Getting dragged through the neighborhood with the intolerable Miss Vickie

I've always been a sucker for buying little mysteries. If it's a grab bag or a blind box, I'm in! So I was pretty excited when a friend told me about a little online store that would ship a lot of regional spiral cookbooks for a pretty reasonable price. I knew I could end up with books I already had or books from 2006 (which is practically yesterday as far as I'm concerned!), but curiosity won out. (They're not sponsors and I get nothing if you buy anything, but if this is your kind of thing too, you can get your own shipment here.)

The shipment got here way faster than I thought it would. I did already have one book (Cotton Country Collection), but I had accidentally destroyed the spiral binding on the earlier copy (and it hadn't been great to begin with). The new one is in much better shape, so I don't mind too much. I got two books from the '70s, one that is barely too new (early 1980s), and one that is way new (2000!). To justify my purchase, of course I'll be posting all of them here eventually. It might be fun to see how 2000 stacks up against 1976.

I just said 1976 because that's the date of today's specimen: A Walking Tour and Cooking Guide of Saint James Court (The Saint James Court Association of Louisville, Kentucky). 

The title is serious about this being a walking tour. The recipes are arranged not by courses or types of dishes, but by houses that provided the recipes. The book is led by a fictional tour guide named Miss Vickie, who gives us a tour of each house as we go, along with the recipes it provided.

I'm sure it's meant to be charming, and some people must have thought it was since somebody made and bought this book, but I get annoyed with Miss Vickie pretty damn fast. I'm here for the recipes, and she's always taking up space yammering away about how how many families have lived in this house, and who bought it from whom, and when the swimming pool was added. There's even a big section that imagines I care how often the Saint James Court Association meets and how they fund the upkeep of the fountain, especially now that so many of the larger homes have been split into apartments. I can only take so much of this upper class twit until I want to beat her to death with her own parasol.

I'm also glad I don't actually plan to cook from this book, as it would be a nightmare to find a recipe. There's no index and, again, the recipes are arranged by the houses they came from, so best of luck to anyone who just wants to find the Cheese Fluffs again! Unless you remember their street address or dog-eared the page, you'll have to flip around until you find them.

The book does have some interesting recipes, though, especially since the makers were committed to presenting the recipes exactly as they were received, without revision. I love the minimalism of Quick Cake:

It bakes in 10 minutes! No temperature or pan size, so I'm guessing it's made like any baked goods improvised on Chopped: spread really thinly in a huge pan and baked at a high temperature. Take it out when it's still raw in the middle and/or smoking, and very selectively cut out the chunks that aren't still wet and/or won't taste burned.

I also like the variety of recipes. Some are overly healthy.

Yep. Mike's Bread is a brick of unleavened raw wheat germ and sesame seeds. (You'll be happy to know that "Mike was with Shakespeare in Central Park and will return this fall to Actor's Theater.)

If the whole thing seems too healthy and you want to counter it with something really processed, you can always make Sandwich Spread.

It's a thickened can of tomato soup with dried beef and sharp cheese, sure to be salty enough to make you forget about the wheat germ brick it's spread on.

I also liked the ways that recipes sometimes defied my expectations. When I saw Pineapple Cheese Loaf, I expected a pineapple-cheese-gelatin concoction, molded in a loaf pan. 

Nope! This one is a loaf of bread with sharp cheese, walnuts, and crushed pineapple.

Well, surely the Marshmallow Loaf would be the gelatin "salad," then.

Wrong again! It's a big old wad of marshmallows, dates, Graham crackers, and nuts moistened with milk or wine. (There aren't too many recipes with marshmallows, Graham crackers, and wine! The kids will be confused that they aren't allowed into this dessert.)

I knew I'd find a jiggly loaf eventually. The gelatin-laced loaf is not desserty in this case. That's right, the Luncheon Tuna Loaf is not essentially tuna-patty ingredients baked in a loaf pan. 

This is the gelatin-based loaf! So... jellied tuna salad.

It might sound like I kind of wish I didn't take a chance and wind up with this book, but that's not the case at all. I've never been actively annoyed with a fictional character in an old cookbook before, and it was oddly fun to come to hate Miss Vickie and her ceaseless prattling. I also like to know that even though she thinks of her neighborhood as being so posh, the people there are eating canned soup, crushed pineapple, marshmallows, health food, and weird gelatin, just like everybody else in 1970s America. 

Funny Name: "Genuinely" Funni Edition

The Shriners don't want you to think they're trying to fool anyone with this recipe from Shriners Parade of Recipes Main Dish Edition Including Meats and Casseroles (1966). That's why they use the scare quotes. After all, it's not a recipe for Genuine Hungarian Goulash, and they wouldn't want you to think so.

It's for "Genuine" Hungarine Goulash. 

