In which your humble writer fears an ingredient will lead to a decade of annoying targeted ads

It's that glorious time once again: Pieathalon Day! I don't usually cook except for when the delightful Yinzerella of Dinner Is Served 1972 facilitates a recipe exchange among a group of people who blog about old recipes and cookbooks. I send in a really weird recipe, hope that I get a recipe from someone who is kinder than I am, and then bake whatever I get. And the person who got my recipe ends up doing weird things with prunes or mayonnaise.

This year, I got a pie from Betty Crocker's Bisquick Cookbook (Ed. Myrna McCauley, second printing, 1973).

From a  Bisquick cookbook, I might expect an impossible pie-- one that is thickened with Bisquick, making a separate crust unnecessary, as Yinzerella used to make. No such luck, though, as I would have to make an actual crust for my assignment: Apricot Mallow Pie.

I was kind of nervous about the crust because I really suck at crust making, but this one seemed pretty easy: mix Bisquick with softened butter and boiling water, stir it all up until it forms a cohesive ball, and pat it into the pie pan.

It had a weird texture-- almost reminded me of choux pastry before the addition of eggs-- and there did not seem to be enough to quite cover my pie pan. There was definitely not enough dough to attempt the fluted edge the recipe recommended, but I have an odd-sized 9-1/2 inch pie pan, so that could be part of the issue. I just kept squidging the dough around until the pan was mostly covered and there were no longer any egregious holes.

Luckily, the crust puffed up as it baked, so it looked better when it came out. I thought I took a picture of it, but I guess I didn't. My mind is mush when I'm this deep into the grading season.

Okay, time to move on to the filling, which actually gave me more anxiety than the crust. If you paid attention, you probably noticed that it called for two jars of chopped apricots with tapioca (junior food). I searched the internet, and it appears that chopped apricots with tapioca (junior food) is no longer a thing. I'd like to pretend that I briefly contemplated trying to make my own version by mincing canned apricots and cooking some tapioca in the juice, but we all know I'm too lazy for that. I decided to use just straight-up baby food. Then I discovered that my grocery store only offers apricot baby food in expensive pouches, and those pouches mix the apricots with various other ingredients (including squash) anyway, so I just got cheap tubs of peach baby food and called it a day. 

That's still not what really gave me anxiety, though. I figured the swap would be fine. I was really worried that my internet sleuthing for baby food would mean that I'm going to get targeted ads for baby-related items for the next decade. And now that I bought baby food at a store where I have a loyalty card, that could mean I start getting personalized coupons for baby food, which I definitely do not want! I didn't realize how annoyed I can get by targeted advertising until I thought about the implications of making this recipe....

So anyway, here's what a pot full of cheap peach baby food and marshmallows looks like.

I was worried about what the recipe meant by "Chill until partially set." I could see myself either melting and deflating the whipped cream with under-chilled peachy marshmallow gunk or allowing said gunk to thicken up so much that the whipped cream would bounce right off instead of folding in. I guess my choice to let it chill out in a cold-water bath for 20 minutes or so before whipping and folding in the cream was fine, though. The end result looks pretty good for baby-food-and-marshmallow-whipped-cream on Bisquick.

So I threw the pie into the fridge for 10-or-so hours to make sure it really set up.

That evening, peeling back the plastic wrap that covered this concoction, I noticed something in the air that was hard to describe but ... definitely not telling me to go there. Luckily, I was quickly distracted by a knock on the door as my special guest taster showed up.

"Look at you, with your mouth watering! You certainly came ready to taste a vintage Apricot Peach Mallow Pie," I said. Then I realized that his mouth was probably watering because he'd been looking at the girl who sits in the top of the greenest tree in my yard and I felt like an idiot. 

As the lone member of Devo who was available this evening surveyed the pie, I assured him that before the cream set out too long, I had whipped it... and then mixed it with baby food and melted marshmallows. He did not look impressed. And I felt like an idiot.

So I just cut him a nice big slice.

