Tiger Recipes for April!

I was intrigued to receive a tiny four-page brochure (if you count a single sheet of paper printed on both sides and folded in half as four pages) in an envelope full of cooking ephemera that I received recently. 

It's Kraft TV Recipes for Spring Weekends! As seen on the TIGER, TIGER Nature Documentary! This little slip of paper is undated, but I figured a bit of digging would tell me when the documentary aired. It was on a major network and merited a TV recipe advertising booklet, after all. However, finding the air date wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. (So many search results thought I was looking for Tiger Woods!) I did finally find, in the Blake Issue Archive, a notification in the summer 1977 issue that "On 28 April CBS-TV aired 'Tiger, Tiger,' a documentary on the Bengal tiger, an endangered species." That's the long way of saying that this is apparently from 1977.

You will be relieved to know that there are no recipes calling for tiger meat. I was a little disappointed that there weren't even any recipes for cookies or kids' sandwiches that looked kind of tiger-y. The brochure is mostly for pretty boring salad recipes, I guess in the quest to sell more salad dressing. There's also some advice for ways to zazz up sandwiches, like adding Kraft singles and beet strips to an egg salad sandwich. Oh, boy! 

I was a little confused about the recipe for "Taxco Salad." Was this a misspelling of "Taco Salad" or simply an old-timey spelling of "taco" that I hadn't encountered before?

I tried searching "Taxco Salad" and Google immediately asked if I meant "Taco Salad," so I thought it was just a misspelling. I also found out that there's a small Mexican city called Taxco de Alarcón, so maybe I'll be very generous and suppose that this is not a typo but in fact an assertion that the residents of Taxco love covering mounds of iceberg lettuce with beef and kidney beans mixed with French dressing, tomatoes and green peppers mixed with more French dressing, and guacamole made of avocados, Miracle Whip, onion, and bacon. In fact, it's the dish their city is best known for. (Wikipedia suggests Taxco is known for dishes that include jumiles-- a type of stink bug-- so I can see why Kraft wouldn't go for that particular angle.)

The brochure also includes the 1970s-required gelatin salad. 

Of course the lemon gelatin has to include Kraft Real Mayonnaise, along with vinegar, celery, cabbage, carrots, green pepper, and onion. This is definitely going for actual salad vibes, and not "Let's all pretend this dessert is really a salad so we can unapologetically eat another dessert at the end of the meal."

I was also a bit surprised by the booklet's version of a Waldorf salad. I'm used to seeing recipes for Waldorf salad that call for apples, celery, mayonnaise, and maybe some walnuts and/or grapes. It sounds terrible to me mainly because of my white-hot hatred of mayonnaise, but I guess I can understand that others would be attracted to the lightly sweet and refreshing crunch. Kraft's version, on the other hand...

It doesn't just go for the crunchy-but-mostly-flavorless celery as the vegetable element. It also includes more assertive cauliflower. And instead of walnuts for the fattier crunchy element, this tops off the salad with raisin bread croutons! I can't imagine that too many people are really begging for cauliflower with raisin bread croutons.... Will using French dressing instead of mayonnaise make this unholy mixture better or worse? I have no idea because pretty much any type of salad dressing is a crime against nature as far as I'm concerned, though your mileage will likely vary...

I'm sure tigers would vote for raw meat above any of these recipes, though. In this case, I may reluctantly have to side with Kraft. (I only said "may," though, so I'm not fully committed either way. For all I know, Taxco may be right and the stink bugs may be the best bet....)

Endless salads: The entire point of a 1930s refrigerator

I got the Westinghouse Refrigerator Book (1932) partly because it was under $5 and had a lovely pastel cover, but if you know anything about me, you probably also suspect that I wanted a refrigerator cookbook because refrigerators were a gateway to that most coveted of early-to-mid-20th-century dishes: the chilled salad. This book did not disappoint.

There is, of course, a salad with a kind of racist name.

I'm not really sure why shaved cabbage topped with tomato slices, half a hard boiled egg, chopped parsley, and "a generous mound of mayonnaise which has been pressed through a pastry bag" couldn't simply have been called a garden salad.

There is an attempt to show off the freezer compartment.

Everyone is sure to be thrilled by chunks of frozen tomato, cucumber, green pepper, crushed pineapple, and celery suspended in a mayonnaise-y gelatin. 

There's a "Health Salad," though I'm not really sure what sets it apart as being any healthier than the others.

The vegetables are certainly nutritious, but not particularly distinctive. Maybe Philadelphia cream cheese was considered a health food in the 1930s? 

There's a "de Luxe" salad. Something about making "deluxe" into two words always makes me feel like it's fancier, somehow.

Here, apparently "de Luxe" means the standard gelatin and chopped veggie mixture get the canned tomato soup and American cream cheese treatment. (Also, how was American cream cheese different from Philadelphia cream cheese?)

There's also a reminder that cottage cheese was once so popular (especially when money was tight) that a ring mold of cottage cheese stiffened with gelatin could be considered a main dish...

