Non-Sesqui-Turs

 Guess which American city has its bicentennial this year! Okay, to be fair, there's more than one, but I only have the 50-year-old sesquicentennial cookbook for one city, so you better guess that one.

Yes, it's Sesqui-Samplings: 150 Years of Cooking in Indianapolis (Indianapolis Sesquicentennial Commission, 1971). I've got to admit that I love that clunky title.

Rather than being arranged by type of food (appetizers, meat, poultry, etc.), this initially arranges recipes by time ("A Taste of the Past," with modernized versions of historical recipes and "What's Cooking Today in Indianapolis"). Then it gives up on the time theme and has a chapter of recipes from the cookbook committee ("The Committee Cooks").

The earliest recipes are supposedly from descendants of two of the earliest Indianapolis settlers.

I always thought of hoecakes as a southern thing, but they must have been common in early Indiana too.

Apparently, early Indianapolis residents mostly had cornmeal on hand.

Notes in the margins also tell the tale of early Indianapolis life, and the corn was a source of amusement as well as cornmeal.

I'm sure it was great fun for the young women to simultaneously work and worry about having kisses foisted upon them by one or more of the young men present. At least Indianapolis was so thinly populated back then that the number of kisses should have been pretty limited....

The book also has recipes for local foods, like the persimmons featured in the (maybe) title of another Indiana cookbook.

I love the simple drawing to go with this one, and the tan pages with pops of orange illustration seem so '70s!

The historical section ends with recipes from rationing in World War II, like this Top-of-the-Stove Meatloaf loaded up with veggies and cracker crumbs to make the ground beef stretch further.

Plus, it came with another great drawing, this time of a woman weighing out her ground beef purchase to make sure sit will fit her ration budget.

There's something about her lips that makes me think she started putting on clown makeup and then changed her mind when she remembered she was just going to grocery, but she didn't have time to remove it and start over...

So what were Indianapolites cooking up in the early 1970s? According to the "What's Cooking Today in Indianapolis" chapter, they were making Bacon Bits. If you wonder why they needed a recipe to cook bacon until crisp and then crumble it, then you obviously don't know what bacon bits are.

They're slices of bread spread with cream of mushroom soup, rolled up, wrapped in bacon, and baked until the smell of the bacon is strong enough hide the fact that you're about to bite into a chunk of bread spread with cream of mushroom soup until it's too late.

Of course, the Indianapolitans were also in on the disgusting jellied salad craze.

I'll bet that broccoli and hard-cooked eggs trapped in a gelatinized consommé and mayonnaise blob smelled just lovely. (At least it's plain gelatin and not lemon or lime!)

I was surprised to learn that Naptowners also made a bastardized version of Cincinnati chili.

On the plus side, it's got no cinnamon. On the minus side, the spaghetti is at least partially cooked in the sauce-- for 45 minutes, and that's after the initial pre-boil, so it's sure to be mushy!

And finally, what were the committee members serving up at their own functions? I was not surprised to see a committee member recommend having a luau-themed party, but I was shocked at her recipe.

I thought pineapple was absolutely an obligatory component of the main dish for mid-20th-century "luau" menus, but Sweet Pork and Walnuts just gets its sweet from brown sugar-- no pineapple! I guess those Indianapoleons were just a little bit different from their other midwestern counterparts.

Happy bicentennial, Indianapolis! Thanks for the fun cookbook, but don't feel compelled to make me anything. And no, I have never shucked an ear of red corn, so stay on your own side of the barn.

Apocalypse Part 2: Health Food Horsemen!

Last weekend, we learned that the Four Horsemen of the Vintage Recipe Apocalypse are (arguably) cottage cheese, gelatin, mayo, and pineapple. That made me think of one of my favorite subgenres of vintage recipes: vintage health food recipes. What would their four horsemen be? My forays into the genre suggest soy, nonfat dry milk powder, carob, and honey could be the appropriate grouping, so I started hunting through The Rodale Cookbook (Nancy Albright, 1973, brown type) and New Age Vegetarian Cookbook (The Rosicrucian Fellowship, 1968, black type) for examples.

I know soy was a huge part of "healthy" cooking. Just look at the way Baked Soy Cheese Supreme doubles down on it.

The "soy cheese" is just the book's name for tofu, not the soy nondairy "cheese" we see today. If that's not enough protein, the "soy noodles" (which are homemade noodles made with soy flour instead of the regular wheat flour) provide backup. Soy sauce and soy oil also make appearances! This goes all-in on the soy.

