That Changed the Course of Food History,” by Megan Zhang.

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If you have leftover rice in your fridge, you can make chagayu, a Japanese tea porridge that calls for simmering the cooked grains in brewed tea. The dish is a popular breakfast in Nara, Japan’s first permanent capital, which has one of the longest histories of tea cultivation in the country. This chagayu recipe uses hojicha, roasted green tea that contains less caffeine than most green varieties and perfumes the rice with a delicate, earthy fragrance.

Look for hojicha in its whole-leaf or bagged form at your local Japanese grocer, or online. Nara-based chef Yasunori Iwata recommends enjoying chagayu with flavorful side dishes like kyurizuke (pickled cucumbers), umeboshi (bracingly acidic pickled plums), and kombu tsukudani (seaweed simmered with sake and mirin).

Featured in, “Seeking Mindfulness in a Bowl of Japanese Tea Porridge“, by Megan Zhang

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After Shirley Garrier’s family left Vietnam and settled in France, her grandmother couldn’t find the ingredients to make a classic Vietnamese bánh mì. So she bought French sardines preserved in olive oil, which were cheap but very tasty. It was a revelation. Because sardines are a fatty fish, they balanced out the sourness of the pickled vegetables and the herbaceous cilantro. To this day, Garrier remains proud of the way this sandwich exemplifies her family’s cultural background. When she and her partner in life and business, Mathieu Zouhairi, were writing their cookbook, The Social Food: Home Cooking Inspired by the Flavors of the World, they knew this canned sardine banh mi recipe had to be in it.

Though store-bought bread will work well in this sandwich, nothing beats a fresh homemade baguette. Follow this dồ chua recipe to make the Vietnamese carrot-daikon pickle at home.

This recipe is adapted from The Social Food: Home Cooking Inspired by the Flavors of the World by Shirley Garrier & Mathieu Zouhairi (Rizzoli New York; 2022).

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Mountain yam aficionados love its viscosity when finely grated, but for the uninitiated, fresh julienned pieces are an excellent way to enjoy the crisp texture of the tuber. In this mountain yam recipe with vinegared sesame sauce, the rich dressing balances beautifully with the delicately flavored vegetable.

When cutting mountain yam, place a clean cloth atop the cutting board, so the slippery pieces don’t slide around as you julienne. To counteract the itchy properties of mountain yam, wash your hands and forearms with warm soapy water after handling.

Konbu dashi is easy to make from scratch, and a batch can be used to make a variety of vegetarian Japanese dishes. Look for white sesame paste at your local Japanese market, or online. Different brands of sesame paste have varying consistencies, so you may need to add more konbu dashi to make the sauce pourable.

This recipe is adapted from Japan: The Vegetarian Cookbook and was featured in “This 1-Ingredient No-Cook Stock is at the Heart of Japanese Vegetarian Cooking.”

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Natto has diehard fans, but some people cannot get past the thick whipped-up threads surrounding the beans. Here, the natto is not aerated, and the spicy wetness of grated daikon helps mitigate the fermented funkiness, rendering the dish much more widely appealing and a tasty, healthy bite to start the day.

Try to source natto made locally rather than in Japan; imported natto is typically frozen for shipping and loses some of its unusual delicacy. (We like the New York-make NYrture brand—look for it in local specialty stores or online.) Konbu dashi is easy to make from scratch, and a batch can be used to make a variety of vegetarian Japanese dishes.

This recipe is adapted from Japan: The Vegetarian Cookbook and was featured in “This 1-Ingredient No-Cook Stock is at the Heart of Japanese Vegetarian Cooking.”

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Serving cold tofu as a light side dish for a summer meal is a popular method for combatting the hot, humid weather in Japan. Here the cucumber vinegar is an especially refreshing and tasty dressing for the tofu, but also could be combined with lightly roasted sesame oil or fruity olive oil as a dressing for summer tomatoes. Konbu dashi is easy to make from scratch, and a batch can be used to make a variety of vegetarian Japanese dishes.

This recipe is adapted from Japan: The Vegetarian Cookbook and was featured in “This 1-Ingredient No-Cook Stock is at the Heart of Japanese Vegetarian Cooking.”

