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.