Harvest the oranges and cranberries! It's August

Cooking by the Calendar (edited by Marilyn Hansen, 1978) muses that "The steady golden hum of August is upon us with its humid heat and incessant growth. Yes, growth does seem to happen almost overnight, especially if we water regularly." And that is why this chapter is so devoted to using up produce. Of course, a big part of that is gelatin salads! 

Well, in theory, anyway. I'm not sure many of the readers are likely to be growing oranges, bananas, and avocadoes, but they make the chart, too. 

I expected something in this array of Jell-Os to sound appealing, but there's nothing too impressive. The apple, banana, and peach versions sound the most promising, but they still require gnawing through stringy celery and sogged-out nuts to enjoy the better bits. And then there are combinations like avocado, orange, and onion in a citrus gelatin; cheese and celery in a tomato-and-citrus gelatin; or grapefruit, celery, and olives in lemon.... 

I was also a bit surprised by the recommendation to make Cranberry Mousse with Raspberry Sauce.

I don't usually see cranberries in stores until about November. Why not a peach mousse with raspberry sauce if we're trying to use up the produce? Hansen just doesn't seem very committed to the premise for August's recipes.

The chapter also includes grilled recipes for family picnics. While it has the classics like barbecued ribs and barbecued chicken, I was more curious about the Grilled Leg of Lamb Nuggets.

Part of my confusion is probably from reading this in 2025 rather than in 1978. When modern readers see "nuggets," we're almost certainly thinking of finger food-- little breaded-and-deep-fried bits (probably chicken!) ready to dip in a sauce of some sort. These small bits of "lamb-leg meat [cut in] the individual shape nature gives" are not breaded-- just grilled-- and pre-seasoned with a marinade rather than served with a dip. I'm also not sure why any cook would want to try to make grilled nuggets in the first place. I imagine them all dropping through the grill grates. Wouldn't it be easier to just cook bigger pieces of meat?

The recipe that might make the most sense for the purported purpose of this chapter is this one that features one of the veggies of the month: cucumbers.

Hodgepodge Relish also incorporates a whole range of other veggies (though not the other featured veg of the month-- corn). You've just got to be willing to boil big bunches of  canning jars in one of the hottest months of the year to preserve the harvest for later. It's a bit of a tradeoff. (You've also got to like vinegar waaaaaay more than I do to actually enjoy pickles, but we all know I'm a picky five-year-old at heart.)

Of course, August is always a tradeoff--  the beginning of the end of long, sunny days, melting into the first days of school. I get the impulse to try to hold onto it just a little bit longer.

Some Dahnke Salads

I had better hurry up and get to Marye Dahnke's Salad Book (1954) before summer slips away! (Yeah, I know it's only late July, but also, IT'S ALREADY LATE JULY!)

And just in case you're worried about pronunciation, the back cover assures readers that the author's name is pronounced "Mary Dank." I guess she was just a big fan of extraneous letters.

The book has what I expected-- recipes for leafy green salads like chef's or Caesar, recipes for the jiggly standbys like sea foam salad and sunshine salad. And of course, it has plenty of salads that reflect the trends of the time, like throwing olives and celery into absolutely everything.

Can't say I've ever looked at a peach half and thought what it really needed was celery and olives bound with some mayonnaise. (I'm almost always okay with nutmeats, though! 😄)

And of course there are salads attributed to other countries and cultures for reasons that are elusive at best. I have no idea how "Fiesta" got into the title of Fiesta Peach Salad.

I thought there might be avocado or cinnamon in there somewhere, but nope!  The peach halves, cream cheese, and maraschino cherries are just "fiesta-ed" for no apparent reason. The Mexican Vegetable Salad similarly has no real indications of how it got that name.

It's just a pretty unremarkable mixture of super-common salad ingredients. You could just as easily simply call it "Vegetable Salad," and diners would be happy not to expect something at least mildly spicy and instead get a plate of mayonnaise and otherwise-plain green peppers, onions, cabbage, tomatoes, and cucumber.

The Oriental Salad--aside from the less-than-ideal name-- is just as confusing.

