Funny Name: Don't Forget the "E" Edition

As you're busting out the fancy recipes for your end-of-the-year party, A Matter of Taste (The Heart Federal Savings and Loan Association, 1979) reminds you that the simple matter of a missing "e" can make a recipe sound really shitty.

The Ladies' Aid goes on a date with beans, and other oddities

Are you ready for a cookbook with a creative title? Too bad! Cook Book (Women's Fellowship of the United Church of Christ in Colwell, Iowa, 1967) arrived from my sister on Christmas Eve, so let's dig into a fresh find with a not-so-fresh title.

Like many community cookbooks of the time, this one prints chirpy, encouraging adages in the margins like "Problems are only opportunities in work clothes" or "Success consists in getting up just one more time than you fall." I was amused to see these contrasted with the poem at the very beginning of the book. 

Despite the group's attempts to seem happy to keep busy with whatever tasks got thrown their way, this poem suggests that Laides' Aid was pretty sick of taking care of everyone else's burdens, and happy to use the first few pages of the book to passive-aggressively complain about it. That is the true midwestern spirit.

Also in the midwestern spirit is this recipe for spaghetti sauce. While I have seen hundreds of recipes for spaghetti sauce, few outside of the midwest call for a cup of tomato soup...

...and I don't think I've seen any others that also call for a cup of mushroom soup! Maybe it needs something creamy to help cut down on the heat from the chili powder and Tabasco sauce. (I was kind of shocked that this called for a half teaspoon of Tabasco, considering most recipes from the time call for a few drops, but this does specify that using less is fine.)

The spaghetti sauce is likely spicier than the chili, actually, which has no Tabasco and an unspecified amount of chili powder. (I imagine many midwestern cooks venturing for a single, tentative shake of the chili powder directly into their hands, so they wouldn't accidentally put too much directly into the chili, and then they would hold their barely-chili-dusted hands upside down over the pot and let whatever grains were not stuck waft down into the pot.)

And while chili is often served with spaghetti in the midwest, this one has the spaghetti cooked right in. Of course, it's precooked, and then simmered for 2 hours in the chili, so it's probably more of a thickener than actual pasta by the time dinner is served.

A few recipes feature surprise ingredients. I'm used to seeing baked beans recipes sweetened with molasses and/or brown sugar, but Ruth Krumrey fortifies their sweetness with something I haven't seen before. 

Dates! The only way I'm used to consuming dates is in Lärabars, so now I'm imagining a very weird limited edition baked bean flavor that I would definitely not try. (Only six ingredients: dates, almonds, beans, onions, salt, and horror!)

Other recipes were more surprising for their technique. When I saw a recipe for Carrot-Raisin Bread, for instance, I assumed it was going to be basically carrot cake baked in a loaf pan. However...

This is a yeasted bread! Not what I expected at all. And despite yeasted breads being way more complicated to make than quick breads, this is the full extent of the recipe. That's right-- no directions at all! You better have enough experience baking yeast bread to be able to guess how to mix, knead, proof, shape, and bake this, because Grace Zimmer isn't giving even the slightest hint.

I was amused to see an over-explained recipe to contrast this under-explained one. Our final recipe is for homemade(ish) pizza. Granted, one might expect some pretty involved instructions for pizza, what with having to make a yeasted crust and a long-simmered, perfectly-seasoned sauce. Dick Menzel's "recipe" is probably not what you're thinking, though. 

Yep. He's walking readers through how to make a Chef Boy-Ar-Dee pizza mix. The recipe starts out by telling cooks to "Mix the dough according to the directions on the package" and ends by telling them to "Bake according to directions of package." Yes, the stuff in the middle explains adding one's own toppings, but do people really need to be told that pepperoni, canned mushrooms, tomatoes, and olives can be put on top? (And do the toppings really need to be placed with precision rather than sprinkled haphazardly?) This recipe is the opposite of the Carrot-Raisin Bread.

