In which soda crackers are made... well... interesting...

 I picked up The Before and After Dinner Cook Book (Charlotte McNamara and Lenore Howell, 1977) because I was kind of interested in the premise. The book promises to provide "a substantial selection of international recipes from two of the most neglected areas in dining: first courses, to stimulate but not satiate the appetite before the main course; and evening snacks, to make an adventurous change from the ubiquitous coffee and cake shared with family and friends after an evening of theatre, cards, or just visiting...." 

The cover is pretty indicative of the contents of the book-- which is mostly about serving bits of meats and/or vegetables in oily dressings and/or with dips. It's a little too upscale for my taste-- no canned-soup quickies or craft projects requiring nearly as many packets of lemon Jell-O as hours of fussing around to ensure that the bell pepper flowers with asparagus stems have optimal placement in the mold.

Instead, it tries to make semi-sophisticated for the '70s dishes using whatever ingredients can be found in '70s grocery stores, like this Guadalajara Fruit Cup. 

Sophisticated '70s adults apparently craved cucumbers, papaya, and avocado in an oily pineapple-juice-and-catsup slurry, perhaps with a bit of crumbled bacon on top. The book's real trademark is taking a minimum of two pages to describe every recipe, even ones that are no more difficult than "Cut up some produce and then stir together a cold dressing to splorp on top of it."

I had to love just how delicious the descriptions sounded too.

Who hasn't longed for tomato juice, cheese, and seasonings mixed with stiffly-whipped (raw!) egg whites, frozen just until "the mushy stage," and served in a tomato shell? Yes, good old mushy tomato sherbet.

The part that really floored me about this recipe, though, was the accompaniment. Look at the end. Marinated Soda Crackers?

Marinated Soda Crackers!?

Yep. Marinated Soda Crackers. 

While I was initially a bit disappointed in this book, I suspected the concept of marinated soda crackers had to be weird enough to be worth the price of admission alone! And I was right.

Yes, soda crackers are actually marinated in that most delicious of all soaks, canned beef broth, until they swell up. Then cooks are supposed to transfer the bloated crackers CAREFULLY (since the mush is likely to fall apart-- but don't worry because the cracker mush can be pressed back together if necessary!) to another baking sheet. Then the sogged-out crackers are supposed to be sprinkled with melted butter, topped with any number of toppings, and baked for an hour and a half to dry and recrisp. Why not just, say, buy a box of Chicken in a Biskit or Sesame Toasts rather than spending the better part of a day laboring away to make the snack aisle's most boring cracker first more and then (hopefully!) less disgusting? My best guess is that all the work was somehow supposed to make these morally superior to straight-from-the-package crackers. Maybe all that work showed that the host was self-sacrificing enough to put in hours of effort for no more of a payoff than treating guests to weird-ass soda crackers? Feel free to speculate on the motives of this probably-not-worth-the-effort recipe!

Funny Name: Run, Steak, Run! Edition

I'm not really sure how this recipe from The Garden Club Cookbook Casseroles Including Breads (The Montgomery Federation of Garden Clubs, 1969) is supposed to work.

Why would a steak want a husband? What man would want to marry a steak? (Okay, maybe a guy with a secret cannibalism fetish would be a good candidate for steak marriage, but once the steak found out what happened to his previous "wives," it would probably want to run.)

How not to return to your pre-pandemic figure

Getting ready to go out of the house and realizing that your sweatpants are the only pants that fit anymore after staying home for months on end? Eying the "diet" foods on grocery store shelves (or apps) and wishing they looked more tempting? Well, The Slim Gourmet (Barbara Gibbons, 1976) is here to make you feel better that you're not trying to diet in the '70s.

Let's try out a day on the slim gourmet diet. What's for breakfast?

If you guessed eggs, you were right! I'll bet you didn't guess the eggs would be cooked with an entire fruit salad-- grapes, tangerines, bananas, and all-- then topped with diet cheese. The best part may be that the fruits can change depending on the season, so if you want to wake up to warm watermelon scrambled into your banana-and-egg omelet with "low-fat Cheddar-type 'diet' cheese," then that's an option too. Yay?

The omelet serves as a warning that Gibbons is really serious about dieters getting their fruit. Lunch asks dieters to give up their normal sandwich for an Apple-a-Day Salad.

Yeah, if you don't want to get bored, just chop up an apple, add some celery and a "creamy low-calorie dressing," and your favorite sandwich ingredients. I mean, wouldn't it be more exciting to have an apple-and-canned seafood salad than a nice crab cake or shrimp roll?

Or if you're not a seafood fan, there's always a reuben.

Granted, you won't get your Russian dressing or rye bread, and the sauerkraut is traded out for shredded cabbage for some reason, but it's still a chance to eat corned beef and a whole tablespoon of shredded Swiss on mayonnaise-y apples. Sorry, low-calorie mayonnaise-y apples. Yay?

Maybe we should just skip ahead to dinner. How about some lasagna? I mean lasagne? Diet lasagnae (Yes, the -ae ending is how I'm comically making it plural.) are pretty popular, so what is the trick to this one?

