The simple cooking style I practiced of necessity in my van-life days translates well to the shelter in place weeks we are experiencing now. One of my favorite comfort food ingredients, white sauce, is finding its way back into my repertoire.
If you are older (say in your 70s like myself), mid-twentieth century comfort food may be calling to you in these stressful times. For all of us, comfort foods are the dishes that remind us of the love and safety of our childhood home. In the decades between 1940 and 1970, many traditional family meals originated in the great depression when food was sometimes scarce and money scarcer. Our mothers (or grandmothers) learned to be frugal and prepare meals that satisfied the stomach without leaving a hole in their pocketbooks. Many of these simple comfort foods used dairy products—think Macaroni and Cheese, custard, Tuna Noodle Casserole, bread pudding, and those great layered Stratas made of little more than stale bread, eggs, cheese, and milk.
When I was a child, canned goods were plentiful but frozen food was a modern luxury few could afford or store. Refrigerators were small and if they had a freezer, it was inside the main compartment and only big enough to hold an aluminum ice-cube tray and a rectangular pint of ice-cream. Home cooks knew how to use pantry items and staples that needed little or no refrigeration. If you were lucky your family might have a shelf in the basement stocked with home canned vegetables, fruits and jams.
My mother understood the value of calcium to growing children. I remember she used to say that Americans were taller than Europeans and Asians because we drank more milk. True or not, that was my mother’s interpretation and she made sure we had some kind of dairy at every meal. With limited refrigerator space, fresh milk was reserved for drinking and breakfast cereal. For cooking, where the clean flavor of fresh milk was not essential, she often used dry powdered milk or canned evaporated milk. Today, we also have long-shelf-life milk, a super pasteurized product that keeps close to three times longer than “fresh” milk.
In these pandemic days, I have cut back on trips to the grocery store. When I do go, I find myself looking at things that safely store longer making frequent trips to the grocery aisles unnecessary. Sometimes the dairy and freezer sections stand half empty and selection is limited. I find myself returning to staples I used during the two years I cooked in a Volkswagen van (as told in my upcoming memoir, Wherever the Road Leads) —dried or canned milk, canned fish and vegetables, pasta, rice and beans.
I have to admit, that many of my favorite comfort foods start with a good Bechamel sauce. My mother called it White Sauce and declared it too much trouble, though I suspect she avoided it because of its high calorie content. I learned to make creamy, lump free, white sauce in my high school home economics classroom. Miss Messman taught us that white sauce wasn’t difficult as long as you kept stirring and didn’t let those pesky lumps form in the bubbling milk.
Bechamel sauce can be made using fresh, extended-life, reconstituted dried, or canned evaporated milk. Besides the milk, all you need is butter (or some other fat or oil), a little flour, salt and pepper. A heavy bottomed pot helps prevent scorching the milk and a wooden spoon or a wire whip is needed for constant, patient stirring. Recipes for classic Bechamel sauce (aka cream sauce or white sauce) abound in basic cookbooks like The Joy of Cooking or Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook, as well as on the internet.
The sauce can be made ahead and stored in the refrigerator for about a week to be used as needed to create a rich and delectable dish from all kinds of left overs or pantry staples. Some classic dishes that use white sauce are: Seafood a la King, Kedgeree (a casserole of rice and canned fish), filled dinner crepes, Croquettes, Tuna Noodle Casserole, New England Clam Chowder (or any creamed soup), and the ubiquitous Macaroni and Cheese.
In my tiny, van kitchen (two burners, no oven, and a bar ‘fridge) one of the white sauce dishes I prepared regularly was Creamed Tuna on Toast. Not very elegant, certainly not something my mother would have served, it was satisfying after a long day on the road and easy to make when we hadn’t been to a market recently. If I had canned tuna, dried or canned milk, and bread on hand, dinner could be ready in minutes. I would prepare the sauce, stir in the tuna along with any left-over or canned veggies I could scrounge up to make it healthy, and pour the mixture over sliced bread browned (in the absence of a toaster) in a skillet. Garnished with some chopped parsley, a few olives, or 
a slice of tomato, it even looked pretty on the plate.
Though I haven’t made creamed tuna for almost fifty years (not since our return from the long van-life adventure), I’ve been thinking a lot about those meals recently. Maybe it’s time to make it again.
What comfort food do you find yourself craving these days? Have you made any long neglected, mid-twentieth century dishes recently?
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