Nothing but Bundts

I knew Bundt pans became popular in the 1960s, but I didn't realize that they remained popular long enough for Pillsbury to publish 100 New Bundt Ideas in 1977.

Unrelated, but this is also one of the few items in my collection with a barcode!

In any case, Bundt pans were primarily popular for making cakes, so let's get away from the decadence associated with the pan and make a healthy menu that would require either owning a bundle of Bundt pans or making a lot of stuff ahead of time and washing the pan over and over again. 

First, you need a healthy main dish. How about some omgega-3 fatty acids in a Dill-Sauced Salmon Ring?

I'm sure no one will be alarmed to see the Bundt pan out of the cupboard-- a pan best known for the "Tunnel of Fudge" cake-- and smell fish. Well, fish and overcooked peas. But won't that big wet pink lump look lovely under its dilly icing? Sorry, sauce!

Especially if it's put on a glass plate surrounded by very thin lemon slices and backlit so it looks like the whole thing is glowing? (You really gotta sell this one to get the family interested.)

And of course, you need some veggies to go with the salmon loaf. It's easy to demonstrate you've used a Bundt pan to prep the veggies if you use enough gelatin.

This big wet pinkish lump is Gazpacho Salad.

To avoid big wet pink blob overload, let's turn our attention to a necessary component of any real 1970s meal: the bread! In keeping with my theme, we're going with Sunflower Health Bread.

Honestly, I think I'd just skip the raisins if I made this recipe and eat a slice or two of bread slathered in butter for my dinner. Forget the salmon loaf and gazpacho! (I'm permanently scarred by gazpacho anyway. When I was in grad school and we were all trying to pretend to be sophisticated adults and invite each other over for dinner, pretty much everybody made gazpacho because it wasn't expensive and it seemed fancy. Plus you could turn cheap wine into sangria and have an easy theme that would also get everyone tipsy while still pretending we were cultured individuals! I can't stand vinegar or raw onions or tomatoes and was trying SOOO hard to be a reasonable grownup that I choked down at least a few bites of gazpacho at so many parties... Can barely even look at recipes for it now.)

Anyway, on to dessert. Yes, I guess we can actually use the Bundt pan for its boring, usual purpose: to make a cake. We just have to add bits o' zucchini so it will fit our "healthy" theme. 

Good luck figuring out what to replace the Pillsbury Coconut Pecan or Coconut Almond Frosting Mix with, though. (Actually-- I could find recipes to replace the pecan version, like this one on Food.com. I imagine you could just swap out almonds for the pecans if you really wanted the almond version.) Of course, this cake is really zucchini bread, but it's ring-shaped, so no one will be confused by a non-Bundt-shaped foodstuff in your Bundt-based banquet. We couldn't have that!

I may be amused by the kitchenware trends of yesteryear, but at least home cooks in 1977 didn't have to add another app to their phones to get the new appliance to work, and then try to figure out why it wasn't connecting-- and then get it to shut up and leave them alone once everything was set up. Nobody needs the oven to beg for a new accessory at 3 a.m. (Not that I have personal experience with this-- I started to feel exhausted just from Googling "trendy kitchen appliances 2025" when I was trying to decide what fad to put in the previous sentence. It seems like they all require at least as much work to set them up as it will take to use them. Progress!)

Microwave stuffing!

Picture this: it's 1985. You got your first microwave, and you also are so behind-the-times that you don't realize that owning a microwave does not have nearly the same coolness factor as it did five or six years ago. What's the best way to celebrate and show off your good fortune? That's right: microwave Thanksgiving! Let Kenmore Microwave Cooking walk you through it. 

First up: You need a turkey, of course, complete with a sausage-studded cornbread stuffing.

You can make it all in the microwave, from cooking the sausage and veggies for the stuffing to cooking the oiled-up turkey itself. Okay, if you don't like pale, rubbery turkey skin, it will have to spend the last 10-15 minutes in the conventional oven, but that will just leave you time to make the side: jellied carrots.

