Flint tries to put the veggies back in sweet salads

As I read through Tested Tried and True (Junior League of Flint, Michigan, Incorporated, second printing, April 1976), I was not surprised to see the ubiquitous-for-the-'60s-and-'70s Jell-O based "salads" that tend toward dessert more than toward something most reasonable people would consider a salad. I was surprised, though, that the people of Flint often seemed to think that actual salad ingredients (You know, things other than miniature marshmallows, whipped topping, and Coke or 7-Up) belonged in salads. They were so convinced of this that they were willing to ruin perfectly good desserts by throwing in actual veggies and savory ingredients.

Some try to hide this agenda. The Apricot Nectar Molded Salad looks pretty dessert-y, for the most part...

...right up until you notice the black olives and cheddar cheese studding the Dream-Whip-and-apricot-nectar-based topping.

Some try to bury the veggies.

You probably won't notice that the cream cheese, lime gelatin, crushed pineapple, and whipping cream are hiding veggies until you take a bite. Then you have to figure out what to do with what you thought was a cheesecake-adjacent dessert now that you know it's also full of pimentos and celery.

The title Hint of Spring Apple Mold makes me think this salad is supposed to be celebratory. I'm always pumped for winter to be coming to an end!

That doesn't necessarily mean anyone considers bits of celery, carrots, green pepper, and pimento suspended in an apple-and-lemon Jell-O to be a springtime celebration, though. It's more of an "I just cleaned out the fridge" vibe, which I guess is kind of celebratory in its own way. Yay?

Sorry, Flint. I appreciate the sentiment that a salad maybe should have actual nutritional content in it (besides sugar and dairy fat), but the purely dessert "salads" sound a lot tastier.

Recipes for the Reluctant Camper

It's hot AF. But the family insists that it's vacation time, and they want to go camping, dammit! What's a reluctant camp cook to do?

Sigh deeply and grab a copy of Coping with Camp Cooking (Mae Webb Stephens and George S. Wells, 1966). This should get you through the worst of it.

In keeping with the reluctant title, a lot of the recipes are very short. If the family is getting tired of having hot dogs every night, well...

Make it exciting with Frankfurter Splits. Just split the hot dogs, throw in a little cheese spread, or relish, or, who cares? Peanut butter? Whatever is around the camp. Toothpick the stuffed dogs shut, wrap 'em with bacon, roast, and call it a day.

If it gets colder than you expected and the family wants to warm up, you can always make soup. 

Just soften up some broken pretzels and then serve them in hot milk. Ta-da! Soup!

And maybe heat up a bottle of 7-Up or whatever to go with it.

Not that all the easy recipes sound like they may not be worth even the minimal effort...

I'm making a mental note to pick up some cream cheese and raspberry preserves on my next grocery trip.

And finally, if the family insists on making something that takes a little effort...

...just make it such a pain in the ass that they'll be begging for plain old burgers in no time. (Who wants to try to eat an open-faced sandwich of meatballs drenched in cream of mushroom soup off a paper plate, anyway? Especially when it looks like a fly drowned in the soup at some point during the cooking process...)

If you're lucky, you'll be coping with sit-down-in-an-air-conditioned-restaurant-on-the-way-home cooking in no time.

Funny Name: Not an Ingredient Edition

The title from this Cooking Out-of-Doors (Girl Scouts of the U.S.A., 1960) recipe might freak you out a little bit if you're unfamiliar with one of the utensils used to make it...

...but the "spider" in Spider Corn Bread refers to the pan, not the ingredients! (Spiders generally prefer to eat insects, so I don't think they will beg for a slice either. No actual arachnids need be involved.)

Let's Go Camping! (Separately. Because I'm a Pain in the Ass.)

 The sky is blue, and all the leaves are green. The sun's as warm as a baked potato. How about we go camping? We'll need a good outdoor cookbook. Maybe Cooking Out-of-Doors (Girl Scouts of the U.S.A., 1960) will be fun.

If we need something to snack on before we get the camp all set up and the fire started, we can bring along some Walking Salads.

I love that the recipe explains that these cottage-cheese-salad-filled apples are called walking salads because they "can be eaten while hiking." I assumed that apples sprouted legs and gained sentience when they were filled with GORP-flavored soft cheese. I'm glad that mystery got explained.

