In which we learn that Marilyn was tearing it up in 1970s Iowa (and maybe needed some extra cash to pay for it)

Even though From .... Marilyn's Kitchens (Marilyn P. Brown, 1980) is slightly too new for my blog's informal 1970s and before preference, I had to pick it up. 

These types of books with comb binding are usually written by church groups or civic clubs as fundraisers, so why was Marilyn P. Brown publishing her own book in this model? It's definitely not because she was bored. The introduction tells readers that at the time of publication, she was working as a legal secretary in Cedar Rapids during the week and commuting to Sioux City (a four-hour drive right now if Google maps is to be believed-- and perhaps it took longer 40 years ago depending on speed limits, road construction, etc.) every weekend to live as a "housewife and mother with a catering business." (Were there really NO legal secretary jobs closer to Sioux City, and did she really make so much money as a legal secretary that it was worth the extra expense of renting a "high-rise apartment" so she could work there? The questions raised by the introduction can lead one to all kinds of interesting theories. Maybe she was pretty sick of her family? Maybe she just really liked bragging about the apartment? Maybe she was failing to mention her girlfriend who lived in Cedar Rapids?) Before the long commute between being a secretary and caterer, she raised 15 foster sons along with her own three children. Plus her family briefly opened and ran a restaurant until Mrs. Brown realized that owning a restaurant required a lot more work than just cooking. So... Well, maybe I am wrong. It seems like Marilyn P. Brown was the kind of person who liked doing waaaay too many things at once. Maybe she did write this because she was bored, even though she shouldn't have had the time to be bored? Of course, maybe she also just needed to help pay off the debt the family likely went into with the failed restaurant business. Whatever the actual story, Marilyn P. Brown must have been a dynamo! (Past tense because I think she died in 2017.)

I wasn't quite sure what kind of format to use with this book, so in keeping with the craziness of the author's life, I'm going with a discordant menu of mayhem! First up, of course, is an appetizer.

Meatza-- a meat-crusted pizza-- is not that uncommon in old recipe books. This is a little unusual in that it has barbecue sauce and brown sugar on top, but the real thing that makes it stand out is that it's served on Wheat Thins as an appetizer! Meatza is often offered as a low-carb alternative to pizza, so this is the first time I've ever seen it re-carbed with crackers (or served in app-size portions).

I'll admit that the main dish came from the brunch section, but I had to include it because Chicken Sparta was Mrs. Brown's all-time favorite (at the time of printing) recipe! (I'm trying to figure out whether she's making a bit of fun of herself by using "all-time favorite" with the disclaimer, or whether she doesn't see the contradiction of all-time with right now. Either way, it's fun!)

I also love knowing that the Iowa "champagne brunch crowd" is down-to-earth enough to appreciate water chestnuts, American cheese, slices of (likely white) bread, and cans of cream-of-something soup with their champagne. As you might be able to see from the note (presumably added by the author, as it's copied, not written by the book's owner), Marilyn Brown was a nicer menu planner than I am, saying this should be served "with a fruit cup, fresh broccoli spears, small sweet rolls or muffins, wine and/or coffee."

Instead, I'm going to continue with the midwestern theme and provide a barbecued side.

Little bundles of green beans wrapped in bacon, parbaked, then drained and baked for another hour in a pineapple juice/ catsup/ sweet pickle juice/ Worcestershire glaze seems about right.

Okay, fine. I'll add the fruit cup as a salad, just to be nice.

Avocado and melon served in a cream-cheese-ginger-lemonade-concentrate dressing might not be too bad--if you like melon (or if you'd let me swap it out for berries or orange segments). Yeah, I know it's kinda trashy, but I kinda love it.

And finally, for dessert, to show that this book is mostly a product of the '70s anyway, even if the publication date is 1980, we'll throw in a Harvey Wal[l]banger.

For the busy cook, this is mostly mixes (yellow cake mix, instant vanilla pudding mix). Just throw in some oil, booze, orange juice, and DON'T MISS the four eggs hidden off in a corner under the pudding mix. (I love how the recipe seems like it only has one column for ingredients, but there is secretly a second column for just one ingredient for no apparent reason. Nobody was too worried about readability....) Then "Mix in usual way!" Bake. Cool. Glaze with powdered sugar mixed with orange juice.

