Some "healthy" late-summer cakes

August has a lot of really boring food holidays, like National Rice Pudding Day (August 9) and National Sponge Cake Day (today!). But lately I've been feeling like posting for holidays nobody except the food industry actually celebrates, so I once again turned to The Natural Foods Cookbook (Beatrice Trum Hunter, copyright 1961, but mine is from a 1975 printing) to see if it included a health-food version. It did not disappoint. (This book rarely does!)

This version uses "wholewheat" flour (because of course it does) with some of the bran sifted out to make it more cake-appropriate. (Just make sure to "Reserve sifted-out bran for porridge or bread baking.") And it's flavored with "Powdered Fruit Rind" (which home cooks were supposed to make by thinly paring citrus fruit peels, drying the parings, and then pulverizing them in the blender). I can't help but think the addition of the fruit rinds is likely to add a little spark so this version won't be quite as boring as sponge cake typically is. Maybe the citrus will help distract from the whole wheat (which I LOVE in bread, but question in a delicate sponge cake).

Or if you're just not a fan of sponge cake and want a sweet to help you make the transition from late summer into early fall, forget about Sponge Cake Day and go with the cake recipe from the opposing page:

It's kind of like zucchini bread-- in that it's full of zucchini, molasses, and warm spices. The cake is supposed to be yeast-raised, though, not the usual quick bread preparation. I'm not convinced how well this would work, given that half of the grain component is cornmeal (no gluten!), and the other half is whole wheat flour-- so the germ and bran can also interfere with gluten development. In short, I'm not sure how much the yeast can do if there is too little gluten to capture its CO₂ belches.

So take your choice: a potentially dense but citrus-flavored sponge cake to celebrate National Sponge Cake Day or a brick of sweet spiced zucchini to celebrate seasonal change. (I'm going to forego recipes altogether and instead celebrate Halloween Candy Was Just Put on Display Day by eating a Reese's peanut butter pumpkin. That's a much better holiday, even if I just made it up.)

What happens when the authors know that nobody is really here for the recipes

I'm pretty sure I never posted a cookbook from the 2000s before, but when I saw today's featured cookbook at the New Orleans Museum of Death on a long-ago vacation, I realized I had to get my own copy someday. So today, we are Cooking with a Serial Killer: Recipes from Dorothea Puente (edited by Shane Bugbee, second printing, 2004). 

Puente ran a boarding house for people with disabilities. Though the book quotes her protesting her innocence ("Why would I spend money fattening [my boarders] up if I was going to kill them?"), the fact that they continued to cash social security checks after they were buried on the property-- mostly dosed with similar drugs before their deaths-- leads me to disbelieve her.

Obviously, the draw of the book is that you get a bunch of recipes that Puente may well have fed to the people she killed. The recipes occasionally mention how many people she cooked for, such as the end of the recipe for "Mexican Chicken & Chard Calzones." (Also note that every page with a recipe has that same weird, distracting flowery border, I guess to help drive home the idea that Puente was just a nice old grandma-type person.)

I can't help thinking there is little of Mexico in this recipe, what with the Swiss cheese, Italian seasoning, and pizza dough. There's not even an attempt to make the dipping sauce interesting with a bit of chili powder or a dash of hot sauce. And then at the end of the recipe, a reminder that Puente cooked in quantity for her charges: "This recipe may be doubled, had to 8 times for my people." (Also, if you read this book, you really better be able to let comma splices slide, or it will drive you crazy.)

This collection is an effort of someone who clearly had about 100 pages to fill and no real idea of how to accomplish it. Some pages are taken up by full-page quotes from Puente, like this one:

This is across from the recipe for Vegetarian Lentil Loaf. Before I get to the actual recipe, I want to appreciate the end of the quote: "You can take the nuts or the vegetables out and add meat with the lentils, it becomes really tasty." Not only is this recommendation taking away what the title seems to suggest is the main attraction (It's vegetarian!) by adding meat, but it also seems to suggest the vegetarian version isn't so great to begin with. You gotta add meat to make it tasty. And should you wish to follow the recommendation, good luck!

There are conspicuously NO nuts in this recipe to replace. While it does have veggies, they're the kinds of aromatics that people tend to cook with meat to give it some flavor anyway, so I'm not sure how good an idea it would be to take them out considering that the only other seasonings are salt, pepper, and garlic salt. And this reinforces the theme I noticed throughout the book: Bugbee and Puente seem to realize that no one is likely to be that serious about the recipes. They just want the title. That made it pretty easy to shit out a book without even a cursory proofreading. Take, for example, the ingredient list for Dorothea's Homemade Tamales.

