A Royal Pain

All-American Royal Desserts (Standard Brands Incorporated) has such a patriotic cover that I thought it might be for America's bicentennial, but it's actually from 1968-- a few years too early.

And as I flipped through, I was dismayed (but not particularly surprised) to see it celebrating a dark chapter in our history.

It is interesting to know that Royal Lemon Flavor Pie Filling apparently included a "flavor capsule" that might not dissolve without special prompting, though.

The booklet has an extremely expansive definition of cake. When we're talking desserts, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect some flour-and-sugar-based concoction at the very least. Even if we're being more expansive-- like salmon cakes or rice cakes-- people usually expect them to at least be solid. Nobody hears Peach-Pineapple Upside-Down Cake and imagines this:

Well, nobody except Royal, obviously. They apparently didn't think they could sell this as a salad. Maybe they figured people were getting tired of gelatin-based desserts (even though my cookbook collection would suggest otherwise!) and thought calling it a cake was the way to go? By the time guests who had been promised cake realized they were actually getting gelatin, it was too late to object...

There's even a layer "cake." (Okay, the other one had layers too, but one is meant to represent the peach-pineapple topping and I'd say the other is meant as the "cake." This one is all "cake.")

And if you pay attention to the colors of the layers, you can probably guess that this is billed as "Citrus Cake."

The booklet isn't all fake cakes, though. There's an attempt to highlight a brand-new product-- pistachio pudding mix. (I assumed that Jell-O created pistachio pudding, but it was actually Royal in 1966.) This recipe doesn't sound bad-- just like it was probably a real pain in the ass to make, and more likely to result in a mess than to be the cute little individual servings the recipe developers envisioned.

I've always thought chocolate and pistachio pudding were a great combination that most people don't seem to think about. Here, they're combined, but I can't imagine Pistachio Cups coming out well. I have never tried peeling thin chocolate shells filled with pistachio pudding out of paper cups, but I can already imagine bits of broken chocolate cups and globs of pistachio pudding covering the work surface... I initially wondered why the instructions didn't say to make the chocolate cups, remove them from the paper, and then fill the cups with pudding. That seems like it would be way less messy. But then I realized the instructions are probably an implicit admission the recipe is unlikely to work very well. The recipe writers probably realized the cups might have holes in them and/or crack on being removed from the paper cups, so trying to fill them with pudding after they've already been removed would obviously be a losing proposition. Better to get the cooks to actually use the pistachio pudding mix before they realize the whole recipe is a waste of time.

Other recipes seem mainly fine, at least until you get to some weird little twist. I'd expect a recipe for a whipped-cream-topped chiffon pie, for instance, but what is with the weird brownish lumps in this pie's topping?

If you remembered that prune whip used to be a popular dessert, give yourself 50 bonus points. This is Orange Chiffon Pie with Prune Topping.

I'm certainly not opposed to a flavored whipped cream, but I doubt "prune" is at the top of anyone's list of flavors they would request...

And of course, this post would be incomplete without at least one terrifying "salad." The picture may not look too bad if you're only half-paying attention...

But then you'll look closer and think the mold looks kind of lumpy, and the topping on the cream is not walnut halves, but ...

Shrimp! Yes, Lime-Cheese Salad with Shrimp Sauce combines sweet lime gelatin with lumpy cottage cheese and disconcerting onion, mayo, and horseradish before plunking a blob of shrimp salad into the middle. That's 1960s "cooking" at its "finest."

This booklet should make you think twice about wanting the Royal treatment... I don't want to leave you with a bad taste, though, so I'll end with a picture of the back cover (really just because I am a sucker for pictures of old products, and I assume anybody who shows up here shares my weakness).

I love that the Burgerbits for dogs hung out with the coffee and tea.

Some snibbled wet bumpers for July

Happy (almost) July! July is when things REALLY start to heat up-- both in the daily weather forecast and in Home Gardener's Cookbook (Marjorie Page Blanchard, 1974).You could fit the February chapter into the July chapter three times and still have room to spare. The July section showcases recipes for all of mid-summer's heavy hitters: cherries and berries, green beans, tomatoes, and of course, zucchini.

I'll start with the green bean recipe just because I like the title. I wasn't sure what "snibbled" meant, but it's a fun word.

So I tried to look it up and... I still don't know what "snibbled" means. There's a recipe for Snibbled Beans on the Mount Vernon website, but that one has a sweet-n-sour egg sauce over green beans, onion, and bacon. I also saw some references to "snippled beans," but they're pickled. So maybe Blanchard just heard the term somewhere and made up her own version?

I picked the tomato recipe because I thought the title didn't do it any favors.

"Deviled Tomatoes" probably sounds fine to people who like things like deviled eggs, but adding "wet"? I don't know.... Makes it sound like something went wrong in the deviling process and the cook feels compelled to warn the diners that this batch is a little off, so they'll need extra napkins. 