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Though day-old coffee might offer a caffeine boost, it tastes pretty bitter and acidic on its own—yet pouring it out feels like a waste. The next time you’ve got a bit of java left over in the pot, use it to make this leftover coffee overnight oats recipe. Depending on the beans’ origins and flavor profile, the morning beverage can bring earthy, floral, or chocolatey notes to an otherwise simple bowl of oatmeal. Top the oatmeal with ingredients like coarsely chopped nuts, seeds, shaved chocolate, berries, and nut butter, and coffee becomes a key player in a symphony of flavor.

When making overnight oats, look for old-fashioned oats, also called rolled oats. Other oat types, like instant or steel-cut, won’t work here. For the milk, you can swap in any plant-based milk, which would also make this recipe vegan. Leftover coffee should be covered and kept in the fridge.

Featured in, “The Latest Thing Brewing in Portland: Unsung Coffee Beans”

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Mesmerized, I watched my grandmother’s hands working the dough as she told me how she survived the Great Depression. How she brewed tea twice. Diluted soap. Saved every bag, tie, and scrap of foil.

These idiosyncrasies of the Silent Generation annoyed my mother, but fascinated me. My grandmother’s lessons in frugality would serve me a few years later when I became homeless.

Frugality does not mean what it did a century ago, a decade ago, or even a year ago if you consider the price of eggs. A word that originally meant the care and enjoyment of the fruits of one’s labor, “frugal” doesn’t have the same definition for everyone. That’s because not everyone has equal access to those fruits.

To understand the role of frugality in American culture, studying the Great Depression is a good starting point. “There’s a great dish called Milkorno,” says baker and author B. Dylan Hollis, who revived an old recipe for the powdered milk and cornmeal gruel for TikTok. Hollis studies history through cookbooks. “In the Great Depression, you had institutes and universities coming up with frugal ways to teach the populace how to stretch their dollar,” Hollis says. Milkorno was one of Cornell’s concoctions. Hollis’ scalding review described the bite as “Depressed polenta! Oatmeal that needs therapy! Unemployed grits.”

But wealthy people weren’t eating depressed polenta during the Great Depression. They were busy serving aspic, those towering, jiggling plates of savory gelatin—in part to show they could afford a refrigerator, as historian Jonathan Rees explains in Refrigeration Nation. A modern analog might be the Vitamix or Instant Pot, appliances that streamline cooking while also being status symbols. As in every era, the more money you have, the more frugal you can afford to be with your time. 

“The trade-off is time for money,” says dietician and author Jessica Wilson, who specializes in anti-hunger work. These days, Wilson is terrified about her patients losing access to food stamps, now that Covid-19 pandemic emergency aid is ending. Across the country, many will soon face the precarious predicament of having to be frugal with both time and money, which, for the working poor, were already in short supply. “A lot of people I work with are in areas of food apartheid that don’t have grocery stores,” she says, emphasizing that she doesn’t use the term “food desert” because a desert is naturally occurring, whereas apartheids and redlining are man-made. “Until [people] can get food, I don’t want to talk to them about healthy food,” she says. That’s because dictating to people what they should put in their bodies often “only creates guilt.”

Having to be frugal with one’s money and time leads many shoppers to buy groceries in bulk to cut down on spending and trips to the grocery. But that presents another issue: space. Anyone who’s lived in a small apartment knows how to get the most out of every square inch—but that’s not easy when it comes to storing, say, a 24-pack of canned green beans. 

For Becky Schwarz, a business manager who works from home, lupus has made food shopping stressful. “An anti-inflammatory diet is brutal because it’s so much more expensive,” she says, explaining that fresh fruits and vegetables are far pricier than the cheaper, packaged foods that are harmful to her health. When her lupus flares up, sapping any energy to cook, Schwarz relies on Costco’s ready-made meals that won’t risk making her more sick (she says the membership fee is worth it).

Perceptions of frugality shift according to age and income. It’s not all gloom and doom—lots of people enjoy gamifying frugality by couponing. Take Josh Gabel, who left his job at Amazon during the pandemic to return to grad school, where he studies Indian law. Using coupons, he manages to save at least 40% on each trip to the grocery store, helping stretch his tight student budget. “I’ve gotten it down to where it’s worth the time investment, because time is money,” he says. (Gabel acknowledges that the digitization of coupons has excluded many elderly folks who aren’t as tech-savvy.) 

