Saturday, March 16, 2024

Funny Name: Tiny Hats Edition

I've already expressed amusement at The Any Oven Cookbook's (Saran Wrap, 1981) insistence that it's a great idea to cook seafood in the microwave. While that's still relevant for today's recipe, I'm more amused by the recipe title.

I'm caught between asking whether anybody else imagines hats for undersized fish when they hear this name and proclaiming that "Shrimpy Flounder Turbans" would be a good band name.


Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Veggie-Heavy Oddities from the Hilltop

I wasn't sure what to expect from Hilltop YWCA Cook Book (January 1970). All I knew was that "Gourmet Classes and 'Tuesday at the 'Y'" were somehow involved. (The cover is as much explanation as the book offers.)


I did like the chicken tiptoeing past the salt shaker and pepper grinder. She's hoping she can escape before anybody realizes that dinner is sneaking away. I couldn't let her get away, though, so I picked this book up. 

A lot of the collection consists of baked goods that sound perfectly fine-- so the pictures of cakes and pie on the cover are pretty representative of the recipes in this collection. You know I'm here for the weirder stuff, though!

The Minnesota Casserole may not strike you as weird because it is a pretty standard midwestern casserole.


Ground beef, onion, celery, various canned soups and veggies, rice, and soy sauce. The thing that shocked me was that Irene Agin labeled this as Minnesota. In any other regional cookbook I have, this would be called "Oriental Casserole" (or something similarly appalling) because of the soy sauce, rice, and Chinese noodles. The fact that this was accurately identified as something belonging more to the midwestern U.S. than to the far east impressed me far more than it probably should have.... The Hilltoppers shocked me without even trying!

If you want to get weirder, though, the Party Sweet Potatoes straddle the line of sweet and savory...


Whether canned onions and apricot halves in a brown sugar sauce sounds better or worse than marshmallows and/or canned pineapple as a sweet potato topper is your call.

Another oddity, the Baked Tomato does not involve an actual baked tomato.


Instead, it's a bread-pudding-ish concoction with tomato juice as the liquid.

And for the dieters, there's a weird little salad.


Ever yearned for kidney beans and shredded cabbage suspended in a jiggly mass of cottage cheese and French dressing? No? Well, that will make portion control a snap.

And now I wonder if the chicken on the cover of the cookbook is actually planning to cross the road because she lives near Mickey Shaw. Maybe she's just trying to escape the smell of Cottage Cheese and Kidney Bean Salad, and somebody up the road is baking a layer cake and just might have leftover crumbs to throw in the yard. A chicken can dream...

Saturday, March 9, 2024

Funny Name: Put the Dentist on Speed Dial Edition

The Bake-Off recipes should at least sound appealing, right? I'm not so sure Bake-Off Cook Book (Pillsbury, 1968) worried overly much about what the contestants named their recipes.


I imagine the fork means that the dough can be mixed with a fork and the finger means that it can then be patted in the pan with one's fingers, but I can't help but think that Fork 'N Finger Onion Pie sounds like something that would break your teeth. If biting down on a metal fork doesn't get you, biting down on a finger bone surely will! (And for those of you keeping score, this is another recipe with gratuitous potato flakes.)



Wednesday, March 6, 2024

Going places with Kraft

Of course, I knew that Kraft's Main Dish Cook Book (1970) would feature a lot of salad dressing, cheese, and/or macaroni. It is here to sell Kraft products, after all. 


I just wasn't anticipating that Kraft would act like the recipes created some kind of time portal or mini-vacation.

You know, like back to the old West, when colonizers staked their claims on freshly-uninhabited land.


I'm sure the homesteaders had plenty of Velveeta cheese spread to go around! 

If we want to be more glamorous, Kraft suggests we could just retire to our estate to dine with the country set after a day of riding to hounds.


You know how those fancy people love sitting down to a nice plate of macaroni and cheese topped with boiled frankfurters after a long day of hunting. It's even classier if the treat is assembled to roughly resemble a campfire before it gets devoured.


