Gettin' Festive with Betty

The cover of Betty Crocker's Festive Fixin's with a Foreign Flare (General Mills, 1964) pretty accurately sums up its contents. 

It's full of sweet baked goods-- great for holiday sharing, but less so for a blog that focuses primarily on the more horrifying aspects of vintage recipes. (About the meanest thing I can say about the cover is that the bûche de Noël looks like a loaf of sandwich bread with a BIG outie belly button and the start of a mold problem.) But you just know I can persevere and find at least a few weird odds and ends in such a booklet.

The most cynical aspect of the booklet is that it's partially intended to help sell Saran Wrap, so it includes a couple of decorating ideas that will incidentally require anyone who follows them to waste yards and yards of Saran Wrap to make pointless decorations like imitation bunches of grapes out of hard candies.

Yes, why put out actual grapes (or even cheap and no-effort bunches of plastic grapes) when you can waste a couple hours of your time Saran Wrapping hard candies to thin wire, briefly boiling them (so the wrap will be good and tight), using florist tape to wrap them all together, and adding artificial grape leaves? It's not like you've got anything else going on in December.

Alternatively, if bright green wreaths with red decorations are a little too cheery, you can waste your time turning nuts still in their shells into a big brown wreath using similar methods.

I'm sure the squirrels would agree with the observation that "a nut wreath also makes an attractive outdoor decoration." (I really don't see a flimsy layer of plastic as being too much of a deterrent.)

If you want actual recipes, though, there's an interesting one for gnocchi. I used to think that gnocchi was always made from potatoes, but I've watched enough Food Network by now to know that while choux gnocchi might not be the first kind to come to mind, it's also not that uncommon. Putting it inside a tart shell, though?

Can't say as I was expecting to see gnocchi in a pastry and covered in a cream sauce and cheese! The pastry seems wholly superfluous, but as a carb lover, I could see this as a pretty fun treat.

Most of the recipes are for European baked goods, but America does make a brief appearance near the end of the pamphlet.

We are a nation of snackers lorded over by overdressed creepy dolls, apparently. And General Mills thinks your snacks should be Cheerios-based, obviously. If you're more the traditional "Chex mix" type of person, then Festive Mixin's will turn Cheerios and Kix into an approximate equivalent.

Or, if you want a peek back into the time before Cheerios was trying to equate itself with heart health, there's Crispy Mixin's, loaded up with bacon and Cheddar.

I can't imagine trying to eat this-- sounds like it would be a big, gloppy, greasy mess-- but maybe 4 cups of Cheerios would be enough to absorb all that animal fat.

Okay, fine. If you really want an actual cookie recipe with a European pedigree, I'll leave you with Viennese Devils.

Mostly because the cookie looks kind of horrifying. The torso makes me wonder if this is about to become a scene from The Thing. And on that happy note, I will leave you to whatever you are busy with at this time in December. I'm gonna go Saran Wrap some nuts.

Holiday recipes with some "modern" flair

Tired of the same holiday spread, year after year, but also afraid of changing things too much-- so much that it won't feel like a holiday at all? If you live in the 1960s (or at least appreciate the casserole-and-gelatin aesthetic of the time period), Modern Approach to Everyday Cooking (American Dairy Association, 1966) has some small twists on some holiday classics just for you.

If it's too much work to make both poultry and a green bean casserole (or if you've got leftover cooked chicken or can easily procure a precooked one from the grocery), Chicken Green Bean Casserole handily combines them into one main dish.

In addition to the usual green beans, there's also a can of chop suey vegetables, some cheddar cheese, and some chopped fresh onion, along with the usual topping of crispy fried onions. So it will feel familiar and yet (perhaps a bit alarmingly) different.

If you miss the tang of cranberries from Thanksgiving, add a festive Layered Cranberry Salad.