I initially understood the naming-- almonds and peas are pretty common in American-style Chinese restaurant food-- but then I got to chopped dill pickles and cubed American cheddar cheese. And it's of course all coated in that most Asian of sauces-- mayonnaise. 

Speaking of Americanized Chinese food-- this one doesn't say it's sweet and sour, but it looked like a 1950s attempt to turn popular sweet-and-sour recipes into a gelatin salad.

I just can't see that pineapple-and-green-pepper mixture without thinking of all the sweet and sour recipes I've read. And if you've ever wondered what it might taste in a cream-cheesy lime Jell-O with Worcestershire sauce in it, well, this would be your chance to find out!

While there are plenty of recipes that surprised me, the book seemed to have a very poor gauge of what would be shocking. The headnote for Hot Chicken Salad starts with "Alice in Wonderland might exclaim: 'What, a hot salad?'" I'm not sure why readers at the time would be shocked, though, as plenty of old cookbooks have recipes for hot potato salad and often a hot slaw, too. 

I think readers are more likely to wonder why the hot chicken salad has to be served in grapefruit halves and topped with a mixture of cheese and crushed potato chips. (Okay, the second question has an easier answer-- It would taste good! The first question is more elusive, though. Maybe the grapefruit shells are just supposed to lull you into thinking this chicken-mayo-walnut-cheese-potato-chip concoction is light and healthy?)

My biggest surprise may have been that a salad book has a recipe for a salad that it compares to refrigerator cookie dough.

Just don't get confused, slice off the "dough" of cheese, pecans, hard-cooked eggs, chopped pimiento, pickle relish, and mayonnaise, and throw it in the oven! I could imagine a harried and distracted mom making disastrous "cookies" as an after-school snack and/or serving a plate full of chocolate-chip-cookie-dough-topped lettuce. At least the family would have a hilarious story to tell for years to come.

I loved going through all these old-timey salad recipes, even if I never found my grandpa's favorite: Honeymoon Salad. (If you don't know what it is, the recipe/ punchline is "Lettuce alone." I imagine that joke is at least as old as this book.)

A Saturday Morning "Treat"!

It's Saturday morning! You are a 1950s mom who is occasionally in the mood to cook and surprise the family with a special treat, so you decide to make homemade GRIDDLECAKES (Pancakes). So you get out the flour, eggs, baking powder, milk, etc., just as Woman's Home Companion Cook Book (edited by Dorothy Kirk, 1955) tells you to do.

And then you start worrying that if you make a these today, the family might expect them every goddamn weekend, which sounds like a lot of work.... at which point you notice something you might want to try in the list of variations below the main recipe.

And when the family comes to the table to eat, they wonder why the pancakes are being served with ketchup. And those bold enough to brave a ketchup-y bite soon notice the lumps of coarsely chopped clams hidden in the "cake" below.... And nobody complains because if you're capable of this, what else might you be capable of?

It's the perfect morning: You get the fun of making something when you're in the mood to spend a few minutes in the kitchen. There's little danger of running out of food and having to try to whip up a new batch when the ingredients are running low, or of needing to fend off a request for a repeat next weekend when you just want to sleep in. And you got to enjoy your slice of cinnamon toast while it was still hot and crisp-- rather than eating it cold and slightly damp after having to help Suzie with the orange juice and Peter with a second helping-- because you ate before you got started with everyone else's "treat." Only you know what a genius you are.

Observing the unwatched pot

The cover of The Unwatched Pot: A Crockful of Recipes for Electric Slow Cooking (Paula Franklin for Hamilton Beach, 1975) looks like the coziest version of the 1970s.

I love the brick-wall-print slow cooker, the subtle harvest gold theme, and the funky cutting board. The cover doesn't make a bit of sense if you examine it for more than a second, though. How is a bunch of asparagus taller than the slow cooker and nearly as wide? And why do we need a collection of asparagus, mushrooms, cauliflower, a pepper, and a beet when the slow cooker is clearly already full and probably done cooking (based on the steam and the brown meat)? This is not even mentioning that the contents of the slow cooker (likely meat, peas, carrots, and potatoes) have absolutely no overlap with anything being prepped. So it's a cozy cover, but it's best not to think too hard about it.

