A deep dive into a LOT of chicken and broccoli

Ready for a deep dive? This recipe from Tested Tried and True (Junior League of Flint, Michigan, Incorporated, second printing, April 1976) is just begging to be unpacked.

If you're asking when you might need a Chicken Broccoli Casserole for 500, that question is answered by the end note, as this was "Served at the Flint Institute of Music Gourmet Sale and prepared by 20 dedicated souls." So, apparently, you're supposed to sell this casserole in support of music? And it's easy enough for souls to prepare? (I prefer human cooks, myself.)

First of all, I love that this starts with the assumption that we've already stewed and boned 50 chickens before we even started. We are apparently very ambitious.

Next, I love the measurements. Most of them try to be user-friendly, noting, for example, that you'd need 50 sticks to get the necessary 12-1/2 pounds of butter. The flour, though-- rather than giving the number of cups and/or pounds of flour, the recipe asks cooks to measure out 300 tablespoons! I can just imagine someone standing there, counting tablespoons of flour out loud. "Okay, 127, 128, 129..." Then some wiseass walks by yelling "72, 96, 153!" Then the wiseass is covered with about 132 tablespoons of flour and somebody new has to start over counting out 300 tablespoons.

Third, I love that the recipe never tells how many 9 x 13 x 2 pans this will take, anyway. At least simple math tells me that it will be anywhere from 42-50 if each pan serves 10-12 people, but it would have been nice to know that up front rather than having to figure it out myself.

I love that the end of the recipe instructs cooks to "Serve with pear halves and muffins for a late supper," as if this is something we've just casually thrown together for a weeknight dinner when everyone was running late. 

And finally, I love that the recipe is soooo enormous! I mean, unless you have access to an industrial kitchen, who is even going to be able to cook on this scale? Cramming 20 people into even a really nice home kitchen is just not going to work, and those blessed with a double oven would still be hard-pressed to cook at least 42 trays of Chicken Broccoli Casserole in any reasonable amount of time. Why not, you know, scale it down to serve 25 or 50 and ask multiple people to bring over a batch? That seems way more practical.

Whoever owned this book before me seemed to have had a similar thought-- as it looks as if they were trying to scale it down to 1/50th of the original! I so wish I knew if they managed it! And how it turned out if they did! And why they insisted on using this recipe rather than the one of the other much more reasonably sized chicken broccoli casseroles in the same cookbook. The world will never know, but I salute you, unknown cookbook owner who was just as intrigued by this recipe as I was.

Put a flower in your bread's ear and get your tuna some lemonade! It's time for kids to cook.

I want to admire A Child's First Book of Cooking (created and illustrated by Jesse Zerner, 1975). You can tell from the cover that it's kind of trying to go for equality, saying that both girls and boys should learn about cooking.

You can also tell it's not trying too hard. The girl is doing the actual work while the boy is just licking the bowl. (And who cooked in a wood-burning stove in the 1970s, much less trusted the kids with one? Okay, I'm sure a few families probably did, but I doubt they were the same types of families as those who bought learn-to-cook books for the kids.)

The note to parents at the books' beginning reinforces this half-hearted commitment to equality, noting that "The child can be assisted in the kitchen by Mother, or possibly Father." So I guess I almost appreciate that they gestured toward equality without really committing to it.

The recipes themselves are pretty basic, as children's recipes tend to be, but they do usually have a bit of a twist. Frozen ice treats are a pretty usual entry in the kids cook genre.

This one moves beyond straight-up orange juice or lemonade by adding "baby food fruits." I guess it's a '70s version of smoothies that doesn't require a blender!

There are super-simplified versions of common main dishes too. If tuna and noodles is a little too much work, well...

Just mash together tuna, cream of mushroom soup, and crushed potato chips and bake them into a loaf. (Kids will probably especially appreciate that this leaves out the vegetables common in tuna noodle casseroles, unless you want to count potato chips as a vegetable. They'll just be an indistinguishable part of the loaf, though, rather than a crunchy topping.)

