Getting half-crocked about "natural" foods

I was excited to pick up Carlson Wade's Natural Foods Crockery Cookbook (1975) because I love a '70s health food cookbook. They are usually just as packed with questionable-at-best theories about what makes food "healthy" (and what "healthy" means anyway) and trendy-for-the-time foods as any wellness nonsense we see today.

I actually came away kind of disappointed with this one, though. It is WAAAAY more about the "crockery" (meaning slow cooker) part of the title than the "natural." Natural foods cookbooks usually have lengthy explanations of what is "natural" or "healthy" (and often attack anything that falls outside that realm), an in-depth exploration of the author's health food philosophy, etc. This book mostly tells how to use and take care of a slow cooker. Sure, there are mentions of how the cooking method will help retain vitamins in the foods' natural juices, but there's really not a lot of health food talk. Perusing the recipes doesn't exactly help, either. A lot of them are just pretty standard stews and roasts with standard meats and vegetables.

Occasionally, there's a hint that there might be some weird "health" philosophy behind the scenes, like this recipe for "Fruit" Cake.

Why does the book insist on calling a carrot cake a "fruit"-in-scare-quotes cake? You might think that the author has some hang-up about the sugars in fruit and recommends replacing fruits with vegetables, but 1. This recipe allows for optional raisins; and 2. This has 2-1/2 cups of sugar! Clearly, the author is not afraid of sugar. And if any question of trying to limit fruit remains (The raisins are optional, after all!), well, the recipe for Ham Steak in Port Wine should dispel that notion.

Clearly not as put off by fruity-and-meaty combinations as I am, Wade smothers the ham in cranberries, grapes or raisins, and pineapple, all kept juicy and sweet with cider, port wine, maple syrup, and orange juice. Again, this is clearly not someone put off by sugar!

The dessert section isn't packed with cottage cheese, nonfat dry milk powder, prune, and sunflower-seed-based concoctions, either.

This has the expected honey and carob, though in this case the carob powder is inexplicably paired with crème de cacao?! I can't even begin to guess the idea behind this. And while dippers can be apples or bananas, the recipe also suggests cake and marshmallows.

Since the commitment to "natural" foods was so low, I guess I shouldn't have been that surprised to find a few recipes that seemed minimally committed to the "crockery" part of the title, either. Sure, Gourmet Dressing does eventually come around to the slow cooker.

This only happens after a stint of sautéing a meat mixture and cooking rice on the stovetop-- a time-consuming enough process that it kind of negates all the points in the introduction about how slow cooking will streamline everything-- but then once everything is combined, the dressing is stuffed into a bird (conspicuously absent from the ingredient list). Sure, you can cook the bird in the slow cooker (as instructed), but if you want crisp skin, you're better off putting it in the oven. I expected the recipe to be for a dressing served on its own (as the name dressing rather than stuffing seems to imply)-- one that could spend time in the slow cooker while the oven was occupied with other foods. (You know, the kind of thing that would be helpful at a holiday meal.) In short, the slow cooker could have saved the day, rather than turned out a soggy fowl with rubbery skin.

In short, Carlson Wade's Natural Foods Crockery Cookbook doesn't seem fully committed to its premise, but as terrible as '70s health food tends to be, I can't entirely blame it. Plus, its occasional decision to use a slow cooker in a less-than-optimal way is not even half as egregious as the uses microwave cookbooks used to dream up for those expensive appliances.... I guess I'll give Carlson Wade a pass on this one.

Post-Thanksgiving Cranberry Follies

When I said that Recipes on Parade: Salads Including Appetizers (Military Officers' Wives Clubs, 1966) had a lot of cranberry salads, I was serious. I posted a bunch of those recipes before Thanksgiving, but I thought I'd keep it going after Thanksgiving with some recipes to use up the leftovers: salads with both cranberry products and poultry. (Okay, most of these call for chicken, but I'm sure turkey would be a fine sub.)

I was surprised by just how popular these types of salads were. Even former First Lady Mrs. Eisenhower sent in a recipe for Chicken Jewel Ring Salad.

Luckily, the recipes generally follow this formula of making the cranberry sauce into one layer and the jellied-chicken-salad-type-thing into a separate layer. This example has a fairly standard chicken, mayo, celery, and almond salad, but a lot of the recipes use canned soup in the chicken layer:

This version also suggests the celery more properly belongs in the cranberry sauce than in the chicken layer. 

Some recipes get fancy with the cranberry layer, adding in an orange, for instance. 

Others opt for crushed pineapple, because what '60s recipe couldn't be enhanced by a can of crushed pineapple?

