Barbecuing with Big Boy (grill-- not the restaurant)

It's officially summer! That means it's time for the Big Boy Barbecue Book (Tested Recipe Institute, Inc., 1963), especially as we head into Independence Day, when people are likely to be firing up their grills.

It's not too surprising that "Big Boy" hews to the traditional idea that barbecue is the one time that gender roles for home cooks get reversed. The cover shows a man cooking up massive hunks of meat while the women look on, admiringly. I doubt he notices tat their admiring expressions seem a bit strained. Maybe the women are having trouble getting excited about a meal consisting of a huge portion of meat that's underdone in the center and burned on the outside accompanied only by 13 pounds of fruit that's been cooking in the sun and covered in flies all afternoon.

The inside cover carries on the theme with a series of cartoons showing the "history" of cooking:

Men started it by intrepidly getting their mastodon steaks close to a fire-- then it was carried on by women with hearths, fuel-burning ovens, and finally electric stovetops as the centerpiece of groovy '60s kitchens-- before it was finally reclaimed by men intrepidly holding supermarket steaks above a backyard flame.

The book's page extolling "The Fun of Barbecuing at Home" even has a section explaining how wives will appreciate a backyard barbecue.

I love the way this discounts all the wives' work, noting that "All they have to do is make the salad and dessert [which are of course so easy that the husband needn't bother to try to do that work himself]. The kitchen stays clean [except, of course, for any dishes needed to make the salad and dessert, plus any kitchenware the husband uses in the grilling process but doesn't deign to wash himself]. The kitchen stays clean [as long as you ignore the fact that it does not]. There is almost no wash-up afterwards [because any work not done by the man is invisible]." Even the illustration seems to suggest that the "no cleanup" line is bullshit. While the plate could plausibly be construed as a paper plate, the mug being thrown in the trash looks distinctly non-disposable. It's funny how a woman who is only an illustration and not a real person feels compelled to play along with the illusion that this is all carefree and effortless.

You may notice that I'm vamping on the illustrations. That's partly because I'm genuinely amused by them and partly because the book doesn't have a lot in the way of recipes, aside from discussions of how and how long to cook various types and thicknesses of meat to reach varying degrees of doneness. There aren't too many scintillating recipes. Still, I'll offer up a quickie menu for your fourth of July (or whenever!) festivities.

First of all, you need some hot dogs. The book has a whole array of Frankfurter Treats, each identified with a different part of the country.

This picture at the top of the page led me to suspect that there might be a recipe for marshmallow-coated hot dogs, but no such luck.

There are the unfortunately named "Dixie Dogs," a treat Elvis would have gobbled up: franks filled with peanut butter and wrapped in bacon before hitting the grill. Wisconsin's Pride made an appearance on our grill once in a great while when I was a kid, but we just called them the hot dogs with cheese and bacon. Boston's Best unsurprisingly feature baked beans (plus mustard and relish). The Coney Island Special sounds very wrong to me. I always thought of Coney dogs as featuring meat sauce, not sauerkraut, ketchup, and mustard. Wikipedia agrees with me, so I don't know what Big Boy was thinking. The South-of-the-Border dogs featuring chili sound closer to Coneys than the Coney Island Specials do!

But let's not get mired in semantics and instead pick out a side dish. Maybe a nice stuffed pepper?

These are easy: fill green peppers with canned chili beans, top with ketchup, wrap with foil, and barbecue! (They don't even sound bad to me-- swap out the ketchup for a sprinkle of cheese and I'm in!)

And finally, we need dessert. For a patriotic holiday, that means apple pie!

This one isn't grilled, so it's probably supposed to be a recipe for mom to make ahead of time in the kitchen. I'm sure all that paring, slicing, rolling out of pie crust, folding, trimming, pressing, fluting, and baking are no real effort and generate no dishes! The part of the recipe that intrigued me the most was the decoration. What are those weird orangey lumps on the top crust?

They are "'apples' cut from slices of processed cheese and sprinkled with paprika." I guess that puts Big Boy right in the apple-pie-and-cheese camp along with Ed Gein.

