Going crackers for substitutions

If you want to keep the holiday going, July 5 is National Graham Crackers Day. I'm sure most people think of s'mores, or maybe crumb crusts, when they think of recipes involving graham crackers. The sweet little sheets can be more versatile than that, though, as The American' Woman's Cook Book (ed. Ruth Berolzheimer, 1942) reminds us. 

I'm guessing that Graham Cracker Cream Cake was for when the cook was running a little low on flour and/or sugar (or trying to work within ration limits) since all those graham cracker crumbs could help make up for any shortfalls. (Plus, the shortening is probably cheaper than real butter.) And now, with grocery prices consistently going crazy and threats of shortages on the horizon, it's always nice to have old recipes to remind us to be flexible in using what we've got. Cooks have always used a little ingenuity when they had to. (Bonus points that they're not using their ingenuity to create, say, a Jell-O and tuna salad pie!)

If you made this with some applesauce or mashed banana instead of the eggs, it could fit right in with the modern era, 80+ years later.

Reluctantly venturing into July

When I was a kid, the beginning of July always felt like the beginning of the end to me-- a person who is hardwired to feel unhappy about things well in advance of them actually happening. (I cried about having to go to kindergarten two years before I was old enough to be a kindergartener, if my mother is to be believed.) So July means summer vacation is practically over. The stores start displaying their back-to-school stuff right about now.

Cooking by the Calendar (edited by Marilyn Hansen, 1978) focuses more on the here-and-now than I tend to. The beginning of July means Independence Day (at least for Americans), so the July chapter offers a Red, White and Blue Pie for the occasion. 

It sounds yummy and summery-- basically a lime pie topped with fresh berries. I'd skip the smattering of silver dragées, though. They would probably sink into the soft filling and/or hide under a berry, and the last thing you need to do on a holiday is try to find (and pay!) an emergency dentist.

The chapter also suggests various dishes that might be easy to take on a picnic, like this Stuffed French Bread. 

The bread-- meant to serve six to eight people--  is filled with, among other things, a quarter cup of bacon drippings, more than a half cup of butter, two pounds of Braunschweiger, and a brick of cream cheese. So light summer food-- not so much! I can't really imagine melting in the sun and wanting something this rich (even if I could pretend to like Braunschweiger). 

Other recipes seem more summer-appropriate. July is so full of fresh veggies that the chapter names both tomatoes and zucchini as the veggie of the month. They come together in the recipe for Zucchini-Stuffed Tomatoes.

Turning on the oven might not be that appealing on a blazing day, but at least it's only 350℉ for 20 minutes, and the recipe uses up a LOT of fresh produce.

The most summery recipe of all, though, is probably the Solar Plum Leather.

Aside from being composed primarily of fresh fruit, this is especially seasonally appropriate because it's supposed to take advantage of the hot summer sun to dry out the fruit leather. 

I know running the oven can be a pain in summer, but for this recipe, I think I'd go for the entirely-indoor variation. I can just imagine going outside to get the fruit leather and realizing that a bird shit in and/or ate part of it. Maybe it's got stray leaves and feathers stuck to the surface. Maybe it's full of ants. I just have a feeling that whatever precautions one might take when making this outside-- it's more of a recipe for disaster than a recipe for fruit leather. 

So, in closing, may your July not be full of stray feathers and bird shit and ants. And try not to think too hard about how quickly time passes.

Tapioca: Not just a bland pudding

Happy National Tapioca Day! I remember tapioca from childhood mainly as the weirdest pudding (made more edible by stirring in a big spoonful of chocolate Quik) and as Glop, one of those weird midwestern concoctions that my grandma made and served as dessert, though I imagine it counted as a salad at some people's houses. (It did have pineapple and pecans in it! That's enough to count as a salad in some circles.)

You can easily find tapioca pudding in just about any vintage cookbook, but today's recipes from American Home All-Purpose Cookbook (ed. Virginia T. Habeeb and the food staff of American Home, 1966) remind us that tapioca was a pretty common thickener in pies, too. 

I'm used to seeing strawberry and rhubarb ream up, but this book offers a lesser-known couple: Rhubarb Cherry Pie.

That one is good for late spring/ early summer-- perfect for Tapioca Day!

If you want to keep the tapioca party going a little later in the summer, there's a Deep-Dish Plum Pie.

I really hope the plums are small since they're only halved! I can just imagine trying to figure out how to at least semi-gracefully deal with a big slab of plum tumbling out of the pastry. 

And then for even later in the season-- if you really want to keep the tapioca fun-- we have Colonial Grape Pie.

