Some rare Hallowe'en recipes!

I'm sad that so few old cookbooks have Halloween-specific recipes. Of course they're loaded with traditional Thanksgiving and Christmas recipes. Hell, they usually even have a cherry pie recipe for Presidents' Day! But nothing for Halloween. 😞 That's why I was so excited to find a couple of salads for my favorite holiday in New Delights from the Kitchen (Kelvinator, 1930). 

First up, the delightfully apostrophed Hallowe'en Salad.

It's basically a sweet cole slaw topped with extra dates, mayonnaise flourishes, and "eighth inch peelings from very red apples cut into Hallowe'en shapes such as crescent moons and pumpkin faces." I can't imagine too many cooks in the 1930s spent much time cutting apple peels into tiny shapes-- I'm not even sure how one might go about cutting a pumpkin face into such a tiny bit of apple peel, even if one were so inclined!-- but at least it's a fun thought.

The alternative-- a Goblin Salad-- seems much easier.

Just gussy up a canned peach half with clove eyes and nose and a maraschino cherry mouth. (Leave the mayonnaise out of the cream cheese hair, and I might even consider eating this one!)

Plus, cooks can pair the Goblin Salad with a big bowl of the more-recent concoction Cheddar Goblin for a full meal. Yay! These recipes make me as close as I am likely to get to that "all's right with the world" feeling. 

Betty Gets Lazy

The cover of Betty Crocker's Dinner Parties (7th printing, 1978) promises all kinds of plans, including those for "impromptu suppers."

While there are recipes for more complicated menus (like the homemade lasagna on the cover), the first menu in this cookbook is definitely of the "impromptu supper" type.

The Deli Dinner in Disguise is not joking about the "deli" part. This is just a deli run slightly disguised by light personalization-- the kind of instruction I don't imagine '70-s cooks as even needing. The barbecued deli chicken is just that:

A reheated barbecued chicken from the deli. The cook can brush it "with bottled Italian salad dressing or barbecue sauce" before reheating to make it slightly easier to pretend that this isn't just reheated deli chicken.

The Hot Spiced Fruit 'n Melon?

A can of "fruits for salad" (I'm assuming this is an attempt to make fruit cocktail sound fancy) combined with a jar of watermelon pickles and a little allspice. The cook does have to heat it up so it's clear they exerted some effort beyond opening the packages.

The Garden Patch Coleslaw is-- you guessed it!-- dressed-up deli coleslaw.

It's "garden patch" because it has a bag of defrosted peas dumped in (plus a little Italian dressing to keep the dressing ratio sufficient).

My favorite item in the menu is probably the Onion Rolls.

I love them primarily because the cook is supposed to cut each roll into 3 strips and then reassemble them before heating them in the oven. I have absolutely no clue why the rolls should be hacked up and reassembled. The cut surfaces are not spread with butter and seasonings, as I assumed they would be when I initially saw they were being cut into strips. It doesn't seem like cutting the rolls into thirds will help that that much in distributing the six rolls evenly among four diners. (If that were the goal, cutting them into halves or quarters would have been a better choice.) This strip-cutting is just random, pointless busywork as far as I can tell. Betty Crocker must have gotten tired of trying to think of things to do to make items from the deli seem at least kinda homemade and just said, "I don't know! Cut them into little strips?" when she got to this "recipe." She was done with this menu before she was done with this menu. It's good to know that even symbols of domesticity sometimes got sick of pretending to care.

Recipes for the maniac with a butcher knife

Let's Cook It Right (Adelle Davis, originally 1947, but mine is a 1962 edition) is so convinced of the incredible value of meat in the diet that even most of the recipes in the chapter that is supposed to be about meat substitutes still contain meat. So, it should be no surprise that the book recommends eating a wide variety of cuts of meat, too. 

I rarely see recipes for backbones, for example, but this book has one. 

I'm not really sure how people were supposed to serve or eat backbones-- the recipe ends pretty abruptly. Simmer 15 minutes and... Remove any meat and add it back to a stew based on this cooking water? Hang them from the ceiling as really gnarly Halloween decorations? Decide you've wasted your time trying to cook backbones? At least it shows how to cook them. 

The book also included a lot of variety meat recipes. Why settle for plain old meatloaf when you can have Heart Meat Loaf?

I'll bet grinding is a good strategy for cooking a tough muscle like the heart, and it could keep the kids from realizing what they're actually being served...

And speaking of keeping people from figuring out what it is they're actually eating... Maybe this recipe could do with a title change.

I like that the note at the end reassures cooks that "Brains prepared in this manner are usually assumed to be hard-cooked eggs." So, again, maybe reconsider calling it brain salad. Easier to fool people into thinking they're eating eggs that way!

Sometimes, though, the book thinks cooks should go big and bold when serving variety meats. 

