Government-Issue Egg Recipes

The cover of Egg Dishes for Any Meal (U.S. Department of Agriculture, issued June 1946, slightly revised February 1946) cracks me up. (Pun intended because I'm just that kind of person.)

I love the big, round font that "EGG" is written in, as if each letter kind of wants to be an egg. I love the row of eggs standing on their comically tiny legs holding banners that say "Protein," "Vitamins," and "Minerals" with their comically tiny hands. And I can't help but wonder if the "Vitamins" and "Minerals" eggs feel kind of slighted since they're mostly hidden, or whether they have stage fright and are glad "Protein" is up front to take the brunt of viewers' gazes.

The pamphlet itself is not super exciting, mostly full of standard instructions, like how to fry, scramble, poach, etc. or standard recipes like soufflés, omelets, and custards. The back reminds readers of how much home cooks had to stretch ingredients in those years so soon after the war, touting eggs as a way to add extra protein and richness to the ubiquitous white sauce.

Eggs also provide a way to stretch whipped cream when there's not quite enough.

And there is a savory custard, apparently because adding little cubes of savory custard could turn vegetables or soup or pretty much anything into a main dish.

It was a tough time.

There are a few fun recipes, though. "Eggaroni" is kind of fun to say all by itself.

I can just imagine all the kids who thought they were getting a plate full of pale macaroni and cheese and then realizing it was macaroni with horseradish-flavored white sauce and hard cooked eggs. I'll bet that went over well.

For those who love the mingled scents of cabbage and hard-cooked eggs, there's an Egg Slaw.

I can only imagine how rotten that could get during a midday picnic...

And for gelatin salad enthusiasts, there is a Molded Egg Salad.

This recipe is made with unflavored gelatin rather than lemon or lime! And mayo-haters could actually avoid it in this version of egg salad, presuming they could get out of any last-minute garnishing that might occur.

In any case, the recipes do seem to hold the promised protein, vitamins, and minerals! The family's excitement levels about this may vary, but hey-- cooks could always fall back on good old scrambled eggs and toast if savory custards and eggaroni didn't go over as well as expected. 

Some old veggie recipes that are not quite as sad as I would have anticipated

Even though The Abridged Edition of the Saturday Evening Post Fiber & Bran Better Health Cookbook (Cory SerVaas, M.D., Charlotte Turgeon, and Fred Birmingham, 1977) is not a vegetarian cookbook, it does have a pretty good selection of vegetarian recipes. Some of them are exactly what I expect from old cookbooks: a big pile of random veggies on top of a starch.

In this case, the recipe recommends millet instead of the more usual brown rice. That gets topped with some sautéed veggies and a whole lot of parboiled veggies in the water from their parboiling adventure. No real sauce-- just cheese and a garnish of beets on top. 

Of course, there's the obligatory veggie loaf as well. 

This one is better than a lot of older veggie loaf recipes, though. It's got tomato puree and cheese for some flavor, so it won't just be a brick of brown rice and veggies. Plus, it's a relatively small vegetarian meatloaf, so hopefully it will get finished off before everyone is too sick of it.

There's also a selection of veggie burgers. One sounds like it could be a euphemism for a testicle-based dish...

... but "Nut Burgers" refers to the cashews and walnuts in the recipe. This even calls for chili powder, hot sauce, or other seasonings in addition to a full cup of cheese, so it might not taste like a lump of cardboard!

Another recipe just sounds like a carb to put between more carbs.

Put your oat burger on some whole wheat buns for an extremely brown and grainy meal!

And one recipe just sounds sad.

I mean "Meatless Bran Patties" sounds like something they'd serve in jail as a punishment meal for somebody who broke the rules. 

If everything seems a bit too dry and bland, the book even offers a Blended Cashew Gravy to try to alleviate the issue.

Two tablespoons of onion powder sounds like a lot, but I guess at least the gravy will have some kind of flavor, other than "slurry."

Even if the recipes aren't always terribly tempting, I've got to appreciate that this cookbook put more effort into the vegetarian recipes than I would expect in a 1970s non-vegetarian cookbook. Yay?

More weird-pile-o'-ingredient sandwiches for your wtf-ing pleasure

You ever get a hankering for a sandwich just before 3:00? Well, I have a pamphlet for that.

Well, I do in theory, anyway. Although the cover of Sandwiches Around the Clock (American Institute of Baking, 1950) suggests that the contents of the pamphlet will be arranged around time, the "recipes" (really just lists of things you can put together and spread on bread) are mostly themed by the target audiences-- children, men, party guests. So if you were hoping to find out the perfect mid-afternoon snackwich or the bread-fillers that might get you back to sleep if you wake up just before 3 a.m., this is false advertising.