I'm assuming the "Maza" is "masa," and that "caniender" is supposed to be "coriander." I'm more amused by the formatting errors, like "2-1/2 cups water that meat has." (I'm assuming that it's supposed to pair with "been cooked in," but that phrase follows "1 tablespoon chili powder"-- which, it is important to note-- has also been preceded for instructions to add 1-1/2 tablespoons of chili powder.) And then the ingredients list ends with "2-1/2 lbs pork roast boiled in 3 quarts           Corn husks/ water to which the following has been added:"

And it just ends with that colon to nowhere. If you think the instructions will help make sense of this mess, you are clearly not understanding just how few fucks Puente and Bugbee gave.

Let's say you want to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume the double-listed chili powder was perhaps meant to suggest it was divided and part was used in one portion of the preparation and part in another-- sure! Maybe! But don't expect the instructions to help you figure it out. Instead, they casually recommend out of nowhere that "You may use beef or chicken, also" and offer such helpful advice as "Fold over so there are about 3 husks."

If this is all too complicated for you, well, just make Tamales Prison Style (as, I'm assuming, Puente eventually resorted to).

The last third-or-so of the book gives up on recipes entirely and includes some photographs, letters, incredibly trite poetry written by Puente (and a slightly modified version of this "classic" that Puente claims a friend sent her because apparently she couldn't be bothered to crank out enough drivel to fill out the last few pages). Plus, there's an "INTERVIEW EXCLUSIVE!!" advertised on the back of the book that includes such shocking and revealing exchanges as this:

Shane: Hi, is this Dorothea.

Dorothea: Yes it is.

Shane: Hi, this is Shane.

Dorothea: How are you?

Shane: Okay. How are you?

Dorothea: Pretty good.

Such insights into the mind of a killer! That's worth the price of admission alone.

So, in short, I was very amused by this purchase (though probably not in the way Puente and Bugbee may have hoped) and happy that I bought it secondhand so my money did not go to these losers. (Well, Puente is long dead, but the sentiment remains.)

Not-quite-day-drinking for National Rum Day

This year, National Rum Day is on a weekend (Today!), so you can celebrate all day long (assuming you don't have a weekend job that expects you to come in sober). Woman's Home Companion Cook Book (edited by Dorothy Kirk, 1955) has some recipes to help you start early.

If you like sweet rolls in the morning, try making rum rolls the night before.

Granted, they only use rum flavoring, and even if you had used real rum, it would bake off anyway. But you could use real rum in the rum confectioners' frosting.

That's a whole teaspoon in a batch of frosting that will cover (at least) a whole panful of rolls.

Well, you'll need protein anyway to go with those rolls, so maybe the rum omelet will help you give your breakfast a higher proof.

This uses 2-3 tablespoons of rum! But it's for 4-6 servings. And most of the alcohol will get burned off anyway when you ignite it. So, okay, this breakfast is probably fine even if you do have to go to work sober (assuming you can handle this much sugar first thing in the morning).

The more I look at it, the biggest thrill this menu is likely to provide is the chance to accidentally set your kitchen aflame when you're half-asleep, fumbling with rum and matches. You're probably better off with a much simpler solution if you want to start your celebration early-- put a little rum in your coffee. Your not-on-fire curtains will thank you.

Cooking with Hurpum

I know I should have written about the Women's Circle Home Cooking from July 1975 in July-- its 50th birthday! But I didn't get this until the start of August, so I'm posting it now. It's either that or forget my intention to post about it next July, when I'm busy with whatever catches my interest then.

My favorite thing about this copy is that whoever owned it before me liked to write on the cover. I can't quite figure out what's going on in the upper right. I'm assuming it's the owner's name, which appears to be... Hurpum Pasteer? That's my best guess, anyway.

Luckily, Hurpum's handwriting was better (or maybe just easier to read against the lighter background) further down on the page. I can tell their favorite recipes were "tomato skillet cabbage page 51" (written right above the pancake) and "cheese cake blueberry page" (written upside-down at the bottom of the page). The page number is not there, but "12" is written twice near the 51 under the tomato recipe, so I guessed it was on page 12.

And this is what we have on page 12:

I guess "Uncle Jan's Blueberry Cheese Torte" was too much to write. Looks like Hurpum's got some good taste, though. I will always be excited about something that gives me an excuse to eat cream cheese.

When I turn to the Tomato Skillet Cabbage, I am greeted by this figure:

Maybe Hurpum was caught up in '70s diet culture and felt the need to atone for liking mounds of sugary, buttery graham crackers covered by mounds of sugary cream cheese. Or maybe they just really liked cabbage cooked in tomatoes and beef bouillon. (The little checkmark next to the title doesn't suggest much emotion, so I was left to speculate.)

