Telephone sandwiches and the waffle of Monte Cristo

Now that we're burrowed deeply into the dead-leafy heart of fall like some foliage-decomposing worms, I'm celebrating the weekend with some toasty hot sandwich recipes from "Good Housekeeping's Book of Breads and Sandwiches" (from the 1958 collection Good Housekeeping's Cook Books).

I picked this one because I loved the title: Italian Telephones! So what should you expect in one of these? Marinated pigs' ears? Cow tongue? (A tongue phone before it could be a Nightmare on Elm Street reference! That would be exciting.)

No, though. The telephone theme is not from the ingredients themselves, but because of "their resemblance to Italian telephone receivers." Apparently Italian telephones looked like French bread slices stacked with melty cheese and anchovy fillets. (I was trying to think of a food product that would resemble a phone now, and the closest I could come was a Hershey bar still in the foil.... Maybe I'll start calling those "American telephones" and see how long it takes for people to start avoiding me.) (That's a joke because the smart ones already do...)

One thing I love about this recipe is that it tells what to substitute for mozzarella cheese if it's not available. Try imagining a time when it was easier to find Munster than mozzarella! Pizza was not a staple back then.

Here's another recipe that seems pretty dated:

What makes "Texas Frankwiches" Texan, exactly? They're kidney beans, chopped-up hot dogs, various relishes, sauerkraut, and cheese on hot dog buns.

Given Texans' love of meat and hatred of beans in their chili, it seems unlikely they'd be too excited about a recipe that spreads a half cup of hot dogs (not even beef!) amongst six sandwiches and fills it out with kidney beans. Plus sauerkraut? That seems more like a Pennsylvania or Indiana ingredient than a Texas one. Serving the mess on little hot dog buns also doesn't square with the bigger-is-better Texas mentality in things like Texas toast, so I really can't see this being passed off as a "Texas" sandwich today.

I did find one hot sandwich fitting a trend that is still with us: breakfast for dinner!

Of course, I'm not convinced I'd want Wafflewiches for breakfast, dinner, or anything in between. They're frozen waffles stuffed with ground ham and mustard, then dipped in an egg batter and fried like a Monte Cristo.

Fried frozen waffles? I think I'll pass...

Happy October weekend! Spend it with a toasty sandwich (just maybe not one from this book).

Resistible Urges

I like shopping at Aldi. It's got cheap staples next to a changing series of specials that makes the whole trip feel like a treasure hunt. (Will the smoked pepperjack I bought once and never saw again make a return appearance? Will there be a bargain wine with an owl or some other cute critter on the bottle? Will they have veggie burgers this week? I am so boring that I think these are exciting mysteries...)

Aldi recently sold pressure cookers as a weekly special, and I had to dig out another old pressure cooker cookbook to remind myself that no, I do not need a pressure cooker. This time, the "Deluxe Mirro-Matic Pressure Pan" (1958) booklet did the honors.

Mostly, it reminded me that I'd have to make a hell of a lot of dried beans to break even on the cost of a pressure cooker, and I like canned beans-- which take even less effort than pressure cooked ones-- just fine.

The booklets always make it look as if pressure cookers are good for pretty much everything, though. They not only reduce cooking time on dried beans and dense vegetables, but they can do so much more! Did you know you could make fried chicken in one?

Well, fried chicken if your definition of fried chicken is pretty loose. The recipe shows you just brown the chicken in a little fat first, then basically steam it on a rack in the pressure cooker for 18-25 minutes. Then reduce the pressure, wait, and broil the chicken "to crisp" (because it must come out pretty soggy after all that steam).... Or you could just, you know, fry the chicken. It probably wouldn't even take as long since you wouldn't have to fire up the broiler to crisp it up when you were done. That method wouldn't require a pressure cooker, though, so it is right out!

Since I've been a bit obsessed lately, I noticed that this booklet has a recipe for pigs in a blanket too, and it's again, not like any of the others I've found so far:

Here, the "pigs" are slices of round steak and the "blankets" are bacon and onion. I'm starting to think the term "pigs in a blanket" has no meaning at all! The FDA should write some standards of identity for these things. (The cooking time of 25-30 minutes, plus cooling, does not strike me as being particularly short, either....)