It was way runnier than I would have imagined, given that it had spent the whole day setting up. Facing down the massive slice, my energy-domed friend tried to assert his freedom of choice as far as the tasting portion went, but I assured him that freedom from choice was what he wanted and handed him a forkful.

"How does it taste?" I asked.

"It almost makes me want to cry-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y."

"Because it's so fresh?"

He shot me a look that suggested I was being way too optimistic, and then he gave me the slip.

I got a fork and tried a bite too. The filling is somehow bland at first taste and then slowly takes on all the worst qualities of underseasoned and overprocessed canned fruit. It gets worse the longer you think about it. The crust, though. I can't be mad at extra-buttery Bisquick. It's rich and still on the edge of being crispy, though I'm sure it will be soggy with peachy baby food cream in just a few more hours.

So, my fellow Pieathletes, I hope it's a beautiful world for you.

For you.

For you.

It's not for me.

As always, a bit THANK YOU to Yinzerella for putting this together. You can see her Candy Apple Cheese Pie at Dinner Is Served 1972.

Battenburghbelle at Kitchen Confidence was subjected to my contribution of Zucchini Pie.

The charming Dr. Bobb at Dr. Bobb's Kitschen got to try the delightful-sounding Praline Pumpkin Pie.

The hilarious and thorough SS at A Book of Cookrye can no longer claim that she has a site with everything but Yul Brynner, as she made Yul Brynner's Pie.

Jenny at Silver Screen Suppers got astrological with Sagittarius Hamburger Pie.

Surly of Vintage Recipe Cards went back to childhood with Pooh's Summer Pie.

Taryn of Retro Food for Modern Times got a little boozy with Lime Pie with Creme de Menthe.

Kari of The Nostalgic Cook got to try a pie that could taste her back: Ham Tongue Pie.

Camilla of Culinary Adventures with Camilla adventured all the way to heaven (I assume) with Chocolate Angel Pie.

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

Year Eight: Chocolate-Crusted Coffee Pie

A Very Half-Assed Pieathalon Tease

As I was typing for the 66th time today "The narrative would have been more effective if you used details to show what you meant here instead of just explaining it," a man in some very distinctive headgear appeared in my office.

"Is it Pieathalon time again?" I asked. "I almost forgot because I still have papers to comment on for two other schools once I get this batch finished."

The visitor glanced at my stacks of cookbooks, but I was not in the mood to let anyone dig around in my office while I worked.

"I'll find a recipe to represent you so readers can guess the identity of my secret guest taster. It shouldn't be too hard. Just go out there and enjoy that beautiful world we live in. Come back on Wednesday to taste test the vintage pie I was assigned to make."

After he left, I checked my Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook (Souvenir Edition, 1965) and found a handy way to save cream before it's out too long.

Yep, you can whip it, make it into little mounds, and freeze those mounds for up to three months. Just put them on dessert 20 minutes before you want to serve! I'm sure my guest would approve. Now to find out what he thinks of the pie...

Roanoke gets lost in cheese!

Of Pots and Pipkins (Junior League of Roanoke Valley, Virginia, 1971) made me look up "pipkin." Of course, I assumed the long-handled roundish pot on the cover was a pipkin, but I wanted to make sure.

Based on the Wikipedia definition, I'm not entirely sure the Junior League fully understood the term either, as pipkins are supposed to be earthenware and not made for use of direct flame. The one on the cover looks like it's metal. I wouldn't be surprised if the Junior Leaguers didn't care if it wasn't a real pipkin, though. They had their own way of doing things.

At the beginning of a meal, they might serve an old-fashioned glass filled with a frozen ball of mushed-up cantaloupe and lemonade concentrate leavened with some egg white and expect you to pretend that is a regular first course.

If, instead of a first course, they decided to serve a cheese ball appetizer, you might expect it to be, well, just a cheese ball. You know-- seasoned cream cheese in a ball shape, maybe rolled in a coating of nuts or herbs before serving. A Bourbon Cheese Ball would be exactly the same, only flavored with bourbon before the coating step. Not in Roanoke, though.

