The Any Oven Cookbook (Saran Wrap, 1981) is just a bit newer than I usually go, but I was intrigued by the premise of providing both microwave oven and conventional directions for the recipes. (Since Saran Wrap is microwave safe, the motive was to sell the plastic film to microwave owners. I guess the addition of conventional directions is an implicit admission that microwaves are mostly better at reheating than cooking, so cooks can still use the cookbook once they give up on trying to make entire dinners from scratch using the microwave.) I also loved all the Pepto-Bismol pink in the cover picture. It's not a great sign when the cover seems to be giving the subconscious suggestion that the recipes will cause indigestion.
The book offers examples of that perennial favorite of microwave cookbooks-- things that would take almost as much time to make without the microwave. My favorite just might be the Shrimp Curry.
Note that the microwave cooking time is 20 minutes, shaving two whole minutes off the conventional cooking time! Of course, if you cook it conventionally, you will not only lose those two precious extra minutes but also miss out on the opportunity to smell shrimp curry anytime anybody microwaves anything for the next week and a half.
The book offers some rather complicated recipes, like this one for Tamales.
The microwave recipe does actually shave more than an hour off the cooking time, but I imagine anyone who wanted to go to the trouble of actually making tamales from scratch might want to use a more traditional method that they're sure will work. Still, I'm impressed that the recipe actually calls for wrapping the tamales in corn husks. I would have expected the book to encourage cooks to roll the tamales in a sheet of Saran Wrap for the microwave version.
A lot of the recipes are pretty conventional, but the book includes some weird ones, like Hot Potato- Apple Salad.
Hot potato salad is pretty common. Sweet potatoes with apples is also pretty common. Hot potato salad with apples, though? Not so much...
The book includes some color pictures of recipes as well. While the recipe for Summer Soup sounds fine, if unexceptional...
I love the picture that accompanies it.
Something about serving it in a big, glass bowl next to drinking glasses that kind of match makes me see this as a big bowl of very odd punch. I can see somebody absentmindedly pouring a ladleful into a glass and then doing a cartoon-character-style double take.
I hope you enjoyed the recipes because now it's a wrap.
When I introduced The Science of Food and Cookery (H. S. Anderson, 1921), I promised/ threatened that we'd check out some casserole recipes. I love reading casserole recipes anyway, but it will be really interesting to see what cooks did 100+ years ago when they weren't trying to stretch the meat (as this is a vegetarian cookbook) or able to throw in a can of cream of mushroom or cream of celery soup as a binder (as these soups weren't available yet and Anderson probably wouldn't have approved of them even if they were). So what was on the menu?
I'm starting with spaghetti in tomato, even though it's technically not a casserole, but a one-pot meal.
I'm sure that the first step, "Break the spaghetti into inch lengths," probably has some readers apoplectic. It probably doesn't help that the sauce is a barely-seasoned tomato pulp thickened with a roux. My favorite part of the recipe may be that the spaghetti is boiled "until thoroughly done" and then added to the sauce and simmered "until it is of a consistency to dish up and not run on the platter." This sounds like code for cooking the spaghetti until it's practically melted into the sauce-- definitely not the al dente texture modern readers are accustomed to.
Also, if you're wondering about the cream roast flour in the ingredients, it's not nearly as exotic as you might think it is. It's just flour toasted in the oven but removed before it turns brown.
Today's Pennsylvania Dutch Recipe Book (1966) is brought to you by Pennsylvania Dutch.
Just in case you thought I meant this was a fund-raising cookbook for a Pennsylvania Dutch community-- Nope! I meant Pennsylvania Dutch brand noodles.
You may notice that they sold Bott Boi, now renamed "Square (Pot Pie) Egg Noodles," a style of noodles I've denigrated not because they sound terrible but because the name is likely to mess with diners' expectations. If you're looking forward to a pot pie with a crisp golden crust and a creamy filling, getting a dish scarcely different from, say, chicken noodle soup is not likely to make you happy.
This book offers additional ways to unsettle diners with "pot pies" that aren't pot pies at all, but at least the Creamed Chicken Bott Boi retains the "bott boi" (rather than "pot pie") name, so people with at least some familiarity with Pennsylvania Dutch dishes might know better than to expect a pot pie.
There's also an interesting Italian-by-way-of-Pennsylvania-Dutch recipe for Baked Lasagne.
I'm a bit mystified by the idea of turning ground veal into tiny meatballs that then get fried together with unshaped ground pork or sausage, as it seems like a recipe for everything to meld together as it cooks, negating the work put into the meatballs. Still, considering that lasagne/a has noodles in it anyway, at least this recipe doesn't seem like it would be a huge disappointment the way a "pot pie" might be. The worst is that this would likely be a scoop-and-serve casserole rather than one you'd cut. Well, the tomato sauce isn't seasoned with much beyond the garlic (which is actually removed partway through the cooking process), salt, and pepper, so it's probably pretty bland, too.... Maybe I'm being overly optimistic in thinking this wouldn't be too much of a disappointment to lasagna lovers.