My favorite recipe, though, might be this one:

How did this get named "hot tamales"? The ingredients are heated up, sure, but there is nothing else hot about them, unless people somehow thought green peppers, Worcestershire sauce, or pepper were "hot."

There's no tamale about these, either-- no masa, no corn husks. The tomato soup-y glop is supposed to be served on split buns. Might as well call this what it really is: slightly-less-sweet-than-usual sloppy joes, which you can make in about 20 minutes in a pressure cooker, or in about 20 minutes in a skillet.

In short, a lot of the time-saving bluster looks like it's bullshit. The number of times a pressure cooker will really come to the rescue is too short to fill out even a smallish booklet that comes with the pan.

In short, I triumphed over my impulse to buy a pressure cooker once again. Thanks Mirro-Matic!

Puff, the magic fungus

Know what this is? Hint: Once in a while when I'm taking a fall walk in the woods, I come across one of them.

I leave them alone, but some of them edible.

Gertrude Park's Going Wild in the Kitchen (1965) has a few ideas for this little guy, though:

It's a puffball! They are a type of mushroom and apparently, they taste like it since the recommended recipes would work for more common mushrooms-- saute in butter, cook in cream, or add raw to a salad.

This is one odd delicacy that I have actually consumed, though I barely remember it since I was maybe five or six at the time. Someone found a puffball in my grandparents' woods and they decided to cook it. 

I really wonder if I'm misremembering the details, though, because the way I think my grandma cooked it would totally NOT make sense for a mushroom. I think she sliced it up, dipped the pieces in flour, sauteed them, and then served them with maple syrup since the the flat, round slices resembled pancakes.

I love mushrooms, and I loved the maple syrup grandpa cooked down every spring from their own maple trees, but I can't really imagine mushrooms and maple as the best of friends.

That little memory, probably at least a bit faulty, pops up along with the puffballs this time of year. I'm glad to see it, even if it is more than a little confusing. Have a memorable fall weekend!

Fly killer, medical advice, more pigs in blankets, and cocoa sandwiches

Because I can't resist, here is another creature from the haunted antique shop grab bag:

It's "F. W. McNess' Cook Book" (undated; I've seen estimates from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s). There are various versions of this booklet, but I have the one with a woman practically standing on top of a man while he tries to choose a biscuit from the giant carby pyramid she has constructed. They are also apparently having water in wine goblets and something so unappetizing-looking that she has hidden it in a covered tureen. Looks like an exciting dinner!

So who was F. W. McNess?

Apparently, McNess was a company that sold items door-to-door:

I would love to buy peppermint extract, grape nectar, and ginger from someone who also sells fly killer, sewing machine oil, and insect powder in remarkably similar containers! It makes grabbing for an ingredient without looking at it carefully so much more interesting....

The company didn't just sell various food products and household items, though. They also gave out advice:

Yep! Free medical advice AND veterinary advice, from the same company that sells "Vanilla, Vanillin and Coumarin" (a name for their naturally and artificially flavored extract). That does not sound at all shady. 

The booklet is not all ads, though. There are some actual recipes. Since I was recently discussing what properly constitutes a "Pigs in Blankets" recipe, here is another take: 

Here, it's bacon fried around oysters, then served on toast-- which is nothing like either of the two versions I discussed earlier! I'm not sure bacon would be a much better blanket than a cabbage leaf. (And why should it be the blanket when it's clearly from a pig? How are oysters the pigs?)

Since I love looking for vegetarian stuff, I was excited to find this:

Nut Roast is probably not all that exciting, with its "nut meats" and bread crumbs held together by eggs and milk, seasoned with a bit of sage. At least there's a tomato sauce to go with it.

Some recipes do suggest the age of this booklet:

It's winter ice cream for cooks who don't have freezers. I hate winter, but if it were the only time I could ever get ice cream-- well-- the promise of dessert could move winter to just-this-side-of-bearable. 

The recipe title that made me the most curious, though, proved to be pretty disappointing:

What is a cocoa sandwich? Is it bread with some kind of a cocoa-and-cream-cheese-based spread? Is it bread with peanut butter, banana, and cocoa? Is it some kind of a sandwich cookie? Maybe an ice cream sandwich?

