Be thankful for extra stuffing mix!

Did you buy too many boxes of Stove Top in preparation for Thanksgiving? Did a generous friend or family member offer to make the dressing from scratch, so you didn't need to use the mix from the back of the cupboard? If you find yourself with excess stuffing and a desire to make a vintage casserole, Sharing the Flavor with Family & Friends (Roseville (OH) PTO, undated, but the cover art is dated 1973 and the chapter dividers are dated 1978) offers up some possibilities. 

If you need some cruciferous veggies (and canned soups!) in your life, there's Vegetable Casserole.

As much as I want to make fun of this conglomeration of highly-processed ingredients, I'm pretty sure I'd love it. If you've got broccoli, Cheddar cheese soup, and mushrooms (even canned), I'm usually on board.

If you are tired of increasingly cold fall weather want a more summery vibe from your veggies, there's always Zucchini Casserole.

This one is enriched with plenty of dairy fat from the sour cream, butter, and Parmesan cheese, so you can enjoy all the holiday-season richness while pretending that the zucchini and carrots make it health food.

And if you've got a lot of leftover poultry, it probably wouldn't be too much trouble to convert Chicken Casserole to Turkey Casserole.

This one might be a good joke, too-- Fool the family into thinking you're serving a big old tray of plain dressing for dinner-- until they dig down into the dairied-up poultry layer at the bottom.

The Roseville PTO families must have really loved their stuffing mixes, and now we can be thankful (ironically, earnestly, or both-- your call!) that they passed those recipes on to us.

Pumpkin pie-palooza!

 As I was perusing the Re/Max Holiday Cookbook (1977), I expected to see all the regular holiday main dishes-- roast turkey, spiced ham, maybe goose-- along with a ton of desserts-- fruitcake, dozens and dozens of cookies, a pumpkin pie recipe or two.

And while I did see those things, I realized I had seriously underestimated the pumpkin pie department. I expected one standard-issue pumpkin pie and maybe a common variation, like pumpkin chiffon or impossible pumpkin pie. I was completely wrong, as there are no recipes to fit any of those descriptions. Instead, there's nearly a half-dozen quirky pumpkin pie variations, one for nearly every taste except for the inveterate pumpkin-hater. So for once, I'm going to be nice and give you a glut of actually good-sounding (for the most part) recipes.

For the caramel lover, there's Pumpkin Caramel Crunch Pie.

Maybe add some flaky salt to the chopped walnut topping for a twist on salted caramel, and this could seem like a modern recipe.

For the person who loves old-school meringue pies, but wishes to spice things up a bit, there's Pumpkin Pie with Ginger Meringue.

Real bits of crystallized ginger in the meringue! I'm hungry just thinking about it.

For those who are nutty, like me, there's a Walnut Pumpkin Pie...

...with Maple Walnut Cream! I know Cool Whip is the standard for 1970s dessert recipes, but I'm definitely team Maple Walnut Cream.

For people who only see Thanksgiving as a gateway to Christmas, there's Eggnog Pumpkin Pie.

And for those who have a whole headache of family coming ("Headache" is the collective noun for family members, isn't it?) and too little patience to make multiple pies, there's Pumpkin Pie Squares.

The recipe may well serve more than 15 if some of your guests object to pumpkin pie that tastes the way sunblock smells and has a texture like someone emptied a pencil sharpener into it. (Yep, that's my reminder that I hate coconut!)

There you go: a pumpkin pie for just about everyone! Poppy can be nice occasionally. Don't expect it to last all the way to the next Pieathalon, though.

Have a happy Thanksgiving if you celebrate it.

Diet like an Iowa police officer!

Thanksgiving is coming! Maybe you need to save a little space for the big day with a pre-Thanksgiving diet? A delightful feature of Police Potpourri (Iowa State Policeman's Association Auxiliary, 1977) is that it has a very short diet chapter. I always loooooove diet advice, so let's see what police claim to eat after they've had a few dozen too many donuts.

For the main dish, there's Easy Barbecue Chicken (Diet).

