Serve it cold and boozy!

It's hot enough to make me want to belt the next person who suggests frying an egg on the sidewalk. That means it's time for another book of chilled recipes! Today's specimen is Serve It Cold! A Cookbook of Delicious Cold Dishes (June Crosby and Ruth Conrad Bateman, 1969).

Of course the book has all the cold molded salads, like the elaborate fish (actually made out of crab!) on the cover. What really struck me about the book, though, was the soup chapter. The authors clearly saw cold soup as being a good cover for day-drinking. When the weather is this hot, why fight it?

Gazpacho recipes usually call for sherry vinegar or red or white wine vinegar, but Belmar Hotel thought it would be more fun just to go for the wine itself, and Crosby and Bateman seem to agree.

If you prefer paprika with your wine and tomato concoctions, there is also a Hungarian Tomato Soup.

And if you feel like giving up and straight-up admitting the cold soup is just an excuse to day drink, then there's Bloody Mary Soup.

If there are some teetotalers in the house who'd prefer that their soup not be spiked, you should make them a cold soup too so they won't feel left out.

How about clams and avocado in ice-cold canned cream of chicken soup? (Maybe your teetotalers will change their minds.)

If all the alcohol and/or the clammy cream of chicken are making you a bit queasy, the book also offers a stomach-settling sandwich option.

Once the candied ginger in these ribbon sandwiches sets things right again, maybe you'll have room for just a little more alcohol in gelatin form...

Eating jellied alcohol over lettuce and mayo proves that it's not just a gussied-up Jell-O shot, right? It's a genuine salad. (At least it makes you work hard to maintain the illusion that this is not an excuse to get smashed at lunch. I don't think anyone was begging for a rosé-and-mayo pairing.)

Here's hoping we can get through today by whatever means necessary....

A camper full of pineapple and bacon

I've already shared my favorite recipes from my imaginary '70s vacation with a copy of Gayle and Robert Fletcher Allen's The Complete Recreational Vehicle Cookbook for Campers, Vans, RVs and Motor Homes (1977). My copy came with a special bonus, though, so I can share with you some of the favorite recipes of whoever owned it before I did!

So what did this family like? Well, the first thing I noticed is that they must really have liked pineapple. The "Sizz Pineapple" is an appetizer right above the Pink Crackers that I shared earlier.

It's a simple combo of pineapple wrapped in bacon, skewered, and cooked over coals (or sterno!) until the bacon is crisp and "The juice of the pineapple drips through and the aroma is magnificent."

For the really pineapple-forward family, the appetizer can be followed by one of two pineapplicious main dishes. For a simple, informal affair, it might be Pineapple Burgers.

This is a great treat for anyone who has ever wished to bite into what looks like a normal hamburger and discover that it's actually a barely-seasoned meatloaf wrapped around a slice of canned pineapple.

For a more formal occasion, there's a Samoan Pineapple Roast.

Can it really be considered formal if the roast is canned ham slices sewn in layers with canned pineapple slices by a coat hanger wire "needle"? Sure! That's fancy if you're camping, and the cutting of the twine and removal of the buttons might even be reminiscent of a grand opening ribbon-cutting ceremony. I always admire a recipe that's as much craft project as cooking instruction.

The family clearly liked hot breakfasts, too. The Fried Breakfast on the list is toast fried with a bacon and egg mixture. More interesting to me was the Creamed Eggs on Toast.

I mostly just wondered if canned white sauce was even a thing anymore. Not so much, from the looks of it, but you can still get it if you're willing to buy at least a six pack on Amazon or industrial amounts straight from Campbell's. I have to say that it's probably now more practical to make your own white sauce than to try to store cases of it in a camper...

The Bacon Skillet Bread seems a lot more in line with modern cooking:

Bacon! A beginner-level baking project that can be cooked right in the skillet! (Okay, those are the only two things that come to mind, and anything is likely to look modern compared to canned white sauce, but the point stands.)

And finally, dipping into nostalgia again, a little dessert.

