Spring suggestions from Women's Circle

I usually focus on pre-1980s cookbooks (partially because the presentation and photography started getting slicker in the 1980s, and I prefer the more homespun look of older books, and partially so there's a cutoff date to keep me from being tempted to buy everything I see at a thrift store or antique mall). But sometimes a newer collection slips through, and I'm not going to waste it just because it's a little new. Today is one of those slightly-newer-book days. We're looking at the April 1990 issue of Women's Circle Home Cooking. 

This issue is partially about Easter, as it was mid-April in 1990, so we get a ham recipe that I am tempted to call "Pig in a Blanket."

Baked Ham in a Blanket features a 12-15-pound ham-- so only one pig!-- and I'm pretty sure the blanket is not supposed to be eaten. It's just there for seasoning and insulation. The booklet expects cooks to know that, though, as the instructions end at "Bake at 300 degrees, allowing 25 minutes per pound of ham." (I figured out that the dough is not edible mainly because the it had no fat-- so it's likely to be hard. Plus, Jenny of Silver Screen Suppers mentioned this technique a while ago...)

Since Catholics in the audience will be going meatless on Fridays in the weeks before Easter, the booklet dedicates its Microwave Magic section to Lent-appropriate dishes. I'm most interested in their adorable "Microwave Magic" mascot, tbh. 

How could I resist the little guy, with the reflection face and microwave-sized chef's hat? There's a pretty boring recipe for Salmon Casserole (mostly just a can of salmon mixed with bread crumbs and minced celery and onion bits, topped with a couple slices of cheese, and microwaved until hot) in case you want the microwave to stink like fish, but I was more intrigued by the Quiche Stuffed Peppers.

Peppers loaded up with feta and a custard of eggs mixed with half-and-half sound pretty good (well, if you like onions, or if you'd allow me to swap them out for something I'd prefer, like a half-can of petite diced tomatoes)! That is, assuming they actually work out. This is one of those recipes that sounds like it will be good in theory and a mess in practice-- a pepper won't balance quite right and will fall over, knocking over the next nearest pepper, and next thing you know, the domino effect means the filling is spilled everywhere. Or maybe they would just boil over before the eggs could set? In any case, this seems like a recipe that would end with a lot of scrubbing...

And if ingesting all that dairy fat on "fast" days when you're avoiding meat, and later gobbling down pounds of ham and Easter candies leads to unwanted weight gain, the magazine offers up a "Tasty Trimmers" section, complete with this recipe for a "diet" custard dessert.

You might wonder why I decided to include a fairly standard custard, but check out what the "Sweet Milk" entails: soaking 2/3 of a cup of raisins in a couple cups of "reconstituted nonfat milk" overnight, and then straining them out to leave 1-1/2 cups of milk that "should be an ivory color" to use as the sweetener. I don't think I've ever seen this trick before, and I have no real idea of whether this would actually save more calories than just using a small amount of regular sugar in the custard. I guess the fact that raisins were employed is supposed to make this healthier!? And maybe the cook will burn a negligible number of extra calories straining the milk...

In any case, Home Cooking editors seemed to think that April was a good time for fiddly little recipes-- a time for making throwaway dough blankets, leaky peppers, and milk full of mushy raisins that need to be strained out before the liquid is fit to use. I guess you need something to do inside when the weather decides to dump inches of rain on you before and/or after getting 40 degrees warmer and/or cooler in five hours flat... (Not that my spring has been like that so far...)

Funny Name: Laid-Back Edition

Don't you hate it when you just want to eat dinner in front of the TV in your most comfortable (and stained-up stretched-out) T-shirt, and then you realize your dinner is wearing a tuxedo? And you feel irritated that it might judge you, when you just want to fill your belly while you watch Horror Geek videos? Well, Favorite Recipes of America: Meats Including Seafood and Poultry (1966) has just the recipe for you. (Okay, maybe most people wouldn't see "Sick Flicks" as appropriate to watch while you're eating, but my grandmas both thought graphic descriptions of other people's medical problems and procedures were the perfect mealtime conversational topic, so... maybe I should stop filling in my hypotheticals with personal examples.)

In any case, this is an Informal Pork Roast with Vegetables, so it won't judge. (Unlike you. Or the tuxedo-clad roasts most people make.)

Treasure Hunting at Harris House!

Ready for a treasure from 1978 1991? (I thought it was from 1978 when I bought it because the divider pages with chapter names on one side and kitchen tips on the other had that copyright written on them, but then a closer inspection showed the book itself is from 1991.) In any case, these are Treasured Recipes from Harris House (in Westerville, Ohio). 

This one has all kinds of familiar-sounding recipes with their own little spin, so today's post is a menu of mayhem! First up, an appetizer:

I fully expected seasoned cream cheese to be rolled up in the middle of the salami slices, so I was surprised (okay, more like alarmed) that these are loaded up with tuna-and-egg salad and a slice of mozzarella. I can see mozzarella and salami going together just fine, but I can't understand what tuna-and-egg salad would bring to that party (other than a smell I'd prefer to avoid).

