Wednesday, January 31, 2018

From the Mixed-Up Files of Enterprise United Methodist

I actually have a good-ish reason for a change, as to why my pictures are askew rather than straight for today's book:

Centennial Cook Book: 100 Years of Tried & True Recipes: 1874-1974 (Enterprise United Methodist Church of Pomeroy, Ohio) got some hard use-- or maybe just some light use from a very clumsy, absent-minded person like me. The back cover has a tell-tale spiral from being burned on an electric stove, and half of the plastic spine is melted. If you're wondering, those are burn marks on the front cover too. This book has some issues...

The recipes make me think that the good Methodists of Pomeroy had some issues as well.

I am no stranger to the frozen salad, but most are pretty straightforward fruit-based concoctions. When I saw the first two ingredients for this one, I thought I was going to see a new type of frozen salad, a savory one perhaps:

Then I realized the pimento cheese and Miracle Whip were getting the crushed pineapple and marshmallow treatment! I'm pretty sure that abuse of perfectly good pimento cheese could get you arrested in a few states.

This dessert recipe seems to be either a tragic misunderstanding of the proper uses for Oreo crumbs or a very wrongheaded early attempt to develop Larabars:


Few cookie-lovers would want to taint their Oreos with dates, and the Larabar crowd buys the date-y concoctions because they have clean ingredient lists, not miniature marshmallows and highly-processed cookies. I can't picture much of an audience for Date-Oreo Dessert....

In Pomeroy, even commonly understood terms like milk shake or ice cream can escape the residents.


You know how people often assume that milk shakes will contain ice cream? Yeah, forget that. And you know how they generally hope for flavors like chocolate or vanilla? Forget that too. In Pomeroy, if you're lucky, your milk shake is apple juice mixed with milk, and if you're not lucky, it's milk and prune juice! (Even Good Housekeeping's misguided prune shake at least had some ice cream!)

But maybe the milkshakes don't include ice cream because the people of Pomeroy aren't even sure that it is:


Aunt Emma, sorry to break it to you, but I'm pretty sure that your "hot ice cream" is what most of us would call pudding.

6 comments:

  1. Maybe the residents of Pomeroy were constipated?

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    1. It does seem like that was one of their problems!

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  2. That book looks like so many sweatshirts I inherited as a kid...
    I also think those dairy based recipes broke several laws in Wisconsin. Maybe not written laws, but you just DON'T do things like that with cheese and milk there.

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    1. Sorry I leaned too far over the stove so often!

      Yeah, you can definitely tell this is not a Wisconsin cookbook...

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    2. Some time ago, I had a good laugh while reading a screening document for adverse childhood events. One of the questions was phrased something along the lines of whether your clothes had holes and stains when you were a kid. The point they were trying to make was talking about neglect (like nobody bothered to launder your clothes before you were old enough to do it yourself), but it came off sounding like hand me downs from clumsy older siblings were child abuse.

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    3. Ha! I had no idea I was such an abusive older sibling... although that would make me a victim of myself too.

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