Today's cookbook specimen is Heavenly Dishes: Favorite Recipes from the Good Cooks of Our Lady of Mercy (Dec. 1958). While those weird little angels whose wings are nearly indistinguishable from their apron ties grace most of the pages that introduce chapters, my favorite chapter introductory page omits them.
I love the fish gasping at the sight of a sizzling steak and a steaming chicken descending toward him. I can't decide whether he's agape at the thought of such a feast being carelessly tossed in his direction or whether he's having a sudden revelation of the fate of being cleaned and cooked that will surely befall him if he bites on the lure at the hook-shaped bottom of the "y" on poultry. Regardless of whether the look of shock is for surprise at good fortune or horror at fate, it's hilarious.
Considering that this is an explicitly Catholic cookbook and starts with a list of fasting rules and complete abstinence days (no meat on Fridays, Ash Wednesday, Holy Saturday, the Vigils of the Immaculate Conception, and Christmas) plus partial abstinence days (which I didn't even know were a thing! Meat was allowed only at the principal meal on Ember Wednesdays, Saturdays, and the Vigils of Pentecost and All Saints), I expected a lot of vegetarian and fish-based recipes. The book had surprisingly few, and a lot of them were pretty standard (macaroni and cheese, omelets, tuna patties). A few were interesting though, like this spin on chow mein:
Considering the near-absence of vegetables (aside from a few mushroom fragments in the soup) and lack of soy sauce, I guess the only thing that makes this tuna-based Chow Mein Loaf chow-mein-ish is the can of noodles. (Dowsing the whole thing in "Velveta" white sauce doesn't help make it seem any chow-meinier.)
The cooks did have some good ideas about how to structure the baking duties around attending mass, though. (They must have liked sweets a lot better than meatless days.)
I'm not sure what's so "cowboy" about the Cowboy Cake. (Maybe cowboys really liked cinnamon streusel?) The cake is great for Sunday mornings if the dry ingredients are mixed the night before, the moist ingredients are added in the morning, and the whole thing is popped into the oven before the family leaves for Mass so they'll have either a hot treat or the smoldering remains of their kitchen waiting for them when they get home.
My favorite recipes in the book may be the interpretations of Italian food, though.
Pizza Rustica is more of a meat-lovers' pot pie than a pizza, with no actual sauce (unless you count the eggs mixed with the grease that will render out of the raw bacon as the pie cooks) and both a top and bottom crust.
And lest the Pizza Rustica and Chow Mein Loaf recipes make you think that the cooks who contributed to this book were completely averse to adding vegetables to their cooking, I'll leave you with this Easy Spaghetti & Meat Balls recipe.
This has onions in the meatballs AND tomato juice and catsup in the spaghetti sauce. (And that list of sauce ingredients is complete, by the way! No need to muddy up a perfectly-good catsup-based sauce with other vegetables or seasonings....)
I wasn't sure how to end the post, so I'll reassure you that the book has some handy housekeeping hints in it too. Here's one that you're bound to find useful in your day-to-day life: "Try waxing your ashtrays. Ashes won't cling, odors won't linger and then can be wiped clean with a paper towel or disposable tissue. This saves daily washing." No need to thank me for all the daily ashtray washings I just saved you!
I was quite impressed with how short mass must be in order to get to church and home in 45 minutes or less. I remember having my homework done and the Sunday paper read before getting home from church, and I still attended Sunday school and the service. They obviously didn't have a parent who worked for the church.
ReplyDeleteC says that mass was usually pretty efficient. People wanted to get in and out.
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