I hope you have a chance to grill something if you want to! Or don't if you don't! It's a lot of work for something that usually comes out burned anyway, so you do you. I'll be eating sugar snap peas and watching Uncle Sam in the privacy of my own home.

Pillsbury Puffs Up

One thing that struck me about the Pillsbury's Bake Off Main Dish Cookbook (1968) was just how many recipes called for unusually flavored choux pastry. There were so many odd little "puff" recipes that I thought they deserved to have their own little party.

The Filled Parmesan Puffs initially sound pretty good, flavoring the pastry puffs with cornmeal, cayenne pepper, and the titular cheese.

The pickle-y tuna salad filling sounds decidedly less great to me, but even for people who are less skeptical about tuna salad, I suspect the addition of canned shoestring potatoes will make it seem kind of odd.

Parmesan also shows up in the Parmesan Puff Chops...

This time, though, the Parm-and-onion seasoned pastry is baked right on top of the pork chops. I imagine chops crowned with a crisp, cheesy crown taste just fine, but it seems like it would be pretty confusing to dig around under a layer of pastry trying to find the pork chops.

If you want veggie-flavored puffs, the Onion Corn Puffs feature onion soup mix and cornmeal in the pastry.

Plus, the chicken salad filling adds celery, carrots, pimiento, and green pepper to the party.

If you're not so into veggies, the Chicken Devil Puffs might be more your speed.

The "devil" comes from deviled ham right in the choux pastry, which added to the creamy chicken filling makes these the meat-lovers' version of cream puffs, I guess?

And finally, since no post is complete without a misguided use of canned pineapple, we have Hawaiian Tuna Puffs, featuring soy-sauce-flavored puffs...

...and a pineapple-and-water-chestnut-laced tuna salad filling. It's one of the purest distillations of trying to be midwest-fancy I've seen in ages. It's also a reminder that real people apparently make cream puffs at home once in a while... or at least they used to. I'm perfectly content to watch contestants on Food Network shows try to make ugly-sweater-themed croquembouche in 10 minutes and say that's as close as I'm going to get to making the pastry. The '60s were a very different era.

Plan-Ahead for Disappointment

I love ideas about how to use leftovers. A lot of times they sound pretty good, of course, but the concoctions can just as often lead to recipes that are clearly the product of someone panicking and, say, cramming all the leftovers together into a Jell-O mold. Hoping for the latter, I picked up The Plan-Ahead Cookbook: 300 Delectable Ways to Use Leftovers (Ceil Dyer, 1969).

The Spice Islands jars are so prominent on the cover that I initially thought this might have been commissioned by Spice Islands, but a closer inspection reveals there are actually more McCormick canisters in the picture-- they just aren't facing out. Nobody is actually sponsoring this book.

In any case, spice doesn't always play much of a role anyway, like in this Noodle Pie. I initially imagined it would be a pie with a noodle-and-egg mixture as the crust and a spaghetti-sauce-like filling, but I was very wrong.

This is hot carb-on-carb action, with noodles (seasoned with ham, onions, salt, and pepper, and lubricated with a bit of sour cream) sandwiched between two pastry crusts! 

Even entries that I would expect to be a bit spicier don't really come through, as the Quick Chicken Enchiladas mostly rely on the seasoning of the "medium can chili sauce, without beans" (which I initially assumed to mean canned chili, given that things sold as "chili sauce" tend not to have beans in them anyway, so specifying the kind without the beans wouldn't really even make sense-- but then again, it would be hard to dip tortillas in actual canned chili, so maybe Dyer is trying to clear up 1960s cooks' confusion about canned chili vs. chili sauce in the most confusing way possible?).

In any case, I think I'm actually less appalled by the lack of spice than by the instructions to roll shredded lettuce in the tortillas with the chicken before baking. Fresh, crispy lettuce atop a taco? Yum! Hot, soggy lettuce in an enchilada? No thanks. And thinking that American or Swiss cheese is a suitable cheesy topper does not help matters...