At least the name of the Zucchini Sauce for Pasta is pretty straightforward.

It sounds pretty bland, but it would help use up the bumper crop of zucchini, and it's probably fine as long as you keep the pepper and Parmesan on the table so diners can add as much extra as they need to make it taste like something.

We will end with a dessert-- once again chosen for its name. This one sounds cute!

I am all for referring to hand pies as "bumpers." Plus, it's fun that you can use bumpers to help use up a bumper crop of cherries!

Okay, it's too nice a day to spend it all marveling at old recipe names... It's only (almost) July once a year, so I'm going out to enjoy it.

Modern(ish) poultry in family meals!

Poultry in Family Meals: A Guide for Consumers is from the USDA in 1982. That's a little new for this blog, but government publications are so no-frills that they often look like they could be a decade older than they really are.

All that brown on the cover certainly seems like it could have come from the 1970s.

A lot of the guide is pretty boring-- explaining things like how to store poultry, how much to buy to feed a certain number of people, how long to roast per pound, etc. Still, there are a few interesting recipes. I was kind of surprised to see a recipe for wings in here, as wings were not a very popular cut in most of America until the mid-1980s. Maybe this was meant as a money-saving recipe?

These are clearly NOT intended as bar food-- seasoned with soy and ginger to be served with brown rice pilaf and green beans.

I was kind of amused by the recipe for Chicken rolls, Italian style.

Chicken breasts rolled around ham and cheese, then coated in crumbs before being cooked? That's basically chicken cordon bleu, with its famously French name. These are Italianized by swapping out the Swiss cheese for mozzarella and serving it with a tomato sauce. I guess it's pre-figuring what we now call fusion cuisine?

For a slightly more veggie-centric meal (likely meant to use up leftovers), the book offers Chicken-stuffed baked tomatoes.

It's also a great way to get your family to eat more "round snack crackers" if you're worried that their consumption may be too low. I picked the recipe mainly because I liked the picture.

Well, I liked the caption for the picture, to be more precise. Boy, those chicken-stuffed baked tomatoes sure are "a colorful luncheon entree"! Was whoever wrote this unaware that the booklet was black-and-white? Or maybe they just expected readers to have better imaginations back then, and they were priming the pump to get home cooks to also imagine that this would taste more exciting than reheated chicken mixed with tomato pulp, onion, green pepper, egg, and crackers is likely to...

Even if the book does look a bit older than the 1980s, I can see the connection to more modern dishes. Older USDA publications (or most mainstream American cookbooks, for that matter) really pushed the white sauce and meals built around meat and potatoes. This one has a bit more international flavor and emphasis on other veggies. It's so exciting that home cooks might have been tempted to do the chicken dance... which would bring us full circle-- right back to old-timey!

Not committed to the bit

The recipe for Meat Loaf in the Women's Circle Home Cooking magazine (April 1990) is a little odd-- subbing in All-bran for the usual bread or cracker crumbs. (Frankly, you don't see a lot of recipes mixing All-bran cereal with tomato sauce, onion, mustard, and chili powder.)

But that's not why I picked it.

You might notice a theme: the Cherry Coffee Cake that shared the page also features All-bran, this time with the more expected dessert-y ingredients, like sugar, pecans, and maraschino cherries.

The reason I really picked the recipes, though, is because of the section of the magazine where I found them.

I don't think Mary Pledge Peterson was very committed to the bit, considering that one recipe in the "Cooking for Two" section serves six, and the other serves eight to nine. Yes, the headnote for the meat loaf insists "You'll welcome the extra servings for sandwiches, to reheat in the microwave oven or on a griddle," but nearly any food that home cooks make can also be eaten as leftovers. Same thing with noting that the coffee cake "Freezes well." Sure, but a lot of desserts do. I didn't major in math, but I'm pretty sure "Cooking for Two" is meant to imply that the recipes will serve TWO without leaving a bunch of leftovers. Otherwise, pretty much every recipe in this booklet fits the "cooking for two" requirement, in which case... WHY BOTHER WITH THIS SECTION AT ALL?

Maybe I'm overthinking this, but I don't care. And no, a slab of microwaved leftover meat loaf will not calm me down. 

The mystery of cooking for two

I was surprised to find a copy of Cooking for Two (USDA, August 1974) so battered and taped up among my grandma's old cookbooks.

As I mentioned before, I don't really remember her using recipes for very much, but this book clearly got used. The date is 1974, though, not too long before their youngest child left for good. Maybe grandma was having trouble cutting her cooking back to a manageable level for two people, and this was a help. (Come to think of it, she'd cook holiday meals for 10 that could easily have served at least twice as many people, so this seems kind of likely....)