The thing I really love about this recipe is the picture, though! Tuna Loaf means a tuna fanning itself on a hammock while drinking a glass of lemonade! I love the literalism. Plus, I guess the lemonade means the tuna is self-seasoning.

Other recipes are surprisingly involved and have a more sophisticated flavor profile than I would expect. The Jam Tarts are not toast cups filled with a little jelly, as I suspected.

Kids are actually supposed to make pastry dough for the crust, and it's a cheddar cheese dough, so these are fruit and cheese tarts. Not exactly what I expected. (Not sure how my childhood self would have reacted to that combo, but it sounds pretty good to me now!)

For kids who really wanted to go all-out, there was a very special French toast.

You've just got to love the toast doing the hula! I especially love the flower somehow perched on the bread's non-existent ear.

What makes this toast Hawaiian? It substitutes pineapple juice for the usual milk in the egg wash. As it's fried in bacon grease and topped with the bacon that created the grease plus pineapple rings, this is a much more decadent recipe than I would have expected. (And of course being loaded with probably-canned pineapple, it's also exactly what I expect from '70s cookbooks.)

In short, even if the book only gestures toward being progressive, the imaginative pictures and slight twists on the common kiddie recipes make this a fun addition to my stacks and stacks of vintage cookbooks. Now I just have to find a wood burning cookstove and find some kids to bake in it. (Do I mean that the kids will be baking inside the stove or that they will use the stove as they learn to bake? Take your best guess.)

Saladcraft!

Even if the flavors in many of the recipes in 500 Delicious Salads (ed. Ruth Berolzheimer, 1940) are questionable, the book has some really solid edible craft projects.

If you're just a beginner and not that experienced with artfully turning canned fruit into bugs and bunnies or making deviled eggs into tiny chickens, you can start out with something easy.

Just turn a wad of frozen condiments and sea food into a beautiful garden by adding a sprig of watercress and olive flowers on top.

Once you've got the garden down, maybe you can move up to a still life with a bunch of grapes.

Of course, the easy part is making the grapes look like grapes. The harder part is gluing them all to a pear half.

But, hey! That's what they make cream cheese for. It's edible salad glue.

If you're having a special ladies' luncheon, though, the ladies won't be really impressed unless you can make them some flowers. (And they are heartily sick of radish roses! Every 1940s home cook could make those in their sleep (I imagine)!)

They need bigger roses! With pasty petals!

Yes, of course cream cheese makes the magic happen, this time pressed into service as rose petals, and a little egg yolk dust in the center completes the flowery illusion.

If you're really serious about having flowers, though, you've got to make the pots and the flowers. Yes, if you want the Benevolent Lutheran Ladies' Children's Hospital Community Outreach Association and Charitable Trust for the Children to really remember you and maybe elect you treasurer next year, you need to make spring flower salads.

Start out with the pots:

This time, the cream cheese gelatin gets anchovy paste or, if you're feeling wild, Roquefort cheese.

Then decide what weird combination of ingredients you want to turn into flowers. You can go with the sedate but timeless classic lilies of the valley.

Easy! A little endive, a few chives, and some artfully-piped cream cheese.

If you're feeling a little more adventurous...

...pipe some tinted cream cheese onto a piece of pineapple surrounded by endive to make a hyacinth!

If you really like stacking, try some tulips!

Just layer pineapple slices and tomato wedges (yum!) over a green pepper stalk, again with endive leaves. (Strange how all the flowers have the same leaf structure!)

And if you're thinking of running for president of the BLLCHCOAaCTftC, maybe make all three! Or you can just be lazy like me and admire the photos on a warm summer day. Eat cream cheese straight from the block if you need your fix. I won't tell. 

I didn't count the number of recipes on the less-than-50 pages, but I doubt all claims in this book's title

I'm glad I don't remember summers from 1940, back before most homes had air conditioning and the easiest way for the family to stay cool was to run a few fans, wear the most worn-out overalls you owned because the holes let in the breeze, and eat cool meals, like the ones in 500 Delicious Salads (ed. Ruth Berolzheimer, 1940).

