Microwave stuffing!

Picture this: it's 1985. You got your first microwave, and you also are so behind-the-times that you don't realize that owning a microwave does not have nearly the same coolness factor as it did five or six years ago. What's the best way to celebrate and show off your good fortune? That's right: microwave Thanksgiving! Let Kenmore Microwave Cooking walk you through it. 

First up: You need a turkey, of course, complete with a sausage-studded cornbread stuffing.

You can make it all in the microwave, from cooking the sausage and veggies for the stuffing to cooking the oiled-up turkey itself. Okay, if you don't like pale, rubbery turkey skin, it will have to spend the last 10-15 minutes in the conventional oven, but that will just leave you time to make the side: jellied carrots.

Before I read the recipe, I wondered whether we really needed to use the microwave to boil water for Jell-O, but this isn't the shredded-carrots-and-pineapple-in-fruity-Jell-O recipe I was imagining. These carrots are "jellied" by being cooked in equal parts butter and cranberry sauce, so much more Thanksgiving-appropriate. (Maybe double the recipe, though!)

Your microwave will be pretty busy with the other dishes, but luckily, you can make the dessert ahead of time. Ginger bars aren't quite the traditional pumpkin pie, but they do have pumpkin pie spice in them. 

I'm not entirely sure how you can stretch a recipe in which the main ingredient is 6 tablespoons of flour into 16 servings, but hopefully everybody will fill up on microwaved turkey and the brown-and-serve rolls you had in the oven when the turkey was crisping up.

If you're family is nice, you will be able to figure out on your own that microwave ownership is not nearly as impressive as you thought it was. And if they're not nice, well, at least the fight this year won't be entirely dominated by politics.

Wealthy peasants and bountiful ingredients in an imagined 1970s Italy

It's about time for something wonderful, right? Right?! I can't do much about the real world, but I can show you Wonderful Ways to Prepare Italian Food (Jo Ann Shirley, 1978).

I kind of love the nearly 3-D style of the cover, with the bowl of cooked farfalle sitting on top of a mound of uncooked farfalle.

Most of the recipes are actually not too terrible sounding-- just sometimes not very authentic considering the questionable availability of various ingredients in 1970s groceries. (Yes, "risotto" is made with long grain rice in this book, for example.)

I did like the occasional recipe that put a spin on a common '70s dinner. This meat loaf recipe might shake up the usual meat loaf in a dinner rotation.

Not only is this a rolled meat loaf, but the stuffing isn't just the cubed-bread dressing I expected. It's a different meal entirely-- ham and cheese with mashed potatoes! 

My favorite entries might be the ones that confused me, though. I was not at all surprised to see a minestrone recipe-- pretty much every Italian cookbook I ever see has at least one--

--but then I was a bit confused by the Peasant Minestrone recipe that followed.

The original recipe was mostly what I expected: kidney beans cooked with tomatoes and other vegetables, then finished with a starchy component (rice, in this case, though I usually expect a small pasta). The peasant version is inexplicably more expensive than the standard, subbing two kinds of meat (beef ribs and Italian sausage) for the dried beans and adding an extravagant sprinkling of Parmesan at the end. Are the peasants somehow richer than everyone else? I was a bit mystified.

The biggest mystery of all, however, might have been this one.

You might wonder what is so odd about steak with brandy and Marsala. Meat with wine is a pretty common combination. But look at the sauce! This recipe for four people calls for TWO FULL POUNDS of liver paté! Who wants a HALF-POUND of paté on top of a steak? And the recipe title doesn't even mention paté, as if it is only a minor component of this recipe.

I guess maybe the diners were supposed to eat only a little sauce and save some for other dishes? Who knows? All I know is that I was grateful for this book's little mysteries.

How to have a chill Thanksgiving

Just in case you're having an unusually hot November, here are some cold recipes from New Delights from the Kitchen (Kelvinator, 1930), back when refrigerators were so new that they merited their own cookbook.

If you just want some cold desserts that aren't yet another round of pumpkin pie, the book offers "Kelsherbs." The American Beauty Kelsherb freezes cranberry puree in buttermilk-- sort of like a tangy version of cranberry ice cream that is likely to be rock hard if you let it freeze even a bit too long, I imagine. 

If pumpkin is simply a must, then you might go with the Sunset Kelsherb instead. 

It's a tangy and rock-hard version of pumpkin ice cream. (In Kelvinator's defense, commercial ice cream wasn't really available back then.)

