Dairy goes modern!

I'm going modern today! 

Not too modern, though. If the cover of Modern Approaches to Everyday Cooking looks like it's straight from 1966, that's because it is from 1966. And as the the cheese-stuffed peppers and piles of whipped cream on various desserts hint, this book is from the American Dairy Association. 

I'm going to be uncharacteristically social today and have a party. I'll start out with a cheesy appetizer.

More specifically, an Appetizer Cheesecake! A savory cheesecake probably sounds weird since most of us are used to dessert-y cheesecakes. This actually looks pretty similar to a cheese ball though-- what with all the shredded cheese, seasonings, and finely-chopped veggies. It just uses sour cream instead of the usual cream cheese and puts it all on a crushed cracker crust rather than rolling the mixture in chopped nuts.

I think I'll put a couple salads on the buffet, since we had such a heavy appetizer. (Nothing like starting a meal with cheesecake, right?) Maybe something with seafood...

Baked Salad of the Sea combines the expected canned seafoods with celery, Swiss cheese, crushed pineapple, and sour cream before dumping the whole shebang into avocado halves and-- as the title suggests-- baking it. Once again, I'm left wondering whether this is one of those instances where cheese and seafood are supposedly A-OK together (Maybe the crushed pineapple or hot avocado make the combination okay?) or whether this is an instance where the judges on the cooking show I'm watching would act like putting seafood and cheese together is tantamount to scraping an unidentifiable mound of festering goo off the sidewalk and suggesting they should eat it.

For those not up to eating canned seafood and pineapple on hot avocado halves, I could offer Chicken Almond Mousse Salad. 

This has the distinction of combining lime gelatin with chicken stock before blending in the chicken, celery, almonds, and cucumber and folding in some whipped cream. Nothing quite like a slightly jiggly, pale green block of chicken to whet the old appetite...

We need something to go with the salads... Maybe a nice Cheese Buffet Sandwich. 

This one goes all-in on the protein, with tuna, ham, bacon, and eggs in addition to the titular cheese. My favorite thing about this, though, is that it's touted as a buffet sandwich. The construction-- slices of bread topped with tuna, onion, lettuce, cheese dressing, more bread, ham, tomato, bacon, a generous pour of more dressing, plus egg and olive garnish-- doesn't seem like it would work so well on a buffet. The first person to try to transfer one of those towering piles of ingredients coated in goop would probably end up demolishing at least several sandwiches in the attempt. Before long, the sandwich platter would look like a mucous-based alien in a monster movie disintegrating into a pile of goo after the heroes figured out that it could be defeated with, say, a few good splashes of vinegar.

Maybe I should go for something a little easier to pick up individually for dessert: Rice Cakes.

These aren't your 1980s styrofoam-based snacks! It's more like rice pudding bound with eggs and cooked as a patty. There's barely any sweetener, so better leave out a LOT of sweetened strawberries to go with them, or the guests may not realize the cakes are supposed to be dessert.

Have to admit that I'm not too tempted to throw a dairy party now, but it's more because of my aversion to crowds than anything else. While I like to imagine I'm not that susceptible to suggestion, I also have to admit that this post makes me want a baked potato with a mound of sour cream and cheese. So maybe I'll have a dairy "party" for one. Don't tell anybody. 

The March chapter of "Cooking by the Calendar" is more than ready for spring

Happy March! The new month means it is time, once again, to check in on Cooking by the Calendar (edited by Marilyn Hansen, 1978). The March chapter begins by claiming that "When the season changes, our mood changes, too, and the versatility of the egg appeals to our subtle leaning toward lighter foods." I would highlight the "subtle" in that sentence, as the chapter begins  with a few tables suggesting combinations for egg-based dishes, including this one on quiches. 

I'm not sure how "light" I would consider copious amounts of eggs, cheese, and often meat in a pastry crust, but at least if I put aside my unreasonable levels of hatred for mustard, nothing in this lineup sounds egregious. A green bean quiche with basil, almonds, and cheddar would probably be pretty good. (And maybe even better with broccoli or Brussels sprouts subbed in for the green beans!)

March is also the earliest month that might include Easter or Passover, so the book has a few recipes for each holiday. (It's easy to note the recipes and use them later if the holidays are later-- as they are this year-- but no good if the recipes are posted in April and the holidays were early!) Since lamb cakes are so iconic, I picked out that recipe. 

