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!