Some alternatives to pumpkin pie

Tired of pumpkin pie every goddamn Thanksgiving? Easy Homemade Desserts That Say You Care (Thank You brand pie filling, undated, but looks like it's from the 1980s) has some suggestions.

Yeah, I know the cover makes it look like all of them would involve cherries, but there are plenty of other types of recipes too! Cherries were probably just the brand's best seller.

If you really like the pop of red, maybe go for some cranberries rather than cherries.

Well, cranberries plus apples-- and oats, brown sugar, and cinnamon! This will definitely feel like fall, even without the pumpkin. 

If you insist on the pumpkin but are apprehensive about the pie part, there's a pumpkin parfait.

It doesn't get much easier than layering pumpkin pie filling straight out of the can with scoops of vanilla ice cream. (Reminder: Canned pumpkin pie filling is NOT the same thing as pure canned pumpkin! Layering plain canned pumpkin with ice cream would probably be pretty gross.)

If you're not so into a heavy dessert after a heavy meal, there's an airy Apple Angel Pie.

(I'll bet you could sub in the pumpkin pie filling for the apple if you wanted. Or maybe you'd end up with a runny mess. I'm no psychic... or ambitious cook.)

And finally, if you want something resembling an apple-and-cheese pie without the bother of rolling out a crust, you could try Apple Cheese Squares.

I don't see too many recipes calling for a pat-in-pan cake-mix-based crust, covered with a layer of cheesy apples. (And I sincerely doubt that using the "lite" apple pie filling is going to save a substantial amount of calories in a dessert filled with cake mix, butter, coconut, and cheese, but I guess Thank You had to advertise that they made "lite" fillings somewhere, and this recipe was as good a place as any.)

If you celebrate Thanksgiving, I hope yours is as weird as an Apple Cheese Square (if you're like me and enjoy weird) or as sweet as a Pumpkin Parfait (if you're the more conventional type).

A pocket full of Thanksgiving... and maybe giblets...

Thanksgiving is coming! The Pocket Cook Book (Elizabeth Woody with Gertrude Lynn and Peg Heffernan, originally published in 1942, but mine is the 1960 edition) has a few recommendations.

First, here's a recipe for Thanksgiving day proper. Maybe you're tired of using the same old stuffing/ dressing year after year. If you need something new, try good old-fashioned Bacon and Oatmeal Stuffing.

This kind of sounds like it could be a 1980s recipe-- some weird little scheme to "negate" the saturated fat and cholesterol in the bacon by serving it up in a mound of oats. (I guess it would have been oat bran if this were really from the '80s, though. We all know oat bran was magic.)

If you're more worried about using up the leftovers, here's a way to disguise the leftover turkey.

I guess Devilled Mock Drumsticks are meant to make the leftover turkey seem more like leftover chicken? But hey, they are deep fried, so that will make them go down easier. (I'm not sure how many people would bother with the wooden skewers and paper frills, though.)

And if you're never sure what to do with the giblets, turn them into Giblet Scrapple Squares!

If you make the mold ahead of time, you could fry up slices for breakfast to quell any turkey cravings until the big dinner. Or maybe they could be a unique side dish. Or, if you're like me and not so good on follow-through, you could just say you have plans for the giblets, put them in the fridge, forget about them until you start to wonder what stinks, and then throw them out. It's a lot less work.

Whatever your holiday plans, I hope they don't stink like rotten giblets!

Nothing but Bundts

I knew Bundt pans became popular in the 1960s, but I didn't realize that they remained popular long enough for Pillsbury to publish 100 New Bundt Ideas in 1977.

Unrelated, but this is also one of the few items in my collection with a barcode!

In any case, Bundt pans were primarily popular for making cakes, so let's get away from the decadence associated with the pan and make a healthy menu that would require either owning a bundle of Bundt pans or making a lot of stuff ahead of time and washing the pan over and over again. 

First, you need a healthy main dish. How about some omgega-3 fatty acids in a Dill-Sauced Salmon Ring?

I'm sure no one will be alarmed to see the Bundt pan out of the cupboard-- a pan best known for the "Tunnel of Fudge" cake-- and smell fish. Well, fish and overcooked peas. But won't that big wet pink lump look lovely under its dilly icing? Sorry, sauce!

Especially if it's put on a glass plate surrounded by very thin lemon slices and backlit so it looks like the whole thing is glowing? (You really gotta sell this one to get the family interested.)

And of course, you need some veggies to go with the salmon loaf. It's easy to demonstrate you've used a Bundt pan to prep the veggies if you use enough gelatin.

This big wet pinkish lump is Gazpacho Salad.

To avoid big wet pink blob overload, let's turn our attention to a necessary component of any real 1970s meal: the bread! In keeping with my theme, we're going with Sunflower Health Bread.

