How to make your apples feel very special

I always post special recipes on this blog, but today I'm going all out and posting very special recipes.

That is the opinion of American Cyanamid Company in cooperation with the National Apple Institute, who put out Very Special Apple Recipes from America's Orchard Lands (undated, but pre-zip code, so before mid-1963). Now let's go bobbing for apple recipes!

The booklet offers various regional recipes accompanied by illustrations of the areas from which they originated. 

For instance, from New York and New England...

...represented by Robert Frost getting ready to stop by some woods on a snowy evening, we have Cape Cod Baked Apples.

This is the Thanksgiving side dish to serve when you want apple pie, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes with marshmallows, and pecan pie, but you don't have the space/ time/ energy to make all of them individually.

From the West...

...represented here at the start of a secret Russian invasion, we have Apples-on-the Half-Shell.

It's the ever-popular mid-century-fancy dish of seafood in avocado halves-- this time with apples since it's an apple cook booklet, after all. 

My favorite recipes, though, are from Appalachia...

...represented here by a man pointedly ignoring a woman trying to get water from an old-timey pump. Woman, don't expect help. He's got hogs to stare at. Or maybe really misshapen, out-of-scale cows. It's hard to tell. That's why he's got to stare.

There's an Apple Potato Salad, I guess to show the West that they aren't the only ones who can randomly throw apples into popular salads that are generally apple-free.

And there's also a Saturday Night Casserole.

I guess this is to remind everybody that even if it is the day after payday, the family can't afford anything more than hot dogs to go with the home-grown apples, onions, and home-canned cabbage for dinner on a Saturday night.

This is a cozy little booklet to peruse, especially on a crisp fall day when the grocery stores are filled with fresh apples. I'm only tempted to try to find some Ginger Golds or Cortlands to eat raw, though. No recipes (very special or plain old) needed!

Celebrate Halloween with melting clowns and figs that make you uncomfortable

Happy (almost!) Halloween! For the last weekend before the big day, here are a few Halloween dessert ideas from Mary Margaret McBride's Encyclopedia of Cooking Deluxe Illustrated Edition (1959).

First, we have a simply decorated cake. 

The decorations are so simple that the blurb beneath the picture is all the instruction you get: use orange frosting to make pumpkin. Paint on face with chocolate. Looks cute, but I'm distracted by the witch pumpkin in the background. Is that just really weird shading, or does she have some kind of complexion issue? Maybe a weird birthmark? I know better than to ask, so I'll just leave it to my imagination. (Scarring from surviving a burning-at-the-stake attempt it is!)

I know the Party Clown isn't technically Halloween-related, but I'm throwing it in anyway, given the ubiquity of killer clowns in horror movies and Art the clown's recent box office success.

This clown looks more like a horror movie victim than villain, though-- just a disembodied head resting on ... something. At least this dessert has instructions, so I can find out.

Ah-- so disembodied clown head atop a cake round. Now I want a new clown-related horror movie with a title like Big Top Bakery of Blood. 

The real horror, though, is the Halloween Fig Faces cake. 

The little dude staring at us from the center of the top row realizes just how racist this cake will look in 65 years, and he wants nothing to do with this picture. 

The book doesn't give instructions for this one either, I guess because it was so easy to tap into the free-floating racism of the time that it was second nature...

Hope I didn't ruin your Halloween with these sad little figs! If you feel too down, I find that a nice Reese's peanut butter pumpkin can always set things right. 

Thinking way too hard about the manliness of rice-based dishes

When I saw Man-Pleasing Recipes (1971), I was a little surprised by the big bowl of rice front and center. Given that men are stereotypically supposed to be so meat-focused, I'd have expected the roast in the prominent spot.

Then I saw that this recipe booklet is from Rice Council of America. That's why rice is so prominent! Maybe rice could seem manly by association with things that typical Americans at the time saw as manly.

For instance, the book offers a hearty beef stew to be served with Rice Verte.

Using the French word for "green" to emphasize the rice's veggie content isn't what I would expect for a 1970s book that bills itself as "man-pleasing." Maybe that's why the stew has to be served in a roughly football-shaped vessel.

I was surprised that the book had so many recipes with Frenchified names, like the Beef Choufleur.

