A Treet to End 2020

 To round out 2020, let's look back at another difficult time in American history. I'm not sure of the exact date of this ad for Treet (a canned meat that resembles Spam but is a lot less well-known/ popular), but it has to be from sometime between spring 1943 and mid-1945.

If you're not sure how I know that, it's the mention of Red Points-- used to ration meats and cheeses during World War II. One might be tempted to contrast a time when people were actually willing to cut back on personal consumption to help a larger cause with now, when they can't even be bothered to put on a damn mask to help themselves as well as others, but I won't. Of course there was a thriving black market to get around rationing (like this one). People have always been selfish dipshits, and it dangerously romanticizes the past to imagine otherwise. Still, the dipshits can be counterbalanced by people like Mary-Helen, who apparently compiled the binder full of recipes (including this Treet ad!) I've been terrified to go through because they're overcrowded and I'm afraid of destroying them when I try to turn pages. She was devoted enough to cut recipe sections and food ads out of her magazines and stash them away so she could make low-point dinners and save the rationed items.

So what could she have made with a can of Treet?

Option 1 is a platter of Treet and Spanish Corn. I'll admit that I was intrigued by the idea of Spanish corn since I'm secretly in love with 1970s-era Spanish rice. I think the corn would need a little more seasoning that green pepper, onion, and pimiento to be able to compete with Spanish rice, though. It looks more like a lame version of Mexicorn.

For families that liked a little more protein and a little less roughage, there's the Treet and Egg Salad Sandwich.

I'm not sure how excited "war-workers" would be to find this soggy, smelly Treet sandwich in their lunch boxes, but at least it would be low points! (Low ration points! Not Weight Watchers' points, modern readers.)

And of course, since these are vintage recipes, we can't leave out the most important food group of all: gelatin molds!

Yep, it's cold, salty-sweet jellied meat next to cold, sweet-and-sour jellied pickled peaches! Maybe it's the platter mom leaves in the fridge for dinner when she has to work the evening shift so she doesn't have to watch everybody glop individual servings from the platter onto their plates and squish their way through dinner. But, hey! She was doing her best in a tough time, just like most of us are doing now.

I'm not sure what 2021 will bring, but I made it through 2020 without having to rely on Treet, so that's a win! Here's hoping that 2021 will improve enough that it will take more than a cursory glance across the grocery aisle to identify the dipshits among us.

Plan a Party for the End of 2020!

New Year's Day is coming, and after a year of stress baking and/ or eating an endless parade of whatever canned and packaged goods were available at the grocery store two weeks ago, maybe you're ready for a little break. No recipes. No work except a little pre-planning. Let's let the Kroger Deli [and] Bakery Party Guide take us back to the 1980s (or thereabouts--the pamphlet is undated but looks similar to the one in this 1986 commercial) so we can pre-order a party tray and pretend all those cold cuts will be shared with other people.

And if you're serious about cold cuts, you can go with the All Meat Splendor.

There's a lot of greenery for an "all meat" tray, but I guess you have to have some contrasting colors to highlight all that "moist, pink ham."

In fact, if you're really into ham, there's this option:

I love that the All Ham Tray "has eye appeal with the mustard center highlighting its elegance." Who knew that a tray of sliced salted pig could be so refined?

Of course, all that ham will get old fast if you're the only one eating it. If you live near a fancy Kroger, maybe you should treat yo self to a tray of Gourmet Hors d'oeuvres.

You'll have to turn on the oven for a half-hour or so, but who can resist an entire tray of franks 'n blankets, cheese straws, beef pockets, chicken liver puffs, potato whirls, and shrimp puffs? (Okay, I can, easily, because I hate everything, but I'm sure a lot of people would be happy to polish off this tray for the new year.)

Maybe you've been doing a bit too much treating yourself when the fridge is always a few steps away, though. Well, don't worry! Kroger has that covered too. 

Just get the Dieter's Delight tray loaded up with turkey breast and lo-fat cheeses! And cry silently as you shovel them in.

