Rawleigh gets potato-happy in September

And now it's almost September. Hooray. September is the start of drink-from-the-firehose season for me, but I imagine that for the housewives the Rawleigh's Good Health Guide Almanac Cook Book (1953) had in mind as the main audience, September meant at least a small break. Little Linda and Johnny might be going to school! The house (and especially the kitchen!) might start cooling off. Rawleigh's recipe ideas sometimes seem appropriate for the season and sometimes seem comically mismatched, so let's see what they thought the good wives and mothers of 1953 should be cooking up in September.

It seems like Rawleigh counted on the usual fickle early fall weather by providing plenty of cold items (like tuna fish salad and chiffon pie), but also hedging their bets by serving the cold items with things that would need to be baked for an extended period (like a full leg of lamb or a peach betty that requites two hours in the oven). I'm sorry to report that the menu items that I most wanted recipes for (gelatin beet salad and cocomint chiffon pie) have no accompanying recipes. We're left with things like the standard tuna salad and the aforementioned peach betty.

September is also apparently unofficially potato month, as the menus call for mashed potatoes, twice baked potatoes, baked sliced pimiento potatoes, creamed potatoes, Franconia potatoes, Dutch potato salad (made in the pressure cooker!), and presumably also in Thursday night's New England boiled dinner, the only menu that doesn't explicitly mention potatoes.

What's in store for Virgos? Well, the book says they are "strong believer[s] in blue blood," who "aspire to the best things." They may consider themselves "fine scholars and inspirational musicians," so I guess this is all a warning to steer clear of Dorothy when she's trying to put together one of her insufferable little ladies' luncheons where she shows off her new china, goes on and on about the wonders of vitamin-enriched bread, and then makes everybody listen to her play the flute.

The Rawleigh product for September is perhaps a tacit acknowledgement that Linda and Johnny are going to drag all kinds of germs home from school.

I love that Rawleigh keeps stating that the pine oil disinfectant is "safe to use." It's in both the pink and the blue large type, plus serves as point three on the list of the product's features. I guess that families in the 1950s were getting wary of the household disinfectants that were so efficient at killing off germs that they also killed off the biggest reservoirs of germs: the entire family. I'm sure glad we have better product safety laws now! 

Happy September, whether this marks the start or end of your busy season, or is just another month.

Just a bit more summer as August comes to an end

As the school season starts and I've been desperately trying to stockpile a few more posts to last through the crazy-busy months, I realized that something was missing. I started... something... in the spring and figured I'd follow up in the summer... Oh, yeah! It's time for a seasonal round of the The Vegetable Protein and Vegetarian Cookbook (Jeanne Larson and Ruth McLin, 1977). I'm glad I remembered before summer was completely over! Let's check out a summer menu:

I'm really wondering what those Spinach Meatballs look like.

They mostly sound like what I'd expect: spinach, onion and garlic, some grated Parm, plus bread crumbs and egg (or soy flour) to bind. The sticking point is the can of "vegeburger." I have tried all kinds of fresh, frozen, and homemade veggie burgers, but canned? I can't imagine they were any good. I also imagined they were not even a thing anymore, as so many (presumably better) options are available now than in 1977, but somebody was selling six-packs of canned Loma Linda Vegetarian Burger on Amazon when I was writing this article, so apparently there are still some holdouts!

The "meatballs" sound like they might not be too bad (especially if you sub in better veggie burger crumbles!), but the tomato sauce for this recipe is pretty sad.

It's just a can of tomato sauce diluted with water and re-thickened with a margarine-and flour roux. There aren't even any seasonings! The meatball recipe says it's acceptable to sub in spaghetti sauce if there's not time to make the tomato sauce, so I'd recommend pretending you don't have the time for this sauce regardless of whether it's true.

It seems  kind of weird to serve the meatballs with potatoes and carrots instead of noodles, but that's the recommendation. Are the Baked Shredded Carrots a worthy addition?