Let's just move on to the vegetable: Carrot Salad. I kind of assumed it would be either the carrots-raisins-mayonnaise salad OR the carrots-citrus-Jell-O-pineapple salad, so you know it won't be either of those.

It's kind of both, with the mayonnaise and raisins of the former AND the pineapple of the latter, plus marshmallows, coconut, celery, and whipped cream for good measure. (I'm sure marshmallows and celery are awesome together.)

Good news: I'm giving some relief from the questionable-at-best sounding dishes and ending with a main dish and dessert that sound relatively appetizing. They're just... different. I imagine that the Best-Ever Macaroni and Cheese is actually pretty darn good.

I am just kind of floored that a recipe with a serving size of four uses a full cup of butter and a pound of cheese! That's a quarter cup of butter and a quarter pound of cheese PER PERSON. Also, there's only a half-pound of macaroni in this whole thing, when I've seen recipes that use twice as much pasta for the same amount (or less) of butter and cheese. So this recipe is clearly just cover to eat as much dairy fat as you can get away with while claiming it's a main dish... I guess we know what makes it "best ever!"

In case the main dish doesn't fully sate your cravings for fat and carbs, there's a dessert: Double Upside-Down Cake.

I always thought the point of an upside-down cake was to flip the cake out of the pan to show off the carefully-arranged layer of fruit on the part that was initially the bottom, but this recipe suggests I've got it all wrong. Even though this version goes to the extra length of creating two different fruit layers-- one with pineapple and one with peaches-- it turns one into a bottom layer so its topping will be invisible on the finished cake, and then covers up the top layer with additional whipped cream. It will just look like a regular layer cake. (But at least it will work a little more dairy fat into the meal!) Or maybe the cake recipe is just trying to bury the treasures, to go along with the "treasure" title? 

Who knows? But if you consider tuna-and-egg salad "buried" in salami and cheese or marshmallows and celery buried in shredded carrots and mayonnaise to be buried treasure, then I'm curious how your mind works...

The Congealing of the Green

Remember how I said Favorite Recipes of America: Meats Including Seafood and Poultry (1966) still had some wonders for the masochists out there? Well, today we're looking at a few for St. Patrick's Day. (It's my understanding that a lot of people end up puking for that celebration anyway, so these should fit right in.)

We will start with the one the book actually recommends for the day: St. Patrick's Salad.

Yep-- it's one of those salads, with olives, tuna, celery, mayonnaise, vinegar, and cucumber in lime gelatin dessert. It's green! That's the only requirement. Nobody said it had to taste good.

And since this recipe had other lime-gelatin salads nearby, I decided to throw those in for good measure. Want to ruin some perfectly delightful pecans? Then the Chicken-Pecan Salad is the way to go.

Yep, you've got to suspend the titular ingredients in lime gelatin, along with celery, cottage cheese, and mayonnaise.

And if that doesn't seem sufficiently complicated, you can make the Cottage Cheese Salad with Shrimp Dressing instead.

Honestly, I kind of love lime gelatin with cottage cheese puréed into it. It's got a cheesecake-adjacent vibe without being overly heavy and rich. But throw in some onion, horseradish, and mayonnaise? Why? And if that's not bad enough, you can ruin some shrimp by making it into a sauce (probably a pretty good sauce if you actually like salad dressing and shrimp) to pour over the top of this monstrosity. 

In short, you're better off sticking to the green beer! But if you want time-consuming and money-wasting additional invitations to barf, you've got options.

Meats of 'Merica

Have to admit that I'm always excited to pick up cookbooks from the Favorite Recipes of America series because they have a good selection of weird regional concoctions from all over the country alongside the boring and repetitive things like beef stew. So today, we're diving into the Meats Including Seafood and Poultry edition from 1966.

There are so many weird and wacky recipes that I will write several posts to go over this book, but I have two main takeaways for today. 

1. Americans apparently really loved ham and marshmallows in 1966. I was surprised to find a Mandarin-Ham Salad that vaguely resembled the glorified rice my grandma used to make for dessert occasionally.

I never imagined anyone would want to throw ham in with all the fruit and marshmallows. Maybe this is an attempt to really emphasize that this is a SALAD, not dessert.

And then I came across Pineapple Hamettes...

...which top the ham-patty-topped pineapple slices with mashed sweet potatoes and a melty half-marshmallow. It's like two casseroles in one!

2. People must have really had to guess at the meaning of cooking terms before the age of the internet. You might expect Parmesan Veal Cutlets to be made with Parmesan and veal. (At least, I did, but I guess I am hopelessly naïve.)

No Parm to be found! I guess maybe Sylivia (Is that a typo? Part of me says yes, but then again, my mother-in-law's name looks like a typo of a common name, so maybe there was a "Sylivia" out there?) Rakosnik thought that "Parmesan" meant "topped with tomato sauce and cheese" without realizing that it was actually a reference to a specific type of cheese?

