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!
Don't forget that the smiles on the smile cakes are also overcooked batter. That teaspoon of maple flavored syrup isn't enough to make them darker than the rest of the batter. That comes from the fact that they were cooked longer than everything else.
ReplyDeleteI guess that's a warmup for disappointment during their teenage years when mom starts serving tuna pancakes with cheese, and the reason why you never hear an athlete say that you better eat your whuffins. Sadly, I didn't think that the cooked egg in the pepperoni squares was too far out in left field. Do they belong? No, but they aren't as unexpected as say chopped canned peaches would be.
I have to admit that I kind of like a lot of things a bit overcooked. My mother-in-law always complains that pizza is burned if we go to my favorite place, and I think it looks just perfect.
DeleteMaybe I've been looking at old cookbooks too long because I realized that I'd only have been equally surprised (rather than more surprised) to see canned peaches instead of hard-cooked eggs in the pepperoni squares. A lot of old cookbooks love the random addition of canned fruit. Hell, canned pineapple would be an actual pizza topping that chains offer, so that might make more sense than eggs. (That's also something my in-laws and I disagree over, as I'm not a pineapple-on-pizza person. For a while they thought that meant I disliked pineapple in general, but I've finally established that I can like it in other contexts, even if it's not okay on pizza.)