Chiquita Banana Presents Her Fever Dreams

This week is way too cold for November, so I'm going tropical to warm up! Today we have the notorious Chiquita Banana Presents 18 Recipes from Her Minute Movies (1951), a booklet with recipes that are rock stars in vintage horror recipes circles.

Yes, it's those Ham Banana Rolls that more adventurous cooks than I have been making for years.

In case you don't remember, they're bananas baked in ham and mustard, then served with a cheese sauce.

Yeah.

Just across the page is a slightly less popular recipe, though.

The Retrochef who tried these was afraid actual scallops might be involved, but they're just supposed to look like scallops. At least that's my guess. Her take on the recipe: "Meh. If you like cornbread with warm bananas, then this is the dish for you! They might have been better with a finer cornmeal, since they had very crunchy outsides and very mushy insides."

My favorite part is the caption under the picture in this booklet:

I'm assuming this is only giving part of the movie title. The full title is "Chiquita Banana Convinces the Cannibal that He Has Made the Right Lifestyle Choice." Now he's sure he'd rather face a plateful of fried fingers than mushy hot cornmeal bananas. It's always nice to know for sure!

Funny Name: Department of Redundancy Department Edition

At least Mable Hoffman, author of Crockery Cookery (1975) was aware that this wasn't a real Chinese recipe.

She just doesn't seem to recognize that the "chop suey" pretty much implies an American dish. 

Stuff it!

Thanksgiving is coming! I've posted lots of alternative recommendations for Thanksgiving dinners (and sides!) over the years. Thanks to a big, odd chapter in House & Garden's New Cook Book (1967), this year we're going right for the stuffing.

Okay, admittedly, not all of these are designed for turkey. Farce Mirabelle may be intended more for a holiday goose or duckling than a turkey.

Still, they had me at the words "unusual dressing" followed up with canned plums, celery, and orange juice. Maybe this is an attempt to pair up the main course and the plum pudding?

Here's another that's not exactly designed for turkey, but good for goose or-- if you want it to look really holiday-appropriate-- stuffing into a pumpkin!

Of course, you might want to really think hard about whether you want want the centerpiece to be a pumpkin stuffed with crushed shredded wheat, walnuts, bacon fat, orange sections, watercress, and onion before starting to make it.

If you want to go fancy with squab or small game birds, the book offers Kenscoff Dressing:

Yes, this is from back when cookbooks wanted people to put cooked banana in everything, so it's a half-crouton, half-banana purée blend. Will the lime, rum, and Tabasco help? I'm not sure, but if you steer the discussion to politics, then nobody will pay attention to the food anyway.

If you're having Thanksgiving somewhere cold, Macadamia Stuffing transports dinner to Hawaii/ the deep south.

I don't see too many Macadamia nut/ baking-powder biscuit combos, but this does look a lot more like traditional stuffing than the others.

If you're the type who likes meat stuffed into other meat and can't afford a turducken, then Port-au-Prince Dressing might be the poor family's version.

Enjoy a turkey stuffed with pork loin, salt pork, and kosher(!) frankfurters mixed with rice and mushrooms.

I always thought dried fruits and shellfish were the primary divisive stuffing ingredients, but these stuffing recipes give families entirely new sets of ingredients to fight over. Still, fighting over the stuffing is better than listening to uncle Bill rant about tax rates. Happy Thanksgiving!

Always make sure the cranberries are dolphin-safe

Are you tired of the same old cranberry salad? Will your special heirloom turkey turn tail if it has to share the table with a cranberry sauce shaped exactly like the can it shplooped out of? Well, Three Rivers Cookbook (Child Health Association of Sewickley, PA, copyright 1973, but mine is the ninth printing from 1977) has a very special recipe for you.

Cranberry Tuna Mold! The perfect accompaniment to a good Thanksgiving dinner is tuna salad aspic topped with a citrus-cranberry gelatin, right? Plus, for avowed turkey haters, this can be dinner and dessert all in one! Leaves more room for the mashed potatoes (if the indigestion doesn't hit first).

Rx for blandness

How are you feeling? Really, everything okay with you? I've been kind of worried, seeing as how you share my fixation on weird old cookbooks. I think I better take you to the hospital.

Okay, maybe it's just The Cookbook of Highland View Hospital: Rx for Happy Eating (Oct. 1972).

What is the recipe for happy eating? Well, it's pretty bland for the most part.

You might expect a recipe called Chicken Delicious to have something in it to make it... well... delicious.

Will 8-10 chicken pieces pressure cooked in two cups of barely-seasoned water (1/8th of a teaspoon each of pepper, meat tenderizer, paprika, MSG, and garlic powder) have a delectable flavor? What if you release the pressure and add some bell pepper along with onion that will be barely cooked before it's taken off the heat? Well, I guess that raw-ish onion will have some flavor, but its deliciousness will depend on one's tolerance for onion.

Usually recipes with "zippy" in the name have at least a minuscule measure of Tabasco sauce, or maybe some vinegar if the writer equates tang with zip. Zippy Vegetable Soup with Meatballs, though...

