Surprise! Casseroles!

If there's one thing home ec teachers and I have in common, it's love of a casserole. (Of course, theirs is genuine and mine is often-but-not-always ironic, but we don't have to tell them that.) That's why today, we're checking out a few casseroles from Quick and Easy Dishes (Favorite Recipes of Home Economics Teachers, 1978 edition). 

Anything with the word "surprise" in the title should be suspect, and Ground Beef Surprise is no exception.

The surprise? A sogged-out layer of French fries between a layer of greasy (apparently not pre-cooked and drained) ground beef and a slick of canned soups. Yay. 🎉

These casseroles tend to use a LOT of canned ingredients, as it was easy to keep canned food on hand. (Couldn't easily or cheaply order groceries delivered to your door back in 1978!) I'm not (that) snobby about canned foods. I'd rather have canned than fresh tomatoes. I go through cans and cans of tomatoes, beans, pumpkin, and even cream of mushroom soup. Still, I wonder about the '70s combinations, like in Quickie Supper Casserole.

Vegetarian vegetable soup with canned spaghetti and chow mein noodles? I mean-- dry spaghetti is already shelf stable. You don't need the mushy metallic canned version if you want to keep spaghetti on hand. (And I'm not sure why anyone would need spaghetti with chow mein noodles!)

But canned spaghetti was pretty popular, for some reason.

If you're not into serving it over chow mein noodles, layer it up with cheese, onions, corn chips, and pork and beans! 

You might hope that the Quick Chinese Supper breaks the overly-reliant-on-cans streak and doesn't even belong in the casserole section, as it should be a stir fry of a few fresh vegetables with a thinly-cut protein (and en casserole was originally a French cooking method anyway!). If so, then you don't really understand vintage "Chinese" recipes, where the term generally means "I dumped in a can of chow mein noodles."

And in this case, it also means "I dumped chow mein noodles, cashews, and canned mandarin oranges into tuna casserole to make it 'Chinese!'" Let that sink in for a moment. (Or don't! I'm trying not to think too hard about it.)

I promise, some casserole recipes are good. Just not these....

Stay slim the vintage way, with iceberg lettuce, canned peaches, and low-cal pudding mix!

Swimsuit season is just around the corner! And back when women were required by law to care about such nonsense, they might have pulled out Better Homes and Gardens Eat and Stay Slim (copyright 1968, but mine is from the 1974 9th printing and originally belonged to my best friend's mom). (Also, my friend is very happy that her mom never made any of the recipes from this collection as far as she remembers.)

Despite the appearance of the cover, the recipes are not all super-plain: pile of plain lettuce, plain roast with a pile of cooked but otherwise very plain mushrooms. Let's see how interesting it could get with another Menu of Mayhem!

Notably, dieters were allowed to start with an appetizer (though most of said appetizers, admittedly, are just small drinks). This one is the prettiest.

So what is in this Double Deck Cocktail besides the watercress garnish?

If you guessed that it's just tomato juice poured on top of pineapple juice, then congratulations! You could be a recipe writer in the 1960s. You win a box of nonfat dried milk!

Now, we'll need a salad. As I said, it's not ALL just piles of lettuce.

Sometimes, the pile of lettuce is encased in green Jell-O.

While that wobbly green ring of low-calorie lime-flavored gelatin with vinegar, shredded lettuce, and sliced green onion could be filled with tuna salad...

I'm going to be a bit more indulgent and serve a sandwich instead. I like the perky sound of "Peachy Ham Swisser."

Not only does it stack the titular ingredients (peaches, ham, and Swiss cheese) on a slice of rye bread, but it also covers them with a sauce of low-calorie mayonnaise, skim milk, chili sauce, and finely-chopped dill pickle. Sounds... confusing at best. I guess if you overwhelm your taste buds with a bunch of random ingredients, maybe they will shut up for a while because they're scared of what you might try next?

But if you insist upon dessert, try a Ribbon Fudge* Parfait. 

*Contains no fudge-- just low-calorie chocolate pudding from a mix combined with instant coffee and fluffed up with whipped egg whites. Then layered with even MORE air... I mean, low-calorie dessert topping.

This collection also has the distinction of ending with eight pages of exercises to help with the slimming! This may be my only cookbook that ends with pictures of people doing stretches.

And the editors of the book must have really needed some extra pages. The exercise section could easily have been half as long because the exercises are divided by gender, but there are almost no differences between them other than whether the picture shows a woman or a man demonstrating the exercise. The one difference I could spot was in the push-ups.

And yes, the book did recommend different reps of each exercise for women and men, but the recommendations were just in the headnotes, which could easily have been combined...

