Wonderful Country Cooking (that's really just typical '70s cooking)...

When I picked up "Wonderful Good Cooking" from Amish Country Kitchens (recipes collected and checked by Larry Rogers, edited by Johnny Schrock, copyright 1974, third printing, 1976) I kind of knew better than to expect this collection to call for fewer highly-processed ingredients than other '70s cookbooks.

When I commented on a supposedly Amish recipe in another cookbook, I asked whether the Amish actually spent "the '70s eating casseroles made with four cans of soup and half a pound of Velveeta, just like everybody else except the health nuts," as the recipe seemed to suggest. The answer from Julie D., a reader who said she lived in Amish country, was an unequivocal yes. (The full post, along with the comment, is here.)

This book pretty much confirms Julie's comments! The Amish topped off their hamburger/ bacon/ veggie/ spaghetti creations known as Wiggles with mushroom and tomato soups plus two pounds of Velveeta. (My joke estimate was too low!)

At least, that's when they weren't making their surprisingly violent-sounding Pancake Burger Bash...

...with ground beef, canned tomato products, and canned corn, all topped off with pancake-mix-and-crushed-corn-chip dumplings.

In contrast to the Amish, even my shortcut-happy childhood family made ham and bean soup starting with dried beans, but...

...the Amish version starts with oleo and goes on to add two cans of soup beans. It could easily be made in well under an hour.

The recipes are more decadent than I expected, too. The Strawberry Hotcakes don't just add fresh strawberries to plain, homemade pancakes.

They add sweetened strawberries to pancakes made out of cake mix. Yep. Cake for breakfast! It's fine if it's pancake shaped.

And despite the lack of refrigeration, the '70s Amish loved Jell-O just as much as anybody else, which meant ... 

mixing lemon Jell-O with onion, salad dressing, cucumber, and cottage cheese, as one did back then.

Or...

...getting really crazy and mixing the lemon and lime Jell-Os with Miracle Whip, horseradish, canned pineapple, and cottage cheese. (And oh, yeah-- nuts are also essential to either salad.)

Hell, they even had frozen salads, which is quite a trick, considering even in the middle of winter, you can't keep frozen food frozen if you pack it in the middle of a snowbank (as anyone whose electricity has gone out in an ice storm can tell you). 

No Jell-O this time, but we can see that the Amish also loved their miniature marshmallow salads just as much as any midwesterners.

In short, even if the Amish seem to outsiders like they're stuck in some other time, their '70s recipes were just as '70s as anybody else's in the All in the Family era.

Funny Name: Not up to the challenge edition

Based on the name of this recipe from The Garden Club Cookbook Casseroles Including Breads (The Montgomery Federation of Garden Clubs, 1969), I kind of expected it to include something that really doesn't belong in chicken casserole, like fruit cocktail, lime gelatin, paraffin, or thumb tacks.

Challenging Chicken Casserole is a pretty typical '60s casserole, though-- chicken, rice, multiple canned soups, and a little optional seasoning. The trickiest step is probably cutting up the chicken, so I'm not sure what makes this such a challenge. Maybe it's just pretending that this is much different from any of the other recipes in the chapter?

R.I.P. Norm Macdonald. You were so good at being Burt Reynolds/ Turd Ferguson that I kind of forgot I posted your picture so much.

Rawleigh, "piquant" sauces, and plenty of soybeans

When I found my 1944 Rawleigh's Good Health Guide Almanac Cook Book, it was tied together with another treat: the 1946 version!

I love that the man and woman inspecting a flower as their cat tries to telepathically signal its desire to be fed is "From a Noted Italian Painting," but not one so well noted that Rawleigh feels compelled to credit Eugenio Zampighi as the artist. It's so well "noted" that my half-assed Zampighi Google searches didn't turn up the title of this particular work.

Even though World War II was over (as was most of the rationing) by 1946, this booklet was written and printed before it was clear that that would be the case, so it still has quite a bit of the wartime vibe I noted in the 1944 version. It still recommends victory gardens.

Those gardens can yield the ingredients for an exciting Cabbage Casserole...

...which is just cabbage covered in a "Piquant Cheese Sauce" that has nothing to make me think that it could possibly be very piquant. What is sharp pungent about butter, flour, milk, cheese, and a bit of salt and pepper?

Rawleigh seemed to have a very loose definition of piquant, in any case.

I guess the bit of lemon juice gives the "Piquant Sauce" over this summer squash at least some claim to the title, even if it still mostly just besamel (Greek version of white sauce with an added egg yolk). 

There are still plenty of ways to stretch the meat budget, like making sausage into Sausage Shortcakes.

