Maple Madness

When I idly wondered what kinds of recipes Home Gardener's Cookbook (Marjorie Page Blanchard, 1974) would include for March, I wasn't really sure what kinds of recipes might fit. After all, there's not a whole lot growing in March that would already be ready to harvest, especially considering the book is written for people whose climates are similar to those of the author, who lived in Connecticut. I didn't expect that finding the answer would make me so happy.

Maple! That led me to remember grandpa's little shack in the woods near their pond. It was abandoned the vast majority of the year, but if we were lucky enough to make a late winter visit to their house, the shack might be pumping out big clouds of steam as grandpa boiled down the sap that he'd collected in the little metal "houses" (as I thought of them since they had roofs) tapped into the maple trees. And I knew on our next visit, grandma would get out the electric skillet to make stacks of golden-brown pancakes to drown in the syrup. (It takes a long time to boil down syrup-- 40 gallons of sap make one gallon of syrup.) We never had anything so fancy as this Maple Nut Mousse (and there's no way grandma would have put rum in it!), but it sounds pretty tasty. (Especially if you subbed in pecans for the walnuts.)

There's also a recipe for another thing that sounds delicious but never would have been on grandma's list of things to make: Maple Bourbon Cake.

I was excited to see these recipes not just because they brought back some happy memories, but also because the recipes were in the right month. I know it's a pedantic, who-cares problem, but in the past few years, food companies have decided that maple is a fall flavor. It seems like they whip out the maple stuff to try to distract/ mollify the people who are offended when someone somewhere has the audacity to enjoy anything with pumpkin spice. But there I am in the corner, practicing my own equally pointless form of judginess, saying "But maple is a late winter/ early spring flavor!" So I am grateful to Marjorie Page Blanchard for putting maple in with the March recipes, even though the people who bought the book better damn well already have had some maple trees if they hoped to make syrup. It's not like the gardeners in her readership could have planted some maples and been ready to tap them anytime soon!

So here's to being made happy by some pointless little detail. Take what you can get!

Some OLD recipes (and old problems)

Mountain Makin's in the Smokies: A Cookbook (The Great Smoky Mountains Natural History Association) is from 1957, but s lot of the recipes in the book credibly claim to be much older than that, starting with the recipe on the first page: Ash Cake.

You can tell the book was well-loved, given the stains. (I suspect the original owner used the cornbread recipes on verso of this page and that's why this is so stained, but who knows? Maybe cooking food right in a fire was still something people did in the late '50s if their homes were really rural? Though I suspect they wouldn't be the type to spend money on cookbooks like this if that were the case...) The idea of putting food directly in contact with ashes makes me really nervous as a modern person, though-- seems like a good way to eat whatever pollutants the firewood absorbed when it was a tree... Still, the illustration makes cooking an ash cake seem like such a cozy thing to do on a cold winter's day.

The book also connects some of its recipes to the area's history, as this "Indian Bean Bread."

Essentially balls of cornmeal and beans boiled together, these sound very bland, but they would be a good mix of carbs and protein when resources are limited. (Plus, they might be flavored by whatever else they were served with?) 

The Chestnut Bread is similar, though it seems like this version is supposed to be cooked like tamales (at least, if I am understanding the recipe). 

I wonder how similar these are to actual native recipes...

There's also (perhaps) a glancing mention of slavery in the Hoe Cake recipe.

The mention of the "workers" may be a sanitized reference to enslaved people, but given that this book was published 90+ years after the end of the Civil War, I could be reading too much into this. The other terminology is obviously outdated, but I was a little surprised to see this discussed at all. Groups that aren't well-respected often get ignored entirely. 

There are some slightly higher-end recipes, like the Stack Cake, given to the contributor by "Mrs. Dolphus Kerley... who died January 6, 1948, two months before reaching 90 years of age" and who got this recipe from her mother.

