A hamburger holiday

It's almost Labor Day-- a high grilling holiday! That calls for some Holiday Hamburgers! Have to admit that a pasta cookbook would not be the first place I'd look for a burger recipe, but today's entry is from Mueller's Classic Recipes (Marilyn M. Houston, 1972). (And in case you weren't aware, Mueller's is a pasta company, so this cookbook is meant to sell noodles of all sorts.)

Okay, I'm pretty sure Houston was thinking of Christmas since the noodles on which these seasoned burgers are served are spiked with green pepper and (red) pimiento, but 1. I have a feeling a lot of people would gripe about burgers served on noodles not being fancy enough for Christmas and 2. in most parts of the country, the option of grilling is not very appealing in late December. So I feel fully justified in turning this into a Labor Day recipe... even though you'd probably rather not have to make noodles if you're grilling burgers... So much easier to just serve them on buns (grilled if you're fancy!) and with a side of chips. Okay, maybe this is just a good holiday recipe if you want to be irritated on any random holiday. We all know that the potential pitfall of having to deal with your family might not be quite enough to send you over the edge. 😅 Best to have to grill burgers without burning them (Okay, fine, you could use a skillet for the burgers, but where is the holiday fun in that?) AND boil noodles without turning them to mush and then try to eat a burger patty on a slithery pile of noodles just to ensure that someone will end up having a bad day.

I think I will enjoy Labor Day by drinking some canned wine and watching Severance. (I'm sure you're thinking of the TV series, but I'm thinking of the 2006 film. Either choice is appropriate, though, so it's a solid plan.) Hopefully you have something fun and not too labor-intensive to do too (if you're lucky enough to have the day off).

Muellers makes macaroni meh

If you are ever at a loss as to what to do with macaroni (or other pasta, but this book has the most recipes for macaroni), then Mueller's Classic Recipes (Marilyn M. Houston, 1972) has some ideas.

Since it's from the '70s, of course it has its fair share of macaroni and cheese recipes and recipes that call for canned condensed soups. I expected that if it had a mac 'n cheese recipe calling for soup, the soup of choice would be cheddar cheese...

... but I was wrong. This uses cream of mushroom! It still gets copious amounts of cheese stirred in, so the mushrooms might add the right amount of umami to all that cheese. (I imagine that kids would be upset by the tiny mushroom bits, though!)

I'm always curious about what constituted "chili" in all those old cookbooks, so I was eager to see what was in the Macaroni Chili. (Funny that it was so formal! Now it's usually chili mac.)

Impressive that it has more seasoning than a lot of older chili recipes do-- two tablespoons of chili powder, plus cumin, oregano, and a bay leaf (along with the usual salt and pepper). But then I saw it also had a cup of sweet mixed pickles! I don't think I've seen a recipe calling for pickles in chili before. Sounds revolting to me, but I don't like pickles... As popular as pickle-flavored everything has been over the past year or two, I kind of expect to see a canned or fast-food version of pickle chili before too long. (Or maybe they're already here and I missed them. Or maybe, and this is a longshot, the idea really is as revolting as I think it is.)

I'd associate pickles more with macaroni salad, but the Molded Macaroni Salad doesn't have any!

At least it uses unflavored gelatin rather than a dessert-y lemon, but I'm not sure how eager anyone is to devour macaroni, celery, and shreds of American cheese suspended in gelatin and mayo... (Especially when everybody knows the best use of macaroni and cheese is macaroni and cheese!)

The Sweet and Sour Chicken Salad does include both macaroni and pickles with the chicken...

...along with pineapple, sour cream, mayo, mustard, and melon balls! There's a LOT going on here, and not much of it is good. There's maybe a decent fruit salad OR a decent chicken salad, but I'm unconvinced that they belong together.

And just so it's not all macaroni, I'll throw in a recipe for spaghetti...

...served under peppers stuffed with raisin-befouled meatloaf. (It would have been so much easier and better to just cook crumbled ground beef and diced green peppers with the tomato sauce, but what's the fun in that?)

I do have to give Mueller's credit for doing the unexpected. We're all pretty familiar with a lot of pasta dishes, so they consistently added unexpected ingredients to throw you off! From the surprise soup and pickles to the unexpected gelatin, melon, and raisins, the recipes keep you guessing! (Guessing you will just make the same thing you usually make instead of trying one of these concoctions, I'm assuming.)

