Some Summer Breakfasts

Are you ready for July? The waaay-too-hot month is still just "Early Summer" according to The Political Palate (The Bloodroot Collective (Betsey Beaven, Noel Giordano, Selma Miriam, and Pat Shea), 1980), and I've already given some early summer recipes, so this time I'm shaking things up a little. Beyond the eight seasonal recipe sections, the book also offers a breakfast chapter and a bread chapter. I'll save the breads chapter for a cooler month (when baking might sound more appealing) and focus on breakfasts today.

Most of the breakfast chapter is dedicated to omelets. Here's the basic recipe.

It's interesting that while most cookbooks recommend a splash of milk or cream in the eggs as they're getting mixed, this book recommends a dash of Tabasco and a tablespoon of beer to add "flavor and lightness."

This is a health-food-adjacent book, so I wasn't surprised when an ingredient I've never particularly associated with omelets is claimed as an ingredient in the restaurant's best-selling version.

Of course it has alfalfa sprouts in it. I always thought of them as simply the largely flavorless stringy topping that comes standard on pretty much all health-food-restaurant sandwiches. I guess they got thrown into omelets too.

There's also an old-fashioned sounding "use up the leftovers" omelet that seems like it could come from a thrifty 1940s cookbook.

Honestly, I am a fiend for homemade bread, so an omelet full of homemade bread cubes sounds lovely to me (though I'd go with fresh parsley and/or sage for the herbs).

The book also offers a granola recipe (as was required by law for any health-food-ish cookbook from the era). More interesting is the overly-complicated pancake recipe.

Of course health food aficionados want sourdough (or sour dough) pancakes! Part of the point of quick breads like pancakes is that they're... well... quick! And here is a recipe that requires creating a starter (if you don't already have one) and tending it long-term if you do. It just seems a bit counter-intuitive to me, though I imagine it's a fun way to use the starter if you've got it anyway and need to use some occasionally before it takes over the entire neighborhood.

I, however, will continue to feel just a little bit overly proud of myself whenever I manage to make "homemade" pancakes from a just-add-water mix. That's good for July, in any case, when too much extra effort can lead to a melt-down. We'll check in on Bloodroot again in late summer....

Some strange and savage salads from the seventies

What with the [consider filling in some current events before you publish his one, then reconsider whether you really want to mention any of those things, and finally decide to just leave this note in to let readers feel like they've caught you being lazy and forgetting to finish a post before hitting "publish"] in the news lately, I'm sure we could all use something wonderful. That's why today we're looking at Wonderful Ways to Prepare Salads (Jo Ann Shirley, 1978). (And if you need even more wonderful things in your life, this was a predecessor to her Wonderful Ways to Prepare Crepes & Pancakes.)

What did Jo Ann Shirley consider "wonderful" in salads? She liked spice, as indicated by this Spicy Chicken Salad.

Correction: she thought she liked spice. If you were expecting a green salad topped with chicken fried in a crispy, capsaicin-rich coating, you were definitely on the wrong track. It took me a while to figure out what was even supposed to be spicy in this. I guess this fairly pedestrian chicken salad is supposed to be spicy because there's a little bit of chili sauce in the mayonnaise-and-sour-cream dressing. Woo!

Ms. Shirley also liked random additions to gelatin salads as much as anyone in the 1970s. I wasn't too shocked to see an Avocado Cucumber Mold.

I was a little surprised that it was based on lime gelatin, since most of her savory gelatin molds are based on plain gelatin. I was most surprised that she thought stuffed green olives were a natural pairing with the lime Jell-O.

She liked to have fun with gelatin in more ways than one, though. I can't help but imagine that the Avocado and Strawberry Salad looks like avocadoes got attacked by some knife-wielding maniac, staggered onto a salad plate, and died as their internal organs leaked out.

Okay, maybe that description says more about my imagination that Jo Ann Shirley's. Fair enough.

The author also seems to have been a futurist who foresaw that people in the 2020s might be able to work from home during an emergency. She also knew that employers would try to force workers back into the office once they got the all-clear. She was enough of a forward-thinker to think of ways that employees could fight back. That's why she developed Beany Egg Salad.

If you can imagine what the office would smell like after somebody brought Beany Egg Salad sandwiches for lunch... well, I think it's pretty self-explanatory why there might be second thoughts about bringing everybody back to the office again.

Okay, you knew I wouldn't think the salads themselves were wonderful, but they were a wonderful distraction from, well, [relist stuff from the introduction].

