Now that the kids are off in school, Cincinnati Junior Leaguers have time to make life unnecessarily complicated

Happy September! It's time once again for Cincinnati Celebrates: Cooking and Entertaining for All Seasons (Junior League of Cincinnati, first printing August, 1974, though mine is from the 1980 fifth printing). I could have gone for the Swinging School Days Menu, but it was pretty boring (that "Nuts and Bolts" snack mix made out of nuts and popcorn and pretzel sticks you find in every old cookbook, guacamole, burgers, slaw). Instead, I went with the weirdest, most complicated celebration in the fall section. 

The Progressive Dinner is really something else, requiring seven different households to coordinate meals and décor. Well, one household doesn't have to cook or decorate. The invitations are so complicated that one gets included by virtue of making them! (If I were at all inclined to do this type of stuff, I would definitely have to be the one in charge of making the invitations because at my house, everybody would have to try to find someplace to eat that wasn't already covered in cookbooks!)

The "coupon" booklet invitation would send the invitees to all six houses, in order, along with clues as to which decade the house was supposed to represent, as the theme was "It's a sign of the times" and the courses progressed from the 1920s to the 1970s. I don't know whether one super-bossy organized person mapped the entire thing out and coerced everyone into going along with this entire detailed plan or whether everyone was assigned a decade and a course, figured it out from there, and recorded it all later, but there's a LOT of planning. Like, way more than I put into anything other than lesson plans. 

The 1920s theme is Prohibition, so the first house is a "speakeasy" with bathroom décor suggesting the hosts are brewing up some bath tub gin.

That means the "Prohibition Punch" (a renamed Whiskey Punch) has to be served in coffee cups.

Make sure you use the "good Maryland rye" along with the frozen lemonade and orange juice.

The first house needs some nibbles, too, so there are Curried Chicken Chunks (below) over 3-B Cocktail Crackers (which are popular enough that I already featured them in July).

I'm not 100% sure why appetizers that are supposed to be eaten off of toothpicks are served with crackers, but this menu has many mysteries. (It's also interesting that the recipes make enough Prohibition Punch for 25 guests and enough appetizers for 4-6.)

The 1930s house is all about one of the Junior Leaguers' favorite pastimes: cosplaying as poors. By all means, boil an old shoe on the stove.

And put a "Social Security" sign on the bathroom door while you're at it. Everybody wants to feel like they live in a terrible political cartoon, right? At least the boiled shoe wasn't supposed to be the actual soup course.

This minestrone seems pretty respectable, with plenty of veggies and some actual herbs. I'm not Eye-talian, though, so someone can correct me if I'm wrong.

The third house has a World War II theme, and the Junior Leaguers were not nearly as interested in World War II as your dad is. There is barely a description for this one, and most of the décor seems to be centered on the hosts' clothing.

Not even any special bathroom decorations! No special recipe either-- just some kind of tossed salad "served on lettuce leaves in pie tins."

TV is the theme for the 1950s house, and the hosts are back to "cute" bathroom jokes, labeling the bathroom door "Stage Door" this time.

The entrée and sides got served in TV dinner trays, which I would absolutely love. Well, the concept, anyway. I'm sure most people would consider Pork Tenderloin Lorraine to sound pretty tasty...

...even if I'm not into meat, alliums, or vinegar.

It's also nice that the Asparagus and Carrot Escallop reminds us that Junior Leaguers were just as much into cream of celery soup as anyone else at the time.

I'd think they would have sprung for fresh or frozen asparagus, though. Canned is... well... canned. And Army green. 

The 1960s is represented by the Peppermint Lounge. This step apparently requires the group to have one friend who owns a house with big white pillars that can be turned into peppermint sticks.

Here, the bathroom is the "Echo Chamber." Dessert is a Grasshopper Soufflé. 

It's more of a chiffon than a soufflé (since it's gelatin-based and not baked), but it's got enough crème de menthe and crème de cacao that nobody will care unless they're really pedantic, and you can just shut them in the Echo Chamber if they get too annoying.

The final house has to go with a Watergate theme. I guess that's why they don't have to do any actual cooking, offering just "Cigars, nuts and assorted apertifs." If you've got to try to make hardcore political investigations into a party theme, you deserve a break somewhere.

The hosts also need mums handcrafted out of newspaper and a note warning guests, "Don't talk to the flowers; they are bugged." I like knowing that I am not the only human being who is inclined to talk to the flowers when I'm in a roomful of human beings. Apparently, others have that compulsion too. (I am also intrigued by the punctuation after "flowers." It's hard to see here, but there's definitely a comma, and maybe a dot added above it by hand to turn it into a semicolon when somebody realized it was a comma splice. I'm being generous in my quote and pretending that it's definitely a semicolon.)

Whew! I'm exhausted just writing about that much nonsense. I'm not sure how anybody managed to plan and execute an entire progressive dinner. There was no bingeing Netflix back the '70s though, so maybe the next best thing was putting a funny sign on the door and pretending to be trapped in series of half-a-century's worth of sorry political cartoons with six sets of your closest friends.