Of course, by "delicious," the title means only that each individual ingredient in a salad might be considered delicious by someone, not that they necessarily were delicious when they were all thrown together.

Fine, maybe I'm a weirdo because I hate the raw onion slices that so many people seem to love on sandwiches, but I'm not sure too many people beg for raw onion to be combined with citrus...

...or tropical fruits (plus celery!).

Aside from the "throw a raw onion in with it" school of salad making, there is also the once-popular notion that bananas went with everything.

I mean, who has not simply longed for canned salmon and chopped pickle in their banana and pineapple salad?

But my favorite salad, unsurprisingly, is a ring mold, its center filled with poorly-aged packing peanuts and its perimeter of evil eyes spying on all potential diners.

Okay, fine. It's a cranberry mold with shrimp in the middle and a cream-cheese-and-pineapple garnish on the edges.

But I would still be nervous with that thing staring at me! At least I could ascribe my nervous sweat to the oppressive heat of a 1940s kitchen rather than a fear of weird gelatin molds. Well, except that cranberries would be available in the fall rather than the summer, so my premise is not holding up that well, but nobody reads to the end of a post anyway, so I think I can get away with this ending. Tell me I'm wrong! (But please don't make me eat raw onions or stare that pineapple in the eye!)

Using Up the Veggies, '50s Style

It's the height of fresh veggie season! Quick-- What do you do if you have a ton of veggies in the fridge that you need to use up? Today it's 250 Ways to Serve Fresh Vegetables (Ed. Ruth Berolzheimer, 1950) to the rescue. 

Well, I should have specified that you have veggies to use up in old-fashioned veggie recipes. You know, recipes from cookbooks that suggest that pretty much anything can and should be baked into a soufflé...

...or a custard if you're a Lazy Letitia who can't be bothered to whip the egg whites.

Or there's always the vaguely-named "Vegetable Dish."

If you prefer a still-vague but slightly more descriptive term than the noncommittal "dish," there's also a Vegetable Casserole.

These recipes surprisingly lack white sauce! It's a '50s staple, right? Don't worry-- The Baked Vegetables recipe calls for white sauce.

Mmm-mmm! Just look at that thick, milky pool under all those tossed-together veggies.

If you don't have the time to bake the hell out of your veggies and white sauce, just mix the two and call it a day.

If you're feeling really utilitarian and need to use up the bread before it molds in the summer humidity, Vegetable Loaf to the rescue!

That half-teaspoon of paprika really adds a kick!

And if you feel festive, make all those veggies into an upside-down cake.

I am sooooo glad this doesn't start with yellow cake mix! And it makes such a lovely...

...uh... lovely gray blob. (I would have thought that this was the soufflé if I didn't have the caption.)

And when all else fails...

Just grab your biggest plate, arrange all the veggies on it in rows, and call it a day.

The Book of Wholly Bland Meals

I love me some leaden vintage vegetarian recipes-- resplendent with their brown rice and wheat bran and lentils, so I'm pretending that 1983's The Book of Whole Foods (Annemarie Colbin) is older than it is. It's certainly in the style of the 1960s and '70s hippie cookbooks.

It's arranged by season, too, so I briefly considered using this as my beginning-of-the-month feature next year. However, there are only a few menus per season-- not even a full week's worth-- so I decided since it's still summer, I'll just show a bit of the summer section now and get around to the other seasons as they come.

The most striking thing about the recipes is how overwhelmingly bland they sound. I was excited to see empanadas, for example, thinking back to the vegan restaurant (Unfortunately shut down years ago!) that made dessert empanadas with such a meltingly delicious deep fried crust that I swore I would even eat them if they were filled with lawn clippings. I bet those lawn-clipping pies would have given these empanadas a run for their money.

