Quintessential Midwestern "Secrets"

 Pssst! Ready for some more secrets?

This time, they're Home Cooking Secrets of Cedar Rapids (Scarlet Angels Color Guard and Drill Team, 1972-73).

This cookbook is extremely midwestern, as one might expect from an Iowa home-cooking book. You've got your "salads" that consist mostly of sugar.

Canned pie filling AND marshmallows! Or, if you're feeling decadent, sugar plus dairy fat.

Yep! A bottle of Coke helps when the Jell-O is just insufficiently sweet, and the cream cheese makes it substantial. These recipes don't even bother advising a lettuce leaf or two to legitimize the "salad" part of the title.

You've also got your noodle-y casseroles whose only vegetables come from multiple cans of cream-of-something soup.

Oooh-- cream of celery and cream of mushroom! Two types of veggies! So healthy! (Plus a bonus can of cream of chicken to fortify the protein from the straight-up canned chicken! A casserole can never have enough cans of cream soup.)

You've got your recipes that assume you already know how to make major components of the recipe (and if you don't, tough luck!).

Pat Sebetka hopes you had the foresight to make your own favorite biscuit topping for the Church Supper Chicken Pie because she has no plans to tell you hers! Sure, you can know how to make the filling, but show some initiative and make your own damn topping. (No, now that you ask, I did not accidentally leave off a biscuit recipe appended to the end of the chicken pie recipe.)

And if you'd expect a Noodle Ring with Chicken à la King to have a recipe for, well, you know, Chicken à la King...

...you are expecting way too much. Apparently in Cedar Rapids, the cooks will give you a recipe for either the chicken part of a recipe or the starch part of a recipe. That means Helen Carnicle is only willing to tell you how to make the noodle ring and inform you that its function is to hold Chicken à la King. You better have your own recipe for that. (And you better not try to fill the noodle ring with some other bullshit! Try adding a mound of hot buttered peas to the middle and you'll never be invited to a potluck again.)

Plus, there's the midwestern insistence that this one recipe can do pretty much anything, as long as you're accustomed to foods with almost no seasoning and you think ketchup is a great stand-in for any and all tomato products.

Yes, this ground beef/ onion/ celery top/ "catsup" mixture makes mock pizza when it's slopped on a bun and topped with cheese! Add it to spaghetti with a little Parmesan and it's spaghetti sauce! Throw in a couple cans of kidney beans, and it's suddenly chili! No chili powder required.

There are a few unexpected touches, though. For the midwestern precursor to today's chicken fries, there's this:

For "LIVER - that doesn't taste like liver," just cut it into strips, dredge in seasoned flour, deep fry, salt aggressively, and don't tell the kids it's liver. 

And if all else fails, make a Beef Macaroni Bake.

Put a half-cheesed but otherwise prepared package of macaroni and cheese deLuxe dinner on the bottom of a baking dish, a filler-free meatloaf mix on top (I guess the mac underneath is the filler?), and then dot the top with the remaining cheese sauce mix and garlic croutons. With meatloaf, mac and cheese, and a salad (Croutons are enough to make it count as a salad, right?), it's got everything you'd expect in a midwestern dinner.

I loved this pure distillation of the secrets of midwest cooking! Thanks to my little sister for sending the collection my way. It makes me so happy that I don't have to try to feed a husband and six kids with a little ground beef plus "catsup," whatever cans of canned whatever that are left in the pantry, and three and a quarter pounds of sugar.