Another edition of "I do not think it means what you think it means"!

You might wonder why I'm posting this perfectly fine-sounding recipe for homemade pizza from the July 1975 issue of Women's Circle Home Cooking. 

I specialize in recipes that are usually head-scratchingly weird and/or only slightly more appetizing than whatever the cat left in your shoes the time you tried to give it a flea dip. (Yeah, the pair you had to throw away.) And here is a recipe for a simple yeasted dough, topped with a tomato sauce that contains actual flavoring ingredients! Alliums! Oregano! Red pepper! Parmesan cheese! So why did I pick this? The answer is like real estate: Location! Location! Location! You see, the recipe appeared directly under this heading:

Now, I realize ideas about what constitutes a fast-and-easy recipe changed as kitchens got things like microwaves, Insta-Pots, and air fryers, but I have a hard time believing that even in 1975 anyone thought a recipe that took two hours minimum-- and that's only if you're working REALLY fast and the yeast is cooperative-- counted as "Instant Cooking." But then again, the '70s were a crazy time when a guy could cast a fishing line in the same pool that a woman was about to dive into (at least if this graphic is to be believed), so maybe I don't understand the time well enough to judge. Maybe back then, 2+ hours was nothing...

A miraculous bird!

I'm not sure I'm THAT impressed by the concept of chicken, but my booklet The Miraculous Broiler-Fryer Chicken sure is. That's probably because it was put out by the Poultry and Egg National Board. (The pamphlet is undated, but addresses don't include zip codes. That means it probably from before July 1, 1963.)

I'm not entirely sure that whoever owned this before me was all that impressed either. Of the two notes I found in this recipe collection, one was simply "NO." (I thought it was a scribble at first, but then I realized it was a reaction.)

The writer did not elaborate on what the problem with "PRETZEL-FRIED CHICKEN (Deep-fat)" was. Most people love fried chicken, and I'd think pretzels would give it a nice, salty crunch, but the recipe reviewer was clearly not a fan. The other note I found was somewhat more enthusiastic.

There is no follow-up to the "Try" note, though, so I don't know whether this person actually tried hot chicken salad or what they thought of it if they did. Based on the black-and-white photo of said salad, I would never have guessed these things are supposed to be topped with cheese and crushed potato chips. Looks more like chopped egg or maybe avocado.

A lot of the recipes are, as one might expect, pretty standard. Barbecued chicken, roast chicken, chicken pot pie, chicken cacciatore. There are a few somewhat more surprising preparations. You might suppose these are the mid-century version of chicken enchiladas if you didn't look too closely.

But then you'd notice all the greenery and orange slices around the carb-coated chicken tubes. These are actually Chicken Pancakes Imperial. 

I'm still not really sure why the oranges are there, as the pancakes are just wrapped around plain chicken moistened with a milk-based gravy, then topped with more of the gravy. It's giving me bizarre orange-and-cream vibes. 

But then again, orange chicken is pretty common now, and it was back then too.

And just look at the cute half-orange filled with (Cranberries? Grapes? Marbles?) for serving.

Less cute is this chicken mound on the opposing page.

Looks like chicken and wallpaper paste, but it's actually Chicken Cantonese.

I would have assumed this "Cantonese" recipe was Hawaiian Chicken, considering how much pineapple is in it, but this booklet associates coconuts and curry (rather than pineapple) with Hawaii.

Honestly, the thing that sounds best to me out of all this is the pretzel-fried chicken, but the original cookbook owner probably thinks I'm wrong about that.... There is no accounting for taste.

Mashed potatoes can be your friend

I know my initial post about Betty Crocker's Dinner Parties (7th printing, 1978) focused on how lazy an entire menu could be, but the book also recommends ways to make easy mixes more complicated than simply following the instructions on the back of the box. My favorite examples of this show how to make pre-packaged potato products into "fancier" foods. For instance, if you want to serve New England clam chowder but want to be fancier than just reheating a can of Progresso, you can turn a box of scalloped potato mix into Quick Trick Clam Chowder.

It's basically making the scalloped potatoes on the stovetop and then dumping in canned clams and a bunch of extra milk. I imagine this would need some salt given how much the milk will dilute the mix's flavor, but it's an interesting use of packaged potatoes.

The recommendation for instant mashed potatoes is even more work (and more puzzling): turn them into a cold mashed potato salad.