Here, a Bourbon Cheese Ball is a fairly standard seasoned cream cheese ball suspended in a bourbon-flavored consommé jell. I can only imagine the mess this would make when people tried to dismantle it and spread it on crackers....

This Junior League was really into doing odd things with cheese, too. On the brink of the saturated fat/ cholesterol scare, they recommended melting a big (10 ounce!) hunk of cheese, beating in an egg...

...and splitting this concoction between just two people! I love cheese, but I feel a bit sick just thinking about starting the day off by eating more than a quarter pound of cheese over biscuits.

And just in case a nice green salad for lunch or dinner to balance off starting the day with a massive cheese wad might seem a little too austere, the book has a cheesy recommended addition:

Top that salad off with Hot Cheese Balls! This is a different combination of cheese and egg, but deep fried to make up for the fact that the meager pound of cheese is expected to feed 10 people.

Of course, the Junior League in Roanoke Valley was as unable to resist a Jell-O salad as any midwestern group. They weren't immune to outside influences. They were just the type who couldn't decide whether a Jell-O salad should be dessert-y or salad-y, so they split the difference.

I would think that the crushed pineapple, lime gelatin, pecans, and whipped cream belonged together and the American cheese, pimiento, celery, and green olives belonged in an entirely different dish, but in Roanoke, they're apparently appropriate mold-mates. (I also love that this is called Olive Wreath Mold, with the word "wreath" suggesting that maybe this was supposed to be considered a holiday treat?)

I still don't know whether the pipkin on the cover is really a pipkin, but now I really suspect that the Junior League of Roanoke Valley doesn't particularly care. They make their own rules, and if you don't like them, too bad. You're still expected to eat raw egg whites mixed with lemonade concentrate, consume nearly half a pound of cheese in the course of a regular day, top it all off with a slice of the Olive Wreath Mold, and pretend to like it.

A Celebration of Molds

My initial post about Celebration Cook Book (American Association of University Women, West Chester, PA, 1976) "celebrated" its commitment to forcing readers to think critically (because the instructions were often so impenetrable that a lot of interpretation was in order). I've got to give the book credit for another thing, though. Its gelatin-based salads are pretty amazing, even to someone who is kind of inured to Jell-O salads by now.

Sure, I've seen Jell-O salads with tomato soup, or shrimp, or tomato soup and shrimp, but they generally make some effort to look attractive, no matter how they might taste. The gelatin is a neutral color (plain or lemon), or it will match the other ingredients. (The only example of a lime-based gelatin shrimp salad I linked to above features avocado, not tomato, so the green will match the green.) This shrimp mold, on the other hand...

I can only imagine the muddy color it will turn when the lime Jell-O and the can of tomato soup get all mixed up. At least this one will present a visual warning that it's terrible, not just an olfactory one!

I initially thought the Sauterne Ring Mold might be a relatively good one-- lemon Jell-O, a sweet, dessert-y wine. Then it took a hard turn.

Who wants onion, deviled eggs, and artichoke hearts in their sauterne? (And who suspends entire halves of deviled eggs in a Jell-O mold?) This one kind of broke my mind.

The molded salads aren't all terrible, though. Grandma Ericson's Sunshine Salad actually sounds pretty fun!

Not only does grandma insist on swapping out the usual carrots and nuts for cream cheese and whipping cream (not as healthy, perhaps, but YUM!), but she also says the salad needs to be made in a bug-shaped mold and augmented with veggie feet, eyes, antennae, and tail! This sounds so cute! I wish the book had a picture. Plus, anyone who is not thrilled about the idea of eating the veggie appendages on their fruit-and-dairy-fat confection can easily discard them. 

I almost want to make Grandma Ericson's Sunshine Salad to celebrate the Celebration Cook Book, but I'm too lazy. (And besides, the Shrimp Mold and Sauterne Ring Mold might want equal time, and that ain't happening!)