The recipes are mostly what you'd expect in a slow-cooker cookbook-- a lot of stews and braises. This book does try to adapt other types of recipes for the slow-cooker, too, though, and I have to wonder about how well that might have worked. For instance, I imagine that the high point for many green bean casserole aficionados is the crispy canned onion topper. For that reason, I assumed that the slow-cooker version would encourage diners to pass the crispy onions around to top servings once the dish was done.

And I was very wrong. Not only are the fried onions slow-cooked for the entire time, but they are also cooked under wet ingredients: water chestnuts and a cream-of-chicken-soup-and-wine sauce! There can't be much crunch left by the time this is ready....

I doubt I'm alone in thinking that one of the slow cooker's charms is the chance to come home to an amazing-smelling house, knowing that deliciousness will be ready and waiting. And that is part of the reason I'm so skeptical of the fish recipes. Salmon loaf is probably low on anyone's list of favorite meals anyway, and if you've had it cooking for 4-5 hours, the whole house will smell like it for a week afterward.

Plus, I'm not entirely sure how well this would even work. This is a small recipe-- less than a pound of canned salmon once the skin and bones are removed. Mix it with a few jarred mushrooms, bread crumbs, eggs, and cheese. It doesn't seem like that would be enough to fill a slow cooker, so I kind of expected the instructions to say to put it into a smaller pan, put the pan in the slow cooker, and add water to steam this. Nope-- just smear the bottom of the slow cooker with fish bits! Maybe cooks are expected to use a smaller cooker-- not the family's regular full-size one-- but even if the family has multiple sizes of slow cookers (which seems unlikely), there is no real indication to break out the smaller one. I just don't know what is going on here.

Tunafish Casserole is also likely to make you wash the kitchen curtains afterwards because you can't stand that smell anymore.

At least it seems likely to fill the cooker a little better, what with the cream of mushroom soup, three eggs, half-cup of green olives, and cup of dry white wine along with the bread and cheese, but I can't get past the feeling that this would come out unpleasantly gluey.

The book also suggests cooking dessert in the slow cooker. There are plenty of recipes for poached fruit, but I'm more interested in the recipe for banana bread. 

Let's make that flowerpot banana bread! It combines the brief 1970s interest in cooking desserts in flowerpots (Use a NEW one! Not the one that had begonias in it!) with the idea that a crock pot is a good place to bake something (even though the food is not going to brown). People must have been really bored back then. (I mean, this was before they could make up weird shit and post it to social media for the clicks.)

In any case, I'm glad I got to observe The Unwatched Pot. I just hope it doesn't feel violated given that I spent a few hours looking at it.

Pepper prepper

I adore bell peppers! I will throw at least a few bits of bell pepper into pretty much any savory thing I'm cooking-- some green for the slightly bitter minerality, maybe some other colors if I wouldn't mind a subtle sweetness-- and I'll snack on a crispy, juicy raw strip or two while I'm prepping the cooked part. It's just nice that this habit is slightly less expensive now, in the height of summer.

That made me curious what cooks were doing with bell peppers sixty-or-so years ago, so I pulled out my trusty Favorite Recipes of Home Economics Teachers: Vegetables Including Fruits (1966) to see what home ec teachers recommended.

Unsurprisingly, there are a LOT of stuffed pepper recipes. Most go the traditional ground-beef-and-rice stuffing, like these Quick No-Bake Stuffed Peppers.

I thought these might be perfect for hot summer days since they're not baked, but you still have to boil the peppers in a pot large enough to hold four large green peppers, so this recipe is going to get the kitchen hot and humid regardless of whether they're baked....

One recipe went higher-end, stuffing the peppers with shrimp instead of ground beef. 

This version pairs the shrimp with saltine crumbs and cheese. Part of me wonders if modern diners might prefer to ditch the saltines and have shrimp and grits in pepper cups...

