Want some potatoes, rice polish, and soy grits? I mean, dessert?

Let's kick back and make a dessert this weekend! The alarmist "health" cookbook Let's Cook It Right (Adelle Davis, originally 1947, but mine is a 1962 edition) recommends desserts only if they are "made particularly nutritious to compensate for the disadvantages they offer." Davis reluctantly offers dessert recipes only because she realizes people will make dessert anyway, so she might as well recommend some more nutritious versions. Her practicality follows through in recommending cooks use plain old sugar, too, observing that "persons who believe 'raw' sugar and honey to be nutritious foods usually eat far too much of them." Davis is nearly predicting the Snackwell cookie craze here, another instance when people felt free to pig out on junk if they have a semi-plausible reason to believe that the junk is somehow healthy. 

In any case, her dessert recipes don't seem particularly likely to induce overeating. The Molasses Drop Cookies with their wheat germ, powdered milk, and whole wheat flour seem like they would taste overly health-foody as it is. 

And then you might notice the variation of Mock Nut Cookies. Why mock nuts, when the book recommends real nuts in other recipes? Because the mock "nuts" are an excuse to slip in a cup of soy grits.

The Wheat-Germ-and-Oatmeal Cookies remind us that in addition to being the kind of book that slips wheat germ and milk powder into everything...

...this is also the type of book that sees wheat germ as exciting enough to be a headliner and whole wheat pastry flour, soy flour, and rice polish as interchangeably good cookie ingredients.

The book does allow for using mixes occasionally (At least, I assume the reference to the "package prepared pudding" is for a mix, as it would be really hard to thin out already-cooked pudding with 2-1/2 cups of milk and then thicken it back up in just four minutes on the stove.), as in this Prepared Puddings recipe.

I mainly highlighted it because I loved the "Flaming puddings" variation. It's hard to imagine putting that much work into pudding from a mix-- not just the cook-and-serve part (I'm an instant fan!), but then putting it in individual serving dishes to be topped with a marshmallow stuffed with a lemon-extract-saturated sugar cube and set aflame. (All that for a visual spectacle that is not even "effective except by candle light.")

And for the occasion when kids really demand sugar-- like a birthday party-- the book recommends making a big batch of Modeling Fondant out of mashed potatoes, sugar, and powdered milk. 

I love that the fondant is to be shaped into "tiny melons, fruits, and vegetables," as if Davis can somehow will these to be more nutritious simply by the shape. The headnote (which I cut off because part of it is on a different page and I'm too lazy to fuss with it) observes that if the fondant is left unshaped and distributed to birthday party guests, the kids are likely to make "pigs, giraffes, and caricatures of each other," which seems likely. This will also be so much fun that the party will end with the guests "forgetting to go home," which seems much less so (and is the opposite of a selling point in my world). 

At any rate, Davis has convinced me not to use any of her dessert recipes, so she could claim that as a win, I guess. (Well, as long as nobody notices that I avoid the desserts because I'd much rather use up all those empty calories for various Reese's peanut butter candies.)