Or maybe Kraft could take diners on a nice tropical vacation.


One that involved hamburger buns full of ham, pineapple, green pepper, and sweet 'n sour sauce/ dressing.

Or maybe some weird shortcakes if you're not too hung up on the idea that shortcakes should be dessert-y.


Nobody will be the least bit disappointed when you say you're serving shortcake at dinner and it ends up being hot tuna salad full of pineapple tidbits on top of a biscuit.

Maybe it's best to forget about Hawaii and try a nice Hacienda Dinner.


I'm not sure what makes mac and cheese with added sausage, veggies, and barbecue sauce "hacienda" exactly. Maybe the veggies? Tomato with green peppers and onions usually makes dishes Italian in old cookbooks, but you need a little oregano for that to work. It must be that these veggies are coupled with barbecue sauce.

At least I can guess that the Mariachi Supper of mac and cheese with added vegetables and sausage was so named because it started with a package of "Mexican Style Macaroni Dinner."


Apparently, that used to be a thing. (I kind of doubt the wickedness of the advertised "wicked little touch of chili," but I am a skeptic.) 

There's even a picture of this one!


Something about the color balance makes me see the sausages as pickles, which does not help....

Maybe we should just go for a nice trip to England instead. People make fun of their cuisine anyway, so how much could Kraft mess it up?


Granted, it's not usually too risky to count on Americans to be a bit unclear on the details of other cultures, but I'm pretty sure most of us realize that "Fish 'n Chips" does not refer to corn chips! (Especially not to fish under a layer of green-beany cheese sauce topped with corn chips!)

You know what? Let's just go for a good old American-style pizza. 


You know, the kind topped with frankfurters, dill pickles, fried onion rings, and pasteurized process cheese spread. Pizza! 

I can't help but wonder whether the recipes inspired some stay-cations when families wondered why they should travel if the food everywhere is just this bad. (Why pay more to get questionably gussied-up mac and cheese in an exotic location?) Or maybe they inspired more actual vacations when families felt like the cook was losing her grip on reality and needed to find out food elsewhere didn't just consist of questionably gussied-up mac and cheese. (More likely, the booklet inspired the cook to file it away in the less-used corner of the bookshelf and forget about it entirely.... It was better to just go back to adding a can of tuna and some frozen peas to the mac and cheese and calling it good.)

Saturday, March 2, 2024

Marching in Place

As time marches on (Get it? March! Okay, fine... It's a lame intro.), The Political Palate (The Bloodroot Collective (Betsey Beaven, Noel Giordano, Selma Miriam, and Pat Shea), 1980) mirrors the feeling of late winter and obstinately stays in place. Late winter started February 2 and won't end until the equinox-- near the end of the month-- so I've got a couple more recipes from the same section. 

This time, we're going to try to warm up with some southwestern classics. First up: Tamale Pie.

As I read through this, I realized the filling is remarkably similar to the recipe for cashew chili (and by "remarkably similar," I mean nearly identical!). (I'd make some kind of Groundhog Day joke about things getting repeated, but it's March now, not February, so I guess that wouldn't fit.) I'm not sure why the book presented this as a separate recipe when it might have been easier to add the recipe for the topping (referred to at times as "cornbread" and other times as "cornmeal mush") after the chili recipe as a variation. Maybe the authors just needed to reach a certain page count and listing this twice in the same section got them just that much closer? 

The tamale pie is supposed to be served with "guacamole salad," which follows on the next page, and is labeled only "guacamole."

Older recipes often add things like mayonnaise or cream cheese, but this one does not. It even includes jalapeno peppers! I'm most amused by the need to explain that fresh cilantro is an herb available in Chinese and Puerto Rican markets since it's so ubiquitous today. The biggest difference from current guacamole recipes might be that this one doesn't include any citrus juice-- usually lime now, though older recipes often call for lemon. I'm not convinced the citrus actually does much to prevent browning, but diners might miss the zing.

Here's hoping that the cold, slushy days stop repeating themselves, and the recipes for early spring will be here soon!

