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....