Carolina cranberries!

I think of Massachusetts when I think of cranberries, but today's cranberry recipes come from decidedly further south. They are in Myrtle Beach Cookin' (United Methodist Women of First United Methodist Church in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, 1977, though mine is from the 1994 fifth printing), and they are probably a departure from the cranberry recipes you are accustomed to for Thanksgiving. (So no, not jelly with the can seams still visible or plain old cranberries cooked in sugar and water!)

If you prefer your cranberries as a condiment, the book offers Cranlilli (Relish).

With the vinegar, sugar, and green peppers, it sounds kind of like a vintage sweet-n-sour recipe. If you're into that kind of thing (which I am very decidedly not), maybe throw leftover turkey into this, heat it up, and serve it over rice as a quick post-Thanksgiving meal. 

If you're prefer the cranberries as something more substantial, there's also a Cranberry Casserole. 

It looks like it's basically an apple crisp that also includes cranberries, but Mrs. James Kendrick (Ninky) recommends serving it as a side. That works for Thanksgiving when you want to have pie for dessert! And you always want to listen to someone named Ninky. 

I would definitely prefer my grandma's Jell-O-riffic cranberry "salad" to either of these, but the beauty of Thanksgiving is that there is room for interpretation. (Sure, we'll go with that. It's definitely not listening to your relatives talk politics.)

Brazil nuts in uniform!

I'm not sure how old A Parade of Brazil Nut Recipes (Brazil Nut Association) is, but considering how militaristic those little nuts look (along with the two-color printing), I'm going to guess it was around World War II.

This slim booklet's recipes mainly just add Brazil nuts to fairly standard recipes (like meatloaf or stuffed mushrooms) and to all manner of desserts that often incorporate nuts anyway (like brownies). Still, there are a few little surprises.

I wasn't sure what to expect from Baked Tuna with Brazil Nuts. I knew the tuna would be canned back then, but would this be like a tuna-noodle casserole, or maybe a tuna loaf? The answer is not really either...

It's just a white sauce with canned tuna, ground Brazil nuts, and pimientos in it, baked for some mysterious reason. I guess it would have been served over noodles for what we would now call a deconstructed tuna-noodle casserole.

I thought the Cauliflower with Brazil Nut Sauce would have a white sauce with ground or maybe chopped Brazil nuts in it. (At least, I would have if I'd seen only the title, but the picture kind of shows that I would have been wrong.)

There's no real sauce-- just cooked cauliflower with melted butter and chopped nuts on top.

I of course assumed I would see Brazil nuts encased in gelatin of some sort, and I was correct.

I just wouldn't have guessed they would be paired with lime Jell-O, ham, celery, onion, and olives. (But at least I wasn't surprised by this development. I've seen enough of these gelatin concoctions that it's hard to surprise me anymore.)

The title let me know what to expect for this final recipe. Brazil Nut Cherry Jam does indeed contain both cherries and Brazil nuts.

I'm just not used to jam having anything other than fruit in it! I imagine the Brazil nuts would be soggy by the time anyone eats the jam, but considering how often nuts appeared in Jell-O recipes (see above), I guess that didn't bother anybody back in the day. They still remembered wartime rationing and were just thankful for anything with a mountain of sugar in it, I suppose.

In any case, the Brazil nut soldiers look pretty friendly, but I'm not sure I trust them with those guns. I am going to beat a hasty retreat.

Betty switches things up for Thanksgiving

 The random Betty Baker Tested loose pages I have that might be from a calendar offer a lot of holiday-appropriate recipes, so today, we're looking at a couple that would give you a little something different for your Thanksgiving table. 

After the Honey Almond Delight-topped chicken salad, I was a little worried about what Almond-Bran Stuffing might have in store.

I kind of doubt that poultry stuffed full of fortified bran cereal mixed with almonds, celery, onion, and parsley would beat out poultry stuffed with a bread-(or cornbread!)-based stuffing, but at least the Honey Almond Delight recipe puts this one in perspective. It could be worse. And it will make sure the big dinner keeps on moving through the ol' digestive system.

