It's January-- Get Ready to Garden!

A new year means a new seasonally-arranged cookbook! This year, we will be harvesting recipes from Home Gardener's Cookbook (Marjorie Page Blanchard, 1974).

Granted, most of us are not going to be doing a whole lot of gardening in January, but the book offers tips for the reader who will be doing the gardening, and January was apparently the month when the first gardening catalogues started arriving. It's a prime month for planning out what to plant, so most of the chapter is devoted to information for the gardener. There are a few recipes for the cook, though. (The book carefully notes that the gardener and the cook "are not necessarily the same person.")

The recipes are for vegetables that may be left over from last year's garden. I picked Belgian Waterzooie mostly because I was amused by the name, but Blanchard included it because gardeners might still have leeks outside, buried under a protective layer of straw.

The carrots, celery, and onion shouldn't be too hard to come by, as they are often harvested in fall and store well, and the chicken, cream, and egg yolks will make it a substantial meal for a cold night.

The January chapter also recommends Parsnip Soufflé because parsnips get sweeter after a frost. Apparently, the gardener can just leave them out in the cold and dig them out as needed-- at least until the weather warms and turns the parsnips bitter. (And now I know I'm not a parsnip! The cold makes me bitter.)

This eggy dish is recommended as "a nice accompaniment to roast pork or chicken," reminding me that the '70s had its protein-crazed moments too. (Plus, eggs were cheap back then!)

Considering we still have several more months to go before home gardeners are likely to grow much that will be ready to eat (especially considering the book's planting dates are timed to the author's home in Connecticut), I'm wondering how Blanchard is going to fill out those chapters. I guess we will find out when I report back in February. And March. And April. (My guess: an overdose of asparagus and rhubarb.)

A "Fabulous" Finale for the Year

I've got some loose pages with "Betty Baker Tested" headings. I suspect they were from a calendar, as they have a hole in the top of the page-- but if it's a calendar, I don't have any indication of dates. In any case, the year is ending, so we will check out some of the recipes from the "Fabulous Finale Spread" page-- both because it's a finale and because a lot of people eat appetizers for New Year's Eve.

First up, of course, is the titular spread.

It starts out sounding rather cheesecake-esque, with all that cream cheese and sugar. But combine the fear of salmonella from the raw egg yolk and the tinny graininess of canned fruit cocktail, and this takes a turn for the no-thank-you. 

I am also not sure what "thin lemon-scroll-type cookies" might entail. My Google search suggests it might mean rolled-up tubular cookies (like Pirouettes), but it would be hard to spread anything on those-- much less big chunks of fruit cocktail! The picture clearly looks more like it's for a recipe for one of those desserts that can pass as salads in the Midwest than for a spread. 

Our appetizer platter could have a very last bite of Christmas with the Christmas Strawberries (no relation to The Cooking Calendar's Winter Strawberries). 

This offers yet another odd way to ingest cream cheese-- this time mixed with liver sausage, blue cheese, and onion (and mayo as needed), then shaped into "strawberries" before being rolled in "Fine bread crumbs, colored red" and given parsley leaves to help complete the strawberry look. I'm sure that dying bread crumbs red because you need to make fake strawberries is a fine way to end the old year...

To finish off the platter, here's a combination of dippers and dip: Meat Loaf Cubes with Applesauce Dip.

It's for those who want to eat cold meat loaf dipped in a mixture of seasoned applesauce and sour cream... A group that, unsurprisingly, would not include me. But hey-- at least these appetizers could make for a super-easy New Year's Eve party. Just make the recipes well ahead of time, shove everything in the fridge, set the food out on chilled platters as the guests arrive, and you're pretty much done! You probably won't even need to refill anything.

Plus, whatever you eat tomorrow is bound to be better than this! It's an easy way to make sure the new year really will be an improvement-- at least in a very limited way, but we will take what we can get.

Saving the world with gelatin!

The bank account is probably feeling pretty low lately... Grocery prices... Holiday gifts, food etc. The Ghoulies II promo inflatable toilet o' monsters you just couldn't resist on eBay, even though you were already aware of the grocery prices and holiday splurges. (And no, I don't actually own one of them. I'm just thinking of the kind of stuff I'd like to blow my money on to make the post funnier. So if you happen to own an extra one and you'd be willing to let it go for lower-than-eBay prices...) What I'm trying to say is managing money is hard.

But luckily, we can look back at "Knox's Ration-Stretcher Recipes" (undated, but likely from 1943-1945, obviously!) as a way to help stretch our dollars (rather than ration coupons).

If you're shocked by the price of butter, then Knox Spread will make an good substitute. (At least, if Knox is to be trusted with such a proclamation, which I doubt... And also, note that it's a spread. I wouldn't try baking with it!) Double your butter (or margarine, if you want to go even cheaper!) with some Knox gelatin and evaporated milk.

And if you pack it into a lovely glass dish, maybe people will see how much work you put into making the spread and refrain from complaining about how un-butter-like it tastes.