Still, I found out that chicken must have been relatively expensive in the 1950s, as the Chickenette sandwich in the "Family Meal" section doesn't contain the ingredient you would probably assume is the main one.

No chicken at all! Just ground pork dressed up with veggies, peanuts, and mayonnaise.

At least the Hashburger is much more straightforward.

Yep-- canned corned beef hash on a bun! Dress it up with some tartar sauce, tomato, and lettuce, and gesture in a vaguely menacing way with your coffee cup if Walt or little Margaret seems like they might object.

I also learned that picnic time didn't necessarily mean grilling some hot dogs or hamburgers and calling it a day.

I hope those picnickers have something fun in their thermos.

In any case, it was much easier to prepare and pack sandwiches ahead of time than to cook on site. And doesn't a nice chilled sandwich sound good on a hot day anyway?

Well, maybe... Unless it's deviled ham blended with peanut butter, mayonnaise, and pickles.... Then all bets are off.

The book's oddest ideas might just be about what children like. It seems convinced that they really want peanut butter and cheese as a combo. 

And maybe it's right to some extent. Peanut butter with cream cheese and orange sounds weird but potentially good. I mean, cream cheese is good with pretty much anything, and people eat peanut butter with jelly all the time. Orange isn't that far off.

And then there's peanut butter and cheddar cheese...

Along with apple butter, which makes it a little like the apple pie + cheese combo. But also with peanut butter.

And then the book tosses the idea of peanut butter and just goes for the peanut paired with cottage cheese...

And mayonnaise... and onion salt. I guess I can see a few kids liking this, but they will also be the kids that everybody else tries to sit very far away from at the lunch table....

Interestingly, a lot of the recipes billed as being for kids contain no meat, but only one of them is explicitly named a vegetarian sandwich.

And this is just an extremely boring collection of raw grated vegetables bound with chili sauce and mayonnaise. It's hard to imagine anybody getting excited about this sandwich filling, much less a group of kids.

But hey, the booklet thinks the kids will get all excited for smoked tongue, too. 

Maybe kids in the '50s were way more open-minded about food than I imagine they would be. Or maybe everybody back then was just waaaay hungrier and would eat whatever anybody smeared on a slice of bread and told them to eat. In any case, I'm happy to eat peanut butter in my own weird modern way: spread on a flour tortilla, sprinkled with smoked salt, and rolled into a neat little spiral that is easy to scarf down between classes.

A gumbo of gumbos

While I mostly highlight recipes that sound terrible and/or the unfortunate cultural attitudes that show up in old cookbooks, sometimes I just like to see how a dish can be interpreted in a variety of ways. That's why today we're looking at a series of gumbos from River Road Recipes II: A Second Helping (The Junior League of Baton Rouge, Louisiana; January 1977 fourth printing).

Before I went through this book, I assumed gumbo was a stew thickened with okra that usually had seafood and celery, bell, peppers, and onions as the main components. Some Baton Rouge residents have a far more inclusive definition, though, as the Gumbo Vert recipe suggests.

This is just veggies-- cabbage, spinach, and onions (only one of them a component of the holy trinity that one might expect)-- with pickled pork in a flour-thickened sauce. Mrs. James Hymel, Jr., must have realized it wasn't what most others would recognize as a gumbo, so there's a tiny note at the bottom: "This is not a form of soup as one would think of as gumbo. It is called gumbo due to the fact that it is a mixture of things-- in this case green vegetables."

Most of the recipes are much closer to what I would expect, though. Seafood Gumbo was so popular that the book offers two different versions. The first version uses bacon drippings to start the roux and serves 20.

Plus it fortifies the tomatoes with some catsup. This version comes from Mrs. Robert Witcher in New York, so I wonder if it discredits the recipe. (I'm not sure why they'd have a recipe from a random person in New York, though, so maybe Mrs. Witcher originally lived in Baton Rouge and had to move away but still contributed to her old Junior League friends' cookbook.)

The Seafood Gumbo II starts with an oil-based roux and serves 8-10.

No catsup to supplement the tomatoes in this version, but it includes allspice berries, so it might have still been going for a slightly catsup-y taste? I would not have guessed that that was desirable, but it seems to be....

For those who feel intimidated by the huge ingredient lists for the seafood gumbos, there's a Shrimp, Crab, and Okra Gumbo. 

This version is tomato-free and uses filé in addition to okra.

For the hunters, there's a Duck and Sausage Gumbo.

