Ruth Berolzheimer gives cooks the bird

I haven't done much with one of my favorite old series of cookbooks lately: the Culinary Arts Institute's booklets edited by Ruth Berolzheimer. I love that they tend to include so many recipes clearly intended to use up odds and ends in the kitchen, and the black-and-white photos rarely look like much of anything, but often have great captions. Today's exhibit is 250 Ways to Prepare Poultry and Game Birds (1940).

Since the weather is starting to heat up, today we're looking at some chilly chicken concoctions. As you might expect, there are plenty of chicken salad recipes, like Chicken and Fruit Salad.

I know a lot of people like the fruit/ meat combo, but does anyone really long for chicken with orange, grapes, banana, and apple? That seems like it's overboard for all but the most hard-core fruit-and-meat enthusiasts. Maybe I'm misguided, though...

...as "Sunday supper will be gayer for this chicken and fruit salad." (It is nice to know that everybody was okay with Sunday supper being gay, and they would happily allow it to be gayer. And I thought the 1940s were too buttoned up.)

There's a plain old Chicken Salad, too, but this one still gets dressed up a little.

Yes-- check out the cucumber boats-- complete with pimiento strip oars!-- to use as serving vessels. 

If the chicken salad just won't feel complete without gratuitous gelatin, though, it can also be served inside a molded egg ring.

Bonus: The cook will know which came first: the chicken (salad) or the egg (ring). I'd recommend the egg so the ring has more time to set up, but the chicken might come first for those who really like to give the flavors time to blend. Either way, it will come out "festive."

In this case, festive seems to mean "looking like a stranded deep-sea creature that has either too many or not quite enough flippers/ fins/ claws, and enough eyes to look in every direction at once."

Sure, these recipes might be okay for a warm day, but what if it is a REALLY hot day AND you want to show off the fact that your fridge has a fancy freezer compartment?

Yes, it's Frozen Chicken and Rice. I can only imagine what a thrill it was to try to gnaw your way through frozen chicken, rice, peas or asparagus, and hard-cooked eggs! What would a frozen hard-cooked egg feel like? I can't quite imagine the texture, but in any case, my teeth already hurt just thinking about it....

So there you have it-- an array of frosty fowl that might get a chilly reception-- or maybe a warmer one than you might expect if you appreciate a gay supper.

Condensed, chilled, and ready to impress!

When I wrote about Campbell's Great Restaurants Cookbook, U.S.A. (ed. Doris Townsend, 1969), I focused on recipes for hot foods. Lest you worry that the cookbook neglected my beloved genre of scary gelatins, rest easy. They were not just present, but photographed in vivid color, like this Shrimp in Tomato Aspic from the (now closed) Biggs Restaurant.

Looking at this big orangey blob with its frill of shrimp and thinly-sliced cucumbers, I can't decide whether it seems more like a really weird ruffled skirt or a really weird frilly lampshade. It's a nice change from the usual seafood mold shape: a fish with olives for eyes. And what do you suppose is in this concoction?

Why, two cans of condensed tomato soup, of course (what with this being a Campbell's cookbook and all), plus shrimp, sherry, the requisite gelatin, and assorted roughage.

If you're not in the mood for seafood, but want your mold to at least pretend to have some connection to water, the Ham Buffet Mold from The Pirate's House might work.

I'll bet you can never guess what's in this vaguely pyramidal orange lump, pictured here gazing wistfully at what I assume is the Savannah River. (Maybe this mold is sad its protein is terrestrial rather than aquatic?)

Okay, maybe the condensed tomato soup, gelatin, and ham are not really much of a surprise... But there's also cream cheese, lemon juice, grated onion, mayonnaise, and mustard! And you can add garnishes of those old classics: hard-cooked egg slices, olives, and/or radish roses! Fun. (I know it's mean, but I just want to push the thing into the river and see if it will attract some fish.)

In any case, now you know-- you can be just as damn fancy with cold condensed soup as you can be with hot condensed soup! I'm sure this knowledge will come in handy...

Casseroles with Identity Crises

I am endlessly fascinated by the dump-it-all-together ethos of a lot of old casserole recipes, so a vintage cookbook that promises casserole recipes is extremely likely to get picked up if I see it. Well, as long as the price is reasonable, anyway, and the Family Circle Casserole Cookbook (Ed. Malcolm E. Robinson, 1978) was only 99 cents at the thrift store, so here it is.

Gotta love the harvest gold font! I have to admit the clear delineations between meat, green onions, wax beans, and asparagus on the platter gracing the cover are not exactly what I expect from old casserole recipes. (I just noted how they usually just call for dumping a lot of stuff together, after all, not neatly arranging the ingredients into stripes.) Not to worry, though, as the book includes a lot of odd jumbles of ingredients.