Carrots baked with a little green pepper, margarine, salt, and marjoram? I'd vote no! Why keep the oven on any longer than you need to when you could just as easily sauté this mixture if you really thought you needed it? Swap out the baked or scalloped potatoes for noodles, and if you can cook the meatballs for only 7-10 minutes in the toaster oven, the kitchen will stay much cooler. (Or maybe try to sauté the meatballs instead of baking them so you never have to turn on the oven, but I suspect they would fall apart!)

If the spinach, potatoes, and carrots aren't enough veggies, there's also a salad.

Cukes, lettuce, and radishes with a yogurty French dressing doesn't sound too interesting, but at least it's cool! 

And for dessert, Strawberry Mousse!

Or, more accurately, frozen bricks of strawberry-flavored sour cream. Isn't mousse supposed to be aerated and silky? Wouldn't it be easier and more pleasant just to ladle sweetened sour cream over fresh-cut strawberries and call it a day? The Vegetable Protein and Vegetarian Cookbook doesn't care, dammit. You need to work hard on cooking to prove that you care, regardless of whether all that labor makes the food appreciably better.

And I will end this post the same way the book ends the menu: with a random illustration of an artichoke surrounded by leafy greens, even though there are no artichokes in the menu. Enjoy!

The "throw it all in and let diners sort it out" approach to casserole-making

I'm a sucker for casserole cookbooks because so many old casserole recipes seemed to give home cooks a license to just dump whatever leftover meat was in the fridge together with whatever happened to be in the pantry and try to convince their families it was delicious. Southern Living Casseroles Cookbook (Jean Wickstrom, 1974, but mine is from the 1986 fourth printing) of course has some casseroles that sound just fine, like this fried-chicken-on-top-of-rice dealie from the cover.

I'm highlighting some of their other, perhaps less-than-fine choices, though. You would expect nothing less.

You might think my objection to the mostly good-sounding Mexican Rice Casserole would be the raisins.

I mean, you're not wrong. Raisins in a recipe are nearly always a mistake, as far as I'm concerned. That's hardly worth pointing out yet again, though. I'm also amused that this recipe with a full pound of ground beef and four slices of bacon in it is featured in the "Meatless Casseroles" chapter. I guess that in the South any recipe with less than a quarter pound of meat per serving counted as meatless? 

The throw-it-all-in mentality seems to be on display in the Savory Pork Chops en Casserole. While I'm not too surprised by pork-chops-and-applesauce concoctions, or pork with horseradish and sauerkraut, or pork smothered in tomatoes and onions...

...I don't really expect to see all those variations together in the same recipe! I guess this one is for people who just can't make up their minds what they want?

And speaking of not being able to make up one's mind, let's check out the Casserole International.

It is indeed international, calling for everything from garlic and fines herbs to curry powder, frozen chow mein, and fettucine to sherry and Cheddar cheese. I guess the idea was that grocery stores in the '70s and '80s did not generally have extensive international foods sections, so home cooks should just grab every ingredient they could find that seemed like it might count as "foreign" to typical southerners and put them all into one dish.

The weirdest mashup of all, though, might be the recipe with the cringeworthy title Oriental Beef-Spaghetti Casserole. You might suspect that this will be one of those casseroles bound with cream-of-something soup and topped with a gooey layer of American or Cheddar cheese that somehow counted as "oriental" because it contained canned chop suey vegetables and maybe a hint of soy sauce. 

If so, well, you're right about the chop suey vegetables-- but nothing else. The casserole would likely have read mostly as Italian, what with the spaghetti, mix of ground beef and pork, onion, green pepper, tomato paste, canned mushrooms, and topping of Parmesan-- but the can of chop suey vegetables made it "oriental." Most bizarrely of all, this is also flavored with ketchup or chili sauce and a small bottle of 7-Up! My favorite instruction may just be on how to heat the dish if it's been frozen: "To serve, thaw, add additional 7-Up if needed, and bake at 350° for 45 minutes." I'm not sure how to tell whether this pile of ingredients needs extra 7-Up, but then I'm confused by nearly every aspect of this recipe. The possible need for additional 7-Up the least of my worries....

