Vintage Pork for "Two"

I live in small household, so most of my cooking is for just one or two people. The old cookbooks featuring recipes for families with half-a-dozen kids always leave me glad I'm not hauling gallons of soup on and off the stove (I'd almost certainly burn somebody!) or trying to get a massive Jell-O mold to set up. But once in a while, I'll come across some recipes intended to serve one or two people-- a little peek into what the lives of the freer people might have been like. Such is the case for Pork for Two (National Pork Producers Council, undated, but looks very 1970s).

I mean, it has a harvest gold fondue pot on the cover. I rest my case.

Aside from the recommendation to cut two blade steaks into thin strips, skewer them, and then cook them in a fondue pot full of hot oil, the pamphlet also offers another popular vintage recipe option: going Hawaiian.

I hope the smoke on the pork chops is enough to cut through all the sweetness of pineapple chunks, sweet potatoes, and pineapple preserves. (At least if it's not, you're not stuck with a lot of leftovers to throw away or try to choke down.)

The booklet's titles really try to sell the recipes. For instance, calling anything a "platter" makes it sound bountiful and maybe just a little bit fancy. 

And these ham and potato platters feature a glaze on the ham (which sounds wretched to me, but I know my hatred of sweet-and-sour-type sauces is unnaturally strong) plus a fancy piped border of sour-creamy mashed potatoes. Whatever picture you have in your head, though, I kind of doubt it looks like this picture.

Is it just me, or do those look like flowers some six-year-old drew right before they were referred to the student counselor? Then the counselor kept asking why the "flowers" looked so bloody... and whether the centers were ringed by petals or teeth. (That right there is a good reason to keep cooking ONLY for two. If the couple has the wisdom not to reproduce, there's no chance of getting dragged down to the school to find out what Junior has done this time.)

The book's biggest secret, though, is that it is only half-heartedly committed to the assertion in the title that these recipes are for two. If the ingredients in the Fruit Glazed Butterfly Chops sound like a LOT for only two people, well, look near the end.

Yeah-- this makes six servings. But you can freeze and reheat this! Just like you could with a lot of the recipes that serve six in pretty much any other cookbook. So what is the point of Pork for Two if it's "for two" in the sense that any larger recipe can serve two now... and again tomorrow... and maybe again the next day? It's less "pork for two" and more of an early version of what we'd now call "meal prep."

No worries, though! The picture for the caption promises "You'll never get tired of this pork-dried fruit combo accented with ginger and mustard." If you were hoping for recipes you wouldn't get tired of because they wouldn't leave you with leftovers, well, tough. The book implies you should have had Junior and Susan and Richard and Patty so you could just make and fully consume regular-size recipes. Not having excessive leftovers is a fair trade-off for all the afternoons spent in the student counselor's office. 

Celebrating a non-patriarchal November

The Political Palate (The Bloodroot Collective (Betsey Beaven, Noel Giordano, Selma Miriam, and Pat Shea), 1980) starts with late autumn (October 31-- Witch's New Year-- through winter solstice), but I started posting about this book in January (early winter). That means the recipes I'm posting now are earlier in the book than the ones I started the year with! I'm sure nobody else cares, but I think it's funny.

The book does not have many recipes for holidays, as the Collective believes "that carrying on 'holiday' traditions of a system which is, per se, anti-woman, is concretely harmful to our minds and spirits." Harvest celebrations are fine, though, as long as the harvest is celebrated "without reference to the patriarchal Puritans and their condescension and exploitation of 'Indians.'" The Harvest Vegetable Platter is their way to celebrate. 

The Rutabaga-Potato Puree loaded up with butter and a touch of garlic sounds like something I'd see on a cooking show now (except home cooks would be admonished to use a potato ricer rather than a food processor, lest the puree get gummy).

The Roasted Parsnips and Carrots to go with the puree represent a serious commitment to root vegetables! Plus, the sunflower seeds mixed in suggest an underlying allegiance to old-school health foods. 

If that platter seemed a bit lacking to you, don't worry! There are a couple more pages! I just figured it was easier to break this recipe up. On to page two....

