The Fluffy Chicken by the Log Cabin and Other September Surprises

It's almost September, so it's time to check out the month's recipes from Modern Meal Maker (1935). My first impression was that Martha Meade must really have liked Labor Day. The fourth of July seemed barely more festive than any other Sunday (which is why I didn't mention its menu when I wrote about July), and the dessert at dinner was custard pie-- fine, I'm sure, but not anything one would think of as especially Independence Day-appropriate. Labor Day, on the other hand, features a specially decorated cake-- somewhat of a rarity in this book.

The Log Cabin cake has a peaked top to resemble a log cabin roof, plus...

The icing is supposed to be applied to kind of resemble actual logs! That's about as fancy as Martha Meade gets.

Plus, dinner on Labor Day is not a one-cake, but a TWO-cake affair, as this is the main course:

Good old Fluffy Chicken Shortcake....

September also sometimes seems like it's anticipating the foods modern fairgoers might try next to the Tilt-a-Whirl (at least, in years when there are such things as fairs).

Got to love the reminder that deep fried mac and cheese was a thing long before Cheetos or KFC or Sonic made them for a limited time only!

Of course, September has more down-home recipes, too. The family might want to warm up on one of the first chilly autumn evenings of the year with some dumplings.

Well, they might until they remember that dumplings are normally mushy, flavorless balls and learn that those wads of disappointment can also be gray-green and musty tasting. (Thanks, canned peas!)

I'll leave you with a recipe that probably sounds pretty sweet to the sweet potato lovers out there.

Not so sweet: The waffles were to serve as the bready base for a creamed tuna and waffles dinner! You probably could have lived an ever-so-slightly happier life without that final surprise, so I absolutely had to tell you. Happy September!

Selections from '70s Americans in Saudi Arabia

I don't mind that I've largely been confined to my apartment and the nearby walking trail for a few months now, but some people prefer just a little more travel, so today we're going to Saudi Arabia!

This is the Al Hasa Cookbook (1976). The origin of the cookbook is not well explained, as the introductory pages give the names of various committee members, but I could never find a name of the actual organization. Most people listed seen to be affiliated with Aramco, which is a Saudi Oil company, so my guess is that this was put together by various groups of American women (as the title page credits "Associated Women's Groups Presidents") who were in Saudi Arabia because they or someone in the family worked for Aramco. I could be wrong, though, as the introductory information seems to be written for people who are already familiar with the background.

One thing that struck me was how much work it seemed to be for the cooks to find/ cobble together the ingredients they needed to make recipes similar to what they were used to making at home. The Mexican Cheese Dip had to specify where Velveeta cheese and canned tomatoes with jalapenos could be found. (If you weren't in Khobar, you might be out of luck!)

Tortilla chips were apparently not widely available either, as the dip should be paired with "crackers made from taco shells available in the Commissary."

Sour cream proved to be a bit of challenge too.

If sour cream proved elusive, vinegar or lemon juice plus Avoset would work. (I had no idea what Avoset was, but it's apparently a creamer that's still made in Australia.)

Some American ingredients needed a bit of explanation for this group, too. Maybe some cooks had been away from America for a while?

Yes, the Mexican Chef Salad had to explain Doritos. (And diners had their choice of two very Mexican dressings: 1000 Island or French!)

Despite the limitations, the cooks still found plenty of ways to evoke mid-'70s Americana, like the Jell-O "salads" that didn't even bother with fruits or vegetables (unless you count a bit of lemon rind and juice divided among 12-15 servings).

Of course, this was much preferable to the salads loaded up with crushed pineapple, cottage cheese, mayo, green peppers, and pimiento.

Or to the non-jellied salads tossing ham, celery, mayo, rice, and green onions in with pineapple, oranges, marshmallows, sour cream, and coconut. (This seems like an accidental fusion of savory salad with a sweet one. I mean, green onions and miniature marshmallows?)

People who really missed home could sit down to a big dish of American Chow Mein.

Here, chow mein means boiled noodles, tuna fish with corn, mushrooms, green peppers, and onions in a tomato sauce topped with cheese. (I'm not sure whether the families stationed in Saudi Arabia didn't realize that Chow Mein usually meant beef, bean sprouts, water chestnuts, and soy sauce over rice or chow mein noodles in America, or whether this approximation was as close as they could get to "traditional" American chow mein with the ingredients they could find.)

Maybe the unusual conditions made cooks innovative enough to catch a glimpse of America's food future, though, as I found a dish that predated the bacon-in-everything trend that is just dying down now.