Another soy find shook my convictions about the four horsemen a little. Soybean-Rice Casserole reminded me just how ubiquitous brown rice was in these old health food recipes too. If I had to replace one of the items, I might swap out honey (which is still often used as a "healthier" substitute for sugar, even though it's pretty much just sugar) for brown rice, or even for wheat germ (which was also a BIG THING in health-food cookery).

Okay, so I've definitely established that soy was a heavy, but what about my nonfat dry milk powder, carob, and honey (if I'm keeping it in place of the brown rice or wheat germ)?

Soy-Peanut Butter Cookies definitely get us closer!

Of course we have the soy from the title (this time in flour form), plus 3/4 of a cup of skim milk powder and a half-cup of honey!

I still don't have any carob, though. Nut Balls (Don't think about the name too hard!) include plenty of carob powder...

...plus honey! Plus "soy milk powder," which is not quite nonfat dry milk powder, but it's close. It's almost a two-for-one ingredient in my list.

After a little hunting, though, Rodale came through with a recipe using all four ingredients:

Of course, Fudgies are only fudgy if you consider carob to be an acceptable fudge flavor, and the texture of skim milk powder and soy flour "melted" into honey and vegetable oil is an acceptable substitute for the smooth, creamy texture of sugar crystals in milky butterfat.

So, no, I'm pretty sure this wouldn't convince anyone other than a health food devotee that this is fudge, but I was excited to find all four items in one recipe! What do you think about the list? Would you swap out any of the horsemen? I think soy would just about have to stay (for obvious reasons), but should brown rice, dates, wheat germ, nutritional yeast, or some other health food powerhouse have been there instead? The '60s and '70s were full of faddish health foods, so it's a tough call.

How to microwave something for hours or make an identical-looking main course and dessert!

Poppy: It's getting hot, so you know what that means! 

You (whispered quietly to yourself): Poppy will try to tie the introduction into the concept of summer heat using a flimsy premise.

Poppy: No-- Well, yes, obviously, but that's not the answer I was looking for. It's time to do what any moderately well-to-do '70s cook would do: Consult a microwave cookbook. Less cooking time, no burners, no oven cranked up to 450℉= Cooler house! Today's specimen is Guide to Microwave Cooking and Recipe Book (Hotpoint/ General Electric, 1979).

You know the thing I just said about reduced cooking times? Well... That was usually a selling point for microwaves. They could cook meals in a fraction of the time of conventional cooking. Hotpoint and General Electric didn't necessarily see this as the biggest selling point, though. As far as they were concerned, cooks might just want to use the microwave in place of the slow cooker.

This minestrone is definitely NOT a convenience recipe! First cooks have to simmer bones for 8-12 hours to make the stock in the microwave. Then they have to add all the other ingredients to the stock once it's prepared and microwave for another 6-8 hours. It just seems to me like this makes the same questionable assumption as an earlier edition: people who buy microwaves are not all that interested in convenience.

"Well, Poppy," you might say, "Maybe they just want to see how a microwave would work as a slow cooker. There's not that much actual work involved. Most of the recipe just consists of leaving stuff in the microwave for a really long time."

Perhaps, but I'm also not sure the cooks who are in the market for kitchen convenience are the same ones who might want this recipe.

Short ribs and homemade noodles? I thought the whole reason 1970s cooks were willing to spend so much money on microwaves was that they were not the types of people who wanted to spend time making homemade noodles. They wanted convenience. Why make homemade noodles when big bags of pre-made were so cheap (especially if you were just going to microwave them anyway)?

Of course, the book does have some things for cooks who wanted convenience, like pizza on a plate!

And if you're wondering how appetizing refrigerated crescent roll dough, microwaved into supposed crispiness and then topped with pizza toppings might look, here's your answer:

"Since it starts with triangles of dough, Pizza-On-A-Plate may be slightly irregular, but quick and good," proclaims the caption. The slight irregularity is not the issue, though. As someone who likes my pizza cheese to be browned to about three seconds shy of burned, that sad, clumpy mozzarella makes me doubt the "good" part. (And never mind that the crust is likely to be more rubbery than crispy.)

My favorite picture in the entire book might be the picture for an entire microwave meal menu, though.

What's so great about the visual of the pretty boring-sounding Meatloaf Dinner?