This fun little book is worthwhile just for the wild introduction about the author, and the recipes give us an insight into what foods were considered glamorous in late 1970s Iowa. I'm definitely glad I got to peek into Marilyn's Kitchens.

I hope you like your ham and eggs cold and jiggly!

If you celebrated Easter last weekend, I hope your leftovers are used up by this point. If not, though, Mary Margaret McBride's Encyclopedia of Cooking Deluxe Illustrated Edition (1959) suggests a few ways to embalm them so they will last a few more days.

By "embalm," of course I mean the old standby for keeping leftovers around for just a little longer: encasing them in gelatin. You got leftover ham? Go for Ham Mousse if you're feeling classy. 

Or if you also happen to have cabbage that's about to go bad, you can combine it with the ham for Ham and Cabbage Molds.

Hopefully, it will smell better than just boiling the hell out of the cabbage, which seemed to be the preferred cooking method for most vegetables back in the '50s. 

In the unlikely event that you could afford to make more hard cooked eggs than you could easily eat in a few days, you could try an egg mold to use them up. There's a pretty straightforward Egg Salad Mold for people who think regular egg salad should be thicker and jigglier.

Watch out though! It's spicy! It's got two whole drops of Tabasco sauce distributed throughout the dozen eggs.

If you've got a lot of leftover vegetable bits and fewer than a dozen eggs, the Molded Eggs and Vegetables can entomb the eggs along with whatever celery, onion, etc. that didn't quite get used up. 

And if you really want to embrace spring (or at least read the phrase "hot asparagus liquid"), there's an Asparagus-Egg Mold.

Maybe just throw any leftover ham in this one for a ham and egg mold with asparagus, and you have the full Easter-dinner experience in cold, slimy form. (Threaten to make this as the main meal next year, and you may never have to host an Easter get-together again.)

McCall's tries to show off for your man

McCall's Show-Off Cookbook (1974) puts a flaming plum pudding right on the cover so you know they're serious about showing off.

I was honestly most interested in the "Plus" though. Cook your way into his heart with our man-tested menus? I am always interested in seeing gendered menus. What do you put out for the ladies' luncheon? What do you feed the girls at your daughter's sleepover? What foods will win instant access to his heart? According to old cookbooks, there are right answers.

The introduction to the section is a little scary, promising "All planned with malice aforethought, these recipes are designed specifically with your man in mind."

I'm not sure how they have any insight into the reader's man, but considering the booklet "can almost guarantee that you can cook your way into his heart-- and live happily ever afterward," I don't think it has much grasp on reality. Good cooking is never enough to guarantee happily ever after, even if you're trying to run a restaurant, which is much more dependent on good food than a romantic relationship.

And in any case, while the introduction seems to imply that the book will offer romantic little menus for two, the majority of the recipes in this section serve six, so I'm imagining an audition for all the eligible bachelors in the area. If bachelor #2 wants ketchup on his steak or bachelor #5 refuses to even look at any vegetable that has not first been breaded and deep fried, well, then the cook has some valuable knowledge about who will or will not make it to the dessert round.

I imagined there would only be a few menus, and they would mostly consist of things like steak and pommes frites and big slabs of apple pie. And yes, there were a few menus like that, but there were a lot more menus than I expected, and they were actually rather varied.

There's a fish menu, for example.

It's not a recipe for freshly-caught brook trout, perhaps meant to imply that the cook can fix whatever the fisherman boyfriend catches, but a French recipe: Sole Amandine. 

I love that McCall's has to add model ships in the foreground and background of the picture, though, as if that somehow makes the fish in a butter-and-lemon sauce with a sprinkling of almond slivers manlier. 

Plus, the menu calls for green vegetables: Brussels sprouts!

Granted, they're coated in cheese spread and breadcrumbs and walnuts, but they're still actual green vegetables. Plus there's a salad!

I wouldn't want to be within a mile of orange slices mixed with raw onions, but I guess the raw onions are there to make the salad manly?

And while dessert is a pie, it's not the thick slab of apple that I imagined.

Instead, it's an apricot-purée-in-gelatinized-ice cream confection, topped with a frilly lattice of whipped cream. This definitely sounds more like a recipe I'd expect for a ladies' luncheon than for a "man-tested menu."

A different menu in this section starts off with chilled soup, another dish that I thought would be more prevalent in ladies' luncheons than in "manly" repasts.