I loved this opportunity to peek in to see how southern cooks might "casserolify" their odds and ends for a hungry family nearly half a century ago, and as always, I am super glad that I was not among the cooks in this book's target audience. They'd probably make fun of me for my inadequate knowledge of 7-Up uses or my conviction that "meatless" should mean that a recipe does not, in fact, have any meat in it.

A depressing diet plan stowed away among some recipes

I was so excited to finally find a recipe box with actual recipes in it, but that old Shredded-Wheat-themed recipe box also held another surprise: an extremely depressing diet plan. Let's check it out!

The bottom of the page gives these ominous instructions:

I have no idea what "This diet works on a Chemical breakdown" is supposed to mean. Digestion is a chemical process, so what makes this diet's chemical breakdown special is an open question. More pertinently, if the note explaining the diet ends with an emphatic "REMEMBER: It is only for Three DAYS= Four DAYS off," you know it's got to be bad.

For each day, there's a very sad menu. Here's day 1:

I'm assuming that the "1/2 glass grapefruit" means a half glass of grapefruit juice for breakfast, rather than an instruction to eat half of a fake grapefruit constructed of glass. The breakfast is surprisingly sensible, allowing for a serving of fruit, bread, and even a full serving of peanut butter.

Lunch is decidedly less generous, allowing only a quarter cup of tuna (presumably canned) and another slice of toast (along with the black coffee or tea for a beverage). My cat might have considered this to be a reasonable lunch, but an adult human being should definitely NOT.

Dinner allows for 2 slices of any meat (at least I assume it's meat-- This appears to be a copy of someone else's handwritten sheet, so the end got cut off). I like the vagueness of this, as I imagine some dieters took it as license to cut the biggest slices of their favorite meat that they could manage while still leaving something for the rest of the family. There are also string beans, beets, a small apple, and the treat of 1/2 cup of vanilla ice cream at the end of the day. Note the dutiful checks by the food items, suggesting that the owner of the recipe box actually pulled off this diet for a full day. Poor thing. 😧

What did day 2 entail?

Breakfast gets a bit less generous than on day 1, with only an egg, a (presumably plain) slice of toast, and half a banana. Note that only the egg and toast get checkmarks. Maybe the dieter didn't like bananas?

Lunch is a truly pathetic half-cup of cottage cheese with five saltines. I sincerely hope that the lack of checkmarks meant the dieter ignored this menu and had a real lunch!

Dinner consists of 2 "weiners," a cup of broccoli, a half-cup of carrots, the other half of the banana from breakfast, and the exact same treat as day 1: a half-cup of vanilla ice cream. Notably, only the carrots and the ice cream(!) have a checkmark, so maybe the dieter replaced the rest of the items with something they liked better? We can only hope...

On to day 3, the last day of this godforsaken plan!

Note that this day has exactly zero checkmarks, perhaps indicating that our dieter concluded that the plan is bullshit and gave up when they were facing five saltine crackers, a slice of Cheddar cheese, and a small apple for breakfast. Lunch is the same as the breakfast from day 2, minus the half banana. Dinner features more of day 2's tuna and day 1's beets, plus the new additions of cauliflower and cantaloupe. Of course, the day ends with the only treat that exists in this diet's universe: a half-cup of vanilla ice cream.

I can definitely see why this diet was dispiriting enough that dieters had to take four days to recover for every three they were on it. And I'm super-glad that whoever may have started out on this regimen appears to have quit early. Life is too short for subsisting on saltines, beets, and eggs, anticipating the one tiny luxury the diet allows: a taste of vanilla ice cream.

Adventures in Home Canning

The Kerr Home Canning Book (1944) does its best to make home canning look appealing. Just look at the bounty of garden-fresh berries surrounding the sparkling new mason jars.

