Funny Name: The Fat Shrimpy Sings

The title of this recipe from 4-H Local and Ethnic Food Show 1983 (Aiea, Pearl City, Weipahu, Wahiawa, and Honolulu 4-H clubs) makes me think of a pair of jumbo shrimp singing love songs to each other:

Porky Shrimp Duet is just a pork and shrimp wonton, though. I really could have gone for the crustacean version of "(I've Had) The Time of My Life."

The alternate title was "Feed Me, or I'll Eat Every Non-Food Item in the House (and I Still Might)"

I loved the supposedly child-friendly healthy '70s recipes in Vicki Lansky's other book, so I was excited when I finally tracked down the more well-known Feed Me I'm Yours (first printing in 1974, though mine is from a 1984 printing).

The kids on the cover are determined to eat things they're not supposed to-- dog food, a houseplant, their own feet. They inspire the feeling that I have when I see real children: I'm glad I don't have to deal with that! 

And man, I know the illustrator (Pat Seitz) is trying to go for cute with the pictures, but I think they're some of the derpiest looking kids ever.

Great job, kid. You can barely walk and you've managed to dump two boxes of cereal everywhere. But what kind of offspring should we expect from a parent who would dress you up like a sailor?

Aside from the ugly-ass kids, the book is full of "recipes" are really just suggestions about ways to serve food to kids and indoctrinate them into the dubious joys of 1970s food fads.

You've got to have some cottage cheese and Jell-O, of course.

Bonus points for the Dream Whip! I guess what makes this toddler-friendly is that the Jell-O is "either 1/2 jelled or simply sprinkled on," whatever that might mean.

We need some deviled eggs.

Just add raisin faces! Egg yolk, mayo, and raisins has to be the yummiest combo ever, I'm sure.

And sure, busy parents probably didn't have time to go the full Frankfurter Spectacular route, but they could at least approximate it with some canned crushed pineapple and hot dogs.

This one also kind of makes me wonder if Lansky secretly hated kids as much as I do. Even I know you're not really supposed to give toddlers hot dogs unless they're all mushed up. (The hot dogs I mean. Don't mush up toddlers unless you want to go to jail.)

The book also has the ever-popular "healthy" "treats." If the kid wants brownies, make Nutritious Brownies.

The '70s health food powerhouses wheat germ and powdered milk make these super-nutritious, I guess. At least they're not carob brownies.

And if the kid wants cookies for breakfast, make Bacon 'n Egg Cookies!

Whether bacon with Grape-Nuts and orange juice concentrate sounds like a great cookie combo is again, something for the reader to contemplate. The popularity of bacon-y desserts makes me think this one could get a following, especially since the egg is just used in its normal cookie capacity as a binder. I was a little afraid that this recipe would try to incorporate chunks of hard boiled eggs considering that the word egg is right in the title!

I will admit that this book has at least one actually good recipe, though. My mom had this book. I copied the English Muffins recipe as a teenager and still use it now! So if you want a tested and approved recipe, try this sometime.

Okay, full disclosure: I'm lazy, so I halve the recipe and put the ingredients into my bread machine on the dough setting, so I really only have to do steps 7-12. Hey-- the recipe is adaptable! And now that I've got an actual copy of the book, I'm even happier that I don't have to make English muffins the hard way while supervising a passel of derpy kids trying to play in the flour and eat dead bugs off the windowsill. I'll take any win I can get.

Funny Name: Not as Florida as I Thought Edition

The word "Florida" comes with a certain set of expectations, you know? So when I saw Shriners Parade of Recipes: Main Dish Edition Including Meats and Casseroles (1966), I kind of expected Florida Swiss Steak to be, oh, I don't know, an alligator that died of cirrhosis and was subsequently cut into steaks, flattened by having people in golf carts repeatedly run over the steaks, and then braised on the engine of a jet ski.

The Shriners' version is just regular Swiss steak cooked in grapefruit juice. Much less interesting (but probably just as disgusting if you ask me).

The Trotwood Madison Mothers Club just wants your money, okay? Don't make them put in too much effort for it.

I must have picked up Our Favorite Recipes (Trotwood Madison Mothers Club, Trotwood, Ohio, 1975) because it was cheap. Or maybe I felt a little sorry for it. 

Despite the lavish-looking two-tone cover, resplendent with blossoms and vintage cookware, this is a very sad effort at a community cookbook. I mean, sad. It has 25 total pages of recipes from the Mothers Club, padded out with a bunch of the usual filler pages community cookbook companies often provide (calorie charts, charts of how much ice cream you need if you're serving 100 people, etc.), plus several pages of cartoon recipes I recognized as being plagiarized directly from House & Garden's New Cook Book (1977). I really hope these moms did not pass their work ethic on to their children, as the teachers would have constantly been dealing with essays that were plagiarized and/ or about 17 words long.

I shouldn't be too surprised at the laziness of the book, given the recipes. The mothers' idea of cheese fondue was little more than "Heat up a can of cheddar cheese soup."

