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!
Maybe their poor taste party is really about having poorly tasting foods? The outfits sound like a precursor to the ugly Christmas sweater contest.
ReplyDeleteThat could be. Cincinnati: home of ugly clothes parties.
DeleteMaybe spinach was seen as too pedestrian? It's just a common green and not topped with seafood or anything special like that? And maybe green beans and dill are just a little too common, too? Home gardeners (who didn't have the same cachet as they do today) could easily grow them to save some money at the grocery store and anyone could buy metallic canned ones for cheap. I don't have any clear idea how they picked the veggies, but that's my best guess.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure about the mechanics of dump cakes either, but maybe the layer of butter pats on the top helps the mix cohere into something cake-ish. Mixes can take a lot of abuse and still turn out pretty decent.