A Hot Meat Magic Deluxe Salad Loaf

Apparently, Community Favorites: Meat Magic (Favorite Recipes Press, 1965) wasn't a community favorite at the antique mall, as I got my copy for all of fifty cents (marked down from a dollar). Impressive displays of peppercorns on a cookbook cover must not have the same draw they used to....

I loved reading through the book trying to figure out the contributors' cooking philosophies. I saw a lot of hot chicken and turkey salads that looked an awful lot like casseroles to me, for example, so I had to figure out what sets a "hot salad" apart from a "casserole." I was pretty sure "salad" was code for "I used mayonnaise instead of cream-of-something soup."

But then, I came across this, which as far as I can tell is just a baked chicken-and-rice pilaf.

I have no idea what makes it a salad, just as I have no idea what makes Chicken Ravioli into ... well ... ravioli.

It's clearly just a chicken-noodle casserole. I think the contributors to Meat Magic were just sick of admitting that they made casseroles, so they would apply other food-related terms and hope nobody would notice that they didn't actually apply to the recipe.

Sometimes, I can kind of see the logic. Turning popular dishes into loaves was kind of the sixties equivalent of turning everything into sushi now, so the idea of a chili loaf didn't surprise me.

It was more Mrs. Robert Koopman's idea of chili that took me by surprise. I don't imagine chili starting with a big can of peas. Why not a can of chili beans?

Well, the Sloppy Joes Deluxe recipe suggests that a can of beans is maybe just a bit too fancy for an everyday loaf recipe...

As far as I can tell, deluxe is usually old cookbook code for recipes with sour cream, mushrooms, or maybe cashews. Here, it apparently refers to mashed canned kidney beans! This is definitely the first time I've seen deluxe used that way. Mrs. W. D. Hartner must have had a very austere upbringing.

The book does have some room for fun, though. My favorite might just be the Yankee Sea Loaf.

You know I love anything that looks like a craft project, and from the scalloped edges of the bready "chest" to the pepper "handle" on top, this is a great example of the genre. It's filled with, basically, salmon loaf:

So it's a double loaf: a loaf of fish in a loaf of bread! And it is supposed to be doused in Sea Sauce:

You better like white sauce with clam juice and egg yolks.

So, yeah. The ideas about cooking are kind of all over the place in this little booklet, but it's a fun look into how the boredom of spending days mixing proteins and starches together before shoving them into the oven leads to creative recipe titles and pirates' chests stuffed with a bounty of canned salmon.