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.
Now I'm thinking about my Midwestern friend who lived in Mexico for 28 years. I never asked her about the food she cooked for her family day to day when she lived there, but I somehow doubt that convenience items like canned soup and hotdogs were widely available (or affordable). She talked about how people have less there, so I could see locally produced food being much easier to get and cook. I know that for Christmas it was traditional to make salt fish, and she has to really search the area to find something even close to what she wants.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure it was a big change between the midwest and Mexico.
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