A toast (Okay, really just bread, but you can toast it if you want) to December!

December means it's almost time to say goodbye to our seasonal book of 2024: The Political Palate (The Bloodroot Collective (Betsey Beaven, Noel Giordano, Selma Miriam, and Pat Shea), 1980). Most of the month is classified as Late Autumn (which I already covered in November). The Early Winter section begins at winter solstice, but I already covered that in January. The book does offer a bread chapter that's not tied to any specific season, though, and we're now into the time of the year when people might want to turn on their ovens to warm up the house. I think it's time to cover bread!

I will admit a serious fondness for homemade bread, especially the kind with nuts and seeds and various types of grain. The bread chapter has me covered. There's a Four Grain Walnut Bread packed with oats, rye, various wheat products, cornmeal, and, of course, walnuts.

Or there's Oatmeal Sunflower Seed Bread, full of oats plus sunflower and sesame seeds. (I'm not sure why the sunflower seeds get top billing. I hope the sesame seeds aren't pissed off.)

The first rise is for a long time in a cool place, too-- perfect for winter days when you just want to stay inside. I'm half-tempted to try making one when I'm on winter break.

If you want something more celebratory (as long as you don't plan to celebrate a patriarchal holiday), there's also a Cheese Babka. 

This might be a little on the health-foody side of things, with its raisins and dry cottage cheese, but it's still got plenty of butter, eggs, and sugar! It's a nice little celebration to end the year.

And fine, if you need something seasonally-appropriate, here's a quick bread from the Late Autumn section to end our exploration of Bloodroot Collective's dishes: Chenopodium Gems.

I thought chenopods were just plants that pumped out pollen so my pollen tracker would have something to warn me about, but apparently they have edible seeds, too. In true Political Palate fashion, this recipe entreats readers to collect wild ingredients and then warns, "Be sure you know your wild plants before you eat them." That note seems like the appropriate ending for this book. Eat some wild plants! Be sure you know what you're doing, though. We're not going to help much on that front. Good luck!

The new year will bring a new book with some tie to the calendar and/or seasons-- probably one that expects readers to be a little less skilled in identifying what is (and is not) safe to rip out of the ground and stuff into one's mouth.... Until then, happy late autumn/ early winter!

An ocean of bad ideas involving cranberries

When I saw the cover of 101 All-Time Favorite Cranberry Recipes (Ocean Spray, undated, but looks 1970s-ish), I kind of loved the little caricatures. 

I especially like the way the pilgrim men kind of look like they have peg legs. It makes me think of Odie in Garfield's Halloween Adventure. However, seeing the Native Americans also made me nervous. A cook booklet from the 1970s with caricatures of people can be ... uh ... less than sensitive. (And really, any idealized depiction of America's past is sus at best.) But I charged ahead anyway because I was hoping to see some weird cranberry recipes. 

And I was of course immediately greeted by another stereotypical caricature, one of the characters apparently saying "Heap good." Yikes. And while pakimintzen is, so far as I can tell, an actual Lenape word for "cranberry eater" (as the booklet itself states), the way the picture is drawn seems to suggest cannibalism. (The dish on offer should be pakihm-- cranberries! NOT cranberry eaters!) So ... double yikes? At least?

Not content with just being racist against Native Americans, the booklet also offers the cringeworthy Oriental Cranberry Salad.

The salad itself, I'm kind of on the fence about. Cranberry orange relish/ gelatin with crystallized ginger in it sounds pretty amazing, but I can see the water chestnuts either making it (with their crunch) or breaking it (with their sometimes weird, metallic flavor). The picture, though-- NO! Bad Ocean Spray!

Maybe we'd be happier just moving on from the caricatures... Let's check out a few of the more unusual uses of cranberries-- maybe ways they can help replace the typically non-cranberry components of a Thanksgiving dinner. If your family is not the turkey type, you could make Cranburgers the main course.

The cow looks pretty unimpressed by the suggestion to make meatloaf-ish burgers and top them with a "Cranburger Sauce" consisting of canned cranberry sauce blended with A-1, oil, and brown sugar, but dinner guests who are tired of bone-dry turkey breast might be more excited.

If you're tired of pumpkin pie, maybe make some Cranberry Doughnut Puffs for dessert.

They're pretty easy since they use refrigerated biscuit dough as the doughnut, and I could see this being a fun end-of-the-meal project, especially back in the fondue era, with everybody frying their own little puffs in an electric skillet of hot oil in the middle of the table, then rolling their treats in cinnamon sugar. (And then the hosts might be tempted to burn the house down and attempt to get the insurance money after the end of the meal because that could be easier than cleaning up afterward!)

And finally, maybe you're hosting a HUGE gathering and want a beverage to replace the wine. (Maybe because it will be cheaper, and/or maybe because it could help cut down on the number of times family members lose their tempers and fling silverware at each other.) That's when Cranberry Nog comes to the rescue.