It's the old trick of making lasagna "noodles" out of eggs, but this one shocked me because it allowed for some actual flour! So decadent. (And such "fun" to spend the afternoon making "noodle" sheets out of eggs....)

And to round out the day, let's have a little indulgence. How about a cookie? We can have some fun and make pinwheels!

Sorry-- I meant "Prunewheels." What's more fun than cookies that should offer a delicious swirl of chocolate but instead threaten to make you poop? The good news is you can cut off only a few, bake them, and then store the rest of the wax-paper-wrapped dough in the freezer until you notice it a year and a half later, long after you've given up on fitting into those pre-pandemic pants, and then you can throw it away. (Or, if we're on the darkest timeline, you can give thanks that you still have something semi-edible stored away and cry while you eat the somewhat-defrosted dough with a spoon.)

Here's hoping we're not on the darkest timeline! 

Funny Name: It Ain't Gonna be Pretty Edition

Sometimes, home cooks just has to be realistic. Dinner has to be made. People have to eat. But maybe the cook doesn't really have the mental energy to make it look nice. Mrs. Donald M. Seltzer (in The Garden Club Cookbook Casseroles Including Breads, The Montgomery Federation of Garden Clubs, 1969) believed in letting her family know right up front when it was going to be one of those nights.

When it was Glop night, well, you knew what dinner was going to look like.

Bonus recipe! My grandma also made a dish called Glop, but it was a dessert. So, if you want sweet Glop to go with your Glop main course, this will round out your menu.

Glop

Soak 1 cup pearl tapioca overnight. Bring 5 cups of water and 2 cups of brown sugar to a boil. Add tapioca and simmer slowly until tapioca is clear. Cool. Add 1 small can crushed pineapple, drained, 1 cup chopped pecans, and 1 tablespoon vanilla.

The recipe ends there, but grandma always chilled it and served it cold. It was... fine. I kind of liked imagining the tapioca was fish eyes when I was a kid because I'm gross like that (and grandpa probably told me that that's what they were at some point). I was way more interested when grandma made cookies, but sometimes she was just having a Glop day.

Convenient canned dough and barbecue sauce for everyone!

Sick of life's inconveniences? Trying to complete the captcha image five times and beginning to doubt your basic ability to recognize a stoplight (and wondering who the hell uses captcha anymore anyway)? Constantly popping the same batteries into and out of your remote and pushing the buttons extra hard because the batteries are half-dead and you didn't realize you were out of fresh batteries (or are too lazy to try to find them)? Swearing at the self-checkout that will not register half the stuff you try to scan and that requires constant intervention from the single clerk trying to oversee all six of the self-checkouts, meaning you spend MORE time in close proximity to another human being than you probably would have if you just waited in line for the single checkout with an actual checker that wound halfway around the store? 

Well, I can't help with any of that. But we can try to forget about life's inconveniences by scanning through From Pillsbury: The Convenient Cookbook (undated, but it's cheaper than The Nice 'n Easy Cook Book from the late '60s, has an ad for the 1963 version of their family cookbook, and includes Funny Face drink mix (introduced in 1964) and crescent rolls (introduced in 1965) in a few recipes, so it must be from the mid-'60s).

Gotta love the pretend-elegance of meatloaf wrapped in canned crescent rolls, plus a salad with some non-iceberg lettuce floating in a school bus yellow void on the cover.

That pretend-elegance extends to the recipes as well. Just look at this starter for a romantic dinner.

White tablecloth! Candlelight! Fresh flowers!

And canned beef bouillon with just a hint of barbecue sauce! In a glass mug with an upside-down handle that would probably make it super-easy to spill! Cleaning up bouillon-and-barbecue-sauce stains is soooo romantic...

Okay, maybe you've just got to worry about feeding the family. It doesn't have to be romantic, exactly, but maybe you can at least class up the meatloaf so it will be like the one on the cover?

Wrap it in crescent rolls and guess what!

It's a Meatloaf Wellington, perfect for when you want to pretend that you're rich enough to employ someone to make a proper Beef Wellington while you spend the afternoon playing tennis, but when you've actually spent most of it trying to figure out where the cat/ dog/ toddler pooped and then regretting that you opted for wall-to-wall carpeting. If you try really hard, you can pretend that the can of cream of mushroom soup counts as Duxelles. (And also, if you were wondering, yes, "Crescent Rolls can also be used on baked ham.")

Now let's check out the recipes that are meant to be fun, like this state-fair-food wannabe.

It's not a misshapen Twinkie on a stick. It's a Cheese Pronto!

I think the kids are more likely to enjoy hot dogs and cheese in a cornmeal crusted dinner roll wrap, and it's way easier to make than Meatloaf Wellington anyway.

If even wrapping hot dogs in roll dough seems like a little too much, there's always this cute little number.

I love the sunny '60s pop-art feel, and the recipe couldn't be much easier.