If you're too lazy for the layering, though, there's a throw-it-all together recipe.

Salad Supper is essentially a horseradish cole slaw suspended in a lemon Jell-O, mayonnaise, and 7-Up concoction. The turkey and cranberry sauce are just supposed to be toppers, so this might be a good way to use up the very last of the leftovers since the recipe doesn't rely on them for the mold's volume.

And if you've only got leftover cranberry sauce, but the turkey is gone, that doesn't necessarily mean you have to be left out from the meat-and-cranberry-Jell-O fun. Just crack open that can of crab meat you have in the pantry next to the cream of mushroom soup, and you can have Crab Mousse.

Just unmold the mousse onto slices of cranberry sauce, and you've got a memorable post-Thanksgiving meal.

I hope the imaginary mixing of gelatinized canned cream soups, leftover meat, and winter fruits is a festive start for your holiday season! You're welcome.

Not-so-mysterious mysteries of the midwest

I've got loads of Lutheran cookbooks, but Kitchen Korner Cookbook (Lutheran Brotherhood Bond, 1963) might be the most explicitly Scandinavian one short of the volume actually titled Scandinavian Recipes. 

I mean, The Lutheran Brotherhood Bond really expects you to know your (Scandinavian) stuff. The Krum Kake recipe assumes you not only know how to mix the batter, but also have a Krum Kake iron, know how to use it, know that a Krum Kake is a rolled cake, and have the skill to roll it.

Mrs. Audrey L. Hagen is not one to coddle home cooks by spelling it all out (though she definitely doesn't mind sharing a couple paragraphs of biographical information).

The book seemed a bit intimidating at first because so many titles are written in a Nordic language, but most recipe titles are translated for outsiders. The Sild Salat is just a Herring Salad, a kind of modified potato salad that also encompasses beets and (obviously) herring.

I guess you've got to use the hard-cooked eggs as a garnish instead of mix-in to make it seem fancier than a run-of-the-mill midwestern salad.

And for every even moderately-intimidating-to-a-non-Scandinavian recipe, there's a balancing typical midwest-American-of-vague-whitish-ancestry recipe, like the Shrimp Salad Supreme.

If you can't handle the thought of chopping up herring and beets, just suspend some shrimp, eggs, celery, and walnuts in a froth of mayonnaise, whipped cream, and whipped lemon Jell-O, and nobody at the church potluck will think the worse of you.

If you want an "exotic" starch, Schinkennoodle ("exotic" for the "schinken" and reassuring for the appended "noodle") might fit the bill. 

It's just noodles baked into a ham custard and topped with corn flakes, so reassuringly carb-heavy and actually, pretty familiar...

If the name still makes it too intimidating, though, you can get your carb-on-carb fix the proper midwestern way with Wild Rice Casserole.

Just cook your wild rice in a couple varieties of canned soup and top it off with chow mein noodles! 

The similarities in cuisines are just about enough to make you think that there's a pretty strong overlap in the Venn diagram of Scandinavian recipes and midwest-American-of-vague-whitish-ancestry recipes. You've got to have hard-boiled eggs and plenty of mayo in a salad, and you've got to have a whitish binder in a carb-heavy casserole topped off with another carb. 

Wading through a bog of cranberry salads

One thing I've always looked out for in my old cookbooks is my Grandma's cranberry salad recipe. Her recipe was so beloved that it made an appearance at most holiday dinners-- not just Thanksgiving. It came out for Christmas and Easter too, even if it meant she had to remember to buy extra cranberries to freeze when they were in season so she'd have them later. It was also the only item I ever remember Grandpa helping her make. She was generally the cook, but when it was cranberry salad time, Grandpa got in on the act. He'd hand crank the cranberries and apples through their old meat grinder so they would be in appropriately small pieces to disperse throughout the Jell-O while Grandma supremed the oranges-- a step that she would normally consider too much of a hassle to bother with. They were serious about the cranberry salad. I always assumed Grandma had gotten the recipe off the back of some food packaging or from a neighbor who got it from a neighbor who got it from a community cookbook that slightly altered it from the back of some food packaging. This is the long way of saying that anytime I get a new salad or community cookbook, I expect to run across her recipe. I never do. When I got Recipes on Parade: Salads Including Appetizers (Military Officers' Wives Clubs, 1966), I thought I surely must see her recipe this time, as the book has soooo much real estate devoted to Jell-O-based salads, including multiple pages (pages!) of cranberry salads. Her salad is not in there, though.

Some of the salads are nearly devoid of fruit, like the Cranberry Salad Delight.