I was never a Girl Scout, but if I had been, I would have been the one who refused to eat a walking salad because mayonnaise, even if these are darn cute.

Once camp is set up, we could make sandwich fillings that might be tasty if your tolerance for canned fruit with processed cheese is pretty high.

I would, of course, have been the one who made a big deal about how I didn't want pineapple in mine. Then I would have noticed the cheese melting and dripping into the fire as I heated my half-empty Hiker's Knapsack, and I would have dropped the ham slice into the fire while attempting to reposition it so I wouldn't lose all the cheese. So I would have been the one eating a plain bun while everyone else had real sandwiches.

Maybe if we're cooking on sticks, it would be better to try to roast something more hot-dog-shaped.

I'm used to hot dogs wrapped in bacon, but bananas? Yeah, I would have been the one who wanted a banana on the side, and I would have dropped my bacon into the fire in an attempt to heat it on its own. So I would have had half a banana and a peanut butter hot dog bun, separately. (We'd have peanut butter so the other Scouts could earn their Elvis badge by eating a grilled Bacon-Banana-on-a-Stick with peanut butter.)

Now for dessert. I know everybody thinks of S'mores (or Some-Mores, as this cookbook styles the name) as the ultimate campfire treat, but I was more interested to see that the book features an also-ran cracker-based confection:

If the choice to pair with toasted marshmallow is between graham crackers and chocolate OR saltines and nutmeats, well, I can see why Marguerites are not the treat that got remembered. Even if I would be a total pain in the ass to go camping with, I'll bet most people would agree with me on this one!

So happy trails! Enjoy your trip. Don't worry-- I'll set up my own camp off to the side so I can eat my peanut butter buns alone. You can go as crazy with the condiments and fruits as you want. But maybe, if you like, we can make a few Some-Mores together on the last night before we head home. If I don't accidentally drop the bag of marshmallows into the fire.

More tomato semi-weirdness

Earlier, I wrote about how the secrets in Home Cooking Secrets of Cedar Rapids (Scarlet Angels Color Guard and Drill Team, 1972-73) are mostly extremely midwestern secrets about things to do with ketchup and Jell-O. As I read, though, I realized that the Scarlet Angels also really liked to do semi-weird stuff with tomatoes, so we should check the recipes out now that it's tomato season.

While I imagined that the recipes calling for ketchup would be made with Heinz, Hunt's, or a store brand, I discovered that Cedar Rapids residents sometimes made their own "Tomato Catsup."

Not being a catsup/ ketchup fan, I don't know what Heinz devotees would think, but I love that this recipe calls for brown sugar, cinnamon, and pumpkin pie spice. I can't help but imagining this as a dessert catsup. Now I'm imagining a world where people celebrate the beginning of PSL season with fries and pumpkin-pie-spiced catsup.

Maybe they would solemnly mark the end of PSL season with a slice of pie filled with Green Tomato Mincemeat.

I'm not a mincemeat fan either, so I have no idea how green tomatoes with brown sugar, lemon, orange, vinegar, apples, coffee, raisins, and fall spices would taste, but it's interesting to know that the meat in mincemeat can be replaced with green tomatoes when frost season starts.

Tomatoes are in season right now, though, so let's make a summery snack.

You've always wanted to spread tomato-hard-cooked-egg-pickle-and-onion-butter on toast or potato chips, right?

Or maybe you'd prefer a nice, cool relish to serve on greens?

Stewed tomatoes in Jell-O sounds just... well, it sounds... The nice thing is, you can use lemon, raspberry, or strawberry Jell-O, so that's an easy way to use up whatever flavor you have lying around the house. And the recipe calls for canned tomatoes, so it will work even if your tomato plants aren't doing so well this year!

Here's hoping you can look on the bright side this tomato season (even if you don't end up trying these recipes).

Rawleigh responds to war with veggies, a bit of salt and pepper, and a lot of macaroni

Woo hoo! Now that I'm able to safely hit the antique shops/ thrift stores again, I can continue my quest to collect old Rawleigh Good Health Guide/ Almanac Cook Books! My most recent excursion yielded not one, but TWO old guides. Today, we'll peruse the older one.

