When I picked up Bake Off Cook Book from Pillsbury (1971), I knew that the recipes would feature Pillsbury products. I mean, selling Pillsbury stuff is the whole point of the Bake Off. What I was not expecting was that so many recipes featured chips and puffs for no apparent reason. I was almost convinced that the Bake Off was cosponsored by Frito-Lay in 1971, but the recipes don't specify the brand names for the snacks used in the recipes.
Some recipes feature foodstuffs wrapped in Pillsbury biscuits and then covered with crushed potato chips, like Cheesy Biscuit Finger Rolls.
Cheese in a carb in a carb!
It looks almost like the Cheesy Biscuit Finger Rolls could be a coffee cake for people who prefer savory and salty to sweet.
If dairy's not your thing, the Biscuit Fishwich is pretty similar, except it's a fish stick wrapped in a biscuit and covered with crushed corn chips.
I'd think that someone from Hawaii would prefer better fish-based recipes, what with the proximity of fresh seafood, but I guess Hawaiians have the same time and money constraints as the rest of us.
And speaking of seafood, when I saw the picture of the Easy Crust Bean Burger Bake, I wondered why there were shrimp on top of it.
Then I read the recipe and realized those were cheese puffs.
I'm not sure they're "broken into small pieces" per the recipe's instructions, but they are striking...
The weirdest use of cheese puffs, though, might be this one.
This is not a mini version of a regular Dutch apple pie. This is Cheese 'n Apple Pie Cups. And in case you haven't guessed...
...the "cheese" in question is cheese-flavored corn puffs. I imagine in the middle of all that cinnamon and sugar, they'd come off primarily as "crunch" rather than "cheese."
Beyond the grand prize, Pillsbury offered prizes for subcategories (like best consumer value and division prizes for the various product divisions). Maybe this year they should have given prizes for weirdest use of salty snacks. Frito-Lay could have thrown in some prize money if the cookbook would have recommended their brands. Companies must not have thought about cross-promotion as much back in 1971.
All of these crushed snacks tell me that children lived in those homes, and they took the brunt of the children's anger.
ReplyDeleteAlso that cooks didn't want to waste anything. Chip crumbs get put to use rather than tossed in the trash. I do like the use-it-up ethos of old recipes.
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