This one, too, omits the tomatoes, and it goes all-in on the filé, leaving out the okra entirely.

If the list seems a bit empty without crawfish, don't worry! There's a Crawfish Filé Gumbo too.

(I have to admire the way the editors made sure to consistently add the accent aigu to the "e" in "filé"! This recipe even includes the accent on sauté.) Crawfish Filé Gumbo goes with Ro-Tel tomatoes to get a bit more kick, omits the okra, and lets diners add filé  to taste. (Interesting that an ingredient from the title is actually just an optional add-on at the end.)

Okay, and if you're really disappointed that this post doesn't have anything too outlandish (assuming you're not among the people who have VERY STRONG VIEWS about whether tomatoes belong in gumbo, or whether it's acceptable to use smoked sausage rather than a genuine Cajun sausage in a gumbo, or whether...), then here's something at least kind of odd to reset your palate.

I'm not sure what Bleu Cheese Salad Sherbert (Yes-- spelled with two "r"s!) would be like, exactly-- might actually be a pretty good tangy/ creamy surprise between courses-- but if you don't know what to expect, that first bite would probably be pretty alarming! 

So... Gumbo! This is a real mixture of a post, so I'm going to declare it is a gumbo as well! Mrs. James Hymel, Jr. might not care.

The Ladies of the Philoptochos Society Tell Us What to Do with Eggplant

I wasn't sure what to expect from Popular Greek Recipes (The Ladies of the Philoptochos Society, Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church, Charleston, South Carolina, copyright 1976, 1999 printing). Would it be full of actual Greek (or at least Greek-inspired) recipes? Would it have a sprinkling of Greek recipes among a field of recipes featuring cream-of-something soup, canned chow mein noodles, and gelatin salads?

The ruins on the cover and the angular font suggest this book will be pretty serious about sticking to the Greek theme, and it's mostly accurate.

One of the earliest recipes in this book suggested to me just how difficult it was to make Greek (or at least Greek-ish) food decades ago: the Cucumber Dip.

The Greek name is written underneath in parentheses, and I quickly realized that Satziki is such a familiar dip now that I even knew the current preferred spelling: tzatziki. In other words, I imagine most mainstream Americans would know what the dip is if we were just given the Greek name. That was clearly not the case then. Plus, the first step of this recipe is to make your own Greek yogurt because Greek yogurt was just not something most people could buy in the store at that time. Now, it seems like at least a third of the contents of the yogurt case are Greek.

At least cooks could still make Greek yogurt. Sometimes, the substitutions would have to be sneakier. For instance, what do you notice about the Artichokes and Fava Beans recipe?

If you're like me, it is the distinct lack of fava beans. I'm guessing canned lima beans was the closest item in most American grocery stores, so it would have to work here. No need to change the name of the recipe and draw attention to the substitution, though!

Some recipes can be made a more traditional way, but the cooks still attempting to meet Greek Orthodox religious expectations while also adapting to expectations that Americans work a minimum of 247 hours a week realized they had to cut corners sometimes. Bean Soup, for instance, lists two methods: the traditional way and the fast way.

The traditional way soaks beans overnight, cooks them until they start to get tender, and gradually adds various vegetables to simmer until the soup is finally done. The fast way throws a can of tomato soup and a can of navy beans together with some sautéed veggies and calls it a day.

There's also a recipe for "Jiffy Loukoumi" (a Greek version of Turkish delight).

I guess the Greek cooks are not entirely immune to the delights of doing unexpected things with Jell-O, but at least this version doesn't have, say, pineapple juice and gherkins or cherries and olives.

There are plenty of interesting dishes that I had no idea about, too, like the Eggplant Preserve.

Sweet eggplant? It's not something I ever would have imagined, and I'm not really sure what to do with it. (Most Google searches lead to eggplant preserved in oil. The ones that are relevant don't really tell what to do with the sweet eggplants once you have them.) I guess just straight-up eat the sweet, tiny eggplants like candy, since there's a recipe for crystallizing them?

I also learned about a memorial tradition of putting out a wheat tray (Koliva).

This recipe is clearly important-- it takes two days and a lot of shaping and decorating. For memorials, it's probably best not to cut corners! 

So, the book offers all kinds of little insights into Greek Orthodox life a few decades ago... It wasn't something I ever wondered about, but part of the reason I love old cookbooks is that they can let me peek in on details of other people's lives without needing a pair of binoculars (or worrying that the police might get called). Plus, it also makes me wonder if the eggplant emoji would just make Greek Orthodox cooks think of candy.

