Road Trip!

How about a road trip? Let's pack into the car with some snacks, get onto the road, and stop at any thrift store or antique mall we happen across. You can pick up whatever you like... VHS tapes? Vintage Star Wars? Generation 1 My Little Ponies? Playboys with models who are now older than your mom? I won't judge. And I'm going to pick up exactly what you think I'm going to pick up: enough old cookbooks to ruin your car's suspension. (You know we're taking your car, right?) Well, those and maybe a few of the Playboys you didn't pick up.

What should we bring for snacks? I am super-boring and usually just bring a peanut butter cookie Larabar, but today let's look at some vintage snacks to go with our antique-mall theme. 

New Age Vegetarian Cookbook (The Rosicrucian Fellowship, fifth edition, 1975) suggests something that sounds a little dirty:

Nut Balls! Your inner teenage boy can giggle about nuts with balls. (How would that even work?) Loaded with unsulphured molasses, soy milk powder, and the eternal disappointment that is carob powder, these should easily last the whole trip... and well into the next decade.

Would you rather have candy? The Lunch Box Cookbook (Home economists of the Culinary Arts Institute directed by Melanie de Proft, 1955) offers Fruit-Nut Candy Squares:

These are a precursor to the '70s health-food "candies," sweetened mainly with figs and dates... and nothing that I would ever call candy, even if they're probably not bad for coconut lovers.

If you're really the gung-ho energy bar type, Arizona Cook Book (Al and Mildred Fischer, sixth printing, 1979) offers a cereal bar:

What would a block of oatmeal and powdered milk held together with sugar, honey, and citrus gelatin taste like? I'm not sure, but it can apparently pack 400 calories into a 2 x 2 x 1.5-inch space. That will power you through some serious VHS browsing.

If you have a sick sense of humor like me and want to pretend you're a cannibal, the More-With-Less Cookbook (Doris Janzen Longacre, copyright 1976, but I have Bantam's 1981 edition) offers this recipe:

What? What do wheat, oat, date, nut, and seed sticks have to do with cannibalism? Look at the name! They're Hinkelsteins.

I hate coconut, but I might be able to power through one or two just so I could say, "I'm eating the Hinkelsteins." Sounds like I'm taking out a whole German family... but it would really just be a bunch of grain, nut, and seed families.

So what do you say about the trip? You ready? Not quite? Give you a minute? Okay, I'll just wait here with my credit card and my Hinkelsteins.

Waiting patiently.... 

Waiting patiently....

Waiting... waiting... waiting...