My copy of the 1944 Rawleigh's Good Health Guide Almanac Cook Book obviously came from a family with a child who was learning to write, as you can tell from the cover. Nearly every page has handwritten (and incorrect!) page numbers, scribbles, and random circlings, so you might notice a few of those as we go.

The more interesting thing about this booklet, though, is its date. As you might guess for a publication from 1944, it's got quite a bit to say about World War II. The woman on the cover, so eager to read a letter that she reads it right in front of the mailbox-- before she can even get inside-- is probably supposed to represent the farm mothers awaiting letters home from their children in the military. Of course, Rawleigh is also supposed to make the difficult job of wartime housekeeping easier, too, as this woman who is positively overjoyed at a medicine cabinet full of Rawleigh pills and potions suggests.

My favorite part is that the discussions of the medicines make the case that these elixirs are a doubly-good deal, as they are so versatile. The Liniment can be used internally for stomach ache, externally for pain, AND for farm animal ailments. What's more practical than that?

You're not here for the pictures of old medicine, though. You want some good old-fashioned ration-coupon-stretching recipes! There are a lot of veggie-based dishes.

A Tasty Triumph reminds me why meals that didn't feature meat were not as common until the latter half of the 20th century. A lot of them just involved combining various veggies, boiling them, and then hoping that butter, salt, and pepper will be enough to make all that boiled veggie matter exciting. (If you're feeling cheated that I didn't include the picture that the headnote "The particular combination shown here" seems to suggest, rest assured that there is no picture. Maybe "shown here" is supposed to refer to the list of ingredients that immediately follows, though that seems like pretty clunky phrasing if you ask me.)

If dinner's just not dinner without a roast of some kind, there's Cheese-Bean Roast.

This one goes all crazy and adds an eighth of a teaspoon of paprika along with the salt and pepper. Wild!

Those with slightly more extravagant tastes could use coupons for canned fish and make delicacies like Salmon Custard.

Custard recipes were pretty popular, probably reflecting the fact that neither fresh milk nor eggs were rationed because they were too hard to ship overseas.

Families that were sick of all the custard might be placated with Creole Tuna Fish and Peas.

I always associate Creole cooking with hot sauce and the holy trinity of onion, bell pepper, and celery. Rawleigh seems to see it more as a cuisine that's happy to blend salad dressing with chili sauce to season seafood-- which, I guess, fine, but that doesn't really seem to be the best takeaway, especially if you're just using said glop on canned tuna.

For those lucky enough to have a bit of leftover ham, there's Deep-Dish Dinner.

The cheesy sauce and vegetables will make the leftover meat (or frankfurters, minced ham, diced ham, or sausage-- It's adaptable!) go a long way.

Perhaps the thing that puzzled me the most, though, was the fixation on stuffed peppers. I mean, I get why stuffed peppers could be another good way to make rationed meat stretch, but in a booklet with all of 58 recipes, I might expect one recipe for stuffed peppers.

Sure, maybe something stuffed with macaroni, cheese, and tomato puree.

I wouldn't really expect a second stuffed pepper recipe in the same very short booklet, but if I did...

It would not also be stuffed with macaroni, cheese, and tomato. (Well, it's tomato soup this time, not puree, so Rawleigh apparently thinks the distinction is enough to merit an entirely new recipe. They never watched my Grandma cook, as she was fully convinced that any canned tomato product could be replaced by any other canned tomato product.)

And I really would not expect a third stuffed pepper recipe. There is one, though, and I'll bet you never guess what it's stuffed with!

Yep. Macaroni. Cheese. Tomatoes. You'd think that Rawleigh also sold macaroni, green peppers, and/or tomato products, but nope. Apparently someone who wrote this really just loved endless variations of macaroni-and-tomato-stuffed peppers with cheese. 

Oh, well. Let's forget all that and just lean back in a nice bath and let the hot water and mild Rawleigh soap sooth all our wartime worries.

And we'll definitely NOT worry that the bathtub is entirely out of scale with our body. Or that we are in the tub sideways. Or that the tub appears to be much deeper than a standard tub would be. I guess the war and/or Rawleigh just made everything weird.

Make your tomatoes pat their distended bellies and complain about being stuffed

Are you excited that the farmers' markets are starting to show off fresh tomatoes? (I, predictably, am not. Fresh tomatoes-- raw or lightly cooked-- taste the way gasoline smells to me, so I can't choke them down. Luckily, the forms I like-- canned or sun dried-- are available year round.) 