But I know the reality of home canning was sweating over a very hot canning setup in a very hot house, and that's after you've already spent god knows how long cleaning/ peeling/ chopping/ pitting/ slicing/ and/ or doing whatever else was required to get the stuff you were going to can ready in the first place. I helped my grandma can peaches once, sweating even though she had air conditioning (unlike the original audience for this booklet). I distinctly remember thinking, "Or we could just buy canned peaches for less than a dollar" (which was true back then, if not so much now).

Of course, in 1944 it was Patriotic (with a capital "P"!) to can anything and everything to help save food. This booklet actually starts with a rallying cry from an actual mason jar! 

Sorry, a  capital-M capital-J Mason Jar. Kerr is laying it on thick here. From "I was bred of flint... and born of fire... to serve America by serving you" to "I hold the secret of your youngster's rosy cheeks... I hold strength for workers' strong right arms, and steadiness to give their hands," the company wanted home-canners to see this work as more than just one more goddamn chore.

The booklet has the formulas for canning various fruits and vegetables, of course. It also has the expected jams, jellies, pickles, preserves, relishes, etc. There are some unexpected ones, too. I imagined I'd see a recipe for pumpkin butter (and I did), but I was pretty surprised by this Pumpkin Preserves recipe.

It's not pumpkin spice flavor! Instead, little slices of pumpkin mingle with orange and lemon slices in a thick sugar syrup. That's not a pumpkin prep we tend to see today.

The book also includes a reminder that there's a reason Heinz bottles specify that they contain tomato ketchup, as there's a wide array of other types of catsups that home cooks used to make, like apple...

(Well, apple and onion, though the onion doesn't get marquee treatment.)

... and crab apple...

...and elderberry...

(which can be altered to grape or plum if desired!)

...or satsuma plum...

...or, if you want something odd to pair with the pumpkin preserves to make a very unusual Thanksgiving dinner, cranberry.

The book also offers some recipes for ways to preserve meat. If you've been saving meat coupons by shooting neighborhood rabbits, Kerr suggests turning the fuzzy little guys into canned sausage.

Am I alone in thinking that calling it "Bunny Sausage" makes it sadder? I'd expect the less sentimental "Rabbit Sausage." Maybe the cute name is an attempt to make the kids too upset to eat it, so the meat will stretch even further?

I was also surprised to see some recipes that might seem too "exotic" for the white, midwestern home cooks that populate my imaginary version of the 1940s. I know that tamales wrapped in wax paper (rather than corn husks) before being canned are not the tastiest versions of the recipe.

Still, I was surprised they appeared at all! This recipe even calls for a full quarter cup of chili powder in the meat, plus more in the cornmeal mixture, at a time when chili recipes didn't always even call for chili powder.

The 1940s home canners had a bigger range than I expected. I guess they needed something to make all those hot and humid days seem like a bit of an adventure. I doubt that too many of them covered their tables with an array of magnolias and canned goods to make some kind of a demented display when they were done, though. That's something best left to Kerr.

Funny Name: Pizza by Any Other Name Edition

I'm sure whoever wrote this name for a recipe in the Fayerweather Auxiliary Cookbook (Women's Auxiliary of the Fayerweather Yacht Club, Inc., 1977-78) thought it was clever, but I don't know where they're going with this one.

Pizza-gain sounds like "Pizza again?" which sounds like a complaint about having pizza repeatedly. Why make the title sound like a complaint?

It's for a yacht club, so my guess is that the title is supposed to make diners think the recipe will bulk up their muscles with all that protein. (Eggs! Sausage! Cheese! No crust!) My more cynical side thinks it's an implicit admission that people are disappointed when they're made to expect pizza and then they just get baked eggs with sausage and cheese.

Keeping it cool with the Kelvinator

Cooking with Cold (Kelvin Kitchen, 1932) showed up right at the start of August, as if the booklet knew it might get stuck in the queue for who-knows-how-long if it had showed up in a cold-weather month.

