Funny Name: Unsurprising Color Edition

When I saw Beef Brownies in Favorite Recipes of Lutheran Ladies: Traditional Meats Including Seafood and Poultry (1966), I briefly contemplated chocolatey pans full of bar cookies that had an odd and hard-to-identify chew....

I guess Beef Brownies are just called brownies because they are, like many beef dishes, brown. I'm kind of sad not to be horrified. Mrs. Walter Rabe's creation is not nearly as interesting as I imagined based on the recipe's title.

Men can cook too! (Of course, they expect a parade.)

I love old cookbooks in large part because they give me some tiny insight into the lives of women in the past. Today's book has a different angle, though.

Shriners Parade of Recipes: Main Dish Edition Including Meats and Casseroles (1966) "is designed to represent the thousands of men who enjoy cooking," according to the introduction. It encourages its male audience, saying "Whether you are a weekend cook, a bachelor, a cook when the wife's away or a fellow who just likes to cook anytime-- this book is for you!" It's notable that this assumes men only cook occasionally under special circumstances, but it allows for the occasional man who "just likes to cook." Of course, this is all followed up with "Do the wife a favor and let her borrow [the book]." So, you know. Women are still mostly responsible for the cooking. Men just want the credit for when they occasionally feel like taking over.

After the introduction is a section claiming to explain "Main Dishes for Masculine Tastes," but the page is mostly about how to plan a meal and make sure the meat is cooked correctly. I was looking forward to seeing how Shriners thought men's tastes differed from women's, but there is little explanation.

The answer, as far as I could gather from the cookbook, is "not a lot." Shriners sent in recipes for dishes with names that I assumed would sound too fancy for 1960s men, like French Market-Style Sautéd Beef Tenderloin.

They not only liked Roast Spring Lamb with Brussels Sprouts (a vegetable right in the title!)...

...but they also served it in a noodle ring! I'd always assumed that noodle rings were fripperies that no one cared about except mom, and she only cared because her days were so disappointing that being able to successfully unmold a ring gave her a feeling of accomplishment. Nope! Shriner men loved a good noodle ring too.

Shriner men also seemed just as afraid of seasoning as most other white people in the 1960s. Their Tostados con Pollo are seasoned with ... 

Well, the kidney beans have a bit of garlic powder in them, and the chicken is of the straight-out-of-a-can variety. Maybe the sprinkle of Tabasco on the tortilla will come to the rescue in the flavor department, but I wouldn't count on it. And does anyone else think that Parmesan is a weird cheese for a tostada topper? Sometimes I think people in the mid-20th century just threw Parmesan (if they were fancy) or American (if they were not fancy) on anything that they thought needed cheese so they wouldn't have to keep more than one variety on hand.

Don't get me wrong-- Shriners had recipes like Camp-Style Beaver for when they were out hunting with the boys.

But they were just as happy to whip up gelatin-based salads as the women-folk.

And they would be right up front about the fact that the crab salad was based on lime gelatin. None of this business of covering it with enough condiments that maybe people could imagine for a second that it was made with unflavored gelatin before they bit in and found out how sweet it was...

Hell, the Shriners even included the mawkish little "recipes" I so often see in community cookbooks for women's organizations, like how to preserve the children or braise a friendship or drown the cleanup committee in gravy so they will leave you alone for one goddamn minute. (Okay, I think I've strayed a bit from the spirit of those "recipes...") Anyway, here is how to make a Shriner's Lady and Mother.

I'm sure she's thrilled to know that laundress, maid, and cook are all in that description, rather than any idealized and higher-minded terms. (She's probably also driven a bit crazy by the non-parallel scrambling of adjectives and nouns and the spelling of "campanion," but she just puts on that winning smile and "accidentally" makes her favorite dinner that she "forgot" he dislikes when it's her night to cook.)

So... I guess the lesson is that men sometimes cooked. If they felt like it. And what they cooked seems remarkably similar to a lot of what women in the '60s cooked too. Either that, or the men just had their wives submit a few recipes and took credit for the recipes themselves. (Not that I can picture that happening from guys who liked to throw themselves a parade!)

