As much as I make fun of Favorite Recipes of America: Meats Including Seafood and Poultry (1966), I know that whoever owned this book before I did really loved it. How do I know this? They left notes.
Sometimes, the notes are rather minimal, such as those for Pork Chop-Pineapple Casserole.
"Very Good" admittedly doesn't give us a lot to go on, but considering this is their opinion of cream of mushroom soup combined with canned pineapple chunks, it's enough for me to know that this earlier owner and I have Very Different ideas about what is Very Good.
Other notes show that this cook liked to modify recipes to their tastes and what they had on hand, and they wanted to remember those variations. Not only do we know that Oven-Chip Chicken is "Great"...
But we also know that crushed taco chips can be subbed in for the potato chips, and lemon pepper will stand in for the plain pepper. Plus, this person will not let extra butter go to waste (I hear you on that, cook from the past!), and they can always go for a little extra garlic salt.
I did learn that our tastes don't always diverge. In Battuto for Roast Beef, the unknown cook subs in onion salt and garlic powder for actual onion and garlic.
That's something I'd do. Not to get too detailed, but actual fresh alliums tend to make my digestive system unhappy, while a tiny bit of the dried stuff for flavor is usually fine. Plus, this cook would rather use "sesma seed" than caraway seed, a substitution I heartily recommend because caraway seeds taste the way I imagine poison tastes.
And to round out our recipes with the cook's notes with yet another interestingly-spelled variation, here's Scalloped Potatoes with Salami Slices.
I love knowing that "pepornie" can be subbed in for the salami! And if you want to know what this recipe looks like in black-and-white, this is the only recipe from my selections that has a photograph.
You just have to imagine the darker-gray bits as pepornie circles, rather than salami quarters, for this to be accurate to the variation.
The extra notes were a Very Good surprise in this book, making me even gladder I picked it up.
I never thought of mixing canned pineapple and cream of mushroom soup. I think that there's a reason why I never thought of that. I'll stick to cooking my pork chops in a skillet with salt and whatever seasonings sound good.
ReplyDeleteI always kind of assumed that recipes like that were shit out by Dole and/or Campbell's kitchens and tried by virtually no one, but apparently some people actually liked them. (Okay, could kind of see one of our grandmas trying the recipe and then being extremely disappointed when we balked at eating it.)
DeleteI have a friend who is convinced that I would just like condiments if I would just try them. Oh yeah, nobody ever tried to feed me something with mayonnaise, mustard, ketchup, BBQ sauce, salad dressing, etc on it before. How could I possibly remember how disgusting they were all these years later?
DeleteI know, right? (Major eye rolling!) Plus, even if it were true that you might like them now (which I don't really think is the case! I'm just what-iffing for the sake of it), what would be the point of getting into them? Most condiments have sugar, salt, empty calories, etc. that you don't really need. Seems like it would be beneficial to avoid them if you can, and it's a lot easier to avoid them if you just don't want them in the first place. Why try to develop a taste for something you shouldn't really want anyway when you can just avoid it and be happy (rather than feeling deprived if you ever DO have to avoid it)?
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