I like a cookbook that goes to extremes: over-explaining, under-explaining, boiling spaghetti until it's only a loose collection of dissolved starch molecules.... This book has got it all. (And it will complain if you ask it to do too much more!)

There's no side like molds for the holidays

I normally run a rainbow of gelatin salads for Pride Month. This year when I was searching for recipes, I found a couple salads that are plenty colorful all by themselves, but the colors are red, green, and/or white. Since so many LGBTQ+ people have to endure at least a few unenlightened relatives pretending their partners are just their roommates or griping about pronouns, I'm posting those multicolored holidayish/ rainbowish salads for a little boost of pride in December. (Yeah, I know it's really a stretch, but you're getting more jiggly salad madness out of this, so don't examine the premise too hard.) 

First up: If you have relatively good relatives (Ha!), Eggnog Cranberry Salad from Gracious Goodness! A Peach of a Cookbook (The Junior League of Macon, Georgia, first printing in 1981, though mine is from the 1985 third printing) has a festive rainbow-ish holiday feel.

The tart cranberry will be softened by the sweet and rich eggnog flavor. Hell, if you hold off on the celery and garnish with pecans instead of leaving them to get soggy in the mold, this might even be a reasonable addition to the dessert table for relatives who like a little kitsch with their eggnog.

If your relatives are sure to wear out their welcome pretty quickly, though, and you can't decide between the tomato aspic and the avocado mold-type recipes that often populate my June pride posts, you're in luck! There's an abbreviated rainbow in the Tomato-Avocado-Cheese Salad!

This red, white, and green-striped tower will look festive AND discourage guests from sticking around. I can't imagine too many people volunteering to help finish off 12-14 servings of congealed vinegary tomato juice, aging avocadoes, and be-mayo-ed cream cheese.

If there's a chance that Tomato-Avocado-Cheese Salad isn't gross enough, Recipes on Parade: Salads Including Appetizers (Military Officers' Wives Clubs, 1966) can come to the rescue with its own Avocado-Tomato Aspic.

While I acknowledge that this one is not quite as colorful--just lemon gelatin dissolved in tomato cocktail and flavored with pickle juice and brown sugar-- the hunks of celery, avocado, and green onion floating in it will also help make it a festive (and nigh inedible) red and green color.

If you still feel the need for an actual green gelatin mold to go with it, the Holiday Special might be an ideal partner.

It's mostly green from the lime gelatin and chopped gherkins, while the pimentos will give it little pops of red to complement the green (and the canned crushed pineapple will just hang out, making it kinda stringy and very vintage). You might even mold the Holiday Special right on top of the Avocado-Tomato Aspic if you want! The pickle flavor and passive-aggression should be enough to tie them together.

Happy (or at least bearable) holidays to all who celebrate! 

A dessert that says, "Let's end the party, already!"

Need a quick holiday dessert and not sure what to make? Norelco Microwave Oven Cookbook (North American Philips Corporation, 1979; mine is the second printing) has a recommendation!

Just thicken up that divisive holiday libation-- egg nog-- and stir in a bunch of candied fruit (perhaps left over from making that divisive doorstop of a gift-- fruitcake). Dump it over a yellow or white cake et voilà! The guests will be too full for dessert and ready to head home in no time. And since you made it in the microwave, you didn't even have to put too much effort into this house-clearing dessert. Win-win!

The cookbook I almost missed!

I very nearly ignored this book when I saw it at an antique mall, assuming it was a simplified version of the fancy fabric-covered photo albums my grandma used to make as gifts for weddings and graduations. I figured it would still be empty, just those old self-stick photo album pages, yellowing at the edges. It was close to a stack of cookbooks, though, so I opened it up and discovered a Christmas miracle:

It's Ann's Favorites 1989-- apparently a homemade Christmas gift from Ann Hall. Granted, 1989 is a bit new for me, but how could I possibly resist this dot matrix beauty? I am as ready to charge in as the spatula-wielding cook on the title page.

