The self-contradictory guide to natural health

Woo hoo! Today I have a book from one of my favorite genres!

The Beginner's Natural Food Guide and Cookbook (Judy Goeltz, first printing 1975, but mine is from 1981) is one of those crazy-ass 1970s health food books with pages and pages of pseudo-scientific rules that make cooking and eating in the way the author deems healthful sound almost impossible.

In fact, I would argue that the book itself admits as much, as so many of the recipes in the latter half of the book-- the part devoted to recipes-- apparently violate the rules she sets out in the earlier half of the book.

One of the easily spotted contradictions is in this recipe for Sam's Pancakes:

You don't have to have read a lot of health food books to be a bit surprised by the recipe calling for white flour (even if it is unbleached) alongside the soy flour and wheat germ. Page 46 declares "the story of white flour and white bread is bad enough that [Goeltz] flatly refuse[s] to eat it" and 76 insists that readers throw out both bleached and unbleached white flour. In short, it seems pretty odd that this recipe offers white flour not just as an optional substitution for readers still getting used to "health food," but as a regular ingredient.

(Enjoy the lopsided recipes, by the way! This book has some weird issues with the way the spine is glued, so you're going to have to tilt your head for a lot of them.)

Even though the Panamanian French Toast looks pretty spartan by French toast standards, well, it should still be on the author's unacceptable list.

What's the problem with this one? Well, the guide section suggests that for milk, only fresh raw milk should be used. The option to use reconstituted powdered milk contradicts Goeltz's assertion that it is "an unbalanced food" and that removing water from milk completely ruins its nutritive value.

I was also pretty amused to see that Goeltz couldn't entirely resist the siren song of that ubiquitous casserole ingredient, canned cream of mushroom soup.

Even the author can't overlook the apparent issue here, nothing that "mushroom soup contains some undesirables" and suggesting a substitution of mushrooms sautéed in butter mixed with milk thickened with arrowroot and seasoned with Worcestershire sauce. Concerns about health aren't enough for her to simply list the substitution and drop the canned option, though.

I'll admit, I couldn't get all the way through the guide at the beginning of the book, so it's possible that Goeltz somehow reconciles all these instructions to use ingredients she condemns. However, it seems more likely that she has so many rules about what is acceptable and what's not that she just forgot/ ignored them sometimes to have enough recipes to fill out the book.

One rule she definitely followed, though, was adding what she termed "honegar" (a mixture of equal parts raw honey and cider vinegar) to all kinds of things, as it was somehow supposed to aid digestion.

Here's just one recipe that uses her favorite concoction:

As if a tuna and sprout sandwich isn't discouraging enough, make sure it's seasoned with honegar.

(Interesting side note: The guide suggests that a tablespoon of honegar stirred into a cup of water is the only appropriate drink with a meal, as milk is not easily digested and "water will dilute the digestive stomach acid." However, the full menus never recommend honegar water as a beverage, usually suggesting fruit juice, tea, Pero (a coffee substitute), or MILK instead.)

I want to leave you on an indulgent note, so here is a recipe that invites two diners to split a cake containing half cup of butter topped with as much honey as they would like for breakfast.

That's healthy '70s style! (Well, it is as long as you ignore the option to use reconstituted milk. Ha!)

Funny Name: Any Way You Slice It Edition

I don't personally know any contributors to Twickenham Receipts and Sketches (The Twickenham Historical Preservation District Association, Inc., Huntsville, AL, 1978), but I have a feeling Mrs. Howard (Betty) O'Meara was pretty laid-back.

How do you prepare the pie before baking? Just follow the title and "Mix Any Old Way." Bonus points if you noticed this one doesn't even require a crust. Pretty chill, Mrs. O.

Alabama: From Axes to Wheatgerm

Ready for a trip down south?

I was not entirely sure how ready I was for Twickenham Receipts and Sketches (The Twickenham Historical Preservation District Association, Inc., Huntsville, AL, 1978). I like the old-fashioned use of receipt for recipe, but sketches? I imagined a whole book filled with fantasies of mammy doing the cooking and a jet-black butler ferrying her creations out to the waiting white family.

The picture on the cover is representative of the actual sketches in the book, though. They're almost all drawings of old houses.

