The "throw it all in and let diners sort it out" approach to casserole-making

I'm a sucker for casserole cookbooks because so many old casserole recipes seemed to give home cooks a license to just dump whatever leftover meat was in the fridge together with whatever happened to be in the pantry and try to convince their families it was delicious. Southern Living Casseroles Cookbook (Jean Wickstrom, 1974, but mine is from the 1986 fourth printing) of course has some casseroles that sound just fine, like this fried-chicken-on-top-of-rice dealie from the cover.

I'm highlighting some of their other, perhaps less-than-fine choices, though. You would expect nothing less.

You might think my objection to the mostly good-sounding Mexican Rice Casserole would be the raisins.

I mean, you're not wrong. Raisins in a recipe are nearly always a mistake, as far as I'm concerned. That's hardly worth pointing out yet again, though. I'm also amused that this recipe with a full pound of ground beef and four slices of bacon in it is featured in the "Meatless Casseroles" chapter. I guess that in the South any recipe with less than a quarter pound of meat per serving counted as meatless? 

The throw-it-all-in mentality seems to be on display in the Savory Pork Chops en Casserole. While I'm not too surprised by pork-chops-and-applesauce concoctions, or pork with horseradish and sauerkraut, or pork smothered in tomatoes and onions...

...I don't really expect to see all those variations together in the same recipe! I guess this one is for people who just can't make up their minds what they want?

And speaking of not being able to make up one's mind, let's check out the Casserole International.

It is indeed international, calling for everything from garlic and fines herbs to curry powder, frozen chow mein, and fettucine to sherry and Cheddar cheese. I guess the idea was that grocery stores in the '70s and '80s did not generally have extensive international foods sections, so home cooks should just grab every ingredient they could find that seemed like it might count as "foreign" to typical southerners and put them all into one dish.

The weirdest mashup of all, though, might be the recipe with the cringeworthy title Oriental Beef-Spaghetti Casserole. You might suspect that this will be one of those casseroles bound with cream-of-something soup and topped with a gooey layer of American or Cheddar cheese that somehow counted as "oriental" because it contained canned chop suey vegetables and maybe a hint of soy sauce. 

If so, well, you're right about the chop suey vegetables-- but nothing else. The casserole would likely have read mostly as Italian, what with the spaghetti, mix of ground beef and pork, onion, green pepper, tomato paste, canned mushrooms, and topping of Parmesan-- but the can of chop suey vegetables made it "oriental." Most bizarrely of all, this is also flavored with ketchup or chili sauce and a small bottle of 7-Up! My favorite instruction may just be on how to heat the dish if it's been frozen: "To serve, thaw, add additional 7-Up if needed, and bake at 350° for 45 minutes." I'm not sure how to tell whether this pile of ingredients needs extra 7-Up, but then I'm confused by nearly every aspect of this recipe. The possible need for additional 7-Up the least of my worries....

I loved this opportunity to peek in to see how southern cooks might "casserolify" their odds and ends for a hungry family nearly half a century ago, and as always, I am super glad that I was not among the cooks in this book's target audience. They'd probably make fun of me for my inadequate knowledge of 7-Up uses or my conviction that "meatless" should mean that a recipe does not, in fact, have any meat in it.