Get ready for Brown Friday!

The day after Thanksgiving is known as Black Friday for retail workers, but plumbers have their own term for what is also often their busiest day of the year: Brown Friday. I'm sure you can figure out why.... Larger-than-normal meals... Big gatherings... It can be a lot for the pipes to handle.

In any case, if you're afraid you might miss out on that Brown Friday rush, Sunsweet Recipes (California Prune & Apricot Growers Association, 1950) offers a few Thanksgiving-appropriate recipes to make sure your plumbing gets a good workout.

Of course, people expect some vegetable sides, like sweet potatoes. Instead of the ever-popular sweet potatoes and marshmallows angle, try sweet potatoes and prunes.

But why stick to prunes in just the veggie sides? People expect some roughage in those anyway. The turkey might be a good place to hide additional prunes.

Just stuff it full of Fruited Stuffing-- and the fruit will be Sunsweet prunes, of course!

And then you need some cranberries for a zesty counterpoint to all the rich foods. Why should the cranberry entirely steal the spotlight, though?

Make a Prune Cranberry Conserve instead. I mean, the family should be really tripled up on prunes just to make sure the big meal keeps on moving....

I guess if all else fails, a host desperate to get in on Brown Friday can just try sending a box or two of Sunsweet prunes straight down the garbage disposal to get the kitchen in on the action, but it wouldn't be the same.

In any case, may your Friday after Thanksgiving just be a Friday. Hopefully one when you don't have to work... or make anyone else work overtime....

Recipes that Are Swift and Proudly Bland!

There was a time when "bland" was considered a compliment, as Timely Baking Recipes with Swift's Bland Lard (Martha Logan, undated, but probably the 1940s or '50s) reminds us.

Of course, here the fact that "Bland Lard is odorless and tasteless" is a selling point because people wanted their baked goods to taste like the featured flavor. Nobody wants Brown Sugar Cake or Snowy Cream Frosting or Pecan Waffles to taste like rancid animal fat.

You know I'm not going to show off the yummy-sounding desserts, though. I've got to show you a few of the weirder baked goods.

Some recipes really double down on the bland lard, like Franciscan Meat Pie.

The crust uses the Swift's Bland Lard Biscuit Mix, and the filling fries the onion, ground meat, and catsup in additional Swift's Bland Lard for the hard-core lard-heads.

Some recipes go a little lighter on the lard, like the Frankfurter Toastwiches.

Here, cooks just need a couple tablespoons of lard to fry up what amounts to hot-dog-and-cheese-spread-stuffed French toast.

Some recipes sound like they should be familiar, but "egg roll" apparently meant something different back in Martha Logan's day.

This version is just egg salad rolled jelly-roll style into biscuit dough and baked, then served hot "with cream or mushroom sauce." It's certainly not the Chinese-American appetizer you probably imagined.

For those who want to cook with eggs and lard but don't want to bother with the whole rolling-out-a-jelly-roll thing, there's Egg Quickies.

I'm not quite sure what these conglomerations of onion, bread crumbs, milk, and hard-cooked eggs globbed together, cooled on waxed paper, shaped into patties, and pan fried are supposed to be. Maybe a main dish for Fridays during Lent? Maybe a sign that there's not much left in the kitchen besides onion, bread crumbs, and eggs? Maybe an indication that payday isn't until Friday but the family still expects food today? Maybe just a reminder that life mostly sucks anyway, so here's random things glommed together that you are now expected to eat. Hey, it's fried, so it's not all bad. Quit crying.

Celebrating Fast Food Day in a Jiffy

November 16 is National Fast Food Day, so I have kindly found a vintage "speedy" recipe for your eye-rolling pleasure. Today's gem comes from The Family Home Cookbook (director Melanie de Proft, 1973).

True to form, this old-timey "jiffy" recipe will not seem all that quick to today's cooks. It starts with preparing Italian salad dressing from a mix (rather than just using pre-made), and requires marinating the peas in it for a minimum of an hour. Plus, if you have to chop the onion and crisp and crumble the bacon yourself-- as the original audience for this recipe almost certainly did-- this seems like a lot of work for a quick and easy recipe.

Luckily, if you love salad dressing, canned peas, and raw onion every bit as much as I do, it only takes a moment to glance at the recipe, make a disgusted face, and go on with your day. Not making this at all is the real time-saver.

Upper class twits use cholesterol to horrify a child of the '80s

Are you ready for another Woman's Day Collector's Cook Book? This time, we have Traditional English Foods from February of 1965.