Hopefully, this is a really sturdy cake, or the head might fall off. No amount of ribbon tied around the neck is likely to fix that. (I think I'd go for chocolate rather than this plain old vanilla, though. Always been a bit of a black sheep myself.) 

Appropriately for Easter (or at least near-Easter), March's vegetable is carrots. Apparently, baking bananas with various other semi-random foodstuffs was still a thing in 1978, so here's the recipe for Glazed Carrots and Bananas.

At least it sounds better than baked ham and bananas in cheese sauce! 

Here's hoping that March ends up being better than a headless lamb cake, but the way things have been going lately, I wouldn't count on it...

1954: When the USDA trusted cooks to figure out how to divvy up ingredients, but gave them questionable advice on food safety

Freezing Combination Main Dishes (USDA, July 1954) is basically a pamphlet advocating an early version of what we now call meal prep.

The process entailed making big batches of food, maybe eating some of it right now, and freezing the rest for later. (It's kind of weird how the cover of the pamphlet makes it look like the woman is putting home-canned goods into the freezer. That would be a good way to shatter a bunch of mason jars.)

Though the recipes are often for basic foods that families at the time would have found familiar, I was amused by how vague the instructions often were about scaling them up. Granted, the filling for the Lamb or Beef Pie wouldn't be too difficult.

Stew a few pounds of meat cubes with a few cups of veggies and then thicken it into a gravy. Easy. The hard part would be figuring out how to portion everything out and top it with pastry, and the book doesn't really offer much advice. For the part to be served immediately, dump it into a baking dish and top with some of the pastry. (Not even any rough guidelines on how much to use!) Then bake at 400℉ for a half hour. For the rest-- cool filling. Place in ovenproof baking dish and top with pastry. Freeze. These older cookbooks really rely on readers to already have a pretty solid grasp of cooking, as there's no handholding on how to make those 24 portions come out right. Hopefully the cook just has the sense to figure out how to make six pies that will serve four people each or two pies for 12 people.

At least readers get a recipe for the crust rather than being expected to use their own.

Though the cookbook is mostly for old standards like creamed chicken or baked beans, there is an attempt to add excitement with Beans and Sausage Mexican Style.

One might even be half-tempted to be impressed that this calls for two tablespoons of chili powder-- until remembering that this is for a recipe that serves 25. Still, at least it gestures toward seasoning.

The most interesting recipe, though, might just be for Jellied Ham Loaf.

Yes, I picked it partly just because it's one of those gelatin-meat-mayo-assorted-veggies recipes that used to be considered sophisticated and now just seem horrifying, but I was more interested in the instructions to prepare for serving. After freezing(!) portions of the jellied loaf, the cook was supposed to thaw them at room temperature for 3 to 4 hours-- something the USDA would definitely consider a hard "NO" today. Leaving something meaty at room temp for that long would now be considered a recipe for food poisoning.

Even though this booklet is small, it's a surprisingly good window into the ways that our ideas about cooking have changed in 70 years.

Cooking like and for a natural kid

I tried to figure out the ethos of Feasting Naturally from Your Own Recipes (Mary Ann Pickard, 1980) in an earlier post, but that task may have been easier if I'd stuck to only the "Kid's Corner" chapter. It is PACKED with the kinds of recipes I expect from 1970s health food cookbooks, like the Cottage Cheese Sundaes.

This is one recipe that really needs some scare quotes around the "sundaes" part. No kid is going to mistake cottage cheese with sunflower seeds, raisins, and peanuts on top for a sundae.

There's also the health-food equivalent of a grilled cheese sandwich. At least real Muenster cheese is acceptable, and the kid doesn't have to try to pretend a slice of tofu is the same thing...

But there's only one slice of toasted (not grilled) wholegrain bread, and health-foodiest of all, a handful of raisins in the cheesy topping. (At least no alfalfa sprouts or sunflower seeds are required.)

And there's a Yummy Banana Salad to get kids to eat some lettuce.

I'm not sure whether the topping of a full block of cream cheese mixed with orange juice and avocados would make it go down easier or harder, but the whole concoction can become a full lunch with an extra handful of peanuts!

The book offers another (usually) kid-friendly dish, even if it's not in the kiddie chapter. Animal crackers are enough of a favorite that they merit TWO variations that parents can make for snacks. 

Either unhulled sesame seeds bound together with Parmesan and a touch of honey or...

...sunflower seeds with wheat germ, unsweetened coconut, or corn meal held together (I'm guessing just barely) by a little honey. Parents better hope their children never encounter actual animal crackers in the real world, or this snack will lead to a lot of questions, at the very least.