Some of the recipes use peppers as the medium to get additional veggies into the family, like this recipe that seems designed to use up excess produce, with corn and tomatoes in addition to the peppers.

Others just remind me how popular canned veggies used to be.

I worry that no amount of pork-and-beans or cream-style corn will be enough to cover up the smell of the canned peas. 😬

The section also includes a preparation that doesn't require stuffing peppers at all! Just grind up some green peppers, mix the glop with cheese, bread crumbs, and milk, and bake for an hour.

I imagine this coming out of the oven looking like a space alien barfed into a casserole dish... But hey, you don't have to stuff the peppers!

I am, unsurprisingly, going to continue just throwing pepper bits into pretty much everything except pancakes and oatmeal while snacking on raw pepper strips. It's good to know I'm not missing much when I don't use a recipe....

Is that a cookbook in your pocket, or are you just... Oh, it is a cookbook

The Pocket Cook Book (Elizabeth Woody with Gertrude Lynn and Peg Heffernan, originally published in 1942, but mine is the 1960 edition) is one of those old paperbacks that could, as advertised, fit in your pocket (as long as your pockets were relatively substantial). 

My main takeaway from the cover is that whoever created it never worried about washing dishes. (I am not from a "put it in a serving bowl so it will look nice" family. We were firmly of the "serve it out of the cooking container" camp. Besides saving on dishes, it also keeps food warm longer. Double win!)

This little book offers a lot of fairly standard meats, sides, and desserts, but there are a few surprises along the way, so I'm cooking up a menu of mayhem.

First, we need an appetizer. When I saw a recipe for Devilled Cheese Rolls, I assumed it would be for some type of lightly spiced cheese rolled in a slice of white bread with the crusts trimmed off or maybe spread on a slab of biscuit dough which would subsequently be rolled up, sliced into individual servings, and baked. I was wrong.

The vessel for the devilled cheese is not bready at all, but instead, sliced tongue! Definitely not something I would expect in an appetizer...

I couldn't decide for the main course, so you've got two choices. If you really love shortcake, maybe you'd want it as a main course?

You've got to have a high tolerance for Vienna sausages, though. Not sure the corn and white sauce will be enough to cover up their flavor....

If you want to go higher-end, there's Chicken Hawaiian. 

I expected the pineapple, of course, but this also includes ham (a little reminiscent of Hawaiian pizza) and avocado... So if you don't want to have to take out a loan for a recipe that will probably disappoint you anyway, the Vienna Sausage Shortcake might be the way to go.

Now, we need some vegetables, of course. I adore roasted Brussels sprouts, so I wanted to see what Brussels Sprouts Pierre might entail. 

While they're not anything too shocking-- just Brussels sprouts and celery in a cheese sauce-- I was not aware people could (or would even want to) buy canned Brussels sprouts or canned celery. Or maybe they were expected to can those at home? Either way-- it sounds like a waste of money (and possibly time if you had to can them yourself). 

And finally, we need a dessert. This is not a health food cookbook, so I was a little surprised to see this recipe in the chapter on cookies.

I would not be surprised at all to see Bran Brownies in a late '60s/ early '70s "health food" book, but here they are in a basic, mainstream cookbook. At least they're made with chocolate and not carob!

I'm not convinced any of these recipes are worth dirtying up even one dish for-- much less various serving bowls and platters-- but maybe they would need the help of a pretty presentation. The cover may be on to something....

A Ladies' Luncheon, 1960s-Kentucky-Style

Since the Morehead Woman's Club assembled Our Ways with Food (undated, but from the early 1960s), I wondered if I could put together a ladies' luncheon.

Okay, I didn't really come up with this idea on my own so much as I saw the headnote for the Half Hour Salad, wondered, "Who would think that citrus-flavored gelatin with some crushed pineapple, ground nutmeats, and shredded cheese in it is actually a main dish?" and realized that I must be staring at a ladies' luncheon idea.

I'm going to be a stickler for nutrition and say that since the "salad" doesn't actually have any vegetables at all in it, the ladies should have a veggie accompaniment. 

A cooked head of cauliflower covered in raw carrot shavings so it can pretend to be fancy seems about right.