The booklet is peppered with illustrations meant to allow readers to imagine themselves as upper-class British twits, like this cover image of a large dining room full of people being served by a servant in a jacket. The thing that really struck me about the collection, though, was that it was clearly put together before the great fat and cholesterol panic that I grew up during. (Remember cantaloupes being labeled as cholesterol-free? 🙄)

There's potted shrimp, for instance.

If 1980s people weren't already panicking from all the cholesterol in a half-cup of shrimp, the quarter-cup of butter would send them right over the edge.

If that's note quite enough cholesterol, there's also the pie that nestles both bacon and eggs in a double-crust pastry.

The pastry was probably made with suet or lard for good measure!

And speaking of suet, dessert was likely to entail quite a bit of it...

...regardless of whether you were having spotted dog or a roly poly.

And "to clean the palate of the sweet taste" after dessert, the booklet also offers meal-ending savories like this marrow toast, just in case the meal didn't contain quite enough animal fat.

At least there are plenty of calming pictures to look at in case the recipes produce any residual panic from having lived through the low-fat, low-cholesterol era.

Well.... Having to attend a party? With other actual adults? In fancy dress? Maybe not so calming...

Out on a river? With a bottle of wine precariously balanced where it would be easy to knock out of the boat? Which I would then likely tip over as I lunged for the quickly-disappearing wine bottle? Maybe not so calming...

Solitarily watching a cat creep across the rooftops, indifferent to the group of people loitering around their car below? Okay, that's more my speed. Now I'm going to leave 1960s British-American recipes behind and have myself a salad.

Distract yourself with overly-complicated fish recipes!

Want a needlessly-complicated recipe to distract you from the real world while you try to assemble it? Indifferent as to how it will come out, as you've lost your appetite anyway? The Family Home Cookbook (director Melanie de Proft, 1973) has a couple of recommendations.

If simply heating up fish sticks and calling it dinner is not quite sufficient distraction from a crazy week, you can try turning them into an arts and crafts project.

Wrap the breading in more bread! Well, a crust, anyway. Because we all know that making a fussy pie crust and trying to shape it into anything other than "random amoeba that is kind of losing structural integrity" can really focus your attention on the task at hand. 

Add a half-cup of grated Cheddar with the lard or shortening to make it a cheese crust.

And if you do actually manage to turn the crust into a viable shape, your fish sticks could come out looking like lumpy pigs in a blanket or maybe the cookies your weirdest aunt brings for Christmas that get quietly thrown in the trash once the party is over and she declines to take them home, instructing you to "Enjoy."

Alternatively, if you like mindlessly stuffing deviled eggs, but think the steps of boiling the eggs, disassembling the eggs, making the filling, and stuffing the yolk mixture back into the eggs again will be insufficient distraction, try Sardine-Stuffed Eggs. 

They also give you a chance to fiddle around with opening and mashing cans of sardines for the filling. And the excitement doesn't stop there! You also get to cook and drain noodles, mix them with a homemade white sauce, throw the noodle assembly in a casserole dish, top it with the eggs, and bake the whole thing. You can even make toast points for serving. If you're lucky, you might burn the bread and have to make them twice. That's extra pointless work for a dinner that's already starchy! Plus, the casserole will come out looking like phlegm-covered rocks.

Not a bad visual representation of this week. 

Vintage Pork for "Two"

I live in small household, so most of my cooking is for just one or two people. The old cookbooks featuring recipes for families with half-a-dozen kids always leave me glad I'm not hauling gallons of soup on and off the stove (I'd almost certainly burn somebody!) or trying to get a massive Jell-O mold to set up. But once in a while, I'll come across some recipes intended to serve one or two people-- a little peek into what the lives of the freer people might have been like. Such is the case for Pork for Two (National Pork Producers Council, undated, but looks very 1970s).

I mean, it has a harvest gold fondue pot on the cover. I rest my case.

Aside from the recommendation to cut two blade steaks into thin strips, skewer them, and then cook them in a fondue pot full of hot oil, the pamphlet also offers another popular vintage recipe option: going Hawaiian.

I hope the smoke on the pork chops is enough to cut through all the sweetness of pineapple chunks, sweet potatoes, and pineapple preserves. (At least if it's not, you're not stuck with a lot of leftovers to throw away or try to choke down.)

The booklet's titles really try to sell the recipes. For instance, calling anything a "platter" makes it sound bountiful and maybe just a little bit fancy. 

And these ham and potato platters feature a glaze on the ham (which sounds wretched to me, but I know my hatred of sweet-and-sour-type sauces is unnaturally strong) plus a fancy piped border of sour-creamy mashed potatoes. Whatever picture you have in your head, though, I kind of doubt it looks like this picture.