Yes, Kooky Breakfast Cookies were a way to get bacon (and corn flakes! It's breakfast!) in a dessert-y form before maple-bacon cupcakes and donuts were a thing.

I hope you've enjoyed the trip! Maybe seeing how these families managed to substitute ingredients so they could still make the crazy recipes '70s families... loved? Ate? Tolerated? ... will help inspire us to do our best with whatever is left in the pantry before the next grocery trip (and/or after that grocery trip fails to supply a third of the ingredients on the list).

Beanie Boos!

Produce bins are starting to fill up with those tiny green snake look-alikes: green beans! Today, we're going to see what The Illustrated Encyclopedia of American Cooking (editors of Favorite Recipes Press, 1972) suggests we do with this summer bounty.

If you are like my mom-- a devotee of soups completely devoid of flavor-- then string bean soup might be the order of the day.

Okay, she'd leave out the onion so it would just be green beans cooked until tender and then boiled some more as the noodles cooked in the soup base of water thickened with a flour-and-shortening paste. Yum!

Going in the opposite direction, maybe Deviled Green Beans are more your style. At least deviled implies that some flavoring agent will be added.

I kind of expected deviled ham, or maybe mayonnaise and paprika (like deviled eggs), but here the beans are in an onion/ pepper/ tomato/ mustard/ cheese sauce. The peppers are of the not-spicy variety, so I guess the mustard is what makes this deviled?

Of course, no list of old recipes is complete without a loaf, so here's a Green Bean Loaf.

It might be better described as a saltine, tomato sauce, and green bean custard since it's in that milk and egg base, so if you think old recipes aren't really represented unless there's a custard in there somewhere, well, maybe this can check off both the loaf and the custard boxes.

We'll need a good dose of American cheese, too. Even though Green Beans with Walnut Sauce emphasizes the walnuts...

...it has more American cheese in the sauce than walnuts, so our American cheese-centric recipe slot is full.

Maybe you prefer vintage recipes that come under a puffy cloud of egg whites?

Well, I'm not sure how much the mayonnaise mixture will deflate the stiffly beaten egg white, but the condiment-and-egg-white hat is supposed to puff up over the green-bean-and-celery mixture in the oven.

And finally, no list of vintage recipes is complete without something Hawaiian, right?

Green Beans Aloha proves once again that people used to be willing to dump cans of pineapple into pretty much everything! Since this recipe calls specifically for canned beans, it may have been an attempt to make midwinter seem more like summer, what with the veggies that would have been fresh in summer and the tropical fruit....

I'm just going to enjoy actual summer while it's still here. Have a happy late-summer weekend and find a way to enjoy some fresh produce-- preferably not loafed, puffed, or deviled (unless that is your thing).

Snobby Salads for a Change

In case the statue and the classy title The Art of Salad Making (Carol Truax, copyright 1968, Bantam edition 1972) isn't enough of a tip-off that this is not one of those salad cookbooks that prominently features marshmallows, ruffles of piped-on mayo, and ingredients (not so) subtly dyed with food coloring, perhaps the foregrounded dark, leafy greens with carefully-arranged toppings taking precedence over the small salad mold (dark rather than neon-bright) will make the point clearer. Truax is more serious about salad-making than a lot of late '60s cooks seemed to be. My favorite part of the book just might be a passage in the introduction where the author recounts her attempts to avoid being served "the banana special"-- a salad someone thought would be of interest to a famous cookbook author. Truax says, "When I saw it, I thought it was an oversized caterpillar; but it turned out to be a whole banana drenched in honey and rolled-- believe it or not-- in cornflakes." Oh, I can definitely believe it. I've been reading old cookbooks for years now! I wouldn't have been surprised it if the cook had completed the caterpillar illusion with raisin eyes, a maraschino cherry mouth, and a series of legs made out of slivered almonds (or maybe toothpicks if the cook wasn't too concerned whether all the decorations should be edible). Truax tried to keep her composure right up to the point when the cook attempted to force the recipe on her, at which point, she says, she "lost it." (I hope that means she laughed, and not that she barfed.)

In any case, the recipes in this collection tend to be more focused on higher-end ingredients, so they could very well be beyond the budgets of the banana special crowd.

Sure, if the lobster is "terribly expensive," the cook can switch it out for extra shrimp or salmon, but Bouillabaisse Salad is always going to call for at least three pounds of seafood. It's not really in the same league as the salads I'm used to reading about.

Not being as confined by a budget as the cooks for many other books meant that Truax felt freer to include more international recipes with specialized ingredients. I have no idea how authentically Cambodian this recipe is...

