Easy, one-dish meals that kind of aren't....

I love that the foreword of McCall's Book of Wonderful One-Dish Meals (edited by Kay Sullivan, 1972) tries to align itself with "Women's Lib," noting "That old slogan 'Let George do it!' is in vogue again. Thus, our cookbook has double value.... Easy one-dish meals for the liberated lady to prepare so that she does not have to spend all day in the kitchen. And even easier one-dish meals to aid novice George as he encounters soup bones, roux, and shallots for the first time." Plus, the cover is a perfect shade of harvest gold.

Sometimes, this premise means exactly what you think it means: open a bunch of cans, dump contents together, and heat. Ta-da! Dinner.

I'm sure the combination of musty canned peas and sulfurous hard-cooked eggs smelled just lovely, and the crunchy onion topping was enough to make up for the mush-on-mush-on-mush texture.

Other recipes are a window into what foods used to be more common in the early 1970s. Sure, Tongue Hash Casserole may have been pretty easy to throw together 50-some years ago.

You just had to have two cups of coarsely ground cooked tongue lying around first-- a distinctly unlikely scenario today.

And sometimes the book seemed to give up the idea of convenience entirely, as in the recipe for Chicken Pie.

Cooks had to start by cooking a full chicken (well, except for its innards). Then those innards had to be browned with bacon, sausage, and lamb kidneys. (So it was more of a meat-lovers pie than just chicken.) Then cooks had to make the rest of the filling, put all the meats and veggies with their sauce into a casserole (so much for the "one-dish" idea-- whoever is in charge of cleanup will not consider this a "one-dish" meal), make and roll out a pie crust (sorry, a "piecrust," and it's easy because it starts with a mix), top the casserole with the crust, decorate the crust with extra little cutouts if they were feeling ambitious, and then bake the whole thing... So Kay Sullivan was clearly not that committed to the promises at the beginning of the book. (And I am worried that I never saw any instructions to debone or even cut up the chicken. Is the cook just supposed to cook a WHOLE chicken under a pie crust? I thought perhaps the step of picking the meat off the bones was so obvious that the recipe writer didn't feel the need to state it explicitly, but "Lift chicken... to a 3-quart oval casserole" seems to imply that the thing is still whole. How would you even serve something like that?)

These recipes make me kind of anxious just thinking about them. At least the anxiety is opt-in labor! There's no family expecting me to have their nightly anxiety ready when they get home from work or school, and no urge to push "George" to worry about old recipes for me... Yet another reason I'm glad to know that there are decades between me and these recipes. All I have to do is feel pointlessly anxious, and I don't even have to do that! (But it's better than feeling pointedly anxious about, well, everything else.)