Saturday, February 25, 2023

Funny Ingredient: It's Running Away!

Okay, admittedly the name of this recipe from Trinity Cookbook (Trinity Episcopal Churchwomen, Newark, Ohio, 1976) isn't all that funny. 


I picked Tiropetes Greek Appetizer because I love that it calls for Fila dough, so I imagine sneakers filled with three cheeses, eggs, and parsley and coated lavishly with butter. I'm glad to live in the age of spell check so now I know Jean Ashbrook meant fillo dough. I mean phyllo dough. I mean filo dough. 

Eh, never mind.

Tuesday, February 21, 2023

A blandified and randomly frozen world from Frigidaire

Once again, it's time for a trip back to a time when a refrigerator was still kind of a novelty. Your Frigidaire Recipes (the Home Economics Department of the Frigidaire Division of General Motors Sales Corporation, Dayton, Ohio, 1937) assures readers that the Frigidaire is capable of many things.

The booklet explains that price of the refrigerator will be more than made up for over time, as safe reuse of ingredients means "The [leftover] pork chop may be ground with other pieces of meat and used for stuffing green peppers or for making sandwich filling. The tomato slices may be used for garnishing the next meat loaf. The buttered peas may be used in a jellied salad ring or vegetable salad or scalloped vegetable dish. These are just a few of the many possibilities." Whether people really wanted to eat a jellied salad ring full of (likely overcooked) buttered peas was immaterial.

Alternatively, the bits of leftover vegetables might make a grand Cottage Cheese and Vegetable Salad.

Simply mix leftover veggies with cottage cheese and mayo, leaven with a bit of whipped cream, and then freeze into a solid mass that is sure to put nearly everyone's teeth on edge-- mayo-haters and cottage-cheese-haters alike.

As much as the introduction touts using leftovers, many of the recipes start with all fresh ingredients. The more common denominator among recipes is that everything should be bland. Take the Chicken and Rice Creole. I'm not sure what makes it Creole. Maybe Frigidaire thought using tomatoes in the rice was enough?

I'm absolutely not a southern cook, but I was under the impression that recipes like this should at least have the holy trinity of bell peppers, celery, and onion, plus more spices than a couple whole cloves and some paprika. (And online recipes suggest I'm not wrong.)

The Cajun Chicken and Rice is downright wild compared to the chili, though.

Frigidaire Chili is basically the saddest, most basic sloppy joe mix ever (hamburger, onions, catsup) with a can of kidney beans thrown in for good measure. Plus, the instruction to "Add catsup and cook until the mixture appears oily" do not do the recipe any favors.

The book does offer plenty of delicious-sounding desserts: mousses and parfaits and fruit ices. They're not all winners, though. 

Even if Chilled Fruit Dessert sounds really sad (As if anyone wants to eat a partially-frozen can of mixed fruit! Just scrape the whipped cream and maraschino cherries off the top if you like them and skip the rest...), this recipe seems to have had quite a ride, showing up as an even scarier variation in Quick & Easy Dishes (Favorite Recipes of Home Economics Teachers, 1968).

I guess I've learned that blandified foods have a chance of surviving their initial awkward phase in appliance cookbooks that were probably marketed to wealthy white families. Chili and "Creole" cooking managed to survive despite their initially being presented as a meat flavored primarily with onion, a tomato product, and hope. Once people had better access to spices and could afford them, they realized that dinner didn't always have to taste like ketchup and sadness. 

Freezing random things for no clear reason seems less popular now, though. I can't quite imagine anyone serving frozen fruit cocktail or a slab of veggies frozen into cottage cheese today (even if the fruit cocktail abomination did live into the '60s). We need our freezer space for ice cream and trays of Lean Cuisine and/or Hungry Man.

Saturday, February 18, 2023

The life-is-too-short diet

Let's be sweet and think about a classic couple today. Everybody loves grilled cheese and tomato soup, right? 

Well, predictably, everybody but me! While I adore crunchy, melty, salty grilled cheese, gloppy and too-sweet tomato soup is not my choice of pairing. I want a nice vegetable soup instead, made with a thin tomato broth. My point is that I've found a cookbook that can ruin this pairing for just about everyone.

Just in case you're not already skeptical about recipes from The Abridged Edition of the Saturday Evening Post Fiber & Bran Better Health Cookbook (Cory SerVaas, M.D., Charlotte Turgeon, and Fred Birmingham, 1977) because it's a '70s "health" cookbook, you should also know that this came from the diet chapter. Yep. It not only has to be fiberful, but it also has to be low-cal, so these recipes double the chances of sacrificing everything that makes people love grilled cheese and tomato soup.

First up, the riff on grilled cheese:


They're open-faced, so there's way less crunchy toast. Whether you see mustard and barely-cooked onion as exciting additions to the best part-- the cheese!-- is a matter of personal interpretation. (Of course I see it as a chance for things I hate to completely overpower the thing I love.) The worst part, though, is hinted at in the last line: "Cut each piece into 4 squares and serve with the aspics."

The aspics? Yes, this swaps out tomato soup for Individual Tomato Aspics.