The dough is a whole-wheat-and-vegetable-oil concoction (on the previous page that I was too lazy to scan, but trust me, it's unremarkable). And it's filled with corn, peas, and carrots, seasoned up with a bit of shoyu and in a delectable sauce made of thickened water. (Kuzu is just a thickener with no real flavor.) And if you think I might be hiding the fact that the leftover corn, peas, and carrots were seasoned when they were served at the previous meal, you've got me! The previous night's recipe for corn, peas, and carrots did also call for a bit of salt and corn oil. So yes, these are likely to world's heaviest and most flavorless empanadas.

At least as part of the summer menu, the recipe calls for summer veggies like corn and peas. Another summer dinner menu features a Fancy Barley Loaf that just doesn't seem summery at all. 

Barley and lentils seem more wintery to me, and while I guess sunflower seeds do grow in the summer, they're always available. I don't really think of them as seasonal. In any case, baking this into a brick, seasoned with a bit of salt and a bay leaf, is not my idea of summer fun. Will the Green Sauce topping save it?

Annemarie Colbin really loves her water-thickened-with-kuzu sauces, with just a hint of shoyu for flavor. I guess if you really like scallions, they and the handful of parsley might be enough to save the loaf, but  that seems overly optimistic to me...

It seems that even Colbin occasionally realizes her recipes might seem too wintery for the summer section where they appear. When she wanted to add that winter classic split pea soup to the summer section, she thought of a new way to serve it.

Ta-da! Split Pea Aspic! Perfect for the hot days when you wish split pea soup were just cold and jiggly, but don't mind simmering something in your sweltering kitchen for an hour-and-a-half beforehand! (At least this recipe promises a bit of flavor with the fresh ginger.) So what do we think about this?

Yeah, that seems about right.... 

Now just get ready for another wave of heavy, bland madness, coming this fall to a vintage cookbook blog near you.

Math is on the menu

Still enjoying a  little relatively quiet time before my fall work overload kicks into gear, I set the arbitrary goal of putting together a day's menu to follow the requirements set forth for female dieters in the Weight Watchers New Program Cookbook (Jean Nidetch, 1978). I had no idea it would be so complicated and the takeaway would be that '70s women had amazing math skills. The basic guidelines take up a page:

I initially found it interesting that there is just one set of guidelines with no recognition that women with varying heights, body types, goals, etc. might need different plans. Once I started looking around at recipes, I was glad for only one set! It's hard enough to fit a menu into this without having to add all kinds of other rules that this summary doesn't get into, but that I picked up as I paged through the book. (FWIW, the men's menu was almost the same. Men could have two extra servings of bread and fruit per day, plus a little extra protein at the evening meal.)

Since I'm still amused by the Prune-Filled Omelet recipe, I decided to start the day with that.

Now we've got our fruit and egg servings taken care of. Add a piece of toast (one slice, weighing about an ounce and with  no more than 75 calories) with a teaspoon of margarine (for a fat serving), and you're all set.

One thing that fascinated me about this book is that it seems convinced that baked goods should never start with flour. They should start with bread that is mashed up and repurposed into a different baked good than what it was originally. (I guess that's somehow supposed to make them lower carb, or maybe prevent the cook from being overly generous when measuring flour? Don't ask me about the logic.) The book often suggests sweet-ish things for lunch, perhaps to make up for the lack of desserts, so I decided to choose a blueberry muffin as a lunch dish.

I love that there's so much effort for a single muffin: turning a slice of bread into crumbs, separating an egg, whipping the white and then folding into the batter carefully, and then baking that single tiny serving. (Maybe the title is plural just to make it seem like the recipe has more of a payoff for all that effort.) With our second bread serving, that's it for the day. We've also got a second of our three fruits, an egg, and a serving of milk (from nonfat dry milk, that health food mainstay of the 1970s).

Lunch requires a little more protein and some vegetables, so I'll round this out with a very 1970s diet recommendation: a garden salad of non-starchy vegetables (say, iceberg lettuce, sad tomatoes, carrot curls, radish roses, and cucumber coins) with a third-of-a-cup plop of nonfat cottage cheese.