It's packed with cranberry and orange flavor-- very festive-- but your tolerance for it may depend on how you feel about lumpy cottage cheese as part of a Jell-O salad, stringy and vegetal wads of celery hiding out in a mostly-sweet salad, and/or soggy (and often rancid-tasting) walnuts soaking away in those jellied depths.

If you're an eggnog fan, the Eggnog Christmas Salad may be more your style.

It still has festive cranberry and orange-- along with some eggnog diluted with more than a pound of crushed pineapple. So... maybe it's better if you only kind of feel like eggnog occasionally, rather than being a true eggnog lover.

I'm not sure these recipes would pass for "modern" in 2025. (Okay, I'm positive they would not!) But this stuff was cutting-edge if you asked the American Dairy Association in the 1960s. (And I imagine that the only ones who asked for this were the members of the American Dairy Association.)

Surprise! Christmas "sweets" that aren't

Old copies of Better Homes and Gardens used to have little tear-out sheets of recipes that could be added to their big, binder-style cookbooks. Today's sheet from the December 1937 issue stowed away somewhere until it found me, so I scanned it just for you. For December, it offers up a "winter salads" section. The front of the page has cute little jiggly "Christmas Salad" stars that look like they might be a Jell-O encased fruit salad.

No such luck, though. The lemon Jell-O might look like a red flavor, but that's just because it's colored with beet juice! Add vinegar, diced beets and cucumbers, a bit of minced onion, and plenty of horseradish, and those little stars will be an unpleasant surprise for any midwestern kid who is used to "salad" being a code word for dessert when Jell-O is involved. Merry Christmas!

The reverse side gives you a green mold to pair with the red. (Well, it's gray in the picture, but I assume it would be green in real life.)

All those grapes and cherries in the middle probably make you think sweet, right? Well, not so much....

The lemon Jell-O gets filled out with equal parts mayonnaise, avocado, and whipped cream... So maybe weirdly green mayo, without an herbaceous flavor one might expect? Or maybe overly goopy avocado? In any case, it's sure to distract you from noticing that the cherries and grapes have been marinated in French dressing until after you've put some on your plate and know you can't dump them back... At least, not while anyone else is watching. 

Maybe this is a holiday spread for somebody who wishes every day were April Fool's Day? Hopefully the guests will know enough to watch out for tricks...

Bust out the gelatin! It's Christmastime!

I ran into a LOT of Christmassy recipes in the past year, so looks like December will be a whole month of them. I originally posted about Marye Dahnke's Salad Book (1954) in the summer because of course I think of salads in the summer, but the book also includes a bunch of salads that seem holiday-ready (and of course loaded with Jell-O since there's always room for it-- even at a big holiday feast).

Some, I've just decided to call holiday-themed because of their color schemes. Tomato Aspic in Green Peppers is an easy one-- red inside of green!

Plus, you get to garnish slices of aspic-filled pepper with American cheese before serving-- easy to cut it into holiday shapes using tiny cookie cutters to be even more in the holiday style. (Nothing is classier than a star-shaped Kraft single sinking into tomato glop.)

If you want to get a little crazier with the flavors but stick to the red-and-green color scheme, the Cream Cheese Cucumber Ring might be for you. 

Okay, the gelatin might be only barely green, since it's mostly cream cheese and the only green part will be grated cucumber. You can always throw in a little green food coloring if you want. The real trick is that the onion-and-cucumber flavored cream cheese gelatin is topped with canned pear halves dyed bright red by cinnamon candies. Top with mayonnaise or salad dressing for a real(ly confusing) holiday "treat."

The book includes plenty of explicitly holiday salads too, though. I thought Poinsettia Salad might be one of those mostly-sweet gelatin salads topped with a marshmallow cut into a flower-ish shape and dipped in red sugar, but I was wrong.

It's tomatoes cut "into 5 sections, poinsettia fashion" (which sounds pretty difficult) and filled with cream-cheese-and-mayonnaise gelatin cubes. (Dahnke must have really liked an excuse to just straight-up eat blocks of mayonnaisey cream cheese. I might be close to agreeing if it weren't for the mayo!)

