Betty Crocker gets tricky

I have to admit that I'm kind of in love with Betty Crocker's Baking's Believing: Authentic Magic Recipes Perform Feats of Oven Wizardry! Table Sorcery! Eating Enchantment! (created in consultation with Milbourne Christopher, "America's Foremost Magician"; undated, but an address inside does not include a zip code, so it's from early 1963 at the latest). I mean, just look at the cover.

If you can remain unmoved by endless subtitles punctuated with exclamation points AND a tiny wizard making paper birds fly out of a hat-shaped cake, your imagination must be made out of soda crackers and dead bugs. (Or maybe you're just a more convincing grown-up than I am. I don't know. I just needed to feel like somebody else was deficient instead of me.)

And yes, the book does indeed tell you how to make tiny paper birds "fly" out of a cherry-frosted hat cake.

Also, the hat should have a tiny, angry marshmallow rabbit on it to glare at the birds. Maybe it's jealous that the birds will get all the glory? In any case, I assumed that the audience for this booklet would be moms who wanted to make their little magic enthusiast's seventh birthday the best one ever.

Then the variations for the Abracadabra Dough made me question that assumption a bit.

I guess some kids might think optical illusions are cool...

But I don't know how excited kids are really going to be about cookies with varying types of lines on them... or teeny tiny hearts and stars that will only make kids long for the magical day in 1964 when Lucky Charms would first appear in grocery stores.

And then there's the horoscope-themed variation....

I feel tired just looking at all the work this one involves. Six colors of dough-- some to be used straight-up and some to be speckled into others. A dozen cookie cutters. One representative for each shape topped with a hand-crafted horoscope sign. Elaborate plating. Clearly this is a labor-intensive project... Maybe something to make in anticipation of hosting the swingers' party for the first time? The cookies can serve as an icebreaker and make it easier to pick partners based on the compatibility of their signs.

Or maybe the book is just meant to give bored and crafty homemakers something to do.

The Take-A-Card cookies, with their lengthy and repeated rests and double-sided egg paint designs, seem designed to convey to the bridge club that the host was going out of her mind with boredom.

And then I saw a couple pages of "tricks" that seemed to be meant for children to perform for their friends, like "The Winner."

This one seems guaranteed to make the kid performing the trick instantly lose their friends. Set up a bet about which side the match will land on and then bend it at the last second so it will land on its side? This is not even attempting to seem like magic-- just the wonder of someone being an asshole and changing the conditions of the trick at the last second.

And then there is "Number Wizardry."

It seems to assume that kids are just thrilled to have to do lengthy multiplication problems in their spare time (and also that they will be accurate with their math. I could definitely see myself feeling anxious about being asked to do a math problem for an audience and coming up with, say, 558,675,309 for the answer, both messing up the trick and embarrassing myself).

And speaking of tricks that will take a lot of effort for little payoff, there's also a trick asking the performer to perform a lengthy series of intricate cuts because "When you say that you can cut a hole large enough to put your head through, in a piece of paper the size of a playing card, your friends will be dubious."

And they will lose interest after a few seconds of watching you take tiny cuts in that piece of paper, which is probably for the best anyway, as even a small misstep is going to make the whole thing fall apart anyway....

And then once I was convinced that the booklet was for kids with industrial-strength levels of patience, a different trick made me return to the "preparing for a swingers' party" theory again.

Okay, okay, the more likely scenario would be that I as a kid would have wanted to try this one myself, announced that I was going to show off an "incredible penetration" and then have had no clue why everybody else was laughing.

In any case, this book did keep me laughing because I could never figure out who the intended audience was, but I liked considering the various possibilities. And now, for the amazing finale, I'm going to disappear!

Happy 4/20 (Lima Bean Respect Day)!

Happy 4/20! Yeah, I know the date is generally used to refer to a holiday for a special kind of green, but this blog is about old recipes. I looked for other holidays and discovered that 4/20 is also Lima Bean Respect Day. I'm not sure how to respect a lima bean, really, but since eating them is the only interaction most people have with limas, I'll go with that.

Unfortunately, most of my cookbooks just explain how to boil limas and advise cooks to maybe put some butter on them if they want to go all-out. Not exactly thrilling recipes. Luckily, my doorstop of a book Mary Margaret McBride's Encyclopedia of Cooking Deluxe Illustrated Edition (1959) offers far more suggestions. (The book's unwieldy size means I had to photograph rather than scan, so some of these recipes will look wonky, but that's life.)

Since this is an older cookbook, it has plenty of recipes that are attributed to another country with questionable degrees of authenticity, like Brazilian Lima Beans.

