October: The month of chocolate cakes full of veggies

According to Cooking by the Calendar (edited by Marilyn Hansen, 1978), "October is a colorful, spirited month. Vivid blue skies are overhead and sure rays of clear sunshine warm our shoulders. The changing leaves dance in the trees and then drift slowly down to form a multi-colored carpet for our walking pleasure."

In October, I'm more focused on admiring the Halloween decorations than the leaves, but then again, 12-foot-tall skeletons and giant inflatable ghosts, black cats, and spiders were not easy to come by in 1978. I guess they had to take their thrills where they could, so it was the fall leaves.

October is designated as the month for "ethnic" foods, so this chapter features Italian Meatballs and Sauce Heroes.

I think a lot of today's home cooks would consider themselves relatively accomplished if they made meatball sandwiches at home using frozen meatballs and jarred tomato sauce. Spending hours making the ingredients could be a fun way to spend a chilly weekend, though, especially back before people got sucked into doomscrolling.

A lot of October focuses on something we still associate with October: sweets! Granted, none of these would work for trick-or-treating, but still... Sugar!

The book suggests Chocolate Surprise Squares in the "Cooking for the Fair" section. Our county fair was the end of August when I was a kid-- not anytime in October!-- but I definitely remember seeing this recipe well-represented in our baking competitions.

Its popularity was mostly because our fairgrounds were within smelling distance of a sauerkraut factory, and they would sponsor special prizes for dishes with sauerkraut in them. I'm not sure what everybody else's excuse for making chocolate sauerkraut cake was. 

The vegetable of the month-- potatoes-- gets featured in recipes both savory and sweet. The sweet potato isn't the only tuber that gets in on the dessert action. 

Yep! The Chocolate Potato Torte is made with plain old white potatoes sent through a ricer.

The section of the October chapter that puzzled me the most, though, was the section labeled "Halloween Treats." You might expect treats with spooky shapes, like jack-o-lanterns made with oranges or orange peppers. You might expect homemade candies or popcorn balls, given that this was the very end of the era when homemade treats might be considered acceptable for trick-or-treaters. What you would not expect, though, is something like this:

I have zero clue what makes Surfer Shake Halloween-appropriate. It's just a weird hybrid of an indulgent thick ice-creamy milkshake and a weird "nutrition" shake the health-food set would try to choke down. (Okay, now that I think about it, maybe a mixture of raw eggs, wheat germ, vegetable oil, and vanilla ice cream is pretty scary...) And this recipe isn't an anomaly in a mostly-spooky collection. The entire section just seems like it's random recipes Hansen wanted to throw in somewhere and couldn't find the right spot, so she just said, "Let's claim it's a Halloween treat!" and called it a day. 

Here's hoping your October is as cozy as an Italian Meatball and Sauce Hero and far spookier than a Surfer Shake! (And that your chocolate won't be full of surprise vegetables.)

All you need is some Miracle

The Wayback Machine is a little wonky right now-- couldn't make it all the way back to the '70s-- so today's cookbook is from 1989. Let's see what Good Food Ideas with Miracle Whip (Kraft) thinks we should do with that nasty white slime.

Other than to stuff it in pasta shells after mixing it with Fancy Feast, that is. 

The best way to get an overview of this collection might just be a menu of mayhem! So we will start out with an appetizer.

I picked Vegetable Pizza just because I know this recipe got a LOT of use in the late '80s/ early '90s. I swear, it was at every single potluck I ever got dragged to as a kid, although in my area, the cooks were more inclined to top their "pizzas" with raw broccoli and shredded carrots than red pepper and radishes. I just remember staring dejectedly at it and wondering why anybody bothered to make this when actual pizza exists and is MUCH better.

Of course, we need a salad. In a menu chosen for maximum contrast (meaning that everything will clash terribly), let's get a little tropical with Piña Colada Freeze.

Yeah-- with all that fruit and whipped topping, it might sound more like a frozen dessert, but this is in the salad section, so it's a certified salad! (Plus, I'm hoping I can make somebody out there gag at the thought of a piña colada full of Miracle Whip.)

I also liked that the photo of this concoction looks kinda like a brain.

Well, a brain surrounded by kiwi and strawberry slices and topped with pencil shavings.

I picked our main dish mostly because I love the title.

