Since the Morehead Woman's Club assembled Our Ways with Food (undated, but from the early 1960s), I wondered if I could put together a ladies' luncheon.
Okay, I didn't really come up with this idea on my own so much as I saw the headnote for the Half Hour Salad, wondered, "Who would think that citrus-flavored gelatin with some crushed pineapple, ground nutmeats, and shredded cheese in it is actually a main dish?" and realized that I must be staring at a ladies' luncheon idea.
I'm going to be a stickler for nutrition and say that since the "salad" doesn't actually have any vegetables at all in it, the ladies should have a veggie accompaniment.
A cooked head of cauliflower covered in raw carrot shavings so it can pretend to be fancy seems about right.
Since the book is from Kentucky, the invitees would likely be scandalized if there were no dainty little biscuits.
They're triple delicious-- once for the cheese, once for the adornment with pecan halves, and once for the chance to gossip later that the host made them with pie crust mix. (Gasp!)
And finally, a dessert.
I love this one just for its practical and unorthodox measuring method: Once the cook empties the confectioners' sugar box, the same box can be filled with flour to measure the graminaceous component!
Plus, the main dish and the dessert can be prepared well ahead of time, so the host only has to fuss around with the Golden Cauliflower and the Cheese Biscuits at the last minute. That leaves more time for everyone to speculate about whether Carol and Richard were actually swingers, or whatever the ladies' luncheoners liked to talk about back then. (The speculation about what would possess someone to imagine a Half Hour Salad as the main dish would have to wait until some other time.)
I wonder how many women ate before going to a ladies luncheon. They already knew that the only things worth eating were the bread and dessert.
ReplyDeleteMaybe this is why adult women stopped socializing with each other and decided to focus on taking their kids to as many activities as humanly possible.
Nobody is home at lunchtime anymore anyway (unless you work from home, in which case, you're probably still working at lunchtime). And retirees have to stay away from each other because everybody is armed with 1000 pictures of their grandkids on their phones. Who wants to risk wasting a huge chunk of the day saying "Oh, how darling!" on repeat? (The only thing that can make it even slightly redeemable is wondering how somebody's toddler can already look like a middle-school lunch lady who is hoping to retire soon so she can smoke on the front porch for whatever little time she has left.)
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