The descriptions don't always seem to match up with the recipe, either. The Veal Risotto doesn't necessarily sound bad. 

It's just that cooks now know that a risotto is not just "regular rice" (as the recipe specifies), but usually Arborio or another short-grain rice. It's cooked briefly in fat and then stirred as liquid is gradually added-- not just dumped in a casserole dish with meat, veggies, and a broth it can absorb in the oven. In short, I think this is called "risotto" because Family Circle wanted to make it seem fancy, the same way my students throw pronouns like "whom" or "myself" into a paper because they think the words are more formal than "who" or "I." There's no real recognition that the terms have actual, independent meanings and don't just signify fanciness.... 

Then there is a reminder that "peppery-hot" did not have the same meaning in 1978 as it does now. Oriental Pepper Pot promises that "Ground beef, fish, and vegetables steam in a peppery-hot sauce for this unusual meal."

But there are no peppers at all in this dish, unless you count the plain old ground pepper that gets thrown into pretty much every savory dish. Maybe the quarter teaspoon of ground ginger is supposed to set this afire?

Some dishes at least suggest that they're supposed to be variations of a familiar dish, like the Shepherdess Pie.

This contains no lamb, but instead sausage patties (painstakingly cut into 10 small pieces each) in a soup mix gravy, topped with the expected mashed potatoes plus "crumbled whole wheat wafers," whatever those might be. I imagined maybe this meant Triscuits. Then I tried Googling "whole wheat wafers" to see if I was just being dense, and I got all kinds of results, from Wheat Thins to whole wheat soda crackers to whole wheat Ritz to whole wheat communion wafers (though no Triscuits in the top results!), so I guess anything crunchy and whole wheat-y would work. (I assume religious types would argue against using communion wafers as a casserole topping. I imagine snacking crackers would taste better for this purpose anyway.)

My favorite casserole, though, just might be a variation on the divisive sweet-potato-n-marshmallow.

If you've ever thought ham and pineapple or ham with a brown sugar glaze is just not quite sweet enough, this recipe goes all-in on the sweet with pineapple, brown sugar, sweet potatoes, and marshmallows! So if you've ever wondered what a ham-and-marshmallow combo would be like, this is the answer. And just look at all the glorious shades of brown!

Serve with a salad of whole Romaine leaves and green onion sprigs with a squeeze of lemon, plus a bowl of dishwater in which you've floated three Corn Chex. Mmmm-mmmm!

And I will laugh at '70s families who actually tried this stuff while I secretly eat tater tot casserole and Spanish rice when nobody else is looking. Casseroles can make people do crazy things....

Not so tricky tricks

My initial post on Betty Crocker's Baking's Believing (undated, but an address inside does not include a zip code, so it's from early 1963 at the latest) mostly discussed my confusion about the intended audience. Was it moms planning birthday parties for kids? Bored housewives planning overly-elaborate cookie displays for the bridge club or a swingers' party? Kids who wanted to entertain other kids who had an extremely high threshold for boredom? They all seemed simultaneously possible but also wrong. Today, I want to look at a few more recipes I picked out just because they made me say, "Huh." They don't seem great or terrible-- just like more work than payoff.

One of those is Trick Bits, described as a "Magic mix of sweet and salt."

I mean, sweet and salt can be a great combo. (I'm sure that's part of why I adore Reese's peanut butter cups!) I just can't really see the point of creating this particular mix, when it involves mixing four different flavors of cookie dough, cutting each into its own tiny shapes, baking, and combining the product of all that work with nuts-- especially when the cookies will likely start breaking apart and the whole mix will probably taste pretty uniform after a day or so of being mixed together anyway. (My guess is that it will all taste at least vaguely of peppermint, given that that's the most assertive flavoring in the cookie mix.) Why bother with all that work when Reese's peanut butter cups already exist in this world? Plus there's Cracker Jacks, kettle corn, and any number of other sweet-n-salty combos. Trick Bits just seems like unsatisfying busywork. The trick is convincing anyone this should actually be prepared.

Another recipe with a rather non-existent trick  is the Sleight of Hand Cake. There's certainly nothing wrong with a spice and nut cake topped with a browned butter frosting (except that it also contains raisins).

It's just that I don't see much of a trick. It's just a hand outline on a cake. I also have to return to my question about the intended audience for this stuff. I can't really see kids getting that excited about a spice and nut cake with raisins, and I can't see grown-ups getting too excited about a cake with a nutty hand silhouette on top (with gumdrops between the fingers, for some reason).

At least there's kind of a point of the next recipe: Secret Word Cupcakes. Kids like the idea of communicating in secret. There's a reason why disappearing ink and secret decoder rings feature so heavily in stories for and about kids.