It was sure to be a special night when mom carried a big platter of flaming kidneys to the table. 

The prize for most unnerving recipe might go to Brains with Chives.

The part that gives me pause is "pack brains firmly into ice tray, freeze. Remove and slice before sautéing." I can just imagine hunting around for an ice cube and being confronted with a tray full of brains! In fact, finding something like that in an old, oversized farmhouse freezer seems like a good scene in a horror movie-- the moment when some unsuspecting house guest realizes they have to get out right now as the camera pulls back to reveal a guy with a butcher knife coming around the corner, right behind the person trying not to step on the remnants of the shattered water glass they just dropped...

And now I realize that any of these recipe titles could be written on a mock menu posted on the kitchen walls in that farmhouse, the kind of background detail that would make me pause the movie for a moment to appreciate the small touches that make a horror movie house a horror movie home.

Microwave fun for a crisp fall day

I usually go for older cookbooks, but the cover for Kenmore Microwave Cooking (1985) was so perfectly '80s, and I adore microwave cookbooks anyway, so here we are.

So what might a 1980s microwave owner eat on a crisp fall day? We'll start off with breakfast. How about some eggs benedict?

Sure, you could poach the egg in conventionally-boiling water, but then you wouldn't have the fun of trying to pierce the yolk to avoid an explosion in the microwave. And you could enjoy crisp freshly toasted English muffins as the base, BUT YOU HAVE A MICROWAVE! So you will make those toasted English muffins soggy and rubbery by microwaving them under a slice of ham before assembling your breakfast. 

For lunch, we need something cozy. How about French onion soup? Sure, it usually takes quite a while to get the onions properly browned and and the broth full of flavor, but you've got a microwave! You can get that shit done in just barely over half an hour.

As long as you don't mind that the onions don't really brown, so they won't get much flavor. Or that the cheese on top will only melt-- not get browned and delicious. Or that you will be eating microwaved toast. Again.

Then for dinner, let's have this.

No, we're not going for dessert first with a microwaved fruitcake. This is family meat loaf ring!

It's admittedly a pretty boring meat loaf. I just initially mistook the picture for a fruitcake and wanted you to have that fun too. 

We can have some apple-stuffed acorn squash as a side.

At least this is recipe that actually makes sense for the microwave. The squashes will cook faster (and be easier to halve partially-cooked than they are when they're raw). 

And if a side dish full of apples, cinnamon, and honey isn't enough of  a dessert for you, end your meal with a peanut colada sundae!

Hopefully the cream of coconut will help you forget about eating all that microwaved toast! And then you can go to bed and dream about going to see Freddy's Revenge when it comes out next month. I mean, I love microwave cookbooks, but they weren't the best part of 1985.

Substitute? I do not think it means what you think it means

A lot of my old health food cookbooks are for vegetarians, and even the ones that aren't are usually veg-heavy and light on the meat. I picked up Let's Cook It Right (Adelle Davis, originally 1947, but mine is a 1962 edition) in part because I saw it had a fairly substantial chapter about meat substitutes, so I wanted to see what it recommended. Would it be bricks of veggies bound with whole wheat bread crumbs? "Fillets" made with things like olives or cereal? Big platters of overly plain cooked vegetables? 

Nope!

Believe it or not, Spanish Rice with Meat is actually a meat substitute, at least according to the chapter title. Not sure how, as the meat it calls for is, in fact, meat. This chapter reveals that unlike other "health food" writers, Davis is extremely wary of the idea of meatless cooking, noting in the introduction for the meat substitute chapter that plant proteins "lack several essential amino acids and hence do not have the health-building value of meats, fish, eggs, or milk. Generous amounts of meat, cheese, or other adequate proteins should be added to these so-called 'meat substitutes' whenever possible." The inclusion of a meat substitutes chapter seems pretty puzzling once you realize the author is convinced the only adequate substitute for meat is meat. 

You might think that meat is only added to the rice since rice is not all that high in protein, but that recipes based on beans might not get the same level of meaty fortification. You would, of course, be wrong. 

The seasoned lentils or split peas are an adequate meat substitute if they contain meat.

I spotted a Chow Mein recipe and wondered if it might at least introduce readers to tofu since Davis reluctantly named soybeans as being the only "true meat substitute" from the legume family. 

Nope! Forget tofu. The "meat substitute" here is leftover pork roast.

And the one recipe I expected to include meat once I was used to the chapter's emphasis on meat was perhaps the biggest surprise.

Fried rice-- usually enriched with eggs and a meat of some type-- is an entirely different dish in this book. Here, it's just a rice pilaf with a bunch of cheese stirred in at the end! Sounds good, but I'd be pretty surprised if someone promised fried rice and showed up with a dish of this.

