This is a post about a collection of recipes

Can you guess what I'm going to show you today?

If you mumbled "Collection of recipes, like always," your sarcastic sense of humor shows that you do indeed belong here.

You are also factually correct. Today we're looking at Collection of Recipes, a, well, I'm not going to say it a third time... from the Midway Assembly of God Women's Ministries Dept. in Subiaco, Arkansas (1978). Something tells me my copy used to belong to Nell Alford.

The book's title is waaay more straightforward than some of the recipe titles, though. What might you expect from a recipe titled "Individual Applesauce"? Picture it in your mind.... Now, find out what that means in Arkansas:

To be fair, applesauce is involved. It's just mixed into a meatloaf that is cooked in muffin cups, but apparently calling it "Individual Meatloaves" would have been a little too forthright.

What might you picture for "Crackling Cookies"? I thought that meant they would be cooked until crispy, but maybe you're thinking, "Hey, Poppy, this is from Arkansas. 'Crackling' has a second meaning in rural areas."

Well, you would be right. "Crackling Cookies" here means "pork rind cookies." (I always thought they were "cracklins," but the people of Subiaco must be more formal than I expected.)

Here's another recipe that would immediately make sense to people in the region, but I was initially confused:

Creamy Chili is kind of a cross between chili and that Ro-Tel/ Velveeta dip people serve (at least, so I've been told) while they're watching the big game. But what is a pound of "Famous chili"? I did a little research, and it's actually an Arkansas business called Famous Chili Company that STILL pumps out Famous Chili. Have to admit, I'm kind of intrigued by the thought of adding cream and cheese to chili, but I'd have to find a way around using a brick of Famous Chili.

I like that Arkansas cooks seem more interested in seasoning food than cooks in the midwest typically do in their church cookbooks. There's sage and Worcestershire in the meatloaf, all kinds of flavors in the cookies, spicy tomatoes in the chili. Sometimes the seasonings might go a little too far, though:

I'm sure that adding a half can each of cinnamon and nutmeg gives the bread a "spicy taste," but I suspect that taste is more than a little heavy-handed unless they are damn small spice cans. I also notice that this bread calls for more sugar than flour, which is pretty unusual for a bread. Even most of the cake recipes in this book call for roughly equal amounts of sugar and flour or slightly less sugar than flour, so Mrs. Bill Stovall must have liked her pumpkin bread extremely sweet and spicy.

Thank you for reading about old recipes from Arkansas! Now go make something spicy, but not half-a-can-of-cinnamon spicy.

Clown heads done "right"

A few weeks ago, Cake Wrecks ran a side-splitting post about those little plastic clown heads cake decorators sometimes throw onto cakes in an attempt to make them look... I don't know... hilariously creepy seems to be the only effect those heads are really capable of creating, and I'm pretty sure that's not what the decorators are going for. Anyway, I loved that post, but it kept nagging at me. Those clown heads seemed like I remembered them from childhood-- but where? My grandma decorated cakes, but she knew I didn't like clowns, so she never made me a clown cake for my birthday. I watched her decorate cakes for other people, but they were mostly wedding or graduation cakes. I was pretty sure nobody had ordered a clown-themed wedding cake. (That's fun to imagine, though! Pop a couple of clown heads in between the roses or next to the swan-shaped cake pillars and you've got a surreal wedding cake...) Then I remembered the trove of 1970s Wilton Yearbooks I loved so much that Grandma gave them to me when her arthritis got too bad and she gave up cake decorating. Maybe I remembered the clown heads from those?

Yup! This picture from the 1974 Wilton Yearbook is the closest you can come to using those clown heads the "right" way, and I am not entirely convinced by it. The big fat mounds of saggy frosting try to look like clown bodies, and the white accents suggest hands, feet, and buttons, but they are not enough to dispel the suggestion that these tipsy clowns are ready to fall (farther?) off the wagon at any moment, or at least collapse under their own weight.

And that marks the only instance where clown heads would logically make sense.

Most of them are simply sprouting out of the ground for no apparent reason, as these from the 1973 yearbook:

Why not have a row of clown heads just off to the side of the merry-go-round? It will give the horses a goal-- to break free and kick a clown head into the horrified bystanders... or at least, into the pink elephants. (As you will see, Wilton loved pink elephants and clowns together-- which seems to confirm my suspicion about the clowns falling off the wagon.)