And now I understand why I rarely see recipes for grape pie in old cookbooks. This one seems like a lot of work, what with stemming and skinning 2-1/2 pounds of Concord grapes, then cooking and sieving the pulp to get rid of the seeds, re-adding the skins to the pulp, and doing some more cooking before finally turning the whole mess into a pie shell and trying to give it a lattice top crust when the filling is still pretty hot. It's way easier just to make a pumpkin pie or pudding pie. (Or a fruit pie if you can just plunk the filling out of the can and into a waiting pie shell!)

Just thinking about tapioca is as far as I'm going to go for this holiday, though. That's about as festive as I get these days. 

The question of snacks

I picked up Snacks (Miyuki Iida, 1972) because it seemed like something was off. I mean, look at the cover.

I adore seasoned rice and a big salad-- but I wouldn't really consider something like this to be a snack. The inside cover says this was printed in Japan, though, so maybe Japanese consider this a snack? I wouldn't think so-- I tend to think of Pocky when I think of Japanese snacking-- but I can claim absolutely no real knowledge of Japanese culture. Maybe I'm just relying on stereotypes?

And anyway, why would a Japanese cookbook be in English? The back cover offered up a bit more confounding information, as it included a conversion table to convert "English" measurements (in ounces) to "American" measurements (in cups). I wasn't 100% sure whether that meant about the intended audience for this book, so I perused the recipe for American Hamburger.

Since it called for ingredients in both ounces (minced beef and pork) and cups (breadcrumbs), that didn't really help me figure anything out. Just the fact that the title refers to hamburger as "American" is more helpful, as it suggests Americans are not the audience. (This meatloaf-leaning recipe that recommends "a beef and pork mixture" to avoid drying out the patties also bears little resemblance to the American burgers of my youth, when mom would fry 100% beef with no additions-- not even salt!-- until it was so dry I had trouble swallowing it.)

In any case, I'm not sure this looks much like a snack.

At least the pickles and onions should be easy to pick off! I'm not sure why anyone would serve hamburgers from a two-compartment plate like this, though. 

The little book of 20 recipes also lists such snack time favorites as paella. 

I can't tell you how many times I've felt a bit peckish and decided to whip up a big panful of rice with chicken, fish, shrimp, clams, veggies, and saffron. (Oh, wait. I totally can. It's zero.) Also, this is a pretty substantial "snack" considering this mass of three cups of rice (three cups before it's cooked, presumably, considering it's mixed with so much liquid and baked for half an hour) combined with all the chicken, seafood, and veggies makes two servings.

Some recipes provide full menus-- and I generally don't need a menu for a snack. For instance, the Sliced Pork Sauté has the recipe not only for the titular pork, but it also recommends starting with canned tomato soup and provides recipes for rice with green peas and fruit salad.

The fruit salad may be my favorite part just because of the picture.

I love that pear so green it nearly seems to be glowing (to warn diners that the cook laced it with peppermint extract), accented with a maraschino cherry to heighten the wtf-Christmas feel. 

The book does include a sushi recipe, though, and I guess I could see sushi as a snack in the right circumstances. (Well, I probably could if I were a proper adult who enjoyed sushi, which we will pretend for the sake of this post.) Ready?

Yes, this is a giant slab of rice with thin slices of ham in the center and on top-- like a demented layer cake-- with a pickled ginger "flower" in the middle for decoration. 

And this "snack" to serve two starts with FOUR cups of uncooked rice, so I guess the takeaway from this booklet is that something is not a snack unless it's got at least several-hundred-calories'-worth of rice in addition to everything else. (Well, unless it's an American hamburger, which is, oddly enough, the smallest snack in the collection.)

In short, I have not idea what is going on with this book, but apparently there were some communication issues and/or questions about who and what this thing was actually for. Whoever the audience was, they must have had enormous appetites and infinite patience for preparing snacks.

Funny Name: Fabulous Edition

I doubt the Morehead Woman's Club had drag queens in mind when they put together Our Ways with Food (undated, but from the early 1960s), but when I hear "Crabmeat Queens," all I can imagine is a drag troupe that primarily performs as entertainment during brunches.

Stack up the chili! We got a Westinghouse!

I picked up the Recipes.. Care.. Use Westinghouse Electric Ranges booklet (1949) not for the color cover (though it is hard to resist a cover with green petits fours that almost match the pea soup).

I got it because I'm kind of fascinated by pictures of old electric ranges. They always seem so happy, listing all the features as if this specific appliance will change the owner's life.

