Part I: Recipe for a Lard Sandwich

When things look bad you suck it up. You get tough. You show what you're made of.
That's the conventional wisdom.
But given our reaction so far to bad economic news, I'm beginning to have niggling doubts about our own family's fortitude. We know we're going to have to make some drastic spending cuts. We tell each other it won't be forever. Our income will improve some day.
Yet so far, we haven't found the strength to make much of a dent in our spending.
When hard times hit my grandmother's family in the 1930s, they made do with less. When she was alive, she used to tell me about her favorite childhood "treat"--a piece of bread smeared with lard and sugar.
Which makes me wonder: Are we tough enough to eat a lard sandwich?
I decided to find out.

There's a fair amount on the web about cooking and the Great Depression. On YouTube, a 91-year-old survivor of those times named Clara has a whole series of films cooking the food of her childhood. Check out this one for "Poor Man's Meal."

Fried potatoes and onions. What's not to like about that? But I run into trouble where she adds the hot dogs and tomato sauce. I spent several years watching my picky boys eat Beanie-Weenies from the can. As a result, I can't look at a cut up hot dog now without a strong urge to retch. So hot dogs in our family casserole? Ain't happening.
I started at the store with a couple of foods that probably weren't available when grandma was little: Ramen noodles and Spam.
Ramen noodles are, of course, the favorite of broke college students everywhere. This week they were on sale for 20 cents a package. Even when I threw out the disgusting "flavor" packets, I still saved money against regular pasta.
It turns out there are several recipe sites just for ramen noodle lovers. I checked out this one and whoa! Ramen noodle chocolate cakes? Ramen noodles and Jello!? (Appropriately enough, there's an ad beneath this recipe that teases, "How I lost 32 pounds using a crazy method." I'm willing to bet that method was the recipe above.)
I was encouraged, though, that one of the pictured recipes used Spam, because that's exactly what I had in mind.
Spam, the pressed ham in a square can, is enjoying a popularity upswing, says the New York Times. Apparently hard times make people think back fondly on institutional meals of years gone by.
I couldn't quite let go of my family's health, so I picked up a can of Spam Lite. At $3.19, it didn't seem like that great of a deal. But oh well.
I should add here, that this isn't the first time I've cooked with Spam. A few years back, Mike entered a Spam cooking contest. Afterwards, a reader sent him another can, which I made into...something. I can't remember what. And we brought home a can of spicy Spam from the Spam museum in Rochester, Minn. one year just out of curiosity.
As I was leaving the store, I found the lard, tucked quietly between a freezer case and some rawhide dog chews. It had dust on it. Had some wise guy drawn a skull and crossbones?

My supper dish was fairly simple. I cut the Spam into cubes and fried it hard, then added a chopped onion and some frozen peas, a bay leaf and some thyme. I thought this might be a good place to use some cherry juice I had frozen from our tree last summer, so I put in about a half cup. But it was sweeter than I remembered (these are sour cherries) so I put in a little soy sauce and then thickened the whole thing with a cornstarch slurry. The Spam mixture was served atop a bed of three packages of cooked noodles, sans flavor packets.
I made the lard sandwich just as my grandmother described: Lard spread on bread and sprinkled with sugar. While I was at it, my husband wandered through the kitchen. "Just so you know, I'm not eating that. No matter what."
So I cut the sandwich into appetizer-sized cubes and added poked in some festive colored toothpicks. No one can resist party toothpicks. You'll eat lard and like it, mister.
There were the expected jokes at the table. "Could this give you liver failure?" asked my son, the med-school hopeful. But everyone thought the Spam was passable, if a little sweet. As for the lard sandwich--what can I say? Colored toothpicks make everything better. Mike had two.
It was an okay meal, if you're just desperate for meat. We probably would have been better off, though, with one of my endless vegetarian recipes.

Very funny, you may say. The hunger and poverty of the Great Depression wasn't a joke.
No, it wasn't. But our experience has made me think the people who will survive will be the ones laughing anyway. Maybe fancy toothpicks really are the key. Even for a family of marshmallows like ours.