Bisquick, Glamourous Bisquick!

Did you know that Bisquick is positively glamorous? I can't say that I've ever considered it that exciting, but soon after its introduction, Betty Crocker's 101 Delicious Bisquick Creations as Made and Served by Well-Known Gracious Hostesses; Famous Chefs; Distinguished Epicures and Smart Luminaries of Movieland (General Mills, 1933) tried to convince everyone that Bisquick was every fancy person's secret weapon in the kitchen.

One thing that endears this book to me is that the editors insist that any biscuits made from Bisquick be referred to as "Bisquicks." You can see that in this picture of Gloria Swanson with her favored refreshment for "intimate parties"...

Cheese Bisquicks! Which are biscuits made using the Bisquick recipe with half a cup of grated cheese added to the dough. That's quite the innovation!

The booklet was also surprisingly laid back in its insistence on using Bisquick. The editors were so interested in getting a recipe from Princess Rostislav... 

that they didn't even require that her recipe (assuming that it was even hers, which is a pretty big assumption!) use actual Bisquick.

As long as the Chicken Livers and Mushrooms recipe calls for Gold Medal "Kitchen-tested" Flour and instructs readers to serve the creations over "hot Bisquicks," it's fine.

You might have picked up on my skepticism that the stars of the cookbook actually have anything to do with the recipes attributed to them, and you would be right. Do any of these people actually do their own cooking? And is it really likely that America's Sweetheart, Mary Pickford...

...really adores strawberry shortcake made with Bisquick shortcakes?

Although I have to admit that the picture looks pretty glorious.

Okay, now what if I told you that Claudette Colbert liked almost the exact same thing...

except that she preferred the peach variation?

Seems a bit suspicious to me, even though the illustrator was clearly doing their best to sell it.

The recipes from the chefs just might have been authentic, though.

In true old-cookbook fashion, Chef Philip Roemer refuses to give home cooks much in the way of directions for his Chicken Pie.

You better know how to cut and stew the chicken and make gravy from the stock because he's not going to tell you. I love that the chicken in the pie only has "some of the larger bones" removed, meaning that the filling under the Bisquick dough is just partially deboned chicken with gravy. That's going to be easy to cut and eat! But at least it looks stylish in the artist's conception of the dish.

Bisquick eventually gave up on trying to sell itself as glamorous, as the newer cookbooks tend to focus more on straightforward recipes than the stars who "submitted" them. That makes this a pretty fun window into 1930s marketing strategies.

Spring into vegetable protein!

Ever get a craving for some nonfat dry milk, carob, or boiled soybeans? No? Me neither. But sometimes I do get a craving to read about those kinds of things. What I'm trying to say is that it's time for more 1970s health food cookery!

The Vegetable Protein and Vegetarian Cookbook (Jeanne Larson and Ruth McLin, 1977) offers up a series of seasonal veggie menus, so let's check out a bountiful spread for a spring day.

Oooh-- are we lucky! Peanut Loaf with Tomato Sauce and a Stuffed Celery Salad! The Peanut Loaf is probably exactly what you are expecting:

A huge wad of stale bread cubes bound with some eggs and peanut butter. Bonus: It's studded with diced celery (because it's everyone's favorite vegetable and the Stuffed Celery Salad just won't satiate people's celery lust!) and ground peanuts (I'm guessing not too finely ground, or they would just be additional peanut butter).

And what will that tomato sauce entail? Is it going to have tomatoes slowly cooked down and spiked with fresh herbs for a pop of fresh flavor...

...or is it just going to be thickened tomato juice? (Hey, at least it's not just a can of condensed tomato soup.)

And you know what? We're blessed with an Alternate Carrot Peanut Loaf, just in case we need extra vitamin A.

Plus, this one has tomato juice right in the recipe, so I guess you don't have to make the tomato sauce? Bonus points for being easier.

I'm skipping the recipes for Serbian Cabbage and New Potatoes and Peas since they're both kind of boring (shredded cabbage sautéed with green pepper and onion; new potatoes and peas in a cream sauce) and checking out the Stuffed Celery Salad since I do so love celery.

The nice thing about this one is that you just have to stuff the individual celery sticks and you're done, rather than having to try to stuff them and then reassemble the whole thing back into its original form. The downside, of course, is that they're stuffed with a prune, cottage cheese, mayonnaise, and onion salt mixture, then sprinkled with paprika. It would be so much easier and better tasting just to go with good old-fashioned peanut butter, but then I guess that would be considered redundant with the peanut loaf main course.