I love that the meatloaf and the dessert look almost identical! If you just quickly glanced at the page, I bet you'd be hard pressed to tell which one is the Lemon Lovers' Meatloaf and which one is the Apple Graham Pie. (Key: The apple pie is a slightly lighter shade of brown, and the meatloaf has lemons lacquered on top.)

Should you ever need to make sorta-matching main dish and dessert, here are the recipes:

At least these two seem like they're not too much trouble, and they'll actually keep the house cooler on a hot day than traditionally baked versions would. Whether they actually taste like anything (because of the lack of browning) is a separate question, but hey, at least they seem a little more like realistic options for 1970s microwave cooks! Now I'm off to NOT put something in my microwave for 12 hours. (I don't think I could set the timer for 12 hours!)

Vintage Recipe Apocalypse!

My sister texted me this picture the other day:

My first thought (Well, second after being sad that whoever created this doesn't know how to make "horseman" plural, but I won't admit that since the language police are so annoying.) was to wonder about the theology. Do I accept that the Four Horsem[e]n of the Vintage Recipe Apocalypse are cottage cheese, gelatin, mayo, and pineapple? I might quibble and suggest that mayo seems as ubiquitous as ever and go with canned soup instead, but that's just because I like quibbling. The four seem pretty representative of the contents of my regional fundraising cookbooks.

So then my third thought, of course, was that I could probably find ALL FOUR in one recipe without too much trouble. The top book on one of the stacks nearest my desk happened to be Police Potpourri (Iowa State Policeman's Association Auxiliary, 1977), so I opened it up and immediately found Lime Jello Salad.

I didn't think the search would be hard, but I didn't think it would be that easy, either! First try! But it's kind of a boring post if I just have one recipe that's got all four horsemen and nothing else, so I decided to dig a little deeper and find other gelatin salads (The gelatin horseman is absolutely not subject to change as far as I'm concerned!) that could contest the identities of the other three horsemen.

The very same page as Lime Jello Salad offered up an alternative take:

Frozen Fruit Salad omits the cottage cheese, but which ingredient should take its place? Maraschino cherries (The cherries are probably maraschino since I've never seen any other type of green cherries.) and marshmallows are both strong contenders! I could go either way....

Tested, Tried, and True (Junior League of Flint, Michigan, Incorporated, second printing, April 1976) includes Heavenly Salad.

This one says keep the cottage cheese, and swap out the mayo for Cool Whip. That's also a solid choice to represent vintage recipes (though I would also accept Dream Whip, prepared per package instructions, for Cool Whip).

Everyday Cook Book (Trinity United Methodist Church in New Springfield, Ohio, 1976) wants to swap out two ingredients:

Keep the Jello and cottage cheese, but swap out the can of pineapple for a can of fruit cocktail (That's a solid choice.), and swap out mayo for marshmallows. (I guess this seconds the idea that marshmallows are a good runner-up possibility for a displaced horseman. Sorry, maraschino cherries!)

The voting for which one ingredient(s) go(es) and what would replace it/ them is pretty complicated, though, so I'll just end with a different recipe that shows that all four Horsemen of the Vintage Recipe Apocalypse made it into a recipe from Hawaii. Last, we have the tropical rendition from 4-H Local and Ethnic Food Show 1983 (Aiea, Pearl City, Weipahu, Wahiawa, and Honolulu 4-H clubs).

It's got two flavors of gelatin, crushed pineapple, cottage cheese (with extra pineapple!), and mayonnaise, plus evaporated milk, carrots, and macadamia nuts to give this fancy Jello mold that extra Hawaiian flair.

Sadly, I didn't find anything with cottage cheese, gelatin, pineapple, and a can of cream of something soup, but this was still a fun hunt! Now it's your turn to think about what your Four Horsemen of the Vintage Recipe Apocalypse might be. Are you doctrinaire, sticking to the four shown here? Would you swap out one or two? Start over? I'm usually a grump, but for this topic I'm more interested in the debate than in torturing any heretics.

Cooking High and Low in Michigan

 When I picked up Tested, Tried, and True (Junior League of Flint, Michigan, Incorporated, second printing, April 1976), I wasn't sure what to expect. Michigan tends to be a working-class state, but the Junior League can be just a little bit hoity-toity. So was this going to feature humble dinners of modest families or shmancy fare for families where mom can spend a chunk of the family budget on club fees and annual dues? 

