Feeding a crowd with white sauce and "instant breakfast drink"

Feeding a Crowd: The Main Course (General Foods Kitchens, 1965) is the kind of cook-booklet that mid-20th-century churches probably kept in their kitchens so the "ladies" would have some kinds of guidelines for whipping up food for father-son banquets, post-funeral dinners, fundraising feasts, and whatever other occasions required feeding groups of people. At least, that's who I imagine as its main audience.

That makes the lobster on the cover seem pretty out of place to me, as I can't picture the midwestern churches I was coerced into attending serving lobster, but maybe that was a thing on the east coast? Or in rich churches? Or maybe the reach was wider than just churches? In any case, lobster doesn't actually make much of an appearance in the booklet (showing up as just one of the options that could be added to a "Seafood Newburg" recipe), so maybe it's just there to make the booklet look swanky.

A lot of the recipes are clearly of the budget-stretching variety. I remember making a version of this chicken 'n biscuits dinner when I was a student worker in my college cafeteria.

We never bothered to put the chicken gravy in the oven, and the servers poured the gravy over the biscuits when it was served, but the basic "pot pie filling with a biscuit instead of a crust" formulation is a quick and easy way to serve a lot of people pretty cheaply.

There's even an EXTREMELY '60s vegetarian white-sauce-based dinner.

I mean, hard-cooked eggs, mushrooms, and pimientos in a white sauce? Can't get much more '60s than that (unless you used canned mushrooms rather than the fresh ones. And baked the rice into a ring before serving it. So I guess you could get more '60s than the recipe as written... but I'll leave this here anyway for comic effect.)

Sometimes things get a little fancier, like the beef stroganoff.

I have my doubts about a sauce featuring red wine, instant coffee, and sour cream, though.

A few recipes made me wonder why General Foods even bothered.

Did any of the church ladies really need to be told that they could heat several pounds of hot dogs in hot water? My theory is that this was mostly included so General Foods could try to convince people to serve Good Seasons Open Pit Barbecue Sauce as a condiment for hot dogs.

The booklet mostly consists of main dishes, but there are a few sides, too. One serves as our periodic reminder that most mainstream Americans had no real clue what "risotto" meant back then-- only a vague sense that rice was somehow involved.

Hint: baked Minute Rice ≠ risotto.

And finally, I learned what "piquant" meant in the 1960s.

Apparently, it means "in a Tang and nutmeg sauce."

I don't really miss the days when I had to spend time in churches, but this booklet still lit up a weird little nostalgia corner of my brain. Maybe it was the cute drawings of kitchen utensils.

The garden slows down in October

The October chapter in Home Gardener's Cookbook (Marjorie Page Blanchard, 1974) is pretty short, admitting "Now with some feeling of relief we put away the gardening tools, but deep down we know that in a few moths we'll welcome getting them out again." In short, once "The pumpkins are picked and piled up to look festive for Hallowe'en," (gotta love the old-timey apostrophe), Blanchard is pretty much ready to be done with the growing season.

The chapter recommends turning one of the few newly in-season veggies-- chard-- into Chard Rolls in Tomato Sauce.

I had assumed the chard leaves would be used as a wrap for the other ingredients, but the chard is ground up with other veggies and mixed with bread crumbs, seasonings, Parm, and eggs to be molded into "sausage-like links." I also assumed that the tomato sauce would be made out of whatever final tomatoes were still hanging on, but this is just made with pre-made tomato sauce, so I was a terrible guesser on this recipe!

Winter squashes, like butternut, are also in season. Blanchard suggests a preparation with warm fall spices.

It's a lot like recipes for sweet potato casseroles. (Just no marshmallows!)

A couple of recipes in this chapter hint at the "Hallowe'en" mentioned earlier. Since this book was written when it was still somewhat acceptable for people to give homemade treats to trick-or-treaters, I suspect the recipe for popcorn balls was written with the holiday in mind.

And for the pumpkins that get turned into jack-o-lanterns, home cooks could still turn the seeds into a treat.

I'd probably recommend seasoning them with a bit more than plain old salt, but it's good to see that everything was getting put to use. October is the month for scares, but being wasteful doesn't have to be one of those frights! Home gardeners are practical.