Midwestern Stir-Fry is a tacit admission that the closest most Midwesterners at the time would get to cooking Asian food was slathering some sliced smoked sausage and a few veggies in mustard-y Miracle Whip and serving the whole mess over rice.

For dessert, I could have chosen chewy double chocolate brownies or easy carrot cake, but I know that Miracle Whip in baked goods makes too much sense. It's mostly just oil, corn syrup, vinegar, and eggs--most of which are common ingredients in baked goods anyway-- with the possible exception of vinegar, but that still adds acid to help with leavening. The flavor will melt away, and you'll just have fairly typical brownies or cake. So instead, we're getting another frozen treat! This one is intended as a dessert rather than a salad.

I really don't know why you'd need Miracle Whip in with the blueberries, sugar, and gelatin flavored with just a bit of lemon peel. It seems like this icy dessert could very well be better off without it, but Kraft, of course, thinks the MW is essential!

I think the real miracle is that anyone wanted this collection. But then again, I wanted this collection. Maybe it's just a reminder that people always want to look at a train wreck, or a dumpster fire, or... Well... (Shrugging and glancing in all directions as 2025 spreads out around me.) You know.

Funny Name: Not the Bragging Point You Think It Is Edition

When people make rich desserts, they often brag about how the recipe is made with real butter. I'd think that would be the case for the Kentucky cooks who put together Morehead Woman's Club's Our Ways with Food (undated, but from the early 1960s), but I was very wrong.

Yes, these cookies brag about being made with margarine right in the title! How was this a point of distinction?

Want some potatoes, rice polish, and soy grits? I mean, dessert?

Let's kick back and make a dessert this weekend! The alarmist "health" cookbook Let's Cook It Right (Adelle Davis, originally 1947, but mine is a 1962 edition) recommends desserts only if they are "made particularly nutritious to compensate for the disadvantages they offer." Davis reluctantly offers dessert recipes only because she realizes people will make dessert anyway, so she might as well recommend some more nutritious versions. Her practicality follows through in recommending cooks use plain old sugar, too, observing that "persons who believe 'raw' sugar and honey to be nutritious foods usually eat far too much of them." Davis is nearly predicting the Snackwell cookie craze here, another instance when people felt free to pig out on junk if they have a semi-plausible reason to believe that the junk is somehow healthy. 

In any case, her dessert recipes don't seem particularly likely to induce overeating. The Molasses Drop Cookies with their wheat germ, powdered milk, and whole wheat flour seem like they would taste overly health-foody as it is. 

And then you might notice the variation of Mock Nut Cookies. Why mock nuts, when the book recommends real nuts in other recipes? Because the mock "nuts" are an excuse to slip in a cup of soy grits.

The Wheat-Germ-and-Oatmeal Cookies remind us that in addition to being the kind of book that slips wheat germ and milk powder into everything...

...this is also the type of book that sees wheat germ as exciting enough to be a headliner and whole wheat pastry flour, soy flour, and rice polish as interchangeably good cookie ingredients.

The book does allow for using mixes occasionally (At least, I assume the reference to the "package prepared pudding" is for a mix, as it would be really hard to thin out already-cooked pudding with 2-1/2 cups of milk and then thicken it back up in just four minutes on the stove.), as in this Prepared Puddings recipe.

I mainly highlighted it because I loved the "Flaming puddings" variation. It's hard to imagine putting that much work into pudding from a mix-- not just the cook-and-serve part (I'm an instant fan!), but then putting it in individual serving dishes to be topped with a marshmallow stuffed with a lemon-extract-saturated sugar cube and set aflame. (All that for a visual spectacle that is not even "effective except by candle light.")

And for the occasion when kids really demand sugar-- like a birthday party-- the book recommends making a big batch of Modeling Fondant out of mashed potatoes, sugar, and powdered milk. 

I love that the fondant is to be shaped into "tiny melons, fruits, and vegetables," as if Davis can somehow will these to be more nutritious simply by the shape. The headnote (which I cut off because part of it is on a different page and I'm too lazy to fuss with it) observes that if the fondant is left unshaped and distributed to birthday party guests, the kids are likely to make "pigs, giraffes, and caricatures of each other," which seems likely. This will also be so much fun that the party will end with the guests "forgetting to go home," which seems much less so (and is the opposite of a selling point in my world). 