And if you're curious about the Peachy Pudding for dessert, it shows that this natural foods cookbook isn't afraid of mixes.

Dessert stars instant lemon pudding! I kind of wonder if the peach purée would make the pudding loose, but this is low-effort and should at least taste okay. It's not "candy" made out of bran or good old Wheat-Soy Dessert, after all. In fact, the recipes in this aren't nearly as militantly health-foody as they might be... No boiled soybeans, powdered milk, or carob at all!

 I hope you liked the spring recipes, as we should have a summer menu in a couple of months! Get your "healthy" appetite ready.

Getting saucy (in the most boring way possible)

Ready to step back in time? I mean way back-- back to when it was a big deal to promise that milk was cooled, screened, and held "remote from the stable" until it was processed into "pure, safe milk" (italics from original)? I'm not sure when this Borden's Evaporated Milk Book of Recipes came out. The inside cover specifies it's from "The Borden Company"-- a name they took in 1919. The mascot we all associate with Borden-- Elsie-- makes no appearance, and she joined in 1936. So this booklet is probably from the 1920s or early 1930s.

I love the mostly blue cover with the pops of red and yellow. The tree-lined landscape at the top looks so peaceful, and I like the very subtle product placement of the can of evaporated milk in the kitchen scene at the bottom. 

The recipes themselves are exactly what I expect from this time-- mostly desserts that sound fine and very bland-sounding main dishes, which feature white sauce with unsurprising frequency. I guess I'm kind of surprised to see nuts in the Veal and Nut Croquettes.

The croquettes I see usually feature meats or vegetables on their own, so adding walnuts to meat seems like a bit of a novelty. That's the level of innovation you get with this booklet.

The book tries to get a bit fancy with Oyster Poulette.

Instead of plain old white sauce, the sauce is turned into poulette sauce by the addition of the egg yolks. (The name also makes me half-expect this to turn into a craft project requiring the cook to somehow sculpt the oysters so they will appear to be tiny chickens, but no such luck!)

There's nothing particularly unusual about the Salmon or Tuna Fish Salad, but I was amused by the typo in this one.

Good old "Eggless Mayonnaise juice"! Doesn't that sound delicious? (I'm pretty sure that "juice" was supposed to be one line down, after "lemon.")

The color illustrations add to the book's charm, like this picture of a salmon entrée. 

The fancy serving platter seems like it's straight from grandma's house (as does the garnish of white sauce and hard-cooked eggs).

Lest you think any of the recipes in this could be too exciting, the salmon is simply steamed.

Well, it is dusted lightly with salt and pepper before steaming, so I'm sure it's bursting with flavor. But hey, at least it gets garnished with actual white sauce, containing traces of real butter. The Halibut Baked in Milk doesn't even get that.

The fish is just dusted lightly with flour, salt, pepper, and "a sprinkling of minced parsley" before baking in diluted evaporated milk, which while baking should "be thickened by the flour and act as a delicious sauce." I'm sure it will be a sauce, anyway, but I'm having a really hard time imagining canned milk thickened with a bit of fishy flour could really be described as "delicious."

The standards, of course, were different back then. If knowing that your milk was unlikely to be contaminated by cow shit, for example, was a big deal, then maybe even the plainest white sauce was way more exciting than I'm giving it credit for....

Treats for the middle-aged elementary school set

I have to admit that I don't always get cookbooks in my attempts to preserve old print materials that I find amusing for one reason or another. For instance, I picked this up just because I couldn't really wrap my head around the idea that kids in the 1970s were so excited about Love Boat that Scholastic would make a Dynamite (December 1978) cover like this:

Can you imagine kids at the time being just thrilled to get to go behind the scenes with men dressed in black bowties and some lady draped in 10 yards of pink chiffon? 

I know, that whole notion seems crazy, but it's not really on topic for a recipe blog, right? Well guess again! Besides the article about The Love Boat and an article about Abbot and Costello (accompanied by the full text of the famous "Who's on First?" sketch), this allegedly-children's magazine also features a two-page article on how to make toast.