Yeah-- the dot matrix pictures are a big part of the draw. I adore the "Maindishes" title card, with its pitchfork-like fork, blobby turkey, and vertically squashed burger.

Although, gotta admit, the image on the "Misc." section gives me pause.

An garbage can with stink lines wafting off of it does not generally improve one's confidence in the recipes. (And if you were trying to think of a rationale for the graphic, supposing perhaps that the chapter included a recipe for homemade potpourri to make the can smell better or homemade soap to wash it out, nice try, but nope! The chapter has recipes for muesli, homemade Bisquick, and herb mixes.)

The recipes themselves are a fun mix. We have recipes that suggest Ann Hall was not always paying very careful attention.

I sincerely doubt that this cake requires 2-1/2 cups of [baking] soda. Plus, even though the instructions call for flour, there's no flour in the ingredient list. I'm pretty sure some wires got crossed. (If you want the correct proportions, this is a similar cake.) 

I also like that the recipe calls for oleo, I guess because it was supposed to be healthier than butter? If you're putting EIGHT CANDY BARS in the cake, though, health is clearly not a major concern. Just use the butter! It tastes better! (And it is better for you than the partially-hydrogenated margarines of the '80s anyway.)

We have recipes with less-than-appetizing names.

Fish Goop contains no fish, so I'm assuming it's goop to put on fish fillets.

And while this dish layering chicken, vegetables, and gravy over noodles and rice is probably perfectly fine (at least, until we get up to throwing on crushed pineapple and "Marachino" cherries)...

...calling it a "Japanese Sundae" just makes it sound terrible.  People think of desserts when they hear "sundae," not of chicken, veggies, and gravy with a maraschino cherry on top.

Some recipes have little midwestern touches...

Like the concern that the salsa in Mexican Chicken will not be sufficiently diluted by the cans of cream of mushroom and cream of chicken soup, the sour cream, and the cheese, so maybe use just half the bottle as "it is very hot." (Stray observation: Seeing "8 ozzz. can of mushrooms" makes me imagine a can full of snoozing fungi.)

I'm also kind of touched by the midwestern modesty. The Chicken Primavera might look like a standard midwestern interpretation of the dish, and a parenthetical note gives away that Ann Hall got it from somewhere: "1 teasp. of salt (I use half that amount)." 

I want to yell, "It's your cookbook, Ms. Hall! You can just give your measurements without apology!" She doesn't, though. We don't know where this recipe came from, but she feels honor-bound to present the original version, only suggesting her slight variation parenthetically. I find it strangely touching that she can't just own it and tell people to use half a teaspoon of salt. I also really wonder about the "I used frozen veggies" note after the asparagus. Is she telling us that she used frozen asparagus, or that if you can't afford/ don't have asparagus, just throw in some frozen mixed veggies? They'll be fine. I guess that's up to our own interpretation-- which again, I kind of love.

I'm glad I opened this one rather than assuming it was an empty photo album. It is a lovely little snapshot of 1989, but in the medium of dot matrix printing and midwestern family recipes.

Joy from the Little Imperfctions

I have a lot of low-budget community cookbooks. Most of them are at least professionally bound with a plastic spiral, but St. John's Joys (St. John's Episcopal Church, Gig Harbor, Washington, undated, but probably late '70s/ early '80s since one recipe credits the source as a cookbook originally published in 1978) is even lower budget than that. It's clearly put together by hand. The pages are just hole-punched and tied together with a couple bits of cord.

There is just no way I could resist something so homespun.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the recipes also have a homespun quality. 

I'm glad somebody went back and made sure that cooks knew to add sugar to the turtle cookies! Those would not be so great without the sugar.... (I'm also wondering what makes them "turtle." I thought they'd need caramel and pecans to get that designation, but that's not the case here. Maybe being cooked on a waffle iron is supposed to make them roughly turtle-shaped somehow?)