For those who want something pumpkinny but not desserty this year (or who just love opening cans), Colonial Pumpkin Soup could be an option.

I'm not sure how happy the people who prefer pumpkin in its sweeter incarnations would be, but at least they wouldn't be bored! Maybe fighting about whether you should go back to the more traditional Thanksgiving recipes could replace fights about politics at the table this year, so the recipes could still be a win. 

Be thankful I added some November recipes

Guess what Home Gardener's Cookbook (Marjorie Page Blanchard, 1974) has to say about November. Just guess.

The answer is absolutely nothing. The book ends at October because that's when the garden stops producing new crops and the gardener is ready to stop thinking about gardening for a while. I wanted to make the book last for a full year, though, so I held back some recipes for fall crops that can usually be stored and used into late fall and early winter, like turnips. Anybody up for Turnips in Custard?

There are no measurements for the sugar and seasonings, so you can make it as dessert-ish as you want.

If that's not your style, there's a recipe for a somewhat more traditional pairing of pumpkin and custard.

So-- pretty close to pumpkin pie without the crust, and with the fancy of step of being flambéed at the end.

If you really want a pie, the chapter offers a Hubbard Squash Pie.

This made me think of grandma, who always explained that she made her "pumpkin" pies out of squashes she'd grown in the garden, puréed, and frozen to use later. (I'm not really sure whether they were Hubbard squashes, though! She never said. I always assumed it was acorn squash for some reason, but I'm actually not sure... Could have been butternut or something else. We weren't usually visiting when she was harvesting the squashes.)

Or if you prefer to fiddle around with individual servings (because November is a good month for baking and surely you're not too busy!), there's a recipe for Pumpkin Tarts.

I was not aware ginger marmalade existed, but it sounds like a lovely addition to the bottom of a pumpkin tart!

No matter what you choose from this assortment of recipes, though, you're sure to get a blast of sweet, warm fall spices. Every day can taste like Thanksgiving, whether you want it to or not.

A '90s Halloween party!

I tend not to find a lot of Halloween-y recipes in the old collections. Maybe it's because by Halloween, home cooks were already planning for Thanksgiving and Christmas? (Fruitcakes could take months of work, and fall veggies from the garden might need to be preserved.) Luckily, I have some relatively recent (less than 40 years old!) cookbooks to help correct this oversight, like Treasured Recipes from Harris House (Westerville, Ohio, 1991).

Okay, most of the titles don't explicitly mention Halloween, but a title like Ghostly Potato Doughnuts certainly sounds the part.

Besides adding to the ghostly pallor, the potato would increase the hydration and shelf life of the doughnuts, so the recipe could also be a good make-ahead treat for a Halloween party. 

They might be served with Goblin's Perky Punch. (Sugar on sugar is a very important Halloween tradition!)

Besides, if you're freezing candy corn and candy pumpkins inside the ice cubes, it's GOTTA be a Halloween drink. (I can just imagine how excited some kids would be to realize that there's candy inside the ice. Hopefully their parents would have good dental insurance.)

There's also the old Halloween classic of popcorn balls, this time dressed up with orange marmalade.

And if you want black popcorn balls to go with the orange ones, substitute "1 (6 ounce) package of licorice sticks." (I assume it's substituted for the marmalade. Flo Holland does not specify.) In any case, it couldn't be much more obvious that this is a Halloween recipe, short of putting "Halloween" in the title.

And finally, for those who can ONLY be convinced it's genuinely meant as a Halloween recipe if the word is actually in the title, we have Halloween Cookies.

These can also serve as BOTH tricks and treats, as I imagine bars of chocolate candy could enhance plain old refrigerator cookies, but I am much less convinced of the power of Grape-Nuts to improve cookies. (Nobody sprinkles kitty litter or aquarium gravel on top of their cookies, after all!)