Since the book is from Kentucky, the invitees would likely be scandalized if there were no dainty little biscuits.

They're triple delicious-- once for the cheese, once for the adornment with pecan halves, and once for the chance to gossip later that the host made them with pie crust mix. (Gasp!)

And finally, a dessert.

I love this one just for its practical and unorthodox measuring method: Once the cook empties the confectioners' sugar box, the same box can be filled with flour to measure the graminaceous component! 

Plus, the main dish and the dessert can be prepared well ahead of time, so the host only has to fuss around with the Golden Cauliflower and the Cheese Biscuits at the last minute. That leaves more time for everyone to speculate about whether Carol and Richard were actually swingers, or whatever the ladies' luncheoners liked to talk about back then. (The speculation about what would possess someone to imagine a Half Hour Salad as the main dish would have to wait until some other time.)

Cook it right, or you're doomed!

If you take it seriously, Let's Cook It Right (Adelle Davis, originally 1947, but mine is a 1962 edition) is kind of horrifying.

The first chapter warns cooks that "Aside from sickness that results directly from nutritional inadequacies, a contributory cause in the onset of infections, allergies, and possibly all illnesses is carelessly chosen food. The degree of health any family enjoys depends to a large extent upon which foods are selected and how they are prepared." So basically, if anybody gets sick, it's probably the cook's fault somehow. There are certainly no other important factors that influence people's health! (I love the obsession with thinking that everyone is in complete control of all aspect of their lives and if anything goes wrong, that means you fucked up somewhere. 🙄 Bad things can't just happen to people, and we all have endless amounts of experience, time, and resources to prevent every possible problem, and our only priority in life should be risk avoidance.)

At least the recommendations in this book aren't the most difficult, complicated, and/ or loony I've come across. There's no insistence that pretty much every spice will give you cancer, so you'd better not use any. The book doesn't turn every single meal into a lengthy math problem. It mostly just requires making any liquids that ever touch vegetables part of the meal itself (to avoid vitamin and mineral loss), discourages overcooking foods (again, to avoid nutrient loss), encourages use of liquid oils, and recommends avoiding food additives. (That last one is probably the most difficult to follow given the ubiquity of additives, but it's discussed vaguely enough that it would be pretty easy for home cooks to rationalize whatever decisions they make about which additives to steer clear of and which to assume are fine.)

It's the kind of health-food book that allows for treats like French-Fried Fish.

It just requires the fish to be coated in wheat germ or whole wheat bread crumbs and powdered milk before frying. (There's also a rule about adding vitamin E to the deep-frying oil to prevent rancidity.)

You can have Beef Stroganoff as long as the round steak is dredged in whole wheat flour.

And it can even be made with a can of condensed mushroom soup if you don't have sour cream on hand!

It's the kind of book that generally requires whole grains rather than refined ones, but if your cold and jiggly chicken loaf seems a bit boring, Davis will allow you to add some converted rice or cooked noodles to it.

But still, it is also the kind of book that recommends this as an appetizer. 

Start a meal with a grapefruit half full of oysters and horseradish? (Hand me a grapefruit half full of raw or canned oysters or shrimps and the meal is already over.)

While you're at it, maybe wash it all down with some Fortified Milk (a.k.a. "Pep-Up" since that sounds less like something that mom forces on everyone).

Still, it's hard to hide the fact that milk blended with eggs, oil, non-instant powdered milk, fortified yeast, frozen orange juice concentrate, and various compounds from the pharmacy is very much something you'd only drink if mom forced the issue because she was certain the entire family would get every known illness (and maybe even develop some new ones!) if she was off her nutrition game even a little. 

Suddenly, the old-school health food books recommending that you end a meal with some Carob Fudge or Bran Candy seem a little less scary...

Going crackers for substitutions

If you want to keep the holiday going, July 5 is National Graham Crackers Day. I'm sure most people think of s'mores, or maybe crumb crusts, when they think of recipes involving graham crackers. The sweet little sheets can be more versatile than that, though, as The American' Woman's Cook Book (ed. Ruth Berolzheimer, 1942) reminds us. 