Honestly, I think I'd just skip the raisins if I made this recipe and eat a slice or two of bread slathered in butter for my dinner. Forget the salmon loaf and gazpacho! (I'm permanently scarred by gazpacho anyway. When I was in grad school and we were all trying to pretend to be sophisticated adults and invite each other over for dinner, pretty much everybody made gazpacho because it wasn't expensive and it seemed fancy. Plus you could turn cheap wine into sangria and have an easy theme that would also get everyone tipsy while still pretending we were cultured individuals! I can't stand vinegar or raw onions or tomatoes and was trying SOOO hard to be a reasonable grownup that I choked down at least a few bites of gazpacho at so many parties... Can barely even look at recipes for it now.)

Anyway, on to dessert. Yes, I guess we can actually use the Bundt pan for its boring, usual purpose: to make a cake. We just have to add bits o' zucchini so it will fit our "healthy" theme. 

Good luck figuring out what to replace the Pillsbury Coconut Pecan or Coconut Almond Frosting Mix with, though. (Actually-- I could find recipes to replace the pecan version, like this one on Food.com. I imagine you could just swap out almonds for the pecans if you really wanted the almond version.) Of course, this cake is really zucchini bread, but it's ring-shaped, so no one will be confused by a non-Bundt-shaped foodstuff in your Bundt-based banquet. We couldn't have that!

I may be amused by the kitchenware trends of yesteryear, but at least home cooks in 1977 didn't have to add another app to their phones to get the new appliance to work, and then try to figure out why it wasn't connecting-- and then get it to shut up and leave them alone once everything was set up. Nobody needs the oven to beg for a new accessory at 3 a.m. (Not that I have personal experience with this-- I started to feel exhausted just from Googling "trendy kitchen appliances 2025" when I was trying to decide what fad to put in the previous sentence. It seems like they all require at least as much work to set them up as it will take to use them. Progress!)

Microwave stuffing!

Picture this: it's 1985. You got your first microwave, and you also are so behind-the-times that you don't realize that owning a microwave does not have nearly the same coolness factor as it did five or six years ago. What's the best way to celebrate and show off your good fortune? That's right: microwave Thanksgiving! Let Kenmore Microwave Cooking walk you through it. 

First up: You need a turkey, of course, complete with a sausage-studded cornbread stuffing.

You can make it all in the microwave, from cooking the sausage and veggies for the stuffing to cooking the oiled-up turkey itself. Okay, if you don't like pale, rubbery turkey skin, it will have to spend the last 10-15 minutes in the conventional oven, but that will just leave you time to make the side: jellied carrots.

Before I read the recipe, I wondered whether we really needed to use the microwave to boil water for Jell-O, but this isn't the shredded-carrots-and-pineapple-in-fruity-Jell-O recipe I was imagining. These carrots are "jellied" by being cooked in equal parts butter and cranberry sauce, so much more Thanksgiving-appropriate. (Maybe double the recipe, though!)

Your microwave will be pretty busy with the other dishes, but luckily, you can make the dessert ahead of time. Ginger bars aren't quite the traditional pumpkin pie, but they do have pumpkin pie spice in them. 

I'm not entirely sure how you can stretch a recipe in which the main ingredient is 6 tablespoons of flour into 16 servings, but hopefully everybody will fill up on microwaved turkey and the brown-and-serve rolls you had in the oven when the turkey was crisping up.

If you're family is nice, you will be able to figure out on your own that microwave ownership is not nearly as impressive as you thought it was. And if they're not nice, well, at least the fight this year won't be entirely dominated by politics.

Wealthy peasants and bountiful ingredients in an imagined 1970s Italy

It's about time for something wonderful, right? Right?! I can't do much about the real world, but I can show you Wonderful Ways to Prepare Italian Food (Jo Ann Shirley, 1978).

I kind of love the nearly 3-D style of the cover, with the bowl of cooked farfalle sitting on top of a mound of uncooked farfalle.

Most of the recipes are actually not too terrible sounding-- just sometimes not very authentic considering the questionable availability of various ingredients in 1970s groceries. (Yes, "risotto" is made with long grain rice in this book, for example.)

I did like the occasional recipe that put a spin on a common '70s dinner. This meat loaf recipe might shake up the usual meat loaf in a dinner rotation.

Not only is this a rolled meat loaf, but the stuffing isn't just the cubed-bread dressing I expected. It's a different meal entirely-- ham and cheese with mashed potatoes! 

My favorite entries might be the ones that confused me, though. I was not at all surprised to see a minestrone recipe-- pretty much every Italian cookbook I ever see has at least one--

--but then I was a bit confused by the Peasant Minestrone recipe that followed.

The original recipe was mostly what I expected: kidney beans cooked with tomatoes and other vegetables, then finished with a starchy component (rice, in this case, though I usually expect a small pasta). The peasant version is inexplicably more expensive than the standard, subbing two kinds of meat (beef ribs and Italian sausage) for the dried beans and adding an extravagant sprinkling of Parmesan at the end. Are the peasants somehow richer than everyone else? I was a bit mystified.

The biggest mystery of all, however, might have been this one.

You might wonder what is so odd about steak with brandy and Marsala. Meat with wine is a pretty common combination. But look at the sauce! This recipe for four people calls for TWO FULL POUNDS of liver paté! Who wants a HALF-POUND of paté on top of a steak? And the recipe title doesn't even mention paté, as if it is only a minor component of this recipe.

