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!

The slow-cooker makes everything old new again (Okay, not quite "everything." Mostly just aspic.)

While most of The Best of Electric Crockery Cooking (Jacqueline Hériteau, 1976) is rather practical and down-to-earth, suggesting recipes that will save time and money, it does have a fascination with aspics created in the older style-- before home cooks made them with powdered gelatin. I guess aspic must have still been considered rather glamorous in the 1970s, so the book recommended various ways to create it by using the crock pot as a starting point (rather than Knox). 

There's the meaty version:

And of course, the 8-10 hours of cooking time is just the beginning. The aspic still has to be strained and set. And why serve just plain aspic when you can embellish it? Veal Knuckle in Aspic can be "a delicious, delicate dish for a buffet or a gala summer luncheon."

And if mammal meat isn't your thing, there are also chicken aspics, like Brandied Chicken Aspic.

And if you'd prefer something cold-blooded transformed into an aspic, you can also make fish aspic.

Use it as the basis for Canned Shrimp in Aspic.

So, yeah. Even if this book is very 1970s in some ways, it seems much older in others. Maybe the best old-fashioned way to end a meal of all this old-fashioned aspic is with some Homemade Mincemeat.

Yep-- the kind that included actual minced meat.

Part of me wonders why anybody in the '70s bothered with any of this-- if they did at all. But we all need hobbies, and there was no way for people to simply scan recipes and post them on the internet to make gentle fun of them back then. So why not spend a day or two cooking fish trimmings and then suspending canned shrimp, veggies, and hard-cooked eggs in the resulting goo? At least somebody would probably eat it, and they might even think you were fancy.

The Best of Electric Crockery Cooking sets its sights deliberately low...

The cover of Jacqueline Hériteau's The Best of Electric Crockery Cooking definitely looks like it's from the 1970s-- which it is. (1976 to be exact.)

I think everything in the 1970s was brown with a few orange accents. 

The recipes are intended primarily to help '70s homemakers deal with rising food costs by using less expensive cuts of meat that take longer to cook and using up leftovers, especially while everybody is out trying to earn money to buy the groceries. (Again, these old books are feeling eerily relevant...) And the book really does seem committed to the bit, offering recipes to turn leftover odds and ends into soup...

(I love the built-in flexibility of recipes like this, inviting cooks to swap in or out whatever is on hand! Have to admit I'm skeptical about how well leftover spaghetti or macaroni would fare after 10-12 hours in the slow cooker, though.)

...or, alternatively, a different kind of soup.

Again, it's got an admirable "use it all up" mentality, but the phrase "hot-dog leavings" does not exactly excite the appetite (though it is amusing to imagine a tiny person with a pooper scooper following an animated hot dog).

The book is also somewhat charming in that it does not overpromise what its recipes can accomplish.

Gotta admire the admission that Chicken Stuffed with Celery "is not better than roast chicken-- just easier on busy days."

And while Bean-Pot stew is "An authentic, old Maine recipe" and economical, it's "A bit bland, perhaps."

But at the same time, perhaps our modern sensibilities are rather hard on bland dishes. They can have their place, as the book also points out with Church-Supper Meat Loaf with Tomato Sauce.

Modern readers might be tempted (as I was) to make fun of the notion that something "bland" is appealing, but then I thought about the thing I hated most about church potluck suppers when I was a kid: getting a plateful of things that looked good and then realizing that they were NOT what I assumed they were. And then getting yelled at for wasting food. And then spending the rest of the day worrying that the little bit I did eat was secretly poisoned and I was going to die. (Now that I'm a grownup, I realize that I just don't like caraway seeds or anise, but they won't kill me if they unexpectedly make an appearance in something I'm eating.) So here, the blandness probably does make it less likely this will get thrown away at the potluck (though it may also cut down on the likelihood that anyone will ask for the recipe, either). Besides, there's also a recommendation to season it up with oregano, rosemary, basil, parsley, and soy sauce, though I think modern readers would still be justified in laughing at the notion that these seasonings will make the meat loaf "spicy."

This is a very practical cookbook for the most part, and far from the hyperbole a lot of people expect in food media today. I can't help but be a little charmed, even if I have no plans to repurpose hot-dog leavings or cook leftover pasta into oblivion.