At least these sound like they'd taste pretty good. (And a recipe I found by a food blogger who specializes in Brazilian cuisine is at least somewhat similar, in that it too flavors the beans with bacon, onion, and garlic.) I'd say this counts as respecting lima beans, at least, and maybe Brazilian culture too? 

If your late April day is gloomy and you want to brighten it up, the book offers Lima Sunshine Casserole.

I guess the creamed corn is the sun? Maybe the photograph of this recipe will help me figure it out.

Or maybe, since this is a black-and-white photo, it will just end up looking like a bowl full of grayish glop. In any case, I'm kind of surprised the recipe developer didn't amp up the "sunshine" element by working chopped egg yolks into this one. Or pineapple. Or both. You know how the old recipes are.

If you want a good, old-fashioned white-sauce-and-chopped-up-eggs casserole, though, don't worry.

Last Minute Lima Supper has you covered. All the lima bean, white sauce, and hard-cooked egg you want, along with the mid-century staples of American cheese, ham, and pimientos (to fancy it up).

My favorite recipes, though, are those old-fashioned sandwich fillings, from back when people would consider pretty much any random foodstuffs chopped up and mixed with mayonnaise to be acceptable, so long as the glop was served on bread and referred to as a sandwich. First, there's the simple sandwich filling. 

It's perfect for when you have the munchies, but the cupboards are mostly empty. Just drain some canned beans, mix with pickle relish and mayo, and slather onto bread. Hopefully the munchies are sufficiently strong that you can wolf this down without having to experience it too fully.

If you're feeling fancier, though, there's this majestic creation:

Okay, you're probably staring at this and wondering if I've accidentally uploaded some kind of medical image that you definitely do not want to know more about (but at least it's not in color).  Don't worry. These are just Lima Soufflé Sandwiches.

Why you'd want to go to the trouble to whip up egg whites, then add American cheese, mayo, and other seasonings, just so you could slap the airy concoction on top of lima beans on toast before broiling the whole shebang, I have no idea. Maybe it's just more respectful to cover lima beans with a puff of egg whites before you eat them so they won't know what's happening until it's already too late?

Has this post been sufficiently respectful of lima beans? I'm not sure, but at least I haven't put them in a fruit salad flavored with horseradish and lemonade concentrate or made them an ingredient in a fruitcake. That's about as respectful as I get...

Tiger Recipes for April!

I was intrigued to receive a tiny four-page brochure (if you count a single sheet of paper printed on both sides and folded in half as four pages) in an envelope full of cooking ephemera that I received recently. 

It's Kraft TV Recipes for Spring Weekends! As seen on the TIGER, TIGER Nature Documentary! This little slip of paper is undated, but I figured a bit of digging would tell me when the documentary aired. It was on a major network and merited a TV recipe advertising booklet, after all. However, finding the air date wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. (So many search results thought I was looking for Tiger Woods!) I did finally find, in the Blake Issue Archive, a notification in the summer 1977 issue that "On 28 April CBS-TV aired 'Tiger, Tiger,' a documentary on the Bengal tiger, an endangered species." That's the long way of saying that this is apparently from 1977.

You will be relieved to know that there are no recipes calling for tiger meat. I was a little disappointed that there weren't even any recipes for cookies or kids' sandwiches that looked kind of tiger-y. The brochure is mostly for pretty boring salad recipes, I guess in the quest to sell more salad dressing. There's also some advice for ways to zazz up sandwiches, like adding Kraft singles and beet strips to an egg salad sandwich. Oh, boy! 

I was a little confused about the recipe for "Taxco Salad." Was this a misspelling of "Taco Salad" or simply an old-timey spelling of "taco" that I hadn't encountered before?

I tried searching "Taxco Salad" and Google immediately asked if I meant "Taco Salad," so I thought it was just a misspelling. I also found out that there's a small Mexican city called Taxco de Alarcón, so maybe I'll be very generous and suppose that this is not a typo but in fact an assertion that the residents of Taxco love covering mounds of iceberg lettuce with beef and kidney beans mixed with French dressing, tomatoes and green peppers mixed with more French dressing, and guacamole made of avocados, Miracle Whip, onion, and bacon. In fact, it's the dish their city is best known for. (Wikipedia suggests Taxco is known for dishes that include jumiles-- a type of stink bug-- so I can see why Kraft wouldn't go for that particular angle.)

The brochure also includes the 1970s-required gelatin salad. 

