A fruity September

Summer is definitely winding down by the time September starts, but Home Gardener's Cookbook (Marjorie Page Blanchard, 1974) reassures us that some crops are still freshly coming into season. Peaches immediately catch my eye since we had peach trees at my childhood home. When we made "peach pudding," it meant that we'd thrown some home-frozen peaches into the blender and turned them into what would probably now be considered a smoothie. Blanchard's Frozen Peach Pudding is considerably more complicated (and probably more exciting).

Since it involves cutting a loaf cake into layers, it reminds me of the sandwich loaf recipes old cookbooks recommended for parties, but this one sounds a lot more palatable than most of them do. I mean, would you rather have layers of rum-and-ginger soaked cake with sliced peaches or white and wheat bread filled with a mixture of cottage cheese, potatoes, celery, and pineapple?

I always think of melons as more of a height-of-summer fruit, but they are listed in the September chapter. I was surprised to see a recipe for underripe melons, but Blanchard recommends turning them into a curry.

This doesn't specify the type of melon, so maybe it doesn't really matter if it's not ripe. It won't taste like a full-fledged melon anyway. In any case, this is recommended as "a spicy relish for plain meatloaf or chicken" (and reminds us that any added spice was all it took to get called "spicy" back in the day).

In addition to the peaches and melons, grapes are coming into season. (September is really the month for fruit!) While I've seen plenty of recipes for raisin pies, I don't usually see recipes for pies using the fresh counterpart.

Considering that you rarely find Concord grapes in the supermarket, I can see why this recipe would be reserved for home gardeners. (I'm sure that the inconvenience of having to separate the seeds, pulp, and skin also play a role in making Concord grapes an unpopular choice for home cooks.)

And honestly, September is already a pretty inconvenient month for families with anybody in school, so there's a good reason why people choose not to spend what little free time they have separating grapes into their various components or wrestling with underripe melons simply to make them taste like sautéed onions. The peaches, on the other hand... Maybe those would be worth the hassle at the end of a long, hectic week? (Who am I kidding? Throwing some frozen peaches straight into the blender is more my speed. But people in the '70s had way fewer devices beeping for their attention and way fewer choices in the grocery store that could taste just about as good as something homemade and be 100 times easier.)

A hamburger holiday

It's almost Labor Day-- a high grilling holiday! That calls for some Holiday Hamburgers! Have to admit that a pasta cookbook would not be the first place I'd look for a burger recipe, but today's entry is from Mueller's Classic Recipes (Marilyn M. Houston, 1972). (And in case you weren't aware, Mueller's is a pasta company, so this cookbook is meant to sell noodles of all sorts.)

Okay, I'm pretty sure Houston was thinking of Christmas since the noodles on which these seasoned burgers are served are spiked with green pepper and (red) pimiento, but 1. I have a feeling a lot of people would gripe about burgers served on noodles not being fancy enough for Christmas and 2. in most parts of the country, the option of grilling is not very appealing in late December. So I feel fully justified in turning this into a Labor Day recipe... even though you'd probably rather not have to make noodles if you're grilling burgers... So much easier to just serve them on buns (grilled if you're fancy!) and with a side of chips. Okay, maybe this is just a good holiday recipe if you want to be irritated on any random holiday. We all know that the potential pitfall of having to deal with your family might not be quite enough to send you over the edge. 😅 Best to have to grill burgers without burning them (Okay, fine, you could use a skillet for the burgers, but where is the holiday fun in that?) AND boil noodles without turning them to mush and then try to eat a burger patty on a slithery pile of noodles just to ensure that someone will end up having a bad day.

I think I will enjoy Labor Day by drinking some canned wine and watching Severance. (I'm sure you're thinking of the TV series, but I'm thinking of the 2006 film. Either choice is appropriate, though, so it's a solid plan.) Hopefully you have something fun and not too labor-intensive to do too (if you're lucky enough to have the day off).

Muellers makes macaroni meh

If you are ever at a loss as to what to do with macaroni (or other pasta, but this book has the most recipes for macaroni), then Mueller's Classic Recipes (Marilyn M. Houston, 1972) has some ideas.

Since it's from the '70s, of course it has its fair share of macaroni and cheese recipes and recipes that call for canned condensed soups. I expected that if it had a mac 'n cheese recipe calling for soup, the soup of choice would be cheddar cheese...

... but I was wrong. This uses cream of mushroom! It still gets copious amounts of cheese stirred in, so the mushrooms might add the right amount of umami to all that cheese. (I imagine that kids would be upset by the tiny mushroom bits, though!)

