This time, it's Kroger's The New Ground Beef Cookbook (Mettja C. Roate, 1965, but mine is from a Feb. 1966 printing). The book offers a range of ground meat recipes, but it doesn't go too crazy the way some single-ingredient cookbooks do. There is no ground-meat-based desserts chapter, for example, and no attempt to fool readers into thinking that ground meat is a party-worthy addition to eggnog or cocktails. My favorite recipes might just be the various permutations of common recipes, though. If you're into sloppy joes (and I definitely am NOT), the book offers multiple variations. One set is written as a series, beginning with the plain Sloppy Joe.
I love that the recipe heading promises that making the teens a big pot of sloppy joes will mark mom as the type of "mother who knows what to serve while the Beatles are bleating," which will mean she'll be seen as "'cool' forever." (Never mind that anyone who used/ bought into phrases like "the Beatles are bleating" was hopelessly square, no matter their sloppy joe making ability.)
Also of note: This is the only sloppy joe recipe I've ever seen that called for a can of minestrone soup.
If the basic version is insufficiently sloppy, the next iteration is Sloppier Joes.
I'm not sure how a version that doesn't incorporate a can of minestrone is sloppier than one that does. I'd think the cheese melted on top might even serve as a binder, but maybe American cheese is so melty that it adds to the mess?
Of course, if you really want a mess, you have to go with the Sloppiest Joes.
This is the first sloppy joe recipe I've seen that's based on cream of mushroom soup instead of ketchup or tomatoes and some kind of sweetener. Leave off the onion rings, and you might even have been able to talk my childhood self into trying this. I'm still not sure how this is supposed to be sloppier than the version with minestrone, though. It seems like the order might be backwards!
Similarly, the spaghetti recipe had many variations, most of which were based on canned soup.
The first spaghetti is almost a garden-vegetable spaghetti rather than the marinara-based version we typically imagine. This one is loaded with celery, carrots, and a can of gumbo soup(!?) in addition to the more traditional tomato paste, onions, and Parmesan.
I'm not sure what they're going for here, with cream of mushroom soup suggesting a typical midwestern casserole, olives suggesting pasta puttanesca, and catsup suggesting desperation. I guess the breadcrumbs on the top should be able to cover up any abomination. They're crunchy!
Even the more traditional American spaghetti and meatball recipe (which gets third rather than first billing) is soup-based.
At least the meatballs have some Italian sausage and the tomato soup is seasoned up with a pinch of basil along with the extra salt and sugar!
I had enough fun looking through the series of related recipes that I don't really mind the absence of a chapter telling how to make hamburger spice ice cream or a bloody Mary made with chunks of frozen burger as the ice cubes.
These recipes are why manwich (introduced 1969), prego (all I found was that it was introduced internationally in 1981-from Campbell's soup), and ragu (1937) exist.
ReplyDeleteThey're probably all still better than the homemade spaghetti sauce mom used to make before she finally switched over to Prego.
DeleteYou should look for spaghetti sauce recipes in your Betty Crocker cookbook and see if you can find the one she used.
DeleteI don't think she had one. I'm not sure what it was, but I think it was mostly pureed garden tomatoes she froze in the summer, tomato paste, and ground beef. Maybe salt if we were lucky.
DeleteI have a reprint of Betty Crocker's picture cookbook copyright 1950. Their tomato sauce is onion browned in fat, flour, tomato juice, sugar, salt and pepper. You can add some green pepper if you are feeling adventurous.
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