Some Bake-Off recipes that seem... off

The Pillsbury's Best 12th Grand National Bake-Off Cookbook doesn't actually have a date printed on it as far as I can tell, but the winner is Dilly Casserole Bread, which won in 1960, so this was probably printed in late 1960 or early 1961. (Don't tell me that I could figure out the year by knowing that the Bake-Off started in 1949. Then I would have guessed that this was from 1961 because I would have used simple subtraction, not taking into account that both the first year AND the most recent year would count. I wasn't a math major!)

Most of the recipes are fairly-tasty-sounding baked goods and as such, of relatively little interest to me... It's not like a small twist on cinnamon rolls or pound cake is likely to be too exciting or revolting.

The small section of main dishes held some interest, though. To feed my fascination with all recipes that claim to have some type of Asian influence but were clearly dreamed up by white people whose main experience with any kind of Asian cuisine was that they may once have heard another white person describe something they ordered at a Chinese-American restaurant a couple years ago and only vaguely remember, there's Oriental Celery Crunch.

Anything that starts with a cup and a half of shredded cheddar just doesn't sound so "Oriental" to me... Fold some of that cheese into a white sauce loaded with celery and add the rest to a cheese nut pastry to be baked on top of the saucy celery, and I am left wondering what exactly made anyone think the title applied. Usually, "Oriental" means that something has soy sauce, rice, and/or chow mein noodles in it. This has none of the usual suspects, and so much cheese and pastry that it could more credibly be labeled French... Maybe it's the MSG? The almonds? Your guess is as good as mine.

Speaking of pastry, this chapter also has one of those recipes-doubling-as-craft-projects that I love. In this case, it's Seafood Sunfish.

I love the idea of home cooks spending the better part of a day carefully cutting pastry out with a crabmeat can, then cutting and placing fins and tails, adding filling, topping it off with additional crust, carefully scoring all the details, adding olive eyes... Recipes this cute are usually reserved for children's foods, but I can't imagine most kids getting too excited about crabmeat and capers. Maybe this is intended for a ladies' luncheon? Or maybe it's just something for mom to make when she gets bored and wishes she had gotten that art degree instead of getting married and having a passel of children? (And a warning to the rest of the family to tread lightly because mom is in one of those moods again...)

I initially thought the recipe for Hamburger Hotcakes was going to be regular hotcakes with a hamburger-based sauce in place of maple syrup.

Nope! These hotcakes actually have the hamburger mixture baked right into them, to be served "hot, with a mushroom sauce or sandwich-style with a cheese slice between pancakes." I'll bet the "mushroom sauce" was just code for "heated-up cream-of-mushroom soup," and I kind of wonder if anyone ever went crazy and did both at once. Cheese between the top and bottom layer, then sauce over the whole thing would be a savory version of the sweet stuffed pancake stacks people eat now.

It should be no surprise that the nastiest-sounding recipe is Cook's Choice Casserole. "Cook's choice" was always code for "hastily-thrown-together-odds-and-ends-we-need-to-use-up-soon" when it showed up on our elementary-school menus, and it seems to be the animating force in this recipe too.

I love well-prepared Brussels sprouts (especially roasted ones!), but the fact that this recipe starts out by fully cooking frozen Brussels sprouts according to package directions (which were likely "Boil them into submission. Then boil a couple more minutes just to make sure.") and then preparing to bake them for another 20-25 minutes does not bode well. Adding the sulfurous smell of the hard-cooked eggs is unlikely to help... (Maybe the cheese will do some good. It's the only hope.) I'd think the biscuit topping would also help, but it's swirled with mushy and musty canned deviled ham... In short, this definitely has that "I've gotta use this shit up" vibe, which, while an admirable goal, is not really something I'd generally associate with a contest-winning recipe (or even a recipe that the family will accept a second time).

I will close with one baked good, though, as those are the book's main focus. Since I am a licorice hater, here are Licorice Snaps.

I saw the jar full of licorice candies in the picture and immediately wondered what pieces of actual licorice would do to the texture of the cookies. If you check the recipe, though, these have no actual licorice candies in them-- just anise seed. So these are actually better than expected (which isn't saying much). The recipe is just a slightly-more-pleasant-than-I-imagined way to waste yummy pecans.

