Funny Name: Holiday(???) Edition

When you read the title for this recipe from Microwave Magic (produced by the staff of Farm Wife News, edited by Annette Gohlke, 1977), you pretty much have to laugh.

I mean, "Ho Ho Ho" is right there-- for no apparent reason. Also, "Oh Oh Oh," I guess for the less-jolly laughers? Is the "Ho Ho Ho" meant to indicate that this is a Christmas recipe? Maybe. I mean, the custard is green-- one of the two main Christmas colors. Or does the "Oh Oh Oh" negate it? Did Doris Rush just have a weird thing about wanting the beginning and end of a recipe title to be mirror images of each other, and the "Ho"s and "Oh"s are just signs of some OCD tendencies? I have no idea. All I know is...

Getting (not terribly) crazy with the herbs and spices

If you need yet another reminder of how little flavor Americans used to expect from their food, Better Homes and Gardens Cooking with Herbs and Spices (1967, though mine is the 1968 second printing) might just do the job.

I was surprised by how many recipes seemed to suggest that "Flavor Magic" simply meant adding a little marjoram, like this recipe for Rice 'n Tuna Pie.

There's a little bit added to the rice-based crust and a little added to the tuna-and-Swiss cheese filling, so this recipe went all out.

The recipe for Oven Roasting Ears gets a little crazier, adding both rosemary and marjoram to the butter used to coat the sweet corn before it's wrapped in romaine leaves(!) and baked in the oven.

The booklet is also a reminder that snack food flavors were WAY more limited in 1960s America. If you wanted a flavor of potato chips other than "salt" and maybe barbecue or onion, you pretty much had to make them yourself. Better Homes and Gardens recommended using thyme, basil, or (surprise!) marjoram.

But to make it stick, you'd need to fix the potato chips nacho-style, with some melty cheese.

And while a lot of recipes are pretty basic, like adding basil to cooked carrots, dill to cucumber pickles, or candied ginger to ginger crisp cookies, there are a few oddball recipes, like this recipe from the "Fast and Flavorful!" section of the booklet.

Since the section heading wasn't too descriptive, I initially assumed that the applesauce and ginger meant Dixie Dandy Bake was a dessert. Then I saw the luncheon meat. And the sweet potatoes. And the apricot jam. And the mustard... So this is clearly one of those overly-sweet main dish dealies that tend to give me the heebie-jeebies, and the title clearly does not help in that regard...

Still, as I make fun of the 1960s households for being so timid and conventional about herbs and spices, I have to admit that I have an entire spice rack full of barely used (and often unopened) spices that I saw on sale or clearance, picked up because I thought they would be fun to try, and then chickened out on because I was worried what my digestive system might think. I like to make fun of these old booklets, but it's more of an act than you might imagine.... (Still, though, I am more adventurous than salt, pepper, and a hint of marjoram.)

A toast (Okay, really just bread, but you can toast it if you want) to December!

December means it's almost time to say goodbye to our seasonal book of 2024: The Political Palate (The Bloodroot Collective (Betsey Beaven, Noel Giordano, Selma Miriam, and Pat Shea), 1980). Most of the month is classified as Late Autumn (which I already covered in November). The Early Winter section begins at winter solstice, but I already covered that in January. The book does offer a bread chapter that's not tied to any specific season, though, and we're now into the time of the year when people might want to turn on their ovens to warm up the house. I think it's time to cover bread!

I will admit a serious fondness for homemade bread, especially the kind with nuts and seeds and various types of grain. The bread chapter has me covered. There's a Four Grain Walnut Bread packed with oats, rye, various wheat products, cornmeal, and, of course, walnuts.

Or there's Oatmeal Sunflower Seed Bread, full of oats plus sunflower and sesame seeds. (I'm not sure why the sunflower seeds get top billing. I hope the sesame seeds aren't pissed off.)

The first rise is for a long time in a cool place, too-- perfect for winter days when you just want to stay inside. I'm half-tempted to try making one when I'm on winter break.

If you want something more celebratory (as long as you don't plan to celebrate a patriarchal holiday), there's also a Cheese Babka. 