I know the year has been hard on everyone's finances, so if all of these sound a bit too premium to round out 2020, you can always go with The Basic.

If you're all by yourself, you won't even have let anybody else know how basic you are. You can just eat your shame in the form of German Bologna, Dutch Loaf, Chopped Ham, and American cheese.

Or if you want to make the version of myself who worked in a supermarket deli 20-some years ago hate you, you can order The Budgeteer. 

I'd feel bad about hating you because I'm a "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" type of person, so I would feel bad hating someone who ordered a budget tray. Pickle and Pimento Loaf was THE WORST, though. The smell made me work to rein in my gag reflex, but the worst part was that pickles and pimentos flew everywhere when I was slicing. I'd look like a damn Christmas tree by the end of my shift whenever that shit was on sale.

My favorite is the tray for all those artistic souls: the Elegante.

Yes, this "elegant assortment of meat, cheese, spreads and fruit bread" is "imaginatively arranged," all right. It looks like the head of the deli remembered this tray was due about 13 minutes before it was supposed to be ready and just dumped all the random odds and ends she could find onto a tray, toothpicked a bunch of sliced olives to the top in the hopes that no one would notice how messy it was, and called it a day.

Be sure to put in those orders now so they'll be ready by New Year's! Alternatively, you can make up your own 2020 party tray. Maybe just dump a can of rinsed kidney beans onto a quarter of a tray, fill the next quarter with hot dogs (or cocktail weenies if you want to feel fancy), dump the rest of the shredded taco cheese that was in the back of the fridge and that you hope is not yet moldy into the third quarter, and fill the fourth quarter with pasta (cooked if you planned ahead and straight out of the box-- who cares?-- if you didn't). Put a jar of cheap marinara in the middle for dipping/ dumping on everything. Garnish with crumbled banana bread and/ or olives on toothpicks (or cubes of banana bread and olives skewered on the same toothpicks if you feel extra fancy). It's sure to be at least as enjoyable as 2020 was!

Tidings of Jell-O and Joy

Inspired by The Takeout's "Jiggle All the Way" week, I decided it's time for Joys of Jell-O Gelatin.

Okay, this 1981 General Foods book is a bit newer than I usually go, but of course I can't ignore anything Jell-O-y. Plus, we had this book when I was a kid, so it's pretty nostalgic for me.

Since The Takeout is honoring seasonally appropriate Jell-O dishes, this post will too. Let's start out with a sparkly red and green salad.

The pineapple burst on top is almost enough to make me forget how dreary December usually is. And while the name doesn't specifically refer to the holidays, it is appropriate for gift wrapping.

Plus, Ribbon Salad offers that old holiday favorite: fruit-flavored gelatin with mayonnaise (or at least Miracle Whip). 

In our family, homemade marshmallows were a Christmas tradition. While my immediate family typically made plain vanilla or sometimes mint-flavored marshmallows, grandma liked to make fruity ones.

The book sells these as Easter treats since they're pastel, but I assure you that kids are just as excited to eat pink and green marshmallows at Christmas as at Easter!

I have a feeling the more traditional grandmas were busy making this showpiece instead:

While I'll admit that the red and green look nice, I can't help but thinking how much cooler an all-red blood splatter cake or an orange-and-black-cherry cake would look for Halloween.

And finally, if you want to ring in the new year with some jiggly holiday cheer that won't leave you with a hangover, Jell-O offers this:

I'm not sure there's a huge demand for non-alcoholic egg-free nog that tastes vaguely of artificial lemon and is so thick it can be unmolded, but if that's your thing, Jell-O can help!

Have yourself a jellied little Christmas this year!

Tough Cookies for Tough Times

For the last weekend before Christmas, let's have some good old-fashioned cookies from The Household Searchlight Recipe Book (compiled and edited by Ida Migliario, Harriet W. Allard, Zorada Z. Titus, and Irene Westbrook, copyright 1931, from the 1936 eighth printing).  For a festive occasion like Christmas, the cookies might reflect popular holiday flavors.

