This Canned Soup Is Your Secret To Flavor-Rich, 1950s-Style Sloppy Joes

When you're in the mood to dish out a bit of nostalgia for dinner, nothing hits the spot quite like a good old sloppy Joe. The slight sweetness of the brown sugar in the sauce paired with the tang of tomato and a savory hint of onion allows ground beef to shine. While many of today's sloppy Joe recipes call for ketchup, the old-school versions called for a can of condensed tomato soup instead. Keeping canned tomato soup in your pantry has you in good company, by the way — Ree Drummond, aka The Pioneer Woman, always keeps it at the ready.

Adding canned tomato soup to your sloppy Joe recipe is pretty simple. You'll want to be sure to use the soup straight from the can, as mixing it with water or milk (as the can recommends if you're going to actually make soup) will add far too much liquid to your recipe. If you prefer your sloppy Joes on the sweeter side (and you're using condensed tomato soup instead of ketchup to add tomato flavor), you might want to increase the amount of brown sugar you add, as you're going to miss some of the sugar that comes from the ketchup. Of course, you'll want to be sure to taste as you go while you get the recipe just right — and don't forget to keep track of your measurements so you can nail your tomato soup sloppy Joes again next time.

Canned foods were super popular in the '50s, when many women entered the workforce for the first time. (About 25% of women were employed in 1940, according to The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and by 1955, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 34% of women were working outside of the home.) Many still wanted to have a hot dinner on the table at the end of the day, but needed time-saving methods to get the job done. Enter: convenience foods. Creating meals like sloppy Joes with some help from a can of soup allowed women to keep cooking and serving hot meals to their families without having to create a recipe completely from scratch. 

Since most families had refrigerators by the '50s, sloppy Joes were also a great cook once, eat twice meal that saved both time and money. If you're lucky enough to have leftovers, you've got a few different ways you can use them up. First, you can start by adding a little bit of extra condensed tomato soup to rehydrate your beef, if necessary (freeze the extra soup in a new container so you can use it again another time). Then, use the leftover sloppy Joe filling as a base for slightly sweet chili (Cincinnati-style chili is a staple Midwest comfort food that you need to try at least once), toss it on top of baked potatoes with a sprinkle of cheese, or add it to hot dogs for a killer sweet-and-savory combination.