This might be a little on the health-foody side of things, with its raisins and dry cottage cheese, but it's still got plenty of butter, eggs, and sugar! It's a nice little celebration to end the year.

And fine, if you need something seasonally-appropriate, here's a quick bread from the Late Autumn section to end our exploration of Bloodroot Collective's dishes: Chenopodium Gems.

I thought chenopods were just plants that pumped out pollen so my pollen tracker would have something to warn me about, but apparently they have edible seeds, too. In true Political Palate fashion, this recipe entreats readers to collect wild ingredients and then warns, "Be sure you know your wild plants before you eat them." That note seems like the appropriate ending for this book. Eat some wild plants! Be sure you know what you're doing, though. We're not going to help much on that front. Good luck!

The new year will bring a new book with some tie to the calendar and/or seasons-- probably one that expects readers to be a little less skilled in identifying what is (and is not) safe to rip out of the ground and stuff into one's mouth.... Until then, happy late autumn/ early winter!

An ocean of bad ideas involving cranberries

When I saw the cover of 101 All-Time Favorite Cranberry Recipes (Ocean Spray, undated, but looks 1970s-ish), I kind of loved the little caricatures. 

I especially like the way the pilgrim men kind of look like they have peg legs. It makes me think of Odie in Garfield's Halloween Adventure. However, seeing the Native Americans also made me nervous. A cook booklet from the 1970s with caricatures of people can be ... uh ... less than sensitive. (And really, any idealized depiction of America's past is sus at best.) But I charged ahead anyway because I was hoping to see some weird cranberry recipes. 

And I was of course immediately greeted by another stereotypical caricature, one of the characters apparently saying "Heap good." Yikes. And while pakimintzen is, so far as I can tell, an actual Lenape word for "cranberry eater" (as the booklet itself states), the way the picture is drawn seems to suggest cannibalism. (The dish on offer should be pakihm-- cranberries! NOT cranberry eaters!) So ... double yikes? At least?

Not content with just being racist against Native Americans, the booklet also offers the cringeworthy Oriental Cranberry Salad.

The salad itself, I'm kind of on the fence about. Cranberry orange relish/ gelatin with crystallized ginger in it sounds pretty amazing, but I can see the water chestnuts either making it (with their crunch) or breaking it (with their sometimes weird, metallic flavor). The picture, though-- NO! Bad Ocean Spray!

Maybe we'd be happier just moving on from the caricatures... Let's check out a few of the more unusual uses of cranberries-- maybe ways they can help replace the typically non-cranberry components of a Thanksgiving dinner. If your family is not the turkey type, you could make Cranburgers the main course.

The cow looks pretty unimpressed by the suggestion to make meatloaf-ish burgers and top them with a "Cranburger Sauce" consisting of canned cranberry sauce blended with A-1, oil, and brown sugar, but dinner guests who are tired of bone-dry turkey breast might be more excited.

If you're tired of pumpkin pie, maybe make some Cranberry Doughnut Puffs for dessert.

They're pretty easy since they use refrigerated biscuit dough as the doughnut, and I could see this being a fun end-of-the-meal project, especially back in the fondue era, with everybody frying their own little puffs in an electric skillet of hot oil in the middle of the table, then rolling their treats in cinnamon sugar. (And then the hosts might be tempted to burn the house down and attempt to get the insurance money after the end of the meal because that could be easier than cleaning up afterward!)

And finally, maybe you're hosting a HUGE gathering and want a beverage to replace the wine. (Maybe because it will be cheaper, and/or maybe because it could help cut down on the number of times family members lose their tempers and fling silverware at each other.) That's when Cranberry Nog comes to the rescue.

Simply mix cranberry juice with water plus apricot nectar or prune juice and MORE THAN TWO DOZEN EGGS! This should be enough to serve at least 100 (or quite possibly more, given that main components are prune juice and raw eggs). 

Still less cringeworthy than some of those caricatures, though, so I guess that's something.... Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate!

Get ready for Brown Friday!

The day after Thanksgiving is known as Black Friday for retail workers, but plumbers have their own term for what is also often their busiest day of the year: Brown Friday. I'm sure you can figure out why.... Larger-than-normal meals... Big gatherings... It can be a lot for the pipes to handle.

