That same principle applies to casseroles too. I love them both ironically and unironically. I can't be too serious about loving overcooked vegetables and flabby noodles dressed in canned soup and baked under a blanket of crushed potato chips and/or American cheese... but I do genuinely like to see the ingenuity of figuring out how to feed a whole family for a few dollars. Plus, if you give me an evening to eat dinner on my own, it's a pretty safe bet I'm trying to engineer a modernized casserole for one... Maybe I'm turning a can of Trader Joe's giant beans into a Mediterranean pot pie or getting ready to dig into a Tater Tot casserole, but I'm probably making something that suggests I appreciate casseroles on more than a "Wow-- Isn't that awful?" level.
The point is, this weekend we're getting a meal from McCall's Casserole Cookbook (food editors of McCall's, 1965). The recipes, though... Well, I'm not in any danger of trying to transform them into my own dinner.
I couldn't decide on one main dish casserole, so we have our choice of two pork-centric casseroles. One is a beauty:
Yes, it's a mud pie with a genuine pastry crust! Bonus: hard cooked egg and olive saucers, and a side of vanilla pudding with paprika.
Okay, it's more like a stuffing pie than a mud pie.
That's right! Ground-Pork Pie with Mushroom Sauce is the official pie for people who like to do a lot of work before checking the calendar. They make the whole batch of stuffing before realizing there's no turkey... and it's April, not Thanksgiving... and hey, it's only a little more work to make a pastry crust and pretend that stuffing is totally intended as a pie filling! Just add some doctored-up canned gravy, and all will be well.
If actively gross rather than weird-and-awkward is your preference, the booklet also offers this:
Now we need a good (or, more accurately, "good") veggie side dish to go with the pig-centric casserole. If your tastes are like my mom's (supremely bland), there's Carrot-and-Celery Casserole.
No surprise that the title for this one is almost the full list of ingredients. If you want something more exotic, say, in the mushrooms-under-ketchup-whipped-cream direction, there's this beauty:
Sorry, I meant "catsup-whipped-cream."
The casserole book offers dessert casseroles too! There's nothing too terrible, so I thought you might want to see the most 1960s idea in the collection: a new use for boxed pudding mix.
Yep: Pudding Soufflé à la Mode! Cook up the pudding mix, then fold it into a soufflé base, bake it up, and serve with ice cream. I always love the way old recipes will use a mix as a "shortcut" to trim five minutes off a recipe that takes 12 steps and a couple of hours anyway.
Of course, I spend my weekends wrestling cookbooks into submission on an oversize scanner and writing 500+ words about the experience when most people just take one look at grandma's old cookbooks and drop them off at the Goodwill. It's not exactly the best vantage point to question other people's time management skills.
When I first started reading this, I thought of the 4-H book casserole grid. Choose an ingredient from each column, throw it in a casserole dish, and bake.
ReplyDeleteStaying with the theme of 4-H projects, the banana ham casserole makes the gag inducing lemon herb chicken sound pretty good (just don't cook the broccoli as long as they say, and dry that chicken out into a rubbery puck so it isn't raw in the middle). Then I started to wonder if the banana ham casserole would have been chosen for 4-H books of that era. It is just bad enough that it could have been.
Maybe. It uses inexpensive ingredients families could get pretty easily.
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