A non-debatable non-sandwich

What constitutes a sandwich is a hot topic of debate on some corners of the internet. Whether hot dogs are sandwiches is probably the most popular debate, and there have been recent legal rulings over whether things like burritos or tacos qualify as sandwiches. My search revealed that people also ask whether pizza, Pop Tarts, calzones, bagels with cream cheese, corndogs, or Oreos count as sandwiches often enough for Google to recommend the questions. Wherever you may stand on any of those debates, though, I hope we can all agree on the status of this Mexican Sandwich recipe from River Road Recipes II: A Second Helping (The Junior League of Baton Rouge, Louisiana; January 1977 fourth printing).

Tortas, pepitos, and cemitas are Mexican sandwiches. This "Mexican Sandwich" might be considered a Mexican bowl if you focus on the rice or a taco salad if you focus on the corn chips, lettuce, and fresh tomatoes, but this is by no stretch of the imagination a sandwich. The claims people could get away with in 1977, before people on the internet could argue with them!

Fabulous foods and (maybe, if you're lucky) how to cook them

I'm not sure of the age of Louisiana's Fabulous Foods and How to Cook Them (Lady Helen Henriques Hardy and Raymond J. Martinez). It's undated, but NOLA.com says the book was originally released in 1960 and "recently" re-released in paperback (2014, according to Amazon). The book's condition suggests it's from a newer printing, but at least the recipes should still be vintage!

I wasn't quite sure what to anticipate when I picked this up. The book is divided into various sections that don't correspond to the typical cookbook divisions like type of recipe (breads, meats, etc.) or types of preparation. The first section is nearly 15 pages devoted to explaining the nutritional value of Louisiana sugar cane molasses and providing recipes to encourage readers to use as much molasses as possible. (I kind of wondered if the book was sponsored in part by "big molasses.") The recipes for cookies and cakes and gingerbread were to be expected, but there's also a section for molasses-containing drinks. I guess molasses makes sense as a liquid sweetener, but it just seems so thick and sticky that I can't imagine it being refreshing. Still, the book assures readers that molasses can be "A grand 'cooler-offer' for torrid days" when mixed with citrus rind and juice, additional sugar, cloves, mint, and water.

Or, in the unlikely event that you're cold in Louisiana, a Molasses Toddy is "A fine chill-chaser on frosty days!"

And for those special occasions, you can break out the Molasses Egg Nog.

I'm kind of surprised that this doesn't call for any alcoholic ingredients, but maybe that would make the claim to being "Rich in nourishment" a bit harder to believe.

After the molasses chapter, there's a brief section on the wonders of American rice, followed by "Selected Recipes Tried Many Times and Found Delicious," such as this Crab Meat Mousse.

This recipe reinforces the point made repeatedly by Campbell's Great Restaurants Cookbook, USA that canned soup was considered a great starting point for a "fancy" dish. Mix it with enough cream cheese, veggies, mayo, seafood, seasonings, and gelatin, and you've got yourself a party.

And then there are recipes that come from Louisiana restaurants. The dividing lines in this section aren't very clear, so I think the Chaurice is supposed to be from Maylie's, but I could be wrong.  

In any case, if you wanted to try to make a Louisiana specialty using actual Creole sausage (rather than store-bought smoked sausage, hot links, or other things that some Louisiana cooks would surely consider abominations), this is an option! 

Not all the recipes in this section are quite so eager to give up their secrets. I was especially amused by the "recipe" for Mme. Esparbe's Broiled Beefsteak or Filet Mignon aux Cepes. 

There's no real recipe (or even instructions) here! Just an explanation that cepes are a large, flat mushroom that "can be still found in the piney woods of St. Tammany Parish," though you can also find expensive imported canned versions. We also find out that Mme. "always insisted on having her steaks of the best quality" (Quelle surprise!). The "recipe" ends with an assertion that steak is better broiled over coals and that Mme. Esparbe's Charter Oak stove was used for broiling nearly every day. This looks more like someone took a moment to brag about their superior eating habits than like they intended to provide a recipe...

The book ends with brief sections on honey and sweet potatoes, including this recipe for Sweet Potato Waffles.

It doesn't look bad, exactly, but a pint of milk and an egg seems like a LOT of liquid for a recipe with a quarter cup of flour and two rounded tablespoons of masked sweet potatoes. I imagine it would come out more like a custard than a waffle and be virtually impossible to remove from the waffle iron. (Plus, no spices at all? I'd think at least a little cinnamon would be in order...)

The book ends with an illustration of a Creole family at the French opera.

I love the very specific caption and the refusal to provide any sense at all of why this is there. I guess maybe to lament the passing of the days when Mme. Esparbe could regale everyone with descriptions of mushrooms and fine cuts of meat, and then they could all go to the opera to stare blankly into the distance.

Microwave recipes that would confuse and anger nonna

When I initially wrote about Microwave Magic (produced by the staff of Farm Wife News, edited by Annette Gohlke, 1977), I just looked at the general impracticality of some of the offerings. As I read, though, I realized that one category of odd and impractical microwave recipes seemed especially appealing to the farm wives: Italian. So today, we're going to check out some of the microwave Italian specialties. 

Some recipes seemed fine, but pointless to make in the microwave. The Italian Spaghetti Sauce, for instance, doesn't seem to offer any real advantages when it's microwaved instead of cooked on the stovetop. 