I guess the judges agreed with me that these weren't necessarily tops in the competition. These cooks didn't win prize money-- just a new range and mixer, a recipe in an official Pillsbury publication, and a good story for anybody they could get to listen. So they are still winners, which is nice in a world where it is so easy to lose.

A rainbow of Jell-Os that requires inclusivity!

It's Pride Month, so I hope you know what that means! We get a rainbow parade of wildly jiggling Jell-O! It warms my heart how much a salad/ dessert can get into the spirit of the holiday. This year's recipe provider is Country Cookin'  from Ross Chapel Church in Bolts Fork, Kentucky (1977).

Since this year has been such a sour and bitter one, the recipes this time are a sweet counterbalance. We'll start with Apple-Solutely Delicious to represent red. 

Granted, the Miracle Whip and sour cream will likely turn the raspberry gelatin pink, but you always have to be very inclusive with your definitions of colors when we're talking Jell-O molds! (And you also have to be very generous with your definition of  "delicious" when Miracle Whip is involved. But hey, Pride Month is about inclusivity.)

Now for something orange: Sunset Salad.

Okay, this is orange-and-yellow, but again, be inclusive! The carrots will make it orange enough to count (and crunchy enough to be fun). 

Lemon Bisque is a rare gelatin that also involves vanilla wafers.

Sounds good, but it might be bit of a shock to anyone who was expecting banana pudding when they saw it. (And speaking of a shock... What is "Wilson cream"? Uh... I'll let you insert your own off-color joke here...)

(There's a little joke just for me. If you get it, 5000 bonus points, you perv.)

Now on to green, with Lime Chiffon Salad.

Chiffons are usually made with whipped egg whites, but this one subs in cottage cheese and mayonnaise. Not really sure how that qualifies as "chiffon," but we will be inclusive! (Sometimes it's hard work.)

Unfortunately, the book didn't have anything in blue/ purple color range, so I'm going to end by doubling-down on the rainbow theme with Broken-Glass Cake (which does not actually involve broken glass, which you hopefully guessed, or cake, which you may not have realized). 

This just mixes cubes of the various colors of Jell-O together to make one... We'll be generous and call it "glorious"... confection.

At least everything is sweet, and no pickles or olives were involved. May your Pride Month be sweet and inclusive, and may it only involve Wilson cream if all parties consent first!

Picture the foods of the '50s. Or maybe don't.

I wasn't that surprised to find a Rawleigh cookbook in my late grandma's belongings. As I have noted before, my family got caught up in that MLM bullshit. What did surprise me was that grandma's copy of Rawleigh's Picture Treasury of Good Cooking was from 1959. I don't think our family got into Rawleigh sales until the 1980s. Now I'm wondering whether we were in it for longer than that and I just wasn't really aware of it until then, or whether grandma encountered Rawleigh salespeople decades before she got involved in the scheme herself. Or maybe our dealer just gave grandma an old cookbook for some reason. Who knows? (Not me.)

My favorite thing about the collection is the pictures, which often do not sell the recipes as well as Rawleigh probably hoped. I mean, I'm not exactly dying to try mud-covered chicken.

More specifically, the topping looks like the thinned-out clay called "slip" that we used in ceramics class to help glue pieces together. Can't say I ever had any desire to taste it.

The fact that this is seasoned with cloves does nothing to make me more excited about this recipe.

I was briefly alarmed by this next picture, thinking that perhaps I was seeing whipped potatoes served on a sea of guacamole and garnished with mushrooms.

This is actually just that old (and usually pretty tasty if you ask me) standby, chicken tetrazzini.

I guess the editors just wanted to show off that the cookbook had full color pictures and didn't stop to think about what green noodles would actually look like in the photograph.

A few of the pictures seem like they could be illustrations in some intro to biology textbook. This first one reminds me of a diagram of a cell: some kind of a membrane enclosing a bunch of tiny organelles you'll have to label on the exam. Maybe the lettuce represents algae in the pond where this single-celled organism lives? Or maybe it's a series of extensions from the membrane to help with locomotion or nutrient absorption?