I, of course, was more intrigued by the odder recipes. I didn't think the Eggplant Patties with Tomato Sauce would be too surprising-- just eggplant mashed up with a binder and maybe some Italian-ish herbs (if the cook felt adventurous), then fried and served with the tomato sauce.

I never would have guessed the eggplant patties would be made with peanut butter. Is it there for richness? For flavor? (There's not much in the way of seasonings!) I don't know, but that tomato sauce-- a third water and with no flavorings other than salt and maybe some sugar doesn't sound like it would help much.... So weird, bland eggplant-and-p.b. to dip in a bland sauce. Yay. 

I was initially confused by a recipe from the "Cooking with Grandmother" section. 

Grannie looks so content, tasting something she's making with love. 

When I got to the Fruit Punch recipe, I expected it to call for mixing some red drink mix with maybe some frozen lemon- or lime-aid and ginger ale or lemon-lime soda-- something you could serve at a kid's birthday party or a bridal shower in the church basement. So I was really confused when it started out with sliced bananas-- more like the start of a smoothie recipe than a punch. 

But then it went on to sliced citrus fruits. Usually you'd at least peel them for a smoothie. Pineapple pieces would make sense, but raisins? How is this a drink?

And then I saw that after adding the sugar and water, you needed to stir it every day for 8 days, then strain. And now I know why grannie is so happy. This "fruit punch" is to help the grownups put up with the grandkids....

Thanks to Hurpum for giving up their copy of Home Cooking. I should make Uncle Jan's Blueberry Cheese Torte in their honor. (I won't, but I should.)

Pudding away the rice

I wasn't sure whether I would bother writing a post for National Rice Pudding Day. The problem isn't a lack of recipes; I've got hundreds of vintage rice pudding recipes. The problem is that they're usually pretty similar and not particularly exciting. Mainstream cookbooks use white rice, richer dairy, and regular sugar most of the time, while "health" food books often call for brown rice, leaner dairy, and honey. Both usually suggest adding raisins, perhaps along with other dried fruits or some nuts. So I almost didn't bother.

But my copy of Beatrice Trum Hunter's The Natural Foods Cookbook (copyright 1961, but mine is from a 1975 printing) was sitting out and I thought, "Why not just check?" And I almost didn't bother turning to the Molded Rice Pudding I found in the index, assuming that it was made with a thick custard and baked in a mold. Still, there was a chance this would be a weird gelatin mold, so I checked it out.

And my search paid off! This isn't the usual version of rice pudding. It's a fruit-juice gelatin, sweetened with honey and an added fruit of the cook's choice (Raisin-haters, rejoice!), then made creamy with "yoghurt." (The asterisk is suggesting the cook should use the book's yogurt recipe because health-obsessed cooks in pretty much any timeline are assumed to have the time to endlessly fuss around making everything from scratch.)

If you ever wanted rice pudding that was fruitier and less custardy/ raisin-y, this might be for you! And even if it's not, this is still another weird old gelatin dessert (or salad if you serve it over a lettuce leaf!) to gawk at. It's a win either way.

Frozen "delicacies" to show off your fridge

 What could be better than owning an electric refrigerator in the (probably) late 1920s or early1930s? 52 Recipes for Frozen Delicacies (from Copeland Dependable Electric Refrigeration) suggests the answer is having a new recipe for a frozen delicacy for each week of the year.

There's a lot of fairly standard stuff in this booklet, like lemon sherbet or chocolate mousse. Still, a few of the offerings caught my attention.

For instance, while I see a LOT of gelatin recipes, they are rarely minty. 

I think this Old-Fashioned Peppermint Delight would be better than Jell-O full of Grape Nuts and dried fruit or black cherries and olives.

As someone who often cooks my food until it's just this side of being burned because I like the hint of smoke, I was happy to see a recipe with "burnt" right in the title.

And the almonds aren't actually charcoal-- just roasted until "very dark brown." Sounds perfect to me!

I'm not quite so sold on the Russian Tea Ice Cubes, though.

It's not that uncommon to see recommendations to freeze fruit juices into ice cubes as a way to avoid watering down cold drinks, but the thought of potentially finding whole cloves floating in a beverage once they've been liberated from their icy home? Not so appealing.... And I can only imagine what Lace maker would have to say about potentially encountering a maraschino cherry in some tea!

But hey-- the inclusions in the ice cubes can really remind your guests that you have a fancy electric freezer, just in case they didn't notice that the cubes were composed of fruit juice. Part of the point of owning one of these is showing off, right?

I'm just glad I can lazily stock my freezer with vegetarian "chicken" and frozen veggies and call it a day, without having to make any frozen confections to show off that I have a freezer. Nobody would be impressed now anyway!

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....