New twists on cake mix, Jell-O, and potato chips

I wasn't lying when I noted that Still More of Our Favorite Recipes (Maui Extension Homemakers' Council, 1967) features a lot of recipes that seem like they might be authentic Asian/ Pacific Islander, based on this Midwesterner's unfamiliarity with ingredients and the near-absence of prepackaged ingredients. The book still does feature some recipes more like what I would expect in fundraising cookbooks from the Midwest, dumping a few packaged goods together and calling it good. Even here, though, the recipe writers put their own distinctive spin on things. 

Appetizers in the Midwest usually involve dairy and/or meaty things made into a paste and spread on crackers or toast points, or if the texture is looser, used as a dip for chips (for the unpretentious). baguette slices (for the fancy), or veggies (for those who want to pretend that a carrot negates a pound of sour cream). When Midwesterners want rigatoni, they serve it as a main dish after filling it up with cheese and/or ground meat, baking it under a layer of jarred tomato sauce (and maybe more cheese), and call it good. 

In Hawaii, though, rigatoni is an appetizer.

And it's filled with tuna or salmon salad and served cold. So same canned fish and glob of mayo as a Midwest casserole or salad, but totally different application.

I've listed a jillion gelatin-based fruit salads from the Midwest, a region also known for its pasta salads. I don't normally see attempts to combine the two, though. Enter Hawaii! 

The Alphabet Fruit Salad isn't alphabet because the gelatin is loaded with a, b, c ingredients like apples, bananas, and cantaloupe. Nope! This gelatin has fruit, cottage cheese, and alphabet macaroni, like a combination of various midwestern salads (and maybe a soup) into a single super-salad.

When Midwesterners combine a cake mix with gelatin, they bake the cake (usually white or yellow) using the cake mix, poke holes into it, and pour gelatin in the holes. Hawaiians apparently have a very different cake-Jell-O combo.

Mix lemon gelatin, adding instant coffee to the hot water. Partially prepare chocolate cake mix. Dump in the gelatin mixture (and an unspecified amount of lemon extract to accent the lemon so the mocha won't overpower it). Then bake. Again-- same basics: cake mix, Jell-O-- but very different applications.

And finally, potato chips are certainly no strangers to midwestern recipes. They're a beloved casserole topping, adding a pop of crisp to concoctions that would otherwise be pure mush. This use of potato chips, on the other hand... I have no frame of reference.

Why is it called Fried Potato Chips? The chips were already fried before they were packaged, and here the addition of water to the bacon/ onion / chip mixture makes it look like they're boiled more than fried. Then the whole thing is showered with hard cooked egg slices. It's got a lot of the basic midwestern casserole ingredients-- chips, bacon, onion, hard-cooked eggs, but it's just an entirely different procedure.

Even when this book offers something that seems like it will be familiar, the recipe takes an unexpected turn. There's almost a sense of suspense as one reads from the title and ingredients to the procedure, so the book is a real page-turner, whether you come for the authentic island recipes or for the twists on packaged goods that we didn't consider on the mainland.

I hope you enjoyed this trip to Hawaii in mid-January! I needed a little tropical escape from the 11-degree morning.

Recipes fit for a Kansas yacht

Have you ever been yachting in Topeka, Kansas? I doubt that the answer is yes, but apparently Topeka has a yacht club despite its landlocked status.

Or had one, at least. The only reference I can easily find to the Central Yacht Mariners of Topeka is a record stating that the Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library has a copy of this same book-- C.U.P. of Goodies. The library dates it to 196?, which seems about right. I noticed that most of the business addresses in the book do not have zip codes-- including the Kansas City, Missouri, printing company. A few have them, though, so this undated book is probably from sometime near 1963, when zip codes were introduced.

This is one of those little books that has nearly as many pages of advertising, filler content from the publisher (like metric conversions, calorie tables, and those sappy little "recipes" explaining how to preserve a husband or children) as it does actual recipes from the Central Yacht Mariners, but I did find a few that melted my hard little heart (or that hardened it right back up again).

I melted for the homely little name of "Cracker Doos."

It's so unpretentious-- "Maybe you could make those little cracker doos I like." It also sounds a little disgusting, like the crackers were supposed to be housebroken, but.... now we've got cracker doos everywhere. And honestly, it feels a little nostalgic for me. They're just a slightly more involved version of the plate of graham crackers covered in frosting that I remember grandma offering me when I was five and the seemingly endless drive to her house was finally over.