But the idea for writing on the top of a cupcake with corn syrup and colored sugar, then letting it dry overnight, and then covering the rest of the cupcake with additional colored sugar, and then instructing the cupcake eaters to tip off the excess sugar so they can read the writing... Well, there are just too many places where this could go wrong for the plan to feel very useful... starting with the idea that people who would be intrigued by a secret message on top of a cupcake would be willing to wait overnight before they could eat the cupcake. And even if you do get the cupcakes set up with the secret writing before anyone eats them, kids with cupcakes are supposed to listen to instructions on how to eat them rather than just plowing on in and only noticing that you're trying to instruct them once it's too late? And if they do manage to listen and follow instructions-- will the excess sugar actually come off enough that the secret writing will be visible? If not-- that's a disappointment. And if so, then you've probably got colored sugar dumped all over the table, the floor, the kid's clothes, and probably somewhere that will not make any sense, but you won't find it until next Tuesday. Or maybe next October.

In short, I love this book for its amazing weirdness and impracticality. And also for reminding me that I'm happy that I never have to cook for kids.

Del Monte suggests ways to make everything dark green, kind of metallic, and overly moist

I love the front of Del Monte Spinach: A Few Suggestions for Its Everyday Service (undated, but the 1930s estimate I've seen online seems about right).

The top picture (which doesn't seem to illustrate, as far as I can tell, any of the 19 recipes in the pamphlet) looks like a side dish masquerading as a wrapped gift, what with the red-and-white striped sides capped off with a frill of ruffly canned spinach. The middle image looks like a yellow-eyed alien creature peeking out of spinach shrubberies at the diners about to devour it, and the bottom image is maybe Oscar the Grouch on a spa day? (Of course he would have lemon slices on his eyes, not cucumber. He needs to be grouchy, and citrus juice in one's eyes will accomplish that... And the flowery bowl is the spa equivalent of a trash can, which is so fancy as to be infuriating.)

In any case, most of  the recipes are pretty straightforward, like creamed spinach or baked onions stuffed with spinach. A slight variation of creamed spinach for people who really enjoy two supremely boring vegetables is Spinach and Celery Purée.

Yep-- It's basically creamed spinach, made exciting with the addition of thinly-sliced celery. 😮 (Yes, that is definitely a sarcastic "Wow!" face.)

Since it was basically impossible to get too far away from deviled eggs in old recipe collections, as they were the go-to way to add cheap protein to round out any meal, there's a Stuffed Egg Salad.

I thought it was interesting that the filling in this case is just spinach with green onions, salt, and mayonnaise. The yolks get put through a sieve and sprinkled on as a topping-- perhaps because people in the '30s weren't prepared for green eggs and needed the golden yolks to hide the green bits?

The book also offers a very wet and squishy-sounding sandwich of the "anything between slices of bread counts as a sandwich" school of thought.

I imagine chopped up canned spinach mixed with mashed sardines and lemon juice and slapped on buttered bread would indeed make "A moist sandwich for the lunch box"-- one the maker might be glad to have out of the house before the diners discover what got packed. (I swear, some of the old lunchbox sandwich recipes suggest that the cooks were just constantly trying to make the kids and/ or husbands just pack their own goddamn sandwiches, although it's more likely the families didn't have a lot of money or a good way to get to the grocery too often and just had to figure out how to use up whatever odds and ends they had around the house.)

My favorite combo might just be the Spinach Salad--French Dressing.

I am overly amused at the thought of topping garden-fresh lettuce leaves with a tightly-molded wad of canned spinach and some French dressing. If you've got the fresh lettuce, well, there's the salad. Canned spinach can only detract! (But of course, leaving it off would mean having to find a new recipe to fill that hole in the pamphlet, so gloppy, metallic canned spinach on top of fresh lettuce it is!)

You've got to admire the recipe writers' pragmatism: Throw in enough recipes to fill up the space and then go off to do something else. No point in trying to make anything too good out of canned spinach...

Such a very '70s picture!

I have, admittedly, been making fun of The American Culinary Society's Menu Maker (Marguerite Patten, 1973) for several posts, but it's out of love (well, mostly love, but also partly vicarious dyspepsia). I've been saving the thing I love most, though. This book has one of the most perfectly 1970s pictures I own. Feast your eyes on this chorus line of whole fish clearing the way for a billowy pineapple float.

There's nothing quite so peaceful (and by peaceful, I mean nightmare-inducing) as a platter full of whole fish in a starburst of citrus, chins resting on tomato slices and tails weighted with asparagus as their sunken eyes remind all who behold them that death comes for us all. And it will insist that some of us be coated with gelatin and put on a macabre display when we go.

