Gary, the chef on the front ladder of What's Cookin' in Middletown, Ohio (Delta Pi Chapter, Sigma Phi Gamma International Sorority Inc., 1975) is not late to the party. He's climbing up to take the place of the previous chef, Robert, who fell into that enormous soup pot. John and Dave do not seem all that concerned about Robert's demise. (In fact, I think Dave is smirking a little. That'll teach Rob to borrow five bucks and keep "forgetting" to pay it back!) Gary is just a little trepidatious about joining John and Dave because he's kind of worried they've figured out what he's been up to with Linda....
Okay, there's nothing that scary in this book. No soups for cannibals or even recipes to serve 500 people that would require a pot of unusual size. There are, however, serious misunderstandings about what risotto (or rissotto) is.
It's not a casserole of rice layered with onion, green pepper, tomato, and cheese. (Nothing necessarily wrong with that; it's just not risotto!)
There's a serious misunderstanding of Coney Islands, too.
A Coney Island hot dog is a hot dog topped with a spiced tomato-and-ground-beef sauce, not an instant-rice-and-tomato juice-based soup with chunks of hot dog floating in it. (And I think a Coney Island Quickie is something best attempted in the shadow of the boardwalk if you can find a quiet spot that the police don't usually check?)
The book does have some special recipes, though, like this Potato Salad Supreme.
Just think how impressed everyone will be to see the solid loaf of potato salad completely encased in ham! They'll probably fight over the end slices with the extra ham.
For the finale, a recipe that would make me super-nervous if you tried to serve it to me:
Why all the emphasis on the banana skin for Cartwheel Bananas? Make sure to leave the skin on and put the skewer through it! Alternate the banana with oranges that also have the peel (assuming that "unpeeled" means "not peeled"). Broil until the peel is brown! All that attention to the peel would make me worried that I was somehow obligated to eat the peel. After all, the cook put so much work into it! Trying to choke down a browned peel OR trying to remove it and figure out a non-clumsy way to discard it that wouldn't somehow end up staining the tablecloth and/or sailing into the curtains would be equally challenging for someone like me.... So word to the wise-- Serving Cartwheel Bananas would probably be your best course of action to get me to leave early if that is your goal. (Or you could just invite John and Dave over. Nobody wants to hang out with those guys after what happened to Robert and Gary.)
Those skewers are strange. Why the fascination with making people peel hot fruit. Most of the brown sugar and cinnamon will come off with the skins while people are burning their fingers and cussing. They might as well say that they are decorations because who wants to try to eat something that they can't figure out how to eat?
ReplyDeleteI'm always so puzzled by the recipes that seem not to have taken into account that people are expected to actually eat the food! It's not supposed to be a puzzle. The recipes are probably just for mild sadists who like to watch their guests sweat.
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