When I picked up "Wonderful Good Cooking" from Amish Country Kitchens (recipes collected and checked by Larry Rogers, edited by Johnny Schrock, copyright 1974, third printing, 1976) I kind of knew better than to expect this collection to call for fewer highly-processed ingredients than other '70s cookbooks.
When I commented on a supposedly Amish recipe in another cookbook, I asked whether the Amish actually spent "the '70s eating casseroles made with four cans of soup and half a pound of Velveeta, just like everybody else except the health nuts," as the recipe seemed to suggest. The answer from Julie D., a reader who said she lived in Amish country, was an unequivocal yes. (The full post, along with the comment, is here.)
This book pretty much confirms Julie's comments! The Amish topped off their hamburger/ bacon/ veggie/ spaghetti creations known as Wiggles with mushroom and tomato soups plus two pounds of Velveeta. (My joke estimate was too low!)
At least, that's when they weren't making their surprisingly violent-sounding Pancake Burger Bash...
...with ground beef, canned tomato products, and canned corn, all topped off with pancake-mix-and-crushed-corn-chip dumplings.
In contrast to the Amish, even my shortcut-happy childhood family made ham and bean soup starting with dried beans, but...
...the Amish version starts with oleo and goes on to add two cans of soup beans. It could easily be made in well under an hour.
The recipes are more decadent than I expected, too. The Strawberry Hotcakes don't just add fresh strawberries to plain, homemade pancakes.
They add sweetened strawberries to pancakes made out of cake mix. Yep. Cake for breakfast! It's fine if it's pancake shaped.
And despite the lack of refrigeration, the '70s Amish loved Jell-O just as much as anybody else, which meant ...
mixing lemon Jell-O with onion, salad dressing, cucumber, and cottage cheese, as one did back then.
Or...
...getting really crazy and mixing the lemon and lime Jell-Os with Miracle Whip, horseradish, canned pineapple, and cottage cheese. (And oh, yeah-- nuts are also essential to either salad.)
Hell, they even had frozen salads, which is quite a trick, considering even in the middle of winter, you can't keep frozen food frozen if you pack it in the middle of a snowbank (as anyone whose electricity has gone out in an ice storm can tell you).
No Jell-O this time, but we can see that the Amish also loved their miniature marshmallow salads just as much as any midwesterners.
In short, even if the Amish seem to outsiders like they're stuck in some other time, their '70s recipes were just as '70s as anybody else's in the All in the Family era.
I did have a friend who successfully kept a frozen turkey outside in winter. Of course she lived in Alaska at the time, where winter temperatures were well below zero fahrenheit. I was thinking that the Amish in this book were borrowing their modern neighbors' fridge a lot. Otherwise I can see using a lot of canned stuff, or the entire package of something perishable since they are basically camping all the time.
ReplyDeleteYes-- I imagine being in Alaska would make a difference, especially at the time of year when the sun won't be out to thaw groceries more than the below-freezing-but-above-zero-Fahrenheit temps already would.
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