Even though this book is intended to sell noodles, there's only a relatively short section, printed on orangey paper in the very center of the cookbook, devoted to using Pennsylvania Dutch noodles. A lot of the book doesn't seem to care whether readers buy noodles or not. In fact, elsewhere, the cookbook offers a recipe for homemade noodles.
I guess the company knows that modern cooks are too busy to make noodles by hand very often, so there's no point in worrying about a loss in sales.
The book also seems more interested in presenting Pennsylvania Dutch recipes like Schnitz un Knepp than in selling noodles.
I like the imagination in naming a dish the equivalent of "apples and buttons," but the "buttons" part just makes the recipe sound like a choking hazard. This recipe is even accompanied by a poem describing the dish's nostalgic appeal.
My favorite descriptive name might just be the one for brownies, though.
Neither Cake nor Candy! That's true... It also makes me want to call it "Neither Noodles nor Nasturtiums" or "Neither Cattails nor Cobras" or.... Okay, I know I'm missing the point and the title is trying to suggest that brownies have the bakery sweetness of cake and the dense texture of a candy while being neither one, but the idea that a concept as simple as brownies needs such an explanation is charming. (The raisins hidden in this recipe are far less charming!)
I'll close out with a few of the many illustrations the book offers, like a smiling woman feeding her chickens...
...or a horse-and-buggy drag race.
Just know that I've chosen a couple of the more charming illustrations and omitted an illustration of an extremely problematic array of people labeled with various national origins and ethnicities (along with a police officer, for some unspecified reason), all looking vaguely annoyed at being roped into the picture.
The book also includes a series of old-fashioned prints, captioned with old-timey aphorisms, and I will leave you with this dark thought.
The book induces a kind of whiplash between a sweet country charm and a darkness that might be easier to ignore, but they're both there, along with the bott boi.
Now that the leaves are turning vivid shades of red and yellow, grocery stores are displaying their finest pumpkins, and I've started complaining about my hands being cold all the time (and I won't stop until spring because I am a delight!), let's see what The Vegetable Protein and Vegetarian Cookbook (Jeanne Larson and Ruth McLin, 1977) suggests serving for a fall dinner.
Ah, yes, the good old Special K Roast! What does that entail?
Unsurprisingly, it's got a lot of Special K cereal-- I guess because it was known as the high-protein cereal. (God, I hate the jerk at the end of that commercial saying "Good for me!" as if he owns the skinny woman and as if it's impossible to care about anybody who's not skinny.) It's also full of chopped nuts, cottage cheese, and eggs, so it should be loaded with protein. I'm more interested to see that it's also got onion soup mix, MSG, and poultry seasoning, so it might even have a flavor! Most of the old vegetarian loaf or roast recipes sound like they would taste like damp cardboard at best.
I'm not sure why this is listed as an autumn menu, as the corn on the cob and zucchini crisp sound much more like summer dishes than fall ones, but I was intrigued by the notion of a zucchini crisp. "Crisp" usually means a fruit dessert with a buttery oat-and-sugar topping, so is this version a fall-spiced semi-dessert, or does it have some kind of a savory, crispy, oaty topping?
Answer: Neither. In fact, I have no idea why this is called a crisp at all, as it appears to be just zucchini in a creamy sauce. It doesn't sound terrible, but the name seems incredibly misleading.
Does that mean the dessert of Apple Delight isn't delightful?
Well, I'm not a fan of cooked apples, so I would definitely not call this apple cake (maybe with walnuts and/ or dates!) delightful, but your mileage may vary.
Happy fall! May this random illustration of kohlrabi(?), zucchini(?), and lettuce from the end of the menu bring you good luck (or at least warmer hands)!
The Science of Food and Cookery (H. S. Anderson, 1921) is fascinating on a number of levels.
One is that this is a vegetarian cookbook, long before the hippies made vegetarian cookery more popular in the 1960s and '70s. Another is that this copy is a library book from The Hotel and Restaurant Department of the City College of San Francisco. Perhaps most surprising of all is that this book was in circulation until at least September 20, 1996-- the last due date stamped on the date slip in the back of the book! I briefly imagined that the book was in circulation for 75 years, but that's impossible, as the school didn't open until 1935, and then it was named San Francisco Junior College. It didn't become City College of San Francisco until 1948, so this book was already well over 20 years old by the time it became a library book-- perhaps highlighting how few options there were at the time for people who wanted vegetarian cookbooks?
Sometimes, all this work for vegetarian options seems kind of needless. For instance, cooks were expected to make their own homemade breakfast cereal.