There's also a Holiday Salad swapping out the cream cheese for avocado if you feel like being just a little more health-conscious.

And it's easier to make because you don't have to try to pretend the tomatoes are flowers-- just slice 'em up for garnish!-- and you don't have to cut the gelatin into little cubes. (You do have to be able to unmold it, though, so maybe not as easy as you'd hope....)

The Holiday Luncheon Plate is supposedly good enough to make "Santa Claus himself... stop to sample this handsome mold." (I can't say as I'd ever think to call a Jell-O mold "handsome," but the '50s were a weird time.)

I have to admit this predominantly fruity version sounds much more palatable than anything so far (especially if you swap out the mayo for yogurt), but it BETTER be good-- 12 to 16 servings is a lot.

The Christmas Buffet Mold is a smaller and more simplified version-- you just have to be willing to forego cream cheese and gnaw on the occasional wood chip bit of diced celery to enjoy this one.

I hope you enjoyed this little trip to the past, when pretty much any occasion-- Christmas! Easter! Presidents' Day! Washday! Thursday!-- called for a big plate of food suspended in some reconstituted powder derived from collagen. 

One last look at "Cooking by the Calendar"

The December chapter of Cooking by the Calendar (1978) lets me know what editor Marilyn Hansen saw as the most fun part of the season: imbibing. 

The "Holiday Drinks" section has all manner of options for the adults (plus a few kid-safe ones). Along with the expected eggnog and mulled wines, there's a Malikihiki Mai Tai Punch for those who are spending their holidays in the tropics or-- more likely-- simply wishing they were. 

The "Gifts from the Kitchen" section also recommends giving the gift of social lubricant for the family-togetherness-heavy holidays.

You just have to be the plan-ahead type, as Vanilla-Coffee Liqueur takes a couple weeks to mellow. 

If you have a family of tea-totalers, you still have some gift options, like Winter Strawberries.

I'm not exactly sure who the target audience for strawberry-shaped wads of walnuts and coconut held together with strawberry gelatin and sweetened condensed milk is. Kids won't like the nuts. Grownups will think it's overly sweet. Maybe this is just supposed to be decorative?

And speaking of decorative, if your holiday party won't feel complete without some sort of food-related arts-and-crafts project, the book recommends a Holiday Sandwich Tree.

Guests can choose between sandwiches with a corned-beef-cottage-cheese-horseradish filling or a chicken-spread-water-chestnuts-ground-ginger filling, as long as corners are dipped in mayo and then parsley to resemble evergreen branches. (Or you can just sprinkle the whole thing with chopped parsley if you're running late!) If your guests aren't big on canned meat, the tree might remain a nice, intact centerpiece for hours. And maybe somebody else will host the big holiday party next year.

Whether you're in the holiday spirit or not, I hope December brings you something better than winter strawberries. That's it for Cooking by the Calendar! We'll see what the next year has to bring....

Funny name: That Again?! Edition

I have a feeling some home economics teachers thought getting cute with the name would help them get rid of leftovers, as this recipe from Quick and Easy Dishes (Favorite Recipes of Home Economics Teachers, 1978 edition) suggests.

I'm not so sure their families were psyched about "Repeat Meat," but at least they tried. (Better than mystery meat, I suppose!)

Some alternatives to pumpkin pie

Tired of pumpkin pie every goddamn Thanksgiving? Easy Homemade Desserts That Say You Care (Thank You brand pie filling, undated, but looks like it's from the 1980s) has some suggestions.

Yeah, I know the cover makes it look like all of them would involve cherries, but there are plenty of other types of recipes too! Cherries were probably just the brand's best seller.

If you really like the pop of red, maybe go for some cranberries rather than cherries.

Well, cranberries plus apples-- and oats, brown sugar, and cinnamon! This will definitely feel like fall, even without the pumpkin. 

