Campbell's is fanciness in a can!

Today's cookbook, Campbell's Great Restaurants Cookbook, U.S.A. (ed. Doris Townsend, 1969), makes quite a promise.

It states that the recipes in the book "are adaptations of the spécialités de la maison of restaurants famous for their food, their service, their ambience. These are the truly great, the honored, the sought-out restaurants in all parts of the country." Given that Campbell's is the creator, I'll bet you can guess what shortcut they promise will make home cooks prepare "dishes that will earn you a reputation as a fabulous cook" who can create restaurant-style meals. And even if you can't guess, I'll bet you can figure it out pretty quickly.

Let's start out slowly, with an easy mock Hollandaise. Worried that the mixture of egg yolk, melted butter and lemon juice won't emulsify properly?

Longfellow's Wayside Inn suggested that cream of celery soup with lemon juice and mayonnaise would be close enough.

If you prefer something from the southwest, you might go to Santa Fe's La Fonda recipes. If you're up for some chili, here is the secret:

Fortify a couple of cans of condensed chili beef soup with some extra ground meat, seasonings, and condensed beef broth! Easy! (Never mind that this sounds like a recipe a church cookbook might recommend as a use for ground chuck. This is "superb cuisine," according to the blurb describing the restaurant's offerings.)

Or if you prefer recipes with portmanteau titles, La Fonda also offers Harvey's Tomatonion Soup:

This one also involves three cans of condensed soup, but they're onion, bisque of tomato, and chicken broth this time.

If you really want to sound both kind of fancy and kind of scary, Jackson Lake Lodge suggests Calves' Brains Beaumont, Argentenile.

This one does sound genuinely fancy, in part because it only calls for one can of condensed soup (cream of asparagus) and in part because it uses white wine and purée de foie gras truffe.

And if you want something absolutely at the other end of the fanciness spectrum, here's probably my favorite offering in this book: Cocktail Canapés!

Mix a can of condensed cream of celery soup with a package of cream cheese and some ground up pepperoni. Slather on party rye and broil until bubbly. This definitely seems straight out of a church fundraiser cookbook, as something to slap together for unexpected guests. And this recipe, perhaps not entirely surprisingly, comes from the only restaurant I've featured today that is no longer in business: Marzetti Restaurant. 

In short, the book's message is that all you need to do to be a fancy chef is to use a lot of condensed canned soups and broths. I guess Campbell's figured they had already cornered the church fundraiser cookbooks, so maybe they would aim for a more "highbrow" audience... perhaps without entirely alienating the church fundraiser cookbook crowd either.