For Lent, I thought maybe we could do a bit of a deep dive on the "meatless" dishes in Smart Shopper's Cookbook (Loyta Wooding, 1972). So let's check out what those with serious budgeting concerns would do when the menu wouldn't allow for meat and/or the church dictated meatless Fridays.
Here's one of the first recipes in the meatless chapter:
And it appears that Wooding's definition of "meatless" does not coincide with most people's, as this recipe starts out with bacon (and there was no popping down to the grocery for a vegan bacon substitute back in 1972). Even worse, though, after sautéing the bacon, the cook is instructed to discard the bacon drippings and to cook up the rest of the dish in margarine! If you're going to go to the trouble of cooking bacon for something supposedly meatless and this is supposed to be a budget book anyway, why not use the bacon fat as the cooking oil? It boggles the mind. Why should cooks spend extra money for inferior flavor?
Okay, on to the actually meatless meatless dishes. Of course, there is the standard array of loaves, from the expected combination of various veggies and beans held together with eggs and baked into a brick...
...to the slightly less orthodox combo of peanut butter and lima beans with American cheese and tomato sauce...
...to the not-too-bad sounding spaghetti baked into a macaroni-and-cheese-esque custard.
Or, if you want your macaroni and cheese in bite-sized form, there's Macaroni Patties.
(Use them as a side dish for pot roast if you've forgotten the meatless conceit.)
If you can't survive without a gelatin-based side, you can get extra protein from the Tomato Cottage Cheese Salad.
It's made with lemon Jell-O instead of unflavored gelatin and loaded up with cabbage and onion as well, so it's sure to be a memorable treat.
And if you need a festive cake to finish things off, but you've sworn off sweets as well, you're in luck! We can end with the Upside-Down Vegetable Cake.
Maybe the family will be unhappy that it's not dessert, but it's still fresh, hot, homemade bread, and they can cover their pieces with tomato sauce and pretend it's glaze! I'm not sure whether '70s moms could sell that idea with enough conviction to make it work, but I'd have liked to see them try.
The first recipe violates a couple of rules. Yes, it uses meat, no you don't use the bacon drippings you already have, and it uses more than 1/8 tsp of chili powder. It's a spicy rule breaker! The macaroni patties are the old favorite, take carbs, add more carbs, and dip them in carbs, and then fry them.
ReplyDeleteThat 1/2 teaspoon of spice is really quite daring!
DeleteI agree about the eggs! I'm a sucker for eggs scrambled with green pepper and canned tomato (though I use veggie "sausage" instead of bacon and olives).
ReplyDeleteThere are soooo many bizarre Jell-O recipes that I'm sure somebody somewhere must have eaten them at some point. Why create the recipes for no one? Unless, maybe, the good people of the '60s and '70s just wanted to amuse/ confuse people in the distant future. If so, they were master prankers!