Swappin' in cottage cheese

I know Greek yogurt is the currently fashionable high-protein dairy snack, but I secretly prefer the salty, tangy goodness of its old-fashioned counterpart to its chokingly-sour contemporary. That means I'm more predisposed to be charitable with the offerings of this little booklet than a lot of you might be. (Who knows, though? Cottage cheese is making a comeback!)

Swappin' Good Recipes Featuring Cottage Cheese (Home Economics Department of the American Dairy Association, undated, but Michigan State University Library's Alan and Shirley Broker Sliker Culinary Collection estimates it as 1955 and offers a full scan of the booklet here) features charming, blocky, needlework-style flowers, a cow, a tree, and a girl on the cover. The cow looks like it's getting ready to deliver a fresh, steaming cowpat, but the girl is smiling because she's not downwind. Although the cover promises the recipes are "Fittin' for clippin'," I'm not always so sure about it.

This booklet has the expected last-of-the-pantry main dishes, including this one featuring canned tuna and mushrooms mixed with cottage cheese and the ubiquitous, greasy chow mein noodles (mixed with rice this time, for variety).

My real favorite section is the salad chapter, though. Here is another proof of my conviction that the only word that should ever precede "mousse" is "chocolate."

Even better is the fact that a lot of the salad recipes have pictures. We have a representative of the "ring of one kind of food filled with another kind of food" genre.

Even as a cottage cheese fan, I can't say I've ever had much of a craving for cottage cheese mixed with cucumber and green pepper, then dumped over tomato juice aspic. (Given the red and green theme, I'm a bit surprised this isn't being marketed as a Christmas salad. I guess there's not enough sugar.)

Then there's the always-popular mound of shiny pinkish slime model:

The shrimp is already paired with cocktail sauce, plus cottage cheese and sour cream, all in a creamy, slithery gel. Talk about convenience!

Some salads (like the Cottage Cheese Asparagus Mousse?) must not have been very photogenic, as the salad photo page had to fill space by including some pictures of salads without any recipe at all.

Apparently even the American Dairy Association couldn't convince itself that anyone actually wanted a recipe to combine canned pear halves and green pepper rings with a big mound of cottage cheese, so nobody wrote one. The picture looked better than the alternative possibilities, though, so someone slapped this salad together. Enjoy! (That mousse must look ghastly!)