Stairway to Hot Dish Heaven

When I got Minnesota Centennial Cook Book: 100 Years of Good Cooking (ed. Virginia Huck and Ann H. Andersen, 1958), I was not sure what to expect except for hot dish. (A lot of places write it as one word-- hotdish-- but this book consistently writes it as two, so I'm following their lead.)

The book has all kinds of recipes, from those for things that are decidedly Minnesotan (like moose and wild rice) to those that are decidedly not. (A surprising number of recipes call for avocados and/or shrimp, which are not exactly products of Minnesota.) Since I got it because I wanted to see hot dishes, though, I'm going to present all the hot dish recipes in roughly ascending order of deliciousness based on their titles.

The most utilitarian title gets last place. 

Quantity Hot Dish: The title tells you that the writer has nothing to say about how it tastes or even what's in it. It just makes a LOT (of noodles and ground beef in a sweet tomato-and-veggie sauce).

Next come the recipes that at least give away the main ingredient(s) in the title. Since dried beef was generally reserved for days when the pantry yielded little else, I'm going to guess that Corn and Dried Beef Hot Dish is the next lowest rank.

Is being baked with noodles, canned corn, cream of mushroom soup, and beefsteak sauce preferable to being made into shit on a shingle? I have no idea which fate is better for dried beef, but at least it had an alternative possibility. 

Chili and rice are both low-cost but generally pretty good if they're made well, so that's enough to put Chili Rice Hot Dish in the middle of the pack.

I'm not sure how exciting chili seasoned with "a dash" of chili powder and diluted with a cup of celery would be (not to mention using some tomato juice as the only tomato component), but hey, it's not dried beef and canned corn.

We're getting a little more upscale at the middle of the list.

This time, diners get STEAK with their tomato-and-onion flavored rice rather than weak chili.

Now for the upper echelons of hot dish deliciousness, we'll look at the recipes with adjectives in their titles rather than simple names of ingredients. The lowest rung here uses a single simple adjective.

I'm not sure how well zesty applies to Zesty Hot Dish since the only real flavoring that might even come close to being described as zesty is the can of tomato soup. The bar must have been pretty low in 1950s Minnesota.

I'm not entirely sure what the title of the next recipe refers to.

Are diners supposed to be licking their plates? The casserole dish? The serving spoon once the last serving has been scooped onto a plate? Or was the licking incidental and not actually related to the potatoes, onion, creamed corn, pork sausage, and tomato soup in Lickin' Good Hot Dish? 

And finally, the hot dish to which all other hot dishes should bow down, at least, based on its title:

Two kinds of steak! More than a pound of American cheese! Canned corn, noodles, and cans of chicken rice soup, pimiento, and mushrooms! Heavenly Delight Hot Dish has it all.

Well, all except Tater Tots. You might have noticed that none of these recipes feature the starchy treat that might be the most famous crown atop hot dishes. Tater Tots were first commercially available in 1956, so apparently they were not widespread enough by 1958 to make it into this cookbook. That doesn't matter, though, because hot dish could apparently ascend to heaven even without tots.