A bedraggled Bake-Off castoff

I don't usually look too closely at Pillsbury Bake-Off-related cookbooks when I see them because I always assume that they're full of mostly-appealing desserts that might still be familiar to cooks now. There's not necessarily a lot of fun to be had with those. When I came across this Pillsbury's Bake Off Cook Book (1971), though, I made an exception.

I picked it up because it was super-cheap. Why so cheap? It's hard to tell from the cover, but this booklet has sustained some major cooking-related damage that makes it nearly impossible to lay flat on a scanner. Also, the pages are stained, and some were stuck together. These things are somehow pluses in my eyes, I guess because I'm usually the weird damaged castoff at the periphery in any group of people, so I have empathy for other weird damaged castoffs too, even if they are just old books with no feelings.

While this book has plenty of fine-sounding desserts, you know I'm more interested in the odder recipes. One trend I liked was the compulsion to add nonstandard ingredients to yeast bread, as in this Saucy Taco Bread.

I like that a can of tomato soup with a little taco sauce added translates to "taco," perhaps because to someone who looks like a retired home ec teacher from the Midwest, going all-in and using enchilada sauce or salsa would have been a bit too much (especially considering this also has some green chilis).

Another contestant (who also looks like a retired home ec teacher from the Midwest) prefers a can of beans in the dough to make Barbecue Bean Bread.

I was kind of surprised by how popular home-baked yeast breads seemed to be, but there were plenty of quick breads too. Perhaps the most early-'70s sounding recipe of all is the Souper Pancake Muffins.

Dump some canned cream-of-something soup and bacon bits into your pancake mix, and ta-da! Muffins!

Women who looked like retired home ec teachers from the Midwest weren't the only entrants.  David Weirich (who looks more like a dollar-store version of Bob Hope) submitted Beef 'n Bean Roll-Ups.

It turns a quick bread dough into something that looks like cinnamon rolls that went very, very wrong.

So brown and lumpy!

My favorite recipes might just be those that turn refrigerated dough into things that it was really not meant to be, though. I mean, I guess if you're a teenager from Missouri, flattened-out Pillsbury buttermilk biscuits rolled in cornmeal count as tortillas...

...but I sincerely doubt too many people from the southwest would accept them as tortillas in an Easy Enchilada Bake (and do not even get them started on using watered-down packaged barbecue sauce with a bit of chili powder as enchilada sauce).

Still, the most unlikely use of refrigerated dough might just be Saucy Crescent Ravioli.

Yep. Crescent roll dough folded over a meat mixture is supposed to be ravioli, somehow, I guess because it's baked in spaghetti sauce? 

I'm glad I finally picked up one of these booklets so I could appreciate the parade of brownish, very-'70s recipes and also because I can end with an extremely deep cut joke that only my sister is likely to get: I showed my raviolis. Well, actually, Mrs. Edna Buckley's "raviolis." Still, raviolis were shown.