If you insist on the pumpkin but are apprehensive about the pie part, there's a pumpkin parfait.

It doesn't get much easier than layering pumpkin pie filling straight out of the can with scoops of vanilla ice cream. (Reminder: Canned pumpkin pie filling is NOT the same thing as pure canned pumpkin! Layering plain canned pumpkin with ice cream would probably be pretty gross.)

If you're not so into a heavy dessert after a heavy meal, there's an airy Apple Angel Pie.

(I'll bet you could sub in the pumpkin pie filling for the apple if you wanted. Or maybe you'd end up with a runny mess. I'm no psychic... or ambitious cook.)

And finally, if you want something resembling an apple-and-cheese pie without the bother of rolling out a crust, you could try Apple Cheese Squares.

I don't see too many recipes calling for a pat-in-pan cake-mix-based crust, covered with a layer of cheesy apples. (And I sincerely doubt that using the "lite" apple pie filling is going to save a substantial amount of calories in a dessert filled with cake mix, butter, coconut, and cheese, but I guess Thank You had to advertise that they made "lite" fillings somewhere, and this recipe was as good a place as any.)

If you celebrate Thanksgiving, I hope yours is as weird as an Apple Cheese Square (if you're like me and enjoy weird) or as sweet as a Pumpkin Parfait (if you're the more conventional type).

A pocket full of Thanksgiving... and maybe giblets...

Thanksgiving is coming! The Pocket Cook Book (Elizabeth Woody with Gertrude Lynn and Peg Heffernan, originally published in 1942, but mine is the 1960 edition) has a few recommendations.

First, here's a recipe for Thanksgiving day proper. Maybe you're tired of using the same old stuffing/ dressing year after year. If you need something new, try good old-fashioned Bacon and Oatmeal Stuffing.

This kind of sounds like it could be a 1980s recipe-- some weird little scheme to "negate" the saturated fat and cholesterol in the bacon by serving it up in a mound of oats. (I guess it would have been oat bran if this were really from the '80s, though. We all know oat bran was magic.)

If you're more worried about using up the leftovers, here's a way to disguise the leftover turkey.

I guess Devilled Mock Drumsticks are meant to make the leftover turkey seem more like leftover chicken? But hey, they are deep fried, so that will make them go down easier. (I'm not sure how many people would bother with the wooden skewers and paper frills, though.)

And if you're never sure what to do with the giblets, turn them into Giblet Scrapple Squares!

If you make the mold ahead of time, you could fry up slices for breakfast to quell any turkey cravings until the big dinner. Or maybe they could be a unique side dish. Or, if you're like me and not so good on follow-through, you could just say you have plans for the giblets, put them in the fridge, forget about them until you start to wonder what stinks, and then throw them out. It's a lot less work.

Whatever your holiday plans, I hope they don't stink like rotten giblets!

Nothing but Bundts

I knew Bundt pans became popular in the 1960s, but I didn't realize that they remained popular long enough for Pillsbury to publish 100 New Bundt Ideas in 1977.

Unrelated, but this is also one of the few items in my collection with a barcode!

In any case, Bundt pans were primarily popular for making cakes, so let's get away from the decadence associated with the pan and make a healthy menu that would require either owning a bundle of Bundt pans or making a lot of stuff ahead of time and washing the pan over and over again. 

First, you need a healthy main dish. How about some omgega-3 fatty acids in a Dill-Sauced Salmon Ring?

I'm sure no one will be alarmed to see the Bundt pan out of the cupboard-- a pan best known for the "Tunnel of Fudge" cake-- and smell fish. Well, fish and overcooked peas. But won't that big wet pink lump look lovely under its dilly icing? Sorry, sauce!

Especially if it's put on a glass plate surrounded by very thin lemon slices and backlit so it looks like the whole thing is glowing? (You really gotta sell this one to get the family interested.)

