Do you ever get tired of appetizers just being so serious, like consequential crab cakes or downbeat deviled eggs or brooding buffalo wings? Well, Frederica Fare (Parents Association of Frederica Academy, St. Simons Island, Georgia, 1977) has the perfect counterpoint!
Grannie Pantries
A place to appreciate the horrors of vintage cookbooks
Friday, July 26, 2024
Wednesday, July 24, 2024
It's not "Jaws," but this is still horror from the sea...
Saturday, July 20, 2024
A salad a day
When I was reading through Wonderful Ways to Prepare Salads (Jo Ann Shirley, 1978), I started to get the sense that Shirley was fixated on apples.
At first I thought I might be a bit too critical. I'm not really one for fruit and meat pairings, so I guessed apple and chicken wasn't that bad. People often have grapes in chicken salad or oranges on a Chinese chicken salad.
Apple and chicken salad didn't sound great to me, but somebody else probably likes it. But apple and tuna...?
Canned tuna with red (likely "Delicious") apples? Fishy, mealy, medicinal glop.
And potato and apple sounds like a surefire way to make diners who have a thing about textures feel pretty wary.
Once everything is mixed together, it might be hard to tell whether you're going to bite into a soft, cooked potato or a crunchy apple. Disconcerting.
Then I started noticing that apples were turning up in a lot of salads-- even ones that didn't mention apples in the title. For instance, one might reasonably assume that the Potato-Celery Salad doesn't have apples in it.
Pretty presumptuous of you to imagine that, though. Of course it has apples.
As does the Chicken and Asparagus Salad...
...and the Calico Salad...
Yes, MORE potatoes and apples, along with carrots, peas, bell peppers, onion, parsley, and lettuce this time.
Care to guess what the Stuffed Tomatoes are stuffed with?
Yep! More apples! This time with celery in an oil/ sour cream/ horseradish sauce.
There are so many apples in unexpected places that I half-expected to find out the book was partially sponsored by the apple industry, but apparently not. Even they realize that maybe apples don't belong in every salad. This is just a Jo Ann Shirley fixation.
Tuesday, July 16, 2024
Make it a Sealtest Summer!
Are you ready for some ad copy? I hope so, because "Sealtest Cottage Cheese is truly 'The Cheese of a Thousand Uses.' It combines wonderfully with all the summer fruits and vegetables, and, like them, is now in plentiful supply. And it's just as nutritious as it is tasty and delicious." At least, so claims Sealtest in Number 84 of The Sealtest Food Adviser (1950).
This little booklet is not overly ambitious, as you might guess from the Cottage Cheese Pinwheel Salad on the cover. It is exactly what it appears to be...
...a big splop of cottage cheese in the center of some peaches and strawberries artfully arranged on a bed of watercress. Like anyone really needs a recipe for this.
This booklet also offers a few desserts that are lighter spins on cheesecake and a handful (Eww!) of salad dressings. My favorite offerings, though, are a couple of other salads. I was initially surprised by the item offered as an appetizer salad:
Who is really going to want a meal after downing a banana covered in pineapple-y cottage cheese, chopped peanuts, sour cream, and Maraschino cherries? I mean, it doesn't sound like a full meal, but it's also not exactly a little nibble to pique one's appetite before the main course...
And then I saw the recipe claiming to be a dessert salad and I understood.
While plenty of gelatin-based salads masquerade as desserts, the vinegar, cucumbers, radishes, and onion mean that this is clearly not intended as a dessert! (Plus, the fact that the title is "Lime Appetizer Salad" kind of gives it away.) The editor was clearly not paying too much attention. The appetizer salad is, in fact, the salad with "appetizer" right in the title, and the dessert salad is a concoction to sadden the heart of anyone who might reasonably have expected ice cream in a banana split. I'm not sure Sealtest's best strategy for selling more cottage cheese is to send out recipes that will make people wish they weren't eating cottage cheese, but then again, I'm not a marketer. I'm just a weirdo who likes weird old recipes.
Saturday, July 13, 2024
Some little extras from Beaver Dam
Tuesday, July 9, 2024
Pillsbury vegetable torture and other oddities
I'm not sure what I was hoping for from Pillsbury's Vegetable Cook Book (1970)-- probably some casseroles with ingredients that did not seem to go together at all and/or gelatin salads brimming with artichoke hearts, broccoli, parsnip, and/or eggplant along with a can of fruit cocktail or crushed pineapple and maybe some horseradish or cocktail sauce.