I'm always curious about what constituted "chili" in all those old cookbooks, so I was eager to see what was in the Macaroni Chili. (Funny that it was so formal! Now it's usually chili mac.)

Impressive that it has more seasoning than a lot of older chili recipes do-- two tablespoons of chili powder, plus cumin, oregano, and a bay leaf (along with the usual salt and pepper). But then I saw it also had a cup of sweet mixed pickles! I don't think I've seen a recipe calling for pickles in chili before. Sounds revolting to me, but I don't like pickles... As popular as pickle-flavored everything has been over the past year or two, I kind of expect to see a canned or fast-food version of pickle chili before too long. (Or maybe they're already here and I missed them. Or maybe, and this is a longshot, the idea really is as revolting as I think it is.)

I'd associate pickles more with macaroni salad, but the Molded Macaroni Salad doesn't have any!

At least it uses unflavored gelatin rather than a dessert-y lemon, but I'm not sure how eager anyone is to devour macaroni, celery, and shreds of American cheese suspended in gelatin and mayo... (Especially when everybody knows the best use of macaroni and cheese is macaroni and cheese!)

The Sweet and Sour Chicken Salad does include both macaroni and pickles with the chicken...

...along with pineapple, sour cream, mayo, mustard, and melon balls! There's a LOT going on here, and not much of it is good. There's maybe a decent fruit salad OR a decent chicken salad, but I'm unconvinced that they belong together.

And just so it's not all macaroni, I'll throw in a recipe for spaghetti...

...served under peppers stuffed with raisin-befouled meatloaf. (It would have been so much easier and better to just cook crumbled ground beef and diced green peppers with the tomato sauce, but what's the fun in that?)

I do have to give Mueller's credit for doing the unexpected. We're all pretty familiar with a lot of pasta dishes, so they consistently added unexpected ingredients to throw you off! From the surprise soup and pickles to the unexpected gelatin, melon, and raisins, the recipes keep you guessing! (Guessing you will just make the same thing you usually make instead of trying one of these concoctions, I'm assuming.)

Another edition of "I do not think it means what you think it means"!

You might wonder why I'm posting this perfectly fine-sounding recipe for homemade pizza from the July 1975 issue of Women's Circle Home Cooking. 

I specialize in recipes that are usually head-scratchingly weird and/or only slightly more appetizing than whatever the cat left in your shoes the time you tried to give it a flea dip. (Yeah, the pair you had to throw away.) And here is a recipe for a simple yeasted dough, topped with a tomato sauce that contains actual flavoring ingredients! Alliums! Oregano! Red pepper! Parmesan cheese! So why did I pick this? The answer is like real estate: Location! Location! Location! You see, the recipe appeared directly under this heading:

Now, I realize ideas about what constitutes a fast-and-easy recipe changed as kitchens got things like microwaves, Insta-Pots, and air fryers, but I have a hard time believing that even in 1975 anyone thought a recipe that took two hours minimum-- and that's only if you're working REALLY fast and the yeast is cooperative-- counted as "Instant Cooking." But then again, the '70s were a crazy time when a guy could cast a fishing line in the same pool that a woman was about to dive into (at least if this graphic is to be believed), so maybe I don't understand the time well enough to judge. Maybe back then, 2+ hours was nothing...

A miraculous bird!

I'm not sure I'm THAT impressed by the concept of chicken, but my booklet The Miraculous Broiler-Fryer Chicken sure is. That's probably because it was put out by the Poultry and Egg National Board. (The pamphlet is undated, but addresses don't include zip codes. That means it probably from before July 1, 1963.)

I'm not entirely sure that whoever owned this before me was all that impressed either. Of the two notes I found in this recipe collection, one was simply "NO." (I thought it was a scribble at first, but then I realized it was a reaction.)

The writer did not elaborate on what the problem with "PRETZEL-FRIED CHICKEN (Deep-fat)" was. Most people love fried chicken, and I'd think pretzels would give it a nice, salty crunch, but the recipe reviewer was clearly not a fan. The other note I found was somewhat more enthusiastic.

There is no follow-up to the "Try" note, though, so I don't know whether this person actually tried hot chicken salad or what they thought of it if they did. Based on the black-and-white photo of said salad, I would never have guessed these things are supposed to be topped with cheese and crushed potato chips. Looks more like chopped egg or maybe avocado.

A lot of the recipes are, as one might expect, pretty standard. Barbecued chicken, roast chicken, chicken pot pie, chicken cacciatore. There are a few somewhat more surprising preparations. You might suppose these are the mid-century version of chicken enchiladas if you didn't look too closely.

But then you'd notice all the greenery and orange slices around the carb-coated chicken tubes. These are actually Chicken Pancakes Imperial. 

