The title of Make It Now-- Bake It Later! (Barbara Goodfellow, 1965) sounds as if it may be a guide to getting ready for the holidays, and the bright red and white cover reinforces that idea. Make all your cookie and bread doughs ahead of time and freeze/ refrigerate them! Get those goodies almost ready so you'll have more time to enjoy the holidays when they come. (Just kidding! You'd use the time to wrap gifts so quickly that you'll then waste an extra 27 minutes unwrapping and rewrapping all the stuff you forgot to label and can't tell apart anymore. Or now, in modern times, you can also spend that "saved" time surreptitiously checking out the neighbors' porches to see if your Amazon order got shipped to the wrong house or just flat-out stolen.)
My first impression was wrong, though. There are a few sweet recipes in the back, but Goodfellow seems to have forgotten the premise of the book by then. Most of them are just traditional recipes like drop cookies to mix and bake at once, and a few (like mousse and ice cream) don't even require baking.
Most of the book is about mixing various cans of things in the morning, throwing them in the fridge, and then baking them for dinner in the evening.
At least the charming handwritten cover isn't misleading, as the pages are all written by hand too. And to be fair, the recipes don't all involve canned goods. Sausages and Apples doesn't have any.
It's just kind of an apple rice pudding studded with sausages and "frosted" with ketchup. And it will take at least a half-hour of prep time before throwing it in the fridge (assuming you don't mind compromising the refrigerator temperature by putting the casserole in while it's still hot), so the time-saving aspect is pretty questionable.
Some recipes don't call for canned goods, but interestingly use "cheese glass"-- a glass jar that cheese spreads came in-- as a measuring cup.
To go with the breezy directions, this recipe is served cold. No need to bake the mayo/ catsup/ lemon juice/ brandy-soaked lobster.
A lot of the recipes are inexplicably excited about cans, though. Try this California Barbecue at your next cookout!
Your guests are sure to be awed by the treat of five cans of macaroni and cheese mixed with thawed frozen spinach and topped with a can of fried onions!
I'm also not sure why Goodfellow is so thrilled about canned potatoes...
...but the word canned merits an underline AND an exclamation point, so it's apparently super-exciting that canned potatoes can successfully(?) be combined with a can of mushroom soup.
Goodfellow is one of those cooks who seems to think that diners' inability to guess what the hell she's feeding them is a plus.
Tomato Side Dish: Your friends will ask, "How did you make this?" out loud. Silently, they will ask why.
And no one will guess what's in Clam and Corn Souffle.
Well, unless they see the title. But maybe they wouldn't guess that soda crackers are the filler? And they will be too unfamiliar with the concept of corn to notice it hanging out with the clams and soda crackers?
Barbara Goodfellow's enthusiasm is so all-encompassing, though, that it might just have been enough to make everyone else excited for various combinations of canned goods and crumbs. I doubt I could pull off that trick, so I'll hold my casserole dish over my heart in her memory (or at least I'll say that I did because it makes a weird closing line).
Obviously saving time was not a goal for these recipes. The biggest merit would be that you could leave a note with cooking instructions for someone else to start cooking dinner before you got home. I imagine after a few days of these recipes someone else would volunteer to cook, or at least order a pizza.
ReplyDeleteOrder a pizza? That's just craziness. Somebody could saute some sausage in the morning, pour a can of mushrooms and a can of tomato soup over it, then pop it into the fridge. In the evening, somebody could top it with a mix of grated cheese, breadcrumbs, and canned fried onions, and pop it in the oven. Ta-da! Pizza casserole.
Delete