Simply mix cranberry juice with water plus apricot nectar or prune juice and MORE THAN TWO DOZEN EGGS! This should be enough to serve at least 100 (or quite possibly more, given that main components are prune juice and raw eggs). 

Still less cringeworthy than some of those caricatures, though, so I guess that's something.... Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate!

Get ready for Brown Friday!

The day after Thanksgiving is known as Black Friday for retail workers, but plumbers have their own term for what is also often their busiest day of the year: Brown Friday. I'm sure you can figure out why.... Larger-than-normal meals... Big gatherings... It can be a lot for the pipes to handle.

In any case, if you're afraid you might miss out on that Brown Friday rush, Sunsweet Recipes (California Prune & Apricot Growers Association, 1950) offers a few Thanksgiving-appropriate recipes to make sure your plumbing gets a good workout.

Of course, people expect some vegetable sides, like sweet potatoes. Instead of the ever-popular sweet potatoes and marshmallows angle, try sweet potatoes and prunes.

But why stick to prunes in just the veggie sides? People expect some roughage in those anyway. The turkey might be a good place to hide additional prunes.

Just stuff it full of Fruited Stuffing-- and the fruit will be Sunsweet prunes, of course!

And then you need some cranberries for a zesty counterpoint to all the rich foods. Why should the cranberry entirely steal the spotlight, though?

Make a Prune Cranberry Conserve instead. I mean, the family should be really tripled up on prunes just to make sure the big meal keeps on moving....

I guess if all else fails, a host desperate to get in on Brown Friday can just try sending a box or two of Sunsweet prunes straight down the garbage disposal to get the kitchen in on the action, but it wouldn't be the same.

In any case, may your Friday after Thanksgiving just be a Friday. Hopefully one when you don't have to work... or make anyone else work overtime....

Recipes that Are Swift and Proudly Bland!

There was a time when "bland" was considered a compliment, as Timely Baking Recipes with Swift's Bland Lard (Martha Logan, undated, but probably the 1940s or '50s) reminds us.

Of course, here the fact that "Bland Lard is odorless and tasteless" is a selling point because people wanted their baked goods to taste like the featured flavor. Nobody wants Brown Sugar Cake or Snowy Cream Frosting or Pecan Waffles to taste like rancid animal fat.

You know I'm not going to show off the yummy-sounding desserts, though. I've got to show you a few of the weirder baked goods.

Some recipes really double down on the bland lard, like Franciscan Meat Pie.

The crust uses the Swift's Bland Lard Biscuit Mix, and the filling fries the onion, ground meat, and catsup in additional Swift's Bland Lard for the hard-core lard-heads.

Some recipes go a little lighter on the lard, like the Frankfurter Toastwiches.

Here, cooks just need a couple tablespoons of lard to fry up what amounts to hot-dog-and-cheese-spread-stuffed French toast.

Some recipes sound like they should be familiar, but "egg roll" apparently meant something different back in Martha Logan's day.

This version is just egg salad rolled jelly-roll style into biscuit dough and baked, then served hot "with cream or mushroom sauce." It's certainly not the Chinese-American appetizer you probably imagined.

For those who want to cook with eggs and lard but don't want to bother with the whole rolling-out-a-jelly-roll thing, there's Egg Quickies.

I'm not quite sure what these conglomerations of onion, bread crumbs, milk, and hard-cooked eggs globbed together, cooled on waxed paper, shaped into patties, and pan fried are supposed to be. Maybe a main dish for Fridays during Lent? Maybe a sign that there's not much left in the kitchen besides onion, bread crumbs, and eggs? Maybe an indication that payday isn't until Friday but the family still expects food today? Maybe just a reminder that life mostly sucks anyway, so here's random things glommed together that you are now expected to eat. Hey, it's fried, so it's not all bad. Quit crying.

Celebrating Fast Food Day in a Jiffy

November 16 is National Fast Food Day, so I have kindly found a vintage "speedy" recipe for your eye-rolling pleasure. Today's gem comes from The Family Home Cookbook (director Melanie de Proft, 1973).

True to form, this old-timey "jiffy" recipe will not seem all that quick to today's cooks. It starts with preparing Italian salad dressing from a mix (rather than just using pre-made), and requires marinating the peas in it for a minimum of an hour. Plus, if you have to chop the onion and crisp and crumble the bacon yourself-- as the original audience for this recipe almost certainly did-- this seems like a lot of work for a quick and easy recipe.

Luckily, if you love salad dressing, canned peas, and raw onion every bit as much as I do, it only takes a moment to glance at the recipe, make a disgusted face, and go on with your day. Not making this at all is the real time-saver.

