It's officially spring, and Easter is coming! That means we get to sample the Easter menu from Cincinnati Celebrates: Cooking and Entertaining for All Seasons (Junior League of Cincinnati, first printing August, 1974, though mine is from the 1980 fifth printing). Before we look at the menu, we should get started on the invitations because they will take a couple of days to make. (I'm not joking!)
Yep-- You have to make nests out of raffia moistened with wallpaper paste and let them dry overnight! Then you can proceed to stuff the nests with jelly beans and a chenille chick and glue the whole shebang to the cardboard invitation. The suggested invitation is intended to help the hosts understand just how much the guests like (or at least tolerate) egg-related puns. If guests are still willing to show up after having to read through that firehose of eggy wordplay, they must be exceptionally tolerant people.
So what's on the menu? It's a brunch, so you're safe if you guess fruit.
A full two-thirds of the recipes involve fruit (and the Poppy Seed Bundt Cake is not one of them!), so you know this is going to be a super-sweet menu.
The Grapefruit Cocktail sets the Easter scene by including an egg.
I prefer to think of it as a Battery Acid and Salmonella Cocktail, but I am no fun. At least the gin should help guests forget all the egg puns on the invitation and overlook the excruciating boredom of having to watch toddlers who have barely grasped the concept of object permanence "hunt" for eggs (and mostly step on/ smash them).
There's no recipe for the curried fruit, perhaps because Cincinnatians assumed everybody already knew how to dump some curry powder in a heated-up can of fruit cocktail.
There's no recipe for a Baked Ham Elegant, so I assume the menu meant the Baked Stuffed Ham Elegant, which is stuffed with (Surprise!) more fruit.
If the grapes stuffed in the ham are insufficient, don't worry! The ham is also supposed to be surrounded by frosted grapes when it comes out of the oven.
Easter means getting absolutely saturated with sugar, so this brunch needs a cake in case all the fruit-centric dishes, on top of the mounds of Easter candy that are sure to be everywhere, are not enough. Enter the Poppy Seed Bundt Cake.
Don't worry; it's fruit-free in case you're getting burned out on fruit and want just straight-up sugar.
Okay, fine, and maybe ONE savory, egg-centric dish so we can say this menu isn't 100% sugar.
I'll bet you could serve Swiss Eggs with jelly, though, and somebody would put it on top!
And finally, some bread, because no meal was a real meal in the 1970s if it didn't feature bread.
Of course, the Upside Down Orange Biscuits are closer to cinnamon rolls than the flaky, savory biscuits we think of as a side dish, but you can't really admit they're just cinnamon rolls if you're also serving them with cake.
In short, Easter brunch in 1970s Cincinnati might have put people in diabetic shock even before they hit the Cadbury Creme Eggs and neon yellow Peeps, but at least it would have given diners a good day's supply of vitamin C. Plus, they'd always have a raffia nest invitation to remember the day by.
I love how they have this long description of how to make the ham (and it better be a pre-cooked ham since you are supposed to taste the stuffing that contains some of the ham before it is cooked), and then they give a brief description of how to cook a ham if you are in a hurry. You still get your fruit group with wine (since that's the fruit most women prefer these days). Now go take some insulin after reading that menu.
ReplyDeleteI'm a little surprised there weren't instructions to make a noodle nest to serve the ham in.
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