Not just any toast, but fancy toast, as this spread of fixins makes clear. (I spent the longest time trying to figure out why it included the midwest's conception of taco meat, but I finally realized that it was actually brown sugar.) While the recipes include some pretty simple suggestions, such as spreading toast with a mixture of cream cheese and jam or making garlic bread by smearing bread with butter mixed with garlic salt and then toasting it, the article also has some more complicated recommendations, like making "Try-Any-Angle Treats," a concoction that kind of mimics 1950s appetizers.

Now, even kids can make toast triangles topped with bits of things like shrimp or olives with cheese, then broiled until lightly bro... Oh, fudge! It's already burned. And dad is pissed about the smoke alarm going off.

If the kids really want to try to seem sophisticated and/or horrify their friends, they can go all-in on the 1950s dinner party theme and go "Fishing for Compliments."

The snack should at least be entertaining, as the kids who were previously unfamiliar with sardines are likely to be stoked and/or horrified to see that those are very definitely fish, not the chopped and breaded to oblivion stick form that the cafeteria serves.... 

Other recipes try to make traditional dishes a bit easier, like "No-Fuss French Toast."

A 9x13" pan full of eggy English muffins counts as French toast, right?

And finally, the perfect marriage of mid-century dinner party with simplified preparation, a "Quichey, Quichey, Goo."

Yes, that's a baby-talk name for an attempt at Quiche Lorraine made with a crust of toasted bread topped with bacon, eggs, and cheese. I'll bet the kids will like that if they're not too nauseated by the cutesy name to try it.

Overall, this magazine mostly left me with questions about kids in the 1970s. Were they actually interested in The Love Boat, comedy routines that were popular decades before they were even born, and dinner party staples? Were the people who marketed to kids just not aware that kids might have different tastes than their parents? Or were there so many fewer options available to kids back then that they were willing to buy anything that at least pretended to cater to them? I existed, but was not old enough to read at this point, so I have no good answers, just this weird little time capsule.

A Bounty of Bisquick

The dear cynical friend who gave me a couple of Bisquick booklets (The Daylight Time-Savers Are Here! and 133 Quicker Ways to Homemade... with Bisquick) may have thought I forgot about the bigger cookbook those two were hiding out with: The Bisquick Cookbook (General Mills, 1964). I didn't forget this beautiful hardcover. It was just easier to review a couple tiny booklets in between grading essays that increasingly seemed to be AI-generated than it was to do a whole book. Now that I'm through the terminally vague mumblings that have nothing to say but can reach any requested word count regardless, here's The Bisquick Cookbook!

I love how the cover subtly tries to make Bisquick meals look less beige by using brightly-colored tablecloths in the background. It's the little touches that make the difference, you know.

Like the other books, this offers some ways to dress up pancakes. Want to give the kids nightmares?

Make them Smile Cakes and tell them the smiles are the ghosts of dead children that were ground up to make Bisquick mix. Or at least teach them about the disappointments of false advertising by putting a face on only the top cake in a stack and hiding the plain ones underneath. It's not quite as big a disappointment as the knockoff My Little Ponies that only have a cutie mark on the side of their rump that faces outward when they're in the packaging or the stickers that have holograms on the top sheet when the rest of the sheets are plain, so it's a good way to build up their tolerance.

If you just want to seem cool and hip to your teenage children, the book offers another recipe that teens "love" in long, proud tradition of claiming that random recipes are the bee's knees or whatever it is that the kids are saying nowadays. So yes, if you ask Betty Crocker, of course the teens are wild for Pancheesies.

While I don't necessarily see any problem with a slice of cheese melted between a couple of pancakes as a sort of brunchy grilled cheese variant, I sincerely doubt that the "teen-agers" are really hoping mom whips up a nice hot stack of Pancheesies slathered with creamed tuna the next time their friends stop by.

There are other small changes made to base recipes as an excuse to give them funny names, I guess, such as adding Wheaties to the muffin batter to get Whuffins.

For some reason, Whuffins just didn't catch on, even though illustrator Roger Bradfield tried to make them look exciting.

Dad seems to be actively blushing at the thought of eating them, too lost in his Whuffin fantasy to offer Timmy one. I'm pretty sure Timmy's bowtie will start spinning in frustrated excitement any second now.

And of course, I picked a recipe that starts out sounding fine and then takes a left turn. Pepperoni Squares sound perfectly reasonable-- pepperoni in buttery biscuit dough seasoned with oregano and a touch of onion...