I'm still not really sure why the oranges are there, as the pancakes are just wrapped around plain chicken moistened with a milk-based gravy, then topped with more of the gravy. It's giving me bizarre orange-and-cream vibes. 

But then again, orange chicken is pretty common now, and it was back then too.

And just look at the cute half-orange filled with (Cranberries? Grapes? Marbles?) for serving.

Less cute is this chicken mound on the opposing page.

Looks like chicken and wallpaper paste, but it's actually Chicken Cantonese.

I would have assumed this "Cantonese" recipe was Hawaiian Chicken, considering how much pineapple is in it, but this booklet associates coconuts and curry (rather than pineapple) with Hawaii.

Honestly, the thing that sounds best to me out of all this is the pretzel-fried chicken, but the original cookbook owner probably thinks I'm wrong about that.... There is no accounting for taste.

Mashed potatoes can be your friend

I know my initial post about Betty Crocker's Dinner Parties (7th printing, 1978) focused on how lazy an entire menu could be, but the book also recommends ways to make easy mixes more complicated than simply following the instructions on the back of the box. My favorite examples of this show how to make pre-packaged potato products into "fancier" foods. For instance, if you want to serve New England clam chowder but want to be fancier than just reheating a can of Progresso, you can turn a box of scalloped potato mix into Quick Trick Clam Chowder.

It's basically making the scalloped potatoes on the stovetop and then dumping in canned clams and a bunch of extra milk. I imagine this would need some salt given how much the milk will dilute the mix's flavor, but it's an interesting use of packaged potatoes.

The recommendation for instant mashed potatoes is even more work (and more puzzling): turn them into a cold mashed potato salad.

And then stuff that mixture of cold mashed potatoes, hard-cooked eggs, pickle relish, instant minced onion, minced pimiento, and vinegar into small (and apparently raw) green peppers to serve at a picnic. Sounds gross AND hard to eat! The perfect combination if the cook doesn't want to be coerced into catering a picnic again...

At least Betty put more work into these recipes than into the one for onion rolls. I'm not sure what this suggests, exactly, except maybe that she tried drugs in the '70s just like everyone else?

Bust out the margarine! Gotta control that cholesterol

Today, we're looking at one of the less-exciting titles in my collection: Dietary Control of Cholesterol (Fleishmann's Margarine, 1969).

Since it's from a margarine company, it obviously tries to push margarine. There's actually a two-page spread trying to convince readers that margarine can easily be transformed into a lovely "sauce."

"Sauce" is code for simply melting the margarine and adding some kind of flavoring. This "sauce" looks kind of like it's filled with lawn clippings.

But at least it's flavored with fresh parsley. Other recipes call for using dried herbs. Dried herbs are fine in other applications that cook for a little while, but I can't help but think that margarine full of dried oregano would be kind of overwhelming in an unpleasant way (and probably musty tasting, considering how slowly people back then tended to go through their herbs...).

And it would be even worse with dried rosemary. 

No matter how "crushed" it is, you're going to wind up with a piece stuck in a molar and making everything taste strongly of rosemary for hours.

I was surprised to find a few recipes that didn't call for margarine at all-- perhaps as a counterbalance to those "sauces"? Or maybe they just had to fulfill the quota for weird gelatin recipes and (thank goodness!) couldn't figure out a way to work margarine into them?

This one almost sounds good at first. I am honestly a fan of fruity gelatin with cottage cheese-- it has a low-rent cheesecake vibe. But why would you throw in horseradish, mayo, and chopped onion?

If you can't resist the seafood-and-Jell-O combo (which, apparently, few people could do back then, for reasons that remain a mystery), there's a Cucumber-Salmon Ring.

Again, margarine-free! (You might notice that both recipes call for Royal gelatin, though. The same company sold Royal and Fleischmann's, so it's not like the recipe developers forgot their mission to sell the company's products.)

The booklet also includes another of my favorite recipe genres: sandwiches with seemingly-random fillings. The Fresh Garden Sandwiches focus, unsurprisingly, on fresh veggies.

I'm just not sure anyone ever looked forward to a slice of bread slathered with margarine, then topped with watercress-flavored cottage cheese and thin slices of radish...

And while I've seen peanut butter paired with a lot of things, I'm not sure tomato is its best companion.