Whatever it is, it's printed on the sheet of recipes on the McNess cocoa package, and they're not telling unless you buy the cocoa. I tried to find out, but while I could find some images of the cocoa containers and a full scan of the entire booklet (that is in much better shape than mine, if you're interested in seeing the whole thing), I couldn't find the cocoa sandwich recipe. 

In the meantime, feel free to make up your own! Happy Wednesday!

Pommes de terror

After some (mostly bland and kind of sad) apple sweets, this week we're going scary with savory apples.

Okay, maybe more sweet-and-savory first.

Remember the psychology class lesson about how the sense of smell is a huge component of what we consider taste? The teacher would blindfold some poor unlucky sap, tell them to plug their nose, and then make them eat bites of apple and onion to prove that the two are indistinguishable without one's sense of smell. Well, the Junior League of Indianapolis (in The Midwestern Junior League Cookbook, 1978) got the wrong lesson from that experiment:

The experiment is not an invitation to add onions to apples and brown sugar! At least, that's not what I understood as the takeaway, which is that you should never volunteer as a subject for a psychology class demonstration. Some people totally miss the point.

Okay, for honest-to-god savory apple recipes, we're returning to Thomas Mario's The Playboy Gourmet. Maybe he saw the typical apple-and-pork chop pairing as too pedestrian, so he fixated on another apple-and-meat pairing:

Apples and fish! Because who hasn't wanted to add apples and halibut to a potato salad?

If halibut doesn't seem sufficiently fishy to compete with the apples, though, there is always this alternative:

Potato salad with diced canned beets, apples, and herring tidbits! Hooray!

Maybe Opus from Bloom County has enough of a herring addiction to be excited, so I will leave this to him. 

Happy Saturday! And try to enjoy your apples onion-and-herring-free!

Mock turtles, clammy blankets, and an oven that can do anything!

I just added the theme song from Killer Klowns from Outer Space to my Halloween playlist. I set my alarm to wake me up to the Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer" (set to the line "Can't sleep 'cause my bed's on fire," just because I'm weird like that). I loaded up some coupons for my next grocery run and sent someone a picture of a snake that I took when I was on my daily walk. Sixty or seventy years from now, it will seem downright quaint that I think it's cool I could do all that on my phone. (Hell, it already seems kind of quaint as I write these words, but I wanted some way to illustrate that we are not now immune feeling awe for the things we can make electricity do for us. I'm just not tech savvy enough to know the next big thing that will actually reach the masses....)

And sixty or seventy years ago (no date on this one!), the brand-new owner of "Electric Cookery" from Montgomery Ward would have had no idea phones could someday be used to do all those things (although I rarely use mine to actually call people, which the original owner of this book would have known as the phone's only function). The original owner would have been excited (in a way that seems quaint now) that electricity could be used to cook!

Getting the new oven was an event:

All three generations of women had to be present, and even dad was there to smoke his pipe and admiringly inspect the new gadget.

The booklet promises all kinds of delights for the new electric stove owner. I was intrigued by this very mid-century-fancy looking dish:

Shrimp, peas, white sauce, some kind of ring (rice? noodles?), the obligatory olive and pimento garnish, but as far as I can tell, the book doesn't actually have a recipe for this one. Oh, well. I'm sure I can find recipes for white sauce and starch rings elsewhere.

The book does have plenty of other recipes, though. Here's one that used to be pretty common and is as popular as Blackjack gum and trying to stuff 78 people in a phone booth today:

I'm not quite sure why a soup of veal, catsup, lemon, and hard cooked eggs would ever have been popular, but apparently it would be exciting to make on an electric stove (with a deep-well side for making broth).

This next recipe is more popular as a retro dish, although I was initially puzzled to see it in the deep-well section of the booklet:

To me, Pigs in Blankets are hot dogs or sausages encased in a doughy blanket (crescent rolls or pancakes). I didn't know how the dough would cook in a deep-well cooker, but there is no dough here! Apparently to the recipe writer, Pigs in Blankets are stuffed cabbage leaves. This is just nonsense! What would you rather have as a blanket: a warm, fluffy pancake, or a thin, clammy cabbage leaf? I rest my case.