...until I realize that they also have hard-cooked egg chunks blended in for no goddamn reason. I don't know what it is about old cookbooks that made them think that hard-cooked eggs should be randomly chucked into pretty much everything, but I think the pepperoni agrees with me and is prepared to cut whoever is trying to add egg chunks to the Bisquick dough. Way to wield a knife, mustachioed pepperoni! (Gotta admit I'm now wondering how Pepperoni Squares would compare to a pepperoni and peanut butter sandwich.)

Thanks again to my friend for the creepy pancake smiles, ecstasy-inducing Whuffins, and knife-wielding pepperoni!

Funny Name: Mad Mushrooms

Is it weird that I imagine mushrooms taking offense to the title of this recipe from The Casserole Cookbook (Jackie Johnson and the Culinary Arts Institute Staff, 1980)?

"Mushroom Business? Mushroom Business? As if we're all in the same line of work? Well, sure, some of us are in the business of making pizzas and stir fries delicious. But some are in the business of recycling nutrients from plant and animal debris back into the ecosystem. Some are in the business of parasitizing healthy hosts or euthanizing sick ones. And some are in the business of making people trip balls. So don't just act like all mushrooms are in the same mushroom business, okay? Speciesist much?"

I had no idea mushrooms were so proud of their many earthy heritages. All I know is I'm going to try to stay out of their business. I can live without the lecture.

An Indie Microwave Cookbook

Creative and Easy Microwave (Bev Flood and Sue Mitchell, 1980) is slightly newer than the books I usually feature, but I was excited to find a microwave cookbook written by a couple of friends rather than by a microwave company. (Admittedly, the "About the Authors" section notes that the women both worked for microwave companies as well, but I assume the recipes they published on their own had to be substantially different from any they sold to Litton or Tappan or General Electric or Amana or wherever else.)

Of course, I'm not sure microwave companies would be all that impressed with some of their conversions of traditional recipes to microwave recipes. Take the ever-popular (in the midwest, anyway) 7-Up Salad, for example.

Did you know that you can boil the water for the Jell-O in the microwave? And if you forgot to soften the cream cheese beforehand, you can microwave that for a few seconds too! This microwave conversion process is so complicated that I'm glad to have a recipe that did the work for me.

Other recipes made me wonder about the point of using a microwave at all. For instance, chicken salad is cold, and I always figured it was mostly a way for people to use up any leftover chicken they found in the fridge. So how did a chicken salad recipe end up in a microwave cookbook?

You have to use it to microwave a whole chicken. No using up leftover chicken for this recipe! And since it uses a whole chicken, the family better really like chicken salad with apples, onion, and pineapple in it, or this stuff might go bad before you can finish it....

I didn't really expect to find grilled sandwich recipes in the book either. I mean, bread in the microwave? Sog-fest! The whole point of a grilled sandwich is the nice, crisp crust contrasting with the soft (and often creamy) filling.

Well, I guess I didn't actually find a grilled sandwich in this book, just one that's usually grilled: a Reuben.

And in the absence of a nice, crisp crust (which I assume is a big part of the appeal, given that Reubens contain two of my arch-nemeses: sauerkraut and Thousand Island Dressing), Flood and Mitchell decide to just really embrace the sog factor. I doubt the rye toast will remain crispy for long when it's microwaved under a heap of corned beef, sauerkraut, and cheese, but just in case it tries to retain a bit of crunch, the whole thing gets doused in a Thousand Island-ish sauce with a condensed cream of onion soup base.

Some of the recipes seem fairly original, though, like this Pineapple Casserole.

Just admire the beauty of the layering: pineapple chunks, miniature "marshmellows," grated cheddar cheese, pineapple juice-based custard, more cheese! Serve it alongside a microwaved ham, and apparently, you're good to go! (I'm almost surprised that the authors don't advocate for converting this to a summer dish by cooking the custardy sauce in the microwave, letting it cool, and then layering everything and chilling it in the fridge to serve as a salad.)

And finally, something with the name of an old classic and enough weird changes that I'm not entirely sure why they still decided to call it Chicken Kiev.

First of all: the filling! While the text says to mix the butter with Kraft Cheese Spread, the ingredients call for margarine. If you're going for Chicken Kiev, the filling is the star, so you don't want margarine! And the butter is supposed to be mixed with herbs like parsley, not cheese spread, MSG, and *checks recipe again just to make sure this is not a hallucination or misremembering* a can of chopped green chilies.

