Remember how I suggested that The Junior League of Roanoke Valley, Virginia, creators of Of Pots and Pipkins (1971) might not even know what pipkins are? Well, there are a lot of words with meanings the Junior Leaguers can ignore! Do you expect the recipe for Moose to contain, well, moose?
Ha, ha! You fool! Moose is just a lasagna-adjacent casserole made with hamburger, noodles, tomato sauce, and lots of dairy (because the Junior Leaguers of Roanoke definitely believe in dairy above all else!).
What kinds of things might you expect to find in a Tutti Frutti Cake? If you think it should have fruits since "tutti frutti" is Italian for "all fruits," well, you don't understand how the Roanoke Valley Junior Leaguers operate.
To them, "tutti frutti" obviously means "chocolate and nuts." (I had a tough time deciding to post this one because I was convinced I must be missing something. No fruit in the cake? Must be in the filling. Nope! Maybe in the frosting? Nope! Maybe I didn't read the instructions carefully enough, and the fruit is surreptitiously sneaked into the narrative without being included in the ingredient lists? Not that I can tell...)
The one word the Roanoke Junior League seems to take seriously is "easy."
Note that this is not Easy Green Bean Casserole, but "Easy" Green Bean Casserole. I think Mrs. Robert Clement (Dorothy Young) had to use the scare quotes because the cook actually has to make a sauce rather than just dumping a can of cream-of-something soup onto the beans and calling it a day. It's not really easy if you have to make your own sauce, so you can't just throw the word "easy" around unless you indicate that it's being used ironically. Words like "moose" and "tutti frutti," who cares? They can mean anything. But do not tempt a cook with the promise of a recipe being easy unless it is really goddamn easy!
The writer of the moose recipe has obviously never been to Alaska. Okay, I didn't actually have a chance to try moose up there, just reindeer, but there is a difference between a moose and a cow. The Clever Judy Frosting also confuses me. Is the chocolate supposed to be melted? Chopped fine? You mix it in with a rotary beater, so if your chunks are too big you could have problems. Then there's the fact that it is raw egg based. Maybe you should skip the tutti frutty cake and just have an apple.
ReplyDeleteA lot of old frosting recipes used to be based on raw eggs. One of my friends was just lamenting to me that she'd wanted to make a favorite dessert from childhood and realized that the frosting was a salmonella risk. (Hers relied on whipped egg whites, though, so I said to try a carton of pasteurized egg whites.)
DeleteI'm pretty sure the chocolate is supposed to be melted. Funny how cooks used to assume the readers would just know that it would be melted because it's listed with liquid ingredients.