Next, we've got acorn squash (chosen in part because they're "womblike," and that selection criteria for a food is not weird or creepy at all) full of chestnut stuffing. I love that the bread in the stuffing is specified to be homemade. (I will admit that when I was young and idealistic, I made homemade bread several days in advance of a Thanksgiving so I could cube and dry it to use for entirely homemade stuffing. And then I got old and lazy and realized that once you mix in all the seasonings and butter and whatever add-ons you want, nobody can tell the bread is homemade anyway, so why bother? Grocery stores sell bread cubes for a reason.)

There's also an Apple Cranberry Sauce made of -- surprise!-- apples and cranberries, plus a little cider, cinnamon, and honey.

Round things out with steamed broccoli flowerets (because all the root vegetables and squash provide insufficient amounts of vegetable matter) and add a Miso Gravy.

Well, make that Miso Gravy with onion, butter, garlic, mushrooms, seasonings, and beer. Then you're fully ready to "commemorate the fruits of the earth," or at least sate a seasonal urge to cook up a big bunch of food all at once, invite people over so you can engage in arguments that got a lot louder than you might have expected catch up on each others' lives, and hope everybody eats just the right amount of food so you might have a few leftovers but not enough that you will get sick of them....

In focusing on the more traditional holiday, though, I realized that I missed out on posting the recipe for the holiday that starts this book and this season: Witch's New Year (which is technically over now anyway). Witches' Froth (or Apple Cream) is a dessert that recalls the days when people were not worried about salmonella in raw eggs.

Also, a time when apple sauce fluffed up with egg whites and flavored with a touch of honey and rum or applejack could count as a dessert. I personally think the witches are getting short-changed on this one, but eating Reese's Peanut Butter Pumpkins wasn't an option until 1993, and it would have gone against the Collective's anti-capitalist principles anyway.... I guess I wouldn't have made a good witch.

In any case, enjoy the harvest! I will see you in December with some recipes that are definitely not related to "the obscenity of noise and false jollity that is Christmas," as the Collective puts it.

How to make your apples feel very special

I always post special recipes on this blog, but today I'm going all out and posting very special recipes.

That is the opinion of American Cyanamid Company in cooperation with the National Apple Institute, who put out Very Special Apple Recipes from America's Orchard Lands (undated, but pre-zip code, so before mid-1963). Now let's go bobbing for apple recipes!

The booklet offers various regional recipes accompanied by illustrations of the areas from which they originated. 

For instance, from New York and New England...

...represented by Robert Frost getting ready to stop by some woods on a snowy evening, we have Cape Cod Baked Apples.

This is the Thanksgiving side dish to serve when you want apple pie, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes with marshmallows, and pecan pie, but you don't have the space/ time/ energy to make all of them individually.

From the West...

...represented here at the start of a secret Russian invasion, we have Apples-on-the Half-Shell.

It's the ever-popular mid-century-fancy dish of seafood in avocado halves-- this time with apples since it's an apple cook booklet, after all. 

My favorite recipes, though, are from Appalachia...

...represented here by a man pointedly ignoring a woman trying to get water from an old-timey pump. Woman, don't expect help. He's got hogs to stare at. Or maybe really misshapen, out-of-scale cows. It's hard to tell. That's why he's got to stare.

There's an Apple Potato Salad, I guess to show the West that they aren't the only ones who can randomly throw apples into popular salads that are generally apple-free.

And there's also a Saturday Night Casserole.

I guess this is to remind everybody that even if it is the day after payday, the family can't afford anything more than hot dogs to go with the home-grown apples, onions, and home-canned cabbage for dinner on a Saturday night.

This is a cozy little booklet to peruse, especially on a crisp fall day when the grocery stores are filled with fresh apples. I'm only tempted to try to find some Ginger Golds or Cortlands to eat raw, though. No recipes (very special or plain old) needed!

Celebrate Halloween with melting clowns and figs that make you uncomfortable

Happy (almost!) Halloween! For the last weekend before the big day, here are a few Halloween dessert ideas from Mary Margaret McBride's Encyclopedia of Cooking Deluxe Illustrated Edition (1959).

First, we have a simply decorated cake. 

The decorations are so simple that the blurb beneath the picture is all the instruction you get: use orange frosting to make pumpkin. Paint on face with chocolate. Looks cute, but I'm distracted by the witch pumpkin in the background. Is that just really weird shading, or does she have some kind of complexion issue? Maybe a weird birthmark? I know better than to ask, so I'll just leave it to my imagination. (Scarring from surviving a burning-at-the-stake attempt it is!)