...as long as there was a green salad served in the middle and hot clover leaf rolls on the side.

Of course, for those with more free time and a vaguely artistic personality, there was also the opportunity to create a multicolored showpiece salad.

Yep-- the layers are in an ice tray! So homemakers could show off that they had ice trays! And the two-toned salad cubes could nestle into a little lettuce nest. Just perfect for a ladies' luncheon!

And everybody would be jazzed to have tomato aspic on top of cucumber and pineapple jelly. Or at least, that was the polite social fiction. 

But you know that afterwards, Phyllis and Geraldine would spend an hour discussing how silly and vain it was to show off the fancy ice cube tray by serving tomatoes and olives on top of cucumbers and canned pineapple. And then Norma would overhear them and report back to the host, Mildred, and things would never be quite the same.... 

And that's why I love the old salad recipes. They're so dramatic! (Just like Mildred.)

Campbell's is fanciness in a can!

Today's cookbook, Campbell's Great Restaurants Cookbook, U.S.A. (ed. Doris Townsend, 1969), makes quite a promise.

It states that the recipes in the book "are adaptations of the spécialités de la maison of restaurants famous for their food, their service, their ambience. These are the truly great, the honored, the sought-out restaurants in all parts of the country." Given that Campbell's is the creator, I'll bet you can guess what shortcut they promise will make home cooks prepare "dishes that will earn you a reputation as a fabulous cook" who can create restaurant-style meals. And even if you can't guess, I'll bet you can figure it out pretty quickly.

Let's start out slowly, with an easy mock Hollandaise. Worried that the mixture of egg yolk, melted butter and lemon juice won't emulsify properly?

Longfellow's Wayside Inn suggested that cream of celery soup with lemon juice and mayonnaise would be close enough.

If you prefer something from the southwest, you might go to Santa Fe's La Fonda recipes. If you're up for some chili, here is the secret:

Fortify a couple of cans of condensed chili beef soup with some extra ground meat, seasonings, and condensed beef broth! Easy! (Never mind that this sounds like a recipe a church cookbook might recommend as a use for ground chuck. This is "superb cuisine," according to the blurb describing the restaurant's offerings.)

Or if you prefer recipes with portmanteau titles, La Fonda also offers Harvey's Tomatonion Soup:

This one also involves three cans of condensed soup, but they're onion, bisque of tomato, and chicken broth this time.

If you really want to sound both kind of fancy and kind of scary, Jackson Lake Lodge suggests Calves' Brains Beaumont, Argentenile.

This one does sound genuinely fancy, in part because it only calls for one can of condensed soup (cream of asparagus) and in part because it uses white wine and purée de foie gras truffe.

And if you want something absolutely at the other end of the fanciness spectrum, here's probably my favorite offering in this book: Cocktail Canapés!

Mix a can of condensed cream of celery soup with a package of cream cheese and some ground up pepperoni. Slather on party rye and broil until bubbly. This definitely seems straight out of a church fundraiser cookbook, as something to slap together for unexpected guests. And this recipe, perhaps not entirely surprisingly, comes from the only restaurant I've featured today that is no longer in business: Marzetti Restaurant. 

In short, the book's message is that all you need to do to be a fancy chef is to use a lot of condensed canned soups and broths. I guess Campbell's figured they had already cornered the church fundraiser cookbooks, so maybe they would aim for a more "highbrow" audience... perhaps without entirely alienating the church fundraiser cookbook crowd either. 

Funny Name: Bless You Edition

Based on the title, I thought there might be an exceptional amount of black pepper in this recipe from Kentucky Cooking: New and Old (by "The Colonelettes"-- wives of members of the Louisville, Kentucky, Junior Chamber of Commerce, 1955, though mine is the 1958 second edition).

Nope. Maybe it means that the cream-cheese-and mayonnaise-covered minced clams have a distinctly phlegmy look? Or maybe throwing the word gesundheit on at the end is way to show that the phrase Hors d'Oeurves is too pretentious for Kentuckians to take seriously, so might as well throw another big foreign word on the end? (The spelling of hors d'oeuvres was apparently also too pretentious to take seriously.) In any case, I'll pass on the sneezy clams.

Celebrate April with dandelions, asparagus, and plenty of butter and eggs

Happy Late Early Spring! If that sounds confusing, it's because according to The Political Palate (The Bloodroot Collective (Betsey Beaven, Noel Giordano, Selma Miriam, and Pat Shea), 1980), early spring began on the spring equinox (or March 22-- it lists both), so I'm wishing you a happy early spring more than a week late.

The Political Palate is pretty serious about listing seasonally appropriate dishes. Early spring gets a recipe for the first of the dandelions, for instance.

I love the specificity of this one: dandelion leaves without the first signs of flower buds. No inferior lawn dandelions-- you want the ones from "a waste space that dandelions are making their own." Use only "the cleaner central leaves." This definitely seems like a recipe from someone who knows their way around dandelions.