But then I went through the recipes, and many of them are so sad and basic that I was once again shocked that grandma not only gave this book a second glance, but apparently used it regularly. I mean, there's a recipe to make mashed potatoes from instant potatoes.

She made them from scratch as long as I knew her, but even if she wasn't so inclined, the recipe for using instant mashed potatoes is right on the package they're sold in! I can't imagine why anybody would need a cookbook to explain it.

There was also a recipe for something that's so easy most middle-schoolers can manage it without formal instructions: grilled cheese sandwiches. (And it's not like this recipe would be hard to cut down!)

These are SAD grilled cheeses, too, filled with just one thin slice of process cheese. I always use at least a couple types: a slice of process cheese because it's a good melter and a slice of whatever other cheese I already have open so it will taste better. (Plus a slice or two of Tofurky "ham" for some smoke flavor, and maybe a sprinkle of shredded mozzarella if I have some open and want a nice cheese pull.)

At least this sad little grilled cheese recipe comes with an interesting variation. 

I never thought of combining my two favorite types of sandwiches, and I'm still not convinced it's a good idea, but I'm also a bit intrigued...

Speaking of SAD meals... I wasn't surprised to see recipes for cooking dried beans or peas in the book, but I expected them to be used as ingredients in other recipes. The recipes seem to expect readers to straight-up eat the plain cooked legumes as a meal, though. 

To make lightly-salted cooked split peas into a meal, all you have to add is a fruit-cottage cheese salad and a slice of yellow cake. If you've got dried beans, on the other hand...

Serve 'em with coleslaw and applesauce. I'm not making fun of beans. They can be great in things, but I've never been tempted to just open up a can of kidney beans and call it dinner.

To be fair, the pages with these recipes also offer a bit of advice on how to make the beans more flavorful. 

But throwing in some bacon drippings or a bit of ham will only take it so far. I still can't imagine it feeling much like a main dish without a little more assistance.

Then I saw a recipe for rice and beans. That would have to be much better, right?

Not so much. It's barely different-- just adding rice and instructing cooks to include a little meat for flavoring. Not even a few aromatics, herbs, or a couple drops of hot sauce!

The tomato-meat sauce (also known as spaghetti sauce!) is similarly bland.

 No seasonings aside from onion and a little Worcestershire sauce. (Maybe this cookbook is why grandma always bought Prego instead of making her own tomato sauce?)

The book is falling apart, and a lot of pages are stained, though, so I imagine she must have used it. The only recipe I can definitively say she tried was "Chinese-Style Dinner."

You can see how I knew-- she didn't want all that soy sauce! So I guess the blandness wasn't necessarily such an issue for grandma. Still, I am not sure what she saw in such a basic cookbook when she'd already been cooking for decades. Maybe it was a comfort when dealing with an empty nest? Now, it's just a reminder that we can never truly understand anyone else's life... There are always a few surprising, nearly-inexplicable bits if you have a chance to look closely. 

Stretching the concept of "main course" to its limits

I already wrote about how some of the recipes in McCall's Book of Wonderful One-Dish Meals (edited by Kay Sullivan, 1972) make me kind of nervous, but the post didn't mention the especially nerve-wracking chapter on "Salads as a Main Course." I have no problem with the concept, often making a tossed salad loaded with half-a-dozen veggie varieties, Tofurky, cottage cheese, and a sprinkling of mixed nuts into a standalone meal on hot summer days. This book, though, doesn't seem all that concerned with whether a main course salad is all that substantial.

I expected the Fiesta Salad Platter, for example, to be a fairly standard taco salad. Nope! Not even close.

It's mostly just cooked cauliflower and and green beans marinated in oil-and-vinegar dressing and sprinkled with a few croutons. Diners can slather on some herbed mayonnaise to make it a little more substantial, but I'm not sure what would make anyone see this as a main dish (or a fiesta).

I've seen variations of the next selection listed as a salad or as a dessert.

But I have never seen anyone claim that a dish consisting largely of fruit-flavored gelatin and ginger ale should count as the main course.

Also in the desserty realm, the book recommends Rainbow Salad Plate.

This recipe is a bit more substantial, offering diners a bite or two of cheese and a couple pecan halves, but it's still mostly fruit and sherbet. (At least the book recommends hot buttered muffins as an accompaniment to give this meal a little heft.) I saved this one for last just because I wanted to make you imagine eating a scoop of sherbet with oil-and-vinegar dressing on top.

Of course, a lot of old cookbooks list lengthy menus-- soup, meat, potatoes, hot vegetable, cold salad, rolls with butter, and fruit, plus a substantial dessert of pie, cake, cookies, and/or ice cream--  so maybe "main dish" didn't mean as much back then. If the editors are expecting cooks to serve these with accoutrements like soup, bread and butter, and a heavy dessert, maybe they would do as a main course. That would mean that Sullivan was not particularly committed to the "one-dish" premise of the book, but I already established that she wasn't, so... maybe these would actually work? Or maybe Americans' expectations of what constitutes a full meal have changed over the years? People were trimmer in the 1970s.

