Actual Halloween recipes from North Carolina!

Halloween did not used to be quite the draw that it is now. Old cookbooks have tons of recipes for Christmas, and plenty for Thanksgiving. Easter comes in a distant third. Hell, even Presidents' Day tends to inspire more recipes and menus than Halloween in pre-1980s cookbooks. That's why I was pretty excited to find a couple of Halloween-themed recipes in Old 'n' New Tried 'n' True (Boone Junior Woman's Club, Boone, North Carolina, 1978). 

Witch's Brew sounds from the title like it will be a beverage (maybe even adult beverage, given the word "brew").

But nope! Witch's Brew is not a drink at all, but a Cheez Whiz/ chipped beef/ cream of mushroom/ Tabasco dip, that perhaps involves pecans in some capacity? (They're in the ingredient list, then never mentioned again, which is not so unusual for this book. As my earlier post showed, the Boone women are not always overly concerned with providing clear directions.) Fritos are a tasty dipping medium, but pretzel sticks could be a fun choice so the shredded beef gunk dangling off the dipped ends could turn them into little tiny nasty brooms.

Okay, dipping something salty into a vat of processed salt is sure to create a powerful thirst, so we'll need an actual drink. It's time for Halloween Punch!

I am SOLD on the idea of serving punch from a real pumpkin shell! Rather than trying to make a fancy scalloped edge, though, I'd probably hack off the top and draw a horrified face on the front of the pumpkin to imply that everyone is drinking pumpkin brains. I would also get into a lengthy debate with myself over whether orange was the best drink mix flavor to use-- since orange would, in fact, match the pumpkin's interior and make sense in the world of this sentient pumpkin-- or whether I should go for a red drink mix and cranberry juice since people expect blood to be red and the people-- not the pumpkins-- are my audience. That's just the kind of deep thought I would put into this endeavor before remembering that I hate people and deciding to stop at drawing a horrified face on a pumpkin for my own amusement. No need for a punch bowl if it's only me anyway.

Now I will disappear back into the inky shadows, only to trip on a stack of cookbooks as I go. So much for stealth! Happy Halloweekend! 

Some Sheboygan fun with crackers and canned goods

I learned a few things about Sheboygan from Sheboygan Memorial Medical Center Volunteer Cookbook (undated, but looks 1970s-ish). 

First and foremost, I learned that Sheboygan is in Wisconsin. I always assumed it was in Michigan for some reason. You're here for the recipes, though-- not the revelations about how ignorant I am of geography. (Well, maybe you are here for the revelations about how ignorant I am! That does seem to be a major theme here...)

I learned that if you want a snack in Sheboygan, it comes on crackers. You just better not ask what the snack actually is (aside from the crackers). 

You just might find out that "snack" is Sheboyganese for "random mixture of condiments."

I learned that chili is definitively NOT spicy in Sheboygan. It's got no seasoning unless you count onions, whatever flavors are in Campbell's tomato soup, and...

...whatever seasonings are in canned Franco American spaghetti (in tomato sauce with cheese). In short, Sheboygan chili tastes like sweet, bland, mushy canned spaghetti. With kidney beans.

And speaking of sweet, the final thing I learned about Sheboygan is that they really like sweet salads. Or maybe I mean they like really sweet salads. I'm used to the basic Jell-O, Cool/Dream Whip, dairy fat "salads" that can claim the title because somebody threw a bit of canned fruit in there. In Sheboygan, though, they will turn an old-fashioned Halloween treat into a salad:

Simple Taffy Apple Salad features brown sugar, mini marshmallows, and Cool Whip. And it's still not as sweet as the Super Orange Salad!

I love that this mixes already-sweet frozen orange juice concentrate with syrupy-thick sweetened condensed milk. I think the airiness of the Cool Whip may actually tame the sweetness a little! At least the Ritz-crackers-and-butter crust should also help counterbalance the sweet, this time with a pop of salt. (The presence of a crust should also make people wonder whether this is actually a pie, but hey-- this is a salad! It says so right in the title! That means there's still space for dessert.) It looks like dessert and salad may have been the only bright spots in Sheboygan menus anyway....

Peachy Jack!

I don't run into Halloween recipes nearly enough, so I was excited to see Jack-o-Lantern Salad in Recipes on Parade: Salads Including Appetizers (Military Officers' Wives Clubs, 1966). Even better this isn't like the previously posted Jack-o-Lantern salad of carved-up oranges stuffed with their own guts.

Are apples, celery, and nuts moistened with salad dressing anything that I would have been willing to taste as a kid? Hell, no! (And I have not budged on that point.) I might have made my way through the peach half jack-o-lantern before I realized it hid that slop underneath, though.