Other recipes might still need similar corrections.

Or maybe I'm just a weirdo for thinking that Granola-Prune Bread should probably have some prunes in it. 

Every community has its favorite recipes, but I was a little confused about why some garnered so much attention. Judy's Chili Cheese Cubes showed up not just once...

...but FOUR times! I'm sure the little cheesy egg cubes are a fine appetizer, but giving the same recipe four times seems a bit excessive. (Okay, two of them were because my booklet accidentally included the page twice, but that doesn't hurt my thesis that people were not always paying attention when this got put together.)

Then again, math didn't seem to be a strong suit at St. John's either. 

Combine the first nine ingredients and spread them on English muffin halves. Of course, there are only eight ingredients total IF we include the muffins, so... ? 

Even if things don't always quite make sense, the book does live up to its name, as St. John's Joys was a joy to read. 

It's time to save money on Christmas gifts!

Money can get tight around holiday time, so old community cookbooks from poorer areas can come to the rescue! If you can't put a lot of money into gifts, try Cook Book: Favorite Recipes from Our Best Cooks (Mabie Grade School Parent, Mabie, West Virginia, 1975), which offers up Pappy's Cheap Fruit Cake. 

No expensive candied fruits necessary! Nobody really wants fruitcake anyway, so might as well just use the cheaper dried fruits and call it good. Pappy thinks that's a fine idea.

Alternatively, if you really don't like somebody, crush their spirit with a Choco-Moist Cake. From the title, they'll think they're getting a moist chocolate cake. And then, well...

They'll find out that it's a fruit cocktail cake. With a few chocolate bits and nuts sprinkled on top.  (I was going to say "mixed in," but then I saw the instructions to "combine all ingredients, expect chocolate pieces and nuts." I'm still not sure what I'm supposed to expect of them, except that they prefer to be toppers rather than mix-ins and I better pay attention to their preferences.) In any case, yay. Barely any chocolate, but more than a pound of baked fruit cocktail.

It might cost a little bit more to spring for Stokely's finest fruit cocktail, chocolate chips, and nuts than for the currants and raisins in Pappy's Cheap Fruit Cake, but Choco-Moist Cake might save more money in the long run when the recipient decides that it might be better just never to swap gifts with you again.

I don't want the Golden Rule Class to treat me the way they want to be treated

 Ready for another creatively-titled community cookbook?

Yes, it's Cook Book (Golden Rule Class, Methodist Church, South Solon, Ohio, 1951). If you think the bare-bones title indicates that the recipes inside might be pretty basic too, well, that's fair.

Marzetti= hamburger, tomatoes, onion, milk, and noodles. Not even any seasoning. My favorite part is the instruction that the package of noodles needs to be "mashed fine." So, they're really overcooked and then mashed up? This sounds lovely (if "lovely" means "mushy and flavorless").

Maybe we should try for an alternative main dish.

While Spaghetti and Sausage en Casserole might sound kind of fancy from the "en" to emphasize the French origins of the casserole, this one is unlikely to be any more flavorful. In fact, the sausage doesn't even get the advantage of being browned! It's just boiled, added to the cooked spaghetti (or macaroni if you want to be a little different!), and flavored with a can of tomato soup. Oh boy.

Maybe we need some bread to go with the casserole. (I love some carb-on-carb action!) Both  of our casserole options suffer from lack of cheese (I mean, come on! Tomatoes love cheese, and it's not like they're getting flavor from anything else.), so let's go with a cheese bread.

I did not see that one coming. (Okay, that's technically not true since I wrote this post, but it was true when I originally looked at the cookbook.) Cheese Bread sounds like it's closer to bread pudding than bread, consisting of bread crumbs and cheese bound with milk and eggs, then sprinkled with cinnamon (for some reason) before being baked. So, well, hmmm. Maybe I'll just finish this off with some salad and call it a day.

