The Affordable Old-School Fish Dish Worth Revisiting

You don't need us to tell you that social media is full — nearly exploding, actually — with recipe ideas. Modern cooking techniques and exciting flavors have never been closer at hand. Yet, revisiting dishes from the past is always a great idea for several reasons. For one thing, eating foods and cooking recipes from bygone eras grounds us by offering a type of anthropology that we can taste. It also shows us how people throughout history have adjusted their diets during adverse times, like the Great Depression in the U.S. or periods of famine abroad. That's why an affordable, old-school fish dish like creamed tuna is worth revisiting.

Creamed tuna, also called creamed chip tuna or tuna gravy, is a dish you can imagine pretty easily. It's incredibly similar to creamed chip beef as both dishes start by pulling together a butter and flour roux, which is then stretched with evaporated milk. At which point, canned tuna is added. Plus, a few frozen peas, if you have them. You can eat the dish over toast, biscuits, or crackers. You can even stir it in with pasta and bake it as a casserole. The beauty of this vintage fish dish is that it's as versatile as it is inexpensive.

Canned tuna can be purchased as low as $0.96; flour, just $0.54 per pound. Some cans of evaporated milk run around $1 a can, and the most expensive ingredient, butter, is about $4 per pound as of April 2026. This all adds up to one cheap meal. 

There are two main factors that give creamed tuna its reputation as a Depression-era meal. First, it's made with affordable ingredients that have long been considered simple pantry staples. Secondly, canned tuna started to gain seriously popularity during the first three decades of the 1900s. (These are just some of the reasons why some recipes refer to this dish as "Hard Times Tuna.") However, the dish's earliest origins actually precede America's most famous economic downturn.

Salmon wiggle, a once-popular plate that you don't see much anymore, is an early precursor to tuna gravy. The two dishes are created in a similar way, the obvious substitute being canned salmon over canned tuna. Prior to the drastic rise of tuna canning in the early decades of the 1900s, Americans were more familiar with canned salmon. Yet the growth of California's canning industry, as well as both World Wars, would eventually push tuna to the top before the industry's total collapse. During this run, and in the convenience-minded decades of the '50s and '60s that followed, the popularity and availability of tuna would see it replace canned salmon in many recipes. Possibly, one of those instances was this old-school fish dish. 

Whether you make yours with tinned albacore or canned sockeye, either creamed fish dish promises a look into the foods that fuel a family without breaking a budget.