And what do you think of mixing pimento and whole cloves for the face? It seems like the mixed media would look pretty odd and I'd rather go with all cloves, giving it a more dried-out and dead appearance. But maybe the bright red pimento lips would suggest it's a vampire jack-o-lantern that just finished feeding and you better eat it before it tries to eat you? Okay, maybe I'm sold on the lips after all...

With a name like Smucker's, it's got to be... Smuckered

I love stuff that was self-consciously old-timey even when it was new, and that's why I picked up Smucker's Cookbook (J. M. Smucker Company, 1976). 

I mean, just look at it! Big wooden utensils! Milk in a glass bottle! Peanuts on a balance scale! The little embossing dough wheel that I can't find a good name for even though I tried to Google it! So, yes, I had to get this book for the cover alone. Well, that and the promise of getting recipes with Smucker's products where they don't belong.

You know, like putting caramel on the parsnips.

I knew this book would be a major source of the fruit-and-meat concoctions that seem popular with much of the rest of humanity, even if I can't stand them. I found a lot of the usual suspects: pork with apple jelly, ham with pineapple preserves, etc. I expected to run into some odder options too because Smuckers had a whole book to fill, but I didn't expect to see variety meats. Usually, product-specific books try to cram products that don't really belong into recipes that are already popular. They don't bother with stuff that's not that popular to start with. To my surprise, the book has not just one recipe for beef tongue...

...but two!

Whether you prefer your tongue with currants or with blackberry sauce, Smucker's is ready to deliver!

The book still had weird recipes for more popular dishes too, like meatballs. Cheese Hide-a-Ways may sound like pretty run-of-the-mill cheese-stuffed meatballs, but remember-- they're from Smucker's.

That means the meatball has to be seasoned with orange marmalade and served in an American cheese, sour cream, brown sugar, and marmalade sauce. Yep-- double orange marmalade and double cheese-- both inside and out!

The weirdest recipe, though, just might be for burgers, or to be more specific, the unsettlingly-named Crusty Grape Burgers.

The burgers aren't really burgers-- more like mini-meatloaves since the meat mixture is full of the bread crumbs, egg, and condiments typical of a meatloaf and pressed into custard cups for a little pre-baking. Then the partially-cooked burgers/ loaves get glazed with grape jelly and baked under a layer of corn muffin batter. That's where the "crusty" comes from (not, say, crispy edges from being smashed on a hot griddle). So, if you like grape jelly on your corn muffins and always wondered whether that would be a good base for a meatloaf sandwich, this is the recipe for you! Smucker's suspected somebody somewhere might be asking for this. Meanwhile, I kind of wonder if there was actually more of a constituency for fruity beef tongues or parsnips with sundae topping. 

Funny Name: Not Halloween Edition

I am kind of embarrassed admitting how long I tried to figure out the Halloween connection for this recipe from Our Favorite Recipes (publications classes at Miller High School in Hemlock, Ohio, ca. late 1970s).

What makes this Gooly Cake? Did they mean Ghoulie Cake in the days before spell check? How is a Duncan Hines Cake mix topped with a cheesecake-like layer related to malevolent supernatural Halloween-y forces?

And then I finally realized that I'm an idiot and this is probably just a typo for gooey cake. Even Google knows that. Not that I needed a Google search to help figure it out.

In which a magazine tries to sell you on fiber and bran

Oh, yeah! It's that time again. 🎆 Time for some 1970s health food! 🎆

Today we have The Abridged Edition of the Saturday Evening Post Fiber & Bran Better Health Cookbook (Cory SerVaas, M.D., Charlotte Turgeon, and Fred Birmingham, 1977). The fact that The Saturday Evening Post made cookbooks somehow escaped me until I cam across this apparently lesser-known volume. (A quick Google search suggests that their All-American and Family cookbooks were more popular, but I have never been popular, so I guess it's fitting I have a more obscure entry. I'm sure it's more interesting anyway!)

How about a nice fiber and branful dinner menu? To show that this "health" cookbook isn't afraid of salt or sugar, we'll start off with a main dish of Raisin Ham Loaf.

I think the title is a missed opportunity. After all, this recipe also has bran cereal in it, so why not Raisin Bran Ham Loaf? If you consider that it's also got the mandatory '70s healthy recipe ingredient of nonfat dry milk, you might even consider this the precursor to current milk 'n cereal bars that kids grab for breakfast under the pretense that they're not actually candy bars. It's just that this version also has ham.

We'll need a salad to go with that Raisin Bran Ham. How about some of that perennial favorite, Sunshine Salad?

Ha! If you thought this would be the usual sweet carrot-and-pineapple goodness, you were wrong. In fact, even if you thought it was the weird Lutheran off-brand, you were wrong. This one doesn't even have gelatin! It's just a very health-foody mixture of bulgur, sprouts, and sunflower seeds in a vinaigrette. Whee.

Let's just move on to the dessert. How about a hunk of something green that's frozen solid?