I'm not sure why, as commercial cereals were definitely available by this time, and I'd imagine a simple bowl of shredded wheat would be more nutritious than something based mostly on pastry flour and corn meal. (Plus, it wouldn't require all that mixing, rolling out, cutting in strips, baking, and sending through a food grinder!)
You might think some coffee would be a reasonable accompaniment to cereal, but it's not so simple. While coffee is vegetarian, it's still not allowed because it "cheats the body by producing sleeplessness" and "Its use is often followed by palpitation of the heart and indigestion." Instead, the book's audience would have to fabricate "coffee" out of things that were clearly, well, not coffee. Now I know for sure that soybean coffee long predated the version in 1972's Natural Cooking the Prevention Way:
And if cooks don't happen to have access to a big store of soybeans, the book offers more specifics on how to make Homemade Cereal Coffee than Cookbook United States Commemorative 1776-1976 did.
Still, though, it often makes sense that this book expects cooks to put a lot of effort into the dishes. Home refrigerators were not yet a thing, so it took a lot of effort to preserve food. While the book has plenty of recipes for home canning, I was more interested to learn how home cooks preserved eggs (a common ingredient in the recipes for both their protein and their binding abilities). For those who might not have regular access to fresh eggs (or wanted to stock up when the price was low), the book offers the "Water-Glass Method" to preserve fresh eggs for up to a year.
I was interested to know that the preservation in silicate seals the pores in the shell so tightly that it needs to be pricked before boiling, and I was even more interested to see that this type of preservation is still used!
The most difficult part of being a 1920s vegetarian might have been finding substitutes for meat in a culture that saw meat and potatoes as the necessary center of the plate. It's not like cooks in 1921 could run out to the grocery store for packages of Beyond, Impossible, or Gardein. Instead, they got to stay home and make things like Nuttose.
Yum! Nothing like nut butter thinned with water, then thickened with a slurry of tomato pulp, flour, and cornstarch and cooked for 2-3 hours... You may note, though, that the name "Homemade Nuttose" implies that it could be bought. That's right! John Harvey Kellogg invented the original Nuttose and started selling canned versions of it in 1896. (Here's an ad from 1898.) I imagine it was still pretty hard to find with the limited grocery options of 1921, though, and the homemade version probably cost less anyway.
If Nuttose didn't cut it for old-timey vegetarians that might be craving something meaty, the book also offers recipes with the meaty-sounding "fillet" in their names, like these Olive Fillets.
I'm really not sure how a bread triangles enclosing a filling of chopped olives, onion, and parsley before being baked under a thin cream-tomato sauce count as fillets, though. This recipe still seems like less of a stretch than the Cereal Fillets, though.
Isn't this basically just mush? Yes, the cornmeal is cooked in milk instead of water so it has a little extra protein, and it's breaded before the second cooking (baking rather than frying, "because hot fats not only coat but intimately penetrate the food with which they are cooked"! 😮). I guess the breading is supposed to make it look more fillet-like, but come on. This is barely-disguised mush. Even the recommendation to "Serve with maple sirup or jelly" seems like an admission that this is mush rather than a meat-like fillet.
I hope you're as fascinated by this 100+-year-old window into vegetarian cooking as I am, because I haven't even showed you the casseroles, or the toasts, or the aspics! Stay tuned.
I've already discussed the impossibly high expectations Cook and Learn (Beverly Veitch and Thelma Harms, illustrations and calligraphy by Gerry and Tia Wallace, 1981) set for teachers of small children, but that post overlooked another aspect of the book that I can't resist: its attraction to '70s-style health food cookery. The book has a wide selection of "burgers" (plus "steak" and "chops") for kids to make out of a mishmash of "health" food.
A few have the distinction of supposedly helping young cooks learn about other cultures. Rice-Nut Steak is equated to Finland's Pahkina-Paisti. Is this authentically Finnish? I have no idea. A search of "Finnish Rice-Nut Steak" gets a lot of meat pie results, and a search of "Pahkina-Paisti" gets a lot of results I am unable to read. The nearest I've gotten is a translation of the phrase as "Nut Roast."
So feed the kids brown rice and hand-ground nuts bound with cheese and egg and seasoned with chili powder and onion. Tell 'em it's Finnish and make them feel like they've learned something about the world. Maybe they will learn a pretty-accurate-for-1981 recreation of a Finnish recipe? Maybe they will just learn that grownups are liars and that this is neither Finnish nor what a 1981 kid is likely to consider a steak? In any case, it's EDUCATIONAL.
Other recipes are just the standard earth-mother '70s health food stuff, like Soy Burgers.
Soy beans? Check! Wheat germ? Check! Soy sauce? Check! Veggies? Check! Even additional soy, in the form of soy nuts! It's like a greatest-hits of the '70s health food movement.
