The quirks of Lancaster recipes (No, not THAT Lancaster)

I love organizations that use original titles like Our Favorite Recipes for their fundraising books because it's nearly impossible for me to remember whether I already have this one. I took a chance on this version of Our Favorite Recipes from Les De'Voueees' Ohio Child Conservation League of Lancaster, Ohio (undated, but a few recipes include pistachio pudding mix, so I'm going to say mid-'70s). I figured I'd have remembered a name with so many vowels and weird apostrophes as De'Voueees.'

I would only have been out $3 if I had been wrong, but I'm pretty sure this is my only version of this particular Our Favorite Recipes. The recipes in this often seem like I probably already have them too, but then I notice some small twist that makes the recipe Lancaster's own.

For instance, I see a lot of cake recipes that begin with a box mix for cake and another for pudding. The dry mixes are usually combined as is, but in Lancaster, cooks actually make the pudding first!

Then the cake mix goes into the hot pudding, along with some chocolate chips and chopped nuts for good measure. I have to admit that it sounds pretty good.

I see a lot of recipes for pizza burgers and English muffin pizzas, but in Lancaster, they call English muffin pizzas pizza burgers.

The "burgers" also start with ground baloney and pepperoni. I think this may be the only recipe I've encountered that calls for ground pepperoni. (Plus, "chilli powder" is added to the pizza sauce!)

I see a lot of recipes for stuffed cabbage rolls. Most of them get stuffed with ground meat and cooked in a tomato-based sauce. In Lancaster, though, the tomato-based sauce starts out with chili sauce...

... and then gets mixed with grape jelly. Cabbage rolls here are treated like cocktail weenies! (And I am not nearly so enthusiastic about this recipe as I was for the Triple Fudge Cake.)

I also enjoyed the Lancaster method of spelling. They don't make Veal Parmesan like everyone else.

They make "Veal Parmegian." And just as I was reasoning that it was harder to look up words you didn't know how to spell back in the 1970s than it is today, I noticed that the ingredient of parmesan cheese is spelled correctly! Now I'm wondering if Barbara Olds knew one of the spellings was right and wasn't sure which, so she covered her bases by spelling it both ways, or whether she didn't realize that the title of the recipe had anything to do with the ingredients. Maybe she thought "parmegian" was some cooking style or technique, and that the cheese in the recipe had nothing to do with the title?

I'm afraid I'll never know, but I am glad I picked up this puzzling little glimpse into Lancaster. It was worth the $3.