As is often the case when one is presented with two options, the correct answer is "both." Let's see what I mean with a little high-low dinner menu. We'll start out with an appetizer.

Caviar is about as fancy as we can get! Of course, it's served up on a mold of gelatin and cottage cheese to make it stretch, so it's a pretty good high-low blend. 

I also love the way this recipe depends on readers reading it all the way through to fully understand the directions before starting. When I was just starting to cook, I often read each step right before I performed it. My experience with this recipe would have been to see the first step of "Blend all ingredients well in a blender until smooth" and to do just that. Then when I got to the second step-- softening the gelatin in the sherry-- I would have realized that neither the gelatin nor the sherry were meant to be included in "all ingredients." By the time I got to the "top with caviar" step, I would have been in despair that all the caviar had already been pulverized with everything else.... Too late to impress anyone with a fancy caviar-topped appetizer! Good thing no one would have entrusted me with sherry or caviar when I was learning to cook.

If you want something more high-end for the main dish (to make up for having to dilute the caviar with other ingredients in the appetizer), try stuffing one expensive protein with another expensive protein for the main course.

I did not anticipate finding lobster-stuffed tenderloin in a Michigan cookbook. I imagine Margo Blazak contributing the recipe to show off just how wealthy her family was-- and the rest of the Junior League whispering behind her back about how she's a little snobby even for them.

Okay, we've got to balance this really high-end dish out with some much more down-to-earth sides.

How about Bisquick mixed with a can of beer? (Have to admit, this is exactly what I was expecting from Michigan, although I imagine at least a few Junior League members being miffed by Gwynn Falk's lower-class contribution, and maybe even a brief debate about whether they should let this recipe into the collection at all.)

And how about a salad?

It's not just any coleslaw-- It's a Coleslaw Soufflé! All the extra time it takes to make it a "soufflé" shows that you've got some free time to spend trying to make the slaw fluffy, but all the extra work is mitigated by the fact that the fluffiness is achieved via lemon Jell-O. It all balances out to being neither too high- nor too low-end.

Now for my favorite part: Dessert! Let's get a little fancy and have a torte. But not too fancy... We don't want people to start talking behind our backs like they do to Margo.

Yep-- The fancy torte is balanced out with a Milk Dud sauce! I can't think of a better representation of this book to end the post.

Funny Name: What Kind of Cheese, Now?

Chicken and Artichoke Casserole doesn't sound too crazy, right? Why would I choose this recipe from Cotton Country Collection (The Junior Charity League of Monroe, Louisiana, copyright 1972, but mine is from the 1979 ninth printing) for a funny name post? Well, check out the ingredients.

What's that after the Gruyère or Swiss cheese? Is rat cheese made from rat milk? Is it uneaten cheese recovered from rat traps? Is it cheese that has been laboriously crafted into a rat shape and then disassembled for use in this recipe?

Of course it's nothing that interesting. It's just a name for cheap cheese, especially domestic cheddar if dictionary.com knows what it's talking about. I'm bummed that rat cheese is not nearly as entertaining as I thought, but I'm still happy to know the term.

Cooking with Pooh. (Yes, there's an "H" on the end!)

My sister knows I've always been a fan of Eeyore. (There's a shock, right? Who would ever guess that this grump would love another famous grump?) I imagine that's why she sent The Pooh Cook Book (Virginia H. Ellison, 5th printing, August 1976), even though there's no need to bother on my account.

As Eeyore would say, that cover "sure is a cheerful color. Guess I'll have to get used to it."

Of course I was excited to see recipes that referenced the original stories, like this recipe for Haycorn Squash (named after Piglet's love for "haycorns").

(Each recipe includes a relevant quote, too!)

...or the Mastershalum Leaf Sandwiches.

Luckily, thinly sliced cucumbers are an acceptable substitute for those who don't live in the country and have nasturtiums/ mastershalums that their moms will let them decimate. (I imagine most kids being pretty disappointed by nasturtium flavor, too, though I have no actual experience with nasturtiums, mastershalums, or even kids, for that matter.)

The recipes also invite kids to do things the old-fashioned way. I was surprised that one recipe invited children to make butter from scratch.

Then I was even more surprised to see that the kiddos could make not just butter from scratch, but a compound butter! Of course, you always need to find ways to incorporate hunny/ honey into a Winnie the Pooh cookbook.