The collection has a few historical recipes, and while they're based on a nostalgia for the past, it's not exactly the type of nostalgia I was expecting.

The recipe for Beaten Biscuits is nostalgic for a time when cooks had to spend the first half hour after they woke up beating biscuit dough with an axe(!) on a biscuit block.

I'm pretty sure the late "Miss Kate" Halsey was not the one making beaten biscuits, based on her lament of the "Soda and modern institutions" that have made the biscuits such a rarity. No matter how great beaten biscuits may have been, I'm pretty sure the cooks much preferred doing something else with that half-hour in the morning.

Most of the recipes were modern, though. I found a casserole recipe that seemed to want to kitchen-sink every major '70s casserole ingredient, regardless of whether it belonged.

Ground chuck? Check. American cheese? Check! Onion? Check! Canned Chinese noodles? Egg noodles? Check! Cashews? Check! Stuffed olives? Check! Cream of mushroom soup? Check! All it's missing is a can of pineapple or fruit cocktail....

I also loved this dessert recipe that gets half-heartedly (or maybe only quarter-heartedly!) into the '70s health food craze.

Know how to make Reeses Peanut Butter Squares healthy? All it takes for that stick-and-a-half of butter and box of powdered sugar mixed with graham cracker crumbs and peanut butter to be wholesome is a "sprinkle [of] wheatgerm on top"! (Not sure if it's permitted on top of the layer of extra butter with chocolate chips, but let's just assume that it is.)

If nothing else, I learned that making healthy desserts is way easier than most people suspect. Plus, if your efforts to eat healthier somehow lead to weight gain, you can always work off those extra calories with some biscuit dough and an axe.

Funny Name: Striking Insights Edition

You know what you should serve someone who loves chili?

Of course, I would hope any chili could be a chili lovers' chili. A basic rule of etiquette is not to intentionally make things that you know your guests will dislike.... Didn't really think that had to be said. Thanks to Butter 'n Love Recipes (Heritage Temple Ladies Auxiliary, Columbus, Ohio, 1979) for stating the obvious.

Hate the cooking, not the almanack

After a year of stuffy Gourmet 1977 recipes, I've chosen a decidedly more downscale book for the 2019 calendar.

The I Hate to Cook Almanack: A Book of Days (1976) is one of Peg Bracken's follow-up books to her popular (and sardonic) I Hate to Cook Book.

This is an almanac with recipes on some days, and quotes, helpful advice, etc. on others. January 6 features a list of kitchen no-nos, including my favorite: "Don't think the oven is as good a place as any to store the breakfast biscuits that didn't get eaten (telling yourself that of course you'll remember to take them out before you heat the oven again, because you won't)." Not that I have ever burnt up anything I've stored in the oven, mind you.

January 11 features a list of popular cooking terms, including Hunter-Style (which I come across a LOT in old cookbooks). Now I finally know what it means: "Descriptive term for the dish you must hunt around for things to stretch it with. For example, Creamed Chicken Hunter-Style means padded with a cupful of sautéed chopped celery, several sliced hardboiled eggs, and nine sliced stuffed olives."

Many of the recipes are attributed to others as well-- often people Bracken has made up, she admits, "in order to be sure someone would say what I didn't feel quite comfortable saying myself." For January, here are a couple of recipes attributed to Dr. Emmett Neitzelgrinder, inventor of "STIFFO, a special butter that won't melt in your mouth." (It's for the "cholesterol-minded.") He's also the author of Get Away from Me with Those Soybean Cupcakes.

While Dr. Neitzelgrinder is NOT a fan of soybean cupcakes, he's apparently okay with fish turnovers:

(Sorry the scan is a bit blurry. Apparently Bracken hated sufficiently wide margins a bit more than she hated cooking.)

The fish turnovers feature hard-cooked eggs... Am I justified in imagining that the rice substitutes for the celery as a filler and the canned mushrooms for the olives? I so want to call this recipe Fish Turnovers- Hunter Style! Notice also that Dr. Neitzelgrinder is nice enough to do most of the cooking, just leaving his wife to make a quick sauce of melted butter, lemon, and parsley, as "it's the least she can do, and that was her intention."