Recipes that were a little Extra

One thing that often strikes me about old cookbooks is that they so often make dishes more complicated than they really need to be. (Yes, I'm thinking of overly elaborate aspics, but there were plenty of other pointless bits of busywork, like having to carefully score hot dogs and place individual cheese strips into the cavities to create chili dogs, rather than, say, just sprinkling some shredded cheese on top.) I think the extra work was meant to demonstrate that the cook loved her family. (And it was primarily intended as a way to convince herself that she loved her family, as I sincerely doubt many husbands and/or children took the time to marvel at the precision cheese placement on the chili dogs. Mom just figured she wouldn't go to all this trouble if she secretly wanted to run away and sip cocktails in a fancy resort in Bermuda, right? Right? Right?)

Anyway, this is the long way of saying that 250 Ways to Prepare Poultry and Game Birds (Ed. Ruth Berolzheimer, 1940) offers plenty of recipes that add more work to a dish without much payoff.

You'd think creamed chicken, for example, might be an easy way to get dinner on the table without too much fussing, right? Wrong. You've got to make the chicken appeal to the kiddies by serving it in a nest.

That means taking the time to make a macaroni ring to serve it in. Plus...

You've got to "Serve full length green beans bound with pimiento to set off your chicken in nest." Just letting people serve themselves green beans out of a common pot or bowl is not nearly enough work.

Of course, this was also the era of the sandwich loaf, one of the pinnacles of pointless work. You know-- remove the crusts from an unsliced loaf of bread, then cut it lengthwise into four layers, fill each layer with a different filling (preferably ones you've had to put together yourself, ahead of time), assemble,  frost with cream cheese, decorate with lawn clippings, chill, and slice into individual servings.

The recipe itself is not so bad. The layers of the sandwich probably seem okay to the types of people who like eating egg and chicken salads. My favorite part of this recipe, though, is the caption for the picture of the finished loaf. The person who wrote it was either so brainwashed by the cult of kitchen busywork that they meant this sincerely OR figured that the booklet's editors were so sarcasm-illiterate that they wouldn't know the caption was meant to be read ironically.

Yeah, sure "this luscious sandwich loaf" will "serve the gang with the least fuss." It's so much easier than, say, just putting some bread or rolls and sandwich fixings on the table and telling the gang to make whatever they like.

Just in case this post simply wouldn't seem complete without a complicated aspic recipe, I'll end with Goose Livers in Jelly.

Notice that this recipe does NOT begin with gelatin! This one is old school and starts with cleaning, scalding, stripping, and boiling 4 pairs of goose feet. (I imagine this method does taste better than ground liver and onions floating in lemon Jell-O, so the extra work here is probably more justified than for the other recipes, should you be the type of person who thinks eating goose liver jelly is worthwhile.) And you can serve the jelly in peeled tomatoes if you want the appetizer course to look like a clutch of gooey alien eggs.

I've got to appreciate a dish with a sci-fi horror angle.

And in the end, you know I secretly love all the extra work these recipes call for. Maybe the people the extra work was meant to impress never noticed it, but some weirdo 80+ years in the future wrote several hundred words about it. That's got to be worth something....

Prunes will make your blouse's shoulders extra pointy... among other things...

My first thought upon seeing Sunsweet Recipes (California Prune & Apricot Growers Association, 1950) was "Mondays and Thursdays."

I know that response means nothing to anyone else, so I suppose I should elaborate. My first real job was as a cook for a nursing home. On Monday and Thursday mornings, we served stewed prunes as part of breakfast. Nobody generally wanted to go on lunch breaks with the nurses' aides because their goal in life was to tell about the grossest things they'd had to deal with so they would ruin everybody else's appetite. Mondays and Thursdays were of course their real days to shine. (Granted, I was pretty much immune to their talk because both sets of grandmas firmly believed that the absolute best topic for dinner discussion was describing in as much detail as humanly possible any medical procedures they and/ or their friends and acquaintances had recently undergone. I just tried to avoid the nurses' aides because I try to avoid most people in general.)

So... I guess my point is that prunes only make me think of the nursing home being even shittier than usual. While Sunsweet did want readers to know that "Prunes are universally recognized as an excellent regulatory food and one of the best of nature's mild, natural laxatives," they bury that information in the back of the book and spend a lot of the time trying to convince readers that prunes are more of a party food.