General Foods wants you to put frozen food in everything

I picked up General Foods Kitchens Frozen Foods Cookbook (4th ed., 1964) because I loved the colorful cover. It's got space-age-looking appetizers exploding outward in the upper left, tomatoes stuffed with some swampy green gunk to the right, the frozen favorites of lima beans and French fries in the foreground, and front and center, a big pie with multicolored fruits peeking through its lattice. The whole cover a thing of beauty.

This work of "Modern Living with Frozen Foods" is not always terribly creative, though. Recipes for appetizers often just call for stabbing a few reheated frozen tidbits onto skewers, often with other bits of flotsam, like these fancy-sounding Hors d'Oeuvre en Brochette.

I guess General Foods used the French name to distract from the fact that this recipe is just an excuse to sell frozen pre-cooked scallops and potato puffs. Alternating them on a skewer with whatever happened to be around the house made the ploy a little less obvious. Pimiento? Onion? Green pepper? Mushrooms? Mandarin orange segments? Pineapple chunks? As long as it's something that was ubiquitous in the '60s and could be skewered (that second criteria is meant to remind us that Jell-O and canned soup were no-gos), it would work.

Pickabacks are a similar attempt, this time alternating pre-cooked fish bites and cut-up pre-cooked fish sticks with a suspiciously similar roster of additions.

It's a bit odd that cheese slices are added to this list of add-ons, though, especially if the apps were supposed to be kept hot in a chafing dish or electric skillet. That would be a big, gooey mess...

Still, you've got to admit that General Foods can make a lovely gray stick of nondescript foodstuffs.

There are also instructions for cooking straight-from-the-freezer veggies in less-conventional ways. Need some roughage for the family camping trip? Pack the cooler with blocks of frozen veggies and then grill the veggies right in the boxes.

Just make sure to wrap the cardboard in foil first, I assume so it won't catch on fire. When you pull the boxes off the grill 30-60 minutes later, they will look...

...well, still pretty much like a box of frozen vegetables. Only hotter. As a bonus, they will probably taste cardboardy.

At least the book had a few somewhat creative recipes, like this non-standard take on the infamous Tater Tot Casserole.

I knew from the title that Puff-Top Tuna Casserole would be unusual in that it uses tuna instead of the usual ground beef, but it's also weird because it uses condensed chicken with rice soup instead of cream soup as the canned soup component. I'm always interested to see a new variation on Tater Tot Casserole.

My favorite thing from this cookbook, though, is that I found another method of differentiating a salad from a dessert. In addition to our previously-established rule of served on lettuce= salad and served on a lettuce-free plate= dessert, the makes-sense rule of less sugar= salad and more sugar= dessert, and the wtf rule of I'm pretty sure that extra sugar means it's salad, not dessert, we have a new the topping makes the difference rule. For Jellied Raspberry Special, mayo topping= dinner salad and whipped cream topping= dessert salad.

The Strawberry-Grapefruit Chill postulates a similar rule.

Here, it's mayo topping= dinner salad and custard topping= dessert salad. I guess the thinking here is that if you are willing to eat mayonnaise on Jell-O, then you can claim it's whatever you want and still get a separate dessert guilt-free. If you dare to top the sticky-sweet confection with an appropriately sweet topping, then you have to admit that it's just straight-up dessert and no, you don't get to pick something else out for dessert.

While much of this book is just a primer in skewering reheated foods on kabobs and coating frozen foods with a medium white sauce with some pantry staples mixed in, I loved discovering more about the salad v. dessert wars. The half-assed attempts to pass off frozen food as some home-cooked delicacy by putting it on a skewer or throwing it on the grill were a fortunate bonus. This is not always the most exciting cookbook, but it's still fun.

Funny Name: Junior High Flashbacks Edition

It's weird, but just reading the recipe title from Favorite Recipes 1977 (Troy Mills Christian Women's Fellowship, of Troy Mills Disciples of Christ Christian Church) kind of makes me feel anxious, like I'm in junior high and counting down the seconds until the bus will take me home and away from all the assholes who would knock my books on the floor or make fun of the "jean jacket" my mom made out of upholstery material and I only wore because my fear of disappointing her was greater than my fear of being made fun of. (Well, that plus I needed something to help me stay warm, even if it did make me look kind of like a couch.)