In any case, the kid-friendly recipes need to sate the little monsters well enough that they will leave the Doritos alone. Those are reserved for grownup snacks and casserole-topping.

Getting Wikiwiki Wild with Dole

I'm freezing, so we're going tropical today! The title of today's booklet may seem a little modern: How to Have a Wikiwiki Dole Luau (Patricia Collier/ Dole Hawaiian Pineapple Co., undated, but the address on it has no zip code, so it's from before mid-1963).

If you're wondering whether "wikiwiki" is related to things like Wikipedia, the answer is "Yes!" "Wiki" is a Hawaiian word for "quick," and the original version of Wikipedia was WikiWikiWeb because it was supposed to be quickly editable... So there we are. Aside from the "wikis," this definitely seems like it's from the late '50s/ early '60s with all that pink!

I assumed the pamphlet recommend serving Dole pineapple in every goddamn thing, given that this is put out by Dole pineapple.

And initially I don't seem far off the mark so far, given that the main dish of Teriyakis Hawaiian consists of canned ham (or frankfurters!) marinated in pineapple juice spiked with a few seasonings and then alternated on a skewer with pineapple chunks.

Collier must have realized that people's enjoyment of pineapple might go down as the pineapple content of the meal went up, though, as the Polynesian Mingle consists of rice, veggies, and a few seasonings. No pineapple!

And there is not a whole lot of explicit direction for the contents of the Surprise Laulau Finger Salads.

Just the unexpected instruction to fill two blanched romaine leaves with "crisp, fresh vegetables and relishes" and then tie them up "with a twist of green plastic garden tie." (I'm not sure I'd be a huge fan of food secured with garden ties... They're fine on food in the garden, but it doesn't seem right when they make it to the table.)

You just know the desserts and punch have to be pineapply, though... And you would be right. The Wikiwiki Walk-Away Desserts fill ice cream cone cups with something like a no-bake pineapple cheesecake filling. (I wouldn't say no to one of those!)

The Racy Red Punch is Dole Pineapple-Grapefruit Drink (which does not appear to be sold in America anymore) with red hot candies dissolved in it, plus some extra sugar and a "quart" (Why the scare quotes? Maybe it was a liter, but Dole didn't want to offend consumers' delicate sensibilities by mentioning the metric system?) bottle of ginger ale. The real gems of this pamphlet, though, are not the recipes but the party recommendations.

For one, you need leis for a luau, and Dole has some intriguing suggestions.

Yes, they start with the expected recommendations to buy some or make your own with fresh flowers... But then there are other recommendations-- I guess for people who don't have access to or a budget for fresh flowers, such as making leis by stringing popcorn or making "kindergarten chains" (which I guess means rings out of construction paper?). The look is sure to be interesting.

And then for entertainment, everyone can try expressive hula dancing.

I can just imagine backyard patios full of white people, strings of popcorn around their necks like they are mid-century Christmas trees, attempting to wiggle their hips and accidentally thwacking each other as they try to sign things like "palm tree" and "stars." Then they'd laugh and say someone must have spiked the Racy Red Punch. And before you know it, the popcorn leis were coming off and we'd find out that mid-century suburbanites were not nearly so staid as we now imagine... Pineapple is the sign of hospitality, you know. 😉

Cooking for kids, 1930s-style

I previously considered the breakfast and dining outdoors pages of Meat for Every Occasion (National Live Stock and Meat Board, 1932), but another section that really surprised me was the "Meat Dishes for Children" chapter. People now might think of things like hamburgers, cut-up hot dogs, or chicken nuggets as kid-friendly meats, but 1930s parents had VERY different ideas of what kinds of meat kids should eat. 

Old cookbooks really emphasized the nutritional advantages of liver, so of course kids would be considered a prime audience for it.

I guess the concession made for children in the Casserole of Liver recipe is that the star ingredient is paired with bacon rather than onions. 

Sometimes, the recipes seem really damn sophisticated for something intended as a children's meal. Just try telling little Gerald and Betty that they're going to have Sweetbreads and Bacon en Brochette for dinner.

Once they realize that sweetbreads are neither sweet nor bready, they will try to stab you with the skewers. (At least they will eat the bacon. It looks like bacon was the 1930s cheat code to get kids to eat things.)

And some recipes just seem much more like they would be something to serve guests at a dinner party for grownups (possibly ones that the hosts were not so sure they liked) than something for the kiddie table, like Liver Spinach Mold. 

