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.
I'm glad that I'm not the only one who thought it looked like a rice ring filled with barf. Artistically splashed barf nonetheless. I guess that's what you make for someone sick of rice.
ReplyDeleteI agree that their rice cakes look way better than the foam coasters that go by that name these days.
Those little spills over the edge just make it so much worse!
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