I wasn't sure what made this diet, considering that it's got plenty of sugar, butter, and catsup. I thought for a moment that it might be that the recipe never actually calls for a chicken. (The second half hour of baking is pretty rough after you flip the uncovered cake pan, but it does have the advantage of draining off nearly all the calories!) If I'm fair and assume that we're actually supposed to add a chicken and flip it halfway through, then the recipe claims the lack of a "heavy calorie laden sauce" is what makes this diet food, so sure! It's diet food.

You'll need a salad to go with the chicken, and here's the perfect dressing:

It's mostly tomato juice and fairly unremarkable for a diet dressing, but I love the final line claiming that it "'Crisps' up lettuce." Doesn't dressing usually make lettuce soggy? Even the writer seems to think so, using quotation marks around "crisps" as if she wants to have some plausible deniability should the lettuce not actually crisp....

And finally, no diet section is complete without diet cookies. This chapter offers two options. If you're basic, the Basic Diet Drop Cookies might do.

With a full cup of shortening and more than two cups of flour, these cookies can't be all that diet to begin with, liquid sweetener notwithstanding. Then if you throw in suggested additions like raisins, coconut, and/ or peanut butter, well.... Just keep telling yourself the artificial sweetener makes these low calorie.

If you're more dedicated to dieting, the Low Calorie Applesauce Cookies are probably at least marginally better in the calorie count.

Part of the fat is replaced by applesauce, some of the flour is replaced by All Bran, and the batch is divided into four dozen tiny cookies, so it should be easy to resist wolfing down too many. (Especially after the donut run, amirite? Thanks! I'll be here through Thanksgiving.)

It's not quite Roswell, but Roseville is still pretty mysterious

Sharing the Flavor with Family & Friends (Roseville (OH) PTO, undated, but the cover art is dated 1973 and the chapter dividers are dated 1978) is both cute and very confusing.

Okay, you probably can't tell that from the straightforward title and the cover sketch of the town, but trust me.

It's cute because the divider pages have adorable animal sketches. The cakes, cookies, and confections chapter starts out with this tiny woodland birthday party.

I love how enthusiastic the bunny holding the balloons is. I'm not sure I've ever been that excited in my entire life. I love how all the animals seem to accept the raccoon with the seriously malformed right arm. They're cool and won't stare at her like she's in a freak show. And I love how angular the chipmunk's head is. Has he just not had a chance to stuff his cheeks full of cake yet, or is he trying to practice restraint? So many questions.

Some drawings don't have a clear connection to the chapter, but they're still cute.

Love the wet mouse drying off under the toadstool umbrella with its friendly neighborhood caterpillar, even if the connection to soups, salads, and sauces remains murky. (Maybe it's toadstool rainwater soup?)

And some pictures go with the chapter but still raise questions.

Yes, it makes sense to have bunnies drinking lemonade for the beverages, sandwiches, and misc. chapter, but why is the little bunny so angry and the big bunny so nonchalant about the clearly very pissed off little guy? If the little one spilled her first glass, there's still plenty left in the pitcher. No reason to be upset that the other one is still drinking his own glass. Is she mad that the drink is too sour? Is she lecturing the big bunny on the evils of sugar-sweetened beverages? I don't know, but I'd love to hear what the little one is yelling (without being on the receiving end of it). 

The recipes can be puzzles too. Did the good people of Roseville not know what maple is?

I mean, I get it that using pure maple syrup is too expensive, but straight-up brown sugar is not maple! Maybe some amount of maple or pancake syrup was supposed to be included since the instructions call for adding "sugar and syrup," but it's not in the ingredient list.

Another question: Did Telly Savalas used to advertise cheese? I thought lollipops would have been a more logical fit.

I'm assuming Cindy Brandi just didn't realize that people were saying colby-jack cheese. Or maybe they all shortened it the way some people talk about maple serp.

Genuine question: Is Barecutel Ham a regional thing that I am entirely unaware of?

Or was Mrs. Powers just incredibly bad at spelling "barbecue"? (When I search "barecutel ham," Google just shrugs and says "Here are some ham pictures." When I search "ham barecutel," it asks me whether I meant "ham barbecue," so Google seems to be betting on the latter.)