Upper class twits use cholesterol to horrify a child of the '80s

Are you ready for another Woman's Day Collector's Cook Book? This time, we have Traditional English Foods from February of 1965.

The booklet is peppered with illustrations meant to allow readers to imagine themselves as upper-class British twits, like this cover image of a large dining room full of people being served by a servant in a jacket. The thing that really struck me about the collection, though, was that it was clearly put together before the great fat and cholesterol panic that I grew up during. (Remember cantaloupes being labeled as cholesterol-free? 🙄)

There's potted shrimp, for instance.

If 1980s people weren't already panicking from all the cholesterol in a half-cup of shrimp, the quarter-cup of butter would send them right over the edge.

If that's note quite enough cholesterol, there's also the pie that nestles both bacon and eggs in a double-crust pastry.

The pastry was probably made with suet or lard for good measure!

And speaking of suet, dessert was likely to entail quite a bit of it...

...regardless of whether you were having spotted dog or a roly poly.

And "to clean the palate of the sweet taste" after dessert, the booklet also offers meal-ending savories like this marrow toast, just in case the meal didn't contain quite enough animal fat.

At least there are plenty of calming pictures to look at in case the recipes produce any residual panic from having lived through the low-fat, low-cholesterol era.

Well.... Having to attend a party? With other actual adults? In fancy dress? Maybe not so calming...

Out on a river? With a bottle of wine precariously balanced where it would be easy to knock out of the boat? Which I would then likely tip over as I lunged for the quickly-disappearing wine bottle? Maybe not so calming...

Solitarily watching a cat creep across the rooftops, indifferent to the group of people loitering around their car below? Okay, that's more my speed. Now I'm going to leave 1960s British-American recipes behind and have myself a salad.

Distract yourself with overly-complicated fish recipes!

Want a needlessly-complicated recipe to distract you from the real world while you try to assemble it? Indifferent as to how it will come out, as you've lost your appetite anyway? The Family Home Cookbook (director Melanie de Proft, 1973) has a couple of recommendations.

If simply heating up fish sticks and calling it dinner is not quite sufficient distraction from a crazy week, you can try turning them into an arts and crafts project.

Wrap the breading in more bread! Well, a crust, anyway. Because we all know that making a fussy pie crust and trying to shape it into anything other than "random amoeba that is kind of losing structural integrity" can really focus your attention on the task at hand. 

Add a half-cup of grated Cheddar with the lard or shortening to make it a cheese crust.

And if you do actually manage to turn the crust into a viable shape, your fish sticks could come out looking like lumpy pigs in a blanket or maybe the cookies your weirdest aunt brings for Christmas that get quietly thrown in the trash once the party is over and she declines to take them home, instructing you to "Enjoy."

Alternatively, if you like mindlessly stuffing deviled eggs, but think the steps of boiling the eggs, disassembling the eggs, making the filling, and stuffing the yolk mixture back into the eggs again will be insufficient distraction, try Sardine-Stuffed Eggs. 

They also give you a chance to fiddle around with opening and mashing cans of sardines for the filling. And the excitement doesn't stop there! You also get to cook and drain noodles, mix them with a homemade white sauce, throw the noodle assembly in a casserole dish, top it with the eggs, and bake the whole thing. You can even make toast points for serving. If you're lucky, you might burn the bread and have to make them twice. That's extra pointless work for a dinner that's already starchy! Plus, the casserole will come out looking like phlegm-covered rocks.

Not a bad visual representation of this week. 

Vintage Pork for "Two"

I live in small household, so most of my cooking is for just one or two people. The old cookbooks featuring recipes for families with half-a-dozen kids always leave me glad I'm not hauling gallons of soup on and off the stove (I'd almost certainly burn somebody!) or trying to get a massive Jell-O mold to set up. But once in a while, I'll come across some recipes intended to serve one or two people-- a little peek into what the lives of the freer people might have been like. Such is the case for Pork for Two (National Pork Producers Council, undated, but looks very 1970s).

I mean, it has a harvest gold fondue pot on the cover. I rest my case.

Aside from the recommendation to cut two blade steaks into thin strips, skewer them, and then cook them in a fondue pot full of hot oil, the pamphlet also offers another popular vintage recipe option: going Hawaiian.

I hope the smoke on the pork chops is enough to cut through all the sweetness of pineapple chunks, sweet potatoes, and pineapple preserves. (At least if it's not, you're not stuck with a lot of leftovers to throw away or try to choke down.)

The booklet's titles really try to sell the recipes. For instance, calling anything a "platter" makes it sound bountiful and maybe just a little bit fancy. 

And these ham and potato platters feature a glaze on the ham (which sounds wretched to me, but I know my hatred of sweet-and-sour-type sauces is unnaturally strong) plus a fancy piped border of sour-creamy mashed potatoes. Whatever picture you have in your head, though, I kind of doubt it looks like this picture.

