A book to commemorate long-lost recipes, some deservedly so and some not

Independence day is coming, so it seemed like as good a time as any to dig into my stash of bicentennial-themed cookbooks. People must really have been anticipating the bicentennial, as today's offering, the not-so-elegantly titled Cookbook United States Commemorative 1776-1976 (Commemorative Cook Books) is copyrighted 1972-- four years before the event!

The book celebrates the bicentennial in a number of ways. Some recipes provide a tiny snapshot of what life was like before the natives were largely wiped out.

There's nothing quite like starting a party at your new house with an appetizer from the family you murdered to get it, right?

Some recipes remember the ways that settlers learned to make do with whatever they could find.

There wasn't much coffee, so apparently anything that could turn the water brown was considered a reasonable substitute: pulverized bricks of sorghum and cornmeal, dried peas, burned corn, parched carrots.... Without the caffeine, I'm not sure I understand why anyone bothered.

We can even find the prospector version of chicken and waffles: Chipped Venison on Hot Cakes.

I like the story that the the original version required chipping away at frozen meat and the warning that frozen chipped beef won't work. What will happen is left up to the imagination. (Will it blow up? Fail to thicken? Not taste like it's been boiled in the same pot as the laundry? Who knows...)

The book also offers ample opportunities to compare traditional recipes for newer ones. There's a Baked Salmon- Tlingit Style, roasted in a pit with hot rocks, skunk cabbage, and driftwood.

And then there is the contemporary Salmon Casserole, which drowns canned salmon in a white-sauce-mayonnaise-raisin goo.

I can understand the traditional cooking method falling out of favor just because it's so labor-intensive, especially once most people have gas or electric ovens. I can't understand why anybody thought Salmon Casserole should take its place, though! The recipe only seems to be included because it's from a politician-- in this case, Martha Griffiths, a Michigan Representative who would go on to become Michigan's Lieutenant Governor. She was understandably more interested in women's equality than in tasty salmon recipes.

Sometimes I wondered if the women politicians intentionally sent bad recipes to try to help show that their place really was in the political realm and emphatically NOT in the kitchen. I mean, there's a reason Bella Abzug is remembered for her feminist work rather than for Calzone Fondue.

Just because this recipe has pizza flavors does not magically make it a calzone. It's clearly a casserole. Even worse, it's a casserole that proposes raisin bread will go great with pizza sauce, Italian sausage, and Parmesan.

So, in the end, thanks to the female politicians for reminding the cookbook's patriotic audience that plenty of women do NOT belong in kitchens and to the cookbook's editors for reminding us that the "good" old days were not actually very good. Happy Independence Day! 😬