Stacked Chocolate Creams is part of a category I don't see often now-- an icebox cake. I never know quite what to think of them, as the point is to stack a snack that's usually crispy with a cream that will soften it during refrigeration into ... I'm not sure what. Something almost cake-like? Something mushy and/or grainy? I don't know, but if it's an excuse to eat a mound of chocolate-flavored sour cream, it can't be all bad! My list writer seemed to like it, but then again, they liked pineapple-stuffed burgers. I'm not sure what to make of the choices, but I do love the chance to be a bit of a recipe voyeur and imagine someone else's canned white sauce and pineapple-soaked vacation!

How outdoors do the recipes have to be for an outdoor cookbook?

Summertime means outdoor dining, and that goes double this year! That means it's time to look at another outdoor cookbook.

El Patio Outdoor Cookbook (editors of Southern Living, 1973) uses its full color pictures to suggest that carefree outdoor parties are easy.

You've got to love the idyllic scene: swimming, sunbathing, colorful skewers roasting on the grill... It's interesting that the commentary on the page facing the picture emphasizes "Watch that Grill!" and highlights the danger of dripping fat leading to a flareup, instructing readers to "Get an easy chair, a cold drink, a bottle of water to put out flames of your charcoal fire, and settle down by the grill to keep a watchful eye on the meat as it cooks." You might think the picture should also show somebody actually taking the advice and tending the grill, but the editors are not too hung up on the premise of and the content actually matching-- in the pictures or anywhere else.

Of course this book has some outdoor grill recipes as one would expect. I'm not saying the content and premise are entirely divorced from each other.

The ever-popular luau party could feature Hawaiian Grilled Spareribs marinated in the '70s classic beverage Champale. (That's a little more imaginative than the usual pineapple-based Hawaiian-themed rib lacquer.)

For guests who preferred prune-studded meat to malt liquor-soaked meat, there was a Barbecued Pork Loin.

Plus, this version has pineapple juice for those who really need it for any outdoor party! It also repurposes ice cream salt as a meat rub.

A lot of the recipes don't really seem to fit the outdoor cooking theme too well, though. Garden Row Casserole might sound like a good way to use up fresh veggies from the garden-- and maybe a foil pack casserole would work on a grill and give the veggies a bit of smoke flavor?

Nope! This is just a plain old canned veggie casserole (It doesn't even call for fresh onions!), and it's supposed to be baked in a casserole dish-- apparently in an oven, given that an exact temperature is specified and it could have been hard to maintain a consistent grill temperature like that for nearly half an hour-- especially if everyone wanted to be in the pool.

Garden Row Casserole is representative of a lot of recipes that don't seem like they really belong in a book about outdoor cooking, but it's hardly the most egregious offender. At least it would be pretty easy to throw the casserole together quickly and then set it out on the patio once it was hot.

Sweet Surprise Soufflé, on the other hand.... Well, with all the melting, mixing, whipping, folding, and then the need to serve immediately after the individual soufflés are baked, this is just not something I can see any reasonable person expecting to make for an outdoor party. It's like the editors wanted to hang out by the pool too, so they just threw together whatever recipes were easiest to find and said, "Hey, if you can eat it inside, you can eat it outside too!" Why bother to choose outdoor-specific recipes just because it's an outdoor cookbook?

Then I saw why they might be so eager to get it all thrown together.

The caption for this picture notes, "A sunny summer picnic and romance naturally go together." That full spread of goodies is way more food than the two lovebirds in the background could consume on their own, and they're not going to be eager to get everything properly chilled after the meal. This picnic is fuel for a nice outdoor orgy, and nobody wants to miss out! That must be why the editors were so eager to get the recipes submitted already, suitability for al fresco dining be damned! They were much more eager to do something else al fresco, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.

Sloshy slushes for the judges

What sounds especially tasty on a scorching summer afternoon? If it was so hot that even ice cream sounded a bit heavy, my childhood self would occasionally go for a slush instead. (Always the contrarian, I generally ignored the red flavors and had trouble deciding whether my tongue should turn lime green or raspberry blue.)

And what makes a slush an even better summer treat for grownups?

If you immediately thought of alcohol, then the Cedar Rapids Association of Gymnasts is with you. Their Recipes You'll Flip Over (1983, but a cool enough book that it's allowed in even if it's not from the '70s or earlier) has way more alcoholic slush recipes than I might expect from a bunch of people known for being able to do flips on balance beams. But hey-- Vicki Beverige (Ha!) was a judge, not a gymnast, so I guess she didn't care what her beverage options did to her coordination.