If this next recipe had been earlier in the book in the salad section, I would have seen this title and wondered whether Rosevillians loved Nixon so much that they couldn't bring themselves to say "Watergate."

Then I would have seen that they used fruit cocktail instead of the traditional crushed pineapple, and wondered if they were in some weird '70s parallel universe. However, I know they knew about Watergate Salad because it was in the salad chapter. This one-- despite clearly being labeled a salad!-- is in the dessert chapter. So now I'm just confused about what makes fruit cocktail desserty-er than pineapple, and whether Helen Clewis was mad about her salad being exiled to the dessert chapter when other pudding/ Cool Whip/ mini-marshmallow confections were in the salad section.

So many questions! This book is an enigma, and I'm glad that Roseville let me into their weird little world.

The American Culinary Society admits it has no idea what Mexican food might be

In my earlier post about The American Culinary Society's Menu Maker (Marguerite Patten, 1973), I noted that the recipes are very egg-centric. Not all the recipes are for soufflés and egg tarts, though. There are also Mexican recipes,  like this colorful pot of Mexican Macaroni.

And what makes this dish of apparently macaroni, cheese, and peas Mexican?

Uhh... I have no idea. It is just macaroni and cheese with hot dogs and peas. It's a pretty standard quickie dinner from the American midwest as far as I have ever known. Granted, I'm no expert on Mexican food. (My main exposure is the typical midwest American childhood dinner of  flour tortillas filled with hamburger that was cooked with a taco seasoning packet, then topped with cheddar cheese and shredded lettuce, after all.) I imagine some family somewhere in Mexico has made something like this macaroni dish at some point... but it's not something I'd label as Mexican, and I kinda doubt that they would either.

Well, maybe Mexican Frankfurters will be more Mexican (though I have my doubts, as the name is already half German).

What made Marguerite Patten so convinced that pasta with hot dogs is Mexican? At least the tomatoes with a "few drops chili sauce" is arguably more Mexican than the mac-n-cheese-with-peas dinner. The pineapple ring topping suggests this could just as easily have been labeled Hawaiian, though. 

If nothing else, the result is fun to look at:

The symmetry of the pineapple half-rings on the hot dogs and the pop of the yellow canned fruit and red tomato slices almost makes this seem artistic, though the deeper meaning of the piece remains elusive. (My best guess is that this whispers, "I have no idea what Mexican food might be.")

Going Big with the Pennsylvania Dutch

Amish Dutch Cookbook (Ruth Redcay, 1971) is supposed to contain recipes from Pennsylvania Dutch restaurants, shops, and hotels. Since this little booklet was clearly intended as a souvenir for families to take home after visits to such establishments, I expected the recipes to be written for families.

And just to be clear, a lot of the recipes did meet that expectation, like this Fisherman Soup (which I guess is meant for unlucky fishers).

No fish-- just ground beef, onions, potatoes, celery, tomatoes, and hardboiled eggs. There's no specified number of servings, but with a pound-and-a-half of beef and six potatoes, it's probably meant to serve six to eight. That seems pretty reasonable.

I was surprised, though, that so many of the recipes seemed to have been written for gargantuan families or smallish restaurants. A few at least seemed to recognize that they would be too big for typical '70s families, like this Canned Vegetable Soup.

When I saw the title, I assumed it was a soup cooks could quickly make with canned goods from their pantry, but it's actually a huge batch of vegetable soup (starting with eight quarts of tomatoes!). Home cooks were encouraged to can it for home pantries since they wouldn't be likely to eat it all at once.

A lot of other recipes are just plain huge, with no recognition that maybe actual families would appreciate either cut-down recipes or hints on how to store and use all those leftovers. I guess maybe the implied thought behind Amish Style Turkey Filling was that it should be for big family gatherings, given its Thanksgiving-y vibes.

I'm not sure many families with non-commercial kitchens would have the oven space to bake a recipe that calls for-- among other things-- a pound of shortening, eight pounds of bread, more than a dozen eggs, a gallon and a half of milk, and ten pounds of chopped turkey, especially if they wanted to serve anything other than Amish Style Turkey Filling.

