The Congealing of the Green

Remember how I said Favorite Recipes of America: Meats Including Seafood and Poultry (1966) still had some wonders for the masochists out there? Well, today we're looking at a few for St. Patrick's Day. (It's my understanding that a lot of people end up puking for that celebration anyway, so these should fit right in.)

We will start with the one the book actually recommends for the day: St. Patrick's Salad.

Yep-- it's one of those salads, with olives, tuna, celery, mayonnaise, vinegar, and cucumber in lime gelatin dessert. It's green! That's the only requirement. Nobody said it had to taste good.

And since this recipe had other lime-gelatin salads nearby, I decided to throw those in for good measure. Want to ruin some perfectly delightful pecans? Then the Chicken-Pecan Salad is the way to go.

Yep, you've got to suspend the titular ingredients in lime gelatin, along with celery, cottage cheese, and mayonnaise.

And if that doesn't seem sufficiently complicated, you can make the Cottage Cheese Salad with Shrimp Dressing instead.

Honestly, I kind of love lime gelatin with cottage cheese puréed into it. It's got a cheesecake-adjacent vibe without being overly heavy and rich. But throw in some onion, horseradish, and mayonnaise? Why? And if that's not bad enough, you can ruin some shrimp by making it into a sauce (probably a pretty good sauce if you actually like salad dressing and shrimp) to pour over the top of this monstrosity. 

In short, you're better off sticking to the green beer! But if you want time-consuming and money-wasting additional invitations to barf, you've got options.

Meats of 'Merica

Have to admit that I'm always excited to pick up cookbooks from the Favorite Recipes of America series because they have a good selection of weird regional concoctions from all over the country alongside the boring and repetitive things like beef stew. So today, we're diving into the Meats Including Seafood and Poultry edition from 1966.

There are so many weird and wacky recipes that I will write several posts to go over this book, but I have two main takeaways for today. 

1. Americans apparently really loved ham and marshmallows in 1966. I was surprised to find a Mandarin-Ham Salad that vaguely resembled the glorified rice my grandma used to make for dessert occasionally.

I never imagined anyone would want to throw ham in with all the fruit and marshmallows. Maybe this is an attempt to really emphasize that this is a SALAD, not dessert.

And then I came across Pineapple Hamettes...

...which top the ham-patty-topped pineapple slices with mashed sweet potatoes and a melty half-marshmallow. It's like two casseroles in one!

2. People must have really had to guess at the meaning of cooking terms before the age of the internet. You might expect Parmesan Veal Cutlets to be made with Parmesan and veal. (At least, I did, but I guess I am hopelessly naïve.)

No Parm to be found! I guess maybe Sylivia (Is that a typo? Part of me says yes, but then again, my mother-in-law's name looks like a typo of a common name, so maybe there was a "Sylivia" out there?) Rakosnik thought that "Parmesan" meant "topped with tomato sauce and cheese" without realizing that it was actually a reference to a specific type of cheese?

It was easier for me to figure out that one than the Quick Chili Burgers. I assumed it would be a thick chili put on hamburger buns and eaten like a burger or perhaps burgers topped with a bit of canned chili (like chili dogs). 

But ground beef + cream of mushroom soup ≠ chili. There's no chili powder, no hot sauce, no tomato, nothing at all to suggest chili! Maybe Lily M. Hawkins just thought that "chili" meant loose ground meat in a sauce? That's my best guess.

While I am very accustomed to "Chinese" recipes that take real liberties with the cuisine by, say, putting vaguely Chinese-coded ingredients (like rice and canned veggies) in a casserole with a bunch canned cream soups and perhaps a blanket of cheese, this interpretation of "Chinese" was a new one for me.

I mean, I get that Chinese cuisine centers around rice, and some foods come with crunchy peanuts on top... But I don't think that dumping canned shoestring potatoes, raisins (which aren't even that common in Chinese cuisine from what I can tell... Maybe Mrs. John C. Regan is confusing Chinese with Indian food here?) and peanuts on top of some rice, then throwing stewed chicken and "thick" gravy over the top exactly fits the bill. 

This book is an interesting peek into the sweet-loving and meaning-missing world of the 1960s. And don't worry-- it still has such sights to show you. (Especially if you're kind of masochistic.)

A tip that gets less helpful the more you think about it, but it could still be useful...

When I perused The Best of Electric Crockery Cooking (Jacqueline Hériteau, 1976), I did notice one tip for crock-pot-cookery that seemed pretty cool.

Admittedly, I am not the kind of person who would appreciate Sausage-Stuffed Apples, but I get that the sweet-and-savory crowd would see the appeal. The part of this recipe that interested me was the idea that if you wanted the dish for breakfast, you could set the prepped food on a trivet over some ice cubes to keep the food safe if it had to set out for a while, then set the timer "to start cooking on Low, 5 or 6 hours before breakfast." I liked the idea that it would be ready on time AND still safe after setting out for a while, even if you didn't necessarily want the apples cooking the entire night. 

Of course, then I looked at the recipe more closely. If it takes at least six hours to cook, why would you set the timer for five hours before you wanted breakfast? They'd still be underdone. And if they can cook up to eight hours anyway, why bother with the ice at all? You could probably just start everything as you went to bed, or if you sleep a long time or have a lengthy morning routine before breakfast, set the timer to start an hour or two after you go to bed. Food is supposed to be safe at room temperature for up to two hours anyway, unless it's at a picnic in the sun on a hot day or something like that. So the trick doesn't actually seem particularly necessary for this recipe, but it's still a neat idea that might be more helpful for something with a shorter cooking time. 

Maybe Hériteau just wanted to put this tip in somewhere and landed on this recipe? Who knows, but I'm glad it showed up...

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...