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.
I'll have the bacon, hold the relish. I know that it's fast because you get to use canned peas instead of having to shell and cook them yourself. Such convenience to have someone else render the peas inedible before you ever get them.
ReplyDeleteThere's just something about the smell of canned peas that really gets me. There's also the terrible way that they look. For some reason the whole peas in baby food jars really icked me out when I worked night stock for the grocery store. It's even worse when you can see how sad they look through the container. As an added bonus they probably cost 6x more than a can of peas because they were put in packaging aimed at feeding small humans with just a couple of teeth.
I love the line "Such convenience to have someone else render the peas inedible before you ever get them." My thoughts exactly. I love peas-- especially fresh sugar snap peas (Well, the ones that aren't all stringy or that are sold as sugar snap but then have pods as hard as wood chips)-- so much, but just the smell of canned peas makes me gag.
DeleteFunny how canning can make such a difference (and that my tastes are exactly opposite in tomatoes. Fresh ones-- NO THANKS! But I throw canned tomato products into just about everything savory.)