There are also directions for making monster batches of Bot Boi, often translated as "Pot Pie" so cooks can disappoint crowds of people waiting for a crisp, golden-brown-delicious crust enclosing a rich, meaty filling, rather than just disappointing their own small families when they discover bot boi is just basically chicken noodle soup.

Of course,  we need a dessert to end on a sweet note, and the Pennsylvania Dutch are known for their Shoo-Fly Pie. Dutch Haven offered up their bakery-sized recipe.

I'm not sure how many home cooks really need to make 48(!) Shoo-Fly Pies at a time. It can't be many, but maybe that was Dutch Haven's attempt to make sure that tourists would just buy a shoo-fly pie instead of making their own? Nobody wants to divide a recipe by 48.

So, yeah. It doesn't seem like the main goal of this cookbook was to provide practical recipes for home cooks. I will leave you with this cute centerpiece, showing common kitchen items and telling (what I assume are) the Pennsylvania Dutch terms for them.

Bonus: The "Pigs Stomach Recipe" is small enough that you can probably make it just for the family, assuming you can find a pig's stomach and a family willing to eat it stuffed with smoked sausage, spare ribs, and veggies.

A little wining and peanut butter that won't stick to the roof of your mouth

I wasn't sure that Secrets of Salt-Free Cooking (Jeanne Jones, 1979) especially needed a chapter on beverages. After all, most drinks (aside from thin soups-- which could be in the soup chapter, after all!) don't have all that much salt to begin with, or they would make us thirstier rather than quenching our thirst. The book offers a couple of, shall we say, unique recipes along with the expected fruit drinks.

I'm usually thrilled to find peanut butter recipes because I'm a peanut butter fiend, but when I'm looking for a refreshing drink, peanut butter doesn't exactly spring to mind.



Jeanne Jones thinks it can make a fine beverage, though. Well, maybe if it's part of something creamy and lightly sweetened with dates? I'll admit that she's right about it being an "unusual beverage," and a small part of me wonders if the "delicious" might also be true.

This other recipe, though, well... If you don't drink alcohol but keep it around anyway in the hopes that you can one day ruin it so you can drink it, the Calorie-Counter's Wine is perfect!

Just heat up real wine, set it aflame, burn off the alcohol, then chill. It's always a good sign when even the recipe writer has to acknowledge that the creation "is certainly not an epicurean delight." It's already making Peanut Butter Punch seem reasonable by comparison.

Well, this has put me in the mood to crack open a personal-size bottle of Prosecco, so that's all for now. (And you can bet that it's going straight to my mouth-- not getting ignited first!)

A month's worth of Thanksgiving

The recipes in The Chamberlain Calendar of American Cooking (Narcisse and Narcissa Chamberlain, 1957) don't always have a lot to do with the month they've been assigned, but the November recipes definitely seem Thanksgiving-y.

November offers up a cranberry sauce.

I'll admit that I'm always on the lookout for my grandma's cranberry salad recipe, and I have still not found one just like it. This is no exception, as it's a sauce. The Chamberlains are far too classy to include Jell-O based salads like my grandma's. This version sparks the cranberries up with orange marmalade (which sounds delightful!) and almonds (meh). (I mostly love nutty additions to recipes, but not so much when they soak for hours and end up soggy....)

The Chamberlains take us from the cranberries in New England down to New Orleans for some Corn Bread and Pecan Stuffing for the turkey.

And maybe I'm a little hypocritical in thinking that pecans in stuffing sound pretty good, even though stuffing is usually quite moist. 

If you're sick of Thanksgiving turkeys (like my other, non-cranberry-salad-making, grandma was), Wyoming offers up a game option: Roast Wild Duck.

You know this is serious because it starts with hanging the ducks to age, then plucking them and removing the oil glands! Plus, you need one duck for every two guests, so you better plan ahead and have some good luck hunting if you want to pull off duck for Thanksgiving.

I don't know what you're going to do for Thanksgiving, but Chamberlains think you should start planning now! (I'm probably going to shove a Gardein Holiday Roast in the freezer when I find one and then I'll make the same dinner rolls as I make every year. Pretty easy, and no oil gland removal necessary!)