This soup starts out with a lot of cream-of-potato soup, though, so maybe all that potato makes it appropriate for the meat-and-potatoes types?

And this is a potato-heavy menu, though in some upside-down world. If you want the potatoes cold, have the soup. If you want them hot, have the salad! (Unfortunately, there's no recipe, but the menu does specify "Savory Hot Potato Salad.")

The menu also features a sweet main dish, which I thought of as more of a mainstay of ladies' luncheons.

The ham is cooked in a bottle of ginger ale under a blanket of brown sugar, then basted in more ginger ale, crusted in more brown sugar, and served in a sauce of currant jelly. In short, a sugar rush! 

This menu again offers a green vegetable that has not been battered and deep fried!

At least the lemon pie is "manly," eschewing the frothy meringue frill for a top crust.

Still, though... These menus make me think that no matter how relentlessly old cookbooks liked to gender the recipes, the ideas about what should be served to whom largely overlapped. Of course, women always had to cook and serve, but hey, it was an opportunity for a casting call, apparently. If the women had to pick somebody, better to cast a wide net and at least pick somebody who liked the same things as they did.

Making garlic goodies the old-fashioned way

Happy April 19! It's the vampires' least favorite holiday: Garlic Day. You can always just braid some into a comely necklace, or you could make one of these snacks from The Good Housekeeping Cookbook (edited by Dorothy B. Marsh, 1963) to nosh during your next vampire movie marathon.

Of course, popcorn is the snack most people immediately associate with movies.

The garlicky popcorn recipe sounds like a logistical nightmare. Cooks are supposed to heat packaged popcorn with butter and sliced garlic-- then fish all the garlic slices out! Seems like it would be so much easier just to use garlic salt on finished popcorn... You might argue that that wouldn't make for much of a recipe, but it's not like this is much of a recipe either!

There's also a reminder that packaged snack foods tended to be much plainer back in the 1960s. If you wanted garlic-flavored chips, it was a do-it-yourself affair. 

I imagine that enclosing a quart of potato chips with a few half-cloves of garlic wouldn't accomplish much more than making them a bit stale (and shaking and turning the container would break them into smaller pieces).

And when I was perusing the index, I also saw a garlic chip recipe. I wondered how that was different from garlic-flavored potato chips. The answer: Garlic Chips are much weirder and more labor-intensive!

Garlic chips are a variation on Brazil-nut chips-- meaning that Brazil nuts need to be turned into chips! Apparently simply flavoring heated Brazil nuts with garlic salt and some other seasonings would not be sufficient. First, the Brazil nuts had to be simmered, drained, cut into thin lengthwise slices, spread into a shallow pan, and dotted with butter before they could be flavored and toasted. And then they would likely be roundly rejected by the kids, who would want to know where the potato chips were anyway. Their friends don't have to put  up with pretending sliced Brazil nuts are chips! And then they'd learn that the potato chips had been sealed in a container with garlic halves and shaken into potato shards. And then maybe they'd go see if the neighbor kids would share their after-school snacks. Finally, mom could have a few moments of Garlic Day peace... (Is it a fair trade-off for all the time spent making Brazil nut chips? Only the cook can say.)

Picturing Riceland

The little Asian mascot on the cover of Riceland Rice Cook Book (Arkansas Rice Growers Cooperative Association, undated but looks 1970s-ish to me) immediately made me think "Uh oh!"

And the tagline on the back of the booklet only affirmed my reaction.

Not so nice!

Luckily, the interior of the booklet generally relies less on racial caricatures. Instead, there's a weird little generic chef carrying something around, using his apron as hot pads.

I don't think the picture is supposed to illustrate anything in particular, but the recipe below is called Heavenly Hot Dogs Are Barbecued. (That's not an awkward name!)

And apparently, "barbecued" means "served over a bed of onion-lemon rice and drowned under a catsup-and-Worcestershire sauce." You know. Barbecued. Doesn't that sound heavenly?

A lot of recipes have photographs of the food instead of illustrations of people, such as this reminder that "rice cakes" meant something different before the low-fat snacking craze of the 1980s and 1990s.

The nicely browned exteriors topped with luscious pats of melting butter bear little resemblance to the Styrofoam-like pucks my brain conjures up when it hears "rice cakes."