Then once the chicken breasts are wrapped around the, uh, filling, they're coated "with mixture of cheesits and taco seasoning" rather than egg wash and breadcrumbs. Maybe the coating has to be cheesy crackers and taco seasoning so it will have some color? The traditional method of frying browns the butter-filled chicken right up , but these margarine-cheese-spread-chili-filled rolls get cooked in the microwave, of course. That means no browning! 

A more accurate title might be "Chicken 'Kiev' in the Style of Shitty Vaguely Mexican Food," but that is quite a mouthful to say. I can see why the authors kept it to simple Chicken Kiev. And I'm glad that I got a chance to check out the recipes that for some reason did not make it into the major microwave manufacturers' cookbooks.

Mexican for the Midwest

I had my Star Wars Day post a bit early, so here's a Cinco de Mayo post a bit late! Favorite Mexican Cookin' (Baxter Lane Company, Angelito Guerrero special consultant, 1972) is a bit of a novelty. I'm pretty sure that it was supposed to be sent to the folks back home when a family went on an extended vacation in the southwest. 

How can I tell? Well, the back cover looks like this:

Not much point in telling that third-class postage will cost 16 cents or gently suggesting that senders might want to tape the thing shut if they don't want it to get mangled in the mail unless the substantial booklet (64 pages!) is meant to be mailed.

The booklet also seems to be written primarily for people with midwestern food sensibilities, as the recipes mostly look like they're from Lutheran church fundraising cookbooks, slightly modified (mostly by addition of chili powder and/ or chili sauce) to suddenly be "Mexican." The Salads, Dips, & Sauces chapter is a great illustration of this.

I do love Pat McCarthy's cute illustrations for the first pages of chapters, though! Got to love the woman happily popping out of the salad bowl! (I'm just hoping that I don't find out that something about her representation is stereotypical/ problematic. It looks okay to me, but she also shared pages with these guys, who can easily make other pictures seem fine by comparison.)

In any case, the salads, dips, and sauces chapter has all the midwestern classics like cottage cheese dip...

The hot chili sauce makes it Mexican! Also, maybe the bell pepper?

There's potato salad with hot chili sauce and bell pepper...

And Cole Slaw with hot chili sauce and bell pepper...

At least things get a little more creative with the deviled eggs. 

Here, we have chili pepper instead of chili sauce, but the far more interesting feature is using avocado instead of mayonnaise. I'm pretty sure the stuffing of egg yolks mixed with two large avocados and a large onion is going to be waaaaay more than is needed for six egg whites, but at least this is a fresher take on the midwest church potluck classic, and maybe the leftovers could be used as a weird guacamole?

And of course, we need the staple taco salad, here called Mexican Salad.

Interestingly, this uses canned kidney beans instead of the bright-orange taco meat favored by midwestern cooks, and the Italian dressing is Mexican-ified with avocado, sour cream, onion, chilis, and chili powder.

Midwesterners need their casseroles too, so Favorite Mexican Cookin' offers up a few that won't be too scary or unfamiliar to midwestern cooks, like Tuna Casserole. Guess what will make this iteration Mexican.

If you guessed hot chili sauce, you're right! Plus, there are corn chips on top rather than potato chips. The small touches make all the difference.

For those tired of opening cans of cream of mushroom soup and tuna, there's Chili-Rice Bake.

This calls for opening cans of Spanish rice and chili con carne instead. (Still got to keep the corn chip topper!)

For those who want to go almost all-out and make something with a Mexican name but mostly familiar midwestern ingredients, Hot Dog Enchilada Casserole might be the way to go.

Yes, it's just basically chili dogs in tortillas instead of buns, with extra sauce and cheese on top, but it might have seemed exotic to the 1970s midwestern cooks who found this in their mailbox.

And finally, what midwestern recipe collection would be complete without the beloved English muffin pizza?

In this version, the English muffins have chili on top! So it totally counts as Mexican, right?

No matter what, I have to say that the writers certainly knew how to target an audience, making the food accessible enough that midwestern families might try it without too much trepidation or difficulty finding the ingredients. Whether this actually gave them any idea of what Mexican cooking is like, though, is a much different question. (It's definitely not one I'm qualified to answer, though my guess would be that this is pretty firmly not particularly representative of authentic Mexican recipes, no matter how often the word Mexican is used in titles.) In any case, it's sure to be fine if served with enough margaritas.