It's kind of confusing to use the French word for cauliflower for a dish that seems inspired by American Chinese food, but this book is not about meeting one's stereotypical expectations.

Though it does meet my expectation that 1970s foods be predominantly brown....

Sometimes the book really pushes at one's expectations. Rice Jardin omits meat entirely and uses a French name. Pretty bold move for something marketed as manly in the 1970s.

I'm not sure "A garden of flavor, fresh or canned" is the best tagline for a recipe, but I still have to appreciate the assumption that even manly men can enjoy veggies with a fancy name as long as said veggies are strewn through buttery rice.

Maybe men can even appreciate non-brown foods?!

And then I got to the final recipe in the book, and I had so many questions. First of all, how is Royal Rice "low calorie"?

It's just rice with some butter and veggies. In fact, given that this has a larger proportion of rice to vegetables, I'd imagine that the Rice Jardin might be less calorie dense than Royal Rice. The claim seems to arise from nowhere.

Beyond the questionable assertion of being low calorie, the bigger question is whether this is an admission that men might be concerned about calories too, even though women were typically thought of as being the calorie counters. Or is this just a tacit admission that the Rice Council of America had the same stereotypes about men and women as the rest of America, and calling the recipes "Man-Pleasing" was just a way to catch the (likely straight female) audience's attention, while most of the actual recipes were meant to appeal directly to their tastes? Is this book an attempt to change conventional ideas about masculinity? Or is it just doubling down on stereotypes about women by assuming they want to please men in theory because that's what they're culturally expected to do, but that they really want lighter food and will overlook the disconnect between the title and the contents?

Oh, yeah. It's just a way to sell rice by any means necessary, as the supposedly low-cal rice nestled under a big hunk of meat and a pile of deep-fried onion rings reminds us. It just wants to show that rice can be everything to everybody, and I put way too much thought into the premise, here... Certainly more than the people who put the booklet together. I guess these rice recipes just prove that I'm an over-thinker.

Funny Name: Not a Euphemism Edition

"How would you like some 'Copenhagen Cabbage'?"

"I've never tried that before! I was hoping to score some when I went on my student trip in Scandinavia, but I never tracked any down. What's it like?"

"Oh, you mean actual cabbage. With ground beef. And tomato sauce. And cinnamon."

Thanks, anyway, to All Our Favorites Cook Book (The Pioneer Partners of Hawkeye Chapter #17, undated.)

Government-Issue Egg Recipes

The cover of Egg Dishes for Any Meal (U.S. Department of Agriculture, issued June 1946, slightly revised February 1946) cracks me up. (Pun intended because I'm just that kind of person.)

I love the big, round font that "EGG" is written in, as if each letter kind of wants to be an egg. I love the row of eggs standing on their comically tiny legs holding banners that say "Protein," "Vitamins," and "Minerals" with their comically tiny hands. And I can't help but wonder if the "Vitamins" and "Minerals" eggs feel kind of slighted since they're mostly hidden, or whether they have stage fright and are glad "Protein" is up front to take the brunt of viewers' gazes.

The pamphlet itself is not super exciting, mostly full of standard instructions, like how to fry, scramble, poach, etc. or standard recipes like soufflés, omelets, and custards. The back reminds readers of how much home cooks had to stretch ingredients in those years so soon after the war, touting eggs as a way to add extra protein and richness to the ubiquitous white sauce.

Eggs also provide a way to stretch whipped cream when there's not quite enough.

And there is a savory custard, apparently because adding little cubes of savory custard could turn vegetables or soup or pretty much anything into a main dish.

It was a tough time.

There are a few fun recipes, though. "Eggaroni" is kind of fun to say all by itself.

I can just imagine all the kids who thought they were getting a plate full of pale macaroni and cheese and then realizing it was macaroni with horseradish-flavored white sauce and hard cooked eggs. I'll bet that went over well.

For those who love the mingled scents of cabbage and hard-cooked eggs, there's an Egg Slaw.

I can only imagine how rotten that could get during a midday picnic...

And for gelatin salad enthusiasts, there is a Molded Egg Salad.

This recipe is made with unflavored gelatin rather than lemon or lime! And mayo-haters could actually avoid it in this version of egg salad, presuming they could get out of any last-minute garnishing that might occur.