Oh, well. At least the editor got to 93 pages somehow! And that's all that matters (because we know dieting is largely a scam anyway, and it's not like my friend's mom really needed more recipes that she had no intention of making...)

Have an extra-sweet Easter!

Hosting Easter this year? Worried your menu might not include sufficient amounts of pie filling on this high holy day of sugar? Easy Homemade Desserts That Say You Care (Thank You brand pie filling, ca. 1980s) is here to help!

For the main dish, sweeten up that ham with Pineapple Ham Sauce.

It's just a coincidence that a company that made pie filling thinks your sauce should be made with pineapple pie filling instead of the more decorative pineapple rings.

And in case all the candy (and maybe the lamb cake?) isn't enough of a sugar buzz, make Lemon Easter Baskets for dessert.

I'm kind of surprised that Thank You didn't make sponge shortcake shells, too. Seems like they're leaving money on the table with this recipe.... (Maybe that's why they're not around anymore.)

Have a sweet Easter if you're into that kind of thing. I'll just be holing up in my apartment and waiting for the Reese's peanut butter eggs to go on clearance.

Thinking about dinner and the lawn in April

I thought that April might have a few more recipes than the earlier months in Home Gardener's Cookbook (Marjorie Page Blanchard, 1974). After all, spring is officially underway at this point. No such luck, though. It takes plants a while to grow. So the April chapter features a basic dressing recipe meant for dandelion greens along with two recipes for watercress. The enthusiasm for watercress is a bit tempered, and I particularly liked the observation that "just the leaves for garnish tends to give the effect of a lot of grass clippings. Always use the stems for character."

For those who want watercress to play a bigger role in the meal than just last-minute garnish, there's a recipe for Green Baked Fish.

Cooks will presumably have to settle for grocery-store-tomatoes, though, as fresh ones are definitely not in season! (At least, not in the author's home base of Connecticut.)

And for those who want it to play a more supporting role without being mistaken for lawn clippings, there's Watercress Cream.

I can imagine cooks using this in recipes that called for white sauce (and sometimes it seems like half of all savory recipes called for white sauce back in the day-- unless cooks were just using a can of cream-of-something soup instead!), but serving it cold? Seems like that would be an even harder sell...

Maybe cooks counted on the joy of spring to make their families agreeable enough to eat whatever they put out? Or maybe they just liked sprinkling meals with greenery to subconsciously suggest it was time to start taking care of the lawn...

"Surprise!" The recipe is supposed to be a prank somehow...

April is almost here, so there's no better time to post some fun April Fool's Day tricks for the kitchen! Honestly, though, part of me wonders if the editors of Women's Circle Home Cooking (April 1990) didn't really understand the holiday, and part of me wonders if they were just playing a very lame prank with their "April Fool's Fun Recipes" feature.

The headnote really builds the recipes up: "Why not surprise your family and friends with these fun recipes that will fool the 'best' of cooks [Not sure why they needed scare quotes there.] as to what the original ingredients happen to be. Do not tell your secret until they have eaten the last morsel." You might think the recipes will be for things with surprising ingredients, like tomato soup cake, sauerkraut cake, or bratwurst cake. You would be wrong. The surprise is much more lame. Here's a hint: Most of the recipes have "mock" in the titles.

So you could serve up dessert topped with Mock Whipped Cream, for example...

... and then "astonish" (Here, the scare quotes are very much intended!) your family by announcing that it wasn't real whipped cream. And they could respond by saying, "Yeah, we could tell. Skim milk fortified with nonfat dry milk powder isn't really the same thing as heavy cream."

Or you might fill whatever dessert you make with Mock "Twinkie" Filling...

And then "astonish" your family by telling them that it isn't real Twinkie filling... at which point, they could note that they're not even eating Twinkies anyway (There's no mock Twinkie recipe-- just the filling, so the implication is that you can spread this goo on whatever you want), so why would they even think it might be real Twinkie filling in the first place? It's not like they expected you to buy Twinkies, extract the filling, and then repurpose it for some other dessert.

The Mock Chocolate Syrup isn't really even mock chocolate syrup. It's just chocolate syrup, unless you want to get really technical and argue that it's cocoa syrup, not chocolate, since it uses cocoa powder rather than melted chocolate as the flavoring.

So I guess the surprise is supposed to be that this isn't Hershey's syrup? But considering it's stored in sterilized jars and not a Hershey's bottle, I hardly think the family would be shocked by the reveal that this isn't name-brand chocolate syrup.

The lamest entry of all doesn't even bother with "mock" in the title.

