These 10 FORGOTTEN Canadian Crockpot Recipes from the 1970s No One Makes Anymore!

The Decade Dinner Cooked Itself

In 1971 a small appliance the colour of harvest gold and avocado green appeared in kitchens across North America and promised something almost unbelievable: dinner ready and waiting for about four cents a day in electricity.

The Crock-Pot was not actually a new idea.

The slow-cooking concept had existed for years as the Naxon Beanery, originally designed to cook a slow-simmered Sabbath stew.

But when the Rival company picked it up, rebranded it, and unveiled it at a Chicago Housewares show in 1971, it became something else entirely—a cultural phenomenon that swept into Canadian kitchens right alongside American ones.

The timing could not have been better.

An oil crisis made every household suddenly obsessed with energy costs.

At the same time a growing number of women were working outside the home and needed dinner to make itself.

The Crock-Pot answered both needs at once.

You put the ingredients in before leaving for work, set the dial to low, and came home to a meal that had been gently transforming all day.

The recipe booklets that came with those early models are still around today, tucked into drawers and donated to thrift stores.

They are full of dishes with names so specific to the decade that most of them have completely disappeared from modern cooking.

Here are ten of those forgotten Crock-Pot recipes—the ones that once defined Canadian dinner tables in the 1970s and have all but vanished since.

Starting with number ten: Crock-Pot steak soup, straight from the original Rival recipe booklet.

Cubed beef, potatoes, carrots, celery and tomatoes went into the pot in the morning.

By evening the toughest, cheapest cut of meat had become spoon-tender and the broth had thickened into something rich and deeply flavoured.

It was the perfect demonstration of what the Crock-Pot was sold on—the ability to turn inexpensive ingredients into something that tasted far more expensive through nothing but time and low heat.

Today the dish has been replaced by quicker beef-and-vegetable soups that never require the same all-day commitment.

Nine was Texas hash, a one-pot ground-beef dinner that appeared in Crock-Pot manuals throughout the decade.

Ground beef, rice, tomatoes and green pepper simmered together until the rice absorbed every bit of the tomato sauce and the mixture thickened into something between a casserole and a stew.

The name had almost no connection to actual Texan cuisine; like so many regional labels attached to budget recipes, it simply suggested hearty, no-nonsense cooking.

Canadian home cooks did not care about authenticity.

They cared that a complete, filling dinner could be ready with almost no hands-on effort.

Texas hash has nearly vanished, edged out by more elaborate one-pot meals that did not exist when the original recipe was written.

Eight carried the best name of the decade: chicken licking good pork chops.

Despite the title, the dish contained no chicken at all.

Pork chops were browned briefly, then placed in the Crock-Pot with a sauce built from condensed soup, seasonings and often a splash of barbecue sauce.

Hours later the meat was fall-apart tender and infused with sweet-savoury gravy.

The slow cooker did the work of preventing the chops from drying out—something notoriously easy to get wrong on the stovetop or in the oven.

The name itself was pure 1970s marketing flair: catchy, a little nonsensical, and instantly memorable.

Under that specific title the dish has essentially disappeared, though the basic technique survives in modern smothered-pork-chop recipes that no longer carry the same playful branding.

Seven was male chauvinist chili, a dish that could only have been named in the 1970s.

Bacon, sausage and ground beef—three meats in one pot—simmered with beans, tomatoes and chili seasoning.

The combination was meant to signal hardiness and richness, presumably aimed at the male appetites the recipe’s name was poking fun at.

The long cooking time allowed the different meats to render their fat and flavour fully into the sauce.

The title reflects something genuinely specific to the era: a 1970s sense of humour around gender roles in the kitchen, at the exact moment more women were entering the workforce and slow-cooker marketing was explicitly aimed at giving them a break from standing over a stove.

Today a recipe with that name would almost certainly never make it into a published cookbook, which is exactly why it stands out as a genuine artefact of its decade.

Six was stuffed beef heart—organ-meat cooking that vanished with a generation.

A whole beef heart filled with bread-based dressing similar to turkey stuffing was placed in the Crock-Pot and cooked low and slow until the notoriously tough organ meat became tender enough to slice like a roaSt. Heart, liver and kidney were once considered both nutritious and economical, especially in households that had lived through the Depression or wartime rationing.

The Crock-Pot was uniquely suited to the task because the long, gentle heat was often the only way to make tougher organ meats truly palatable.