I guess maybe the diners were supposed to eat only a little sauce and save some for other dishes? Who knows? All I know is that I was grateful for this book's little mysteries.

How to have a chill Thanksgiving

Just in case you're having an unusually hot November, here are some cold recipes from New Delights from the Kitchen (Kelvinator, 1930), back when refrigerators were so new that they merited their own cookbook.

If you just want some cold desserts that aren't yet another round of pumpkin pie, the book offers "Kelsherbs." The American Beauty Kelsherb freezes cranberry puree in buttermilk-- sort of like a tangy version of cranberry ice cream that is likely to be rock hard if you let it freeze even a bit too long, I imagine. 

If pumpkin is simply a must, then you might go with the Sunset Kelsherb instead. 

It's a tangy and rock-hard version of pumpkin ice cream. (In Kelvinator's defense, commercial ice cream wasn't really available back then.)

And if you're wondering what the hell "kelsherb" is, and the Google searches aren't helping, it's a portmanteau of "Kelvinator" and "sherbet," as if the existence of Kelvinator meant that the word "sherbet" was somehow now outdated. (Spoiler: It was not.) In any case, kelsherbs are great accompaniments for a Thanksgiving feast because they're made with buttermilk, which was "widely advocated for intestinal troubles and ... considered very healthful." The health trend of deeming all things fermented as good for gut health is not nearly as new as many might think! 

If you're not into thinking about intestinal wellness while you're planning a dinner but you are interested in getting the meal over as quickly as possible, then the Molded Turkey Rings with Cranberry Jelly might be more your speed.

Just make a cranberry gelatin and throw in some cooked turkey when it starts to thicken. Done! So much easier than roasting a whole turkey and making a cranberry salad or relish from scratch. Serve with some rolls from the bakery, a potato salad, and maybe some green beans straight from the can and you've got a Thanksgiving "feast" that won't heat up the house. No need to thank Kelvinator (or me). I'm sure you wouldn't want to, anyway...

Damn it! I really wanted to unreservedly love the pictures...

The cover of Quick Dishes for the Woman in a Hurry (Culinary Arts Institute, directed by Melanie de Proft, 1955) looks pretty straightforward: corn on the cob, Brussels sprouts, ribs, strawberries with whipped cream, a relish tray with olives and radish roses lurking in the corner.

A lot of the recipes are pretty rudimentary as well, which is to be expected from a quick cookbook. Need some coffee cake? Rather than making one from scratch or getting one from a bakery...

...simply hack up an unsliced loaf of bread, slather with butter, top with more butter mixed with brown sugar and cinnamon, and then bake up into an ersatz coffee cake. 

Want some cheese bread quick? I'll bet you'll never guess the recommendation.

Yep-- hack up a loaf of unsliced bread, slip in slices of American cheese, slather in caraway-mustard butter...

...and for a slight twist ending, dump on some anchovy/ lemon butter just before serving.

The truth is, though, I didn't really get this booklet for the recipes. I loved the pictures by illustrator Kay Lovelace.

While the inside cover does have the expected picture of a woman dressed up for an afternoon out, slipping a casserole into the oven for dinner later, I was much more taken by this imaginative picture just a few pages later emphasizing the need for speed.

The mice NEED to be quick-- hopefully springing the trap with a fork will be enough to catapult the cheese into the catcher's mitt! The two mice in the foreground have their tails crossed for luck, though I'm not sure why. The morsel of cheese is small enough that the catcher will make short work of it before anyone else gets a taste-- even the "chef" in the tiny hat.

Mice make another appearance in the sauce chapter, bringing a bit of humor to an old cliché.

The geese don't mind the cliché about sauce for the goose and for the gander as long as it means a procession of mice in still more tiny hats and aprons delivering dishes full of goodies.

A bunny gets in on the act too, using the salad chapter as a backdrop for her performance of my grandpa's favorite mealtime joke.

He always said he wanted "honeymoon salad-- lettuce alone!" Miss Lapin approves of that choice.

The adorable pictures are not confined to cute animals, either. Here are some hot dogs getting ready to get hot and heavy.

I'm not sure whether it's a reminder of how buttoned-up the fifties were that one of the hot dogs in a romance clearly has to be female, or whether this is actually secretly subversive.... They're both hot dogs, after, all, the the "girl" is even flatter than I am (and that is saying something!). Either way, we have dressed-up yet shirtless hot dogs in the throes of romance, so what's not to love?

Uh... Scratch that question. There is something not to love about the illustrations. Ms. Lovelace should have stuck with pictures of adorable animals and anthropomorphic foods because her pictures of people are not always... (How to put this delicately?) ... very respectful.

Yep. Unfortunately, we have old cookbook racism AGAIN. 

There's a lot to love about old cookbooks, but there are always plenty of reminders that we really need to keep moving beyond that past they represent, even though a LOT of people seem more interested in regressing than progressing...