On to dinner! Let's be sophisticated and have something French.

Ah, yes. "Cassoulet" is apparently French for beanie-weenies. (Okay, fine. I know this isn't exactly beanie-weenies since it doesn't start with a can of baked beans and it has carrots, but you have to admit that it's closer to beanie-weenies than to cassoulet recipes calling for some type of confit, luxuriously seasoned beans, and fancier sausages.)

Now we need a salad to go with it and to meet our vegetable and fat goals.

Oh, crap! Three servings of fat! Now we're over the day's limit. You can either add just two teaspoons of oil instead of the full tablespoon to the salad to make up for the margarine at breakfast, or if you're planning ahead (as seems necessary unless you want to scramble at the end of the day to find recipes that have exactly what you need and/or cut random parts out of recipes/ eat random things to make up for shortcomings earlier in the day), you can just skip the margarine at breakfast. Add a half-cup of fruit and you're done for the...

 

Wait. I forgot the second serving of milk! Well, if you're planning ahead, you could have had a cup of skim milk with breakfast. Or if you waited, you can have a half-cup of plain yogurt over your half-cup of fruit for dessert with dinner.

I'm frankly feeling worn out after planning for just one day, and I haven't even thought about the minimum number of fish servings per week, or the maximum number of processed meat servings, or grappled with vegetables in the "limited" category, or considered the requirement to eat liver once a week, or figured out what "bonus" foods are and how they fit, or....

So, yeah. Whoever spent their days figuring out how to count half a serving of tomato sauce in the meal plan might have sharpened their math skills, but they probably didn't have much time to join consciousness-raising groups or fight for the ERA. Those who argue that diet culture is a great way to distract people from putting their energies into more important matters are probably on to something. 

Weird little August vacations

For August, The Chamberlain Calendar of American Cooking (Narcisse and Narcissa Chamberlain, 1957) focused on a few vacation spots. While the vacation focus makes sense for August, when people are often squeezing in a summer getaway before school and cold weather get in the way, the choices seem a little weird.

A lot of people love seaside adventures, so I get why Marblehead, Massachusetts, is in here. The fresh seafood is a big draw, so I understand the choice of fish chowder, too, even if I'm more interested in chowder when it's cold outside than when the air is already hot and humid enough for me to feel like I'm trying to breathe chowder.

I just don't get the name: Spite House Fish Chowder. A little Googling showed me that the Marblehead Spite House is one of the oldest U.S. spite houses-- houses built to irritate or annoy neighbors with whom one has a dispute. They are often built to block someone's view, or to stay just within the boundaries of a too-small lot. This one is so old that nobody seems to be quite sure of who was being spited or how, but I have no idea how the chowder recipe came to be associated with the Spite House. It's not a restaurant, as far as my many seconds of research have found, and any mentions I can find of this recipe refer back to this cookbook. If anybody knows what the Spite House has to do with fish chowder, let me know!

Another potential destination for summer vacationers-- maybe for ones who love large bodies of water but prefer to know they're shark-free-- is Mackinac Island. I've never been to Mackinac Island, but when I saw that this slow-paced resort was featured, I knew that the recipe had to be for fudge! (If you've never heard of Mackinac Island and think I'm being overly deterministic, just Google "Mackinac Island recipes" and see what comes up. Plus, a lot of regional ice cream makers have a Mackinac Island Fudge flavor. I swear, it's not just me!) Everyone I know who has been there comes home with a few pounds of fudge to distribute to friends and relatives. So of course...

...the Chamberlains for some reason think the resort should be featured with a recipe for Scalloped Eggs and Onions. Which... I guess? Representing Mackinac Island with a recipe for eggs and onions is like taking a trip to New Orleans and coming back with a recipe for Cheddar mashed potatoes. I'm sure somebody in the area makes that, but it's not really the recipe non-native cooks are looking for.

At least these recipes made me think and even do a little bit of research, so I guess that counts as an educational activity? This August entry is getting me prepped for back-to-school time, whether or not I'm ready.