Before I read the recipe, I wondered whether we really needed to use the microwave to boil water for Jell-O, but this isn't the shredded-carrots-and-pineapple-in-fruity-Jell-O recipe I was imagining. These carrots are "jellied" by being cooked in equal parts butter and cranberry sauce, so much more Thanksgiving-appropriate. (Maybe double the recipe, though!)

Your microwave will be pretty busy with the other dishes, but luckily, you can make the dessert ahead of time. Ginger bars aren't quite the traditional pumpkin pie, but they do have pumpkin pie spice in them. 

I'm not entirely sure how you can stretch a recipe in which the main ingredient is 6 tablespoons of flour into 16 servings, but hopefully everybody will fill up on microwaved turkey and the brown-and-serve rolls you had in the oven when the turkey was crisping up.

If you're family is nice, you will be able to figure out on your own that microwave ownership is not nearly as impressive as you thought it was. And if they're not nice, well, at least the fight this year won't be entirely dominated by politics.

Wealthy peasants and bountiful ingredients in an imagined 1970s Italy

It's about time for something wonderful, right? Right?! I can't do much about the real world, but I can show you Wonderful Ways to Prepare Italian Food (Jo Ann Shirley, 1978).

I kind of love the nearly 3-D style of the cover, with the bowl of cooked farfalle sitting on top of a mound of uncooked farfalle.

Most of the recipes are actually not too terrible sounding-- just sometimes not very authentic considering the questionable availability of various ingredients in 1970s groceries. (Yes, "risotto" is made with long grain rice in this book, for example.)

I did like the occasional recipe that put a spin on a common '70s dinner. This meat loaf recipe might shake up the usual meat loaf in a dinner rotation.

Not only is this a rolled meat loaf, but the stuffing isn't just the cubed-bread dressing I expected. It's a different meal entirely-- ham and cheese with mashed potatoes! 

My favorite entries might be the ones that confused me, though. I was not at all surprised to see a minestrone recipe-- pretty much every Italian cookbook I ever see has at least one--

--but then I was a bit confused by the Peasant Minestrone recipe that followed.

The original recipe was mostly what I expected: kidney beans cooked with tomatoes and other vegetables, then finished with a starchy component (rice, in this case, though I usually expect a small pasta). The peasant version is inexplicably more expensive than the standard, subbing two kinds of meat (beef ribs and Italian sausage) for the dried beans and adding an extravagant sprinkling of Parmesan at the end. Are the peasants somehow richer than everyone else? I was a bit mystified.

The biggest mystery of all, however, might have been this one.

You might wonder what is so odd about steak with brandy and Marsala. Meat with wine is a pretty common combination. But look at the sauce! This recipe for four people calls for TWO FULL POUNDS of liver paté! Who wants a HALF-POUND of paté on top of a steak? And the recipe title doesn't even mention paté, as if it is only a minor component of this recipe.

I guess maybe the diners were supposed to eat only a little sauce and save some for other dishes? Who knows? All I know is that I was grateful for this book's little mysteries.

How to have a chill Thanksgiving

Just in case you're having an unusually hot November, here are some cold recipes from New Delights from the Kitchen (Kelvinator, 1930), back when refrigerators were so new that they merited their own cookbook.

If you just want some cold desserts that aren't yet another round of pumpkin pie, the book offers "Kelsherbs." The American Beauty Kelsherb freezes cranberry puree in buttermilk-- sort of like a tangy version of cranberry ice cream that is likely to be rock hard if you let it freeze even a bit too long, I imagine. 

If pumpkin is simply a must, then you might go with the Sunset Kelsherb instead. 

It's a tangy and rock-hard version of pumpkin ice cream. (In Kelvinator's defense, commercial ice cream wasn't really available back then.)