Gabel grew up making frybread and smoking salmon according to his Snoqualmie family’s traditions. “We always maintained salmon smoking as a preservation method,” he says, noting that uplifting native food systems is frugality on a macroeconomic scale that benefits everyone.

Coupons remind us that food prices are not only fluid—they’re sometimes made-up. Crop scientist Sarah Taber notes that markets incentivize environmental depletion, so that once-bountiful (and affordable) foods become delicacies. “Caviar used to be cheap. It was a trash byproduct of the sturgeon fishery. Then we made the sturgeon population mostly extinct, and now caviar is expensive. Lobsters, oysters, same thing,” Taber says, referencing a time when lobster was so undervalued it was served to prisoners. 

Yet supply and demand aren’t always to blame for price hikes, especially when it comes to agriculture. “There’s not a geographical restriction on where you can grow eggs,” Taber says, reminding us that egg prices soared simply because suppliers hiked prices in anticipation of an avian flu epidemic that never really came. While many Americans were forced to be frugal with their eggs, Big Egg was essentially lining its pockets. (Prices have decreased in recent weeks but haven’t returned to their pre-December baseline.)  

Rising food costs are hitting small food businesses particularly hard, and behind the scenes, many chefs are being forced to be more frugal. According to Beet cofounders Eric Rivera (a chef) and Emahlea Wilxer (an epidemiologist and dietician), that frugality might look like less-expensive cuts of meat such as hanger steak or skirt steak on menus. It might look like smaller portions, or worse, slashes in pay or hours for employees. 

Rivera notes that sometimes a historically thrifty menu item becomes so popular that it turns into a luxury. Oxtail is currently experiencing this shift, riding similar waves of food gentrification as quinoa, collards, and kale, which have all increased in price in recent years. This exacerbates food inequality, as many people wind up unable to afford the ingredients their ancestors cultivated and developed over generations because wealthier folks are snapping them up. 

Then there’s the question of “cheap” versus “frugal.” Dried beans are universally touted as frugal, but if you’re working two minimum-wage jobs, do you really have the time or energy to watch a pot for hours? For busy parents, priorities and budgets are constantly shifting. Chef Susie Snyder, who used to own a vegan meal delivery service, says her perception of frugality evolved during the pandemic. “I started making sourdough like everybody else,” she says, recalling how she and her neighbors pitched in to buy a large bulk order of flour to share. But she gives “so many fewer Fs now” and is more frugal with her meal planning efforts. She says convenience foods that create time are now the most important items on her grocery list.

Time and community were two of the only resources I had in abundance as a homeless teenager. I had time to forage and dumpster dive, sharing expired expensive tea, pastries, and other valuable finds. Searching for food I was not allergic to was a constant stress, and continues to be, despite my financial situation being more stable. 

Now, I buy groceries for people around me struggling to make ends meet. I draw on my grandmother’s economical yet flavorful Depression-era recipes and cook them for friends. I continue to annoy my family by diluting soap and—yes—saving every bag, tie, and scrap of foil. 

Across all socioeconomic strata, the main ingredient for frugality, in its healthiest form, is communal cooperation. That might mean donating garden space, giving away seeds and produce, offering childcare, advocating for better laws, sharing a ride to the grocery store, volunteering to cook, providing mutual aid, or sharing resources like foraging extraordinaire Alexis Nikole Nelson’s videos. 

Donating to food banks is helpful, but experts I spoke with emphasize that the food often doesn’t make it to people in need, with their long work hours and lack of transportation being two main reasons. As dietician Jessica Wilson puts it, giving one dollar goes much further than one can of beans.

Frugality won’t save us from poverty. Milkorno is no substitute for a balanced diet. As meager emergency Covid-19 aid ends, already-stressed communities will bear the added weight of their most vulnerable members struggling to survive poverty—and the health implications and death that come with it.

As Congress prepares to vote on this year’s reauthorization of the Farm Bill, contentious debates about expanding food benefits rage in the marble corridors. And what is Congress but community, writ large? If frugality boils down to the management of scarce resources, our leaders should take inspiration from their frugal constituents—and find ways to improve lives with as little waste as possible.

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