Hate the cooking, not the almanack

After a year of stuffy Gourmet 1977 recipes, I've chosen a decidedly more downscale book for the 2019 calendar.

The I Hate to Cook Almanack: A Book of Days (1976) is one of Peg Bracken's follow-up books to her popular (and sardonic) I Hate to Cook Book.

This is an almanac with recipes on some days, and quotes, helpful advice, etc. on others. January 6 features a list of kitchen no-nos, including my favorite: "Don't think the oven is as good a place as any to store the breakfast biscuits that didn't get eaten (telling yourself that of course you'll remember to take them out before you heat the oven again, because you won't)." Not that I have ever burnt up anything I've stored in the oven, mind you.

January 11 features a list of popular cooking terms, including Hunter-Style (which I come across a LOT in old cookbooks). Now I finally know what it means: "Descriptive term for the dish you must hunt around for things to stretch it with. For example, Creamed Chicken Hunter-Style means padded with a cupful of sautéed chopped celery, several sliced hardboiled eggs, and nine sliced stuffed olives."

Many of the recipes are attributed to others as well-- often people Bracken has made up, she admits, "in order to be sure someone would say what I didn't feel quite comfortable saying myself." For January, here are a couple of recipes attributed to Dr. Emmett Neitzelgrinder, inventor of "STIFFO, a special butter that won't melt in your mouth." (It's for the "cholesterol-minded.") He's also the author of Get Away from Me with Those Soybean Cupcakes.

While Dr. Neitzelgrinder is NOT a fan of soybean cupcakes, he's apparently okay with fish turnovers:

(Sorry the scan is a bit blurry. Apparently Bracken hated sufficiently wide margins a bit more than she hated cooking.)

The fish turnovers feature hard-cooked eggs... Am I justified in imagining that the rice substitutes for the celery as a filler and the canned mushrooms for the olives? I so want to call this recipe Fish Turnovers- Hunter Style! Notice also that Dr. Neitzelgrinder is nice enough to do most of the cooking, just leaving his wife to make a quick sauce of melted butter, lemon, and parsley, as "it's the least she can do, and that was her intention."

If all the specific ingredients with specific measurements seems a bit too overwhelming (and if you're disappointed with the lack of puns in the previous recipe title), the good doctor also offers up this set of sandwich guidelines:

Good old Neitzel Grinders! (Even though the alternative names for the sandwiches are listed, of course he would have to go with grinder....) They can be filled with anything from anchovies to liverwurst, then frozen until needed for that poker party. I just love old recipes that lay out the barest of guidelines and trust readers to run with them. I can't imagine keeping a cache of subs in the freezer, though! Mine is so stuffed with half-empty bags of Brussels sprouts, veggie burgers, partial loaves of homemade bread, and other odd-shaped (sometimes unidentifiable) packages that the goal is to open and close the door as quickly as possible before I start an avalanche. Having a bunch of these sandwiches rolling around with torpedo my whole system. (See what I did there? Don't you wish you didn't?)

Of course, since this is for January, maybe the plan should be to just dump the sandwiches in a snowbank for safe-keeping. (Especially if they're liverwurst-and-anchovy!)

I hope you're looking forward to seeing what advice Peg Bracken has for harried housepersons for the rest of the year! I certainly am...