Authentic school day lunch

The bell rings sometime in the 1950s in Van Dyke elementary school on the shore of Trout Lake in Coleraine, Minnesota. It is time for lunch.

It is a short walk across the park and up the hill home. It is a small town, nearly everyone in town lives close enough to school to go home for lunch if they choose to do so.

Here are the ingredients of a very common, very familiar school day lunch. We're getting ready to have a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup. Mmmm, mmmm, good.We mostly purchased food at Shoemaker's Red Owl. Red Owl stores were franchised by Gamble-Skogmo, remember Gambles Hardware stores? The rights to the Red Owl brand were later acquired by SuperValu. SuperValu still operates chains of grocery stores in several markets, including this one. The local SuperValu grocery chain, the successor as it were to Red Owl, is Cub Foods. I went to Cub and bought the cheapest white bread available, the house brand pictured above, Cub Foods Giant White ($1.69 for a pound and a half loaf). My recollection is that Taystee was the bread of choice in our house but Taystee wasn't available in the local Cub and I believe that if Taystee was not available in the 1950s that we most likely would have gone with the cheapest white bread available, most likely the house brand. I believe that my choice of bread is a choice of an authentic bread.

That is also, obviously, authentic cheese. Actually, of course, it's not cheese, it's not even processed cheese or even processed cheese food. It is processed cheese product, less than 51% cheese. I think I was probably at least college age before I ever even considered the idea that Velveeta wasn't "cheese". It sure was cheese where I lived.Butter, not margarine. You have to remember to leave the butter out for a while so that it will be soft enough to spread. I forgot and used the modern method of a microwave oven to produce spreadable butter.Here's one of the few tricky bits. You have to butter the second piece of bread after you have placed the sandwich in the pan for grilling. Note that the soup has already been started. The soup is authentic as well. Again, it seems to me that I was college age before I even noticed that there were brands of soup other than Campbell's. In another bow to authenticity I used a can of water with the can of soup concentrate. TOPWLH reports that in her house they often actually used what the can directions list as an alternative, milk. We never did that that I can recall.Those looking carefully will no doubt observe that TOPWLH declined complete authenticity, requesting that her sandwich be made of sunflower whole wheat bread and actual cheddar cheese. I think she just doesn't recognize what a wonderful opportunity she passed up.

Over easy, it won't be long now. It is a bit tricky when doing only a sandwich or two to get the first couple done properly without burning. TOPWLH had a sandwich that was a trifle dark but she pronounced it OK.Voila, lunch. I was pretty sure that authenticity called for the sandwich to be cut into two pieces but I had a hard time deciding whether the cut should be diagonal or longitudinally across the middle. I settled on the diagonal cut but seeing the picture now it just doesn't seem quite right. I have a vague memory of big halves and small halves of the sandwiches.So, how was it?

It tasted very, very familiar. Familiar is not necessarily a bad thing.

A final note, it isn't very authentic at all, actually. The 1950s was a simpler time, a time when people lived on farms and produced healthy food products for all of us to eat. Today is, of course, the day of agribusiness and the corporate welfare program known as corn subsidies. I am not sure it is true and I am not going to do the research right now but I have heard it said and personally believe it to be true that the largest receivers of "crop support payments" are Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill, the corn giants.

Today's quiz: Guess which of the products pictured above includes on the ingredient list "high fructose corn syrup".