I'm sure that 1930s moms wanted kids to have the nutrition of liver and spinach, but serving thick liver custard with a layer of slimy cooked spinach on top does not seem like the way to accomplish it...

Then again, people were often malnourished in the 1930s, so maybe kids really were less picky. If mom made them something special to eat, it would get eaten, as being full of spinach and liver might have been preferable to going hungry-- especially if there were no dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets waiting in the freezer to quell a temper tantrum?

Betty Crocker tries to get fancy with meringue mix and American cheese

Feeling fancy? Well, Betty Crocker's "Frankly Fancy" Foods Recipe Book (General Mills, 1959) is here for you. 

What were 1950s ideas of fancy foods? Well, aside from the Shrimp Luau and Pink Alaska Pie on the cover, the booklet recommends "fancy" breads, like Mushroom Muffins.

I will admit to loving the slightly salty and rubbery bits of canned mushrooms on top of a hot pizza, but I can see them, and I know why they're there. Unexpectedly biting into one in a muffin would probably be cause for alarm (and perhaps a decidedly un-fancy spit-it-out-to-try-to-figure-out-what's-wrong-with-this-muffin moment-- not the best thing for an elegant gathering, though many current upscale cooks would argue that canned mushrooms and American cheese don't belong there in the first place). 

The book also includes fun punch recipes, such as using meringue mix to make fancy, frothy, super-sweet mocktails...

...and cooling down the tomato juice that seemed to be required for 1950s gatherings with a vegetable ice wreath.

Everybody had seen ice rings with citrus slices and mint sprigs for sweet punch, so a with-it '50s host needed cucumber and radish slices, carrot curls, and parsley floating in the tomato cocktail.

My favorite section, though, has to be the appetizers chapter. At this point (before pizza rolls, bagel bites, and other tiny versions of the snack were available in the nearest freezer case), teeny pizzas were a fancy appetizer.

They also had to be called "Bambinos" so they would sound appropriately Eye-talian, and baked on pie-crust-style pastry so they could drop flaky crumbs on your cocktail clothes if you weren't careful. (And of course, as with a lot of "fancy" cheesy stuff in this book, American cheese was expected.)

From the looks of the inner circle of appetizers in this picture, guests would be unlikely to get enough cheese to really taste it anyway. 

And what do you see skewered on colored toothpicks on the outer edges of this wheel of appetizers?

Yes, it's Cock Kabobs! I spent the longest time trying to figure out whether Betty Crocker was intentionally being a little naughty here. I mean, there's no chicken in this recipe-- the most common cause for the word "cock" to appear in a mid-20th-century recipe title. It calls for sausages, after all. Come on! But maybe Betty is just abbreviating "cocktail" the same way that thoughtless grocery clerks abbreviate "assorted," and the result is a name that is likely to arouse ideas that she would deem filthy rather than fancy....

At least speculating on the name as the host slipped off to the kitchen to refill the tray of Cock Kabobs would make for some fun cocktail chatter. Gotta keep the guests entertained somehow, especially in the late '50s middle class suburbs.

Semi-intelligible marginalia

I had a lot to say about the recipes in Country Cookin' (Ross Chapel Church, Bolts Fork, KY, 1977), but I still haven't even mentioned one of my favorite features of Peggy Kirk's personal copy: handwritten recipes. They're fun because they're kind of sloppy and a bit mysterious....

When I saw this recipe, I wasn't initially sure what it was for.

I love how the writing goes off in all directions. "Stick" juts out above "Melt 1/2 butter in cake pan" since the missing word meant "1/2 butter" could be read as nearly anything: half the total amount of butter (unfortunately left unspecified), half butter and half shortening, half cup of butter... We need "stick" for the real meaning.

"Pour in pan" slopes downward, immediately after flour, I guess to help specify that the entire cake should be mixed in the pan. No washing extra bowls! And then finally I noticed the recipe title-- "CoBBLeR"-- dead center, hiding amidst the all-over-the place directions and the filler proverb: "Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go." (That's got a little more punch than the usually very positive/ inspirational/ religious fillers in most of these types of books.) There was plenty of room on the rest of the page, so I kind of love that the writer decided to put this right on top of the non-blank portion. 

I initially thought the CoBBLeR had no cooking directions, either, but then I saw them tucked away in the upper right corner: "Bake 1 hr. at 350-400°" It's beautiful chaos.