Still, I didn't think the combination by itself was that weird. I personally wouldn't want peanut butter and tomato, but I don't like raw tomatoes. Maybe somebody who likes raw tomatoes would find the combo more interesting than the typical sugary PB&J? I almost didn't feature this recipe until I actually read through it. The peanut butter is combined with margarine for some reason, and each sandwich gets a heaping three tablespoons of the mixture. Then after the tomato, there's an additional thick smear of margarine mixed with oregano. (WHY?) In the end, this massive load of peanut butter and margarine is less than 50 calories away from a quarter pounder with cheese, though it definitely has less cholesterol. But is it worth the trade-off, especially since you're likely to experience dusty old oregano?

In short, "cholesterol control" is about as appetizing and exciting as the title suggests it will be. This one is not a surprise.

But have you ever thought of your zucchini-seller's religious preferences?

Today's recipe is from Cooking Without a Grain of Salt (Elma W. Bagg, orig. 1964, but mine is the 1972 Bantam edition), but I didn't choose it for its notably-low sodium content, or even for its suitability to help you finish off a bounteous harvest of zucchini. It's just got a really weird headnote.

Headnotes often provide extra information-- perhaps advice on where to find an ingredient that wasn't common at the time the book was written or what to sub in if you just couldn't find it. Maybe a brief anecdote about the first time the cook tried this food on vacation and knew they needed to figure out how to make it at home or about a time when the cook served the recipe and got a particularly favorable reaction. But this is the first time I've ever seen a headnote about the cook discussing the religious experiences of Italian immigrants who sell zucchini. I have no idea why Bagg thought this was a good note to include for the recipe... which is, oddly enough, exactly the thing that made me so interested in it. So, well-played, Ms. Bagg! You got my attention. Still not sure what that adds to the recipe, though.

Bready party!

What do you think of when you think of a party? (I usually think of cringing in the corner and waiting for it to be over because I am an introvert. Or if it's VCR Party Live, then I'm watching weird shit on YouTube and enjoying an alcoholic beverage on Joe's behalf since the host gave up drinking.) Well, What Kind of a Party Shall I Give? (1939) is from Wolf's Extra Fine Bread and Quality Bakers of America, so they think parties are distinguished by "unusual bread combinations."

I wasn't sure what that meant, exactly. Would the recipes somehow involve slices of rye, whole wheat, white, and sourdough sandwiched inside a croissant, or something like that? That would be an unusual combination of breads. Of course, that's not quite what the bakers had in mind. These recipes mostly involve putting kinda-weird fillings into regular bread. Like American cheese, mayonnaise, and marmalade.

Or slathering slices of toast with Boston baked beans mixed into a white sauce.

I assumed we were in trouble when I saw scare quotes in the "Tasty" Sandwiches.

But these are just open-faced sandwiches topped with ham and slices of pork or chicken, then topped with white sauce and cheese before being broiled. I'm not sure such a sloppy concoction is the best thing to serve at a party, but at least it sounds better than the Boston baked beans in white sauce!

Alternatively, if you want a "sophisticated tidbit" to serve as an appetizer, you might turn your toast into "chariots" loaded with "fluffy, golden, scrambled eggs"...

...and drawn by a team of animal crackers. You know, sophisticated.

It's not all bread with weird-ish toppings, though. Good party foods could instead be loaded full of breadcrumbs, like this Kidney Bean Loaf.

Nothing says "party" like a solid chunk of kidney beans held together by American cheese, bread crumbs, and eggs. Mmm-mmm!

But surprisingly, the book does sometimes seem to forget its premise, and the recipes don't bother with bread at all, like the Hobo Picnic. (Of course, "hobo" is not really a title we would use anymore!)

Yes, most of this "recipe" consists of a plan to trick your friends into peeling potatoes, hiking outdoors, and building a fire. Their reward, in the end, is potatoes and frankfurters boiled in a bucket and served on a stick. Woo-eee! The end of the description-- "Maybe your friends won't enjoy a meal like this after the exercise they have had! If you think they won't, you don't know them" frankly makes me wonder if the people who wrote this book personally know any humans. I can't imagine too many people would be in high spirits after being bossed around all afternoon only to receive a skewered plain boiled hot dog and a skewered plain boiled potato in return. (Even if the host does remember the mustard, I don't think this will significantly shift the mood.)

So, in short, while I realize I have no real sense of what makes a good party, I may have Wolf's Extra Find Bread and Quality Bakers of America beat. At the very least, I have some sense of what is unlikely to work. Maybe.

Recipes without the main ingredient

I know to expect plenty of typos and mistakes in old recipe collections that schools, church groups, charities, etc. sold to raise money. It's not like Gertrude from down the street or Mildred from the church choir was really that concerned about whether anybody else would be able to follow their instructions. Good cooks should have enough sense to figure out what they meant, and if not, well, then nobody else's version of the recipe would be as good as Gertrude's or Mildred's.