(Of course, now it would be both easier and cheaper to just buy the cheapest margarine sticks and call it a day than to buy gelatin and evaporated milk to add to the base butter. Hello, Imperial!)

Knox's other big idea is the one I write about way more often: using gelatin to help preserve leftover bits! The Basic Vegetable Salad promises "Odds and ends of vegetables transformed into a treat."

You can tell they're serious about using up leftovers, as the vegetable component is very vaguely described: "1-1/2 cups of diced or shredded vegetables (raw or cooked)." Pretty much anything hanging out in the fridge is fair game.

If you want your mold's veggie innards to be slightly more obscured, the Basic Tomato Jelly might be the better choice. Plus it's "A real treat-- brimming with vitamins."

This one can even stretch a cup of diced cooked meat to help serve six people.

Of course, trying to save money this way at the end of 2025 is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Deleting your eBay account and staying away from anything that shows targeted advertisements is probably going to be more effective at helping you save money than trying to stretch everything you eat with gelatin... But at least it's good to know people made it through tough times before, and we can do it again. (Or maybe the world will just implode. Who knows? We could all just be ingested by a gelatinous blob from outer space with the way things have been going.) Here's hoping 2026 will be an improvement!

Some Christmas recipes that should stay in the past

Are you ready to consume Christmas food like a consumer? Consumers Power Company hoped so when they sent out Christmas Recipes 1972.

The booklet only has a few pages of recipes, but because I care, I still managed to put together a holiday menu just for us!

Since it's the holidays, I've got to show off the punch bowl, so we will start with Sea Foam Lime Punch. 

I picked it mostly because I've never seen a punch recipe meant for a festive get-together that included Gatorade among its ingredients. Not sure I want to consider the implications of using it... I mean, am I supposed to assume something will make the guests dehydrated? What kind of Christmas gathering is this? I'm also not really sold on a punch with puréed bananas. They're fine for a smoothie, but the vision of Gatorade topped with a slimy brown banana film after setting out for a while is not nearly as cozy as visions of sugarplums.

Let's just move on to the salad course. You just know it's going to be Jell-O-based if I'm in charge. Will it be a sweet dessert-y confection that relies on a stray lettuce leaf so it's allowed to masquerade as a salad? Nope.

It starts with cherry gelatin, but then it's flavored with catsup and veggified with celery, olives, and peas. At least it calls for frozen peas rather than canned, so it could be worse!

And if you feel like this is missing a little something (by which I mean mayonnaise, which made its way into SO MANY gelatin molds), I've got a special blend to top your salad.

Granted, I despise mayo no matter what, but I doubt that too many mayonnaise lovers really pine for a heaping helping of almond paste blended into their beloved spread.

And now some Christmas sandwiches for the main course. What do you think that might involve? Sandwiches with sliced tomato and lettuce or basil on top, for some red and green? Maybe something involving pickle and pimento loaf? 

How about broiled bologna (or ham) and cheese salad topped with cranberry jelly cutouts? Bet you didn't see that one coming. And the nice thing is that the "Sandwiches may be arranged around the rim of a large plate and decorated with a green bow to resemble a wreath." (Maybe that would be convincing if you have a LOT of imagination and only a vague sense of what a wreath looks like?)

Okay, I'll end with something minty to help get the taste of everything else out of your mouth. I'm not a monster.

I could see this almost as being a clickbait recipe now: Three-Ingredient Christmas Cookies! (if you don't count the sprinkle of sugar)! And if you don't like them, at least they will melt away quickly.

Okay, fine. One last palate cleanser.

Santa with a pinecone beard was just too cute not to share! I love old pictures of crafts that look like they were constructed by an actual human being, down to their scraggly pompons and wandering googly eyes. Here's hoping your holiday season (or just December) is as full of charm as this little guy. (And a lot LESS full of ketchup-y gelatin than this menu.)

A red, white, and blue Christmas?

Better Homes and Gardens magazines used to come with little pages home cooks could cut out and stuff into their Better Homes and Gardens cookbooks (which were three-ring binders, so it was easy to add to them). Sometimes I acquire random pages that someone squirreled away somewhere, long ago, and that is the long way of saying we're going to check out the section on "Holiday Puddings" from the December 1962 issue. While the page offers a couple of things to do with mincemeat (bake it into a spice-cake-like "Cottage Pudding" or layer it with vanilla pudding and cranberry-orange relish for a parfait), I was more interested in the other options.

The first seems perfectly festive with its cluster of holly on top. 

It might not look quite as festive if it were in color, though, as this is not the flavor I was expecting.

Blueberry is just not a flavor I expect in the winter holidays! Blueberries aren't really in season, and a purplish cake (at least, I assume, considering it's supposed to be made from canned berries) doesn't exactly scream "Christmas" either. (Maybe Hanukkah since it's blue-ish and uses up applesauce left over from the latkes?)

The other "pudding" looks a bit like an upside-down coffee filter.

What is this ruffly blob? Why, it's a Cherry Eggnog Mold!