...but I don't see many litchi (more commonly spelled lychee) recipes in my other cookbooks from the 1960s.

Truax also included a ceviche recipe well before it was as mainstream as it is now.

I'm not entirely convinced that half a bottle of catsup is a traditional part of the marinade, but her readers were unlikely to have much of a point of reference. (To be fair, my only real points of reference are cooking contest shows where someone is apt to try to make ceviche out of random seafood and lemon dessert bars, so I could be wrong here.)

The author has a few tics, though. If she wanted something to feel a little different from usual, she'd randomly throw in grapes.

I've never had green beans and asparagus and thought, "You know what would make this better? Grapes!" Truax apparently thought about adding grapes waaaay more often than I ever would.

And of course, she had to have some gelatin salad molds. It is a salad book after all. If you taste one of her aspics, it might be able to taste you back!

She differentiates her gelatin-based salads from the common ones not only by the cost of the materials, but also by including ingredients that kids would not want to eat.

Alternatively, if the kids might like the ingredients, she just makes the molded salads "serious" by adding alcohol.

It's an interesting salad book, to be sure, and one full of recipes that I would never make for slightly different reasons than the standard objections for my Midwest church cookbook recipes.

Passe Peaches

I've run some pretty weird peach recipes in the past. The world is weird enough on its own lately, so today we're getting some old-fashioned peach recipes that are weird in their own old-timey way, but not outright bizarre.

I have a LOT of recipes for scalloped things besides the potatoes everybody usually thinks of. Scalloped apples! Scalloped pigs' feet! Scalloped corn and oysters! Scalloped dandelions! To those, The American' Woman's Cook Book (ed. Ruth Berolzheimer, 1942) adds some good old-fashioned scalloped peaches.

 

I'm not entirely sure why they're labeled scalloped peaches when there's only a cup of peaches and a quart of apples, but I didn't make up the name.

The Wise Encyclopedia of Cookery (Wm. H. Wise & Co., Inc., 1971) has to add that nursing home favorite, sherbet! 

This has the added old-timey dessert pleasure of being loaded with raw egg whites.

And speaking of uncooked eggs to give dessert a quietly menacing tone, how about a Peach Brandy Bavarian Cream from American Home All-Purpose Cookbook (ed. Virginia T. Habeeb, 1966)?

It's rare to see an old dessert recipe section without at least a couple Bavarian creams.

In case the brandied gelatin is a little too grown-up for the kiddies, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of American Cooking (Favorite Recipes Press, 1972) offers a miniature-marshmallow-and-whipped-topping-filled gelatin "salad."

Bonus points for freezing it in cupcake papers! Plus, as always, it's salad and not dessert if it's served on greens.

Okay, and maybe one at least semi-weird peachy recipe from Mary Margaret McBride's Encyclopedia of Cooking Deluxe Illustrated Edition (1959) to finish off our peach-season countdown.

What is that three-eyed monster grinning at me with its row of mandibles?

Why, it's a Peach Omelet with Mint Cheese Spread, of course! So if you're the type who likes sweet omelets, you're welcome for this weekend's brunch idea. (And if you're a lazy curmudgeon like me, enjoy your plain old fresh peaches!) Have as great a summer weekend as your circumstances will allow.

Those middle-aged 4-H kids

I'm going relatively modern today with a cookbook from 1982! If you're a longtime reader, I bet you can guess why.

Yes, my longstanding affection for 4-H meant I had to pick up Ohio 4-H Blue Ribbon Cookbook. The Ohio 4-H Foundation put the book together with recipes "prepared by 4-H members who received outstanding-of-the-day recognition in the 4-H Food and Nutrition Show classes at the Ohio State Fair." There was no fair this year, so we might as well head back in time to the 1982 one!

Since 4-H is for kids and teens, I'm sure most people would expect the book to be filled with cute kid-pleasing recipes like No-Crust Pizza.

Yes, it's basically pizza burgers with faces fashioned on top with condiments.

A lot of non 4-H-members might be surprised by how much effort went into a lot of the recipes, though. This meat loaf might initially sound easy...

This was just the first step though. Meat Loaf would not be complete until it was transformed into Meat Loaf Maruel.

Resplendent in a coat of eggy potatoes with piped-on cheesy potato rose buds and cheesy greenery, this was a meat loaf to impress the judges along with the family.

Similarly, enchiladas do take some work, what with all the rolling and layering, but it still seems like a reasonable effort for a teen cook.

The recipe right before the filling shows that Rhonda Bush didn't wimp out and go for store-bought tortillas, though. She made her own. The 4-Hers in this book really believed in making things themselves.

