Stretch Cooking: an introduction

A majority of Americans, in the nation's 235-year history, have known times when it became necessary to eat low off the hog. Americans in the spring of 2009 were entering another such era.

American tables at dinnertime have always reflected the economy realities of the day. In the long run, this is not a bad thing, having to make a little go a long way. I call it "stretch cooking," whose principles I learned from my grandmother, Susie Foote Grant, who learned them the hard way. Her husband Roy dropped dead of a heart attack, at age 44, on July 4, 1929, not quite four months before the financial crash that began the Great Depression. Susie was left with six children, only two yet old enough to work, and she brought them through the worst years on a menu fashioned, on the worst days, from not much more than beans and meal and grit.

The worst days were over, by the time of my birth in 1943, and all the Grant children were old enough to work. But by then we were in the middle of a world war, the Grant sons were overseas, and the Grant girls were secretaries. The Grant table still featured stretch cooking, with certain luxuries. Susie could afford to put something new on the table almost every night. She set up a rotation of one new thing and three leftovers each day, with today's new thing becoming a leftover tomorrow.

I had no reason to complain. I loved that cooking. Still do. And that is the primary reason for this collection of recipes. Yes, you can survive, if you have to, with some dried beans, some cornmeal, some water, and salt and pepper. But the recipes in my collection are not survival recipes. They yield delicious meals for distressed times, or the best of times. Susie possessed survival, but also wondrous, skills. Every time I sit down to Smothered Steak, Pinto Beans, Corn Bread Thangs and sliced tomatoes, I consider myself a beneficiary of those skills.

I love to cook, and stretch cooking was not my starting point in the kitchen. But I have lived and cooked my way through several economic downturns, none as severe as the circumstances of 2009 and beyond, and every time I have returned to Susie's style, learning more and creating versions of my own. The results have been in fact cheap and also very, very satisfying.

In 1978, I began writing a column for The San Diego Union. Naturally I bragged about this kind of cooking. Eventually readers invited me to put up or shut up, and that is when one thing really started to lead to another. I wrote a cookbook, catchily titled "Michael Grant's Cookbook," which was published in 1987. Some of those recipes you will find here in weeks and months to come, and some are new. There will even be some vegetarian recipes, and technique breakthroughs such as scorching an onion. You can find them under the label: "Stretch Cooking."

I think about Susie a lot when I am cooking. I see myself standing by her electric stove in the early 1950s, watching her make beans and greens and Corn Bread Thangs. One afternoon, I looked up at her and said, "You know, Susie, someday I am going to live in San Diego, California, and write a newspaper column and talk a lot about Texas cooking. And then one morning I am going to cook your Corn Bread Thangs on a television talk show."

And she looked down at me and said, "You're crazy as a loon, boy." It turns out that I wasn't. It's the times that go crazy, sometimes. The cooking stays stable, and good.