Pudding away the rice

I wasn't sure whether I would bother writing a post for National Rice Pudding Day. The problem isn't a lack of recipes; I've got hundreds of vintage rice pudding recipes. The problem is that they're usually pretty similar and not particularly exciting. Mainstream cookbooks use white rice, richer dairy, and regular sugar most of the time, while "health" food books often call for brown rice, leaner dairy, and honey. Both usually suggest adding raisins, perhaps along with other dried fruits or some nuts. So I almost didn't bother.

But my copy of Beatrice Trum Hunter's The Natural Foods Cookbook (copyright 1961, but mine is from a 1975 printing) was sitting out and I thought, "Why not just check?" And I almost didn't bother turning to the Molded Rice Pudding I found in the index, assuming that it was made with a thick custard and baked in a mold. Still, there was a chance this would be a weird gelatin mold, so I checked it out.

And my search paid off! This isn't the usual version of rice pudding. It's a fruit-juice gelatin, sweetened with honey and an added fruit of the cook's choice (Raisin-haters, rejoice!), then made creamy with "yoghurt." (The asterisk is suggesting the cook should use the book's yogurt recipe because health-obsessed cooks in pretty much any timeline are assumed to have the time to endlessly fuss around making everything from scratch.)

If you ever wanted rice pudding that was fruitier and less custardy/ raisin-y, this might be for you! And even if it's not, this is still another weird old gelatin dessert (or salad if you serve it over a lettuce leaf!) to gawk at. It's a win either way.

Frozen "delicacies" to show off your fridge

 What could be better than owning an electric refrigerator in the (probably) late 1920s or early1930s? 52 Recipes for Frozen Delicacies (from Copeland Dependable Electric Refrigeration) suggests the answer is having a new recipe for a frozen delicacy for each week of the year.

There's a lot of fairly standard stuff in this booklet, like lemon sherbet or chocolate mousse. Still, a few of the offerings caught my attention.

For instance, while I see a LOT of gelatin recipes, they are rarely minty. 

I think this Old-Fashioned Peppermint Delight would be better than Jell-O full of Grape Nuts and dried fruit or black cherries and olives.

As someone who often cooks my food until it's just this side of being burned because I like the hint of smoke, I was happy to see a recipe with "burnt" right in the title.

And the almonds aren't actually charcoal-- just roasted until "very dark brown." Sounds perfect to me!

I'm not quite so sold on the Russian Tea Ice Cubes, though.

It's not that uncommon to see recommendations to freeze fruit juices into ice cubes as a way to avoid watering down cold drinks, but the thought of potentially finding whole cloves floating in a beverage once they've been liberated from their icy home? Not so appealing.... And I can only imagine what Lace maker would have to say about potentially encountering a maraschino cherry in some tea!

But hey-- the inclusions in the ice cubes can really remind your guests that you have a fancy electric freezer, just in case they didn't notice that the cubes were composed of fruit juice. Part of the point of owning one of these is showing off, right?

I'm just glad I can lazily stock my freezer with vegetarian "chicken" and frozen veggies and call it a day, without having to make any frozen confections to show off that I have a freezer. Nobody would be impressed now anyway!

Harvest the oranges and cranberries! It's August

Cooking by the Calendar (edited by Marilyn Hansen, 1978) muses that "The steady golden hum of August is upon us with its humid heat and incessant growth. Yes, growth does seem to happen almost overnight, especially if we water regularly." And that is why this chapter is so devoted to using up produce. Of course, a big part of that is gelatin salads! 

Well, in theory, anyway. I'm not sure many of the readers are likely to be growing oranges, bananas, and avocadoes, but they make the chart, too. 

I expected something in this array of Jell-Os to sound appealing, but there's nothing too impressive. The apple, banana, and peach versions sound the most promising, but they still require gnawing through stringy celery and sogged-out nuts to enjoy the better bits. And then there are combinations like avocado, orange, and onion in a citrus gelatin; cheese and celery in a tomato-and-citrus gelatin; or grapefruit, celery, and olives in lemon.... 