With the double work of rolling out the cookies, PLUS making the filling and filling them, I can't imagine Mince-Meat Cookies were super-popular most of the year. They probably made a nice showpiece for trays of goodies shared with family and friends.

Most of the cookies are more of a way to easily add calories to meals and use up leftovers. What if you were making a popcorn garland for the tree and had more left than you could easily eat right away?

If you had leftover egg whites from some rich and yolky creation, they could be pressed into service with the popcorn to make Popcorn Macaroons.

If, on the other hand, you had leftover dried fruit from making fruitcakes...

Popcorn Fruit Cookies would help use up that last bit that didn't get cake-ified. . 

And if your leftovers were just regular, non-festive leftovers, well...

There's always Cottage Cheese Cookies. (I know those probably sound revolting to most people, but I've always got a soft spot for cottage cheese. It's got some of the tang of cream cheese.) This recipe doesn't even call for eggs, so it can really help out if you're out of just about everything.

And finally, how about something with a hint of red for Santa?

Yep! Better hope Santa likes Raisin Catsup Cookies, or you might get reindeer poop on the Christmas tree skirt! I'm sure this recipe will have some believers. Catsup is loaded with sugar and often warm spices like cloves, plus acid for the baking soda to react with. And raisins are a fine dried fruit, not wrinkly rabbit turds. Whatever.

I can champion Cottage Cheese Cookies and maybe you see Raisin Catsup Cookies as a perfectly reasonable idea. The important thing is this: We defend the idea of the cookies without actually wasting ingredients on them. Groceries are hard enough to come by this year! Make the traditional cookies your family actually wants, and let these recipes remind you how good we've got it, even in a tough year.

Get the ketchup! It's international night!

 Even as the vaccine begins to roll out, it's going to be a while before there's too much world traveling. Today, we'll do our traveling 1950s style with A World of Good Eating (Heloise Frost, 1951).

And of course, traveling 1950s style means not leaving home at all if you're poor and/or a woman, pretending that the entire rest of the world consists of Europe and maybe China if you're feeling generous, and assuming that any representation of those other countries is close enough, as long as it comes through the authority of "a New England Housewife," as the title page assures readers.

This book seems to suggest that the Bratwurst Cake from my Ohio Celebrity Cookbook has its roots in Ireland rather than Germany.

Or maybe all of Europe was really into spice cake with coffee, ground meat, and raisins. Either way, it looks like the recipe came over with the immigrants.

I always associated oatmeal recipes with Scotland, but this next one is attributed to Poland (as you might guess from the surfeit of zs).

I'm impressed with a recipe that uses (apparently) three quarts of water to boil just a cup of oats for an hour so there will be sufficient "oatmeal water" (with the oats strained out) to boil beats into a soup. I assume the onion and spare ribs are added to the soup too (and the super-mushy oatmeal is not), but the recipe is not entirely clear on what to do with the various components. That means my idea of how to make this is only slightly clearer than  my idea of how to pronounce Barszcz.

As the holidays approach, maybe you're interested in hearing about a nice Swedish goose recipe.

A roast goose sounds a lot more festive than a boiled goose (though it is less likely to come with the timely reminder that a boombox is not a toy). What really interests me about the recipe is the instructions for using up the fat.

Simmer apple and onion in the fat, strain, chill, and use "as a spread on dark bread." I've got to admire the commitment to using up everything, even if the thought of congealed apple-onion-fat makes me gag just a little. (And I am sure it's a treasured delicacy for those with broader palates than mine...)

A World of Good Eating does recognize that one area outside of Europe exists: China! Unlike a lot of the church cookbooks I have, this book does not feature "Chinese" dishes bound with cream of mushroom soup and hidden under a blanket of cheese.

Instead, it offers canned shrimp in thickened ketchup water! At least this seems like it might be moderately closer to Chinese cuisine than the midwest's casserolified versions.