Lazier cake decorators (or ones lacking the merry-go-round topper) might opt for this nonsensical creation from 1970/'71:

(Sorry for the missing corner, but grandma used the hell out of these books. Some of them are falling apart, and they all still smell like powdered sugar!)

The clown heads sprouting out in front of the row of candles somehow makes this seem like a Monty Python animation of some sort. I half-expect a little girl to pick the clown heads like flowers and make a bouquet of them, sniff them, sneeze, and send the clown and pink elephant heads sailing into an entirely separate sketch.

For those who prefer the more elaborately weird setups, there is this 1974 creation. The little wooden-looking animals on top are quite charming, but then the bottom tier is once again surrounded by creepy clown heads. Even better, these appear ripe for the kicking-- The creepy clown pillars (Is the cake supposed to be their head? Are they bitter to be headless bodies surrounded by out-of-scale disembodied heads?) can kick them into the always-waiting pink elephants.

And last, coning to us straight from 1970/'71 to show that non-pink elephants had to do all the hard work:

Here is a dolled-up gray elephant jumping through a fiery hoop so she can maul all those clown heads growing in the brown sugar sawdust. Step on them, Jumbo! Why should the pink elephants get all the fun?

Since these ideas all came straight from Wilton, we know that these are apparently the approved uses of clown heads... and the success of these approaches are... uh... debatable at best. Is it any wonder the off-label uses are even funnier?

Happy Saturday! Your assignment this weekend is to drink just enough to see pink elephants, but not so much that you will have nightmares about clown heads. Good luck!

Bright-Red, Jiggly Magic

After another week of checking the electric bill a couple times and trying to stay strong before caving in and flipping down the a.c., I'm ready for some cool and/or creamy dessert action!

Amazing Magical Jell-O Desserts (1977) promises pages of dessert recipes for kids (as if kids really need prompting to eat dessert!).

A big draw for this book is its whimsical illustrations. This opening for the "Family Desserts" chapter is a lot of fun:

The house has various gelatin and pudding-based desserts growing in the yard, like absurdist shrubberies while the dog chases... something red and yellow with a black tail... on wheels. (Just stay away from the little brown pile he left in the yard because it ain't chocolate pudding!)

If you're wondering about the top hat and the dessert being menaced by the disembodied mouth in the bottom corners, this collection is also a 2-way flip book. It's crazy in all different directions.

Anyway, let's get back to whatever that dog is chasing. It's a dessert too:

It's a Banana Wobbler-- a half-banana suspended in Jell-O and inserted with a piece of licorice if you want that firecracker look. The dog may seem to be in danger of getting hit by a vehicle or blown up by a firecracker, but he's only in danger of eating a cool and jiggly snack. 

The "Family Desserts" chapter opening left out a dessert that might have fit the picture a bit more naturally:

Ship Ahoy could have sailed around in the background if the picture just had a lake. This cute little nautical dessert could also be either a disappointment or a pleasant surprise to the person who asks "What's for dessert?" and mishears the answer. Whether it's the former or the latter depends on one's feelings about fruit pieces on gelatin and packaged chocolate chip cookies.

The "Snacks" chapter opening is bare in comparison to "Family Desserts," but perhaps as bizarre:

I imagine it's hard to bat with an enormous popsicle, and it's got to be pretty messy sliding into any base that's composed of a bar cookie or ice cream sandwich....

It's not always easy to tell what sets a "snack" apart from a "dessert," but I'm not sure it matters.

You've got to appreciate the commitment to diversity in the Smilin' Snacks. We not only have chocolate and vanilla, but also pistachio to represent the ... witch ... or maybe alien ... community.

As you may have gathered, most of the recipes are not huge surprises, combining fruit, gelatin, pudding, and/or whipped topping in endless variations, but a few are unexpected:

Bright-red Magic Letter Balls look kind of like uncooked meatballs if I'm trying not to be too disgusting and excised tumors if I'm being gross. The raisins making those dark spots do NOT help make these look less tumor-y. I'm sure they just taste like Alpha-Bits with a fruity sugar coating, but I'd rather use them as props in my new horror film, Night of the Living Tumors.

I should start casting that soon. If you're interested in letting me pretend to surgically remove wads of sentient cereal treats from your disease-riddled body, let me know. 

Zucchini, zucchini everywhere...

When I was a kid, I hated zucchini season. My mom would slice the zucchini into thin rounds and saute it in a bit of oil, essentially turning it into slimy green nothing as far as I was concerned. It only had flavor if the oil was getting old, and that flavor certainly didn't help.

