Getting Healthy with Honey

I know everybody's worried about health right now, so how about some health food? The Good Goodies: Recipes for Natural Snacks 'n' Sweets (Stan and Floss Dworkin, 1974, but mine is from the sixth printing, October 1976) is loaded up with good old '70s ideas of health food.

You gotta love the cake, cookie, sundae, and pretzel parading around in clown shoes with their arms around each other! (I think the cookie's pecan is supposed to represent a nose, but I can't help seeing it as a representative of an alien race that keeps its genitals right on its face.)

Anyway, this book follows the general '70s health food rule that refined sugar is terrible, but honey and maple are A-OK because they're somehow not sugar. And of course, powdered milk is the healthiest thing in the world because of protein and calcium, which leads to this epitome of '70s "healthy" recipes:

Well, it's hard to make icing without powdered sugar, so just thicken honey with a whole bunch of powdered milk and call it icing! Sure to be both tasty and load the kiddies up with nutrition.

Of course, the recipes are not all as simple as dumping powdered milk into honey. There are labor-intensive recipes to turn dried fruits into dried fruits stuffed with other dried fruits and seeds. (Plus honey, obviously!)

Yes, it certainly is fancy to stuff dates with raisins and sunflower seeds. (And it's definitely worth putting all that work into rolling and stuffing rather than just dumping it all together and calling it trail mix.)

Even though chocolate is a "health" food today, this book exhibits the classic '70s health craze's horror of chocolate, so we have such wonders as Mock Chocolate Custard (with the goodness of powdered milk, plus carob)!

And don't omit the lecithin granules! They're what make the custard creamy (as opposed to, say, dairy that's not in powdered form).

I know my cookbook's original owner (SallySue Mato, who got it from her grandma for Christmas in 1976 if I can trust the inscription in the front cover) didn't fully buy into the panic against chocolate, though, as I discovered this vintage foil Santa candy wrapper used as a bookmark:

My favorite recipe in the book just might be from the cake chapter. While I already had an Asparagus Cake recipe, I did not have an Asparagus Torte until now!

I'm a sucker for anything that requires egg yolks, honey, and asparagus chunks in a blender that's already ground up a batch of nutmeats! The whole nutty, honeyed, besparagused confection is leavened with nothing but whipped egg whites, so NO TESTING for doneness unless you want to make the thing collapse. Just shake to make sure it won't ripple when you think it might be done. Then enjoy your honey-nut asparagus cake. It's '70s healthy, so it's gotta be good.