It kind of breaks my heart a little to see how modest the cooks were, too. Sure, the title of this recipe is Five Bean Casserole, but if you check the directions...

Mrs. Harold Spear only uses four beans. She leaves out the green beans, but she's too modest to just straight-up send in her Four Bean Casserole and note that a can of green beans can be added as a variation. She sends the "official" version (though we have not idea where it came from) and quietly suggests the actual one she uses. I didn't expect such modesty from a yacht club!

You know my heart is set on finding new weirdo Jell-O recipes as often as I can, and the Fruit and Nut Salad had a little surprise.

While the repulsive yogurt/ mayo combination is not a huge surprise, I'm really not used to seeing peanut butter in a gelatin salad! I could maybe see it in a raspberry gelatin salad as a nod to peanut butter and jelly, but it seems plain weird with lemon gelatin mayonnaise yogurt.

Finally, the "For Junior Cooks Only" chapter has a recipe that hardens my heart and sets my teeth on edge... Not so much because it sounds nasty. It's just for sugar cookies. The issue is that it's a song.

I can just imagine trying to make this recipe with a kid. The fun of singing the song would get old after about three repetitions... and the urge to strangle someone with a dish towel would set in soon thereafter. Good luck baking these with a kid, too, as the instructions stop at flattening the dough balls and topping them with sugar. I assume they're supposed to be baked, but no word on the time or temperature. Are you supposed to just let the kid guess? That sounds like a recipe for ending up with anything from still-raw dough to charcoal! 

Then again, Kansas Yacht enthusiasts are clearly not the most practical bunch, so what should I have expected?

Would you prefer a boiling vat or leaden brick of winter health food?

Now that we're in winter proper, it's time to return to The Book of Whole Meals (Annemarie Colbin, 1983, but feels like it's from the '70s!) to find out what kinds of leaden, bland health food Colbin thinks will help readers survive the winter.

While I have no objection to making extra food to make easy leftover-based meals later, the choices in this book are about as flavorless and unimaginative as they get. For instance, start with a Millet Casserole.

Don't worry, it's generously seasoned with onion, bell pepper, celery, and salt! So it's basically Cajun, right? I mean it does have the holy trinity (and not much else).

For a side, enjoy some luxurious Baked Squash and Turnips.

They're lavishly seasoned with a bay leaf, sesame oil, and salt! 

And then the next day all you have to do is dump the leftovers together, dilute them with over a quart of water, and serve them as a soup!

I'm sure the addition of shoyu with a little garlic and parsley will spark it right up so it won't taste like you're eating the boiled contents of the dustpan after someone swept out the health food co-op.

If a soup for lunch just won't scratch the '70s health food itch, there's always a loaf. For dinner, enjoy steaming Lentil Soup. (Soup is apparently a must-have in winter).

This version has onions, carrots, bay leaves, parsley, and miso, so we're really going all-out on flavor.

Better dial it back with the side and make it as bland and hippie-ish as humanly possible.

Yep-- brown rice! Barley! And the '70s health food favorite, sunflower seeds.

Mix them together the next day, et voilà!

It's Rice-Lentil Loaf! Leaden as a cloudy day in January. Will the Scallion-Kuzu sauce help?

Meh. It's your call, but I'd honestly rather dump a can of cream of mushroom over the lentil brick, even if Colbin would not approve.

Oh, and we have a winter dessert too, in case you still feel the urge to bake cookies, but don't care whether they're particularly palatable.

At least these have actual spices! And coconut, if you like that kind of thing! Will they be enough to make whole wheat pastry flour, corn oil, and barley malt or rice syrup delicious? Well, maybe by '70s health food standards. At least there's no carob!

Now we've choked down summer, fall, and winter health food crazes! Only spring left to go. What do you bet that it's also loaded with brown rice and root vegetables and barely flavored with shoyu? We'll see in a few months....

Those Lutheran ladies are way too sweet!

I knew to expect some German recipes in Favorite Recipes of Lutheran Ladies: Traditional Meats Including Seafood and Poultry (1966). I was certainly right, as this book has at least 16 different recipes for sauerbraten. 