If all the specific ingredients with specific measurements seems a bit too overwhelming (and if you're disappointed with the lack of puns in the previous recipe title), the good doctor also offers up this set of sandwich guidelines:

Good old Neitzel Grinders! (Even though the alternative names for the sandwiches are listed, of course he would have to go with grinder....) They can be filled with anything from anchovies to liverwurst, then frozen until needed for that poker party. I just love old recipes that lay out the barest of guidelines and trust readers to run with them. I can't imagine keeping a cache of subs in the freezer, though! Mine is so stuffed with half-empty bags of Brussels sprouts, veggie burgers, partial loaves of homemade bread, and other odd-shaped (sometimes unidentifiable) packages that the goal is to open and close the door as quickly as possible before I start an avalanche. Having a bunch of these sandwiches rolling around with torpedo my whole system. (See what I did there? Don't you wish you didn't?)

Of course, since this is for January, maybe the plan should be to just dump the sandwiches in a snowbank for safe-keeping. (Especially if they're liverwurst-and-anchovy!)

I hope you're looking forward to seeing what advice Peg Bracken has for harried housepersons for the rest of the year! I certainly am...

Ending the year with a limp

The new year is coming, so I decided to go with something traditional for a change. With the gig economy, I'm sure most of us could use some prosperity in the new year, so I'll post the traditional good luck southern dish from the (horribly racist!) Coastal Carolina Cooking (1963 printing):

I'll admit that I mostly chose this relatively plain version of Hoppin' John (just black-eyed peas, pork, onion, and rice) mostly because it came with Hoppin' John's disabled wife, Limpin' Susan.

Don't they make a ... hastily sketched couple? (Cute is definitely not the word I'm looking for here. Maybe part of Susan's problem is that her waist seems to be where her hips should be, and her head looks a bit like it belongs on a chicken.)

My biggest disappointment is that I don't (as far as I can tell, but given the size of my collection, there's a chance I'm wrong here) have a recipe for a jiggly Hoppin' John Salad. So just for you, dear readers, I'm going to make up a Hoppin' John Salad (with a slightly more elaborate ingredient list than Mrs. Charles Mason Crowson's). It has not been tested, and I don't recommend you try it either.

Good Luck with That Hoppin' John Salad

1 box lemon gelatin

1 c. boiling water

2/3 c. cold water

1 tsp. salt

1 Tbs. vinegar

1 c. cooked black-eyed peas

1 c. cooked rice

2 Tbs. grated onion

1/4 c. minced celery

1/4 c. minced green pepper

4 slices bacon, fried crisp and crumbled

Dissolve gelatin in boiling water. Add cold water, salt, and vinegar. Chill until slightly thickened. Stir in the peas, rice, and vegetables. Pour into oiled mold of appropriate size (quart, I'm guessing) and chill until firm. Unmold and serve topped with crumbled bacon to get the bad luck out of the way first thing in the new year. (Hopefully it can only get better after this!)

Wrap Yourself or a Loved One in Dough!

We're approaching the high holy day of appetizers-- New Year's Day-- so today I'm going to tease your appetites.

I'm teasing them just like the pathetic cornucopia barely coughing up a few loose apples on the cover of Favorite Recipes of the Hartford Homemakers Club (1975).

My copy has obviously seen better days, maybe because the previous owner really liked spreading thickened cans of tomato soup on things.

You could serve the gelatin-infused tomato soup, mayo, shrimp, and celery concoction with crackers, but it might be even more exciting slopped over California rolls.

The term meant something much, much different in 1970s small-town Ohio than it does today.

If you're not up to making homemade bread, though, there's always Pillsbury.

I've got to admit that I just liked the name "Poppin' Fresh Barbecups." Well, that and the name "Ronda Butt." I really hope that was her married name because the playground must have been brutal if she had to be Ronda Butt in second grade!

My favorite app recipe, though, is the one that alerted me to the fact that Pillsbury used to make a product that sounded like a novelty prophylactic.

Check it out-- Onion Crunch Sticks call for packages of Pillsbury's Wiener Wrap! I thought this might be some 1970s small-town Ohio slang for cans of crescent rolls, but Pillsbury Wiener Wrap was a real thing! I can't tell you how much that makes my day! I'm going to tell Mr. Crocker about that right now because he will laugh his butt off....