Instead, these are just a way to use up leftover cooked rice by binding it with flour and eggs and frying it on a griddle.

 They are apparently versatile, as the book suggests serving them "with butter and syrup as hot cakes or as a side dish with meats in the manner of French fries." This definitely sounds more interesting than the rice cakes I know.

Still, the pictures don't always do the recipes many favors. The Riceland Rice Oyster Ring might sound fine, especially if you like rice and oysters.

It's basically just an oyster gravy served "in Riceland Rice ring." But the picture, well...

It looks like somebody with food poisoning mistook the rice ring for a bucket... While I'm not sure Riceland did itself any favors with this picture, I guess it's better than filling the space with another caricature of an Asian rice enthusiast.

And now you can picture me waving goodbye from atop my mound of cookbooks and horror movie memorabilia because this post is over.

Asparagus two ways: Light and heavy

It's asparagus season. My favorite asparagus is the slightly smoky grilled stalks on the Whole Foods salad bar. Prep requires nothing more than an ability to use salad tongs to transfer them to a container and a willingness to imagine that fellow salad bar users are relatively sanitary and sane.

For those who may not be willing to put quite that much faith in humanity (and I can't blame you!), recipes to prepare asparagus at home might be the better way to go. The Natural Foods Cookbook (Beatrice Trum Hunter, copyright 1961, but mine is from a 1975 printing) offers a couple of options. If you want your asparagus light and springy (in both the metaphorical and physical senses), there's an Asparagus Soufflé.

I'm not sure how ethereal this will be given that it is made with those old health-food standbys, whole wheat flour and powdered milk. Still, it sounds much more exciting than the asparagus option right below it. 

Even if you're willing accept the premise that asparagus is appropriate for loafification, I doubt all the wheat germ, soy grits, and milk powder will do much to accentuate the fresh spring taste of tender stalks of asparagus. I imagine it as being more like a brick, made barely edible by the addition of the asparagus.

Kind of makes trusting other salad bar patrons seem like a more palatable option than doing one's own cooking, doesn't it?

A Fruit Meat Cute

McCall's Book of Marvelous Meats (1974) did not seem all that marvelous to me.

There are a lot of time and temperature tips, which do not make for the most scintillating reading, and a lot of interchangeable-seeming meat loaves and recipes that all basically call for cooking meat with potatoes, carrots, and/or onions into a stew or a roast.

For someone who loves weird recipes, the Hamburger Pie was about as exciting as things got.

And even this is mostly just a round meat loaf with potato topping. One thing I did notice about this book, though, is that the editors really liked meat with fruit (one of the many combos that makes me screw up my face into the "trying not to gag" pose). Most sections for each meat have a couple of pages with enough colorful, fruit-centric recipes to cover the "ROY" part of "ROY G. BIV." I decided to represent this with pork chop recipes since the pages faced each other and it made scanning easier. (Don't you love that little peek behind the curtain?)

Representing red, we have a recipe I could imagine my turkey-hating grandma cooking for Thanksgiving dinner.

And then everybody could have spent Thanksgiving yelling at me for only eating side dishes until I finally relented and choked down half a pork chop just to get people to leave me alone. Fun! (Don't worry, though, as they always found some way to yell at me no matter what was being served! I remember being pre-emptively yelled at by my aunt for not eating vegetables-- even though I generally liked them as long as they were pretty plain, which they were that year. I had no intention of skipping the veggies, but I got yelled at for it anyway.)

Anyway-- for orange, there were a couple of options. Obviously, there was an orange orange option.

Honestly, though, the orange juice is not likely to make the pork chops that orange (though the orange sections will help). If you really want things to be brighter, the Braised Pork Chops with Peaches might be the way to go.

And for yellow, the book gets tropical (and a little alliterative) with Pineapple Pork Chops.

And don't worry-- there's a similar series of recipes for ham and veal. There's even boiled tongue with prunes and another tongue recipe calling for a pineapple glaze-- plus standalone recipes for cinnamon-apple wedges, grilled apple rings, baked cranberries, curried dried fruit, pickled pears, spicy cranberry relish, and raisin sauce in case you accidentally forgot to add fruit directly to the meat. I'd almost be tempted to call it the "Meat Meets Fruit Cookbook," but then I'd be forgetting about all those standard pot roasts, stews, and meat loaves.

