Pennies from Sophie Leavitt

I'm sure some people now are new recruits to the penny pinching crowd, but of course it's nothing new. (Anyone who had to dig through half a dozen cottage cheese containers in grandma's fridge to figure out which one actually contained cottage cheese knows this!)

The All New Sophie Leavitt's Penny Pincher's Cookbook (1978) showed '70s cooks how to make their money count, and it largely consisted of eating things from cans.

This vegetable soup may hold the record for most canned goods in a single recipe. 

It's very specific about brands, too! Two cans of Progresso Minestrone, one can of Campbell's Vegetarian Vegetable, one can of Progresso Chick Peas, two cans of Progresso Macaroni and Bean Soup, four cans of College Inn, R & R, or Campbell's chicken broth, plus maybe a can or two of tomatoes if fresh aren't in season, and/or a can of Chinese noodles if this is to be served as chow mein. That's a minimum of 10 cans, but perhaps up to the low teens!

Canned goods can also facilitate a super-cheap staycation. 

I'm really not sure that meatballs cooked in a few cans of Campbell's Chicken Gumbo Soup really screams authentic New Orleans gumbo, but penny pinchers probably wouldn't have been able to afford a trip to New Orleans' best restaurants anyway, so there is no point of comparison to leave them disappointed.

For a  more exotic vacation with fewer canned goods, there's Polynesian Chicken.

Polynesian is usually code for "with pineapple, green peppers, and maybe some soy or teriyaki sauce," but here, it's code for "with Russian dressing, orange marmalade, and onion soup mix." Which is better? A real trip to Hawaii, of course, but that's not in the budget.

Finally, a dessert. Maybe we need some ice cream to help dispel some of the salt from all those packaged soups?

Sophie Leavitt doesn't seem to realize that the title Low Calorie, Fine Tasting, Smooth Chocolate Ice Cream will lead readers to wonder why the title is making such a big deal of its supposed deliciousness. How many of those adjectives are actually accurate? And if it's not clear why ice cream would need to involve nonfat dry milk and oil rather than a full-fat dairy product, the answer is both budget and health. This book has a very vague and hazy health-food allegiance. Obviously, someone who calls for multiple cans of condensed soup is not concerned about sodium, and a lot of recipes use sugar liberally, so Leavitt seems to think that's fine. Dairy fat is sometimes out (unless it's in the form of canned soup or Velveeta), nitrates added to processed meats are avoided, and artificial colors and flavors and  are out, so this icy dessert fits easily into the book's attempts to make recipes healthy-ish.

I'm kind of afraid that the dessert might leave you with a bad taste in your mouth, so I'll sign off with one other thing I love about the book. (You may have already noticed in the dessert recipe's note on "saturated fat"!) Leavitt apparently really loves inappropriate quotation marks. Here is her advice on straining chicken broth.

Paper towels can be a wonderful "work saver." (Now I imagine the paper towels slowing the broth so much that the hapless cook accidentally overflows the strainer and dumps broth all over the counter.)

And of course there is no "messy cheese cloth!" to wash afterwards (which makes me wonder if I've been reading this all wrong, and "chicken broth" and "strain" are euphemisms for acts I can't even begin to contemplate, ones that end in a mess so unimaginable that "messy cheese cloth" gets pressed into service as another euphemism).

As we end the post today, feel free to contemplate what the "saturated fat" in the "ice cream" recipe (Okay-- that last set of scare quotation marks is all mine!) is trying to suggest.