Still, though, does the book have mounds of Jell-O full of random shit? Yes, it does. Well, lovers of pork chops and applesauce may not see the contents of this mold as entirely random, as it does include both pork and applesauce.

However, I don't think the pork-chops-and-applesauce crowd generally imagine the dish as being encased in gelatin with olives and hard-cooked eggs, either.

Ceil Dyer really likes the cold pork and fruit combo. This is the one that really got to me.

The cold ham mousse sounds about as good as one can hope for a recipe like this, consisting mostly of ham salad ingredients in unflavored gelatin aerated by whipped cream. The spicy fruit salad filling, though...?

It's great for anyone who has ever wanted pickled peaches and ripe bananas to mingle with avocado, chives, parsley, and mayonnaise... And for that relatively small (I would assume) subset of humanity, they still have to want to eat this concoction as an adjunct to the ham mousse. This would not be super-popular, I imagine. But hey, the book has "300 delectable ways to use leftovers." If you don't like this, I guess you're just going to have to pick another one and convince yourself that it's delectable. That noodle pie is sounding better all the time...

This tuna is a top (but not a topping)!

I've already done my customary rainbow of Jell-O salads for Pride month, but then I came across this recipe in Pillsbury's Bake Off Main Dish Cookbook (1968), and I thought it wouldn't hurt to have one extra recipe for Pride. Are you ready for Gay Tuna Sandwiches?

I was initially at a loss as to how a canned tuna mixture encased in biscuit dough might be gay, but then I realized that it's obvious: The tuna loves filling Hungry Jack! (And if you're thinking that "tuna" should be applied to a woman, then you've been reading waaay too many ladies' magazines from the 1960s and '70s where a full third of the advertisements are trying to convince readers that nether regions are nasty and should smell like a bed of roses at all times.)

You're welcome for that mental imagery, and happy Pride (again).

The Canned Salmon Industry Sets a Very Low Bar for Magic

Today's cookbook has something unusual on the cover: a starfish!

No-- that's obviously not an echinoderm. The title gives my game away: Magic Entrees to Make with Canned Salmon (Canned Salmon Industry, 1937) is all about the canned salmon, which is only star-shaped if you want it to be.

While the book does have a few lengthy, involved recipes, like Crusty Salmon Loaf...

... for those who want to spend the entire afternoon delicately shaping an unsliced loaf of bread into a boat, drying it, browning it, filling it wit a salmon loaf mixture, continuing to bake it, and then garnishing with egg slices and pickled peaches, most of the recipes are pretty simple.

One just entails dumping a chilled and drained can of salmon into the center of a salad and telling diners to have at it.

See? I wasn't kidding. If you need a recipe for that pile of ingredients, here's the Summer Salmon Delight Recipe.

You may notice that the Canned Salmon Industry likes to print bits of salmon propaganda in italics below the recipe whenever there's a little extra space. I wondered for a second at salmon being a good source of Vitamin G, but then I thought it sounded familiar. Yep! As I discovered many years ago, Vitamin B-2 is the Vitamin Formerly Known as Vitamin G.

Even some of the fancier-looking entrees aren't really that involved. The Salmon Combination Grill looks pretty impressive, decked out with browned pastry puffs and surrounded by a fan of what you might initially mistake for browned fingerling potatoes.

And then reading the recipe, you'll realize it's far easier. There's no pastry-- just browned mashed potatoes (which don't even have to be piped through a pastry tip if you're lazy). Plus those fingerling potatoes that don't look quite right...

... are actually browned bananas. Once you realize this is basically just canned salmon rounds plopped on top of mounds of mashed potatoes (with a bit more on the top as decoration if you feel fancy) and your willingness to eat that with hot bananas and grapefruit sections may be significantly lower than the Canned Salmon Industry imagines, the recipe can become even easier than it already was.

My favorite recipe, though, comes with a whole refreshing summer menu.

Honestly, other recipes have menus too, but I posted this one just because I was amused by "Young Hot Green Beans." It kind of makes me imagine the frustrated home cooks breathlessly watching shirtless green beans take a break to drink a can of Diet Coke.... Or maybe I'm confusing green beans with construction workers? But I digress. It's a refreshing summer menu! The main dish is Magic Salmon Mold! You know what that means. Fish Jell-O!