This model offers extra outlets for appliances, an acid-resistant top, a warming drawer, and an oven big enough so you can bake EIGHT loaves of bread at once! (Never mind that I don't want to imagine what a private, non-bakery life that would require baking eight loaves of bread at once might entail.)

There's even a tiny woman ready to explain the oven's features for any homemaker lucky enough to own one.

Well... A tiny woman with football-player shoulders. She's ready to explain that the minute timer can (You guessed it!) be used as a timer. The "Surface Signalite" lights up so cooks will know when (You guessed it!) a surface unit is turned on. (If you want to know what the "Oven Signalite" does, you'll just have to turn to page 15.)

The recipes themselves are admittedly not the most compelling. If you need to know how long to steam various vegetables or how to adjust a cake recipe if you live in a high-altitude region, this offers up the appropriate guides. Still, a few recipes made me slow down for a closer look. The Chop Suey recipe briefly made me wonder what kinds of weird snack foods were available in postwar America.

A can of mushroom chips? I initially imagined crispy mushroom bits similar to canned fried onions-- like the kind people put on green bean casserole. Then I realized that the recipe also called for "water from mushrooms"-- so this really just means plain old canned mushroom stems and pieces. They're just referred to as "chips" because they're cut in small pieces. So much for that mystery.

I noticed a recipe for "Chili Stack" and was wondering how cooks might stack up their chili, given that it's usually pretty fluid and amorphous.

There is no real stacking involved, though. It's just chili with the suggestion that it be served on toast. (Not even a recommendation for layering toast, chili, toast, chili, which would at least be closer to a stack!)

And there is, of course, the recipe labeled as "Chinese" for extremely flimsy reasons.

The Chinese are known for their cheese-filled omelets with a white-sauce base, right? (And don't even get me started on how this is more of a soufflé than an omelet!) This recipe  is just another reminder that the simple addition of rice was enough to make pretty much any recipe "Chinese" back in the day.

I'm not sure how to end this one, so I guess it will just be with an embarrassing observation about myself. In the picture highlighting the Signalite, I noticed that the range has written indications of which control goes with which burner. (Note the "Right Read" near tiny woman's knees.)  That means I could easily figure out which burner to use! Stoves now try to be more inclusive by using little diagrams to indicate which burner goes with which control so people who may not read English can still figure out which one to use. The problem is that my spatial sense is so terrible that I am often confused by the little diagrams when they are not accompanied by written descriptions. If I've only got a diagram, I end up turning on a burner, touching it to see if it's getting hot, and then adjusting if I guessed wrong the first time. So-- come to admire my cookbook. Stay to hear me make fun of myself! 😄

The rainbow returns! Whether you like it or not!

Happy Pride Month! Or perhaps more appropriately this year, Scrappy Pride Month! It's unfortunately getting more important to remind everybody that we're here, we're queer, we deserve to be treated like real human beings because we are in fact real human beings, and also we like rainbows and kitsch. That last item, of course, is where my rainbow of gelatin comes in.

This year, I'm getting a sixth helping of recipes from River Road Recipes II: A Second Helping (The Junior League of Baton Rouge, Louisiana; January 1977 fourth printing). In case anyone isn't familiar with how a rainbow works: start with red. This year is too sour and bitter, so I'm going with (mostly) nice recipes this year, like Strawberry Delight Salad or Dessert.

I love that this Jell-O, like me, can go both ways. It also reminds readers that any gelatin, no matter how sweet, magically changes from dessert into a salad if you just serve it on a lettuce leaf.

Mandarin Orange Salad represents our violet layer. Yeah-- just kidding. The color is given away by the name. (Fun fact: In English, the color is named after the fruit. Before oranges were familiar, the color was just "red-yellow" or "yellow-red." In short, we have a fruit to thank for "orange"!)

To represent yellow, we've got Ginger Peach Salad for everyone who likes things a bit spicy.

This one also has plenty of soggy nuts, for those who are into that kind of thing. 

I'm going to hope the lime gelatin adds enough green that the Cheese Party Salad will count as green.

With three cheeses plus whipped topping, it's sure to be creamy and decadent. (I'd be a little afraid of the American cheese in the mix, though...)

And finally, as close as I can ever get to blue and/or violet with recipes predating Berry Blue Jell-O, Blueberry Salad.

I know the other side is always grousing about us "shoving things down [their] throats," showing an unawareness of both phrasing and how practically EVERY bit of culture has some implicit messages (and the haters are only consciously aware of the ones they personally disagree with). I just wish we could get the message down their throats as easily as Jell-O. 

In any case, it's Pride Month! And I hope all the jiggling in this post makes yours a little better. Gotta take what you can get...