April is protein month, apparently

Cooking by the Calendar (edited by Marilyn Hansen, 1978) is excited about April, the time when "A sudden shower freshens the ground and the air and the buds unfold daily while the grass grows greener." I'm not really sure what it means for the air to "unfold," and I would be happy for brief and sudden showers if I could trade them for the deluge my area is experiencing. It's easier to be optimistic about April on paper than it is when you're in an actual April....

April features various meat loaves and terrines, like this simplified version of Beef Wellington that is still pretty darn complicated for a meatloaf. 

What with partially baking the meatloaf, making pie crust, smearing the partially-cooked loaf with a liverwurst and canned mushroom mixture, and wrapping the whole thing in the pie crust before additional baking, this is not an easy weeknight dinner. (And that's even before we take the decoration with pastry flowers into account....)

And of course, there's also supposed to be a sauce.

At least this is fairly straightforward-- just doctored-up brown gravy mix.

And if you're more in the mood for a terrine than for a meatloaf, one option is the Walnut-Gherkin Terrine.

This pickle-filled meat reminds me of the bad old days when I worked at a grocery store's deli counter. The week when pickle-and-pimento loaf was on sale was THE WORST. The slicer threw bits of pickles and pimentos everywhere, and by the end of a shift, I'd be covered in green and red flecks like the world's ugliest Christmas decoration. At least this concoction only has the pickles-- no pimentos-- and it won't go through the slicer anyway.

The book also proclaims that spring gives people an appetite for lighter things, like fish, so it suggests Flounder Rolls Florentine.

I picked them mostly because I like the drawing underneath, which looks kind of a like a rejected Muppet. (I could see it wishing "joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea" while Jeremiah shares his wine with Kermit.)

Asparagus is the veggie of the month, and as a further reminder that eggs were cheaper in the '70s, the book recommends an Asparagus Quiche.

The pinwheel-of-asparagus must have been a really popular way to celebrate spring back then. 

Meanwhile, I am going to celebrate by buying a snorkel so I can go outside for a walk. (Or maybe swim?)

Woman's Day goes banana collecting

I understand why, say, Chiquita and Dole put out banana cook booklets. They obviously had an incentive to sell more bananas. I'm less sure why Woman's Day felt compelled to make their entire Collector's Cook Book for April 1970 focus on bananas, but they did it anyway.

Maybe the editors were just so taken with Bud Simpson's cute jungle animal cartoons that they had to go with a banana theme? That monkey chowing down on a banana is adorable, but my favorite is actually the little bird matter-of-factly marching around with an oversized banana under its wing, as if it's on its way to the office and the banana is the equivalent of a briefcase. 

The recipes mostly seem fine when you get to the desserts section. It's hard to be mad at (or very interested in) instructions for a banana split or banana loaf cake. That's, of course, why we're going to be looking at the more savory applications of bananas. (Or unsavory, as the case may be.)

There is a used-to-be-popular-for-some-reason banana meat loaf. 

I am not sure what banana was supposed to add to a meatloaf, other than bulk. Sometimes I think meatloaf was just meant to be kind of the equivalent of an edible garbage can. Just mix whatever you needed to use up into ground beef and proclaim it meatloaf.

I thought the Banana-Meat Roll-Ups might be the ever-popular (in old cookbook circles, anyway) Ham-Banana Rolls. However, they're not. They're a different variation of ground beef with banana.

I guess this is for the cook who doesn't even want to bother trying to pretend there's not banana in the meat. A full banana half is just cooked right in the middle of each wad of ground chuck, perhaps accompanied by half a tomato if the cook is feeling particularly adventurous.

Don't worry, though, there IS a ham and banana recipe.

This one has a simpler sauce than the earlier version-- this one is just thinned-down cheese soup-- so it's updated for the 1970s!

And if ham is too expensive, Franks and Fruit makes for a cheaper smoked-meat-and-banana pairing.

I imagine this sounds pretty good to the "syrup on sausage" crowd, but I am not among their number...

What we can all agree on, though, is that the banana armadillo is pretty cute.

Plus, with its bright orange single-color printing and blocky cartoon style, it's a perfect representation of late '60s/ early '70s style. No wonder the little guy looks so happy. (And of course, that makes me happy too. Gotta get happiness wherever I can find it...)