For those who might want something to do with fresh tomatoes besides serve slices on sandwiches or just straight-up eat them raw, here's a little collection of vintage stuffed tomato recipes. Let's start out with a recipe that might be good for a summer weekend brunch from The Meatless Cookbook (Irma Rhode, 1961).

Pretty easy: scoop out tomato pulp and break an egg into each tomato before baking! Of course, since the recipe is from the '60s, you have to serve it with white sauce, but the white sauce is flavored with the reduced tomato pulp. (I'd never tell anybody if you wanted to melt some cheese into that as well!)

If you're feeling a little more austere, maybe try something from the Mennonite classic More-with-Less Cookbook (Doris Janzen Longacre, copyright 1976, but mine is a 1981 edition).

Forgetting for a second that this was plain cooking, I kind of expected Tomatoes Stuffed with Spinach to be stuffed with creamed spinach or maybe even the Stouffer's Spinach Soufflé that I often see included in regional recipe cookbooks. Nope! We're lucky that the spinach is seasoned at all with a little onion, salt, and butter. There is no need to show off. 

If you want tomatoes stuffed with more aggressively-seasoned greenery, maybe Broccoli-Stuffed Tomatoes from The Garden Club Cookbook Casseroles Including Breads (The Montgomery Federation of Garden Clubs, 1969) will be more your speed.

The broccoli stuffing gets not just onion but also bacon. Plus, the unspecified "cracker crumbs" might make things even better if you choose something flavored like Cheez-Its.

If you want something that has a bit more of a modern sensibility, capitalizing on the apparent recent "tinned fish" takeover of the internet, then Too Many Tomatoes, Squash, Beans, and Other Good Things: A Cookbook for When Your Garden Explodes (Lois M. Burrows and Laura G. Myers, 1976) offers Anchovy Stuffed Baked Tomatoes.

They are a little reminiscent of common stuffed peppers, but here, the rice is obviously mixed with anchovies, green onions, and herbs instead of ground beef and tomato sauce.

If you're more of a tuna than an anchovy fan, and if you love spending forever trying to stuff your tomatoes, then The New York Times Southern Heritage Cookbook (Jean Hewitt, 1976) recommends Stuffed Cherry Tomatoes.

While I often love recipes that double as crafts, spending a hot summer afternoon stuffing nearly 50 tiny tomatoes with tuna-and-egg salad does not sound like a great time. (If you really want a nice summer afternoon craft project, try ice cream instead!)

I hope everyone else will enjoy their farm-fresh tomatoes! I will happily continue to get mine out of a can, just like the 1960s and '70s families that got everything out of cans.

Garden Explosion Spectacular!

Now that growing season is underway, it's time to look at my cookbook with the massive garden-related title: Too Many Tomatoes, Squash, Beans, and Other Good Things: A Cookbook for When Your Garden Explodes (Lois M. Burrows and Laura G. Myers, 1976). 

When I was perusing this cookbook, a certain sense of sameness started to settle in. Each chapter is about a specific vegetable, and a lot of times, the chapters seem to cycle among a few common recommendations: the vegetable marinated in a vinaigrette and presented as a salad, the vegetable sautéed with onions and garlic, the vegetable whipped into a soufflé, the vegetable mixed into a batter and fried into a fritter, the vegetable served in a cream sauce. Maybe there should just have been a chapter listing a few preparations that would work with nearly any vegetable before it moved on to the more vegetable-specific recipes.

At least there are plenty of odd recipes to be found once you get past the stock recommendations. Many of them kind of undermine the specific vegetable focus of the chapter, asking for so many types of veggies that you wouldn't necessarily know which chapter it belonged to. For instance, the Fresh Enchilada Sauce recipe is in the pepper chapter...

...even though it's also loaded with onions, carrots, celery, and tomatoes (well, tomato sauce)--and I don't generally associate carrots or celery with enchiladas! This reminds me of a meal Mr. Crocker and I had at my grandma's house before he was aware of her propensity to be extremely open-minded about what ingredients were interchangeable. Shocked after a bite of home-prepared cheese pizza, he asked, "Why are there carrots in this?" Grandma had used a jar of garden vegetable marinara sauce as pizza sauce. So, this sauce might similarly startle those who are used to enchilada sauce being a smooth sauce with spices and tomato. 