My appreciation for zucchini grew as I got older and learned to fix it myself. A friend recently gave me an enormous zucchini, which I promptly reduced to a couple pounds of "noodles" with my mandolin. I sauteed some with soy sauce, veggies, and cashew butter for a lo mein-ish dish, some with tomato sauce and herbs, then a topping of cheese for a spaghetti-ish meal. As I hit day four of zucchini noodles, I kind of wondered what people used to do with their over-abundances of zucchini.

I learned that the zucchini noodle craze isn't exactly as new as it may seem. Favorite Recipes of Home Economics Teachers: Dieting to Stay Fit (1978) recommends this:

No, they're not the more fettuccine-style noodles I made on the mandolin, but the zucchini planks in Herbed Zucchini Lasagne are clearly meant to stand in for zucchini noodles.

This might actually be a good recipe if it were not so pathetic. Tomato sauce does have more calories than zucchini, but it's not Alfredo sauce. Maybe the recipe could call for more than half a cup? Or maybe a simple rename would make this sound better. If it were called "Zucchini with a Little Tomato Sauce and Cheese," my expectations would be way lower. Calling this meager offering a lasagna sets up expectations that this sad little concoction can't hope to live up to, even if it tastes all right.

I found that zucchini sometimes stood in not just for noodles, but also for other kinds of vegetables:

The New McCall's Cook Book (Mary Eckley, 1963 copyright, 1973 printing) suggests Our Best Zucchini Bread-and-Butter Pickles as a way to use up some of the zucchini without having to immediately consume it (surely a relief after having had zucchini casseroles and zucchini bread for days on end). (Side note: I'd recommend against eating zucchini bread-and-butter pickles on zucchini bread, as that would probably get pretty weird.)

Zucchini is so inoffensive that it was hard to find a truly awful recipe, although a few made me wonder about people's tastes. American Home All-Purpose Cookbook (ed. Virginia T. Habeeb, 1966) suggests a recipe unlikely to become a classic:

Zucchini a l'Orange is the fancy name for zucchini cooked in orange juice concentrate. Giving it a Frenchified name does not change the fact that it is, as you may have gathered by this point, zucchini cooked in orange juice concentrate.

If you are a real sucker for mushy foods, I suspect Rival's recommendation from Crock-Pot Cooking (1975) will sound yummy:

Spaghetti noodles and thinly sliced zucchini cooked with quartered frankfurters in bouillon for six to eight hours are sure to be a gloopy mess... if perhaps inoffensively tomato-y.

Home ec teachers were a great source for questionable recipes. Can you guess what "Creole" means to the teacher who sent the Zucchini Creole recipe to Favorite Recipes of Home Economics Teachers: Vegetables (Including Fruits) (1966)?

It means "boiled to death in catsup" from the looks of it.

And some recipes are just kind of inexplicable, like this one (from the same book as Zucchini Creole):

I would not necessarily be excited about zucchini casserole loaded up with brown sugar, but zucchini bread is fine, so I could maybe see somebody enjoying a sweet zucchini casserole...?

Zucchini is delicious with cheese on it (especially if that cheese is paired with tomatoes)... but... Does anyone really want brown sugar AND Parmesan cheese on zucchini? Am I the weird one in thinking, "Not a match. The board goes back"?

 You can ponder that question while I mourn my inability to find a clip of David Letterman saying that last line.

Secrets, Secrets

I hate to have to be the one to tell you this, but the secret's out! I mean, it was only a matter of time once they found the picture of you with that bottle of Champagne and that pile of zucchini, eggplant, and cucumbers, until...

Ha! Just kidding. Nobody's seen those pictures but me. I meant only to refer to The Secret's Out-- a cookbook put together by the United Methodist Women in Reseda, California, in 1976. (And don't worry. Nobody will ever know what you were drunkenly doing with those defenseless vegetables, at least, not as long as your payments arrive on time. If they don't, well, I can't be responsible for what might slip out.)

Ahem. Anyway, California has a reputation for healthy, trendy cooking with fresh ingredients, but it seems not to have applied so much to '70s Reseda.

Well, maybe "trendy" could apply to this cookie recipe:

After all, Pringle's Cookies call for a cup of crushed "Pringle's new fangled potato chips" right after the snacks became nationally available. Even so, this can't exactly pretend to be following a health-related trend!

If doughnuts sound like a fatty indulgence that Californians should stereotypically reject (unless maybe the doughnuts are vegan, gluten-free, and filled with an artisanal jam made of organic berries), this recipe doubles down on its carefree attitude toward decadent eating:

Doughnuts aren't real doughnuts unless they're made with whipped cream, mashed potatoes, eight egg yolks, and a whole pound of sugar.