If you're not up to foraging around for waste space dandelions, there's also a recipe for an Asparagus Platter. Still spring vegetables, but these are a LOT easier to just grab at the grocery store when they're cheaper and more plentiful than usual.

And this is another reminder that though the book is an older vegetarian one, it does not follow the health food fads that so many old earth-mother-type vegetarian cookbooks do. The asparagus is served with buttery white rice (not brown rice with a smattering of sesame and/or sunflower seeds if the cook felt playful) and sauce Maltaise, an orangey variation of hollandaise. 

Of course, early spring can still get pretty cold, so you might need some substantial desserts to get through April. While the headnote for Topfenkuchen claims that "This is a light cake..."

... it uses three sticks of butter, five cups of almonds, and nearly a dozen eggs. I think this still counts as substantial.

Just in case you miss the old-school health food dessert vibes, the book also offers a carob-based confection. While the book mostly avoids old-timey health food clichés, carob is apparently unavoidable.

This time, the carob is part of a coconut custard, so if spring is too chilly, you can just pretend you are at a tropical resort that has so little to eat that you've been reduced to consuming your own sunscreen. With carob.

Enjoy what's left of early spring! I'm going to try to eat seasonally by seeing if there are any Reese's peanut butter eggs on clearance now that Easter is over.

Grab the vermiculite and the wheat berries! It's Easter!

As Easter hops closer, I thought I'd post an Easter idea from the demented Cook and Learn (Beverly Veitch and Thelma Harms, illustrations and calligraphy by Gerry and Tia Wallace, 1981), a book intended to teach classes full of children about cooking. If you're expecting the book to show kids how to dye eggs using natural colors or make Easter "candy" out of some bullshit like dried milk powder, carob, and dates, I can see why you'd think that. It's consistent with this book's natural-foods ethos. However, the plan is even more disappointing than either of those ideas. 

It's a Living Easter Basket! This "recipe" is not actually for something the kids are supposed to eat. It's just a plan to use vermiculite (a hydrous phyllosilicate mineral that can be used as a soilless growing medium and was known for frequently being contaminated with asbestos up until the 1990s, at least if Wikipedia is to be believed) to sprout wheat berries into "grass" to fill a berry basket. So... non-edible treat sprouted in a possible carcinogen, inside an Easter basket that is waaay too small to hold much of anything fun anyway? (The book suggests "hiding" plain old eggs in the kids' baskets. So much fun to "find" eggs in a different container than the usual egg carton!) The more I look at this book, the more I see it as a primer for just how disappointing life tends to be. Grit your teeth, kids! Better get used to hoping for a big basket with candy and/or toys peeking out through colorful Easter grass and actually receiving a few boring-ass eggs in a berry basket full of damp sprouted wheat berries with a possible side of asbestos. You get to put up with this kind of bullshit for 70-or-so more years if you're lucky! Happy Easter, indeed.

Grains in many guises-- gourmet, health-foody, and redundant

As has been well documented, I love me some '70s "health" food. That, of course, was the draw of Cooking with Gourmet Grains (Stone-Buhr Milling Company, copyright 1971, though mine is from a 1978 printing). I mean, just look at the natural wood, squashes, and jars of whole grains on the cover!

I was not disappointed, either. If this seems like the kind of book that would have a recipe for Soy Beans and Millet Casserole, well...

Good call! It's totally got Soy Beans and Millet Casserole! It's the kind of casserole that starts out by assuming you have soy beans and millet on hand, and it does not include canned soup, so you know it's healthy.

This is also the kind of book that imagines sunflower seeds floating around in hot broth is somehow a proper soup.

Sunflower Soup is not the worst recipe I've ever seen (Obviously!), but it's still pretty hard to imagine getting excited about sitting down to a big bowl of soggy sunflower seeds.

While a lot of '70s health food sounds pretty bland, some recipes in Cooking with Gourmet Grains are right upfront about it!

The Farina soup "is a very mild soup that is a favorite with people who prefer foods that are not highly seasoned." In short, bland.

Occasionally, though, the book seems almost forward-thinking in its health foodiness. Wheat-free recipes like the Rice Flour Cake nearly seem meant for our modern gluten-avoiders.

And then you notice the package of Dream Whip, which puts this squarely back in the '70s.

Aside from the health food theme, I enjoyed seeing how the book managed to fit grains into recipes that don't traditionally call for them. Tuna Salad is often served on bread, but that's usually its only connection to grains. 

Not in Cooking with Gourmet Grains, though! Tuna salad needs a base of brown rice in this version.

And while Carrot Raisin Salad doesn't usually have much more to it than the titular ingredients and some salad dressing...

This version is bulked up with cracked wheat. 

Even traditionally grain-centric recipes get bulked up with extra grain. Is the bread in French Toast not quite enough grain for the grain company? Well...

The Puffy French Toast doesn't just get a soak in an egg-and-milk custard. It gets dipped in an actual floury batter before frying! It's kind of like bread dipped in bread.

That's enough carbo-loading for today! Better stop before we get as puffy as the French toast....