I love the little ice cubes pretending to be an ellipsis after "with" almost as much as I love the tiny Kelvinator coat of arms (which includes a panel with retort and volumetric flasks, two panels of lightning, one panel with a cloudy sky, and in the center-- I don't know-- a black rabbit with a really long snout wearing a dark shirt with a white collar? I'm sure it's actually something related to electricity, but I have no idea what). There's also a woman stirring something in a bowl, but the artist couldn't decide whether to make it day shot or day-for-night and split it into both. 

The booklet has plenty of delectable desserts, but you know I'm not going to tell you how to make fresh strawberry ice cream or Chantilly mousse. Instead, we'll start with an appetizer of Frozen Clam Bouillon.

Will little cupfuls of clam bouillon frozen "to a mush," then topped with salted whipped cream and paprika make diners grateful that something more substantial is sure to follow or apprehensive about what the cook's idea of a delicious main dish might be?

Shrimp Cocktail with Ice Cups might be a slightly more substantial and entertaining starter, though.

I love the way this manages to make ice cubes seem exciting by partially freezing them, draining, and then saving the shell for a serving vessel. The sauce is also one of the spiciest I've seen in my old cookbooks-- six to eight drops of Tabasco in only 1-1/4 cups of sauce! I guess the cook had to offset the chill of the ice cups somehow.

Frozen salads are also pretty common in this booklet. Some are light and loaded with fruits and vegetables, like Frozen Pineapple Salad on Tomato Rings.

Maybe the concept of really cold food was so new back then that nobody thought about the possibility that people's teeth might be too sensitive for a whole plate full of icy chips of pineapple, celery, cabbage, and almonds (presuming they even wanted to try ingesting it). Or maybe the rounds of tomato jelly were supposed to melt the salad enough to make it easier to eat? Who knows?

Some salads are much heavier-- maybe for those summer days when people knew they needed calories but were too hot to want to eat them?

All the fat of the cream cheese, peanut butter, mayonnaise, and whipping cream might make this salad at least a little less likely to be icy? And it would be so cold that nobody could fully taste what that concoction paired with green peppers, pimiento, and celery was really like?

The main dishes made me wonder if "omelet" had a different meaning in 1939 than it does now.

The Frozen Shrimp Omelet is not cooked at all (assuming the shrimp are precooked)! And the shrimp is just mixed with egg yolks, with the whites folded in as the last step before freezing-- not even close to the classic filling enclosed in an envelope of cooked eggs.

There's also a Molded Lamb with Fruit for the people who love meat/ fruit combos (and to help meet my quota for gelatin-based concoctions).

This one starts with plain gelatin instead of fruit-flavored, but it also has a half-cup of fruit juice and 3/4-cup of sugar, so combine that with all the oranges and pineapple, and I'm not sure it would be any less sweet than if it had just started out with flavored gelatin and left out the sugar.

My favorite recipe, though, might be the creatively-named "Salmon Entrée."

Okay, the mixture of salmon, broken-up spaghetti, peas, lemon, and mayonnaise may not sound like much more than a very plain salmon/ pasta salad, but 1. It's frozen! (Kelvinator simply cannot resist telling home cooks to freeze pretty much everything.) and 2. There's a picture! In color!

What could be prettier than a chunk of frozen salmon and peas thunked atop a leaf of iceberg lettuce? Only that frozen chunk and pale leaf accompanied by a lemon slice cut into a flower shape.

I'm pretty sure this is better as art than it is as a main dish.

And I just now figured out how the Kelvinator recipes really kept diners cool on hot summer days. Guests would stare down a slab of frozen salmon/ spaghetti/ canned peas, or an icy chunk of random fruits and veggies on a sea of tomato aspic, or a cup full of clam mush, or a plate fully of frozen raw egg froth, and an icy feeling would creep over their bodies as they would realize "I have to eat this or risk offending the hostess!" Kelvinator's cooling worked on multiple levels.

The opera tells you what to do with excess zucchini

Be on the lookout! Tuesday is National Sneak Zucchini onto Your Neighbor's Porch Day. In case you're the recipient of someone's zucchini largesse and tired of zoodles, fried zucchini, and zucchini bread, here are a couple recipes from the lovable weirdos who brought you Culinary High Notes (Toledo Opera Guild, 1978).