And of course, you need some veggies to go with the salmon loaf. It's easy to demonstrate you've used a Bundt pan to prep the veggies if you use enough gelatin.

This big wet pinkish lump is Gazpacho Salad.

To avoid big wet pink blob overload, let's turn our attention to a necessary component of any real 1970s meal: the bread! In keeping with my theme, we're going with Sunflower Health Bread.

Honestly, I think I'd just skip the raisins if I made this recipe and eat a slice or two of bread slathered in butter for my dinner. Forget the salmon loaf and gazpacho! (I'm permanently scarred by gazpacho anyway. When I was in grad school and we were all trying to pretend to be sophisticated adults and invite each other over for dinner, pretty much everybody made gazpacho because it wasn't expensive and it seemed fancy. Plus you could turn cheap wine into sangria and have an easy theme that would also get everyone tipsy while still pretending we were cultured individuals! I can't stand vinegar or raw onions or tomatoes and was trying SOOO hard to be a reasonable grownup that I choked down at least a few bites of gazpacho at so many parties... Can barely even look at recipes for it now.)

Anyway, on to dessert. Yes, I guess we can actually use the Bundt pan for its boring, usual purpose: to make a cake. We just have to add bits o' zucchini so it will fit our "healthy" theme. 

Good luck figuring out what to replace the Pillsbury Coconut Pecan or Coconut Almond Frosting Mix with, though. (Actually-- I could find recipes to replace the pecan version, like this one on Food.com. I imagine you could just swap out almonds for the pecans if you really wanted the almond version.) Of course, this cake is really zucchini bread, but it's ring-shaped, so no one will be confused by a non-Bundt-shaped foodstuff in your Bundt-based banquet. We couldn't have that!

I may be amused by the kitchenware trends of yesteryear, but at least home cooks in 1977 didn't have to add another app to their phones to get the new appliance to work, and then try to figure out why it wasn't connecting-- and then get it to shut up and leave them alone once everything was set up. Nobody needs the oven to beg for a new accessory at 3 a.m. (Not that I have personal experience with this-- I started to feel exhausted just from Googling "trendy kitchen appliances 2025" when I was trying to decide what fad to put in the previous sentence. It seems like they all require at least as much work to set them up as it will take to use them. Progress!)

Microwave stuffing!

Picture this: it's 1985. You got your first microwave, and you also are so behind-the-times that you don't realize that owning a microwave does not have nearly the same coolness factor as it did five or six years ago. What's the best way to celebrate and show off your good fortune? That's right: microwave Thanksgiving! Let Kenmore Microwave Cooking walk you through it. 

First up: You need a turkey, of course, complete with a sausage-studded cornbread stuffing.

You can make it all in the microwave, from cooking the sausage and veggies for the stuffing to cooking the oiled-up turkey itself. Okay, if you don't like pale, rubbery turkey skin, it will have to spend the last 10-15 minutes in the conventional oven, but that will just leave you time to make the side: jellied carrots.

Before I read the recipe, I wondered whether we really needed to use the microwave to boil water for Jell-O, but this isn't the shredded-carrots-and-pineapple-in-fruity-Jell-O recipe I was imagining. These carrots are "jellied" by being cooked in equal parts butter and cranberry sauce, so much more Thanksgiving-appropriate. (Maybe double the recipe, though!)

Your microwave will be pretty busy with the other dishes, but luckily, you can make the dessert ahead of time. Ginger bars aren't quite the traditional pumpkin pie, but they do have pumpkin pie spice in them. 

I'm not entirely sure how you can stretch a recipe in which the main ingredient is 6 tablespoons of flour into 16 servings, but hopefully everybody will fill up on microwaved turkey and the brown-and-serve rolls you had in the oven when the turkey was crisping up.

If you're family is nice, you will be able to figure out on your own that microwave ownership is not nearly as impressive as you thought it was. And if they're not nice, well, at least the fight this year won't be entirely dominated by politics.