I was also a bit surprised by the recommendation to make Cranberry Mousse with Raspberry Sauce.

I don't usually see cranberries in stores until about November. Why not a peach mousse with raspberry sauce if we're trying to use up the produce? Hansen just doesn't seem very committed to the premise for August's recipes.

The chapter also includes grilled recipes for family picnics. While it has the classics like barbecued ribs and barbecued chicken, I was more curious about the Grilled Leg of Lamb Nuggets.

Part of my confusion is probably from reading this in 2025 rather than in 1978. When modern readers see "nuggets," we're almost certainly thinking of finger food-- little breaded-and-deep-fried bits (probably chicken!) ready to dip in a sauce of some sort. These small bits of "lamb-leg meat [cut in] the individual shape nature gives" are not breaded-- just grilled-- and pre-seasoned with a marinade rather than served with a dip. I'm also not sure why any cook would want to try to make grilled nuggets in the first place. I imagine them all dropping through the grill grates. Wouldn't it be easier to just cook bigger pieces of meat?

The recipe that might make the most sense for the purported purpose of this chapter is this one that features one of the veggies of the month: cucumbers.

Hodgepodge Relish also incorporates a whole range of other veggies (though not the other featured veg of the month-- corn). You've just got to be willing to boil big bunches of  canning jars in one of the hottest months of the year to preserve the harvest for later. It's a bit of a tradeoff. (You've also got to like vinegar waaaaaay more than I do to actually enjoy pickles, but we all know I'm a picky five-year-old at heart.)

Of course, August is always a tradeoff--  the beginning of the end of long, sunny days, melting into the first days of school. I get the impulse to try to hold onto it just a little bit longer.

Some Dahnke Salads

I had better hurry up and get to Marye Dahnke's Salad Book (1954) before summer slips away! (Yeah, I know it's only late July, but also, IT'S ALREADY LATE JULY!)

And just in case you're worried about pronunciation, the back cover assures readers that the author's name is pronounced "Mary Dank." I guess she was just a big fan of extraneous letters.

The book has what I expected-- recipes for leafy green salads like chef's or Caesar, recipes for the jiggly standbys like sea foam salad and sunshine salad. And of course, it has plenty of salads that reflect the trends of the time, like throwing olives and celery into absolutely everything.

Can't say I've ever looked at a peach half and thought what it really needed was celery and olives bound with some mayonnaise. (I'm almost always okay with nutmeats, though! 😄)

And of course there are salads attributed to other countries and cultures for reasons that are elusive at best. I have no idea how "Fiesta" got into the title of Fiesta Peach Salad.

I thought there might be avocado or cinnamon in there somewhere, but nope!  The peach halves, cream cheese, and maraschino cherries are just "fiesta-ed" for no apparent reason. The Mexican Vegetable Salad similarly has no real indications of how it got that name.

It's just a pretty unremarkable mixture of super-common salad ingredients. You could just as easily simply call it "Vegetable Salad," and diners would be happy not to expect something at least mildly spicy and instead get a plate of mayonnaise and otherwise-plain green peppers, onions, cabbage, tomatoes, and cucumber.

The Oriental Salad--aside from the less-than-ideal name-- is just as confusing.

I initially understood the naming-- almonds and peas are pretty common in American-style Chinese restaurant food-- but then I got to chopped dill pickles and cubed American cheddar cheese. And it's of course all coated in that most Asian of sauces-- mayonnaise. 

Speaking of Americanized Chinese food-- this one doesn't say it's sweet and sour, but it looked like a 1950s attempt to turn popular sweet-and-sour recipes into a gelatin salad.

I just can't see that pineapple-and-green-pepper mixture without thinking of all the sweet and sour recipes I've read. And if you've ever wondered what it might taste in a cream-cheesy lime Jell-O with Worcestershire sauce in it, well, this would be your chance to find out!

