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.
The only reason I remember that President's Day is in February is that it was the reason I didn't have school on the day mom had her thyroid surgery. That hospital obviously did not take President's Day off, and neither does the hospital I work for now.
ReplyDeleteI also love the specificity of pouring the egg mixture over the bacon in the "pizza" recipe. You don't pour it into the crust, you don't pour it over the ingredients already in the crust, you pour it over the bacon. Also, extra points for using 2 pork products. I guess that's also a testament to never having had a Jewish president.
Or Muslim, for that matter.
DeleteI'd bet the reason a quiche is called a pizza is that "real men don't eat quiche". The best-selling book of that title didn't come out until 1982, but I'd bet we had that cultural divide[*] even back in 1974.
ReplyDelete* A cultural divide which since then has only grown up, worked out, had kids, and bought them all guns.
That could be it! The Junior Leaguers couldn't risk having husbands think that their masculinity was in question. (Even though that strategy doesn't seem to have helped, given the guns thing....)
DeleteIt's a little known fact* that Thomas Jefferson was the first President to put fruit cocktail and mayo into gelatin and call it a salad.
ReplyDeleteThe log cake may be for Abe, famous for being poor and having to chop wood and split rails as a boy.
*this is a complete lie I just made up.
Ah-- you know my favorite kind of little-known facts!
DeleteGood point about the log cake. I'm so used to the George Washington cherry tree story that I forgot about alternative possibilities.