Nothing that interesting, of course. It's just gelled-up cottage cheese concoction enclosing a salad of canned or previously-frozen vegetables marinated in an oil-and-vinegar dressing.

There's also a protozoa of some sort (or alternatively, an implausibly squishy trilobite?) rowing its way down the dinner table.

This is (also quite implausibly) supposed to be jambalaya.

I realize there are a lot of ways people make jambalaya and that I am NOT by any stretch of the imagination an authority on the subject of Creole cooking, but I'm pretty sure the absence of sausage, the missing celery from the holy trinity, the fact that the rice is cooked separately and not seasoned, and the addition of fried bananas would make many wonder whether this could reasonably be called any variety of jambalaya at all. Then again, it was much easier to get away with calling a recipe whatever you wanted in the 1950s.

The picture that really got me, though, was the one that immediately brought to mind the popular childhood insult "Is that your head, or did your neck throw up?"

Sorry, fish. Looks like your neck threw up. Maybe this is not the best thing to make when someone catches you a delicious bass. 

And just because I am so upset by that photo, I won't end on it. We will end with this recipe for fried fish fillets from the opposite page.

And it's not just because fried foods tend to be delicious. It's also because I think the fishy dishware is just so cute.

I love the balloon-with-eyes look of the fish serving platter and the contemplative-but-also-maybe-a-little-horrified look of the fish serving dish above it. They're kind of disturbing in their own right, but still appealing in a hard-to-identify way-- a good ending note for a blog like this.

Jonesing for June

It's almost June, which according to Home Gardener's Cookbook (Marjorie Page Blanchard, 1974) "is the first month when the gardener is eyed with envy." Blanchard is seriously underestimating my laziness and overestimating my ability to discern the difference between produce from a home garden and that from a grocery store, but it is true that June is the time (at least in the more northerly states) that gardeners finally have some real variety from their gardens.

Spinach is apparently plentiful in June, so the spinach artichoke roll is an option.

I like that this imagines so many possibilities for the roll: serving it filled with herb cheese as hors d'oeuvres, with creamed mushrooms and Hollandaise as a side, or with curried chicken salad for a picnic. (Not that I can really imagine trying to transport this to a picnic, but June is a month for being a little impractically dreamy.)

My very favorite vegetables--beets!-- (heavy sarcasm there) are just coming into season, and the book recommends cooking them with another of my "favorites": celery.

I guess June is such a lovely month that you have to balance it out with a salad of sugared dirt and edible dental floss so you don't risk getting too accustomed to being happy. 

If you want to preserve some fresh herbs but are tired of simply drying them, there's a recipe for basil jelly.

I'm not quite sure what you'd do with such a thing, but at least making it would give the cook a sense of accomplishment. And if they gave it all away as gifts, they wouldn't have to think about how to use the stuff. Make it somebody else's problem!

And speaking of preservation and gift making, June is also the month to start a holiday gift you can work on all summer long: Tutti Frutti!

Add your strawberries and sugar to some brandy or rum now, and just keep adding fruits and sugar as the growing season progresses. By the end of the year, it should be ready to bottle and give away. (And of course, tutti frutti is always an excuse for me to link to The Devil's Rejects!)

On that happy note, I will sign off so I can walk to the grocery, buy some strawberries and fresh herbs, and pretend that they're garden fresh when I eat them in a simple salad later. That's more my speed than any of these recipes...

Grounded and not-so-grounded beef recipes

Since we've been thinking about economizing lately, let's look at Ground Beef Cookbook (Favorite Recipes Press, 1967), which opens with a reassurance that ground beef "fits into every budget and any type of meal."

And some recipes really seemed bent on economizing. (And yes, those italics are meant to suggest that the emphasis on saving money was to the detriment of the recipe.) Wash Day Soup seemed pretty sad, for example.

The soup has nothing in it aside from the meatballs (bound with eggs and graham cracker crumbs, so they're likely to have a weird, overly-sweet flavor). The meatballs aren't even browned first (maybe to save cooking fat?), so they don't get a chance to develop flavor before being dumped into lightly-salted-but-otherwise-plain water-- not even broth! I can't imagine this tastes like anything other than disappointment. Better to just ask for extra slices of toast covered with grated cheese and skip the soup altogether....