The other recipe that caught my eye is much neater, but also more mysterious. When I saw the title "Mexican Wedding Cake" at the top, I assumed it was a recipe for the tiny, buttery cookies filled with nuts and rolled in powdered sugar that my family used to make at Christmas.

Definitely not! The cookies generally use powdered rather than granulated sugar, omit any leavener or eggs, and most of all, DON'T CONTAIN PINEAPPLE. So this is definitely not a recipe for the cookies. I guess it's a recipe for actual cake, but good luck figuring out how to make it based on these instructions. This is the entirety of the recipe, as nothing else appears below. The cook better remember the mixing instructions, the pan size, the oven temperature, and the bake time because none of those things are included. At least modern cooks can pretty easily figure it out with just a little internet sleuthing. (Bonus: The version I found adds CREAM CHEESE FROSTING!)

There's nothing quite as charming as finding old recipes handwritten in the margins of antique cookbooks, but I'm glad it's infinitely easier to research recipes now!

Wish-Bone wishes for more money

Hoping to reach marketers' not-at-all unrealistic goals of unlimited sales growth, in 1980 The Lipton Kitchens published Not for Salads Only... from Wish-Bone, proposing that salad dressing belonged in pretty much any savory dish.

Honestly, though, the chapter on appetizers almost seemed more appropriate for a Pillsbury cookbook, as it invited cooks to turn refrigerated crescent rolls into Empanadillos de Pollo...

...flavored authentically, I'm sure, with Wish-Bone Russian Dressing.

Then it suggested Steamed Pork Buns, with refrigerated buttermilk biscuits as the the bun part...

...flavored authentically, I'm sure, with Wish-Bone Russian Dressing. (Okay, it definitely is a Wish-Bone cookbook!)

My favorite part of the book, though, is that it is filled with full-color photos of some of the dishes, like the Sandwich Loafer.

It looks like the abdomen of a giant insect with a pretty serious medical condition, but it's just a sandwich loaf for people who are a little too lazy to construct a proper sandwich loaf (thus, "loafer").

The bread only has to be cut partway through, like a Hasselback potato, rather than fully sliced horizontally. It only requires ONE filling (rather than different fillings for each layer). And it doesn't need to be "frosted." So easy! 

For the cooks who miss all the ring molds from the '50s and '60s, there's "End of a Sunny Day" Salad.

Salad dressing is not only for salads... but it is also for salads. 

This salad probably tastes like cold leftover sweet-and-sour chicken...

...flavored authentically with (what else?) Russian dressing, enclosed in a ring of rice that also tastes like Russian dressing.

Or, if you want your party spread to look like a wad of gunk you just pulled out of the garbage disposal, there's the Holiday Cocktail Cheese Ball. 

Or maybe it's alive? Those olives do look kinda like eyes. In any case, this glob seems way too wet for a cheeseball (and I'm a little afraid it might be sentient).

But at least it will (in theory) sell some Wish-Bone Thousand Island Dressing. 

Or maybe it will help you understand the vague sense of nausea and foreboding I experience when somebody tries to get me to eat something with pretty much any kind of salad dressing on it. ("You have so much willpower!" people exclaim when I ask for the salad without dressing, while I struggle to understand how they can categorize salad dressing as not only food, but as a food they want to eat.)

Weathering mid-winter with presidential recipes, pot roast, and plenty of cabbage

Happy(?) February! At least the average daily temperature is on the rise now (even if it will take a while to feel a real difference). The new month means a new peek into Cooking by the Calendar (edited by Marilyn Hansen, 1978).

Since Presidents' Day is in February, the book offers a number of recipes associated with various Presidential families. While you might expect of old-timey recipes attributed to frontier days, a lot of them should be very familiar to anyone who has looked at a community cookbook from the 1960s or '70s, including such common findings as Scripture Cake (attributed to Dolly Madison, in this case) and Million-Dollar Fudge.

At least there's not a recipe for Nixon's cottage cheese and ketchup. 

The February chapter has a section for recipes that take a while to cook-- presumably to help keep the house warm and cozy-- like this Bavarian Apple Pot Roast.

There's nothing like a Dutch oven full of pot roast, onion, and mealy Red Delicious apples to make you wish for spring....

And February's vegetable of the month is cabbage, so I'll leave you with Russian Sauerkraut Soup. 

I picked this recipe just because, unsurprisingly, I HATE SAUERKRAUT. But hey, if short ribs cooked in two kinds of cabbage (regular and fermented) will make your winter go faster, enjoy! It probably works better than my method of staring angrily at a calendar.