I somehow can't imagine that Sunsweet Prune Birthday Cake (complete with pitted prune candle holders) was a top choice for birthday celebrations. (Have to admit that I'm really digging the illustration of the woman with the incredibly spiky-shouldered top icing her cake, though.)

And if the Sunsweet Birthday Cake is insufficiently pruny, it could always be augmented with Sunsweet Cake Filling.

This one is mixed by a woman with very angular boobs, which she seems just a little bit smug about.

The book is mostly desserts, but it offers a few main courses, like Sunsweet Pork Chop Skillet.

You know the thought of pork chops with catsup, lemon, onion, Worcestershire, prunes, cloves, sweet potatoes, and brown sugar does not thrill me (given my aversions to sweet plus meat and most condiments), but I know your mileage may vary. I mostly picked this recipe because I love the pig salt and pepper shakers in the accompanying picture.

Look at their plump little faces and blinking eyes! Look at those little neckerchiefs! (And maybe avert your eyes from the pile of grayish masses that are apparently the be-pruned chops.)

The most important question about this booklet, though, is "Does it have gelatin salads?" And my answer is, "Does a bear shit on the Pope?" (Yes, if a bear has had sufficient amounts of prunes, it can shit on anybody.)

There's a salad that combines two common mid-century cooking moves: stuffing foods into other foods and carefully arranging foods in the bottom of a mold so they can be covered with a layer of gelatin.

Stuff prunes with cottage cheese and then cover with lemon/ apricot gelatin for a treat that screams 1950! (And make sure to serve it on lettuce so everybody knows it's a salad and not dessert.)

And there is also, of a course, a WTF salad full of... well... anything that was on hand.

Apricots! Mustard! Vinegar! Paprika! Sugar! Evaporated milk! Celery! Guaranteed to be so impressive it will emit shiny lines in all directions and make the proud cook's shoulders extra pointy!

Maybe she will think back to those glorious pointy-shoulder days 40-some years later when the nurses' aides are getting ready to make her the star of their Thursday lunchtime stories.... Everything in her life is thanks to Sunsweet.

Those classy Fredericans can tell you what you like (and that definitely includes plenty of meat)

When I introduced Frederica Fare (Parents Association of Frederica Academy, St. Simons Island, Georgia, 1977), I never even got to the recipes because I was off on a tangent about the way the book's historical sketches went out of their way to reframe the Civil War and sanitize the treatment of enslaved people. It's important to look at cookbooks as historical documents and think about their agendas, but it's way more fun to look at weird old recipes. Today is the fun part.

One thing I learned about Frederica is that while the residents believe in hospitality, they have a strange sense of it.

Funny how the Gourmet Pumpkin Pie "is good, especially for people who don't like pumpkin pie." If I were making dessert for people who I knew didn't like pumpkin pie, I would imagine the best course of action would be to make some other type of dessert rather than telling them they would like pumpkin pie, goddammit, because this version is gourmet.

I also learned that the people of Frederica have a very specific definition of "classy."

It means "with a small jar of Cheese Whiz and a can of mushroom soup." Classy!

I also learned that Fredericans like sandwich "frosting" so much that they do not reserve this technique for large, layered sandwich loaves to be sliced and served cold at parties.

In fact, they will make individual crustless tuna salad sandwiches, frost them with "Sharp Cheddar Cold Pack Cheese Food" mixed with margarine and eggs, chill the layers overnight, and then bake them before serving! (And everybody wants a nice, hot sandwich in a nice, hot climate...)

My main takeaway, though, was that Fredericans like MEAT. Meat is just assumed to be part of veggie dishes, like Buttered Squash.

No need to mention that the dish also has bacon. (Perhaps, though, the reluctance to mention the bacon comes from the fact that it is boiled, which does not seem like the ideal prep method....)

Fredericans like meat enough that even recipes that sound like they might be light-- such as, say, chicken breasts-- are actually meat fests.

The chicken breasts are wrapped in bacon before being baked on a bed of dried beef-- meaning this is a chicken, beef, and pork dish! And if the meat is insufficient, the cream of mushroom soup can be swapped out for cream of chicken.

Most startling of all, at least for me, was the recipe for Italian Spaghetti.

There is no mention of spaghetti beyond the recipe's title and headnote (which claims that this recipe for the "Best spaghetti ever!" came "from an Italian woman in Illinois"). The recipe is actually for a seasoned chuck roast served with... meatballs? I guess that this entire meal is supposed to be served with a side of spaghetti, but I still can't figure out why one would make both a roast and meatballs or what the logistics of serving this combination might be. Maybe the roast is for the grownups and the meatballs are for the kids? (I'd speculate that maybe the roast is for diners who don't like ground meat and the meatballs are for people who prefer softer textures, but I already know that Fredericans' answer to "I don't like ground beef" would be "But you do like it the way I fix it, so just shut up and eat it.")

