This little piggy got loafed!

One thing I can say about Americans in 1966: They loved weird pig-based loaves! Seriously! Today's post is just a fraction of the recipes for porky loaves in Favorite Recipes of America: Meats Including Seafood and Poultry. 

A lot of them are ham loaves. I expected the Idaho Stuffed Ham Loaf to be filled with potatoes, since those are Idaho's most famous crop. 

Surprisingly, no! I'm not sure I would ever have guessed "Idaho stuffed" means "filled with spaghetti and hard-cooked eggs coated in white sauce," but that's apparently the meaning.

For those with a sweet tooth, the book offers a meaty variation of a pineapple upside-down cake. 

This one can also be made into a ring and filled with hot (likely overcooked!) veggies for those tired of the loaf format.

If you like the upside-down cake style but aren't a huge fan of pineapple, there's an orangey variant:

For those with a serious sweet tooth and who object that the addition of fruit makes the ham loaf too healthy, there's straight-up Caramel Ham Loaf.

Just cook your meat with a thick layer of brown sugar...

The pork loaves aren't limited to ham, either. There's a Bologna Loaf for when bologna is on sale, I guess.

Or for when you're running low on ground beef and have enough bologna to use it as filler.

And if it's still a few days until the paycheck comes, there's Frankfurter Meat Loaf.

Hot dogs stretched out with rice and cheese? I think my childhood self would have considered this gourmet food.

And as a bonus, I'll end this post with a meat loaf that doesn't have pork in it.

I'll bet the kids were thrilled when it was Hamburger-Clam Loaf night.

I'm just happy to reserve my loaf pans for actual bread, rather than having to stuff them full of random ground meats with filler. I never would have survived all those meat loaves in the '60s!

Time Traveling with Vegetables

The Unabridged Vegetable Cookbook (Nika Hazelton, copyright 1976, but mine is from the 1980 Bantam printing) is both exactly what I expected (with a lot of relatively standard veggie preparations) and a surprise (in its introduction of dishes that were likely unfamiliar to mainstream American cooks and its occasional unexpected preparations). 

So, honestly, a lot of the book is about how to turn any random vegetable into a creamed, au gratin, or sautéed-in-olive-oil-and-garlic(-and-maybe-tomato) version of itself. Not terribly exciting. But the book does remind me that the food scene was quite different back then, as concepts that wouldn't need explanations in mainstream America now required commentary back then. It would be hard to find somebody who didn't understand the concept of salsa today, for instance, but mainstream Americans in the late '70s/ early '80s needed to be told that it was a "sauce... found on all Mexican tables" to be served "on any dishes that can stand a little livening up."

At least they called it "salsa," though. "Hummus" (something that most grocery stores dedicate many square feet of refrigerated shelf space to now) was such a foreign concept that the recipe was Americanized to "Chick Pea Appetizer," with "hummus" left as a parenthetical note.

It should also be served with "flat Arab bread" because "pita" was apparently not a common term either!

There's a recipe for something that seems to have gone mainstream significantly later than salsa or hummus, as well. (At least, it seemed like it to me... I knew about salsa and hummus long before I knew this one...)

I imagine a lot of people would argue that this quickly-made, non-fermented, "less powerful" version is not really kimchi, but I was surprised to see it mentioned at all in a mainstream cookbook this old.

And of course, it does occasionally have somewhat-oddball recipes. I expected the cabbage section to include stuffed cabbage leaves, for instance, but I figured they would be stuffed with rice and ground meat and flavored with tomato sauce. Hazelton had something else in mind, though.

These are filled with a buttery mushroom-and-bread stuffing that probably tastes like Thanksgiving.

I expected iceberg lettuce to be cut into wedges and slathered in dressing...

...but not hollowed out, stuffed with a cream-cheese-based filling, chilled to solidify, and served as cheese-stuffed wedges.

I'll admit I wasn't really expecting a potato pizza at all, but the title made me imagine a crust topped with thinly-sliced potatoes and maybe an oily, rosemary-heavy sauce with plenty of cheese.

I was only sort of right. We've got the cheese and rosemary, but the potatoes are mixed into the crust! I could almost see somebody replacing the flour with a gluten-free flour (and/or maybe some eggs?) to make a gluten-free crust today. 

And while I was generally unsurprised to see so many vegetables get au-gratined, I'll have to admit I wasn't quite prepared for this one.

I primarily think of bean sprouts as an Asian ingredient, so the idea of layering them with a bunch of cream sauce and cheese had not really occurred to me...

The Unabridged Vegetable Cookbook is a great little time capsule, with a lot of recipes that remind me of the past (when everything was served creamed), many that look to our more multiculturally-aware future, plus a few little blips to remind me that the late '70s was a weird time.

Surprise! Casseroles!