Home ec goes low-cal

For anyone who believes in New Year's resolutions and may still be sticking to them (Ha!) Quick and Easy Dishes (Favorite Recipes of Home Economics Teachers, 1978 edition) has a pretty substantial "Low-Calorie Recipes" chapter at the end of the book, so I thought it would be fun to check out a few "diet" foods.

We'll start out with a nice Low-Calorie Fruit Salad and Dressing.

Arranging things artfully does a lot of the heavy lifting for this recipe. It's hard to make some lettuce, half a pear, a mound of cottage cheese, and some stray bits of maraschino cherry, grapefruit, and prunes look like an exciting luncheon platter. And then just think of the delightful flavor of vinegar-garlic spiked orange juice on those maraschino cherries, etc. It might be enough to make you lose your appetite-- which is pretty much the point, I guess.

The Tomato Sauce for Meatballs recipe doesn't sound bad, really. I just kind of wonder why it's in this particular chapter.

There's not much to set this apart from any other tomato sauce recipe. You can just tell that it's "diet" because it calls for a little liquid Sweet-10, an old-timey non-caloric sweetener. Yes, tomato sauces often include a little sugar to balance the tartness of the tomatoes, but it's so little that replacing it with an artificial sweetener isn't really going to save much calorically-- especially when the tiny saving is spread across as many servings as the recipe makes. You'll save maybe two calories per serving by not using real sugar. This recipe goes straight into the "Why bother?" file.

And finally, we have a dessert that made me laugh just because of its name.

"Pretend Peach Cheesecake" sounds like peaches are some highly desirable luxury that dieters just can't risk ingesting. Of course, it's not the peaches that are the "problem"-- it's the cheesecake. I guess my point is that I'm a language nerd and the adjective should be next to the noun it modifies-- which in this case is cheesecake! The cheesecake part is definitely the pretend element. There's not even cottage cheese to pretend it's cream cheese-- just "liquified nonfat dry milk" for the dairy element. (Wouldn't that just be... skim milk? I'm not sure I understand the rationale for using nonfat dry milk here.)

These recipes don't do much to contest my perception of home ec teachers as a bit out of touch with the real world, but I wasn't expecting them to do that. (I also wasn't expecting the Sweet-10. Now I kind of want the Spanish Inquisition to show up. But they won't-- because I'm expecting them.)

More Miraculous Microwaving!

If you have a really good memory, you might look at today's post and ask, "Didn't you already write about Multi-Power Microwave Miracles from Sanyo?" 

And, okay, yes I did, but that was the 1979 version. Today, we're looking at the 1977 version. So there.

I can tell Sanyo learned from its mistakes because the newer edition had a relatively-yummy-looking picture of veal parmigiana on the cover, and this has...  chunks of avocado that have been out waaaaay too long mixed with black beans and apples, served over rice? I'm kidding, of course. The background suggests this is a curry of some sort. In this case, Curried Lamb.

It just happens to look weird and greenish and gloppy in the picture. (Good thing the food stylist overrode the instruction to peel the apples, as the little pops of red in the picture are the only parts that look even halfway appetizing.) These observations bring me to the focus of today's post: the photographs. This book's pictures don't always really sell the recipes. 

I can't say I'm particularly inclined to think Tuna Crunch will be great. (I mean, there's a reason Yankee Candle doesn't sell "Microwaved Tuna" jar candles.)

The recipe sounds pretty standard-- a bit of veg, canned tuna and mushroom soup, some chow mein noodles and cashews for the titular crunch. Still, the picture of it seems almost like the book is embarrassed about this recipe. 

The components of the recipe are up front and perfectly in focus, but the casserole itself is kind of backed out and a bit blurry, like nobody really wants to examine it too carefully...

Still, the photographer was perfectly fine with putting the Beef Tacos right up front.

These look like the world's blandest tacos, filled with roughly 50% shredded iceberg lettuce and 50% unseasoned ground beef. There's a little parsley on the side if you want to make it "spicy."

The recipe suggests the tacos may have slightly more flavor than they appear to:

I'm not convinced that a quarter teaspoon of chili powder would do much to spice up a full pound of ground beef in a cup of plain tomato sauce, though.

And for dessert, I'm not exactly sure what recipe these cakes are meant to represent, but it looks like the food stylist let the kids frost them...

... with their toes.

So, yeah. I think Sanyo tried a little bit harder on the next edition because this version wouldn't necessarily inspire a 1977 family to blow a week or two's salary on a microwave.