At any rate, Davis has convinced me not to use any of her dessert recipes, so she could claim that as a win, I guess. (Well, as long as nobody notices that I avoid the desserts because I'd much rather use up all those empty calories for various Reese's peanut butter candies.)

Early refrigerator owners required a LOT of types of cream

I didn't necessarily pick up the Frigidaire Recipe Book (Miss Verna L. Miller, 1931) for the recipes. 

They're mostly pretty unremarkable, like orange sherbet, strawberry whip, or lettuce and tomato salad. (That last one is just lettuce with tomatoes and salad dressing-- as if 1930s cooks needed to be told that they could put tomatoes and salad dressing on top of lettuce.)

Still, there are a few oddities, like the frozen cereal creams. I guess the idea for Grape Nut Cream is that if you soak Grape Nuts in dairy long enough, they're less likely to break your teeth.

And the sugar and dairy fat will make them seem more like food and less like aquarium gravel. 

There's even an exciting variation of Grape Nut Cream: Bran Flake Cream!

Yippee.

And as a reminder that cereal milk was waaaay more boring before the invention of things like Cocoa Puffs and Cinnamon Toast Crunch, there's also a Shredded Wheat Cream.

The book also offers some odd frozen salads, like Frozen Cress Salad.

It's basically frozen squares of cream cheese, whipped cream, and mayonnaise suspending olives and a full quart of watercress. Yum! (Well, as long as it is "not allowed to freeze too solid.")

If you'd rather have frozen squares of cream cheese, whipped cream, and mayonnaise suspending a bunch of fruit and some chopped pecans, there's the Frigidaire Cheese Salad.

If you're curious about the "Rubyettes," they were a brand of grapes made to resemble maraschino cherries (and I've found an even better explanation of them than the one I posted last time I wrote about Rubyettes). 

But as I said, the recipes weren't really the draw. I just loved some of the photos, like this one of a woman showing off her brand-new fridge to all her stylish friends. Just imagine a kitchen full of women in their high heels (and even furs!) eager to ogle a squat white cabinet.

But who could blame their weakness for "glass-like, gleaming surfaces" that are "just as easy to clean, and to keep clean, as a china dish." (Sure, Frigidaire, fine china is known for being super easy to clean and maintain.) It's also interesting that the fridge "when it is ten years old, will boast that same glistening white showroom newness" when the "complete guarantee that covers the cabinet and mechanism alike" is good for only three years. 

The thing that really got my attention, though, is the caption under this picture of mother and son excitedly discussing the Frigidaire as it languishes before them with its doors akimbo, letting all of the kitchen's warm air inside and driving up the electric bill in the process. 

The great thing about the Frigidaire with its fancy self-sealing electric trays is that they can turn "your creamy fluids into firm, tempting desserts in record time." Uhhh... Is anybody else suddenly feeling very uncomfortable, and perhaps eying the frozen cereal creams with A LOT more suspicion?

Not sure whether this suggests that 1931 was a much more innocent time or that bored housewives had to get their laughs somehow and still maintain plausible deniability. I'm just glad I decided to read the captions. 

Salad-y Apple Applications

When I first wrote about Marye Dahnke's Salad Book (1954), I examined Dahnke's tendency to assign salad recipes to seemingly-random cultures. I also presented some oddities, like a "salad" that consisted of a wad of ingredients rolled up in wax paper, stored in the fridge, and sliced off like refrigerated cookie dough. Today, we're going to look at another of Dahnke's fixations, this one because it is fall-appropriate. (Hooray for the six pounds of fresh Ginger Gold I just stored away in the crisper!) Dahnke liked putting apples in pretty much anything.

Remember the salads attributed to a seemingly-random culture that I just mentioned? The Mexicana Salad exhibits both that tendency and the obsession with apples.

Yes, nothing says "Mexicana" quite like a slab of vinegary gelatin full of celery, carrots, cabbage, pimentos, and apple-- especially if it's slathered with mayonnaise before serving.

If pasta salad is more your thing, but you don't like how soft the mixture tends to be, the book suggests Macaroni and Cabbage Salad.