If there's one thing home ec teachers and I have in common, it's love of a casserole. (Of course, theirs is genuine and mine is often-but-not-always ironic, but we don't have to tell them that.) That's why today, we're checking out a few casseroles from Quick and Easy Dishes (Favorite Recipes of Home Economics Teachers, 1978 edition). 

Anything with the word "surprise" in the title should be suspect, and Ground Beef Surprise is no exception.

The surprise? A sogged-out layer of French fries between a layer of greasy (apparently not pre-cooked and drained) ground beef and a slick of canned soups. Yay. 🎉

These casseroles tend to use a LOT of canned ingredients, as it was easy to keep canned food on hand. (Couldn't easily or cheaply order groceries delivered to your door back in 1978!) I'm not (that) snobby about canned foods. I'd rather have canned than fresh tomatoes. I go through cans and cans of tomatoes, beans, pumpkin, and even cream of mushroom soup. Still, I wonder about the '70s combinations, like in Quickie Supper Casserole.

Vegetarian vegetable soup with canned spaghetti and chow mein noodles? I mean-- dry spaghetti is already shelf stable. You don't need the mushy metallic canned version if you want to keep spaghetti on hand. (And I'm not sure why anyone would need spaghetti with chow mein noodles!)

But canned spaghetti was pretty popular, for some reason.

If you're not into serving it over chow mein noodles, layer it up with cheese, onions, corn chips, and pork and beans! 

You might hope that the Quick Chinese Supper breaks the overly-reliant-on-cans streak and doesn't even belong in the casserole section, as it should be a stir fry of a few fresh vegetables with a thinly-cut protein (and en casserole was originally a French cooking method anyway!). If so, then you don't really understand vintage "Chinese" recipes, where the term generally means "I dumped in a can of chow mein noodles."

And in this case, it also means "I dumped chow mein noodles, cashews, and canned mandarin oranges into tuna casserole to make it 'Chinese!'" Let that sink in for a moment. (Or don't! I'm trying not to think too hard about it.)

I promise, some casserole recipes are good. Just not these....

Stay slim the vintage way, with iceberg lettuce, canned peaches, and low-cal pudding mix!

Swimsuit season is just around the corner! And back when women were required by law to care about such nonsense, they might have pulled out Better Homes and Gardens Eat and Stay Slim (copyright 1968, but mine is from the 1974 9th printing and originally belonged to my best friend's mom). (Also, my friend is very happy that her mom never made any of the recipes from this collection as far as she remembers.)

Despite the appearance of the cover, the recipes are not all super-plain: pile of plain lettuce, plain roast with a pile of cooked but otherwise very plain mushrooms. Let's see how interesting it could get with another Menu of Mayhem!

Notably, dieters were allowed to start with an appetizer (though most of said appetizers, admittedly, are just small drinks). This one is the prettiest.

So what is in this Double Deck Cocktail besides the watercress garnish?

If you guessed that it's just tomato juice poured on top of pineapple juice, then congratulations! You could be a recipe writer in the 1960s. You win a box of nonfat dried milk!

Now, we'll need a salad. As I said, it's not ALL just piles of lettuce.

Sometimes, the pile of lettuce is encased in green Jell-O.

While that wobbly green ring of low-calorie lime-flavored gelatin with vinegar, shredded lettuce, and sliced green onion could be filled with tuna salad...

I'm going to be a bit more indulgent and serve a sandwich instead. I like the perky sound of "Peachy Ham Swisser."

Not only does it stack the titular ingredients (peaches, ham, and Swiss cheese) on a slice of rye bread, but it also covers them with a sauce of low-calorie mayonnaise, skim milk, chili sauce, and finely-chopped dill pickle. Sounds... confusing at best. I guess if you overwhelm your taste buds with a bunch of random ingredients, maybe they will shut up for a while because they're scared of what you might try next?

But if you insist upon dessert, try a Ribbon Fudge* Parfait. 

*Contains no fudge-- just low-calorie chocolate pudding from a mix combined with instant coffee and fluffed up with whipped egg whites. Then layered with even MORE air... I mean, low-calorie dessert topping.

This collection also has the distinction of ending with eight pages of exercises to help with the slimming! This may be my only cookbook that ends with pictures of people doing stretches.

And the editors of the book must have really needed some extra pages. The exercise section could easily have been half as long because the exercises are divided by gender, but there are almost no differences between them other than whether the picture shows a woman or a man demonstrating the exercise. The one difference I could spot was in the push-ups.

And yes, the book did recommend different reps of each exercise for women and men, but the recommendations were just in the headnotes, which could easily have been combined...

Oh, well. At least the editor got to 93 pages somehow! And that's all that matters (because we know dieting is largely a scam anyway, and it's not like my friend's mom really needed more recipes that she had no intention of making...)

Have an extra-sweet Easter!

Hosting Easter this year? Worried your menu might not include sufficient amounts of pie filling on this high holy day of sugar? Easy Homemade Desserts That Say You Care (Thank You brand pie filling, ca. 1980s) is here to help!

