Grannie Pantries
A place to appreciate the horrors of vintage cookbooks
Wednesday, November 20, 2024
Recipes that Are Swift and Proudly Bland!
Saturday, November 16, 2024
Celebrating Fast Food Day in a Jiffy
November 16 is National Fast Food Day, so I have kindly found a vintage "speedy" recipe for your eye-rolling pleasure. Today's gem comes from The Family Home Cookbook (director Melanie de Proft, 1973).
True to form, this old-timey "jiffy" recipe will not seem all that quick to today's cooks. It starts with preparing Italian salad dressing from a mix (rather than just using pre-made), and requires marinating the peas in it for a minimum of an hour. Plus, if you have to chop the onion and crisp and crumble the bacon yourself-- as the original audience for this recipe almost certainly did-- this seems like a lot of work for a quick and easy recipe.
Luckily, if you love salad dressing, canned peas, and raw onion every bit as much as I do, it only takes a moment to glance at the recipe, make a disgusted face, and go on with your day. Not making this at all is the real time-saver.
Wednesday, November 13, 2024
Upper class twits use cholesterol to horrify a child of the '80s
Are you ready for another Woman's Day Collector's Cook Book? This time, we have Traditional English Foods from February of 1965.
The booklet is peppered with illustrations meant to allow readers to imagine themselves as upper-class British twits, like this cover image of a large dining room full of people being served by a servant in a jacket. The thing that really struck me about the collection, though, was that it was clearly put together before the great fat and cholesterol panic that I grew up during. (Remember cantaloupes being labeled as cholesterol-free? 🙄)
There's potted shrimp, for instance.
If 1980s people weren't already panicking from all the cholesterol in a half-cup of shrimp, the quarter-cup of butter would send them right over the edge.
If that's note quite enough cholesterol, there's also the pie that nestles both bacon and eggs in a double-crust pastry.
The pastry was probably made with suet or lard for good measure!
And speaking of suet, dessert was likely to entail quite a bit of it...
...regardless of whether you were having spotted dog or a roly poly.
And "to clean the palate of the sweet taste" after dessert, the booklet also offers meal-ending savories like this marrow toast, just in case the meal didn't contain quite enough animal fat.
At least there are plenty of calming pictures to look at in case the recipes produce any residual panic from having lived through the low-fat, low-cholesterol era.
Well.... Having to attend a party? With other actual adults? In fancy dress? Maybe not so calming...
Out on a river? With a bottle of wine precariously balanced where it would be easy to knock out of the boat? Which I would then likely tip over as I lunged for the quickly-disappearing wine bottle? Maybe not so calming...
Solitarily watching a cat creep across the rooftops, indifferent to the group of people loitering around their car below? Okay, that's more my speed. Now I'm going to leave 1960s British-American recipes behind and have myself a salad.
Friday, November 8, 2024
Distract yourself with overly-complicated fish recipes!
Want a needlessly-complicated recipe to distract you from the real world while you try to assemble it? Indifferent as to how it will come out, as you've lost your appetite anyway? The Family Home Cookbook (director Melanie de Proft, 1973) has a couple of recommendations.
If simply heating up fish sticks and calling it dinner is not quite sufficient distraction from a crazy week, you can try turning them into an arts and crafts project.
Wrap the breading in more bread! Well, a crust, anyway. Because we all know that making a fussy pie crust and trying to shape it into anything other than "random amoeba that is kind of losing structural integrity" can really focus your attention on the task at hand.
And if you do actually manage to turn the crust into a viable shape, your fish sticks could come out looking like lumpy pigs in a blanket or maybe the cookies your weirdest aunt brings for Christmas that get quietly thrown in the trash once the party is over and she declines to take them home, instructing you to "Enjoy."
Alternatively, if you like mindlessly stuffing deviled eggs, but think the steps of boiling the eggs, disassembling the eggs, making the filling, and stuffing the yolk mixture back into the eggs again will be insufficient distraction, try Sardine-Stuffed Eggs.
They also give you a chance to fiddle around with opening and mashing cans of sardines for the filling. And the excitement doesn't stop there! You also get to cook and drain noodles, mix them with a homemade white sauce, throw the noodle assembly in a casserole dish, top it with the eggs, and bake the whole thing. You can even make toast points for serving. If you're lucky, you might burn the bread and have to make them twice. That's extra pointless work for a dinner that's already starchy! Plus, the casserole will come out looking like phlegm-covered rocks.
Not a bad visual representation of this week.
Wednesday, November 6, 2024
Vintage Pork for "Two"
Saturday, November 2, 2024
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.
Wednesday, October 30, 2024
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!