In any case, if you're afraid you might miss out on that Brown Friday rush, Sunsweet Recipes (California Prune & Apricot Growers Association, 1950) offers a few Thanksgiving-appropriate recipes to make sure your plumbing gets a good workout.

Of course, people expect some vegetable sides, like sweet potatoes. Instead of the ever-popular sweet potatoes and marshmallows angle, try sweet potatoes and prunes.

But why stick to prunes in just the veggie sides? People expect some roughage in those anyway. The turkey might be a good place to hide additional prunes.

Just stuff it full of Fruited Stuffing-- and the fruit will be Sunsweet prunes, of course!

And then you need some cranberries for a zesty counterpoint to all the rich foods. Why should the cranberry entirely steal the spotlight, though?

Make a Prune Cranberry Conserve instead. I mean, the family should be really tripled up on prunes just to make sure the big meal keeps on moving....

I guess if all else fails, a host desperate to get in on Brown Friday can just try sending a box or two of Sunsweet prunes straight down the garbage disposal to get the kitchen in on the action, but it wouldn't be the same.

In any case, may your Friday after Thanksgiving just be a Friday. Hopefully one when you don't have to work... or make anyone else work overtime....

Recipes that Are Swift and Proudly Bland!

There was a time when "bland" was considered a compliment, as Timely Baking Recipes with Swift's Bland Lard (Martha Logan, undated, but probably the 1940s or '50s) reminds us.

Of course, here the fact that "Bland Lard is odorless and tasteless" is a selling point because people wanted their baked goods to taste like the featured flavor. Nobody wants Brown Sugar Cake or Snowy Cream Frosting or Pecan Waffles to taste like rancid animal fat.

You know I'm not going to show off the yummy-sounding desserts, though. I've got to show you a few of the weirder baked goods.

Some recipes really double down on the bland lard, like Franciscan Meat Pie.

The crust uses the Swift's Bland Lard Biscuit Mix, and the filling fries the onion, ground meat, and catsup in additional Swift's Bland Lard for the hard-core lard-heads.

Some recipes go a little lighter on the lard, like the Frankfurter Toastwiches.

Here, cooks just need a couple tablespoons of lard to fry up what amounts to hot-dog-and-cheese-spread-stuffed French toast.

Some recipes sound like they should be familiar, but "egg roll" apparently meant something different back in Martha Logan's day.

This version is just egg salad rolled jelly-roll style into biscuit dough and baked, then served hot "with cream or mushroom sauce." It's certainly not the Chinese-American appetizer you probably imagined.

For those who want to cook with eggs and lard but don't want to bother with the whole rolling-out-a-jelly-roll thing, there's Egg Quickies.

I'm not quite sure what these conglomerations of onion, bread crumbs, milk, and hard-cooked eggs globbed together, cooled on waxed paper, shaped into patties, and pan fried are supposed to be. Maybe a main dish for Fridays during Lent? Maybe a sign that there's not much left in the kitchen besides onion, bread crumbs, and eggs? Maybe an indication that payday isn't until Friday but the family still expects food today? Maybe just a reminder that life mostly sucks anyway, so here's random things glommed together that you are now expected to eat. Hey, it's fried, so it's not all bad. Quit crying.

Celebrating Fast Food Day in a Jiffy

November 16 is National Fast Food Day, so I have kindly found a vintage "speedy" recipe for your eye-rolling pleasure. Today's gem comes from The Family Home Cookbook (director Melanie de Proft, 1973).

True to form, this old-timey "jiffy" recipe will not seem all that quick to today's cooks. It starts with preparing Italian salad dressing from a mix (rather than just using pre-made), and requires marinating the peas in it for a minimum of an hour. Plus, if you have to chop the onion and crisp and crumble the bacon yourself-- as the original audience for this recipe almost certainly did-- this seems like a lot of work for a quick and easy recipe.

Luckily, if you love salad dressing, canned peas, and raw onion every bit as much as I do, it only takes a moment to glance at the recipe, make a disgusted face, and go on with your day. Not making this at all is the real time-saver.