Some Bake-Off recipes that seem... off

The Pillsbury's Best 12th Grand National Bake-Off Cookbook doesn't actually have a date printed on it as far as I can tell, but the winner is Dilly Casserole Bread, which won in 1960, so this was probably printed in late 1960 or early 1961. (Don't tell me that I could figure out the year by knowing that the Bake-Off started in 1949. Then I would have guessed that this was from 1961 because I would have used simple subtraction, not taking into account that both the first year AND the most recent year would count. I wasn't a math major!)

Most of the recipes are fairly-tasty-sounding baked goods and as such, of relatively little interest to me... It's not like a small twist on cinnamon rolls or pound cake is likely to be too exciting or revolting.

The small section of main dishes held some interest, though. To feed my fascination with all recipes that claim to have some type of Asian influence but were clearly dreamed up by white people whose main experience with any kind of Asian cuisine was that they may once have heard another white person describe something they ordered at a Chinese-American restaurant a couple years ago and only vaguely remember, there's Oriental Celery Crunch.

Anything that starts with a cup and a half of shredded cheddar just doesn't sound so "Oriental" to me... Fold some of that cheese into a white sauce loaded with celery and add the rest to a cheese nut pastry to be baked on top of the saucy celery, and I am left wondering what exactly made anyone think the title applied. Usually, "Oriental" means that something has soy sauce, rice, and/or chow mein noodles in it. This has none of the usual suspects, and so much cheese and pastry that it could more credibly be labeled French... Maybe it's the MSG? The almonds? Your guess is as good as mine.

Speaking of pastry, this chapter also has one of those recipes-doubling-as-craft-projects that I love. In this case, it's Seafood Sunfish.

I love the idea of home cooks spending the better part of a day carefully cutting pastry out with a crabmeat can, then cutting and placing fins and tails, adding filling, topping it off with additional crust, carefully scoring all the details, adding olive eyes... Recipes this cute are usually reserved for children's foods, but I can't imagine most kids getting too excited about crabmeat and capers. Maybe this is intended for a ladies' luncheon? Or maybe it's just something for mom to make when she gets bored and wishes she had gotten that art degree instead of getting married and having a passel of children? (And a warning to the rest of the family to tread lightly because mom is in one of those moods again...)

I initially thought the recipe for Hamburger Hotcakes was going to be regular hotcakes with a hamburger-based sauce in place of maple syrup.

Nope! These hotcakes actually have the hamburger mixture baked right into them, to be served "hot, with a mushroom sauce or sandwich-style with a cheese slice between pancakes." I'll bet the "mushroom sauce" was just code for "heated-up cream-of-mushroom soup," and I kind of wonder if anyone ever went crazy and did both at once. Cheese between the top and bottom layer, then sauce over the whole thing would be a savory version of the sweet stuffed pancake stacks people eat now.

It should be no surprise that the nastiest-sounding recipe is Cook's Choice Casserole. "Cook's choice" was always code for "hastily-thrown-together-odds-and-ends-we-need-to-use-up-soon" when it showed up on our elementary-school menus, and it seems to be the animating force in this recipe too.

I love well-prepared Brussels sprouts (especially roasted ones!), but the fact that this recipe starts out by fully cooking frozen Brussels sprouts according to package directions (which were likely "Boil them into submission. Then boil a couple more minutes just to make sure.") and then preparing to bake them for another 20-25 minutes does not bode well. Adding the sulfurous smell of the hard-cooked eggs is unlikely to help... (Maybe the cheese will do some good. It's the only hope.) I'd think the biscuit topping would also help, but it's swirled with mushy and musty canned deviled ham... In short, this definitely has that "I've gotta use this shit up" vibe, which, while an admirable goal, is not really something I'd generally associate with a contest-winning recipe (or even a recipe that the family will accept a second time).

I will close with one baked good, though, as those are the book's main focus. Since I am a licorice hater, here are Licorice Snaps.

I saw the jar full of licorice candies in the picture and immediately wondered what pieces of actual licorice would do to the texture of the cookies. If you check the recipe, though, these have no actual licorice candies in them-- just anise seed. So these are actually better than expected (which isn't saying much). The recipe is just a slightly-more-pleasant-than-I-imagined way to waste yummy pecans.

I guess the judges agreed with me that these weren't necessarily tops in the competition. These cooks didn't win prize money-- just a new range and mixer, a recipe in an official Pillsbury publication, and a good story for anybody they could get to listen. So they are still winners, which is nice in a world where it is so easy to lose.