And if you're wondering what the hell "kelsherb" is, and the Google searches aren't helping, it's a portmanteau of "Kelvinator" and "sherbet," as if the existence of Kelvinator meant that the word "sherbet" was somehow now outdated. (Spoiler: It was not.) In any case, kelsherbs are great accompaniments for a Thanksgiving feast because they're made with buttermilk, which was "widely advocated for intestinal troubles and ... considered very healthful." The health trend of deeming all things fermented as good for gut health is not nearly as new as many might think! 

If you're not into thinking about intestinal wellness while you're planning a dinner but you are interested in getting the meal over as quickly as possible, then the Molded Turkey Rings with Cranberry Jelly might be more your speed.

Just make a cranberry gelatin and throw in some cooked turkey when it starts to thicken. Done! So much easier than roasting a whole turkey and making a cranberry salad or relish from scratch. Serve with some rolls from the bakery, a potato salad, and maybe some green beans straight from the can and you've got a Thanksgiving "feast" that won't heat up the house. No need to thank Kelvinator (or me). I'm sure you wouldn't want to, anyway...

Damn it! I really wanted to unreservedly love the pictures...

The cover of Quick Dishes for the Woman in a Hurry (Culinary Arts Institute, directed by Melanie de Proft, 1955) looks pretty straightforward: corn on the cob, Brussels sprouts, ribs, strawberries with whipped cream, a relish tray with olives and radish roses lurking in the corner.

A lot of the recipes are pretty rudimentary as well, which is to be expected from a quick cookbook. Need some coffee cake? Rather than making one from scratch or getting one from a bakery...

...simply hack up an unsliced loaf of bread, slather with butter, top with more butter mixed with brown sugar and cinnamon, and then bake up into an ersatz coffee cake. 

Want some cheese bread quick? I'll bet you'll never guess the recommendation.

Yep-- hack up a loaf of unsliced bread, slip in slices of American cheese, slather in caraway-mustard butter...

...and for a slight twist ending, dump on some anchovy/ lemon butter just before serving.

The truth is, though, I didn't really get this booklet for the recipes. I loved the pictures by illustrator Kay Lovelace.

While the inside cover does have the expected picture of a woman dressed up for an afternoon out, slipping a casserole into the oven for dinner later, I was much more taken by this imaginative picture just a few pages later emphasizing the need for speed.

The mice NEED to be quick-- hopefully springing the trap with a fork will be enough to catapult the cheese into the catcher's mitt! The two mice in the foreground have their tails crossed for luck, though I'm not sure why. The morsel of cheese is small enough that the catcher will make short work of it before anyone else gets a taste-- even the "chef" in the tiny hat.

Mice make another appearance in the sauce chapter, bringing a bit of humor to an old cliché.

The geese don't mind the cliché about sauce for the goose and for the gander as long as it means a procession of mice in still more tiny hats and aprons delivering dishes full of goodies.

A bunny gets in on the act too, using the salad chapter as a backdrop for her performance of my grandpa's favorite mealtime joke.

He always said he wanted "honeymoon salad-- lettuce alone!" Miss Lapin approves of that choice.

The adorable pictures are not confined to cute animals, either. Here are some hot dogs getting ready to get hot and heavy.

I'm not sure whether it's a reminder of how buttoned-up the fifties were that one of the hot dogs in a romance clearly has to be female, or whether this is actually secretly subversive.... They're both hot dogs, after, all, the the "girl" is even flatter than I am (and that is saying something!). Either way, we have dressed-up yet shirtless hot dogs in the throes of romance, so what's not to love?

Uh... Scratch that question. There is something not to love about the illustrations. Ms. Lovelace should have stuck with pictures of adorable animals and anthropomorphic foods because her pictures of people are not always... (How to put this delicately?) ... very respectful.

Yep. Unfortunately, we have old cookbook racism AGAIN. 

There's a lot to love about old cookbooks, but there are always plenty of reminders that we really need to keep moving beyond that past they represent, even though a LOT of people seem more interested in regressing than progressing...