In any case, I am grateful that the recipes in this book are far more entertaining than the historical sketches! 

The National Dairy Council thinks you better butter up your man!

To Your Taste... Butter (National Dairy Council, 1954) is only barely a cook booklet.

It's more of a reminder that  pretty much anything tastes better if you cook it in butter and/or put butter in and/or on it. The booklet also encourages cooks to put butter in pasta water (to prevent sticking), invest in a butter warmer so everyone at the table has access to melted butter, and keep the cool butter in an immaculately clean butter dish.

I was most interested in the book's investment in gender dynamics. Clearly, the book saw marriage as women's most important goal in life, and insinuated that butter was the real secret to a happy marriage.

That's why it's "dedicated to BRIDES," "those who have been brides," and "those who hope to be brides." (It's nice that "all others who aspire always... to serve food of good taste" are added in fine print at the bottom of the page.)

The booklet is mostly for the wives, though, as their goal is to make home "the place to which a man wants to return at night... for the sustenance of love... and food."

And of course, "whatever meal you are preparing, your food tastes its best with butter." One might imagine the leading cause of what would then be called "broken homes" was failure to provide sufficient butter with every meal. 

The pressure to please one's man is relentless. If the cook (wife) is getting exasperated, the booklet comes to his defense.

"No, HE's not being fussy-- really he's an easy man to please." He just needs butter on absolutely everything. And if you fail to keep a sufficient supply of butter, well, he might just have dinner at a friend's house and notice that "Jim's bride" served lemon butter on the waffles. Of course, that can only mean that he will "steal" "Jim's bride" if you don't learn the lemon butter recipe right away.... 

Here it is, though I think someone with such a fickle partner would be better off without him.

That's easier to say now that women can get credit in their own name, though....

And just in case the man wants to have fun being the host at a barbecue, there's a barbecue sauce to prepare "that will make your husband proud."

If he's chasing a live pig with a meat cleaver once the barbecue sauce is made and the grill is set up, though, I have a feeling the cookout will end in embarrassment at best and horror at worst. The barbecue sauce will not be the memorable element (if it gets used at all).

Maybe it would be better to just give up on butter for now and hope he runs off with Jim's nameless bride.... Let him run through somebody else's backyard with a meat cleaver. Sit on the patio and drink your Manhattan in peace while he pursues his butter elsewhere.

A rainbow-ish kaleidoscope for Pride Month!

When I read through the New Many Feature Cook Book (Aluminum Goods Mfg. Co., 1939), I immediately thought of my annual Pride month post with a rainbow of gelatins. This book has a LOT of gelatin-based salads! I mean, a LOT. The problem is, though, that they tend to be of very mixed-up and  indeterminate colors-- not so much a rainbow as... Let's be generous and call it a kaleidoscope. But hey, a kaleidoscope might be a pretty good image for Pride Month too, as it still has a rainbow of colors. Their order is just more random--and as more and more queer identities are being celebrated, more people realize there are little pops of queerness everywhere. So here are some colorful gelatin salads that might not quite fit the rainbow stripe pattern, but I hope you'll go with me on this one anyway!

For an example of the myriad of colors in one recipe, Ham Stuffed Tomatoes uses lemon (yellow!) gelatin and not only mixes it up with pink ham and green olives, but then...

...hides it inside (presumably red) tomatoes or green peppers.

You might expect the Pineapple Salad to be yellow.

Even if it didn't call for green food coloring, though, the shredded olives and pickles would still make it rather green.

The recipes often feature plain gelatin, so that can make the color a bit indeterminate. Jellied Asparagus Salad, is more likely to just be kind of whitish with olive green bits than fully green.

So.... Camo kaleidoscope? 

Then there's a pink-yellow-red-green combo in the Tuna Fish (pink!) and Cucumber (green!) Jelly...

...with more pineapple (yellow!) because it was apparently required for at least half of all vintage gelatin salads, plus pops of red pimiento.

The Salmon-Pineapple-Green Pepper Ring mostly follows the same color scheme. 

It just jettisons the red.

The Spaghetti Salad sticks with the red/ yellow/ green scheme.