The popularity of sauerbraten also hints that this book has quite a fixation on sweet and sour, but especially the sweet! I kept finding raisins in so many things. Sometimes it seemed like there was a demented logic to the inclusion. Raisins are round. Lentils are round. Why not throw a couple round things together?

Yeah. Ham and lentils really need some raisins.

Sometimes they're tossed into traditional dishes that don't often have raisins, like veal birds.

Sweetness doesn't always mean raisins, though. Maybe those Lutheran ladies will cook their meatballs in a syrup that sounds more like it should be a soak for a spice cake on a baking show.

Maybe they'll decide that the only logical accompaniment to salmon is banana.

Oh, and diced pineapple, too, because banana by itself might not be sweet enough.

If the meat is insufficiently sweet, it can also be stuffed with Sweet Stuffing.

Don't worry if your apple is a bit tart and the raisins aren't quite giving you the sweet punch you require. Sweet stuffing reinforces the fruit with three quarters of a cup of sugar. 

Lutheran ladies might also pour in some lemon/ lime soda where none is expected, like stroganoff (unlike their moose-stroganoffing sisters).

And of course, if things seem like they still might not be quite sweet enough, the Lutheran ladies can always add raisins and lemon-lime soda! The ingredients are not mutually exclusive.

I'd better end this post now. I don't want to get diabetes before the desserts come out, and desserts are far better than meat buried under/ stuffed with a pile of sugar.

Really committed Scouting!

When I was reading Cooking Out-of-Doors (Girl Scouts of the U.S.A., 1960), I was impressed by just how dedicated they seemed to be. I wasn't a Girl Scout-- just a Camp Fire Girl (now just Camp Fire), which I guess is kind of seen as the off-brand, even though it's slightly older? In any case, we did a little camping, but it was often day camping or at most, a night or two of actual outdoor camping. From the looks of Cooking Out-of-Doors, the Girl Scouts must have been way more hard core.

Yes, they made Some-Mores (their name for S'mores in this book), but they also apparently made honest-to-god candy when they were camping too.

I mean, they made a syrup that had to be cooked to the hard ball stage over an open fire! And the syrup was tested the old-fashioned way, by dropping some into cold water, rather than just using a candy thermometer! (And the puffed rice had to be heated in a hand-crafted reflector oven first, so it would be sufficiently crisp!) That is some dedication to outdoor cookery.

But that's not all! The Girl Scouts were apparently planning to be outside for a while. They were planning ahead like people at the beginning of the pandemic who didn't want to leave their homes for weeks.

Yes, they went full-on sour dough! They would have to be outside for at least the better part of a week for this to be worth the time and effort.

And if you think they were just enjoying a little summer camping, well... What? Do you think the Girl Scouts were soft?

There are recipes for not one, but two...

Two types of bread made with snow. Snow! So they were apparently camping out in the snow. (I can only imagine how many bits of twigs, gravel, bird shit, etc. would be in bread made with 18 cups of snow gathered by middle schoolers.)

In short, being an adult in charge of a bunch of girls camping out for a week, perhaps in the snow(!) would definitely be a level if I were in charge of designing hell. I'm glad I was a soft little Camp Fire Girl, and that the adults who had to deal with me never had to spend entire weeks trying to get me to assemble a reflector oven and bake snow-based breads in it.

I didn't know hawks ate so many soggy tots or sugary beans

Thank you... Thank you... Thank you... Thank you...

Imagine that in four-part harmony, as it's a thank you to my sister for the gift of The Cedar Rapids Harmony Hawks Presents Harmony in the Kitchen (1977). 

I'm not sure the birds wearing the chefs' hats on the cover are hawks. They look more like a cross between a duck and a turkey to me, but if they can put on tiny bow ties, they can call themselves whatever they want.

The Harmony Hawks have not only a distinctive look, but also distinctive tastes. The recipes are often Midwest staples, but with their own little oddities. The Hawks like the ever-popular Tater Tot Casserole (well, Meal in a Dish here). 

They prefer the version that starts with raw burger so the casserole will retain all the grease, plus the soup over the Tots so the potatoes will get soggy rather than crispy. 

They like Bar-B-Que Franks, but their version of Bar-B-Que is not the "dab with Kraft Barbecue sauce" variety. 

