Of smoke and cornmeal

Surprise! Today, we're looking at a cookbook I don't really want to make fun of because it seems like such an earnest effort, with recipes that don't call for a lot of industrial ingredients combined in unlikely ways.

Mountain Makin's in the Smokies: A Cookbook was published by The Great Smoky Mountains Natural History Association in 1957, and the recipes have the make-do, regional flavor you might expect. So here's a brief menu to give you a taste.

Protein is often the most expensive ingredient, so it's better if you can get it for free (or at least, for the cost of a fishing license). "First, catch the fish!"

This picture accompanies the recipe and illustrates the first line-- the one I just quoted! Then clean the fish and cook with a relatively inexpensive cut of meat.

This recipe is meant to make it easier to cook fish that are pretty small-- layering them over strips of bacon both to make the fish easier to turn and to baste them in hot, salty, smoky fat. 

You'll need an accompaniment. The book has sooooo many recipes for bready, cornmeal-based sides, but we'll go for the traditional accompaniment for fish: hush puppies.

The page actually has three different hush puppy recipes, but I chose this one because it has the most explicit instructions on how to make them.

And then to round out our meal, we'll need something sweet. (And full of cornmeal. Just about everything in this book is full of cornmeal because that's what people had on hand.)

The cornmeal custard pie is exactly what it sounds like: a custard pie thickened with cornmeal. It should be cooled on a windowsill, according to the accompanying illustration.

I'd be reluctant to do that, though, as my knowledge of cartoons suggests that someone nearby will follow the aroma lines (probably floating through the air without even needing to put their feet on the ground!) right to the pie and steal it before anyone can stop them.

This is full of recipes claiming to be much older than 1950s-old, and we'll look at some of them later. I just wanted a teaser for today, like a pie on a windowsill.

Funny Name: What's the Bo Status? Edition

When I got to this recipe from Recipes: Homemade Happiness (compiled by Rev. and Mrs. Floyd Miller (Marie) for the Archdale, NC Wesleyan Women, 1994), I figured there had to be some kind of explanation for the name. 

There's no hint in the book about what makes these "Could-Be-Bo-Biscuits." I figured it must be a southern thing that I knew nothing about and assumed an internet search would clear the mystery right up. But all I found were recipes trying to copy the Bo-Berry Biscuits, which are apparently a sweet treat served at Bojangles restaurants. Given that those are loaded with blueberries and topped with a sweet glaze-- these are definitely not trying to be Bo-Berry Biscuits. So I still have no clue what makes them "Could-Be-Bo." Maybe it's the use of flavorless shortening instead of butter? Maybe it's the hint of powdered sugar? Or maybe it's just some family joke that got into the regional cookbook, and half a dozen people have any idea what it's about. All I know is...

Wear-Ever you go, aluminum cookware will be there for your health

"Wear-Ever" New Method of Cooking (1935) promises a lot from their aluminum pans, with the cover suggesting improvements in health, flavor, and economy.

The "new method" of cooking is basically cooking foods (especially vegetables) without added water in a covered pan for a relatively short time, rather than the traditional method of boiling them to death. Small wonder that will improve vitamin and mineral retention as well as flavor! (The "economy" part comes mostly because the book encourages cooks not to peel vegetables unless absolutely necessary, and even then to take off less through such methods as putting whole veggies through the food mill, which is supposed to retain the skin with far less of the underlying material than paring would.) 

The book is also high-class for the time because it has a few color pictures, such as these spinach timbales.

I can't help but be charmed by old-timey illustrations like this, though I have to admit the timbales don't look particularly edible to me... More like something a cousin of the facehugger might burst out of... (And you don't even want to know what the whitish goo they're trapped in is...)

(Okay, it's really just white sauce, but I'm sure you already guessed that if you've ever spent more than 10 seconds looking at a cookbook from the 1930s.)

In an effort toward economizing, the booklet presents this recipe for Hamburger Steak. I kind of assumed it would attempt to be, well, steak-like. The ground meat might be flavored with steak sauce and/or seasonings usually associated with steak and patted into roughly steak-shaped pieces, then smothered in an onion and/or mushroom gravy to give it that juiciness and reinforce the steak-y flavors. 

But no. This is just plain old ground beef with some (presumably diced!) green pepper and onions mixed in before the "cakes" are fried. So, beef with (maybe still crunchy?) veggies mixed in, topped with canned tomatoes if the cook needs a little more filler. Exactly like steak.