It's a rare-for-this-book recipe that doesn't call for cornmeal, but it is sweetened with molasses-- widely used at the time-- and filled with applesauce for a relatively cheap and healthy-ish treat.

The book also includes some home remedies, a reminder that people didn't always have drug stores stocked with aisles and aisles of over-the-counter remedies on every other corner.

And I am sure today's parents are glad not to have to try to use cloth to wrap mashed roast onions "to the hollow of the child's feet" whenever the kids have a cold.

But who knows? Distrust of vaccines and pharmaceutical companies could mean that the Whooping Cough Syrup recipe becomes newly relevant.

No matter how unsavory history may be, looks like we can be drawn back whether we like it or not.

Of smoke and cornmeal

Surprise! Today, we're looking at a cookbook I don't really want to make fun of because it seems like such an earnest effort, with recipes that don't call for a lot of industrial ingredients combined in unlikely ways.

Mountain Makin's in the Smokies: A Cookbook was published by The Great Smoky Mountains Natural History Association in 1957, and the recipes have the make-do, regional flavor you might expect. So here's a brief menu to give you a taste.

Protein is often the most expensive ingredient, so it's better if you can get it for free (or at least, for the cost of a fishing license). "First, catch the fish!"

This picture accompanies the recipe and illustrates the first line-- the one I just quoted! Then clean the fish and cook with a relatively inexpensive cut of meat.

This recipe is meant to make it easier to cook fish that are pretty small-- layering them over strips of bacon both to make the fish easier to turn and to baste them in hot, salty, smoky fat. 

You'll need an accompaniment. The book has sooooo many recipes for bready, cornmeal-based sides, but we'll go for the traditional accompaniment for fish: hush puppies.

The page actually has three different hush puppy recipes, but I chose this one because it has the most explicit instructions on how to make them.

And then to round out our meal, we'll need something sweet. (And full of cornmeal. Just about everything in this book is full of cornmeal because that's what people had on hand.)

The cornmeal custard pie is exactly what it sounds like: a custard pie thickened with cornmeal. It should be cooled on a windowsill, according to the accompanying illustration.

I'd be reluctant to do that, though, as my knowledge of cartoons suggests that someone nearby will follow the aroma lines (probably floating through the air without even needing to put their feet on the ground!) right to the pie and steal it before anyone can stop them.

This is full of recipes claiming to be much older than 1950s-old, and we'll look at some of them later. I just wanted a teaser for today, like a pie on a windowsill.

Funny Name: What's the Bo Status? Edition

When I got to this recipe from Recipes: Homemade Happiness (compiled by Rev. and Mrs. Floyd Miller (Marie) for the Archdale, NC Wesleyan Women, 1994), I figured there had to be some kind of explanation for the name. 

There's no hint in the book about what makes these "Could-Be-Bo-Biscuits." I figured it must be a southern thing that I knew nothing about and assumed an internet search would clear the mystery right up. But all I found were recipes trying to copy the Bo-Berry Biscuits, which are apparently a sweet treat served at Bojangles restaurants. Given that those are loaded with blueberries and topped with a sweet glaze-- these are definitely not trying to be Bo-Berry Biscuits. So I still have no clue what makes them "Could-Be-Bo." Maybe it's the use of flavorless shortening instead of butter? Maybe it's the hint of powdered sugar? Or maybe it's just some family joke that got into the regional cookbook, and half a dozen people have any idea what it's about. All I know is...

Wear-Ever you go, aluminum cookware will be there for your health

"Wear-Ever" New Method of Cooking (1935) promises a lot from their aluminum pans, with the cover suggesting improvements in health, flavor, and economy.

The "new method" of cooking is basically cooking foods (especially vegetables) without added water in a covered pan for a relatively short time, rather than the traditional method of boiling them to death. Small wonder that will improve vitamin and mineral retention as well as flavor! (The "economy" part comes mostly because the book encourages cooks not to peel vegetables unless absolutely necessary, and even then to take off less through such methods as putting whole veggies through the food mill, which is supposed to retain the skin with far less of the underlying material than paring would.) 

