Wednesday, September 30, 2020

Looking for October scares from Martha Meade

I was really hoping Martha Meade would scare me in October's entry from Modern Meal Maker (1935). I didn't exactly expect a table full of assorted meats of questionable origin or chili with a fingernail in it (I mean, one of those hard shell peppercorns!), but I need something scary for Halloween.

The recipes for the month only seemed marginally committed to horror, though. There is a Ham Mold...


...but it's just a baked mold, bound with eggs, which seems less scary to me than if it were a mold based on lemon Jell-O.

If you think of custard as a boring dessert, then the thought of this one might give you indigestion...


...but savory custards were pretty common, so it's not that surprising. Plus cauliflower is now officially in pretty much everything, so I'm not sure how shocking this dish would be to modern palates either.

The Pomme Caprice might seem a little surprising...


...but the battered fried apple and cheese combo isn't all that different from the divisive (but well-known) apple pie topped with a slice of Cheddar. The scariest thing from October was probably the Chocolate Mint Prune Pie I submitted to the Pieathalon, and even that ended up not being so bad.

At least October ends with this sweet cake:


And of course, no Jack O'Lantern Cake is complete without the Hallowe'en (love the old-fashioned apostrophe use!) Frosting.


I expected the chocolate-dipped marshmallows to be fashioned into the jack o'lantern's face, but they're iced to look like tiny jack o'lanterns and arranged around the cake's top and sides. The leftover chocolate is then used to turn the cake top into a big jack o'lantern, so I guess the multiple faces is the biggest surprise I found. It's not a scary surprise, but a sweet one, and this year, I think I'll take it!

2 comments:

  1. I seem to remember you making cauliflower mashed potatoes when we were kids, and they were soundly vetoed by the family. Now they are all the rage. I guess you were ahead of your time. Of course I imagine they would have been easier to make if we had had a food processor instead of overcooked cauliflower and a mixer.

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    1. I doubt the recipe called for much in the way of seasoning, either, so they probably just tasted like overcooked cauliflower with a little skim milk. I'm sure the newer recipes with cheese, sour cream, chives, etc. are a lot tastier.

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