A Fruit Meat Cute

McCall's Book of Marvelous Meats (1974) did not seem all that marvelous to me.

There are a lot of time and temperature tips, which do not make for the most scintillating reading, and a lot of interchangeable-seeming meat loaves and recipes that all basically call for cooking meat with potatoes, carrots, and/or onions into a stew or a roast.

For someone who loves weird recipes, the Hamburger Pie was about as exciting as things got.

And even this is mostly just a round meat loaf with potato topping. One thing I did notice about this book, though, is that the editors really liked meat with fruit (one of the many combos that makes me screw up my face into the "trying not to gag" pose). Most sections for each meat have a couple of pages with enough colorful, fruit-centric recipes to cover the "ROY" part of "ROY G. BIV." I decided to represent this with pork chop recipes since the pages faced each other and it made scanning easier. (Don't you love that little peek behind the curtain?)

Representing red, we have a recipe I could imagine my turkey-hating grandma cooking for Thanksgiving dinner.

And then everybody could have spent Thanksgiving yelling at me for only eating side dishes until I finally relented and choked down half a pork chop just to get people to leave me alone. Fun! (Don't worry, though, as they always found some way to yell at me no matter what was being served! I remember being pre-emptively yelled at by my aunt for not eating vegetables-- even though I generally liked them as long as they were pretty plain, which they were that year. I had no intention of skipping the veggies, but I got yelled at for it anyway.)

Anyway-- for orange, there were a couple of options. Obviously, there was an orange orange option.

Honestly, though, the orange juice is not likely to make the pork chops that orange (though the orange sections will help). If you really want things to be brighter, the Braised Pork Chops with Peaches might be the way to go.

And for yellow, the book gets tropical (and a little alliterative) with Pineapple Pork Chops.

And don't worry-- there's a similar series of recipes for ham and veal. There's even boiled tongue with prunes and another tongue recipe calling for a pineapple glaze-- plus standalone recipes for cinnamon-apple wedges, grilled apple rings, baked cranberries, curried dried fruit, pickled pears, spicy cranberry relish, and raisin sauce in case you accidentally forgot to add fruit directly to the meat. I'd almost be tempted to call it the "Meat Meets Fruit Cookbook," but then I'd be forgetting about all those standard pot roasts, stews, and meat loaves.

April is protein month, apparently

Cooking by the Calendar (edited by Marilyn Hansen, 1978) is excited about April, the time when "A sudden shower freshens the ground and the air and the buds unfold daily while the grass grows greener." I'm not really sure what it means for the air to "unfold," and I would be happy for brief and sudden showers if I could trade them for the deluge my area is experiencing. It's easier to be optimistic about April on paper than it is when you're in an actual April....

April features various meat loaves and terrines, like this simplified version of Beef Wellington that is still pretty darn complicated for a meatloaf. 

What with partially baking the meatloaf, making pie crust, smearing the partially-cooked loaf with a liverwurst and canned mushroom mixture, and wrapping the whole thing in the pie crust before additional baking, this is not an easy weeknight dinner. (And that's even before we take the decoration with pastry flowers into account....)

And of course, there's also supposed to be a sauce.

At least this is fairly straightforward-- just doctored-up brown gravy mix.

And if you're more in the mood for a terrine than for a meatloaf, one option is the Walnut-Gherkin Terrine.

This pickle-filled meat reminds me of the bad old days when I worked at a grocery store's deli counter. The week when pickle-and-pimento loaf was on sale was THE WORST. The slicer threw bits of pickles and pimentos everywhere, and by the end of a shift, I'd be covered in green and red flecks like the world's ugliest Christmas decoration. At least this concoction only has the pickles-- no pimentos-- and it won't go through the slicer anyway.

The book also proclaims that spring gives people an appetite for lighter things, like fish, so it suggests Flounder Rolls Florentine.

I picked them mostly because I like the drawing underneath, which looks kind of a like a rejected Muppet. (I could see it wishing "joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea" while Jeremiah shares his wine with Kermit.)

Asparagus is the veggie of the month, and as a further reminder that eggs were cheaper in the '70s, the book recommends an Asparagus Quiche.

The pinwheel-of-asparagus must have been a really popular way to celebrate spring back then. 

Meanwhile, I am going to celebrate by buying a snorkel so I can go outside for a walk. (Or maybe swim?)

Woman's Day goes banana collecting

I understand why, say, Chiquita and Dole put out banana cook booklets. They obviously had an incentive to sell more bananas. I'm less sure why Woman's Day felt compelled to make their entire Collector's Cook Book for April 1970 focus on bananas, but they did it anyway.

Maybe the editors were just so taken with Bud Simpson's cute jungle animal cartoons that they had to go with a banana theme? That monkey chowing down on a banana is adorable, but my favorite is actually the little bird matter-of-factly marching around with an oversized banana under its wing, as if it's on its way to the office and the banana is the equivalent of a briefcase. 

The recipes mostly seem fine when you get to the desserts section. It's hard to be mad at (or very interested in) instructions for a banana split or banana loaf cake. That's, of course, why we're going to be looking at the more savory applications of bananas. (Or unsavory, as the case may be.)

There is a used-to-be-popular-for-some-reason banana meat loaf. 

I am not sure what banana was supposed to add to a meatloaf, other than bulk. Sometimes I think meatloaf was just meant to be kind of the equivalent of an edible garbage can. Just mix whatever you needed to use up into ground beef and proclaim it meatloaf.

I thought the Banana-Meat Roll-Ups might be the ever-popular (in old cookbook circles, anyway) Ham-Banana Rolls. However, they're not. They're a different variation of ground beef with banana.

I guess this is for the cook who doesn't even want to bother trying to pretend there's not banana in the meat. A full banana half is just cooked right in the middle of each wad of ground chuck, perhaps accompanied by half a tomato if the cook is feeling particularly adventurous.

Don't worry, though, there IS a ham and banana recipe.

This one has a simpler sauce than the earlier version-- this one is just thinned-down cheese soup-- so it's updated for the 1970s!

And if ham is too expensive, Franks and Fruit makes for a cheaper smoked-meat-and-banana pairing.

I imagine this sounds pretty good to the "syrup on sausage" crowd, but I am not among their number...

What we can all agree on, though, is that the banana armadillo is pretty cute.

Plus, with its bright orange single-color printing and blocky cartoon style, it's a perfect representation of late '60s/ early '70s style. No wonder the little guy looks so happy. (And of course, that makes me happy too. Gotta get happiness wherever I can find it...)