The book is also high-class for the time because it has a few color pictures, such as these spinach timbales.

I can't help but be charmed by old-timey illustrations like this, though I have to admit the timbales don't look particularly edible to me... More like something a cousin of the facehugger might burst out of... (And you don't even want to know what the whitish goo they're trapped in is...)

(Okay, it's really just white sauce, but I'm sure you already guessed that if you've ever spent more than 10 seconds looking at a cookbook from the 1930s.)

In an effort toward economizing, the booklet presents this recipe for Hamburger Steak. I kind of assumed it would attempt to be, well, steak-like. The ground meat might be flavored with steak sauce and/or seasonings usually associated with steak and patted into roughly steak-shaped pieces, then smothered in an onion and/or mushroom gravy to give it that juiciness and reinforce the steak-y flavors. 

But no. This is just plain old ground beef with some (presumably diced!) green pepper and onions mixed in before the "cakes" are fried. So, beef with (maybe still crunchy?) veggies mixed in, topped with canned tomatoes if the cook needs a little more filler. Exactly like steak.

The booklet also tries to make things interesting by adding international(ish) favorites, blanded down to 1930s standards. Take the Rice O'Mexicano, for instance.

It's one of those old-timey recipes that was considered "ethnic" because it included tomatoes and green peppers with the standard carrot, onion, and celery, and it used rice instead of potatoes. It could just as easily (and incorrectly) have been labeled as creole, Italian, or Spanish-- maybe even Chinese, though that might require the addition of a handful of cashews-- depending on the editor. Of course, in no case are any seasonings that might actually suggest a specific type of cuisine permitted, other than a garnish of parsley.

I could neve quite get a handle on what the booklet was going for with the spaghetti recipe.

It starts with ham and cream cheese, so I thought it would be one of those creamy-and-smoky recipes, similar to carbonara. But then it adds tomatoes, green pepper, and onion, so it's more of a garden sauce. Then canned mushrooms go in, along with the pre-browned ham. Then the whole thing gets a garnish of Parmesan when it's served. I'm still not really sure what it is, but at least it sounds like it would have more flavor than the Rice O'Mexicano. And it will be a weird shade of pink, if this picture is any indication. 

Looks kind of like Fancy Feast on spaghetti. Yum!

So, in short, I'm not sure these particular concoctions convince me of the value of Wear-Ever recipes, but if the cookware did actually help get our ancestors to stop boiling everything to death, then I'm happy to give it credit for doing something right. 

Something hot to get you through February... Hope you're not too picky

Since we were just looking at the Cooks' Round Table of Endorsed Recipes supplement about vegetables from February 1951, let's follow up with their page of "Meats" recipes from February 1952. The front of the page shows off this pile of slop.

But it's topped off with a couple of pepper rings to class it up a little. What might it be?

Goulash Supreme! "Supreme" is often code for "sour cream" in old recipes, so I hoped this would be enriched with a little dairy fat, but no such luck. I guess the "supreme" is for the "unusual blend of spices": caraway, crushed peppercorns, bay leaf, and paprika. I'm not sure I'd call any of that unusual, but I guess maybe it was for 1952 when most white families' spice cabinets had pre-ground pepper, salt, onion salt, cinnamon sugar, and maybe a little chili powder or oregano if the family felt particularly adventurous.

The picture for one of the recipes on the back drew my attention, too. Are... Are those cinnamon rolls on top of the Savory Stew?

I'm now just trying not to imagine eating a cinnamon roll soggy from being cooked in a stew of carrots, onions, and beef.

Luckily, though, the bready topping is parsley pin wheels! (I'm still convinced they would be much better if you just baked them on a baking sheet rather than letting their butts get water-logged, but again, at least they're not cinnamon rolls.)

I guess in February, you have to take whatever hot glopola you can get!

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.)