They're precursors to fast-food breakfast sandwiches!

There's also a nutty way to stretch the meat in sandwich fillings.

Everybody loves a good old Ham-n-Peanut, right?

Or you can stretch dinner with soybeans.

I'm not sure why this chili isn't further filled out with some tomato, but at least it has chili powder! The aversion to seasoning beyond salt, pepper, and maybe paprika if the writers felt like going crazy had me wondering whether the chili would have any flavor at all.

And finally, of course, we can combine ingredients from the last two recipes (mayo and soybeans) to get a weird sandwich filling.

I have a feeling one of my health food cookbooks from the '60s or '70s has a Soybean Salad Sandwich that's pretty similar, but it probably replaces the mayonnaise with some concoction based on nonfat dry milk.

And now, to wash the blandness out of your mouth, I'll end with my favorite part of this particular booklet: the Very Happy Veggies!

I guess they're all so happy because they have not yet been draped in some version of a white sauce, but feel free to speculate if you have a better idea.

New Breakfast Idea!

Okay, this is a little off topic, but it's kind of a nightmare "recipe" and I thought it was funny, so it's going here.

I was having a frustrating dream of being a kid and trying to get breakfast at grandma's. The place was packed. All my relatives were there-- especially the agent-of-chaos cousins. I got a bowl, and then when I found the cereal, the bowl was gone. Got a new bowl and put the cereal in it. When I got milk, the bowl with cereal had been taken, so I just poured milk in a new bowl, then learned we were out of cereal but somebody was making pancakes. I got a pancake on a plate, but it disappeared when I was looking for the syrup. I tried to get another pancake, but we were out of plates, so I had to put it in a bowl. By then, the syrup was gone again, so I went looking for syrup. When I came back, someone had dumped minestrone and a handful of potato chips onto my pancake. Then they thought better of it and abandoned the whole concoction. I shrugged. At least the bowl had something in it. So, yeah. I had a pancake topped with minestrone and potato chips for breakfast, at least in my dream. There's one recipe I don't think I'll ever find in a vintage cookbook!

On a budget with the American Culinary Society

In my earlier post about The American Culinary Society's Menu Maker (Marguerite Patten, 1973), I questioned the extra proteins in one menu in the "Money-Saving Meals" chapter, as protein is usually the more expensive part of the meal. If you need to save money, you might do better to add more starches than to serve multiple protein-heavy dishes. As I got further and further into the money-saving ideas, I became more fascinated by all the ... unusual... recommendations.

We all know that chicken and waffles is pretty beloved in some circles, and it's not too expensive. Did that combo inspire the American Culinary Society to attempt to fuse breakfast and dinner into a new low-cost treat?

I am not at all surprised that pancakes slathered with creamed tuna have still not caught on, nearly 50 years later, even if they could be livened up with "tiny pieces of lemon pulp, diced cucumber, chopped hard-cooked egg, etc."

I was surprised by the visual contrast between the components of another low-cost menu.

Are the cute little orange cups topped with grape "flowers" supposed to make up for the fact that the main course looks like an enormous can of Fancy Feast on a platter?

Okay, fine. The "Fancy Feast" is really Steak Upside Down Pie, a savory take on the pineapple upside-down cake.

And the "steak" is really ground beef plumped up with onions, tomatoes, and bouillon.

The pretty cups of Grape and Orange Whip are mostly orange gelatin...

...plus they use up the leftover raw egg white from the Steak Upside Down Cake, so you're all set if you like risking salmonella from dessert.

One appetizer recipe from a budget menu really made me wonder what was so money-saving about it.

It calls for an avocado, and even recently people (Well, idiotic people, but the point still stands.) argued that poor people can't afford housing because they're wasting all their money on luxuries like avocado toast. I can't imagine avocadoes were more affordable in the '70s. Plus it has shrimp, and shellfish was still rather luxurious in the '70s. Then I noticed this note above the recipe:

Oh, so this is supposed to be a formal meal for six!? That means that each person gets a couple of teaspoons of shrimp and a sixth of an avocado stretched with grapefruit and served in a bed of shredded lettuce. Now it just seems sad.

Well, not quite as sad as the "celebration" menu for those who are watching both the budget and their waistlines.

Yes, they can have sumptuous Tomato and Celery Soup!

Consisting of tomatoes! And celery! Plus onions! At least it's a festive red and green, so you can pretend it's the saddest Christmas ever.

Maybe the beef spirals will have a fun stuffing.

Or maybe they'll just have a little parsley and/or green pepper secured in their folds. Woo hoo! (Make sure to use canned peas in the border of peas and carrots for maximal disappointment.)