At least Marilyn Hansen knew that Thanksgiving is in November

Given that Cooking by the Calendar (edited by Marilyn Hansen, 1978) seemed to have NO IDEA what gets harvested in August or what kinds of treats would be appropriate for Halloween, I kind of wondered what it would recommend for Thanksgiving. Hansen had a much clearer idea of what people would expect, though-- no recipes for random things with titles like "Rumba Rhubarb" or "Prospector's Pancakes."

The month kicks off with a wide range of stuffing recipes.

Whether your tastes are traditional (sage-y bread cubes or cornbread and sausage) or more adventurous ("Hawaiian" bread stuffing with water chestnuts and pineapple chunks or bulgur stuffing with mint and dried fruit), there's something you can shove up the rear end of a dead bird.

And what to do with the leftover poultry? The "After the Feast" section adds some less-expected options in with the usual turkey noodle soup, like Turkey and Olive Manicotti.

I am not sure how many cooks would be up for making manicotti filling and sauce, stuffing individual manicotti tubes, and baking the whole thing a day or two after preparing an entire Thanksgiving dinner, but at least this dish wouldn't add to Thanksgiving flavor fatigue.

The Turkey Cantonese seems more likely to feel do-able after a cooking-heavy holiday...

Well, if you don't mind chopping up celery, onions, green peppers, and maybe mushrooms. It comes together pretty quickly after that! (And the dish may be boiled rather than steamed or stir-fried, but at least it doesn't have cream-of-something soup or bunch of cheese dumped in, so it's probably slightly more authentically Cantonese-style than one might expect from a book like this.)

The veggies of the month are squash and pumpkins. My favorite recipe from this section explains what to do if a bunch of rowdy squash cubes start harassing you on the street.

Oh, wait. "Mace" isn't a verb here. Never mind.

Given how contentious family Thanksgiving gatherings can be, though, macing the squash cubes instead of Uncle Arthur might not be the worst idea.

Whatever you have planned for November, I hope you can get through it without macing anybody. Unless you just want to add a little ground mace to your veggies.

New(ish) recipes!

I'm not really sure why I have Recipes: Homemade Happiness (compiled by Rev. and Mrs. Floyd Miller (Marie) for the Archdale, NC Wesleyan Women). It's from 1994-- later than what I usually pick up. Maybe I just thought the cover looked old and picked it up without checking?

It does have the overwhelming brownish tone that photos from the 1970s often exhibit. Or maybe somebody gave it to me at some point? In any case, I've got a community cookbook from the '90s that looks like it could be from the '70s, and I'm going to make you lunch.

Everybody loves a burger, and since I like you, I'm making Fancy Hamburgers!

You know, the kind with the applesauce and Lipton onion soup mix in them? And of course, the Ritz crackers! That's what makes them fancy. 

If you want pickles on your burger, I've got something inspired by the applesauce in those burgers.

Admittedly, I'm not sure how well Red-Hot-flavored cukes will go with the burgers, but I've never been a fan of pickled anything. I hear that people like Cincinnati chili, so I imagine cinnamony pickles on an oniony burger will be fine. (For someone else, obviously.)

Now we'll need a salad to get some veggies into you. Cincinnati chili often gets slopped over spaghetti, so how about all the spaghetti salad you can eat?

Seriously-- feel free to take home an extra gallon or two to feed family, friends, neighbors, enemies... Hell, use it to make an oily freeform art project for all I care. Just eat all you can and take a bucket to go.

And for dessert, something easy and SWEET.

Yep-- Twinkie Dessert involves Twinkies. All I had to do was cut 'em up, lay 'em in a 9x13, and cover with instant pudding, Cool Whip, and butter brickle bits. (Well, sourcing the butter pecan instant pudding was the hardest part of the recipe. I was lazy and threw some finely chopped pecans into butterscotch pudding and called it a day, but there's a recipe to make a homemade mix for the very specific demographic of people who are not willing to make their own sponge cake but eager to throw together homemade instant pudding mixes.)

I hope you enjoyed lunch! And if not, enjoy something else from 1994. 

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.