Modern(ish) poultry in family meals!

Poultry in Family Meals: A Guide for Consumers is from the USDA in 1982. That's a little new for this blog, but government publications are so no-frills that they often look like they could be a decade older than they really are.

All that brown on the cover certainly seems like it could have come from the 1970s.

A lot of the guide is pretty boring-- explaining things like how to store poultry, how much to buy to feed a certain number of people, how long to roast per pound, etc. Still, there are a few interesting recipes. I was kind of surprised to see a recipe for wings in here, as wings were not a very popular cut in most of America until the mid-1980s. Maybe this was meant as a money-saving recipe?

These are clearly NOT intended as bar food-- seasoned with soy and ginger to be served with brown rice pilaf and green beans.

I was kind of amused by the recipe for Chicken rolls, Italian style.

Chicken breasts rolled around ham and cheese, then coated in crumbs before being cooked? That's basically chicken cordon bleu, with its famously French name. These are Italianized by swapping out the Swiss cheese for mozzarella and serving it with a tomato sauce. I guess it's pre-figuring what we now call fusion cuisine?

For a slightly more veggie-centric meal (likely meant to use up leftovers), the book offers Chicken-stuffed baked tomatoes.

It's also a great way to get your family to eat more "round snack crackers" if you're worried that their consumption may be too low. I picked the recipe mainly because I liked the picture.

Well, I liked the caption for the picture, to be more precise. Boy, those chicken-stuffed baked tomatoes sure are "a colorful luncheon entree"! Was whoever wrote this unaware that the booklet was black-and-white? Or maybe they just expected readers to have better imaginations back then, and they were priming the pump to get home cooks to also imagine that this would taste more exciting than reheated chicken mixed with tomato pulp, onion, green pepper, egg, and crackers is likely to...

Even if the book does look a bit older than the 1980s, I can see the connection to more modern dishes. Older USDA publications (or most mainstream American cookbooks, for that matter) really pushed the white sauce and meals built around meat and potatoes. This one has a bit more international flavor and emphasis on other veggies. It's so exciting that home cooks might have been tempted to do the chicken dance... which would bring us full circle-- right back to old-timey!