Roanoke gets lost in cheese!

Of Pots and Pipkins (Junior League of Roanoke Valley, Virginia, 1971) made me look up "pipkin." Of course, I assumed the long-handled roundish pot on the cover was a pipkin, but I wanted to make sure.

Based on the Wikipedia definition, I'm not entirely sure the Junior League fully understood the term either, as pipkins are supposed to be earthenware and not made for use of direct flame. The one on the cover looks like it's metal. I wouldn't be surprised if the Junior Leaguers didn't care if it wasn't a real pipkin, though. They had their own way of doing things.

At the beginning of a meal, they might serve an old-fashioned glass filled with a frozen ball of mushed-up cantaloupe and lemonade concentrate leavened with some egg white and expect you to pretend that is a regular first course.

If, instead of a first course, they decided to serve a cheese ball appetizer, you might expect it to be, well, just a cheese ball. You know-- seasoned cream cheese in a ball shape, maybe rolled in a coating of nuts or herbs before serving. A Bourbon Cheese Ball would be exactly the same, only flavored with bourbon before the coating step. Not in Roanoke, though.

Here, a Bourbon Cheese Ball is a fairly standard seasoned cream cheese ball suspended in a bourbon-flavored consommé jell. I can only imagine the mess this would make when people tried to dismantle it and spread it on crackers....

This Junior League was really into doing odd things with cheese, too. On the brink of the saturated fat/ cholesterol scare, they recommended melting a big (10 ounce!) hunk of cheese, beating in an egg...

...and splitting this concoction between just two people! I love cheese, but I feel a bit sick just thinking about starting the day off by eating more than a quarter pound of cheese over biscuits.

And just in case a nice green salad for lunch or dinner to balance off starting the day with a massive cheese wad might seem a little too austere, the book has a cheesy recommended addition:

Top that salad off with Hot Cheese Balls! This is a different combination of cheese and egg, but deep fried to make up for the fact that the meager pound of cheese is expected to feed 10 people.

Of course, the Junior League in Roanoke Valley was as unable to resist a Jell-O salad as any midwestern group. They weren't immune to outside influences. They were just the type who couldn't decide whether a Jell-O salad should be dessert-y or salad-y, so they split the difference.

I would think that the crushed pineapple, lime gelatin, pecans, and whipped cream belonged together and the American cheese, pimiento, celery, and green olives belonged in an entirely different dish, but in Roanoke, they're apparently appropriate mold-mates. (I also love that this is called Olive Wreath Mold, with the word "wreath" suggesting that maybe this was supposed to be considered a holiday treat?)

I still don't know whether the pipkin on the cover is really a pipkin, but now I really suspect that the Junior League of Roanoke Valley doesn't particularly care. They make their own rules, and if you don't like them, too bad. You're still expected to eat raw egg whites mixed with lemonade concentrate, consume nearly half a pound of cheese in the course of a regular day, top it all off with a slice of the Olive Wreath Mold, and pretend to like it.