If you'd prefer a little more complexity than just orange juice, lemonade, and 7-Up in your vodka slush, the Unknown Gymnast (unmemorable because she had too many of these before a competition, or unwilling to acknowledge that this is her recipe?) offers up a version with tea and lime vodka.

For the more sophisticated set, here's a slush you might be tempted to drink from a snifter.

And if you just wanna get the job done, Sara Winders offers both the easiest and hardest drink of all.

Mix a gallon each of 7-Up and rum with a cup of sugar and freeze. Just don't get on the balance beam after you try it.

Thanks to my sister for the new book! There will be a more in-depth look later, but the weather demanded an immediate slush post.

'70s RV Adventure!

It's summer vacation time! Maybe it's not the best year to go to a busy hotel, or to check out a lot of local restaurants wherever you end up. What's a pandemic-concerned vacationer to do? Go retro!

This seems like the perfect time for Gayle and Robert Fletcher Allen's The Complete Recreational Vehicle Cookbook for Campers, Vans, RVs and Motor Homes (1977). Campers have their own housing that they don't have to share, they'll spend time in the great (and well-ventilated) outdoors, and they can cook their own food from minimally-risky grocery runs, supplemented by wild-caught fish and fruits and veggies from outdoor stands. Going back to the '70s looks surprisingly good right now.

Of course, enthusiasm for cooking might be tempered by the limited cooking and storage facilities as well as the desire to do something other than cook while on vacation. That's why a lot of recipes are pretty basic, like these snacks/ appetizers.

I'm not sure I really needed a recipe to melt butter with a bit of paprika on soda crackers, but when the Fletcher Allens came up with a name like "Pink Crackers," they had to put it in the book.

I can't believe it takes them half a page to explain rolling little balls of flavored cheese spread in crushed corn chips, but they had a book to fill!

There are more recipes than just snacks, though. As a transition to the sandwich section, here's a hybrid snack-sandwich that takes minimal effort.

It's mini BLTs! The sandwiches are probably mini because once people realize the "bacon" is just canned bacon bits, they might not want a full-size one.

If you need something heftier, this is an option.

Tuna salad cooked in savory french toast slices and smothered in cheese soup should be heavy enough to make mom tell the kids they shouldn't swim for at least two hours after lunch. (So maybe not the best idea if she doesn't want to be driven crazy for half the afternoon.)

There's a lighter sandwich option if needed.

This also shows that lettuce "buns" were a thing way before the current low-carb crazes. I can't imagine too many campers happy to kick back with a lettuce cup full of cottage cheese, bologna, and pickles, but this had to be way easier to fix in camping conditions than the fried tuna.

And finally, if the weather turns cold and rainy, you might want a nice, steaming bowl of soup. Maybe something with a vaguely holidayish vibe to prop up the vacation feeling would help.

French Fried Onion Soup is a close enough cousin of green bean casserole to make it feel like you're camping at Thanksgiving... which would be kind of weird for most of us... but hey! Thinking about that will keep your mind off the rain and the way you're going to feel after consuming all that salty onion gunk.

Okay, I'm not really tempted to try any of these, but I liked the mental vacation of imagining a week lounging in the woods by my '70s mobile home. I'd spend a lazy afternoon lobbing tiny missiles of cheese spread coated in crushed corn chips at the passing squirrels and chipmunks. Now sit back and imagine your perfect '70s RV vacation, with bonus points if you can work in a camping recipe.

Time to get corny!

Picking out produce at my favorite vegetable stand is weird this year. Sniffing the produce for ripeness is out. The stand has gloves everywhere and asks us to use them before handling anything, so I can't feel it as well as usual. This all makes it a bit harder to pick out good specimens, but hey, at least there's fresh produce! Luckily, sweet corn is still pretty easy. All I have to do is peel down a corner of the husk to see if the kernels are well developed but not overly mature, and at least I know that will be good.

That's the long way of saying that today's post is all about sweet corn.

First up is an old recipe from Better Homes and Gardens Heritage Cook Book (1975).

Dried Corn Salad represents the colonial period cooking of the "Middle Colonies"- Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. Drying the corn took a week according to the note, but it's not like the settlers could pop on down to the supermarket for a can of creamed corn or a bag of frozen once summer was over. They'd just have to soak, salt, and simmer the dried corn, and then, if they had cabbage (seems likely) AND green peppers and sugar (seems much less so)... plus some vinegar and dry mustard-- bam! Dried corn salad.