In any case, the recipes do seem to hold the promised protein, vitamins, and minerals! The family's excitement levels about this may vary, but hey-- cooks could always fall back on good old scrambled eggs and toast if savory custards and eggaroni didn't go over as well as expected. 

Some old veggie recipes that are not quite as sad as I would have anticipated

Even though The Abridged Edition of the Saturday Evening Post Fiber & Bran Better Health Cookbook (Cory SerVaas, M.D., Charlotte Turgeon, and Fred Birmingham, 1977) is not a vegetarian cookbook, it does have a pretty good selection of vegetarian recipes. Some of them are exactly what I expect from old cookbooks: a big pile of random veggies on top of a starch.

In this case, the recipe recommends millet instead of the more usual brown rice. That gets topped with some sautéed veggies and a whole lot of parboiled veggies in the water from their parboiling adventure. No real sauce-- just cheese and a garnish of beets on top. 

Of course, there's the obligatory veggie loaf as well. 

This one is better than a lot of older veggie loaf recipes, though. It's got tomato puree and cheese for some flavor, so it won't just be a brick of brown rice and veggies. Plus, it's a relatively small vegetarian meatloaf, so hopefully it will get finished off before everyone is too sick of it.

There's also a selection of veggie burgers. One sounds like it could be a euphemism for a testicle-based dish...

... but "Nut Burgers" refers to the cashews and walnuts in the recipe. This even calls for chili powder, hot sauce, or other seasonings in addition to a full cup of cheese, so it might not taste like a lump of cardboard!

Another recipe just sounds like a carb to put between more carbs.

Put your oat burger on some whole wheat buns for an extremely brown and grainy meal!

And one recipe just sounds sad.

I mean "Meatless Bran Patties" sounds like something they'd serve in jail as a punishment meal for somebody who broke the rules. 

If everything seems a bit too dry and bland, the book even offers a Blended Cashew Gravy to try to alleviate the issue.

Two tablespoons of onion powder sounds like a lot, but I guess at least the gravy will have some kind of flavor, other than "slurry."

Even if the recipes aren't always terribly tempting, I've got to appreciate that this cookbook put more effort into the vegetarian recipes than I would expect in a 1970s non-vegetarian cookbook. Yay?

More weird-pile-o'-ingredient sandwiches for your wtf-ing pleasure

You ever get a hankering for a sandwich just before 3:00? Well, I have a pamphlet for that.

Well, I do in theory, anyway. Although the cover of Sandwiches Around the Clock (American Institute of Baking, 1950) suggests that the contents of the pamphlet will be arranged around time, the "recipes" (really just lists of things you can put together and spread on bread) are mostly themed by the target audiences-- children, men, party guests. So if you were hoping to find out the perfect mid-afternoon snackwich or the bread-fillers that might get you back to sleep if you wake up just before 3 a.m., this is false advertising.

Still, I found out that chicken must have been relatively expensive in the 1950s, as the Chickenette sandwich in the "Family Meal" section doesn't contain the ingredient you would probably assume is the main one.

No chicken at all! Just ground pork dressed up with veggies, peanuts, and mayonnaise.

At least the Hashburger is much more straightforward.

Yep-- canned corned beef hash on a bun! Dress it up with some tartar sauce, tomato, and lettuce, and gesture in a vaguely menacing way with your coffee cup if Walt or little Margaret seems like they might object.

I also learned that picnic time didn't necessarily mean grilling some hot dogs or hamburgers and calling it a day.

I hope those picnickers have something fun in their thermos.

In any case, it was much easier to prepare and pack sandwiches ahead of time than to cook on site. And doesn't a nice chilled sandwich sound good on a hot day anyway?

Well, maybe... Unless it's deviled ham blended with peanut butter, mayonnaise, and pickles.... Then all bets are off.

The book's oddest ideas might just be about what children like. It seems convinced that they really want peanut butter and cheese as a combo. 

And maybe it's right to some extent. Peanut butter with cream cheese and orange sounds weird but potentially good. I mean, cream cheese is good with pretty much anything, and people eat peanut butter with jelly all the time. Orange isn't that far off.

And then there's peanut butter and cheddar cheese...

Along with apple butter, which makes it a little like the apple pie + cheese combo. But also with peanut butter.

And then the book tosses the idea of peanut butter and just goes for the peanut paired with cottage cheese...

