Getting dragged through the neighborhood with the intolerable Miss Vickie

I've always been a sucker for buying little mysteries. If it's a grab bag or a blind box, I'm in! So I was pretty excited when a friend told me about a little online store that would ship a lot of regional spiral cookbooks for a pretty reasonable price. I knew I could end up with books I already had or books from 2006 (which is practically yesterday as far as I'm concerned!), but curiosity won out. (They're not sponsors and I get nothing if you buy anything, but if this is your kind of thing too, you can get your own shipment here.)

The shipment got here way faster than I thought it would. I did already have one book (Cotton Country Collection), but I had accidentally destroyed the spiral binding on the earlier copy (and it hadn't been great to begin with). The new one is in much better shape, so I don't mind too much. I got two books from the '70s, one that is barely too new (early 1980s), and one that is way new (2000!). To justify my purchase, of course I'll be posting all of them here eventually. It might be fun to see how 2000 stacks up against 1976.

I just said 1976 because that's the date of today's specimen: A Walking Tour and Cooking Guide of Saint James Court (The Saint James Court Association of Louisville, Kentucky). 

The title is serious about this being a walking tour. The recipes are arranged not by courses or types of dishes, but by houses that provided the recipes. The book is led by a fictional tour guide named Miss Vickie, who gives us a tour of each house as we go, along with the recipes it provided.

I'm sure it's meant to be charming, and some people must have thought it was since somebody made and bought this book, but I get annoyed with Miss Vickie pretty damn fast. I'm here for the recipes, and she's always taking up space yammering away about how how many families have lived in this house, and who bought it from whom, and when the swimming pool was added. There's even a big section that imagines I care how often the Saint James Court Association meets and how they fund the upkeep of the fountain, especially now that so many of the larger homes have been split into apartments. I can only take so much of this upper class twit until I want to beat her to death with her own parasol.

I'm also glad I don't actually plan to cook from this book, as it would be a nightmare to find a recipe. There's no index and, again, the recipes are arranged by the houses they came from, so best of luck to anyone who just wants to find the Cheese Fluffs again! Unless you remember their street address or dog-eared the page, you'll have to flip around until you find them.

The book does have some interesting recipes, though, especially since the makers were committed to presenting the recipes exactly as they were received, without revision. I love the minimalism of Quick Cake:

It bakes in 10 minutes! No temperature or pan size, so I'm guessing it's made like any baked goods improvised on Chopped: spread really thinly in a huge pan and baked at a high temperature. Take it out when it's still raw in the middle and/or smoking, and very selectively cut out the chunks that aren't still wet and/or won't taste burned.

I also like the variety of recipes. Some are overly healthy.

Yep. Mike's Bread is a brick of unleavened raw wheat germ and sesame seeds. (You'll be happy to know that "Mike was with Shakespeare in Central Park and will return this fall to Actor's Theater.)

If the whole thing seems too healthy and you want to counter it with something really processed, you can always make Sandwich Spread.

It's a thickened can of tomato soup with dried beef and sharp cheese, sure to be salty enough to make you forget about the wheat germ brick it's spread on.

I also liked the ways that recipes sometimes defied my expectations. When I saw Pineapple Cheese Loaf, I expected a pineapple-cheese-gelatin concoction, molded in a loaf pan. 

Nope! This one is a loaf of bread with sharp cheese, walnuts, and crushed pineapple.

Well, surely the Marshmallow Loaf would be the gelatin "salad," then.

Wrong again! It's a big old wad of marshmallows, dates, Graham crackers, and nuts moistened with milk or wine. (There aren't too many recipes with marshmallows, Graham crackers, and wine! The kids will be confused that they aren't allowed into this dessert.)

I knew I'd find a jiggly loaf eventually. The gelatin-laced loaf is not desserty in this case. That's right, the Luncheon Tuna Loaf is not essentially tuna-patty ingredients baked in a loaf pan. 

This is the gelatin-based loaf! So... jellied tuna salad.

It might sound like I kind of wish I didn't take a chance and wind up with this book, but that's not the case at all. I've never been actively annoyed with a fictional character in an old cookbook before, and it was oddly fun to come to hate Miss Vickie and her ceaseless prattling. I also like to know that even though she thinks of her neighborhood as being so posh, the people there are eating canned soup, crushed pineapple, marshmallows, health food, and weird gelatin, just like everybody else in 1970s America.