At least there's still dessert.

It's a lot less work (and arguably at least as tasty-- possibly more!) to just set out sliced apples and raisins for dessert rather than turning that mess into an applesauce gelatin with a rat turd raisin surprise.

I don't know... I'm starting to think it might be more fun to celebrate with tuna pancakes or an enormous mound of Fancy Feast than this "festive" menu, but that's certainly an open question.

Going to Eggstremes with the American Culinary Society

I was a bit perplexed when I started looking through The American Culinary Society's Menu Maker (Marguerite Patten, 1973). (I'm not showing you the cover because mine is hardcover with no dustjacket. There's not much to see!) The first chapter was supposed to represent "Money Saving Meals," but the first menu had two proteins, something I don't really associate with low-cost cooking.

It's got both soufflé eggs and roast chicken. I thought with low-cost menus, you'd probably stick with either the eggs (because they are cheaper) or the chicken (if you want to feel a little more luxurious), rather than both. Then I looked more closely at the egg recipe and discovered this is actually a triple protein menu:

The eggs are supposed to have ham in them too! This menu starts off almost more like a high-protein-diet menu than a money-saving one-- that is, until it veers off into "sweet sour stuffing," starchy vegetables, and dessert.

As I continued reading the book, though, I realized that Marguerite Patten must just have had an egg fixation.

This menu starts off with Tomato Soufflés.

Yep, that's a soufflé mixture baked right into a tomato case! It's pretty cute.

It kind of looks like the tomatoes' minds have been blown, and we're seeing the mushroom cloud begin to rise. And what's that behind them? You know that peanut-covered monstrosity has got to be the sandwich loaf! And what do sandwich loaves generally contain, in their 27 layers of various random ingredients?

If you guessed/ remembered the egg salad layer, you know how to play this game! Yep, more eggs. (P.S.- The suggested variations also include subbing in a layer of scrambled eggs in place of one of the other fillings. The sandwich loaf could conceivably have an egg salad layer and a scrambled egg layer!)

When I got to a recipe for Golden Tomatoes later in the book, I assumed it was something to make with the lower-acid, yellow-toned tomatoes I sometimes see at the summer vegetable stand. Of course, I was wrong.

Golden Tomatoes are just regular tomatoes with hard-cooked egg whites stuffed inside and the chopped-up yolks adhered to the outside with a spackle of thick mayonnaise. Yep: golden= egg yolk coated.

And then, I hit a menu that seemed like it wasn't even trying to hide the egg-heaviness anymore.

Yep-- it's Crab and Egg Tartlets with a Liver Soufflé. Maybe the Crab and Egg Tartlets have some special kinds of eggs in them? It's seafood, so maybe the eggs are roe? 

Nope. This calls for chicken eggs (unless there's a way to make scrambled roe with just three fish eggs?).

Well, maybe the Liver Soufflé is one of those recipes that says it's a soufflé but it's not a traditional eggy soufflé-- Maybe light and airy from whipped gelatin or just called a soufflé for no goddamn reason at all.

Nope. This is a traditional whipped-egg soufflé. So we've basically got an egg appetizer with an egg main dish. I'm kind of surprised this menu didn't go all the way and just add a custard or some meringues (or a meringue-topped custard) for dessert!

In short, I started to suspect that The American Culinary Society got paid off by the American Egg Board to write this cookbook. If you want a secretly egg-centric cookbook, this wouldn't be a bad choice. If you're not excited about the idea of eating eggs with a side of eggs, though, then you might not want to follow the menus too carefully.

Let's Roll Up Some Ham!

My initial post about Tested Tried and True (Junior League of Fling, Michigan, Incorporated, second printing April 1976) marveled at how this cookbook was content to mingle recipes for lobster-stuffed tenderloin with rolls made of beer and Bisquick. Other than the contrasts between expensive socialite-type recipes and humble family fare, I also noticed a real love of rolled-up ham. Here's a little post dedicated to Flint's love of salted smoked pig in roly-poly form.

The love starts early, as the chapter on foods kids can prepare themselves suggests.

Start the kids off with Ham Roll-Ups! It's as easy as rolling a tablespoon of cottage cheese in a slice of ham.

Of course, once they're grown-ups, the rolled-up ham has to get a little fancier. Here are some adult-appropriate appetizers.

If you assumed that Ham and Egg Rolls would be in egg roll wrappers, you're wrong. Ham is still the wrapper. It's just filled with chunks of sautéed veggies, bread crumbs, hard boiled eggs, and salad dressing, then baked under a coat of cheese and served with Bloody Marys. Much more sophisticated than the cold cottage cheese kiddy version!