That's why they need to be followed by the fluffy little cloud of pineapple-- so we can say "Ooh, cute!" Then we can admire the way the gold-tipped meringue points imitate the pineapple skin and the way the saved pineapple top completes the look, because the best way to put a pineapple on a 1970s dinner table is to completely deconstruct it and then reconstruct it again with ice cream and whipped egg whites to show off that one has the leisure time to fuck around with a pineapple all day.

Should you ever need put on a 1970s dinner party (and have an entire day to arrange garnishes, shellac them with fishy gelatin, whip and pipe egg whites, etc.), here are the recipes.

I think I'm just going to use the picture as the wallpaper on my desktop for a few weeks. I scanned it. That's as much work as I am willing to put into this menu.

Not-so-Sexy Sixties Microwave Recipes

I've written about Amana microwave cookbooks before, but those books were from the 1970s-- a time when microwaves were just beginning to get popular. Today's book is special because it's even earlier.

The Amana Radarange Microwave oven Microwave Cooking Guide is from 1968-- just after the first models appropriate for household use went into the market.

Part of what I love about the cookbook is its sixties vibe. Microwaves were so new that owners had to be instructed on how to find a place for the appliance, and this kitchen is just soooo sixties I want to frame it and hang it by my desk.

Just look at the cheery red-orange cupboards with the white trim! And the profusion of bright orange and yellow flowers in the wallpaper, with an avocado-green dining room chair hiding in the background! It's such a cheery late-'60s wonderland that I can almost forget for a second that people who weren't killing and dying in Vietnam were being assassinated right here at home. 

But hey! At least lobsters didn't feel self-conscious about going out with unshaven armpits.

And yeah... If you were rich enough to own a microwave, you were also rich enough to nuke a lobster. I've already covered that.

The thing that really struck me about this very early microwave cookbook, though, was just how many organ meat recipes it had. The microwave was billed as an easy way to cook liver.

It could also scramble sweetbreads like nobody's business.

Or it could bake veal OR pork brains!

Or if you couldn't remember whether your fridge was full of sweetbreads or brains, well, either could be Dejeunered, as long as you had a few fresh veggies and some canned asparugs.

It just seemed odd to see so many organ meat recipes (dishes that seem more like meals for farmers who used up all parts of their animals or for people on limited budgets who couldn't afford steaks than for ritzy trend setters) in a cookbook for a pricy appliance. I guess maybe microwave owners had to make up for the price of the microwave by making more economical dishes?

Or maybe tastes just really were more old-fashioned back then, as the first word in "Prune Party Crock" now seems out of place to me.

Yeah, there's wine in the prunes, but maybe party guests would rather have their alcohol without prunes, especially if they're trying to make smoldering glances to the cutie across the room rather than worrying about what that gurgly feeling down below might presage....

I'm just not sure Amana was quite ready to party in 1968, but it was trying to make using up the prunes and organ meat seem kind of fancy and thrilling.

These cringes are not just from the recipes...

I would be remiss not to note that Campbell's Great Restaurants Cookbook, U.S.A. (ed. Doris Townsend, 1969) reminds me that the 1960s were definitely NOT enlightened times. Each selection of recipes comes with a headnote describing the restaurant from which they came, and some of those headnotes have... shall we say... not aged well.

Maybe some people will think the biggest offense in the section featuring Homard à la Crème is the idea that one should waste lobster, brandy, sherry, butter, and cream in a can of condensed cream of mushroom soup.

I'm more disturbed by the description of the Bacchanal restaurant from which it comes, however...

The end of the last line... Ouch! I'll bet the people who played those "slave girls" et al. had to put up with a lot. People who thought it was a good time to be served this way were surely royal pains in the ass.

And then there was the Golden Lion, which offered up a different type of old-school cruelty.

No, I'm not talking about stretching out a creamy oyster soup with an indeterminate number of cans of frozen condensed oyster stew. 

I'm talking about using phrases like "gateway to the Orient" and "exotic spectaculars" and a longing for "the glory of British colonialism at its height, when far-ranging British ships were opening to Western civilization the mysteries of the East." This concept aged so poorly that The Golden Lion no longer exists, but the Seattle Public Library's digital collection offers a menu, and the menu does in fact include an oyster-based Golden Lion Soup, priced at $1.50 (which, assuming this menu is roughly contemporary with the book, would be about $13 now). 

I know people often long for a simpler or more glorious past, but looking through old cookbooks is a good reminder that I am happy not to be there! Not that society has necessarily made that much progress since this book was published, but we've made enough that most reasonable people know it's at least in poor taste to playact oppressive stereotypes and assume one should be "justly proud" about it. It's a small, small victory, but I'll take what I can get...