This sauce still has to be cooked for nearly 40 minutes, so it's not like it's super speedy. The lack of browning on the hamburger along with the fact that the sauce won't reduce much since it's trapped in a steamy box rather than evaporating on the stovetop means this is unlikely to get a deeper flavor in those 40 minutes. And, while the sauce is splattering the microwave with bits of tomato that will be a real pain in the ass to scrub out later, the cook has to make spaghetti on the conventional stovetop anyway. Unless the kitchen has only a single-burner hot plate, there doesn't seem to be much point to making the sauce in the microwave.

The book also offers some lasagnas. While I have no objections to microwaved pre-made lasagna (and remember buying myself a microwave lasagna as a quick and affordable birthday celebration for one when I was in grad school), I'm not so sure about making a homemade lasagna in the microwave. It seems like the kind of thing that takes enough work, you might as well make it the conventional way so it's more likely to taste good.

Seeing the recipe doesn't change my mind. You can cook the noodles and the filling at the same time on the stovetop, rather than microwaving the noodles for 15 minutes followed by microwaving the meat. I'll admit, the cooking time for the full casserole-- 10 minutes!-- is reduced compared to traditional lasagna, but there's no crusty brown cheese on the top, either. (And I live for cheese that is so brown it's about two seconds shy of burned.)

But wait! There's more! There's also a Poor Man's Lasagna. This amuses me endlessly because 1. In 1977, if you had a microwave, you weren't poor, and 

2. I'm not sure what's supposed to make this version cheaper. The ingredients are pretty similar to the ones in the other lasagna. This uses elbow macaroni instead of lasagna noodles, but that's not going to be any significant savings. I guess the savings are in the use of cheddar cheese instead of a mix of cheeses like the cottage, mozzarella, and Parmesan in the other recipe. Whether the difference is substantial enough to make a real difference in the overall grocery budget is a personal call.

Want some puzzling pizzas? No worries! I found a couple of those. When I looked at Topsy Turvy Pizza, I initially thought it was going to be one of the old recipes that used ground beef mixed with a tomato product as the "crust" and topped it with typical pizza toppings.

Then I saw that this included biscuit mix. So what's going on? Well-- it starts out with a microwaved meat-veggie mix, adds soup, then spreads it on a big round of prepared biscuit mix-- to be further microwaved, before being topped with a tiny bit of American cheese (half a slice per serving!) that's microwaved just enough to melt before serving. It sounds much more like a casserole than a pizza.

And speaking of casseroles that masquerade as pizzas (or at least as something pizza adjacent), the opposite page from Topsy Turvy Pizza suggests French Bread Italian.

It's kind of like someone saw Stauffer's French bread pizzas in the frozen aisle and said, "I wonder what those would be like if they were a lot wetter." Then they went home and microwaved French bread in a cheesy custard under a bunch of sausage, Ragu, and mozzarella.

Finally, if you're worried that all these Italian-ish delights might be served without breadsticks, worry not! There's a way to turn those crispy little premade breadsticks (grissini?) into a microwave treat.

Just wrap bacon around them, "'barber pole' fashion," and microwave until the sticks are soft and the bacon is cooked. They'll crisp up again as they cool, and then you'll have an "Italian" feast fit for a '70s family who wants to get some use out of the microwave.

Rudy the Rutabaga's Ridiculous Repasts

Are you ready for a weird but VERY enthusiastic food mascot? Meet Rudy.

Yes, Rudy is apparently the very enthusiastic spokesrutabaga for the Ontario Rutabaga Producers Marketing Board's Rudy's Rutabaga Recipe Register (undated, but mentioned in a newspaper from January 7, 1981, so likely from 1980 or earlier. It looks like that page has a rant about the worst recipes from 1980 that is right up my alley, but alas, I am too cheap to sign up for Newspapers.com to read the whole thing, so I just got the gist of it from the garbled extract available for free). I love Rudy's huge smile, the fact that it looks like he's doing a little dance, and the way his arms seem to be coming out from where his ears should be.

He is so excited because rutabagas can be thrown into a lot of things. Like Waldorf Salad? (I'm not sure why you would, but Waldorf Salad appears in enough places that a lot of people must have loved it, once upon a time, including the grandma who was always trying to force me to eat things I hated.)

Throw some rutabagas into it to replace the more-typical celery. Hell, replace the fresh grapes with raisins and the walnuts with peanuts too. That way, people will be even more confused when you call it a Waldorf Salad. And Rudy will dance with glee at their confusion.

Need a side dish? Rudy recommends scalloping those rutabagas.

Throw in some apples and brown sugar, and this is a dish that seems dessert-y, can still be eaten at the main meal (leaving room for actual dessert), and doesn't contain Jell-O!

But if you want to go savory, you can use rutabaga as a savory stuffing.

There's nothing quite like a turkey packed full of sausage, bread, onions, and rutabaga.

There's also a Rutabaga Puff, which looks like a very-slightly-sweet vegetable custard.

But rutabaga is not just for salads, stuffings, and dessert-adjacent side dishes! It can be straight-up dessert too. Since previously-listed recipes featured cinnamon, mace, and ginger, it should be no surprise that there's a recipe for Ontario Rutabaga Spice Cake.

I kind of want to see tomato soup thrown into this one too, just so it can be a veggie-based spice cake mashup.

But if announcing to the world that there are rutabagas in the dessert just doesn't seem like a great idea, Rudy gives his blessing to Golden Cheesecake as well.

It's a pie that is certain to inspire diners to ask, "What's wrong with the cream cheese?"

And Rudy will pop out of nowhere to laugh and do his little rutabaga dance. And everybody will realize that he's not wearing pants. He never wears anything. The cream cheese is the least of their worries....