Well, except for brown rice, but there's a whole other burger for that.
I'm just glad that the burgers start with precooked soybeans and brown rice! This book is unhinged enough that I could picture the recipes starting with children measuring out tiny portions of brown rice or soybeans and water, then being instructed to boil them for an hour or more, cool them, and then mix them with everything else. This book is not generally one to worry too much about simplifying logistics or catering to short attention spans.
If the kids are really not into brown rice and soy, a teacher might try to tempt them with peanut butter.
Well, with Peanut Butter Chops-- which have no actual chops and enough brown rice and wheat germ to make them more similar to the other recipes than different from them. I imagine these will be less well-loved than simple peanut butter and jelly, but on the other hand, they are way more work.
The biggest surprise may have been that not all of the alternative-protein patties are vegetarian. The Tofu Burgers surprised me in this respect.
That's right-- the Tofu Burgers are made with tuna (or can sub in ground meat as an alternative to the fish).
Once the kids are all fake-burgered-out, they might feel like having a sweet. Maybe some nice Brownies? (If you're familiar with 1970s health food trends, you can probably guess what's coming.)
Yep! Carob. Nobody gets to enjoy real chocolate when carob can make baked goods deep brown so they look like they should be chocolatey. At least the little muffin-shaped brownies should be easy to launch at the teacher, classmates, the ceiling, etc., so kids can get some enjoyment out of them. After all, a food fight is likely the most fun one can have with '70s-style health food.
This week, I want to play a game. (Okay, maybe that link was a little misleading. It's not that kind of game. Nobody has to saw off a body part or anything to "win.") I'm going to present a lunch and dinner menu consisting of a series of not-particularly-surprising recipes that are from a specialized cookbook published in 1948. You have to figure out what the cookbook's specialty is supposed to be.
Okay, let's start lunch with a vitamin-packed salad.
The combo of carrots, green peppers, and apples also gets a sprinkling of chopped peanuts, so maybe it's a health food cookbook? Lots of veggies combined with peanuts definitely seems health foody.
The peanuts are probably not enough protein on their own. To go with that, let's have some Baked Rabbit.
Obviously, it's not actual rabbit, but the "Welsh rabbit/ rarebit" variety, so maybe this is a vegetarian cookbook? The use of processed American cheese suggests it's not a particularly health-foody vegetarian cookbook if that's the case. "Processed" did have a nice scientific ring in 1948, though, so maybe that doesn't wreck the vegetarian health food theory.
Now, let's move on to dinner. We can start with something that blows the vegetarian theory out of the water: Broiled Chicken.
And lest you think that maybe this is a diet to convert people away from the saturated fats in red meat, note that the chicken needs to be basted in some fat, and bacon grease is one of the options. There haven't been too many carb-heavy foods so far, though, so maybe this is a low-carb diet? Well, let's go for the side dishes and find out.
Well, potatoes are still on the menu...
...as are minted green peas. So carbs must be okay, I guess. Can we have dessert from this cookbook? Maybe if there's a dessert, that will help you figure out the specialty.
Aaaaand... it's pretty standard sugar cookies. That does not help. Give up?
It's 201 Tasty Dishes for Reducers (Victor H. Landlahr)!? What makes this a weight-loss cookbook? It honestly just seems like a pretty standard cookbook. Maybe there's a little less butter in the potato-parsnip combo and on the minted peas than one might expect? Maybe the rabbit servings are a little on the small side? Who knows?
The funny thing is that the recipes themselves don't really even seem to be related to the reducing component of the book. There's a bunch of pretty standard-looking recipes (aside from occasionally specifying to use lean cuts of meat or skim milk) with no real guidance on their calorie counts or how to combine them, followed by an extremely Spartan 7-day reducing diet at the very end of the book (Most days call for less than 1000 calories total! 😵) that makes almost no mention of any of the actual recipes and generally calls for dieters to eat things like 2/3 of a cup of spinach, 3 oz. of broiled hamburger, and 1/3 of a cup of canned applesauce. It's almost like Landlahr (or whoever actually wrote the book-- I'm just naming Landlahr since he wrote the forward and is responsible for other diet books) really only had a 12-or-so page reducing diet and knew he couldn't sell that by itself, so he padded it out with unrelated recipes at the beginning and some calorie count and height-weight charts at the end.
I'm pretty sure that whoever originally owned this book wasn't all that committed to diet recipes either, as she taped this in the front:
I am kind of charmed to learn that "stick tight pie" is "the old fashioned name for pecan pie." I'd never heard that before, and it seems like the name must be largely localized and forgotten, as I could only find ONE relevant result with a Google search. (Mostly, Google seemed to think I needed help with getting a lattice pie crust to work!) I'm so glad the previous owner of this book did not take it too seriously, and she taught me something new. The other recipes are mostly fine but forgettable.