This starts with a full cup of bourbon! I guess the birds like to have a better time than Meal in a Dish led me to believe....

And to go with their franks, they might like some beans. One hallmark of the Hawks is that they like sweet beans.

As in, Baked Beans with a full cup of brown sugar and a pound of canned pineapple chunks. Or, if plain old baked beans sound a little too sedate, there's always Candied Kidney Beans.

Yep. Candied. In catsup, bacon, and a full cup of sugar...

Speaking of beans, the Hawks make Chili, but their version is even more heat-averse than the typical Midwestern version.

No chili powder or furtive dashes of Tabasco! Just Ragu spaghetti sauce with ground meat, canned beans, and some brown sugar (only a couple tablespoons, so they didn't go too crazy-sweet). You know, chili.

Well, I guess if you wanted it hot, you could always add some Real Hot Sauce.

And by "Real Hot Sauce," of course, they mean extra-hot catsup diluted with water, molasses, vinegar, Worcestershire, and a few (decidedly non-hot!) seasonings. We wouldn't want the Real Hot Sauce to be too hot, right?

Not sure how to end this one, so I'll just send you over to a video from good old SPEBSQSA (the unexplained acronym on the cover) explaining barbershop choruses. Enjoy!

Celebrating a New Year with Cincinnati's Junior League

 Happy New Year! With a new year comes a new monthly cookbook. This year, we'll be following Cincinnati Celebrates: Cooking and Entertaining for All Seasons (Junior League of Cincinnati, first printing August, 1974, though mine is from the 1980 fifth printing).

I'm not sure whether the word "Cincinnati" is supposed to be celebrating by setting off fireworks or by letting the first "i" wear a massive, feathery, Vegas-style headdress on the cover. I was going to bet the former since the city tends toward the conservative, but then again, the conservative people are always the ones getting arrested for funny business in public restrooms, so you never know what's going on under the surface... I might be safer betting on the feathery headdress.

This book has menus for major holidays, as one would expect, but it offers more offbeat party themes for each season as well. Rather than starting off with their new year menu (dubbed "Oriental New Year" and explicitly intended for January 1, not the lunar new year), I thought I'd go with an idiosyncratic offering that promises to brighten up the dreary winter months and that has also aged poorly. We'll start off with the theme:

It's "Poor Taste"! I interpret that as meaning it's in poor taste for snobby Junior League ladies to pretend that they're "poors" for fun, but they think it's a fine way to celebrate "when you're remodeling or caught between cleaning ladies." Yes, those poor Junior League ladies did have to deal with a lot. At least they were into recycling before it was so popular, seeing as how they were supposed to use "'junk mailers'" for invitations. It's interesting to see that Junior Leaguers saw it as positively naughty to break out a few plastic forks instead of the good silver and admit they saved jelly glasses for table settings, but a line must be drawn at allowing guests to "serve themselves from pots and pans on the stove"! I mean, one needs a sense of decorum, apparently, even when one is cosplaying as a poor. 

And what's on a "poor taste" menu? I kind of thought it might be tuna noodle casserole, bound with cream of mushroom soup and topped with potato chips along with a Jell-O salad containing at least seven clashing flavors, but that's a little too déclassé for the Junior League.

Not all of the items on the menu are in the book. (Maybe it was safe to assume that even Junior League ladies had a family Sloppy Joe recipe?) 

The Marinated Spare Ribs (which I assume are the Marinated Ribs listed above) sound pretty cloying, with 3/4 of a cup of sugar, but maybe the cider vinegar balances it out.

The hints of curry powder and soy sauce maybe made these seem a bit exotic to Cincinnatians of the '70s and '80s?

The Mock Pâté used two kinds of liver:

Yep! Chicken livers AND Braunschweiger. Plus raw onions. So maybe "Bad Smell" would have been an appropriate party theme. 

The most popular item on the menu was probably the dessert, Dump Cake.

It's just an even easier version of pineapple upside-down cake. And I know "dump" recipes are a popular genre to this day because they're easy to make and save on dishes, but I will never think that recipe titles sound appetizing when they remind me of the end product of eating the resultant dish. Poor taste indeed.... I might be even snobbier than the Junior Leaguers that way!