Is it just me, or do those look like flowers some six-year-old drew right before they were referred to the student counselor? Then the counselor kept asking why the "flowers" looked so bloody... and whether the centers were ringed by petals or teeth. (That right there is a good reason to keep cooking ONLY for two. If the couple has the wisdom not to reproduce, there's no chance of getting dragged down to the school to find out what Junior has done this time.)

The book's biggest secret, though, is that it is only half-heartedly committed to the assertion in the title that these recipes are for two. If the ingredients in the Fruit Glazed Butterfly Chops sound like a LOT for only two people, well, look near the end.

Yeah-- this makes six servings. But you can freeze and reheat this! Just like you could with a lot of the recipes that serve six in pretty much any other cookbook. So what is the point of Pork for Two if it's "for two" in the sense that any larger recipe can serve two now... and again tomorrow... and maybe again the next day? It's less "pork for two" and more of an early version of what we'd now call "meal prep."

No worries, though! The picture for the caption promises "You'll never get tired of this pork-dried fruit combo accented with ginger and mustard." If you were hoping for recipes you wouldn't get tired of because they wouldn't leave you with leftovers, well, tough. The book implies you should have had Junior and Susan and Richard and Patty so you could just make and fully consume regular-size recipes. Not having excessive leftovers is a fair trade-off for all the afternoons spent in the student counselor's office. 

Celebrating a non-patriarchal November

The Political Palate (The Bloodroot Collective (Betsey Beaven, Noel Giordano, Selma Miriam, and Pat Shea), 1980) starts with late autumn (October 31-- Witch's New Year-- through winter solstice), but I started posting about this book in January (early winter). That means the recipes I'm posting now are earlier in the book than the ones I started the year with! I'm sure nobody else cares, but I think it's funny.

The book does not have many recipes for holidays, as the Collective believes "that carrying on 'holiday' traditions of a system which is, per se, anti-woman, is concretely harmful to our minds and spirits." Harvest celebrations are fine, though, as long as the harvest is celebrated "without reference to the patriarchal Puritans and their condescension and exploitation of 'Indians.'" The Harvest Vegetable Platter is their way to celebrate. 

The Rutabaga-Potato Puree loaded up with butter and a touch of garlic sounds like something I'd see on a cooking show now (except home cooks would be admonished to use a potato ricer rather than a food processor, lest the puree get gummy).

The Roasted Parsnips and Carrots to go with the puree represent a serious commitment to root vegetables! Plus, the sunflower seeds mixed in suggest an underlying allegiance to old-school health foods. 

If that platter seemed a bit lacking to you, don't worry! There are a couple more pages! I just figured it was easier to break this recipe up. On to page two....

Next, we've got acorn squash (chosen in part because they're "womblike," and that selection criteria for a food is not weird or creepy at all) full of chestnut stuffing. I love that the bread in the stuffing is specified to be homemade. (I will admit that when I was young and idealistic, I made homemade bread several days in advance of a Thanksgiving so I could cube and dry it to use for entirely homemade stuffing. And then I got old and lazy and realized that once you mix in all the seasonings and butter and whatever add-ons you want, nobody can tell the bread is homemade anyway, so why bother? Grocery stores sell bread cubes for a reason.)

There's also an Apple Cranberry Sauce made of -- surprise!-- apples and cranberries, plus a little cider, cinnamon, and honey.

Round things out with steamed broccoli flowerets (because all the root vegetables and squash provide insufficient amounts of vegetable matter) and add a Miso Gravy.

Well, make that Miso Gravy with onion, butter, garlic, mushrooms, seasonings, and beer. Then you're fully ready to "commemorate the fruits of the earth," or at least sate a seasonal urge to cook up a big bunch of food all at once, invite people over so you can engage in arguments that got a lot louder than you might have expected catch up on each others' lives, and hope everybody eats just the right amount of food so you might have a few leftovers but not enough that you will get sick of them....

In focusing on the more traditional holiday, though, I realized that I missed out on posting the recipe for the holiday that starts this book and this season: Witch's New Year (which is technically over now anyway). Witches' Froth (or Apple Cream) is a dessert that recalls the days when people were not worried about salmonella in raw eggs.

Also, a time when apple sauce fluffed up with egg whites and flavored with a touch of honey and rum or applejack could count as a dessert. I personally think the witches are getting short-changed on this one, but eating Reese's Peanut Butter Pumpkins wasn't an option until 1993, and it would have gone against the Collective's anti-capitalist principles anyway.... I guess I wouldn't have made a good witch.

In any case, enjoy the harvest! I will see you in December with some recipes that are definitely not related to "the obscenity of noise and false jollity that is Christmas," as the Collective puts it.

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.