I'm guessing that Graham Cracker Cream Cake was for when the cook was running a little low on flour and/or sugar (or trying to work within ration limits) since all those graham cracker crumbs could help make up for any shortfalls. (Plus, the shortening is probably cheaper than real butter.) And now, with grocery prices consistently going crazy and threats of shortages on the horizon, it's always nice to have old recipes to remind us to be flexible in using what we've got. Cooks have always used a little ingenuity when they had to. (Bonus points that they're not using their ingenuity to create, say, a Jell-O and tuna salad pie!)

If you made this with some applesauce or mashed banana instead of the eggs, it could fit right in with the modern era, 80+ years later.

Reluctantly venturing into July

When I was a kid, the beginning of July always felt like the beginning of the end to me-- a person who is hardwired to feel unhappy about things well in advance of them actually happening. (I cried about having to go to kindergarten two years before I was old enough to be a kindergartener, if my mother is to be believed.) So July means summer vacation is practically over. The stores start displaying their back-to-school stuff right about now.

Cooking by the Calendar (edited by Marilyn Hansen, 1978) focuses more on the here-and-now than I tend to. The beginning of July means Independence Day (at least for Americans), so the July chapter offers a Red, White and Blue Pie for the occasion. 

It sounds yummy and summery-- basically a lime pie topped with fresh berries. I'd skip the smattering of silver dragées, though. They would probably sink into the soft filling and/or hide under a berry, and the last thing you need to do on a holiday is try to find (and pay!) an emergency dentist.

The chapter also suggests various dishes that might be easy to take on a picnic, like this Stuffed French Bread. 

The bread-- meant to serve six to eight people--  is filled with, among other things, a quarter cup of bacon drippings, more than a half cup of butter, two pounds of Braunschweiger, and a brick of cream cheese. So light summer food-- not so much! I can't really imagine melting in the sun and wanting something this rich (even if I could pretend to like Braunschweiger). 

Other recipes seem more summer-appropriate. July is so full of fresh veggies that the chapter names both tomatoes and zucchini as the veggie of the month. They come together in the recipe for Zucchini-Stuffed Tomatoes.

Turning on the oven might not be that appealing on a blazing day, but at least it's only 350℉ for 20 minutes, and the recipe uses up a LOT of fresh produce.

The most summery recipe of all, though, is probably the Solar Plum Leather.

Aside from being composed primarily of fresh fruit, this is especially seasonally appropriate because it's supposed to take advantage of the hot summer sun to dry out the fruit leather. 

I know running the oven can be a pain in summer, but for this recipe, I think I'd go for the entirely-indoor variation. I can just imagine going outside to get the fruit leather and realizing that a bird shit in and/or ate part of it. Maybe it's got stray leaves and feathers stuck to the surface. Maybe it's full of ants. I just have a feeling that whatever precautions one might take when making this outside-- it's more of a recipe for disaster than a recipe for fruit leather. 

So, in closing, may your July not be full of stray feathers and bird shit and ants. And try not to think too hard about how quickly time passes.

Tapioca: Not just a bland pudding

Happy National Tapioca Day! I remember tapioca from childhood mainly as the weirdest pudding (made more edible by stirring in a big spoonful of chocolate Quik) and as Glop, one of those weird midwestern concoctions that my grandma made and served as dessert, though I imagine it counted as a salad at some people's houses. (It did have pineapple and pecans in it! That's enough to count as a salad in some circles.)

You can easily find tapioca pudding in just about any vintage cookbook, but today's recipes from American Home All-Purpose Cookbook (ed. Virginia T. Habeeb and the food staff of American Home, 1966) remind us that tapioca was a pretty common thickener in pies, too. 

I'm used to seeing strawberry and rhubarb ream up, but this book offers a lesser-known couple: Rhubarb Cherry Pie.

That one is good for late spring/ early summer-- perfect for Tapioca Day!

If you want to keep the tapioca party going a little later in the summer, there's a Deep-Dish Plum Pie.