While there are plenty of recipes that surprised me, the book seemed to have a very poor gauge of what would be shocking. The headnote for Hot Chicken Salad starts with "Alice in Wonderland might exclaim: 'What, a hot salad?'" I'm not sure why readers at the time would be shocked, though, as plenty of old cookbooks have recipes for hot potato salad and often a hot slaw, too. 

I think readers are more likely to wonder why the hot chicken salad has to be served in grapefruit halves and topped with a mixture of cheese and crushed potato chips. (Okay, the second question has an easier answer-- It would taste good! The first question is more elusive, though. Maybe the grapefruit shells are just supposed to lull you into thinking this chicken-mayo-walnut-cheese-potato-chip concoction is light and healthy?)

My biggest surprise may have been that a salad book has a recipe for a salad that it compares to refrigerator cookie dough.

Just don't get confused, slice off the "dough" of cheese, pecans, hard-cooked eggs, chopped pimiento, pickle relish, and mayonnaise, and throw it in the oven! I could imagine a harried and distracted mom making disastrous "cookies" as an after-school snack and/or serving a plate full of chocolate-chip-cookie-dough-topped lettuce. At least the family would have a hilarious story to tell for years to come.

I loved going through all these old-timey salad recipes, even if I never found my grandpa's favorite: Honeymoon Salad. (If you don't know what it is, the recipe/ punchline is "Lettuce alone." I imagine that joke is at least as old as this book.)

A Saturday Morning "Treat"!

It's Saturday morning! You are a 1950s mom who is occasionally in the mood to cook and surprise the family with a special treat, so you decide to make homemade GRIDDLECAKES (Pancakes). So you get out the flour, eggs, baking powder, milk, etc., just as Woman's Home Companion Cook Book (edited by Dorothy Kirk, 1955) tells you to do.

And then you start worrying that if you make a these today, the family might expect them every goddamn weekend, which sounds like a lot of work.... at which point you notice something you might want to try in the list of variations below the main recipe.

And when the family comes to the table to eat, they wonder why the pancakes are being served with ketchup. And those bold enough to brave a ketchup-y bite soon notice the lumps of coarsely chopped clams hidden in the "cake" below.... And nobody complains because if you're capable of this, what else might you be capable of?

It's the perfect morning: You get the fun of making something when you're in the mood to spend a few minutes in the kitchen. There's little danger of running out of food and having to try to whip up a new batch when the ingredients are running low, or of needing to fend off a request for a repeat next weekend when you just want to sleep in. And you got to enjoy your slice of cinnamon toast while it was still hot and crisp-- rather than eating it cold and slightly damp after having to help Suzie with the orange juice and Peter with a second helping-- because you ate before you got started with everyone else's "treat." Only you know what a genius you are.

Observing the unwatched pot

The cover of The Unwatched Pot: A Crockful of Recipes for Electric Slow Cooking (Paula Franklin for Hamilton Beach, 1975) looks like the coziest version of the 1970s.

I love the brick-wall-print slow cooker, the subtle harvest gold theme, and the funky cutting board. The cover doesn't make a bit of sense if you examine it for more than a second, though. How is a bunch of asparagus taller than the slow cooker and nearly as wide? And why do we need a collection of asparagus, mushrooms, cauliflower, a pepper, and a beet when the slow cooker is clearly already full and probably done cooking (based on the steam and the brown meat)? This is not even mentioning that the contents of the slow cooker (likely meat, peas, carrots, and potatoes) have absolutely no overlap with anything being prepped. So it's a cozy cover, but it's best not to think too hard about it.

The recipes are mostly what you'd expect in a slow-cooker cookbook-- a lot of stews and braises. This book does try to adapt other types of recipes for the slow-cooker, too, though, and I have to wonder about how well that might have worked. For instance, I imagine that the high point for many green bean casserole aficionados is the crispy canned onion topper. For that reason, I assumed that the slow-cooker version would encourage diners to pass the crispy onions around to top servings once the dish was done.

And I was very wrong. Not only are the fried onions slow-cooked for the entire time, but they are also cooked under wet ingredients: water chestnuts and a cream-of-chicken-soup-and-wine sauce! There can't be much crunch left by the time this is ready....