As those meats fell out of favour with younger generations, recipes like stuffed beef heart disappeared almost entirely from mainstream Canadian kitchens, surviving today mostly in specialty or nose-to-tail circles.

Five was busy woman’s roast chicken, the recipe that defined the Crock-Pot’s entire marketing pitch.

A whole chicken went into the pot surrounded by carrots and a package of boxed stuffing mix.

By dinner time the entire meal—protein, vegetable and starch—had cooked itself, the chicken falling tender and the stuffing absorbing every flavourful dripping.

For Canadian women entering the workforce in greater numbers, a recipe like this represented something genuinely valuable: a complete hot dinner without a day spent in the kitchen.

The name itself would not survive in a modern cookbook; today’s titles tend to avoid such explicitly gendered framing.

Yet the underlying appeal of a one-pot roast-chicken dinner never really went away.

It simply lost its very 1970s label.

Four was one-pot dinner, the recipe so basic it did not need a real name.

A cheaper cut of beef or a few pork chops, root vegetables—potatoes, carrots, onions, sometimes turnip—and a simple seasoned broth simmered all day.

There was no elaborate sauce, no unusual flavour combination, no attempt at sophistication.

It was quite literally a complete dinner cooked in one pot, which was precisely the entire appeal of the appliance.

The Crock-Pot was not always used to create exciting new flavours; often it simply automated a meal families had been making for generations, a pot roast that could simmer unattended rather than requiring careful oven monitoring.

The specific title has disappeared even as the underlying concept remains a slow-cooker staple.

Three was Old World sauerkraut supper, a dish that reflected Canada’s European immigrant communities.

Pork or sausage simmered with sauerkraut, often with caraway seeds or a touch of brown sugar to balance the tang.

The slow cooker made an already traditional dish even easier.

The long cooking time allowed the pork to become completely tender while absorbing the fermented flavour of the kraut, which itself mellowed significantly.

For families with German, Ukrainian or Eastern European roots, the dish was a bridge between an older style of traditional cooking and the new convenience the Crock-Pot offered.

As that specific immigrant home-cooking tradition became less central to mainstream Canadian kitchens, the sauerkraut-and-pork combination faded from common rotation.

Two was Continental chicken, ordinary chicken dressed up with a sophisticated-sounding name.

The bird simmered with cream of mushroom or cream of chicken soup, a splash of wine or sherry if the household had it, and mushrooms, creating a creamy rich sauce.

The word “Continental,” evoking a vague sense of European sophistication, did a lot of marketing work for what was essentially a simple braised-chicken dish.

This naming convention was extremely common throughout 1970s recipe culture: ordinary dishes given French or European-sounding titles to make them feel special without any genuine connection to European traditions.

Under that specific name the recipe has essentially disappeared, even though variations of creamy slow-cooked chicken remain common under far more straightforward titles.

And number one: pork chop abracadabra, the recipe name nobody who encountered it has ever forgotten.

Pork chops were browned and placed in the Crock-Pot, covered with an entire can of cream of mushroom soup, and left to cook until the chops were completely tender and the soup had transformed into a rich savoury gravy.

The magic the name referred to was not culinary technique; it was the simplicity of the transformation.

A few basic ingredients, almost no effort, and hours later a fully cooked, gravy-smothered dinner appeared as if it had assembled itself.

The recipe perfectly captured the entire appeal of 1970s Crock-Pot cooking in a single dish: minimal ingredients, almost no skill required, and a name designed to make the whole process feel like a small kitchen miracle for households juggling work, family and dinner all at once.

Pork chop abracadabra, alongside its cream-of-mushroom cousins, has almost entirely vanished from modern recipe collections, viewed today as a dated relic of an era when canned condensed soup was treated as a base ingredient rather than a shortcut.

Ten recipes, one small kitchen appliance that changed how an entire generation of Canadian families got dinner on the table.

Some of these dishes disappeared because the ingredients fell out of favour—organ meats, condensed soup as a base, sauerkraut suppers tied to specific immigrant traditions that have since blended into the broader culture.

Others disappeared simply because their names were too specific to the decade that created them, too tied to a particular sense of humour and a particular moment in how households were changing.

But the appliance itself never really left.

It is still sitting on countless Canadian counters today, just with different recipes inside it.

And somewhere in a thrift-store bin or a grandmother’s kitchen drawer there is still an old Rival manual with “pork chop abracadabra” printed on a stained, dog-eared page, waiting to be found again.