Perhaps what I like best about this recipe is that it is so much more focused on telling a story than on explaining how to make the actual doughnuts. More lines are devoted to the story of Anna Eliza Bennett and her daughter Florence than to the actual recipe itself. You better have a pretty good idea how to cook doughnuts, because there is no instruction past "Twist or cut out with doughnut cutter."

The United Methodist Women were busy adapting somewhat popular recipes, but they didn't seem to be doing it by adding local avocados and almonds, or the newest trendy greens. When these ladies wanted to make a new version of Chicken Parmesan, this is what they made:

Yep! In Parmesan Franks, they swapped out the chicken breast for hot dogs! Not exactly a move I would have anticipated, but I like the mental picture of breading and frying hot dogs, then layering them with pizza sauce and cheese.

We may argue that this group anticipated the bacon craze of the 2000s...

...but Bacon and Egg Casserole looks much more like a mid-century, mid-western staple. Packed with not only bacon, but also potato chips, canned cheese soup, canned mushroom soup, grated cheddar, and dried onion soup mix, this promises to be an oily salt lick of the highest order.

Some recipes did hint that forward-thinking churchwomen knew the times would be changing, though:

The name "Jell-O (Sort of) Salad" suggests that Barbara Paul knew the days were numbered for mixing Jell-O and Cool Whip with some canned fruit and cottage cheese and referring to it as a salad. She still couldn't resist the impulse, of course, but she knew there was something off about it.

I guess the United Methodist Women's secret was that even though they lived in California, they were West Virginians and Minnesotans at heart.

And YOUR secret will remain your secret as long as those payments keep on coming. *Evil grin*

Staring straight into August

It's almost August! August! That time of year when my childhood self knew the mornings of building yard clipping huts for My Little Ponies and dinosaurs were numbered, and there was no way a fresh box of fresh, pointy crayons was going to protect me from being made fun of when school started.... It's funny how close the feeling of impending doom still lies when I contemplate changing the calendar to August.

It also will mean I can start my countdown to Halloween, though, so it's not all bad. Maybe the calendar flip won't feel so bad if I sing "Ninety days til Halloween, Halloween, Halloween. Ninety days til Halloween. Silver Shamrock!" (I'm sure you're going to thank me for that one.)

Here, the advent of August can only mean one thing: more menus from Glamour Magazine's New After Five Cookbook (Beverly Pepper, 1963). What glamorous menus could '60s couples expect as the summer heat reached its zenith and began to subside?

Well, a Tuesday might reinforce feelings of existential dread with this spread:

Liver Squares! Here, the liver and onions get a bit of an upgrade with tomato paste, red wine, and seasonings (but it's still liver and onions). The side combines limas-- the most stick-in-your-throat tasteless beans-- with celery-- the most stick-in-your-throat, tasteless veggie. Hopefully the cream will help. At least blueberry shortcake sounds genuinely all right, especially if you make sweet biscuit shortcakes instead settling for dessert shells.

Wednesday might initially seem to lighten the mood a bit:

Corn-Stuffed Peppers! I was shocked to see a seasonally appropriate item. Fresh sweet peppers! Corn! (Yes, the recipe does suggest canned corn, but it also acknowledges you might actually have fresh corn to scrape right off the cob.) Of course, the side goes back to frozen asparagus served over toast with a can of cream of mushroom soup dumped over the whole lot, but how much can we expect? That side plus the thought of avocado, orange, and onion mixed with French dressing in place of dessert brings me right back down to liver squares with lima beans and celery territory.

Thursday is less a day of despair than one of confusion:

What kind of a menu is this? The tomato juice, scrambled eggs, and bread seem to suggest a breakfast-for-dinner theme. The "Risotto Milanese" seems to belong to an entirely separate menu. Besides, that, I had to use scare quotes to get myself to call this a risotto at all. The recipe looks more like one for a pilaf, since it seems to call for regular rice, the bouillon is added all at once rather than installments, and the rice is cooked covered, rather than being stirred. The cheese and butter are considered toppings, not stirred in at the end. To its credit, this version has wine and saffron, but Risotto Milanese it is not. The fancy-sounding Chocolate Coupe dessert is just instant chocolate pudding with grated chocolate and walnuts. (Despite all my grumbling, this is one menu I would gobble up without a second thought! It's incoherent and guilty of false advertising, but it all sounds pretty good to me.)