You get the crunch of shredded cabbage and diced apple (along with the usual suspects for a macaroni salad). And if you're craving apples, pickles, cabbage, and mayo with your macaroni and cheese, you are a very different person from me...

If you really want to show off the cabbage-and-apple combo, the Buffet Cabbage Salad is served right out of the hollowed-out cabbage heads.

This time, the cabbage/apple/mayo/cheese combo gets enriched with olives instead of macaroni and pickle. 

Finally, I am not even sure Dahnke was fully convinced of the combination in Kidney Bean Salad I. The headnote says kidney beans "are natural partners with celery, onion, and hard-cooked egg." You will notice that this description doesn't mention apples.

But apples are in there all the same. Maybe Dahnke realizes they are not such "natural partners" but throws them in anyway, just because she can't help herself? Or maybe she was bribed by USApple Association to throw them into extra recipes? (Or maybe she was bribed by some orange growers to sour readers on apples?)

Whatever the case, I'd recommend using Red "Delicious" apples in these recipes. They combinations don't sound good anyway, so there is no point in wasting an apple you'd actually want to eat in one of these salads. 😆

Recipe Dispatches from the Dispatch

Do you remember newspapers? You know, the kind that came on actual paper and that (if you were like me) you begged your parents to get every day because you didn't want to miss out on the comic strips and they were too cheap to get a subscription? Today's pick is from back when newspapers were so popular they would sell their own cookbooks. Well, kind of. 

This is a loose-leaf cookbook (edited by Bernice Thomas) in a binder, and readers could send away for additional recipe sets to keep adding to their collections. More specifically, "From time to time, 20 pages of recipes will be released for distribution to Dispatch Readers and can be secured by writing the Household Department of The Columbus Dispatch, Columbus, Ohio, and inclosing 9 cents in stamps." Whoever owned this one gave up pretty quickly, as my Dispatch Recipe Book only has pages 1 and 2 of each chapter (1 on the front and 2 on the back-- so I only have one sheet of paper for each chapter). It's undated, but the Columbus Metropolitan library dates the collection as beginning in February 1933. (They also scanned the whole thing, so the link is worth checking out-- though you will be limited as to how many pages you can access at one time.) As far as I can tell, "Volume One" was an ambitious claim. I couldn't find evidence of a volume two (though the library's copy of volume one proves there were a lot more pages than I have).

For today, let's "enjoy" a brief menu from the small selection of pages in my volume. We need to start with an appetizer, of course.

It's pickled green chili peppers, olives, Worcestershire, and "enough yellow grated cheese to make a paste." (Doesn't that sound appetizing? Mmmm.... Paste.) And then the paste is spread on pineapple, topped with more pineapple, frosted with "plain soft yellow cream cheese," and broiled. So... weird. 

Also, my brain broke when I was trying to figure out what "Cut six slices pineapple in half, making two circles" meant. I thought pineapple slices were already circles, so how halving six of them would result in two circles (rather than a dozen half-circles) completely eluded me. I am terrible at visualizing written directions for real-world physical processes (I need pictures!), so I knew I must be missing something. (I finally realized cooks were probably supposed to try to cut the pineapple slices like a layer cake, so each single thicker circle turns into two thinner ones, but it took me a while-- longer than I am willing to admit. I'm still not convinced I would have the coordination to make that happen, but at least I think I understand the process now.) These are the instructions you get when nobody has home cooks test the recipe before you print it.

The entrée should be more straightforward so my brain can rest. How about a nice spaghetti platter? A bounty of spaghetti coated in a thick tomato sauce seasoned lavishly with herbs...

...or not! Yes, this is just buttered spaghetti noodles with link sausages, pineapple, and prunes camping in Hoovervilles on the edges of the platter. You can definitely tell this one is Great Depression era.

Maybe we should end the meal with a nice novelty to lighten the mood.

Banana novelty is one of those recipes for when home cooks must have been bored out of their minds. Cutting grooves in bananas, filling the grooves with partially congealed gelatin (which sounds nearly as easy as nailing Jell-O to the wall), and then chilling the combo until the gelatin sets up (and the banana turns brown) seems so pointless when you can just stir a sliced banana or two into a container of partially set gelatin and call it a day.

Maybe these recipes are the reason that whoever owned this book gave up after the first round of pages? Who knows, but at least I got a few of them.