A little sweetness and a little danger for October

According to The Political Palate (The Bloodroot Collective (Betsey Beaven, Noel Giordano, Selma Miriam, and Pat Shea), 1980), early fall started at the autumnal equinox and only lasts through Halloween, so I better give you a crop of early fall recipes!

The first frost can come in early fall. If so, you might need to pick tomatoes while they're still green. Yeah, fried green tomatoes is a common way to use them, but this book offers a different (and far more involved!) preparation. 

The Green Tomato Pie is a mostly-savory preparation, combining the green tomatoes with onions, two full pounds of cheese, and just a touch of brown sugar, all enclosed in a two-crust pie. I'll bet this one would make the onion-lovers happy.

Of course, I need to include something wild, as The Political Palate centers fresh, local ingredients. For early fall, we get a whiff of danger with Pasta con Funghi.

Yes, this is a recipe that starts with a warning. If you don't know what you're doing, this preparation could kill you! And studying mushroom field guides is unlikely to be enough to ensure your safety! So get out there and pick some wild mushrooms! The chance that everyone could wind up dead is an added bonus for the Halloween horror season.

I have to imagine most people who owned this cookbook skipped that recipe (or just made a tomato sauce with boring supermarket mushrooms the Collective may not have approved of). I can't blame them.

Let's get the taste of danger out of our mouths by ending with something sweet: Lime Tart.

I was expecting the typical key-lime-plus-sweetened-condensed-milk preparation, but this one goes a different route and cooks lime juice and rind in a bunch of eggs (with extra yolks), honey, and butter. I can't help but imagine this tasting like lime scrambled eggs... I hope it's better than that, though, especially served the recommended way under a cloud of whipped cream.

Here's hoping your October is better than you imagine it will be, and that the scariest thing you encounter is kids dressed like ninjas or dinosaurs. I'm not a fan of kids, but they are better than deadly mushrooms in your pasta. I guess. Especially if they're dressed like dinosaurs.

A small Victoria

Sometimes I spot a little pamphlet that seems to have fallen out of a larger cookbook when I'm in second-hand bookstores. If the store sells books only-- and I don't see any attempt to sell pamphlets on their own-- the pamphlet will often somehow find its way into a book I'm buying anyway. I figure it would have been free in the original book if it hadn't fallen out, so no loss if it hitches a ride out in a different book. That's how I ended up with La Victoria Authentic Mexican Recipes (undated, but my guess is mid-1960s since this looks '60s-ish and the address has a zip code).

I love the bright colors on this cover! (Also appreciate having a floating, disembodied head by the bottom half of the title, but that's just because I'm weird.) Plus, the faint stamp on the cover suggests this specific pamphlet was originally distributed from Casa Moneo in New York, a Spanish and Latin food hub. I'm always excited to catch glimpses of history from objects that most people would just throw away when grandma (or perhaps abuela in this case) died.

The booklet includes a lot of dishes that seem very familiar now, but the pronunciations following the recipe names suggest that they were not so familiar back when this was distributed.

And then when I look at the pronunciation guide for burritos (Boo-ree'-toes), I wonder how familiar I am with the concept. I always say the word like they're chilly (Brrr-ree'-toes)! At least I could accurately assume that the tortilla wrapped up beans (or meat) and sauces.

I get a similar concern with the Enchiladas. Am I really as familiar with the concept as I think if I can't even pronounce it right?

En-chee-lah'-dah? I always say it like these are cold too-- En-chill'-ah-dah. Maybe the fact that I get cold so easily subconsciously influences my pronunciation? (More likely, it's just that I'm from the Midwest and never took a Spanish class.) In any case, the audience for this pamphlet must have been pretty big, considering the little recipe collections were distributed in Casa Moneo, where the shoppers seem unlikely to need this type of instruction, and to people who did need this type of instruction.

The pamphlet also offered some dishes that might still be somewhat unfamiliar to white Midwesterners, like Nopalitos Tiernos.

This offers a few mini-recipes and suggestions for the diced jarred cactus, but my favorite is the very last paragraph, which suggests, "For a unique salad, chill cactus, rinse and drain, put on lettuce and cover with your favorite salad dressing. Use as a filler for meat loaf." I assume those two ideas were meant to be separate, but they ran out of room to put the meat loaf suggestion on a new line, so it looks like cooks are supposed to fully assemble the salad, then give up and stuff the whole thing into a meat loaf.

I'm glad this little guy hitched a ride home with me. Maybe I should celebrate by making some Bean Boo-ree'-toes. Now that I know the pronunciation is supposed to be scary (Boo!) rather than chilly (Brr!), I like them just a tiny bit more than I already did.