I really hope the plums are small since they're only halved! I can just imagine trying to figure out how to at least semi-gracefully deal with a big slab of plum tumbling out of the pastry. 

And then for even later in the season-- if you really want to keep the tapioca fun-- we have Colonial Grape Pie.

And now I understand why I rarely see recipes for grape pie in old cookbooks. This one seems like a lot of work, what with stemming and skinning 2-1/2 pounds of Concord grapes, then cooking and sieving the pulp to get rid of the seeds, re-adding the skins to the pulp, and doing some more cooking before finally turning the whole mess into a pie shell and trying to give it a lattice top crust when the filling is still pretty hot. It's way easier just to make a pumpkin pie or pudding pie. (Or a fruit pie if you can just plunk the filling out of the can and into a waiting pie shell!)

Just thinking about tapioca is as far as I'm going to go for this holiday, though. That's about as festive as I get these days. 

The question of snacks

I picked up Snacks (Miyuki Iida, 1972) because it seemed like something was off. I mean, look at the cover.

I adore seasoned rice and a big salad-- but I wouldn't really consider something like this to be a snack. The inside cover says this was printed in Japan, though, so maybe Japanese consider this a snack? I wouldn't think so-- I tend to think of Pocky when I think of Japanese snacking-- but I can claim absolutely no real knowledge of Japanese culture. Maybe I'm just relying on stereotypes?

And anyway, why would a Japanese cookbook be in English? The back cover offered up a bit more confounding information, as it included a conversion table to convert "English" measurements (in ounces) to "American" measurements (in cups). I wasn't 100% sure whether that meant about the intended audience for this book, so I perused the recipe for American Hamburger.

Since it called for ingredients in both ounces (minced beef and pork) and cups (breadcrumbs), that didn't really help me figure anything out. Just the fact that the title refers to hamburger as "American" is more helpful, as it suggests Americans are not the audience. (This meatloaf-leaning recipe that recommends "a beef and pork mixture" to avoid drying out the patties also bears little resemblance to the American burgers of my youth, when mom would fry 100% beef with no additions-- not even salt!-- until it was so dry I had trouble swallowing it.)

In any case, I'm not sure this looks much like a snack.

At least the pickles and onions should be easy to pick off! I'm not sure why anyone would serve hamburgers from a two-compartment plate like this, though. 

The little book of 20 recipes also lists such snack time favorites as paella. 

I can't tell you how many times I've felt a bit peckish and decided to whip up a big panful of rice with chicken, fish, shrimp, clams, veggies, and saffron. (Oh, wait. I totally can. It's zero.) Also, this is a pretty substantial "snack" considering this mass of three cups of rice (three cups before it's cooked, presumably, considering it's mixed with so much liquid and baked for half an hour) combined with all the chicken, seafood, and veggies makes two servings.

Some recipes provide full menus-- and I generally don't need a menu for a snack. For instance, the Sliced Pork Sauté has the recipe not only for the titular pork, but it also recommends starting with canned tomato soup and provides recipes for rice with green peas and fruit salad.

The fruit salad may be my favorite part just because of the picture.

I love that pear so green it nearly seems to be glowing (to warn diners that the cook laced it with peppermint extract), accented with a maraschino cherry to heighten the wtf-Christmas feel. 

The book does include a sushi recipe, though, and I guess I could see sushi as a snack in the right circumstances. (Well, I probably could if I were a proper adult who enjoyed sushi, which we will pretend for the sake of this post.) Ready?

Yes, this is a giant slab of rice with thin slices of ham in the center and on top-- like a demented layer cake-- with a pickled ginger "flower" in the middle for decoration. 

And this "snack" to serve two starts with FOUR cups of uncooked rice, so I guess the takeaway from this booklet is that something is not a snack unless it's got at least several-hundred-calories'-worth of rice in addition to everything else. (Well, unless it's an American hamburger, which is, oddly enough, the smallest snack in the collection.)

In short, I have not idea what is going on with this book, but apparently there were some communication issues and/or questions about who and what this thing was actually for. Whoever the audience was, they must have had enormous appetites and infinite patience for preparing snacks.