This copy of Bake-Off Cook Book reminded me that 1968 was a very different time from 2023.
It was apparently a time when people were not afraid to put homemade bread dough directly into a greased paper grocery bag instead of a bread pan...
...even though I assume people in 1968 were more likely to own an actual bread pan than people in 2023. They apparently weren't worried about bag lint, or whatever weird chemicals might be used to make paper bags more durable or water-resistant or whatever. Or maybe they felt ambivalent about something so closely related to fruitcake and half-hoped it would be ruined by baking it in a paper bag?
They were absolutely mad for stroganoff and willing to call pretty much any main dish with sour cream in it stroganoff, even if it used canned Vienna sausages for the meat component and replaced mushrooms with canned green beans and noodles with a "crust" of mashed potatoes reconstituted from flakes and a topping of French fried onions.
At least it's more colorful than stroganoff usually is.
They were concerningly eager to label pretty much any random recipe as "Oriental" for no apparent reason.
Sorry, I meant "because it had a teaspoon of soy sauce and some canned fried noodles in the biscuit topping." That's more than enough to offset the fact that this is, you know, full of cream of mushroom soup, canned tuna, and country-style biscuits.
At least the people of 1968 and 2023 have one thing in common: a love of a two-dessert mashup. Instead of a brookie or a cronut, the people of 1968 instead went for Cookie Cap Cakes...
...which were carrot cake cupcakes topped with a butterscotch nut cookie owl face.
Maybe owls looked way different in the 1960s.... Like I said, different time!
I had load pans for years and only used them a few times. I finally got rid of them because I have very little storage space in my home. I figured that I could get foil pans or borrow them from the library. Using a paper grocery bag never crossed my mind. Plastic bags wouldn't work the same for sure. I guess they were hoping to score points for creativity and it seems like maybe it worked.
ReplyDeleteI make bread often enough that I have to have two sets of pans: one for normal bread, and one for the cinnamon raisin bread I make as a gift at Christmas. The cinnamon is so strong in that bread that I can't use the pans for anything else because no matter how hard I scrub, whatever else I bake in them still tastes faintly of cinnamon.
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