I doubt the colonists had really nice serving dishes with a wavy border like the one in the picture, but their dried corn version of cole slaw had to be better than the canned pineapple and marshmallow variety invented much later.

On my hunt for recipes about a specific type of food, I always have to consult my home economics teacher sources, as they have so many recipes that the often deranged-seeming home ec teachers used to love. Favorite Recipes of Home Economics Teachers: Vegetables Including Fruits (Favorite Recipes Press, 1966) offers up Scalloped Corn and Oysters. At first, I thought this was a recipe for scalloping corn oysters (the little corny cakes that are fried up to look like oysters), but it is actually corn scalloped with oysters.

When I saw that The Modern Woman's Encyclopaedic Cook Book (ed. Ruth Berolzheimer, 1961) offered up Casserole of Sausage and Corn, I thought it might be pretty good. Corn is so sweet that the spicy snap of Italian sausage or the savory notes of smoked sausage can be a great contrast.

Vienna sausages, on the other hand... Why? The bland, musty mush of Vienna sausages will disappear into the white sauce if you're lucky and ruin the whole dish with its funk if you're not.

The Ladies' Home Journal Cookbook (ed. Carol Truax, 1960) offers up something that sounds much more sophisticated: Corn and Green Beans Smitane.

This one muddies up the creamed corn and green beans with a different potted meat-- a can of deviled ham this time-- but maybe the tang of the sour cream will help balance it out? Cooks in the '60s really loved their questionable canned meats, apparently.

It seems like the only thing my corn post is missing is a recipe that calls for canned soup. From The Wise Encyclopedia of Cookery (1971), I present Corn Scramble.

No, it would not be enough to simply scramble corn-sweet-corn into some freshly-beaten eggs, with maybe a bit of onion and green pepper for pep. What kind of a recipe is that? You need a can of tomato soup and a quarter cup of oil to make sure it's a big, red, slushy, oily mess. That's what vintage recipes are all about.

I think I'm going to stick with sautéing corn freshly cut off the cob in a little butter. I'm proud to be way lazier than the home ec teachers and recipe editors of the '60s and '70s.

Celebrating a centennial in massive cake form

Since I just posted from a bicentennial cookbook, this week we'll look at a centennial cookbook. No, I don't have a cookbook from 1876! Today's cookbook is not for the U.S. centennial, but for a school's centennial celebration.

Centennial Cook Book (The University Women's Club of the Ohio State University, 1970) celebrated the fact that even though drunken frat boys and scarlet-and-grey clad sports fans had been making life in central Ohio miserable for decades, at least Jeffrey Dahmer had not yet flunked out of the school. (Okay, the women's club would have said it was a celebration of the university's rich history or some bullshit, but I prefer my version.)

Like any good academic, the cooks sometimes like making things more difficult than they really have to be. Take this recipe for Delicious Instant Cocoa.

Yes, the first step is to buy a pound of instant sweetened cocoa mix. The second (and final) step is not to follow the instructions on the mix to make a cup of cocoa, but to mix the mix with non-fat dry milk, Coffeemate, and confectioner's sugar to make the process more work and the outcome less cocoa-y. We all know the main complaints about cocoa mix are that it's not enough work and that it tastes too intensely of cocoa, right? Problem solved.

Yes, those OSU women have their own ways of doing things. For example, I'd assume their recipe for fried rice would involve, you know, frying some rice.

Nope. It's just a typical rice pilaf recipe. There's not even any soy sauce or bits of egg and/or meat! I Are the slivered almonds are supposed to somehow make it fried rice?

I guess the cooks just really liked making their own rules.

You might think I'm planning to make fun of them for deciding that raw eggs are an appropriate ingredient in a fruit salad dressing, but the part that really interests me is the fruit salad part. I love that marshmallows apparently count as a fruit!

Sometimes the cooks just like playing with our expectations, though. The OSU women's version of Tuna-Vegetable Salad is not simply tuna mixed with mayo, onion, celery, and maybe a little pickle relish.