Also, is Hungarine a word used for imitation Hungarian items, like plant-based "chik'n" nuggets? If so, then the Shriners are even trying to watch out for people who don't understand scare quotes. If they can't figure out that scare-quoted "genuine" is not actually genuine, then hopefully they'll pick up on the Hungarine. That might be a lot to ask of people who don't get scare quotes, but you can't say the Shriners didn't try to warn cooks about the authenticity of the recipe.

A cookbook that tells you what to do if you've got too much pig or not enough of it

I get nervous whenever I pick up a community cookbook titled Cook Book: Favorite Recipes from Our Best Cooks. It's got to be one of the most common titles, and a lot of them even use the same levitating cow butt and vegetable wedding chapter dividers (as this one does), so it can be really tough to know whether I'm picking up a new-to-me cookbook when I see one. I didn't remember having anything from Mabie Grade School Parents (Mabie, West Virginia, 1975), so I took a chance on this version, and as far as I can tell, I didn't already have it.

I kind of expected a cookbook from West Virginia to be full of rather down-home, practical, inexpensive recipes, and this one delivered.

People with a taste for tea and no tea budget can still make Sassafras Tea (as long as they can find a sassafras tree).

People with big cuts of pork to store and too little freezer space to accommodate them can find advice on dry curing.

And those with the opposite problem-- no meat budget-- can find a recipe for a Meatless Roast.

It's mostly cottage cheese, carrots, and bread crumbs, but it will be something to put on the table.

There are even non-food recipes. If you can't afford fancy soap, you can make No Boil Lye Soap.

Well, you can as long as you store any extra lard from the hog you sugar cured....

Plus, there are plenty of ways to make the main dish stretch by adding a little extra flour, like Old German Chicken Dinner.

I'm pretty used to seeing recipes for chicken pies with a layer of biscuit dough as the top crust, but this is the first time I've seen two layers of biscuit dough-- one in the middle and one on top! (Considering this entire thing is covered with water and seasoned with nothing but salt and pepper, I imagine the dough ends up as the sodden, flavorless dumplings my mom used to love to make, but hey-- it is cheap!)

Hell, even the WV version of Tater Tot Casserole has a budget treatment. The brand name Tater Tots are replaced with cheaper hash browns AND...

The whole thing is encased in pie crust to make it stretch a little further. 

I'll end with a fun fact about West Virginia. My significant other has relatives there and does not know them well. Whenever his grandma used to mention any of them, he'd ask, "How's their new baby?" She could always answer the question, no matter which relatives she was talking about (and even though we rarely had any idea of their age or family structure). And that's why I'm glad to study West Virginia from the distance of a mid-'70s community cookbook.

Vegging out in 1950

There's nothing like a look back at old cookbooks to remind me that now there are way more vegetarian options than there used to be. If you're the type to spend hours on a dish, starting with dried beans and raw whole grains, an internet search will provide hundreds of recipes to suit any palate. If you're lazy like me, you can throw some Gardein chunks into the stir-fry and call it good. If you're the drive-thru type, Burger King is happy to present you with an Impossible Whopper.

Back in 1950, on the other hand, well.... Mirro Cook Book reminds us just how exciting and inspirational those old vegetarian dishes were.

Yay! Plain rice packed into a ring shape, with peas dumped over squash in the middle and a ring of beets around the outside. At least there's cheese sauce if the cook feels ambitious.

Maybe the Vegetable Luncheon will be more exciting than the Vegetarian Platter.

Well, I guess there's some heft from the kidney beans, but carrots, kidney beans, green pepper (two whole tablespoons!), onion, a can of tomatoes, a sprinkle of rice, and a few mushrooms, all seasoned only with a bit of parsley and divided by six doesn't exactly inspire mouth-watering anticipation.

Maybe the incidentally vegetarian dishes-- the ones that don't explicitly call out veggies in the title-- will be better. There's the Three-in-One Platter.

Apparently platter was Mirro's code word for a ring of plain starches filled with some kind of veggie and rimmed by beets. Yum.

A lot of people are eating less meat right now just because meat's so expensive. Maybe we should look at an economy dish.

Yep. It's named Economy Dish. Basically macaroni (or potatoes!) and cheese with hard-cooked eggs for added protein, this may be the most exciting meal of the lot. So... yeah. I can see why the veggie life was not very popular in 1950 (and likely to show up only around Lent in Catholic families).

Now I'm off to celebrate the fact that I don't have to surround every plate of food I make with a sentry of beets.

Looking into the Mirro

What are your thoughts on Mirro?