If you want a main dish with rolled up ham, there's Chicken Hawaii Kai.

Does anybody have an idea of why this is considered Hawaiian? I mean, it really just looks like Chicken Cordon Bleu for people who don't like cheese to me.

If your love of ham rolls is such that you want to make rolling ham into a half-day project, then the Hamwiches might be your best bet.

When I see a title like Hamwiches, I expect the recipe to be one of those ham-salad-slopped-on-a-hamburger-bun-then-baked numbers, but this is a real project, starting out with homemade yeasted bread dough flavored with tomato juice and bacon drippings, and ending with slices of ham baked right into crescent rolls. That's a real labor of love! Flint + Rolled-Up Ham = 💖

In which your humble writer tries to figure out what to do with a chunk of custard

Chapter 1: The Setup

It's that glorious time once again: Pieathalon Day! Just in case the Pieathalon is a new concept for you (and it's probably not, as you were likely redirected here from someone else's Pieathalon entry), the delightful Yinzerella of Dinner Is Served 1972 facilitates a recipe exchange among a group of people who blog about old recipes and cookbooks. We all send in our wildest vintage pie recipes (or best ones, for bloggers who are nicer than I am), receive one in return, bake it, and post our results.

Keep in mind that my blog consists mostly of scans of old cookbooks-- I don't usually cook! So it should come as no surprise that my pies are usually wrecks. (Just thought newcomers should be prepared.)

So what challenge did I get this year? My pie came courtesy of Greg at Recipes for Rebels. He wrote Recipes for Rebels…in the Kitchen with James Dean. For this year's Pieathalon, Greg cracked open Pillsbury's Best 1000 Recipes: Best of the Bake-Off Collection (ed. Ann Pillsbury, 1959)...

...and sent me Chocolate-Crusted Coffee Pie. 

I'm sure this recipe sounds delectable to a lot of you, but if you're not familiar with this blog, I hate pretty much everything. That includes coffee. I sign up to make these things because it's fun, but I don't expect to like them because I'm a weirdo. So let's get started.

Chapter 2: Poppy Tries to Cook

First, gather all the pie crust ingredients.

Then mix them up and roll out 2/3 of the dough to fit in my pie pan.

Yeah, yeah. I know I was supposed to flute the edges, but the crust was seriously hard to work with because it was full of chopped pecans. I could only roll it thin enough to fit the pan-- no extras at the edge for fancy fluting. Maybe I should have saved less dough for the second crust. Maybe I should have cut the pecans smaller than they were when I bought them. It would probably also help if my pie pan were actually 9 inches, but it's 9-1/2. The point is, I am too lazy to try to figure out how to do a fluted edge on the crust, even though Greg was nice enough to send me (blurry) instructions.

You'll notice that this pie is also unusual in that it has a "second layer of tender pastry hiding in the filling." That means the remaining third of the crust got kind of rolled into a circle to be baked separately. (I was not too precious about it because it would be hidden anyway. Nobody's going to see it, so what do I care how it looks? Well, I guess you will see it, but if I cared what you thought, I would be too ashamed by my pie-making skills to keep doing the Pieathalon year after year.) I know I was supposed to "mark six wedges" on it, but I just cut the crust most of the way because I was worried it would be hard to cut once it was submerged in the filling and I couldn't see it. And I made eight sections because the slices would be massive if there were only six. And I baked it on a cookie sheet since I didn't have an 8-inch cake pan. I am not good at following directions.

While the crusts were cooling, I started on the filling. First, we need the ingredients:

Ha, ha. Sorry. Wrong picture.

Then I started the custard filling. I mixed the flour, sugar, instant coffee, and salt in a saucepan, added the milk gradually, and stirred as it heated. It seemed smooth initially, but once it started getting thick, it also started getting lumpy. Hmm. And even though I tempered the egg yolks before I added them to the hot filling, well, I'll just say they didn't help with the lumpiness situation. Plus, the filling got thick. I mean, really thick. Thick enough that once I took it off the heat, I re-checked the recipe to make sure I didn't add too much flour or skimp on the milk. My proportions were right, though, so I left it to cool.

Doesn't that look delightful? Not at all like fetid swamp mud drying out in the sun? I thought about trying to strain it, but it was so thick I thought the entire lump would just sit atop the strainer rather than going through. (And no, I don't think it would have gone through a strainer if I had thought of it when the custard was still hot, either.) I finally decided to bust out the food processor and try to make it at least smooth-ish and loose enough I could fold in the whipped cream. I didn't even have to scrape the pan, as the custard simply peeled out in a single gelatinous chunk. (Sorry, but I was so lost in thought about how to fix the filling that I didn't think to take pictures.) I just soldiered on, running the food processor until it it had done as much as it could to make the custard smooth. Then I folded in the whipped cream, plopped about 3/4 of it into the pie shell, and topped it with the crust insert.