I know the Party Clown isn't technically Halloween-related, but I'm throwing it in anyway, given the ubiquity of killer clowns in horror movies and Art the clown's recent box office success.

This clown looks more like a horror movie victim than villain, though-- just a disembodied head resting on ... something. At least this dessert has instructions, so I can find out.

Ah-- so disembodied clown head atop a cake round. Now I want a new clown-related horror movie with a title like Big Top Bakery of Blood. 

The real horror, though, is the Halloween Fig Faces cake. 

The little dude staring at us from the center of the top row realizes just how racist this cake will look in 65 years, and he wants nothing to do with this picture. 

The book doesn't give instructions for this one either, I guess because it was so easy to tap into the free-floating racism of the time that it was second nature...

Hope I didn't ruin your Halloween with these sad little figs! If you feel too down, I find that a nice Reese's peanut butter pumpkin can always set things right. 

Thinking way too hard about the manliness of rice-based dishes

When I saw Man-Pleasing Recipes (1971), I was a little surprised by the big bowl of rice front and center. Given that men are stereotypically supposed to be so meat-focused, I'd have expected the roast in the prominent spot.

Then I saw that this recipe booklet is from Rice Council of America. That's why rice is so prominent! Maybe rice could seem manly by association with things that typical Americans at the time saw as manly.

For instance, the book offers a hearty beef stew to be served with Rice Verte.

Using the French word for "green" to emphasize the rice's veggie content isn't what I would expect for a 1970s book that bills itself as "man-pleasing." Maybe that's why the stew has to be served in a roughly football-shaped vessel.

I was surprised that the book had so many recipes with Frenchified names, like the Beef Choufleur.

It's kind of confusing to use the French word for cauliflower for a dish that seems inspired by American Chinese food, but this book is not about meeting one's stereotypical expectations.

Though it does meet my expectation that 1970s foods be predominantly brown....

Sometimes the book really pushes at one's expectations. Rice Jardin omits meat entirely and uses a French name. Pretty bold move for something marketed as manly in the 1970s.

I'm not sure "A garden of flavor, fresh or canned" is the best tagline for a recipe, but I still have to appreciate the assumption that even manly men can enjoy veggies with a fancy name as long as said veggies are strewn through buttery rice.

Maybe men can even appreciate non-brown foods?!

And then I got to the final recipe in the book, and I had so many questions. First of all, how is Royal Rice "low calorie"?

It's just rice with some butter and veggies. In fact, given that this has a larger proportion of rice to vegetables, I'd imagine that the Rice Jardin might be less calorie dense than Royal Rice. The claim seems to arise from nowhere.

Beyond the questionable assertion of being low calorie, the bigger question is whether this is an admission that men might be concerned about calories too, even though women were typically thought of as being the calorie counters. Or is this just a tacit admission that the Rice Council of America had the same stereotypes about men and women as the rest of America, and calling the recipes "Man-Pleasing" was just a way to catch the (likely straight female) audience's attention, while most of the actual recipes were meant to appeal directly to their tastes? Is this book an attempt to change conventional ideas about masculinity? Or is it just doubling down on stereotypes about women by assuming they want to please men in theory because that's what they're culturally expected to do, but that they really want lighter food and will overlook the disconnect between the title and the contents?

Oh, yeah. It's just a way to sell rice by any means necessary, as the supposedly low-cal rice nestled under a big hunk of meat and a pile of deep-fried onion rings reminds us. It just wants to show that rice can be everything to everybody, and I put way too much thought into the premise, here... Certainly more than the people who put the booklet together. I guess these rice recipes just prove that I'm an over-thinker.

Funny Name: Not a Euphemism Edition

"How would you like some 'Copenhagen Cabbage'?"

"I've never tried that before! I was hoping to score some when I went on my student trip in Scandinavia, but I never tracked any down. What's it like?"

"Oh, you mean actual cabbage. With ground beef. And tomato sauce. And cinnamon."

Thanks, anyway, to All Our Favorites Cook Book (The Pioneer Partners of Hawkeye Chapter #17, undated.)

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.