My guess is that most people will just think "Huh?" unless they collect old cookbooks or aluminum cookware. Mirro is technically still around, but they're nowhere near as popular as they were when they put out this Mirro Cook Book (third edition, 1950). As you can tell from the cover, this is the height of mid-century cooking trends like making delicate radish-"petal" topped salads and loaves of something starchy covered in a layer of phlegmy white sauce to serve at flower-bedecked ladies' luncheons. Back then, the company was rich enough to put out an affordable cookbook with some full-color pictures so readers could admire the splendor of all the Mirro-enabled creations.

The book starts right out with a very 1950s appetizer spread.

I adore all the carefully cut-out slices of bread bedecked with delicately tinted cream cheese! They are so '50s. The book doesn't label the pictures, but I'm pretty sure this platter is full of "Canapés or Snacks."

"Canapés" is apparently French for "slightly damp bread with semi-random morsels spread/ piped/ piled on it."

This is distinguished from Hors d'Oeuvres...

...which are other random tiny foods, often served on toothpicks. (Got to love the classy "American cheese cut in 1/2 inch squares" and served on toothpicks. So fancy!)

Of course, you probably already know what the photo at the beginning of the salads chapter features. (Hint: Mirro made more than a dozen gelatin molds.)

I can definitely see a star-shaped gelatin mold decorated with red cherries and greenery taking a place of pride in 1950s Christmas buffets. (And you know somebody had to say it looked almost too good to eat.)

The picture is across from this recipe for Cherry Salad.

I think it looks too blindingly white to actually contain cut-up cherry bits, but otherwise, the recipe seems to fit the picture....

In case the star mold isn't enough to show off Mirro's line of gelatin molds, there's also a colorful plate of other molded salads in the background.

A whole tray of variously colored and shaped gelatin salads spread across a sea of iceberg lettuce may be even more '50s than the decorated star! 

The book also reminds me that the doll cake Grandma used to make for my birthday had been around for decades before she ever made it for me.

Of course, the doll in the center wasn't Barbie back then. The delicate ceramic figure in the white dress with a delicate petit four backdrop makes me think this might have been seen as a bridal shower cake rather than a child's birthday cake.

I'm not sure, but for a shower maybe this cake would be served with a platter of pear halved dyed a delicate pink and stuffed with (icing? cream cheese? There's no explanation for this one, and I know the recipes for mint and currant jellies on the opposing page don't apply!) and red hots. Nestle those blushing pears into a field of frilly lettuce and the ladies will really be impressed.

Your guess is as good as mine about the dip in the middle. Mayonnaise? Custard sauce? Canned cream of mushroom soup with all the mushrooms strained out?

The most '50s of all recipes just might be from the "Combination and Casserole Dishes" chapter, though.

Noodles baked in a ring mold? Check! Cream of something-or-other (with pimiento for color)? Check! Jell-O mold in the background? Check! This is just about as '50s as it gets. I love it sooooo very much.

It might be the Golden Egg Noodle Mold from the opposing page, perhaps with the bits of vegetable left out of the noodles so they will pop in the filling.

The center filling is not the recommended creamed mushrooms, but I'm pretty sure it's the Creamed Tuna Fish or Salmon from the same page.

I love this book so much for the pictures alone! They make me want to pretend I have a whole array of molds... and that I would actually want to put in the effort to make things in them... and that the molded food wouldn't suck... and that I wouldn't immediately get sick of being the only one to eat whatever the hell I made in a mold that holds eight servings....

These recipes, just like the fifties, are at their best when they're only imagined in their idealized form from a very great distance.

Watch some Smart Shoppers try to go "meatless"

For Lent, I thought maybe we could do a bit of a deep dive on the "meatless" dishes in Smart Shopper's Cookbook (Loyta Wooding, 1972). So let's check out what those with serious budgeting concerns would do when the menu wouldn't allow for meat and/or the church dictated meatless Fridays.

Here's one of the first recipes in the meatless chapter:

And it appears that Wooding's definition of "meatless" does not coincide with most people's, as this recipe starts out with bacon (and there was no popping down to the grocery for a vegan bacon substitute back in 1972). Even worse, though, after sautéing the bacon, the cook is instructed to discard the bacon drippings and to cook up the rest of the dish in margarine! If you're going to go to the trouble of cooking bacon for something supposedly meatless and this is supposed to be a budget book anyway, why not use the bacon fat as the cooking oil? It boggles the mind. Why should cooks spend extra money for inferior flavor?

Okay, on to the actually meatless meatless dishes. Of course, there is the standard array of loaves, from the expected combination of various veggies and beans held together with eggs and baked into a brick...

...to the slightly less orthodox combo of peanut butter and lima beans with American cheese and tomato sauce...

...to the not-too-bad sounding spaghetti baked into a macaroni-and-cheese-esque custard.

Or, if you want your macaroni and cheese in bite-sized form, there's Macaroni Patties.

(Use them as a side dish for pot roast if you've forgotten the meatless conceit.)

If you can't survive without a gelatin-based side, you can get extra protein from the Tomato Cottage Cheese Salad.