The book did offer some ways to turn cheap ingredients into something more appetizing than this soup, though. The simple addition of a flour-and-shortening crust turns plain old meat loaf into something akin to Beef Wellington.

Plus, these are individual loaves, so everybody can feel special!

Still cheap, but probably not as good unless you enjoy soggy fries is the Beef and French Fry Loaf.

It has not one, but TWO strata of fries between beef layers.

Of course, there were plenty of recipes for ground beef in a tomato sauce with pasta and often a cheese topping. These types of recipes are usually described as Italian in vintage cookbooks, but this one was a little more imaginative, describing one such dish as Chop Suey...

...and another as a Danish Casserole.

I also expected the "Polynesian" recipes to have the usual combination of pineapple and green peppers seasoned with soy sauce, but this book's Beef Polynesian went a different route.

Here, "Polynesian" adds curry powder to the soy sauce and substitutes mushrooms, raisins, peas, and mandarin oranges for the pineapple and green pepper. I never thought the pineapple-pepper combo sounded good, but this take makes it sound better by comparison!

Speaking of questionably-"ethnic" recipes, this booklet had a note from the original owner in it. Written on a scrap of a calendar from 2005, it just said "Japanese Casserole." It was on the page for (you guessed it!) Japanese Casserole, so I suspect the previous owner may have made this one.

I have zero sense of what makes this casserole Japanese. It sounds far more like a recipe from the Midwest to me, what with the meat, potatoes, carrots, and cream of mushroom soup. If anybody figures out how this name got attached to the recipe, let me know!

At least Japanese Casserole is, indeed, a casserole. This last recipe title has me even more stumped. I wasn't expecting to find kimchee in a mainstream American cookbook from the 1960s... and I'm still not convinced I actually found a kimchee recipe.

What this combination of veggies, ground beef, chili sauce, pinto beans, and bean sprouts has to do with kimchee, I have not the faintest idea. Maybe Mrs. William H. Buescher heard that "kimchee" was a Korean word that referred to vegetables and involved chili, so she assumed this could somehow fit the bill, not realizing that fermentation was a vital part of the equation?

Whatever happened, I like that there is such a variety of recipes in this book-- expected, unexpected, nasty, not so bad. It's a fun collection! And it makes me glad that "wash day" is not really a thing anymore...

Poppy plays a sandwich psychic

What's your favorite way to fix a sandwich? 

You didn't say "In the microwave," did you? 

Okay, that display of my "powers" is probably not quite enough to convince you that I'm a psychic. 

How about if I add that Sanyo is very disappointed in you? Can reading an electronics company's "mind" count toward my psychic ability?

Okay, I'll accept that you're still not convinced, but doesn't that kind of prove...?

Fine. I give up. This is just a bit anyway, meant to suggest that Multi-Power Microwave Miracles from Sanyo (1977) didn't really need a chapter on sandwiches, but I'm glad it had one.

The Hot Salad Cheesewiches recipe shows that the "just put anything you've got between slices of bread and call it a sandwich" mindset extended into the 1970s. 

Just drape tomato and pickle slices over lightly-toasted bread, heap with a Cheddar, cucumber, onion, sour cream, and seasoning mixture, and microwave the heck out of it! Be sure you make four because everybody is sure to want a tower of rubbery bread covered in hot, soggy vegetables that probably would have tasted better chilled or at room temperature.

If the cheesewiches don't seem like quite enough work for you, try the Cheese Roll-Ups. 

Yes, this is one of those recipes that starts with buying an uncut loaf of bread and cutting it into slices horizontally. Then the slices get spread with a mixture of crumbled bacon, grated American cheese, chopped-up olives, Worcestershire, and condensed cream-of mushroom soup. (I love salt more than a reasonable person should, but even I think this sounds pretty damn salty.) Roll each one up, microwave the heck out of it, and then serve with a sauce of the rest of the cream of mushroom soup (slightly diluted). The great part about this recipe is that each of the six sandwiches has to be microwaved for 1-1/2 minutes, and then everybody has to wait around for the soup topping to microwave for at least another 4 minutes. That means by the time everything is done, the first sandwich that got cooked will have had more than 10 minutes to cool off-- so by now, it's probably not only rubbery and soggy, but also cold. If you actually wanted to try this recipe for some reason, you'd probably be better off just wrapping the sandwiches in foil and warming them all at the same time in the conventional oven while the mushroom sauce heated.