And this one is made with lime gelatin, not plain, so you know it's going to be oddly sweet and kinda green. Well, the illustration doesn't make it look green.

You might notice that the other pictures were actual photographs, though, and this is just an artist's conception of what canned salmon floating in lime gelatin over thin layers of sliced hard-cooked eggs and shredded cabbage might ideally look like. I suspect this is a tacit admission that Magic Salmon Mold is not much of a looker in real life.

Still, the booklet got me to think about canned salmon for a whole afternoon, so it must have some magic!

Somewhere over the Jell-O

I hope you're ready for a rainbow of gelatin, once again! This year's pride list comes from Recipes on Parade: Salads Including Appetizers (Military Officers' Wives Clubs, 1966). I'm pretty sure officers' wives from the 1960s would not have been super excited to see their recipes used for the cause, but they certainly offered a colorful and jiggly collection of Jell-Os.

This year, red is represented by Shrimp Delight. If you think that shrimp is pink and suspect me of calling a light-and-airy seafood mousse that is pinkish at most "red" just for this post, think again.

Shrimp Delight starts out with strawberry gelatin and tomato sauce, not the plain gelatin whipped with mayonnaise that you may have been picturing. There's definitely shrimp, too... but delight? Probably not so much.

This year, our orange is "golden," as this is a Golden Salad Mold. It's a variation of the tried-and-true carrot and pineapple concoction.

This one is made more memorable with orange juice and sections plus Cheddar and Bleu cheeses.

This year's yellow is condiment-bright: Gelatin Mustard Ring-Coleslaw Center. That's right! You get not only an odd egg, sugar, and cream gelatin flavored heavily with mustard...

...but also a celery-and-pineapple studded slaw to "enjoy" with that jiggly yellow wonder.

The green often comes from cucumber-based salads, but this year we'll make Olive Green Salad by mixing the lime Jell-O with exactly what the title suggests.

Yep-- It's lime Jell-O and olives! Plus extra green from celery, green peppers, English peas, and perhaps the apple (if you pick a green variety).

The book is from way before Berry Blue Jell-O, so I have to get the blue from Blueberry Salad-- a recipe that might actually be good.

This version features black raspberry gelatin, blueberry pie filling, and a creamy white topping if you're feeling extra naughty.

I usually have to combine blue and purple, as gelatin salads at this end of the spectrum are usually few and far between. The military wives really loved their gelatin, though, so this time we have a purple as well! Well, purple-ish.

Made with a can of frozen grape juice concentrate, black cherries, and black cherry gelatin, this is probably a pretty dark mold. But, hey... That just means it's getting dark and the pride parade can transform to an after-dark celebration, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.

Happy Pride Month! I hope you get a chance to jiggle like Jell-O!

Pillsbury picks some surprising winners

I picked up Pillsbury's Bake Off Main Dish Cookbook (1968) mainly because I liked the colorful pictures. I figured that the fact that the recipes were award-winning meant that they would likely be crowd-pleasers and thus kind of uninteresting for someone who lives for weird and off-putting concoctions.

I mean, how upset can you get about seeded biscuits baked atop a beef and vegetable stew? The cover suggests exactly the kind of beloved family and potluck staples I expect.

I was happy to see that the book does have some of my favorite weird midwestern subgenres, like using outdated/ borderline racist terms to describe food that don't even seem relevant to the recipe.

Seriously, wouldn't it be far more appropriate to call chicken and celery in a cheese sauce topped with a cheesy crumble Midwest Celery Crunch?

And what could be more midwestern than a party sandwich roll "frosted" with a pasteurized cheese spread?

Answer: one that is also filled with canned shrimp, cream cheese, pecans, pineapple, and water chestnuts.

As I continued to read, the recipes seemed to get more questionable. I'm not a huge fan of sweet-and-savory combinations, so I always kind of wonder if I'm being unreasonable to be horrified by recipes that play up that combo. What is the proper reaction to Sunshine Chicken Casserole?