The booklet also tries to make things interesting by adding international(ish) favorites, blanded down to 1930s standards. Take the Rice O'Mexicano, for instance.

It's one of those old-timey recipes that was considered "ethnic" because it included tomatoes and green peppers with the standard carrot, onion, and celery, and it used rice instead of potatoes. It could just as easily (and incorrectly) have been labeled as creole, Italian, or Spanish-- maybe even Chinese, though that might require the addition of a handful of cashews-- depending on the editor. Of course, in no case are any seasonings that might actually suggest a specific type of cuisine permitted, other than a garnish of parsley.

I could neve quite get a handle on what the booklet was going for with the spaghetti recipe.

It starts with ham and cream cheese, so I thought it would be one of those creamy-and-smoky recipes, similar to carbonara. But then it adds tomatoes, green pepper, and onion, so it's more of a garden sauce. Then canned mushrooms go in, along with the pre-browned ham. Then the whole thing gets a garnish of Parmesan when it's served. I'm still not really sure what it is, but at least it sounds like it would have more flavor than the Rice O'Mexicano. And it will be a weird shade of pink, if this picture is any indication. 

Looks kind of like Fancy Feast on spaghetti. Yum!

So, in short, I'm not sure these particular concoctions convince me of the value of Wear-Ever recipes, but if the cookware did actually help get our ancestors to stop boiling everything to death, then I'm happy to give it credit for doing something right. 

Something hot to get you through February... Hope you're not too picky

Since we were just looking at the Cooks' Round Table of Endorsed Recipes supplement about vegetables from February 1951, let's follow up with their page of "Meats" recipes from February 1952. The front of the page shows off this pile of slop.

But it's topped off with a couple of pepper rings to class it up a little. What might it be?

Goulash Supreme! "Supreme" is often code for "sour cream" in old recipes, so I hoped this would be enriched with a little dairy fat, but no such luck. I guess the "supreme" is for the "unusual blend of spices": caraway, crushed peppercorns, bay leaf, and paprika. I'm not sure I'd call any of that unusual, but I guess maybe it was for 1952 when most white families' spice cabinets had pre-ground pepper, salt, onion salt, cinnamon sugar, and maybe a little chili powder or oregano if the family felt particularly adventurous.

The picture for one of the recipes on the back drew my attention, too. Are... Are those cinnamon rolls on top of the Savory Stew?

I'm now just trying not to imagine eating a cinnamon roll soggy from being cooked in a stew of carrots, onions, and beef.

Luckily, though, the bready topping is parsley pin wheels! (I'm still convinced they would be much better if you just baked them on a baking sheet rather than letting their butts get water-logged, but again, at least they're not cinnamon rolls.)

I guess in February, you have to take whatever hot glopola you can get!

Easy, one-dish meals that kind of aren't....

I love that the foreword of McCall's Book of Wonderful One-Dish Meals (edited by Kay Sullivan, 1972) tries to align itself with "Women's Lib," noting "That old slogan 'Let George do it!' is in vogue again. Thus, our cookbook has double value.... Easy one-dish meals for the liberated lady to prepare so that she does not have to spend all day in the kitchen. And even easier one-dish meals to aid novice George as he encounters soup bones, roux, and shallots for the first time." Plus, the cover is a perfect shade of harvest gold.

Sometimes, this premise means exactly what you think it means: open a bunch of cans, dump contents together, and heat. Ta-da! Dinner.

I'm sure the combination of musty canned peas and sulfurous hard-cooked eggs smelled just lovely, and the crunchy onion topping was enough to make up for the mush-on-mush-on-mush texture.

Other recipes are a window into what foods used to be more common in the early 1970s. Sure, Tongue Hash Casserole may have been pretty easy to throw together 50-some years ago.

You just had to have two cups of coarsely ground cooked tongue lying around first-- a distinctly unlikely scenario today.

And sometimes the book seemed to give up the idea of convenience entirely, as in the recipe for Chicken Pie.

Cooks had to start by cooking a full chicken (well, except for its innards). Then those innards had to be browned with bacon, sausage, and lamb kidneys. (So it was more of a meat-lovers pie than just chicken.) Then cooks had to make the rest of the filling, put all the meats and veggies with their sauce into a casserole (so much for the "one-dish" idea-- whoever is in charge of cleanup will not consider this a "one-dish" meal), make and roll out a pie crust (sorry, a "piecrust," and it's easy because it starts with a mix), top the casserole with the crust, decorate the crust with extra little cutouts if they were feeling ambitious, and then bake the whole thing... So Kay Sullivan was clearly not that committed to the promises at the beginning of the book. (And I am worried that I never saw any instructions to debone or even cut up the chicken. Is the cook just supposed to cook a WHOLE chicken under a pie crust? I thought perhaps the step of picking the meat off the bones was so obvious that the recipe writer didn't feel the need to state it explicitly, but "Lift chicken... to a 3-quart oval casserole" seems to imply that the thing is still whole. How would you even serve something like that?)