I mean, Dorkenonner definitely sounds like a name bullies would yell at some poor unfortunate kid in junior high. I assumed this was the name of a regional dish I hadn't heard of before, but a Google search just asks me if I meant "dorking donner" and then takes me to websites for tools to help disabled people put on their compression socks. Maybe this recipe name is Bessie Klopp's attempt to reappropriate the name she was called in junior high? Poor little dorkenonner. 

Small Planet Part 2: This Time, It's Supposed to Taste Better

Not long ago, we checked out Frances Moore Lappé's Diet for a Small Planet, and we saw that it made vegetarianism into a never-ending and complicated math problem to be solved with mostly boring/ borderline unappealing dishes. Even Frances Moore Lappé seemed to see the problem, as her forward to the follow-up book Recipes for a Small Planet (Ellen Buchman Ewald, 1973, though mine is from a 1976 12th printing) notes that when the author was confronted by skeptics who doubted "the appeal of a diet based on plant food," she "wished that [she] could introduce them to Ellen." Lappé seemed to know her recipes were not quite cutting it.

So do the recipes in this follow-up book sound infinitely more appealing? I'm making you lunch from this book, so you can decide what you think.

First, you'll need a sandwich. I'm making the bread from scratch!

I'm so glad this is Unusual Pickle or Olive Juice Bread, as I am sick of the usual pickle or olive juice bread. (And if you're wondering, I made Olive Juice Bread, partly so it will go with the sandwich filling and partly so I can mouth the words "olive juice" at the bread and it will think I'm saying "I love you" and I can laugh at how stupidly naïve the bread is.)

So what goes with Olive Juice Bread? Pizza Spread, of course!

Full disclosure: Pizza Spread contains no tomato products, but three hard-boiled eggs instead. Apparently the olives, onions, and cheddar with chili powder and oregano are supposed to somehow overcome the boiled egg flavor to evoke the idea of pizza. Or maybe they'll just taste so weird you'll forget what this was supposed to be anyway.

Now we need a light, refreshing salad to go with the pizza-adjacent (or maybe, more accurately, a couple blocks away from a so-so pizzeria, but you can still kind of get a whiff of pizza from here if the wind is right) sandwiches. How about some Cool Slaw?

You get veggies in the form of carrots and cabbage plus fruit in the raisins, apples, and banana-based dressing! That means that rather than giving you a boring old box of raisins or red "delicious" apple for dessert, I can make you some brownies!

Hope you like Carob Nut Brownies made with whole wheat flour and surprise sunflower seeds! Are these recipes any better than the ones in Diet for a Small Planet? Your call. I can say that these recipes haven't convinced me that my usual packed lunch of peanut butter sandwich, carrot and pepper sticks,  sugar snap peas, and bowlful of berries needs an update.

Now that the kids are off in school, Cincinnati Junior Leaguers have time to make life unnecessarily complicated

Happy September! It's time once again for Cincinnati Celebrates: Cooking and Entertaining for All Seasons (Junior League of Cincinnati, first printing August, 1974, though mine is from the 1980 fifth printing). I could have gone for the Swinging School Days Menu, but it was pretty boring (that "Nuts and Bolts" snack mix made out of nuts and popcorn and pretzel sticks you find in every old cookbook, guacamole, burgers, slaw). Instead, I went with the weirdest, most complicated celebration in the fall section. 

The Progressive Dinner is really something else, requiring seven different households to coordinate meals and décor. Well, one household doesn't have to cook or decorate. The invitations are so complicated that one gets included by virtue of making them! (If I were at all inclined to do this type of stuff, I would definitely have to be the one in charge of making the invitations because at my house, everybody would have to try to find someplace to eat that wasn't already covered in cookbooks!)