I was at a loss as to how the recipes in the meat substitutes chapter were different from the recipes in any other chapter. Then I noticed the full title of the chapter (rather than the shortened version written in the header of each page in the section): Meat Substitutes and Extenders for Limited Budgets. This chapter is more about stretching the meat than using something else in its place. I always thought that was the role of things like casseroles, though, and they show up in a lot of chapters. I never did quite figure out how these recipes got singled out for this particular chapter when they might have fit just as easily in the chapters on meats or using up leftovers, but at least I had an interesting afternoon trying to figure it out. 

Enjoy some peanut butter and meat!

 As someone who used to make the boring vanilla ice cream mom bought when I was a kid more interesting by stirring peanut butter (and chocolate Nestle's Quik if we had some) into it, and as someone who now tops pancakes with a thin layer of peanut butter instead of syrup, I can't resist the temptation of a peanut butter cookbook! That's how I ended up with Peter Pan Peanut Butter Cook Book (1963). 

This book is not quite as wild as Jif's 1979 book, but it does have its moments. Honestly, my favorite things in this book are not the actual recipes, but the recommendations for how to gussy up other foods with a little Peter Pan.

Need some appetizers? Get the peanut butter!

Appetizers apparently really needed both peanut butter and some kind of pork, as the peanut butter is paired with bacon for the Bacon Pinwheels and Stuffed Celery Sticks (or Hog on a Log?), blended with deviled ham for the Deviled Ham Puffs, or used in an attempt to make Vienna sausages less sucky in the Meat Morsels. The book also offers Cheese Dillies with peanut butter, cheddar, and dill pickle juice if someone refuses to eat pork. 

I also love how appetizing the picture makes the Stuffed Celery Sticks seem-- like a cross section of the bottom half of a clay drain pipe clogged with sludge. Yum!

For those who love doctoring up canned goods, there's a soup suggestion.

Just mix Peter Pan into cream soup! Creamy peanut tomato! Cream of celery and peanut butter! The possibilities are... well, not endless. Just weird. And extra rich because we all know cream soup is not rich enough unless you fortify it.

If your mom won't let you have peanut butter as your sole protein because she thinks you will immediately DIE of a protein deficiency if you don't have meat at every meal, she might try some meat tricks. (Not that I know of any mothers like that...)

Peanut butter in the meat loaf! Peanut butter broiled onto the tops of hamburgers! Peanut butter grilled right onto the chicken! (Hell, throw some peanut butter on the grilled corn too if you're feeling wild and/or out of dairy butter.)

The end of the book has another of my very favorite things: pictures of vintage packaging!

Oh, yeah, baby! Show me some old peanut butter jars!

I know I'm not alone in my love for peanut butter, so I hope you enjoyed this too. And thank goodness I'm not as into peanut butter as some people are! I'm sure Peter Pan is glad that this peanut butter lover is a Skippy man. (You're welcome.)

Cool Fall Soup-Jells

Sometimes on cool fall mornings, you think you might want a big, hot bowl of soup later-- such a cozy idea! Maybe you even stocked up on a bit of canned soup for just such an occasion. And then as the day goes on, the temperature rises from maybe the upper 40s to mid 70s and those cans of soup lose their luster.

Well, Marye Dahnke's Salad Book (1954) has the perfect solution: gelatin with soup in it! Yeah, I know I've featured recipes like these (but from other cookbooks) before, but I will never cease to be amazed by how many people used to seem to think that combining Jell-O and Campbell's was a great plan. I hope you are similarly amazed and amused, but if not, well... Where is your sense of wonder? (As in, "I wonder what was wrong with the people who wrote these recipes.")

At least the old recipes calling for a can of tomato soup make some degree of sense. Tomato was a pretty common aspic flavor, so soup wasn't that different from the tomato puree that usually went into an aspic, for example.

And it's not like too many people would object to combining it with a brick of cream cheese (except maybe on health grounds). A brick of cream cheese can make just about anything better.

A bit more out-there but still pretty common are the ones that call for a can of cream-of-something soup.

This time, our cream of chicken soup is combined with a smaller brick of cream cheese. I'm starting to think the real attraction of these soup-and-gelatin molds might be the excuse to eat cream cheese.

Tomato and cream-of-something soups tend to be the only ones I see turned into gelatin molds, but this book goes all-in and even recommends turning canned gumbo into a shimmery and wobbly salad.

 And of course, this one gets the little brick of cream cheese too, along with plenty of ground ham. (I'm not sure New Orleans would really want to claim this, but at least this seems more plausibly connected to New Orleans than some of the "Mexican" salads seemed connected to Mexico.)

Whether your fall is turning out to be too hot, too cold, or just right, I hope it's at least as spooky as a soup-haunted blob of gelatin.