Sometimes I looked at a recipe title through a modern lens without even realizing it. When I saw Broccoli Guacamole, I assumed it replaced some of the avocado in guacamole with puréed broccoli to help keep it green and cut down on calories, similar to the divisive modern pea guacamole. 

Nope! This is just a straight-up broccoli-based dip. Apparently people in the '70s saw the green color, rather than the addition of avocado, as the sign of a guacamole? (Plus, if they insisted on calling this a guacamole, why not Broccomole? That's a missed opportunity.)

Some seemed so vintage that I wasn't sure which '70s-appropriate way they might go. Will Rainbow Vegetable Ring consist of layers of vegetables in different shades of Jell-O, or will it layer different colors of veggie custard on top of each other before baking?

If you guessed the latter, you are correct! There's a green spinach-and-pea layer, an orange carrot-and-brown-sugar layer, and a white cauliflower-and-cheese layer. Whether those flavors go together is debatable, but vintage cooks never let questions like "How will it taste?" get in the way of a multicolored mold.

Of course, this book offered up plenty of veggie-containing desserts, too. Many were expected, like carrot cake and pumpkin pie. A few were unexpected but probably delightful concoctions, like Winter Squash Doughnuts.

Market them as Pumpkin Spice Doughnuts, and you'd probably sell them as fast as you could fry them in the fall. 

A few were, well, as we say in the midwest when we're trying to be nice, interesting. I thought Cabbage Strudel might be a savory recipe, starting as it does with cabbage and onion.

Then I got to the sugar, raisins, cinnamon, nutmeg, and graham cracker crumbs. I can easily imagine this as disappointing both those who are ready for a savory appetizer-style bite and those who smell the cinnamon and sugar and are ready for dessert--only to find it's loaded up with shredded cabbage. But hey, at least it's way more memorable than being another iteration of creamed veggie or veggie soufflé!

If your garden is threatening to overwhelm you, you don't necessarily need this book. Just remember that those veggies can be vinaigretted, souffléd, frittered, cream sauced, etc. or, if you're feeling adventurous, mixed together and marketed as a sauce. (You only need one sauce-- just change the name to pizza sauce, enchilada sauce, marinara, chili, etc. based on how you plan to use it!) Alternatively, try grating or mashing a random veggie and throwing it into dessert! Dinner can always be a surprise when there are too many veggies.

Rock Salt and Peaches

Ready for some hot weather food now that it's July? While The Chamberlain Calendar of American Cooking (Narcisse and Narcissa Chamberlain, 1957) has a somewhat spotty record of choosing seasonally appropriate dishes, the picks for July seem like they belong in July!

What's the number one cooking method people usually associate with July (based on my exhaustive research protocol of rhetorically asking this question and then answering it myself)? Barbecue! The Chamberlains come through with a barbecue treat for a real high roller.

The Rock Salt Barbecue Steak has the added benefit of being a craft project, as the steak is encrusted with damp rock salt, wrapped in damp newspaper, and then freed with a hammer (bolded because I'm intrigued anytime hardware supplies can be used in cooking) once the grill has burned off the paper and left a rock salt shell encasing the meat. Serve with a pound of seasoned butter.

If the barbecue leaves you hot (but not fully sated for dairy fat), you know what will cool everybody off?

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream! (Okay, this title is a better match, but it doesn't have Clint Howard.) In any case, the inclusions in this ice cream are far more benign than the Ice Cream Man's mix-ins-- fresh peaches and a little lemon juice for tartness. Bonus points for including directions for people who don't have a "hand freezer" (by which I assume they mean a hand-cranked ice cream maker).

I'm not sure why the Chamberlains associated peaches with Philadelphia, but hey, peaches grow a lot of places. We had a peach tree when I was a kid, and our sweet but dim cat used to like to climb it and meow plaintively at the birds, as if he thought they would feel bad for him and somehow let him catch them in the tree. I'm not really sure how he thought it would work, but it never did.

Now, go out and enjoy some of your own unlikely dreams under a shady tree as the July sun bakes your brain.