Microwaving down on the farm

Are you ready for another early-days-of-the-microwave cookbook? This one with grandma dressed up in her Sunday best on the cover? Well, you're in luck!

Microwave Magic (edited by Annette Gohlke, 1977) was produced by the staff of Farm Wife News, so you might expect it to be a relatively down-to-earth cookbook. I guess, in some ways, it was. For instance, if you wanted a very quick and easy recipe to make dressing for your fruit salad, well...

Why not just microwave vanilla ice cream and then stir in an equal amount of mayonnaise? (I mean, besides the obvious end point where you end up with a bowl mayonnaise-y melted ice cream or vanilla-ice-creamy mayonnaise, depending on your perspective, with which to wreck a perfectly acceptable fruit salad.)

The book also offers both an easy way to cook cauliflower and TWO ways to dress it up.

Both mayo-based, of course. The curry sauce mixes in a lot of mustard, some curry powder, and a lot of shredded cheddar. The zippy sauce has no discernible reason to be called "zippy," though, as it is basically a half-recipe of the curry sauce with minced onion subbed in for the curry powder and waaay less mustard.

There's also a recipe for homemade noodles-- something I imagine farm wives generally avoided making when it was so much easier to just buy a bag of noodles, though they might make an exception once or twice a year for a special meal or contribution to a fundraiser. In any case, it's not something I'd imagine would involve a microwave in any way.

And I still don't really understand how the microwave is necessary. Can't you just roll the dough thin and cut it? Why microwave between steps? It also took me forever to figure out what the recipe meant by 650° oven, as microwaves do not have temperature controls. I finally realized that this is probably supposed to be the timing for a 650-watt oven! But in any case, you should "Adjust timing to suit your degree of oven." I also LOVE the specification that "Yolks are left from baking an angel food cake." There's the farm wife practicality I was looking for, even if it seems absent elsewhere...

The Brunch Bonbons also offer some egg-related practicality.

These muffin-like morsels are portioned out in candy-size paper liners and then microwave "baked" using a "styrofoam egg carton as a tin." I don't think I've ever heard of this method before, and the thought of putting styrofoam in the microwave makes me nervous, but there's a candy liner between the muffin and the egg carton, so I guess that's okay? When the farm gals are indulging in brunch, I guess it's best to just go with it and not ask too many questions.

Still, plenty of recipes called for a bit more of what my farm-wife grandma would have called "fussing" than she would have been likely to do, like this Vegetable Meat Puff.

Looking at the recipe, I realized the first step (well, after browning bread crumbs in the microwave) is basically making a choux pastry (with the unusual addition of baking powder, maybe because leavening with only steam doesn't work as well in the microwave as in a conventional oven?). Then it's mixed with various bits of meat and veg (maybe leftover), baked in the microwave, and served under a sauce of slightly-thinned canned cheese soup. I have a feeling this recipe is part of the reason why so many Europeans look down on American cooking.... I just have to wonder why go to the trouble of making a choux pastry if you're just going to microwave the thing anyway? It won't brown. I can't imagine it as being any texture other than foam rubber. So much work for a book emphasizing quick and easy!

But then again, the grandma on the cover seems to be showing off a vessel that would barely have fit into most microwaves from the time, anyway. I guess the cover was a warning that the book might be more about attempting to show off in impractical ways than providing quick, easy, practical recipes for the farm wife lucky enough to own a microwave.