Pillsbury picks some surprising winners

I picked up Pillsbury's Bake Off Main Dish Cookbook (1968) mainly because I liked the colorful pictures. I figured that the fact that the recipes were award-winning meant that they would likely be crowd-pleasers and thus kind of uninteresting for someone who lives for weird and off-putting concoctions.

I mean, how upset can you get about seeded biscuits baked atop a beef and vegetable stew? The cover suggests exactly the kind of beloved family and potluck staples I expect.

I was happy to see that the book does have some of my favorite weird midwestern subgenres, like using outdated/ borderline racist terms to describe food that don't even seem relevant to the recipe.

Seriously, wouldn't it be far more appropriate to call chicken and celery in a cheese sauce topped with a cheesy crumble Midwest Celery Crunch?

And what could be more midwestern than a party sandwich roll "frosted" with a pasteurized cheese spread?

Answer: one that is also filled with canned shrimp, cream cheese, pecans, pineapple, and water chestnuts.

As I continued to read, the recipes seemed to get more questionable. I'm not a huge fan of sweet-and-savory combinations, so I always kind of wonder if I'm being unreasonable to be horrified by recipes that play up that combo. What is the proper reaction to Sunshine Chicken Casserole?

Is it fair for me to gaze with gape-mouthed horror at the thought of canned white grapes and golden raisins mingling with chicken and hard cooked eggs, all swimming in a sea of condensed cream of celery soup seasoned with cinnamon, cloves, and pimiento? I kind of wonder if the layer of drop biscuits on the top is a tacit admission that this horror deserves to be buried.

And is this casserole better or worse than the Chicken Party Pie?

I will openly admit a love of gelatin-based fruit pies, but lemon-gelatin-chicken-salad in a pie shell? It kind of reminds me of the recipe that prompted me to start this blog almost a decade ago.

My favorite recipe just might be the Funny Face Hamburgers, though. 

They may not be immediately scary to anyone who likes ketchup in their hamburgers (and realizes the raisins are just decorative and can be pretty easily picked off if you don't want to eat them), but the picture.... Well...

"C-come... hic... complay withhhh ushhhh!"

I can't see anything other than biscuit representations of drunk kids! The two in the back are so far gone that their tongues are lolling out, and the one in front has gone cross-eyed. And the parsley somehow gives me the impression that the cross-eyed kid would probably be wearing a toga if it had a biscuit-y body. This book ended up being far more entertaining than I anticipated. Good thing I picked it up after all!