The book did not confine its mistreatment of ketchup to the China chapter, either. From the brief American chapter, here's a recipe that I think was meant to evoke California.

Yep! Drown some avocadoes in ketchup and enjoy. Sounds like California to me.

All the words except a and of in the title A World of Good Eating are often a bit questionable, but hey, at least it got my mind out of the house for a few minutes.

Bonus Feelie: If you were wondering why the page for Mandarin Shrimp was discolored, the book came with an extra recipe:

Bonus feelies found inside a book with hand-lettered pages: just a couple more reasons I 💓💓💓 old cookbooks!

Crush Those Holiday Cravings!

What do dieters dream about? A thick slice of homemade bread fresh from the oven and slathered in butter? Twice baked potatoes loaded up with cheese? A slab of chocolate cheesecake with a gooey caramel and pecan topping? Or maybe in December, the cravings shift to a big glass of sweet, creamy eggnog spiked with rum and Cognac? A bowl of cornbread stuffing flavored with sausage? A couple big scoops of peppermint ice cream dripping with hot fudge?

Nope! According to Secrets of Salt-Free Cooking (Jeanne Jones, 1979). Dieters don't want to get left out of when it comes to that other Christmas classic....

Yeah, they crave fruitcake. And since a lot of the calories are in the cake part, it gets replaced by a low-fat milk gelatin. Candied fruits are caloric too, so those get replaced with applesauce, crushed pineapple, and a few raisins. I didn't think fruitcake could get more disappointing than it already was, but Jeanne Jones has clearly proven me wrong. Happy holidays, dieters! Enjoy this sad, sad applesauce-and-milk gel.

Double work makes life easier?

I picked up The Working Wives' (Salaried or Otherwise) Cook Book (Theodora Zavin and Freda Stuart, 1963) in part just because I like the way the title nods to the way our society tends to undervalue care work. Work is hard-- whether it's paid or not! Of course, I also wanted to see how the gimmick played out, as this book tells how to make dinner the night before so there's not a lot to do when the titular wife and/or other family members get home. The writers are skeptical of the "quick" cookbooks, as they note in the introduction, because the books attempt to solve the problem of mom coming home at the same time as everybody else by relying heavily on recipes that "revolve around canned cream of mushroom soup to which you add meat, fish, or chicken. The dishes are quick and economical, and they lend a certain harmony to your cooking. Everything tastes like cream of mushroom soup." For me, that line is worth the price of admission alone-- and that's a good thing because the recipes are, for the mot part, pretty boring. A lot of them simply consist of cooking a roast or chicken with vegetables (or sometimes canned fruit) in the evening while/ after the family eats the dinner prepared the previous night, popping the precooked food in the fridge, and then reheating it in the oven for dinner the next day. Unsurprisingly, there is no cream of mushroom soup-- usually just meat and veggies with a gravy made of the drippings, or sometimes a tomato-based sauce. That's why today I'm doing one of my Menus of Mayhem-- with one of the more interesting main dishes, plus sides.

If the cook is not interested in cooking yet another slab of meat with potatoes, carrots, and onions before heading off to bed, there's a recipe for Tropikabobs.

The night before can be a craft festival and give the oven a rest! Just thread ham, canned pineapple, and canned oranges onto skewers and cook up a little sugar-juice-mustard sauce to go with them. Then the next night, all you have to do is broil the skewers and baste them with the reheated sauce. (Of course, the skewers are supposed to be served on  a big platter of rice. No word on how that magically materializes for the harried cook.)

The authors note that as long as there's a solid main dish, it's fine to serve canned veggies as the side. Acknowledging that canned veggies are not particularly appealing, they offer a few ways to perk up the soggy, vaguely metallic mush.

Just throw some buttered bread crumbs, crumbled hard-cooked eggs, crumbled bacon, or sautéed onions and/or mushrooms on/ in them. Problem solved!

The family probably expects bread with dinner, so there's even a night-before recipe for Mushroom Biscuits.