And finally, we have a sandwich that can double as dessert if you want it to. (I know what you're thinking, but it's not a microwaved fluffernutter.) It's Brapples!

I guess "Brapples" is supposed to be a portmanteau of "bread" and "apples." And it's kind of like slices of bread topped with apple pie filling (sans cinnamon) and sliced cheese. To transform into a dessert, simply top "each with a tablespoon of sour cream and a sprinkling of brown sugar and nuts." (Now I kind of wonder if you can turn it into a "salad" by serving it with a lettuce leaf. Could I stretch the Jell-O based salad rules to cover this too, since it's got fruit, cheese, and nuts?)

At least I can kind of see this last recipe appealing to someone. (Not so much with the first two!) I'm not sure any of these will convert people to the idea of microwaving sandwiches though. (For the last one, maybe microwave the apple mixture on its own and then broil the assembled sandwiches in the conventional oven to brown the cheese!)

Well, I can see I'm wearing out my welcome (Are you sure I'm not psychic?), so this post is over.

Stretching food dollars with the USDA

As upset as we are over the rising price of... well... pretty much everything lately, it's not like this is the first time in history people have had to stretch their budgets, as today's featured pamphlet-- Money-Saving Main Dishes-- from 1966 attests.

So the USDA used to send out pamphlets like this to help Americans save money. (I tried to find links to similar current publications, but I kept getting forwarded to the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans no matter what I clicked, so if they exist, they are not getting promoted well enough to find easily.) It's interesting that this even came with a stamp from the district representative, as if politicians wanted people to think the government could, in fact, be helpful. Even though Latta was Republican, he was apparently on board with spending money to help make people's lives better (rather than reserving tax dollars for prisons and weapons and insisting any other spending was wasteful).

The booklet offers a lot of ways to stretch the definition of "burgers." There are Meat-potatoburgers. I'll bet you can't guess the filler!

Okay, if you didn't guess that the filler was potatoes, I'm a little worried about you. There's also a variation to use cooked meat and leftover mashed potatoes for maximum savings. Whether you want to stretch the a meager portion of ground beef or use up last night's leftovers, the book has got you covered.

I guess the Scotch meat patties aren't technically listed as burgers, but they still take on that classic shape.

Alternatively, they can be formed into meat balls and be simmered in a nearly seasoning-free tomato sauce for some super-bland spaghetti.

I thought the biggest stretch might just be the Fish-cheeseburgers.

I doubt many self-respecting kids would consider fish sticks with chili sauce and cheese on a hamburger bun to be burgers! Then I saw the "quick pizza" version listed under "For variety," and I had an even harder time imagining kids accepting split rolls topped with fish sticks, catsup, garlic powder, oregano, and a slice of cheese as "pizza."

If you want to branch out beyond burger variations, there are some ways to stretch canned fish, like the Sardine puff.

I'm guessing there is a reason I see a breakfast version of this dish (with sausage and/or bacon in place of the sardines, and which is so common and appetizing-sounding that I don't think I've ever bothered to feature it) far more often than I see this one (which is once, so far).

For the families who want to know how something like pineapple upside-down cake would translate into a fish-based main course, there's Topsy turvy tuna pie.

When it gets inverted for serving, it will have lemon or orange slices on the top, over a tuna-and-mushroom-soup custard and a cornbread crust. It should certainly be a conversation-starter. (Like, "Why couldn't you have made chili with a cornbread topper instead?")

Perhaps oddest of all for our modern "French toast is so sweet it should almost be considered a dessert" sensibilities, there is a recipe for French toast with tomato-meat sauce.

And even if you're not entirely convinced that French toast should be sweet, having a tomato-meat sauce with anything other than pasta sounds a bit weird. (Not to mention that eating the sauce on pasta would be way cheaper than making French toast, but maybe this recipe is for families with eggs and/or bread that is about to go bad?)

I can't be too hard on these recipes, though. They represent a time when there was more emphasis on the government actually making some attempt to help people out when times got tough. I'd certainly like to see more of that....