Celebrating a centennial in massive cake form

Since I just posted from a bicentennial cookbook, this week we'll look at a centennial cookbook. No, I don't have a cookbook from 1876! Today's cookbook is not for the U.S. centennial, but for a school's centennial celebration.

Centennial Cook Book (The University Women's Club of the Ohio State University, 1970) celebrated the fact that even though drunken frat boys and scarlet-and-grey clad sports fans had been making life in central Ohio miserable for decades, at least Jeffrey Dahmer had not yet flunked out of the school. (Okay, the women's club would have said it was a celebration of the university's rich history or some bullshit, but I prefer my version.)

Like any good academic, the cooks sometimes like making things more difficult than they really have to be. Take this recipe for Delicious Instant Cocoa.

Yes, the first step is to buy a pound of instant sweetened cocoa mix. The second (and final) step is not to follow the instructions on the mix to make a cup of cocoa, but to mix the mix with non-fat dry milk, Coffeemate, and confectioner's sugar to make the process more work and the outcome less cocoa-y. We all know the main complaints about cocoa mix are that it's not enough work and that it tastes too intensely of cocoa, right? Problem solved.

Yes, those OSU women have their own ways of doing things. For example, I'd assume their recipe for fried rice would involve, you know, frying some rice.

Nope. It's just a typical rice pilaf recipe. There's not even any soy sauce or bits of egg and/or meat! I Are the slivered almonds are supposed to somehow make it fried rice?

I guess the cooks just really liked making their own rules.

You might think I'm planning to make fun of them for deciding that raw eggs are an appropriate ingredient in a fruit salad dressing, but the part that really interests me is the fruit salad part. I love that marshmallows apparently count as a fruit!

Sometimes the cooks just like playing with our expectations, though. The OSU women's version of Tuna-Vegetable Salad is not simply tuna mixed with mayo, onion, celery, and maybe a little pickle relish.

It's tuna and celery encased in a cream of chicken soup gelatin! (Admittedly, if I weren't veg I would be way more likely to eat this than regular mayo-drenched tuna salad, especially if the little bit of mayo in this recipe was forgotten.)

The OSU women also bucked the trend of requiring pineapple as an ingredient for anything supposedly in a Hawaiian Style.

Chicken Waikiki means chicken in a currant, raspberry, or apple jelly sauce topped with Swiss cheese and almonds. (I'm not sure where the Waikiki comes in, but I've never been to Hawaii. Maybe Swiss over apple jelly is a big thing there?)

OSU does believe in celebrating just like anyone else, though, so I'll end this post with their recipe for the Centennial Cake.

This is the first recipe I've read that measures baking soda and cream of tarter in pounds. (And I would really hate to be the person tasked with separating out 2466 egg whites or making 80 pounds of icing roses!) Now let's look at an artist's conception of what this massive cake might look like. Will it be constructed in layers like a wedding cake? Maybe presented as a series of festive sheet cakes? Combine the two, surrounding the wedding-cake-like centerpiece with cutely complementary sheet cakes or cupcakes? Where will they use the 80 pounds of icing roses? Cascading down the sides? Carefully marking off serving-sized slices? And will we get to see the throngs of celebrating Buckeyes?

Or maybe the picture will just show two massive, round sheet cakes, each with a year written on top and NO ROSES AT ALL. (Apparently making decorations was just busy work?) The cakes will be presided over by one middle-aged bald guy in glasses, squinting off into the middle distance as if he didn't expect to be created to stand next to some really boring centennial cakes.

Maybe OSU was so afraid of being branded a party school that the women's club just decided to make the centennial cakes look like a lame part of the saddest party ever.

Oh, wait. The Sesquicentennial events ended up being even sadder. COVID-19 made this look positively ebullient by comparison.