Chiseling the tops out of frozen biscuits with a grapefruit knife is the perfect companion activity to threading ham and fruit onto skewers! (I have to admit that biscuits with a buttery mushroom sauce baked right in sound pretty good.) Good luck baking the biscuits at the same time the Tropikabobs are broiling, though, unless you're lucky enough to have a double-oven kitchen!

I'm not entirely sure that the answer to the dinner rush was to make two dinners a night-- reheating the one from the previous night and putting together tomorrow's-- instead of just one. I've got to give Zavin and Stuart creativity points for trying to make life easier by doubling down on the work, though.

Funny Name: Strog-a-what-now?

What do you get when you cross a rich, sweet, and nutmeggy Christmas beverage with a ground meat?

Okay, I know stroganogg is just a misspelling of stroganoff, but the mental image of hamburger cooked in egg nog was too nasty to resist. Thanks to Centennial Cook Book (The University Women's Club of the Ohio State University, 1970) for making me do a spit-take.

December with Martha Meade: An Interminable Parade of Poultry and Fruit

As I've read through the Modern Meal Maker cookbook (Martha Meade, 1935) over the past year, I've sometimes wondered how people back in the 1930s managed to weigh less than, say, their farm equipment. After all, the menus for each day were pretty heavy. Breakfasts usually consisted of fruit, cereal, a protein, and another carb (like coffee cake, biscuits, or sweet rolls), plus milk (often top milk-- which was mostly cream!). Lunches (or suppers on Sundays/ holidays) always had bread and dessert, plus a couple other components (often a cream soup or leftover meat and/or vegetables from the previous day dressed up with cheese and/or buttered breadcrumbs). Dinner was the most elaborate meal, with at least a protein, a couple of vegetables, some rice or veggies, bread, and dessert-- plus often a bonus appetizer or soup. Cookies were only sometimes considered a proper dessert by themselves, and more often served as a way to dress up a fruit- or dairy-based dessert.

Then I remember that a lot of people in the 1930s had to work hard on their farms rather than sitting at desks all day... and they didn't eat entire cans of Pringles on their tractors the way people now do at their computers.

As I started looking through December's menu, I was once again overwhelmed by wondering how 1930s people didn't dwarf their hay balers. The month is solidly holiday-themed. As in, cooks were supposed to make another stuffed turkey on a random Sunday between the stuffed turkey on Thanksgiving and the stuffed goose for Christmas. (Plus, the stuffing was another ingenious way to push Sperry's Wheat Hearts into everything.)

December actually has more cranberry recipes than the month of November, including cranberry apples, cranberry mold, cranberry nectar, cranberry tarts, and this unusual pie.

Don't even get me started on the fruit puddings and cakes. There's more than one a week, on average. Cooks were supposed to serve a steamed pudding full of raisins, currants, suet, and spices on the same day as the aforementioned random stuffed turkey. The month also called for a raisin pudding, a Sicily fruit cake, and a quick and easy fruit cake. There's an Old English Plum Pudding with Hard Sauce on the Christmas menu (to go with the Roast Goose with Wheat Hearts Stuffing, Cinnamon Baked Pears, Glacé Onions, Dinner Rolls, and Celery Victor).

And of course, all this is before the Scottish spin on fruit cake for New Year's Eve.

Yes, it's a fruit cake baked inside a pastry. Clearly, you've got to up the fruited-dessert game after a whole month of similar offerings.

Then I realized that the strategy might have been to make people so heartily sick of holiday food that they would give up on eating it long before the season was even over. Few people are really fans of fruit cake or big slabs of roasted poultry in the first place. Serve up an all-you-can-eat buffet of it for a solid month, and people will start pretending they're already full long before they gain an extra 50 pounds. Hell, maybe if the cook was lucky, the memories of all the repetitive menus would be enough to make the family insist giving her a little break the new year. Well played, Martha Meade! 

I loved spending a year with this cookbook, and don't worry. I've got something new waiting for 2021!