Menu for a quiet Memorial Day

Memorial Day is supposed (in theory, anyway) to be a more subdued holiday since it is a memorial, after all. Of course, in practice it generally means families with 523 young children going to the park to incinerate pounds and pounds of hot dogs and hamburgers while the parents get more and more hostile thanks to the increasingly whiny kids and the dwindling beer supply.

This year may actually be more subdued since we're not supposed to have big parties. I'm not counting on it, though, so here are a couple of holiday recipes from Minnesota Centennial Cook Book: 100 Years of Good Cooking (ed. Virginia Huck and Ann H. Andersen, 1958) to help ensure that nobody will want to be a guest at your place. You don't want to be too obvious about the fact that you are trying to dissuade people who invite themselves over, so you can initially tell them that you're having coneys and macaroni salad. That sounds pretty normal, right? (And not initially repulsive to people who aren't as damn picky as I am.)

Then you can drop hints that the coneys aren't exactly hot dogs topped with meat sauce.

No-- they're Tuna Salad Coneys! Who can resist sitting in the sun eating hot tuna, egg, and American cheese salad  from a hot dog bun?

And if that doesn't scare them away, you might let slip that the macaroni salad isn't exactly traditional either.

The pasta is just a vehicle for serving rapidly-browning bananas, oranges, canned pineapple, and chopped marshmallows in a pineapple-juice-and-egg-yolk dressing!

If you're lucky, the menu plan will be enough to ensure you can be like me and spend a quiet afternoon checking out a repository of old Maine cook books. You won't even have to follow through with your threat to make the recipes.