Quick Mix is-- as the parenthetical subtitle explains-- like Bisquick. So the trick of this recipe is that you can serve your family biscuits or pancakes or whatever you usually make with Bisquick and then, at the end of the meal, shock them by proclaiming, "That wasn't made with Bisquick!" And the reaction, I imagine, would be slightly baffled indifference. Although maybe, if they have very active imaginations, it could be a feeling of creeping dread. What was in those things....? Am I sure I saw the cook eating these too? Thallium isn't easy to get, is it?

Okay, maybe these tricks are ever-so-slightly better than I give them credit for being.

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Did you fall for that conclusion? Come on! These really are the lamest "joke" recipes ever.

Spring suggestions from Women's Circle

I usually focus on pre-1980s cookbooks (partially because the presentation and photography started getting slicker in the 1980s, and I prefer the more homespun look of older books, and partially so there's a cutoff date to keep me from being tempted to buy everything I see at a thrift store or antique mall). But sometimes a newer collection slips through, and I'm not going to waste it just because it's a little new. Today is one of those slightly-newer-book days. We're looking at the April 1990 issue of Women's Circle Home Cooking. 

This issue is partially about Easter, as it was mid-April in 1990, so we get a ham recipe that I am tempted to call "Pig in a Blanket."

Baked Ham in a Blanket features a 12-15-pound ham-- so only one pig!-- and I'm pretty sure the blanket is not supposed to be eaten. It's just there for seasoning and insulation. The booklet expects cooks to know that, though, as the instructions end at "Bake at 300 degrees, allowing 25 minutes per pound of ham." (I figured out that the dough is not edible mainly because the it had no fat-- so it's likely to be hard. Plus, Jenny of Silver Screen Suppers mentioned this technique a while ago...)

Since Catholics in the audience will be going meatless on Fridays in the weeks before Easter, the booklet dedicates its Microwave Magic section to Lent-appropriate dishes. I'm most interested in their adorable "Microwave Magic" mascot, tbh. 

How could I resist the little guy, with the reflection face and microwave-sized chef's hat? There's a pretty boring recipe for Salmon Casserole (mostly just a can of salmon mixed with bread crumbs and minced celery and onion bits, topped with a couple slices of cheese, and microwaved until hot) in case you want the microwave to stink like fish, but I was more intrigued by the Quiche Stuffed Peppers.

Peppers loaded up with feta and a custard of eggs mixed with half-and-half sound pretty good (well, if you like onions, or if you'd allow me to swap them out for something I'd prefer, like a half-can of petite diced tomatoes)! That is, assuming they actually work out. This is one of those recipes that sounds like it will be good in theory and a mess in practice-- a pepper won't balance quite right and will fall over, knocking over the next nearest pepper, and next thing you know, the domino effect means the filling is spilled everywhere. Or maybe they would just boil over before the eggs could set? In any case, this seems like a recipe that would end with a lot of scrubbing...

And if ingesting all that dairy fat on "fast" days when you're avoiding meat, and later gobbling down pounds of ham and Easter candies leads to unwanted weight gain, the magazine offers up a "Tasty Trimmers" section, complete with this recipe for a "diet" custard dessert.

You might wonder why I decided to include a fairly standard custard, but check out what the "Sweet Milk" entails: soaking 2/3 of a cup of raisins in a couple cups of "reconstituted nonfat milk" overnight, and then straining them out to leave 1-1/2 cups of milk that "should be an ivory color" to use as the sweetener. I don't think I've ever seen this trick before, and I have no real idea of whether this would actually save more calories than just using a small amount of regular sugar in the custard. I guess the fact that raisins were employed is supposed to make this healthier!? And maybe the cook will burn a negligible number of extra calories straining the milk...

In any case, Home Cooking editors seemed to think that April was a good time for fiddly little recipes-- a time for making throwaway dough blankets, leaky peppers, and milk full of mushy raisins that need to be strained out before the liquid is fit to use. I guess you need something to do inside when the weather decides to dump inches of rain on you before and/or after getting 40 degrees warmer and/or cooler in five hours flat... (Not that my spring has been like that so far...)

Funny Name: Laid-Back Edition

Don't you hate it when you just want to eat dinner in front of the TV in your most comfortable (and stained-up stretched-out) T-shirt, and then you realize your dinner is wearing a tuxedo? And you feel irritated that it might judge you, when you just want to fill your belly while you watch Horror Geek videos? Well, Favorite Recipes of America: Meats Including Seafood and Poultry (1966) has just the recipe for you. (Okay, maybe most people wouldn't see "Sick Flicks" as appropriate to watch while you're eating, but my grandmas both thought graphic descriptions of other people's medical problems and procedures were the perfect mealtime conversational topic, so... maybe I should stop filling in my hypotheticals with personal examples.)

In any case, this is an Informal Pork Roast with Vegetables, so it won't judge. (Unlike you. Or the tuxedo-clad roasts most people make.)