Is it fair for me to gaze with gape-mouthed horror at the thought of canned white grapes and golden raisins mingling with chicken and hard cooked eggs, all swimming in a sea of condensed cream of celery soup seasoned with cinnamon, cloves, and pimiento? I kind of wonder if the layer of drop biscuits on the top is a tacit admission that this horror deserves to be buried.

And is this casserole better or worse than the Chicken Party Pie?

I will openly admit a love of gelatin-based fruit pies, but lemon-gelatin-chicken-salad in a pie shell? It kind of reminds me of the recipe that prompted me to start this blog almost a decade ago.

My favorite recipe just might be the Funny Face Hamburgers, though. 

They may not be immediately scary to anyone who likes ketchup in their hamburgers (and realizes the raisins are just decorative and can be pretty easily picked off if you don't want to eat them), but the picture.... Well...

"C-come... hic... complay withhhh ushhhh!"

I can't see anything other than biscuit representations of drunk kids! The two in the back are so far gone that their tongues are lolling out, and the one in front has gone cross-eyed. And the parsley somehow gives me the impression that the cross-eyed kid would probably be wearing a toga if it had a biscuit-y body. This book ended up being far more entertaining than I anticipated. Good thing I picked it up after all!

Rawleigh thinks June is November, maybe?

It's June-- that lovely time of year when the roses are blooming, the butterflies are flitting about, and I am yelling at the birds at 5 a.m. to quit being such jackasses and wait to start that goddamn singing until, oh, say 9 a.m. But I digress. It's also time for Rawleigh's Good Health Guide Almanac Cook Book (1953). What do those purveyors of fine MLM wares have in store for June?

In their resolute determination not to acknowledge the actual season, Rawleigh decides that June is the prefect month to bust out the Spicy Sweet Potatoes-- though the apple cider and warm spices seem far more fall-appropriate (not to mention the hour-plus baking time back when few houses had air conditioning!). Then there's the warm-weather classic, Baked Prune Whip, a dish that to Rawleigh doesn't at all seem more suited to winter when one has to rely on dried fruit, rather than June when the strawberries and raspberries are in full swing. (At least Monday does acknowledge the late spring/ early summer bounty with its recipe-less red raspberries and cream dessert.) And while Banana-Nut Loaf and Carrot and Raisin Salad maybe aren't quite as clearly out of season as the sweet potatoes and the prune whip, they still seem more suited to the days when one has to rely on the pantry than when the fresh young fruits and vegetables are emerging after months of cold... At least there's a tossed salad, but this seems to be partly out of season too, as the bell peppers and tomatoes will probably have to come from the grocery store rather than the garden this early in the season. For a time when I thought more people kept home gardens, this book seems out of touch with what gardeners would have been likely to have had.

As for the horoscope, I'm not sure what it means to "have a very good mind," especially in 1953. Does it mean that someone actually knows what fruits and vegetables might be in season? Does it mean that they're especially good at forcing the kids to go to church without too much complaining (what with the Gemini's "strongly religious" nature)? Does it mean they're especially good at explaining why white guys are the only ones who deserve to be treated like full-on human beings, or does it mean they're especially good at pointing out why that mindset is bullshit, even if it's typical for the time? A "good mind" could mean just about anything...

As for the product spotlight, June is the month of romance, so Rawleigh knows its best play is to make everybody feel anxious about their sex appeal.

That's right! "(beautiful girls can lose their men; and handsome brutes can lose their gals through body odor)"

I'm not really sure why Rawleigh felt the need for the parentheses (or the semicolon for that matter). Maybe they thought the message would be too alarming without the parentheses? In any case, Rawleigh could come to the rescue in the form of cologne, powder, or cream.

There's nothing quite like to idea of starting the day by sticking a finger or two into the deodorant cream and rubbing it around in one's armpits to make me so happy for stick deodorant... especially now that we're heading into the hot weather. Stay cool and deodorized, everyone, until we find out what's in store for July.