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

The Farm Journal survey says...

Farm Journal's Best-Ever Recipes (Ed. Elise W. Manning, 1977) resulted from the Farm Journal surveying 250,000 cookbook users on their favorite recipes, then compiling the results into a cookbook. That's why it's titled "best-ever." 


The Farm Journal users apparently had pretty plain tastes, so there's not as much for me to cringe over as I might have hoped-- just lots of straightforward recipes for things like beef stew and dinner rolls and layer cakes.

The readers did branch out a little, though. The picture in the upper-left corner of the cover is their 1970s midwestern take on enchiladas.

I guess I should call them "American-Style Enchiladas." Rather than starting with tortillas, they use crepes-- and the filling mixes chili powder into spinach and spaghetti sauce, making this a kind-of fusion dish. At least it calls for a substantial amount of chili powder: more than two tablespoons! (Of course, it's spread among 30 enchiladas...) I love the touching testimonial in the headnote that "This dish looks so elegant I can't believe I made it."

The book offers up typical midwestern "salads," from the brightly-colored and shiny hunk of gelatin with vegetables...


(and topped with a cheese-horseradish dressing)...

...to the frozen salad that's so sweet the title admits that it's kind of a dessert.

Well, the headnote claims that "The youngsters like it as an after-school snack-- it's not too sweet," but kids aren't exactly known for being afraid of sweets! You better hope the concoction of heavy cream, mayonnaise, marshmallows, crystalized ginger, pecans, and fruit, fruit, and more fruit is well-liked by someone, though, as the recipe makes NINE QUARTS of frozen fruit-salad dessert.

At least the slices look pretty in cross-section.

And finally, to tie together the mid-century midwest's shaky grasp of the meaning of  "pizza" with its love of apple pie with cheese, there's an Apple Pie Pizza.

Nope-- the cheese isn't used as a topping, though having melted cheese on the top might be a reasonable expectation, given the recipe title. It's part of the crust. The crumb topping is more like part of an apple coffee cake, with powdered non-dairy creamer as part of the crumble, so I guess it's vaguely cheese-ish? Pair that with using a pizza pan as the vessel, and I guess that's all you needed to declare this a pizza. Nobody who is coming in for a meal after a day running the combine is going to argue with what you call it.

In any case, it's difficult to be too much of a grump with these recipes, as they come with such glowing recommendations in the headnotes. Somebody loved these recipes. Hell, even I kind of love them in my weird, roundabout grudging way.

Saturday, February 24, 2024

Pillsbury does the mashed potato!

Something about Bake-Off Cook Book (Pillsbury, 1968) made me suspect that Pillsbury started selling potato flakes in the mid-to-late 1960s. Was it the puffy soufflé made with potato flakes?

Was it the "Super Supper" baked on a potato-flake-based crust?


Was it these biscuits that were made with not only potato flakes...


...but also a packet of gravy mix?


Maybe it was the fact that two different desserts put the potato element right in their titles.


If you're not excited about the Scotch Spud Cookies, maybe the Chocolate Butter Tater Cake is more your style.


Maybe it was the weird mixture of canned salmon, eggs, Italian salad dressing, pimiento, and green beans capped off with a coating of potato flakes and gravy mix combined with mayo.


You know, the one that looks like cat barf garnished with green pepper rings and mandarin orange slices for some reason.

Maybe it was the fact that even a wad of mashed potato flakes bound with eggs and flour and then rolled around in crushed cereal before being baked could make it into the official Bake-Off.


Why this inundation of weird potato flake recipes? It seemed like a new product must be the explanation, but I was wrong. They'd been around since the 1950s.

Maybe this was the first year potato flakes were allowed as a Bake-Off ingredient? Nope. Wrong again, as they were apparently part of "Bachelor's Bake" the preceding year

I guess the Pillsbury Bake-Off judges just really wanted potato flakes that year. Or maybe their brains were turning to mashed potatoes from looking at so many recipes? Not that I'd know anything about that....