This is a fun little collection of Halloween-y recipes, and maybe a kid could even try to convince the parents that this is a wholesome and balanced menu for Halloween night. There's a vegetable in the doughnuts, fruit in the punch, and whole grain in the popcorn balls and cookies! It's practically health food to scarf all this stuff down before going out for candy. 

Food! from the USDA

The imaginatively-named Food is a magazine-ish publication of the UDSA from 1979. 

This booklet was "the first of a new series of USDA publications designed to give you up-to-date, reliable information about food and nutrition issues and suggestions on how to apply this information to your food decisions." The series doesn't seem to have gotten very far-- three issues, as far as I can tell. 

As the cover suggests, this one focuses mainly on breakfasts and snacks, and the recipes are, to some degree, what I would expect. Healthy snacks? I would have bet money on this having a recipe for a cottage-cheese-based dip. 

And I was right in betting on the type of recipe included, but I was mistaken in using the singular (dip). There are in fact TWO cottage-cheese-based dips.

And of course, there would be a healthy-ish popsicle.

I was impressed that this one is made with plain gelatin-- not strawberry!-- and plain yogurt, too... so even if the frozen strawberries had some added sugar, this would still have been a less sugary treat than a lot of midwestern-style Jell-O "salads."

The booklet also highlights economical meals, so you know it will have a meatless dinner option that's basically a brick of veggies, nuts, wheat germ, eggs, and dairy trying to masquerade as meatloaf.

This version is dressed up with a home-made onion sauce rather than cream-of-mushroom soup or ketchup. 

There were a few surprises, though, like the "Open-Faced Submarine Sandwiches."

Sorry, USDA, but calling an English-muffin-half topped with a little salami, (broiled!) lettuce and other veggies, and American cheese a "submarine sandwich" is such a misuse of the term that I am physically incapable of writing it without scare quotes.

And then there are the French Toasted Tuna Sandwiches.

I tried to keep an open mind, even though, admittedly, I hate tuna salad and am not particularly fond of French toast either. I thought, "Well, if you like tuna salad and use a savory rather than sweet custard for the French toast, you'd probably think this was fine." And then I saw the vanilla in the recipe. Does anybody really want vanilla and tuna salad?

Apparently the USDA thought so. And the more I gaze upon these recipes, the more surprised I am that this series made it all the way up to three issues....

Spooooooky Sandwiches!

Halloween recipes tend to be somewhat rare in my old cookbooks, but I love Halloween and want to put it in whenever I can, so today's recipes from Multi-Power Microwave Miracles from Sanyo (1977) seemed Halloween-ish enough for me to say they could fit the part.

My inspiration was the Witches' Brew Heroes, since the witchy aspect made them an obvious Halloween choice. I was also amused that "witches' brew" part of the name suggests it will be some kind of a beverage (or at least a soup or stew that could be cooked up in a big kettle over an open fire under a full moon). Nope! These are sandwiches.

Basically a very mild, bean-free chili on "hero rolls." So I guess it's at least close to a stew, now that I think about it. And maybe the green from the green pepper makes it extra witchy? (I don't know, but I'd add a "spider web" of shredded cheese to the tops of these.

Apparently, Sanyo really liked the idea of something chili-adjacent on a bun, as the Paul Bunyans are pretty similar-- just have some olives added in and they're served on hamburger buns.

Paul Bunyan is a Halloween-appropriate costume, and the added olives could be passed off as chopped-up eyeballs if you want to make it seem even spookier, so I'm calling this a Halloween recipe too.

And if you don't want basically thick chili on a bun, but you still want a sandwich with a spooky-ish name for Halloween, there's Old Mystic.

Granted, the mixture of crab, shrimp, cream cheese, white wine, and horseradish seems a bit too grownup for the kiddies on Halloween night, so it might be best to save Old Mystic for the adults. 

Of course, the scariest part of all these recipes is just trying to clean out the microwave after you've made them! (And airing out all that microwaved seafood smell from Old Mystic.) But "You know, it's Halloween. I guess everyone's entitled to one good scare, huh?"