It's tuna and celery encased in a cream of chicken soup gelatin! (Admittedly, if I weren't veg I would be way more likely to eat this than regular mayo-drenched tuna salad, especially if the little bit of mayo in this recipe was forgotten.)

The OSU women also bucked the trend of requiring pineapple as an ingredient for anything supposedly in a Hawaiian Style.

Chicken Waikiki means chicken in a currant, raspberry, or apple jelly sauce topped with Swiss cheese and almonds. (I'm not sure where the Waikiki comes in, but I've never been to Hawaii. Maybe Swiss over apple jelly is a big thing there?)

OSU does believe in celebrating just like anyone else, though, so I'll end this post with their recipe for the Centennial Cake.

This is the first recipe I've read that measures baking soda and cream of tarter in pounds. (And I would really hate to be the person tasked with separating out 2466 egg whites or making 80 pounds of icing roses!) Now let's look at an artist's conception of what this massive cake might look like. Will it be constructed in layers like a wedding cake? Maybe presented as a series of festive sheet cakes? Combine the two, surrounding the wedding-cake-like centerpiece with cutely complementary sheet cakes or cupcakes? Where will they use the 80 pounds of icing roses? Cascading down the sides? Carefully marking off serving-sized slices? And will we get to see the throngs of celebrating Buckeyes?

Or maybe the picture will just show two massive, round sheet cakes, each with a year written on top and NO ROSES AT ALL. (Apparently making decorations was just busy work?) The cakes will be presided over by one middle-aged bald guy in glasses, squinting off into the middle distance as if he didn't expect to be created to stand next to some really boring centennial cakes.

Maybe OSU was so afraid of being branded a party school that the women's club just decided to make the centennial cakes look like a lame part of the saddest party ever.

Oh, wait. The Sesquicentennial events ended up being even sadder. COVID-19 made this look positively ebullient by comparison.

America in a Cookbook

Happy Independence Day! (Or happy Saturday, if you're not American and/or not particularly sentimental about a celebration for a country built on slave labor and slaughter/ forced migrations of indigenous people!) Today I'm dipping into another bicentennial cookbook: Bicentennial Heritage Recipes (Beta Sigma Phi International, 1976).

I should start by acknowledging that there are plenty of people happy to wax nostalgic over building a country on slave labor.

I'm sure whoever wrote this shit thought they were writing a moving tribute to the women who had to be separated from their own families to care for someone else's. Self-delusion has to be an inherent part of the American character, though, for a country loudly proclaimed to be built on equality and still struggling nearly two and a half centuries later with qualities like basic fairness.

Let's move on to the sweeter part-- the good intentions. (And dessert!) I'm not sure whether the cake featured on the cover actually matches any of the cake recipes in the book, but I did find a recipe for a different flag cake in case you want a vintage flag cake recipe rather than one you could find in seconds with a Google search.

Admittedly, the blueberry and strawberry decoration scheme is likely to be pretty much the same as anything else you'll find online, but this flag cake recipe is waaay more likely to contain bourbon than one you'd find through a "flag cake" search. (It also has raw egg yolks in the icing, so you'll just have to hope the alcohol wins its independence from the salmonella.)

Some of the recipes actually seem like they could be authentic to the early days of the nation. 

A recipe that contains nothing but beans and cornmeal, one that requires hours of work to end with the great reward of a ball of boiled beans and cornmeal, definitely seems like food created for frontier-types with limited options. The end note suggests the recipe is from the Cherokees, a group that may well have been better off if they hadn't helped the newcomers figure out survival strategies.

A lot of the recipes are clearly modernized, though. 

I love that the sourdough bread recipe calls for commercial yeast in the starter and in the bread dough too. The recipe wouldn't have been particularly helpful to either the Gold Rush miners OR to home bakers hit by yeast shortages in the past few months.

The book has quite a few German recipes, reminding me why I rarely get too nostalgic for my grandmas' cooking. At least they never made German Cabbage Pie.

I can definitely live without cabbage creamed with caraway seeds and baked over a shell of sweet roll dough.

The book works pretty well as a representation of America over the years-- of its different types of ingenuity from frontier outposts to industrial processing, of its immigrant makeup, of its senseless cruelty and of those who could still repay cruelty with kindness. A cookbook is always more than a cookbook-- and that's part of the reason I love them. (That, and the Jell-O recipes...)