And if you're wondering what the hell "kelsherb" is, and the Google searches aren't helping, it's a portmanteau of "Kelvinator" and "sherbet," as if the existence of Kelvinator meant that the word "sherbet" was somehow now outdated. (Spoiler: It was not.) In any case, kelsherbs are great accompaniments for a Thanksgiving feast because they're made with buttermilk, which was "widely advocated for intestinal troubles and ... considered very healthful." The health trend of deeming all things fermented as good for gut health is not nearly as new as many might think! 

If you're not into thinking about intestinal wellness while you're planning a dinner but you are interested in getting the meal over as quickly as possible, then the Molded Turkey Rings with Cranberry Jelly might be more your speed.

Just make a cranberry gelatin and throw in some cooked turkey when it starts to thicken. Done! So much easier than roasting a whole turkey and making a cranberry salad or relish from scratch. Serve with some rolls from the bakery, a potato salad, and maybe some green beans straight from the can and you've got a Thanksgiving "feast" that won't heat up the house. No need to thank Kelvinator (or me). I'm sure you wouldn't want to, anyway...

Damn it! I really wanted to unreservedly love the pictures...

The cover of Quick Dishes for the Woman in a Hurry (Culinary Arts Institute, directed by Melanie de Proft, 1955) looks pretty straightforward: corn on the cob, Brussels sprouts, ribs, strawberries with whipped cream, a relish tray with olives and radish roses lurking in the corner.

A lot of the recipes are pretty rudimentary as well, which is to be expected from a quick cookbook. Need some coffee cake? Rather than making one from scratch or getting one from a bakery...

...simply hack up an unsliced loaf of bread, slather with butter, top with more butter mixed with brown sugar and cinnamon, and then bake up into an ersatz coffee cake. 

Want some cheese bread quick? I'll bet you'll never guess the recommendation.

Yep-- hack up a loaf of unsliced bread, slip in slices of American cheese, slather in caraway-mustard butter...

...and for a slight twist ending, dump on some anchovy/ lemon butter just before serving.

The truth is, though, I didn't really get this booklet for the recipes. I loved the pictures by illustrator Kay Lovelace.

While the inside cover does have the expected picture of a woman dressed up for an afternoon out, slipping a casserole into the oven for dinner later, I was much more taken by this imaginative picture just a few pages later emphasizing the need for speed.

The mice NEED to be quick-- hopefully springing the trap with a fork will be enough to catapult the cheese into the catcher's mitt! The two mice in the foreground have their tails crossed for luck, though I'm not sure why. The morsel of cheese is small enough that the catcher will make short work of it before anyone else gets a taste-- even the "chef" in the tiny hat.

Mice make another appearance in the sauce chapter, bringing a bit of humor to an old cliché.

The geese don't mind the cliché about sauce for the goose and for the gander as long as it means a procession of mice in still more tiny hats and aprons delivering dishes full of goodies.

A bunny gets in on the act too, using the salad chapter as a backdrop for her performance of my grandpa's favorite mealtime joke.

He always said he wanted "honeymoon salad-- lettuce alone!" Miss Lapin approves of that choice.

The adorable pictures are not confined to cute animals, either. Here are some hot dogs getting ready to get hot and heavy.

I'm not sure whether it's a reminder of how buttoned-up the fifties were that one of the hot dogs in a romance clearly has to be female, or whether this is actually secretly subversive.... They're both hot dogs, after, all, the the "girl" is even flatter than I am (and that is saying something!). Either way, we have dressed-up yet shirtless hot dogs in the throes of romance, so what's not to love?

Uh... Scratch that question. There is something not to love about the illustrations. Ms. Lovelace should have stuck with pictures of adorable animals and anthropomorphic foods because her pictures of people are not always... (How to put this delicately?) ... very respectful.

Yep. Unfortunately, we have old cookbook racism AGAIN. 

There's a lot to love about old cookbooks, but there are always plenty of reminders that we really need to keep moving beyond that past they represent, even though a LOT of people seem more interested in regressing than progressing...

At least Marilyn Hansen knew that Thanksgiving is in November

Given that Cooking by the Calendar (edited by Marilyn Hansen, 1978) seemed to have NO IDEA what gets harvested in August or what kinds of treats would be appropriate for Halloween, I kind of wondered what it would recommend for Thanksgiving. Hansen had a much clearer idea of what people would expect, though-- no recipes for random things with titles like "Rumba Rhubarb" or "Prospector's Pancakes."

The month kicks off with a wide range of stuffing recipes.

Whether your tastes are traditional (sage-y bread cubes or cornbread and sausage) or more adventurous ("Hawaiian" bread stuffing with water chestnuts and pineapple chunks or bulgur stuffing with mint and dried fruit), there's something you can shove up the rear end of a dead bird.