The cream cheese cubes and pasta might hide the red of the pepper and apple, the yellow of the egg yolks, and the green of the celery and dill pickles, but they will show up in little pops, like beads in a kaleidoscope or Enbies in a world of pink and blue. 

And something that we might expect to be yellow-ish, like a Ginger Ale Salad with pineapple...

Well, it might be yellow if the Royal Ann cherries are at the yellower end of the spectrum, and if the apples are Golden Delicious, and if the celery is from the heart, but it is more likely to be yellowish (from the ginger ale gelatin) but loaded with Christmassy red and green. (So... I know everyone will hate me for this one, and the range of reasons could be quite wide, but... Piss Christmas?)

And on that note, I am OUT! (Well, I mean, the person who plays Poppy has been out for years, but I just mean the post is over.) Happy Pride Month!

Some very dark sketches of Frederica

Frederica Fare (Parents Association of Frederica Academy, St. Simons Island, Georgia, 1977) boasts right on the cover that this is a collection of both recipes and "historical sketches."

If you're not sure what historical sketches might mean, they're not sketches from townsfolk who lived 100 years ago or anything like that. The crumbling building in the cover photo is a hint: they're sketches of historical buildings. And I have to admit that I got so distracted by the agenda of those historical sketches that I decided to focus on them first. I'll post some recipes from this book later, but today, we're looking at the buildings sketched by L. Josey and the accompanying captions to describe them. 

The first sketch in the book-- before the beverages chapter-- shows a lighthouse with the keeper's cottage. It looks nice and remote, the kind of place where a misanthrope might be able to hole up and not be bugged by the neighbors. (Not that I would know anything about misanthropy....)

It seemed pretty nice. And then I read the accompanying caption and realized what kind of book this is.

It notes that this lighthouse was built in 1872 to replace the original 1810 version that was "torn down by the residents of St. Simons when they abandoned the island during the War between the States." Yep-- this seemingly innocuous community cookbook is also an effort to reframe the Civil War to put the South in a better light.

There's also a sketch of a church.

Bet you can't guess its backstory!

Or maybe you can. "The present church was built in 1884 ... to replace the church which had been destroyed by Federal forces during their occupation of St. Simons in the War Between the States."

Aside from pointing out how St. Simons had to replace buildings destroyed during the Civil War, the book also puts a lot of emphasis on what it refers to as a "slave hospital," as if to suggest that the enslaved people couldn't possibly have had it all that bad since there was an actual hospital dedicated to their care. The ruins on the cover are actually of this building, but there is a full sketch inside.

And the description tries to make it sound quite impressive. 

"There were two nurses on duty at all times and a doctor was brought in when needed. According to plantation records, approximately one thousand dollars a year was spent on medicine...." I am sure the people who were held captive, forced to work without pay, and otherwise treated as if they were not, in fact, human beings were extremely impressed. (And I would not be at all surprised if they were in fact subjected to some horrific experiments without their consent.)

And did you catch the line about the ruins being part of "the Sea Island Golf Club"? In case you wondered how that turned out, there is a sketch.

And a description.

In short, the Sea Island Golf Club is a place where rich people can play golf and also view ruins of a place of human suffering and imagine this was a sign of how much the enslavers cared. (Yep-- still around! The promotional materials say it was "completely redesigned... in 2019," so maybe there is some slight recognition of the unseemliness, but not enough to, you know, do something more respectful than turning the site into a golf course.) 

Ugh. Okay, just so this post does not completely ruin everyone's day, I also found one sketch that occasioned some hopeful speculation: The Mahoney-McGarvey House.

It looks pretty. It wasn't built until 1891, so there's no Civil War history to discuss. And the caption makes me wonder if there's a hidden love story.

How many people leave a mansion that was in their family for more than half a century to a "close friend"? I suspect that this might be code for a lesbian couple that figured out how to care for each other in an era when such relationships were afforded no legal recognition.

Granted, I could be wrong. A preliminary Google search just found information about the architecture, not about the relationship between Mahoney and McGarvey. I imagine I could find out more if I went on a deeper dive, but after contemplating all the dark history treated so dismissively, I just want something at least a little nice to end on. So Mahoney and McGarvey were in love. Mahoney figured out how to make sure McGarvey was still cared for, even after her death. And if that's not the story, I don't want to know! Just give me a sweet story for Pride Month! Okay, I promise that next time I mention this book, I'll look at actual recipes. The historical sketches were just too egregious to gloss over....