Getting squirrely and going catfishing down on the farm

If you need some stick-to-your-ribs, belt-tightening, homestyle, old-timey-cliché-inspiring recipes that are not necessarily clichés themselves, The Farmers' Almanac Cook Book (Ed. Thea Wheelwritght, 1969) is a good choice.

The cover picture of the barnyard full of cows, pigs, and sheep suggests that this book is intended for families used to providing for themselves, and the recipes largely reflect that.

I can easily picture Squirrel with Parsley as a late winter/ early spring meal when there is not much left to eat.

Just squirrel, some leftover onions and potatoes, plus dandelion greens-- some of the earliest greens to supplement the parsley growing in the kitchen window.

There are quite a few game recipes, but they're not all as straightforward as the squirrel.

Is it just me, or does the Rabbit with Cabbage and Sausage seem to just chuck a bunch of stuff together and hope it works? I'm just not sure rabbit, onions, and cabbage belong with beets, evaporated milk, sausage,and bacon. (Full disclosure: I'm never convinced beets belong in anything.)

Don't be misled by all the "catch your own meal" recipes, though. I thought Catfish Steak would be, well, catfish, probably some caught from the nearby creek earlier in the day.

But somehow Catfish Steak is basically mush with a can of salmon mixed in.

The Fresh Lima Bean Loaf at least is made of fresh lima beans, but if you're expecting it to be a variation of the vegetarian loaves in older cookbooks, well...

It's not. This is basically mashed limas bound with a little butter and flour and resolidified in a cake around diced weiners or sausages.

The editor of this book seemed to be a bit atypical for a midwesterner, too, as the book does not have a lot of sweets. For the few recipes that suggest a dessert to go with the main dish, I'd say about a third of them recommend cheese and "toasted crackers." Even breakfast foods that are typically sweet often have a savory variation in this book.

I have seen pancakes with cheese in them before, but never a variation that makes a cheese and consommé sauce to pour over/ bake into pancakes.

The salad chapter was devoid of Jell-O salads, and the very few gelatin concoctions were in the (brief) dessert chapter at the end of the book.

The molds are full of mincemeat instead of marshmallows! And they're unmolded on beds of lettuce, even though the rules of telling a salad and dessert apart clearly state that lettuce= salad. A Jell-O to be served with lettuce in the dessert chapter? This is absolute craziness.

As traditional as I thought the farmers would be, their almanac did manage to shake me up a little!