Of course the lemon gelatin has to include Kraft Real Mayonnaise, along with vinegar, celery, cabbage, carrots, green pepper, and onion. This is definitely going for actual salad vibes, and not "Let's all pretend this dessert is really a salad so we can unapologetically eat another dessert at the end of the meal."

I was also a bit surprised by the booklet's version of a Waldorf salad. I'm used to seeing recipes for Waldorf salad that call for apples, celery, mayonnaise, and maybe some walnuts and/or grapes. It sounds terrible to me mainly because of my white-hot hatred of mayonnaise, but I guess I can understand that others would be attracted to the lightly sweet and refreshing crunch. Kraft's version, on the other hand...

It doesn't just go for the crunchy-but-mostly-flavorless celery as the vegetable element. It also includes more assertive cauliflower. And instead of walnuts for the fattier crunchy element, this tops off the salad with raisin bread croutons! I can't imagine that too many people are really begging for cauliflower with raisin bread croutons.... Will using French dressing instead of mayonnaise make this unholy mixture better or worse? I have no idea because pretty much any type of salad dressing is a crime against nature as far as I'm concerned, though your mileage will likely vary...

I'm sure tigers would vote for raw meat above any of these recipes, though. In this case, I may reluctantly have to side with Kraft. (I only said "may," though, so I'm not fully committed either way. For all I know, Taxco may be right and the stink bugs may be the best bet....)

Endless salads: The entire point of a 1930s refrigerator

I got the Westinghouse Refrigerator Book (1932) partly because it was under $5 and had a lovely pastel cover, but if you know anything about me, you probably also suspect that I wanted a refrigerator cookbook because refrigerators were a gateway to that most coveted of early-to-mid-20th-century dishes: the chilled salad. This book did not disappoint.

There is, of course, a salad with a kind of racist name.

I'm not really sure why shaved cabbage topped with tomato slices, half a hard boiled egg, chopped parsley, and "a generous mound of mayonnaise which has been pressed through a pastry bag" couldn't simply have been called a garden salad.

There is an attempt to show off the freezer compartment.

Everyone is sure to be thrilled by chunks of frozen tomato, cucumber, green pepper, crushed pineapple, and celery suspended in a mayonnaise-y gelatin. 

There's a "Health Salad," though I'm not really sure what sets it apart as being any healthier than the others.

The vegetables are certainly nutritious, but not particularly distinctive. Maybe Philadelphia cream cheese was considered a health food in the 1930s? 

There's a "de Luxe" salad. Something about making "deluxe" into two words always makes me feel like it's fancier, somehow.

Here, apparently "de Luxe" means the standard gelatin and chopped veggie mixture get the canned tomato soup and American cream cheese treatment. (Also, how was American cream cheese different from Philadelphia cream cheese?)

There's also a reminder that cottage cheese was once so popular (especially when money was tight) that a ring mold of cottage cheese stiffened with gelatin could be considered a main dish...

...as long as there was a green salad served in the middle and hot clover leaf rolls on the side.

Of course, for those with more free time and a vaguely artistic personality, there was also the opportunity to create a multicolored showpiece salad.

Yep-- the layers are in an ice tray! So homemakers could show off that they had ice trays! And the two-toned salad cubes could nestle into a little lettuce nest. Just perfect for a ladies' luncheon!

And everybody would be jazzed to have tomato aspic on top of cucumber and pineapple jelly. Or at least, that was the polite social fiction. 

But you know that afterwards, Phyllis and Geraldine would spend an hour discussing how silly and vain it was to show off the fancy ice cube tray by serving tomatoes and olives on top of cucumbers and canned pineapple. And then Norma would overhear them and report back to the host, Mildred, and things would never be quite the same.... 

And that's why I love the old salad recipes. They're so dramatic! (Just like Mildred.)

Campbell's is fanciness in a can!

Today's cookbook, Campbell's Great Restaurants Cookbook, U.S.A. (ed. Doris Townsend, 1969), makes quite a promise.

It states that the recipes in the book "are adaptations of the spécialités de la maison of restaurants famous for their food, their service, their ambience. These are the truly great, the honored, the sought-out restaurants in all parts of the country." Given that Campbell's is the creator, I'll bet you can guess what shortcut they promise will make home cooks prepare "dishes that will earn you a reputation as a fabulous cook" who can create restaurant-style meals. And even if you can't guess, I'll bet you can figure it out pretty quickly.

Let's start out slowly, with an easy mock Hollandaise. Worried that the mixture of egg yolk, melted butter and lemon juice won't emulsify properly?