I doubt I'm alone in thinking that one of the slow cooker's charms is the chance to come home to an amazing-smelling house, knowing that deliciousness will be ready and waiting. And that is part of the reason I'm so skeptical of the fish recipes. Salmon loaf is probably low on anyone's list of favorite meals anyway, and if you've had it cooking for 4-5 hours, the whole house will smell like it for a week afterward.

Plus, I'm not entirely sure how well this would even work. This is a small recipe-- less than a pound of canned salmon once the skin and bones are removed. Mix it with a few jarred mushrooms, bread crumbs, eggs, and cheese. It doesn't seem like that would be enough to fill a slow cooker, so I kind of expected the instructions to say to put it into a smaller pan, put the pan in the slow cooker, and add water to steam this. Nope-- just smear the bottom of the slow cooker with fish bits! Maybe cooks are expected to use a smaller cooker-- not the family's regular full-size one-- but even if the family has multiple sizes of slow cookers (which seems unlikely), there is no real indication to break out the smaller one. I just don't know what is going on here.

Tunafish Casserole is also likely to make you wash the kitchen curtains afterwards because you can't stand that smell anymore.

At least it seems likely to fill the cooker a little better, what with the cream of mushroom soup, three eggs, half-cup of green olives, and cup of dry white wine along with the bread and cheese, but I can't get past the feeling that this would come out unpleasantly gluey.

The book also suggests cooking dessert in the slow cooker. There are plenty of recipes for poached fruit, but I'm more interested in the recipe for banana bread. 

Let's make that flowerpot banana bread! It combines the brief 1970s interest in cooking desserts in flowerpots (Use a NEW one! Not the one that had begonias in it!) with the idea that a crock pot is a good place to bake something (even though the food is not going to brown). People must have been really bored back then. (I mean, this was before they could make up weird shit and post it to social media for the clicks.)

In any case, I'm glad I got to observe The Unwatched Pot. I just hope it doesn't feel violated given that I spent a few hours looking at it.

Pepper prepper

I adore bell peppers! I will throw at least a few bits of bell pepper into pretty much any savory thing I'm cooking-- some green for the slightly bitter minerality, maybe some other colors if I wouldn't mind a subtle sweetness-- and I'll snack on a crispy, juicy raw strip or two while I'm prepping the cooked part. It's just nice that this habit is slightly less expensive now, in the height of summer.

That made me curious what cooks were doing with bell peppers sixty-or-so years ago, so I pulled out my trusty Favorite Recipes of Home Economics Teachers: Vegetables Including Fruits (1966) to see what home ec teachers recommended.

Unsurprisingly, there are a LOT of stuffed pepper recipes. Most go the traditional ground-beef-and-rice stuffing, like these Quick No-Bake Stuffed Peppers.

I thought these might be perfect for hot summer days since they're not baked, but you still have to boil the peppers in a pot large enough to hold four large green peppers, so this recipe is going to get the kitchen hot and humid regardless of whether they're baked....

One recipe went higher-end, stuffing the peppers with shrimp instead of ground beef. 

This version pairs the shrimp with saltine crumbs and cheese. Part of me wonders if modern diners might prefer to ditch the saltines and have shrimp and grits in pepper cups...

Some of the recipes use peppers as the medium to get additional veggies into the family, like this recipe that seems designed to use up excess produce, with corn and tomatoes in addition to the peppers.

Others just remind me how popular canned veggies used to be.

I worry that no amount of pork-and-beans or cream-style corn will be enough to cover up the smell of the canned peas. 😬

The section also includes a preparation that doesn't require stuffing peppers at all! Just grind up some green peppers, mix the glop with cheese, bread crumbs, and milk, and bake for an hour.

I imagine this coming out of the oven looking like a space alien barfed into a casserole dish... But hey, you don't have to stuff the peppers!

I am, unsurprisingly, going to continue just throwing pepper bits into pretty much everything except pancakes and oatmeal while snacking on raw pepper strips. It's good to know I'm not missing much when I don't use a recipe....