The canned cranberries are the only real fruit, joined by the flavorings from the pineapple-grapefruit gelatin (which was apparently a thing in the early 1960s!) and 7-Up.

Many include nuts and/or celery, neither of which Grandma used. (I don't think any of us would have been happy about celery in a fruity salad, and Jell-O-fied nuts just get soggy.)

Some of them include toppings, which hers did not have. No one in my family would have been impressed by old-fashioned mayonnaise on our jiggly treat. (Pretty sure I would have entirely refused to taste it if any portions even touched mayo, homemade or not.)

I might have been persuaded to try the one with marshmallow-studded sour cream topping if I had been unaware that this version had a little bit of mayo in the sour cream, though.

And some recipes are just way too fancy.

I'm not sure my Grandma ever even bought an avocado, much less put it into a Jell-O salad. (The same is true of Port wine.) And if the fancy ingredients in Cranberry Layered Mold would not have been enough to discourage her, the multi-layer construction would have done it. That's way too much fussing around.

Even though the book is stuffed with cranberry gelatin recipes (and there are more to come for the post-Thanksgiving weekend!), there's still nothing quite like Grandma's recipe. I don't know where she got it, and I'm still shocked that I haven't stumbled across it (or even one with her secret ingredient of orange juice concentrate to taste, to balance out the sweet and tangy flavors) after countless Jell-O recipes and almost a decade of writing this blog. Maybe Grandma occasionally got more creative in her cooking than I gave her credit for.

That lean and clueless look

One interesting thing about Lean Cuisine for the Weight Conscious (1978) is that no one, as far as I can tell, wants to take credit for it. While it looks like a common spiral-bound fundraising book, it has no information about who created it.

There's no real set of rules, either, that might clue me in about which diet regimen this is supposed to fall under. The chapter on liver suggests maybe Weight Watchers since they used to be so focused on making sure dieters ate plenty of liver, but that's about it. Given little guidance (and no calorie counts!), I decided to just throw together a day's menu based on whatever weird-looking recipes I found. 

We'll start, of course, with breakfast. Since there's so little guidance on what dieters are supposed to eat, I thought I'd better play it safe and choose a recipe with "breakfast" right in the name. This one is a treat, too, so it should help gradually ease you into dieting (rather than expecting you to get by on a grapefruit half and a cup of coffee).

I'm not sure how much of a treat nonfat dry milk, imitation margarine, cocoa powder, artificial sweetener, dehydrated apple, and corn flakes make when they're all smushed together and frozen. I guess "treat" is pretty subjective for dieters. And I'm sure the tablespoon of reserved corn flakes sprinkled over the top makes all the difference in the world. Let's just move on to lunch....

If you're the stay-at-home type, here's a nice craft project:

Yep! Hollow out an apple, stuff it with diced frankfurters mixed with the apple innards and some garlic salt and curry powder, and then bake the thing. Yum? 

If you work in an office and need to bring your lunch, never fear! You can still have a weird experience with hot dogs, though it will be less elaborate. From the special section of packed lunches, I present Spicy Frankfurters and Friends.

I personally love the idea of someone sitting at their office desk using strings to pull hot dogs out of hot tomato juice (Sorry, tomato soup since it's now mixed with hot dog juices, I guess?) so the franks can be laid out on very thin slices of rye bread and consumed with a pickle and the "soup." The frozen dessert provides extra nonfat dry milk and a nice temperature contrast.

For dinner, we'll be fancy and provide an appetizer so this won't all seem too restrictive: Spicy Dip. 

What makes a bunch of pureed broccoli stalks seasoned with Worcestershire, dry mustard, garlic salt, onion powder, and lemon juice "spicy" is beyond me. Oh, wait, there it is! The "dash cayenne pepper." An immeasurably small amount of cayenne in more than two cups of vegetable matter is sure to heat things up.... And I suppose you're supposed to dip the broccoli crowns in this? (Or go crazy and have it with chips. Who knows what the guiding philosophy is for this one?)

Maybe we should just move on to the main course. Let's try a lovely regional specialty to help counteract all the blandness of dried milk powder and hot dogs.

I will be the first to admit that I have zero expertise in gumbo, but I still feel more qualified to make a gumbo than whoever created this abomination! There is no holy trinity, even though celery, onions, and bell peppers are all diet-friendly. There is no okra or filé powder. There's no shellfish-- just canned tuna, and in case the canned flavor is insufficiently strong, canned asparagus. You know what this does have, though? Yep. Nonfat dry milk, for some reason.

Fine. Let's just skip to dessert. I'll bet you can't guess what it is!

