The "new method" of cooking is basically cooking foods (especially vegetables) without added water in a covered pan for a relatively short time, rather than the traditional method of boiling them to death. Small wonder that will improve vitamin and mineral retention as well as flavor! (The "economy" part comes mostly because the book encourages cooks not to peel vegetables unless absolutely necessary, and even then to take off less through such methods as putting whole veggies through the food mill, which is supposed to retain the skin with far less of the underlying material than paring would.)
The book is also high-class for the time because it has a few color pictures, such as these spinach timbales.
I can't help but be charmed by old-timey illustrations like this, though I have to admit the timbales don't look particularly edible to me... More like something a cousin of the facehugger might burst out of... (And you don't even want to know what the whitish goo they're trapped in is...)
(Okay, it's really just white sauce, but I'm sure you already guessed that if you've ever spent more than 10 seconds looking at a cookbook from the 1930s.)
In an effort toward economizing, the booklet presents this recipe for Hamburger Steak. I kind of assumed it would attempt to be, well, steak-like. The ground meat might be flavored with steak sauce and/or seasonings usually associated with steak and patted into roughly steak-shaped pieces, then smothered in an onion and/or mushroom gravy to give it that juiciness and reinforce the steak-y flavors.
But no. This is just plain old ground beef with some (presumably diced!) green pepper and onions mixed in before the "cakes" are fried. So, beef with (maybe still crunchy?) veggies mixed in, topped with canned tomatoes if the cook needs a little more filler. Exactly like steak.
The booklet also tries to make things interesting by adding international(ish) favorites, blanded down to 1930s standards. Take the Rice O'Mexicano, for instance.
It's one of those old-timey recipes that was considered "ethnic" because it included tomatoes and green peppers with the standard carrot, onion, and celery, and it used rice instead of potatoes. It could just as easily (and incorrectly) have been labeled as creole, Italian, or Spanish-- maybe even Chinese, though that might require the addition of a handful of cashews-- depending on the editor. Of course, in no case are any seasonings that might actually suggest a specific type of cuisine permitted, other than a garnish of parsley.
I could neve quite get a handle on what the booklet was going for with the spaghetti recipe.
It starts with ham and cream cheese, so I thought it would be one of those creamy-and-smoky recipes, similar to carbonara. But then it adds tomatoes, green pepper, and onion, so it's more of a garden sauce. Then canned mushrooms go in, along with the pre-browned ham. Then the whole thing gets a garnish of Parmesan when it's served. I'm still not really sure what it is, but at least it sounds like it would have more flavor than the Rice O'Mexicano. And it will be a weird shade of pink, if this picture is any indication.
Looks kind of like Fancy Feast on spaghetti. Yum!
So, in short, I'm not sure these particular concoctions convince me of the value of Wear-Ever recipes, but if the cookware did actually help get our ancestors to stop boiling everything to death, then I'm happy to give it credit for doing something right.
What if you cook your vegetables in the 1294 pan instead of the vegetable pan? Then there's the fact that the rice is cooked in the inner pot of a pan with boiling water in it. I guess that maybe you don't have to worry about the rice sticking to the bottom of the pot if you don't stir it enough. Now there's the idea that aluminum isn't the best material for cooking.
ReplyDeleteJust think about all the current cooking methods and health claims from this era that won't age well.
There's always a market for cure-alls, even if they don't actually exist.
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