Okay, fine, you do have to dip the biscuits in milk and cornmeal, plus stand them on their edges before baking. On the plus side, though, you only have to heat up the chili. Oh, and take it out of the can first. If you call it "Chili Mexican," nobody will know that it's just plain old canned chili surrounded by refrigerated-dough petals.

And finally, since these books are not complete without a gelatin of some kind, here's Cherry Mold.

It's of the ever-popular "Let's throw in some celery and olives for good measure!" genre. Nobody wants olives and celery with their cherries and pecans, but if the family get used to a world that bends to their wishes, well, they will just become unbearable. It's best to keep their expectations low so life will be more convenient. (There's the real convenience in this cookbook!)

If you want something less sweet than salad, maybe you should try dessert

I'm used to sweet "salad" recipes. They were a genre unto themselves in old cookbooks, providing everyone with a chance to pretend it was virtuous to eat a mound of cream cheese, marshmallows, Cool Whip, Jell-O, etc., as long as there was a fruit (or at least a fruit flavoring) somewhere in there. And yet, Saint Edward's Cookbook (date unknown, ca. 1970s) still managed to surprise me.

I guess I should have been tipped off about their serious love of sweet salads when a recipe in the dessert section called for "salad marshmallows."

Yep, as far as they're concerned, the mini marshmallows were made for salads! At least this particular recipe is recognized as being a sweet, but it's still considered to have a salad ingredient.

I was entranced by the progression of orange salad recipes on one page in the salad section. The first mildly amused me by claiming that a little can of mandarin oranges was enough to make two full packages of orange Jell-O plus a pint of orange sherbet into a salad.

It seemed like so little fruit that I doubted Nancy Reilly's sincerity in calling it a salad.

Then came Orange Tapioca Salad...

...which upped the ante by using two packages of tapioca pudding and a full tub of Cool Whip with the pack of orange Jell-O-- still "healthified" by the little can of mandarin oranges.

But that wasn't enough either! The progression ended in this Orange-Tapioca Salad...

...which adds a cup of miniature marshmallows to the pudding mixes, orange Jell-O, and tub of whipped topping. At least it has the decency to double the mandarin oranges.

If you get bored of using regular "salad marshmallows" in your salad, Barbara Hagarty offers an alternative with her circus peanut salad.

It's perfect if you want to impart that weird fake banana flavor in the orange Jell-O, crushed pineapple, and Cool Whip.

If you're serious about pretending that it's a real salad and not dessert, there's even a very sweet pasta salad.

It has actual vegetables and macaroni in it, so it will look like a regular pasta salad, but the dressing is made with sweetened condensed milk and more than a cup of sugar, so I'm guessing this  is a bit sweeter than usual for a pasta salad.

The final recipe made me most excited because it's another answer to the question of how to tell a salad apart from a dessert. (Previous answers: It's salad if you put a little lettuce under it. It's salad if you use slightly less sugar than you would for dessert.)

The answer here is entirely new! Add an extra half-package of pudding to make it salad! Apparently to these ladies, dessert is actually less sweet than salad. Saint Edward's parishioners must have had some serious sweet teeth! Thanks again to my little sister for this very sweet find!

Post- Easter Hard-Cooked Egg Casserole Roundup!

Happy post-Easter week! Got a lot of leftover ham? Hard-boiled eggs? Well, you're in luck. The Garden Club Cookbook Casseroles Including Breads (The Montgomery Federation of Garden Clubs, 1969) has some ham-and-egg casseroles just for you.

If you're trying to fill some post-holiday free time, turn your casserole into a craft project.

Start your Scalloped Eggs with Ham casserole by making deviled eggs, and then make a nice homemade cheese sauce to smother them. Glop it on in alternating layers with crisp bread crumbs and leftover ham.

Or, if you're feeling lazy, there's always the easy version.

Just chop up the leftover eggs and chuck them into a cream sauce with your bread crumbs and ham. No deviling or cheese grating and melting required!

And if you don't make ham, don't sweat it. You can still turn those leftover eggs into something mid-century appropriate.

Yes, mix all those eggs with milk, mushroom soup, American cheese, MSG, mushrooms, water chestnuts, and peppers and call it Chow Mein. Bonus '60s casserole points for serving it over crispy canned noodles!

Happy Leftover Egg Week, everyone!

The Humpty Cake will keep you awake

Want an egg-themed dessert for Easter, but you're tired of the typical lamb and carrot cakes? Want something even more likely to give the kiddos nightmares than a human-sized bunny who hides food all over the house and/or yard when they're not looking? Well, has McCall's Book of Cakes and Pies (1974) got a cake for you!

Just make the Humpty Dumpty Cake! And "Whatever you do, don't fall asleep!"

No problem with the  not falling asleep part-- this thing takes an entire oversize page and the better part of a day to decorate.

And of course, the kids will never sleep again after facing the terrifying eggish cake staring them down with its beady little eyes, then plotting revenge as it gets sliced to bits! Happy Easter (or spring, from someone who only watches the holiday amusedly from the sidelines)!