The big pot of honey on the cover may also serve as a warning. The book is so saccharine that it made my stomach hurt a little... and I'm not referring to the recipes this time! Every spare inch at the bottom of the page is filled with the types of optimistic, power-of-positive-thinking quotes that make me feel like barfing.
Are you feeling overwhelmed looking at that stack of after-dinner dishes? Well, smile!
Dirty dishes are a gift from God, and you have no business feeling like maybe there's something else you'd rather be doing with your life. The bootleg bear primed me to hope this would be a slightly subversive book, but no such luck.
The recipes often just leave me feeling a bit baffled. What makes this round steak spicy, for example?
The only "spice" is salt and pepper! While this does call for a sliced pepper too, I sincerely doubt it was jalapeno. These types of recipe books invariably mean bell pepper when they call for an unspecified sliced pepper. Maybe ketchup was the spiciest seasoning Mabel Black could imagine?
The word "health" in '70s cookbooks usually means that wheat germ, nonfat dried milk, some form of bran, and/ or sunflower seeds have been thrown into a recipe, so I'm not sure how "Health Stew" got the name.
Was it the addition of carrots to the usual potatoes and onions? That's my best guess, and it doesn't seem like a good one since most beef stews had carrots anyway.
Even the gelatin molds-- a recipe genre I've grown somewhat desensitized to over the years-- could be a bit of a shock. I'm used to seeing salads that try to turn lime Jell-O savory by adding some onion and other salty or sour elements. I'm used to desserts that masquerade as salads despite their being full of things like cream cheese and Cool Whip. I am not, however, accustomed to seeing them both in the same mold!
This could be a pretty tasty riff on cheesecake if it were just lime Jell-O with Cool Whip and cream cheese-- but horseradish and onion?
The meaning of "pizza" seems to have escaped this town as well...
Pizza is a casserole with boiled wieners on the bottom, a tomato-sauce-flavored dough in the middle, and on top, sawdust-flavored dry cheese from a packet. Don't give in to big pizza and follow the directions on the pizza mix box!
Okay, the recipes are amusing enough that I can almost overlook the fact that the bottoms of the pages say shit like "The only wish speed at which to live is ... Godspeed." Godspeed, everyone!
Dirty dishes certainly weren't a gift from God when I was in high school. I can't remember how many times I looked at the dishes and everything else I had to do, and shrugged as I said that they would be there tomorrow while I decided to take care of more pressing issues like homework and trying to run a household on my own. Thankfully none of those recipes would have worked for mom's special diet back then (except for the health stew if you used plain salt. It's a lot like the beef stew I made for her over and over again.)
ReplyDeleteWell, now you know it's HEALTH stew! You were being health-conscious in more ways than you knew.
DeleteNot really, I was using stew meat, not ground beef. I also used a Crock-Pot so it was way easier. "Health food" in the 1970s was code for bland and unnecessarily labor intensive.
DeleteI think it's "Health" as in nurse you back to health rather than "Health" as in healthy for you in general.
ReplyDeleteA round steak is just leg meat as in bottom round or it's also known as the eye round.
I'm pretty sure that Horseradish mold is a Rachel. I mean, Cool Whip and horseradish? SO MUCH NO.
Pizza in a pan sounds like hot dog flat bread (because if you mix pizza crust with sauce, it is not gonna rise). Hot dogs were not better 40 years ago. Pre-made pizza was probably worse so maybe it did help? Grossness.
Also, I thank no one for dirty dishes. I thank them for the clean ones. End of story.
That could be, as it certainly doesn't look like "health" in the traditional 1970s health-food sense.
DeleteI'm pretty sure this is the first Cool Whip and horseradish combo I've seen.
I think the pizza was supposed to be a pizza mix rather than entirely pre-made, like the Chef Boyardee Pizza Maker kits. Not that I'm sure it would help much.
And yes, thanking people for CLEAN dishes seems like a much more sensible choice!
Yeah, the dirty dish poem sounds like we should shut up and be glad to get back in the kitchen. Besides, science says washing dishes is terrible. I HAVE CITATIONS. https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/04/doing-dishes-is-the-worst/557087/
ReplyDeleteOh, you get an A+ for that!
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