I thought that Lime Jello Salad sounded like a perfectly respectable desserty salad-- lime Jell-O, cream cheese, pineapple juice. The touch of mayo is not optimal if you ask me, but there's probably too little of it to make much difference. But then, well... Things get interesting once you look past the ingredient list at the top of the page and read the instructions. Pineapple. Yum! Celery. Meh. I guess, but why? Nuts. Fine, if you don't mind soggy nuts. (Ha!) Jar of stuffed olives. What? Who adds olives to dessert? Probably someone who is desperate to convince people that this is a bona fide salad and not dessert, but trust me, people in the midwest are prepared to accept this as a salad without the olives.

But maybe the people in this town just really like fruity gelatin with the relish tray dumped in. This Holiday Salad gets its festive colors from maraschino cherries mingling with tiny sweet pickles.

In short, South Solon may seem very bland with its basic casseroles, but that might be better than when the townsfolk decide to get creative with garnishes, canned fruit, and Jell-O.

The Junior Leaguers finally get worn out in December

Cincinnati Celebrates: Cooking and Entertaining for All Seasons (Junior League of Cincinnati, first printing August, 1974, though mine is from the 1980 fifth printing) goes ALL OUT for Christmas. There's a Nature's Noel menu asking kids to make edible treats for the birds. There's a Yuletide Feast letting me know that Pheasant in Port with a Cucumber Mousse (and countless other dishes) constitutes a Junior Leaguer's proper Christmas dinner. There's a Tin Party to serve a bunch of cookies with brandied cheese and to recycle tin cans into invitations and decorations. I decided to go with Wind Down, though, as this menu is dedicated to serving the leftovers, which is one of my favorite themes.

I think the Junior Leaguers were getting sick of the elaborate invitations by this point because they're not even trying anymore.

Just rip the covers off your old Christmas cards with Santa "Clause" themes and write on the backs. And to decorate? The kids are off school, so some of that work can be delegated. Just make the kids a big old wad of Rice-Krispies-treat-style goo, throw in Cheerios for a change...

... and have them shape the mixture into trees, then decorate the "trees" with gumdrop slices and a construction paper star. Easy! And if that's not enough party décor, well, get down that large brandy snifter.

And fill it with soda water and mothballs! Yes, it's a real conversation piece to watch the mothballs "rise and fall animatedly." (Full disclosure: The snifter o' mothballs trick is what really sold me on this menu. I might have mentioned it already, but the Junior Leaguers REALLY seem to be running out of steam at this point.)

As for the menu, the Glogg has enough booze that nobody will care if your idea of decorating is putting out a big snifter full of mothballs on top of trashed wrapping paper and next to lumpy Cheerio trees. Hell, if guests have enough Glogg, they might not even remember those last-minute embellishments.

There are no recipes for Turkey Hash (I guess because everybody was expected to have a favorite hash recipe at the ready back then?) or for Green Beans with Toasted Almonds (presumably because everybody knew how to heat up some canned or frozen beans and throw on some almonds at the last minute). 

The Cranberry Salad could use up that last pound of cranberries, along with any stray nuts that didn't get eaten at the 27 other holiday parties that Junior Leaguers hosted.

And of course, it is a way to add the obligatory can of crushed pineapple. (Sometimes I think families in the '50s through the '70s must have had an entire separate pantry dedicated just to canned crushed pineapple and fruit cocktail.)

The menu doesn't specify what Christmas cookies to set out in the assortment, so I'll leave you with the Holly Wreath Cookies that might have been left over from the Tin Party.

I hope you've had as much fun peeking into the lives of '70s Junior Leaguers as I have! I can't say that they've inspired me to wire faces onto tennis rackets or turn a spatula into a prospective bride's arm, but I could sure go for a snifter full of soda water and mothballs right now. Now I'm off to choose a new book to begin each month in the new year!

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.