The recipes often have a surprising level of sophistication. Fruit Layer Gateau calls for homemade cake, filling, topping, and glaze, and takes a bit of assembly. 

Not to mention, I'm not sure how many parents would really trust their teen cooks making a recipe that calls for orange liqueur. (Granted, 18-year-olds could buy beer in 1982 Ohio, but still....)

It's amazing how middle-aged so many of these young cooks seem, too. 

It would never occur to me to spend the better part of a day making my own Onion Celery Salt when I can buy a 5+ ounce bottle of onion salt for less than $2 and/or 4 ounces of celery salt for less than $4 at Meijer. It would also never occur to me to complain about how "the commercial salts have a high price tag!"

And not only were the kids baking their own bread (an activity I learned through 4-H too, and practiced regularly once I realized it meant I could pack my lunch without resorting to the gross, squishy, overly-sweet Home Pride bread our dad insisted on buying)....

...but they were baking a round loaf to be fashioned into that pièce de résistance that mom used to make for her bridge club before the kids were born: a Party Sandwich Loaf!

I wasn't shocked by all the effort these kids put into cooking. I remember longing for those state fair ribbons! I was just shocked by how much this cookbook felt like it was twenty years older than it really was, what with the sandwich loaf and the homemade seasoning salt to save a few cents. It seems like I barely cheated on the date at all.

Serious Zucchinage

In zucchini season, it's easy to miss the one sleeper zucchini hiding out in the back, quietly growing to the size of a graboid (Or megaworm? Sucker? Suckoid?) from Tremors. What do you do with that one?

If you said "Let it rot in the garden. That's half a dozen fewer loaves of zucchini bread I have to make," that's the wrong answer, at least according to Sunset Italian Cook Book (ed. Jerry Anne DiVecchio, 1972, though mine is the 7th printing, 1975).

You should cut it in half and scoop out its guts. (Well, unless it's transformed itself into a chunk of wood... Then it's no longer edible!)

Then stuff it full of Italian-inspired meatloaf and ignore the whiners who claim they can only eat so many pounds of zucchini per day. (Or maybe torment them by making a zucchini cream pie for dessert. After all, this recipe only uses half the monster squash.)

A Gel-Cookery Bookery

Summer isn't complete without some good old-fashioned gelatin recipes, right? Cue the Gel-Cookery Recipe Book (Knox, 1955)!

I love the full-color cover with the bright yellow desserts and a salad that looks like a science textbook blowup of a microscopic organism that lives in freshwater ponds. The superfluous dash in Gel-Cookery and the scare quotes in "Over 40 ways to give that 'something special' touch to your meals with Knox desserts, salads, main dishes" also help ensure that I am in love with the cover.

Let's start off with a fancy, multilayered main dish to keep everyone cool at dinnertime.

First, lay down a luncheon-meat-and-mayo layer of gelatin, then once it's almost firm, top with a tomato-juice-and-hard-cooked-egg layer! It's like you told the cook you couldn't decide between a luncheon meat sandwich or an egg salad sandwich with tomato, hoping that she would find and offer a better alternative, and she just said, "Okay. How about both? In gelatin?  Minus the bread?"

You'll need veggies to make it a meal, so why not keep the theme going by making them cold, jiggly, and disappointing too?

It sounds weird to have veggies suspended in barbecue-sauce-flavored gel, but apparently that used to be quite the thing. I'm intrigued that the molds for this one are supposed to be lined with Parmesan cheese. I wonder if that really helped with unmolding-- and what gel-soaked Parm tastes like. Seems like a waste of good cheese!

You're probably expecting a fruity gelatin for dessert, but I wanted to mess with your expectations, so I picked another gelatin-based recipe with an unlikely coating.

Wonder Marshmallows sound fairly unremarkable-- we're all familiar with marshmallows. You'll realize that this recipe calls for four cups of crushed corn flakes, though! They're used like the Parm in the previous recipe to coat the pan and make the marshmallows easier to remove. Then once they're out and cut, the little cubes of sugary, springy goodness are rolled in more corn flakes so they won't stick to each other. I really wonder how these would work. Would the flakes get soggy after a day or two? I'm also imagining someone dropping a couple marshmallows into a mug of hot cocoa and ending up with stray corn flake bits floating around in it. Of course, the hot cocoa will only come out once the cooler weather sets in, so I'll leave you imagining the first really chilly fall day, one spent with a mug of hot corn flakes. Maybe that will send a little shiver down your spine in the meantime.