These recipes make me kind of anxious just thinking about them. At least the anxiety is opt-in labor! There's no family expecting me to have their nightly anxiety ready when they get home from work or school, and no urge to push "George" to worry about old recipes for me... Yet another reason I'm glad to know that there are decades between me and these recipes. All I have to do is feel pointlessly anxious, and I don't even have to do that! (But it's better than feeling pointedly anxious about, well, everything else.)

Enduring both winter and canned vegetables

In the depths of winter, it used to be hard to get fresh veggies. (And honestly, what with the price of groceries and the often-dicey quality of fresh food shipped thousands of miles, fresh is still not always the best option.) So today, we are perusing a "Veggies" feature from the Cooks' Round Table of Endorsed Recipes (a section in old Better Homes and Gardens magazines that recipe collectors were supposed to cut out and slap into their BHG binders) from 1951. Since it's from the February issue, it features canned veggies.

Because I'm accustomed to seeing potatoes O'Brien in the freezer section, featuring onions and bell peppers along with the titular potatoes, I assumed that the Corn O'Brien on this page would feature onions and bell peppers along with the canned corn.

But, nope! The head note explains that "O'Brien here means you make corn taste extra good with celery and pimiento." So, I guess O'Brien just means a main veggie flavored with bits of other veggies? Or maybe BHG just decided O'Brien means whatever they want it to mean.... 

I figured the Sweet-and-sour Green Beans would feature pineapple bits and vinegar, along with maybe some green pepper. It seems like that's what "sweet and sour" means in pretty much any vintage cookbook. I was wrong again, though!

I guess the sweet and sour elements are both supposed to be covered by the sweet-pickle juice in this recipe, and the bacon is there because canned green beans need something to perk them up.

There was one recipe I was correct about: Minted Peas.

This is mostly just what you'd expect: peas and mint jelly. Of course, you have to be able to endure the squooshy texture, army-green color, and musty-locker-full-of-dirty-socks aroma of canned peas to meet your daily veggie needs with this blend.

This all makes me very glad that frozen food is extremely common, and I can throw frozen veggie bits into whatever I'm cooking rather than putting up with the metallic flavor and hopeless mush of many canned veggies. There's nothing like some old cookbooks to make me realize how good I have it now... (At least on the food front. Don't ask about anything else.)

P.S.: If you want to see how beautiful the Corn O'Brien and Minted Peas were, well...

I imagine the black-and-white photo does the peas some favors, but I'll bet the corn would have been prettier in color, especially with that pimento garnish.

Dreaming of gardens in February

Welcome(?) to February! It's the shortest month that feels like the longest month! This year, Home Gardener's Cookbook (Marjorie Page Blanchard, 1974) is here to remind you that spring IS coming.

Just as the book did in January, it primarily gives plans for planting once the weather is more amenable to gardening, but there are a couple of recipes for using up hardy veggies that are maybe still outside-- perhaps under a layer of snow-- or maybe in a root cellar if the home cook is lucky enough to have one.

I thought that Jerusalem Artichoke Pickle might be a recipe for, well, pickles. 

But considering that everything is ground up, it sounds more like a relish to me. (Or maybe I don't understand what relish is? Honestly, anything pickled is beyond my realm of understanding.) In any case, the addition of red bell peppers suggests that this is a recipe better made in the summer if you're really intent on using home-grown produce. (To be fair, though, it's better to do all that boiling in the winter! It might be a good trade-off just to buy some red peppers and process the pickles when you want to heat up the house.)

The other recipe sounds more exciting to me-- like a cross between a carrot cake and a pumpkin pie.

Swap out the walnuts for pecans (and maybe cut down on the nutmeg and replace it with some cinnamon and./or ginger), and I'll bet this would be pretty tasty, especially the pop of orange in mid-winter when everything is either brown or covered in snow.

This chapter ends on a hopeful note, promising "We leave February with the vegetable seed order placed in the mailbox to the very faint sounds of the hounds of spring following on winter's traces." Here's to those sounds getting louder!