If you're low-carb but want pancakes, these Zucchini Pancakes might fit the bill.

And if you're into sweet and salty combos, maybe you could finely dice some watermelon as a topper to turn this into a really weird variation of a feta-watermelon salad.

If your tastes run more to the sweet, though, but you're not quite ready for the fall spices that are usually in zucchini bread, here's a zingy cookie recipe.

Okay, maybe a teaspoon of grated lemon peel in the Lemon-Zucchini Cookies would fall a little short of "zingy," but you could always add a bit more. The batch makes 72-84 cookies, so it also gives you a chance to return some of the zucchini to your neighbor should these be actually good and you like your neighbor OR should they be pretty crummy and you hate your neighbor. It's nice to know that you're covered either way.

Rawleigh Throws an August Veggie Party

Happy August! It's the month when I try to enjoy the last leisurely bits of summer before being plunged directly into the absolute busiest quarter of the year. The 1953 cooks who used Rawleigh's Good Health Guide Almanac Cook Book were probably already starting their chaotic end-of-summer rush, canning peaches and tomatoes, making jelly and jam, pickling the cucumbers and peppers, and just generally doing whatever they could to get ready for the leaner winter months. Let's see what else Rawleigh thought should be on their "to cook" lists.

Rawleigh actually seems to have put together a list that's appropriate for August! This menu is heavy on the fresh produce that would likely be in season, including two tomato recipes, one corn recipe, and one corn and tomato recipe! The Tomato Delight Salad is basically a veggie-heavy egg salad stuffed into a tomato, so your level of delight will probably hinge on your feelings about egg salad. The Broiled-Soufflé Tomatoes are one of those weird mid-century concoctions that makes a kind of mayonnaise-meringue to broil on top of an unsuspecting veggie. The Escalloped Corn with Frankfurters marries two summer favorites with the ever-popular white sauce, though it would probably be more summer-friendly if the cook adapted it to a stovetop prep rather than baking it for an hour. (And everybody would probably enjoy it more if the franks and corn were grilled and served with buns and butter, respectively, instead of being coated in white sauce, but the mid-century moms seemed to be convinced that only time-consuming recipes and copious amounts of white sauce could properly demonstrate love for their families.) The Corn and Tomatoes is pretty straightforwardly just that-- baked with some bread crumbs and butter, I guess to help meet the casserole requirement that was nearly as stringent as the white sauce requirement in mainstream 1950s America.

The horoscope suggests that Leos "are capable of the highest devotion to those [they] love," so I wonder what that meant to this booklet's readers. I imagine them thinking that Leos could turn anything (Fruit cocktail! Tiny canned shrimp! Chicken livers!) into a delicious white-sauce-based casserole while simultaneously canning 10 bushels of peaches and shucking a couple dozen ears of corn.

The Rawleigh product-of-the-month for August suggests that it's okay to "cut down" on one's work, though, so maybe work wasn't always supposed to equate to love?

What kinds of helpers do you imagine? Maybe detergents that won't leave a buildup to clean out of the washing machine, or, even better, will gain sentience and tell the kids they're old enough to wash their own damn clothes now? Okay, probably not. The booklet offers the exciting Non-Rubbing Liquid Wax...

...for those occasions when the family desperately needs to laugh about Spot skidding across the kitchen floor, I guess.

There's also the very exciting Rawleigh's Scented Starch...

...which doesn't so much cut down on the work as make the work (that seems totally unnecessary to modern readers who are used to synthetic fabrics) a little bit smellier. 

So, yes, Rawleigh, I really question the "cut down on your work" premise on this one. A 21st-century smartass is not in their target market, though, so my opinion counts for jack shit. Oh, well. Time for me to shut up about Rawleigh until our September installment, when I will be dreaming about a labor-saving device that makes essays sentient so they can accurately grade themselves.