You've got to love that the kid on the front of my copy has a "mustache" made of the various prices people tried to charge for this book: $2.00, $3.00, (I think) $1.00, and maybe $13 from some crazy optimist. And of course, the price I actually paid was written on a Post-It note inside the front cover, so this book has had plenty of homes.
I'm not sure how anyone else was willing to part with this! The whimsical drawings by Mrs. Lee Bain that introduce each section are worth the price of admission alone!
Why would anyone be willing to give up a picture of a walrus waiter and a cook wearing a deep-fryer basket as a hat chased by an army of oysters?
Or a chicken standing on a pig that's surfing on a slightly-larger-than-pig-sized fish?
Or some explorers being stewed Looney-Tunes Style, who seem bored by the prospect of being boiled in their pith helmets?
Or of a turtle getting way too excited about the prospect of eating a sandwich while standing in a bowl of (presumably) turtle soup?
Like the drawings, the recipes were often surprising. One thing that really interested me about this book is that it has so many specialized recipes, but they're not segregated off into their own little sections the way they are in other regional cookbooks. Paging through, I found a gluten-free banana bread recipe from before going gluten-free was popular:
I think someone's family must have had a wheat allergy, as a cornbread recipe on a later page specified that it was good for people with wheat allergies. I was just surprised to see rice-based bread casually hanging out with all the other recipes in the bread chapter rather than stuffed in a "Miscellaneous" chapter in the back.
Jewish recipes were integrated too, as matzo was pretty popular, from the straightforward Passover Rolls...
...to the more daring Passover Pizza Pie.
The Meat, Poultry, and Fish chapter even included vegetarian recipes made with meat substitutes:
Side note: Canned veggie "burger" is hard to find now that better options are available just about everywhere, but it is still available! I saw some in a specialty grocer just a couple months ago. I am excited to spot it in the wild, but I'm so sure that it's terrible that I've never actually tried a can.
The widespread "specialty" recipes threw my expectations a bit off, though. Now that cauliflower is used to make everything ("Rice"! Pizza crusts! Mashed "potatoes"! Veggie "wings"! "Cream" sauce!), I of course expected Cauliflower Dip to contain puréed cauliflower.
It's just a dip for cauliflower, though. Mrs. Frank Bustillo could just as easily have called it celery or cucumber dip.
And it's not all specialty or health-focused recipes. My last selection holds the prize for most packaged soup in a single recipe:
Delectable Shrimp Souprise has the soup part right, with five total cans of three types of soup, plus two packages of soup mix (plus seasoned salt to taste, as if there's not enough salt in all that soup!).
This is such a fun read that I can't accuse the cover of false advertising.
I also immediately thought that the crossed out prices looked like a moustache. Then you had to go and make me Google vegetarian Spam. Considering I've never tried "meat" Spam, I don't know if the vegan version would be better or worse.
ReplyDeleteI was going to say that you had probably had Spam at some point, but then I remembered that we used to get knock-off Spam called Treet....
DeleteThat's the Walrus and the Carpenter from Through the Looking Glass.
ReplyDeleteWow! I didn't realize that one was making a reference. Good eye!
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