And then stuff that mixture of cold mashed potatoes, hard-cooked eggs, pickle relish, instant minced onion, minced pimiento, and vinegar into small (and apparently raw) green peppers to serve at a picnic. Sounds gross AND hard to eat! The perfect combination if the cook doesn't want to be coerced into catering a picnic again...

At least Betty put more work into these recipes than into the one for onion rolls. I'm not sure what this suggests, exactly, except maybe that she tried drugs in the '70s just like everyone else?

Bust out the margarine! Gotta control that cholesterol

Today, we're looking at one of the less-exciting titles in my collection: Dietary Control of Cholesterol (Fleishmann's Margarine, 1969).

Since it's from a margarine company, it obviously tries to push margarine. There's actually a two-page spread trying to convince readers that margarine can easily be transformed into a lovely "sauce."

"Sauce" is code for simply melting the margarine and adding some kind of flavoring. This "sauce" looks kind of like it's filled with lawn clippings.

But at least it's flavored with fresh parsley. Other recipes call for using dried herbs. Dried herbs are fine in other applications that cook for a little while, but I can't help but think that margarine full of dried oregano would be kind of overwhelming in an unpleasant way (and probably musty tasting, considering how slowly people back then tended to go through their herbs...).

And it would be even worse with dried rosemary. 

No matter how "crushed" it is, you're going to wind up with a piece stuck in a molar and making everything taste strongly of rosemary for hours.

I was surprised to find a few recipes that didn't call for margarine at all-- perhaps as a counterbalance to those "sauces"? Or maybe they just had to fulfill the quota for weird gelatin recipes and (thank goodness!) couldn't figure out a way to work margarine into them?

This one almost sounds good at first. I am honestly a fan of fruity gelatin with cottage cheese-- it has a low-rent cheesecake vibe. But why would you throw in horseradish, mayo, and chopped onion?

If you can't resist the seafood-and-Jell-O combo (which, apparently, few people could do back then, for reasons that remain a mystery), there's a Cucumber-Salmon Ring.

Again, margarine-free! (You might notice that both recipes call for Royal gelatin, though. The same company sold Royal and Fleischmann's, so it's not like the recipe developers forgot their mission to sell the company's products.)

The booklet also includes another of my favorite recipe genres: sandwiches with seemingly-random fillings. The Fresh Garden Sandwiches focus, unsurprisingly, on fresh veggies.

I'm just not sure anyone ever looked forward to a slice of bread slathered with margarine, then topped with watercress-flavored cottage cheese and thin slices of radish...

And while I've seen peanut butter paired with a lot of things, I'm not sure tomato is its best companion.

Still, I didn't think the combination by itself was that weird. I personally wouldn't want peanut butter and tomato, but I don't like raw tomatoes. Maybe somebody who likes raw tomatoes would find the combo more interesting than the typical sugary PB&J? I almost didn't feature this recipe until I actually read through it. The peanut butter is combined with margarine for some reason, and each sandwich gets a heaping three tablespoons of the mixture. Then after the tomato, there's an additional thick smear of margarine mixed with oregano. (WHY?) In the end, this massive load of peanut butter and margarine is less than 50 calories away from a quarter pounder with cheese, though it definitely has less cholesterol. But is it worth the trade-off, especially since you're likely to experience dusty old oregano?

In short, "cholesterol control" is about as appetizing and exciting as the title suggests it will be. This one is not a surprise.

But have you ever thought of your zucchini-seller's religious preferences?

Today's recipe is from Cooking Without a Grain of Salt (Elma W. Bagg, orig. 1964, but mine is the 1972 Bantam edition), but I didn't choose it for its notably-low sodium content, or even for its suitability to help you finish off a bounteous harvest of zucchini. It's just got a really weird headnote.

Headnotes often provide extra information-- perhaps advice on where to find an ingredient that wasn't common at the time the book was written or what to sub in if you just couldn't find it. Maybe a brief anecdote about the first time the cook tried this food on vacation and knew they needed to figure out how to make it at home or about a time when the cook served the recipe and got a particularly favorable reaction. But this is the first time I've ever seen a headnote about the cook discussing the religious experiences of Italian immigrants who sell zucchini. I have no idea why Bagg thought this was a good note to include for the recipe... which is, oddly enough, exactly the thing that made me so interested in it. So, well-played, Ms. Bagg! You got my attention. Still not sure what that adds to the recipe, though.