The book is rather basic, though. While it goes through individual vegetables, it has a pretty standard set of tricks: creamed veggies, veggies in a sweet and sour sauce, veggies baked in cream-of-something soup and topped with bread crumbs, and/ or if they're on the sweeter end of the spectrum, veggies baked in an orange glaze with a hint of ginger. It all kind of blends together after a while.
Still, I was a little thrilled to find crushed pineapple dumped into some pork and beans.
Old cookbooks just can't get enough crushed pineapple!
I found a few super-lazy recipes, like Chilled Picnic Peas.
Take the grossest form of plain peas (canned!), add some onion and a bit of garlic salt. Chill, drain, serve, watch as everyone avoids the cold, nasty canned peas, and then throw them out at the end of the picnic. It's a great way to avoid food poisoning!
I also found a recipe with a name that took me way longer to figure out than it should have.
What's Chemiento? I initially thought it might be some cooking technique I'd never heard of before. Google results just suggested that it was a jewelry brand I was misspelling. And then I realized that it was just a portmanteau of "cheese" and "pimiento." So Chemiento Turnips are just turnips in ersatz pimento cheese.
My favorite part, though, is probably a photograph near the middle of the book. There's no explanation. It just seems like Pillsbury wanted to include a photo of a veggie-centric art installation.
At first, I thought the veggies were hanging, perhaps as an eccentric mobile. Then I realized they're actually just on skewers, being pulled out of a variety of unnamed dips. Of course, as a horror movie lover, I imagine these veggies as being impaled by their captors and repeatedly dunked headfirst into slime that will either suffocate them or transform them into embittered and angry monsters, ready to skewer some humans when they go on a rampage. (Be stalked by celery or choked by an artichoke! Watch in terror as romaine tries to leaf the city begging for mercy!)
Just keep your eyes on the mutant vegetables so you don't notice how abruptly this post ends.
Saturday, July 6, 2024
Casseroles that just won't quit!
In my previous post about Family Circle Casserole Cookbook (Ed. Malcolm E. Robinson, 1978), I highlighted some recipes that were not exactly what I (or most modern cooks) might be expecting. My favorite part of the cookbook, though, is that it has two separate sections inviting cooks to create their own casseroles. The book offers rough formulas of proportions and cook times so home cooks can use up whatever they happen to have on hand to create their own unique casseroles.
The first chart is less extensive and a little more prescriptive than the second, and thus, not quite so much fun. I'll start with that one.
There's no question what the sauce will be for these, as they all start with a can of undiluted condensed soup. Then there's the protein, vegetable, and the appealingly-named "starch or filler." Note that Chart II has the "more highly seasoned combinations," like tomato soup with ground beef, green pepper, and diced potatoes. Spicy! The trick is that cooks can mix and match, as long as they take one item from each column. You know where this is going! I'm going to post the combination that sounds weirdest to me... So I say New England Clam Chowder with sliced frankfurters, a one-pound can of tomatoes, and a one-pound can of hominy. Maybe throw some chow mein noodles on top (per the topping instruction from the headnote) just to keep things extra confusing.
And then, there is a big, beautiful two-page chart with even more recommendations! They're not even all soup-based! Plus, the needlework illustration of all the fruits and vegetables is adorable.
However, I realize that the columns are way too small to read easily, so I'll list each one in isolation below and pick my favorite option from each column to create a crazy, mixed-up casserole by the end.
First up: Proteins!
I'm going with 8 hard-cooked eggs, sliced. Next come the starches!
I'm going for a pound of frozen crinkle-cut French fries. Next, we need a veggie.
How about pared, cubed, and par-cooked cucumbers? Then we need a sauce to cook all this weirdness in...
How about a couple cups of bottled barbecue sauce? And finally, the toppings.
How about wheat germ with chopped parsley and green onions?
Now all I have to do is bake those ingredients in an 8-cup casserole dish in a 375° oven for 35 minutes, et voilà ! Egg and Cuke Barbecue with Soggy-Ass Fries!
I hope you find the endless-casserole exercise as much fun as I do. Feel free to share your own dream/ nightmare combinations.