Okay, they added a little actual cheese and some French onion dip, but still... Definitely not the fancy wine-and-cheese concoctions of '70s dinner parties.

They loved the Sweet & Sour Pork craze, but thought Kraft barbecue sauce with extra vinegar might be easier than trying to make their own sauce.

I also think they must have really liked the sweet aspect, considering they include pineapple preserves rather than the plain old canned pineapple I usually see.

The moms also really loved sandwiches of the "spread some stuff on a bun and bake it" variety, like good old Weiner Mix Buns. 

Grind weiners, green peppers, and Velveeta (plus onion, maybe), smear that mix on a hot dog bun, and bake until it's hot. I'm not sure this method stretches the meat by much, but I guess it's an easy way to make sure the little kids don't choke on the hot dogs. 

And if you want to feel fancy about "spread on a bun" sandwiches, there's Meat Salad Hideaway Sandwiches.

I like that they include "luncheon meat spam." Super-busy moms can make up a big batch of spam-olives-eggs-catsup-cheese-onions-and-mayo buns, freeze them, and then give it their best guess as to how much longer the frozen versions will have to bake than the non-frozen variety. Eunice Murdock might have given an estimate, but putting that much work into it would have ruined the ethic of the book.

So that was my lazy review of the book, and here is my lazy ending: The End.

More Surprises from the Lutheran Ladies

We know that Favorite Recipes of Lutheran Ladies: Traditional Meats Including Seafood and Poultry (1966) includes lots of sweets, especially for a book centered on meat. However, those Lutheran ladies can also take the sweet out of a recipe, too. 

For instance, I wondered what Sunshine Salad was doing in a meat cookbook. The recipe is usually kind of like a carrot cake changed its mind and decided it wanted to be Jell-O instead. There's no  meat involved! Those Lutheran ladies do keep the lemon gelatin, but their version of Sunshine Salad is otherwise very, very different.

Theirs is chicken and macaroni salad, congealed with peas, pickles, onions, and cheese for a truly inexplicable mold. Maybe Mrs. William Block sat in the sunshine too long and got delirious when she came up with this one?

Alternatively, Lutheran ladies just like to make their own way of doing things. When they get tired of plain old meatloaf, they dress it up...

...with a mustard meringue top hat! It's kind of a meatloaf version of baked Alaska. Well, except the middle is hot, not frozen. So not really baked Alaska at all. Okay, forget about the premise of making not-sweet versions of sweet things. Those Lutheran ladies just have their own way of looking at the world.

And when they have to face down a can of tamales, they don't go the obvious facehugger route. 

They go for an international mashup, using those tamales with pizza sauce, cheese, and olives as toppers on a cornmeal-mush-based crust. 

I'm never sure just what the Lutheran ladies are thinking, but they are full of surprises-- surprises that I hope will stay in their church potlucks, far away from me.

A Natural Lunch Just for You!

I know life is tough, so I thought I'd make you lunch today! And of course we all have to do our best to stay healthy, so it's from The Natural Foods Cookbook (Beatrice Trum Hunter, copyright 1961, but mine is from a 1975 printing). 

I thought soup and salad would be ideal for a blustery winter day, so here's some Cereal Soup. (And no, it's not Lucky Charms that have been left in the milk for way too long. This is a health food book!)

It's just hot stock with tiny amounts of various whole grains cooked in it. Plus, this might be the only time you can brag about having mushrooms and onions in your cereal! Won't your friends be jealous when you tell them that?

If you like crackers with your soup, you're in luck! I made some Wholewheat Wafers.

They're uncooked, and it hasn't been very sunny lately, so the drying process did not go as smoothly as I would have liked.... The point is, the crackers might be a bit loose. And oily. 

Maybe we should just move on to the salad. I made a lovely Winter Molded Salad.

Don't you just love the way the alfalfa sprouts, celery tops, cabbage, green pepper, and apple float in the grape-juice gelatin? It's almost like somebody tried to switch Grimace into a health food mascot once McDonald's forgot about him.

You don't look too happy about any of this. Fine. Just have a cookie.

Well yes, the cookies are just ground roasted soybeans bound up with eggs and flavored with sugar and a bit of anise. What's wrong with that? Why aren't they "real cookies"? Ouch! And where did you learn to throw cookies so accurately, anyway? That's gonna leave a mark.

See if I make lunch for you again.

Maybe the corn syrup company's drawings are not quite so whimsical after all....

 Earlier, I promised you some military-grade whimsy from the pages of Best Foods' The New Way to Cook Is with Karo! (1963). Today's pictures are here to deliver on that promise.

What's more whimsical than prettily decorated petit fours?

Petit fours glazed by a hot air balloonist with a massive spoon and cat whiskers!

What kind of picture should illustrate Orange Baked Pork Chops? 

If you're not powered by corn-syrup-derived creativity, you might just draw pork chops. Baked. With oranges. The power of Karo brings us an orange-juggling pig, though!

Much cuter!

