How men from 1970s Louisiana cooked

I was excited to see that River Road Recipes II: A Second Helping (The Junior League of Baton Rouge, Louisiana; January 1977 fourth printing) had a "How Men Cook" chapter. I am never sure what to make of such chapters on the semi-rare occasions when I see them. It's nice that men actually contributed recipes too, but also telling that they got their very own chapter, as if they were such a novelty that they needed to be celebrated for doing something women did all the time with little fanfare. 

Such chapters often mostly consist of recipes for grilled meat and mixed drinks, but this one had more of a focus on game recipes, I guess since there are so many animals Louisianans caught for food. I was impressed that the Cooking Game with a Brown Gravy recipe seemed to rely on cooks already being familiar enough with cooking to be able to make choices intuitively.

The recipe can be used for "anything young and tender" including "dove, quail, duck, rabbit or squirrel," and its recommendations for proportions mean the quantities can be varied to suit meals for as few as four people or as many as 50. There's even recommendations to add mushrooms, bay leaves, and garlic to make the gravy taste better, along with a dig at cooks who "add prepared gravy mixes" as "this only proves that they don't know how to cook." The attitude here seems to be that everybody-- including men-- should be comfortable cooking.

There are also more structured recipes, such as a Wild Game Jambalaya to incorporate any squirrels, rabbit, ducks, and deer a hunter might catch.

Plus there's some hot link sausage, in case the wild game doesn't add quite enough protein. 

This chapter showed me that gelatin dishes, though often associated with women for their supposed "daintiness," were seen as something men might make, too.

To be manly, the gelatin (thankfully plain!) just has to be loaded up with crawfish, along with the usual assortment of condiments, vegetables, and boiled eggs.

The chapter also offers a loaf-- another type of recipe that typically seems more associated with women than with men. Dr. Leveque's Catfish Loaf is probably meant for the fishers in the audience.

I thought this was going to be like salmon loaf: fish bound with eggs and a carb and baked into a loaf. I was totally wrong: this is a fish filling in a hollowed-out loaf of bread (the way muffuletta sometimes is) for a big, hot sandwich. I guess this fits my expectation for typical "men's cooking" in that it's fun-- a party-worthy recipe rather than the more practical "Let's rely on the pantry and/ or leftovers" approach that women typically had to take when they had to feed families every single day.

The men's cooking section had some other unexpected twists that I wouldn't have guessed based on the title, such as this Cappuccino recipe.

When I looked at this, I thought, "What?" And I'm not even a coffee drinker. I didn't actually know exactly what a cappuccino usually entails, but I was pretty sure it was not coffee flavored with hot cocoa mix and cognac. So I looked it up, and the description of a shot of espresso with frothed milk does not really seem to fit. This recipe just starts with regular coffee, and maybe the whipped cream on top could count as frothed milk, but that's probably pushing it. But hey, Louisiana cuisine was shaped by people from all kinds of backgrounds-- so maybe this version is based on an earlier idea of cappuccino, a melding of coffee drinks from different regions that happened to get attached to the name "cappuccino," or a more fun interpretation of the concept?

 In any case, I'm glad the men of Baton Rouge seemed to be having some fun in the kitchen and that they expected other men to be able to cook, too. They could even dip into things that were a little more feminine-coded like aspics and drinks topped with fluffy whipped cream! Like the cappuccino, it's not quite what I expected....