Oh, wait. You probably did because this book has a real fixation on frozen fruit-and-dried-milk concoctions. My favorite part about A Better Banana is that the part that is supposed to somehow make the banana better has just as much brown food coloring as actual cocoa powder, I guess in a bid to make dieters think the mostly-dried-milk topping is more chocolatey than it is. The butter flavoring should really help enhance the dish's richness.

I can kinda see why nobody wanted to take credit for this book. Admitting that you're this fixated on nonfat dry milk, clueless about the meaning of "spicy," and ignorant of famous regional delicacies would just be sad.

Funny Name: Same Name, Different Goop

Apparently, regional fundraiser cookbooks really liked to troll Gwyneth Paltrow before they even knew who she was or that she would associate the word "goop" with quartz yoni eggs and other weird, overpriced bullshit. While Grangers thought goop should be enough ground beef, spaghetti, and cheese casserole to serve a crowd, the Celebration Cook Book (American Association of University Women, West Chester, PA, 1976) insists the recipe should use more heavily-processed ingredients and be for a smaller party. 

Here, "Goop" involves mixing wiener chunks into Kraft Garlic Cheese, mushroom soup, and sherry or vermouth, and garnishing said chunks with canned olives or mushrooms. It's much cheaper (and possibly healthier!) than the crap Paltrow tries to unload on people with (as my grandma would say) more money than sense.

Guess what else Norelco used to make

What do you think of when you hear "Norelco"? I'm guessing you're thinking of electric shavers, and a quick Google search for "Norelco" not only brought up various types of shavers but also informed me that a popular question people ask when searching Norelco is "Can you use a Philips Norelco on your balls?" (Answer: "Our best ball shaver is Philips Norelco BG7030 /49.") So why am I writing about ball shaving on a vintage cookbook blog?

Yep. Norelco used to made microwaves, so they also offered this Norelco Microwave Oven Cookbook (North American Philips Corporation, 1979; mine is the second printing).

The book offers all of the head-scratcher recipes that microwave cookbooks used to promote. I mean, why bother making Tomato Beef Stew in the microwave...

...if it's still going to take more than an hour anyway? There doesn't seem to be any real advantage to this unless the cook enjoys the chance to scrape dried-up splashes of canned tomato soup off of a microwave "ceiling" (which can be accomplished with much less time and effort by simply microwaving the canned soup on its own).

The book also offers recipes for the types of specialty foods that most people wouldn't want to risk ruining in the microwave.

I mean, really, who is going to microwave whole ducks?! Especially if they still need to be broiled in the conventional oven at the end of their cooking time anyway?

But there are also some recipes that just seem odd no matter what type of cookbook they're in. Hot Chili Mexican Salad doesn't necessarily sound bad at first-- probably just another variation of the ever-popular taco salad.

I knew I was probably being a little snobby when I scoffed at the ketchup (sorry, catsup) in the recipe. A lot of these types of recipes call for a cooked tomato product anyway, and nobody cares if I'd prefer tomato paste or juice. But then I saw the next ingredient was mayonnaise. Seriously? Catsup and mayo in a taco salad variant? That's weird, microwave or no microwave.

Similarly, I wasn't surprised to see a Sweet 'n Sour Chicken recipe. I swear that nearly every '70s cookbook has one. But...

...how is this sweet 'n sour? Sweet 'n sour is usually vinegar, sugar, pineapple, and green peppers, or some variation thereof. Cream of mushroom soup with extra mushrooms, poultry seasoning, and sour cream wouldn't seem to fit anybody's definition of sweet 'n sour. I kind of wonder if this has the wrong title, but it's the only recipe on the page that goes on and on about the wonders of "thigh-legs," so that part seems to line up. Maybe the sherry is supposed to be sweet and the sour cream is supposed to be sour? Even that explanation seems like a stretch.

And now, for the final mystery: Why do you need a microwave to make these?

Wouldn't microwaving the ice cream make it too soft to scoop into ice cream cones?

Yes, it probably would, but you're looking at the wrong part of the picture if you're asking that question. It's easier to tell on the mint chocolate chip cone, so look there-- under the ice cream.

You need  the microwave to bake the cupcake part.

Yep-- Birthday Cake Cones are cupcakes baked right into flat-bottomed ice cream cones, and they're probably easier to bake in a microwave than a conventional oven because they're easier to put in without spilling cake batter everywhere. I'm being nice and ending with a fun recipe that actually does seem to kinda make sense in the microwave-- probably because I had entirely forgotten about these and have a bit of nostalgia for them. Someone in my childhood church made cupcake cones for potlucks (with icing instead of ice cream on top-- or they would have melted in the buffet line!) and I thought they were the greatest thing ever because they looked so cool. I mean, they tasted like cake in an ice cream cone, so that was fine too, but the look was what made them so fun. Thanks to Norelco for reminding me of those... and also for allowing me to start a post by writing about ball shaving.