Ta-da! Perfect fit. 🙄 Now just to cover that second crust up so nobody else will see it...

Well, maybe a corner sticks out here or there, but so what? I popped it into the fridge to fully chill and firm up before we went out to meet the special guest taster.

Chapter 3: The Taster Arrives

Even after yesterday's meeting, I was still shocked that a gust of icy wind blew through the door at our prearranged meeting spot. It's still summer! How does John Ruth do that? He must have been starving from running around in that cold weather because he immediately started eying the pie.

I thought for a second he was going to dive right in. "Shut the door!" I yelled. I handed him a hammer and some nails to make sure it would stay shut against the winter storm that had somehow followed him. Then I turned aside to address you, dear readers. If you haven't seen The Hateful Eight and don't intend to, well, you might not fully get the joke at the end, but I hope you're amused anyway. If you have seen The Hateful Eight, then you probably know where this is going, but I hope you like the payoff just the same. Don't let on that you know because I don't want to spook John Ruth. And if you haven't seen The Hateful Eight but want to and will be bent out of shape about spoilers, well, I hope you're dense enough that you haven't picked up on the plan yet. Just visit the other blogs participating in the Pieathalon, maybe check out my previous Pieathalon posts, and wait to scroll down to the results at the very end of this post until after you've watched the movie. Now I better get back to talking about the pie since the door seems to be firmly shut.

Intermission

• Jenny at Silver Screen Suppers was subjected to my entry, Surprise Fudge Pie
• Yinzerella at Dinner is Served 1972 got to play with candy bars for Mahogany Pie
• S.S. at A Book of Cookrye got to find out whether Osgood Pie is any good
• Surly at Vintage Recipe Cards had some fun with Rum and Butterscotch Pie
• Greg at Recipes4Rebels smells nice and citrusy from making a Tarte à l'Orange
• Dr. Bobb at Dr. Bobb’s Kitschen tried to learn whether the way to the heart really is through the stomach with Ann Landers' Save Your Marriage Meat Pie
• Kari at The Nostalgic Cook got all fancy with Tarte au Petit Suisse
• Taryn at Retro Food for Modern Times went wild with Ozark Pie
• And maybe I missed somebody?! (Check back and I'll fill in as needed. We were not at our most organized this year...)

My previous pies:

Year One: Four-Step Black Bottom Pie
Year Two: Brandy Alexander Pie
Year Three: Lemon Meringue Pie
Year Four: Nutty Caramel Pies
Year Five: Strawberry Ginger Pie

Year Six: Banana Split Pie

Year Seven: Avocado Lime Pie

Chapter 4: John Ruth Tries the Coffee

"Here," I said, having cut a big slice of Chocolate-Crusted Coffee Pie for my visitor while also addressing the audience in an aside. (Actually, I cut two because the first slice was completely scrambled. It is hard to get that first slice out, and even though this one is definitely better-looking, it's nothing a food stylist would want to take credit for.)

I'm not sure John Ruth fully appreciated the interesting effect of the submerged crust (which was surprisingly easy to cut--probably tenderized by the filling). He just dug on in.

And then gasped, "The coffee!"

I guess my special guest wasn't much of a fan.... Too bad.

Chapter 5: The Real Taste

Okay, I'll admit that the rest of the mysterious entities that I will refer to as "us" tried the part that I'd flavored with vanilla instead of poison. The crust was pretty good and if I ever actually made pie, I might use the recipe with a little extra cocoa instead of the instant coffee. It's very nutty and a bit bittersweet. The nuts add a crunchy texture to contrast the cream filling. The filling was smoother than I expected (and it held its shape rather than gushing everywhere!), so I guess the food processor helped.

Nobody else who tried it is a big fan of coffee, but they declared the pie "Not bad" and "Better than I expected." Everybody (except the resident nut-hater) agreed that the crust was the best part. The filling was rich and creamy but very coffee-forward. My partner liked this confection enough to take a piece home. The rest of it stayed with the tasting panel, who liked the pie enough that the un-poisoned portions of this were finished off in a couple of days. So, minor success, I guess, especially considering our dislike of/ indifference to coffee? If you really like coffee and are game for figuring out how to tame super-thick lumpy custard, check it out. Just remember to use vanilla instead of poison.