Longfellow's Wayside Inn suggested that cream of celery soup with lemon juice and mayonnaise would be close enough.

If you prefer something from the southwest, you might go to Santa Fe's La Fonda recipes. If you're up for some chili, here is the secret:

Fortify a couple of cans of condensed chili beef soup with some extra ground meat, seasonings, and condensed beef broth! Easy! (Never mind that this sounds like a recipe a church cookbook might recommend as a use for ground chuck. This is "superb cuisine," according to the blurb describing the restaurant's offerings.)

Or if you prefer recipes with portmanteau titles, La Fonda also offers Harvey's Tomatonion Soup:

This one also involves three cans of condensed soup, but they're onion, bisque of tomato, and chicken broth this time.

If you really want to sound both kind of fancy and kind of scary, Jackson Lake Lodge suggests Calves' Brains Beaumont, Argentenile.

This one does sound genuinely fancy, in part because it only calls for one can of condensed soup (cream of asparagus) and in part because it uses white wine and purée de foie gras truffe.

And if you want something absolutely at the other end of the fanciness spectrum, here's probably my favorite offering in this book: Cocktail Canapés!

Mix a can of condensed cream of celery soup with a package of cream cheese and some ground up pepperoni. Slather on party rye and broil until bubbly. This definitely seems straight out of a church fundraiser cookbook, as something to slap together for unexpected guests. And this recipe, perhaps not entirely surprisingly, comes from the only restaurant I've featured today that is no longer in business: Marzetti Restaurant. 

In short, the book's message is that all you need to do to be a fancy chef is to use a lot of condensed canned soups and broths. I guess Campbell's figured they had already cornered the church fundraiser cookbooks, so maybe they would aim for a more "highbrow" audience... perhaps without entirely alienating the church fundraiser cookbook crowd either. 

Funny Name: Bless You Edition

Based on the title, I thought there might be an exceptional amount of black pepper in this recipe from Kentucky Cooking: New and Old (by "The Colonelettes"-- wives of members of the Louisville, Kentucky, Junior Chamber of Commerce, 1955, though mine is the 1958 second edition).

Nope. Maybe it means that the cream-cheese-and mayonnaise-covered minced clams have a distinctly phlegmy look? Or maybe throwing the word gesundheit on at the end is way to show that the phrase Hors d'Oeurves is too pretentious for Kentuckians to take seriously, so might as well throw another big foreign word on the end? (The spelling of hors d'oeuvres was apparently also too pretentious to take seriously.) In any case, I'll pass on the sneezy clams.

Celebrate April with dandelions, asparagus, and plenty of butter and eggs

Happy Late Early Spring! If that sounds confusing, it's because according to The Political Palate (The Bloodroot Collective (Betsey Beaven, Noel Giordano, Selma Miriam, and Pat Shea), 1980), early spring began on the spring equinox (or March 22-- it lists both), so I'm wishing you a happy early spring more than a week late.

The Political Palate is pretty serious about listing seasonally appropriate dishes. Early spring gets a recipe for the first of the dandelions, for instance.

I love the specificity of this one: dandelion leaves without the first signs of flower buds. No inferior lawn dandelions-- you want the ones from "a waste space that dandelions are making their own." Use only "the cleaner central leaves." This definitely seems like a recipe from someone who knows their way around dandelions.

If you're not up to foraging around for waste space dandelions, there's also a recipe for an Asparagus Platter. Still spring vegetables, but these are a LOT easier to just grab at the grocery store when they're cheaper and more plentiful than usual.

And this is another reminder that though the book is an older vegetarian one, it does not follow the health food fads that so many old earth-mother-type vegetarian cookbooks do. The asparagus is served with buttery white rice (not brown rice with a smattering of sesame and/or sunflower seeds if the cook felt playful) and sauce Maltaise, an orangey variation of hollandaise. 

Of course, early spring can still get pretty cold, so you might need some substantial desserts to get through April. While the headnote for Topfenkuchen claims that "This is a light cake..."

... it uses three sticks of butter, five cups of almonds, and nearly a dozen eggs. I think this still counts as substantial.

Just in case you miss the old-school health food dessert vibes, the book also offers a carob-based confection. While the book mostly avoids old-timey health food clichés, carob is apparently unavoidable.

This time, the carob is part of a coconut custard, so if spring is too chilly, you can just pretend you are at a tropical resort that has so little to eat that you've been reduced to consuming your own sunscreen. With carob.

Enjoy what's left of early spring! I'm going to try to eat seasonally by seeing if there are any Reese's peanut butter eggs on clearance now that Easter is over.