"Electric Cookery" is also full of promises that an electric oven can handle any amount of crowding. Not that I could ever see myself needing to bake eight loaves of bread at the same time (and I pity any cook back then who had to!), but I sincerely doubt that the oven could make this a reality:

Yes, they loaves are all crammed into the oven but perfectly risen and evenly browned. Maybe it would work-- if you had spare time to keep rotating the bread, necessitating a longer bake time because yo we're always opening up the oven to fuss with the bread configuration. But if you're the kind of person who needs to bake this much bread at once, my guess is also that you don't have a ton of free time for bread-rotating.

I'll leave you with a fall oven-dinner fantasy:

The stuffed pork chop dinner sounds just right for some fall evening-- chops, fries, roasted acorn squash, freshly-made warm spiced apple sauce. Just pop it all in the oven and 1-1/2 hours later, voila! A harvest feast is served! So easy!

Of course, before that, you have to make dressing from scratch and stuff it in the chops, slice the potatoes and roll them in melted butter, halve the squash without removing your fingers as well, and chop and season several cups of apples. The fantasy of popping dinner in the oven and going about your business has to start at just that moment, because the previous hour (maybe more!) will be spent prepping everything... and that's presuming you can actually manage to fit it into the oven and get it out again without spilling apple sauce onto the fries or accidentally flipping the squash onto the floor....

And will it all be evenly cooked? Properly browned? That's anyone's guess. It's nice to pretend the plan will work perfectly, though, just like I pretend my phone makes me more efficient when it mostly provides an extra way to watch old monster cereal commercials on YouTube.

Happy Wednesday! Enjoy your favorite electrically-powered devices!

Have some applesauce 'n' bread or an apple-y zoo!

Markets are starting to bust out the real apples-- Cortlands! Ginger Golds! Braeburns! Honeycrisps!-- next to the always-available Red "Delicious" and Granny Smith varieties, so for a couple of weekends, I'm going to go apple (recipe) picking.

This week: Apple Desserts!

I expected apple desserts to start with apples and add delicious things to them: a rich dough of some type, nuts, spices. Okay, I wasn't too surprised by how austere The Rodale Cookbook's (Nancy Albright, 1973 copyright, 1977 printing) '70s health take on apple desserts was this:

Equal parts of breadcrumbs and applesauce-- seasoned with a touch of honey, cinnamon, and oil-- doesn't sound like a significant step up from plain old applesauce with a cinnamon on top to me. This is just applesauce with some filler.

I was a bit surprised by how bland some of the more mainstream cookbook desserts sounded, though. When I picked up The Margaret Rudkin Pepperidge Farm Cookbook (1973 edition, from which the apple picking picture above was also taken), I expected some flavorful and decadent desserts. I found some, but there is also this:

It's just applesauce (can even be canned applesauce!) dumped into a shell of white bread and baked. I mean, I'm not exactly surprised by old recipes for "spicy" food that call for a dash or two of hot sauce or for spaghetti sauce that's only seasoned with salt, pepper, and a bit of fresh parsley. But who could object to apple pie spices? They're mostly just cinnamon and nutmeg, with a wild card like allspice, ginger, or cardamom thrown in for good measure. There is nothing to season this Charlotte except the suggested addition of heavy cream-- which will help, mind you-- but this isn't exactly the confection I expected.

The most fun dessert-y dish was actually the oldest, from my 1996 reproduction of the 1896 Fannie Farmer Cook Book:

Apple Porcupines sound like they actually might have some flavor (syrup-cooked apples stuffed with marmalade and coated in nuts) AND make an adorable end to dinner with their split almond quills. I wouldn't have guessed that 1890s cooks who had to make pretty much everything from scratch, in between hand-scrubbing the laundry and making sure the fire didn't go out, would bother with something this whimsical. I should have known that I'm not the only one with a strong whimsy drive.

Next week, we'll have some main dishes with apples. I didn't know where to put this one, though, so I'm using it as a transition. From Thomas Mario's The Playboy Gourmet (1979):

It's Welsh Rabbit with Fried Apple! The beer-and-cheese sauce is usually served as a main dish over toast, but here it's served with fried apples. Does the common European dessert of fruit and cheese make this a dessert recipe? Does the sweet-and-savory combination make this more of a side dish for the main meal? It's your call. Either way, it's a new bunny to me.

Come back next weekend for some scary, savory apples!