While you may blanch at the thought of how tooth-achingly sweet Chewy Butterscotch Bars are likely to be....

...our friend in the illustration is just concerned about how flaccid the bars are when they're used as a diving board.

I also have to marvel at just how far his butt juts out in that old-timey swimsuit! It would make a better diving board than the butterscotch bars do!

The almonds (too carefree to even be clearly affiliated with any specific recipe as far as I could tell) are not such picky divers, as one prepares to land directly atop the other in a vat of...

...I'm gonna say caramel. Just because I'm trying to be nice for a change and not gross you out. (And with that bit of misdirection, I have you contemplating exactly what I was planning to claim that yellowish liquid was. You're welcome.)

Of course, all this whimsy does have its darker side.

Do you seriously think a cookbook from the '60s could have a recipe for Cantonese beef...

...without a racist picture of Cantonese cow?

Sometimes the darkness is only implied, as it is in the picture to accompany this recipe.

You may look at the overly-happy visage of Saucy Baked Tomatoes and be lulled into complacency...

...and then notice that Miss Saucy Tomato is only holding up a towel to distract you from the fact that she is standing heels-deep in tomato skins. And she is using "His" towel to dry off after she washed away all the blood.

The Spicy Baked Oranges may sound like an attempt to serve potpourri at a meal...

But the picture makes it clear that they are an out-and-out act of war.

...and they are actively happy at the thought of flattening your troops!

The innocuous-seeming Pineapple Upside-Down Cake...

...gets paired with the diabolical pineapple serial killer.

He's even got the head tilt down as he holds up a tray of his dismembered victim.

And perhaps most sinister of all, the Fudge Sauce Cake requires sacrifice.

I mean, a real sacrifice...

...as in, your second-smallest child has to drop a tiny, tiny coffin into the the pan of melting chocolate and Nucoa margarine. Don't ask what's in that tiny, tiny coffin. Just know that it will make fudge sauce cake that much sweeter. Well, unless the Karo does that. But you definitely still need the mystery coffin sacrifice for the cake to come out right, so don't skip it!

I hope you enjoyed the lighter and darker sides of Karo illustrations! Come back next week when I pit the tomato, orange, and pineapple against each other to see who wins. Second-smallest-child gets to bury the losers in a vat of boiling syrup. You won't wanna miss it.

Eating Like "Early Americans," '70s Style

Happy February! Yeah, I know February sucks, but at least it means that January is over. So that's something. It's also time to return to Cincinnati Celebrates: Cooking and Entertaining for All Seasons (Junior League of Cincinnati, first printing August, 1974, though mine is from the 1980 fifth printing).

Presidents' Day must have used to have been a bigger deal than it is anymore, as a lot of old cookbooks have (usually super-boring) recommendations for special Presidents' Day menus. I am so unused to hearing anything about the holiday anymore that I briefly panicked, thinking that I had wasted January on the Poor Taste party when I should have gone for the Presidents' Day menu. Then I checked the calendar and saw that my December self was correct in guessing that the holiday is indeed observed in February, not January. 

So how was a Cincinnatian to celebrate Presidents' Day in style?

And how does one translate this "atmosphere of early America" into 1970s recipes?

I have to admit, I did not picture a boozy brunch punctuated by a gelatin salad when I thought of early presidents.

Given the iffy-ness of the water before the advent of water treatment plants, day drinking is probably the most historically accurate part of this whole menu!

However, I sincerely doubt that early Americans were drinking the popular '70s surfer-themed drink. 

I also don't imagine Americans from Washington or Lincoln's time eating all that many pizzas, brunch or otherwise. That's fine, because the Brunch Pizza turns out not to be a pizza at all. 

It's a quiche! And quiches were already well-known in America by the 1970s, so my only guess as to why it's being called a pizza is that this recipes is baked in a rectangular dish rather than a pie plate. Who knows? At least I have a guess as to why they're calling a quiche a pizza. I have even less idea of what it has to do with Presidents' Day.

Brunch is finished off with several pounds of sugar, I guess because it would have been an expensive ingredient in the late 18th and mid 19th centuries, so that makes it seem celebratory? First, there's a "salad" made with another item that would have been a luxury in Washington's day: gelatin.

Plus raspberries and sweet cherries, ingredients that would have been very hard to find in February a couple hundred years ago. (Cherries are just about the only constant in Presidents' Day menus, though, thanks to the old story about Washington chopping down a cherry tree.)

Every meal needed bread in the '70s, so there's an Apple Bread.

Sure, it's got two full cups of sugar, but it's not cake. Because we're calling it bread.

And then the meal is finished off with a cake that actually admits it's a cake, a Chocolate Log Cake (no recipe given). This is probably another reference to the apocryphal cherry tree incident because that's just about the only story that easily lends itself to a Presidents' Day menu.

Too bad so few of us get Presidents' Day off anymore! No day drinking and calling a quiche a pizza in the name of patriotism this year, but I guess it was a strong possibility in the '70s.