Wealthy peasants and bountiful ingredients in an imagined 1970s Italy

It's about time for something wonderful, right? Right?! I can't do much about the real world, but I can show you Wonderful Ways to Prepare Italian Food (Jo Ann Shirley, 1978).

I kind of love the nearly 3-D style of the cover, with the bowl of cooked farfalle sitting on top of a mound of uncooked farfalle.

Most of the recipes are actually not too terrible sounding-- just sometimes not very authentic considering the questionable availability of various ingredients in 1970s groceries. (Yes, "risotto" is made with long grain rice in this book, for example.)

I did like the occasional recipe that put a spin on a common '70s dinner. This meat loaf recipe might shake up the usual meat loaf in a dinner rotation.

Not only is this a rolled meat loaf, but the stuffing isn't just the cubed-bread dressing I expected. It's a different meal entirely-- ham and cheese with mashed potatoes! 

My favorite entries might be the ones that confused me, though. I was not at all surprised to see a minestrone recipe-- pretty much every Italian cookbook I ever see has at least one--

--but then I was a bit confused by the Peasant Minestrone recipe that followed.

The original recipe was mostly what I expected: kidney beans cooked with tomatoes and other vegetables, then finished with a starchy component (rice, in this case, though I usually expect a small pasta). The peasant version is inexplicably more expensive than the standard, subbing two kinds of meat (beef ribs and Italian sausage) for the dried beans and adding an extravagant sprinkling of Parmesan at the end. Are the peasants somehow richer than everyone else? I was a bit mystified.

The biggest mystery of all, however, might have been this one.

You might wonder what is so odd about steak with brandy and Marsala. Meat with wine is a pretty common combination. But look at the sauce! This recipe for four people calls for TWO FULL POUNDS of liver paté! Who wants a HALF-POUND of paté on top of a steak? And the recipe title doesn't even mention paté, as if it is only a minor component of this recipe.

I guess maybe the diners were supposed to eat only a little sauce and save some for other dishes? Who knows? All I know is that I was grateful for this book's little mysteries.

How to have a chill Thanksgiving

Just in case you're having an unusually hot November, here are some cold recipes from New Delights from the Kitchen (Kelvinator, 1930), back when refrigerators were so new that they merited their own cookbook.

If you just want some cold desserts that aren't yet another round of pumpkin pie, the book offers "Kelsherbs." The American Beauty Kelsherb freezes cranberry puree in buttermilk-- sort of like a tangy version of cranberry ice cream that is likely to be rock hard if you let it freeze even a bit too long, I imagine. 

If pumpkin is simply a must, then you might go with the Sunset Kelsherb instead. 

It's a tangy and rock-hard version of pumpkin ice cream. (In Kelvinator's defense, commercial ice cream wasn't really available back then.)

And if you're wondering what the hell "kelsherb" is, and the Google searches aren't helping, it's a portmanteau of "Kelvinator" and "sherbet," as if the existence of Kelvinator meant that the word "sherbet" was somehow now outdated. (Spoiler: It was not.) In any case, kelsherbs are great accompaniments for a Thanksgiving feast because they're made with buttermilk, which was "widely advocated for intestinal troubles and ... considered very healthful." The health trend of deeming all things fermented as good for gut health is not nearly as new as many might think! 

If you're not into thinking about intestinal wellness while you're planning a dinner but you are interested in getting the meal over as quickly as possible, then the Molded Turkey Rings with Cranberry Jelly might be more your speed.

Just make a cranberry gelatin and throw in some cooked turkey when it starts to thicken. Done! So much easier than roasting a whole turkey and making a cranberry salad or relish from scratch. Serve with some rolls from the bakery, a potato salad, and maybe some green beans straight from the can and you've got a Thanksgiving "feast" that won't heat up the house. No need to thank Kelvinator (or me). I'm sure you wouldn't want to, anyway...