...has no discernible zip. The meatballs are the most basic meatballs you can imagine: ground meat pressed into a ball. No seasoning. No binding. Hell, not even any browning! They're just squashed meat simmered in slightly salted water. Throw in some common veggies and "salt to taste," then wonder if the word "zippy" wandered into the title from a nearby recipe, didn't feel like going home, and just decided to live as a squatter at the beginning of the title. The word Vegetable is pretty easygoing and just went with it. Vegetable kind of appreciates not having to take all the pressure of being the first word in the title anymore. Meatballs is pissed because it's tired of hearing Zippy's stories about life in Louisiana (probably made up anyway, that liar!), but Meatballs is too far away to do much and just sits at the end of the title, stewing in its own juices.

If you think you might need an appetizer to stimulate your appetite for this bland glop, you're in luck. The book offers some suggestions for consommé-based starters:

If you think I included this just so you could see that bouillon-cube-based broth mixed with "tomato catsup" or cut with canned asparagus juice was suggested as a good starter, you'd be right. Any meal might taste better compared with this!

My favorite part of the cookbook might not be the recipes, though. I kind of love Mrs. Nancy Minadeo's illustrations at the beginnings of the chapters. They show various hospital employees doing something food-related. Some are just straight-up playful, like this title card for the "Meat, Poultry, and Fish" chapter:

I think it's a little late to help that patient-- unless they're just helping themselves to some slices of white meat. (Is it normal to have a table in the surgery to be used for chicken carving? It looks way too small to be used for human surgery.)

Some of the pictures are just kind of inexplicable, like this one from the "Bread" chapter.

Does anybody have a clue what's going on here? There's a speech therapist, apparently trying to get the patient to say bread. The other people have PT and OT on their sleeves, so I'm guessing they're the physical and occupational therapists. It looks like they're all tending to a patient completely covered with a sheet, which would suggest to me that the coroner and mortuary attendant might be more appropriate than any of these therapists.

If the patient is supposed to be yeast bread rising under a towel, I'm not sure what physical and/or occupational therapy might entail. (Maybe the PT and OT are getting ready to shove the dough into the oven so it can become bread, thus fulfilling its occupational destiny?) The speech therapist is just deluded if she thinks she's going to get the loaf to say its name, though.

If you've got better theories as to what's going on in this one, feel free to share!

Funny Name: Primal Scream Edition

Do you want a dressing that will make you scream and breathe heavily? Spices of the World Cookbook by McCormick (Mary Collins, copyright 1964, 1976 reprint) has just the recipe for you:

Okay, clearly this has nothing to do with Lamaze classes. For a half-assed history of the sauce name and a taste-test of an even more half-assed version of the recipe from Campbell's, check out this post from Retro Recipe Attempts.

Breakfast that will make you burst, even before the turkey hits

November means turkey and pumpkin pie recipes for any cooking magazine. Gourmet's 1977 offering tries to keep its holiday spread fresh by using a trick grandma used to use-- substituting winter squash for pumpkin to make a squash pie. 

We're not going to look at more turkeys and pumpkin-spiced pies, though. I'm taking a cue from the cover. The real November treat for the idle rich was apparently to go for a Thanksgiving hunt in Connecticut, "complete with sumptuous hunt breakfast" because, you know, there just aren't enough opportunities to gorge oneself at Thanksgiving.

For those who want to reproduce the experience at home (rather than eating at "Chef Victor Modic's Thanksgiving hunt breakfast buffet"), the menu will be easy to fit into holiday cooking schedules: Gazpacho Bloody Marys, Cheshire Cheese Omelets, Seafood Quiche, Apricot-Glazed Pecan Coffee Ring, Apple Crisp with Almond Streusel, Rumtopf, and Pumpkin Cheesecake, plus these two recipes that I could easily scan without ripping the collection apart.

The first recipe depends on previous success at a hunt, unless your party can field dress and butcher a deer really damn fast:

I'm sure it was a complete coincidence that this venison sausage recipe appears just a page away from a food processor ad.

The spread also features this unique take on apple dumplings:

These aren't apples baked in a pastry crust, but apple bites cooked in a gnocchi-esque casing. I hadn't seen any apple (and plum) dumplings like these before.

Since I didn't scan the full menu, I'm throwing in another brunch-appropriate, super-rich dish from the same issue. November is the month to gain 10 pounds to get in practice for December's 15, right?

Yeah-- Noodles with Scrambled Eggs encourages you to split a dish containing a full stick of butter between two people-- three if you're feeling stingy. Let the holidays begin.

Funny Name: Extra Crunchy Edition

Today's recipe from The Complete Book of Outdoor Cookery (Helen Evans Brown and James Beard, 1955) sounds like just the type of thing that would seriously jeopardize the peace brokered with the giant telepathic spiders.

Don't be too alarmed, though. The name Spider Bread isn't referring to the ingredient list, but to the pan used over the fire.