Is it just me, or do those look like flowers some six-year-old drew right before they were referred to the student counselor? Then the counselor kept asking why the "flowers" looked so bloody... and whether the centers were ringed by petals or teeth. (That right there is a good reason to keep cooking ONLY for two. If the couple has the wisdom not to reproduce, there's no chance of getting dragged down to the school to find out what Junior has done this time.)

The book's biggest secret, though, is that it is only half-heartedly committed to the assertion in the title that these recipes are for two. If the ingredients in the Fruit Glazed Butterfly Chops sound like a LOT for only two people, well, look near the end.

Yeah-- this makes six servings. But you can freeze and reheat this! Just like you could with a lot of the recipes that serve six in pretty much any other cookbook. So what is the point of Pork for Two if it's "for two" in the sense that any larger recipe can serve two now... and again tomorrow... and maybe again the next day? It's less "pork for two" and more of an early version of what we'd now call "meal prep."

No worries, though! The picture for the caption promises "You'll never get tired of this pork-dried fruit combo accented with ginger and mustard." If you were hoping for recipes you wouldn't get tired of because they wouldn't leave you with leftovers, well, tough. The book implies you should have had Junior and Susan and Richard and Patty so you could just make and fully consume regular-size recipes. Not having excessive leftovers is a fair trade-off for all the afternoons spent in the student counselor's office. 

Celebrating a non-patriarchal November

The Political Palate (The Bloodroot Collective (Betsey Beaven, Noel Giordano, Selma Miriam, and Pat Shea), 1980) starts with late autumn (October 31-- Witch's New Year-- through winter solstice), but I started posting about this book in January (early winter). That means the recipes I'm posting now are earlier in the book than the ones I started the year with! I'm sure nobody else cares, but I think it's funny.

The book does not have many recipes for holidays, as the Collective believes "that carrying on 'holiday' traditions of a system which is, per se, anti-woman, is concretely harmful to our minds and spirits." Harvest celebrations are fine, though, as long as the harvest is celebrated "without reference to the patriarchal Puritans and their condescension and exploitation of 'Indians.'" The Harvest Vegetable Platter is their way to celebrate. 

The Rutabaga-Potato Puree loaded up with butter and a touch of garlic sounds like something I'd see on a cooking show now (except home cooks would be admonished to use a potato ricer rather than a food processor, lest the puree get gummy).

The Roasted Parsnips and Carrots to go with the puree represent a serious commitment to root vegetables! Plus, the sunflower seeds mixed in suggest an underlying allegiance to old-school health foods. 

If that platter seemed a bit lacking to you, don't worry! There are a couple more pages! I just figured it was easier to break this recipe up. On to page two....

Next, we've got acorn squash (chosen in part because they're "womblike," and that selection criteria for a food is not weird or creepy at all) full of chestnut stuffing. I love that the bread in the stuffing is specified to be homemade. (I will admit that when I was young and idealistic, I made homemade bread several days in advance of a Thanksgiving so I could cube and dry it to use for entirely homemade stuffing. And then I got old and lazy and realized that once you mix in all the seasonings and butter and whatever add-ons you want, nobody can tell the bread is homemade anyway, so why bother? Grocery stores sell bread cubes for a reason.)

There's also an Apple Cranberry Sauce made of -- surprise!-- apples and cranberries, plus a little cider, cinnamon, and honey.

Round things out with steamed broccoli flowerets (because all the root vegetables and squash provide insufficient amounts of vegetable matter) and add a Miso Gravy.

Well, make that Miso Gravy with onion, butter, garlic, mushrooms, seasonings, and beer. Then you're fully ready to "commemorate the fruits of the earth," or at least sate a seasonal urge to cook up a big bunch of food all at once, invite people over so you can engage in arguments that got a lot louder than you might have expected catch up on each others' lives, and hope everybody eats just the right amount of food so you might have a few leftovers but not enough that you will get sick of them....

In focusing on the more traditional holiday, though, I realized that I missed out on posting the recipe for the holiday that starts this book and this season: Witch's New Year (which is technically over now anyway). Witches' Froth (or Apple Cream) is a dessert that recalls the days when people were not worried about salmonella in raw eggs.

Also, a time when apple sauce fluffed up with egg whites and flavored with a touch of honey and rum or applejack could count as a dessert. I personally think the witches are getting short-changed on this one, but eating Reese's Peanut Butter Pumpkins wasn't an option until 1993, and it would have gone against the Collective's anti-capitalist principles anyway.... I guess I wouldn't have made a good witch.

In any case, enjoy the harvest! I will see you in December with some recipes that are definitely not related to "the obscenity of noise and false jollity that is Christmas," as the Collective puts it.