I imagine avocado with lemon and honey isn't too bad, but a lightly sweet avocado ice cube is not exactly what most people hope for when they hear "dessert." It just seems like a recipe to make two things that people usually like-- avocados and dessert-- disappointing.

If all else fails, you can sneak a snack. The cookbook recommends keeping Super Seed Mixture in the fridge for whenever you need a little something to keep you from getting hangry at everyone within a 10-block radius.

I don't know, though. If the choice is between yelling at everybody who crosses your path and eating a spoonful or two of damp seeds, buckwheat, and rice out of the fridge, well... I'm not entirely sure which would be more satisfying. Fiber and bran might be good for what we politely call digestive health, but we might want to think about the impact on emotional and social health too...

The one word Roanoke cooks take very seriously

Remember how I suggested that The Junior League of Roanoke Valley, Virginia, creators of Of Pots and Pipkins (1971) might not even know what pipkins are? Well, there are a lot of words with meanings the Junior Leaguers can ignore! Do you expect the recipe for Moose to contain, well, moose?

Ha, ha! You fool! Moose is just a lasagna-adjacent casserole made with hamburger, noodles, tomato sauce, and lots of dairy (because the Junior Leaguers of Roanoke definitely believe in dairy above all else!).

What kinds of things might you expect to find in a Tutti Frutti Cake? If you think it should have fruits since "tutti frutti" is Italian for "all fruits," well, you don't understand how the Roanoke Valley Junior Leaguers operate.

To them, "tutti frutti" obviously means "chocolate and nuts." (I had a tough time deciding to post this one because I was convinced I must be missing something. No fruit in the cake? Must be in the filling. Nope! Maybe in the frosting? Nope! Maybe I didn't read the instructions carefully enough, and the fruit is surreptitiously sneaked into the narrative without being included in the ingredient lists? Not that I can tell...)

The one word the Roanoke Junior League seems to take seriously is "easy." 

Note that this is not Easy Green Bean Casserole, but "Easy" Green Bean Casserole. I think Mrs. Robert Clement (Dorothy Young) had to use the scare quotes because the cook actually has to make a sauce rather than just dumping a can of cream-of-something soup onto the beans and calling it a day. It's not really easy if you have to make your own sauce, so you can't just throw the word "easy" around unless you indicate that it's being used ironically.  Words like "moose" and "tutti frutti," who cares? They can mean anything. But do not tempt a cook with the promise of a recipe being easy unless it is really goddamn easy!

Close readings of some recipes from North Carolina

I picked up Old 'n' New Tried 'n' True (Boone Junior Woman's Club (I wonder which junior woman had an entire club all to herself and how she got everyone else to participate in the cookbook.), Boone, North Carolina, 1978) partly because the picture on the cover is so awkward-looking and mostly because I'll pick up nearly any reasonably-priced community cookbook from the 1970s. 

The couple's pose here is just soooo weird. It looks kind of like the woman is falling asleep while she's trying to stir something and so a guy somehow decides that the best course of action is to give her the Heimlich maneuver. Maybe the legend "Kissin' wears out... Cookin don't!" is meant to explain the supremely awkward stance? She's sick of being kissed and just trying to cook, hoping he'll give up on... kissing her neck, I guess? Maybe he's just a really ungainly vampire? In any case, I'd feel a lot better if they would do whatever they're trying to do here further away from the hot stove and the steaming pot full of whatever.

What might the pot be full of? The book has some unusual recipes, so it could be just about anything. This one made me remember my grandma's old trick of using extra icing from another project to make me a plate full of graham cracker sandwiches.

Pearl was way more ambitious than my grandma, as her filling for the graham crackers had to be cooked. The little sandwiches even got icing on top-- separate from the filling! My grandma definitely would have called it too much "foolin' around" for a snack with premade ingredients, but it's interesting to see how much work some people would put into it.

As I read the recipes, though, I tended to get caught up in the ways they were presented. Even if there's nothing too unique or exciting about the veggie/ cream of something soup/ packaged Pepperidge dressing mix combo in squash casserole...

... there's something about the wording of "The butter would go on top of the 1/2 cup of dressing saved for the top" that catches my breath for a moment. That little slip from instructional mode into a more conversational tone, as if Gail Ford had just realized she almost forgot to tell what to do with the reserved stuffing, just gets to me. She wants to be formal, but her more friendly personality slips through.

You might also notice that there's no butter in the ingredient list. That's one thing that drove me a little crazy about this book. Soooo many cooks would partially list the ingredients at the beginning and then casually mention other additions in the narrative of the recipe. If you wanted to make a recipe, it would be hard to make a quick list of ingredients to buy before you went to the grocery store. You'd either have to slow down and read the entire recipe carefully OR get home with everything listed at the top and realize that you still didn't have everything you needed. Sometimes, even the recipe writers seemed to get confused by their own systems. Take Pepper Steak, for example. 