For the main dish, sweeten up that ham with Pineapple Ham Sauce.

It's just a coincidence that a company that made pie filling thinks your sauce should be made with pineapple pie filling instead of the more decorative pineapple rings.

And in case all the candy (and maybe the lamb cake?) isn't enough of a sugar buzz, make Lemon Easter Baskets for dessert.

I'm kind of surprised that Thank You didn't make sponge shortcake shells, too. Seems like they're leaving money on the table with this recipe.... (Maybe that's why they're not around anymore.)

Have a sweet Easter if you're into that kind of thing. I'll just be holing up in my apartment and waiting for the Reese's peanut butter eggs to go on clearance.

Thinking about dinner and the lawn in April

I thought that April might have a few more recipes than the earlier months in Home Gardener's Cookbook (Marjorie Page Blanchard, 1974). After all, spring is officially underway at this point. No such luck, though. It takes plants a while to grow. So the April chapter features a basic dressing recipe meant for dandelion greens along with two recipes for watercress. The enthusiasm for watercress is a bit tempered, and I particularly liked the observation that "just the leaves for garnish tends to give the effect of a lot of grass clippings. Always use the stems for character."

For those who want watercress to play a bigger role in the meal than just last-minute garnish, there's a recipe for Green Baked Fish.

Cooks will presumably have to settle for grocery-store-tomatoes, though, as fresh ones are definitely not in season! (At least, not in the author's home base of Connecticut.)

And for those who want it to play a more supporting role without being mistaken for lawn clippings, there's Watercress Cream.

I can imagine cooks using this in recipes that called for white sauce (and sometimes it seems like half of all savory recipes called for white sauce back in the day-- unless cooks were just using a can of cream-of-something soup instead!), but serving it cold? Seems like that would be an even harder sell...

Maybe cooks counted on the joy of spring to make their families agreeable enough to eat whatever they put out? Or maybe they just liked sprinkling meals with greenery to subconsciously suggest it was time to start taking care of the lawn...

"Surprise!" The recipe is supposed to be a prank somehow...

April is almost here, so there's no better time to post some fun April Fool's Day tricks for the kitchen! Honestly, though, part of me wonders if the editors of Women's Circle Home Cooking (April 1990) didn't really understand the holiday, and part of me wonders if they were just playing a very lame prank with their "April Fool's Fun Recipes" feature.

The headnote really builds the recipes up: "Why not surprise your family and friends with these fun recipes that will fool the 'best' of cooks [Not sure why they needed scare quotes there.] as to what the original ingredients happen to be. Do not tell your secret until they have eaten the last morsel." You might think the recipes will be for things with surprising ingredients, like tomato soup cake, sauerkraut cake, or bratwurst cake. You would be wrong. The surprise is much more lame. Here's a hint: Most of the recipes have "mock" in the titles.

So you could serve up dessert topped with Mock Whipped Cream, for example...

... and then "astonish" (Here, the scare quotes are very much intended!) your family by announcing that it wasn't real whipped cream. And they could respond by saying, "Yeah, we could tell. Skim milk fortified with nonfat dry milk powder isn't really the same thing as heavy cream."

Or you might fill whatever dessert you make with Mock "Twinkie" Filling...

And then "astonish" your family by telling them that it isn't real Twinkie filling... at which point, they could note that they're not even eating Twinkies anyway (There's no mock Twinkie recipe-- just the filling, so the implication is that you can spread this goo on whatever you want), so why would they even think it might be real Twinkie filling in the first place? It's not like they expected you to buy Twinkies, extract the filling, and then repurpose it for some other dessert.

The Mock Chocolate Syrup isn't really even mock chocolate syrup. It's just chocolate syrup, unless you want to get really technical and argue that it's cocoa syrup, not chocolate, since it uses cocoa powder rather than melted chocolate as the flavoring.

So I guess the surprise is supposed to be that this isn't Hershey's syrup? But considering it's stored in sterilized jars and not a Hershey's bottle, I hardly think the family would be shocked by the reveal that this isn't name-brand chocolate syrup.

The lamest entry of all doesn't even bother with "mock" in the title.

Quick Mix is-- as the parenthetical subtitle explains-- like Bisquick. So the trick of this recipe is that you can serve your family biscuits or pancakes or whatever you usually make with Bisquick and then, at the end of the meal, shock them by proclaiming, "That wasn't made with Bisquick!" And the reaction, I imagine, would be slightly baffled indifference. Although maybe, if they have very active imaginations, it could be a feeling of creeping dread. What was in those things....? Am I sure I saw the cook eating these too? Thallium isn't easy to get, is it?

Okay, maybe these tricks are ever-so-slightly better than I give them credit for being.

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Did you fall for that conclusion? Come on! These really are the lamest "joke" recipes ever.