It's made with lemon Jell-O instead of unflavored gelatin and loaded up with cabbage and onion as well, so it's sure to be a memorable treat.

And if you need a festive cake to finish things off, but you've sworn off sweets as well, you're in luck! We can end with the Upside-Down Vegetable Cake.

Maybe the family will be unhappy that it's not dessert, but it's still fresh, hot, homemade bread, and they can cover their pieces with tomato sauce and pretend it's glaze! I'm not sure whether '70s moms could sell that idea with enough conviction to make it work, but I'd have liked to see them try.

Smart? Maybe... but at least it's entertaining

Yes, I want budget cookbooks because they often have terrible recipes, but I also have a soft spot for books like Loyta Wooding's Smart Shopper's Cookbook (1972) because they are unpretentious and they do try to serve a genuinely useful purpose for cash-strapped families.

I'm sure you can't get any menus for six that cost only $1.05 anymore! Even the comparatively pricy "Serves 2 for $1.68" recipe seems unlikely....

And yes, some of the recipes are just as grim as you might imagine.

Nothing says "We are out of money" quite like boiled cabbage and hot dogs under a layer of thin white sauce.

The book often goes out of its way to try to make cheap food seem more appealing, though. Wooding's idea of a Poor Man's Crown Roast certainly seems closer to a real crown roast than the Campbell's soup version. 

Sometimes, the book tries to make diners feel special by including at least a taste of a food they are unlikely to afford servings of.

Whether people's appetite for shrimp will be sated with the few bites in the red snapper stuffing is an open question, but I find it kind of touching that Wooding is consciously trying to include at least bits of more expensive foods the audience might crave. 

Sometimes when even smidges of pricier fare are beyond reach, it seems as if Wooding just hopes that the application of extra labor will somehow make cheap food tastier.

Will beating seasoned hamburger vigorously for five minutes before adding tomato sauce really make it better? I'm not sure, but at least the whipping will give the cook a chance to work out some aggravation over not getting decent paychecks.

Of course, this book also goes for the mid-century trick of making old standby recipes seem new by encasing them in gelatin.

No, peaches and cottage cheese is not a sad, boring staple of cheap diets, something to count as lunch when paired with a cheap cigarette! It's a "treat" of a "new-styled salad"!

And of course, there's always the option of pretending one can afford a Hawaiian vacation via the time-honored method of dumping canned pineapple on whatever's for dinner.

This is a less common variation that includes not only the usual pineapple, green pepper, and soy sauce, but also sauerkraut, and the protein of choice is the budget staple frankfurters. It's Hawaii by way of Germany. Dinner might still be pretty sad, but it will also be entertaining.

Funny Name: I Hope the Title Isn't the Effect Edition

How do you feel about the word "chucker" in a recipe title? Just asking for Shriners Parade of Recipes: Main Dish Edition Including Meats and Casseroles (1966). 

My only thought about a chucker is that it sounds like what you'd call somebody who's upchucking.... Not exactly the mental picture you want with a recipe! The fact that this was in the game chapter helped me figure out that this is probably supposed to be a bird spelled "Chukar," not "Chucker," not that it helps much. They still (apparently) sound the same.

When the Carbs Come Marching in

March means that I've been yelling "Yeah! It's winter! I get the idea!" for several straight months now. And the world has generally been indifferent. So let's check in with Cincinnati Celebrates: Cooking and Entertaining for All Seasons (Junior League of Cincinnati, first printing August, 1974, though mine is from the 1980 fifth printing) to see how the Junior Leaguers recommend dealing with the wintertime blues.

They say to have a Calico Bridge Luncheon. I'm not sure how authentic Swiss Cheese Bread and Angel Pie are to "pioneer Americana," but considering the group's ideas of "early America" for February's Presidents' Day celebration, I wasn't expecting much.

There's no Sherry Cobbler recipe, so I assume the ladies liked the usual sherry/ simple syrup/ orange wheel combo, as long as there was enough sherry to make them forget, however briefly, that it was still winter.

I thought that Junior League types might have been wary of carbs, but the rest of the menu suggests they longed for carbs just as much as anyone else holed up for a midwest winter. Hungarian Rye Bread Soup is just what it sounds like: soup made out of rye bread.

The rye bread is puréed not just into bouillon, but into bouillon fortified with instant mashed potatoes for that extra carby boost early March requires.

And if the bread soup is not enough, well, there's non-soggy bread to go with it.

Add a few marinated veggies to balance things out with some acidified carbs.

And then finish it all off with some sweet and fluffy carbs.

This menu shows the Junior League had the same instincts as pretty much everybody else by this point in the year: hole up in the den and put yourself into an alcohol-and-carb coma until it's at least possible to trick yourself into believing that spring is coming....