Do you notice any conspicuous absences? The vegetables are listed on top. Once they're browned, they should be covered by the sauce ingredients that are mentioned narratively. Apparently meat is supposed to be included in some amount at some point, as the final step before serving is "Cover and cook until meat and vegetables are done," but that's the only mention of meat--aside from the word "steak" in the recipe title.

While many recipes underexplain, a few make me tired just reading them. Homa's Special Rice must be really special because she is willing to go through so many steps.

Once the sauce is cooked and the rice is boiled, then the two have to be combined in a casserole dish and topped with three separate (narratively added) piles of ingredients: carrots, raisins, and almonds. After baking them together, then the piles are removed separately so the rice can be poured over "your favorite dish." Then the carrots need to be sprinkled on top, and then the raisins, and then the almonds. I just can't imagine going to all the trouble of combining and separating and recombining... If I were the type of person who liked raisins in rice, I'd just mix everything in the casserole dish together before baking it and then serve it straight out of the dish. Of course, then it might not be quite so special.

I'm not always sure the recipe writers know what words mean, either. I'm not talking about specialized cooking terms that isolated '70s home cooks might not use regularly, like chiffonade or romesco. In this case, I mean a really simple, common term-- one that entire restaurant chains are based on. When people say that they want to get some pizza pies, I'll bet they're not thinking of this.

How is a pie shell filled with ground beef and onions in a thickened mayonnaise/ milk/ egg/ cheese sauce in any way a pizza? I believe this dish already has a name, and it is quiche. (And why is the title plural when it only makes one? Mellie B. Long is not one for details, as her Pepper Steak recipe suggests.)

Old 'n' New Tried 'n' True drove me a little crazy, but crazy in an amusing way... not crazy like the guy who sneaks up on a cook and tries to Heimlich her for no apparent reason.

October comes in on a Styrofoam tiger and rubber chickens

You know I wanted to do a Halloween menu from Cincinnati Celebrates: Cooking and Entertaining for All Seasons (Junior League of Cincinnati, first printing August, 1974, though mine is from the 1980 fifth printing) for October, but the one in this book was frankly boring. The menu was pretty basic and had few actual recipes associated with it. The decorations were pretty traditional. The most exciting touch was that the invitations were supposed to be written in invisible ink on ghost-shaped paper with only the instructions "Iron Me" visible, so the invisible ink would turn visible. So instead of going with the holiday I love, I picked a menu for an event that I could not care less about: tailgating.

I mean "Parking Lot Picnics."

The invitation is a miniature card of an actual tailgate, though, so I'm pretty sure I'm right in assuming that the Junior Leaguers mean tailgate parties.

Note that the invitation says to "look for the 'chickens.'" If you've been paying attention to this book, I'll bet you can guess why.

Yep! It's a craft-- in this case, rubber chickens with the name of the opposing team tied around their necks before they were fastened to the car antennas. My favorite touch is the "replica of a football field with a Styrofoam tiger representing the Cincinnati Bengals," though. I'm sure everyone was impressed by the ball-shaped tiger with a yarn tail and cork legs running across a white-ribbon-bedecked green Styrofoam field. I also love that the illustration makes it look like a hybrid cat-pig with gumdrop legs trampling some freshly-dug graves, so maybe this post is still Halloween-appropriate. (Yes, I know the crosses are supposed to be a goalpost, but let me have this one.)

The Champura is supposed to help with the chill if it's a nippy fall day.

The boozy hot chocolate should take the edge off. Just hope that nobody drinks enough that they start making fun of the model of a hybrid cat-pig in the cemetery, or Mitzi will lose her shit. She worked hard on that!

The chili doesn't have any hot sauce or chili powder, but at least the recipe calls for green chilis and cumin. It's not a contender for least chili-like chili of all time.

I think corn or tortilla chips would be better sides than crackers, celery and carrot strips, and slaw (and really wonder about cottage cheese as a topper!), but I also think the chili could maybe have used some chili powder and hot sauce, so what do I know?

The Shrimp & Mushroom Picks are here to add a little class to the tailgate, so everybody will know it's a Junior League event.

Plus there should be Cocktail Wieners with Mustard Sauce so it will seem tailgate-y enough. Have to balance out subbing champura for the beer and serving shrimp with things like chili and mini-wieners.

There are no recipes for the relish plate, banana cake, or coffee royale, but everybody knows the relish plate is only for decoration anyway, especially at a tailgate party! The cake could probably be picked up at a bakery on the way to the parking lot, and anybody could pour their own booze into some coffee and call it "royale" if they wanted. Everybody knows the real work for a tailgating party should be on the handcrafted decorations anyway. The food is just a lure to get everybody to admire rubber chickens and Styrofoam tigers on Styrofoam fields.