As the week winds down, the menu falls into a state of tedium:

Fillet of Sole Portico is just a fancy name for fried sole with some mushrooms. The Celery-Seed Peas and Watercress & Endive Salad are exactly what they sound like. The only frisson of excitement is dessert: Lemon-Prune Cream. If you've ever wanted an excuse to whip a jar of baby food prunes into an egg white with lemon juice and sugar, this is your chance! (And if that is your idea of excitement, your hobbies are even sadder than mine...)

What have we learned for August?

1. Once in a great while, it's okay to serve fresh seasonal produce like blueberries, peppers, or corn, but it's got to be carefully balanced out with frozen lima beans and cans of cream of mushroom soup to avoid too much of a shock to the system.
2. When there is a bit of extra space, throw in a random drawing of a row of sausage links. Stretching intestines across the page adds a decorative touch.
3. Balance in menus is overrated. If your main dish is primarily vegetables, add two vegetable sides. If your main dish is a starch, serve it with some bread.
4. Using the word "Portico" as a cooking term meaning "with mushrooms" never caught on.
5. If you see the words "mushroom sauce" in a vintage cookbook, it's a euphemism for canned cream of mushroom soup about 72% of the time.

Self-delusion in all its glory

As the heat index begins to rival the number of cookbooks in my collection (Who am I kidding? My house would burn down if it were really THAT hot out. Just play along with my introduction, will you?), I thought it was time to dig out "The No Cooking Cookbook" (Lillian Langseth-Christensen, 1962).

This cookbook promises "maximum pleasure and minimum effort." The pictures on the cover-- a whole pineapple to be carved up and cored, a big stock pot full of something simmering, a whole lobster to cook, cut apart, shell, etc.-- suggest that the author is just a bit delusional about her recipes.

A quick check inside the book suggests that yes, this is the case. Take something that should be easy, like chips and dip.

You could just put in the minimum effort like the cover suggests-- stir together the dip, put it on the table with a pile of potato chips, and let everybody dig in. That would apparently be a little too easy, though, as you apparently have to mix the ingredients, mince up some water cress, spread "only medium-sized potato chips" carefully with the mix, and then dust the finished product with the cress. (After all, what are chips if they're not dusted with minced cress?) What an easy, laid-back recipe!

Sometimes I wonder about Langseth-Christensen's ideas about word meanings. Take "raw," for example:

Raw Soup starts out with canned beets-- certainly not raw!-- and tomato juice-- extremely unlikely to be raw. While the home cook is probably not the one who cooked them, they're still cooked, so either "raw" had a different meaning in the '60s, or the cooking step didn't count if somebody else did it.

The section that struck me as most delusional might be the chapter on chicken. It starts out with this introduction:

Pay special attention to those last two sentences. For one thing, her recipes do not "call for 'One can chicken combined with one can mushrooms and one tablespoon chopped parsley.'"

Nope. They might call for ...

...1-1/2 cups canned chicken and a can of mushrooms with Parmesan instead of parsley...

...or 2 cups of canned chicken and a can of sliced mushrooms with jarred macaroni...

...or 1-1/2 cups of canned chicken with a can each of rice and mushrooms...

...or canned chicken and chicken liver pate with a can of mushrooms. (It even has the parsley!) I think when the author said her recipes would not be "One can chicken combined with one can mushrooms and one tablespoon chopped parsley," she meant that literally. A lot of recipes call for canned chicken and canned mushrooms with a garnish, but none of the recipes is exactly the one she disavowed in the introduction! They all call for something more than just the canned chicken-mushroom-garnish combo.

The other highly questionable line is that the "main course ... can never take more than about 20 minutes to prepare." If that's the case, I have a hard time explaining this:

Is anyone really going to carve the breasts into supremes, put them on ham spread with goose liver pate, coat with a thin layer of "gelatine," chilling and repeating "until Supremes are beautifully coated" in less than 20 minutes (especially considering that the gelatine has to be kept over tepid water to prevent it from setting-)? Cold Chicken Jeanette is just one more example of how deeply deluded Langseth-Christensen seems about the nature of her cookbook....

Now, I'm off to organize my own cookbooks. No, I'm really going to do it this time. Just as soon as I buy some more bookshelves... and get them put together... and ... hey, wait! I don't think I've featured anything from the Dinner Party Cookbook I just found when I was moving this stack. It won't hurt to flip through for just a couple minutes. Right?