And what to do with the leftover poultry? The "After the Feast" section adds some less-expected options in with the usual turkey noodle soup, like Turkey and Olive Manicotti.

I am not sure how many cooks would be up for making manicotti filling and sauce, stuffing individual manicotti tubes, and baking the whole thing a day or two after preparing an entire Thanksgiving dinner, but at least this dish wouldn't add to Thanksgiving flavor fatigue.

The Turkey Cantonese seems more likely to feel do-able after a cooking-heavy holiday...

Well, if you don't mind chopping up celery, onions, green peppers, and maybe mushrooms. It comes together pretty quickly after that! (And the dish may be boiled rather than steamed or stir-fried, but at least it doesn't have cream-of-something soup or bunch of cheese dumped in, so it's probably slightly more authentically Cantonese-style than one might expect from a book like this.)

The veggies of the month are squash and pumpkins. My favorite recipe from this section explains what to do if a bunch of rowdy squash cubes start harassing you on the street.

Oh, wait. "Mace" isn't a verb here. Never mind.

Given how contentious family Thanksgiving gatherings can be, though, macing the squash cubes instead of Uncle Arthur might not be the worst idea.

Whatever you have planned for November, I hope you can get through it without macing anybody. Unless you just want to add a little ground mace to your veggies.

New(ish) recipes!

I'm not really sure why I have Recipes: Homemade Happiness (compiled by Rev. and Mrs. Floyd Miller (Marie) for the Archdale, NC Wesleyan Women). It's from 1994-- later than what I usually pick up. Maybe I just thought the cover looked old and picked it up without checking?

It does have the overwhelming brownish tone that photos from the 1970s often exhibit. Or maybe somebody gave it to me at some point? In any case, I've got a community cookbook from the '90s that looks like it could be from the '70s, and I'm going to make you lunch.

Everybody loves a burger, and since I like you, I'm making Fancy Hamburgers!

You know, the kind with the applesauce and Lipton onion soup mix in them? And of course, the Ritz crackers! That's what makes them fancy. 

If you want pickles on your burger, I've got something inspired by the applesauce in those burgers.

Admittedly, I'm not sure how well Red-Hot-flavored cukes will go with the burgers, but I've never been a fan of pickled anything. I hear that people like Cincinnati chili, so I imagine cinnamony pickles on an oniony burger will be fine. (For someone else, obviously.)

Now we'll need a salad to get some veggies into you. Cincinnati chili often gets slopped over spaghetti, so how about all the spaghetti salad you can eat?

Seriously-- feel free to take home an extra gallon or two to feed family, friends, neighbors, enemies... Hell, use it to make an oily freeform art project for all I care. Just eat all you can and take a bucket to go.

And for dessert, something easy and SWEET.

Yep-- Twinkie Dessert involves Twinkies. All I had to do was cut 'em up, lay 'em in a 9x13, and cover with instant pudding, Cool Whip, and butter brickle bits. (Well, sourcing the butter pecan instant pudding was the hardest part of the recipe. I was lazy and threw some finely chopped pecans into butterscotch pudding and called it a day, but there's a recipe to make a homemade mix for the very specific demographic of people who are not willing to make their own sponge cake but eager to throw together homemade instant pudding mixes.)

I hope you enjoyed lunch! And if not, enjoy something else from 1994. 

Some rare Hallowe'en recipes!

I'm sad that so few old cookbooks have Halloween-specific recipes. Of course they're loaded with traditional Thanksgiving and Christmas recipes. Hell, they usually even have a cherry pie recipe for Presidents' Day! But nothing for Halloween. 😞 That's why I was so excited to find a couple of salads for my favorite holiday in New Delights from the Kitchen (Kelvinator, 1930). 

First up, the delightfully apostrophed Hallowe'en Salad.

It's basically a sweet cole slaw topped with extra dates, mayonnaise flourishes, and "eighth inch peelings from very red apples cut into Hallowe'en shapes such as crescent moons and pumpkin faces." I can't imagine too many cooks in the 1930s spent much time cutting apple peels into tiny shapes-- I'm not even sure how one might go about cutting a pumpkin face into such a tiny bit of apple peel, even if one were so inclined!-- but at least it's a fun thought.

The alternative-- a Goblin Salad-- seems much easier.

Just gussy up a canned peach half with clove eyes and nose and a maraschino cherry mouth. (Leave the mayonnaise out of the cream cheese hair, and I might even consider eating this one!)

Plus, cooks can pair the Goblin Salad with a big bowl of the more-recent concoction Cheddar Goblin for a full meal. Yay! These recipes make me as close as I am likely to get to that "all's right with the world" feeling.