What this means in practice is you get to eat your rapidly-congealing open-faced grilled cheese with a blob of V-8 congealed around an artichoke heart stuffed with cottage cheese and garnished with imitation mayonnaise! 

If the thought of having to eat tiny squares of oniony cheese bread served with a side of jiggly V-8 makes you wish for a stiff drink, well, the diet chapter offers some drink recipes too! (Minus the "stiff" part, because alcohol has calories, you know.)


You could have Calf Shots or Sea Juice to drown your sorrows! Never mind that "calf shots" sound either like veterinary pharmaceuticals or the least popular variety of upskirt photography... or that "sea juice" sounds like a mouthful of ocean water. Just have a goddamn drink already.

Alternatively, decide that life is too short to waste on this nonsense and have a crisp, gooey, rich grilled cheese with whatever you like.

Wednesday, February 15, 2023

What's up with Watkins?

You know how I'm always posting Rawleigh pamphlets when I can find them thanks to my family history with this questionable sell-from-home company? Well, today we're looking at something similar: Watkins. When I found a copy of Watkins Cook Book (J. R. Watkins Company, 1938), I had to pick it up to see what this sell-spices-and-other-assorted-nonsense from home company thought people should be cooking in the years following the Great Depression. 


The plain blue cover is a good indication that a lot of the cooking is very plain and practical too-- as would befit post-Great-Depression food. There's a lot of repurposing. Got leftover cereal? Turn it into soup. 


Very, very bland soup, seasoned only with a bit of salt and Watkins pepper.

Need a sandwich, but have only odds and ends?


Just slap some olives, almonds, peppers, and apple between slices of bread and call it a sandwich. Hopefully, whoever you packed it for will be at work or school by the time they figure out the filling is a random assortment of be-mayoed plantstuff and you won't have to hear the complaints until evening, by which time they will hopefully be too wiped out from mining the coal or clapping the erasers for the chalkboard or whatever else people had to do at work or school back in 1938 to put up too much of a fight.

The book also had the requisite questionably-Eye-talian recipes, like this Spaghetti Italianne.


Any recipe that begins with breaking the spaghetti into smaller pieces automatically loses some Italian points, I'm pretty sure-- and it doesn't help the case that the sauce is flavored with Worcestershire and catsup.

I think I'd rather go with their macaroni-and-cheese-adjacent Spaghetti Loaf.


The "Italianne" spaghetti made me a little too skeptical of the book's ideas about Italian cooking, though. When I saw a recipe for Gnocchi (described also as "Italian Luncheon Dish"), I expected to see little potato-based dumplings shaped on a fork and boiled before serving, so I was skeptical when I found this instead.


Cornmeal gnocchi, cut out like tiny cookies and baked? It sounded like Watkins was making things up again, but this is totally a thing. I can never get too high and mighty working on this blog because it reminds me way too often that there's so much I don't know.

Still, though, it's not a bad idea to be skeptical. This book ends with a health guide, naming the various components of food, telling why they are important, and listing good sources of them. I'm not sure how much I trust a book that tells me to get my vitamims...


And I'm even more puzzled when it insists that sugar is a good source of vitamims. Sorry, Watkins, but you lost me there. I appreciate the effort to help people use up leftovers when money was tight, but the health advice seems a bit suspect! 

On second thought, though, I could maybe argue that Reese's peanut butter cups are an excellent source of vitamims, what with all the sugar. Hmm. Maybe I'll come around to their health advice too, the same way I did with my new understanding of gnocchi....

Saturday, February 11, 2023

The old homesteader still surprises

When I saw Old Homesteader Main Dish in Lower Deer Creek Mennonite Cookbook (Kalona, Iowa, 1977), I was amused by the vague specification that this is a main dish, and I also assumed that it would be some kind of recipe made out of basic ingredients people would have had back when Iowa was still in the process of becoming a state. Maybe it would be something full of organ and/or heavily salted meats, root vegetables, cornmeal.

And then I saw it was an appropriate recipe to help celebrate canned food month, full of canned tomatoes, kidney beans, and Campbells chili beef soup. I guess the "Old Homesteader" this refers to is not the guy who rode his horse to the general store a few times a year to stock up chewing tobacco and molasses, but the old guy in the 1970s who didn't want to have to do any more cooking than necessary. Even after nearly a decade of perusing old cookbooks, I still have trouble figuring out just where they're going. I think that's part of why I love them so much.

Wednesday, February 8, 2023

Recipes that will make you think differently about victory

The cover of this booklet seems to suggest that the title is Recipes.

However, the title page inside says Victory Recipes (Columbia Broadcasting System, WCCO, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1943), so I will go with that. It's more representative of what the book is: a book on "Menu planning in wartime, a wartime involving rationing, points and scarcities." The recipes come from a contest held by WCCO's Saturday Morning Open House show, which must have been super popular, as the book claims that 1,500,000 recipes had been submitted during its nearly four years in existence.