And mayonnaise... and onion salt. I guess I can see a few kids liking this, but they will also be the kids that everybody else tries to sit very far away from at the lunch table....

Interestingly, a lot of the recipes billed as being for kids contain no meat, but only one of them is explicitly named a vegetarian sandwich.

And this is just an extremely boring collection of raw grated vegetables bound with chili sauce and mayonnaise. It's hard to imagine anybody getting excited about this sandwich filling, much less a group of kids.

But hey, the booklet thinks the kids will get all excited for smoked tongue, too. 

Maybe kids in the '50s were way more open-minded about food than I imagine they would be. Or maybe everybody back then was just waaaay hungrier and would eat whatever anybody smeared on a slice of bread and told them to eat. In any case, I'm happy to eat peanut butter in my own weird modern way: spread on a flour tortilla, sprinkled with smoked salt, and rolled into a neat little spiral that is easy to scarf down between classes.

A gumbo of gumbos

While I mostly highlight recipes that sound terrible and/or the unfortunate cultural attitudes that show up in old cookbooks, sometimes I just like to see how a dish can be interpreted in a variety of ways. That's why today we're looking at a series of gumbos from River Road Recipes II: A Second Helping (The Junior League of Baton Rouge, Louisiana; January 1977 fourth printing).

Before I went through this book, I assumed gumbo was a stew thickened with okra that usually had seafood and celery, bell, peppers, and onions as the main components. Some Baton Rouge residents have a far more inclusive definition, though, as the Gumbo Vert recipe suggests.

This is just veggies-- cabbage, spinach, and onions (only one of them a component of the holy trinity that one might expect)-- with pickled pork in a flour-thickened sauce. Mrs. James Hymel, Jr., must have realized it wasn't what most others would recognize as a gumbo, so there's a tiny note at the bottom: "This is not a form of soup as one would think of as gumbo. It is called gumbo due to the fact that it is a mixture of things-- in this case green vegetables."

Most of the recipes are much closer to what I would expect, though. Seafood Gumbo was so popular that the book offers two different versions. The first version uses bacon drippings to start the roux and serves 20.

Plus it fortifies the tomatoes with some catsup. This version comes from Mrs. Robert Witcher in New York, so I wonder if it discredits the recipe. (I'm not sure why they'd have a recipe from a random person in New York, though, so maybe Mrs. Witcher originally lived in Baton Rouge and had to move away but still contributed to her old Junior League friends' cookbook.)

The Seafood Gumbo II starts with an oil-based roux and serves 8-10.

No catsup to supplement the tomatoes in this version, but it includes allspice berries, so it might have still been going for a slightly catsup-y taste? I would not have guessed that that was desirable, but it seems to be....

For those who feel intimidated by the huge ingredient lists for the seafood gumbos, there's a Shrimp, Crab, and Okra Gumbo. 

This version is tomato-free and uses filé in addition to okra.

For the hunters, there's a Duck and Sausage Gumbo.

This one, too, omits the tomatoes, and it goes all-in on the filé, leaving out the okra entirely.

If the list seems a bit empty without crawfish, don't worry! There's a Crawfish Filé Gumbo too.

(I have to admire the way the editors made sure to consistently add the accent aigu to the "e" in "filé"! This recipe even includes the accent on sauté.) Crawfish Filé Gumbo goes with Ro-Tel tomatoes to get a bit more kick, omits the okra, and lets diners add filé  to taste. (Interesting that an ingredient from the title is actually just an optional add-on at the end.)

Okay, and if you're really disappointed that this post doesn't have anything too outlandish (assuming you're not among the people who have VERY STRONG VIEWS about whether tomatoes belong in gumbo, or whether it's acceptable to use smoked sausage rather than a genuine Cajun sausage in a gumbo, or whether...), then here's something at least kind of odd to reset your palate.

I'm not sure what Bleu Cheese Salad Sherbert (Yes-- spelled with two "r"s!) would be like, exactly-- might actually be a pretty good tangy/ creamy surprise between courses-- but if you don't know what to expect, that first bite would probably be pretty alarming! 

So... Gumbo! This is a real mixture of a post, so I'm going to declare it is a gumbo as well! Mrs. James Hymel, Jr. might not care.