Cherries and Brazil nuts are not exactly the flavors I tend to associate with eggnog, though. I guess this is supposed to be eggnog-ish since it's got eggs, milk, vanilla, and rum flavoring, but I'll bet they will be overpowered by the maraschino cherries. Plus, nutmeg is the main flavor I think of with eggnog, and it's nowhere in sight! At least with the red and white, this one is likely to look Christmassy, but these kind of make me wonder about BHG's conception of Christmas. (And of pudding...) I guess you could get away with claiming dubious connections to holiday traditions back when readers couldn't immediately question your judgment on social media.

Gettin' Festive with Betty

The cover of Betty Crocker's Festive Fixin's with a Foreign Flare (General Mills, 1964) pretty accurately sums up its contents. 

It's full of sweet baked goods-- great for holiday sharing, but less so for a blog that focuses primarily on the more horrifying aspects of vintage recipes. (About the meanest thing I can say about the cover is that the bûche de Noël looks like a loaf of sandwich bread with a BIG outie belly button and the start of a mold problem.) But you just know I can persevere and find at least a few weird odds and ends in such a booklet.

The most cynical aspect of the booklet is that it's partially intended to help sell Saran Wrap, so it includes a couple of decorating ideas that will incidentally require anyone who follows them to waste yards and yards of Saran Wrap to make pointless decorations like imitation bunches of grapes out of hard candies.

Yes, why put out actual grapes (or even cheap and no-effort bunches of plastic grapes) when you can waste a couple hours of your time Saran Wrapping hard candies to thin wire, briefly boiling them (so the wrap will be good and tight), using florist tape to wrap them all together, and adding artificial grape leaves? It's not like you've got anything else going on in December.

Alternatively, if bright green wreaths with red decorations are a little too cheery, you can waste your time turning nuts still in their shells into a big brown wreath using similar methods.

I'm sure the squirrels would agree with the observation that "a nut wreath also makes an attractive outdoor decoration." (I really don't see a flimsy layer of plastic as being too much of a deterrent.)

If you want actual recipes, though, there's an interesting one for gnocchi. I used to think that gnocchi was always made from potatoes, but I've watched enough Food Network by now to know that while choux gnocchi might not be the first kind to come to mind, it's also not that uncommon. Putting it inside a tart shell, though?

Can't say as I was expecting to see gnocchi in a pastry and covered in a cream sauce and cheese! The pastry seems wholly superfluous, but as a carb lover, I could see this as a pretty fun treat.

Most of the recipes are for European baked goods, but America does make a brief appearance near the end of the pamphlet.

We are a nation of snackers lorded over by overdressed creepy dolls, apparently. And General Mills thinks your snacks should be Cheerios-based, obviously. If you're more the traditional "Chex mix" type of person, then Festive Mixin's will turn Cheerios and Kix into an approximate equivalent.

Or, if you want a peek back into the time before Cheerios was trying to equate itself with heart health, there's Crispy Mixin's, loaded up with bacon and Cheddar.

I can't imagine trying to eat this-- sounds like it would be a big, gloppy, greasy mess-- but maybe 4 cups of Cheerios would be enough to absorb all that animal fat.

Okay, fine. If you really want an actual cookie recipe with a European pedigree, I'll leave you with Viennese Devils.

Mostly because the cookie looks kind of horrifying. The torso makes me wonder if this is about to become a scene from The Thing. And on that happy note, I will leave you to whatever you are busy with at this time in December. I'm gonna go Saran Wrap some nuts.

Holiday recipes with some "modern" flair

Tired of the same holiday spread, year after year, but also afraid of changing things too much-- so much that it won't feel like a holiday at all? If you live in the 1960s (or at least appreciate the casserole-and-gelatin aesthetic of the time period), Modern Approach to Everyday Cooking (American Dairy Association, 1966) has some small twists on some holiday classics just for you.

If it's too much work to make both poultry and a green bean casserole (or if you've got leftover cooked chicken or can easily procure a precooked one from the grocery), Chicken Green Bean Casserole handily combines them into one main dish.

In addition to the usual green beans, there's also a can of chop suey vegetables, some cheddar cheese, and some chopped fresh onion, along with the usual topping of crispy fried onions. So it will feel familiar and yet (perhaps a bit alarmingly) different.

If you miss the tang of cranberries from Thanksgiving, add a festive Layered Cranberry Salad.

It's packed with cranberry and orange flavor-- very festive-- but your tolerance for it may depend on how you feel about lumpy cottage cheese as part of a Jell-O salad, stringy and vegetal wads of celery hiding out in a mostly-sweet salad, and/or soggy (and often rancid-tasting) walnuts soaking away in those jellied depths.

If you're an eggnog fan, the Eggnog Christmas Salad may be more your style.

It still has festive cranberry and orange-- along with some eggnog diluted with more than a pound of crushed pineapple. So... maybe it's better if you only kind of feel like eggnog occasionally, rather than being a true eggnog lover.

I'm not sure these recipes would pass for "modern" in 2025. (Okay, I'm positive they would not!) But this stuff was cutting-edge if you asked the American Dairy Association in the 1960s. (And I imagine that the only ones who asked for this were the members of the American Dairy Association.)