And if it looks as if the book puts a little more trust in young cooks' interests and abilities than most children's cookbooks do (like the ones that, say, mostly give instructions for elaborately-constructed salads from canned fruit and cottage cheese). A few recipes, like this Pea-Bean Alphabet Soup, take hours.

Granted, several hours of the time are just soaking the beans and peas in water, but the book trusts the kids not to lose interest and forget about the project altogether by the time the beans are presoaked. Then the recipe trusts the kids not only with simmering, but simmering for two hours! And remembering to add the alphabet noodles in the last ten minutes! And to pull out the soup bones, remove any mean on them, and return it to the soup! Virginia H. Ellison really trusts kids' patience and ability to avoid burning themselves/ spilling a half gallon of soup all over the kitchen.

She even trusts them to make a two-crust pie!

And not only is the top crust expected to fit, but it should be decorated too, with Woozle and Wizzle tracks! I, a grown adult woman, cannot make even a presentable bottom crust, as evidenced by the Pieathalon. (Or a passable filling, for that matter, as evidenced by the same recipe, but I'm choosing to focus on the crust.) In short, Virginia H. Ellison has a lot of confidence in kids, which probably seems nice to some people and overly optimistic to us grumps. After all, as Eeyore says, "We can't all, and some of us don't. That's all there is to it." Thanks anyway to my sister, for amusing this grump.

Somewhere over the Jell-O

It's June-- Pride month! You know what that means, right? It's a rainbow of gelatin from your favorite bisexual vintage cookbook blogger! (Okay, maybe not favorite? I hope I'm in at least the top five. Top ten?)

This year, I found a rainbow in Cotton Country Collection (The Junior Charity League of Monroe, Louisiana, copyright 1972, but mine is from a 1979 printing). Part of me imagines those old southern ladies taking to their fainting couches at the thought of their treasured recipes being part of a Pride month celebration, but another part of me thinks they might be a little less judgmental since they're from Louisiana. Who knows what they saw (and did!) in their lifetimes?

Let's start out with red. Usually I post something bright and full of berries that sounds yummy, but this year, our red is from tomato puree or paste.

Instead of being a mold, this is frozen as well. If you've ever wondered what it would be like to scoop a frozen gelatin flavored with tomatoes, cheeses (Roquefort and cream), and mayo onto an avocado half but hesitated since you didn't have official instructions on construction, well, you're in luck! This year's red offering is like me-- quite the little weirdo.

Next up is orange. This year, I'm going with Apricot Salad.

The interesting thing about Apricot Salad is that it has no apricots-- just apricot-flavored gelatin with enough orange juice in it that it will probably taste like orange anyway.

Those Louisiana Ladies must have really loved their apricots because yellow is represented by an apricotty dish too.

I'm not sure exactly how yellow this would be, but the apricot color will be muted by the whipped cream and yellowed-up by the mustard. (Besides, there is NO WAY I could resist posting a recipe that calls for apricots, pecans, whipped cream, and a pound of miniature marshmallows along with vinegar, mustard, and Tabasco sauce! As if that's not enough, diners are invited to drown that shit in a Puffed Dressing made of vinegar and eggs with still more mustard and whipped cream! I hit the jackpot with this one.)

For green, I'll move away from all those apricots and also make sure it will actually be the right color. It's "Green Dream" Congealed Salad!

The fun thing about this one is that it initially made me think of the Avocado Lime Pie I made for the Pieathalon last year. Lime Jell-O? Check. Avocado? Check. Cream cheese? Check. Then it goes totally off the rails with mayo, celery, bell pepper, and onion. So... probably best not to serve this one in a graham cracker crust.

For the blue/ purple end of the spectrum, I'll be nice and give you one that sounds like it would probably be pretty good: Blueberry Salad.

This is no naughty and all nice: blackberry Jell-O, blueberries, pineapple, and plenty of dairy fat. It's a nice sweet ending for the pride post.

If you'll feel cheated without the traditional semi-purplish beet mold to round things out, though, I won't leave you hanging.

This one is a little different in that it  uses plain (rather than lemon) gelatin and adds "India Relish" along with the usual veggies and horseradish.

Now I'm off to build a tiny pride float with a serving platter on rolling pin "wheels" so my rainbow of imaginary gelatins will have something to dance on. They sure can jiggle, so it will be interesting to watch! Happy Pride Month!