I used to make tuna noodle casserole from my mother's family recipe, and Dale and I ate it Monday and were still eating it Thursday.
This is tuna noodle casserole for two, and twenty-four more forgotten 1950s dinners from Betty Crocker, Good Housekeeping, Joy of Cooking and Martha Deane, every one scaled down to two plates.
The dinners were never the problem, the pan was, so halve the recipe, then halve the pan, and the old 1950s recipes come out right for two.

RECIPE FOR TWO: Tuna Noodle Casserole
4 ounces egg noodles
1 five-ounce can of tuna, drained
Half a can of cream of mushroom soup
1/4 cup milk
1/2 cup frozen peas
A handful of crushed saltines
1 tablespoon melted butter

1. Heat the oven to 350 degrees and get out a one-and-a-half-quart casserole dish.
2. Cook the noodles two minutes short of the package time and drain them.
3. Stir the half can of soup with the milk, then fold in the noodles, tuna and peas.
4. Spread it in the one-and-a-half-quart dish, not a full-size pan.
5. Toss the crushed saltines with the melted butter and scatter them over the top.
6. Bake twenty minutes, until the edges bubble thick and slow and the crackers go the color of a paper bag.

IF IT GOES WRONG
Edges dry as a sponge: half a casserole went in a full-size dish, spread thin and dried out.
Sauce gone to leather: the sauce had no depth to stay a sauce, so halve the pan too.
Still eating it Thursday: the recipe was written for six, and nobody wrote it again for two.

LEFTOVERS: The other half can of soup keeps in a covered bowl in the refrigerator, and it goes into the tuna-potato chip casserole, number eight.
#CookingForTwo #1950sRecipes #RetroRecipes