What kinds of recipes was the station looking for in World War II? Well, like nearly all midwestern cookbooks of the time, this one suggests that recipes with extremely questionable claims to an ethnic group are welcome.

What makes Mexican Rice Timbales Mexican? The French timbale form? The old English cheese? The cooked asparagus garnish? My guess is that maybe it's the fact that these have rice in them, since rice is right in the title, but it's not as if Mexican cuisine has the only claim to rice...

Since meat was rationed, I expected to see some soybean recipes, and I was not disappointed.

Sometimes I think that women in the 1940s could (and did!) loaf-ify pretty much everything. Give them bits of things that need to be used up, a cup or two of crumbs and an egg, and bam! Loaf in about two hours.

The book made me laugh at myself when I realized my distinctly 21st century vantage point. When I saw this recipe, I was incredulous.

Duck and Rice Dinner? As a watcher of cooking shows, I thought, "Who would splurge on a duck during wartime?" And then I felt incredibly silly when I realized that this was a way to use a duck that the family hunter bagged! It wasn't a luxury. It was just a way to avoid using points to get meat.

Well, maybe it was still a luxury compared to eating shit in a squash boat (I guess to help save the wheat bread that would normally serve as the "shingle").

I also find it interesting that Squash with Chipped Beef is imagined as a "Saturday lunch before the big football game." Tailgating was definitely not a thing back then!

Victory sandwiches filled with carrots, olives, raisins, chopped nuts, and mayonnaise may also have helped drive the popularity of duck hunting.


The prospect of a raisin-and-olive-salad sandwich was enough to make almost anyone reach for a gun. (To hunt ducks, obviously.)

There was also the threat of a baked bean, peanut, celery, onion, and ketchup sandwich to contend with.

And for sugar rationing, cooks had to get really creative with their icings.

There's nothing quite like the thought of a cake covered in a grape-jelly-flavored meringue to make people give up on the idea of cake entirely.

Victory recipes are definitely fun to read through, but I'm pretty glad I didn't have to experience them.

Saturday, February 4, 2023

Guess why this has "quotation marks"!

Aside from being fixated on dried milk and clueless about the meaning of "spicy," Lean Cuisine for the Weight Conscious (nobody wanted credit for this one, but it's from 1978) really appreciated unnecessary quotation marks.

Sometimes they are used in the Weight Watchers way, indicating that a recipe does not really contain the named ingredient, as in the Mixed "Fruit" Sherbet.

Nope-- no actual fruit. It's just "black cherry flavored dietetic soda" and strawberry extract (because strawberries and cherries are known for being so calorific-- can't risk actually eating any). 

Sometimes, the scare quotes seem to be an open admission that the recipe title is a lie.


"Fantasy" Fudge is admitting that not even the most deprived dieter is fantasizing about nonfat dry milk with chocolate and vanilla extracts, diet margarine, and artificial sweetener.

Sometimes, the scare quotes appear to be trying to perform some kind of complicated reverse psychology maneuver.


See, "Mistake" Cake isn't a mistake because "mistake" is in scare quotes, meaning that it's not really a mistake to consider crumbled raisin bread reconstituted with an egg, artificial sweetener, and extra spices and flavorings to be a dessert-y cake!

And some quotation marks are just... a puzzle.


I have no idea where they're trying to go with "Spice" Spice Cake. Are they trying to imply that cinnamon is insufficient to make it a spice cake? That seems like a weak guess. Maybe it's to reassure readers that the cake doesn't have any hot and spicy pepper ingredients-- just non-spicy spices? Maybe it's to fool midwesterners into thinking spices are just imaginary, so it won't hurt if they actually add a few? I welcome all theories, no matter how far-fetched!

Wednesday, February 1, 2023

Rawleigh Doctors Up February

Happy February! Kidding, of course. The shortest month usually feels like the longest, as the cold weather would really be wearing out its welcome at this point if it had ever been welcome in the first place. Let's try to take out some of the sting with more of Rawleigh's Good Health Guide Almanac Cook Book (1953).

I was interested to see February had recipes for both spaghetti sauce and chili con carne, as those are in so many old cookbooks and can run the gamut from having almost zero seasoning to being the among the few recipes in a cookbook that call for substantial amounts of spice, and from being slowly cooked down using carefully-selected ingredients to being doctored up tomato soup

Rawleigh goes the vaguely-seasoned route, opting for all-purpose seasoning in the meatballs, and chili powder for both the spaghetti sauce and the chili. There are also cloves in the chili, which I'm not sure I'd be a fan of...

The horoscope is unfailingly positive as always, though it does note that Aquarians "do not often show [their] affection." Maybe that's code for "It's too cold to get nekkid!" 

Finally, the spotlighted Rawleigh product for February is the Medicated Ointment and Antiseptic Salve.

I would never have guessed that based on the picture of a young boy and his pet dog, captioned "Such a relief if you're ready WHEN ACCIDENTS COME." Before I noticed the round tins in the corner, I briefly wondered if Rawleigh had ever made a product for getting pee out of rugs. Fido doesn't want to go out in the cold right now either, you know! Let's hope next month will be just a little bit warmer.