I expect at least somewhat more accuracy if I'm getting recipes that are formally published as part of a newspaper's recipe collection. Newspapers are supposed to have proofreaders, after all. The Dispatch Recipe Collection (put together by The Columbus Dispatch (newspaper) in 1933, edited by Bernice Thomas) shows that this was not always the case.

See if you can spot the missing ingredient in the egg cutlets.

That's right-- no eggs, except for the one that's beaten and used to adhere the bread crumbs to the cutlets' exteriors. Instead of the eggs, the recipe just lists the finely cut pim(i)ento a second time. (Maybe Thomas just wanted to try out both spellings?) So much for adding the eggs to the seasoned thick white sauce before "spreard"ing the mixture in a shallow pan to chill until stiff.

Okay, now guess what is in the pear macaroni salad.

If you unimaginatively guessed "pears" and "macaroni," you were only half right. The pears are saladified not with macaroni, but with macaroons. So, yes, pears slathered in cream cheese, rolled in cookie crumbs, and topped with a maraschino cherry half counted as a salad as long as they came atop a lettuce leaf with a spoonful of mayonnaise.

I guess this all suggests that the "women's pages" in 1930s weren't considered worthy of having a proofreader. Or maybe the proofreader just got so distracted by the prospect of macaroons and mayonnaise that proofreading became impossible? 

I know the explanation is probably just Occam's razor-- nobody really cared enough to notice-- but it's fun to speculate.

Miss Fluffy Rice gets a little weird

Miss Fluffy's Rice Cook Book (Rice Council, undated, but it mentions Sperry Rand on the back cover, so it's from sometime between 1955 and 1978) has a somewhat-adorable/ somewhat horrifying Miss Fluffy Rice mascot on the cover.

I'm not sure whether the rice is supposed to be her hair (though her face looks too young go with white hair) or a weird hat that could almost be described as wispy, but could also almost be described as lumpy. And I love that the title of "Miss Fluffy Rice" comes with an apron rather than the more typical beauty-pageant sash.

Miss Fluffy Rice is also unfortunately (but not all that surprisingly, given the era) a bit racist, encouraging cooks to make Plantation Chowder.

At least there is no headnote pining for the days when the euphemistically-labeled "help" would be responsible for making it. This recipe also comes with a photo-- one that highlights an oddity of the booklet.

The pictures are sideways! You might think that I forgot to rotate this picture after I scanned it, but I assure you, this is the way it appears in the book. If readers want to see the pictures at a normal angle, they have to turn the book sideways like they're checking out the centerfold in an old magazine of the type that used to be described as "girlie." I also can't help but wonder why the editors chose to crop the picture this way, as the actual chowder doesn't get much emphasis. It's almost as if they think it doesn't look that great and are trying to hide it.

I'm not sure the editors were discerning judges of what does and doesn't look good, though, considering this appeared on the very next page.

Those look more like creatures I'd want to give a wide berth to in a horror movie than like something I'd want to try to ingest. (The shrimp kind of look like appendages they would use in an attack. Lucky that some of them haven't managed to grow any yet! Or maybe they lost them in a fight?)

In any case, these gloopy little mounds-- as you might have guessed, given their "appendages"-- are Shrimp and Rice Mousse.

And they appear not to have been made according to the recipe, which directs cooks to use a 2-quart mold to make one large gloop to serve eight, rather than six little gloops.

The booklet also includes a reminder that "spicy" did NOT used to mean what it means now.

Apparently, salt (in regular, celery, and soy sauce form!) was all it took to be spicy back then.

There's a fun, old-timey use of past tense that nobody bothers with anymore. 

Well, nobody but me. I will sometimes ask if I should make "hashed browns" for dinner just because I know it will make my partner laugh-- but I hadn't heard of hash-browning rice before.

And finally, the recipe that seemed weirdest to me was Frozen Strawberry Rice Pie.

This mostly sounds delicious. Strawberries, sugar, and plenty of dairy fat in the forms of cream and cream cheese? Sign me up! But I can imagine people taking a nice, big bite expecting fruit and fluff, only to encounter weird, pasty rice lumps. It's the kind of pie you'd want to warn people about first, or they would probably ask what was wrong with it. This is a good example of the recipes made for cook booklets that feature one ingredient in everything-- whether it makes sense or not. The Rice Council wanted some dessert recipes and knew everybody already had their own preferred formula for rice pudding, so rice got thrown into some other random concoction without any regard as to whether it would make that recipe better or worse....

Miss Fluffy Rice essentially represents a booklet full of questionable decisions, but at least she will smile anyway! (Got to keep that hair/ hat(?) in place, as any facial movement could turn it into an avalanche.)