The "coupon" booklet invitation would send the invitees to all six houses, in order, along with clues as to which decade the house was supposed to represent, as the theme was "It's a sign of the times" and the courses progressed from the 1920s to the 1970s. I don't know whether one super-bossy organized person mapped the entire thing out and coerced everyone into going along with this entire detailed plan or whether everyone was assigned a decade and a course, figured it out from there, and recorded it all later, but there's a LOT of planning. Like, way more than I put into anything other than lesson plans. 

The 1920s theme is Prohibition, so the first house is a "speakeasy" with bathroom décor suggesting the hosts are brewing up some bath tub gin.

That means the "Prohibition Punch" (a renamed Whiskey Punch) has to be served in coffee cups.

Make sure you use the "good Maryland rye" along with the frozen lemonade and orange juice.

The first house needs some nibbles, too, so there are Curried Chicken Chunks (below) over 3-B Cocktail Crackers (which are popular enough that I already featured them in July).

I'm not 100% sure why appetizers that are supposed to be eaten off of toothpicks are served with crackers, but this menu has many mysteries. (It's also interesting that the recipes make enough Prohibition Punch for 25 guests and enough appetizers for 4-6.)

The 1930s house is all about one of the Junior Leaguers' favorite pastimes: cosplaying as poors. By all means, boil an old shoe on the stove.

And put a "Social Security" sign on the bathroom door while you're at it. Everybody wants to feel like they live in a terrible political cartoon, right? At least the boiled shoe wasn't supposed to be the actual soup course.

This minestrone seems pretty respectable, with plenty of veggies and some actual herbs. I'm not Eye-talian, though, so someone can correct me if I'm wrong.

The third house has a World War II theme, and the Junior Leaguers were not nearly as interested in World War II as your dad is. There is barely a description for this one, and most of the décor seems to be centered on the hosts' clothing.

Not even any special bathroom decorations! No special recipe either-- just some kind of tossed salad "served on lettuce leaves in pie tins."

TV is the theme for the 1950s house, and the hosts are back to "cute" bathroom jokes, labeling the bathroom door "Stage Door" this time.

The entrée and sides got served in TV dinner trays, which I would absolutely love. Well, the concept, anyway. I'm sure most people would consider Pork Tenderloin Lorraine to sound pretty tasty...

...even if I'm not into meat, alliums, or vinegar.

It's also nice that the Asparagus and Carrot Escallop reminds us that Junior Leaguers were just as much into cream of celery soup as anyone else at the time.

I'd think they would have sprung for fresh or frozen asparagus, though. Canned is... well... canned. And Army green. 

The 1960s is represented by the Peppermint Lounge. This step apparently requires the group to have one friend who owns a house with big white pillars that can be turned into peppermint sticks.

Here, the bathroom is the "Echo Chamber." Dessert is a Grasshopper Soufflé. 

It's more of a chiffon than a soufflé (since it's gelatin-based and not baked), but it's got enough crème de menthe and crème de cacao that nobody will care unless they're really pedantic, and you can just shut them in the Echo Chamber if they get too annoying.

The final house has to go with a Watergate theme. I guess that's why they don't have to do any actual cooking, offering just "Cigars, nuts and assorted apertifs." If you've got to try to make hardcore political investigations into a party theme, you deserve a break somewhere.

The hosts also need mums handcrafted out of newspaper and a note warning guests, "Don't talk to the flowers; they are bugged." I like knowing that I am not the only human being who is inclined to talk to the flowers when I'm in a roomful of human beings. Apparently, others have that compulsion too. (I am also intrigued by the punctuation after "flowers." It's hard to see here, but there's definitely a comma, and maybe a dot added above it by hand to turn it into a semicolon when somebody realized it was a comma splice. I'm being generous in my quote and pretending that it's definitely a semicolon.)

Whew! I'm exhausted just writing about that much nonsense. I'm not sure how anybody managed to plan and execute an entire progressive dinner. There was no bingeing Netflix back the '70s though, so maybe the next best thing was putting a funny sign on the door and pretending to be trapped in series of half-a-century's worth of sorry political cartoons with six sets of your closest friends.