Funny Name: Double Take Edition

You might wonder why I chose Meat Loaf for Two from Favorite Recipes 1977 (Troy Mills Christian Women's Fellowship, of Troy Mills Disciples of Christ Christian Church) as a funny name entry. It's not really a funny name. The ingredients are not particularly interesting for a meat loaf, either: ground beef, carb crumbs, milk, egg, some seasonings.

And then you get to that very last line: Serves four. Did Mrs. Tim (Mary K.) Johnson forget the premise halfway through? Did she just assume that everybody likes leftovers, so it was meat loaf for two twice? Was she really bad at math? Or maybe it's meat loaf for two large dogs or for four people, and she assumed most people would just feed this to the dogs after they tasted it? If you have any additional theories, feel free to share!

In November, a miserable party before the more famous miserable party

It's November, so you're probably expecting a Thanksgiving 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). The menu is pretty predictable, though, and I thought the concept of an election night party sounded much more, well, not fun, but interesting, so we're going with that.

I can't imagine an election night party where "Bi-partisan politics [would] not spoil the conviviality of good friends, food and a sense of humor." Maybe politics were less polarized in the '70s, but maybe the Junior Leaguers were too clueless to catch on to the sarcasm that crept into guests' voices, or maybe everybody was so embarrassed by what actually transpired that they all decided to say it was a good time and try to trap other people into having similarly distressing parties. If the Junior Leaguers had to suffer through an election night party, well then you should too. 

The invitations are uncharacteristically low-key, not needing specialized craft products or hand delivery.

I was more amused by the decorations. The appetizers are speared on cocktail picks and displayed by sticking the picks through a layer of cabbage leaves hiding a styrofoam ball. "Cabbage planet surrounded by canape moons" is as good a theme as any for an election night party, I suppose.

The centerpiece is a hat filled with patriotically-hued carnations and play money, I guess to celebrate the proud history of bribery and lobbying? 

I didn't bother to copy the recipe for stuffed cherry tomatoes, as it just tells cooks to cut the tops off of cherry tomatoes, remove the centers with a spoon, drain, and then stuff them with whatever you want to stuff them with, like crabmeat, cream cheese mixed with grated onion, thumb tacks in a wad of silly putty. Whatever. (Okay, I may have added one of those options myself.)

The Marinated Shrimp are only a bit more interesting.

I just hope that the cook remembers to let the shrimp marinate in the refrigerator for at least two days before serving... although, if partisan politics were not really as easygoing as the writers let on, maybe the server would just leave the appetizers out for a couple of days and then remember not to eat them. Ingesting days-old shrimp will teach Mark and Debra for voting for Carol for the school board!

I am ALWAYS into fresh-baked bread, so the promise of homemade soft pretzels is the one thing that might lead me to briefly consider going to such a party. 

These are just pretzel-shaped breadsticks, though, not actual pretzels, as they're not boiled in an alkaline solution before baking. I'm sure they're fine, but not really pretzels. They're just pretending, the way everybody at the party is trying to pretend they can still be friends after the row about whether Carol was fit for the school board.

The Company Casserole seems kind of like it might be pretending, too. 

The layers of dairy, noodles, and tomato meat sauce sound like a pretend-lasagna. I'm sure it's pretty good, and making this instead of a real, labor-intensive lasagna an easy way to save some time so you can rehearse the whole speech about why Carol is going to be the ruination of the school district, just in case she wins.

The Tossed Italian Salad will give the cook a chance to use up the can of garbanzo beans that has been in the pantry since before Watergate and those last two hard-cooked eggs in the back of the fridge.

And there are no recipes for the onion bread or the "Election Night Cookies." Maybe the invitations should have come with RSVP cards asking guests to vote for their favorite option from a list of cookies. Then the cook would have ignored the results and made whichever one they'd already chosen because it's their house, dammit! Who is going to bend over backwards to humor a fool who would vote for Carol anyway?

I usually think of Thanksgiving as being a meal that is high-tension and high-conflict, but Election Night Party seems like it could be even worse. Maybe this menu is supposed to make Thanksgiving simply seem tamer by comparison? Or maybe it's just practice to help the cook exercise the self-control not to strangle Uncle Bill when he goes on another one of his rants at the Thanksgiving table...