It was easier for me to figure out that one than the Quick Chili Burgers. I assumed it would be a thick chili put on hamburger buns and eaten like a burger or perhaps burgers topped with a bit of canned chili (like chili dogs). 

But ground beef + cream of mushroom soup ≠ chili. There's no chili powder, no hot sauce, no tomato, nothing at all to suggest chili! Maybe Lily M. Hawkins just thought that "chili" meant loose ground meat in a sauce? That's my best guess.

While I am very accustomed to "Chinese" recipes that take real liberties with the cuisine by, say, putting vaguely Chinese-coded ingredients (like rice and canned veggies) in a casserole with a bunch canned cream soups and perhaps a blanket of cheese, this interpretation of "Chinese" was a new one for me.

I mean, I get that Chinese cuisine centers around rice, and some foods come with crunchy peanuts on top... But I don't think that dumping canned shoestring potatoes, raisins (which aren't even that common in Chinese cuisine from what I can tell... Maybe Mrs. John C. Regan is confusing Chinese with Indian food here?) and peanuts on top of some rice, then throwing stewed chicken and "thick" gravy over the top exactly fits the bill. 

This book is an interesting peek into the sweet-loving and meaning-missing world of the 1960s. And don't worry-- it still has such sights to show you. (Especially if you're kind of masochistic.)

A tip that gets less helpful the more you think about it, but it could still be useful...

When I perused The Best of Electric Crockery Cooking (Jacqueline Hériteau, 1976), I did notice one tip for crock-pot-cookery that seemed pretty cool.

Admittedly, I am not the kind of person who would appreciate Sausage-Stuffed Apples, but I get that the sweet-and-savory crowd would see the appeal. The part of this recipe that interested me was the idea that if you wanted the dish for breakfast, you could set the prepped food on a trivet over some ice cubes to keep the food safe if it had to set out for a while, then set the timer "to start cooking on Low, 5 or 6 hours before breakfast." I liked the idea that it would be ready on time AND still safe after setting out for a while, even if you didn't necessarily want the apples cooking the entire night. 

Of course, then I looked at the recipe more closely. If it takes at least six hours to cook, why would you set the timer for five hours before you wanted breakfast? They'd still be underdone. And if they can cook up to eight hours anyway, why bother with the ice at all? You could probably just start everything as you went to bed, or if you sleep a long time or have a lengthy morning routine before breakfast, set the timer to start an hour or two after you go to bed. Food is supposed to be safe at room temperature for up to two hours anyway, unless it's at a picnic in the sun on a hot day or something like that. So the trick doesn't actually seem particularly necessary for this recipe, but it's still a neat idea that might be more helpful for something with a shorter cooking time. 

Maybe Hériteau just wanted to put this tip in somewhere and landed on this recipe? Who knows, but I'm glad it showed up...

Maple Madness

When I idly wondered what kinds of recipes Home Gardener's Cookbook (Marjorie Page Blanchard, 1974) would include for March, I wasn't really sure what kinds of recipes might fit. After all, there's not a whole lot growing in March that would already be ready to harvest, especially considering the book is written for people whose climates are similar to those of the author, who lived in Connecticut. I didn't expect that finding the answer would make me so happy.

Maple! That led me to remember grandpa's little shack in the woods near their pond. It was abandoned the vast majority of the year, but if we were lucky enough to make a late winter visit to their house, the shack might be pumping out big clouds of steam as grandpa boiled down the sap that he'd collected in the little metal "houses" (as I thought of them since they had roofs) tapped into the maple trees. And I knew on our next visit, grandma would get out the electric skillet to make stacks of golden-brown pancakes to drown in the syrup. (It takes a long time to boil down syrup-- 40 gallons of sap make one gallon of syrup.) We never had anything so fancy as this Maple Nut Mousse (and there's no way grandma would have put rum in it!), but it sounds pretty tasty. (Especially if you subbed in pecans for the walnuts.)

There's also a recipe for another thing that sounds delicious but never would have been on grandma's list of things to make: Maple Bourbon Cake.

I was excited to see these recipes not just because they brought back some happy memories, but also because the recipes were in the right month. I know it's a pedantic, who-cares problem, but in the past few years, food companies have decided that maple is a fall flavor. It seems like they whip out the maple stuff to try to distract/ mollify the people who are offended when someone somewhere has the audacity to enjoy anything with pumpkin spice. But there I am in the corner, practicing my own equally pointless form of judginess, saying "But maple is a late winter/ early spring flavor!" So I am grateful to Marjorie Page Blanchard for putting maple in with the March recipes, even though the people who bought the book better damn well already have had some maple trees if they hoped to make syrup. It's not like the gardeners in her readership could have planted some maples and been ready to tap them anytime soon!

So here's to being made happy by some pointless little detail. Take what you can get!